Not in the driver's seat.

What a bumpy ride for George W. Bush on the way back to D.C. today. His poll numbers are falling and our gas prices are soaring. And then Air Force One had to dip down over Louisiana to give him a look at the damage.

New Orleans happens to be on an easy flight path from Never-Admit-Anything-Land Ranch in Crawford to the liberal-infested East Coast. So Bush looked out the window.

After arrival, Bush called the hurricane "historic" and pledged help. How soon he'll actually go to New Orleans is not yet known. But this isn't an election year, so he doesn't really have to go, unless his handlers decide that the storm will give him some good photo-ops as a distraction from the deadly war in Iraq.

Last August, on the other hand, Bush rushed down to Florida to survey damage from Hurricane Charley. He flew over the affected areas with brother Jeb and hopped off the helicopter to hand out water and hug assorted residents.

The people in Louisiana have it a lot worse, but the rest of America will now suffer with even higher gas prices. Too bad Bush was a bust at finding oil when he was involved with companies like Harken Energy.

Any subhead here would be superfluous

Desperately seeking refuge from Topical Storm Cindy, George W. Bush is now telling us that we're in Iraq for the oil.

If that didn't blow your mind, consider that the radical right is now saying, "Impeach Bush!" World Net Daily's Joseph Farah, formerly an ardent supporter of the POTUS because John Kerry was "treasonous," says Bush is too soft on illegal immigrants. (When Bush gets up from his nap and hears about this, he's going to be so cranky.)

And then we learn that hundreds of people died today in a religious stampede in Baghdad.

And if that still hasn't fried all your wiring, long-dead Louisiana governor Huey Long re-appeared this morning to talk about the hurricane that killed thousands of people in his beloved state.

Battered Louisianans who had access to a working TV set probably didn't turn it to C-SPAN this morning. Even on a calm day, most people wouldn't. But if they did they probably did a double-take when Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, appeared at a FEMA press conference on Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

Tell me that McHale isn't a dead ringer for the Kingfish (see photos above).

In times like these, lots of people turn to religion for answers, although maybe they don't also turn completely away from reality, as Bridgett Magee has. Sure enough, she says, the Jews did it. Well, some of them, anyway.

In a fascinating piece on BeliefNet, Deborah Caldwell explores Magee's theories:

At least one New Orleans-area resident believes God created the storm as punishment because of the recent role the United States played in expelling Jews from Gaza. On Sunday evening, Bridgett Magee of Slidell, La., told the Christian website Jerusalem Newswire that she saw the hurricane "as a direct 'coming back on us' [for] what we did to Israel: a home for a home."

Stan Goodenough, a website columnist, described Katrina as “the fist of God” in a Monday column. “What America is about to experience is the lifting of God’s hand of protection; the implementation of His judgment on the nation most responsible for endangering the land and people of Israel,” Goodenough writes. “The Bible talks about Him shaking His fist over bodies of water, and striking them.”

Other people say it's not God but Gaia the earth mother. As Caldwell notes:

Meanwhile, spiritual and political environmentalists say that massive hurricanes such as Katrina, along with the Asian tsunami, are messages from the earth, letting humanity know of the earth’s pain. These hurricanes are caused by global warming, environmentalists say, which are the result of using too much fossil fuel. They see the catastrophic consequences as a kind of comeuppance.

All we really know for certain about comeuppance is that Paul McHale, the dead ringer for Huey Long, used to be in the House of Representatives, where he was the first Democrat to condemn Bill Clinton for getting a blow job from Monica Lewinsky.

Unlike Hurricane Katrina, that was an imperfect storm.

For the Bush regime, the 'good fight' is the fight against releasing more Abu Ghraib photos

Coming off the bench at the last minute to fight against release of further Abu Ghraib photos and videos, General Richard "Quag" Myers has apparently wowed Judge Alvin Hellerstein with an argument that flies in the face of facts.

Hellerstein, hearing the case in Manhattan federal court, hasn't decided whether to let the public see these additional torture/abuse photos, but he promises to do so quickly. If he buys Myers's argument that bad publicity from release of the photos would endanger our troops to the extent that the material shouldn't be shown to us, that's bad news.

The public needs to know the full scope of the prison abuses. Maybe then, the public would exert more pressure on the Bush regime to stop trying to white-knuckle its way to the bitter end of the Iraq debacle.

For now, you can keep track of this vital case via the ACLU and other sites, including the excellent legal-news source Jurist, which also has links to Myers's affidavit to the court and other stuff.

The AP reports this morning that the judge expressed hesitation during Tuesday's hearing in New York to release additional photos and videos from Abu Ghraib, as requested by the ACLU:

The judge questioned whether he could disregard arguments by Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has warned that releasing the photos would aid al-Qaida recruitment, weaken the Afghan and Iraqi governments and incite riots against U.S. troops.

"How can I ignore the expert opinion of General Myers, who is concerned with the safety of his troops?" the judge asked. "I can't substitute my opinion for the opinion of General Myers."

But Myers's affidavit is based on the unstated fallacy that most of the bloodshed in Iraq has been caused by the insurgents.

The Bush regime is desperate to prevent release of the photos because they would prove harmful to the Bush regime, whose approval ratings are plummeting. Safety of the troops is secondary, as it has been throughout the Iraq fiasco.

In the general's "second amended declaration" to the court, dated August 26, Myers said:

Among the goals of the insurgency are to use violence against innocent civilians … . The insurgents will use any means necessary to incite violence and, specifically, will focus on perceived U.s. or Coalition mistreatment of Iraqi civilians and detainees as a propaganda and recruiting tool to aid their cause.

Thus, for example, we have documented situations in which insurgents have falsely claimed that U.S. actions in Iraq, rather than their own terrorist attacks have caused death and suffering.

Yes, the insurgents do doctor photos and present false evidence. No doubt. But the facts are that we have killed more civilians than the insurgent terrorists have. As I pointed out last month, most of the bombs exploding in Iraq are ours.

Iraq Body Count's detailed study released in late July estimated 25,000 civilian casualties so far and asked, "Who did the killing?" The answers:

• US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.

• Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.

• Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.

• Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period.

What puts our troops in danger in Iraq is their continued presence in Iraq.

600 trampled to death or drown after mortar blasts and rumors panic a Shiite pilgrimage crowd

How could it get any worse in Baghdad? Well, it has. A understandably jittery crowd of Shiite pilgrims, gathered a million strong for a holy day, panicked today, and more than 600 people were killed in the resulting stampede on a bridge.

Martrydom is a major theme in the Shia branch of Islam, so this tragedy is likely to find a hallowed place.

As far as death by human stampede, this tragedy moves to the top of the list for 2005, according to stats compiled by Crowd Dynamics Ltd., a consulting firm that works with the Saudis on preventing similar tramplings during the annual Hajj. (See Wikipedia's list of fatal incidents during Hajj.)

Rumors of a suicide bomber in the crowd apparently set off today's stampede near the Khadimiya mosque, but religious events are particularly deadly anyway. This past January 25, about 300 people were trampled to death during a religious festival in Wai, India, according to Crowd Dynamics.

Here's what happened today, from the Washington Post:

Rumors of a suicide bomber in the midst of a crowd of Shiite Muslim pilgrims set off a stampede Wednesday on a Tigris River bridge, killing hundreds as panicked worshipers trampled others or hurled themselves off the bridge, according to witnesses and officials.

Col. Adnan Abdul Rahman, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said 637 people died and another 183 were injured, though other estimates ranged widely.

The stampede occurred as hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims walked to a Baghdad shrine in an annual religious commemoration that shut down much of Baghdad.

You can hardly blame people for panicking. Only two hours earlier, mortar rounds and rockets hit the area of the shrine, killing seven and wounding 40, and U.S. helicopters blasted back at the rocket launchers.

This was a huge crowd, estimated by some at a million people. And many of them were on a bridge over the Tigris when the rumor of a suicide bomber swept through them. More from the Post:

"The people when they were at the bridge, more than one person started yelling, and saying the bridge will fall down, the bridge will explode," said Khalid Fadl, a nearby resident. "So the people started running in panic, pushing each other, trying to run away. Some of the people fell down, and the people stepped on them," Fadl said.

"The others threw themselves off the bridge, into the river."

Crowds tore down metal sidings erected along the sides of the bridge in order to leap into the river, witnesses said. Worshipers pulled countless bodies from the river into late afternoon.

No expression of sympathy yet from George W. Bush, whose handlers could at least release a statement. The White House's "Renewal in Iraq" page gets renewed only when there's supposedly good news. No wonder it's not up to date.

Moqtada pursues the same occupation, but with more vigor

As Don Rumsfeld sounds more and more like Robert McNamara — the blustery, dogged, pre-"apology" McNamara — what the current secretary of defense says publicly about Iraq is increasingly irrelevant.

What Moqtada al-Sadr says, on the other hand, is increasingly important. Muckety-muck of the Mahdi militia, he's been the bane of arrogant U.S. policymakers like Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, and Jerry Bremer. They've long ignored evidence that he's consistently been more popular with Iraqis than various U.S. puppets like Ayad Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi.

Anthony Shadid writes in a brilliant piece in this morning's Washington Post that Sadr stands at the head of "a protest movement in a country with plenty to protest about."

The country's shattering into militias, as Lebanon once did.

What makes Shadid's story so good is that he has humanized rebellious Iraqis. I don't mean that he's glorifying them, only that he's delving into what makes them tick. The early days of war reporting in Iraq were filled with nothing but portraits of our soldiers fighting a faceless enemy. Now there are faces. Shadid's story is a sharp profile and a history lesson, starting with this:

Hazem Araji's résumé reads like a story of Iraq's recent past — and perhaps its near future.

In the tumult that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003, he hit the streets with a clique of fellow Shiite Muslim clerics to organize what became Iraq's first postwar popular movement. Their symbol was Moqtada Sadr, a young, radical clergyman and son of a revered ayatollah. The next year, Araji emerged as the group's public face, as it twice fought U.S. troops. He and others were arrested, and for nine months he languished in U.S. custody in Abu Ghraib prison, then at Camp Bucca.

Now, as the country enters a time as politically uncertain as any since the fall of President Saddam Hussein, Araji is a free man. So are a handful of Sadr's other closest, most dynamic aides, men in their thirties who have helped shape the organization's combustible mix of Iraqi and Arab nationalism, millenarian religious ideology, grass-roots protest and gun culture. With customary bravado, Araji and the others today are sending a message: They are ready to make up for lost time.

A little more than a year ago, Jerry of Arabia shut down Sadr's newspaper and issued an arrest warrant. And then Bremer left Iraq with a whimper. Pin a medal on him. So George W. Bush did.

Much of the U.S. "strategy" regarding Sadr was foolish. Naomi Klein drew a fine portrait of that period in 2004 in her "Baghdad Year Zero" piece last year in Harper's:

… I got word that there was a major demonstration outside the CPA headquarters. Supporters of the radical young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their newspaper, al Hawza, by military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of publishing “false articles” that could “pose the real threat of violence.” As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer “is pursuing a policy of starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied with procuring their daily bread so they do not have the chance to demand their political and individual freedoms.” To me it sounded less like hate literature than a concise summary of Milton Friedman’s recipe for shock therapy.

Two years after our invasion, our abrasive occupation is the only thing that Iraqis can agree on: They hate it. The level of their discontent — not we or our plans for belatedly training their troops — will determine the timetable for our departure.

Shadid weaves the personal stories of Sadr's Mahdi movement people into the current combustible climate. The agitprop of the Bush regime doesn't take into account the nuances of Iraq. Shadid does:

In a country whose sectarian and ethnic divides have relentlessly deepened, Sadr stands as a rare figure with support among both Sunnis and Shiites. At a protest Monday against Iraq's new constitution in Tikrit, near Hussein's home town, Sunnis held aloft pictures of the cleric. "Yes, yes to Sadr!" some of the 1,500 protesters shouted.

Ahead are difficult questions, namely about Sadr's still-undeclared stance on the proposed constitution: Support could anger Sunni allies, but opposition might endanger his Shiite support. One aide hinted that Sadr may leave his position ambiguous. But for the moment, Sadr officials say they are reaping the benefits of their position as a protest movement in a country with plenty to protest about.

The Bush regime, fearing a fragging, has retreated to its bunker, emerging only to talk to troops and other friendly audiences.

Yesterday, for example, Rumsfeld was at Fort Irwin, California, talking to soldiers in training for desert warfare. Sergeant Sara Wood, one of the Pentagon's permanently embedded reporters, writes this morning:

Every war has had critics who say it's the wrong place, wrong time or wrong fight, Rumsfeld said, but in every instance, those people have been wrong. The U.S. does not go to war lightly, and the fight against terrorists is one that this country will see through, he said.

"People who want to toss in the towel were wrong yesterday, they're wrong today, and they'll be wrong tomorrow," he said.

I told you that Rumsfeld sounds like the old McNamara.

Through this crucial period, the Democrats are missing in action — Hillary Clinton's showing her true colors as a hawk. So it's up to moderate Republicans like Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska to call the war for what it is: a debacle.

The mostly somnolent New York Times still runs predictably establishmentarian stories from Iraq, for the most part. But back in the arts-fartsy pages, Frank Rich is regularly splenetic. On August 28, in "The Vietnamization of Bush's Vacation," Rich wrote:

Mr. Bush's current definition — "as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down" — could not be a better formula for quagmire.

While Bremer is back home in America writing his memoirs, it's Sadr who's standing up. We never could make him stand down.

To limit damage, a key whistleblower in Halliburton scandal is demoted

Not as deadly as Hurricane Katrina promises to be, Whistleblower Bunny represents a threat to only two structures — three, if you count Halliburton's headquarters.

But that's why the Pentagon and White House have urgently demoted the top U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contract overseer, Bunnatine H. "Bunny" Greenhouse.

The veteran official, fed up with her inability to call attention to cronyism that led to a five-year, $7 billion Iraq oil-repair contract to Kellogg Brown & Root, the subsidiary of Dick Cheney's Halliburton, ignored her bosses' warnings and testified before a powerless Senate Democrats-only panel in June that the sweetheart deal was "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."

Greenhouse is one of the highest-ranking and most potentially damaging whistleblowers about the Bush regime's bidness practices. She's been the focus of stories like Michael Shnayerson's "Spoils of War" in the April 2005 Vanity Fair. If there is ever a real investigation, she'll be a household name. After her strenuous objections to cronyism were ignored, she was forced to go public. Obviously in reprisal, Pentagon officials demoted her. The New York Times reports it this morning, but a better story on the outrageous action can be found at Halliburton Watch.

Greenhouse's effect has been to spur investigations by the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Pentagon's inspector general, Halliburton Watch notes. Nevertheless, while those probes supposedly continue, Greenhouse has been bounced from her executive post.

She showed courage back in 2002 and 2003, while the charges of cronyism were being directly denied by the White House and Pentagon. Later, of course, the liars came clean — partially.

In June 2004, the Pentagon finally admitted that the first sweetheart Halliburton deal for the war was awarded on the recommendation of aptly named political appointee Michael Mobbs, an assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, a chief neocon schnorrer. Feith was in charge of post-war planning.

Mobbs, a former associate in Feith's law firm that serviced defense contractors before the neocons came to power, was placed in charge of half of Iraq's ministries. He was also a fixer on the pre-invasion issue of how to mistreat "enemy combatants."

His role in the Hamdi case back in August 2002 produced a frighteningly hilarious episode in federal court. District Judge Robert Doumar grilled the government on its reasons for holding Yaser Esam Hamdi incommunicado in a Navy brig. As the Washington Post wrote at the time:

The government has declared Hamdi an "unlawful enemy combatant," entitled to neither constitutional protections nor international prisoner-of-war status.

And the government provided a two-page "declaration of facts" by Mobbs about how the Pentagon determined that Hamdi was an "enemy combatant." The judge questioned the government's attempt to ignore due process:

"I have no desire to have an enemy combatant get out of any status. However, I do think that due process requires something other than a basic assertion by someone named Mobbs that they have looked at some papers and therefore they have determined he should be held incommunicado. Just think of the impact of that. Is that what we're fighting for?"

No, judge, we're fighting to liberate Halliburton. Dogged work by Congressman Henry Waxman has helped uncover that rock. Waxman's June 13, 2004, letter to Cheney about the Mobbsed-up contract with Halliburton is a classic, a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the bidness scandal surrounding our unjustified invasion of Iraq.

As Halliburton Watch said at the time:

During the Summer of 2002, Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry. By the Fall of 2002, Mobbs had decided that three companies could carry out the oil fire contract: Halliburton, Bechtel Group and Fluor Corp.

Contracting experts say it is highly unusual for a political appointee, rather than career civil servants, to designate which companies will compete for a government contract. "The suggestion that political appointees would be directing that type of investigation does not seem consistent with maintaining the appearance of propriety," contracting expert Steven L. Schooner told the Los Angeles Times.

In 2002, an Army lawyer objected to the oil fire contract on grounds that it would be awarded to Halliburton under the company's Army supply contract, which is not authorized to govern firefighting issues. Mobbs overruled the lawyer and the contract was later awarded to Halliburton under the Army supply contract. But the auditing arm of Congress, the General Accounting Office, will release a report this week concluding that the firefighting contract was indeed improperly awarded to Halliburton because it was not awarded as a separate contract from the company's already-existing Army supply contract.

"Rumsfeld's political lawyers steamrollered the career guys to push through Halliburton's secret deal," law professor Charles Tiefer told the Times. "It creates a disturbing appearance of influence when Cheney's lawyers are told several times Halliburton is getting special deals, and they never say, 'Make sure the career people agree this is being done right.'"

This past June, Waxman rounded up examples of the preferential treatment of Halliburton — including the Mobbs and Greenhouse incidents. Of Greenhouse's work, the roundup notes:

Despite strenuous objections from the chief contracting official at the Army Corps of Engineers, the Defense Department secretly awarded Halliburton a five-year, no-bid contract to repair Iraq's oil infrastructure in March 2003. Bunnatine H. Greenhouse served as the Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting (PARC) with the Army Corps of Engineers. Ms. Greenhouse objected for several reasons to the award to Halliburton of the RIO contract, which was worth up to $7 billion.

It didn't take Halliburton, which still pays Cheney, much time to run up a tab. In December 2003, the government found that it had overcharged taxpayers $61 million for importing gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq. The next month, however, the Pentagon ignored its own auditors and gave Halliburton yet another huge contract.

Will there ever be a real investigation? Not as long as the GOP controls Congress.

And not as long as ass-kissing officials in agencies like the Corps of Engineers keep demoting whistleblowers to please the Pentagon and White House bosses.

Greenhouse warnings just don't go over too well with this White House.

Buried news: Pay hike for dead soldiers — and yet more word games

In George W. Bush's deadly version of no-limit Texas Hold 'Em, bullshit talks and money walks.

On July 1, Don Rumsfeld's Pentagon announced an immediate pay hike for dead soldiers, an increase in what's been known as the "Death Gratuity" from $12,420 to $100,000. That's the "immediate cash payment," the Pentagon boasts, for survivors of "those whose death is as a result of hostile actions and occurred in a designated combat operation or combat zone or while training for combat or performing hazardous duty."

Plus retroactive payments. Plus payment or reimbursement of premiums for automatically higher life insurance. What a good deal.

As military.com notes, the Pentagon "is making an effort to ease the hardship for families in mourning."

In all, the retroactive money and pay hikes are estimated to cost about $47 million. As I said, bullshit talks, and money walks. That total cost of the extra money is pocket change compared with the $5 billion a month we're spending on the unjustified war in Iraq — the increasingly deadly war that Bush continues to bullshit us about as a heroic cause.

Particularly galling is the continuing public-relations spin slapped on the war — and not only by the Bush regime, which, I noted a few days ago in "Slab in the Face," is chiseling euphemistic slogans on dead soldiers' tombstones.

Democratic senator Ken Salazar of Colorado pushed through Congress a replacement of the term "Death Gratuity," which has long described the financial help taxpayers give to survivors of dead soldiers, with the term "Fallen Hero Compensation."

In a March speech to a VFW conference in D.C., Salazar said:

Hearing the term "gratuity" is a bitter pill for survivors who have just received the worst news of their lives. Not one of the widows, widowers, or children left behind think of that money as a gift.

This is a simple change, but it more properly reflects the sacrifices military survivors have made and more properly expresses the gratitude and dignity we owe these families.

Actually, what we owe them is a just war, not just war.

The best thing Salazar could do, as a member of the supposed opposition party, is not to come up with a jingoistic euphemism but to press the GOP majority into finally investigating the reasons for and conduct of the war.

The facts already revealed in the Downing Street Memo and numerous other documents indicate that, if anything, survivor benefits for Iraq war deaths could be renamed "gratuitous death gratuity."

Salazar noted in his speech that 1,504 American soldiers had died in Iraq and 158 in Afghanistan.

Hey, Ken, those figures, as of 10 a.m. EDT on August 26, are now 1,872 killed in Iraq and 231 in Afghanistan. Do your fucking job.

Not that the money won't help the grieving families. Presumably, the money means a better effort than the Pentagon made to ease the pain of Pat Tillman's family.

Under severe pressure, the Pentagon said August 22 — only in response to a San Francisco reporter's prodding — that it's reopening the probe of the former NFL star's 2004 death by friendly fire in Afghanistan (and subsequent coverup for public-relations purposes) by reviewing a previous "investigation" that Tillman's family has denounced.

"The other investigations were frauds," Tillman's father told Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle. The football player's mom, Mary Tillman, said, "People above should have been punished."

As Steve Coll and others at the Washington Post have revealed, the Bush regime lied about the circumstances of Tillman's death, saying he had been killed in combat with the Taliban, when in fact they almost immediately knew that he had been mistakenly shot to death by his own troops as he frantically yelled, "I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!"

Until the facts were finally revealed, Bush's handlers got good p.r. mileage out of his death, lauding him, the Chronicle's Collier recalls the White House saying, as "an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror."

As Collier noted, Tillman's death by friendly fire — not exactly the death this heroic figure deserved — was known by Pentagon commanders, including General John Abizaid, head of Centcom. But the unheroic circumstances of his death were withheld from the public — even from his family — until after Tillman's funeral.

When the likes of Abizaid and Rumsfeld die, do we have to call them "fallen heroes" too?

Similar situation in Iraq, too

It's purty hot down there in Crawford, but it's not the heat that makes George W. Bush feint. Even during his quick dip in the press pool the other day in Idaho, he lied about his nemesis Cindy Sheehan (left), captured in this shot by Dallas photog Randal Dean (check out Dean's other work). No, Bush's discombobulation is probably the result of a growing insurgency coalescing around Sheehan this summer that provides a sharp contrast to last summer's overly polite protest of the Republican National Convention.

Half a million people turned up in New York City exactly a year ago for that one, but the protest organizers' tack of asking the city's government and cops for permission to march led to the crowd's being co-opted and herded like so many sheep.

The lack of spontaneity doomed any chances of impact. It didn't help that the mainstream media went along with the propaganda that the protesters were "anarchists" and that the Democratic Party leadership and namby-pamby nominee John Kerry pointedly ignored them. Look what that got Kerry.

Sheehan didn't ask permission. She simply went to the Crawford ranch this summer to try to talk to Bush. It was the kind of "Schelling incident" that sparked what has turned out to be a long-overdue protest of the war and Bush.

If at least some of last summer's protesters hadn't submitted to their organizers, there would have been a convergence at Central Park, from which the protesters had been banned. Maybe it would have gotten ugly. But it wouldn't have been as ugly as what's going on in Iraq right now. As the Belfast Telegraph reports today:

The latest bloodshed — including the deaths of 13 policemen and an American — came after dozens of masked gunmen occupied parts of Baghdad. President Jalal Talabani escaped an assassination attempt in which eight of his bodyguards were killed and 15 injured. In further evidence of sectarian unrest, the bodies of 36 men, thought to be Kurds, were found in a dry river bed near the Iranian border at Badrah. They had been "executed" with shots to the head.

Meanwhile, back at Bush's vacation ranch, his handlers are taking Sheehan's protest seriously. That's why Bush trekked to Utah and Idaho in search of friendly crowds. But even there he couldn't escape from Sheehan. The first question from the pool gathered on August 23 at Tamarack Resort in Donnelly, Idaho, was directly about Sheehan, and Bush was typically comatose — non-responsive:

Q: Mr. President, we know you met with Cindy Sheehan a year ago, but she says a lot has changed since then; she has more to say to you. And even some Republicans have said that you should meet with her. Why not do that when you get back to the ranch?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I did meet with Cindy Sheehan. I strongly support her right to protest. There's a lot of people protesting, and there's a lot of points of view about the Iraq war. As you know, in Crawford last weekend there were people from both sides of the issue, or from all sides of the issue there to express their opinions.

That's the kind of response you'd expect to get from someone who's been smoking weed all day. No, Bush didn't meet with Sheehan. The questioner specifically mentioned last year's meeting and asked about the possibility of Bush's meeting with her this year.

The president will face more such questions now that he's back in Crawford after his brief hunt for weapons of mass distraction (during which he found some). The Washington Post reports this morning from Crawford:

Both the president and Sheehan returned to Crawford on Wednesday to find the protests larger and more organized than when they left.

The focus of anti-war activity has moved to "Camp Casey 2," named after Sheehan's 24-year-old son, Army Spec. Casey Sheehan, who was killed last year in Iraq. It is a large tent complex erected in Sheehan's absence on private land, with several portable toilets, a stage, a hot buffet and parking attendants.

Meanwhile, dozens of Bush supporters are camping along the perimeter of the president's ranch, opposite the tent Sheehan used when she first arrived. More supporters of the "You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy" tour are expected to arrive in the next few days.

Sheehan's letter to Bush last November 4 was powerful, but it rambled — understandable because Casey (left) was an altar boy and a Boy Scout and had been in Iraq only two weeks when he was blown up in Baghdad. Her new little video is such a blockbuster of brevity that I don't think Bush's handlers will ever let their little feller go outside to play with that mean ol' girl:

Mr. President, my name is Cindy Sheehan. On April 4, 2004, my son Casey was killed in Iraq. He was only 24, and he died in his best friend's arms.

Casey was so good and so honest. Why can't you be honest with us? You were wrong about the weapons of mass destruction. You were wrong about the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

You lied to us. And because of your lies my son died.

You said he died for a noble cause. What cause?

Mr. President, I want to tell you face-to-face how much this hurts. I love my country. But how many more of our loved ones need to die in this senseless war? How many more soldiers have to die before we say, "Enough"?

I know you can't bring Casey back. But it's time to admit mistakes and bring our troops home now.

Actually, Bush is doing the opposite. We're sending reinforcements to Iraq for the supposed election that's coming up. And with Sheehan's video scheduled to run as an ad on cable, Bush's handlers are spending more time on the insurgency here than they are on the insurgency in Iraq. As the Post story notes:

The president stepped up the strategy to divert attention from Sheehan on Wednesday, with a speech to the Idaho National Guard in which he praised Tammy Pruett, whose husband and five sons have served or are serving in Iraq. Providing an unmistakable counterpoint to Sheehan, Bush declared: "America lives in freedom because of families like the Pruetts."

But Sheehan's protest has already generated as much face time on prime time as last year's overly polite RNC protest. More from the Post:

The anti-war protesters responded Thursday with an emotional ceremony, carried live on national television, in which Sheehan was presented with the boots worn by her son before he was killed. She tearfully laid them before a small cross bearing her son's name, surrounded by dozens of supporters. There were sobs from other women whose sons were killed in Iraq.

Sheehan said that she realizes Bush has no intention of meeting with the protesters, but that her vigil has accomplished other things. "We've started people talking about the war again," she said.

Coincides with Bolton's invasion of NYC. Hmmm.

John Bolton just arrived at the U.N. and he's already made a splash. Typically, it was a caustic spill of some sort. The face of American arrogance (left) proliferated a ton of paperwork on other countries, calling for a rewrite of practically everything the other countries were supposed to discuss, do, or not do.

All part of the neocons' master plan to destabilize the hated U.N. We've got that destabilizing thing down pat. Bolton's diplomacy reminds me of preposterous pasha Jerry Bremer's maneuvers with Moqtada al-Sadr and other Iraqis in Baghdead. And Bolton's just treating the rest of the world the way Doug Feith treats Arabs.

Meanwhile, our dumping of nuts and Boltons on the U.N. is sure to not only screw up the rusty gears of the world body but also worsen the chances of holding U.S. corporate citizens accountable for a mammoth oil spill in Ecuador.

The Bush regime and its pals are mounting a multi-level attack on South America, the only continent on Earth in which left-leaning governments have been on the rise.

While the Cheney administration's theocratic wing — in the person of wing nut Pat Robertson — has called for the assassination of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, the regime's envoys are putting the economic squeeze on every other country down there to pledge not to hold us accountable to any international court of law.

Juan Forero of the New York Times pointed this out on August 19:

Three years ago the Bush administration began prodding countries to shield Americans from the fledgling International Criminal Court in The Hague, which was intended to be the first permanent tribunal for prosecuting crimes like genocide.

The United States has since cut aid to some two dozen nations that refused to sign immunity agreements that American officials say are intended to protect American soldiers and policy makers from politically motivated prosecutions.

Our rich partners, like Australia, Japan, Germany, and Great Britain, have been exempted from these "immunity agreements," but things look darker for people of darker color.

More than 100 countries yielded and signed the agreements. But 53 others — including Ecuador — haven't, and they're paying the price. Here's more from Forero:

Most of the penalties, outlined in a law that went into effect in 2003, have been in the form of cuts in military training and other security aid. But a budget bill passed in December also permits new cuts in social and health-care programs, like AIDS education and peacekeeping, refugee assistance and judicial reforms.

Though the amounts are a pittance for Washington, their loss is being sorely felt in small countries.

In an outburst, in June, President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador told a Quito television station that he would not yield to Washington. "Absolutely no one is going to make me cower," he said. "Neither the government, nor Alfredo Palacio nor the Ecuadorean people need to be afraid."

His nation has one of the region's largest American military bases and has become increasingly important as a staging ground for American surveillance of everything from the cocaine trade to immigrant smuggling. Still, Ecuador has lost $15 million since 2003 and may lose another $7 million this year.

Ecuador's not alone. Forero pointed out that 12 nations in Latin America and the Caribbean have been penalized. He added:

The cuts are generating strong resentment at what many see as heavy-handed diplomacy, officials and diplomats in seven countries said.

More than that, some Americans are also beginning to question the policy, as political and military leaders in the region complain that the aid cuts are squandering good will and hurting their ability to cooperate in other important areas, like the campaigns against drugs and terrorism.

Just like in the Middle East, the Bush regime's civilian troublemakers are ignoring warnings from their military people:

In testimony before Congress in March, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the commander of American military forces in Latin America, said the sanctions had excluded Latin American officers from American training programs and could allow China, which has been seeking military ties to Latin America, to fill the void.

"We now risk losing contact and interoperability with a generation of military classmates in many nations of the region, including several leading countries," General Craddock told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

This "immunity" business certainly doesn't protect the people in Ecuador from the poison that U.S. oil companies dumped on them. The watchdog ChevronToxico summarizes a historic trial now going on in eastern Ecuador:

The lawsuit on behalf of five indigenous tribes and 80 communities alleges Texaco dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into Ecuador's rainforest during its two decades of operations in Ecuador's northern Amazon region, from 1970 to 1992.

The amount of direct crude dumped is roughly 30 times larger than the amount spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster.

The trial is the first time in history that rainforest dwellers have forced a multinational oil company to be subjected to jurisdiction in their national courts. The Ecuador phase began in 2003 in the jungle town of Lago Agrio and is expected to conclude next year.

If only the U.S. had had a little more time to coerce these countries into extending immunity to our corporate citizens. Oh, well. The latest dispatch from activists about water samples from poisoned wells in Ecuador's rainforest bodes ill for the oil conglom now known as Chevron:

Chevron’s own sampling has produced devastating proof against itself — for example, of 77 water samples submitted to the court by Chevron, 97 percent violate Ecuadorian legal standards.

And those standards are far more relaxed than the ones that protect Americans' health.

But, hey, these are Ecuadoreans we're talking about. They don't really count. Proof of that is how they were treated this past April at Chevron's annual shareholder meeting in San Ramon, California:

Perhaps angered by a call by large shareholders that the Ecuador situation be independently reviewed by the Board of Directors, ChevronTexaco CEO David O'Reilly Wednesday reported record oil profits and then promptly shut down the microphone on a prominent Ecuadorian rainforest leader before she had a chance to speak at the company's annual meeting about oil contamination caused by Texaco in her homeland.

Wouldn't want these foreigners to soil a nice clean meeting, even though Humberto Piaguaje, a Secoya indeigenous leader who traveled from Ecuador and got a chance to briefly speak, told the Chevron board with the kind of decent tone not heard from the likes of, say, ugly Americans like John Bolton:

"I may be foreign to you but I am human. The jungle was once a great university, market, and hospital to us. Since ChevronTexaco came, our university, market, and hospital has been vanishing. I am not here to tarnish your image but to find a solution to this crisis."

Sit down and shut up, pal. We're Americans. Yeah, you Ecuadoreans are upset. And some of you, like Carmen Perez, are even sad:

Perez, a mother of six from Ecuador's Amazon region, had traveled two days by bus from her small community just to arrive in Quito, Ecuador's capital. She then flew a full day to the Bay Area to attend ChevronTexaco's annual meeting at the invitation of shareholders and the human rights organization Amnesty International.

"I was very sad that I traveled for three days to come to this meeting, only not to be heard by the chairman of the company," said Perez, who is a health care worker in the community of La Primavera, in Ecuador's Sucumbios province. Sucumbios is the epicenter of what industry experts believe could be the worst oil-related environmental catastrophe in the world.

Flexing his American muscles, Chevron's chairman ran roughshod over the activists:

Five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to end, O'Reilly shut down the microphone and adjourned the meeting in the middle of a presentation by Atossa Soltani, the executive director of Amazon Watch, a non-profit group that has been working for years with the Ecuadorian communities.

Soltani was presenting a letter sent by Amazon Watch to O'Reilly earlier in the week accusing company employees of making false and misleading public statements about the evidence at the trial, which thus far shows significant levels of toxic contamination at Texaco's former sites. She was attempting to cite ChevronTexaco's own soil and water tests from a well called Sacha-53 that found 22 samples over the maximum allowable legal limits for toxins.

Turning off a microphone is one ploy. Another good tactic is to dump an unexpected load of documents on your enemies. That's what John Bolton has done at the U.N., hardly a surprise considering his longstanding enmity toward the international body and his history as an expert in controlling arms by twisting them. As Colum Lynch of the Washington Post reports this morning:

Less than a month before world leaders arrive in New York for a world summit on poverty and U.N. reform, the Bush administration has thrown the proceedings in turmoil with a call for drastic renegotiation of a draft agreement to be signed by presidents and prime ministers attending the event.

The United States has only recently introduced more than 750 amendments that would eliminate new pledges of foreign aid to impoverished nations, scrap provisions that call for action to halt climate change and urge nuclear powers to make greater progress in dismantling their nuclear arms.

Our diplomatic moves have paid off in Iraq. Sending Bolton to the U.N. with a load of documents is just another example of what we Americans like to call "reinforcing success" in "support of continued progress."

Right-wing Christian group said to wrongly get over on taxpayers to the tune of $1.1 million

The best-laid plans of Rick Santorum's fave no-teen-sex group to keep shagging the public have hit a snag.

Apparently, the whole abstinence thing promoted by the Pennsylvania-based Silver Ring Thing national organization is just another ploy to brainwash teens for Christ. What a shock.

OK, youth ministers, go ahead and try to stop teens from screwing. But first, why don't you stop fucking us taxpayers?

It was so obvious that even the Bush regime's Department of Health and Human Services had to formally instruct the Silver Ring Thing to stop fucking the public. Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post wrote on August 23:

The Bush administration yesterday suspended a federal grant to the Silver Ring Thing abstinence program, saying it appears to use tax money for religious activities.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services ordered the group to submit a "corrective action plan" if it hopes to receive an expected $75,000 grant this year.

The group's gotten more than $1.1 million in fed funds overall. Run by a guy named Denny Pattyn out of Pittsburgh evangelist John Guest's Christ Church at Grove Farm, the Silver Ring Thing denies that it is reaming taxpayers:

Representatives of the Pennsylvania-based nonprofit describe Silver Ring Thing as a "faith-based" group but dispute charges it has commingled its public funds with religious activities.

"Any religious teaching that goes on is separate in time and place from what the government is funding," said Joel Oster, senior litigation counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the Silver Ring Thing. "They offer a religious program and they offer a secular program; kids can choose which one they want to go to."

In an advertisement on its Web site for a set of educational materials on DVD, Silver Ring Thing promises: "A secular program is also in development."

Uh-huh. As the Post story noted:

The action comes three months after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against HHS, accusing the administration of using tax dollars to promote Christianity. In documents filed in federal court in Boston, the ACLU alleged that the activities, brochures and Web site of Silver Ring Thing were "permeated with religion" and use "taxpayer dollars to promote religious content, instruction and indoctrination."

Teenage graduates of the program sign a covenant "before God Almighty" to remain virgins and earn a silver ring inscribed with a Bible passage reminding them to "keep clear of sexual sin." Many of its events are held at churches.

Santorum is probably frothing at the ACLU over this development. In December 2003, when he announced a $700,000 grant of taxpayer money to Silver Ring Thing—which followed a $400,000 grant in February 2003 — the GOP senator said:

Funding for education programs which promote sexual abstinence will help Pennsylvania youth become better informed about healthy alternatives to sexual activity. I believe these important programs will also provide young people with the necessary tools to combat peer pressure, reducing the rate of STDs and teen pregnancy.

But Christ Church at Grove Farm, in the tony Pittsburgh suburb of Sewickley, already had a prominent role that same year in alerting teens about alternatives to healthy sexual activity.

In May 2003, the news broke in Pittsburgh that an Episcopal priest allegedly sexed up a teen girl at Christ Church in 2001.

No big deal: The guy, a junior pastor, who was quietly let go by Christ Church in '01 and had to be tracked to Tucson to be arrested, was charged with rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, endangering the welfare of children, corruption of minors, and three counts of unlawful contact or communication with minors.

Here's how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote about it in 2003:

The girl's father was on the Christ Church parish council, and he and his wife had vacationed with the Guests, he said. [The junior pastor] was in their home several times each month to lead a Bible study and prayer group for church members.

"He cooked in our kitchen. He was a friend," the father said.

He said he also gave [the junior pastor] "significant" financial support because [he] always seemed to be short of money. The father attributed it to poor management skills.

His daughter began seeing [the junior pastor] for weekly counseling sessions in spring 2001. According to police records, after several sessions he began telling her she was beautiful, raising issues about her self-esteem and proposing that they engage in "sexual therapy." The girl told police she tried to resist his advances, but relented during three sessions between May and August 2001.

A later story in the Tribune-Review noted that the rape charge was dropped, but that the case was continuing full force on the other charges. (I haven't discovered the outcome.) The follow-up story did add some juicy details of this passion of the Christ Church:

[The junior pastor] massaged the girl's bare breasts and performed other sex acts on her, according to the affidavit of probable cause.

"He insinuated to her that because her family was not paying for these counseling sessions, and that he was helping her out of the goodness of his heart, she should do her best to keep her family happy," the affidavit said.

The girl initially refused his offer of what he referred to as "sexual therapy" and denied further requests for sexual contact after the third incident, the affidavit said. He apologized and instructed her not to tell anyone, the affidavit said.

I didn't realize until now that "just say no" is short for "just say nothing."