Rag Hand

The State Department is now having to threaten people to get them to work in the US Embassy in Baghdad.

About 250 foreign service staff are to be told they are “prime candidates” for nearly 50 jobs, state department human resources director Harry Thomas said.

If too few people volunteer, some will be ordered to go and risk dismissal if they refuse, Mr Thomas said.

American diplomats have been forced to work in undesirable postings before.

Some were given no choice but to take postings in some African countries in the 1970s and 1980s and in 1969 an entire class of new foreign service officers was sent to Vietnam.
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The former head of the US-led civilian administration in Iraq has defended his decision to send billions of dollars in cash to Baghdad in 2003 and 2004.

Much of the money went missing and critics say there was no system to track how it was used.

“Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone? But that is exactly what our government did,” Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said during Tuesday’s hearing.

Large bundles of cash meant for Iraq’s reconstruction were stashed in filing cabinets, handed over without receipts and gambled away, a report has found.

One official kept $2m (£1.1m) in a bathroom safe, while another allegedly stole $100,000 from a colleague’s unsecured stash to balance his own books, investigators found.
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Testifying to a House oversight panel, Secretary of State Rice was told Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki had issued an order requiring his approval before any top officials were charged.

Mr Waxman presented Ms Rice with an order apparently from Mr Maliki which, he said, essentially would grant immunity to the prime minister and top officials from corruption charges.

Ms Rice responded that the US did not accept “any policy that would make immune from investigation or prosecution any member of the Iraqi government, no matter how high”. —–If you repeat the lie often enough a certain number of people will inevitably start to believe it.

Once upon a time there was a man named Nguyn Vn Thiu……. Now it’s Maliki.

I guess we’re once again saving the world from communism, or what ever the cause of the month is this time. (It’s called Empire Building)

In the mean time, Rice remains nothing more or less than a hired gun. –Supporting a corrupt regime of a President is convinced that he and his administration are above the law. –Not Maliki… George W Bush.

I watch Charlie Rose on PBS quite often. Sometimes the guests are quite interesting and sometimes they help with my insomnia.
All in all I highly recommend him.

However, his two part interview with Gen. Hayden, the Director of the CIA was embarrassing.
Mr. Rose only asked those questions that would allow the Director to quote the party line. –Not that you could possibly get any other answer from him. But, nothing the director said was ever challenged while I watched.

The General as with all Generals, got his rank by understanding and playing politics. His adroitness at the game was well demonstrated with his oh, so, carefully worded, politically correct, song and dance.
This did not appears as an interview so much as a place for the Director to say what his bosses in the Whitehouse coached him to say.
A very similar interview occurred with Eric Prince of Blackwater.

I know Mr Rose is not a confrontational interviewer but if all he’s going to do is ask leading questions that are selected to allow people like this to say whatever they want us to believe without worrying about being challenged, I would suggest they change the name to the administrations’ hour.

FOXNews.com – Cops: Seattle Woman Claims David Copperfield Raped Her – Local News | News Articles | National News | US News
A Seattle woman has made a rape claim against magician David Copperfield, law enforcement sources tell FOX News.

The woman told Seattle police the magician raped her while she was in the Bahamas, sources said. Because the alleged incident happened abroad and the woman did not report it until she returned to the United States, Seattle authorities turned over the case to the FBI.

The FBI raided Copperfield’s warehouse here in Las Vegas on Thursday.
Police said it had to do with a case in Washington State.

My guess is that she plans on making money by suing, writing a book or most likely both. Otherwise, it seems to me, that she’s have reported it while she was still in the Bahamas.
If their police didn’t have the manpower or expertise to handle the case they have already shown their willingness to ask the FBI for help.

ITworld.com – MySpace will use Skype for VOIP in social network
MySpace will give its millions of members the ability to engage in free voice chats via the MySpace instant messaging service, thanks to a partnership with VOIP provider Skype.

MySpace, the world’s largest social network, has about 110 million monthly active users, while Skype has about 220 million registered users, the companies said.
MySpaceIM with Skype will mesh MySpace’s IM service, which has an installed base of 25 million users, with Skype’s Internet voice communications services, the companies said.

This should be interesting.
MySpace is the biggest waste of bandwidth, and resources in general, that has ever existed.

In the office where my office is physically located there are 3 or 4 loan officers out front.
The second we have a dead moment, they will gather around the single computer that they are allowed to use for general internet access and go directly to MySpace.
There will invariably be customer files that need to be filed, phone calls that need to be made, and their response is an equally invariable “just a minute.” This “minute” will usually last until the next customer walks in.

There are times when I don’t bother to check the logs at our satellite offices because I know what I’ll find.
We limit which sites they can visit, but each office has one computer that is isolated from the rest of our network. This they can use during their breaks to go online.

Our’s is a small company(less than 100 people total) and this is already a problem.
When they add major new features they exacerbate the problem.
Not only does MySpace and it’s ilk waste time, with the music, various moving pictures, and other scripts it chews up unbelievable amounts of bandwidth.

At a much larger company(10,000+ users) the IT department unilaterally blocked MySpace, Facebook and at least one other.
The CEO personally ordered them to remove these sites from the blacklist.
The network admin had to generate a report, over a period of a month, showing the difference in bandwidth usage, and the costs of that band width, before anyone upstairs would even admit that it could be a problem.

The mystery continues: Why are Windows machines automatically updating themselves? by ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley — Microsoft is continuing to investigate how and why some Windows Vista users saw their machines automatically patch and reboot last week, even though these users had opted out of Automatic Updates. Microsoft is now saying it was neither Automatic Update nor last week’s batch of patches at fault.

They say nothing recent did this, therefore, it must be left over from the last time they forced an update against of our wishes.
Either that or the monster has finally become self aware.

“Hal, open the door.”
“I can’t do that Dave.”