straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings
Okay… for a sort of “echo chamber duty”, picking out some of the most important news items of the day…
Item #1: The case of Philip A. Cooney — chief of staff for the White House council on environmental quality, or rather Corporate Whore”: The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.
Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues. Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the “climate team leader” and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he has no scientific training.
In one instance in an October 2002 draft of a regularly published summary of government climate research, “Our Changing Planet,” Mr. Cooney amplified the sense of uncertainty by adding the word “extremely” to this sentence: “The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult.” In a section on the need for research into how warming might change water availability and flooding, he crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and snowpack. His note in the margins explained that this was “straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings.”
Mr. Cooney’s alterations can cause clear shifts in meaning. For example, a sentence in the October 2002 draft of “Our Changing Planet” originally read, “Many scientific observations indicate that the Earth is undergoing a period of relatively rapid change.” In a neat, compact hand, Mr. Cooney modified the sentence to read, “Many scientific observations point to the conclusion that the Earth may be undergoing a period of relatively rapid change.”
Item #2: The closing of the House Judiciary Hearing on the Patriot Act. Rep. Sensenbrenner: AND: Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the panel, abruptly gaveled the meeting to an end and walked out, followed by other Republicans. Sensenbrenner declared that much of the testimony, which veered into debate about the detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was irrelevant.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, protested, raising his voice as his microphone went off, came back on, and went off again.
”We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it,” he said.
Democrats asked for the hearing, the 11th the committee has held on the act since April, saying past hearings had been too slanted toward witnesses who supported the law. The four witnesses were from groups, including Amnesty International USA and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, that have questioned the constitutionality of some aspects of the act, which allows law enforcement greater authority to investigate suspected terrorists.
Nadler said Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, was ”rather rude, cutting everybody off in mid-sentence with an attitude of total hostility.”
Tempers flared when Representative Michael Pence, Republican of Indiana, accused Amnesty International of endangering the lives of Americans in uniform by referring to the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a ”gulag.” Sensenbrenner didn’t allow the Amnesty representative, Chip Pitts, to respond until Nadler raised a ”point of decency.”
Sensenbrenner’s spokesman, Jeff Lungren, said the hearing had lasted two hours and ”the chairman was very accommodating, giving members extra time.”
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, speaking immediately after Sensenbrenner left, voiced dismay about the proceedings. ”I’m troubled about what kind of lesson this gives” to the rest of the world, he told the Democrats remaining in the room.
ITEM #3: … Darned it. I had two other news-items of some import I wished to stick here. Don’t remember what they were.
Ah well. The Toledo Blade has a page up with the various news-stories for their investigations into “Coin-Gate”… a curious scandal if there ever was one.
ITEM #4: Muse over Lindsey Graham’s solution to the recruitment-shortfall crisis that the military is struggling with:
“We have a chronic problem on our hands, not an acute problem,” said South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, chairman of a Senate subcommittee on military personnel. “We should assume there are going to be 100,000 troops in Iraq two years from now, and continuing losses. It is time to repackage this war and let Americans know we are fighting for freedom.”
— Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator of South Carolina
Harold Ford, Democratic Congressman of Tennessee and Senate hopeful, expresses a similar opinion.
How exactly do you “let Americans know that they are fighting for freedom”? (I think Bush says just that every day.)
ITEM #5: The curious case of the implementation of the Tobacco Settlement: Despite a key government witness asserting that $130 billion is necessary to fund smoking cessation programs, the Justice Department asked the Court for only $10 billion, surprising reporters and those familiar with the issue.
A person familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Los Angeles Times the change was “forced on the tobacco team by higher-level, politically appointed officials of the Justice Department,” including Associate Atty. Gen. Robert McCallum, who oversees the civil division.