Dear W., don't come home.
Topic: Bush Administraiton

A few days ago I asked how long W. could stay out of DC while his administration implodes and it turns out it might be for quite a while. He's going to be traveling for pretty much the whole month of November. That's a good piece of timing because a new Post-ABC News poll came out today and among the mostly very negative opinions people have of the administration, one of the most troubling for the brains behind Bush has to be this one:

"A clear majority -- 55 percent -- now says the administration deliberately misled the country in making its case for war with Iraq -- a conflict that an even larger majority say is not worth the cost.

About 3 in 4 -- 73 percent -- say there have been an unacceptable level of casualties in Iraq."

That's a pretty bad combo; too much lying and too much dying.

Living in the Americas:

According to the AP Bush is having no troubles at all finding common ground with his fellow hemospheric leaders at the Summit of the Americas. He told Argentine President Nestor Kirchner that Manu Ginobili from, a guard for the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association, has made, "A vital contribution to a basketball team from the state in which I live. But he's also a good ambassador for your country." Well, at least we can all agree on that. Before he met Bush, Kirschner said that he would "win by a knockout" in his discussions with Dubya. Hugo Chavez said he might sneak up behind W. and scare him and thousands of demostrators yelled "Bush get out!" So, all in all, it looks like this summit will be as sucessful as the last one in Chile when Bush had to rescue his body guard..

Where's the money?

The WaPo reports:

"Two months after the government began allotting billions of dollars for disaster relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, subcontractors in the Mississippi Gulf Coast say they are not being paid. As a result, they say, they cannot pay their workers, who are mostly immigrant laborers and who have painted homes, removed debris and completed other salvage chores."

A subcontractor of a company controlled by Halliburton Co., which was awarded a no-bid contract for disaster relief work by the Bush administration, is still waiting to get paid. According to the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, "150 immigrant workers, both legal and illegal," are waiting on $100,000 in unpaid wages.

If they think they have it bad, they should talk to the foreign workers Halliburton exploits in Iraq!

Naturally the government is getting right on this problem, right?

Not so much: "Spokesmen for the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees about $50 billion in hurricane relief, said they were unaware that subcontractors and workers were not being paid. The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, which hired contractors for debris removal, did not respond to a request for a comment.

Tamara Faulkner, a spokeswoman for the inspector general's office at DHS, which is responsible for overseeing more than 100 disaster relief contracts, said the issue has not been mentioned in reports."