Live Earth — the concerts, the concept

Despite naysayers, Live Earth will be happening tomorrow, so check listings or go to Google to get some info. There is no question, now, that we’re in the grip of climate change … fuss about Gore as a candidate or schlepping disinformation for political traction be damned; the naysayers will go the way of the brontosaurus. Let’s just hope we don’t.

Here’s a note from Al, and a place to sign the pledge to participate in environmental activities; after that, articles and links for more green reads and justification for Gore and those who support him.

By the way, it’s the Decider’s birthday, and evidently he’s showing the wear, these days — I’ve thought so, lately, from snips on TV. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to be Prez, anyhow — they’re all sucked dry by the end of their terms.

Oh — and as regards the snip on endangered species, I saw a couple of eagles overhead the other day, scouting the lakefront for dinner, I’d suppose. Amazing creatures, but extraordinary predators for sure — and I can’t help but wonder … because I think symbolism counts in shaping consciousness … what direction the US of A might have taken if Ben Franklin’s pitch for the turkey [in the wild, these are hardy, smart and peaceful critters] had won popularity as the symbol for the country, instead of the eagle. But from a totem point of view, eagle is the blending of both dark and light power — balance counts — and they’re something to see, wheeling above you with that mighty wingspan.

Jude

From Al Gore:
http://www.algore.com

Live Earth is tomorrow and even if you’re not coming to one of the concerts, there’s still a way for you to be a part of this historic event. Right now there are thousands of Live Earth parties taking place in 129 countries. (It’s pretty unbelievable, actually.)

From the beginning, you have been the driving force behind our work here at AlGore.com. That’s why it’s so vital that as many AlGore.com members as possible attend these parties.

So don’t miss this incredible event — sign up to attend a Live Earth party near you by visiting:
http://friendsofliveearth.com/page/event/search_simple

Just as important as attending a Live Earth Party is making sure that you sign the Live Earth Pledge. It’s through this document that we will show our leaders how united we are behind solving the climate crisis.

Sign the Live Earth Pledge by visiting:
http://liveearthpledge.org/algore.php

Thank you,

Al Gore ++

Gore Slams US-Led Climate Pact as Sham
Truthout

Could This Be the Global-Warming Generation?
Live Earth concerts in eight countries hope to inspire action. Will it work?
Peter Ford, The Christian Science Monitor
Thursday 05 July 2007

Beijing - It’s billed as the biggest show on earth: eight pop music concerts spanning 15 time zones and an expected TV, radio, and Internet audience of 2 billion people.

The “Live Earth” shows that start Saturday in Australia are meant to be more than a planetary party. Event founder Al Gore hopes they will kick-start a global civic crusade to combat climate change and to inspire individuals everywhere to do their part.

Will the event mark the debut of a “Global Warming Generation” - a significant shift in attitudes and behavior? Or will it simply be a fun, musical follow-up to Mr. Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that resonates little beyond the current advocates?

Reporting from eight countries indicates that today the issue is most relevant to residents of the US and Europe. But in the developing countries where the concerts are being held, such as China, South Africa, and Brazil, few citizens appear to see global warming as a pressing personal problem. In Turkey, the concert was canceled because it couldn’t get enough local support.

No matter, say organizers. “These concerts are a way to engage individuals who have not been engaged before,” says Andrea Robinson, in charge of gathering support from nongovernmental organizations worldwide for the event. “Music can have a definitive effect on a culture at a particular moment.”

In industrialized nations, where more people say they are worried by climate change, surveys indicate that not many of them are yet doing much about it in their daily lives.

Eighty-eight percent of Americans believe individual actions can have a positive impact on climate change, according to a poll carried out in anticipation of the “Live Earth” concerts, and 51 percent of those who had heard about the event expected it would inspire them to do more.

Using music by the likes of Ludacris and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to attract young people’s attention, “Live Earth” aims “to have people make changes in their own lives,” says Yusef Robb, global coordinator for the concerts. “When people change, corporations and leaders follow.”

Critics, such as Roger Daltrey, former lead singer for “The Who,” and Bob Geldof, the original global-gig guru, have said that the last thing the world’s climate needs is a yeti-sized carbon footprint left by rock stars jetting to venues that will tap megawatts of electricity for lighting and sound systems.

“Live Earth” planners counter that they have deployed “sustainability engineers” at all the venues to make them as green as possible, from using recycled toilet paper to LED lights. And they say that hundreds of millions of people are not aware enough of global warming’s threat.

Certainly the Turks do not appear overly concerned. Plans for a concert in Istanbul had to be scratched because “nobody is interested,” complained Cengizhan Yeldan, the frustrated promoter.

In China, No. 13 on Green Issues List

In China, which is about to overtake the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, climate change came 13th on a list of 14 environmental concerns in an opinion poll last year, way behind food safety and air pollution. “The sense of urgency is still not so big as in other countries,” says Ma Jun, head of the Institute for Environmental and Public Affairs, a Beijing think tank, “because here air and water pollution threaten people’s health directly every day.”

When Hu Xin, an environmentalist, returned home recently from studying in Sweden to take the helm of “Global Village,” a prominent NGO in Beijing, he says he found “hardly anybody (on the staff) who knew enough about climate change to conduct change-related projects.”

In South Africa, host to the Johannesburg concert, a poll late last year found that nearly half the respondents did not think global warming would affect them personally. “When you come from a place where people are looking for their next meal,” says Kushmika Singh, a student of Environmental Sciences at Witwatersrand University, “you might not care what is going to happen to the environment in 50 years.”

In Rio de Janeiro, organizers hope 1 million people will show up for a concert on Copacabana beach starring Lenny Kravitz. If so, it’s likely to be the music, not the cause, that draws. When Greenpeace staged a bicycle ride through the city this past Sunday to draw attention to global warming, only a few hundred people turned out.

Many around the world appear to feel that climate change is so large a problem there is nothing they themselves can do about it. “Individuals can take action by pressuring their government to do something, but I don’t think my turning off the lights or driving less will do anything,” says Fang Jie, a 27-year-old in Shanghai, China, who has bought a ticket for the concert there.

Ursula Wolsoncraft, a 28-year-old project administrator in Sydney, says she encounters a similar attitude among her generation of Australians. “They feel climate change is such a big problem they have no control over it,” she explains.

That is where “Live Earth” hopes to make a difference, says Ms. Robinson. “People feel powerless,” she acknowledges. “They wonder what they can do about a melting glacier. Part of “Live Earth” is to tell them, ‘Hey, there is something you can do.’”

Bring Your Own Chopsticks

Concertgoers and TV viewers will be shown video clips and public service messages proposing scores of practical tips for cutting CO2 emissions, from turning off their computers at night in America to bringing their own chopsticks to restaurants in China, so as not to use the disposable wooden ones provided and thus save millions of trees.

In Fukuoka, Japan, English major Yuko Araki says she expects young Japanese to pay more attention to musicians than to politicians discredited by a string of scandals. “If popular artists send some message about environmental problems to young people they are sure to listen,” she says.

How much they - and their peers in other industrial countries - will actually do, however, is unclear. A poll published Tuesday in Britain found that though 68 percent of respondents believe we are seeing climate change, 37 percent admitted to doing nothing at all about it.

“Most people seem to accept climate change but don’t buy into it enough to translate into action,” says Phil Downing, head of environmental research at IPSOS Mori, which conducted the poll. And though young people “seem to be the most concerned about climate change,” he adds, “paradoxically they are the most likely to engage in behavior that’s environmentally destructive like flying, buying plasma screens and fast cars.”

While US high school students may not be indulging in such pastimes yet, they do not seem to care much about global warming. A poll last November by Hamilton College found that only 28 percent of American high school students think it is very likely that climate change will affect them personally in the future.

Generation Y: Seeks Green Employer

Their older brothers and sisters, however, think differently. “Generation Y is getting fired up about global warming,” says Jeff Angel, director of the Total Environment Centre, a green advocacy group in Sydney. “There’s a lot of evidence in Australia to show that young people look for employers with the right environmental credentials.”

In America, too, “there has been an absolute explosion among young people whose main concerns are related to the environment,” says James Pittman, who teaches Environmental Studies at Prescott College in Arizona. “They are concerned about their future and it is really starting to sink in.”

Global warming “is the defining challenge of our generation,” proclaims Billy Parish, a 25-year-old who dropped out of Yale to found Energy Action, a coalition of US universities and students seeking to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. “The window of time … we have to solve this problem is a narrow one.”

“Live Earth” is seeking to capitalize on that sort of attitude. “Today’s generation has a decision to make, it has a choice,” says John Hanawa, who works at the Beijing office of the UN Development Program, which is helping to organize the Shanghai concert. “That’s why we have these events … to get traction with young people.”

If the strategy is not working so well in Rio, where “there has not been one article in the Brazilian press about the cause of the show, about global warming,” complains environmental activist Sergio Ricardo, the sky is a little brighter elsewhere.

In China, for example, climate change has become a “hot topic” among young people in the past few months, says Mr. Hu, now that the government has begun to tackle the subject more frankly and opened it for public debate. “It is almost like trying to be green is some sort of fashion,” adds Mr. Ma.

In South Africa, where young people have been at the forefront of protests to win better public services in the townships and for new government policies on HIV/AIDS, global warming could be the next big youth cause, says John Langford who is organizing the Johannesburg concert.

“While “Live Earth” might be another step in a long-running campaign against global warming in the US and Europe, here it could be the launch of a broad social movement,” Mr. Langford predicts. ++

Written and reported by Peter Ford in Beijing. Reported by Nick Squires in Sydney, Takehiko Kambayashi in Tokyo, Jude Blanchette in Shanghai, China, Stephanie Hanes in Johannesburg, South Africa, Yigal Schleifer in Istanbul, Turkey, Mark Rice-Oxley in London, Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro, and Tony Azios in Boston.

Climate S.O.S.
7/6/07
Center for American Progress Action Fund

[open for links]

This summer’s concert season is about more than just impressive displays of live music. It will also push individuals, corporations, and governments to address global warming. This Saturday, Al Gore’s Live Earth, the biggest concert in history, will last twenty-four hours on all seven continents and feature more than 100 music artists such as Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West. Gore will kick off the event Saturday morning with a 10 a.m. concert in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. “The Live Earth concerts represent an unprecedented opportunity to ask for the world’s attention long enough to deliver an S.O.S. and then to begin delivering information about the solutions to every single person,” said Gore. This year “is on track to be the second warmest since records began in the 1860s,” and unless global carbon dioxide emissions fall at least 60 to 80 percent by 2050, the planet will heat up more than two degrees Celsius. Increasingly, people worldwide view climate change as the greatest threat facing the earth. Yet just like it did before the Iraq war, the Bush administration is waging an assault on reason, manipulating the facts and “staying the course” on a policy of environmental destruction. Sign the Live Earth Pledge and demand that your country cut global warming pollution by 90 percent by 2050.

HEADING TOWARD CATASTROPHE: In Aug. 2001, President Bush ignored the dire warning, “Bin Laden determined to strike inside the US.” Four days after Hurricane Katrina, Bush claimed, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” in New Orleans. But evidence shows that he and his administration were warned repeatedly about that possibility. The same thing is currently happening with climate change. As Gore writes in Assault on Reason (pp. 208-9), “Now, the scientific community is warning us of the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization. … The president says he is not sure humans are responsible for the threat of global warming. … He tells us that he believes the science of global warming is in dispute. This is the same president who said after the devastation of New Orleans, ‘Nobody could have predicted that the levees would break.’” Just as his administration relied on Ahmed Chalabi for flawed intelligence about the Iraq invasion, Bush has now turned to ExxonMobil for policies on global warming that will benefit no one but the oil industry. Most recently at the G-8 summit in May, the United States rejected German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s global pact on carbon emissions, which would have reduced global emissions “50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.” But instead of mandatory emission reductions, Bush pushed for “aspirational goals.” “Countries would work independently for the next ‘ten to twenty years’ to develop strategies to ‘improve energy security, reduce air pollution and also reduce greenhouse gases.’”

CHENEY’S MANIPULATION: On global warming, as on the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s policy outcomes have been “predetermined, in spite of the voluminous evidence that it would lead to catastrophe.” New reports show that Vice President Cheney took “full advantage of the president’s cluelessness” on climate change and dominated the policies. On Sept. 29, 2000, Bush pledged, “We will require all power plants to meet clean-air standards in order to reduce emissions of…carbon dioxide within a reasonable period of time.” In February and March 2001, then Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman urged the White House to take steps to combat global warming, but she was overruled. Instead, Cheney armed the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) with industry heavyweights. Thereafter, “a CEQ memo concluded Bush’s promise to regulate CO2 ‘did not fully reflect the president’s position’ and that ‘it would be premature at this time to propose any specific policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming.’” The authors of the memo stated that “the current state of scientific knowledge about causes of and solutions to global warming is inconclusive.” CEQ chief of staff Philip Cooney, who worked for the oil industry before joining the White House and then joined Exxon in 2005, repeatedly censored government reports to play down the links between global warming and human activities. In March, Cooney admitted to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, “My objective was to align these communications with the administration’s stated policy” of climate skepticism. Evidence also shows that the Vice President’s office was in regular contact with CEQ. Kevin O’Donovan, an aide in Cheney’s office, wrote a memo to Cooney suggesting they try to “reinvigorate debate on the actual climate history of the past thousand years.”

LIVE EARTH: The ten Live Earth concerts will be broadcast to 2 billion people in more than 100 countries. Even Antarctica will have a performance by the indie rock band Nunatak, which is “made up of five scientists aged 22 to 28 who are stationed on the generally unpopulated continent.” Recognizing that large concerts often have damaging environmental footprints, the organizers of Live Earth are striving to make the events as ecofriendly as possible. Each artist has been given “a ‘Green Handbook’ of touring tips, such as where to get biodiesel for their trucks and how to offset carbon emissions.” Electricity to power the concerts will come from renewable energy sources, and greenhouse gases from the “stars’ jets or by the audience’s travel will be offset by investments in renewable energy and by safeguarding forests. Concert props may live on long after stars such as Madonna, Shakira and Bon Jovi have left the stage — old tires and oil drums used in the New York set will be re-used while some concert signs in Johannesburg will be used as roofing.” The seven-point Live Earth Pledge asks individuals to demand that their countries “join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide.” It also “asks people to cut their own pollution, to make their homes, business, schools and transport more energy efficient, and to plant new trees and preserve forests.” “We have to get all nations involved, but in order to accomplish that we have to bring about a sea change in public opinion,” said Gore. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) both signed the pledge in June.

ENVIRONMENT — BUSH GUTS WETLAND PROTECTION POLICIES AFTER HEAVY INDUSTRY LOBBYING: In 2004, President Bush announced that “[i]nstead of just limiting our losses, we will expand the wetlands of America,” proposing to “create one million acres of wetlands and restore another million damaged by development” by the end of the decade. Wetlands are a crucial part of America’s ecosystems, providing biological hubs for “an immense variety of species of microbes, plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish, and mammals.” But the New York Times reports today that Bush has reneged on that promise after “a concerted lobbying effort by property developers.” In particular, the administration is scaling back guidelines for enforcing a 2006 Supreme Court decision that would have brought thousands of small streams and wetlands under the protection of the Clean Air Act of 1972. “But just before the new guidelines were to be issued last September, they were pulled back in the face of objections from lobbyists and lawyers for groups concerned that the rules could lead to federal protection of isolated and insignificant swamps.” Last month, the administration again issued new guidelines, “which environmental and recreational groups said were much more narrowly drawn.” Environmental groups have long been concerned about Bush’s wetland policies. In 2005, the Sierra Club noted that the administration was pursuing policies preventing “massive numbers of wetlands from protection under the Clean Water Act.” Today, it notes a worsening trend: “There are definitely waters that will not be protected because of this latest guidance. … The final guidance is clearly weaker than what we saw in the September guidance,” said Navis Bermudez of the Sierra Club.

“GLOBAL WARNING is radically changing the face of Mount Everest, the sons of the men who first reached its summit 54 years ago said.” The sons of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay say “their fathers would no longer recognise the world’s highest mountain,” noting the base camp is now 132 feet lower than it was 53 years ago.

TRIPLE-DIGIT temperatures are expected to set records in parts of the West. Forecasters predicted a high of 107 in Boise, ID, and 125 in Baker, CA. Residents in some states were warned “that outdoor activities could be dangerous except during the cooler early morning hours.”

“THE BALD EAGLE may be soaring back from near-extinction, but hundreds of other imperiled species are foundering, as the federal agency charged with protecting them has sunk into legal, bureaucratic and political turmoil.”

NEARLY HALF of the National Hurricane Center’s employees urged the Bush administration to replace their boss. “The staff of the National Hurricane Center would like nothing more than to return its focus to its primary mission of protecting life and property from hazardous tropical weather,” they wrote, “and leave the political arena it now finds itself in.”

“AN EXODUS of highly trained mid- and upper-level firefighters” from the U.S. Forest Service has left “swaths” of flammable national forests protected by little more than luck. “On any given day, about 40 of 271 U.S. Forest Service engines remain in firehouses rather than on patrol, idled by a shortage of supervisors.” ++

How We Can Survive the Age of Energy Anxiety
Peter Teague, Jeff Navin, The American Prospect via Alternet
July 3, 2007
There is a way to attract a sustainable majority of Americans who will enact, and then defend, comprehensive policies to solve the climate crisis.

Union Heavy Embraces Green Energy as Crucial Vision for the Future
Joan Hamilton, Sierra Magazine via Alternet
July 6, 2007
A new alliance is forming between the labor and environmental movements, beginning with United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment July 6th, 2007

[almost] Federal Inmate No. 28301-016 — the reads

Big Dog commentary, save it for the weekend if you like — Krugman, Scheer, Blumenthal, Swanson, Pitt, more.

Jude

Sacrifice Is for Suckers
Paul Krugman, Welcome to Pottersville
Friday, July 06, 2007

On this Fourth of July, President Bush compared the Iraq war to the Revolutionary War, and called for “more patience, more courage and more sacrifice.” Unfortunately, it seems that nobody asked the obvious question: “What sacrifices have you and your friends made, Mr. President?”

On second thought, there would be no point in asking that question. In Mr. Bush’s world, only the little people make sacrifices.

You see, the Iraq war, although Mr. Bush insists that it’s part of a Global War on Terrorâ„¢, a fight to the death between good and evil, isn’t like America’s other great wars — wars in which the wealthy shared the financial burden through higher taxes and many members of the elite fought for their country.

This time around, Mr. Bush celebrated Mission Accomplished by cutting tax rates on dividends and capital gains, while handing out huge no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations. And in the four years since, as the insurgency Mr. Bush initially taunted with the cry of “Bring them on” has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and left thousands more grievously wounded, the children of the elite — especially the Republican elite — have been conspicuously absent from the battlefield.

The Bushies, it seems, like starting fights, but they don’t believe in paying any of the cost of those fights or bearing any of the risks. Above all, they don’t believe that they or their friends should face any personal or professional penalties for trivial sins like distorting intelligence to get America into an unnecessary war, or totally botching that war’s execution.

The Web site Think Progress has a summary of what happened to the men behind the war after we didn’t find W.M.D., and weren’t welcomed as liberators: “The architects of war: Where are they now?” To read that summary is to be awed by the comprehensiveness and generosity of the neocon welfare system. Even Paul Wolfowitz, who managed the rare feat of messing up not one but two high-level jobs, has found refuge at the American Enterprise Institute.

Which brings us to the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr.

The hysteria of the neocons over the prospect that Mr. Libby might actually do time for committing perjury was a sight to behold. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “Fallen Soldier,” Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University cited the soldier’s creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” He went on to declare that “Scooter Libby was a soldier in your — our — war in Iraq.”

Ah, yes. Shuffling papers in an air-conditioned Washington office is exactly like putting your life on the line in Anbar or Baghdad. Spending 30 months in a minimum-security prison, with a comfortable think-tank job waiting at the other end, is exactly like having half your face or both your legs blown off by an I.E.D.

What lay behind the hysteria, of course, was the prospect that for the very first time one of the people who tricked America into war, then endangered national security yet again in the effort to cover their tracks, might pay some price. But Mr. Ajami needn’t have worried.

Back when the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity began, Mr. Bush insisted that if anyone in his administration had violated the law, “that person will be taken care of.” Now we know what he meant. Mr. Bush hasn’t challenged the verdict in the Libby case, and other people convicted of similar offenses have spent substantial periods of time in prison. But Mr. Libby goes free.

Oh, and don’t fret about the fact that Mr. Libby still had to pay a fine. Does anyone doubt that his friends will find a way to pick up the tab?

Mr. Bush says that Mr. Libby’s punishment remains “harsh” because his reputation is “forever damaged.” Meanwhile, Mr. Bush employs, as a deputy national security adviser, none other than Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to unlawfully withholding information from Congress in the Iran-contra affair. Mr. Abrams was one of six Iran-contra defendants pardoned by Mr. Bush’s father, who was himself a subject of the special prosecutor’s investigation of the scandal.

In other words, obstruction of justice when it gets too close to home is a family tradition. And being a loyal Bushie means never having to say you’re sorry.

Independence Day for Libby
Robert Scheer, TruthDig
Jul 3, 2007

Whatever happened to “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” which allows tough-love conservatives to cheerfully sentence petty criminals to incarceration? Suddenly, no prison time for perjury and obstruction of justice is termed by this president to be a “harsh” penalty, because I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby will suffer enough with his reputation “forever damaged.” Poor baby.

We will see just how damaged his reputation is as Libby comes to be celebrated on the right-wing lecture circuit with fees that will easily cover his wrist-slap of a fine. Can agents with the promise of an Ollie-North-style talk show be far behind? Once again, we have an example of politicians championing the slogans of law and order—until the criminal is one of their own, at which point they suddenly become bleeding-heart liberals eager to ease the pain of the misjudged underdog. Blame the victim for Libby’s troubles; it was that outed CIA agent, Valerie Plame, who made him do it. Who told her to be married to a guy who dared to publicly criticize Libby’s boss?

That’s the easiest explanation for President Bush’s commutation of the Libby sentence, but there is an even more odious possible cause for the president cutting loose his friend, the felon, hours after a unanimous appeals court panel ordered Libby to start serving his 30-month sentence. It’s that old chestnut of honor among thieves: They didn’t want Libby to have any incentive to squeal on higher-ups. Libby was never more than the fall guy whose usefulness to the prosecutor was that he was a lower-level scoundrel in a position to turn in his White House superiors.

The obstruction-of-justice and perjury charges of which Libby was convicted do not involve some minor technicality or even a non-crime as alleged by Mitt Romney: “I believe that the circumstances of this case, where the prosecutors knew that there had not been a crime committed, created a setting where a decision of this nature [Bush’s decision] was reasonable.” How odd that a leading Republican presidential candidate doesn’t consider perjury and obstruction of justice to be crimes. But what he probably had in mind was the original focus of the investigation: to determine if government officials had participated in the outing of Plame as a means of discrediting her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had dared to criticize Bush’s now totally discredited reasons for invading Iraq.

Precisely because prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was stonewalled in his investigation by Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice, we have no way of knowing whether that more serious crime was committed. Romney and others who are apologizing for the administration are in the position of accepting the word of a convicted perjurer as to the intent of his conversations with reporters and his insistence that his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, was not involved in his shenanigans.

It is, however, inconceivable, from everything we have learned of Cheney’s operating style, that his chief of staff ever did anything, other than order lunch, without consulting with the vice president. That certainly goes for the nefarious activities that got Libby in trouble with the law in this instance. We do know, from a solid body of published insider memoirs, that Cheney was the key figure within the administration in pushing the Iraq invasion, and that he remains determined to this day to deny that there was any tampering with intelligence data in making his case for war.

We also know that it was Cheney, more than anyone else in the White House inner circle, who sought to counter criticism of the president, and that he was outraged that Wilson had gone public with his criticisms when Cheney and others in the administration continued to knowingly disseminate false information. That was the case concerning the bogus Niger yellow cake uranium acquisition by Iraq which the CIA had dispatched Wilson to investigate and which he, along with others, easily discounted.

Cheney certainly had a motive for wanting to destroy Wilson’s credibility, which was the purpose of those leaked stories suggesting that Wilson—who had previously been honored by President George H.W. Bush for standing up to Saddam Hussein before the 1991 Gulf War—had gone to Niger on a joyful junket, and that his subsequent critique of the administration’s perfidy was politically motivated.

What was politically motivated was the outrageous behavior of the vice president’s chief of staff in the denigration of a dedicated civil servant and the president’s rewarding that convicted liar with a commutation of sentence, effectively ending the pressure on Libby to ‘fess up.

Bush and Cheney walk, too
Even as the president confesses that Scooter Libby engaged in a cover-up — after all, that was the verdict — he completes the ultimate obstruction of justice in the Plame affair.
Sidney Blumenthal, Salon
July 3, 2007

In the Plame case, as in nearly every matter, Vice President Dick Cheney controlled and directed the flow of information that shaped the decision making of President George W. Bush. When Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, published “Missing in Action: Truth,” on May 6, 2003, referring to but not mentioning by name former Ambassador Joseph Wilson as one who conducted a mission to Niger, where he found no evidence of Saddam Hussein seeking to purchase yellowcake uranium for nuclear weaponry, Cheney furiously launched the effort to discover Wilson’s identity and to discredit him. He ordered I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, his chief of staff, to head the operation. Libby’s frenetic activity triggered a secret State Department investigation and memo that identified Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA operative.

Cheney aroused President Bush to the danger from Wilson. A handwritten note by Libby that surfaced in his trial revealed that Bush raised his concern about the Kristof column in a subsequent June 9 meeting. The next day, the State Department memo “Niger/Iraq Uranium Story” began circulating within the administration. On June 12, Cheney identified Plame to Libby, and Libby went hard to work. Within three days, he discussed Plame with five officials. On July 6, after Wilson published a New York Times op-ed disclosing that the rationale the president gave for the war was premised on false information, an enraged Cheney ordered Libby into high gear. Cheney also secured Bush’s concurrence for Libby to leak selected parts of the still-classified National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to New York Times reporter Judith Miller on July 8. Bush, therefore, was deeply involved. But what did the president know, and when did he know it?

Bush’s commutation of Libby’s 30-month prison sentence for four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice was as politically necessary to hold his remaining hardcore base for the rest of his 18 months in office as it was politically damaging to his legacy and to the possibility of a Republican succession. It was also essential in order to sustain Libby’s cover-up protecting Cheney and perhaps Bush himself.

The sole reason that Bush offers for the commutation — that Judge Reggie Walton’s sentence was “excessive” — is transparently false. Indeed, the sentence meets the normal guidelines for such a crime. “The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country,” said Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor. “In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws.” Nothing is irregular or extraordinary about the length of the sentence, except the person receiving it.

It was not the judge who exceeded the sentencing guidelines; it is the president who ignored federal standards for commutations, by which it is customary that the convicted person serve some time before being eligible. Dishonestly appealing to the letter of the law, Bush’s spirit of impunity is masked as benevolence and mercy.

Even as Bush attacked the judgment of Walton, his own appointee to the federal bench, he acknowledged Libby’s guilt, declaring: “I respect the jury’s verdict.” Even as Bush engages in juridical nullification, he does not seek jury nullification. By confessing that Libby was engaged in a cover-up — after all, that was the verdict — Bush establishes his own motive. In brief, Bush’s act ratifies Libby’s cover-up. The “cloud over the vice president” that the prosecutor decried will never be dispelled. Cheney — and Bush — walk, too.

Libby had to have understood, without a word ever being passed, that leniency of some sort would be granted. His steadfast cover-up was encouraged by his intimate knowledge of the methods of Cheney and Bush. The fine he must pay — $250,000 — is meaningless because he will certainly not be paying it himself. His legal defense fund, supported by the friends of the president and vice president, boasts a treasury of $5 million. He has been well taken care of.

The pardon is the one monarchical power that the framers of the Constitution assigned the presidency. But they placed one restriction, that it could not be exercised for impeachment. In other words, the president could not use his power to pardon himself. Bush is entirely within his narrow right to use the pardon power in the Libby case. But it violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law governing that power because it is a consummate gesture of self-exoneration, at least if the vice president is an “entity within the executive branch.”

Bush rewards Libby’s cover-up, thwarting the investigation into Cheney’s and perhaps his culpability. Bush’s commutation is the successful culmination of the obstruction of justice.
Since 1776, on every July Fourth, the Declaration of Independence has been posted in public places, published in newspapers and read aloud. Its bill of particulars contains these two passages defining royal tyranny and justifying revolution:

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers. … For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.

Happy Fourth.

When Presidents Pardon Their Own Crimes
Scooter and the Commuter
DAVID SWANSON, CounterPunch
July 3, 2007

George Mason (1725-1792), the father of the Bill of Rights (1791-2002), argued at the Constitutional Convention in favor of providing the House of Representatives the power of impeachment by pointing out that the President might use his pardoning power to “pardon crimes which were advised by himself” or, before indictment or conviction, “to stop inquiry and prevent detection.”

James Madison (1751-1836), the father of the U.S. Constitution (1788-2007), added that “if the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.”

Of course, Bush has long been connected in a suspicious manner to Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and others. Madison would probably have called for Bush’s impeachment when Bush first refused to investigate or hold anyone accountable for leaking Valerie Plame’s identity, or rather when Bush lied us into the war in the first place, or when he confessed to illegal spying, or when he detained people without charge and tortured them, or when he overturned laws with signing statements or refused to comply with subpoenas, and so on and so forth. Madison wouldn’t have wanted to see his Constitution tossed aside until the moment Bush commuted Libby’s sentence. But he certainly would have acted now if not before.

The trial of Scooter Libby produced overwhelming evidence that Vice President Cheney personally led the campaign to attack Joe Wilson through the media. This “get Wilson” campaign included telling numerous reporters that Wilson was sent to Niger by his wife Valerie Plame, a CIA operative. Cheney was told by the CIA that Plame worked as a covert agent in the CIA’s Nonproliferation Division, which is the critical division of the CIA responsible for stopping the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Cheney’s efforts to expose Plame actually exposed her entire covert network, at tremendous cost to the CIA’s secret war against terrorism. If Plame’s work had been exposed by a double-agent in our government like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, that person would face prosecution for espionage and treason. The evidence of Cheney’s role is more than enough to start an impeachment investigation. And, of course, a hand-written note from Cheney, introduced as evidence in the trial, implicated the President.

The Libby trial also exposed the lead role of Vice President Cheney’s office in manipulating pre-war intelligence to defraud Congress into authorizing the invasion of Iraq. Sworn testimony revealed that Cheney’s office managed the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, all of which proved to be lies. Cheney personally visited the CIA several times before the invasion to pressure the CIA to distort pre-war intelligence. And Cheney exerted “constant” pressure on the Republican former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stall an investigation into the Bush administration’s use of flawed intelligence on Iraq, according to the new chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller.

Libby’s crime was obstructing an investigation that appeared to be headed for Cheney and possibly Bush. The proper course of action for Congress, in the face of Bush commuting Libby’s sentence, is to begin impeachment hearings against Cheney and then Bush. With the White House openly disobeying a stack of subpoenas, it is finally clear that impeachment is the only possible check on Bush-Cheney power remaining to Congress. In fact, in the wake of Bush’s Scooter commuting, the following people all released statements condemning Bush’s action and recommending that Congress and the public do absolutely nothing about it: Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson. In contrast, Joe Biden recommended that the public phone the White House and complain. That ought to show them!

Bush has just obstructed justice. His act of commuting Libby’s sentence itself adds one more small item to the pile of impeachable offenses. Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. (D-IL), had the right reaction, releasing the following statement:

“In her first weeks as leader of the Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi withdrew the notion of impeachment proceedings against either President Bush or Vice President Cheney [actually she did that 8 months earlier, and Jackson began parroting her line right away, but who’s counting]. With the president’s decision to once again subvert the legal process and the will of the American people by commuting the sentence of convicted felon Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, I call on House Democrats to reconsider impeachment proceedings. Lewis Libby was convicted of lying under oath to cover up the outing of active, undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. It is beyond unthinkable that the president would undermine the legal process to protect a man who engaged in treason against the United States government, threatening the security of the American people. In November’s election, voters put Democrats in charge of Congress because they believed our pledge of oversight and accountability. Now it’s time for us to honor that pledge. The Executive Branch should be held responsible for its illegalities. Our democratic system is grounded in the principle of checks and balances. When the Executive Branch disregards the will of the people, our lawmakers must not be silent. Today’s actions, coupled with the president’s unwillingness to comply with Senate and House inquiries, leave Democrats with no other option than to consider impeachment so that we can gather the information needed to achieve justice for all Americans.”

Very well said. It’s tremendous to see Jackson come around. There’s only one problem. Congressman Dennis Kucinich has introduced articles of impeachment against Cheney. Ten other Congress Members have signed on. And Jackson isn’t one of them. Rep. Jackson and every other member of Congress needs to do one of three things now: Sign onto Kucinich’s bill, H Res 333, www.impeachcheney.org , or introduce new articles of impeachment against Cheney or Bush, or crawl out of town in fear and eternal shame.

Now, the articles that Kucinich has introduced focus on war, and some Congress Members, terrified as they might be to fight in a war, are equally terrified of NOT sending other people to kill and die. Now would be the moment to introduce new articles of impeachment against Cheney for his role in the retribution against Wilson, for illegal spying, for torture, and for refusing subpoenas. Or take your pick of the available menu of offenses and choose your three favorites: www.impeachcheney.org

And now would be the time for Nancy Pelosi to announce that she could not possibly have meant that impeachment would stay off the table no matter what, that she meant it was not on the table at that time. Numerous crimes and abuses have come to light since that table clearing moment. Pelosi is in the clear. She can renew her oath to uphold the Constitution. Or she can go down in history as the appeaser of the new dictatorial U.S. regime, as the person who looked fascism in the face and said “That looks worth allowing to happen as long as we win in 2008,” and whose party went down in bitter flames in 2008 because the American people still cared about their democracy.

Now is the moment for members of the public to act. Go to your Congress Member’s office. Sit down. Read the U.S. Constitution aloud. Do not leave until they take you to jail. Or come to Washington, D.C., and do the same thing–but do it in the office of Congressman John Conyers, who is in the position to save this Republic in a week, who has the knowledge and the skill to do it, and who has absolutely no constitutional duty to step and fetch or bow and scrape for Miss Nancy.

On His Last Day in Office, Bush Will Pardon Himself and Cheney
Brent Budowsky, The Hill
July 3, 2007

Congress should devise a set of subpoenas that would call the president and vice president to testify about actions that could constitute violations of law and set the stage for a historic Supreme Court decision that would determine whether any president is above the law.

George H. W. Bush charged that those who disclose the identities of covert operatives are committing the equivalent of treason, while George W. Bush believes that those who lie under oath about such matters should receive less jail time than Paris Hilton.

When the president stated he would not intervene in this case until all appeals had been heard, the president was lying.

A majority of Americans believes George W. Bush does not tell the truth. An overwhelming majority of Americans has come to disrespect and disapprove of this president. Throughout the free world there is revulsion and disgust about what this man has done.

Things are being done in this corrupt and failed administration that should never happen in America and have never happened before, in this way, to this magnitude.

Justice Robert Jackson, in his summation at Nuremberg, spoke at length about the ideals of justice being open, decisions being made in public, charges being filed, the law being respected, right to counsel being provided and the common standards of jurisprudence and civilization behind honored.

Never before in American history has any president so casually claimed the power to violate the Bill of Rights and Constitution through secret acts in violation of commonly accepted law.

Never before has an American president claimed unitary powers to violate statutes though signing statements on such a regular and unprecedented scale.

Never before has an American president tried to impose secret courts, secret trials, secret files and secret charges, using secret forms of what the civilized world calls torture, often without the right to counsel, often imprisoning and torturing detainees without filing charges.

Never before has an American president had a vice president who boasts about working on the dark side, and conducts a virtual super-secret government from the vice president’s office while he desperately tries to keep truth from law, and bullies and intimidates those who disagree.

Never before has an American president named and kept an attorney general who defames the very notions of justice in America, devalues the very ideals that our Founding Fathers held so dear, defrauds the nation in public testimony and destroys the entire upper echelon of the administration of justice in America.

Thousands of Gold Star mothers know the price of these transgressions and the pain that has flowed from these obsessions, lies, frauds and misrepresentations that have led our country into the tragedy of Iraq.

Torture in violation of decency and law, secret eavesdropping in violation of constitutional history beyond the reach of the courts and the Congress, lies under oath, slanders of political opponents, Abu Ghraib crimes and the cover-up charged by the general of such integrity he could stay silent no longer — the list of wrongs is long.

Knowing of these crimes more than our people or our system of justice, fearing the exposure that is ultimately inevitable, and well aware of the legal consequences I expect the president, on his last day in office, to issue a series of pardons that would include himself and the vice president.

These pardons would include a list of those most legally vulnerable to the long litany of wrongs, done in secret, but destined for exposure.

Congress should call the leading constitutional authorities in the nation, and devise a series of subpoenas to directly call the president and the vice president to testify on matters that could involve violations of law. This would lead to a historic test case that would decide, once and for all, whether Thomas Paine was right when he stated that in monarchies the king is law, but in America, the law is king.

Libby’s Pardon: The Failure of Mr. Bush
Pierre Tristam, Candide’s Notebooks
Tuesday, July 3, 2007

There was always something excessively distasteful about the Lewis Libby trial. It wasn’t the five felony counts of lying to investigators and misleading a grand jury, or his conviction on four of them, or what it revealed of the incestuous corruptions between the nodes of power and the Washington press corps that did so much to cover up the larger crime the Libby trial danced around (the Iraq war). It wasn’t even that Libby’s conviction had nothing to do with the original offense (the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name). The distaste about it all was that it was a farce from the start—an unwitting show trial headed for its inevitable dismantling at the hands of a president to whom even the Department of Justice is a basement annex in a machinery of expedience.

What Bush calls a compromise is, of course, a pardon. That Libby still has a $250,000 fine to pay, that he’s on probation, that he can’t practice law anymore is all beside the point. The money he owes will be raised in a day’s radiothon. It doesn’t take a law degree to practice lobbying, to rake in money on the talk circuit, to play adviser to scoundrels, to be in the shadows of Dick Cheney’s shadows all over again. Fines and probation and ruined careers affect ordinary people. Libby is no ordinary man. He is a Bush administration Untouchable, taking one for the team and being rewarded for it. And still, the Wall Street Journal found room to excoriate Bush for not giving the full pardon, for playing into the half-guilt of a man who “deserved better from the President whose policies he tried to defend when others were running for cover.”

“But by failing to issue a full pardon,” the Journal wrote, “Mr. Bush is evading responsibility for the role his Administration played in letting the Plame affair build into fiasco and, ultimately, this personal tragedy.” That about sums up the neocon re-writing of the last five years. Just as Oliver North managed to single-handedly turn the Reagan Administration’s illegal war (and war crimes) in Central America into a cause for the “just,” for “freedom fighters” and apple pie, just as Oliver North managed to turn the Iran-Contra scandal from what should have led to Reagan’s impeachment into another springboard to ideological vindication and (for North) stardom, Lewis Libby, in the reactionaries’ eyes, is single-handedly deflecting the tragedy and crimes of the Iraq war onto his own supposed personal valor and loyalty, his sacrifice, his, if the Journal is to be believed, honesty.

It wasn’t about cooking up a false case for war, nor about manufacturing the demolition of a country on the basis of that lie (a lie even now the Journal denies when it writes about “Joe Wilson’s original, false accusation about pre-war intelligence”). It was about a man standing up for just policies leading to a just war that a special prosecutor’s zeal and a liberal press’ hatred for America ruined for all of us.

The symbolic temptation is to think that by pardoning Libby, Bush is pardoning himself of whatever crimes he committed. But that would presume a sense of justice at the core of the president’s thinking. What the pardon shows in as stark a light as any aborting of justice Bush has orchestrated is his utter contempt for the law, for the very system he defends but has never upheld. But if he and Cheney have been so easily amused at making buffalo chips of due process in their so-called global war on terror, in Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, what should, what could keep them from doing the same at home?

I’m reminded of an Onion story a year ago spoofing that book by San Francisco Chronicle reporters about Barry Bonds’ steroid abuse: “With the publication of a book detailing steroid use by San Francisco Giants superstar Barry Bonds, two San Francisco Chronicle reporters have corroborated the claims of Bonds’ steroid abuse made by every single person who has watched or even loosely followed the game of baseball over the past five years.” The logo that accompanied the story said it all: “No Shit.”

The other inevitable comparison that comes to mind is the Gerald Ford pardon of Nixon in 1974. It was a bit revolting, back in December when Ford died, to read once again the press’ toadying over that pardon. Seen at the time as an insult to the Constitution, it’s been revised since as a “healing” gesture that spared the country more anguish than it needed. As if the United States were an infant, an emotionally deranged democracy that needed cuddling above all. Cuddling Ford provided. But the Times was right at the time, headlining its editorial plainly enough: “The Failure of Mr. Ford.” Not President Ford, mind you, but Mr. Ford: By pardoning Nixon, Ford had abjured his claim to the title. He had, in the Times’ words, “affronted the Constitution and the American system of justice.” Odd how the reasons Ford gave for his pardon dovetail those Bush gave for Libby’s. Nixon/Libby suffered enough. Bush/Ford had to act on his own conscience. Far from a healing act, the Nixon pardon laid the groundwork for the erosion of justice at its core, making pardons like Libby’s the required routine rather than the surprise.

And still in the end the Libby cesspool adds up to nothing more than the last act in a predictable made-for-television movie. If you’re looking at all this through the eyes of an Iraqi, the war crimes carry on untouched, the demolition of Iraq is complete, the mocking of the American justice system continues apace, with Alberto Gonzales at Justice, Dick Cheney at the vice-presidency, and, at the center of it all, Mr. Bush, the criminal-in-chief, oblivious, in our face, unrepentant, and even, from time to time, sainted by the very press that continues the incestuous relationship with power that got us this far down the drain pipes: “Bush,” the Post wrote in a half-fawning, half-horrified profile on Monday, “has virtually given up on winning converts while in office and instead is counting on vindication after he is dead. ‘He almost has . . . a sense of fatalism,’ said Rep. Peter T. King ( R-N.Y.), who recently spent a day traveling with Bush. ‘All he can do is do his best, and 100 years from now people will decide if he was right or wrong. It doesn’t seem to be a false, macho pride or living in your own world. I find him to be amazingly calm.’”

Isn’t that what was said of Saddam on the scaffold?

Libby: One More Twist in the Yellowcake Road
Michael Winship, CommonDreams
Tuesday, July 3, 2007 by

So much for, “No man is above the law.”

The chief prosecutor, jury, trial judge — a Republican he himself appointed to the bench. The federal appeals panel. The majority of public opinion. All ignored.

I know, I know. The president was within his constitutional rights commuting Scooter Libby’s sentence for perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice. Article Two, Section 2 and all that. He claimed Libby’s two-and-a-half-year prison sentence was “excessive.”

But Bush’s action does violate the official Department of Justice’s Standards for Considering Commutation Petitions (”Requests for commutation generally are not accepted unless and until a person has begun serving that sentence. Nor are commutation requests generally accepted from persons who are presently challenging their convictions or sentences through appeal or other court proceeding.”)

And keep in mind, this is a man who famously pledged during the 2000 campaign, “In my administration, we will ask not only what is legal, but what is right; not what the lawyers allow, but what the public deserves.”

Nor was the announcement of Libby’s commutation exactly what you’d call a Profile in Courage. President Bush didn’t come out and make a public statement to the media and the country he’s supposed to lead. Instead, a brief press release slithered out as he returned to Washington after his Kennebunk meet with Vladimir Putin.

That’s the kind of guy this president is. You just know that if the Internet had been around when Dubya was in school he would have broken up with a girl via e-mail rather than tell her face-to-face.

Yes, it’s a sop to George Bush’s conservative base at a time when part of the reason for his basement-level approval ratings is vast right-wing dissatisfaction (Even the coquettish Ann Coulter called President Bush a “nincompoop” last week. Monday’s Washington Post described him as “a president who has endured the most drastic political collapse in a generation… No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public.”).

But that’s not the real story. Nor is the story the crimes for which Libby was going to prison. It’s not even the original outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent by Libby, Karl Rove and others.

It’s the continuing effort to hide the truth behind the Iraq war; that we had no overwhelmingly compelling reason to invade that country, especially when so much remained — and remains — to be done against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The accusations that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden were false. And long before war began, the reported existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was known to be a sham.

The visit of Valerie Plame’s husband Joe Wilson to Niger to investigate allegations that the African country was selling yellowcake uranium to Iraq was just part of the unraveling of the WMD hoax. That’s why the administration sought to hide his findings and discredit him, leading Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, to leak Plame’s name and then lie about it.

In the current New York Review of Books, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and espionage expert Thomas Powers uses a spate of recent memoirs to dismantle the notion that the belief in the existence of Iraqi WMD’s was just an honest intelligence mistake. He writes that according to Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA’s European division, as early as the evening after 9/11, David Manning, foreign policy advisor to Tony Blair, said to CIA director George Tenet, “I hope we all can agree that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq.”

Tenet replied, “Absolutely. We all agree on that. Some might want to link the issues but none of us wants to go that route.”

But Cheney did and so did Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Libby and the other members of the neocon gang. George Bush quickly was on board, too.

When the vice president’s attempts to prove a link between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence proved unsuccessful, they ramped up the WMD wardrums with stories of aluminum tubes for centrifuges, mobile weapons labs and yellowcake. Powers writes, “The claim tha