There’s going to be a lot of hype around the Bush climate summit this week. The key buzzwords of the global warming Delayers are “aspirational” and “technology” and “intensity.” The more someone uses those words, the less serious they are about stopping climate change.
The bottom line is that any international global warming agreement must include prompt, binding, and enforceable greenhouse gas reductions by the
In an interview with Newt Gingrich today on Fox News, The Big Story With John Gibson moved away from the shot of Gingrich and the interviewer to display a screenshot stating, “Is war the only way to stop Mahmoud?”:
Paul Starr, bona fide health care expert, gives his review of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. Paul’s extremely positive though his view, like that of most everyone who’s looked at it, is that the Democrats’ plans are all pretty similar. Dare I point out that some of this similarity comes from the fact that their plans are all a bit vague? After all, the difference between more and less generous subsidies could, in this context, be hugely important. I understand (and even to some extent embrace) why the candidates don’t want to get hyper-specific on these points, but the upshot is that all the emphasis on “plans” of various sorts hasn’t actually rendered things as clear as you might think.
Over the past two years, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been on the Sunday talk shows 30 times, making her the most second frequent guest after Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE).
But that may be changing. In his Washington Post column, Howard Kurtz reveals that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is no longer a “prize catch” for the Sunday talk shows. She was recently turned down by both CBS and NBC:
The secretary of state has always been considered a prize catch for the Sunday talk shows. But when the White House offered Condoleezza Rice for appearances eight days ago, after a week focused on Iraq, two programs took the unusual step of turning her down.
Executives at CBS and NBC say Rice no longer seems to be a key player on the war and that her cautious style makes her a frustrating guest.
“I expected we’d just get a repetition of the administration’s talking points, which had already been well circulated,” says Bob Schieffer, host of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” who questioned two senators instead. “We’d had a whole week of that with General Petraeus and President Bush.”
Television media aren’t the only ones uninterested in Rice. A few months ago, every single major newspaper turned it down an op-ed by Rice on Lebanon. Price Floyd, formerly the State Department’s director of media affairs, recounted that the piece was filled glowing references to President Bush’s wise leadership and “read like a campaign document.”
Recent reports indicate that Rice’s influence within the White House is also waning, giving way to the more extreme policies of Cheney and his allies. A Newsweek article in June found that Cheney’s national-security team had “been actively challenging Rice’s Iran strategy in recent months.” In April, Rice advocated that five members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard be freed from captivity, but she was overruled after Cheney “made the firmest case for keeping them.”
These reports contrast when Rice first became Secretary of State. The media gushingly predicted she would succeed because she and Bush “know each other so well they have conversations based on body language” and speculated that she may even run for president in 2008.
This past Sunday, none of the five network talk shows turned down Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), who appeared on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox.
Time for an intra-Atlantic link-fest! Ambinder reports:
In private, Obama likens himself to Reagan, according to some of his friends. He believes that the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder of America’s original sin (slavery), would directly engage the mass Muslim world in a way that no one who voted for oil or empire could, and … you get the idea.
Ross says “this is ridiculous and overblown and self-serving, but … it isn’t totally wrong.” Be that as it may, I don’t see what about this would resemble Reagan. I think most foreigners greeted Reagan’s election with alarm that it would lead to nuclear war.
In his speech at Columbia University today, Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was asked about the treatment of gays in Iran. Ahmadinejad responded, “In Iran, we dont have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you we have it.” Watch it:
“Some international gay rights groups believe that more than 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979,” notes 365gay.com.
State and city lawmakers in New York are threatening to punish Columbia University for hosting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who spoke at the Ivy League university earlier this afternoon, by potentially “withholding public funds from the school“:
“[Columbia President Lee] Bollinger made a big mistake, and there should be consequences for him for making that decision,” the chairman of the New York City Council’s Finance Committee, David Weprin, said in an interview. “We should look at everything involving Columbia, whether it be capital projects, city and state, or other related things that we do in the city for them,” he said. [...]
“It’s not going to go away just because this episode ends. Columbia University has to know … that they will be penalized,” an assemblyman of Brooklyn, Dov Hikind, who also attended the rally, said.
“Is there anyone who fails to see how dangerous and improper this is — not to mention unconstitutional — that government officials threaten and punish universities for hosting speakers whom the officials dislike?,” comments Glenn Greenwald.
McMegan says “Despite what Matt says, I fail to see how Bush made any difference, given that the Senate had rejected the treaty 99-0 with one abstainer.”
This is silly (about as silly as the view, sometimes expressed in comments, that I should avoid criticizing Megan when she writes things that are wrong on the theory that conservative views would somehow vanish if I ignored them) — Clinton signed the treaty, knowing he couldn’t get it ratified, and Bush un-signed it, knowing that there was no threat of ratification. Neither administration did what they did for no reason. Rather, they did it because of the impact on the political momentum, precisely the factor UN officials have cited to me as the relevant mechanism.
Meanwhile, let me also just say that I find there to be something incredibly wearing about this worldly-wise pose where one combines fatalism with nitpicking attacks on straw environmentalists instead of just forthrightly taking the view that the United States government ought to be indifferent to the problem of climate change. Maybe we’ll do the right thing, and maybe we won’t — the future isn’t written yet. One factor determining whether or not we do the right thing is whether or not right-of-center elites — yes, including political bloggers at the Atlantic — put emphasis on the idea that it’s important for us to do the right thing.
The area — half a million square miles — of ice melted in the Arctic “compared to its last record low just two years ago.” The current rate puts the region “on track for an ice free Arctic by 2030, decades ahead of the climate models.”
Here, courtesy of UN Dispatch, is a kind of meta-compilation of different bloggers who are at the UN today.
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