• Jan. 23, 2004
• By Shawn
• In Politics
• 6 Comments
• 0

Loads of goodies from Today’s Papers.

It’s been two days. It must be time for a new story about Halliburton! Halliburton has admitted (holy fuck?!) to the Pentagon that two employees took kickbacks worth up to $6 million for awarding a lucrative contract to a Kuwaiti company. This scandal is not related to another Halliburton scandal that involves a Kuwaiti company that doubled the price of fuel it sold to the U.S. government. However, the Kuwaiti company, KBR, is the same in both scandals. Why do I feel like I’m playing connect-the-dots, and there’s only one dot? I’m just going to shake my head and slowly walk away from this subject before my head explodes. But, I’ll leave you with this, according to today’s WSJ: KBR’s services which include repairing Iraqi oil fields and supplying U.S. troops with everything from laundry to food to housing has “so far cost nearly $6 billion, well over twice what has gone to all of the other 40 U.S. contractors in Iraq.”

Not too far from the subject of crooked, oil-driven assjackals, there’s ex-Halliburton Chairman and your Pres– er, Vice-President, Dick Cheney. God, I wish this guy would talk to the press more often. According to Slate, yesterday on NPR, Cheney, “reiterated his belief

• that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq,
• that there was a definite link between al-Qaida and the former Iraqi regime, and
• that ‘we haven’t had confirmation one way or another’ about Iraq’s involvement in 9/11.”

What he also said, but didn’t make onto the air due to NPR’s time budget was that

• he’s mastered a new plan with the Dept. of Homeland Security. They are currently working on a new, more efficient solution that will end airport security woes by installing crack teams of phrenologists to positively identify terrorists; and
• such humors as brain fever and the scurvy are not caused by evil gnomes or toads, but can in fact be cured with leeches, an exorcism, and a cutting of the hair.

I guess the pre-New Hampshire Dem debate was a bit of a sleeper last night. I wouldn’t know, because it wasn’t fucking televised on primetime television. And people wonder why we have a problem getting voters to the polls. Even PBS didn’t give it a nod. By the way, am I the only person who finds it strange that every major network that shows commercials aired the State of the Union commercial-free, but the non-commercial, government-endorsed Public Broadcasting System skipped it entirely?!

And my favorite little chunk from today’s Slate:

“The U.S. did not capture Osama Bin Laden yesterday, according to a ‘U.S. official’ who issued a terse denial in a Reuters wire piece. ‘It’s not true,’ the official said. Enough people apparently believed the al-Qaida leader was in custody to cause a spike in the value of the dollar for a few hours. Of course, [Today’s Papers] imagines the official had to deny knowledge: That story’s not supposed to be leaked until late October.”