From Wired
By Alexis Madrigal

A water crisis in the Western United States is primarily due to manmade global warming, and it could force difficult choices for the region as farmers, residents and biofuel producers fight for their share of water.

Sixty percent of the changes in the West’s water cycle are due to increased atmospheric greenhouse gases, write scientists in a paper published Thursday in Science. Small increases in winter air temperature, the research found, reduce the amount of snow falling in mountains. In turn, snow packs that previously acted as time-release water storage provide less water as they melt in the spring.

“In a place like California, the snow pack is going away or melting earlier. We don’t have enough dams to catch it all so we have to let it go out to the ocean,” said Tim Barnett, a research physicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the study’s lead author. “All of our infrastructure has been set up to take advantage of climate the way it was, but things are changing.”

The new research comes as Western states are already struggling to supply water for both their farms and cities. Increased migration to the water-poor regions of the Southwest into cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas has increased the amount of water necessary to support the rising U.S. population. With such a constrained supply and rising demand, the cost of water is likely to rise, experts said. Some California farmers, responding to a record water shortage, are even beginning to consider selling their water rights, instead of their crops.

Barnett’s team worked with climate models to simulate the impact of greenhouse gases on the Western water cycle. If their models for the future prove as accurate as their modeling of the past, the paper predicts unprecedented water shortages.

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From Think Progress
By Ali

President Bush has long touted clean coal technology as a potential solution to global warming. In 2006, he insisted that the United States is “spending quite a bit of money here at the federal level to come up with clean-coal technologies.” During Monday’s State of the Union address, Bush said, “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions.”

Yet just 24 hours after his SOTU declaration, Bush’s Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman indicated the White House was pulling the plug on the ambitious FutureGen project, a clean coal plant that was touted as “the cleanest fossil fuel fired power plant in the world.”

In a meeting with lawmakers from Illinois — where FutureGen was set to be installed — Bodman “all but drove a stake in” the $1.5 billion project:

[Rep. Timothy] Johnson [R-IL] said Bodman told the group that he planned to disband FutureGen and go “in another direction.” At one point, Johnson and Bodman snapped at each other. At another, U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat, told Bodman that “the first action taken by the president after the State of the Union was a series of broken promises.”

“In 25 years on Capitol Hill, I have never witnessed such a cruel deception,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said, hinting at the administration’s political considerations for the project’s demise. “When the city of Mattoon, Illinois, was chosen over possible locations in Texas, the secretary of energy set out to kill FutureGen.”

Read more Lies

From The Star Tribune Minn
By Susan Lenfestey

It’s been a year since Molly Ivins died, leaving us to slog through the political landscape without her sanity-saving blend of insight, humor and outrage. Unlike Maureen Dowd, who delights in snippy wordplay, with Molly you felt the words erupting from her soul, ricocheting off her funny bone and then passing through her brain to be arranged in a way that made sense — an enormous challenge when dealing with the non-sense of the president she called “Shrub.”

As Super Tuesday closes in with the fate of — oh, just about everyone — at stake, I keep wishing I could open my paper and find Molly’s take on it all. What fun she would have had with the entire Republican slate, from the moribund-on-arrival Fred Thompson to the 12th-century worldview of affable Mike Huckabee to the transformation of “America’s Mayor” to America’s meltdown.

And she wouldn’t have let John McCain’s resemblance to an ermine — a short-legged weasel who changes color with the seasons — go unnoticed.

On the other side I imagine she’d have taken a few jabs at Dennis Kucinich for toe-tapping with a UFO and at John Edwards for his pricey girly-man haircuts — yet slapped them a high-five for the truths they dare to speak. She encouraged veracity no matter how eccentric the package; she just couldn’t tolerate “clever straddling,” as she put it.

She would have donned a hazmat suit to deal with the hydra-like beast called Billary that clawed its way to defeat in South Carolina. She was clear on where she stood on the Clintons, calling Bill “as weak as bus-station chili” and writing in January 2006, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president. Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation.”

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From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

It was sad to see John Edwards bow out of the race.

Because he fought the good fight.

Throughout this campaign, he talked about poverty more insistently than any other candidate. In fact, he brought the issue back onto the public stage.

And so it was fitting that he extracted a pledge from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to “make ending poverty central to their campaign.”

Throughout his campaign, he talked about economic inequality, and he illustrated it with the stories of real live Americans who suffered because of the cruelties of our system.

He stressed the need for universal health care, and brought that issue better than any other candidate, as well.

He wasn’t perfect.

A brilliant debater, sometimes he seemed too good, too canned.

On the issues, his record in the Senate was far to the right of his agenda on the stump. He had voted for the Iraq War. He had voted to give China favored trading status. He had voted for a bad bankruptcy bill.

But to his credit, he came clean, early, on his Iraq vote.

And he focused attention, in speech after speech, debate after debate, on one of the most crucial issues of our democracy: the stranglehold that corporate power has over our economy and our political system.

This is the issue that animated Teddy Roosevelt and Fighting Bob La Follette and the old progressives.

Read more Edwards

From The Consortium News
By Ray McGovern

“For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more — always more — even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the ‘haves.’ ”
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Finally, the truth is seeping out. Contrary to how President George W. Bush has tried to justify the Iraq war in the past, he has now clumsily — if inadvertently — admitted that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was aimed primarily at seizing predominant influence over its oil by establishing permanent (the administration favors “enduring”) military bases.

He made this transparently clear by adding a signing statement to the defense appropriation bill, indicating that he would not be bound by the law’s prohibition against expending funds:

“(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq,” or

“(2) To exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.”

But, if you have been asleep for the past five years, you may ask, what about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its ties to al-Qaeda?

A recent study by the Center for Public Integrity found that Bush made 260 false claims about these in the two years after 9/11. He was followed closely by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell with 254.

Read more Inequalities

From The Washington Post
By Dana Priest

Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who was waiting for the Army to decide whether to court-martial her for endangering another soldier and turning a gun on herself last year in Iraq, attempted to kill herself Monday evening. In so doing, the 25-year-old Army reservist joined a record number of soldiers who have committed or tried to commit suicide after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“I’m very disappointed with the Army,” Whiteside wrote in a note before swallowing dozens of antidepressants and other pills. “Hopefully this will help other soldiers.” She was taken to the emergency room early Tuesday. Whiteside, who is now in stable physical condition, learned yesterday that the charges against her had been dismissed.

Whiteside’s personal tragedy is part of an alarming phenomenon in the Army’s ranks: Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121 soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006.

At the same time, the number of attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries in the Army has jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began. Last year, about 2,100 soldiers injured themselves or attempted suicide, compared with about 350 in 2002, according to the U.S. Army Medical Command Suicide Prevention Action Plan.

Read more Suicides

From Global Research
By Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay

War—after all, what is it that the people get? Why—widows, taxes, wooden legs and debt.

Samuel B. Pettengill

“Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

James Madison, 4th U.S. President (April 20, 1795)

“Let me issue and control a nation’s currency and I care not who makes its laws”.

Nathan Rothschild, 1791

Last summer, I observed that there was a “solvency crisis” underneath the ongoing subprime mortgage liquidity squeeze. Central banks can alleviate a “liquidity crisis”, but they cannot solve a solvency crisis.

Last year also, before the events, I warned that the U.S. was heading toward stagflation.

This was due to three fundamental factors.

First, the structural fiscal imbalances of the federal budget in a period of prosperity, as a result of the Bush-Cheney administration’s continuous deficit spending linked to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and to its large tax cuts;

Second, the over-indebtedness of the overall U.S. economy coupled with an overall saving rate close to zero (in 1981, it was 12 percent), and, as a consequence, the rapidly increasing foreign debt of the U.S.; and,

Third, the required decline in the U.S. dollar to reverse and correct the deteriorating American balance of payments.

Read more Stagflation

From The Khaleej Times
By Matein Khalid

The CIA was responsible for some of the most notorious failures in American diplomacy. The agency’s Bay of Pigs invasion failed to dislodge the Castro regime, its analysts failed to track the shipment of Soviet hardware ahead of the Cuban missile crisis and its hired mafia assassins failed to poison the hirsute El Commande who ruled in Havana.

The CIA’s Phoenix programme assassinated 20,000 suspected Viet Cong members, but failed to prevent America’s humiliating defeat in the Vietnam War.

The CIA’s cynical alliance with Saddam Hussein and the Afghan Mujaheedin in the 1980s led to a catastrophic blowback in August 1990 and 9/11. The CIA’s coup to restore the ousted Shah of Iran to the Peacock Throne and covert relationships with successive Pakistani military dictators have fanned visceral anti-Americanism in two of the most powerful, populous nations in the Islamic world. The CIA (and the Mossad) armed the Phalangist Maronite militias in the Lebanese civil war but failed to arrest the meteoric rise of the Hezbollah, whose operatives massacred 241 Marines in a Beimt truck bombing. A subsequent Hezbollah suicide bomber slaughtered the entire CIA Near East division leadership led by the legendary Bob Ames as they convened for a supposedly clandestine meeting, then captured, tortured and murdered its Beirut station chief William Buckly.

The fate of the Beirut Marines and Bill Buckley did not deter President Reagan’s surreal sales of TOW missiles to Teheran in the surreal Iran-contra scandal. As the fate of the Shah, Anwar Sadat, General Zia, Bashir Gemeyal, Emperor Haile Selassie and Ahmed Shah Masood proves, the only thing more dangerous than being the CIA’s enemy is to be the CIA’s friend. The large number of Vietnamese, Afghan, Laotian, Iraqi Lebanese, Ethiopian and Kurdish restaurants in Washington DC and the northern Virginia suburbs only vindicated the Langley wit who observed that the CIA’s foreign allies can cook a lot better than they can fight in the Agency’s ghost wars. Incidentally, the CIA also failed to predict the break-up of the Soviet Union, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and the BJP’s nuclear test in Pokhran. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never had so many paid so much (in money and blood) for the bureaucratic bungling of so few spooks.

Read more Loser

From Common Dreams
By Thomas A. Bass and Maurice Isserman

The last time the United States lulled itself into thinking that a military surge was working was January 1968, just before the Tet lunar New Year ushered in the Year of the Monkey. Gen. William Westmoreland, commanding America’s half million troops in Vietnam, assured President Johnson that 65 percent of the South Vietnamese population was living in secure areas, with “victory in sight.”

America was shocked when it got the news that early on the morning of Jan. 31, 1968, a hole had been blown in the wall of the United States Embassy in Saigon. The compound was occupied by Communist forces, while other targets throughout Saigon and a hundred other cities in South Vietnam were under attack.

The last of the communist offensive was repulsed by Feb. 23. That allowed the U.S. military to claim victory, but the Tet Offensive was a major blow. Only when the cable traffic was released after the war did we learn that U.S. commanders had contemplated using nuclear weapons to counter the attacks. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called it “a near thing,” while advising Johnson that this “major, powerful nationwide assault has by no means run its course.”

This was indeed the case when the Communists launched another mini-Tet offensive three months later, shelling Saigon with 122 mm Russian rockets and driving American casualties back toward their February level of 500 a week.

In March 1968, after squeaking out a narrow victory in the New Hampshire presidential primary over anti-war challenger Eugene McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson quit the race and partially halted the bombing of North Vietnam. In May, the Paris peace talks began, inaugurating the torturous process that would end, seven years later, with America’s disorderly retreat from Vietnam.

Claims that victory is at hand in the Iraq war are as fatuous and unsubstantiated as Westmoreland’s belief in 1968 that he was seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel.” In spite of the optimistic talk coming from Baghdad that “civilian deaths have decreased by 62 percent,” the metrics measuring progress in Iraq are no more believable than they were 40 years ago in Vietnam. In fact, America’s military adventure in Iraq is even less sustainable than it was in Vietnam.

Read more Similarities

From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

“Many in this chamber understand that America must not fail in Iraq, because you understand that the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching . . .”

There it is again, that choking lie, so smoothly administered — with just enough fear to help America gag down all that righteousness.

President Bush told it again in his final State of the Union address the other night, of course. What choice did he have? The truth, coming from him at this point, would be . . . too weird, too offensive, impossible to comprehend.

But the truth is that we’ve already failed in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East and Central Asia — failed with consequences beyond reckoning. God knows someone will have to take a swig of political courage and acknowledge it one of these days, simply to stop the lie — the lies, a governmental cluster bomb of them — from doing further harm.

It’s common knowledge now that we “went to war on a lie” — the WMD scam — but what isn’t common knowledge is how the war is sustained on a daily basis by lies and partial truths and desperate, behind-the-scenes financial damage control. The war is all weapons systems and public relations, with the reality of wrecked countries and wrecked lives and a hemorrhaging of the national treasury suspended in media hoodoo and denial.

Consider the number 72,000. This number — of total U.S. battlefield casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, through Jan. 5, 2008 — is simple enough, but as I ponder the fact that Paul Sullivan and his organization, Veterans for Common Sense, had to wrest it from the Department of Defense with a Freedom of Information Act request, and the fact that the only media outlet to pick up on it so far is the Scottish newspaper The Herald, I begin to grasp the extent of the deception in place sustaining the war on terror.

Read more War