FALLUJAH, Iraq - Insurgents with two chlorine truck bombs attacked a local government building in Fallujah in western Iraq on Wednesday, the latest in a string of attacks using the poisonous gas, the U.S. military said.

Fifteen Iraqi and U.S. soldiers were wounded in the blasts and many more suffered chlorine poisoning, the statement said.

“Numerous Iraqi soldiers and policemen are being treated for symptoms such as labored breathing, nausea, skin irritation and vomiting that are synonymous with chlorine inhalation,” a U.S. statement said.

It said no Iraqi or U.S. forces were killed in what it called a “complex attack” using mortars and small arms as well as the truck bombs.

Chlorine gas was widely used in World War I but its use in insurgent attacks in Iraq has particular resonance there. Saddam Hussein attacked Kurdish areas with chemical weapons in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.

Earlier Iraqi police said two car bombs exploded near an Iraqi checkpoint outside a U.S. military base in Fallujah, killing eight Iraqi soldiers.

Revenge killings

Meantime, police and hospital officials said off-duty Shiite policemen enraged by massive bombings in the northern town of Tal Afar went on a revenge spree against Sunni residents there on Wednesday, killing at least 45 men.

The policemen began roaming the town’s Sunni neighborhoods on foot early in the morning, shooting at Sunni residents and homes.

A senior hospital official in Tal Afar said at least 45 men ages 15 to 60 were killed and four others were wounded.

Other tolls were higher. “Between 50 and 55 people were killed. I-ve never seen such a thing in my life,” said a doctor, who refused to be named because he said he feared for his life.

More at MSNBC

Ray Charles & Stevie Wonder
Just Enough For the City

This is bullshit. Adding Circuit City to the list of places I won’t be shopping.

(NEW YORK) - A new plan for layoffs at Circuit City is openly targeting better-paid workers, risking a public backlash by implying that its wages are as subject to discounts as its flat’screen TVs.

The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers_ immediately _ and replace them with lower-paid new hires as soon as possible.

The laid-off workers, about 8 percent of the company’s total work force, would get a severance package and a chance to reapply for their former jobs, at lower pay, after a 10-week delay, the company said.

Analysts and economists said the move is an uncertain experiment that could backfire for the chain. The risks: Morale could sink and customers could avoid the stores. Also, knowledgeable customer service is one of the few ways Circuit City can tackle competitors that include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., they say.

“This strategy strikes me as being quite cold,” said Bernard Baumohl, executive director of The Economic Outlook Group. “I don’t think it’s in the best interest of Circuit City as a whole.”

While other companies, such as Caterpillar Inc., have introduced two-tiered wage systems, where newer workers make less, firing workers and offering to rehire them at a lower wage is very rare.

“I don’t think you’re going to find too many examples,” of this, said Ken Goldstein, labor economist for the Conference Board, a business research group. “That certainly has not been a trend we’ve seen.”

Circuit City, the nation’s No. 2 consumer electronics retailer behind Best Buy Co. Inc., says the workers being laid off were earning “well above the market-based salary range for their role.” They will be replaced with employees who will be paid at the current market range, the company said in a news release.

More at Time.com

A Congressional probe into the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys last year has raised new questions about the role that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff played in the 2003 demotion of Frederick Black, the former U.S. attorney in Guam.
At issue is whether a report compiled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general took into account the fact that White House officials had been using email accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee before concluding that Black was not demoted for political reasons.

Black had served as interim U.S. attorney in Guam for twelve years and was appointed by former President George H.W. Bush before being abruptly replaced in May 2003.

His dismissal stirred controversy at the time because Black was a political enemy of Abramoff, who had been retained as a lobbyist by numerous individuals that were being investigated by Black for public corruption.

Many of the White House and DOJ officials currently under scrutiny in the U.S. attorney firings played a role in Black’s replacement, including then Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales, his former Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson and President Bush.

A parallel issue with the current U.S. attorney firing investigation is the vital role of the liaison between the DOJ and the White House. In both cases, this official coordinated and participated in meetings with DOJ and White House staff who were planning the replacement of U.S. attorneys. In the Guam case, Sampson served as a liaison for communications between then Attorney General John Ashcroft and the White House. Sampson met directly with President Bush prior to announcing Black’s demotion to gain approval for the candidate for Black’s replacement.

Read more at FreeInternetPress

By Sam Provance

Editor’s Note: Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance was one of the heroes of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the only uniformed military intelligence officer at the Iraqi prison to testify about the abuses during the internal Army investigation. When he recognized that the Pentagon was scapegoating low-level personnel, he also gave an interview to ABC News.

The Congress, which was then controlled by the Republicans, promised a fuller investigation. Provance submitted a sworn statement. But Congress never followed through, leaving Provance hanging out to dry. Then, in February 2007, he went to a special screening of the documentary, “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” and learned more than he expected about why the scandal died:

03/27/07 “Consortium News” For those of you who have not heard of me, I am Sam Provance. My career as an Army sergeant came to a premature end at age 32 after eight years of decorated service, because I refused to remain silent about Abu Ghraib, where I served for five months in 2004 at the height of the abuses.
A noncommissioned officer specializing in intelligence analysis, my job at Abu Ghraib was systems administrator (”the computer guy”). But I had the misfortune of being on the night shift, saw detainees dragged in for interrogation, heard the screams, and saw many of them dragged out. I was sent back to my parent unit in Germany shortly after the Army began the first of its many self-investigations.

In Germany, I had the surreal experience of being interrogated by one of the Army-General-Grand-Inquisitors, Major General George Fay, who showed himself singularly uninterested in what went on at Abu Ghraib.

I had to insist that he listen to my eyewitness account, whereupon he threatened punitive actions against me for not coming forward sooner and even tried to hold me personally responsible for the scandal itself.

The Army then demoted me, suspended my Top Secret clearance, and threatened me with ten years in a military prison if I asked for a court martial. I was even given a gag order, the only one I know to have been issued to those whom Gen. Fay interviewed.

But the fact that most Americans know nothing of what I saw at Abu Ghraib, and that my career became collateral damage, so to speak, has nothing to do with the gag order, which turned out to be the straw that broke this sergeant’s back.

After seeing first-hand that the investigation wasn’t going to go anywhere and that no one else I knew from the intelligence community was being candid, I allowed myself to be interviewed by American and German journalists. Sadly, you would have had to know German to learn the details of what I had to say at that time about the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Continue reading at Information Clearing House

H/T Patriot for this post. His comments:

I detest and that is a mild way to describe my feelings about Lindsay Graham. When I came back from Viet-Nam in Jan 68 I still had 10 months to do in the Army. As a demo man, combat engineer they decided that I would be a good stockade guard ? The people that I was expected to guard were mainly people who had gone AWOL. I was expected to feel hard toward these guys for having the intelligence and initiative to think for themselves. I saw much abuse of individuals whenever the asshole guards could isolate the prisoners. One of the people that I worked with was the person who went into a church in Boston and dragged an AWOL man out who was claiming sanctuary. He was very proud of that. Lindsay Graham is one of the worst people that I know of. He must be one of Mitch McConnells buddies.

Our madman of a president isn’t going to stop until we’re all wiped off the planet. When can impeachment get put back on the table?

MSNBC.com:

Bush, Putin hold tense call on missile defense

Conversation highlights strains between two countries

WASHINGTON - Russian President Vladimir Putin registered his concerns Wednesday with President Bush about a planned U.S. missile defense system in Central Europe in a conversation that highlighted strains between the two nations.
[...]

‘Growing tensions and mistrust’
Despite Russia’s support last Saturday for a U.N. resolution toughening sanctions on Iran for refusing to stop enriching uranium, “there are growing tensions and mistrust in both capitals,” Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, said in an interview.

“And it makes it more difficult to work together on nonproliferation and counter-terrorism,” Simes said.
[...]

As for Iran, Simes said Russia does not want to see it armed with nuclear weapons. “But Russia also does not want to see a U.S. military action against Iran, no matter what,” Simes said.

I’ll tell ya what, Bush and McCain need to get on a plane and hurry their delusional asses over to Baghdad. Bush can do the google with all the happy bloggers while McCain strolls through the oh so safe streets!!

From Yahoo

WASHINGTON - To back up his point that pulling out of Iraq would be a disaster, President Bush has quoted opinions from the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top U.S. general in Iraq - and now, two bloggers from Baghdad.

Bush made a surprising reference to the blogosphere during a spirited defense of his war strategy on Wednesday. The mention seemed even more unusual because the president didn’t identify whom he was quoting, so he seemed to be leaning on anonymous commentary.

“They have bloggers in Baghdad, just like we’ve got here,” Bush told the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

Then he began to quote: “Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed.”

His point was that Iraqi people are seeing signs of progress - and what better example of their unbridled expression than blogs.

A small Texas business that didn’t meet requirements to qualify as a small business. Wonder who owns this company and who recommended them. Another VAST ripoff…….that led to VAST breaches of veteran’s data!

From Boston.com

It found that the VA put out multiple and inconsistent changes to the contract awarded in 2002 to VAST, a small business joint venture based in Texas, for computer service work aimed at fending off computer hackers.

According to the findings, the VA:

–Spent more than $35 million for equipment and supplies under the contract that it cannot account for.

–Hastily increased the scope of the contract several times, bringing the total value of the contract from $102.8 million to $250 million with little thought or oversight. “This made the contract an open checkbook … with little assurance of price reasonableness and no planned funding.”

–Did not ensure that the joint venture, VAST, met requirements to qualify as a small business.

–Made overpayments on the contract as high as $8.5 million.

–Did not conduct required background investigations on the contract employees.

In addition, because the department spent money on the contract so quickly, it was left temporarily without a defense against hackers after the 10 year contract was allowed to expire prematurely in 2005.

In recent weeks, VA officials have faced a fresh round of bipartisan criticism over data security, with auditors telling Congress that gaping holes persist and that most VA data remains unencrypted.

At a hearing last month, Maureen Regan, counselor to the VA inspector general, said the department still hasn’t fully implemented any of its recommendations from reports dating back to 2001.

The department also hasn’t adopted five key recommendations issued shortly after the massive data breach last May involving veterans. That data was later recovered.

The IG report was publicly released Feb. 26 and first noted Tuesday by McClatchy newspapers.

Note To New Congress:

Turn The Beat Around (Gloria Estefan)

We spend so much time on our blogs telling the world just how evil politicians can be. But take note… politics is not the root of all evil. GREED IS! (Politics is just a means to that end)

Yahoo! News:

Tax cheat escapes $100 million repayment

WASHINGTON - Poorly written Justice Department documents cost the federal government more than $100 million in what was supposed to have been the crowning moment of the biggest tax prosecution ever.

Walter Anderson, the telecommunications entrepreneur who admitted hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRS and District of Columbia tax collectors, was sentenced Tuesday to nine years in prison and ordered to repay about $23 million to the city.

But U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said he couldn’t order Anderson to repay the federal government $100 million to $175 million because the Justice Department’s binding plea agreement with Anderson listed the wrong statute.

Friedman said he could have worked around that problem by ordering Anderson to repay the money as part of his probation. But prosecutors omitted any discussion of probation - a common element of plea deals - from Anderson’s paperwork.

“I’ve come to the conclusion, very reluctantly, that I have no authority to order restitution,” Friedman said. “I hope the government will appeal me.”

Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case in cooperation with Justice Department headquarters, said the government would bring civil charges against Anderson.

“The IRS still has ample civil remedies available to recoup the money which are, in some respects, more efficient and quicker,” Phillips said. “Combined with today’s nine-year prison sentence, this was a significant victory for the government.”

That will require a new round of litigation in a court that does not wield the threat of more jail time. Prosecutors have said Anderson has money stashed away in accounts around the world, a claim Anderson denied in court.