Insta-Hoglets 23rd Nov.

I'm pleased to see that the FEMA Grinches have had a change of heart. After many complaints, they have decided that most of the estimated 150,000 hurricane evacuees still living in hotel rooms would have an extra month to find other housing before the federal government stops footing the bill. The deadline has been changed from 1st December to 7th January. I'm feeling pretty good that I was one of those yelling about this, to tell the truth.

Just a minute...Halliburton under investigation? It's true! A former contracting officer's "allegations about wrongdoing" in connection with Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown and Root unit were referred "for further criminal investigation" to the Justice Dept. Now we wait and see if its a whitewash.

Following the judge's refusal to dismiss DeLay's charges in December, Tom will now miss his self-imposed deadline and probably have to live up to his promise to permanently step down as Majority Leader of the House. The sharks are already starting the feeding frenzy to become the biggest fish in the pond.

But some of those sharks may yet be caught on a big hook called Abramoff. Some of the top Republicans are on the list of those who may be hooked by ongoing investigations of graft, bribery and corruption. Rep. Bob Ney is the likeliest to be caught and gutted, but Hastert, Blunt and many more GOP faithful are on the list- as are a few Democrat big names like Harry Reid.

The European Union's special investigator is tracking the flight paths of 31 suspect planes that landed in Europe in recent years and is trying to acquire past satellite images of sites in Romania and Poland - all in the hunt for secret CIA prisons.

If you're wondering where my coverage of this story on Bush's alleged threats to bomb a friendly nation has gone, look no further than the story, run by every UK newspaper today, that they are being threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act if they reveal too much. I'm still a British citizen and I don't have the oomph of the Guardian or the Times so...I will restrict myself to observing that if the story is as "outlandish" as the Bushites claim, would Blair have reacted so strongly to the prospect of the leak being published?

Thanks to Kirkrrt for drawing my attention to this one:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

What was that about Congress and the Senate seeing everything that Bush did?

More politician shell games with troop numbers. Knowing that troop levels in Iraq are currently inflated by the overlap between deployments, John Kerry last month confidently predicted that the US would withdraw 20,000 or more troops in January. What he hoped was that few would notice that this would simply bring troop numbers back down to the usual 130,000 or so from an anusually high level. It worked, so this month Condi Rice and the Pentagon are trying the same trick.