This was Christmas-shopping day for me: time is short, so I'll just hit a few of the high points--or low points--of the day.
The spinners are already well along with the Iran NIE. The Wall Street Journal, about as reliable a right-wing trumpet as can be found, opines more or less as expected, including this marvellous remark: "What's amazing in this case is how the White House has allowed intelligence analysts to drive policy." Of course! Silly us, thinking the commander-in-chief should pay attention to his own experts on a subject! How very un-Republican. Twenty lashes at least.
As expected, now that Mike Huckabee's 15 minutes of fame are upon him, people are starting to lift the lid for a little look, and--also as expected--what they are finding ain't pretty. In 1992, Huckabee wrote, "If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague."
His comments then, made in response to an AP questionnaire sent to Senatorial candidates, also include other of what I suppose we should start calling "Hucksies", like this: "In light of the extraordinary funds already being given for AIDS research, it does not seem that additional federal spending can be justified. An alternative would be to request that multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor (,) Madonna and others who are pushing for more AIDS funding be encouraged to give out of their own personal treasuries increased amounts for AIDS research."
Now he's trying to wriggle in the classic style: deny that it means what it plainly says, but with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink to the evangelical base the remark curried. At a news conference in Asheville, N.C., on Saturday, Huckabee said he wanted at the time to follow traditional medical practices used for dealing with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. "Medical protocol typically says that if you have a disease for which there is no cure, and you are uncertain about the transmission of it, then the first thing you do is that you quarantine or isolate carriers," Huckabee said. But when Huckabee wrote his answers in 1992, it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact. I think the 15 minutes is drawing to a close.
Over at the Daily Kos, duha has a plausible analysis of why the Huckster's surge is A Really Bad Thing for the GOP. Such articles (like the ones claiming the Giuliani's campaign was dead meat after the last round of revelations) are usually just pipe dreams, but this one makes sense.
The Bali environmental conference continues to produce amazing stories. As a recent study from Europe showed, one of the simplest, cheapest, and most effective ways to deal with the carbon production that is driving global warming is to keep existing forestation and plant more forest. No one doubts it, and, again, it is cheap. But apparently nothing is cheap enough for the big-biz hogs that continue to act as if the global-climate problem were some annoying triviality, a little bump in the smooth road to even more money.
Each year, tropical forestation covering an area at least equal to the size of New York state is destroyed; the carbon dioxide that those trees would have absorbed amounts to 20 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, about the same as total U.S. emissions.
The idea is for the rich nations to pay the poor ones who are doing all that tree-chopping to not do it, the payments making up what the chopping might have earned, which isn't much. Everyone is paying lip service to the idea, but no one is yet putting money where their mouth is.
A large Episcopal diocese in southern California has become another of the by-now 110 dioceses that have broken or are in the process of breaking from the national Episcopal church because the national church--steady yourself--does not discriminate against gays. That, apparently, is as bad or worse than not discriminating against women. Fortunately for the faithful, the Fresno diocese proudly does both of those things, not like the main church, which, they point out, "has isolated itself from the overwhelming majority of Christendom and more specifically from the Anglican Communion by denying Biblical truth and walking apart from the historic Faith and Order." Check that overwhelming majority part.
The Baseball Writers Association of America has just decided to open up its membership for the first time to web-based baseball writers. Qualified candidates were required to be "full-time baseball writers who work for websites that are credentialed by MLB for post-season coverage." Curiously, membership is not decided simply by meeting a set of qualifications: each individual has to be voted on and approved.
Astoundingly, ESPN's Rob Neyer was not approved for membership. The only reason I can see is that he's too smart for the bozohood that largely (though, in fairness, not entirely) composes the BBWAA membership.
If you are uncertain about how to take the new NIE--considering that more or less the same fine folks thought very differently a few years ago--you ought to read the Washington Post's description of how the new estimates were put through the wringer before being accepted. It was a mighty thorough review.
As I suggested yesterday might soon happen, the Senate has passed a gutted Alternative Minimum Tax relief bill, one that does not pay for the relief with counterbalancing taxes elsewhere. (Can you spell gutless?).
Even with time dreadfully short, the House might still get up on its hind legs and Just Say No to this gutlessness. Everyone knows that the Congress has to provide that relief, else a boatload of congressfolk are going to be in very deep do-do back home. That idea cuts two ways: you can surrender to the Republican holdouts, who don't like to think about what their paymasters would say to a bill that taxes those paymasters, or you can say nyah nyah, dare you to them and see if they want to bear the burden of failure to enact.
Gee, I wonder which way it will go?
It gets tiresome to hear, year in and year out, how "the military" lockstep marches to the right wing of the Republican party. The Los Angeles Times' recent article "Bush loses ground with military families" exposes that belief for the nonsense it is. No one, from privates to colonels, and maybe even some generals, likes to see blood and money wasted on a frivolous and counter-productive military venture, and least of all those on the ground where it's happening.
And last for today but very far from least is a transcript of Keith Olberman's--well, scathing is inadequate--philippic about "the President's cataclysmic deception about Iran."
Well said, sir, well said, and would that there were more with the fortitude to speak so plainly and honestly.
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