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McCain remains delusional on Iraq
January 31

Straight talk isn't necessarily sane talk. During the debate on Jan. 24, McCain was asked to respond to military leaders who say Iraq is breaking the army. Speaking like a man who remarkably apt at ignoring generals not named "Petraeus", McCain said, "I know of no military leader, including General Petraeus, who says we can't sustain our effort in Iraq." You'd think he'd keep up on this stuff. Gen. George Casey sees danger the army could "break". There's Colin Powell and Barry McCaffrey.

At least McCain is consistent with his position early last year. By "position", I mean being positioned among a whole bunch of soldiers, wearing a bullet proof vest, protected by snipers and helicopters, and walking through the Shorja Market in Baghdad after it had been carefully cleared of anything dangerous. This he portrayed as a demonstration of how safe and normal Baghdad had become. He went shopping with some other pro-occupation congressmen, buying from merchants who would rather not have been there (it's not like there were any actual Iraqis shopping). McCain said, "Never have I been able to drive from the airport, never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today." He probably can't go out like that again, since the market was bombed a few days later.

Obama had a strong point in tonight's debate. Since he always opposed the invasion rather than believing the nonsense that the war resolution didn't mean authorizing an invasion (funny, nobody in Washington was in doubt it was a vote to go to war) and didn't have to be dragged years later into admitting it was a bad idea, he's the stronger candidate to argue against McCain. Against Clinton, McCain (or another Republican) can turn the debate away from questionable judgment and towards whether Clinton wants to "surrender".

Speaking of Obama, he will be coming to Minneapolis for a rally Saturday afternoon. It was announced late last night or early today, and the arena is already out of tickets. That's 20,000 tickets in a few hours. Wow.

A million dead Iraqis
January 31

Forgive me not knowing who first said this, and it's definitely a paraphrase, but the news of a new mortality survey estimating a million Iraqis have died because of Bush's invasion reminds me of it: if you kill one person you're a murderer, but if you one hundred thousand you're a statesman. The Bush administration and punditocracy salesmen are undeniably statesmen. Ten times over apparently. Is there any number of deaths that would make them admit the invasion was a terrible mistake? But don't forget, the surge is working!

Stretching the Dead Polar Bear Award
January 21

I'm stretching the criteria of the Dead Polar Bear Award on this one. It's meant for global warming deniers (sorry, you need to be honest about the evidence to be called a "skeptic"). This time there's no global warming, but there are literal dead polar bears. This award goes to the Interior Department, where the Fish and Wildlife Service is doing everything it can to avoid listing polar bears as a threatened species, while the Minerals Management Service is rushing to open up polar bear habitat for oil and gas development. I guess global warming isn't fast enough, so the bushies want to add habitat destruction too. The lined article quotes Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity saying, "Short of sending Dick Cheney to Alaska to personally club baby polar bears to death, there's not too much that the administration can do that is worse for polar bears than oil and gas development in their habitat." So this award goes to the political appointees at Interior and yes guys, feel free to take it with you when you leave. It looks likely that your successors won't deserve it.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guantánamo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.



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This letter has been read by the acting president and approved as within his definition of national security.