I'm leaving North Street and heading a few blocks up Richmond into a much nicer apartment. the one we're in now is dirty, small, and a haven for too many crackheads. Molly and I are moving into a much bigger and nicer place now.

A picture of the new apartment on Richmond.



It has a porch in the back, off-street parking, all utilities and appliances included, 2 bedrooms, a big living-room, a real kitchen with counters and storage, and it's in a nice building, not like this one.
Very excited, I can't wait to have a porch and more space, it's going to be a good summer.

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I'd also like to mention one of my new favorite beverages,
Wild Irish Rose. one bottle costs a whopping $3.50, and after about half of it you start slurring your words. It's a red wine with 18% alcohol, but it's not bitter or cough syrupy, it's like a light sherry, easy to drink. Great for bonfire parties, camping, and barbecues. it's my fun summer wine.




At this point in the bottle Molly and I were too drunk to stay inside, so we went for a drunken stroll around the neighborhood. it was too fun, we aren't lightweights, this is just good wine.

Thoughts,
ok supply and demand right, if America raised the fuel efficiency standards on vehicles we would all save money. if there was some incentive for car companies to make more fuel efficient cars, or if there was an incentive for people to buy more efficient cars, the price of gas would go down and everyone would save money. do you think that this is a good use for government?
We need to demand that car companies make more fuel efficient cars. The fuel efficiency standards haven't been raised since the 1970s, raise them 2-6 mpg and we'll be saving a lot of oil and paying a shit load less for gas as a nation. We will be using less gas because we have switched to more fuel efficient cars.
Thoughts from you guys?

I'm tired of the short term political 'solutions' to the increase in gas prices. Artificially lowering the price of gas by giving a gas tax holiday, or rebate checks, and all the other bs will just screw up supply and demand, and ignore the real issue of declining fossil fuel supplies. I'm also pissed that we are giving tax breaks to the richest company in the world Exxon-Mobil, which has made record profits the past 6 years straight, but they still get breaks from the government.

La Times sums it up well


Oil and politics don't mix
April 28, 2006

NO DOUBT PRESIDENT BUSH hoped his Tuesday speech to the Renewable Fuels Assn. would mollify grumpy Americans tired of high gas prices. But by proposing dubious policies that - at best - might save a few cents per gallon in the short term, while doing little to address the underlying problem of U.S. oil dependence, the president did something worse than nothing: He ushered in a silly season for wrongheaded, economically ignorant proposals by headline-chasing politicians.

Just a few short months ago, Bush was paying lip service to addressing the country's oil "addiction." On Tuesday, he offered us gas junkies a cheaper, faster fix by deferring new deposits to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And now, after a week's worth of 1970s-style economic rhetoric, the prospects for successful detox seem all the more distant as public officials scramble to follow the president's lead in dreaming up their own "solutions" to the oil market. Like most insta-legislation rushed to the floor in the wake of controversial news - think Terri Schiavo - the gas-price proposals should be ignored and scorned.

Take the calls to root out alleged misdeeds by oil companies. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wants to look at Big Oil's tax returns "to make sure [they] aren't taking a speed pass by the tax man." Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) proposed breaking up the industry altogether. And state officials want their piece of the witch hunt too. On Tuesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he had sicced the California Energy Commission on the case. In Arkansas, a candidate for attorney general also pledged to investigate oil companies, even though that state's anti-gouging law only applies during emergencies.

Everyone likes to see a villain squirm. The problem is, the Federal Trade Commission already has been sniffing out price gouging in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and has yet to uncover one instance of illegal behavior. Election-year investigations into marketwide collusion and gouging are window dressing, nothing more.

Worse are renewed calls to authorize drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to relax environmental restrictions on polluting refineries. A still-lower circle of populist hell is reserved for embarrassingly baldfaced sops to voters, such as the Senate's $100 taxpayer refund. Or that body's proposal to increase farm energy subsidies by $1.5 billion. Or its push for a 60-day federal gas tax holiday.

All of these proposals would provide scant relief even while encouraging continued fuel overuse. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before Congress on Thursday, "Unfortunately, there's nothing, really, that can be done that's going to affect energy prices or gasoline prices in the very short run."

Sensible policy would focus on curbing consumption. Indeed, if politicians were being honest about breaking the addiction, they'd admit that it might make sense to hope that gas prices stay high - which would drive down demand and perhaps spur businesses to get real about alternative fuel technologies and improved auto mileage.

As a Texas governor running for president wisely said in 2000, the "Strategic Reserve should not be used as an attempt to drive down oil prices right before an election."

You think I'm kidding don't you?



On June 2 the the pentagon will test a 700 ton bomb at their Nevada testing site. This is the largest open air explosion ever at the site, no others come close. This test just happens to be called called "Devine Strake" seriously. what the hell is wrong with the people in our government? apparently they are all about the holy war metaphors.

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From Washington Post
"This is the largest single explosive we could imagine doing," said James A. Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is conducting the test.

The June test will detonate 700 tons of heavy ammonium nitrate-fuel oil emulsion -- creating a blast equivalent to 593 tons of TNT -- in a 36-foot-deep hole near a tunnel in the center of the Nevada Test Site, according to official reports. It aims to allow scientists to model the type of ground shock that will be created, and to weigh the effectiveness of such a weapon against its collateral impact.

Tyler Drumheller, the CIA's number one agent in europe during the lead up to the war has recently retired, and has just come forward to talk about how the Bush administration ignored evidence that Saddam had no WMD.

For example he says that in the lead up to the Iraq War, the CIA got Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, to cooperate with them by making a deal. George Tenet went to the whitehouse to deliver the good news to the president VP and other top officials and they were very excited about the success. until the report came back from this new spy that Iraq didn't have any WMD, and then the administration decided it wasn't worth their time, they didn't want any additional data from Sabri.

"The [White House] group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "



I'll just post the full story here it's short:

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A Spy Speaks Out
April 21, 2006
Source

(CBS) A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war charges the White House with ignoring intelligence that said there were no weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program in Iraq.

The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence - which the administration chose to ignore.

Drumheller talks to 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley in his first television interview this Sunday, April 23 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Drumheller, who retired last year, says the White House ignored crucial information from a high and credible source. The source was Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, with whom U.S. spies had made a deal.

When CIA Director George Tenet delivered this news to the president, the vice president and other high ranking officials, they were excited - but not for long.

"[The source] told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," says Drumheller. "The [White House] group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "

They didn't want any additional data from Sabri because, says Drumheller: "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy."

The White House declined to respond to this charge, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stated that Sabri was just one source and therefore not reliable.

Drumheller says the administration routinely relied on single sources - when those single sources confirmed what the White House wanted to hear.

"They certainly took information that came from single sources on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all," he says. The "yellowcake story" refers to a report the CIA received in late 2001 alleging that Iraq had purchased 500 tons of uranium from Africa, presumably to build a nuclear bomb.

Many in the CIA doubted the uranium report from the beginning, and continued to doubt it, even as White House speechwriters tried to include the report in the president's speeches.

In a major speech the president was scheduled to give in Cincinnati, the leadership of the CIA intervened directly to remove the uranium report from the speech. But that didn't stop it from making it into the president's State of the Union address a short time later.
"As a British report," says Drumheller. A senior CIA official signed off on the speech only because the uranium reference was attributed to the British.

"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure. ... This was a policy failure. ... I think, over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time," Drumheller tells Bradley.