LOTTOMIKE's Blog

If you thought gasoline prices were scary on Halloween, just wait until Thanksgiving or Christmas.

By then, if close watchers of oil and gasoline markets are right, prices could be close to the record levels set in May. "You could be paying that by the time you sit around your Christmas tree," said Stephen Schork, publisher of The Schork Report, a daily energy newsletter.

And when warmer weather comes back in 2008, a march toward $4 a gallon isn't out of the question, Schork said.

For motorists using diesel, that future is now. On Friday, the average price of diesel in the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area was a record $3.71 a gallon, according to AAA. Diesel prices have run well above gasoline for months.

For regular unleaded in Snohomish County, the average price Friday was $3.19 a gallon, up 25 cents from a month ago and 75 cents higher than a year ago.

It could be worse.

"All things being equal, we should have expected our prices to be higher by now," said Janet Ray, spokeswoman at AAA's regional office in Bellevue.

That's because crude oil, which makes up close to half the price of a gallon of gasoline, is closing in on $100 a barrel, up nearly 40 percent since late August.

"Crude oil prices have been moving higher nonstop since mid-September," Schork said.

On Friday, oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $95.93. That's also just a few dollars short of the all-time, inflation-adjusted high for crude oil set in 1980.

In May, crude oil was selling for well under $70 a barrel when gasoline in the U.S. hit new highs. At that time, gasoline in the Puget Sound area peaked at an average price of just under $3.47 a gallon.

Thus, Ray said, we can be thankful we haven't set new records yet at the pump based on how high crude oil is now.

Part of the reason is that overall demand for gasoline in November doesn't usually match demand during the late spring and summer months. That's why the past pattern was for gas prices to ramp up from March to May, peak in the summer, then slowly slide to annual lows as winter starts.

They have followed that pattern less and less in recent years, however. Pressures including war in the Middle East, fast-growing demand for oil and gasoline in China and speculation in oil futures have helped to drive up prices.

During that time, U.S. demand for gasoline and oil also has grown, stretching the nation's refining capacity to the limit, so any problem or seasonal switch in production of fuel blends can affect gasoline supplies and prices more than ever, Schork said.

As of last week, U.S. crude oil inventories fell to 7.5 percent below the year-ago levels, the federal Energy Information Administration reported.

Unless rising prices dramatically curb people's demand for gasoline, Schork said, holiday travel will likely keep prices relatively high. He said the nationwide average, now at $2.94, could top $3.10.

Brian Couch, who oversees the service station at Donna's Travel Plaza in Marysville, said he hasn't noticed any slack in sales. His station, which sells huge amounts of diesel to commercial truck drivers, is more affected by economic slowdowns than fuel prices, he said.

Based on indicators he's seeing, he also doesn't expect diesel or gasoline prices to ease much.

"All my reports are saying crude stocks are falling left and right," Couch said.

What does all this mean for next year? Schork said he isn't prone to wild guesses, but he won't rule out passing the $4-per-gallon mark around here.

"Five dollars (a gallon), I think, is absurd," he said from his office in Pennsylvania. "But I don't think $4 is out of the realm of possibility."

 Herald Writer Eric Fetters

UPPER MARLBORO, Md. (Nov. 17) - Scores of grumbling parents facing a threat of jail lined up at a courthouse Saturday to either prove that their school-age kids already had their required vaccinations or see that the youngsters submitted to the needle.

The get-tough policy in the Washington suburbs of Prince George's County was one of the strongest efforts made by any U.S. school system to ensure its youngsters receive their required immunizations.

"We're going to continue to do the right thing for the American people by having limited accountability for the president and not a blank check," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a $50 billion bill by Democrats that would have paid for several months of combat but also would have ordered troop withdrawals from Iraq to begin within 30 days. The measure, narrowly passed this week by the House, also would have set a goal of ending combat in December 2008.

The 53-45 vote was seven votes short of the 60 needed to advance. It came minutes after the Senate rejected a Republican proposal to pay for the Iraq war with no strings attached.

Now, Democratic leaders say they won't send President Bush a war spending bill this year. They calculate the military has enough money to run through mid-February.

Responding to the congressional blockage, Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Friday signed a memo ordering the Army to begin planning for a series of expected cutbacks, including the layoffs of as many as 100,000 civilian employees and another 100,000 civilian contractors, starting as early as January, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.

"The memo reflects the urgency of the situation we find ourselves in -- we are in a real crisis," Morrell said, noting that layoff notices to some civilian employees would have to be sent as early as mid-December. He decried Congress' refusal thus far to provide the money needed to continue fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, accusing lawmakers of "holding hostage the well-being of our men and women in uniform, and our national security."

The delay will satisfy a Democratic support base that is fiercely anti-war. But it also will give Republicans and the White House ample time to hammer Democrats for leaving for the holidays without funding the troops.

"We ought to get the troops the funding they need to finish the mission without restrictions and without a surrender date," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

At the White House on Friday, deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said the spending gap is unjustified.

"We'd rather see the Department of Defense, the military planners and our troops focusing on military maneuvers rather than accounting maneuvers as they carry out their mission in the field," Fratto said.

Since taking the reins of Congress in January, Democrats have struggled to pass any significant anti-war legislation. Measures that passed along party lines in the House repeatedly sank in the Senate, where Democrats hold a much narrower majority and 60 votes are routinely needed to overcome procedural hurdles.

In May, Republicans agreed not to stand in the way of a $95 billion bill that would have set a timetable for troop withdrawals. Bush rejected the measure and Democrats lacked the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto, as Republicans anticipated.

Democrats eventually stripped the timetable from the bill and sent Bush the money without restrictions on force levels. The move was an unpopular one with many Democratic voters who say Congress should cut off money for the war.

As the year progressed, Democrats hoped for Republican defections. But a drop in violence this fall in Iraq helped to shore up GOP support for the war.

On Friday, only four Republicans joined Democrats in voting for the Iraq measure: Sens. Gordon Smith of Oregon, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Susan Collins of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Sen. Christopher Dodd was the lone Democrat opposing it because he said it did not go far enough to end the war. Other Democrats, including Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, said they too opposed the bill as too soft but that they supported advancing debate.

"The only way to end the war is with a firm deadline that is enforceable through funding," said Dodd, D-Conn.

Democrats acknowledge recent progress made by the military in Iraq but contend the security will be short-lived unless the Iraqi government reaches a political settlement.

"We need to do more than say to the Iraqis that our patience has run out and that they need to seize the opportunity that has been given them," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. "Their dawdling will only end when they have no choice."

Republicans on Friday tried to counter with an alternative proposal that would have paid $70 billion toward the war without restrictions. That measure failed by a vote of 45-53, falling 15 short of the 60 needed to advance.

Republicans said there were appalled by Sen. Chuck Schumer's comment, reported by The Associated Press on Thursday, that the Bush administration wouldn't get a "free lunch."

Schumer, D-N.Y., had told reporters that unless Bush accepted the restrictions, the Defense Department would have to eat into its core budget.

"The days of a free lunch are over," he said.

Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said Schumer's comments were "unbelievable," and Rep. Heather Wilson said the senator should apologize to the troops.

"Sen. Schumer only wants to fund pay, body armor and chow for the troops if he can put conditions on the money so that they cannot do the mission they have been ordered to do," said Wilson, R-N.M.

The Pentagon confirms the military will not run out of money until mid February, after which all Army bases would cease operations.

By ANNE FLAHERTY
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam War, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.

"We're asking a lot of soldiers these days," said Roy Wallace, director of plans and resources for Army personnel. "They're humans. They have all sorts of issues back home and other places like that. So, I'm sure it has to do with the stress of being a soldier."

The Army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for longer than 30 days. The soldier is then discharged as a deserter.

According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year.

The increase comes as the Army continues to bear the brunt of the war demands with many soldiers serving repeated, lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military leaders - including Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey - have acknowledged that the Army has been stretched nearly to the breaking point by the combat. Efforts are under way to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps to lessen the burden and give troops more time off between deployments.

"We have been concentrating on this," said Wallace. "The Army can't afford to throw away good people. We have got to work with those individuals and try to help them become good soldiers."

Still, he noted that "the military is not for everybody, not everybody can be a soldier." And those who want to leave the service will find a way to do it, he said.

While the Army does not have an up-to-date profile of deserters, more than 75 percent of them are soldiers in their first term of enlistment. And most are male.

Soldiers can sign on initially for two to six years. Wallace said he did not know whether deserters were more likely to be those who enlisted for a short or long tour.

At the same time, he said that even as desertions have increased, the Army has seen some overall success in keeping first-term soldiers in the service.

There are four main ways that soldiers can leave the Army before their first enlistment contract is up:

They are determined unable to meet physical fitness requirements.

They are found to be unable to adapt to the military.

They say they are gay and are required to leave under the so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

They go AWOL.

According to Wallace, in the summer of 2005, more than 18 percent of the soldiers in their first six months of service left under one of those four provisions. In June 2007, that number had dropped to about 7 percent.

The decline, he said, is largely due to a drop in the number of soldiers who leave due to physical fitness or health reasons.

Army desertion rates have fluctuated since the Vietnam War - when they peaked at 5 percent. In the 1970s they hovered between 1 and 3 percent, which is up to three out of every 100 soldiers. Those rates plunged in the 1980s and early 1990s to between 2 and 3 out of every 1,000 soldiers.

Desertions began to creep up in the late 1990s into the turn of the century, when the U.S. conducted an air war in Kosovo and later sent peacekeeping troops there.

The numbers declined in 2003 and 2004, in the early years of the Iraq war, but then began to increase steadily.

In contrast, the Navy has seen a steady decline in deserters since 2001, going from 3,665 that year to 1,129 in 2007.

The Marine Corps, meanwhile, has seen the number of deserters stay fairly stable over that timeframe - with about 1,000 deserters a year. During 2003 and 2004 - the first two years of the Iraq war - the number of deserters fell to 877 and 744, respectively.

The Air Force can tout the fewest number of deserters - with no more than 56 bolting in each of the past five years. The low was in fiscal 2007, with just 16 deserters.

Despite the continued increase in Army desertions, however, an Associated Press examination of Pentagon figures earlier this year showed that the military does little to find those who bolt, and rarely prosecutes the ones they find. Some are allowed to simply return to their units, while most are given less-than-honorable discharges.

"My personal opinion is the only way to stop desertions is to change the climate ... how they are living and doing what they need to do," said Wallace, adding that good officers and more attention from Army leaders could "go a long way to stemming desertions."

Unlike those in the Vietnam era, deserters from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars may not find Canada a safe haven.

Just this week, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the appeals of two Army deserters who sought refugee status to avoid the war in Iraq. The ruling left them without a legal basis to stay in Canada and dealt a blow to other Americans in similar circumstances.

The court, as is usual, did not provide a reason for the decision.

18-27-36-45-54--8

11-18-25-32-40--8

13-18-25-36-44--8

15-19-27-36-44--8

what are your plans for thanksgiving?

mine are watch football,play with my children and just be thankful we are able to celebrate thanksgiving.....

Gas at the pump is within striking distance of May's all-time record of $3.227 a gallon, having risen 0.6 cent overnight to a national average of $3.111, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the service, said gas may rise another 10 to 15 cents a gallon in the coming weeks as it catches up with oil prices that have soared close to $100 a barrel.

"We think there's room for the price nationally to set a new record," said Geoff Sundstrom, an AAA spokesman.

Oil futures, meanwhile, rebounded Wednesday after a sharp decline the previous session as investors started questioning whether OPEC will increase production. Light, sweet crude for December delivery rose $2.55 to $93.72 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after a $3.45 drop Tuesday.

Americans are starting to feel more pain from fuel costs because they are rising as a percentage of income. According to a new Oil Price Information Service study, it now costs 3.8 percent of median household income to fuel a single vehicle, up from 1.9 percent in 2002.

Those percentages are dramatically higher in the South and Midwest. The average household in Wilcox County, Ala., for instance, spends 12.7 percent of its income fueling each vehicle, compared to the 1.52 percent the average household in Hunterdon County, N.J. spends.

Rozell believes consumers are starting to cut back on their driving.

"Retailers that I've been talking to have been saying that demand ... is down or flat," Rozell said, predicting that demand for gasoline will fall first in the South and Midwest.

"Unfortunately, this price increase, for a lot of Americans, is going to be very difficult this year," Sundstrom said.

On average, families may find themselves spending an additional $80 to $90 a month on gasoline this holiday season, he said. Many people will find they can't cut the amount they drive, and so will spend less on other things, Sundstrom said.

Sundstrom cautioned that if oil drops below $90 a barrel, the predictions of record gas prices might not come to pass. But crude's rebound Wednesday again raised the prospect that prices could rise to $100 a barrel, or higher. Oil peaked at $98.62 last week.

Prices rose Wednesday after OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem el-Badri said there is no need for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to add more oil to the market, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

Oil prices fell earlier this week in part due to comments from Saudi Arabia's oil minister suggesting that the cartel will discuss raising production at a meeting next month.

Meanwhile, the dollar slipped on Wednesday, driving investors back to crude futures. Oil futures offer a hedge against a weak dollar, and oil futures bought and sold in dollars are more attractive to foreign investors when the U.S. currency is falling.

Investors were also encouraged by a Labor Department report that inflation at the wholesale level rose only 0.1 percent in October. That increase reignited hopes that the Federal Reserve could cut interest rates again soon, said John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at MF Global UK Ltd. That could pull the dollar lower again.

"The levers that had been working to get oil prices up are back in operation this morning," Kilduff said.

Other petroleum futures also rose Wednesday. December gasoline jumped 4.48 cents to $2.3615 a gallon on the Nymex, while heating oil for December delivery added 6.64 cents to $2.5685 a gallon.

Nymex natural gas for December fell 2.4 cents to $7.925 per 1,000 cubic feet.

In London, December Brent crude futures rose $2.29 to $91.12 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.

Expectations that oil inventories fell last week also supported prices. The Energy Information Administration's weekly inventory report, delayed until Thursday this week due to Monday's Veteran's Day holiday, is expected to show that crude oil supplies fell by 300,000 barrels last week, according to the average estimate of analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires. Gasoline inventories, on average, likely fell 100,000 barrels, while distillate stocks were expected to fall 300,000 barrels. Refinery use likely rose 0.7 percentage point to 86.9 percent of capacity.

By JOHN WILEN
AP Business Writer

An estimated 90,000 people in the United States fall ill each year from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. It is not clear how many die from the infection; one estimate put it at more than 18,000, which would be slightly higher than U.S. deaths from AIDS.

The infection long has been associated with health care facilities, where it attacks people with reduced immune systems. But many recent cases involve an aggressive strain, community-associated MRSA, or CA-MRSA. It can cause severe infections and even death in otherwise healthy people outside of health care settings.

The CA-MRSA strain secretes a kind of peptide -- a compound formed by amino acids -- that causes immune cells called neutrophils to burst, eliminating a main defense against infection, according to researchers.

The findings, from a team of U.S. and German researchers led by Michael Otto of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared in Sunday's online edition of the journal Nature Medicine.

While only 14 percent of serious MRSA infections are the community associated kind, they have drawn attention in recent months with a spate of reports in schools, including the death of a 17-year-old Virginia high school student.

Both hospital-associated and community-associated MRSA contained genes for the peptides. But their production was much higher in the CA-MRSA, the researchers said.

The compounds first cause inflammation, drawing the immune cells to the site of the infection, and then destroy those cells.

The research was conducted in mice and with human blood in laboratory tests.

Within five minutes of exposure to the peptides from CA-MRSA, human neutrophils showed flattening and signs of damage to their membrane, researchers said. After 60 minutes, many cells had disintegrated completely.

"This elegant work helps reveal the complex strategy that S. aureus has developed to evade our normal immune defenses," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, NIAID director, said in a statement. "Understanding what makes the infections caused by these new strains so severe and developing new drugs to treat them are urgent public health priorities."

Dr. George G. Zhanel, a medical microbiologist at the University of Manitoba in Canada, said the study was the first he had seen that identifies the peptides involved.

This shows at least one of the reasons CA-MRSA is able to cause serious problems, Zhanel, who was not part of the research team, said in a telephone interview.

Findings like this may help lead to better treatments, such as ways to neutralize the peptides or to activate the immune system to defeat them, he added.

Dr. Lindsey N. Shaw of the division of cell biology, microbiology and molecular biology at the University of South Florida, also was enthusiastic about the research.

"Specifically identifying a factor which seemingly makes CA-MRSA more pathogenic than HA-MRSA is a real find," Shaw, who was not part of the research group, said via e-mail. The "molecules identified in the study are indeed novel."

Zhanel noted that while hospital-based MRSA seemed to concentrate on "sick old people," the community-based strain can break out in on sports teams, prisons, cruise ships and other places where people are not necessarily sick or have weakened immune systems.

In a worrisome development, he noted that the more aggressive strains have started appearing in hospitals.

Dr. Clarence B. Creech, an assistant professor of pediatric infectious disease at Vanderbilt University, said every time scientists find a new way that staph uses to make people sick, "we open up the field of developing new vaccine targets and new drug targets."

"This is one of the papers we can look to as we develop new vaccines and drugs," Creech, who was not part of the research team, said in a telephone interview.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the German Research Council and the German Ministry of Education and Research.

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
AP Science Writer

If there's one document on global warming policymakers might put in their briefcase, this would be it. On Monday, scientists and government officials gather in Valencia, Spain to put together the fourth and last U.N. report on the state of global warming and what it will mean to hundreds of millions of people whose lives are being dramatically altered.

Unlike the past three tomes, this one will have little new data. Instead, it will distill the previous work into a compact guide of roughly 30 pages that summarizes complex science into language politicians and bureaucrats can understand.

It will be the first point of reference for negotiators meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia, to decide the future course of the worldwide push to curb greenhouse gas emissions after the 2012 expiration of the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the landmark agreement that assigned binding reduction targets to 36 countries.

The last of four reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "integrates all the elements, the connections between them," said one of its authors, Bert Metz, of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

U.N. officials delayed the Bali meeting by several months until after the report is released, expecting it would add political momentum to the conference.

Though the IPCC was created in 1988 to assess the science of global warming, its work gathered a momentum this year that has helped reshape opinion in the public and governments.

In the ultimate validation, the IPCC's warnings of man-induced climate change shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, the world's best-known global warming campaigner.

"The reactions that I heard from politicians around the world is that they were shocked by the reports and that they should be acted on," said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate official.

The United States, Australia and many developing countries that shunned the Kyoto treaty are now ready to begin discussing a successor agreement at the Bali conference, De Boer said.

"There is a growing consensus that Bali needs to achieve a breakthrough to put negotiations in place, and that's very encouraging," he said. "But it's not going to be a piece of cake."

The studies issued earlier this year painted a dire picture of a planet in which unabated greenhouse gas emissions could drive average temperatures up as much as 11 degrees by 2100.

Even a 3.6-degree rise could subject up to 2 billion people to water shortages by 2050 and threaten extinction for 20 percent to 30 percent of the world's species, the IPCC said.

While some people will go thirsty from lack of rain, millions more will suffer devastating floods; diseases will proliferate; the food supply may at first increase in some areas, but will plummet later; countries that are now poor will grow still poorer.

The scientists set out a basket of technological options to keep the temperature rise to the minimum, with investments amounting to about 3 percent of the world's gross domestic product — far less than what the IPCC said it would cost later to fix the damage caused by higher temperature increases.

Campaigners are looking for the final "synthesis report" to emphasize the action governments can take, the consequences of inaction and the brief time remaining to put that action into gear.

"We would want to emphasize the urgency which comes from the science," said Stephanie Tunmore of the Greenpeace environmental group. "We know what's happening, we know what's causing it, and we know what we have to do about it."

A draft report of about 60 pages — distilling the previous three reports totaling more than 4,000 pages — has been circulating for months to governments, environmentalists and scientists for comment. The authors gathered in Valencia last week to incorporate some of the comments into the final draft.

Starting Monday, delegations from 145 countries meeting in this Spanish Mediterranean city will review the Summary for Policymakers, the critical document that becomes the single most important reference for nonscientists.

Each line must be adopted by consensus — and sometimes the use of a single word can be heatedly contested.

The final document is due to be released Saturday. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's presence at the unveiling is meant to underscore its importance.

"I expect some scuffling over the final language," especially over the urgency and the level of certainty of some predicted events, said Peter Altman, of the Washington-based lobby National Environmental Trust.

Despite the haggling, the political input into a scientific document is essential, because governments cannot later disown it.

"After the summary is approved, it becomes the property of the governments," said Metz, who was one of about 40 scientists working on the final draft. "It becomes difficult for them to ignore the conclusions that they were subscribing to."

By ARTHUR MAX –
The Associated Press

who do YOU want to be the next president here in america?

rudy,hillary,mitt,obama,ron,etc.  it doesn't matter who it is i would just love to see the feedback.

i want hillary for president,who do you think should be her vice president?

Two issues are being debated concurrently in the United States these days. On the one hand, critics of the Bush administration say that, from the look of things, the Bush/Cheney regime has been working assiduously to pave the way for a declaration of military rule in the US, such that at this point, in the words of one critic, “it really only lacks the pretext to trigger a suspension of Constitutional government.” In an article published by CommonDreams.org on July 27, 2007, Dave Lindorff, author of the book “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), says that Bush and Cheney “have done this with the support of Democrats in Congress, though most of the heavy lifting was done by the last Republican-led Congress.”

On the other hand, talk of impeachment is getting louder. In an article published by the Seattle Post Intelligencer on July 27, 2007, Hubert G. Locke, former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, says that “on the eve of a congressionally mandated assessment of the unending madness in Iraq, strange and ominous signs are beginning to appear in all sorts of odd and curious quarters that this nation (the US) should not have to endure another 18 months of the George W. Bush administration and that, if we do, it might well be at the nation’s peril.”

As Locke notes, “Much of the current dismay swirls around Vice-President Dick Cheney, who is busily ignoring rules of government he doesn’t like and declaring his office to be beyond the purview of anyone’s scrutiny, while actively setting about to demolish any government agency that has the impertinence to suggest otherwise.”

Locke says, “Cheney’s advocacy of interrogation techniques for ‘enemy combatants’ that many think tantamount to torture, of monitoring phone calls and e-mails without bothering about (court) warrants, and of ignoring the niceties of the Geneva Convention when dealing with terrorists has put him out of favour even with a growing number of conservatives. Some want to jettison him as a hopeless drag on the Republican Party’s electoral prospects next year; others are beginning to join the throng that is convinced Cheney is out of control and needs to be dispatched for the health and safety of the republic itself.”

Arguing that the threat of martial law in the US is real, Lindorff says, “The first step, of course, was the first Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed in September 2001, which the president has subsequently used to claim improperly (but so what?) that the whole world, including the US is a battlefield in a so-called ‘War’ on Terror, and that he has extra-Constitutional unitary executive powers to ignore laws passed by Congress.”

As constitutional scholar and former Reagan-era associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein observes, that one claim, that the US itself is a battlefield, is enough to allow Bush or some future president to declare martial law, “since you can always declare martial law on a battlefield. All he would need would be a pretext, like another terrorist attack inside the US.”

The AUMF was followed by the PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, which undermined much of the US Bill of Rights. The PATRIOT Act is an assault on constitutional protections so atrocious that legislators in several US states and local officials in more than 200 cities, towns and counties across the land have passed resolutions or ordinances condemning and rejecting its abuse of civil liberties.

More than 25 million Americans live in states or communities that have officially declared that they oppose those parts of the PATRIOT Act and the even more draconian Homeland Security Act of January 2002 that trample on their freedoms. Yet the Bush administration has continued to ignore such protests and has continued to press ahead with an agenda that has had the effect of turning America more and more into a police state.

Even libraries in America are under siege. Under the PATRIOT Act, which was enacted by Congress with hardly any debate, the FBI has the right to obtain a court order to access any records that American libraries have of books borrowed by customers. Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act allows law enforcement agencies to peer into Americans’ reading habits and Internet activity, not only at the nation’s libraries but in bookstores as well.

Around the same time that the PATRIOT Act was passed in October 2001, President Bush began a campaign of massive spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA), conducted without any court warrants or other judicial review. As Lindorff notes, the campaign “was and remains a programme that is clearly aimed at American dissidents and the administration’s political opponents, since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) would never have raised objections to spying on potential terrorists.”

This, and other government spying programmes, have resulted in the Bush administration having a list now of some 325,000 “suspected terrorists”!

In October 2006, Bush and Cheney, with the help of a compliant Republican-controlled Congress (as it then was, before the November 2006 mid-term congressional elections in which the Democratic Party won control of both the Senate and House of Representatives), put in place some key elements needed for a military putsch.

As Lindorff notes, “There was the overturning of the venerable Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which barred the use of active duty military inside the United States for police-type functions, and the revision of the Insurrection Act, so as to empower the president to take control of National Guard units in the 50 states even over the objections of the governors of those states.”

Put this together, says Lindorff, “with the wholly secret construction now under way - courtesy of a $ 385-million grant by the US Army Corps of Engineers to Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc - of detention camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people, and a recent report that the Pentagon has a document, dated June 1, 2007, classified Top Secret, which declares there to be a developing ‘insurgency’ within the US, and which lays out a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign against legal dissent, and you have all the ingredients for a military takeover of the United States.”

It is no coincidence that the contract for the building of detention camps in the US has been awarded to Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), the construction subsidiary of Houston-based oil services giant Halliburton Corporation. Before Dick Cheney became George W. Bush’s running mate in the 2000 presidential campaign, he was Halliburton’s CEO for five years (1995-2000). When Cheney left Halliburton, he was given a $ 37 million severance package by Halliburton and continues to receive $ 100,000 a year from the company under a deferred payment arrangement. He also has stock options worth $ 18 million in Halliburton. The company’s share price has shot up over the last four years as the result of the huge profits it has earned from well over $ 12 billion worth of reconstruction, supply and services contracts it has been awarded in Iraq by the Bush administration through a manifestly non-transparent no-bid process. If Cheney were to cash in his stock option today, he would earn a windfall profit of more than $ 49 million.

Says Lindorff, “As we (Americans) go about our daily lives - our shopping, our escapist movie watching, and even our protesting and political organising - we need to be aware there is a real risk it could all blow up, and that we could find ourselves facing armed, uniformed troops at our doors.”

Former Reagan-era associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein is not an alarmist. He says he doesn’t see martial law in the US coming tomorrow. But he is also realistic. He says, “This is all sitting around like a loaded gun waiting to go off. I think the risk of martial law is trivial right now, but the minute there is a terrorist attack, then it is real. And it stays with us after Bush and Cheney are gone, because terrorism stays with us forever.”

Bush claims that the 2001 AUMF makes him commander-in-chief of a “borderless, endless war on terror.” It may be significant that Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate for president, has called for the revocation of the 2002 AUMF against Iraq, but not for the revocation of the 2001 AUMF.

As Locke notes in his article in The Seattle Post Intelligencer, the US “media are also speaking these days of a looming constitutional crisis as committee chairs in the House and Senate confront a White House refusal to provide requested documents regarding the firings of US attorneys by the Justice Department.”

by Kaleem Omar

HELSINKI, Finland (CNN) -- At least one person has been killed in a school shooting in Finland, CNN has learned.

The headmaster of the school in Tuusula, near Helsinki, is reported to have died in the attack, according to a reporter for CNN affiliate station MTV.

Some media reports have put the number of dead as being at least three. Police are telling reporters on the ground that at least one person is dead with several others injured

Jarkko Sipila, a reporter with MTV, told CNN that the shooting happened around noon Finnish time (10:00 GMT) in the quiet town around 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Helsinki.

He said that at least four people had suffered gunshot wounds and that others had been injured by shattered glass.

Sipila said the gunman is believed to be an 18-year-old student and to currently be holed up inside the school, the channel said.

Local media say that police have surrounded and sealed off the school. Some pupils are said to still be in the school, although it is unclear whether the gunman has any hostages.

The Associated Press reported Heidi Hagman, assistant to the municipality director for Tuusula as saying that: "Some of the pupils have managed to escape from the school, but others are still inside."

The school is believed, according to local media, to be Jokela High School, attended by more than 400 students, aged between 12 and 18