Critical Exponent

Is there any doubt that America is turning into a dictatorship? When the government censors scientific discourse, it is time to be very afraid:

“There was a story about a scientist who got authorized to speak at a conference. He was prohibited from using the phrase ‘global warming.’ He was allowed to say ‘global,’ and he could say ‘warming,’ but he couldn’t put them next to each other. It became a charade,” [U.S. Rep. Peter Welch] said.

Obviously, Bush & company want to continue sacrificing peer review on the altar of dogma. Nothing like making public policy with blinders on!

A Senate report concludes there was no pre-war link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The response by the administration that likes to talk about “personal responsibility”?

White House spokesman Tony Snow dismissed the report, saying, “We’ll let people quibble over three years ago.”

A shrug of the shoulders is all Americans get as thanks for sending their children off to be killed for the profit of plutocrats.

Watch this. Please. Or at least read the transcript.

Apparently, Republicans entirely funded the Pennsylvania Green Party Senate campaign. Presumably the idea is to split the liberal vote so that Santorum can get re-elected.

If this doesn’t make the case for instant runoff voting, I don’t know what does.

Sen. Kennedy, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, shows how the judicial confirmation process has been badly damaged in the Bush administration, with candidates’ opaqueness and promises of fair-mindedness being no more than empty promises abandoned for partisan agendas once on the bench:

[T]he careful, bipartisan [judicial confirmation] process of years past — like so many checks and balances rooted in our Constitution — has been badly broken by the current Bush administration. The result has been the confirmation of two justices, John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr., whose voting record on the court reflects not the neutral, modest judicial philosophy they promised the Judiciary Committee, but an activist’s embrace of the administration’s political and ideological agenda.

Now that the votes are in from their first term, we can see plainly the agenda that Roberts and Alito sought to conceal from the committee. Our new justices consistently voted to erode civil liberties, decrease the rights of minorities and limit environmental protections. At the same time, they voted to expand the power of the president, reduce restrictions on abusive police tactics and approve federal intrusion into issues traditionally governed by state law.

He goes on to discuss how the nomination process should be reformed:

The discussion should start with a few truths. First, any qualified nominee to the Supreme Court will have spent many years thinking about legal issues. We should require that nominees share that thinking with the Judiciary Committee, and not pretend that such candor is tantamount to prejudging specific cases. In particular, the Senate should have the same access to the nominee’s writings as the administration.

Remember Jim Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies? He was the one that the Bush administration tried to silence after he gave a public warning that the current rate of fossil fuel use will make the earth into “a different planet.”

Hansen’s work is the subject of an article in Technology Review that explains how danegrously close we are to the point of no return. Look at this graph. It appears that every 100,000 years, small oscillations in the earth’s orbit cause minute changes in the amount of, and larger changes in the distribution of, sunlight on the earth. These changes caused natural fluctuactions in carbon dioxide levels, which in turn led to temperature fluctuations on the order of 5°C, enough to change ocean levels by 100 meters. It appears we are in the middle of such a natural fluctuation right now.

Now look at the very right edge of the graph. Carbon dioxide levels have skyrocketed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This is clearly not part of any natural cycle– and is a harbinger of dire consequences:

Owing to greenhouse changes we have already incurred, Hansen told his audience in San Francisco, Earth’s temperature will rise about 0.5 ºC in the next 50 years even if we stop burning fossil fuels today. We’re on a slippery slope: we could cross a threshold that leads to a drastically different planet, half a century before knowing that we’ve done so. Hansen believes we are horrifyingly close to such a threshold, and that we will cross it if we don’t change our greenhouse ways within the next few years.

Earth is now passing upward through the highest temperatures of the past 12,000 years, and the half a degree that is already in the pipeline will bring temperatures within half a degree of the high points they have reached only a few times in the past two million years. During a warm period about 120,000 years ago, for example, sea levels were probably five or six meters higher than they are today.

Running future emissions scenarios on a GISS computer model, Hansen finds that if we remain on the path he calls “business as usual,” temperatures will rise between two and three degrees this century, making Earth as warm as it was about three million years ago, when the seas were between 15 and 35 meters higher than they are today. There go many major cities and the dwellings of about half a billion people.

The current issue of Technology Review is dedicated to the climate crisis and how the technologies exist to slow down human-induced climate change: time is running out, but it’s not too late yet.

Finally, to the skeptics who refuse to accept these conclusions and are happy to proceed with business as usual, I offer this: No one debates that modern technological advances, and in particular industrialization, change the environment (think strip mining, deforestation) and pollute the atmosphere (think smokestacks) and the oceans (think chemical effluvia). Surely all those byproducts will have some sort of effect, don’t you think? It’s not impossible that the scientists who have spent countless careers studying these phenomena could be wrong, but are you willing to take the chance that maybe, just maybe, they’re right? If we as a species clean up after ourselves and leave the natural world no worse than we found it, then, and only then, can we rest assured that climate fluctuations are not due to our activities.

(n) a ruler who is unconstrained by law

From The Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON — President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Here’s a comparison to other presidents and some examples.

Thanks to Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post for pointing this out.

UPDATE: Some more commentary from Slate.

Sean Wilentz of Princeton writes in Rolling Stone a scathing review of how GWB compares to other presidents, and how he will be judged by history. A fascinating read, well worth the time.

Thanks to AMERICAblog for the pointer.

I stopped by my friendly neighborhood bookstore today and spotted a book by the Center for Constitutional Rights called Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush. I did a web search for “articles of impeachment bush” and found quite a few hits about bringing Bush to justice, and justice to the public. There are activist sites such as ImpeachBush.org and ImpeachPAC and informational sites such as the Wikipedia entry.

Have you had enough of the lying, the abuse of power, the deaths, the lack of privacy, the decline of government accountability, the disregard for the environment, the hubris of the prepotent, tha cozy deals for the well-connected, the shafting of the underprivileged, the distortion of science, the censoring of public health information, and the theocratic dogma spewing from the halls of power?

Get involved! Stay informed! Show your dissatisfaction this Novermber! And call for the impeachment of the man accountable.

… that it could trigger a Homeland Security investigation.