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SchNEWS DRILLS FOR THE TRUTH IN PEAK OIL THEORY

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

SchNEWS | From Transition Town workshops to the city slickers at the Financial Times (to over-excited pieces in ill-researched journals like SchNEWS), there’s been more and more interest in ‘Peak Oil’. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the price of a barrel reaching $140+ (down to a mere $115ish at the mo), and more noticeably for most, petrol at the pumps is at record highs. Not to mention UK power companies pushing the burden on to punters with up to 35% price increases.

So, is the reality of scarce energy really beginning to hit home? Is the oil now running out?
The basic premise is what’s known as Hubbert’s Peak. Oil, a finite commodity with an ever expanding demand, will reach its halfway point somewhere in the early 2000s (now) and from then on will irreversibly decline. Hubbert developed his theory in the 1950s when he predicted that America’s domestic oil would peak by the mid 70s. In the mid-80s they realised he was right. Since then others have taken his predictions and expanded them to fit the whole globe, where the consensus has been for a peak in the first decade of the 21st century.

Scary stuff, and not just for gas guzzling SUV drivers but for all of us; it’s oil that fuels the equipment that sows and reaps our crops (and makes the pesticides to slowly kill us with blemish-free uniform produce) and oil that fuels the trucks that drive the food to our shops. Add to this plastics, fertilisers, and all the other by products it becomes easy to predict apocalypse if the pumps ever run dry (see SchNEWS 499).

Something like this actually happened not so long ago, back in the ‘90s, in that wacky dictatorship called North Korea. The industrialised and oil dependent nation found itself without petroleum after its sole provider - the Soviet Union - collapsed. The result was that, far from western eyes, over a million people died as the infrastructure collapsed. And, so warns the Peak Oil doomsayers, this could happen on a global scale.

WELL WELL WELL

All of this has some anarcho-primitivists jumping with glee at the prospect of the imminent collapse of earth-raping industrial capitalist society. But, before you stock up on tinned goods, shotgun cartridges and bottled water, here’s a few things to consider:

Firstly, there’s no oil shortage. This may come as a bit of a surprise to all those who’ve been watching the prices rise and rise. As the Saudis recently pointed out to outgoing President Bush - pumping more oil won’t lower the price. Actually, there’s a glut of oil in the supply markets. The Iranians (one of the oil nations pumping under their maximum capacity) have tankers full of the stuff that they just can’t shift because no one wants it. What’s lacking is refining capacity.

While oil use in the US has increased 35% in the last 30 years, no new refineries have been built to keep up with demand. The ability to turn oil into petrol, diesel, aviation fuel etc is massively underdeveloped by the oil corporations, who generally like to keep refining to ‘safe’ (i.e. Western and friendly) countries. By artificially creating a bottleneck in the amount of usable oil, the price just goes up and up, leading to massive profits for the oil business as this nice little scam can keep functioning. Exxon Mobil made profits of $11.8 bn in the last quarter alone, and the other big five oil companies are making similarly obscene dosh. The scam has worked pretty well so far.

The predictions of world oil reserves are based on proven, reachable oil. This is a tricky concept because, as it turns out, there’s a whole lot of ‘unproven’ marginal oil that’s already making its way on to world markets. The most known about of these are the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. Until very recently (when the technology became economical on a large scale) these were considered ‘unproven,’ yet a lot of these are now making their way to the US (and world) oil markets.

The tars sands, also known as bitumen, are a very dirty form of oil, one that’s very expensive, polluting and energy hungry to exploit and process. It takes the equivalent of one barrel of oil to extract six barrels of oil from the tar sands. They also happen to be located in an area of unspoilt natural wilderness, but hey, what profitable minerals aren’t these days? Canada’s tar sands contain an amount of oil in excess of that under Saudi Arabia’s sands. And exploiting them is fast becoming its most profitable activity.

Venezuela has similar deposits of bitumen in Orinoco, and significantly larger than Canada’s. They’re estimated at around 260 million barrels (i.e. another Saudi Arabia) on top of the 80 million or so of ordinary oil. They’re easier to exploit than Canada’s and are barely touched. It’s no wonder that the US has got such a keen interest in the actions of Venezuelan President, Hugo the Chavmeister. Industry experts had been saying that these areas will become among the world’s future energy heartlands, but that until oil was worth over $40 per barrel it was too expensive to develop. Oil’s now worth over $100 and will be so for some time to come, so go figure.

CRUDE THOUGHTS

A real danger of Peak Oil, or rather, the fear of peak oil, is that it risks handing states and corporations even more planet-wrecking power. If people believe the oil is running out, then pressure from consumers and businesses alike is to find more at any cost. This is already being written into the US election strategy of the republicans, where John McCain is promoting drilling in the Arctic Circle as a way out of the energy ‘crisis’.

This could lead to a seriously deadly irony: The warnings of Peak Oil by environmentalists could lead to the erosion of the public’s psychological barriers protecting the few remaining areas of wilderness left. There’s oil in unknown (but quite possibly huge) quantities in Greenland, as well as plenty in Alaska, where the Bush junta has already green-lighted the destructive process of exploring and exploiting. The Russians have laid their claim to their chunk of the Arctic Circle too, with an eye to expansion for more oil.

And, in a genuinely insane piece of economic logic, as global warming melts the Arctic’s frozen seas, the previously unreachable oil reserves that lay under the ice become more exploitable, and, as they are burned, yet more undersea oil becomes available. Or if that runs out there’s always the Antarctic…

And if these reserves still don’t prove to be quite enough to satisfy demand, there’s always ole king coal. China, main producers of the world’s plastic consumer tat, is rich in coal but virtually empty of large oil deposits.

To keep their economy expanding at its current pace they are building two coal fired power stations a week. However, they need oil as well for their cars and trucks (and tanks). As oil’s expensive and foreign suppliers can be notoriously unreliable (they haven’t as yet turned to Amercian-style invasion of oil producers) what they really crave is a domestic source of oil, which they don’t have.

Or at least didn’t, until they turned to the combined wisdom of the Nazis and the apartheid-era South Africans. Both the Nazis during the war and the South Africans during sanctions found it hard to import oil. Luckily for them a German scientist found a way to turn coal into synthetic oil, known as the Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis. It’s a very energy hungry process (of course) and needless to say massively polluting (obviously) but it does mean that, even if oil is tricky to get hold of, you can just magic some out of coal - kind of like a very dirty alchemy that’s bad for the planet.

China has already constructed its first huge synthetic oil refinery in Chinese Mongolia.

PRICE OF SUCCESS?

The current cost of oil, often mistaken as a indicator of its scarcity, is actually driven by far more complex forces.

As a commodity like any other, it’s traded on the international markets via brokers. In recent years the power of the cartel that set the price of oil, OPEC, has been significantly reduced, and now it’s the speculators that call the shots on its price (more or less - OPEC still caries a lot of weight, but it’s a player now rather than the whole game). That means that, as long as the price of oil is rising, speculators will push the price even higher.

It’s estimated that as much as 60% of the price of today’s oil is pure speculation. To give an example of the logic of nonsense capitalism: Today oil is worth, say $125 a barrel. As the price is going up, you, a speculator, figure that if you buy some at that price today, you can sell it in a week or two for $135. Because you’re buying oil, other speculators have more confidence the price will continue upwards, so they’re happy to pay $130 after you.

This continues until no one who actually needs to use oil for their cars, homes or businesses etc. can even afford to refill their zippo lighters, at which point the entire economy crashes, taking the price of oil with it.

In fact, herein lies one of the central flaws in the theory of peak oil - supply and demand: that fundamental essential of capitalism. If the price of oil goes up as its demand goes up (and its availability goes down) then at some point it will be too expensive for oil based industrial capitalism to afford. At that point we enter a new depression/recession. Businesses collapse, people can’t afford to run their cars, factories grind to a halt and so on. The effect of a depression means that, with the entire economy in free fall, the demand for oil drops. As the demand drops so does its price, until at some point people can afford to buy it again, and, hurrah, capitalism reasserts itself (albeit in a leaner, less carbon-heavy form).

DRILLER KILLER

The truth is that the oil has already peaked for Western multinationals. In the 70s, major Western oil giants controlled over half the world’s oil, they now only own 13%. As Arjun Murti, an energy analyst at Goldman Sachs puts it: “What we have now is geopolitical peak oil.”

There’s plenty of oil left, but it’s all in either politically unstable / US-unfriendly states (Iraq, Iran, Russia) or difficult and expensive to get at (the Arctic, Canadian tar sands). These alternative sources of fossil fuels could keep us going well into the future, past our lifetimes and maybe even that of our grandchildren. The problem is: exactly that. The effect of burning a trillion tons of coal and perhaps a trillion barrels of oil is that the planet will burn up faster than a petrol-soaked moth near a candle. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the world’s leading authority) predict a global temperature rise of at least 3°C by 2050, with further predictions that CO² and climate temperatures will rise and rise.

Mother nature has been steadily locking away excess carbon under the ground for the last three billion years in order to maintain a steady, liveable temperature for all of us life-forms. Suddenly, us wayward children have begun reversing the process, sticking it back in the air. In the process we’re experimenting with the atmosphere on an unprecedented scale, causing massive changes to the climate and biosphere, driving many species to extinction on a par with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The real problem isn’t that we’re going to run out of fossil fuels. The problem is what happens when we don’t…

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Bush Seeks to Affirm a Continuing War on Terror

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

By ERIC LICHTBLAU | WASHINGTON — Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush’s defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush’s advisers assert that many Americans may have forgotten that. So they want Congress to say so and “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”

The language, part of a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.

Some lawmakers are concerned that the administration’s effort to declare anew a war footing is an 11th-hour maneuver to re-establish its broad interpretation of the president’s wartime powers, even in the face of challenges from the Supreme Court and Congress.

The proposal is also the latest step that the administration, in its waning months, has taken to make permanent important aspects of its “long war” against terrorism. From a new wiretapping law approved by Congress to a rewriting of intelligence procedures and F.B.I. investigative techniques, the administration is moving to institutionalize by law, regulation or order a wide variety of antiterrorism tactics.

“This seems like a final push by the administration before they go out the door,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a former lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency and an expert on national security law. The cumulative effect of the actions, Ms. Spaulding said, is to “put the onus on the next administration” — particularly a Barack Obama administration — to justify undoing what Mr. Bush has done.

It is uncertain whether Congress will take the administration up on its request. Some Republicans have already embraced the idea, with Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, introducing a measure almost identical to the administration’s proposal. “Since 9/11,” Mr. Smith said, “we have been at war with an unconventional enemy whose primary goal is to kill innocent Americans.”

In the midst of an election season, the language represents a political challenge of sorts to the administration’s critics. While many Democrats say they are wary of Mr. Bush’s claims to presidential power, they may be even more nervous about casting a vote against a measure that affirms the country’s war against terrorism. They see the administration’s effort to force the issue as little more than a political ploy.

Mr. Bush “is trying to stir up again the politics of fear by reminding people of something they haven’t really forgotten: that we are engaged in serious armed conflict with Al Qaeda,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard and legal adviser to Mr. Obama. “But the question is, Where is that conflict to be waged, and by what means.”

With violence rising in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden still at large, there are ample signs of the United States’ continued battles with terrorism. But Mr. Bush and his advisers say that seven years without an attack has lulled many Americans.

“As Sept. 11, 2001, recedes into the past, there are some people who have come to think of it as kind of a singular event and of there being nothing else out there,” Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey told House lawmakers in July. “In a way, we are the victims of our own success, our own success being that another attack has been prevented.”

Mr. Mukasey laid out the administration’s thinking in a July 21 speech to a conservative Washington policy institute in response to yet another rebuke on presidential powers by the Supreme Court: its ruling that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay , were entitled to habeas corpus rights to contest their detentions in court.

The administration wants Congress to set out a narrow framework for those prisoner appeals. But the administration’s six-point proposal goes further. It includes not only the broad proclamation of a continued “armed conflict with Al Qaeda,” but also the desire for Congress to “reaffirm that for the duration of the conflict the United States may detain as enemy combatants those who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated organizations.”

That broad language hints at why Democrats, and some Republicans, worry about the consequences. It could, they say, provide the legal framework for Mr. Bush and his successor to assert once again the president’s broad interpretation of the commander in chief’s wartime powers, powers that Justice Department lawyers secretly used to justify the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects and the National Security Agency’s wiretapping of Americans without court orders.

The language recalls a resolution, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001. It authorized the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to prevent future strikes. That authorization, still in effect, was initially viewed by many members of Congress who voted for it as the go-ahead for the administration to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban, which had given sanctuary to Mr. bin Laden.

But the military authorization became the secret legal basis for some of the administration’s most controversial legal tactics, including the wiretapping program, and that still gnaws at some members of Congress.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he wanted to make sure the Bush administration — or a future president — did not use that declaration as “another far-fetched interpretation” to evade the law, the way he believes Mr. Bush and aides like Alberto R. Gonzales, the former attorney general, did in using the wiretapping program to avoid the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“I don’t want to face another situation where we had the Sept. 14 resolution and then Attorney General Gonzales claimed that that was authorization to violate FISA,” Mr. Specter said.

For Bush critics like Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, the answer is simple: do not give the administration the wartime language it seeks.

“I do not believe that we are in a state of war whatsoever,” Mr. Fein said. “We have an odious opponent that the criminal justice system is able to identify and indict and convict. They’re not a goliath. Don’t treat them that way.”

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Protesters denied access to attorneys, forced to march in leg shackles, ACLU charges

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

By John Byrne | The ACLU issued a stinging rebuke to the Denver Police Department Wednesday, alleging that the department may have violated laws and constitutional rights of protesters arrested outside the Democratic National Convention.

In the letter, obtained by RAW STORY, the ACLU revealed that the police refused those arrested access to attorneys. Police did not let detainees use phones unless they posted their own bonds, and even failed to provide shoes, in one case marching a protester into court in bare feet and leg shackles, according the ACLU.

What’s more, police are said to have tricked protesters into pleading guilty, by giving them the impression they had to plead guilty in order to post bond. This meant that no one was allowed to make a phone call unless they plead guilty, thus making it impossible for arrestees to even call a lawyer until admitting guilt.

Most ominously, the ACLU letter claims that protesters were told they would be “facing ‘years’ in jail for a conviction of a single particular charge.”

“In fact, all the charges were municipal court violations that do not carry such penalties,” the ACLU added in a footnote.

Charges for arrestees were issued on pre-printed forms, where police were told to “cross out” charges that they were not facing. In many cases, police failed to cross out inappropriate charges, and so the detainee would be charged with “begging, loitering and throwing stones and missiles,” the ACLU said.

Nor were protesters even given the chance to back down before they were arrested.

“It is not clear whether any order to disperse was given. No Legal Observer [sic], witness or arrestee on the scene we’ve debriefed heard any order to disperse,” wrote Taylor Pendergrass, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Colorado. “Numerous persons, including Legal Observers, asked to be able to leave the blockaded area and were refused.”

“After the arrests, attorneys from the People’s Law Project and the ACLU arrived at the [Temporary Arrestee Processing Site to conduct confidential attorney-client consultations," Pendergrass continued. "The City refused to provide any access to allow these persons to meet with attorneys."

Perhaps the most outrageous charge, however, is that one protester was forced to march barefoot into court in leg shackles.

"Arrestees were kept barefoot at [the detention center],” Pendergrass wrote. “I personally saw one such arrestee later at the City and County Building. I saw her marched from the elevator to the courtroom in bare feet and leg shackles. I saw her appear in bare feet and leg shackles.”

“Some arrestees who could not make their own bond spent 6, 7, 8, or more hours waiting at TAPS before being transferred to court,” he added.

Pendergrass also elaborates on the detainees being kept from being able to talk to a lawyer. The only opportunity lawyers had to speak with those arrested was in front of the jury gallery or in open court in front of the judge.

“The only access we were given to those clients was to whisper,” he wrote.

Among the seemingly more minor complaints, Pendergrass also notes that many detainees weren’t able to eat because they were vegetarian or vegan and the city mostly provided meat-based food.

In addition, he said that the city was well aware that the ACLU and other groups had arranged for attorneys to be present. “Attorneys were at the court from 11 pm on the night of Aug. 25, 2008 and were staying until each and every arrestee came to the City and County Building.”

In conclusion, the ACLU demands the City permit attorney access at the detention facility; provide blankets, shoes and slippers; allow phone calls immediately upon entering the facility; permit detainees to use restrooms individually and privately; and permit confidential attorney-client consultations in the City and County Building.

Last week, New York City agreed to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit claiming 52 Iraq war activists were unjustly arrested.

The activists were arrested in April 2003 outside the Manhattan offices of a military contractor, the Carlyle Group.

Lawyers for the activists charged that the tactics used by police at the demonstration were similar to those used a year later when hundreds of activists were arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden.

The city of New York and police department faced backlash after the convention, with critics claiming the aggressive response showed a blatant disregard for the demonstrators’ civil rights.

PDF OF FULL ACLU LETTER CAN BE READ AT THIS LINK

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POLITICS DRIVEN BY FICTION: MADE FOR TV

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

By Sam Smith | The confluence of Barack Obama’s stadium acceptance extravaganza and John McCain’s pick for vice president offers superfluous but final proof that Americans have been consigned to spend their lives as part of a crowd scene in an HBO special. Both Obama and Palin have come out of nowhere, rising to preeminence not on the basis of achievements, politics or service but by having all the qualities an ad executive looks for when trying to market a new product. What the Mad Men of the 1960s sought in cigarettes and cars, their 21st century equivalents now apply to candidates.

Of course, at some point reality enters and we find that the cigarettes bringing us springtime on one puff and the cars taking us to heaven weren’t what they seemed. Or, as ad executive Jerry Della Famina once put it, “There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster.” Which is one reason why, as our marketing skills have improved, both our economy and politics have declined.

If you step way from the politics and reality, the marketing of Obama has been remarkable if not necessarily all productive. Dana Milbank gave the feel:

|||| Obama’s everyman efforts are unlikely to be aided by accepting the nomination in front of Greek-style columns in the middle of a football stadium. Privately, Democrats cringed. . . Luckily, Democrats had the foresight to remove the Air Force One model, the presidential limousine, the full-size replica of the Oval Office and the inauguration gowns that had been on exhibit earlier in the week. . .

Instead of savoring the history-making, Obama aides found themselves answering questions about the columns and the stadium from anxious Democrats and from journalists . . .

After nightfall, the nominee emerged between the columns, walked out to the wedding cake and waved skyward. He delivered a speech that soared to the heights of Mount Olympus. . .

The speech ended, the nominee gazed heavenward, and red, white and blue fireworks poured from the tops of the columns. Streamers hung over the Doric frieze. Triumphant orchestral music played, and Obama, his running mate, and his family departed through the still-smoking Pillars of Hercules. ||||

It may seem stunning that an otoh botoh (on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand) unaccomplished centrist whose vaunted eloquence is so elusive that his only words regularly quoted are marketing slogans like “change we can believe in” and “yes we can” has made it so far so quickly. Yet if you study the other work of some of his major backers in Hollywood such as David Geffin it becomes less surprising. For example, as I watched the stadium oration, the trailer for Genghis Khan drifted into my head.

The marketing effort for Obama has been aided immensely by a media that no longer offers the relief of facts but functions as movie critics, applauding the skill or failure of fictions rather than comparing them to reality. Proof of this shift is that candidates have submerged positions or policies in favor of narratives, once the skill of novelists and playwrights rather than those engaged in the real. In the past month alone, the term narrative has been used along with the word campaign over 2200 times in new stories. And the Democratic convention speeches were as stuffed with appealing personal sagas as they were lacking in ideas or arguments.

The media commentary has also been hyperbolic in the extreme. Howard Fineman claimed that “If you know American history, you know that Obama’s nomination is the social equivalent of landing a man on the moon.” And Radar reported that ” Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews kicked things off right with some unabashed rejoicing (replete with comparisons to Alexander the Great and Aaron Sorkin). . . Political analyst Michelle Bernard later tried to keep things in perspective by admitting that she watched the speech alone in the green room so she could weep and declaring that it was ‘the greatest day in our nation’s history.’”

In fact, the nomination of a bi-ethnic candidate for president was only a matter of time rather than of effort and it insults an entire civil rights era to give it such an overblown status. Obama has been trained, financed and comforted by the white establishment and while this is not his fault, neither does it compare with the pain and suffering of those who paved his way.

Further, in its groupie-like enthusiasm, the media has ignored major matters such as another speech Obama gave in Colorado some weeks before the convention. In it he made the extraordinarily frightening promise that “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

With Google’s news search, one comes up with only two media citations of this comment, both by conservative journals.

Besides, before one assigns too much credit to Obama’s purported intrinsic qualities, consider that Hillary Clinton came within inches of being successfully recreated as a sturdy defender of the working class as well as having all her past sins, lies and near indictment totally exorcised from public discussion. It’s amazing what the Mad Men can do with enough money floating around.

And now, less than 24 hours after Obama departed the Albert Spearian stage in Denver a new product has been introduced: Sarah Palin.

Palin is where Obama was four years ago: overwhelmingly unknown and suddenly selected by powers that be for a leading role in another made for TV special. While Obama was young, bi-ethnic, smart and unthreatening, Palin also has plenty of meat for the Mad Men, witness this from Wikipedia:

|||| Palin was born as Sarah Louise Heath in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Charles and Sally (Sheeran) Heath. Her family moved to Alaska when she was an infant. Charles Heath was a popular science teacher and coached track. The Heaths were avid outdoors enthusiasts; Sarah and her father would sometimes wake at 3 a.m. to hunt moose before school, and the family would regularly run 5k and 10k races.

Palin was the point guard and captain for the Wasilla High School Warriors, in Wasilla, Alaska, when they won the Alaska small-school basketball championship in 1982; she earned the nickname “Sarah Barracuda” because of her intense play. She played the championship game despite a stress fracture in her ankle, hitting a critical free throw in the last seconds. Palin, who was also the head of the school Fellowship of Christian Athletes, would lead the team in prayer before games.

In 1984, Palin was second-place in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant after winning the Miss Wasilla contest earlier that year, winning a scholarship to help pay her way through college. In the Wasilla pageant, she played the flute and also won Miss Congeniality.

Palin holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Idaho where she also minored in politics.

Her husband, Todd, is a Native Yup’ik Eskimo. Outside the fishing season, Todd works for BP at an oil field on the North Slope and is a champion snowmobiler, winning the 2000-mile “Iron Dog” race four times. The two eloped shortly after Palin graduated college; when they learned they needed witnesses for the civil ceremony, they recruited two residents from the old-age home down the street.

She briefly worked as a sports reporter for local Anchorage television stations while also working as a commercial fisherman with her husband, Todd, her high school sweetheart. One summer when she was working on Todd’s fishing boat, the boat collided with a tender while she was holding onto the railing; Palin broke several fingers.

On September 11, 2007, the Palins’ son Track joined the Army. Eighteen years old at the time, he is the eldest of Palin’s five children. Track now serves in an infantry brigade and will be deployed to Iraq in September. She also has three daughters: Bristol, 17, Willow, 13, and Piper, 7. On April 18, 2008, Palin gave birth to her second son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, who has Down syndrome. She returned to the office three days after giving birth. Palin refused to let the results of prenatal genetic testing change her decision to have the baby. “I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection,” Palin said. “Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?”

Details of Palin’s personal life have contributed to her political image. She hunts, eats moose hamburger, ice fishes, rides snowmobiles, and owns a float plane. Palin holds a lifetime membership with the National Rifle Association. She admits that she used marijuana when it was legal in Alaska, but says that she did not like it. ||||

If you were looking for something to replace the Obama special on HBO, this wouldn’t be a bad narrative. And just as irrelevant to what we should be talking and thinking about.

Some years ago the Green Party in Germany was divided into two groups known as the fundis and the realos. While the definitions aren’t applicable - the fundis held to core Green priniciples while the realos wheeled and dealed with the other parties - the names seem to fit well what has happened to Democratic politics. The liberal fundis - like Christian fundamentalists - are content with an icon with whom to deposit not only their hope but any critical thought about what such a course might produce. Fundi liberals are not new; they first appeared in large numbers with the campaign of Bill Clinton, the most right wing Democratic presidential candidate in over 60 years. These liberals essentially gave up thinking about anything other that which the Clinton regime wanted and Clinton took full advantage of them. The same is going on with Obama, a jettisoning of any serious interest in policies and programs in favor of blind faith in a particular leader. History tells us that little good comes of this.

In fact, you need only check the lack of significant liberal activity in anti-war, anti-torture and efforts to preserve the constitution to see how incapable the fundi libs are of anything beyond adoration.

Realos are those who still believe in working on issues and understand that politicians play a complicated and often contradictory role in achieving their goals. They know Obama will be good about some things and awful about others. They know that his post-partisanship so far only appears to include outreach to conservatives. And while they know that he would be better than Bush or McCain, blind complicity in a phony political “narrative” that relieves him of all pressure to do right is a disaster waiting just a few months to happen.

It is truly scary to be a realo these days, to be told repeatedly that it is enough to have hope and faith and that , implicitly, everything politics is meant to be about really doesn’t matter. It is sad to find how little liberal participation there has been in efforts to save the Constitution or to press for sanity in numerous other areas. It is painful to find those whose job description is the description of reality - that is to say, the media - enthralled by endless fictional manipulations.

But it is where we are and those who prefer reality to fiction are badly outnumbered on both the left and the right. In the end, as it always does, reality decides to speak for itself and, when it does, we then wonder why we hadn’t thought about it sooner.

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Diebold Finally Admits its Voting Machines Drop Votes

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

By Bruce Schneier | Premier Election Solutions, formerly called Diebold Election Systems, has finally admitted that a ten-year-old error has caused votes to be dropped.

It’s unclear if this error is random or systematic. If it’s random — a small percentage of all votes are dropped — then it is highly unlikely that this affected the outcome of any election. If it’s systematic — a small percentage of votes for a particular candidate are dropped — then it is much more problematic.

Ohio is trying to sue:

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is seeking to recover millions of dollars her state spent on the touch-screen machines and is urging the state legislature to require optical scanners statewide instead.In a lawsuit, Brunner charged on Aug. 6 that touch-screen machines made by the former Diebold Election Systems and bought by 11 Ohio counties “produce computer stoppages” or delays and are vulnerable to “hacking, tampering and other attacks.” In all, 44 Ohio counties spent $83 million in 2006 on Diebold’s touch screens.

In other news, election officials sometimes take voting machines home for the night.

My 2004 essay: “Why Election Technology is Hard.”

Have Your Say: Diebold Finally Admits its Voting Machines Drop Votes
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Blair has no right to lecture on the rule of law

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

By Inayat Bunglawala | Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, has been lecturing Russia on the need to respect Ukrainian and Georgian sovereignty. He doesn’t seem to realise how incongruous this sounds to much of the world, given Britain’s own disregard of international law.

In a similar vein, our former prime minister, Tony Blair, also caused wry smiles earlier this month when he visited Malaysia to give the Universiti Malaya’s 22nd Sultan Azlan Shah lecture on Upholding the Rule of Law: A Reflection.

Blair argued that this means “rules and procedures that are transparent, and rules of evidence that make sense and are fair. These basic principles apply universally and without them, the rule of law means little or nothing.”

As you can imagine, the topic Blair sought to address was a source of both amusement and disbelief among the Malaysians.

This is what the vice-chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, had to say: “It is quite obvious from casual observation that someone who has been known to have misled others, including the country’s parliament, has lost the moral authority to preach about the rule of law and good governance … One wonders then what ‘basic principles’ Blair had in mind when he gave an almost unconditional support for the unilateral decision to invade Iraq against the wishes of the international community and without the approval of the UN … Indeed, as late as April 2006, when an eminent British former law lord attacked Guantanamo Bay as ‘a stain on American justice’, Blair reportedly refused to follow suit. According to Lord Steyn, who just retired from Britain’s highest court: ‘While our government condones Guantanamo Bay, the world is perplexed about our approach to the rule of law. You may ask: how will it help in regard to the continuing outrage at Guantanamo Bay for our government now to condemn it. The answer is that it would at last be a powerful signal to the world that Britain supports the international rule of law.’”

The former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, was characteristically blunt: “It is disgusting to see this criminal of the highest order being welcomed in Malaysia and worse still to talk on the rule of law when he broke all international laws and the laws of his own country by deliberately lying and sending young British soldiers to die in a war of aggression.”

Mahathir added that: “Saddam has been hanged, Karadzic was recently arrested, but this man goes around the world, lecturing on the rule of law.”

Roger Tan, a member of the Malaysian Bar Council, asked if, “by supporting and participating in the 2003 United States-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, I wonder whether Britain, being the world’s oldest democracy, still possesses moral authority in a comity of nations to lecture on the principle of rule of law.”

I visited the official Tony Blair website to read his own account of what had transpired in Malaysia. Unfortunately, I could find no mention made of the trip.

Have Your Say: Blair has no right to lecture on the rule of law
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3,000 Vets, War Protesters Hand-Deliver Their Message

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

By Patti Thorn | DNEVER - “Follow Us. Welcome to Denver,” read the electronic sign on the police vehicle.

And with that conciliatory gesture, an unpermitted march for peace was allowed to proceed Wednesday afternoon through downtown Denver streets - peacefully.

It was easily the largest demonstration in a week filled with them.

See video of the march here and here.

At least 3,000 Iraq war veterans and war protesters marched from the Denver Coliseum to the Pepsi Center perimeter. The veterans’ ultimate goal was to deliver a statement to presidential candidate Barack Obama, urging him to promote the immediate withdrawal of “all occupying forces” from Iraq, among other points.

After about an hourlong standoff with police at the end of the march, contact was made with an Obama aide. Mission accomplished.

Co-sponsored by the anti-war group Tent State University and the Iraq Veterans Against the War, the march began around 3:15 p.m. outside the coliseum after 9,800 people attended a free concert featuring the heavy metal/rap band Rage Against the Machine and three other acts.

During the four-hour show, audience members were urged to join the demonstration. Band members and others stressed the need for the march to remain peaceful.

At one point, rapper Jonny 5 of Denver’s Flobots referred to conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, who has been widely quoted as saying it would be his “dream” for riots to break out in Denver during the convention. The musician told the crowd the worst thing they could do was make that dream come true.

While some feared police would attempt to stop the march, officers surprised the group by escorting the protesters through city streets, redirecting traffic and pedestrians along the way.

“Under the totality of all the circumstances, it was handled in a manner that best addressed the public safety at the time,” said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the Joint Information Center, a clearinghouse for convention security information.

The group of mostly young people walked behind a banner that said: “Support GI Resistance.”

Wearing T-shirts and stickers with slogans such as “Arrest Bush” and “Make Out Not War,” they sang rolling chants, Marine- style. “Tell Me What We’re Marching For,” sang one group. “Stop the torture, stop the war,” answered another.

People lined the streets to watch, most approvingly.

As the marchers wound their way through the neighborhoods west of the coliseum, they found solidarity with a group of Latinos holding up an anti-war sign and cheering them on. “Si, se puede!” shouted some young marchers. “Yes, we can!”

But not all were supportive. From the balcony of an apartment complex, a man yelled at the throngs to move on. “Don’t come back here,” he said.

As the march wore on under a hot sun, some dropped out. Others found ways to take shortcuts. Two teens on the 16th Street Mall shuttle wearing Rage Against the Machine T-shirts admitted they had skipped part of the march and planned to join it as it neared the end.

One foot clad in a black shoe, the other barefoot, James Koller, 17, explained: “Someone clocked me in the face and took my shoe in the mosh pit. This is a quicker route to the Pepsi Center.”

Koller’s friend, Joey Minicucci, 18, of Littleton, noted that his brother was in the military and would soon be sent to Iraq. That was one of the reasons he was going to the march.

Anne Hill, of Montrose, had other reasons. “I’m marching because it seems to be the last vestiges of our free speech and because people have demands and our government’s not listening,” she said.

The march came to a standstill at the perimeter of the Pepsi Center around 6:30 p.m., at which time the veterans attempted to have their statement delivered to Obama. Tension with police seemed to escalate, until several veterans stepped forward and saluted police.

“We are your brothers and sisters in arms,” said one. “We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want you to hurt us.”

With that, the standoff melted away and soon an appropriate aide was contacted.

“I figured as long as we kept things peaceful, they would hear us, and they did,” said Army veteran Jeffrey Wood.

Staff writers Allison Bruce, Daniel J. Chacon, Abigail Curtis, Jeff Kass, Dan Kelley, Sue Lindsay, Steve Myers and Judi Villa contributed to this report.

Have Your Say: 3,000 Vets, War Protesters Hand-Deliver Their Message
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