I’m blogging lite again this evening.  I am exhausted.  All the book shelves are in place, and most of my library has been separated, shelving has yet to begin.  It became so stuffy this evening, I nearly passed out once, so I quit.  I’ve also discovered if I ‘abuse’ my right elbow, I get very woozy and slightly nauseous.  Typing is very difficult because my arm hurts a bit.  But – the knobs are on the new bathroom door, all shelves are up and it only cost me an additional $1500 – in breakage.  My magnificent pink flamingo Armani sculpture shattered, as did a s/n piece of art glass. But – it’s just stuff, right?  Not a life!

 

We almost had a CATASTROPHY today.  About 15 minutes after leaving, Maggie called to remind me Raymond left two windows open in my bedroom.  They had been open for several hours.  I panicked because one window, on ground level, has no screen.  You know what happens when in-door cats see an open window!  I quickly did a head count, but couldn’t find Miss Piggy.  I eventually found her upstairs in her bed.  Everyone accounted for.  

MY MINI RANT

Melanie Phillips has a column in the Spectator today, that was picked up by Michael Reagan, where I heard it.  The basis of her piece is that the Bush Administration allowed some highly radioactive WMD’s to slip through their fingers, and into Syria.  Her source is WMD searcher, David Gaubatz, who says he found the material, but it ended up in Syria.  

 

Phillips stresses how the MSM has dismissed Gaubatz.  She also stresses how the Administration and Tony Blair are ignoring his work because they would be humiliated.  The Dems are ignoring it because then it would prove GWB was correct.  And then his work went missing.

 

“…When Mr. Gaubatz returned to the US, he tried to bring all this to light. Two congressmen, Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Curt Weldon, were keen to follow up his account. To his horror, however, when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports, they were told that all 60 of them — which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003 to the computer clearing-house at a US airbase in Saudi Arabia — had mysteriously gone missing. These written reports had never even been seen by the ISG.

 

One theory is that they were inadvertently destroyed when the computer’s database was accidentally erased in the subsequent US evacuation of the airbase. Mr. Gaubatz, however, suspects dirty work at the crossroads. It is unlikely, he says, that no copies were made of his intelligence. And he says that all attempts by Messrs Hoekstra and Weldon to extract information from the Defence Department and CIA have been relentlessly stonewalled.

In 2005, the CIA held a belated inquiry into the disappearance of this intelligence. Only then did its agents visit the sites — to report that they had indeed been looted.

 

Mr Gaubatz’s claims remain largely unpublicised. Last year, the New York Times dismissed him as one of a group of WMD diehard obsessives. The New York Sun produced a more balanced report, but after that the coverage died. According to Mr Gaubatz, the reason is a concerted effort by the US intelligence and political world to stifle such an explosive revelation of their own lethal incompetence…”

 

The problem I have with this whole thing is the find hand of John Loftus, a one time highly respected analyst of intelligence, but because of his abject hatred of the Bush family

 and his tendency to see all manner of conspiracies, trilaterials, etc. within the Bush family is now discredited. Loftus has come out defending Gaubatz.  Loftus basically things the Bush family helped fund Hitler.  Captain Ed has picked up on the story, one of the few people who has, but he has not picked up on the Loftus problem. I would give the whole store my credibility if Phillips had not quoted Loftus.  

 

Articles on the subject have appeared in several places:

The Sun

The Front Page Mag interview has a different take on the story.

“…Gaubatz: The most accurate intelligence is what is initially obtained by ground intelligence officers.  The intelligence myself and other Agents obtained on the ground never reached our President or Congress.  The intelligence they eventually received was so diluted and politically scrubbed, that it was often far from the original intelligence we received. 

 

There was no intelligence failure; there was a serious dissemination failure.  The intelligence ground agents obtained what they had to obtain, but they must in the future get it into the appropriate hands immediately without it being filtered.  I have no doubt that no member of Congress or President Bush ever got the intelligence myself and other Agents assigned to Nasiriyah, Iraq obtained.  I know Congressman Hoekstra nor Congressman Weldon had ever seen this.  After the war, President Bush was briefed that WMDs were not in Iraq and all suspected WMDs sites were searched.  All sites have not been searched….”

 

Read Captain Ed’s take on the Phillips article, then read from the interview with Gaubatz from last year.  Someone is not telling the whole story, or is slanting it to make the Administration look bad.  I think Phillips is doing a hatchet job on GWB.  Considering her use of Loftus as a source, this is one article I would handle with kid gloves.  Captain Ed is also a little skeptical of the story, but for a reason other than the Loftus connection.

 

 

The Cho family finally speaks out.  I do feel sorry for them.  But, I still maintain they knew something was wrong with their son and should have taken more extensive steps to contain him.   I also think his high school system did much to fail him by not pegging his mental problems.

A hero goes home to Israel, at last.

“…It was also the first time anyone buried in my local cemetery had been cited just two days earlier by the president of the United States. In a Holocaust Memorial ceremony Wednesday, President Bush praised Librescu’s heroism in the shooting that took place on the day set aside to remember Hitler’s victims, “On the Day of Remembrance, this Holocaust survivor gave his own life so that others may live. And this morning we honor his memory and we take strength from his example.”

Librescu, a 77-year old leading scholar in his field, survived the Holocaust in Romania. During World War II, he was first sent to a labor camp, then to a ghetto in the city of Focsani. After the war, he rose to become such a prominent scholar that the Communist Regime refused his request to emigrate to Israel, and as a result of the request, he was fired from his job. He was permitted to leave the country only with the intervention of the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He was honored not only by Israel and the U.S., but his native land as well. At the funeral, a representative of Romanian President Traian Basescu presented Librescu’s family with the Order of the Star of Romania both for his bravery and his contributions to science.

Over the course of the week, Librescu’s son Joe spoke of the two homes he loved in Israel and in Virginia. “He saw himself as something of an ambassador for Israel in a place where there were very few Israelis, and in his field of study.”…

LYIN’ DEMS

The Dems want to impeach someone so bad they can’t stand it.

The Politico says they are going to subp. Rice, etc. Strata-Sphere

Harry Reid, Copperhead.

 PRIMARIES 2008

Romney is playing local hard-ball in SC county by county.

Giuliani in SC.

Thompson (Fred) has tort reform problems.

Those without humor have their knickers in a wad over McCain’s little jingle.