alternative hippopotamus

Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly blogger:

Increasing production mainly means investing more in "frontier oil" and — in the U.S. — drilling in ANWR. As Jared Diamond points out in Collapse, it's perfectly possible to drill for oil in environmentally sensitive ways, and the fact is that Prudhoe Bay has been relatively trouble free for such a large-scale operation.

Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, mayor of the arctic village of Nuiqsut:

"Air pollution is visible over the North Slope in winter as a yellowish haze. Nitrogen oxide emissions from the oil fields are more than twice the total emitted in Washington, D.C. During winter there are many natural gas flares that occur, which caused me to have many busy nights on call responding to community members' complaints about respiratory illnesses. I remember when I began as a health aide there was only one asthmatic patient, and when I quit in 1999 there were 60 people who had to use respiratory medications. There are also increased numbers of thyroid disorders. For this village of more than 400 people, a 600 percent increase in respiratory patients should get some type of response. Our voices are not being heard."

Perhaps, Mayor Ahtuangaruak, the problem is that some people hear just what they want to believe.
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Greg Palast:

Why don't we read more "Watergate" investigative stories in the US press? Given that the Woodwards of today dance on their hind legs begging officialdom for "access", news without official blessing doesn't stand a chance.

The Post follows current American news industry practice of killing any story based on evidence from a confidential source if a government honcho privately denies it. A flat-out "we didn't do it" is enough to kill an investigation in its cradle. And by that rule, there is no chance that the Managing Editor of the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, would today run Deep Throat's story of the Watergate break-in.

The part about access appears to be true, as evidenced by Woodward's love poetry to W in the guise of an account of 9.11. The part that doesn't sound right to me is the part about killing a story based on the denial of a "government honcho" (for some reason I'm picturing Wolfowitz in a sombrero). Wouldn't the Plame leak investigation have been killed? The Bush AWOL story? Abu Ghraib?
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It goes without saying (but, I'll go ahead and say it, anyway) that today's Birth of Deep Throat article is a real page-turner, certainly up there with le Carre's Among Friends.

As we learn from this (Washington Post) Ben Bradlee on-line chat, Woodward didn't just dash this off since Tuesday, it's part of an article that Bradlee and Woodward had agreed on for the future passing of Mark Felt.

Also in the on-line chat was this Q&A:

Las Vegas, Nev.: I watched your Nightline interview with great interest. In explaining how you were all but convinced Nixon was lying, you said, "That national security red flag is -- I've heard it before and I'm just sick of it."

In saying,"I'm just sick of it," it sounded for all the world as though you were about to draw a parallel between Nixon's lies and rationalizations and others you're hearing in 2005.

Your thoughts on this? Thank you.

Ben Bradlee: It's very hard to stand up to the government which is saying that publication will threaten national security. People don't seem to realize that reporters and editors know something about national security and care deeply about it. I spent almost four years on a destroyer in the Pacific ocean during World War II and it makes my blood boil when some guy who maybe ran an insurance company in the Midwest becomes an assistant secretary of this or that and tells me about national security.

It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth. Remember that Nixon's first comment about Watergate claimed that he was going to be unable to answer questions about Watergate because Watergate involved "matters of national security." That was baloney and Nixon knew it, but the charge convinced some people otherwise. Too bad.

I have no idea how many times the Bush administration has played the national security wildcard, but it must lay somewhere in the gap between countably infinite and uncountably infinite. Is winning so important to Republicans that they're willing to overlook that Bush, Cheney, Rove et al may have been just as Nixonian as Nixon in the lead up to the Iraq War? Are they so afraid of the answer that they're not even willing to ask the question?
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This may be the biggest news I've read today (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists):

Without any press conferences, grand announcements, or hyperbolic advertising campaigns, the Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the world's largest publicly owned petroleum companies, has quietly joined the ranks of those who are predicting an impending plateau in non-OPEC oil production. Their report, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, forecasts a peak in just five years.

That's a stark admission. ExxonMobil, like most energy companies had been painting a rosey scenario of virtually infinite resources. Significantly, this is not a situation we can produce our way out of. The article continues (emphasis mine):

With non-OPEC oil production reaching a plateau and frontier resources not viable, ExxonMobil proposes that increased demand be met in two ways. The first is greater fuel efficiency. (That alone should convey the seriousness of this report: When have you ever heard a petroleum company make a plea for vehicles that use less gas?) New cars in the United States are expected to go 38 miles on a gallon of gas in 2030, instead of the current value of 21 miles per gallon. This goal is actually quite modest, as new cars sold in Europe since 2003 already achieve 35 miles per gallon.

The other way ExxonMobil believes demand will be satisfied is from vastly and rapidly increased OPEC production: "After 2010, the call on OPEC increases quickly, requiring OPEC to add more than 1 MBD [million barrels per day] of capacity every year," notes the Outlook. "OPEC's resources are large enough to achieve this rate of expansion, and we expect that investments will be made in a timely manner."

You'll note that the suggested annual expansion is equivalent to the peak capacity of the Arctic reserve, about 1 MBD. Independence from foreign oil, my amphibious derriere.

You may also note that the "Energy Bill" that commander coocoo-bananas keeps talking about does nothing towards making cars more efficient (I might also point out that CAFE standards have been frozen since the Gingrich revolution, the Republic take-over of Congress. I'm not saying there's a cause/effect relationship there, but I'm not saying there isn't either.)
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Josh Marhsall is trying to sort out this mess on Deep Throat:

It's hard to say what significance it all has historically at this point, though it does shed some new light or at least deepens our understanding of the role the Nixon administration's antagonism with the FBI had in bringing Nixon down.

Josh is a really bright guy, and I'm a bit confused why he confounds the Whitehurst Freeway for the Watergate on this one. I'm guessing he's caught up in the history of the moment, and doesn't understand that folks on the right have been looking at Watergate for years as the defining act of the liberal MSM.

Perhaps he doesn't understand that, according to the right, Deep Throat was just a wetdream of Woodward and Bernstein. As long as Deep Throat was potentially fictitious, then one could plausibly deny that Nixon abused the instruments of government.

Confronted with a living, real Deep Throat, who also happens to be a former #2 in the FBI, one has to ask whether abuses of political power are much more common than we'd like to think.
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As this article on the KTUU website points out, the compromise worked out last week makes it more likely that the Arctic Reserve will get drilled:

When a group of moderate senators announced Monday they had reached a deal over the filibustering or blocking of federal judicial nominees, a major fight was averted. Legislative business would not come to a halt, as it could have.

That made a difference for those fighting against and for ANWR development.

“As it relates to ANWR being tied into the budget, I am more optimistic today about it than I was yesterday,” Sen. Murkowski said.

If the Senate continues to avoid the “nuclear option” -- a name given to the deep conflict over judicial nominees -- it's more likely that Congress could pass a final budget measure this year. And that measure could allow ANWR to be drilled in order to raise revenue for the federal government.

Remember that the principle weapon used by pro-drilling Republicans is the budget in that a filibuster is not possible.

I thought it was interesting that the author of this piece didn't even bother to cloud the issue with false claims that it will lower gas prices, make us less dependent on foreign oil, or any of the other claptrap that the White House uses.

It's about money.
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... played by Hal Holbrook in All the President's Men. Who it could be said superficially resembles Mark Felt.


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Taken at a memorial statue near the Vietnam Wall, Memorial Day.
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This article in the Washington Post describes a Brave New World in dating: on-line reviews of how the date went.

Browsing around a bit on truedater.com I ran across this gem:

I never got to meet this guy in person, but I pity any poor soul who would suffer to actually spend time with him. Never have I encountered anyone as pompous, conceited, or self-righteous... and now I can add spiteful and vengeful to that list. While he may claim to be intelligent, in point of fact, his knowledge is broad, yet shallow. While he may claim to be religious, there is not a drop of Christian compassion to be found in him. He is a poster-child for prejudice and spite. He obviously has no alternative than to spend his "precious" time tarnishing the reputation and integrity of people he has never met. Quite pathetic

You'll note that the reviewer had not actually met the umh... victim of this review.

It's a great comic premise at any rate. Imagine two people on a first date armed with each others entire dating history. Oh, and when I say comic, I mean it in the most Kafkaesque sense.
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Along with "catching up" on the news I'm finally getting around to reading Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command.

You might have assumed that the November election made this and other books of their ilk, passe. To which I respectfully respond: au contraire.

As it turns out, the Downing St. Memo and the report of pre-war bombing (Times of London) makes a second pass at this material that much more relevant.

One of the things that was never clear to me was the hubub over the passage in the 2003 SOU concerning whether Sadam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, and in particular the reaction against Joe Wilson. Why go the politically risky route of exposing a CIA operative in retaliation for exposing the weakness of that assertion? To me that would be like destroying a wildlife reservation so you can take your SUV on a roadtrip.

Okay, bad example. And, certainly, the Bush administration has never been accused of under-reacting on anything. Except of course for the PDB about Bin Laden attacking a month before he attacked. Okay, so you need to pick your examples carefully.

The point is, it wasn't just the SOU as we learn from this passage in Chain of Command:

Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foeign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq's attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, initially denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger when my story appeared, in March 2003. I learned later that an internal Senate investigation was launched to identify my source.)

The same bogus Niger-uranium story was used to make the case to the Senate, and if I'm reading Hersh right, was a key piece of evidence to get them to authorize the war. That would at least explain why the reaction to What I Didn't Find in Africa was so strong.
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I'm still trying to read through blogs and news and stuff like that, in a hopeless attempt to get "caught up." One of the things I'm trying to figure out is how the Bush apologists are going to get around the question of what BushCo knew and when did they know it vis a vis the decision to invade Iraq.

The more I reflect on what drives the Bush machine the more I come around to those two magic words: propaganda and disinformation. What the right has been persistently effective at is using these tools to confound issue after issue. See Rather, Dan for more details.

More to the point, there's a new bit of corporate speak that all the kool kids have picked up on: FUD. While the acronym is etymologically unrelated to FUBAR, the inference is understandable. No, FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Poking around a bit I found this explanation:

F.U.D. stands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. It is a marketing technique used when a competitor launches a product that is both better than yours and costs less, i.e. your product is no longer competitive. [ed: hard not to think of the 2004 election, eh?] Unable to respond with hard facts, scare-mongering is used via 'gossip channels' to cast a shadow of doubt over the competitors offerings and make people think twice before using it.

In general it is used by companies with a large market share, and the overall message is 'Hey, it could be risky going down that road, stick with us and you are with the crowd. Our next soon-to-be-released version will be better than that anyway'.

In the computer world, FUD was first practiced on a large scale by IBM in the 1970's. Many people cite Amdahl as coining the phrase when he left IBM to start his own company thus making himself a FUD target.

When IBM moved into the desktop market with the launch of the IBM PC, it took FUD tactics along with it. IBM themselves only reckoned on selling around 100 to 200 thousand units of the PC, which were to be sold as an alternative to the APPLE II in 'all IBM' companies. It should be remembered that in many respects the IBM PC was an overpriced and retrograde step for the desktop market which had already reached the level of 16 bit multi-user, multi-tasking machines with a good deal of flexibility and inter-operability of hardware. The IBM PC had non of these characteristics and cost more, but by marketing on the strength of the IBM label (stick with us, we are big), the PC exceeded all expectations and killed off the existing market.

While the technique traditionally refers to one brand over another, say for instance Bush vs. Kerry, it can also be applied to a Go/No Go decision, for instance, Iraq. The line of reasoning for this case would be: the Republicans are strong on security and good to the military (as opposed to the anti-war crowd who are unpatriotic) so stay with me on this.

Was Iraq sold on the basis of FUD? I would say yes. I'm certainly watching the right-wing blogs, FOX news, the Washington Times, etc., to see if they come up with a FUDish campaign to get their Boy George out of this mess. And, yes, when 50% of people polled (Gallop) say they believe Bush misled on the issue of the Iraq invasion, I'd call that a mess.
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