Archive for June, 2009
Paul Krugman Revives the “Global Warming is a Bigger Threat Than Terrorism” Canard
“[A]s I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason—treason against the planet….
“Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an ‘existential threat’ to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole—but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.
“Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.
Can we get Krugman on record supporting the death penalty for the 212 Representatives who opposed the climate change bill? Because I personally favor the death penalty for the Times editors who exposed Bush’s warrantless wiretapping efforts.
WP: The Debt Tsunami
“The CBO’s latest warning on the long-term deficit is scarier than ever…
“Both President Obama and leading congressional Democrats were less than thrilled when the CBO estimated that the costs of universal health coverage would be much higher than advertised…
“Now comes the CBO with yet more news of the sort that neither Capitol Hill nor the White House is likely to welcome: its freshly released report on the federal government’s long-term financial situation. To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/27/AR2009062701979.html
CBS: EPA May Have Suppressed Report Skeptical Of Global Warming
“Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty ‘decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.’”
Oh, is that all it doesn’t do? Pshaw!
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/06/26/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5117890.shtml
My Way: Supreme Court to Decide Final 3 Cases on Monday
“A closely watched discrimination lawsuit by white firefighters who say they have unfairly been denied promotions is one of three remaining Supreme Court cases awaiting resolution Monday…
“Sonia Sotomayor, nominated to take Souter’s place, was one of three appeals court judges who ruled that officials in New Haven, Conn., acted properly in throwing out firefighters’ promotions exams because of racially skewed results.
“The city says it decided not to use the test scores to determine promotions because it might have been vulnerable to claims the exam had a ‘disparate impact’ on minorities in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The white firefighters said the decision violated the same law’s prohibition on intentional discrimination.
“The opinion that Sotomayor endorsed has been criticized as a cursory look at a tough issue. Among the critics are fellow judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.”
WSJ: The Climate Change Climate Change
“[T]he global warming tide is again shifting… The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
“In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
“The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak ‘frankly’ of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming ‘the worst scientific scandal in history.’ Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the ‘new religion.’ A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled…
“Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation… Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science.”
Michael Barone: The Adolescent Angst of Barack Obama
“There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did… [S]ome of it, and especially in the case of Barack Obama, seems to come from an adolescentlike confidence that everything done by those who came before is (insert your own generation’s expletive here).
“We have seen this spectacularly in the dozen days since the June 12 Iranian election. Back in July 2007, Obama said that he would meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and other tyrants without preconditions. Grown-up squares like George W. Bush wouldn’t talk to these guys, so as the avatar of the generation of hope and change, Obama would. Obama figured he was cool enough to get the mullahs to agree to renounce nuclear weapons and all that hate stuff…
“These moves show an adolescent determination to renounce the policies of those who came before, no matter what. As parents know, it takes time for an adolescent to grow up.”
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/The-adolescent-angst-of-Barack-Obama-48934402.html
U.S. Invents Diabolical Weapon Called “Twitter” to Bring Down Iranian Regime
President Obama said last week that he doesn’t want the U.S. to be seen as “meddling” in the recent Iranian presidential election. In his view, vocally supporting the protesters is comparable to the CIA’s coup against Mossadeq in 1953.
That old bald eagle Zbigniew Brzezinski believes Obama has struck the “perfect tone”: Zbig thinks we should refrain from antagonizing the Iranian leadership and avoid a showdown.
Joe Klein’s thoughtful message for John McCain, who has been requesting that Obama take a tougher stance on Iran: “Be quiet.” According to Klein, supporting the protesters is mere “self-indulgence.”
Joe Scarborough thinks it’s ridiculous that we know what’s best for women’s rights in Iran. Peggy Noonan writes, “America so often gets Iran wrong… So modesty and humility seem appropriate stances from which to observe and comment.”
What planet are these people from? The would-be appeasers’ argument seems to be thus: We should not offer clear, unwavering, forceful encouragement to the Iranian protesters. If we do, Iran’s leaders will accuse the U.S. of being behind the demonstrations—you know, the ones that no one in the West predicted, the ones that happened after the election results no one foresaw, the ones that few Western journalists are close enough to eyeball, let alone instigate.
My question for the ersatz pacifiers: So what? Who believes the mullahs? Nations of the free world don’t. The protesters who spontaneously organized don’t. The mullahs don’t—they were already making their misstatements long before our Equivocator-in-Chief changed his mind this week and raised an eyebrow over the carnage.
Memories of the 1979 Revolution, including citizens’ taking to the streets and rooftops to chant, are having a greater impact on present-day protesters’ behavior than anything any American has said. Iran’s leaders are paying more attention to circumstances in the U.S. than are protesters—as in their specious comparison of Iran’s election to the 2004 Bush-Kerry contest. (It was Ahmadinejad who co-opted Obama’s “Yes, We Can” slogan for his reelection campaign.)
So if the mullahs blame us no matter what we do, why is it mandatory that we shut up? Are we afraid that if we support the protesters, the mullahs might despise us even more viciously and biliously than they do now?
The “Let’s stay out of this” argument also seems to be based on the premise that a first-world country’s expression of support for the protesters is condescending and makes the Iranians look backwards and childlike.
I’ll tell you what’s condescending: believing that Iranians aren’t smart enough to figure out that (1) 39 million votes cannot be counted in two hours, (2) Ahmadinejad did not crush Mousavi by the exact same percentage in every demographic group in all 30 provinces, (3) Mousavi-leaning urban centers did not have enough ballots sent to them on purpose, and (4) Iranian elections have been rigged to within an inch of their lives for the past 30 years. All of that I think the Iranian citizenry is capable of figuring out on its own. Thousands of Iranians were savvy enough to bring pens to the voting booth out of fear that the ones supplied by the government would be filled with disappearing ink.
The Iranian protest movement has been brewing underground for decades, mostly among college students and graduates, and women’s groups. I don’t recall any accusations of our having meddled in Iranian universities’ gender studies curricula recently.
The “Mind your own business” line of reasoning is reminiscent of the old charge that we shouldn’t go to war against Iraq (in 2003) or Afghanistan (in 2001), because we’ll only stir up anti-American sentiment; or the notion that we shouldn’t help Israel, because jihadists’ real hatred of America stems from our support for that country.
In fact, we should vocally support the protesters in Iran, because that stance gives us credibility when we fight our own battles. When fools like Ahmadinejad (and Obama) declare that we have no right to decide which countries get nukes and which don’t, we must be able to respond confidently, “Yes, actually, we do—it should be free nations that support individual rights and aren’t run by lunatic dictators, which includes the U.S., Britain, Israel, and our allies; and not Iran, North Korea, Syria, or any other place of our choosing.” If we support movements for freedom where they occur, rather than ignoring them, then our stance gains consistency and credibility to reformists in hostile regimes who are potentially open to our ideas. Those are the only people we should even dream of catering to.
Critics of supporting the protesters are right about one thing: one does not “impose” democracy on a nation. Consequently, I think if protesters in Iran actually objected to American ideals more than theocratic values, we would have heard more people chanting “Death to America” than “Death to the Dictator” these past two weeks. Protesters would presumably not have embraced Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube with the same gusto if they had felt that the country that invented these tools were hampering them with “cultural imperialism” or some other made-up crime. (Undoubtedly there is a minority crackpot fringe arguing that YouTube’s relaxing of its restrictions on videos with graphic content is “inciting” the Basij to commit more acts of violence.)
Certainly it is helpful that this is a homegrown revolution, and yes, statements against the Iranian government carry more weight when they come from Iranian citizens who could be jailed or killed than from Americans safely speaking half a world away.
Here’s how we actually did encourage the protesters in Iran—by turning their next-door neighbor, Iraq, into a democracy. Our transformation of Iraq has given Iranians hope that a government that protects liberty can work in an Islamic country in the Middle East. So yes, we did influence the protesters—in a phenomenally helpful, productive, and material way, at great cost to ourselves. Why shouldn’t we underline our message by supporting the protesters?
TVNewser: New All-Time Lows for Both CBS & ABC Evening Newscasts
“[T]he CBS Evening News has once again set an all-time low last week with 4.89 million Total Viewers and 1.42 million A25-54 viewers. But it was also the lowest (since records began in the 1991-’92 season) for ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson.”
Scott Spiegel
