Magpie

Saturday, October 23, 2004

They're putting something in Cheney's water again.

At a campaign stop in New Mexico today, US vice-president Dick Cheney told a GOP crowd that the Soviet Union might still be around if John Kerry had been running the country during the 1980s. Even by Cheney's standards, this was going pretty low.

Cheney told supporters that Kerry had run for the U.S. Senate in the 1980s on a promise to do away with many of the weapons that U.S. President Ronald Reagan used to end the Cold War.

"So if John Kerry had been in charge, maybe the Soviet Union would still be in business," President Bush's running mate said on a campaign trip to the swing state of New Mexico.

But Cheney didn't stop there:

"In 1991, John Kerry voted against sending troops to expel Saddam Hussein after he invaded Kuwait. So if John Kerry had been in charge, Saddam Hussein might well control the Persian Gulf today," Cheney said.

A Democratic spokesperson had a pretty succinct response to the vice-president's charges:

"The desert heat is making Dick Cheney come unglued. Soon he'll be arguing that John Kerry lost the Battle of Gettysburg and sank the Lusitania."

Psssssst! Mr Vice-President ... Magpie will give you this one for free:

Nobody's ever seen John Kerry and Osama bin Laden on the same stage at the same time.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:49 PM | Get permalink

Is the October surprise a war with Iraq?

That's what a former member of the National Security Council under President Reagan thinks. According to Wayne Madsen, sources in the White House say that a US attack on Iran is imminent:

[The] Bush administration, worried that it could lose the presidential election to Senator John F. Kerry, has initiated plans to launch a military strike on Iran's top Islamic leadership, its nuclear reactor at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, and key nuclear targets throughout the country, including the main underground research site at Natanz in central Iran and another in Isfahan. Targets of the planned U.S. attack reportedly include mosques in Tehran, Qom, and Isfahan known by the U.S. to headquarter Iran's top mullahs.

The Iran attack plan was reportedly drawn up after internal polling indicated that if the Bush administration launched a so-called anti-terrorist attack on Iran some two weeks before the election, Bush would be assured of a landslide win against Kerry. Reports of a pre-emptive strike on Iran come amid concerns by a number of political observers that the Bush administration would concoct an "October Surprise" to influence the outcome of the presidential election.

We don't think this report is particularly credible, but given the political environment in the US, and the disconnection of Dubya's administration from any sense of limits or reality, anything is possible. Madsen's article certainly shows the increasing level of paranoia in the US as the date of the presidential election grows closer.

Via Suburban Guerrilla.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:00 PM | Get permalink

Friday, October 22, 2004

The October surprise.

It's been a tradition in US presidential contests at least since 1980, when the Reagan campaign produced a deal with Iran that resulted in the release of the US hostages being held by Iranian militants. That was enough to turn the tide in a close contest, and doom Jimmy Carter's hopes of a second term. This October is almost gone, and we haven't seen the surprise yet.

So what's it gonna be?

Over at Making Light, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and her readers are having an interesting discussion about whether Dubya's administration is going to produce Osama bin Laden sometime in the next few days. We're not sure we're convinced that Osama's about to get pulled out of a cave, but the fact that Dubya is supposedly spending this weekend at his ranch in Texas makes us think that some kind of October surprise is imminent.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:50 PM | Get permalink

We've always suspected this was true.

Dubya is the Antichrist.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:30 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, October 21, 2004

We want one.

Of these.

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:01 PM | Get permalink

The real threat from the flu.

It's not the vaccine shortage in the US, and it may not be the possibility of avian flu strains crossing over to humans. Instead, the biggest threat to world health could be inadequate safety procedure at laboratories that are conducting studies of especially virulent flu strains.

According to a report in New Scientist, biosecurity experts are worried that the scientists studying the flu virus are risking the escape of deadly flu strains into the general population. These include the 1918 flu virus that killed 40 million people, and which spread around the world in three months — during a time of far slower transportation and less international travel than at present.

Research on the 1918 virus apparently includes dropping 1918 flu genes into contemporary flu viruses, which effectively recreates the deadly 1918 strain. Given this, the possibility that the safety precautions used in the labs studying flu viruses are insufficient to prevent accidental infection of lab workers are even more worrying.

[Despite] the danger, researchers in the US are working with reconstructed versions of the virus at less than the maximum level of containment. Many other experts are worried about the risks. ?All the virologists I have spoken to have concerns,? says Ingegerd Kallings of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control in Stockholm, who helped set laboratory safety standards for the World Health Organization.

Work on the 1918 flu virus is not the only worry. Some experiments with bird flu have also been criticised as dangerous (New Scientist print edition, 28 February 2004)...

In the US, the differing standards applied by different groups are due to the fact that experiments on engineered viruses such as the 1918 flu are approved on a case-by-case basis by Institutional Biosafety Committees (IBCs), composed of local scientists and officials. Critics say these are free to interpret the official guidelines in a way that suits them.

?There is no effective national system to ensure consistency, responsibility and good judgement in such research,? says Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a biosecurity pressure group in Austin, Texas. In a review of IBCs published this month, he found that many would not provide minutes of recent meetings as required by law.

He says the IBC that approved the planned 1918 flu study at the University of Washington considered only one scenario that could result in workers being exposed to airborne virus ? the dropping of samples. Its solution: lab workers ?will be trained to stop breathing?.

For more details about the 1918 virus and avian virus research currently being done, and the problems with keeping those viruses inside labs, make sure to read the whole New Scientist article.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:19 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Is this scary or what?

We think it's been pretty clear up until now how unprepared Dubya's administration was for running a war in Iraq, and especially for dealing with Iraq after the war. But this Dubya comment to fundamentalist evangelist Pat Roberson before the war indicates a disconnecton from reality that's almost unbelievable.

Pat Robertson, an ardent Bush supporter, said he had that conversation with the president in Nashville, Tennessee, before the March 2003 invasion U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He described Bush in the meeting as "the most self-assured man I've ever met in my life."

"You remember Mark Twain said, 'He looks like a contented Christian with four aces.' I mean he was just sitting there like, 'I'm on top of the world,' " Robertson said on the CNN show, "Paula Zahn Now."

"And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.' "

Robertson said the president then told him, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

We're waiting for Dubya to tell the country whether Robertson is telling the truth. We suspect that we shouldn't hold our breath waiting for the official reply.

Via CNN.

More: Well, the administration's first response to Robertson has come faster that we expected. And it's pretty lame:

In Washington, CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller reports that Karen Hughes, a senior Bush campaign adviser, said that Robertson was wrong in quoting Mr. Bush as saying the U.S. wouldn't suffer any casualties in Iraq.

"It's not accurate," Hughes told CBS News. "It's not the kind of thing the president would say."

'Not the kind of thing the president would say'? Gee, that certainly sounds well researched, doesn't it? It just instills a person with confidence that Hughes asked Dubya directly whether Robertson's comment was true, yes?

And you'll notice that Hughes didn't deny that Dubya said he didn't expect casualties in Iraq — she just claimed that he never would have said such a thing.

We suspect that this quick White House response is a good indication of how damaging they think that Robertson's comment could be.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:37 PM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

Infrared images of the Mt St Helens volcano in Washington State, USA.

Infrared image of Mt St Helens volcano

[Photo: NASA/JPL]
The image here was taken on October 12, and shows an increase in the number of hot spots and a smoke plume coming from the crater. The bright red shows the hot spots and the blue shows snow on the ground and the smoke plume.

For more info about the photo (including a larger version and another photo), go here.

Via NASA Image of the Day.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:34 PM | Get permalink