Photo: Jeremiah John McBride / CC In the coat and dagger world of international espionage, it takes a cool head and nerves of steel to get the job, though being a human isn’t necessarily a prerequisite — at least that’s according to authorities in Saudi Arabia who recently detained a wild vulture under the suspicion that the bird was a spy. Yes, a vulture. Officials became concerned when they discovered that the otherwise unremarkable bird was wearing a transmitter and a ID bracelet around its leg, tying it to a foreign entity…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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With U.S. gas prices above the $3 level, the conservative echo chamber is in overdrive. While the Heritage Foundation warns “Obama will make you pay more at the pump” and Americans for Limited Government decries “Obama’s war on energy,” Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center simply asks, “How does Obama plan to raise prices?” Of course, as Paul Krugman pointed out this week, stagnant production and accelerating global demand for oil as the world recovers from the 2008 economic meltdown have much more to do with price increases at the pump. That, and oilman turned President George W. Bush’s utter failure to “jawbone” his friends in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia into opening the spigots. On May 7, 2001, Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer was asked “does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?” Fleischer’s infamous response made clear energy conservation was off the table for President Bush: “That’s a big no. The President believes that it’s an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life.” Instead, George W. Bush promised to get biblical on OPEC. His pledge to persuade, cajole and other twist arms dated back to his first run for the White House in 1999. As oil prices rose to the then-alarming level of $30 that December, then Governor Bush said President Clinton “must jawbone OPEC members to lower prices.” At a New Hampshire Republican debate the next month, Bush claimed the mantle of the Great Persuader. Contending that his days in the West Texas oil fields made him uniquely qualified for the task, Bush proclaimed: “What I think the president ought to do is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots…And the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price… …I used to be in the oil business. I was little oil — really little oil. And so I understand the — I understand what can happen in the marketplace.” By June 2000 , the Bush jawbone pledge became a standard on the stump. As the New York Times reported, Bush foreshadowed future expenditures of political capital he would fail to accumulate: “I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply,” Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, told reporters here today. “Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.” That November, of course, the American people were persuaded. Despite Bush’s own personal record of busts and bailouts in the business, his family’s close ties to Prince Bandar and the Saudi royal family, Americans must have reasoned, should count for something. As it turned out, not so much. Confusing master and slave in the American-OPEC relationship, Bush failed at every turn to get his Persian Gulf friends to bump up production or slash prices. Other times, of course, he didn’t even try. In the spring of 2004, the White House trumpeted Saudi Prince Bandar’s commitment to maintaining the price of oil in the range of $22 to $28 a barrel. With the price then at $33 a barrel, by April speculation ran rampant that President Bush had secured a deal with the Saudis just in time for the November election . But as a barrel reached then-record levels topping $50, it became clear that both Bush and Bandar were backing off their past pledges. As CBS News reported that September: As gas topped a record level of $50 a barrel this week, Mr. Bush has shown no propensity to personally pressure, or “jawbone,” Mideast oil producers to increase output. A spokesman for the president reportedly said in March that Mr. Bush will not personally lobby oil cartel leaders to change their minds. In the spring of 2005 , President Bush returned to his failed formula on oil prices. Promising to use his self-proclaimed charm to woo the Saudis, Bush would ultimately leave the American people to the mercy of the marketplace. As the AP detailed : In a CNBC interview, Bush said he would press the Saudi crown prince to boost production. “I’ll be talking to our friends about making sure they understand that if they pinch the world economy too much, it’ll affect their ability to sell crude oil in the long run,” Bush said. Jerry Taylor, an energy analyst at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank that advocates less government regulation, said the idea that “jawboning OPEC or arranging for nice relations with OPEC will somehow get us more oil is utter illusion.” An illusion, indeed. As the price of a barrel oil surged into record territory in March, OPEC dismissed out of hand President Bush’s latest use of his jawbone. Pointing to the collapse of the dollar during the Bush presidency and the slumping American economy, OPEC leaders are not budging on production levels or prices: “OPEC is angry that President Bush wants them to increase production while the dollar is sinking and the administration is doing nothing about that,” said Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Company in New York. “It”s really not surprising that they have ignored him.” Back in Washington, President Bush that April was left to grouse about Congress for a situation he insisted was not his fault. In prepared remarks peppered with accusations of Congressional inaction, Bush opened with a salvo aimed at Capitol Hill. “I’ve repeatedly submitted proposals to help address these problems,” Bush said, “Yet time after time, Congress chose to block them.” Ultimately, a frustrated George W. Bush suggested the energy crisis called for a higher power: “And so I firmly believe that — you know, if there was a magic wand to wave, I’d be waving it, of course.” By early 2008 when a barrel of oil reached $127, President Bush’s impotence in the face of the stratospheric – and uninterrupted – rise in gas prices reached comic proportions. Asked by a reporter on February 28, 2008 about the looming arrival of $4 gas, Bush the former oil man did what comes naturally and played dumb: Q What’s your advice to the average American who is hurting now, facing the prospect of $4 a gallon gasoline, a lot of people facing — THE PRESIDENT: Wait, what did you just say? You’re predicting $4 a gallon gasoline? Q A number of analysts are predicting — THE PRESIDENT: Oh, yeah? Q — $4 a gallon gasoline this spring when they reformulate. THE PRESIDENT: That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that. To put Bush’s mind-numbing mindlessness into context, it is worth noting that even White House press secretary Dana Perino had gotten the memo. Six months before Bush gave his deer-in-the-headlights response, the woman who earlier proclaimed her ignorance of the Cuban Missile Crisis discussed the $4 barrier with reporters at an October 16, 2007 press briefing: Q Dana, analysts say that gasoline prices could go as high as $4 a gallon because of the current run-up in the price of a barrel of oil. Does the White House have any plan to — for relief for the American consumer should gasoline get — MS. PERINO: Well, I’d refer you to the Department of Energy. Obviously they track that very closely. Last spring everyone in here said gasoline was going to go to four gallons — $4 a gallon, as well. Look, there’s no doubt that energy prices are too high. They disproportionately hurt low-income families that have to spend so much of their money on energy, and when those prices go up, it eats into the family budget on the other things that they want to be able to buy. Perino was right, of course, about the impact that $4 a gallon gas (it reached a high of $4.11 in July 2008) would have on working Americans. But that paled in comparison to the Bush Recession which devastated the economy. It was that calamity and the plummeting demand accompanying it, and not Dubya’s dubious powers of persuasion, which by November 2008 drove gas prices below $2 a gallon and the decline of a barrel of oil by almost $100 since its record high that July. But those days are over. As Paul Krugman explained this week: What the commodity markets are telling us is that we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices. And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this story…. In particular, today, as in 2007-2008, the primary driving force behind rising commodity prices isn’t demand from the United States. It’s demand from China and other emerging economies. As more and more people in formerly poor nations are entering the global middle class, they’re beginning to drive cars and eat meat, placing growing pressure on world oil and food supplies. And those supplies aren’t keeping pace. Conventional oil production has been flat for four years; in that sense, at least, peak oil has arrived. Appearing Wednesday on CBS News to hype his new book, former Shell executive John Hofmeister concurred with Krugman’s analysis: “We’re right back to where we were in 2007 and 2008, in terms of U.S. demand. What’s different this time, however, is that Asia’s demand is much, much higher than two years ago. And the world is having a very difficult time getting past 85 million barrels-a-day of (crude oil) production.” As for the critics of President Obama’s policies on offshore drilling, even George W. Bush in 2008 admitted that in the near term “drill, baby, drill” wouldn’t do much to budge production or prices. “I readily concede that, you know, it’s not going to produce a barrel of oil tomorrow, but it is going to change the psychology.” Of course, it wouldn’t change the psychology of oil markets or Bush’s Republican Party. That unified block of climate change deniers has opposed President Obama’s alternative energy proposals at every turn. Instead, conservatives insist, for its energy future America should continue to rely on the jawbone of an ass. (This piece also appeared as Perrspectives .)
Continue reading …Holy xenophobes! Far-right whities all uptighty about another comic-book hero: A Muslim Batman
December 31, 2010 No Commentenlarge Remember how the white supremacists at Council of Conservative Citizens got their panties in a wad over the plan to have a black man portray a Norse god in the movie version of Thor ? Now we have right-wing nimrods getting into the act, all because DC Comics has created a Muslim version of the Batman : The argument against Nightrunner, led by conservative blogger Warner Todd Huston, is based on the bigoted belief that a Muslim superhero is by definition an exercise in deceitful political correctness, and that Muslims are natively evil. Introduced in this month’s Detective Comics Annual #12 and Batman Annual #28, Nightrunner is a 22-year-old Algerian Muslim who’s lived in Paris his entire life (it seems reasonable to assume he was born in France, but at the very least he was raised there). Born Billai Asseiah, the character is uncommonly adept at the highly YouTubeable gymnastic form known as parkour. That and Asseiah’s sense of justice make him an ideal recruit for Bruce Wayne’s new Batman, Inc. initiative, whereby he franchises Batmen to cities all over the world. Huston views French Muslims — which is to say, immigrants or those descended from immigrants — as inauthentically French, and, as such, that Batman would choose a Muslim as Paris’ champion is gravely offensive to him and his loathsome ilk. DC Comics has decided that the “French savior,” the French Batman is to be a Muslim immigrant. The character’s name is Bilal Asselah and he is an Algerian Sunni Muslim and an immigrant… Apparently Batman couldn’t find any actual Frenchman to be the “French savior.” …it is pretty condescending to France, too. France is a proud nation. Yet DC Comics has made a foreigner the “French savior.” This will not sit well with many Frenchmen, for sure. What we really hope will not “sit well” with Frenchmen and Frenchwomen is Huston’s ugly assertion that French identification is exclusive to non-immigrants (read: white people). I’m not as sure as Andy Khouri that Huston — who is one of the regular contributors at the right-wing media critic outfit, NewsBusters — is a racist per se. What’s self-evident, however, is that he is a religious bigot and an ignorant, hatemongering xenophobe: Huston doubles down on the disgust and writes that a Muslim hero is patently ludicrous because Muslims are apparently congenitally terrorists. …in this age of international Muslim terrorism assaulting the whole world, Batman’s readers will be confused by what is really going on in the world. Through it all DC makes a Muslim in France a hero when French Muslims are at the center of some of the worst violence in the country’s recent memory. The true cause of the riots and violence between Frenchmen of European stock and that of immigrant Muslim stock is glossed over as if it doesn’t even exist. DC Comics makes the whole problem as simplistic as mere racism as if that is all there is to it ignoring the fact that Islam is the single most important factor in the strife. Huston refers to the civil unrest France saw in late 2005, when a state of emergency was declared after Muslim youths began rioting in Paris and other cities, burning thousands of cars and several buildings. Huston, Green and other bigots in the conservative media read the tragic situation as an expression of nefarious Islamic purpose, but most commentators and reporters who followed the event described a matter having more to do with social inequality than religion. As is the case in America, where there have also been riots, the economic and social underclass of France is populated largely by minorities and immigrants, and many of those immigrants are Muslims. You can read all of Huston’s attack here. We recommend a shower afterward, though.
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Leaked US diplomatic cable says Saudi Arabia proposed setting up Arab force to fight Shiite militants in Lebanon with help of US, UN and NATO, fearing that a Hezbollah victory against Lebanese gov’t would eventually lead to Iran’s takeover of country
Continue reading …There’s all sorts of hysteria surrounding Julian Assange and this latest WikiLeaks revelations, although I would posit that “revelations” is a little strong a word for what essentially looks like confirmation of some well-known biases and actions on the part of the government. I also think the personal attacks on Assange are tactically unwise, as it appears to feed into his self-styled rogue anarchist mythology. Fareed Zakaria takes a much bigger picture look at the alleged damage done by WikiLeaks instead of the wailing and vigilantism of some others. From Zakaria’s article in Time Magazine : A remarkably broad consensus has formed that WikiLeaks’ latest data dump is a diplomatic disaster for the U.S. While there are debates over how the Obama Administration should respond, everyone agrees that the revelations have weakened America. But have they? I don’t deny for a moment that many of the “wikicables” are intensely embarrassing, but the sum total of the output I have read is actually quite reassuring about the way Washington — or at least the State Department — works. First, there is little deception. These leaks have been compared to the Pentagon papers. Which they are not. The Pentagon papers revealed that the U.S. engaged in a systematic campaign to deceive the world and the American people and that its private actions were often the opposite of its stated public policy. The WikiLeaks documents, by contrast, show Washington pursuing privately pretty much the policies it has articulated publicly. Whether on Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or North Korea, the cables confirm what we know to be U.S. foreign policy. And often this foreign policy is concerned with broader regional security, not narrow American interests. Ambassadors are not caught pushing other countries in order to make deals secretly to strengthen the U.S., but rather to solve festering problems. Zakaria makes the argument that the leaks are actually more embarrassing to other countries than to us, especially when it comes to the very delicate situation in the Middle East with Iran. The most significant revelations in the trove are those relating to Arab views of Iran. We now have official confirmation of something many of us have been saying for years: Arab regimes share Israel’s concerns about a nuclear-armed Iran. In fact, since they do not have the massive nuclear deterrent that Israel possesses, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are probably even more nervous about an Iranian bomb. It’s one thing to have diplomats expressing these sentiments in private, quite another to have the direct and explicit words of the King of Saudi Arabia. I understand that these revelations embarrass the Arab regimes, which publicly speak only of the Palestinian cause but privately plot against Iran. But why is that bad for the U.S.? The WikiLeaks data powerfully confirms the central American argument against Iran’s programs: that they are a threat to regional stability and order, not merely to Washington’s narrow interests. Here, I have to diverge with Zakaria. He accepts the premise of the nuclear threat by Iran at face value, although there is significant evidence that the threat is exaggerated . There is little of face value in diplomacy, as the WikiLeaks data dump does reveal. What we say is not always what we know to be true and often designed to give us leverage for a completely different agenda. What Zakaria glosses completely over is any reason why Arab countries (of which, Iran decided is not) or Israel would have to cause suspicion and cause aggression towards Iran for reasons entirely separate from a nuclear arsenal.
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More News The first batch of newly leaked U.S. diplomatic cables Sunday documented that the king of Saudi Arabia, echoed by other Arab leaders, have urged the United States to “cut off the head of the snake” and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. They also revealed a U.S. State Department instruction to U.S. diplomats to spy on United Nations officials and collect their personal data, and they contained unflattering portraits of a number of world leaders. Further releases in coming days will outline U.S. fears over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear program, U.S. and South Korean discussions of Korean reunification and alleged Chinese cyber-sabotage, according to the five media organizations…
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enlarge And the fur will start flying. Wikileaks has released some 250,000 documents from US Embassy cables (thus dubbing this latest scandals “Cablegate”) and what they reveal isn’t pretty for this country. Huffington Post : WikiLeaks published the first set of more than 250,000 secret State Department documents Sunday, in one of the largest leaks of classified information in history. Earlier in the day, The New York Times and The Guardian published a selection of the documents. The WikiLeaks website was inaccessible for part of the day, and WikiLeaks said in its Twitter feed that it was experiencing a denial of service attack . WikiLeaks also provided the documents to Spain’s El Pais , France’s Le Monde , and Germany’s Der Spiegel . The website says it will publish the full set of 250,000 documents in stages over the next few months. According to The New York Times , the cables reveal how foreign leaders, including Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, urged the U.S. to confront Iran over its nuclear program . “The cables also contain a fresh American intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile program,” The Times reports. “They reveal for the first time that the United States believes that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that could let it strike at Western European capitals and Moscow and help it develop more formidable long-range ballistic missiles.” Haaretz reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to pressure the U.S. into military action against Iran by exaggerating its nuclear capabilities: Meanwhile, another cable shows that a 2009 claim by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran was months away from achieving military nuclear capability was dismissed by the Americans as a ploy. According to German weekly Der Spiegel, which also received advance information from WIkiLeaks, a State Department official says in a classified cable that Netanyahu informed the United States of Iran’s nuclear advancement in November 2009, but that the prime minister’s estimate was likely unfounded and intended to pressure Washington into action against the Islamic Republic. Perhaps more embarrassing to U.S. officials is the revelation, according to The Guardian that U.S. diplomats spied on UN officials , including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications. Story continues below It called for detailed biometric information “on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders” as well as intelligence on Ban’s “management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat”. The cables also provide frank assessments of foreign leaders : Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.” French president Nicholas Sarkozy displayed a “thin-skinned and authoritarian personal style.” Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is described as “feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader.” Hamid Karzai, is “an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts but was instead easily swayed by anyone who came to report even the most bizarre stories or plots against him.” At least one progressive blogger, while generally supportive of Wikileak’s actions, sees some long term damage from this . However, I’m of the belief that if this is the price we must pay to show the government that acting as if no one has a right to privacy is a double-edged sword that can hurt them as well, we might as well pay it now. If the government thinks it will damage their interests to have their corrupt actions known, perhaps they might not want to participate in them.
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Documents released to press after much hype say Netanyahu, Mubarak agreed that nuclear Iran would be as dangerous as Cuban missile crisis; leaders from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and UAE called Islamic Republic ‘evil’
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The hajj was winding down in Saudi Arabia Thursday with some of those taking part performing a ritual stoning of the devil in Mina. (Nov. 18)
Continue reading …Drudge has a big red banner up today claiming that President Bush’s new book is being revealed just before the election (and before it’s scheduled release date.
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