Running down the press:

Post: 'IDIOT SI SIBS PROVE 'GUIDO' MAYOR RIGHT: COPS'

Attention, immigrants: If you can prove that you understand this headline, you pass the New York City citizenship test. If you need help, here's Kyle Murphy's lede:

Times: 'As Iraq Surplus Rises, Little Goes Into Rebuilding'

Based on a GAO report spurred by indefatigable Michigan senator Carl Levin, James Glanz and Campbell Robertson write:

As if that weren't enough:

Too bad the Times is so hidebound, parochial, and old-school newspaperish that it won't include a link to the National Priorities Project's Cost of War page, which breaks down the tab to U.S. taxpayers at $341.4 million a day and the running total, as I write, as $543,045,201,657. Oops, make that $543,045,394,187.

Those damn Iraqis. We oughta just invade their country.

Daily News: 'Doped-up teen kills couple in Queens wreck: cops'

Bullshit.

The lede sez:

Actually, the kid wasn't "doped-up" enough, but the story doesn't reveal that until the 11th graf:

Marijuana caused this tragedy? If he'd smoked another blunt, he probably wouldn't have been able to even get into the car.

Times: 'Town in China Returns to Normal a Day After a Bold Attack'

Yeah, "normal." Edward Wong's folo on Monday's violence in far-western China ignores recent and ongoing history. The U.S. press swallows the propaganda of China's rulers and calls this "terrorism," but that depends on how you look at it.

China's government is pushing its dominant Han Chinese into historically Uighur territory. So this is like calling the American Indians "terrorists" when the U.S. government encouraged white settlers to push West in the first three centuries of our country's existence. Terror is terror; it's frightening and disgusting. "Terrorist" depends on your point of reference.

There are millions of Uighurs, so what's "normal" for this huge occupied area? The world's most self-prestigious paper needed to background this piece at least a little for its readers' sake. And when the Times doesn't do this, then most of the rest of the lapdog U.S. press, which take their cue from the Times, doesn't bother to do it either, which is why we need to keep ragging on the paper to do its job. And the paper could have done it by checking other mainstream-journo sources and throwing in a paragraph.

For instance, see Terry McCarthy's 1997 story on Time mag's website and from one paragraph you may understand why there was such a brutal attack yesterday in you-never-heard-of-before Kashgar:

For some great right-now photos of China's Far West turbulence, go to The Opposite End of China.

Times: 'Texas Executes Mexican Despite Objections'

You don't have to be a foe of the death penalty to throw this context into the story — which the Times didn't:

Of the top five bloodthirsty countries in the world, the U.S. is fifth and last. And that's the end of the good news from the humaneness perspective. The four other countries are (in order of state-sanctioned bloodthirstiness) China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

Note that, of the top five, the U.S. is the only Western country, the only one close to being a democracy, the only "Christian nation," and the country with the most Toyota-sales-event TV ads.

Post: ' 'THRAX DOC'S KIDS FACED FBI'S HEAT'

There was really no reason to abbreviate "anthrax," but somehow it's just right for this hed. Chuck Bennett's ripped-from-a-'40s-teletype lede:

Times: 'Where the Race Now Begins at Kindergarten'

Winnie Hu reports on a really sad story for really small kids who belong to a really tiny percentage of New York's population that can afford non-parochial private schooling:

Thank God the city's public schools are in great shape, as my colleague Nat Hentoff points out.

Post: 'ONE MORE SHOT AT GOTTI: FEDS TRY TO NAIL "JUNIOR" AGAIN BY CHARGING MOB SON WITH 3 SLAYS, COKE DEALING'

"Whacked" is such a cool word. It's sure to outlive the fading era of the Italian-American gangsters.

That's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly word business.

Times: 'Guantánamo Bay Judge Admits Possible Error'

Wait a minute. You mean the "international law of war" is even supposed to be "applied"? Have you checked with George W. Bush's handlers? Or with Alberto Gonzales?

Post: 'PAPERS BARE SOARES' LOVEFEST WITH SPITZER'

Misleading use of the word "lovefest," which has come to mean only one thing in the Spitzer sex lexicon — unless the ex-governor has a previously unrevealed kink involving "kid gloves":

Slate: 'When "Skinny" Means "Black": The weirdest new criticism of Obama' Tim Noah's piece isn't a P.C. piece; it's about a Wall Street Journal may-or-may-not-have-been-a hit piece:

Even though Noah neglected to mention Fat Albert or Biggie Smalls, it's still interesting.

Times: 'Accusations of Sex Abuse Trail Doctor'

Leslie Kaufman gingerly backs into this explosive tale of celebrity pediatrician Melvin D. Levine's having faced years of sexual-abuse allegations. You have to wait until the middle of the sixth graf to read this:

Yes, we can't imagine highly respected people such as doctors or priests behaving in such a criminal way and then being defended by their defenders.

Not just for kids: a parody of the self-parody administration

Fight off your recession and read this requiem for a lightweight: Goodnight Bush, a parody to end all self-parody presidencies.

It's almost time to say "good night" to George W. Bush, and Erich Origen and Gan Golan pronounce the laugh rites over the administration.

Bush's favorite kiddie book in times of crisis may be The Pet Goat, but mine is now Origen and Golan's Goodnight Bush, which sends the regime up to the moon in the same way that Ralph Kramden was always threatening to do to wife Alice.

This is a very funny book, even if it may induce nightmares instead of sweet dreams. Cute illustrations abound: a refinery plume, piggy war profiteers, a spilt glass of water with Katrina victims floating in it.

The text is warm and fuzzy — not as fuzzy as Bush's brain but warmer than Cheney's heart:

See Dick run. See Dick run away. See Dick run away finally.

And see the book's website here.

Still secret: Corruption in the White House.

Over at Secrecy News, the indefatigable Steven Aftergood has posted a heretofore secret study of Iraqi government corruption.

Even though the Nation's David Corn already wrote about the study, I can't say it would be much of a surprise anyway: The investigating agency, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, knows a lot about corruption.

Anyway, the report notes:

Sounds like the White House. U.S. congressmen and various public-interest groups got nowhere when they tried to probe Dick Cheney's "energy task force" early in the Bush regime.

And the White House has continually tried to call a halt to the excellent investigative work by Stuart Bowen on corruption in Iraq.

It took a British NGO, Christian Aid, to break the news a few years ago that Jerry Bremer, the Barney Fife of Baghdad, couldn't explain why $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue was missing.

Besides that oil-for-slush scandal, we're still waiting to see those millions of White House e-mails the regime is withholding that relate to various scandals. Then there are the missing-weapons scandal and the various KBR scandals — you get the picture.

In any case, this new report on corruption inside Iraq's puppet government is still worth reading. It turns out that we really have planted a seed of our own form of democracy over there.

This morning's New York Times story on the widening weapons scandal in Iraq is shocking — the biggest shock is that the Pentagon's special investigator has been saying this for a long time and we're just now sending teams of investigators from numerous agencies to check it out.

Still awaiting investigation is war profiteering related to weapons and armor. One of the people planning to profit from the continuing Iraq war is ex-czar and Medal of Freedom winner Jerry Bremer, and not just from his book tours.

Meanwhile, we never have found out what happened to the $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue that Bremer's regime oversaw but which can't be exactly accounted for. Just one of many oil-for-slush scandals in Iraq, that story was broken by the British NGO Christian Aid in June 2004

Back to the present: The latest quarterly report by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, revealed that numerous contracts for weapons and armor have gone unfulfilled.

An audit last October by Bowen's office revealed that we weren't even keeping track of — or prepared to maintain — the thousands of weapons we were handing out to Iraqi and U.S. soldiers.

Just about the same time, Bremer, the Bush regime's former head man in Iraq when the country started descending into civil war, joined the board of directors of BlastGard, which sells a reinforced wrap to protect Humvees from mines and homemade bombs. He's also a lobbyist for BlastGard. An enthusiastic article by Philip Siekman in April's Fortune Small Business accented Bremer's value to the company in one paragraph:

The article explains just what the company does and how its prospects are truly "explosive":

Meanwhile, inspector Bowen's report last October showed that of a $531,000 contract for reinforced armor for the Iraqi Army, $424,800 hadn't even been spent. The Pentagon has, however, completed a $76,955.50 contract to put decals on the Iraqi Army's Hummers.

Back when he took over in Iraq in the spring of 2003, Bremer obviously never foresaw that he would be joining a company like BlastGard that has such exciting and explosive prospects. As Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 22, 2003:

Now Bremer is working to make a profit off the chaos of Baghdad. BlastGard itself proudly points to a November 15, 2006, Wall Street Journal article saying that Bremer will be a "director and lobbyist with an eye on opportunities within the government and Defense Department."

You can't say exactly the same thing about Bremer's predecessor in Iraq, Lieutenant General Jay Garner.

Garner has also joined BlastGard, but only as a "military advisor," not a director.

One current scandal glows brighter than the rest, but only because it simply glows brighter: the story of how renegade Russian Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned by highly radioactive polonium-210 last November.

The supposed poisoning of a supposed spy took place over tea at London's Pine Bar, where fictional spies Sean Connery and George Lazenby used to lunch with 007 producer Cubby Broccoli. Beneath the cinematic tea-time episode at the Pine Bar is the tangled dance of George W. Bush and Vlad "The Paler" Putin. Even further beneath is a mixture of international oil politics. From Teapot Dome to Teapot Dumb, things haven't changed much.

Before the 9/11 deaths gave the Bush regime a reason to live, Bush himself called to mind Warren G. Harding, a president who sat on his porch swing while his oil-patch buddies plundered the Treasury, most famously in the Teapot Dome scandal. Bush's performance still brings Harding to mind.

Now, however, things are more complex. More on that later. The Litvinenko poisoning is colorful enough. It's laid out in a recent interview of head barman Norberto Andrade by Richard Gray in the Telegraph (U.K.):

Litvinenko later died of what was said to be a dose of polonium-210 that was 200 times the amount considered lethal. Traces of polonium were found all around the area where Litvinenko had been sitting. That naturally freaked out Andrade:

Britain — now under Tony Blair's successor, Gordon Brown — has angrily demanded the extradition from Russia of accused poisoner Andrei Lugovoi and has expelled Russian diplomats for Putin's refusal to do so.

Conservative anti-war drumbeater Justin Raimondo pooh-poohs the whole affair, saying oil politics are behind it all. He notes that Russia has shut out British oil giant BP from oil deals and he casts doubt on the whole poisoning episode:

It's always about the money and natural resources unnaturally extracted. Brown's anger at the Russians is matched by Bush's friendliness with ex-KGB chief Putin. Bush and Putin not only have a personal connection; they also have a business link. As Mark Baard wrote in a January 2004 Voice story about Bush's touting of a "hydrogen economy":

Yes, Bush and Putin personally struck a business deal in 2002 that gave Russia control over a key U.S. mining company:

Why was Bush touting hydrogen so much in the early days of his regime? Maybe it also had to do with the fact that when Bush tapped Jerry Bremer to run Iraq, Bremer was a board member of Air Products, a huge producer not only of hydrogen but of a plan to install hydrogen-fueling stations throughout the planet.

Hydrogen, platinum, nickel — these aren't radioactive. But the scandal of Bush's buddies making a mint off war and natural resources will cast a glow long after the polonium scandal dims to a flicker.

Sorry we complained that the federal government was taking its own sweet time responding to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Remember when Congress rushed to interfere with poor brain-dead Terri Schiavo? When it comes to the alive and kicking black people of New Orleans, it's moving quite a bit more slowly.

But then again, when Congress does act, look what happens.

A House bill hurriedly OK'd, rubber-stamped by the Senate and rushed today to the desk of George W. Bush includes a provision that will make any previous looting in New Orleans seem downright poignant. The watchdog group POGO notes that the bill "encourages federal agencies to waive taxpayer protections on Katrina-related contracting."

This provision, which the watchdog group POGO calls "Katrina Relief Bill: Contractors at the Pig Trough," is absolutely unnecessary, chimes in bulldog congressman Henry Waxman. He notes that other parts of the bill allow equally speedy ways of getting money to the problems, but without the potential for fraud, abuse, graft and so on. Waxman immediately fired off a letter of complaint to Appropriations Chair Jerry Lewis (not that one, but the one who's leading this telethon-like effort for the GOP's bidness pals).

Waxman's letter explains it like this:

I am writing about my very serious concerns with a provision in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill for Hurricane Katrina. A substantive provision was inserted in the bill, at the request of the Administration, which would raise the "micro-purchase" threshold from $15,000 to $250,000 for purchases relating to relief and recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

Raising this threshold would mean that any federal employee with a government-issued credit card could buy up to a $250,000 in goods or services in a single purchase. There would be no limit to the number of such purchases. This is an unwise provision that could lead to contract abuse and extensive waste, fraud, and abuse.

The use of government credit cards has a track record, and it is not a good one. In the decade since these credit cards were first introduced, GAO and agency Inspectors General have documented millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.

Oh, Henry! Can't be that bad, can it? Yes, it can be. While stressing that the vast majority of federal employees are honest, he plucks only three of many examples of abuse enumerated by the Government Accountability Office in past reports:

• A Navy cardholder who made $250,000 in unauthorized purchases in less than a year, including buying a dog. (GAO report)

• A Navy cardholder who spent $150,000 for automotive equipment, home building, and general home supplies, some of which the cardholder later resold for cash. (same report as above)

• A Department of Education cardholder who made fraudulent purchases from pornographic websites, including one named SlaveLaborProductions.com. (GAO report)

POGO's executive director, Danielle Brian, sums up the onerous provision this way:

The insertion of the provision is the result of callous contractors and their allies in Congress taking advantage of the country’s desperate desire to help the survivors of Katrina. This provision opens up the possibility for much more waste, fraud and abuse and offers no improvement in the government’s ability to quickly assist the people who need it.

Speaking of contractors and their allies, it's good to see ol' Joe Allbaugh hard at work on another national crisis, as I previously noted. The ex-FEMA chief (Mike Brown was his college roomie) is back to doing campaigning. But instead of running Bush's campaign, as he did in 2000, he's running interference for Halliburton and other companies down on the ravaged Gulf Coast. There's a ton of stuff now out there on Allbaugh's current lobbying. One of the best is Thomas B. Edsall's account in today's Washington Post. Edsall lets Allbaugh's quotes speak loud and clear about this Bush political hack's sense of community and civic service:

Allbaugh, now head of his own Washington lobbying and consulting firm, was in Baton Rouge, La., helping his clients get business from perhaps the worst natural disaster in the nation's history.

Allbaugh said he was there "just trying to lend my shoulder to the wheel, trying to coordinate some private-sector support that the government always asks for." In the case of one client, UltraStrip Systems Inc., a Florida company, Allbaugh said he persuaded "them down here" to present the case for a water filtration system.

"I'll tell them, 'Here are the list of entities [that might buy the system] that are in town, here is where they are — go to it.' "

Allbaugh said he advises clients on how to present their product or service to government agencies. "I tell them how to best craft their pitch, to craft their technical expertise so everybody knows exactly what they do."

Edsall does a fine job, but a must-read on the subject of Allbaugh, Brown, and FEMA is Jon Elliston's excellent "Disaster in the Making," published in the fall of 2004 in numerous alternative papers around the country and starkly relevant right now. This long but fine piece of recent history gave a prescient look at how Allbaugh worked hard to privatize as much of FEMA's duties as he could.

As Elliston wrote:

At FEMA, President Bush appointed a close aide, Joe Allbaugh, to be the agency's new director. Allbaugh had served as then-Gov. Bush's chief of staff in Texas and as manager of his 2000 presidential campaign. Along with Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, Allbaugh was known as one part of Bush's "iron triangle" of professional handlers.

Some FEMA veterans complained that Allbaugh had little experience in managing disasters, and the new administration's early initiatives did little to settle their concerns. The White House quickly launched a government-wide effort to privatize public services, including key elements of disaster management. Bush's first budget director, Mitch Daniels, spelled out the philosophy in remarks at an April 2001 conference: "The general idea —that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided — seems self-evident to me," he said.

That approach comes in handy now that Allbaugh is putting his "shoulder to the wheel" to help companies profit from doing work that government used to do.

This hiring of consultants and private firms for everything is a tremendous waste, of course. Look at the millions of dollars in documented overcharges by Halliburton and its subcontractors during the Iraq debacle. It was only a few days ago that the Corps of Engineers demoted its top civilian contracting official, Bunny Greenhouse, for blowing the whistle on Halliburton's sweet deals.

Our pasha in Iraq, Jerry Bremer, was possessed of the same mania for privatizing, and billions of dollars slated for work there remain unaccounted for — that's the continuing and still not investigated oil-for-slush scandal, in case you've forgotten amid the self-righteous hubbub raised by the GOP concerning the U.N.'s oil-for-food scandal.

When it comes to more-or-less natural disasters like Katrina, the same problems with consultants and private firms like Halliburton running wild in Iraq hold true here in the homeland. As Elliston wrote a year ago:

William Waugh, a disaster expert at Georgia State University who has written training programs for FEMA, warns that the rise of a "consultant culture" has not served emergency programs well. "It's part of a widespread problem of government contracting out capabilities," he says. "Pretty soon governments can't do things because they've given up those capabilities to the private sector. And private corporations don't necessarily maintain those capabilities."

But now the GOP-controlled Congress wants to loosen the restrictions on hiring private firms to work on the Katrina cleanup.

Who cares whether the problems are solved? Corporations and ironists are sure to get rich on Katrina.