On Sept. 16, Dr. Mohammed, a dentist in Baghdad and author of the blog Last Of Iraqis, wrote about the possibility of cholera in the city as he described and photographed the changes in water coming from the tap in his home:

This week the World Health Organization confirmed Dr. Mohammed’s fears, with cases confirmed in Baghdad and Basra. The disease had been previously limited to the northern Kurdish provinces, with the number of infected at over 7,000.

Iraq’s deputy health minister, Dr. Adel Mohsin said that further spread of the epidemic was “very likely” in the capital without water testing and maintaining sufficient levels of chlorination, which kills the bacteria. Mohsin said teams testing in the capital had found chlorine levels were insufficient to prevent cholera in 20 areas.

Chlorine imports have been dramatically curtailed in the wake of insurgent bombs that used chlorine. Dr. Naeema al-Gasseer, the WHO’s representative in Iraq, said some 100,000 tons of chlorine were being held up at Iraq’s border with Jordan because of fears the chemical could be used in explosives, leaving Baghdad with only a week’s supply.

Cholera “is a gastrointestinal disease that is typically spread by drinking contaminated water and can, in extreme cases, can lead to fatal dehydration.” Cholera is fairly simple to manage under ordinary circumstances, but the precarious security situation in the country prevents medical teams from reaching the ill, and the mass displacement of the population into unsanitary conditions makes control and treatment difficult.

– Candyce G.

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Just last night, a friend and I were discussing the weirdly open nature of the California governorship in the post-Arnold era. The question of whether or not Jerry Brown was eligible to run again came up. It seems that he is and that he just might take the plunge.

Several presidential candidates have spoken out in support of tighter regulations governing private security contractors in Iraq after the recent shooting involving Blackwater USA.

Former Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has remained silent though. Not only has his campaign not issued a statement, but as the Politico reports, it has refused to even answer any questions:

Romney’s campaign has declined to answer specific questions posed by Politico about issues central to the debate — issues now being hashed out by Congress, the State Department and the Iraqi government. [...]

After the shooting, though, a Romney spokesman would not say whether Black has advised Romney on the use of security contractors in Iraq. Nor would he elaborate on Black’s role in the campaign or answer specific questions about whether the U.S.’s level of oversight over security contractors is adequate.

Romney has a clear interest not condemning Blackwater. Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater, currently serves as a Senior Adviser for counterterrorism and national security issues on the Romney campaign. From the April press release announcing that Black would be joining the campaign:

“I am pleased to welcome Cofer Black to our campaign. He has a long and impressive career dedicated to making America safer and more secure in the world,” said Governor Romney. “Our country faces a new generation of challenges and Black’s experience at the forefront of our nation’s counterterrorism efforts will be a tremendous asset.”

The recent incident was not the first violent episode that involved Blackwater in Iraq. Iraqi officials are now investigating “allegations about the security firm’s involvement in six other violent episodes this year that left at least 10 Iraqis dead.” The day before the Coalition Provisional Authority ceased to exist, L. Paul Bremer, then the chief American envoy in Iraq, issued an order that “granted American private security contractors immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts.”

Black previously served as the CIA’s chief of counterrorism. In 2001, he infamously ordered an agent to “Capture Bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back in a box on dry ice.”

UPDATE: Steve Clemons at The Washington Note has more.

A “paper claiming to show that the scientific consensus on climate change is not in fact a consensus has been rejected by the journal Energy & Environment.” The journal is run by a “climate change skeptic” and “known for publishing work that denies a link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.” Brandon Keim at Wired writes, “So if Energy and Environment wouldn’t take it, the paper…really is hot air.” More at DeSmogBlog.

Andrew posts an extended meditation from a reader on Marc Bloch’s theory, outlined in Strange Defeat that, as the reader puts it, “the extreme polarization of the 1930s fatally weakened the Third Republic, sowing disunity when the Hitlerite threat demanded precisely its opposite.” It’s a fascinating book, and well-worth reading (as is Ernest May’s counterpoint, Strange Defeat) but it’s worth saying that there are some real failures of analogy here. Indeed, the reader himself concedes:

Now, I don’t mean by this that Bin Laden or Ahmedinejad are comparable with Hitler, as all the Michael Ledeens of the world would have it; the NRO crowd is seemingly incapable of understanding the inherent subtlety of historical comparison, the necessary lack of a 1:1 correspondence between any two epochs — this is why it’s always 1938 for them. However, we would be remiss if we ignored the cautionary example of another great democracy undone by political polarization.

But on top of that, though there clearly is a sense in which current American politics is very polarized, there’s another sense in which our levels of polarization are almost trivial compared to 1930s France. We don’t have a substantial revolutionary Communist movement here in the United States, nor a monarchist movement, nor do we have an officer’s corps that’s generally skeptical of civilian command and republican governance. Indeed, even compared to the United States of forty years ago when you had a lot of votes going to George Wallace on a white supremacist platform and substantial intellectual support for the idea of convergence between the Soviet and American economic models, our politics is conducted across a pretty narrow ideological spectrum.

What’s new in America isn’t polarization in that sense, but the rise of partisan polarization organized around two fairly coherent political parties. The good news about this is that it’s mostly an inevitable consequence of the decline of Jim Crow. The bad news is that the country has a set of political institutions that weren’t designed with competition between two ideologically coherent parties in mind. That’s creating a lot of problems, a lot of frustrations, and a lot of intra-party tensions. But it’s not nearly the same thing as a society being ripped apart over the sort of profound ideological differences you saw in interwar Europe.

This weekend on Bloomberg Television, right-wing pundit Robert Novak ripped former Fed chief Alan Greenspan because he criticizes Bush’s economic policies while hailing those of President Clinton. Novak said that Greenspan revealed himself “as a Democrat”:

[Greenspan] suddenly emerges from the sea, naked like Venus, as a Democrat. He loves Bill Clinton, he loves tax increases, he’s dismissive of Ronald Reagan as an amiable putz, he detests the Bushes.

Greenspan has identified his roots as that of a Goldwater Republican, and he has said he will vote for the Republican candidate in the 2008 presidential elections. Greenspan hasn’t emerged as a progressive, but rather has revealed the truth about the failure of conservative economic theories.

Later in the show, Novak went on to criticize President Bush’s selection of Judge Michael Mukasey, arguing, “He’s totally unqualified to be Attorney General. He has no administration experience.” Novak is the latest in a long line of right-wing voices who has complained of the pick.

Novak said a better choice would have been former Solicitor General Ted Olson, because he “knows where the bodies are buried” at the Justice Department:

[Mukasey] is going into a zoo at the Justice Department. It is chaos — he has no idea what to do there. They have vacancies there, staff. You need someone who knows where the bodies are buried, like Ted Olson.

Watch a compilation:

Federal investigations are now investigating whether Blackwater USA employees smuggled weapons into Iraq. The employees allegedly “sent over unlicensed weapons and equipment, that could have been used by a group labelled as terrorist by the US.” Iraqi officials are also probing “allegations about the security firm’s involvement in six other violent episodes this year that left at least 10 Iraqis dead.”