Prairie Weather

Snowball's chance in hell

Most United States residents feel that world leaders are “morally obligated” to fight climate change, according to a new poll commissioned by Reuters.

Sixty-six percent of the poll’s respondents said world leaders are morally obligated to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change, the survey out Friday said.

Even more respondents — 72 percent — said they feel obligated to do what they can to fight carbon pollution.The survey shows that ethical arguments might be one of the best ways to convince Americans that climate change is an important battle. ...TheHill

Meanwhile, in the Senate...

Sen. Jim Inhofe, a devoted climate change denier, tossed a snowball at someone on the Senate floor today as he tried to debunk climate change.

“In case we had forgotten because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair: You know what this is? It's a snowball and that just from outside here so it's very, very cold out. Very unseasonal,” he said.

“So, Mr. President, catch this,” Inhofe, R-Okla., said on the Senate floor, tossing the snowball to someone off-screen as he tried to suppress a smile. ...ABCNews

Republican control of Congress means more "big government spending"

The days of "austerity" are over -- gone bye-bye -- as former belt-tightening Republicans scribble their signatures on checks made out to the defense industry.  That's your money and mine they're lavishing on their campaign contributors. 

Rather than on our roads, schools, and our financial security.

For voters promised a leaner federal budget, certain areas, such as food stamps, are already in the crosshairs of legislators. But for the nation’s cyberspying companies and military contractors, “some measure of relief,” is on the way.

That’s how George Pedersen, the chief executive of ManTech International Corp., a defense contractor that works closely with the National Security Agency, described the expected boost in military spending during a call with investors last week.

Pedersen, explaining that the days of defense cuts are “behind us,” credited the shift with the change in control of Congress. “We do not know how the new Republican Congress will work with the president and the new secretary of defense,” he noted. But Pedersen predicted that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the new chairs of the Armed Services committees, will move “forward an expanded defense budget.” ...Intercept

How about them "useless tanks" funds, folks?  Full-speed ahead into the red!

Among the sweetheart, earmark-like items in the package was $120 million more for the M-1 Abrams tank program. Military planners have asked time and time again for Congress to stop funding Abrams tanks, which are outdated for most modern warfare and have repeatedly been destroyed by improvised explosive devices. In a symbolic display of government waste, over 2,000 of these tanks are now stored in the California desert, where they remain unused and unwanted. For the Obama administration and Republican leaders to get along, expect the purchase of more wasteful scraps of metal like these. ...Intercept

Bush bombs

Jeb Bush, that is.  At the Conservative Political Action Conference where, according to Dana Milbank, writing in the Washington Post, "attendees ... let it be known that, as part of their anti-everythingness, they are also anti-Bush."

The modest size of the Friday-afternoon walkout was of little comfort to Bush, because those who remained behind were hardly more approving of his efforts to establish his conservative bona fides. From the moment he was introduced, boos from all corners of the room mixed with the polite applause. Attendees heckled Bush with shouts of “Common Core!” and “Open borders!” and “Amnesty!” — reminders of Bush’s education and immigration heresies. When Hannity asked Bush about his support for driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and in-state tuition for immigrant children who aren’t citizens, the booing grew fierce. ...Milbank,WaPo

Immigrants?  You may marry one, as Jeb Bush has, but you can't make them Real Americans?   Even now, we're only gradually come to terms with how much America's booming economy is the result of forced immigration from Senegal to the American South.  The Bush family, Plymouth Colony immigrants but not productive slaves, nonetheless did very well for themselves but not so much for America. Thanks to descendant George W. Bush, the economy was brought  to a halt during the first decade of this century.  Now Jeb Bush is asking us to give him the same opportunity. 

 

So here we have him, in all his wisdom in a staged interview with Sean Hannity yesterday at CPAC:

Hannity did his best to puff up Bush with gentle questions (“Why do you love this country?”), and he vouched for Bush’s record as a tax-cutter and proponent of school vouchers. Hannity was almost apologetic in asking Bush the necessary tough questions, gently telling him that “every article I have read talks about you and a divide with the conservative movement.”

“I’ve read about it,” Bush deadpanned.

The two men chose to stand on the stage, awkwardly, as if having an impromptu hallway conversation in front of a couple thousand people. Bush’s attempt to affect a casual manner, by inserting a hand into a pants pocket, didn’t help. He shifted and fidgeted his way through the performance, at one point losing control of his syntax by suggesting that we “put ISIS around a noose.” Asked about securing the border, Bush replied with a jovial “Let’s do it, man!” And when Hannity said he had a final question, Bush blurted out, “Boxers!” ...Milbank,WaPo

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The Post's Chris Cillizza disagrees with colleague Milbank about Jeb Bush's speech at CPAC, writing that Bush was "very, very good" and right wing opponents "fizzled."

Bush was energetic -- maybe due at least in part to nervousness in facing a testy crowd -- and informed. He refused to back down -- particularly on immigration -- from positions that he knew would be unpopular with the crowd.  He insisted that Republicans were good at opposing things but bad at "being for things." He was composed. He was up to the moment. He looked, in a word, presidential. ...Cillizza,WaPo

Let's cool relations with Israel until Netanyahu is gone

No more America v. Israel talk until we've dealt with the biggest issue for Americans as well as Israelis:  the battle in both nations and around the globe of military-industrial interests versus the supporters of democracy and justice.

At home, Bibi Netanyahu may be on his way out thanks to revelations of corruption in his personal and political life.  The Israeli prime minister is evidently using public money to keep his family happy: public money is buying thousands of dollars worth of take-home sushi and fancy hairdos.  Added to that is the more serious rise in housing costs for Israelis during Netanyahu's tenure as prime minister.  Those issues -- probably more than a growing break with the US -- are weakening Bibi's case for reelection in mid-March.

For many Israeli voters, day-to-day issues like the high cost of living and housing can resonate just as strongly as strategic ones like the acute tensions in Israel’s relations with the Obama administration over Mr. Netanyahu’s plans to address a joint meeting of Congress next week and the nuclear talks with Iran.

Mr. Netanyahu is perceived as being weaker than many of his rivals on socioeconomic issues, an element that has turned the election on March 17 into a surprisingly open race, with his conservative Likud party struggling in the polls against the center-left Zionist Union led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni. ...NYT

I bet I'm not the only American who sees the cleansing of our relationship with Israel to be a significant plus for President Obama's "legacy." 

Meanwhile, Israelis are dealing with a nasty piece of reality:  during Netanyahu's reign, "housing prices shot up by about 55 percent from 2008 to 2013, and they have continued to rise."

Deficient planning and the limited number of housing starts relative to the growth in the number of households has led to a shortfall of tens of thousands of units and high costs for those that are on the market, the report concluded.

Rents have also gone up by about 30 percent, according to the report, while salaries have not kept pace, increasing only modestly....NYT

The Prime Minister's Likud party remains strong and with it the likelihood that we haven't seen the last of Netanyahu.  But the much-needed hard line taken by the Obama administration has strong echoes in Israel.  "Conservatives" (reactionaries) in Israel and America are taking a significant hit.

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Meanwhile, Israel's prime minister is trying to get Arab ambassadors in Washington attend his speech on the Hill.

Netanyahu's ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, has tried, without success, to recruit Arab ambassadors to come to his boss’s speech, e-mailing them personally to plead for their attendance. Dermer, who is not a trained diplomat, is the man who helped engineer the invitation to Netanyahu to speak to Congress in opposition to President Obama’s (so far theoretical) Iran nuclear deal.

Israeli sources tell me that Dermer in recent days has e-mailed at least two Arab ambassadors, those of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. He made the case in these e-mails that Sunni-majority Arab states and Israel have a common interest in thwarting a nuclear agreement with Shiite Iran—and that presenting a united and public front on Capitol Hill will help convince Congress to stop the Iran deal before it’s too late. ...Jeffrey Goldberg,Atlantic.

Mental floss

Remember now: when America says "defend," it means attack

Take that cybersecurity defense plan.  Bunch of hooey!  Peek under the coverlet and you'll find an obese (and growing) cyberattack capability.  Check out Kevin Poulsen's report at Browser:

On Monday, we finally learned the truth of it. America already has a computer security Manhattan Project. We’ve had it since at least 2001. Like the original, it has been highly classified, spawned huge technological advances in secret, and drawn some of the best minds in the country. We didn’t recognize it before because the project is not aimed at defense, as advocates hoped. Instead, like the original, America’s cyber Manhattan Project is purely offensive. ...Poulson,Browser

This isn't America of the fruited plain.  This is the "bombs bursting in air" land we inhabit, waving our little "we're good, earnest folk" flags.

This is Bush-style use of war to achieve peace.

This revelation came by way of the Russia-based anti-virus company Kaspersky. At a conference in Cancun this week, Kaspersky researchers detailed the activities of a computer espionage outfit it calls the “Equation Group,” which, we can fairly surmise from previous leaks, is actually the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit. NSA’s cyber capabilities have been broadly known since the German news magazine Der Spiegel published a leaked 50-page catalog of NSA spy gear and malware in late 2013. But the one-page catalog descriptions didn’t convey the full flavor of the NSA’s technology. For that, somebody had to actually get their hands on that technology—capture it in the wild—and take it apart piece by piece, which is what Kaspersky did.

The result is impressive. The company has linked six different families of malware—“implants,” as the NSA calls them—to the Equation Group, the oldest of which has been kicking around since 2001. The malware has stayed below the radar in part because the NSA deploys it in limited, cautious stages. In the first stage, the agency might compromise a web forum or an ad network and use it to serve a simple “validator” backdoor to potential targets. That validator checks every newly infected computer to see if it’s of interest to the NSA. If not, it quietly removes itself, and nobody is the wiser.

Only if the computer is a target of interest to the NSA does the validator take the next step and load a more sophisticated implant from a stealth NSA website like suddenplot.com or technicalconsumerreports.com. ...Poulsen,Browser

But NSA has shown itself to be an aggressive whore, right?  It strives to own the goods on all of us and has banks of data in the Utah desert to prove it.  The idea of it "quietly removing itself" leaving "nobody the wiser" is already a set-up for a joke. 

...We can stop pretending now that the government is ever going to have a “Manhattan Project” that improves the state of the art in computer defense. That would undermine the very attack system it has spent billions of dollars and a decade-and-a-half building. Despite the popular can-do appeal, a defensive Manhattan Project isn’t just unlikely. It’s a moon shot. ...Poulsen,Browser.

So.  We no longer have police defending us.  Local"help," instead, comes in the form of deadly attack with military equipment to control us.  No more do we have a military to defend us.  No sirree!  We are gifted instead with a huge National Security Agency whose power to hogtie us at any given moment continues unchallenged.