It only counts in horseshoes

Damn, they keep coming so close but when it comes right down to it, the Democrats just can't pull off a really good impression of a vertebrate. I refer to the statement from Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in response to Bush's "invitation" regarding war funding, a statement which was deeply disappointing and a sign of the Democrats' refusal to stand up to the White House thugs.

First, the background. It seems that yesterday, our Cacoepist-In-Chief

invited Democrats to discuss their standoff over a war-spending bill, but he made clear he would not change his position opposing troop withdrawals. The White House bluntly said the meeting would not be a negotiation. ...

"At this meeting, the leaders in Congress can report on progress on getting an emergency spending bill to my desk," Bush said. "We can discuss the way forward on a bill that is a clean bill, a bill that funds our troops without artificial timetables for withdrawal and without handcuffing our generals on the ground."

What, then, is the Congress supposed to be like a coporate project manager being called to the boss's office in order to explain themselves? What the crap is this "report" nonsense? Does Bush even think of Congress as a co-equal branch of government?

[White House deputy press secretary Dana] Perino said Democrats could benefit by meeting with Bush.... "Maybe they need to hear again from the president about why he thinks it is foolish to set arbitrary timetables for withdrawal," she said.

Okay, I take it back. Congress is not supposed to be a corporate project manager being called to the the boss's office. It's supposed to be a recalcitrant grade school student being called to the principal's office.

In response, Democrats, doing their very best to look like evolved creatures, declared that they were ready to talk with Bush, but, in the words of Harry Reid, in order for that to happen

Bush must agree to "take a seat at the table of negotiation, of compromise, of direction change."

So far, so good. But, as one might expect, the Dummycrats couldn't leave it at "good." That might leave the wrong impression. So Reid and Pelosi issued a joint statement staking out a Democratic Party position on Iraq. This is it, quoted in full (the introductory paragraph of the press release is not included):

The American people want the President and the Congress to work together to bring a responsible end to the war in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are willing to meet with the President at any time, but we believe that any discussion of an issue as critical as Iraq must be accomplished by conducting serious negotiations without any preconditions. Our goal should be to produce an Iraq supplemental bill that both fully funds our troops and gives them a strategy for success.

With his threat to veto such a plan for change in Iraq, President Bush is ignoring the clear message of the American people: We must protect our troops, hold the Iraqi government accountable, rebuild our military, provide for our veterans and bring our troops home.

The President is demanding that we renew his blank check for a war without end. Despite the fact that the President persists in trying to score political points at the expense of our troops, congressional Democrats have repeatedly reached out in the spirit of cooperation. We renew our request to work with him to produce a bipartisan bill that provides our troops and our veterans with every penny they need, but in turn, demands accountability.

This statement, received well in various parts of the lefty blogosphere (for example here and here) is actually a mismosh of nonsense and bullshit, both internally contradictory and vacuous.

Look, let's cut to the chase. Reid and Pelosi insist they want to "bring our troops home." They want us to believe and accept and come next year vote on the basis of the Democrats being the antiwar party, the "bring 'em home" party. This in the same statement where they declare their desire for a supplemental bill that "fully funds" Bush's war and produces a "strategy for success."

Just what the hell is a "strategy for success" in Iraq? In fact, what the hell constitutes success, much less a strategy for it? Four years in, hundreds of thousands of dead, hundreds of billions of dollars spent and, it feels like, a lie for every dollar, a history of deceit, ignorance, hubris, and greed that has chaos and civil war as its only progency, and people want to talk about a "strategy?" About success? Just how blind, how removed from reality, how stupid can some people be?

No, that's not right. Not stupid. Rather, how motivated by partisan ambition can some people be? Refine it further: We know how motivated by partisan ambition the Bushites can be, we've had six years of seeing it. But now we're seeing just how motivated by the same the Democrats can be. This is not a statement of position but of positioning, not of policy but of politicking, carefully designed to appear antiwar while fleeing in terror from the prospect of being called "anti-troop" or "wishing for defeat."

It is, in fact, just another attempt to straddle the divide, to say "We're for the troops! We're for victory! We're for ending the war!" all at the same time. And what's more, "We want 'accountability!' But we won't take any steps to enforce it." Reading their statement made me feel like the Robot going "It does not compute!"

Because it doesn't. Not so long as George W. Shrub can say, and has said, essentially the same thing: "I want the troops home as soon as possible but we have to support them and we can't withdraw before victory."

To put it calmly, despite the good sign that others take the Reid/Pelosi statement to be, I am singularly unimpressed. And until the Dems offer an actual "strategy for success" that involves "bringing the troops home" instead of "supporting them" by prolonging the bloodshed, I will remain so.

Footnote: Perino said that

We understand that Congress has a role to play. We understand what that role is.

It would have been amusing and, I suspect, instructive if someone had asked "And just what is that role?"

Maybe the world isn't completely going to hell after all

It was nothing, it seemed, nothing, that is, that affected my life in any discernible way. Surely nothing Earth-shattering. But still, there is was: Agence France Presse reporting that

[v]ote counting began in East Timor Monday after a peaceful presidential election which saw long queues at polling stations and raised hopes for an end to the cycle of violence that has gripped the nation.

East Timor has certainly had its share of pain and violence. The invasion by Indonesia in 1975 initiated 25 years of repression and mass murder that killed over 100,000 people, perhaps as many as 200,000, in a nation with a population considerably less than 1 million. Another wave of violence swept the country when in the wake of a 1999 vote for independence, militias loyal to Indonesia "went on the rampage, murdering hundreds and reducing towns to ruins," as the BBC put it.

Then, about a year ago, fighting broke out again in a dispute between parts of the army that lead to months of violence and instability, echoes of which rang as recently as February and March of this year.

East Timor has a long way to go. There are persistent divisions and unresolved enmities. It has economic potential but lacks the infrastructure to take advantage of it and so will need outside help for some time.

But still, look again, and there it still is:

Vote counting began in East Timor Monday after a peaceful presidential election....

The words "East Timor" and "peaceful" in the same sentence. It's a moment to be savored - especially by the people there who have lived through the things they have seen.

Interesting to note

Kenneth Walsh, chief White House correspondent for US News & World Report, says that

Republican strategists with close ties to Congress predict that majority Democrats and President Bush will find a compromise on the Iraq funding issue sooner rather than later once the legislators and the president return to Washington from their spring break. ...

One possible outcome ... would be for the White House accepts [sic] some form of nonbinding "bench marks" for success in Iraq as part of legislation to increase supplemental funding for the war, while at the same time the Democrats delete a mandatory withdrawal timetable from the funding bill.

Interestingly, this "compromise," which substitutes meaningless blather for anything that even pretends to be a means of enforcement (and it really was a pretense but even that was better than this), is exactly what Sen. Carl Craven (D-WeSupportTheTroops!Really!) suggested as a possibility on Sunday. So was that actually a trial balloon? Or perhaps a signal of something in the works?

It'd certainly be smart politics for the White House, which is what spurs doubts, since the Shrub gang is more prone to petulant foot-stamping and stick-your-tongue-out stubbornness than to smart politics. Nonetheless, they are not complete dunderheads and a bill that would give Bush everything he wants without constraints that can't be "certified" away or even ignored if necessary while at the same time undercutting attempts to actually enforce an end to the madness (efforts which were contingent on his vetoing the supplemental) would seem to be a dream deal. A dream deal brought to him, to you, to all of us by, yes indeed, your "we are so against the war" Democratic Congress.

Thanks to Raw Story for the link.

Fourth footnote

It is, if you will, a top-down view of the already-present effects of global warming.

Mountaineers are bringing back firsthand accounts of vanishing glaciers, melting ice routes, crumbling rock formations and flood-prone lakes where glaciers once rose.

The observations are transforming a growing number of alpine and ice climbers, some of whom have scientific training, into eyewitnesses of global warming. ...

"I personally have done a bunch of ice climbs around the world that no longer exist," said Yvon Chouinard, a renowned climber and surfer and founder of Patagonia, an outdoor clothing and gear company that champions the environment. ...

Already, Switzerland's Matterhorn had to be closed to some climbing at times because of recent summer rockfall attributed to global warming, and its Great Aletsch Glacier — Europe's largest — has retreated a couple miles from its peak of 14 miles in length in 1860. The Swiss Alps' icy soil that glues its rock faces together is thawing, causing instability.

At Montana's Glacier National Park, glaciers are vanishing like the storied snows of Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro. In South America, the great ice fields of Patagonia in Argentina and Chile are shrinking; Bolivia hopes to keep its only ski area open by using artificial snow as the Chacaltaya Glacier fades.

The glacier from which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made their first ascent of 29,035-foot Mount Everest in 1953 has retreated so much that mountaineers now walk hours longer to reach it.

A mile-long lake replaced the glacier at 20,305-foot Island Peak in Nepal's Everest region.

"So who ya gonna believe," sneer the skeptics. "Me or your lying eyes?" Fortunately, it seems that fewer and fewer people are listening.

Third footnote

Subtitled, perhaps, the revenge of the nerds. The IPCC Summary for Policymakers is just that: a summary. The real facts are contained in the technical summary, which will not be edited by politicians and will be released to the public.

Some highlights, not included in the 23-page already released summary:

- "More than one-sixth of the world population live in glacier- or snowmelt-fed river basins and will be affected by decrease of water volume." And depending on how much fossil fuels are burned in the future, "262-983 million people are likely to move into the water-stressed category" by 2050.

- Global warming could increase the number of hungry in 2080 by between 140 million and 1 billion, depending on how much greenhouse gas is emitted in coming decades.

- "Overall, a two- to three-fold increase of population to be flooded is expected by 2080."

- Malaria, diarrheal diseases, dengue fever, tick-borne diseases, heat-related deaths will all rise with global warming. But in the United Kingdom, the drop in cold-related deaths will be bigger than the increase in heatstroke-related deaths.

- In eastern North America, depending on fossil-fuel emissions, smog will increase and there would be a 4.5 percent increase in smog-related deaths.

- Because global warming will hurt the poor more, there will be more "social-equity" concerns and pressure for governments to do more.

The technical summary will also include the portions deleted from the policymakers' summary.

Second footnote

The Public Agenda/Foreign Affairs poll I mentioned on Friday considered global warming.

Three-quarters of those surveyed say they worry about global warming, up 7 points from six months ago. But the most notable shift is in the intensity of public feeling. Four in 10 (41 percent) said they worry "a lot" about global warming, and that's up 8 points. Those who said they worry somewhat held steady and the number who say they didn't worry about the issue at all dropped 6 points to 24 percent.

In addition, 70% of Americans expressed the belief that government can do "something" or "a lot" about the problem and nearly two-thirds agreed that international cooperation can result in a reduction in global warming. People also were aware of the shortcomings of those efforts: 61% gave the US no better than a "C" grade on working with other nations on the issue.

First footnote

Three studies that came out just before the IPCC report also point to the impact of climate change.

- Save the Children estimated that 50 million more children would be affected by climate-related disasters like droughts, floods and storms every year over the next 10 years as compared to the previous 10 years.

- Risk Management Solutions, a risk modeling firm, said that businesses are already starting to feel ill effects of global warming, with losses from weather-related disasters climbing an average of 2% per year since the 1970s.

- Great Britain's Environment Agency declared that temperatures would continue to rise for the next 40 years regardless of emissions curbs due to the effects of greenhouse gases already emitted.

A little late but still important

The vision presented was stark, frightening, even "near-apocalyptic." The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change minced few words, portraying a world of

hundreds of millions of people short of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction. ...

Africa will suffer the most, with up to a quarter of a billion people running short of water by 2020, and yields from rain-fed crops falling by half in many countries. The continent could spend at least 5% to 10% of its gross domestic product to adapt to rising sea levels, the report said.

But while Africa might suffer the most, it will hardly be the only area affected. Everywhere is at risk.

Asian coastal areas, especially the big cities in the seven "mega-deltas" from India's Ganges to China's Yangtze, will be at greatly increased risk of flooding, with an associated increase in death to due to diarrhoeal disease, while by 2050, crop yields in central and south Asia may drop by 30 per cent.

In Latin America, water supplies available for human consumption, agriculture and energy generation are predicted to be "significantly affected" by changes in rainfall patterns and the disappearance of Andean glaciers. Parts of the Amazon rainforest are likely to turn into semi-arid savannah.

And no, we don't get off, either.

North America can expect more hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires, the report said, and the coasts will be flooded by rising sea levels. Crop production will increase initially as the growing season gets longer, but climbing temperatures and water shortages will ultimately lead to sharp reductions.

And, as I reported just the other day, the poor - including poor nations and the poor in the wealthier nations - will in each case get the worst of it.

Global warming is not only real,

[t]he impacts are already visible, the report said, with significant changes due to rising temperatures now apparent in ice masses, water bodies, agriculture and ecosystems. Changes consistent with higher temperatures have been noted in 29,000 sets of data and 75 separate studies; they range from melting permafrost in Arctic regions to shifting distributions of fish populations, and earlier timing of spring events such as leaf-unfolding, bird-migration and egg-laying.

How bad will it be, really? Consider that this is a softened version of the report. The Summary for Policymakers was the subject of five days of negotiations and bitter arguments between governments and scientists. Tensions ran high enough that

[s]ome of the world's best-informed climate change scientists walked out of an all-night drafting session of yesterday's report on global warming, as tempers flared.

Among those who left was Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior researcher at NASA and one of the report's authors.

The fractious nature of the meeting of representatives of 115 countries and 52 scientists was driven by the determination of certain nations - the US, China, and Saudi Arabia primary among them - to change the report to their benefit. The final result was several deletions that affected the intensity of the report and removed timelines related to development of effects, to the frustration of the scientists.

"The science got hijacked by the political bureaucrats at the late stage of the game," said John Walsh, a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who helped write a chapter on the polar regions. ...

Several scientists vowed afterward that they would never participate in the process again because of the interference.

"Once is enough," said Walsh, who was not present during the negotiations in Brussels but was kept abreast of developments with a steady stream of e-mails from colleagues. "I was receiving hourly reports that grew increasingly frustrated."

In the words of another, "The authors lost. ... I have had it with them (the IPCC)."

I understand the frustration, understand the anger of scientists finding their years of work being picked over by political operatives and bureaucrats more concerned with PR than the future of humanity. But that very weakness of the report is also its strength. Consider:

Negotiators pored over the 21-page draft meant to be a policy guide for governments. The summary pares down the full 1,572-page scientific assessment of the evidence of climate change....

Each word was approved by consensus, and any change had to be approved by the scientists who drew up that section of the report.

Let me repeat that: Each word was approved by consensus. Each. And. Every. Word. Take that to those idiot global warming deniers and stuff it down their throats. This is a consensus document that reflects the unified opinion of thousands of scientists and representatives of well over 100 countries. These. Are. The. Facts!

So hey, deniers: You lost the scientific debate some time ago. You have now lost the political debate, as all those nations have signed on to what this summary says. So grow up. And shut up.

Footnore to the preceding, Someone Tell Levin Div.

In his annual Easter "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message, Pope Benedict XVI declared

"[n]othing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees,"

and denounced

"the thousand faces of violence which some people attempt to justify in the name of religion."

I believe the official name for the latter is "sectarian violence."

I knew it

The no-good, mother-fucking, yellow-bellied assholes. I knew it. Didn't I say it? Didn't I say just a week ago that "follow through ... is still a definite 'if'" and "I don't want to get sucked in again?" Didn't I?

The Senate will not stop paying for the Iraq war or relent from insisting that President Bush keep pressing the Baghdad government for a negotiated end to the violence, a top Democrat said Sunday.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the Senate Armed Service Committee chairman, took issue with an effort by Majority Leader Harry Reid to cut off money for the war next year as a way to end U.S. involvement.

"We're not going to vote to cut funding, period," Levin said. "But what we should do, and we're going to do, is continue to press this president to put some pressure on the Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement."

Press him exactly how, you gutless nitwit? How are you going to do it? Tut-tut at him? Talk to him sternly? Express your "disappointment?" Pass another non-binding - read "utterly meaningless" - resolution? The one power that everyone agrees Congress has is the power of the purse - and that is the one power which you have now insisted that Congress will never, ever, oh dear me perish the very thought, use.

Oh god, I swear this makes me sick to my stomach. I find it impossible to adequately express the anger, the disgust, the contempt I'm feeling. Just how bad was Senator Craven's performance? This bad:

"We can keep the benchmarks part of the bill without saying that the troops must begin to come back within four months," Levin said. "If that doesn't work and the president vetoes because of that, and he will, then that part of it is removed, because we're going to fund the troops."

So in other words, Bush was right when he said it was all a pose, just "a political statement" so hurry up and send me a bill so I can veto it so we can get this silly posturing out of the way so you can get back to giving me what I want. You really aren't serious about ending the war. Just like I said about your House counterparts a month ago, this is

about saying you oppose the war while at the same time running away from any actual responsibility for doing anything about it. It's about, bottom line, positioning for the 2008 campaign and who gives a damn about the lives, American (and allied) and even more Iraqi, ruined in the meantime.

But oh no! cries Craven. We're Very Serious! Because

"what we will leave will be benchmarks, for instance, which would require the president to certify to the American people if the Iraqis are meeting the benchmarks for political settlement, which they, the Iraqi leaders, have set for themselves," he said.

Oh, yeah, swell. Especially considering how well that's gone so far. In the New York Times last week, Leon E. Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff, ran down a list:

By early 2007, there was supposed to be a provincial election law. No progress has been made on it. There were supposed to be changes in de-Baathification laws in order to reintegrate officials of the former regime and Arab nationalists into public life. No progress there, either. There was supposed to be a law to "rein in sectarian militias." Ditto.

A referendum was supposed to happen by March on constitutional amendments. It didn't and no one knows when it will. By May, the still non-existent law about militias was to be enforced. Obviously, it won't be. By June, there were to have been provincial elections. They are not going to happen.

As for security issues, things are not going much better. The Iraqis have increased security spending over 2006 levels as promised, but they are falling behind on the number of battle-ready Army units.

By April, the Iraqis want to take over total control of the Iraq Army (not likely based on current progress).

By September, the Iraqis want to be given full civil control of all provinces (to date they control 3 of 18 provinces).

By December, the Iraqis, with United States support, want to achieve total security self-reliance (too early to tell, but does anyone really find this likely?).

This is the sort of record you want us to rely on? What are you going to do when the benchmarks are not met, or when Bush issues phony "certifications," or when he tells you to shove your certifications and dares you to do anything about it? What are you going to do, since you've already taken funding cuts off the table?

You toad-sucking, ass-licking, pathetic excuse for a moron. You and every other lamebrain Democrat cowering and weeping like a cliché victim in a slasher movie at the first hint of being called "against the troops" because you're more interested in keeping your perk-sodden ass in your comfy office chairs than in doing the right thing. You disgust me.

A video of the pathetic performance can be found here. By the way, why was it presented as a "Democratic response" to Bush when it also featured a GOPper supporter of Shrub?

Footnote: Senator Arlen Specter said

"We cannot leave the troops unfunded in the field. That just can't be done. And Congress is not in a position to micromanage the war. But we do not have any good alternative. Right now, you can't see the end of the tunnel, let alone a light at the end of the tunnel."

Specter said he was not prepared "to withdraw funding at this time. But my patience, like many others, is growing very thin."

Just how bad have things gotten when Arlen Specter sounds more antiwar than leading Democrats?

One other footnote: This slam, for the moment, does not apply to Harry Reid, Russ Feingold, and John Kerry (and any others, if there are any) who have pledged to support a cutoff of funding as of next March if Bush vetoes the limitations in the funding bill.

Footnote to the preceding

Point:
"The business of America is business."

Counterpoint:
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

Will wonders never cease

The wonder in this case is that even the Bush administration can't be wrong all the time. As reported by the New York Times for Saturday,

the law in the United States requires that virtually all its donated food be grown in America and shipped at great expense across oceans, mostly on vessels that fly American flags and employ American crews — a process that typically takes four to six months.

For a third year, the Bush administration, which has pushed to make foreign aid more efficient, is trying to change the law to allow the United States to use up to a quarter of the budget of its main food aid program to buy food in developing countries during emergencies. The proposal has run into stiff opposition from a potent alliance of agribusiness, shipping and charitable groups with deep financial stakes in the current food aid system.

The article presents a number of objections to the change from Congressional, corporate, and nonprofit sources, objections ranging from the perhaps reasonable through the patently ridiculous before landing at the transparently greedy. It's a rather short flight.

Get past the let's just call it questionable claim that "American food is safer and of higher quality" than that available locally and the condescending hand-wringing over the risks of stolen cash and "badly managed" local programs and you get to the real nub:

Agribusiness ... defend[s] the idea that federal spending should benefit American business and farming interests, as well as the hungry. Without support from such interest groups, food aid budgets from Congress would wither, they say.

“It would be at extreme risk of being diminished,” said Paul B. Green, a consultant to the North American Millers’ Association, a trade group for the milling industry that counts Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Horizon Milling, a joint venture of Cargill and CHS Inc. among its members.

Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and Cargill, along with Cal Western Packaging Corporation, have for the past three years sold the federal government well over a billion dollars in food to be used in relief programs, over half the total. Shipping companies, which also oppose the proposed change, were paid $1.3 billion over the same period to move the food overseas.

The claim of "diminished" support if the White House's proposed change goes through was echoed by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, who said last year that

decoupling food aid from American maritime and agribusiness interests was “beyond insane.”

“It is a mistake of gigantic proportions,” he said, “because support for such a program will vanish overnight, overnight.”

This despite that fact that, according to James Kunder of USAID, the proposal would affect less 0.5% of US agricultural exports and that the agency estimates that under it, the US could feed a million more people for six months and save 50,000 additional lives every year.

So let's be clear here, completely clear: These voices in industry and in the Democratic Congress - I'll repeat that for the blind partisans among us, the Democratic Congress - are saying in so many words that US support for aiding the hungry, the poor, the needy, the destitute, is contingent on there being enough bucks to be made in the process. That unless wallets enough are fattened enough, the rest of the world can just go somewhere and die. It's hard to imagine a clearer or colder celebration of selfishness.

And make no mistake about it, people are dying as the result of this greedhead callousness. The same NY Times article opens by describing the plight of people in Zambia who are among the half-million people who are facing the prospect of their food rations, supplied by the the United Nations World Food Program, running out in the next few weeks. In some places, rations have already been halved to stretch them out.

Hoping to forestall such a dire outcome, the World Food Program made an urgent appeal in February for cash donations so it could buy corn from Zambia’s own bountiful harvest, piled in towering stacks in the warehouses of the capital, Lusaka.

But again, due to the opposition of largely corporate interests, the US government cannot offer cash assistance. Even in an emergency. Even as people face starvation. Even as they begin to die.

While we congratulate ourselves on our generosity and goodness.

Footnote: Oxfam is among groups supporting the proposed change, arguing it will not only enable the US to feed people more quickly in emergencies, it can help alleviate poverty in poor countries by supporting local farmers. The Zambian office of the World Food Program, which imports food during lean years, buys locally-grown corn during good years - and in so doing has injected more than $1 billion into local economies since 2001.

Another small victory in the struggle

And it is a small one, but like the song says, "every victory brings another." The Independent (UK) reported on Saturday that the Disney Company has apparently had a change of heart about how it treats gay couples wanting to "participate in the saccharine-sweet, faux adventure that is a Disney-arranged marriage."

Previously,

it emerged that Disney had ruled that while gay couples could organise their own weddings or commitment ceremonies at rented rooms at their resorts in California and Florida, they were not eligible to purchase their fairytale wedding packages. The packages consist of various options to ensure "your wedding day is everything you have always dreamt it would be. This is the magic of Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings".

Now, however, same-sex couples can fork over the $8000 (and up) to get the full Mickey (and Minnie) Mouse treatment. Disney representatives denied the change had anything to do with criticism from gay rights groups and tried to downplay it, referring to it as a change only in what venues ceremonies could take place - but it had been that very limitation that blocked same-sex couples from getting one of the "fairytale wedding packages," which take place in the previously-off-limits pavilions.

Oddly enough, Disney had previously been slammed by the theocratic right for being too gay-friendly: The Southern Baptist Convention spent eight years pushing a boycott of Disney,

criticising it for corporate policies such as providing health benefits to same-sex partners of employees, allowing "Gay Day" celebrations at its theme parks and airing a prime-time television show on its ABC network featuring the lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres. The boycott was dropped only in 2005.

As I recall, the SBC declared in abandoning the campaign that it had "made its point" or some such face-saving blather. The real reason was that when asked their reaction to the news, Disney reps said (in very politic language) "Boycott? What boycott?"

Just a quick note

My apologies for the intermittent posting the past few days. I haven't been feeling too well just at the time that there's a little more activity involving work. Bear with me for a bit longer.

After all, my vast audience - numbered, I can confidently claim, in the high single figures - deserves my best and I want to give it.

Lookin' bad - is that good?

You can decide for yourself if the implications of this survey are good news or not. Personally, I think they're very good news. Not unalloyed good news, but still good. (Thanks to Juan Cole.)

According to a Wednesday press release from Public Agenda and Foreign Affairs, their latest survey of public confidence in US foreign policy "provides striking evidence that Americans' anguish over Iraq is spilling over to other areas of foreign policy."

The Spring 2007 Anxiety Indicator stands at 137, well above the neutral mid-point of 100 and a seven point increase since September 2006. "The Anxiety Indicator is moving closer to the 150 mark, the 'red zone' that to me would signal a full blown crisis of public confidence," said Public Agenda Chairman Daniel Yankelovich.

Among the points providing "striking evidence" are these:
- 84% are worried about the way things are going for the US in world affairs
- 82% say the world is becoming more dangerous for the Americans
- 73% say the US is not doing a good job as a leader in creating a better world
- 68% believe the rest of the world sees the US negatively
- 67% say US relations with the rest of the world are on the wrong track

And in what the the report calls the spill-over from Iraq,
- Only 8% (!) support military action against Iran. Indeed, "public support for military solutions in many scenarios is virtually off the table."
- Meanwhile, 31% say the accusation that the US has been too quick to resort to war is "totally" justified and another 39% say it's "partly" justified.
- On how to resist terrorism, more effort on diplomacy beats our more effort on military action by 67%-27%.
- 84% say it's important to "initiate military force only when we have the support of our allies." A majority, 51% call it "very important."

In the short run, such figures are impressive and important. I doubt they mean a whole long in the longer run; we have seem too many times before how people, fed up and distressed with a particular war, begin to critique war in general and the militarism that feeds it (and off which it feeds, in a morbid symbiosis) - only to be stampeded into the next Great Campaign, waving banners (and in our case, yellow ribbons) all the while. I can't help but remember that these same sort of sentiments were being expressed in the same sort of percentages in the last years of Vietnam - but just five years later we were electing Ronald Reagan.

Still, in the short run the numbers matter because they will impact foreign policy in the near future. And to the extent they do, that impact will be a good one.

Public Agenda's discussion of the report and its findings are in a series of linked pages beginning with this one; the full report is available in .pdf format at this link.

Really!

It's nice to have some bit of good news now and again. According to a press release from the ACLU on Thursday, the state legislature of Washington

passed a bill in a landslide to block implementation of the federal REAL ID Act. The action makes Washington the fourth state to pass legislation opposing the law, joining Maine, Idaho and Arkansas.

"The overwhelming margin of today's vote shows how truly bipartisan the opposition is to REAL ID. It would threaten personal privacy, as well as create a bureaucratic nightmare to implement," said ACLU of Washington Legislative Director Jennifer Shaw.

The vote was 95-2.

Less than a month ago, when I last posted about Real ID, only two states had rejected it, although several others were moving in that direction.

Passed by Congress in 2005, the REAL ID Act requires states to produce standardized driver's licenses and to store the drivers' information in nationally connected databases - creating a de facto national ID card. ...

REAL ID has drawn opposition from organizations across the political spectrum, including the American Bar Association, the American Conservative Union, the Council of State Governments, Gun Owners of America, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National Conference of State Legislatures and the National Governors Association.

Not to mention both the ACLU itself and the Cato Institute. The ACLU has a scorecard of how well the proposed regulations governing Real ID, released at the start of March by the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland, deal with the concerns and objections raised by critics and officials. The unsurprising answer was "piss poorly." That report, in .pdf format, is here.

Oh, and by the way

Amnesty International is charging that a new facility at Guantánamo Bay is creating "even harsher conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation."

Despite the US authorities describing Camp 6 as a "state-of-the-art modern facility" that is "more comfortable" for detainees, the conditions appear more severe than the most restrictive levels of "super-maximum" custody in the US. There is growing concern they could have a serious adverse effect on the psychological and physical health of many of the detainees.

Which is a polite way of saying that US officials are lying through their damn teeth. Not that such is a surprise, as there has been little other than lies coming from the White House and the Pentagon about Gitmo since it opened.

The organisation's UK director, Kate Allen, described the process at Guantanamo as "a travesty of justice"[, the BBC reported].

"With many prisoners already in despair at being held in indefinite detention... some are dangerously close to full-blown mental and physical breakdown.

"The US authorities should immediately stop pushing people to the edge with extreme isolation techniques and allow proper access for independent medical experts and human rights groups."

The full report can be found at this link.

Run away! Run away!

Now they said it...

Vice President Dick Cheney repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq on Thursday....

Cheney contended that al-Qaida was operating in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion led by U.S. forces and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida. Others in al-Qaida planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June," Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh during an interview. "As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq."

...and now they didn't.

Interrogations of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and documents seized after the 2003 US-led invasion confirmed that his regime had not been cooperating with Al-Qaeda, the Washington Post reported on its website Friday. ...

The Post reported that a newly released declassified Department of Defense report said information obtained after the fall of Saddam confirmed the prewar position of the US Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon intelligence that the Iraqi government had had no substantial contacts with Al-Qaeda.

In his continuing flight from reality, "The Big" Dick Cheney managed to ignore both that Zarqawi was a rival to bin Laden until after the invasion of Iraq and that while in Iraq, Zarqawi was operating out of the Kurdish north, an area beyond Saddam's control. Then again, facts were never very useful to the Shrub team - which, the report makes clear, knew there were no links and deliberately chose to ignore that fact.

I should make it clear that when I refer to Cheney's "flight from reality," I don't mean that he's delusional, as some are maintaining. I mean I envision him running down the street, being chased by a figure labeled "Reality," with his fingers in his ears shouting "LA LA LA LA - I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" He knows goddam well what the truth of the matter is - he just consciously refuses to admit to it.

Tales from the Geek

Filed under the heading "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," a saying that is usually misapplied in politics but has real meaning in science, is this from the Beeb for Thursday:

One of the rarest species of rabbit in the world has been spotted for only the third time in the last 35 years.

The Sumatran striped rabbit was photographed in late January on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the Wildlife Conservation Society said.

The species is listed as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union, due to loss of habitat.

The rabbit was previously photographed in 2000, with the last sighting by a scientist back in 1972. ...

"This rabbit is so poorly known that any proof of its continued existence at all is great news, and confirms the conservation importance of Sumatra's forests," Mr Poole said.

Numerous studies name habitat loss as the primary threat to endangered species.

A little housekeeping note

Since I just did some of it, I thought I'd take a moment to outline my policy on editing posts after they first go up.

When a post is changed in any meaningful way, the word Updated in bold type will be placed at the very beginning of the post. At the very end will be an explanation of what was changed or added.

I will go back and edit posts to correct typos, grammatical errors, and the like without making an announcement.

The same is usually true of correcting or cleaning up syntax, which I usually do to make the piece more readable. However, if the correction is made because I think the statement as originally expressed might have confused someone as to my meaning, I will mark the post as having been updated.

I will mark a post updated if I add any information, including additional links or references.

I almost never remove anything from a post and would do so only under very limited conditions such as a material misstatement of fact. The only time I recall doing so was one occasion when I learned through comments that I had accidentally quoted someone as saying something they had not said. I removed the quote, marked the post Updated, and explained the change.

If, however, such misstatement affects any conclusions I draw in the post, I won't change it. Instead, I will do a new post, linking back to the old one, withdrawing or adjusting the conclusion as needs be. The old post will be marked as Updated with a link to the correction. (Note, however, that this doesn't mean that I'm going to keep going back and updating or correcting every conclusion I ever drew or prediction I ever made. That would not only be tedious for me and boring for readers, it would be stupid.)

One last thing: I often do not mark as Updated any changes of any kind that get made within the first two or three hours after a post goes up. Frankly, my readership is so small that I really don't think it probable that any meaningful number of people will have seen the post in that time - especially since I tend to post late at night.

So, in short,

1. I will correct typos, grammatical errors, and sloppy syntax, things that affect the readability of the post, without notice.
2. I will announce any changes that add new information to a post.
3. I will announce any changes, whether additions or deletions, that might affect or clarify the understanding of a post.

What I will not do is change a post in any way that changes the meaning of the post, including any predictions I make or conclusions I draw. I will not edit posts to cover up my mistakes or bone-headedness. If I was an idiot, I was an idiot and I can un-idiot myself with a subsequent post.

That didn't take long

Just a few hours after I make my predictions as to the outcome of the UK-Iran standoff, we get to check them in the happiest way possible: Comparing them to the actual release. This from the BBC:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says 15 British naval personnel captured in the Gulf are free to leave. ...

He repeated allegations that the Britons were captured in Iranian waters, and awarded medals to the Iranian commanders responsible for detaining them. ...

"We have every right to put these people on trial," Mr Ahmadinejad asserted.

"But I want to give them as a present to the British people to say they are all free." ...

The Iranian leader said no concessions had been made by the British government to secure the releases, but that Britain had pledged "that the incident would not be repeated".

So let's see how I did. I said:

The crew gets released in exchange for some kind of statement out of London ... that Iran can say is an apology and an admission but the UK can say is not.... Maybe the five Iranians get released, although I doubt it.... If they are released, I expect there'll be a delay, some way to as least strike the pose that the two events are not related.

Well, no statement from London, instead - clever! - an amnesty from Iran. While not the exact means I suggested, it still has the net effect of resolving the immediate situation while allowing each side to maintain they were right. Face gets saved all around. And the other five Iranian prisoners, the ones grabbed by the US in January, were not released - but apparently Iranian officials were given access to them for the first time, so maybe something is afoot there.

So how'd I do? I'd say pretty damn good, frankly. Hooray for me!

On another side of this

Updated The big buzz and rush in much of the lefty blogosphere the last day or so was produced by Patrick Cockburn's assertion in Tuesday's The Independent (UK) that crisis over the seizure of the British sailors was actually the result of the US's attempt to kidnap two senior Iranian security officers who were on an official trip to an Iranian liaison office in the Iraqi city of Arbil in January.

The raid, carried out within a relatively few hours of Bush's bellicose January 10 speech in which he tried to blame Iran for US casualties in Iraq, captured

five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Those being Mohammed Jafari, deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, intelligence chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The assertion that the US wanted to grab the two Iranian officials is well-sourced; Cockburn quotes both Iranian and Kurdish sources. And in a different story, the one linked in the previous post, he notes the otherwise-odd

attempted abduction of five US soldiers in a highly sophisticated attack near the holy city of Kerbala, south of Baghdad, in which the assailants first tried to take prisoner the US soldiers but later killed them.

However, I have to be rather contrarian here and swim upstream against the current of progressive blogs. I harbor considerable doubts about the contention that the taking of the British sailors is connected to the US raid in January. Contrary to Cockburn, while the attack in Kerbala does bear striking marks of a tit-for-tat, the March 23 incident does not. Different country, different circumstances, different history: Remember, a very similar incident between the UK and Iran had taken place in 2004.

Remember, too, that if this is thought of as a tit-for-tat, it lends credence to the British claim that the boats were in Iraqi waters. If they were in fact in Iranian waters, the Iranians could well have taken them for precisely that reason alone.

Remember, three, that if Iran wanted to play tit-for-tat, it seems the deaths of the Americans in Kerbala would have accomplished that. So what was the next US or UK tit that produced this particular tat?

And it's not like Iran had no desire for, or impulse toward having, bargaining chips. Despite its defiance, Tehran assuredly is not happy with the sanctions imposed on it so far over its nuclear program (which, I note briefly and parenthetically, I'm not convinced is intended to produce a bomb but I do think it's more likely than not) and now it's facing even tougher ones.

It also has been the target of very threatening language coming out of the White House and in March the US staged war games in the Persian Gulf with two aircraft carries and a total of 15 warships.

The two-carrier deployment in the Gulf was the highest level of U.S. naval presence in the gulf since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003,

Defense News reported last week.

Now, that fact is that the rumors running rapidly around the Web of a planned US attack this Friday are surely bogus. (You heard it here first!) For one thing, the claimed Jerusalem Post article on the matter doesn't exist anywhere on its website and the one place I found that supposedly linked to it actually linked to sending a letter to the editor. And for all the posting, it turns out to be tail-chasing, as everything always comes back to a single source, a supposed article by a "well-known" Russian journalist writing in a Russian weekly - a weekly, more than one source insists, akin to the Weekly World News.

But the very fact that the report was accepted so readily by so many is an indication of the atmosphere that has been created, one in which Iran could with justice fear an attack.

What's more, I believe Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn't get the response he expected to his conference on the Holocaust in December; it was a nice propaganda forum but I think he expected to have his reputation embellished rather more than it was. And his government is not without a fair amount of internal opposition.

All in all, a man - and a government - that could use a domestic distraction and a little international leverage. Many people, and not just wingnuts, accepted that Bill Clinton would bomb a pharmaceutical plant to distract attention from Monica Lewinsky. Is it that hard, then, to imagine someone else might snatch some sailors to a similar end?

In fact, one Iranian exile group claims exactly that, that

the capture of 15 British naval personnel was premeditated "to win concessions from the international community and divert attention from its nuclear projects."

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said that a Revolutionary Guard garrison was on full alert from the night before the incident.

Hossein Abedini, of the organization’s foreign affairs committee, told a press conference in London that the move was a "meticulously concocted operation".

I have to admit, however, that the source is not exactly credible: NCRI would fairly be described as Iran's equivalent to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and just as interested in provoking a Western attack on Iran as Chalabi was in the case of Iraq.

So what are we left with? Ultimately, given all the circumstances as I understand them, I simply find Cockburn's claim that the seizure of the British sailors was the result of the US seizure of the Iranian officials seriously unpersuasive. There are simply too many other factors and too many other at least equally plausible explanations.

So what do I think happened? Personally, I think the simplest explanation is the most likely: Either the Brits thought they were in Iraqi waters but actually were in Iranian waters or they were in Iraqi waters but the Iranians thought they were in Iranian waters. In other words, somebody screwed up. No conspiracies, no aggression, no espionage, no "meticulous operation." A screw-up under tense conditions conducive to precisely that sort of screw-up. The two sides started to go all macho on each other but managed to realize things could easily get out of hand and started started thinking about how to disentangle without looking like they were backing down.

My prediction: The crew gets released in exchange for some kind of statement out of London kind of like a nolo contendre, one that Iran can say is an apology and an admission but the UK can say is not, not really. Maybe the five Iranians get released, although I doubt it as that part runs straight into Bushite pig-headedness. If they are released, I expect there'll be a delay, some way to as least strike the pose that the two events are not related.

So crisis averted - but problem not solved and overall atmosphere of confrontation continues. We'll see how I do.

Footnote One: Cockburn reminds us that in the wake of the attack in Kerbala, the US blamed the episode on Iraqi Shias acting as proxies for Iran. We should also remind ourselves, then, that at the time, that claim was derided as both ridiculous and an attempt to foster war hysteria against Iran. Now, however, it becomes a link in a chain of evidence connecting the US kidnapping to the Iranian seizure and thus, it's said, blaming the latter on the former. To the extent we say it's true now, to that same extent we are saying we were wrong before.

Just sayin'.

Footnote Two: What's this about? ABC News said on Monday that

[a]n American citizen is missing in Iran, the State Department said today.

Sources tell ABC News that the missing American was a former FBI agent, although they stressed that he was now a private citizen and that his trip to Iran was on "private business" and not associated with official U.S. matters.

State spokesman Sean McCormack said that the United States had been monitoring this case for several weeks and today had sent a message to Iran through diplomatic channels for more information on his whereabouts. ...

McCormack denied any connection between this case and that of the 15 British sailors and marines being held by Iran for allegedly straying into Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf.

You've been monitoring this for several weeks and there's no connection with the British sailors? Then pardon me for my cynicism, but why the hell did you bring it up now?

Updated to note that I spelled the town "Kerbala" in line with Cockburn's spelling so it would be consistent throughout. US media and blogs usually spell it "Karbala," as I have the previous times I've referred to it. I doubt one is to be preferred to the other since they are both attempts to phonetically Anglicize Arabic names, but I mention it here just to avoid any possible confusion.

Take a breath

According to The Independent (UK) for Tuesday, the confrontation between the UK and Iran over the capture of 15 British sailors nearly two weeks ago is heading toward a diplomatic resolution based on a de facto, but not formally acknowledged, prisoner exchange.

The first sign of a breakthrough yesterday was the release of Jalal Sharafi, an Iranian diplomat abducted from the streets of Baghdad two months ago, whom Iran claimed had been seized by Iraqi commandos controlled by the US. At the same time, an Iraqi Foreign Ministry official said the Iraqi government was "intensively" seeking the release of five Iranian officials captured in a US helicopter raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the Kurdish capital of Arbil in January.

Another good sign is the cooling of the rhetoric. Tony Blair talked about the next two days being "fairly critical" and how he was "not looking for confrontation." For it's part, Iran, which maintains the ship was in Iranian waters when it was seized, initially referred to "aggression" and hinted broadly that the sailors might be tried for espionage. Now, it's apparently referring to the two boats as having "strayed" into its waters.

And both sides now talk about wanting a diplomatic solution. Ali Larijani, head of the Supreme National Security Council in Iran, even suggested that direct talks aimed at a settlement are already going on. The UK downplayed the statement but didn't deny it.

It'll be interesting to see how this sits with our domestic talking head warmongers; on Sunday, the Fox All Stars were oh my so upset with Blair's lack of bloodlust. My favorite excerpt (all praise to Digby for the transcript) was this gem from Mort Kondracke:

I've got to say, Tony Blair is not exactly acting like Margaret Thatcher would act under these circumstances. He's acting like Jimmy Carter would act.

Oh, slammer! Acting like Jimmy Carter? What a terrible thing to say! What's more, panelists said, the British were following a "wimpy" policy of going to the UN, which is "a strategy of 'strong letter to follow.'"

Instead, they suggested "closing" an Iranian port, perhaps using US ships - because Bush should have told Blair we're ready and willing for a military strike if Blair wanted one - and blocking ships from leaving the Persian Gulf. But however it'd be done, they cried, it "is the time to put the whammy" on this "terrorist organization," this "outlaw rogue regime." As long as, of course, someone else's blood gets shed in doing it.

It's really sad when a bunch of "wimps" and a collection of "outlaw" "terrorists" appear to be displaying more maturity and sanity than the collected wisdom of a panel of leading pundits.

Footnote to the preceding

Consider this an additional verse to "There But for Fortune," sung by Sunday's New York Times.

Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries. Those and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, and in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought.

In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, that are most at risk.

The vastly unequal distribution of wealth in the world means that the poorer nations, which have contributed the least to the volume of greenhouse gases yet are the ones most likely to experience the worst effects of global warming the soonest, are also the ones least able to prepare for those effects. While the richest nations are spending billions to limit the risks they face, and

despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world's most vulnerable regions - most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

In fact, only about $40 million, a piddling amount, is being spent on projects designed to help those most vulnerable regions adapt to climate change - while through their resources of money and technology, the rich nations can largely protect themselves from effects of flood and drought for a generation or more.

Michael H. Glantz, an expert on climate hazards at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has spent two decades pressing for more work on adaptation to warming, has called for wealthy countries to help establish a center for climate and water monitoring in Africa, run by Africans. But for now, he says he is doubtful that much will be done.

"The third world has been on its own," he said, "and I think it pretty much will remain on its own."

Maybe the right song is actually "Small Circle of Friends."

Footnote to the footnote: But don't get too smug:

Cynthia E. Rosenzweig, a NASA expert on climate and agriculture who is a lead author of the United Nations panel's forthcoming impacts report, said that while the richer northern nations may benefit temporarily, "As you march through the decades, at some point - and we don't know where these inflection points are - negative effects of climate change dominate everywhere."

Ultimately, for everyone, even for the rich nations of the Earth, the question isn't if they'll get screwed if nothing is done but only when.

Warming to the facts

Updated The Shrub team got a good smack upside the head from a divided Supreme Court on Monday, which ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency was wrong in claiming it had no authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles and had given "no reasoned explanation" for its failure to do so.

By refusing to regulate CO₂ as a pollutant while offering only a "laundry list" of reasons why, the Court found, the EPA had violated the Clean Air Act.

What gives the decision its particular significance beyond the simple fact of victory is that CO₂ would be regulated due to its nature as a greenhouse gas - that is, the case was about global warming. And the Court ruled that the EPA could not ignore the issue.

The case dates from 1999, when the International Center for Technology Assessment and other groups petitioned the EPA to set standards for greenhouse gas emissions for new vehicles. Four years later, the EPA declined, saying that it lacked authority to regulate greenhouse gases and that even if it did, it might not choose to because of "numerous areas of scientific uncertainty" about the causes and effects of global warming. Massachusetts, along with other states and cities, took the agency to court.

A total of 12 states, three cities, and 13 environmental groups sued. Monday's decision, an almost-total victory for the plaintiffs, was the result. Now, to be clear, this does not mean the the EPA must regulate CO₂ emissions. It does mean, first, that the EPA can't claim that such regulations are beyond its authority and second, that it must go back and determine if such emissions are, in the words of the Clear Air Act, likely "to endanger public health or welfare." However, since Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion, stated the word "welfare" was defined broadly to include "effects on the climate and weather," it's hard to see how the agency could justify refusing to do so in the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus on the matter.

Not that the EPA hasn't tried. It's "laundry list" of reasons for not regulating CO₂ included the claims that it would only mean an incremental improvement and that it "might impair the president's ability to negotiate with 'key developing nations' to reduce emissions." Stevens swatted the first aside ("A reduction in domestic emissions would slow the pace of global emissions no matter what happens elsewhere.") and tartly rejected the second, saying "While the president had broad authority in foreign affairs, that authority does not extend to the refusal to execute domestic laws." Overall, the opinion found the EPA's reasons "arbitrary, capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law."

All of which means, no surprise, that the WHS* have been dragging their feet on global warming just like everything else environmental, such as, for one example, their notorious "Clear Skies Initiative" which would have allowed more, not less, air pollution. (To easily give a sense of how bad it was, when the bill was introduced in 2003, its main Senate sponsor was James Inhofe.) Their method is stall and stonewall while quietly rewriting regulations and undercutting enforcement. But the decision also means that at least on this they are being run to ground.

That's especially true because

[t]he politics of global warming have changed dramatically since the court agreed last year to hear its first case on the subject, with many Republicans as well as Democrats now pressing for action. ...

"In many ways, the debate has moved beyond this," said Chris Miller, director of the global warming campaign for Greenpeace, one of the environmental groups that sued the EPA. "All the front-runners in the 2008 presidential campaign, both Democrats and Republicans, even the business community, are much further along on this than the Bush administration is." ...

Business leaders are saying they are increasingly open to congressional action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is the largest.

Even in their dissent, the four reactionaries on the court - John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas - were forced to admit that global warming may be a "crisis," even "the most pressing environmental problem of our time." The only objections they could raise were about technical legal issues of standing and the claim that global warming is an issue for the legislative and executive branches of the government, not the judicial one. (Interestingly, the minority accused the majority of "reaching" to allow the states standing to sue - but considering the issue before the Court was not global warming per se but rather the EPA's failure to live up to its responsibilities under the law, the minority's latter objection seems a much longer reach than anything the majority did.)

The nanny-nanny naysayers still fuss and fume, still try to claim "vast uncertainties" in the face of overwhelming evidence, still try to nitpick at details, still approach global warming in the same spirit as someone who would denounce a house as "filthy" because they found a single dust bunny under a bed. But they are losing. They have lost the scientific battle, they are losing the public relations battle (slowly, but losing), and they are losing the legal battle. Bottom line here is that

[w]hatever else comes of the decision, "this administration's legal strategy for doing nothing has been repudiated," said David Doniger, counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group involved in the case.

And there's a more immediate effect. California's pioneering regulations limiting CO₂ emissions from new vehicles starting in the 2009 model year have been adopted by 10 additional states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. But enforcement of those rules has been blocked by the refusal of the EPA to issue the required waivers. With the conclusion of this case, California Governor Arnold "I'm not as bad as you thought I'd be, am I?" Schwarzenegger

said he expected the EPA "to move quickly now in granting our request for a waiver, which will allow California and [the] other states that have adopted our standards to set tougher vehicle emissions levels."

Yes, it's an incremental victory because it will produce only an incremental improvement. But yes, it's still important because it could serve as a breakpoint in awareness of and willingness to act against global warming. Maybe it'll be the butterfly in China.

Footnote: In another environmental case, the Court upheld an effort dating to the Clinton administration to require the retrofitting of older, coal-fired power plants with modern pollution control equipment. This time, the ruling was unanimous.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths

Updated to add the link to the Public Agenda survey about global warming (at "losing the public relations battle").

Unintentional Humor Div.

Maybe everyone else already knew this, but it was a recent item at TalkingPoints Memo that tipped me to it:

Elliott Abrams is now a White House aide in charge of advocating global democracy.

Footnote to the preceding, The Mind of the Beast Div.

The Times article quotes John Yoo (Yes, that John Yoo, the one who thinks it's okay to crush the testicles of a child of a terror suspect) as proposing that, quoting now,

military commissions can balance a fair trial with protecting national security in a way that the civilian courts cannot. One of the purposes of the military commissions was to provide a forum where the government and Al Qaeda terrorists could reach plea bargains that would allow our intelligence agencies to win their cooperation.

The only rational way to interpret this is that the commissions are based on the assumption that everyone held now or in the future is guilty and that hearings are not about finding the truth but are just another way to compel "cooperation."

Yoo may be a certifiable psychopath (psy-cho-path, n., a person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse - more simply put, someone who can't tell the difference between right and wrong) but at least he's honest about it.

Supreme folly

Faced with the possibility of finally having to deal with a "watershed challenge" to George Bush's criminal usurpation of the Constitution (and Congress's craven capitulation in the same), the Supreme Court ran into its bedroom and locked the door. Reuters has the report:

A closely divided Supreme Court said on Monday it would not decide whether Guantanamo prisoners have the right to challenge their confinement before U.S. federal judges, avoiding a test of President George W. Bush's powers in the war on terrorism.

Over the strongly worded dissent of three justices, the high court said it would not rule on the constitutionality of part of an anti-terrorism law that Bush pushed through Congress last year. The law takes away the right of the foreign terrorist suspects at the U.S. prison in Cuba to have a judicial review of their detention.

That is, the law, the heinous Military Commissions Act, had stripped them of habeas corpus rights. (You remember habeas corpus, that's the right that Alberto Gone-zales insisted actually doesn't exist.)

The Court had twice ruled - in 2004 and again in 2006 - that prisoners at Guantánamo had the right to file suit related to their imprisonment in US courts. But in February, a lower court largely ignored those decisions, upholding the MCA in ruling that petitions that had been filed by two groups of prisoners challenging their imprisonment must be dismissed. The prisoners appealed; it was that appeal the Supreme Court refused to hear. The support of four justices is required to accept an appeal and only three - Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg - voted to do so.

However, two more of the justices said the Court

could consider the issue later, if the congressionally approved proceedings involve unreasonable delays or some other injury for the prisoners.

The two, John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy, issued a statement saying rejection of the appeals at this time "does not constitute any opinion on the merits" of the dispute.

So what the Court said, in effect, was "Uhhhhh - check back later, okay?" And then the bedroom door slammed shut.

Reuters said the Court appeared to accept the Shrub team's argument that the "process" should be given a chance. Under that "process," there is no right to sue in court but prisoners can get a limited review by an appeals court of the decision of a military tribunal as to whether or not they are an "enemy combatant." But rather than "accepting" anything, it seems more a matter of the Court hoping something: hoping that prisoners will be moved through the system fast enough that the justices can avoid having to rule on the issue at all.

Except, of course, speed should not be the only issue or even the primary one. Fairness and justice would seem to be natural candidates for higher ranking, and it's in precisely those areas that the "system" fails, as the New York Times makes clear.

In the last few weeks, the two most famous prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay naval base[, David Hicks and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,] responded to proceedings against them by admitting their guilt.

That might appear to be a vindication of the Bush administration’s strategy of creating a built-from-the-ground-up military justice system limited to people said to be terrorists.

But because of the unusual circumstances of the two admissions, it is not clear yet that either one is truly representative of the system the administration has established, legal experts said. ...

Guilty pleas are common in ordinary criminal cases, too, of course. But in a garden-variety criminal prosecution, the parties bargain, in the famous phrase, in the shadow of the law.

In the usual case, defendants make a rational calculation based on the strength of the evidence against them, the state of the law and, most important, outcomes in earlier cases. If defendants think a plea will result in a shorter sentence than the likely one at trial, discounted by the possibility of acquittal, they plead guilty.

None of that holds at Guantánamo. The incentives and calculations are quite different there.

Mr. Hicks, for instance, was bargaining in the shadow of many things - the conditions at the base, international diplomacy, homesickness and the possibility of indefinite detention without charge. But he was not, for the most part, bargaining in the shadow of the law.

The law under which he was to be tried is untested. The relevant regulations are mostly unwritten. The military judge hearing the case disqualified two defense attorneys, one of them for refusing to agree to abide by the regulations that do not yet exist.

And that's if you even get as far as Hicks did: Before such a trial, you'd go before a military tribunal to determine your status. At that proceeding, which is held in secret before a group of military officers whose names are also secret, you have no legal representation, no practical ability to challenge (or, often, even see) evidence against you, and not even a guarantee of a complete transcript. (The transcript of Mohammed's hearing was redacted after he began suggesting he'd been tortured.)

And there is no requirement that you ever have such a hearing. If you do and are found to be an "enemy combatant," there's no requirement that charges be filed. And even if you're not found to be an "enemy combatant," there is no requirement that you be released.

There are about 385 detainees at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The first prisoners arrived more than five years ago....

And most of them have never been charged with anything. This is the "system" the Supreme Court wants to give more time. What a farce.

Oh, please...

...I don't wanna get sucked in again, into thinking these people are serious. But maybe I can think of it as one more step, just one more.

Three Senators - John Kerry, Russ Feingold, and most significantly Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - have thought the unthinkable, spoken the unspeakable, broached the unbroachable. They have introduced legislation that would cut off all funds for combat operations in Iraq as of March 31, 2008. What's more,

"If the president vetoes the supplemental appropriations bill and continues to resist changing course in Iraq, I will work to ensure this legislation receives a vote in the Senate in the next work period," Reid said in a statement.

But here's the real kicker: I doubt anyone expects the proposal to pass. But

Reid spokesman Jim Manley said if legislation to cut off funding for the war fails, Reid will try again with the hopes of getting new supporters. "It is the next in a series of steps to try to ratchet up the pressure to try to get the administration to change its policies," he said.

That is, he will keep bringing it up. We can even hope he means to bring it up over and over, as many times as necessary. A good sign toward that end is that the article says that Democrats expect that "with each passing week ... they pick up additional support" because people will become "increasingly tired of" the war. Well, dammit, I've been saying that for some time, most recently just a few days ago. Good to see that fact is finally sinking in among some leading Democrats.

Maybe they're not immune to reality, the reality that people are going to want more than symbolic moves against the war, after all. That is, of course, assuming they follow through, which experience says is still a definite "if."

And I don't want to get sucked in again.

Important Footnote: That rising support, particularly in Congress, might rise faster than expected. There's been a fair amount of buzz in the lefty blogosphere about Andrea Mitchell's appearance on Chris Matthews' show Sunday morning, when she said that Gen. David Petraeus had recently met with the Senate Republican caucus to discuss legislative strategy on war funding. (Although she now says it wasn't just Republicans.) But while that generated most of the outrage, this is the part that struck me (and several others) as the significant part:

I think the Republicans are going to crack[, Mitchell said]. What I’ve been told from inside the moderate center of the Republican caucus is that the vote in favor of the president this week - it was against the president but the Republicans holding for the president - was misleading. That they really are not in favor of the surge. They don’t believe it’s going to work. But they basically said the president has until August, until Labor Day. After that, if it doesn’t work, they’re running. ...

They’ll stick until September and then they’ll leave. I believe very firmly that they’re against what he is doing but they feel that General Petraeus has persuaded them that for all intents and purposes, they can’t vote a withdrawal before September.

Some postings have attacked these "moderate" GOPpers (Remember when there actually was such a thing? Mark Hatfield? Charles Goodell?) for not breaking ranks now, condemning them for putting party loyalty above doing the right thing. But I don't read it that way; I read it as an ultimatum: Bush, you've got five months to make this work. Last chance. Screw up and we're history.

If it's true, it is, I say, damn good news. Not the best possible news (that would have been an immediate break) but given the realities of politics and personalities, still damn good news.

(Tip o' the Lotus hat to AmericaBlog for the link to Think Progress.)

Reminders

Updated Kirkuk is back in the news. The Washington Post for Sunday reports that

[t]he Iraqi government will soon begin relocating Arabs who were moved to Kirkuk under an edict by Saddam Hussein to force Kurds out of the disputed northern city, officials said Saturday.

The controversial step for the oil-rich city could help determine whether it becomes part of an autonomous Kurdish region, but critics warned that it would stoke sectarian tensions.

The relocation is supposed to be voluntary and those who choose to leave the city will be paid about $15,000 and be given a plot of land in their home town.

Under Saddam Hussein, thousands of Kurds were forced to leave the city, to be replaced by thousands of mostly Shiite Arabs. It was an attempt by Saddam to solidify his control of this center of Iraq's oil industry against the always-restive Kurds. After the war, many of those Kurds wanted to return to their homes but found them occupied by Arabs who were often unwilling to leave the houses they had occupied in some cases for decades.

The issue of the status of Kirkuk kept getting punted further down the field; even the Iraqi constitution didn't resolve it. So it remained, as I have mentioned several times (such as here and here), a potential flashpoint. But people are running out of field: The constitution requires a referendum to be held on the future of Kirkuk - specifically, whether or not it will be part of an autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Iraq - by the end of this year. First, however, the government needs to have moved on relocating Arab settlers and repatriating former Kurdish residents. This plan is intended to be a start on that.

However, if Iraq has taught nothing else, it has taught that intentions and outcomes are not necessarily related. There is considerable fear among Arabs in Kirkuk that the program will be voluntary in name only. That fear is not unfounded: The fierce determination of the Kurds to undo the effects of Saddam is considerable, driven not only by the fact that they regard Kirkuk as a Kurdish city, but because Kirkuk would be vital either for an economically-viable Kurdistan or an economically-influential Kurdish region in Iraq, depending on their views on secession. So whether Arabs who refuse to move from homes previously occupied by Kurds will be allowed to remain in peace is, frankly, still an open question.

Toss in one more fact: There is a third ethnic grouping in Kirkuk, that of Turkmen. And just like the Kurds, Turkmen think of Kirkuk as "their" city.

Hossam Abdullah, leader of the Patriotic Turkmen Movement in Kirkuk, stated his opposition ... bluntly: "All the Turkmens will become suicide bombers to defend the Turkmen identity of Kirkuk," he said.

All in all, you have a volatile mix which has remained as stable as it has as long as it has only because of a combination of forbearance and luck. The conflicts are many, the passions high, and the commitments are - or at least the rhetoric is, which might be even more dangerous - hot. In July 2005. writing about Kurdish hopes and Kirkuk, I said this:

Maybe it can be resolved. Maybe the negotiators can pull it off. So far, all anyone has done it put it off. But the time and the options for doing that are running out.

It's over a year and a-half later and while there has not been the explosion I feared, neither has there been resolution. What I said then remains true today, including the possibility that an agreed settlement can be pulled off. True, that is, with one exception: It can be put off no longer.

Updated with the news that the relocation program might not happen at all. Shortly after posting this, I read Juan Cole's item that some Iraqi parliamentarians are

rebelling against the decision of the cabinet on Thursday to implement article 140 of the Iraqi constitution,

the one which provides for the referendum on Kirkuk's future. "The Arab MPs." Cole says, citing the Arab-language newspaper Sawt al-Iraq, "are rethinking their approval of article 140."

Be gone

Newt Gangrene, tapping his never-ending supply of pseudo-intellectual buffoonery, slammed bilingual education in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women on Saturday in a way that laid out his racist soul for all to see.

After mocking multilingual election ballots as "mandating that various documents be printed in any one of 700 languages depending on who randomly shows up" to vote, Gangrene, who has previously labeled bilingual education as a "danger to the fabric of our nation," described English as "the language of prosperity" and alternatives as "the language of living in a ghetto."

The audience cheered.

Which serves to make clear a point more important than Gingrich's evil rhetoric: The xenophobia he celebrates has a receptive audience among a large and possibly increasing number of white people living in irrational terror of being overrun by brown hordes.

For a perfect illustration of that, just consider the reader comments made about a story in Friday's Washington Post about how

[f]ederal immigration agents detained 69 workers from Latin America and Africa yesterday after raids on nine businesses that used a Baltimore-based temporary employment agency suspected of providing illegal immigrants....

The raids on the Baltimore area companies were part of a stepped-up nationwide campaign by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement against firms suspected of employing illegal immigrants.

The comments not only were overwhelmingly in favor of the raids and the ICE, many of them slipped smoothly into overt bigotry. For example:

- "The uneducated illegal immigrants have no idea how the laws of supply and demand work. They only FEEL what they know. Dont ask them to comprehend why the world works."
- "Another good article of the WP pandering to the poor little illegal immigrant!" This same person referred to Casa De Maryland, a support group for immigrants mentioned in the article, as a "terror group against America itself."
- After claiming that an undocumented worker making $5 to $6 an hour actually receives $20 to $30 an hour in benefits, another bright light among our citizenry claimed "American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean up."
- "Load these vermin into choppers and push them out while hovering a few hundred feet over Mexico. Spare me the pity party for these CRIMINALS who have no respect for our laws."

Oh yes, it was the issue of legality that was surely foremost in these good folks' minds. Or so we repeatedly get told. However, what really seemed to get the juices flowing were these two passages from the story:

[T]earful relatives of several detained women pleaded for them to be released, saying they had young children at home or were pregnant. ...

Immigration officials ... said that they might release as many as 20 detained workers on humanitarian grounds so they could care for their children, but that they would still face immigration charges.

The responses included such gems as

- "Deport the pregnant women *first* so that their children can be born in their country."
- "Make them renounce US citizenship for their children and ship pregnant women out first so they cant make anchor babies."
- Another suggested "these children are nothing but expendable commodities, used by the parents to get tax funded services and benefits while in the country illegally, [who] will be abandoned to become wards of the state."

And my favorite, the chillingly calm statement that

- "[t]he pregnancy issue can be resolved by a little rough housing during the arrest."

These, I emphasize, were not plucked out of a long list of less fearsome expressions - I didn't even go through all the comments, just the first couple of pages. (That was all I could take.) And of those, these were not the exceptions, they were the mainstream.

It's a kind of language for which David Niewert, the proprietor of the valuable Orcinus, has created the term "eliminationist." Words that express a clear desire for a perceived "enemy" not merely to be defeated but to disappear; not just vanquished, vanished. It's hate speech and like most hate speech it's being pushed while hiding under umbrellas to shield it from the truth of its real meaning, umbrellas tagged "fairness" and "the law" and, through it all, "patriotism" - but which would more honestly be called "racism," "selfishness," and "corrupt nativism."

For people like Newt Gingrich and his cheering audience and the people quoted above and the, let's be honest, millions or tens of millions more of their fellow citizens for who they speak, the real problem is not illegal immigration, it's immigration itself, immigration which in their minds is equated, for now, with Hispanics. (I say "for now" because if we look back across the 20^th century, we can find similar expressions directed at various times against Asians, Irish, and Italians, to name just three. Bigotry can be applied against anyone successfully defined as "other.") That's why concern about "illegal aliens" so often overlaps a desire for "immigration reform," which, when push comes to shove, usually comes down to "how do we keep those damn Mexicans out?"

In fact, the whole immigration debate stinks of racism and I can't help but wonder if the surge in enforcement isn't just another plan to game the 2008 elections by manipulating the red hot button of "immigration reform."

But, you know, there's a way to convince me otherwise. And beyond that, a way to convince me that all the push for "reform" isn't just xenophobia in disguise. I want to see those "reform" groups advocating a massive increase in foreign development and humanitarian aid - and not loans channeled through the IMF and World Bank, but grants provided through independent agencies whose respect for human rights can be verified by such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and who are capable of getting that aid to projects at the local and regional level where they will do the recipients, and not the local elites or international financial interests, the most good. And advocate it without mouthing bogus platitudes about how "generous" the US is: Measured in per capita terms, in 2006 the US ranked 20^th out of the 23 major donor nations of foreign economic aid. Measured as a percentage of GDP, the US ranked dead last.

In short, instead of putting the money into fences and guns and raids and prisons, put it into improving the lives of people in other nations on the argument that they will then have less incentive to leave their homes. Then, and only then, will I be able to believe your demands for "enforcement" and "reform" are driven by anything other than your own irrational fears and hatreds.

Footnote: Wikipedia has a list of dozens of nations that are bi- or multilingual, at least some of which appear to have survived quite nicely, contrary to our domestic Newtwit - including about 20 where there is more than one official language. The US, of course, does not (yet) have an official language, but three states and three territories are officially bilingual and one territory has three official languages.