Needlenose

If you thought the Energy Bill was shaping up badly before it went behind closed doors into dank, smoke-filled rooms inhabited soley by fetid Repugnicans, the document that has emerged borders on pure evil.

In addition to the already proposed billions of dollars of pork for Big Oil and Big Nuke, the Repugnicans went ‘hog wild’ and added several billion more lard bucks, ranging from tax breaks to nuclear reactors to another billion to build a new reactor (now where are they gonna put that? I can think of a few places…). Insidiously, the Greedy Old Pigs also proposed a billion dollar handout to the MTBE manufacturers (to reinvent themselves), as well as ‘get-out-of-jail-free cards,’ shielding them from personal injury lawsuits from folks unfortunate enough to have imbibed water from MTBE-contaminated drinking water. Also in the insidious department is a potentially infrastructure-trashing provision preventing FERC from developing consistent energy market regulations nationwide until 2007 – we wouldn’t want the poor ‘ol Texians to experience California’s energy market ‘first-hand,’ now would we?

Forget developing energy self-reliance. Forget cutting off the flow of petro-dollars to Middle Eastern totalitarian governments and terrorists. Forget mitigating pollution and global warming. Forget about fiscal responsibility and reducing the deficit. Let’s redistribute America’s wealth from the shrinking middle-class into the hands of Big Oil and Big Nuke.

Jeez! Why don’t the bastards stop screwing around with all the tax credits and such and just write their whore-selves and their sugar daddies big checks and be done with it? At least it would be more efficient.

Cordesman says our tactics improving
Kristof on Afghanistan going south
Asia Times series on occupation troubles — detainees held 6 months
already cutting and running (or at least hiding)
Afghanistan mess
“There are 1.4 million soldiers in NATO. Where are they? Why are so few countries stepping up to the plate?” asked Maj. Gen. Andrew Leslie, deputy commander of the 5,500 peacekeeping forces here. “The left hand has made the commitment, but the right hand is not ponying up.”

Leslie said that the situation in southern Afghanistan “will keep getting worse if we don’t do something about it” and that the provincial assistance teams were only a “temporary answer in the absence of a coherent vision” for how to bring security and stability to the country. “The status quo will only lead to failure,” he said.

Something about pipeline sabotage?Shiites and elections

Along the walls across from Sayyid Ali Abdel-Hakim Musawi’s office in Basra are the graffiti of militant Islam. “Long live the Islamic Republic of Iran,” one slogan read. “Iraq and Iran are one people, one nation, destroying colonialism and fighting the tyrant,” another said. But inside his office was a message of tranquillity. Musawi preached patience.

“We don’t care about the time period,” he said. “We only want a constitution that serves us.”

Musawi is a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most influential cleric in Iraq, whose opinions could determine the success or failure of the U.S.-charted transition. For clerics such as Musawi, Sistani’s opinion on the new process will be critically important. “We will accept only Sistani’s opinion, whatever the circumstances,” Musawi said. “We are waiting to hear.”

Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, Sistani has preached separation between government and Iraq’s Shiite clergy, one of the few organized institutions to weather Hussein’s three decades of repression. But despite his reluctance to interfere in politics, the cleric has not been averse to delivering judgments with far-reaching political implications. In a religious ruling issued this summer and repeated several times since, he demanded that a constitutional convention be elected.

Sitting in his office, where tribal leaders kissed his hand as he entered, Musawi, a cheerful, energetic man, rifled through stacks of petitions. Some were piled in manila folders, others in clear plastic sheaths. They listed thousands of signatures — of doctors, lawyers, engineers, tribal sheiks and clergy — insisting that Sistani’s edict be obeyed. They were delivered to the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, whose Shiite members were loath to oppose Sistani’s order and instead searched for an alternative.

The decision by the United States to endorse an elected constitutional convention marked a stunning victory for Sistani, perhaps the clearest sign yet of his power in postwar Iraq.

Adel Abdel-Mehdi, the director of the political bureau of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shiite parties, said that he met Sistani last Thursday and that the ayatollah “blessed” the new plan. But Sistani has yet to publicly declare his position. Some believe he may never formally endorse the process, permitting it to go forward.

“Sometimes his silence is enough,” said Amr Khuzai, a formerly exiled doctor and the representative in Basra of the Dawa party, an influential Islamic party whose leader sits on the Governing Council.

Bush cult of personality
WaPo on handover plan, Sistani blessing

mismanagement feared with $20 billion
Bush to meet with British families
Alex Parker on Kaus’ relief-pitcher theory (moral: look ahead, not back)

Jerome Doolittle on using surrogates to attack Bush

creeping fascism
electricity declining

Overnight, Mark Kleiman praised a recent speech by Wesley Clark this way:

He explains not only why he thought the invasion of Iraq a bad idea, but also what he’d plan to do from here, and why. . .

Operationally, I have no idea whether any of this will work. . . . But it’s worth reading the speech through, just to remember how good it felt when we had leaders who spoke to us as if we were grown-ups, capable of understanding grown-up choices. It’s an eminently serious speech, and a rousing one at the same time.

Unfortunately, when it comes to popular elections, one man’s serious, grown-up leader is another’s ineffectual egghead. Here’s the Los Angeles Times yesterday, with a story on how Dubya succeeds by following the opposite strategy:

Most of the Bush backers, however, cited not his policies but his personality as the key to their votes. As restaurant owner Kari Lynch, 42, said with a shrug: “I just like him.”

In fact, when measuring Bush’s performance issue by issue, many voters found much to gripe about.

They complained that he gives too many tax breaks to the rich. That he alienates allies abroad. That he is paying far too dear a price, in blood and billions, in the occupation of Iraq.

Still, all but a few said they want him back in the Oval Office for four more years.

“He’s less phony than most of the candidates. He’s more credible. And I can understand him. He speaks at my level,” said Gene Goldman, 50, a financial advisor.

The painful fact is, no matter how thoroughly documented his lies are, many voters instinctively think of Dubya as honest because he “speaks on their level” — in short sentences and simple terms. Anyone who speaks to them as grown-ups draws the visceral suspicions of “He thinks he’s smarter than I am,” “He’s trying to fool me with all those details” (remember “fuzzy math”?), and “He thinks too much; he’s not a man of action.”

I’m not worried about whether Clark, or any of the other Democratic candidates, will be able to figure out the right thing to do in Iraq. I’m worried about whether they can communicate it clearly to enough of those voluntarily simple-minded voters to win.