Month: July 2006

What the president really cares about.

Murray Waas seems to have connected another dot. it’s useful to remember, in the current hysteria over leaks, that the president, according to Waas, told the special prosecutor in the Plame case that he

had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson.

The president discloses classified information; others merely leak it.

Bob Samuelson, as so often, puts what I have been trying inelegantly to express much more directly:

From 2003 to 2050, the world’s population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that’s too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world’s poor to their present poverty — and freeze everyone else’s living standards — we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

Even the most drastic measures from Western nations will not make much more than a dent in this. Only an energy technological breakthrough can. I’d ratchet up gas taxes to see what the market will throw up in innovation (and for national security reasons). But then I’d channel resources into adjusting to global warming, rather than trying to prevent it. If the technology comes through and we can really do something to heal the planet in time, I’m all for it. Until then, a lot of this debate is, as Samuelson says, posturing. Or have I and Samuelson missed something?

This is their latest creation, courtesy of Kos:

McCain-Lieberman: the Independent ticket in 2008. I can dream, can’t I?

The NYT has a wonderful pargraph in its print edition today:

The other missiles that the North fired appeared to be a mix of short-range Nodong missiles, of the kind the North has sold to Iran, Pakistan and other nations.

In the online edition, the missiles are now called Rodong. But the 620-mile Nodong clearly exists. Let us now praise silly names for weapons and the fact that missiles of mass murderers manage to live up to them.

"We do not want gold, or dresses or the food of kings. We want to live without fear for our lives and our kids. These days neither your tribe nor the police can protect you. It is the jungle law," – Qais Mohammed, shop-keeper, in the hell of Ramadi.

This piece is a real example of the MSM at its best: gritty, balanced, detail-based reporting on the grim war of attrition against the insurgency in Anbar province. The soldiers who are fighting on our behalf in these conditions are among the finest this country has ever sent abroad. We need more of them. Two more divisions in Baghdad at the very least.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 9.15 am.

San Leandro, California, 4.50 pm.

"All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day [Independence Day] forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them," – Thomas Jefferson, June 24, 1826, in the last significant letter he wrote (he died on July 4, 1826).