There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America - as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting - without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.
In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy - or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre - the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.
But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).
This is largely because the NRA's duping its own members, which we'll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we'll discuss in Part II of this series.
If the NRA leadership is not radical, they certainly see the benefit in playing radicals on TV in order to enrich their financial benefactors who produce and sell the weaponry of death.
In the 1990s, in a climate of fear and paranoia that produced the Oklahoma City bombing, they were all too happy to refer to the government authority that tries to enforce gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), as "jack-booted thugs". This led former president George H.W. Bush to resign his membership.
They then decided to up the ante by accusing former president Bill Clinton of murder and saying he "had blood on his hands" - all for the crime of supporting background checks at gun shows - which is among the many legislative proposals to reduce gun violence that they have repeatedly blocked.
Others include a ban on high-capacity magazines, banning sales to those on terrorist watch lists, and fully funding the aforementioned ATF (think about the latter when they say they want to "strengthen existing gun laws" after each new tragedy).
In fact, just a few days after the mass shooting in Tucson it was reported by Ryan Reilly from TPMMuckraker that a "jihadist" in America who was... "a moderator and contributor on Islamic extremist web forums, posted songs praising suicide bombers, discussed his jihad fantasies in the open..." was able to get an AK-47, no questions asked.
Emerson Begolly, the "jihadist" in question, responded when queried about this with laughter and facetiously exclaimed that "someone at the FBI showed up to work drunk". Perhaps, but if they were, it was only because the NRA forced them to do keg stands.
WaPo Editors Finally Realize The GOP Isn't Serious About The Debt
First Posted: 01- 3-11 12:37 PM | Updated: 01- 3-11 08:45 PM
For the better part of the past year, the editors of the Washington Post have been generically a-screech with worry over the deficits, and their insistence that the Obama administration needs to get serious about them. Well, today, the editors seem to have finally realized that the alternative is not much better, and that the GOP may actually not be all that serious about taming them either:
Are House Republicans serious about dealing with the deficit? You could listen to their rhetoric - or you could read the rules they are poised to adopt at the start of the new Congress. The former promises a new fiscal sobriety. The latter suggests that the new GOP majority is determined to continue the spree of unaffordable tax-cutting.
The ominous signs come in the wording of the new majority's version of its pay-as-you-go rules, which normally require that new programs or tax initiatives be covered with cuts to other programs or new revenue. In the GOP concept, pay-as-you-go applies only to spending programs. When it comes to tax cuts, it's all go, no pay. Taxes can be cut, and the national debt increased, without any offsetting savings.
The editors are referring to the new "cut-go" plan, which exempts tax cuts from the fiscal realities of the federal government's balance sheet. It seems to have caught them by surprise! Had they, say, availed themselves of their own paper's reporting, they might have caught a whiff of this coming from several million miles away. Let's check in with Washington Post reporter Lori Montgomery, circa September:
Even as they hammer Democrats for running up record budget deficits, Senate Republicans are rolling out a plan to permanently extend an array of expiring tax breaks that would deprive the Treasury of more than $4 trillion over the next decade, nearly doubling projected deficits over that period unless dramatic spending cuts are made.
For decades the Wall Street Journal editorial pages were famouse for this sort of thing, spouting off endlessly about an imaginary economic surreality of Laffer Curves, trickle down golden reigns of endless prosperity, self-regulating markets and tooth fairies, while its actual reporters did the best nothing-but-the-facts-ma'am business reporting money could buy, since they were writing for a business audience that had no desire whatsoever to be "spun" (aka deceived, taken for a ride, sold a bill of goods, etc.) when the result of dishonest reporting could well be financial disaster. The business model made perfect sense for the WSJ, whose readers presumably understood perfectly what was going on.
This week, as the progressive blogosphere seethed in resentment over President Obama's cave-in to Republicans on tax cuts for the wealthy, at least one commentator linked the debate over tax policy to education reform.
It was depressing enough when the president caved on extending $120 billion in tax cuts for the highest-earning 2 percent of Americans at a time of war and surging debt. As proof of White House fear and timidity, and Republican greed and myopia, the news doesn't get much worse.
That's $120 billion over two years that won't go to boost job creation. Nor will it fund a portion of the $300 billion we'll spend on wars during same period - instead, we'll borrow that abroad and hand the bill to the kids. Worse, none of that cash will be available to lure America's top young talent to the classroom by finally making teaching a prestigious, well-paying career.
Oops - I forgot - no one in the tax and budget talks was talking about transforming the teaching profession as part of America's long-term economic recovery plan. After all, that would mean thinking beyond 2012. Yet the education world was rocked Tuesday when students in Shanghai, in that city's debut on a respected international test, outscored dozens of other countries in math, science and reading.
The "respected international test" that Miller is referring is, of course, the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, and the supposed stunner about this year's results is that PISA ranked American school kids 23rd or 24th in most subjects while students in the city of Shanghai outscored the rest of the world.
Miller laments how this is yet another "grim reminder of our lagging schools" and concludes that the argument about taxes and school improvement needs to be re-framed into one where retreats on tax cuts need to be equated to our deteriorating education system. In his call to arms, he exhorts the education reform movement's famed poster-person, Michelle Rhee, to lead the charge:
As part of her newly launched advocacy group, Students First, former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee should take these scary new findings to editorial boards, business groups and PTAs in every state. Only when enough of us wake up to the fact that we're losing badly in today's global education race will we have a hope of getting serious about turning things around.
Although Miller's thinking might strike many on the left-end of the political spectrum as sensible and logical - i. e., tax cuts for the rich = less money to improve our deteriorating schools - his argument will actually be quickly and summarily dispensed with in the broader debate. And it should be.
(I've written about Project Vote's poll released last month, as well as front-paging their diaries about it. If we had a functioning hegemonic war-fighting machine on our side, we would have been talking about it all over the place. Instead, there was virtual media silence. But, belatedly, there appears to be some indication that their message is getting some echoes. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Yesterday the Post reported that their own new survey finds—as Project Vote’s poll did—that there is strong support for government programs that provide a social safety net and protect ordinary people from the predations of the market. “Although Republicans, and many Democrats, have tried to demonize Washington,” write Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, “they must contend with the fact that most major government programs remain enormously popular…”
According to the Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University poll, large majorities among the public say that Medicare (96 percent), Social Security (95 percent), food stamps (82 percent), federal aid to public schools (91 percent), unemployment benefits (91 percent) and environmental protection (89 percent) are important government programs. For the functions served by these government programs, large majorities also say they want to see more federal government involvement, not less. For example, 64 percent of respondents said they want to see more federal government involvement in reducing poverty; 61 percent want more government involvement in protecting the environment; and 52 percent want more government involvement in ensuring access to health care. And as our own survey found, presented with a choice, more people want government to spend more now to create jobs and improve the economy (50 percent) than do those who want government to avoid increasing the federal deficit (46 percent).
This week in the general media and internet there was an interesting rhetorical scrum among pundits and bloggers that revealed a lot about where the debate in education is heading and, in particular, what it may mean for the fate of poor brown and black kids in the most impoverished neighborhoods of America.
The tete-a-tete started with a column in Monday's Washington Post by Robert J. Samuelson in which he declared that nearly 40 years of school reform have been a "failure." To buttress his argument he points to results from tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress which show that while "some improvements have occurred in elementary schools . . . they're erased by high school." He also points out that even though "there has also been a modest narrowing in the high school achievement gaps among whites, blacks and Hispanics; unfortunately, the narrowing generally stopped in the late 1980s." Then he adds an aside that "(Average test scores have remained stable because, although the scores of blacks and Hispanics have risen slightly, the size of these minority groups also expanded. This means that their still-low scores exert a bigger drag on the average. The two factors offset each other.)" Samuelson concludes his column by blaming the lack of progress in school improvement on a decrease in student motivation and his observations that "more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well."
The next day, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic blasted Samuelson for being an out-dated, hang-dog curmudgeon who doesn't understand that "American education policy has been on auto-pilot," "the current wave of reform" has never been tried before, and that charter schools, specifically KIPP schools, "have shown revolutionary improvements among poor, inner-city students and have rapidly expanded."
Joining the fray soon after is the Daily Howler's Bob Somerby who accuses Samuelson of spewing "disinformation" and accuses Chait of being a "liberal" who doesn't "care about blacks." His argument is that from 1971 to 2008 17-year-old black students gained 29 points in reading and the fact that neither Samuleson or Chait acknowledge this shows that these authors are "dissembling" at best, or at worst, have "no earthly sign" of understanding the matter at hand. His conclusion, in a Friday post, is that "we're surprised by these test score gains; we wouldn't have thought that an increasing focus on testing, 'standards' and accountability would have produced this type of result. But these large score gains exist-and they simply beg for analysis, unless you don't give a flying fig about the kids who achieved them."
Not to be left out of the fun, Matthew Yglesias from the Center for American Progress sided with Somerby to a point, but wants to assert that the main message from looking at the most recent data from NAEP is to realize that "history gives us no reason to doubt that it's possible for black kids to do better in school." (Earth to Yglesias: Is there anyone to the left of a Tea Party troll asserting that it's not "possible for blacks to do well in school"?)
The last one hurtling into the moshpit is Kevin Drum of Mother Jones who concludes that what all this brou-ha-ha over NAEP scores shows is:
"You can say that black and Hispanic scores have risen dramatically since the early 70s. Or you can say that black and Hispanic scores have stagnated (or even dropped slightly depending on how you cherry pick your dates) since the early 90s. Or you can say that white kids have made slight gains. Or you can say that the black-white gap closed considerably for a while but hasn't changed much lately."
So according to Drum, there aren't any conclusions about the NAEP data really worth making, and he nonchalantly dismisses the whole crossfire by saying that "there's just not much there there."
What none of these supposedly informed observers of educational progress dare to address though is the 50,000 pound gorilla staring at them from the NAEP report (pdf).
The gorilla makes its first appearance on page 4:
"the reading score gaps between White and Black students at all three ages showed no significant change from 2004 to 2008, the gaps did narrow in 2008 compared to 1971. White - Hispanic gaps in reading scores also showed no significant change from 2004 to 2008 but were smaller in 2008 than in 1975 at ages 9 and 17. Across all three age groups, neither the White - Black nor White - Hispanic gaps in mathematics changed significantly from 2004 to 2008, but both were smaller in 2008 than in 1973."
Then on page 14:
No significant change in White - Black score gaps since 2004
Page 16:
No significant change in White - Black score gaps since 2004
And page 17:
No significant change in White - Hispanic score gaps since 2004
In other words, one of the most overwhelming conclusions of the NAEP data - that four years of NCLB-driven "reforms" produced nothing in terms of narrowing our country's achievement gap - is either being denied or brushed away by those who proclaim to speak for the interests of poor black and brown school children. And it is the very same NCLB-styled reforms - "accountability" based on standardized testing - that are driving the current administration's education policy and its KIPP-inspired charter school benefactors.
The New York Times today highlights a new report released by ProPublica and the National Law Journal concluding that torture and "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved by the Bush Administration and used on suspected terrorists has made it impossible to bring many of those alleged terrorists to justice.
Of the 53 habeas corpus cases brought by Guantanamo detainees and decided by federal court judges, the government has lost 37. Many of those losses were because the only evidence against the detainee was a coerced confession or statements from other prisoners who'd been tortured. Federal court judges have rightly found such statements unreliable and inadmissible. The result is that many of those suspects have won orders of release. (Only three have actually been freed.)
Unfortunately, those orders have led some critics of the administration - including Sen. Lindsey Graham and Brookings Institution commentator Benjamin Wittes - to argue that we need more expansive detention laws so the government doesn't have to let those suspects go. That's precisely the wrong response in a society that claims to presume suspects are innocent until actually proven guilty. (The standard in habeas cases is actually much lower than in a criminal case; the government only has to prove that it's "more likely than not" that the suspect can legally be detained.) Those 37 prisoners won their habeas cases because the government had no reliable evidence that they'd been fighting for al Qaeda or the Taliban. So judges across the political spectrum concluded that the government hadn't demonstrated that these detainees are detainable under the laws of war.
In a report Human Rights First released with The Constitution Project in June, 16 former federal judges explained that the courts deciding these habeas cases are doing the right thing: they're weighing the evidence, deciding the facts and applying the law. No new laws are needed. On the contrary, a new detention law designed to help the government win more cases in the absence of reliable evidence would only tarnish the reputation of the U.S. justice system, which in these cases is doing itself proud.
As the Times points out, these court decisions demonstrate a "respect for due process [that] will help repair this country's battered reputation." The Bush administration's failure to apply basic, longstanding American justice standards is what landed us in this mess in the first place, requiring that some terror suspects go free. Creating a new legal standard to accommodate those past mistakes would only compound the problem and drive the United States' reputation further into the ground.
We're already seeing that happen at the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Although, as Peter Finn in the Washington Post today points out, many of the military commission cases have stalled, one that has gone forward recently produced a highly questionable ruling that was immediately broadcast around the world.
In the case of a Canadian citizen and alleged child soldier, Omar Khadr, the judge ruled that a threat of gang-rape and murder in prison from his lead interrogator did not taint any of the 15-year-old's later "confessions" that he threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. Given that there's no physical evidence that Khadr committed the act, his statements to interrogators at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantanamo Bay are critical to the prosecution.
In a similar case, brought against Mohammed Jawad, also accused of throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers as a child, the military commission judge in 2008 concluded that early threats by Afghan interrogators tainted all of Jawad's later statements made to the Americans. His case was ultimately thrown out and he was returned to Afghanistan.
These sorts of conflicting rulings can happen in the military commissions, an ad hoc justice system created in fits and starts over the last eight years with no binding precedent or road-tested rules. It's one reason why those military commissions lack the legitimacy of civilian federal courts.
Like the court rulings ordering Guantanamo detainees freed, the military commissions, too, are a legacy of torture. They're an attempt to patch together a quasi-justice system to accommodate, without acknowledging or rectifying, the egregious mistakes of the past.
But neither new detention rules nor military commissions can truly overcome torture's legacy. That can only be done by admitting what happened, holding perpetrators accountable, and ultimately, prosecuting terror suspects in our time-tested, world-renowned American justice system. And that is rightly something about which this country can be proud.
Channeling Brad DeLong, why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
On April 20th, Roll Call published a guest piece from Andrea Lafferty, the whack-job from the Traditional Values Coalition, listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. In it, she called ENDA a "time bomb", moaned that public schools "will not be able to discriminate in hiring transgender teachers", hinted that drag queens will now all be teaching our kids, and whined that such laws "should not be forced upon the dissenting majority" (waiting for Andrea's thoughts on civil rights in the 1960s). This is the same person who once referred to an ENDA hearing as a "freak show" and the bill as the "Barney Frank She-Male Shower Bill".
Today, The Washington Post publishes a piece by Mary Ann Akers which quotes- you guessed it:
The Traditional Values Coalition, on the home page of its Web site, asks: "Do you want men dressed as women teaching your kids? Will this be the ENDA of innocence?"
The group warns that, under ENDA, "your children will be trapped in classes taught by drag queens and transgender activists" and they will be "forced to learn about bizarre sexual fetishes."
The coalition's executive director, Andrea Lafferty, has been lobbying members of Congress, and she describes them as "freaked out" by the bill. She tells members if they vote for the bill, they'll be allowing "she-males" with "serious mental disorders" into children's classrooms, leaving parents with no legal recourse.
To Roll Call and the WaPo, controversy is more interesting than journalism. If you want to present a two-sided view, there are lots of different organizations and people that have that perspective in a reasonable way- Barney Frank, in the piece, responds to two concerns about the transgender provision. But Akers, and her editor, think it's much better copy to find the most offensive, bombastic language possible from a hate group with a known history of lying about ENDA. "She-males" is just as offensive a term as nigger, kike or fag, but because Akers and her editor know that probably none of their readers know anyone who's transgender, it's no big deal to them to print a word that essentially labels an entire oppressed community as fringe.
Sometimes people bemoan to me the death of the traditional media, and I sympathize, partly as someone who gets the WaPo and NYTimes delivered on Sundays, and appreciates valued research. They also whine about blogs having no editorial control or oversight. Then I read more and more examples of bad journalism in the traditional media, including this latest example Chris posted by Mark Fournier, and wonder more and more if it's a few bad apples or prevalence across the entire landscape, and what to do about it.
The Washington Post reports today that President Obama's advisors are planning to recommend that the administration reverse its decision to try the September 11 suspects in federal court and instead opt for military commissions. That's more than just disappointing, given the overwhelming consensus of military and legal experts that civilian courts are more effective for prosecuting terrorists. If the president were to heed that advice, it would also be astonishingly bad politics.
Today, Washington Post "reporter" Jason Horowitz has this scoop: Rahm Emanuel is the cool voice of reason in the White House. Just last week, his colleague at the Post, Dana Milbanks, had this point: Obama needs Rahm.
Huh. Did the first story not get enough play so they decided to run it again?
Let's take a look at Mr. Horowitz's story:
Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He's the town's resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration.
Really? I don't think I've seen the "Rahm is wrong" angle get much play on the front page of, say, the Washington Post. What you mean to say, Mr. Horowitz, is that bloggers don't like Rahm, right?
But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts.
Translation: This contrary narrative is emerging because I'm writing it right now. Or, rather, my colleague Dana Milbank wrote a story last week based on mostly anonymous sources and I'm using those same nameless guys in my own story today. So now there are two stories by two different reporters which establishes a trend. People are talking! There's a pro-Rahm boomlet!
It is a view propounded by lawmakers and early supporters of President Obama who are frustrated because they think the administration has gone for the perfect at the expense of the plausible. They believe Emanuel, the town's leading purveyor of four-letter words, a former Israeli army volunteer and a product of a famously argumentative family, was not aggressive enough in trying to persuade a singularly self-assured president and a coterie of true-believer advisers that "change you can believe in" is best pursued through accomplishments you can pass.
See? People are talking! "Lawmakers" and "early supporters" and "they" and others too!
...The pairing [Obama and Rahm] made sense, but things haven't worked out as expected. And in the search for what has gone wrong, influential Democrats are -- in unusually frank terms -- blaming Obama and his closest campaign aides for not listening to Emanuel.
So who are these "influential Democrats?" The story quotes only one on-the-record Democrat with an explicitly pro-Rahm comment: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz. Others offer rather neutral-sounding analysis and others are anonymous. Two on-the-record sources that emerge in Horowitz story as Rahm supporters: Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Olympia Snowe.
So there you have it. Horowitz's point: President Obama should have listened to Rahm (and Republicans) more and to "idealistic" voices less.
Nevermind that many so-called idealists have been a better source of "Realpolitik" on things like health care reform than inside-the-beltway experts. One example? Current efforts to pass health care reform through reconciliation were pushed by Chris Bowers and others a full year ago. Back then, getting simple majorities was a low bar and we'd have moved on to other battles long ago. In today's political climate it's a much closer call.
Newspapers are in trouble. Big, end-of-the-road death spiral big trouble. The Boston Globe was recently pulled off the market because its owners who shelled out $1.1 billion for the paper were a little upset at the $35 million offer plus assumption of some debt that they received.
This isn't pennies on dollars, this is pennies on hundreds of dollars. Nice.
About this Investigation Over ten months, the Washington Post analyzed the spending, services, and finances of every specialized AIDS organization funded by D.C.'s HIV/AIDS Administration from 2004-2008, an estimated 90 groups, building a database from tax returns, audits, lawsuits, real estate records, D.C. Council records, and corporate and police reports. The Post also obtained grant agreements, invoices and government correspondence for about 60 of these groups. The newspaper interviewed dozens of people with HIV or AIDS patients, their families and service providers, and visited more than a dozen offices across the city.
The largest possible sum at issue seems to be $25 million, since that's the total sum available to non-profits, where the problems seem to be concentrated.
Barack Obama put together the outlines of a really solid health insurance reform plan in his 2008 campaign, and sent a similar package of ideas to Congress earlier this year. While not everything I would have wanted, I have strongly supported him in getting those basic ideas passed, as have three House committees and one Senate committee, and the overwhelming number of Democratic activists and voters. He has said he would remain flexible about specifics, but that to him, health care reform needed to achieve certain goals, including dramatically expanded coverage of the uninsured, serious cost containment, and providing enough choice and competition to keep health insurers honest. I agree 100%.
My question now is why are certain anonymous White House officials trying to undermine the President? I ask this question in all seriousness, because this is exactly what happened in the Clinton fight for health care reform. We would do these terrific, thoughtful, complex policy meetings where we go over various options on the health care bill but make no firm decisions. The next day in the New York Times or The Washington Post, some particularly controversial aspect of the bill would be headlined as in "High-ranking administration officials say Clinton is considering X." It was without question one of the things that eventually killed health care reform.
What I discovered when I worked in the White House was that there were plenty of people who work in that building whose primary loyalty is not to the President but to themselves. They leak things to reporters to cultivate them and make sure they write puff job articles about them. They help certain lobbyists because they might want a job in their firm someday. They empower certain powerful Senators or members of Congress because they are personally close to them, and/or because they might want to get paid big money to lobby them someday soon. Maybe they want to run for office themselves one day, and so they cultivate certain donors.
So while it is possible that all the back-tracking on the President's bill from anonymous staffers is all a carefully laid-out strategy, since it's a strategy that is really not working, I think it is also quite possible it is just classic disloyalty from self-interested staffers. In part I say this because what kind of brain-dead strategy would it be for an anonymous staffer to say on the front page of The Washington Post "I don't understand why the left of the left has decided this (the public option, a core part of Obama's health care plan) is their Waterloo." I mean, why would you undermine and attack the people who are actually fighting for the President's plan? Talk about a dumb strategic move. And the Obama people are smart, so I have to assume that his is just pure disloyalty, perhaps someone trying to suck up to Max Baucus, for example.
I am going to keep fighting for the President's plan and goals. I will not give in until the fight is done. I just hope all the anonymous White House staffers will keep fighting with me.
David Broder has wasted some valuable space in the Washington Post urging President Obama to hold firm against torture investigations. No wait, that's wrong. Space in the Post isn't valuable anymore. That explains why they're willing to publish this brilliant conclusion:
Suppose that Obama backs down and Holder or someone else starts hauling Bush administration lawyers and operatives into hearings and courtrooms.
Suppose the investigators decide that the country does not want to see the former president and vice president in the dock. Then underlings pay the price while big shots go free. But at some point, if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me.
Is that where we want to go?
Yes. That's exactly where we want to go. But Broder, like Peggy Noonan, just wants to look the other way. So the precedent would be this:
President wants to do something illegal. Wants to really bad. Compliant legal aides rewrite rules for him to do so. Underlings break laws based on said legal advice.
No one gets punished.
David Broder turns 80 this year. He should use the occasion to retire and the Washington Post should use the occasion to put something more insightful in the vacated space.
January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.
Extended quote:
Global temperatures during 2007
The analyses made by leading climate centres rank the year 2007 amongst the ten warmest years on record. The Met Office Hadley Centre analyses showed that the global mean surface temperature in 2007 was 0.40°C (0.72°F) above the 1961-1990 annual average (14°C/57.2°F) and hence marks the seventh warmest year on record. According to the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the global mean surface temperature anomaly was 0.55°C (0.99°F) above the twentieth century average (1901-2000) of 13.9°C (56.9°F), which ranks 2007 the fifth warmest year in its record.
January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.
I'll say one thing for George Will: at least the guy believes in recycling--when it comes to global warming lies, that is. Because that's his entire shtick in his most recent columns on the subject, "Dark Green Doomsayers" (Feb 15) and "Climate Science in A Tornado" (Feb 27), both of which have been widely and thoroughly debunked, perhaps most succinctly here at the Wonk Room, which also takes note of the Post's Fred Hiatt's dishonest defense of Will's lies as 'inferences.' (Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, provides the lowdown on the Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander's shameful performance here.)
The death of Mark Felt (AKA "Deep Throat") has Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr., wondering "Could We Uncover Watergate Today?"
Over at Dkos, LithiumCola notes that Downie had been "executive editor of the Post from 1991 (after Ben Bradlee stepped down) to earlier this year, when he retired. Downie therefore held Bradlee's post for most of the Bush Administration. A point which makes his column in Sunday's edition of the Post particularly mystifying, or maddening, at any rate revealing."
LithiumCola goes on to note:
The recently retired executive editor of the Washington Post is musing about what "would" happen if a "story such as Watergate" were to emerge once again.
A wild hypothetical, to be sure.
It put me in mind of an article I wrote for Random Lengths News back in June of 2006, constituting "a conservative list of 25 reasons to impeach President Bush." For by now, one thing, at least, should be blazingly clear: the entire Washington establishment was in on this particular crime spree, every last step of the way.
STATE BLOGS
