Some blogs are impossible to keep up with. Just too prolific, or too strident, or too repetitive, or all of the above. But I keep them in my Bloglines subscriptions because I do occasionally find something good there. Needlenose is one of those, and today he pointed me towards this MSNBC article, The Empire’s New Clothes

A clear head and a calculator will tell you very quickly that the costs of this conflict in Iraq are on a scale far beyond whatever benefits it was supposed to bring. If Saddam had been behind 9/11, OK. But he wasn’t. If he’d really posed a clear and present danger to the United States with weapons of mass destruction, then the invasion would have been justifiable. But he didn’t, and it wasn’t. Bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people is a laudable goal, but not one for which the administration made any worthwhile preparations—which is why the occupation has been so ugly, bloody and costly. Tabloids may amuse their readers with snapshots of Saddam in his skivvies, but it’s the Bush administration’s threadbare rationales for postmodern imperialism that have been exposed.

I don’t know who Christopher Dickey is, but I’ll be looking for more of his articles now. Just what I need, eh? More to read on the web!

Wow! You’ve got to take a look at this gallery that I found via this post on Boing Boing, A Directory of Wonderful Things

Art of Science gallery
Pinceton University asked the university’s scientists and engineers to collect and submit images ‘produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science.’ The resulting gallery is mind-boggling.

The whole collection is astounding. Its hard to pick on favorite, but here’s one:

Chris Allbritton is a free lance journalist who had been covering Iraq for years. His blog, Back to Iraq 3.0 is another good example of a first-person blog that goes beyond simple reporting to provide a unique insight into life in Iraq. His latest post, Bumps in the Road is a perfect foil for the heavy delusional spinning by the administration:

I’m not sure who’s winning this war, the Americans or the insurgents. But I know who is losing it: the Iraqi people. Those bumps in the road are their graves.

Nice to see John Kerry on the NYT Op-ed page, in front of Bush’s Iraq speech. Gives me hope that Kerry won’t fade to black like Gore did. Check out The Speech the President Should Give

TONIGHT President Bush will discuss the situation in Iraq. It’s long past time to get it right in Iraq. The Bush administration is courting disaster with its current course - a course with no realistic strategy for reducing the risks to our soldiers and increasing the odds for success.

Ok, so the middle of the piece was written with a shotgun. But hey, he doesn’t get to make the full-length speech. And he hits his targets more often than not.

The next months are critical to Iraq’s future and our security. If Mr. Bush fails to take these steps, we will stumble along, our troops at greater risk, casualties rising, costs rising, the patience of the American people wearing thin, and the specter of quagmire staring us in the face. Our troops deserve better: they deserve leadership equal to their sacrifice.

And unfortunately, they won’t be getting that any time soon.

When you read a blog for any length of time, you get very familiar with the author’s style, their voice, their point of view. Blog writing is less formal, less edited, and more immediate. With a good blog, you feel like you really connect with the author.

For some reason that’s been particularly true of the blogs that I follow that cover Iraq. Riverbend, Salam Pax, My War, Dagger JAG, Kevin Sites, Juan Cole… are compelling because they are living the war and relating their personal experiences, not just reporting the news. So when I read that Phil Carter at Intel Dump had been called up it hit my almost as if a nephew was being (re)deployed.

INTEL DUMP - Heading downrange

On Thursday, I received orders from the Army mobilizing me for Operation Iraqi Freedom. These orders followed an earlier set, cut on Tuesday, which transferred me from the Army’s individual ready reserve into the 101st Airborne Division. It’s an honor and privilege to deploy with such a storied unit — a band of warriors who have nearly all deployed at least once since 9/11. I’m scheduled to report for active duty in a little under 3 weeks to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. After some period of pre-deployment training and preparation, I will deploy with my unit to Iraq.

It’s difficult to describe the swirl of emotions I have now. I’m excited about this opportunity to serve, but also apprehensive about what lies ahead. I’m worried for my family and friends (this will be harder on them than me), and I will miss them terribly; but I’m also comforted by the strength they have displayed over the past few days.

INTEL DUMP will go through some changes over the next few weeks as a part of this deployment. […] To the extent I can, I will contribute notes and dispatches from the field, although obviously my mission and my soldiers will take priority over any writing I might do.

See you on the high ground — more to follow…

I salute you, Phil Carter. Good luck and Godspeed. I sure hope you are able to keep blogging—for the same reasons our families hung on every email from our nephews when they were there.

Another winner from Green Car Congress. Amory Lovins tosses some cold, hard, market-driven facts on the nuclear revivalist craze wtih
Competitors To Nuclear: Eat My Dust

In a market economy, private investors are the ultimate arbiter of what energy technologies can compete and yield reliable profits, so to understand nuclear power’s prospects, just follow the money. Private investors have flatly rejected nuclear power but enthusiastically bought its main supply-side competitors—decentralized cogeneration and renewables. Worldwide, by the end of 2004, these supposedly inadequate alternatives (see graph) had more installed capacity than nuclear, produced 92% as much electricity, and were growing 5.9 times faster and accelerating, while nuclear was fading.

Read the whole thing. Its a nice and short, and relieves me of my doubts about future needs for nulcear electric generation.

Blogs, at least many of the high profile ones, have an annoying tendency to be prolific slaves to the meme of the moment. Hurrying to be the first to make a point. Its exhausting for the reader and, I imagine, the blogger. Here I want to pursue a more relaxed pace. In that vein I know this NYT editorial by Anthony Lewis is old news. I hope you have already read it. Its point resonates even more strongly on a second read, after another week of Durbin’s tempest, Rove’s provocations, and Cheney’s up-is-downism. Lewis is speaking an important truth with, Guantanamo’s Long Shadow

No one can seriously doubt now that cruelties and indignities have been inflicted on prisoners at Guantanamo. Nor is there any doubt that worse has happened elsewhere - prisoners beaten to death by American soldiers, untold others held in secret locations by the Central Intelligence Agency, others rendered to be tortured by governments such as Uzbekistan’s.

Since the widespread outrage over the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Americans have seemingly ceased to care. It was reported yesterday that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former American commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is being considered for promotion. Many people would say the mistreatment of Mohamed al-Kahtani, or of suspects who might well be innocent, is justified in a war with terrorists. Morality is outweighed by necessity.

The moral cost is not so easily put aside. We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.

Beyond morality, there is the essential role of law in a democracy, especially in American democracy. This country has no ancient mythology to hold it together, no kings or queens. We have had the law to revere. No government, we tell ourselves, is above the law.

Over many years the United States has worked to persuade and compel governments around the world to abide by the rules. By spurning our own rules, we put that effort at risk. What Justice Louis Brandeis said about law at home applies internationally as well: ‘If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law.’

Did I mention that RealClimate posts come in fits and burts? Right after the rebuttal of the WSJ junk science I read this one applying the brakes to the sensational reporting on
Gulf Stream slowdown?

There has been an overwhelming popular demand for us to weigh in on recent reports in the Times Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows and CNN Changes in Gulf Stream could chill Europe.

At the heart of the story was a statement at the recent EGU meeting by Peter Wadhams from Cambridge University, that convection in a normally active area of the Greenland Sea was much reduced last winter. Specifically, in an area where a dozen or so convective ‘chimneys’ form, only two small chimneys were seen.

[…]how does this relatively small-scale observation get translated into headlines forecasting changes in the Gulf Stream and chilly times ahead for Europe? The major problem is that the background story and the climate model results are now very well known, and any scientific result that appears to project onto this storyline therefore gets a lot of attention.

[…]Thus while continued monitoring of this key climatic area is clearly warranted, the imminent chilling of the Europe is a ways off yet.

So the Day After Tomorrow won’t be happening any time soon. Too bad for the press–the truth about Climate Change is not as compelling a story.

Talking Points Memo has a running investigation of Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s corrupt dealing that is worth keeping track of. The story is that Cunningham sold his home at a grossly inflated price to a businessman who subsequently procured lucrative DOD contracts. Straight up pay for play graft. In a recent post TPM’s Josh Marshall speaks to the lack of support for an ethics investigation by the Dems in Congress. Check out Tammany on the Potomac:

On Wednesday, the Post’s Jeff Birnbaum had a story on the explosion in the lobbying trade since 2000. If the Dems want their knock-out campaign cudgel for 2006, Jeff provided it: ‘The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent.’

In explaining these developments Birnbaum writes: ‘The lobbying boom has been caused by three factors, experts say: rapid growth in government, Republican control of both the White House and Congress, and wide acceptance among corporations that they need to hire professional lobbyists to secure their share of federal benefits.’

Now, a daily newspaper man works under different constraints and has a different brief than someone in my shoes. And this is what my late advisor Jack Thomas would have called a crackerjack piece. But I think I can cover this ground even more simply.

How’s this? In Washington today, everything is for sale so there are a lot more salesmen. And there’s so much to sell they’re all getting higher commissions.

It may lack the granularity of Jeff’s explanation. But that is the essence of the matter. That’s why there are so many more lobbyists. The whole place is corrupt to the core. It’s Tammany on the Potomac.

This fits nicely with my belief that the Democrats need to learn to be the opposition party —and take aim at entrenched, corrupt power. They need to connect with the issues of liberty and freedom to connect to the independent bent of American voters. Attacking Republican corruptions should be an obvious winner if they do adopt this voice.

Consider the fact that New Hampshire is trending Democratic. Then consider the New Hampsire motto, “Live Free of Die”. See the connection?

I’ve been meaning to post more references to the excellent analysis of the Downing Street Memos that have ben posted on the Daily Howler over the past week. As always, he does a thorough and insightful job of reviewing the controversy. His best insight comes from reviewing the implications of the memos with what Woodward writes about in Plan of Attack. Check out
A few weeks after the Downing Street memo, Cheney started pimping the nukes

Did the Bush Admin start faking the intel shortly after the Downing Street memo? In Woodward’s book, it’s clear that they did. Woodward clearly says they overstated the intel about the general WMD question. Indeed, as Woodward stresses, after Cheney overstated the intel on August 26, and the president himself shortly followed, making unequivocal claims for the first time about Saddam’s possession of WMD. Was there “no doubt” that Saddam had WMD? That just wasn’t the state of the intel, Woodward stresses. But he also stresses that major players did believe that Saddam had such weapons.

But those scary nukes were different. Although Woodward downplays this part of the story, it is perfectly clear that the Bush Admin began pimping the nukes shortly after the Downing Street memo. Cheney’s speech on August 26 raised the specter of nuclear attack. “Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon,” Cheney said–and he implied that “fairly soon” might mean “within a year.” Cheney may have been “convinced” of this fact–some are convinced that the earth is flat–but this plainly wasn’t the state of the intel, nor were Cheney’s claims supported in the subsequent October NIE. And uh-oh! Two weeks after Cheney’s speech, Rice went and out and embellished further, baldly misstating the actual intel regarding those aluminum tubes. Soon Bush himself was scaring the voters; in a major speech on October 7, he said “we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” In short, within a few weeks of the Downing Street memo, the Bush Admin was “fixing the intel” by lustily pimping Saddam’s scary nukes. Sadly, though, the liberal and Democratic establishments haven’t put this info to good use in their critiques of the route to war in Iraq.

Read more of the Daily Howler’s analysis of Downing Street. I know its changed my perspective.

RealClimate is the kind of blog that you need Atom or RSS feeds to keep track of. Sometimes they post regularly, sometimes infrequently. And you always want to listen to what they have to say. Here they’ve posted a long rebuttal to a WSJ editorial, The Wall Street Journal vs. The Scientific Consensus

We are disappointed that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has chosen to yet again distort the science behind human-caused climate change and global warming in their recent editorial ‘Kyoto By Degrees’ (6/21/05) (subscription required).

Last week, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and 10 other leading world bodies expressed the consensus view(pdf) that ‘there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring’ and that ‘It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities’. And just last week, USA Today editorialized that ‘not only is the science in, it is also overwhelming’.

It is puzzling then that the WSJ editors could claim that ‘the scientific case….looks weaker all the time’.

While we resist commenting on policy matters (e.g. the relative merits of the Kyoto Protocol or the various bills before the US Senate), we will staunchly defend the science against distortions and misrepresentations, be they intentional or not. In this spirit, we respond here to the scientifically inaccurate or incorrect assertions made in the editorial.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan brings us this on the odious Bolton’s chances, Still Ticking? By Fred Kaplan

Will Bush escalate this battle to the next level and simply brush aside the Senate? My guess is, he will. Otherwise, why would he have taken the fight as far as he has? Why would he have kept today’s cloture vote on the schedule? Surely he and his whips knew they didn’t have enough support to win. The Senate Democrats had made a case against cloture on two grounds—not just on Bolton’s dreadful qualifications for the job, but also on Bush’s refusal to turn over documents relevant to the Senate’s investigation. It was clear that, since last month’s motion, the White House had lost — not gained —ground. Most likely, the president and his spokesmen will now repeat, with renewed intensity, what they’ve been saying for a while now—that the Democrats are obstructionists, that a majority of the Senate favors Bolton, and so he should simply be placed in the job if need be.

Still, President Bush might want to reassess the situation, and not just because Bolton is a lousy pick—a judgment that Bush does not share, in any case. He might want to consider the following question: At a time when he is touting the glories of democracy, does he want his ambassador at the United Nations—America’s global spokesman—to have come by the job through such undemocratic maneuvers?

Principles and democracy don’t seem to have much to do with the conduct of the Bush administration, do they?