The Guardian

Condoleezza Rice ordered George Bush not to return to Washington after the 9/11 attacks before hanging up the phone, the former national security adviser has revealed in a documentary interview.

In a heated exchange, Ms Rice had to argue with the US President in Florida not to return to the White House because it was a potential terrorist target.

She told the Channel 4 documentary: “The President got on the phone and he said: ‘I’m coming back’.

“I said: ‘You cannot come back here. The United States of America is under attack, you have to go to safety. We don’t know what is going on here’. He said: ‘I’m coming back’. I said: ‘You can’t’.

“I said to him in a raised voice, and I had never raised my voice to the president before, I said: ‘You cannot come back here’. I hung up.

“The president was quite annoyed with me to say the least.

“I’ve known the president a long time and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to be there at the helm of the ship.”

And it get worse….the bullshit is astounding….who coulda known.

Will Tony love Jeb?

Surviving Jeb Bush

Dear Sir,

How splendid it is to see the flower of British manhood wiping itself out with such pluck and tenacity.
Britain need have no fear with leaders of this calibre. If only a few of the so-called working classes would destroy themselves so sportingly.

Yours etc.,
Brigadier Mannering Smith-Smith-Smith etc.

(BTW, I bought an eight-pack of Bounty paper towels Saturday, and returned them the next day. After I opened them, I detected a distinctly unpleasant aroma. I strongly encourage anyone who happens to purchase a multi-pack of Bounty paper towels who smells an odor of bitter tea to do the same.)

the world had to be made anew and … it had to be done by force and with urgency

Sounds very much like Pope Urban II’s Clermont speech in 1095 launching the Crusades. Of course Tony ‘Opus Die” Blair would love that from Pope Dick I and his favourite acolyte ‘W’. A new Crusade, wow! a chance to kill those godless Moslems.

I swear the world would be a more peaceful place if the damn religious fantasists would just vanish, poof, no more fairies in the air being used as an excuse for killing, no more killing on Saturday and absolution on Sunday, no more hating the other guy because his fantasy is not the same as your fantasy no more “my fairy is better than your fairy”.

Reality may be a bit harsh at times but surely it is better than living in a dream world full of hate.

Happy Labor Day, pups. I was hoping that we’d be spared the worst of Monday on this Labor Day, but alas that is not to be. The Pasty Little Putz is here to cast a pall over the day. In “Paranoid About Paranoia” he babbles that obsessing about extremists and conspiracy theories, on the right and on the left, is often a way for the elites to gloss over their own failures. Typical. Prof. Krugman, in “1938 in 2010,” says the inadequacy of the Obama administration’s initial economic stimulus has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap.

Here they are.

The coffee and tea are ready, the cold drinks are in the fridge, and I’ve got chocolate croissants and fresh raspberries to nibble on. The only thing I have on the agenda today is one or two loads of laundry and dosing the cats with flea medicine, so I’m looking forward to reading and napping and generally doing not much. Have a great Labor Day.

Shorter Poodle: I did not have sex with that intelligence.

Dick Cheney is insane.

An insane megalomaniac who scared people in front of the curtain just like the story of OZ, except with real dead people instead of witches.

He’s still liable for murder of prisoners under questioning Mr. holder.

The chicken shits that run around inside the White House, pretending to run the government, are real scared of the disgusting, worthless, dumb ass dick cheney, a traitor without equal short of Benedict Arnold.

There have been numerous stalwart, forthright, and reasonable British Prime Ministers over the years.

Tony wasn’t one of them.

When Clinton was prez, I admired Blair. Turns out he’s just a star-fucker.

Swim is up…

I think it is fair to say that America has touched Tony Blair, too often and quite inappropriately

.

I think it is fair to say that that’s a pretty good line.

This creature is so obviously a toady. One must recall seeing Question Period from the floor of the British Parliament and his superior, smug responses. He epitomizes everything one conjures up when you think of the Upper Crust Brit.

Or, as Tom Robbins wrote, “Religion is not the opiate of the people, it is the cyanide of the people.”

It’s not Bounty. It’s Brawny that smells like tea.

Sorry, that’s what I meant to say, too early, I guess. Paper towels with the lumberjack, &c. Thanks, you are a gentlewoman and a scholar.

What did Tony know and when did he know it?

For the hundreds of hedge funds caught up in the collapse of Lehman Brothers International’s prime brokerage, it might take years to claw back securities entrusted as collateral. Some face destruction through rehypothecation. It’s the first case of its type, and now the entire structure of prime brokerage is under scrutiny.

- from “Prime brokerage: The day the music stopped,” Nov. 2008, EuroMoney.com, Helen Avery

One can appreciate Helen Avery‘s snarkiness on the matter:

Helen joined Euromoney in December 2003 to cover private banking in a bid for free trips to the Cayman Islands. After one year and no invites to Caribbean tax havens, she changed beat to cover alternative investments.

Certain that there were more naughty hedge funds in the US than Europe, she moved to New York in early 2006, where she is now US editor. Before joining Euromoney, Helen was a reporter with IPE (Investments & Pensions Europe) covering fund management and pensions regulation. She also worked for the International Financial Review (IFR) writing about debt capital markets.

Finger-pointing … (from “City in danger of falling victim to EU wiles and becoming another Antwerp,” May 2009, The Telegraph) –

There was eerie resonance to last week when the EU unleashed its assault on Britain’s hedge funds and private equity. Those behind this drive are well aware that hedge funds were no more than bit players in the credit bubble. The real villains were banks with 30 to 50 times leverage and we know from the IMF that Europe’s banks were the worst with their off-books “conduits”.

Given that 80pc of Europe’s hedge business sits in Mayfair, the latest EU directive is a discriminatory political attack on the City and almost certainly the start of something broader and nastier. Powerful forces in Paris, Berlin, and the EU institutions have long held a repressed urge to break the City’s hold on chunks of global finance, from bonds to currencies and metals. Some wish to shut “Le Casino” altogether. They at last have the chance to act on it.

More finger-pointing (from “Eve of Destruction 2,” Mar. 2009, Belmont Club) –

Think of the various less-than-transparent actors that have set up shop in London

- Many sovereign wealth funds.
- A lot of the SIVs set up by US (and European) banks were legally domiciled in the UK
- Some credit hedge funds
- And most importantly, a host of European banks with large dollar books (think of them as badly regulated credit hedge funds) ran a large part of the dollar exposure through London.

Fast-forward to this year …

“EU to get tough with hedge funds and private equity,” May 2010, The Guardian

“London’s Cayman Island: The Empire of the Hedge Funds,” Sept. 2010

It’s telling we have no Truth Commissions … on any important questions.