AUSTIN, Texas -- It's the All-American Blame Game! A Finger-Pointing festival. A perfectly circular firing squad of, "Told you so." Bureaucrats perfecting their CYA moves. Politicians jumping on the opportunity to make points against the other guys. And so's your old man.

            U.S. officials quickly blamed a Canadian plant for touching off the mess. Mel Lastman, the clearly sleepless and exhausted mayor of Toronto, replied bitterly: "Tell me, have you ever heard the United States take blame for anything? This is no different."

            It would be a refreshing change, would it not, if somebody just stood up and said, "My fault."

            The early book has the great power outage of '03 beginning with FirstEnergy of Akron, Ohio.

            But there has been no shortage of warnings that the grid was elderly, frail, inadequate, could short out, would short out, should short out at any time.

            Those regulatory tigers at FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), the guys who stood by doing nothing while California got ripped

Thank God for a web site where we can get the other side of the news. News where corporate media cannot interfere with the truth. Good Work !!!

Just writing to tell you about one of the things that has made me feel the worst here so far.

I have been staying almost every night for the past 6-7 weeks with the Abu Ayesh family in the Balata refugee camp (more info about Balata here: www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/westbank/balata.html).  Their son Amer Ayesh performed an operation in 1948 near Quaqila 5 months ago in which 3 soldiers were killed.  There are also 2 other families that live in this house.

Several days ago some neighbors had told the Ayesh family that they had seen soldiers looking into the men's room window where me and the two sons were sleeping at about 3 in the morning.  This concerned us and we were ready for soldiers coming the next night, but nothing happened.  The 2nd night all was quiet as well.  It all went bad yesterday night.

At about 2:00 am, Jihad (one of the sons, about 15 years old) woke me up saying "Steve Jeesh" over and over while tugging my leg.  I was walking to to door from the men's room to the main living room and

The California media has been whining that Pete Wilson, Arnold's chief press flak, won't let them ask Schwarzenegger any direct questions.

But in the wake of the big northeast blackout, they're missing the boat---it's "Blackout Pete" they should be grilling.  If the policies he enacted as governor of California are any indicator, the Terminator will be destroying a lot more than just the Golden State grid.

Wilson was the Republican governor of California in 1996 when he made utility deregulation the centerpiece of his doomed campaign for president.  Competition in the electric power business, said Wilson, would usher in a new age of lower prices.  The "miracle of the marketplace" would mean better, cheaper, more reliable electricity from a host of competing suppliers.

Deregulation is also the centerpiece of Schwarzenegger's campaign for Wilson's old job.  The Terminator isn't allowed to say much.  But the few short sentences he does utter seem to have something to do with policies that would mirror what Wilson did when he set the utilities free.

Power disaster hits North America CBC News, Canada

Maybe it's terrorism, maybe it's a problem in the power grid caused by a local Niagara Falls power generation plant.