THE FULCRUM

Vice President Dick Cheney sought to "clean up" a controversy over comments he made this week, saying that the country must brace for a potential terrorist attack no matter who is elected president.

"I did not say if Kerry is elected, we will be hit by a terrorist attack," Cheney told the newspaper. "Whoever is elected president has to anticipate more attacks.

For the second year in a row, al-Qaida released a video tape rallying its supporters near the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and experts were investigating if the images of the terror network's No. 2 leader were new or not.

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"The defeat of America in Iraq and Afghanistan has become a matter of time, with God's help," al-Zawahri said on the tape. "The Americans in both countries are between two fires, if they continue they bleed to death and if they withdraw they lose everything."

The House voted to bar the Bush administration from enforcing new wage rules that make it easier for employers to deny overtime pay to white-collar and administrative workers.

The White House has threatened to veto the prohibition to keep the rules in effect. But in a rare victory to organized labor, 22 Republicans broke ranks on the 223-193 vote, despite strong pressure from their party leadership.

"Overtime is not a gift from America's employers. It is the right of American workers."

Bush Now Backs Budget Powers in New Spy Post

President Bush said on Wednesday that he wanted to give a new national intelligence director "full budgetary authority," a sharp shift from an earlier position and an acquiescence to a major recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission.

It offered a $10 million (U.S.) reward for help in hunting two separatist Chechen rebels, and a top Russian general said the military will strike "terrorist bases in any region of the world" — but would refrain from using nuclear weapons.

Demand for Oil Could One Day Outstrip Supply

A respected oil-forecasting group predicted that the energy industry may be unable to produce enough oil to meet projected demand by the end of the next decade, in a study that lends support to a small chorus of analysts who warn that a peak in petroleum output is looming in the years ahead.

In a presentation yesterday, analysts from Washington-based PFC Energy warned that the world won't be able to produce more than 100 million barrels of oil a day, only some 20% more than current output of about 82 million barrels a day, and well below demand projections for the end of the next decade.

"Even production of 100 million barrels a day can only be sustained for a few years," said Roger Diwan, a PFC analyst. "Every year since the 1970s, we have been consuming much more oil than we have been discovering."

1. Disobeying a direct order.


2. Failure to get a flight physical.


3. Being suspended from flight duty.


4. Adversely affecting unit readiness.


5. Failure to attend required drill dates.


6. Failure to attend Guard duties in Alabama.


7. Failure to join a National Guard unit in Massachusetts.

Most disturbing of all, I’ve come across a lot of men and women who’ve grown afraid of their fellow Americans. It’s as if their patriotism has been poisoned. They say they feel their flag has been appropriated by narrow-minded zealots. Their hopes are being crushed by cynical politicians. Their sons and daughters are being sent to die in wars that seem to have no end, and anyone who questions those politicians or those wars is being branded a traitor.

Christopher Dickey
From the Article

"You don't 'prevent' anything by war except peace."

President Harry S Truman

"Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right."

Carl Schurz
Nineteenth-century immigre

...the United States should stand for freedom and independence wherever her flag is unfurled, but "she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." By launching foreign wars of interest and intrigue, [he] predicted, the fundamental underpinnings of American policy would change "from liberty to force." America "might become the dictatress of the world: she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit." Foreign adventures and foreign threats are, as often as not, pretexts for curtailing the freedoms Americans believe they should be fighting for.

John Quincy Adams
1821

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday warned Americans about voting for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, saying that if the nation makes the wrong choice on Election Day it faces the threat of another terrorist attack.

Texans for Truth, established by the 20,000-member Texas online activist group, DriveDemocracy.org, has produced a 0:30 second television advertisement, "AWOL." The ad features Robert Mintz, one of many who served in Alabama's 187th Air National Guard -- when Bush claims to have been there -- who have no memory of Bush on the base. In other words, Bush failed to fulfill his military duty while others were dying in Vietnam.

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

The U.S. Army plans to move within months to break up the multibillion-dollar logistics contract that Halliburton Co. has to feed, house and look after U.S. troops in Iraq, and to put out the work for competitive bid.

The move, laid out in an internal Army memorandum, comes after more than a year in which Halliburton's work in Iraq under the contract has been plagued by accounting turmoil and accusations of overcharging. The contract, which the memo values at as much as $13 billion, has been used since early last year to provide massive support services for U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait, including housing, dining halls, transportation and laundry.

Pentagon auditors said in a report last month that KBR hadn't provided satisfactory details to back up more than $1.8 billion of work in Iraq and Kuwait. The Army still is debating whether to begin withholding payment on 15% of all billings until KBR is able to resolve the accounting backlog.

The United States and its allies have moved closer to capturing Osama bin Laden in the last two months, a top U.S. counterterrorism official said in a television interview broadcast Saturday.

"If he has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking. He will be caught," Joseph Cofer Black, the U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, told private Geo television network.