Dear Scarlett,

Thank you for stopping by and taking the time to comment on this post. I've always found it difficult to reply to talking points tossed like muck from a bucket. The hope, I know, is that something . . . anything will hit and while the target is distracted, ya hit ‘em with another bucketful.

So I'm not going to bother trying to untangle your screeds. What I am going to do, however, is pinpoint a few items I've chosen to pull out and address only them.

You wrote:

Bush cut funds that were intended to fix the problems with the levees and diverted that money to the middle east where it ended up in the hands of those at Haliburton which also got a no-bid contract to rebuild NO.

No. But I'm only going to talk about Halliburton's "no-bid" contracts.

The work Halliburton did and is doing in the middle east, and the projects it's currently working on in New Orleans were awarded under the U.S. Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. Known as LOGCAP, it is a competitively-awarded umbrella contract for specific items and services. Please see here for a quick overview of the program's history.

Halliburton is NOT rebuilding New Orleans. In Katrina's wake it is repairing the Navy's facilities and piers along the Gulf Coast. The other emergency project was and is repairing the water pumps in New Orleans so that it can be emptied out. (See here and here.)

You wrote:

The Bush administration gave millions in aid to the TALIBAN and members of the Taliban visited Washington and engaged in negotitions with the Bush adm for a pipeline thru Afganistan. Bush promised them a "carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs" for the pipeline.

I'll correct only one thing here. It was the Clinton Administration. In 1997 . . .

"[w]hile Afghanistan became a sanctuary for al Qaeda, the State Department’s interest in Afghanistan remained limited. Initially after the Taliban’s rise, some State diplomats were, as one official said to us, willing to “give the Taliban a chance” because it might be able to bring stability to Afghanistan. A secondary consideration was that stability would allow an oil pipeline to be built through the country, a project to be managed by the Union Oil Company of California, or UNOCAL." -- 9-11 Commission

As for your contention, Scarlett, that Saddam shoulda been left alone 'cause he never hurt or killed nobody in the US . . . Hussein and Terror.

Interesting stuff about the links to Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center. The one in 1993.

If you're not familiar with that one, google it!