The antics of three conservative commentators/Congressmen are worth noting in this time of year-end reflection. People with more free time than I have compiled a list of outrageous public statements that should send these blowhards to the woodshed.

Some of the worst recent public statements are below. Each of these guys is wholly contemptuous of constitutional values, freedom of speech and association, and old fashioned horse sense.

First, columnist Dennis Prager says that a newly elected Muslim congressman should not be allowed to swear himself in with the Koran, but must use the Bible.

Commentary on Prager's suggestion has been swift and convincing. Take a good look at what this guy is telling us:

Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not take his oath of office on the Bible, but on the bible of Islam, the Koran.

He should not be allowed to do so -- not because of any American hostility to the Koran, but because the act undermines American civilization.

First, it is an act of hubris that perfectly exemplifies multiculturalist activism -- my culture trumps America's culture. What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book.

Forgive me, but America should not give a hoot what Keith Ellison's favorite book is. Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress. In your personal life, we will fight for your right to prefer any other book. We will even fight for your right to publish cartoons mocking our Bible. But, Mr. Ellison, America, not you, decides on what book its public servants take their oath.

Devotees of multiculturalism and political correctness who do not see how damaging to the fabric of American civilization it is to allow Ellison to choose his own book need only imagine a racist elected to Congress. Would they allow him to choose Hitler's "Mein Kampf," the Nazis' bible, for his oath? And if not, why not? On what grounds will those defending Ellison's right to choose his favorite book deny that same right to a racist who is elected to public office?

. . .

When all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book, they all affirm that some unifying value system underlies American civilization. If Keith Ellison is allowed to change that, he will be doing more damage to the unity of America and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9-11. It is hard to believe that this is the legacy most Muslim Americans want to bequeath to America. But if it is, it is not only Europe that is in trouble.

Next on the shit-list is a Congressman who says that Americans need to wake up before more Muslims are elected to Congress.

Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) issued a letter to constituents earlier this month in which he declares, “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States” if we do not adopt “strict immigration policies.” The letter was inadvertently sent to a local progressive activist, who shared it with the C-Ville Weekly newspaper.

In the letter, Goode references the election of Muslim Rep.-elect Keith Ellison (D-MN), and warns “American citizens” to “wake up” or “there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office”:

I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.

At another point in the letter, Goode describes telling a “Muslim student” who “came by my office” that the Koran will never be hung on his office wall:

The Ten Commandments and “In God We Trust” are on the wall in my office. A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, “As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, The Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office.”

Finally, there's a Congressman who has blocked a Federal judgeship nomination because the candidate attended a same-sex marriage ceremony. This Congressman, Sam Brownback, wants to run for President in 2008. Brownback has modified his opposition by suggesting that this woman promise not to hear any cases involving same-sex marriage, a ludicrous and unprecedented demand. Use your imagination in wondering how Brownback's litmus test could block any qualified Federal appointment because of choices they make in their personal life.

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, a potential presidential candidate, said Friday he would lift his hold on a federal judicial nominee if she agrees to step aside from any case dealing with same-sex unions.

Brownback, a Republican raising money for a possible White House bid, has stalled the confirmation of Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Janet Neff to the federal bench because she once attended a lesbian commitment ceremony.

Neff has said she attended the ceremony as a friend of one of the two women, a longtime neighbor. She insisted in an Oct. 12 letter to Brownback that the ceremony had no legal effect and would not affect her ability to act fairly as a federal judge.

Brownback, a prominent gay marriage opponent, says he is concerned the incident colors her legal view on the constitutionality of allowing same-sex marriages.

The guys profiled above are the remnants of a conservative movement that spiraled out of control. That these people thought they could get away with this tells us a lot about who they are and how they perceive their audience. Maybe the tide is turning.

President Bush faces some discouraging poll numbers as the year many have called the most challenging of his presidency comes to an end.

A majority of the American people, 55 percent, no longer believe Bush shares their values. They also are not sure if he is honest and trustworthy or if he understands complex issues, a CNN poll released Thursday reports. The poll was conducted for CNN by the Opinion Research Corporation and has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Nearly 53 percent say he is not honest and trustworthy, and the same number believes he does not understand complex issues. Fifty-one percent also say he is not a strong leader.

Only 37 percent believe that the president inspires confidence, compared to 61 percent who say that he does not. In 2005, 46 percent thought the president inspired confidence. Bush fared much better in this category in 2001 following the September 11 terrorist attacks, when 75 percent said that he inspired confidence.

Saddam is dead. And the secrets go down the chute with him. No one sheds any tears for Saddam Hussein, one of the world's worst. His crimes were many. But he was our man in Iraq for many years, and some of our most beloved politicians loved him the way a little boy loves his puppy.

Robert Fisk, one of the top journalists in the Middle East, has some interesting commentary on this. He reminds us that the United States strongly supported and helped Saddam during the 1980's, when Saddam was Saddam, a real killer who loosed chemical weapons on his enemies, not the weak tinpot dictator with a decimated military, the guy we attacked in 2003. Fisk writes:

Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.

If you understand how criminal law works in the United States, then you know that accomplices to murder are as guilty as the guy who pulled the trigger. If Fred robs a bank and shoots the bank teller, then Phil the getaway driver is also guilty of murder. If Saddam gasses innocent people and throws them into a mass grave, what about the guy who gave him the material necessary to make the weapons? Here's Fisk:

Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981. AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. "We started counting - we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting," he said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination - the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies ... the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they spat blood."

At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America's complicity in this atrocity remain secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this period - although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax, and Escherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report concluded that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including ... chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment."

Another recent piece by Robert Fisk details the U.S. relationship with Saddam, including Donald Rumsfeld's meeting with the butcher of Baghdad and his assurances that the Reagan administration deemed him an ally. "In 1982, the administration ignored objections in Congress and removed Iraq from its list of countries supporting terrorism. By November 1983, the National Security Council had issued a directive that the US should do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent an Iranian victory. Washington did nothing to deter Saddam's use of chemical weapons. As the 1980s progressed, a clandestine network of companies developed in the US and other countries to help the Iraqi war effort. The conflict between Iraq and Iran ended in 1988, but Saddam continued his Western-supported military build-up until the very moment he invaded Kuwait in August 1990."

The notion that Saddam's death spares his American accomplices from embarassing revelations reminds me of what happened in 1990, when the first Bush administration invaded Panama and seized Manuel Noriega, a military dictator sufficiently demonized by George H. W. Bush to rally public support for this invasion. Noriega was a close ally of the Reagan administration and we loved him at his most violent. But he grew unpredictable and it was easy to send American troops to overthrow his government. Noriega was the man with the secrets, once pronouncing that he had George Bush "by the balls." This was a threat to expose the Reagan-Bush complicity with Noriega's crimes. Today Noriega sits in a Florida jail in connection with this drug crimes, prosecuted by the U.S. government after the invasion. Who would believe Noriega today?

A recent article from the New York Daily News says that George W. Bush issued a "signing statement" that would allow the government to open your mail without a court order. No comment is necessary on a story like this other than to hope that the Democratic Congress will find a way to deal with this or that the courts will strike it down as a violation of the Constitution.

You may ask, what about letters sent by terrorists containing life or death information? The Carpetbagger Report answers that riddle: "But what about the proverbial 'ticking bomb'nightmare? Under existing law, before the signing statement, the Postal Service is already empowered to block delivery of suspicious mail, and the administration could quickly get a warrant from a criminal court or a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge to search targeted mail. The Bush White House has decided to short circuit that process, giving itself the power it wants."

Hats off to the Daily News for uncovering this story:

New postal law lets Bush peek through your mail

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

President Bush added a "signing statement" in recently passed postal reform bill that may give him new powers to pry into your mail - without a warrant.

WASHINGTON - President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

"Despite the President's statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people's mail without a warrant," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

"The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

"The danger is they're reading Americans' mail," she said.

"You have to be concerned," agreed a career senior U.S. official who reviewed the legal underpinnings of Bush's claim. "It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we've ever known."

They said global warming wasn't our problem. Enjoy the warm weather. In January. Today it was 70 degrees in New York, a time of year when we are usually freezing our cujones off, shoveling heart attack snow and sliding around on ice like Olympic skaters, though not as graceful.

The local newspapers don't know what to do about the warm weather. So they send out reporters who quote people hanging around the public square in shorts and a tee-shirt. They'll say something like, "Geez, I know its global warming, but hey, I'll take it today. It's beautiful outside." Then some business owner who profits from warm weather will say that global warming is good for business.

There ain't nothing good about this weather. The newspapers are now regularly covering broken ice shelves in the arctic, and it seems that every year is another "warmest year on record." But I don't think the media has really gone on the offensive in covering global warming properly. We all laughed at Al Gore when he ran for president. An environmental wanker, we said. George H.W. Bush called Gore "ozone" when they ran for President and Veep in 1992. "Ozone" was an insult to an oil man who makes money by polluting the planet. In 2000, we instead elected Bush's son, another oil man who peed on the Global Warming treaty that much the world signed.

Some people profit from the pollution that is causing global warming and killing us all. This article says that ExxonMobile is financing "studies" intended to persuade the public that global warming is not a problem.

ExxonMobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in a coordinated effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming, the Union of Concerned Scientists asserted Wednesday.

The report by the science-based nonprofit advocacy group mirrors similar claims by Britain's leading scientific academy. Last September, The Royal Society wrote the oil company asking it to halt support for groups that "misrepresented the science of climate change."

Shouldn't this kind of propaganda be illegal?

It's not every day that I would cut and paste a New York Times editorial. But yesterday's editorial seems to summarize our state of affairs and represents a call to arms for the Democratic majority to take on President Bush. When an establishment paper like the Times attacks Bush this way, you know it signals that the country is moving against Mr. W. Let's hope that the new Congress turns Bush into an early lame duck, and that his agenda is completely scuttled.

The Imperial Presidency 2.0 The New York Times

Sunday 07 January 2007

Observing President Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.

That year, the White House used the fear of terrorism to scare American voters into cementing the Republican domination of Congress. Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney then embarked on an expansion of presidential power chilling both in its sweep and in the damage it did to the constitutional system of checks and balances.

In 2006, the voters sent Mr. Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions. But we have yet to see any sign that Mr. Bush understands that - or even realizes that the Democrats are now in control of the Congress. Indeed, he seems to have interpreted his party's drubbing as a mandate to keep pursuing his fantasy of victory in Iraq and to press ahead undaunted with his assault on civil liberties and the judicial system. Just before the Christmas break, the Justice Department served notice to Senator Patrick Leahy - the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee - that it intended to keep stonewalling Congressional inquiries into Mr. Bush's inhumane and unconstitutional treatment of prisoners taken in anti-terrorist campaigns. It refused to hand over two documents, including one in which Mr. Bush authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to establish secret prisons beyond the reach of American law or international treaties. The other set forth the interrogation methods authorized in these prisons - which we now know ranged from abuse to outright torture.

Also last month, Mr. Bush issued another of his infamous "presidential signing statements," which he has used scores of times to make clear he does not intend to respect the requirements of a particular law - in this case a little-noticed Postal Service bill. The statement suggested that Mr. Bush does not believe the government must obtain a court order before opening Americans' first-class mail. It said the administration had the right to "conduct searches in exigent circumstances," which include not only protecting lives, but also unspecified "foreign intelligence collection."

The law is clear on this. A warrant is required to open Americans' mail under a statute that was passed to stop just this sort of abuse using just this sort of pretext. But then again, the law is also clear on the need to obtain a warrant before intercepting Americans' telephone calls and e-mail. Mr. Bush began openly defying that law after Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail between the United States and other countries.

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News accounts have also reminded us of the shameful state of American military prisons, where supposed terrorist suspects are kept without respect for civil or human rights, and on the basis of evidence so deeply tainted by abuse, hearsay or secrecy that it is essentially worthless.

Deborah Sontag wrote in The Times last week about the sorry excuse for a criminal case that the administration whipped up against Jose Padilla, who was once - but no longer is - accused of plotting to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States. Mr. Padilla was held for two years without charges or access to a lawyer. Then, to avoid having the Supreme Court review Mr. Bush's power grab, the administration dropped those accusations and charged Mr. Padilla in a criminal court on hazy counts of lending financial support to terrorists.

But just as the government abandoned the "dirty bomb" case against Mr. Padilla, it quietly charged an Ethiopian-born man, Binyam Mohamed, with conspiring with Mr. Padilla to commit that very crime. Unlike Mr. Padilla, Mr. Mohamed is not a United States citizen, so the administration threw him into Guantánamo. Now 28, he is still being held there as an "illegal enemy combatant" under the anti-constitutional military tribunals act that was rushed through the Republican-controlled Congress just before last November's elections.

Mr. Mohamed was a target of another favorite Bush administration practice: "extraordinary rendition," in which foreign citizens are snatched off the streets of their hometowns and secretly shipped to countries where they can be abused and tortured on behalf of the American government. Mr. Mohamed - whose name appears nowhere in either of the cases against Mr. Padilla - has said he was tortured in Morocco until he signed a confession that he conspired with Mr. Padilla. The Bush administration clearly has no intention of answering that claim, and plans to keep Mr. Mohamed in extralegal detention indefinitely.

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The Democratic majority in Congress has a moral responsibility to address all these issues: fixing the profound flaws in the military tribunals act, restoring the rule of law over Mr. Bush's rogue intelligence operations and restoring the balance of powers between Congress and the executive branch. So far, key Democrats, including Mr. Leahy and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of a new subcommittee on human rights, have said these issues are high priorities for them.

We would lend such efforts our enthusiastic backing and hope Mr. Leahy, Mr. Durbin and other Democratic leaders are not swayed by the absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now "look ahead" rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush's one-party rule.

This is a false choice. Dealing with these issues is not about the past. The administration's assault on some of the nation's founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.

Let's cut through the crap. No one knows what to do about the war in Iraq. Should we add more troops? We don't have enough troops. And who would volunteer to fight in someone else's civil war? Should we leave? OK, but what happens after we leave? Realistically, our government is not going to leave with the possibility that they will suffer blame if things get worse.

Our troops are turning against the war. The public doesn't like it much, either. Twenty three percent of the American public is happy with President Bush's handling of the Iraq war. Seventy three percent disapprove. These numbers are unprecedented. Normally, the public loves war and will support the president in whatever foreign entanglements he falls into. Not anymore.

This one should have been easy. Everyone hated Saddam Hussein. No one cared that successive Republican administrations in the 1980's and early 1990's supported Saddam and gave him weapons and diplomatic support when he was gassing Kurds and weaking havoc. And no one cares now. This morning's New York Times carries a front page story about a tape recording of Saddam's admission that gassing people would kill thousands. But this liberal bulwark once again omits our government's complicity in these horrible crimes.

I am certain the psychological experts in the Bush administration (they all have public relations people to predict public support for administration policy) believe that Joe Average would support this war for the long haul. Somehow the American people thought Saddam attacked us on September 11. They also thought that Saddam and Osama were friends. Administration propaganda no doubt caused these misconceptions. But the cover has been torn off the ball.

According to the Washington Post, "More than 17,000 Iraqi civilians and police officers died violently in the latter half of 2006, according to Iraqi Health Ministry statistics, a sharp increase that coincided with rising sectarian strife since the February bombing of a landmark Shiite shrine." News like this comes out every day, these days.

Apologists will say that it does no good to look backward, that we should look forward to deal the problem rather than assess blame. I say we can look forward and backward. We do it when we drive (thanks to rear-view mirrors). We can do it in analyzing the war. Someone has to pay for this war.

Congress should immediately schedule hearings and slap subpoenas all over the White House and State Department. They should be called the Downing Street hearings, focusing on the infamous Downing Street Memos, the smoking guns showing that the war was a fraud from the outset. You can't write about this enough. Read one of the smoking guns here. It says in part:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Did you see that? At at time (summer 2002) when Bush was telling us that war was an absolute last resort, he had already made up his mind. He was not a stateman, he was a liar. And, more important, the memo makes it clear that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The same memorandum reveals more shenanigans:

It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

But we were kept in the dark about the monumental decision to fight a war in the world's top hotspot, the absolute last place on Earth for this kind of intervention. According to Knight Ridder newpapers,

The public version of the U.S. intelligence community's key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit arms programs was stripped of dissenting opinions, warnings of insufficient information and doubts about deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's intentions, a review of the document and its once-classified version shows.

As a result, the public was given a far more definitive assessment of Iraq's plans and capabilities than President Bush and other U.S. decision-makers received from their intelligence agencies.

The stark differences between the public version and the then top-secret version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate raise new questions about the accuracy of the public case made for a war that's claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. service members and thousands of Iraqis.

The public is fooled no more. Bush should pay. If the Vietnam War drove President LBJ from office and Watergate drove out Nixon, what's the price for starting a bad war on false pretenses? Here's a solution.

Hey, we all make mistakes. Some people lose their wallet, some people leave the coffee maker on all day, and some people start a war that they can't get out of.

Pouring more gasoline on the fire, President Bush last night said he will send 20,000 more troops to babysit Iraq. Every story has a hidden story. One of my favorite hidden stories of the Iraq war is Bush's desire as presidential candidate to have a war to call his own. This is not a new story, but it gains new importance each time Bush tries to dig himself out of the mudslide.

When Bush decided to run for president in 1999 or so, he had no serious governmental experience. He was elected governor of Texas in 1994 and got re-elected a few years later, but at some point he decided he wanted to be president. His father (former President George H.W. Bush) hooked George W. up with policy experts to guide his world views. At the time, W. had no world views. In Bob Woodward's recent book, "State of Denial," we read that George W. openly admitted to these advisors at the time that he had no world view and didn't know where to start.

In its review of State of Denial, Salon.com reported last year:

"State of Denial" begins in 2000, with George H.W. Bush fretful about George W. Bush's utter ignorance of foreign policy, and the elder Bush's securing Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, a longtime friend and ally of the former president's, as tutor. "Bandar," Woodward reports George W. Bush saying at an early encounter, "I guess you're the best asshole who knows about the world. Explain to me one thing ... Why should I care about North Korea?"

One thing that George W. did know was that war is good for a president's image. So when Bush sat down with a ghostwriter for his campaign autobiography, "A Charge to Keep," he candidly talked about the utility of war.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

Herskowitz's claims have an air of credibility. He was loyal to the Bush family, having been hired to write the puffy campaign book that bore George W.'s name. But Herskowitz's puffwork was not good enough, and he was replaced, like some many people in the Bush administration who asked too many questions. The following passage is a real eye-opener:

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."

Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.

The public relations industry makes it living by lying to the Amercan people, or at least spinning money out of your wallet. The government specializes in public relations, too, fooling the public by manipulating the language. Whoever owns the language controls the policy. "One of the earliest definitions of PR was coined by Edward Bernays. According to him, "Public Relations is a management function which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures and interest of an organization followed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance."

After the Republicans took control of Congress in the 1990's, blowhard extraordinare Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House and moved to manipulate the language even further. This memo shows how Gingrich trained Republican congressman to use positive words to describe their agenda and negative words to demonize the enemy. It's a funny memo, but it's not so funny when you realize that controlling the language affects public policy.

Modern spinning reached its apex in the 1940's when the Department of War became the Department of Defense. Then we invaded Vietnam without any provocation and killed a few million people.

WIth President Bush's popularity hovering somewhere near the toilet and the sewer, it was time for a new round of snow-jobbing. Some guy in the White House basement came up with the word "surge" to describe George W. Bush's plan to escalate troops in Iraq. You have to admire the public relations job here. Everyone is calling it a surge, not an escalation.

"Surge" sounds strong and determined. "Escalation" sounds like quagmire. Except that no one escalates into quicksand. We escalate into war. The public relations success story that surrounds Surge is discussed here. The media routinely describes the Bush plan as a Surge, not an escalation.

As Think Progress tells us:

The choice of words is not an academic point. A CBS poll released Monday found that only 18 percent of Americans support an escalation of forces in Iraq. However, when asked whether they support a “short-term troop increase,” the number jumps to 45 percent approval (48 percent disapproval).

Surge or escalation, call it what you will. It was said that the Best and the Brightest dragged us into the hellhole that was the Vietnam War. Now America's dumbest is doing the same in Iraq. According to IraqBodyCount.org, more than 50,000 Iraqis have died since George W. decided he wanted a war of his own. Another study, by the British medical journal Lancet, says the death toll is in the six figures. This reminds me of the best spin job of all: calling war deaths "collateral damage." "Hello, Mrs. Jones? This is Sgt. Smith from the United States Military. Your son Charles was the victim of collateral damage. The funeral is Monday."

The question is whether George W. Bush is trying to destroy whatever's left of constitutional government in the United States. The Bush administration's assault on all that we hold dear is boundless. Books upon books as well as investigative news and magazine articles are regularly exposing what happens when fanactics are allowed to take control, much like what happens if you let children run kindergarten or alcoholics run the local tavern.

The latest outrage is George W's promise to ignore Congressional authority in his effort to escalate troops in Iraq and drag the military even further into the civil war that we handed the Iraqi people. On 60 Minutes this week, Bush said that he's going foward with troop escalation no matter what Congress says. There's a problem with this. The U.S. Constitution says that Congress has power "To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years."

In addition, "A new report from the Center for American Progress details how, over the last 35 years, Congress has passed bills, enacted into law, that capped the size of military deployments, prohibited funding for existing or prospective deployment, and placed limits and conditions on the timing and nature of deployments." Congress also has the power to declare war and to fund Presidential initiatives, such as war. The analysis here only confirms that Congress does not have to sit back as a potted plant and allow Bush to further squander the national treasure at the tune of $5 billion a month.

Second on the list is the recent news that a Bush administration official wants to organize a corporate boycott against the large law firms that are devoting attorney time to representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Pro bono lawyering is very much within the tradition of American law. Often the only time that prisoners and other unpopular clients get any representation is through the generocity of these mega-firms which can obviously afford to devote unpaid time towards defending the American principle that everyone has the right to a lawyer and that government policies need to be challenged in court to ensure they comply with the Constitution.

From the New York Times:

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

. . .

I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.

I fully endorse the following critique by blogger David Kurtz: "The Administration has already done virtually everything possible to deny detainees any hope of justice. Encouraging boycotts of the law firms representing detainees is an effort to close off any last chance that the detainees will be treated in accordance with Anglo-American legal standards. Each of us will mark our own low point of the Bush presidency. This is on my short list."

Consolidating power and destroying constitutional freedoms is the hallmark of authoritarian government. I am not the first person to suggest that the Bush administration is on the road towards authoritarianism. John Dean, former counsel to President Nixon, recently published a book on this topic. Dean is no liberal. But even principled conservatives see authoritarianism when they see it.

There are conservatives, and then there are conservatives. I used to think that the worst of the worst was Ann Coulter, a very sick woman whose crazed ravings speak for themselves. But leap-frogging ahead of Coulter is rightwing "scholar" Dinesh D'Souza, who is publishing a book that blames the "cultural left" for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This guy appeared on the Colbert Report yesterday and the host played with him like the kitty plays with a mouse, getting D'Souza to suggest that FDR was indirectly responsible for 9/11. According to ThinkProgress:

Last night on The Colbert Report, D’Souza repeated the right-wing attack that President Bill Clinton “did absolutely nothing” to fight global terrorists. Stephen Colbert jokingly asked, “Doesn’t some of it lie at FDR’s doorstep? Doesn’t things like Social Security and Medicare and LBJ’s Great Society, doesn’t some of that send the wrong message to our enemies?”

D’Souza answered, “Indirectly, yes,” explaining that “FDR gave away Eastern Europe through Yalta, and then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Muslims had to fight back and that’s where bin Laden got his start.”

D'Sousa explains his thesis on his website:

In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country (such people as Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, George Soros, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, and Noam Chomsky) is responsible for causing 9/11. The term “cultural left” does not refer to the Democratic Party. Nor does it refer to all liberals. It refers to the left wing of the Democratic Party—admittedly the most energetic group among Democrats, and the main source of the party’s ideas. The cultural left also includes a few Republicans, notably those who adopt a left-wing stance on foreign policy and social issues. Moreover, the cultural left includes organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and moveon.org.

In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice—but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.

Folks, this is real sick. Most Americans have not even heard of Noam Chomsky or George Soros, but they somehow wound up on D'Sousa's shitlist. Does anyone really think the ACLU and Human Rights Watch got bin Ladin so wound up that he ordered 9/11?

D'Souza adds:

the cultural left has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world, that are being overwhelmed with this culture. In addition, the left is waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values in non-Western cultures. This campaign has provoked a violent reaction from Muslims who believe that their most cherished beliefs and institutions are under assault. Further, the cultural left has routinely affirmed the most vicious prejudices about American foreign policy held by radical factions in the Muslim world, and then it has emboldened those factions to attack the United States with the firm conviction that “America deserves it” and that they can do so with relative impunity. Absent these conditions, Osama Bin Laden would never have contemplated the 9/11 attacks, nor would the United States today be the target of Islamic radicals throughout the world.

Conservatives regard D'Souza as an intellectual. To my knowledge, the new right has no serious intellectuals, at least no one whose books provide any real guidance into the state of the world and how we got here. There is no intellectual foundation for modern conservativism that I can discern, other than raw power and horrendous outburts by blowhards like Dinesh D'Souza, Rush Limbaugh and the others. This book will almost certainly become a best-seller. The question is, who's buying this shit?

One of George W. Bush's selling points was the meant what he said and he said what he meant. His campaign handlers knew that George W. was a little bit dumb, but that they could sell him as a guy who spoke from the gut and didn't back down. When the New York Times reported in December 2005 that the Administration was wiretapping phone conversations without a court order or warrant, Bush defiantly forged ahead and told the legal community to shove it.

Last year, a Federal judge ruled that the wiretapping program was illegal because it violated the constitutional prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provides for a secret court to issue national security warrants. Bush argued that anyone opposing warrantless surveillance was actually against monitoring terrorists. He said, on October 30, 2006, "In all these vital measures for fighting the war on terror, the Democrats just follow a simple philosophy: Just say no. When it comes to listening to the terrorists, what’s the Democrats’ answer? It’s, just say no." This was poppycock, of course. No one opposes any program that monitors terrorists. We do oppose end runs around the law and Constitution.

Yesterday, Senators tore the Attorney General a new one on this issue. Here's a transcript from ThinkProgress:

During today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) confronted Attorney General Gonzales with these accusations. Gonzales denied they referred to elected officials, but instead to unnamed “blogs today”:

FEINGOLD: Do you know of anyone in this country, Democrat or Republican, in government or on the outside, who has argued that the United States government should not wiretap suspected terrorists?

GONZALES: Sure. I mean, if you look on the blogs today, there are all kinds of people who have very strong views about the ability of the government to surveil anyone for any reason. And so…

FEINGOLD: Do you know of anybody in government that has said that?

GONZALES: No. But my remarks — that’s not what I said. […]

FEINGOLD: […] Mr. Attorney General, as I said when Director Mueller was here, to me these comments are blatantly false. I think they do a disservice to the office of the attorney general. Falsely accusing the majority of this committee of opposing the wiretapping of terrorists is not going to be helpful to you, to the Justice Department, to Congress or to the American people.

GONZALES: Senator, I didn’t have you or this committee in mind when I made those comments.

The Administration is now abandoning the warrantless wiretapping program and allowing judges to issue warrants. Maybe this the consequence of real opposition party controlling Congress. Another consequence is Congress actually taking its responsibilities seriously and grilling Administration officials about bad polices and arrogant decisionmaking.

This happened the other day when another U.S. Senator, Pat Leahy (D-VT) also tore Attorney General Gonzales a new one over U.S. sponsorship of torture. Click here to view the satisfying video. After six years of a Republican Congress doing absolutely nothing to advance to social good, it's good to see the opposition party hit the Administration, and hit it hard.

The stupidest man in America holds a law degree and used to be a judge in Texas. Today he's the Attorney General of the United States. A few days ago, while testifying before the U.S. Senate, he proclaimed that Habeas Corpus is not a constitutional right. The problem with this statement (made under oath) is that the right to Habeas Corpus is specifically enshrined in the Constitution.

Habeas Corpus is a protection against arbitrary and oppressive government, dating to the Magna Carta of 1215. It means that the government cannot detain you without good cause. Murder, rape, arson, kidnaping and embezzlement are good cause to detain someone. Plucking someone off the street because of his political views is not good cause. If the government detains someone for no good reason, there is not a judge in this country (liberal or conservative) who will allow such an injustice to continue. That is what Habeas Corpus gives us.

The Constitution says this about Habeas Corpus:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

In other words . . . well, there are no other words to describe this. It's a plain as day. The "privilege" of Habeas Corpus cannot be taken away from us except in dire emergencies. This means we have the right of Habeas Corpus.

So what did Attorney General Alberto Gonzales tell the Senate the other day? Here's transcript and some commentary from ConsortiumNews.com:

Responding to questions from Sen. Arlen Specter at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18, Gonzales argued that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly bestow habeas corpus rights; it merely says when the so-called Great Writ can be suspended.

“There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales’s remark left Specter, the committee’s ranking Republican, stammering.

“Wait a minute,” Specter interjected. “The Constitution says you can’t take it away except in case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there’s a rebellion or invasion?”

Gonzales continued, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion.

“You may be treading on your interdiction of violating common sense,” Specter said.

The full exchange and more commentary is here.

Taken to its logical extreme, Gonzales's distorted view of the national charter which memorializes democratic freedoms means that we have no "right" of free speech or protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Again, ConsortiumNews:

While Gonzales’s statement has a measure of quibbling precision to it, his logic is troubling because it would suggest that many other fundamental rights that Americans hold dear also don’t exist because the Constitution often spells out those rights in the negative.

For instance, the First Amendment declares that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Applying Gonzales’s reasoning, one could argue that the First Amendment doesn’t explicitly say Americans have the right to worship as they choose, speak as they wish or assemble peacefully. The amendment simply bars the government, i.e. Congress, from passing laws that would impinge on these rights.

I don't know what Gonzales is trying to say here. The Bush administration has at least partially wiped out Habeas Corpus in the Military Commissions Act, a monumental event that should have gotten more attention if the Earth-shattering news about Tom Cruise's marriage and Britney Spears' panties did not consume our attention instead. So I don't know if Alberto Gonzales' preposterous interpretation of the Constitution will get much attention, either. It's not as if he is the chief law enforcement officer in the United States. (Actually, he is).

The God of hellfire reserves a seat for the world's worst. That includes dictators, murderers, terrorists and music publishers who sell classic rock songs for beer and car commercials.

Hell is also a place where you'll find guys who blame the victim. The most popular news talk show in cable news is the O'Reilly Factor, where a middle-aged blowhard talks like a street fighter, cuttin' through the crap and spin and tellin' it like is. The intellectual content of the O'Reilly Factor is like a Hostess Twinkie. But who cares? O'Reilly puts liberals in their place and sticks up for America.

Bill O'Reilly writes a new book every few years, one of them called "The O'Reilly Factor for Kids," giving children some straight talk about growing up and staying on the straight and narrow. He also wrote, "Who's Looking Out for You?", a book that tells us which American institutions and personalities are screwing us and which ones are, uh, lookin' out for ya.

So it came as quite a surprise a few years ago when O'Reilly was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit by one of his former subordinates who apparently taped this married man trying phone sex and proposing to perform some perverse sex acts in the shower with her. Read all about it here, and then run to the bathroom to throw up.

OK, so O'Reilly is a pervert who likes to hit on young woman even though he devotes much of his television show to attacking immoral Hollywood values and, of course, cultural progressives. But last week he took the cake in suggesting that a boy held captive for years by a child abuser probably enjoyed his captivity. This is the first time I have ever heard someone suggest this.

What about the Stockholm Syndrome, where the oppressed identify with their captors? Apparantly taking the view that psychological explanations are nothing more than liberal silliness, O'Reilly's not "buyin it," he thunders on national television. Transcript here.

I try to avoid using the F word in writing this blog. Here I will make an exception. Does anyone in his right fucking mind think that a 15 year old probable sexual abuse victim actually enjoyed his captivity and stayed with a kidnapper because he could stay away from school and run around and do what he wanted? O'Reilly thinks so.

Some pundits suggest that O'Reilly be taken of the air. Our favorite, Keith Olbermann, wonders why O'Reilly still has a job, stating on his rival TV show, "We've all gotten a lot of amusement from Mr. O'Reilly's baseline idiocy, but this is reprehensible. It reeks of perversity and inhumanity. Simply put, Mr. O'Reilly no longer deserves any place on the public stage."

I guess it's interesting to watch a celebrity lose his mind in public. It happens a lot with movie and rock stars as alcohol, drugs, too much money and huge egos get the best of them. We pay attention to this the way we stop and look at a car accident. "Holy crap," we say. "The car flipped right over and they're pulling the guy out with the Jaws of Life. Look at all the blood!" This is what we see when we turn on the laughable Fox News and watch the country's most pathetic blowhard self-destruct right before our eyes. O'Reilly tried to take it all back when he saw that the world wasn't laughing with him. Too late, Bill, you sick dog.

When he ran for president in 2000, George W. Bush said he would not engage in nation-building. Other than reconstructing Iraq, he wasn't kidding. Not a word in last night's State of the Union address about the lost American city, New Orleans, wiped out by Hurricane Katrina.

According to Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) - New Orleans is still a mess and the pace of recovery across the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina's strike remains achingly slow after 17 months. But none of this captured President Bush's attention on the year's biggest night for showcasing policy priorities.

In the president's State of the Union speech last year, delivered just five months after the disaster, the devastation merited only 156 words out of more than 5,400.

On Tuesday night, the president spoke for almost exactly as long before a joint session of Congress. But Katrina received not a single mention.

By contrast, in the days ahead of the president's address, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia compared the U.S. money being spent on Iraqi reconstruction with the fraction committed to the Gulf Coast rebuilding. And, chosen to give the Democratic response to Bush on Tuesday, Webb brought up the continuing struggle of Katrina victims right away, listing ``restoring the vitality of New Orleans'' just behind education and health care among his party's most pressing priorities, according to the text of his speech distributed in advance.

The irony of it all is that if Bush promised some kind of Marshall Plan to rebuild New Orleans, the public would probably go along with it. Who can forget those terrible images of people living in the squalid Superdome or watching their houses wash away in the flood which swallowed the city? Apparently everyone forgot, or at least Bush's speechwriters. While Bob Herbert of the New York Times continues to write about the tragedy, New Orleans had its day in the news, and Hurricane Katrina was sooo 2005. We are a disposable society and yesterday's tragedy makes room for new ones.

Most Americans would be surprised at how easily First Amendment rights can be restricted. Your right to criticize the Iraq War during a street protest is almost unrestricted so long as you don't step on someone else's rights in the process. But that same protester may have to watch what she says in her capacity as public employee. A recent court ruling shows how fragile these rights are and how someone can lose her job because of her comments at work.

A public schoolteacher was talking to her high school students in current events class when someone asked if she had ever protested anything in public. According to the court ruling, she answered that "when she passed a demonstration against this nation's military ioperations in Iraq and saw a placard saying 'Honk for Peace,' she honked her car's horn to show support for the demonstrators."

Apparently, one of the students ran home and told mom and dad, who complained to the school that the teacher was discussing controversial things in class. (This was a current events class, mind you). The teacher was fired for saying this and then brought a lawsuit to get her job back under the First Amendment.

To the great unwashed masses, this case would look like a no-brainer, a slam-dunk, as some in the legal community would say. The teacher lost the case and the Court of Appeals in Chicago agreed that her case could not go forward.

Here's why. It has been generally accepted for decades that public employees cannot just say anything they want at work. They only have the right under the First Amendment to speak out on matters of public concern. If Joe Smith in the Department of Transportation complains that he was unfairly denied a promotion or that he doesn't like the air conditioning at work, that's not free speech. If he complains that public money is being wasted in his office, that's free speech. The public would be concerned about money being wasted in a government office, but the public couldn't care less about the air conditioning.

So why isn't it free speech for a teacher in her current events class to say (in response to a specific question from a student) that she honks her car in support of anti-war protesters? Isn't the war a matter of public concern? Normally, the answer is yes. For a public school teacher, at least in the view of one influential appeals court, the answer is no.

The reason for this is that in spring 2006, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that states that a public employee is not engaging in free speech under the First Amendment if the speech is pursuant to official job duties. This ruling attacted widespread criticism because it means that public employees who actually know what they are talking about have the fewest rights under the Constitution. So the example above involving a guy working in the Department of Transportation has to be revisited. If this employee is in charge of financial affairs at the Department, his speech relating to squandered public money is no longer free speech but unprotected work speech because it was his job to say this.

What about the school teacher? The Court ruled against her because the speech was in the course of her current events class. The school district was paying her to educate students so the district can terminate her employment if it doesn't like what she says. Her classroom comments are not free speech but instead unprotected comments which the district was paying her to make.

In ruling against the teacher, the Court compared her case with a Social Studies teacher to tells her students that Benedict Arnold was not a traitor or an English teacher who decides the use her favorite fiction books instead of the assigned curriculum. The court also cited an earlier case ruling that a Social Studies teacher cannot tell students that the Earth is the product of divine creation when the curriculum says the world is four billion years old.

These examples, of course, have nothing to do with a teacher in a current events class honestly answering a student's question about whether she ever participated in a protest. The teacher wasn't lying to the students or railroading them to adopt her point of view. But judges can reason their way through cases any way they want, and there is nothing we can do about it. The court also ruled that students are a captive audience and taxpayers do not have to put up with teachers presenting their personal views against the instructions of the school board.

Bottom line: a current events teacher can be fired for answering a student's question about her protest activities because it's technically not free speech but instead curriculum speech which the school district can object to. This distinction is disturbing and outrageous and probably very difficult for non-lawyers to swallow. It's difficult for lawyers to swallow as well, and I can assure you that as we speak (two days after the decision came down) the teacher's lawyers are wondering how the hell a decision like this case can happen.

I'll tell you how a decision like this can happen. The Supreme Court ruling in spring 2006 which provides the groundwork for this decision was decided 5-4, with George W. Bush's two appointees in the majority. A different president would have appointed different Supreme Court justices, and I seriously doubt that a Democratic President would have chosen two guys with such repressive views on the First Amendment. While the country debates hot-button issues like abortion and affirmative action each time a Supreme Court vacancy arises (and these issues rarely come before the Supreme Court these days), the Court is quietly issuing rulings that affect millions of people in significant ways. This is not a wholesale endorsement of the Democratic Party. But if you think that a teacher should be fired for telling her students in a current events class that she honked her horn in support of an anti-war protest, then by all means, vote Republican.

"Thirteen percent of Americans have never heard of global warming even though their country is the world's top source of greenhouse gases, a 46-country survey showed on Monday," according to Reuters.

This seems about right. I would say that about 10 percent of the American people have almost no idea what's going on. These are the people who never vote, never read the newspaper, don't know who the President is and couldn't pass the basic citizenship test given to immigrants. But they pollute the world like the rest of us.

Global warming is good for big business. According to Think Progress:

Global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions is rapidly melting the Arctic. Sea ice coverage this past March “was the lowest in winter since measurements by satellite began in the early 1970s,” and NASA-funded U.S. scientists believe in 30-50 years, “summer sea ice will have vanished from almost the entire Arctic region,” conditions not seen in the area in a million years.

For energy companies, this catastrophe means a “new era of oil and natural gas exploration in the region,” Greenwire reports:

The Arctic region contains a quarter of the world’s remaining oil reserves, experts estimate. It also contains massive natural gas fields in the Barents Sea, including Russia’s huge Shtokman field. “By 2040 or 2050, the Arctic Ocean will be navigable and that will mean significant developments very soon,” said ArcticNet research group head Martin Fortier.

European Environment Agency head Jacqueline McGlade warned that “the region’s opening could lead to another rush like the Klondike gold rush, which ‘could potentially destabilize’ the area and its 10 million indigenous inhabitants.”

One Republican Senator has said that global warming is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." And the Washington Post reported last year that "Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing."

Some climate experts are meeting this week Paris to take up the issue further. Is anyone listening?

World scientists meet on global warming By ANGELA CHARLTON, Associated Press Writer Scientists from around the world gathered Monday in Paris to finalize a long-awaited, authoritative report on climate change, expected to give a grim warning of rising temperatures and sea levels worldwide.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to unveil its latest assessment of the environmental threat posed by global warming on Friday.

As the panel meets, the planet is the warmest it has been in thousands of years — if not more — and international concern over what to do about it is at an all-time high.

"At no time in the past has there been such a global appetite" for reliable information on global warming, the panel's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri of India, told the conference.

Scientists are keeping quiet about the contents of the report, but say it is both more specific and more sweeping than the panel's previous efforts.

Early drafts of the document give a rosier picture than that of the last report, in 2001, foreseeing smaller sea level rises than previously predicted. But many top scientists reject the new figures as not new enough: They do not include the recent melting of big ice sheets in two crucial locations — Greenland and Antarctica.

That debate may be central at this week's meetings at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. After four days of closed-door, word-by-word editing involving more than 500 experts, they will release the first of four major global warming reports by the IPCC expected this year.

"We're hoping that it will convince people that climate change is real and that we have a responsibility for much of it, and that we really do have to make changes in how we live," said Kenneth Denman, one of the report's authors and senior scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis.

It has been an unusually warm winter in some parts of the world, and awareness of the consequences of climate change is growing.

Few people really know how government works. Sure, we have a President and a Congress and the court system, and the States have their counterparts, like the governor, a state legislature and state courts. But beyond that, what exactly do the government officials do all day? Many people really can't answer this question, which is why an extremely important and disturbing front page story in the New York Times today will be ignored immediately.

This topic is somewhat boring, but it affects our lives directly, particularly our health and also product safety and any other protection against unbridled greed. I'll try to make it interesting.

Here's the poop: when Congress passes a law, the Executive Branch has to enforce it. So all the agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and so on, are located within the Executive Branch. Everyone in these agencies reports to the President. The idea is that the people working in these agencies are supposed to be experts and civil servants who get the job based on merit. Since many of them work for the agency no matter who's president, they are supposed to work free from political pressure and know what they are doing.

To help them do their jobs, these civil servants draft regulations which guide their work. The regulations have the force of law but they have to be consistent with the laws passed by Congress.

When it comes to regulating and keeping an eye on private industry, it's regulations which help the agencies do their job. As you can imagine, since regulations are supposed to reign in and check corporate behavior, the more extreme elements of the private sector don't like regulations. So the phrase "deregulation" grows out of efforts by private industry to rid themselve of these regulations so they can make decisions without significant government oversight. Fewer regulations means more profits and corporate autonomy. The idea is to allow businesses to make money and service the public while at the same time allow the government agencies regulate their behavior in the interest of public health, safety, welfare, education, etc.

With that in mind, The New York Times today had the following story:

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats.

The White House said the executive order was not meant to rein in any one agency. But business executives and consumer advocates said the administration was particularly concerned about rules and guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The first parapragh of the story says it all: the President, through his flunkies, will have more influence over rules governing health, safety and the like. He wants to do this by having a political appointee supervising the regulatory process, particularly concerning the environment and workplace safety, two areas that affect us all. This is unheard of. Why have a political appointee supervise the rules and regulations that govern our lives? Probably so that the administration can work around laws and statutes and answer to the needs of his corporate base. There is no other reason. Political hacks are not needed in drafting and supervising regulations; experts are needed.

We know that the President's cozy relationship with big business is substantially affecting policies and government decisionmaking. Corporate lobbyists are helping to write laws that benefit them and big campaign donors get their way in general. Democrats are guilty of this also, but the general view is that Republicans are worse.

There has not been much discussion about this issue online today (but a good analysis is here), and the blogosphere has pretty much ignored it, but there is no issue more important than this. This new directive brings us closer to corporate-ocracy. The health and safety consequences will be felt for years to come.