Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue

America's nightmare: If something happened at the White House, would we even care?
By Jane Stillwater http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com

This morning, I woke up with a start from one of those really lucid nightmares that we all dread. Some man was running down the street screaming, "Run for your life! A bomb is in the United States!"

Then a man in a cowboy masked turned to me and said, "If something bad happened at the White House, would anyone even care?" What in the world brought on that dream? It must have been the olallieberry pie that I ate last night instead of dinner.

"Did you read in the newspaper about that construction firm in New Orleans that ripped off a bunch of money from the Katrina funds?" asked my friend Sonya. "This whole country is riddled with corruption." Geez Louise. How could anybody sink so low as to steal from Katrina victims?

According to Pratap Chattergee of CorpWatch, "the track record of private contractors and federal agencies in Iraq and now in the Gulf states bodes ill for the likelyhood that the public will enjoy [the right to expect an effective response in a time of emergency]. The Corps contracts and those awarded FEMA replicate 'the same flawed contracting strategy that produced disastrous results in Iraq,' Conresssman Seny Hoyer wrote to the Government Accountability Office."

More corruption: Bush's pals at Diebold have conned American taxpayers into purchasing a whole bunch of malfunctioning voting machines. In a recent Ohio primary, for example, Diebold touch-screen machines failed so badly that election officials in Cuyahoga County had to hand-count 17,000 ballots. And Lord knows who we really elected to the White House in 2000 and 2004. (Hint: It wasn't George Bush.)

Carpetbagging close to home: In my home state of California, we can't even get the levees repaired because the federal funds to do it with are tied to a Congressional pork barrel bill giving fabulous bonuses to Donald Rumsfeld as a reward for his failures in Iraq.

For the sake of my blood pressure, I'm not even going to mention the billions of dollars disappearing down Dick Cheney's Halliburton rat-hole while our troops languish in hellholes near Baghdad without even minimal essentials such as clean water and sanitary food -- let alone bullet-proof vests.

And to quote CitizenDC, "Have you ever wondered how a man who owns a $1,500,000 house in DC, a $1,000,000+ house in Florida and a $48,000 cottage in Texas manages to survive on a $161,000-a-year federal salary? It's odd." He's talking about White House employee Karl Rove. "Would it raise questions if that same man had sold a property to a shell company controlled by his former business partners and that man made between $250,000 and $750,000 profit?" Apparently not. Bush hasn't raised any questions at all.

The Bush bureaucracy's "strip America down to the floorboards" carpetbagging policies have become a national shame. And despite all the cover-ups, Americans know that their wallets are being stolen from under their very noses. And NOBODY likes George Bush. His popularity ratings have sunk so low that if he was a TV show with those kind of sorry bottom-of-the-barrel numbers, it would have been canceled right out the gate.

Still and all, I love the White House itself and what it used to stand for. If something bad EVER happens to the White House, they will be in big trouble from me.

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From Aprille: Well, it isn't "W's" house Jane. It STILL belongs to everyone of US and stands for what this country is all about, or used to be all about. That is not to say it won't need a thorough scrubbing and total fumigation services once the 'Deciders' are back in Texas. The squatters that are in residence now are just like the crooked, evil guy that moved into the house in 'Pacific Heights'.........Michael Keatons' character managed to strike fear and loathing into our hearts even tho we never really BELIEVED anyone could get away with what he did to the owners. Who knew we, as a country, were in for the same treatment but with the damages and the backlash being on a worldwide scale?

Who knew? WE did!

Who listened? Nobody.

Who pays? EVERY ONE of us.

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From TruthOut [Why is Rumsfeld getting a BONUS for all this inefficiency?]: Death in Iraq. It is relentless and incessant. Know what it is like when scores of your fellow citizens are being killed every single day while the world proceeds unheedingly on? As a journalist I've had but a taste of that poison during my eight months in Iraq. Try it out: be an Iraqi for a day, into your fourth year of being occupied, humiliated, tortured and killed, doing all you can just to survive. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050306J.shtml

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Where to get olallieberry pie: Fat Apple's (corner of Rose and Martin Luther King in Berkeley, CA): They've got comfort food (and breakfast) here too, but the things to get are the cheese puffs, the apple turnovers, the apple pie a la mode, the olallieberry pie, and, if they're fresh, the lemon bars. . . but really, try the cheese puffs, it's like a dimensional wormhole to france. . . http://www.thatnotsofreshfeeling.com/so_you_wanna/eat_in_berkeley.html

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From CLG News:
Santorum pushes for new rules, lives by old --The senator took flights sponsored by corporations while arguing against the perk. 03 May 2006 Speaking from the Senate floor on March 8, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) urged his colleagues to curtail a popular perk: private corporate-sponsored flights at bargain rates for members of Congress. Two days earlier, he had taken a BellSouth plane from a runway near his home in Leesburg, Va., to fund-raising events in North Carolina and South Carolina. The jet ferried Santorum, two aides and Ward White, BellSouth's top Washington lobbyist. Santorum paid $6,955... a fraction of what it costs to operate the plane... Santorum, in an interview, said he did not have the "luxury" of a self-imposed ban.

Rep. Harris's Action Prompts Call for Probe 04 May 2006 A political strategist who left U.S. Rep. KKKatherine Harris's Senate campaign last month said Harris (R-Terrorist) ignored her staff's recommendation to reject a defense contractor's $10 million appropriation request, now being challenged by a congressional watchdog group.

Voting machine warning issued in Penn. --Schuylkill, Carbon bolster security efforts after glitch found. Alerted late Tuesday that new electronic voting machines that many counties bought are vulnerable to tampering, election officials in Schuylkill and Carbon counties say they will keep the equipment locked up tight until the May 16 primary. A ''potential security vulnerability'' in machines sold by Diebold Election Systems Inc. of McKinney, Texas, could let ''unauthorized software to be loaded on to the system,'' Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortez said in a warning issued to the counties.

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From TruthOut: The worst problems in Ohio appeared to be in Cuyahoga County, where officials resorted to paper ballots after touch-screen machines failed and about 17,000 absentee ballots were being hand-counted. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050406O.shtml

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From Pratap: Big, Easy Iraqi-Style Contracts Flood New Orleans: "They are throwing money out, they are shoveling it out the door," said James Albertine, a Washington lobbyist and past president of the American League of Lobbyists, told the New York Times. "I'm sure every lobbyist's phone in Washington is ringing off the hook from his clients. Sixty-two billion dollars is a lot of money -- and it's only a down payment."

....In a September 15 speech to the nation, Bush said that Americans "have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency." But the track record of private contractors and federal agencies in Iraq and now in the Gulf states bodes ill for the likelyhood that the public will enjoy that right. The Corps contracts and those awarded FEMA replicate "the same flawed contracting strategy that produced disastrous results in Iraq," Conresssman Seny Hoyer wrote to the Government Accountability Office. http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12647

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From Chuck: Excuse me. Corporations do not spend time developing new ideas. Their prime direction and main function is still the same. Improving upon their time-tested method of squeezing every last penny out of every living being on this earth (and if Cheney had his way) on the moon too. Why, well of course to increase "shareholder" profitability.

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