Inara George - “Fool’s Work”

Inara George now mainly tours as one half of The Bird and the Bee.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is expected to be executed “this weekend,” Bush administration officials told CNN on Thursday.

Hussein will be transferred from U.S. to Iraqi custody within the next day, one official said.

More than one administration source confirmed the impending transfer.

But Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, speaking on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” cautioned that the timing of the execution is up to the Iraqi government.

Two defense attorneys Thursday told Hussein in his jail cell that his death sentence had been upheld.

“He was not surprised at this. But he believes in his fate, and his only concern is the unity of the Iraqi people,” chief defense attorney Khalil al-Dulaimi told CNN in Amman, Jordan.

Read more at CNN.com

Of course, the MSM isn’t covering this story, but when I heard of the death of the Turkmenistan dictator, Niyazov, I wondered how long it will take us to stick our nose. My guess is it won’t be long. Turkmenistan holds the world’s largest natural gas fields. Nuff said…….

“The narcissism of the man is really beyond description,” said Professor Gerald Post, director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University. “He has essentially turned himself into a living god.” But now the god is dead.

Saparmurat Niyazov, supreme ruler of Turkmenistan for the past 21 years, was a Communist dictator who made North Korea’s father-and’son act, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, look like shrinking violets. Post-Communist, actually, since he dropped the ideology once the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, but in all practical respects Niyazov was a Stalinist until the day he died a week ago.

The biggest of the thousands of statues of Niyazov that litter Turkmenistan sits atop a 310-foot arch in the center of the capital, Ashgabat, and rotates to face the sun. Covered in gold leaf and wearing a flowing cloak, the statue makes Niyazov look like a pudgy Superman, but he always insisted that it was nothing to do with him. “I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the street, but it’s what people want,” he said modestly. He probably half-believed that he was immortal, for he made no provision whatever for his succession. And now, suddenly, he is gone.

Read more here and here

He was delicious!

Gerald Ford Dead Ate By Wolves
Thank you,
   

Guess he needs it after all he spent in legal fees, eh? NOT I think it’s wrong that any government official who has been convicted of a crime gets to keep his pension. Wrong wrong wrong. When I read this I thought of Shoebox Paul Powell…..anybody remember him? The Illinois Secretary of State’s office has had it’s share of crooks over the years! Republican and Democrat alike.

CHICAGO –Convicted former Gov. George Ryan is suing to keep at least part of his $197,000 state pension, the third of it that he says he earned before the scandals that now have him facing 6 1/2 years in prison.

Ryan was found guilty in April of mail fraud, money laundering, extortion, obstruction of justice and bribery while he was secretary of state and governor between 1991 and 2003.

After his conviction, the General Assembly Retirement System board voted to strip him of his entire annual pension.

Ryan’s attorneys argue in the lawsuit filed Wednesday that the Republican former governor should still get $65,000 in annual pension payments that he earned in the 24 years before 1991, when Ryan was a county board member, legislator and lieutenant governor.

Read more here

Published: December 28, 2006
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec. 28 - Just hours after the Islamist forces abandoned Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, militias loyal to the transitional government seized the city today in a stunning reversal of fortunes.

According to residents, troops from the transitional government, along with Ethiopian soldiers who had been backing them up, poured into the capital from the outskirts of the city while militiamen within Mogadishu occupied key positions, like the port, airport and dilapidated presidential palace.

“The government has taken over Mogadishu,” a transitional government leader, Jama Fuuruh, told Reuters by telephone from Mogadishu’s port.

” We are now in charge.”

Read more at the NYTimes

Mark Dodd
December 27, 2006

THE Israeli army has admitted its soldiers may have fired on a Red Cross ambulance during the war in Lebanon - an incident Foreign Minister Alexander Downer claimed was a hoax that had duped a gullible Australian and international media.
The claims centred on a controversial July 23 attack in southern Lebanon in which two Red Cross ambulances were destroyed, either by artillery or missiles - injuring at least six Lebanese, including one man whose leg was later amputated.
Initial media reports claimed the Israeli Defence Force targeted the vehicles, firing a missile directly through the roof of one ambulance using the international Red Cross symbol as a target marker.

Others blamed Israeli artillery or armed unmanned drones.

An Israeli army spokesman has now gone closer than ever before to admitting responsibility.

“We (IDF) certainly do not target ambulances but in a combat zone, we cannot always co-ordinate their safety,” Captain Benjamin Rutland said. “It (the ambulance) could have been struck by our mortar or artillery.

Read more at the Australian

Al Franken:
Where Rush Limbaugh’s Facts Come From

Now you know!Rush Limbaugh Makes it all up Butthole

I hope this passes.

By Frederic J. Frommer, Associated Press Writer | December 28, 2006

WASHINGTON –After years of trying, advocates think they have a good chance of getting Congress to pass legislation next year that would require equal health insurance coverage for mental and physical illnesses, if their policies include both.
The legislation, named for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat who championed the cause, has strong support in Congress but has run into GOP roadblocks. In the last congressional session, 231 House members — more than half of the chamber — signed on as co’sponsors. The GOP leadership, which in the past had expressed concern that the proposal would drive up health insurance premiums, wouldn’t bring it up for a vote.

In 2003, Senate Democrats tried to win passage of the bill as a tribute to Wellstone, who died in a plane crash the previous year. Republicans blocked an attempt to pass it by unanimous consent.

“I’m very optimistic that 2007 will finally be the year that our health care system recognizes that the brain is, in fact, a part of the body,” said Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat who sponsored the bill in the last Congress. “We’ve had majority support for this legislation six years in a row, and now we have a chance to bring it to the floor and pass it.”

Read more at Boston.com

98 U.S. deaths this month. So far, the 6th deadliest month for U.S. forces in Iraq since the war started. 2,987 total U.S. deaths.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three U.S. soldiers were killed by roadside bombs in and around Baghdad, the military said Thursday.

Two soldiers died Wednesday when a roadside bomb exploded while they were on a foot patrol southwest of the Iraqi capital, the military said in a statement. Another soldier was wounded in the explosion, the military said.

A third solider was killed in a separate attack Wednesday in an eastern section of Baghdad, another statement said. The unit was on a route clearing mission when a roadside bomb exploded nearby, the military said. Two other soldiers were wounded.

Source

The John Edwards who today announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination is a very different contender from the fresh-faced young senator who in 2004 bid for the party nod–and eventually secured a place on the ticket as the vice presidential nominee.

By any measure, he has a lot more to offer progressives than he did in 2004. That potential to appeal to the party’s left flank is essential for Edwards, who will need an ideological base as he struggles for attention in a race where New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois Senator Barack Obama have been sucking most of the air out of the contest.

Edwards struggled to craft a message in 2004. After stumbling frequently and, many assumed, fatally in 2003, he finally developed the “two Americas” stump speech that identified him as a candidate who was serious about broadening the national debate to include a serious discussion of the dangerous gap between rich and poor in America.

More at YahooNews

Bush has been consulting and thinking about the war in Iraq for quite some time now. It would be nice to think the reason for this is because he is oh so thoughtful and truly does care what the American people want……what the Iraqi people want….and that he honestly wants to do the right thing. But I don’t believe that. I believe all this time has been taken to ease the American public into the next really bad decision. The one that calls for an escalation. Surge. Increase in troops. Call it what you will…….it’s wrong. He’s not really listening and the only thing he’s thinking about is how he can keep this conflict going.

CRAWFORD, Texas Dec 28, 2006 (AP)- Already weeks in the making, President Bush’s new war plan is being burnished with the assistance of top military and diplomatic advisers as critics of the war urge the Democratic Congress to resist any call for a large military buildup in Iraq.

It’s unclear whether Bush will signal his desires or just seek further consultation when he meets at his Texas ranch on Thursday with Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the National Security Council.

Downplaying expectations, the White House says it’s a “non-decisional” gathering. Yet advisers have set the stage for a presidential speech after the first of the year in which Bush will lay out a new U.S. strategy in Iraq where violence could be sparked by the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Read more here