Wag the Dog

To my knowledge, no one in the White House press corps has asked about this recently disclosed memo by Tony Blair's top foreign policy adviser - and they really should:

Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says - New York Times: "...The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was 'unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.' Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein."

Pooper Scooper For Your Car

I can't say what led me to this web page today, but I decided to go ahead and do it. If you drive, and are worried about climate change, consider offsetting your carbon dioxide emissions with TerraPass or a similar service (Google "carbon offsets" and you'll find a handful very quickly).

TerraPass is less expensive than you might think ($30 for 10,000 miles with my Corolla), they have a third-party NGO verify that they use the money to offset your emissions by buying up carbon emissions permits and sponsoring wind energy projects, and on top of it all they give you an attractive decal to display proudly on your vehicle.

Should Scalia Recuse Himself From Gitmo Case? - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com

A little prelude here: once upon a time not so long ago, when John Roberts and Sam Alito came before Congress to be confirmed as Justices of the Supreme Court, GOP Congressmen and pro-GOP pundits fiercely contended that these nominees had a duty to withhold all but the most bland statements of their judicial philosophies. Any Democrat who dared to ask the nominees' opinions on any topic more recent or more controversial than Brown v. Board of Education, was blasted for violating the nominees' responsibility to maintain a studied indifference as to all questions that might come before them in court. Anything else was to "politicize" the nomination process.

That said, I await with bated breath the reaction of conservative commentators to Justice Antonin Scalia's comments in Europe a few weeks ago, as reported in Newsweek:

Should Scalia Recuse Himself From Gitmo Case? - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com: "April 3, 2006 issue - The Supreme Court this week will hear arguments in a big case: whether to allow the Bush administration to try Guant�namo detainees in special military tribunals with limited rights for the accused. But Justice Antonin Scalia has already spoken his mind about some of the issues in the matter. During an unpublicized March 8 talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions, adding he was 'astounded' at the 'hypocritical' reaction in Europe to Gitmo. 'War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts,' he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by NEWSWEEK. 'Give me a break.' Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don't have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: 'If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy.' Scalia was apparently referring to his son Matthew, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Scalia did say, though, that he was concerned 'there may be no end to this war.'"

My, it almost sounds like Scalia is prejudging the Hamdan case set for hearings tomorrow, doesn't it? Surely it's inappropriate for a Supreme Court justice to do such a thing. What about the famous neutrality of our courts? George Will, any thoughts?

Just to clarify my own thoughts on this: I thought at the time and still think that the nomination kabuki is bogus. After all, conservatives like to remind us all the time that judges are unelected, unaccountable, and fundamentally countermajoritarian. Their appearance before the Senate as nominees is virtually the only "accountability moment" the public will ever get for a public servant who may sit on the bench for 15, 20, or 30 years. While I certainly agree that no nominee should express a specific opinion on a specific issue likely to come before the court, more general questions that seek to reveal how these justices approach constitutional interpretation, and apply that approach to past and present cases, seem entirely appropriate to me. We all know that justices have opinions and should know by now that judging - especially on constitutional questions - is nowhere near the scientific or value-free process that conservatives make it out to be. The nomination process, it seems to me, should not be merely a check to make sure that the nominee has a law degree and a pulse, but also a way to screen out justices whose values lie far outside the mainstream.

That said, being a nominee is different from being a sitting justice of the Court. And any judge - and especially a justice of the highest court in the land - should seek to at least maintain the appearance of objectivity and neutrality and open-mindedness outside the courtroom, for the sake of the integrity of the institution if not for the sake of justice. While he doesn't mention Hamdan as far as we know, Scalia ventures awfully close here to prejudging the case. It's the kind of statement that might make a normal judge recuse himself. Yet somehow I don't think we'll see that happen. And somehow I doubt we'll hear any conservatice criticism, though I will be happy to be corrected on this point.

Next on Jon Stewart

So, according to the NYT, someone has got a hold of an authentic copy of the list of demands that the Vice President hands out to hotels when he's traveling in the US. I'll bet a bottle of Perrier (or Calistoga, if you prefer) that this shows up on the next edition of "The Daily Show.":

Cheney's Needs on the Road: What, no NPR? - New York Times: "The document listed 13 requirements. Among them were these: All televisions sets in Mr. Cheney's hotel suite should be tuned to Fox News, all lights should be on, and the thermostat set at 68 degrees. Mr. Cheney should have a queen- or king-size bed, a desk with a chair, a private bathroom, a container for ice, a microwave oven and a coffee pot, with decaf brewed before arrival.

The vice president should also have four cans of caffeine-free Diet Sprite and four to six bottles of water. He must have the hotel restaurant menu, with a copy faxed ahead to his advance office. If his wife is with him, she should have two bottles of sparkling water, either Calistoga or Perrier.

For his reading material, Mr. Cheney should have The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and the local newspaper."

For a public employee, Cheney sure is picky, ain't he? Must have picked that up while he was CEO of Halliburton. Gotta love the TV's tuned to Faux News. Wouldn't want to stumble across any unpleasant real news (or heaven forbid, "Big Love") while trying to find Fox, now would we? And what's the deal with the "Caffeine Free" Sprite? I thought Sprite is naturally caffeine free?

UPDATE: And, I am right on the mark: a friend today pointed me to the video clip from last night where he rips into Cheney's FOX preference.

The Future is Here

See it here. It's been a long time coming, it's crude and still in its infancy. Broadband access will have to become faster, more reliable, and more universal before it really takes off. But within 2-3 years, maybe we won't need expensive licenses for office software anymore. The question is, how will Microsoft squelch or deter this?

Tales From Bizarro Land

So, the Washington Post today reports on a conservative seminar at the CATO Institute in which Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan let loose on the Bush Administration for everything from economic policy to the war in Iraq to the expansion of executive power to the treatment of detainees. The White House, naturally, refused to send anyone to rebut their charges - which the Washington Post somehow regards as surprising. This administration never engages any of its critics head on in an uncontrolled setting, and in any case, it's tiresome to defend the indefensible.

All by way of getting to my point, which is that -- bizarrely -- Fred Singer was the only Bush defender who spoke up at the seminar:

At Conservative Forum on Bush, Everybody's a Critic: "The only man who came close to defending Bush, environmental conservative Fred Singer, said he was 'willing to overlook' the faults because of the president's Supreme Court nominations."

Fred Singer, who the WaPo describes as a "environmental conservative" but is more precisely described as an atmospheric physicist who is skeptical of climate change, said that he would "overlook" all of Bush's mistakes just for his Supreme Court nominations. Reactions:

1) Why didn't he take the opportunity to mention what he must see as the inherent wisdom of Bush's inaction on climate change?

2) What makes him so fixated on the courts that he believes Sam Alito and John Roberts somehow compensate for all the other atrocities this administration has committed?

Fred Singer is really a very sad and curious little man. I saw him speak on his climate change research at Oxford in 2005, and found him singularly unimpressive and unconvincing. He spent his entire lecture smugly showing us slides with data that were at least a decade old - bringing up all the familiar straw men such as the inconsistency of satellite measurements, of older measurements of ocean temperatures, etc. as if no one else had thought of this and no corrections for those data errors were possible. Afterwards some of the climate scientists present began questioning him about newer findings, and rebutting his assertions about their models (for example, he claimed that hemispheric climate models were being run with different sets of parameter values, and that he would only be convinced by global air ocean models that ran with uniform parameters, only to be told that the Oxford group had already done that and come up with the same conclusions). He responded, and I am not making this up, by pretending he couldn't hear the questions or lamely refusing to address the merits because he hadn't read their papers. And remember, this is a leading climate skeptic and a supposedly eminent physicist.

But, if there's one thing to be said for Fred Singer, it's that he's not afraid to bowl alone. Not on climate science, and not in his defense of the worst administration in history.