In commemoration of Martin Luther King, former Vice-President Al Gore gave the best speech heard in this country by this reporter, a Gore doubter, in some time. While challenging the idea that the President can act on foreign policy unchecked by Congress or the judicial branch (which Gore says should be called the "unilateral theory" of the Presidency), Gore also effectively linked the Administration’s tendency to bully questioners to its blindness to politically inconvenient facts, which leads inexorably to the unhappy results we are now seeing around the nation.

Or, as the well-known blogger Josh Marshall put it:

The point Gore makes in his speech that I think is most key is the connection between authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence.

In the speech, Gore showed how the Administration’s desire to ram through a Medicare drug benefit, any benefit, despite doubts from Republicans and Democrats alike about how well the plan would work is part of the Administration’s mindset, which equates controlling the debate with a total unwillingness to face facts: 

...when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing- all over the country- with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming.

Well argued, Al.

A month ago I posted on political change and what John Lennon would do were he still with us. In response a friend (Craig Rosen) sent me a fascinating interview between Lennon and Yoko Ono and well-known British radicals Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, which ran in an Trotskyist sheet called (believe it or don’t) The Red Mole back in the early 1970’s. It’s posted on the Counterpunch site.

As is so often the case with Lennon, the interview is fascinating on about seventeen different levels, and still very much worth reading, twenty-five years later. (Just to cite one example: Lennon believed that the first big step for himself and the Beatles, to break out of the societal role they were assigned, came out of their "Liverpoolness"–refusing to change their accent to go on the BBC. Not what you might expect, is it?)

But here’s the crucial item, I think, for people who care about the planet. In the midst of an interview thick with references to the saintly Workers, oppression, the capitalist game, and other such weary Marxisms, Lennon abruptly quotes writer Richard Neville, who compared Wilson (of the Labor Party) and Heath (of the Conservative Party). As Lennon put it:

Like Richard Neville said, there may be only an inch of difference between Wilson and Heath but it’s in that inch that we live….

Back in 2000, people who knew me often assumed that because the environment matters to me, that I would vote for Ralph Nader. I found the assumption insulting. I know Ralph Nader wasn’t going anywhere, and didn’t trust him for a minute; I wanted to preserve that inch’s difference, where millions of us live, between the Democrats and the Republicans.

I’m going to be blunt: Six years later, is there any doubt about the wisdom of that choice?

(But in the next breath, I must admit that if Lennon were still with us, he would not settle for the Democrats, and likely would call for us all to live in cities…or something equally challening.)

This week the pro-logging policies of the Bush administration took two hits, as reported on the useful Forest Service Employees for Environmental ethics (FSEEE) site.

First, an extensive study in Science of so-called "salvage" logging in the aftermath of the disastrous Biscuit fire in Oregon found that, contra logging industry and Republican claims, post-fire logging resulting in much higher fuels loads and far fewer surviving seedlings. The researchers concluded:

Therefore, the
lowest fire risk strategy may be to leave dead trees standing
as long as possible (where they are less available to surface
flames), allowing for aerial decay and slow, episodic input to
surface fuel loads over decades.

Second, a Federal judge reinstated the requirement that the Forest Service and other Federal agencies "survey and manage" forest lands before opening them up to logging, a requirement the Bush administration eliminated in 2004 without notice or discussion.

As this laconic AP story on the ruling points out, this will cost the Bush adminstration about $2.7 million dollars from lost sales…which by some strange coincidence is the same number the government would have to pay to survey the 5.5 million acres of forest, much of it old growth forest, for endangered and threatened species, according to this story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Yet another example of the fundamental incoherence of the Bush administration’s environmental policies, which so often seem to boil down to a reckless desire cut, drill, and develop…at any cost.