BBC interview with Wilkerson

CNN is reporting on a BBC interview with Col Lawrence Wilkerson (Powell's Chief of Staff) where he accuses Cheney of advocating terror. You can read the full text of the interview here. It's pretty damning.

Now you call this alternative decision-making as a process and you seem to be laying the blame pretty fairly and squarely at the door of Dick Cheney. Am I correct in assuming that?

Well in the two decision-making processes into which I had the most insight - the detainee abuse issue and this issue of post-invasion planning for Iraq - I lay the blame squarely at his feet.

I look at the relationship between Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld as being one that produced these two failures in particular and I see that the president is not holding either of them accountable, or at least up to this point he is not, and so I have to lay some blame at his feet too.

Rumsfeld's got Tamiflu

For the conspiracy theorists and anti-bigpharma folks out there, this article is from
Bob Parks—a great skeptic and theoretical physicist.

3. SHAMIFLU: THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE AND THE WAR AGAINST BIRD FLU. President Bush went to Congress early this month to ask for $7Bto prepare the nation for a possible outbreak of Asian bird flu http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN05/wn110405.html .  The federalgovernment has since become the world's biggest customer forTamiflu, produced by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Roche.  Thatwas good news for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who doesn't havebird flu.  He doesn't have stock in Roche either, but he doeshave millions of dollars worth of stock in a company named GileadSciences, having been Gilead's Chairman prior to joining the Bushadministration.  Low-profile Gilead Sciences owns the rights toTamiflu, which it outsources to Roche.  There is little evidencethat the antiviral drug would help much in a flu pandemic.

I don’t know where he gets his info from and I have no idea whether that last claim is true.

Adding people

Hey Gretchen,

I don't have everyone's email, so please feel free to invite more participants.

Here we go!

I am on!
What a wonderful world.

jumping right in...

fantastic! i get to piss in the snow-- i mean, publish a post-- first!

how about this article from American Prospect Online:

Homeward Bound
“Choice feminism” claims that staying home with the kids is just one more feminist option. Funny that most men rarely make the same “choice.” Exactly what kind of choice is that?

i know some of my female relatives with children are working, and some are not. and of course, my male relatives have liberal cred (mostly). with that in mind, i must say that i agree with the premise of this article. there is something wrong with the fact that well-educated, priveleged women, who should be the ones who are reaping the rewards of historically middle-class white feminist activism, are still "choosing" to stay home. but if a choice is no choice at all... then, well, it's not a choice now is it?

um, and, i'm saying "there's something wrong" in terms of there's something wrong with the way our society works. i'm not saying any personal decisions that have been made on this topic are inherently wrong. i mean no disrespect to stay at home moms, so don't kick my ass! i understand the argument that parents need to spend time with their children, i just object to the assumption, on the part of men and women, that it will be the woman who stays home. and there are lots of reasons for that assumption, from irritating sexist attitudes toward gender roles to the economic fact that women, overall, make less money.

discuss. ;)

(for those of you who don't know how these fancy newfangled contraptions called blogs work, if you want to respond to this post, click on "comment," login, and fill out the comment box. then click submit. i vote that we don't start new posts on the same topic unless they're an obvious tangent off the main topic. what says?)