For 52 minutes Saturday, I witnessed the worst football game ever played by a major college undefeated team as UCLA managed to dig themselves deep into a well-deserved 24-3 hole. A deader bunch of losers I couldn't imagine. "Who are these imposters, where are you holding my 7-0 team, and how much do you want for them?" I shouted. I was packed and ready to make a run for the car but my son insisted on seeing the bitter end. For the next 8 minutes, I witnessed something truly extraordinary...
Oct 29, 11:21 PM (ET)
STANFORD, Calif. (AP) - Maurice Drew and Marcedes Lewis sat at their lockers and looked at each other in disbelief. UCLA was down and disheveled at halftime, its powerful offense sputtering and its perfect season in big trouble. [nah! They were only down 7-3 at halftime, but let's not quibble...]
Two hours later, Drew and Lewis looked at each other again with even more amazement - because UCLA was still unbeaten, thanks to the cardiac Bruins' most unlikely escape yet.
Brandon Breazell caught a 23-yard TD pass from Drew Olson in overtime after No. 8 UCLA scored 21 points in the final 7:04 of regulation to stun Stanford 30-27 on Saturday.
UCLA (8-0, 4-0 Pac-10) has specialized in fantastic finishes during conference play, rallying from double-digit deficits against Washington, California and Washington State earlier in October - but none was as dramatic or unlikely as the Bruins' escape from Stanford Stadium.
"It doesn't seem real. I still can't believe what we did," said Drew, who ran for two late scores, including a 1-yard tumble across the goal line with 46 seconds left to force OT.
Olson, soundly outplayed in the first 52 minutes by workout buddy Trent Edwards, went 24-of-35 for 293 yards and two TDs while leading his latest jaw-dropping comeback. He led fourth-quarter scoring drives of 65, 72 and 66 yards - and all three took a combined 3:40.
Joe Cowan caught a 31-yard TD pass with 4:43 to play, and Drew shook off a bruised right knee to score on UCLA's final play of regulation. Though Olson celebrated wildly along with his teammates, the quarterback knew his team might not have deserved its outrageous fortune.
"For 3? quarters, we played horrible football," Olson said. "I was surprised we were only down 7-3 at halftime. I've got no explanation for this."
UCLA 30, Stanford 27, OT
Has there ever been a season of finishes like this?
Monday, October 31, 2005
Thursday, October 27, 2005
None dare call it treason
(... but a rose by any other name wouldn't smell this bad)
I suspect the Plame leak was just someone forgetting what was classified when smearing yet another enemy to a friendly reporter. Obstruction of Justice is also naughty but probably not impeachable.
What was really, REALLY bad was what triggered the whole sordid chain of events -- the administration (maybe Michael Ledeen) forged documents purporting to show Saddam got uranium from Niger and fed them to allied intelligence agencies, who dutifully fed it back to the CIA so we could go to war under false pretenses!
This is the most treasonous act in US history since the Rosenbergs, and certainly qualifies as a High Crime and Misdemeanor.
http://caribmon.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/19/41429/846 ">Politics - World - s.f. bayarea forums - craigslist: "None dare call it treason < RoughJustice > 10/27 13:54:00
I suspect the Plame leak was just someone forgetting what was classified when smearing yet another enemy to a friendly reporter. Obstruction of Justice is also naughty but probably not impeachable.
What was really, REALLY bad was what triggered the whole sordid chain of events -- the administration (maybe Michael Ledeen) forged documents purporting to show Saddam got uranium from Niger and fed them to allied intelligence agencies, who dutifully fed it back to the CIA so we could go to war under false pretenses!
This is the most treasonous act in US history since the Rosenbergs, and certainly qualifies as a High Crime and Misdemeanor.
http://caribmon.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/19/41429/846 "
I suspect the Plame leak was just someone forgetting what was classified when smearing yet another enemy to a friendly reporter. Obstruction of Justice is also naughty but probably not impeachable.
What was really, REALLY bad was what triggered the whole sordid chain of events -- the administration (maybe Michael Ledeen) forged documents purporting to show Saddam got uranium from Niger and fed them to allied intelligence agencies, who dutifully fed it back to the CIA so we could go to war under false pretenses!
This is the most treasonous act in US history since the Rosenbergs, and certainly qualifies as a High Crime and Misdemeanor.
http://caribmon.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/19/41429/846 ">Politics - World - s.f. bayarea forums - craigslist: "None dare call it treason < RoughJustice > 10/27 13:54:00
I suspect the Plame leak was just someone forgetting what was classified when smearing yet another enemy to a friendly reporter. Obstruction of Justice is also naughty but probably not impeachable.
What was really, REALLY bad was what triggered the whole sordid chain of events -- the administration (maybe Michael Ledeen) forged documents purporting to show Saddam got uranium from Niger and fed them to allied intelligence agencies, who dutifully fed it back to the CIA so we could go to war under false pretenses!
This is the most treasonous act in US history since the Rosenbergs, and certainly qualifies as a High Crime and Misdemeanor.
http://caribmon.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/19/41429/846 "
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
AlterNet: War on Iraq: Who Forged the Niger Documents?
Vincent Cannistaro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan:
... The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.
[Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ... ]
I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case ...
[If I said “Michael Ledeen” ...?]
You’d be very close . . .
[do you believe that this process worked out in such a way to exonerate the White House and to lay the blame with the wrong . . .]
I think that’s certainly the objective. To lay it off to the intelligence community. But, it’s very disingenuous. It’s like saying, OK, the intelligence community that we whipped into a frenzy in order to provide information to sustain our policy conclusions that Saddam had a WMD program and that he was an imminent danger — that intelligence community provided information that now turns out not to be correct. And that’s why we were misled into saying what we did say, and doing what we did do. That’s very disingenuous, because that’s not the case at all.
The case was that this was not a fact-based policy that the U.S. government adopted. It was a policy-based decision that drove the intelligence, and not the other way around...You had a lot of people who played along to get along, and they understood that in that kind of administration, you couldn’t say exactly what it is that you really believed.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21704/?comments=view&cID=1127&pID=1077#c1127
... The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.
[Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ... ]
I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case ...
[If I said “Michael Ledeen” ...?]
You’d be very close . . .
[do you believe that this process worked out in such a way to exonerate the White House and to lay the blame with the wrong . . .]
I think that’s certainly the objective. To lay it off to the intelligence community. But, it’s very disingenuous. It’s like saying, OK, the intelligence community that we whipped into a frenzy in order to provide information to sustain our policy conclusions that Saddam had a WMD program and that he was an imminent danger — that intelligence community provided information that now turns out not to be correct. And that’s why we were misled into saying what we did say, and doing what we did do. That’s very disingenuous, because that’s not the case at all.
The case was that this was not a fact-based policy that the U.S. government adopted. It was a policy-based decision that drove the intelligence, and not the other way around...You had a lot of people who played along to get along, and they understood that in that kind of administration, you couldn’t say exactly what it is that you really believed.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21704/?comments=view&cID=1127&pID=1077#c1127
Thursday, October 20, 2005
cabal hijacked US foreign policy
Cheney cabal hijacked US foreign policy
By Edward Alden in Washington
Published: October 20 2005 00:00 | Last updated: October 20 2005 00:19
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.
In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”
Transcript: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.
It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.
“If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.”
The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.
Among his other charges:
¦ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”
¦ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.
¦ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.
Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.
“There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.”
By Edward Alden in Washington
Published: October 20 2005 00:00 | Last updated: October 20 2005 00:19
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.
In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”
Transcript: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.
It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.
“If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.”
The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.
Among his other charges:
¦ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”
¦ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.
¦ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.
Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.
“There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.”
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