Letter Never Sent

If you don’t read Al Martin’s website you should. He’s a former government insider turned crusader. I try to drop by once every few weeks. He doesn’t update very regularly, but its always wonderful and ironic.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the TNT channel had what they called the “Salute to George Bush Movie Marathon.” Included in the list of movies they played as a salute to George Bush was “Enemy of the State,” Conspiracy Theory,” “Air America” and “Double-Crossed.” The over-arching theme was that TNT was obviously trying to be tongue in cheek. The underlying message is that George Bush is linked to all sorts of nasty illegal covert deeds. Here are the movies, in other words, that portray the Bushonian form of government — movies about the surveillance society (Enemy of the State), mind control (Conspiracy Theory), State-sponsored drug trafficking (Air America) as well as fraud and backstabbing (Double Crossed).

Found via the ever wonderful Ethel the Blog:

In a just-released report, the General Accounting Office informed Congress that its auditors found a number of “seemingly unneeded expenditures” made by the Air Force and Army in 2000 and 2001.
…

The Air Force was also criticized for an array of what the GAO deemed unjustified and excessive spending, including:

• At al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, the service bought a $2,200 coffee table.
• At Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, it bought a $24,000 loveseat and arm chair and $9,800 worth of Halloween decorations.
• At al Jaber Air Base in Saudi Arabia, the questionable spending included an $1,800 “executive high-back” pillow, a $3,000 computer tutorial titled “The Intelligent Investor” and $19,000 worth of decorative “river rock.”
• At various Air Force installations in the Persian Gulf region, the service bought a $35,000 golf cart, a $16,000 corporate golf membership and $5,333 in golf passes.

Military experts claim that such recreational items can be a useful tool for building good relations with officials of a host country, whom base officers can invite for, say, a friendly round or two of golf.
…

Apparently, while Dick Cheney was at the helm of oil exploration giant, Halliburton, raking in the dough his company engaged in the same economic strategy as Enron. In fact, the toothless SEC is investigating the ‘fuzzy math’ Halliburton used when cooking its books.

In a statement Tuesday night, Halliburton said the S.E.C. was investigating a change in its accounting practices that enabled the company to postpone possible losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. Halliburton did not reveal the change to investors for more than a year after instituting it.

This is too funny. I forgot Rev. Sun Moon owns the conservative The Washington Times. This is kind of like how Rupert Murdoch owner of right-wing Fox News is a big supporter of the oppressive Communist Chinese government.
All I want is some consistency. Is this too much to ask?

At Tuesday night’s celebration of the Washington Times’ 20th anniversary, its founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, gripped a podium at the Washington Hilton and delivered an impassioned, hour-long evangelical sermon in Korean saying he established the newspaper “in response to heaven’s direction.”

During the sermon, he set the course for the Times’ next 10 years: “The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God.” Later, he added: “The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world.” …

The charges were not helped by allegations of former reporters, who say stories were changed to favor conservatives; by editors who quit, claiming church tampering; or by obscurity surrounding the paper’s finances. It has been years since many of those incidents, though, and five years since Moon’s last mass wedding in Washington, which inevitably pulled the Times into scrutiny. For the past few years, the Times has enjoyed a relatively Moon-free zone.

Obviously, objectivity is nearly impossible. The best course is to dislike both sides.