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Lee Raymond is chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation, and his company just had one hell of a quarter:

Exxon Mobil Corp. had a quarter for the record books. The world's largest publicly traded oil company said Thursday high oil and natural-gas prices helped its third-quarter profit surge almost 75 percent to $9.92 billion, the largest quarterly profit for a U.S. company ever, and it was the first to ring up more than $100 billion in quarterly sales.

That's not a typo — Exxon made a seventy-five percent profit during the time when you were spending well over $3 for a gallon of gas.

In the same quarter, Shell's net income rose 68%, ConocoPhillips reported a hefty 89% increase in profits, while BP lagged behind with a mere 34% profit.

How was your summer?

Posted on 10/27/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

Adolf Hitler would be so proud.

Today, in America, sixty years after the death of a madman with more blood on his hands than any other human being in history, and sixty years after the crashing demise of his thousand-year reich that lasted all of thirteen years, there exists a budding musical sensation that calls itself Prussian Blue.

Prussian Blue is two adorable-looking 13-year-old twins, Lamb and Lynx Gaede. Here is a sampling of lyrics that these sweet little girls sing:

Aryan man awake, How much more will you take, Turn that fear to hate, Aryan man awake...

I see the apathy in your eyes, knowing not what it means to be free, watching as the White flame dies...

If the White men won’t battle for Life and Race. The women and children, the Terror will face...

And then there's this, from a charming little ditty called Victory Day:

Well sit down and listen, to what I have to say. Soon will come a great war, a bloody but holy day. And after that purging our people will be free, and sing up in the bright skies, a sun for all to see.

Times are very tough now for a proud White man to live. And although it may appear that this world has no life to give. Times are soon changing, this cant go on or long. And on that joyful summer’s day we’ll sing our Victory song.

The women, they’ll smile, on Victory Day. And the children, they’ll laugh and they’ll sing and they’ll play. And the forests will echo our grace, for the brand new dawn of our Race.

According to ABC News:

They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate...

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white...we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

Someone should warn these cute little teeny boppers with their Adolf Hitler smiley-face t-shirts that if they're not careful, they might grow up someday and turn into this.

Posted on 10/24/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

Recently, Ann Coulter spoke at the third annual Ronald Reagan Black Tie and Blue Jeans BBQ in Florida. Something tells me that the audience was a friendly one.

The incredibly credulous paid up to $75 to hear Coulter spew her special brand of insight:

She also criticized the media for being liberal and Democrats for whining about their rights under the First Amendment.

"They're always accusing us of repressing their speech," she said. "I say let's do it. Let's repress them."

She later added, "Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment."

Her statements received applause, and many attendees said they enjoyed her speech, but some added that they think she's somewhat extreme.

Her First Amendment crack is pure Coulter (if you will excuse the oxymoron). But what bothers me is the audience making excuses for her. Calling Coulter "somewhat extreme" is a little like calling Hannibal Lecter somewhat unusual in his appetites.

Posted on 10/24/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

There's one thing Americans are very good at — staying the course. No matter if we're on the right road or the wrong road. No matter if we're even waist deep in the Big Muddy. If the big fool says push on, we push on. No questions asked.

So it was with Vietnam, for over a decade, at a cost of 58,000 American lives and the lives of millions of Vietnamese. And so it is with Iraq.

And so it is with America's stubborn refusal to fix our overly expensive, inefficient, and exclusionary health insurance system:

Somehow, the rest of the industrial world can provide health coverage for everyone, and only spend an average of about 10 percent of its national income, while we spend 14 percent and leave over 44 million people without health insurance.

How is that possible? Simple: we squander hundreds of billions of dollars processing claims, having dozens of competing insurers spend a fortune on marketing, paying HMO reviewers to second-guess physicians, evaluating who is ''insurable," and otherwise wasting about 30 cents on every premium dollar paying middlemen who provide no healthcare.

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney intends to do something about the health care problem in his state.

Does his plan address the inefficiencies and inequities of a private, multi-payer system? Hardly. He just intends to push his state further on down the same old road, getting everyone in deeper and deeper.

Romney's plan will provide subsidies for those who can't afford insurance. Other uninsured residents whom the state deems can afford health insurance will be required to purchase it for themselves and their families:

Romney...would apply the individual insurance requirement to everyone. He wants to combine the requirement with rule changes that would allow insurance companies to offer limited, low-cost policies, and wants to provide state subsidies to help low-income people buy the policies. Under his plan, residents who choose not to obtain health insurance would face tax penalties and even the garnishment of their wages.

"I don't see how it works without an individual mandate," Romney said.

Push on, fools. Push on.

Posted on 10/22/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

Does anyone still doubt that the administration of George W. Bush will be remembered as the most incompetent and corrupt administration in history?

This administration is a noxious brew consisting of the arrogance of Marie Antoinette (Let them eat yellowcake), the villainy of Madam Defarge, and a liberal helping of low French farce. The overall effect would be comical were it not so tragic.

The last five years have seen so many blunders, abuses of power, and blatant attempts to distort and deceive that it's almost too much to keep track of it all. It's as though this administration has purposely adopted a strategy of overwhelming the public with one travesty after another, so as to keep us from focusing on any one.

But the one travesty we must focus on is the Iraq war, and the false reasons the administration gave for dragging this country into it.

In yesterday's online American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias attempts to sweep away all the distractions and redirect our attention on what should be the overarching issue of the day:

The war was about nuclear weapons and uranium related to nuclear weapons -- and so important things hinged on the uranium.

For the past couple of years, the press and the political system have gone into a remarkable amount of denial about this. At some point, Bush changed his mind and decided we went to war in order to build a pluralistic democracy in Iraq. And in light of the WMD realities on the ground, you can see why he did it. Bizarrely, however, huge numbers of other people, including liberal pundits, analysts, and members of Congress, have gone along with this switcheroo...

That's all silly. Bush never would have gone on and on about the alleged nuclear program unless he had a reason of some sort for doing so. And of course he had a reason. If he'd stood on the floor of the House and said "Iraq poses no threat to the United States and will pose no such threat for the foreseeable future, but we should invade anyway to make it a democracy," people would have laughed at him.

Yglesias ends with a simple statement of truth that can't be emphasized enough:

That the nukes we went in to eliminate did not, in fact, exist is scandal of monumental proportions.

But in reality, it is not. Why?

And if the stated reasons for invading Iraq were incorrect at best or lies at worst, why are we still there?

And for that matter, why is George Bush still in the White House?

Posted on 10/19/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

The Washington rumor mill was spinning so fast and furiously today that it could have generated enough electricity to heat the entire northeast all winter long.

The buzz has Vice President Cheney about to resign over the Valerie Plame leak.

As if that's not enough to keep idle lips flapping, the speculation is that President Bush will elevate Condoleezza Rice to fill the vacancy.

But I can say with absolute certainty that the VP spot will not go to Rice.

Remember when President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, and people joked that he chose Miers only because the White House cleaning lady wasn't available? I happen to have first-hand knowledge that recent history is about to repeat itself.

I'm not talking about more jokes where the president nominates the cleaning lady as vice president. I'm saying that if and when Cheney resigns, the president fully intends to nominate, in fact, the White House cleaning lady.

Filomena Drimopper, 47th Vice President of the United States.

With the word "impeachment" so much in the wind these days, nominating the cleaning lady to the vice presidency is this president's way of ensuring he will never be impeached. As he told the Official White House Nanny: "Hah. Won't impeach me then, will they? They impeach me and they get Filomena. Who wants a cleaning lady president?"

Actually, Mr. President, if the polls are any indication, a good many Americans would be only too happy to take Filomena over you.

Posted on 10/18/05 by Deep Post | Link | Comments?

You Americans are such hypocrites.

You think of me as both a genius and a monster because of propaganda films I made for my country 70 years ago.

Are you surprised I admit to making propaganda? Of course you are. Propaganda is a tool used to mislead people. Who would admit to that?

You certainly don't.

Your country is hardly above using propaganda to mislead people about its policies. You have journalists on the government payroll advocating administration programs such as the so-called No Child Left Behind act. You distribute government-made news releases as though they were objective newscasts by actual journalists. You have a president who dresses up in a flight suit and lands theatrically on an aircraft carrier, and then delivers a premature victory speech for an unjust war before cheering military personnel.

It's one thing for an unethical administration to try stunts like these. It's quite another for the public to condone them and make excuses for them.

Recently a Government Accountability Office investigation reported that some of these practices violated the law. But you really haven't paid much attention to that, have you? After all, propaganda by your government is well intentioned. What's the harm?

President Bush hasn't paid much attention to the GAO report either. Two weeks after the report was released, the president participated in another propaganda stunt, one that featured his (and my) favorite prop — soldiers in uniform.

The event was a so-called "conversation" between US troops in Iraq and President Bush in Washington. But just before the videoconference began, deputy assistant defense secretary Allison Barber was caught on camera rehearsing the soldiers for the event like the director of a one-act play:

"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said... "If the question comes up about partnering — how often do we train with the Iraqi military — who does he [the president] go to?" Barber asked.

"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.

"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit — the hometown [of Saddam Hussein] — and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.

This isn't a "conversation." This is choreography. Leave nothing to chance and you won't be embarrassed, as Rumsfeld was by unscripted questions about vehicle armor in Iraq.

The Pentagon denies that the soldiers were coached on what to say. But clearly they knew what questions were going to be asked and who was assigned to answer them. And certainly, they knew the answers that were expected.

One of the "ordinary" US soldiers Bush interviewed was actually a "plant" — Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo, who is, in fact, a media spokesperson for the military. As a PR pro, Lombardo likely needed very little coaching to say what Bush and the Pentagon expected her to. That's her job:

Lombardo: I can tell you over the past 10 months we've seen a tremendous increase in the capabilities and the confidences of our Iraqi security force partners. We've been working side-by-side, training and equipping 18 Iraqi army battalions. Since we began our partnership, they have improved greatly, and they continue to develop and grow into sustainable forces. Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations.

Lombardo's boss, Gen. George Casey, sees things differently. But truth is hardly a necessary ingredient of propaganda, is it?

Propaganda is theater. Sit back and enjoy the production. It is so much more pleasant than truth.

Posted on 10/15/05 by Leni Riefenstahl | Link | Comments?

Just my luck. When I was head honcho, and I got myself in a little jam, it seemed like everyone in the country wanted not only to impeach me, but to cut off my <expletive deleted> and hang them from the Capitol Rotunda.

And all because of a third-rate burglary.

But there's a whole new breed of American out there today. According to a new poll, fifty percent of Americans would want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about his reasons for invading Iraq.

Fifty percent? Would just consider impeachment?

Let me speak just briefly to the other fifty percent out there. Where were you <expletive deleted> zombies thirty years ago when I needed you?

God damn. What does a president have to do to get himself impeached these days?

Compared to deliberately starting a war under false pretenses, a little harmless obstruction of justice doesn't seem like such a big deal. So why was I the one making pathetic V-for-Victory signs as I was about to be shuttled out of town in disgrace?

Who knows. If we had distractions like Desperate Housewives and Internet porn back in my day, I might have been able to hang on for three or four more terms before anyone even noticed.

Posted on 10/12/05 by Richard M. Nixon | Link | Comments?

So I'm skimming through this article that a friend emailed me and it was the same old Bush bashing on Iraq and I really don't buy into that stuff but then something caught my eye:

[W]e were so shocked by the banner "Mission Accomplished" and so amused by the awkwardly costumed president-as-pilot — Falstaff would have been jealous of Bush's codpiece — that we did not see the truth of the statement hung out before our eyes.

For once the Bush administration did not lie.

The mission was never about saving America from destruction by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, was never about bringing democracy to the Middle East, was never about winning "the war against terrorists" — it was about oil and empire.

Do you believe this guy who by the way fought for his country in Korea but today is just giving comfort to the terrorists with talk like this:

The Iraqi mission was accomplished in two months. Bush's "noble cause" was to secure oil fields and 14 strategic sites for permanent bases.

That's not what this war's about. And then he says we "tricked" Saddam into invading Kuwait back when Bush's dad was president — that's that old April Glaspie fairytale. America would never do a thing like that. No way.

And then the bashing goes into high gear:

Even if we had had an idiot in the White House, he would have known that after 13 years of photo surveys and bombing of every inch of Iraq, no WMDs could possibly have survived as a threat to our country and our "freedom."

Hindsight's 20-20 mister. But what really makes me crazy is hearing about the sanctions that we got the UN to impose on Iraq between the two wars and how they supposedly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

We're America for God's sakes. We're not child killers. And I don't know what Madeline Albright was thinking when Leslie Stahl asked her on 60 Minutes about the half a million Iraqi kids who supposedly died as a result of our sanctions and Albright said:

I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.

I don't know why she didn't deny an obvious lie like that — it can't be true, right? No way we'd allow all those kids to die, for any reason. No way.

Oh well gotta run . . .

Posted on 10/10/05 by Faith Hope | Link | Comments?

Compared to Americans, Narcissus was a rather modest young man.

As Americans gaze admiringly into our reflecting pool, we simply refuse to believe that every last man, woman, and child on the planet doesn't want to be exactly like us.

Even an eleven-year-old child named Elian Gonzalez.

The arrogance that America has become famous for is all too apparent in Jeff Jacoby's column about Elian in today's Boston Globe. Jacoby seems both stunned and stung by the fact that Elian appeared genuinely happy during a recent interview with Bob Simon of CBS' 60 Minutes. After all, the bewildered Jacoby asks between the lines, what normal eleven-year-old wouldn't rather live in the United States with strangers than live in Cuba with his father?

Jacoby flatly refuses to believe his lying eyes were looking at a clearly happy Elian, preferring instead to believe that the boy "has been brainwashed by a totalitarian police state."

Graciously, Jacoby excuses Elian "for spouting the Communist Party line" because he is just a boy. But, he asks, "What excuse is there for CBS?" The expected answer — None:

The story was a shameless piece of agitprop...

[V]irtually the entire segment had the oily feel of Cuban government propaganda. Which it may literally have been: Simon disclosed that "Castro's personal cameraman" had "helped" put the story together.

I can't help but wonder if the interview might have had a less oily feel for Jacoby if the Cuban cameraman had some help from the more polished propagandists in the Bush administration.

And I wonder if the agitprop was as shameless as our government's attempts to mythologize and exploit Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman.

To Jacoby and the like-minded, Cuba is just another story about good guys (us) and bad guys (them). Even the death of Elian's mother is presented in simplistic black-and-white:

Come to think of it, why did [Elian's mother Elizabet] Brotons want so desperately to leave Cuba? Why was she willing to risk her and her son's life on such a dangerous — in her case, fatal — attempt to cross the 90 miles that separate Cuba from freedom?

Jacoby answers his own question with the usual — poverty, rationing, political and religious repression, etc. — all true. But he fails to mention our own role in driving people to such desperation — the economic embargo of Cuba, now in its fifth decade of helping to impoverish an entire nation.

That, Jeff, is what is truly shameless.

Is it any wonder that when so much of the world looks at America, they see something very different than we do when we gaze into that reflecting pool?

Posted on 10/09/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

There are millions of genuine religious devotees in America. Most if not all will tell you they speak to God through prayer. But very few will tell you that God actually speaks back to them. And those who do make that claim are either candidates for sainthood, or they are, to put it kindly, a few doses behind on their meds.

Among the few souls who claim that God speaks directly to them is none other than President Bush. And somehow, I doubt that he is destined to be canonized anytime soon.

The BBC is reporting that, in 2003, President Bush told a Palestinian delegation to an Israeli-Palestinian summit that:

God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did...

And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East'. And, by God, I'm gonna do it.

That the president of the most powerful country on earth might be completely whacko is too frightening a possibility to entertain. So let's assume that a supernatural being did, in fact, direct the president to undertake this "mission" to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Justin Raimondo raises an even more frightening question:

I wonder: how does Bush know the voice he's hearing is God's? What if it's the Devil's?

God, it seems to me, is the strong, silent type; it's the Other Guy who's a bit of a chatterbox, always whispering in people's ears, trying to get them to do cool-but-forbidden stuff, tempting and flattering them at the same time. If Bush is hearing voices in his head, then I fear we ought to be very worried, because it's either the delusions of a dry alcoholic, or something far more sinister.

You have to admit — this would explain quite a bit.

Posted on 10/07/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

President Bush's nomination of fellow Texan Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is, in a word, brilliant.

As with many of the president's actions, it's going to take a while for lesser intellectual lights to catch on to the sagacity of this nomination. For example, Patrick Buchanan acknowledges that Miers is a "gracious lady" and an accomplished lawyer, "but her qualifications for the Supreme Court are non-existent:"

She is not a brilliant jurist, indeed, has never been a judge. She is not a scholar of the law. Researchers are hard-pressed to dig up an opinion. She has not had a brilliant career in politics, the academy, the corporate world or public forum. Were she not a friend of Bush, and female, she would never have even been considered.

She's not a judge... She's not a constitutional scholar... Ok, I admit that I was also having trouble following Bush's esoteric reasoning. But then former Bush speech writer David Frum identified the one qualification that puts Miers far above the most astute constitutional experts in the country:

In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.

Of course. Miers saw the president for what he truly is. All of a sudden the five years of the Bush presidency was set in an entirely new light. Bush is . . . brilliant. That explains everything. How else could a president lead us into an utterly indefensible war, but still convince over 60 million Americans to vote for him again? Brilliant.

And why would a president risk his reputation trying to revamp Social Security, one of the most popular federal programs in American history? Place this vital security net at the whim of the marketplace and in the hands of largely unsophisticated investors? To most of us in the median IQ range, it seems a foolhardy ideological fantasy. But maybe, just maybe, it takes a Mensa-level intellect to see it for what it really is — absolutely ingenious.

Yes. So much is becoming clearer now. Take taxes — a modest intellect like mine assumes we'd need to raise taxes to pay for the $200 billion it will cost to repair the damage done by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But the president says no new taxes are necessary. Either the president is dangerously delusional, or Miers is right — he's brilliant.

After seeing the catastrophic result of hiring his friend Brownie to head up FEMA, you would expect the president to think twice about nominating another seemingly unqualified old friend to a high-level position.

And you would be wrong. Clealy, Bush's keen intellect perceives something that the rest of us are missing. What else could explain why the president would nominate Meirs? What she lacks in legal qualifications, she makes up for by being an old friend of the president's, his former personal attorney, and the White House counsel.

And most of all, she thinks the president is brilliant. What more could we ask for in a Supreme Court justice?

Posted on 10/03/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

"I am a mom, and I love kids."

So said Karen Hughes, in her role as the newly created Minister of Spin and Propaganda (excuse me, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy). Hughes spoke those words in a feeble attempt to bridge the wide cultural gap between herself and her "pre-selected" audiences during her goodwill tour of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Hughes is burdened with the task of repairing the tattered reputation of the US in the Middle East, defending the war, and forging a bond between the average citizens of those nations and ours. But by and large, Middle Easterners aren't buying it.

Some man-in-the-street reactions:

"They want to stop terrorism but they are helping it to spread," said an American University student...

An engineer in Cairo was quoted as saying that what upsets him is the "hypocrisy" of fighting for democracy in Iraq while maintaining strong ties to the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia.

At times Hughes appeared clueless and even condescending to her audiences, especially the women:

Speaking to women in the Saudi city of Jeddah, the former television reporter who is a long-standing member of Mr Bush's inner circle, introduced herself as a "Mom" and said the right to drive a car was "an important part of my freedom..."

The Texan was soon on the defensive. A reporter present said a member of the audience said: "The general image of the Arab woman is that she isn't happy. Well we're all pretty happy."

The audience applauded loudly. Many said they resented the idea they would adopt US lifestyles given the chance.

Hughes was also blasted about the war, especially by her audience in Turkey:

"War makes the rights of women completely erased, and poverty comes after war -- and women pay the price," said Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Kurdish women's rights activist...

Hughes, looking increasingly pained, defended the decision to invade Iraq as a difficult and wrenching moment for President Bush, but necessary to protect America...

"War is not necessary for peace," shot back Feray Salman, a human rights advocate. She said countries should not try to impose democracy through war, adding that "we can never, ever export democracy and freedom from one country to another."

[Hidayet Sefkatli] Tuksal said she was "feeling myself wounded, feeling myself insulted here" by Hughes' response. "In every photograph that comes from Iraq, there is that look of fear in the eyes of women and children."

Yes, a fear that we put there. No amount of "I'm a mom too" talk will ease it. No amount of photo ops with kids will lessen the bitterness and frustration that Hughes encountered. In fact, it's likely to make things worse.

If we are to succeed in winning back the friendship and respect of the average person on the streets of Cairo, Ankara, and Riyadh — not to mention Baghdad — we need to do more than send a well intentioned but widely off-the-mark Karen Hughes on a superficial feelgood campaign. As a commentator on Al Jazeera TV put it, "Any shift [in opinion of the US] would require a change in policy, not just a change in PR."

That's not about to happen, not with this clueless president.

Posted on 10/02/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?