© Catia Amadio | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE’s Musings

In case current events in the nation of Georgia haven’t made the fact crystal clear, yr (justifiably) humble svt is unhappy to inform you that the U.S. military hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory over the past nearly 20 years since the end of the Cold War.

And the diplomatic corps has similarly shown itself to be overstressed and undermanned.

Nicholas Kristof made the point this past weekend: the U.S. has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats!

And what Kristof’s story omits, due to rapidly breaking events, is the failure of both U.S. diplomacy and U.S. military strength during the Russian invasion of Georgia this past week.

Military strength? Well, we can’t simultaneously put sufficient boots on the ground to meet our objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan, much less come to the aid of a strategically critical ally, Georgia.

Diplomacy? A strong diplomatic corps might have foreseen (yes, hindsight is always 20:20) that Georgia was simultaneously taking U.S. and NATO support as more than words, while underestimating Vladimir Putin’s urge for regained empire, and warned Mikheil Saakashvili away from his adventuristic invasion of South Ossettia.

Or a diplomatic arm with some heft might have been able to forestall, or at least mitigate, Russia’s response. Putin may now be emboldened to exercise his brand of “diplomacy” over other, West-leaning, former states of the old Soviet empire, and the U.S. will be hard pressed to protect them, diplomatically or militarily, if it even figures out that this would be a useful strategy.

But George III is a happy warrior, as befits a civilian who took giant steps to avoid substantive military service, and diplomacy apparently doesn’t mean much to him, or it appears, to Congress.

Make Diplomacy, Not War

Op-Ed Columnist | By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: August 9, 2008

Iraq and Afghanistan are the messes getting attention today, but they are only symptoms of a much broader cancer in American foreign policy.

A few glimpses of this larger affliction:

¶The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.

¶This year alone, the United States Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that’s more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.

¶More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the Foreign Service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.

In short, the United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems.

After all, you can’t bomb global warming.

We increasingly ask our military to be diplomats on the ground, a totally misguided and criminal misuse of force. Women and men trained to kill should hone their expertise in warfare, and leave diplomacy to unarmed experts in the language and culture.

And we love to spend billions on hardware, at the expense of all else.

For the price of one F-22, we could — for 25 years — operate American libraries in each Chinese province, pay for more Chinese-American exchanges, and hire more diplomats prepared to appear on Chinese television and explain in fluent Chinese what American policy is. And for the price of one M.R.E. lunch for one soldier, the State Department could make a few phone calls to push the Chinese leadership to respond to the Dalai Lama’s olive branch a few days ago, helping to eliminate a long-term irritant in U.S.-China relations.

Op-Ed Columnist – Make Diplomacy, Not War – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

We have lost our way in the world, and one cannot be certain whether even a new administration will know what needs to be done to right the ship of state.

Barack Obama’s most glaring vulnerability is his lack of military, or global experience.

John McCain’s most frightening (from a pretty serious list) propensity is wild overstatements regarding the liberal use of military force.

100 more years in Iraq was not a misstatement, it was an unusually cogent (for this septuagenarian former POW) reflection of his world view: every problem in the world is a nail, and the U.S. military is a damned fine hammer.

This is wrong on every count (and I hope to have more on our current military failings perhaps as soon as tomorrow). The U.S. deserves so much better than its present Evangelical, neocon, mush-mouthed leader, and trading him for an adulterous, corrupt, overaged and showing signs of it every day, misspeaking leader would be a catastrophe on a truly global scale.

Give us a well spoken, analytical, reflective leader, who values diplomacy (and gave the world a brief preview during his “victory” tour a couple of weeks ago), and the nation might just have a chance to once again lead the planet in the important virtues:

Vigorous championship of human rights; leadership by example sustaining economic and political freedom for every one of its 6.5Billion inhabitants; and the resolution of inevitable conflict through substantive and skillful negotiation across a table, not at the business end of a laser guided bomb.

Rebuilding the Foreign Service would be a good start. Even at the expense of a few flugelhorns.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

MUDGE’s Musings

We’ve spent the past month or so watching the candidates come off their primary paces, attempting to rejigger their respective approaches to the general election, and taking some hits for the resulting adjustments.

The mishandled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been top of mind for many voters since the pointless charade of “Mission Accomplished!”

Paul Krugman reminds us, however, of another paramount issue in this election, the economy, and what its dire condition means to John McCain.

Our current economic distress has been covered in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© quite frequently, most recently while highlighting this glass-half-full analysis from two senior Federal Reserve Bank officials. The U.S. economic juggernaut didn’t get to its current poor state by itself. President Bush, and his Republican allies in Congress can take plenty of the credit.

Behind the Bush Bust

Op-Ed Columnist | By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: July 7, 2008

By huge margins, Americans think the economy is in lousy shape — and they blame President Bush. This fact, more than anything else, makes it hard to see how the Democrats can lose this election.

But is the public right to be so disgusted with Mr. Bush’s economic leadership? Not exactly. We really do have a lousy economy, a fact of which Mr. Bush seems spectacularly unaware. But that’s not the same thing as saying that the bad economy is Mr. Bush’s fault.

On the other hand, there’s a certain rough justice in the public’s attitude. Other politicians besides Mr. Bush share the blame for the mess we’re in — but most of them are Republicans.

For Krugman, our crummy economy has many causes, but three of the most important are the housing/mortgage bubble, the cost of health care and high commodity (fuel and food) prices. And the seeds to the crises in all of these areas were sown, if not on George III’s watch, then under the constipated purview of the six years of Republican Congresses that immediately preceded Bush’s presidency.

Op-Ed Columnist – Behind the Bush Bust – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

Whatever his strengths might be, the economy has not been McCain’s area of expertise. As a result, he’s fallen back on knee-jerk Republican economic thought (cut taxes for the wealthy, and the rest be damned) that has led us into this all-but recession. We’ll let Paul Krugman have the last word:

And bear in mind that John McCain has gone to great lengths to affirm his support for Republican economic orthodoxy. So he’ll have no reason to complain if, as seems likely, the economy costs him the election.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Surprisingly (to me at least) it’s been several weeks since we last looked at the nation’s recession. Maybe we were hoping that we would wake up and find it was all a bad, bad dream.

Basically, the time since Jan. 20, 2001 has been a bad, bad dream; our collective misfortune is that we’ve been experiencing it together. Okay, people, no more sushi from that place down the street!

But, about our recession. Did you catch the news that the unemployment numbers weren’t as desperately bad as predicted? These are the types of statistics examined by gimlet-eyed economists, whom I’m afraid function in much the same way (just different, more electrified tools) as witch doctors and soothsayers.

Consider the employment numbers as so much chicken entrails.

[*His lips are moving.]

Allison Kilkenny, a clever political blogger, gives it to us straight, in The Huffington Post.

The Dummies’ Guide to Stupid Leaders and Misleading Numbers

Allison Kilkenny | The Huffington Post | Posted May 3, 2008 | 08:05 PM (EST)

In case you didn’t know, the loss of 20,000 American jobs in April is actually good news. You see, economists had predicted 73,000 jobs would be lost last month, so thank God we dodged that bullet, right?!

In fact, the unemployment rate fell to 5.0% from 5.1% in March. Therefore, the unemployment rate is going down!! Surely, a .1% drop in the unemployment rate means America’s determined locomotive is chugging toward the dawn of a new economic renaissance…right?

These kinds of figures can mislead citizens, particularly when delivered in sound bites by an ignorantly defiant leader. Let’s first consider the possibility that less people are losing jobs because so many people are already unemployed. People can’t lose jobs they don’t have, and I know very few people that have been laid off the same job twice. These kind of polls also rarely consider the underemployed, who are in as much danger of bankruptcy as unemployed citizens due to medical bills.

Finally, the government doesn’t count everyone who is unemployed. Only people who are actively looking for employment are considered unemployed.

Some time ago, we first quoted Benjamin Disraeli, courtesy of Mark Twain, elucidating the three types of untruths: “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

It’s bad enough out there, without being lied to.

Let’s let Ms. Kilkenny coin a phrase:

But I know when I’m beat, so if protecting rich people is decisive action, then yes, George W. Bush is the most decisive president in the history of the United States. Call him “the Decisiver.” Tell him it’s a real word. He’ll believe you.

As she points out, “the first step of recovery is recognizing that there’s a problem.”

Do you know that we have a problem, George?

Do you have a clue how to fix it for all your citizens, not just the fortunate .05% who are your oil and banking buddies?

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Allison Kilkenny: The Dummies’ Guide to Stupid Leaders and Misleading Numbers – Business on The Huffington Post

We need substance, we need a plan, we need the truth. Any chance that the next president can provide those?

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

This nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© is always intrigued when one of its obsessions interests pops up as news.

Danger Room is a military affairs blog (part of Wired.com) we don’t check into sufficiently often, but today we were rewarded with a new Predator tale.

The changing face of military aviation

ninth in an occasional series

The series so far…

Gates, Air Force Battle Over Robot Planes

By Noah Shachtman | March 21, 2008 | 2:53:00 PM

There may not be an open war, quite yet, between the Secretary of Defense and the leadership of the Air Force. But there is serious, palatable tension. And a nasty game of brinksmanship over the use of drones in the Middle East has only made things worse.

Last fall, the Pentagon’s civilian chiefs shot down an Air Force move to take over almost all of the military’s big unmanned aircraft. “There has to be a better way to do this,” complained Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Michael “Buzz” Moseley. Things only got more tense when Gates said that the future of conflict is in small, “asymmetric” wars — wars in which the Air Force takes a back seat to ground forces….

Now comes word from L.A. Times’ ace Peter Spiegel that Gates “has ordered the Air Force to put nearly all of its unmanned Predator aircraft into the skies over the Middle East, forcing the service to take steps that officers worry could hobble already-stressed drone squadrons.”

Pressure from the Defense secretary in recent months has nearly doubled the number of Predators available to help hunt insurgents and find roadside bombs in Iraq. But it has forced air commanders into a scramble for crews that officers said could hurt morale and harm the long-term viability of the Predator program.

It’s apparent that the use of robot aircraft is increasing in the two Middle Eastern theatres. And why not? They are inexpensive (if only in the military appropriations context), small and flexible (ideal for asymmetric warfare fought in alleys and caves), and the occasional loss of one is not accompanied by a body bag landing at Dover.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Gates, Air Force Battle Over Robot Planes | Danger Room from Wired.com

MQ-1 Predator

Let’s step back and take a quick look at Predator. This is from the site of Barnard Microsystems, Ltd., perhaps a subcontractor for Predator.

The General Atomics ” Predator MQ-1″ UAV

The MQ-1 Predator is a system, not just an aircraft. A fully operational system consists of four aircraft (with sensors), a ground control station, a Predator Primary Satellite Link, and approximately 55 personnel for deployed 24-hour operations.

The basic crew for the Predator is one pilot and two sensor operators. They fly the aircraft from inside the ground control station via a line-of-sight data link or a satellite data link for beyond line-of-sight flight. The aircraft is equipped with a color nose camera (generally used by the pilot for flight control), a day variable-aperture TV camera, a variable-aperture infrared camera (for low light/night), and a synthetic aperture radar for looking through smoke, clouds or haze. The cameras produce full motion video while the SAR produces still frame radar images.

One starts to understand the dimensions of the Air Force personnel issue: one system, four aircraft, 55 personnel, 24-hours.

Economist

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

General Atomics Predator MQ-1 UAV

MQ-9 Reaper

General Atomics increased some of Predator’s dimensions, including its power plant, and created what was long called Predator B, later Reaper.

MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer UAV

Reaper, (also known as Predator B) an outgrowth of the combat proven Predator A UAS, became operational in 2007 and as it began flying combat missions over Afghanistan. This Medium Altitude Long Endurance UAV overcomes most of the difficulties encountered with previous UAVs that commonly must compromise between conflicting demands for payload, speed, altitude, speed and persistence. With an operational ceiling of 50,000ft, and higher cruising speed, Reaper can cover a larger area, under all weather conditions carrying payloads of more than 1.5 tons. The aircraft is powered by a single Honeywell TP331-10 engine, producing 950 shp, provides a maximum airspeed of 260 kts and a cruise speed for maximum endurance of 150-170 kts.

Just a bigger, better mousetrap…

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer UAV

There’s a downside to success: increased demand. The report that the generals would have seriously considered clobbering the training program in order to get the trainers back into combat is a signal.

We’ve been at war in Afghanistan for 5½ years, and you couldn’t possibly miss this week’s tragic fifth anniversary of the George III/Tricky Dicks (Cheney, Rumsfeld) multigenerational chickenhawk misadventure we fondly call Iraq. All this has drained resources, both treasure and human, and pushed equipment and the men and women who are the teeth of the tiger well beyond the limits of prudence.

And so, even the guys and gals who sit in the comfy chairs in Nevada playing videogames with their Predators and Reapers are, not so surprisingly after so many unrelieved years of war, stressed.

But not shot at. Our kids on the ground in Baghdad and Kandahar are the ones we need to find the ways and means to support, protect and eventually bring home. The operators of Predator and Reaper are doing good work on the first two of those.

The voters for president and the national legislature between now and November will have a big say on the third element.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

There’s most read, and then there’s favorite. This is a post which yr (justifiably) humble svt is, regrettably, but not regretfully, not at all humble about.

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From our very earliest days, originally posted May 28, 2007.

mm016: Unimpeachable?

When do we impeach?

Saturday’s Washington Post drove it home once more:

Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and “probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups” in the Muslim world.

The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be “a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.” The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was “largely bereft of the social underpinnings” to support democratic development….

In a statement attached to yesterday’s 229-page report, the Senate intelligence committee’s chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), and three other Democratic panel members said: “The most chilling and prescient warning from the intelligence community prior to the war was that the American invasion would bring about instability in Iraq that would be exploited by Iran and al Qaeda terrorists.”

In addition to portraying a terrorist nexus between Iraq and al-Qaeda that did not exist, the Democrats said, the Bush administration “also kept from the American people . . . the sobering intelligence assessments it received at the time” — that an Iraq war could allow al-Qaeda “to establish the presence in Iraq and opportunity to strike at Americans it did not have prior to the invasion.”

It used to be a silly punch line: “Don’t confuse me with the facts!” The Bush administration has consistently ignored information that contradicts its neo-conservative Christian evangelical mind set, and this Memorial Day weekend we register that this month of May, 2007 has seen the largest death toll (103 and counting) of any single month during this war in the past 2½ years. Mission accomplished my ass.

Our situation is far beyond honest differences of opinion or partisan politics — by any and every standard, this administration has been criminally negligent, and must be called to account for its crimes, beginning with the Silly-Grinner-in Chief himself, and his puppeteer, our own Tricky Dick for the Aughts.

It’s not enough to wait to vote this felonious administration out of office 18 months from now — we need to remind those who are eviscerating this country in the name of ultra right politics and a skewed religious agenda that their crimes cannot go unpunished, starting immediately

When do we impeach? How about today!

Thanks for indulging me.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

The number crunchers are beginning to weigh in on the administration’s latest economic stimulus plan.

Can one really be surprised that the stimulus mainly impacts those who need it least?

Paul Krugman had the following observations in the NYTimes, and on his blog:

Stimulus Gone Bad

By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: January 25, 2008

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon.

Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

In his related blog (linked to in the Times, and full of a series of useful comments on the stimulus plan) he reproduces the chart that the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center created after analysis:

Predictable:the top 40% of income earners would get 58% of the proceeds. It’s just so typically wrong-headed. We’re headed toward rough seas; let’s take the motors off the lower-deck lifeboats, so that the upper deck lifeboats have two!

And the Democratic leaders in Congress, as has been typical for them since they assumed majority status after the 2006 elections, caved. No stomach for a fight, Ms. Pelosi? If not, you certainly are in the wrong place at the wrong time!

Krugman points out that getting money to people who really need it “does double duty: it alleviates hardship, and also pumps up consumer spending.”

The result: a program that isn’t helpful where most needed, and fails in its goal as an economic stimulus.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Stimulus Gone Bad – New York Times

You needn’t be a card-carrying curmudgeon to be disgusted.

I just love the FDR quote, at a time when spats-wearing plutocrats were desperately clinging to their customary piracy – er, business – as usual:

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

When will it end, you ask? timeanddate.com tells us: 360 days, 15 hours: Noon Eastern Standard Time, Tuesday, 20-January-2009.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

We’re not a news organization here at Left-Handed Complement — nor do we aspire to be.

But, we can be quick. We posted the following at approximately 8:05pmCST on Wednesday, 19-December-2007, in response to that day’s news of the fire in Dick Cheney’s ceremonial offices in Washington.

mm226: Tricky Dick’s burn bag blew out of control…

… tell me you didn’t think of that!

White House Office Building Catches Fire

Blaze May Have Started in Utility Closet

By Allison Klein, Debbi Wilgoren and Michael Schmuhl

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 19, 2007; 3:11 PM

The historic Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House caught fire this morning, and D.C. firefighters broke windows and doused the second and third floors with water to extinguish the two-alarm blaze.

At an afternoon news conference, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Fire Chief Dennis L. Rubin said security concerns prevented them from saying exactly where or how the fire started.

So here’s a member of L-HC’s blogroll The Raw Story, pointing out that we were hardly the only curmudgeonly comedian on the story:

Post columnist jokes: What was Cheney trying to hide with that office fire?

Nick Juliano  | Published: Friday December 21, 2007

Conspiratorial wheels started spinning in plenty of people’s minds this week when a fire broke out in Dick Cheney’s ceremonial offices. The vice president is known for his penchant for secrecy, and between destroyed CIA tapes and missing e-mails, the government he helps run hardly lacks precedent for getting rid of potentially incriminating evidence.

For one Washington Post columnist, Wednesday’s fire sparked reminders of an abandoned plot from the Watergate era, when a young Cheney was cutting his teeth of government service.

“Arson might seem a bit far-fetched to folks outside the Beltway, but it would not be the first time a small conflagration was planned by a White House official,” writes Al Kamen Friday in his “In The Loop” column. “We recall that Watergate burglary mastermind G. Gordon Liddy plotted firebombing the Brookings Institution — ‘as a diversion,’ he writes in his memoirs — to get into the security vault and steal Daniel Ellsberg’s Vietnam War papers.”

Is it a joke?

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

The Raw Story | Post columnist jokes: What was Cheney trying to hide with that office fire?

Remember how we finished up the other day?

… in advance of impeachment, right?

I know there’s only a year left, but you have to send a message to the evangelicals and the neocons that they’ll remember, and you can’t get to George III until you remove his even worse alternative.

We’ve had occasion to make this point previously: the only scenario for which impeachment is really practical eerily mirrors the situation in 1973, when the vultures started circling around our first nefarious Dick; the Senate and Congress couldn’t seriously consider impeachment of Nixon with slimy Spiro Agnew ready to succeed.

They got Agnew on tax evasion charges from his Maryland governorship days, and then the path toward Nixon’s impeachment was clear.

Thus it could be for George III.

Maybe our present Dick is feeling some heat… and feels compelled to do some inflammatory housekeeping.

Faithful reader heard it here first, or at least could have, as early as 8:05pmCST on 19-December.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Have to congratulate Al Gore.

One gets the impression that, like many such awards, the Nobel Prizes are subject to public relations campaigns and politicking…

It was inevitable that the Nobel Peace Prize would go to Gore. Historically, the prize has had very little to do with rewarding genuine peacemakers. In 1939, nominees for the prize included such distinguished fighters for peace as Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. The prize has always been influenced by the exigencies of realpolitik. So, over the years individuals like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Willy Brandt received the Nobel. [--Spiked (see below)]

… so it wasn’t exactly out of the blue that Gore was awarded the Peace prize for his work on behalf of environmental awareness.

So, a couple of weeks ago, Gore’s “campaign” to win the Nobel was widely enough known that we picked up on it even in this out of the way nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©.

What was speculation (the Prize) is now fact. And so many other observers are taking a closer look at Gore’s presidential opportunity.

So, two of L-HC’s usual suspects, Salon and Slate weigh in.

What are the odds that Al Gore enters the presidential race?

We put that question this morning to Karen Skelton, who served as Gore’s political director while he was vice president. Her response: “He will not run. Negative odds. He’s got all he needs. He’s a Nobel Prize winner, which means he’s being rewarded for following his passion successfully in a way that’s changed the world. His passion was never politics for the fight, it was for the cause.”

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

War Room: Political News, Politics News – Salon

Will Al Gore now run for the White House?

By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, Oct. 12, 2007, at 10:43 AM ET

Al Gore

Al Gore is a winner. Al Gore was right. One of the best things for Al Gore about winning the Nobel Peace Prize is that the sound bites are finally all on his side. For decades the two-term vice president has been championing environmental causes and until recently often received public scorn and derision. Now he’s been rewarded with one of the most coveted prizes on the planet.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

What does the Nobel Peace Prize mean for Gore 2008? – By John Dickerson – Slate Magazine

With the help of an interesting publication out of the UK, Spiked let’s put this prize into some context.

On Monday, spiked will publish a series of articles on Al Gore, the Nobel and the climate change debate. As a preview, here is Frank Furedi explaining why Gore is a fitting winner of the ‘Nobel Fear Prize’.

When I heard commentators this morning praising Al Gore as a ‘charismatic figure’, I waited around for the punchline. But they weren’t joking.

Somehow, this dull provincial politician suffering from a charisma-bypass has been transformed into a hi-tech twenty-first century prophet – and now he has won the Nobel Peace Prize to boot.

It is hard to tell if the reinvention of Gore is a testimony to the persuasive powers of PowerPoint, or to the collapse of the cultural and political imagination in the West. Probably, Gore’s emergence as a modern-day icon is a result of his ability to personify our culture of fear. He is the ideal spokesman for an era in which virtually every human experience comes with a health warning attached. Now, with his Nobel award, he joins a pantheon of cultural saints, including fellow Nobel recipient Mother Teresa.

A bracing point of view. And welcome.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

And the Nobel Fear Prize goes to… | spiked

And now for some perspective on Gore as a past presidential candidate, from an opinion columnist for the NYTimes.

Yesterday began with the gratifying news that Al Gore, derided by George H.W. Bush as the “Ozone Man,” had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The first thing media types wanted to know was whether this would prompt Mr. Gore to elbow his way into the presidential campaign. That’s like asking someone who’s recovered from a heart attack if he plans to resume smoking.

Mr. Gore, who won an Academy Award for his documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and an Emmy for his cable TV network, Current, knows better than anyone else how toxic and downright idiotic presidential politics has become.

He may be one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, talented men in America and remarkably well-equipped to lead the nation, but it’s Mr. Bush’s less-than-curious, less-than-distinguished son, George W., who is president.

There are all kinds of ironies wrapped up in the title of Mr. Gore’s latest book, “The Assault on Reason.”

Especially useful is the comparison with (the even more hypocritical than most of his fellow hypocritical candidates in his hypocritical party) Rudy Giuliani.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

The Trivial Pursuit – New York Times

And another comparison with Gore’s “successful” opponent in 2000 from the Washington Post…

By Peter Baker, Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 13, 2007; A09

MIAMI, Oct. 12 — Somehow, it seemed only fitting that at the moment of Al Gore‘s triumph, George W. Bush would spend the day in Florida, scene of the fateful clash that propelled one to the presidency and the other to the Nobel Prize.

What a difference seven years makes. The winner of that struggle went on to capture the White House and to become a wartime leader now heading toward the final year of a struggling presidency. The loser went on to reinvent himself from cautious politician to hero of the activist left now honored as a man of peace.

For the Gore camp, it was a day of resurrection, a day to salve the wounds of history and to write another narrative that they hope will be as enduring as Florida. “We finally have their respective legacies,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a veteran of the Clinton-Gore White House. “Bush earned the Iraq war, and Al Gore earned the Nobel Prize. Who knew Al Gore would one day thank the Supreme Court for their judgment?”

The White House stuck to polite, if restrained, congratulations. “Obviously, it’s an important recognition, and we’re sure the vice president is thrilled,” spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters aboard Air Force One heading here Friday. Another senior official, commenting on the condition of anonymity to speak less diplomatically, said the Nobel Prize is nice, but the presidency is still better. “We’re happy for him,” the aide said, “but suspect he’d trade places before we would.”

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Feats Divide Pair Linked by Election

A similar perspective from an opinion column in the the LATimes:

Jonathan Chait

No wonder conservatives are apoplectic – Gore’s fortunes rise as the president’s plummets.

October 13, 2007

When Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, conservatives reacted with apoplexy. Talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, conservative bloggers and other Republican faithful denounced the prize as a fraud….

The defensiveness of Gore’s critics comes because he is the ultimate rebuke to Bush. Gore, obviously, is the great historic counter-factual, the man who would have been president if Florida had a functioning ballot system. More than that, he is the anti-Bush. He is intellectual and introverted, while Bush is simplistic and backslapping.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Al Gore: the anti-Bush – Los Angeles Times

Finally, James Woudhuysen, again from Spiked, takes a most incisive look at the environmental movement itself, in the light of this latest event and symbol of its ascendency into the mainstream of political thought.

Environmental activists and commentators frequently argue that climate change is the most pressing problem facing humanity, and that if we don’t do something about it the planet will burn up. Yet when planet-sized technological solutions to global warming – also known as ‘geo-engineering solutions’ – are put forward, environmentalists are the first to balk. ‘It will never work’, they say. Why are those who are most concerned about climate change also the most hostile to doing something serious to tackle it?

It isn’t just because such solutions would be ambitious, costly and distant in time; nor is it only because these solutions would carry risks. Rather, environmentalists tend to dismiss geo-engineering because, at root, they are not interested in halting climate change. For many today, both green activists and leading politicians, climate change is a moral and political issue rather than simply a practical problem. They see the ‘issue of climate change’ as a means to changing people’s behaviour and expectations, rather than simply as a byproduct of industrialisation that ought to be tackled by technological know-how. They are resistant to geo-engineering solutions because putting an end to climate change would rob them of their raison d’être.

Here’s a particularly telling point:

Yet it is not particular technologies that environmentalists hate, so much as the whole idea of human ingenuity – the conscious, designing, problem-solving capabilities that distinguish mankind from naturally occurring species. If, as environmentalists claim, mankind means waste and the reckless destruction of finite natural resources, then artificial constructions can only deserve varying degrees of ridicule – partly for the damage they will bring in tow, but mainly for their creators’ outrageous arrogance.

How soft-headed can the Greens get? Keep reading.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Why greens don’t want to ‘solve’ climate change | spiked

So, a refreshing change here for L-HC.

It’s not been our experience in this space to date to have had the occasion to expose the practitioners of political correctness.

PC comes from those drug-addled survivors of the ’60s that now set policy in so many institutions of higher education and non-governmental organizations.

We are reminded, courtesy of Spiked, that the jerks of the right have no monopoly on wrong-headed moral certitude.

But Al Gore, child of those same times, is not a jerk.

And if he restrains himself from the temptations that his stellar year has exposed to him, he’ll remain one of the good guys. Either way, he deserves our congratulations.

Al, direct your energies toward persuading your friends the Greens that technological solutions to our environmental challenges are perfectly appropriate.

Then, perhaps they’ll retire the Peace prize with your name on it.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Today was collection day here at L-HC. Accumulated enough story ideas for a week at least; of course, if they’re news based, the fish get stale quickly.

Found this courtesy of reddit.com, out-digging Digg once again, and it caused me to toss the fish back, perhaps to catch another day.

This one is too important not to share.

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
Published: Tuesday August 28, 2007

The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to a new analysis.

The paper, “Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East” – written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament – was exclusively provided to RAW STORY late Friday under embargo.

Well, okay, we know that military strategists are always war-gaming, right?

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.

Sounds a bit more further advanced than a theoretical game, huh?

It’s lengthy, but now take a look at the original story.

[Per L-HC's reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

The Raw Story | Study: US preparing ‘massive’ military attack against Iran

Anyone the least bit concerned about this?

Even-handedly, near the end, the report includes some push-back:

“The report seems to accept without question that US air force and navy bombers could effectively destroy Iran and they seem to ignore the fact that US use of air power in Iraq has failed to destroy all major military, political, economic and transport capabilities,” said Johnson late Monday after the embargo on the study had been lifted.

“But at least in their conclusions they still acknowledge that Iran, if attacked, would be able to retaliate. Yet they are vague in terms of detailing the extent of the damage that the Iran is capable of inflicting on the US and fairly assessing what those risks are.”

Back to the paper:

We should not underestimate the Bush administration’s ability to convince itself that an “Iran of the regions” will emerge from a post-rubble Iran. So, do not be in the least surprised if the United States attacks Iran. Timing is an open question, but it is hard to find convincing arguments that war will be avoided, or at least ones that are convincing in Washington.

Constant reader may already know this about MUDGE: I am not a knee-jerk pacifist peace-nik make love not war child of the sixties.

Like so many of my generation, I artfully dodged the Vietnam draft, in the interests of self-preservation rather than some lofty anti-war principles, I freely, if somewhat shamefacedly admit.

But, carefully reflected upon, carefully conducted war has its place.

My father and father-in-law, both members of the Greatest Generation and now deceased, did their duty, honorably in an honorable cause.

My son, and new daughter-in-law both served multiple tours aboard Naval vessels in the Arabian Gulf enforcing the U.N. sanctions of Iraq in the ’90′s and targeting cruise missiles against the enemy in Afghanistan.

So, it’s not knee-jerk pacifist peace-nik make love not war that is making me feel nauseous as I write this.

Forest fires, after all, are Mother Nature’s way of taking old-growth forests and starting over. Sometimes this same principle may be operative where wrong-headed nations are concerned. Turns out that Smokey the Bear and his fellow peace-loving comrades were both utterly wrong.

Unfortunately, the Muslim states have made no secret of their aim to obliterate Israel, and it’s in reaction to that virulent hatred, and that alone, that causes this observer to think: “Hmm, remove Iran’s capabilities to destroy Tel Aviv and generally make destructive mischief throughout the region? Maybe sooner than later.”

So, I’m concerned. Not because punishing Iran is a bad idea per se. To protect our interests, which include Israel’s right to exist, some punishment may be necessary.

But the gang that can’t shoot straight scares me.

If there’s a way to conduct a preemptive strike against Iran, no matter how good the reasons, we cannot trust George III and his ne’er-do-well minions to correctly consider the geopolitical ramifications, nor direct the military campaign effectively.

So I’m thinking, “Stand down, Pentagon.”

And, all you macho presidential candidates out there (and Hillary, I meant you most of all!), Iran is not the issue with which to flex your warlike muscles. The stakes are way too high for posturing, either by the Bush mis-administration, or by any of you.

This is one initiative that, unless dire reality intrudes, should get put on the shelf until, say, 21-January-2009, the earliest.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Completing today’s war trilogy is this excellent commentary…

Bush’s non-exit exit strategy

Not only is the “surge” not working, it’s destabilizing Iraq. Yet military leaders say troops should stay for the long term.

By Joe Conason

Aug. 03, 2007 | To read the prepared testimony of Adm. Mike Mullen, President Bush’s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is to understand that the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy requires U.S. troops to remain in that country for a long time, perhaps permanently. With unusual candor, the admiral explained in answers submitted before his appearance in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that he and the president believe in the necessity of a “pragmatic, long-term commitment that will be measured in years not months.”

How many years Mullen did not say, but he did offer a suggestion in this tangle of redundancies: “We must commit to a long-term security relationship with Iraq that facilitates political reconciliation, supports development of a stable Iraq, and is directly tied to our enduring long-term interests in the region.” American forces will be there for the long term, just in case that wasn’t clear the first few times.

Mullen forthrightly admitted that there is no “purely military solution” to Iraq’s problems, and his testimony was refreshingly honest about the catastrophic errors committed by the Bush administration over the past four years, from disbanding the Iraqi army and purging all Baathists from government to the failures of war planning and diplomacy. As he noted during his live testimony, the prospects for “victory” are mixed at best because Iraq’s political leaders have made so little headway toward a political settlement among the country’s warring ethnic and religious communities.

[Per L-HC's reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!] Salon.com | Bush’s non-exit exit strategy

Adm. Mullen is well respected by MUDGE‘s own military advisors, his son and daughter-in-law, both former Navy lieutenants with front line experience, and his testimony this week is a clear demonstration that at the Joint Chiefs level, politics always trumps military excellence. Think Colin Powell.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. have led us to the point where there are only bad choices, where the only sure bet is that many, many more of our daughters and sons will die, fighting battles that everyone now understands are unwinnable in a country that will blow itself apart even if our troop strength was an order of magnitude greater.

As Conason writes:

But at this late date, as the political structures in Iraq fall, the war’s advocates cannot pretend that their strategy is working, either. The way to encourage compromise, if not reconciliation, among the Iraqis is to place our withdrawal on the negotiating table — and to warn those we have brought to power that we are leaving, sooner rather than later, and that their only hope for stability is to dither no longer. That was the essential recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, and it is still the only plausible exit strategy.

Plausible, of course. But if there’s one sure fact that emerges from six years of war, it’s that logic will never budge this administration. Only the next election, or given a gutsier Congress, impeachment.

January 20, 2009 can’t come soon enough.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Back to the political world, after a couple of weekend jaunts into my professional world, which is political in the corporate politics context only.

From MUDGE’s hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, comes this eye-opening report from its Sunday Perspectives section. The sidebar below it repeats a news story from earlier this week regarding congressional testimony from a former surgeon general in George III’s administration.

PERSON OF INTEREST: ROGER PEDERSEN

A refreshing change of climate

Having left U.S., stem cell researcher finds British view is music to his ears

By Jeremy Manier a Tribune staff reporter

July 22, 2007 CAMBRIDGE, England

To see Roger Pedersen relaxing at a favorite spot beside the River Cam, it’s hard to fathom that this unassuming scientist helped spark America’s fiery debate over embryonic stem cells.

Pedersen stirred fears of a mass emigration of stem cell researchers in 2001, when he left his prominent research post in California for the University of Cambridge, citing Britain’s looser stem cell laws. To this day, backers of stem cell research invoke the specter of a brain drain to Britain and other countries as one reason for rolling back the restrictions President Bush placed on stem cell funding.

Yet Bush’s policy never drove away much American research talent, thanks in part to state initiatives that have compensated for the federal funding limits. These days, what’s most striking to an American observer in Britain is the utter absence of the intensity and rancor that have charged the stem cell debate in the U.S.

The calm scene in Britain may offer a glimpse at the stem cell conversation in a post-Bush America. Many of the current Democratic and GOP presidential candidates have pledged to loosen or remove Bush’s restrictions.

Pedersen’s move to Britain has led him to research success, a new marriage and a new hobby: violin-making. He said his home country would do well to copy his adopted nation’s stem cell consensus.

“I’m very happy to be in a place where the first thing that comes to your mind when you say ‘stem cells’ isn’t politics,” said Pedersen, 62, co-director of the Cambridge Stem Cell Initiative.

No one knows how the U.S. research scene might have developed had Bush not limited funding for embryonic stem cells — microscopic blank slates that can grow into virtually any type of tissue. But Pedersen’s experience illustrates just how pivotal the 2001 policy shift was for many scientists.

For Pedersen, the first American researcher to apply for federal funding of work on embryonic stem cells, Bush’s moral qualms about the field spurred a personal and professional crisis.

The administration often states that Bush was the first president actually to fund embryonic stem cell research, but that’s a bit misleading. In reality, President Bill Clinton authorized such funding for the first time in 2000, under a relatively loose regulatory scheme.

After Clinton’s announcement, Pedersen immediately applied for a federal grant to support his stem cell work at the University of California at San Francisco. For Pedersen, who in 1997 had lost the race to be the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells (to James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin), the federal money offered a measure of protection from the vagaries of private biotech funding.

But a few months after Bush took office, Pedersen received a phone call on April 12, 2001, from the National Institutes of Health saying it had suspended consideration of his grant.

“It was very disappointing because in the previous four years I had ramped up my lab to do research on embryonic stem cells,” Pedersen said. “On the day I was told there would be no federal funding, I knew I would either have to change the direction of my lab or leave. And I happened to have an offer from Cambridge literally simultaneously.”

The departure of a major figure such as Pedersen from UCSF, a citadel of the American medical research community, helped launch stem cells to the top of the national agenda. Many experts warned that other scientists were poised to follow Pedersen’s lead and leave for friendlier shores.

Instead of ordering a total ban, Bush restricted stem cell funding to exclude cell colonies made after 2001. That may have prevented a stampede of scientists, but Pedersen said the limits fostered an “invisible brain drain.” Many young researchers have told him that the field appeared so uncertain after Bush’s decision that they simply chose a less controversial area of medical research.

Most American scientists would have found it difficult to follow Pedersen’s example in any event. He said he took a pay cut of about 50 percent when he left the U.S. — a reduction that he could partially offset with retirement savings. But he still makes “substantially less” than the $200,000 salary an institute director of his stature could command in the United States.

Pedersen said he tries to snatch all the good American talent he can for his center, but it’s more of a brain trickle than a brain drain. He often competes in recruiting with Harvard, which has a large, privately funded stem cell program, and universities in California, home to the nation’s largest state-supported stem cell initiative.

What Britain can promise young scientists is a political climate that Americans would find unrecognizable.

All three of the nation’s major parties substantially agree about the value of funding work on embryonic stem cells. The government has successfully portrayed its investment in stem cell research as having a practical basis in the potential long-term benefit to patients in the state-funded health care system.

“It’s a culture shock now for me to go back to the States and be reminded what a political football stem cells are,” Pedersen said. “Here it’s much more about patient care for its own sake.”

The untroubled approach to stem cells is possible because most Britons see the underlying abortion debate as essentially settled. Parliament decriminalized abortion in the late 1960s, and subsequent attempts to change that law have been “flatly unsuccessful,” said David Albert Jones, a Catholic bioethicist at St. Mary’s University College Twickenham in London.

“Ultimately you do have quite a lot of consensus here, because the lines of debate are drawn differently,” Jones said. “Anti-abortion views that are common in the U.S. command about 10 to 15 percent support here.”

Pedersen said he does not regret moving to Cambridge, which has a rich store of researchers doing work on stem cells. He found Britain too expensive to pursue his old hobby of flying single-engine airplanes, but he discovered a different pastime more appropriate to the town’s medieval feel when he decided to take up violin-making.

“The variation that your eye can detect in an instrument is on the order of the size of a human embryo,” Pedersen said. Working on stem cells, he said, is “very much linked to this experience of making a violin, in the sense that you have to be precise, patient and persistent to make it all come out.”
———-
jmanier@tribune.com

- – - SIDEBAR – - -

In testimony before Congress earlier this month, former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona bemoaned the “partisanship and political manipulation” that greeted him in Washington after being appointed by President Bush. Carmona said White House officials sought to silence him on such issues as mental health, secondhand smoke, contraception and embryonic stem cell research. Following are excerpts from his testimony:

POLITICAL SCIENCE

On being ignored
“The reality is that the nation’s doctor has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas. Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is often ignored, marginalized or simply buried.”

On telling the truth
“I was often instructed what to say or what not to say. I did the best I could to speak out on issues. Honestly, I never lied, I never covered the truth, but it was a fine line that I walked all the time because often the particular issue already had a preconceived political solution. … I would see policy moving forward and I would scratch my head and think, shouldn’t the surgeon general have been involved in this discussion?”

On global warming
“The issue of global warming came up once … with senior officials, where they were heralding global warming to be nothing more than — you know, a liberal cause that had no merit, and they were kind of dismissing it. And then I — and I remember thinking — I said, ‘Well, I understand why they want me here now. They want me to discuss the science because obviously they don’t understand the science.’ And I had this scientific discussion for about a half an hour, and I was never invited back to the meeting.”

On speechwriting
“I was asked to say certain things at meetings, things were put into my speeches — in fact, I had two speechwriters who ultimately quit because they were so intimidated and browbeaten by appointed officials. … We’d play this game [of] taking things out, putting things in. And finally, I told the staff, ‘Let them put in whatever they want. I’m not going to say it anyway.’ “

On public health
“The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds. The job of the surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party.”

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

A refreshing change of climate — chicagotribune.com

I have become aware lately that stem cell research may be able to lead to cures for such wide spread, potentially treatable but currently not curable diseases as Alzheimer’s and diabetes. It’s criminal that such research has been stymied in the U.S.; galling that Roger Pedersen needed to emigrate to find the funding and academic freedom to pursue his vital research.

And, the testimony of Dr. Carmona is positively chilling. And except in our fundamentalized, right-wing politicized and downright lunacized era, it shouldn’t have to be said, as quoted above, “The job of the surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party.”

Congress, wake up! Start please by impeaching Viceroy Cheney. Then …

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE