A Wartime Love Story

from NYT via Welcome to Pottersville:

by Maureen Dowd

At the heart of every administration, there is one relationship above all others that shapes history. Ron and Nancy. Poppy Bush and James Baker. Billary. Cheney & Rummy.

W. is the hood ornament, but Cheney & Rummy are the chitty chitty bang bang engine of this administration. Their four-decade friendship stretches from Nixon to Bush II, from Vietnam to Vietnam II.

It’s a beautiful love story, really, even more touching than Ted Haggard, the evangelical preacher and Bush White House adviser, asking a male prostitute for crystal meth, or Borat putting a bag over the head of a squealing Pamela Anderson and carrying her off.

The country, the world, a growing number in their party, and some of the president’s own family may object to the star-crossed match of Cheney & Rummy, but the two men are secure in each other’s embrace. They’ve had tons of fun, from unmanning Colin Powell to unraveling the Geneva Conventions to undoing half a century of American foreign policy to unnerving the small Chesapeake Bay town of St. Michaels, Md., where they have bought weekend estates near each other.

Like some out-of-control manbot, Vice says they will continue “full speed ahead” in Iraq, no matter what voters say. “We’re not running for office,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We’re doing what we think is right.” Damn the democracy — full speed ahead.

W. ratified the Cheney-Rummy mésalliance this week, saying they were doing “fantastic” jobs and vowing to stick with them. He said “the good thing about Vice President Cheney’s advice is, you don’t read about it in the newspaper after he gives it.” (How would he know?) Being discreet when you give disastrous advice: priceless.

Noting that Rummy had presided over Afghanistan and Iraq while overhauling the military, W. said he was “pleased with the progress we’re making.” (Insert your own punch line here.)

Rummy did have one other defender. The House majority leader, John Boehner, told Wolf Blitzer that it is the generals who should be blamed if the war is going badly. So now Republicans are trashing Democrats for undermining the troops even as they’re undermining the troops?

Mr. Bush will go down in history as an isolated, naïve president who was led by Cheney & Rummy, when he could have gotten better advice from his dad and wife.

In his new book, “State of Denial,” Bob Woodward sketches a scene in which an anxious first lady presses Andy Card for information about the war. Mr. Card says he can’t tell her classified information, and she says that W. won’t tell her that stuff, either. She confides her fear that Rummy is hurting her husband and wonders why he puts up with it.

It’s enough to make you long for Nancy Reagan, who quickly dispatched advisers who were hurting her husband.

Even Rummy’s Iraq war cheerleaders, “Cakewalk” Ken Adelman and Richard “Nix Blix” Perle, are falling all over themselves to knife the Pentagon boss. Scaling new heights in the annals of Now They Tell Us, the two men blame the “dysfunctional” Bush team for the “disaster” in Iraq and say that if they had known then what we all know now (and what some of us knew then), they never would have pushed to invade Iraq.

In January’s Vanity Fair, Mr. Adelman told David Rose that when he wrote in 2002 that “liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” he “just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”

He said of his old friend Rummy: “I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.” He concludes that “the idea of using our power for moral good in the world” is finished, at least for a generation.

The neocons insist that it was the execution of the war that was wrong. Actually, it was wrong to go to war with a trumped-up casus belli and without ever debating what could happen if they took a baseball bat to a beehive. A war designed to bring moral good shouldn’t start with a pack of lies. As a Shakespeare expert, Mr. Adelman should have known about ends and means.

As Bechtel Goes…

from NYT via Welcome to Pottersville:

by Paul Krugman

Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission — to rebuild power, water and sewage plants — wasn’t accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq’s population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to stay the course complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they’ve already cut and run. The $21 billion allocated for reconstruction over the last three years has been spent, much of it on security rather than its intended purpose, and there’s no more money in the pipeline.

The failure of reconstruction in Iraq raises three questions. First, how much did that failure contribute to the overall failure of the war? Second, how was it that America, the great can-do nation, in this case couldn’t and didn’t? Finally, if we’ve given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying for?

There’s no definitive way to answer the first question. You can make a good case that the invasion of Iraq was doomed no matter what, because we never had enough military manpower to provide security. But the lack of electricity and clean water did a lot to dissipate any initial good will the Iraqis may have felt toward the occupation. And Iraqis are well aware that the billions squandered by American contractors included a lot of Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayers’ dollars.

Consider the symbolism of Iraq’s new police academy, which Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has called “the most essential civil security project in the country.” It was built at a cost of $75 million by Parsons Corporation, which received a total of about $1 billion for Iraq reconstruction projects. But the academy was so badly built that feces and urine leak from the ceilings in the student barracks.

Think about it. We want the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down. But if they do stand up, we’ll dump excrement on their heads.

As for how this could have happened, that’s easy: major contractors believed, correctly, that their political connections insulated them from accountability. Halliburton and other companies with huge Iraq contracts were basically in the same position as Donald Rumsfeld: they were so closely identified with President Bush and, especially, Vice President Cheney that firing or even disciplining them would have been seen as an admission of personal failure on the part of top elected officials.

As a result, the administration and its allies in Congress fought accountability all the way. Administration officials have made repeated backdoor efforts to close the office of Mr. Bowen, whose job is to oversee the use of reconstruction money. Just this past May, with the failed reconstruction already winding down, the White House arranged for the last $1.5 billion of reconstruction money to be placed outside Mr. Bowen’s jurisdiction. And now, finally, Congress has passed a bill whose provisions include the complete elimination of his agency next October.

The bottom line is that those charged with rebuilding Iraq had no incentive to do the job right, so they didn’t.

You can see, by the way, why a Democratic takeover of the House, if it happens next week, would be such a pivotal event: suddenly, committee chairmen with subpoena power would be in a position to investigate where all the Iraq money went.

But that’s all in the past. What about the future?

Back in June, after a photo-op trip to Iraq, Mr. Bush said something I agree with. “You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered,” he declared. “You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people.” But what those measures actually show is the absence of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were under Saddam.

And we’re not planning to do anything about it: the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is basically over. I don’t know whether the administration is afraid to ask U.S. voters for more money, or simply considers the situation hopeless. Either way, the United States has accepted defeat on reconstruction.

Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what?

Bush Names Exxon Chief to Chart America’s Energy Future

from BushGreenwatch:

Even for an administration dedicated to putting industry lobbyists in charge of the very agencies they have devoted their careers to undermining (coal and oil lobbyist J. Stephen Griles as Deputy Secretary of the Interior is one of dozens of examples), Bush has recently outdone himself. He has named Lee Raymond, the retired chief of ExxonMobil, to head a key study to help America chart a cleaner course for our energy needs. Raymond currently chairs the National Petroleum Council (NPC), one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman says the study will address the supply and demand of oil as well as “…assess the potential contribution of conservation, efficiency, alternative energy sources, and technology advances” and determine “the potential long term impact of alternative energies that are plentiful, affordable, reliable and transportable.”

Energy Department Under Secretary David Garman, added that the NPC is “well qualified to provide a balanced and informed perspective on strategies and action affecting the energy future for both the U.S. and for every country on earth.”

Environmentalists are outraged about the appointment of Lee Raymond. During his long tenure at ExxonMobil, the company spent $19 million on front groups designed to discredit the science on global warming. It also resisted funding clean energy alternatives and lobbied aggressively to drill in the Arctic Refuge.

In a Wall Street Journal article on June 14, 2005, Mr. Raymond said, “it’s yet to be shown how much of this [global warming] is really related to the activities of man.”

ExxonMobil is considered a rogue company even among its peers. It vocally opposes U.S. energy independence and presses for deeper reliance on oil producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, where the company has sunk heavy investments. Critics argue that Mr. Raymond’s legacy is to deny that oil dependence is a problem.

ExxonMobil is the only major oil giant calling renewable energy an “uneconomical” investment. Known for abruptly shutting off the microphone at shareholder’s meetings when opposition is voiced, Mr. Raymond has the reputation of an impatient, authoritarian leader who shows no qualms about publicly belittling those who disagree with him.

The Exxpose Exxon coalition, a collaborative effort of many of the nation’s largest environmental and public advocacy organizations representing millions of Americans, called on Secretary Bodman “to remove the Global Oil and Gas Study from the purview of Raymond and the NPC. “

“This issue is too vital to be handed over to a company and an industry that have demonstrated again and again that they will maximize profits at the expense of our national security, the environment, and U.S. consumers,” they argued. The coalition recommended the study be given to an independent body such as the National Academy of Sciences.

“Putting Lee Raymond in charge of solving U.S. energy problems is like putting Jack Abramoff in charge of solving corruption,” said Shawnee Hoover, campaign director for the Exxpose Exxon Coalition.

Take Action - Tell Secretary Bodman Not to Let Exxon Chart America’s Energy Future.

References:
Exxpose Exxon Backgrounder, http://www.ExxposeExxon.com
Undersecretary Garman, Presentation with notes, 6/21/06, http://www.npc.org
Remarks for Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman, U.S. Department of Energy, 6/21/06. http://www.energy.gov/print/3764.htm

Kerry (Finally) Unloads

Google Bombs…Away!

(image: Project for the Old American Century)

Majikthise notes this from MyDD: each of the following links reports a story that illustrates the cretinous behavior and "values" of the associated rethuglican candidate. HTML source code to put this list on your blog is here.

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert

In Syria, Iraq’s Fate Silences Rights Activists

from WaPo:

By Ellen Knickmeyer

DAMASCUS, Syria—Horror at the bloodshed accompanying the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Iraq has accomplished what human rights activists, analysts and others say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been unable to do by himself: silence public demands for democratic reforms here.

The idea of the government as a bulwark of stability and security has long been the watchword of Syrian bureaucrats and village elders. But since Iraq’s descent into sectarian and ethnic war—and after Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, on the other side of Syria—even Syrian activists concede that the country’s feeble rights movement is moribund.

Advocates of democracy are equated now with supporters of America, even “traitors,” said Maan Abdul Salam, 36, a Damascus publisher who has coordinated conferences on women’s rights and similar topics.

“Now, talking about democracy and freedom has become very difficult and sensitive,” Salam said. “The people are not believing these thoughts anymore. When the U.S. came to Iraq, it came in the name of democracy and freedom. But all we see are bodies, bodies, bodies.”

Iraq and Your Wallet

from the NYT via Pottersville:

by Nicholas D. Kristof

For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.

So aside from the rising body counts and all the other good reasons to adopt a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, here’s another: We are spending vast sums there that would be better spent rescuing the American health care system, developing alternative forms of energy and making a serious effort to reduce global poverty.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to “finance its own reconstruction.”

But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion — perhaps more than $2 trillion. The higher sum would amount to $6,600 per American man, woman and child.

[...]

Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush’s financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project.

[...]

Of course, many of the costs are hidden and haven’t even been spent yet. For example, more than 3,000 American veterans have suffered severe head injuries in Iraq, and the U.S. government will have to pay for round-the-clock care for many of them for decades. The cost ranges from $600,000 to $5 million per person.

Then there are disability payments that will continue for a half-century. Among veterans of the first gulf war — in which ground combat lasted only 100 hours — 40 percent ended up receiving disability payments, still costing us $2 billion each year. We don’t know how many of today’s veterans will claim such benefits, but in the first quarter of this year more people sought care through the Department of Veterans Affairs than the Bush administration had budgeted for the entire year.

[...]

The administration didn’t raise taxes to pay for the war, so we’re financing it by borrowing from China and other countries. Those borrowing costs are estimated to range from $264 billion to $308 billion in interest.

[...]

The bottom line is that not only have we squandered 2,800 American lives and considerable American prestige in Iraq, but we’re also paying $18,000 per household to do so.

We still face the choice of whether to remain in Iraq indefinitely or to impose a timetable and withdraw U.S. troops. These studies suggest that every additional year we keep our troops in Iraq will add $200 billion to our tax bills.

My vote would be to spend a chunk of that sum instead fighting malaria, AIDS and maternal mortality, bolstering American schools, and assuring health care for all Americans. We’re spending $380,000 for every extra minute we stay in Iraq, and we can find better ways to spend that money.

After Pat’s Birthday

from truthdig:

By Kevin Tillman

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after.  It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military.  He spoke about the risks with signing the papers.  How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people.  How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition.  How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is.  Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them.  Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.  It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people.  So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.  Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy.  People still have a voice.  People still can take action.  It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

Chimp Signs the Terror Legalization Bill

The Day Habeas Corpus Died

From Crooks and Liars, another excellent Olbermann piece:

The Day Habeas Corpus Died

Jailed Journalist Sami al-Hajj: Shame on the U.S.

from the NYT via Welcome to Pottersville:

By Nicholas D. Kristof.

There is no public evidence that Sami al-Hajj committed any crime other than journalism for a television network the Bush administration doesn’t like.

But the U.S. has been holding Mr. Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, for nearly five years without trial, mostly at Guantanamo Bay. With the jailing of Mr. Hajj and of four journalists in Iraq, the U.S. ranked No. 6 in the world in the number of journalists it imprisoned last year, just behind Uzbekistan and tied with Burma, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This week, Bush is expected to sign the Military Commissions Act concerning prisoners at Guant�namo, and he has hailed the law as “a strong signal to the terrorists.” But the closer you look at Guant�namo the more you feel that it will be remembered mostly as a national disgrace.

Mr. Hajj is the only journalist known to be there, and, of course, it’s possible that he does have terrorist connections. If so, he should be tried, convicted and sentenced.

But so far, the evidence turned up by his lawyers and by the Committee to Protect Journalists — which published an excellent report on Mr. Hajj’s case this month — suggests that the U.S. military may be keeping him in hopes of forcing him to become a spy.

Mr. Hajj, 37, who attended university and speaks English, joined Al Jazeera as a cameraman in April 2000 and covered the war in Afghanistan. He was detained on Dec. 15, 2001, and taken to the American military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.

“They were the longest days of my life,” Mr. Hajj’s lawyers quoted him as saying. He told them he was repeatedly beaten, kicked, starved, left out in the freezing cold and subjected to anal cavity searches in public “just to humiliate me.”

In June 2002, Mr. Hajj was flown to Guant�namo, where he says the beatings initially were brutal but have since subsided somewhat.

At first, interrogators said Mr. Hajj had shot video of Osama bin Laden during an Al Jazeera interview, but it turned out that they had mixed him up with another cameraman of a similar name. When that assertion fell apart, the authorities offered accusations that he had ferried a large sum of money to a suspicious Islamic charity, that he had supported Chechen rebels, and that he had once given a car ride to an Al Qaeda official.

One indication that even our government may not take those accusations so seriously is that the interrogations barely touched on them, Mr. Hajj’s lawyers say.

“About 95 percent of the interrogations he went through were about Al Jazeera,” said one of the lawyers, Zachary Katznelson of London. “Sami would say, ‘What about me? Will you ask about me?’ ”

He added, “It really does seem that the focus of the inquiry is about his employer, Al Jazeera, and not about him or any actions he may have taken.”

Mr. Katznelson also says that interrogators told Mr. Hajj they would free him immediately if he would agree to go back to Al Jazeera and spy on it. He once asked what would happen if he backed out of the deal after he was free.

“You would not do that,” Mr. Hajj quoted his interrogator as saying, “because it would endanger your child.”

The Defense Department declined to comment on Mr. Hajj’s case.

While Mr. Hajj is unknown in the U.S., his case has received wide attention in the Arab world. The Bush administration is thus doing long-term damage to American interests.

Mr. Hajj’s lawyers say he has two torn ligaments in his knee from abuse in his first weeks in custody, making it exceptionally painful for him to use the squat toilet in his cell. The lawyers say he has been offered treatment for his knee and a sitting toilet that would be less painful to use — but only if he spills dirt on Al Jazeera. And he says he has none to spill.

And while Defense Department documents indicate that he has been a model inmate at Guant�namo, he protests that he has been called racial epithets (he is black) and that he has seen guards desecrate the Koran.

When Sudan detained an American journalist, Paul Salopek, in August in Darfur, journalists and human rights groups reacted with outrage until he was freed a month later. We should be just as offended when it is our own government that is sinking to Sudanese standards of justice.

This doesn’t look like a war on terrorism, but a war on our own values.

They Belong in a Zoo

Science Ignored, Again

from the NYT:

The Bush administration loves to talk about the virtues of “sound science,” by which it usually means science that buttresses its own political agenda. But when some truly independent science comes along to threaten that agenda, the administration often ignores or minimizes it. The latest example involves the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to reject the recommendations of experts inside and outside the government who had urged a significant tightening of federal standards regulating the amount of soot in the air.

At issue were so-called fine particles, tiny specks of soot that are less than one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair. They penetrate deep into the lungs and circulatory system and have been implicated in tens of thousands of deaths annually from both respiratory and coronary disease. The E.P.A., obliged under the Clean Air Act to set new exposure levels every five years, tightened the daily standard. But it left unchanged the annual standard, which affects chronic exposure and which the medical community regards as more important.

In so doing, the agency rejected the recommendation of its own staff scientists and even that of its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council, a 22-member group of outside experts that had recommended a significant tightening of the standards. Stephen Johnson, the agency administrator, claimed there was “insufficient evidence” linking health problems to long-term exposure. He added that “wherever the science gave us a clear picture, we took clear action,” noting also that “there was not complete agreement on the standard.”

One wonders how much evidence Mr. Johnson requires, and how “complete” an “agreement” must be before he takes action. A 20-2 vote in favor of stronger standards seems fairly convincing to us; likewise the unanimous plea for stronger standards from mainstream groups like the American Medical Association.

The environmental and medical communities suspect that the administration’s main motive was to save the power companies and other industrial sources of pollution about $1.9 billion in new investment that the more protective annual standard would have required. But here, too, the administration appears to have ignored expert advice. Last Friday, the agency released an economic analysis showing that in exchange for $1.9 billion in new costs, the stronger annual standards could save as many as 24,000 thousand lives and as much as $50 billion annually in health care and other costs to society. Studies like these always offer a range of possible outcomes, but even at the lower end — 2,200 lives and $4.3 billion in money saved — the cost-benefit ratios are very favorable.

In the next year or so, the administration must decide whether to tighten the standards for another pollutant, ground-level ozone, which causes smog and is also associated with respiratory diseases. The scientific advisory committee has tentatively recommended that the ozone standard be tightened, citing new evidence of smog’s adverse effects. This time Mr. Johnson should pay more attention to the scientists and less to the political strategists in the White House.

Retreating to Small Talk When the News Isn’t So Good

from WaPo:

By Dana Milbank

Bush needed to change the subject.

“If I might say, that is a beautiful suit,” he told NBC News correspondent Kevin Corke at yesterday’s news conference in the Rose Garden.

“My tailor appreciates that,” replied Corke, wearing a $1,500 custom pinstripe number by Tom James with bright-red tie and pocket square.

“And I can’t see anybody else who even comes close,” Bush added, drawing laughs from the assembled scribes in wrinkled navy blazers.

Then Bush spied CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux, pointing at her Benetton suit with pink pinstripes. “Suzanne, I take that back,” Bush amended with chivalry. Moments later he bestowed on her the day’s “best-dressed” honors.

“Kevin and I coordinated,” she explained.

CBS News’s Jim Axelrod was feeling left out. “My best suit’s in the cleaners,” he told the commander in chief.

Bush eyed Axelrod’s slacks with disdain. “That’s not even a suit,” he said, before chalking up the whole thing to “high-priced news guys.”

It was about the only fun Bush had all morning. North Korea is exploding, Iraq is imploding, and congressional Republicans are self-destructing. Reporters weren’t about to let Bush forget about that, even if he looked natty in his gray suit and dark-blue tie.

“Do you ever feel like the walls are closing in on you?” Axelrod tormented.

Bret Baier of Fox News asked Bush about “the tide turning, according to several polls, towards the Democrats.”

USA Today’s David Jackson noted the “shelf full of books” about Iraq and their claims that “administration policies contributed to the difficulties there.”

“There’s a lot of books out there—a lot,” Bush agreed. “I guess it means that I’ve made some hard decisions.”

Actually, the books say he and his aides made a lot of bad decisions: too few troops in Iraq, no reconstruction plan, ignored insurgency warnings, and keeping Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon while pushing Colin Powell out of the State Department.

The underdressed reporters peppered Bush with 15 questions about Iraq and North Korea; only near the end did the Chicago Tribune’s Mark Silva mention some guy named Foley. Pressed to defend his foreign policy, Bush instead cited the “stakes” involved in the Middle East and North Korea—13 times.

“I understand the stakes,” Bush announced. “I’m going to repeat them one more time. As a matter of fact, I’m going to spend a lot of time repeating the stakes.”

He made good on that promise. Five times he said “the stakes are high,” occasionally adding that “the stakes are really high” and even that, “as a matter of fact, they couldn’t be higher.”

“I know this sounds [as if] I’m just saying it over and over again,” Bush admitted. But repetition is crucial to learning; to that end, Bush also said four times that the enemy is trying to establish a “caliphate.”

Dissatisfied with the reporters’ prickly questions, Bush went about answering his own. He said abandoning Iraq would allow terrorists to launch new attacks on America. “How do I know that would happen?” Bush asked himself. “Because that’s what the enemy has told us,” he answered.

When a questioner asked about the credibility of the administration’s threats toward North Korea, Bush said: “I thought you were going to ask . . . ‘How come you didn’t use military action?’ “ Bush then replied: “My answer is that I believe the commander in chief must try all diplomatic measures.”

“I’ll ask myself a follow-up,” Bush continued. “If that’s the case, why did you use military action in Iraq?” His answer to himself: “Because we tried the diplomacy.”

It’s dicey for a president to hold a news conference when his support is below 40 percent and there is little good news to share. Bush started off by pointing out that the federal budget deficit has been shrinking faster than expected. But his questioners, perhaps heeding Vice President Cheney’s admonition that “deficits don’t matter,” didn’t ask any questions on the subject.

Bush’s opening statement, though heavily qualified, contained some of his trademark sanguinity: “We’re on the move. We’re taking action. . . . We accomplished that mission.”

But the mood darkened when the first questioner asked “is your administration to blame” for North Korea’s getting nuclear weapons. On cue, a sudden breeze sent willow leaves fluttering onto the party.

No, Bush answered, the Clinton administration is to blame.

This provoked a challenge from ABC News’s Martha Raddatz. “How can you say your policy is more successful, given that North Korea has apparently tested a nuclear weapon?” she asked.

Off to the side sat four Bush aides who had been with him through his entire presidency: Josh Bolten, Karl Rove, Steve Hadley and Dan Bartlett. Grayer and thinner on top than they were six years ago, they watched expressionlessly as Bush entered with a spring in his step and a wave to the cameras, then as he left an hour later with less good cheer.

“Thank you for your interest,” Bush said curtly, skipping the usual pleasantries. As he walked back into the Oval Office, he shot a glance in the direction of his aides that showed he was not pleased.

Study Finds Iraq’s Excess Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

from WaPo:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.