According to a new Seymour Hersh article, the Bush administration has ramped up covert action inside Iran, and has notified the congressional leadership that it’s planing to spend up to $400 million on it. Thanks, Democratic-controlled Congress!

But the most important part of the piece is this:

But a lesson was learned in the incident [in January when tiny Iranian boats sailed near US battleships]: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

Recall that the Bush administration also made plans to create a pretext for war with Iraq if the WMD stuff didn’t work out. This is from Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

DB/Anabasis was the code name for an extensive covert operations plan that had been drawn up by the CIA to destabilize and ultimately topple the regime of Saddam Hussein…

Over an intense forty-five day period beginning in late 2001, [two CIA operatives] cooked up an audacious plan…

Anabasis was no-holds-barred covert action. It called for installing a small army of paramilitary CIA officers on the ground inside Iraq; for elaborate schemes to penetrate Saddam’s regime; recruiting disgruntled military officers with buckets of cash; for feeing the regime disformation…for disrupting the regime’s finances…for sabotage that included blowing up railroad lines…It also envisioned staging a phony incident that could be used to start a war. A small group of Iraqi exiles would be flown into Iraq by helicopter to seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border. They then would take to the airwaves and announce a coup was under way. If Saddam responded by flying troops south, his aircraft would be shot down by U.S. fighter planes patrolling the no-fly zones established by UN edict after the first Persian Gulf War. A clash of this sort could be used to initiate a full-scale war.

On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees—including Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat—were briefed.

“The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out” [said CIA operative John McGuire]. If all went as planned, “you’d have a premise for war: we’ve been invited in.”

Yikes:

The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is ‘does the North Pole melt out this summer?’ and it may well,” said the center’s senior research scientist Mark Serreze.

It’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen last autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said…

“Five years ago, to think that we’d even be talking about the possibility of the North Pole melting out in the summer, I would have never thought it,” he said…

“If you talked to me or other scientists just a few years ago, we were saying that we might lose all or most of the summer sea ice cover by anywhere from 2050 to 2100,” Serreze said. “Then, recently, we kind of revised those estimates, maybe as early as 2030. Now, there’s people out there saying it might be even before that. So, things are happening pretty quick up there.”

Here’s some good work on the same general subject by Free Love Forum. The fossil fuel industry may have all the money, but we have all the talented sketch comedy artists.

You have to feel for Vic Svec. He’s a senior vice president at Peabody Energy, the largest private coal producer on earth, and it’s apparently his job to be wheeled out whenever there’s any threat of action on global warming. After James Hansen’s recent Senate testimony, Svec sent this statement to the New York Times:

Blaming big oil and big coal for the broad array of opinions about climate change is disingenuous. If [Hansen] would imprison those who don’t march in lockstep with his views, the jails would be very, very big. It would include thousands of scientists and university professors and the likes of the president of the Czech Republic, a former founder of Greenpeace and the former founder of The Weather Channel.

Here’s John Coleman, the “former” founder of the Weather Channel, giving his fascinating views on climate change:

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide…I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

Here’s how I imagine the meeting went as Vic Svec huddled with his staff to draft the New York Times statement:

SVEC: We need three names on our side.

LACKEY: We’ve got Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic.

SVEC: Great. Just make sure he doesn’t start talking about the dangers of “homosexualism.”

LACKEY: And then there’s Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace guy.

SVEC: Didn’t Moore just say we have to stop using fossil fuels due to the threat of global warming? And that “coal causes the worst health impacts of anything we are doing today”?

LACKEY: Eh, who cares. No one will notice except the losers who fuck around on blogs.

SVEC: Ha! Got that right. And who’s number three?

MINION: Um…

LACKEY: Yeah, that’s the thing. We’re having trouble getting to three.

SVEC: What about Charles Manson? Our focus groups just remember his name, not why they remember it.

MINION: He doesn’t want to be associated with us anymore. Says it hurts his credibility.

SVEC: How about that monkey we’d been training to talk?

LACKEY: He won’t do it either. He told the trainer he felt like we’re insulting his intelligence.

SVEC: Shit. Don’t tell me we’re going to have to go with that Weather Channel moron.

[long pause]

SVEC: Son of a bitch. All right, let’s saddle up.

MINION: One last thing, just looking at the text—how can people be “former” founders of Greenpeace and the Weather Channel?

SVEC: Jesus Christ, do I have to teach you people everything? You obviously don’t understand the first thing about SCIENCE!

Remember when John McCain admitted that he’s computer “illiterate“? Now his tech guys are trying to defend the fact that their candidate isn’t familiar with the most culturally significant communications medium in our lifetimes :

Pressed again on McCain’s tech savvy, he defends his candidate.

“You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country,” he says.

“You actually do,” former Edwards blogger Tracy Russo responds, suggesting he try to explain Twitter to his grandmother and then ask her how that applies to governing.

“John McCain is aware of the Internet,” says Soohoo. “This is a man who has a very long history of understanding on a range of issues.”

The fact that McCain would consider the internet one of a range of “issues” is hilariously out of touch. That’s like bragging that Richard Nixon was familiar with the television “issue” in 1960 or that FDR’s fireside chats were panders on the radio “issue”. I don’t expect John McCain to start his own blog or have a personal Facebook account, but a lack of experience with a communications medium this ubiquitous is pretty revealing. After eight years of a president with zero intellectual curiosity, I find it astonishing that we have a prospective leader who wouldn’t want to get a little hands-on time with what has amounted to a communications revolution. I know if I was alive a hundred years ago and everyone around me was gushing about this new-fangled invention called the telephone, I’d probably put down the telegraph needle and give it a shot.

In other words, the medium really is the message in this case, and John McCain doesn’t seem to be interested in either.

… and a small shout-out to my late mom, if you’ll excuse a point of personal privilege. Carlin was probably too liberal, and certainly too profane, for her tastes. But he was so damned funny that she bought all his albums anyway, and always made a point of sharing them with her eleven year old son. Thanks for that, mom.

Back in the mists of history, the New York Times Week in Review used to occasionally feature cartoons by the likes of myself, and Ted Rall, and Ruben Bolling. But that was a different regime — these days, there’s limited space for editorial cartoons, which kind of disallows the excessively verbose practioneers of our form. And part of the reason for this is that the editors of the Week in Review took some of that space and devoted it instead to snippets from the monologues of late night comedians. Like this from Jay Leno (my transcription from the print edition):

Gay marriage now legal here in California. In fact, you hear who got married today in San Francisco? Rice and Roni. Yeah, finally got married.

Thanks, New York Times, for sharing these small pearls of humor-related writing activities. Rice and Roni? I am doubled over with laughter, so great is my amusement.

William Kristol is, of course, the man who helped to kill health care reform in the nineties, with the wildly successful Republican talking point that “there is no health care crisis,” leaving us fifteen years later with a bigger mess than ever. This is a man who understands the power of words, and the extent to which they can triumph, at least momentarily, over reality.

Today, he attempts to redefine the meaning of a recent MoveOn ad:

The ad is simple. A mother speaks as she holds her baby boy:

“Hi, John McCain. This is Alex. And he’s my first. So far his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog. That, and making my heart pound every time I look at him. And so, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him.”

I’ll even grant Kristol his point that little Alex isn’t in much danger of being sent to Iraq by a McCain administration, given that Alex would only be nine years old at the end of an excruciatingly unlikely two-term McCain presidency. Nonetheless, the meaning of the ad is clear: this is my child, and I do not intend to sacrifice him on the altar of an unnecessary, and unecessarily prolonged, war.

Hard for any parent to argue with that.

At least, not until the master propagandist plies his trade:

Here’s what the mother of an actual soldier has to say about the remarks of the mother of the prospective non-soldier in the ad:

“Does that mean that she wants other people’s sons to keep the wolves at bay so that her son can live a life of complete narcissism? What is it she thinks happens in the world? … Someone has to stand between our society and danger. If not my son, then who? If not little Alex then someone else will have to stand and deliver. Someone’s son, somewhere.”

This is the sober truth. Unless we enter a world without enemies and without war, we will need young men and women willing to risk their lives for our nation. And we’re not entering any such world.

* * *

The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.

And the sole responsibility of others.

Note how deftly he replaces the implicit understanding that Iraq is a disaster borne of the grandiose fantasies of neocons like himself with the assumption that our imperial adventure is necessary to our very safety — and having made that conceptual leap, proceeds to note matter-of-factly that young parents whose dreams for their childrens’ futures do not include an appointment with a roadside IED some twenty years hence in a country we should never have invaded in the first place … are simply being selfish.

And from there, of course, it is a short hop and a skip to the conclusion that such parents are motivated by their irrational hatred for the troops.

You have to admire the sheer, breathtaking chutzpah of it all — particularly given the crowning irony that Kristol is one of the many architects of this war who themselves never served in the military, and who are entirely comfortable viewing the necessary sacrifices of wartime as the sole responsibility of others.

Iraqis have recently been comparing the US-Iraqi “agreement” now under negotiation to the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930. The treaty, imposed by England under circumstances similar to today’s U.S. occupation, was deeply hated in Iraq.

Of course, most Americans have no idea what the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 is. So I thought it would be useful to post the text of the treaty—which used to be essentially impossible to find online—together with an examination of the many parallels between it and what Bush has been demanding. It’s all over here.

As you’ll see, it appears history actually has direct relevance to the present day. Who knew?

Bernard Chazelle visited the West Bank recently to work with the math programs at several Palestinian universities. He wrote up his distressing (and sometimes encouraging) experiences, complete with lots of pictures, here.

This is from a letter John Adams wrote to his wife Abagail in 1777; it appears at the end of HBO’s John Adams miniseries:

Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

And here’s Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri this morning, explaining why Congress is making it legal for giant telecoms to wiretap us:

When the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.

So maybe Adams would have been better off not bothering. Canada didn’t, and they seem to be doing okay.

Y’know it’s funny that all of the Republicans who are wetting themselves about Barack Obama rejecting public financing seemed to have no problem with huge financial disparities when they were the ones outspending the Democrats in 2000 and 2004. Hell, at the time, they were the ones who were the loudest opponents of campaign finance laws, insisting that giving corporate interests the ability to buy elections was a “free speech” issue. Now that the tables are turned, however, they can’t complain loudly enough about Obama’s apparent “hypocrisy” for rejecting public financing after previous expressing support for it. Needless to say, it’s hard to take someone’s complaints of hypocrisy seriously when they’re committing and even more egregious form of insincerity by conveniently failing to mention that John McCain not only backed out on a binding promise to accept matching funds in the primary, but that in not binding himself to the public financing commitments that he made, John McCain’s campaign is breaking the law.

Unlike John McCain, Barack Obama is under no legal obligations to accept public financing. Does that mean Obama’s ability to raise more money gives him an unfair advantage in the general election? Welcome to our world, Republicans. Boo-frakkin-hoo.