The trustees of Southern Methodist University have been given the the go-ahead to lease campus land for the George W. Bush Presidential Library, where thousands of copies of The Pet Goat and transcripts from warrantless wiretaps will be housed.

If a majority of San Francisco voters give an "aye" in November to a ballot measure certified Thursday, however, a rather different kind of public building will be named after the current occupant of the White House. It's now called the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant. If voters approve, it will become the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

Backers of the measure, who for several months circulated a petition to place [it] on the ballot, turned in more than 12,000 signatures on July 7, said organizer Brian McConnell. The Department of Elections today informed those supporters, the self-proclaimed Presidential Memorial Commission, that they had enough valid signatures - a minimum of 7,168 registered San Francisco voters - to qualify for the November ballot, he said.

McConnell, who came up with the idea over beers with friends, often donned an Uncle Sam outfit to drum up support for the petition. Other signature gatherers - all volunteers - often carried around an American flag and blasted patriotic music from a boom box to attract attention. He said today that the campaign to pass the measure will be an equally grassroots effort.

San Francisco Republicans say the plan stinks and they plan to oppose it, according to the Associated Press.

McConnell says the name-change makes perfect sense to memorialize an administration that has dragged our nation (and a few others) through the muck on a daily basis, leaving behind a mess that will take a decade or two to clean up.  

How disrespectful. How juvenile. How delightful.

But surely Richard Bruce Cheney should also be honored with his own appropriately labeled memorial. Whenever the brown has flowed during the past seven-and-a-half years, the gray eminence of this administration has been in it up to his eyebrows.

• Al Gore delivered a "moonshot" speech on energy today, a speech many people had hoped would come from Barack Obama's lips on January 20, 2009. Every kilowatt of U.S. electricity, Gore said, should come from solar, wind and other eco-friendly sources in a decade. Not 25 or 50 years, but 10.

  A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But here’s what’s changed: the sharp cost reductions now beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power – coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal – have radically changed the economics of energy.

  Andy Revkin at The New York Times's Dot Earth has an annotated version of the speech.

Video moved below the fold for our friends running Macs. -ct

• In a new paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Marina Ottaway and Mohammed Herzallah write that even Arab countries usually aligned with Washington are undertaking diplomatic initiatives that contradict U.S. policy, "because they no longer trust the U.S. capacity to contend with escalating regional crises" whether that relates to Iran, Lebanon or Hamas.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced objections  to the Cheney-Bush administration's efforts to redefine as abortion contraception that 40% of Americans use. A new Department of Health and Human Services proposal would prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer use of these contraceptives under the Weldon and Church amendments. Said Pelosi:

  “The majority of Americans oppose this out of touch position that redefines contraception as abortion and represents a sustained pattern of the Bush Administration to reject medical and sound science in favor of a misguided ideology that has no place in our government.

• Ben Smith over at Politico wonders if John McCain's often raw humor, which in the past has included a rape joke, will be seen as a "McCain being McCain" authenticity or backfire.
• The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee is holding hearings today on how foreign banks facilitate "tax evasion by U.S. clients, hide client and bank misconduct behind the cloak of bank secrecy laws, and add to the offshore abuses that cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $100 billion each year."
• President Bush gets credit for pushing the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, but on Wednesday 16 Senate Republicans voted against the bill that will triple spending to treat and protect millions in Africa and elsewhere from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Previously, as DemFromCT explained here, several conservative Republicans put a hold on the bill because it eliminates the requirement that recipients provide "abstinence" education. The current program expires in September. Known as PEPFAR, it has helped bring lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to some 1.7 million people and has supported care for nearly 7 million. Up to $48 billion will be spent over the next five years "for the most ambitious foreign public-health program ever launched by the United States."

It wasn't exactly a full hall when John McCain spoke to the NAACP at its 99th annual convention in Cincinnati Wednesday, but he did manage to coax a respectful, if not thunderous, standing ovation from the crowd by the time he was finished speaking and answering a few questions. Besides lauding Barack Obama, the Arizona Senator again favorably mentioned Teddy Roosevelt - something some right-wingers are unhappy about - noting TR's controversial 1901 decision to invite black educator Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.

Somebody might have let McCain know ahead of time that NAACP leaders, especially W.E.B. Du Bois, were quite critical of Washington for being too accommodating to racist white society and for the endorsement of segregation he gave in his 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech. But mentioning Washington was a perfect introduction to the centerpiece of McCain's speech, a standard, if tepid, right-wing rap on the failure of American public education, depicted as the fault of federal bureaucrats, teachers' unions, state credential approvers, and inflexible school administrators.

He didn't mention, of course, that the NAACP itself gave McCain an F rating for his legislative work in the 109th Congress. In the organization's estimation, he cast a wrong vote on eight of nine education-related issues. (Overall, McCain cast a wrong vote on 26 of 28 issues of interest to the NAACP. Obama got an A.)

Among those votes, said Think Progress, he:

- Voted Against Head Start Programs: In 2005, for instance, McCain voted against increasing "federal spending on Head Start programs by $153 million."

   - Voted Against Expanding Pell Grants: While 45 percent of African Americans rely on Pell Grants to pay for college, McCain has consistently voted to cut the value of Pell Grants.

   - Voted Against Title I Education Grants: McCain voted against increasing spending on Title I education grants, which are designed to help public schools that serve predominantly low-income students, by $3 billion."

Indeed, McCain has consistently voted against funding Head Start and against appropriating enough money to cover the mandated costs to schools for implementing the No Child Left Behind program. He also voted against reducing the five-year tax cut by $5.4 billion so the money could be spent on education, voted for $40 billion in cuts to entitlement programs, including student loan programs, and voted against an amendment to increase by $7 billion spending on education, training and low-income support programs.

Talk is cheap. Praising Barack Obama costs nothing. Reforming education, something everyone agrees needs doing - costs money. Experience has taught us that Senator McCain has far more heart for cutting rich people's taxes than for appropriating enough dollars so America's kids will get the education they deserve.  

If you have a longer memory than the traditional media, you'll recall that, about this time two months ago, Mister Bush got caught in a lie when he told Politico in an interview that he had given up golf so as to be "in solidarity" with the families of troops in Iraq because, he said, for the Commander-in-Chief to play "golf during a war just sends the wrong signal." If you do have a short memory or missed that news cycle, you can catch the gist here:

But next Monday, as Examiner.com points out, Bush Will Attend A McCain Golf Fundraiser Hosted By His Parents

According to a solicitation sent by the McCain camp, for the low, low price of $5,000, you can play a round of golf at Cape Arundel Golf Course, Bush’s home course.

"Both President Bush and Governor Jeb Bush will be stopping by to greet the foursomes," the missive promises. "The course is reserved for this private group, and VIPs will be visiting during your round of golf. This event is a great way to end a weekend getaway, and we would be honored if you can attend."

Think Progress speculates:

It’s unclear what Bush will do while everyone else is ignoring the war and golfing. Perhaps he’ll ride around in golf carts or simply make swinging motions with his arms. ...

McCain also seems to have few qualms about golfing during wartime. In fact, on his campaign website, he sells golfing gear.

Apparently, Senator McCain won't be at the fund-raiser. Which is too bad. If he were, he could help out by giving Mister Bush another great big hug down by the water trap on the sixth hole. The hug photo we have now is getting a tad frayed.

In a new survey, Health Care and the Economy in Two Swing States: A Look at Ohio and Florida, National Public Radio, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health found that the economy, health care and the occupation of Iraq are the top items on people's minds, with seven out of ten saying the economy will have a significant influence on how they will vote for President in November.

Asked to name the most and second most important issues "when you decide how to vote for president," respondents replied:

In Florida, half of those polled say they're struggling not just with one, but with multiple economic problems.

There's the collapse of the housing market and the decline in home values. Also, a credit crunch is making it hard for consumers to borrow their way out of trouble. Then there's triple or quadruple whammy: spiraling fuel and food prices.

In the new poll, more than three-quarters of people in Florida said they were facing at least one serious economic problem; half said they were struggling with three or more. The big ones? It's jobs, gas prices, housing and health care.

Floridians List Serious Problems with the Economy
Percent who say or their family experienced serious problems on account of recent changes in the economy

People in lower- and middle-income groups are suffering most, of course, but the economic problems are affecting higher-income groups as well, according to a spokeswoman for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The poll found broad similarity in how Ohioans and Floridians rate their economic problems. Both say their inability to get a good job or a raise in pay is a top concern. But in Florida, the collapse in home values ranks higher as an economic problem than in Ohio. And for people in the real estate, banking and construction industries, it's also a jobs issue. ...

More than four in 10 Floridians polled believe that expanding health coverage to all Americans would do a great deal to help fix the country's economic problems. A similar number say the same thing about reducing health care costs.

But according to the poll, the top two things people in Florida say would help the most are stopping American jobs from going overseas and pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq.

For [Dee Moskona, a 47-year-old attorney and mother in Miami], Iraq is an economic issue.

"Absolutely," she says. "Iraq is draining everything. It's a demoralizing, horrible thing that we're stuck with, that we have to live with."

Retail prices last month took their biggest annual leap since May 1991, when gasoline prices skewed the figure upward because of the Gulf War.

Meanwhile, some 2 million Americans face home foreclosures, millions of industrial workers have lost well-paying jobs to cheap labor in the Pacific Rim, consumer confidence is near its all-time low, and pessimism about the economy is at a 27-year low.

Thirty-seven million Americans are living in poverty, 100,000 of them military veterans. By October, 28 million Americans will be receiving Food Stamps, a new record. The stamps, however, don't buy as much as they used to because of soaring food prices. In 2007, 54 million Americans had no health insurance at least part of the year. One in four adults aged 18-34 had no health insurance, and 9% of children under 18 had none.

But, according to PhD economist and supply-side shill Phil Gramm, all we've got going is a "mental recession" on the part of "whiners."

Somebody's mental all right.

Media Matters took note of the fact that on Monday GOP strategist Andrea Tantaros again referred to Barack Obama as a "fancy lad" on the July 14 edition of America's Newsroom on Fox News. The first time she did this was July 7 on MSNBC:

Tantaros was discussing the possibility of Obama's speaking in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and called the proposition "risky," adding that "Obama needs some gravitas, and so that's why they're sending him there. He's a fancy lad. He likes fancy language with fancy backdrops. And that's exactly why they're putting him there." On neither MSNBC nor Fox News was her remark challenged by the anchors of the shows. On MSNBC, Democratic strategist David Goodfriend responded to Tantaros by saying: "Well, first of all, just in response to what Andrea said, there isn't a single Ivy League fancy guy on that ticket."

Here's the tubular version.

At Pandagon, Pam Spaulding links to a definition and writes that a "fancy lad" is a "guy who is very 'girly'":

What is it with the GOP and the insistence on gay-baiting? This is the party of closeted, tortured men trolling for sex in airport bathrooms, park restrooms and assaulting fellow Republicans in their sleep with oral sex attacks, yet they persist in trying to tar Dems with the gay label. The taunts are so high school at this point.

Just goes to show how twisted these slugs are with their view that "Muslim" is a smear and "gay" is a smear. Something had to replace "Red," I suppose. It and "your mama wears combat boots" just don't have the punch they used to.

What else will they conjure with the conventions still weeks away?

+ + +

The Overnight News Digest has been posted and includes a story on how Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party may be banned by the Constitutional Court on charges of undermining secularism.

Check out pico's Diary, Literature for Kossacks: Satire.

• Jane Mayer's new book, The Dark Side, The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, includes this tidbit:

  In the days after 9/11, when fears of another terrorist strike were at their peak, Vice President Dick Cheney was convinced that he had been subjected to a lethal dose of anthrax ...

  White House insiders from that white-knuckle time [said] the scare contributed to Cheney's insistence on hard-line tactics for fighting terror.

- brownsox
• Oil prices plunge on demand concerns. Reasons for the sell-off? Mostly "whines" about the economy. There was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saying that "numerous difficulties" are affecting the U.S. economy of the world's largest oil consumer, and rising prices for energy and food. The Labor Department reported that wholesale inflation jumped by 1.8 percent last month, with a year-to-year rise of 9.2 percent, the most since 1981. Meanwhile, GM announced more cuts, including health benefits for salaried retirees and several thousand more jobs. Truck production will be cut by 300,000 units, 150,000 more than approved last month. - brownsox/Meteor Blades
• From our Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry Department: Senator Joe Lieberman said today he won't accept a vice presidential offer if John McCain makes offers it this year. Nor would he take a Cabinet post in a McCain administration.

  "I'm where I was meant to be," said Lieberman, who won re-election to his Senate seat two years ago as an independent after losing the Democratic primary.

  -  brownsox

• Meanwhile, Charlie Cook at The National Journal warns that the political community has a lousy track record of predicting who will get vice presidential nods. But it doesn't stop anybody from trying.

  All of this is pretty pointless, and the more certain that folks around Washington and the political community are that they have figured out the pick, the more laughable it is.

  - Meteor Blades

• Bush Drops to 28% Approval. Just 28 percent of Americans approve of President Bush's job performance, a match for Jimmy Carter's career low. Only two presidents produced lower ratings: Richard Nixon, 24 percent in July and August 1974 just before he resigned in the face of impeachment; and Harry Truman, 22 percent in February 1952. - brownsox
• Several folks at the Center for American Progress via Alternet have taken on The Three Biggest Myths the Bush Administration Wants You to Believe About Offshore Drilling.

  No. 1 - Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. A Newt Gingrich group is promoting that theme. The truth: No significant impact on production or prices before 2030.

  No. 2 - China on Our Coasts. Rudy Guiliani, Dick Cheney and others claim the Chinese are drilling for oil off the coast of Cuba. They aren't.

  No. 3 - Not a Drop Was Spilled. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, Mike Huckabee, George Will, and Bill O'Reilly have all claimed "not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina or Rita." BS piled deep. According to the Minerals Management Service, those hurricanes caused 124 offshore spills for a total of 743,700 gallons. - Meteor Blades

• New Mexico blogger Heath Haussamen interviewed John McCain yesterday on the "Straight Talk Express" in Albuquerque.  He talked about how he "philosophically" supports protecting the environment (whatever that means); in that context, he had a few words about the Udalls:

  I love and revere the Udall family. Mo was very good to me, and Mark (Tom's cousin) and Tom are good friends, McCain said. He added that he has a "great appreciation" for former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, Tom Udall's father and Mo Udall's brother.

  That doesn't mean McCain supports Tom Udall in his race against Republican Steve Pearce.

  "I want him elected," McCain said of Pearce. "It's just a matter of philosophy. We're both conservative Republicans."

  Sorry to disappoint you, Senator, but it's going to take a miracle to get Pearce elected. - Plutonium Page

The American Civil Liberties Union pointed out today that the Terrorist Watch List Has Hit One Million Names

"Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon."

Fredrickson and Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, spoke [Monday] along with two victims of the watch list: Jim Robinson, former assistant attorney general for the Civil Division who flies frequently and is often delayed for hours despite possessing a governmental security clearance and Akif Rahman, an American citizen who has been detained and interrogated extensively at the U.S.-Canada border when traveling for business.

"America's new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what's wrong with this administration's approach to security: it's unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of travelers in this country," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. "It must be fixed without delay."

A year ago, when the list was only 755,000 names, Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies, said: "It undermines the authority of the list. There's just no rational, reasonable estimate that there's anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists." In 2004, there were 158,000 names on the list. You can read the Government Accountability Office's October 2007 report on the terrorism watch list here.

The ACLU is calling for controls to be placed on the watch list, including: 1) due process, 2) a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based, 3) tight criteria for adding names to the list, 4) rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the list.

The organization also called upon the President to issue an executive order requiring a review of the list and the limiting of those on to people "for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist ties or activities. The review should be concluded within 3 months."

One name was removed from the list just this month, that of Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former President of post-apartheid South Africa. (He turns 90 on Friday.)

The ACLU has also announced the creation of an online form where victims of the watch list can tell their stories. A link to the form is available online here.

+ + +

^{Total coalition military fatalities in Iraq since March 2003: 4119}

Total Iraqi fatalities due to the invasion and occupation: Unknown, but as high as 1.4 million

Total coalition fatalities in Afghanistan since 2001: 891

Total Afghan fatalities because of the war: Unknown, many thousands

One of the 50 political blogs I visit daily is Calitics, a progressive blog that deals with California politics and their intersection with national politics. I particularly enjoy the work of David Dayen, a fine writer, reporter and analyst who also posts at Daily Kos and digby's Hullabaloo as dday. He also has his own blog. Not just good but prolific. Other regulars include Brian Leubitz, Lucas O'Connor, Robert in Monterey, and Bob Brigham.

I can always count on getting good coverage of our governor, now apparently angling for an Obama Cabinet post, and a state perspective on issues like FISA:

As bad a week as it's been for John McCain, it's been a TERRIBLE week for Dianne Feinstein.  She watched in the Senate Judiciary Committee as Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who she voted to confirm, put on as bad a performance as Alberto Gonzales ever did, covering for the Administration's criminal actions, from torture to politicization of the Justice Department.  Then, of course, there was the FISA vote, where she bowed to President Bush and voted to participate in a coverup.

There are 36 million of us Californians, spread over an area just slightly smaller than Iraq, so, of course, there's no way any single political blog (or even a dozen of them can cover everything), but Calitix fills an important niche. Coverage is just like that on every blog - whatever the posters find interesting, important, fun or worthwhile. I also read a handful of other statewide blogs, particularly the excellent California Progress Report and Bayne of Blog: California Notes.

Jonathan Brown and Paul Maslin at Salon are wondering today whether pollsters are undercounting Barack Obama's support by millions of voters because they are failing to survey cellphone-only users, a growing portion of the population, especially the population of young adults most likely to have only cellphones and which showed a strong preference in the primaries and caucuses for the Illinois Senator. (Maslin was Howard Dean's pollster in 2004, and polled for Bill Richardson this year. Brown works for Fairbanks, Maslin, Maullin & Associates, a public opinion research firm.)

Say you want to reach a representative sample of the U.S. electorate for a presidential poll. The Obama-McCain race is relatively close these days, with the Democrat's lead hovering around 5 to 6 points in most surveys. Someone tells you that he's selected a sample that's predominantly under 40 years of age (oops, that one favors Obama); disproportionately renters rather than homeowners (Obama-leaning again); full of college students (sounds like a Starbucks Obama thing to me) - and, for good measure, includes a higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics than the national population does.

At this point you throw up your hands and exclaim: "Why are we concentrating on such a pro-Obama universe? He could be leading by 20 points or more among those people!"

He could. He probably is. But in actuality, the sample I've described is either not being included at all in many national polls or is being undercounted. Why? Because I'm talking about the growing number of American cellphone users who have no other type of phone or who choose to go wireless for the vast majority of their interactive needs. And this election cycle -- for the first, and perhaps only, time -- this group has the chance to render presidential polls "wrong from the start": potentially disguising at least 2 to 3 percentage points of Obama support and maybe more. Heretofore my industry has dismissed the cellphone-only population with a troika of "yes, buts." Yes, they're undercounted, but 1) they don't vote anyway; 2) their numbers are still small; and 3) we can find acceptable substitutes in the land-line population.

And to be honest, there is a fourth, still more powerful rationale that remains unstated: "Yes, they're undercounted, but it's too damn difficult and expensive to reach them."

In 2004, the National Election Pool exit poll found that 7.1 percent of voters were cellphone-only users, a figure the authors think could be twice as high this year.

Pollsters, Brown and Maslin write, don't like to survey cellphone-only users because, by law, they can't automatically dial them, and manually dialing them costs more and takes more time. Moreover, these users tend to be less cooperative. But taking the easy way out could prove problematic.

This year, the increasingly inexcusable failure to count a growing pool of voters could prove mathematically embarrassing. Let's say that with the campaigns' increased focus on the Web, Facebook, phone-texting and other targeted ways to communicate to younger Americans, voter turnout rises and this cellphone-only universe climbs from under 10 percent of the electorate to something closer to 20 percent. If these voters' preference is 60-40 for Obama, they alone will increase his national total by 2 percentage points. And those could easily be conservative projections. In fact, Gallup Poll results from earlier this year (prior to Obama's designation as the presumptive Democratic nominee) had a 4-point swing in favor of Obama once cellphone-only respondents were folded into the overall sample.

If Maslin and Brown are right, pollsters who continue to take the easy path this election year could wake up red-faced on the morning of November 5.

With the news of Tony Snow’s ultimate departure, we’re faced with yet another round of grappling over how to respond to the death of someone whose temporal behavior enabled dark forces to exercise their plunder and rapine. We are exhorted to hold our tongues out of respect and compassion. And, if we can’t muster that, then out of self-interest, for, inevitably, some day someone we love will be laid to rest. Some day we will be.

Most people who argue, with Chilon of Sparta, that we should speak no ill of the dead put a time limit on their prescription. It’s not that we shouldn’t ever speak ill of the dead, in their view, merely that we should allow the decedent’s family time to get the corpse in the ground before lighting the flamethrowers. It’s understandable in that "we’re all sinners, let God judge" kind of way. Who gets hurt if we roast some war criminal or child molester or lying government shill after the Reaper swings his scythe? Certainly not the target of our wrath. Just kin and friends. What purpose is served by intensifying their grief at its peak? Where is our human kindness?

The trouble with this polite posthumousness isn’t that it gives space to the begrieved, a worthy and understandable behavior. Nor is it that speaking the truth is held in abeyance for a few hours or days. It’s that people who should know better get carried away with themselves. It should be remembered that we’re not talking here about the passing of somebody’s great-aunt Dolores who may have ripped off the collection plate as it passed by or had an affair unbeknownst to great-uncle Phil. We’re speaking of public figures, women and men who so often become saints at graveside services, no matter how despicable their life’s work.

At The Independent, Michael McCarthy writes:

^{Return of the ivory trade}

The world trade in ivory, banned 19 years ago to save the African elephant from extinction, is about to take off again, with the emergence of China as a major ivory buyer.

Alarmed conservationists are warning of a new wave of elephant killing across both Africa and Asia if China is allowed to become a legal importer, as looks likely at a meeting in Geneva next week.

The unleashing of a massive Chinese demand for ivory, in the form of trinkets, name seals, expensive carvings and polished ivory tusks, is likely to give an enormous boost to the illegal trade, which is entirely poaching-based, conservationists say.

"This is going to mean a return to the bad old days where elephants are being shot into extinction," said Allan Thornton, of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the group which provided much of the evidence on which the original ivory ban was based in 1989. ...

The EIA released an internal Chinese government document yesterday which, it said, showed that, over 12 years, officials had lost track of 121 tonnes of ivory from the country's official stockpile – equivalent to the tusks of 11,000 elephants. "We have not been able to account for the shortfall through the sale of legal ivory by the selected selling sites," Chinese officials reported in the document to Cites in 2003. "This suggests a large amount of illegal sale of the ivory stockpile has taken place."

Asked about the document, officials from China's Foreign Ministry said they had no information on the subject.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

+ + +

Because of the
Obama
Obama, Obama
Bo Bama
Banana, Fanna, Fo, Fama
Fee, Fie, Moe, Mama
Obama
Diary surge tonight, you might have missed this one well worth reading by A Siegel:

^{What Fraction Of America’s $4+/Gallon Gasoline Is Due To The War In Iraq?}

Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans, along with members of some other ethnic groups, are therefore understandably alarmed that the Department of Justice may soon have the tools to bring them under investigation without any proof of wrongdoing. ... [They] have already suffered from being profiled in a de facto sense. Unsurprisingly, to have that injustice become policy concerns them. The protests would be even louder if so many in the community were not afraid to speak up and draw attention to themselves ...

That’s Juan Cole in his Thursday Salon smackdown of the FBI’s proposed new system for profiling Muslims and Arab-Americans.

As SusanG pointed out yesterday, no less a personage than U.S. Attorney General Mike Mukasey says that merely having a particular national origin or ethnicity will not be grounds for investigating anyone under the profiling system. Because, the A.G. says, the administration believes in constitutional guarantees, or rather, what he actually said was, "we value the Constitution." Uh-huh. Value it for the same reason my parents used to value mail-order catalogs in the outhouse.

In Congress, I suspect, there is a cohort that would fund cattle cars and barbed wire if the administration made the request. So no way a little old profiling proposal would set them atwitch. But the minority of members in the Senate and House who really do value the Constitution – enough to actually show some spine about it, I mean – ought to be pointing out, loudly, that this latest proposal is all part of the total package of torture, rendition, secret prisons, warrantless wiretapping, government snooping into the records of activists and dissidents, national security letters, denial of habeas corpus, ad nauseam.

As Cole points out, there is plenty of reason to be suspicious. What the FBI engaged in in the case of six Florida men was entrapment. The bureau operated just short of being an agent provocateur. So now, with its long history of ignoring constitutional guarantees and worse crimes, the FBI is going to be given more latitude so that it won’t have to step over the line so much? Call me a traditionalist, but I’d prefer that government agencies continue to be forced to break the law when they violate my civil liberties. Why must everything be made so easy for them?

Airport harassment has been a staple of my family’s life since September 2001. That was the year my wife was reunited with her Libyan-raised children, abducted as toddlers in the 1980s and held in Tripoli incommunicado for 15 years. Since each of them, in turn, has come to live with us and attend college, we’ve come to expect extra attention when flying, whether alone, two at a time or all together. Each of us has been subject to extra wandings, brief interrogations in the open, longer interrogations in windowless rooms, missed flights, surly treatment. Two of us have been strip-searched. We’ve all been patted down more than once. In all, we’ve probably made some 70 air trips. Less than 10 of those times has one or more of us not been "randomly" selected for more than average scrutiny.

In the early days after September 11, we not only accepted but also understood the rationale behind this. Its true nature has long since been revealed. It has nothing to do with real security. Heavyweights who would commit or enable others to commit terrorist acts get billions in U.S. taxpayer aid. We get profiled. Yet we get nowhere near the attention that some other unfortunate Americans have. The DOJ proposal would take us further down that path.

Violating civil liberties is an old tradition in America. For instance, the FBI not only spied on dissidents, it also spurred some of them to attack each other and engaged in other actions appropriate to a police state. Once, half my life ago, some people in Congress investigated and made an effort to curtail those violations. It wasn’t a full-throated probe nor were comprehensive constraints enacted. But at least some effort was made. As we have learned to rue, these days cowardice means too many of our supposed representatives are wholly reckless instead of fearless in protecting our rights.        

Over at the Oil Drum, a blog that has been gaining a much-deserved increase in attention, Heading Out writes:

^{Asking one of the less comfortable questions about our energy future...}

The evidence seems to be pointing to an overall increase in the global decline rate for existing wells. What this means is that, if world production is around 86 million barrels a day, then to replace existing declines next year, an additional new production of 4.47 mbd [million barrels a day] at 5.2% decline, instead of the 3.87 mbd required at 4.5% decline, will be needed just to stabilize supply at a fixed level. If the rate is accelerating this difference of 600,000 bd will increase and drop the top line of the curves such as those that Khebab and others have so carefully assembled.

This increased decline rate is already being reported, and thus the potential peak in 2010 that the graph shows is already at risk and we may struggle to get much above the numbers that we are at today. Bear in mind that decline rates are cumulative over the years, and that outyear production must be that much greater to sustain supply, relative to today’s production.

At present there is still considerable complacency about how the oil supply situation will play out. There is an implication that this is just a difficult period to get through, and that, in a relatively short time the situation will get better. Sadly I would suggest that even our current thinking here is largely overly optimistic, and that instead it is going to be much more difficult, faster than we expect. But also, in light of peoples’ expectations about oil really being there at a reasonable price, the greater the dangers of civil unrest, as it occurs without proper public education as to the reason that "there is no more" signs start to spring up at gas stations.

The Overnight News Digest is posted, and includes an item on the direct cost of operations in Iraq, now at $535,635,000,000.

Update: In the two hours since this Diary has been posted, that figure above has risen to $535,665,000,000. In other words, in two hours, the U.S. has directly spent on the Iraq occupation what the Department of Energy is spending over three years in demonstration and development projects for plug-in hybrid vehicles.  

From CongressDaily (subscription only):

^{Dorgan Assails Pentagon For Inaction On Contractorss}

Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Byron Dorgan of North Dakota Wednesday castigated the Defense Department for not addressing contractor malfeasance in Iraq.

"I’ve seen precious little activity out of the Pentagon," Dorgan said at a meeting of his panel, which focused on Kellogg, Brown and Root.

Charles Smith, the former chief of the Field Support Contracting Division for the Army Field Support Command, said he personally saw KBR submit $1 billion in overcharges to the Army, including excessive meal counts for more soldiers than were stationed at a camp and more trucks than the Army needed, and was fired for protesting.

Smith, who was in charge of the LOGCAP III contract in Iraq overseeing the KBR contract, said the Defense Department Contracting Agency documented $1.8 billion in unsupported charges from KBR.

"In 31 years of doing this work, I have never seen anything like the way KBR’s unsupported charges were handled by the Department of Defense," Smith said.

Surely there is an immunity deal that can be cooked up to save KBR and other contractors from embarrassment and legal action.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

At Climate Progress, Joseph Romm writes:

^{Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb}

The Phone Call — based on a true story

Major cable network: What do you think of T. Boone Pickens’ latest energy plan ?

Climate Progress: Half of it is great, the big push on wind power. Heck, even the Bush administration says wind power could be 20% of U.S. electricity. But the notion that we would use the wind power to free up natural gas in order to fuel a transition to natural gas vehicles makes no sense. Why would we go to the trouble of switching our vehicle fleet from running on one expensive fossil fuel to another expensive fossil fuel? Any freed up natural gas should be used to displace coal....

Major cable network: I was hoping you liked the whole plan. That way we could use you on the show.... You don’t have any ideas of who might like the whole thing?

Climate Progress [Long pause, crickets chirp, the wind sighs, sea levels rise a few meters]: No. The people who will like the renewables part probably won’t be thrilled about the fossil fuel part, and vice versa.

Major cable network: Thanks. I’m sure we will find some reason to use you soon.

I am thinking about working that into a screenplay about a mild-mannered blogger for a great metropolitan progressive think tank who sacrifices his chance to be on television because he refuses to endorse an inane idea. I was looking at Matt Damon to play me, especially now that he has put on a little weight.

You can read about Swiftboater Pickens's energy plan here or straight from the horse's mouth here and what Man is 5 and other Kossacks have to say here, and A Siegel has to say here.

Romm's take on the subject is the most complete so far, however, and it is devastating:

The Pickens Plan, however, is based on the utterly impractical idea that "Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel."

Uhh, never gonna happen, T. Boone. Never. The most obvious reason is the gross inefficiency of the entire plan.

Right now, "We currently use natural gas to produce 22% of our electricity." Most of that electricity comes from gas burned in combined cycle gas turbines at an overall efficiency of up to 60%. Why in the world would the federal government — or anyone else — spend billions and billion of dollars on natural gas fueling stations and natural gas vehicles in order to burn the gas with an efficiency of 15% to 20%? Natural gas is simply too useful and expensive to squander in such a fashion.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Political blogging in Egypt has its limits. Government responses apparently don't. At the Christian Science Monitor, Liam Stack wrote on Monday:

^{Politics on Facebook brings trouble for young Egyptian}

When Egypt’s secular opposition groups called for a nationwide strike to support disgruntled factory workers last April, Ahmed Maher wanted to help. So he did what many middle-class 20-somethings here do: He logged onto Facebook.

Two weeks before the strike, he and a friend, Esraa Abdel Fattah, started a group on the popular social-networking site to support the walkout and invited friends to join. But soon they realized they had much more than just a new Facebook group on their hands. ...

By the day of the strike, more than 60,000 Egyptians had joined the group, and Maher went into hiding rather than face the possible wrath of the country’s feared State Security Investigations (SSI) unit. ...

Even though the second nationwide strike never got off the ground, Maher was arrested in early May, just two days after he had returned home, by four carloads of plainclothes police.

In an interview last week, Maher says he was shackled, blindfolded, and stripped. He says the police dragged him across the floor and beat him for almost 12 hours. They demanded to know the password to his Facebook account and asked for information about the 60,000 people in the group, then threatened to rape him if he would not comply, he says.

"Maher’s treatment is part of a pattern of abuse and extralegal intimidation by state officials," says Joe Stork, Middle East deputy director at Human Rights Watch. "Egypt needs to put an end to the lawlessness of its law enforcement officers."

From Agence France Presse June 1:

A blogger released after weeks behind bars over deadly protests at Egypt's biggest textile plant for higher pay and controls on prices, said Monday he and his fellow detainees suffered weeks of "torture".

"We were subjected to electric shocks, to beatings and there was no food and or drink for the first few days," blogger Karim el-Beheiri told AFP a day after his release. "We went through weeks of torture and humiliation."

Beheiri, Tarek Amin and Kamal al-Fayoumy, three worker activists, were arrested on April 6 at the Misr Spinning and Weaving company in the Nile Delta industrial city of Mahalla after riots which left three people dead and hundreds detained.

An interior ministry official confirmed the three had been released but denied they had been mistreated.

"These are false accusations," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "Everything took place within a framework of human rights."

Amira al Hussaini at Global Voices wrote on May 16:

Egyptian bloggers, cyberactivists and activists on the ground continue to pay the price for speaking up against the rising cost of living and calling for higher wages and a better life. What started as a call for a strike on April 6, quickly spiralled out of control, with a face off between rioters, protesters and the police. Here's an account of what has happened and is still happening to some of the activists who have used the worldwide web to spread news of what is happening at home.

During the unrest, on April 6 and 7, Egyptian bloggers worked round the clock telling the world about the workers' revolt that shook their country, as thousands rioted at a textile mill in Al Mahalla. They were also among the first casualties of the unrest, which left some killed, scores injured and an undetermined number of activists, organisers and mere spectators behind bars. Their coverage came in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, Flickr shots, Facebook messages and all other online tools they could get their hands on.

The saga seems to continue, as some activists are still detained, six weeks after their arrest, prompting calls from their colleagues for their immediate release. Others, allegedly harassed, physically abused and later released by the police, continue to use online tools to tell the world their story.

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

In the final paragraph of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans,   the Delaware sage Tamenund remarks, "The pale faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again." Despite hopeful signs, in the case of commercially viable movies, that time has still not come.

Although we’ve come a long way from those movies in which whooping, headdress-bedecked Plains Indians are depicted riding around and around circled wagon trains – a myth stolen directly from the performances of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – the only places you can typically see Indians as more than savages or sidekicks is in films by Indians given attention by the American Indian Film Institute at the American Indian Film Festival, the 33rd annual of which will take place this autumn in San Francisco, and the Talking Stick Film Festival, which debuted two weeks ago in Santa Fe. The Talking Stick Festival opened with Older Than America, a Canadian film by director Georgina Lightning (Cree) about atrocities at Indian boarding schools, and Hopi director Victor Masayesva’s  Paatuwaqatsi – Water, Land, Life.

These festival films aren’t the kind that make it to your neighborhood multiplex. Indeed, although Wes Studi (Cherokee), Gary Farmer (Cayuga), August Schellenburg (Mohawk), Michael Horse (Yaqui), Irene Bedard (Inupiat-Metis), Steve Reevis (Blackfeet), Adam Beach (Saulteaux), Kalani Queypo (Blackfeet), Graham Greene (Oneida), and a handful of others make a living as actors, only a single American Indian has managed to sustain a career as a director – Chris Eyre (Cheyenne-Arapaho), whose premier film was Smoke Signals a decade ago.