Yukon Fishtrap

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How Fox News Manipulates the News

Fox News: "Historians Pretty Much Agree" That FDR Prolonged the Great Depression That's the title of Huffington Post's article and you know immediately: that can not be true. Or is there a piece of forgotten, even hidden evidence? So we want to hear or read about reliable sources. Who is called "historians"? Pointer's guess is that it is a kind of oral history, like common in the dark ages. Well that's the field of religion or any other kind of devoted believe. It's not factual.
Watch the video:
In the article David Sirota gives us some quote, as is appropriate. Read it, but the finest is this:

Paul Krugman recently explained to a stunningly ignorant George Will on ABC News, 1937-1938 was the period Roosevelt dialed back the New Deal in the name of conservative demands that he stop spending:

By 1937 things were a lot better than they were in 1933. Then [FDR] was persuaded to balance the budget or try to and he raised taxes and cut spending and the economy went back down again and then it took an enormous public works program known as World War II to bring the economy out of the depression.

So with all of that data, let's go back to Fox News' main assertion: Is it really true that "historians pretty much agree" that the New Deal's government intervention prolonged the Great Depression? Of course not, as New York Times economics writer Daniel Gross says:

It was only with the passage of New Deal efforts--the SEC, the FDIC, the FSLIC--that the mechanisms of private capital began to kick back into gear. Don't take it from me. Take it from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who wrote the following in Essays on the Great Depression: "Only with the New Deal's rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression."...
The argument that the New Deal's efforts "perhaps had prolonged, the Depression," is a canard. One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian--I mean a serious historian, not a think-tank wanker, not an economist, not a journalist--who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression. (emphasis added)

In other words, it's the opposite of what Fox News says. "Historians pretty much agree" on one thing when it comes to Roosevelt: The New Deal helped end the Great Depression. But I would go even further than that, and agree with economist Brad DeLong who said that whether you are a historian or not - to argue what Jarrett and Crowley argued yesterday is to publicly declare oneself as divorced from the facts as the most ridiculed conspiracy theorists. As DeLong says, "A normal person would not argue that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression."
But, then, these are not "normal people" - those making these arguments are right-wing automatons whose claim that we shouldn't look at actual data, we should simply accept the truth of their claims because they insist "it's in the books!" or they've supposedly seen "all kinds of studies and academic work" that proves their hysteria true.

Couldn't better say it.

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Heaven for the Godless?

crusade

Pointer can't help it. Op-Ed Columnist CHARLES M. BLOW wrote publicly about what he had read from others, yes those catholic PEW-guys who wrote about it and so do I. They want to scare me?
Well, take a look out of my atheist window.
You are dead and in heaven?
That will never end because you can't die twice!
You have to live there for ever and ever, so, what do you have to do?

• Can you produce something;
• can you improve something;
• can you extend your knowledge;
• can you practice your skills
• or can fulfill your lifelong desire to f**k your first teacher?

That's not gonna happen, my friends. Heaven is perfect, isn't it? It's all done.
So, there is nothing to do for you. It's your duty to be wallpaper for the boss, decoration and you even can't order the choir of angels to shut up and you also can't safe your loved ones who you can see burning in hell because the boss gave them that destiny before they were born. If you ask why? The answer is: Thát's why! So, heaven is a cruelty and the really jolly nice message is: It doesn't exist! The whole religious crap is a fabulous fraud!
So after your death you are as unaware of something anything as before your birth.

Now let's see what others think about it. In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life. This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that. The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they? So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them. And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go. What on earth does this mean? One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus. Also, many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible. According to Pew’s August survey, only 39 percent of Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, and 18 percent think that it’s just a book written by men and not the word of God at all. In fact, on the question in the Pew survey about what it would take to achieve eternal life, only 1 percent of Christians said living life in accordance with the Bible. Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said, “The capacity of ignorance to influence survey outcomes should never be underestimated.” But I don’t think that they are ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are choosing to ignore it ... for goodness sake.
It's really the bloody limit of all human stupdity, Heaven, that eternal life without duties, is a curse of unthinkable cruelty. If there should be a living god who invented it he/she/it should have to be prosecuted and hastily punished to death.
But who am I...?
The answer is blown in the wind.

The Brittish Approach on Counterterrorism

Sound during the first minutes is poor and the introducing lady is not aware of the microphone; her voice is heading north-east to Iceland, Greenland or Newfoundland.
So, make yourself a drink and come back for about an hour.

Double Trouble

Research Highlights

Nature Reports Climate Change
doi:10.1038/climate.2008.137

Olive Heffernan

Conservation Biol. doi:10.1111/j.1523–1739.2008.01096.x (2008)

Replacing tropical rainforests with oil palm plantations threatens biodiversity and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, report scientists. One of a number of biofuel crops touted as a sustainable, environmentally friendly energy source, palm oil now covers some 13 million hectares of land surface worldwide, mostly in Southeast Asia.

An international team of researchers, led by Finn Danielsen of Denmark's Nordic Agency for Development and Ecology, has carried out the most comprehensive analysis yet of the impact of oil palm plantations on tropical forests. They estimate it would take 75 to 93 years for the carbon saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost through clearing tropical rainforest. This payback time would increase to more than 600 years if the original habitat was peatland, and would decrease to just 10 years on degraded grassland, they say. Based on a meta-analysis of faunal data and a comparative field study of flora on forested and converted land in Indonesia, they also show that plantations support species-poor communities compared to forests, and that the most abundant species in converted lands are generalists of low conservation value.

The authors call for global standards to assess the sustainability of biofuel crops.

Methane Mystery

Research Highlights

Nature Reports Climate Change
doi:10.1038/climate.2008.134

Alicia Newton | Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L22805 (2008)

Atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas methane rose sharply in early 2007, having remained largely stable over the past decade. Methane is released from wetlands and wildfires as well as from human activities, such as fossil fuel use and farming, but is destroyed in the atmosphere through reaction with a compound known as the hydroxyl radical.

Now Matthew Rigby of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have examined the change in global emissions of methane over a ten year period. They retrieved atmospheric measurements of methane and other chemical compounds from two monitoring networks with a total of 12 worldwide locations. Methane levels rose simultaneously across all global sites since early 2007. The team propose that the increase may have coincided with a slight decline in levels of the hydroxyl radical, but the changes in hydroxyl chemistry alone were insufficient to explain the entire methane rise.

By combining the data with numerical simulations from an atmospheric transport and chemistry model, they were able to attribute the methane spike to a worldwide rise in emissions between 2006 and 2007, the bulk of which originated in the Northern Hemisphere. The exact source of the extra methane, however, remains a mystery.

Send Caroline Kennedy to Court of St. James?

It's what Steve Clemons posted December 26, 2008 in Huffington Post. Too early for Pointer's delicate taste. Delicate when it comes to Garoline, such a sweaty. How can you pass her while she want to become a humble Democratic Senator? Of course she is suited for the function of ambassador in the UK and of course that appointment should be very honorable, but Obama needs some persons who are absolutely 100% loyal in the Senate without any fear to lose their position for the next election and there has to be put some really independent and fresh blood in that Senate. Or does it all have to go how we are used to?
"I wish she had decided to enter the political fray via election rather than appointment." Steve writes.

George W. Bush and Richard Cheney abused this democracy, built an imperial presidency, emasculated Congress, launched an illicit war, spied in massive proportions on American citizens, authorized torture as a tool in interrogations. They ruined what "democracy" means in the eyes of many American citizens -- but also for many around the world who want to knock back their totalitarian governments and achieve some form of real democracy and self-determination.

To succeed the Bush era with a high profile appointment of the untested, iconic Caroline Kennedy does not bolster the Democratic Party's message that democracy at home needs to be rebuilt and revitalized.

Revitalize, yes, but can that only be done by the old fellows hardboiled politicians who come to the Senate at the end of decades of political practice, like a kind of remuneration? The problem is more simple. Didn't Gov Blago of Ill. say that you have to pay to play? That's the problem.
the New York Daily News writes:

Caroline Kennedy's supporters say she could raise tons of money as a senator, but when it comes to writing checks to New York Democrats, she's been largely AWOL. This decade, other than a $1,000 donation to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the Camelot heiress has not financially supported any Democrat seeking city or state office in New York, records reveal.

Some say Kennedy, who is worth at least $100 million, missed an opportunity to curry favor among Democratic pols to establish herself as a serious political player as she lobbies Gov. Paterson for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat.

Pay to Play, that what matters and you can't explain that in London.
That has to change will the Brits have to say and that's what you also can say in New York and in Illinois.

The Embarrassing Position of the USA in Civilization on the Issue of LOVE

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The Lame Duck and The Total Lack of Transparency

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Caroline Kennedy Talks with NY1’s Dominic Carter

New York, NY, December 26, 2008 –In her first television interview since declaring her interest in Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, Caroline Kennedy tells NY1 Political Anchor Dominic Carter:

On the Senate seat: ‘I would be an unconventional choice’: “Well, there are many qualified people for this position. This is the governor’s choice. This is not your typical kind of selection process. But I think, I would be an unconventional choice - I haven’t followed a traditional path, but I think I bring a lifetime of experience to this. In my family public service is really the greatest honor anyone can have it’s a legacy I cherish and that I’ve tried to live up to my whole life.”

On her brother: “Right now he would be laughing his head off. There is no doubt about it…That was the kind of relationship we had. He was 100 percent behind me, he always was. Ya know, it would be great if he was here.”

On her mother: “She believed in doing the unexpected and living life on your own terms.” “Most people don’t realize, my mother loved campaigning because you get to meet people, it’s such an education, and of course she would roll her eyes about the whole thing but she was an incredible patriot herself and I think she would be really proud that I’m doing this.”

Would she be in this position if she wasn’t a Kennedy? ““If my last name weren’t Kennedy, maybe I would have run for office a long time ago.”

On Hillary: “We are losing a tremendous advocate for New York, even though our country is gaining a great Secretary of State when Hillary Clinton ascends to the state department. I think we need somebody who is going to be able to be heard and deliver for this state and I would love to be that person.

She admires J. LO. Is she the political equivalent of J Lo as Congressman Ackerman said? “I admire the journey J. Lo has traveled. I’ve been to a school in the Bronx near the house she grew up in and so I actually have a lot of admiration for her and she looks pretty good but in terms of public policy and as we spend our adults lives and I don’t think there is really much we have in common.”

On reports that she has missed votes in several elections: “I was dismayed by my voting record.”

No Child Left Behind a Success or Failure? “it’s never been funded adequately… not a fair test’

On her private life: “Everybody has tough moments. I've lost family members that I love and that I miss everyday and so has many, many other people has dealt with an ill parent the loss of a family member and stuff and that's a part of life I think I share those experiences with everybody else and if there's ways I can help other people who are suffering some of the same things I have gone through I would love to do that.”

See more of Caroline Kennedy’s first interview tonight on NY1’s Inside City Hall at 7pm and at 10pm.

Bush pushes Persian Gulf nuclear agreement

But critics say the US should go slowly on a deal that would help Iran's biggest trading partner.

The Bush administration is quietly advancing a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), raising concerns in Congress and among nonproliferation experts about the deal's repercussions in a volatile region. The deal to provide the small but strategically located country with the means to generate electricity through nuclear technology could be signed by President Bush before he leaves office, thus making the accord – similar to the much higherprofile nuclear pact the administration reached with India – part of his legacy.

But that would leave the incoming Obama administration with the task of taking the agreement to Congress, where objections over the UAE's close trade relations with Iran – and over the Emirates' history of serving as a transshipment point for sensitive materials – are already rising. A more recent wrinkle in the brewing controversy around the agreement is the revelation by the foundation of former president Bill Clinton that the ruling Zayed family of the UAE was one of about a dozen governments among the Clinton Foundation's hundreds of thousands of donors. With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton picked by President-elect Obama for secretary of State, some observers are citing the UAE agreement as an example of the kinds of conflicts Mrs. Clinton will face as she seeks to further national interests in a world where her husband has extensive personal and business relations.

"Some Republicans for sure will want to seize on anything they can to make life rough for the new secretary of State, and this is exactly the kind of connection involving the former president and his foreign ties that will not go unnoticed," says Michael Hudson, director of Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. "It would be a complication," he adds, "But it also seems implausible that because Bill has got quite a lot of money from the Zayed family and others in the Gulf, that's going to alter judgments that will be made in the government on the grounds of national security and other interests."

Indeed, it is the potential for harming US national security that congressional critics are citing to oppose the accord. And they are ringing the alarm bells the loudest over the UAE's close trade relations with Iran – and evidence that technology and parts used against US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan follow a path back to Iran that involves transshipment through the UAE. "Any [nuclear cooperation] agreement between the United States and the UAE should not be submitted to Congress until, at a minimum, the UAE has addressed the critical issue of transshipments and diversion of sensitive technologies to Iran," says Rep. Brad Sherman (D) of Calif., who chairs the House foreign affairs subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation, and trade. Citing evidence that American-made electronics equipment following this path has been used to make some of the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) targeting US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Sherman says the deal should not even be considered "until the UAE government has cracked down on Iranian procurement networks." The UAE is Iran's top trading partner, with less than 100 miles separating the two and the Emirates' port of Dubai just across the Persian Gulf from Iran.

The Bush administration only reviewed the provisions of the accord with key congressional committees in a hastily called briefing last month. The plan had been for the two countries to sign the accord when Abu Dhabi's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, met with Mr. Bush at Camp David in November. But since then the UAE government has backed off from signing the deal as it gauges congressional and Obama administration reaction.

Since the congressional briefing, one member of Congress has introduced legislation requiring certification that the UAE had taken concrete steps to close off the flow of sensitive materials and financing to Iran before Congress could approve it. Noting the Bush administration is touting the agreement as a model for future nuclear pacts with other interested Middle Eastern countries, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says the reasons for getting the UAE agreement right are all the more compelling.

"We've been told by the State Department that the UAE has already reformed and put in all kinds of oversights and controls, but we'd like to see a track record before even thinking about a nuclear cooperation deal with them," says a Republican congressional aide involved in the issue who could only discuss it on condition of anonymity. The Bush administration, which has been in initial discussions on nuclear cooperation with other countries in the region including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, argues the UAE deal would serve as a model since it includes tight controls on the use and disposal of nuclear fuel and stipulates intrusive international inspections of facilities. But the region's volatility and Iran's growing influence dictate a more cautious approach, the congressional aide says.

"Nuclearizing the Persian Gulf is not something we should be rushing into," he says.

Georgetown's Mr. Hudson says that as worrisome as prospects for a nuclearized Gulf may seem, the incoming Obama administration might also consider how a tightly controlled nuclear power deal with the UAE, exchanging nuclear energy know-how for strict international oversight, could serve as an example to Iran. Right now, the Iranian government has adopted a very nationalist and uncompromising stance over its nuclear program, he notes, but a more moderate government resulting from elections next June could see things differently.

"In a way the [UAE] agreement presents itself as an attractive alternative path for nuclear development plans," Hudson says. "The Iranians could look over and see that the US and international agencies are OK with this technology coming to the Gulf, as long as it's under the right controls. It could offer a way to get beyond how this has become a core national issue for them." But others say that before promoting an agreement that, once signed by Bush could not be renegotiated, the US should press the UAE for a tougher stance toward its powerful neighbor. "We need to remember that everything the Iranian regime needs to hold on to power goes through the UAE," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. "We shouldn't just give up the opportunity to put the squeeze on Iran and to make some headway on a nuclear problem in the region that is everyone's concern."

Cheney, Biden Spar In TV Appearances

Dick Cheney's unique gift for making hard questions easy and vice versa. by Dahlia Lithwick
In an ever-escalating game of chicken between the executive branch and the rest of the world, Vice President Dick Cheney wants you to understand that he has done nothing wrong over the past eight years. In fact, to hear him tell it to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday yesterday, we are all safer for his infallibility in the face of our own complacency. His liberal critics, for their part, answer Cheney's moral certainty by continuing to vigorously debate all the reasons to let him off the hook. What other possible response can there be to all that bristling manliness? History will remember Dick Cheney as the man who managed to make President George W. Bush look like a wimp.
One hesitates to waste too much time deconstructing Cheney's last-minute debater's tricks. The threats and insults stopped being impressive a long time ago. But the vice president's greatest rhetorical sleight of hand may be that he has completely inverted settled and open legal questions. As he snarks his way through his final exit interviews, he takes the position that the thorniest legal questions are the easy ones and the settled ones are still open.
First there's Cheney on the efficacy of torture. In his ABC interview last week he swaggered, "I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the No. 3 man in al-Qaida, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information. There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al-Qaida came from that one source."

Could this be a close call? In fact, the debate ended years ago, almost as soon as it began. You may remember back in 2002, some of us were actually engaged in discussing this issue. Alan Dershowitz at Harvard was poking at the possibility of judge-sanctioned torture warrants. Those charged with setting interrogation policy at Guantanamo were seeking inspiration from Jack Bauer. And boneheads like me were positing fascinating hypotheticals about the possible efficacy of abusing our prisoners.

Well, guess what? The efficacy of torture is not a close question anywhere outside of Fox television anymore. Darius Rejali has definitively studied the question and showed that torture does not elicit truthful confessions. In his book How To Break a Terrorist, former interrogator Matthew Alexander agrees that abusive interrogation techniques don't work and endanger Americans. FBI Director Robert Mueller recently told Vanity Fair's David Rose that he doesn't "believe it to be the case" that enhanced interrogation stopped any attacks on America. And the stunning bipartisan report issued earlier this month by the Senate armed services committee confirms that lawyers in every branch of the military consistently warned top Bush officials that torture wasn't effective. The handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who are still blathering about how well torture works do so in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

What about the legality of torture? That's an easy one, says Cheney, again in his ABC interview. "On the question of so-called torture, we don't do torture. We never have. It's not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross." Yet just a few moments later, when asked whether water-boarding a prisoner was appropriate, he said yes, adding that he was even involved in clearing the technique as part of the interrogation program.
Cheney says water-boarding is not torture. That question has been resolved as a legal matter for centuries and is not actually open to relitigation on ABC News. Water-boarding has been deemed torture and prosecuted as a war crime in this country. It violates, among other things, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the U.S. anti-torture statute. Its illegality is neither an open question nor a close one. Yet again, the handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who maintain that torture is completely legal corresponds almost perfectly to the number of people who could be prosecuted for war crimes because it is not.
Just as Cheney is able to sow legal doubt where none exists, he is adept at issuing blanket legal proclamations about questions that are open-ended and theoretical. Some of his finest overstatements of this past week include the assertion that those prisoners still left at Guantanamo Bay represent "the hard-core." Oh good grief. Even the CIA stopped believing that hooey six years ago. Which brings us to Cheney's biggest whopper of the week. In yesterday's interview with Chris Wallace, he was as blunt as anyone can be in articulating the Nutty Version of the Unitary Executive Theory:

The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.

The claim that "the nature of the world we live in" warrants a perennially unchecked executive branch can be delivered with all the gravitas in the world, and it still amounts to constitutional nonsense. To this end it's well worth reading Absolute Power, in which distinguished legal journalist John MacKenzie takes a close look at claims about the unitary executive. MacKenzie shows how a scholarly constitutional claim about the right of executive branch officials to interpret the Constitution morphed into the aggressively ahistorical interpretation of executive power that Cheney parrots with such perfect confidence. As MacKenzie writes: "The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution."
None of this will matter if President Bush issues blanket pardons in the coming weeks. Nor will it matter if the rest of us continue to invent reasons to neither investigate nor—if appropriate—prosecute wrongdoing by the highest-level officials in the Bush administration. Dick Cheney is counting on one or both of those outcomes when he obfuscates the easy legal questions and oversimplifies the complicated ones. If we choose to be bulldozed into living in his topsy-turvy legal universe, we really are as complacent as he believes.

Prius: It’s Not Just a Car, It’s an Emergency Generator

By Kate Galbraith and Pointer.
The Prius has a new use, and it does not involve driving. The Harvard Press — which serves the Massachusetts town of Harvard as opposed to the university — reported that the car’s battery helped keep the lights on for some locals during the recent ice storms.
The newspaper reports that John Sweeney, a resident who lost power, “ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas.”
Said Mr. Sweeney, in an e-mail message to The Press: “When it looked like we were going to be without power for awhile, I dug out an inverter (which takes 12v DC and creates 120v AC from it) and wired it into our Prius.”

According to the newspaper, “the device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power.” (The Times reported on a similar venture last year.)
In fact, this development, which comes at a tough time for Toyota, which makes the Prius, may not be as strange as it sounds. Mr. Sweeney’s tinkering is along the lines of the “smart grid” technology that many utility executives and other experts say lies in our future. The idea is that the battery of an electric car — a plug-in, in most smart-grid scenarios — can feed power to the electricity grid when the grid needs it.
Even President-elect Barack Obama has endorsed this idea, as seen toward the end of this YouTube clip in which he said: “We’re going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids — then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that’s generated.”
O yes, Rachel Maddow is great, Barack Obama is greater and where do you get them both together? Simpel, watch this:

Mr. Sweeney, out of necessity, got there first. But Pointer has with part 2 of the Rachel and Obama talk the last blast of a hit:
Sometimes you need some inspiring talk to energize.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

Barack Obama and his team haven't reached the White House yet, but they already seem to have mastered the art of the slow-motion leak. We learned yesterday, via George Stephanopoulos, that Rahm Emanuel has been cleared in the incoming administration's internal investigation of its dealings with Rod Blagojevich. Whether that was a deliberate, strategic leak or just intrepid reporting, it served its purpose: The story trickled out on a sleepy Sunday morning, got picked up everywhere, and by today it seems like old news. Well, glad that's all cleared up! Let's move on now.

To an unusual degree given how quiet he's been so far, Joe Biden is much in the news today. Biden will be chairing a task force on "strengthening the middle class," which sounds -- even by the standards of Washington task forces -- dull and more likely to be the source of photo ops rather than real legislative action. And after Biden and Dick Cheney both made Sunday show appearances, much of the focus was on how the two men differ on the proper role of the vice presidency. Biden said he wants to "restore the balance" between the president and vice president, while Cheney said Biden wants to "diminish the office" of the No. 2.

Here's another difference: Cheney probably wouldn't be caught dead chairing a task force on strengthening the middle class. Remember, this is the VP who reportedly said no when asked whether he would head up the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. For the most part, Cheney seemed to have free rein on issues that interested him and stayed as far away as possible from those issues that didn't. What will happen the first time Obama asks Biden to do something he would rather not?

George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews

George John Tenet (born January 5, 1953) was the Director of Central Intelligence for the United States Central Intelligence Agency and is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Tenet held the position as the DCI from July 1997 to July 2004, making him the second-longest serving director in the agency's history — behind Allen Welsh Dulles — as well as one of the few DCIs to serve under two U.S. presidents of opposing political parties. In February 2008 he became the managing director of the secretive investment bank Allen & Company.
That's him!
I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

And then this:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."

Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler reports.
I'll ask around about this and post any responses I get.

Americans Take Parting Shots at Bush

It was bad enough for President Bush to have shoes tossed at his head during his farewell journey to Baghdad. Now comes a new poll in which Americans call Bush all sorts of names -- some of them a lot worse than "dog."
In a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, respondents were asked to volunteer their assessments of how Bush would be remembered after he leaves office. The most frequent response, from 56 people, was "incompetent," followed by "idiot," "arrogant," "ignorant," "stupid," and so on. Nine people volunteered a three-letter synonym for donkey.
There were some kinder sentiments as well, including "honest," "honorable," and "dedicated." The number of participants who called Bush a "liar" also dropped from 18 in 2004 to just 4 this time around.
Overall, though, the Pew poll underscored the depth of public disdain for Bush, who now ranks as the most consistently unpopular president since the advent of modern political polling. He has not had the approval of a majority of Americans since the beginning of his second term, and has hovered in the 20s in most approval rankings for more than a year. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll last week found that eight out of 10 Americans would not miss him once he's gone.

"The public's verdict on the Bush presidency is overwhelmingly negative," the Pew researchers write in a summary of their findings. "Just 11% said Bush will be remembered as an oustanding or above average president -- by far the lowest positive end-of-term rating for any of the past four presidents." In 2000, by comparison, the recently-impeached Bill Clinton scored 44 percent on the same measure. (Ronald Reagan got 59 percent, while Bush's father received 36 percent.)
The Pew survey also found that 64 percent believe Bush will be remembered mostly for his failures, and 34 percent said he will go down in history as a poor president.

The new polling comes as Bush has embarked on a legacy campaign, attempting to burnish his reputation by claiming success in preventing terrorist attacks, turning around the security situation in Iraq and other accomplishments. Although it's too soon to tell if the campaign is working, most presidents have enjoyed a surge in popularity during their last months in office. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released earlier this week showed 30 percent of Americans now approve of how Bush is doing his job, up from his low of 23 percent in early October.
For his part, Bush has repeatedly claimed to be unbothered by his low popularity, and has pointed to his willingness to endure opposition as a strength. "The thing that's important for me is to get home and look in the mirror and say, 'I did not compromise my principles,'" Bush said in one recent interview. "And I didn't."
The Pew survey was conducted Dec. 3-7 among a sample of 1,489 adults using both landline and cellphones. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percent.

Keith Olbermann: Is Governor Sarah Palin palling aroud with drugdealers?

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The inaugural controversy

(NOTE: Copies of what seemed to be a draft of an inaugural invocation by Pastor Rick Warren arrived in the fax machines of several prominent journalists this morning. This site does not vouch for the authenticity of the draft, although each of the statements does conform to material in Pastor Warren's speeches, interviews, or on his websites.)

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O Lord, as we come together on this historic and solemn occasion to inaugurate a president and vice president. We pray, O Lord, for President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, to whom You have entrusted leadership of this nation at this moment in history.

We pray for their advisors and supporters, particularly their Jewish advisors and supporters, who will surely roast in hell if they do not abandon their refusal to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior. Pray for the conversion of Obama chief advisor David Axelrod and his economic wise man Larry Summers, his early supporters Lester Crown and his campaign finance chair Penny Pritzker, for, as the Bible says, there will be a day when there will be a great revival of faith in God through Jesus among the Jewish people. (Romans 11). Obviously, this is a day that we, as believers in Christ, want to pray for! Let the light of Christian salvation come to the Jewish Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel and his family, some of whom survived the German effort to bring them to Christian truth in the last generation.

May all efforts to stop homosexuals from violating the ancient humanitarian institution of marriage succeed as did your will in California in the last election. Attend particularly, O lord, to President Obama's environmental chief Nancy Sutley, and to the man who has worked essentially without sleep for three months to save the American economy from total collapse, Representative Barney Frank. Use the government to bring an end to acts as bad as incest, pedophilia and polygamy, by stamping out homosexuality among the homosexuals, a people evolutionarily unfit, that we may truly become one nation before God. May the First Amendment to the Constitution protect all who want to compare homosexual sex to incest, pedophilia and polygamy from the arrows of hate speech accusations shot by the politically correct.

Change the hearts of the new administration's pro-choice advisors and supporters, including the Justices of the Supreme Court who stand here today with us: Holocaust denier Anthony Kennedy, holocaust denier Ruth Bader Ginzburg, holocaust denier David Souter, holocaust denier Stephen Breyer, and holocaust denier John Paul Stevens, who is about to swear in the Vice-President, in that abortion is a holocaust and the eighteen million or so women who have committed abortion in the thirty-five years since 1973 are thus no better than Nazis.

Bless the women, who have chosen to follow their ambitions into public life, but change the hearts, Lord, of Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis from independent lives of their own to submission to their husbands, if any, for I love the King James Version's rendition of Ephesians 5:22 "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands" and of course "Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ if God." 1 Corinthians 11:3. These women have chosen to participate in the public life of the community. Enlighten them as to the requirement that women not speak in church, saving any questions they have about their common life to ask their husbands as they return home.

Now, O Lord, despite the plain language of the Constitution that created this great nation, we dedicate this presidential inaugural ceremony to You. May this be the beginning of a new dawn for America as we humble ourselves before You and acknowledge You alone as our Lord, our Savior and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rachel Maddow on Torture Logic

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Tortured Reasoning by David Rose, Vanity Fair
...
The case of Abu Zubaydah is a suitable place to begin answering some pressing but little-considered questions. Putting aside all legal and ethical issues (not to mention the P.R. ramifications), does such treatment—categorized unhesitatingly by the International Committee of the Red Cross as torture—actually work, in the sense of providing reliable, actionable intelligence? Is it superior to other interrogation methods, and if they had the choice, free of moral qualms or the fear of prosecution, would interrogators use it freely?

President Bush has said it works extremely well, insisting it has been a vital weapon in America’s counterterrorist arsenal. Vice President Dick Cheney and C.I.A. director Michael Hayden have made similar assertions. In fact, time and again, Bush has been given opportunities to distance his administration from the use of coercive methods but has stood steadfastly by their use. His most detailed exposition came in a White House announcement on September 6, 2006, when he said such tactics had led to the capture of top al-Qaeda operatives and had thwarted a number of planned attacks, including plots to strike U.S. Marines in Djibouti, fly planes into office towers in London, and detonate a radioactive “dirty” bomb in America. “Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al-Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has saved innocent lives.”

Really? In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts—with Abu Zubaydah’s case one of the most glaring examples.

Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading “information” that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.

Everything that was to go wrong with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah flowed from a first, fatal misjudgment. Although his name had long been familiar to the C.I.A., that did not make him an operational terrorist planner or, as Bush put it in September 2006, “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.” Instead, Scheuer says, he was “the main cog in the way they organized,” a point of contact for Islamists from many parts of the globe seeking combat training in the Afghan camps. However, only a tiny percentage would ever be tapped for recruitment by al-Qaeda.

According to Scheuer, Abu Zubaydah “never swore bayat [al-Qaeda’s oath of allegiance] to bin Laden,” and the enemy he focused on was Israel, not the U.S. After Abu Zubaydah’s capture, Dan Coleman, an F.B.I. counterterrorist veteran, had the job of combing through Abu Zubaydah’s journals and other documents seized from his Faisalabad safe house. He confirms Scheuer’s assessment. “Abu Zubaydah was like a receptionist, like the guy at the front desk here,” says Coleman, gesturing toward the desk clerk in the lobby of the Virginia hotel where we have met. “He takes their papers, he sends them out. It’s an important position, but he’s not recruiting or planning.” It was also significant that he was not well versed in al-Qaeda’s tight internal-security methods: “That was why his name had been cropping up for years.”

Declassified reports of legal interviews with Abu Zubaydah at his current residence, Guantánamo Bay, suggest that he lacked the capacity to do much more. In the early 1990s, fighting in the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, he was injured so badly that he could not speak for almost two years. “I tried to become al-Qaeda,” Abu Zubaydah told his lawyer, Brent Mickum, “but they said, ‘No, you are illiterate and can’t even remember how to shoot.’” Coleman found Abu Zubaydah’s diary to be startlingly useless. “There’s nothing in there that refers to anything outside his head, not even when he saw something on the news, not about any al-Qaeda attack, not even 9/11,” he says. “All it does is reveal someone in torment. Based on what I saw of his personality, he could not be what they say he was.”

In May 2008, a report by Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice inspector general, stated that, as he recovered in the hospital from the bullet wounds sustained when he was captured, Abu Zubaydah began to cooperate with two F.B.I. agents. It was a promising start, but “within a few days,” wrote Fine, he was handed over to the C.I.A., whose agents soon reported that he was providing only “throw-away information” and that, according to Fine, they “needed to diminish his capacity to resist.” His new interrogators continued to question him by very different means at so-called black-site prisons in Thailand and Eastern Europe. They were determined to prove he was much more important than the innkeeper of a safe house.

Bush discussed Abu Zubaydah’s treatment in his 2006 announcement. “As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures…. The procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.” Soon, Bush went on, Abu Zubaydah “began to provide information on key al-Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September 11.” Among them, Bush said, were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, and his fellow conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. In fact, Binalshibh was not arrested for another six months and K.S.M. not for another year. In K.S.M.’s case, the lead came from an informant motivated by a $25 million reward.

As for K.S.M. himself, who (as Jane Mayer writes) was waterboarded, reportedly hung for hours on end from his wrists, beaten, and subjected to other agonies for weeks, Bush said he provided “many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans.” K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

It is, perhaps, a little late, more than six years after detainees began to be interrogated at Guantánamo Bay and at the C.I.A.’s black-site prisons, to be asking whether torture works. Yet according to numerous C.I.A. and F.B.I. officials interviewed for this article, at the time this question really mattered, in the months after 9/11, no one seriously addressed it. Those who advocated a policy that would lead America to deploy methods it had always previously abhorred simply assumed they would be worthwhile. Non-governmental advocates of torture, such as the Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, have emphasized the “ticking bomb” scenario: the hypothetical circumstance when only torture will make the captured terrorist reveal where he—or his colleagues—has planted the timed nuclear device. Inside the C.I.A., says a retired senior officer who was privy to the agency’s internal debate, there was hardly any argument about the value of coercive methods: “Nobody in intelligence believes in the ticking bomb. It’s just a way of framing the debate for public consumption. That is not an intelligence reality.”

Rachel Maddow on Bush's new abortion rule and "asleep at the swich"

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Asleep At The Swich

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Richard D. "Rick" Warren has pushed Blagojevich from the frontpages

Though maintaining traditional evangelical positions on issues such as abortion and gay marriage, Warren has challenged the conservative views of many evangelical leaders by devoting less attention to these issues and instead calling on the church to focus its efforts on fighting international poverty and disease, expanding educational opportunity for the marginalized, and combatting global warming. He has thus worked to promote an evangelical movement that is more centrist rather than wedded to the Republican Party. He has maintained good relations with both Republicans and Democrats, and during the 2008 presidential election he hosted the Civil Forum on The Presidency featuring both John McCain and Barack Obama at his church. President-Elect Obama chose Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, a decision that has drawn some criticism as a result of several of Warren's public positions, including his support of California's Proposition 8.
I don't understand how anyone who listened to Obama during the campaign would be shocked that Obama lets Warren give the invocation. It's vintage Obama. It does not signal agreement with Warren's political positions, some of which are clearly at odds with Obama's. Warren isn't making policy or even giving a sermon., He's saying a prayer and then possibly dancing later at some inaugural parties. If anything, it's the possibility of this dancing that should be deeply troubling to all Americans.
Rick Warren felt some of this same heat when he invited Barack Obama to speak at his church on World Aids Day. Conservatives railed against Warren for legitimizing Obama. People with different political opinions aren't supposed to come together in anything but a shouting match.
In a few weeks, Barack Obama will be sworn in as President and be joined by two men leading prayers - Rick Warren and Joseph Lowery. Lowery is the 'dean of the Civil Rights movement', the man who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr. Lowery supports same sex marriage.
There's something bigger at play here and you can't say Obama didn't warn you. He talked about reaching out, about expanding our politics and that crazy bastard actually meant it. Nobody on the left or right quite knows what to make of it. We want to cram Obama into our old, divisive, two toned ideological and political frame and if he doesn't fit, we'll attack him too. Attacking is what we're used to doing.
But in the long run this new politics benefits us all. Ironically, it benefits the minorities and marginalized and ill-treated the most. I know this may be hard for many to see right now but the truth is that this sort of symbol is what America needs. Not seeing just Warren on stage or just Lowery but seeing both of them of there at once
Obama said it in the abstract time and again during the campaign. Now he's showing us. Seeing the things that Pastor Rick Warren and Reverend Joseph Lowery have in common is more important than seeing the things that separate them. America needs to see that. It's a step down the road where a majority of us see the things that straight Americans in love want are the same things that gay Americans in love want, too.
If you are mad about Rick Warren, I'm not attacking you. I understand your anger and I'm not saying it's not justified. But it's all right to let your anger go, too. It doesn't mean surrender, it doesn't mean giving up the struggle for equality.
It means doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It means winning, right now - because the fight against hate starts whenever you want it, in your own heart. You can win a battle right now by not hating.

Can I get an amen?

Mugabe insists 'Zimbabwe is mine'

Mugabe: "I will never surrender"

President Robert Mugabe has said that "Zimbabwe is mine" and rejected calls from some African leaders to step down. "I will never, never, never surrender," he told delegates of his ruling Zanu-PF party at its annual conference.
Mr Mugabe also said he had sent a letter to the country's main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, inviting him to be sworn in as prime minister.
Earlier, Mr Tsvangirai said he would pull out of power-sharing talks unless abductions of his supporters stopped. He said more than 40 members of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were missing and accused the Zanu-PF of orchestrating a campaign of terror.
Zimbabwe is currently gripped by economic collapse and a cholera epidemic. The UN on Thursday reported that the death toll from the disease had risen to 1,123 and that 20,896 people had been infected.
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Friday the antiquated methods being used to treat the epidemic could not bring hope to the suffering of Zimbabweans, and called for more aid to be sent.
"I believe the situation, contrary to what President Mugabe says, from all the evidence we have is deteriorating and deteriorating rapidly," he told a news conference in London.
US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer meanwhile said there was "a complete collapse right now" in Zimbabwe, and said Mr Mugabe needed to step down.

'Pack of lies'
But in a defiant speech at Zanu-PF's annual conference in Bindura, the president insisted "the only persons with the power to remove Robert Gabriel Mugabe are the people of Zimbabwe. I will never, never, never surrender. Zimbabwe is mine, I am a Zimbabwean. Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans," he said.
Mr Mugabe said international criticism of his government's handling of the cholera outbreak was "a pack of lies".
"I won't be intimidated. Even if I am threatened with beheading, I believe this and nothing will ever move me from it: Zimbabwe belongs to us, not the British," he added. He also questioned whether any of his country's neighbours would "have the courage to order a military intervention". "What would they come and do militarily here? All that they would come and really pose is a threat to our stability," he said. "There would be an unnecessary war started in a foolish manner because of foolish persuasion coming from foolish sources."
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade became the latest in an increasing number of senior African politicians calling for Mr Mugabe to quit earlier on Friday.
He told the French newspaper, La Croix, that he had supported Mr Mugabe in the past but was forming the view that the president was now the cause of his country's problems.
'No letters'Mr Mugabe said international criticism of his government's handling of the cholera outbreak was "a pack of lies".
"I won't be intimidated. Even if I am threatened with beheading, I believe this and nothing will ever move me from it: Zimbabwe belongs to us, not the British," he added. He also questioned whether any of his country's neighbours would "have the courage to order a military intervention".
"What would they come and do militarily here? All that they would come and really pose is a threat to our stability," he said.
"There would be an unnecessary war started in a foolish manner because of foolish persuasion coming from foolish sources."
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade became the latest in an increasing number of senior African politicians calling for Mr Mugabe to quit earlier on Friday.
He told the French newspaper, La Croix, that he had supported Mr Mugabe in the past but was forming the view that the president was now the cause of his country's problems.

'No letters'
Also in his speech on Friday, the Zimbabwean leader said he had written to Mr Tsvangirai, inviting him to become prime minister as part of the inclusive power-sharing government, but expressed doubt whether he would accept.
"I have sent letters so that they can come and I can swear [in] and appoint them. We have not reached a stage where we can say with a degree of certainty that they want to be part of this," he said.
Also in his speech on Friday, the Zimbabwean leader said he had written to Mr Tsvangirai, inviting him to become prime minister as part of the inclusive power-sharing government, but expressed doubt whether he would accept.
"I have sent letters so that they can come and I can swear [in] and appoint them. We have not reached a stage where we can say with a degree of certainty that they want to be part of this," he said.
MDC officials told the Reuters news agency that they had received no such letters.
The two rivals signed a power-sharing deal in September, under which Mr Tsvangirai would have become prime minister and head a new council of ministers, but they have been unable to agree on the distribution of key ministries.
Earlier, Mr Tsvangirai said Mr Mugabe had repeatedly broken the spirit of the agreement. He said the president was trying to stay in power at all costs, and threatened to suspend all contact with the Zanu-PF unless there was an end to the abduction of MDC supporters and civil society activists.
"More than 42 members have been abducted," the MDC leader told a news conference in Botswana, where he is currently based. "If these abductions do not cease immediately and if all abductees are not released or charged in a court of law by 1 January 2009, I will be asking the MDC's national council to pass a resolution to suspend all negotiations and contact with Zanu-PF."
Mr Tsvangirai said there could be no meaningful talks while a campaign of terror was being waged to undermine the MDC's support and reduce it to a junior partner in the new government.
BBC Southern Africa correspondent Peter Biles says that this represents a significant shift in Mr Tsvangirai's position, as he had previously remained committed to the power-sharing talks despite a number of reservations.

Drillers break into magma chamber

Source caption: This is a three-dimensional perspective view of a false-color image of the eastern part of the Big Island of Hawaii. It was produced using all three radar frequencies -- X-band, C-band and L-band -- from the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) flying on the space shuttle Endeavour, overlaid on a U.S. Geological Survey digital elevation map. Visible in the center of the image in blue are the summit crater (Kilauea Caldera) which contains the smaller Halemaumau Crater, and the line of collapse craters below them that form the Chain of Craters Road.
The image was acquired on April 12, 1994 during orbit 52 of the space shuttle. The area shown is approximately 34 by 57 kilometers (21 by 35 miles) with the top of the image pointing toward northwest. The image is centered at about 155.25 degrees west longitude and 19.5 degrees north latitude. The false colors are created by displaying three radar channels of different frequency. Red areas correspond to high backscatter at L-HV polarization, while green areas exhibit high backscatter at C-HV polarization. Finally, blue shows high return at X-VV polarization. Using this color scheme, the rain forest appears bright on the image, while the green areas correspond to lower vegetation. The lava flows have different colors depending on their types and are easily recognizable due to their shapes.
It has been described as a geologist's dream - a unique opportunity to study up close the volcanic processes that built the Earth's continents.
Drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber.
Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several metres before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study.
Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made.
"This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat," the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, professor told BBC News.
"Before, all we had to deal with were lava flows; but they are the end of a magma's life. They're lying there on the surface, they've de-gassed. It's not the natural habitat.

"It's the difference between looking at dinosaur bones in a museum and seeing a real, living dinosaur roaming out in the field."
Professor Marsh has been discussing the discovery here at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting 2008.

In control
This is not the first time drillers have encountered magma; the depth of the hit and the setting are, however, thought to be unique.
The exploratory well was being put down in the east of Hawaii's Big Island, through the basalt lava fields formed by Kilauea Volcano.
The idea was to find steam from waters heated deep underground in fractured rock, to drive turbines on the surface to generate electricity. The company behind the project, Puna Geothermal Venture, has had a successful power operation in the area for 15 years.
But the drillers were shocked - not only to hit magma but to also hit such a big heat source at the relatively shallow depth of 2.5km.
"It's hotter than hell; it's over a thousand degrees centigrade," said Professor Marsh.
Bill Teplow, a consulting geologist with US Geothermal Inc, who oversaw the drilling, stressed there was no risk of an explosion or of a volcanic eruption at the site.
"It was easily controlled in the well bore because of the magma's highly viscous nature. It flowed up the well bore 5-10m but then the cool drilling fluid caused it to solidify and stop flowing," said Mr Teplow.
"At no time were we in danger of losing control of the well."

The breakthrough was made in 2005. Only now are researchers confident enough about their work to discuss the details publicly.
They are not sure how large the magma chamber is, but some initial testing suggests it may have been put in place by activity from Kilauea in the 1950s, perhaps even the 1920s.Professor Marsh said the chamber was docile and slowly cooling. The consistency of the magma was like chilled pancake syrup, he said.
It is hoped the site can now become a laboratory, with a series of cores drilled around the chamber to better characterise the crystallisation changes occurring in the rock as it loses temperature.
The magma is a dacite, making it chemically distinct from the basalt which forms nearly the entire mass of the Hawaiian Islands and the surrounding oceanic crust. It has a much higher silica content.
Dacite magma chemistry is similar to that of the granitic core of the continents. Professor Marsh said the Puna material, therefore, may represent the first time that the actual process of differentiation of continental-type rock from primitive oceanic basalt had been observed in situ.
"Granites are about 75% SiO2 and basalts are about 50%. Average continental material is probably in between, at about 60%," explained Professor Marsh.
"Here's one that turns out to be 67% silica. It's up there; it's a very respectable silicic magma. And it's in the middle of the ocean, and it could be this is how continents could have been started to be built on the planet."
Geothermal experts are also fascinated by the event. The Kilauea encounter is by far the shallowest and the hottest encounter of rock in a commercial operation, and it will be studied to see if there are lessons that can be applied to electrical generation project elsewhere in the world.
"We were at about 2.5km which is pretty routine drilling depth," explained Mr Teplow.
"But that is half the depth of experimental projects in Europe and Australia where they are drilling very deep into hot granite - some 5-5.5km down - and getting 260C rock; and here we're getting 1,050C rock."

35 Iraq Officials Held in Raids on Key Ministry

Up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three days with some of them accused of quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, according to senior security officials in Baghdad.
The arrests, confirmed by officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security as well as the prime minister’s office, included four generals. The officials also said that the arrests had come at the hand of an elite counterterrorism force that reports directly to the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
The arrests reflect a new set of political challenges for Iraq. Mr. Maliki, who has gained popularity as a strong leader but has few reliable political allies, has scrambled to protect himself from domestic rivals as the domineering influence of the United States, his leading backer, begins to fade.
Rumors of coups, conspiracies and new alliances abound in the Iraqi capital a month before provincial elections. Critics of Mr. Maliki say he has been using arrests to consolidate power.
But senior security officials said there was significant evidence tying those arrested to a wide array of political corruption charges, including affiliation with Al Awda, or the Return, a descendant of the Baath Party, which ruled the country as a dictatorship for 35 years, mostly under Mr. Hussein. Tens of thousands of Iraqis died or were persecuted, including Mr. Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, by the Baath Party. It was outlawed after the American invasion in 2003.
While most members of the Baath Party were Sunni Muslims, as Mr. Hussein was, those arrested were a mix of Sunnis and Shiites, several officials said. It was unclear precisely how many Interior Ministry officials were detained.
While most members of the Baath Party were Sunni Muslims, as Mr. Hussein was, those arrested were a mix of Sunnis and Shiites, several officials said. It was unclear precisely how many Interior Ministry officials were detained.

A high-ranking Interior Ministry official said that those affiliated with Al Awda had paid bribes to other officers to recruit them and that huge amounts of money had been found in raids.

He said there could be more arrests. Some of those under arrest belonged to the now-illegal party under Mr. Hussein’s government. Mr. Maliki’s office declined to comment. But one of his advisers, insisting that he not be named because he was not authorized to speak, said the detainees were involved in “a conspiracy.”

The Ministry of the Interior is dedicated to Iraq’s internal security, and includes the police forces. The ministry has a history of being heavily infiltrated with Shiite militias, though it has improved considerably over the past two years.

A police officer, who knows several of the detainees but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said they were innocent, longstanding civil servants and had little in common with one another. Those who once belonged to the Baath Party were lower-level members, he said, insisting that the arrests were politically motivated.

Interior Minister Jawad Kadem al-Bolani, who has not been implicated and is out of the country, has his own political ambitions and has been expanding his secular Iraqi Constitutional Party. Iraq is a nation where leadership has often changed by coup, and as next month’s provincial elections approach, worry about violence is increasing. So are accusations about politically charged detentions.

Tumult in Iraqi Parliament Over Shoe

BAGHDAD — A session of the Iraqi Parliament erupted in an uproar on Wednesday as lawmakers clashed over how to respond to the continuing detention of an Iraqi television reporter who threw his shoes at President Bush during a Baghdad news conference earlier this week, people attending the parliamentary meeting said.
As Parliament began to discuss legislation on the withdrawal from Iraq of armed forces from nations other than the United States, a group of lawmakers demanded that the legislature instead take up the issue of the detained journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, 29. After his shoes narrowly missed Mr. Bush’s head at the news conference on Sunday, Mr. Zaidi was subdued by a fellow journalist and then beaten by members of the prime minister’s security detail.

The legislative session became so tumultuous that it prompted the speaker of Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, to announce his resignation, according to The Associated Press. A spokesman for Mr. Mashhadani, Jabar al-Mashhadani, refused to confirm whether the speaker had tendered his resignation, although he would not deny it. Some in Parliament say the government should release Mr. Zaidi immediately, while others say the judiciary should decide his fate.
How badly injured Mr. Zaidi was by members of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s security detail is not clear. He has not appeared in public since his arrest, and his family members and his legal representatives say they have not been permitted to visit him. On Wednesday, Mr. Zaidi was scheduled to appear before a judge, but it was unclear whether that happened.

Dhiya al-Saadi, one of Mr. Zaidi’s lawyers, said Wednesday that he was not sure whether Mr. Zaidi had appeared before a judge. As part of the Iraqi legal system, a judge typically determines whether bringing formal charges against a suspect is warranted, criminal lawyers in Iraq said. Mr. Zaidi faces up to seven years in prison if he is charged with and convicted of offending the head of a foreign state.