Bill's Big Diamond Blog

News Notes

Two news notes from this morning:

1- The Weather Channel is launching a new program series, “Climate Code,” that will focus on global warming. Dr Heidi Cullen will host the half-hour program. The tag line for the ad campaign is, “The problem is global. The solution is possible.” Should be interesting to see if the program sparks greater awareness and action among weather junkies.

2- A large majority of reporters queried believe the situation in Iraq is best now characterized as a civil war. Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith told NPR’s “On the Media” that it would be hard to describe a conflict in which 30-40,000 citizens are dying annually in any other way. Listen to the full NPR story at the program website to hear thoughts on why calling the conflict anything else might be shading the story in ways that will prolong both the Iraqi and American agony there.

CORRECTION- It was actually Larry Diamond, a former advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and a Senior Fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, who mentioned the 30-40,000 dead per year as an argument for using the term civil war. Former Ambassador Galbraith also strenuously argues that the situation is indeed a civil war.

Vituperative? ...Well, Sometimes... But Still Hopeful

Why we blog…

As usual, few say it better than Will Bumch. With apologies to David Broder, who I once admired as well.

Citgo Must Go...We'll Fry With Exxon-Mobil!

Boston City Councilman Jerry McDermott is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. He wants the giant Citgo sign over by Fenway Park taken down. The Houston-based company purveying Venzuelan oil is really pissing him off.

When he was a kid on the way to Fenway, McDermott said, "you'd be sitting in the bus and you would see the sign and you knew you were close." But, he said, the sign "doesn't have the reverence that it once did." McDermott added: "It's a corporation that is funding activities against this country, and we should take heed. I don't see why this symbol of foreign aggression should be emblazoned against the sky of Boston."

Apparently, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ comments at the UN about the smell of ‘El Diablo’ Bush’s after-aroma at the podium were just too much for the Boston pol. He’s angrier at the left-wing populist this season than he is at Red Sox management for failing to secure reliable starting pitching.

On the other hand, Exxon-Mobil’s incessant paid advertisements contesting the reality of global warming have gotten little attention from politicians who want to selectively turn off the branding lights at major landmarks. Talk about the scorching hellfire and sulfuric smells…

Kinda’ makes you wonder… what really makes for offensive speech? Bad manners or big lies?

Can You Say, "Disenfranchisement?"

This from an article in today’s NY Times on new ID requirements in state voting laws:

In Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest in
population, election officials said that 35 percent
of new registrations were rejected for
insufficient proof of citizenship last year and
that 17 percent had been rejected so far this year.
It is not known how many of the rejected
registrants were not citizens or were unable to
prove their citizenship because they had lost or
could not locate birth certificates and other
documents.

In Indiana, Daniel J. Parker, chairman of the
state Democratic Party, said: “Close to 10
percent of registered voters here do not have
driver’s licenses. Who does that impact most?
Seniors and minorities.”

NIE on Iraq

This morning I heard an NPR report that makes the National Intelligence Estimate conclusions published in yesterday’s NY Times all the more interesting to imagine through the lens of the White House.

It’s not news to the rest of us that the war in Iraq has spawned a new and reinvigorated generation of global jihadists— at least not to anyone who reads the news.

But the NPR report makes it clear that the NIE is not simply a report of what a study group at the CIA or the NSA thinks— it’s the consensus opinion of the heads of ALL the US intelligence agencies.

What must the siege mentality be like at the White House when all of its intelligence chiefs now publicly repudiate the logic of the President’s war?

Just wondering…

A Spoonful of Sugar...

Sometimes you just have to take your political bile with a little dose of humor. It goes down better.

Dan Tynan found a friendly way to respond to Disney and “The Path to 9/11.” It serves as a nice bookend to President Clinton’s ripping of Chris Wallace over the wingnut revisionist US/Al Qaeda history now in stores everywhere.

By the way, according to Juan Cole, Osama’s still free— and not dead. Must be Clinton's fault...

UPDATE: As we ponder the wrestling to rewrite the history of Al Qaeda’s evolution and the ‘seriousness’ of the US government’s campaign to root it out, Glenn Greenwald’s post today strikes me as worth reading.

Greenwald closes with the following:

…worse than the endless political exploitation of 9/11
attached to the most transparently hypocritical protests
that 9/11 must never be politicized (all of that is old
news) is the sheer ineptitude of the administration's
efforts to capture the individual we have long been told
is responsible for the slaughter of several thousand
innocent people (and scores of other attacks in pursuit
of the War of Civilizations).

Our country's handling of the Al Qaeda terrorist threat
is as inept and just pitifully incompetent as its handling
of the war in Iraq (and, as the consensus of the
intelligence community recognizes, nothing has done
more to worsen than former than the latter). But the
media will tell you time and again that it is a "great win"
for Republicans whenever terrorism is discussed
because they are so tough and powerful with the
terrorists and only they are serious enough to protect us.
Whatever Bush followers might be when it comes to
terrorism, "serious" is not one of them.

Torture...Compromise...Torture...Compromise...

Marty Lederman at Balkinization clears up what little confusion might have been left about the torture compromise in the Senate.

What’s more vague? The Geneva Convention or a clarification that requires a flow chart of dastardly activities with maze-like arrows and boxes to explain it?

On the other hand, Jeralyn Merritt goes with the even simpler, “prohibition of judicial review is enough to earn a filibuster.”

Meanwhile, Joy Reid points to the language that gives immunity to anyone (I suppose all the way up to the top) who has violated the Geneva Convention to-date.

Well, any bets that Senate Democrats will muster up the courage to fight a bill that puts the words “torture” and “compromise” in the same sentence?

UPDATE- Also worth reading at this point in the torture ‘compromise’ is Vladimir Bukovsky’s 2005 Op-Ed on the subject, which Bukovsky can speak about firsthand — viaRandy Paul at Beautiful Horizons.

An excerpt:

As someone who has been on the receiving end of the
"treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying
to make a distinction between torture and CID (NOTE-
CID refers to “cruel, inhumane and degrading” –
Geneva Convention wording) techniques is ridiculous.
Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the
nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A
simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress
and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night
after night after night…

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and
used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well,
congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method
that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular
confessions in Stalin's "show trials" of the 1930s. The
henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was
interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a
wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any
confession without even understanding what he had
signed.

As Iraq Burns... Headlines in the US Turn Away

… In forgotten news today, the war in Iraq continues to go swimmingly—for the enemies of democracy and pluralism.

While the US press largely follows the distractions of the election-season noise machine... on Iran... and now about the ‘devil’ and Hugo Chavez— another 32 Iraqis were blown to smithereens while waiting to buy gas in Baghdad yesterday.

Richard Cranium points out in the All Spin Zone that the even murkier picture behind the bombing reflects the broken economic situation in Iraq: everyone on line beside the targeted tanker truck was waiting to buy black market gas. Oil prices in the country whose oil resources are legendary are so high that people would rather wait beside the tanker than pay the prices at the licensed gas stations.

Wonder how this could be?

Well, the militias are the key— and while earning their approximately $1 million US per day through crime and black marketeering, they, “control … many petrol stations ... The Mahdi Army is the largest and most powerful of the Shiite militias in Baghdad, with an estimated 10,000 members.

"You see the guards around the petrol stations," (intelligence officer) Colonel Brown said. "It is easy for them to sell 40 litres of gas then give only 35 litres.""

The situation in Baghdad has deteriorated to the point where much of the Iraqi army no longer even responds to orders to leave their post to join operations there. Baghdad is run by the militias.

Welcome to democracy.

Thanks to Juan Cole for the daily references.

Citizen Power and Global Warming

...But seriously folks, the phenomenon Lovelock (via Billmon) describes in the previous post is not so outlandish. Global warming is virtually assured to be under way. The only real question is: Can we slow/stop it?

I submit that the wisest assumption is that we can lick global warming. I say this not because I’m a scientist and have personally weighed the data, but because I’m a human being and have an interest in living to a ripe old age as well as in seeing my grandchildren grow up. It’s a beautiful planet that we live on— and it would be a shame to have to leave it so soon.

I would prefer to believe that this problem is soluble, much like the problem of ozone depletion. Holes in Earth’s ozone layer, having grown rapidly because of human use of chlorofluorocarbons, seemed destined to wipe out Earth’s protective shield from the Sun’s most damaging effects. Despite that, humans, having created the rupture in the ozone layer, found the means to correct it and the will to do so. International agreements changed the way we did business in chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone layer is healing again.

One huge stumbling block standing between humanity and a solution to the global warming crisis, however, is enormity of the problem and the mentality of powerlessness and consequent denial. There’s a tendency, rampant in a postmodern age, to assume that people don’t matter, except in our totality as a culture. This outlook makes it alluring to pass on our personal responsibility to change the culture, since each of us make up such an infinitesimal part of mass culture as to be statistically insignificant individually.

Ironically, however, progress in a culture must begin with an assumption that change is possible. It’s my belief that individually, we are unlikely to cause great unilateral change, but that as individuals, we can influence others— and by making ourselves heard, can create ripples that grow into waves when amplified.

Ideally, we can leverage democracy to cause shared resources to be brought to bear against great problems. Global warming is the best example I can imagine of this. In order to create real change in the production of greenhouse gases, we need to make changes to the economic equation. This requires governmental action. In order to get action, we need to create change in the balance of power.

The government we now have in the United States is beholden to oil interests, which shortsightedly want to maximize their profits at the expense of our future existence. To preserve the planet, not to mention our foreign policy and our economy, this alliance must be broken.

The bad news is that no other long-term goals can be achieved if we are unsuccessful in combating global warming. The good news is that the same basic political changes we need to make in order to address issues of justice, peace, and economic equity are the first changes we need to make in order to address global warming as well. We can fight global warming and accomplish changes in our political culture too. In fact, we must do the latter in order to address the former.

It’s an election season— and despite all the silliness that accompanies the ramp-up to Election Day, there are indeed deadly serious issues at stake. The gravity of global warming is one huge reason to vote and to be involved, not a reason to be overwhelmed. The stakes are too high to surrender to postmodern denial.

Feel Better?

Billmon is trying to make us all feel better about the future.

Unfortunately, he’s quoting James Lovelock on the end of life as we know it and he's usually right.