Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Mitt Romney, Circa 1994

Should the conservatives' darling, Mitt Romney, win the Republican nomination, I’ll gladly buy more server space to let viewers hit this video.

Riverbend in Syria: Safe From the "Improved" Iraq Conflict

After reading about how things have “improved” in Iraq, I noticed that Riverbend has finally written again, now from Damascus. She brings alive the situation of millions of people displaced throughout the Middle East.

…I had resigned myself to the fact that we were
refugees. I read about refugees on the Internet
daily… in the newspapers… hear about them on
TV. I hear about the estimated 1.5 million plus
Iraqi refugees in Syria and shake my head,
never really considering myself or my family as
one of them. After all, refugees are people who
sleep in tents and have no potable water or
plumbing, right? Refugees carry their belongings
in bags instead of suitcases and they don’t have
cell phones or Internet access, right? Grasping
my passport in my hand like my life depended
on it, with two extra months in Syria stamped
inside, it hit me how wrong I was. We were all
refugees. I was suddenly a number. No matter
how wealthy or educated or comfortable, a
refugee is a refugee. A refugee is someone who
isn’t really welcome in any country- including
their own... especially their own…

The Turbococina: One Little Thing to Transform Lives

Sometimes it’s a little thing that makes all the difference in a person’s life.

I remember noticing the terrible deforestation during my first trip to El Salvador in the early 1990’s. The country had long been ravaged by civil war, fed by American funding, but one of the most prominent blights on the countryside had nothing to do with the war. Huge black scars on the land, made by slash and burn agriculture, and denuded forests, devastated by campesinos who needed wood to burn on their cooking hearths had taken a heavy toll everywhere we traveled.

El Salvador is a beautiful country, but it’s incredibly poor. In many areas, most of the people live below the poverty line. Nationally, it’s a major improvement that poverty is now below 40%. When I say poverty, I don’t mean housing projects and poorly paved roads. Poverty in El Salvador is of an entirely more serious order. In most of the land mass of this small country (about the size of Massachusetts), more than 10% of the children are underweight. Most people in the countryside live on small amounts of simple food, cooked in the open over wood fires and their homes are incredibly simple, made from whatever materials might be found nearby.

This background is what seems to have driven one Salvadoran man to spend a lifetime working on what seems a little thing: a stove. But it’s not just any stove. Rene Nunez’s Turbococina is a highly efficient burner of wood or other fuels, which leaves little to none of the emissions that cloud the air of Salvador’s villages. It also makes wood fuel, which is a scarce commodity in many villages, last for many times longer. The Turbococina uses 95% less fuel than the open fires most Salvadorans cook on today. But because of an apparent combination of funding problems and personal desperation on the part of the inventor, the stove remains out of mass production.

Marla Dickerson writes about Nunez and his invention in today’s LA Times. When you read about it, imagine the difference mass production of these stoves could make in developing countries and the difference it would make to the environment to keep open fires from bilging carbon pollution into Earth’s air. Imagine also the annual percentage of the 1.6 million people who currently die from indoor cooking fire pollution who might live.

Sometimes it’s a little thing that can make a big difference.

Sweeping Up Before the 2008 Slugfest/Mudfest

The upcoming general election in 2008 promises to be more vicious and dirty even than the Swift-Boating, Rather-firing, Ohio-fixing election of 2004. Particularly if the Republicans nominate Rudy Giuliani and the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, the stage will be set for a revisitation of Whitewater and the Lewinsky affair, complete with right-wing sing-along sessions of “The Witch is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz. We’ll probably hear the word witch transposed with another word starting with B as well.

On the other hand, Rudy Giuliani has taken preventive measures to begin securing any dirt that might be dusted off from his mayoral years here in New York. While New Yorkers know Rudy as a man who wasn’t afraid to break a few laws, or to work with those who made it a daily habit, most of the country knows him only as the caring “Americas Mayor” character who traveled the country on paid speaking tours post-9/11.

Frank Rich’s column today links to a Chicago Tribune article that details how the Giuliani campaign had all the mayor’s papers brought over to Giuliani Partners and “copied,” before being “returned” to the New York City archives, presumably “intact and complete.” No city official inventoried or copied the papers before they were carted out to Giuliani Partners, so no accounting will be ever done of papers that didn’t make it back.

In the light of the current City Council investigation into the fire radio scandal— you know, the one that resulted in FDNY firefighters entering the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 with the same inadequate transmitter/receivers that sparked a decade-long and crony-ridden effort to replace them after the 1993 Trade Center bombing— Rudy’s cleansing of his records was probably well timed.

Hillary will be an easier target. She’s been investigated back to her days as a young Governor’s wife and every ill-timed move or political favor she’s ever made is already in the playbook for the right-wing attack squads. Whether the Democrats decide to go with her as the standard-bearer or not, the race will turn on character assaults and dirty tricks. It will be interesting to see if Democratic and Republican primary voters want to relive the 90’s on both sides of the divide, however.

UN Climate Report to Hit Today

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue it’s third and conclusory report today. According to the NY Times, the report will be more alarming than the panel's previous papers and will outline some of the serious and likely consequences, including species extinction, of the current climate trends.

The report will also focus on some worst-case scenarios it previously shied away from. Some of these are incredibly dire.

One such area is the future melting of ice sheets
in Greenland and western Antarctica. In earlier
reports, the panel’s scientists acknowledged that
their computer models were poor at such
predictions, and did not reflect the rapid melting
that scientists have recently observed. If these
areas melt entirely, seas would rise 40 feet,
scientists said. While scientists are certain that
the sheets will melt over millennia, producing
sea-level rises, there is now evidence to suggest
that it could happen much faster than this,
perhaps over centuries.

“In my view that would make it not just difficult,
but impossible to adapt successfully, some of my
colleagues would say catastrophic,” said Dr.
Oppenheimer. “If they say that it’s possible that
melting could occur in centuries leading to
meters of change, that’s a headline.”

The UN report will precede upcoming international talks about climate change in Bali and will surely provide the primary basis for discussion about what international agreement will replace the Kyoto protocol. The US has not been a partner in the current Kyoto accords.

Real Security: Musharraf-Style

I thought that this excerpt from a letter by Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani lawyer under house arrest in Lahore. was a telling story. The entire letter was published in the Washington Post on Friday of last week. Perhaps some will also see in it a parable. It could be useful in thinking about the powers arrogated unto itself by our Executive in the war on terror.

Since Saturday, police officers have barged into my house
twice after receiving (false) warnings that I had escaped. On
seeing me, they sheepishly admitted they were misled.

I have tried to make them understand the difference between
people such as myself and terrorists. "If I did run away, how
far would I go?" I asked them. "In any event, I am not likely
to blow myself up around the corner." One police officer said
that he agreed but that his job was at greater risk if I got
away than if a terrorist escaped the law. Terrorists, he
pointed out, outnumber rights activists in our country.

The officer argued that lawyers and judges hamper law
enforcement. "How can we bring law and order if we cannot
torture criminals? We must be given a free hand to deal with
terrorists, and the chief justice has no business to ask us to
produce them in courts. We are itching to lay our hands on
all those judges who humiliated us for carrying out our
duties," he told me. When I asked how he knew who the
terrorists were, he insisted that the intelligence was infallible.

Yet he didn't know I hadn't escaped from my house.

Dems Deadlocked in Iowa: CBS Poll

Iowa voters appear to be bucking the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton has the Democratic nomination locked up. A CBS poll out today shows the top three Democrats, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama virtually deadlocked for the lead, with large numbers of voters yet to decide.

On the Republican side, the CBS poll shows Mike Huckabee surging against Mitt Romney, who has long led in Iowa.

Bush Stands With the New Marcos

Almost uncannily, support from the Bush Administration seems to be an inverse predictor of respect for foreign leaders. Today, as opposition leader Benazir Bhutto calls for General Pervez Musharraf to vacate his office as President of Pakistan, it is the continued backing of the United States that stands in relief against the rest of the world’s condemnation of Musharraf.

Even though the US Administration now calls for the General/President/Ruler to give up at least one of his titles and to legitimize his continued reign by conducting elections 'soon,' the U.S.’s designated opponent has gone past her sponsors' mandate by calling for his immediate departure. Bhutto realizes what the Bushies haven’t yet: that Musharraf is now so hated that he will never be able to rule with the consent of the population of Pakistan again.

However, our President stands alone among world leaders in coddling the man who would dictate his own terms for demmocracy. To him, it's all about backing his proxy in the war on terror. "He understands the stakes of the war, and I do believe he understands the importance of democracy," President Bush told the Fox Business Network today.

Wow. Did anyone say that about Ferdinand Marcos at the end?

Iowa and New Hampshire Voters, Please Pierce the 'Bubble'

This morning I was reading a post over at Steve Benen’s Carpetbagger Report about the tempest created by Senator Clinton’s staff getting caught asking an Iowa student to pose a canned question to Hillary about global warming. Benen’s thread seemed to dovetail with the post I wrote yesterday about the White House echo chamber that keeps the President from exploring real alternatives to the fixed views he already holds.

I don’t think that the attempt by Clinton’s staff to get a convenient question asked of their boss is at all in the same universe of self-containment as the virtually airless isolation chamber that the White House has long-since refined. Bushworld almost always manages to keep negative vibes away from the President as he travels the country and the world, no matter how cacophonous the scene may be just outside his hermetically sealed environment. Nonetheless, there is an element of canned background music in all presidential politics in our mainstream, muzak that goes well beyond Bush’s perfect bubble.

The Iowa and New Hampshire contests are probably the last time during presidential campaigns when the candidates still have to deal with the actual quirks of real people in a serious way— and the Clinton campaign was jumping the gun in priming their candidate to answer the “right questions” just a bit too early. I hope that the experience in these two states continues to thwart any organization’s attempt to prematurely escape from retail politics.

The accelerated primary schedule after Iowa and New Hampshire will tend to put leaders in the money race even farther ahead of the rest of the pack, but perhaps voters in Iowa and New Hampshire (and maybe South Carolina) can still have a retail impact on the contenders— by responding viscerally to the way candidates perform outside the bubble of paid media, canned responses, and constant bridging to their planned agendas.

So thanks to the student reporter at Grinnell who wrote about the plan to can the question— and thanks in advance to the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, who are our the bellwethers for all the B.S. we’ll be subjected to in the coming year. Hopefully, you will be able to cut through some of the hype and tell us what you really think of the crowd only you will see upclose and personally.

The President's Echo Chamber Allows Only Support for His War Policies, Even Among the Bereaved

In today’s NY Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes about the President’s intimate relationship with members of military families whose soldiers have perished on the Commander-in-Chief’s watch. The headline, “Bush and Relatives of Fallen Lean on Each Other,” indicates a close and open emotional bond between some of the military bereaved and the President. Stolberg’s article, however, also takes note of apparent screening of families by political handlers at the White House before putting them together with Bush.

While President Bush has opened his heart to some families of the fallen who have written to express their support for his war policies, those family members whose opinions are less sympathetic have mostly been excluded from the intimate Presidential gatherings. This isn’t a big surprise, given this Administration’s history of maintaining an echo chamber for the President, in which he hears only supportive voices, wherever he travels.

Having personally talked with military family members who oppose the Iraq War, I know there is a rich diversity of opinion about the conflict within the military community. Having also corresponded in particular with the sister of one soldier killed in Iraq, I have witnessed how deeply her anger cuts toward the President and the result of his policies. Hopefully, media coverage of military kin and their perspectives will continue to reflect to the President that his minions have taken pains to avoid exposing him to the fullness of familial feelings against his prosecution of a bitter and unpopular war.

Stolberg’s article includes an interview with a family member who opposes the Iraq War:

Bill Adams, who has been leading war protests
in Lancaster, Pa., wrote Mr. Bush a letter — not
to praise the president, but to question the
military’s account of the death of his son, Brent.
When Mr. Bush held a town-hall-style meeting
in Lancaster last month, Mr. Adams asked a
friend with a ticket to deliver his missive to the
president. It worked, and a top aide to Mr. Bush
later called Mr. Adams.

But when the president met families of the fallen
that day in Lancaster, it did not escape Mr.
Adams’s notice that he was not among them.

“I can’t help but be left with the suspicion that
possibly his advance team screened those
families for people who would be sympathetic,”
Mr. Adams said. Given the chance, he said, he
would have told Mr. Bush “that my son’s life was
squandered.”

One wishes that Presidential advance teams, who now screen out kin like Mr. Adams, will in the future at least include his opinions in their daily digests of press coverage they put in front of the President.

While hoping for better Presidential perspective, maybe we can also hope that in the future, Times headline writers for articles like Stolberg’s will be more reflective of the content of the piece, rather than simply spinning a warm and sympathetic glow, like today's page-one headline bestowed on Stolberg’s more evenhanded reporting.

The heading on the page 12 continuation of the story was actually more balanced than the one that ran on the front page. It read, “Bush and Some Relatives of Fallen Are Leaning on Each Other.”