Tinsel Wing

Git along, little bloggie

2007-02-02T20:07:00.000-08:00

Like many other formerly satisfied (except for the occasional blackout periods) blogspotters, I'm finding things steadily less comfortable in this venue. The old blogger doesn't let me tag my posts, too many html tags aren't recognized, and the upcoming regime smells buggy and intrusive, at first sniff anyway.

I have moved copies of all my posts over to http://www.tinselwing.wordpress.com.

That's where I'll be posting in the near future. Some things - like the blogroll and the majority of the graphics - failed to make the transition. And I haven't played with the themes at all. So it'll look kind of rough and unfinished til I get the hang of the new digs, for which I humbly beg the indulgence of all two and a half of my readers.

"Life is change. How it differs from the rocks." As Grace and Marty and Jorma used to put it.

I used to be Cleopatra after all

2007-01-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks back, I was walking down the street, basking in the afterglow of a day of celebrations raucous and quiet, attendant on my daughter in law's baby shower. I kept breaking into retrospective grins over the sheer giggling quantity of infants and toddlers our kids' friends and relations had brought to weave in amongst the proceedings.

What could be grander than mellowing out into another grandparenting gig? What, except the spectacle of the whole next generation stepping capably and for the most part happily into our old roles, with all that angst and joy and hubbub ahead of them? And I found myself wishing that, once I shuffle off this mortal coil, I could turn around, start right in again, and go through the whole cycle one more time. Not that I have any overwhelming objection to disappearing from the scene, but the game has been such a hoot, why not have another whack at it?

As Pope George Ringo used to say, "When I get to the bottom, I go back to the top of the slide, where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride..."

It was an oddly disinterested, depersonalized sort of wish. I felt no envy toward all these fine young folks who are still near the top of the helter skelter. The feeling was more one of, how delightful it is that this game is going on and is going to go on; and wouldn't it be a kick if I were to get another turn.

I've never seen the payoff in reincarnation. What's the point of returning, be it as pauper or prince, if the future me has no memory of the present me? But in the peculiar mindset I was in, this burst of detached lust for life, my usual objection lost its force.

And thereupon I realized something odd. If I stop caring about continuity of memory, then something indistinguishable from reincarnation just about certainly takes place. Billions of babies will be born in the few years after the angel of death kicks my bucket of life. Now, consider how very differently I - that is to say, someone with exactly my innate talents and predispositions - could have turned out if I had been born to a different station, a different continent, or a different gender. It is then obvious that thousands of those babies will be at least as much like "me" as I am like many of those alternate possible selves. Any one of them is therefore the moral equivalent of a reincarnation of "me".

But it goes further. Because there are thousands of other babies with enough innate similarity to any one of those (say that Kabrala Singh who pops into the world the fourth week of 2078), to be the moral equivalent of a reincarnation of Kabrala. And, time being merely so much illusory Maya anyway, there's nothing except our illogical human love for orderly sequential narrative to prevent any reincarnation from appearing earlier than its "previous" life rather than later.

And so, stone-hopping from one moral equivalent of reincarnation to the next, each in sufficient continuity to hang onto its me-ness, I can pretty well count on reincarnating sooner or later as everyone who ever has lived or will live. Literally? Maybe not. But I can derive all the (admittedly utterly intangible) benefits I would have derived if each reincarnation had been literal. So it comes to the same thing.

I would still prefer to retain the sense of personhood that's bound up with memory. And even if it weren't so, as a practicing Christian, I mean to hang on to the hope of resurrection and "saecula saeculorum". But I can't say I mind having in my back pocket this small and bemused consolation prize.

Plain talk from the plains

2007-01-25T20:51:00.000-08:00

Chuck Hagel has been a man on fire for the truth of late. It's like a light bulb went on. Like the censor every politician, Democrat or Republican, carries around in his head, the one who whispers at every impulse to depart from Cloud Cuckoo Land, "You can't say that, Michael Moore might approve," has dropped his blue pencil behind the chaise longue and just can't find it again.

But in an interview with GQ, he takes a couple giant leaps beyond even his celebrated remarks on the Senate floor.

Leap 1: Chuck confirms what a couple Dems peeped (without media echo) at the time. Bush initially insisted that the AUMF authorize not just war in Iraq, but any military step Dubya chose in "the region". By implication, he intended to get cover not just for invading Baghdad, but also Damascus and Tehran. And, should they happen to strike oil, Armenia.

Leap 2: Chuck confirms that we were deliberately lied into the war (see p. 3 of the interview):

HAGEL. So the president comes out talking about "weapons of mass destruction" that this "madman dictator" Saddam Hussein has, and "our intelligence shows he's got it," and "he's capable of weaponizing," and so on.

GQ. And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored.
HAGEL. Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that's what we were presented with. And I'm not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, "I don't believe them."

McCain's badly stained Plain Talk jersey has just passed to a new player. And unless they're willing to pass it on to Jim Webb on the other team, I'm betting it retires with him.

Time to take away their keys

2007-01-25T20:34:00.000-08:00

...which they have made very easy to do.

Yep, Diebold has thoughtfully provided every basement and kitchen hacker in the country with his or her own set of keys with which to open any Diebold touch screen voting machine, so as to install the virus of his or her choice.

As Bradblog reported yesterday morning, a public web page for Diebold's company store carries a photo of the keys in question. [Hastily taken down, once copies had spread throughout the Internets.] Since all their touch screen units open with the same key; and since the key is built on a blank available at any hardware store; all you have to do is look at the photo, file innies and outies that approximate what you see, and - voila! - you too can elect the dogcatcher, city councilman, or congressional rep of your choice.

The fellow who discovered the photo mailed his 3 homegrown keys to Princeton, which has a Diebold machine on hand for such tests. And two out of three opened it on the first try.

May I submit that there is no high-level conspiracy between Diebold and the GOP's top miscreants to use these machines to steal votes? Because such a conspiracy would require, first, that Diebold management and said miscreants have, between them, at least three neurons to rub together. Obviously, they do not.

However, the slight lift that knowledge has given to my day is offset by the revelation that Wayne and Garth now have the power to install the lead guitarist from Rush into the Oval Office in 2008.

Congress unbound?

2007-01-23T20:08:00.001-08:00

Many of those who have seen through this war from the beginning have been expressing frustration with the Congress for diddling around with non-binding "sense of the chamber" resolutions against Bush's surge. MEC over at
Mercury Rising posts a cogent defense of the strategy from Senator Levin on Fox:

So the power of this resolution is a first step to urge the president not to deepen our military involvement, not to escalate this matter. That is a first step. If the president does not take heed to that step, at that point, you then consider another step.

But the worst thing we can do is to vote on something which is critical of the current policy and lose it, because if we lose that vote, the president will use the defeat of a resolution as support for his policy.

The public doesn't support his policy. A majority of the Congress doesn't support his policy. And we've got to keep a majority of the Congress — or put a majority of the Congress in a position where they can vote against the president's policy, because that is the way in which we will begin to turn the ship around that is leading us in the wrong direction in Iraq.

MEC goes on to point out that the message to be sent is not being sent to Bush, who will never listen anyway. Rather, by echoing the electorate's disapproval, it is setting up the real message, the one Bush will send to the electorate when he ignores the sense of the chamber resolutions, "Who cares what you think?"

The electorate's disgust with that message from Bush is what will empower Congress to take the more substantive following steps. MEC's brilliant observation is that the purpose of these initial resolutions is, in Downing Street parlance, to "wrongfoot" the President.

It's ironic. This is exactly how Bush justified the invasion of Iraq: set Saddam Hussein up to defy a United Nations resolution, then use that defiance to justify moving against him.

The "surge" was initially supposed to be a two to four month affair. Tonight on ABC, General Keane was explaining that it will take 18 to 24 months to work. That is, for the duration of the Bush administration, the "surge" will be indistinguishable in any respect from an escalation. And that, undoubtedly, by design.

Had the surge duration been as initially advertised, Congress would have had to move precipitously to block it. But Chancellor Bush intends a longer game; and Congress may therefore do well to take a little time to set up its shot.

[Image by dogwelder]

Some grand tours

2007-01-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

As this Flash shows, Eric Idle's song and NASA's visual dance are a marriage made in the heavens.

And for those of you with high bandwidth, who are already weary of mere HDTV and bluetooth, here's a page devoted to gigapixel photography. And here's another.

It's a sweet job, but somebody's gotta do it

2007-01-19T21:06:00.000-08:00

In the annals of Too Much Time On Their Hands, only a few pages count as truly epic.

Behold: a scale model of the battle of Helm's Deep, rendered entirely in candy.

A shift in the Central Front

2007-01-19T19:58:00.000-08:00

Up until a few months ago, Chancellor Bush regarded Iraq as "the central front in the War on Terror." With the arrival of the Splurge, the Augmentation, the New Fork Wayward, or whatever they're calling it this news cycle, it became clear that he understands the Front has shifted.

Now that it's clear the war is lost, the Central Front has become the battle to assign the blame for the loss to someone, anyone, but Bush. Ideally, to assemble a Dolchstoss narrative: The dang war was all but won until the wimpy Democrats and liberals stabbed America in the back.

The original Dolchstoss, of course, was Hitler's explanation for why Germany lost WW I. It worked for him like a charm. The Republicans copied the strategy after Vietnam; and it worked like a charm for them, too. At least a third of the country still believes that narrative.

In order for the Dolchstoss narrative to take hold, though, two things are essential. Not too many Republicans can call for the war to end - a difficult line to hold when most of them understand how harshly the electorate will make them pay if we're still massively bogged down in November '08. And the war must be dragged out until the end of Bush's term. That's the real purpose of the Splurge: to stall a few months until the next bit of life support for the comatose war can be concocted.

While all these silly and deadly games are played out, though, two of the most prominent liberal hawks have finally begun to state out loud the long unspoken truth. Namely, the Central Front in the War on Terror is now, and always has been, Afghanistan. Ghastly as the consequences of the Iraq loss will be (and make no mistake, they will be vicious both for Iraq and America), they pale in significance next to the consequences of a loss in Afghanistan.

And Afghanistan is not at all a lost cause. Yet. We remain relatively popular with the general populace, which despises the Taliban and hopes for our protection from them. But the situation is deteriorating, even in the winter, a period when Mullah Omar's legions have usually hibernated. Schoolteachers are regularly assassinated. And after a few months without major reinforcements, our failure to protect ordinary Afghanis could become so marked that the country tips.

Should Afghanistan fall to the Taliban, Pakistan is the next domino. The Islamist regime that would replace Musharraf would be infinitely more dangerous than the clerics in Iran. Unlike Iran,

It would have no interest in cooperating with the U.S. in the struggle against terrorism. (The ayatollahs in Tehran were swift to denounce the 9/11 attack, gave us a lot of good intelligence in the ensuing months, until the "axis of evil" speech chilled relations.)
It would already have nuclear weapons - quit a few of them, along with working missiles.
It would be Sunni, in fact Wahabbist, a natural ally rather than a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda's brand of Islamism.

Iran has been pragmatic and conservative in its dealings with other nations. It has initiated no wars, and vividly remembers the horrors of the war Saddam forced it to fight. It would be jealous of any nuclear weapons it eventually obtained, careful not to let them slip out of its control into jihadist hands, and is stable enough to enforce such a policy. A Talibanized Pakistan would labor under none of those constraints, and could easily pass suitcase bombs along to Al Qaeda.

Yet Bush is pulling troops out of Afghanistan to bolster his attempt to throw a string of sevens in an already lost Baghdad crap game. He is happy to lose the more important of the two wars, simply to avoid blame for the less important one he has already lost.

Earlier this week, Senator Clinton and Evan Bayh returned from their fact finding tour of the Middle East. The letter they wrote to Defense Secretary Gates afterward didn't even mention Iraq. Instead, it baldly stated the crucial need for more troops in Afghanistan.

This is not only the desperately needed right approach for the sake of protecting the U.S. from real peril; it is also the Democrats' ticket to seizing the mantle of the party which is strong on security. Rather than highlighting withdrawal from a lost battle, it highlights advance in a battle that is very winnable. It underscores, in terms that should be clear even to the bloodthirsty right, why the Splurge is folly.

And yesterday on Hardball, Senator Biden (of whom I am not usually a great fan) struck the same note with great clarity:

MATTHEWS: One of your potential rivals for the Democratic nomination for the president is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator Clinton has said we need more troops to go to Afghanistan, although she agrees with you on the need to cap the troop number in Iraq. Do you agree we need more troops in Afghanistan?

BIDEN: Yes. When the president announced his surge, I made the case that he should be surging in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. Chris, I know you know a lot about this. Imagine if we fail in Afghanistan.

What that will mean is Musharraf will cut even a closer deal with al Qaeda and with the Taliban, and if he doesn‘t, he puts himself in the position of being overthrown more than he is now. That is a radicalized country. It has nuclear weapons and it will be a disaster.

Bush's New Wayward Foray

2007-01-10T20:15:00.000-08:00

We've had The Speech, and it was hardly full of surprises. Nearly everything was the same old same old, and the rest had been well telegraphed. But several items jumped out as worthy of note.

First, Bush steered clear of any new catchphrase. No "surge". No "New Way Forward". That means Rove had tried out three hundred different catchphrases on six hundred different focus groups, and every last one bombed. Our Rovester has fallen upon hard times.

Second, Bush identified two things that have been done wrong so far. Not enough troops was the first (though Shinseki was still completely wrong; we've only been exactly 21,500 short apparently, not a couple hundred thousand.) The other thing?

And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have...
Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this. Here is what he told his people just last week: "The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation."

That is to say, these new troops (with their inadequate armor) will be doing sweeps through Sadr City, and those sweeps will not necessarily be as restrained as, say, the gentle way in which the Marines flattened Fallujah. And Bush is naive enough to think that Maliki will both (1) go meekly along with this and (2) escape assassination from within his own camp.

Third, Bush has used this speech to begin positioning himself for the assault on Iran. He identified Iran as the backer of our adversaries in Iraq, to whose "network" we will take the fight:

Iran is providing material support for attacks on American
troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

And since those "networks" extend past Iraq's borders into the Persian motherland, we hear just two sentences further into the speech that

I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.

Notable also are the things Bush left unsaid.

He said he'd form "a new bipartisan working group" to advise him on the "war on terror". He didn't say that he would be hand picking which Democrats would be allowed into his "bipartisan" group; but I suppose by now that sort of weaseling really does go without saying.

He said that the 21,500 would be sent in so that commanders would no longer have to play whack-a-mole, chasing the militias out of one neighborhood, only to have them return when we moved on to the next. He didn't say why the militias wouldn't simply return when the surge was over. And he didn't say how long the surge would last, though the military certainly told him it couldn't be sustained for more than four or five months. (Everyone who thinks the militias and the insurgents can't sit tight for that long, polishing their weapons and enjoying the R & R, so signify by waving your dunce caps in the air. Thank you. Census taken.)

"Surge" is a technical term within physics, designating the third derivative of displacement with respect to time. But there's an even shorter technical term physicists more commonly use for the same quantity.

The term is "jerk".

Toys in the attic

2007-01-09T19:24:00.000-08:00

I've taken to posting less, not because there's less to note or say, but because there's too much. But frankly, friends - that's a mighty lily livered excuse, isn't it?

Let me take a deep breath then, and mention just these few tidbits plucked from today's stream, if only because I want them handy in this attic when I need them:

The midget in the Oval Office has abandoned his promise to "listen to the generals on the ground", turned his back in contempt on the American people, on the Congress, and on his Daddy's rescue team the ISG. The Decider has decided that he will now be the hand puppet of the more insane elements of the American Enterprise Institute. It's therefore useful to have at hand at least the executive summary from the AEI Kagan paper which has outshouted every voice of sanity in the land. Note that the summary doesn't mention the trivial detail of the numbers Kagan is asking for his "surge" - at least 30K extra offerings to Moloch, for at least 18 months. That number, as Congressional hearings have repeatedly shown, and as the ones to come will show again, is pure fantasy.

The AEI in its wisdom is telling the President to win the war with the batallions of soldiers to be found under cabbage leaves. The fairies will be glad to point them out, right there at the bottom of the garden.
But suppose the fairies supplied those 30,000 troops. What effect would they have on the outcome of Bush's War? General Petraeus, just promoted to Casey's old job, happens to have been in charge of producing the Army's new Counterinsurgency Manual (pdf). It explains (section 1-67) that successful containment of an insurgency typically requires a ratio of 20 to 25 combat troops to each 1,000 population. Of our 140,000 military in Iraq, 70K are combat, and 70K support. Baghdad's population is over 5 million. So to actually do the job, by the military's own standards, will take a shade under 190,000 more troops. For the duration of the conflict.
The new Congress is going to be very busy. The House in particular will be doing lots of stuff, real fast. Fortunately, you can keep up to the minute tabs on the docket by checking the Daily Whip Line, courtesy of new Majority Whip James E. Clyburn. Today, f'rinstance, they were passing practically all of the 9/11 Commission's ignored recommendations.

Return of the blue dress

2007-01-05T20:31:00.000-08:00

Last May 17th the Bush administration announced that the President has taken a mistress.

Well, strictly speaking, there was no announcement. Rather, the White House quietly issued a memorandum of understanding with the Secret Service, in which the Service agreed to prevent anyone from learning when the President's mistresses came and went from the Oval Office.

Ever since the Secret Service was instituted, it has been responsible for clearing and tracking visitors to the White House. The records of those visits, being records of a government agency (to wit, the Secret Service), were subject to FOIA requests. That's how the comings and goings of Monica, Betty Curry, and a passel of other relevant figures and witnesses in l'affaire de cigarre became general knowledge; it was how the misadventures of the Clinton willy became, as it were, exposed to the public.

The memorandum of understanding states that from now on, the records in question will be presidential records. Not subject to FOIA, and presumably colorably covered by claims of executive privilege.

What's that you say? Bush didn't want to cover up hanky panky with young female aides? He wanted to cover up numerous visits by sleazy Abramoffic purveyors and receivers of bribes? For shame! Those would be illegal favors. Our Glorious Leader would surely never stoop to favors lower than the merely immoral.

So, in defense of his character, we must insist: he's been having trollops carted in. One at a time, or in threesomes? Once a day, or in shifts? Would it be irresponsible to speculate? The alternative being to fan suspicions of high crimes and misdemeanors, it would be defamatory not to.

Splurge

2007-01-05T20:26:00.000-08:00

For the last four years, Bush has been spending the nation's monetary treasure, and its greater treasure, the blood and the limbs of its professional military, like a sailor on leave.

Next Wednesday he will take to the airwaves to explain that the only problem all this time has been that he hasn't been spending them fast enough. He wants to go on one last spree through the supermarket of deficit, destruction, and death. Semi-officially, this strategery is known as a "surge".

That's three letters short. It's the wastrel in chief's last splurge.

Poetry archive 4

2006-12-19T20:03:00.000-08:00

In which I continue to inflict my old poems on my readers.

This impertinent snippet never had a title, but if it had, it would probably have been "Entire Sanctification".

The rain is always incomplete.
It sweeps the dust from off my feet;
It leaves the jam between my toes,
And what will cure it, heaven knows.

A revelation at dawn

2006-12-17T19:59:00.000-08:00

And lo, I dreamed, and in my dream I beheld in my hands the organizational chart of the command structure of the U.S.A. in Iraq. Thereon were displayed the faces, together with both the public and private job descriptions, of each of the principal players.

In the middle were a pair of defense secretaries, one (Don Rumsfeld) flickering out, and one (Robert Gates) flickering in. The former bearing the title "The Derider", having served for many years as an effective sneerer-in-chief at all critics of the war and the occupation. While the latter, protected from any scrutiny by the contempt universally showered upon the former, was seen to hold the refashioned position of "The Freerider."

Reporting to these worthies was General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, here simply designated "The Topfighter". Below him, Nouri al Maliki, somewhat prematurely - but then dreams are allowed a little slippage into the future - named as "The Pushed Asider.", and further down, a tiny image of a crowd of bearded fellows whose smudged legend might or might not have been "The Suiciders".

Above Rummy, of course, was George Junior, "The Decider". But the chart didn't stop there. Dubya's boss was a winding path of digestive organs, "The Insider", none other than the renowned and infinitely wise Gut of the Emperor.

And at the very top of the command chain, ruling the sacred Gut, too ineffable to be pinned down to any name, appeard the brains of the entire operation: a thriving colony of Escherischia coli.

And it came to pass, when I awoke, that I spoke unto the wife of my bosom, saying, "You know, dear, that explains an awful lot."

Bush's ponder heart

2006-12-17T19:38:00.000-08:00

.

In his cowboy boots and Santa hat, Bush promised us all first row tickets to the premiere of his New Way Forward before Christmas. Then he changed his mind. It'll be sometime after the first of the year. Because although presidenting is hard, wouldn't you know it? Deciderating is even harder.

And stalling for two whole years, dragging the armed forces down into utter decomposition, just so that his successor will take part of the blame for his own titanic mistakes - that's going to be hardest of all. Even though the press, the remorseful yet somehow unrepentant flock of liberal hawks, the Wise Men of the Baker-Hamilton commission (none of whom, oddly, were wise enough to advise against the Excellent Baghdad Adventure before it started), and the Pottery Barn centrists ("You break it, you own it. And that means you've got to stay until you've broken every last Hummel figurine in the shop") will all join hands to help him stall.

So we shall be treated to the spectacle of George W. Bush "thinking". Which is to say, diving so deep into his own gut, the place he has always assured us is the sole source of all his thoughts, that he'll need a bathysphere for the journey. And then we'll all need a firehouse crew to hose down the smell of the prize with which he emerges from the depths.

[Cartoon by Nick Anderson, Washington Post]

Tortured until proven innocent

2006-12-16T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's nice to see the press doing its job. Josh Marshall reports that the AP has done the legwork to track down as many former detainees at Guantanamo as it could. We always release these guys with the declaration that they were vicious terrorists when we caught them, but they don't pose a danger any longer; and we're turning them over to other countries, usually their country of origin. In most cases we've requested that they be held there in ordinary jails for their (always nameless) crimes.

Of 245 released detainees that AP was able to find, 205 were released by their host countries without ever being charged, or were cleared of charges. A grand total of 14 have actually gone to trial. Eight of those were found not guilty; none have been found guilty.

Meanwhile, back at Gitmo, the brass has announced that they're through with coddling their prisoners. According to today's New York Times, they have dropped the long established programs of extending privileges for good behavior. It is, of course, a pure coincidence that the "no more Mr. Nice Guy" policy is being put into place just after the last, shameful Congress passed the Torture Act, providing that no court will ever be allowed to consider whether prisoners at Gitmo are being or have been mistreated - unless the President chooses to place the prisoner on trial.

You just don't allow the prisoners who you torture to go before a tribunal. The same Torture Act (no, of course they didn't call it that, you goose) provides that the President can just keep them forever without bothering with any tribunals. When he finds it politically useful to have a show trial, he can have a show trial. Otherwise, he can just throw 'em down the hole and forget 'em.

Every one of them, after all, is a guaranteed vicious killer. Just like the broken hundreds that our allies have decided were innocent all along.

The Baker-Hamilton report: the dead-enders speak

2006-12-15T07:47:00.000-08:00

Being on the road during the week of the Unveiling of the long awaited report, I must confess that even now I have not sat down and read the thing. I've had to piece my impressions together from newspapers, and bloggers left and right.

Nevertheless, I feel confident in submitting this Tomgram by Michael Schwartz as recommended reading on the topic. It places the BH report in the context of the real reasons for invading Iraq - a program and a set of goals (namely, a perpetual military presence in the heart of the world's Oil Alley, together with the privatization of Iraq's oil fields) which Baker-Hamilton continues to line up squarely behind.

Schwartz is particularly good at homing in on the qualifications and weasel words missed by the press. Attentively read, they imply that the commission has not in fact recommended anything like a substantial drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq in the near term. Nor has it suggested that the threat of withdrawal be used to light a fire under the feet of the Maliki government. The actual threat, no doubt read clearly by Maliki and friends, has been obscured by press coverage here.

Most striking is the report's twenty-first (of seventy-nine) recommendations, aimed at describing what the United States should do if the Iraqis fail to satisfactorily fulfill the many tasks that the ISG has set for them.

"If the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government."

This could be interpreted as a threat that the United States will withdraw -- and the mainstream media has chosen to interpret it just that way. But why then did Baker and his colleagues not word this statement differently? ("… the United States should reduce, and ultimately withdraw, its forces from Iraq.") The phrase "reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government" is probably better interpreted literally: that if that government fails to satisfy ISG demands, the U.S. should transfer its "political, military, or economic support" to a new leadership within Iraq that it feels would be more capable of making "substantial progress toward" the milestones it has set. In other words, this passage is more likely a threat of a coup d'état than a withdrawal strategy -- a threat that the façade of democracy would be stripped away and a "strong man" (or a government of "national salvation") installed, one that the Bush administration or the ISG believes could bring the Sunni rebellion to heel.

Gimme that nickled and dimed religion

2006-11-29T18:42:00.000-08:00

An idle thought.

Among first world nations, the USA stands out as being, by far, the most religious; and as having, by far, the lousiest set of welfare state bennies, which has by design been getting steadily lousier for the last thirty years. Could the first be a consequence of the second?

Imagine, if you will, a state whose populace is subjected to perpetual and rising free-floating anxiety, due to the knowledge that John or Jane QP and the family of JOJ QP are one serious illness or one pink slip away from living out of a shopping cart. Imagine that in this same state, every adult in the household has to work fifty plus hours a week just to keep marginally ahead of the loan sharks who happen to own Congress, leaving no time to cultivate any interdependent social network, or the sort of thing their foreparents knew under the now-quaint term "friends".

How is such a free-floating anxiety to be assuaged? One avenue might be to throw yourself into political activism, to try to alter the economic conditions that created the anxiety in the first place. But that takes time, up-front sacrifice, as well as information not easily found. A second avenue is to seek assurances that someone is already taking care of you. Just as there's a Big Daddy in Washington who is keeping you safe from those perpetual and (if Big Daddy has anything to say about it) perpetually rising anxieties about chemical attacks and bioweaponry and mushroom clouds, there is a Big Daddy in the clouds who will ensure that your home will always be encompassed by four walls rather than four wheels. And there's also a ready-made social network down at the church house, which won't except in some rare best cases lift a finger if that year of chemo or that lateral transfer to the unemployment office come along, but which can sure make you feel less alone up until then.

There is a lot more to genuine religion than a prosperity gospel, of course, or the comfort of familiar faces in the pews. But just because the USA has a lot more religion than its peers doesn't mean it has any more genuine religion at all, does it?

If I've fingered a real connection here, the synergy of the GOP strategy becomes clear: the more they demolish the social safety net, the more they swell the ranks of their fundamentalist base. The good news is, that anything which serves to rebuild the safety net will build synergy in the opposite direction.

Will the real Mitt Romney please sit down?

2006-11-28T20:40:00.000-08:00

Around March of 2005, the media decided that John McCain will be elected President in 2008. Since they have the power to destroy whoever they like (see "Gore invented the Internet" and "Dean Scream" for details), and the power to suppress whatever information they find unpalatable (see - if you can find them - Bush's lost years in the Texas ANG, his suppression of federal investigations into electricity manipulation in California, and the invisible Texas Funeralgate story), chances are they'll be right about that.

But just in case the bobs and weaves of the supposedly straight talking McCain lead to his implosion somewhere along the line, it will be worthwhile tucking away a note on the guy who seems to be next in line, the telegenic Mitt Romney. Joan Vennochi recalls, in a Globe op-ed, Romney's dance to the right, how today's brimstone-breathing friend of the fetus and foe of gay marriage started out five years ago as defender of Roe and a champion of gay rights.

When he ran against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, Romney wrote a letter to the Massachusetts Log Cabin Club, pledging that as "we seek to establish full equality for American gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent." During that same campaign, Romney was accused of once describing gay people as "perverse." In response, Romney's campaign vehemently denied that he used the word "perverse" and said that he respected "all people regardless of their race, creed, or sexual orientation."

While running for governor in 2002, Romney and his running mate, Kerry Healey, distributed pink fliers at a Gay Pride parade, declaring "Mitt and Kerry wish you a great Pride weekend." He backed domestic partner benefits for public employees, winning the endorsement of the national Log Cabin Republicans. In his inaugural speech, he promised to defend civil rights "regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or race."

Romney's brand of politics is best served in stacks, with your choice of maple syrup or blueberry topping.

Teachers' organization finds a truth inconvenient

2006-11-27T19:20:00.000-08:00

The producer of An Inconvenient Truth offered to distribute 50,000 copies of the DVD to schools for free. The National Science Teacher's Association refused to accept the gift.

Why? Because it might jeopardize the funds Big Oil regularly pumps into science curricula. See, this is why the private sector is where you should always turn for things like education. Unlike that nasty gummint, the private sector is altruistic, and wholly free of any agenda. Especially from those icky liberal agendas, like telling kids stuff that scientists know.

Poor Al Gore. He shoulda made sure to have lots of product placement for Coca Cola in the film, then maybe he and his producer could have snuck a little science into our science classes.

[Update: in view of a NSTA press release pointed out by commenter "anonymous", the first para should have said "offered 50,000 free copies of the DVD to NSTA for distribution". The sticking point appears to have been the distributing, rather than the acceptance of the gift.]

The margin of error in the margin of error

2006-11-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

If you aren't a poll junkie like me, you can skip this one.

Though he leans well to the right, Rasmussen is a very good, very professional pollster, who bothers to publish a new job approval figure for Bush every day. (It's a tracking poll, which is to say, in order to get his 3.5 percent margin of error, he polls 300 odd people each day, and the day's published figure is the rolling average of the three most recent days.) He is also commendably transparent in discussing his methodology.

Recently, he explained why particular polls consistently show Bush's job approval higher or lower than other polls do. It depends on which of three usual ways of posing the question are used. Rasmussen's way, which requests a "Strongly approve", "Somewhat approve", "Somewhat disapprove", or "Strongly disapprove", regularly adds several points to the Prez's numbers. The trick is to ignore the absolute levels, and just follow the ups and downs within any given poll. Those changes will track each other closely, regardless of the form of the question.

My own interpretation, after reading R's essay, is that respondents, even when they think the Chief is sucking more than a little, tend to want to give him the benefit of the doubt if the poll lets them do that. If their feelings are negative but not strongly so, they'll pick whatever answer looks to them like the lowest passing grade.

Strange Seas and Shores

2006-11-24T15:07:00.000-08:00

Politically, sure, it's been a nightmare. But sometimes I just love the 21st century.

Every issue of Science or Nature these days includes an article or two spelling out how some enzyme or bit of RNA expression machinery does its thing: clarifying how it hooks or snips or binds or stretches some other bit of the machinery, or perhaps just drafting a megamolecule's shape precisely enough that some future article can suss out the ways that shape can bend and move.

This is what it looks like when biologists and 3-D graphics professionals put a big fat stack of those brain-numbing articles together with meticulous accuracy, a good sense of space and color, and loving care. These are the dances that are going on in every one of your cells, every minute. It's a journey that puts that dear old chestnut Fantastic Voyage to shame.

Here the animation team describes how the 3 minute clip was created. And here is a summary of the plotline, from a biologist's point of view.

Ketchup post

2006-11-20T21:07:00.000-08:00

Items that lately caught my nictitating eye:

Torture from the top: The ACLU's FOIA endeavors have turned up a Bush executive order and a DOD memorandum authorizing torture. Or whatever they're calling it nowadays. In a Spiegel interview, Ron Suskind confirms that Bush knew who was waterboarding whom.

Go, Go, Go: WaPo today passed on the deliberations of a Pentagon review of three Iraq options: Go Big, Go Long, Go Home. Consensus is forming on bumping up in country numbers by 20 or 30K "for a while", then scaling back quickly to 60K for forever or until The End Of Evil.

A Connecticut Patriot: Senator Dodd introduces legislation to repeal the noxious portions of the Torture Act. He does a commendably thorough job.

Sneak Thieves? For reasons I may expound later, I'm dubious about this. But O'Dell and cohorts at Election Defence Alliance believe they have a smoking gun that November 2006 was rigged, but the ploy fell short because the riggers didn't realize how big the Democratic wave would be.

Euphemism of the Week: A Vietnam Vet commenting at TPM Cafe recalls how he and his fellow draftees, thrust to the front lines, summed up their job positions: "Ordnance Absorption Technicians".

Goo Is Good: Nanotechnologists at Rice University have come up with a high tech manufacture/ low tech distribution way to clean up the arsenic poisoning most of the drinking wells in Bangla Desh and southeast India. Rust particles, each smaller than a virus, can adsorb the toxin on their surfaces. Once they've done their work, an ordinary hand magnet can scoop them up, with their cargo, leaving potable water behind.

A fact so dread, he faintly said

2006-11-17T20:28:00.000-08:00

Lewis Carroll's Mad Gardener's Song lends itself to almost endless variations on the following theme:

The Mad President's Song

He thought he saw a missile threat
From which Star Wars would shade us.
He looked again and found it was
A strike plan of Al Qaeda's.
"Clinton was paranoid," he said.
"These clowns are small potatoes."

He thought he saw a Pet Goat book
That he could read straight through.
He looked again and found it was
A plane that struck Tower Two.
"I'll just sit tight until" he said,
"Dick tells me what to do."

He thought he saw M. Atta link
Up to Iraq in Prague.
He looked again, and found it was
A puff of stovepipe fog.
"That makes no never mind," he said,
"We still can demagogue."

He thought he saw a mushroom cloud
That issued from Saddam.
He looked again, and found it was
A script by David Frum.
"Heck, let's still go to war," he said,
"To prove I am Da Bomb."

He thought he saw a guitar chord
He could strum happily.
He looked again and found it was
New Orleans undersea.
"What are those corpses there?" he said,
"Just Democrats to me."

Feel free to document any of the dozens of Dubya's other well-known hallucinations in the same format.

What a right-wing Webb we weave

2006-11-15T05:09:00.000-08:00

We've all been assured, most recently by the sagacious Joe Klein in his Time cover story, that the Democratic party won by shifting sharply rightward. Exhibit A are five or so pro-life candidates in the mix, and exhibit B are the new Second Amendment senators Tester of Montana and Webb of Virginia.

The fourth estate would be astonished to learn how many of us old-line Hubert Horatio Hornblower liberals have come to appreciate, over the last six years, the value of not letting the gummint know where all the guns are. But now I'm feeling like rilly rilly betrayed, because Jim Webb has gone over to the enemy and -gasp!- started publishing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. A tiny taste of his liberal bashing:

The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars...

This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation's most fortunate.

Markos snarks delightedly over Webb's defection today. He doesn't quote what I found the most interesting of Webb's paragraphs, in which Jim addresses specifically the readership of the WSJ opinion page, whom he knows from experience have only been nodding off while he quoted the statistics of inequality, and limned its depradations on those unimportant losers who don't have the WSJ propped up next to their tea caddy in the morning.

America's elites need to understand this reality in terms of their own self-interest. A recent survey in the Economist warned that globalization was affecting the U.S. differently than other "First World" nations, and that white-collar jobs were in as much danger as the blue-collar positions which have thus far been ravaged by outsourcing and illegal immigration. That survey then warned that "unless a solution is found to sluggish real wages and rising inequality, there is a serious risk of a protectionist backlash" in America that would take us away from what they view to be the "biggest economic stimulus in world history."

More troubling is this: If it remains unchecked, this bifurcation of opportunities and advantages along class lines has the potential to bring a period of political unrest. Up to now, most American workers have simply been worried about their job prospects. Once they understand that there are (and were) clear alternatives to the policies that have dislocated careers and altered futures, they will demand more accountability from the leaders who have failed to protect their interests. The "Wal-Marting" of cheap consumer products brought in from places like China, and the easy money from low-interest home mortgage refinancing, have softened the blows in recent years. But the balance point is tipping in both cases, away from the consumer and away from our national interest.

The middle class is the goose that laid the golden egg of American prosperity. The moneyed elites, including the media (whose reporters are not liberal but libertarian), have been deliberately, and successfully, destroying the middle class. But ultimately, the karmic truth is that they do so at their own peril.

The Cheese Stands Alone

2006-11-14T19:08:00.000-08:00

The U.S. is now the only holdout. The world's deputy global warming bad boy, Australia, has joined the reality-based community, and will start playing the Kyoto side of the fence. As America's biggest G-W Denier, Senator Inhofe (R-Toto), is forced to take his fingers out of the ears of the Senate Environment Committee, Barbara Boxer (D-Green as Grass) will pick up the gavel and a megaphone. Perhaps even the High Sheriff Global Warming Bad Boy will put some chips down in the game now.

About time would have been six years ago. But I'll take it.

Rovester's Last Stand

2006-11-10T15:31:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld's defenestration came as no surprise. But the fact that he was shown to the window mere days after Bush had sworn to the skies that he would stick to Don like glue to the end of his days did raise some eyebrows. That Bush openly admitted he was lying when he so swore, raised a few more. Talking through one's ten gallon hat has always been integral to the Cowboy Code, Crawford style; but fessing up to it is a new codicil.

You may ask which was the lie: the old assertion that he planned to keep Rummy on forever, or the newer assertion that Rummy would have gone packing even if Republican supremacy had stayed put. And the only answer will be a Rumsfeldian one: It's one of those unknown unknowns.

But what raised eyebrows in punditstan raised hackles among the Republican faithful. Why on earth did Bush make a categorical commitment to his SecDef, just when congresscritters on the stump were trying to emphasize their flexibility on the war? Didn't he realize he was handing over the Congress to the enemy?

I have a contrarian take on that. The facts are these: the middle had turned decisively against Bush, by nearly two to one. Not only did independents not like his war, they no longer thought him truthful. They would not have believed a sudden burst of "flexibility" from him.

Rove's whole electoral theory over seven years had been to play very hard right for the base, count on winning nearly half of the inattentive middle by default, and so to squeak out a 51% majority. The theory fell apart when the middle began to pay attention, and decidedly dislike what they saw. Once Bush lost credibility with the middle, a sudden feint to the left would have payed no dividends. Worse, it would have confused and depressed the True Believers. Rove had painted himself into a corner. He had deprived himself of all options but the same old playbook. He had to appeal even harder to the base, hope that the Dems were overestimating their new GOTV prowess, and hope that the middle just stayed home in droves.

Dubya's eternal commitment to Rumsfeld the Brilliant was the final application, the dying spasm, the last throes, if you will, of the Rove Theory of Conservative Domination. He and Bush weren't ignoring the plight of their congressional hopefuls. They were sending in the only cavalry they had left in the fort.

And they were trying not to see the arrows streaming through the air, or the ghostly aura of yellow moustaches streaming behind Karl in the wind, as he led the charge.

Just because

2006-11-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

Check out this two minute epic from Youtube via Dependable Renegade, wordlessly but eloquently expressing the way tens of millions of Americans have felt this week.

That's what you call a tough house, eh?

Point of balance

2006-11-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

The talking heads are all saying that Democrats now have to "govern from the center". That's all well and good.

I see from the papers we just had an election, and the electorate decided that Democrats are the center.

We'll govern from there.

Okay, Nancy, let's see how Grover enjoys being date raped

2006-11-08T19:44:00.000-08:00

There's been some grumbling in the left blogosphere over the open hand of bipartisanship Nancy Pelosi extended today to Chancellor Bush. They naturally want to see her become our own Iron Lady, the embodiment of Kos's "fighting Dems." But though their fears of wimpitude to come may prove prophetic, the fact is that for now not-yet-Speaker Pelosi is playing her cards exactly right.

We won this election because the country no longer trusts the GOP, not because they trust us. Poll after poll shows the public has no idea what Democrats stand for - even in those simple, plain cases where our (unreported) votes ought to have made it plain as day. At the same time, they no longer automatically believe the old right-wing demon liberal caricatures. The fact that we've brought a new broom brings this bonus, that our slate is swept clean.

The weeks between now and Speaker Pelosi's first gavel fall will be spent trying to inscribe an identity on that tabula rasa. The Republican talking point will be to type us as angry partisans intent on wasting the country's next two years on vindictive "witch hunts" (formerly known to civics texts as "oversight".) Pelosi has just struck a pre-emptive blow against that tactic. The kid glove demurely encasing her mailed fist, combined with a unified message hammering home her first 100 hours agenda, will prepare the field to our advantage for the memetic war to follow.

Once in power, the Democrats need to display themselves, quickly, as the party that stands up for ordinary working Americans. There's very low hanging fruit, like raising the minimum wage, removing the negotiation ban on Medicare part D, allowing Canadian pharmaceuticals in. Things even Bush won't dare to veto. We've already settled on this opening salvo.

Quiet investigation, preparatory to public hearings, can go on in parallel.

The second thing the Dems need to do is to brand themselves as bipartisan on the war. Here "bipartisan" has nothing to do with playing pattycake with Bush. It has to do with playing pattycake with the Baker commission, and with the growing body of Republicans who would rather not have ongoing carnage in Iraq necklacing their Congressional chances in '08.

The Dems must impose bipartisanship on the GOP as the precondition for bailing them out of Dubya's Excellent Adventure. Only with Republican signatures on the dotted line does the war end. This means, first, that the pundits and right wingers will not be able to claim afterwards that "We would have won in Iraq, if only the Democrats hadn't forced us to cut and run." Or at least will not be able to make the claim pass the general public's laugh test.

And it means, second, that Democrats will get credit (even among some of the punditry) for bipartisanship and changing the tone. It may even become part of the brand. And that will further strengthen them when the investigations are unleashed.

Finally, they should brand themselves as cleaning up the corruption. Rather than a single bill, they should introduce each reform as a separate bill, with its own ballyhoo. March it through and dare the Republicans to obstruct it. A lot of that can be done as chamber rules, not even subject to presidential veto.

When all that's done, the public will have a reasonably fair notion of what the Democrats stand for, concerning which they are just now clueless . Just bulling full steam ahead with all the overdue oversight, without defining our new identity first, could forestall it all.

Pelosi's initial politeness doesn't worry me overmuch. I'm going to see how it goes.

[Adapted from a comment on Greenwald's blog.]

Just-in-time Justice

2006-11-06T13:36:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows, though the "liberal media" have politely avoided mentioning it, that the Iraqi judicial panel sentenced Saddam to death on Guy Fawkes Day, because hanging was the sentence, and two days before the American election was the date, in the orders they received from their puppet masters in Washington. (The sentence is no doubt richly deserved, at least in Saddam's case. But the "coincidence" here lies not in the timing, but in the fact that the result of the show trial happens to match what a real trial would have determined.)

There should have been no lingering doubts on that score, since the panel postponed its announcement for over a month, and then postponed it again, saying they had not yet finished their deliberations. Yet despite being still at an impasse a couple of months beyond their deadline, somehow they were able to proclaim with confidence, several weeks in advance, the exact date on which they would be ready.

And, lo! Even so it came to pass. Norman Vincent Peale himself could scarcely produce a finer exhibit of the miraculous power of positive thinking.

The Bushbots naturally scoff at the notion anything but coincidence could be involved. The spectacle these stagehands present, sweeping their arms through the air above the Iraqi judiciary to declare, "See? No strings!", while ignoring the Rumsfeldian wrists which extrude from said judiciary's posteriors, provides some small amusement, I suppose. But now it appears the obedient little jurists couldn't roll all the lumps out of their cookie cutter justice quite on demand. So today Josh Marshall administers the coup de grace to the coincidence theory:

Saddam was sentenced yesterday. But we do not know exactly what for. The judges met their deadline for the sentence of death; but the bill of particulars, the actual verdict, will not be released for some days to come.

The protectors of the rule of law in the White House rise as one to shriek with the Queen of Hearts:
"Sentence first! Verdict afterwards!"

[graphic credit to beepbeepitsme]

Pocketbook voting in the pews

2006-10-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

Much of the thesis of the bestselling What's the Matter With Kansas?, and much of the conventional wisdom of the left (yes, there is a left-wing CW, just as there's a very right wing "centrist" CW), is that evangelical Americans are a pack of Wal-Mart shoppers who keep voting for Republicans even though the Republicans keep taking them to the cleaners economically at every turn.

Well, thirty years ago evangelicals came primarily from the lunchbox class. The middle and upper classes tended to be Protestants from "mainstream" denominations. But over the decades, and I don't know which is the chicken and which is the egg, evangelical churches have grown gradually more upscale. And it is no longer true that a Republican vote is something you get when you drag a glossy photo of a bloody fetus through a trailer park.

Take a gander at this fascinating chart of the voting habits of evangelicals, when broken down by income. The unwashed religious masses are not as stupid, not as prone to voting against their own interests, as the overwashed secular masses have been trained to think they are.

Evangelicals making less than 35 grand a year are more likely to vote blue than red. Who knew?

How the West will be stolen?

2006-10-24T17:18:00.000-07:00

Concerned about masked elephants in black coveralls tip-toeing away in the dead of the November 7th night with all the votes innocently entered into touch screen "voting" machines? It's a valid and natural fear.

But a lot depends on where you're voting. If you're in Georgia or Maryland, of course, your vote is as good as vanished, because both of them have state-wide mandated paperless touch screen machines courtesy of Diebold. If you're in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, the methods vary, but you're pretty sure to have an honest vote (precinct-based optical scan, or hand counts).

Ohio has gone almost entirely to "electronic" machines - though only two counties are getting theirs from Diebold. So, did the GOP pull its funding from the DeWine Senate bid because Sherrod Brown had pulled too far ahead, or because they have it in the bag? We'll learn in due course. But they are continuing to fund Steele, even further behind in Maryland. And they're pouring money into Tennessee, which is mostly gone over to E-voting this year.

If you want to check out local stealability conditions, this page from Verified Voting is a godsend. It shows, county by county on clickable maps, just what machinery is in use everywhere in the USA. Bear in mind that "precinct based" optical scan machines are the good ones; "centrally tabulated" optical scans are the bad ones, where votes can be switched at the central machine. But even for the CT OS, vote switching is a big risk, and can't be done too blatantly, because the paper trail remains and the fraud could be found out.

My guess? They can jigger all the close House races in Indiana, the Senate in Tennessee and Maryland, and a number of others. But they can't steal enough votes in enough districts to keep the House. For that, they'll have to depend on their staples: vile last minute push polls, massive voter suppression, tons of money behind tons of lies. And fear.

If Steele loses in Maryland, and DeWine in Ohio, it will mean that they really can't jigger the machines. Yet. It will be instructive to watch.

Demise of the unexpected hangsman?

2006-10-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

There's a well-known logical paradox known as "The Unexpected Hanging". A condemned prisoner is told Saturday night that he will be hung at dawn sometime during the next week, but to increase the mental anguish of his punishment, he will never know which morning.

The prisoner reasons, "They can't hang me next Saturday, because it's the last day, so I'll know it's coming. They can't hang me on Friday, because I know they can't do it on Saturday, so when Friday comes, I'll know it's their last chance." By the same process of elimination, he concludes that there is no day on which he can be hung without his expecting it.

So he is genuinely surprised when they trot him out the door and string him up on Saturday morning.

Republicans have successfully caused Democrats mental anguish for many elections now, by promising their hangsman Rove will deliver an October surprise, but we'll never know what or when. But I'm coming round to the view it won't be surfacing this time. Since the only October surprise big enough to help them out this time around would be launching the Iran war, I certainly hope I'm not whistling in the dark.

There are several sources for my growing confidence that Karl won't be showing up with that noose. The first, and weakest, is the absolute desperation being shown by all the embattled GOPers this cycle: wildly over the top negative ads, hurling easily exploded accusations of hebophilia, pedophilia, cavorting with naked Playboy Bunnies, the works. Ken Blackwell in Ohio preparing to break the 2-2 party line tie between election board members on whether to disqualify his opponent for Governor, ahead of him in the polls by over twenty points, on the grounds that he switched from one Ohio residence to another, and that whichever house he claims as his home, the Secretary of State will claim the other one is, making him ineligible to vote, and therefore ineligible to be a candidate.

Crazy stuff.

The second tipoff is that popping jacks out of boxes in late October is a game with diminishing returns. Both because early voting is growing more and more common, so that at least 10 percent of votes will already be cast by the time you spring your surprise. And because all such surprises consist of TOUS, Teeror-alerts Of Unusual Size. The hope is to send such a jolt of fear-adrenaline through the limbic system of the electorate that it will turn off its brain until just after it exits the voting booth. The model is Pulp Fiction: Travolta slamming that hypo into Uma Thurman's heaving chest.

But it turns out that our citizenly hearts have become habituated to the GOP's terror adrenaline drug. Each dose is less effective. The poll bounce is smaller and shorter. Not even the ritual chest-beating video from Osama, much as UBL would like it to give his favorite recruitment officers in DC a boost, will make any noticeable difference this time.

Third is the fact that their latest Horrorama campaign ad, aping Johnson's infamous Daisy Ad to the best of their ability, has as its punchline an entreaty to the party faithful to go vote early. They fear more uncontrollable October surprises that will break the Dems' way, more than they look forward to any rabbit Karl is going to pull out of his size eighteen hat.

Most potent argument of all? Last week, the panel of judges who heard the first set of charges against Saddam announced that they'd reached their conclusions. Verdict and sentence all ready. But they were going to sit on it, and not schedule an announcement until - let's see now, what's the first date one of us doesn't just happen to have a dentist's appointment or an urgently required beard trim? Ah, here it is! - November 5.

That Bushco is so abjectly eager to control the last news cycle before the election, that they would humiliate the supposedly sovereign government of Iraq and its supposedly independent judiciary with instructions from the Washington overlords to time their trial outcomes at the overlords' convenience, seems a strong indication that they have no other means at hand to control that cycle. Heck, the verdict of guilty and the sentence of death are neither of them even surprises.

The triumph of Or Else diplomacy

2006-10-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

The NYT reports that Dubya is fixing to send an ultimatum to ~~our enemies~~ our allies in Iraq. Like an unproductive employee going on probation, they will be handed a list of benchmarks and a timeline.

...the officials said that for the first time Iraq was likely to be asked to agree to a schedule of specific milestones, like disarming sectarian militias, and to a broad set of other political, economic and military benchmarks intended to stabilize the country.

Although the plan would not threaten Mr. Maliki with a withdrawal of American troops, several officials said the Bush administration would consider changes in military strategy and other penalties if Iraq balked at adopting it or failed to meet critical benchmarks within it.

What's striking about this approach is its deep similiarity to the way the Badministration tackled the problem of North Korea.

Step One: Throw away the only bargaining chips you've got. (In the case of NK, forswear the existing signed agreement, and let them toss out the IAEA inspectors and hide away the previously monitored plutonium. In the case of Iraq, grind down your armed forces until the whole world knows they are powerless to mount any additional threat whatsoever.)

Step Two: Refuse to offer any carrots whatsoever, refuse to enter into talks with your adversaries, and wave around a papier maché big stick. Loudly insist, and this is key, that the other parties must do exactly as you say, Or Else.

Step Three: When the other parties do whatever the heck they please, do nothing. (In NK, doing nothing consists of saying, "China will negotiate for us, we're not here." In the case of Iraq, doing nothing consists of "staying the course:.
Step Four: Loudly insist that the other parties must now do exactly as you say, Or Else. Loop to Step Three.

The Badministration appears to be suffering under the delusion that reality can always be cowed into submission by the issuance of vague threats. Because it is a point of pride among them always to speak, and never to listen, they haven't been hearing the whole world replying, in ever more contemptuous tones, "Or Else what?"

How Joe can he go?

2006-10-19T19:07:00.000-07:00

Apprently it takes a weasel to know a weasel. atrios passes on the word from a reader who listens to Rush Limbaugh so we don't have to:

According to reader b, Limbaugh just said that Lieberman is "seething inside" and has "payback in mind" for the Democrats if he wins.

Lieberman obtained the primary endorsements of every big Dem name, by swearing to them that if he lost the primary, he wouldn't make an independent run.

Right after losing the primary, he promised that he will caucus with Democrats if the independent run he promised not to make wins back his Senate seat. Until earlier this week, when he said, essentially, "Unless they try to strip my seniority."

So they'll give him the seniority he threw away. And the sun, and the moon, and a star or two. And he won't even have to break his promise this time around. "Yes, I said I'd caucus with Democrats. But I didn't say for how many minutes."

There's a better deal for Democrats than this. And his name is Ned.

How the Grownups Do It

2006-10-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

Below: Shiny happy people clapping hands.

Yesterday, Chancellor Bush signed into law the "Yes, Virginia, America Stands for Kidnapping, Rendition, Life Imprisonment Without Charges, Torture, and Amnesty for War Crimes Act of 2006", more affectionately known to its friends as the Military Commissions Act. The full text of the bill as signed may be found on the GPO site. (That was pdf, the plaintext is here.) I've slogged through all the pages of depressing verbiage, and no one sums it up more clearly or succinctly than T Bogg:

Torture.
Secret prisons.
Hearsay evidence.
No habeas petitions.
Kangaroo courts.
Star chambers.

None of these things, of course, are remotely necessary in order to "protect us from terrorists". Over in the state of Israel, which in the face of enormous security pressures and despite the general dominance of its hawkish party, has managed to remain a vibrant democracy and to harbor a press expressing a far wider range of views than the USA permits, they don't do any of this. Prisoners are charged with crimes, or they're released. Judges insist on respect for the constitution. The executive branch submits to and respects judicial decisions.

According to Israeli government figures, terrorists killed 1,123 of its citizens between September of 2000 and May of 2006 - the equivalent, in that country of just over six million, of around 54,0000 American deaths. That's 20 September 11s. And that doesn't even count the bloodshed of the preceding five decades. Israelis know terrorism. They know what it takes to deal with it, face it down, and survive it. What do our more experienced, and more freedom-loving, allies have to teach us?

Israel enacted its own Unlawful Combatants Law in 2002, with the purpose of providing a domestic legal framework for the prolonged detention of terrorists. Rejecting the terrorists' status as prisoners of war, the law instead provides for holding them ``until the end of hostilities." ...

Unlike the US bill , the Israeli law provides for a first hearing of the detainee before a high-ranking officer immediately upon his detention; a detainee has a right to legal representation; a first judicial review of the detention warrant has to take place in a district court no longer than 14 days after the first arrest, and every six months thereafter; and the detainee can appeal his detention before a Supreme Court j udge. The court must revoke the detention order if it finds that the release of the detainee would not threaten national security or if there are other special reasons that justify it.

Regulations promulgated under the law stipulate conditions for detention. These include provisions on medical treatment, clothing, food (including the right to purchase items in a canteen), outdoor exercises, religious practices, correspondence with the outside world, and even cigarettes. Unlike the US bill, in Israel, the detainee also has a right to meet with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Ralston not so Purina

2006-10-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

Susan Ralston, the long time Abramoff aide who became Karl Rove's personal assistant, resigned, or more accurately was gently helped over the gunwales of the ship, just in time for the Friday night no-news-here cycle. It seems she had remained a little too embroiled for comfort with Mr. Black Fedora.

One can understand the impulse. It wouldn't do for the visible ties between Abramoff and the Oval Office to be more than a few hundred times tighter than the "ties" between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Ralston was Abramoff's personal assistant until she moved over to Rove's office in 2001. Abramoff reportedly bragged to others that Ralston was his "implant" at the White House.

The White House announced an internal ethics investigation of Ralston after a Congressional report released last week showed extensive contacts between Ralston and Abramoff's lobbying team. Among other things, the report showed that Ralston had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts from Abramoff without compensating him. White House ethics rules prevent employees from accepting gifts worth more than $20.

All the more important to lighten the Leakin' Lena now, while the issue is merely "thousands of dollars in gifts". Should the favors being traded - support for the forced sex and abortion operations Abramoff was seeking to protect in the Marianas - finally make it out of the blogosphere into the mainstream media, the chunk of Bush's base that could drop off would rival Larsen B's departure from Antarctica.

The time-honored principle here (as with Dennis Hastert's recent manful promise to fire some of his staff members if it turns out he did anything wrong) is that turning your underlings into jetsam is a better deal than finding yourself turned into flotsam. But fellas, trust me: if the ship is well-holed, the principle no longer applies.

Bush's new breed of rape shield law

2006-10-04T18:11:00.000-07:00

While we're discussing signing statements, here's a great catch by Daisy Cutter at dailykos.

By overwhelming bipartisan majorities, Congress in 2003 passed a law empowering the aggressive investigation of instances of prison rape. Bush's signing statement reserved the President's right to stonewall any such investigation.

In more halcyon days, rape shield laws were intended to protect victims. Bush's idea of a rape shield law is apparently one which enables the government to protect those noble Americans who have raped prisoners on behalf of the state.

When the Torture Act of 9/28/06 was passed, it detailed a very short list of acts prohibited to the President: torture (however the President chooses to define it), murder, maiming, and rape. If, however, rape should be used as a torture technique in defiance of the Torture Act, the 2003 signing statement permits the President to guarantee that the act will never be investigated.

Say what you will about Chancellor Bush. This is a guy who thinks ahead. He had the foresight to carve out exemptions from the meager constraints of his own Torture Law, three years before he knew he would get the Reichstag to pass it.

The limited modified Iran route?

2006-10-03T21:22:00.000-07:00

I'm glad only a handful of people read this blog; and in particular, glad that Karl Rove isn't one of them. Because I'd hate to give him ideas.

Aircraft carriers have been told to be ready to head out for an unspecified location this week. We don't have to be told that the location is the Persian Gulf, at which they could then arrive on October 21. Bush may or may not have decided to launch the air war on Iran as his October Surprise. But clearly, he has sent out the word that he wants the option ready.

He is miscalculating. This country is desperately weary of war. It has not been rendered sufficiently terrified of Tehran. There are too many competing stories on the newslines, and now the Foley story is burning up critical air time just when the boogeyman buildup was supposed to go into fifth gear. This time, they should have begun marketing their new product in August, or even in June.

The rules have changed. The "bounce" from the next war will turn into a negative in less than two weeks. Unless.

If I were Rove, and I trust he's not that smart, I'd have Bush designate two or three nuclear related Iranian targets, not ones near urban centers. The October surprise would be a lightning attack on those targets alone. Not enough to seriously affect Tehran's nuclear program, but that wouldn't be the point. One set of sorties, then Bush says, "This is to show Iran that we're serious. This seems to be the only language they'll understand. I hope now they'll come to the negotiating table. The United States of America is open for direct talks."

With such a move, he could present himself to his base as the War President redivivus; and to Iraq-weary independents as the earnest man of peace, wholly focused on diplomacy. The press would love him to death again.

Then on November 8, having gulled us all one last time, he could send in the nonstop bomber armadas.

The one drawback to this plan? When the Pentagon wargamed Iran last year, they found that Tehran blinded our electronic surveillance by switching to motorcycle couriers, and our entire carrier fleet was taken out in the first wave. A limited strike might be a military impossibility. All of Persia's defenses would have to be decapitated first, a tall order in itself. We might find the mullahs putting us in as ignominious a position as Hezbollah put Israel when she attacked southern Lebanon.

Never underestimate Chancellor Bush's capacity to highlight American military impotence before the world.

The President is dead. Long live the Chancellor.

2006-10-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a colorful bunch of weeks since this blog went into radio silence, hasn't it?

The most important story, of course, eclipsing all else by its mind-staggering, soul-sucking magnitude, was the official declaration by virtually all Republicans and too bloody many Democrats that from now until All Evil Is Utterly Vanquished And The President Tells Us So, America shall stand foursquare and proud on the world stage for Mom, apple pie, and um, let's see - oh, yes. For disappearings, life imprisonment, torture, and execution by kangaroo courts, all on the whim of the King.

Like every other American with a conscience or a sense of history, I spent the last couple weeks of September calling down almost every bolt of blue lightning on Harry Reid that I'd ever called down on George W. Bush. How could someone fail to raise a filibuster over the most egregiously anti-American legislation to pass through the Capitol dome since Reconstruction? I wasn't going to contribute another dime to these slugs, much less waste shoe leather on them. What's the difference between the party of "Hey, I've got a keen idea! Let's tell the world that torture is the great new American value!", and the party of, "Oh, okay, if you really want to, I won't deny you your fun"?

It was when I saw the final vote in the Senate that I began to calm down a bit, rage modulating into mere anguish. Twelve Dem senators cast "ayes" for this abomination. Yes, that's depressing, dispiriting, and disgusting. But what was Reid going to do? When he went around and did his whip count, and found he was eight votes in the hole for sustaining a filibuster, the writing was on the wall. No power on earth could have breathed life into that filibuster. The USA was about to become a tyranny; the Congress was about to transform itself voluntarily into the Reichstag, presiding over its own fundamental castration. The Republic had suffered an unavoidable, indefinite suspension.

Reid was effectively hooded and shackled. I don't find it hard to imagine that he was calling down the same blue bolts on himself that I was. So what remained to do? Anything that could possibly help toward the goal of restoring the Republic, beginning in November.

A thousand liberal blogs have pointed out the utter folly of caving to Bush for fear of being attacked as "weak on terrorism". And yes, it's true. No matter whether one caves or does not cave, one will be attacked, viciously, continuously, mendaciously, gleefully, as "weak on terrorism". It's a gimme, an axiom, as sure as the phases of the moon or a dog returning to its vomit. It's what Republicans have always done, will always do, and actual votes and facts will never have any bearing whatsoever on their dedication to the canard, or on the media's ritual echo thereof.

But voters do, sometimes, pay attention to actual votes (if not actual facts). Since Dems have made no effort over the preceding months to educate voters on the actual facts, and since the hour is so late, there was no way to turn the boat around. Democratic candidates will crash into the "weak on terror" reef, and last minute attempts to explain why Bush has done everything to encourage terrorism, short of lending Osama the Nimitz and the GOP's direct mail operation, will only fall flat. There was some hope, however, of focusing voters' attention on the economy, on Iraq - and now, it appears, on the blitheness with which Republicans will shield sexual predators.

That hope was magnified by not raising a fuss in advance of the inevitable defeat on the torture bill. Whether the small advantage so gained will be enough to offset the sense of betrayal among the Democratic - and the libertarian - base, remains to be seen. The sacrifice the party leadership is now asking from us, to campaign as if the Democrats actually stood for liberty and the rule of law, is painful. But the shades of Paine and Jefferson and Adams, and all those who have fought for democracy for two centuries, call us to the same sacrifice. If we can't do it for the current leadership, we can do it for them.

It should never have come to this. If Dems had shown the spine to talk truth about the "war on terror", and to defend the Constitution, in the preceding months, it would not have come to this. But a show of spine exactly at this juncture, gratifying as it would have been to every patriot, would have been counterproductive. (I am saying this excuses Reid, in some small measure, for not mounting a filibuster. In no way can it excuse the faithless twelve who championed torture and the denial of habeas corpus. They, especially the handful whose seats were already securely blue, must be dealt with in primaries to come; and Lieberman especially must be defeated this year.)

After 9/28, a day far blacker in our history than 9/11, we can no longer refer to Bush as "President". With the advent of the DC Reichstag, he has assumed the position of Chancellor. It will not be appropriate to call him "Fuehrer" until such time as Congress, instead of merely stripping itself of effective power, formally dissolves itself. And that is unlikely to happen before another major jihadist attack on the Homeland, or the consolidation in '08 of an additional four years of neocon rule. But Chancellor fits.

Like Saint Ronald told us, it's morning in America. Specifically, the year which has just dawned is 1931. As deeply as they have disgraced themselves, the Democrats are now the only force standing between us and the dawn of 1933 in two more years.

Shoe leather, don't fail us now.

The Diebold Hackuvote TS

2006-09-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

Princeton, once home to sublime interactions between Kurt Goedel and Albert Einstein, keeps on keeping on. Most recently, they issued a report on the craptastic "Diebold Accuvote TS". That's TS as in: "You thought we were going to count your vote? Tough Shit, Eliot."

Visit their site. Watch the video. Yes, you too can insert your Trojan into one of these machines and make the vote come out any way you like. It takes less than a minute alone with the machine. (If you don't have a key, no problem: the lock is a cinch to pick.) And since it can install itself on the resident memory card, and the card is transferable between machines, infecting one machine is equivalent to infecting as many as you like.

The virus Princeton wrote cleans up neatly after itself. Not a trace of any kind is left to indicate that the votes were jiggered.

Watch the movie. Pass it around to your friends. Every American should know how perfectly designed these achingly expensive machines are to assist the election criminal in the squashing of democracy. If you live in Georgia, Maryland, Ohio, - heck, just about anywhere - duplicate copies and mail them to your state legislators. They've been wined and dined and reassured that these beauties are the derniere cri in perfection. And 90% of them swallowed the bait, the hook, the sinker, the line, the pole, and the angler.

I love a Parade

2006-09-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

Back in 2003, Wilton Sekzer, a retired NYC cop, wanted the country to go to war with Iraq so bad he could taste it. The President had told him, again and again, that Saddam was the guy who had ordered his son killed, along with over 2,000 others, that day in the twin towers. And Sekzer wanted vengeance.

In answer to his anguished appeal, one company after another painted his lost son's name on the missiles that they rained on Iraq. A little memento for his child's killers. It didn't end the pain, but it felt good; it was at least a kind of recognition.

Months later, I was watching TV when President Bush came on and said he didn’t know why people connected Iraq to 9/11. He said: “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th [attacks].” I said, “What did he just say?” I mean, I almost jumped out of my chair. I said, “What is he talking about? What the hell did we go in there for? If Saddam didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, then why did we go in there?”

I’m from the old school. Certain people walk on water. The President of the United States is one of them. It’s a terrible thing if someone like me can’t trust his President. I began to wonder what the hell’s with the whole system. There’s something wrong with the entire system.

I feel that the government exploited my feelings of patriotism. But I was so insane with wanting to get even, I was willing to believe anything.

Sekzer got to tell his story, and it became a centerpiece of the hard-hitting antiwar documentary Why We Fight.

Now the astonishing part: the quote above is from his account in this week's Parade magazine. Distributed along with hundreds of different Sunday newspaper outlets, Parade has always displayed a political sensibility only a shade less to the right than Reader's Digest. It defines the sensibilities of the marginally political center right of Middle America. When George W. Bush is called to account in its pages for the deceit by which he dragged these United States into this unholy war - when it is not embarrassed to call as its witness the star of a lefty documentary - there has been a seismic shift in the nation's willingness to accept reality and demand responsibility.

Friends, the worm at last is turning. Or, is it a worm exactly? That familiar banner flying above it reads, "Don't tread on me".

Carbon return desk II

2006-08-27T13:34:00.000-07:00

So, as I posted a couple of days ago, the standard - and surprisingly well developed - technique for carbon sequestration is to stick it way under the ground, in deep aquifers.

But there's another contender out there accruing its fan base: sticking it onto the ground.

More specifically, there are marvelously productive soils out there, typified by the terra preta of the Amazon, which are a couple of feet deep and which turn out turnips and whatnot twice the size of those that come up in ordinary soil. It turns out this class of rich black earths is anthropogenic. Armed with the right know-how, any farmer or gardener can have it. And fight global warming withal.

The chief evangelist for terra preta was the late peripatetic Dutchman Wim Sombroek. As Nature reported on August 10:

Sombroek was born in the Netherlands in 1934 and lived through the Dutch famine of 1944 — the Hongerwinter. His family kept body and soul together with the help of a small plot of land made rich and dark by generations of laborious fertilization. Sombroek's father improved the land in part by strewing it with the ash and cinders from their home. When, in the 50s, Sombroek came across terra preta in the Amazon, it reminded him of that life-giving 'plaggen' soil, and he more or less fell in love. His 1966 book Amazon Soils began the scientific study of terra preta.

Since then trial after trial with crop after crop has shown how remarkably fertile the terra preta is. Bruno Glaser, of the University of Bayreuth, Germany, a sometime collaborator of Sombroek's, estimates that productivity of crops in terra preta is twice that of crops grown in nearby soils

Sure enough, the Brazilian soils had been built up by Brazilian locals over centuries, with bone and manure and - chiefly - charcoal, which is the source of the black color. For a sense of the soil's productivity, compare the photo of preta corn on the left, normal soil corn on the right, and like they say in the Sure commercial, your left side will convince your right side.The charcoal tends to absorb water and assorted nutrients that would otherwise sink into the aquifer. That in turn encourages massive growth of microorganisms, who not only further enrich the soil, but bind an astonishing quantity of carbon in subsoil biomass. Three feet of terra preta, it is claimed, will support a biomass equal to the rain forest above the same ground.

Expertise is still slim (What's the optimal mix of char with other ingedients, and how does it change with climate? How compatible is formation of these soils with other green practices like no-till farming?), but it's growing. In addition to the Bayreuth project, Danny Day runs a working production facility in Athens, Georgia, which turns farm waste like peanut shells half into biofuels and half into char. Free hydrogen is another byproduct. At Iowa State University Ames, Robert Brown is doing something similar with corn rather than peanuts. In New South Wales, Biomass Energy Services and Technology has constructed a series of char-producing engines at increasing scales.

The bottom line? Brown estimates that the U.S. corn crop alone could be used to sequester a quarter of a billion tonnes of carbon a year.

That's funny, you look planetish

2006-08-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

So Pluto's planeteering days are over. As a card-carrying geezer, I guess I'm supposed to get all nostalgic and upset. But it was past time the astronomical community settled this thing, one way or another. And there was simply no intellectually honest way to maintain the old canonical nine.

I've seen quite a few horrified cries of "But think about the children!" The children were well served by this decision; better served than they would have been by the open-ended planet list of the committee's Roundness Recommendation. Our solar system now has exactly eight planets, and always will.

Not that extrasolar planetary systems won't trip us up down the road. Whether under the Committee's scheme, or the one that got voted in, planets do not constitute a natural kind. Domination of an orbital region is hardly a bright line in the universe of possible arrangements of heavenly bodies. When we run into a former planet busted up into half a dozen pieces, or an asteroid-like belt with one major body and a couple of dozen lesser ones that failed to amalgamate, the sky solons will have to convene and scratch their heads all over again. But surely this definition will be serviceable for a generation or two. And that's an eternity in science.

The one thing that "the children" now need is a standard classroom census of the solar system which isn't planet-centric. The magic number is no longer nine, but it shouldn't be eight either. It's twelve: the eight planets, plus Sol, the asteroids, the Kuiper belt, and the Oort cloud.

May victimes evade Muhammad Ali's jaw slamming uppercut? No: Knock Out!

The carbon return desk

2006-08-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

Last week's Nature had a fascinating pair of news features on carbon sequestration. There is, of course, no silver bullet for beating global warming. It's going to take, you should pardon the expression, an energetic attack across several simultaneous fronts. But I had been imagining that sequestering CO2 was no more than a bit of blue-skying. Turns out all of the technology is well established, and it may solve a goodly fraction of the puzzle.

The zine's first piece, The hundred billion tonne challenge, concerns the standard plan: capture the carbon dioxide from coal as it burns, and then inject it into deep aquifers, where it will be stabilized under pressure in dissolved form. Three ongoing industrial scale projects already exist, in Canada, Algeria, and Norway. The Norwegian plant is already economically viable, because of Norway's hefty carbon tax, set at $50 a tonne as compared to the EU's timid $20. A scaled-up project is under construction in Ketzin, Germany, which will stuff 60,000 tonnes of CO2 away over two years.

It had better scale up a lot further. In order to keep from shooting past the doubling mark for carbon dioxide concentrations, we've got 175 gigatonnes of Chevron's favorite gas to make vanish over the next 50 years. The potential storage capacity of deep aquifers, though, is from 1,000 to 10,000 gigatonnes.

For CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) to become a significant chunk of the solution worldwide will take around $80 billion in capital investment. When a coal plant is built from scratch to accommodate the integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), you have to pay out 20% more up front. If it has to be retrofitted, the cost gets steeper. Then there are operating costs, the IGCC burns up some energy itself, and you still only recover half the carbon dioxide the coal gives off. The bottom line: IGCC will add about 3 cents per kilowatt hour to the production costs of a coal plant, a bit under double. Enough to make you swallow hard, but when compared to the costs of global warming, not particularly alarming. As a side benefit, the technique also scours such pollutants as sulfur from the plant's stacks.

It's a two-step process.

In IGCC plants, the fuel — coal, fuel oil or biomass — is introduced into a hot gasifier along with oxygen and steam. This produces a fuel gas consisting mainly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The carbon monoxide then goes through a second 'shift' reaction with steam, making carbon dioxide and more hydrogen. The carbon dioxide can be relatively easily separated at this point.

The magazine's second article dangles its limbs a little bit out into blue sky territory, but there's some good science behind it. More next time...

A Tale of Two Countries

2006-08-14T18:18:00.000-07:00

A week ago today, a little blurb on the inside pages of the Boston Globe caught my eye. The headline was "Surveillance Bill OK'd", and I started scanning it with that now familiar Dorothy Parker feeling. (That grand dame got bored answering her phone with "Hello," and switched for a while to "What fresh hell is this?")

The further I read, the better I felt. Until I went back and read it a little more slowly, including the dateline. And as a result, for your delectation, this little quiz, which I'll call A Tale of Two Countries.

Country A:
According to a new law

The government is allowed to "to use telephone wiretaps, e-mail scans and other surveillance techniques in the name of public security."
The government must obtain permission from a judge first.
Citizens are guaranteed a right to sue for compensation for wrongful surveillance
Upon passage of the law, the entire opposition party walked out of the legislative chamber en masse in protest.

Country B:

The government confirmed that it has been using telephone wiretaps, and unspecified additional surveillance techniques, on thousands of citizens in the name of public security.
It asserted the right to do this in violation of a law making it a felony to do so without obtaining permission from a judge first.
When citizens brought suit for wrongful surveillance, the government insisted the suits be dismissed without a hearing, under a "state secrets" privilege.
When some judges permitted some suits to go forward, the government introduced a law to consolidate all such suits under a court which had a firm track record of kowtowing to all government claims of "state secrets" privilege.
In the opposition party, no other legislators were willing to back a call to censure the government's behavior.

One country is the United States of America, bastion of liberty. The other country is the evil, repressive regime of Communist China (specifically, the province of Hong Kong). Now, the trick question: which is which? Answer in the Chicago Tribune

How the Brits pinched the plotters

2006-08-11T20:46:00.000-07:00

Reputable news agencies have been agreed that the unraveling of the plane-bombing network in the UK was the fruit of good old fashioned police work. Today, I went scouring a dozen major news outlets in Britain and the U.S., with one question in mind: where did it start? What was the first loose thread on which MI5 was able to begin tugging?

Perhaps it was all there in previous days' reports. Today, many sources were trumpeting the great value of NSA wiretaps in catching the communique from Pakistan bosses to the bombers, who, freaked by the arrest of two British conspirators on Pakistani soil, to begin operations right away. There's legitimate drama in that story, which also explains the timing of the sweep-up. And of course most of the accounts did a roundup and summary of the previous week's news.

But only CNN answered my question. The whole investigation began with a tipoff to the British cops by a concerned Muslim citizen:

The original information about the plan came from the Muslim community in Britain, according to a British intelligence official.

"The plotters intended this to be a second September 11th," said U.S. Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend. "It's a frightening example of multiple, simultaneous attacks for explosions of planes that would have caused the death of thousands."

The tip was from a person who had been concerned about the activities of an acquaintance after the July 7, 2005, terror attacks in London, the official said.

Let this be noted, then. At no point did the police operation depend on warrantless wiretaps.

The initial tip came from a concerned citizen. In the U.S., this would have given ample probable cause for the government to go to the FISA court and obtain a warrant. The court has rejected only two requests out of more than 5,000 since its inception.
The wiretap which caught the "do it now" message was also legal under the standard FISA law. As a Pakistan to UK call, it did not involve a "United States person" and the sternest critic of Bush's illegal wiretapping programs would agree the FISA framework already allows such calls to be monitored without warrants. But even if the same scenario had played out in America rather than in the UK, cops already knew about the callers and the called through normal police work, and there would have been no difficulty whatsoever in obtaining a FISA warrant.

The acolytes of Dubya's New World Ordure will be leaning hard in coming weeks on the notion that "NSA wiretaps" were crucial to breaking this case. They will fail to mention that it was not illegal wiretappers, but alert citizens, who provided the real break, and they will fail to mention that every wiretap involved was one for which the normal warrant procedure would have worked just as efficiently.

Meta-abuse of government secrecy

2006-08-06T19:42:00.000-07:00

So many atrocities to cover, so little time. Should I talk about the fact that the House has slipped into the Defense appropriations bill a little clause that would, at the President's discretion, stomp on governors' control of the National Guard, and federalize it? Or the bill to retroactively immunize the entire military and executive branch from penalties for war crimes, gutting the law the Republicans passed in 1996? Or Negroponte's continuing refusal to provide Congress, as required by law when they request it, a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq? Or the GOP's insistence that the minimum wage can't be raised, unless a 750 billion tax break for millionaires only is passed along with it? (Hint - that's 750 billion that will have to be taken out of the pockets of the middle class and the working poor. Cuts to Medicaid and tuition assistance and unemployment benefits, anyone?) Or half a dozen other Bush-generated horrors from just the past week?

I'll settle for this catch from The Memory Hole.

The Justice Department tipped its hand in its ongoing legal war with the ACLU over the Patriot Act. Because the matter is so sensitive, the Justice Dept is allowed to black out those passages in the ACLU's court filings that it feels should not be publicly released.

Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent).

This is also the week that even Charmin' Chairman Roberts of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose whole life the last four years has been dedicated to helping the Bush administration cover up its crimes and its incompetence, finally got steamed about the Prez's fetish for classifying everything that moves, as a warmup exercise for classifying everything that holds still.

A section of that Phase II of the Intel Committee's report on Iraq intelligence, delayed now for a mere three years - the phase that was to look at whether the White House misused or mischaracterized the intelligence it received - was finally due to be released. It was a section based entirely on material in the public record; but its conclusions (roughly, that Chalabi played the neocons for patsies with his own disinformation campaign) was embarrassing. So it came back black magic markered to death, based on chunks of public information having been newly classified.

It just so happens that classifying information just because it's politically embarrassing is illegal. But obeying, or even noticing, the law has never been a forte of the Silencer In Chief.

Most frightening to his crowd of all pieces of information is that piece so well known to the framers of the Constitution: that executive power can be abused. We can now with some confidence expect the Federalist Papers to be declared state secrets sometime before the 2008 conventions begin. Get your own copy of them now. Perhaps when they raid your library, they'll leave it intact if you've taken the precaution of rebinding it in, say, the cover of Ann Coulter's next bestseller, Vermin.

Poetry archive 3

2006-08-04T20:24:00.000-07:00

In which I continue to inflict my old poems on my readers.

After Jacques Roux

Wherever the shady clerics come
The pressure of an inky Thumb
Detains desire, while all things High
Are mapp'd out plain before the eye.
They deftly finger from the Blue
Promissory notes long due;
From faces formed of Robes and Hoods
They attach for their Master lands and goods.
Their Master's name no man may guess.
They buckle their boots with a silver cross.

The Gitmo franchise expands

2006-08-03T20:32:00.000-07:00

Everybody and his cousin linked to yesterday's lead at the Onion:

In a decisive 1–0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers...

Coincidentally, the same morning, the Washington Post reported on a leaked draft of the legislation Bush is proposing to bring detainee treatment into compliance with Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld.

The proposal? Codify into law everything that was in the executive order that established Gitmo, - except that the death penalty will now require only 5 military jurors out of 12, rather than 7, to concur. Reconfirm the absence of jurisdiction of any civilian court over any part of the process. Codify into law many features of Gitmo policy that weren't spelled out in the executive order: no right to a trial, even to a tribunal, even to a list of charges, ever. Evidence obtained by coercion to be admissible. No release upon being found not guilty.

But those are the innocuous parts.

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such "commissions" to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction.

Oh, yeah. And U.S. citizens, as well as foreigners, may be designated "enemy combatants" enjoying the same extensive list of rights.

The draft's breathtaking assignment to the President of life-and-death powers over anyone he pleases, for any crime he on his sole discretion chooses to define in the future, makes John Adams' embarrassing Alien and Sedition Act look positively timid in comparison. One presumes - no, sorry, we overran that goalpost some yards back. One would like to presume that these preposterous clauses were inserted purely for shock value, in the expectation that when one or two of them are eliminated or modified, the resulting Draconian expansion of the current system will be hailed by the punditocracy as a moderate compromise.

But what does it say about how far we've descended, that Bush's goals have become so extreme that his negotiating position reads like self-parody? Albeit a self-parody which evokes more chills than chuckles?

Or is this just what an initial negotiating position looks like, when your bedside management literature is not Getting To Yes but Getting To Yes, Massa?

From Boswell, an oracle for our time

2006-08-03T19:15:00.000-07:00

These days I'm reading Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild's penetrating and compulsively readable history of the British antislavery movement. One of the attendees at a critical London dinner, at which M.P. Wilberforce agreed to take up the abolitionist cause, was James Boswell.

Even the crotchety Boswell (who was later to change his mind) expressed backhanded support: "After saying the planters would urge that the Africans were made happier by being carried from their own country to the West Indies, [he] observed, 'Be it so. But we have no right to make people happy against their will.'"

How delightful it would be, if Johnson's scribe could attend a present-day White House dinner. Upon being told of how Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, in raining death and destruction upon one Middle Eastern country after another, have no object in mind but the spread of Democracy and Freedom, and the happiness of whatever little brown folks might be left alive at the end of America's kindly ministrations, that acerbic son of Scotland could deliver himself of exactly the same remark.

Traces of Mr. Smith found in Washington

2006-07-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

Two cheering developments on the Russell Tice front.

First, his lawyers have successfully got his Grand Jury appearance postponed, on the grounds that the subpoena did not inform him whether he was a target or a witness, and did not give him sufficient time to prepare.

Second, it may be illegal for the government to spend any money investigating him. may be illegal for the government to spend any money investigating him.

That conclusion is based on the interplay between two key whistleblower laws. First, under the Lloyd Lafollette Act of 1912, it is illegal to obstruct communications with Congress. For over 25 years, it has been accepted in the law that media disclosures qualify as communications with the government.

Second, the anti-gag statute shields speech protected by Lloyd Lafollette and other good government laws from any government spending on retaliatory investigations against the whistleblower. It has been passed annually in appropriations legislation since 1988. It states that free speech rights listed in certain good government laws supersede any other restrictions against unclassified disclosures. The government violates the anti-gag statute if it spends money to implement or enforce the superseded policies. Under the Anti Deficit Act, officials responsible for the illegal spending are personally liable to repay the Treasury.

Can't You You Can't Hear That Whistle Blow

2006-07-29T13:48:00.000-07:00

If a whistleblower whistles in a forest, and no one is permitted to hear, does (s)he make a sound?

I've mentioned Russell Tice, the would-be NSA whistleblower, who knows about agency domestic spying programs yet unrevealed to Congress, and has had a hard time getting the beans properly spilled.

Tice's closed testimony before the House Armed Services committee is probably the source of the faux indignation from Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Goosestep) on May 17, over not being told about some unspecified "program". Hoekstra quieted down once he'd made his point, which was presumably that he'd better get an extra portion of pork for awhile, if the White House expected him to jolly their lawbreaking along.

(Hoekstra also made the front pages by acting as stage magician Rick Santorum's lovely assistant, when Rick went before the cameras to perform his most crowd-pleasing trick: making the ~~elephant~~ WMDs appear. Despite the fact that every elephant on the stage was a fake, the crowd was most appreciative. Over the following weeks, the percentage of Americans deluded into the belief that Saddam actually had WMDs at the start of the war leapt from 38% to 50%.)

The entrails tell this augur that Hoekstra and the White House are back on the best of terms, and ready to work in tandem to quash all inquiry into whatever it is that Tice knows. The federal intimidation machinery cranked into high gear yesterday, issuing a subpoena to haul Tice before a Grand Jury to testify about "violations of criminal law" - which is the term the Feds now use for informing the public about the Government's violations of criminal law.

In a statement issued by the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, of which Tice is a member, he declared "This latest action by the government is designed only for one purpose: to ensure that people who witness criminal action being committed by the government are intimidated into remaining silent."

Quietus for the status quo

2006-07-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

I'm going to do what no would-be pundit should ever do. Stand back, Jeanne Dixon. I'm going to make a prediction.

President Bush famously declared back in March that when American troops leave Iraq will be "decided by future presidents." The statement was widely interpreted to mean troops would be there for at least 2 and a half years. In point of fact, the plural "presidents" meant troops would be there for at least six and a half years.

Conventional wisdom in the mainstream media has agreed for a long time, that our GIs will be tied down in the Green Zone for at least a decade.

On the other hand, John Murtha, whose humint within the military runs deep and wide, predicted in January that troops would be drawn down under 100,000 by midsummer. Murtha underestimated the Administration's capacity for bullheadedness; likewise its fear of doing anything that looks like cut-and-run prior to the fall elections. But strong signs are beginning to justify his analysis, if not its precise timing.

First, we have one of the rawest-throated of the war cheerleaders, former Dubya speechwriter David Frum, saying that it's time to take Murtha's advice, and pull troops over the horizon (to Kurdistan, rather than Murtha's more logistically informed Kuwait). Not that Frum admits it's Murtha's advice, of course; nevertheless his capitulation to the reality based is complete.

Second, we have the Reuters report a week ago Friday, that the Iraqi parliament has begun quiet negotiations on the partitioning of Baghdad into a Sunni quarter west of the Tigris, and a Shia quarter to the east. That would be the trickiest - and in the event of an expanded civil war, the most lifesaving - element of the three-way partition some (like Peter Galbraith in the NY Review of Books) have been urging for some time as the only way to salvage some kind of stability in the end.

Okay, my prediction. The status quo simply cannot possibly be maintained beyond the end of 2006. By then, at least one of the following three events will have occurred:

Open and public negotiations begin for the country's partition. Omnia Babylonia in tres partes divisa est.
Evacuation of most American troops out of the Green Zone to some set of over the horizon bases.
A massive air campaign against Iran.

The Administration will do everything in its power to prevent either of the first two from happening before the congressional elections. Since any Republican bounce due to yet another war will last for weeks at best, the third is also likely to be postponed until at least late October; but should facts on the ground turn clearly desperate, it will be the fallback.

The three options are not mutually exclusive. No doubt the gang that can neither shoot straight, nor refrain from shooting, would like them to occur in the order mentioned. In particular, should the third precede the second, the Green Zone's southern logistic lifelines would be snapped, and the carnage on our troops would make Iraq Part Deux look like a Sunday School outing. But the gang tcnssnrfs is not exactly in full control of events any longer.

Same old show. More expensive seats.

2006-07-28T21:59:00.000-07:00

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 431 BCE:

The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted, and his opponent suspected.

The weapons grow more terrible, the costs more insupportable. But the ugliness and inhumanity of war never change. And the traits of a nation caught up in war fever never change either.

The country's growing weary of the Iraq war, so the trusted lovers of violence are in the kitchen cooking up the next one, a fresh new shiny one, with its riveting new cast of scary villains. Their eye on fat juicy ratings, the media will once again pick up their trumpets and join the parade. But maybe, just maybe, it's a little too soon since the last scam. This time, maybe, just maybe, the rest of us won't fall into lockstep behind them.

I would like to find an old snapshot of the America I grew up in. A country where even the poorest had a roof over their heads. A country that wasn't afraid of its own shadow; that did not kidnap and disappear people; that did not run secret torture chambers; that did not eavesdrop on all of its citizens' conversations; that did not wage bloody Blitzkrieg on nations which posed no threat to it. I'd like to put that snapshot on milk cartons all over the land, asking "Have you seen me?"

Maybe some kind soul would find that strong, generous, friendly country, perhaps sleeping in an alley among the bombed-out and homeless, or sheltering between the pages of a forgotten Constitution, gather her up, give her a square meal of unfiltered information and fortified civil liberties. And bring her back to us.

Eyeless in Gaza

2006-07-27T18:12:00.000-07:00

While Lebanon and northern Israel suffer, the suffering in Gaza hasn't stopped. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz summarizes activities there. the last couple of days. (The story is a little bloglike; they keep adding paragraphs at the beginning of the page.) Note this part of the account (my emphasis), from Wednesday:

Wednesday's death toll in Gaza was the highest in two weeks.

Medics said two girls, one an infant, died when a tank shell struck a house near Jabalya, a Hamas stronghold. A three-year-old girl was killed earlier in the day.

Nearly 60 people were wounded, including a cameraman for Palestinian television. Six were in a critical condition.

IDF troops have pursued an offensive in Gaza while fighting on a second front in Lebanon, but have failed to stop rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel.

Saeb Erekat, a top aide to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, called on the world to remember the plight of the Palestinians despite the conflict in Lebanon.

"This is the forgotten war," he told Reuters. "We urge the international community to intervene."

The IDF, which withdrew its forces from Gaza in 2005, confirmed that it had carried out strikes against miliants.

At least 30 IDF tanks and other armored vehicles pushed more than two kilometers into the northern Gaza Strip overnight as part of Operation Samson's Pillars. The troops clashed with militants on the edge of the Jabalya throughout the day.

What struck me was the name the IDF chose for the operation.

In the book of Judges, Samson was a mighty warrior against the Philistines (after whom Palestine is named.) A name could have been chosen from other Samsonian (Samsonite?) episodes - Operation Righteous Jawbone, Operation Burning Brand. When Samson pulled down the pillars of the Philistine temple, he destroyed the Philistine elite; but he himself died with them. And, incidentally, he was in chains and blind at the time. His enemies had put out his eyes years before.

So what kind of gallows humor was this, on the IDF's part? Was it an acknowledgement that they were going into the operation blind? Or even of the way that mutual hatred has blinded both sides for decades? That for all their military supremacy they feel chained, imprisoned by history, grinding year in and year out at the same bloody mill wheel? Were they expressing a worry that things have escalated so far that, no matter how many Arab murderers and Arab innocents Israel crushes, she herself will be doomed by those same apocalyptic victories?

Maybe it's just me. But I sense a different feeling in the air from any preceding stage of the long rapacious melodrama. It's as if none of the combatants any longer expects any good end, any fruit from their pain. They are just reflexively, robotically, going through the motions of war, the motions of rage, the motions of grief. They can do this in their sleep by now. They can do it with their eyes closed.

Except for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the neocons. The worst remain full of passionate intensity.

Some folks sure know how to put the pang into birth pangs

2006-07-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

Woah. I just became anonymously famous again.

There's been a fair amount of scorn leveled at Condi Rice on the left blogosphere for her chirruppy talk about the death and destruction raining down on Israel and Lebanon right now as the "birth pangs" of a new Middle East. No one seems to have noticed it was code talk, that had a potentially sinister edge to it, for those with ears to hear .

So when, in the discussion of Soros's new book at Firedoglake, Digby mentioned it again as an instance of the Bushies' cockeyed optimism, I dropped in a comment (#178). "Birth pangs" are of course the way that Jesus talks in Q, the ur-document for the gospels, about the "wars and rumors of wars" that will precede the hour of His return. Thus, Condi was quietly reassuring Bush's fundamentalist base that his support of the Lebanon war, and his refusal to feign interest in a cease-fire, were just him doing his bit of midwifery, as an upstanding Christian, to hasten the Apocalypse.

Now Digby has catapulted the meme, crediting "one of the commenters". What an unpredictable megaphone this Internet medium is.

For the fundamentalist base, more wars - especially in the Middle East - is a good thing, because it will usher in a more rapid Rapture. For the neocons, more wars - especially in the Middle East - is a good thing, because it constitutes "creative destruction", hastening the final secular showdown in which American nukes will decide the issue.

For the rest of us, it's hard to distinguish where Condi's "birth pangs" end and Cheney's "last throes" begin. The span of human life they appear to envision between the two is nasty, brutish, and short.

More on signing statements

2006-07-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

True blue Illinois blogger ellenofthetenth, who writes more goodish than either (in rapidly ascending order) myself or Glenn Greenwald, has a useful brief roundup of thoughts and links on the signing statements issue, in the context of a local house race.

If there were no terrorists, they'd have to invent them

2006-07-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

Are you too tall? Too short? Too round? Too square? Too conspicuous a color of iPod in your ear? Then you, too, may already have won a slot on a terrorist watchlist, that you can never be taken off of.

But it's all in a good cause. If you were allowed to fly, some poor air marshal in Las Vegas would have been deprived of his bonus, or even his promotion. As channel 7 in Denver reports:

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.

These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.

What does that mean, quota? You mean, like, some kind of vague affirmative action? Or are we talking hard numbers?

...several air marshals object to a July 2004 memo from top management in the Las Vegas office, a memo that reminded air marshals of the SDR requirement.

The body of the memo said, "Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month."

Oh. But no pressure, right?

A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, "There may come an occasion when you just don't see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I'm sure that if you are looking for it, you'll see something."

Another federal air marshal said that not only is there a quota in Las Vegas for SDRs, but that "it directly reflects on (their) performance evaluations" and on how much money they make.

For example, one marshall decided that a passenger who snapped a photo of the skyline as the plane took off looked suspicious enough for him.

I had a boss once whose hobby was touristing around Iron Curtain countries on his summer vacation. Bulgaria, Romania, wherever, the second his camera came out, all of a sudden there was a crappy little two-passenger black sedan following him around.

We don't do it that way here in America. If you get classified as an Al Qaeda wannabe because you came within the orbit of an agent suffering a slow month, it'll be sooo much less annoying. Instead of the black sedan, you (and all your friends and relatives) just get a little ol' NSA wiretap on your cell phone. Forever. Or until Senator Specter's Go Ahead And Wiretap Whoever The Hell You Like And We'll Keep The Judges Out Of Your Hair Act of 2006 expires. Whichever comes first. (See analysis of the act's contents here, by Anonymous Liberal, who links to several other analyses.)

And just to be on the safe side, how about a wire on that funny colored iPod, too?

To boldly backtrack where none has backtracked before

2006-07-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

The NASA mission statement as it was drawn up, with massive input from scientists around the country, in 2002:

To understand and protect our home planet.
To explore the Universe and search for life.
To inspire the next generation of explorers...
as only NASA can.

The NASA mission statement, as it was imposed last week from the top down:

To advance and communicate scientific knowledge and understanding of the earth, the solar system, and the universe.
To advance human exploration, use, and development of space.
To research, develop, verify, and transfer advanced aeronautics and space technologies.

The earth gets a one-word mention. We only want to "understand" it now, not to "protect" it. As befits the eternal Bush mantra: we are deeply concerned about global warming, which is why we want to study it very carefully for another few decades before we, you know, do anything about it. Not that there's any real interest even in the "understanding" part. Last month, you may recall, the Bush administration deep sixed two previously approved programs to monitor moisture and climate.

This has, of course, nothing whatsoever to do with top NASA climatologist Jim Hansen's frequent reference to the old mission statement as he has spoken out about the dangers of climate change.

Still more disturbing, I feel, is the demotion of Earth from its former status as "home planet." How painful must be the pinch of exile felt by members of this Administration from their own home planet. But rather than terraform Mars, they are soldiering bravely on to bring our own blue-green globe under the rule of Mars, the god of war. Above, a photo snapped by our crack correspondent on location in the future, of downtown Washington D.C., once they've succeeded.

No list of the fallen

2006-07-22T14:38:00.000-07:00

I caught Richard Linklater's film A Scanner Darkly (q.v., q.v., q. very much v.), based on Philip K. Dick's mostly autobiographical novel of the same name. It verified what I have come to regard as a law of physics, that it is impossible to make a bad flick from PKD's fiction. But of the several such flicks out there (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and the French rarity Barjo), this is the one that fully captures Dick's humanity, humor, darkness, and paranoia. The rotoscoping lends just the right air of reality cum unreality to the proceedings.

Phil Dick was honest about the drug scene as no one else I know of ever was. He gets the coolness, the fun, and the camaraderie. He gets the unchanging idiocy of the drug war and the Rotarian squeaky clean horror not just of what the drugs can do to people, but of the people it does them to. He gets the tragedy of decaying mental powers, from the inside. If D.A.R.E. were really daring, it would throw out the whole anti-drug curriculum, and just show this film. It would be ten times as effective as what they do.

But they won't. Because the kids viewing it would be left to come to their own sympathies and their own conclusions.

One narc, who like the protagonist Robert Arctor has a foot in both sides of the war, surveys the wreckage as the novel winds down:

If God has an M.O., he reflected, it is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can't perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will not know the dreadful war we've been through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen.

We of the Left in America are privileged, at least for the moment. Because our polity is so far only, to use John Dean's word, proto-fascist, these words do not apply to us. I look at the failed states in which America's fear of terrorism is working its dark magic on numberless victims invisible to us, and the only part of that passage that doesn't ring true is the part about evil being transmuted into good.

I can pray, though, that it fails to ring true only because I am watching it unfold in a glass darkly.

After interesting times

2006-07-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

The apocryphal Chinese curse has caught up with us, and we are living in interesting times. I earnestly hope that downright fascinating times are not next for us, though William Kristol and Newt Gingrich have begun lobbying openly for World War III to begin. They represent a large chunk of the thinking within the Administration, "thinking" conducted by two organs slightly forward from the epididymus, and may get their way.

Some parts of the planet have leapfrogged ahead of us, and are already in Bill And Newt's Wonderful World of Fascination. The two of them are exhilarated by the same scenes, in Haifa and Beirut, which chill the rest of us. (I am reminded of the old Charles Addams cartoon of a darkened movie theater, its patrons frozen in various attitudes of shock, grief, and horror, while one fat fellow in the middle orchestra is laughing his head off.) Kristol's little-boy grin was ingratiating once. Coupled with calls for a war that will, at a minimum, kill hundreds of thousands, it's just creepy.

You can find photos of gore and broken bodies around the Net if you care to go looking for war porn; and video of the bodies being rapidly deposited into mass graves in Tyre. For me, these pictures of a broken Beirut and its stolid refugees suffice.
Ground zero #1
Ground zero #2
Terrorists using a school for cover
It's all there. Just add a pinch of imagination. Add another pinch, and you'll find the future the neocons are preparing for us all.

There once was a man who said "Um"

2006-07-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

I was peacefully napping when the messenger appeared at my bedside. The wings and the flowing robe accorded with tradition, but there was something slapdash about her. Maybe it was the strands of tinsel no one had bothered to brush out of her hair.

"It has come to our attention," she said, "That you've blogged a few poems."

"True enough," I admitted, wondering what sort of infraction that might be.

"Not all that many bother with poetry anymore," she said. "As a reward, you are being blessed with a Visitation. That would be me. Let me introduce myself. My name is Nevergotintogranta, and I am an Adjutant Assistant Inferior Muse. The Literaturnichtsohauptamt has authorized me to inspire you. In a small way, of course." With a slightly embarrassed duck of her head, she withdrew a tiny scroll from under her robe, placed it by my pillow. "You may find this of comfort," she said, "on those days when the stupidity and apathy are about to drive you to despair." Then she vanished in a puff of Pine Needle Scent.

And so this limerick came into being.

There once was a man who said "Um",
Sat down, and proceeded to num-
Ber lives that would end
Should survival depend
On removing one's ass from one's thumb.

It ain't just the humidity

2006-07-20T06:08:00.000-07:00

First half of 2006 was the hottest in history for the continental U.S.

The average temperatures of the first half of 2006 were the highest ever recorded for the continental United States, scientists announced today.

Temperatures for January through June were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average.

Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri experienced record warmth for the period, while no state experienced cooler-than-average temperatures, reported scientists from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Heat map.

Most of us live on the thick end of the wedge

2006-07-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

Okay, so Dubya doesn't like stem cell research. But why does he assign it such an over-the-top priority that it becomes the only veto of his two terms?

For the same reason that, although he couldn't lay aside his vacation to deal with Katrina until three days into the catastrophe, he leapt onto a plane back to Washington at a moment's notice to sign the Schiavo bill. The culture war is largely bogus. Most Americans are agreed on most issues, and the party that agrees with them has a kick and a bray. (Would that it kicked harder and brayed louder.)

So it's necessary to pump air into the culture war, which is made up of often artificial, mostly backburner issues, and always in danger of deflating if left to the course of nature. It has top priority for the kleptocrats, because if they don't catapult the social issues propaganda, the media spotlight might turn onto the real concerns of Americans. Who might become informed.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in an interview at BradBlog:

I made the conclusion many years ago that there's not a huge values difference between Red State Republicans and Blue State Democrats. The distinction is really informational. 80% of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on

Surf's up

2006-07-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

Tired of surfing the same old URLs? Here's two places to go to kickstart a wider foray into the blogosphere.

First, we have Nature magazine's list of the top 50 science blogs. Self explanatory, and there's some fine browsing in there.

For a less focused tour, try the interactive blogosphere map. On this graph, each node is a blog, the size of the node indicates its traffic level, and blogs that reference one another cluster together. Node color codes the domain - for example, red is blogspot, and orange is typepad.

Jesus wants me for a snowflake

2006-07-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

Today George W. Bush proudly vetoed a stem cell research bill. The debates on this are old and tired now; everybody knows everybody else's talking points, everybody has seen everybody else's dog and pony shows.

For opponents of embryonic stem cell research, the cutest puppies and the high-steppingest colts are photos of the "snowflakes" - embryos scheduled for discard, who have been "adopted" by right-to-lifers, implanted in the adoptive mother's womb, and in the (thereafter) natural course of things, turned into post-born babies.

Like all babies, they are of course cute as the dickens. But it's hard to see exactly what that's supposed to prove. They are no cuter than the already post-born babies, languishing in orphanages and crying out for homes, whom those same eager parents decided to shove aside in order to make a space in their lives for the "snowflakes."

That's not the only thing that bugs me about the phenomenon. The theory upon which this callous disregard of the already post-born in favor of the single frozen cell is justified has been clearly articulated: each frozen egg is already a full human person in every sense, and it would be murder to discard it with the rest of the day's medical waste.

Okay, then - why not "adopt" the frozen egg, and never implant it? After all, there's a reason why all those extra fertilized eggs are lying about in fertility clinics. The reason is that each infertile couple needs several eggs to work with since, once implanted, most of them fail to come to term. Less gently put, the process of implantation kills most of them.

You see where this is going. According to their own logic, the "snowflake" parents have been murdering children. On average, murdering several children to produce each bouncing, cooing child that is displayed before the Senate cameras. By their lights, how could that ever be justified? Especially when they could "adopt" dozens and dozens of frozen eggs, and keep them alive forever, just by maintaining the lab fees, for far less effort than it took them to kill several eggs, and shepherd one to adulthood.

Yes, each "snowflake" that survives the uterine gauntlet gets to do things like breathe, sleep, eat, gurgle, things it could never have done back in the petri dish. But that scarcely makes it right to kill its siblings off to give it the luxury of experiencing those things. After all, it was already a full and complete human being back in the freezer. These little add-ons are merely the kind of "quality of life" trappings that the right to life movement is always telling us pale into insignificance beside the stark difference between preserving life, and committing murder.

While I wait for those happy adoptive parents to grasp the logic of what they've done, and spend the rest of their natural lives curled up in a ball of horrified remorse - no doubt a very long wait - let's turn to the latest scientific breakthrough.

Another staple of opponents of embryonic stem cell research has been the flatly false canard that adult stem cells can do anything that embryonic stem cells can do. (In reality, some kinds of adult stem cells are multipotent, coaxable into forming several kinds of tissue, but none are pluripotent as embryonic stem cells are.) But of course every gene that's in an embryonic stem cell is present in an adult stem cell - and for that matter, present in every adult cell. Pluripotency should be a simple matter of turning on the embryonic genes that got turned off as pluripotency was lost. If only one could determine which set of genes that is.

At the end of last month, Shinya Yanamaka of Kyoto University announced the production of "embryonic-stem-cell-like cells" from adult mouse cells. They are capable of generating some tissues from each body layer (ecto-, meso-, endoderm), and pump out at least one of the proteins that appears only in embryonic stem cells. It takes a concoction of just four enzymes to pull it off. Considerable work remains to be done to double check all this, and then to try it out with human cells.

The hope is of course that, several years down the road, stem cells from this new process could replace embryonic ones, and cut the Gordian knot of the current stem cell debate. And that would be great. Stem cell research is a fine wedge issue for the left, but I'd rather see the wrangling end, and the medical miracles begin to roll in.

But would it really stop there? If there's a magic formula for making an adult cell revert to a pluripotent form, there's probably another magic formula that goes all the way. By providing the right nutrient bath, an adult cell could probably be made to revert to totipotent form - to the precise equivalent of a fertilized egg, capable of generating not just arbitrary tissues, but the whole organism.

Voila! - the Gordian knot retied. All that keeps a frozen embryo from becoming a baby is the lack of a nurturing environment. And at that point all that would keep any adult cell from becoming a baby is the lack of a (slightly enhanced, by a handful of extra chemicals) nurturing environment. It therefore becomes immoral, under the axioms of the Right To Life movement, not to preserve every cell of flaked skin or fallen hair root, every cell of every biopsy or excised tumor, so that the life all those pre-born babies will not be lost.

When that Rubicon of knowledge is crossed, Jesus will not just want you for a snowflake. He will want you for thousands and thousands of them.

Calico Women and Larry Summers: part deux

2006-07-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

Okay, so assuming I haven't been tarred, feathered, and defenestrated: Where do calicos come into it?

This is the fun part. Calicos explain why males enjoy a standard of deviation that makes them more deviant and less standard than their opposite numbers.

As you probably already know, all calico cats are female. No toms ever sport that colorful patchwork fur. What you may not know is that all female mammals, including all women, are calicos. Here's how it works.

Most chromosomes come in two copies. The copy from Dad will differ in minor ways from Mom's copy, but they code for pretty much the same genes. A certain amount of that gene's product, not too much and not too little, is needed for the proper functioning of the cell. So all of the cell's deliriously complicated little gene expression mechanisms work together to guarantee that each chromosome pumps out enough messenger RNA to get half of the optimal amount of the protein in question built. Jointly, they fill the quota.

But when it comes to the sex chromosomes, there's a snag.

The Y's all right. Nobody, in the ordinary course of things, has more than one copy. Anything it produces, it will have to produce all of, so the gene activation machinery just doubles the order. But what to do with the X?

Sometimes (in girls) there'll be two copies of the X, sometimes (in boys) there'll be only one. But most of the X genes (unlike Y) have nothing to do with sexual characteristics. A protein that functions well at one concentration will starve or overwhelm its target process at half or double that concentration. It wouldn't do to have all the guys spending their lives in hypoglycemic shock, or all the girls with blood sugar counts off the charts. (Just a for instance, the gene for insulin lies elsewhere.)

Evolution's solution to the problem was to set the gene expression thermostat at male levels. And then, in the females, to turn off one X chromosome in every cell, so that its genes never get expressed. As it happens, it doesn't get around to doing this until the fertilized egg cell and its daughters have divided quite a few times. And then it picks at random which X chromosome to turn off. Half the cells will now express Dad's X genes, half will express Mom's. The embryo has become what's called a "chimera": its body is composed of two kinds of cells, which are genetically different. Two intermingled and interspersed parts of its body have, in effect, become fraternal twins.

The choices of X are frozen. As the cells divide and the embryo grows, each Daddy-X cell produces only Daddy-X daughters, and each Mommy-X cell only Mommy-X daughters. The fetus, and eventually the infant, is patched together from big clumps of cells of one kind or the other. How big are those clumps? Look at the coat of a calico cat, and you'll see the patches written out on her fur.

In humans, skin and hair color aren't coded on the X chromosome, sparing girls some serious wardrobe compatibility headaches. What has emerged from the human genome project, though, is the fact that X contains a higher than usual density of genes which are expressed only in neural tissue. Brain genes. Consequently, while a man's brain runs on only one parent's X-genes, a woman's contains regions expressing her mother's X-genes, and other regions expressing her father's. You could say that women have twice the brains.

One would expect this to have a smoothing effect. Any brain protein from the X that makes her brother particularly smart, or dumb, or impulsive, or cautious, would have its effects moderated in her case by the version of the same protein she inherited from her other parent. Presto! The lower standard of deviation, in IQ and what have you, among females.

Last I heard, they'd pinned down which X proteins are expressed only in nerves. Learning the functions of them all is going to be a long hard piece of gumshoeing. So my previous graf's final sentence is just speculation at this point. The rest is solid.

Calico Women and Larry Summers: part one

2006-07-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

I don't get very exercised over feminist issues. I don't know why, unless it's a vague feeling that the sisterhood can handle the jerks on their own. But Larry Summers' ramblings early last year about women just not being up to math and science is on my mind this week. Partly because I stumbled across the neat blog On being a scientist and a woman. And partly because of a news feature in last week's Nature, "Does Gender Matter?" Ben Barnes has an advantage writing on the topic. As a transgendered scientist, he's looked at it from both sides, now. I think he gets the core of the reason for the disparities in academia spot on.

Having looked at it only from the male side, my experience throughout my professional life among engineers and 'puter nerds had always been that the talents and ideas of women were regularly discounted and brushed off: usually by men and often by themselves. I could see the male brains clicking off when the girl began to speak at a staff meeting. Other guys mostly swore this wasn't happening. I'm sure they were sincere; it was part of the ground for them and not the figure, just the sea they had always swum in, and they never saw it. Then I got to MIT - and I was delighted with the difference. There, every professional was listened to; when a woman voiced a problem or brainstormed a solution, the group never had to wait until a guy said the same thing before taking it seriously.

And yet, even in Bucky Beaverland, which seemed to me to have made a miraculous leap forward into a more enlightened century, when Nancy Hopkins performed a ground breaking survey of how science department resources were allocated, she found that women faculty came up with the short end of the stick. By wide margins. Even after adjusting for things like years of experience, papers and citations. Though even I, who had always prided myself on my sensitivity, got nary a blip on my sexism radar, the discrimination was still there, pervasive, massive, readable in cold hard numbers. I am therefore certain that Summers was dead wrong in placing "socialization" factors dead last among the causes of gender disparity in science faculty positions. And Barnes is dead right in placing it first. To the extent that there's any difference in mean aptitude for science and math between men and women, it lies way way down in the noise. So far down that there's no more reason to suppose that the tiny difference, if it exists, favors men than there is to suppose it favors women.

That said, here's where I make myself a pariah.

One of Summers' points - perhaps the one he felt at the time was his central point, though it was overshadowed by blunderbusses he fired elsewhere in his speech - may have a lot to it. He spoke specifically of a difference in innate ability "at the high end". Most of the heat and light in the subsequent hue and cry flashed over the question of whether males typically have more innate aptitude than females at math and science. To which the answer is certainly "not so's you could tell." But that's a completely different question from whether a higher percentage of males than of females have extremely high innate ability. One is a question about means; the other is a question about variances. And there is no dispute that the male population exhibits a larger variance on a batch of mental characteristics (notoriously including IQ) than the female population does. Many more male dumbos; many more male whizzes. You'd therefore expect the upper reaches of any profession requiring someone to excel in one of those mental characteristics to be topheavy with males. Just as you would also expect to see more males spending their careers at the wrong end of a broom.

Frankly, I don't see any way around that logic. How to quantify it is another issue. I certainly hope the point continues to be overlooked, cause it's a whacking great excuse for administrators all over academe to do nothing about the very real discrimination that's out there. (You just know that West Rattail Community College will think of itself, for these purposes, as "the upper reaches" of the profession.)

Okay, so assuming I haven't been tarred, feathered, and defenestrated: Where do calicos come into it?

Catchup post

2006-07-17T18:20:00.000-07:00

Some useful links, collected over recent days (or weeks):

BBC Map of Lebanon, as of July 16.
Regularly updated chart of crude oil prices.
Jim Hansen, formerly muzzled chief climatologist for NASA, on global warming in New York Review of Books.
Gitmo prosecutors get the facts wrong, in Boston Globe investigation, because they don't bother trying to get them right. My hometown paper sure is making me proud lately.
The ACLU gives a rundown of the bills about NSA spying before the Senate Judiciary committee - the bad, the worse, and the ugly.
The Top Ten best financed religious right organizations, from alternet.

Sorry, no comment

2006-07-17T17:48:00.000-07:00

Woops.

I finally figured out that comment moderation was turned on. And , not knowing that, I hadn't been moderating.

My apologies, and thanks, to those of you who were kind enough to leave remarks. I've turned moderation off, and from now on you should see instant feedback.

It'll never get as far as YouTube

2006-07-17T05:07:00.000-07:00

Every few mornings, my subconscious informs me that it's time to wake up by tossing a brief snippet my way, a phrase or an image too startling to let me go back to sleep. This morning's minidream was longer than usual, a twenty second political spot.

Night shot of an urban street. Broken porch posts, boarded windows, litter blowing in the rain. Voice over: "Crime. Dirt. Decay." Somber pause. "It doesn't have to be this way. There's one candidate we can count on to clean it up. He's as fed up as you are with the filth in Springfield's streets."

A blur of blazing orange comes barreling forward. It's a golden retriever. Following behind him saunters a small army of people, carrying brooms, hammers, and saws. "Because it makes the tires taste funny."

Rapid voice over, as the crowd parts for a delivery truck, and the retriever takes off after it: "Paid for by the Springfield Max For Mayor committee." Cut to close up of the retriever's head, barking happily into the camera. At the bottom, the crawl for the canine-impaired reads: "My name is Max, and I approved this ad."

Update: Photos of the real Max, aka Captain Retardo Dog, from the town of not-Springfield, North Carolina, may be viewed here.

I like his style. He has, however, declined the Committee's nomination.

The RAPT file

2006-07-16T19:11:00.000-07:00

RAPT stands for "Republicans Are Patriots Too".

John Dean came out with a new book this week, "Conservatives Without Conscience". In it, he examines the willingness of most elected Republicans and established conservative pundits to embrace a set of policies on the part of the Bush administration which are not at all conservative, but profoundly radical: both in the way they massively increase governmental power, concentrated in the executive branch, and in the way they base foreign policy on a grandiose vision of preventive war and unilateral interventions.

Dean is a lifelong Goldwater conservative. His positions, he says, have not changed, but now he finds himself classified as a "liberal", because of his criticism of the Bush administration's departure from conservative principles.

Here I'm interested in the complementary phenomenon: conservatives with a conscience.

From the moment when 9/11 handed Bush and Cheney the tools with which to frighten the American public into agreeing with pretty much anything they proposed, there have been principled conservatives who have pointed out the folly of the Iraq adventure, and the danger to the Constitution of the new dedication to secrecy and to the supremacy of the executive branch. But the Republican establishment laid down a narrative claiming that all criticism of these policies was coming from "the far left", "the Bush haters", and from partisan motives.

The mass media supinely accepted that narrative. In the runup to the war, on the rare occasions when they invited opponents of invasion to speak, they selected people like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, leftists far out of even the liberal mainstream, who could be counted on to go off on tangents about all the horrible things "American imperialism" had done in times past. They did not invite conservatives who were cautioning against the war: Brent Scowcroft, the Cato Institute, Pat Buchanan. That would only have confused the public, which had to understand and accept that no one but America haters could possibly object to the onset of Shock and Awe. And now the same "only partisans and America haters object" narrative is being used in an attempt to silence critics of mass warrantless eavesdropping, torture, rendition, denial of habeas corpus, presidential nullification of laws by "signing statement", and so on.

I believe it is critical to counter that narrative. So I have begun to collect a little list of pieces by writers with solid Republican, solid conservative credentials, who understand the danger of Bush's New World Order, and his campaign to eliminate all constitutional checks and balances on executive power. I disagree strongly with much of the political philosophy of these individuals. But our disagreements fall within the long and honorable tug of war between liberal and conservative, whose balance has kept our ship of state on a pretty even course over two hundred odd years. What George Bush, under the tutelage of Vice President Cheney, has undertaken in the past five years is to bore holes in the hull of the ship of state: the seaworthy hull known as the Constitution, which until now had framed and bounded the country's central political disageements.

This honor roll of conservatives - and there are many more I will never get to - has put patriotism above party. That takes a special order of moral courage, and I am grateful for each one who has stepped forward.

The first batch aren't in chronological order:

William Sessions, named by Reagan as head of the FBI, in a Seattle Post intelligencer op-ed: Bush Stretches Executive Power

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, in the Baltimore Sun: "Is US Being Transformed Into a Radical Republic?". Mirrored by Truthout

Bob Barr was one of the House managers who argued the case for impeachment against Bill Clinton before the Senate: "Patriot Act Games: It Can Happen Here.

Bruce Fein, Associate Deputy Attorney General under Reagan. Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

The Cato Institute, a conservative think tank:"Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush".

The Financial Times, a stolidly pro-business paper in the UK. Behind subscription wall, cached here and here.: "Bush administration’s telephone snooping".
On Iran, even Henry Kissinger advises against pre-emption, and acknowledges that democracy is not the natural result of eliminating a dictatorial regime.
Andrew Bacevich, formerly a writer for Weekly Standard and National Review, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. A two part interview in Tomdispatch,Part one, "The Delusion of Global Hegemony", and Part two, "Drifting Down the Path to Perdition."
Ronald Bailey of the libertarian Reason magazine, explains why he's voting Dem for the first time since 1972.

I will update this post periodically over here, to add links to accounts about or by Republicans who are standing up against the Cheney Administration's seizure of extraconstitutional powers.

Meanwhile, back at the other war...

2006-07-14T20:43:00.000-07:00

I can't process the horror unfolding from Beirut to Gaza City. I've read a dozen commentators, left and right, and still can't imagine what kind of game plan, if any, Ehud Olmert is pursuing, or whether he is a pawn caught up in a self-sustaining maelstrom. Nor can I fathom why Washington has settled on a policy of sitting back to watch while the theater of war enlarges - unless the powers that be have subscribed to the Ledeen vision of some cleansing apocalypse that will dismantle all the region's unsavory regimes at once.

Back in Baghdad, an older, more familiar horror is expanding. American media continue to shield us Yanks from the true state of things on the ground. But the Internet gives access to eyewitnesses who won't make it onto Tim Russert's show.

Riverbend, the young Iraqi woman who blogs at Baghdad burning, lost a friend this week in one of those neighborhood sweeps by the ethnic cleansers.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he'd promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.

People are staying in their homes in the area and no one dares enter it so the wakes for the people who were massacred haven't begun yet. I haven't seen his family yet and I'm not sure I have the courage or the energy to give condolences. I feel like I've given the traditional words of condolences a thousand times these last few months, "Baqiya ib hayatkum… Akhir il ahzan…" or "May this be the last of your sorrows." Except they are empty words because even as we say them, we know that in today's Iraq any sorrow- no matter how great- will not be the last.

I've been following her intense, humane, ground-level blog for two years now. Like thousands around the world, I've come to feel that I know her. And for the first time, I am worried that she will disappear without a trace. The violence, the torture, the men and children turning up at the morgues in batches, with electric drill holes through their bodies, are spiralling out of control. The west of the city is the worst, but there's no safety anywhere.

Here's the testimony of James Hider, the Baghdad correspondent for the London Times, a paper which leans center right. (Shorter James Hider: the war in Iraq is over, and chaos won.)

Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death
By James Hider, of The Times, from Baghdad

As I hung up the phone, I wondered if I would ever see my friend Ali alive again. Ali, The Times translator for the past three years, lives in west Baghdad, an area that is now in meltdown as a bitter civil war rages between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. It is, quite simply, out of control.

I returned to Baghdad on Monday after a break of several months, during which I too was guilty of glazing over every time I read another story of Iraqi violence. But two nights on the telephone, listening to my lost and frightened Iraqi staff facing death at any moment, persuaded me that Baghdad is now verging on total collapse.

Ali phoned me on Tuesday night, about 10.30pm. There were cars full of gunmen prowling his mixed neighbourhood, he said. He and his neighbours were frantically exchanging information, trying to identify the gunmen.

Were they the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia blamed for drilling holes in their victims’ eyes and limbs before executing them by the dozen? Or were they Sunni insurgents hunting down Shias to avenge last Sunday’s massacre, when Shia gunmen rampaged through an area called Jihad, pulling people from their cars and homes and shooting them in the streets?

Hider quotes sources who say that over 800,000 Iraqis have given up and fled the country, flooding Syria and Jordan, but the exodus is only just beginning:

Fares al-Mufti, an official with the Iraqi Airways booking office, told The Times that the national carrier had had to lay on an extra flight a day, all fully booked. Flights to Damascus have gone up from three a week to eight to cope with the panicked exodus.

Muhammad al-Ani, who runs fleets of Suburban cars to Jordan, said that the service to Amman was so oversubscribed that that prices had rocketed from $200 (£108) to $750 per trip in the past two weeks.

Despite the huge risks of driving through the Sunni Triangle, the number of buses to Jordan has mushroomed from 2 a day to as many as 40 or 50.

And what is the American army doing to stem these waves of killing? Sitting tight in "Emerald City", waiting for Iraqi police to call them in. But the police have stopped bothering to call.

I've dithered some, but so far mostly I've agreed with the Pottery Barn crowd. Yes, conditions for ordinary Iraqis are horrific; yes, they're only going to get worse; yes, the presence of our troops pours oil on the fires. But if the U.S. pulls out, the bloodshed could turn still worse by orders of magnitude. Does that line of thought makes sense, when we are do nothing about the rising tide of blood anyway, except to observe it? I'm beginning to lose sight of the relevancy of the Pottery Barn argument.

Iraq: the opportunity cost, and the opportunity to contribute

2006-07-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I'll blog because I have something to say, or something overlooked to display. Sometimes just to provide myself with a handy attic I can search for information that was well known to the blogosphere at the time.

"Balancing Act", at Firedoglake today, had two chunks of information worth keeping at my fingertips. First, there's Murtha's list, at first startling and then sobering, of all the neglected Homeland Security that various tiny pieces of what we spend on the Iraq war could buy. For example, five years after 9/11, Congress still hasn't been able to scrape up the dough to give all the country's first responders compatible comm systems. The price? $350 million dollars. AKA 1.2 days of the war.

Second, it tells you two routes by which you can send reading matter to the troops. (When you do, consider packing a few pairs of absorbent socks.) Progressive political material is good; sci fi and mysteries and thrillers are golden. Few stand in greater need of escape literature.

When perusing Murtha's list, bear in mind that this time three years ago, a couple months after the Mission was Accomplished, the monthly tab for Iraq was 2 billion. Now it's eight billion. It's not hard to speculate on the reasons for the quadrupling. We now have to figure in equipment replacement costs, which were a freebie back then when we were working through our initial supplies. We are now paying a huge army of mercenaries, in roughly one to one ratio with our GIs, and each privateer costs several times what a regular Government Issue does.

Finally, for three long years the Republican Congress has heroically refused to peek under the hood of any sweetheart contracts - except when, like the now jumpsuited Representative Duke Cunningham, it was to extract the lobbyist kickbacks nestled under the carburetor. Which guarantees that since George's triumphal strut down the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, graft and war profiteering have surely risen by some large multiple. (Hand out fliers to the foxes announcing that the henhouse doors are always open, and a Great Fox Flock will be attracted to the neighborhood.)

All clear enough. But it would be lovely to get a handle on how much each of these factors has contributed to the flood of simoleons chasing each other daily down the sewer of Cheney's Folly.

Seven at the Golden Ager's Shovel

2006-07-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

This month's edition of Poetry magazine is the humor issue. Much of the contents are a demonstration that, even for pretty good poets, funny isn't easy.

John Updike's dry, wry, appreciative account of a colonoscopy is as neatly observed as you'd expect. X. J. Kennedy, a serious poet who does make funny seem easy, serves up a slick collection of "Famous Poems Abbreviated". For instance:

Of man's first disobedience, and its fruit
Scripture has told. No need to follow suit.

Rebecca Hoogs penned my favorite, Another Plot Cliche, which I will refrain from quoting in full only to stay within bounds of fair use. Instead of grasping for the laugh track, it exhibits a clear eyed, rueful humor.

Another Plot Cliché
by Rebecca Hoogs

My dear, you are the high-speed car chase, and I,
I am the sheet of glass being carefully carried
across the Street by two employees of Acme Moving
who have not parked on the right side
because the plot demands that they make
the perilous journey across traffic,
and so they are cursing as rehearsed
as they angle me into the street...

I know i'm done for; there's only one street
on this set and you've got a stubborn streak a mile long.
I can smell the smoke already.
No matter, I'd rather shatter
than be looked through all day. So come careening. I know
you've other clichés to hammer home: women with groceries
to send spilling, canals to leap as the bridge is rising.
And me? I'm so through. I've got a thousand places to be.

Finally, this is the one piece that had me laughing out loud. (You may find its revered model here.)

We Old Dudes
by Joan Murray

We old dudes. We
White shoes. We

Golf ball. We
Eat mall. We

Soak teeth. We
Palm Beach; We

Vote red. We
Soon dead.

The breadth of Hamdan

2006-07-11T18:45:00.000-07:00

When the Supreme Court ruled against Rumsfeld in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, it did so on two principal grounds. The first was, that Congress had not authorized the President to set up any special form of tribunal. Supporters of the imperial presidency are now working overtime to put their stamp of approval on as many denials of due process as they can, and promise to have some excrescence or other along those lines drafted by the time they return from August recess.

But the second ground for the Hamdan ruling is going to cramp their style. The five justices stated unambiguously that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to prisoners taken in the course of the War on Terror. I'm no legal eagle, but the most illuminating commentary I've seen on the question is from Marty Lederman of Georgetown University Law School:
Top Ten Myths About Hamdan, Geneva, and Interrogations".

The whole thing deserves to be read, and worn in the breast pocket to ward off the small arms fire of Republican talking points to come. There's too much meat to summarize here. But the central point is that Common Article 3 does not merely lay out boundaries for tribunals. There are a host of policies and deeds that the president's casuists have been coating with a noxious veneer of pseudo-legality, applied over a thick slather of secrecy; Common Article 3 names them for what they always were: crimes.

The provision of Common Article 3 at issue in Hamdan was a portion of subsection 1(d) that prohibits all signatory states from passing sentences or carrying out executions "without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court." (The Court held that the President's commissions were not "regularly constituted.")

But even more significantly, subsections 1(a) and (c) of Common Article 3 also prohibit the following, "at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to [persons who are out of combat as a result of detention]":

"violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture"; and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

These standards establish what CA3 itself specifically refers to as "a minimum" code of conduct that parties are "bound to apply."

The nutmeg of isolation

2006-07-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

Let's see, now. Forearms bulging like Popeye's as he twisted delegate's arms at the state convention couldn't keep his challenger Ned Lamont off the primary ballot. Not by a factor of two. Hillary led a slowly swelling parade of prominent Dems who have said they will support the party's nominee from the Connecticut primary, whoever that may be. His campaign ads have turned out to be unintentionally funny; while Ned's latest displays winningly self-deprecatory humor.

And one can just picture the woe on that classic nutcracker face of his, upon learning that Joe Biden accidentally on purpose missed the train that was going to carry him to the Real Democrats Follow Orders Rally for Little Joe, disappointing the nearly thirty enthusiastic supporters who did show up.

Chuck Lawhorn, bassist for the great Celtic band Iona, suggests:

If Lamont wins the primary, he should run an ad showing someone in a "Connecticut for Lieberman" t-shirt walking in to a restaurant, and the host asking, "Party of one?"

Signing statements: the top ten list

2006-07-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

On April 20, 2006 the Boston Globe broke the story of President Bush's extensive use of signing statements, in a front page piece, "Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws", under the byline of Charlie Savage.

There was a text box in the story which was not included in the online version of the story, summarizing the most significant signing statement instances. (It is available in the Globe online, if you know just how to search for it.)

In the interests of wider accessibility and future preservation, here's the list.

Examples of the president's signing statements

Since taking office in 2001, President Bush has issued signing statements on more than 750 new laws, declaring that he has the power to set aside the laws when they conflict with his legal interpretation. The federal government is instructed to follow the statements when it enforces the laws. Here are 10 examples and the dates Bush signed them:

March 9, 2006: Justice Department officials must give reports to Congress by certain daes on how the FBI is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers.
Bush's signing statement: The president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations.

Dec. 30, 2005: US interrrogators cannot torture prisoners or otherwise subject them to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
Bush's signing statement: The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks.

Dec. 30: When requested, scientific information "prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay."
Bush's signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.

Aug. 8: The Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its contractors may not fire or otherwise punish an employee whistle-blower who tells Congress about possible wrongdoing.
Bush's signing statement: The president or his appointees will determine whether employees of the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can give information to Congress.

Dec. 23, 2004: Forbids US troops in Colombia from participating in any combat against rebels, except in cases of self-defense. Caps the number of US troops allowed in Colombia at 800.
Bush's signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can place restrictions on the use of US armed forces, so the executive branch will construe the law "as advisory in nature."

Dec. 17: The new national intelligence director shall recruit and train women and minorities to be spies, analysts, and translators in order to ensure diversity in the intelligence community.
Bush's signing statement: The executive branch shall construe the law in a manner consistent with a constitutional clause guaranteeing "equal protection" for all. (In 2003, the Bush administration argued against race-conscious afirmative-action programs in a Supreme Court case. The court rejected Bush's view.)

Oct. 29: Defense Department personnel are prohibited from interfering with the ability of military lawyers to give independent legal advice to their commanders.
Bush's signing statement: All military attorneys are bound to follow legal conclusions reached by the administration's lawyers in the Justice Department and the Pentagon when giving advice to their commanders.

Aug. 5: The military cannot add to its files any illegally gathered intelligence, including information about Americans obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches.
Bush's signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can tell the military whether or not it can use any specific piece of intelligence.

Nov. 6, 2003: US officials in Iraq cannot prevent an inspector general for the Coalition Provisional Authority from carrying out any investigation. The inspector general must tell Congress if officials refuse to cooperate with his inquiries.
Bush's signing statement: The inspector general "shall refrain" from investigating anything involving sensitive plans, intelligence, national security, or anything already being investigated by the Pentagon. The inspector cannot tell Congress anything if the president decides that disclosing the information would impair foreign relations, national security, or executive branch operations.

Nov. 5, 2002: Creates an Institute of Education Sciences whose director may conduct and publish research "without the approval of the secretary [of education] or any other office of the department."
Bush's signing statement: The president has the power to control the actions of all executive branch officials, so "the director of the Institute of Education Sciences shall [be] subject to the supervision and direction of the secretary of education."

Photo credit: Starange Waze

Update: Ellen Beth Gill writes in the context of Illinois 10th district politics, but her post on signing statements deserves wide readership. Not just professional commentary, but several useful URLs for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

Update 2: Now that the ABA has issued its unanimous report (pdf at link) denouncing the President's practice of issuing these statements, and a bill has been introduced in the Senate to correct the situation, the web dialogue keeps moving forward. See coherentbabble for exhaustive text of signing statements to date, and a whole lot more.

SCOTUS gets another one wrong

2006-06-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

With regard to the Supreme Court ruling striking down Vermont's campaign finance law:

"If money is speech, why can't I recite the Edda at Safeway to pay for my groceries?"

(Hat tip to Aleta S. of Salon Tabletalk.)

Vampire malaria fighting

2006-06-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

I've just learned that over on dailyKos, one hekabolos runs a scrumptious weekly diary called Science Spider Friday. This week, the guest of honor is the jumping spiderEvarca cilicivora, a beastie from East Africa who specializes in mammalian blood.

Now, jumping spiders are small and wouldn't be able to break human skin with their jaws. So they can't drink human blood directly. They ply their trade by hunting down mosquitoes, but they will smell the difference between the ones that are empty and the females that have just taken a blood meal, feeding only on the freshly engorged. As predators of the carriers of malaria, they qualify as beneficial vampires.

More detail (and pics) at the link.

Fobbit holes on parade

2006-06-16T17:21:00.000-07:00

Be vewy, vewy quiet... we're hunting fobbit holes.

George Bush never tires of reciting the mantra, "As they stand up, we'll stand down." But he doesn't expect them to stand up for some decades to come, as he demonstrates by authorizing the construction of a dozen permanent military bases around Iraq.

Friends Committee on National Legislation has served up a web page with a handy map of the dozen bases built or under construction. Mouse over the "x" to get additional text information on each little GI town.

Reporters, too, have the right to remain silent

2006-06-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

All the reporters at Gitmo were tossed out yesterday, per Rummy's orders, in the wake of the triple suicide by inmates. Their sin appears to have been writing up not only Admiral Harris's spin, but also the reactions of the detainees' lawyers. Harris notoriously declared, "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of assymetrical warfare waged against us." One wonders whether the neocons, in a brilliant tactical coup, will now retaliate with their own act of warfare against Al Qaeda, by committing mass suicide themselves?

Editor & Publisher reports that the rebuffed news services are neither happy nor impressed. In the interpretation of some, the summary ejection smacks of panic. My interpretation? Seeing as how Rummy's "Enemy" - that is to say, civil libertarians and what remains of the free press - has the howitzers of truth on its side, and the neocons have only the popguns of lies, secrecy, and repression on theirs, they find themselves enmeshed in an asymmetrical conflict. And so the poor dears must resort to whatever poor weapons are available to them.

The Tice testimony: a damp squib?

2006-06-15T16:31:00.000-07:00

Russell Tice delivered his testimony to a select handful of members of the House Armed Services Committee. He says he told them "everything he knows"; the testimony was given in closed session, and they are sharing none of it with the class.

For some while the House Government Reform National Security Subcommittee, in the persons of its chair, Christopher Shays (R-CT), and its ranking member Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), has tried to get the same debriefing. The NSA is balking, withholding permission, and refusing to say why. Think Progress on June 6 (yes, I'm playing catchup here), cited CongressDaily:

Tice said his information is different from the terrorist surveillance program that President Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts last month that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. Because he worked on special access programs, however, it has not been clear on Capitol Hill which committees have jurisdiction to debrief him. Shays and Kucinich gave the NSA until Friday to explain any legal reason why they cannot interview him. But that deadline passed without a response, and a subcommittee aide today called the missed deadline troubling.

Shays and Kucinich had originally asked the NSA to give them a reason by May 26, but the agency asked for an extension until June 9.

If NSA refuses to allow Congress to do its job, Tice cannot presumably speak to the press to get the word out, since his own phones are certainly tapped (without a warrant), and so are the phones of the most influential reporters (without a warrant).

The Bush regime has pitched the Fourth Amendment, requiring warrants for searches and seizures, out the window. Others are following behind it. Used to be that "You have the right to remain silent" was a clause of the Fifth Amendment. These days, it seems to be turning into the substance of the First as well.

Disorientiering

2006-06-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

Eight straight days without a television, a net connection, or a newspaper has left me feeling dazed and confused. You mean the all-purpose bogeyman Zarqawi actually existed in the first place? Karl Rove is not going to be Fitzed after all? The HPV vaccine was approved without a murmur? The attempt to wrongfoot Ahmedinejad led to a rightfooting? The GOP surprised everybody by winning a by-election in Cunningham's massively Republican district? The Iraqi government-in-exile in Baghdad actually finished naming a cabinet?

My head is whirling. How did I ever manage to keep drinking from this firehose?

I'm sure I'll be oriented in a day or two.

Meanwhile, my lifetime total of redwinged blackbirds identified rose by a factor of fifty in one week. That's got to count for something. What do you mean, it's cheating if you do it by going to Iowa?

I'll say only this about Zarqawi. His passing is (sadly temporary) good news for Iraq. But it's likely to be bad news for the occupation. And both for the same reason: it will tend to return the energies of the insurgents from sectarian killing to attacking soldiers and cops. Wahabbist intolerance had been helping the new governmnent by giving the insurgency a bad name; now the "coalition forces" are going to have to win their propaganda victories inch by bloody inch.

The wrong alien invasion

2006-06-03T04:52:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman figured that if only they could get Congress and the media squawking loud enough that we are being invaded by Mexicans, no one will notice that all the organs of our government have been seized by Ferengi.

So far it's working.

Saturday morning anatomy lesson

2006-05-31T20:05:00.000-07:00

I know it's not Saturday morning. (And I know this is a lot of posts for one day, but I will be taking a hiatus from the Web all next week, and working long hours this week to clear the decks for that vacation. So it's time to sweep away my backlog.)

But it was a Saturday morning when we met most of these characters in the flesh. And here they are flensed of that flesh. All in the interests of pseudoscience.

[Update: the link seems to have shifted. I have renewed the URL.]

Homing in on a home away from home.

2006-05-31T19:50:00.000-07:00

Catching up on the implications of a two week old bit of science news. Nature reported that three new Neptune sized planets have been found circling the nearby star HD69830, 41 light years away.

This was gratifying news for three reasons. First, infrared studies had already disclosed the presence of an asteroid belt around the star. It was predicted that a pair of planets would be found, one on each side of the belt, acting as shepherds to keep the belts in place, much as the inner moons of Saturn shepherd the particles in its rings. So it was pleasant to see observation follow dynamical theory.

Second, detection of the planets was possible because of a big jump in the sensitivity of the Doppler technique for finding extrasolar planets, by observing the wobble they induce on the location of the parent star.

Third, at the new level of sensitivity, it still isn't possible to find the holy grail of extrasolar planetary research: a rocky, earth-sized planet orbiting a sunlike star at a distance congenial to life. To do that, the sensitivity of the Doppler technique would have to be ratcheted up by another 90%.

But here's the beauty part: most nearby stars are not sunlike. They are smaller: lighter in mass, and less bright. That makes a habitable planet easier to find on two counts. The habitable zone is closer in to the star, so that an earth-sized planet would tug harder at its sun. And the star is smaller, so that the same size tug would make it wobble further.

We're getting close. The first planet around a different star worth a beamdown by Kirk's crew should put in its appearance within the next three to five years.

A brief requiem for AuH20

2006-05-31T19:40:00.000-07:00

How far Republicanism has sunk from the days of Goldwater. Among today's GOP, Feingold's attempt to censure the President's lawbreaking constitutes extremism in the defense of liberty, to be decried and shouted down. But a mere call for investigation, a mere Mittyesque request that the President spell out just which of our liberties have been taken away, is enough to call down elephantine wrath.

A great many Republicans on the sidelines understand and are appalled at the damage being done to our system of government, from Bob Barr to the Cato Institute to John Dean to numerous former Reagan officials. Appreciation is due to them all for rising above partisanship in the name of patriotism. But among its elected officials, Barry's party today stands firm for the principle that any defense of liberty is a vice.

One cheer for democracy

2006-05-31T19:22:00.000-07:00

Only one cheer, because this piece of apparent good news is destined to slide down the oubliette - and as likely as not designed to do so.

The Washington Post Sunday noted a bunch of really sweet requirements on the Executive voted in by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, thanks to a coalition of all Democrats with Republican "moderates" Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

As recommended by the September 11 commission, the total spending of all intelligence agencies is to be reported to the public.

The AG is to report within six months on the pros and cons of breaking that total down among the various agencies.

All members of the intelligence committees of the two chambers are to be given a complete list of all clandestine prisons maintained by the United States.

Whenever a subset of the intel committees is briefed on a matter, all members must be informed of the brief and its basic subject.

As long as Hayden is both CIA head and active military, he shall "not [be] subject to the supervision or control of the Secretary of Defense."

All well and good. However, at the President's direction, the House will kill all these provisions, as it has killed the first one before. This is purely a symbolic gesture on the part of Snowe and Hagel. Whenever they have an opportunity to take an action that will result in an actual effect, they join with Chairman Roberts in backing the President's one-man rule to the hilt.

For example, they have consistently voted against any real investigation into the NSA's domestic wiretapping; they have voted against any investigation into how the Administration used or misused the pre-war intelligence on Iraq; and they have both signed on to the DeWine legislation, which would retroactively legalize the NSA program, without ever learning what it actually consists of, and make it a felony for any member of Congress briefed on the program to make any comment on it in public, thus essentially criminalizing the act of oversight.

Where the President's attacks on the Constitution, the rule of law, and the separation of powers are concerned, these two have reliably performed as MINOs: moderates in name only.

Hey, buddy, get a warrant

2006-05-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

This blog noted a couple of weeks ago how National Security Letters might be used to launder illegal surveillance.

Well, here's some good news that flew beneath my radar last week. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the rulings of two lower courts (one in NY, one in CT) that the National Security Letters provision of the USAPATRIOT Act is unconstitutional.

Wrote Judge Richard Cardamone:

"A ban on speech and a shroud of secrecy in perpetuity are antithetical to democratic concepts and do not fit comfortably with the fundamental rights guaranteed American citizens.... Unending secrecy of actions taken by government officials may also serve as a cover for possible official misconduct and/or incompetence."

Judge Cardamone added that national security concerns “should be leavened with common sense so as not forever to trump the rights of the citizenry under the Constitution.”

A consequence of moral clarity.

2006-05-25T20:14:00.000-07:00

In George Bush's moral universe, the one transcendent value is personal loyalty to the President. Every member of the Administration who failed to grasp that, such as John DiIulio and Paul O'Neill, soon found himself exiled from the Administration.

Don't you suppose that it must have dawned on Bush early on - perhaps around October 2001, when it became apparent that despite his express wish, intelligence would steadfastly decline to proclaim Iraq the engineer of 9/11 - that reality was not personally loyal to him?

What could be more natural, or more forthright, than his manly revulsion at this moral flaw? Clearly, reality had become an unprofitable servant. To remain uncorrupted by its taint, the President was compelled to exile it from the White House with the rest.

Poetry Archive 2

2006-05-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

Another of my own pieces.

On Reading Emily

Death is a Motion in the mind
A stillness in the Nerve --
A jest -- unchaperoned by smile --
A feast that scarce -- will serve

That so replete with matter is --
One may miss the Gist
A sentence -- understood til given
Hyphenated -- twist

Don't scratch at that, it'll only make it worse

2006-05-24T15:40:00.000-07:00

Zippy the Pinhead periodically goes into a trance, repeating a polysyllabic three-word mantra over and over. Once in a while I stumble across a phrase in my science reading with just the right hypnotic quality to send Zippy to Zen heaven. A couple of months back, just before I began this blog, it was "nonsense mediated decay". I may have to post about that sometime, but for today's lesson our mantra is "giant gutless tubeworms."

From the moment hydrothermal vents were discovered -- deep ocean trench communities of organisms which get their energy not from sunlight, but rather from geothermal temperature gradients where tectonic plates meet -- these guys have been media stars. As the name indicates, they are gutless wonders. They start as free-swimming larva with normal digestive systems, but they soon settle down to a sedentary life. Taking Saint Paul's advice to extremes, they then put away childish things, including the gut, the mouth and the anus, and set about the serious adult business of putting on mass. They can grow up to eight feet long.

They get all their nutrition from symbiotic bacteria. They don't inherit the bugs from their parents; they harbor no colonies in their free-swimming youth. What's new this week, as reported in Nature, is the way they take on their microscopic boarders, which dwell in a specialized organ called the trophosome.

It had been thought that when it attached to the vent floor, the larva simply swallowed some of the proper bacteria, which then, by some mechanism yet to be determined, defended themselves against being digested. Not so. It turns out they are still bacteria-free when their mouths close over. Instead, the bacteria invade through their skin, and migrate to a region which then differentiates into a trophosome. While this is going on, the cells of the skin and intervening muscle go through a massive die-off, just as if they were succumbing to a nasty infection. Once the colony is ensconced, the die-off stops. The process presents a lovely example of a relationship somewhere between infectious disease and comfortably established symbiosis.

No matter how weird the life style, some organism somewhere is living it.

Giant gutless tubeworms, giant gutless tubeworms, giant gutless tubeworms. Go ahead, try it. No one can say it just once.

The bubble defends its perimeter

2006-05-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

Joe Galloway has spent 20 years as a war correspondent. The strutting, draft dodging popinjays now in charge, finding a chestful of toy soldiers at their disposal, joyfully plopped them into their pet Adventurama in Iraq, oblivious to the fact that those neatly maneuverable poppets were our sons and daughters. Unlike them, Galloway knows the officers, the grunts, and the face of war. He gets an earful, and then he writes what he hears.

Rumsfeld's Pentagon, in the person of Larry Dirita, never gets an earful, because they have made it clear to their underlings in uniform that they want to hear nothing, unless it is their own wise words bounced back to them. Galloway wrote down in an April 26 column what he heard from Lt. General Paul Van Riper about a war game gone bad, and Dirita took umbrage. The
Booman Tribune records the email traffic that went back and forth between the two. That alarming column is worth a post in its own right, but for now just read the letters, and savor the difference between a patriot who cares about the troops, and a Rumsfeld apparatchik who cares only about his boss's reputation. He typifies the badministration's matchless inability to tune its radio dials to the frequency we call "reality".

General Tommy Franks once famously said of another of Rumsfeld's stable of prize cronies, Douglas Feith, that he was "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Feith turned out to be neck deep in passing state secrets to foreign powers. So now he has departed, one step ahead of the shoeshine and two steps away from the county line. As his replacement Dirita may be bucking for the title of FSG in the galactic sector He previously gained brief notoriety, as reported in a no longer web accessible LA Times story from July 18, 2003, at a point when the first flush of fubars was grandly unfolding in Baghdad:

Still, he and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely - to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.

"We're going to get better over time,' promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. "We've always thought of post-hostilities as a phase' distinct from combat," he said. "The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum."

"This is the future for the world we're in at the moment," he said. "We'll get better as we do it more often."

Ah, 2003, what sweet and innocent times those were! Back then, Bush's golden horde believed they were going to sweep from little brown nation to little brown nation, from victory to victory, in another fresh bright clean war every year, just one banner waving vote magnet of a bloodfest after another.
How aft has the dulcet vision gang agley. Only now, after three painful years of delay, are they gearing up for their first followup, in Iran. And even that arrives less in the original spirit of triumphal advance than it does in the spirit of Bre'r Rabbit, fired up in rage at how fast his fist has got stuck in the tar, and hauling off to whack that offending lump of foreign matter with his other fist.

That they are strapping on their boots for the followup, that they are determined to stay in their bubble, having learned nothing from four years of mistakes, that they are ignoring the attempted protests of those small green plastic figurines they so enjoy directing, is clear from General Van Riper's account. When his Red team, wargaming Iran, so easily defeated the Blue team invasion, Rumsfeld's unreality bubble swiftly defended its perimeter. The Blue team just took a mulligan:

Van Riper resolved to strike first and unconventionally using fast patrol boats and converted pleasure boats fitted with ship-to-ship missiles as well as first generation shore-launched anti-ship cruise missiles. He packed small boats and small propeller aircraft with explosives for one mass wave of suicide attacks against the Blue fleet. Last, the general shut down all radio traffic and sent commands by motorcycle messengers, beyond the reach of the code-breakers.

At the appointed hour he sent hundreds of missiles screaming into the fleet, and dozens of kamikaze boats and planes plunging into the Navy ships in a simultaneous sneak attack that overwhelmed the Navy's much-vaunted defenses based on its Aegis cruisers and their radar controlled Gatling guns.

When the figurative smoke cleared it was found that the Red Forces had sunk 16 Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier. Thousands of Marines and sailors were dead.

The referees stopped the game, which is normal when a victory is won so early. Van Riper assumed that the Blue Force would draw new, better plans and the free play war games would resume.

Instead he learned that the war game was now following a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory: He was ordered to turn on all his anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed and he was told his forces would not be allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.

The Pentagon has never explained. It classified Van Riper's 21-page report criticizing the results and conduct of the rest of the exercise, along with the report of another DOD observer.

As a strategic military exercise, this can't be taken seriously. As an exercise in telling Rumsfeld and/or Bush what they want to hear: that Iran will, like Iraq before it, be a slamdunk, a cakewalk, and an all around humdinger - in short, as an exercise in justifying a decision already taken for war - it is as serious as a heart attack.

Cutting a path through the conspiracy jungle

2006-05-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

There's a semi-regular feature on Salon.com called "Ask the Pilot", the columnist being a commercial airline pilot named Patrick Smith. His latest piece takes up 9/11 conspiracy theory questions that have been put to him, and lays a lot of red herrings to rest. Which he doesn't take to mean that it's necessarily red herrings all the way down.

This is good. It's extremely unlikely that the official story on the events of that day is the whole truth. The more that foolish speculations recirculate through the rumor ether, the harder it will be for the signal emitted by reality (and yes, Virginia, there is a reality) to make it through the static. When knowledgeable folks with no love for the neocons peel away the wild conspiracy theories, the outlines of the real conspiracy, if any, are more likely to surface.

Pseudo-Judas: not a Gnostic?

2006-05-19T19:52:00.000-07:00

With all the hullabaloo about that plodding movie made from that silly book, it was refreshing to bump into some serious discussion of hidden church history.

In its June 8 edition, The New York Review of Books assigned three Princeton grad students the task of reviewing the National Geographic blockbuster, The Gospel of Judas. It's a fine piece. It summarizes the contents of the Coptic text in crisp detail, accords it its rightful importance (on a par with the principal Nag Hammadi texts) without hyping it as some sort of authentic history. And best of all, it presents a cogent critique of the underlying assumption of the Kasser/Meyer/Wurst commentary in the book version.

Since the NYRB link may go behind an archive pay wall, here's the nub. The book under review categorizes the Gospel of Judas as "Gnostic", and reads it under the presumption that its author shared all the beliefs held by the academic's stereotype of Gnostics:

that salvation is through knowledge and has no particular ethical complement;
that the physical world is the creation of an evil power in rebellion against the higher, true God.
that Jesus' salvific role was as a teacher, and his crucifixion had no redeeming importance;

The reviewers don't think any of those fit the text. First, the Judas gospel has a distinct ethical cast. The higher race of beings into which Judas is to be inducted is described as "pious" or "holy", and Jesus is sent to save the elect because they are"walking in the path of righteousness." Second, the angelic beings who create the physical Adam are not depicted as rebelious agents of Chaos, but as agents of the high God, sent to minister over the chaotic material realm.

Third, the final section of the Gospel, in which Jesus gives Judas the mission to assist in getting him crucified, although it is poorly preserved and ambiguous, contains these last words from Jesus to Judas, about the consequence of his crucifixion:

And the image of the great race of Adam shall be lifted up, because before heaven and earth and the angels, that race existed throughout the eternal realms. Behold, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and see the cloud and the light within it, and the stars surrounding it. And the star that leads the way, that is your star.

The three reviewers point out that this sounds like a pretty cosmic description of the Passion and its result, not just a mere casting off of an irrelevant physical shell. (And I would point out that the term "lifted up" is a direct reference to the Crucifixion, the Johannine language of "even as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so the Son of Man shall be lifted up." And that the notion of the crucified Christ as the image of Adam is a Pauline staple. There are significant continuities here with the New Testament.)

There's also considerable discussion of the role of the Gospel in second century controversies over the value of martyrdom. The twelve disciples, portrayed in the papyrus as even more abysmally clueless than the butts the New Testament gospels often make of them, are set up to stand in for the bishops of the second century, who claimed descent from those same apostles, and preached the great virtue of martyrdom.

CEI: We call it lies

2006-05-18T20:57:00.000-07:00

It's finally happened. Someone has actually managed to underestimate the intelligence of the American people.

An energy company consortium called The Competitive Enterprise Institute, alarmed at the upcoming release of Al Gore's wonderful documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, are attempting a pre-emptive strike, with two 60-second ads being released in 14 cities.

The second ad contains some mumbo jumbo references to a couple of actual scientific papers, which do in fact indicate that parts of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are getting thicker. Needless to say, the ad completely misrepresents the significance of this fact, which is predicted by global warming models, which also predict that the phenomenon will be temporary. In the case of Greenland, the rate of melting at the edges already greatly outstrips the rate of temporary buildup inland. (In the case of Antarctica, it is not clear which feature predominates at the moment, though it's clear that melting will win out in the future.) More of the real poop available from a real live climate scientist may be found at Real Climate.

Though the second ad consists of what e. e. cummings called "the purest kidooleeyoon", it might achieve some of its intended propagandistic effect. But oh, sweet honey in the rock, the first ad! What a case study in self-parody. "Carbon dioxide" it intones, over tinkly Hallmark card music, "is essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in..." Leading up to the all-powerful sound bite: "CO2. They call it pollution. We call it life."

If MoveOn doesn't have a follow-on ad within a week or two, I'd be surprised. Same tinkly music. "Excrement is essential to life. [Image of cutest possible toddler on potty training seat] We push it out. [Image of field being fertilized] Plants take it in..." Or, maybe it could be identical to the first ad, but in the last scene we see the business-suited oil execs, while "CO2. They call it pollution" is being intoned, all take out plastic clothes bags and fit them over their heads. And grin stupidly at us through the sheeting while the voice over says, "We call it life."

There is a limit, folks. Americans know nothing about science. But there is a fixed lower limit to our dumbnicity, and these bozos have aimed well underneath it.

Hopeful signs for Darfur

2006-05-17T20:05:00.000-07:00

It must be February. January's over, and the molasses is starting to move.

It had almost seemed in recent years that the world had decided the proper speed for stopping a slow motion genocide was somewhere between first gear and park. But first there was the magnificent rally on the National Mall this April 30. Then came word that Khartoum and the largest rebel group had signed a peace deal.

Even so, trust remained low, and not all rebel groups were on board. Peacekeepers were sorely needed, and the African Union troops were overextended and underequipped.

Washington Post reports

U.N. Council Approves Mission to Darfur "The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a legally binding resolution Tuesday that instructs the United Nations to replace an underfinanced African Union peacekeeping mission that is struggling to halt the killing of civilians in the Darfur region of western Sudan. The council threatened sanctions against anyone who impedes peace efforts there.
The U.S.-sponsored resolution, which passed 15 to 0, is aimed at speeding the transition from an African force of about 7,000 troops to a much larger U.N. mission of as many as 20,000 international peacekeepers. The council demanded that Khartoum supply visas for U.N. and African Union military planners within a week to travel to Darfur and prepare for the transition...
......senior U.N. officials noted that the resolution was passed under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which can be enforced through the threat of sanctions or military force.

This action was pushed through on the initiative of the United States. When it comes to genocide, unfortunately, it appears that America remains the indispensable nation. We have one example of a genocide that was stopped without American troops (by Australians in East Timor in 1999), but even that required a US push for authorization at the UN. Otherwise, when America acts, genocide is halted or averted; and when America holds aloof, it continues unimpeded.

It took far too long. But Mom always said, "If you can't say anything good about somebody, don't say anything at all." From now on I am free to declare with a clear conscience that George W. Bush is the worst president ever. Not just by a whisker or a nose, but by a parsec or two. And Mom won't be offended, because I can also point to the one thing he has eventually done right. In future generations, all around the world, whenever his name comes up, it will be cursed and reviled. But in one western corner of Sudan, a word of blessing may be reserved for him.