Posted on 02/21/2006 3:38:39 PM PST by ohioWfan
Today President Bush traveled to Golden, Colorado to participate in the Energy Conservation & Efficiency Panel at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and discuss his national energy strategy, as well as tour the lab with Dan Arvizu, the director of the laboratory. Before leaving Colorado, the President visited the troops and their families at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora.
When he arrived home at the White House, he made a statement to the press regarding the controversial port buyout by the United Arab Emirates from Great Britain.
Enjoy your much needed trip to Sanity Island on the Daily Dose!!
He's saying "I'm going to strangle the next reporter who asks me a dumb question. So does anyone else have a question?"
There are only a handful of members of Congress that I have any respect for. IMHO we could be served much better if serving in Coongress was handled like Jury Duty, picked at random and asked to use common sense. IMHO all they are interested in is getting re-elected and being loved by the media.
By next week I will probably be able to write it on a postage stamp.
My view exactly. But when I said (posted) that before, I got thoroughly trashed. (I hope I will get kinder treatment for a reply :-))
I think it's very hard to listen to anyone who is so determined that his opinions are right and everyone else is wrong because eventually there's going to be something you disagree with him on. I agree with Rush probably 70 to 80 percent of the time. But anyone who has a mind of their own is going to disagree with him at some point. And with Rush's way of acting, he's bound to try to make you sound like an idiot when you do.
As a business and property owner I provide a service and a product, just as the U.S. owns the Ports and the commerce resulting from the sale of the cargo, and worrying about who manages the transactions is like my customers worrying about the repairs to the wrecked cars being compromised because I changed the company who processes the Credit Card transactions
To me if I was an American I would feel offended because they are basically saying the average American is not intelligent enough to understand facts and make their own minds up on issues. Instead they infer they will believe what the media spoon feeds them./
Unfortunately it is a political disease worldwide.
I still listen occasionally, but my primary purpose in listening to him years ago was because I had no other media source for my point of view. With the advent of Fox, the use of the internet, and other talk radio programs, I don't find him as important to me.
That does not mean he isn't important; he is, because of his large audience. It's just that I don't consider him a primary source of information.
I'm certainly offended. I am perfectly capable of figuring out what I believe on an issue without the media telling me what to believe. However, I worry that a lot of people don't have the patience or the understanding to actually look at issues and see what they think. Instead, they look at what the media says and base their decisions on that.
YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY, SLEEPY....SLEEPY.
Miss Marple, you and I are definitely on the same wave length about Rush. He invented talk radio, and when he started, he was the only one who reflected my views. I will always admire him for that.
But there are now a lot of Conservative talk show hosts who spend more time and energy making sure they understand the issues. They are better sources of information than Rush is. He's entertainment now, not a source of information.
He badly muffed the issue about the ports. But he has so many listeners that the effect was magnified. I wish more people recognized both his strength (invention of talk radio) and his limitations (laziness about research).
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2006/tr20060221-12543.html
Q Mr. Secretary, I'd like to ask you about government -- the U.S. government's decision to have a company from the UAE run six U.S. seaports. Is that a decision that the Defense Department weighed in on? And what, if any, national security issues do you think that raises?
SEC. RUMSFELD: First, let me say I'm not expert on this subject, and it -- my understanding that I've been told secondhand by others is the following: that there's a process that exists in the government; that six departments and agencies are involved, and five or six offices in the Executive Office of the President and the White House are involved; and there's a time limit of something like 30 days during which this process is to be executed; that the process worked; it was chaired by the Department of Treasury -- the deputy, Bob Kimmitt, is -- was the chairman -- and they -- in the normal order of things, what they do, as I understand it, is they select a lead agency or department based on the substance of it -- and in this case, it was Homeland Security, obviously, because the Coast Guard has the responsibility for the security of ports -- and that the process went forward; and in the course of it, the Department of Homeland Security and the interagency process negotiated a letter with the company that had purchased, I believe, a British company, setting forth exactly how security would be handled. I've not seen it, so I can't describe it, but that's my understanding.
And the -- I guess the only other thing I'd say is that we all deal with the UAE on a regular basis.
It's a country that's been involved in the global war on terror with us, it's a country that we have facilities that we use, and it's a country that was very responsive to assist in Katrina, one of the early countries that did that, and a country that we have very close military-to-military relations as well as political and economic relations.
Do you want to comment?
GEN. PACE: Sir, the military-to-military relationship with the United Arab Emirates is superb. They've got great seaports that are capable of handling, and do, our aircraft carriers. They've got airfields that they allow us to use, and their airspace, their logistics support. They've got a world-class air-to-air training facility that they let us use and cooperate with them in the training of our pilots. In everything that we have asked and work with them on, they have proven to be very, very solid partners. And as the Secretary said, they were the very first country -- a hundred million dollars is what they offered to Katrina victims.
SEC. RUMSFELD: I should add that I wasn't aware of this until this weekend, as I think is the case with Pete.
GEN. PACE: That's correct, sir, on the port --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Yeah. And I'm told that Deputy Secretary of Treasury Kimmitt and others will be briefing on this, who do have the background of the discussions and the information on it.
Q There was a Defense Department representative in the decision-making process? Is that what you're --
SEC. RUMSFELD: There were Defense Department and -- I think as I said, there were six departments that were involved in the process in one way or another, and the Defense Department was one of them. The lead was the Department of Homeland Security.
Q Are you confident that any problems with security -- from what you know, are you confident that any problems with security would not be greater with a UAE company running this than an American company?
SEC. RUMSFELD: I am reluctant to make judgments based on the minimal amount of information I have, because I just heard about this over the weekend. I'm told that nothing changes with respect to security under the contract, that the Coast Guard is in charge of security, not the corporation.
And the corporation -- is this correct?
GEN. PACE: Sir, that's true. And there are many companies in various ports around the United States that are not U.S.-owned that help do this kind of cargo handling. And of course, our Coast Guard are the ones who make the judgments about the security of the ports and how that all interfaces. And that was part of the dialogue, as I understand it, that took place amongst the various departments.
SEC. RUMSFELD: And the Coast Guard, of course, has the responsibility for the ports, and they should be the ones who would describe how it would be handled and why it is acceptable, because they signed off on it.
sorry for the late answer...got it
The DWP Company is nothing more, if not similar too, a Credit Card Transaction processor. They make money off the transactions and THAT'S IT
Thank you, sweet snugs.
Then note that United Arab Empirates (UAE) is very close to the critical Straight of Hormuz, and very close to southern Iran. With Iraq on the west, and Afghanistan on the East, this gives us 3 of 4 sides of Iran. That's a nice place to be.
I doubt that Bush wants to come right and say this. The UAE would prefer we not make to public a point of their support in the war on terror.
Being in a strategic world war with an enemy who rules some of the countries, and who has significantly infiltrated the other fiefdoms, controlling an essential portion of your energy supply calls for a deft choice of words at time.
The stunning city of Dubai:
This part of the world is strategic to the oil and gas that is the primary energy source for civilization, with huge oil and gas fields in Saudia Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, southern Iraq, Iran and Turkmenistan.
The kind of war we are fighting is not like World Wars I or II. This war is sub critical -- the enemy lacks the military to take us on straight up in a frontal assault. Without that force threatening us, we can continue to expect a less than 100% focus on winning the war from many people. We need to be able to win using the excess strength of a robust economy, rather than the galvanizing force of a wide spread all out war focus by all our citizens.
Until we can reduce our dependence on foreign oil, which is many years out at best, we have no choice but to maintain some cooperative ties with some of the fiefdoms in this region, even though that too has its risks
Money speaks. We bring to the table the worlds largest stable banking system and worlds largest market. China brings the worlds largest labor force (but deposits their money with us, since our banks work) and the Middle East brings the largest supplies of easily gotten oil and gas.
The above analysis is, I suspect, suggestive of the motivation behind this decision. The corresponding analysis, that others have done explaining why Dubai's purchase will not threaten our security, can be made somewhat more public, though even that can't have all aspects spelled out. It would not help our security to give the enemy a road map to our port security measures.
This war will provide plenty of opportunity for all but the most sanguine amongst us, sooner or later, to be outraged at what we are, or are not, doing to win it.
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