Fitz and Starts
After a crazed few days of work and wedding responsibilities, let me comment briefly on Friday's big news--the indictment of Irving Lewis Libby and the climax, at least for now, of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity in 2003.

I watched most of Fitzgerald's Friday afternoon press conference, and was deeply impressed. On Friday and throughout this long investigation, he has demonstrated no agenda, no preconceived notions, and no desire either to prolong his moment in the spotlight or score points with any faction or constituency. Just the facts, indeed.

At the same time, I bemoan the truth that when it came time to investigate Bill Clinton, the right wing was able to empower a rabid partisan whose transparent mission and desire was to "get the president"--and spent years and tens of millions in trying to do so, doing great damage to the prestige of government in the process. But when it was time to investigate the Bush White House, we got a man of integrity whose fealty to the Law and commitment to staying within his mandate superceded all other considerations.

That Fitzgerald is so much better than the bastards he has investigated, and that his quality of character and unwillingness to go beyond his instructions might insulate them from their just deserts (aside from Libby, who's likely to serve time), is the crowning irony here. It's a bit like the ideals that Judy Miller's defenders cited, of press freedom and absolutist defense of the First Amendment: the worst actors hide behind the best principles.

But at the same time, I'm glad he was the one to do this job, and hopeful (though not very) that his honorable conduct in the public service might serve as a salutary counter-example to the slimy tactics of the administration. As I felt about Bunnatine Greenhouse, any country that produces public servants of this caliber must still have redeeming qualities.

Unhappy Day
Today marks the anniversary of one tragedy and a milestone for another.

Three years ago today, we lost the great progressive champion Senator Paul Wellstone to a plane crash in Minnesota. Wellstone was headed toward a likely victory in his race against the repellent Norm Coleman for a third term in the Senate; he might well have run for president in 2004, and in any event he would have brought his charisma, integrity and populist credibility to the great political battles of our time since that dismal day. Paul proved that idealists can be winners too. His legacy lives on through Wellstone Action.

Also, it was confirmed today that the American death toll in Iraq has reached 2,000. But you'll look in vain for prominent coverage of this from the big news outlets. About all I have to add here is what Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said today on the subject:

"We do not honor our fallen soldiers simply by adding to their numbers."

Fitzmas Eve?
The word is that indictments are coming--probably tomorrow.

An uber-insider source has just reported the following to TWN:

1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.

2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.

3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and "filed" tomorrow.

4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.

The shoe is dropping.

The rumor from earlier today, first aired by Raw Story, was that "at least" two indictments were coming; wonder if the source is the same. I probably trust Clemons slightly more than Raw Story, but we're all in the dark here.

Perhaps showing the aftereffects from years of disappointment and pain (a trauma I know well; I'm a Phillies phan), lefties at Daily Kos and elsewhere seemed to be a bit crestfallen about the low number. What I think they miss in this analysis is that the process works over time; we've become so conditioned by 24-hour news and the whole apparatus of real-time information to want things quickly. But the real value here is twofold, and neither corresponds to a quick outcome:

1. Political: This erodes the credibility and functionality of the White House and the whole corrupt right-wing apparatus. They're distracted, they have no political capital to draw upon, they can't bring good people into the administration (putting aside whether the dimwit-in-chief gives a rat's ass about doing so), and they can't recruit quality candidates for other races. The media grows ever more skeptical, and starts to see the percentage in challenging, rather than parroting what comes out of the West Wing.

2. Institutional: Ultimately, whether or not wrongdoing is exposed and punished is more important to the nation than "horserace" considerations. If we're Americans first and Democrats/liberals subsequently, the resiliency of our institutions and the system's ongoing ability to correct and improve itself should way outrank whether we get the pleasure of seeing Rove take a perp walk, or even--delicious though this would be--Cheney's resignation press conference.

The reason I thought the last election was so important, and why the continued ascendancy of Cheney/DeLay/Rove/Norquist/Dobson was so dangerous, is that their systemic approach has placed what I consider to be unprecedented pressure on those institutions (checks and balances, country over party, of/by/for the people). Their purpose is self-enrichment and perpetuation of power, not the advancement of the public interest. If abuse of power leads to their downfall--whether through the Plame scandal, DeLay's legal travails, and/or the Abramoff investigations (which I still think are the most structurally important, in terms of showing how these guys work and how amoral they really are)--then the system is redeemed.

Judy Miller: Endgame
After all those high-minded editorials, appeals to principle and hyperbolic declarations issuing from the New York Times during Judith Miller's summer imprisonment, the paper finally seems to be moving toward where many of us have been since Miller's role in the Plame leak scandal first became known. It's an interesting but ultimately academic question whether this change of heart is spurred by a belated recognition of the facts, or just stark terror that their irrational defense of this high-grade hellion was going to damage the bottom line, but either way, the smoke signals clearly read that Miller Time is over at the Times.

See first executive editor Bill Keller's e-mail to the paper's staff, evidently sent Friday afternoon:

I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details -- the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes -- to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.
...
Dick Stevenson has expressed the larger lesson here in an e-mail that strikes me as just right: "I think there is, or should be, a contract between the paper and its reporters. The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally -- but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her. In that way, everybody knows going into a battle exactly what the situation is, what we're fighting for, the degree to which the facts might counsel compromise or not, and the degree to which our collective credibility should be put on the line."

Boiled down, Keller is admitting two things: Miller lied to us--her colleagues and management--and in doing so she badly damaged the credibility of the paper. Earlier in the letter, he refers to the Times' struggles in the wake of both the Jayson Blair episode and the specious reporting on WMD in the runup to war with Iraq. That too, of course, was more Miller's doing than anyone else's. The parallel here is quite compelling: Just as leaking Valerie Plame's identity was the original sin of the Bush administration, made more severe by what looks like a conspiracy and cover-up, the Times first erred with Miller's Chalabi-planted stories, and then when she saw her own career threatened--remember why Joseph Wilson went public to start with--she abetted the dirty work of Lewis Libby and the rest of the anti-Wilson cabal.

The Keller letter was, at least in theory, an internal communication. (He must have known it would be leaked, but it wasn't explicitly meant for publication, and I still think it's safe to say that the readership that peruses it on Crooks and Liars is vastly smaller than the NYT audience.) Maureen Dowd's column on Miller, though, was included in Saturday's paper, and is at least as damning. Dowd starts in her entertainingly catty style ("I've always liked Judy Miller"... before relating a story transparently intended to show what a monstrous bitch Miller is), and then lowers the boom:

Judy's stories about W.M.D. fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber that Senator Bob Graham, now retired, dubbed "incestuous amplification." Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.
...
Judy admitted... that she "got it totally wrong" about W.M.D. "If your sources are wrong," she said, "you are wrong." But investigative reporting is not stenography.
...
She casually revealed that she had agreed to identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, as a "former Hill staffer" because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The implication was that this bit of deception was a common practice for reporters. It isn't.

She said that she had wanted to write about the Wilson-Plame matter, but that her editor would not allow it. But Managing Editor Jill Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief, denied this, saying that Judy had never broached the subject with her.

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame." Nor does it seem credible that she doesn't know how the name got into her notebook and that, as she wrote, she "did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby."

An Associated Press story yesterday reported that Judy had coughed up the details of an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log showing that she had met with him on June 23, 2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

Judy refused to answer a lot of questions put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes that she shared with the grand jury. I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

Dowd sticks the shiv in at the end, almost gratuitously--though I won't deny I like it. But the bigger story here is that there's no way in hell the paper would have allowed this to see print two months ago, probably not even two weeks ago. Better late than never, though sooner would have been better for both the Times and its readers.

Thank You, Jeebus
See here.

Now, the question: to buy or not to buy the inevitable DeLay mug-shot t-shirt? The thought of seeing that prick's face in my clothesdrawer is less than appealing, but then again, seeing him in that context is just about the most appealing notion possible... gonna have to ponder this one.

Update: James Wolcott sounds the warning. Read it, note it, remember it, as "Fitzmas" draws nigh for all us long-suffering Good little boys and girls.

I don't know what indictments, if any, are coming down the pike. But I promise you this: If there are high-reaching indictments from Fitzgerald's grand jury that threaten to rip out several vital organs of the Bush regime, the same milksop Machiavellis who extol "hardball" as the Beltway's favorite sport will suddenly start worming their fingers together in major fits of nervous handwringing and warning us these trials risk "tearing the country apart" and becoming a "terrible distraction" to more "urgent problems facing the nation."

I remember this happening during the early stages of Watergate, when many of the poohbahs of journalism and punditry tried to bottle up the surge force of the investigations, feeling that the country had been through so much pain and woe in the late Sixties (the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the riots at the Chicago convention, etc) that another national trauma would be too much to bear. This was before the full dimensions of the rot and gangsterism were known, and even the Voices of Caution (such as Hugh Sidey) were forced to concede that Nixon had to go. I fully expect a replay if there are major indictments, with David Broder assuming the role of Sidey, Richard Cohen performing his yeoman best to much everything up, etc., and the all the former hardballers going soft, saying that whatever was done to strike back at Joe Wilson is dwarfed by the more important challenges facing us in Iraq, the War on Terror, the Katrina rebuilding, and so on.

If it looks as if Cheney has to resign and Bush himself enters the Nixon danger zone, we'll hear the same frets and cries from the pundit shows about the country being torn apart and Americans losing faith in their government. But it isn't the country that will be torn apart by Plamegate any more than the country was torn apart during Watergate (which provided daily thrilling news entertainment value that bound citizens together); it's the Washington establishment that will be torn apart. And it should be torn apart. It's failed the country, and it's played by its own rules for too long, and "criminalizing politics" is exactly what should be done when political criminals deceive a nation into a war with Judith Miller serving as the Angie Dickinson to their Rat Pack and Richard Cohen auditioning for the part of Joey Bishop.

Strange Bedfellows
Just a quick one here, but I can't resist: Pirro Seeks an Unlikely Donor

Recently, Jeanine F. Pirro sent out letters to potential donors in her campaign to unseat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton next year. But there is very little chance that she will get any help from one recipient of her appeal: Mrs. Clinton herself.

In a potentially embarrassing (albeit minor) gaffe, one of the Aug. 19 fund-raising letters that Ms. Pirro's campaign sent out was addressed to none other than Mrs. Clinton.

It would have been bad enough if the letter had been addressed to, say, Mrs. Clinton's home in Chappaqua. But this one was sent to her previous residence: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500-0030 - an address more commonly known as the White House. The letter was forwarded from the White House to Mrs. Clinton's Senate office.

"Dear Hillary, You and I have been through a lot over the years," the solicitation begins. "I need you and every New Yorker on my side. But most importantly in this difficult campaign, I need people like you who I can trust."

Considering that Sen. Clinton has raised over $5 million--an important fact given that campaign finance law allows her to save unspent funds from this cycle for "some future race"--she certainly has it to spare. But still.

Harriet the... Why?
I think Bush Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is going down. Republican Senate staffers are essentially doing oppo research on her, Bush himself is speaking out both sides of his mouth--telling the theocracy brigade that her religion informs the pick, while maintaining that he hasn't spoken with her about abortion--and even Republican pundits, from George Will to Rich Lowry, are bemoaning her lack of accomplishments and gravitas.

(Will: "If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists." Lowry: "[T]o place so much weight on Miers's demographic profile, rather than her own merits and judicial philosophy, is noxious and un-American." One grim philosophical tenet, much loved by high-school stoners, is that we all become what we hate. Thus it seems the Republicans, already rife with the corruption and self-dealing they once deplored in the Democratic congressional majority, are now becoming the party of identity politics as well.)

Josh Marshall makes perhaps the key point: outside of the White House itself and those would-be theocrats who presumably have gotten assurances that she would "vote right," Miers isn't likely to find many vigorous defenders:

Besides James Dobson this nomination has no supporters outside of the senate and the White House. And the conservative opposition isn't just opposing, it's contemptuous -- and critical in ways that mimic the long-expressed criticism from the other side of the aisle.

Nominations can have dynamics similar to those of political scandals.

We tend to think that the real key to a scandalee's fate is how many mobilize against him or her. Usually, though, the key issue is whether and how quickly they can find some committed group to mount a defense. If that happens, and quickly, a scandal equilibrium can be reached, and an embattled pol can often withstand merciless attacks and revelations. With no true base of support, however, a career can rapidly collapse even if the opposition itself isn't all that intense.

Miers' nomination could fail in a similar way.

Sure, only a few Republican senators have expressed serious misgivings. But who is it exactly, either in or out of the senate, who is going to fight hard for this nominee? What argument are those senators going to make on the floor? That the country needs Harriet Miers on the Court? That the criticisms of her nomination are frivolous?

On the Democrats' side, there seems to be no consensus about how to respond to the nomination. Some argue that Dems should support it simply on the grounds that Miers doesn't seem like a fire-breathing righty with nut-job leanings, and that if she's defeated, Bush would likely just pick someone worse (and more formidable). Others argue--and I have to admit, I kind of like this one just on style grounds--that Democrats should simply abstain altogether when it comes time to vote on Miers. What I haven't seen much of, to my dismay, is the argument that Democrats should oppose Miers because... well, she's not really qualified, and the country simply deserves better from its most honored judges.

If there's one thing left and right should still be able to agree upon, it's that the highest public offices should be held by people of stature and talent. (Yes, the other side did nominate, and a slender majority of the voters subsequently elected, George W. Bush. So maybe I'm off-base from the jump here. But I'd rather believe that the public, however erroneously, saw merit in this obviously limited individual than accept that they just figured it didn't matter, or that campaign-filtered "likability" was the key criterion.) While G. Harold Carswell might not have ruled any differently than Antonin Scalia if he'd been confirmed, in terms of outcomes, I'm still happier to have Scalia, with his irascible brilliance, on the bench. Mediocrity need not have "representation" at that level.

At the same time, the nomination of a non-entity like Miers is perhaps the ultimate result of a political philosophy that amounts in large part to "the government sucks, and it can't help you, and only losers pursue public service." She did win first place in The New Republic's very funny and very upsetting piece ranking the top 15 Bush-appointee cronies. Perhaps the rejection of this sub-optimal candidate might signal a new willingness to demand more of our high officials than that they know the right people--and who knows where that might lead?

Public Discourse and the Persistence of Poverty
As I mentioned in the Bob Mould entry, I was on a Center for an Urban Future panel this past Thursday morning titled "Restoring Economic Opportunity for New York City's Working Poor Families." The discussion was a follow-up to our 2004 report "Between Hope and Hard Times," on low-income working families in New York state, with a closer focus on city issues and policymaking. I think it went pretty well on balance, but where I thought the conversation really got interesting was when we began to talk about how even now, after Hurricane Katrina and a welter of distressing statistics showing an increase in poverty within the United States over the last several years, we don't really hear anything about the issue from our press or politicians.

Broadly defined, I think the public discourse in America and probably every other modernized country runs along two tracks. One has to do with scandal and personalities: who's winning elections, who's appointed to high offices, who's under investigation, and what all these things mean in terms of future elections, appointments and juridicial goings-on. This all is sometimes derided as "horse race" style coverage; except for the underlying content, it's not all that different from those celebrity magazines that seem to be proliferating like bacteria and are forever writing about Angelina and Jen and Jess and Brad and Britney and that whole hell-bound rabble (if I might be allowed a little snobbery). How much of this is simply human nature, and how much of it is a reflection of how monoculture and technologically enabled short attention spans have changed the world, I'm not really stoned enough to consider right now.

(Sidebar: Al Gore gave an absolutely superb speech on some of these issues earlier this week. Though I've never been a big fan of the former vice-president--aside from his Futurama guest stints, that is--a few more of these and he might yet make me a believer.)

But they do obscure, probably more than was the case 30 or 40 years ago, the second track, which has to do with the actual substance of governance and public life. This is power relationships, wealth and poverty, economic trends, and the moral choices of those in power. If this "second track" were somehow prevalent, maybe we would ask questions like why none of the self-appointed moral leaders of this country--from Radical Cleric James Dobson to the crypto-racist Bill Bennett, ever talk about poverty. Or why George W. Bush and his peeps can talk about an "Ownership Society" while willy-nilly disinvesting in the tools people need to take ownership of their own careers, like job training and even basic language skill acquisition. (The administration proposed a two-thirds cut in federal support for ESL in its most recent budget.)

It's also why the whole debate over new Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers--is she Souter in a dress? Thomas with eyeliner and without the pube on the Coke can?--misses the point. As does the larger focus on "moral issues"--abortion and gay marriage--in considering Miers and other court nominees. Fortunately, Robert Reich knows the score:

The social or religious values of Bush’s Supreme Court nominees get most of attention, but economic values are also at stake. When Miers said last year that "[t]he future of the American economy depends on ... making the president's tax cuts permanent, lowering the costs of health care, [and] reducing the burden of frivolous lawsuits and unnecessary regulation," she was sharing a particular vision of how American society should be organized.

A central moral problem for the American economy today is that, although it has been growing at a good clip, with corporate profits rising nicely, most American paychecks have been going nowhere. Last year, the Census Bureau tells us, the U.S. economy grew a solid 3.8 percent. Yet median household income barely grew at all. That’s the fifth straight year of stagnant household earnings, the longest on record. Meanwhile, another 1.1 million Americans fell into poverty, bringing the ranks of the poor to 37 million. And an additional 800,000 workers found themselves without health insurance. Only the top 5 percent of households enjoyed real income gains. These trends are not new. They began 30 years ago, but are now reaching the point where they threaten the social fabric. Not since the Gilded Age of the 1890s has this nation experienced anything like the inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity we are witnessing today.

A central moral choice, then, is whether America should seek to reverse this trend. Those who view this society as a group of self-seeking individuals for whom government’s major purpose is to protect property and ensure freedom of contract would probably say “no.” Those who view America as a national community whose citizens have responsibilities to promote the well-being of one another would likely say “yes.” Is the well-being of American society the sum of individual goods, or is there a common good?

Over the next decades, the U.S. Supreme Court will play an important role in helping America make this choice. Under the guise of many doctrines and rationales -- interpretations of the “takings” and due-process clause of the Fifth Amendment, the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the commerce clause, the doctrine of federal preemption, and so on -- the Court will favor either property or community, depending on the economic values of a majority of the justices.

Reich goes on to discuss the "switch in time that saved nine"--how the Supreme Court of Franklin Roosevelt's day, supposedly under threat from FDR's "court-packing" scheme, suddenly started upholding New Deal actions in 1937. Reich interestingly dismisses the prevalent and cynical view that the justices did this to save their own power, and instead argues that the balance between community and property simply shifted as the realities of Depression became clear.

I think there are strategies for progressives to start talking about these subjects in ways that could impact the discourse. John Edwards certainly seems to be looking for them. An environment in which record corporate profits have become detached to an unprecedented degree from stagnant wages would seem to allow such a conversation. But for now I just want to make the point that the "moral values" of judges absolutely should not only address questions of sexual behavior and reproductive decisions, important as many believe those things to be.

I Got Your Classic Rock Right Here
Saw Bob Mould playing with his new band this past Wednesday night at Irving Plaza. It might have been the best of the dozen or so times I've seen Bob, in various groupings and contexts (with Husker Du, solo/acoustic, with Sugar) over the past 20 years or so. The really interesting aspect to me was that the set was so obviously designed to be "crowd-pleasing," and that it succeeded so well at it. Here's a review by Jon Parales in the Times, mostly positive but a bit condescending, methinks. And for the devoted, a link to Mould's blog: I'm not sure what he meant by "a little rough in spots;" Bob's voice sounded better than I've ever heard (a tribute to healthy living, I guess) and the backing band was tight and dynamic. Below is the set list, as I remember it--aside from "See a Little Light" and "Egoveride", pretty much only drawn from the new album, Sugar's "Copper Blue", and Huskers classics (which obviously was the thrill for yours truly--aside from seeing Husker Du play "Could You Be the One" when I was 13, I don't think I've ever heard those songs performed live, full-band).

The Act We Act
A Good Idea
Changes
Circles
Paralyzed
I am Vision, I am Sound
Underneath Days
Hoover Dam
See a Little Light
High Fidelity
Hardly Getting Over It
Could You Be the One
I Apologize
Chartered Trips
Best Thing
Celebrated Summer
--
Egoveride
If I Can't Change Your Mind
--
Helpless
Makes No Sense at All

About eight hours after this show ended, I found myself sitting on a CUF panel talking about low-income working families in New York City, which I'll try to write a bit more about later today in a larger context.

And am currently sitting here listening to the new Broken Social Scene album--lovely and weird, though perhaps not to the extent of "You Forgot It In People"--a high bar, to be sure.

Something Bad About Bloomberg
(First, a little disclaimer. There have been roughly a million things going on in the last week and a half that I've wanted to blog about here. Hopefully I'll get to some of them once work stuff--yeah, the job I'm theoretically transitioning out of, but is actually kicking my ass to a nearly unprecedented degree--calms down. Phillies withdrawal ain't helping either, though it's not like I've written about those people here so much anyway since the advent of The Good Phight. Anyway, I'm gonna try to write more. Promise.)

As I've noted here before, the meta-debate about whether New York City Democrats should oppose Mike Bloomberg's bid for re-election hasn't much moved me over the last year-plus. I think the guy has done a good job, I have absolutely no confidence in Fernando Ferrer's ability to govern the city in a competent and effective way, and I instinctively recoil from the notion that blind partisanship should guide anyone's voting choices. (This is one of the things I want to get back to: whether Democrats are better advised to meet any and all Republican measures with knee-jerk resistance, or if there's a way to "tame" the other side such that they stop being the Party of Norquist and Dobson, and return to their Lincoln/TR/Eisenhower roots.)

But I did read something in today's Times that seriously gives me pause.

As he campaigns for re-election this fall, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg never mentions that he is a Republican. Far from it: He has gone out of his way to oppose both President Bush's nominee for chief justice and a federal reconstruction plan for the Gulf Coast, and he expressed disappointment that the Freedom Center was evicted from ground zero by another Republican, Gov. George E. Pataki.

But when it comes to donating money to politicians, Mr. Bloomberg's Republican bona fides are as good as they get, judging from his campaign finance records. As mayor, he gave $250,000 to the same Republican party-building effort that Representative Tom DeLay is now charged with using to launder political money. Mr. Bloomberg has also doled out thousands of dollars to politicians who are far more conservative than he is.

For Mr. Bloomberg, whose campaign slogan casts him as "a leader, not a politician," this pattern of giving may be the most partisan-driven aspect of his life in politics. In a city where Democratic registration far outweighs Republican, the mayor's financial ties to Republicans and President Bush are a source of concern to some allies, who worry that the donations will turn off liberal voters he needs.

Mr. Bloomberg's aides say the donations advance the interests of New York with the political party that controls Washington and federal funds for the city. Yet in the case of his $250,000 donation, in 2002, Mr. Bloomberg was also aiding a major goal of the party that had nothing to do with urban issues: bringing more Republicans to power in statehouses and legislatures. He made his donation when Republicans were considering selecting New York City for their 2004 convention, as they ultimately did.

The recipient of the $250,000, the Republican National State Elections Committee, is the political vehicle that Mr. DeLay is accused of using to violate election laws in Texas, his home state. Mr. DeLay says he is innocent, and Mr. Bloomberg's donation was unrelated to Mr. DeLay and has not been questioned.

Mr. Bloomberg also gave $140,000 to New York Republicans to elect more members to the State Assembly and Senate, and $25,000 to the Republican National Committee. Asked about Mr. Bloomberg's support for expanding Republican control in state capitals, Ed Skyler, a spokesman, said the goal was to enhance the mayor's influence with Republicans in positions to help the city.

None of this is exactly news: Bloomberg's contributions to Bush have been very well documented. But there's something about seeing the mayor's name so close to that of Tom DeLay that just repels me. He's subsidizing the bad guys, and in ways that I think go beyond credibly "representing New York's interests": the fairly explicit goal of Karl Rove and Grover Norquist is to create a one-party nation. I don't think Bloomberg wants this, but his dollars evidently do.

I'll still probably suck it up and vote for the guy, but this confirms me in the thought that if the Democrats had nominated Weiner, or some other competent candidate, I likely would have gone that way.

Journey Through the Mind of a Phan: Phaltering, or Phaithful?

That was... epic.

I missed the comeback--or rather, I was watching Battlestar Galactica and taping it for Annie, and kept flipping back during breaks. I'd seen the last out of the Reds 8th, keeping the score at 10-6 Cincinnati right before the show started, saw "Rollins, Lofton, Utley" due, and thought... well, maybe. Sure the Reds had scored nine unanswered runs to wipe away a 6-1 Phils lead and inject a serious bummer element into my evening; yes, I'd increasingly switched away from the worsening game to watch West Side Story (TCN) and The Usual Suspects (AMC) through the 9pm hour. But it was just four runs, top of the lineup due, and...

Nah. Not again. Twice in a week? Uh-uh.

Against the Reds, who dashed our hopes two hours ago, knocked us out of the playoffs 29 years ago, and started the spiral toward eternal infamy for a Phils team 41 years ago? No. The lefty Kent Mercker will do the job on us, cementing Wade's lifelong impetus to possess him. He'll probably strike out Ryan Howard to end it, and then this winter they'll be traded for each other.

Show comes back on, the VCR is running, I'm trying to put it out of my mind. It's a really, really good show, Battlestar; tonight was the season finale, and might have been the best episode they've ever aired. I think to myself, I have to let the Phils go.

Commercial break and I flip back to ESPN to check. It's now 10-9. There are two outs. Nobody on base. Howard vs. Mercker.

No. Frackin'. Way.

Count goes to 2-0. I'm flipping back and forth between every pitch, in part to make sure I'm not missing the show, in part because each pitch is a ball and thus whatever I'm doing seems to be working. It's obvious by 2-0 that Mercker won't give Howard any meat, and the kid is too disciplined to go fishing ahead in the count, down by a run and nobody on base. Ball four.

Commercial break's ending. Bell comes to the plate. I figure: No. I know how this one ends. I'm not doing it to myself. I turn back to SciFi.

(Though the thought also crosses my mind that, if they come back to win this game and then go on to... well, you know... if all that happens, then THIS is the moment that might live forever. Could I live with missing that?)

So be it. They scored the three runs with my not watching; the last scoring I'd seen had been the Reds' 9th. I'm letting it go.

15 minutes or so later, Battlestar breaks again. I flip back to ESPN; the ballgame is over, college football is on, and there's no ticker at the bottom of the screen. ESPN2 is on a commercial break, and is also showing college football in any event. Back to SciFi. If only I knew the past tense of "que sera, sera."

The show breaks one more time--this is the last one till January, rich in hints and cliffhangers and complications, even closing holes left by earlier episodes this season--and then I switch to ESPN2 watching the ticker. There's the final: Phillies 11, Reds 10. S: Billy Wagner (35)

So be it. But what had happened? I get online, go to PhilliesPhans.com, read through the entire game thread, smiling and cringing through 9-6, not sure how the Reds scored that 10th run but recognizing the "resigned, but not leaving" tone of late game threads when the team is behind. Then an Utley 3-run bomb, his second of the game, just as we'd all given up on his for this year as exhausted and spent... wow, but I figured someone had probably done that since I'd seen two outs, none on, one run down in "real time."

An Abreu strikeout and his ejection, along with Cholly Manuel... gut punch. The best player on the team, obviously injured, already having endured a bad game--this was his fourth strikeout of the night. Then he's tossed. Burrell follows with a bad AB, not that much of a surprise. Howard's walk, which I'd seen.

And then David Bell continues down redemption road with a two-run bomb; a ten-page orgasm on PhilliesPhans, with Scott Graham's home run call audio. By now, my wife is home; I call her in for the repeat playing.

I'm not sure whether my "letting go" was rewarded by the win, or whether my lack of faith was punished by my missing such a moment. Either way, I feel much in the grip of larger forces at work.

Quite an evening.

Big Dog on the Hunt
Bill Clinton evidently returned to politics over the weekend. I didn't see his appearances on "Meet the Press" or other shows, but he set the blogworld abuzz--check out these observations (two very different variations on a common theme) by Bull Moose and The Rude Pundit.

This was enough to send me to the transcript, where I found the following brilliant little frame:

...just think what would happen if the Chinese--we're pressing the Chinese now, a country not nearly rich as America per capita, to keep loaning us money with low interest to cover my tax cut, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Katrina and at the same time to raise the value of their currency so their imports into our country will become more expensive, and our exports to them will become less expensive. And by the way, we don't want to let them buy any oil companies or anything like that.

So what if they just got tired of buying our debt? What if the Japanese got tired of doing it? Japan's economy is beginning to grow again. Suppose they decided they wanted to keep some of their money at home and invest it in Japan, because they're starting to grow?

We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it's wrong.

This was in response to a question George Stephanopoulos asked Clinton about what the Democrats should do in response to the White House refusing to back down on tax cuts to pay for disaster relief. Clinton effortlessly ties this into a larger narrative that hits on the illogic of our policy toward China; the risk we incur thereby; and the larger unfairness of Bush's economic approach ("my tax cut," which he'd referenced earlier).

The guy is unbelievable. It's nice to see him back in the game.

On a housekeeping note, I proudly announce two additions to my blogroll on the left side of this page:

• The Smiling Nihilist: newly launched blog by my itinerant college roommate Greg D--fixer of flailing tech companies, gluttonous consumer of high and low entertainment, lover of many women, fighter of real and virtual evil (in video game action at least), and, um, a smiling nihilist.


• 826NYC: a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group that helps school-age kids with their creative and expository writing skills. It's modeled after 826 Valencia, the San Francisco-based center founded by Dave Eggers among other s. I'm tutoring there this fall one day a week and excited to be working with kids again. The center is nestled in the back of the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, a great place to browse if you ever find yourself on Fifth Avenue of a sunny afternoon.

True Confessions of a Right-Wing Toady
I'm obviously a fan of what's sometimes known as the "progressive blogosphere." Look at the links to the left of these words, and you'll see a handful of sites that have a distinct and consistent take on the issues of the day. Even better, the proliferation of community sites with a strong liberal perspective has allowed wave after wave of new, heretofore totally unknown writers to find audiences, informing and inspiring and entertaining as they go. It's good for progressives, and I think it's even good for democracy.

Unfortunately, the echo-chamber tendencies of these sites have some less pleasant side effects too. One, which I wrote about a lot in the wake of the catastrophic defeat last November, is that we as participants leave ourselves open to delusion. There's a clear selection bias at work, and we tend to, as the old song goes, accentuate the positive and eliminate--or at least rationalize away--the negative. Another is the enforcement, or attempted enforcement, of a rigid ideological conformity that's often expressed in very ugly ways.

So it was when I wrote a diary entry on Daily Kos last week titled "Why I'm supporting Bloomberg." As the New York City mayoral primary was just concluded, and already my e-mail box was filling up with requests from the likes of John Kerry himself to send money and support to newly minted Democratic nominee Freddy Ferrer (unofficial motto: "It Takes a Hack"), and the front-page proprietors of dKos were similarly throwing brickbats at "so-called Democrats" who were lining up behind Mike Bloomberg, I figured I'd at least try to set out my arguments, with a little history and background thrown in. I don't want to recap the whole piece here--I thought it was pretty good, and the link is just a few lines up--but basically my points were: I voted and volunteered for Mark Green four years ago, I was really bummed when Bloomberg won, but I think he's done a very good job on balance and I like that he's free of the usual cronyism and political debts that dominate urban politics; and Ferrer, based on his history, his allies, and his campaign to date, IMO would likely be a failure in City Hall.

Here's the first comment I got in response:

Bloomberg Is A Traitor (3.16 / 6)

Therefore so are his supporters.
He is a Republican now.
Furthermore he detained American citizens en masse unlawfully (against court rulings issued in advance) for the Republican convention.

A vote for Bloomberg is a vote for Republican hegemony, and as a fellow New Yorker, I detest you.
I can't say you have no right, but I can say you are a rightwing toady, period, end of story.
Ferrer is competent, you have no excuse.

And it kind of went on from there. Someone else declaimed that I was betraying my country. More recently on dKos, having rejoined this argument in another thread, I was told I should re-register as a Republican. There was very, very little substance offered on behalf of Ferrer.

Most of the complaints follow two themes: "Bloomberg equals Bush," and "Bloomberg mistreated the RNC protesters last summer." (There's also, as the comment I cited above implies, a bit of irrational "thou hast betrayed me" scorn for Bloomberg's apostasy in running as a Republican; to me that's not worth engaging with, for the simple reason that "there's no Democratic or Republican way to fix a pothole"; at the local level, party label doesn't matter very much.) The second, I guess, has some validity. But frankly, I don't think any mayor, of either party, would have done much different; four years earlier in Philadelphia, Ed Rendell (a Democrat) was similarly criticized.

And to be even more blunt--because we're on my turf now--I suspect a lot of the protesters were looking for the outcome they earned. The cops might have been dicks, but I doubt many of them wanted the extra paperwork and general effort of arresting a bunch of mouthy white kids.

Should they have been treated so harshly? No. Should they have been given a Central Park permit? Yes. But in the grand scheme of things, I fail to see how this is all that big of a deal.

Then there's the Bush charge. It's based on, one, Bloomberg's campaign giving to Bush and the Republicans; and two, that the city hosted the RNC last year. That he contributed to Bush certainly bothers me; I gave a lot of time, money and effort to beat that prick, and it rankles me that my mayor worked against me. In the full context of Bloomberg's philanthropy and a lifetime of political giving, however, the theme of his 2004-cycle contributions is pretty clear: it's "DON'T FUCK OVER NEW YORK CITY." Given the deep bias against our claiming a fair share of state and federal budgets prevalent in Albany and DC, I understand it even if I don't condone it.

As for the RNC, though I myself protested their presence (and--I remember--wrote repeatedly here and elsewhere about how much it bothered me to have them exploiting our tragedy, given their policies), I'm also glad they dropped however many millions into our local economy. If these self-righteous "liberal" jerkasses want to pick up all the schoolteacher, sanitation worker and cop salaries paid for by Republican delegate spending last year, then I'm happy to talk with them. Otherwise, they've got no beef.

Not to mention that Bloomberg, like any smart mayor, wanted *both* political conventions in the city last year. Terry McAuliffe and Ted Kennedy put the kibosh on that one, I think it's fairly safe to say to the detriment of our results last November. Remember, the Democrats had their convention first, as the "out" party; if they'd held it here, they could have made any number of powerful political points: how everyday Republican policies hurt the city they'd come to exploit; how Bush used the tragedy of 9/11 to push a terribly divisive partisan agenda and a war waged under false pretenses against an "enemy" that hadn't been involved with the attacks; even how (as Bloomberg noted in his address to the RNC) the Republican thugocracy distributed homeland security money based on political calculations rather than an honest assessment of risk.

But that gets me pretty far from the thread. And the thread is that these "Better Dead than Republican Red" arguments leave us arguably as badly off, in terms of supporting the public interest, as those on the other side. That so many of those bloviating the loudest don't actually live here--and clearly know nothing about Ferrer, or the deeply corrupt borough-based Democratic machines--just adds another layer of insult.

Politicizing 9/11
It's a beautiful day here in Brookyn. The NFL season is well underway; Annie's best friend gave birth yesterday in Dublin, with mother and child both well; we've gotten tons of things done today; the Phillies are whomping the Marlins down in South Philadelphia.

Four years ago, on another beautiful day, the course of American history changed. The government somehow managed to turn unprecedented tragedy and signal failure into a political triumph; it then took the fruits of that triumph to plunge our country into perpetual deficit, interminable war and, as these facts became apparent to some, bitter polarization.

Having won the election last November, George W. Bush and his band of supporters and enablers saw all their policies and practices justified. The privileging of loyalty over competence, ideology over results, and self-advancement over public service all went effectively unpunished by the electorate. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is only the most glaring, and viscerally painful, evidence of the costs of this approach to governance. There will be others.

But even if you take it as given that the administration couldn't, and shouldn't, have better defended the country on 9/11--a view that's tough to sustain given what Richard Clarke and so many others have told us--let's consider the poison and ineptitude of the response to that attack.

We never got the perpetrator. In fact, he sneers at us from the covers of magazines.

For a group of people so supposedly bound up with honor and martial pride, so praiseful of war and violence, doesn't it seem odd that more right-wingers aren't rabid with fury over the fact that Osama bin Laden remains at learge? That the substitute in terms of militaristic self-gratification has gone so badly awry is almost like injury added to insult. Michael Tomasky issues a reminder in the American Prospect:

[E]ven the disaster Bush has created in Iraq takes a back seat to one overwhelming fact: By the time night falls on September 11, Osama bin Laden will have been at large for 1,461 days.

America vanquished world fascism in less time: We obtained Germany’s surrender in 1,243 days, Japan’s in 1,365. Even the third Punic War, in which Carthage was burned to the ground and emptied of citizens who were taken en masse into Roman slavery, lasted around 1,100 days (and troops needed a little longer to get into position back in 149 B.C.).
...
Just imagine bin Laden having been at large this long in President Al Gore’s administration. In fact, it’s impossible to imagine, because President Gore, under such circumstances, wouldn’t have lasted this long. You probably didn’t know, until you read this column, the number of days bin Laden has been at large. But I assure you that if Gore had been president, you and every American would have known, because the right would have seen to it that you knew, asking every day, “Where’s Osama?” If Gore hadn’t been impeached, it’s doubtful he’d have survived a re-election campaign, with Americans aghast at how weak and immoral a president had to be to permit those 2,700 deaths to go unavenged this long.

It was briefly a matter of debate in last year's presidential campaign whether or not the Bush administration "let bin Laden get away" in December 2001. General Tommy Franks said no; others, including the Pentagon's own investigators, say yes.

"We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader's location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp." It was not until this spring that the Pentagon, after a Freedom of Information Act request, released a document to The Associated Press that says Pentagon investigators believed that bin Laden was at Tora Bora and that he escaped.

The administration's defenders and apologists have lately become very sensitive about "playing politics" in a time of national tragedy; getting absolutely nailed for transparent ineptitude perhaps has something to do with this change of heart. These were the same people who sold (and bought) photos of Bush on the plane, in his moment of pants-crapping cowardice, the Republican National Committee offered as gifts for generous donors.

As Tomasky implies, had history gone differently and a Democrat sat in the White House on September 11, 2001, it still would have been the Republican Party exploiting 9/11. They just would have been much more justified in doing so.

Katrina as Warm-Up Act?
Last week a friend of mine e-mailed to note that this hurricane came quickly on the heels of last summer's series of big storms in Florida, as well as the tsunami in the south Pacific that struck over the winter. We agreed it didn't seem like a coincidence; and as I noted in a previous post, to me one of the lessons of Katrina is that we can no longer view homeland security, fuel dependence and global warming as separate phenomena: they're inter-related, and so must be an approach to address and mitigate their effects.

This article from Fortune suggests that we'd do well to find some answers sooner rather than later, as storms of this magnitude are becoming increasingly common:

[L]ess than a month before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Kerry Emanuel published a portentous paper in the journal Nature that illustrated how hurricanes' destructive potential has risen dramatically over the past few decades, in tandem with global warming. And a few weeks before Emanuel's paper, the Association of British Insurers issued an equally ominous report on the growing financial risks posed by extreme weather events due to global warming. It predicted that the U.S. may suffer insured losses from single hurricanes of up to $150 billion in 2004 dollars. (To put that in perspective, Hurricane Andrew racked up insured losses of about $20 billion, in 2004 dollars, when it slammed Florida and Louisiana in 1992.)

While the great majority of climate researchers believe that global warming is real (and also that it is partly caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels), no one says Katrina sprang directly from the warming—that would be like arguing that a particular stock's plunge last Tuesday was caused by the onset of a bear market a year ago. But Emanuel and other experts have warned for over a decade that global warming may be creating an environment prone to more violent storms, droughts and other weather extremes, just as a bear market can pave the way for an outsized drop in a particular company's stock price.

Global warming is certainly controversial—while some researchers see evidence that it's contributing to the recent uptick in extreme storms, others argue that the number of bad hurricanes in recent years merely reflects a natural weather variation. But the science of how warmer weather induces violent storms isn't. Hurricanes suck energy from warm waters to drive their winds. So as sea-surface temperatures rise, the storms absorb more energy that gets pumped out in the form of high-speed winds.

To be sure, most of the escalating property losses from hurricanes in recent years stem from the fact that more and more people are putting their homes in harm's way. From 1980 to 2003, the U.S. coastal population grew by 33 million, and is expected to swell by a further 12 million by 2015, according to the British insurers' report.
...
The British insurance association report, titled "Financial Risks of Climate Change," was similarly cautious: Rising losses from extreme weather are mainly due to the rising number and value of property in harm's way, it states, though the "trends to date (in devastating weather) are consistent with what we might expect as climate change intensifies." But the report's survey of recent weather extremes is anything but reassuring. Among other things, the study found that:

* Each year since 1990, there have been at least 20 weather events categorized as significant natural catastrophes. There were only three years that bad among the 20 years preceding 1990.
* Four hurricanes that hit the U.S. last year racked up a record $56 billion in total losses over a period of just a few weeks, setting an annual record for such losses.
* Last year 10 typhoons hit Japan, four more than the previous record, making it the costliest year ever for typhoon damage there.
* In 2003, Europe suffered the hottest summer of the past 500 years, causing 22,000 premature heat-related deaths. Accompanying wildfires caused $15 billion of losses. Changes in the weather appear to have already doubled the chance of such hot summers.
* The number of severe winter storms in Britain has doubled over the last 50 years.

The report also notes disturbing recent data indicating that Atlantic hurricane activity is on the rise. The data aren't clear cut—hurricane activity goes up and down in decades-long cycles related to changes in ocean currents, potentially masking a long-term rise due to global warming. Still, the average number of hurricanes in the current "up" cycle, which began in the mid-1990s, is higher than during the previous upswing—a indication that global warming is boosting the effects of the longstanding, natural variation in hurricane activity.

There's no political screed buried in here: yes, the Bush administration has totally ignored global warming, but the Democrats haven't been all that much better, and Bill Clinton always seemed to have more energy for voter-friendly "micro-initiatives"--a school dress code here, a V-chip there--than for pushing the sacrifice and change that a robust policy response would have required. The lesson, I guess, again points to our national disinclination toward planning ahead. The likely costs of this tendency are, to say the least, pretty daunting.

A Chilling Vision of Things to Come?
One common reaction to hard-to-comprehend events like the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina is to say, "It really makes you think." The elemental struggle of people to survive can, and should, make one feel pretty silly about getting worked up over a car that cuts you off, or a stain on a favorite shirt, or your favorite baseball team losing a game. But there's another sense in which an event like this one, with its different set of consequences and revelations about our world, should probably raise: how vulnerable are the core material truths of our life that we almost never stop to consider.

Today I woke up in downtown Philadelphia, at my dad's home. He drove Annie and me out to the northern suburbs, where we met my mom and uncle for breakfast, and then went to his office, probably spending some 45 minutes behind the wheel. After we ate, my mother drove us up to Trenton, from where we caught a train into Manhattan and then a subway home to Brooklyn. We took a nap in our air-conditioned bedroom. I went to the gym, also air-conditioned, where I enjoyed my iPod while exercising on the elliptical machine and stationary bike. Then I bought some frozen and refrigerated goods at the market, went home and watched TV, turned on lights, went online, microwaved some red sauce, etc.

This banal list is offered not to make some point about my life, but rather to indicate how much we take the easy and inexpensive availability of fuel and energy for granted. Gasoline still feels affordable enough for my parents to drive out of their way getting my wife and me around the Philadelphia area. Energy costs are so low that I'm able to enjoy a lifestyle that depends quite substantially upon audio/visual entertainment or interface. Food is available at any temperature we want, almost instantaneously.

It's all so fucking easy. And we've come to take the means of that ease as an immutable fact of existence, like gravity. There's a moral conclusion to be drawn here, having to do with the complacency and unthinking entitlement many believe characterize the United States vis-a-vis the developing world. But there's also a practical conclusion: that if the cheap and easy energy goes away, we are truly screwed.

James Kunstler is a writer and keeper of the Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle. I'd seen this referenced in passing many times on one left-leaning site or another, and if I clicked through I don't remember it (and, after reading the below, I think I would have made a mental note). He stated the following in a speech earlier this year. The whole thing is a fascinating read; what I've excerpted here only sets up Kunstler's musings on a range of subjects from the coming ruination of Wal-Mart and other mega-retail chains to how our patterns of housing development, public education and "sense of place" will change as a result of what he calls "The Long Emergency": transformation to a world without cheap oil.

The world - and of course the US - now faces an epochal predicament: the global oil production peak and the arc of depletion that follows. We are unprepared for this crisis of industrial civilization. We are sleepwalking into the future.

The global peak oil production event will change everything about how we live. It will challenge all of our assumptions. It will compel us to do things differently - whether we like it or not.
...
[S]ome of the most knowledgeable geologists in the world believe we have reached the global oil production peak. Unlike the US oil industry, the foreign producers do not give out their production data so transparently We may never actually see any reliable figures. The global production peak may only show up in the strange behavior of the markets.

The global peak is liable to manifest as a "bumpy plateau." Prices will wobble. Markets will wobble - as the oil markets have been doing the past year. International friction will increase, especially around the places where the oil is - and two-thirds of the world's remaining oil is in the states around the Persian Gulf where, every week, a half dozen US soldiers and many more Iraqis are getting blown up, beheaded, or shot.

The "bumpy plateau" is where all kind of market signals and political signals are telling you that "something is happening, Mr. Jones, but you don't know what it is." We'll only know in the rear-view mirror.
...
The meaning of the oil peak and its enormous implications are generally misunderstood even by those who have heard about it - and this includes the mainstream corporate media and the Americans who make plans or policy. [For an example of major media coverage of the peak oil question,see this New York Times Sunday Magazine article from August. While the reporting seems fine, it gives little sense of just how fundamental the changes will be when the peak oil moment comes.--DJF]

The world does not have to run out of oil or natural gas for severe instabilities, network breakdowns, and systems failures to occur. All that is necessary is for world production capacity to reach its absolute limit - a point at which no increased production is possible and the long arc of depletion commences, with oil production then falling by a few percentages steadily every year thereafter. That's the global oil peak: the end of absolute increased production and beginning of absolute declining production.

And, of course, as global oil production begins to steadily decline, year after year, the world population is only going to keep growing - at least for a while - and demand for oil will remain very robust. The demand line of the graph will pass the production line, and in doing so will set in motion all kinds of problems in the systems we rely on for daily life.

One huge implication of the oil peak is that industrial societies will never again enjoy the 2 to 7 percent annual economic growth that has been considered healthy for over 100 years. This amounts to the industrialized nations of the world finding themselves in a permanent depression.

Long before the oil actually depletes we will endure world-shaking political disturbances and economic disruptions. We will see globalism-in-reverse. Globalism was never an 'ism,' by the way. It was not a belief system. It was a manifestation of the 20-year-final-blowout of cheap oil. Like all economic distortions, it produced economic perversions. It allowed gigantic, predatory organisms like WalMart to spawn and reproduce at the expense of more cellular fine-grained economic communities.
...
[W]e [can't] replace the current car fleet with electric cars or natural gas cars. We're just going to use cars a lot less. Fewer trips. Cars will be a diminished presence in our lives.

Not to mention the political problem that kicks in when car ownership and driving becomes incrementally a more elite activity. The mass motoring society worked because it was so profoundly democratic. Practically anybody in America could participate, from the lowliest shlub mopping the floor at Pizza Hut to Bill Gates. What happens when it is no longer so democratic? And what is the tipping point at which it becomes a matter of political resentment: 12 percent? 23 percent? 38 percent?
...
No combination of alternative fuel systems currently known will allow us to run what we are running, the way we're running it, or even a substantial fraction of it.

The future is therefore telling us very loudly that we will have to change the way we live in this country. The implications are clear: we will have to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do.
...
The implication of this is enormous. Successful human ecologies in the near future will have to be supported by intensively farmed agricultural hinterlands. Places that can't do this will fail. Say goodbye to Phoenix and Las Vegas.

I'm not optimistic about most of our big cities. They are going to have to contract severely. They achieved their current scale during the most exuberant years of the cheap oil fiesta, and they will have enormous problems remaining viable afterward.
...
All indications are that American life will have to be reconstituted along the lines of traditional towns, villages, and cities much reduced in their current scale. These will be the most successful places once we are gripped by the profound challenge of a permanent reduced energy supply.
...
We are entering a period of economic hardship and declining incomes. The increment of new development will be very small, probably the individual building lot.

The suburbs as are going to tank spectacularly. We are going to see an unprecedented loss of equity value and, of course, basic usefulness. We are going to see an amazing distress sale of properties, with few buyers. We're going to see a fight over the table scraps of the 20th century. We'll be lucky if the immense failure of suburbia doesn't result in an extreme political orgy of grievance and scapegoating.

The action in the years ahead will be in renovating existing towns and villages, and connecting them with regions of productive agriculture. Where the big cities are concerned, there is simply no historical precedent for the downscaling they will require. The possibilities for social and political distress ought to be obvious, though. The process is liable to be painful and disorderly.
...
Some regions of the country will do better than others. The sunbelt will suffer in exact proportion to the degree that it prospered artificially during the cheap oil blowout of the late 20th century. I predict that the Southwest will become substantially depopulated, since they will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. I'm not optimistic about the Southeast either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and combine with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism.

All regions of the nation will be affected by the vicissitudes of this Long Emergency, but I think New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy, or despotism, and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

There is a fair chance that the nation will disaggregate into autonomous regions before the 21st century is over, as a practical matter if not officially. Life will be very local.

These challenges are immense. We will have to rebuild local networks of economic and social relations that we allowed to be systematically dismantled over the past fifty years. In the process, our communities may be able to reconstitute themselves.

The economy of the mid 21st century may center on agriculture. Not information. Not the digital manipulation of pictures, not services like selling cheeseburgers and entertaining tourists. Farming. Food production. The transition to this will be traumatic, given the destructive land-use practices of our time, and the staggering loss of knowledge. We will be lucky if we can feed ourselves.

I'm sure counter-arguments can be made for many of Kunstler's predictions. And there are whole other realms of surmise--how the end of cheap energy will interact with the telecommunications revolution, or popular culture, or evolving gender roles. But through his assertions, he's asking important questions. Unfortunately, the Katrina disaster illustrates, yet again, our indisposition as a people to plan ahead effectively. Sleepwalking into the future, indeed.

A Theory of Everything
Maureen Dowd in Saturday's Times skewers the Bush administration:

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

The fact that they were all on vacation is bad politics, but the truth is that this is what rich people do the week before Labor Day; I'd bet that between Bush, Cheney and Card, they haven't worked a month's worth combined over the last week of August in their entire lives. (Rice probably had to work until around when she got that oil tanker named after her.) It's not what they've done this week; it's what they've done for the last five years. I don't know what Michael Brown did to merit consideration for his job, but I'm pretty much mortally certain it had nothing to do with emergency preparedness or disaster management, and a lot to do with political dependability and personal ties to some Bush or other.

To a greater or lesser extent, the same could be said of pretty much everyone in the second-term administration. The somewhat independent-minded folks--Colin Powell, Paul O'Neill--are gone. For that matter, so are those who might have their own political ambitions, like Mitch Daniels (now governor of Indiana) and John Ashcroft, who still probably sees a future president in the bathroom mirror, which hypothetically could have moved them to counter the administration. Only the loyalists are left. Their agenda is Bush's agenda; that's it.

What this means is that there will no voice inside the administration to say what must be said: that three issues of crucial importance to the nation--global warming, homeland security, and energy dependence--are now and henceforth will be inextricably bound together. We're failing to solve any of them, and their combined impact probably represents the greatest threat our country has ever faced.

I haven't seen anything in the news or the blogs connecting climate change to the various water-borne disasters of the last year: the tsunami, flooding in South Asia, Hurricane Katrina. I assume this will come with time, as scientists tend to approach these loaded questions with greater prudence and care than do pundits. What's not in question is that the damage done to the Gulf Coast has sparked an oil shock in the country, on the eve of one of the heaviest driving weekends of the year no less. In the current Atlantic Monthly, obviously written before the hurricane struck, a writer blasts the recently passed energy bill:

Somewhere in the vast spaces of the Energy Policy Act, you might think, room could have been found for actions that actually addressed the two main energy-policy challenges of the next decade: global warming and the national-security implications of dependence on imported oil. But no, the authors of this purportedly comprehensive law mostly chose to concentrate on... urgent battles to win on subsidies and tax breaks for their respective energy-producing constituencies.

The cost of fuel has been rising fairly steadily for the last several years. I don't know (though I've wondered often enough) at what point, if any, it will get high enough to really trigger behavioral change on the part of commuters and corporations; what I do think is likely is that the cascading effect of higher prices, on everything from produce to plane tickets, will make itself felt in our consumption-driven economy. A responsible government would get out in front of this change, encouraging conservation and the pursuit of alternatives; they also would have anticipated the easily predictable problem we're currently facing. (Given the nature of the world fuel supply, the only surprise here is that it was domestic production that was disrupted.) Those who view government as a means of enrichment, on the other hand, will do as they in fact did, larding the bill with giveaways.

I don't pretend to know what the answer is. History suggests that there are no problems we can't solve; from slavery to fascism, we have always--eventually--found an answer and made ourselves stronger. What really frightens me is the notion that the venality and indifference to real suffering that characterize the Bush administration and Republican-led congress--which has announced that it will go ahead next week with measures to repeal the Estate Tax--somehow reflects a rot within the American character that has spread beyond the point where it can be contained. Any criticism of the administration's response to the hurricane will be shrugged away as "politicizing the tragedy"... by the same people who somehow turned their tragic failure on 9/11 into greater opportunity to gorge at the public trough.

From calling on the best in Americans, our political leadership now seems to exist only to exonerate our worst, most selfish natures. While this is the case, how can we rise to the occasion as a people?

Why Government Matters

Update: Red Cross--Donate to aid relief efforts

I'm having trouble thinking about, much less reading, what's going on in New Orleans right now. The pictures--aerial shots of multi-story buildings mostly submerged--seem unreal, doctored, a trick of editing like a photo-surrealism calendar someone once gave me. My mind shies away from thinking about what the death count ultimately will be; I think about those thousands left in the Superdome--mostly non-white, pretty much all poor--with a deep sense of shame.

But the human tragedy, the fundamental disaster that has befallen that community, is just one of the stories here. Another is why it's important to vote, to speak out, to make sure that public stewardship is in the hands of those who will use it responsibly. This New Orleans disaster didn't have to be as bad as it is; the two levees that broke tonight evidently went unfinished.

They weren't finished, in part, because the public funds that were to go toward finishing them were diverted to the Iraq war effort. The Philadelphia Daily News blog Attytood has the details:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

The specifics are extraordinarily damning. After last year's hurricane season, New Orleans officials well understood the danger they were facing and wanted to speed up the work of SELA. But the money, and the commitment, simply wasn't there.

The 2004 hurricane season, as you probably recall, was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:

The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.

"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.

But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach.

What self-proclaimed "small government conservatives" always fail to understand is that THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO DO THESE SORTS OF THINGS than government action. Projects like this are the whole fucking reason we *have* government: to protect lives and property. And not only should they get top priority, their successful completion really depends upon those in charge fully understanding that this has to be the priority.

Instead, we have a bunch of armchair war fetishists and crony capitalists who generally have never faced disaster at the hands of impersonal forces--whether natural, like the hurricane, or systemic, like job loss caused by macroeconomic change. Their lack of foresight, their lack of care, their lack of felt responsibility shouldn't surprise us. But it should make us reconsider just what it is we look for in leadership, and remember what a sacred trust it is.

Department of Self-Promotion
My NFC East preview package is now online at nfl.com. The frustrating thing about doing these is that events can always render considered prognostication almost immediately obsolete: if Eli Manning's elbow is really damaged, the Giants are probably closer to 5-11 than the 8-8 I foresee for them. Hopefully the football gods won't conspire to make me look like a total idiot.

If you don't feel like reading through, here's my predicted order of finish: Eagles, Cowboys, Giants, Redskins. Assuming Manning's okay, Cowboys/Giants might actually be a tossup: Dallas could struggle switching to the 3-4 defense, and I think Drew Bledsoe will get to know the Texas Stadium sod more intimately than he'd probably like.

Hopefully I'll be writing a few more columns for nfl.com over the course of the football season. I'm obviously going to need something to keep my attention through the pending Battlestar Galactica hiatus.

For the more serious-minded, here's a link to the Mayoral Policybook the Center for an Urban Future put together in partnership with the Center for NYC Affairs at The New School and Regional Plan Association. I edited this, and wrote chunks of the Intro and workforce development sections. It's pretty hefty stuff, and hopefully will offer some substance in a mayoral campaign that, like the quintessentially New York show "Seinfeld," so far seems to be largely about nothing.

Better Luck Next Time?
It might seem strange to be thinking about February 2008 while in the midst of a sweltering August 2005, but that's what Democratic speechwriter/pundit Kenneth Baer is doing in this New Republic article on changes to the party's nominating process. A party commission, co-chaired by former Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman and Congressman David Price, is meeting with groups around the country to consider alterations to the timetable, sequencing and guidelines for the nomination race.

As usual, the biggest focus is on whether Iowa and New Hampshire should maintain their all-but-decisive importance in the contest. Critics charge, justifiably, that "[t]hese states don't have enough minorities; they lack a large concentration of union members; they are without a major city." But despite their evident lack of general-election predictive power (in 2000, George W. Bush lost the New Hampshire primary, but won the state over Al Gore that November; last year, John Kerry memorably won Iowa but lost it, narrowly, to Bush in the general election) and the significant differences between small-state and national voters, Iowa and New Hampshire are almost determinative as far as who gets the nod. You have to go back to 1992, when home-state/region favorites Tom Harkin and Paul Tsongas won Iowa and New Hampshire respectively, to find a nominee of either party who didn't win in those first two states.

Baer makes a strong case against the argument that the "retail politics" candidates must practice in Iowa and New Hampshire serves as some kind of proving ground:

Conventional wisdom, which like a good student of American politics I once faithfully subscribed to, has held that the longer nominating process the better, as it allows a candidate to meet more voters, emerge to challenge an established favorite, and be vetted over a long and perhaps bruising process. Think Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Gary Hart in 1984. But in the past 20 years the ways in which campaigns are funded, run, and covered by the media have changed to such a degree that the extended primary season of today is now as out of date as the smoke-filled rooms of the '40s and '50s.

The current president offers perhaps the best example of this paradigm shift. When Granite State voters had months of close-up exposure to George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000, it clearly didn't do the Texas governor much good: John McCain, a master of retail campaigning who enjoyed the up-close contact and back-and-forth with voters as obviously as the super-scripted Bush detested it, won a resounding 19-point victory. Bush reversed his fortunes in the race before the next primary in South Carolina, burying McCain under an avalanche of money and slander; the media never really punished him for his clear deficiencies in "connecting with the voters" on issues of substance.

Thus for Iowa and New Hampshire. Baer goes on to make a positive case for what the Price-Herman Commission should do: further front-load the process, in effect using the primary contest as a dress rehearsal for November.

[W]hat the Commission and DNC do have power over is the "window," the time in which states must select their delegates to the nominating convention. And by closing the window earlier and opening it later--that is, shortening the nominating season from four months to one, and moving it later in the year from early February to the middle of March--the DNC can create a nominating system that increases rank-and-file participation and produces a candidate and campaign team that has been tested in conditions most resembling the general election.

By compacting the calendar into a four-week window in March, press coverage and voter interest would intensify--and not just in Iowa and New Hampshire. Candidates would have more of an incentive to campaign--not just fundraise--in voter-rich states such as New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California. In addition, they would have a huge incentive to begin using new ways to reach voters--such as niche cable stations like Outdoor Life Network or Bravo, ethnic media such as Univision, the Internet, and peer-to-peer organizing--which, as seen in the 2004 general election, Democrats have yet to master.

By approximating the pace and scope of a general election campaign, a month-long sprint of primaries would be a much more effective dry run for a candidate and his staff--weeding out the candidates and consultants who lack the imagination and appeal to reach beyond core Democratic constituencies in select states. Of course, any candidate who made it to the starting line would have already passed a high bar--the scrutiny not of the "boys on the bus," but the bloggers on bandwidth. The invisible primary is hardly invisible; it is, in fact, when most campaigning takes place. And with a 24-hour political press, along with hundreds of political bloggers, the scrutiny during this period in 2008 will be as intense as any month during the old system. A longer "official" primary system is unnecessary.

There's something about this move that might not sit well with Democratic primary voters. The appeal of small-group conversations with concerned citizens, dozens and dozens of "Town Hall" meetings and house parties in which contenders painstakingly build credibility in tiny New England hamlets and corn-belt towns, is real and in a sense legitimate. But if Democrats are going to craft a process that gives their nominee the best real chance to win the White House, maybe it's time we stop considering politics as we'd like it to be, and start thinking about it as is.