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Monday, May 29, 2006
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This weekend on the show “Cashin’ In,” Fox News analyst Jonathan Hoenig asserted that global warming was “bogus,” and “dreamed up” by environmentalists to stop economic development:
There’s no scientific proof that global warming even exists. To be honest, it’s a bogus consensus dreamed up by Greens because they hate industry. They hate advancement. They hate technology…Greens will lead us back to the stone ages.
It’s Hoenig that’s living in a dream land. Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity.
A big part of the solution to global warming, of course, is technology – more efficient cars, renewable energy, cleaner production methods. Don’t bother telling that to Hoenig, however. He’s too busy with his conspiracy theories.
(Via Think Progress.)
11:03:00 PM 
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At this point, the only way to claim that Iran has passed a law regulating the clothing which non-Muslims must wear is by lying. But that's exactly what Powerline is claiming. And four months from now, and six months from now, when the debate intensifies over whether the American military should forcibly change Iran's government, Big Trunk and Rocket will be writing posts insisting that Iran has a law requiring Jews and Christians to wear identifying clothing, and they will link to the post they wrote today setting forth the "rationale" which proves that, and scores of other warmonger pundits and bloggers will link to that post when arguing, with increasing urgency, that Iran is the new Nazi Germany and that those who oppose an attack on it are a bunch of appeasers who never learned the mistake of Neville Chamberlain and who don't care if another Holocaust occurs.
1:04:01 PM
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This weekend, President Bush delivered the commencement address at West Point and declared that his global war on terror is helping to spread freedom in the Middle East:
Decades of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe. So long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place where terrorists foment resentment and threaten American security. So we are pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.
This morning on Meet the Press, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered a strong rebuke of Bush’s assessment of what’s going on in the Middle East:
I think you could make a pretty strong case that things are worse off in the Middle East today than they were three years ago. By measurement of Iraq, by Iran, by the Palestinian-Israeli issue, what’s going on in Egypt. And, I think the United States must use its force of diplomacy to engage Iran.
Hagel isn’t alone in making his argument that the Middle East is worse off since the Iraq invasion. In Newsweek, prominent Arab journalist Rami Khouri writes:
Three years after the assault on Iraq, the country is delicately balanced between a reconfigured democratic polity and an endless slide into hell. More troubling, though, is that events in Iraq are not a freak sideshow. The evidence suggests that Iraq mirrors a wider and troubling trend throughout this region that is being fostered by Bush, Blair and their freedom-loving friends, whether deliberately or inadvertently. Once stable Arab countries are slowly polarizing and fragmenting into smaller units of ethnic, religious and tribal identities, each with its own militia and contacts with Washington, London, Paris and other global power centers. Like it or not, failed states are an increasingly common outcome of Western meddling in the Middle East.
If Bush truly wants to admit mistakes about the Iraq war, he must acknowledge the negative consequences it has had on the region.
(Via Think Progress.)
10:35:36 AM
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Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe, the reporter who had the story on the historic 700+ signing statements by Bush, adds another layer to that story. Apparently, it's not the Whitehouse that is pushing so hard, it's the Office of the Vice President, mainly in the form of David Addington.
WASHINGTON -- The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president's desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power, according to former White House and Justice Department officials....
"Addington could look at whatever he wanted," said one former White House lawyer who helped prepare signing statements and who asked not to be named because he was describing internal deliberations. "He had a roving commission to get involved in whatever interested him."
Knowing that Addington was likely to review the bills, other White House and Justice Department lawyers began vetting legislation with Addington's and Cheney's views in mind, according to another former lawyer in the Bush White House.
This is unprecedented in the history of our country. For more, check out this Firedoglake blogpost on this article because it adds some broader context.
(Via Born at the Crest of the Empire.)
10:09:36 AM
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Can the executive branch now enter private property without a warrant if it believes there is something going on that could faintly be related to the war on terror? Seems so. And the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger enthusiastically concurs: The Supreme Court's purpose in Brigham was to clear up confusions among lower courts about "the appropriate Fourth Amendment standard governing warrantless entry by law enforcement in an emergency situation." I'd call the terror war an emergency. Brigham said the Court has held that officers can make a warrantless entry "onto private property" to fight a fire, investigate its cause, prevent the imminent destruction of evidence, and engage in pursuit of a fleeing suspect. Al Qaeda qualifies as all four. Yet another precedent cited for "obviating the requirement of a warrant" is "the need to protect or preserve life." That sounds like the point of the war on terror, but some may disagree.
So from now for the indefinite future, the government has "emergency" powers to violate your private property without a warrant, tap phones without a warrant, jail suspects indefinitely without due process, and even torture them? Eveyone concedes that some surrender of liberty is necessary in this new world. But the glee with which some conservatives greet the expansion of unlimited government power is truly remarkable. 
(Via Daily Dish.)
9:34:31 AM
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A horrifying, must-read article on what it's like n Baghdad these days. This is what Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have created.
I have spent nearly two of the three years since Baghdad fell in Iraq. On my last trip, a few weeks back, I flew out of the city overcome with fatalism. Over the course of six weeks, I worked with three different drivers; at various times each had to take a day off because a neighbor or relative had been killed. One morning 14 bodies were found, all with ID cards in their front pockets, all called Omar. Omar is a Sunni name. In Baghdad these days, nobody is more insecure than men called Omar. On another day a group of bodies was found with hands folded on their abdomens, right hand over left, the way Sunnis pray. It was a message. These days many Sunnis are obtaining false papers with neutral names. Sunni militias are retaliating, stopping buses and demanding the jinsiya , or ID cards, of all passengers. Individuals belonging to Shiite tribes are executed.
Read the whole thing. It'll make you sick.
8:52:21 AM
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To the Hubris of the Bush Regime. There are going to be many more of them in Iraq -- and God knows where else.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A slew of car and roadside bombs killed more than 30 people in Iraq on Monday, a day after a tribal chief who challenged Iraq's most feared terrorist and sent fighters to help U.S. troops battle al-Qaida in western Iraq was gunned down.
The explosions began just after dawn with a roadside bomb that killed 10 Iraqis who worked for an organization of Iranian dissidents living in Iraq. The blast targeted a public bus near Khalis, 50 miles north of Baghdad in Diyala province, an area notorious for such attacks. Twelve people were wounded, police said.
All the dead were Iraqi employees heading to the main camp of the Mujahedeen Khalq, which opposes Iran's regime, the group said.
(Via Rising Hegemon.)
8:41:33 AM
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This scientifically site debunks fox(which doesn't take for much thinking to debunk something on fox) program about the photos being fake. If you still think the Apollo moon then read this site debunks it.
(Via digg / dig.)
You really do need to be some kind of dope to believe that the moon landings were faked -- but I guess a lot of these Digg readers are dopes, witness the poor spelling and grammar and even worse reasoning on the posts. I guess it's no surprise that this comes from Fox. In any case, the page Digg links to does a nice job of summing up the idiocies of the anti-moon landers arguments.
8:33:24 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 6/1/2006; 8:55:15 AM.
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