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For every time she shouted "fire!"
They only answered "Little liar!"
And therefore when her aunt returned,
Matilda and the house were burned.
- Hilaire Beloc, Matilda
At first it seems outrageous. Then the reader puts it in perspective. In a war that has cost millions of Iraqi lives and more than 4000 American lives, a handful of deaths is not that big a deal.
The most recent disclosure that 13 soldier were killed - not because of enemy fire, land mines, defective or inadequate body armor or humvees that were inadequately protected - is literally a shock since the deaths that were caused by a surge. Not the surge in troops of which George Bush was so proud. No, it was an electrical surge that was not planned and, in a well managed war, would never have happened.
The reports of the deaths were almost unnoticed and might still languish in the graveyard of Bush mistakes alongside the corpses he helped create, were it not for
the death of Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth.
In January of this year Sgt. Maseth was taking a shower on his base in Baghdad and was electrocuted because of defective electrical wiring. At first the army explained to Sgt. Maseth's mother that her son had an electrical appliance with him in the shower that caused his electrocution. That, as so much else associated with this war is, was a lie.
Maseth was electrocuted because a water pump in the building was not properly grounded and when the shower was turned on he was zapped with a powerful surge of electricity. The sergeant was not the first person to be electrocuted. According to Pentagon documents more than 12 other people have been electrocuted on U.S. bases in Iraq and many more injured by electrical shocks. In one barracks there were almost daily reports of its inhabitants receiving electrical shocks. And, in early July of this year an electrical fire resulted in the destruction of 10 buildings.
According to the New York Times an Army survey of February 2007 noted "a safety threat theater-wide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires."
The first thing one is tempted to do when learning of something like this is to assume it is the fault of contractor Kellogg Brown Root. That is because KBR is the poster child for what went wrong with private contractors in Iraq. Among other things, it charged for food it did not serve the troops, it failed to build a pipeline for which it was paid $75.7 million and failed to deliver safe water for hygiene uses.
Some people may wonder how one company can get so much wrong. The answer is since the war began it has been paid more than $24 billion and has 40,000 employees in Iraq. That affords it lots of opportunity to perform incompetently and it has taken advantage of many of them. More are on the way. KBR was recently awarded a part of a $150 billion contract for restoring the oil fields in Iraq. It will develop the southern oil fields while two other companies, one of which, Parsons, which has had its own share of shoddy performance, will develop those in the northern part of the country.
It would not be fair to blame KBR for Sgt. Maseth's death just because it was responsible for the Radwaniya Palace Complex (RPC) where he died. That is because KBR not required to act prophylactically. Reporting on the palace electrocution, CNN reported that KBR said its contract hold KBR responsible for "fixing potential hazards." It was only required to fix things after they broke down.
KBR and the Pentagon would probably agree that a shower that electrocutes the bather is a shower that has broken down but the only way that can be discovered is after someone has been electrocuted. Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, said the company found no link between its work and the electrocutions. As is sometimes the case when KBR explains what happens, not everyone agrees with its self-analysis.
Ingrid Harrison, an official with the Pentagon's contracting management agency was quoted in the Times as saying: "KBR has been at [the palace] for over four years and was fully aware of the safety hazards, violations and concerns regarding the soldiers' housing." KBR, said she, "chose to ignore the known unsafe conditions."
Electricians who were formerly employed by KBR said their repeated warnings to their superiors as well as to military personnel about unsafe electrical conditions were ignored. That probably explains why 283 electrical fires took place between August 2006 and January 2007. There should be fewer in the future. The Times notes that "senior army officials have ordered electrical inspection of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR. Chris Isleib, a spokesman for the Pentagon said: "We consider this to be a very serious issue."
He got that right. KBR, as usual, got it wrong. It won't affect its shareholders - only the soldiers who have died or been injured and the taxpayer who pays the company for its incompetence.
When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research - Wilson Mizner, Sayingyu
We live in a country run by a consummate liar whose most egregious lies have resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 American servicemen and women, the infliction of life altering wounds on more than 20,000 servicemen and women, and the creation of millions of refugees in foreign countries.
We live in a country where a general of the U.S. Army whose first concern should be the welfare of his troops, lies to Congress about the quality of water supplied to troops working in the far off land that the consummate liar has done much to destroy. This is a general to whose command the welfare of those he commanded was entrusted.
Yet we whine about a plagiarist.
Early in July it was disclosed by Sen. Byron Dorgan that Maj. General Jerome Johnson misled (a Washington euphemism for lying) Congress in April 2007 when he testified that there were no problems with water supplied to American troops by Kellogg Brown Root, described as the largest defense contractor in Iraq.
According to the New York Times, beginning in 2006 whistleblowers let Congress know that there were problems with the nonpotable water KBR supplied the troops. The Pentagon's inspector general confirmed that KBR had not provided safe water for hygiene uses at several Iraq bases. The Pentagon learned of this in a communication from the inspector general on March 31, 2007. Three weeks later Gen. Johnson testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that problems with the water supplied by KBR were not widespread.
It was a minor breach of trust by the general. After all, when your commander-in-chief is a man whose lies have ruined millions of lives, a drop or two of bad water is hardly anything to get excited about.
Nor, it seems, is a bit of plagiarism even when the plagiarist has been nominated to a Federal District Court judgeship. It is hardly surprising that an administration that routinely lies would be unperturbed by a bit of plagiarism and would naturally consider confession of misconduct adequate to remove the stain from a reputation.
Michael E. O'Neill, a former to aide to Sen. Arlen Specter is law professor at George Mason University. He is considered a fine legal scholar who has had a brilliant career and is clearly of the sort of cloth from which federal judges are cut. There is only one flaw in the fabric and it would not even be noticeable if some journalist from the New York Times had not only discovered it but then seen fit to hold the fabric up for all to see. Alan Liptak is the journalist. He discovered that Mr. O'Neill has plagiarized on more than one occasion. One of those occasions involved an article he wrote in 2004 for the Supreme Court Economic Review, a journal published by the George Mason School of Law.
The purloined passage dealt with something called "bounded rationality" which, according to Mr. O'Nell "is not a refutation of the rational actor model," quoting word-for-word from a book review published in 2000 in the Virginia Law Review. Explaining the copying Mr. O'Neill said it was a result of a "poor work method." "I didn't keep track of things. I frankly did a poor and negligent job." He got that right. In 2007 the review issued a retraction of the article.
The White House is unperturbed by a bit of plagiarism sanctioning, as it has, lying to create foreign policy. Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman said Mr. O'Neill had been completely forthcoming" and had "expressed remorse for his actions. " She also said that the background searches the White House conducts are "very thorough" and "would capture issues such as this one." Not everyone agrees with the White House.
Deborah Rhode who teaches legal ethics at Stanford described the retraction of the article in the review as "extremely unusual" and told the Times reporter that plagiarism was a "textbook case of conduct that casts doubt on someone's fitness for judicial office."
Mr. O'Neill, in contrast, said the 2004 plagiarism was "fairly insignificant" and asked whether it was "something to kill someone's career for?" One answer was given by Daniel Polsby, the dean of the George Mason law school. He said as a consequence of the plagiarism Mr. O'Neill "stepped away from tenure and will reapply for it." That may not be necessary. Mr. O'Neill, answering his own question has refused to withdraw his nomination for a federal judgeship and if an unethical administration has its way, Mr. O'Neill will have life tenure as a federal judge. That's much better than humbly applying for restoration of a privilege lost through misconduct held up for all the world to see.
The Lord rewards him according to his works. - The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy
Rewards. That's the newest game in Washington D.C.
Almost simultaneously Republican presidential nominee John McCain and the U.S. Census Bureau have come up with clever ideas to make the United States of America a better place. The Census Bureau would like for more people to fill out the forms it sends out ever four years and John McCain would like for someone to invent a really good car battery.
Both have concluded that the secret is to offer rewards. Both are great ideas.
The United States Constitution requires that a census be taken every ten years pursuant to laws enacted by Congress which has determined that citizens must respond to forms they receive so that the census can be properly completed. Many people refuse to complete and return the forms and Congress and the Census Bureau have been trying to figure out how to get people to comply with the law. If the traditional approach were used, criminal sanctions would be imposed on those who refuse to obey the law. (Those who refuse to file income tax returns can explain how that works.) To address the problem of non-compliance in returning census forms, however, Congress and the Census Bureau are considering a solution that is thrilling in its simplicity. They have concluded it is more cost efficient to offer incentives to those who comply with the law than to prosecute those who don't. Prior to the 2000 Census there was talk of having some kind of sweepstakes. That idea has resurfaced and a $1 million prize has been suggested. That amount seems a bit on the penurious side, given the fact that there are close to 300 million people living in this country. They could easily triple that without adversely affecting the budget.
Rewarding those who comply with the census law is, of course, just a first step in reforming our justice system. If encouraging compliance with the law by the use of rewards instead of punishments catches on, other proposals equally attractive will almost certainly follow. The money needed to pay those who abide by the law can be found in money saved by not having to build and staff prisons. Once we have established the appropriate reward for the citizen who returns the census form, it will be necessary to determine the appropriate rewards in other ways.
Those who do not break any traffic laws during a given year may be rewarded by being entered into a lottery for a modest sum. Those from families with criminal proclivities who do not, for example, rob any banks, would be entered in lotteries with considerably higher rewards. After all, the level of the reward should be commensurate with the level of the foregone criminal activity.
And offering money as an incentive to forego criminal activity is no less imaginative than is John McCain's suggestion on how to encourage creativity.
Sen. McCain has suggested that the government (which most Republicans believe should stay out of people's lives unless it is chasing terrorists on private phone lines or e-mails or determining what women should do with their bodies) , should offer incentives for creativity.
He has suggested that taxpayers offer a $300 million prize to whoever builds what he refers to as "a better car battery," one that "has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars." He wants, said he, to "inspire the ingenuity and resolve of the American people."
Until those words were spoken, few, if any citizens, realized that it was the prospect of a taxpayer reward that inspired creativity. Most people thought that the truly creative among us such as Bill Gates, believed their rewards were to be found in the satisfaction of a job well done and the profits that followed the commercial success of their efforts. McCain's comments suggest that he has no confidence in the ingenuity and creativity of the American people unless the federal government steps in and offers them extravagant rewards for their efforts.
Surely, everyone would agree that both ideas have great merit. If implemented, only time will tell whether rewarding the compliant or the creative will produce better results for society.
To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant - Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk
This is an appendix. Not the removable kind. The kind that adds information to something previously reported. It is an appendix about George Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Last week I told you about some of the things that went on between George Bush, science and the EPA. In every case George Bush won and science and the EPA lost. Here is what is happening as you read this. George Bush is scampering as fast as he can to make sure coal fired power plants can be built near several national parks. He isn't personally scampering. His EPA is.
According to a recent report, the EPA is proposing a rule change to take effect before George Bush becomes nothing more than a bad memory. It would alter the way the impact of a new pollution source is calculated when determining if it can be built. Under the existing rule, peak periods of pollution are used to determine the effect of a new pollution source. If the pollution source would adversely affect a site at peak period times it could not be built. Under the proposed rule annual averages would instead be used thus making it easier to build polluting power plants near national parks.
Congress has designated 156 national parks, wilderness areas and wildlife refuges as Class-1 areas giving them maximum legal protection. Senator Lamar Alexander, the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, represents Tennessee, a state that includes the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, says that if the new rule is enacted Congress should promptly enact legislation to overturn it. In a letter to Stephen Johnson, the EPA Administrator, Mr. Alexander said the proposed rule "provides the lowest possible degree of protection" for those areas. The EPA disagrees. It says the rules are simply refinements to regulations that measure Class-1 air quality standards. When the Bush administration, the least refined in United States history, defines something as refined, warning hackles rise. Mr. Alexander's hackles are not the only ones that rose.
Federal air-quality experts at both the EPA and the National Park Service describe the proposals as a step backward. John Bunyak, policy chief at the National Park Service's planning and permit branch said the new rule "[C]ould allow additional pollution sources to locate in a particular area, where they wouldn't have been under the old rule," Clayton told the Christian Science Monitor. EPA regional staff experts say that the new rule provides "the lowest possible degree of protection" against spikes in pollution.
Echoing the staff experts' concerns, Mark Wenzler, clean air director of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), says the new rule would permit "phony pollution accounting" methods. The EPA fact sheet, in contrast, says the "proposed rules would provide greater regulatory certainty and reduce complexity without sacrificing the current level of environmental protection."
The NPCA's list of threatened parks includes the Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, Capitol Reef, Zion Canyon and Mesa Verde. If the EPA rule takes effect and is not overturned, higher levels of pollution in our national parks will become, together with the war in Iraq, one of the enduring legacies of George W. Bush.
It is, not clear that Mr. Bush is aware of this. It seems that if George Bush's White House gets an email it doesn't like it doesn't open it.
That 's what the administration did with an e-mail report it got from the EPA in December of 2007, the month the agency responded to a 2007 Supreme Court order that it determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment. The EPA's conclusion: greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled.
Someone at the EPA thought such a conclusion should be shared with George "Ignorance is Bliss" Bush. The EPA could have saved itself the trouble. When Mr. Bush received the e-mail it told the EPA its e-mail would not be opened. And it wasn't. As a result the EPA waited six months and then released what the New York Times described as a "watered-down version of the original conclusion contained in the un-opened e-mail that greenhouse gases are a pollutant." Instead, according to the Times, the agency's recent report simply "reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant." The paper further says that for five days preceding the report's release the White House put pressure on the EPA to eliminate large sections of the e-mail it refused to open that supported regulation of greenhouse gases.
Here's a tip for my readers. Refusing to open e-mails because you don't like the new it brings may work in George Bush's White House world. It's probably not good practice in the real world of which George Bush is not an inhabitant.
