Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill (WashingtonPost.com) By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 29, 2006; Page A13

The military trials bill approved by Congress lends legislative support for the first time to broad rules for the detention, interrogation, prosecution and trials of terrorism suspects far different from those in the familiar American criminal justice system.

President Bush's argument that the government requires extraordinary power to respond to the unusual threat of terrorism helped him win final support for a system of military trials with highly truncated defendant's rights. The United States used similar trials on just four occasions: during the country's revolution, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and World War II.

Included in the bill, passed by Republican majorities in the Senate yesterday and the House on Wednesday, are unique rules that bar terrorism suspects from challenging their detention or treatment through traditional habeas corpus petitions. They allow prosecutors, under certain conditions, to use evidence collected through hearsay or coercion to seek criminal convictions.

The bill rejects the right to a speedy trial and limits the traditional right to self-representation by requiring that defendants accept military defense attorneys. Panels of military officers need not reach unanimous agreement to win convictions, except in death penalty cases, and appeals must go through a second military panel before reaching a federal civilian court.

By writing into law for the first time the definition of an "unlawful enemy combatant," the bill empowers the executive branch to detain indefinitely anyone it determines to have "purposefully and materially" supported anti-U.S. hostilities. Only foreign nationals among those detainees can be tried by the military commissions, as they are known, and sentenced to decades in jail or put to death.

At the same time, the bill immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year. It gives the president a dominant but not exclusive role in setting the rules for future interrogations of terrorism suspects.

Written largely, but not completely, on the administration's terms, with passages that give executive branch officials discretion to set details or divert from its protections, the bill is meant to provide what Bush said yesterday are "the tools" needed to handle terrorism suspects U.S. officials hope to capture.

(More ... Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill - washingtonpost.com)  ¶ 21:20 0 comments

  The Choice: A Longer Life or More Stuff (NYTimes.com) By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: September 27, 2006

The most authoritative report on the cost of health insurance came out yesterday, and it’s sure to cause some new outrage.

The average cost of a family insurance plan that Americans get through their jobs has risen another 7.7 percent this year, to $11,500, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In only seven years, the cost has doubled, while incomes and company revenue, which pay for health insurance, haven’t risen nearly as much.

These spiraling costs — a phrase that has virtually become a prefix for the words “health care” — are slowly creating a crisis. Many executives have decided that they cannot afford to keep insuring their workers, and the portion of Americans without coverage has jumped 23 percent since 1987.

An industry that once defined the American economy, meanwhile, is sinking in large measure because of the cost of caring for its workers and retirees. For every vehicle that General Motors sells, fully $1,500 of the purchase price goes to pay for medical care. “We must all do more to cut costs,” G.M.’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said on Capitol Hill this summer while testifying about health care.

Mr. Wagoner’s argument has become the accepted wisdom about the crisis: the solution lies in restraining costs. Yet it’s wrong. Living in a society that spends a lot of money on medical care creates real problems, but it also has something in common with getting old. It’s better than the alternative.

(More ... The Choice: A Longer Life or More Stuff - New York Times)  ¶ 20:45 0 comments

  New Hope for Democrats in Bid for Senate (NYTimes.com) By ROBIN TONER
Published: September 28, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 — Six weeks before Election Day, the Democrats suddenly face a map with unexpected opportunities in their battle for control of the Senate.

In Virginia, a state that few expected to be seriously competitive, Senator George Allen looks newly vulnerable after a series of controversies over charges of racial insensitivity, strategists in both parties say. In Tennessee, another Southern state long considered safely red, Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., a Democrat, has run a strong campaign that has kept that state in contention.

Elsewhere, Democratic challengers are either ahead or close in races in five states held by the Republicans: Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, according to political strategists in both parties and the latest polls.

All of these races could shift direction in a matter of days, let alone six weeks, and Republicans are counting on their superior finances and large blocks of television advertising to hold the line. Democrats also have their own vulnerabilities, particularly in New Jersey, where Senator Robert Menendez is in a tight race with his Republican challenger, State Senator Thomas H. Kean Jr., according to recent polls.

Democrats must win six Republican seats to regain a Senate majority, meaning they would have to win nearly every close race. Even the most optimistic Democrats acknowledge that such a feat would require a big anti-Republican wave, a lot of money and a lot of luck.

Still, a shift in the Senate was always considered a long shot this year. Some analysts now say, however, that there are enough Republican seats facing serious challenges to make it at least plausible.

(More ... New Hope for Democrats in Bid for Senate - New York Times)  ¶ 20:38 0 comments

  Bush Reveals Secret War Report (SFGate.com) Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

(09-27) 04:00 PDT Washington -- An intelligence report ordered declassified Tuesday by President Bush offers a sober assessment of the spread of Islamic terrorism, finding that the war in Iraq is "cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.''

In ordering the release of sections of a secret national intelligence estimate prepared last April, Bush was reacting to an election-year leak that threatened to undercut his claims about the war in Iraq.

Bush said the leaks this weekend of portions of the document had mischaracterized the report prepared by analysts from 16 intelligence agencies. But critics of the war said the report made their case that the war in Iraq has distracted the United States from the real war against terrorism.

While only a few paragraphs in the released "key judgments'' section of the report entitled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States'' deal directly with Iraq, they do mirror reports in newspapers Sunday.

"We assess that the Iraqi jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere," read the declassified section of the intelligence report released Tuesday.

(More ... BUSH REVEALS SECRET WAR REPORT / In papers declassified in response to leak, spy agencies see Iraq conflict fueling jihad)  ¶ 20:31 0 comments

  US Army’s Kill-Kill Ethos Under Fire (TimesOnline.co.uk) Sarah Baxter, Washington

THE American army should scrap the Warrior Ethos, a martial creed that urges soldiers to demonstrate their fighting spirit by destroying the enemies of the United States at close quarter rather than winning the trust of local populations, according to senior US officers and counter-insurgency experts.

Soldiers are instructed to live by the creed, which evokes the warrior spirit of the modern US army. It begins with the stirring vow, “I am an American soldier”, and goes on to affirm that “I will never accept defeat. I will never quit . . . I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat”.

Admirable though this may be in the heat of battle, the Warrior Ethos’s emphasis on annihilating the enemy is inimical to the type of patient, confidence-building counter-insurgency warfare in which America is engaged in the Middle East, according to Lieutenant-General Gregory Newbold, former director of operations to the joint chiefs of staff at the Pentagon.

“The future crises that relate to Iraq and Afghanistan will be a struggle for hearts and minds,” Newbold said. “We’re in a different environment now and that requires different techniques.”

The Warrior Ethos replaced the Soldier’s Creed drawn up in the post-Vietnam era which stated: “I am an American soldier . . . No matter what situation I am in, I will never do anything for pleasure, profit or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform. I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my army comrades from actions disgraceful to themselves and the uniform.”

(More ... US army’s kill-kill ethos under fire - Sunday Times - Times Online)  ¶ 20:30 0 comments

  Innovator Devises Way Around Electoral College (NYTimes.com) By RICK LYMAN
Published: September 22, 2006

LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif., Sept. 21 — In his early 20’s, John R. Koza and fellow graduate students invented a brutally complicated board game based on the Electoral College that became a brief cult hit and recently fetched $100 for an antique version on eBay.

By his 30’s, Dr. Koza was a co-inventor of the scratch-off lottery ticket and found it one of the few sure ways to find fortune with the lottery.

Now, a 63-year-old eminence among computer scientists who teaches genetic programming at Stanford, Dr. Koza has decided to top off things with an end run on the Constitution. He has concocted a plan for states to skirt the Electoral College system legally to insure the election of whichever presidential candidate receives the most votes nationwide.

“When people complain that it’s an end run,” Dr. Koza said, “I just tell them, ‘Hey, an end run is a legal play in football.’ ’’

The first fruit of his effort, a bill approved by the California legislature that would allocate the state’s 55 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, sits on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk. The governor has to decide by Sept. 30 whether to sign it, a decision that may well determine whether Dr. Koza’s scheme takes flight or becomes another relic in the history of efforts to kill the Electoral College.

“It would be a major development if California enacts this thing,” said Tim Storey, an analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “It will definitely transform it from a smoldering thing into a fire.’’

There have been many efforts over the decades to kill the Electoral College, the little-known and widely misunderstood body that actually elects the president based on the individual states that a candidate wins. Most recently, former Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois and former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana spearheaded a drive, Fair Vote, for a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College.

(More ... Innovator Devises Way Around Electoral College - New York Times)  ¶ 10:43 0 comments

  G.O.P. in Senate Narrows Immigration Focus to 700-Mile Fence (NYTimes.com) By CARL HULSE
Published: September 21, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 — Senate Republicans formally put aside a broad immigration overhaul sought by President Bush on Wednesday and decided instead to press ahead with narrower bills to require building 700 miles of fence on the southwestern border.

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said the fate of millions of illegal immigrants already in the United States had become a “fundamental sticking point” in trying to reach agreement with the House on a broad bill.

Mr. Frist said the fence proposal, which the House has passed, was the best alternative if lawmakers wanted to salvage some immigration changes before the Nov. 7 elections.

“Let’s focus on a problem the American people understand,’’ the senator said, “and that is, we have hundreds of thousands of people coming across our border every year into our country.”

He added that the broad measure could be considered when Congress returned in mid-November or next year.

The Senate voted, 94 to 0, to debate the measure on fencing and other border barriers at the cost of billions of dollars. But the fate of even that measure is unclear, because members of both parties have reservations, and Mr. Frist may need to block any amendments if he wants to deliver it to Mr. Bush before Congress adjourns next week.

(More ... G.O.P. in Senate Narrows Immigration Focus to 700-Mile Fence - New York Times)  ¶ 19:35 0 comments

  Progress or Regress? (NYTimes.com) By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 15, 2006

Is the typical American family better off than it was a generation ago? That’s the subject of an intense debate these days, as commentators try to understand the sour mood of the American public.

But it’s the wrong debate. For one thing, there probably isn’t a right answer. Most Americans are better off in some ways, worse off in others, than they were in the early 1970’s. It’s a subjective judgment whether the good outweighs the bad. And as I’ll explain, that ambiguity is actually the real message.

Here’s what the numbers say. From the end of World War II until 1973, when the first oil crisis brought an end to the postwar boom, the U.S. economy delivered a huge, broad-based rise in living standards: family income adjusted for inflation roughly doubled for the poor, the middle class, and the elite alike. Nobody debated whether families were better off than they had been a generation ago; it was obvious that they were, by any measure.

Since 1973, however, the picture has been mixed. Real median household income — the income of the household in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation — rose a modest 16 percent between 1973 and 2005. But even this small rise didn’t reflect clear gains across the board. The typical full-time male worker saw his wages, adjusted for inflation, actually fall; the typical household’s real income was up only because women’s wages rose (although by far less than everyone’s wages rose during the postwar boom) and because more women were working.

The debate over the state of the middle class, for the most part, is about whether these numbers understate or overstate the true progress achieved by typical families. The optimists point to technological advances that, they argue, don’t get reflected in official estimates of the standard of living. In 1973, you couldn’t chat on a cellphone, watch a video or surf the Internet; many medical conditions that are now easily managed with drugs were untreatable; and so on.

(More ... Progress or Regress? - New York Times)  ¶ 12:04 0 comments

  Stampeding Congress (NYTimes.com) EDITORIAL

Published: September 15, 2006

We’ll find out in November how well the White House’s be-very-afraid campaign has been working with voters. We already know how it’s working in Congress. Stampeded by the fear of looking weak on terrorism, lawmakers are rushing to pass a bill demanded by the president that would have minimal impact on antiterrorist operations but could cause profound damage to justice and the American way.

Yesterday, the president himself went to Capitol Hill to lobby for his bill, which would give Congressional approval to the same sort of ad hoc military commissions that Mr. Bush created on his own authority after 9/11 and that the Supreme Court has already ruled unconstitutional. It would permit the use of coerced evidence, secret hearings and other horrific violations of American justice.

Legal experts within the military have been deeply opposed to the president’s plan from the beginning, and have formed one of the most influential bulwarks against the administration’s attempt to rewrite the rules to make its recent behavior retroactively legal. This week, the White House sank so low as to strong-arm the chief prosecutors for the four armed services into writing a letter to the House that seemed to endorse the president’s position on two key issues. Congressional officials say those officers later told lawmakers that they did not want to sign the letter, which contradicts everything the prosecutors, dozens of their colleagues, former top commanders of the military and a series of federal judges have said in public.

The idea that the nation’s chief executive is pressing so hard to undermine basic standards of justice is shocking. And any argument that these extreme methods would be used only against the most dangerous of international terrorists has been destroyed by the handling of hundreds of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, many of whom appear to have been scooped up in Afghanistan years ago with little attempt to verify any connection to terrorism, and now are in danger of lingering behind bars forever without a day in court.

(More ... Stampeding Congress - New York Times)  ¶ 20:42 0 comments

  A Defining Moment for America (WashingtonPost.com) The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture.

Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A18

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won't have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

There's no question that the United States is facing a dangerous foe that uses the foulest of methods. But a wide array of generals and others who should know argue that it is neither prudent nor useful for the United States to compromise its own values in response. "I continue to read and hear that we are facing a 'different enemy' in the war on terror," retired Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) this week. "No matter how true that may be, inhumanity and cruelty are not new to warfare nor to enemies we have faced in the past. . . . Through those years, we held to our own values. We should continue to do so."

(More ... A Defining Moment for America - washingtonpost.com)  ¶ 20:30 0 comments

  Warning: Bigger Carbon Cut Needed to Avoid Disaster (Guardian.co.uk) Leading researchers say government has misled public and call for 90% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050

John Vidal, environment editor
Friday September 15, 2006
The Guardian

Drastic action is needed if Britain is to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, a ground-breaking environmental report warns today.

In the first big study of what households, business and government may have to do to cut carbon emissions, the leading climate change research body has revised upwards by 50% the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that need to be achieved by 2050.

The government-funded Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says this is necessary because successive governments have failed to include aviation or shipping emissions in their calculations.

At the moment, the government's estimate is that a 60% cut in emissions is needed to avoid a 2C increase in temperatures by 2050. But the authors of today's study conclude that a 90% cut in emissions is needed. Their data suggests that when aviation and shipping is factored in, UK carbon emissions have not fallen at all since 1990.

In a scathing report commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Cooperative Bank, the Tyndall Centre academics lambast successive governments for misleading the public on what has been achieved and what needs to be done.

(More ... Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Warning: bigger carbon cut needed to avoid disaster)  ¶ 20:27 0 comments

  In Gamble, Calif. Tries to Curb Greenhouse Gases (NYTimes.com) By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: September 15, 2006

SACRAMENTO — In the Rocky Mountain States and the fast-growing desert Southwest, more than 20 power plants, designed to burn coal that is plentiful and cheap, are on the drawing boards. Much of the power, their owners expected, would be destined for the people of California.

But such plants would also be among the country’s most potent producers of carbon dioxide, the king of gases linked to global warming. So California has just delivered a new message to these energy suppliers: If you cannot produce power with the lowest possible emissions of these greenhouse gases, we are not interested.

“When your biggest customer says, ‘I ain’t buying,’ you rethink,” said Hal Harvey, the environment program director at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif. “When you have 38 million customers you don’t have access to, you rethink. Selling to Phoenix is nice. Las Vegas is nice. But they aren’t California.”

California’s decision to impose stringent demands on suppliers even outside its borders, broadened by the Legislature on Aug. 31 and awaiting the governor’s signature, is but one example of the state’s wide-ranging effort to remake its energy future.

The Democratic-controlled legislature and the Republican governor also agreed at that time on legislation to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by 2020, a measure that affects not only power plants but also other large producers of carbon dioxide, including oil refineries and cement plants.

(More ... In Gamble, Calif. Tries to Curb Greenhouse Gases - New York Times)  ¶ 19:23 0 comments

  Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned (NYTimes.com) By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: September 10, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — From those first moments five years ago when Secret Service agents burst into Vice President Dick Cheney’s office on Sept. 11, lifted him off his feet and propelled him to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the man who had returned to Washington that year to remake the powers of the presidency seemed unstoppable.

Within minutes, Mr. Cheney was directing the government’s response to an attack that was still under way. Within weeks, he was overseeing the surveillance program that tracked suspected terrorist communications into and out of the United States without warrants. Within months, he and his staff, guided by a loyal aide, David S. Addington, were championing the reinterpretation of the rules of war so that they could detain “enemy combatants” and interrogate them at secret detention facilities run by the C.I.A. around the world.

It was Mr. Cheney and his staff who helped shape the rules under which members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva Conventions and would be tried by “military commissions” at Guantánamo Bay — if they faced trial at all.

“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,” Mr. Cheney said in December on a flight from Pakistan to Oman. “You know,” he added, “it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.”

But as the nation observes the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his influence challenged. Congress and the Supreme Court have pushed back at his claim that the president alone, as commander in chief, can set the rules for detention, interrogation and domestic spying.

On Wednesday afternoon in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Cheney sat silently as President Bush urged Congress to restore to him the powers, stripped away by the Supreme Court in a 5-to-3 ruling in June, to create military commissions and define the precise meaning of the Geneva Conventions when it comes to interrogations.

There is little question that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney still share the goal of expanding the power of the presidency: legislation they have sent to Congress would essentially allow them to set the rules of evidence, define interrogation techniques and intercept domestic communications as they have for the past five years.

But they have been stymied in their effort to simply assert those powers and carry them out with minimal oversight, as part of Mr. Cheney’s declared goal to restore to the presidency an authority that he believed was dangerously eroded after Vietnam and Watergate.

(More ... Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned - New York Times)  ¶ 21:56 0 comments

  For Democrats’ Hopes, Less Promise in New York (NYTimes.com) By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
Published: September 11, 2006

In a year when Democrats hope to take control of the House of Representatives, New York would appear to be fertile ground for toppling Republican incumbents. Democrats have a statewide edge in enrollment, and a popular incumbent, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is at the top of the party’s ticket.

In fact, just a few months ago, Democrats envisioned significant gains in New York, perhaps picking up as many as four seats, possibly even five. But that goal now seems increasingly remote, and there is an emerging consensus among political analysts that the party’s best chance for capturing a Republican seat is the battle to succeed Representative Sherwood L. Boehlert, one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress, who is retiring.

At the same time, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to spend roughly $50 million on advertisements for races around the country, according to Republican estimates. But none of that money has been set aside for New York races, except for Mr. Boehlert’s seat in the 24th District in the Utica area, according to Democrats involved in the races.

The shifting local fortunes for Democrats could have serious political implications beyond New York. The party needs 15 seats to take control of the House. Even one victory in New York would be an important step toward that goal, giving the Democrats a cushion if they lose elsewhere in the nation.

The situation in New York is particularly surprising given the state’s reputation as a Democratic bastion. National and state party officials have spent months trying to create buzz around those races. But Republican incumbents, in New York and elsewhere, have been trying to shift the focus of the races away from hostility toward the Bush administration to more local concerns, like the potential loss of federal aid to their districts if they lose veteran congressmen.

(More ... For Democrats’ Hopes, Less Promise in New York - New York Times)  ¶ 21:53 0 comments

  Scientists Find New Global Warming Threat From Melting Permafrost (USATODAY.com) Updated 9/6/2006 3:35 PM ET

By John McConnico, AP

WASHINGTON — New research is raising concerns that global warming may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb trapped in once-frozen permafrost.

As the Earth warms, greenhouse gases once stuck in the long-frozen soil are bubbling into the atmosphere in much larger amounts than previously anticipated, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.

Methane trapped in a special type of permafrost is bubbling up at a rate five times faster than originally measured, the journal said.

Scientists are fretting about a global warming vicious cycle that had not been part of their already gloomy climate forecasts: Warming already underway thaws permafrost, soil that had been continuously frozen for thousands of years.

Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost, and so on.

"The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle," said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "That's the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tends to shut it off."

(More ... USATODAY.com - Scientists find new global warming threat from melting permafrost)  ¶ 08:20 0 comments

  Scientists Find New Global Warming Threat From Melting Permafrost (USATODAY.com) Updated 9/6/2006 3:35 PM ET

By John McConnico, AP

WASHINGTON — New research is raising concerns that global warming may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb trapped in once-frozen permafrost.

As the Earth warms, greenhouse gases once stuck in the long-frozen soil are bubbling into the atmosphere in much larger amounts than previously anticipated, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.

Methane trapped in a special type of permafrost is bubbling up at a rate five times faster than originally measured, the journal said.

Scientists are fretting about a global warming vicious cycle that had not been part of their already gloomy climate forecasts: Warming already underway thaws permafrost, soil that had been continuously frozen for thousands of years.

Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost, and so on.

"The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle," said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "That's the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tends to shut it off."

(More ... USATODAY.com - Scientists find new global warming threat from melting permafrost)  ¶ 08:20 0 comments

  Climate Change Will Reach Point of No Return in 20 Years, Says Expert (Guardian.co.uk) · Government review 'failed to address problem'
· Renewables could fill energy gap, delegates told

Alok Jha, science correspondent
Tuesday September 5, 2006
The Guardian

The world only has 10 years to develop and implement new technologies to generate clean electricity before climate change reaches the point of no return - something the UK government failed to appreciate in its recent energy review, according to an expert.

Speaking at the British Association festival of science in Norwich yesterday, Peter Smith, a professor of sustainable energy at the University of Nottingham, said the UK had to embark on a strategy to reduce energy use by insulating homes better and encouraging more micro-generation schemes such as solar panels.

"The scientific opinion is that we have a ceiling of 440 parts per million [ppm] of atmospheric carbon before there is a tipping point, a step change in the rate of global warming," said Professor Smith. "The rate at which we are emitting now, around 2ppm a year and rising, we could expect that that tipping point will reach us in 20 years time. That gives us 10 years to develop technologies that could start to bite into the problem."

The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 380ppm.

He said the government's recent energy review had failed to address the problem and had simply reiterated two long-held assumptions: that wind power should provide 15% of electricity by 2020 and that renewable energy alone could not fill the energy gap left by the decommissioning of nuclear and the demise of fossil-fuel power stations. The solution presented was to build a new generation of nuclear power stations.

"Astonishingly, the review pays hardly any regard to the principle energy asset which this country enjoys, namely its rivers, estuaries, coastal currents and waves," said Prof Smith. "Huge amounts of energy could be harvested using existing technologies, which could meet the nuclear shortfall several times over." A tidal energy barrage across the Severn river, for example, could have a peak output of around six gigawatts, more than 10% of the country's peak demand.

"The technology is robust, simple, it's basically a water-wheel," said Prof Smith. "To say it is too innovatory, which the government has done, is rubbish."

(More ... Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Climate change will reach point of no return in 20 years, says expert)  ¶ 20:52 0 comments

  GOP Seen to Be in Peril of Losing House (NYTimes.com) By ROBIN TONER and KATE ZERNIKE
Published: September 4, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — After a year of political turmoil, Republicans enter the fall campaign with their control of the House in serious jeopardy, the possibility of major losses in the Senate, and a national mood so unsettled that districts once considered safely Republican are now competitive, analysts and strategists in both parties say.

Indiana, which President Bush carried by 21 percentage points in 2004, now has three Republican House incumbents in fiercely contested races. Around the country, some of the most senior Republicans are facing their stiffest challenges in years, including Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr. of Florida, the veteran Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee; Representative Nancy L. Johnson of Connecticut, a state increasingly symbolic of this year’s political unrest; and Representative Deborah Pryce of Ohio, the No. 4 Republican in the House.

Two independent political analysts have, in recent weeks, forecast a narrow Democratic takeover of the House, if current political conditions persist. Stuart Rothenberg, who had predicted Democratic gains of 8 to 12 seats in the House, now projects 15 to 20. Democrats need 15 to regain the majority. Charles Cook, the other analyst, said: “If nothing changes, I think the House will turn. The key is, if nothing changes.”

Republican leaders are determined to change things. Unlike the Democrats of 1994, caught off guard and astonished when they lost control of the Senate and the House that year, the Republicans have had ample warning of the gathering storm.

“I have been in all these tough races, and the ones in those tough races are doing what they have to do,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House majority leader, who spent all but two days of the August recess campaigning for fellow Republicans. “It is a difficult environment. I can see us losing a seat or two. But I don’t see us losing our majority at all.”

Representative Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, countered, “The Republicans are playing defense in over 40 races — one-tenth of the House.”

“My biggest worry,” Mr. Emanuel said, “is getting overpowered from a financial perspective.”

(More ... G.O.P. Seen to Be in Peril of Losing House - New York Times)  ¶ 08:13 0 comments

  Kerry Reignites 2004 Battle Over Ohio (SFGate.com) John Wildermuth, Chronicle Political Writer

Friday, September 1, 2006

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry jumped back into the 2004 presidential race this week with a scathing letter accusing Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Republican secretary of state, of using "the power of his state office to try to intimidate Ohioans and suppress the Democratic vote'' in the 2004 election.

The letter was sent to 100,000 Democratic donors, asking them to send money to U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, who is running against Blackwell for governor. But it focused on Blackwell as a Republican who must be defeated.

Blackwell, who was co-chair of Bush's 2004 campaign in Ohio, "used his office to abuse our democracy and threaten basic voting rights,'' Kerry said in the letter. "His legacy as secretary of state? Putting partisanship ahead of the electorate's fundamental right to vote.''

Although Kerry was careful not to suggest that Blackwell and the Republicans manipulated the Ohio vote to cost him the presidential election, he shoved a stick into a very angry hornets' nest. It was George Bush's narrow victory in Ohio that secured his re-election, and livid Democrats and the liberal end of the blogosphere have challenged those numbers since election day.

The issue erupted again in June when Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine asking "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?'' In the piece, he echoed much of the Democratic and progressive left when he said Kerry should be in the White House today.

(More ... Kerry reignites 2004 battle over Ohio / He accuses GOP governor candidate of partisanship)  ¶ 20:00 0 comments

  Was the 2004 Election Stolen? (RollingStone.com) Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

(More ... Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?)  ¶ 19:56 0 comments

  US Direct Action: How American Cities Have Bypassed Bush on Kyoto (Independent.co.uk) By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 01 September 2006

It is not just the state of California that is bypassing the authority of the US government to take action on global warming.

The mayors of more than 300 cities across the country have signed a Climate Protection Agreement in which they have pledged to meet the emissions-cutting timetable laid down by the Kyoto Protocol - regardless of what the Bush administration decides.

Some of those cities, such as Seattle, which took the lead on drafting and lobbying for the agreement, are bastions of liberal politics and environmentalism, acting out their ideological convictions. Others, though, such as the exclusive Colorado ski resorts Vail and Aspen, are also motivated by a powerful self-interest. If global warming continues unabated, the Rocky Mountain snowpack will melt and there will be no skiing in Vail, Aspen or anywhere else by the end of this century.

Seattle's Mayor, Greg Nickels, proposed the mayors' agreement whenKyoto came into effect at the start of last year. By June 2005, he had 140 signatories, and the number has more than doubled since.

The goal is to "meet or exceed" the Kyoto target of cutting global warming pollution to 7 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The agreement also contains a 12-point action plan, urging signatory cities to discourage sprawl, promote public transport, car-pooling and bicycle lanes, turn to alternative energy sources including alternative fuels for the municipal vehicle and bus fleet, plant lots of trees and introduce environmental education programmes in schools and community colleges.

(More ... Independent Online Edition > Environment)  ¶ 14:07 0 comments

  Ohio to Delay Destruction of Presidential Ballots (NYTimes.com) By IAN URBINA
Published: August 31, 2006

With paper ballots from the 2004 presidential election in Ohio scheduled to be destroyed next week, the secretary of state in Columbus, under pressure from critics, said yesterday that he would move to delay the destruction at least for several months.

Since the election, questions have been raised about how votes were tallied in Ohio, a battleground state that helped deliver the election to President Bush over Senator John Kerry.

The critics, including an independent candidate for governor and a team of statisticians and lawyers, say preliminary results from their ballot inspections show signs of more widespread irregularities than previously known.

The critics say the ballots should be saved pending an investigation. They also say the secretary of state’s proposal to delay the destruction does not go far enough, and they intend to sue to preserve the ballots.

In Florida in 2003, historians and lawyers persuaded state officials not to destroy the ballots in the 2000 presidential election, and those ballots are stored at the state archive.

(More ... Ohio to Delay Destruction of Presidential Ballots - New York Times)  ¶ 12:53 0 comments

  Editorial Observer; Has Bush v. Gore Become the Case That Must Not Be Named? (NYTimes.com) By ADAM COHEN
Published: August 15, 2006

At a law school Supreme Court conference that I attended last fall, there was a panel on ''The Rehnquist Court.'' No one mentioned Bush v. Gore, the most historic case of William Rehnquist's time as chief justice, and during the Q. and A. no one asked about it. When I asked a prominent law professor about this strange omission, he told me he had been invited to participate in another Rehnquist retrospective, and was told in advance that Bush v. Gore would not be discussed.

The ruling that stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush is disappearing down the legal world's version of the memory hole, the slot where, in George Orwell's ''1984,'' government workers disposed of politically inconvenient records. The Supreme Court has not cited it once since it was decided, and when Justice Antonin Scalia, who loves to hold forth on court precedents, was asked about it at a forum earlier this year, he snapped, ''Come on, get over it.''

There is a legal argument for pushing Bush v. Gore aside. The majority opinion announced that the ruling was ''limited to the present circumstances'' and could not be cited as precedent. But many legal scholars insisted at the time that this assertion was itself dictum -- the part of a legal opinion that is nonbinding -- and illegitimate, because under the doctrine of stare decisis, courts cannot make rulings whose reasoning applies only to a single case.

Bush v. Gore's lasting significance is being fought over right now by the Ohio-based United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, whose judges disagree not only on what it stands for, but on whether it stands for anything at all. This debate, which has been quietly under way in the courts and academia since 2000, is important both because of what it says about the legitimacy of the courts and because of what Bush v. Gore could represent today. The majority reached its antidemocratic result by reading the equal protection clause in a very pro-democratic way. If Bush v. Gore's equal protection analysis is integrated into constitutional law, it could make future elections considerably more fair.

(More ... Editorial Observer; Has Bush v. Gore Become the Case That Must Not Be Named? - New York Times)  ¶ 12:52 0 comments