Prometheus 6

President Bush Calls for More Oil Exploration at Home
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — President Bush said Saturday that Saudi Arabia’s decision to boost oil production by 300,000 barrels a day is “something, but it doesn’t solve our problem,” and he called again on Congress to approve legislation allowing more oil exploration at home.

Thomas Lippman of the Middle East Institute explains why he's right that it won't solve out problem, but is alos wrong because domestic exploration won't solve it either.

The New York Times says Saudis Rebuff Bush, Politely, on Pumping More Oil. The Washington Times says Saudis increase oil production. Thomas Lippman of the Middle East Institute explains what happened.

'What Do You Really Want From Us?'
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B03

This poem appeared on the Internet in March and has since gone viral, popping up on thousands of blogs and Web sites, in both English and Chinese. Its authorship could not be confirmed.

When we were the Sick Man of Asia,
We were called the Yellow Peril.
When we are billed as the next Superpower, we are called The Threat.
When we closed our doors, you launched the Opium War to open our markets.
When we embraced free trade, you blamed us for stealing your jobs.
When we were falling apart, you marched in your troops and demanded your fair share.
When we tried to put the broken pieces back together again, Free Tibet, you screamed. It was an Invasion!
When we tried communism, you hated us for being communist.
When we embraced capitalism, you hated us for being capitalist.
When we had a billion people, you said we were destroying the planet.
When we tried limiting our numbers, you said we abused human rights.
When we were poor, you thought we were dogs.
When we lend you cash, you blame us for your national debts.
When we build our industries, you call us polluters.
When we sell you goods, you blame us for global warming.
When we buy oil, you call it exploitation and genocide.
When you go to war for oil, you call it liberation.
When we were lost in chaos, you demanded the rule of law.
When we uphold law and order against violence, you call it a violation of human rights.
When we were silent, you said you wanted us to have free speech.
When we are silent no more, you say we are brainwashed xenophobes.
Why do you hate us so much? we asked.
No, you answered, we don't hate you.
We don't hate you either,
But do you understand us?
Of course we do, you said,
We have AFP, CNN and BBC. . . .
What do you really want from us?
Think hard first, then answer . . .
Because you only get so many chances.
Enough is Enough, Enough Hypocrisy for This One World.
We want One World, One Dream, and Peace on Earth.
This Big Blue Earth is Big Enough for all of Us.

A Ludicrous Denial
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, May 16, 2008; 1:29 PM

What do you call it when White House officials say one thing in public and almost the exact opposite in private?

You might call it lying.

[P6: I should stop right there]

How do you shift the conversation from domestic issues to national defense?

Have Bush say something incredibly stupid about war. No one will even wonder why he said it.

Bingo! One step taken toward Bush's third term. 

Via Electronic Village, we see what Huckabee thinks is funny. That's your ordained Southern Baptist minister, right? 

It's the ol' Straight Talk Express...

Officer Is Accused of Molesting Boy
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A New York police sergeant assigned to the Police Academy has been charged with sexually abusing a boy over a period of five years, prosecutors said on Friday.

The sergeant, Jaime Katz, 38, is charged with committing a criminal sexual act and endangering the welfare of a child. He was arrested on Thursday and arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court, where he was ordered jailed in $500,000 bail.

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Jennifer Kushner, said the abuse began in 2002, when the boy was 12, and took place weekly until November 2007. The abuse occurred in locations including Sergeant Katz’s home in Rockland County, his car, the victim’s home in Manhattan, and the sergeant’s sister’s house in New Jersey, Ms. Kushner said, as well as during family vacations.

Sergeant Katz, a 10-year police veteran, met the boy through another sergeant who had been involved in a mentoring program, she said.

One cop got into a heated argument with the chief even after seeing the ID, sources said.

That cop was stripped of his gun and badge and placed on modified duty last night, sources said. The status of the second officer was unclear.

The incident occurred as the NYPD is under fire for record numbers of pedestrians being stopped and frisked, the majority of them black or Hispanic. Some 145,098 people were stopped by the NYPD in the first quarter of this year.

Zeigler has headed the Community Affairs Bureau since January 2006. His wife, Neldra Zeigler, is NYPD deputy commissioner for equal employment opportunity. 

Plainclothes officers in trouble - didn't recognize off-duty chief
By ALISON GENDAR
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, May 10th 2008, 4:00 AM

At least one cop has been disciplined for ordering the NYPD's highest-ranking uniformed black officer out of his auto while the three-star chief was off-duty and parked in Queens, the Daily News has learned.

"How you can not know or recognize a chief in a department SUV with ID around his neck, I don't know," a police source said.

This dude works for the Middle East Institute, and discussing oil production and the politics around it he's kicking ass.

Video clips forthcoming later. 

The former official said that Mr. Berwick, whom the official last spoke with several weeks ago, was demoralized by the damage to Mr. Felton and by the strain of the investigations.

“He was not happy with the turn of events,” the former official said. 

Former State Police Official, a Guard to Governors, Commits Suicide
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and NATE SCHWEBER

A former New York State Police inspector who once headed the governor’s personal security detail committed suicide at his home in Orange County on Thursday, a family friend confirmed on Friday. The inspector, Gary A. Berwick, 48, retired from the State Police last month, shortly after the resignation of the acting State Police superintendent, Preston L. Felton.

Several friends and former colleagues of Mr. Berwick said they were unaware he had been having any personal problems. But a former State Police official who was close to Mr. Berwick said he had been scheduled for an interview with the agency’s internal affairs bureau.

On the day Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was endorsed by the governor of North Carolina, a supporter gave her a three-foot-long balloon replica of herself, complete with blond hair, black pantsuit and wide pink smile, which Mrs. Clinton promptly took on her plane and laughingly showed off to reporters.

On Thursday, little more than two weeks later, the doll lay on the sofa by her seat on the plane, shriveled and deflated.

I'll be talking mad shit about folks who militate against voting yet demand attention due to the result.

I'll also be supporting your immediate issues if they are valid, as they tend to be. But I'll still talk mad shit about ya. 

In the South, a Force to Challenge the G.O.P.
By ADAM NOSSITER and JANNY SCOTT

NEW ORLEANS — The sharp surge in black turnout that Senator Barack Obama has helped to generate in recent primaries and Congressional races could signal a threat this fall to the longtime Republican dominance of the South, according to politicians and voting experts.

Should Mr. Obama become the Democratic nominee, he would still have to struggle for white swing voters in the South and in border states like West Virginia, where he lost decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Tuesday’s presidential primary. In West Virginia, where more than three-fourths of white voters chose Mrs. Clinton, 20 percent of the white voters said the race of the candidate mattered in their choice.

Am I wrong or did Wordpress.com stick a couple of new product announcements into the RSS feed of all the blogs they host?

Americans do not send their sons and daughters to war for other countries. That is why the Bush administration made up the Iraq-9/11 connection. Americans would not go to war for oil, or to remove "the dictator" or to strengthen Israel (all goals of the neoconservatives).

They will only go to war if they believe we are threatened. Israel knows that and has never asked the United States to fight its wars for it. So when Bush tells Israelis that he is ready for war on Israel's behalf, he is giving currency to an idea that harms Israel. And Jews.

We are a tiny minority in this country. Enough people believe the canard that America went to war in Iraq for Israel, a damnable lie. But that is precisely the rationale for war with Iran that Bush is giving by invoking the threat to Israel over and over again.

Is It Pandering to Jews or Scapegoating Them: Plus McCain's Sterling Endorsement of Talking to Hamas
By M.J. Rosenberg - May 16, 2008, 9:44AM

If I did not know better I would think that there is some conspiracy out there to produce an anti-Semitic backlash in a country, this country, that has been relatively free of that scourge since its founding.

Think about it. President Bush went to Israel to celebrate its 60th anniversary, a nice gesture and one in keeping with a President who personal proclivities are strongly pro-Israel even if his policies have not done Israel much good.

He used his visit there not just to salute our friend and ally but to promote confrontation with Iran, an idea that is utterly unpopular in the United States (to put it mildly) but is an applause producer in Israel. In fact, he went before the Israeli Knesset to denounce Americans who favor negotiations with Iran before resorting to war. He was clearly referring to Sen. Obama although Secretary of State Rice and Secretary of Defense Gates hold the same views and they work for Bush!

That doesn't seem to be what's going on.

Here's the deal: At VoteVets, we hear anecdotal evidence all the time from returning veterans that the VA is trying to cut costs and to save resources by not diagnosing people with PTSD. We hear suspicious stories about the VA diagnosing vets with personality disorders or adjustment disorders. But we've never seen proof that there was an organized policy within the VA, or that there were directives coming from the top to actually do this. And that's why this email is so important. This email--sent by a VA Medical Center PTSD coordinator--directly ties the diagnosis to monetary concerns and not to the medical condition.

The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America by Michael J. Thompson is an American history. It reaches all the way back to the philosophers of Greece, all the way through Europe to explain the economic ideas current when the United States of America declared its independence. Then it follows the way these ideas were expressed as the economy (and hence the politics) of the nation changed beneath their feet. The overall result was the exchange of our intellectual forbears' sure knowledge that excessive inequality undermines the democracy itself, for the government supported libertarian market economy we now enjoy.

The "Cracker Ass Cracker" Vote

An arrest two years ago involving a man found with a kilo of cocaine in his backpack was subsequently thrown out by an Albany County judge, who ruled the cops had no legitimate reason to approach and question the man.

During the hearing that led to that dismissal, Terence L. Kindlon, the defendant's attorney, accused a sheriff's investigator of lying and embellishing his testimony by using precise language -- "I sensed 'criminality was afoot' " -- directly from the Court of Appeals ruling, according to a court transcript. 

Outcry over Sheriff's Department search methods
By BRENDAN J. LYONS, Senior writer
First published: Sunday, March 2, 2008

ALBANY -- Two years ago, Tunde Clement stepped off a bus at the city's main terminal downtown.

Clement, a black man, was carrying a backpack and coming from New York City. That may have been enough to pique the interest of undercover sheriff's investigators scanning the crowd with their eyes.

They cornered Clement and began peppering him with questions.

He was quickly handcuffed and falsely arrested. He was taken to a station to be strip-searched and then to a hospital, where doctors forcibly sedated him with a cocktail of powerful drugs, including one that clouded his memory of the incident.

The actions of police in the minutes that followed would end in controversy rather than with an arrest. They would also leave Shutter, a 28-year-old single mother from Ravena, shaken and angry after one of the officers allegedly inserted his finger into Shutter's vagina on a public street during an apparent search for drugs.

When it was over, "I pulled off down the road and I just cried for probably a half hour," Shutter said. "I called my dad. ... I felt like I had been basically raped."

That's because you were. Raped...

Shutter said she grew increasingly unnerved by her experience with internal affairs -- which is known as the Office of Professional Standards -- because male detectives twice requested she wear clothes from the night of the incident to re-enact the body search.

And serially disrespected.

Police: 'You fit the profile'
By BRENDAN J. LYONS Senior writer
First published: Sunday, March 2, 2008

ALBANY-- The cops in the marked patrol car had circled through West Hill a couple times keeping an eye on their female target.

They were part of the Street Drug Unit, an aggressive squad assigned to help rid Albany's neighborhoods of drug dealers and addicts blamed for much of the city's problems.

It was early evening and already dark when the patrol car's emergency lights flashed in the rearview mirror of Lisa Shutter's Mitsubishi sedan on Quail Street, just off Central Avenue.

At least she didn't attack him, or boost McCain above him this time. 

Clinton defends Obama from Bush

Hillary, today in Rapid City, South Dakota, defended Obama from President Bush's apparent comparison of him to Neville Chamberlain, Ken Vogel reports.

She told reporters:

President Bush’s comparison of any Democrat to Nazi appeasers is both offensive and outrageous on the face of it, especially in light of his failures in foreign policy. This is the kind of statement that has no place in any presidential address and certainly to use an important moment like the 60th anniversary celebration of Israel to make a political point seems terribly misplaced. Unfortunately, this is what we’ve come to expect from President Bush.

“There is a very clear difference between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy and that difference will be evident once we take back the White House.

Party leaders speak of the need to refurbish the "Republican brand." The problem goes far beyond packaging, though. It's not that the box needs to be more colorful; it's that the ideas inside have long since gone stale.

The GOP's Ideas Deficit
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, May 16, 2008;

The Reagan era in American politics is about to end, and we have George W. Bush to thank for its demise.

In this respect, it doesn't matter who wins the Democratic nomination or even who wins the general election in the fall. I was going to try to write this column without using the word "paradigm," but already I've failed: Regardless of who takes the oath of office in January, the paradigm that reigned for nearly three decades -- the notion that government is useless, if not inherently evil -- is no longer operative.

It's painful to compare the United States today with what it was in 2000. On indicator after indicator, we have fallen backward. Under the last Democratic administration, we had huge budget surpluses; now we wallow in debt. Real income was growing; now it is shrinking. The price of energy was contained; now it is out of control. We were at peace; now we are in a two-front war that threatens to expand to Iran. Before, America was at the pinnacle of respect, power and influence around the world; now we are held in contempt, even by our closest historic allies. Above all, the sense of optimism that defined the American dream has been shattered. Eight out of 10 Americans are convinced that our nation is going in the wrong direction. If ever there was a time, indeed a demand, for change, it is now.

If the Democratic Party cannot win with this hand of cards, maybe we don't deserve to. We have to make fundamental decisions. No matter whom we supported in our nominating process, and with whatever intensity, we have to focus on how much we want to practice the policies that we preach and how much we want to change the direction of our country. The battle has lasted 15 months. Tens of millions have participated, including record numbers of new voters, and the amount of campaign contributions has been unprecedented. We all should be proud of what has been accomplished. But Democrats should also understand that prolonging our internal war seriously endangers our chance to recapture the presidency.

The Danger of Fighting On
By Robert S. Strauss
Friday, May 16, 2008; A19