Category: Issues of the Day

Is it time to yell “fire” in our crowded theater?

If your oldest child is seven, the window slams shut before he or she will be old enough for a driver’s license. If your first grandchild was born this year, cherish your posterity: that grandchild’s likely to be the last of your line. Unless….unless we force action now and over the next 100 months.

The Window Before Climate Change Closes Down Our Kids’ Future: 100 Months, Or Less?

Here’s why:

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, is the highest it has been for the past 650,000 years. In the space of just 250 years, as a result of the coal-fired Industrial Revolution, and changes to land use such as the growth of cities and the felling of forests, we have released, cumulatively, more than 1,800bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently, approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 are released into the Earth’s atmosphere every second, due to human activity. Greenhouse gases trap incoming solar radiation, warming the atmosphere. When these gases accumulate beyond a certain level – often termed a “tipping point” – global warming will accelerate, potentially beyond control.

Andrew Simms | The Guardian

It’s a simple equation. There’s this much CO2 in the atmosphere. We add this much more each day. At some point it reaches the tipping point.

There is no credible debate about this among those who study the problem. The debate is when and how bad it becomes. The serious scientists keeping sending stronger and more frightening alarms while we dither.

The carbon industries, and their political cronies, are keeping the sense of doubt alive by getting the media to act as if the question about CO2 was still being debated.

There is, of course, only one time when it is OK to yell fire in a crowded theater — when the theater is on fire.

Ted Stevens indicted

I see they finally caught up with that scofflaw Ted Stevens for almost running me down in a crosswalk in front of the National Archives in 1973.

I see also that Bennigan’s has gone under — not only closed, but to be liquidated. Ha, that’ll teach her. Her being THAT bartender in April that was snippy with me when I was snippy with her about showing ID to buy a Michelob Ultra 42 years after I turned 21. “Do you want to get me fired?” she said. Well, yeah.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks

1. The Bush Administration sent a high-level diplomat to Iran.

2. Just about everyone agrees all-of-a-sudden on a 16-month timetable for American troops to leave Iraq.

3. T. Boone Pickens is funding wind generation and Pickens — the guy who paid for the Swift boating of John Kerry four years ago — now says he’d welcome Al Gore as an energy czar.

4. People in Europe are waving American flags.

Best question of the day, so far

Now, [Robert] Novak says he didn’t realize he’d hit anyone. And if that’s true it removes a great deal of the moral and potential criminal liability. But it puts in real question whether Novak should be driving a car. If you can be driving through the relatively compact streets of downtown Washington, hit a pedestrian so that he rolls up on to your windshield and then trundles off onto the ground and you don’t notice, should you really be driving?

Josh Marshall

Why is it?

Why is it that some argue that American laws don’t apply outside America, say at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

While at the same time some argue that American laws do apply outside America, say to babies born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone?

McCain = Bush = Offensive

A 61-year-old librarian was ticketed (her court date is July 23rd), escorted off a public plaza outside a McCain town hall meeting, and threatened with arrest for carrying a sign that read “McCain=Bush.”   (Hey, it’s a free country – you ought to be able to be arrested for anything, so long as it’s not hurting other people, right?) 
 
You really have to watch the two-minute video.  I love what she asks at the end:  “Why is [the sign] offensive? Why would Republicans who voted for Bush find it offensive?”
 
I suppose it would be gilding the lily to note that when the grotesquely unchristian Reverend Phelps holds up signs reading “God Hates Fags” outside funeral services, he is not ticketed, forced to leave, or threatened with arrest.  (Nor, in America, should he be.)

Andrew Tobias

This took place in Denver.

Best line of the day, so far

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Atrios quoting the United States Constitution, Amendment 4, which I will remind you all federal office holders are sworn to “support and defend … against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Just so you don’t get confused about that bastard Jesse Helms

“I’ve been portrayed as a caveman by some. That’s not true. I’m a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners or niggers.” (1985)

“All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction.” (1986)

“Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.” (1995)

Jesse Helms, a few of the many quotes at Freedom Road.

Disappointment again

Too bad. I had been looking forward to voting for Barack Obama.

Now it’s just another suck it up and vote for the least bad guy election like all the rest.

I am not alone:

Atrios: Wanker of the Day
Paul Krugman
Hullabaloo: No Hope Today
Jesus’ General: Lead, damn it!
Glenn Greenwald
Talking Points Memo | Why Obama’s Support For FISA Cave-In Is Such A Downer

And:

The Edge of the American West has this:

Obama

Balkinization: Why Obama Kinda Likes the FISA Bill (But He Won’t Come Out and Say It)

And another two:

Discourse.net: Obama Acts Like a Coward
Obsidian Wings: Bleccchh

Breaking: They’ve found what they were looking for in Iraq

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The New York Times

Race or Gender

At a dinner party NewMexiKen attended Saturday evening there was a conversation about whether sexism or racism was the greatest obstacle to success. The women argued that women have faced more discrimination than minorities — and they gave some convincing personal examples. The men were, I think, less certain, but mainly argued that race was the greater hurdle.

I didn’t think to mention it at the dinner, but the first black woman in Congress, Shirley Chisholm, once said, “Of my two ‘handicaps’ being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.”

Yet, writing for The New Yorker this week, Hendrik Hertzberg makes the opposite case:

Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Hertzberg adds that there are 16 women senators and eight female governors, but only two black governors and one senator.

NewMexiKen fears that even today, racism and sexism are more closeted than gone. The veneer of open-mindedness, even of political correctness, is paper thin.

In such a world, who has the steepest climb?

Earmarks

While not endorsing the use of earmarks by federal legislators, I would like to point out that they amount to less than 59 cents out of every $100 in the budget. They really are of no fiscal consequence.

Complaining about earmarks makes about as much sense as complaining about the 9/10ths when gas is $4.049 a gallon. Making it a key part of your economic policy is either pandering or stupid.

And I am so tired of having a president that panders and/or acts stupid.

From the heart of America

Nearly 500 Californians have lost their lives while in service to their country in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least 58 were immigrants; more than 160 were parents, who left behind more than 300 children. One descended from two presidents; another was a Guatemalan street orphan taken in by an American family as a teenager. One high school lost six of its graduates.

The above from an article in the Los Angeles Times describing a study by the paper to be published Sunday.

“He was Mexican, but he thought like an American. And he gave his life for this country.”

Obscenity

You know, you can’t say “fuck” on the radio, but here’s a real obscenity —

“The poor guy’s been suffering for years, you know? Unfairly he’s been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated. And so, to cut this out in some respect for Ted Kennedy, here’s a tune coming at you from the Dead Kennedys. Go ahead and play it, please.”

Nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage yesterday, the day Senator Edward Kennedy’s tumor was announced.