mr ed - luvverly to see the EU constitution conference fall over - i dont have any particular view on the issues, but i did note that the 3 major players are all american allies - poland, spain and (berlusconi).


With a flu epidemic spreading through the United States, another 150,000 shots for children are not due to arrive until January because of delays in packaging and other administrative problems

Thompson said flu shots are in short supply in the United States, because producers last year had a surplus and had to dump 12 million extra doses. This year, they were not prepared to meet demand.

Also Friday, Thompson, ( U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson ) in Mexico for a binational health commission meeting, announced a $5.4 million grant to fight infectious diseases and bioterrorism along the U.S.-Mexico border. That includes 20 million doses of anthrax vaccine.

mr ed - if i put on my cynical/conspiracy hat for a sec... firstly, i question whether 'other administrative problems' are a legitimate reason, unexplained, for the death of lots of kids. secondly, i wonder why they had to dump 12 million shots last year... a short shelf-life? if so, does the anthrax vaccine also suffer from the same problem? how often do they have to replace the 20 million anthrax shots? annually? perhaps the flu virus mutates more quickly than anthrax. even still, unless there are shelf-life issues, then they could have stored last year's vaccine - just in case, given that they were reducing the manufactured supply. maybe they are too expensive to store. the order of magnitude in the numbers is also a bit odd - they had to destroy 12 million doses last year, but now they can only crank out perhaps 150,000 in a month. something doesnt quite add up.

"Some of the flu shots available in Mexico, however, may not protect against the strain of virus attacking the United States."
mr ed - neither does the US version! another weird element of this story is that the flu vaccine story is mixed into a story about ' a $5.4 million grant to fight infectious diseases and bioterrorism along the U.S.-Mexico border.' - spread over 3 years mind you. and the $ will be distributed ' to Mexico's Health Department and the six Mexican border states: Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas.' - thats about a quarter mill each. meantime helliburton apparently overcharges for oil in iraq to the tune of $61M in a few months. the 5.4mill is just a rounding error on helliburtons rounding error in a tenth of the time.

" Almost one-fourth of all foreign-born people with tuberculosis in the United States are from Mexico, the U.S. health agency said."
mr ed - which is presumably sposed to point to a problem - 25% is a lot, right? of course, they dont mention what % of the foreign population is mexican. something like 8% of the US pop is hispanic - so praps the 25% indicates that mexicans have a lower tb rate than expected?


Lieutenant Colonel Allen West was suspended from his post in August when he was charged with beating up and threatening to kill an Iraqi policeman he was interrogating about attacks on U.S. forces.
West was fined $5,000 but escaped a full military trial.
"While his crimes could merit a court martial, mitigating factors involved were considered including the stressful environment our leaders and soldiers face daily and Lt Col West's record as an officer and commander," the division said in a statement.
"If it's about the lives of my men and their safety, I'd go through hell with a gasoline can," West said at the hearing, referring to the need to get information on possible attacks.
Before his suspension, Allen commanded some 700 troops as part of the U.S. occupying force in Iraq. He is the most senior soldier to be found guilty of assaulting Iraqis since the invasion last March.

Surging natural gas prices are generating a familiar accusation: market rigging. Despite above-average supplies, prices have surged 46 percent since Thanksgiving.
Oppenheimer & Co. senior energy analyst Fadel Gheit said natural gas price levels and volatility don't seem consistent with market fundamentals.
"I would like to see (New York Attorney General) Eliot Spitzer take a closer look at the market," Gheit said, adding that residential and industrial consumers are paying more for no good reason.

James Baker sets off to negotiate Iraqi debt forgiveness with our estranged allies. And at that very moment the deputy secretary of defense releases a "Determination and Findings" on reconstruction contracts that not only excludes those allies from bidding, but does so with highly offensive language. What's going on?
Maybe I'm giving Paul Wolfowitz too much credit, but I don't think this was mere incompetence. I think the administration's hard-liners are deliberately sabotaging reconciliation.
These are tough times for the architects of the "Bush doctrine" of unilateralism and preventive war. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their fellow Project for a New American Century alumni viewed Iraq as a pilot project, one that would validate their views and clear the way for further regime changes. (Hence Mr. Wolfowitz's line about "future efforts.")
Instead, the venture has turned sour — and many insiders see Mr. Baker's mission as part of an effort by veterans of the first Bush administration to extricate George W. Bush from the hard-liners' clutches. If the mission collapses amid acrimony over contracts, that's a good thing from the hard-liners' point of view.
Remember also that blowups by the hard-liners, just when the conciliators seem to be getting somewhere, have been a pattern.
There was a striking example in August. It seemed that Colin Powell had finally convinced President Bush that if we aren't planning a war with North Korea, it makes sense to negotiate. But then John Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control, whose role is more accurately described as "the neocons' man at State," gave a speech about Kim Jong Il, declaring: "To give in to his extortionist demands would only encourage him and, perhaps more ominously, other would-be tyrants."

Things are not what they seem in the Bush administration's latest internecine imbroglio over Iraq. The mess appears to involve two contradictory developments: 1) the Pentagon's directive banning countries that didn't support the war from sharing in its spoils (i.e., from bidding for reconstruction contracts); and 2) James Baker's impending trip to Europe, on behalf of President Bush, to convince the largest of those antiwar countries to forgive Iraqi debt.

So the question becomes: Why did Wolfowitz make such a gratuitously big deal of this? Why did he restate the policy on prime contracts in a public directive—and one with such a nasty tone, to boot? And why did he do so on the eve of Baker's trip?
If Baker's mission were solely about Iraq's debt, it would not be arousing such a fuss. In fact, it would almost certainly not involve Baker at all. Baker, in short, is a big wheel, a strategic savior. No one calls on a figure like Baker—no one gives him a White House plane, a portfolio to meet with world leaders, or a promise of unfettered access to the president afterward—for a tech-geek issue like debt-renegotiation.

It can fairly be surmised that Baker, who heads off to Europe on Monday with no accompanying press corps and no obligation to hold news conferences along the way, has been given a broader agenda. Most likely, this agenda involves down-and-dirty turkey-trading—asking what the Europeans need in exchange for bailing the United States out of Iraq (i.e., for supplying troops, money, and international legitimacy) and assuring them, with an authority possessed by no current Cabinet officer, that the president will do the deal.
Despite the announcement a few months ago that Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, would be taking over the operation, nothing of the sort has happened.
Few if any news reports, about either the Wolfowitz directive or the Baker trip, have noted that a similar Baker mission was in the works last summer—until the hard-liners flexed their muscles and derailed it.
Around noon on Friday, July 25, the Washington Post reported in its online edition that "the White House hopes to persuade" Baker "to take charge of the physical and economic reconstruction of Iraq as part of a broad restructuring of the postwar effort." By 7 p.m., the story was modified: Bush was now "contemplating major changes" in reconstruction policy, and Baker was mentioned as one of the figures he was "considering asking" to "work alongside" Bremer. By Monday, July 28, the deal was quashed.
Baker was seen, by all sides, as a potent tool for the multilateralists. In August 2002, well before even mobilization for the war began, Baker had written an op-ed piece for the New York Times urging Bush not to "go it alone" in confronting Iraq and to "reject the advice of those who counsel doing so." Most people saw the piece as a signal from Bush's father; it is doubtful that Baker, who remains close to the elder Bush, would have submitted it to the Times without at least tacit permission. The following month, the younger Bush—against the advice of Rumsfeld and Cheney—took his case to the United Nations.
What's going on now has all the appearances of a renewal of this power struggle. The hard-liners couldn't stop this Baker mission, so it looks as if they're doing all they can to obstruct it—to create ill will before it's started and thus to minimize not so much Baker's chance of success as what might go with that success: his ascent to power.

This week's Elle magazine, for example, printed an open letter to Mr. Chirac signed by leading French women — Muslim and non-Muslim — calling for an outright ban.
The report, prepared by an independent commission appointed by the government, also recommended that public schools add Jewish and Muslim holidays to the Christian holidays now observed, a move so far untested in Europe, and to provide special meals for Jews and Muslims in school cafeterias.

Mr. Chirac has made no secret of his opposition to head scarves in schools, telling students at the French high school in Tunis last week that he saw "something aggressive" in the wearing of Muslim veils and pledging that the French state would forbid students to wear what he called "ostentatious signs of religious proselytism."

In April, as Baghdad fell and American soldiers began searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, federal officials uncovered a cache of deadly chemicals much closer to home — in the eastern Texas town of Noonday. The stockpile included a fully functional sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing hundreds, as well as neo-Nazi and antigovernment literature, illegal weapons, half a million rounds of ammunition, and more than 100 explosives, including bombs disguised as suitcases.
An isolated incident involving a few Americans on the far-right fringe? Most people probably assume so, but federal authorities served more than 150 subpeonas in the case, and are still searching for others who may have been involved.
The Noonday case shows just how serious a threat we face from domestic terrorists. Consider this year's other high-profile incident involving rightist causes: the arrest of Eric Rudolph, accused of bombing abortion clinics and the 1996 Olympics. During his five years in the wilderness, he was often viewed by the public and press as a lone fugitive. But law enforcement officials have linked him to two national movements: the Army of God, a biblically inspired underground network of anti-abortion extremists; and the Christian Identity movement, whose members believe that Jews are the literal children of Satan, nonwhites are sub-human, and that Anglo-Saxon Christians are the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.

The examples keep coming. James Kopp, who was found guilty earlier this year in the 1998 shooting of Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo was also affiliated with the Army of God. Matthew Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist group, was arrested in January in Chicago on charges of soliciting the murder of a federal judge. In February, federal officials arrested Rafael Davila, a former Army National Guard intelligence officer from Washington State; they say Mr. Davila and his former wife planned to distribute highly classified documents to white supremacists and antigovernment groups in North Carolina, Texas and Georgia.

"Unfortunately, keeping track of right-wing and neo-Nazi hate groups isn't necessarily a path to career advancement in the Bureau," a Justice Department official told me not long after the Oklahoma City attack. "Agents get ahead by solving real crimes, like bank robbery, espionage and murder."

It is also worrisome that the discovery of lethal chemicals in President Bush's home state was not deemed occasion for a high-profile announcement by Attorney General John Ashcroft or other officials trumpeting the arrests of Mr. Krar and his compatriots. This stands in stark contrast to the department's news media onslaughts whenever alleged operatives for Al Qaeda have been apprehended in the United States.

April 3: RICHARD PERLE ATTACKS PM JEAN CHRETIEN ON WEDNESDAY, THE SAME DAY JAMES BAKER III, IN TORONTO, TRIES TO MEND RELATIONS WITH CANADA.
''...If Canada wishes to subordinate its moral and political values to President [Jacques] Chirac-so be it. Chirac and Chrétien deserve each other.''