I don't like John McCain, and I never fail to be amused by the media's willingness to portray him as a moderate. Still, compared to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) -- who yesterday described a UN session on climate change as "brainwashing" -- McCain's willingness to criticize the Bush administration for stonewalling Congress about the reality of global warming is...
Germanwatch and the Climate Action Network-Europe (CANE) have released their 2007 Climate Change Performance Index. Their press release describes the purpose and methodology of the index as follows:Jan Burck and other Germanwatch experts developed the CCPI methodology, which is meant to help increase transparency in international climate policy. The Index compares the climate protection efforts of 56 industrialised and...
The moment of truth for Luis Posada Carriles is approaching: U.S. District Judge Philip Martinez held last Friday that the Bush administration has until February 1, 2007, to either prosecute or release Posada. Prosecution is looking increasingly unlikely: although the administration urged the judge in October to keep Posada in detention, it has consistently refused to bring criminal charges...
A number of commentators have noticed that the new season of Battlestar Galactica, the best show on television, is a thinly disguised attack on the Bush administration's policies in the War on Terror. Here, for example, is a snippet from an essay in Slate entitled, appropriately enough, "Does Battlestar Galactica Support the Iraqi Insurgency?": It starts with a suicide...
According to Steve Clemons at the Washington Note, Bolton's nomination is dead despite Bush re-nominating him:At 1:22 pm, the White House sent John Bolton's controversial nomination to serve as US Ambassador to the United Nations back up to the Senate. Luckily, Lincoln Chafee would have none of it — suggesting that such a nomination is clearly not in the spirit of...
News involving Saddam to report: Saddam's principal defense attorney, Khalil Duleimi, has accused the U.S. military of confining the defense team in the Green Zone since the verdict was announced, preventing them from returning to Amman. Dulemi believes that their confinement represents a deliberate attempt on the part of the military to deprive them of access to the media and...
File this one under "not such a good idea":Part of a Nazi leader's speech was played over the public address system before a high school soccer game, prompting an apology by the home team's principal. Forestview High School principal Robert Carpenter said neither he nor his team's coach knew about the speech before the 90-second excerpt was played during warmups Saturday,...
The AP has a story today on Saddam's pending appeal that implies very strongly that Saddam will be executed before the Anfal trial is completed:If the nine-judge appeals panel upholds the death sentences, they could be ready for signing early next year, according to a schedule laid out Monday by chief prosecutor Jaafar Moussawi. Moussawi said the Iraqi High Tribunal must...
In other Saddam news, statements by the Iraqi government earlier today support my suspicion that it believes quickly executing Saddam will help quell the insurgency:If the final verdict confirms Saddam’s guilt, he will be executed within 30 days, and some powerful Iraqi voices are calling for the judges not to dawdle. ‘We strongly feel that every day he lives is not...
I will have more to say when the IHT's written decision is available, but here are a few quick thoughts on Saddam's conviction. First, until this morning, I did not believe that the U.S. had orchestrated the timing of the verdict. But then I learned that the written decision will not be released until Thursday "for technical reasons." So...
You know your policies in Iraq are a disaster when Richard Perle -- he of the infamous phantom libel suit against Seymour Hersh, and one of the neoconservative architects of the war -- says that invading Iraq was a mistake. From this week's Vanity Fair:Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It...
Privacy International, a human-rights organization that was formed in 1990 to track surveillance and privacy invasion by governments and corporations, has released the results of its 2006 international privacy survey. Using primarily quantitative data, the survey scored and ranked 36 countries -- all of the members of the EU and 11 benchmark countries, including the U.S. and New...
