Political Waves » Claptrap x 3 + 1

Claptrap x 3 + 1

April 17th, 2008

Today we’ll look at the Pope’s visit, the Dubby’s climate change rhetoric, the Democratic debates and the newest Supreme Court ruling. Yes, our day is full of sound and thunder, but most of it is bogus claptrap …

Papal pomp and excess has newscasters speaking in hushed, enraptured tones and make me wonder if they recruited only dedicated Catholics to comment; ok, it’s good that Pope Ratz decries the sex scandals and that the faithful get a peek at him up close and personal — but here’s a snip from Froomkin that gave me the willy’s and reminds me why I prefer my religion [and religious visitors] farther from the make-up chair and bright lights, and appropriately confined to its/their own bailiwick [i.e., NOT the White House.] To be sure, Bush and the Pope disagree on a lot of important issues [torture, the war, yadda] but they’ve got the same “theocratic’s” going on, which none of us should trust [given the last seven years]:

Snipped from yesterdays Froomkin:

Arroyo: “You said, famously, when you looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes you saw his soul.”

Bush: “Yes.”

Arroyo: “When you look into Benedict XVI’s eyes what do you see?”

Bush: “God.”

Oh, good — God [formerly known to some as the Vatican’s rottweiler] is visiting America and holding a revival at the ballpark. Bring yer camera.

The next piece of bluster to look at is our Dubby’s lethargic and obvious attempt to step up on global warming before its too late to make his mark, and keep that e-brake pulled; he’s still calling for voluntary action … which is no attempt to step up, at all. He knows it, we know it, the world knows it. It’s THE most important problem the planet is facing, and Bush shows up with his bubble still glistening around him. Now that there is no further question about climate change, no further studies required to put off the inevitable, the Dub comes to the table days late by years, and dollars short by trillions [embarrassing for our nation and tragic for our world] to issue a list of “aspirational goals.” Pfffft! Tell it to the polar bears!

Snipped from Froomkin:

Bush’s Third Climate-Change Fake-Out

[…]

It took so long for Bush to even acknowledge the human role in global warming that whenever he even mentions the topic, some people act like it’s big news.

But in an era where a consensus has emerged that forceful action is required to save the planet, Bush’s essentially empty words are not very different from silence. And to the extent that their intent is to subvert sincere attempts to find solutions, they’re actually worse.

Bush’s trick on climate change is to wait until others are about to embrace mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, then make a major speech about goals and process, without any specifics on measures or penalties.

His planned speech this afternoon recalls his two earlier attempts to muddy the debate and buy time.

I chronicled his first such effort in my June 1, 2006, column, Bush’s Climate-Change Feint. In a clear move to derail European and U.N. plans for strict caps on emissions, Bush proposed a new round of international meetings that would take up most of the rest of his presidency. The purpose of the meetings, he said, would not be to write rules, but to establish what the White House, in breathtaking new euphemism, called “aspirational goals.”

Andrew Gumbel of the Independent offered an instant “translation” of Bush’s basic message: “In recent years, my refusal to acknowledge the reality and seriousness of global warming has turned me into a laughing-stock and contributed to my record low poll ratings. So now I have to look interested.” […]

The last bit of biliousness to discuss is what is being called the “Gotcha Debate,” a series of Righty landmines set to explode rancor that was presented last night on ABC — we know about ABC, of course; they’re egregiously right-wing and remain so. I saw Charlie Gibson discussing his nervousness about hosting the debate a day or two ago; he mentioned his desire to do a good job, and his counting on the practiced hand of George Stephanapoulos to steady him. Well — that didn’t work out so well, and if his idea of doing a ‘good job’ was to be a disdainful bully on issues that meant nothing in the national debate, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. George S. didn’t do much better — they were booed and heckled at the end of their 90 minutes, Gibson mumbling, “The crowd is turning on me.”

Gratefully, I missed the first hour, which dwelt excessively on vapid tabloid issues and put both candidates into defensive posture — the last thirty minutes was bad enough, with Gibson on attack and especially toward Obama; at one point he cut him off, turned to Clinton with the same question while sniping that he hadn’t really gotten an answer from Barack. Tom Shales writes, in his piece, “In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC”:

At the end, Gibson pompously thanked the candidates — or was he really patting himself on the back? — for “what I think has been a fascinating debate.” He’s entitled to his opinion, but the most fascinating aspect was waiting to see how low he and Stephanopoulos would go, and then being appalled at the answer.

Was it skewered toward Mrs. Clinton — George S. being an ex-Clintonista and Conservatives more interested in dealing with her than an energized Obama? Let’s just say that the camera cut to Chelsea Clinton in the audience EIGHT TIMES — you decide. [Obama noted the slice ‘n dice attack today, and some are calling him whiny — no, I’M WHINY and so is the progressive blogosphere: we wanted some substance and instead we got FAUX Newsiness … and Obama? He wanted to have an adult conversation with the nation. Fat chance on ABC.]

In the last few moments, both Dem’s were given 30 seconds [???] to give the pitch they’d give to undecided SuperDelagates — Clinton told what SHE’d do to save the country, Obama discussed we’d WE’d do to restore the nation … that’s the governing style and American vision of each, and what we’ll be voting on this fall. Meanwhile, ABC gets another “F” for failed in delivering truth to the citizens they serve, but a B in giving the Pubs a day to celebrate. John Nichols over at The Nation entitled his piece today, “Democrats Debate Republican Talking Points.”

It should be mentioned, as we discuss the candidates, that Obama is up by significant margins nationally and he’s tied Clinton in Pennsylvania, having closed her double-digit lead with almost a quarter of a million new voters registered. Clinton could still take the state, but the slim margins render the ‘electibility’ question moot. Sadly, McCain’s numbers are also looking very good — nobody is making the case against him, they’re too busy talking about lapel pins.

The 1, mentioned in the title, was a sadly serious moment, delivered from On High [no, not by the Pope … from the Supreme’s] restoring government-inspired murder. Prisons across the country can now feel free to gear up for more executions, which confirms us, especially to a watching world, as institutional brutes and spiritual toddlers; you’ll find those articles last — and a few reads and links to the aforementioned topics … of the day … below.

[By the way, this is late today because my PC took fits and wouldn’t let me access Google — I’ll probably be stuck doing more Ms. Fix-It tomorrow. VISTA SUXXXX!]

Jude

Vatican Now Views United States, Europe Quite Differently
John O’Sullivan
Tuesday, April 15, 2008

As Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the United States, his visit is likely to deepen and ratify the growing friendship between the Vatican and Washington.

To be sure, there are disagreements between them over the Iraq war, multilateralism, the United Nations, and other hot topics. But they will not loom large. America and the pope will get on famously.

It wasn’t always so.

When Al Smith, the Catholic governor of New York, was defeated in the 1928 presidential election, the joke ran that he sent a one-word telegram to the Vatican: “Unpack.”

Many Americans in the overwhelmingly Protestant United States of the 1920s suspected that the Catholic Church was hostile to civil and religious liberty. They breathed a sigh of relief at Smith’s defeat.

Earlier popes bear some blame for this mistrust. Pope Leo XIII had criticized those American Catholics who thought the church should reconcile itself to such ideas as freedom of the press, liberalism, individualism, and separation of church and state. This heresy even had the all-too-memorable name of “Americanism.”

At the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, however, the entire Catholic Church embraced the ideal of religious liberty (due in large measure to the work of the a distinguished American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray) that lay at the heart of Americanism.

The ghost of this heresy was finally laid to rest in 1979 when John Paul II told a welcoming crowd in Boston: “I greet you, America the Beautiful.” He went on to forge the close alliance with President Ronald Reagan that helped bring down the Soviet empire. By his death three years ago he was revered as a spiritual leader by Americans of many faiths.

Vatican’s ‘Rottweiler’

The United States and the Catholic Church were no longer wary of each other. But they were hardly the warmest of friends either.

At first glance, Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, looks unlikely to improve the relationship greatly.

At his accession to the papacy, he was portrayed by the media as an unsympathetic Teutonic enforcer of Catholic orthodoxies — the Vatican’s “rottweiler” — because of his previous office. Polls suggest that he is still largely unknown to the American public. He is a not a natural media superstar like John Paul but a modest academic theologian. And he inherits the difficult double legacy of the priestly child sex-abuse scandal and the disaffection of many Catholics over church teaching on contraception, gay marriage, married clergy, and sex generally.

In his few years in the papacy, however, Benedict has shown a very different personality from that of the Vatican enforcer — personal modesty, a stress in his encyclicals on love and understanding rather than rules, pastoral openness to Catholics who live outside Catholic teaching, and a desire to build bridges between Catholics and other faiths.

John Allen, the well-informed Vatican correspondent of the “National Catholic Reporter,” describes his approach as “affirmative orthodoxy,” by which he means “a strong defense of Catholic doctrine and practice pitched in the most positive fashion possible.”

For instance, Benedict’s first encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est,” offered a positive vision of sexuality without “rehearsing the church’s well-known prohibitions on birth control, abortion, and gay marriage” and even conceding that a kernel of genuine love might exist in illicit relationships.

So Benedict is likely to impress Catholics and non-Catholics alike as a warm and loving father rather than a stern disciplinarian. If he condemns the “child sex-abuse scandal” in the church with clarity and firmness — as he undoubtedly will — but otherwise discusses questions of sexual morality in terms of their effects on the family and social life, he may well strike a chord with many Americans of all faiths. There is a growing anxiety that the sexual revolution, whatever its merits in highlighting previously hidden sins such as violence against women, has also encouraged marriage breakdowns, more births to unwed mothers, abandoned children, and a brutalized popular culture.

Three Issues Will Dominate

Even so, these issues are unlikely to dominate Benedict’s visit. Nor will the Iraq war. His (and John Paul’s) opposition to the war is well-known. But it was rooted in a prudence that now counsels caution about withdrawing U.S. troops before a stable political solution is reached in Baghdad. Even if the pope mentions the war in his UN speech, he is likely to deliver only a glancing blow to the Bush administration.

That said, three issues are likely to dominate the visit: immigration, the UN and multilateralism, and the rise of radical Islamism. All present great difficulties — both to the pope and to the United States.

First, Catholic social teaching on immigration has traditionally sought to reconcile the rights of migrants with rights of nations to defend their distinctive cultures and national identities. During the 1970s, for instance, Father Theodore Hesburgh, a prominent Catholic theologian who headed the University of Notre Dame, was the chairman of an official commission that recommended quite stringent controls on immigration. No one considered this at all odd.

In recent years, however, migrant rights have trumped most other considerations in the pastoral letters of the U.S. Catholic bishops and, quite coincidentally, in the policies of the Bush administration and the opinions of political and business elites.

At the same time, a clear majority of Americans — and a smaller majority of Catholics — now fears that the United States is harmed by uncontrolled immigration. And, quite coincidentally, Italian bishops are concerned that large-scale Muslim immigration is further weakening the already ailing Christian culture of Europe.

So the the pope will almost certainly support the U.S. bishops by calling for the United States to respect migrant rights during his visit. (In addition to other factors, Hispanic immigration is strengthening the American church.) But it will be interesting to see if he qualifies this obligation by acknowledging the rights of nations, including the United States to defend its particular national cultures.

Second, the Vatican in recent years has embraced the UN as the best hope for “global governance” and peace achieved through “multilateralism.”

Today, in the second half of the Bush administration, the United States largely accepts this stress on multilateralism. But the Vatican is still at odds with many Americans who regard the UN as morally flawed, undemocratic, hostile to Western freedoms, and unduly influenced by such cynical great powers as China and Russia pursuing self-interested policies.

Almost certainly the pope will repeat the traditional Vatican line when he addresses the UN. But the Vatican has become uneasily aware in recent years that the UN bureaucracy has become almost an independent power seeking to impose “reproductive rights” (i.e. abortion) and other antireligious policies through UN treaties. Again, therefore, it will be interesting to see if Benedict qualifies his support for the UN as its “global governance” looks increasingly hostile to Catholic values.

Relations With Islam

The third issue is relations with Islam against the backdrop of the war on terror. This is a complex matter for the Vatican. On the one hand, Islamic states are its main allies at the UN on moral issues such as abortion; on the other, it presses some of those same states to allow greater religious liberty to their Christian residents. And like the United States, the West, and moderate Muslims, the Vatican has to deal with the challenge of radical Islamism.

If the jihadists are to be separated from moderate Muslims and ultimately defeated, that defeat will have to be won in mosques, churches, and philosophy lecture halls, as well as on the battlefield. Politicians speak with little or no authority on the vital questions of faith. Their words on religion are not really heeded — except when they are provocative intentionally or unintentionally — by the faithful on both sides.

As both pope and philosopher, however, Benedict has been prepared to raise with Muslims quite painful and tough questions on the relationship between faith and violence — and between God and reason. In his Regensburg lecture, he said that Christianity now accepts that God’s truth could not be spread by violence and, in effect, sought an assurance that Islam felt the same way.

Despite the angry riots in the Middle East against it, this lecture persuaded moderate Muslim leaders to respond. A serious Muslim-Christian dialogue between Islam and the Vatican is now beginning.

Americans will hope to hear the pope’s next thoughts on this dialogue — precisely because he raises real and hard issues for Muslims and Christians to answer rather than taking refuge in mildly benevolent cliches about “a religion of peace.” He is unlikely to address these issues directly. As John Allen suggests, he will probably discuss them obliquely in his UN speech, calling for universal rights rooted in religion (rather than in Christianity solely) and stressing that these rights are in conflict with some of the rights favored by the UN bureaucracy.

‘Wrong End Of European Telescope’

That may prove contentious with liberal opinion in the United States and Western Europe. Whatever differences the pope may express on these three contentious issues, however, he will address Americans almost as soul brothers — something unimaginable until John Paul.

As late as the 1970s under Pope Paul VI, the Vatican looked at the world through the wrong end of a European telescope. Through that distorting lens, the United States looked quite a disorderly and dangerous place — Protestant, capitalist, democratic, socially egalitarian, religiously volcanic, and in general unpredictable.

Since then Europe and the United States have changed places in papal eyes. Europe now looks highly secular and even hostile to religion, refusing to acknowledge its Christian heritage in its proposed constitution.

The United States, on the other hand, is proving to be a lively popular religious society in which God is acknowledged, Catholicism respected, and Christianity of all kinds flourishes in a political system based on liberty of conscience. Americans commit their share of sins, but “Americanism” seems to work. And Benedict knows it.

In the immortal words of Humphrey Bogart, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The President, the Pope and the Media
Jay Carney, TIME Mag blog
April 16, 2008

First I read Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook, in which Laura Bush’s chief of staff revealed that the elaborate reception at the White House for Pope Benedict XVI was “a sign of the President and Mrs. Bush’s respect and love and friendship with the Holy Father.”

I cringed.

Then I heard Ed Henry on CNN inform viewers that President Bush and the Pope share “a special bond.”

I groaned.

Finally, Henry paraphrased an unnamed White House official explaining why no one could be sure how long the closed-door session between Bush and Benedict would last: “When you’re meeting with the Holy Father, a schedule is just a suggestion.”

At that point I wanted to gag.

Please. This is silly. According to this morning’s USA Today, President Bush has met this pope exactly once — last June at the Vatican. According to the transcript of yesterday’s White House press briefing with Dana Perino, it’s quite possible that they’ve never once spoken on the phone. So from what shared experience springs all that love and affection? How exactly was their special bond developed? And why is it that the leader of the Catholic Church has more sway over the President’s schedule than any other head of state? If Bush were Catholic, I’d understand. But he is not.

I have no doubt that Pope Benedict XVI is a wise and decent man and a compelling spiritual leader. He may also become a great temporal leader, like his predecessor. And I think it’s an important and wonderful thing when the Pope visits the United States, meets with the President and performs mass in America. It’s a big deal.

But hyping the relationship between the President and the Pope is pure political exploitation, a play for the electoral affection of American Catholics. The Pope is no doubt aware of this, but he is blameless in his complicity. The more attention he gets, the more broadly he is able to spread his message.

As Chris Matthews has rightly said, the battle for the Catholic vote in America is really the battle for swing voters. The coming election, like so many before it, could well hinge on how Catholics break — this time in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico.

Forgive me for being so cynical as to believe that the special bond Bush feels for the Pope springs from the pivotal role Catholics will play in deciding whether his eight years in office are repudiated or validated on Election Day.

Jon Stewart Eviscerates Media’s Pope Coverage
Huffington Post
April 17, 2008

Last night on “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart mocked the media’s breathless coverage of the Pope’s uneventful arrival. “I thought the media was controlled by Jews!” Stewart said. Open link for video.

Bush’s Toothless Climate Plan
BRYAN WALSH, TIME Mag
Wednesday, Apr. 16, 2008

President George W. Bush stood in the White House’s Rose Garden this afternoon, and delivered his strategy for saving the world from climate change. Central was a new goal of stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, through a mix of incentives for lower-carbon power and better energy efficiency, especially for utilities. It wouldn’t be a bad plan — if it were the year 2000 and this was candidate George W. Bush speaking on the presidential campaign trail. As it stands, Bush’s new climate change policy — though no new specific initiatives were announced, aside from the 2025 goal — is too little, too slow, too late.

Actually, the candidate George W. Bush was tougher on global warming than the 2008 version. Back then, Bush said he was in favor of limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But he backtracked from that position quickly after his election, and since then has steadfastly opposed any kind of mandatory cap on U.S. carbon emissions. That didn’t change during his Rose Garden speech today, and that is why, while it’s heartening to see Bush actually name a goal for carbon emissions, his new proposal is virtually meaningless. Without hard carbon caps, climate change will not be defeated — and more than seven years into his Administration, that’s a fact Bush has yet to learn.

It’s not that Bush doesn’t have some good ideas. In the past and during his speech, Bush has emphasized the importance of developing new, carbon-free alternative energy sources as the only way to ultimately eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. “We must all recognize that in the long run, new technologies are the key to addressing climate change,” he said. Absolutely — and Bush’s ideas of reforming incentives that speed the commercialization of new technologies is smart, though difficult to fully judge without greater details. But bringing carbon-free alternatives to market isn’t easy — which is why renewables still make up a tiny percentage of our energy supply, despite all the attention paid to climate change. That’s why carbon caps — which gradually limit the level of carbon dioxide emissions that can be emitted by the economy — are so important. By raising the cost of fossil fuels, carbon caps drive investment toward energy efficiency and alternative power — and anything that allows businesses and consumers to escape the cost of carbon. Suddenly being green goes from a virtue to an economic necessity.

Bush has it wrong when he separates carbon caps and technological development — the two must go hand in hand. A number of cap-and-trade programs are circulating in Congress — most notably the legislation co-sponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Warner, which would cap U.S. carbon emissions at 2005 levels by 2012 (effectively ending emissions growth well before Bush’s new goal of 2025), and then reduce them to 70% below 2005 levels by 2050. Though Bush didn’t mention Lieberman-Warner by name, comments by advisers before the speech indicated that the Administration would continue to oppose mandatory cap-and-trade legislation. “Bad legislation would impose tremendous costs on our economy and American families without accomplishing the important climate change goals we share,” said Bush.

Yes, carbon caps will impact the economy in the short run, by raising energy prices on businesses and consumers alike. But many models suggest it wouldn’t be the economic apocalypse Bush foresees. The President’s own Environmental Protection Administration, in an analysis released last month, estimated that the U.S. economy’s GDP would grow just 1% less between 2010 and 2030 under Lieberman-Warner than without the bill. Other studies suggest that over the long-term firm carbon caps could benefit the American economy, by creating new clean tech companies and new green jobs to replace polluting industries — which are already slowly being outsourced to the developing world.

With less than a year to go and carrying low approval ratings, it may not matter what Bush promises to do on an issue that has never seemed close to his heart. Fortunately, all three presidential candidates favor mandatory caps, as do growing segments of the business world and governments on the state level. (Though Senator John McCain, who just announced a proposal to lift the U.S. gasoline tax during the summer, is in danger of losing his green credentials.) Real climate change action is on its way, and it’s unlikely to be shaped by Bush. It’s a shame though. Over his Administration — which has been disastrous for the environment — Bush has slowly evolved on climate change, from denier, to doubter, to where he is today, a believer in the reality of global warming, but one who just isn’t ready to take strong action. Maybe if he had a little more time — perhaps 20 or 30 years — he’d finally become convinced that this is one of the top threats facing America, and needs a similarly vigorous response. But by then, it’d be too late for the rest of us.

Bush Passes The Buck Again
Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, and Benjamin Armbruster, The Progress Report
April 17, 2008

In a Rose Garden speech yesterday that was “greeted with relief by global warming skeptics in Congress and energy lobbyists on K Street,” President Bush “called for a national goal of halting the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, mostly by curbing power plant pollution.” Bush’s voluntary goal, however, is one “that the scientific community says is too little, too late, to prevent dangerous global warming.” “The growth in emissions will slow over the next decade, stop by 2025, and begin to reverse thereafter, so long as technology continues to advance,” said Bush.

In other words, “Bush is calling for rising CO2 emissions for another 17 years,” despite the fact that the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, says that “if there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”

“Scientists of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded last year that global greenhouse gas emissions must begin to drop by 2015 in order to avert drastic climate change, a timetable that would compel developed nations to turn that corner even earlier.” “Europe has agreed to reduce its emissions 20 percent and pledged to 30 percent by 2020 if the U.S makes a comparable commitment,” notes John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA. “After squandering seven years, President Bush still refuses to respond to alarm bells,” says Daniel J. Weiss, the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress. At a time when most agree that “forceful action is required to save the planet, Bush’s essentially empty words are not very different from silence.”

BUSH SETS ANOTHER ROADBLOCK: “Bush’s trick on climate change,” wrote the Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin yesterday, “is to wait until others are about to embrace mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, then make a major speech about goals and process, without any specifics on measures or penalties.” The White House says the “speech was intended to influence an international conference on climate change, which is convening in Paris on Thursday.” But critics say that Bush is actually “trying to derail legislation that would curb emissions even further.” The speech has already drawn “a fiery response” at the Paris conference, where South Africa branded it “as a retreat from previous US positions that would leave the United States ‘alone against the overwhelming majority of the world.’” According to Froomkin, Bush’s speech “recalls his two earlier attempts to muddy the debate and buy time.” In the spring of 2007, Bush made “a clear move to derail European and U.N. plans for strict caps on emissions” by proposing “a new round of international meetings that would take up most of the rest of his presidency. The purpose of the meetings, he said, would not be to write rules but to establish what the White House called ‘aspirational goals.’” Again in the fall of 2007, Bush gave a speech that “superficially gave the appearance of favoring a global reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions,” which “again embraced unspecific goals and voluntary compliance that left other nations and serious advocates unmoved.”

RIGHT WING FREAKS OUT: On Monday, the Washington Times broke the news that Bush was “poised to change course and announce as early as this week that he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming.” The immediate reaction from the right wing was anger and bewilderment. Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute said that Bush was offering “unconditional surrender on global warming” and that conservatives had to “get very, very angry about this.” In an op-ed, Washington Times columnist Tony Blankley called it a “global-warming assault on free economies,” while the National Review’s Christopher Horner declared that “the president will have caused harm by embracing the global-warming agenda, regardless of the specifics of what he calls for today. The moment he legitimizes the agenda, he will have lost control of the issue.” Faced with a backlash from its conservative and business base, the White House watered down its already watered-down proposal.

According to the Washington Times, “the president has backed away” from calling for “a cap-and-trade program for electric utilities” after “the White House was flooded with complaints from industry officials and lobbyists.” Even the Senate’s top climate change denier, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), was placated by Bush’s speech, calling it “a fairly moderate position to take.”

WHITE HOUSE CLAIMS TO BE LEADERS: At the same time that the White House was laying out “just another way of Bush saying no,” the administration was patting itself on the back and claiming to be an international leader in the struggle to address climate change. “The United States has launched — and the G8 has embraced — a new process that brings together the countries responsible for most of the world’s emissions,” Bush claimed in his speech yesterday. But as Grist’s David Roberts points out, “It is laughable to say the G8 has ‘embraced’ Bush’s farcical Major Economies meetings” as “they have accepted it because they have no choice.” In the White House press briefing yesterday, James Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, compared the Bush administration’s efforts to those of Europe and Canada, saying, “We are the only three that have” stated mid-term goals for reducing emissions. But as Brad Johnson of the Center for American Progress Action Fund points out, European countries are seeking to actually reduce emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 while Canada is aiming to simply reduce to 1990 levels through a plan that former Vice President Al Gore calls “a complete and total fraud.” In contrast, Bush has set “no target” for actually reducing emissions while allowing emissions to keep increasing until 2025.

An open letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanapoulos
Attywood, Philadelphia Daily News
Thursday, April 17, 2008

Dear Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos,

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, “a shameful night for the U.S. media.” It’s hard because — like many other Americans — I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that “media criticism” — especially when it’s one journalist speaking to another — tends to be a genteel, collegial thing, but there’s no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I’m a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues — trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn’t enough space — and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited — to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans’ benefits to improving education. You ignored virtually everything that just happened in what most historians agree is one of the worst presidencies in American history, including the condoning of torture and the trashing of the Constitution, although to be fair you also ignored the policy concerns of people on the right, like immigration issues.

You asked about gun control — phrased to try for a “gotcha” in a state where that’s such a divisive issue — but not about what we really care about, which is how to reduce crime. You pressed and pressed on those capital gains taxes, but Senators Clinton and Obama were forced to bring up the housing crisis on their own initiative.

Instead, you wasted more than half of the debate — a full hour — on tabloid trivia that for the most part wasn’t even that interesting, because most of it was infertile ground that has already been covered again and again and again. I’m not saying that Rev. Wright and Bosnia sniper fire and “bitter” were never newsworthy — I myself wrote about all of these for the Philadelphia Daily News or my Attytood blog, back when they were more relevant — but the questions were stale yet clearly intended to gin up controversy (they didn’t, by the way, other than the controversy over you.) The final questions of that section, asking Obama whether he thought Rev. Wright “loved America” and then suggesting that Obama himself is somehow a hater of the American flag, or worse, were flat-out repulsive.

Are you even thinking when simply echo some of the vilest talking points from far-right talk radio? What are actually getting at — do you honestly believe that someone with a solid track record as a lawmaker in a Heartland state which elected him to the U.S. Senate, who is now seeking to make some positive American history as our first black president, is somehow un-American, or unpatriotic? Does that even make any sense? Question his policies, or question his leadership. because that is your job as a journalist. But don’t insult our intelligence by questioning his patriotism.

Here’s a question for you, George. Is it true that yesterday you appeared on the radio with conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity, and that you said you were “taking notes” when he urged you to ask a question about Obama’s supposed ties to a former member of the Weather Underground — which in fact you did? With all the fabulous resources of ABC News at your disposal, is that an appropriate way for a supposed journalist to come up with debate questions - by pandering to divisive radio shows?

And Charlie…could you be any more out of touch with your viewers? Most people aren’t millionaires like you, and if Pennsylvanians are losing sleep over economic matters, it is not over whether the capital gains tax will go back up again. I was a little shocked when you pressed and pressed on that back-burner issue and left almost no time for high gas prices, but then I learned tonight that you did the same thing in the last debate, that you fretted over that middle-class family that made $200,000 a year. Charlie, the nicest way that I can put this is that you need to get out more.

But I’m not ready to make nice. What I just watched was an outrage. As a journalist, you appeared to confirm all of the worst qualities that cause people to hold our profession in such low esteem, especially your obsession with cornering the candidates with lame “trick” questions and your complete lack of interest or concern about substance — or about the American people, or the state of our nation. You embarassed some good people who work at ABC News — for example, the journalists who worked hard to break this story just last week — and you embarassed yourselves. The millions of people who watched the debate were embarassed, too — at the state of our political discourse, and what it has finally become, at long last.

Quickly, a word to any and all of my fellow journalists who happen to read this open letter: This. Must. Stop. Tonight, if possible. I thought that we had hit rock bottom in March 2003, when we failed to ask the tough questions in the run-up to the Iraq war. But this feels even lower. We need to pick ourselves up, right now, and start doing our job — to take a deep breath and remind ourselves of what voters really need to know, and how we get there, that’s it’s not all horse-race and “gotcha.” Although, to be blunt, I would also urge the major candidates in 2012 to agree only to debates that are organized by the League of Women Voters, with citizen moderators and questioners. Because we have proven without a doubt in 2008 that working journalists don’t deserve to be the debate “deciders.”

Charlie, I’m going to sign off this letter the way that you always sign off the news, that “I hope you had a great day.”

Because America just had a horrible night.

It’s All About Me (MSM), Isn’t It, Charlie Gibson?
Christine Bowman, BuzzFlash
Thu, 04/17/2008

Let’s see. Voters care about the economy and Iraq and whether candidates are honest and ethical and will change our country’s direction. So far, 13,689,293 Americans have gone to the trouble of voting for Barack Obama, and 12,861,985 have so honored Hillary Clinton, according to the estimates of Real Clear Politics.

But enough about us. More importantly, what does mainstream media care about?

Democrats muddying one another. Gaffes. Gotcha moments. It’s the bread and butter of television, as we know all too well. The bottom line. Nielsen numbers. Advertising dollars (which come from campaigns, not only from corporate sponsors).

That’s why last night’s so-called “debate,” featuring Clinton and Obama in supporting roles, spent over 50 minutes at the top of the show on personal attacks and right-wing, media-generated gotchas like the flag pin “issue” and a 1960s anti-war activist. Even sadder is the fact that the Democratic Knock-Down, Drag-Out brought to us by ABC News/Disney was the first over-the-air televised debate since ABC’s other one which aired January 5th from New Hampshire. Economically constrained regular folks who don’t pay for cable have seen nothing else.

Thank you, Charlie Gibson!

Kudos to you, George Stephanopoulos!

Your show was great entertainment for anyone who wanted to see Barack Obama, very possibly our next American president, squirm. We doubt your show helped Hillary Clinton much either since you ignored her for most of the night except to bring up sniper fire.

The show definitely came up short for Pennsylvania voters who have to choose their candidate by next Tuesday. Guess they’ll just have to grab a newspaper or go to the Internet for answers to their substantive questions.

You ABC pundits really had us in your hands, but then you dissed us. Your viewers weren’t tuning in to Fox’s “American Idol,” after all. We came to ABC News seeking in-depth political coverage. Silly us.

Don’tcha wonder how many viewers hit their remote control buttons before the end? Do you get it, yet, Charlie, why the crowd was turning on you?

P.S.: Look here, Charlie, Mission Accomplished! ABC bumps up on Democrat slugfest: “At 8 p.m. ABC was first with a 2.7 for the first hour of the debate: … [but] Fox took the lead at 9 p.m. with an 8.5 rating for ‘American Idol,’ while … ABC was third with a 2.8 for the second half of its debate …”

The Supreme Court Fine-Tunes Pain
New York Times Editorial
April 17, 2008

The Supreme Court’s regrettable ruling upholding Kentucky’s use of lethal injection is a reminder of why government should get out of the business of executing prisoners. Rather than producing a crisp decision upholding the constitutionality of lethal injection, the court broke down into warring opinions debating the ugly question of how much unnecessary pain the state may impose. Most compelling were the dissenters, which wanted to know more about whether Kentucky was torturing inmates needlessly, and Justice John Paul Stevens’s challenge to capital punishment in all forms.

Kentucky is one of at least 30 states that execute people by lethal injection of a three-drug cocktail. This method was meant to be humane, but it can cause inmates to feel excruciating pain. Kentucky lacks proper safeguards, including adequate training, to avoid needless suffering.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for himself and two other justices, found that Kentucky’s procedures do not violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Even if they inflict great pain, he said, the inmates challenging them failed to show that the risk of harm was “objectively intolerable.” (Seven justices concurred, to varying degrees.) Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia laid out an even crueler standard — unless an execution is “deliberately designed to inflict pain” it does not violate the Eighth Amendment. That would allow a lot of grossly negligent infliction of agony.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for herself and Justice David Souter, emphasized that Kentucky does not take steps that other states do to help ensure that inmates do not suffer. She argued that the case should be sent back to a lower court to determine if Kentucky should use such safeguards.

Justice Stevens, in a welcome surprise, said that he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty carries such high risks of error and discrimination, while doing so little good, that it is unconstitutional. He voted to uphold Kentucky’s procedures because he believed precedent required it, but he said it is time for the court and legislatures to take a hard look at whether the death penalty’s substantial costs outweigh its benefits.

Wednesday’s ruling clears the way for states that had put their executions on hold to resume them. Lawyers for death-row inmates insist, however, that the legal test the Roberts decision used gives them a basis for more challenges to lethal injection. That means more fights over how much needless pain is too much.

The better course would be for the nation to undertake Justice Stevens’s hard look at capital punishment — and leave it behind.

The Supreme Court Brings Back the Death Penalty
Liliana Segura, AlterNet
April 17, 2008

The Supreme Court just made a decision that will send prisoners across the country to their deaths.

In a 7 to 2 ruling, it upheld lethal injection as currently carried out as Constitutional, ending a de-facto moratorium on state-sanctioned murder.

Executions in the United States had been on hold since last September, when the Court decided to take on the case of Baze v. Reese. At stake was the question of whether Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol violates the 8th Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” The three-drug killing technique or some version of it — a paralytic, a barbiturate, and a dose of potassium chloride — is used in 35 out of 36 death penalty states. (Nebraska, whose sole method of execution used to be electrocution, ruled the electric chair unconstitutional this past February.) As states froze their execution machinery to await the justices’ ruling, not a single execution was carried out for seven months. Last-minute stays of execution aside, it was a glimpse into what the United States might look like without the death penalty.

Baze represented a critical development in death penalty litigation, the first time the Court has considered a specific method of execution since it upheld the firing squad in 1878. Ever since the Supreme Court’s last-minute intervention in the case of Florida death row prisoner Clarence Hill — he was strapped onto a gurney with intravenous lines in his arms — in January 2006, the stage had been set for a showdown on lethal injection. When the Court ruled later that year that prisoners could appeal their death sentences based on the possibility that lethal injection is cruel and unusual, a wave of appeals swept the country.

Now, those prisoners have lost significant legal footing and with it, very possibly, the right to live. “While the opinion appeared to leave open a chance that some further challenges could be made to the use of lethal drugs under a specific procedure in another state,” explained Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog, “…The opinion also appeared to mean that the three drugs now used in all of those jurisdictions do not, alone or in combination, fail the Court’s new standard.”

In other words, the country’s preferred execution method is now insulated by a legal precedent.

This is a serious blow to death penalty opponents who hoped that disabling the death machinery would lead to abolishing it. It is also, in many ways, the result of a frustrating failure of legal strategy. The attorneys who argued Baze did so on very narrow grounds, contending that Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol is broken, but not beyond repair. “One needs a person trained in monitoring anesthetic death to participate in the process,” defense attorney Donald Verrilli suggested, not only encouraging the controversial notion that medical professionals have a role in carrying out executions, but also encouraging the Court to treat botched executions as an aberration; freak accidents that rarely occur. “The Court has held that an isolated mishap alone does not violate the Eighth Amendment,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the decision. But states from California to Florida have had lethal injections go horribly wrong in recent years; with states often secretive about their execution procedures — and many not keeping data on file about them — how “isolated” these incidents are is largely unknown.

Lethal injection is often described as a “three-drug cocktail.” The first drug is the barbiturate sodium thiopental; the second, a paralytic called pancuronium bromide, and the third, potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The technique has been favored by death penalty supporters who find appeal in its medical veneer. In theory, if the drugs are administered correctly, the victim will die quickly and painlessly. But in reality, executioners, contrary to the assumption of many, usually have little or no medical training. If they wrongly administer the first drug, the result can be grisly.

Take the case of Joseph A. Clark, a death row prisoner in Ohio. On the day of his execution in May 2006, it took the execution team 22 minutes to find a vein — a not uncommon problem. Shortly after the catheter was finally inserted, Clark’s vein collapsed and his arm began to swell, at which point, he lifted his head. “He said ‘It don’t work, it don’t work, it don’t work, it ain’t working,’ about five times,” one witness later described. At that point, the gurney was concealed by curtains.

Thirty minutes later, there was “moaning, crying out and guttural noises.” An hour and a half after the start of the execution, Clark was dead.

Then there are instances where the paralytic drug can make it impossible to tell if something has gone wrong. Since a paralyzed prisoner cannot cry out or move if in pain, clues that he or she suffered only come with the autopsy. In the case of Florida prisoner Angel Diaz in December 2006, he started to move following the first drug, “squinting and grimacing as he tried to mouth words,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center. “A second dose was then administered, and 34 minutes passed before Mr. Diaz was declared dead. At first a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Corrections claimed that this was because Mr. Diaz had some sort of liver disease. After performing an autopsy, the Medical Examiner, Dr. William Hamilton, stated that Mr. Diaz’s liver was undamaged, but that the needle had gone through Mr. Diaz’s vein and out the other side, so the deadly chemicals were injected into soft tissue, rather than the vein.” Angel Diaz was quite literally tortured to death.

The cruel irony is that the paralyzing agent is totally pointless; serving no purpose aside from masking the effects of the lethal chemicals on a prisoner’s body. In fact, veterinarians long ago decided not to use it for the that very reason. But death row prisoners, despite being human beings, do not inspire the humane treatment that animals do — and twisted logic is offered to keep the paralyzing drug in place. “The purpose it serves,” argued Roy Englert, the attorney representing Kentucky before the Court, “is the purpose of dignifying the process for the benefit of the inmate and for the benefit of the witnesses.” In reality, it is used to “dignify the process” for the benefit of the state. It makes murder look a little less murderous.

For legal experts, the Baze decision is not a major surprise and in fact, contains some interesting language about the future of death penalty litigation. ‘’I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol, and specifically about the justification for the use of the paralytic agent, pancuronium bromide, but also about the justification for the death penalty itself,'’ wrote Justice Stevens. The variety of opinions expressed by the justices — a “plurality” in legal terms — in the rather glib interpretation of one expert blogger, “provides a little something for everyone.” Unfortunately, for prisoners granted a temporary reprieve by the seven-month-long de facto moratorium, what the decision provides is death.

As they have since the return of the American death penalty in 1976, defense attorneys will find new legal arguments to try to spare their clients’ lives. But how many prisoners will die before another opportunity arrives like the one presented by Baze? How many of them are on death row because they are poor or black? How many of them are innocent?

As Marlene Martin, executive director of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty says, “I think of people like Troy Davis, Rodney Reed and Timothy McKinney — all on death row, all African American, all poor and almost all surely innocent. What does this decision mean for them and the countless others like them?” As executions resume in a country with more than 3,000 people on death row — whose names are unknown to the vast majority of Americans — it is a question not enough people are willing to ask.

Liliana Segura is a staff writer, editor of Rights & Liberties Special Coverage, and a board member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

“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

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