Bush and the Global Greenhouse

"The Bush administration has spent $20 billion on climate change programs since taking office, Dobriansky added, and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 0.8 percent between 2000 and 2003."

Really? I guess we're supposed to be convinced by those numbers that our president is really concerned about global climate change. Here is one analysis of the president's alternative to the Kyoto Protocol:

"The Administration's strategy instead sets a target for greenhouse gas intensity: the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) to economic output expressed in gross domestic product (GDP). This approach minimizes economic impact by allowing emissions to rise or fall with economic output; however, it provides no assurance that a given level of environmental protection will be achieved since the degree of environmental protection is measured in relation to GDP. Theoretically a GHG intensity target can lead to a net reduction in emissions, but only if it is sufficiently stringent. The Administration's target - an 18 percent improvement in GHG intensity over the next decade - allows a substantial increase in net emissions." [Emphasis mine.]

Decreasing the intensity of emissions has in fact been done before. As the Pew Center notes,

"[a]lthough total emissions continued to rise, greenhouse gas intensity in fact fell over the last two decades ... In the 1980s greenhouse gas intensity fell by 21 percent. During the 1990s greenhouse gas intensity fell by 16 percent. The Administration's strategy aims to cut greenhouse gas intensity to a level of 151 metric tons carbon equivalent per million dollars of GDP by 2012, 18 percent below its present level. While this would represent a very modest improvement over the "business as usual" emissions projections for 2012 used by the Administration, it appears to continue the same trend of GHG-intensity reductions and GHG emissions increases experienced over the last two decades."

In other words, the Bush program to decrease the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions won't necessarily decrease the actual amount of gas being emitted into the atmosphere. Given sustained economic growth, unless the allowable percentages become very low, the absolute tonnage of gases emitted will still increase. It's simply a means of postponing the day of reckoning, and it's the typical sleight of hand that is regularly employed by Bush & Co. to hide what they're really up to.

We should also note that the Bush plan is voluntary, and, as the Pew Center report notes: "Previous voluntary GHG targets, including the UNFCCC's target of returning to 1990 levels of GHG emissions by 2000, have not been met by the United States."

D-oh!

But maybe Ms. Dobriansky is correct in that the Bush administration has been spending lots of money on non-CO2-emitting energy sources. Could it have anything to do with this?

The problem with reports such as those from Ms. Dobriansky is that the Bush administration has no credibility. Recall the Medicare scam; they will say anything or present any numbers they need to present in order to make people think they're really working in the public interest, rather than

1. Draining the treasury,
2. Wasting natural resources,
3. Killing people.

Nothing the Bush administration has said or done to this point gives cause to believe that what Ms. Dobriansky is saying has any but the most tenuous connection with what's really happening at the Energy Department, the Interior Department, or the White House itself. These people are liars and nothing they say should be believed without the most rigorous reality testing.

Here's more reading:

http://www.net.org/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=29017
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0608-05.htm
http://www.ciel.org/Climate/WhiteHouse_HotAir_14Feb02.html

Now, I'm all for fairness, and in all fairness, here's the eyewash the White House has published about its program. Take it with a grain of salt.

We report, you decide--or barf and throw a shoe through the TV, as necessary.

Fool Me Once ...

The "special relationship" appears to have its limits, after all.

About Me

Well loved though socially inept. Straight.

Politically liberal (from a family of mostly Republicans). Retired military (enlisted, never in combat except with father over morality of Nixonism and Vietnam--please don't ask why I stayed in).

Native of Cincinnati, married and living in Marin County, Calif. Keine kinder.

Currently reliving fish-out-of-water AF experience as admin/exec assistant (at my age?!) in small (but growing!) construction-development company.

SF Giants fan.

Don't like long walks on the beach.

Would Bush and Limbaugh Kill Journalists?

The question is being asked (about Bush, not Limbaugh; that part's mine), so let's consider it.

Bush is said to have wanted to bomb al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar, but a cooler-headed Tony Blair talked him out of it. Would Bush kill journalists? No, not if you just put a gun in his hand and Sy Hersh in front of him. Well, maybe Hersh ... just kidding!

No, Bush would never shoot or stab anybody; he's not that kind of killer. But I think we can say that Bush does not hold a soft spot in his heart for the journalistic profession--at least as I believe the profession is understood, which is a purveyor of true interpretation to us citizens out here in teeveeland about the events and personalities of the day (that the craft of journalism on teevee is just about dead is beside the point). As with those unfortunates who happened to come up for execution in Texas on Governor Bush's watch, I think President Bush sheds no tears when this cameraman or that journalist's driver happens to get caught in harm's deadly way. This is especially true when it is our troops doing the firing because our troops can do no wrong, and by the way, we do not torture either.

Americans have twice bombed al-Jazeera headquarters, in Kabul and in Baghdad, so this would be nothing new. In the case of the Baghdad office, where the Palestinian journalist Tarik Ayoub was killed, the building was clearly marked as a press office and the US military had been expressly informed of the map coordinates so they could avoid dropping bombs on it--oops! And let's not forget the Palestine Hotel.

I think the simple fact is that any regime that would perpetrate the horrors of "shock and awe"--not as an aberrancy but as a matter of policy--can certainly be counted on literally to kill the messenger, especially during the "fog of war" when mistakes can be made. The fact that, as Reuters reports, more journalists have been killed in the three years of war in Iraq than were killed in 20 years of war in Vietnam is suggestive in this regard. When the U.S. military won't pledge to even try to protect unembedded journalists, you figure out quick which side of the bread the butter's on.

(The real question, though, is whether Bush would actually have called down an air strike on Qatar, a sovereign, non-combatant, and allied nation, in order to do the al-Jazeera hit. The fact that Tony Blair had to talk him out of doing this should make us wonder about the man who is ostensibly leading us.)

Along with George Bush's itchy trigger finger, I think we can also count on a chorus of support for the killing and intimidation of journalists from people like Limbaugh, Coulter and their ilk. (We already have heard, explicitly, from Coulter on this subject, at least twice that I’ve read.) These people are are widely and mistakenly considered to be journalists themselves rather than court jesters, albeit swinish ones. They are outspoken in their contempt for those who are forthright in their disapproval of what Bush and the Congress are doing in the Middle East (and note that I said Congress, meaning it's not just Republicans who are fomenting and enabling the mess over there).

Let's consider an example. Do Rush and Ann give a shit when real journalists like Dan Rather and Mary Mapes are run out of town on a rail for doing their jobs, albeit mistakenly? Of course not, because these propagandists of the public airwaves are part of the conspiracy themselves, whether they choose to admit it or not, the lying bastards.

Gee, ain't it funny how CBS got suckered in about certain documents--notably not the details that were in those documents--of George Bush's military service that turned out to be forgeries, red herrings. Could CBS have been sucker-punched over forged documents that--oh, my!--were purposely interjected into the national dialogue by someone aligned with Karl Rove, a man with a proven track record of such wanton criminality?

Limbaugh et al. not only didn't stand up for the real journalists here by calling for an investigation into the creation and use of the documents, they aided in and papered over the crime by criticizing CBS for being taken in by forgers. Such was their means of deflecting criticism away from where it really needed to be, which was on George W. Bush's record of "service" during the Vietnam War. No, instead of doing the right thing and protecting journalists who were trying to uncover the truth about Bush's military service, Limbaugh and company led the charge to have Rather fired.

I wonder if that’s because Rather is one of the infamous Press Losers of the Vietnam War, a stupid and ruinous war whose outcome apparently had nothing to do with William Westmoreland’s being a lousy general who never did understand his enemy and who apparently forgot that we weren’t supposed to be getting into any land wars in Asia any time soon. And maybe Westmoreland should have made that perfectly clear to his president and then resigned instead of sucking up and promising to do the impossible, which was to replay World War 2 and be the Great Liberator once again. Fucking social climber.

But I digress.

Instead of coming to the aid of a once-great news organization that was being patently and publicly dirty-tricked, right on network TV in front of twenty million people, professional liars Limbaugh, Coulter, and the rest of their sick company clamored to have Rather and Mapes drummed out of the profession in shame.

Dan Rather gets professionally gang-raped by Karl Rove in front of God and everybody and we are then treated to the spectacle of a hypocritical drug addict like Limbaugh having the nerve to say Rather should resign because he was tricked! Get a grip, America! It’s not about George Bush being a liar, it’s about Dan Rather being a fool.

Thanks for coming down on the side of decency, Rush. Where would Karl Rove be today without the trusty right-wing echo chamber?

And by the way, this is what Armed Forces Radio is feeding to our troops around the world every day and twice on Sunday. Dude, where’s Wolfman Jack when you need him?

So, would Bush kill journalists? I think so:

He’ll merely wish it, and yes, it will be so.
Someone else will have to pull the trigger, though.

Would Limbaugh? He’d support it, for sure. Same thing on the trigger, too.

Cheney's "Other Priorities"

Could this be evidence of intramural bureaucratic warfare within the Executive Branch, specifically, between the CIA and the Bush Administration? I'm wondering whether the bureaucrats of the CIA--meaning the working stiffs who collect the data, do the analyses and write the reports, not the Mob politicians like Porter Goss and his crowd of enforcers--are fighting back against the obvious Administration plan to pin the rap for disaster in Iraq on the intelligence itself rather than on the Administration's misuse of it, as in "the Democrats had the same intel we did."

(We could ask why, if the intel was so bad, George Tenet got a Medal of Freedom, but we won't.)

The irony of the CIA, formerly directed by Bush 1, being a finger in the eye of Bush 2 would be sweet indeed. The Agency may actually have some loyalty to the Bushes through its association with H.W.; after all, they did name their headquarters after him. And some of that loyalty might rub off onto George the Stupid. But I doubt there's any love lost among the bureaucrats for Cheney, who's really at target-center of this affair.

I'm thinking that some memo-leaker somewhere in the Agency thinks it's important that the public not be deceived about the quality of the Agency's product, at least enough to say, "When we're wrong we're wrong, but when we're right we like to get some credit. We were right on a lot of things about the situation in Iraq before the war, and we don't like being tarred as misinformed by people who know damn well that we were right but who, having 'other priorities' for this war, chose to disregard what we told them. Which is their right, of course, but they shouldn't ask us to lie back and enjoy it when they tell the world that it was us who fucked things up, not them."

The current memo indicates that Cheney & Co. (a wholly independent subsidiary of Bush Inc.) knew shortly after 9/11 that there was no operative connection between the regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Queda. Yes, the memo notes, Hussein was a sponsor of terrorism, in that he did support Abu Nidal, who as I recall died peacefully in a Baghdad apartment not long before the current chaos. And yes, Saddam Hussein did provide monetarily for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. All for the cause, as it were.

But the report said that Saddam wasn't in league with Osama bin Laden, and if there's anybody who knows its former asset Osama bin Laden, it's got to be the CIA.

Quick, hide that fucking report!

It's clear that just getting rid of Saddam Hussein was not enough for Cheney and the boys. That could have been done through other means such as the fomenting of a peaceful revolution like those that took place before our eyes in the East Bloc states during the collapse of Communism. Nary a shot was fired in anger, as everyone well knows. Those revolutions--against heavily militarized and repressive governments--proved that military force is not the political be-all and end-all that warmongers like Cheney apparently think it is.

(Let's recall where those peaceful revolutions occurred: East Germany, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia. Gee, even the Soviet Union itself. We can't say Yugoslavia , I think, because of what came later. Did I miss any? Yes! Albania!)

Not to mention that Saddam has been in custody for, what? Two years?

No, in fact a peaceful revolution is exactly what Cheney (and Rumsfeld et al.) did not want for the simple fact that while revolution would not have excluded the United States as a player completely, it would still have rendered us more of an equal partner rather than the controlling entity. And the whole point of this real-life war game from its conception fifteen or twenty years ago has been American control of Iraq and its oil: the primacy of American interests over all others. That means we have to do it right now before anybody else can get in there and that means we need American boots on the ground, no time for diplomacy or Hans Blix or any of those other cheese-eating surrender monkeys. For what else are the Marines useful for if not to protect American corporate power in those parts of the world where the rule of a gun is more effective than the rule of the people? (Thank you, Smedley Butler.)

Which is also why talk about a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops must be busting Cheney right in the gut: "What do you mean, withdrawal? We're there for fucking ever, you idiot!"

Talk about fighting the last war. The lizard Cheney is stuck in the Nineteenth Century, worshiping William McKinley on an altar provided by Citibank.

Will the bureaucracy take Bush-Cheney down from within while the rest of the civilized world takes them down from without? Stay tuned!

America the Great!

Are we at an historical turning point? Is it possible that the base and obvious criminality of the Bush Republicans will be enough of a lesson to us to cause us to make the fundamental changes in our political system that need to be made in order for us to survive as the democratic nation dreamed of by the Founders?

We spend ten times on "national defense" what we spend on social services such as college loan guarantees and food stamp programs--aid that middle and lower class citizens depend on for their survival and their future happiness (pursuit of; see Decl. of Indep.). We've known about the pernicious quality of the "national defense" myth for years now, and how the gaping maw of militarism has swallowed trillions of dollars since World War 2 while hospitals, schools, libraries, and police and fire departments all seem to be caught up in a never-ending scramble for funding just to keep the lights on.

And we have come to accept that as normal state of affairs rather than the grand, tragic mistake of social priorities that it is. "I dream of the day when schools have everything they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a new bomber."
We have become enamored of war and militarism, but Bush and the Republicans have taken that misguided love, turned on their own kind, and ground it into the dirt of their venality and cronyism--and in doing so may have inadvertently exposed the myth of national defense for what it is, which is something that modern, civilized people like America should reject and despise.

The curtain is being pulled back on what "national defense" really means. It means profiteering by defense contractors and a revolving door from the Pentagon and other public offices to private industry and back again. It means the diversion of precious engineering and manufacturing resources away from socially beneficial ends and toward wasteful and destructive government programs such as nuclear weapons development and the Strategic Defense Initiative, a multi-billion-dollar research-and-development program so ludicrous and anachronistic as to be laughable were it not tragic.

It means violence against innocent people who happen to get in the way of the grand designs of corrupt and deluded policy makers. And it means a lust for war on the part of Americans, which is how it most harms us--in our souls--since we also manage to conveniently locate far from our own shores (and therefore our eyes, ears, and bodies) the armed conflicts we cause to take place.

The image of America has changed from the Great Liberator of the 20th Century into the self-centered bully, insisting, all evidence to the contrary, that our way is the right and only way and not giving a shit--indeed, becoming offended and defensive--over what other people may believe in contradiction.

How dare they disagree with America, the Greatest Nation of All Time? (Indeed, time stops with us.) We are the repository of freedom! You are puny and irrelevant! We alone defeated the dark forces of fascism in World War 2 and we alone stood fast against Communist totalitariansm while the rest of you swine cringed in terror and would have been engulfed were it not for the bravery and steadfastness of your American protector.

And don't you forget it.

Our Friends, the Oil Companies

Oil-industry profits are at an all-time high. Are there calls in Congress for those companies to plow some of that money back into the infrastructure that makes their existence possible? That seems the most reasonable thing, after all, since it is we consumers who make a large segment of their vast profits possible.

(Homework: what portion of American oil industry profit derives from consumer purchases and what portion from governmental or other types of purchase?)

We buy their products and pay their salaries; you'd think they'd be grateful and return some of that profit to us in some material way--like cheap petroleum products! Since we live in an automobile culture! Instead, gas prices go up so far that I'm actually happy to seem them come back down to $2.50. Besides, what's a car culture for if not to be an endless revenue stream, at least until the oil runs out?

Maybe they could pay taxes--which I guess they do, in their own way. A few million for these Republicans here, a few million for those (fucking) Democrats there; if that's not supporting your government then I don't know what is.

But no, those profits seem destined to remain liquid, in the forms of compensation for executive management and securities, I would say. And R&D for new products to generate either real need or the illusion of need. In either case, it's a one-way revenue stream (there's that word again) to our disadvantage. The rich get richer and the poor get negative cash flow.

Did I mention advertizing?

Honesty Is Such a Lonely Word

"And by the way, enough with the 'spousal' notification bullshit, okay? You won’t let gay people get married, so we’re only talking about heteros here, and last I checked, men couldn’t get pregnant, so let’s call this what it is—the Husband’s Prerogative Over His Wife’s Body Law. Sure, it doesn’t have the snappy ring to it that 'spousal notification' does, but at least it’s honest."

And honesty is always the best policy.

Oh, That Maradona!

"Earlier, the tone was struck by the former football star Diego Maradona, who wore a 'Stop Bush' T-shirt to an anti-Bush "counter-summit" that drew some 4,000 protesters from around the world and easily eclipsed the official summit in the public's attention. 'I'm proud as an Argentine to repudiate the presence of this human trash, George Bush,' said Maradona."

That fucking Maradona!

The scene: Kindsbach, West Germany, me sitting at home watching the finals--the finals!--of the 1986 World Cup on TV. West Germany on the cusp of history! Hans Beckenbauer and the boys! Versus Argentina! Gonna do it! You can hear the shouting from the people watching the game on TV in the neighborhood bars! And the winning goal is kicked by ... Maradona.

Waah.

"Human trash", indeed. Well, we certainly call a spade a spade, don't we?

Why Bush is Bad for the World

Oh, my god.

"President Bush last week appointed nine campaign contributors, including three longtime fund-raisers, to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a 16-member panel of individuals from the private sector who advise the president on the quality and effectiveness of U.S. intelligence efforts." (Newsweek, via Altercation)

Note, of course, that he picked nine people for a 16-member board, thereby ensuring that his wishes will be accommodated. Smart man, that George W. Bush.

Anybody who thinks George W. Bush is doing a good job, like about 35 percent of Americans, should think about this particular piece of presidential news. What is arguably our biggest challenge right now? Could it be spelled I-R-A-Q? And what is arguably the most critical element in that effort, beyond the breathing human flesh that is required to make everything happen? Could it be spelled "I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-E-N-C-E"? And so maybe we want people overseeing our intelligence efforts to be people who k-n-o-w-w-h-a-t-t-h-e-y-'r-e-d-o-i-n-g? Is this really a job for c-a-m-p-a-i-g-n-c-o-n-t-r-i-b-u-t-o-r-s?

The man is a sociopath.

Unless Congress decides to exercise its oversight authority, we are doomed.

A Thought on Grover Norquist

"I want to get government down to the size where you can drown it in the bathtub."

Famous words from Grover Norquist, anti-tax god and virulent anti-government wild man. My question to him: If you hate government so much, why are you so dependent on its existence for your own? The logical end of your campaign is to eradicate government altogether; what will you do when it's gone?

Parasite.


Update on Nov. 27 05: It's nice to see that even the guys on Grover's own team see that he's useless:

"When we asked [McCain's] staff for a comment on Norquist's fusillade against McCain, his chief of staff, Mark Salter, had a lot to say. 'In Norquist's world, the truth is for suckers. And it's as pointless to respond to him as it would be to respond to some street-corner schizophrenic,' Salter responded."

Yeah, baby!