At The Christian Science Monitor, Ben Arnoldy writes:

^{Internet attacks on Georgia expose a key flaw for more than 100 nations.}

As Georgian troops retreated to defend their capital from Russian attack, the websites of their government, also under fire, retreated to Google.

In an Internet first, Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reopened its site on Google's free Blogger network and gave reporters a Gmail address to reach the National Security Council.

The attacks have deluged the websites of the president, various ministries, and news agencies with bogus traffic. The jam not only shut down those sites but also clogged Georgia's Internet access, exposing its reliance on Russian Internet pipelines. ...

"The lesson here for Washington is that any modern conflict will include a cyberwarfare component, simply because it's too inexpensive to be passed up," says Bill Woodcock, research director at Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit Internet research institute in San Francisco. "The best [defensive] strategy is always preparedness. We've spent eight years completely ignoring that, while the Chinese and Indian governments have been paying really close attention and investing many tens of billions of dollars."

Georgia's Internet infrastructure has two big weaknesses. First, most of its external connections go through Russia. Second, there's a lack of internal connections called Internet exchange points. So when a Web surfer in Georgia calls up a Georgian Web page, that request routes through another country, which is similar to driving to Mexico to get across town in San Francisco, says Mr. Woodcock, whose organization helps countries build their own Internet exchange points.

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Total fatalities of U.S. military in Iraq since March 2003: 4139

Total fatalities of coalition military in same period: 4453

Total fatalities of Iraqis as a consequence of the invasion and occupation: Uncertain, but ranging as high as 1.4 million

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The Overnight News Digest is posted. including the story, Diary shows Tojo resisted surrender till end.

Josh Holland at Alternet writes:

^{Big business has prepared a war chest of at least $150 million to stop progressive economic legislation that would seriously tax the rich}

...it may be a bill that many Americans have never heard of that sparks the most pitched battle Washington has seen since the Civil Rights Act. It's called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) -- a measure that would go a long way toward guaranteeing working people the right to join a union if they so choose -- and it has the potential to reverse more than three decades of painful stagflation, with prices rising and paychecks flat, for America's middle class and working poor.

The Chamber of Commerce, D.C. lobbyists, firms that rely on cheap labor and a host of "astroturf" front groups are building a war chest that could reach hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to build a firewall against EFCA and other efforts to put a check on corporate power and rebuild a declining middle class. ...

According to a report in the National Journal that received less attention, "several business-backed groups ... (including) two fledgling coalitions fighting labor-supported legislation and the conservative political group Freedom's Watch are trying to raise $100 million for issue advocacy and get-out-the-vote efforts to benefit about 10 GOP Senate races."

It's the EFCA -- the idea that working people who want to join a union can -- that has corporate America quaking in its collective boots. The bill passed the House easily in 2007 -- by 56 votes -- and had majority support in the Senate. But it didn't reach the 60 votes required to kill a GOP-led filibuster, and that massive war chest being amassed by the corporate Right is, in part, an attempt to maintain a firewall of at least 41 anti-union senators -- mostly Republicans joined by a few corporatist Dems -- to kill the bill in the 2009 Congress. President Bush threatened to veto the legislation if it had passed in 2007, but this time around, they fear that a Democrat will be sitting in the White House. Obama was a co-sponsor of the 2007 legislation; McCain opposed it.

The prospect of a filibuster-proof majority that's sympathetic to the needs of ordinary working Americans, according to the National Journal, is making "business groups jittery."

It would nice if "business groups" were as jittery as people who live paycheck to paycheck.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted, with ample material on the war in Georgia and this story, Afghan president urges military action in Pakistan.

Scott Horton at Harper's writes:

^{The Justice Department’s Truthiness Problem}

In her recent book, Dark Side, Jane Mayer interviews senior political appointees, all card-carrying Republican conservatives with long records of faithful service to the Republican Party, who describe the atmosphere of fear and intimidation which the White House had carefully cultivated in the nation’s erstwhile temple of justice. The message was clear: the Justice Department existed to do the White House’s political bidding. Any suggestion of independence or fidelity to the law would be rudely crushed. Many were convinced their phones were being tapped illegally. Some even feared that they might be targeted for a hit or "accidentally" run over by a truck (the favored tactic of the Ukrainian mafiosi with whom Karl Rove was seen hobnobbing at Yalta only a few weeks ago). Any hint of caution about the White House’s agenda would be enough to destroy a career. This is the environment in which the Justice Department launched roughly six criminal probes into Democratic political figures for every one targeting a Republican. It was a Justice Department hijacked and converted into a partisan political attack machine.

Still, the Inspector General’s report concluded that the hacks were there to stay. Glenn Fine took a "forgive and forget" attitude towards the perpetrators, recommending no criminal action against them, though that was plainly a viable option. And most disturbingly, the Inspector General report stopped with Sampson and Goodling, not venturing to peel back the curtain to look at the person who trained them and for whom they were working: Karl Rove. ...

In other administrations, the fact that two senior Justice Department officers were refusing to cooperate with a criminal probe would be shocking news. The fact that they had to be subpoenaed to answer questions about their official conduct at the Justice Department would grab headlines. For the Bush Justice Department, however, it’s just another day, hardly any different from those that preceded or will follow it. Indeed, the sense among senior Justice staff with whom I have spoken is that Schlozman and Spakovsky are, relatively speaking, small fry. The focus remains on the investigation of the U.S. attorneys’ scandal, which involves serious allegations of wrongdoing and the prospect of a criminal probe of the Department’s four most senior political appointees, starting with Attorney General Gonzales. Still the real focus of inquiries into the scandal is not on the Justice Department at all, but rather its former political puppetmaster, Karl Rove.

The Inspector General’s report on the U.S. attorney’s scandal is due to be released before Labor Day, the traditional start of the presidential campaign.

More words to add to the gigantic pile that indicts the Cheney-Bush administration. Metaphorically speaking, of course. As for real indictments, puhleez.  

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Senator Obama and his family are on vacation in Hawai'i, but when you're running for the Presidency, they never let you escape the microphones for too long. Here's a photo of him. You can find more in Haole in Hawaii's Diary, Obama Event in Honolulu, A Photo Diary

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The Overnight News Digest is posted, and includes this story, Abkhazia Threatens Georgia with Second Front.

At Mother Jones, Justin Elliott writes:

^{Don't Know Much About History}

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History." Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history's most powerful empires.

The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires sustained their military might across continents and even centuries. The study posits that the historical examples offer "insights into what drives U.S. military advantage," as well as "where U.S. vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about maintaining its military advantage in the future." ...

Most striking is how the study conceives of the United States in imperial terms. "You'll see some neoconservatives at the beginning of the Bush administration crowing that 'we do have an empire, let's just come out of the closet and say we do,'" said Ivan Eland, the author of a book on America's "informal empire" and the director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on hearing a description of the study. "But the administration never did that because empire doesn't sell well with the public." After reviewing the study at Mother Jones' request, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, said he was struck by its "arrogance and immorality." "The presumption that the United States should rule the world, sword at the ready, for the foreseeable future is an unacceptable basis for a just, even-handed foreign policy."

Elliott goes on to point out that it isn't just objectionable ideology to be found in the monograph, but factual inaccuracy as well. Given a chance to review the section on the transformation of the Roman Army over a period of 1000 years, Lee Brice of Western Illinois University, who is the president of the Society of Ancient Military Historians, described it as "so completely incorrect as to be useless."

The entire study, Brice said, is afflicted with "an intense, myopic habit of wanting to make the ancient world fit into modern stereotypes," something that might be expected in "much lower-undergraduate-level work."

It's become habitual over the past nearly eight years to tie such work to the machinations of the Cheney-Bush administration, but imperial thinking is no newcomer to American politics, nor the project of a single administration or two. In this case the idea for the study arose in 1999. Its five authors, employees of federal intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, wrote it for the Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center - a Department of Defense operation that their company has run since 1998. Elliott notes that the Carlyle Group announced in May that it will be taking over Booz Allen's government services operation.

Just as the transformation of the United States from great power to American Empire was not done on the watch of a single administration, it will not be dismantled by a single one. Just getting started on such a project will require a commitment to actually want to dismantle and the political clout to move in that direction.

Gargantuan forces - including a deeply instilled belief among most Americans that the U.S. has no empire - form a strong counterweight to any such moves. One of the strongest of those forces is the election-killing theme that any leaders who try to reduce the imperial footprint - though they do not describe it as such - are "weak on defense." Overcoming that obfuscation, then, has to be the first step.

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted..}

Tonight an excerpt from Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew:

Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all their peculiarity, these people -- Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years -- have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.

Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.

And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort -- a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the "virtue of selfishness" when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.

Diarist and corruption specialist dengre recently took a look at The Wrecking Crew here and here.

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^{The Overnight News Digest has been posted and includes this story, CIA officials deny fake Iraq-al-Qaida link letter.}

Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute write:

^{Job market recession persists}

On average this year, payrolls have contracted by 66,000 per month. Job loss in the private sector has occurred more quickly, however, dropping an average of 83,000 jobs a month since it peaked in November 2007. Private sector payrolls are down 665,000 since then, including the loss of 76,000 last month. Since government employment is less sensitive to the business cycle, the private sector losses are more indicative of the full extent of labor market weakness.

This persistent and deepening slack in the job market, in tandem with accelerated inflation, is leading to significant real wage and benefit losses for most workers. Average weekly hours slipped slightly last month to 33.6 hours per week, the lowest level since November 2004. This put downward pressure on weekly earnings, which rose 2.8%, before inflation in July, the same rate as the previous month and the slowest pace of weekly earnings since September 2005. With inflation running between 4-5%, the buying power of weekly paychecks is dropping sharply.

In a related release yesterday, the BLS reported that the Employer Cost Index—a comprehensive measure of average wages and benefits—fell 1.8% in real terms in June 2008 compared to June 2007. That is the largest real decline in this data series’ history (dating back to the early 1980s).

Along with the decline in weekly hours worked, another important sign of the extent to which our current workforce is underutilized is the increase in part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs. In July, there were 5.7 million part-timers in this category, 1.4 million above last year’s level and the highest level since the BLS settled on a way of measuring this condition in 1994. Since these involuntary part-timers are included in the underemployment rate noted above, they are partly responsible for its spike last month.

Meanwhile, as Chye-Ching Huang and Chad Stone at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted in a new analysis on Wednesday:

Average pre-tax incomes in 2006 jumped by about $60,000 (5.8 percent) for the top 1 percent of households, but just $430 (1.4 percent) for the bottom 90 percent, after adjusting for inflation, according to a new update in the groundbreaking series on income inequality by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Their analysis of newly released IRS data shows that in 2006, the shares of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of households were higher than in any year since 1928. ...

Some 42 percent of total income gains since 2002 have accrued to the top 1 percent of households, and 66 percent have gone to the top 10 percent of households.  As a result, by 2006, the share of income flowing to the top 1 percent of households had surpassed the level it reached in 2000, at the peak of the 1990s expansion.

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted, including the story, Ivory Poaching At Critical Levels: Elephants On Path To Extinction By 2020?}

At the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten writes:

^{The putsch that imperiled America}

According to an article by New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer in the latest New York Review of Books,"President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a small handful of trusted advisors sought and obtained dubious legal opinions [on national security] enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions." She details how they used these legal opinions to dramatically expand executive power. ...

The putschists were driven by ideology, not partisanship, Rutten says. Which is why some Republicans in the administration - including some very conservative ones - refused to go along.

Others have been less scrupulous for reasons that do them even less credit than ideological fanaticism. Take, for example, former Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II. In a sworn statement, Air Force Col. Morris Davis -- the former top prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions -- says he resigned after being pressured by Haynes to move forward with politically "sexy" prosecutions even though Morris believed the evidence against the defendants had been obtained by torture. Davis said he also told Haynes that a few acquittals at Guantanamo, if warranted, would send a message that the commissions sitting there were fair, just as the not-guilty verdicts against some Nazi defendants had done for the Nuremberg trials.

Haynes' response was emphatic, according to Morris: "We can't have acquittals! We've got to have convictions! ... If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?"

At some point, the American people will demand a precise accounting of how and why their government and its officials behaved in this reckless, appalling fashion. That will require following the chain of command into the White House. When it happens, you can bet that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington et al will demand every protection of the law and insist on every comma of the due process they've derided as mere inconvenience.

Rutten clearly is an optimist. Certainly, if the handcuffs were to be snapped on Cheney, et al., they would demand the due process to which every citizen has a Constitutional right, or used to. But will there be a "precise accounting"? As noted in Ixnay on Letting Bygones Be Bygones, even some who call themselves progressives argue against investigating the crimes of the Cheney-Bush administration after the reins are turned over in January.

The idea of a new committee along the lines of the investigatory 1975-76 Frank Church Committee, much less anything stronger, has not yet caught on. Too many more important issues to deal with, goes the reasoning. A new administration shouldn't appear vengeful, should look forward instead of backward. If some progressives are taking that view, what can be said of the rest of the population?

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted.}

The 5.4 temblor that hit Southern California Tuesday morning didn’t cause any major damage or injuries. But in the dozen or so seconds of wondering whether the crescendo of shaking was going to be the Big One before it became obvious that it wasn’t, I had plenty of time to remember that I hadn’t recently checked the expiration dates of the food the three people in my household have stashed in our disaster kits. That’s one kit for each car – food, bottled water, a change of clothes and shoes, a mini-flashlight, sunscreen, assorted first-aid items, some cash and batteries. My wife and stepdaughter also have small kits at their job sites.

At home, we have cached 180 gallons of purified water and enough packaged meals-ready-to-eat for two weeks, battery-powered lanterns, candles and several other just-in-case items. We also have a plan for how to get back together if we are separated when something major happens.

A few friends think we’re a little deranged. What surprises us, on the other hand, is how many people have made absolutely no preparations in case a disaster strikes. It’s almost as if they, like the people of Bali, refuse to buy vehicle insurance because this is like daring the gods to do something bad to you. When the subject came up at a party some years ago, one person excused his lack of preparation on the grounds that he refused to be ruled by fear, as if stocking up on spare water and sundries is akin to building a bunker to shield against an asteroid strike.

Being prepared depends mostly on where you live. We don’t keep any hip-waders around. For many Kossacks, however, that might be a good idea.

Three years ago, shortly after Katrina wrecked the Gulf Coast, killed nearly 2000 people and left tens of thousands stranded without power or potable water for days, the Kossack AlphaGeek, a Silicon Valley technical executive with professional  experience in risk assessment and disaster-readiness planning, performed a tremendous service with a five-part series on the subject.

In his introductory piece, he wrote:

The psychology of disaster preparedness

In order to effectively prepare for disaster without becoming overwhelmed, you must be able to make realistic judgments about risks.  On one hand, it is an effort for most people to "think the unthinkable", to contemplate scenarios which are far outside the routine of their daily lives.  It is difficult for most people to imagine a world where fresh water does not flow from the taps, electricity is something you can't take for granted, and the grocery store shelves are empty... assuming the stores are even open.

On the other hand, there's a phenomenon I think of as the "armageddon fallacy".  This is the temptation, once that our Pandora's Box of fears and concerns has been opened, to imagine extremely unlikely events as real threats.  We must be cautious to exercise good judgment when considering risks, as the "armageddon fallacy" is a surprisingly easy trap to fall into.  Keep in mind that your plan, at some point, will be shared with friends and family.  This incents most people to stay clear of the Crazy Talk Express to Armageddon Town when making a plan.

Here are links to all five parts:

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 1 of 5 - Assess your risks!

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 2 of 5 - Plan to survive!

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 3 of 5 - Plan to survive!

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 4 of 5 - Gear, supplies and training

Are YOU ready for disaster? Part 5 of 5 - Conclusion

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The Overnight News Digest has been posted, including a story on Audit questions millions in Blackwater contracts.

In the 1970s, Fawn Brodie wrote a biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait. The book, which as its title suggests, was a look at the third President's private life, was one of what was then a new genre, a psychohistory. Many well-known historians, particularly some of the leading Jefferson biographers, pilloried Brodie's work, especially her detailed speculations that this American icon had carried on an affair over three decades with Sally Hemings, his slave, called, in the terminology of the time, a quadroon.

Consequent to this lengthy affair, Brodie wrote, several children, including Eston Hemings (1808-1856), may have been born. The rumor of mixed-race Jefferson children was published in his own time, and the repetition of what heavily credentialed historians considered calumny brought some sharp criticisms Brodie's way, especially since she had no PhD and her two degrees were in English. Nonetheless, the book became a much-talked-about best-seller in 1974, and I count myself lucky to have a "Best Wishes" signed copy acquired during the author's book tour at the time. It's a fine piece of writing.

An obituary in Saturday's Los Angeles Times caught my eye. It was for 81-year-old Eugene Foster.

Eugene Foster, the retired pathologist who  orchestrated the DNA testing that showed Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of the children of slave Sally Hemings, died Monday at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, according to his son-in-law Brian Pusser. He was 81.

Historians had speculated for nearly two centuries that Jefferson's affair with the household slave had produced offspring, because of rumors at the time and because the children strongly resembled the nation's third president.

Some of the children also said they were Jefferson's descendants. But most experts had dismissed the speculation as idle gossip.

In 1996, after suffering mockery from experts who said it couldn't be done, and using what was then a new DNA technique to track down male ancestry, Foster and amateur historian Winifred Bennett found...

...four male lineages to test: Jefferson's lineage, descended from his paternal grandfather because Jefferson himself had no direct male heirs; the lineages of Thomas Woodson and Eston Hemings Jefferson, Sally Hemings' oldest and youngest sons; and that of the Carrs, two of Jefferson's sister's sons, who were widely thought to have fathered Hemings' children.

Hemings' other children left no surviving male heirs.

Their conclusion: The Y chromosome of a descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson matched that of Jefferson's lineage, that of Woodson's descendants did not, and none of them matched the Carrs'.

One of those Foster and his team found was a direct descendant of Sally's son Eston Hemings, John Weeks Jefferson. Members of his family had decided in the 1940s not to tell the children about any connection between themselves and President Jefferson because to do so would have meant acknowledging black ancestry, not something a prominent white family in Evanston, Ill., would risk at the time.

The Foster study was released a decade ago, and published in Nature. But it didn't end the controversy. The view of some Hemings's descendents and the majority of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is that Jefferson did father children with his slave, perhaps all of her children.  

After extensively reviewing Foster's findings, the TJF reported in January 2000:

The results clearly show that the male-line descendants of Field Jefferson and Eston Hemings have identical Y-chromosome haplotypes (the particular combination of variants at defined loci on the chromosome). Scientists note that there is less than a 1 percent probability that this is due to chance. Thus the haplotype match is over one hundred times more likely when Jefferson and Eston Hemings are genetically related through the male line. This study by itself does not establish that Hemings’s father was Thomas Jefferson, only that Hemings’s father was a Jefferson.

A year later, scholars commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society argued the opposite case, that Hemings only played a minor role in Jefferson's life and that he fathered none of her children.

Subsequent to the DNA report, descendants of Hemings and descendants of Jefferson have met in various venues, including on the Oprah show, where their similarities to  each other and to Thomas Jefferson were noted.

White and black descendants of the two have also met at tense reunions held by the Monticello Association. Although some positive connections were made, the members of the association, which, among other things owns the cemetery where Jefferson is buried, voted overwhelmingly in 2002 to refuse membership to any of Hemings's descendants, arguing that the evidence for Jefferson-Hemings progeny remains disputed. No new vote has been taken.

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^{The Overnight News Digest is posted.}

It was just a few years ago the very idea that the Arctic was showing signs of increased summer melts was hooted down as alarmist. The threat to native species and native cultures presented by the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was laughed off as just another crazy, radical, environmentalist scheme to mess with the economy. Except for a few wigged-out pockets of denial amplified by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, most of the laughing has ceased. Not, of course, that the Cheney-Bush administration has retreated from its censorship of science, as noted here by smintheus, to provide one example. In that instance, the censorship came about for the purpose of getting some new Arctic oil leases into the ... uh ... pipeline without pesky scientific concerns being allowed to introduce obstacles into the discussion.

Discussion of the situation is made more difficult because the melting is not a steady downward plunge. This year, for instance, as of a week ago, Arctic sea ice extent clocked in at 3.44 million square miles. This was well below the 1979-2000 average of 3.83 million square miles. But it was 0.41 million square miles above the value for July 16 last year.

So, you can expect to hear any day now from the usual suspects that the wider extent of ice this year proves the Arctic may not be heading for ice-free summers in the next couple of decades. This claim, of course, will ignored data showing that, while first-year ice is thicker than was predicted this summer, multi-year ice is much thinner than seen in 2006 and 2007. In other words, the long-term trend and consequences are not in doubt, whatever spikes may occur year-to-year.

Meanwhile, nationalists and entrepreneurs seem to have no doubts about the melting. There continues to be a laying of claims to the Arctic seabed, which began last year when famed explorer Artur Chilingarov led a Russian North Pole expedition and planted a Russian flag 13,390 feet below the surface, and remarked: "The Arctic is Russian. We must prove the North Pole is an extension of the Russian landmass"

Paul Coring at the Globe and Mail wrote Tuesday:

"We were there first and we can claim the entire Arctic, but if our neighbours like Canada want some part of it, then maybe we can negotiate with them," says Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the flamboyant Russian ultranationalist, who happily hands out pictures of a Russian flag sitting on the seabed at the North Pole. ...

Supposedly cooler heads prevailed in Greenland this spring at a meeting of the five circumpolar countries: Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States. They agreed "to the orderly settlement of any possible overlapping claims" in a joint communiqué called the Ilulissat Declaration.

But the race to claim the top of the world and, more importantly, reap the vast bonanza of oil and gas believed to lie beneath the Arctic seabed is only just getting under way. ...

No surprise, then, that Russia is conducting naval exercises in the Arctic. Canada had soldiers stamping about in the North this spring, and some analysts fear power projection, not talks at the UN, will decide who controls the Arctic.

Under the Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries can extend their zones beyond 200 nautical miles (about 370 kilometres) from their coasts if they can prove the outer edge of the continental shelf extends beyond that distance. Hence, the contentious Russian claim to the Lomonosov Ridge.

The prize may be huge. One study estimates 400 billion barrels of oil lie beneath the Arctic seabed, beyond the existing 200-nautical-mile economic zones where countries can regulate and control drilling. That's a little less than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia and Iran combined.

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

Following the lead of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters announced Monday in Colorado, Ohio, Montana, Michigan, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C., that it is endorsing Senator Barack Obama for President.

^{Included in the photograph to the right, in my old stomping grounds around Confluence Park in Denver, are Tony Massaro, the LCV's Senior Vice President for Political Affairs and Public Education,  former Secretary of Energy Federico Peña, and freshman Congressman Ed Perlmutter from Colorado's 7th District.}

"Senator Obama’s proven record and his commitment to a clean, renewable energy future make him the best choice for President," LCV President Gene Karpinski said.

"At a time when this country must reinvent itself for a new energy future, we can imagine no better steward than Barack Obama. Under his leadership, America will finally achieve the economic growth, environmental protection, and national security that are possible with a new, clean energy economy."

"We have a real choice here," said Carol Browner, LCV board member and the longest-serving EPA Administrator in the agency’s history.

"Barack Obama has been a committed leader and has offered bold and comprehensive proposals when it comes to global warming, energy and the environment. John McCain, whose plan will be a continuation of Bush-era political gimmicks, will carry on Bush’s legacy of failure when it comes to energy policy,"

For thirty-eight years, LCV’s annual Environmental Scorecard has been the nationally accepted, non-partisan, environmental report card for our leaders. Barack Obama has earned an impressive lifetime 86% score.  His opponent, Senator McCain, has earned only a 24% score.  

Juliet Eilperin at Washington Post campaign log "The Trail" wrote:

A new ad from the McCain campaign blaming Obama for rising gas prices prompted the following response from Friends of the Earth Action President Brent Blackwelder: "It's only July, but we're already seeing dishonest and hypocritical gutter politics from John McCain. Flip-flopping John McCain said just two weeks ago that our dangerous dependence on oil 'has been 30 years in the making,' but now he tries to blame Obama -- even though it's McCain who has been in Washington for 26 years. Here's the truth. The Bush/McCain drilling plan won't lower gas prices but will increase our over-reliance on oil. We can provide relief from high gas prices while growing the economy, protecting our security and fighting global warming by focusing on conservation, clean energy and transportation choices instead."

Twenty-six years in Washington. Which is just one year shy of the 27 years the U.S. has had a lousy energy policy, courtesy, originally, of Ronald Reagan and the folks who told us that low-carbon alternatives were a scam and energy conservationists just wanted us all to "freeze to death in the dark."

Happy 90th birthday, Nelson Mandela! In case you haven't heard, Mister Bush has signed a law that says you can visit the United States without having to get the Secretary of State to write you a pass saying you're not a terrorist.

Former FBI special agent Coleen Rowley and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern write about 'Justifying' Torture: Two Big Lies at Consortium News.

Writing consequent to former Attorney General John Ashcroft's  Thursday testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, those two big lies, they explain in detail, are, first, that after failing to prevent the September 11 attacks the Cheney-Bush administration pulled out the stops to avoid another attack. And, second, that torture saves lives.

What accounts for the blithe departure from international and national law — not to mention time-honored civilized procedures for dealing with prisoners and detainees?

What accounts for the marginalization of those military, FBI and other professionals who warned that torture is not only a war crime but also that it doesn’t yield reliable information — that, rather, it is the very best recruiting tool for terrorists?

We suggest four reasons why George "I don’t care what the international lawyers say" Bush and dark-side Dick Cheney opted for torture:

1 - Deceit: Granted, torture does not yield truthful information. It can, though, be an excellent way to obtain the untruthful information you may wish to acquire. All you really need to know is what you want the victims to "confess" to and torture them, or render them abroad to "friendly" intelligence services toward the same end.

One case that speaks volumes is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured and rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he told his interrogators precisely what they wanted to hear. ...

2 - Sadism: Cheney’s open advocacy of waterboarding speaks volumes, but what about the President? Sad to say, as psychiatrist Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, has noted:

"Bush’s certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a BB gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers (explaining that the resulting wound was ‘only a cigarette burn’)..."

3 - Intimidation: Are you perhaps in some "shock and awe" at the prospect of the President designating you an "enemy combatant" and sending you off to the Navy brig in South Carolina for an indefinite stay? He now has court approval to do precisely that, and we are proceeding on faith that this joint article will not bring us "enhanced interrogation techniques." ...

4 -- Because We Can: Lord Acton was, of course, right. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And closeness to it does the same. ...

The very transparency of the excuses for torture serves to demonstrate that this kind of power is in place, and is not to be questioned.

As is often the case, you can't get the full flavor from excerpts. Click on through to the whole essay.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

The trustees of Southern Methodist University have been given the the go-ahead to lease campus land for the George W. Bush Presidential Library, where thousands of copies of The Pet Goat and transcripts from warrantless wiretaps will be housed.

If a majority of San Francisco voters give an "aye" in November to a ballot measure certified Thursday, however, a rather different kind of public building will be named after the current occupant of the White House. It's now called the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant. If voters approve, it will become the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

Backers of the measure, who for several months circulated a petition to place [it] on the ballot, turned in more than 12,000 signatures on July 7, said organizer Brian McConnell. The Department of Elections today informed those supporters, the self-proclaimed Presidential Memorial Commission, that they had enough valid signatures - a minimum of 7,168 registered San Francisco voters - to qualify for the November ballot, he said.

McConnell, who came up with the idea over beers with friends, often donned an Uncle Sam outfit to drum up support for the petition. Other signature gatherers - all volunteers - often carried around an American flag and blasted patriotic music from a boom box to attract attention. He said today that the campaign to pass the measure will be an equally grassroots effort.

San Francisco Republicans say the plan stinks and they plan to oppose it, according to the Associated Press.

McConnell says the name-change makes perfect sense to memorialize an administration that has dragged our nation (and a few others) through the muck on a daily basis, leaving behind a mess that will take a decade or two to clean up.  

How disrespectful. How juvenile. How delightful.

But surely Richard Bruce Cheney should also be honored with his own appropriately labeled memorial. Whenever the brown has flowed during the past seven-and-a-half years, the gray eminence of this administration has been in it up to his eyebrows.

Media Matters took note of the fact that on Monday GOP strategist Andrea Tantaros again referred to Barack Obama as a "fancy lad" on the July 14 edition of America's Newsroom on Fox News. The first time she did this was July 7 on MSNBC:

Tantaros was discussing the possibility of Obama's speaking in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and called the proposition "risky," adding that "Obama needs some gravitas, and so that's why they're sending him there. He's a fancy lad. He likes fancy language with fancy backdrops. And that's exactly why they're putting him there." On neither MSNBC nor Fox News was her remark challenged by the anchors of the shows. On MSNBC, Democratic strategist David Goodfriend responded to Tantaros by saying: "Well, first of all, just in response to what Andrea said, there isn't a single Ivy League fancy guy on that ticket."

Here's the tubular version.

At Pandagon, Pam Spaulding links to a definition and writes that a "fancy lad" is a "guy who is very 'girly'":

What is it with the GOP and the insistence on gay-baiting? This is the party of closeted, tortured men trolling for sex in airport bathrooms, park restrooms and assaulting fellow Republicans in their sleep with oral sex attacks, yet they persist in trying to tar Dems with the gay label. The taunts are so high school at this point.

Just goes to show how twisted these slugs are with their view that "Muslim" is a smear and "gay" is a smear. Something had to replace "Red," I suppose. It and "your mama wears combat boots" just don't have the punch they used to.

What else will they conjure with the conventions still weeks away?

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The Overnight News Digest has been posted and includes a story on how Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party may be banned by the Constitutional Court on charges of undermining secularism.

Check out pico's Diary, Literature for Kossacks: Satire.

The American Civil Liberties Union pointed out today that the Terrorist Watch List Has Hit One Million Names

"Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon."

Fredrickson and Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, spoke [Monday] along with two victims of the watch list: Jim Robinson, former assistant attorney general for the Civil Division who flies frequently and is often delayed for hours despite possessing a governmental security clearance and Akif Rahman, an American citizen who has been detained and interrogated extensively at the U.S.-Canada border when traveling for business.

"America's new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what's wrong with this administration's approach to security: it's unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of travelers in this country," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. "It must be fixed without delay."

A year ago, when the list was only 755,000 names, Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies, said: "It undermines the authority of the list. There's just no rational, reasonable estimate that there's anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists." In 2004, there were 158,000 names on the list. You can read the Government Accountability Office's October 2007 report on the terrorism watch list here.

The ACLU is calling for controls to be placed on the watch list, including: 1) due process, 2) a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based, 3) tight criteria for adding names to the list, 4) rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the list.

The organization also called upon the President to issue an executive order requiring a review of the list and the limiting of those on to people "for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist ties or activities. The review should be concluded within 3 months."

One name was removed from the list just this month, that of Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former President of post-apartheid South Africa. (He turns 90 on Friday.)

The ACLU has also announced the creation of an online form where victims of the watch list can tell their stories. A link to the form is available online here.

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^{Total coalition military fatalities in Iraq since March 2003: 4119}

Total Iraqi fatalities due to the invasion and occupation: Unknown, but as high as 1.4 million

Total coalition fatalities in Afghanistan since 2001: 891

Total Afghan fatalities because of the war: Unknown, many thousands

At The Independent, Michael McCarthy writes:

^{Return of the ivory trade}

The world trade in ivory, banned 19 years ago to save the African elephant from extinction, is about to take off again, with the emergence of China as a major ivory buyer.

Alarmed conservationists are warning of a new wave of elephant killing across both Africa and Asia if China is allowed to become a legal importer, as looks likely at a meeting in Geneva next week.

The unleashing of a massive Chinese demand for ivory, in the form of trinkets, name seals, expensive carvings and polished ivory tusks, is likely to give an enormous boost to the illegal trade, which is entirely poaching-based, conservationists say.

"This is going to mean a return to the bad old days where elephants are being shot into extinction," said Allan Thornton, of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the group which provided much of the evidence on which the original ivory ban was based in 1989. ...

The EIA released an internal Chinese government document yesterday which, it said, showed that, over 12 years, officials had lost track of 121 tonnes of ivory from the country's official stockpile – equivalent to the tusks of 11,000 elephants. "We have not been able to account for the shortfall through the sale of legal ivory by the selected selling sites," Chinese officials reported in the document to Cites in 2003. "This suggests a large amount of illegal sale of the ivory stockpile has taken place."

Asked about the document, officials from China's Foreign Ministry said they had no information on the subject.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

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Because of the
Obama
Obama, Obama
Bo Bama
Banana, Fanna, Fo, Fama
Fee, Fie, Moe, Mama
Obama
Diary surge tonight, you might have missed this one well worth reading by A Siegel:

^{What Fraction Of America’s $4+/Gallon Gasoline Is Due To The War In Iraq?}

Over at the Oil Drum, a blog that has been gaining a much-deserved increase in attention, Heading Out writes:

^{Asking one of the less comfortable questions about our energy future...}

The evidence seems to be pointing to an overall increase in the global decline rate for existing wells. What this means is that, if world production is around 86 million barrels a day, then to replace existing declines next year, an additional new production of 4.47 mbd [million barrels a day] at 5.2% decline, instead of the 3.87 mbd required at 4.5% decline, will be needed just to stabilize supply at a fixed level. If the rate is accelerating this difference of 600,000 bd will increase and drop the top line of the curves such as those that Khebab and others have so carefully assembled.

This increased decline rate is already being reported, and thus the potential peak in 2010 that the graph shows is already at risk and we may struggle to get much above the numbers that we are at today. Bear in mind that decline rates are cumulative over the years, and that outyear production must be that much greater to sustain supply, relative to today’s production.

At present there is still considerable complacency about how the oil supply situation will play out. There is an implication that this is just a difficult period to get through, and that, in a relatively short time the situation will get better. Sadly I would suggest that even our current thinking here is largely overly optimistic, and that instead it is going to be much more difficult, faster than we expect. But also, in light of peoples’ expectations about oil really being there at a reasonable price, the greater the dangers of civil unrest, as it occurs without proper public education as to the reason that "there is no more" signs start to spring up at gas stations.

The Overnight News Digest is posted, and includes an item on the direct cost of operations in Iraq, now at $535,635,000,000.

Update: In the two hours since this Diary has been posted, that figure above has risen to $535,665,000,000. In other words, in two hours, the U.S. has directly spent on the Iraq occupation what the Department of Energy is spending over three years in demonstration and development projects for plug-in hybrid vehicles.  

From CongressDaily (subscription only):

^{Dorgan Assails Pentagon For Inaction On Contractorss}

Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Byron Dorgan of North Dakota Wednesday castigated the Defense Department for not addressing contractor malfeasance in Iraq.

"I’ve seen precious little activity out of the Pentagon," Dorgan said at a meeting of his panel, which focused on Kellogg, Brown and Root.

Charles Smith, the former chief of the Field Support Contracting Division for the Army Field Support Command, said he personally saw KBR submit $1 billion in overcharges to the Army, including excessive meal counts for more soldiers than were stationed at a camp and more trucks than the Army needed, and was fired for protesting.

Smith, who was in charge of the LOGCAP III contract in Iraq overseeing the KBR contract, said the Defense Department Contracting Agency documented $1.8 billion in unsupported charges from KBR.

"In 31 years of doing this work, I have never seen anything like the way KBR’s unsupported charges were handled by the Department of Defense," Smith said.

Surely there is an immunity deal that can be cooked up to save KBR and other contractors from embarrassment and legal action.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.