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Monday, Jan 14, 2002

midrift

"In what follows I lay out a new alternative. It seeks to achieve a separation of the two peoples, but not through unilateral action. Rather, it proposes that the United States use the UN Security Council to achieve a kind of coordinated separation, but one in which the Council will not take no for an answer. In this, it represents a radical departure from previous US policies. But the proposal is far from radical in its objectives. It leaves for later the issues of Jerusalem and refugees; instead, it focuses on the issues of territory, statehood and settlements. Here it seeks to be decisive, to achieve an end to the territorial dimension of the conflict through the emergence of a Palestinian state living at peace with Israel. The territorial specifics are little different from what Clinton proposed and what is now an international consensus: the near complete withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories."

phasers on stunted

"Enterprise, which debuted this fall on UPN as the newest entry in the Star Trek franchise, has a fundamentally different vision. Its crew copes with bleeding-edge technologies: they don�t trust the transporter not to scramble their molecular data, the torpedoes miss their targets, the shields are on the fritz and the computers make crappy food. Starfleet is now a paternalistic bureaucracy. In short, the message is, we have seen the future and it doesn�t work."

gasaholic

"The reason is both simple and complex: oil. Washington is determined to dominate the world's richest new source of oil, Central Asia's Caspian Basin, over which sit the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Well before Sept. 11, the US already had special forces operating in Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan. Last spring, Osama bin Laden advised the unworldly Taliban regime to turn down a low bid from the US oil firm Unocal to build a pipeline to export Central Asian oil - awarding it instead to a rival Argentine firm. The US cut off discreet financial aid to Taliban and began updating contingency plans to invade Afghanistan and install a compliant regime. Events of Sept. 11 facilitated this decision."

presidential chew toy

"My mother always said, 'When you're eating pretzels, chew before you swallow,"' Bush said. "Always listen to your mother."

Sunday, Jan 13, 2002

energy concerns

enron weekend round-up

smog dogs

"Virginia environmental officials have hired a contractor to place two teams of technicians at different sites in Northern Virginia and Richmond beginning in March for a nine-month $300,000 pilot program. The teams, from Connecticut-based Environmental Systems Products, will set up at on-ramps and other high-traffic areas. They like to call their device the "AccuScan Remote Vehicle Emissions Testing System," though some in the industry prefer the term "smog dog." The system shoots an invisible beam of light through a car's exhaust plume to measure a range of pollutants, and a video camera records license plate numbers. Computers in a van parked nearby crunch the emissions data."

Friday, Jan 11, 2002

rascal racicot

"The political reforms passed after Watergate had two somewhat paradoxical consequences. On the positive side, outright, cash-in-a-bag corruption became quite rare in Washington. On the negative side, sleaze got much more inventive. The fruits of this trend included such instruments of dubious virtue and technical legality as corporate soft money, "honoraria" for speech-making, campaign contribution "bundling," insider stock deals for members of Congress, and ever more blatant forms of influence-peddling."

df tribune

The Future of bin Ladenism
Pipeline Politics
Carlyle's Way
Bush Family Value$
Bad Intelligence Causing Pentagon-CIA Rift
A Creeping Collapse in Credibility at the White House

band on the run

"There, boasted a flurry of HBO press releases, several dozen construction workers had labored mightily to build an 80-square-foot high-definition movie screen, a viewing tent, and a reception area that could accommodate up to 1,000 guests, "as well as lounge and bar space." The occasion for all this was not so much the annual D-day commemoration, which was squeezed in after lunch, but an event that had for all intents and purposes replaced it: the star-studded premiere of Band of Brothers--a $125-million television miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, based on the book by Stephen E. Ambrose, telling the true-life story of Easy Company, and appearing on a TV screen near you in early September."

clear channel

"The United States is more likely to suffer a nuclear, chemical or biological attack from terrorists using ships, trucks or airplanes than one by a foreign country using long-range missiles, according to a new U.S. intelligence estimate."

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