THIS MODERN WORLD

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.

On talk radio lately, it’s an accepted fact that the Chinese either are currently or are about to start drilling for oil sixty miles off our coastline. If they can do it, outraged talkers ask, why can’t we? This is part of a larger argument that the current energy crisis is entirely the fault of Democrats and environmentalists, and no one should harbor any ill feelings toward the oil industry, or be concerned with conservation.

Just one problem.

Yet no one can prove the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba’s shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is “akin to urban legend,” said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.

“China is not drilling in Cuba’s Gulf of Mexico waters, period,” said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon’s research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight.

* * *

China’s Sinopec oil company does have an agreement with the Cuban government, but it’s to develop onshore resources west of Havana, Pinon said. The Chinese have done some seismic testing, he said, but no drilling, and nothing offshore.

Western diplomats in Havana tell McClatchy that to the best of their knowledge, there is no Chinese drilling in or around Cuba.

“I’ve never heard anything about this,” said one diplomat from a country in the hemisphere.

Nonetheless, talk radio callers are very concerned about the Chinese drilling — and, I kid you not, the possibility that the Chinese may use their imaginary drilling rigs as a platform from which to launch nuclear missiles at the U.S.

It’s a wonder that this country functions as well as it does, given that at least a third of our fellow citizens are clinically insane.

… on a related note: drilling in ANWR solves all our energy problems, if you inflate estimated oil production by 7000 percent.

Here are some statements by Ms. Rice in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq:

“I think he [then Secretary of State Colin Powell] has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that.” (NPR, Feb. 6, 2003)

“We need to be ready for the possibility that the attack against the U.S. could come in some form against the homeland, not necessarily on the battlefield against our forces. And I think there, too, is an area where the American people need to be better prepared by our leadership. … It’s clear that Iraq poses a major threat. It’s clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that’s the path we’re on. I think the question becomes whether we can keep the diplomatic balls in the air and not drop any, even as we move forward, as we must, on the military side.” (NPR, Dec. 20, 2002)

“I think the United States government has been clear since the first Bush administration about the threat that Iraq and Saddam Hussein poses. The United States policy has been regime change for many, many years, going well back into the Clinton administration. So it’s a question of timing and tactics…We do not necessarily need a further Council resolution before we can enforce this and previous resolutions. (NPR, Nov. 11, 2002)

Of course, this sounds like Condoleezza Rice. But in fact all those quotes are from Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration and now part of Obama’s newly formed “Senior Working Group on National Security.” The quotes are from an examination of the Working Group done by the Institute for Public Accuracy, here.

I’d long believed that black women named Rice who are willing to be appalling hacks to rise to the top of the foreign policy establishment are a precious national resource. However, I thought we faced serious supply constraints. Apparently I was wrong.