Change We Can't Believe In

Unfortunately I find myself pretty much in agreement with this comparison by Stephen Walt -- now of Harvard and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- of the difference between the liberal interventionists leading us into war with Libya and the neocons who led us into war in Iraq:

The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that U.S. power -- and especially its military power -- can be a highly effective tool of statecraft. Both groups are deeply alarmed at the prospect that WMD might be in the hands of anybody but the United States and its closest allies, and both groups think it is America's right and responsibility to fix lots of problems all over the world. Both groups consistently over-estimate how easy it will be to do this, however, which is why each has a propensity to get us involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not engaged and that end up costing a lot more than they initially expect.

So if you're baffled by how Mr. "Change You Can Believe In" morphed into Mr. "More of the Same," you shouldn't really be surprised. George Bush left in disgrace and Barack Obama took his place, but he brought with him a group of foreign policy advisors whose basic world views were not that different from the people they were replacing. I'm not saying their attitudes were identical, but the similarities are probably more important than the areas of disagreement. Most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has become addicted to empire, it seems, and it doesn't really matter which party happens to be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue.

So where does this leave us? For starters, Barack Obama now owns not one but two wars. He inherited a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and he chose to escalate instead of withdrawing. Instead of being George Bush's mismanaged blunder, Afghanistan became "Obama's War." And now he's taken on a second, potentially open-ended military commitment, after no public debate, scant consultation with Congress, without a clear articulation of national interest, and in the face of great public skepticism. Talk about going with a gut instinct.

It's Off to War We Go

Again. Hi Ho. Hi Ho. No Congressional debate needed. No clear definition of what the end game is, how success will be defined. (At least I didn't hear it from the President's remarks.) Just a promise from the President that there will be no troops on the ground in Libya. But we have lots of high-tech technologies and weapons to use and that military-industrial complex to feed. So it's off to the shores of Tripoli we go, again.

A Pope in Trouble

I am beginning to think that the stories of cover-up of child sex abuse by priests in America, Germany, and Ireland are going to bring down this pope:

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

There is No Global Warming - NOT

Global warming deniers, including one in my denomination, have been all over the news that a prominent expert scientist on global warming supposedly says there has been no warming since 1995. Not surprisingly, it turns out the scientist was quoted out of context:

The scientist in question is Professor Phil Jones, who is the head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Suffice to say, this has made quite a hubbub around the blogosphere. The article is based on an interview that Jones gave to the BBC. Of course, delving into the article itself, it’s clear that Professor Jones did not say that there is no global warming since 1995. He says that there is no ’statistically significant’ global warming since 1995. Which still sounds bad.

Unless, of course, you actually read the interview.

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

That’s hardly the same as “no global warming since 1995″ and certainly does not represent a “retreat” or a “U-turn.” (For a good primer on statistical significance and what that means, check out this link).

There are several other flagrant misinterpretations of Jones’ statements in the Daily Mail article, as well, but they’re pretty easy to spot simply by comparing the article to the interview and its companion piece.

Heck, reading the Daily Mail, one might come away with the impression that Jones was renouncing the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change. To correct that impression, let me just quote one more part of the interview:

E – How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?

I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

This is what happens when you get your news from FOX and Drudge. Facts are fungible. Scientists are only quoted if a portion of their quote can be twisted to match a preconceived ideology.

There are Martyrs and then...

there are martyrs.

The cable news and even the once respectable network news has been going on non-stop about the failed attempt of Abdul Mutallab to blow up a plane in the hopes, I imagine, of being greeted in heaven by 27 virgins.

Meanwhile the Times of London has nominated for person of the year a real martyr, Neda Soltan:

Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.

“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”

Ms Soltan, 26, had no idea just how big a footprint she would leave. Hours after leaving home, she was indeed shot, by a government militiaman, as she and other demonstrators chanted: “Death to the dictator.”

Arash Hejazi, a doctor standing near by, remembers her looking down in surprise as blood gushed from her chest. She collapsed. More blood spewed from her mouth. As she lay dying on the pavement, her life ebbing out of her, “I felt she was trying to ask a question. Why?” said Dr Hejazi, who tried to save her life. Why had an election that generated so much excitement ended with a government that claims to champion the highest moral values, the finest Islamic principles, butchering its own youth?

A 40-second telephone clip of Ms Soltan’s final moments flashed around the world. Overnight she became a global symbol of the regime’s brutality, and of the remarkable courage of Iran’s opposition in a region where other populations are all too easily suppressed by despotic governments.

Freedom is on the march right now in Iran. Young people are in the streets facing down a brutal, despotic government. The government is Muslim. And so are the protesters who want to be Muslim and free. If they succeed it will be because of the bravery of people like Neda Soltan.

BTW, it strikes me that Neda Soltan was "not political" in the same way that Jesus was not political. Being not political like Jesus and Neda can get you killed.

Obama Wins Peace Price

President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, he hasn't done anything yet to deserve it. And I am an Obama supporter. It isn't his fault that he won, of course. In fact, if I am correct nominations were closed for the prize shortly after he took office. So the Nobel Committee was really awarding the American people the prize for moving the country in a different direction.

It will be interesting to see how Obama responds. I hope he either declines it or accepts it on behalf of the American people. If he accepts it he has big shoes to fill to live into its meaning. If we get mired down even further in Afghanistan or Iraq, or the Middle East blows up, or we get hit with a big terrorist strike, this prize will be prime material for political commercials in the next election cycle.

Walter Cronkite Dead

Another icon from my childhood is gone. Because of the internet and cable TV there is no one like Walter Cronkite today. Whether I was at home or at my grandparents' homes evening meal time was organized around his evening news broadcast. His influence on the events of the day was enormous. I was too young to remember his reporting on the assassination of President Kennedy; I do remember his reporting on the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and MLK, Jr., as well as his series on Watergate and his editorial comment that the Vietnam war was unwinnable. And I remember watching Dan Rather getting slugged at the Democratic Convention in 1968 and Cronkite commenting on it. We also watched his daily coverage of the first moon landing while at school. Uncle Walter will be missed.

And That's the Way It Is

I grew up as a child watching the most trusted man in America deliver the evening news. Walter Cronkite obviously had his biases and faults, but he understood that it was the job of the journalist not only to report the news but to hold the people he reported on accountable to the Truth. Truth with a capital T. There was such a thing then. I still remember watching the reporting out of Vietnam and it was clear that no matter what LBJ or Nixon was saying about the war, the pictures on the screen were telling the real unpretty story. Cronkite reported the Truth about the war.

The MSM long ago lost its belief in the Truth, or at least its belief that it is part of the media's job to dig for the truth and hold officials accountable to the truth. We make fun of Fox News' 'fair and balanced' moniker but only because it is so unabashedly brazen about the fact that what matters on Fox is not the Truth but that their 'truth' outshouts everyone else's truth. It's crude post-modernism on display every night on Fox.

But everyone else does it too now. The media's job is not to report the Truth but to report what competing interests say the truth is. Let the listener try and figure out the Truth if they dare, or care.

Even NPR is apparently too cowed by its corporate sponsors. Is waterboarding torture? When the North Vietnamese were doing it to American soldiers it was torture. By every known human rights convention waterboarding is torture. When Jack Bauer does it on 24 it is torture, vitally necessary to save the free world of course, but still torture. But when the Bush administration does it suddenly it isn't torture. Now it all depends on who is doing it and why they are doing it and whether they have lofty motives. So NPR bars its reporters from using the word 'torture' when they are talking about what the Bush Administration was doing to terror suspects. That would be telling the Truth and reporters can't do that any more.

Glenn Greenwald has a lot more to say about this here.

Let the Earth Bear Witness

Via Andrew Sullivan, a music and video tribute from the Waterboys' Dublin singer, Mike Scott to those protesting for freedom in Iran.



Whatever happens from here on out in Iran, we know now that Iran is not just President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards. When we deal with Iran on the world stage, as we must, and when we think about the future of this country, we must remember these people who also want a different Iran. They have been truly inspiring.

The Future of Newspapers?

The Christian Science Monitor is ending its daily:

After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday. The cost-cutting measure makes The Monitor the first national newspaper to largely give up on print.

I read the sports and local section of the Star Tribune every day and then go online for everything else. We kept the paper coming while our kids were living at home because we wanted them to see us reading the paper and we wanted to talk with them about what we were all reading. They got the lesson, I think, about the importance of keeping up with current events, but it is unlikely they will go about it the same with their kids.

Murdered American in China is a Bachman

I was reading the story on the New York Times website about the American man who was stabbed to death in China while attending the Olympics. It turns out he was Todd Bachman, own of the owners of Bachmans Garden Centers, the boss of my wife who is a manager at one of the stores. Todd is the father of former Olympian Elisabeth Bachman. His wife, Barbara, was hospitalized. Elisabeth Bachman is married to U.S. men's volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon.

What a loss for his family and the company.

Why are Gas Prices So High?

If you want to know the answer to that question, you need to first find the answer to another: why aren't journalists asking the right questions? So says Howell Raines, former editor of the New York Times. In his recent column in Portfolio, he says too many journalists today give oil companies a free pass:

When it comes to the cost of gasoline, who should we believe? Here are some nominees and their viewpoints:

1. The oil companies: It’s supply and demand at its most basic, just like your professor outlined in your freshman economics course.
2. The petro-toadies in Congress: All we have to do is open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the waters off Florida and California.
3. The Department of Energy: OPEC has to pump more, and we’ve got to allow more refineries by rolling back environmental restrictions.
4. King Abdullah: OPEC pumps plenty of crude but “despicable” oil-futures speculators in the West are driving up the prices due to their “selfishness.”
5. Senator John McCain: Exxon Mobil has done such a good job of demonstrating the magic of the marketplace that it deserves another $1.2 billion in tax breaks.
6. Senator Barack Obama: Impose a windfall-profits tax to remind American oil executives that price gouging can backfire politically.
7. About 90 percent of the print and TV reporters in America: See No. 1. It really is that ol’ devil supply and demand.
8. The White House: Never mind. Nobody’s home.

For my money, a sounder answer as to whom to believe is Don Barlett and Jim Steele, the investigative reporting team that has won two Pulitzers and two National Magazine Awards for exposing government theft and corporate greed. Their 2003 series for Time magazine on oil economics remains required reading for anyone who wants a better understanding of how gas at $4 to $5 a gallon represents a carefully arranged screwing of consumers. “The bottom line for the oil people is, How much can I make while spending the least I can get by with on refineries, synthetic fuels, and for exploration and drilling on the vast, unused acreage in existing oil leases?” Barlett says. He notes that Canada has become the United States’ No. 1 oil supplier by funding joint government-­industry exploration of the tar-sand fields of Alberta. “The most chilling statistic is Exxon Mobil’s. It spent twice as much last year to buy back stock as it did on exploration.”

As for shallow journalism that helps Big Oil, Steele makes the point that the newsrooms that were once staffed by the redistributionist children of the New Deal and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. are now populated with the children of Reaganomics: “Younger reporters come out of a mind-set that the market rules, taxes are evil, and government ought to let these people in the oil industry go about their business.”

As journalism has passed from a hungry to an elite profession, there’s no shock value in the fact that Exxon Mobil paid only $5 billion in U.S. income taxes last year while it paid $25 billion to foreign governments. Even with Exxon Mobil making $76,000 a minute, the last thing that occurs to many assignment editors and reporters is to investigate whether a windfall-profits tax would drive Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil companies to invest in the alternative-energy strategies they boast about in their television commercials.

So, Raines says, we get puff pieces like Matt Lauer interviewing Rex Tillerson, chairman and C.E.O. of Exxon Mobil assuring Lauer's Today Show audience that Exxon is a victim along with consumers in the oil economy. They are doing all they can to explore and drill. But if only they could get more lands open for exploration that would help alot.

No mention is made of the fact that oil companies haven't explored 80 percent of their existing leases in the continental U.S., that they have closed more than half of their 300 refineries in the last 25 years, and made a conscious effort to cut back on exploration and plow money into profits.

What drives me crazy about television news in particular isn't the supposed liberal bias of Katie Couric or the conservative bias of Fox News, it is the constant deferential, trusting treatment of government and business leaders. It is one thing to be respectful and another to be fawning.

Exxon Mobile is raking in record profits while soaring gas prices are affecting the livelihoods of most everyone in the country. I happen to think that the pain at the pump is a good thing if it finally forces us to begin to wean ourselves off of oil, but the oil companies are not victims in this process; they are strategically reaping the financial benefits of our pain. You wouldn't know that by watching the nightly news. Give me back Dan Rather.

Eating Dirt Cookies in Haiti

I was just watching a story on NBC News about people eating dirt cookies in Haiti. No link to the video is up on their website. But ABC News has the story:

It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud.

With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies.

Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.

Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said.

The good we could be doing with the billions spent in Iraq. And I know we are dealing with a failed state, too. There is plenty of blame to go around.