Really - they're not

If you are still prone to wondering about who is on what side, consider that besides expanding the "national security" prerogatives of the Executive branch, cutting aid to the poor, "containing" Social Security benefits, and never never raising taxes on the rich, there is something else on which the wackos and the White House agree: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

should be left to die and that their support for the housing market should wither away. ...

Federally backed Fannie and Freddie buy mortgage loans and guarantee them against default. This government guarantee has lent certainty and stability to the housing market, keeping funding available and interest rates low, at a time of severe stress. Fannie and Freddie, combined with the Federal Housing Administration, which supports low down-payment loans, have been behind more than 90 percent of new home loans in recent years.

In other words, they have expanded the possibility of home ownership to moderate- and lower-income people who never could have afforded a house otherwise and helped to secure the housing market against collapse until the greed of the bankers was too much to bear so when the giant investment houses went down, the undertow took Fannie and Freddie with them. The wingnuts have always hated them precisely because of the leverage they gave to ordinary workers and other members of the non-elite, so when the opportunity to (falsely) blame them for supposedly causing the 2008 financial meltdown arose (it would be more accurate to call them victims or at worst accessories after the fact), the wackos of course took it. What PHC's reason for agreeing to kill the firms off is less clear.

Oh, wait, maybe it's not:

"I think it's absolutely the case that the U.S. government provided too much support for housing, too strong incentives for investment in housing," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said Friday during a speech at the Brookings Institution.

So to correct that egregious interference in The Free Market (pbui),

[t]he Obama administration wants to raise fees for borrowers and require larger down payments for home loans as part of a long-term effort to restructure the nation's housing market. ...

[T]he administration said it intends to wind down the federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and curtail the Federal Housing Administration to help reduce the government's outsized role in mortgage funding.

Significantly, as it did it admitted that the plan

could boost mortgage rates and make it harder for home buyers to secure the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, a mainstay of American home buying for decades.

So, in sum, the plan is for higher fees, bigger down payments, higher interest rates, and fewer fixed-rate mortgages. All to correct the supposed mistake of having helped ordinary schmucks like us buy a house by, it certainly appears, making it harder for us to get one.

This despite the fact that people who have the biggest mortgages, those in excess of $1 million, are far more likely to be delinquent than those with smaller loans (1 in 7 versus 1 in 12) and a 2008 study by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation found that

[m]ortgage defaults stem from loan products not income level....

Delinquency and foreclosure rates for subprime borrowers were comparable across all income levels, according to Michael Rubinger, LISC president/CEO.

Even Timmy G. says that part of the problem was that

the government "allowed a huge amount of basic mortgage business to shift where there was no regulation or oversight"

and even the Wall Street Journal, for pity's sake, referred to "lax lending and speculation" as inflating the housing bubble and unless you know a bunch of blue-collar or middle- and lower-income families who are housing speculators, that wouldn't seem to be directed at us.

Doesn't matter. The problem in their minds is still that all those déclassé people were helped to buy houses, when they should be grateful for the opportunity to pay someone else for the privilege of living where they do, as

[t]he report emphasized the importance of rental housing for low and moderate-income communities.

Now let me be clear: I have nothing against rental housing. I have rented and I have owned and while overall I prefer owning, the place my wife and I lived before here, a place we had hoped to live in for a long time, was a rented apartment. Rather, it's that I agree with

John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, [who] said his group supports the effort to expand affordable rental housing, but he feared the plan's effect on working-class home buyers who couldn't afford the higher upfront costs.

And what enrages me is the attitude, the attitude that, despite the facts of the matter, the facts that indict Wall Street avarice, corporate corruption, and financial speculation as the drivers of the burst bubble, the attitude that the real problem with the housing market is that too many non-wealthy people were able to be in it. The self-blinding hubris is breathtaking.

Fortunately, there is some pushback coming from "some influential interest groups." (Are the banks ever called an "interest group?")

They include small banks, real estate agents and consumer groups, who all say that Fannie and Freddie, or something similar, are crucial for sustaining the struggling housing market. ...

Some business groups, such as small banks and credit unions, are worried that the demise of Fannie and Freddie would allow large financial firms to dominate the mortgage market,

an even bigger concern than you may realize, considering that according to a study by researchers at Ohio State University which was released last month,

[e]ven the riskiest borrowers tend to have an easier time dealing with their home loan obligations if they got their mortgage from smaller local banks.... If two homeowners with similar credit ratings get a loan for the same amount and at the same interest rate, the one that went to their local bank will default far less often.

“The door you walk into when you’re looking for a loan matters a lot,” said Stephanie Moulton, assistant professor at OSU’s John Glenn School of Public Affairs. “Local banks seem to offer some protection to homebuyers, particularly those with low incomes who may be seen as risky borrowers.”

Which makes PHC's* plan a double whammy: harder-to-get loans from places less willing to work with you afterwards.

Bottom line:

"The administration today has laid out a series of options that could lead to the abandonment of a nearly 70-year commitment to affordable homeownership by working American families," Barry Zigas, director of housing policy for Consumer Federation of America, said in a statement. "American consumers need policies that will foster affordable, long-term fixed rate mortgages, as well as a stable supply of capital that will be available to lenders of all sizes, including community banks and credit unions."

Which is exactly what PHC would see us denied.

Footnote: Timmy G. does not want to completely abandon a federal role in the housing market. He said that

whatever path lawmakers choose for Fannie and Freddie, there must in the future be "some capacity for the government to step in and protect the economy from the collateral damage that can come from that sort of crushing deleveraging, big withdrawal of private capital that happens in crises."

That is, whenever the banks fuck up again (and they will) we taxpayers will have to jump in again in "shared sacrifice" to save their stinking asses so they never have to suffer - Perish the thought! - from their bonehead greed fetish.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

They still are not on your side

So on Wednesday, Sir Boner of Orange and his crew announced a series of deep cuts of $30-something billion in current federal spending, focused almost entirely on programs related to environmental protection, public support for transportation, the arts, and aid to the poor, with zero cuts aimed at the military, the wars, or corporate subsidies.

By Thursday, they had already "accede[d] to demands from conservatives" for even deeper cuts; "conservative" being the polite term, it seems, for the right wing of the right wing, making me wonder if we now are supposed to regard Sir Boner as what, a "moderate?"

By Friday, Boner, et. al., had come up with a plan to slash $61 billion in current spending, a notable degree of responsiveness to their base.

Well, still, who expected better? But what about the "other side?" What, that is, of PHC*? What hope and change is he offering in response?

According to Jacob Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, it's "a five-year freeze on discretionary spending other than for national security." Remembering that unless inflation is zero, spending freezes equal benefit cuts, what does "a five-year freeze on discretionary spending other than for national security" mean in a practical sense? It means cuts focused almost entirely on programs related to environmental protection, public support for transportation, the arts, and aid to the poor. And not on war.

Is there an echo in here?

By the way, when is a freeze not a freeze? When it's an actual immediate cut - and PHC

is planning to request that funding for heating oil aid to the poor be cut in half in his upcoming budget proposal, according to several news reports.

The president would seek to reduce the Low Income Home Energy Heating Assistance Program from the current funding of $5.1 billion to $2.6 billion, the Associated Press said, citing a source familiar with the budget discussions.

Because as we all well know, hypothermia is character-building.

These people are not on your side.

What, you expected better? You expected more from those who respond to criticism from their left by calling them "fucking retards," dismissing them as the "professional left," and telling them, in pretty much just these words, to shut the fuck up and get with the program? Really?

Get a clue: They are not on your side.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

They are not on your side

As everyone knows, the renewal of some provisions of the Traitor ('scuse me, "Patriot") Act was unexpectedly defeated in the House on Tuesday. Brought to a vote under a "suspension of the rules" procedure, it required a two-thirds vote to pass - a margin it failed to reach.

Most of the media coverage - and a good deal of the online commentary - was about how "embarrassing" this was for Rep. Boner and his cronies, since it was the fact that 26 GOPpers defied the leadership and voted "nay" that brought the bill down. In a sense, I suppose that was a reasonable focus, since the vote was 277-148 for passage and when it is brought up again under normal procedures - and there is a rush on to do just that, under a rule allowing for just one hour of debate with no amendments or points of order allowed* - it should pass handily.

That outcome should be of great relief to much of elite opinion, i.e., the Serious People, such as the editorial writers at the Washington Post, who ran a panicky, trembling-lip piece on how "the clock is ticking" on the Traitor Act and how

[i]f lawmakers fail to act, they risk stripping the government of important anti-terrorism tools,

thus, we are apparently supposed to gather, leaving us all at the mercy of The terrorists! The terrorists! who hate our freedom and want to murder us in our beds. I expect the editorial was dictated; I can't help but think their hands would have been shaking too much in fear to type it in themselves.

But getting back to the overall coverage of the vote, there were a couple of points that were either wrong or omitted.

One thing that was wrong was all the talk about the vote reflecting some kind of "tea party insurgency" or "tea party defiance." But only eight of those 26 GOPpers were first-termers. Even if every one of the 5 non-voting GOPpers was a first-termer, that would still mean that 50 of the 63 new GOPper House members voted with the leadership. Not much "defiance" there.

On the other hand, something that was omitted almost entirely from the coverage that I saw was that support for renewing provisions of the Traitor Act declined rather significantly. Last year, only 10 GOPpers voted against renewal as compared to this year's 26. And that renewal got 315 votes, which is 38 more than this year. So 16 GOPpers and 22 Dims went from "yea" to "nay" since last year. Not nearly enough to make the difference for more than the immediate moment, but when support for this sort of crap drops nearly 14% in a year, well, it's at least worthy of mention.

Something else worthy of mention but got very little is that the defeat of the bill is proof again, if proof were still needed, that the areas of privacy and civil liberties are the ones where the right and the left can overlap and diverge in perhaps unexpected ways. In a lot of ways, Ron Paul may be (meaning is) suitable for popping out of a cuckoo clock - but when he says that police powers should be strictly limited to those proven actually necessary and protection of personal privacy against government intrusion is a high ideal, there are many on the left who could (and will) echo not only the sentiments, but the words.

But here's the crux of it, the vital, central point that has to be made and made clearly and to which the title of the post refers: The GOPper leadership and the White House were and are united in support of the bill. They are united in their support for continuing the expanded government powers to poke, prod, and pry into every aspect of our private lives. The are united in their devotion to the maintenance and yes expansion of executive power. In fact, the White House's only objection was that the extension was only to December of 2012 instead of 2013.

This is nothing new, of course. When these same three provisions were up for renewal in 2009, the White House was all over it, calling them "important authorities" even as they admittted that one of them hadn't ever been used, which does raise the question of just how "important" it is. No matter, we need it! Why? Well, because we have it! Which has always, always, been the cry of the national security state from the very beginning: It must have more power and it must continue to have whatever powers it already has. It's vital! Important! Necessary! It's for your own good! Power, we need to keep reminding ourselves, never concedes anything (least of all its own powers) without a fight.

And in this the Obama administration - with the full support of the Serious People - is every bit as bad as the Bush administration was, adopting its policies and embracing its positions, even going beyond them in some cases, sometimes shockingly so. On the power of the powerful, the extent of the Executive, on the ability of the government to know more about you while you know less about the government, PHC** and Shrub are two of a kind, peas in a pod, birds of a feather, soulmates, whatever cliché you care to employ.

Which is why the whole business about "sunset" provisions, about how "Oh, this is just a temporary extension, just so we can take a better look at it" is such thoroughgoing bull and has been since the Traitor Act was first passed in a panic after 9/11. At that time, we were assured that we needn't worry about the impact on civil liberties because most of the provisions - 16 of them, in fact - we going to sunset after five years.

Well, four years later, in 2005, the House voted to make 14 of those 16 permanent and the other two were extended for 10 years. The Senate made a number of changes in the Traitor Act, but most of those were undone in conference and ultimately the House version passed pretty much intact. Other provisions have gotten the same treatment: They haven't been made permanent, but "sunset" keeps getting later and later, pushed back again and again. And now some Dims in the Senate are saying they want the three provisions involved here made permanent.

All of which means that when it comes to your privacy, when it comes to your civil liberties, when it comes to insulating the individual against the power of the state, they are not on your side. Never have been. Never will be.

*Because of the way Thomas files information, that link may not be valid for long. If it doesn't work, go to the Thomas home page, look up H.R.514, select "All Congressional Actions," and look for February 9.

**PHC = President Hopey-Changey

Just in time for BAD

The three days of this weekend (i.e., Fri-Sun) are the somewhat misnamed Blogroll Amnesty Day, when small bloggers give a nod to other small bloggers that they think deserve wider notice.

To understand why I've not been promoting it, you need to know the background and my own opinion on that. BAD got started a couple of years ago when a few of the "big" bloggers decided they were going to cut their blogrolls and so chucked off a number of smaller, lesser-known blogs. They called it "blogroll amnesty" on the idea that they were not going to feel guilty about it.

There were howls of protest, primarily from those affected by the loss of links, who more or less argued that the big blogs had some kind of moral duty to provide links to smaller blogs, even as those link lists got to be hundreds of items long, which to me makes them pretty useless. I had a hard time feeling offended; my attitude was "It's his/her blog, they can do whatever they damn well please with it." I also had trouble conceiving of Skippy, one of the loudest denouncers, as having a "small" blog considering that over the course of its lifetime it has averaged nearly 1000 hits a day.

Still and be all that as it may, the idea of smaller bloggers supporting each other is a good one. I know from experience, as I know you have, that there is a lot of talent and insight out there that doesn't get due notice. (Plus, there is my contention - I am speaking here of political blogs - that a number of the big blogs are not big because they are better, indeed, often, to be blunt, they are not, but merely because they were among the first and so got established before many others appeared on the scene .)

So I do want to point up a couple of blogs I think deserve notice. They are all taken from my blog list to the right (minus the "big" or at least bigger ones), so no big surprises, but since, as it says right there, "Beyond the reciprocal links, my blog list is pretty much limited to blogs I actually do look at on at least a fairly regular basis," I can claim familiarity with each of my selections. Most people seem to be picking about five for their list, so I'll so the same.

Blckdgrd
Daisy's Dead Air
Jobsanger
Notes From Underground
The Existentialist Cowboy

Of course, now I feel like it'll seem I'm dissing the others on my link list that I didn't mention. Which I'm not, I'm just.... Oh the heck with it, I refuse to feel guilty about my choices. Amnesty!

Footnote: Damn! Forgot one I meant to include because I haven't gotten around to adding it to the sidebar.

Pruning Shears

And now for something completely different

This aging hippie is feeling much the aging part today. I learn from Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast that Jorma Kaukonen is get me my cane and shawl 70.

Yeah, I know most of you are going "Who?" He was the lead guitar for Jefferson Airplane and if you're still going "Who?" then I can tell you that you missed out.

Jorma and his friend Jack Casady, JA's bass player, returned to their roots in blues in 1969 when they started their own group (while still playing with Airplane) which they called Hot Tuna. I haven't checked to be sure, but I think I still have their eponymous first album - on vinyl, no less.

Jefferson Airplane went the way of many rock bands, shifting, breaking up, evolving (into Jefferson Starship in this case), reuniting, and finally dissolving. But Hot Tuna is still going, still playing, still touring, 40 freaking years later. This is from December:



But I have to say that when I think of Jorma Kaukonen, this is what I think of - and if you haven't heard this before, bear in mind as you listen that this is a solo.



And I have to admit, it's the result of overlearning if anything ever was, that when I hear the last notes of that, in my head I always hear the opening bass line of this:



So happy birthday, Jorma - oh, and to Paul Kantner, too, who I gather is also about to join the septuagenarians.

Another passing thought

Frank Wisner, who had served as Barack Obama's special envoy for Egypt, told reporters in Germany on Saturday that "President Mubarak remains utterly critical in the days ahead." According to Al Jazeera (see 8:07pm at this link), he said

We need to get a national consensus around the pre-conditions for the next step forward. The president must stay in office to steer those changes.

How's that? He must stay in power to "steer the changes" toward a "national consensus" on "the pre-conditions" for "the next step?" How many months, how many years, are there in a "steer changes to national consensus on pre-conditions for the next step?"

So just a thought: How many weasel words can be fit into one statement? (And I didn't even include that ridiculous modern cliché "forward.")

Passing thought

In an interview with ABC reporter Christiane Amanpour, Hosni Murbarak was quoted as saying "I am fed up. After 62 years in public service, I have had enough. I want to go" before adding that he couldn't because "If I resign today, there will be chaos."

Beyond the extraordinary self-pity there, I can't be the only one who thought "Après moi, le déluge."

The quote, attributed to both Louis XV and his paramour Madame de Pompadour, has been understood a couple of ways but it always seemed to me to say, as Mubarak clearly did, "I'm all that stands between you and chaos."

And as a passing thought on the passing thought, if Mubarak quit, what would be immediately left behind? A vice-president and a new cabinet, all of which he hand-picked. It seems he doesn't have much faith in his own people.

Everything you need to know in one sentence

Twice.

Number one comes from Fox Business.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has named Goldman Sachs Asset Management Chief Investment Officer Eileen Rominger to head its division overseeing asset managers and hedge funds.

Number two is via Raw Story.

President Barack Obama announced Monday that he plans to nominate former Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lawyer Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. as solicitor general, a position formerly held by Elena Kagan.

Verilli is not a complete waste; he's represented defendants in death penalty cases and signed an amicus curie brief that argued Jose Padilla could not be classified as an "enemy combatant." But still, isn't there somewhere other than the heart of corporate America where PHC* can find staff?

Yeah, I know.

Thanks go to Dan at Pruning Shears for both links.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

Egypt

Watching the live video coming out of Egypt tonight reminded me of something I was thinking of including my earlier post on events there, something I should have included but didn't: Another tactic dictators often use when faced with mass opposition is to try to provoke violence specifically in order to justify a massive, severe, violent repression of the opposition in the name of "security" or "public safety" or some similar spurious crap.

I didn't include it for a couple of reasons, one being that I thought the post was already rather long but another being that, as I said there, such large-scale repression would require the cooperation of the military, a cooperation of which it certainly appears Mubarak can have no assurance.

Perhaps that's why when Mubarak's hired thugs and police goons attacked the protestors in Tahrir Square today, they weren't trying to provoke a violent reaction, they were trying to physically drive the protestors out of the square, to achieve a sort of overt physical victory over, a clear physical defeat of, the regime's opponents. That this was a coordinated, planned, assault can't be denied: An attack that comes "without warning," including riders on camels and horses, which includes

[r]egime supporters dropp[ing] concrete blocks on the opposition protesters from the roofs and balconies of surrounding buildings

doesn't occur spontaneously. Neither does what appears to be a planned intention to attack journalists. Meanwhile,

Mustafa el-Fiqqi, a top official from the ruling National Democratic Party, told The Associated Press that businessmen connected to the ruling party were responsible for what happened

and some government workers said they were ordered by their employers to participate in pro-government protests. Even the New York Times, hardly a friend to "instability," referred to Wednesday's events as Mubarak

unleashing waves of his supporters armed with clubs, rocks, knives and firebombs in a concerted assault on thousands of anti-government protesters.

The attackers, however, ultimately got more than they bargained for and were driven back out of and away from the square even as sporadic violence, driven by anger and a desire for revenge, continued through the night.

The position of the military remains a question. Journalists and other observers on the scene appear to agree that the army is trying to keep out of events, perhaps partly for fear of being seen as partisan and partly for fear of a rebellion within its own ranks if it did try to impose "calm" by force after having made much of saying how it will not fire on protestors. But that position is a difficult one: By not intervening, the army also risks being seen as partisan. The military leadership no doubt just wants the whole thing over with and just needs lets call it a nudge in the right direction.

So this is what I think should happen right now: The US has already broken with Mubarak, a fact made plain by Obama's deliberate use of the word "now" in referring to a "transition" in Egypt. (If there was any doubt that it was deliberate, Robert Gibbs made it plain: "Not September. Now means now.")

According to The Globe & Mail (Canada), a range of US officials, both civilian and military, are

all giving their Egyptian counterparts the same message. The Americans are warning of consequences – believed to be cuts in the $1.3-billion in military aid that provides Egypt’s officer corps with a privileged lifestyle in a society plagued by poverty.

“Officers throughout our command ranks have spoken to their counterparts … it's safe to say, again, each and every one of those conversations starts out with a conversation about restraint and non-violence,” Mr. Gibbs said.

It's time to go that one better. It's time for PHC* to tell Bob Gates to tell Mike Mullen to get on the phone to Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Sami Hafez Enan, Mullen's Egyptian equivalent, and tell him that the US has determined that it will be impossible for stability to return to Egypt so long as the Mubarak regime is in power and that we're so very sorry but, y'know, the US simply can't provide military aid to unstable governments. Put it as diplomatically and politely as you want, as you can, but make it clear: As long as the Mubarak regime is in power - and having Mubarak graciously "retire" seven months from now in another set of rigged elections designed to put his some Gamal in his place is not getting rid of the regime - there will be no more military aid.

See how long Hosni Mubarak stays around after that.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

Chills me to the bone

Writing at AOLNews.com, meteorologist Paul Yeager starts a February 1 piece this way:

A massive snowstorm is slamming America's midsection - again. New York City just set a record for January snowfall. The South has experienced bitter cold, snow and ice this winter.

If the Earth is getting warmer, why's it so darn snowy and cold?

AAAAAHHHHH!

Do we still have to argue this? Do we still have to deal with this canard? Are people still spreading this "Where's your global warming now, huh?" crap?

Apparently so, he said with a deep sigh, apparently so.

So let's go through it one more time. Short-term phenomena are just that, short-term. It's impossible to attribute a single storm or even a single cold, snowy spell to anything more than normal variations in weather, just as the same is true for a single heat wave. As I have written several times before here and elsewhere, no one cold winter disproves global warming any more than one hot summer proves it. Only a trend over a period of a fair number of years (climatologists suggest 30) is revealing. Which means the snows and storms of this winter in the US in and of themselves tell us nothing one way or another about climate change. Period

To be as fair as I can to Yeager, he acknowledges that early on, writing that "short-range weather events have little to do with the climate change debate." But he sullies that central point in three ways: First by immediately preceding that statement with "opinions about climate change vary greatly," second by including the word "debate," both of which falsely imply there is a genuine scientific debate, and third by having the first "expert" quoted being Roy Spencer.

Roy Spencer, for pity sake.

Don't know who Roy Spencer is? Well, for starters he's a meteorologist (not a climatologist) who now holds the title of Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and makes much of his work with NASA.

He's also something of a fruitloop.

You can get an idea of his style at his most recent blog post, dated January 31, in which he starts out with a clichéd slam of Al Gore (Just what the hell is it with the nanny-nanny naysayers' obsession with Gore?) and ends up by counterposing "those who read all of Reverend Al’s sermons" with those "who are still capable of independent reasoning and thought."

Back in October 2009 a naysayer at MMFA held Spencer up as an authority and referred to two links at his site. I'm posting below what I wrote in response, somewhat edited for length, because I think it gives a broader sense of how Roy Spencer argues his points and what kind of "authority" he is. (The links to Spencer's posts in the following are from the original.) After saying I looked at the links and was "unimpressed," I said this:

For example, the first link says that "global warming theory starts with the assumption that the Earth naturally maintains a constant average temperature." That is a crock. I don't know of anyone who's ever said that. The average temperature of the Earth has varied by a good number of degrees over time.

What the Earth will do is seek an equilibrium, a balance, between energy in and energy out - but there are so many things that can disturb (and have disturbed) that equilibrium from the very-predictable and very-long term (such as the precession of the Earth's orbit) to the somewhat predicable (such as the radiance of the Sun) to the relatively unpredictable (such as large-scale volcanic activity) that no one would rationally claim that "the Earth naturally maintains a constant average temperature." It's a straw figure.

What global warming theory says is that an equilibrium that had persisted for several hundred years if not longer is being disturbed by human activities that have lead to the release of large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with the result that the average temperature of the Earth is rising as the climate seeks a new equilibrium.

So right at the top he misstates what he's supposedly critiquing.

He refers several times to "forcing and feedback (loosely speaking, cause and effect)" - but that is, again, wrong. A "forcing" is something that drives climate in a certain direction. An "effect," the result of a forcing, isn't a "feedback" unless it is a new forcing. One of the big dangers of global warming is the development of positive feedback loops [where forcings produce new forcings in the same direction] such that the temperature would continue to rise even if we generated no additional greenhouse gases.

[On to] the other link you give. There, he says "The main arguments for global warming being manmade go something like this: 'What else COULD it be? After all, we know that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations are sufficient to explain recent warming, so what's the point of looking for any other cause?'" That is such a stinking pile that I'm grateful that Smell-o-Vision is still fictional. I mean, how many ways could that be wrong? For one, CO₂ is the most abundant greenhouse gas, but it's not the only one or even the most powerful one. (Methane, for example, is 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO₂ is.) For another, the idea that scientists are simply dismissing out of hand any other possibility is not only ridiculous, it is a puerile slam on the entire community of atmospheric scientists.

So much for the links, what about the author himself? Dr. Roy Spencer is a leading nanny-nanny naysayer on climate change. His 2008 book Climate Confusion not only argued that human impact on the climate is so small as to be safely ignored, he claimed the very best thing we can do for the world's poor is to keep on right on doin' exactly what we're doin' now.

But he's rather more than that. For one, he's a creationist, having said in 2005 that creationism "actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution." For another, he was a "scientific advisor" to something called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, which declared itself to be "committed to bringing a proper and balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development."

He's associated with both the Heartland Institute, a right-wing outfit promoting "free market" solutions to just about any problem you can think of, including global warming, and the George C. Marshall Institute, a right-wing think tank.

In 2004, he wrote that "either you believe that the world has been created for mankind's use, with a certain resiliency and stability, or you believe it is just a cosmic accident, fragile, and overly sensitive to our meddling" - a particularly interesting statement in light of his repeated efforts to prove the climate is "insensitive" [- that is, unlikely to be affected by human activity]. In that same article he compared toxic waste to deer droppings.

A year earlier, he and a partner had published an analysis that claimed that the troposphere, the lowest level of the atmosphere, was actually cooling, not warming. Two years later it turned out they had screwed up the calculations and the troposphere was actually warming, and warming in a way that was in large agreement with global warming computer models. Despite having to admit they were wrong, the pair said "our view hasn't changed," that is, even though they were wrong, they were still right.

Two final tidbits: One, in 2007 he asserted that "very few scientists in the world - possibly none - have a sufficiently thorough, 'big picture' understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming." Which is probably why the IPCC, for example, relies on the combined effort of a few thousand scientists in relevant disciplines from around the world - and why, by his own words, Spencer's lone-wolf nanny-nanny naysaying is not as impressive as some here (eagerly) find it.

And two, he also insists that despite his connections to the Heartland Institute, which has gotten a good deal of money from Exxon-Mobil, "My research has always been 100% U.S. Government-funded." Which would seem to be a poke in the eye to those who claim that researchers keep finding new support for anthropogenic global warming because "that's where the grant money is."

I'll here add one other bit: He has argued that both environmentalism and "evolutionism" - that is, acceptance of the scientific reality of evolution - are religions and that teaching evolution in schools violates the First Amendment's separation clause.

So yes, short-term weather tells us nothing about long-term climate change. But no, you do not want to go to Roy Spencer as your first source. Or second. Or fifty-third. Or - how many sources are there?

Footnote: If you want the unedited version and more of the same exchange from which the above is taken, I posted my side of it here. That longer exchange also contains the acknowledgment that when I referred to carbon dioxide as "the most abundant greenhouse gas" I should have said "the most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas," the one for which we are responsible for the increase and the one, therefore, that we can do the most about. In terms of pure abundance, water vapor far outstrips carbon dioxide.

Footnote to the preceding, Meanwhile... Div.

Since 1994, homosexuals have been among the groups eligible for asylum in the US if they can demonstrate past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution based on being one of that group.

However, human rights groups and asylum-seekers bemoan the fact that while even a hint of being gay or lesbian can cost you a military career, you risk being denied asylum if you are not "gay enough."

The New York Times tells the story of Romulo Castro, a homosexual and native of Brazil, who, trying to be sure he would gain asylum,

considered attending his asylum interview in Rosedale, Queens, dressed as Fidela Castro, a towering drag queen in six-inch stilettos, a bright green poodle skirt and a mane of strawberry blond hair. In the end, Mr. Castro, 34, opted for what he described as understatement: pink eye shadow, a bright pink V-neck shirt and intermittent outbursts of tears. ...

"I knew I had to put on the performance of my life,” [he said.] ...

“Judges and immigration officials are adding a new hurdle in gay asylum cases that an applicant’s homosexuality must be socially visible,” said Lori Adams, a lawyer at Human Rights First.... “The rationale is that if you don’t look obviously gay, you can go home and hide your sexuality and don’t need to be worried about being persecuted.”

Jhuan Marrero was challenged about his "macho demeanor" by the immigration officer at his asylum interview. Victoria Neilson of Immigration Equality referred to a 21-year-old lesbian who was initially denied asylum because she was young, attractive and single, apparently not conforming to the officer’s stereotype of a lesbian.

What, wasn't she butch enough? This is insane and just shows how, sixteen years after the immigration rules were changes, a bigoted, stereotyped view of homosexuals persists.

Chris Rhatigan, a spokeswoman for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, said such behavior by immigration officers would not be condoned.

“We don’t say that someone is insufficiently gay or homosexual, whatever that would mean, or that he or she could be saved by hiding his or her homosexuality,” Ms. Rhatigan said. “Sexual preference is an immutable characteristic. It is something an individual can’t or shouldn’t change.”

Well, good for the words. Now how about backing them up with some actions, such as making clear to every immigration officer what you just said.

Footnote: It seems that the Czech Republic has been testing the claims of homosexual asylum seekers by attaching genital cuffs to monitor their responses to pornography. The Times reported that human rights groups in the US expressed relief that the use of such a device is impossible to imagine here.

Considering how recently it would have been equally impossible to imagine the US government openly advocating, justifying, and engaging in illegal domestic spying, indefinite imprisonment without charge, and torture, I think they had better think again about tossing around the "it can't happen here" line.

It ain't over 'til it's over

On Friday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lawsuit challenging "don't ask, don't tell" policy can continue at least for now.

The White House had asked the court to set the case aside because of the decision of Congress to end the ban on gay and lesbian servicemembers and, it said, the Pentagon was moving as fast as it could to implement the change. President Hopey-Changey (President H-C for short and no, dumbos, get a grip, that is not a sly reference to a President Hillary Clinton) has said he expects to finalize the repeal by the end of 2011.

The Log Cabin Republicans, the gay political group whose lawsuit challenging "don't ask, don't tell" persuaded District Court Judge Virginia Phillips in September to enjoin the military from enforcing the policy, had opposed the government's effort to put the case on hold.

R. Clarke Cooper, the group's president, said Saturday that while he thinks the Pentagon's efforts are sincere, the case should proceed as long as gay servicemembers still can be discharged.

The case, that is, could be thought of as a kind of backstop in case the Pentagon's plans stall.

The court agreed to proceed, at least for now, ordering the DOJ to explain why it should overturn Phillips' ruling. The deadline for filing is February 25. And I still wonder how the Log Cabin Republicans can stay in a party that hates them.

State of de Nile

I haven't said anything about the events in Egypt, much as I'd like to and as much as I've been following them, because - well, for a couple of reasons, central to which in that it's not really a matter of separate "events" but of a single ongoing event. It's an admittedly weak analogy, but think of it like a beating heart: It pulses with a series of individual beats but they're not the point; it's the continuing series of them that's meaningful and you have to look at the whole to see what's really going on.

Considering that I'm surely not a source anyone looks to for up-to-the-minute coverage of events - nor should they - and the fact that the "whole" is constantly changing, it's hard for me to say anything worthwhile that others haven't said or won't say sooner and probably better. So consider what follows some blue-skying about the future.

My own impression is that Mubarak is going down and that his regime will not survive much longer. The first hint was when the government, faced with the single focused demand of "Mubarak must go" made some totally-unrelated changes and promises that would not impinge on his control. That is always - always - the first step, a clear sign of a regime that has realized that it faces a serious challenge and it is trying to buy off the opposition on the cheap. When that didn't work, the result was more promises combined with threats.

Government's like Mubarak's always face the same dilemma when faced with a mass protest movement - especially when those protests appear in multiple places - when that movement is not coupled with outright violent insurrection: Go easy, you might encourage more protest. Crack down, and you also might encourage more protest as the result of outrage. There is a risk either way. Most repressive governments, in such cases, wind up doing both. After the fig-leaf promises, comes the hope that the protests will fade away. When they don't, comes the crackdown.

Most cases, just like this one, run that same course. The break point comes when the crackdown turns from a show of force to real force, real state violence. What happens then often tells the future.

By the third day of the protests in Egypt, police were shooting demonstrators; by Sunday, when Mubarak gave the army orders to shoot to kill when it saw fit, at least 150 people already had been killed and thousands more wounded. But the demonstrations didn't stop. They kept right on going, even grew as the spirit grew. That's when I became convinced Mubarak was finished.

You want other signs beyond the on-going protests? How about this:

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Syrian President Bashar Assad ... said that he will advocate for political and economic reform in Syria, following the massive protests that have recently swept the Middle East, which he said have ushered in a "new era."

Assad, that is, intends to be out in front of protests, to try on some reforms before the protests break out in Syria, the better to head them off. That's how seriously he takes what's going down in Egypt and how seriously he regards the potential of a threat to his own regime from the spread of protest, even as he also insists that his government is "more stable" than Mubarak's.

Here at home there is that fact that according to the Los Angeles Times, the Obama administration is

preparing for a post-Mubarak era after three decades. ...

As early as last Wednesday, the Obama administration recognized that they would not be able to prop up the Mubarak regime and keep it in power at all costs, [one former senior administration advisor] said.

"They don't want to push Mubarak over the cliff, but they understand that the Mubarak era is over...."

This in addition to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of the word "transition" and the reference to US aid to Egypt being "reviewed" as events unfold. The implied threat about aid is unlikely to be carried out, but it does signal to Mubarak that yes, he can go too far. Then there is the attitude of the US toward Mubarak's newly-sworn in cabinet, an attitude the Voice of America described as "dismissive." The US is hedging its bets in case Mubarak does manage to survive, but what's clear is that his biggest sponsor, his long-time backer, is more than ready to see him go.

Like the man said, the Mubarak era is over.

At this point, Mubarak's only remaining clear option if he wants to maintain his regime is large-scale violent repression, which would require the cooperation of the military. That cooperation appears unlikely to come, especially after the military issued this statement, as translated by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which I spell out because if I said ABC you'd get the wrong idea:

Your armed forces acknowledges the legitimacy of the people's demands and is adamant on carrying out its responsibilities and protecting the country and its citizens as ever.

The armed forces' presence on the Egyptian streets is for your own sake - safety and security. Your armed forces have not and will not resort to the use of force against this great people.

(Al-Jazeera had a slightly different version of the statement, which added the line that the army "affirms that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody.")

Mahmoud Shokry, a former Egyptian diplomat, declared the army "is not a puppet" in anyone's hands.

“The army does not want to confront the youth,” Mr. Shokry said. “If they think this will make a kind of civil war, they will ask Mr. Mubarak to leave the country, I am sure.”

Meanwhile, on the ground, the military allowed citizens gathered in Tahrir Square to ignore the curfew and the soldiers freely mingled unarmed among the crowds. Their immediate superiors, the middle-rank officers,

try to avoid talking about politics but appear to sympathize with the sentiments of the masses demanding the removal of President Hosni Mubarak.

Clearly, Mubarak can't count on the army to save his pitiful hide. In what can only be seen as a last-ditch attempt to save himself, minutes after the military released its statement, Mubarak had his new vice-president, Omar Suleiman, declare

"I was assigned by the president today to contact all the political forces to start a dialogue about all the raised issues concerning constitutional and legislative reform...."

With force having failed, it's back to placate and stall. But I strongly suspect it will not be enough. Al-Jazeera reports that opposition leaders in Cairo rejected the offer of negotiations, saying that the protestors "say it isn't an issue of a different approach from Mubarak, they just don't want Mubarak." As for the pledge to institute economic and political reforms, it's regarded as too little, too late. What's even more, Suleiman is damaged goods: His history of working with the CIA on rendition may not be widely known in Egypt, but his role in Mubarak's intelligence service surely is. Indeed, there is speculation that he was chosen as VP because it would please the army, with which Mubarak was and is trying to strengthen relations, rather than with any eye to pleasing the protestors.

All of this is not to say Mubarak is totally without friends, however: On Saturday night, the Israel Foreign Ministry

issued a directive to around a dozen key embassies in the United States, Canada, China, Russia and several European countries. The ambassadors were told to stress to their host countries the importance of Egypt's stability. In a special cable, they were told to get this word out as soon as possible.

Put more bluntly, Israel was telling its ambassadors to encourage other countries to "lay off Mubarak."

"The Americans and the Europeans are being pulled along by public opinion and aren't considering their genuine interests," one senior Israeli official said.

Apparently justice, freedom, democracy, human rights, economic improvement, and all the rest of that leftist rot are not to be counted among "genuine interests." The attitude of "Wait a minute - how does this affect me?" is not limited to Americans.

As I type in these last few lines, it is a little after 6am in Egypt and we are hours away from the "march of a million people." Al-Jazeera's live blog quotes one of its correspondents in Tahrir Square as saying

[t]he protesters seem to be increasingly energised this morning. They clearly are determined to get today's march starting with a big bang. The atmosphere on Tahrir Square is very good. People seem to feel that some sort of victory is the air.

Perhaps they're right. They well could be. The dying Mubarak regime is trying as best as it can to limit the size of the action by blocking transportation and communication: The internet is down, there are predictions that the mobile phone network will be shut off, and all train traffic has been stopped. But while those trains can be stopped, there is a bigger train here, the train of history. And while I freely admit I have been wrong, even embarrassingly wrong, in predictions before, I think that that train is not one that will be derailed.

Everything you need to know in two sentences

In this case it's everything you need to know about US media. It comes from the valuable UnknownNews.org. The opening quote is from Al-Jazeera:

"We go now to two reports from Cairo, but we won't show or name our reporters on the scene as they're violating restrictions imposed by the Egyptian government." Have you ever heard a line like that on CNN?

Preach it, friends.

I'm reminded of an incident from when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The official claim was "national defense" plus the assertion that the Afghan government had actually asked for the "assistance."

A short time later, a news anchor on Radio Moscow over the course of a day gradually referred to the action in tougher terms until finally using the term "invasion." He was not to be found on subsequent broadcasts.

In response, someone - I don't recall who - pointedly asked if anyone could recall a single time across the entire length of the Indochina War when a single network news person had on the air referred a single time to a US "invasion" of Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia. No one could.

It has gotten no better and in many ways worse in the years since.

Several people died at once

Impressionist David Frye died this past Monday of a heart attack at the age of 77.

He was not the best voice impressionist I've ever heard; in fact when he tried to maintain a voice for more than a few sentences, there were occasions where the impression seemed to slip away from him and the inflection or pacing just sounded off. But his ability to capture the (if you'll pardon the cliche) essence of a person's mannerisms and facial expressions more than made up for it. And when he nailed someone, damn did he nail them.

And another part of my younger days slips away.

Footnote to the preceding

There is another, often related area, besides serving economic power where the demand is to justify the "don't" rather than the "do." That is serving military power. Since the former provides for the latter which is used to protect the former, a nice and historically long-standing symbiotic relationship, the same flipping of the burden of proof from the claimant to the questioner is not surprising.

Amtrak and other mass transit projects are not, of course, the only targets of the Republican Study Commission I mentioned a couple of posts earlier. Their list is a veritable plethora of traditional right-wing targets, most of which have the common feature of being something that government does well or where it provides a genuine service or in some other way makes an actual contribution, which is the one thing the wingers can never allow or admit to.

However, and again this will come as no surprise, there is one area where they had a strict hands-off policy, one area exempt from cuts or even any consideration of them: anything to do with war. Past, present, or future. Military spending is off the table. Veteran's benefits are off the table. "Security" is off the table.

Because we can always find money for war. Always. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Iraq war - Oh yeah, remember that? - is now costing about $5.4 billion every month. The Afghanistan war is costing $5.7 billion every month. In July, there was a "supplemental request" (of which I thought we were told there would be no more) of $34.4 billion, mostly for the cost of the escalation in Afghanistan.

In FY2010 $171 billion was spent on our wars and that same amount is desired for FY2011. Together, those two wars so far have cost about $1.1 trillion, says the CRS.

That same figure, by coincidence, represents something else: a minimum figure for military-related spending proposed for FY2011. A trillion dollars a year. Even the White House's own figures (see Table 3.2 at this link to the OMB or go directly to the file), which conceal some of the costs now being incurred due to past military spending, peg the figure at $778 billion ($750 billion for "national defense" plus $28 billion for "international security assistance"). Despite some TPer huffing and puffing, no official is going to be called before any committee with a requirement to justify it, as the "presumption of correctness" lies with the war chiefs and it's the opponents who not only have the burden of proof but must somehow overcome that presumption even to get a serious hearing.

Money to save life? You have to justify spending it. Money to take life? You have to justify not spending it. Money to raise people to health? Can't afford it. Money to lower people to hell? Can't afford not to. Money for smarter students? Prove it. Money for smarter bombs? Goes without saying. Money for railroads? No. For railguns? Yes.

While I started this by referring to the Republican Study Committee, I should emphazie that this is not a GOPper vs. Dimocrat thing - those budgets for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for FY2010 and FY2011 did not come from the George Bush White House, after all - and it's not even, strictly speaking, a left-right thing: The far right, driven by its isolationism, is sometimes even harsher on such matters than the left. There is, rather, a broad conservative-to-liberal consensus that spending on the military, on arms, ultimately on war, is all but sacrosanct. That consensus is not new and it did not originate in the US; it is, as I said at the top, historically long-standing. But that makes is nonetheless real and nonetheless deadly both because of what it enables by its biases and what it prevents by its sucking up of emotional, physical, financial, and scientific resources.

The thing that gives some hope in the short run is that Americans on the whole have come to realize that war spending is not and must not be given a special pass. Asked in a recent NYT/CBS poll whether they would cut Social Security, Medicare, or the military budget in order to reduce the deficit, a majority of Democrats and independents and a plurality of Republicans chose the military; 55% overall.

But the pushback among The Serious People has already begun: A couple of weeks ago, "Newsweek" carried a piece that called moves to cut war spending a "risky rush" which no one knows how to do "without jeopardizing security and our place as a world leader." Making actual cuts, cuts that are not merely symbolic or PR, will take a lot of work. A good place to start, not the only place but a good place, is the Friends Committee on National Legislation, while the more radical among you might try the War Resisters League while the more centrist could check out the Center for Defense Information.

Wishing us good luck.

Footnote: In case someone thinks this as I am almost certain someone will, while I do regard veteran's benefits as a present cost of past military spending and therefore part of current military spending, I do not object per se to such benefits nor do I object to veterans applying for them. They are there to be used. What I object to, as I explained (or at least tried to) in my post Heroics and later here, is veterans getting benefits simply because they are veterans, benefits that others are denied, and getting them without regard to need. Benefits, that is, which they receive as a kind of reward and which have the effect of declaring their lives and their contributions more important, more valuable, than those of non-veterans.

How they really think about you

At the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, on Saturday, Larry Summers, former head of the White House National Economic Council, endorsed Barack Obama's stimulus spending.

"The highest priority has to attach to establishing strong and significant growth," said Summers....

He got immediate pushback from Edmund Kelly, CEO of Liberty Mutual insurance company, one of whose first actions on joining the company in 1992 was to fire 1500 employees. He said

the U.S. fiscal expansion was acceptable on condition that the country lowers the long-term cost of employment by slashing benefits.

The U.S., he said, "can stimulate in the short term and at the same time give the world the confidence that we as a country are willing to make the tough decisions on the long-term cost of benefits, whether heath care or pensions," he said.

But not, it would appear, on corporate salaries - Kelly took in a cool $27 million in 2005 - and perks.

Danish labor leader (or, as the article labeled him, "union boss") Peter Waldorff objected, pointing out that 30 million people worldwide had lost their jobs over the past two years and said nations should "secure people a minimal salary, some social security, some pension benefits."

What's affordable, Waldorff said, was a matter of priority: "How many trillions could we raise overnight to save the biggest business in the United States?"

Kelly countered that the U.S. bailout fund, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was likely to recoup most or all of the money disbursed.

Which is true and so sounds like a clever retort - provided you don't actually think about it. What it actually does, though, is ignore or perhaps better said evade Waldorff's point, which was that the money to bail out the banks and the bankers was raised and it was raised more or less overnight. When it was decided the corporate world needed the cash, it was found. It was there. When that TARP money went out, the feds hoped to recover most of it - but they had no real idea if they would or not. That was not a requirement of the program going in and while it was a consideration, the consideration was "Big powerful companies need our help! We must not fail them lest the thunder of their fall doom us all!"

It's always the way: When people need help, you have to justify doing it. When big corporations need help, you have to justify not doing it. Because that is how they think of you: You are just not that important.

Footnote: It's attitudes like Kelly's that always tempt me to say these meetings are held in Davros.

It's also good to be a corporation

On September 9, an explosion and fireball ripped through part of the California town of San Bruno. A natural gas pipeline owned by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the nation's largest utility, had exploded. Eight people were killed and more than three dozen homes were destroyed.

In November, the utility admitted that its records about the pipeline were all wrong. Not only wasn't it "seamless," as the company had said, "even a layperson could see the patchwork of welds marking the pipe" in the words of Deborah Hersman, who chairs the National Transportation Safety Board.

And now it emerges that the utility can't locate any testing records for 30% of its lines going through urban areas. That is, PG&E has no idea of the condition of nearly a third of its pipelines passing under areas where people live and has no idea of how much pressure they can withstand.

The result so far has been a call for "a new perspective on safety culture" and some hearings. I wonder what would have happened to an individual whose clear negligence had killed eight people.

It's good to be a cop

A few items to compare and contrast.

First, there's this:

Trying to win some internet cash prize, Juan Rodriguez streaked an Obama rally in Philadelphia in October. He was sentenced to two years probation - but prosecutors had wanted to see him jailed for nearly two years.

Then there's this:

Two Japanese men have been indicted in Los Angeles on charges of animal smuggling, conspiracy, and wildlife trafficking for allegedly smuggling more than 50 live turtles and tortoises into the US. If convicted on all charges, they each could be sentenced to 26 years in prison.

And then again, there's this:

In 1993, Chicago police commander Jon Burge was fired over the case of Andrew Wilson, who an investigation found had been beaten and tortured while in police custody in the unit Burge oversaw, part of what another investigation said was a "systematic" pattern of abuse within the unit over more than a decade.

A slowly building case against Burge related to more than 100 cases of serious abuse - all of them against black men - hit a roadblock in 2006 when it was determined that the statute of limitations had expired on most of them. However, federal prosecutors found a way around that:

Burge was not charged with abuse; he was charged with lying about it. The allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice were based on answers he provided in a civil lawsuit filed by a freed death row inmate when Burge denied he and other detectives had tortured anyone.

Last summer he was convicted, and last month he was sentenced - to 4½ years in prison. After being involved with and/or deliberately turning a blind eye to and helping to conceal the torture, the quite possibly racially-biased torture, of over 100 people.

In fairness to the judge, as I understand it, the sentence was relatively tough considering the actual charges on which he was convicted. But it is still true that that occurred after Burge walked on what should have been the charges when earlier investigators found "a wall of resistance" among cops.

Less than a week after Burge was sentenced, a move to deny him his pension failed on a tie vote when the police pension board ruled that his conviction, which was for lying about a pattern of torture committed under his watch, was unrelated to his role as a police officer. He will receive about $3000 a month for the rest of his life.

Environmental credit where it's due

Updated One good thing Obama offered in the SOTU was a continued commitment to high-speed passenger rail. In particular, he proposed to have 80% of Americans have access to that form of travel within 25 years.

The proposal, however, worthy as it is on its own merits, is not without its difficulties and shortcomings and I'm not referring to financial or technological problems but problems in the proposal itself. The central one is inherent: Its focus is on the glitzy toys of 220-mph trains running in high-traffic areas rather than on building and maintaining an actual nationwide intercity mass-transit system; that is, a national modern railroad system. The National Association of Railroad Passengers put it more delicately but with the same botton-line point:

“The National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) pledges to support the President’s visionary plan for high-speed rail” said Ross Capon, president of NARP. “And we are asking the President—along with the rest of the nation’s leaders and transportation officials—to work towards expanding the existing intercity passenger rail network to give 100 percent of Americans access to reliable, modern train service.”

The real goal, that is, should not be 80% having access to high-speed trains but 100% having access to good trains.

The other problem is a bit more subtle but still quite real: Focusing on high-speed rail actual undermines rather than advances that broader goal. What's envisioned is a relatively few regional hubs with rail lines reaching out like spokes to other cities in the region, an arrangement whose primary purpose seems to be making it more convenient for business travelers than taking planes. It proposes, that is, to enhance regional train travel at the expense of long-distance train travel. Want to go from Milwaukee to Chicago? You're cool; take the train. Want to go from Boston to Chicago? Um, yeah, you're still gonna fly.

Over the long term, the idea, supposedly, is to link those hubs into a single network, but the economic and environmental questions of completely revamping our rail system just to do the regional hubs are so great that anyone who thinks that we can skip the long-distance trains and get back to them later - especially when the criterion is "better than flying" - is dreaming. In fact, I think that is so obvious that I have trouble believing those pushing for high-speed rail don't see it.

A related point is that we have been here before. This is very similar to the notion advanced by the Shrub gang back in 2005-2006 and again in 2007-2008 as part of its attempts to dismantle Amtrak, just without the panache of high-speed rail: They proposed to break it into a series of disconnected regional lines. And then as now, the primary concern seems to be how to get business travelers from one place to another in the shortest time.

There's another "same as it ever was" aspect to this: The Shrub gang wanted to "split off" the Northeast corridor, which would effectively wreck the system. Now we have this:

Sitting beneath the famous zodiac mural of Grand Central’s main concourse, with the rumble of commuters and trains in the background, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held its first field hearing of the new session this morning. The topic was the future of high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor.

Chairman John Mica led the committee’s Republicans towards what appears to be their emerging message on high-speed rail: they’re for it, so long as it’s built through public-private partnerships and largely limited to the dense Boston-Washington corridor.

While I'm tempted to think that this is because it's the line these people are the most likely to use, I think the real reason is more fundamental: The Northeast corridor was and remains Amtrak's only profitable long-distance line. So of course private industry, which abandoned passenger rail, which deliberately drove it into the ground to justify doing so, now that government has proven this line can be run profitably which of course we can't have, we can't have the government being able to do anything well, of course private industry is to be brought in as a "partner." Of course it's time for another "public-private partnership," which generally means, as here, public investment and private profit.

In fact, the comparison with the Bush years is even closer, as some voices want to throw the whole thing into private hands. One is the US High Speed Rail Association, which wants the Northeast corridor privatized. In an interview with Fox Business, Andy Kuhns, president of the group, said:

We're pushing for some private companies to come in and run the trains but we do need the new infrastructure to get the high-quality trains that are comparable to Europe and Japan.

Which rather blatantly translates to "Government, you do the work and pay the price to make it convenient; corporations, you take the profit."

Besides the obvious GOPpers and other right-wingers, the voices included former Pennsylvania governor (and Rachel Maddow favorite) Ed Rendell, who said

the federal government could lease the operational rights to a private company or sell the assets completely.

So even before any proposal is formally made by the White House, there is already bipartisan agreement that the future of public rail - isn't public. Not when there's a buck to be made.

Not everyone agrees, happily. Representative Nick Rahall, ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee,

said in his opening statement that a national rail network ought to remain the focus. “After all,” the West Virginia Democrat said,” it was a national vision that led to the creation of the world’s most advanced highway and aviation networks.”

He had already reacted to the SOTU by saying he

supports Obama’s call for more high-speed passenger rail spending as long as Amtrak, the U.S. long-distance passenger railroad, doesn’t get left behind.

Which is exactly the risk I see and that the NARP hinted at.

(Rahall, by the way, was a cosponsor of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act a couple of years ago, which provided some stable funding for Amtrak for the first time by providing around $7.5 billion over five years. “Americans, especially West Virginians, love their railroads,” he said.)

Long-time readers here will likely know that I'm one of those who loves the trains. Not only do I agree with the old Cunard line ad slogan "Getting there is half the fun" or at least it damn well should be, I agree with the travel writer (link misplaced) who said the best way to see the US is from the windows of a train. I say it as I have before: When you fly, you see clouds. When you drive, you see pavement. When you take the train, you see scenery. And yeah, I do walk the walk: I've logged something over 35,000 miles on Amtrak and we're planning another trip.

Amtrak has been a whipping boy of the right ever since it was created, so much so that it has a bad reputation as an inefficient boondoogle - a reputation, while not entirely undeserved in the early years, is now held mostly by people who have never ridden it.

What's not well-known even among its fans, though, is that it was never intended to succeed. In fact, it was set up to fail. How, you ask? Simple: The (claimed) idea was that Amtrak would, after a couple of years of declining subsidies, break even and "stand on its own." But that was a fool's errand and everyone involved either knew it and didn't care, didn't know it and didn't care, or knew it and looked forward to the failure.

[Amtrak] has struggled ever since it was formed," said John Spychalski, a transportation expert and professor of supply chain management at Pennsylvania State University.

He said Amtrak has been systematically starved of investment over the years and subject to unrealistic expectations that it could somehow get up on its own feet and become a profitable enterprise. "You cannot operate intercity rail service at a profit," he said.

Some individual lines may make money "above the rail," excluding the cost of basic infrastructure and maintenance, but "there is no way those systems as a whole are going to make money on passenger traffic," he said.

In fact, there is hardly an example any time anywhere in the world where intercity passenger rail has made money "above the rail" and none have done so when the other costs are considered. Amtrak was set up to be a failure.

But it has survived. Just barely sometimes, scraping by, but it has survived because it has proved sufficiently popular - increasingly popular, it would appear, as ridership was up 14% in November over the year before - that the wingnuts have been unable to kill it. Like the man said, "Americans love their railroads." The very fact that it has survived, it has done better than was expected, that it has even improved, is precisely why the wackos of the right hate it and why they are again trying to kill it. As part of its maniacal plan to slash government spending, the Republican Study Committee has proposed

eliminating federal subsidies for Amtrak ($1.6 billion annually), the Transportation Department's New Starts program for commuter rail and rapid transit systems ($2 billion annually), and all grant programs for intercity and high-speed rail ($2.5 billion annually).

So it's not good enough to spin visions of bullet trains and 220-mph trains getting you from one city to another faster than you can read your paper while at the same time failing to openly and aggressively support long-distance public rail as well as regional public rail. Not when the real system we already have is under threat.

Let me be clear: Obama's support for high-speed rail can't be doubted. Remember that the stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, included $8 billion for related projects around the country, an investment which is already starting to show results in a number of those areas. I have no doubt he is sincere in his desire for the "80% access to high-speed rail" goal.

But high-speed is not the only issue here and, putting it perhaps overly-colorfully, in considering mass rapid transit we shouldn't - in fact we can't, we dare not - put all the emphasis on the "rapid" to the detriment of the "mass."

Updated with a Footnote: Coincidentally, the day before this was posted the Wrexham & Shropshire line, which since 2008 had run trains from Marylebone Station in London to the town of Wrexham in northern Wales, closed down despite getting extraordinarily high ratings from its riders. What makes this relevant is that the line was one of three in the whole of the UK that ran without a government subsidy - and despite the high approval ratings, the company that ran it felt there was no chance it could be made profitable.

Which just goes to show yet another time that if you want to have an environmentally-friendly, efficient, intercity mass rapid transit system - that is, a modern railroad - you have to have public investment. Which is one of the reasons right-wingers hate it.

Environmental bullshit

Bullshit and blather. That's what it is. Bullshit and blather masquerading as an environmentally-sound energy policy. And oh how I bet it's giving the Obamabots an Obamagasm.

Facing a Congress that is more hostile to environmental regulation, President Barack Obama is moderating his environmental goals: a clean energy standard that mixes nuclear, natural gas and "clean coal" with renewable sources such as wind and solar.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Obama called for 80 percent of the nation's electricity to come from clean sources by 2035.

Yes! Eighty percent clean in 25 years! Ladies and gentlemen, it's the Amazing Mr. O!

And how is he going to do that? By, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu essentially admitted, simply changing what is meant by "clean." In Chu's words, what constitutes "clean" energy "depends on how you define it." Obama will do it, that is, by bullshit and blather.

I'd wager that when most people think of "clean energy," they think of things like solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower. But oh, no, now that's what, old school? Now it's more nukes! More natural gas! More "clean coal!"

More bullshit and blather!

Natural gas is very likely the least dirty of the fossil fuels, but it is still a fossil fuel, it still taints water supplies in the course of production, and it is not "clean" in the (until now) normally-understood sense of the term.

And nukes? Do we still have to argue about nukes? When, contrary to industry lies, there is still no safe, reliable means for disposal of the waste? (Even the World Nuclear Association, an international trade group, can only bring itself to claim that methods for long-term disposal "are currently being developed.") When, contrary to industry and politician lies, it is still no answer to global warming? When the entire damn industry still would not be economically viable but for government largesse?

What's more, contrary to the fanciful visions of some who should know better, nuclear power is not and will not be a "partner" to developing renewable energy and energy efficiency. Rather, according to a study from last fall, investment in an expansion of nuclear power will crowd out investment in renewables and actual clean energy, making matters worse, not better.

And "clean coal?" Oh my nonexistent lord have mercy, "clean coal?" Are we - is anybody - still talking about the chimera, the industry shibboleth, of "clean coal?" Really? Seriously?

First, recall that coal is most commonly mined now by a process known as MTM/VF, for "mountain top mining with valley fill." Simply put, you blast away the top of the mountain, dig out the coal that's exposed, and dump the debris over the side, there to fill the valley and often to clog up the streams or rivers running through it.

Okay. Two years ago, in the wake of the failure of a retaining pond that resulted in 500 million gallons of coal ash sludge being dumped on Harriman, Tennessee, that hotbed of radical leftwing rhetoric, "Time" magazine, had an article titled "Exposing the Myth of Clean Coal Power" which concluded

coal can be cheap or it can be (somewhat) clean. But the sea of ash in Tennessee shows it can't both.

Right around the same time, Fred Pearce, the environmental columnist for The Guardian (UK), who often bends over backwards to find a way to say "the critics of environmentalists have a point" in order to appear reasonable (aka Serious), called "clean coal" a case of "utter greenwash" - that is, just industry PR crap.

Even Popular Mechanics piped in:

There's just one problem with this [clean coal] scenario: Coal will never be clean.

It can be less dirty, but it will never be clean.

Then about one year ago, a study published in the journal "Science" of the environmental and health impacts of large-scale coal production revealed “serious environmental impacts that mitigation practices cannot successfully address.”

[W]e conclude that MTM/VF permits should not be granted unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.

Which still leaves the other side of coal, when it is burned at power plants to generate electricity, generating huge piles of coal ash in the process. But meanwhile, to hear the industry tell it, through the miracle of CCS (for "carbon capture and storage" or "carbon capture and sequestration"), the coal is magically made clean, green, and pristine! It's bullshit and blather.

CCS involves forcing gases from the combustion of the coal through a liquid that captures the released carbon dioxide. That gas is then separated, piped to a sequestration site, and injected into underground reservoirs. It is a unproven technology whose one and only commercial-level project, located at Weyburn, Saskatchewan, is under challenge as leaking CO₂. It also will quite possibly never become economically viable at industrial scales because of the large cost of the separation equipment and of all the new pipelines that would have to be laid to carry the CO₂ to the sequestration sites.

That is what President Hopey-Changey, who spoke just a couple of weeks after the release of "Dirty Business," the new documentary about "clean coal," and who, by the way, did not even mention, not even in passing, global warming, is describing as "clean" energy. Bullshit and blather. Bullshit and blather.

In response to the SOTU,

[Bob] Deans [of the Natural Resources Defense Council] called clean coal an oxymoron and said the government should not be subsidizing nuclear power, because of concerns over waste and nuclear proliferation.

"Coal, nuclear power, biofuels and natural gas are inherently dirty," said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. "Telling Americans anything else is just misleading."

But since being misleading is the only way a corporate energy policy of nukes, natural gas, and coal can be sold to the public, don't expect the bullshit and blather to stop.

Footnote: Something from the linked AP article that kinda did piss me off, not like the above but just was irritating, was this:

Chu called the new proposal "a recognition that solutions can be different in different parts of the United States, but ... this is the goal we're looking for and depending on the region, you have different options of getting to that eventual goal."

The administration's plan has echoes of the GOP's "all of the above" approach to energy.

"Let's not pick just wind or solar, let's pick everything," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Thursday. "Let's do all of it."

Over 30 fucking years ago I proposed an energy policy specifically to promote and maximize the use of renewable, environmentally-sound energy sources. I called it "No One Answer." It was based on the idea that no renewable source was useful everywhere, but everywhere some form of renewable was useful, so different types should be promoted in different areas. Thirty years later, at least some part of the political establishment has recognized that concept, even calls it pretty much the same thing, only to twist it into a stalking horse for more mining, more drilling, and more radioactive waste.

Damn.

Everything you need to know in one sentence

In an interview on KQED-TV (San Francisco), Normon Solomon spent the better part of two minutes running down a list of "cascading disappointments" with Obama - and then punctuated it with this:

Obviously, on the one hand, when November comes along we want to stop right-wing Republicans, so we're going to vote Democrat.

After which you will have achieved the goal of building a longer list of disappointments. We are so screwed.

Thanks for John Caruso at The Distant Ocean for the link.

Pointing the way

Thanks for the link go to Blckdgrd, who a different post and in reference to the same report noted in the post below, said this:

Perversely, what gives me optimism we might survive as a species is as shitty as we are we haven't killed each other by now.

Sometimes I think having hope or optimism is itself what is perverse, but be that as it may, it is this sort of thing that keeps my candle in the rain lit:

A local charity is refusing to certify that it does not use United Way funds to support terrorism, saying the request smacks of McCarthyism.

Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham, who since 1968 have operated Viva House soup kitchen and food pantry on the city [of Baltimore]’s west side, say they were surprised to receive a letter in December from the United Way of Central Maryland asking them to sign and return an “Anti-Terrorism Compliance Measures” form or risk losing money that was pledged to them.

“It’s tantamount to signing a loyalty oath,” Walsh says. ...

Bickham and Walsh drafted a letter in reply declining to fill out the form. “We continue to ‘do the works of mercy and resist the works of war,’” the couple wrote in a Jan. 5 letter addressed to the United Way’s [local director of donor services, Gail] James, quoting from Viva House’s mission statement. “Loyalty oaths don’t bring about unity or good health. Instead, they break us apart as a people.” The letter urges the United Way to abandon its USA PATRIOT Act compliance effort.

Viva House, which has been in operation for more than 40 years, is part of the Catholic Worker movement, whose long and highly-honorable history began with it's founding in the depths of the depression: In 1933 Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started the "Catholic Worker" newspaper, which they sold for a penny a copy (and which is still the price today). It sparked a movement of hospitality houses serving the poor.

Today over 185 Catholic Worker communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and foresaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.

"Violence" including the slow but continuing erosion of civil liberties and the right of free association. Good on them.

Footnote: Back in 2003, the ACLU initially agreed to sign a related oath from the Combined Federal Campaign for fear of losing the funding it received that way but then rescinded the decision and gave up the funding, rejoining only after it and other nonprofits successfully challenged the restrictions. That's just one indication of how tempting it can be to surrender your principles in the face of ever-constricted budgets, to say "It's just a little thing, it doesn't matter, and think of the good we can do with the cash." But it's not a little thing. It never is, even when (in a sense, maybe especially when) it's hard to see it that way. So good on the ACLU for eventually, and double good on Viva House for immediately, recognizing just what it is they were being called on to do.