The big judicial decision that happened while the networks were running Jon-Benet stories

You probably didn’t hear much about the stunning slap-down of Bush’s unconstitutional wiretapping program on Friday — what with the far more important news that a visibly disturbed man has made a dubious claim to be the murderer of Jon-Benet Ramsey. But a judge confirmed what we all knew, and Bush had a conniption, and the wingnuts are - predictably - screeching with racist indignation about the judge. Buzzflash sets them straight.

All of which reminds me… I went bumpersticker shopping at Carry A Big Sticker and got this one

and this one

and this one

But the only one the Better Half will allow on the shared automobile is this one.

Nice, but pretty innocuous. The Better Half is afraid the others will invite small arms fire when the vehicle ventures outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

(By the way, it’s nearly 10 p.m. Pacific time, and the Apocalypse hasn’t happened, yet. So I guess my comprehensive exam is still on. 7 days and counting…)

Exam Countdown

 

Many, many thanks to the lovely and talented “Dr. Ruth” (no, not that Dr. Ruth) for permission to post her gorgeous photo of a cactus wren - which she snapped somewhere along her journeys through New Mexico and Arizona.

Count on things being a little sparse around here for the next 11 or so days. During my non-work hours, I’m desperately and anxiously preparing for a comprehensive exam. In fact, I should be doing that right now! 

Jim Wallis in Berkeley, September 11

I’ve received this notice from a couple of sources, and keep meaning to share it. For those of you in the Bay Area: Jim Wallis will be speaking in Berkeley on September 11. ‘abc’ and I will have just heard him the previous weekend at the Politics and Spirituality conference we’ll be attending in Pasadena, so I will probably be catching up on homework instead of attending this event:

Christian leader Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, will speak about faith and politics at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley on Monday, September 11 from 5:30 to 7:00 pm in an event co-sponsored by the Graduate Theological Union, the Sojourners organization, and the Beatitudes Society. The executive director and editor-in-chief of Sojourners, Wallis brings a progressive message that links personal values with public issues. Prior to his talk, books will be available for purchase from 5:00 to 5:30 pm.

First Congregational Church of Berkeley is located at 2345 Channing Way in Berkeley, California 94704. For more information, contact David Myers at 510/649-2420 or dmyers@gtu.edu.

Pat Robertson: Ceasefire sucks

Just two weeks ago Pat Robertson alarmed me greatly when he declared himself a believer in global warming.

But I’m relieved to report that he’s back to normal:

Pat Robertson laments Mideast cease-fire

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. The Reverend Pat Robertson, who prayed for victory last week with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, contends that the cease-fire with Hezbollah has rendered the entire bloody conflict pointless.

Back from Israel to resume hosting his “700 Club” broadcast, Robertson quoted a Bible passage from the prophet Isaiah: “We were with child. We writhed in pain, but we gave birth to wind.”

“In other words,” he said, “nothing came out of this at all. ‘We writhed in pain,’ but nothing was born from it.”

Suggesting that the invasion of Lebanon failed to achieve its objective, Robertson said, “Israel went in, but what have they done? Is the word of Isaiah true? — ‘We writhed in pain but we gave birth to wind’ — I’m afraid so.”

(via Faith in Public Life)

Brown Bears=Sitting Ducks

(Update: photo should be clickable, now. But just in case, it came from here and is used with gratitude!)

I just caught a very disturbing story on CBS News.

The reporter visited McNeil River State Game Sanctuary in Alaska, which runs a kind of eco-tourist program where lucky lottery winners (200 a year) are allowed to come and observe/photograph very habituated wild brown bears at close range.

(CBS) The spectacle plays out each summer at the world’s premier bear-viewing area: Alaska’s massive brown bears posing, wrestling and filling up on migrating salmon in the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary.

CBS News correspondent Jerry Bowen reports there’s not a more camera-friendly group of brown bears in the world, because over time they’ve become very accustomed to having human visitors watch what they do.

And it’s a tough ticket. A lottery system grants admission to just 10 visitors a day, totaling just 200 for the entire summer.

“It’s overwhelming,” says Steve Roberts, who came from Minneapolis to see the bears. “You just don’t know which way to look.”

“It’s a three-ring circus,” says Ruth Roberts.

Some people wait years for their chance to visit the sanctuary. Cheryl Parker, of Fairbanks, Alaska, found herself taken with a skinny girl bear who was trying to catch salmon: “There’s a girl out here who’s a tiny thing, and it takes her a while to get that fish. But once she gets it, she tears off with it.”

The sanctuary is located a float plane ride over Cooke Inlet on the Katmai Peninsula, just past the still-steaming Augustine volcano. Once there, it’s a four-mile hike to experience the ultimate bear tale.

Close encounters are common, and, as Bowen discovered, unnerving.

A young bear looked to Bowen for a little help with other, bigger, bears who wanted his fish. Guides shooed him off, but retired sanctuary manager Larry Aumiller said it’s another sign that these are not your average bears.

“They’re so confident and so unconcerned about us and what we’re going to do, that they’re relaxed enough to play,” Aumiller says. “It’s great.”

Therein lies the problem. McNeil’s bears may be too relaxed for what’s about to happen, when, one year from now, adjacent buffer zones that protect them will be opened to trophy hunters. It’s led Aumiller to retire, because he fears he’s set the bears up for disaster.

He says, “When you finally get there, and they finally trust you, and you know that trust is going to be violated, I don’t know how to describe it except to say it’s heartbreaking.”

Emphasis mine. Seems like that little zinger should get a bit more play in this story! Trophy hunters will be allowed to shoot habituated bears? Sounds like Dick Cheney’s cup of tea. Judging from the comments following the story link, a lot of reader/listeners are outraged by the plan. One commenter posted a link to an online petition you can “sign” here (and get more info here).

Well, that didn’t take long — Part II

(Here is part 1.) Try to act surprised.

A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.

The New York Times was deeply impressed by the tightly coordinated spin operation:

That picture of Republican disunity eased dramatically this week with the defeat on Tuesday of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut and the news on Thursday that Britain had foiled a potentially large-scale terrorist plot.

The White House and Congressional Republicans used those events to unleash a one-two punch, first portraying the Democrats as vacillating when it came to national security, and then using the alleged terror plot to hammer home the continuing threat faced by the United States.

By the time the president’s top political strategists met at his ranch on Friday for an annual summer fund-raiser, the events had given them an opportunity to pull together the Republican Party as it headed toward the home stretch of the campaign, rallying once more around Mr. Bush’s signature issue, the fight against terrorism.

The entire effort was swiftly coordinated by the Republican National Committee and the White House, using the same political machinery that carried them to victory in 2004. It began in the days before the anticipated loss of Mr. Lieberman, a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq, to Ned Lamont, a vocal war critic whose victory Republicans used to paint Democrats as “Defeatocrats.”

That word originated in a White House memorandum by Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow, suggesting ways to frame the debate, that was shared with officials, including Ken Mehlman, the Republican chairman, and Karl Rove, the president’s top strategist.

The effort continued with the news of the British intelligence breakthrough, with the message that the plot had highlighted the stakes of a fight that the Democrats, according to Republicans, were not equipped to face.

But Democrats, seeing a political opportunity, began to focus on national security, making a vigorous case this week that the Republicans were mismanaging the war and making the country more vulnerable to attack.

“If the Republican Party thinks this is a good political issue for them, they are mistaken,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

And a top Republican strategist cautioned that the party’s candidates still faced serious challenges in states where the war and Mr. Bush were overwhelmingly unpopular.

But at the very least, news of the plot helped the White House and the Republican Party achieve something they have struggled to do all year: bring the party forcefully together with the president.

(Hat tip Americablog and FDL.)

Massive oil spill off the coast of Lebanon

Hannah Allam, McClatchey Newspapers:

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A massive oil spill off the coast of Lebanon is choking marine life, polluting the air as it evaporates and threatening to produce a long-lasting ecological disaster if Israel doesn’t allow cleanup crews into the sea soon, local environmental officials warned yesterday.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 tons of heavy fuel oil poured into the Mediterranean Sea after Israeli jets bombed a power plant south of Beirut in mid-July, during the first days of the war between Israel and Hezbollah militants. A month later, Israel’s maritime blockade is still in place, making Lebanese coastal waters far too dangerous for specialized teams to get to work on the spill, environmental officials and activists say.

While international attention is focused on the human casualties of Israel’s month-long bombing campaign, the Lebanese government also is pleading for help to save its pristine beaches and fragile underwater life.

“The turtles are hit, the dolphins are hit, the urchins are hit, the corals are hit,” Lebanese Environment Minister Yacoub Saffar said. “We are facing a major ecosystem failure.”

The spill already has reached Syrian waters north of Lebanon, and the governments of Cyprus, Turkey and Greece are on alert, as strong tides spread what experts are calling the worst spill ever in the Mediterranean and a disaster comparable with the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989.

The United Nations, the European Union and Greenpeace International have dispatched experts to assess the damage, but no real cleanup can occur until the waters are safe again for boats.

Cleanup efforts are expected to take more than a year and cost more than $150 million.

The crisis began July 13, when Israeli air strikes targeted fuel storage tanks at the Jieh power plant, about 19 miles south of Beirut. Another strike at the same site came two days later. The tanks caught fire and burned for weeks, as thousands of tons of industrial fuel oil washed into the Mediterranean.

The early bombing campaign against Lebanese infrastructure was so intense, Mr. Saffar said, that the government was unable to conduct a comprehensive study of the damage. He added that it was only on Aug. 2, nearly three weeks after the last strike, that the Israelis provided aerial photos of the damage.

Satellite photos show the spill as a series of oily blobs darkening the aqua waters just half a mile from Lebanon’s coast. The spill runs 93 miles long and more than 8 miles wide at some points, and it is contained in a small sea rather than an ocean.

“This is like a spoonful of sugar in a cup of tea. If you dump it in a bathtub, it’s different,” Mr. Saffar said. “And the Exxon Valdez treatment started 72 hours after the spill. We are 25 days late.”

The damage already is visible at several beach resorts, where inky waves have washed oil-covered fish and birds ashore. The fuel’s most volatile elements are the first to evaporate, which sends toxins into the air in and around Beirut, experts said.

A greasy, gray film has shown up on cars near the coast, and the government warns that it’s just a matter of time before the pollution causes headaches and nausea among Lebanese fishermen and coastal residents. The government has advised all Lebanese to stop eating seafood until the scope of the pollution is determined.

“All along the bay, it’s just a strip of oil. The white sands have become black beaches,” said Zeina Alhajj, who is studying the disaster for Greenpeace International. “The water is full of oil and debris and dead fish. We saw crabs full of oil, struggling, fighting.”

An oxygen-starved “dead zone” that has appeared annually off the coast of Oregon is more extensive this year:

[...]On Tuesday, underwater video cameras remotely operated from this research vessel sent back a starkly different view — a reef barren of fish but littered with what researchers estimated as thousands of carcasses of decaying crabs.

Worms, normally dug into sea sand, drifted dead along the bottom.

“It’s just a wasteland down there,” said Francis Chan, an Oregon State University marine ecologist aboard the Elakha. “I didn’t expect to see anything quite like this.”

These crabs and worms died because they proved too slow to move away from an extraordinary swath of oxygen-depleted water.

Scientists call this a dead zone.

Although this reef appeared to be a worst-case scenario, oxygen-poor water now stretches along 70 miles off the Oregon Coast. Oxygen-poor water also has been detected off the coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.[...]

Try not to miss this 5-part special feature in the LA Times, Altered Oceans. It doesn’t seem to require registration, at this point. Each part is essential reading, and the graphics, photos, and videos are all worth viewing.

Loren Eisley, quoted in Sylvia Earle’s 1995 book, Sea Change:

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water….Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast upon the sea.

Well, that didn’t take long.

How breathtakingly coincidental. One day after Lamont wins the Connecticut Democratic primary, the Prince of Darkness, VP Cheney, heads out to warn Americans that the election of Ned Lamont will prove to “Al Qaeda types” that we don’t have the stomach to fight the war on terror, and Tony Snow warns Americans that electing people like Ned Lamont leads to events like 9/11. Then today, a foiled plot is announced (the White House has known about it for several days), the US moves the color-coded terror threat level to “red” for the first time ever, the RNC is all ready with a new “war on terror” fundraiser plea (via Americablog) and “anonymous” administration officials celebrate an opportunity to make political hay:

But Bush’s Republicans hoped the raid would yield political gains.

“I’d rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn’t done well,” one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

“Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big,” said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won’t “look as appealing” under the circumstances.

(Also via Americablog.) Of course, we knew this was coming. The next three months will be one long scarefest as the Rovians try to win back their apostates.

I finally got to listen to a podcast I’ve been carrying around for months - Martin Doblmeier talking about the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Krista Tippett’s “Speaking of Faith.” Download and listen to the program if you can, or read the transcript and look at the photos on the SOF site. (And rent Doblmeier’s documentary on Bonhoeffer.) But I was particularly struck - and even more so today - by something Bonhoeffer said at a conference in August 1934:

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture, and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security.

I wasn’t going to do this…

…but it’s just too good. From the Department of Says-It-All:

George Stephanopoulos reports:

According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President’s political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: “The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do.”

Via TPMCafe.

(Update: A Lieberman advisor claims no help was offered.)

And now for something completely different

Because every news- and blog-site you look at today is going to have a blow-by-blow analysis of the causes and meanings of Joe Lieberman’s momentous and much-deserved loss in the CT primary — including discussion of his campaign’s last-minute 24-hour “they hacked our web site” smear (to account for a massive crash that was their own fault), their refusal to acknowledge that the Lamont campaign offered their own technical staff and even hosted the site for the day, and the details of Lieberman’s plan to carry out his threat of further dividing the Democrats by running as an independent in order to keep his place at Bush’s table — I’m not going to post about any of that.

Instead, I’m going to link to this very cool story about caterpillars. An enticing snippet:

Few reference-quality collections of specimens exist, because, unlike birds and beetles and butterflies, dead caterpillars do not keep well. Scientists have tried pickling them in alcohol, or hollowing them out and blowing them up like little balloons, but both techniques distort them badly.

And until recent advances in DNA science, the only way to identify a caterpillar positively was to rear it to adulthood, which requires careful husbandry. (There are well-known moths whose caterpillars have never been seen by science.) Most caterpillars shed their skins five or six times as they grow, and each stage, or instar, can have radically different markings and patterns from the previous one.

“In order to do this well, you sort of had to know the entire universe,” said Dr. Wagner, who said that 5 percent to 10 percent of the caterpillars in his book had never before been studied through their entire life cycles. The 700 species in the book are only a small fraction of the 5,000 east of the Mississippi.

It’s a very cool feature. Watch the video, too (it’s in the multimedia sidebar).

I snatched the photo above of the cecropia moth catepillar from Google Images because I remember them from my youth and think they’re bizarrely gorgeous. I think we also called them tomato worms, but that could be a crossed-wire in my addled memory. In any event, when I was growing up in Ohio, we saw them all the time — in the moth form, too. Seems like I don’t see them at all anymore. (My “little” brother - then around 7 - will never live down having adopted one as a playmate one afternoon - carrying it around on his bike, “feeding” it blades of grass, etc., and finally carrying its limp and deflated former-caterpillar-self to my mother, announcing, “I don’t want it any more, it’s too dead.”)

Here’s a link to Wagner’s book, Caterpillars of Eastern North America. (Entry updated to fix a format issue and make sure nobody was left thinking my now 38-year old brother kills caterpillars.) (Also, my brother protests, “I believe I was much younger than SEVEN.”)