ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.
Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.



The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.

Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.

Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack.

Some analysts warned that Iranian retaliation for such a strike could range from disruption of oil supplies to the West to terrorist attacks against Jewish targets around the world.

In mid-December I got confirmation that a major national advertiser, VISA, pulled their ads from the Melanie Morgan and Lee Rogers show, based on listening to audio clips I provided them. I also think that FedEx, AT&T and Kaiser are considering pulling their ads. Visa isn't the first advertiser who has left KSFO, multiple advertisers have left the station, especially from the Brian Sussman show. In July of this year when KSFO lost MasterCard as an advertiser someone from KSFO "outed" me on a counter-blog (which I won't link to). This same person has also threatened me with local and federal criminal action for using the audio (which I clearly used under the fair use portion of copyright law). And because they have suggested violence toward me (in addition to talking about suing me "for everything I have") I have chosen to remain anonymous.

When Keith Olbermann and Media Matters ran Melanie Morgan's comments about "putting the bull's-eye on" Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, management did nothing. Morgan did a jokey non-apology where she never even mentioned she used the term bull's-eye.

I'm guessing Lee Rogers may have gotten a memo telling him to stop talking about burning people alive, torturing them and blowing their brains out, because on November 30th, he defiantly said to management and advertisers, "Nobody is gonna tell me what to talk about or not talk about or in what fashion on this radio program. It ain't gonna happen!"
ABC/Disney acted only when they lost revenue. Then they went after ME with a cease and desist letter.

The federal government wants your Internet provider to keep track of every Web site you visit.

For more than a year, the U.S. Justice Department has been in discussions with Internet companies and privacy rights advocates, trying to come up with a plan that would make it easier for investigators to check records of Web traffic.

The idea is to help law enforcement track down child pornographers. But some see it as another step toward total surveillance of citizens, joining warrantless wiretapping, secret scrutiny of library records and unfettered access to e-mail as another power that could be abused.

"I don't think it's realistic to think that we would create this enormous honeypot of information and then say to the FBI, 'You can only use it for this narrow purpose,'" said Leslie Harris, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, D.C.-based group that promotes free speech and privacy in communication.

"We have an environment in which we're collecting more and more information on the personal lives of Americans, and our laws are completely inadequate to protect us."

So far, no concrete proposal has emerged, but U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has made it clear that he'd like to see quick action.

• U.N. weapons inspector David Kelly, who "committed suicide" days after appearing before the U.K. Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the bogus Iraq WMD claims;
  
• Enron executive Cliff Baxter, who "committed suicide" days after agreeing to testify to Congress about Enron;
  
• Paul Sanford, a California civil rights attorney who in 2005 questioned White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan about whether violating the statute about disclosing the identity of a CIA non-official cover agent consituted treason, who inexplicably jumped to his death from a hotel balcony for no apparent reason on December 24;
  
• John J. Kokal, an official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division, who questioned the claims of WMD in Iraq and apparently jumped from the roof of the State Department and was found on November 7, 2003
  
• former Bush White House technology adviser Gus Weiss, who opposed the Iraq war and who jumped to his death from the Watergate Hotel (!!!) on 11/25/03 -- weeks after Kokal's suicide
  

In a shocking disclosure, it was revealed today that the Bush Administration cut a deal with the Secret Service to prevent disclosure of White House visitor logs. The action came after CREW sued the Secret Service for records relating to White House visits by Jack Abramoff:

The five-page document dated May 17 declares that all entry and exit data on White House visitors belongs to the White House as presidential records rather than to the Secret Service as agency records. Therefore, the agreement states, the material is not subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the past, Secret Service logs have revealed the comings and goings of various White House visitors, including Monica Lewinsky and Clinton campaign donor Denise Rich, the wife of fugitive financier Marc Rich, who received a pardon in the closing hours of the Clinton administration.

The memo last spring was signed by the White House and Secret Service the day after a Washington-based group asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Secret Service in a dispute over White House visitor logs for Abramoff.

Our lawyer, Ann Weismann, blasted this move:

The chief counsel to another Washington-based group suing to get Secret Service logs calls the creation of the memo "a political maneuver couched as a legal one."

"It appears the White House is actually manufacturing evidence to further its own agenda," Ann Weismann, a Justice Department lawyer for 19 years and now chief counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Friday.

The White House and the Secret Service declined to comment.

Of course the White House and the Secret Service declined to comment. This action is appalling. And, it begs the question: What is the White House hiding? Clearly, something big. The Bush Administration has gone to extreme lengths to prevent the public from seeing any information about Jack Abramoff's visits to the White House.

He began this mid-October day in Sioux City, appearing at a fund-raising Siouxland Breakfast for Representative Steve King, an immigration hard-liner. Recently he had called McCain an "amnesty mercenary" for daring to work with Senator Ted Kennedy on a compromise bill that would provide an eventual path to citizenship for the millions of immigrant workers already in the United States illegally. A day earlier, in Milwaukee, in front of an audience of more sympathetic businessmen, McCain had been asked how debate over the immigration bill was playing politically. "In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base," he said. "In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you'll pay a heavy price." Then he added, unable to help himself, "By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."

"I'm willing to negotiate anything," McCain tells the breakfast crowd in Sioux City, explaining that there is no way the millions of illegal aliens now here can be sent back to their countries of origin. But he acknowledges that anything seen as amnesty for illegals is "totally unacceptable, particularly to our Republican base."

The battle between Bush and McCain in 2000 was bitter, with Bush supporters in South Carolina spreading rumors that McCain was insane and that he had fathered a black child....When I asked McCain how a rapprochement with Bush could ever have been achieved, he began by saying, "For 10 days I wallowed," then made it clear that the best balm was his realization that the campaign had raised his stature. "We came out of the campaign, even though losing, enhanced nationally, with a lot of opportunities in the Senate legislatively, with more influence, and eventually, if necessary, to be able to go at it again."

"The Iraq situation looks like we're in a quagmire," one man in Milwaukee says. Another adds, "It seems to be tipping." A third asks, "What should the president be doing differently?"

McCain is subdued. Like the rest of official Washington, he has been waiting for the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission on Iraq led by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton. He hopes the commission will point the way to some promising new direction, and he knows that, whatever the wise men say, he must refine his own approach to the war. But his remarks this morning are uninspired, even vapid. "The next few months will be critical," he tells the businessmen, his critical faculties not as acute as they had been with me just a month earlier, in private, when he said, "A lot of people tell me that the next four months or so are critical … but I'd like to say that, two years ago, everyone said the next six months would be critical."

Finally, a questioner lays it all on the line: "The war's the big issue," he says, adding, "Some kind of disengagement—it's going to have to happen. It's a big issue for you, for our party, in 24 months. It's not that long a time." McCain replies, "I do believe this issue isn't going to be around in 2008. I think it's going to either tip into civil war … " He breaks off, as if not wanting to rehearse the handful of other unattractive possibilities. "Listen," he says, "I believe in prayer. I pray every night." And that's where he leaves his discussion of the war this morning: at the kneeling rail.

On the way to our next stop, McCain tells me, "It's just so hard for me to contemplate failure that I can't make the next step." And that afternoon, at a roundtable with more Republicans in Appleton, McCain gets testy with a woman who says that her grandson and granddaughter have served in Iraq and that things there are going better than the American media say.

"The situation is not improving," McCain says shortly. "There's no biased reporting in the number of casualties."

A week after the November elections, I went to have another conversation with McCain, in his Senate office. I pressed him on the war. He maintained that deploying more American troops was "the only viable option," but added, "There are no good options from where we are today." He went on: "My difference with these people who are saying, 'Threaten the Iraqis with leaving and then they'll do more'—that assumes that they can or will do more. And there's no way that you're going to have any kind of stability without security. Political progress cannot take place unless you have the fundamental elements of a security situation. So, do I know it would be a tremendous strain on the army and Marine Corps? Absolutely. But I saw the kind of impact of a broken army, a defeated army and Marine Corps, after Vietnam. And I'd much rather have 'em take a strain and have some success than be defeated."

Wesley Autrey probably has enough new nicknames to fill a top 10 list: "subway superman," "hero of Harlem" and "subway savior," to name a few.

Whatever the number, Autrey's dramatic move to rescue a young man in a subway track earned him a spot on David Letterman's "Late Show," capping a day spent basking in his newfound celebrity.

But Autrey has said since the rescue Tuesday that he doesn't consider himself a hero, and he told Letterman's audience it was just "something that all New Yorkers should do."

"How are you going to walk by someone who's ill and just look - 'Oh, well, I'm busy, I've got to go to work'?" Autrey said in an interview broadcast Thursday night.

The two men first saw the baby from across the Bronx street, dangling from a fire escape four stories above the sidewalk. His grip was growing weaker by the second. The two men saw only one choice: run over and try to catch him.

They positioned themselves below, arms out. The little boy fell. He glanced off a branch of a tree that was brushing against the fire escape. Then he bounced off the chest of one of the men, who was knocked off balance and could not grab him.

But he landed safely in the arms of the other man, who managed to hold on tight.

And so yesterday, the two men — longtime friends who had been looking over a used Honda that one was thinking of selling and the other was thinking of buying — became the second and third good Samaritans of the new year, not even a week old.

A 10-year-old boy hanged himself accidentally on New Year’s Eve after watching reports of Saddam Hussein’s execution, the police and relatives said Thursday.

Family members discovered the body of the boy, Sergio Pelico, hanging from his bunk bed and called the police in Webster, between Houston and Galveston.

The boy watched television reports on Saturday and asked about the execution, said an uncle, Adolfo Chavez.

“He asked, ‘Is this how they killed people?’ ” Mr. Chavez recounted in Spanish. “We said, ‘No, but they did it to this man because he’s bad.’ ”

Mr. Chavez said his nephew had said nothing more about the hanging.

The next night, as adults prepared supper and his cousins played, Sergio went upstairs to his bedroom. Another child found the body, Mr. Chavez said.

Capt. Thomas Claunch of the Webster police said there was no reason to suspect suicide.

“It was nothing more than a tragic accident,” Captain Claunch said. “I think he was trying to mimic the behavior, and it got out of hand. There were no indications of depression, no problems within the home. He was very positive.”

The captain said Sergio, an only child who was in the fifth grade, had given his mother a belated Christmas card. “In it,” Captain Claunch said, “he says he will do better in school this year, that he wants to get her a better Christmas present next year.”

Ever since Iraq began spiraling toward chaos, the war's intellectual architects — the so-called neoconservatives — have found themselves under attack in Washington policy salons and, more important, within the Bush administration.

Eventually, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Defense department's most senior neocon, went to the World Bank. His Pentagon colleague Douglas J. Feith departed for academia. John R. Bolton left the State Department for a stint at the United Nations.

But now, a small but increasingly influential group of neocons are again helping steer Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week — a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort — has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

This group — which includes William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick W. Kagan, a military analyst at a prominent think tank, the American Enterprise Institute — was expressing concerns about the administration's blueprint for Iraq even before the invasion almost four years ago.

In their view, not enough troops were being set aside to stabilize the country. They also worried that the Pentagon had formulated a plan that concentrated too heavily on killing insurgents rather than securing law and order for Iraqi citizens.

These neoconservative thinkers have long advocated for a more classic counterinsurgency campaign: a manpower-heavy operation that would take U.S. soldiers out of their large bases dotted across the country and push them into small outposts in troubled towns and neighborhoods to interact with ordinary Iraqis and earn their trust.

But until now, it was an argument that fell on deaf ears.

"We have been pretty consistently in this direction from the outset," said Kagan, whose December study detailing his strategy is influencing the administration's current thinking. "I started making this argument even before the war began, because I watched in dismay as we messed up Afghanistan and then heard with dismay the rumors that we would apply some sort of Afghan model to Iraq."

If Bush goes ahead with the surge idea, along with a shift to a more aggressive counterinsurgency, it would in many ways represent a wholesale repudiation of the outgoing Pentagon leadership.

These leaders — particularly former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the departing Middle East commander — strongly resisted more U.S. troops and a larger push into troubled neighborhoods out of fear it would prevent Iraqis from taking over the job themselves and exacerbate the image of America as an occupying power.

He is essentially saying that he can’t be wrong and he is not ever going to be proven wrong. What seems like dithering or failure to react to the Baker Commission, is much more of a direct reaction, which is a way of ignoring it completely. He is very honest when he says I’m not going to change. He said that to Tim Russert in 2004. He also said that a couple of months ago, that if everybody in the world disagreed with him, he would sort of stay with Laura and his dog, and that that would be that. He is not going to change.

In his Wednesday press conference, he started talking about bipartisan behavior, but hee tried to reshape what seemed to me to be a voter mandate about getting out of Iraq, or changing course, into a message supporting his own needs, and he’s always done that.

It comes down to his psychic survival. It’s the fear of being wrong. It’s the fear of shame and humiliation at needing other people. It’s a fear of dependency, like we were talking about earlier about the antipathy towards psychoanalysis. He is determined to never be wrong, and to never make a mistake, because shame is a terrible thing for him.

[snip]

...there is a grandiose and somewhat paranoid aspect to him. The word I use in the book was megalomanic, which is that he has a corner on what is right and what is wrong. And he feels that so strongly that nobody is going to be able to shake him. It is a form of a delusion, where a person feels that nothing that can affect them, and nothing can change their point of view. When you’re stuck to a delusion, that’s that.

[snip]

I think it’s reductionistic to say that it’s rejecting his father and turning the Baker report into an intervention by his father. And by reductionistic, I mean, it oversimplifies things. I think what he does is he turns everybody who disagrees with him into his father. It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually the concrete representation of his father, like Baker, or the voters who vote against staying in Iraq. We have become his father. We are the people he is now defying. He will turn everybody, any authority, anybody who disagrees with him, into a father figure who he’d have to defy.

"I have to do what I believe is right and what I know is right," McCain told NBC's "Today Show" Thursday, acknowledging that his call for an increase in U.S. troops in Iraq could backfire politically. "If I pay a price for that and it's a misjudgment then that's a price I willingly pay."

[snip]

"I have to do what I believe is right and what I know is right," McCain told NBC's "Today Show" Thursday, acknowledging that his call for an increase in U.S. troops in Iraq could backfire politically. "If I pay a price for that and it's a misjudgment then that's a price I willingly pay."

People google the darnedest things! I was checking my sitemeter and nearly a dozen people came to my site after googling "Nancy Pelosi-breast size."

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.
The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

"Despite the President's statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people's mail without a warrant," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

"The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

"The danger is they're reading Americans' mail," she said.

"You have to be concerned," agreed a career senior U.S. official who reviewed the legal underpinnings of Bush's claim. "It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we've ever known."

A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised, "It's something we're going to look into."

Most of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane reform measures. But it also explicitly reinforced protections of first-class mail from searches without a court's approval.

Yet in his statement Bush said he will "construe" an exception, "which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection in a manner consistent ... with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances."

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

As a potential candidate, Obama has presented himself as a fresh voice offering a politics of hope. Many say he offers something new in American politics: an African American with a less-than-traditional name who has so far demonstrated broad appeal. What remains to be seen is whether the candor he offered in his early memoir will be greeted with a new-style acceptance by voters.

It was not so long ago that such blunt admissions would have led to a candidate's undoing, and there is uneasiness in Democratic circles that "Dreams From My Father" will provide a blueprint for negative attacks.

I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the opposing party.

Furthermore, I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich — between Randian hedge fund managers on the right and helipad environmentalists on the left. I dream that the big-money people who seem to dominate our politics will put aside their partisan fury and discover the class solidarity that Karl Marx always said they shared, and their newfound civility will trickle down to the rest of us. I dream that Berkeley will make peace with Buckhead, Streisand with DeVos, Huffington with O’Reilly.

I have my dreams, but of course, I am realistic too, for I am aware that at present there is no peace among the secluded island villas. I look out across the second homes of America and its surrounding tropical regions and I see polarization among the Kate Spade devotees and bitterness among the Rolexes. And I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife.

Some people believe that Pelosi is an airhead, but that is wrong. Some people believe she is a radical San Francisco liberal, but that, too, is wrong. The main fact to know about Pelosi is that she is a creature of the modern fund-raising system. Some politicians rise because they run political machines. Some rise because they are great communicators. Pelosi has risen because she is a master of the thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraising circuit.

Living amid a web of investors, venture capitalists and West Coast technology tycoons, she raised heroic amounts of money for the Democratic Party before she ever thought of running for anything herself. In 1984, she was the state party chairwoman. In 1986, she was the national fund-raising chairwoman for the Senate Democrats.

Since coming to the House, she has discovered what many a savvy pol has discovered — that the fastest way to ascend in Congress is to raise a lot of money and give it to your peers.

She paid her dues selecting party favors, arranging seating charts (after that, legislation is easy), and laying thick dollops of obsequiousness on cranky old moguls and their helmet hair spa-spouses. She has done what all political fund-raisers do: tell rich people things they already believe, demonize the other side, motivate the giving with Manichaean tales of good versus evil.

It is no wonder The Los Angeles Times calls her a “rabid Democrat” or that Time magazine calls her “hyperpartisan.” It is not a surprise, as The Washington Post reported this week, that despite campaign promises about changing the tone in Washington, Pelosi has decided to exclude Republicans from the first burst of legislation — to forbid them to offer amendments or alternatives.

She is part of the clash of the rival elites, with the dollars from Brookline battling dollars from Dallas, causing upper-class strife that even diminutive dogs, vibrant velvets and petite salades can’t fully soothe.

The civility lobby -- which now urges Democrats to bring pea-shooters to a gunfight -- has strong support among Washington's wise men, especially its media lions. Today's Washington Post warns in its news pages of the "mounting pressure from liberal activists to chart a more confrontational course "; on its editorial page, it scolds Speaker Pelosi's 100-hour agenda for setting "an unfortunate precedent that fairness will be offered on sufferance, when the majority finds it convenient, and not as a matter of principle. "

Yes, matters of principle -- the selfsame lofty principles that doubtless will guide John Boehner and Roy Blunt in days to come. The same devotion to fairness that will now be the north star for Mitch McConnell and Trent Lott. Right. And George W. Bush is Gerald R. Ford, Dick Cheney is Edmund Burke, Karl Rove is the Marquess of Queensbury, and love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Rumania.

The rules changes would also take aim at the so-called K Street Project, the effort associated with the hardball tactics of the former Republican leader Tom DeLay, to pressure trade groups and lobbying firms to hire Republicans or face the legislative consequences. The proposal would prohibit lawmakers and staff members from trying to exert partisan influence on hiring decisions.

“I think this package is more than a good-faith effort,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, an ethics group. Referring to the incoming House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Ms. McGehee said, “If these rule changes are any indication, she is serious.”

But the ethics rules do not address the most valuable gifts that come from lobbyists and others interested in legislation: campaign donations. And the Democratic Party’s fund-raising machine — revved up by the advantages of being in the majority — continued apace this week with individual members inviting lobbyists and other contributors to a host of events.

On Thursday night, Mrs. Pelosi is having a $1,000-a-head fund-raiser with performances by Tony Bennett, Carole King, Wyclef Jean and the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. “Ms. Pelosi is a huge Dead fan,” her spokeswoman said.

The American voters in November made it clear that it's time to start withdrawing from Iraq. Political leaders from both parties and any number of experts are increasingly coming to the realization that American soldiers are dying, day in and day out, in pursuit of an unattainable goal.

So what is President Bush about to do? By all indications: escalate. His "new way forward" in Iraq appears to call for more troops -- along with a series of other measures that might have helped if he'd taken them three years ago.

News reports suggest that Bush's plan is not likely to win enthusiastic support, even from within his own party. But my question is: Where's the outrage?

If the vox populi and the cognoscenti agree that throwing more American bodies at the problem will only result in more American deaths, then how is the apparent Bush plan anything short of a betrayal of the troops and an expression of contempt for the will of the people?

And is there any more plausible explanation for Bush's behavior than that he is willing to sacrifice more troops so he won't have to admit -- at least not yet -- that he made a mistake? Is that a good enough reason to ask even one more soldier to die?

Official word is that Bush hasn't yet made up his mind, but every indication is to the contrary: That Bush threw his support behind a "surge" in early December (see my December 15 column) and that in the interim, his national security team has been scrambling to find some post-hoc pretext to make it sound like there's a "specific mission" that such an escalation can achieve.

Yochi J. Dreazen and Greg Jaffe write in the Wall Street Journal: "White House officials say a troop 'surge' almost certainly will be the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's new strategy for Iraq to be unveiled mid-month. But while administration officials have gone to great lengths to emphasize that the extra troops will be in Iraq only temporarily, there is no clear definition of how long that might be. . . .

"The debate over how long the new forces should remain in Iraq stems from tension between the political and military aspects of the emerging proposal. Mr. Bush has staked his presidency on Iraq, and several White House aides say they believe he would be inclined to leave the extra troops there until improvement is evident. Senior commanders, by contrast, have expressed concern that leaving extra troops too long risks lasting damage to the U.S. armed forces."

Meanwhile, the intellectual architect of the "surge", Frederick W. Kagan, admits to the Journal: "If we surge and it doesn't work, it's hard to imagine what we do after that."

"It seems that the DC courtiers have been so moved by all the blather they've been dribbling about Jerry Ford's magnificently brave decision to pardon the man who put him office that they are convinced the biggest problem the country faces is the possibility that the Democrats might not let the Republicans date-rape them again. "

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I was in Miami in October, strolling past the retail shops on Collins Avenue in South Beach, when I saw two mannequins in a store window that caused me to stop and stare. I wasn't the only one staring. The mannequins -- one wearing a tight white bikini and the other a flirty miniskirt and a T-shirt tied at the waist -- were modeled after women who'd had breast augmentation surgery and gone in for DDDD cups. These buxom Fiberglas beauties weren't in a head shop or an adult video store, but rather at Deco Denim, a family-owned Miami retail group specializing in brand-name denim and casual wear.

I've never been one to complain about our culture's obsession with beauty, to worry that shows like "Extreme Makeover" normalize plastic surgery in an already looks-focused society. You won't hear me ranting against Botox treatments at the mall. "Which mall?" is more likely my response, "And how much does it cost?" But these mannequins with their massive chests crossed the line from a little harmless obsession with appearance to a society run amok.

I grabbed my husband's hand and jerked him to a stop in front of the store. "Look at that!" I demanded. He was already looking. I was suddenly conscious of my own chest and its relative lack of girth. It's easy to feel physically inadequate in South Beach, to see oneself as too short or too fat or too insufficiently swathed in lime green Spandex. Perhaps mannequins with boob jobs were just a South Beach thing?

Not so. When I returned to Manhattan, I noticed two of the top-heavy models in the window at Mystique Boutique, a trend-focused, budget clothing store in SoHo. I did a quick Internet search and turned up a dozen sites selling the super-busty mannequins -- generally Chinese imports costing as little as $150, about a tenth the cost of top-of-the-line mannequins sold today. I gaped at "Olivia" (40 inches/25 inches/37 inches) and "Marie" (40.5 inches/24.5 inches/36.5 inches), introduced in 2005 on Washington state's MannequinStore.com. I gawked at the equally well-endowed "Mary" on StudioRox.com, the Web site of a New York mannequin manufacturer and importer. I saw a "Full Size Realistic Sexy Standing Female Mannequin" -- also named "Mary" -- for $289.99 on the Los Angeles site DisplayImporter.com.

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan.

Have you ever made a profit from a catering business or dog walking? Do you prefer to work alone or in groups? Have you ever set a world record in anything?

Google has always wanted to hire people with straight-A report cards and double 800s on their SATs. Now, like an Ivy League school, it is starting to look for more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.

Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google — in typical eccentric fashion — has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.

The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers to whether they have ever tutored or ever established a nonprofit organization.

The answers are fed into a series of formulas created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score — from zero to 100 — meant to predict how well a person will fit into its chaotic and competitive culture.

“As we get bigger, we find it harder and harder to find enough people,” said Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for people operations. “With traditional hiring methods, we were worried we will overlook some of the best candidates.”

Google has doubled the number of employees in each of the last three years. Even though the company now has about 10,000 employees, Mr. Bock says he sees no reason the company will not double again in size this year. That would increase the number of hires to about 200 a week.

As a result, Mr. Bock, who joined Google from General Electric last spring, has been trying to make the company’s rigorous screening process more efficient. Until now, head hunters said, Google largely turned up its nose at engineers who had less than a 3.7 grade-point average. (Those who wanted to sell ads could get by with a 3.0 average, head hunters said.) And it often would take two months to consider candidates, submitting them to more than half a dozen interviews.

Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people.

“Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance,” Mr. Bock said.

Mr. Bock said that he wanted the company’s human resources department to bring the iconoclastic style as its Web site developers to the normally routine function of interviewing job candidates. “The level of questioning assumptions is uniquely Googly,” Mr. Bock said.

So Google set out to find out if there were any bits of life experience or personality it could use to spot future stars.

Last summer, Google asked every employee who had been working at the company for at least five months to fill out a 300-question survey.

Some questions were factual: What programming languages are you familiar with? What Internet mailing lists do you subscribe to?

Some looked for behavior: Is your work space messy or neat?

And some looked at personality: Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

And some fell into no traditional category in the human resources world: What magazines do you subscribe to? What pets do you have?

“We wanted to cast a very wide net,” Mr. Bock said. “It is not unusual to walk the halls here and bump into dogs. Maybe people who own dogs have some personality trait that is useful.”

[snip]

Indeed, there was no single factor that seemed to find the top workers for every single job title. (And pet ownership did not seem to be a useful predictor of anything.) But Dr. Carlisle was able to create several surveys that he believed would help find candidates in several areas — engineering, sales, finance, and human resources. Currently about 15 percent of applicants take the survey; it will be used for all applicants starting this month.

Even as Google tries to hire more people faster, it wants to make sure that its employees will fit into its freewheeling culture. The company boasts that only 4 percent of its work force leaves each year, less than other Silicon Valley companies. And it works hard to retain people, with copious free food, time to work on personal projects and other goodies. Stock options and grants certainly encourage employees to stay long enough to take advantage of the company’s surging share price.

Google’s hiring approach is backed by academic research showing that quantitative information on a person’s background — called “biodata” among testing experts — is indeed a valid way to look for good workers.

Michael Mumford, a psychology professor at the University of Oklahoma who specializes in talent assessment, said that this sort of test was effective, but he cautioned that companies should not rely on oddball factors, even if they seemed to correlate to good performance.

“You have to know or at least have a hypothesis why having a dog makes a good computer programmer,” Professor Mumford said. “If you ask whether someone started a club in high school, it is a clear indicator of leadership.”

At Google, it is too early to tell if the system is working. The surveys have been in use in about a dozen areas for several months.

Indeed, there is some resistance even at Google to the idea that a machine can pick talent better than a human.

“It’s like telling someone that you have the perfect data about who they should marry,” Dr. Carlisle said.

But even before the results are in on the new survey, Mr. Bock says he is already seeing success in easing the company past its obsession with grades.

“More and more in the time I’ve been here, we hire people based on experience as a proxy for what they can accomplish,” he said. “Last week we hired six people who had below a 3.0 G.P.A.”

Okay, let's review. Last week, the White House was ready with a statement from the President as soon as Hussein was executed -- even though the President was asleep.

Yet, today, after it's clear the execution was a disaster, the White House is trying to create some distance. See, the Bush Administration are the heroes here. Their people were really trying to postpone the execution. One more time, the White House is in full spin mode over Iraq:

The American decision to confirm that they had opposed the quick execution came after days of silence from the American Embassy and the United States military command in Baghdad, which appeared to have been shocked, like so many others, by the unofficial video recording that showed the bedlam at the gallows.

With some Iraqi politicians raising fresh demands for Mr. Maliki’s dismissal, the Americans, in offering to have a senior official discuss the matter in a telephone interview with The New York Times, appeared keen to protect the Bush administration from a fresh surge of criticism for its handling of events in Iraq.

The official said that among American officials in Iraq who had tried to stop Mr. Maliki from rushing Mr. Hussein to the gallows, the reaction to the scenes of abuse had been one of dismay.

“Well, yes, when I think of the behavior of the people who were there, I’m disappointed and distressed, that’s true,” the official who spoke in the telephone interview said. He had been one of the Americans who intervened with Mr. Maliki on Friday night,

See, the White House needs to prevent "a fresh surge of criticism" over Iraq while the President is planning a fresh surge of troops in Iraq. This latest debacle interferes with Bush's major escalation of his war.

How the hell did George Bush let Saddam Hussein become a martyr?

Why am I reading the Jeff Gannon article, I mean NYT article, that Joe cites below, and getting the sinking feeling that I'm reading a Bush administration press release?

[snip]

Also, a little red meat for the religious right Republican extremists out there. Note that Bush was (allegedly) concerned about the execution taking place during the Muslim holiday. The White House wasn't concerned about hanging a man during the week of Christmas, oh no. They were concerned about a Muslim holiday, rather than "our" own Christian holiday. Not that I believe the White House was concerned about anything - they very likely pushed the Iraqis to kill Saddam pronto - but it is funny how Bush is publicly pandering to Islam, since his religious right supporters, and much of his own party, is made up of anti-Muslim religious bigots.

Oh yeah, and one final very interesting fact from the NYT article. If the White House was so adamant about Saddam not being killed just yet, then why did they happily hand him over to the Iraqis to be executed?

After Mr. Maliki made it clear to the Americans in Baghdad that his decision was final, the official who discussed the events on Friday night said, American commanders were told to deliver Mr. Hussein to an execution bloc in the Kadhimiya district of northern Baghdad that Mr. Hussein?s military intelligence agency used to execute countless opponents of his government. At 4 a.m., Mr. Hussein was flown by an American military helicopter from an American detention center and handed over to the Iraqis.

Yeah right. Maliki, the pit bull, made it clear to the weak, wimpy, powerless Americans that his decision was final. Seriously, how did any editor at the Times read this and keep a straight face?

If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene?

Would you at least protest?

What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them?

What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them — and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?

[snip]

If the BBC is right — and we can only pray it is not — he has settled on the only solution all the true experts agree cannot possibly work: more American personnel in Iraq, not as trainers for Iraqi troops, but as part of some flabby plan for “sacrifice.”

Sacrifice!

More American servicemen and women will have their lives risked.

More American servicemen and women will have their lives ended.

More American families will have to bear the unbearable and rationalize the unforgivable —“sacrifice” — sacrifice now, sacrifice tomorrow, sacrifice forever.

And more Americans — more even than the two-thirds who already believe we need fewer troops in Iraq, not more — will have to conclude the president does not have any idea what he’s doing — and that other Americans will have to die for that reason.

For the first time, more troops disapprove of the president’s han dling of the war than approve of it. Barely one-third of service members approve of the way the president is handling the war, ac cording to the 2006 Military Times Poll.

When the military was feeling most optimistic about the war — in 2004 — 83 percent of poll re spondents thought success in Iraq was likely. This year, that number has shrunk to 50 percent.

Only 35 percent of the military members polled this year said they approve of the way President Bush is handling the war, while 42 percent said they disapproved. The president’s approval rating among the military is only slight ly higher than for the population as a whole. In 2004, when his popularity peaked, 63 percent of the military approved of Bush’s handling of the war. While ap proval of the president’s war lead ership has slumped, his overall approval remains high among the military.

Just as telling, in this year’s poll only 41 percent of the military said the U.S. should have gone to war in Iraq in the first place, down from 65 percent in 2003. That closely reflects the beliefs of the general population today — 45 percent agreed in a recent USA Today/Gallup poll.

Professor David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Mil itary Organization at the Univer sity of Maryland, was not sur prised by the changing attitude within the military.

“They’re seeing more casualties and fatalities and less progress,” Segal said.

He added, “Part of what we’re seeing is a recognition that the in telligence that led to the war was wrong.”

Say you're an oil executive and you want to keep the Republicans in control of Congress. What can you do prior to an election?

Well, you can keep your refineries running at full speed, flood the market with extra fuel, and take less per gallon in profit than usual.

And guess what: Department of Energy data suggest that's exactly what the oil companies did this fall.

By the second week in October, gasoline prices fell 70 cents from summer's record highs. Refineries were running full throttle and America's gasoline inventories were up nearly 7 percent from the three previous Octobers.

The rise in supply came despite BP's major pipeline disruption in Alaska. Ordinarily, that's an industry excuse to shrink supplies and raise prices.

Now, the oil industry claimed pump prices fell because crude oil prices dropped.

But gas prices dropped far more steeply than crude oil. Crude oil comes in barrels. There are 42 gallons in a barrel and the price of each gallon was down 10 cents this October over last. But gas prices fell 61 cents a gallon over the same time last year.

In other words, in the run-up to the election, oil companies cut gasoline prices 500 percent more than their raw material cost fell. And it wasn't because refining and distribution costs rose. They're relatively stable.

Oil companies simply took less profit from their refineries for a short period of time. Could it have been to influence a political outcome?

Well, right after election day, the price of gas suddenly rose after two months of sharp decline. Post-election, refineries have slowed down, inventories are shrinking, and gas prices are climbing.

It's back to business as usual, unless the new Congress starts to do business differently.

US President George W Bush intends to reveal a new Iraq strategy within days, the BBC has learnt.

The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces.

The move comes with figures from Iraqi ministries suggesting that deaths among civilians are at record highs.

The US president arrived back in Washington on Monday after a week-long holiday at his ranch in Texas.

The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week.

Its central theme will be sacrifice.

The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers.

The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.

What do the islands gain? Tourism generates desperately needed foreign revenue for the government, creates employment (as high as 60 percent of the jobs in the Bahamas), and makes possible a wide range of support services and industries. For many of the smaller islands, it is a godsend, especially in the face of the collapsing traditional banana and sugar industries.

Nonetheless, the literature on Caribbean tourism is surprisingly critical. Foreign anthropologists complain about the “tourist gaze” and the distortion of local cultures; local chauvinists declaim that “tourism is whorism.” These criticisms are largely puerile. In Jamaica, it’s the locals who do the gazing while the tourists are busy baking themselves behind the high walls of all-inclusive hotels. If anything, tourism enhances residents’ awareness of indigenous cultures, and it supports large numbers of entertainers. Reggae artists have no problem singing dated versions of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-oh! Day da light an’ me wan’ go ’ome” if it allows them to get nasty and ragamuffin the next night in the thriving dance hall music culture.

The criticisms of economists seem more substantial. The two buzzwords are linkages and leakages. On most islands, most of the money spent by tourists leaks right back out of the country to pay for supplies for the tourists, or for the repatriation of profits and salaries. Thus there is little linkage, or integration, with the rest of the economy, leaving the islands solely dependent on a fickle industry. Leakage runs as high as 80 percent on the smaller islands.

Here is the critics’ problem: The islands with the highest leakage and tourist dependence are all doing better, per capita, than the larger islands with more integrated economies. The Bahamas and Antigua have almost no unemployment and per-capita incomes three times that of Jamaica. And these islands have substantially higher human development indexes, the gold standard of how well a country is meeting a broad range of basic needs. Barbados’s index of .864 approaches European levels.

The main cost of tourism is its effects on the environment. The disposal of solid waste from cruise ships and the poor treatment of hotel sewage threaten marine fauna, and degrade coral reefs and fishing grounds. Water sports are a menace. Beaches are eroded and landscape violated by bad architectural planning. Noise pollution is often unbearable. Corrective efforts have had limited success.

However, the industry is too often criticized for the wrong reasons. In Jamaica, tourism is booming, and 2007 promises to be the industry’s best year. Most American tourists go to the all-inclusives, which are criticized for greedily gating them off from the rest of the local economy. The real situation is more complex, as explained by Dr. Noel Lyon, a Harvard-trained economist and entrepreneur experienced in both farming and tourism.

Jamaica has terrible crime rates, but that has little effect on tourism because travelers know they are safe inside the all-inclusives. Furthermore, the all-inclusives draw substantially on local suppliers. Over all, Jamaica, with a high ratio of local ownership and management, has relatively lower leakage. All-inclusives are actually a nimble adaptation to a volatile social environment. Jamaica’s socioeconomic failures cannot be linked to tourism, without which it would be in even more dire straits.