Needlenose

Our War on Planet Earth has another victim – the Chinese Paddlefish joins the Yangtze River dolphin in extinction.

I tried to explain to you all where the ubiquity of Liz Cheney was headed…

I’ve been raging for some time about Japan not only flauting the IWC ban on commercial whaling but actively seeking to overturn the moratorium.  But the Iceland has not only left the IWC, but is now flagrantly and egregiously whaling like mad and exporting the product to Japan…and they are doing this at a loss!

Those Sea Shepherd dudes are really wasting their time hunting around the Antarctic for the Japanese fleet – they would have a much easier time going after Thor Codbiter in the Atlantic, and maybe get some public interest in the EU and the US around boycotting Icelandic goods.  Given Iceland’s current crappy economy, I seriously doubt it would take much of a boycott to get them to stop this one measly company’s depredations on fin and minke whales!

Lindsay Beyerstein of the Media Consortium caught up with Howard Dean after an event in New York, capturing her brief, exclusive interview with him on video.

She asked Dean what it would mean if Democrats passed healthcare reform through the Senate using budget reconciliation rules, rather than relying on the whims of faux-centrists (Snowe, Lieberman, Nelson, et al.) to get a filibuster-proof 60 votes.

His response was that reconciliation would produce a better healthcare reform bill, and not just (as Lindsay notes) because of a lessened need to water the legislation down.

Saying that “the best way to do the public option is to have it be part of Medicare,” Dean points out that using reconciliation rules for a budget resolution would force the bill in this direction, because “there would be no question that an expansion of Medicare was germane and permitted in the budget resolution.”

Another benefit, Dean adds, is that “for political reasons, the Democrats need to get this done by 2010, so some people can sign up for it by 2010. And the only way to do that is to use an existing bureaucracy.”

The advantage isn’t just the typical desire of politicians to point at tangible results of their legislative work, either:

Implementing it [a public option] immediately for significant numbers of Americans is going to deflate all the lies that Republicans tell about this bill. Once people actually start to sign up, they’re going to find out that all those things weren’t true.

. . . Once health care reform actually goes into effect, the Republicans who are only selling fear and anger — that’s all they’re selling — that has to go away, because reality will always trump fear and anger.

Dean cites his experience with civil-unions legislation in Vermont as proof of this. All Democrats need to do is find the will to make the reality happen.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

…Far East.  I’m really happy for the Chinese, really I am, when I hear that their economy is booming again, although admittedly I’d be happier if our own recovery wasn’t jobless.  Still, Horace Greeley’s advice to a job seeker: “Go West, Young Man,” is relevant once again, assuming you go so far West that you are in the Far East.

There is a growing trend for young job seekers to look for work in China.  It’s only a matter of time before the “Chinese Only” and the “Red Brigade” Minutemen movement arise to protest American illegals sneaking over to the new land of opportunity.

The conventional wisdom is that the “McChrystal leak” is the Obama Administration getting blindsided by “some on the Obama team [who are] are dismayed at the White House’s slow response and fear that this is an indication that President Obama is leaning towards rejecting the inevitable requests for additional U.S. forces that this report tees up.”

Another possibility is that Obama is trying to backtrack from his campaign promises and early moves to escalate the war, perhaps giving some time for public opinion and debate while he comes up with a new strategy.

Maybe he’s finally come around to my realization that this war was doomed from the get-go.

I know I had a brief twinge of hope when Pakistan entered the fray and whacked some Taliban moles in the Swat Valley that maybe the Taliban could be put down, but even with the occasional capture of a few high-profile leaders, I’m back to my former pessimism – too little, too late.   McChrystal certainly figured out that the real front is in the tribal lands of a weak and untrustworthy ally.  As before, I certainly don’t see how throwing more bodies on the fire on the other side of the border will put out this fire.

*Update* In the spirit of pithiness, I want to rebut McChrystal more succinctly:  Adding more troops to Afghanistan will only postpone the inevitable defeat.

Nada Bakri had an interesting article for the Washington Post yesterday on the latest popular TV shows among the denizens of Baghdad’s cafes:

It was time for “Dar Dour,” one of more than a dozen Iraqi TV shows that run only during Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast from dawn until sunset.

Ramadan shows — broadcast after iftar, the traditional meal that breaks the fast — are nothing new. . . . But this year, the most popular programs here break with the usual Ramadan fare of formulaic sitcoms and dramas. Instead, they seek humor in Iraq’s precarious — often traumatic — postwar life, with its endemic corruption and violence, rising prices and hours of electricity as short as traffic jams are long.

“I only watch Iraqi series,” Mohammad said as the power went off and the screen went black. “Only those shows know what we have to endure.”

“Dar Dour” is perhaps the most popular of these distinctly Iraqi dark comedies.

Produced by al-Sharqiya, an independent Iraqi satellite TV network based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, it chronicles the days of Abu Wardeh, a helpless man who struggles to make ends meet. . . .

In almost every episode, a policeman stops Abu Wardeh, then arrests him. The charges are always ludicrous: polluting the air, riding his motorcycle without wearing a seat belt, making too much noise and distracting other drivers. And every charge leads to a dialogue with an official that soon turns into a monologue in which Abu Wardeh lists everything that is wrong with Baghdad today: congested traffic, pollution, poverty, unemployment, corruption, bombings, assassinations and the U.S. occupation.

“I’m innocent,” he declares at the end of each monologue.

. . . ”It is a reflection of everything that goes on in Iraq today,” Jalal Naji, a 27-year-old teacher, said as he waited with friends in another cafe for the next program to begin. “The plot, the problems, the events, the people — it is almost like real life.”

. . . Another Ramadan hit here is “Who Will Win the Oil?,” an Iraqi parody of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” The show, produced by al-Sharqiya, was filmed in Cairo but features only Iraqis. The seats and tables are in the shape of oil barrels. The prizes start with five liters — just over a gallon — of oil for the right answer to the first question. Blond women dance to the show’s opening song. “The oil of the people is not for the people,” they sing. “It’s for the thieves.”

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have nothing on these guys.  Then again, I’m sure they’re grateful not to have the Iraqis’ wealth of bleak comedic material to work with.

I mentioned below the forthcoming book from Neil Latimer on his days as a speechwriter during Dubya’s second term.

As part of his self-promotional effort, Latimer has an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post, where he drops this pithy passage about who he blames for how badly things went wrong:

After the 2004 election, [Karl] Rove was given a far-reaching portfolio — overseeing political affairs, policy and personnel. His operation went on a power trip — and was ineffective at advancing conservative ideals. After Rove took over policy chores, the administration passed no significant conservative legislation through a Republican Congress. Within 24 months the GOP lost the House, the Senate, a majority of governorships and the presidency.

Ouch.  Oh, and as a side note about “inexperienced political operatives enjoy[ing] nearly unrestrained power” in the staffing of Cabinet departments, Latimer mentions that “one of the organizers of the ‘birther’ movement is a former personnel vetter at the Pentagon.”

Shrubya antagonized Russia and bilked US taxpayers with his expensive plan to build a cordon of missiles  around Western Russia under the guise of defending Western Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles – a cordon that would be ineffective at shooting anything out of the sky but extremely effective at putting our money in the hands of his defense contractor buddies.

Obama has sensibly shelved this bogus European missile defense plan. Wrong-wingers are already screaming that we’ve given Russia something for nothing, but the real winner of this decision is the US taxpayer – who will no longer be paying something for nothing.

Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post attended the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh yesterday, and wrote this about President Obama’s speech there:

In a fiery speech to the nation’s largest labor federation, Obama urged members to get behind his proposal to overhaul the health-care system, which he vowed would pass in the next few months. To his audience’s satisfaction, he reiterated his support for including a government-run insurance plan, or public option, among the choices for consumers — a top priority for AFL-CIO leaders. And he dropped some of the language he used in last week’s health-care address to Congress in which he seemed to play down the importance of the public option.

But Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times was also there, apparently in the same convention hall but a different world:

A week after he asked Democrats in Congress to support the outlines of his health care plan, Mr. Obama made a similar but broader case to union audiences here and earlier Tuesday in Ohio. . . .

Yet despite the thunderous applause he received, his mentioning the term “public option” only once during a 35-minute speech at the convention did not go unnoticed. Many delegates carried signs and wore T-shirts declaring that a government-run insurance program was a nonnegotiable piece of health care legislation.

I suppose this is better than MacGillis and Zeleny getting together and deciding among themselves what the approved spin should be.  But still…