“The Dixie Chicks completed a defiant comeback on Sunday night, winning five Grammy awards after being shunned by the country music establishment over their anti-Bush comments leading up to the Iraq war. The Texas trio won record and song of the year for the no-regrets anthem ‘Not Ready to Make Nice.’” More: “‘That’s interesting,’ Maines said in picking up the band’s Grammy Award for best country album on Sunday. … ‘Well, to quote the great Simpsons: heh-heh,’ she said.
Via Atrios:
The AP on lessons of the Libby trial: “‘What didn’t he touch? It’s almost like there was almost nothing too trivial for the vice president to handle,’ said New York University professor Paul Light, an expert in the bureaucracy of the executive branch. ‘The details suggest Cheney was almost a deputy president with a shadow operation. He had his own source of advice. He had his own source of access. He was making his own decisions,’ Light said.”
As you’ve all no doubt heard, John Howard made the odd decision to lash out and attack Barack Obama today. One thing I haven’t seen mentioned on American blogs is that I know Howard’s Australian critics think he’s a racist. As in John Quiggin’s observation that “Whenever it has appeared possible to ride a wave of prejudice in Australia, Howard has sought to do so, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.” So his brief intervention into US politics may just be part of that pattern and have nothing in particular to do with Obama, Iraq, our election, etc.
As Pedro Moura Costa, founder of the carbon credit trading company EcoSecurities, explained:
If you pick a winner in the right technology in the search for a low carbon economy you are talking about potentially billions. It is really the holy grail.
The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme is giving investors in the carbon market a glimpse of the future and it’s a “green goldrush.” The flood of investments in carbon trading and green technology funds has quickly created a market worth billions, and projected to be as much as $40 billion by 2012. One businessman in New York guesses that “the next Bill Gates” will be an environmental entreprenuer, someone who taps into the emerging clean technology market and moves it into homes.
Henrik Hasselknippe, manager of the carbon market analyst group PointCarbon, observed that, “[the carbon market] is increasingly a capitalist arena. The eco-warriors are being replaced by the eco-capitalists.”
While this is serious business, can’t you just envision the Monty Python skit? Eco-warriors morphing into eco-capitalists with swords that turn smoke and smog into gold revealing, at last, the Holy Grail….
This is really shocking:
In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the “Axis of Evil.” Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush’s controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn’t ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan’s ringing denunciations of the “evil empire.”
Once again, Iran’s reformists were knocked back on their heels. “Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized,” says Adeli. “The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America’s intentions.”
In short, Michael Gerson and Condoleezza Rice, purely in order to make a speech that (a) sounded good, and (b) pretended not to be exclusively about Iraq, set the United States on a collision course with Iran. That’s really got to be a historic speechwriting blunder.
Naturally enough, Gerson’s paid a high price for his role in instigating this destructive conflict. After continuing to serve for years in the White House he’s been forced to accept a humiliating position as a Council on Foreign Relations fellow and a columnist for some obscure magazine called Newsweek.
“Why are US officials hiding behind the cloak of anonymity when presenting the most detailed evidence yet that Iran is supplying weaponry to anti-US forces in Iraq?” IraqSlogger.com’s Eason Jordan asks. “After weeks, if not months, of US official planning to present a damning ‘dossier’ of incriminating evidence against Iran, and after this same US administration presented us with lopsided, erroneous information about the capability and evil intentions of the Saddam Hussein regime, the best the US government can give us today is incendiary evidence presented at a Baghdad news conference by three US officials who refuse to be quoted by name? That’s disgraceful and unacceptable.”
I wonder sometimes if there’s a common psychological profile to blogging’s early adopters. One interesting data point is that I, like Amanda and Atrios absolutely despise talking on the phone. This is why even though I like writing and I like politics, I could never in a million years be a “real” political journalist. I can get through a conversation with, say, my dad but as a general matter I just absolutely hate to talk on the phone and will always use email, IM, or SMS if it’s even vaguely plausible as a substitute.
I’m not entirely sure whether or not I ever attended a Rangers game when I was a kid. If I did, though, I don’t remember it. Last night, however, courtesy of a friend I was able to watch the Caps game from the Steptoe & Johnson luxury suite (because nothing says hockey like a white-shoe law firm … even funnier, they share the suite with a French company) and one can’t help ask oneself, “where are the cheerleaders?” My buddy was trying to tell me it would be too hard to recruit people with the requisite skating skills, but I don’t find that very convincing, the world must be awash in young women who used to figure skate and then had to abandon their olympic dreams. I’d certainly believe that per-unit labor costs for ice cheerleaders might be higher than for, say, the Wizards Dance Team but you could address that by simply fielding a smaller squad, there’s no need to go down to zero.
Today on Meet the Press, Politico reporter Roger Simon called the case against Scooter Libby “a nutty trial that nobody except the people involved in it and the people covering it care about.” Simon said Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Libby merely because he “didn’t tell him the complete truth.”
Actually, Scooter Libby lied — under oath, to a federal grand jury. He is facing serious felony charges: obstruction of justice, making false statements to a grand jury, and perjury. But according to Simon, these aren’t “real crimes.”
Watch it:
The American people know Libby stands accused of “real” crimes. An ABC News poll taken when Libby was indicted found that 70 percent of Americans considered the charges against Libby to be serious, and a majority of Americans believed the Libby indictment “indicates broader problems with ethical wrongdoing in the Bush Administration.”
Transcript: Read more
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