Martini Republic » Fall from Grace: "President Bush has indicated that Harriet Miers’ conversion from Catholic to evangelical Christianity is one of her ‘qualifications’ for the Supreme Court."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged - Yahoo! News: "It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

'This is an important time,' Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. 'The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you.'

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.

As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit — the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

'I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me,' Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued."

(Via Martini Republic.)

World Temperatures Keep Rising With a Hot 2005: "New international climate data show that 2005 is on track to be the hottest year on record, continuing a 25-year trend of rising global temperatures."

(Via /.)

All Pain, No Gain - Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling's little-known role in the Vietnam War. By Fred Kaplan: "Thomas C. Schelling won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this week. Today's papers note his ingenious applications of 'game theory' to labor negotiations, business transactions, and arms-control agreements. But what they don't note—what is little-known in general—is the crucial role he played in formulating the strategies of 'controlled escalation' and 'punitive bombing' that plunged our country into the war in Vietnam.

This dark side of Tom Schelling is also the dark side of social science—the brash assumption that neat theories not only reflect the real world but can change it as well, and in ways that can be precisely measured. And it's a legacy that can be detected all too clearly in our current imbroglio in Iraq."

(Via a DefenseTech.)

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Saving America's Soul Kitchen -- Sep. 19, 2005: "Now the levee breach has been fixed. The people have been evacuated. Army Corps of Engineers magicians will pump the city dry, and the slow (but quicker than we think) job of rebuilding will begin. Then there will be no 24-hour news coverage. The spin doctors' narrative will create a wall of illusion thicker than the new levees. The job of turning our national disaster into sound-bite-size commercials with somber string music will be left to TV. The story will be sanitized as our nation's politicians congratulate themselves on a job well done. Americans of all stripes will demonstrate saintly concern for one another. It's what we do in a crisis.

This tragedy, however, should make us take an account of ourselves. We should not allow the mythic significance of this moment to pass without proper consideration. Let us assess the size of this cataclysm in cultural terms, not in dollars and cents or politics. Americans are far less successful at doing that because we have never understood how our core beliefs are manifest in culture--and how culture should guide political and economic realities. That's what the city of New Orleans can now teach the nation again as we are all forced by circumstance to literally come closer to one another. I say teach us again, because New Orleans is a true American melting pot: the soul of America. A place freer than the rest of the country, where elegance met an indefinable wildness to encourage the flowering of creative intelligence. Whites, Creoles and Negroes were strained, steamed and stewed in a thick, sticky, below-sea-level bowl of musky gumbo. These people produced an original cuisine, an original architecture, vibrant communal ceremonies and an original art form: jazz."

(Via Salon.)

America's new jazz museum! (No poor black people allowed): "'We should not allow the mythic significance of this moment to pass without proper consideration,' he wrote. 'Let us assess the size of this cataclysm in cultural terms, not in dollars and cents or politics. Americans are far less successful at doing that because we have never understood how our core beliefs are manifest in culture -- and how culture should guide political and economic realities.' In an interview with BBC-TV, Marsalis went further, describing the black faces on CNN looking for lost mothers and fathers as calling up a historical memory of Southern slave families torn apart.

And at Marsalis' 'Higher Ground' benefit, the tone was more pointedly political than is customary at Lincoln Center. 'When the hurricane struck, it did not turn the region into a third-world country,' actor Danny Glover said from the stage. 'It revealed one.' Singer Harry Belafonte, at his side, declared, 'Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors and abdicates its responsibility altogether.'"

Emphasis mine.

(Via Salon.)

Please, not him...: "The Leftcoaster, AmericaBlog and Joe Conason have Jeff Gannon possibly involved in Rove-Gate."

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Martini Republic » Warrants issued for Allawi Government officials : "Remember Iyad Allawi, the U.S.-backed Iraq interim President, who was put in power by Bush in June of 2004, and was kind enought to recipricate by coming over here in advance of our own Presidential election, and put on a dog-and-pony show about how successful Bush’s Iraq policy was in making Iraq ‘safe, good?’

Well, it seems that 28 of his former officials, including 5 ministers, are wanted by the current Iraqi government for misappropriating a billion dollars."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Government Can't Explain Increase in 2002 TSA Contract: "In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the government changed a contract to hire federal airline passengers screeners in a way that cost taxpayers an additional $343 million. More than three years later, officials cannot explain exactly why.

Homeland security officials say they have no memos, e-mails or other paperwork to document the reason for the change, as required by federal contracting regulations. They have also offered accounts of the decision that conflict with internal government documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The modification to the contract involved switching the interview sites for tens of thousands of airline passenger screener jobs from a contractor's own assessment centers to hotels and luxury resorts.

The change added hundreds of millions of dollars to a contract that increased from $104 million to $741 million in nine months. Federal auditors later called into question $303 million of that spending."

(Via Salon.)

Salon.com | News Wires: "Three New Orleans police officers are facing battery charges after investigators reviewed a videotape showing two patrolmen repeatedly punching a 64-year-old man accused of public intoxication and a third officer assaulting an Associated Press Television News producer who helped capture the arrest on tape.

After being questioned and arrested, the three officers were suspended without pay Sunday, police spokesman Marlon Defillo said. The police promised a criminal investigation.

'It's a troubling tape, no doubt about it,' Defillo said.

The assaults come as the department -- long plagued by allegations of brutality and corruption -- struggles with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the resignation last month of Police Superintendent Eddie Compass."

(Via Salon.)

Salon.com News | "A crisis of biblical proportions": "Polluters will have to answer to God, not just government, says Richard Cizik. Vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, Cizik is a pro-Bush Bible-brandishing reverend zealously opposed to abortion, gay marriage and embryonic stem-cell research. He is also on a mission to convert tens of millions of Americans to the cause of conservation, using a right-to-life framework. Cizik has been crisscrossing the United States in recent months, spreading the doctrine of 'creation care' to evangelical Christians.

Citing the Bible, Cizik says 'it is sinfully wrong -- it is a tragedy of enormous proportions -- to destroy, degrade, or despoil the earth.' And he maintains that subscribing to the 'creation care' agenda does not mean people 'have to become liberal weirdoes.' With his leadership, NAE, one of the most politically powerful religious advocacy groups in America, released a manifesto last year urging its members to adopt eco-friendly living habits and exhorting the government to lighten America's environmental footprint. Next month, the organization will begin circulating a charter calling on its member network and top-level Beltway allies to fight global warming."

(Via Salon.)

Defense Tech: Stanford Beats Odds, Wins Robo-Race: "Eighteen months ago, when Darpa held its 'Grand Challenge' -- a $1 million, all-robot rally across the Mojave desert -- none of the competitors could get past mile seven of the 150 mile-long course.

That was then, this is now.

A second, slightly shorter, Grand Challenge went down yesterday. And three robo-cars managed to complete the entire 132-mile race. Two were from Carnegie Mellon's massive robotics program. Finishing just a few minutes ahead, with an average speed of 17 miles per hour, was Stanley, a modified Volkswagen Touareg from Stanford University."

(Via a DefenseTech.)

The Counterterrorism Blog: "Al-Qaida's Jihad in Palestine" Distributes Flyers in Gaza Strip: "An organization calling itself 'Al-Qaida's Jihad in Palestine' has reportedly been distributing leaflets from the Salahudeen al-Ayyubi Mosque in the Gaza Strip on the occasion of Ramadan.  "

(Via The Counterterrorism Blog.)

Martini Republic » Religious notes from all over hell: "Dobson had recently affirmed his belief that same-sex marriage would lead to ‘marriage between daddies and little girls, between a man and his donkey.’"

(Via Martini Republic.)

Martini Republic » Uh-oh! We’re in charge!: "Of course, it’s lunacy. But reading the Week in Review summary by Kirkpatrick this morning, it doesn’t get any better on the evangelical side these days. A key paragraph.

Some reasons for the discontent over Ms. Miers may go back to the pessimistic view many evangelicals hold about society and culture, Professor Green said. ‘They kind of expect to be betrayed,’ he said. ‘They see themselves as an embattled minority. They feel the culture is moving in the wrong direction and they are fighting an uphill battle to turn it around, but they half expect to lose.’

It’s true. A large part of the appeal of the whole zeal attendant to being an evangelical Christian is the martyr-fetish, the feeling that everything is against you. The degree to which they’ve been able to delude themselves into thinking so is astounding, perhaps unparalleled in history. Never have so many who have had so much been able to sustain the feeling of disenfranchisement for so long."

(Via Martini Republic.)