Instahoglets 7th Feb 06

Punchposts with a dose of snark to keep your brain ticking.

(Welcome, visitors from Crooks & Liars. The "Instahoglets" roundup happens every couple of days here at Newshog so please, feel free to drop by again. Regards, Cernig)

Well whaddaya know... the Republican Chair of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence (the one that oversees the NSA) obviously doesn't need Rove's money. She has called for a full Congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program citing "serious concerns" about warrantless snooping and concealing the program from Congress. That sound you hear is s**t hitting the fan over at the White House.

But wait..the excrement hitting the rotary air impeller gets deeper! Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Stuart McGill spoke out today about what he called the "misperception" that the United States can achieve energy independence saying the United States will always rely on foreign imports of oil to feed its energy needs and should stop trying to become energy independent. Sweden thinks it can manage the trick, though. Fifteen years until it's weaned off oil completely and without building new nuclear plants.

Deeper still...Iraqi and American officials say they are seeing a troubling pattern of government corruption enabling the flow of oil money and other funds to the insurgency and threatening to undermine Iraq's struggling economy. Ali Allawi, Iraq's finance minister, estimated that insurgents reap 40 percent to 50 percent of all oil-smuggling profits in the country. Which is why our own crooks can stand down as Iraq's stand up. Mission accomplished, eh?

Is there anything left of the SOTUS address that's credible?

Pat Robertson is foaming at the mouth again, this time accusing Satre of bringing about the "racial suicide" of Europe. I can only quote the motto of freedom loving European existentialists - "pas d'elle yeux rhone que nous" (Hint - try it phonetically) - and tell him to stick his bigotry where the sun don't shine, as my countrymen have done in the past.

Paul Craig Roberts, once a trusted member of the Reagan administration and a staunch conservative still, has chosen to speak out again and again against the Bush regime. Why?

When I saw that the neoconservative response to 9/11 was to turn a war against stateless terrorism into military attacks on Muslim states, I realized that the Bush administration was committing a strategic blunder with open-ended disastrous consequences for the US that, in the end, would destroy Bush, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement.

There's far more too. A damn good read.

Talking of good reads, let my good friend and true Texan libertarian Libertas tell you about the oft-quoted "clash of civilisations" as he debates whether Islam is truely a religion of peace and ends with words echoing those of Paul Craig Roberts:

President G. W. Bush proposes an eternal crusade under the guise of fighting a tactic. You cannot successfully wage war on a tactic and simultaneously fertilize the soil in which it grows. To defeat the tactic of terror we must starve it of the injustice on which it feeds.

How to create eternal war - The acting Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said yesterday that he plans to annex the Jordan Valley and major Jewish settlement blocks to Israel in drawing new borders. If the Jewish state were to annex all of the Jordan Valley, which is dotted with small settlements, it would leave a future Palestinian state on the West Bank entirely surrounded by Israel and without a direct link to neighbouring countries. What peace process? It sounds more like Berlin to me but there's damn all chance of a US President declaring "I am a Palestinian."

Not all evangelists are Bush sycophants. Modern socialist and British Chancellor Gordon Brown has found himself a religious advisor - an American evangelist by the name of Jim Wallis who has spoken out against the Iraq war and BushCo. By a non-coincidence, recently retired chairman of US Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan took a job as Brown's unpaid advisor the day after he quit the Fed. Interesting, huh?