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U.S. has more military musicians than diplomats.

By ThinkProgress on Jul 17, 2007 at 5:17 pm

David Kilcullen, a senior adviser to Gen. David Petraeus notes in new paper:

At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces employ about 1.68 million uniformed members. By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has about 2,000. In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined–there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.

Politics

Cheney invited to testify about politicizing Interior Dept.

By ThinkProgress on Jul 17, 2007 at 3:50 pm

The House Natural Resources Committee has invited Vice President Dick Cheney to a hearing examining his “role in influencing scientific and policy decisions at the Department of the Interior.” The hearing will focus on “Cheney’s intervention in the development of a 10-year water plan for the Klamath River,” revealed in a recent Washington Post series, which resulted in the “collapse of the West Coast salmon-fishing industry.”

Media

Blogosphere Responds To O’Reilly’s Baseless Attacks On The Netroots

By Matt Corley on Jul 17, 2007 at 3:04 pm

Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly dedicated a segment to disingenuously attacking the upcoming YearlyKos convention, its namesake DailyKos, and one of the event’s sponsors, JetBlue. The Fox newsman who has encouraged terrorists to target San Francisco is now claiming that DailyKos is “one of the worst examples of hatred America has to offer.”

O’Reilly went on to compare the YearlyKos blogger convention to “a David Duke convention” while calling DailyKos “hatemongerers” like “the Ku Klux Klan” and “the Nazi Party.” Watch it:

Not only is O’Reilly’s “report” a textbook example of shoddy journalism — passing off an extreme minority of reader comments and diaries as representative of the site itself — but it also reveals his own intellectual dishonesty and ignorance.

As BooMan points out, one of the “hateful” comments O’Reilly parrots — “the Pope is a primate” — isn’t actually an insult. The prime definition of “primate,” the seemingly offending word, is actually:

pri·mate -noun
1. Ecclesiastical. an archbishop or bishop ranking first among the bishops of a province or country.

Furthermore, when Business Week Senior Writer Diane Brady notes that DailyKos is “an open forum” and anyone, even “lunatics,” can post there, O’Reilly dismisses her, saying “I have my own website. Open forum is bull. You can regulate what’s on your website.” O’Reilly doesn’t mention, however, that his website doesn’t have a public forum and the message boards are available only for a $50 annual membership fee.

Voices across the blogosphere have weighed in on the “report,” responding to different portions of O’Reilly’s disingenuous attack:

- McJoan points out that it’s not news that individuals “say stupid things on the Internet.”

- BarbinMD notes the many positive contributions DailyKos makes to the public discourse, such as the I Got The News Today series honoring fallen soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

- Noting the irony, Kos posts some of the hateful email he has received as a result of the O’Reilly segment.

- Jeffery Feldman shows how O’Reilly has hosted “hateful” voices on his show numerous times in the past.

As Cenk of the Young Turks points out, thanks to O’Reilly’s declaration that he’ll never fly on JetBlue again, passengers can fly in comfort knowing their flight won’t be interrupted by Papa Bear.

UPDATE: O’Reilly has previously said that he’d like to “go in” to the blogosphere “with a hand grenade.”

Yglesias

National Intelligence Estimate

By ThinkProgress on Jul 17, 2007 at 2:56 pm

New National Intelligence Estimate on the threat from al-Qaeda apparently says the threat is “persistent.”

  • Spencer Ackerman notes that what we’re seeing declassified today is eerily silent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq’s impact on jihadism.
  • Rand Beers’ National Security Network does some myth versus reality stuff.
  • Kevin Drum deems it vacuous.
  • Richard Clark says “It’s more about what it doesn’t say than what it does say.” In particular, it doesn’t say we have al-Qaeda on the run — because we don’t.

Anything else? My view is that these NIEs have started to suffer from a kind of Heisenberg Principle problem. They only constitute fodder for valid political point scoring if the authors aren’t expecting them to become political footballs. Since that’s clearly not the case with a report like this, it winds up having little probative value.

Climate Progress

2007: First or second hottest year on record so far

By Joe Romm on Jul 17, 2007 at 2:34 pm

glob-jan-jun-small.gifThe NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies data has January-June 2007 just edging out the same period in 1998 for the record. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported today that 2007 has been “the second warmest on record for January-June year-to-date period,” missing 1998 by only 0.01°C. Either way, it is hot!

Other factoids from the NCDC data:

  • For the January-June period, the global surface temperature over land ranked warmest on record, beating 2002 by 0.10°C.

Don’t worry Denyers–I wouldn’t dare attribute this extreme weather to human-caused climate change. No, let’s just say, if we don’t take action soon, this weather won’t be extreme for very long–it’ll just be the norm.

Politics

‘Mildly profane’ Bush ‘crashes’ Republican meeting on Iraq.

By Satyam Khanna on Jul 17, 2007 at 2:30 pm

Fox News reports that “President Bush shocked Capitol Hill staffers and Republican leaders Monday when he crashed a meeting at the White House. … His message: the policy on Iraq isn’t changing. He is not backing down and no one on Capitol Hill should be confused into thinking he is letting up.” Watch the segment:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/07/bushcrash83.320.240.flv]

Bush was described as “folksy, adamant and mildly profane” when he interrupted the meeting. “It was stunning. We couldn’t believe he came in,” said one aide in attendance. “We kept looking at each other, amazed he came in,” said another.

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