Wednesday

‘I have the blood of American troops on my hands.’

Reporter and “Fiasco” author Tom Ricks: “I asked one officer why are you talking to me about these things, and he looked down at his hands, and he said because I have the blood of American troops on my hands. And I said what do you mean? And he said because when I said to Rumsfeld we need that division, and Rumsfeld said no, I gave up. I compromised. And he said U.S. troops died because of that. And he said that’s why I’m talking to you. … And he was practically crying as he spoke to me about this.”

Happy Birthday, Energy Policy Act!

In early 2001, Vice President Cheney brought together an energy task force made up of “utility companies and the oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy industries,” and “incorporated their recommendations, often word for
word,” into the administration’s energy plan.
One year ago today, President Bush signed that plan into law. It lavished $14.5 billion in tax breaks on energy firms, nearly 60 percent of which went to “oil, natural gas, coal, electric utilities and nuclear power.”

As recently as April, Bush claimed the energy bill would help take “pressure off the price of gasoline at the pump.” It hasn’t worked out that way, as the chart below shows. (Click here to see the full image, courtesy of the minority staff on the House Government Reform Committee.)

Meanwhile, President Bush’s 2007 budget proposed funding “less than half of what the recent energy bill promised for renewable energy and energy efficiency — the two most readily available opportunities to break our addiction to oil.”

Climate change is causing a Swiss mountain to crumble.

Visitors to the mountain “hope
to watch a rock the size of two Empire State Buildings collapse onto the canyon floor nearly 700 feet below, as retreating glacier ice robs a cliff face on the eastern edge of the Eiger Mountain of its main support.” August 8, 2006 4:02 pm Comment (18)

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National Review Editor: ‘Global Warming Is Great’

It’s getting difficult to distinguish actual opposition to global warming science and
parody. FYI, the following is not a joke.
National Review editor James S. Robbins shares his thoughts today:

Personally, I don’t know what all the shouting is about. Global warming is great. Granted, maybe it isn’t really happening, and if it is there are strong reasons to doubt that humans have anything to do with it. But if the world is warming, I say “bravo.”

What are the benefits? According to Robbins, “vast regions” of Canada would become “comfortably habitable,” “more land will be available for cultivation,” and there will be a “land boom up the coastlines as people rushed on up for beachfront property.”
Robbins brushes off all negative consequences. He acknowledges that rising sea levels could create “some dislocations” but says that a
worldwide sea level rise of as much as 20 feet could be taken care of with “some form of sea wall.” The image above illustrates the impact a 20 foot sea level rise on Florida. Apparently, Robbins plans on building a sea wall around the entire state.
Robbins doesn’t even mention increased hurricane intensity, drought, wildfires and the other severe impacts of global warming — much less explain, as he claims, how these natural phenomena can “be overcome.”
Robbins concludes, when “you are enjoying the surfing at your beach house in upper Newfoundland, you won’t care what caused global warming,
you’ll just thank goodness it happened.” In so doing, he illustrates an important point. Intentional or not, his arguments are a joke.

DeLay likely to support write-in candidate.

Time magazine’s Mike Allen reports that Tom DeLay is “leaning” towards “stepping aside and supporting a write-in candidate for his old seat.”

Lohan to Iraq: Fully
Loaded.

Actor and pop singer Lindsay Lohan wants to go to Iraq, People magazine reports. “I’m not afraid of going,” she says. “My security guard is going to take me to a gun range when I get back to L.A., and I’m going to start taking shooting lessons.” Lock and load.

Americans disapprove

of Bush’s handling of every major national security issue facing the country, a new Washington Post/ABC poll shows. 50 percent disapprove of his handling of terrorism (vs. 47 percent approval), 50 percent disapprove of his handling of the
Israel-Lebanon situation (vs. 43 percent approval), and 62 percent disapprove of his handling of Iraq (vs. 36 percent approval). August 8, 2006 11:21 am Comment (48)

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Gen. George Casey: Civil War Is ‘The Most Significant Threat Right Now’ In Iraq

In an interview with ABC News, Gen George Casey — the top U.S. commander in Iraq — said a civil war in Iraq “certainly is possible.” He described a potential civil war as “the most significant threat right now” in Iraq.
Casey adds his voice to a chorus of top generals — including CentCom commander John Abizaid and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter
Pace — who warn that Iraq is in danger of sliding into civil war. Watch it:

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Yesterday, President Bush dismissed the concerns expressed by Casey and other Generals. Bush said “You know, I hear people say, Well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box.”
Read the full transcript of ABC’s interview with Casey.

ThinkFast: August 8, 2006 »

Democracy not on the march, says Justice Kennedy. “Our best security, our only security, is in the world of ideas, and I sense a slight foreboding,” Kennedy said in a speech. “Make no mistake, there’s a jury that’s out. In half the world, the verdict is not yet in” on Western-style democracy.
“A plague of jellyfish along Europe’s beaches has become the latest environmental hazard to be blamed on global warming.”
What friends are for: Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) reportedly met with Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) last week to “urge him to step aside, reminding him that” if he lost his seat, “Ney could not expect a lucrative career on K Street to pay those tuition bills [for his children], along with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees piling up.”
Defenders of Ann Coulter’s “scholarship” have repeatedly pointed to the hundreds of endnotes contained in her books. MediaMatters examined the endnotes of her most recent title, “Godless,” and found them “rife with distortions and falsehoods.”
Congress is all in the family. USA Today
finds that there are 53 U.S. senators and representatives closely related to governors or other members of Congress, up from 24 in 1986. expand post »

Despite bipartisan objections, the Bush administration is producing the first new landmines “in over 10 years,” placing the U.S. “on the same short list of nations that includes Iran, North Korea and Burma, a list of countries producing landmine weapons banned by an international treaty.”

New study shows that children on Medicaid or with no insurance have a death rate twice as high as that of children with private insurance. “Nationwide, providing more primary and preventive care to those children could save an estimated $5 billion a year.”
38,000. Number of veterans at risk of identity theft (again) because “a Veterans Affairs Department subcontractor lost a desktop computer containing their sensitive personal data.”
And finally: First a Stanford professor, then Secretary of State, and now…a member of Vanity Fair’s International Best Dressed List. The magazine cited Condoleezza Rice as “immaculately groomed and formidably dignified but with an audacious renegade streak.”

Since Hannity & Colmes had such a liberal tilt…

Conservative comedian Dennis Miller “is joining Fox News as a contributor to ‘Hannity & Colmes’ this autumn, according to a network executive.” Miller did a stint on H&C in 2003, which led to a now-cancelled CNBC primetime show. A preview of what you can expect.

July 2006 was second hottest on
record.

“The heat wave broke more than 2,300 daily temperature records for the month and eclipsed more than 50 records for the highest temperatures in any July, according to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.”

Click on the image above to see how your state stacked up.

Think Tank Fires Fellow For Criticizing Bush

Last month the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, fired John Hulsman. Heritage refuses to say exactly why they let him go, but the New Republic reports the “reasons for Hulsman’s departure” are “perfectly evident”; he criticized the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Hulsman previously had kept his dissent to himself, but “years of insurgency, civil war, and general chaos” in Iraq led him to speak out.
In an essay last year for The National Interest, Hulsman took issue with Bush’s policy in Iraq:

[N]eoconservatives, through their policies of expending blood and treasure for problematic gains such as Iraq, are significantly retarding America’s ability to act against the true barbarians at the gate - Al-Qaeda and Islamist extremists.

And Hulsman criticized the Bush administration’s refusal to talk to regimes it dislikes, specifically Iran:

America, on the other hand, having determined the mullahs in Iran were evil, disdained to engage them. But we cannot only conduct diplomatic relations with Canada; I have always naively thought a major reason for diplomacy was talking to those one didn’t agree with, in
an effort to modify their behavior to suit one’s own national interests.

These critiques may seem mild, but as Chris Preble of the Cato Institute explains: “At Heritage, anything that smacks of criticism of Bush will not be tolerated.”

Rep. Doolittle: A Devoted Friend of Sex Slavery

The Northern Marianas are the site of America’s most shoddy labor practices. Human “brokers” bring thousands there to work as sex slaves and in cramped sweatshop
garment factories where clothes (complete with “Made in U.S.A.” tag) have been produced for all the major brands.
The workers are “paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage,” and are “forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed.”
Thanks to Jack Abramoff, who lobbied against better worker protections, that’s the way conditions stayed. But Abramoff couldn’t do his work alone. McClatchy reported this weekend:

Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) helped Jack Abramoff secure a lucrative lobbying contract with the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in 1999 and then assisted the now-disgraced lobbyist’s efforts to route federal money to the islands and defend its garment industry, newly obtained documents show.
The California Republican accepted $14,000 in contributions from Abramoff… The first contribution came just a few weeks before Doolittle endorsed the election of a key commonwealth politician crucial to Abramoff winning the contract. The last Abramoff contribution came as the Northern Marianas lobbying contract was expiring in December 2001.

Doolittle’s excuse: he had “traveled to the Northern Marianas in 1999 on a congressional trip and saw none of the abuses or ‘reported inhumane working conditions.’” Which obviously means they weren’t happening.