Stygius

Mass greenness

pacified:

While SpongeDob and the gang are busy taking out gay-bashing ads across the country and attacking Ken Salazar, our junior Democratic Senator is actually highlighting an issue that matters: America's dependence on foreign oil.  Salazar spoke Tuesday morning at the unveiling of RTD's 4 new hybrid buses . . . .

Senator Salazar is sticking to his guns when it comes to energy independence for the United States. See previously.

Virtuous junk

Brad Plumer at his best with a post on the production of junk packaging with just the right whiff of conspiracy:

Litter's awful. It's disgusting. We're all agreed. But it seems that the nationwide anti-litter campaign, which began in the 1950s, was a bit less pure in its origins. According to Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, the entire anti-litter movement was initiated by a consortium of industry groups who wanted to divert the nation's attention away from even more radical legislation to control the amount of waste these companies were putting out.

Stuck on signing statements

In yet another nod to the inimitable Laura Rozen, from the Boston Globe:

The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president's desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power, according to former White House and Justice Department officials.

The officials said Cheney's legal adviser and chief of staff, David Addington , is the Bush a dministration's leading architect of the ``signing statements" the president has appended to more than 750 laws. The statements assert the president's right to ignore the laws because they conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.

The Bush-Cheney administration has used such statements to claim for itself the option of bypassing a ban on torture, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and numerous requirements that they provide certain information to Congress, among other laws.

Radical Denny

Dana Milbank on House Speaker Hastert's war on the White House:

First, he came out to demand that the administration return documents seized in a raid of a Democrat's congressional office. Then, when ABC News reported Wednesday night that Hastert was under investigation in the Jack Abramoff affair, the Illinois Republican blamed the Bush administration for the dubious report.

"This is one of the leaks that come out to try to, you know, intimidate people," the usually mild speaker told Chicago's WGN radio yesterday. "We're just not going to be intimidated on it." Asked later if he was charging the Justice Department with retaliating for his stance in the congressional office raid, he answered: "Here are the dots. People can connect any dots they want to." If that wasn't clear enough, he added: "I thought it was an interesting sequence of events."

Lovely. Actually, it tend to think some zealous US Attorney made the call on this one, mostly because of the preponderance of evidence against Rep. William Jefferson, who has disgraced his state. Time for him to go.

The real Libya story

During the vice presidential debate in 2004, Dick Cheney made the absurd claim that the invasion of Iraq caused Libya's long-term diplomatic strategy of reconciling with the West -- which began far before the invasion, let alone the current presidency -- to reach some fruition.

And a major part of the case against John Bolton during his nomination fiasco was his blatant attempts to sabotage US-UK negotiations with Libya. Anyway, just covering alittle old ground as an introduction to Michael Hirsh's piece, "The Real Lesson from Libya".

HT Laura Rozen

Counterinsurgency and wireless warfare

Real-time network cetric warfare . . . .

Defense Tech thinks we're losing the wireless war in Iraq:

Local command centers have a torrent of information pouring in. For soldiers and marines on the ground, this war isn't any more wired that the last one. "There is a connectivity gap," a draft Army War College report notes. "Information is not reaching the lowest levels."

And that's a problem, because the insurgents are stitching together a newtwork of their own. Using throwaway cellphones and anonymous e-mail accounts, these guerrillas rely on a loose web of connections, not a top-down command structure. And they don't fight in large groups that can be easily tracked by high-tech command posts. They have to be hunted down in dark neighborhoods, found amid thousands of civilians, and taken out one by one.

Also check out the Washington Post's e-Qaeda project, as

More values than you?

I have to agree with George Will on this one:

An aggressively annoying new phrase in America's political lexicon is "values voters." It is used proudly by social conservatives, and carelessly by the media to denote such conservatives.

This phrase diminishes our understanding of politics. It also is arrogant on the part of social conservatives and insulting to everyone else because it implies that only social conservatives vote to advance their values and everyone else votes to . . . well, it is unclear what they supposedly think they are doing with their ballots.

What Will finds "odd" is simply a not-so-new twist on chauvinistic politics: For whatever reason, some people really need to think they are better than others. And a large and powerful network of "values" organizations like Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition function to promote and pander to such sentiments.

Conservatives should be wary of the idea that when they talk about, say, tax cuts and limited government -- about things other than abortion, gay marriage, religion in the public square and similar issues -- they are engaging in values-free discourse. And by ratifying the social conservatives' monopoly of the label "values voters," the media are furthering the fiction that these voters are somehow more morally awake than others.

Sent packing in Pennsylvania

On the startling primary results from Pennsylvania, TommyWonk:

As John Baer writes, "They are the first Pennsylvania legislative leaders to lose a primary election since 1964." These defeats presage trouble for incumbent legislators in November.

In another sign of a shakeup in PA politics, a Democrat won a special election to the state Senate in overwhelmingly Republican Chester County.

The Washington Post on America's brewing anti-incumbency, in PA. and elsewhere.

A Shanghai realignment?

Blogging will continue to be light.

I've written previously a bit on the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, a multi-lateral group of Central Asian nations organized under China and Russias' mutual desire to counter-balance the US's growing presence in the region. It is a young effort -- and I don't think the SCO has much in the way or credibility yet -- but reading two stories this morning really makes clear the cooperative attempt to force a global realignement right now.

AFP reports that the SCO is talking about letting Iran join. Given the West's attempt to turn Iran into a pariah nation, even the discussion of this is a blatant shot across the bow.

Likewise, the New York Times piece on the oil-producers' increasing use of increasingly expensive oil as a political tool, points to the great strategic weakness this country faces.

As energy-rich countries feel empowered by high oil prices, they are increasingly using a blunt instrument to make their influence felt. Call it the power of the pipeline.

He who grows food has far less power than he who supplies the farmer with water. There's the dependency dynamic in a nutshell.

Thus, having a US vice president rail against Russia about energy prices -- even if on Russia's doorstep, is a sign of incredible weakness. And this was the same vice president who equated national security with oil access, when the oil itself is the insecurity.

So just what isn't "lawful"?

Slip-sliding down the slippery slope.

Kevin Drum:

FEDS AND THE PHONES....Say what?

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

....Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

So, you think they bothered getting warrants?