US House Leaders Plan Vote on Big Foreign Worker Increase This Week -- Despite 5-Year Unemployment High

Here's another entry in the contest to find out whether many politicians are just stupid or are cynically evil:

• THE CRISIS: The feds announced last week that our official unemployment rate has soared to 6.1%, the highest since September 2003.
• THE CARING RESPONSE IN WORDS: Anticipating and reacting to the economic uncertainty in so many households, both Presidential Nominating Conventions were full of promises to help the beleaguered American worker.
• THE ACTUAL STAB IN THE BACK: But this week, we get to see what ACTIONS the politicians plan for us. First out of the blocks, the Democratic Leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives is responding this week by trying to shove through a bill -- H.R. 5882 -- which would provide about 550,000 permanent green cards to foreign workers next year. And those would be ABOVE the 1 million permanent green cards already planned!

Folks, this is not just rhetoric. This is the House leadership trying to pass this bill to permanently give away hundreds of thousands more American jobs to foreign workers.

Unless you make a phone call before Wednesday, this legislation is almost guaranteed to pass because it is backed by the richest, most powerful corporate lobbying interests in town, by the House Democratic leadership and by a large number of corporate-lobby-inspired Republicans. ....

Gearing Up to Strike Iran

According to a recent article (in Hebrew) in the Israeli daily Maariv, Israel’s top political and security officials have taken a decision to attack Iran’s nuclear program if nothing else is done to halt it.

Senior journalist Ben Caspit writes that “the debate between those who think everything must be done, including a military operation, to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb and those who think one can live with it, has been decided. If the Iranian regime doesn’t fall during the coming year, if the Americans don’t deliver a military blow and if the sanctions don’t break the Iranian nuclear program, Israel will have to take action. In other words: the preparations for an Israeli military option…are already underway.” ....

Somalia: the Next Challenge

Major terrorism threat against US interests looms in Horn of Africa, according to new report.

Even the most assiduous news consumer would be hard pressed to find much mention of Somalia in discussions this election year about either foreign policy or counterterrorism. Indeed, most current attention is on Pakistan and Afghanistan as the epicenter of planning and organizing of jihadist attacks on US interests. A new report by the Washington, DC based think-tank Center for American Progress and Enough, a Brussels, Belgium based human rights group, however, argues that Somalia is fast and alarmingly becoming an incubator for a new generation of terrorists, in part due to self-defeating strategies of US counterterrorism efforts there.

The report, titled Somalia: A Country in Peril, a Foreign Policy Nightmare, is authored by Ken Menkhaus, a Davidson College professor who is regarded as one of the foremost US experts on the Horn of Africa. It portrays Somalia in a condition of rapid humanitarian, political and military meltdown. The fallout from this meltdown, Menkhaus believes, is likely to be an epidemic of Islamist extremism. Click here to see full report. ....

Neglect threatens infrastructure - US security chief

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON, Sept 5 (Reuters) - The United States has increased security to protect its levees, dams and power grids from terrorists, but neglect of ordinary upkeep exposes such critical infrastructure to dangerous decay, the U.S. homeland security chief said on Friday.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff accused political leaders of playing a game of "musical chairs" by ignoring maintenance and needed upgrades and hoping facilities can avoid disaster until after they leave office.

"It's kind of like playing Russian roulette with our citizens' safety," Chertoff said in a speech at the Brookings Institution think tank. Private companies have shown a similar short-term attitude over infrastructure maintenance, he said.

"We've made a lot of progress in terms of these common goods, publicly owned and privately owned, when it comes to protecting them against terrorist attacks," Chertoff said.

"When it comes to making long-term investments simply to maintain things we rely upon ... we have failed time and again," he said.

A 2005 study by the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated it would cost $1.6 trillion over five years to bring U.S. physical infrastructure to acceptable levels. Other studies have also recommended spending more on maintenance.

But in a sign of the times, the Bush administration asked Congress on Friday for an immediate $8 billion to reimburse states for highway projects funded with federal gasoline taxes, which have slumped as American motorists drive less.

Chertoff encouraged states to follow the example of the federal anti-terrorism program and inventory infrastructure projects vulnerable to natural disasters. Strategies could then be drawn up for maintaining, reinforcing and protecting them.

Long-term maintenance costs must also be considered in evaluating projects that might be to expensive to maintain.

"It's really about putting the common good first," he said.

Chertoff spoke during a week in which Hurricane Gustav's strike on New Orleans recalled the devastation of that city three years ago when Hurricane Katrina caused a main canal levee to break.

President George W. Bush's administration was heavily criticized for the slow Katrina relief efforts.

Chertoff said that during a visit to see New Orleans storm preparations last week, he viewed a huge steel gate installed after Katrina to protect the canal from rising waters on Lake Pontchartrain.

A proposal a decade earlier to install such a gate, when it could have preserved the city from Katrina, was scrapped due to local political opposition, he said.

Similarly, he said, vital Sacramento, California, levees remained at risk of "catastrophic failure," as opposition by local development officials and businesses concerned over the economic impact, delays upgrades to the flood-control system.

Chertoff also expressed frustration over difficulties getting oil companies to equip gasoline stations with emergency generators so they can keep operating in a widespread power outage -- a problem after Katrina that federal officials said recurred after Gustav. (Editing by Peter Cooney)

The Bakken oil formation and national security

(Compiler's note: Drill here, drill now.)

This is a post from June 2, 2008. Yesterday, Bloomberg News published a story about some young oil developers and their rush to bring the Bakken oil formation, located in eastern Montana and western North Dakota, into major production.

The Bakken Formation has been a minor producer of crude oil for over a half century. What has increased this formation’s potential is the arrival of mature horizontal drilling technology, now combined with water fracturing recovery techniques. These techniques could turn the Bakken Formation from an inconsequential dud into perhaps the largest oil field on the planet.

How large? In an unpublished research paper he wrote while working as a geochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey, Mr. Leigh Price (who died in 2000) calculated a mean estimate of recoverable oil from Bakken at a stupendous 413 billion barrels. This compares to Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves of 267 billion barrels.

Mr. Price’s report did not receive a complete peer review and was not published as an official USGS study. As it happens, in April the USGS did publish an official estimate of Bakken’s potential. Based on recent exploratory efforts and current recovery technology, the current USGS mean estimate of recoverable oil from the Bakken Formation is 3.65 billion barrels, less than 1% of Mr. Price’s estimate from nearly a decade ago.

Isn’t this USGS report a severe letdown? Perhaps not. The USGS last studied the Bakken Formation in 1995. Using recovery technology in existence at that time, the USGS estimated Bakken’s potential at a mere 151 million barrels. With such low potential and crude oil prices relatively depressed at that time, it is easy to understand why Bakken was ignored.

The combination of data from new test wells and new recovery technology has caused the USGS to expand its estimate of Bakken’s potential by 25 times between 1995 and 2008. In its April report on Bakken, the USGS admitted that it has collected only very limited data from assessment areas surrounding the center of the Bakken Formation. There is a potential here for upside revisions as more test wells are drilled.

More importantly, Bakken’s expansion has been tied almost completely to improvements in drilling and recovery technology. Absent a breathtaking plunge in global crude oil prices, it is reasonable to assume that horizontal drilling and water fracturing recovery techniques will continue to advance in the years ahead, making recoverable even more of Bakken’s crude oil. Another 10-20 fold upgrade of Bakken’s potential would make it a peer of Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field, currently the world’s largest.

Bakken has many other merits. Bakken’s crude is easy to refine. Unlike the Gulf Coast, Bakken is not vulnerable to weather or terror disruptions. Unlike Alaska, there are no geographical problems getting Bakken’s oil and gas to refineries and markets. Local politicians are enthusiastic backers of development and support plans to expand supporting infrastructure in the area.

Should Bakken live up to this hypothetical potential, the economic and national security implications would be significant. Production from the Bakken Formation could create a large positive swing in the U.S. balance of payments. This would open up decision-making flexibility for U.S. economic policymakers. And in the national security realm, future U.S. presidents would have more policy options available for their consideration as they contemplate problems such as Iran.

Long ignored, the Bakken Formation is now the hottest development in U.S. domestic oil exploration. Will it be the next Saudi Arabia? That remains hard to say. But it would take a tremendous oil price crash to prevent Bakken from being a significant development.

For additional information -- click here and here

Generals Behaving Badly

(Compiler's note: As a former Marine, it has always been my understanding that those who would attack us must be ferreted out and quickly defeated. This article provides some very interesting insight.)

By WILLIAM MCGURN

When Abraham Lincoln famously sent word to Gen. George McClellan that he'd like to "borrow" the army if the general wasn't planning on using it, the commander of Union forces likely did not take it kindly. McClellan, after all, was a man whose letters home referred to Lincoln as an "idiot," "a well-meaning baboon" and other colorful language.

AP

Gen. George Casey.

In the first few pages of "The War Within," Bob Woodward opens with another presidential remark that offended another wartime general. This time the recipient was the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey. During a videoconference with Baghdad, the president said, "George, we're not playing for a tie. I want to make sure we all understand this." Gen. Casey, Mr. Woodward writes, took this as "an affront to his dignity that he would long remember."

Whether or not Gen. Casey long remembered, "The War Within" makes clear his disdain for his commander in chief. If the views and remarks attributed to Gen. Casey are not accurate, Mr. Woodward has done him a grave injustice. If they are accurate, they come as further evidence of the obstacles President George W. Bush had to overcome to get his commanders to start winning in Iraq.

Opening with Gen. Casey also says something about Mr. Woodward. There's a case, I suppose, for using the general who opposed the surge to open what is hailed as the definitive account of that surge (not to mention using Robert McNamara, the Defense secretary who helped lose Vietnam to end the book). Surely, however, that would be the same case for wrapping the definitive account of the strategy that brought Robert E. Lee to Appomattox around Gen. McClellan.

Gen. Casey, after all, was the commander who all along maintained that the solution in Iraq was for America to draw down its forces -- even after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. He was the commander who later that year was given his own chance to secure Baghdad with Operations Together Forward I and II, and failed. Most of all, he is the commander who was wrong when the president was right to insist that Baghdad could be secured and al Qaeda dealt a harsh blow with more troops.

Gen. Casey's continued adherence to a failed strategy does not make him a dishonorable man. It does make him an odd choice to serve as the foundation for the charge that the president was out of touch with the war. As evidence, both the general and the journalist point to questions about how many of the enemy we were killing as a sign that "the president did not get it."

Then again, maybe it's Gen. Casey and Mr. Woodward who did not get it. The questions the president asked were driven by something everyone in the West Wing worried about. Every night for years, Americans tuning into the evening news were greeted by the same image from Iraq: a burning car or Humvee, accompanied by a fresh report about soldiers or Marines who'd been blown up by an improvised explosive device or suicide bomb.

Nor did these images exist in a vacuum. A media obsessed with body counts featured grim roll calls of the dead, marking each macabre "milestone" -- 1,500 war dead, 2,000 war dead -- along the way. In this context, was it really unreasonable for a president to ask his commander on the ground if we were fighting back, when it sure didn't look that way to the American people?

The same might be said of the one truly original take offered by Mr. Woodward. This is his curious assertion that it's not the surge that has produced the great reduction in violence in Iraq. The reduced violence, he says, is the result of the increased lethality of covert operations against terrorist leaders and operatives.

Which brings up two interesting points. First, we are led to find fault with a president allegedly obsessed with a "kill the bastards" approach to Iraq. But then we are asked to accept that the reason we're now seeing success in Iraq because we're . . . killing the bastards.

Second, the surge was a shift in mission, not simply an addition of five brigades. Until the surge, we had pursued a political solution, hoping that the answer to Iraq was the rise of a democratic government that would persuade Iraqis to come together for their future. The surge, by contrast, finally recognized the obvious: Until Iraqis started feeling safe in their own homes and neighborhoods, there would be no compromise or rebuilding.

Sophisticates have never liked Mr. Bush for his preference for words like "win" and "victory" to describe what America is trying to do in Iraq. And if Mr. Woodward's latest contribution is any clue, they'll never forgive him for doing something even worse: proving it can be done.

Together Again

Following the 1959 communist revolution led by Raul and Fidel Castro, Cuba served as the Soviet Union’s strategic partner and proxy, due to its key location just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Now, under an increasingly assertive and authoritarian Russia, the classic Cold War alliance appears to have been renewed. ....

Our commitment to freedom

ByFrank J. Gaffney

PRAGUE, The Czech Republic.

Neville Chamberlain once called the nation of which this city was the capital in 1938, "a faraway country" with "people of whom we know nothing." With those words, he reneged on Britain's alliance with Czechoslovakia, abandoning it to Adolf Hitler's quest for "breathing room" for the German people and the rest, as they say, is history.

In recent months, the United States has undertaken important new security commitments with the Czech Republic and Poland in the face of emerging threats to those countries, the rest of Europe and indeed the Free World more generally from a regime whose aspirations are arguably even more ominous than those of the Nazis: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

After all, the mullahocracy of Iran seeks, in the words of its front man, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to bring about the return of the 12th Imam, a messianic figure known in Shi'ite Iran as the Mahdi. The trouble is, according to the ayatollahs, the precondition to the Mahdi's ushering in of the golden age of Islam is something that sounds a lot like the apocalypse.

As a result, it is advisable to take seriously threats issuing forth with great regularity from Tehran to the effect that Israel will be "wiped off the map" and that it is "desirable and achievable" to bring about "a world without America." Iranian ballistic missiles have demonstrated the ability to reach distant targets like Tel Aviv, parts of the European Continent and, if launched from ships, the United States.

If used to detonate nuclear weapons in space over targeted nations, such missiles could unleash electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks, resulting in widespread destruction of electrical grids and what a congressional commission has described as the "catastrophic" disruption of civilizations reliant upon them. A world without America could be the practical result of such a strategic EMP attack here, as the United States is reduced to a pre-industrial society.

Against such a threat, the Bush administration has begun to put into place modest anti-missile defenses. Deployed ashore in Alaska and California and aboard a growing number of naval vessels, these systems afford some protection against certain ballistic missile-delivered attacks on the United States.

The United States has also concluded agreements with the governments of Poland and the Czech Republic that will allow the fielding of 10 land-based interceptors and an X-band radar, respectively, in the two nations. These systems will extend very limited missile defenses to our allies in Europe and permit some additional capability to intercept future intercontinental-range Iranian missiles aimed at the United States.

These benefits will accrue, however, only if the Congress agrees to fund such deployments and the associated military construction. As of this writing, Democrats in the House of Representatives have declined to do so. Thankfully, a Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, will offer Tuesday an amendment designed to honor America's commitment to its European allies and provide the protection they and we need at an absolute minimum.

The Kirk amendment has taken on greater urgency in the aftermath of Russia's recent, devastating invasion of another "faraway country" - the sovereign, democratic and pro-Western republic of Georgia. Even though the Polish-based interceptors and the radar in the Czech Republic represent no threat to Moscow's ability to destroy Europe should it choose to do so, Vladimir Putin is determined to try to stop their deployment.

The Kremlin has gone so far as to threaten nuclear attacks on the basing countries if they proceed with their efforts to defend themselves and others from the menace posed by Moscow's ally, Iran.

It appears Mr. Putin hopes to engineer a "re-do" of the 1983 deployment of U.S. ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing II ballistic missiles in five West European countries. Back then, the NATO alliance held firm in the face of an all-out Soviet campaign to block the basing of such weapons and destabilize the governments involved. The failure of that campaign marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, an event Mr. Putin mourns as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" and one he evidently seeks to reverse.

It would be unconscionable for the Congress now to give Mr. Putin - fresh from his rape of Georgia - a new and far more strategic victory by denying the funds needed to implement the missile defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic. Not only would doing so assure that Europe remained vulnerable to nuclear blackmail, or worse, from Iran. Not only would it deny the United States additional protection from Iranian missiles intended to bring about a world with this country.

A refusal to take the corrective action proposed by Mark Kirk would signal that the West, once again, views with indifference the security concerns of our allies. It will encourage the belief in Moscow and elsewhere that our time's most powerful democracy will, like its predecessor 70 years ago, abandon its friends to the appetites of their rapacious neighbors.

The vote in the Appropriations Committee Tuesday is an opportunity to demonstrate instead to our friends here in Prague, to America's allies around the world and to our actual and prospective foes that, despite the intense partisanship of this election season, Democrats and Republicans alike will honor our national commitments and stand together in defense of freedom.

U.S. plans $7 billion missile-defense sale to UAE

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON, Sept 8 - The Bush administration is planning to sell the United Arab Emirates an advanced U.S. missile defense system valued at up to $7 billion that could be used to defend against Iran, people who have attended briefings on the matter said on Monday.

The Pentagon is set to notify the U.S. Congress of the proposed sale, which would be the first of the so-called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, ....

"The UAE has been concerned for many years about possible retaliation against it for U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities," ....

THAAD is the first missile defense system designed to defend against short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles both inside and outside the Earth's atmosphere.

The potential $7 billion sale would include anti-missile interceptors, firing units, associated radar sites and training, among other things, ....

U.S. still vulnerable to attacks

(Compiler's note: Must read .... As a country, we really need to pull together here against a common enemy. We can see by this report and the response of those opposed to the current president that is NOT the case. Everything is still being made into a political response. Too bad I'm not in a position to personally fire them all and start over. These people still just don't get it. We must act as one here. rca)

By Brett J. Blackledge and Eileen Sullivan

WASHINGTON AP — The United States remains "dangerously vulnerable" to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks seven years after 9/11, a forthcoming independent study concludes. And a House Democrats' report says the Bush administration has missed one opportunity after another to improve the nation's security.

The recent political rupture between Russia and the U.S. only makes matters worse, said Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana Democratic congressman who helped lead the 9/11 Commission and now chairs the independent group's latest study.

Efforts to reduce access to nuclear technology and bomb-making materials have slowed, thousands of U.S. chemical plants remain unprotected, and the U.S. government continues to oppose strengthening an international treaty to prevent bioterrorism, according to the report produced by the bipartisan Partnership for a Secure America.

The group includes leaders of the disbanded 9/11 Commission, the bipartisan panel that investigated government missteps before the 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

"The threat of a new, major terrorist attack on the United States is still very real," concludes the report to be released Wednesday, the same day a congressional commission will hold a hearing in New York on nuclear and biological terrorism threats.

"A nuclear, chemical or biological weapon in the hands of terrorists remains the single greatest threat to our nation. While progress has been made in securing these weapons and materials, we are still dangerously vulnerable," the report said.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, had harsher criticism of the Bush administration's efforts. Their report found little or no progress across the board on national security initiatives.

"The Bush administration has not delivered on a myriad of critical homeland and national security mandates," the Democrats' report states. That report was being released Tuesday.

"The administration has just failed to act in so many ways," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. "Let's say that we've been fortunate that we have not been attacked" since 2001, said Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.

The independent report focuses narrowly on weapons of mass destruction.

The report and supporting studies describe the failure of international cooperation to prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, which they call a major problem. Many countries continue to ignore a United Nations mandate to prevent the spread of weapons; the ability of many countries to monitor potential bioterrorism is "essentially nonexistent," and dangerous chemical weapons stockpiles remain in some countries, including Russia and Libya, the report said.

Russia has been a significant player in U.S. efforts to secure nuclear weapons and to eliminate inventories of chemical weapons in the former Soviet region. That cooperation could be jeopardized as the two countries face off over the Russian invasion of Georgia and concerns about a U.S. missile defense base in Poland, Hamilton said.

Bush on Monday Bush on canceled a civilian nuclear cooperation deal with Russia.

"The things we do to penalize Russia will make it more difficult for us to deal with Russia on other matters," Hamilton said.

State Department spokesman Robert Wood said he hasn't seen the report. But he said there have been a number of successes in recent years, including negotiations to dismantle North Korea's nuclear program and Libya's agreement to end its nuclear and chemical weapons program.

"We have been engaged multilaterally with a number of countries to deal with this issue of weapons of mass destruction," Wood said.

Wood said he also has not seen the Democrats' report. "I fundamentally reject the charge that the administration has made the world less safe from terrorism," he said.

House Democrats also blasted Bush policy in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia as damaging to national security. U.S. efforts to combat terrorists in Pakistan have suffered because of "unyielding support for a military dictator"; Iraq has drained resources from the fight in Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia continues to serve "as a major source of terrorist activity," the Democrats' report states.

The independent study, however, did credit the Bush administration with progress in a number of areas. It cited improved U.S. port security, reduction of military chemical stockpiles, increased U.S. funding for securing nuclear weapons sites in Russia and new international programs aimed at preventing crimes involving biological weapons.

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