[Greg Palast] has a very interesting analysis of the Baker report:

[The Baker Boys: Stay Half the Course]

Iraq Study Group or Saudi Protection League?
by Greg Palast
They’re kidding, right?

James Baker III and the seven dwarfs of the “Iraq Study Group” have come up with some simply brilliant recommendations. Not.

Baker’s Two Big Ideas are:

1. Stay half the course. Keeping 140,000 troops in Iraq is a disaster getting more disastrous. The Baker Boys’ idea: cut the disaster in half — leave 70,000 troops there.

But here’s where dumb gets dumber: the Bakerites want to “embed” US forces in Iraqi Army units. Question one, Mr. Baker: What Iraqi Army? This so-called “army” is a rough confederation of Shia death squads. We can tell our troops to get “embedded” with them, but the Americans won’t get much sleep.

The November issue of The American Prospect has a wonderful article by Joshua Kurlantzick:

Some oil companies boast about their commitment to fighting global warming. But as the arctic heats up, these same companies are racing to drill in newly melted waters. The rush to exploit the melting ice cap is on.

Kurlantzick lays out a contradiction between what the oil companies are saying on the one hand, and placing themselves in line for on the other.

Real Cost of oil Equates to $10 Gallon Gasoline
Source: IAGS
[Apr 02, 2006]

SYNOPSIS: Milton Copulos, president of the [National Defense Council Foundation] and Senior Fellow at the [Institute for the Analysis of Global Security] tells Senate the ‘hidden cost’ premium for imported oil amounts to $825 billion.

“A set of oil supply disruptions similar in scope to those of the 1970 could carry a price tag as high as $8 Trillion - a figure equal to 62.5% of our annual GDP or nearly $27,000 for every man, woman and child living in America,” warned Milton Copulos, president of the National Defense Council Foundation and Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS).

Lots of news today about the Iraq Study group, which suggests that Iraq
privatize its oil industry and to open it up to international companies.

Nowhere is mentioned what author and activist Antonia Juhasz notes:

“Put simply, the oil companies are trying to get what they were denied before the war or at anytime in modern Iraqi history: access to Iraq’s oil under the ground.”  I’ll just quote the conculusion of her article but you should read the entire piece :

Published on 4 Dec 2006 by Energy Bulletin.
Archived on 4 Dec 2006.
by Dmitry Orlovv

Robert Steele posted this to his [Open Source Inteligence] site where he wrote:

2006-12-05 Scary Comparisons of Soviet and US Collapses

The 29-page slide with briefing notes at the link dated today, is quite sensible and quite scary. It is sufficiently credible to have earned a complete reprinting in the [Energy Bulletin].

In our view, we have two years to make a public intelligence case for electing a transpartisan team able to address the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers in a responsible manner. If we fail to do so, we anticipate severe destruction in major urban areas, and a balkanization of rural areas. St.