02.09.10
Extremely good movie
I just watched American Women, and I highly recommend it. An Irish romantic comedy ensemble piece, it’s totally wonderful, not least because it offers a perfect realization of Louis Armstrong’s "Give Me A Kiss (To Build A Dream On)".
Salad day
I’m making this salad, and just waiting for the quinoa to finish. I was able to get red quinoa, which looks great.
About Abdulmutallab
John Brennan, Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, writes in USA Today:
Politics should never get in the way of national security. But too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming together to keep us safe.
Immediately after the failed Christmas Day attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was thoroughly interrogated and provided important information. Senior counterterrorism officials from the White House, the intelligence community and the military were all actively discussing this case before he was Mirandized and supported the decision to charge him in criminal court.
The most important breakthrough occurred after Abdulmutallab was read his rights, a long-standing FBI policy that was reaffirmed under Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s attorney general. The critics who want the FBI to ignore this long-established practice also ignore the lessons we have learned in waging this war: Terrorists such as Jose Padilla and Saleh al-Mari did not cooperate when transferred to military custody, which can harden one’s determination to resist cooperation.
It’s naive to think that transferring Abdulmutallab to military custody would have caused an outpouring of information. There is little difference between military and civilian custody, other than an interrogator with a uniform. The suspect gets access to a lawyer, and interrogation rules are nearly identical.
Would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid was read his Miranda rights five minutes after being taken off a plane he tried to blow up. The same people who criticize the president today were silent back then.
Cries to try terrorists only in military courts lack foundation. There have been three convictions of terrorists in the military tribunal system since 9/11, and hundreds in the criminal justice system — including high-profile terrorists such as Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarius Moussaoui.
This administration’s efforts have disrupted dozens of terrorist plots against the homeland and been responsible for killing and capturing hundreds of hard-core terrorists, including senior leaders in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond — far more than in 2008. We need no lectures about the fact that this nation is at war.
Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill. They will, however, be dismantled and destroyed, by our military, our intelligence services and our law enforcement community. And the notion that America’s counterterrorism professionals and America’s system of justice are unable to handle these murderous miscreants is absurd.
Grateful Dead studied by management theorists
Interesting article by Joshua Green in the Atlantic Monthly:
Fans of the Grateful Dead are big believers in serendipity. So a certain knowing approval greeted the news last year that the band would be donating its copious archive—four decades’ worth of commercial recordings and videotapes, press clippings, stage sets, business records, and a mountain of correspondence encompassing everything from elaborately decorated fan letters to a thank-you note for a fund-raising performance handwritten on White House stationery by President Barack Obama—to the University of California at Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz was understood to be a fitting home not only because it exemplifies the spirit of the counterculture as much as, and perhaps even more than, Berkeley and Stanford, which also bid for the archive, but because the school’s faculty includes an ethnomusicologist and composer named Fredric Lieberman, who is prominent among a curious breed in the academy: scholars who teach and study the Grateful Dead.
It’s worth noting right up front the hurdles Dead Studies faces as a field of serious inquiry. To begin with, the news that it exists at all tends to elicit grinning disbelief; a corollary challenge is the assumptions people carry about its practitioners, such as my own expectation when arranging to visit Lieberman last year that I would encounter an amiable hippie, probably of late-Boomer vintage and wearing a thinning ponytail. Rough mental image: Wavy Gravy with a Ph.D.
Lieberman is nothing of the sort. A small man with parchment skin, wisps of white hair, and large round glasses, he could have looked more professorial only by wielding a Dunhill pipe. His interest in the Grateful Dead, he explained, had arisen largely by chance. In the 1960s, he studied under the noted ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger (father of Pete Seeger) at UCLA, and came to share his mentor’s dismay at the academy’s neglect of popular and non-Western music. Lieberman went on to teach a series of classes in American vernacular music and, though he held no particular fondness for the Grateful Dead, became one of the first academics to teach the band’s music, in the early 1970s.
In 1983, the Dead’s drummer, Mickey Hart, asked Lieberman to help …
More on our cyberwar
James Fallows in the new Atlantic Monthly:
Early in my time in China, I learned a useful lesson for daily life. In the summer of 2006, I saw a contingent of light-green-shirted People’s Liberation Army soldiers marching in formation down a sidewalk on Fuxing Lu in Shanghai, near the U.S. and Iranian consulates. They looked so crisp under the leafy plane trees of the city’s old colonial district that I pulled out a camera to take a picture of them—and, after pushing the button, had to spend the next 60 seconds running at full tilt away from the group’s leader, who pursued me yelling in English “Stop! No photo! Must stop!” Fortunately he gave up after scaring me off.
The practical lesson was to not point a camera toward uniformed groups of soldiers or police. The broader hint I took was to be more careful when asking about or discussing military matters than when asking about most other aspects of modern China’s development. I did keep asking people in China—carefully—about the potential military and strategic implications of their country’s growing strength. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and consequent disappearance of the U.S. military’s one superpower rival, Western defense strategists have speculated about China’s emergence as the next great military threat. (In 2005, this magazine published Robert Kaplan’s cover story “How We Would Fight China,” about such a possibility. Many of the international-affairs experts I interviewed in China were familiar with that story. I often had to explain that “would” did not mean “will” in the article’s headline.)
The cynical view of warnings about a mounting Chinese threat is that they are largely Pentagon budget-building ploys: if the U.S. military is “only” going to fight insurgents and terrorists in the future, it doesn’t really need the next generation of expensive fighter planes or attack submarines. Powerful evidence for this view—apart from familiarity with Pentagon budget debates over the years—is that many of the neoconservative thinkers who since 9/11 have concentrated on threats from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran were before that time writing worriedly about China. The most powerful counterargument is that China’s rise is so consequential and unprecedented in scale that it would be naive not to expect military ramifications. My instincts lie with the skeptical camp: as I’ve often written through the past three years, China has many more problems than most Americans can imagine, and its power is much less impressive up close. But on my return to America, I asked a variety of military, governmental, business, and academic officials about how the situation looks from their perspective. In most ways, their judgment was reassuringly soothing; unfortunately, it left me with a new problem to worry about.
Without meaning to sound flip, I think the strictly military aspects of U.S.-China relations appear to be something Americans can rest easy about for a long time to come. Hypercautious warnings to the contrary keep cropping up, especially in the annual reports on China’s strategic power produced since 2000 by the Pentagon each spring and by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission each fall. Yet when examined in detail, even these show the limits of the Chinese threat. To summarize: …
Notepads you might love
I’m a sucker for notepads: their pristine pages seem to ache for my pen, and I imagine myself writing all sorts of wondrous things in them. Dustin Wax seems to have the same affliction, and he reviews 5 different and useful notepads:
Hi. My name is Dustin, and I’m addicted to notepads.
I first realized I was addicted when I found myself prowling office supply stores in the wee hours of the afternoon, trying to score a college-ruled composition book. Pretty soon, I couldn’t go anywhere without my works – a battered red Moleskine and a black Sharpie click-pen.
And it got worse. I started thinking, “maybe there’s a perfect notebook out there for this particular project.” My Moleskine’s 192 leaves bound in pocket-sized covers wasn’t enough to satisfy my growing need for specialty papers.
The worst part is, I liked it. And I stand here before you, still liking it. Loving it. Yes, my name is Dustin, but I”m not a mere addict. I’m a paper enthusiast, a connoisseur of the carnet, a gourmand of the grid line, a foodie of foolscap.
Let me show you a few of my more exotic finds…
Crazy Republican hysterical lies
I’m finding Steve Benen’s blog especially valuable these days. Probably you should just read it directly. But I can’t resist pointing out this post:
As baseless Republican criticism of administration counter-terrorism policies has intensified, the president’s team has come up with some pretty straightforward defenses. When the GOP gets hysterical over trying accused terrorists in the U.S. justice system, Obama administration officials remind folks that more than 300 terrorists have already gone through this exact same system — with nary a complaint from Republicans.
In response, instead of adapting their argument to reality, GOP attack dogs have decided that the "more than 300" number has to be a trumped up number and the result of Obama administration deception.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, called the number "unsubstantiated" and questioned its validity. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) called the number "disingenuous." National Review called the figure "bogus." Dana Perino concluded, "The 300 number is as false as false gets."
So, who’s right? Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball sets the record straight.
Maybe it’s time to stop some of the name calling over counter-terrorism policy and start checking the facts….
[I]t turns out that the Administration’s claims do appear to be well-documented — assuming that an official budget request sent to Congress by Bush’s last attorney general was truthful itself.
Yes, the figure Republicans insist was manufactured by the Obama administration was actually published in the budget released by Bush’s Justice Department. The document put the exact number of terrorists convicted through the civilian courts since 2001 at 319.
Indeed, George W. Bush actually used to boast about these numbers, delivering a speech in 2003 explaining that "more than 260 suspected terrorists have been charged in the United States courts, [and] more than 140 have already been convicted."
Of course, the point here isn’t just to mock Republicans for being wrong about the nature of the data. That’s amusing, but it’s not enough.
The more meaningful angle here is that Bush/Cheney tried hundreds of terrorists in civilian American courts — without incident — and then imprisoned these terrorists on American soil. No one complained, no one freaked out, no one got hysterical. But now that Obama is keeping the same practice in place, it’s the subject of a huge debate, and the same policy that was considered perfectly acceptable as part of a "war on terror" is now perceived as proof of weakness.
The question, then, for Republicans isn’t, "Will you concede that the 300 figure is legit?" but rather, "Will you start being consistent in how you assess the exact same policy?"
An example of why healthcare reform is important
Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:
One of the worst abuses of private insurance companies is the practice of using spurious reasons to deny claims for medical treatments, which are often necessary for saving patients’ lives.
Kyler Van Nocker’s story shows that even 5-year-old kids are not exempt from this insurance company abuse. Van Nocker has neuroblastoma, which is a very rare form of childhood cancer that targets the nervous system and creates tumors throughout the body.
Due to successful treatment in 2007, Van Nocker’s cancer went into remission, giving him 12 months of pain-free life. Unfortunately, in Sept. 2008, the cancer returned, and Van Nocker was once again in need of treatment. Unfortunately, his health insurer, HealthAmerica, refused to pay for one form of treatment doctors believe could save his life (MIBG treatment) because they consider it “investigational/experimental” since it has yet to be approved by the FDA.
Yet in April 2008, the insurer approved cheaper treatment for Van Nocker that was also “experimental,” prompting Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky to ask, “So why, pray tell, is HealthAmerica playing the ‘experimental therapy’ card in the case of the MIBG treatment Kyler now needs? Gee, money couldn’t have anything to do with the decision, could it?”
Van Nocker’s parents are suing HealthAmerica, citing the fact that the company has apparently been dishonest about its criteria for the types of treatment it will cover and is denying payment for treatment in this case because of the high cost of the procedure — $110,000 pays for only two rounds of MIBG treatment. “These companies have to be brought to the courthouse to get them to do the right thing,” says the VanNockers’s family attorney. “This child needs this treatment, or else.”
The sad truth is that Van Nocker is certainly not alone in having his claim denied by a major health insurer. The California Nurses Association (CNA), a nurses’ union and health care advocacy group, recently released a comprehensive study of claims denials across California. The study found that the six largest insurers in California rejected 47.7 million claims in the first half of 2009, nearly 22 percent of all claims submitted.
The United States is the only industrialized nation without cradle-to-the-grave, universal health care. In no other developed country would a child with cancer have to go without care because an insurance company decided it was not profitable enough to cover him.
New roles for Bush torture-mongers
Glenn Greenwald has an entertaining column today on Rich Lowry’s peculiar mental processes (with examples), and in a separate addendum has this interesting note:
Several months ago, the excellent Obama Pentagon aide in charge of detention policy — former Army Capt. Philip Carter — abruptly resigned shortly after the administration announced it would indefinitely detain many Guantanamo detainees and send others to military commissions: policies which Capt. Carter long opposed when embraced by Bush (though it’s unclear whether there was a causal connection between those policies and his resignation). As Spencer Ackerman reports today, the administration has now replaced Capt. Carter: with Col. William Lietzau, who — as Ackerman put it — "previously served as a special adviser to Jim Haynes, the top Pentagon lawyer during Donald H. Rumsfeld’s tenure, when Rumsfeld and Haynes codified torture and indefinite detention as hallmarks of Bush-era terrorism policy" (h/t Jim White). Given that Obama’s top "terrorism adviser" was a Bush-era CIA official who cheered for various torture and rendition policies, and given that Obama detention policies are so closely modeled after the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld approach (indefinite detention, military commissions, denial of habeas corpus, renditions), this is both an unsurprising and an appropriate choice for that position.
Bush officials who helped design the torture and detention regime aren’t prosecuted or even held accountable under Obama. Instead, they’re hired, empowered, relied upon, and promoted.
Obama’s transparency initiative for government agencies
They’re gradually rolling out their open-government websites. Take a look at the list and click to see any of the sites (4 still not up as of now).
Businesses HATE to protect their workers
Why? It costs money, and if a worker gets disabled or killed, you can always hire another. That’s why business (along with the GOP) has consistently fought workplace safety regulations. Who (besides the workers and their families) cares about workers? Joaquin Sapien for ProPublica:
As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the White House are trying to minimize their differences, a brewing battle at OSHA over a workplace injury reporting rule illustrates how tough that could become given the administration’s pro-labor leanings.
While bureaucratic clashes over subtle rule changes like this one are usually waged outside the public’s view, they can have big ramifications for business and workers.
At issue is a regulation that would force employers to identify when a workplace-related injury or illness is considered a musculoskeletal disorder (MSD), a term broadly used to describe ailments caused by repetitive stress, like carpal tunnel syndrome or strains from frequent heavy lifting.
Figures gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that MSD-related problems accounted for nearly a third of the 1.1 million workplace injuries and illnesses in the private sector that led to days off work in 2008.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration wants to include an additional column on the federal surveys employers are required to fill out, to identify when a worker’s injury is musculoskeletal in nature. Currently, these injuries are recorded in the same category as problems like hearing loss, making it difficult for OSHA to collect accurate data. Union representatives and OSHA officials say the data could help the agency find opportunities to reduce injuries.
But business representatives, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, say the move is the Obama administration’s first step toward developing sweeping regulation of ergonomic safety, which could cost employers millions.
I despise Sen. Ben Nelson (?-NE)
President Obama last year nominated Craig Becker to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. There can be no doubt about Becker’s qualifications — he’s been an associate general counsel for the Service Employees International Union since 1990, has served as counsel for the AFL-CIO, and has spent his adult life working to protect the interests of America’s workers.
Last year, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blocked a Senate vote on Becker’s nomination. So, the president re-nominated him last month. After Massachusetts’ special election, the nomination was in peril, but late yesterday, the Democrats’ most conservative senator crushed any hopes of overcoming Republican obstructionism.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) announced Monday evening that he will support a Republican-led filibuster over President Barack Obama’s nominee to serve on the National Labor Relations Board.
The move is likely to infuriate labor groups who have fought hard for Craig Becker’s nomination to serve on the five-member NLRB — and will likely give Republicans enough support to sustain a filibuster Tuesday.
Nelson, in a statement, accused Becker of wanting to "take an aggressive personal agenda to the NLRB." As a result, Nelson not only decided to oppose Becker’s nomination, but insists on preventing the Senate from even having a vote on the nomination.
As frustrating as this is, also keep in mind that Nelson is actually taking a harder line on Obama’s nominees than Bush’s. Sam Stein reminds us of this report from May.
During the Bush/Cheney era, Nelson decried obstructionism, found filibusters against George W. Bush’s nominees offensive, and routinely voted with Republicans to cut off Democratic efforts. He explained that he believed Bush’s nominees "deserve an up-or-down vote," even when the person in question "isn’t popular with the special-interest groups in Washington."
So, when Democrats raised concerns about John Bolton’s U.N. nomination and Alberto Gonzales’s Attorney General nomination, for example, Nelson sided with Republicans against filibusters. Now, however, there’s a Democratic president, and Nelson is siding with Republicans in support of filibusters.
In other words, a senator who claims to be a Democrat will not let a Democratic Senate vote, up or down, on some of a Democratic president’s nominees. It’s not enough to vote against them, Nelson wants to prevent his own Democratic colleagues from voting on them at all.
This from a man who claims to oppose "obstructionism."
More sludge available—still toxic, though
Source: Organic Consumers Association, February 8, 2010
Fifteen years ago, CMD’s book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! first exposed the hidden government and industry PR campaign greenwashing toxic sewage sludge as "biosolids," an invented PR euphemism used to cynically re-brand toxic waste as "fertilizer" given free to farmers. Today, unfortunately, the biosolids scam is bigger than ever. The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) reports that "San Francisco has come up with an ingenious plot to trick city residents into taking their toxic sewage sludge back and disposing of it in their own gardens. San Francisco is having Synagro, the corporate giant of the toxic sludge industry, ‘compost’ some of the toxic sewage sludge. Then they give it away to San Francisco’s gardeners telling us it’s ‘high-quality, nutrient-rich, organic Biosolids Compost.’ " OCA has launched a grassroots campaign calling on San Francisco’s mayor to stop the practice, noting "municipal sewage sludge routinely contains thousands of dangerous pathogens, toxic heavy metals, flame retardants, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pharmaceutical drugs and other hazardous chemicals coming from residential drains, storm water runoff, hospitals, and industrial plants."
Social Security Benefits Will Be Paid, It is the Law
Dean Baker:
Allan Sloan told listeners to Marketplace radio this morning that future retirees should be worried about their Social Security benefits because the program is now paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes. In fact, the program has accumulated more than $2.5 trillion on government bonds in its trust fund. The Congressional Budget Office projects that this fund will be sufficient to pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2044.
Even after that date, if nothing is ever done to change the program, the projections still show that it will be able to pay close to 80 percent of scheduled benefits. This will still provide future retirees with a benefit that is considerably larger than what current retirees receive.
All of these benefits will be paid under current law. Congress would have to vote to overhaul the program to prevent the payment of benefits.
Those fiscally conservative Republicans
Republican President, and for 6 of the 8 years a Republican Congress. Result:
Wonder how the GOP can even hope to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility.
Susan Collins, political hack
Susan Collins presents as a moderate Republican, but her voting record gives her away. She’s also trying to carry out an attack (in which she’s totally in the wrong but refuses to back down). Steve Benen continues this sad story:
For reasons that are still unclear, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has decided to take a leadership role in going after the Obama administration’s handling of the attempted Abdulmutallab attack. So far, this hasn’t gone especially well.
Collins said officials only interrogated Abdulmutallab for 50 minutes. That was wrong. She said Abdulmutallab "stopped talking" after having been told of his rights. That was wrong. Collins suggested Abdulmutallab only began cooperating "in the context of plea negotiations." That was wrong. She said there "was no consultation with intelligence officials" about the questioning. And that was wrong .
More recently, Collins has emphasized her outrage over the Obama administration’s decision to make Abdulmutallab aware of his rights (the same step taken by the Bush/Cheney administration in a nearly identical terrorist plot in 2001). Except, she, too, was briefed on the arrest by a top Homeland Security official, and raised no concerns about the legal process.
This afternoon, a Collins spokesperson, without a hint of irony, accused the Obama administration of trying to cover its "mistake."
It is offensive, to Senator Collins and the American people, that the Obama Administration is more concerned with political spin to cover a mistake than with taking the actions urgently needed to improve our nation’s security. Clearly, the Administration is trying to divert attention from the fact that it interrogated a foreign terrorist for less than one hour before the Justice Department unilaterally decided to Mirandize him and he stopped talking.
Senator Collins calls on the Obama Administration to immediately change its policies and ensure consultation with top intelligence and security officials before treating the capture of the next foreign terrorist as only a civilian law enforcement matter. She will continue to press for her bipartisan legislation that mandates this consultation.
When we cut through the nonsense and cheap talking points, what we’re left with is Collins, after making a series of demonstrably false claims, complaining that the Justice Department didn’t coordinate further with other agencies on how best to deal with Abdulmutallab. That’s it. That’s all that’s left from the original argument.
But, again, this is foolish. For one thing, the Obama administration has applied the exact same procedures as Bush/Cheney, and Collins never expressed this outrage before. For another, as Attorney General Eric Holder explained last week, "No agency supported the use of law of war detention for Abdulmutallab, and no agency has since advised the Department of Justice that an alternative course of action should have been, or should now be, pursued."
What we’re left with, then, is Susan Collins making a mistake by falsely criticizing the administration, and then digging deeper with a series of even more absurd false criticisms.
She should have quit while she was behind. As this story has dragged on, Collins has sounded less like a reasonable, moderate, influential senator and more like a rookie House member trying to impress Fox News producers. As Josh Marshall noted recently, Collins’ criticisms have turned her into something of "an embarrassment."
Michael Mann and the Hockey Stick
Apparently Michael Mann (now cleared by an investigation) and the hockey stick were the victims of a GOP hit job. Richard Littlemore at DeSmogBlog.com:
"Independent" Hockey Stick analysis revealed as Republican set-up
The purportedly independent report that Dr. Edward Wegman prepared in 2006 for the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce was actually a partisan set-up, according to information revealed today.
Wegman, who had presented himself as an impartial "referee" between two "teams" debating the quality of the so-called Hockey Stick graph was, in fact, coached throughout his review by Republican staffer Peter Spencer. Wegman and his colleagues also worked closely with one of the teams (and especially with retired mining stock promoter Stephen McIntyre) to try to replicate criticism of the Hockey Stick graph, while at the same time foregoing contact with the actual authors of the seminal climate reconstruction.
The Hockey Stick refers to a graph (by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes) that became a defining image of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It also became a target for Steve McIntyre and the Guelph University economist Ross McKitrick, who since 2002, at least, has been a paid spokesperson for ExxonMobil-backed think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Fraser Institute.
According to a detailed analysis by the blogger Deep Climate, McIntyre and McKitrick’s criticism of the Hockey Stick graph was aggressively promoted and disseminated by an echo chamber of think tanks and blogs, all of which had financial or ideological associations with fossil fuel industry funders.
Then, in 2005, (and perhaps through the machinations of CEI climate specialist Myron Ebell), Republican Rep. and Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Joe Barton began calling for an investigation into the graph. But Barton rejected an offer from National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Ciccerone to conduct a formal and independent review in the highly professional manner typical of the nation’s foremost scientific body. Barton chose, instead, to engage a statistician (Wegman) from one of the most conservative institutions in the country (George Mason University) and to task him with setting up a team to dissect Mann’s Hockey Stick.
The result was predictable. Collaborating with McIntyre, Wegman’s team recreated and then endorsed the critical view of Michael Mann’s work. According to earlier revelations from Deep Climate, Wegman also cribbed – arguably plagiarized – work from Raymond Bradley, lifting whole sections of his 1999 textbook, but periodically changing material or inserting information calculated to cast doubt on the reliability of tree-ring data (the source of the MBH climate reconstruction). In the most outrageous example, suspiciously unattributed, Wegman’s report actually suggested that tree rings might be affected positively by automobile pollution. ("… oxides of nitrogen are formed in internal combustion engines that can be deposited as nitrates also contributing to fertilization of plant materials.")
All this could be dismissed as typical politicking except for two things. First, because this was presented as an independent and impartial review, it is reasonable to ask whether Barton, Wegman, et al, are guilty of misleading Congress, a felony offense.
Second, the same echo chamber that promoted Steve McIntyre’s criticism of the Hockey Stick is now fully engaged accusing scientists of manipulating data to increase global concern about climate change. The manipulation of both data and public opinion are certainly evident in this story. Science has most certainly been politicized. But (thanks to Deep Climate’s careful research) the record shows that the manipulation and politicization has been bought and paid for by the energy industry and executed by a sprawling network of think tanks and blogs – and by leading Republicans and their staffers.
This is, at the very least, fodder for a Congressional investigation as to whether the Energy and Commerce Committee was, indeed, intentionally and perhaps disastrously misled.
Since this criticism has been revealed to be a hatchet job by people with a vested interest in denying global warming, clearly the whole lot of criticism of global warming is thus invalidated (following the usual denialist reasoning).
"Finish the kitchen"
Good column by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post:
If President Obama gets to sign a health-reform bill, as I believe he will, one reason may be Rep. Jay Inslee’s difficult experience renovating his kitchen.
He told his kitchen story at a House Democratic caucus after Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts sent Inslee’s colleagues into paroxysms of dismay, chaos and fear. Brown’s triumph reduced the Democrats’ majority in the Senate to "only" 59, and this led many in both houses to want to give up on health reform altogether. Even Obama was sounding an uncertain trumpet.
This made no sense to Inslee, a Democrat from Washington state. First elected to the House in 1992, he was swept out of office in the 1994 Republican landslide that followed the collapse of Bill Clinton’s health-care efforts. Four years later, Inslee returned to Congress.
"I introduced myself as a fella who was defeated in 1994, the last time we didn’t pass meaningful health-care reform," Inslee recalls saying. "I said it was a painful event, and I didn’t want them to go through that pain." In politics, he told his colleagues, assuming the "fetal position" can be the most dangerous thing to do.
And then he recounted all the grief he and his family went through while work on their kitchen renovation dragged on and on and on. "During that time, I had blood lust against my contractor," Inslee said. "Six months went by, and he was still arguing with the plumber. Eight months went by, and there were still wires hanging down everywhere, and he was having trouble with the building inspector."
But eventually, the job got done. "And now I love that kitchen," Inslee recalls saying. "I bake bread in that kitchen. My wife cooks great meals in that kitchen. The contractor’s now a buddy of mine, and I’ve had beers with him in that kitchen."
Inslee looked at his colleagues and declared: "We’ve got to finish the kitchen." His point was that Americans won’t experience any of the benefits of health-care reform until Congress puts a new system in place.
I called Inslee about his kitchen oration after Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) told me it was one of the turning points in calming Democrats’ nerves. "Now," Wu says, "people run into him in the hallway, smile and say, ‘Finish the kitchen.’ " …
Sarah Palin’s stupidity exceeds all bounds
Former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) once claimed to have valuable foreign policy insights to offer because Vladimir Putin had flown over her state. She wasn’t kidding.
Nevertheless, Palin still feels comfortable talking about foreign policy, and even giving advice to the president. Over the weekend, for example, Palin said President Obama would be in much better shape if only he’d initiate a war against Iran. Another U.S. invasion of a Middle Eastern country, she seriously argued, would ensure the president’s re-election.
"Say [the president] played, and I got this from [Pat] Buchanan, reading one of his columns the other day. Say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran, or decided to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do. But that changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going to happen between now and three years. [...]
"I’m saying, if he did, things would dramatically change if he decided to toughen up and do all that he can to secure our nation and our allies. I think people would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and decide, well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he is today."
Palin "got this" from "reading" one of Pat Buchanan’s columns — apparently this one, headlined, "Will Obama Play The War Card?"
The problem, of course, is that Palin didn’t get quite past the headline. Buchanan argued against going to war with Iran. While Daniel Pipes said invading Iran would be a boon to Obama’s presidency, Buchanan argued the opposite.
It’s a shame mildly-sophisticated foreign policy ideas — such as who supports which war — can’t fit on the palm of a hand.
Sarah Palin’s capacity to be a constant embarrassment to herself is limitless.
