Author: Buck Banks

According to a Program On International Policy Attitudes poll, an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens favors the United States joining with other G8 members to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That places George Bush in a small and radically insouciant minority.

The PIPA-Knowledge Networks poll asked whether President Bush should or should not be willing to act to limit greenhouse gases that cause climate change if the leaders of the G8 countries are willing to act to limit the gases. Of all respondents, 86% said that he should; 81% of Republicans supported that as well as 89% of Democrats.

Virtually all respondents — 94% — agreed the United States should limit its greenhouse gases at least as much as the other developed countries do, and 44% think the U.S. should do more than other countries, on average.
[…]

While I view the recent strong-arming of reporters by judges as a clear constitutional violation, it’s clear that there is a difference between Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller. Cooper’s boss made him turn over his notes after his source revoked his confidentiality agreement; Miller is going to jail for not naming her source.

While Time Inc. is being portrayed as a consitutional sellout and Miller as a martyr for journalism, the case is surely more complex. It’s likely that, by turning over Cooper’s notes, Time Inc. could actually give legs to the story and expose the source that outed Valerie Plame (Karl Rove?!). By going to jail, Miller simply protects her source (Karl Rove!?) and seemingly gains in stature as a member of the Fourth Estate sacrificed on the altar of justice.

A New Tork Metro column outs the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miller as a journalist of the whacko — not gonzo — type whose series on weapons of mass destruction for the New York Times was quoted by the Bushites as evidence of WMD existence in Iraq. Of course, her exclusives were based on interviews with former Iraqi golden boy, Ahmad Chalabi.

For the past year, the Times has done much to correct that coverage, publishing a series of stories calling Chalabi’s credibility into question. But never once in the course of its coverage—or in any public comments from its editors—did the Times acknowledge Chalabi’s central role in some of its biggest scoops, scoops that not only garnered attention but that the administration specifically cited to buttress its case for war.

The longer the Times remained silent on Chalabi’s importance to Judith Miller’s reporting, the louder critics howled. In February, in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing held up Miller as evidence of the press’s “submissiveness” in covering the war. For more than a year, Slate’s Jack Shafer has demanded the paper come clean.

But finally, with Chalabi’s fall from grace so complete—the Pentagon has cut off his funding, troops smashed his portrait in raids of the INC office—the Times’ refusal to concede its own complicity became untenable. Last week, on page A10, the paper published a note on its coverage, drafted by executive editor Bill Keller himself. The paper singled out pieces that relied on “information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors, and exiles bent on ‘regime change.’ ” The note named Ahmad Chalabi as a central player in this group.

It seems likely to me that Miller is in jail not because of principle, but because she’s hiding a source even more embarrassing than Ahmad Chalabi.

The Defense Department has issued its homeland defense plan for the next 10 years, and it looks like we can expect another decade of police-state activities where the gubmint will trample on personal freedoms with impunity.

Here’s a sample of the rhetoric of the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support”:

Directed by the Strategic Planning Guidance (March 2004), this Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support focuses on achieving the Defense Department’s paramount goal: securing the United States from direct attack. The Strategy is rooted in the following:

• Respect for America’s constitutional principles;
• Adherence to Presidential and Secretary of Defense guidance;
• Recognition of terrorist and state-based threats to the United States; and
• Commitment to continue transformation of US military capabilities.

[…]

Today is the Dalai Lama’s 70th birthday. Send a peaceful thought into the cosmos.

Newsweek’s Periscope column this week considers what George W. Bush’s autobiography will be like. And who will write it. In the wake of “A Charge to Keep,” a slim tome written by Bush’s former communications chief Karen Hughes and rushed to press in time for the 2000 election, expectations are generally low.

But I disagree. There would seem to be plenty of opportunities for Bush to rise to the occasion and produce a work (or have someone produce it) that would explore his place in history and establish his legacy as U.S. president. Of course, as the Newsweek column notes, Bush neither keeps a journal like his father or records his thoughts like Bill Clinton, and he writes thank-you notes with a black Sharpie pen, so any autobio from his camp is likely to be a work of fiction.

With that in mind, here are a few speculative titles I suggest for a George W. Bush (auto)biography:
• Myth and Metaphor in The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• An Encyclopedia of Lies I Told Leading Up to the Invasion of Iraq (Vol. 1)
• Cheney Made Me Do It
• How Condi Got Her Groove Back
• Me ‘n’ Jesus — Just a Couple of Good Old Boys with an Agenda
• Pennies from Heaven — An Investment Guide for Political Capital
• The Kids are All Right, or How I Packed the Supreme Court with Wingnuts
• Dustbowl Dreams: Environmental Policies to Make the Whole World Look Like South Texas
• Serving as the Leader of the Free World and Commander and Chief of the Most Powerful Army on Earth with Your Finger on the Nucular Button for Dummies

Update: Keep those suggestions coming in. Here are a few more:
• Staying the Course: It’s Not About Principle, It’s About Lack of Ideas
• I’ve Never, Even Been Wrong: Being George Bush
• My Life, by George W. Bush and Karl Rove
• Winning the War on Terror Using the War on Logic
• How to Raise Perfect Daughters Even When Their Mother is a Manslaughterer

From Comments: Love this one:
• George W Bush: Nepotism Gone Wrong.

If you have a title to suggest for President Bush’s autobiography, send it to News Desk at Pensito Review Dot Com.

Oakland-based Redefining Progress and the Earthday Networtk have created an on-line quiz that might get you thinking about your lifestyle. Only 15 questions long, and requiring no registration, the quiz measures how much of the surface of the planet is required to sustain your existence.

In the United States, that average is 24 acres. Compare that with the fact that there are only 4.5 acres per person on the planet and you get some idea of how out of whack our consumer culture is.

Take the quiz here.

July 4, 2005, marked the 39th anniversary of the signing into law of the Freedom of Information Act, a resource for public disclosure of government documents that has become essential to keeping the process of governance at least somewhat transparent. Though first proposed by the Democratic Party in 1956, it took a decade before the FOIA was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson — one day before it would have expired in a “pocket veto” if he had not signed it.

Since then, the FOIA has been instrumental in bringing to light hundreds of thousands of documents and aiding investigations from Watergate in the 1970s to prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, Cuba, today.

The FOIA has spawned “sunshine law” statutes in all 50 U.S. states, and similar access laws in other nations. Only Sweden’s freedom of information law is older than ours.

According to Interpress News Service, the law is continuing to evolve through current legislation.

Efforts to strengthen FOIA are continuing, today by an unlikely partnership of one of the U.S. Senate’s most liberal members and one of its most conservative.

The odd couple is Senator John Cornyn, a conservative Republican from Texas and Senator Patrick Leahy, a liberal Democrat from Maine. Amid growing complaints about delays and difficulties in obtaining information from federal agencies, the pair has put together two bills.

One would create a commission to identify ways to reduce delays in processing FOIA requests. A second would establish a way for people to track their Freedom of Information Act requests on the Internet and would establish an ombudsman to mediate disputes between agencies and requesters.

It is interesting to note that with the current administration’s tight-fisted approach to information, the number of FOIA filings has increased dramatically as U.S. citizens seek to find out what our government ius up to. A recent Government Accountability Office report noted that during George Bush’s administration, FOIA requests increased 71% from 2002 to 2004, with a 68% rise in requests processed during that period, and a 14% rise in the backlog.

While the report found that 92% of 2004 requests resulted in ”responsive records” being provided in full, it noted that many of those seeking information still must sue the government to get it.

Here is a text analysis of President Bush’s speech delivered at Fort Bragg June 28, 2005.

• The speech contained 1996 words, 928 of them different words.
• The compexity factor (lexical density) was 46.3%; readability on the Gunning-Fog Index, where 6 is easy and 20 is hard, was 8.6. On another readability scale where 100 is easy and 20 is hard, and the optimal range is 60-70, the speech scored 46.
• There were 228 sentences averaging 16.04 words; the longest sentence was 48 words: I said that America’s mission in iraq is to defeat an enemy and give strength to a friend, a free representative government that is an ally in the war on terror and a beacon of hope in a part of the world that is desperate for reform.

The top 10 words in frequency (ocurrences in parentheses):

Most frequently used three-word phrases:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks earlier this week may hold unforeseen ramifications for Pensito Review. While aimed primarily at such P-to-P products as Grokster and Napster, it appears the ruling also might impact Penster, Pensito Review’s P-to-P truth-sharing network.

Penster is the backbone of Pensito Review, providing the technological means for PR’s editors and readers to “swap” truths. For eample, Trish uncovers a truth in Florida about that rascal Jeb Bush and posts it on Pensito Review. Visitors to the PR Web site can then access that truth and comment on it, thereby “swapping” their own version of the truth with their peers.

Of course, users of Penster do not pay for the truth they access, which is where Pensito Review runs afoul of the Supremes. In the current political environment created by the Bush Administration, truth has value, and that value must be tightly controlled or the truth will become devalued.

For example, the Downing Street Memo was very valuable to the administration as long as it remained a secret. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the memo’s value has plunged precipitously, according to the administration. By allowing readers to “swap” truths using Penster, Pensito Review is contributing to the devaluation of those truths, since, according to the wingnuts in Washington, the wider truths are disseminated, the less valuable they are. Hence, the admin’s tendency to discount such truths in press briefings.

We here at Pensito Review believe that peer-to-peer truth swapping via the Penster network is protected by the First Amendment.

During the Supreme Court’s debate over the matter, constitutional expert Justice Antonin Scalia maintained that there was no express guarantee of freedom of speech in the Consitution. When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor pointed out that the First Amendment to the Constitution did guarantee freedom of speech, Scalia burst out: “Amendment? What amendment? Nobody told me there were amendments to the Consitution! Jeez!”