Shopping at one of those "big box" stores the other day, I was struck by something the attractive young checkout lady said to me, quite out of the blue: "What scares me more than anything is global warming."
We had been talking about something innocuous -- I forget what -- when she made the comment while handing me the bag. If it had come up earlier in our conversation, I might have asked her the basis for her fears or try to calm her in some way. Alas, I had the bag of items I bought and my receipt, so I was on my way.
In this age when we are at war, with men and women of her age fighting and sometimes dying halfway around the world, global warming was her biggest concern. Being a checkout girl, I wondered if she lived in a blighted neighborhood threatened by crime. Or if her parents were facing foreclosure of their home. Or if she were able to afford the schooling necessary for her to get a better job.
Maybe she was otherwise content with her lot in the world. Perhaps she had nothing else to worry about other than global warming.
I thought about her statement every so often until last week, when it gained new relevancy with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, who has spent the past few years on a crusade to raise awareness of global warming. He certainly made his point with this young woman.
I wonder if it was Gore's intent to instill fear into a young cashier. Maybe it was. That doesn't sound like a very peaceful act to me. My opinion on global warming is stated in the header on this blog -- it's something we need to deal with and plan for but the claims of worldwide catastrophe are way over the top. And it's Al Gore who has been the King of Catastrophe on the subject.
It was rather funny that the Nobel Committee in Norway announced the Peace Prize winner the day after he was rebuked by a judge in the United Kingdom for including numerous falsehoods in the film "An Inconvenient Truth." He misrepresented data to support his claims, exaggerated the projected rise of the sea level and based his presentation on worst-case scenarios. He also did something that global warming naysayers are guilty of -- point toward individual weather events like a heat wave, unusual snow storm or destructive hurricane to prove his point of view.
And there are a lot of people right now who disagree with claims about global warming. That's a shame, because there is a strong basis of information that the world has been warming significantly over the past few decades. I don't know what share of blame we people have, or cows have, or Mother Nature has in her natural cycles.
Al Gore did not need to depend on hyperbole and falsehoods to prove that something was indeed taking place with our world. But he did. Now there are two strongly diametrically opposed camps on this extremely important subject. It didn't have to be that way, but it is, and is in large part due to the former vice-president of the United States.
Strange to think that the leading global warming advocate on the planet has POLAR-ized us on the issue. Not cool. (Sorry, couldn't resist).
For that, and scaring a young woman just beginning life as an adult, Al Gore definitely did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
---
The Washington Post has answered the New York Times story of a couple months ago in which a number of U.S. airborne troops discussed how poorly things were going in their Shiite section of Baghdad despite the surge. The Post's own article is from 12 former Army captains who served in various times in Iraq, and they also write about how bad things were.
The media lately has ravenously consumed any military opinion that opposes U.S. policy in Iraq, including recent stories on criticism by retired generals and troopers who turned out to be less than what they said they were, giving rise to talk radio host Rush Limbaugh's now-infamous "phony soldiers" label.
There's a couple of problems here. First, the airborne soldiers -- a couple of whom have tragically died since the article was published -- were billeted in one of the worst areas of Baghdad while surge operations were taking place outside the city. Of course things were bad where they were. Only in recent weeks have our soldiers and Iraqi troops been concentrating on Shiite areas. The stories of those soldiers were true, but meaningless in the debate over Iraq policy.
Second, the criticisms of Gen. Mark Sanchez, who led the military effort, who called the Iraq operation "a nightmare with no end in sight," are also true. The trouble is, he was the commander from June 2003 to June 2004. That's now a long time ago. His complaints are best left for the history books.
Now, the Washington Post article posted today. It was written by 12 former Army captains and exposes the rampant corruption and crumbling infrastructure they witnessed. They told of how the lack of manpower hinders operations even today.
At the bottom of the article, the names of the authors appear, along with when and where they served. None of them have been in-country this year. Zero. Two of them were in Iraq as recently as last year. This being mid-October, that was a while ago, well before the surge started. Most of them served their tours in 2003 and 2005 -- the second one certainly coming at a time when things weren't so good.
So be vigilant when reading articles from former and current members of the military who criticize the war effort. What they'll tell you is interesting and probably true. But so far, in the media's rush to put some armed forces credibility behind it's anti-war stance, there have been none who can legitimately say that the war is lost based on current conditions.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
Stealth Guerrilla Candidates Mock Electoral System
Coming soon to a presidential election near you: Dennis Kucinich running as an independent in the general election, funded by Wall Street capitalists scared of the concept of Hillary Clinton in the White House; or Mike Huckabee also aiming for commander-in-chief without a party, with campaign funds funneled surreptitiously from George Soros.
That mind-spinning scenario came down late last week and is just another sign of how our political leadership would rather play the system than take care of the needs of our country.
The idea is simple. In the past couple of years, Ralph Nader ran to the left of the Democratic candidate and took away just enough votes to give the presidency to Republican George Bush. The current leader's father was undone in 1992 by H. Ross Perot, much more a conservative than a liberal. Each time, the effect of the insurgent candidate was to help someone with a completely opposite point of view into office.
Perot and Nader at least ran on principle. If there's an independent candidate this time, it will be all about politics.
The possibility of something like this happened rose when Dr. James Dobson, who has been one of the leaders of the so-called "religious right" as the president of Focus on the Family, threatened to withhold support from the GOP if abortion-rights supporter Rudy Giuliani won the nomination. No matter that the former mayor of New York City has a tough law-and-order record that cleaned up the Big Apple, is strong against terrorism and is more likely to appoint judges sympathetic to Dobson's viewpoint. Pulling a power play, it would seem he'd rather throw the election to Hillary Clinton.
Dobson has been highly influential in the Republican party in the past, with many thousands of supporters across the country. However, in this election season, none of the front-running candidates could be described as a Christian conservative and one of them, Mitt Romney, is a -- gasp! -- Mormon. Seeing Huckabee and other religious right candidates trailing badly, Dobson is grabbing at straws to try to remind party pros how much sway he really has.
Right now, it's an empty threat and could remain that way. People are going to vote however they're going to vote in the primaries and, if the polls are in any way accurate, Giuliani could very well win the GOP nomination. In a match between Giuliani and Clinton, the religious housewife from Alabama will hold her nose and vote for Rudy, much like independents held their nose and gave Hillary's husband a second term.
But, what would happen if someone were to approach Huckabee (and I'm only using the Arkansas governor as an example because he fits the Christian conservative profile) and convinces him to run as an independent. Financial backers of the left, seeing a chance to divert Giuliani votes to someone else, can flood the new campaign with donations and make him appear to be a legitimate candidate, giving that Alabama housewife a realistic alternative to Giuliani. That could give Hillary one or two competitive states.
There's a similar scenario possible for the other side, where Clinton's stance on Iraq has not convinced anti-war activists that she represents them. In fact, Clinton and Barack Obama both refused recently to promise that all U.S. troops would be out of that country by the end of their first term. The anti-war left wants those troops out NOW, if not YESTERDAY.
Just like the Alabama housewife wouldn't change her vote in a two-person race for the White House, the University of Massachusetts philosophy professor would hold his nose and vote for Clinton over someone like Giuliani, who generally supports President Bush's military efforts in the Middle East.
However, if Kucinich (like Huckabee, a profile-fitting example), were to be convinced to run as an outside candidate in the general election, and for rich Republicans to provide him with money and legitimacy, then he could draw away votes from Clinton, handing a couple Upper Midwest states and maybe the White House to Giuliani.
This is politics in the United States in 2007. We still have not passed solutions to the Medicare and Social Security crisis, our borders are still sieves, and terrorists might still be in our midst. Our leaders might not be able to tackle the real problems of the day, but they're at the ready to game the electoral system in a bid to gain or maintain their power. After all, what's more important?
You know the answer for them. Just remember the answer for us.
---
Interesting to see the pro- and negative treatments of the arrival of the autobiography by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, "My Grandfather's Son." As you might expect, the conservative media has been glowing in its reviews of the book and the man, while the left is somehow shocked -- shocked! -- that he hates them for their abusive confirmation hearings in 1991.
Those hearings were a watershed moment for American politics. If a young person amazed at the hatred and mistrust between the political parties ever asks how control of Washington, D.C. turned into a death struggle, point to the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas.
Anita Hill, then a professor at the University of Oklahoma and now at Brandeis University, claimed that Thomas had sexually harassed her years earlier while they worked at the Dept. of Education. The issue never came up in Senate Justice Committee hearings, only when his nomination, opposed by liberal groups fearful of a black conservative in a high government position, went to the whole chamber.
There was no way to prove or disprove what took place between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Therefore, there was no way it should have become an issue in the nomination. But liberal groups, desperate to keep blacks on their side of the political fence, pulled out all the stops to prevent Thomas from reaching the high court.
Thomas, however, won approval and has for 16 years been a pretty good justice, and has proven to possess a mind of his own, not always ending up on the side of Antonin Scalia. We're definitely better having him on the court, and much worse off for how his confirmation was handled.
National politics, through the Clinton and Bush years, have never been the same.
That mind-spinning scenario came down late last week and is just another sign of how our political leadership would rather play the system than take care of the needs of our country.
The idea is simple. In the past couple of years, Ralph Nader ran to the left of the Democratic candidate and took away just enough votes to give the presidency to Republican George Bush. The current leader's father was undone in 1992 by H. Ross Perot, much more a conservative than a liberal. Each time, the effect of the insurgent candidate was to help someone with a completely opposite point of view into office.
Perot and Nader at least ran on principle. If there's an independent candidate this time, it will be all about politics.
The possibility of something like this happened rose when Dr. James Dobson, who has been one of the leaders of the so-called "religious right" as the president of Focus on the Family, threatened to withhold support from the GOP if abortion-rights supporter Rudy Giuliani won the nomination. No matter that the former mayor of New York City has a tough law-and-order record that cleaned up the Big Apple, is strong against terrorism and is more likely to appoint judges sympathetic to Dobson's viewpoint. Pulling a power play, it would seem he'd rather throw the election to Hillary Clinton.
Dobson has been highly influential in the Republican party in the past, with many thousands of supporters across the country. However, in this election season, none of the front-running candidates could be described as a Christian conservative and one of them, Mitt Romney, is a -- gasp! -- Mormon. Seeing Huckabee and other religious right candidates trailing badly, Dobson is grabbing at straws to try to remind party pros how much sway he really has.
Right now, it's an empty threat and could remain that way. People are going to vote however they're going to vote in the primaries and, if the polls are in any way accurate, Giuliani could very well win the GOP nomination. In a match between Giuliani and Clinton, the religious housewife from Alabama will hold her nose and vote for Rudy, much like independents held their nose and gave Hillary's husband a second term.
But, what would happen if someone were to approach Huckabee (and I'm only using the Arkansas governor as an example because he fits the Christian conservative profile) and convinces him to run as an independent. Financial backers of the left, seeing a chance to divert Giuliani votes to someone else, can flood the new campaign with donations and make him appear to be a legitimate candidate, giving that Alabama housewife a realistic alternative to Giuliani. That could give Hillary one or two competitive states.
There's a similar scenario possible for the other side, where Clinton's stance on Iraq has not convinced anti-war activists that she represents them. In fact, Clinton and Barack Obama both refused recently to promise that all U.S. troops would be out of that country by the end of their first term. The anti-war left wants those troops out NOW, if not YESTERDAY.
Just like the Alabama housewife wouldn't change her vote in a two-person race for the White House, the University of Massachusetts philosophy professor would hold his nose and vote for Clinton over someone like Giuliani, who generally supports President Bush's military efforts in the Middle East.
However, if Kucinich (like Huckabee, a profile-fitting example), were to be convinced to run as an outside candidate in the general election, and for rich Republicans to provide him with money and legitimacy, then he could draw away votes from Clinton, handing a couple Upper Midwest states and maybe the White House to Giuliani.
This is politics in the United States in 2007. We still have not passed solutions to the Medicare and Social Security crisis, our borders are still sieves, and terrorists might still be in our midst. Our leaders might not be able to tackle the real problems of the day, but they're at the ready to game the electoral system in a bid to gain or maintain their power. After all, what's more important?
You know the answer for them. Just remember the answer for us.
---
Interesting to see the pro- and negative treatments of the arrival of the autobiography by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, "My Grandfather's Son." As you might expect, the conservative media has been glowing in its reviews of the book and the man, while the left is somehow shocked -- shocked! -- that he hates them for their abusive confirmation hearings in 1991.
Those hearings were a watershed moment for American politics. If a young person amazed at the hatred and mistrust between the political parties ever asks how control of Washington, D.C. turned into a death struggle, point to the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas.
Anita Hill, then a professor at the University of Oklahoma and now at Brandeis University, claimed that Thomas had sexually harassed her years earlier while they worked at the Dept. of Education. The issue never came up in Senate Justice Committee hearings, only when his nomination, opposed by liberal groups fearful of a black conservative in a high government position, went to the whole chamber.
There was no way to prove or disprove what took place between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Therefore, there was no way it should have become an issue in the nomination. But liberal groups, desperate to keep blacks on their side of the political fence, pulled out all the stops to prevent Thomas from reaching the high court.
Thomas, however, won approval and has for 16 years been a pretty good justice, and has proven to possess a mind of his own, not always ending up on the side of Antonin Scalia. We're definitely better having him on the court, and much worse off for how his confirmation was handled.
National politics, through the Clinton and Bush years, have never been the same.
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