I’ve been waiting for the rubber to meet the road with Barack Obama. His rocket ride to the highest levels of American poiltics has been a lot of sizzle, and just enough substance to keep the afterburner kicking.

I was patently disappointed when the Senator released his ‘solution‘ for global warming last week. It combines technocratic half steps and half measures (reductions in the greenhouse intensity of the American auto fleet) with policy proposals tailored to please the ethanol belt, rather than, you know, actually halt catastrophic climate change. Dubbed, forgettably, the National Low Carbon Fuel Standard — or even worse the NLCFS, in Beltway acronymese — Barack’s proposal seems to give lie to the claim that he does not know the ‘ways of Washington’ and seems to help explain why wonked out senators have such a hard time rising to the White House.

The plan seems cautious and timid and unoriginal — indeed, it is largely a national version of something proposed by Ahnold for California — and just a hair better than Hillary Clinton’s ethanol-centric jibber-jabber on the topic.

I was expecting to be similarly disappointed by Obama’s foreign policy proposals this week. But I gotta say. Wow. (more…)

You owe it to yourself to read Sy Hersh’s latest piece in The New Yorker, in which he reports that the U.S. Government is now covertly funding Sunni extremists — al Qaeda sympathizers at the very least — in an attempt to constrain Shia / Persian power, particularly in Lebanon.
Because this administration sees the rise of Iran as the greatest geopolitical threat, Hersh says, it is now cynically funnelling money to Sunni jihadists — adherents of the same “evil” ideology as bin Laden and his followers.

The criminal stupidity of treating the enemy of our enemy as our friend, when the enemy of our enemy is the enemy that attacked us on 9/11, is nearly impossible to overstate.

After forty-eight years of Chinese control, a peaceful country is fighting its oppressor. Will one of the world’s oldest culture’s survive?

Find out how you can help. The International Campaign for Tibet, a leading human rights organization, has identified six things you can do to help make the 2008 Beijing Olympics a catalyst for change in Tibet.

Read our feature story and take action now.

[photo by Jennifer Hsu]

We should all be a little terrified that incoming House Intel Chair Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) not only thinks we should ramp up troop levels in Iraq, but doesn’t seem to know Hezbollah from a hole in the ground, at least to judge from his abject failure of this impromptu quiz offered up by an enterprising reporter for Congressional Quarterly:

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players.To me, it’s like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who’s on what side?

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up a l Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.

Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?
And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?

“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah…”

“The administration wants to silence the messenger that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq,”—

–Rep. Henry A. Waxman on the last-second provision inserted in a military spending bill to shutter the office of the Iraq auditor who has uncovered millions in fraud by Halliburton and others.

Here’s one to put on your radar: India is now semi-officially blaming Pakistan for the bomb attacks in July in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 200 people. This isn’t just a quarrel between two unfriendly neighbors: both countries have nuclear weapons. And not the kind that Iraq supposedly had before we invaded Iraq (i.e., nothing) or the kind that Iran is supposedly trying to develop, but the real thing.

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The waves in 2004, rumblings last month from a volcano, a possible case of human-to-human bird flu transmission — and now . . . another tsunami. It was never gonna be easy for SBY, the newish president of one of the world’s largest democracies, but we can’t imagine how he’s feeling now. BBC reports that at least 80 are dead . . .

UPDATE: Death toll hits 230.

When footballers attack . . .

Materazzi insulted Zidane’s sick mother. At least that’s the theory advanced by an Italian lip reader hired by the BBC to analyze the WorldCup’s ugliest incident. Check out the YouTube clip here.