Fletch at A Smoky Mountain Journal has some great photography of fall in the Smokies [dial-up alert: a longish download].
Not only has Fletch compiled some nice pictures, but he’s also found the WMDs! I think he should get a cut from the Iraq arms inspector’s budget.

Does it seem like you’re paying too much at the pump? Sometimes it feels that way here, where gas has recently been in the $1.40-$1.50/gallon range. But it turns out things could be worse. I could be the U.S. government, purchasing gas from a friendly Halliburton station in Iraq:

A Democratic lawmaker yesterday accused Halliburton, the Texas oil services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, of overcharging the US government for gasoline the firm imports into Iraq.
Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, has a contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild Iraq’s oil sector, which has included importing gasoline products in short supply to the oil-rich nation.
“Millions of Americans want to help Iraqis but they don’t want to be fleeced [by Halliburton],” Representative Henry Waxman of California said at a news conference.
Waxman said Army documents showed that as of Sept. 18, the United States had paid Halliburton $300 million to import about 190 million gallons of gasoline into Iraq. Halliburton charged an average price of $1.59 per gallon, excluding the company’s fee of 2 percent to 7 percent, said Waxman.
He said the average wholesale cost of gasoline during that period in the Middle East was about 71 cents a gallon, a figure an oil industry source told Reuters was accurate. That meant Halliburton was charging more than 90 cents a gallon to transport fuel into Iraq from Kuwait.
“When we checked with independent experts to see if this fee was reasonable, they were stunned,” said Waxman, saying a reasonable transport cost would be 10 to 25 cents per gallon.

Taking the price at the high end of the range, that works out to be a $0.65/gallon Halliburton surcharge. But hey, I’m sure the service is extra good. Or the former CEO benefits are good. Or something.
Via No More Mister Nice Blog.

On Monday, Rep. George Nethercutt had this to say (via Talking Points Memo):

“The story of what we’ve done in the postwar period is remarkable,” Nethercutt, R-Wash., told an audience of 65 at a noon meeting at the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.
“It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.”

Afterward, Nethercutt reportedly added that “he did not want any more soldiers to be killed”–a good qualifier to add as you’re seeking elective office.
Nethercutt is but one of the pro-Iraq war proponents who have engaged in a recent campaign, lead by President Bush, to blame the media for America’s faltering support for our Iraq policy:

In one of the television interviews, Bush vented some pique at major television stations and big-city newspapers for focusing as he saw it on the negative.
He referred to such media as a “filter” that he says has given short shrift to what he sees as the administration’s accomplishments in Iraq.
“Sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people,” Bush told Hearst-Argyle Television, which owns local affiliate stations from coast to coast in the United States.

The crux of this type of complaint against the media is that there are too many bad stories about Iraq, and not enough good ones.
Most people will agree that the media should be presenting a balanced picture of developments in Iraq. And that probably entails more “success” stories on the progress of rebuilding. A primary reason we don’t see more of those now is basic economics–the American public isn’t very interested in the physical rebuilding of Iraq. Any network that runs extended segments on the restoration of Iraq’s power grid is embarking on a ratings free fall.
As for the supposed overemphasis on bad news, is this criticism fair? The negative coverage has had two main themes: American casualties and the cost of occupation/rebuilding. Reporting on government spending has long been a media staple. Although war proponents may object to the questioning of spending on this narrow issue, it’s not going to go away–people are always interested in where taxpayer money goes.
What about the casualty coverage? Has that been overblown? I don’t think so. As one news analyst recently asked: on which page of the paper should the story of an American being killed go? Page 1 or page 17? I think the answer to that is pretty clear. The Bush administration may want to downplay the shedding of American blood, but it’s going to remain in the spotlight.
In short, Bush et al. complain about the filter, and there may something to that. But there are institutional reasons which account for the coverage we see. As much as the administration may not like it, we’re going to continue seeing more of the negative than the positive from Iraq.

Looks like not too many people want to mess with the smallpox virus:

Less than a year after President Bush announced a smallpox vaccination plan to protect Americans in the event of a terrorist attack, a fraction of the expected number of health workers have been immunized and the much ballyhooed program is dead in the water.
Federal health officials say they’re not ready to declare the program dead, but they readily acknowledge it’s ailing.
“The fact is, it’s ceased,” says Ray Strikas of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “not that anyone’s issued an edict to say stop.”
The smallpox vaccination program was a central part of the Bush administration’s plan to protect the nation against bioterrorist threats in the wake of 9/11.

Predictably, administrators are trying to put a rosy spin on the program’s limited acceptance:

Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says the plan has accomplished what it set out to do. “We are pleased that the program has inoculated enough first responders and health care workers that could respond should there be an outbreak of smallpox,” he says.

But the number of people vaccinated is far less than health officials planned for:

States initially told the CDC that they expected to administer 450,000 doses to health workers who would form response teams ready to care for patients infected with the deadly virus. Though the CDC has shipped 291,400 doses, at last count, 38,549 people had been vaccinated.

The risks of the smallpox vaccine have been fairly-widely known. But I suspect the response rate would have been much higher had we had another domestic terrorist attack since 9/11.
In the grand scheme of things, 38,000 doesn’t seem like a whole lot of health care workers. Hopefully we won’t have an outbreak which makes it an issue.

. . . is up at Les Jones Blog.