ABC News is now reporting that “Paul Wolfowitz will not resign and would rather push the issue of his tenure to a vote by the World Bank board, his lawyer says.” Earlier today, ABC reported that Wolfowitz would likely “resign this afternoon.”
UPDATE: The World Bank Board has adjourned tonight with no deal made about Wolfowitz.
Former counsel to Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department liaison to the White House Monica Goodling, who allegedly holds the “keys to the kingdom” of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, will testify before the House Judiciary Committee on May 23.
Climate Science Watch has a devastating and detailed debunking of Richard Lindzen’s April 16 op-ed in Newsweek, “Why So Gloomy?”
Let me expand on one point. Lindzen writes, “There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way.” That is just plain wrong.
As far back as 1995, analysis by the National Climatic Data Center showed that over the course of the 20th century, the United States had suffered a statistically significant increase in a variety of extreme weather events, the very ones you would expect from global warming, such as more — and more intense — precipitation. That analysis concluded the chances were only “5 to 10 percent” this increase was due to factors other than global warming, such as “natural climate variability.”
And since 1995, the climate has gotten much more extreme. For instance, a 2004 analysis by the Center found an increase during the 20th century of “precipitation, temperature, streamflow, heavy and very heavy precipitation and high streamflow in the East.” They found a 14 percent increase in “heavy rain events” of greater than 2 inches in one day, and a 20 percent increase in “very heavy rain events”-best described as deluges-greater than 4 inches in one day.These extreme downpours are precisely what is predicted by global warming scientists and models.
The deluge that socked the mid-Atlantic and Northeast the last week of June 2006 fits this global-warming-type drought. Washington, DC, for instance, was drenched with over seven inches of rain in one 24-hour period. And this deluge happened at the same time that 45 percent of the continental United States as a whole was experiencing moderate to extreme drought.
For more on the global warming/extreme weather connection, read Chapter Two of Hell and High Water.
Amazon to sell non-DRM files from EMI. I expect we’ll see that the other major labels won’t be able to hold out for very long against consumers’ desire to legally acquire music files that are as flexible as the ones you can illegally obtain.
During last night’s presidential debate, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) repeatedly motioned to his stomach to argue against pro-choice policies. “Here in the womb,” he said, there “is a child that we’re talking about doing this to.” Brownback argued specifically for prohibiting rape and incest victims from obtaining an abortion. Watch it:
No matter how much Brownback gesticulates, there will never be a child in his “womb.”
Transcript: Read more
In 2005, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz appointed former-Spanish government official Ana Palacio as Bank General Counsel, one of the top positions in the organization. Wolfowitz claimed that he had appointed Palacio for her “legal skill and diplomacy” and for her “exceptional leadership and management capabilities, which he assured “she will bring to this position.”
In reality, she was appointed largely because of her strong support for the Iraq war, and “diplomacy” does not appear to be one of her traits. Highly unpopular within the Bank, an anonymous bank employee speaks up today at the site worldbankpresident.org:
She is known to be overbearing and yell on a regular basis. … She is known to intimidate people by mentioning her proximity to the President. Her conduct can only be characterized as unprofessional. Since the time she has been holding the position, two members of her immediate staff have left after very short periods on the basis of “untenable working conditions”. …. Throughout the Bank, staff find her absent, incoherent, rude and simply not fitted for the job.
Considered a “personal friend” of Shaha Riza’s by bank employees, Palacio has gone to great lengths to deflect the ongoing investigations. As the bank’s top legal counsel, she was supposed to help investigate the pay raise controversy, but she instead tried to stonewall the investigation from even occurring. According to an internal Bank bulletin, a bank employee wrote:
As last week’s Board meeting on Riza-gate was about to commence, Mr. Wolfowitz and Mmes. Cleveland and Palacio barged into the Board room and demanded to participate in the closed-door Board session. An argument ensued between the Board and the executive triumvirate. … Ms. Palacio demanded to stay because she claimed she had a right to remain as counsel to the board. … A needless debate that lasted close to an hour followed and MS. PALACIO REFUSED TO LEAVE THE BOARD ROOM! The board was then forced to adjourn the meeting.
Furthermore, as the controversy began to gain more attention last month, Palacio attempted to deflect attention towards an unrelated investigation, conveniently announcing at the same time that she was looking into a leak of “confidential internal communications” revealed by Fox News.
The abysmal management skills and partisan loyalty that Palacio exhibits reflects how Wolfowitz has loaded the World Bank with unpopular right-wing political appointees with little real effectiveness at the Bank.
“Governors could order federal facilities to lower their flags to honor fallen military troops under legislation passed by the House Tuesday.”
Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat whose northern Michigan district has lost close to 20 people in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he sponsored the bill after unsuccessfully trying to persuade President Bush to issue an executive order on the issue.
The bill passed 408-4 and now goes to the Senate, where Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., have introduced parallel legislation.
The measure would amend federal law with regard to the flying of the national flag at half-staff to allow a governor to require that federal facilities in the state lower their flags when a member of the armed forces from that state dies while on active duty.
Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, summed things up quite well: “We really view energy efficiency as the fifth fuel.”
Luckily, cities, states, and utility companies across the nation have begun to recognize the plethora of benefits to energy efficient technologies: they demand more from less, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, are increasingly cost effective, and are available. At this point, reaping the benefits is a matter of making the commitment.
On the flip side, the United States is falling more and more behind in the industry for energy efficient technology. This week the European Union is releasing a paper that sketches how the EU will proceed to spark ‘”a new industrial revolution” that will “transform Europe into a highly energy-efficient and low-CO2 energy economy” by the mid-century.’
While we dwell and debate over our lagging 20th century technology, the EU is poised to burst out of the gates and and lead the industry in innovation and jobs. Already, the EU has access to an entire carbon market of which the U.S. is essentially shut out.
It’s time to make the ‘fifth fuel’ the first fuel.
A group of senators led by Russ Feingold (D-WI) sent Alberto Gonzales a letter today highlighting an apparent lie Gonzales told while testifying under oath last year about the NSA warrantless spying program.
As ThinkProgress noted this morning, Gonzales said in 2006 that there was no “serious disagreement about the program,” a claim that flies in the face of the extraordinary testimony delivered by former Justice official James Comey yesterday. In the letter, the senators ask Gonzales if he stands by his claim:
You testified last year before both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee about this incident. On February 6, 2006, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, you were asked whether Mr. Comey and others at the Justice Department had raised concerns about the NSA wiretapping program. You stated in response that the disagreement that occurred was not related to the wiretapping program confirmed by the President in December 2005, which was the topic of the hearing. …
We ask for your prompt response to the following question: In light of Mr. Comey’s testimony yesterday, do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it?
As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Peter Swire wrote this morning, Gonzales’s testimony raises two possibilities:
1) Comey’s objections apply to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that Gonzales was discussing. If so, then Gonzales quite likely made serious mis-statements under oath. And Gonzales was deeply and personally involved in the meeting at Ashcroft’s hospital bed, so he won’t be able to claim “I forgot.”
2) Perhaps Comey’s objections applied to a different domestic spying program. That has a big advantage for Gonzales — he wasn’t lying under oath. But then we would have senior Justice officials confirming that other “programs” exist for domestic spying, something the Administration has never previously stated.
Read the full letter HERE.
Daniel Mitchell, who seems to be a bottomless pit of crazy blog posts, recommends an item by Kevin Hassett (yes that Kevin Hassett) making the case that dictatorships outperform democracies economically because they’re “not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state.”
The chart tells a striking story: the countries that are economically and politically free are underperforming the countries that are economically but not politically free. For example, unfree China had a growth rate of 9.5 percent from 2001 to 2005. But China was not the whole story—Malaysia’s GDP grew 9.5 percent from 1991 to 1995, Singapore’s GDP grew 6.4 percent from 1996 to 2000, and Russia’s grew 6.1 percent from 2001 to 2005.
In fact, the story the chart tells is that the set of economically and politically free countries is a set heavily weighted to very rich countries, whereas the other set is weighted to substantially poorer ones. Strikingly Hassett even recognizes the glaring flaw in his argument, acknowledging that “nearly all of the unfree nations are developing countries” which “grow faster, at least for a while, than mature nations.” But he decided to write the column anyway!
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