Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Bush Administration's Media Manipulation--MediaGate? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (4638)	8/9/2005 1:20:45 PM
From: Rock_nj	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

He supports gun rights, from Vermont. Liberal Democrats are a hard sell in America at the moment. The Dems will run a moderate next time around. Hillary will lose a Democrat running from the South or MidWest. The Dems will put up a moderate male from a more conservative part of the country. The Repubs might get lucky with a strong economy continuing into 2008, but who knows with oil prices going up?!? 2008 is still 3 years away.

To: steve harris who wrote (4638)	8/9/2005 1:51:03 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 9838

Bush's Oilmen Got it all Wrong in Iraq by Marie Cocco No oil for blood. The bumper sticker popular among left-leaning opponents of the conflict - no war for oil - has been inverted. There is no oil to be had for the shedding of American blood. Not for years anyway. Remember the bold promises? "Iraq has oil," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Fortune magazine in 2002, discussing the potential cost of an Iraq invasion and how it would be met. "They have financial resources." Paul Wolfowitz, formerly Rumsfeld's deputy, was bolder: "The oil revenues of that country could bring in between $50 [billion] and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years," he told Congress as the war began. "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction." Iraq exported 1.6 million barrels per day in July, according to the oil ministry, at least half a million barrels a day less than in the waning months of Saddam Hussein's regime. Hours-long lines at gas stations are a constant of daily life, and the country must import gasoline. How did an administration overflowing with oilmen get it all so wrong? The story line is tiresome. It parallels the warnings about weapons of mass destruction. It tracks with the delusional prediction about being greeted as liberators, and the fantasy about how only a few "dead-enders" continued to fight after our troops took Baghdad. The president's men saw what they wished to see - the 115 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the desert. They were blind to what was really there: an oil industry decimated by more than a decade of economic sanctions, with technological decay and even geological deterioration of the fields already gnawing at it. The rash predictions about Iraqi oil paying for the American conquest of Iraq were always suspect, part of the marketing campaign that sold the war. "The statement in and of itself always struck me as part of the spin that this was going to be a clean, simple, fairly cost-free operation," a veteran adviser to Western governments in Baghdad told me in an interview. Just as UN weapons inspectors, once allowed back into Iraq, correctly surmised that there were no weapons of mass destruction, so, too, did oil industry inspectors for the United Nations accurately assess the dire condition of Iraq's oil industry. In 1998 a UN report found it in a lamentable state. The conclusion was confirmed in 2000 and again in 2001. "Basically being held together with chewing gum," is how the Western expert described it. "At the time this was dismissed by the United States as just another example of how the UN had been taken in by the Iraqis." The U.S. Energy Information Administration concedes the point. The report for the United Nations "now appears to have been largely accurate," the agency says in its latest analysis of Iraq's oil situation. Now Iraq's oil industry contends with sabotage and violence. No major oil company is likely to put its employees, or its money, at risk. The Kurds, if they succeed in forming an autonomous state in the north, are likely to lay claim to Kirkuk, a locale responsible for as much as a quarter of the oil production. There has never been credibility to the crude argument that this war was about crude. If it had been, wouldn't the oilmen who waged it have conducted it differently? The fields would have been secured, not left as targets. The careerists who ran the industry under the old regime would not have been banished. We are told now that by Aug. 15 another bright marker toward Iraq's golden future will be reached. The writing of a constitution is to be finished. It is a deadline the Bush administration is determined to have the Iraqis meet. For Iraqi political progress is a prerequisite for the president's underlying political goal: an American troop withdrawal to begin before the 2006 congressional elections. But if Iraq cannot produce and sell its oil, it cannot rebuild its roads or hospitals. It cannot feed itself. It is a candidate not for becoming a fabulously wealthy Middle East player, but for becoming a failed state. © 2005 Newsday, Inc.

To: steve harris who wrote (4638)	8/9/2005 2:54:58 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

For some reason, this didn't make it onto CNN: Another 43 Iraqi schools funded and approved for rehabilitation By LuAnne Fantasia Gulf Region Division U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Iraqi sub-contractors place and fill concrete tiles that are surfacing the play yard of this U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) funded and managed school renovation project outside of Erbil, northern Iraq, on June 20, 2005. (U.S. Army photo by Jim Gordon) Baghdad, Iraq—Slightly more than six weeks from now, approximately 18,000 Iraqi school children will sit in freshly refurbished schools when their new school year starts. A team of Iraqi and U.S. government entities announce today that renovations of 43 schools in the northern and southern governorates are funded for repairs, with contracts awarded for the work. As part of the Iraq Relief Reconstruction Fund, over $1.3M was set aside to continue a nationwide school repair program. Repairs include rehabilitating sanitary facilities, and electrical and mechanical systems, as well as structural repairs to schools in Karbala, Dahuk, Najaf, Basrah, and Qadisiyah. “And, we’ll keep working toward clean, safe and healthier learning environments for the Iraqi children,” said Karen Durham-Aguilera, Director of Programs at the Project and Contracting Office, Baghdad. “The announcement of funding for 43 more schools comes after a whirlwind construction program of school renovation begun just over a year ago. Since June of last year, 656 of the total 800 schools in reconstruction have completed,” she added. According to Durham-Aguilera, renovation costs for each school averages $30 – 35K, and plans are for all of the 43 projects to be completed before the end of September. “Over $86M from the Iraqi Relief Reconstruction Fund was committed to the Iraqi Ministry of Education to renovate 800 schools in Iraq,” Durham-Aguilera said. “These particular projects are the last phase of renovation and/or repairs of existing schools,” she added. She explained that the projects provide employment opportunities for Iraqi citizens. “The contracts for all of the school projects in the program are competitive—they’re awarded directly to Iraqi contractors, and collectively, the remaining 43 projects will employ approximately 800 Iraqi workers,” she said. The projects were identified and approved by the Ministry of Education and local governorates, in coordination with the U.S. government, according to Durham-Aguilera. At Iraq’s transition to sovereignty June 2004, there were just over 200 Reconstruction projects started. Today, there are more than 2,700 projects started, with nearly 1,600 completed. Projects will continue for the Iraqi Ministries of Security and Justice; Electricity; Oil; Public Works and Water; Buildings, Health and Education; and Transportation and Communication. grd.usace.army.mil