Month: March 2011

Somebody’s got Cockroach Fever

by digby

Eewww…

Africa isn’t called the Dark Continent for no reason. Africa has forever been a political nightmare full of overt corruption, tribal warfare, genocide, murderous regimes and brutal dictators. There is no country in Africa that truly respects freedom or the rule of law. The majority of countries in Africa are in economic ruin because of political corruption and a history ugly with cruel despotism. That’s why starvation and disease are rampant. AIDS is projected to kill as much as half the populations of some countries. Genocide is a way of life. There is little light in Africa. […] Africa is an international scab. Bono of the band U2 advocates that if we forgive debt African nations owe, peace and tranquillity will sprout up mystically. The real problem is murdering, corrupt thugs and punks like Col. Gadhafi. Once we swat one of these African cockroaches or intervene in their civil war, where do we stop?…

If the real goal of the United Nations is to topple the Libyan leader, kill him and all his henchmen. Flatten the area of Tripoli where it is believed he is holed up with a human shield surrounding him. Kill all those people and get it over with. Implement total war for a week, and cockroach Gadhafi will be entombed in a pile of rubble.

That’s conservative intellectual and political philosopher Ted Nugent writing for the Washington Times.

I’m not a booster of this intervention either, but reasons are important. And these are vile.

.

Waiting until you feel the labor pains

by digby

Apparently, the forced childbirth zealots have successfully extended the “waiting period” for the foolish fetus vessels again.

South Dakota governor Dennis Dugard signed into law a bill requiring women to wait 72 hours before obtaining an abortion. Like all “waiting period” regulations, the law is based on the inherently sexist assumptions that Anthony Kennedy made explicit in his infamous Carhart II opinion: namely, the idea that women who choose to obtain an abortion must be acting irrationally and need states to coerce them to reconsider. And the 3-day waiting period (rather than the more typical 24-hour one) imposes a particular burden on poor women and women who have to travel long distances (a particular problem in a rural state in which 98% of counties lack an abortion provider.)

If they play their cards right, they can extend the waiting period up to nine months. These silly girls need to feel the labor pains before they can truly understand what they are doing.

.

Humanitarians R Us

by digby

People keep asking me if I support Dennis Kucinich’s call to impeach Obama for failing to get congressional authorization for the operation in Libya. Actually no, and not because Obama wears my team jersey. It’s because I know that if he had gone to the congress to get authorization he would have gotten it, so the whole question seems a little bit irrelevant. They always do. Sometimes it’s by acclamation as it was with Afghanistan or it’s a little bit tougher as it was in Gulf War I. But the congress is not going to deny the president his prerogative to make war. Certainly, the Senate isn’t going to do it — they all look in the mirror every morning and see a future president and they want to be able to make their own wars when the time comes.

All this talk about process obscures the real question of whether or not we should have intervened in Libya and I have little doubt that if the great debate everyone thinks should have happened had happened, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome one bit except to give the imprimatur of congress to the administration’s decision. So, that’s a big whatever. Process matters, but in this case, it’s only barely relevant to the real question before us.

The other complaint I’m getting is that my gripe about using the “humanitarian” excuse is shallow. “Just because we can’t intervene everywhere to save the people doesn’t mean we can’t intervene somewhere.” To that I’ll just say that when you use this rationale in a blatantly cynical way, you not only abuse and cheapen the whole notion of humanitarian intervention, you create even more cynicism about humanitarianism in general. Being a humanitarian only when it suits your own interest isn’t humanitarianism, it’s opportunism.

Gloria Borger just articulated the alleged doctrine on CNN:

This is a humanitarian operation. The president has said as have other heads of state that we can’t stand by as a murderous thug kills his own people.

It’s quite obvious that isn’t true and they look like assholes when they say it. After all, this situation is far more clear cut. The democratically elected leader is not being allowed to take office and the defeated one is killing vast numbers of his own people creating a massive refugee crisis:

The rising violence in Ivory Coast means more people are trying to get out of the country. It’s estimated the number of displaced within Ivory Coast and refugees in neighboring countries is between 300,000 and 400,000 people.

The International Office for Migration [IOM] is helping the displaced find safe haven. Spokesperson Jemini Pandya says, “There’s been very large-scale displacement within Abidjan since fighting really increased a few weeks ago. It’s extremely difficult to be able to go and assess the real scale of the displacement because the security conditions are too bad and also because of the targeting of humanitarian aid workers.” But she adds, “One thing that our staff on the ground in Abidjan are saying is that the city is rapidly emptying, [with people] finding any way they can to get out and escape the violence. They’re leaving on public buses, vans, cars, taxis – anything they can find basically to reach their home villages.”“IOM has now had to also evacuate its remaining staff… in the west, where there’s been significant internal displacement…because of the conflict,” says Pandya.

It isn’t just displacement:

The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Ivory Coast says it is concerned that heavy weapons could be used against civilians as rival presidents struggle for power.

In a statement Tuesday, the mission said forces loyal to incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo are repairing an attack helicopter and preparing multiple rocket launchers for use.

The mission called the weapons “a grave threat to the civilian population” and warned Gbagbo forces that the U.N. would act if such weapons are used.

Earlier, Ivory Coast’s internationally recognized president, Alassane Ouattara, called on the United Nations to authorize “legitimate force” to protect civilians.

What’s the reason we can’t we intervene here? If anything, this seems like a much more obvious humanitarian intervention than Libya where a spontaneous uprising to overthrow the government has not even come close to the mayhem and displacement in Ivory Coast. It’s not that I think we should intervene in every humanitarian crisis. But honestly, the truth is that we don’t intervene in any humanitarian crises. We intervene in places in which we have large financial and strategic interests, period. It’s merely a convenience to attach a humanitarian label to it and persuade everyone that we are doing God’s work instead. Even the arguments for Iraq were all wrapped up in “rape rooms” and “he gassed his own people” rhetoric. The entire debacle eventually rested on the trope “the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.”

I used to think in these terms — using our military power for good and all that rot. But as I’ve grown older I’ve come to the conclusion that wars are almost always the wrong choice. If Hitler is sweeping across Europe, committing genocide and declaring his intention to take over the world, I’m reluctantly in. But short of that I’m always going to be extremely skeptical of motives and interest about any of these military adventures. It’s rare that this extreme form of violence is used for the reasons stated and far more often than not it creates more mayhem and instability than it stops. The law of unintended consequences is never more consequential.

The reasons being stated for this one are even more unconvincing than usual. Insulting, actually. Millions of people are suffering all over the world, even here in the US. And the money that’s spent to protect oilfields and our “strategic interest” in keeping people drunk on scarce resources so that the already wealthy can get wealthier would go a long way toward alleviating it. Calling these oil field protection operations “humanitarian” is Orwellian and it prevents the American people from facing the real questions before them about their own futures and how to genuinely work toward a more peaceful, equitable and decent world.

Update: Oh please

Speaking on CBS’ The Early Show today, McCain twice cited the fact that Moammar Gadhafi has “American blood on his hands” as a reason the U.S. should try to oust the dictator. McCain specifically referred to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which was indeed carried out by a Libyan agent. What McCain is apparently forgetting is that, apart from the past few weeks, the last decade has been a period of rapprochement between the United States and Libya. It started with President Bush announcing in 2003 that Gadhafi had agreed to give up his “weapons of mass destruction” programs. In 2006 Bush removed Libya from the official list of state sponsors of terrorism. In September 2008 Condoleezza Rice traveled to Libya to have talks with Gadhafi. And just a few days before the 2008 presidential election, Bush signed a settlement under which Libya compensated families of victims of Lockerbie and other 80s-era attacks. Who else was involved in the effort to forge better ties with Gadhafi? John McCain. In August 2009 he led a delegation of senators including fellow hawks Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman on a trip to visit the Libyan leader in Tripoli. Discussed during the visit was delivery of — get this — American military equipment to Gadhafi (a man with American blood on his hands no less). “We discussed the possibility of moving ahead with the provision of non-lethal defense equipment to the government of Libya,” the AP quoted McCain as saying at a press conference. McCain also noted that “ties between the United States and Libya have taken a remarkable and positive turn in recent years.”

Why yes, they certainly did:

24/04/2004 – 10:16:15

US president George Bush has taken huge steps to restore normal trade and investment ties with Libya, resuming oil imports and most commercial and financial activities as a reward to Muammar Gaddafi for eliminating his weapons of mass destruction.

Libya’s actions “have made our country and the world safer”, the White House said.

Update II: Matt Yglesias brings up another side to this argument which is well worth considering: who really benefits in the big picture? Did the powers that be decide they needed to draw a line somewhere — and the universally unpopular crazy man gave them an opportunity?

.

It’s The Cameras

by digby

Seymour Hersh on the Afghan atrocities:

It’s the smile. In photographs released by the German weekly Der Spiegel, an American soldier is looking directly at the camera with a wide grin. His hand is on the body of an Afghan whom he and his fellow soldiers appear to have just killed, allegedly for sport. In a sense, we’ve seen that smile before: on the faces of the American men and women who piled naked Iraqi prisoners on top of each other, eight years ago, and posed for photographs and videos at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad.

It’s also the cameras. Der Spiegel reported this week that it had obtained four thousand photographs and videos taken by American soldiers who referred to themselves as a “kill team.” (Der Spiegel chose to publish only three of the photographs.) The images are in the hands of military prosecutors. Five soldiers, including Jeremy Morlock, the smiling man in the picture, who is twenty-two years old, are awaiting courts martial for the murder of three Afghan civilians; seven other soldiers had lesser, related charges filed against them, including drug use. On Tuesday, Morlock’s lawyer said that he would plead guilty.

We saw photographs, too, at My Lai 4, where a few dozen American soldiers slaughtered at least five hundred South Vietnamese mothers, children, and old men and women in a long morning of unforgettable carnage more than four decades ago. Ronald Haeberle, an Army photographer, was there that day with two cameras. He directed the lens of his official one, with black-and-white film in it, away from the worst sights; there is a shot of soldiers with faint smiles on their faces, leaning back in relaxed poses, and no sign of the massacre that has taken place. But the color photos that Haeberle took on his personal camera, for his own use, were far more explicit—they show the shot-up bodies of toddlers, and became some of the most unforgettable images of that wasteful war. In most of these cases, when we later meet these soldiers, in interviews or during court proceedings, they come across as American kids—articulate, personable, and likable.

Why photograph atrocities? And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units? How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost? No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question. As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare. In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary. In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy—the people trying to kill you—do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise. The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous. This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us. The G.I.s in Afghanistan were responsible for their actions, of course. But it must be said that, in some cases, surely, as in Vietnam, the soldiers can also be victims.

Read on. That is so true. It reminds me of this post from a few years ago:

“If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it,” he said. “One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, ‘Why didn’t you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?’ They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn’t even bother to ask questions.” Ultimately, he said — echoing Gerber’s comments — “torture becomes an end unto itself.”

[…]

According to a 30-year CIA veteran currently working for the agency on contract, there is, in fact, some precedent showing that the “gloves-off” approach works — but it was hotly debated at the time by those who knew about it, and shouldn’t be emulated today. “I have been privy to some of what’s going on now, but when I saw the Post story, I said to myself, ‘The agency deserves every bad thing that’s going to happen to it if it is doing this again,'” he said. “In the early 1980s, we did something like this in Lebanon — technically, the facilities were run by our Christian Maronite allies, but they were really ours, and we had personnel doing the interrogations,” he said. “I don’t know how much violence was used — it was really more putting people in underground rooms with a bare bulb for a long time, and for a certain kind of privileged person not used to that, that and some slapping around can be effective.

“But here’s the important thing: When orders were given for that operation to stand down, some of the people involved wouldn’t [emphasis mine –ed]. Disciplinary action was taken, but it brought us back to an argument in the agency that’s never been settled, one that crops up and goes away — do you fight the enemy in the gutter, the same way, or maintain some kind of moral high ground?

Read on …

.

Looking Forward to The Primaries? I am.

by digby

I never thought I’d say that, but this sounds like a lot of fun to me:

Mitt Romney is the godfather of what Republican critics call Obamacare. Newt Gingrich is an adulterer on his third marriage. Tim Pawlenty is too green – environmentally, that is.

Jon Huntsman worked for President Barack Obama. And Haley Barbour has come off as dismissive of racial segregation.

Is any potential Republican presidential nominee without vulnerabilities that could alienate voters, especially those in the GOP primaries, and provide ready-made attacks for opponents?

Not in this crop.

The 2012 Republican field is deeply flawed, lacking a serious GOP contender without a personal misstep or policy move that angers the party base. Each of those weighing bids has at least one issue that looms as an obstacle to White House ambitions, and that could derail the candidate if not handled with care.

That explains why the would-be candidates are trying to confront their troubles early on, just as the nomination fight gets under way. They’ll have to answer for black marks on their records – and insulate themselves from criticism – repeatedly between now and early next year when voters cast the first caucus ballot.

Their aides are trying to figure out how to weather the attacks likely to show up in mailings, online or in television ads; responses are likely to be included in media interviews, debate appearances and, perhaps, even in major speeches. Aides also are studying – and testing – the best ways to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses. Already, Internet sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are magnifying their woes, and every embarrassing document, speech or utterance is certain to appear online.

The article goes on to outline all the ways in which all the presumed candidates are vulnerable and it’s pretty clear that the problem is less them than the GOP base. They are demanding General Jesus Christ.

It’s going to be the best primary campaign evah.

Much needed cute animal break

by digby

Just watch this all the way through and you will feel better:

h/t to @aterkel

Civility In The Chambers

by digby

This story of the dysfunctional Wisconsin Supreme Court is pretty amazing:

As the deeply divided state Supreme Court wrestled over whether to force one member off criminal cases last year, Justice David Prosser exploded at Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson behind closed doors, calling her a “bitch” and threatening to “destroy” her.

The incident, revealed in interviews as well as e-mails between justices, shows fractures on the court run even deeper than what has been revealed in public sniping in recent years. Problems got so bad that justices on both sides described the court as dysfunctional, and Prosser and others suggested bringing in a third party for help, e-mails show.

Prosser acknowledged the incident recently and said he thought it was becoming public now in an attempt to hurt him politically. Prosser faces Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg in the April 5 election.

He said the outburst came after Abrahamson took steps to undermine him politically and to embarrass him and other court conservatives.

“In the context of this, I said, ‘You are a total bitch,’ ” Prosser said.

“I probably overreacted, but I think it was entirely warranted. . . . They (Abrahamson and Justice Ann Walsh Bradley) are masters at deliberately goading people into perhaps incautious statements. This is bullying and abuse of very, very long standing.”

Read the whole thing. It’s much more than just a typical case of a male elite hurling sexist insults, although that does figure prominently in this recent dust-up. And obviously it features a group of very difficult people who don’t observe much of what we’d normally think of as courtesy on a high court.

But it’s more than that. I don’t know what cases these people are arguing over, but if it’s the kind of cases that the Supreme Court of California or the United States argue over, it’s more than a matter of personalities. We have sharply different worldviews, philosophies and ideologies at work in our public life in this country. In this case it may be that they have unpleasant personalities on all sides arguing them out (and I’m sure that the fact that these are elected offices in Wisconsin has something to do with it) but there is a serious, civic argument happening. Certainly the action in the political realm in Wisconsin in recent days should have shown that if nothing else.

.

The Rebels Yell: More, More More

by digby

Chris Matthews had Richard Engle in Tobruk on Hardball today talking about the Libyan rebels and their perspective on the war:

Matthews: What is going on in the war? Are we going after Qaddafi? What are we doing in this war, do we know?

Richard Engle: The rebels here think we have given them unconditional military support. Their only strategy seems to be allow the US and other military powers to scorch the earth and destroy Qaddafi’s military so that they can make a very slow advance toward Tripoli.

They do see a humanitarian element to this because if Qaddafi’s forces had been allowed to enter Benghazi or Tobruk there very likely would have been massacres, but now they think this rebel movement which has been leaderless and disorganized believes it has has been recognized and given the full support of the United States military.

Matthews: Are we giving arms of any kind? Small arms, artillery,armor, what are we giving to the rebels. Anything?

Engle: I have seen no evidence that we are giving the rebels anything. They seem to be holding the weapons that they seized from the units of Qaddafi that were destroyed by the Americans. Sometimes they’re armed with just pocket knives…

The rebels are in two groups. There are the volunteers, they seem to be a little bit braver, they’re the ones heading out to the front lines. They’re not having a lot of success. That’s one group. The other are the divisions of the army, formerly Qaddafi’s army, that defected. And they are not really doing much of anything.

In Tobruk today, we went to the main army command to talk to one of the top generals here who had supposedly joined the rebellion. He was at home today and had taken the day off.

Oy.

He went on to describe the rebels as being completely disorganized and leaderless, without any kind of strategy or useful tactics at their disposal.

Matthews then asked if the rebels believe we are “going for the kill, Qaddafi:”

Engle: they hope so and that’s what they want. They seem to think there could be a few ways to end this conflict. The US could continue to trailblaze for them and scorch the earth so they can move forward. They think they can reach Tripoli in a short amount of time, perhaps weeks or a few months. Or if there’s enough pressure, there could be some sort of coup in Tripoli and someone could come out and assassinate Qaddafi. Or the third option would be that one of these missiles comes and actually kills Qaddafi. If none of those things happen there could be a long stalemate. Once the US starts this, once the US and other powers begin to provide the rebels with a safe haven and air cover it’s very hard to take that away. Because if you’re offering your protection and they try to advance, they will advance, and you take that air cover away, the rebels are very likely to start losing again and we’re back to the situation where we were and the main cities being threatened with being overrun.

Again, hope for somethi9ng decisive to happen fast or we are well and truly stuck.

The New Republic endorses the action but publishes a compelling dissent by Michael Walzer.

This article by Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy is also interesting and somewhat uncomfortable, I’d imagine, for liberal interventionists. It’s not as shocking as one might think. After all, the original neocons all started out as liberal interventionists back in the day.

Finally this piece by Michael Cohen indicting the White House for its seeming incoherence takes Hillary Clinton specifically to task, which seems fair. She is the secretary of State. However, while Clinton threw her weight behind the decision in the end and may have been the tipping point, it sounds to me as if the real force behind the decision was Samantha Power, the woman who was fired from the campaign for publicly calling Clinton a monster. That’s not surprising considering Power’s background and interests.

But in the end blaming people in the administration is evading the reality that Obama isn’t Bush the dizzy Dauphain being led around by the nose by his Machiavellian advisors. He’s an active, engaged president and he made the decision, reportedly from a wide range of advice. The buck stops with him.

Update: Jonathan Schwarz looks at the lessons that other tyrants may take from this and they are not what you might think they are.

.

They’re Comin’ Ta Git Yah

by digby

If you thought the Minutemen had gone away, think again. From my email this afternoon:

Dear America:

Look at this headline.

Bill Clinton lowered the Immigration Laws, Bush did nothing about Illegals and Obama wants to give them Free Food, Free Medical Insurance and is suing the State of Arizona for their new Immigration Laws.

Impeach Obama and Fire Eric Holder today!

From: Minuteman PAC

663 Illegal Aliens with Ties to Terrorism Arrested in 2010 Fellow Patriot,

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), speaking at a border issues conference yesterday, said 663 individuals arrested along the southwest border in 2010 were from countries known to have ties with terrorism.

In the last year alone, 448,000 individuals were detained at the southwest border – 59,000 came from countries other than Mexico. Among them were countries like Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and four other so-called “state-sponsors of terrorism” –Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Sudan.

Even more terrifying – 84% of the approximately 448,000 illegal aliens arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol were not prosecuted!

At the 15th annual U.S.-Mexico Congressional Border Issues Conference, the Director of National Intelligence was quoted as saying that the 663 individuals arrested represented a national security vulnerability and that we need to do more.

Help MMPAC Secure the U.S.-Mexico Border!

Select Here Now!

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano consistently evades the question of results by limiting the majority of her remarks on border security to the resources devoted to border areas and even claims that “it’s clear from every statistical measure that the approach is working.”

Sec. Napolitano also called the Border Patrol apprehensions a “key indicator of illegal traffic” along the U.S. borders.

Clearly, the “approach” taken by the Obama Administration is NOT working and whatever statistics were fed to her by the Pro-Amnesty administration are wrong and politically motivated.

If that’s the case, we have much, much bigger issues on our hands than the influx of Hispanic illegal immigrants draining our economic resources and bringing their crime and drugs over the border to our neighborhoods.

We can’t count on President Obama to secure our borders or to crackdown on illegal immigration. He is desperate to win re-election in 2012 and will even grant amnesty to 12 million illegal immigrants in order to do so.

So what will it take for Washington to listen and to lobby for America’s safety and to take action and secure our borders immediately?

Your support.

Will you help us?

Help MMPAC Demand Border Security NOW!
Select Here!

As you well know, Minuteman PAC is an independent Political Action Committee of the Minuteman civilian border security movement, supported by many volunteers of the nation’s oldest, largest and most-effective citizen’s border vigilance group, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

Our mission is clear: Help elect candidates who carry out their constitutional duty to defend our borders and oust those who do not.

Meanwhile, your special gift of $35, $60, $100, or more will give us the financial ammunition we need to:

++ fund a massive anti-amnesty effort with a phone, TV, radio, newspaper, and Internet campaign;

++ mobilize Minuteman PAC activists from all over the nation to protest any legislative action that will reward illegal aliens with “amnesty”;

++ print and distribute literally million copies of our “WARNINGS TO WASHINGTON” nationwide; and

++ provide direct financial support for debt retirement to our endorsed border security candidates.

So please, help us secure the southwest border and defend America from President Obama’s Open Borders-Amnesty agenda by electing Anti-Amnesty Patriots in 2012 and supporting Border Security legislation!

Help Minuteman PAC and your fellow Patriots hold Washington accountable for securing our borders and securing America from every illegal immigrant.

Will you help us? Click HERE to help Minuteman’s efforts TODAY!

Thank you for reading our message, and for taking the time to forward our message to friends and family.

For America,
Minuteman PAC

P.S. Fellow Patriot, please help us fight alongside the Patriots in Congress as they wage war to SECURE OUR BORDERS in 2011! Your much-needed gift will help us rally patriot Americans do the job that Washington WON’T DO. So please, act now — TODAY! This much needed gift of $35, $60, $100 or even $250 will help us rally patriot Americans to hold Congress — both establishment RINOs and pro-“illegal alien” leftists — accountable for SECURING THE BORDERS!

.

Markey Tells It Like It Is

by digby

Representative Markey was on Andrea Mitchell talking about the absurdity of building nuclear power plants on earthquake faults and says that we need to shutter the ones we have and not build any new ones. (Apparently one of the newer designs is said be likely to “shatter like a glass house” if it comes under stress!)

He points out that we have had major earthquakes in the last year in Chile, New Zealand, Japan and that California is the other part of that quadrant. From what I’m reading in the LA Times today, I’m not all that confident in the safety of these California reactors.

At the end of the conversation, she asked him if he had any reservations about Libya:

We’re in Libya because of oil. And I think both Japan and nuclear technology and Libya and this dependence that we have upon imported oil have once again highlighted the need for the United States to have a renewable energy agenda going forward…

It is limited … I think it is consistent with siding with the aspirations of young and educated people who are seeking a new direction for Libya in the 21st century, but it all goes back to the 5 million barrels that we import from OPEC on a daily basis.

And the Republicans in congress, and I’m just going to finish on this note, last week in the House of Representative in the energy and commerce committee stripped the environmental protection Agency of their ability to increase the fuel economy standards ofd the cars and tucks and planes and trains that we put the oil into and by the way on a bill that passed three weeks ago, zeroed out all of the loan guarantee money for wind and solar while leaving in the money for nuclear power.

So this is the time for a great debate. Japan and Libya. Oil and nuclear. What is our future? And if we are going to have one, shouldn’t it be one where we tap into our own technologies, our own ability to provide the electricity we need with the indigenous natural resources that we have in our own country rather than dangerously playing games with OPEC countries or with nuclear technology which is inherently unsafe.

Then he said most people agreed that Libya was a good decision as long as no bloodshed was attributed to our troops. But his greater point is where the real debate should be — but won’t be.

The polling on this is still amorphous and inconclusive, IMO. But I have to agree with @ddayen that support for the president seems unusually low for the early days of a military strike. That’s mostly because of the incoherence of the Republicans who say they disapprove of the way the president is handling Libya but support his policy, so maybe that’s not surprising. But it’s hard to see that improving over time.

.