Digby: Sweet Home Alabama

The US Attorney scandal is still percolating even though Alberto Gonzales has wandered off into the sunset, and one of the most intriguing cases is one of the more obscure: the apparent railroading of the Democratic Governor of Alabama at the direction of Karl Rove:

Siegelman's case has become something of a major cause among those who charge that he was targeted by a highly partisan Department of Justice so he would be no threat to Republican Gov. Bob Riley in his bid for reelection to the post he wrested from Siegelman in 2002.

Digby: His Due

Here's an interesting article about Alan Greenspan's new book. It sounds oddly gripping yet bizarre:

Mr. Greenspan returns repeatedly to the far-reaching importance of communism's collapse. He says it discredited central planning throughout the world and inspired China and later India to throw off socialist policies. He recalls meeting a former manager of a produce distribution center in China who says he once had to labor to allocate produce according to government edict; now the allocations are made by auction. "Now I don't have to get up at four a.m.," he quotes the manager as saying. "I can sleep in and let the market do my job for me." Mr. Greenspan recalls his amazement when an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin asks him to discuss Ayn Rand, the libertarian philosopher with whom Mr. Greenspan had been friends.

Digby: The Presidential

A very savvy friend of mine, a political player of many years, has put together a memo for various interested parties about the lay of the political landscape which he has allowed me to share with you. I'll excerpt passages in various posts over the next week or so, but I thought you might be interested today on his thoughts on the presidential race:

The Presidential

As we are only one-quarter of the way through the longest and first open election in decades, most pundit predictions are, no doubt, wildly premature. Pundits in Washington read early and inconclusive polls. They then sometimes venture to real America like anthropologists (think David Brooks or Broder) but manage to return with their preconceptions remarkably intact.

Dollar's retreat raises fear of collapse

By Carter Dougherty

Published: September 13, 2007

FRANKFURT: Finance ministers and central bankers have long fretted that at some point, the rest of the world would lose its willingness to finance the United States' proclivity to consume far more than it produces - and that a potentially disastrous free-fall in the dollar's value would result.

But for longer than most economists would have been willing to predict a decade ago, the world has been a willing partner in American excess - until a new and home-grown financial crisis this summer rattled confidence in the country, the world's largest economy.

Iraq, deep in your bones

A war that isn't really a war, the great humiliation that's ours forever. Is there any upside?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, September 14, 2007

We are, of course, mostly fighting against ourselves.

It must be repeated every so often, just as a painful, necessary, ego-tweaking reminder: Iraq was never a war. Not really, not in any sense that mattered or that we could actually define and understand or to which we could truly submit ourselves or our national identity.

It never mattered how many little American flags appeared on how many bloated Chevy Avalanches, how many right-wing radio shows found a new reason to pule, how many furiously blindered uber-patriots happily ignored all the harsh words from all those naysaying generals or even all the "turncoat" anti-war Republicans and insisted we're really over there to fight some sort of great Islamic demon no one can actually see or locate or define but that we must, somehow, attempt to destroy -- even though doing so only seems to make the situation far, far worse.

A Rendezvous With Destiny

-- by Sara

One of the most important tasks confronting us as we rebuild American progressivism is reclaiming our own long, rich heritage. It's astonishing, when you look through popular history books or watch what's presented on TV (if you watch the so-called "History Channel," you easily get the idea that American history started in 1941 and ended in 1945), to realize that there's a vast, deep, and important current of liberal history that has flowed straight down the memory hole.

We may be the first Enlightenment nation -- but all traces of that radical impulse have been carefully, consciously excised from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and what's desirable and possible in the world. Other generations have faced down these same tyrants -- and yet we can't even name most of them, let alone recount how how they did it. And it costs us, because without those stories, we have far less confidence in our ability to fight that battle once again.

Ted Olson and the pushovers

- by Dave

Why is it that foulmouthed left-wing bloggers seem to be the only people who have noticed that there's a peculiar set of political rules ruling the Beltway, particularly within media circles, these days?

Here's what we've noticed: For some reason, Democrats must be the model of decorum and civility and moderation and bipartisanship when it comes to governing; any deviance from this script brings on fainting spells and finger-wagging. Meanwhile Republicans can be as vicious and nasty and ruthless and nakedly partisan as they please, and their "toughness" is merely celebrated.

Digby: Constitutional Hardball

The New York Times' editorial begins this morning with this:

The Justice Department is a disaster zone. It should be the embodiment of America’s commitment to the rule of law, but it has been contaminated by partisan politics. The nation’s top lawyers may have broken the law, and even may have sent innocent people to jail, to advance the interests of the Republican Party. To replace Alberto Gonzales, President Bush must appoint an attorney general who is above politics, and the Senate should only confirm a nonpolitical lawyer of unquestioned integrity.

Isn't it pretty to think so? But there are very good reasons to assume that the Bush administration will not do it.

TPM: Doing to History What He Did to Iraq

With the president's speech tonight it appears we are back to the supposed 'Korea analogy' for the occupation of Iraq. We've been in Korea for more than a half century, as we have been in Japan and Germany. And for all the commitment of troops and money, we now have three highly prosperous allied democracies where in two of the cases we had ardent foes.

The IRD's Next Front Line: Gambling on Your Xenophobia

By John Dorhauer, Wed Sep 12, 2007 at 04:40:49 PM EST

In April of 2007, a number of pastors from across the United Church of Christ were calling me asking me why the Institute on Religion and Democracy had sent them a copy of Ephraim Karsh's book Islamic Imperialism. Within a week, I learned that not only had UCC pastors received a free copy of this book as a gift from the IRD, so also had Lutheran, United Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal clergy. UMNexus is now reporting that the IRD mailed this book to 100,000 clergy across the US, at a reported cost of over $1.5 million.

At the time, my initial response was one of curiosity, although I did tell those who called that the IRD did nothing unless it had the potential to divide congregations, and congregations from their denominational leaders. I said we would need a little more time to try and discern what was up. It was my colleague on staff, and co-author Rev. Sheldon Culver who pointed out that this would soon become the new wedge issue.
Please read on.

The Ignored Issue That Can Get Progressives Elected

By Riane Eisler, AlterNet
Posted on September 13, 2007, Printed on September 13, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60596/

A recent poll found that the biggest issue for voters as the 2008 election approaches is not the Iraq war. It's an issue that leaders have not been focusing on: the well-being of America's children.

The poll asked conservatives and liberals, whites and blacks, men and women, Christians and non-Christians which of 11 changes were "absolutely necessary" for the United States to address within the next 10 years. The 11 ranged from national security and environmental protection to the state of marriage and families and the spiritual state of the country. But the issues that emerged as the frontrunners were "the overall care and resources devoted to children" and "the quality of a public school education." That was the response by 82 percent of the adults surveyed. What's even more interesting is that this poll was conducted by the Barna Group, a Christian polling organization.

Are You on the Government's 'No Fly' List?

By Naomi Wolf, Chelsea Green Publishing
Posted on September 13, 2007, Printed on September 13, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62407/

The following excerpt is from Naomi Wolf's latest book, End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007) and is used by permission of the publisher. In this timely call to arms, Wolf compels us to face the way our freedoms are under assault, and that each of the ten classic steps used by dictators to close down open societies are underway in the United States today.

ARBITRARILY DETAIN and RELEASE CITIZENS

The Press Department of the Foreign Ministry judged that ... I was urging the "spread of counterrevolutionary developments in the GDR." Because of the role I was clearly playing "in the ideological war of imperialist media against the GDR" I should be placed on the list ... -- Timothy Garton Ash

Protest has been lively in our nation throughout most of our history because being free means that you can't be detained arbitrarily. We have also felt free in the security of our homes, believing that the state can't break in and go through our possessions. All that is changing.

Corals added to IUCN Red List of Threatened Species for first time

Climate change, over-fishing blamed for threats to marine life

Arlington, Virginia (Sept. 12, 2007) – For the first time in history, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species includes ocean corals in its annual report of wildlife going extinct.

A comprehensive study of marine life sponsored by Conservation International (CI) and implemented jointly with the IUCN (World Conservation Union) used data from the Galapagos-based Charles Darwin Research Station and other regional institutions to conclude that three species of corals unique to the Galapagos Islands could soon disappear forever.

Paulson: Market Turbulence May Linger

Wednesday September 12, 2007 4:46 PM

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER

AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday that the turbulence that has hit financial markets will take some time to be resolved, especially in the area of subprime mortgages.

Paulson, speaking to officials of some of the country's biggest financial firms, said the Bush administration was looking for their help in making sure subprime homeowners get assistance in dealing with sharply rising mortgage payments as their initial low adjustable rate mortgages now reset to higher levels.

Republicans trying to split California Electoral Vote

A well-connected California Republican law firm is pushing a ballot initiative that would split the state's Electoral Votes according to Congressional districts won

Election chicanery -- aka voter fraud --is as American as lead-laden Mattel toys, air polluting "clean skies" initiatives, and closeted Republican Party politicians. In recent years, GOP partisans have cleansed voter rolls of legitimate voters; hatched schemes to disenfranchise thousands of minority voters; mastered the art of push polls and robo calls, and supported the use of voting machines with no paper trail.

NYT Editorial: Running on Empty

The dangers of America’s Faustian bargain with Pakistan’s military dictator are growing more obvious by the day. Gen. Pervez Musharraf was on his way to declaring a state of emergency last month until Washington rightly warned him that such a move could set off a political explosion. This week General Musharraf defied Pakistan’s Supreme Court and blocked the return of his longtime political rival, Nawaz Sharif, and then arrested nearly the entire top leadership of Mr. Sharif’s party.

Mr. Sharif is no Washington favorite, and this time the Bush administration’s criticism of the general’s overstepping has been pro forma. The violent street protests in Pakistan, however, are raising new fears of cataclysmic political upheaval in a country that is both armed with nuclear weapons and the fault line in the fight against terrorism.

TPM Cafe: Crank Politics

By Paul Krugman | bio

There’s only one word to describe Jon Chait’s book: shrill. I mean, how can Chait say that “American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists”? The cocktail-party circuit knows better. As Peter Beinart, the then editor of The New Republic, wrote in his review of my 2003 book The Great Unraveling, “guest lists that cross ideological lines can help liberals understand the conservatives they write about. And many Washington conservatives genuinely don't see the Bush administration as radical: they see it as having ratified a big-spending, culturally liberal status quo.”

OK, end snark. Obviously I agree with just about everything that’s in Jon’s book. I cover some of the same ground in my own forthcoming book, The Conscience of a Liberal, though in much less detail. I’d like to take this conversation in a slightly different direction by talking about the second part of the book, on the political environment that lets crackpot economics flourish; Jon’s description is correct, but, I think, somewhat incomplete.

Two of Seven Soldiers Who Wrote 'NYT' Op-Ed Die in Iraq

By Greg Mitchell

Published: September 12, 2007 7:25 AM ET
NEW YORK The Op-Ed by seven active duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq questioning the war drew international attention just three weeks ago. Now two of the seven are dead.

Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance T. Gray died Monday in a vehicle accident in western Baghdad, two of seven U.S. troops killed in the incident which was reported just as Gen. David Petraeus was about to report to Congress on progress in the "surge." The names have just been released.

Is the Foreign Policy Process Working?

By John Tirman, MIT Center for International Studies
Posted on September 4, 2007, Printed on September 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/61631/

For decades, political analysts have dissected the mechanisms in the U.S. government and other institutions to describe how foreign policy is made. The matter seems to rise with international crises, and those are upon us again: the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the confrontation with Iran, HIV/AIDS, and the pressures of climate change, among other issues, underscore the point. With the U.S. government split between parties, fractiousness is in full view.

With troubles for the U.S. global position mounting, it is easy to say that the foreign policy process is not working well. But what are the sources of trouble, and how readily can they be fixed?

Petraeus: The Paris Hilton of Generals

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on September 12, 2007, Printed on September 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62302/

The former Cockney flower-girl turned elegant-English-speaker Eliza Doolittle caught something of our moment in these lyrics from My Fair Lady: "Oh, words, words, words, I'm so sick of words .... Is that all you blighters can do?"

Of course, all she had to do was be Pygmalion to a self-involved language teacher. We've had to bear with the bloviating of almost every member of Congress, the full-blast PR apparatus of the White House, and two endless days of congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, not to speak of the flood of newspaper, radio, and TV stories about all of the above and the bevy of experts who are hustled out to do the horse-race assessments of how the general and ambassador performed, whether they "bought" time for the President, and the like.

Voter Purging: A Legal Way for Republicans to Swing Elections?

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on September 11, 2007, Printed on September 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62133/

The Department of Justice's Voting Section is pressuring 10 states to purge voter rolls before the 2008 election based on statistics that former Voting Section attorneys and other experts say are flawed and do not confirm that those states have more voter registrations than eligible voters, as the department alleges.

Voting Section Chief John Tanner called for the purges in letters sent this spring under an arcane provision in the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the Motor Voter law, whose purpose is to expand voter registration. The identical letters notify states that 10 percent or more of their election jurisdictions have problematic voter rolls. It tells states to report "the subsequent removal from rolls of persons no longer eligible to vote."

Digby: Top Dog

As Jack Cafferty said earlier today, "are they going to give us another one who can't talk?"

On Friday, Thompson told reporters in Iowa that bin Laden is "more symbolism than anything else" and said his presence in the "mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan is not as important as there are probably al-Qaida operatives inside the United States of America."

Digby: The Plan

As the blogosphere has been saying for years now:

Bush policy to bequeath Iraq to successor

The president plans to end his term with a strong U.S. military in the country and leave the issue of exiting to his successor.

By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 11, 2007

WASHINGTON -- -- The talk in Washington on Monday was all about troop reductions, yet it also brought into sharp focus President Bush's plans to end his term with a strong U.S. military presence in Iraq, and to leave tough decisions about ending the unpopular war to his successor.

Digby: 9/11

Gary Kamiya in Salon has written an indispensible article today about 9/11,retribution, terrorism and how we got here. This is the conclusion:

Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties.

The Supreme Court Phalanx

By Ronald Dworkin

1.

The revolution that many commentators predicted when President Bush appointed two ultra-right-wing Supreme Court justices is proceeding with breathtaking impatience, and it is a revolution Jacobin in its disdain for tradition and precedent. Bush's choices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, have joined the two previously most right-wing justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in an unbreakable phalanx bent on remaking constitutional law by overruling, most often by stealth, the central constitutional doctrines that generations of past justices, conservative as well as liberal, had constructed.

Citizen Gore

By Michael Tomasky

The Assault on Reason

by Al Gore

Penguin, 308 pp., $25.95

Editor's note: Michael Tomasky will be answering questions from readers about his article "Citizen Gore," and his recent articles about Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the 2008 campaign for the presidency. Please send your question, stated as succinctly as possible, by September 15, 2007 to web@nybooks.com, with the subject line "Question for Michael Tomasky." Mr. Tomasky will reply to selected questions on nybooks.com later this month.

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is more up in the air than it seems. Much has been made on cable news channels of Hillary Clinton's lead, which has grown since the spring to 22 points over Barack Obama, according to a recent USA Today poll.^[1] But national polls are meaningless because we choose nominees state by state, and in the crucial early primary states, such as New Hampshire, the picture is far different. The best snapshot we've been given to date of Iowa, for example, is to be found in a Washington Post–ABC News poll from the same week showing Obama with 27 percent, leading both Clinton and John Edwards by a (statistically insignificant) single point.^[2] In other early-voting states, surveys similarly show that the race is much closer than suggested by the national polls.^[3]

Deakin University research finds diesel exhaust kills throat cells

Researchers at Deakin University have found that diesel exhaust is far more damaging to our health than exhaust from biodiesel, the plant-based fuel.

Associate Professor Leigh Ackland, Associate Head of Deakin’s School of Life and Environmental Sciences, led a team of researchers who compared the effects of diesel exhaust and biodiesel exhaust on human airway cells. They found that diesel exhaust damaged and killed the cells, while biodiesel exhaust had little effect.

9/11: How Bush Has Betrayed Us

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on September 10, 2007 - 7:04pm.

Like everyone else, I'll never forget Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I was living in Brooklyn then, and breathed air polluted by the ash from incinerated flesh. But I'll also never forget Friday, September 14. That was the day my Brooklyn neighborhood held its candlelight vigil. Our bodies spanned Seventh Avenue from sidewalk to sidewalk, for over a dozen blocks. I'll never forget the next morning either, because that's what really made me cry. I nearly broke my neck, you see, from all the leftover candle wax coating the sidewalk. So many people feeling the same thing together: remember the solidarity?

Solidarity. That was America's, and the world's, immediate response to September 11. Christopher Hayes wrote a classic essay on this forgotten word last year. He quoted the dictionary definition: "The fact or quality, on the part of communities...of being perfectly united or at lone in some respects, .esp. in the interests, sympathies, or aspirations."

Paul Krugman: Where’s My Trickle?

Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went to Americans with incomes of more than $1 million a year.

Needless to say, administration economists produced various misleading statistics designed to convey the opposite impression, that the tax cut mainly went to ordinary, middle-class Americans. But they also insisted that the benefits of the tax cut would trickle down — that lower tax rates on the rich would do great things for the economy, helping everyone.

Economic outlook is worst in 5 years

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer
Mon Sep 10, 7:35 PM ET

Strained by an ailing housing market and credit woes, the economy in 2007 is expected to log its worst growth in five years and should be somewhat sluggish next year.

The No. 1 risk, though, is that the economy will lose its footing altogether and fall into a recession, forecasters say.

'Swear Him In' Provokes Expulsion

By Ray McGovern
September 10, 2007

“Swear him in.” That’s all I said in the unusual silence this afternoon as first aid was being administered to Gen. David Petraeus’s microphone at the hearing before the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees.

It had dawned on me that when House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Missouri, invited Gen. Petraeus to make his presentation, Skelton forgot to ask him to take the customary oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I had no idea that would be enough to get me thrown out of the hearing.

I had a flashback to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in early 2006, when Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, reminded chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, that Specter had forgotten to swear in the witness, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; and how Specter insisted that that would not be necessary.

Health care premiums rise 6.1%, far outpacing wages

By Julie Appleby, USA TODAY

Health insurance premiums rose 6.1% this year — the lowest rate of increase since 1999 — but that fact offered little solace to employers and workers, who have seen overall premium increases rise far faster than wages or inflation during that same period.

So says a report released Tuesday by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which annually surveys about 2,000 employers and publishes a detailed review of costs.

Low Technologies, High Aims

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: September 11, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Beneath the bustling “infinite corridor” linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time.

M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve the lives of the world’s bottom billion, those who live on a dollar a day or less and who often die young.

Six Years After 9/11, Why We're Losing the War on Terror

By David Cole and Jules Lobel, The Nation
Posted on September 11, 2007, Printed on September 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62143/

President George W. Bush is fond of reminding us that no terrorist attacks have occurred on domestic soil since 9/11. But has the Administration's "war on terror" actually made us safer?

According to the July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, Al Qaeda has fully reconstituted itself in Pakistan's northern border region. Terrorist attacks worldwide have grown dramatically in frequency and lethality since 2001. New terrorist groups, from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia to the small groups of young men who bombed subways and buses in London and Madrid, have multiplied since 9/11.

Could a recession lie ahead? Watch the job market.

The US economy lost 4,000 jobs in August. Home builders, factories, and schools were hit hard.

By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 10, 2007 edition

The latest snapshot of American employment showed the first monthly decline in four years, but the worst part is this: The numbers suggest a steady weakening of the job market, not just an August dive.

Factories, home builders, and public schools all saw big employment losses in August, yielding a net loss of 4,000 jobs for the nation. But what's more troubling than the negative tally, economists say, is the breadth of deceleration.

Hundreds Of Antarctic Peninsula Glaciers Accelerating As Climate Warms

Science Daily — Hundreds of glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula are flowing faster, further adding to sea level rise according to new research published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Climate warming, that is already causing Antarctic Peninsula increased summer snow melt and ice shelf retreat, is the most likely cause.

Political Animal: The Chaos Hawks

In the beginning were the War Hawks, and much did they counsel the powerful to do battle against the evildoer Saddam. Then came the war, and the looting, and the Heritage Foundation hordes, and the hawks lamented exceeding loud and many soon repented of their ways. Yea, verily, they presently transformed themselves into Pottery Barn Hawks, eager to fix the disaster they had helped create and thus redeem themselves in the eyes of the faithful. In the fullness of time, though, the disaster ripened and flowered and became impossible of resolution, and the hawks despaired. Success had become unachievable, yea unto their own generation and the generation to come after them. In short, life sucked.

Homo politicus: brain function of liberals, conservatives differs

by Marlowe Hood
Sun Sep 9, 1:33 PM ET

The brain neurons of liberals and conservatives fire differently when confronted with tough choices, suggesting that some political divides may be hard-wired, according a study released Sunday.

Aristotle may have been more on the mark than he realised when he said that man is by nature a political animal.

Dozens of previous studies have established a strong link between political persuasion and certain personality traits.

Digby: Requirements

Seven years in the White House and he's still as stupid as the day he was installed:

Oops, Bush did it again. After telling Australia's deputy prime minister that "We're kicking ass" in Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush made two more of his characteristic verbal blunders at the APEC summit in Sydney.

In a speech this morning, Bush welcomed business leaders to the OPEC meeting, not the APEC meeting.

Daily Kos: How the Republicans Can Win the Iraq War

by LarryInNYC Fri Sep 07, 2007 at 08:27:09 PM PDT

Howard Dean said it best when he said "What I want to know is why are so many Democrats supporting this Republican War?" The war in Iraq has been a Republican, neo-conservative undertaking from its inception, notwithstanding the fact that too many Democrats were pushed by public support for the war into granting Bush the authority to pursue it.

For what it's worth, I believe the neo-cons when they say they're reason for pursuing the war was to remake the Middle East into some kind of fantasy American Enterprise Institute. That war is lost. But the Iraq war has always also been a war on the Democrats. And that war the Republicans are poised to win.

Mahablog: Religion and Liberalism

I’ve been struggling with an essay by Stanley Fish in the behind-the-firewall New York Times. Fish seems to be arguing that liberalism and religion are incompatible and that liberal society requires the diminution of religion.

Liberalism is in no way incompatible with my religion. However, I’m not going to dismiss Fish’s argument out of hand, even though I think he has several blind spots.

First, I want to repeat the point made by Mark Lilla in his recent New York Times essay, “The Politics of God,” that I blogged about here: Separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible.

New Book Details Cheney's Lawyer's Efforts to Expand Executive Power

By Dan Eggen and Peter Baker
The Washington Post

Wednesday 05 September 2007

Vice President Cheney's top lawyer pushed relentlessly to expand the powers of the executive branch and repeatedly derailed efforts to obtain congressional approval for aggressive anti-terrorism policies for fear that even a Republican majority might say no, according to a new book written by a former senior Justice Department official.

David S. Addington, who is now Cheney's chief of staff, viewed both U.S. lawmakers and overseas allies with "hostility" and repeatedly opposed efforts by other administration lawyers to soften counterterrorism policies or seek outside support, according to Jack L. Goldsmith, who frequently clashed with Addington while serving as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and 2004.

The Genius Doctor Who Diagnosed Nuke Power's Deadly Disease

By Harvey Wasserman
The Free Press

Friday 07 September 2007

The nuke power industry now wants $50 billion and more in loan guarantees to build new atomic reactors. As it strong-arms Congress, the warnings of the great Dr. John Gofman, who passed away last week at 88, loom ever larger.

One of history's most respected and revered medical and nuclear pioneers, Gofman's research showed as early as 1969 that "normal" radioactive reactor emissions could kill 32,000 Americans per year.

Justice Department on net neutrality: “Trust us”

Yesterday the Justice Department filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission opposing the principle of “net neutrality” and urging the FCC not to sanction regulations to protect it. In a report and press statement that sound like they were written by executives from AT&T and Verizon, the DOJ regurgitates telecom talking points that falsely claim net neutrality will hamper innovation and that the market is somehow working awesomely:

The Department said in its filing that it may make economic sense for content providers who want a higher quality of service to pay for the Internet upgrades necessary to provide such service, arguing that “any regulation that prohibits this type of pricing may leave broadband providers unable to raise the capital necessary to fund these investments.”

Melting ice cap triggering earthquakes

· Estimates of sea-level rise out of date, say scientists
· Religious leaders pray for planet at Greenland glacier

• Paul Brown in Ilulissat
• The Guardian
• Saturday September 8 2007

The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.

Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea-level rise and make predictions this February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change far too low.

Frank Rich: As the Iraqis Stand Down, We’ll Stand Up

It will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus instead on another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without notice: Sept. 8, 2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for the administration's latest scam.

That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice — were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a sales pitch concocted by a White House speechwriter.

What Will the Greenest Cars Be?

Posted by Tara Lohan on September 7, 2007 at 1:58 PM.

I have to admit that I was a little nervous driving a vehicle I was told cost about a million bucks right now. On the outside it looks like a Toyota Higlander -- but on the inside it's something special.

What I was driving was known as an FCHV, a fuel cell hybrid vehicle and it was among a half dozen or so alternative and cleaner fuel vehicles that journalists were getting to test out an the annual Society of Environmental Journalism conference.