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Bush Foils Non-Existant Terrorist PlotsThursday, Feb. 01, 2007 4:59 AMThose of you who managed to sit through the State of the Union Address last week may recall the part where President Bush listed four separate plots that America foiled, thus proving a) that there really are these evil folks who want to attack us here at home, and b) that his policies made it possible to foil these plots. Except, as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has pointed out in one of his special commentaries, the plans to fly a plane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles were nothing more than a loosely-framed idea; no one knows what terror plot Bush was talking about in Southeast Asia; that plans for terrorists to use anthrax were equally vague; and, of course, we had the arrests of the liqui-bombers in Great Britain. Mr. Bush neglected to mention that a third of the men have been released, that the plot was impractical at best, horribly misreported (and whether that was the media dropping the ball, or more fear-mongering by the Bush Administration is unclear), and that British Authorities had been watching the suspects for over a year. It helps if your policies are actually stopping terrorists, not rejected plots for the next James Bond movie. And speaking of policies, and measuring their success, the latest report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction points out little tidbits like: � $4.2 million spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size swimming pool, items ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, but never authorized by the U.S. � $36.4 million spent on weapons, armored vehicles, body armor, and communications equipment that can't be accounted for. � $18 million in potentially unjustified costs that may have been prematurely billed by one contractor. � $73 million worth of substandard construction at the Baghdad Police College, which will have to be redone. Columnist Molly Ivins has died from breast cancer. She was 62. She is known for her satirical wit and for dubbing President Bush, "Shrub." Whether you believe in global warming or not, at least the media is doing it's job by warning us here in the San Francisco Bay Area that rising waters could very well flood AT&T Park. Somehow, if downtown San Francisco starts to turn into Venice, I think we'll be a little busy to worry about the frigging ballpark. On the other hand, scientists are now apparently admitting that their models for melting ice do not account for large ice masses to melt in irregular patterns (i.e. calve off and melt in large chunks, partly due to free-flowing water running across the surface of the ice). Their models only accounted for even, uniform melting. Guess they've never had to clean out the ice bin in their freezers.
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