More evidence of BushCo living in denial, "U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports." From the same folks who tried to tell BushCo that there was no WMD in Iraq and that they may want to bump up the number of troops being sent to war. If this president were a company CEO, he would've been forced to resign a long time ago.

An interesting "Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention...." in the Washington Post: "Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales appeared to suggest yesterday that the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance operations may extend beyond the outlines that the president acknowledged in mid-December."

BushCo has cut back on auditing of oil companies to insure they don't cheat when it comes to royalty payments. BushCo favors "compliance reviews" but Yusef Robb, a spokesman for California's state controller, said, "Under the compliance review system, if you fill out your fraudulent form correctly, you can get away with the fraud. We know we can't trust companies to do what's right without regular auditing."

Here's an interesting story about how the effects of global warming are killing millions of trees:

Millions of acres of Canada's lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.

..."It's pretty gut-wrenching," said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. "People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It's now."

..."It's a rapid warming" that is increasing the beetles' range, said Carroll. "All the data show there are significant changes over widespread areas that are going to cause us considerable amount of grief. Not only is it coming, it's here."

...The tiny beetle has always lived in high areas from Arizona to northern British Columbia, and occasionally populations have grown in limited outbreaks. In Canada, where the beetle's favored lodgepole pine thrives, it has been controlled by winters with early cold snaps or long killing spells of 20 degrees below zero. But for more than a decade, forestry experts say, the weather here has not been cold enough for long enough to kill the beetle.

Despite Reagan's idiotic quote that trees pollute, the fact is less trees will amount to less oxygen and more toxins in the air. Trees take in pollutants and trap them within their wood. Also, like the beetles, this warming is not allowing for diseases to be killed off via extreme cold. Look forward to more vicious strains of influenza and flu in the near future.