If We're Going To Fuck Up The World, I Guess It Makes Sense To Leave It... Loyal MLWL readers will note that the dollar falling to a record low against the euro has been an almost daily occurrence over the past few weeks. Not only has the dollar been falling to the euro, but it's getting weaker to the UK pound and the Japanese yen. Why is our currency so weak? After huge tax cuts and a gigantic increase in spending, the US has bills that need more money than we'll have. This deficit could make interest rates soar and pose huge risks for our economy and the economy of the rest of the world. It's such a risk that the International Monetary Fund has just released a report warning of the hazard of this administration's financial foolishness. (Amazingly, on economic matters such as cutting spending or balancing the budget, Bush is far from conservative. It could be said that he's even worse than a "tax and spend liberal" because he is spending federal money that was taken away with his tax cuts. As I write this there is a group of Republican heads on C-SPAN howling against the deficit Bush has created.) What is Bush's answer to the impending economic gloom and the rapidly shrinking dollar? Plan a trip to Mars and a permanent moon base with a modest price tag of $400-500 billion or so.
America Continues To Lose Its Mind About a week before Christmas the wife of an Air Force Reserve pilot took her 10-year old son to a Staples to look at flight simulation software so her son could learn to fly like his dad. She asked a clerk for help locating the software and he quickly replied that "asking how to fly airplanes... was against the law." By 8pm that night a state trooper was at her house inquiring about her early attempt to purchase legal software. What is the most disturbing aspect of this whole mess? That nobody found anything wrong with the opera of anxiety. The wife of the Reservist said, "At first I felt like, 'Wait a minute, this is America.' But we also have to understand it takes everybody to pay attention. At first I was a little frazzled with someone knocking on my window at 8:30 at night, but the bottom line is this is a civilian who has tried to do his best." The most efficient cops are the ones you put in your own head Julie.
The Only Iraqi Bombshell We Will Find The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has released their report on post-war findings of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and it hits the US and the Bush administration like a ton of bricks. According to the report Saddam's inability to pose a threat with WMDs was "knowable" before the war, the intelligence community was unduly influenced by policy makers starting "sometime in 2002" and "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs". Meanwhile in Washington, as the chief weapons inspector is about to quit, Colin Powell acknowledged that he had seen no "smoking gun (or) concrete evidence" of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. As recently as September Bush has claimed that there was "no question" Saddam and Osama were connected. Colin Powell defended his actions against the Carnegie report by stating that Saddam had obviously used weapons of mass destruction in the 80s, but failed to state that the US provided him with those. He also said that, "In terms of intention, (Saddam) always had it." Now how exactly could you prove that?
Greenpeace, Scurvy Dogs In a federal court in Miami, an 1872 "sailor mongering" law originally designed to prevent whorehouse and tavern owners from jumping onboard ships to lure sailors ashore, is being used to prosecute Greenpeace for attempting to unfurl a banner that read "President Bush: Stop Illegal Logging" on a boat that allegedly contained illegally imported mahogany. If convicted Greenpeace could lose its tax-exempts status and have federal officials look over their records.
-The Sikh Geek
10:57:15 AM 
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