Just a quick postscript to Bob’s post below: the designated talk radio (and, I’m willling to bet, Fox News) culprit for the California fires is environmentalists who oppose controlled burns.

If not for them, apparently, none of this would be happening. As for global warming, well, ha ha ha ha Al Gore snicker snicker.

… more here.

[Added Saturday, Oct. 27th: looking back in advance of a CNN gig tomorrow, the word “cause” in that headline was poorly chosen. I meant “a” probable cause, not “the” probable cause, as you can see from the concluding sentence, but the phrase “contributing factor” would have been much more accurate. My bad. Still, the point about climate change being an obvious factor in California’s future as a growing tinderbox, and the Bush administration’s resistance to climate change discussions, is plenty obvious.]

This was my view on the day I came back from the West Indies last spring:

Fire on the left, downtown on the right. Great to be home.

Now it’s fall, and there are fires in all directions, with things particularly bad down in San Diego County. I’m nowhere near the fire this time, but the air everywhere is smoky and brown and when the sun is near the horizon the whole sky looks bizarrely red. Kinda hard not to think about today.

Also, it’s 97 degrees outside in late October. According to the Weather Channel, this is 23 degrees above the historic seasonal average. Gee, global warming much? Actually, yes. Anecdotal evidence in isolation is meaningless, but add up everything that has been happening for years, and according to today’s Science Daily:

The catastrophic fires that are sweeping Southern California are consistent with what climate change models have been predicting for years, experts say, and they may be just a prelude to many more such events in the future — as vegetation grows heavier than usual and then ignites during prolonged drought periods.

“This is exactly what we’ve been projecting to happen, both in short-term fire forecasts for this year and the longer term patterns that can be linked to global climate change,” said Ronald Neilson, a professor at Oregon State University and bioclimatologist with the USDA Forest Service.

[snip]

“In the future, catastrophic fires such as those going on now in California may simply be a normal part of the landscape,” said Neilson.

However, yesterday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control testified before Congress on the impact of climate change on human health. And today we learn that the White House deleted large swaths of the prepared testimony in advance, removing large swaths of scientific information on major health risks posed by global warming.

The deletions directed by the White House included details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming, according to one official who has seen the original version. Also deleted were the scientific basis for some of the CDC’s analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea level, the official added.

About two-thirds of the CDC’s testimony on global warming seems to have been deleted by the Bush administration.

I have friends in San Diego who are sheltering neighbors whose homes may not be there anymore. Unseasonable heat and changing weather patterns have turned southern California into a tinderbox, precisely the way forecast by people warning us about global warming for years:

In studies released five years ago, Neilson and other OSU researchers predicted that the American West could become both warmer and wetter in the coming century, conditions that would lead to repeated, catastrophic fires larger than any in recent history.

And the White House is still actively trying to pretend that a main underlying cause of these disasters simply doesn’t exist.

Steve Bergstein has the amazing end to the story of Egyptian citizen Abdallah Higazy:

Higazy was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy’s life is worth garbage at that point, but … well, that’s why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy “confesses” and he’s processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession.

But that’s not the end of the story. The end of the story is that all this came out in the decision in Higazy’s case, which was posted online last week. But the court apparently realized they’d made a mistake in allowing Americans to read about the threats the FBI made against Higazy’s family–so the court took down the decision, then replaced it with a version that redacted those parts, and actually called a blog which had published that section and asked them to TAKE IT DOWN. The blog said no.

See Bergstein for all the details. How I love our little websites.

And what’s the best part, beyond the cruelty to Higazy and unknown others? The best part is the FBI has unlimited money, time and trained agents, so there’s no possible way they’d miss a real threat to our lives while dicking around with all their coerced confessions.

(Via Jim Henley, who’s been on the Higazy story since the beginning.)

AND: Remember this was no idle threat. A story about the Egyptian government’s extraordinary brutality–including their willingness to drug and rape thirteen year-olds, videotaping it all the while–is here.

Bob is going to be was at at Firedoglake today Sunday at 5 pm ET to talk about his new book Who Hates Whom.

As it happens, my friend Mike Gerber and I were talking just moments ago about what a great piece of work it is—hilarious, informative and humane. We decided every television sold should come with a copy, so that people can understand what the hell’s going while watching the news. Until that happens, though, you can always buy it separately.

I understand that New York Times columnists are not subject to much interference from their editors, but someone needs to tell Thomas Friedman that he should really, really, really lay off the use of taxicabs as illustrative examples.

Related cartoon here.

Many thanks to generous longtime reader Mike E. for the wish list gift package that appeared unexpectedly on my doorstep yesterday.

That’s an actual current Reuters headline.

Princeton professor Eric Maskin shares this year’s Nobel Prize in economics with two colleagues; the trio are pioneers in the field of mechanism design theory, which is dedicated to finding ways to make markets work more efficiently and fairly.

Maskin dares to say something fairly sensible, it turns out:

Professor Eric Maskin, one of three American economists to receive the award, said that he “to some extent” takes issue with free-market orthodoxy championed by U.S President George W. Bush and some other western leaders.

“The market doesn’t work very well when it comes to public goods,” said Maskin, a slight, soft-spoken 57-year-old who lives in a house once occupied by Albert Einstein.

[snip]

“If I buy a car, I use the car, you don’t and the market for cars works pretty well. But there are many other sorts of goods, often very important goods, which are not provided well through the market. Often, these go under the heading of public goods,” he said.

Prof. Maskin goes on to speak of the needs of ensuring that public goods are provided for properly, taking into account the interests of all citizens, and on the role of his field in finding ways to do so most fairly and efficiently.

This should be considered sane, valuable, important work, especially if we care about building sustainable human societies more than any ideology, yes?

However, the mere acknowledgment of this complex field is an affront to “free market” ideologues who prefer to believe that markets are, by their very existence, efficient — in much the same way that food riots are, by their very existence, orderly.

Unfortunately, this remains something of a state religion in the US, so while hundreds of newspapers have reported on Maskin’s winning of a Nobel, few seem to have bothered to pick up the Reuters story of what the Nobel Prize winner actually says. (In fact, as I write this, the wire story is already a day old, and while I might have missed something, I can’t find it in a single American newspaper.)

The efficiency of the great free market, absolutely proven once again.

As mentioned previously, the initial draft of this week’s cartoon was actually written a couple of weeks ago, and was originally intended as a general riff on the Right Wing Noise Machine in the wake of the “General Betray-us” stuff. Except, while I was on vacation, they actually started attacking children.

And now they’re at it again.

I tell ya, these are tough times for satire. Reality itself is just too damned weird.

I know multinationals are getting more brazen about their plans for increasing power. But I didn’t think they’d actually brag about it yet.

I give it fifty years before they eliminate government middlemen and simply mobilize their own private militaries. Golden Arches Strike Force, away!

One of Hannity’s current riffs is that the Clintons are very vengeful people, and if Hillary is elected, people are warning him that they will send the IRS after him, etc., etc. He then goes on to recite a list of people harassed and/or destroyed by the Clintons, which, oddly, includes Ken Starr.

Only in rightwing world would Inspector Javert be portrayed as the victim of relentless Jean Valjean.

Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman has resigned his post, says a spokesperson, after being accused of enticement and fondling of an underage boy, reports the Green Bay Press-Gazette Saturday.

Story.

*Name for phenomenon suggested by reader S.T.:

Perhaps espousing anti-gay positions while secretly craving homosexual love should enter the lexicon as “having a wide stance”.
Besides being a highly quoted Craig line, it can be taken to mean your public stance is way wide of your private stance, as it were.