Planet Out:

It took the resignation of one mayor and the extortion conviction of his replacement for openly gay San Diego Councilwoman Toni Atkins to ascend to the top spot in the nation’s seventh-largest city. But the fact that she landed the position is what’s important to LGBT political groups, who finally — if temporarily — have a big-city mayor to call their own.

The results of Tuesday’s municipal election guaranteed that Atkins will serve as appointed acting mayor until December, following a November run-off between the two top vote-getters in the mayoral race. Until the end of the year, San Diego will be the largest American city with an openly gay mayor…

According to gay political groups, the largest U.S. city with an openly gay mayor had been Providence, R.I., whose population of 174,000 is dwarfed by San Diego’s 1.2 million.

In the wake of Gen. William Westmoreland Jr.’s recent death, many commentators reflected on how the general — during the Vietnam conflict and in the decades after — never really “got it.” He tried to fight a conventional war against an unconventional foe.

Similarly, the chickenhawks in the Bush administration who loudly advocate for the War on Terror are showing Westmoreland-esque signs of a disconnect with a reality that is quickly outstripping their capacity to understand it. As in Vietnam, in Bush’s War on Terror, its proponents think the enemy is Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but in reality, it is a decentralized, disenfranchized, band of “Muslim desperados” organized at the cellular level whose aim is far different from al Qaeda’s.

So argues Jamal Dajani in 21st Century ‘Muslim Desperados’ — Why London Bombers Don’t Fit ‘War on Terror’ Frame” for the Pacific News Service.

Dajani says it is a mistake to lump in the recent London and Egypt bombings by home-grown “desperados” with al Qaeda’s actions as a consolidated target of the War on Terror:

This rationale, which has subsequently appeared in several op-ed articles, goes like this: Since 9/11 happened before the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no cause and effect relationship between terrorist actions now and the war in Iraq and foreign troop presence in Afghanistan.
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There is no more sanctimonious figure in modern politics than Ken Starr. So it would be more than a little delicious if a piece of the legal legerdemain Starr pulled off – with the help of rightwing court decisions – to “get” the Clintons were to bite President Bush in his nether parts now:

The White House is citing the attorney-client privilege as the basis for refusing to reveal memos written by Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. when he was representing the government before the high court. At the time, Roberts was the top deputy to Solicitor Gen. Kenneth W. Starr.

But it is not clear that this legal privilege shields the work of government lawyers from the eyes of government investigators — thanks to a legal ruling won by Starr himself, when he was independent counsel investigating President Clinton.

Usually, the attorney-client privilege protects private lawyers from being forced to reveal what their clients told them. It also shields their notes and memos from prosecutors. This rule of secrecy is seen as vital to the adversarial process.

But in 1996, Starr challenged the notion that White House lawyers who worked for Clinton could invoke the attorney-client privilege when Starr sought notes they had written.

Starr argued that the lawyers worked for the people of the United States, not for the president… The dispute … resulted in a broad appeals court ruling that held that government lawyers did not have the same right to keep secrets as private attorneys did.

Starr was in pursuit of First Lady Hillary Clinton at the time. He wanted the notes taken by White House lawyers who were advising Mrs. Clinton over the course of her years of legal harassment by Starr – who we now know was working in concert with his friend Ted Olsen, who was the bag man for the rightwing nutcase philanthropist, Richard Mellon Scaife, and others in what Hillary referred to as the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy.

Starr finally got the notes after appealing all the way to the Supreme Court.

The likelihood that Democrats will prevail in this matter ranges from slim to none – providing another example, as if one were needed, of the way the Republicans play hardball and then squeal like babies when nasty ol’ libruls try to make them abide by their own rules.

Nobody should be happy with the way the energy bill has been compromised into toothlessness and rushed through the conference process so the boobs on the Hill can appear to be addressing this essential issue before they take their summer break.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has analyzed the conference bill and found that it would save a lot less energy than the Senate’s version (much of which was dropped in conference) — especially on reducing oil consumption.

ACEEE’s preliminary analysis found that the Senate bill would have saved a million barrels per day, or about 4% of total oil demand in 2020. The conference report, on the other hand, would save only about 100,000 barrels per day, or less than .005%.

Most of the bill’s energy savings come from energy efficiency standards that ACEEE estimates would save about 30,000 megawatts of capacity and 90 billion kilowatt-hours in 2020, offsetting about 3% of total U.S. power plant capacity and 2% of total electricity use.

Tax incentives provide the other big source of energy savings — about 0.5 quads, or just under .005% of projected 2020 energy use.

Other efficiency provisions include:

* Increased R&D spending authorizations
* Improved appliance labeling
* Voluntary agreements to increase industrial energy efficiency
* A study and pilot program for states to expand use of Energy Efficiency Resource Standards
* Requirements for states to facilitate development of combined heat and power and other distributed generation technologies
* A national public education campaign on energy efficiency

ACEEE concluded:

While these efficiency provisions save modest amounts of energy, Congress dropped more substantial provisions in the Senate bill, including the one-million-barrel-per-day oil savings target, efficiency standards for vehicle tires, combined heat and power incentives, and a requirement for states to consider energy savings targets for utilities (similar to the standard President Bush approved when governor of Texas). These and other provisions would have doubled overall energy savings and increased oil savings tenfold. ACEEE’s earlier analysis of an enhanced bill that would tackle these issues more seriously showed that it could produce four times the total energy savings and 15 times the oil savings of the conference report.

Bolton says he forgot he was interviewed about the CIA leak:

John Bolton, the nominee for U.N. ambassador, inaccurately told Congress he had not been interviewed or testified in any investigation over the past five years, the State Department said Thursday, responding to a Democratic critic.

Bolton was interviewed by the State Department inspector general as part of a joint investigation with the Central Intelligence Agency related to Iraqi attempts to buy nuclear materials from Niger, State Department spokesman Noel Clay said.

When Bolton filled out a Senate questionnaire in connection with his nomination, “he didn’t recall being interviewed by the State Department’s inspector general. Therefore, his form, as submitted, was inaccurate,” Clay said. “He will correct it.”

At the offices of the New York Times, there’s an alternative theory floating around about Judith Miller’s true motives in going to prison rather than revealing her source in the Bush CIA Leak scandal. She is portrayed in the media as martyr to the First Amendment, but, according to The Huffington Post, the theory is, she’s covering her own ass:

It’s July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson’s now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has “manipulate[d]” and “twisted” intelligence “to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war — and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller’s credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he’s married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an “unnamed government official”). Maybe Miller tells Rove too — or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn’t want to reveal her “source” at the White House — because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn’t the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)… but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn’t an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn’t to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson’s motives. Which Novak did.

Here’s a blast from the past made all the more poignant by the government’s renewed search for oil in the shark-rich waters off the Gulf coast of Florida. This was probably the last time George Bush received even grudging praise from environmentalists.

In an L.A. Times article from May 30, 2002, archived on www.waterconserve.info Jeb’s bro moved to curb drilling within 30 miles of the Florida coast and in the Everglades through a huge drilling rights buy-back.

The federal government will pay $115 million to oil companies to drop their fight to drill about 30 miles off the Florida Panhandle. The companies bought drilling rights in the 1980s but faced obstacles put up by Republican and Democratic state officials who objected that drilling could wreak havoc on the white-sand beaches in the Panhandle and on the state’s vital tourism industry.

The federal government will spend an additional $120 million to buy oil and gas drilling rights held by private individuals in three sensitive areas of the Everglades. Bush’s decision to preserve what he termed “some of our nation’s most beautiful natural treasures” should bolster his environmental credentials in Florida, as well as help his brother Jeb, who is seeking reelection there as governor.

Jeb was right there, riding his big brother’s political coattails and chiming in:

Jeb Bush, who visited the White House on Wednesday, conceded that he stands to benefit from his brother’s move. “But more importantly,” he added, “it is good public policy, and when there’s a convergence of good politics and good public policy, I don’t think we should be ashamed about it.”

But that comment apparently pissed off George:

The White House denied that politics played a role in the decision.

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