Thursday, October 19, 2006

Brussels

Check out the photos of our trip to Brussels, Amsterdam, and Bruges here.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Beginning of the end of America

Olbermann addresses the Military Commissions Act in a special comment
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC

Updated: 7:33 p.m. ET Oct 18, 2006

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived as people in fear.

And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before—and we have been here before led here—by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.

We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen—he is still a Japanese.”

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.

Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.

Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.

And Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

In times of fright, we have been only human.

We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake us.

We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, “the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.”

We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.

Or substitute the Japanese.

Or the Germans.

Or the Socialists.

Or the Anarchists.

Or the Immigrants.

Or the British.

Or the Aliens.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And, always, always wrong.

“With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”

Wise words.

And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.

Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.

You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.

Sadly—of course—the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.

We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

But even within this history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

You, sir, have now befouled that spring.

You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.

You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants” and ship them somewhere—anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere - anywhere.

And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant”—exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?

“These military commissions will provide a fair trial,” you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, “in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney and can hear all the evidence against them.”

"Presumed innocent," Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain “serious mental and physical trauma” in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

"Access to an attorney," Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.

"Hearing all the evidence," Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions Act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies that imperil us all.

“One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks,” you told us yesterday, “said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America.”

That terrorist, sir, could only hope.

Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.

Habeas corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be “the beginning of the end of America.”

And did it even occur to you once, sir — somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 -- that with only a little further shift in this world we now know—just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died --- did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future president and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “unlawful enemy combatant” for -- and convene a Military Commission to try -- not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And doubtless, Sir, all of them—as always—wrong.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Dallas

I am off to Dallas for a couple of days. Doesn't look like the weather will be too hot. It's supposed to snow here, though.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Natural Gas

Yesterday I was at natural gas seminar sponsored by WPS Energy Services at Monona Terrace in Madison.

Monona Terrace is a new Frank Lloyd Wright building. He designed it in the late 1930s, but it was never built. Amazingly, considering the location near the state capital and on the shore of Lake Monona, the land he designed the building for was never developed. The main interior space is fabulous – it’s as though you were right on the lake.

The seminar was interesting. Some highlights:

  • We have 3.254 trillion cubic feet of gas in storage, a near record.
  • Gas prices have been plummeting, currently about $4.4/MMBTU.
  • Gas represents about 18% of electricity generated, but is about 42% of generation capacity: not surprising when you think about it.
  • LNG is expected to be about 16% of gas consumed by 2030.
  • The annual world energy consumption is about 450 “quads” – quadrillion BTUs.
  • The U.S., with about a quarter of the GWP, uses about 115 quads annually.
  • The U.S uses about half the energy per unit of economic output as China, the number 2 energy consumer.

One of the speakers, William F. Ford was president and CEO of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank and served with both Paul Volker and Alan Greenspan. He’s a pretty entertaining guy. He sat at my table during lunch.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Had Enough?

Had Enough?
Tuesday, 03 October 2006

The State Department has admitted that George Tenant and J. Cofer Black had an emergency briefing with then National Security Advisor Condi Rice on July 10, 2001 to warn her that Al Qaeda was planning on attacking the United States, as was disclosed in Bob Woodward’s book, State Of Denial .

We also learned that the White House Press Secretary Tony Snow called the messages that Florida Representative Mark Foley sent to a 16-year-old page, “naughty emails.” When House Speaker Dennis Hastert was asked why the Republican Leadership did nothing more than warn Foley to “stay away” from the page, he replied “coulda, woulda, shoulda.”

Weren’t Jack Abramoff , Bob Ney , Claude Allen , Scooter Libby , Ralph Reed , Duke Cunningham , and Dick Cheney and his secret oil meetings enough? Wasn’t it bad enough that we were supposed to be greeted as liberators in Iraq, that Iraqi oil was going to pay for our effort, and that that there wasn’t even supposed to be an insurgency?

Wasn’t letting Osama Bin Ladden go when we had him trapped in Tora Bora because we didn’t want to commit the troops enough of a reason? Aren't the emergence of Iran as a regional power, the increasing prestige of Hezbollah , and the total breakdown of the Israeli – Palestinian peace process reasons enough?

Aren’t the record budget deficits and huge Congressional “earmarks” by so-called fiscal conservatives that are our children will have to pay for and the disastrous relief effort by Heckofajob Brownie et al enough?

Look at your children, then Mark Foley and the Republican leadership and ask yourself, “Whom should I vote for this November?”

Monday, October 02, 2006

Energy Consumption

October 06: 20.62 kWh/day 3.59 therm/day
September 06: 28.97 kWh/day 0.72 therm/day
August 06: 34.2 kWh/day 0.63 therm/day

We got our energy bill this week.

Last month we averaged 34.2 kWh/day and 63,000 BTUs/day. That's about the same as last year. Our cost is $0.1165/kWh and $1.41/therm.

Our gas bill is going to go up soon. We use about ten times more gas in the winter.

I think it's important to be aware of these numbers in order to be a good energy consumer and steward of the Earth.