I'm a pretty law-abiding guy. I pay my taxes. I obey the speed limits (within the 5 mph margin of error we always hope traffic cops will grant us). I don't torture animals, I've never kidnapped an ex-lover, my high school episodes of vandalism were limited to toilet papering houses and throwing an occasional egg, I never committed voter fraud, and (although I fully support the right to do so) I don't even smoke pot or take any recreational drugs except for alcohol, chocolate, and caffeine.I am also supportive in general of intellectual property rights. I understand why the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) went after the guys who ran Napster.

But now the RIAA calls ME a criminal, and to paraphrase the eminently twisted philosopher Dee Snider, I'm not gonna take it. At least, I won't take it quietly.

What have I done to offend the RIAA? I have, gasp, actually taken CDs that I purchased and copied them onto my computer. I have NOT made them available on-line. I do not file share.

I have downloaded about four albums in my entire life -- all ones made available for free legal download by the groups. Hell, when Radiohead released their latest album and said "name your price," I put $10 on the digital barrelhead when I could have downloaded it legally for free. I buy CDs. I buy a lot of them. Dozens in a year.

So I resent being told that making a copy for personal use is criminal activity. Why do I copy them? So I can listen to them while I'm surfing the web, blogging, playing games, whatever on my PC, which is located in a different room from my stereo. Yeah, I could just stick the CD into the drive and play it, but having it on the hard drive frees up the CD-drive for a computer game. Importantly, it also allows us all to make a copy of a song from a CD that we can load on our MP3 players.

How is this different from copying a vinyl album onto a cassette so you could listen to it on your car stereo or on your Sony Walkman? Yes, I understand that if it's on the computer it could be swapped on-line. And I don't really care if RIAA goes after people doing that. But it is absurd to argue against the long-established practice of copying something you purchased legally to listen to on a different format.

I do not cheer when I see news like this - album sales in 2007 declined 9.5%. I LIKE music, I like buying CDs rather than (legally) downloading individual songs because I prefer listening to music in album-sized chunks. And I know that many many artists, producers, etc do not approve of the RIAA's single-minded and counter-productive campaign to make criminals out of their customers in such a way.

But it doesn't win the RIAA support among those of us who understand their concerns when they make such absurd logical and legal overreaches in their flailing, desperate attempts to adapt to a new media.

Peter Baker is entirely too kind to de facto President George W. Bush in this long article on how his views on climate have changed over the past year. Baker, relying in large part on the usual current and former White House sources who won't let their names be used because they don't want to get in trouble (or are embarrassed by their own lies), says that Bush's thinking on climate has gradually changed because he's "found the science increasingly persuasive."

But there are hints at the reality. The familiar story about Dick Cheney in 2001 reversing Bush's campaign pledge and killing any plan to require cuts on carbon emissions from power plants. Nods to the fact that it is the changing political reality - including the efforts at state and city levels of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mike Bloomberg and other governors and mayors, the Democrats' victory in the 2006 elections, and even the changing attitudes among many businesses about climate change - that is more responsible for Bush's change of heart (such as it is).

Because after all, any statement that the science is so much certain now than in 2001 is pure crapola. The scientific consensus has been strongly in place since well before January 2007. The only change in the consensus in 2007 has been recognition that all the bad shit we worry could come from climate change may be happening even quicker than we'd feared.

And that of course, makes the Republicans' reprehensibly irresponsible legacy of delay and denial all the more appalling and indefensible. I say "Republicans" not "Bush" here because remember that the Republican party, the party of pandering to big energy and religious zealots, has been on a decades-long war against science. Most of the war on science has been merely embarrassing for America abroad, and has "only" cost us jobs and money as we lag behind in fields like stem cell research. The Republican war against climate change could cost trillions of dollars, billions of lives, and in the worst case, jeopardizes our global civilization.

Bush's climate change adviser Jim Connaughton says, "You ask, why now? Well, the convergence has finally happened, both internally and externally. Everybody's ready for the next step."

But the real answer to "why now?" is - "oh shit, we don't want to be seen by history as colossal fuck-ups or worse, as being purely in the pockets of Exxon and Detroit and the coal industry, and we don't want the voters to hold this against us Republicans."

As I've said before, when it comes to judging the sorry history of this incompetent, immoral, corrupt, and illegal Administration, I fear the verdict will be even more scathing about its ostrich-in-the-sand stance on climate change than about Iraq, torture or our Constitutional protections.

http://vaguelylogical.blogspot.com/ 

In the Iowa Republican presidential race (Dana Milbank calls it a holy war), Mike Huckabee, ex-Arkansas governor, former Baptist minister, and all-around godboy, is now out in front all alone, ahead of ex-Massachusetts governor, current Mormon elder, and recent convert to all-around godboy status, Mitt Romney.

Huckabee's support, based on this article, appears to be the Church Lady times a few thousand. Yes, a jump in support for Huckabee among religious women is a big part of his recent surge to the top of the GOP dogpile. Meanwhile, the allegedly handsome Fred Thompson and the rest of the pack have lost much of their support and are way way behind the minister and the elder.

Robert Novak just can't stand it. I mean, who would ever have thought that a political party that has based much of its political power over the past 30 years on pandering to right-wing evangelical Christian types could POSSIBLY ever actually VOTE for a right-wing evangelical Christian type? The nerve. Anyway, Novak is grasping at straws in pointing out how the Southern Baptist Convention leadership isn't necessarily supporting Huckabee whole-heartedly, and how Huckabee was NOT part of the "conservative resurgence" that has gripped the Baptists. (The fact that Huckabee is allegedly not part of that conservative movement shows just how extremely right-wing much of the SBC has become. Huckabee is not remotely a liberal or even moderate by any normal definition.)

And David Broder, deemed wise out of habit as far as I can tell, is also befuddled by the whole Iowa situation, with the Democrats as well as the Republicans.

To prove he is befuddled, he actually PRAISED Fred Thompson for refusing to indicate that he believed in climate change during this week's Republican debate. Broder said it was a brave effort to jump-start his stalled campaign. But I think he's wrong. There are two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive. One is that old Ugly Fred just plumb didn't understand the question and thought the moderator had asked whether any of the candidates had ever drafted a piece of legislation.

Or, Fred kept his hand down out of a desire to pander to the stupid and willfully ignorant segment of the GOP electorate - a group which, if they all voted for him, would give him a sizable win in Iowa. But I don't think it'll work; far as I can tell, the dumb vote is going mostly to Romney and Huckabee.

A bunch of twenty-something College Republican types gathered recently at the Holy Shrine of Saint Ronnie, aka the California ranch owned by the late and not-so-great Ronald Reagan. It was an annual get-together where all the young conservatives can get together and agree how hard it is to get English-speaking help, how Hillary Clinton is such a bitch, how gays are EVERYWHERE now and it was so much easier when they stayed in the closet and you only had to worry about straight teachers molesting the kids, and how things would be great if the media would just give a conservative like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Robert Novak or anybody at all on Fox News a chance to make his or her voice heard.

And gosh, some of them are disillusioned. I mean, like as one college girl said, none of the GOP candidates for president are perfect like Reagan. The same student, with the impeccably conservative name of "Coolidge", thought Ann Coulter was just nifty - "a strong woman, and she's incredibly intelligent".

Her blinkers about Reagan, who was certainly not perfect and deserves a lot of blame for the shitty situation we are in after 25 years of conservative ascendancy, and Ann Coulter who even many adult Republicans find a tad over-the-top with her gay-bashing, liberal-hating shtick, are simply precious. She and most of the others present have clearly spent too much of their formative years watching Rush Limbaugh and assuming he was a journalist (with the implicit if disappearing idea of being somewhat objective) rather than the hired gun of the Republican Party's chief propaganda arm, Fox News.

But the Kool-Aid is sweet and mommy and daddy either (a) have plenty of money and just HATE paying taxes for wasteful government programs ("daddy says ALL government programs are wasteful except for the farm subsidies which he likes just fine since he grows cotton") or (b) tell her all the time how the Democrats are a bunch of satanistic atheists so you have to vote for the Republicans who claim to be anti-abortion, even though that is the party that closed the mental institute where Uncle Frank used to live ("wonder where Uncle Frank is nowadays") and has slashed the real minimum wage over the past 25 years ("gosh, my paycheck just doesn't go as far as it used to," says Mommy who recently took a second job).

I don't mind them deluding themselves. I just don't like the fact that the conservative movement has imposed so many of its delusions on the rest of us, damaging the fabric of our country and by condoning torture, illegal wiretapping, and the worse-than-Nixonian "if the President does it, it's legal" doctrine of the de facto Bush White House, shredding the Constitution. Not to mention bankrupting us in Iraq and thru tax-cuts for the rich. Sigh.

http://vaguelylogical.blogspot.com/

No, I'm not referring to the de facto Bush Administration as "an overwhelming experience that induces horror" - although come to think of it, that's pretty accurate. That is part of a quote from Malcolm Wrightson Nance, who used to teach US Navy personnel how to endure torture. As part of his education, Nance was waterboarded. Here is how he described it before the House hearing on torture:

"In my case, the technique was so fast and professional that I didn't know what was happening until the water entered my nose and throat. It then pushes down into the trachea and starts the process of respiratory degradation. It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts. As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening: I was being tortured."

But hey, bad guys deserve it and besides, that's how we get the information we need to let Jack Bauer save the US of A, right?

Wrong. "Nance and Air Force Colonel Steven Kleinman, a senior intelligence officer with decades of experience, said waterboarding is an ineffective tool for gathering information. Nance said that waterboarding sets off a fear of impending death and that people will say anything to get out of it."

It's a broken record but it needs to be repeated to counter the ceaseless stream of lies and evasions from the Bush Administration's minions. Waterboarding is torture, and therefore illegal. Torture is also immoral. And it is ineffective. And it ruins our international reputation, in Iraq and everywhere else. And (although a much lesser concern) it either warps those who perform torture, or even worse is enjoyed by the sadists who find themselves in the place to do torture on behalf of the state.

It degrades America. It is wrong. It must be stopped.

So maybe Congress can quit passing pork-laden water bills (what a waste as the first over-ride of a Bush veto) and pass a bill making this even MORE explicit. And dare Bush to veto that.

Vaguely Logical

George Bush has threatened Congress. He says, if the Senate doesn't confirm Michael Mukasey because of concerns about whether he thinks waterboarding is torture or not, there would be no attorney general because the standard would be too high.

Yes, the President (de facto) of the United States of America, the Leader of the Free World and Promoter of Democracy, believes that attitudes about torture should not be relevant in a confirmation hearing for the country's senior legal official. And further, he believes that no "responsible nominee for attorney general" could meet the Senate's impossibly high standard of agreeing that waterboarding is torture and as such, should be illegal, mmkay?

Speaking to reporters, I (Heart) Waterboarding Bush said "It's important for Congress to pass laws and/or confirm nominees that will enable this government to more effectively defend the country and pursue terrorists and radicals that would like to do us harm." Doubtless, the radicals include Democrats and anybody else who opposes the radical Bush/Cheney program to dramatically increase presidential power to encompass basically ANYTHING as long as they say it is for national security purposes.

An aside - I suspect Mukasey personally believes that waterboarding is torture and therefore illegal under US and international law. The fact that he cannot admit this fact before the Senate shows that he will likely be as compliant an attorney-general as Alberto Gonzales, willing and able to ignore the clear meaning of law and inconvenient truths in order to advance the White House agenda. This means he would be a typical Bush appointee, and therefore Congress would be eminently within its legal rights to refuse to confirm him.

And again, it makes me sick as an American and a supporter of democracy and human rights, and a believer in the idea that America can be a force for good in the world, that the Bush Administration has made "American torture" a topic for serious debate.

Bjorn Lomborg has earned a pretty penny as the so-called skeptical environmentalist. Lomborg is typically deceitful in his latest column pooh-poohing various environmental dangers. For example, he grotesquely oversimplifies the issue of global warming to "the polar bears are in danger," and he then refutes that by claiming that polar bear population has increased from 5000 to 25,000 in the past 40 years.

Of course, Lomborg ignores the unhelpful fact that the frigging Arctic Ocean was actually sufficiently ice-free this summer to allow shipping thru the Northwest Passage. Nor does Bjorn note the fact that polar bears rely on sea ice. Not to mention that Bjorn ignores the myriad other problems associated with climate change. We shouldn't worry about climate change just because polar bears may go extinct, sad as that would be. We worry about it for so many other reasons - rising sea levels, drier agricultural lands, mass extinctions. Despite Lomborg's professional skepticism, a very sober bunch of people who are not prone to fits of hysteria and fad-hopping are increasingly worried about climate change - the sober men and women at Lloyds of London, Swiss Re, Allianz and other insurance companies, who fear increased extreme weather incidents.

In any case, Lomborg, the past 40 years are not a predictor of the next 40 years. I am sure he understands that, and I am sure that he ignores it for his convenience, so he can send out his soothing message that we don't really have to do anything. Relax little froggies, and don't worry about that water heating up around you because it hasn't killed you yet.

For example, over the past 40 years Lomborg has thrived - he has grown up and grown taller, gotten out of diapers, become much better educated, seen his earnings rise dramatically, become stronger. Using Lomborgian logic, I believe Bjorn is immortal (after all, he hasn't died once in the past 40 years) and will grow ever wealthier (earnings are up therefore can only go up) and stronger until he is as rich as Croesus and as strong as Atlas. Because surely those past trends in Lomborg's life will continue indefinitely regardless of any changes in conditions, right?

Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist" book was a bunch of crap. The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty saw fit to review it, and found it contained fabricated data, selective discarding of unwanted results, deliberately misleading use of statistics, distorted interpretation of conclusions, deliberate misinterpretation of others' results, oh and for good measure, plagiarism.

Why does this guy get published? Because there are still those who are willing to finance the dishonest who are willing to say, "don't worry be happy." I would like to believe in hell, because I think they deserve a special spot there.

So Alberto Gonzales is going to resign. Good riddance. His lack of scruple was matched only by his lack of qualifications, save one - his utter loyalty to George W. Bush, the de facto President.

But don't think that Gonzales' resignation changes anything. It doesn't. Gonzales didn't make the decisions to implement the Great US Attorney Massacre in order to make attorneys conduct more overtly political prosecutions against Democrats, and to use the powers of the Department of Justice and other branches of the US government to suppress the vote along likely Democrats. It was the White House.

Gonzales wrote opinions justifying torture, but the decision was with the White House.

Gonzales argued for warrantless wiretaps and other intrusions without demonstrating cause into the lives of American citizens. But the decision was with the White House.

Gonzales doesn't have the basic wit to do any of this. He is the quintessential empty suit, with a pleasingly Spanish sounding name so he could double as a demonstration of Republican "diversity." But he was the quintessential "yes-man", unwilling to say NO to anything, no matter how immoral, illegal, or unconstitutional.

He was a symptom of the infection of the US body politic by extremist elements on the far right of the Republican Party. A symptom, not the cause.

So on Wednesday former White House political director Sara Taylor deigned to testify before the Senate, but refused to take questions that basically had anything to do with the White House. And Harriet Miers' lawyer told the Senate that she wouldn't testify, because she'd been ordered not to by the de facto Bush Administration.

Taylor's mis-statement (repeated until Senator Patrick Leahy finally got her to recant) that she swore an oath to Bush rather than the Constitution was no mistake; that's clearly how this crowd sees it. Loyalty to the Republican Party and to the Decider in Chief. The country, the constitution, us citizens be damned. "If they ain't with us, they're against us, right?"

Taylor's friend, another White House type, said "I just feel like it's incredibly unfair that she's being caught in what's really a struggle between Congress and the White House." True. But it is solely because of this White House's mania for complete control, extending even to former staffers, and utter secrecy, and its to-the-death defense of its royal prerogative. Excuse me, I mean "executive privilege."

As for ordering Miers not to testify - hey since when can the President give orders to a private citizen? Isn't this still a free country? I mean, if he had a legal leg to stand on maybe he could get a court to issue some sort of gag order on her. But this is pure crap.

Vaguely Logical 

I was musing - if Dick Cheney, as de facto vice president, isn't under the head of government as part of the executive branch and isn't part of the legislative branch, what is he? Clearly not a judge. So all I can conclude is that he is some sort of king with renewable four-year terms. (Heck, this king wasn't even elected - selected in 2000 by the Supreme Court, and 2004's vote is dubious at best.) I bet Dan Quayle and Hubert Humphrey and Spiro Agnew and Walter Mondale and the others that preceded Cheney wish they had realized that they were in fact King of America.

And a mad king Dick is. The lunacy of his Iraq ideas (remember, Cheney wanted to attack Iraq before 9/11, which Iraq was NOT involved with anyway) and his push to attack Iran which would be truly foolhardy and self-defeating are pretty well known and acknowledged now, outside of the realm of Fox News and Limbaughland. Ditto his leading role in the willful shredding of the Constitution in the so-called war on terror.

And Rolling Stone now reports on Cheney's role within the de facto Bush Administration's "secret" campaign to deny climate change. Now, I must say that most of what was in this report was familiar to me. And I don't think the Administration has made much of a secret of its climate change skepticism, fueled by the wooing of the best friends-with-benefits of the Bush-Cheney administration, the voluptuous good-time-girl twins we know as Big Oil and Big Coal.

But the Rolling Stone report does a good job of describing Cheney's role in this policy (is there a policy Cheney has been involved in that hasn't gone badly?). He grabbed climate change and energy policy from a clueless W. ("what's the CEQ?") when they took office, staffed it out with a bunch of energy industry lobbyists, relied on industry-funded "scientific" reports to play up the absurd idea that the key facts and main conclusions about human-induced climate change were in any way in doubt. And they have delayed by a full eight-plus years any meaningful action by the world's largest (recently surpassed by China) emitter of greenhouse gases, also delaying meaningful international action.

Not "madness" if you are ExxonMobil looking at profits for 2012 and 2017. But madness if you give a rat's ass about the state of this planet. Every living thing on this globe, with the possible exception of the odd thermophilic creatures that live in boiling seawater near submarine volcanic vents, will be effected by climate change. If left unchecked, it will do all sorts of terrible things, perhaps most seriously undermining the basis of the current agricultural system that feeds the planet. It is utter madness to be so cavalier on this issue -- and according to former Bush environmental chief Christine Todd Whitman and others, this administration's madness on climate change is squarely attributable to mad King Dick.

As for ExxonMobil and other professional deniers of climate change, I have one question. Don't any of them have children and grandchildren?

Sir Wally Herbert died. The Scotsman Herbert led the first expedition to cross the entire Arctic Ocean on foot, back in 1968-69. This earned him a knighthood. The data Herbert collected is still being used by scientists, including to assess the effects of climate change.

The Washington Post editors are right to excoriate the Senate energy bill for "ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the room," climate change. And they're right to say that all of de facto President Bush's hoorah about technology and converting switchgrasses into gasoline notwithstanding, we need to put a price on carbon (either a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade regime, or some combination) into effect soon. That will send the right price signals, force emitters to pay for some of the damage done, and make alternative technologies economically competitive.

Because if we don't, the King or Queen of England could be giving some other explorer a knighthood in about 2060. For being the first person to cross the entire Arctic Ocean - on a yacht.

Another update on Republican corruption, cupidity, and sleaze...

Nobody can be surprised that another Republican operative connected to Jack Abramoff is in legal trouble. The poetically named Italia Federici (who was "romantically linked" with Steve Griles while he was the deputy at the Department of Mining And Logging I mean Interior, even as Abramoff and she were trying to influence Griles on behalf of Abramoff's Indian tribe clients, talk about full service lobbying) will plead guilty on tax evasion and blocking a congressional investigation. But the true scandal in this Washington Post article is the headline: "GOP Environmentalist Linked to Abramoff to Plead Guilty".

Federici is an environmentalist in the same way that John Yoo is an advocate for the rights of the accused. Her "nonprofit" organization, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, was founded by Bush Environmental Protection Agency chief (and really, doesn't that say it all?) Gale Norton and that Reagan-loving drowning-government-in-the-bathtub- advocating hypocritical anti-all-taxes maggot Grover Norquist, for pete's sake. Not exactly Sierra Club material. By "environmental advocacy," these sorts of Republicans mean advocating FOR big businesses like clear-cutting loggers, wetlands-clearing developers, groundwater- polluting mining outfits and other commercial interests AGAINST environmental protection measures. I suspect CREA never met an environmental law or regulation that it liked. No, Federici isn't an environmentalist. The Post shouldn't sully that word by inaccurately applying it to her.

Turning to the ongoing scandals at the Department of Justice, turns out that Dick Cheney tried to roll Justice into approving the wiretapping program that John Ashcroft refused to approve on his sickbed. What a surprise. Cheney also denied a promotion to a career professional at Justice who was in his eyes too closely linked to the anti-wiretapping effort. Yes, the Vice President reached deep into a cabinet agency to stop a promotion of a qualified career civil servant, Patrick Philbin. And Alberto Gonzales, that paragon of integrity, didn't support his employee and cancelled the promotion. That'll build morale!

If we now know that the VP was involved in this issue to this level of detail, even to the point of exacting revenge against civil servants, is there any reason to give the White House any benefit of the doubt about their knowledge of the ongoing effort to politicize the Department of Justice (and stop eligible citizens from voting), via the Great US Attorney Massacre among other tactics? Of course not.

And now word that Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (a Republican of course) has gotten that most dreaded of requests from the FBI to please "preserve records." That ranks up there with "60 Minutes on line two, sir" as something you don't want to hear. It's all about a big political bribery and corruption scandal in Alaska that surprise, surprise, Ted Stevens' son Ben, the Senator's political buddies and his moneymen are involved in.

Stevens is famous for bringing home absurd amounts of Federal tax dollars to Alaska, the state that has no income tax, that gives a fat check drawn on oil revenues to its residents every year, and STILL has the nerve to beg for rivers of money from the Federal budget to do various pork-barrel projects while still loudly proclaiming its rugged independence. Alaska -- as independent as a three-month-old baby sucking at its mother's teats. And apparently not as pure as the driven snow.

So with all this going on, it's hardly a surprise that the Republican presidential hopefuls at the debate were all at pains to distance themselves from the de facto Bush Administration...

http://vaguelylogical.blogspot.com/ 

The Washington Post today runs an article about three interrogators -- an American who was in military intelligence in Iraq January 2004-January 2005, a British (Northern Irish) who interrogated Irish Republican Army members, and an Israeli.

Two quotes from the American, Tony Lagouranis:

Among the other problems with torturing people is what it does to the interrogators, and to our society. Lagouranis seems troubled by what he did; his girlfriend describes him as gentle. But even he admits to enjoying the administration of torture against helpless prisoners. Do we really want our intelligence and military and police developing a taste for torture in some who may enjoy it more than Lagouranis, and be bothered by it less?

Another quote, from a victim of torture:

"The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again."

This instance was in the Soviet Union. But Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who was tortured for having the nerve not to wholeheartedly agree with the Communist system, also points to the problems the TORTURERS suffered (writing in December 2005): "Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers."

Torture. Cruel. Ineffective. Un-american. Dehumanizing. We shouldn't be doing this, and we shouldn't tolerate a government that encourages it. Especially since you never know when their focus might change to others they proclaim enemies of the state.

Talk about mixed signals. The de facto President of the United States gives a big speech on climate change and pushes some sort of international meeting to do something about it. And the head of NASA gives an interview questioning whether we need to do anything about climate change.

Let's start with the arrogant jerk -- no, no I mean the NASA guy, Administrator Michael Griffin. A quote from him: "I guess I would ask which human beings, where and when, are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings."

Griffin calls such people "rather arrogant." I call Griffin extremely arrogant and stupid beyond my comprehension. As Dana Milbank points out, his biography at NASA's web site lists SEVEN degrees, in hard stuff like physics and aerospace engineering. For such a technically educated person to suggest that melting ice caps might be GOOD for us is literally breathtaking.

First, I'm guessing that Griffin owns no land in Florida or Bangladesh or London or other places that will end up under water should the ice caps disappear. Second, Griffin seems to discount the fact that the current climate is one that has ALLOWED HUMAN CIVILIZATION TO FLOURISH. Sorry for the shouting there, but that seemed like a moderately important point to make. You see, Dr. Administrator Griffin, people eat food. Food is grown in fields on farms. Crops like to get the right amount of rain, sunshine, etc, at the right time. Change the basic equation for the production of food in sufficient quantities to create a surplus sufficient to support non-farmers, and you risk knocking a key prop out from under civilization.

It isn't "arrogant" to think that the climate of the past 10,000 years is good for humanity. It's common sense. It isn't out of arrogance that I want our government to try to mitigate climate changes. It is out of simple fear and concern for humanity.

And how arrogant it is to decide we SHOULD change the current climate, the flip-side of Griffin's snide slur. I think if we took a planet-wide vote on "should we keep the current climate" that, with the exception of some cold people in Siberia, the result would be an overwhelming "YES".

I just can't believe a NASA Administrator could say such crap.

Anyway, turning now from him to his boss. Yeah, Bush gave a speech calling for an international something to do something about climate change, maybe. Some seemed impressed by it. That's only because expectations were so low. It's like being impressed by your kid getting a B-minus on a spelling test because his usual score is an F. Or when the worst shooter on your basketball team actually hits two free throws in a row. Hardly impressive.

So, let's look at the White House's Fact Sheet on a "New International Climate Change Framework." First of all, it misspelled "gases" as "gasses." Even for this anti-intellectual administration, you'd hope somebody in the White House would be frigging smart enough to run a spell check on a document that will be read by quite a few people.

It says the US will get together a big meeting by the end of 2008. The timing is critical - not because of anything scientific, but to show voters right before the election that Republicans are doing something on climate change. If it weren't for growing voter concern, no way this Administration would touch climate change even with a ten-foot pole. It upsets the oil barons. This is just a gift to Rudy or Fred or Mitt or John or whoever the heck ends up getting the GOP nomination.

The proposal says climate change "must be addressed by fostering both energy security and economic security", relying on new technologies. But nowhere in the fact sheet does it say that the US will put any sort of cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Nowhere. Nowhere does the fact sheet say the US will put any sort of tax on the carbon emissions. Nowhere.

Yes, new technologies are critical. Incentives for their development are appropriate; so is direct government spending. Fine. But to do so without also forcing emitters to pay part of the price for their emissions - the price being the potential destruction of ecosystems that have supported humanity (not to mention animals, plants, fish etc) - is not going to work. Market signals should be part of the fight against climate change. Just throwing money and rhetorical support at technologies without also making it clear that there will be immediate economic COSTS for belching out carbon unabated undermines the whole thing.

At the end of the fact sheet is this nifty little paragraph:

"We Are Well On Track To Meet – And Currently Projected To Exceed – The President's 2002 Goal Of Reducing U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emission Intensity 18 Percent By 2012. U.S. greenhouse gas intensity declined by 2.5 percent in 2005, much faster than the average decline of 1.9 percent over the 1990-2005 period."

Wow, sounds pretty good, huh? We're actually cutting greenhouse gases.

No. Don't be dazzled by this bullshit. Greenhouse gas "emission intensity" measures how many tons of greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere per unit of GDP. A decline in "intensity" just says that our greenhouse gas emissions are growing more slowly than the economy. But they have still RISEN since 2002. We need to reduce ABSOLUTE levels of emissions. This is a devious "measure" designed to make Bush look good. It is a prime example of truthiness, Republican-style.

Imagine, if you will, a young man, aged 29, driving down the road. He hits another vehicle and dies and now his dad wants to sue people. OK.

But wait. The son was drunk, with blood levels TWICE the legal level for intoxication, and just for kicks there was also marijuana in the car. Oh, and he was speeding on the interstate. Oh, and he was talking on a damn cell phone. Oh, and he wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

So I wonder quite what the rationale is for suing the tow truck company that owned the tow truck this young man hit. And for suing the driver of a car who's car was stalled on I-64 and was getting help from the tow truck driver. And for suing the restaurant that served the driver.

Anyhow, that's what Dean Hancock, father of the late St Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock, is doing. But he should be more creative in his lawsuits -- after all, there are PLENTY of entities that had some connection to the accident.

First, he should sue the manufacturer of the driver's stalled car because if that car had been made better it wouldn't have stalled and Josh Hancock wouldn't have hit that tow truck in his speeding, drunken, seatbelt-scorning cellphone wielding stupor. Then for good measure he should sue the manufacturer of the tow truck itself because if it had been made out of Nerf-style foam the impact wouldn't have killed the drunken, speeding, cell-phone using, seatbelt-ignoring Josh Hancock. He should sue the maker of Hancock's SUV for not installing technology to lock the ignition to prevent somebody who is completely bombed out of his mind from being able to operate the vehicle. He should sue the maker of whatever booze Josh Hancock was drinking for supplying booze in the first place.

Finally, he should sue the corpse of President Dwight Eisenhower for authorizing the construction of the Interstate Highway System because without I-64, there could have been no wreck on I-64 to kill drunken Josh Hancock.

I tend to feel sympathy for the father of somebody who has died in an accident, even if the person who died was clearly completely irresponsible in his behavior, and clearly completely responsible for his own death. But such mass-blast lawsuits tend to erode the sympathy pretty quickly. Leave Eddie's Towing and the other victims of this legal shooting spree alone.