- So now it's Newt Gingrich's turn. The Republican desperation for a viable and committed conservative candidate has lurched over the past year from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michelle Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich. It's fun just to write that. And there have even been blips on the radar screen about Ron Paul. The only person who seems perpetually in the doghouse is poor Rick Santorum. No love. Ever. And given that he's a legitimate moron with comfortably Medieval views on science and social issues, he would seem a natural fit. It's sad.
The problem with Newt Gingrich is that he reminds everyone of Newt Gingrich, and nobody who remembers Newt Gingrich likes Newt Gingrich. Earlier this week, Greg Sargent summarized:
Yes, Newt Gingrich has spiked in the polls. No, he’s not going to be the nominee.
And he then laid out three simple but compelling reasons why Gingrich's moment in the sun won't last. Mostly it's because Newt Gingrich reminds everyone of Newt Gingrich, and nobody who remembers Newt Gingrich likes Newt Gingrich. In fact, for those who remember the past couple decades, the moment when partisan rancor crossed the line from fierce to toxic was the moment Newt Gingrich became House Republican leader. Everything has been downhill from there. Even Newt Gingrich's being forced from the political stage due to his party's recognition that his personal toxicity was making his party politically toxic hasn't slowed the steady political slide since Newt Gingrich became House Republican leader. He set the template. And nobody who remembers him likes him. And as people get reacquainted with him, they too will remember why they don't like him. And as people who never knew him get acquainted with him for the first time, they quickly will learn why nobody who remembers him likes him. Newt Gingrich will never be the GOP nominee, much less president.
- Atrios summarizes the feelings of many toward Catfood Commission 2.0:
Please Fail And Go Away
Of course, that will trigger across-the-board cuts, and as many of us long have predicted ways will be found for the Pentagon to be spared. So last summer's artificially concocted debt crisis will have succeeded. For the Republicans. And that's the best-case scenario.
Perhaps it would have been better a year ago to have allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire. Perhaps it would have been better last winter to have allowed the Republicans to shut down the government rather than accede to their demands on the budget deal. After all, President Bill Clinton did exactly that when Newt Gingrich was House Speaker and played the same political game of budget brinksmanship, and not only did it prevent destructive budget cuts, it revived Clinton's presidency and effectively ended Gingrich's Contract on America. Perhaps rather than spending the past year playing politics on the Republicans' home field, the current White House and current Congressional Democrats instead should have been fighting to protect the New Deal and the Great Society and the Keynesian paradigm. If you believe in the need for a social safety net and at least some degree of economic fairness and stuff like that.
- The peacefully protesting young woman who was pepper sprayed directly in the face is 20-year-old Liz Nichols, from a small town in Arkansas, who says she joined the Occupy Portland movement in support of her disabled parents. Her mom, who has multiple sclerosis, told Nichols she's proud of her. After pepper spraying her in the mouth then dragging her away by her hair what did the police tell her?
Next time you get pepper sprayed, keep your mouth shut, she said they told her.
Nichols has been charged with interfering with police. She says she will fight it. The police thug who blasted pepper spray straight into the face of a peaceful protester has not been charged with anything.
- This should warm the cockles of everyone's heart: CPAC and the religious right seem to be kissing and making up.
- Building a bridge backward to the 20th Century:
The U.S. Senate approved a package of legislation Thursday night that eliminates future funding for high-speed rail projects, including the California bullet train.
The vote, coming after a similar vote in the House of Representatives, leaves the future of the ambitious state project to create a new rail system from Southern California to the Bay Area uncertain. The state has less than 15% of the funds needed for the $98.5-billion project.
- It's good that the New York Times is calling out the Republican presidential candidates for refusing to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture, but as emptywheel points out, it would be an easier argument to make if the New York Times hasn't itself been confusing it.
- And speaking of the New York Times, Natasha Lennard is not on their staff but she has done freelance reporting for them. Of late, she had been criticized for taking the side of Occupy Wall Street. In an impressive display of honesty and integrity that is lacking for so many biased full-time reporters for major media, she is embracing her bias and rejecting the myth that being objective necessitates ignoring the truth:
In my view, it now makes little sense to be objective about Occupy Wall Street and its various, amorphous iterations across the country. As Matt Taibbi wrote recently in Rolling Stone about learning to love OWS: “People don’t know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.”
If the diffuse and experimental disruptions, discussions, assemblies, occupations, strikes, marches, chants and more that constitute OWS are primarily coherent only in so far as they agree that the current status quo, rife with inequity and cruelty, is wrong — I cannot but consider myself in agreement. As such, it would be disingenuous to play the “objective reporter.”
- Cool:
Led by Professor Dr. Martin Bentz, archeologists at the University of Bonn began unearthing one of Greek antiquity's largest craftsmen's quarters in the Greek colonial city of Selinunte (7th-3rd century B.C.) on the island of Sicily during two excavation campaigns in September 2010 and in the fall of 2011.
- Also cool:
The European Union on Monday prohibited the use of X-ray body scanners in European airports, parting ways with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has deployed hundreds of the scanners as a way to screen millions of airline passengers for explosives hidden under clothing.
- Here comes the sun:
Materials for thermal storage may make cheap solar energy available around the clock—even when the sun doesn't shine.
- Vienna's magnificent Museum of Natural History probably is best known for housing maybe the most famous prehistoric sculpture, the tiny Venus of Willendorf. Local photographer Klaus Pichler gained access to shoot the museum behind the scenes, at all times of day and night. The results are fascinating and fun and can be viewed here and here.
- With winter coming, a drought in Afghanistan may leave more than 2,500,000 people hungry. And all the money being poured into the country won't help. Bombs don't feed people, and humanitarian aid is being focused on the south, where the endless war that cannot be won is hottest. The millions who will suffer most from the drought are in the north. U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker rationalizes:
"We have put substantial assistance into the south. You know, we are trying to end an insurgency here and that means, in part, funding a better future and giving people alternatives," he says.
You know, ending that insurgency isn't working, and it won't work, and people are not going to have a better future if they're being bombed and their hunger is being all but ignored in the present. One alternative might be to stop bombing them and start helping them feed themselves.
Oxfam's policy and advocacy director in Afghanistan, Louise Hancock, insists that such a policy means that political and military objectives are often being allowed to outweigh humanitarian need when the allocation of aid is decided.
Military objectives tend to outweigh humanitarian need when a war that should have ended long ago isn't being ended.
Other aid agencies, including Save The Children, take a similar view. They further argue that more longer term development aid is needed and that blurring the lines between aid work and military objectives puts their staff, as well as the people they help, at more risk.
On Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators offered an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill urging President Obama to accelerate the timetable for withdrawal. Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon sent out this press release:
Earlier this year, President Barack Obama began the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan with the goal of removing all combat troops by the end of 2014. However, that would mean that tens of thousands of troops will remain in country for three more years with many support and training personnel remaining beyond that.
Given that America has largely accomplished the goals set out at the onset of the war and that the chief mission has morphed into a wide-ranging “nation-building” effort that is costing our country nearly $10 billion a month, the senators believe that we need to rethink this use of our military resources and speed the handover to the Afghanistan government.
The resolution calls for the President to expedite transition of responsibility for military and security operations to the government of Afghanistan and provide a plan to Congress within 90 days of passage of the resolution of a timeframe and completion date for that accelerated transition.
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally states the obvious: climate change is responsible for some of the recent extreme weather patterns. Global weirding is the new normal.
The new report on extreme weather, one of a string of reports that the panel is issuing on relatively narrow issues, did not break much ground scientifically, essentially refining findings that have been emerging in climate science papers in recent years.
Indeed, the delegates meeting in Kampala adopted scientifically cautious positions in some areas. For instance, some researchers have presented evidence suggesting that hurricanes are growing more intense because of climate change, but the report sided with a group of experts who say that such a claim is premature.
Nonetheless, the report predicted that certain types of weather extremes will grow more numerous and more intense as human-induced global warming worsens in coming decades.
Joe Romm is not pleased with the report's caution:
My biggest problem with the report remains the short shrift it gives to the vast literature on drought that I reviewed in my recent Nature article. As I wrote, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”