Oil up, Dollar down.

Now I get it..the price of oil is tied to the value of our Dollar. So with the Buck hitting an all time low, everyone is investing in Oil? From the IHT writeup:

The immediate catalyst for the spike in energy prices is the drop in the value of the dollar. Currency traders are selling dollars and buying euros to take advantage of the difference in interest rates between the United States and Europe.

The dollar weakened, continuing its steep decline of last week, and the euro rose to a record $1.5274 in early New York trading. The dollar also fell to its lowest level in three years versus the yen.

“The question for oil is where is the dollar going,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director at PFC Energy, a consulting firm in Washington. “That’s going to the main market mover in the short term.”

The question really is..when does it all come screeching down around our heads?

What do you get for $736M-A huge Fire Risk

Sweet Jesus in a speedo..they couldn’t even get a decent firefighting system? WTF? According to the Washington Post..the answer is..NOPE!

The firefighting system in the massive $736 million embassy complex in Baghdad has potential safety problems that top U.S. officials dismissed in their rush to declare construction largely completed by the end of last year, according to internal State Department documents, e-mails and interviews.

A State Department Official, who wants to be anonymous, has said the following about America’s huge money pit in Iraq:

“The fire systems are the tip of the iceberg. That is the most visible. But no one has ever inspected the electrical system, the power plant”

A-fucking-mazing my dear reader..This complex is four times the size of the Pentagon, and evidently unsafe as shit. And they knew it:

As early as October 2006, State Department fire inspectors raised concerns about the embassy’s alarm and sprinkler systems. Several sources said the inspectors were denied permission to reinspect the systems after Golden and French assured them that the problems had been fixed.

Then, in September 2007, the pipes burst during a pressure test, and the inspectors discovered that many of the problems they had identified had been ignored. The inspectors documented hundreds of violations of the contract specifications and of fire codes and regulations, according to portions of the report made public by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in October.

Nice..so friggin nice..Gotta love those Iraq contractors.