It's well known that the U.S. supplies the Israelis with much of their military hardware. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has provided about $53 billion in military aid to Israel. What's not well known is that since 2004, U.S. taxpayers have paid to supply over 500 million gallons of refined oil products -- worth about $1.1 billion –- to the Israeli military. While a handful of countries get motor fuel from the U.S., they receive only a fraction of the fuel that Israel does -- fuel now being used by Israeli fighter jets, helicopters and tanks to battle Hamas.

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The trend lines of the problem have gone from bad to worse. During the first two years of the war, IEDs accounted for just over 20 percent of all U.S. soldier deaths. Over the past year, that percentage has been about 50 percent, according to data compiled by the Brookings Institution. In addition, half of all U.S. soldier injuries in Iraq are caused by IEDs.

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During the run-up to the war, the Bush administration denied that oil was a factor in its desire to oust Saddam Hussein from power: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, during a November 2002 interview with CBS News' Steve Kroft, declared that the approaching U.S. invasion had "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." But four months later, as U.S. troops seized Iraq's oil infrastructure and closed in on Baghdad, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (now the president of the World Bank) made it clear that Iraq's oil was going to save American taxpayers a lot of money. Wolfowitz told Congress on March 27, 2003, that the U.S. was "dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." He added that Iraq's oil revenues could "bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years."

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On Oct. 27, an announcement by the White House made it clear that despite the disastrous intelligence failures that have been driving Bush's policies over the past few years, he's not going to put up with any independent voices on the PFIAB, especially from anyone who might actually know something about foreign intelligence, like, say, Brent Scowcroft.

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We'd better get ready, because it's probably on the way. On Monday, the price of diesel reached an all-time high of $3.21 per gallon, and that may be just the beginning of a long-term rise. Over the next 18 months or so, parts of the country could be seeing shortages of certain diesel blends, and the resultant price spikes. And that means more bad news for American consumers. America's economy runs on diesel; nearly 80 percent of U.S. communities get their goods solely by truck. As diesel prices go up, so will prices for goods at Quickie Pickie, Wal-Mart, and practically every other commercial outlet. Right now, most Americans are focused on sticker shock at the gas pump, but higher diesel prices will mean higher prices for many things we buy, from bananas and Starbucks coffee, to newspapers and orange juice.

Alas, we can't blame Hurricanes Katrina and Rita for the looming price spike. Although 10 refineries (accounting for about 14 percent of domestic capacity) remain shut down from the storms, the coming diesel disaster will be caused by several other things that have nothing to do with the weather. Those factors include stringent new federal regulations on sulfur content in motor fuel, a global shortage of refining capacity, and soaring demand for diesel, both in the United States and around the globe.

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Both Texans will be tarred by history for having waged disastrous, unwinnable wars. Both holed up at their Texas ranches whenever they wanted out of Washington. Both were surrounded by a coterie of hawks who believed that America's techno-military machine could prevail over any enemy. Johnson had Robert McNamara as defense secretary. Bush has McNamara's body double: Donald Rumsfeld, a man whose demeanor, defiance and even eyeglasses are the spitting images of his Pentagon predecessor from 37 years ago.

There are other similarities between Bush and Johnson: their personal charm, their predilection for cowboy hats, their ability to dial up their "Texan-ness" whenever the moment required. They are even twins in the polls: A recent Newsweek poll shows that just 34 percent of Americans approve of Bush's handling of the Iraq war -- a number that is almost identical to the 32 percent who approved of LBJ's handling of Vietnam back in early 1968.

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Yes, Rove is the perfect target for the Democrats. Yes, the Democrats would like nothing better than to sully the reputation of the man who has been kicking their butts for years. And yes, there are questions about exactly what Rove told Matthew Cooper and possibly other reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame. But for many reasons, Bush cannot dump Rove.

Reason No. 1: Firing Rove would be perceived as an admission by George W. that things are amiss in his administration. The hallmark of Bush's presidency has been its ability -- when faced with adversity or controversy about a war, a policy or an individual -- to simply ignore the matter and stick to its talking points.

Look at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: A man whose many miscues should long ago have consigned him to retirement is now halfway through his fifth year in the top job at the Pentagon. Need another example of the Bush White House's method of turning failures into press events? Then recall that it was just seven months ago that Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on three characters who had leading roles in the Iraq debacle: Gen. Tommy Franks, George Tenet and Paul Bremer.

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The crusade for energy independence reached another crescendo last week, when the House voted to approve some $8.1 billion in tax breaks for the mightily struggling energy industry. Let's see, during the first quarter of this year, Exxon Mobil's profits jumped 44 percent. Royal Dutch/Shell's profits were up 42 percent while Marathon Oil's profits were up a measly 26 percent. And there's this news: According to John S. Herold Inc., a research-only firm, five of the country's biggest oil and gas companies had a total of some $51.4 billion in cash on hand at the end of 2004.

Never mind the absurdity of tax breaks for a sector that's printing money. The main problem with the energy bill is that it's being sold as a magic potion that will help America wean itself from foreign sources of energy. When that "energy independence" moment occurs, goes the reasoning, America will be a self-sufficient Valhalla with lots of good-paying manufacturing jobs. Farmers will make big profits by growing acre upon acre of corn and other plants that will be turned into oil-replacing, clean-burning ethanol. And American GIs will never again need to visit the Persian Gulf, except, perhaps, on vacation.

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Today, the analysts at Herold -- a research-only firm that issues valuations on several hundred publicly traded energy companies -- are making predictions even bolder than their call on Enron. They have begun estimating when each of the world's biggest energy companies will peak in its ability to produce oil and gas. Herold's work shows that the best minds in the energy industry are accepting the reality that the globe is reaching (or has already reached) the limit of its own ability to produce ever increasing amounts of oil.

Many analysts have estimated when the earth will reach its peak oil production. Others have done estimates on when individual countries will hit their peaks. Herold is the first Wall Street firm to predict when specific energy companies will hit their peaks.

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Retrograde or not, Bush's convincing win over John Kerry means that America's identity has now been subsumed by the Texas worldview. American voters have chosen a government that is militarist, self-absorbed, piously Christian, dominated by big business, generally unconcerned about social inequality, and perfectly happy with regressive taxation. Those characteristics have defined Texas for generations. And now that Bush has regained the White House, the state will accelerate its export of these attitudes to rest of the United States, if not to the rest of the world.

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The bad news from the oil fields continued last week when men loyal to Sadr surrounded several Iraqi government buildings and threatened to attack pipelines and other oil facilities unless the government stopped pumping oil through the pipes that feed Iraq's oil export terminals in the Persian Gulf, Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya. (Mina al-Bakr was built by Halliburton for the new Baathist government in the mid-1970s, when the United States did not have diplomatic relations with Iraq.) The Iraqi government reportedly stopped pumping oil in an effort to stem unrest in Basra, a city that for months has been viewed as more pro-Western than other areas.

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Of course, there are plenty of CEOs that should to be on that list, including Enron's Kenneth Lay, Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Adelphia's John Rigas. While those bosses certainly are being pilloried, Cheney's disastrous five-year-long tenure at Halliburton deserves far more scrutiny than the mainstream business press has bothered to provide.

Cheney's job at Halliburton is particularly newsworthy now that John Kerry has chosen John Edwards as his running mate. The Republicans have already begun hammering Edwards for his work as a trial lawyer; Democrats have an opportunity to bash Cheney's performance at Halliburton. Given the wreckage that Cheney left behind, that record offers a target-rich environment.

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Lay recently told the New York Times that it was a "tougher decision not to indict me than to indict me." Indeed, for the Bush administration, Lay's indictment is the perfect Machiavellian political move. Once the presumably humbled, handcuffed Lay has been paraded in front of the news media, Justice Department prosecutors are likely to give statements to the press saying, in effect, that they're going after all of the Enron miscreants -- even the ones who are friends of President Bush and his father.

But what if Lay responds with his own Machiavellian move? Others crossed by George W. Bush have decided to speak out rather than stand by quietly. Paul O'Neill did so after he was forced out as treasury secretary. The Bush administration's chief of counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, also emerged as a critic. Both men wrote bestselling books and got a measure of revenge. Lay could do the same. And while his brigade of lawyers would obviously advise him to keep quiet, Lay could choose to ignore them. He doesn't have much to lose.

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Four days before Enron Corp. filed for bankruptcy, the Fastow Family Foundation, a nonprofit trust controlled by Fastow, paid more than $13,000 in moving expenses incurred by his parents, Carl and Joan Fastow, who moved from New Jersey to Houston in the summer of 2001.

The expenditure is significant now that federal prosecutors have moved to seize about $37 million in assets held by the Fastow family, a sum that includes $4.6 million held by the Fastow Family Foundation. The use of the foundation's money to pay the moving expenses appears to violate IRS regulations, which prohibit the use of foundation funds for personal expenses.

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Ken Oden, a Democrat who has been the Travis County attorney for 16 years, charged Saturday that Bush's failure to answer some of the questions on his jury questionnaire, coupled with his lawyer's efforts to get Bush excused because he might someday be called on to pardon the offender, was part of an effort to deceive prosecutors and others.

Bush "used his position as governor" to avoid having to answer potentially embarrassing questions about his past, Oden told Salon. "I feel I was directly deceived."

The prosecutor, who handles civil cases as well as misdemeanor criminal cases for the county, said that Thursday's news that Bush pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of driving under the influence in Maine in 1976 caused him to reexamine the 1996 case.

"With all the new information that has come forward, it's logical to see that there may have been motives at work that none of us knew about. But at the time, we were just trying to be courteous to the governor," said Oden.

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The photo tells a great deal about the government's attitude toward the Davidians in the hours after the deadly fire. "All those people may be dead," the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms flag seems to say, "but we won the battle."

By winning the civil trial, the government has prevailed again over the Davidians. But the trial and the verdict have left both sides disappointed. U.S. District Judge Walter Smith Jr. limited both sides to 40 hours of presentation, a ruling that kept mountains of evidence out of court and many pivotal witnesses off the stand. There remains much that the public doesn't know about the deadly standoff, which resulted in the deaths of 80 Branch Davidians -- including 18 children under age 10 -- and four ATF agents.

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The animals' demise has become a central issue in the Branch Davidians' $675 million lawsuit against the federal government because the shooting of the dogs apparently led to the ferocious Feb. 28, 1993 gun battle that left 10 people dead, including four agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and six Davidians. Ever since the shootout, the Davidians and the government have been arguing over which side shot first. And the picture emerging from the trial, now entering its third week, is that when the ATF began killing the dogs, the Davidians believed they were being attacked and began returning fire.

In testimony Wednesday, ATF agent Ken Latimer described the scene at Mount Carmel shortly after he exited a cattle trailer in front of the building. Latimer, who was riding in the second of the two cattle trailers used by the ATF, told the half-full courtroom that he heard sporadic gunfire near the entrance to the building shortly after he got out of the trailer. "At first I thought it was the dogs being shot," Latimer said. A few seconds later, Latimer said a volley of gunfire erupted from inside Mount Carmel.

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And the image of government helicopters firing on her and other Branch Davidians during the initial assault on the sect's home near Waco in 1993 is one Marjorie Thomas can't shake.

Thomas, one of only nine people who escaped from the burning ruins of Mount Carmel during the final hours of the 51-day siege, testified in court Monday that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents fired at her as she looked through the window of her third-floor room on the building's north side during the agency's raid against the Davidians on Feb. 28, 1993.

"I could see the gun from the helicopter, and then he fired," she said. "The bullet came through one of the other windows in the room. We all got down on the floor. By this time, some more of the bullets were coming through the sheetrock and coming across the room."

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Meanwhile, conservatives have taken up for David Koresh and the 80 Branch Davidians who died in Waco in 1993. Why haven't liberals shown the same concern for them? While there are some questions about the conduct of police and prosecutors in the Mumia case, there are many more lingering questions about the police actions taken against Koresh and his followers. For instance: Why did the Department of Justice use tanks against civilians? Why did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms continue with its raid against Koresh when it knew the element of surprise had been lost? Why didn't the ATF simply arrest Koresh when he was shopping in Waco or away from the Mount Carmel compound in the weeks before the February 28, 1993, raid?

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It's odd. Computer engineers have spent 20 years fanatically improving every aspect of the PC: figuring out how to make machines faster, smarter, better looking, better sounding and easier to use. They've done just about everything except make the damn things quiet.

"Sometimes all the noise makes me feel like I'm working pit-side at the Indy 500," says Frank Kurzawa, a computer programmer in Austin, Texas, who operates as many as five computers at a time in his home office. "Since I do it for a living, I take it for granted as one of the penalties of [programming]. It's the price you have to pay for working with computers."

The true noise culprits are, of course, the cooling fans, but without them your computer would probably melt. One fan blows outside air onto the processor; the other pulls hot air out of the PC's power supply to keep the transformer and capacitors from getting too hot. And exacerbating the loudness issue is the intermittent, high-pitched whine of the hard drive.

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