07 Feb

Airline security hurting US tourism

Another gem from the Center for Really Obvious Things, but this one I almost missed:

The US has suffered a sharp drop in tourism since 9/11, mainly because of concerns over tighter passport and customs controls, according to the travel industry.

It estimates that there has been a 17% drop in the US share of tourism, costing the country an estimated $1bn (£508m) in lost revenue over the past five years and almost 200,000 jobs.

snip

The Travel Industry Association of America said the number of visitors from the UK had declined from 4,703,000 in 2001 to 4,345,000 in 2005, a drop of 7.6%. UK visitors to other countries - such as Canada, Australia and China - increased during the same period. The figures are included in a document, A Blueprint to Discover America, that sets out proposals for tackling the crisis. It suggests streamlining the visa process and a major promotion campaign.

A Discover America Partnership survey of more than 2,000 non-American travellers in October and November found 66% were "worried that they will be detained for hours because of a simple mistake or misstatement at a US airport".

That’s hitting ‘em where it hurts! Seriously though, in discussions with other expats, it seems that even as citizens we all share the same concerns. Delays, unprovoked suspicion, abuse of power, etc. all seem to be common practice at the US border these days.

To be perfectly fair, aside from having to open my pants once in Amarillo National Airport (not a pleasant experience), 9 times out of 10 I make it through without any exceptional incident. Nevertheless, I feel as though I am greeted with a presumption of guilt at every entry point and constantly worry that some small slip-up will result in missed flights or worse. Honestly, if I didn’t have family to visit, I rather doubt I would choose the United States as a vacation spot when there are so many stress-free alternatives.

IMHO, I am inclined to believe that every freedom we voluntary strip from our lives is one step closer to the totalitarian utopia envisaged by vanguard al-Qaedists. Yet as annoying as all these changes are, if they actually resulted in increased security I would be in full agreement. Unfortunately, the most egregious reformations in airline security – shoe removal, triple ID checks, liquid bans, no-fly lists, fingerprinting, etc. – make nice window dressing for the doomsayers but offer approximately zilch towards making air travel more (or less) secure.

Anyway, as someone who travels often, I am interested in people’s opinions on the matter. What policies do you favor? Which are completely asinine? What would you do differently? And why the hell would the Dukes of Hazzard try to pass of Coy and Vance when everybody knows Bo and Luke are the REAL Duke brothers?

06 Feb

Libby: Leftly Leaning - Tuesday, February 6th

Over at FDL, TRex compares the trial to an Antarctic “ice core sample of the Bush Administration's incestuous, manipulative, and deeply disingenuous relationship to the media” while Jane Hamsher finds the search for a coherent defense strategy as elusive as Iraqi WMDs.

On a continuing mission to glean what bloggers can add to the reporting process, Aldon Hynes at Orient Lodge steps outside the big picture to focus on character development.

Noting that this trial is “first and foremost a trial of the media, by the media and for the media,” Rory O’Connor has the unfortunate epiphany that modern journalists are nothing more than partisan hacks who may be hurting America.

Jeff Lomonaco adds himself to the “list of observers” who are skeptical that Tricky Dick v. 2.0 will be called to the stand.

Given recent trial revelations, Larry C. Johnson, posting at No Quarter, argues that it was Walter Pincus and not Nicholas Kristof who is responsible for starting the “five alarm fire” in 2003 and suggests that timelines need to be updated.

Likewise, Jeralyn is equally stumped about Wally’s role and wonders why Pincus isn’t being called as a witness? And speaking of key witnesses not testifying…

Finally, Digby sees the Libby trial as providing an excellent peak into Kurtz’s thesis that Cheney has concocted a constitutional rationale to turn the OVP into a fourth branch of government.

05 Feb

Bush solves deficit with ball-point pen, coathanger, and a wish

Now there’s a glass-is-half-full kind of guy:

The budget that President Bush will submit to Congress today shows the federal deficit falling in each of the next four years and would produce a $61 billion surplus in 2012, administration officials said. But to get there, Bush is counting on strong economic growth, diminishing costs in the Iraq war and tight domestic spending to offset the cost of his tax cuts.

So basically, the boy president, who spent a lifetime running business after business into the ground before squandering the biggest national surplus in history (compacted doubly by also creating the largest deficit), now claims he can turn it all around and guide us into a new golden age of financial largess and a chicken in every pot. Oh, and everyone gets a free quilt.

Our future affluence is basically a done deal. As long as we can count on virtually unprecedented economic growth. And we stop hemorrhaging money in elective and bungled warmongering. And we cut both spending and entitlement programs. Oh yeah, and we wait at least four years until after this incompetent boob has left office.

Well that last one sounds about right.

05 Feb

Libby: Leftly Leaning - Monday, February 5th

No rest for TalkLeft’s Jeralyn as she burns the weekend oil exploring Team Libby’s attempts to insert Bush into the narrative and churns out a couple of posts on Cheney and other potential upcoming witnesses. Also, check out this parsing of Saturday briefs from both legal teams over the recent admission of two Washington Post articles from 2003.

Posting at the Daily Kos, emptywheel argues the significance of changing the date on Libby’s 2003 note and offers four possible scenarios explaining its sensitivity.

Forget Dick Cheney! MaineWebReport explains how Russert’s testimony is just as significantly tied into the wider ramifications of this trial.

Meanwhile, over at Huffington’s Eat the Press, a little heathers-esque rivalry between Russert and Matthews helps illuminate this White House’s manipulation of the news cycle.

Brent Budowski, one of the original authors of the CIA Identities Law, sees the trial beginning to unravel “a long term, well planned, highly deceptive campaign” to bring the country to war and offers some predictions for the trial’s future

Larry Johnson at BooMan rejoices in the document dumping process this trial has initiated and explores documents between the CIA and OVP in 2002 expressing skepticism over the Iraqi-Niger connection.

eRiposte from FDL offers some observation and analysis of documents from the trial proceedings as well as an exhaustive exploration the under-reported war against Wilson.

Finally, a big welcome to Eric Brewer and Lance Dutson who will be in the courtroom this week.

05 Feb

Big breakthrough in energy storage?

Mebbie, mebbie not:

A secretive Texas startup developing what some are calling a "game changing" energy-storage technology broke its silence this week. It announced that it has reached two production milestones and is on track to ship systems this year for use in electric vehicles. 

EEStor's ambitious goal, according to patent documents, is to "replace the electrochemical battery" in almost every application, from hybrid-electric and pure-electric vehicles to laptop computers to utility-scale electricity storage. 

The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company. 

The implications of such an innovation, if true, are mind-boggling.  At the storage capacity they are describing, we can maintain the same power output at several orders of magnitude below current levels.  Imagine how fat and lazy we can get when we are free from the guilt of fossil-fuel pollutants!

02 Feb

Happy Global Warming Day!

In a parallel universe where an adorable overgrown rodent controls the weather, there was no shadow to be seen for poor Punxsutawney Phil.


Back on planet Earth, global warming experts responded with a collective 'er, no duh'.

01 Feb

Goodbye Molly

Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins (August 30, 1944 – January 31, 2007)

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. - From her final column, January 11th, 2007.

01 Feb

Libby: Leftly Leaning - Thursday, February 1st

Highlighting Miller as the least credible witness “in the history of witnesses,” BooMan notes the cruel irony that her only payback is to be torn to shreds by the very people she was trying to protect.

Jeff Lomonaco at TAP discusses some of the potential evidence Fitzgerald is lobbying to introduce as the trial proceeds.

Quipping on the twisted brilliance of banishing bloggers to indefinite “fake jury duty,” Wonkette weighs in on Cheney’s notes (“written in the blood of infants”) as potentially damning to the president.

With the assault that recent testimony has delivered to the professional stature of journalism, Wendy at Creative Ink explores whether the politics of journalist subpoenas is a cyclical phenomenon or a merely the result of political ideology.

Observing witnesses under cross-examination, Jeralyn at TalkLeft examines their respective performances and hints at a possible surprise revelation regarding a conversation with Mary Matalin.

For the visually-oriented, Eric Brewer at BTC news has put together a handy relationship chart of “Plame at a Glance.” Also from BTC, Weldon Berger offers some biographical context on the testimonies of Miller and Cooper.

1 Boring Old Man discusses the “fingernails on a chalkboard” experience of attorneys hammering away on typos and finds himself vindicated in having renounced a career as a jurist.

Finally, C&L gives us a comedic break with this spot-on clip from The Daily Show.

01 Feb

Lara Logan needs our help!

From Media Channel:

One would assume that Ms. Logan, as CBS chief foreign correspondent, has a fair amount of influence as to what stories she gets to cover, and that most of her important stories, once produced and delivered, will be broadcast. But when the story comes out of the mean streets of Baghdad, and doesn’t fit the officially-sanctioned narrative of Iraqis and US soldiers working arm in arm to help protect thankful Iraqi citizens, even chief foreign correspondents sometimes need to ask for help in getting it seen. Imagine our surprise recently when–over the digital transom–we received a copy of an email from a frustrated Lara Logan (see below)

In it, Logan asks for help in getting attention to what she calls “a story that is largely being ignored even though this istakingplace everysingle [sic] day in Baghdad, two blocks from where our office is located.”

The segment in question–”Battle for Haifa Street”–is a piece of first-rate journalism but one that only appears on the CBS News website–and has never been broadcast. It is a gritty, realistic look at life on the very mean streets of Baghdad, and includes interviews with civilians who complain that the US military presence is only making their lives worse and the situation more deadly.

You can check out the video, which has never aired on CBS, here. Honestly, I can’t imagine what CBS news has against broadcasting, er, well … the news, but Logan is one dynamo journalist who has been right in the thick of it since the beginning. If everyone would be so kind as to pass this link along to as many people as possible , the world just might be a better place for your efforts.

31 Jan

Cheney's Halliburton stock up 3,281%

Everyone remember this little interview from way, way back in 2003 (you know, before indoor plumbing and motion pictures)? 

MR. RUSSERT: Democrats have written you letters and are suggesting profiteering by your former company Halliburton and this is how it was reported: “Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contrast worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents. The size and scope of the government contracts awarded to Halliburton in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than was previously disclosed and demonstrate the U.S. military’s increasing reliance on for-profit corporations to run its logistical operations.” Were you involved in any way in the awarding of those contracts? 

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Of course not, Tim. Tim, when I was secretary of Defense, I was not involved in awarding contracts. That’s done at a far lower level. Secondly, when I ran Halliburton for five years and they were doing work for the Defense Department, which frankly they’ve been doing for 60 or 70 years, I never went near the Defense Department. I never lobbied the Defense Department on behalf of Halliburton. The only time I went back to the department during those eight years was to have my portrait hung which is a traditional service rendered for former secretaries of Defense. And since I left Halliburton to become George Bush’s vice president, I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had now for over three years. And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government, so...

Well, I know this may come as a shock, but it turns out – eh, not so much.  In fact, Cheney still holds nearly half a million Halliburton stock options which have risen 3,281% in the last year and are now valued at over $8 million. 

Somehow I doubt that 200 years from now kids will be telling stories about Cheney and a cherry tree.