I’ve been in hibernation for the last few months, barely surviving another bleak Bushy winter, but today the intimations of spring in California—and of hopeful Obamamania throughout this fair land—have drawn me out of my lair to join the fun here at S&R. I do want to start again with something easy, and fortunately I found an amusing blog meme at Crooked Timber that looks like just the ticket. Now I know you’re not supposed to pick a meme randomly out of the digital ether, and Eszter Hargittai did not actually tag me, but I’m going to carry on anyway, as though all the webby proprieties had been observed.

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

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Six years ago, I learned about the attacks on New York and Washington a day late, on September 12. Ensconced in the Umbrian countryside, intentionally cut off from all electronic contact with the world, I was oblivious for 24 hours to the events that (as everyone insisted) changed the world.

In fact, the world did not change that day. Terrorism—the violent acts of those too weak to do anything else—and war—the violent acts of those too unimaginative to do anything else—have always been part of human history. It was only the United States that changed, driven to fear and frenzy by its lying leaders.

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Bad news. Now that Bush and Cheney’s approval has fallen into the lower depths, the two-headed president no longer has anything to lose. Therefore, according to Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger of the Guardian, Iran is again in serious danger of being attacked. At some point before Bush leaves office, a preemptive strike is very likely:

The shift [in thinking] follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: “Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo.”… Full Story »

Because I like to think well of my countrymen, I prefer to believe that George Bush got into the White House by fooling them about his real intentions. If only they had known, if only they had understood a little more about his competence and his worldview and his intended policies, they would never have given him enough votes to slide by in 2000, and certainly not enough votes to win outright in 2004.

But many Americans didn’t know. Three years ago, when I was canvassing for John Kerry in the conservative western suburbs of St Louis, one angry woman stood on the steps of her mobile home and told me that she was voting for Bush because Teresa Kerry planned to force all states to make gay marriage legal. She knew it was true because she had read it in four different places on the internets, and Teresa had enough money that she would have been able to get if off the internets if it weren’t true. We did not have a productive conversation. Despite my best efforts, in that trailer park and elsewhere, Bush won the 11 electoral votes of Missouri.

But times change. Since 2004, the drip, drip, drip of information has opened many an eye to the administration’s mendacity and incompetence, and a few big-picture events have broken through the media camouflage protecting Bush. The abandonment of New Orleans, increasing chaos in Iraq, and now the unfair release of a criminal from prison because he is the president’s friend—each of these stories has awakened a few more oblivious voters from their slumber, and if Bush were running for office today, he would not find enough friends in Missouri to host a barbecue at any trailer park in the state. Full Story »

California Senator Barbara Boxer called global warming “the challenge of our generation.” On a conference call today with Jerome Ringo of the Apollo Alliance and Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org Political Action, she said, “We need action now on global warming. The American people are far ahead of our government on this issue.”

Boxer outlined the challenges but said she is optimistic. “Diverse voices of the world are coming together to support action now,” she said, and the Live Earth concerts tomorrow demonstrate that support. “It’s time for the US to take leadership in the fight on global warming.” The Apollo Alliance and MoveOn.org PA are cosponsoring the events, and despite Republican opposition, another concert has just been scheduled for Washington, DC, to join the concerts already scheduled in cities on every continent, including London, Johannesburg, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro.

As chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Boxer is introducing a bill to reduce carbon use in the US 80 percent by 2050, and Republican Senator John Warner is joining her to sponsor a carbon cap-and-trade program. “On this issue I have hope, not fear,” she added. “We must work together to preserve our home, our planet.” Full Story »

Scooter Libby walks free because he is a friend of the king. Two hundred thirty-one years after we American colonials declared our independence from the tyranny of one King George, another King George has reasserted the royal prerogative of placing himself and his friends above the law.

It’s time for a new Declaration of Independence, but we don’t have to start from scratch. Many charges in the original bill of particulars against George III are equally applicable to George W:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice. Full Story »

The only characteristic George Bush shares with Solomon is his certainty that God anointed him king. He certainly exhibited no Solomonic wisdom when he commuted Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. True, he could have pardoned Libby outright, or he could have allowed Libby to serve his 30-month sentence. Commutation, therefore, appears to be a split-the-difference compromise, a wise middle course.

But it is not. Bush decided on commutation, in fact, as simply the best way to protect himself and Cheney, because it keeps the lid on Libby. As Jeff Lomonaco predicted two weeks ago when he wrote this oped, either of the other two courses would have been more likely to open legal avenues for establishing Bush and Cheney’s involvement in the case—including both the initial leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity and the subsequent coverup for which Libby was convicted.

Either pardoning or allowing imprisonment might also have kept the case active in Congress and in the media, as the investigative pot continued to bubble. Pardon would have further enraged Congressional leaders, while imprisonment would have further enraged the right-wing GOP base. But commutation, while hardly a real compromise in legal terms, is more nearly acceptable to Bush’s critics on both sides and so less likely to create continuing dispute. Full Story »

Any discussion of race in America must begin with the fact that for 388 years African Americans have been victimized, and for most of that time they were treated as chattel property, no better than domestic animals. They were enslaved from 1619 until 1865, and they were classified as slaves solely according to a binary conception of race. For most of the next 100 years, they were discriminated against in nearly every area of their lives, solely according to a binary conception of race. And even since the civil rights triumphs of the 1950s and 1960s, they have continued to suffer unequal treatment, solely according to a binary conception of race.

Now Chief Justice John Roberts, in a Supreme Court decision that effectively overturns one of those triumphs—the 1954 antisegregation case Brown v. Board of Education—has the temerity to write, “Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to a binary conception of race is an extreme approach in light of this Court’s precedents and the Nation’s history of using race in public schools, and requires more than such an amorphous end to justify it [italics added].” In fact, this decision ignores real precedents (whatever Roberts may have told Congress about stare decisis), and it turns on its head the nation’s history of using racial considerations to improve the education of black children.

Apparently, Roberts believes that classifying African Americans—to their detriment—according to a binary conception of race is acceptable when it occurs naturally, as the result of white racism, but that any such classification used to repair the ravages of nearly four centuries of discrimination by invoking the legal system of the US government—to their advantage—is “an extreme approach.” His hypocrisy is breathtaking.

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George Bush has done his work—with a little help from Dick Cheney, as the Washington Post series this week has made clear—and he has almost certainly changed the political landscape for decades. His arrogance and incompetence have so thoroughly discredited the Republican Party that Democrats start the 2008 races with a huge advantage. Most Americans are now ready to vote for a Democratic candidate for president—any Democratic candidate—and to solidify the party’s control of Congress.

But one troubling factor remains: In the process of discrediting his party and conservative policies, Bush has also, in the eyes of many voters, discredited government of any stripe. While Iraq, New Orleans, and a hundred other scandals all happened under Bush’s watch, some voters interpret these failures to mean that we can’t trust government to do anything right. Democratic government, Republican government, it doesn’t matter that much—by this
reading they’re all inefficient, feckless, and self-serving. You know, politicians, they’re all just politicians. And that’s a reading Republicans would like to encourage.

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Major General Antonio Taguba, who directed the first investigation of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, has now retired from the US Army and spoken at length with Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. His story of torture in Iraq and coverup in Washington is newly shocking.

Since the release in March 2004 of the Taguba Report, and of those now-iconic photos of cavalier mistreatment in May 2004, the scandal of Abu Ghraib has been locked in a deep freeze of inaction. At the time, Taguba found that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees” and there was “systematic and illegal abuse.” But only a few low-ranking enlisted soldiers were charged with crimes. Then, under a barrage of lies from George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and their underlings, the scandal disappeared from the mainstream media’s attention. Nothing, it seemed, could be done, so it was better that we all turn our attention to other matters.

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Michael Pollan’s delectable new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, examines the wretched state of modern agriculture—and the unhealthy relationship most of us have with what we eat—by tracing the origin and consumption of four very different meals. He concludes that Americans now live in a wasteland of bland, interchangeable commodities, dominated by monocultured corn and fueled by imported oil. It’s not a pretty sight, but Pollan writes with such verve and insight that the book is hard to put down.

For the first meal, Pollen takes his family to McDonald’s; like 19 percent of all meals in the US, this one is eaten in the car. Next, he prepares a meal from ingredients labeled “organic,” a feel-good label that is now often applied to food produced in industrialized, energy-wasteful ways. He then visits a farm in western Virginia where sustainable multicrops, free-range animals, and ecological reuse create a happily updated version of the traditional family farm. And finally, he turns hunter-gatherer to create a meal with ingredients from the gardens and forests of Northern California: he shoots a feral pig, hunts mushrooms, picks cherries and lettuce, and even captures wild yeast for his bread.

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Richard Rorty is dead at age 75. He was more than a philosopher; he was a social thinker. In this era of dysfunctional, amoral government, he left Americans a legacy of hope by reminding us of the intellectual foundations of our political morality and practical accomplishments. Rorty wrote, in his 1999 book Philosophy and Social Hope, of his “hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society,” and many of his later essays explored the ideas on which such a society could be built.

Hope is what we chiefly need in the era of George Bush, Osama bin Laden, and their fellow fearmongers. We need leaders who encourage us to broaden the circle of friendship and kinship beyond the usual boundaries, who sensitize us to the suffering of fellow human beings and help us to identify with them—and therefore to reduce the tensions that lead to violence and war. Rorty suggests that this is the best path to take not because it is admirable or moral in some universal sense, but because it is practical; if we have defined our desired goal as a peaceful, egalitarian society, such expanded sympathy is simply the most likely path to achieve that goal.

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The five reactionary members of the Bush/Roberts Supreme Court are showing themselves, case by case, to have a radical view of the law and of their place in American government. Furthermore, whatever John Roberts and Samuel Alito said in their Senate confirmation hearings about stare decisis, they have now made clear that they have little regard for precedent or for the history of the Court.

Yesterday, in yet another 5–4 decision, Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy overturned decades of case law in a way that will likely result in more executions. They allowed a trial judge to disqualify a juror who expressed some doubts about the death penalty but who was prepared to follow the law. We can now expect many more “hanging juries.” Full Story »

The Roberts/Bush Supreme Court has delivered another crushing blow to women. In a 5–4 decision, with new justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito in the antiegalitarian majority, the court held that “employers should be protected from lawsuits over pay discrimination linked to gender or race and based on decisions made or acts committed years ago.” Employers should be protected, they wrote, not workers—as though there exists somewhere a powerful cabal of rapacious Amazonian laborers intent on destroying the powerless Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and only the Supreme Court stands in the way of its impending bankruptcy.

It was Lilly Ledbetter who needed protection. Full Story »

Shortly after 470 BCE, following years of triumph as the leader of wartime Athens, Themistocles was accused of treachery against the city. He escaped the death sentence and traveled to Persia to visit his erstwhile enemy, King Xerxes, but they did not speak a common language. So their conversation was translated, often clumsily, from Greek to Persian and Persian to Greek. Plutarch describes what happened next:

[Xerxes] gave Themistocles leave to speak his mind freely on Greek affairs. Themistocles replied that the speech of man was like rich carpets, the patterns of which can only be shown by spreading them out; when the carpets are folded up, the patterns are obscured and lost; and therefore he asked for time. The king was pleased with the simile, and told him to take his time; and so he asked for a year. Then, having learned the Persian language sufficiently, he spoke with the king on his own.

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On Memorial Day, we remember those who perished in war. All the victims—the guilty and the innocent, the powerful and the downtrodden, the soldiers and the civilians. Especially, this year, we remember those who have died in Iraq:

• approximately 800,000 Iraqis, who continue to perish at a rate of about 3,700 per week
• 3,454 American military personnel, dying recently at a rate of more than 30 per week
• 276 other coalition military personnel, about 2 per week
• 916 coalition contractors, about 9 per week
• at least 132 journalists, an average of 1 per week

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George Bush’s minions have again leaked the amazing news that Bush is considering removing lots of American troops from Vietnam … oh, I mean Iraq. I thought for a moment it was another announcement of Dick Nixon’s secret plan for peace. David Sanger and David Cloud at the New York Times seem to take the leak at face value:

The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. Full Story »

New technologies are rarely intuitive. And that’s where the helpdesk comes in. Oh, yes, and the manual. This familiar, timeless scene is from the Norwegian TV show Øystein og jeg (hat tip to JoAnne at Cosmic Variance).

In much of the US, it’s now cheaper to install a solar-electric system than to buy your electricity from the grid. If your house is in the right place—it gets enough sunshine and it’s in a state that provides a solar rebate—a photovoltaic system is simply a good personal investment. You’re not just reducing your carbon footprint, you’re actually saving money—and the resale value of your house is likely to rise by almost exactly the amount you invest, while you get free electricity, year after year.

That was not always the case. Full Story »

On Tuesday, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey related his Shakepearean tale of George Bush’s thugs and the botched hospital/wiretap caper. Bush’s two hardnosed consiglieri—Al “Recollections” Gonzales and Andy “Screws” Card—descended on a comatose John Ashcroft to extract legal indulgences for their NSA sins, and only the FBI could fend them off. But then something about the wiretap program was changed (sorry, can’t tell you what, it’s secret) to something else (sorry, also secret) to keep Ashcroft and Comey from resigning. Nevertheless, Bush continued to break the law and ignore the Constitution. (Marty Lederman tells the tale in full here.)

Today, Bush appeared at a mutual-admiration “press availability” with Tony Blair, and Kelly O’Donnell of NBC News asked him about Comey’s story. He stonewalled, as usual. Did not answer the direct question about his involvement. Changed the subject to the necessity of the NSA warrantless-wiretap program. Security, you know. 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. We have nothing to fear but the diminution of fear. Full Story »