An open letter to Brit Hume

This past Monday Fox News managing editor Brit Hume did his part to help propagate global warming denial misinformation.

Island of Doubt science blogger James Hrynshyn has written Hume a response.

Dear Mr. Hume,

I doubt that you intended to further tarnish your already sullied reputation in the journalism community, but your failure to exercise even an infinitesimal measure of professional skepticism this past Monday during a climate change segment of your Fox News program "Special Report" has made you the laughingstock of the industry.

This may not trouble you on a personal level, so long has it been since you enjoyed even a modicum of respect from those who still exhibit some degree of concern for fairness, accuracy and responsible reporting in the news. But there are bigger issues at stake, specifically the biggest public policy challenge facing civilization in many decades, if not history itself. Furthermore, while I have no specific memory of the days in which you were allegedly a genuine journalist (I grew up in Canada where your early reports received little attention), I have to believe that there might still reside somewhere in your brain some small yearning for credibility. It is to that theoretical remnant that I address this note.

Read on ...

Why I despise Michelle Malkin

A few months ago Michelle Malkin made a snide remark* about how Henry Waxman (D-Ca) was going to set-up "obstructionist" oversight hearings on the Iraq resonstruction contracts (many of them no-bid and cost-plus) that T Miller demonstrated in Blood Money have resulted in billions of wasted dollars.

So what exactly would Henry Waxman be obstructing, Michelle? Corruption and incompetence preventing successful Iraqi reconstruction efforts? So who here is the obstructionist: the person who wants oversight or the person who doesn't?

Let me tell you about another "obstructionist". His name is Ted Westhusing. He was a colonel in the army with a PhD in Philosophy who taught ethics at West Point. Convinced that the invasion of Iraq was a just war, at 44 Westhusing volunteered for service and was put in charge of overseeing the training of an Iraqi police squad by a private contractor.

In the course of doing his job, Col. Westhusing uncovered specific corruption within the company he was overseeing and in Iraq in general, and became despondent over the lack of honor and ethics within the reconstruction efforts. Despairing over his perceived inability to improve the situation, Col. Westhusing committed suicide, writing in his suicide note, "death before dishonor."

You can listen to Col. Westhusing's story here and Crooks and Liars has a round-up of recently released documents that "that paint a picture of a man tortured by the realization that our presence in Iraq was hopelessly corrupted and an unwinnable situation."

I've previously written about Col. Westhusing - here - where I noted the absurdity of a military psychologist concluding that Westhusing's "flaw" was that he could not accept that in a war zone monetary values could outweigh moral ones.

So this is why I despise Michelle Malkin. When she calls efforts to put an end to the corruption that drove Col. Westhusing to suicide "obstructionist" she is defending the rotten corruption that led to his death. Not to mention all the other lives that have been wasted due to those who put profit before duty.

*I tried searching Malkin's archives but I've been unable to find the post where she made this remark. If anyone knows where it is, a link would be appreciated.

Quote of the day

"Yes, apparently the only thing worse for these candidates than another terrorist attack, would be a gay hero stopping it."

-- Jon Stewart commenting on every candidate in the Republican debate last night failing to answer in the affirmative that they would allow gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military in light of the fact that talented Arabic linguists have been dismissed from the military because they were openly gay.

When Rush is right he's right

I flipped to Rush Limbaugh this afternoon and heard him saying that "left liberals" direct anger, hate, and lies at Limbaugh because they are unable to compete with him intellectually. That they are upset that they no longer have a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas and are frustrated because they are unable to respond to Limbaugh's intellectual arguments.

He's got a point ... take global warming for example. I've previously linked the position paper of the Center for Inquiry on global warming, NewScientist's global warming faq, The Discovery of Global Warming website, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth site, and I keep the group climate scientist blog RealClimate in my Links, but how can any of that stuff possibly withstand the following devastating cold hard logical and factual argument from Rush

Another story. This is so dear to my heart. This was in the Atlanta Urinal Constipation on the 26th of February, so two or three days ago. The headline: “Cars Improved the Air.” This is something that I don't mention enough. I've talked about this over the course of the many stellar years of this program's eminence. However, it doesn't come up enough. This is by Dwight R. Lee: “The motto of all environmentalists should be ‘Thank goodness for the internal combustion engine.’” But it's not, is it? The internal combustion engine is enemy #1, is it not? The internal combustion engine is the target. Fossil fuels are burned by the internal combustion engine! For those of you in Rio Linda, well...you've got three or four of them stacked up on concrete blocks in front of your house.

“The abuse heaped on the internal combustion engine by environmentalists was never justified. But a recent story on cow flatulence in the British newspaper, The Independent, makes the environmental benefits from gasoline-powered engines even more obvious. Based on a recent study by the Food and Agricultural Organization, The Independent reports that "livestock are responsible for 18 percent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.” Remember we discussed yesterday with Roy Spencer that the greenhouse effect is a natural thing. Many of you believe that the greenhouse effect is something that never existed on the planet until Americans invented the automobile and started driving around and building smokestacks and polluting. That's not true.

The point is that “livestock are responsible for 18 percent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together,” and that is true. “Long before global warming became an environmental concern, however, the move from the power provided by animals to that provided by gasoline had greatly improved the environment. The emissions that came out of the tailpipes of horses were much more lethal pollutants that those now coming out of the tailpipes of cars. Horse emissions did more than make our town and cities stink; they spread fly-borne diseases and polluted water supplies that killed people at a far greater rate than the pollution from cars and trucks ever have.” That is Oh-so-true.

Our favorite thing, conventional wisdom, says that automobiles, the internal combustion engine had been an environmental disaster. This guy has the gonads to ask, “Compared to what?” You watch Westerns, and those things are sanitized. You don't understand that back in the old days when the horse and buggy or the horse was the primary mode of transportation, the ox or what have you, manure was everywhere. It was in the streets. You had flies. You had insects flying around. It stunk. Why do you think the buggy whip was eventually gotten rid of? Human beings are always trying to improve their standards of living. Human beings have always, since the beginning of time, tried to improve their lifestyles. They have tried -- and they have sought and they've succeeded -- in finding a more advanced way of living. It is those advances which are now coming under attack by global warming hysterics, hoaxers and plain, out-and-out liars.

It's based on the notion that everything in the past was pristine and beautiful. "It was like the Garden of Eden before we came to this continent. Before we polluted it with syphilis and horses and all that, why, it was pristine, and even after that it was all nature. Anything animals do, that's fine. That's nature. What man does..." See, we are exempt from nature because we are evil, particularly American men and women. You ought to research this if you don't believe me, because it is just logical -- it stands to reason, and it is irrefutable -- that back in the days when horses were the primary mode of transportation... Have you ever been to a horse farm? Have you ever been to a barn? Have you ever walked into a barn? Imagine living in a town that smelled like one and looked like one, no matter where you went! In front of the saloon; in front of the blacksmith's place; in front of the bordello; in front of your house, that's what it was. The internal combustion engine cleaned things up, made life easier, and it's now under attack by a bunch of people that, frankly, folks, should not be given anywhere near the time of day. They still don't get it, and they don't want to get it.

See? As Rush says, "irrefutable."

But seriously, though. What's disturbing is that Limbaugh has something like 8 million listeners that listen to this kind of bullshit and still think Limbaugh is a reliable source of information and opinion. The longer these people listen to Rush, the more disconnected from reality they become. I recall Al Franken citing a study in Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot finding that people who got their news from Limbaugh polled higher than people who got their news from other sources on having confidence that they were well-informed about current/political events, yet those same people actually tested lower for knowledge of current/political events than those who got their news from other sources. In other words, the more that someone listens to Rush, the dumber that person gets while at the same time becoming more confident that his/her stupidity is knowledge. Call it the Rush effect ... it' like some kind of strange reverse Flowers for Algernon phenomena ... except the process isn't temporary, it lasts as long as the person is a "dittohead."

Pyschiatrists caused the Holocaust

According to Scientologists.

In this link, Deborah Lipstadt, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Emory, writes about BBC reporter John Sweeney who got into a shouting match with a Scientologist inside the "Mind Control" section of the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death museaum in L.A which asserts that psychiatrists are responsible for the Holocaust (and the rise of Nazi Germany). Lipstadt duly notes that this is a "soft-core" form of Holocaust denial that is despicable, not just because of its a misrepresentation of modern psychiatry, but because it whitewashes those who are truly responsible for the Holocaust.

Scientologists immediately rushed copies of the shouting match off for propaganda purposes, but of course they failed to mention that as soon as Sweeney began investigating Scientology he became a target of Scientology's "fair game" doctrine. As Sweeney explains

While making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists and been chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.

Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law's house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.

Sweeney also relates a wholly contemptible incident that should give just an idea of what the heart of Scientology is like

Take "Rosemary", who is an ordinary mum and lives in England. She had two children and one died. Her surviving daughter was also her best friend. Then her daughter joined Scientology and her mother saw less and less of her.

Almost two years ago she received a "disconnect" - a letter cutting her mother out of her life totally.

Rosemary received no Christmas cards, no birthday cards, no Mother's Day cards.
Rosemary said Scientology was a cult. It was one of the most moving and shocking interviews I have ever done.

Out of the blue, three hours after we left, her daughter came round for the first time in almost two years seeking a reconciliation. The next day she begged her mum not to use the interview. So we won't.

Rotten. Absolutely rotten.

Sweeney notes that the goal of Scientologists is the "'global obliteration' of psychiatry" because according to founder L. Ron Hubbard,"There is not one institutional psychiatrist alive who, by ordinary criminal law, could not be arraigned and convicted of extortion, mayhem and murder. Our files are full of evidence on them."

To get an idea of how nuts these folks are, check out the following ominous propaganda video produced by the Citizens Commision on Human Rights, a Scientology front organization dedicated to eliminating the discipline of psychiatry in order to prevent psychiatrists from achieving their long standing dream of world domination (seriously, I'm not making this up.)

Shut it down

From the New York Times editorial page, Gitmo: A National Disgrace

There is only one path likely to lead to a result that would allow Americans to once again hold their heads high when it comes to justice and human rights. First, Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration’s own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.

Second, Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act and start anew on a just system for determining whether prisoners are unlawful combatants. Among other things, evidence obtained through coercion and torture should be banned.

And Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay ...

The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.

It is time to get rid of it.

Stupidity on display

Michelle Malkin is upset that the New York Times accurately reported that the terror plot against JFK was high on intention, but low on capacity for actual execution and that initial reports of the plot had sensationalized it as a catastrophic terror attack that had been averted; and thus accuses the paper of having an agenda to pretend that terrorism does not exist, despite the Times having written

No one would second-guess the authorities for pursuing and arresting suspected plotters. An enduring lesson that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have taught prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the danger of inaction.

But as with many post-9/11 terror plots, the line between terrible aspiration and reality can get lost in a murky haze.

So let's spell that out for Malkin. The New York Times is saying that, yes, we should take seriously, pursue, and arrest terrorist plots. But we should be careful that we present the reality of these cases in such a way as not to engage in fear-mongering.

But Malkin is incapable of making that distinction or recognizing the reality of the situation. Islamofascists almost blew up the JFK airport and we should be in a state of panic willing to support anything that President Bush says needs be done to protect us from this grave danger, and that's all there is to it.

At the end of her post, Malkin provides a Dr. Seuss cartoon from WWII (he was a young political cartoonist at the time) in which Seuss shows Americans ignoring the threat of Hitler by putting ostrich hats on and then sticking their heads in the ground. Malkin says the cartoon has"timeless relevance."

This is Malkin putting her stupidity on display. Let me explain.

First, no one is denying the threat of terrorism or arguing that we should not pursue and arrest terrorists. What is being argued is that we should report terrorists plots realistically ... which I would consider the opposite of sticking one's head in the ground.

Secondly, the ostrich cartoons were a recurring theme for Dr. Seuss during that time, as he directed them towards isolationist Americans (primarily America First-ers) who refused to see Hitler as a danger. The cartoon Michelle provides is from April 29, 1941. By that time (see here for a timeline), Germany had begun persecuting Jews, invaded Poland,Denmark, Norway, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Romania, and had begun planning an invasion of Britian with a world war already having broke out.

The suggestion that those who see the JFK terror plot for what it is (e.g high on intent, low on capability) and report it as such non-hysterically are comparable to Americans in April 1941 who did not see Nazi Germany as a threat or Americans like Charles Lindbergh (himself a frequent target of Seuss) who saw in Germany a potential ally is, simply put, idiotic.

Update: New York Times editor Suzanne Daley further explains the paper's coverage of the JFK plot.

Here's the basic thinking on the J.F.K. story: In the years since 9/11, there have been quite a few interrupted terrorist plots. It now seems possible to exercise some judgment about their gravity. Not all plots are the same. In this case, law enforcement officials said that J.F.K. was never in immediate danger. The plotters had yet to lay out plans. They had no financing. Nor did they have any explosives. It is with all that in mind, that the editors in charge this weekend did not put this story on the front page.

In truth, the decision was widely debated even within this newsroom. At the front page meeting this morning, we took an informal poll and a few editors thought the story should have been more prominently played. Some argued it should have been fronted, regardless of the lameness of the plot, simply because it was what everyone was talking about.

Blogger's Note - Slight modifications made from initial posting.

Speaking of O'Reilly ...

In the post I did about celebrities being told by pundits to "shut up and sing" I mentioned that shame should fall on people who denigrate efforts by individuals to raise awareness or do some good in the world, and one of the examples I gave was Angelina Jolie and George Clooney who have both been ridiculed for their efforts by Michelle Malkin. What I forgot was that Bill O'Reilly is also one of the ones demeaning their efforts.

ThinkProgress features an interview with actor Ryan Gosling and ENOUGH Project co-founder John Prendergast which touches on the subject. From the interview.

Prendergast on Bill O’Reilly, who has attacked the work of other Africa activists like Don Cheadle and Angelina Jolie:

He’s [O’Reilly] just pandering for ratings. He doesn’t want to have a discussion, about Northern Uganda or Darfur or any of these issues. They more than anyone — these guys will use these kinds of issues as roadkill for ratings. … What’s really remarkable to me frankly is people like Ryan and Don Cheadle and George Clooney who, it doesn’t help their careers, by the way, to be working on these kinds of issues and to be spending a whole lot of time away from what they do, in order to go crusading around the world about issues that matter to them personally. … So I think there’s no negative, there’s no downside, and people that look for the downsides are sort of the debris, the barnacles, that feed off of this kind of stuff, and that’s how they get their ratings.

Transmission in progress

In Dave Neiwert's essay on Media Transmitters, one of the major media transmitters he identified was Bill O'Reilly, noting that he "has a penchant for conspiracy theories." What's notable about O'Reilly is that O'Reilly likes view himself as a hard-nosed independent who is equally tough on "the left" and "the right," yet he isn't - he's a conservative guy (independent minded, I'll give him that, but conservative) pretending he isn't. This is interesting because in his effort to distinguish himself as an independent O'Reilly has come up with his own spin on the traditional right-wing meme (see here and here) that Judeo-Christian America is under assault from atheists/communists/liberals and in the most hardline right - Jews - which is considered synonymous with the previous three.

In O'Reilly's version, there is a culture war being fought between "secular-progressives" and "traditional" Americans. And that's about it as far as it goes for there being a difference between O'Reilly's meme and the more traditional ones. But it still serves a purpose. O'Reilly, as a major pundit on Fox News and - despite his lack of understanding of what the term secular means - a secular figure he provides a version of the meme that is free of extremist or religious right overtones which are more transparently bigoted.

Yet O'Reilly's use of his "s-p"/"traditionals" designation is none the less pure bigotry. O'Reilly uses "S-P" as a pejorative label to identify anyone he disaproves of as unAmerican, a concept for him which is insuperable from conservative Christian America, and it need not matter whether the individual in question actually is religous or not, whether the individual is conservative or not. If you do something O'Reilly doesn't like - you're a S-P and at war with America and Christianity.

Case in point: Media Matters documents that O'Reilly stated on the June 1st edition of his show the following about Andrew Speaker traveling with TB

So what the story comes down to is philosophy of life. Traditional-values people put others on a par with themselves. That's a Judeo-Christian tenet. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Secular progressives put themselves above all others. That philosophy says, "Me first, then I'll worry about you." As a nation, the USA has been successful embracing the traditional point of view. But today, that's being challenged. And this TB case is a great example.

Notice here that the difference between O'Reilly's right-wing meme and traditional right-wing memes dissapper. What's even more disturbing to me is how easily this same sort of rhetoric would fit in with early 20th German anti-Semitic rhetoric about Jews assaulting traditional Christian values ... in Germany also the concept of "traditional" German and Christianity were insuperable. What O'Reilly is doing is creating a category of Americans - like the Germans did - who are by definition unAmerican.

Now one can object that by no means is O'Reilly as virulently prejudiced against "S-P"s as Germans were against Jews, that is true. But later in the show while discussing comments made to a group of students in Boulder, Colorado O'Reilly stated to James Dobson "Secular progressives are going to basically tell children to use drugs, to have indiscriminate sex, do what you want when you're 14 years old, never mind what your parents think."

James Dobson is a dominionist and he is virulently prejudiced against non-dominionists, which by his appearance on O'Reilly have been conflated with "S-P"s. And thus a transmission has taken place, O'Reilly has mingled his views with a representative of an anti-democratic totalitarian belief system, and the representative of the anti-democratic totalitarian belief system-has been able to transmit his message in a non-extremist package by having O'Reilly present him as a representative of "traditional" America.

What the paddlefish can tell you about your hands and feet

At The Loom, Carl Zimmer has written a rather interesting (at least to a science geek like me) blog post about research into the evolutionary development from fish fins to animal feet. The coolness of the research is that it show that our human hands and feet are still "built with the help of gene patterns that existed dozens of millions of years before the first true hands and feet existed, patterns that can be found in distant relatives like the paddlefish."

Of democracy

"Chance shows us two road in life; one is the road of freedom, which has a rough beginning that is hard to walk, but and ending that is smooth and even; the other is the road of servitude, which has a level beginning, but an ending that is hard and dangerous." - Aesop, as quoted by Paul Woodruff in First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea

Really, that's an excellent (and timely) book. A glowing review can be read here. From the intro of the review

Democracy may be one of the most radical political concepts in the history of humanity — and it continues to be radical even today in part because it hasn’t been fully, successfully realized. In many ways, ancient Athenian democracy fell far short of its own principles of democracy, but in other ways it was ahead of the democratic systems we have today. By understanding both the failings and successes of that First Democracy, we may be able to improve our own democratic experiment for the benefit of all.

This is the basic goal of Paul Woodruff’s book First Democracy: The Challenge Of An Ancient Idea. Woodruff previously wrote the short but excellent book Reverence, one of the best books I’ve ever reviewed here, and he does just as well with First Democracy, a relatively short work that is easy to read, accessible to the average person, but also filled with fascinating information and challenging ideas. Woodruff makes you think, question, and take a step back from common assumptions in a manner that is really enjoyable to read.

Almost the entire book, it seems, can be read on-line at Google books. Here's the link.

Word of the day

Kakistocracy: (n) Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens

H/t Island of Doubt. Now let's get busy getting this word into circulation.

Bush's somewhat incredible feat

The feat is uniting almost the entire Washington foreign policy establishment in the opinion that the US invasion of Iraq has been an utter disaster both for Iraq and the United States of America.

Via 3 Quarks Daily, "Bush's Amazing Achievement" at the New York Review of Books takes a look at this accomplishment in the context of reviewing Nemesis: The Last Days of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Statecraft and How to Restore America's Standing in the World by Dennis Ross.

The reviewer, Jonathan Freedland, breaks the review into four sections. In the first he covers Second Chance and Statecraft and How to Restore America's Standing in the World and in the second (and third) Nemesis, with the final section summarizing the proposed solutions of each book. In section 1, Freedland points out that the heart of both books is the Bush admininstration's invasion/occupation of Iraq which both authors consider to be:

a spectacular failure. It took a country that had been free of jihadist militants and turned it into their most fecund breeding ground; it took a country that posed no threat to the United States and made it into a place where thousands of Americans, not to mention many tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis, have been killed. And it diverted resources from the task that should have been uppermost after September 11, namely the hunting down of Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, allowing them to slip out of reach.

What's more, Bush's "war on terror" did bin Laden's work for him. Brzezinksi is not alone in suggesting that it was a mistake to treat September 11 as an act of war, rather than as an outrageous crime; in so doing, the administration endowed al-Qaeda with the status it craved. What followed was a series of missteps that seemed bent on vindicating the jihadists' claim of a war of the West against Islam. Whether it was the invasion of Iraq or the early talk of a "crusade" or the abuses at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration fed violent Islamism all it needed to recruit young men the world over. What began as a fringe sect has become, thanks in no small measure to the Bush administration, a global movement able to draw on deep wells of support.

Both authors also have harsh words for America's role in Israeli-Palestinian relations, as well as allowing Iran and North Korea to become more dangerous while we were in Iraq (while concomitantly turning the invasion of Iraq into a lesson that if you don't want to be invaded by the United States, possess nuclear weapons), and go on to criticize virtually every aspect of the Bush adminstration's foreign policy; a policy which has significantly damaged America's standing in the world. Freedland quotes a particularly biting passage from Brzezinski

Because of Bush's self-righteously unilateral conduct of US foreign policy after 9/11, the evocative symbol of America in the eyes of much of the world ceased to be the Statue of Liberty and instead became the Guantánamo prison camp.

In section 2 Freedland covers Nemesis, which he says makes the other books look like "mere slaps on the wrist." The difference between Johnson and the authors is that their criticism is primarily of the execution of Bush's foreign policy, but they do not question the fundamental premise that the United States should be a dominant global force, where as Johnson argues that the United States has become an empire and must de-militarize itself if the republic and democracy are to survive. I will here disclose my bias (which to a regular reader should already be apparent from recent posts) and state that I am partisan for Johnson's argument.

Johnson argues that America has established a global empire of military bases and Freedland spends the rest of section 2 explaining that Johnson has put together a strong case that such is the case while also drawing striking parallels between our empire and that of the Roman and British empires.

In section 3, Freedland contrasts Johnson with traditional critics of American foreign policy (such as Noam Chomsky) who tend to be somewhat one-note critics of US history, where as Johnson reveres our constitutional traditions and balances of power. Freedland notes

[Johnson's] fear is that America's steady descent into imperialism renders those arrangements unsustainable, just as the rise of the Roman Empire ensured the slow death of the Roman Republic.

This is the core of his argument, that by extending its reach in the world America is not only endangering itself physically, by increasing the risk of blowback, but bankrupting itself, financially, constitutionally, and morally.

Johnson goes on to demonstrate the financial burden our militarism is placing on the republic, as well as how our overgrown military has concentrated powers in the Executive in a manner that makes it difficult for constitutional checks to function properly. Freedland writes that:

his most powerful evidence is drawn from the Bush years since 2001. Johnson may argue that these are trends that have been in evidence for decades, but it is the current administration which has illuminated them. By declaring the nation at war and himself a wartime president, Bush has grabbed powers to himself that America's founders never intended him to have. As the infamous "torture memo" made clear, Bush's legal team has constructed something it calls the "unitary executive theory of the presidency" to place the Oval Office outside the law, arguing that there can be no infringement on his "ultimate authority" as commander in chief in the conduct of war. Because practically any measures taken, at home or abroad, since September 11, 2001, can be construed as the conduct of war, this doctrine is nothing less than a claim of absolute power. Whether it be treaties signed and ratified by the US, like the Geneva Conventions, or the laws of the land passed in Congress, nothing can touch him. He is Caesar.

This is precisely what led me to comment upon the recent NSD which declares the president head of the federal goverment in case of a vaguely defined "catastrophic emergency" that we are living in some kind of bizarro proto-1984 America. Johnson argues (as did founders like Alexander Hamilton) that in the case of perpetual war it is inevitable that our liberties will begin to erode.

Section 4 of the review deals with what the respective authors suggest should be done. Brzezinski and Ross have what I confess are reasonable ideas about potential diplomatic solutions and foreign policy improvements that are worth working towards, but as I said earlier, my bias is with Johnson who argues that something far more radical is going to have to occur for significant change to be effected; namely, some sort of grassroots democratic movement "to abolish the CIA, break the hold of the military-industrial complex, and establish public financing of elections" will have to occur, stating that we are left with a choice: keep our empire or lose our republic.

Quote of the day ... with tangential commentary

"The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time that they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind" - Thomas Paine, The American Crisis #5

H/t to this commenter at The Mahablog in response to this post about the NSD issued by President Bush that would apparently make him a dictator in the case of a "catsphrophic emergency" which previously wrote about here. The story has generated some moderate buzz on the internet across the ideological spectrum, with bother liberal bloggers such as Barbara O'Brien linked above and conservative commentators such as Jerome Corsi (in this column) worrying about the initiative, but it has generally escaped in serious news coverage.

I used to do a series of posts titled "Broken Democracy Watch", and the failure of this story to spark national discussion and vigorous inquiry from Congress I think would qualifiy for that series. Although there has been little national news coverage, one of the few journalists in the country who does consistently concern himself with matters concerning the future of democracy, Charlie Savage, did see fit to write an article about the directive, which sheds more light on the anti-democratic nature of it. Savage points out that that the new policy was posted to the White House website on May 9 "without any further announcements or press briefings." Yet given that this new policy raises serious constitutional questions about what kind of government we'd be left with in the case of some vaguely defined emergency, one would think this might be something that the American people and Congress should have a say in, a point that was raised by several Constitutional groups in the article

Sharon Bradford Franklin , the senior counsel at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan think-tank that promotes constitutional safeguards, said the policy's definition "is so broad that it raises serious concerns about when and how this might be used to authorize unchecked executive action."

But Johndroe said it was necessary for a loosely-worded definition because the goverment can't be sure what kind of emergency might arise.

"I don't think you want to have anything in the directive that would tie the president's hands from being able to implement emergency action," he said.

The policy also does not contain a direct reference to statutes in which Congress has imposed checks and balances on the president's power to impose martial law or other extraordinary measures.

For example, the policy does not explicitly acknowledge the National Emergencies Act, a post-Watergate law that gives Congress the right to override the president's determination that a national emergency still exists, activating the president's emergency powers.

The policy says that it "shall be implemented consistent with applicable law," but it does not say which laws are "applicable." Because the Bush legal team has pushed a controversial theory that the Constitution gives the president an unwritten power to disobey laws at his own discretion to protect national security, some specialists said that the vagueness of the policy is troubling.

Asked if the White House believes that the National Emergencies Act is a constitutional constraint on executive power and thus would apply, Johndroe repeated only that "Anything developed would be consistent with all applicable laws."

But despite the troubling implications (e.g. Bush gets to declare himself dictator on his say so without-nay-despite pre-existing Congressional checks against such an usurpation) White House spokesman Gordan Johndroe asserted that the American public needs no explanation because of 9/11. So what the hell does that mean? We've already ceased being a democracy and the White House can just rewrite our system and form of government by fiat now?

I've said before that what Savage did in examining Bush's use of signing statements to usurp the powers of the Legislative branch and assert the right to overturn laws duly enacted by Congress needs to be done with Bush's use of Executive Orders. This is another such instance that highlights that need, as the NSD is itself a specialized form of the executive order.

If we are to save democracy, then we must have a full accounting in the public realm of all of the ways in which it has been subverted and undermined, and unless something starts to change in the way media discourse is carried out, the prospects of American democracy surviving through the 21st century are going to grow dim. Democracy can not survive without a well-informed citizenry and a press ever on guard against encroachments against our liberties.

It's on days like this that I have to pinch myself and make sure that I haven't slipped off into some dream (nightmare) to only then realize that I am in fact living in some strange bizarro proto-1984 version of America. If we are going to establish COG plans in case of some sort of national emergency, then the American people must have some assurances that there will be checks in place to preserve the rule of law. Let us not make the mistakes the post WWI Germans made and write an Article 48 into our Constitution (or rather let President Bush and his lawyers pretend that one already exists in Article II).

And although I agree with much of this Alternet article about the inherent dangers of the theory of a unitary executive, we need not even wander into the realm of speculative conspiracy to take alarm at the nature of this directive. The point is that NO PERSON should be above the law in this country and that NO PERSON has the power to rewrite the Constitution by personal fiat and assertion. The new NSD and the theory of a "unitary executive" are in themselves enough to take alarm at. Have we as a nation forgotten the principles that the founders put their lives on the line for?

"[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of [the] noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. " - James Madison, "Memorial and Remonstrance" (1785)

Will democracy survive if we forget the price of liberty is eternal vigilance - what Madison called "the first duty of citizens?"

"Shut up and sing"

When Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks expressed an opinion about the invasion of Iraq (which has since turned out to be the most disastrous military engagement in US history), she was told to shut up and sing.

Laura Ingraham has a book titled "Shut up and Sing" in which she argues that celebrities who express opinions she disagrees with are "subverting" America. When George Clooney tried to raise awareness about the conflict in Darfur Michelle Malkin essentially told him to shut up and act. And Angelina Jolie is routinely riduculed by movement conservative pundits for her humanitarian efforts.

What these people are really saying is "shut up, you have no right to express your opinion ... unless you express an opinion that we agree with."

What's more, they are saying to any citizens who might also agree with whatever opinion has been expressed by the celebrity that they too are to shut up, that they too have no right to their opinion.

Well, in 1985 a group of artists known as USA for Africa did sing, but they did not shut up. And since that date their song - "We are the World" - has raised 63 million dollars for famine relief in Africa.

Which shows that it is possible to do some good in this world when the political will is there. And shame on anyone who would denigrate such efforts.

Update for the New American Newspeak Dictionary

Today's addition to the New American Newspeak Dictionary is:

Embassy: imperial palace

See here for an explanation.

Responding to the latest bit of global warming denial propaganda

I flipped to Rush Limbaugh yesterday* and heard him raving about a NASA scientist saying that the problem of global warming was overblown yada yada which had been preceeded by Rush playing a parody song of someone doing an impression of Al Gore saying that the earth will soon burst into flames. Typical Rush. Here's what the propaganda king said:

That's former vice president Algore portrayed vocally by white satirist Paul Shanklin. This is pretty big news here. The NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, I don't know if this guy is a dittohead or not, but if not, he could be ... Michael Griffin, NASA administrator appeared on NPR and he told them that while he has no doubt that a trend of global warming exists, quote, "I'm not sure it's fair to say it's a problem we have to wrestle with." In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep that aired today, administrator Griffin said, "I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

That is a brilliant point. As long as the Earth has been around, billions and billions of years, who are we to say that the way it is right now is perfection for everybody on the planet. This drills one of the biggest holes in the whole hoax of global warming that there is. The vanity, the assumption that the Earth as it is now is precisely perfect, has been, should be, and that any change from this point is bad and that we are causing it, how do we know that the so-called perfect climate of the Earth is now, for all the people of the planet? How do we know that the climate 30 years ago or a hundred years ago -- the point is, there is no perfect climate because it's always changing. The Earth is constantly heating and cooling. To arbitrarily say, "Today," when we have this political/religious issue that we're trying to infuse everybody's minds with, "this is perfect, any change from here is bad," when nobody can possibly know this.

"The comments come at a difficult time for the Bush administration, which is undergoing pressure from other members of the G8 club, which under the current chair of Germany is pushing for global action on CO2 emissions." Speaking of CO2. Get this. Roy Spencer sent this to me yesterday, Dr. Spencer, our resident expert, climatology, University of Alabama Huntsville. He said, "Rush, people try to scare you by saying that humanity pumps 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, and it sounds like a big number." You know, Gore's out there saying this in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, 30 billion tons of CO2. Thirty billion tons. That's bad. Dr. Spencer's writing a book that's due out sometime in the fall about some of this, and he said, "I came up with the following illustration of how little CO2 there really is in the atmosphere and how little humanity produces. While Gore is out there saying that there are 30 billion tons of CO2 being pumped by human beings into the atmosphere each year, the current constitution of the atmosphere is this. It contains 38 molecules of CO2 for every 100,000 molecules of air." Folks, that's nothing. "Thirty-eight molecules of CO2 for every 100,000 molecules of air, and it would take humanity five years to increase that number from 38 to 39. So every five years we add one molecule of CO2 to each 100,000 molecules of air." And yet this is how the left sells stuff, 30 billion tons, CO2, and now Germany and the G8, they're saying, "Well, we gotta stop CO2 emissions. We're pumping 30 billion tons." It's not a factor. Thirty-eight molecules for every 100,000 molecules of air. Anyway, congratulations, Michael Griffin, great comment. There's some other things that he said here as well. But that's the main point. Who are we to say that it's perfect now?

First, it may come as some surprise (not**) but Michael Griffin was appointed to NASA by President Bush. This might lead one to speculate that the White House did one of its infamous litmus tests and made sure that Griffin had the "right" (i.e. Exxon Mobil supported view) opinion on global warming before he landed his position. Indeed, a blogger at the climate science blog Prometheus raised that very point in his response to Griffin's NPR interview. And the quite simple answer to what Rush has deemed "a brilliant point" is that it

indicates ... that Griffin has absolutely no appreciation for the risk that anthropogenic climate change poses. Risk implies both knowledge and uncertainty and if Griffin simply wanted to make a point about uncertainty I'd concede it. But instead he seems to simply cast out the severe risks that do exist in favor of some sort of fig leaf that says "we may have altered the climate but we're too arrogant if we think we should stop altering it because our alterations might be good for other people."

And as Chris Mooney adds in his entry "Of Idiocy and Optimal Climates"

what Griffin is ignoring is the whole issue of risk and its distribution. Our global society is set up for--adapted to--the current climate. But now we're moving in the direction of raising the sea level considerably--even as much of the global population is coastal--and melting large amounts of ice, while also altering the occurrence of phenomena, such as droughts, that could have a dramatic impact on food and water supplies.

How can anyone think this is not a tremendous societal risk, even if there might be some people--in, say, Buffalo, New York--who may actually have more pleasant weather under global warming?

Now, the bit about Roy Spencer. Frankly, I'm amazed that a scientist would have the nerve to say such a thing. That is pure and absolute sophistry and the only people that sort of "argument" is going to sway are individuals who are completely ignorant of the science of global warming and the relationship that CO2 has to temperature. Basically, the fact that CO2 comprises a small total percentage of the atmosphere is totally irrelevant to the debate, and it is Spencer who is in point of fact doing exactly what he is accusing his opponents of doing ... he is using the relative minute amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to trivialize the fact that current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are unprecedented in human history and that a plethora of evidence has established a correlation between increased levels of CO2 and temperature. For an analogy to demonstrate how specious this line of reasoning is, it would be like me asserting that drinking 2 or 3 shots of vodka can't intoxicate you because your blood alcohol content would still only be about .08.

As it just so happens, Human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter is the first myth debunked in NewScientist's Climate Change: A guide for the perplexed. Given the sheer inanity of Spencer's bit of denial that he gave to Rush Limbaugh to be consumed without question by Rush's million of listeners, perhaps considering Spencer's links to global warming denial organizations is in order.

But the sad reality is that none of this matters. Griffin and Spencer have done their part. Their assertions will circulate the Rush-Hannity-Drudge axis (coined by Gore in The Assualt on Reason) of the noise machine and the individuals who get their news from these sorts of places are also the individuals most likely to take them at face value (confirmation bias.) This is how the noise machine operates, and how it proceeds to cut large chunks of the American public off from reality.

Update: This isn't related to global warming, but instead to the noise machine. Take a look at this post by Glenn Greenwald documenting how the noise machine has spent the last two years (and I would quibble that its been longer than two years) asserting categorically that Valerie Plame was not covert when her identity was leaked. As Greenwald notes

Many people who listen to right-wing commentators such as these get their "news" about the world primarily, even exclusively, from these sources. And these sources, knowing that, routinely create their own self-affirming though wildly warped realities, in the process denying the most established facts or asserting propositions for which there is no factual basis (Fred Barnes: "The CIA made such a big deal out of Valerie Plame and her name being published. She wasn't even an covert agent or anything" -- Glenn Reynolds: "Since it seems as clear as anything in this affair that Valerie Plame was not a covert agent the day before Novak's column").

And there are countless identical statements about Plame that are not included here where the commentator confined their assertion to whether Plame was "covert" within the parameters of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Victoria Toensing, for instance, repeatedly made misleading statements insinuating that Plame was not covert -- even calling for Senate Democrats to investigate the CIA's criminal referral of the Plame disclosure -- but typically couched those claims as a
statutory analysis, rather than a straight-forward claim about her employment status with the CIA.

But the above-listed right-wing pundits simply made clear, unequivocal statements about Plame's status with the CIA that were outright false. They had no basis at the time for making such statements. But, as they so often do, they made them anyway, because those statements helped to defend the Leader and bolster their political agenda. Most of all, they know that their readers will trust what they say even when those statements are demonstrably false.

This is what the noise machine does non-stop. These pundits/"journalists"/propagandists over and over again state things that are not true. Yet no matter how many times they are wrong, nor how much evidence controverts their assertions, they keep doing the same thing, because in the alternate reality they have fabricated their lies are excepted uncritically as truth. And in cases such as this, when the evidence that they were wrong becomes incontrovertible, they still manage to rationalize reality away or pretend they were never wrong in the first place. And there is no consequences for them being wrong because their salaries are not dependent on them making statements that are factually accurate or adhering to any kind of basic levels of journalistic integrity.

In Greenwald's post you'll find Glenn Reynolds stating that he feels no need to issue a retraction for asserting Plame was not covert because he was simply commenting on a news item. This itself has been one of the standard excuses that the conservative movement has given for its orchestrated assault on reality and truth; bullshit and lies are deemed acceptable if they are issued under the guise of "opinion/commentary."

And this mentality (the Fox News "fair and balanced" model of journalism which can excuse an unmitigated serial truth distorter such as Sean Hannity as "commentary") has started to become a media norm. Witness Lou Dobbs calling critics who point out that he has been disseminating white supremacist lies about immigrants "commies and fascists." As Dave Neiwert has pointed out, Lou Dobbs' - in the words of the New York Times article - "mixes opinions and untruths," yet he refuses to take responsibility when it is demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has issued factually incorrect statements.

*Here's a good rule of thumb: flip to Rush's radio program at any given moment and he will either be in the process of telling a lie or will begin lying within 30 seconds.
**With all due respect to Wayne's World.

Trivia of the day

Question: When was it discovered that a porpoise is a mammal and not a fish? Who made the discovery?

Answer: In 1680 by Edward Tyson, having made the realization during the course of dissecting a porpoise.

Cool site of the day

Discover Magazine

Ok, it might appear strange that I've made a site that is on my Links list as a cool site of the day, but if you click the Links you'll see that the link now leads to the Discover Credit card website (which I will change when I have more time). The reason is that Discover magazine has revamped its webpage, and for a limited time all of the magazine's content since 1992 is available for free without a subscription.

I'd take advantage of that while it lasts and browse around in the archives ... lots of great and interesting science stuff to find in there.

Classical music of the day

"Air on the G String" by Johann Sebastian Bach

If I believed in such a place as Heaven, I imagine this is what music would sound like there.

Inspirational video of the day

"Instant Karma" by John Lennon

I don't know ... the post below where I mentioned the need for a grass roots democracy movement made this song pop into my head. So I posted it.

Frustration

I haven't written hardly anything so far about Congress giving President Bush another blank check to continue waging disastrous war in Iraq. That's because I want to bash my head against a wall when I think about it. So instead I'll just link to two articles: one that explains why the Democrats won't end the war, and one that explains why President Bush hasn't been impeached.

- Democratic Spin Won't End the War in Iraq.

The only thing I would add to the above article is that I think we need more than a grassroots anti-war movement. I think we need a grass roots democracy movement. I'm not sure the author would disagree with me, however.

- Why Bush Hasn't Been Impeached

I agree with the author here, too, in that failure to impeach the President can't just be blamed on Democrats or the media, but must also be placed on we the American public. We have not pressured Congress for impeachment. Which ties into what I said above, we need a grass roots democracy movement.

Quote of the day

"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist." - Winston Churchill

As quoted by Al Gore in The Assault on Reason.

How ironic it is that a political movement which repeatedly invokes the image of Winston Churhill supports the United States executive doing precisely what Churchill identified as "the foundation of all totalitarian goverment."

Video of the day

It's that time again. A time to make a change. A time to impeach this president and this vice president before they do any further damage to this nation.

It's time for the sentiments of the American public to turn. An American public just betrayed by a Congress that gave this president a blank check to continue waging a war that appears more and more to be a staging ground for launching a war with Iran.

It is time to put a stop to the war. It is time.

On this Memorial Day, we must remember the troops. The troops and their families are the ones who will suffer the burden of having to fulfill the dominatorial war dreams of our unintelligent president and his amoral cretin of a vice president. It is our troops who will be put into harms way by an administration that has proven over and over again that the only thing that it is competent at is killing democracy and corruptly enriching its special interest constituents.

And we must remember the children and future generations of Americans who will inherit the rotten fruit of this immoral illegal war. They will inherit the burden of paying off a bankrupted nation. They will inherit a country with less civil liberty ... they will be born into an America in which the rights enshrined in our Constitution are no longer thought to be inalienable.

They will be born into an America where the American dream has died and been replaced with a reality of inherited wealth and privilege for the few, and diminished prospects for all the rest.

It's time to take an interest. It's time to make a change. It's time to make a difference. It's time to get involved. It's time to remind our leaders that the power rests with the people. The people are the only rightful source of authority ... and that we are a nation of laws, not of men.

It is time to restore the rule of law. It is time to impeach. We owe it to democracy and ourselves.

Art of the day

The Key to the Fields (1936) - Rene Magritte

Satire at its finest

"A good labour union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all; and as its the best way of fighting unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers' association and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish Log who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to."

That quote is from the title character - George Babbit - of Babbit by Sinclair Lewis. If you haven't read the book, do your self a favor and give it a shot (the link above is an e-text). It was written in 1922, but you'll find that all that much hasn't changed since Lewis was inspired to write this satire about how an emerging business class would seek to manufacture American "values" and impose conformity on the middle class, and how such a dynamic can suck the life out of life. I've taken to calling Bill O'Reilly George Babbitt on steroids minus the crisis of conscience, so if for nothing else, you can read the book to get an appreciation of that insult.

The circle of hate

It didn't take long for someone to come along and prove the point that I made in the post I wrote recently about Hamas teaching children to be racist jihadists being a crime against humanity because it can only serve to make the world a more hate filled place and increases the likelihood that Palestinian children will in turn become the target of someone else's hate.

So here we see Pamela of Atlas Shrugs (previously the winner of the Unhuman quote of the day) calling for Israel to begin a genocidal carpet bombing campaign in the Gaza strip because "you must destroy the enemy" and "all is fair in love and war and these barbarians mean to kill us all." Please note that Pam has defined "enemy" to be every resident in the Gaza strip, including children. Now, you might be inclined to say that Pam's genocidal zeal sounds reminiscent of German fascism and if so, it's worth pointing out that Pam before she started her blog was a regular commenter at Little Green Footballs (click here to see other L.G.F. commenters sounding indistinguishable from "late German fascists") and is a huge fan of the blog's owner Charles Johnson.

But that's beside the point. Both Pam and Hamas are caught in the circle of hate, which is why the only solution that they can see is for the total elimination of the target of their respective hate. Both sides feed each other ... Pam cites Hamas calling for the end of Israel as justification for genocide, and Hamas can cite people like Pam as justification for the same.

And we can also consider how the passing of hate from one generation to the next plays into this. How many of the terrorists who are launching the rocket attacks into Israel that have led Pam to decide that genocide is the only recourse for Israel were themselves brainwashed into becoming vehicles of hate when they were children?

The circle of hate can not be broken by fanatics like Hamas or Pam. The circle of hate can only be broken by rational Israelis and rational Palestinians who recognize that they have a common enemy in anyone who advocates hatred and violence targeted at civilians. It is these people who stand to become the "collateral damage" of those who drink from the cup of Hatred and Wrath.

Quotes of the day ... and a comment

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" - Thomas Jefferson

"Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America" - President Eisenhower

"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason" - Edward R. Murrow

All great quotes, and they all have something in common. They're in Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason which I began reading today. When I'm done I'll review it, but so far I've gone to say I'm incredibly impressed. Gore demonstrates his understanding of the role of reason and the marketplace of ideas in democracy, and how reason and open debate are now absent from that marketplace. The book is lucid, intelligent, eloquent, and substantial.

Which is what makes this so infuriating. Read the link and come back .... ok done?

Figures like Dowd, as journalists, have a civic obligation to democracy that they are supposed to fulfill. And yet they make a mockery of that duty (which they should view as sacred) by engaging in these inane and banal highschool like attacks on anyone who dares suggest that there is something wrong with the media and press in this country. News flash to the establishment press: when 7 out 10 Americans think Iraq had something to do with 9/11 (as they did when we invaded) YOU HAVE FAILED THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

The Center for Inquiry's Position Paper on Global warming

Global Climate Change Triggered by Global Warming

Executive Summary:
This paper will offer compelling evidence from a large body of research that global climate change caused by global warming is already underway and requires our immediate attention. The research in question appears in refereed scientific literature, and most of it reflects a broad consensus of the worldwide climatology community. The principal points of this position paper are summarized below and are considered in detail, with supporting references, in the text that follows.

Convincing evidence that the Earth’s climate is undergoing significant, and in some cases alarming, changes has accumulated rapidly in recent years, especially during the past three decades.

The conclusion that there is significant warming of the Earth’s surface is not based primarily on theoretical models, although these models do succeed in replicating the existing database with growing success. Instead, global warming is a fact confirmed by an enormous body of observations from many different sources. Indeed, the focus of research has now shifted from attempts to establish the existence of global warming to efforts to determine its causes.

Although the exact extent of harm from global warming may be difficult to predict now, it can be said with confidence that the harmful effects of global warming on climate will significantly outweigh the possible benefits.

The probability is extremely high that human generated greenhouse gases, with carbon dioxide the major offender, are the primary cause of well documented global warming and climate change today.

Much can be done now to mitigate the effects of global warming and the associated climate change. Difficulties in addressing the problem are not caused primarily by unavailable technology, but by the lack of sufficient incentives to implement the new technologies more aggressively.

After consideration of these points, the paper will end with a brief analysis of the role of the political process in addressing these issues. No detailed recommendations will be made, but some general suggestions will be offered. This final section will argue that any solution to this major global problem will require contributions from all major elements of our society, from the academic research community to American industry. Getting the science right is the critical first step, but implementation of solutions will need more broadly based cooperation that takes economic realities, and opportunities, into account. We will end this paper on that note, expressing the view that without a determined political effort, a successful attack on climate change is unlikely soon.

Read the entire paper ...

The case for worst President ever in U.S. history continues to grow

Hell, I'll let the title of the Washington Post article I'm linking to speak for itself:

Rules Skirted, Millions Wasted on Navy Boat Barriers

The men from al-Qaeda guided their bomb-laden skiff through the harbor and drew near the USS Cole, detonating a quarter-ton of C-4 plastic explosive that killed 17 sailors and tore a 40-foot hole in the side of the Navy destroyer.

Pentagon officials vowed that nothing like the Oct. 12, 2000, attack in the Yemeni port of Aden would happen again. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service embarked on a plan to shield U.S. ships around the world with rings of floating, rubberized barriers.

The investigative service is responsible for security and probing criminal wrongdoing, including fraud in Navy contracts. But auditors concluded that NCIS hired companies that did little or no significant work on the boat barriers yet collected millions of dollars in fees.

Invoices, e-mails and audit documents obtained by The Washington Post also show that the General Services Administration, the agency that awards and oversees federal contracts, allowed the Navy to sidestep federal procurement rules designed to ensure competition and protect taxpayers from abuse and fraud.

"Millions of taxpayer dollars went out the window, given to companies who did nothing in return," said Eugene L. Waszily, a former deputy GSA inspector general who reviewed spending under the boat-barrier contract. "This was particularly disturbing because it was a national security project."

Another problem emerged for the project, which cost at least $100 million. "Navy officials advised us that the barriers were prone to leaks, can deflate completely, and that defects caused barrier gates to remain open," the GSA auditors said in a 2004 report.

Boy, howdy, I sure am glad we got a President who is so keen on protecting us from terrorist threats.

Where's Neal Boortz? Is he out there somewhere? Boortz, I guess this proves you right ... you know what I'm talking about, right? Back in '04 when you said you weren't sure who was more dangerous: al Qaeda or John Kerry voters.

I mean, this top notch job that is being done to make sure our Navy is prepared, along with the 24 billion spent to make our Coast Guard less prepared to protect us from terrorists, is just another example of how right you were to make such a statement.

Skeptic quote of the day

"Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hudred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno." - Mark Twain, "Was the World Made for Man?"

Who said it? A Nazi or a commenter from Little Green Footballs?

Via commenter L.W.M. at Greenwald's blog, take the:

Little Green Footballs? Or Late German Fascist? (Quiz)

I scored 85% (missed 2 out of 14).

So the next time you flip to Fox News or the AM radio and you hear some pundit hysterically (and untruthfully) pontificating about the "hateful" comments that are supposedly prevalent at sites such as Daily Kos or the Huffington Post, stop for a moment and ponder if the comments cited by these pundits remotely compares to the level of disgusting eliminationist racist hate displayed by the commenters from L.G.F in that quiz.

Edit - And I should point out, Michelle Malkin - an individual who has centered her career around asserting that "the left" is unhinged and that "conservatives zealously police their own ranks for extremism" - frequently links approvingly to L.G.F., has L.G.F. in her blogroll, and has promoted L.G.F. during her appearances on Fox News.

Re-quote of the day

Given the subject matter of the previous few posts, I thought it fitting to reuse the following previous Quote of the day.

"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." - George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism"

Edit - And in the context of the conservative movement, one might read Chapter 3 of The Authoritarians with this Orwell quote in mind.

A book recommendation

Yesterday Glenn Greenwald wrote a post - The Islamic Enemy Within - in which he observes

Pew released a new poll today regarding the political beliefs and attitudes of American Muslims and -- needless to say -- our right-wing warriors, within hours of its release, have exploded in shrieking alarm. These revelations about American Muslims are "hair raising!," and the warrior-pundits are working in unison to milk every ounce of anti-Muslim fear-mongering that can be squeezed from this new poll.

It is literally difficult to overstate the prominence that fear and hatred of Muslims assumes in the worldview of these right-wing war proponents. They frantically search every news story for any possible angle to seize in order to exploit anti-Muslim hysteria. It is the centerpiece, the animating "principle," of the vast bulk of their public commentary.

and after demonstrating the distortion and hypocrisy inherent in the fear-mongering of the "right-wing warriors", Greenwald states

The U.S. already has at least 14,000 people held in detention around the world without charges of any kind -- the vast, vast majority of them Muslim, many of whom have been tortured. And yet, there is a sizable portion of the country -- and clearly large portions of the GOP base -- which believe we have been too restrained against our Islamic Enemy, that we need more torture and more detentions and still fewer restraints, that the principal failing of the Bush administration is that they have been too meek and too compromising when dealing with the Great Islamic Threat.

The group that has embraced this worldview is a minority group, though a large and influential minority. But the danger of laying the foundation for policies of the type they have sought and continue to seek is that once they take root, once the premises on which they are based become accepted and lose their taboo, much larger-scale abuses are easily imagined.

For a country that has been primed to view Muslims, including American Muslims, as a mortal threat, and which has come to embrace policies of torture and arbitrary, indefinite detention as ordinary and normal -- really to lose any moral or political limits of any kind -- another terrorist attack or even general instability can easily generate all sorts of excesses, as can a new president who campaigns on an ethos of eroding still further our moral and legal limits. Exactly that has happened many times in the history of our country alone. The mix of mindless anti-Muslim hysteria and an open embrace of torture and limitless detention is truly toxic, and yet that has become the central, defining trait of the base of the Republican Party.

In a follow-up post today, Greenwald again demonstrates the bigotry and hypocrisy of Malkin et all

The hysteria over the Pew poll about American Muslims continues unabated, with the focus now on the finding that while 80% of American Muslims oppose attacks on civilians in all cases, 13% said they could be justified in some circumstances. The "discussion" illustrates some standard failings of our political discourse.

Michelle Malkin went to National Review to proclaim that the poll "should be a wake-up call, not another excuse for the mainstream media to downplay the threat of homegrown jihad." Mark Steyn said it demonstrates the existence in America of "a huge comfort zone for the jihad to operate in," and Jonah Goldberg warned how "significant" this is. On CNN last night, Anderson Cooper was horrified -- just horrified -- that "so many" American Muslims would support such violence.

The reality, though, is that it is almost impossible to conduct a poll and not have a sizable portion of the respondents agree to almost everything. And in particular, with regard to the specific question of whether it is justifiable to launch violent attacks aimed deliberately at civilians, the percentage of American Muslims who believe in such attacks pales in comparison to the percentage of Americans generally who believe that such attacks are justifiable.

Which brings me to the book recommendation - The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism by Haynes Johnson - a timely book about the parallels between the anxiety over communism in the 50s which led to abuses of civil liberties and the anxiety felt today over terrorism. I'll let the review from Publishers Weekly speak for itself and then I will quote a passage from another review; after which I think the point and importance of the book will be clear without needing further comment from me.

Pulitzer-winning journalist Johnson (The Best of Times) offers an engrossing account of the career of red-baiting demagogue Joseph McCarthy and a chilling description of his legacy for today. The focus is on the disturbing questions raised by McCarthyism: how could a little-known freshman senator, driven by Cold War paranoia, quickly amass the power to intimidate senior colleagues, bully the media, terrorize innocent citizens and even threaten two respected presidents? Why did fellow Republicans not reject his sleazy, dishonest tactics when they were personally revolted by them? Most urgently, are we seeing the birth of a new "age of anxiety," in which terrorism replaces communism as the bogeyman? Johnson's answer is clearly yes. He traces the current climate in Washington directly to the 1950s: "McCarthyism was a major factor in the rise of the radical Right and the polarization that plagues American life, pitting group against group and region against region, sowing cynicism and distrust, and manipulating public opinion through fear and smear." He reviews recent events,including the use of the Patriot Act to stifle dissent, the abuse and detention of thousands of American Muslims guilty of no crime, and politicians' readiness to impugn the patriotism of opponents without evidence. Johnson's own critique is not ideological; rather, his most important argument may be that ideological polarization continues to prevent us from rationally assessing and dealing with real threats.

And from the Christian Century review:

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of five national best sellers, Haynes Johnson has written what is not only a brilliant history of the McCarthy era but also a warning about our present fears and political caution and about right-wing demagoguery. He cites the most important studies of McCarthyism, from Thomas C. Reeves's The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy to Ellen Schrecker's No Ivory Tower to William Manchester's masterly history, The Glory and the Dream. And like Samuel Johnson, he has ransacked entire libraries in order to write his book.

Most of the volume is devoted to an account of the history and effects of the McCarthy era, but when Johnson finally draws parallels between that time and ours, the meaning of the title becomes clear: thanks to McCarthy and his present-day adherents, we continue to live in an age of anxiety. "Half a century later," Johnson writes, "a considerable bloc of Americans still bear allegiance to McCarthy's memory and remain devoted to his anticommunist (or, now, anti-liberal) cause."

Fears following September 11, 2001, for example, parallel those of the cold war. After September 11, Johnson writes, "Americans, the most optimistic of people, now faced unnerving official terror warnings.... Their television screens broadcasted alerts. Their newspapers published emergency preparedness articles full of alarming instructions on how to protect themselves from biological, chemical or radiological attacks. Their government authorities, already vastly expanding the surveillance and interrogation of citizens suspected of being security risks, advised them to be on the lookout for terrorists." Fifty-five years earlier America had been gripped by similar fears: fear of a cold war turning hot; fear of a Soviet Union that had detonated an atomic bomb, ending the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons; fear of traitors within who were stealing the fruits of victory. Civil defense shelters blossomed in American cities. Children were taught how to crouch under classroom desks, as if that would stave off the effects of nuclear attacks.

And from the conclusion

In The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out that Americans are never safe "against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire." Niebuhr demanded both modesty about our virtue and "a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our vanities." Haynes Johnson awakens us anew to that prophetic call.

Quote of the day

"[T]oday dogmatisms feed and flourish on the dessicated corpse of reason" - Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide

80s video of the day

"The Promise" by When in Rome

The song had a recent resurgence when it was used to score the final scene in Napoleon Dynamite.

Various stuff (and lots of it)

There are a bunch of items in the news and around the net that I'd like to comment on so I'm going to group some of them into a single post or else I'm going to fall behind and lose track of all of them.

1) Eric Boehlert, author of the invaluable Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, has a column up today at Media Matters about how Murdoch's proposed purchase of the Wall Street Journal has raised discussion about Murdoch's habit of using his media outlets to disseminate his own views and/or promote his political agenda. Boehlert also notes that what isn't being discussed is that although the Journal does have a high standard for journalistic reporting, its Op-Ed page has for years now been the vehicle for conservative movement propaganda. It's a good read ... the only thing missing is Boehlert did not take the opportunity to raise the issue of how increased media consolidation has led to systemic flaws and failures of the press to fulfill their first amendment civic duty. Which leads into item ...

2) More on Noam Chomsky and the propaganda model. Danny Schecter at Media Channel reflects on the 20th anniversay of Manufacturing Consent. Schecter observes that the model is generally true, but that it doesn't quite capture what is going on with our press, suggesting pointing out that at a recent conference it was suggested that a more appropriate title might now be "manufacturing compliance" (a theme one finds in the aforementioned book by Boehlert) But then Schecter goes further and (echoing the point I made when I brought up Aldous Huxley's essay about the propaganda of the irrelevent) states

Even more distressing is the tend towards the depoliticalization of politics through the merger of showbiz and newsbiz to assure that much of the media agenda is noisy and negative, stripped of all meaning, superficial, often celebrity-dominated with little in-depth explanatory or investigative journalism. They would rather market American Idol as the American Ideology. To them, the only “hegemony” in Canada is its beer and hockey.

The people who run our media are, after all, in the end, promoting a culture of consumption, not of engaged citizenship. They want eyeballs for advertisers, not activists to promote change. The sound-bytes presented as substance are there for entertainment, not illumination. It’s heat, not light, all the way.

So truth be told, the real propaganda in an era with more pundits than journalists, is less real coverage. It is pervasive and invisible at the same time — omission more than commission. They want to dumb us down, not smarten us up. They foster passivity, skepticism and resignation. Forget beliefs of any kind — just buy, buy, buy. Why even use deception when distraction works just as well?

Yes, the lack of coverage of East Timor that Noam Chomsky railed against was atrocious, as is today’s war coverage, but so is the absence of reporting on the devolution of democracy and much of the suffering in our own country.

Perhaps the more appropriate title in what Detroit calls a “new model year,” is “Manufacturing Indifference.”

3) More on Chomsky. This time, from Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy, a site which does invaluable work in documenting the ways in which propaganda undermine democracy. Rampton's essay "Has the Internet Changed the Propaganda Model" I would call the definitive analysis of this subject. Rampton concludes that propaganda is very much a dominant force in media today and that much of the propaganda model still applies, except where the 5th Filter has changed from anti-communism to anti-terrorism. Rampton also notes disturbing trends in corporate media's encroaching efforts to inject propaganda onto the internet. Read the whole thing.

4) More incompetence and corruption from the Bush administration. From Alternet, an article about how FEMA trailers used in the wake of Hurricane Katrina containing high levels of formaldehyde are still trying to be used by FEMA.

5) If you missed it, this Sunday 60 Minutes did a report on how even after spending 24 billion dollars on a modernization program known as "Deepwater" the Coast Guard is actually less prepared to deal with Homeland Security than it was before 9/11. Surprise, surprise, the problem seems to have arised from outsourcing the project to a private contractor that got paid lots of money but didn't get the job done. Let's call this reason #23423423423 that the Bush administration is the worst in US history.

6) A Democratic leaning think-tank has concluded that the way to win for Democrats is to increase the number of US troops and to increase the amount of government propaganda. Which leads me to ...

7) I said a few days ago that my tone would be harsher because I sincerely believe that democracy is in danger ... that it is dying. My feelings on that have been heavily informed by the writings of Chalmers Johnson and Kevin Phillips. Both authors have been detailing how America seems to be on a course for collapse that has been paralleled time and again in history by other republics that developed overstretched empires. Johnson's latest book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic I feel is the best of his so far and the most important (and I believe it will be more accesible to the reader than the work of Phillips.)

Unlike the think-tank above, Johnson suggests that the only way to save the America republic is for us to give up our military empire - which is bankrupting the nation and uniting/militarizing the world against us and eroding our liberties - and instead divert that money back into the infrastucture of our economy and into education and gov't programs that help the American public. In his Harper's magazine article "Republic or Empire" (I would classify this as a MUST READ article) Johnson outlines his thesis and introduces the concept of military keynesianism, which roughly means that ever since WWII the American economy has been sustained by perpetually growing the military-industrial complex, and how an ever growing military establishment has led to the expansion of Executive power to the point today where we have a president claiming for himself the powers of a dictator and engaging in virtually unchecked lawlessness. The outlook, according to Johnson, is bleak.

In his most recent article for TomDispatch, Johnson dileneates what he thinks would be neccesary to prevent the collapse of the American republic (from bankruptcy or worse.) I've already alluded above to what Johnson thinks is necessary to be done, but this article lays it out in full. Again, I would highly recommend reading this article, as well.

8) The revolving door continues. This is standard operating procedure for the Bush administration. Its a con, and US citizens are the mark. What the Bush does is run for office getting lots of campaign donations from corporation and special interest groups. While campaigning he says he's for the people. In office, he's for the corporations and special interests that gave him money. So someone who lobbied for relaxed regulations against a particular industry (usually one that donated to the campaign) gets appointed to a position overseeing the regulation of said industry, and lo and behold, the regulations get relaxed from lack of oversight.

It's a great scam. The company profits from its investment from the increased revenue it generates from the relaxed regulations and the President profits by becoming president. The only one who loses is the citizen who has bear the burden and costs of - in this instance - decreased consumer safety.

9) In my previous discussion of Dinesh D'Souza I noted how his criticism of the American "cultural left" was reminiscent of Qutb's critique of American culture. Over at Reason, Cathy Young points out that in D'Souza's book he actually is flat out sympathetic to Qutb. Young also observes that the book has not been well received by the conservative movement, primarily because they view it as a right-wing variant of "blame America first" mentality. Young is correct in this, but she also goes on to state that "some American social conservatives have long expressed guarded sympathy with the radical Muslim critique of Western 'decadence.”'" I think this gets at something significat, and something that will make sense when framed in terms of The Authoritarians.

Authoritarians find it very difficult to see double-standards and hypocrisy when viewing themselves. They can quite clearly see Islamic fundamentalists as anti-democratic and authoritarian, but they can not see similar (yet less extreme) authoritarian and anti-democratic behavior on their part. Which is where the backlash against D'Souza comes in ... it's not that he's critical of "the left" so much that they have a problem with, its that he would in anyway excuse the actions of a group that has been designated an enemy by their authority figures (e.g. Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, etc).

10) Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, is set to come out Thursday. The Center for American Progress has written an advance review of the book and its importance. I've got to say, I'm glad Gore left politics, because he has been doing invaluable work in defending science and reason from the forces of anti-intellectualism that are now surrounding us and eating away at democracy. First, with An Inconvenient Truth which helped raise awareness of the issue of global warming, and now with his latest book which is fiercely critical of the Bush administration's lawlessness and wreckless contempt for critical and empirical thinking. An excerpt of the book can be read here. Gore is sounding the alarm louder and clearer than most everyone else that democracy is in danger, as evidenced by the following passage

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

That in itself shows us that half of the American public has been cut off from reality. Indeed, something has gone terribly wrong, and reason is under assault. I'm somewhat pleased to note that I've myself been working on an essay I've tentatively titled "Truth Under Siege: The Assault on Democracy" that I may or not get around to finally posting. But do take advantage of the online excerpt of Gore's book, it really is lucid and Gore has on-point ideas about what we can do to save democracy.