Some of it's hot, some of it's not.

I told Rimone there have been some great news stories in the past few days.

As always, you have to look past Big Name News© because who cares who Pat Robertson or Sam Brownback endorse for president? I don't—except when Keith Olbermann comments:

Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition -- a man who blamed the 9/11 attacks on America and its tolerance of abortion -- apparently now places more trust in preventing future terrorist attacks in Rudolph Giuliani...than he does in the faith he has spent half a century selling as if it were toothpaste.

Some news is just not so hot. But other stories really excite me:

• Jason Leopold spells out Cheney's plans to more easily license dozens of new nuclear plants with practically no public scrutiny. This one's a gigantic blockbuster.

• Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson has this very hot story about the Bush administration's politicization of inspectors general. A sample:

No inspector general has been more criticized for his lack of independent oversight than Robert "Moose" Cobb, who served as associate White House counsel under Alberto Gonzales before being appointed inspector general of NASA in 2002. According to a report by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, an office run by fellow IGs to police the work of their peers, Cobb helped cover up the theft of nearly $2 billion in rocket-engine data from NASA's servers. The council also found that Cobb had tipped off Sean O'Keefe, the head of NASA, to impending FBI search warrants, and sought O'Keefe's input on how he should structure his "independent" audits.

Cobb wasn't nearly so considerate of those under him: According to the council, he berated subordinates as "knuckle-draggers" and "fucksticks," causing more than half of his staff to quit. As his own hand-picked assistant testified before Congress, "Mr. Cobb's arrogance, his abusive, bullying style, absence of managerial experience, limited understanding of investigative processes, egotism and misplaced sense of self-importance make it impossible for him to successfully manage and lead an organization."

Lots of thrills and chills in that one, and how I love it!

• Tom Engelhardt deserves recognition as a great reporter who digs up incredible facts which reveal that no matter what Washington says about troop levels, they plan to keep a vast number of troops in the Middle East until the end of time—and expand our offshore torture prisons:

By the way, don't overlook Guantanamo itself. That crown jewel of our offshore prisons is now a hive of construction activity. Don't even worry about the $10-$12 million that's already being spent to create a semi-permanent "tent city" on an unused runway there in which the U.S. military plans to hold war-crimes trials for some of the prison's detainees; focus instead on the $16.5 million camp that's going to be built elsewhere on the base to house up to "10,000 Caribbean migrants" - just in case, assumedly, something happens in post-Castro Cuba. And that may only be a detention appetizer. The main course could be a $110 million-dollar contract to build a second "compound" that would hold 35,000 more of those "migrants."

Tom's article is a horrifying revelation about America's policy decisions to make war and create detainees long into the future, itemized as building opportunities for young contractors.

No wonder the dollar is collapsing. You can't funnel off trillions of dollars for all this useless, nonproductive junk and expect anything but catastrophe. But, that would be a subject for many libraries jam-packed with fat volumes.

• Robert Scheer has one of the many great articles about trouble in Pakistan, proving Wrongway Dubya and Deadeye Cheney's collective penchant for running us down dead ends, at unbelievable expense. The Reagan-Bush White House did everything to make Pakistan's nuclear weapons program happen, and to spread that technology to other nations, some of which are the most hostile to the United States on earth.

• One man tried to stop it:

All this could have been avoided, says Richard M. Barlow, the former CIA and Defense Department expert whose warnings on the acquiescence of Reagan and Bush administration officials in Pakistan's nuclear program were quashed by the Pentagon and avoided by Congress.

For his candor, and despite the backing of some top intelligence officials, Barlow was stripped of his Top Secret/Codeword clearances and hounded out of the Pentagon.

Now he lives in a motor home, divorced, broke and unemployed. He spends half the year in a campground in Montana, the other half in California, living off the quickly diminishing proceeds of the sale of his house.

"I have serious financial problems," Barlow, now 52, told me by phone last week. "I basically live like a vagrant."

The only possible conclusion is that the Bush family has conspired for decades to deliver nuclear weapons to our country's most hateful and radical enemies. They had a proper motive: they did it to get money. The "God told me to do it" line doesn't work anymore.