I thought Hillary wouldn't answer hypothetical questions

Continuing her unfortunate habit of embracing the Republican talking points, Hillary Clinton declares that another terrorist attack on the U.S. will benefit the same incompetents who let the first one happen.

"It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world," Clinton told supporters in Concord.

"So I think I'm the best of the Democrats to deal with that," she added.

I'm not sure why she considers herself the best Democrat to deal with that. (If she explained herself, the NY Post didn't bother to tell us). We all know that the first reaction of the Republicans will be to blame Bill Clinton for destroying the U.S. military.

We know that, because that's what they're doing right now.

Here's Mitt Romney, casually ignoring the fact that almost 7 years have passed since Bill was in charge and that George Bush Junior has been given carte blanche to rebuild the military as he sees fit:

After President George H. W. Bush left office, in 1993, the Clinton administration began to dismantle the military, taking advantage of what has been called a "peace dividend" from the end of the Cold War. It took a dividend, but we did not get the peace. It seems that our leaders had come to believe that war and security threats were gone forever; as Charles Krauthammer observed, we took a holiday from history.

Here's Fred Thompson, echoing the same quote by Krauthammer:

Our country was not prepared for our current situation. We took a holiday from history in the 90’s. We cut our military, our procurement and our research and development. Now our military is stretched too thin. We are wearing out our equipment. Our intelligence capabilities are inadequate.

And here's Rudy Giuliani, explicitly blaming Bill Clinton for the attacks on 9/11:

"Islamic terrorists killed more than 500 Americans before Sept. 11. Many people think the first attack was on Sept. 11, 2001. It was not. It was in 1993," said the former mayor.

"The United States government, then President Clinton, did not respond," Giuliani said. "(Osama) bin Laden declared war on us. We didn't hear it."

h/t TPMCafe

Rudy Giuliani defines "fiscal conservatism"

I had a surplus once but I spended it.

Mayor Giuliani “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.” ... and then turned that into a $4.8 billion deficit.

The Giuliani campaign defended the advertisement, noting that it merely states that Mr. Giuliani created a multibillion-dollar surplus, not that he passed one on to his successor.

Rudy cut taxes, increased spending, and raided the city's pension fund. The plan worked great while the economy was booming. Then the stock market collapsed. Then 9/11 changed everything.

The Norwegians solve global warming

Illustrating the human habit of being overcareful about trivial things and undercareful about important ones, millions of Norwegians are apparently worried that the country's moose population is responsible for global warming.

The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year -- equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey.

But don't worry the country has a solution:

Norway has some 120,000 moose but an estimated 35,000 are expected to be killed in this year's moose hunting season, which starts on September 25, Norwegian newspaper VG reported.

Norway has about 4.5 million people and roughly 2 million cars. So unless the Norse drive less than 1,000 kilometers a year on average (620 miles American), they need to find a different scapegoat.

Warner calls for pullout by winter (of 2039)

John Warner is getting a lot of credit in the press for his "sharp and clear message" suggesting that it would be nice if the president pulled a few troops from Iraq by Christmas.

In a misleadingly titled article ("Warner Calls for Pullouts by Winter") the Washington Post quotes exactly what the senior Republican moderate considers a significant change in course.

"I can think of no clearer form of that than if the president were to announce on the 15th that, in consultation with our senior military commanders, he's decided to initiate the first step in a withdrawal of armed forces," Warner said. "I say to the president respectfully, 'Pick whatever number you wish.' . . . Say, 5,000 could begin to redeploy and be home to their families and loved ones no later than Christmas of this year. That's the first step."

5000 troops brought home by Christmas. At that rate, we'll be out of Iraq in 32 years.

But only if the president really thinks we should do that, of course.

Hurricane Dean crosses the Yucatan

From NASA's Earth Observatory

Just the right number of troops in Iraq

It's strange how, these days, everyone realizes that the Iraq war is stretching the military to the breaking point.

After all it wasn't very long ago that senior administration officials were telling us that we had millions of troops to draw upon.

Condoleeza Rice, September 2005:

SECRETARY RICE: There were, I think as of today, more than 70,000 forces in the Louisiana area. So we have an active and reserve and guard force of 2.5 million people; 139,000 people are in Iraq. So this is just not an argument that holds water. What is the question is how we better coordinate and decide when federal resources of this magnitude are going to be brought to bear.

Donald Rumsfeld, January 2006:

"And there isn't any reason in the world why we shouldn't be able to maintain, with an active and reserve total force ... of over 2 million people, why we shouldn't be able to maintain 138,000" troops in Iraq, he said.

We didn't send 150,000 Americans to Iraq because that's all we had. We sent 150,000 Americans to Iraq because that was the perfect number. This was the operative argument right up until the elections last November.

Rumsfeld again, January 2005:

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, there’s of course a debate going on in our country as to whether or not the number of troops is the right number...

The one place there is not a varying opinion on that is among the general officers who are responsible for providing the U.S. military effort in Iraq. ... everyone of them believes that the goal is not to increase the number of troops because then we’d look more and more like an occupying force. We have more and more people that could be attacked. It takes more and more force protection people, more and more logistics support people. And their unanimous recommendation to the president and to me has been that what we want to do is to have right about this – we went from about 140,000 up to 153,000 during this election period, after the election bring down that number and work with the coalition over the period ahead to adjust the force levels downward towards whatever the security situation may or may not require.

From the Heritage Foundation, July 2006:

In Vietnam, the United States employed a flawed strategy referred to as “graduated pressure.” The idea behind this was that increasing levels of military force, applied incrementally, could ultimately push the North Vietnamese to some abstract breaking point, achieving victory for the U.S. and South Viet­nam. The strategy focused on mini­mizing costs rather than winning the war, relied on faulty assumptions about the enemy’s psychology, and, most of all, offered no real solutions about how to defeat the Communists other than essentially throwing more troops at the problem.

Free Speechless Zones

Protecting the president from all criticism has been an obsession with this White House.

From the Presidential Advance Manual (stamped "Sensitive - Do Not Copy"):

The first step to keeping demonstrators out of events, the manual tells the president's event staff, is to encourage the Secret Service to "ask the local police department to designate a protest area...preferably not in view of the event site or the motorcade route."

Protest areas and "free speech zones" have no place in American society. Their only purpose is to protect the powerful and muzzle dissent.

Also in the document, we learn the true purpose of rally squads.

These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstators. The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA! USA! USA!).

As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site.

For large rallies... at least one squad should be 'roaming' throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems.

via Americablog

George Bush's plan to run out the clock on Iraq (part 2)

Just in case anyone is still wondering what the purpose of the surge is:

One administration official made it clear that the goal of the planned announcement was to counter public pressure for a more rapid reduction and to try to win support for a plan that could keep American involvement in Iraq on “a sustainable footing” at least through the end of the Bush presidency.

It's not about a defeating al Qaeda or getting the Iraqis to form a democratic government. It's about saving George Bush's pride. The president only cares that he won't be the one who has to make the hard decision to call an end to this fiasco.

Many Republicans have urged Mr. Bush to unveil a new strategy, and even to propose a gradual reduction of American troops to the levels before this year’s troop increase — about 130,000 — or even lower to head off Democratic-led efforts to force the withdrawal of all combat forces by early next year.

That's about the number of troops we had in Iraq in June of 2005.
Of course, this is just business as usual for this White House:

"We should gum this to death," Sampson wrote to a White House aide on Dec. 19. "[A]sk the senators to give Tim a chance . . . then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in 'good faith,' of course."

Mitt Romney gets 373 votes in Illinois straw poll

Or 40.4% as he prefers to describe it.

Non-candidate Fred Thompson came in second with 184 votes and blog favorite Ron Paul came in third with 174 votes.

Notable by his poor showing was Mike Huckabee, whose second place finish at Ames gave him some positive press. He only received 28 votes at the Illinois fair.

You wouldn't expect much excitement at such a poorly attended event. But apparently, Ron Paul is getting under the skin of Romney's campaign committee:

Paul's libertarian stylings and campaign of strict interpretation of the Constitution has earned him an unorthodox band of sign-carrying supporters. They frequently interrupted TV reports of the event and at one point, Romney's Illinois chairman, state Sen. Dan Rutherford (R-Chenoa), ripped a sign out of one Paul supporter's hands and threw it on the ground.

What's a "seismic bump"?

A term most of us have probably never heard before, has been popping up a lot today after several rescue workers were killed trying to find survivors in the Crandall Canyon Mine.

In simple terms a seismic bump occurs when the stresses caused by mining aren't properly compensated. It's one of the reasons we need well enforced safety regulations in this hazardous line of work.

Bumps occur when too much stress builds on mine support structures. Often the mine's roof and floor are strong, so what gives under the pressure is the coal, usually on the support pillars. It can cause the floor and roof to buckle, too.

It's a benign name for something that explodes like a hand grenade. Mine "bumps'' shoot high-speed coal and rock at anyone in the way as support pillars buckle.

This is not related to earthquakes or natural seismicity, despite the efforts of some (like Utah Senator Orrin Hatch) to claim otherwise:

"You use the best technology you can, you do best you possibly can. You hope natural disasters don't occur, like did occur. I don't think anybody could say it's anything but a natural disaster," Hatch said.

Actually, people who know earthquakes are saying it wasn't a natural disaster.

It'd be nice if the Senator was as concerned about the safety of mine workers as he is about the welfare of mine owners.

h/t Schreinervideo

Tony Snow earns $168,000 a year

As of 2007, according to the White House staff list at the Washington Post.

I only mention this because some of you might have gotten the impression that Press Secretary might be a volunteer position, given his recent comment to Hugh Hewitt:

SNOW: No, I’m not going to be…I’ve already made it clear I’m not going to be able to go the distance, but that’s primarily for financial reasons. I’ve told people when my money runs out, then I’ve got to go.

I'm not sure what he spends his money on, but for comparison, that puts him in the top 5% of U.S. earners. It's over 3 times the median salary and it's 65% higher than the the average for those with Professional and Doctoral degrees ( doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, etc. )

His assistant, Dana Perino, makes over $141,000.

Hillary Clinton: First choice of conservative Republicans

It's pretty incredible given the years of Hillary hatred on the right but she's now their favorite liberal. Conservatives are arguing, "If you must vote for a Democrat for God's sake vote for Hillary".

First came Rupert Murdoch, magnate of the FOX news empire.

Murdoch to host fundraiser for Hillary Clinton

One media lobbyist said: “Murdoch will be for the Republicans but he is also smart enough to know that the Republicans might not win. At some level, whether nationally or in New York, Hillary is the future and what savvy businessman would not want to put a line of interest in someone who will be the future?”

And now we have neoconservative icon Bill Kristol singing her praises.

William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, sounded more effusive. "Obama," he said, "is becoming the antiwar candidate, and Hillary Clinton is becoming the responsible Democrat who could become commander in chief in a post-9/11 world."

But why would conservatives, to whom Hillary has come to personify everything that's wrong with the left, pick her as their best hope?

First, given the hard times the Republicans have fallen on, they realize that she's may be their best bet. With the possible exception of Joe Biden, she's the most conservative candidate on the Democratic side.

Here's Bruce Bartlett.

Having come to this realization, it became necessary to judge the Democratic field to determine which candidate would be the least bad from my point of view. I concluded that Hillary Clinton was less objectionable that the others. She appeared to be a clone of her husband on economic policy--which is good as far as I am concerned--and a realist on foreign policy. Given the choices facing us, I concluded that conservatives ought to consider supporting Hillary in order to ensure that a more liberal candidate such as Barack Obama or John Edwards didn't become our next president.

Republicans hated Bill because he kept stealing their ideas, not because he was a radical leftist. Now they're worried that the choice is between a triangulator and an liberal ideologue.

They also think she's more of an opportunist than an idealist - she might be happy just to get the brass ring. Ross Douthat:

As a conservative, I see this as an advertisement for a Clinton presidency, not a mark against her candidacy. I like my liberal Presidents to offer "no big ideas, no crusading causes" - particularly after eight years of George W. Bush, Big Thinker.

... And yet, and yet. She has a real record now, and it's no more left-wing than her rivals, and a good deal more restrained. Whether you're a libertarian like Andrew or a social conservative like me, you're not going to be wild about any Democratic president. But better a liberal "Nixon in a Pant Suit," I often think - and whatever her pathologies they can't hold a candle to Tricky Dick's - than the liberal, realigning Reagan that Obama has an outside chance of turning out to be.

Moderate Republicans see in her a bit of themselves. Here's Andrew Sullivan, who dislikes Hillary, but can still identify with her on a fundamental level:

I've written before that Clinton's relentless sensibleness on many issues - including the war, where her own journey has been in the same direction as mine - makes her hard to oppose.

And finally, for the far right, there's the war. Hillary is the only Democrat running who hasn't completely repudiated the case for the Iraq war.

(Rich Lowry)

In those moments in the Democratic debates that have offered a choice between saying what the pacifist left wants to hear or saying what someone who might someday be president should say, she has done the latter. Her default mode is seriousness, and all her preparation shows. When she was asked in the most recent debate about the possibility of nearly three decades of a Bush or Clinton in the While House, I found myself commenting to a friend, “Watch — she’ll hit this out of the park.” Which she did with a joke about regretting that Bush won in 2000.

(Fred Barnes)

There was a key moment, however, and once again it pitted Clinton, the New York senator, against Barack Obama, her counterpart from Illinois. The question was whether they'd promise to meet in the first year of their presidency with the leaders of such enemy nations as Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, and Syria.

"I would," Obama said, foolishly showing his inexperience, and perhaps his naivete as well, in foreign affairs. After all, he said, President Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and still talked to Soviet leaders. "I think it's a disgrace we haven't talked" to leaders of the five anti-American countries, Obama said.

(Charles Krauthammer)

From the Nation's David Corn to super-blogger Mickey Kaus, a near-audible gasp. For Hillary Clinton, next in line at the debate, an unmissable opportunity. She pounced: "I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year." And she proceeded to give the reasons any graduate student could tick off: You don't want to be used for their propaganda. You need to know their intentions. Such meetings can make the situation worse.

Just to make sure no one missed how the grizzled veteran showed up the clueless rookie, the next day Clinton told the Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa, that Obama's comment "was irresponsible and frankly naive.

None of these men will vote for Clinton. With the exception of Andrew Sullivan, they look at the Democratic field and think, "she's a person I could vote for, but I'd rather have a real Republican".

Deep down they believe Hillary is the smart move for Republicans. She motivates their base helping Republicans generally, but if she wins, she's still the most conservative Democrat. It keeps the debate shifted to the right.

And they dream of a rematch in 2012.

The magnitude 7.9 Peruvian earthquake

A magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck Peru 90 miles south of Lima causing significant shaking and a small tsunami. So far (6:10 GMT) it's been followed by 10 aftershocks larger than magnitude 5.0. The quake struck at the junction of two oceanic plates near the location of two previous magnitude 8 events (1908 and 1974). The USGS map below shows the area of greatest intensity.



"There was a pretty big, intense, long-wave earthquake," a woman named Erica in Lima told APTN television. "You could see all the buildings here in San Isidro and the glass shaking."

Huge drop in casualties or deja vu all over again?

August 2007:

U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't support the claim.

Let's hope it's true. But there is reason to suspect the official count if it's not backed up by specifics.


September 2006:

It turns out the official toll of violent deaths in August was just revised upwards to 1535 from 550, tripling the total. Now, we’re depressingly used to hearing about deaths here, so much so that the numbers can be numbing. But this means that a much-publicized drop-off in violence in August - heralded by both the Iraqi government and the US military as a sign that a new security effort in Baghdad was working - apparently didn’t exist. […] Violent deaths now appear roughly in line with the earlier trend: 1855 in July and 1595 in June.

And why was the count so low?

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

500 Iraqis may be dead because of a blood feud

Virtually everyone is pointing fingers after the recent suicide bombings that has killed at least 250 people in northern Iraq. Americans blame al Qaida (in Iraq). Shiite leaders blame the Sunni insurgency, and Kurds put the blame on the battle for northern oil fields. But according to McClatchy it may be the latest shot in a religious vendetta.

U.S. officials blamed al Qaida in Iraq, a Sunni Muslim extremist group that has targeted American troops, Iraqi government forces and Shiite Muslim civilians. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite, blamed Sunni extremists. Kurdish officials said the blast was part of the jockeying between Kurds and Arabs for control of northern Iraq, though Nineveh province lies outside the Kurdish autonomous region.

Many, however, said the blast appeared to be the latest spasm in a blood feud that erupted earlier this year when members of Iraq's non-Muslim Yazidi ethnic minority stoned to death a teenage girl they accused of dating a Sunni Arab man and converting to Islam.

The brutal death of Doaa Khalil Aswad, 17, in April was captured on video by cell phone. Stomach-turning images of her writhing as she was beaten and pelted with stones by hundreds of young Yazidi men spread across the Internet.

Two weeks later, 23 Yazidi men were taken from a bus and executed.

Southern Justice: Tennessee frees a convicted killer

67 days for murder?

The woman convicted of manslaughter in the shotgun slaying of her minister husband was freed Tuesday after serving 67 days in custody.

I thought only ACLU loving, Northeastern states were this soft on confessed killers.

She even remembered holding the shotgun later that morning. But she insisted she had no recollection of what happened thereafter, until she saw her dying husband lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

Her testimony contrasted sharply with the prosecution's portrayal of Mary as a calculated killer who shot her husband after he confronted her with a check-kiting scheme she had become involved in. Matthew, according to the prosecution, was a loving husband, caring father and beloved minister.

Because there was no dispute that Mary shot Matthew, the jury was faced with deciding first whether it believed Mary and, if so, whether the physical, verbal and sexual abuse excused her husband's murder.

Basra: how not to make an exit from Iraq

For a picture of what a poorly planned American pullout might look like, look no farther than Basra:

Attacks on British forces in Basra are soaring. Deaths and injuries are higher than any time since the invasion.

The [British base at the Basra airport] has become a shooting gallery for Iraqi insurgents. British forces are housed in tents, many near the airport tower which is visible from well beyond the heavily defended airport perimeter. Insurgents using 107mm or 120mm rockets, fired from old drainpipes or other makeshift launchpads, simply aim at the tower and hope to cause mayhem in the camp.

Basra is the major city in oil rich southern Iraq. Controlled by the majority Shiites, the battles in Basra are dominated by factional power struggles, not the ethnic slaughter currently seen in Baghdad. The small Sunni community along with intellectuals and teachers is being driven out by the militias.

Earlier this year, Tony Blair decided to call it quits and begin pulling out completely. But that hasn't spared British troops who largely remain confined to the airport.

Basra, mind you, is Dick Cheney's idea of a success story:

"The British have done what is really the plan for the country as a whole, which is to be able to transfer security responsibilities to the Iraqis, as conditions permit," Cheney said. "What I see is an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well."

This also lends the lie to the idea that a "soft partition" along ethnic lines would prevent the collapse of Iraq into civil war. Ethnic rivalries are only the most obvious conflicts to those of us on the outside. The Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds are themselves divided into hostile factions who target each other as often as they target anyone else.

Couldn't we just get rid of the electoral college?

California Republicans, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger's lawyer are the latest in a string of partisans who would like to guarantee that their team wins the presidency regardless of the whims of the little people:

Instead of laboring in vain to turn California Red, a clever lawyer for the state Republican Party thought of a gimmicky shortcut. Thomas Hiltachk, who specializes in ballot referenda that try to fool people in the titles and fine print, is sponsoring a ballot initiative for the June 3, 2008, California primary (which now falls four months after the state's presidential primary). The Presidential Election Reform Act would award the state's electoral votes based on who wins each congressional district. Had this idea been in effect in 2004, Bush would have won 22 electoral votes from California, about the same number awarded the winners of states like Illinois or Pennsylvania. In practical terms, adopting the initiative would mean that the Democratic candidate would likely have to win both Ohio and Florida in 2008 (instead of one or the other) to be elected.

The strategy is a simple one. Take 40% of the electoral votes in states dominated by the opposition party, add 100% of the electoral votes in states dominated by your own party and suddenly you've got a system where an extremely unpopular candidate could win the presidency while losing by 10 or 20 million votes nationwide.

Partisans who cheer the effort when it works to their advantage are typically outraged when the other guy pulls the same stunt:

North Carolina appears headed to becoming the third state in the nation to abandon the winner-take-all method for awarding its electoral votes as the House tentatively agreed Thursday to shelf the method.

Republicans called the change a cheap way to give Democrats, who have been shut out in North Carolina since 1980, some electoral votes.

"This is clearly a partisan bill. There's no question about that," said Rep. Leo Daughtry, R-Johnston. "You've got to change the law to make it an advantage."

Not that Republicans wouldn't trade a few votes in North Carolina for a couple of dozen in California.

And of course, partisans like the idea of a national popular vote even less than the current system. Governor Schwarzenegger, who hasn't taken a position on his lawyer's scheme (and denies being involved personally) vetoed a bill that would have given California's sizeable electoral to the overall winner.

So long, Johnny, we hardly knew ye

What's that?...........It's Tommy Thompson?.......... Seriously?

We may lose in Afghanistan because George Bush got bored

For an example of the number one reason critics opposed the Iraq war from the start.

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator drone spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

Unfortunately, Afghanistan remains the forgotten front, even as the Taliban rebuilds and the Afghan population tire of being caught between American guns and their targets.

In all the posturing about expanding or ending the Iraq war, few in the Congress and none in the Executive branch make any mention of the risk that we could lose on both fronts.

How do they know it wasn't caused by an earthquake?

Much to the chagrin of Robert Murray, CEO of the company that owns the Utah mine where 6 workers are trapped; scientists have confirmed that the collapse was not caused by an earthquake. The magnitude 3.9 event was the collapse itself.

Murray insisted there was no way the collapse was not caused by an earthquake - "It was a natural disaster and I'll prove it to you" - even though a federal geologist said Tuesday evening the collapse was absolutely not caused by an earthquake

Murray spent as much time attacking union workers, environmentalists and global warming theory as he did addressing the concerns of the miner's families so he's hardly a sympathetic figure.

Still, how do seismologists really know that there was no earthquake?

By looking at the data from seismometers, scientists can determine how the energy emerged from the source. In simple terms, if all the energy is expanding outward you've got an explosion, all the energy moving inwards identifies an implosion or collapse. Earthquakes slip along faults and some of the energy moves outwards, some inwards in a characteristic pattern called a double-couple.

Scientists at the Berkeley Seismology Lab looked at the data from 16 nearby instruments and the identified the source as a collapse. In the figure above earthquakes fall in the blue region, explosions in the red, and collapses in the green. The Utah event, indicated by the red star, falls well outside the earthquake zone.

Climatologists make a near term prediction

....Plan for warmer weather soon.

Because of the complexity of the Earth system, most forecasts of climate change are long-range predictions. External forcing becomes dominant over the long term (decades to centuries), but in the near term natural signals such as El Nino play a larger role. Now a new method which includes the initial state of the ocean and atmosphere and accounts for this natural variability provides improved near term forecasts:

From news@nature:

When called on to forecast the coming decade, [the Decadal Climate Prediction System] produced a 10-year temperature curve distinctly different from those predicted by conventional models. The curve is based on 20 different model runs starting on 20 different days in 2005, each with its own set of initial conditions.

If the model is correct, in the next few years natural variability — mainly in factors affecting the heat content of the ocean — will offset some of the climate warming resulting from humanity's greenhouse emissions. But global warming will be taking only a brief breather: [at least] half the years from 2009 to 2014 will be warmer than 1998, which is currently the warmest year on record.

Those with subscriptions to Science can read the original paper here.

Petraeus: what's a couple of missing weapons

..when you've got a crackerjack force like the Iraqi military.

These comments are infuriating:

"Some percentage" of weapons the U.S. military provided to the Iraqi army and Iraqi police units were not tracked by serial number because there were no procedures in place to do so within the Iraqi units, Petraeus said in an interview broadcast last night on Fox News Radio's "Alan Colmes Show."

From a practical standpoint, Petraeus added, it was more important to get the weapons to the Iraqis as they started to enter the fight against a strong insurgency than it was to keep meticulous records.

Of course the worry is that we've been arming the insurgency ourselves all this time. That Iraqi units have either gone AWOL, sold their weapons on the black market, acted as death squads against rival factions or turned those guns on American soldiers.

Hillary Clinton: How could you possibly doubt me?

Hillary Clinton: “I don’t think, based on my 35 years of fighting for what I believe in, I don’t think anybody seriously believes I’m going to be influenced by a lobbyist”.

Actually, they do. Just like they'd believe it about any other candidate. The idea that some people are incorruptible because they've spent a lifetime in politics is a little bit absurd at this point.

It's like the claim that you can't bribe a wealthy man.

Somebody really doesn't want to be a Senator anymore

From the Washington Post site, these are the number of votes missed during the current session of Congress:

Hillary Clinton (D) ......... 11 votes (3.5%)
Dennis Kucinich (D) ......... 71 votes (8.4%)
Barack Obama (D) .......... 59 votes (19.0%)
Ron Paul (R) ................ 169 votes (20.0%)
Christopher Dodd (D) ....... 74 votes (23.9%)
Joseph Biden (D) ............ 78 votes (25.2%)
Tom Tancredo (R) ......... 225 votes (26.6%)
Duncan Hunter (R) ......... 244 votes (28.8%)
Sam Brownback (R) ........ 123 votes (39.7%)
John McCain (R) ........... 149 votes (48.1%)

Most Senators and Congressmen have missed less than 3% of scheduled votes. Only the seriously ill Senator Tim Johnson has missed more votes than John McCain.

Mitt Romney and the Attack of the Clones

I've always found it a little baffling that Mitt Romney, recent convert to the pro-life cause, wasn't won over by the fact that millions of children have been aborted since Roe vs. Wade was decided.

He was won over by the fantasy that scientists were on the verge of creating a new clone army:

ROMNEY: I am pro-life. That’s the truth. And several years ago, when we faced the issue of cloning of embryos in our state, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe and said I’m pro-life.

Here were his views on abortion when he was campaigning for Senator of the most liberal state in the Union:

In an October 1994 debate with US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, Romney said: ''I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a US Senate candidate. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years we should sustain and support it."

Mitt Romney: we need to have a "person of faith" lead the country.

But you must never, ever, ever ask me about mine.

Romney: "Let me, uh, let me offer just a thought. And that is, uh, one of the great things about this great land, is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions. And uh, I'm convinced that the nation, that the nation does need, the nation does need to have people of different faiths but we need to have a person of faith lead the country."

There's something a little pathetic about a man who runs on cleaning up the "cesspool" that is our culture, and appeals for votes among the most partisan fundamentalists complaining when people ask him about his personal religious values.

Romney likes to cite the fact that many voters want a religious person to lead the country. His problem is that many of the same people who would never vote for an atheist, would never vote for a Mormon, either.

Poor Tommy Thompson gets no respect

Even the political junkies at Americablog have forgotten that there's a already a candidate named Thompson in the GOP field:

And this is the alleged savior of the GOP presidential field -- the yet-to-announce Fred Thompson, at Sunday's GOP clown car debate:

"I believe that Vice President Cheney is criticized for a lot of things that he doesn't do. And I believe that Dick Cheney is an honorable individual. And I think the president of the United States depends a great deal upon him."

Like the Freepers are begging, run, Fred, run.

That comment was, of course, made by Tommy Thompson not Fred. Fred doesn't do debates. He does fireside chats.

The law is meant to protect the powerful from embarassment

George Bush and Alberto Gonzales will likely never be made accountable for violating the FISA law. But the whistleblower who exposed their program - that's a different story:

[T]he raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants. (At the time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the leak: "This is really hurting national security; this has really hurt our country.")

Don't expect many tearful editorials bemoaning the fate of the leaker if he is caught in this case. Those laments are saved for members of the dinner party set.

It's the sign of a completely corrupt government when we struggle to retroactively legalize official wrongdoing while the perpetrators have the gall to prosecute those who expose their actions. State secrets are meant to protect the nation, not its ruling class.


h/t John Cole

Rudy Giuliani defines political correctness

Apparently now political correctness is when you won't say what I want you to say:

Giuliani saved his sharpest jabs for Democrats. "In four debates, not a single Democrat said the word, 'Islamic terrorists.' Now that is taking political correctness to extreme," he said.

Originally the term was used by old-guard communists to mean toeing the party line, as in: "we're fighting Islamic terrorists in Iraq".

Ron Paul: the favorite candidate of active duty soldiers

Ron Paul, alternatively described as a "crank" and an "also ran" by the mainstream media for his opposition to the Iraq war and belief in a smaller government, leads all candidates in donations from the American military.

“Lots of military people turned out to be aware that our campaign got more donations from soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines than any other,” said Paul in a statement on his website. “Funny, that made a big impression in Congress too. Many of my colleagues were amazed and encouraged that you can be against this unconstitutional and disastrous war, and get military support.”

Paul said it is “an outrage that we are accused of not supporting the troops” and called it a “scam when the warmongers claim to be pro-soldier.”

Senate Democrats cave to Bush, again

Unable to hold fast against a president now mired in the high 20's, the Democrats are rapidly proving that the November victory didn't include a backbone transplant. Having caved completely to Bush on the Iraq war supplemental, they've now caved completely to his demands for domestic spying:

The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.

The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted.

Anyone who believed that September was going to be a magic drop dead date for the president's war strategy should take a lesson from this. Congress believes it is subservient to George Bush. He will continue to treat them with utter contempt until they give him a reason to take them seriously.

Prepare to see Congress's approval numbers drop dramatically again, as voters who elected Democrats to serve as a check on this president, realize that the rubber stamp Congress just changed leadership.



Update - the political consequences are summarized best here:

The Democrats have seriously alienated a significant portion of their base and they will not replace those voters with the Fox News viewers they sought to appease. It's not easy to win an argument (if it's possible at all) against people who claim there's no difference between the parties. Right now, the results are the same as they were seven months ago.

Mitt Romney makes the case for government health care

Unintentionally, I think:

Romney was quick to say he didn't like Clinton's plan and opposed taxes to pay for health care subsidies, but that prompted a question from another patron. "Who's paying for the subsidies if it's not the government of Massachusetts?"

"We found it cost us more money to be giving free care out at hospitals than to help people buy their own private care," Romney said.

That, of course, is one of the standard arguments for the single payer system. It's cheaper to pay up front than to pay for the uninsured when they show up at the emergency room.

Scientists discover the perfect diet

Eat all you want, stay slim, live longer.

Via Nature, we learn that scientists may have stumbled upon a significant breakthrough in life extension while researching heart health.

Researchers have created a mutant mouse that lives longer despite eating more and weighing less — all thanks to the loss of a single protein.

Without this protein, the body is less susceptible to the heart-pounding effects of the hormone adrenaline, and may become more resistant to some forms of stress.

Currently, the main focus of ageing research is on using calorie restriction as a way of activating a metabolic 'fountain of youth'. The new discovery, that knocking out a single cardiac gene could lengthen lifespan, was an unexpected byproduct of heart research.

But in the process, the research team also realised that the mutant mice lived longer than their normal counterparts. Now, in a paper published in Cell this week2, they report that the treated mice lived 30% longer and did not develop the heart stress and bone deterioration that often accompanies ageing.

If this can be extended to humans, it's pretty much the world's dream diet. It's also guaranteed to be more popular than the current leading contender for life extension: Extreme calorie restriction demands a life-long regimen of near starvation.

John McCain votes against ethics reform

Sacrificing the last shreds of his dignity, John McCain joined 13 other Senate Republicans voting against ethics reform today. Despite missing a record number of votes this year, he cut short a campaign stop to make his voice heard against this one.

Enactment of the bill would mark the most sweeping ethics reforms since the Watergate era, requiring lawmakers for the first time to disclose fundraising by lobbyists, tightening rules on gift-giving to staff and lawmakers, forcing lobbyists to disclose their contacts, clamping down on members’ junkets and requiring lawmakers to disclose when they seek earmarked funds for projects in their home states.

Despite having failed to advance Congressional ethics reform during the years his own party was in control, McCain thought this bill was too timid.

But a bloc of conservative Republicans said the plan does not go far enough in shining a light on earmarks, the source of recent corruption scandals on the Hill. They slammed their Republican colleagues for backing the earmark disclosure requirements, which they said would allow members to hide their pet projects by exploiting loopholes in the legislation.

He lent his reputation as a reformer to the same Republican leaders who presided over the biggest pork-barrel spending in history.

This unfortunately isn't the first time McCain has gone soft on transparency in politics.

Fred Thompson: "scientists are morons"

The Republican war on science rages on as Fred Thompson "debunks" global warming theory:

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto.

NASA says the Martian South Pole's ice cap has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter's caught the same cold, because it's warming up too, like Pluto.

This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non-signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.

Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn't even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There's a consensus.

Ask Galileo.

That's right, the guy from Die Hard believes that thousands of scientists who spend their lives studying the Earth's climate simply forgot that the Sun is the driving force heating the planet. Unfortunately, he's hardly the only conservative digging in his heels against global warming science and making absurd arguments against it.

Of course, scientists do measure the variations of the Sun and its effects on our climate. Left out of all the commentaries about Mars' ice cap and the Solar connection is that fact that Solar activity has not increased in decades and that the actual measurements of air temperature significantly exceed the predictions based on solar forcing.

Couple that with the fact that, on average, half of the planets in the solar system will be warming and half cooling at any time, that Pluto has just passed the point closest to the sun in it's 248 year orbit, that there is no evidence that Jupiter is warming globally and that 3 years of pictures of a shrinking polar cap is a short term local measurement, not a long term global one -- well you start to wonder where all the evidence against man-made global warming went.

As stated at RealClimate:

There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth…

Barack Obama decrys the neglect of New Orleans

Another candidate responds to the question of rebuilding New Orleans:

Thank you for contacting me about the egregious negligence of the federal government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, neighborhoods are still deserted; thousands are still homeless or displaced; most public schools are still closed; and police are headquartered in FEMA trailers. There is still a lot of work to do. Going forward, we must not only rebuild New Orleans for all who wish to return, but also ensure that adequate preparations are made for future catastrophes.

After the massive failures of the Bush administration, I helped lead Congressional efforts to bring effective and prompt relief to the Gulf Coast. Together with the Congressional Black Caucus, I introduced the Hurricane Katrina Recovery Act of 2006, which provides comprehensive federal supports for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the reconstruction of New Orleans. In addition, I worked to make all working families that were victims of the disaster eligible for an expanded and refundable Child Tax Credit.

No-bid construction contracts and administrative waste have compounded the governmental failure in New Orleans and further slowed the recovery. To address this problem, I have worked to strengthen government accountability by creating a Chief Financial Officer for federal spending on the Gulf Coast. The CFO would ensure that money is spent appropriately and that all contracts are accessible to local businesses - including small and minority firms - through fair and open competition.

Ultimately, we need to learn from the woeful response to Katrina and make sure that we are better prepared for the next disaster. Prior to Katrina, the federal government did not require localities to make specific plans for safeguarding Americans with special needs. I championed successful legislation that requires special needs planning for future disasters, whether man-made or natural.

After all, we might want to censure Hillary someday

In another example of the absurd logic of our Republican political leaders: James Sensenbrenner worries that, if we don't give George Bush a blank check today, we'll be forced to give every president a blank check in the future.

“I think the White House is going to win in court,” asserted Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), the former chairman of the panel. “If we do bring the case to court and lose, then that is going to be viewed as a blank check by the current president and the future presidents to snub the Congress” in its oversight responsibilities.”

Guantanamo judge scolds detainee for dressing badly

Another excerpt from the kangaroo court.

Apparently, the judge was unimpressed that a man who had been held without charge and without access to the outside world for 5 years arrived at the hearing in his prison uniform:

GUANTANAMO Bay detainee David Hicks fronted a US military commission hearing earlier this year in a shapeless prison shirt and baggy trousers, his hair long and unkempt.

His style did not impress the presiding judge, US Marine Colonel Ralph Kohlmann.

Colonel Kohlmann indicated that Hicks, who stood accused of supporting terrorism and attempted murder, would be better off in a suit and tie, or casual smart attire. It matters what you wear to a terrorism trial, apparently.

Barack Obama supports the separation of church and state

OBAMA: I am proud of my Christian faith. And it informs what I do. And I don't think that people of any faith background should be prohibited from debating in the public square.

But I am a strong believer in the separation of church and state, and I think that we've got to translate...

By the way, I support it not just for the state but also for the church, because that maintains our religious independence and that's why we have such a thriving religious life.

But what I also think is that we are under obligation in public life to translate our religious values into moral terms that all people can share, including those who are not believers. And that is how our democracy's functioning, will continue to function. That's what the founding fathers intended.

Mitt Romney endorses the Stork Theory

The Republican War on Science is reaching new levels of absurdity:

"Senator Obama is wrong if he thinks science-based sex education has any place in kindergarten," Romney told some 150 people at a restaurant in the northern part of the state. "We should be working to clean up the filthy waters our kids are swimming in."

And what exactly is this cesspool of science based sex education Romney is scolding Obama over?

WASHINGTON, July 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Statement from Kathleen M. Burke, CEO, Robert Crown Center for Health Education on age-appropriate sex education for 5 year-olds:

"Age-appropriate classroom sex education for this age group is simply referring to teaching medically appropriate names for parts of the body instead of baby names. We keep it simple -- it isn't necessary to go into detail about the functions of those body parts, but having an accurate vocabulary goes a long way toward developing understanding and respect for themselves and their bodies. In the absence of this proper language, all that is left are unanswered questions, baby names and playground slang.

It also helps when they ask where their baby brother came from.

This is of course, yet another reversal of the former Governor's position.

The president assigns "Why Bush will be a winner" to his staff

Believed to be a candid picture of George Bush (center) discussing his brilliant Iraq war strategy with his cracker jack staff Karl Rove (left) and Stephen Hadley (right). Also shown, Condoleeza Rice and Karen Hughes with their backs to the camera.

Bill Kristol's the-war-is-being-won piece in The Washington Post brought him plenty of ridicule, but at least one person liked it.

President Bush read the July 15 Outlook article that morning and recommended it to his staff.

Russ Feingold renews call for censure of George Bush

In March of 2006, following the discovery that the President was covertly spying on Americans, Russ Feingold (D -Wisconsin) called for the Congress to censure the President for acting in violation of the FISA law.

At the time, the Republicans controlling Congress blocked all oversight of the president. Their idea of a solution was to retroactively legalize the program. The minority Democrats meanwhile, fearful of losing votes by challenging a president whose approval ratings were in the mid 30's, tried to pretend Russ Feingold didn't exist.

Today, Senator Feingold has renewed his call for censure, citing mismanagement of the Iraq war and the assault on the rule of law.

U.S. Senator Russ Feingold announced today that he will introduce two censure resolutions condemning the President, Vice President and other administration officials for misconduct relating to the war in Iraq and for their repeated assaults on the rule of law. Feingold called the resolutions appropriate and necessary steps for Congress to rebuke an administration that is responsible for some of the worst misconduct and the worst abuses of the law in American history.



The first resolution will condemn the President and others for misconduct relating to the war in Iraq including:

* Overstating the case that Saddam Hussein had WMD, particularly nuclear weapons, and falsely implying a relationship with al Qaeda and links to 9/11.

* Failing to plan for the civil conflict and humanitarian problems that the intelligence community predicted.

* Over-stretching the Army, Marine Corps and Guard with prolonged deployments.

* Justifying our military involvement in Iraq by repeatedly distorting the situation on the ground there.



The second resolution will focus on the administration’s attack on the rule of law with respect to, among other things:

* The illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

* Extreme policies on torture, the Geneva Conventions, and detainees at Guantanamo.

* The refusal to recognize legitimate congressional oversight into the improper firings of U.S. Attorneys.

Did I say September? I meant November.

Lt. General Odierno, live from Baghdad, says things are going great so far. But...

"Forty-five days from now, September 1 ... I'll be able to make a bit more accurate assessment if it's something we think is going to continue or something we think is just a blip," he said in a video link from Baghdad.

"In order to do a good assessment, I need at least till November to do that," Odierno added.

Oh and about those benchmarks....

In a separate session, [U.S. Ambassador Ryan] Crocker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that political benchmarks set by President Bush for the Iraqi government were not necessarily the best way to measure progress.

You might remember those were the non-binding benchmarks the Republicans insisted should replace timelines, lest the terrorists win.

FEMA ignored pleas from Katrina victims, again

And you can't blame Brownie for this one.

As early as March 2006, FEMA began to receive complaints about formaldehyde odors. After one trailer was tested, an April 2006 e-mail sent from a FEMA attorney to another staffer concluded, "The end result — well above OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) standards Tester himself developed eye-watering symptoms of exposure."

Yet, in response to complaints, FEMA's legal department advised that testing "would imply FEMA's ownership of the issue." Another read, "Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK...Should [tests] indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them."

From the testimony of Scott Needle, MD to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

My concern in this issue stems from my experience treating children in Hancock County, Mississippi in the weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina. In spring 2006, certain patterns of illness emerged among some of my patients. Many children returned repeatedly to my office with symptoms that would not go away, or that would clear up and then recur: sinus infections, ear infections, colds, and other respiratory symptoms.

In talking with these families, I found that they all shared two common characteristics. First, they were all living in travel trailers provided by FEMA. Second, these families reported that their symptoms started not long after moving into these trailers.

Dick Cheney's official duties

A federal judge agrees that outing covert CIA agents is part of Dick Cheney's job description:

"The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Mr. Wilson's comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavory, " Bates wrote. "But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration's handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials."

Of course, "speaking with the press" wasn't the problem. Revealing state secrets was.

Absurdity alert: filibuster edition

Just now on CNN: Republican leader Mitch McConnell complaining that Harry Reid tabled the bill that the Republicans filibustered.

Stop poking the hornet's nest

Proving that Homeland Security doesn't even understand basic pest control:

Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush's homeland security adviser, took issue with the suggestion that the president had ignored warnings from the intelligence community that attacking Iraq would stimulate al-Qaeda's drive for recruits and influence.

"You're assuming it's a zero-sum game, which is what I don't understand," Townsend said. "The fact is, we were harassing them in Afghanistan, we're harassing them in Iraq, we're harassing them in other ways, non-militarily, around the world. And the answer is, every time you poke the hornet's nest, they are bound to come back and push back on you. That doesn't suggest to me that we shouldn't be doing it."

Actually, that's exactly why you aren't supposed to poke hornet's nests. You're supposed to fumigate and destroy them:

Do not disturb the nest in anyway.

Do not make any loud noises.

Treating hornets should be done at night, without shaking the nest.

Simply removing the nest will not resolve the problem, because surviving wasps will reconstruct a new one.

Just asking

Does anybody else wish that, instead of inviting groups of sycophants and ego strokers to talk about his legacy, George Bush would have instead called in a group of Senators and foreign policy experts to brain storm a solution to the disaster in Iraq?

And that instead of keeping quiet and "waiting until September" to start debating the country's priorities, we were having a vigorous debate right now?

Tom Coburn asks: "Why can't we just shoot people?"

A "Culture of Life" Republican Senator proves that being a devout Christian doesn't guarantee you have a solid sense of morality:

Tom Coburn, R-OK: "Why is it wrong for a Border Patrol agent who has stopped a van full of drugs, and the guy's running, why is it wrong to shoot him after they've told him to stop?"

U.S. Attorney Sutton: "Under the Constitution, if somebody's not causing you fear, you can't just shoot 'em because you're trying to stop 'em, or you're angry at 'em or you want to teach them a lesson,"

Coburn: "If in fact the message was: 'You come here with drugs, we interdict you and you don't stop, we're going to wing you, we're going to shoot you' – that message itself would do a lot to stop a lot of this."

Sutton: "If we let our agents just open fire, shooting to kill ... some innocent person is going to get gunned down execution-style by a cop, and there's going to be an outcry,"

h/t DSADevil

The party of winners

British journalist Johann Hari on a cruise with America's most partisan wingnuts catches this quote:

Yes, D'Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, "of course" Republican politics is "about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers."

Kind of an odd statement after the beating they took last November.

Then again, Brits sometimes have a problem with American-English. Maybe D'Sousa said "Republicans are the party of whiners"

Let the real filibusters begin

A filibuster is an attempt to prolong debate, typically used by the minority to prevent passage of a bill with majority support. Best exemplified in the movie Mr. Smith goes to Washington in which an honest Senator battles against graft and corruption by taking to the well of the Senate and stands his ground until the corruption is exposed and his rivals defeated in shame.

It's hard to believe that just 2 years ago, the Republicans attempted to kill the filibuster entirely. They complained that the Democrats were abusing the system by denying a vote on 10 of Bush's 229 judicial nominees. Former majority leader Bill Frist invented the idea of the "nuclear option" to strip the minority of it's right to continue debate.

But times change. Mitch McConnell embraced the idea of the filibuster within days of the 2006 elections, after the Republicans lost both Houses of Congress. Since January, he's blocked votes over 40 times, on everything from funding renewable energy to implementing the 9/11 Commission's recommendations. No more talk of "up or down votes". Today he's all about minority rights .... well in the Senate, anyway.

So it's good to hear that Harry Reid now plans to start making Republicans take to the floor of the Senate if they don't want to cut off debate.

I'm guessing Senator McConnell isn't going to cut as sympathetic a figure as Jimmy Stewart while he's on the Senate floor arguing against ethics reform and increasing the minimum wage.

Ron Paul: restore Constitutional checks and balances

From Ron Paul's House web site:

Recently, the General Accounting Office studied nineteen instances where the President issued so-called “signing statements.” In such statements, the President essentially begins the process of interpreting legislation – up to and including declaring provisions unconstitutional—hence often refusing to enforce them.

The GAO study found that in nearly 1/3 of the cases studied, the administration failed to enforce the law as enacted.

The legislature should not yield its authority to the executive. Our constitutional republic demands that all branches of government understand and respect our system and jealously guard their own prerogatives.

In modern Washington nothing is more misunderstood, and less appreciated, than the genius of republicanism. Presidents issue signing statements that effectively “approve in part and reject in part,” laws of the land—even though there is no constitutional provision for such a process. In addition, Congress cedes its powers at the crucial moment when a decision on whether or not a war is to be fought will be made, only to then criticize the effort it could have used its powers to stop.

Maybe if we ethnically cleanse Iraq they'll stop fighting?

via ThinkProgress we learn that it isn't only politicians who have stupid ideas for Iraq.

[Michael O'Hanlon and Edward Joseph] hoping to draw the attention of Bush administration policymakers are proposing a partition plan for Iraq that would divide the country into three main regions.

The proposal would require the acquiescence of major political factions in Iraq. There would be substantial, voluntary movement in mixed, volatile areas.

This idea echos the plan supported by Joe Biden and Sam Brownback to divide the country into Shia, Sunni and Kurd dominated regions and is only slightly less stupid than Tommy Thompson's idea to partition the country into 18 parts.

That these men believe that any political factions would acquiesce to an American partition simply proves they haven't been paying attention for the last 4 years. Our forces haven't been able to convince any of the parties to do anything to date. Not even the Shia, who were effectively given the keys to the entire country when the Bush administration created the new government.

As for the substantial, voluntary relocation they imagine, it will most certainly be substantial, but hardly voluntary. We've already seen massive coerced relocations by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish death squads as each faction attempts to claim territory. This plan would legitimize these efforts with an American seal of approval.

We already have a long sad history of these ethnically based partition plans. India and Pakistan remain on the edge of war over boundaries disputed for 60 years now and the European plan to ethnically partition Bosnia resulted in a bloody campaign as all sides slaughtered their rivals in a final land grab.

A plan that calls for the voluntary ethnic-cleansing of Iraq would be a disaster.

Putin decides the Cold War isn't over after all

While George Bush has been obsessesing about small actors like Iran and Syria, he's been completely blind to the threat of a resurgent adversary in Russia.

He saw the Berlin wall fall and the Soviet Union disintegrate. "Reagan won the cold war". Put a check mark in the win column. It's time to move on to the threat of militant Islam.

So he complains that decades old treaties which have helped keep the peace between the two nuclear giants are "outdated", launches wars of preemption, and decides to build a missile shield right on the border of our old nemesis.

The Russians, of course, remember that the original purpose of the "missile shield" was to counter their military power, not Iran's. They see the Vice-President declaring that the United States is the world's sole superpower which won't permit any rival, and they see NATO expanding into old Soviet block nations while hostile forces build up along their borders, first in Afghanistan, then Iraq and soon possibly Iran and Syria.

Vladimir Putin very much sees a growing threat. And he doesn't think it comes from Iran.

Unfortunately, George Bush appears to sincerely believe that "the Cold War is over" and that Russia and the United States have become fast friends. This despite Putin's rollback of democratic reforms in Russia, his assertion of dominance over former Soviet states and his repeated declarations that the Americans have become like the Nazis of old.

And now Putin has taken a page from Bush's playbook and begun declaring treaties outdated himself:

Russia engaged the West in a new round of brinkmanship yesterday when Vladimir Putin effectively tore up a vital treaty designed to end the threat of war in Europe.

In a chilling message to his adversaries, the Russian president signed a decree suspending Moscow's participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, a move that will allow Russia to mass tanks on its border with Europe for the first time in 15 years.

Limiting the number of troops that could be stationed on Cold War front lines by both sides, the treaty required Russia to move the bulk of its military hardware east of the Ural Mountains, the geographical divide between Europe and Asia. With the treaty's demise, Mr Putin seems to be declaring a return to adversarial Cold War politics.

Hillary Clinton on the "Right to Return" to New Orleans

From the June 28th debate:

MS. MARTIN: [W]ould you support a federal law guaranteeing the right to return to New Orleans and other Gulf regions devastated by Hurricane Katrina, based on the United Nations Human Rights Standards Governing the Internal Displacement of Citizens?

SEN. CLINTON: I have proposed a 10-point Gulf Coast Recovery Agenda, because it’s sort of as a chicken and an egg issue, Michel.

First, we’ve got to get the hospitals back up. We’ve got to get the law enforcement and the fire departments -- you know, right now this administration has basically neglected with almost criminal indifference the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, in particular New Orleans and the parishes.

So even if we were to give people a right, there is nothing to return to. We have got to rebuild New Orleans, and it’s not only the protection from the levees, it is all the infrastructure. And until very recently, the administration would not give the people of New Orleans the same right we had after 9/11, which was to get FEMA money without a 10 percent match.

And we finally got that changed, but it was outrageous that it took so long.

In May she visited the city and explicitly called for rebuilding the city with significantly greater protection from future storms.

"I believe we should order the corps to achieve Cat 5 protection over time"

The "right to return" refers to a suit brought by many of the city's residents, particularly those who lived in the most devastated areas. They believe that the wealthier communities are trying to build a smaller New Orleans, purged of its poorest citizens. Federal reconstruction aid has been slow to arrive and gone largely to the city's land-owners. Before Katrina, a majority rented their homes and worry that there is no guarantee they will have anyplace to return to.

When the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans was lifted, residents of public housing, many of whom left with only the clothes on their backs, returned to find most of their homes locked and boarded up. This closure was not due to hurricane damage or flooding. In fact, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology architect's assessment in October 2006 showed no structural damage and minimal interior damage to most of these buildings because these all-brick structures were built to withstand such storms.

The city, developers and the feds are planning the largest urban renewal and black removal in U.S. history. While it's clear that blacks were hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, there is no aggressive plan to bring them home.

While HUD professes to want something better for public housing residents, its plan falls woefully short. There is no strategy to replace every unit that is demolished nor to increase the number of affordable housing units to meet growing needs.

"I'm looking for Jack Bauer"

Since so many senior Republican officials dream of styling their national security strategy on FOX's 24 ; it should be remembered that in Jack Bauer's universe the United States has had two presidents assassinated, lost possession of a stealth fighter and a nuclear weapon, seen several reactors melt down, experienced multiple suicide bombings and had at least one city nuked.

This despite the frequent use of enhanced interrogation methods in the national defense.

That's because the fictitious Counter Terrorist Unit is completely inept and disfunctional. Jack Bauer tortures people because he doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

The most insidious of traitors

Matt Yglesias thinks Bush took the honorable path in freeing Scooter Libby.

I didn't think he would do it, but it's really the only honorable course of action available to him. It would be silly for Bush to pretend to believe that people deserve to be punished for breaking the law to help cover up his administration's crimes when he clearly believes no such thing.

But, there are those who get absolved for doing Bush's dirty work, and there are those who don't:

Eleven U.S. soldiers _ all from the enlisted ranks _ have been convicted in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, with former Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. receiving the harshest sentence, a 10-year prison term.

The leading cause of death among black women

During Tavis Smiley's Democratic debate, the candidates were asked about AIDS and it's affects on black America:

MS. MARTIN: [Y]ou can imagine how disturbed we were to find out from the Centers for Disease Control that African-Americans, though 17 percent of all American teenagers, they are 69 percent of the population of teenagers diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.

SEN. CLINTON: You know, it is hard to disagree with anything that has been said, but let me just put this in perspective. If HIV/AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.

According to the CDC, HIV is the leading cause of death among black women 25-34 years old, and is a significant killer of all American women. Black women are 23 times more likely to contract AIDS than their white counterparts.

Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for white women 25-34.

American women as a whole are most likely to die of heart disease or stroke.