"Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change."

Apparently a guy named Tyler Drumheller just gave a rather important interview to CBS. It seems he was our chief spook in Europe, and he claimed that in early 2002 before the invasion of Iraq that the CIA finally got high-level HUMINT penetration in Iraq, and that Rumsfeld, Cheney et al. were very excited to hear this. That is, they were excited to hear this until the Iraqi declared that there were no WMD or WMD programs active in Iraq at that time. Then they were immediately disinteresed, and claimed that since he was just a single source, that they shouldn't weigh that too heavily, even though they'd been happy enough to accept other single-source inputs that fit their presuppositions. When Mr. Drumheller objected, saying "Hey, what about the intel", the reply was "Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change."

So here's the scary idea. Let's face it, Bush's a theocratic twerp who doesn't even pretend to be a conservative any more. Ok, we were sorta coming to grips with that, and hoping that maybe he hasn't destroyed all the momentum we'd built up on the Republican side of things. But what if the tinfoil asshats on the left are actually correct, and the president really was out for empire? I'm all for what's gone down if the claims really were true to the best of our knowledge at the time, well except for Shit-secki (misspelled on purpose -- he's an ass whose people hated him) getting his successor named years before his retirement because he said the obvious, that we'd need a lot of troops to maintain order. But what if the Bush really had gone into the war on false pretenses? I find that very disturbing. I find it doubly disturbing that I'm not hearing ANY denunciations of this guy's statements in the MSM; I've been waiting for the "ok, he's full of it and here's why", but nothing. Near media-silence. Is this CBS interview total tin-foil-hat and the left-wing twinkies have been wasting my attention or what?

Or, in the immortal words of the bard, whiskey tango foxtrot over.

It's begun ...maybe

This's a snapshot of a weekly US-Dollar <-> Japanese Yen chart. I've been waiting for a month now (since the 3rd solid blue bar from the right) for what just happened yesterday. See the vertical gap? That's called, in typically high-falutin' trader-speak, "gapping down", and is generally the result of traders with pent-up demand to pull the trigger on something all rushing to do it at the same time, sorta like "on your marks, get set, wait for it! wait for it! wait... go!".

The market's been waffling over whether or not we should be having a bear market vis-a-vis the USD or not, with most pressure downwards. Now that Russia has come stating it'll price oil in both Euros and (US)Dollars, with the implication of pricing its oil solely in Euros sometime in the future if it doesn't cause too large a diplomatic row, and with the IMF being asked to request for China to allow the yuan (CNY) to float, this could be the beginning of the end for the post-WWII dollar regime that's been around since Bretton-Woods collapsed.

Or not. The charts never lie, but nor do they predict (ever).

Is this guy a total wingnut, or is what he's saying sensible: you political guys please opine.

Vikram's Weblog - A Journey Through Life: Could George Bush be impeached from presidency ?