The concert is on!
We’ve started 24 hours’ worth of music from the series of Live Earth concerts in Rio, London, Hamburg, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Johannesburg, and most importantly, New York – where I’ll be blogging live during the concert!
So, as you’re tuned in to your TV or your computer (what an era!), check back with us on a regular basis for the latest from an insider’s view on the concert! Press pass granting, look forward to some exciting stuff!
According to a new report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, “in the first half of this fiscal year, the Defense Department’s “average monthly obligations for contracts and pay is running about $12 billion per month, well above the $8.7 billion in FY2006.” Additionally, depending on troop levels, total funding could reach “about $980 billion to $1.4 trillion by 2017.”
NASA’s James Hansen has sent around this note with a new, short essay (below):
George Polk initiated a stimulating meeting when I was in London earlier this week, which led to a focus on the critical task of halting construction of additional “dirty” coal-fired power plants, i.e., ones w/o CCS (carbon capture and sequestration). In working on my assignment to write “two paragraphs” of science rationale, I could not refrain from wandering into a related matter: the need to involve people, especially young people, in vociferous objection to the damage that such coal plants are doing to their and the entire planet’s future. It seems to me that we have not done a good job of making young people aware of the matter. How can we communicate with them??”
Here are Hansen’s thoughts on “Old King Coal”:
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month, neoconservative scholar Fouad Ajami compared Scooter Libby to “fallen soldiers” in Iraq. “[Libby] can’t be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own,” he wrote.
MSNBC’s David Shuster confronted Ajami about this comparison today on Hardball. “Mr. Ajami, do you really believe Mr. Libby is like the 3,600 soldiers killed in Iraq?” he asked. “I don’t need to be lectured on the soldiers killed in Iraq,” Ajami said. “You have to be able to handle metaphors, this really was a metaphor.” Schuster noted, “The word ‘metaphor’ is nowhere in your column.”
Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war veteran and executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), said of Ajami’s comparison:
I think it’s absurd. It’s a new low and an act of desperation here to defend a man by comparing him to fallen soldiers. … Part of the soldier’s creed is to uphold the Army values and live the Army values. Those values include honor, integrity, and personal courage. They don’t include lying and breaking the law. So I think it’s really an absurd analogy.
Shuster asked Rieckhoff, “If someone was convicted of four felonies, would they even be entitled to serve in the military?” “No, they’d be in a military prison right now.” replied Rieckhoff. Watch it:
During the segment, Shuster repeatedly corrected Ajami’s falsehoods about the Libby case. When Ajami tried to claim that Libby wasn’t a leaker of Plame’s identity, Shuster quickly debunked him, noting that it came out at trial that seven different people in the administration revealed Plame’s identity in a concerted campaign to out her. “Why did Libby lie to the FBI?” Schuster asked. A flummoxed Ajami could only falsely claim, “I don’t know that he did.”
“Would you like to apologize for your position on the Iraq war?” David Shuster asked. “No, not at all, I think it was a noble war,” Ajami responded.
UPDATE: Crooks and Liars has video of the full segment.
Everyone’s already raked David Ignatius over the coals for his inability to understand that political controversy exists because disagreement is a real phenomenon of American life (see Benen in particular). To merely extend the analysis a bit, there’s also the point that there are actual conflicts of interest existing in society — some people would benefit from things being done one way, others would benefit from them happening a different way.
This, I think, is at the root of elite distaste for argument and democracy. There’s an enormous desire on the part of the people near the top of the political-media pyramid to believe that they are participants in some kind of ethereal realm of Pure Ideas. The idea that politics is a clash of interests is disturbing to their self-image. It’s disturbing, but also undeniable, which leads to a desire to somehow purge and purify things. The ideal would be something like the court of Frederick the Great, where the country is ruled by an absolute monarch who likes to gather the leading intellectuals (but none who are too radical) around his table to debate the issues and then the winner gets his way — never mind what the peasants think.
Last month, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) argued on CBS’s Face the Nation, that the U.S. should “be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq.” “If there’s any hope” of stopping Iran’s nuclear program, “we can’t just talk to them. … We’ve got to use our force and to me that would include taking military action.”
Today in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Lieberman writes, “[E]very leader [in Washington] has a responsibility to acknowledge that…the Iranian government…has all but declared war on us and our allies in the Middle East.” He argues that the use of force against Iran is needed for one primary reason — to temper Iran’s “expansionist” desires to “dominate” its neighbors:
Iran is acting aggressively and consistently to undermine moderate regimes in the Middle East, establish itself as the dominant regional power and reshape the region in its own ideological image.
…[Iran] hopes to push the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, so that its proxies can then dominate [neighboring] states. Tehran knows that an American retreat under fire would send an unmistakable message throughout the region that Iran is on the rise and America is on the run. That would be a disaster for the region and the U.S.
Lieberman, however, used nearly identical talking points to retroactively justify the U.S invasion of Iraq. In the spring of 2004, after the search for WMDs proved fruitless, Lieberman argued that without U.S. intervention, Iraq would have embarked on its own campaign to dominate the “Arab world”:
I believe that [Iraq] developed [weapons of mass destruction] to use them against their neighbors. I’m talking about the Iraqis, their neighbors in the Arab world and the Persian Gulf.
Remember that Saddam was very clear that he had a plan. And the plan was to become the emperor, if you will, of the Arab world, to make Baghdad the capital of the Arab world.
Now, of course, that would have been terrible for the Arab world, and it would have been terrible for us. And, I think, in the short run his neighbors in the Persian Gulf and the Arab world are probably more significantly safe today than they were before, almost equal to our increase in safety as a result of our victory.
Lieberman was wrong in his solution for how to deal with Iraq and he’s wrong today about the consequences of U.S. military action against Iran. Fortunately, Lieberman is standing increasingly alone — according to a recent poll, 72 percent of the American public “favor diplomacy to pressure with Iran.”
UPDATE: Carpetbagger has more.
This morning, Fox and Friends asked, “Why is it at the end of every term, these kids who on the bubble…they come in and beg for extra credit so they can get an A?” Citing a report by a university professor, Fox speculated one possible answer: “Blame Mr. Rogers! Because Mr. Rogers had an optimistic message where everyone was special even if they didn’t deserve it.” During the segment, one chyron read: “Mr. Rogers’ Mixed Message: ‘You’re Special.’” Another chyron asked: “Is Mr. Rogers Ruining Kids?: Sense of Entitlement.” Watch it:
The late Fred Rogers was the highly acclaimed host of the children’s television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and was a tireless advocate for children. Fox’s Brian Kilmeade said “that man unintentionally did a whole generation or two a disservice.”
Number of voting Americans who “disapprove of President George W. Bush commuting the 30-month prison sentence of I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby.”
It seems that ninety percent of Israeli settlements “sprawl beyond their official boundaries despite the large amount of unused land already allocated to them.”
The audio for my “Talk of the Nation” interview is here. I came in around the 25 minutes mark. The subject of the interview:
From organic food to carbon offsets environmentally friendly products are all the rage — but what do “green” labels really mean? Guests discuss how to determine whether a “green” product is truly eco-friendly, and whether the current trend of eco-marketing will ultimately pay off for the environment.
One of the other guests was the very knowledgeable Josh Dorfman, host of The Lazy Environmentalist talk show, who was kind enough to invite me on his show.
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