You've probably seen the photo the the polar bear nibbling at a U.S. submarine.
There is more in a story at strategypage.com, but what caught our eye was this:
American submarines have been operating under the Arctic ice for over half a century. ... They have also used their sonar to measure the ice thickness and report that the ice has lost 40 percent of its thickness in the last 20 years. This has caused problems for the polar bears, who feed on seals that surface near offshore ice flows or through breathing holes in pack ice. Some bears are forced to come ashore earlier because of the longer warm season. This is caused by a combination of global warming and the normal fluctuation of Arctic ice thickness.
So, does this mean that the U.S. Navy has solid evidence that we are at risk of losing the north polar ice-cap? And has the skeptical-of-global-warming Bush administration got the data, but not released it? The world wonders.
An essay entitled "The New Rules of Politics" by E. J. Dionne Jr accurately summarizes the current dynamic in Washington D.C. Essentially, it's winner take all - even if the winner has a razor-thin margin.
Excerpt:
With a slim congressional majority, Bush would have been expected to seek genuine compromise -- under the old rules. But Washington has become so partisan and Bush is so determined to push through a domestic program based almost entirely on tax cuts for the wealthy that a remarkably radical program is winning despite the odds against it and lukewarm public support.
and
Bush promised to change the ways of Washington. He has succeeded brilliantly, but not by creating the "new tone of respect and bipartisanship" he promised in 2000. The new tone in Washington is not bipartisan but hyperpartisan. "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape," said White House ally Norquist, according to the Denver Post this week, as he promised to bring Washington's new ferocity to the state capitals.
We thought Friday's editorial, "Bush WIns Again", a remarkable piece of work. Here is an excerpt: (emphasis added)
ECONOMICS is a science of single instances, hence it is hardly a science. So how much the president's most recent tax cuts will stimulate the economy is conjectural, a conjecture being a guess by a Ph.D. The Los Angeles Times, using Commerce Department figures, says the economy may be expanded "by somewhere between the annual output of North Dakota, the smallest of the states in economic terms, and Nevada, which ranks 31st," or by the equivalent of "adding another Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Dell Computer Corp."
But as a stimulus to the president's political stock and conservatives' aspirations, the latest tax cuts, signed Wednesday, will be doubly successful. They will make it more difficult for a Democrat to win the presidency. And should one win, the cuts will make it more difficult to use the presidency for Democratic purposes.
The cuts were the third set Bush has signed in 24 months. Were he to keep up that pace through a second term, by 2009 the government's revenue base would be significantly smaller, and quite differently composed. Both House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who is a firebrand, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is not, say there soon will be more tax-cut proposals.
Some will seek to make permanent the new cuts, almost all of which are, in theory, "sunsetted" - set to expire - beginning next year. Others will continue the incremental but brisk march toward truly radical tax reform. It is a march away from taxing investment income - the new rates on capital gains and dividends are the lowest since the Depression - and perhaps away from taxing all sorts of income, and instead taxing consumption.
The sunset provisions serve the transparent fiction that the new cuts will deprive the government of no more than $350 billion over 10 years, the number that several deficit-phobic Republican senators insisted on. But given the success of Republican rhetoric - a success deriving from the public's common sense - in arguing that allowing a tax cut to lapse is equivalent to increasing taxes, the sun will set on few, if any, of these cuts.
So the 10-year cost to the government may exceed even the president's original goal of $726 billion, which he supposedly "compromised" in half. Democrats, noting that Bush has achieved all this with almost no help from congressional Democrats and with little enthusiasm from the public, are probably muttering to themselves, as they have been muttering since election night 2000: It is a good thing George W. Bush is dumb as a stump or we'd really be in trouble.
and
Even when tax cuts are not stimulative, they are justified as the most effective restraint on government spending. Today's Democratic presidential candidates are proposing universal health care and increased spending on school construction, teachers' pay, national service programs, medical research, energy research, infrastructure and on and on and on.
Let's get this straight. The New York Post is happy that Bush's tax cut will make it difficult for a future Democratic president to make policy - even if that's what the country wants. Face it, nowadays conservatives simply don't like democracy.
A justification big enough to drive an Abrams fighting vehicle through:
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton says:
Iraqi “intellectual capacity” for producing unconventional weapons was sufficient justification for the successful U.S.-led war against the country ...
Since the first Gulf War, he said, “The most fundamental, most important thing that was not destroyed was the intellectual capacity in Iraq to recreate systems of weapons of mass destruction.”
Bolton said U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors “could have inspected for years and years and years and probably never would have found weapons-grade plutonium or weapons-grade uranium.”
“But right in front of them was the continued existence of what Saddam Hussein called the ‘nuclear mujahadeen,’ the thousand or so scientists, technicians, people who have in their own heads and in their files the intellectual property necessary at an appropriate time … to recreate a nuclear weapons program.”
Bolton said the United States was justified in attacking Iraq because of that alleged capacity.
Apparently, a nation could be bereft of any material objects related to WMD's, and the United States would justify an invation because of a "capacity." Which means that virtually any country - excepting the extremely poor ones - could be attacked on the grounds that it represents a threat.
WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
The extraordinary admission, which is bound to stir the controversy in Washington and London about the murky motivations for war, comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair.
Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom.
"Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door" towards making progress elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz argued. The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups.
So Bush did exactly what Osama wanted. Congratulations, George!
AFTERTHOUGHT: Not that it really matters much, but did Bush know WMD's were an excuse, or was he fooled by his advisors?
In a discussion about the intelligence used to support claims that Iraq had WMD's, this was said on the News Hour:
RICHARD PERLE: [The charge is that] There were a lot of mistakes made including among intelligence analysts who ignored whole bodies of material because they were pursuing a theory, and the material was inconsistent with the theory. And this charge of politicization which is aimed at the Department of Defense is totally without merit.
What I think we're talking about here is the fact that four people -- four people in the Defense Department -- were asked to review material that had been collected by other intelligence organizations with a view to seeing whether there were connections in there that had been missed in previous examinations. That is not politicization. That is not pressure. And the fact is that they established beyond any doubt that there were connections that had gone unnoticed in previous intelligence analysis. And the analysts who had failed to notice those connections went to the press and started complaining about politicization, and there was none.
JUDITH YAPHE (CIA analyst who specialized in the Middle East): Politicization is when a policy maker, a policy prescriptive office does its own intelligence analysis. To me that is politicization.
RICHARD PERLE: That's complete nonsense. I mean you're saying that senior officials can't, if they're not satisfied with the product they're getting, go out and look for other intelligence.
JUDITH YAPHE: Why aren't they satisfied with the product?
RICHARD PERLE:Because it was deficient. That's why.
We spent the requisite 30 minutes paging through Henry Kissinger's book Diplomacy to look for his statement that "intelligence conforms to what the policy leaders want," but were unable to find it. But it's in there somewhere. Honest.
Parody or sincere? At first, we couldn't make up our minds about the Fast for George W. website, but upon further examination it appears to be a sincere effort by the faithful. From the 1st page:
Answer a call to personally fast once a month for President Bush.
God is raising up multitudes of Christians (regardless of political affiliation) to fast and pray for the holiness of President George W. Bush and our nation.
Now that the $350+ billion tax cuts are going forward, to be followed by cutbacks in social services, some people will be fasting for George W. - whether they want to or not.
Roger Ailes once again directs our attention to the Pickering affair, this time sparked by a not-too thorough New York Times story. As a service to our readers, we repost our entry from 11 January 2003:
Show me a picture!
This diagram shows key elements in the Pickering / Swan affair. Inspired by Roger Ailes excellent coverage of this matter.
What it's all about: Conservatives assert that Pickering reduced Swan's sentence because it was disproportionate to the punishment for the other two - plain and simple. As if he was a judge, new to the scene, making an impartial review. They also point out that the Clinton Justice Department's Office of Civil Rights was involved in the case, and bears some responsibility for the various deals/sentences.
Opponents of Pickering note that he was involved with the other two deals, approved them, and it's inconsistent for Pickering to attack Swan's sentence for being disproportionate. Also, in Senate hearings Pickering testified that (at some point in the process) he had no knowledge of a specific issue - the juvenile's use of a gun. But from the beginning, that fact was firmly established and recorded in the trial transcript.
One thing that hasn't gotten much play is that of the three culprits, Swan was the most mature (the others being a juvenile or low-IQ), was instrumental in carrying out the cross-burning (they used his truck and materials), and therefore deserved a tougher plea-bargain offering. When conservatives tell the tale, the juvenile is the ring-leader and Swan a mere tag-along - unworthy of harsh punishment.
