REMEMBER WHEN THEY THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY TO CALL THE INVASION "OPERATION IRAQI LIBERATION?"

It probably isn't likely that an Obama administration is going to be as gung ho as the Bush-Cheney Regime to allow oil companies that have financed Republican party politics to gobble up Iraq's oil industry. In the 2006 election cycle Big Oil and Gas donated over $20,000,000 to federal politicians-- $3,576,445 to Democrats and $16,570,858 (82%) to Republicans. So far this year-- and they're only getting started-- they're contributed over $17,000,000, again overwhelmingly to Republicans ($12,650,059 or 74%). Of their 7 biggest beneficiaries in 2006, only one is still in office, Hay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), the rest, all slavish and stupendously corrupt servants of Big Oil's special needs, were defeated-- Rick Santorum (R-PA), Conrad Burns (R-MT), George Allen (R-VA), James Talent (R-MO), Denise Bode (R-OK), and Dirty Dick Pombo (R-CA). Many other of their favored candidates are no longer in positions to help them-- being defeated, arrested or having retired. And not one Democrat was in their Top 20 (although fake Dems Senator Ben Nelson and Rep. Dan Boren were close).

This year their Mr. Big, predictably is John W. McCain ($791,777 so far). The members of Congress they are most eager to shore up-- so they can continue fighting for Big Oil-- are John Cornyn (R-TX), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and a couple of fake-Dem shills, Mary Landrieu (LA) and Dan Boren (OK). Their top 20 House recipients include 5 conservative Democrats and 15 Republicans and their top 20 in the Senate, exclusive of the presidential candidates, include 3 conservative Democrats-- Landrieu, Pryor and Baucus-- plus 17 reactionary Republicans.

This morning's NY Times seems to indicate that the Bush and Cheney connected oil companies are moving in for the kill while Republicans still run the show and they still can. Henry Waxman is asking some embarrassing questions that seem to smack of the Regime and its operatives helping to set up big campaign contributors with even bigger Iraqi opportunities-- illegally.

Hunt Oil, huge, longtime Bush backers, has moved in on Kurdistan-- no-bid contracts and all-- infuriating the central government and, despite stated U.S. policy to the contrary, "State Department officials did nothing to discourage the deal and in some cases appeared to welcome it..."

Disclosure of those contracts has provided substantial fuel to critics of the Iraq war, both in the United States and abroad, who contend that the enormous Iraqi oil reserves were a motivation for the American-led invasion-- an assertion the administration has repeatedly denied.

Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, has condemned the Kurdistan deal as illegal because it was not approved by Iraq’s central government and was struck without an oil law, which has still not been passed.

Jesse Lee in Speaker Pelosi's office has the inside scoop from Chairman Waxman's perspective-- and it's not a pretty picture. In fact, its a damning one that pretty much confirms what most Americans have long suspected-- we went to war, sacrificed so much in terms of blood and treasure-- so that a small handful of Bush cronies could get even richer (and keep funding Republican Party (and Blue Dog) politics.

From DWT's 'So What Else Is New?' Dept.: What's the point of having disasters if Republicronies can't make a buck (or a million, or 11 mil) off them?

Former HHS Sec'y Tommy Thompson -- our next president?

"It is ironic that former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson's firm won the contract to provide the services, given the history of delay from the Bush administration when he was secretary and now. But I am glad these heroes are finally getting the help they deserve."

--Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)

Unless, of course, Secretary Thompson's company provides the kind of performance that HHS did while Secretary Thompson was running it. (And of course who can forget the galvanic campaign that came so close to winning the former secretary this year's GOP presidential nomination?)

The Associated Press's Devlin Barrett reports:

Ex-Bush health chief's firm wins Sept. 11 work

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As President Bush's health chief, Tommy Thompson was criticized for not doing enough to help workers exposed to toxic debris from the Sept. 11 attacks at the World Trade Center.

Now, a company he leads has won a $11 million contract to treat some of those workers who responded to New York's ground zero.

The contract awarded by the Centers for Disease Control is aimed at tracking the health of between 4,000 and 6,000 workers who live outside the New York City area, where a separate health monitoring program is in place. The CDC is part of the Health and Human Services Department, which Thompson headed in Bush's first term.

Internal e-mails obtained by The Associated Press show that the one-year contract went to Logistics Health, Inc., a La Crosse, Wis.-based company where Thompson is president.

While health secretary, Thompson was pressed by New York lawmakers to take a more active and aggressive role in tracking and treating Sept. 11-related health problems.

Of course there was nothing amiss in the contract-awarding process:

The CDC contract was awarded after the government received proposals from four different companies, including Thompson's, officials said. The contract went to Logistics Health based on "an evaluation of everything from cost to technical abilities to past performance," CDC spokeswoman Bernadette Burden said.

Because, as we all know, where the Bush regime is concerned, nothing matters but performance. (Now, now, laughing that hard is apt to lead to physical injury.)

As for the nitty-gritty:

Logistics Health will provide annual examinations to World Trade Center responders around the country, diagnose and treat Sept. 11-related conditions and provide a pharmacy benefit to those responders.

Late last year, the government halted an effort to organize health monitoring for ground zero workers spread around the U.S., saying the program could cost far more money than Congress has provided.

Estimates for how much treatment ground zero workers need -- and how much that treatment will cost -- vary widely. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have put the figure around $400 million a year, but that amount includes treating the much larger group of patients who live in and around New York City.

According to New York City officials, some 400,000 people were exposed to ground zero dust, and 71,000 have enrolled in a long-term health monitoring program for people with and without health problems. Health advocates believe the number of people sick years after their exposure is in the thousands.

Now, Representative Maloney has been outspoken in the fight for proper care for 9/11 victims, starting with those first responders, and if she's satisfied that this contract will accomplish its stated goals . . . well, maybe she's right.


BREAKING NEWS: LESS THAN 7 YEARS AFTER 9/11, NYC HIGH-RISE WORKERS HAVE AN 'ACTION PLAN' FOR NON-FIRE EMERGENCIES

While I was cobbling the above item together, everyone on my floor of our Midtown Manhattan high-rise office building was summoned to a fire drill. By law we have these on a regular basis, at some stated interval -- I always forget what. It's always an event of some jocularity, but we also take these things seriously, since we get regular reminders on the evening news of how vulnerable we are, packed into these giant death traps, in emergency situations.

But this fire drill was different. The gentleman who conducted the drill, who introduced himself as a now-retired 21-year veteran of the Fire Department (which certainly got my attention; like many New Yorkers I have mixed feelings about the NYPD but an admittedly sentimental near-reverence for the FDNY) explained that for the first time the fire drill wasn't about fire-related emergencies. As a result of the 9/11 Commission's discoveries about emergency preparedness, or lack of same, laws were passed which mandated the development of an Emergency Action Plan for non-fire-related events.

I'm not sure I grasped the limited amount of detail that was thrown our way, but I'm certainly glad to know that we now have a plan for dealing with all those other emergencies that may arise. And to think, it took less than seven years to accomplish it!

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WHAT'S MORE OUTRAGEOUS-- A $100K BELT BUCKLE, A $194K BENTLEY, 50 CENT AT YOUR OWN DAUGHTER'S BAT MITZVAH-- OR CHEATING OUR TROOPS OUT OF BODY ARMOR?

David Brooks, GOP war profiteer

What ever happened to the good old days when war profiteers and traitors undermining our soldiers in the field were put against a wall and shot? (Yes, unlike many of my liberal pals, I'm a death penalty fanatic-- although just when the punishment fits the crime-- like in the case of the Bush Regime cronies who have long and solid records of treasous criminality.)

David Brooks is probably best known, in our shallow, celebrity-obsessed society, for the lavish and grotesque bat mitzvah be threw for his daughter Liza at the Rainbow Room in 2005. Aside from 50 Cent (for the kids) his own middle-aged friends were entertained by middle aged rockers Aerosmith (who were paid a million dollars for the show), as well as Tom Petty, Kenny G and the Eagles. I can't imagine that the Eagles or Tom Petty took less than the fee Aerosmith got since they all share the same manager. I don't know much about Kenny G. but I suspect he got more than your average bat mitzvah band even if his music sounds just like your average bat mitzvah band's.

But it isn't the $10,000,000 tax deductible, company-paid bat mitzvah, the $194,000 Bentley, the stable of 100 race horses, the $100,000 diamond-studded belt buckle and numerous other egregious instances of fashion crimes or even more shameful manefestations of the sybartic lifstyle the Bush tax breaks for multimillionaires encourages. It's how he made all that loot.

Now, keep in mind that when Brooks was in business with the Bush Regime, making defective body armor for our troops on the front lines, he gave the National Republican Campaign Committee a nice fat check for $25,000, much less than he paid Kenny G to wow his friends at the notorious bat mitzvah the same year, but still, something the Republicrooks were happy to see come there way. He got plenty of business... unfortunately.

According to today's NY Post it was our troops who got the shitty end of that Republican stick. Brooks reaped $185 million by selling his company's stock "when he learned that 6,000 bullet-proof vests the company made were about to be recalled for being faulty and not able to block bullets."


UPDATE: STILL SPENDING BIG

Brooks retained Joe Tacopino as his $750-an-hour attorney. Radar tells us he was the subject of a March 2007 GQ profile titled 1-800 Save My Ass. "Tacopino also defended the Dutch kid held in the disappearance of Aruba blondie Natalee Holloway, the cop charged with sticking a plunger up Abner Louima's ass, and Foxy Brown."


UPDATE: BROOKS DENIED BAIL

Smart judge!

A federal judge denied David H. Brooks bail Tuesday, citing concerns about his access to immense wealth and the possibility that he could obstruct justice from within the walls of his 58th-floor Upper East Side highrise.

"I think the government has established that there is a serious risk of flight," U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert said during a hearing in Central Islip. "I don't have a clue what this man's assets are."

IF BUSH DID WANT TO CARRY OUT A COUP, I BET THERE ARE PLENTY OF GOOD GERMANS AMERICANS WHO WOULD HELP... WITHOUT BATTING AN EYE

Good Germans know what is expected of them

My first contact with another human being this morning-- not counting when I woke up and turned on the TV in time to see a Howie Kurtz discussion of McCain wearing "gay sweaters," while he boldly changed into a... gay sweater-- was an IM from a friend who works as an Air America host. He wanted me to read a blog post at Whatever about the unlikelihood of the Bush Regime being able to pull off a coup to perpetuate itself in office. Personally I didn't find it persuasive enough in an overall sense since it didn't take into account the catastrophe that the Regime could employ to trigger it-- something that would make the Reichstag Fire and 9/11 look like child's play, like a nuclear explosion in Manhattan or in Congress, something only the most illegitimate and heinous figures in American history could ever conjure. But let's leave that argument for another day. One of the premises of the post is that the Bush Regime is simply too incompetent to pull off a coup.

Assuming Bush did decide to declare martial law over the entire nation, how on Earth is he going to enforce it? The federal government, even at this late stage in the Bush administration, is not entirely composed of Regent University graduates; there aren't enough people in the government itself who would be willing to follow Bush down that road. And even if there were, does anyone believe the sort of people the Bush administration appoints-- folks who we know are picked for ideological purity over actual competence in their job -- are going to be able to administer a coup of this magnitude? For God's sake, it took them a week to find the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. It's on maps. Does anyone really believe that this bunch could manage martial law-- an infinitely more complex undertaking-- any better?

That makes sense but, I moved on quickly to my e-mails and the first one I opened was from an old pal who manages a band that's recording their new album in Europe. He wanted to call my attention to a story I had just finished reading in this morning's Washington Post, Bush Aide Blocked Report-- Global Health Draft In 2006 Rejected for Not Being Political. Now we're back at Regent University output. Actually I don't know if the dull-looking hack referred to by the Post is a Regent U. alum or not-- like Bush, he could have gone to Yale, for all that it matters-- only that he's the son of a right-wing Republican congressman from Wisconsin who once hired Cheney to be his intern, is Bush I's godson, and got his job through cronyism via former Wisconsin Governor/Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. And his job is Director of Global Health Affairs.

You may recall a week or two ago there was another of those passing scandals in the Bush Regime that might have caused more of a stir in a less controversial context, a context, say, where there isn't an impeachable offense committed on a weekly basis. This particular scandal had a whole gaggle of Surgeon Generals complaining to Congress how the Bush Regime tramples science-- and the nation's health and safety-- in the name of extremist ideological purity, not unlike what fascist dictators who have been admired in the Bush family have done in the past.

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate.

A few of the issues it focuses on, such as AIDS treatment and research, have been public health priorities for the Bush administration. But others-- including ratifying the international tobacco treaty and making global health an element of U.S. foreign policy-- are more politically sensitive. The report calls on the administration to consider spending more money on global health improvement, for instance. And it warns that "the environmental conditions that poison our water and contaminate our air are not contained within national boundaries... The use of pesticides is also of concern to health officials, scientists and government leaders around the world."

"Public health advocates have accused Steiger of political meddling before. He briefly attained notoriety in 2004 by demanding changes in the language of an international report on obesity. The report was opposed by some U.S. food manufacturers and the sugar industry." Bush appointed Steiger to be the U.S. Ambassador to Mozambique; he hasn't been confirmed.

Ex-Surgeon General Carmona had been trying to get the report that Steiger bottled up released-- but to no avail. "Thomas Novotny, a former assistant surgeon general who ran the global health office before Steiger, said, 'It's embarrassing, just ridiculous that the report hasn't come out.' Novotny, who served at HHS in the Clinton and in both Bush administrations, said that many nations have made health issues central to their foreign relations and trade policies, but that the United States has been reluctant to embrace that idea. 'It made perfect sense for the surgeon general to take up the issue because the U.S. used to be a leader in this field,' Novotny said. 'For the nation's top doctor to be unable to release the report shows that leadership is gone.'"

My pal over in Europe wrote that it's great that more decent people are starting to speak out. I hope it isn't too late. I suspect there are an awful lot of smiling Steigers out there, just waiting for their orders.