Schröder wil EU Grondwet nog dit jaar!

1. Hub vraagt zich af wat er nog aan individuele vrijheid zal overblijven.
   
   Tot overmaat van ramp blijkt nu uit een interview van zijn vorige financiesecrataris Paul O’Neill, die in december 2002 ontslagen werd, dat ook George W. Bush een rasechte onnozelaar is http://news.ft.com/servlet/…
   
   Wat nu gedaan?

   En indien de chauffeur van Diana in Parijs bij haar overlijden zoveel had gedronken als zijn bloedstaaf beweert, dan kon hij niet wandelen (naar zijn auto).
   
   http://www.news.scotsman.co…
   
   God save the Queen!

   http://www.drudgereport.com
   
   meldt ook dit:
   
   U.S. officials find evidence corroborating American charges during Iraq war that Russia was selling Saddam night vision goggles and radar jammers, the LA TIMES is planning to report on Saturday, sources tell DRUDGE… Developing…

   Zoals de Chinezen zeggen: "may you live in interesting times!"

2. Drudge report volhardt:
   
   A senior administration official tells Sunday’s WASH POST: O’Neill’s suggestion ‘is laughable. Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?’… Developing…

   Het wordt meer en meer duidelijk waarom de EU Khadaffi heeft uitgenodigd. De marionnet (dat is de pop in de poppenkast) in Washington is on the way out.

3. Het laatste(?) Bush nieuws from the lunatic side:
   
   http://www.usagold.com/busi…
   
   mikal (1/11/04; 00:04:22MT – usagold.com msg#: 115086)
   
   Time warping the precious metals
   
   Strange happenings in the world today including growing Bush criticism. Tomorrow Paul O’Neil speaks again if the event proceeds according to plan, without his suicide or an unfortunate accident or untimely natural or manmade disaster.
   
   Rolling Stone magazine’s latest cover headlines a story about "The Bush Family Empire Revealed".
   
   Popular Mechanics magazine latest(February) cover has a large landed UFO and the story title(paraphrased): "What is planned for when UFO’s land."
   
   I was only able to quickly skim the contents and found that there ARE elaborate plans to deal with the craft and the aliens- quarantine, decontamination, and more! Magazine questioned what other plans the gov’t might have.
   
   Getting stranger than fiction out there.
   
   Perhaps Bush will not serve out the full term or be induced to declare Force Majeur.
   
   But the space program is a boost to certain high tech industries, where gold and silver will be in even greater demand as a key component in shields, sensors, suits, custom circuitry, plating, optics, and many other space-exclusive applications. (The Gold Institute and The Silver Institute both offer detailed internet lists of most of the industrial applications of Au and Ag.). Modern weapons manufacture relies especially heavily on silver, titanium and other precious and base metals.
   
   But can anyone forecast the enormous appetite those ET’s will have for the shiniest metals?

4. http://www.drudgereport.com
   
   INSPECTOR O’NEILL: THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE OF WMD
   
   Sun Jan 11 2004 08:46:45 ET

   New York – Discussing the case for the Iraq war in an interview with TIME’s White House correspondent John Dickerson, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who sat on the National Security Council, says the focus was on Saddam from the early days of the Administration. He offers the most skeptical view of the case for war ever put forward by a top Administration official. "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," he told TIME. "There were allegations and assertions by people. But I’ve been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions. To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence." TIME’s new issue will be on newsstands Monday, Jan. 12th.

   O’Neill spoke with TIME on the eve of publication of a new book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill, written by Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind which traces the former Alcoa CEO’s rise and fall through the Administration: from his return to Washington to work for his third President, whom he believed would govern from the sensible center, through O’Neill’s disillusionment, to his firing, executed in a surreal conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney, a man he once considered a fellow traveler.

   In Suskind’s book, O’Neill’s assessment of Bush’s executive style is a harsh one: it is portrayed as a failure of leadership. Aides were left to play "blind man’s bluff," trying to divine Bush’s views on issues like tax policy, global warming and North Korea. Sometimes, O’Neill says, they had to float an idea in the press just to scare a reaction out of him. This led to public humiliation when the President contradicted his top officials, as he did with Secretary of State Colin Powell on North Korea and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman on global warming. O’Neill came to believe that this gang of three beleaguered souls—only Powell remains—who shared a more nonideological approach were used for window dressing. We "may have been there, in large part as cover," he tells Suskind.

   When the corporate scandals rocked Wall Street O’Neill and Alan Greenspan devised a plan to make CEOs accountable. Bush went with a more modest plan because "the corporate crowd," as O’Neill calls it in the book, complained loudly and Bush could not buck that constituency. "The biggest difference between then and now," O’Neill tells Suskind about his two previous tours in Washington, "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl [Rove], Dick [Cheney], Karen [Hughes] and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics. It’s a huge distinction."

   On the eve of the Iraq war, O’Neill tells Suskind that he marvels at the President’s conviction in light of what he considers paltry evidence. "With his level of experience, I would not be able to support his level of conviction." That conviction, he tells the book’s author seemed to be present in the administration from the start: "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country," he tells Suskind. "And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.’"

   Developing…

Comments are closed.