The Distant Ocean

All your power are belong to us

Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation is participating in democracy!

PG&E Corp. plans to spend $25 million to $35 million on a California ballot initiative that would limit the ability of cities and counties to go into the public power business, the company reported Friday.

PG&E Corp. is the parent company of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. utility, which is fighting efforts by Marin County and San Francisco to start their own power agencies. Proposition 16, on the June 8 ballot, would force any local governments that want to establish electrical service to win the approval of two-thirds of their voters first.

So far, PG&E has supplied all of the proposition campaign's funding, totaling $6.5 million. On Friday, PG&E took the unusual step of telling its investors that funding for the campaign would affect the company's 2010 profits, lowering them by 6 to 9 cents per share.

Now, some cynics might believe that PG&E is taking this hit to its bottom line for selfish reasons.  In fact, they might even assume that if a corporation spends $25-$35 million to pass a ballot measure, it's solely because it believes it will accrue more than $25-$35 million in additional profits as a result in the future.

But it would be wrong to assume that in this case, because nothing could be further from the truth.  Here's the real reason why PG&E is providing the sole backing for this ballot measure:

When local governments enter the retail electricity business, it can cost taxpayers millions or billions of dollars in public money or debt. These are risky long term capital decisions that can impact local spending on other budget priorities, can increase consumer electric rates, and cannot be easily reversed.

See?  PG&E is just worried that these risky public power agencies would end up costing taxpayers more money, thus depriving them of important public services like, say, pillow-providing for the elderly or possibly adorable puppy-petting.  And by the way, the quote above is from the web site of "Taxpayers Right to Vote"—the grassroots organization PG&E has just founded for the sole purpose of helping taxpayers retain their precious right to vote, which is apparently mortally threatened in some way by the creation of municipal power authorities.  That's just how dedicated they are to democracy!

In fact, PG&E is so selflessly devoted to the common good that they're even planning to reduce electric rates this summer:

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is asking the California Public Utilities Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve proposals that would reduce average electric rates by 2.5 percent from March 1 levels, beginning June 1. The proposals are among a number of measures PG&E is taking to help customers with their electricity costs.

"We understand that electricity is a fundamental need, and know that many of our customers are deeply affected by job losses and the economic downturn," said Helen Burt, senior vice president and chief customer officer at PG&E. "While our customers work hard to conserve energy and pay their bills, at PG&E we are also working hard to help customers save."

You see?  PG&E obviously just loves their customers, who are of course also taxpayers and (though it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else mentioned here) voters.  And in a gigantic and no doubt entirely unrelated coincidence, this rate reduction will  happen on June 1st—one week before the June 8th election.  Life's funny that way, isn't it?

Now, it's true that this reduction will basically just balance out a rate increase that PG&E has already scheduled for March 1st.  And I don't doubt there are a few people out there so cynical that they might suspect that PG&E planned these offsetting rate changes in order to use the rate "decrease" to curry favor with voters right before the election, without affecting their bottom line.

And that's what's wrong with this country: too many people (like these nogoodniks) refuse to believe that corporations have only their best interests at heart.  Thank goodness there are magnanimous corporate citizens like PG&E to prove them wrong.

Radio silence (continues)

I'll be out of town for a few days trying to reach an elevation where the snow doesn't melt before it hits the ground.  While I'm away, here's some fresh meat to gnaw on—the always-reliable Katha Pollitt gamely rationalizing the numberless failings of her Democratic hero, and imploring him to come back to his True Self.  Here are the paragraph starters, which tell you all you need to know:

How disappointed are the Obama warriors of 2008? "May your love for me not fade as quickly as your love for Obama," read one pale pink e-card making the rounds on Valentine's Day. [...]

I'm still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. [...]

I'm not even sure how much of it you can blame on Obama. [...]

But let's not go overboard. The real-world constraints on what Obama can do are considerable. [...]

It's true that Obama was elected with the votes of many independents and some Republicans, and he has to respect that or end up building houses with Jimmy Carter. [...]

During the campaign Obama was often attacked as being all airy speeches and noble rhetoric. Maybe he took that criticism too much to heart and made the mistake of trying to rack up accomplishments quickly through wonkery and compromise and deal-making, the normal things politicians do--only unfortunately the Republicans aren't interested in governing, and the Blue Dogs are mostly interested in themselves. [...]

What is the point of Obama being conciliatory and careful if his opponents are reckless and don't want to conciliate?

Aww, that's just sweet.  And she's right; it's really a shame that Obama's reckless, unconciliatory opponents have forced him to carefully murder hundreds of people with drone strikes, increase the ferocity of the rape of Afghanistan, collude with Israel's every crime, hand our money over to the banks, submarine action on global warming, adopt and even expand Bush-era assaults on civil liberties, etc, etc.  Damn those reckless opponents for forcing him to act against his better nature!

As Chris Hedges wrote about useless liberals:

The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his "true" self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

Though in fairness to Pollitt, this abject, cloying letter was only about Barack Obama, not to him.

Ready...aim...

I was about to put together a posting noting that the IAEA's new U.S.-backed director general (Yukiya Amano) has tossed aside the evidence-based approach of his predecessor (Mohamed ElBaradei), issuing a report that adopts the U.S. propaganda line that Iran should be assumed guilty until proven innocent, and how the timing of that report dovetails so conveniently with the uptick in belligerent rhetoric coming from Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Obama administration...but then I saw that Chris Floyd had already written it, and covered the subject so thoroughly that there's not much left to add on those counts.  So by all means, go read his article right now.

When you get back, here's one thing Floyd didn't mention:

Although much of the research took place nearly a decade ago, the report said some tests "seem to have continued beyond 2004."

The date is significant because it contradicts a bedrock assumption by U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran halted weapons-related research in 2003. U.S. officials are revising their key judgments about whether Iran is seeking nuclear weapons or the capability to quickly produce them. The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, said he was "waiting on the intelligence community for a new document" assessing Iran's intentions.

The old document that established this "bedrock assumption" was the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (PDF), which "judge[d] with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" and "assess[ed] with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007," concluding (in an amusing bit of bureaucratic understatement) that Iran "is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005."  The Obama administration made a point of rejecting the substance of the 2007 NIE just weeks after the inauguration, all but openly declaring its belligerent intentions—even as Obama was lying about his goal of "sitting across the table face to face" with Iran.

Just as the IAEA's relatively cautious assessments under ElBaradei have been the major international argument against the hair-on-fire, Iran-is-going-to-nuke-us-all narrative Obama and his coterie have been hawking, the 2007 NIE has been the major domestic counterargument (I'm talking about mainstream arguments here, by the way, not ideologically unsound responses like "Iran hasn't attacked another country since the 1800s" or "Iran isn't insane" or even "war is wrong").  But now the IAEA's pliant new director general has swept away the international counterargument, and based on the bolded quote above it appears that the Obama administration is planning to finish nullifying the 2007 NIE as well by having the intelligence agencies produce a new report that reaches the right conclusions—namely, conclusions that match the policy, thereby justifying even more hysterically aggressive posturing and threats.

What's crystal clear from all this is that the Obama administration is carefully and methodically removing the roadblocks to a military attack.  So as I said last year, it looks like the decision has already been made to commit the crime of assaulting a country that's no threat to us whatsoever, and all that's left now are the details of how and when.

"...has to be seen going through the motions"

I am shocked, shocked to read this:

MI6 was tipped off that Israeli agents were going to carry out an 'overseas operation' using fake British passports, it was claimed last night.

A member of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, said the Foreign Office was also told hours before a Hamas terrorist chief was assassinated in Dubai. [...]

The security source said that the tip-off was not a request for permission to use British passports but more a 'courtesy call' to let the security services know 'a situation' might blow up. The Mossad man said Israeli intelligence chiefs understand British authorities will have to 'slap them on the wrist' and added: 'The British government has to be seen to be going through the motions.'

And in yet more shocking news, the British government is denying that such an outlandish thing could ever happen—even as it goes through the motions of delivering the aforementioned slap on the wrist.

I suppose in one sense it would be helpful to get this kind of immediate confirmation of similar kabuki performances by the U.S., but then again it kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn't it?

That squeaking sound you hear is the mighty war cry of outraged liberals

Oh good god:

So you’re disillusioned with Obama. So you watched The Who play "Won’t Get Fooled Again" during the Super Bowl. So you’re mad, and you’d like to do something about it.

Well, don’t sit around being a whiny liberal, the kind of softy Rahm Emanuel likes to insult. Don’t retreat into cynicism, either, or such pointless barroom analysis as "All politicians are alike" and "The big money runs everything."

No, do something constructive — something, moreover, that RahmObama will clearly understand. Give Obama a primary. [...]

If you feel betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and mercenary forces in Iraq; by seeing him kowtow to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein; by his plan to donate 30 million taxpayer-subsidized policies to the health-insurance business, and you wonder why Guantánamo and NAFTA are still open for business, then it’s not too early to start thinking about 2012 and who might run against the incumbent now stationed in the White House.

Yes, let's wait two years and then run a symbolic, doomed, ineffectual primary challenge against Obama!  And then when it fails, vote for him anyway!  But do it grudgingly and unenthusiastically.  Just imagine the awesome power of our eventual collective mild disapproval—that'll teach him a lesson he won't soon forget!

And this, my friends, is why the left (or the "left") in this country has become less than a joke.

I know you are but what am I?

An unfortunate misquote in the Guardian:

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, on a visit to the Middle East, warned that Iran's democratic institutions were in danger of falling to the guard, the most powerful wing of the country's military.

"Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship," Clinton said in Doha, Qatar.

What Clinton actually said was, "I am moving toward a military dictatorship."

Burn!

One of these things is not like the other

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon opines that "Demanding Israel stop building in settlements is like demanding the Palestinians give up the right of return for refugees."  Interesting theory, Daniel, but while my intention to keep kidnapping your relatives might certainly be related to your desire that I stop, it's just the tiniest bit disingenuous to suggest they're the same.

Ayalon truly does have a keen grasp of both history and analogy, though, as he demonstrated in this quote from the same interview: "Iran is not only clashing with Israel, but with the entire world. This is the severest threat to the world since Hitler."

Girls gone wilding

This collection of testimonies from Israeli women who've served in the West Bank and Gaza is worth reading to see what your tax dollars are paying for, like this:

"[I]t's boring, so we'd create some action. We'd get on the radio, and say they threw stones at us, then someone would be arrested, they'd start investigating him… There was a policewoman, she was bored, so okay, she said they threw stones at her. They asked her who threw them. 'I don't know, two in grey shirts, I didn't manage to see them.' They catch two guys with grey shirts… beat them. Is it them? 'No, I don't think so.' Okay, a whole incident, people get beaten up. Nothing happened that day."

Or this:

A female Border Guard detailed to protocol she called "dismantling rubber" – the dismantling of rubber bullets from clusters of three to single bullets, and peeling the rubber off of them. She also said that, despite the clear orders to fire in the air or at the demonstrators' feet, it was common procedure to fire at the abdomen.

(Keep that in mind the next time you read about the Israelis using "rubber bullets" on Palestinians.)

A female Border Guard officer in Jenin spoke of an incident in which a nine-year-old Palestinian, who tried to climb the fence, failed, and fled – was shot to death: "They fired… when he was already in the territories and posed no danger. The hit was in the abdomen area, they claimed he was on a bicycle and so they were unable to hit him in the legs."

But the soldier was most bewildered by what happened next between the four soldiers present: "They immediately got their stories straight… An investigation was carried out, at first they said it was an unjustified killing… In the end they claimed that he was checking out escape routes for terrorists or something… and they closed the case."

I've always said the easiest way for a Palestinian to get a gun is to be killed by Israelis, but I didn't realize they could get a bicycle that way as well.

The full report is here (PDF).

And I mean that most sincerely

Fight!

Late last month, a Web site called the Electronic Intifada reported that Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times, has a son in the Israeli military. Others, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog group, demanded to know if it was true and, if so, why it did not create an unacceptable conflict of interest for Bronner and The Times.

With all due respect to EI and FAIR, I think we can safely assume that Bronner and the Times will have no trouble maintaining the exact same level of objectivity they've always shown when it comes to Israel.

This can't possibly go wrong

It's good to know that in between obliterating Afghan wedding parties and executing children, the US military still has time to dream a little:

In its 2011 budget (PDF, 522 pages), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency lays out its intention to create "BioDesign," a project to create artificial life, presumably with military purposes in mind.

"BioDesign eliminates the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement primarily by advanced genetic engineering and molecular biology technologies to produce the intended biological effect," the DARPA document states.

The agency says it wants to develop "a robust understanding of the collective mechanisms that contribute to cell death" so as to "enable a new generation of regenerative cells that could ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely."

You know, there are some science fiction stories I wouldn't mind becoming true, but this isn't one of them.  (But then again neither was this, and we're making stellar progress there as well.)

AND FURTHERMORE: This comes in the wake of the Pentagon doing its best to make Terminator 2 a reality:

The Pentagon has unveiled a new "chemical robot" that's half liquid, half solid. [...] The new robot — which scientist are calling a ChemBot — moves by inflating and deflating parts of its body via a process called jamming. This causes its skin to change between semi-liquid and semi-solid states.

(My favorite quote from the story was "It's like the Blob with an attitude"—because the original Blob was really short on attitude, wasn't it?)

BUT: Despite all of that, the most immediately horrifying manifestation of science fiction spilling over into reality for us Californians is Arnold Schwarzenegger promising to veto single-payer health care legislation for the third time.   Y'know, as a kid I never even suspected that when he said "Fuck you, asshole" he was talking to me personally.

Toxically cute pudge

I'm off to see what a volcano is like when it's covered with snow, but I thought I'd leave you with this while I'm gone.  I warn you: if you're prone to cute overload, turn away NOW.  I'm talking Knut+ here, people.

Don't believe me?  Ok, then, don't say you weren't warned:

If your brain is still functioning there's more here.  Also, in related news, don't forget the big sporting event this weekend!

We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas

John Feffer bewails the lack of any alternative to the Democratic Party:

We don't have our own party, which would say yes to things we like. True, we have the Green Party and assorted groupuscules. But I'm talking about a viable, national party that secures the votes of the 16 percent of Americans who identify themselves as progressives, and can win a governing majority by crafting arguments that appeal to the two-thirds of Americans who support progressive ideas.

Got that?  We don't have a national party that says yes to things we like, except for the national party that says yes to things we like.  But the Green Party doesn't count because it's not "viable"—meaning it hasn't somehow managed to garner the votes of the 16% of Americans who identify as progressives, but who refuse to vote for it until the 16% of Americans who identify as progressives have already voted for it.

Call me pedantic, but I can't help but sense a subtle logical flaw here.

Liberals like Feffer (and he's far from being the only one) apparently want to see a new "progressive" party spring to life fully formed like Athena popping out of Zeus's skull, somehow instantly gaining ballot access in all 50 states and going directly from non-existence to 16% of the national vote in a single election cycle—though they themselves won't actually vote for this miracle party until the next election cycle, once it's a known "viable" quantity.  And until all of that happens, they refuse to throw their vote away!  On anyone but the Democrats, that is.

I sometimes imagine a dialog with a drowning liberal:

DROWNING LIBERAL: Help!  Help!

ME: You seem to be drowning.  Here, let me throw you this life preserver.

DL: No!  How do I know that life preserver is viable?  It might dissolve on contact with salt water!  I won't grab it unless I see twenty million other people use it first!

ME: Well, that's up to you.  But I have to say that no matter what, I think it'd be better than what you're holding on to now.

DL: You mean this anchor?

ME: Yeah, that.

DL: Well, it's very easy to say that, but how can I be sure?  That life preserver may never have been tested in the water, whereas this anchor is obviously a viable seafaring device!  Sure, in some ideal world the life preserver might be better, but this anchor is serving its intended purpose in the actual ocean right now!  And furthermore <glub glub glub>.

You might be tempted to feel sorry for poor DL, but don't worry—there are millions more exactly like him.

Shadow puppies

In case you noticed an article come and go for a few hours yesterday, that was me mucking up the target date when I republished a puppy posting from 6 months ago that I'd been hiding from the Google image indexer (just the latest in a series of tricks I've tried to keep it from rising to the top of the puppy image search and filling up the access logs).  I've sent it spiraling back through time again now.  So no, you weren't seeing things.

ADDING: If there's anyone out there who happened across this site thanks to this Google image search and is now a regular reader, I'd love to hear about it...but I can't help but suspect that most of those people are just using me for their cute animal fix.