President Bush Links Hurricane Katrina and Terrorism and Is The Prez Drinking Again? in Today's Details 9/22/05

- Crude oil prices climbed toward $68 a barrel Thursday as Hurricane Rita advanced on Texas, raising fears it would hit key production facilities along the U.S. Gulf Coast that were largely untouched by Hurricane Katrina's onslaught three weeks ago.

- Hundreds of thousands of people across the Houston metropolitan area struggled to make their way inland in a vast, bumper-to-bumper exodus Thursday as Hurricane Rita closed in on the nation's fourth-largest city with winds howling at 150 mph.

- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has maintained for years that his stock holdings in the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain posed no conflict of interest for a policymaker deeply involved in health care matters. He even received two rulings in the 1990s from the Senate ethics committee that blessed the holding of the stock in blind trusts. So when Frist decided in June to dump all the stock, and later cited as the reason his desire to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, eyebrows went up among ethics experts and congressional watchdogs. Why did he do it at that time? Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold, its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter.

- The widening investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff is moving beyond the confines of tawdry influence-peddling to threaten leading figures in the Republican hierarchy that dominates Washington. This week's arrest of David Safavian, the former head of procurement at the Office of Management and Budget, in connection with a land deal involving Abramoff brings the probe to the White House for the first time.

- Ford Motor Co. jumped on the hybrid-car bandwagon yesterday with a promise to boost production tenfold to 250,000 cars and trucks per year by 2010, a decision that moves hybrids closer to the mainstream of the U.S. auto market.

- President Bush on Wednesday for the first time linked the American response to terrorism and its response to Hurricane Katrina, declaring that the United Statesis emerging a stronger nation from both challenges, and saying that terrorists look at the storm's devastation "and wish they had caused it." (SAY WHAT??? Guess this shows how desperate they are --- the "T" word has always worked for them before, guess they thought they'd try it again.)

- Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal. Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe. Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster. (Am only posting this BECAUSE I heard an interview on the radio with the editor who said they had two sources for the story AND another major news organization was working on the story as well. Take it with a grain of salt however....it would explain a lot and further my own theory that he's an empty suit.)