What's in a Tea Party?

From a comment in Glenn Greenwald's post today on erosion of U.S. Citizen rights, comes a link that took me to this:

So are the Tea Partiers ordinary people with no political leanings, as they say they are? Definitely not. The findings cited above and other data in the polls indicate that the Tea Party is overwhelmingly stocked with Republican supporters. They are by no means "ordinary people," although the public's perception that they are is one of their strongest suits.

Are they just economic conservatives then? The Winston survey tells us much about Tea Partiers‟ economic views, and the "Contract from America" released on April 14, 2010 focuses on taxes, federal spending, and big government. But if you Google the questionnaires that local Tea Parties send to candidates, you will almost always find more than questions about these issues. You will often discover inquiries about religion as well (e.g., Do you support school prayer? Do you recognize God‟s place in America?). And often there are questions about abortion and gay marriage and teaching Creation Science in public schools. And you run into queries about gun control, law and order, and immigration. So while Tea Partiers overwhelmingly take conservative economic stands, which bind them together most, many seem to be strong "social conservatives" as well. Local groups often speak of wanting only "pure
conservatives" or "100 percent" conservatives as candidates.

Leadership in Washington: Spinelessness is a bipartisan Issue

My fellow blogger Glenn Greenwald is at it again - pointing out obvious fallacies in the positions of politicians who seem to think they don't need to hold themselves accountable to their own standards:

Whatever else is true, the American Right is now openly siding with a foreign government against their own, and bitterly Blaming America for these problems. They're protecting this foreign government's actions even though our top Generals say those actions undermine our war effort and directly endanger American troops. They're advocating policies -- such as the Israeli bombing of Iran -- which America's Joint Chiefs Chairman has gravely warned will seriously impede our wars and lead to the deaths of our soldiers. They're demeaning the top American General with command responsibility for two theaters of war. And, in a Time of War, they're attacking the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief -- and relentlessly depicting him as weak and inept -- all because he's prioritizing American interests over those of a foreign country. All of that seems to severely breach the standards of Patriotism they have long advocated and which have long prevailed, to put that rather mildly.

I leave you to read Glenn's well reasoned derivation of how we got to this point, and why its bad for us, but I'll add a few thoughts from a Leadership perspective.

Leading people requires integrity - your words and actions need to match, and when they diverge you better have a really good explanation for it. I think Congressman Dennis Kuchinich's statement about why he is voting for the healthcare bill is a great example of that integrity at work (though Glenn is right - it will make it hard for Washington to take Progressives seriously)

Unfortunately, far-Right Neocons are violating this cardinal rule of leadership, and further exposing why so many Americans will, I hope, continue to give them the short shaft. If the President does something right when he's in your Party, that thing is still right when the President of the opposing Party does it. Ditto for an American general who is trying to fight a war that no one but neocon hawks still wants America to be involved in (never mind the lying to get into it in the first place).

Bottom line - what you say does matter, especially when you come off as an opportunist, when you were for something before you were against it (!); when you promise to enact a Public Option when you are campaigning and then work behind closed doors to kill it after you get elected. That's not integrity - its political opportunism, and it turns my stomach.

Are you listening Mr. President?

The bailouts and healthcare reform - one quote says it all

While ruminating on what the loss of the public option means to so-called "healthcare reform," and trying to draw useful links and lessons to the payback of TARP funds (apparently hastened by huge additional tax breaks); I read this in a comment at The Intersection. Marion's comment was in a post about the death of science journalism, but it rings true for so many things these days:

Markets don’t give you what you want OR need – they trade whatever you can scrape up by way of labor or money for what, crudely expressed, the owners of resources and physical plant and the providers of finance and credit want to offer, and you then try to cobble together what you want and need from the menu you’re given.

Blogs to read daily - my top 6 sources of information

The lovely red-headed wife once asked me how I manage to keep up with all the blogs, and my own blogging, without getting sucked into wasted hours on a daily basis. She has, as she freely admits, a highly addictive personality, and so she resists blogs primarily to keep this from happening to her.

My answer is really quite simple – while there are about two dozen blogs I monitor regularly, I only read six blogs daily. See, my ritual is to listen to NPR’s Morning Edition on the Metro in to work each morning, scan the on-line Washington Post while reading my morning email and having the first cup of coffee, and then take 20 minutes or so to read these authors:

Glenn Greenwald

Mike at the Big Stick

Ames at Submitted to a Candid World (where I often run into Mike as well)

Simon and James at the Baseline Scenario

Sheril and Chris at The Intersection

And secularist 10 at 100 Treatises

Granted, some of them update their blogs several times a day, but I find a good morning read is about all I need from the six sources (and the WaPo and NPR) to get a pretty good handle on the issues of the day. I may not always agree with them – I think there are days Mike would rather throttle me then dialogue with me – but all are immanently accessible, and all will provide you a great insight that can help you sort the B.S. flying around in the blog-o-sphere.

Now, of the others I read less frequently,

Stephanie Z at Almost Diamonds

Is ALWAYS worth my time as well.

Let's get rid of the Beltway Mentality

Glenn Greenwald is right when he says, of our modern politicians and media:

Dispensing with core Constitutional principles in the name of "practical considerations" -- and treating ludicrous, bad faith claims with respect -- creates a facade of reasonableness. But there's nothing reasonable about
it. It's intellectually barren and, worse, is the prime enabler for why our political leaders stray so far and so frequently from those principles. It's why they break the law with impunity and know they can. The Bill of Rights and the rule of law aren't like modifications to the tax code or compromises over the stimulus package. They're in a fundamentally different category. The failure to recognize that category is a defining attribute of the Beltway sickness and is a prime reason why Washington so frequently degrades and destroys whatever it touches.

He's wrong abou tone thing, however, and it's a labeling issue.See, like many pundits, commentators, and thoughtful journalists (a.k.a. Bill Moyers), Glenn refers to this as a Beltway Mentality. Its a phrase of convenicne, meant to excoriate politicians in Washington D.C. located inside the Capitol Beltway (I-495). I get that. The thng is - I live and work insdie that same beltway, in a federal executive agency. Yet I do not share the outlook, ideaology, or platfrom of those oligarchs. And I' appreciate it if Mr. Greenwald would consider inventing an dpopularizing a new term - Capitol Mentality, Congressional Mentality, American Oligarch Mentality - something pithy and succinct, but which leave out the character and world views of everyone else who lives and works inside the Beltway. That way, the focus will be on the people (and their words and deeds) who are really the responsible parties.

Thanks Glenn, I know you will come through.

The Use of Military force on U.S. Soil - not a mere flight of fancy

From the inestimable Glenn Greenwald, comes word that the Bush Administration considered using America's armed forces on our own soil to detain U.S. citizens. This is not, by the way, a new accusation, but as Glenn point out, the New York Times has now substantiated it. Aside from HUGE Constitutional issues, consider what this agitation for suborning American citizens says about the use of power by a government:

It's the nature of governments that powers of this type, once vested, rarely remain confined to their original purpose. They inevitably and invariably expand far beyond that. Powers that are endowed to address a limited and supposedly temporary circumstance almost always endure for years if not decades. Once a political official possesses a particular power, they almost never relinquish it voluntarily (there are exceptions -- Jimmy Carter in 1978 signed, and subsequent Presidents until Bush complied with, FISA, which barred Presidents from eavesdropping without a judicial warrant, but such instances are exceedingly rare). Perhaps most dangerous of all, detention and punishment schemes that are implemented in relatively normal times (such as now) will inevitably expand, and expand wildly, in the case of some heightened threat (such as another Terrorist attack). Put another way, once we depart for ostensibly limited purposes from our fundamental principles of justice -- in order to indefinitely detain "just some special cases" without charges -- then, by definition, we're fundamentally altering our system of justice far beyond that. (Emphasis mine) - G. Greenwald

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I support Glenn's analysis. It will also come as no surprise that I find this one more example of why I believe the U.S. is descending into a oligarchical authoritarian state. Because these very real threats to our lives are not covered by the Main Stream Media, most Americans dismiss them as flights of fancy, when they consider them at all. We should not, because then we'd become countries that we say we are better then. We'd mimic the authoritarian states that used to exist to our south, and which we spent decades fighting against covertly. That is not the legacy I want to leave to my daughters.

Another Obama bomb - unlimited detention policies coming into existence.

Yes Martha, the Obama Administration is going to detain certain suspected terrorists indefinitely. So now we as a nation will be "safe" from those . . . people . . . who are denied due process because the government . . . . might loose . . . on account of the previous Administration's refusal to abide by the rule of law in the first place. But we'll be "safe."

Problem is, once a system of permanent detention gets set up, it will be nearly impossible to take just down, just as the "War on Terror" will be nearly impossible to end (so loose are its defining parameters). History also teaches us that such a system, while initially turned outward against some "other" will all too easily be turned inward against crticis of the regime. Think I'm joking? The USSR used to do it, and Russia still does in Chechnya. Nearly every South American country has had a totalitarian phase with unlimited detention without trial. So does North Korea. Think our President, at some point, won't use it? Really? Play the lottery much?

The legal case FOR torture prosecutions

As the Torture Watch continues in the blog-o-sphere, there are a lot of defenders of the Bush 43 Administration who do so based on one or more of the following strawman:

• You say we tortured terrorists, but we do it to our own servicemen all the time, so it can’t be torture. A variant is to ask if waterboarding is torture for the same reason.
  
• There’s no legal basis for calling this torture, especially since we’re at war and so we have to circumvent the laws in order to keep our people safe.
  

There are a host of others, but I think you get the point. What they are driving at, as Glenn Greenwald so elegantly puts it, is proving that Serious and Thoughtful People know more then we mere plebs do, and so we must TRUST them with our very existence, lest we all vaporize in the latest terrorist attack.

Now I’m no lawyer. I’m an oceanographer. That means I’m trained to look at things skeptically, ask questions, formulate hypotheses, test them, and then draw conclusions. In this case, that means I want to know what the law actually says we can and can’t do.

So I went to Google, and there, from the U.N. Convention on Torture (At Part 1, Article 1, §1) we read (highlighting mine):

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Scrolling on down, we fin in Part 1, Article 2:

Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Further, in Part 1, Article 4:

Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

And way down in Part 1, Article 16, we find:

Each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article 1, when such acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. In particular, the obligations contained in articles 10, 11, 12 and 13 shall apply with the substitution for references to torture or references to other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Sadly for my many conservative, torture-defending sparing partners, the language could not be clearer on what torture is, and how we as a nation are supposed to deal with it. Basically, the Convention says you can’t inflict severe mental or physical pain and suffering intentionally, especially to get a confession or obtain information. It also says you can’t do that at the direction of any public official; that orders from a superior officer aren’t reason to do it, and that you can’t even do it under the rubric of war. And it says you can't inflict any other cruel or unhuman punishment even when told to do so by a public official or anyone acting in a public capacity.

Ok, I can hear them saying, why do you think this applies to us? It is, after all a U.N. convention, and what right does the U.N, have to tell us what to do?

It’s an interesting argument, until you read the U.S. Constitution. It says in Article Six, Paragraph 2:

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary not with-standing.”

Translating that to modern, non-legal English: When the United States enters into a Treaty (which we do by Presidential Signature and congressional Ratification), that Treaty becomes Federal Law, and the language of the treaty becomes binding on the U.S., and particularly our judicial system. And Since President Reagan signed the Convention in 1988, and COngress Ratified it in 1994 (Under Republican control, as I recall), the Convention is the highest law of the land.

In other words, since the Convention on Torture says explicitly what torture is, and that it can not be sanctioned by any public official or in any public capacity, and since it says that the signatories must criminalize the act, and since it says war is not an excuse for torture, And since our own Constitution says this is our highest law; then the U.S. legal system has NO CHOICE but to investigate and prosecute any official for torture

“when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

The President, Vice President, White House Counsel, their Chiefs of staff, and the CIA and military officers are all public officials. The law is exceedingly clear. For anyone to pretend otherwise, is, as I see it, to destroy both the legal framework of the Constitution, and to pervert the intentions of our Founding fathers so they can engage in a sick, revenge drive blood bath. We need to eat our humble pie, investigate and prosecute. Otherwise, we are now a Nation that has 280 Million accomplices to torture in its name.

Shame on us!

UPDATE: Hilzoy has the best response to Mr. Obama's proposal for indefinite detention I've seen to date.

Glenn Greenwald keeps up the good fight on Torture

This may be the most cogent (and most frightening) thing I've seen on the web regarding our post 9/11 actions as a nation. It's a comment (early in the thread too) about Glenn's post today on the Obama Administrations decision to keep some sort of military commission in place to deal with suspected terrorists. PDA's response, and Glenn's whole point, are the reason Mr. Bush and his Administration were such a disaster for the U.S.

UPDATE: See the Comments Section Here and Here for my reasons in supporting prosectuions against Bush Administration officials regarding torture. I need to go lie down now.

America tortures - and the Far Right yawns.

I haven't weighed in much on torture here - but I am commenting elsewhere when I see fit. Part of the reason is that this whole thing sickens me. The other part is other do it so much better.

There was a day when I respected Mr. Krathammer. Almost admired him. But as time goes on, he descends so far into the lap of the Far Right, that I can no longer count him among those whose words I read to frame a cogent opposition argument to my own beliefs. Rush Limbaugh passed that mark many years ago too. These men, who have so often called for greater imposition of their morals as the law of the land on many issues, refuse to sanction the application of that law (signed by Mr. Reagan whom they claim to revere). The double standard is appalling. I hope that some of the other conservative I monitor won't go there, but I fear for their souls as well.

Waterboarding is torture. So are a whole host of other "enhanced" interrogation techniques. These actions have ABSOLUTELY no place in a country supposedly dedicated to the rule of law. They are morally and religiously repugnant acts (their practice by the historical Catholic Church not withstanding). As such, there is no justification for their use other then revenge or unbridled evil masquerading as punishment. And to be clear - a government that tortures others will eventually begin to torture its own.

Glenn Greenwald on Democratic complicity and what "politicizing justice" really means

As Usual, Glenn Greenwald makes an excellent point about the torture debate. Sadly, until the vast majority of Americans are clearly shown how this affects them, he and I are probably still tilting at windmills.

UPDATE: Mark Danner's piece in the Sunday WAPO makes for a compelling companion to Glenn's. Both are correct - we as a nation cannot ignore this assault on our basic principles.

Mr. Obama fails to restore civil lilberties

Glenn Greenwald is right - and it makes me sick. For A Democrat to do this . . . .

How Chas Freeman got me skinned

Thanks to my colleague Mike at The Big Stick, I’ve been reading some very interesting conservative and progressive blogs of late. I can’t say I always agree with what they write, but they write well, they are open to comments from seeming all sorts of people, and I think if the Republican Party can harness a few of them, then in 4 years Republicans might be a coherent opposition party again.

So I was interested yesterday when Megan McArdle took up the Chas Freeman Affair in her blog. She started by exerpting an Article from Foreign Policy:

David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy: “Financial trivia, minutiae from people's personal lives and political litmus tests have grown in importance while character, experience, intelligence, creativity and wisdom have fallen by the wayside.”

Then, perhaps forgetting that as a conservative she’s supposed to always rail against Democratic policies and politicians, she made this entirely reasonable point about how Mr. Freeman’s opposition had worked it’s magic:

Megan McArdle: “This new tradition of bulldogging every appointee in the hope of embarrassing the president has to stop. We should be focusing on whether or not the nominee can do the job, not whether there is some small breach of an onerous regulation in his history that can possibly be dug up. It feels good in the short term, but when ability to find a native-born nanny becomes a more important qualification for the presidential candidate than experience relevant to the job to be done, it's time for a national rethink.

While I may not agree with Ms. McArdle’s politics, I heartily agree with her assessment of the appointment process. Her commenters, however, took the opportunity to heap on as much spin as they could, to somehow deflect the fact that, when all is said and done, even Washington Post columnists think AIPAC gave MR. Freeman the shaft. So, 26 comments later, I said this:

Sadly, you have all missed the iceberg here. Mr. Freeman wasn't sunk because of these things, he was sunk because he speaks regularly and forcefully against current U.S. policy regarding Israel. Gleen Greenwald has the latest on his blog. All the things mentioned above were part of an organized campaign to discredit Mr. Freeman, without directly attacking him on this key issue. That it succeeded, and is intellecually dishonest at best, speaks volumes about the sad state of American foreign policy.
Posted by Philip H. March 11, 2009 1:29 PM

Not content to attack Ms. McArdle, they began to fire at me:

So, Philip H., what you're saying is that it's okay to be on the Saudi payroll, support the crushing at Tiananmen Square, and support the US Army firing on the Bonus Army veterans, so long as Jews oppose you? Would you have opposed Mr. Freeman on the basis of those other things if only AIPAC and the Jews hadn't been involved? Sure, I'm upset that enough other people don't seriously care about that horrific statement about the Bonus Army, about being on Saudi payroll, or about Tiananmen Square. That doesn't make me support Mr. Freeman just because I think not enough people are opposing him for the right reasons. In any case, your theory may be wrong anyway. Newsweek's sources claim that Speaker Pelosi's opposition came about because of Tiananmen Square. Of course, the Speaker and Newsweek could just be lying too...
Posted by John Thacker March 11, 2009 1:49 PM

Would if that were all true, but it isn’t. As has been noted by numerous bloggers and journalists, there is no Chinese or Tibetan human rights group on record as opposing the Freeman nomination. Nor is there any quote available anywhere from anyone who works on Chinese foreign policy and analysis that says anything bad about Mr. Freeman. What Mr. Freeman was saying, and said repeatedly, is that the Chinese government should have acted sooner to resolve the issue, whether by force or by negotiations. He never makes the case that what the Chinese did was right, just that it was done too late so that the Chinese governement had fewer choices in how to respond.

As to the Saudi payroll contention – if it’s perfectly acceptable for Republican officials to go back and forth through the revolving door of K Street lobbying firms (many of whom are also paid by the Saudi’s as well as other foreign countries), why is it not ok for Mr. Freeman?

Then I made the mistake of trying to bring this back to being a process argument, as Ms. McArdle intended her blog to be:

All, i'm not saying anything that other Atlantic Authors aren't saying. Railroading a guy out of public service because you don't like what he says is ok by me - so long as you are HONEST about it. Hiding behind supposed tax issues (unproven), or speeches (misquoted) on one subject when you really object for other reasons is LYING. That's where my problem exists.
Posted by Philip H March 11, 2009 3:21 PM

From that point, I was dismissed using many classic conservative approaches. First, I was accused of having some sort of God-like ability to discern motives which other commenters supposedly lacked (as if it is hard to fathom what AIPAC’s motive might be). This is called an ad hominum attack, BTW:

Philip H., where did you purhcase your finely calibrated motive-o-meter, which allows you to peer into the souls of people who you don't know, and thus unerringly discern the real reasons all the critics of Freeman have for opposing his appointment to this job?
Does everyone say stupid things at some times in their life? Sure. We aren't talking about some off the cuff remarks at a cocktail party here, however. We are talking about scheduled interviews, in which there was plenty of time to antcipate the questions that would be asked, and then WERE asked. To anaswer in a manner which suggests you have had a psychotic episode does not engender confidence.
Posted by Will Allen March 11, 2009 3:53 PM

Then, even though I’m trying to focus on the process by which all this was handled, the bus is backed over me because I haven’t said whether I agree or disagree with Mr. Freeman (which is irrelevant to whether he was dealt with fairly and honestly and evaluated on the credentials he would bring to the table):

so long as you are HONEST about it. Hiding behind supposed tax issues (unproven), or speeches (misquoted) on one subject when you really object for other reasons is LYING. That's where my problem exists.
Take it up with Newsweek and Speaker Pelosi, then, as they insist that her (very important) opposition was about China. They're liars, too?
But if that's where your problem exists, fine. Just answer one way or the other, Philip H. Aside from all the "opponents were motivated by the wrong reason" crap, and your allegations that they wouldn't care if someone on their team made his other statements, do you think his statements on Tiananmen and the Bonus Army were disqualifying? Do you at least disagree with them?
Posted by John Thacker March 11, 2009 4:11 PM

Finally, I am dismissed with a backhanded . . . compliment . . . . that what I’ve actually written is satire. I suppose one could argue that most political discussion these days is satire at one level or another, but clearly this is another attempt to move away from my central process thesis:

Aren't a lot of you missing Philip H.'s point? Do you really think he means to be taken at face value? He's written some pretty good satire there, and the uncertainty as to whether it really is satire only makes it better.
Posted by Bambi March 11, 2009 4:19 PM

Quite the ringer. How I managed to get away from being accused of being shrill is beyond me. Here’ the thing – Walter Pincus made the very point I was making in his article in today’s Washington Post. To quote Pincus:

For example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), often described as the most influential pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, "took no position on this matter and did not lobby the Hill on it," spokesman Josh Block said.

But Block responded to reporters' questions and provided critical material about Freeman, albeit always on background, meaning his comments could not be attributed to him, according to three journalists who spoke to him. Asked about this yesterday, Block replied: "As is the case with many, many issues every day, when there is general media interest in a subject, I often provide publicly available information to journalists on background."

All I was trying to get at is this – if you are the official, employed spokesman for a political action committee, as Josh Block is, and you tell everyone that the PAC you work for has no official position even as you are meeting off the record with various journalists who grant you anonymity in exchange for the real thinking of your organization; and that thinking goes against the public statements of your organization, then you are lying. That’s one of the major reasons why our national political discourse is so broken. It is one of the things that needs to be fixed. And there is nothing satirical about my belief in this regard.

UPDATE:

Apparently I'm not the only one with the view that this is bad . . . . . .

What we learn from Mr. George Will.

There has been much press since 15 February about the writings of George Will on climate change. Back then, Mr. will wrote an opinion piece continuing his fight against climate change (and particularly climate change caused by human action) by misrepresenting global sea ice data to try and prove that global warming isn’t occurring, or is at least not the next big catastrophe. If you’ve missed this tempest, I’ve included many links below you can follow for a variety of view points.

I’m not going to spend time rebutting the science – others have done a far better job then I could. I’m also not going to spend too much time dealing with the journalistic ethics, though I did leave a fairly lengthy comment on the Columbia Journalism Review blog about the controversy. There, I wrote in part:

“So, if Mr. Will believe (sic) the science says something that I do not, he needs to do two things. First, he needs to accurately tell us what scientists say, instead of telling us the opposite, and he needs to cite his sources. And for the record, published scientists do not cite blog posts in peer-reviewed literature.”

Having framed my two arguments, now I am forced to ask myself – what do I as a scientist and blogger do about this? What role can I adopt? And what can I carry forward as a lesson for future events like this one?

First, I think it needs to be said that Mr. Will can always be expected to start his columns from a conservative ideological point, not a set of facts. Pundits always start with their worldview. Second, I think I need to remind a few people that we shouldn’t expect Mr. Will to frame the facts he chooses in ways that we recognize or agree with, at least if we come from a liberal perspective. That’s not his job. Third, we do need to be on our guard in our responses. As I have noted before (and so Glenn Greenwald), too many forthright and reasoned responses to conservative opinion makers get shoved aside because they can too easily be accused of being shrill (as if conservatives never are). Finally, we need to make sure our responses not only set the facts straight, but make clear when ethical standards have been violated. This is especially important, since many Republicans rail that liberals do not believe in personal responsibility, the rule of law, or any kind of moral or ethical code.

Having digested all that, I view Mr. Will’s two columns as a cautionary tale for liberals (and climate change scientists especially). We need to get out ahead of these controversies. We need, as bloggers, science journalists, scientists, bureaucrats in science agencies, to start figuring out where we might be confronted by conservative ideologues and run their stories with our rebuttals before they do. This shouldn’t be too hard anymore.

Over at The Intersection, one of Chris Mooney’s commenters, Wes Rolley, notes he has suggested to ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous that they have Chris on as a guest to debate Mr. Will. While I’d love to see Chris on that show (he’d thus be in D.C. and we could meet for brunch after), responding to Mr. Will now is too little, too late. Had we been data mining before hand, someone could have put this out on the intertubes, and then when the first column came out, we could have all politely directed the WaPo to the blog post in question, thus making the error not just one of science (where faked controversy helps the Post sell papers) but rather one of process. And journalists, as we’ve seen, love to defend their process.

I’ll grant you I don’t have the time to do that regularly. I don’t have the audience to make that impact. And I don’t have a good command of every aspect of the science. I also can’t easily think like a conservative most days. But I’m betting there is someone out here who can. And they need to start doing so, or we’ll end up fighting rear-guard actions for decades, all the while witnessing the increasing economic, environmental and security demands of a planet driven warmer by our inaction.

One note – my typing isn’t the best, and I have now spotted three typos in my CJR comment, even though I reread through it twice before hitting the POST button. I’d really love to see more spell checking available in blog comment sections for typing challenged folks like me.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/02/27/unchecked-ice-a-saga-in-five-chapters/#comment-15159

http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2009/02/george_will_lies_music_to_my_e.php

http://www.scienceprogress.org/2009/02/the-george-will-scandal/

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/15/george-will-global-cooling-warming-debunked/

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/27/in-a-journalistic-blunder-reminiscent-of-the-janet-cooke-scandal-the-senior-editors-of-the-washington-post-let-george-will-reassert-several-climate-falsehoods-plus-some-new-ones/

http://mediamatters.org/items/200902240010?f=h_top

http://mediamatters.org/static/pdf/wapo-letter-20090224.pdf

http://mediamatters.org/items/200902260029?f=h_latest

http://mediamatters.org/discuss/200902260029

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/expers-big-flaw-in-wills-ice-assertions/

UPDATE:
Here's a good summary page that gives you the state of Play as of 5 March or so.

Let's do right by the United States

Quoth Glenn Greenwald :

"It's critical that Obama -- and the rest of the political establishment -- hear loud objections, not reverential silence, when he flirts with ideas like the ones he suggested on Sunday. This dynamic prevails with all political issues. Where political pressure comes only from one side, that is the side the wins -- period."

Now, if we could just get the rest of the country to actually take up this responsibility, then the Change We Need will be come the Change We Get. Freedom is not, afterall, free, and we have to fight for it. Otherwise, the authoritarians win, and we the people loose. Again.