"When environmentalists are writing tracts like "The Death of Environmentalism," you know the movement is in deep trouble.
That essay by two young environmentalists has been whirling around the Internet since last fall, provoking a civil war among tree-huggers for its assertion that "modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live." Sadly, the authors, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, are right.
The U.S. environmental movement is unable to win on even its very top priorities, even though it has the advantage of mostly being right. Oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may be approved soon, and there's been no progress whatsoever in the U.S. on what may be the single most important issue to Earth in the long run: climate change.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public. Some do great work, but others can be the left's equivalents of the neocons: brimming with moral clarity and ideological zeal, but empty of nuance. (Industry has also hyped risks with wildly exaggerated warnings that environmental protections will entail a terrible economic cost.)"

"Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine's. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty - fish, then crab, then steak.
Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called "devil's brew." A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.
The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:
"Is it decaf?"
I was sitting there in an orgy of excess. My head was fogged with wine, bourbon, conversation and a couple of hours at the craps tables at Harrah's, but strong is the power of the zeitgeist. So I did what all of us middle-aged Prufrocks do when coffee follows dinner. I asked, "Is it decaf?""

"When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit, giving a kung fu kick to any diabolical mastermind who merits it.
I try not to visualize myself as one of the witches in "Macbeth," sitting off to the side over a double, double toil and trouble, bubbling cauldron, muttering about what is fair or foul in the hurly burly of the royal court.
There's an intense debate going on now about why newspapers have so few female columnists. Out of what will soon be eight Times Op-Ed columnists - nine, counting the public editor - I'm the only woman.
In 1996, after six months on the job, I went to Howell Raines, the editorial page editor, to try to get out of the column. I was a bundle of frayed nerves. I felt as though I were in a "Godfather" movie, shooting and getting shot at. Men enjoy verbal dueling. As a woman, I told Howell, I wanted to be liked - not attacked. He said I could go back to The Metro Section; I decided to give it another try. Bill Safire told me I needed Punzac, Prozac for pundits.
Guys don't appreciate being lectured by a woman. It taps into myths of carping Harpies and hounding Furies, and distaste for nagging by wives and mothers. The word "harridan" derives from the French word "haridelle" - a worn-out horse or nag."

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Guns and Poses: "DOWN at the crossroads of Hudson and West Houston Streets, where the radio station WQHT, Hot 97, broadcasts hip-hop programming, music and violence seem inextricable. Last week there was a sidewalk gun battle between the entourages of the rising rap star known as the Game and his former mentor, 50 Cent, while the latter was in the studios doing an interview to promote his new CD. Meanwhile, in a Manhattan federal court, testimony continues in the trial of rap artist Lil' Kim, who has been charged with perjury and conspiracy for her responses to questioning on the matter of a 2001 pistol fight outside the WQHT offices between her followers and those of a rival, Capone (born Kiam Holley).

In its bloodlust, hip-hop is more old school than many of its fans and critics may realize; in fact, the music is carrying on a tradition as old as the blues. Created by and for indigent African-American sharecroppers in the South a century ago, the blues gave voice to the discontent and anxiety of a subjugated, marginalized people. It was an outlet for rage - as well for joy, sometimes, to palliate that fury - coded in language about domestic matters, to throw off any eavesdropping whites.

Robert Johnson, the iconic early master of country blues, whose legend tells how he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his enigmatic guitar style, laid the bedrock for hip-hop lyrics when he sung freely of gunfire in songs such as '32-20 Blues' (Johnson's rewrite of a tune by a contemporary, Skip James), which he recorded in 1936:

She got a .38 special but I believe it's most too light

I got a 32-20, got to make the caps right...

I'm gonna shoot my pistol, gonna shoot my Gatling gun

You made me love you, now your man have come

Wrath and weaponry of various kinds infused virtually every style of blues in the music's formative years. Bessie Smith, the fearsome sexual provocateur, bellowed (in 'Black Mountain Blues'), 'I'm bound for Black Mountain, me and my razor and my gun/Gonna shoot him if he stands still and cut him if he run.' Lonnie Johnson, the virtuoso of delicate, chamber-style guitar blues, crooned (in 'Got the Blues for Murder Only'), 'I'm going to old Mexico, where there's long, long reaching guns/When they want real excitement, they kill each other one by one.' Leadbelly, the pardoned convict who composed lyrical and earthy folk-blues, entertained nightclub audiences with his tribute to a bartender who shot a policeman, 'Duncan and Brady': 'Brady, Brady carried a .45, said it would shoot half a mile/Duncan had a .44, that what laid Mr. Brady so low.'

Gunpowder helped ignite the blues, which spread and transformed over a century to give us innumerable musical styles from jazz to rock, and nearly every style has an element of the outlaw ethos at its core. Country music has always celebrated renegades, bandits and gunslingers - its founding father, Jimmie Rodgers, yodeled about being 'free from the chain gang now' and Johnny Cash came to epitomize outlaw cool - despite having served only a single day of his life in jail. Even swing had an aura of roguishness before Benny Goodman, with one early big band called the Racketeers of Rhythm.

How does hip-hop fit into this legacy? Awkwardly. While it too has at its heart the fury of profoundly frustrated, often desperate, souls, gunfire-for-show like the Lil' Kim incident and the recent altercation over 50 Cent demean that history through pettiness, self-consciousness and off-handedness.

In blues, the reasons (or rationales) for the violence were ostensibly amatory or otherwise personal, though societal by extension: a broken heart, wounded pride, maltreatment by the boss (standing in for white society). But what was the shooting on Hudson Street about?

Six years ago, Mr. Holley and his group, Capone-N-Noreaga, made a recording with the rapper Foxy Brown in which she referred to Lil' Kim as 'lame.' A year later, Mr. Holley bumped into Lil' Kim's former manager and one of her friends outside the radio station; two dozen rounds later, one of Mr. Holley's associates ended up wounded."

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: They're Back, and Still Unworthy: "The Senate is preparing for a major showdown over the Democrats' use of the filibuster to block a handful of President Bush's judicial nominees. When the arguments about procedures are over, the key question will remain: Has Mr. Bush put up men and women who deserve lifetime appointments to the federal bench? The three nominees who had hearings this month - a mining and ranching industry flunky, a much-reversed judge with an antipathy for individual rights, and a lawyer with a bad habit of not following the rules for practicing law - show why Democrats should stand firm.

There have been widespread calls for the White House to sit down with Senate Democrats and come up with a list of nominees who would be acceptable to both sides. The previous three administrations, of both Republican and Democratic presidents, at least tried to work toward consensus candidates. But the Bush administration has refused to negotiate. It has begun its second term on a particularly controversial note by resubmitting seven nominees who failed to win approval last year after Democratic filibusters. It has also sent back several other nominations on which the Senate had failed to act.

William Myers III, one of the seven filibustered nominees, has built a career as an anti-environmental extremist. He was a longtime lobbyist for the mining and cattle industries. Then, as the Interior Department's top lawyer, he put those industries' interests ahead of the public interest. In one controversial legal opinion, he overturned a decision that would have protected American Indian sacred sites, clearing the way for a company to do extensive mining in the area. Mr. Myers has been nominated to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco. That court plays a major role in determining the environmental law that applies to the Western states.

Terrence Boyle, who has been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, is also a troubling choice. He has an extraordinarily high reversal rate for a district court judge. Many of the decisions that have been criticized by higher courts wrongly rejected claims involving civil rights, sex discrimination and disability rights. Mr. Boyle's record is particularly troubling because the court reversing him, the Fourth Circuit, is perhaps the most hostile to civil rights in the federal appellate system, and even it has regularly found his rulings objectionable.

Thomas Griffith, who has been nominated to the powerful Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has the unfortunate distinction of having practiced law in two jurisdictions without the required licenses. While practicing law in Washington, D.C., he failed to renew his license for three years. Mr. Griffith blamed his law firm's staff for that omission, but the responsibility was his. When he later practiced law in Utah as general counsel at Brigham Young University, he never bothered to get a Utah license.

Mr. Myers, Mr. Boyle, and Mr. Griffith were chosen for their archconservative political views, not their qualifications for the bench. No impartial person interested in choosing only the best possible judges would have put them at the top of the list. The federal judiciary is one of the cornerstones of American government - one of the three branches the nation's founders created, and set against one another, to guide the nation and keep it free. Surely this vital institution deserves better."

Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!: "March 10th, 2005 6:59 pm
Remembering all those arguments made 1,500 deaths ago



By Joseph L. Galloway / Knight Ridder


WASHINGTON - Something about anniversaries prods us to pause and reflect on what's transpired in the intervening time. March 20 is the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and it's a good time to consider what's happened since then.

Do you recall our civilian leadership's rationale for a pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein? President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and, yes, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the world that the United States had no choice but to invade Iraq. They said Saddam was hiding chemical and biological weapons, and that his scientists would be able to produce a nuclear weapon in a few years.

Do you remember those who predicted that the operation would be financed in large part by sales of Iraqi oil? It would be cheap, easy and, oh yes, so swift that civilian leaders in the Pentagon ordered the military to plan to begin withdrawing from Iraq no later than the summer of 2003.

There was no need for much post-war planning because there wasn't going to be any post-war. America would come, conquer and get out. If Iraq was broken, its new government headed by the neo-conservatives' favorite exile, Ahmad Chalabi, could fix it. There would be no need for American nation-building, just some modest humanitarian aid.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office had visions of a replay of the almost effortless destruction of Afghanistan's hated Taliban regime using precision-guided munitions, Special Operations forces with laser pointers and Afghan allies.

In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, less would be more, lighter would be better and faster would be best of all. Any Third World regime could be taken down by a few special operators and some airplanes. The Army's heavy divisions were relics of the Cold War.

When then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki reluctantly answered a senator's persistent questioning by suggesting that occupying and pacifying Iraq, an unruly nation the size of California with 25 million citizens, might require a force of 'hundreds of thousands,' he was mugged by Rumsfeld's minions.

Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz hastened to the Hill the next day and told the legislators that Shinseki's estimate was 'wildly off the mark,' and that Iraq wouldn't be nearly as tough as Afghanistan had been because Iraq didn't have the sort of nasty ethnic divisions one found in Afghanistan.

At that moment, in late February 2003, on the eve of the invasion, the U.S. invasion force of 278,000 American troops began to dwindle as someone tried to prove the job could be done with fewer than Shinseki's 200,000 troops. Call that the Shinseki Threshold.

One division's tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles bobbed around at sea for weeks and arrived too late for the attack. A second division of tanks and Bradley armored vehicles slated for the follow-up to the invasion was canceled; a third division's deployment to Iraq was postponed for several months. Military Police units needed to secure a hundreds of miles of dangerous supply lines - and to establish law and order - disappeared from the war plan.

A strike force that amounted to an Army division and a Marine Expeditionary Force, with Air Force and Navy fighters and bombers, took down Baghdad in three weeks.

But as the invasion forces regrouped, the world witnessed an orgy of looting and burning of government ministry buildings, and even the power plants upon which a city of 11 million people depended. There was no one to prevent it.

Birthing democracy, Rumsfeld allowed, can be 'messy.''

After nearly 18 months, the Pentagon admitted that a team of nearly 1,000 intelligence officials and scientists had combed Iraq for evidence of chemical and biological weapons or any sign of an active nuclear weapons program. They found nothing.

This war that was supposed to be a cakewalk has taken the lives of 1,510 American troops and sent thousands more home, maimed by improvised explosive devices that tear off arms and legs.

American taxpayers have paid more than $200 billion in two years for a war we were told wouldn't cost much, if anything, and the cost in fiscal 2006 will be at least $70 billion more.

Now the administration tells us that we had to attack not because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, but because he wasn't a democrat. Sadly, however, the costs of trying to make Iraq a democracy probably would have been lower, and the chances of succeeding better, if we hadn't gone to war with flimsy evidence and wishful thinking."

NY Times Op-Ed: Maureen Dowd:"In sports, the offense is more glamorous. It moves the ball, it scores, and everybody breaks out the high-fives. It's all about flash and glory.
Defense, on the other hand, toils in anonymity. It's about wrestling in the trenches, digging in your heels and fighting the opposition for every inch. The most important unit of the last undefeated team in the National Football League, the 1972 Miami Dolphins, was tagged the No-Name Defense.
Republicans understand the publicity advantage of a relentless offense. They had a flashy offense in W.'s two presidential campaigns and two wars, and in their war on the press.
In his 2002 pre-emptive doctrine, laying the groundwork for attacking Iraq, President Bush was reputed to have written the line, "We recognize that our best defense is a good offense."
W. successfully confused Americans by labeling the invasion of Iraq an offensive thrust in the war on terror, even though Iraq had played no role in the 9/11 attacks, had no ties with Al Qaeda and had no weapons to share with terrorists. But 9/11 was an emasculating blow, and the White House had to strike back at somebody.
What the administration doesn't acknowledge, as it crows about democracy blooming in the Iraqi desert, is that our defense against terrorists who want to attack here is full of holes, and that the war in Iraq may have made it even worse. Despite the promising election, the war has created more insurgents and given them a training ground. It has siphoned off attention, money and troops that could have been used to catch Osama, pursue Al Qaeda and secure our own country. And it has alienated not only many Arabs, but also allies who were eager, after 9/11, to help us fight Al Qaeda - even Italians are mad now."

NY Times Op-Ed Contributor: "MORE than once, it has occurred to me that I'm the only person ever to forget her own SAT scores. While I'm generally no good with numbers, this memory lapse may have been intentional: I've always been able to recall just enough to know that my scores were low compared with those of my boarding school classmates - I graduated from Groton School in 1993 - and compared with those of my three siblings.
Recently, while talking to my older sister, I mentioned my SAT haziness. Without hesitating, she said, 'You got 1180.' She also remembers her own scores (1380) and those of our younger sister (1440) and younger brother (1400). My older sister is a well-adjusted person with a successful career, so of course having come in third out of four siblings doesn't matter to her at all. She does, however, feel compelled to announce, on the infrequent occasions when the topic of the SAT arises, that our younger siblings' higher scores are misrepresentative because they took the test after the scoring was adjusted in 1995. But, really, not that it matters.
Now the SAT is about to change again, and the biggest change is the inclusion of an essay. I applaud this addition, and not just because I'm pretty sure it would have raised my score. It's a positive development because - unlike the verbal analogies about to be eliminated - the essay will test a skill that really does matter both during and outside of school. Not once as an adult have I needed to know that, as one SAT-practice Web site tortuously explained, 'impecunious' is to 'money' as 'verify' is to 'doubtful.' But over and over and over, I've had to write."

NY Times Op-Ed: Maureen Dowd: "Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks.
Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political or financial. Americans like to see women who wear the pants be beaten up and humiliated. Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women be rewarded.
That's how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. That's how Hillary Clinton won a Senate seat and a presidential front-runner spot. And that's how Martha Stewart won her own reality TV show and became a half-billion dollars richer while she was in prison.
We've come a long way, baby, from the era of witch trials, when women with special power who knew how to curse were burned at the stake. Now, after a public comeuppance, they are staked to a lucrative new career. In this century, the scarlet letter morphs into a dollar sign.
Maybe temperamental, power-mad divas always needed to be brought down a peg. They used to do it to themselves. Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe were gorgeous monsters, but were so self-destructive there was no need to punish them further.
But Hillary and Martha - the domestic diva with the new ankle bracelet echoed Judy Garland on her Web site yesterday that 'there is no place like home' - are not self-destructive. They are brass-knuckled survivors who elicit both admiration and an enmity that Alessandra Stanley memorably dubbed 'blondenfreude.'
From pornography to 'Desperate Housewives,' women being degraded has an entertainment value far greater than men being degraded. People liked Hillary and Martha a lot more once they were 'broken,' like one of Martha's saddle horses, ice queens melted into puddles of vulnerability."