The Distant Ocean

Sunburn worsens despite blistering heat wave

You've got to love this headline: "Israeli settlement activity surges despite peace talks".  Yes, what a bewildering irony that is.  I can barely make sense of it.  I'm just as perplexed as the author.  You can feel my sincerity, I know.

Other headlines in this series include:

• Man bleeds to death despite being bitten by shark
• Corporations evil despite profit motive
• Movie sucks despite Natalie Portman
• Peeps fun to eat despite being slathered in sugar
• Triangle isosceles despite having two equal sides
  

Change is coming

I've mentioned before that we're having extremely unusual weather this year in the San Francisco Bay Area.  At that point we'd had two heat waves, which was already unusual, but before spring ended we'd already had a total of five (two minor and three major).  In a normal year we'll have about three, all in the summer.  And it just gets better:

More than 800 wildfires were set by a storm that unleashed nearly 8,000 lightning strikes across Northern California over the weekend.

The storm was unusual not only because it generated so many lightning bolts with little or no rain over a large geographical area, but also because it struck so early in the season and moved in from the Pacific Ocean. Such storms usually don't arrive until late July or August and typically form southeast of California.

"You're looking at a pattern that's climatologically rare. We typically don't see this happen at this time of summer," said John Juskie, a science officer with the National Weather Service in Sacramento. "To see 8,000, that's way up there on the scale."

The storm struck as California was experiencing one of its driest years on record. Earlier this month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought and directed agencies to speed up water deliveries to drought-stricken areas.

So 8000 lightning strikes from a thunderstorm which was just that—a storm of thunder and lightning with practically no rain—coming out of season, in a state stricken with drought, in a year that's seen more than a year's worth of heat waves before summer even arrived.  We're being told to stay indoors now since much of Northern California is blanketed by the haze from the fires; even at midday and with no clouds today, the sky was a dirty yellow, and if you opened a window you could smell the smoke from 50 miles away.  I stayed inside all day, but my eyes are stinging now anyway.  Really, can the plague of locusts be far behind?

We're by no means the only ones experiencing unusual weather, of course, nor are we getting the worst of it.  Yet these are the issues that Americans feel should be the top priorities for the federal government, in order:

27% Job creation and economic growth
24% The war in Iraq
18% Energy and the cost of gas
8% Health care
6% Terrorism
5% Illegal immigration
4% The environment and global warming
1% The mortgage and housing situation

In other words, more Americans are terrified that some shifty Mexican immigrant is going to steal their cushy tomato-picking job than are concerned that THE ENTIRE PLANET IS ABOUT TO SPIRAL INTO AN IRREVERSIBLE AND CATASTROPHIC CYCLE OF WARMING that will make Soylent Green look like an attractive alternative.  To say that public alarm about global warming lags the scope of the danger would be the understatement of a lifetime; it's as though we're standing in the last corner of a room that's otherwise entirely ablaze, and we're just now noticing there's a little smoke in the air.  But hey, once our hair catches fire we might grab a glass of water and try to put it out, so there's still some hope, right?

It's not really fair to blame people for their lack of awareness on this issue, just as it's not fair to blame them for their ignorance of US crimes around the world—because we live in a society that's carefully structured to produce apathetic consumers, not engaged and well-informed citizens.  But fairness doesn't matter one whit; like ignorance of the law, ignorance of the science is no excuse, and the forces we've set in motion are utterly indifferent to our indifference.  If we fail to stop this, no matter what our excuses might be, we're all going to share the consequences.

Bureaucratic heroism (and otherwise)

I've always respected Mohamed ElBaradei for his ability to do his job while still taking principled stands, and this only increases it:

Mohamed ElBaradei also warned he would not be able to continue in his role as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency if the Islamic republic were attacked.

"A military strike [against Iran] would in my opinion be worse than anything else … It would transform the Middle East region into a ball of fire," he said in an interview with Al-Arabiya television.

Here's Scott Ritter speaking about ElBaradei in 2005:

SCOTT RITTER: Look, Mohamed ElBaradei deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, not only for the potential work that his organization can do down the road regarding Iran and North Korea, etc., but let’s take a look what this guy did. He stood up to the Security Council when it counted. In the weeks and months before the [Iraq] war, this is a man who spoke truth to power. He stared the United States in the face and said, “The data you have provided is false. It’s based on forgeries. There are no nuclear weapons in Iraq. There is no nuclear weapons program. I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say that we don’t want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud, because no mushroom cloud is coming out of Iraq.”

The contrast between ElBaradei's efforts to squash US propaganda and Hans Blix's willingness to play along with it couldn't have been more pronounced in the months leading up to the US assault on Iraq.  Here's the rest of Ritter's comment above:

SCOTT RITTER: Had Hans Blix, his counterpart, done the same thing, showed the same courage, you know, it would have been very difficult for the United States to try and bully the United Nations into this mad, headlong rush to war.

AMY GOODMAN: What did Hans Blix do?

SCOTT RITTER: Hans Blix was a lawyer. He parsed phrases. He didn’t commit to anything. His statements were so watered down.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

SCOTT RITTER: I call him a moral and intellectual coward. This is only an answer that Hans Blix can provide. For me, Hans Blix had an opportunity to stand up and be counted in the face of history, and history is going to condemn this man for not doing what was necessary in one of the more critical times of modern history.

This exactly echoes how I've felt since 2003.  Blix was the one person in the world who had the greatest opportunity to stop the US march to war, or at least to make the path much more difficult to follow—and instead he produced mealy-mouthed, bureaucratic assessments that allowed the Bush administration to continue pushing its lethal lies.  I've often fantasized about going to a talk of Blix's and confronting him over this during the Q&A, so I was overjoyed when Amy Goodman recently treated him to Ritter's criticisms.  I can't force myself to read Blix's response for long enough to actually reproduce it here, so let me attempt to paraphrase it as best I can:

AMY GOODMAN: That was Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq in October of 2005. Hans Blix, your response?

HANS BLIX: Well, you must keep in mind that I am a sniveling coward.  I cannot state this too strongly.  I attempt never to go out of doors when the sun is in the sky, because when I do there is always a dark presence that follows me wherever I go, and I am unsure of its intentions.  Also, my penis is I suppose you would say very very small.  When I am in the washing room, I must often search for minutes on end for "little Blix", as I call him.  And it is because of my innate cowardice and this tiny penis that I failed to do what was so easily within my ability to try to prevent the murderous assault on Iraq and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings.

In any case, as unlikely as it seems, here's hoping that ElBaradei is still doing the same job in 2009, 2010, and beyond.

Obama: so different from Democrats: so different from Republicans

With Barack Obama appointing William Perry and Madeleine Albright to his National Security Working Group, it seems like a good time to revisit this posting from two years ago:
_______________________________

Not surprisingly, Clinton administration alumni Ashton Carter and William Perry have called on the Bush administration to strike at North Korea's missile if the North Koreans go ahead with their plans to launch.  Mixed in with the rest of the madness was this criticism:

The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of "preemption," which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma.

So Carter and Perry don't oppose the idea of preemptive strikes--they just don't like that the Bush administration has been so unsubtle about them.  And in this they precisely mirror statements by their Clinton co-conspirator Madeleine Albright in a 2003 article in Foreign Affairs:

When the administration published its 2002 National Security Strategy last September, it took this process even further, transforming anticipatory self-defense -- a tool every president has quietly held in reserve -- into the centerpiece of its national security policy. This step, however, was dangerously easy to misconstrue. (Do we really want a world in which every country feels entitled to attack any other that might someday threaten it?)

No, of course not--clearly this right must be reserved for the US.  We can't have just anyone thinking they can do it.  And Albright goes on to echo (or presage) Ashton and Perry's feelings about the Bush administration's distressingly vulgar tendency to just state outright their contempt for all norms of international law:

It would be helpful now if the doctrine of preemption were to disappear quietly from the U.S. national security lexicon and be returned to reserve status.

Note carefully: it's not that the doctrine should disappear; it's that the doctrine should disappear from the lexicon, and go back to its status as the unspoken, exclusive right of the most powerful nation on the planet.

This is precisely why I believed in 2004--and still believe now, more than ever--that a Democratic loss was the best hope for the long-term health of the world.  As Ashton, Perry, and Albright so clearly demonstrate in this instance, it is not the actual policies that are different under Democratic administrations but merely their presentation to the world. By asserting (and acting upon) these uniquely American "rights" with such unvarnished arrogance and disdain, the Bush administration is revealing the true face of American foreign policy--a face that never changes, but which is rarely displayed with such clarity.

-ism reality check

One of the more odious stratagems Hillary Clinton employed to further her quest for power, especially as the inevitable end approached, was to dismiss the still-epidemic levels of racism in our society so she could lay claim to being the alpha victim:

...in private conversations and in interviews, Mrs. Clinton has begun asserting that she believes sexism, rather than racism, has cast a shadow over the primary fight, a point some of her supporters have made for months.

This "sexism is costing Hillary her rightful victory" meme found a ready hearing from many of Hillary's supporters, who were impervious even to the obvious counterargument.  As evidence they pointed to numerous very real examples, large and small, of sexism expressed toward Hillary.  Some of these anecdotes were considered so archetypal and damning that they were repeated over and over; if I had a girder for every time I heard that Hillary makes Tucker Carlson cross his legs, I could build the Eiffel Tower by now.

But by comparison, here's what Obama volunteers were hearing:

In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. ...

She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

You can read the article for more heartwarming examples.  Staying true to their unity theme, the Obama campaign tried to downplay the extent of these kinds of reactions, but I'm just a teeny bit skeptical that 99.9999997% of Americans are entirely race-blind and there's one lone yahoo so filled with hate that he's willing to openly call for a lynching.  Maybe they accidentally phoned a friend of KKK imperial wizard Ray Larsen, who suggested that Obama will be assassinated by white supremacists if he's elected—but somehow I doubt it.

Lest we forget that those kinds of threats are not idle in the least, last week was the tenth anniversary of the murder of James Byrd, Jr., killed by three white men in Jasper, Texas in a manner so vicious that it's like a punch in the soul just to imagine it, much less to realize that it was done to an actual human being.  To their enormous credit, Byrd's family founded the Byrd Foundation for Racial Healing, dedicated to bridging the racial divide in Jasper and other places like it.  And they're making real progress:

Clara Byrd Taylor, Boatner's sister, is president of the organization.

"On the surface, it looks good in Jasper," Taylor said. "The races have been more cordial; older whites will speak to you and look you to your face. White men and white ladies will open doors for blacks going into businesses, and you will be greeted when you go into businesses, and that's a change."

So in ten years they've gotten to the point where whites will speak to them and look them in the face—and this is a genuine change from those ancient, mist-shrouded days of 1998.  It's difficult for coddled liberal [sub]urbanites like myself to understand that this kind of deeply-ingrained racism not only continues to exist but is even widespread in many parts of the country to this very day, but it's a fact.

So as Clinton's coronation quest dies its richly-deserved death, I'm overjoyed that I won't have to listen to any more of her calculating, narcissistic attempts to further her ambitions by simultaneously playing the victim card and downplaying the level of racism in this society.  And as critical as I've been (and will continue to be) of Obama, it really is a major and important symbolic step for this country—founded on racist genocide, developed through racist exploitation, and torn kicking and screaming from these deep racist roots only within the last few decades—to have a non-white as a candidate for president.

Naomi Klein on Obama's economic team

Something to share with your Obama-fan friends:

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart’s most prominent defenders, anointing the company a "progressive success story."

The rest.

Kucinich on "time" for impeachment

I've often been impressed by Dennis Kucinich's ability to make forceful, informed, eloquent points, and never more so than in his response to the question of having enough time to impeach Bush:

JUAN GONZALEZ: Your response to those who say that there’s no—there isn’t enough time in the calendar, given everything else that is going to be occurring, the presidential election, over the next few months, to even be able to deal with this issue?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: George Bush has enough time to bomb Iran on another pretext. He has enough time to continue policies of torture. He has enough time to continue policies of eavesdropping and wiretapping. He has enough time to continue to ignore critical science with respect to global climate change. He has enough time to help facilitate more violations of election law for the 2008 election.

We don’t have enough time. We can’t spend any more time temporizing, while the Constitution, the United States laws, international laws, are being shredded.

It's worth listening to it or watching it to get the full effect of his delivery.

The nadir of this type of talking point was surely Bill O'Reilly's badgering of Kucinich.  It beggars belief that O'Reilly, who rode Bill Clinton's joeblob to new heights of popularity, could say there are far too many important things going on right now to waste time on impeachment (though he couldn't manage it without a smirk—which I think wasn't so much his usual condescension as a "yes, I'm a gargantuan hypocrite and no, I don't care" tell).

No matter what happens, Kucinich deserves credit for his willingness to shine the spotlight on the criminal behavior of the US government under Bush.  But it's worth comparing his straightforward honesty now with the nerf balls he threw when he finally turned the corner on Clinton's bombing of Yugoslavia (which had far less legal legitimacy than Bush's attack on Iraq):

We need to rethink not only the manner in which we wage war, but also the manner in which we manage conflict and keep the peace. We must demonstrate that we know the difference between a legal and just humanitarian intervention on behalf of a civilian population and an illegal and unjust military intervention against civilians.

As Kucinich told The Nation, "There will be plenty of time for Monday-morning quarterbacking when the conflict is over...I don't want to create a war about the war."  And as a measure of the integrity of Democrats more generally, Kucinich's criticisms, though narrow and tactical, nonetheless put him at the outer reaches of Democrats who were willing to offer even token resistance to Clinton's manufactured and manipulated war.

So while I'm happy with what he's doing now, I'll be far more impressed if he's willing to hold the criminals in his own party to the same standards in the future.

CCR on Boumediene/Al Odah vs. Evil

When I was reading through the press accounts of the Supreme Court's ruling on habeas corpus yesterday, one thing was conspicuously missing: any mention of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the cases and worked with co-counsel to argue them all the way to the Supreme Court.  Here's CCR's detailed analysis of yesterday's decision.

Last week I attended a CCR event where CCR's senior managing attorney for the Guantanamo cases (Shayana Kadidal) gave an update on the Guantanamo proceedings and predicted yesterday's victory.  One of the things he pointed out was that unlike the ACLU, which focuses on establishing legal precedents, a major part of CCR's purpose is to bring cases that activists in the street want them to bring—even if there's essentially no chance of success.  That difference goes a long way to explaining why I donate five times as much to CCR as to the ACLU.

But even though they're willing to bring important but hopeless cases that are all but guaranteed to lose, I'm happy they won this time around, and that they're out there day after day fighting the battles that need to be fought.  Thanks yet again, lawyers!

UPDATE: Amy Goodman interviewed CCR executive director Vincent Warren today, discussing the ruling; click here to read/listen/watch.

Clinton's undoing: Insufficient click-through

Like me, you may have thought that Hillary Clinton's refusal to recant her Iraq war vote, while refreshingly honest, was the major reason for her failure in the primaries.  How wrong we were:

Google political ad man Peter Greenberger thinks Hillary Clinton's campaign was hampered by its failure to use search advertising consistently throughout the primary season. While he acknowledges the New York Senator's campaign deserves credit for experimenting with new media tools, he argues savvy search advertising contributed to the success of both Barack Obama's and John McCain's primary season wins by helping them build supporter lists. Through sponsored links in search results, the McCain and Obama camps have driven users seeking information on the candidates to their official Web sites to register for newsletters, volunteer or to donate money.

I wouldn't have thought that people who couldn't work out that Hillary Clinton's web site was hillaryclinton.com, even if they might have considered her the "bee's knees," would have gotten much help from Google (or The Google, as they'd likely call it).  And it seems to me that finding your way to Hillary's campaign (in one medium or another) over the past few months would have been about as hard as finding heat on the surface of the sun—even without a computer.  But hey, I could be wrong.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a spokesman out there for the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters saying that her problem was, you know, not enough speeches about plumbing.

George Bush wishes to correct our mistakenly accurate impression

Just in case you missed this:

President George Bush says he regrets the tough talk he used during the Iraq war, wrongly painting himself as a warmonger.

In an exclusive interview with Britain's The Times, he expressed regret at the divisions over the war and said he was troubled by how his country had been misunderstood.

"I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric," he told The Times.

"Phrases such as 'bring them on' or 'dead or alive' indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace," he said.

Yes, I can see how those phrases might give some people the impression that Bush is, you know, not a man of peace.  Just like they might also be misled by this:

"Kick ass!" [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell's tough talk. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!'"

Huh.  Ambiguous.  I admit I can't make it out one way or the other.  And then there are the hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq and Afghanistan who'd still be alive today if not for the wars Bush has waged on them and their countries.  It sure does paint a mixed picture.  Perplexing, really.  I can certainly see why some people might miss the nuance here and leap to the facile but—we now know—deeply mistaken conclusion that George Bush is not a man of peace.

My favorite part of the article: when they quote Bush quoting Bush saying "Bring them on."  I don't believe that George Bush would be capable of pronouncing the full word "them" in that sentence even under the threat of forced removal of his left testicle—any more than he can successfully manage his way through "nuclear."

( "Kill them!" quote via. )

Prolonging our illusions

I've had plenty of differences with Justin Raimondo over the years, but I give him enormous credit for this:

I have to say I was wrong – dead wrong – about Obama. In my eagerness to find a bright spot in a rapidly darkening world, I grasped on to his alluring rhetoric and his at-times trenchant critique of the Bush foreign policy, like a sinking man holding on to a life-jacket. But looking for hope in all the wrong places doesn't create opportunities for peace – it only prolongs our illusions. We must face the prospect of a much more terrible conflict than we have ever known, and look it squarely in the face, without flinching or looking for false messiahs.

(I recommend you follow his "dead wrong" link to see just how far advanced his Obamamania was; I was going to post about it at the time, but where's the satisfaction in threshing self-satirizing phrases like "those golden words melted the very air"?)

I'm very glad to see that Raimondo has recovered, recanted, and is speaking such critical truths.  I couldn't agree with him more; in fact I wrote about the danger of prolonging our illusions a few months back.  But the fact remains: Barack Obama managed to snow someone who's been the editorial director of antiwar.com for over a decade, who had every possible resource available to see through the rhetoric, and whose armor should have been miles thick.  Just one of the many reasons there's no doubt in my mind that if Obama wins, we're in for a marathon bout of illusion-prolonging that'll make the Clinton years look like the golden age of liberal skepticism.

"...changed himself into an Israel hard-liner"

I'm about to do something low, sordid, and shameful.  Something so odious that no amount of lye will purge the stain from my soul.  If you want to look away, this is your last chance.

I'm about to approvingly quote Dana Milbank:

Now, here's a change we can believe in.

A mere 12 hours after claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee yesterday -- and changed himself into an Israel hard-liner.

He promised $30 billion in military assistance for Israel. He declared that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force has "rightly been labeled a terrorist organization." He used terms such as "false prophets of extremism" and "corrupt" while discussing Palestinians. And he promised that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

Vowing to stop Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon, the newly minted nominee apparent added: "I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally, Israel. Do not be confused."

How could they be confused? As a pandering performance, it was the full Monty by a candidate who, during the primary, had positioned himself to Hillary Clinton's left on matters such as Iran. Yesterday, Obama, who has generally declined to wear an American-flag lapel pin, wore a joint U.S.-Israeli pin, and even tried a Hebrew phrase on the crowd.

Obama even outdid President Bush in his pro-Israel sentiments. On the very day that Obama vowed to protect Jerusalem as Israel's capital -- drawing a furious denunciation from the Palestinian Authority -- Bush announced that he was suspending a move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

God, I feel so dirty.

Next up: I break out a scanning electron microscope in an attempt to locate that "hope" and "change" I keep hearing about.

(If you think I should feel more ashamed of splitting an infinitive, you need to fully accept that that's a dead prescriptive rule based on the unitary nature of Latin infinitives and doesn't apply to English's two-part infinitives.  No, really, you do.)