From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

What could possibly be left of the environment for the Bush administration to degrade on its way out the door? Leave it to the Forest Service not to see the forest or the trees.

The Washington Post this week reported that the administration plans to issue yet another “midnight” ruling. This one would let timber companies pave over national forest logging roads so pine tree woods can become residential subdivisions with names like “Pine Woods.”

The ruling would most immediately benefit the nation’s largest private landowner, 8-million-acre-owning Plum Creek Timber. The Forest Service, directed by former timber industry lobbyist Mark Rey, had long been working on a paving deal with Plum Creek behind closed doors. It has been held up by outraged local officials who were not consulted over the impact of development on resources and by environmentalists gravely concerned about wildlife endangerments.

“We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months,” Patrick O’Herren, rural initiatives director for Missoula County, Montana, told the Post last July. Plum Creek is the biggest private landowner in Montana, with 1.2 million acres, much of it not far from either Missoula or Kalispell in the western part of the state. Much of that land’s mountain wilderness, complete with glaciers and grizzlies, is so pristine that the Post said parts of it are “as Lewis and Clark found it.”

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From Salon
By Heather Havrilesky

“Why am I back here? Man, I’m back here trying to clear my place up. It took me too long and I worked too hard to build what I have here to just pick up and leave like that.” — Herbert Gettridge

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August of 2005, all 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge could think about was returning home again. He watched the devastation from the safety of his daughter Cheryl’s house in Madison, Wis., straining his eyes for a glimpse of his own house all the while.

“He was outta his mind, worried about when he was gonna be able to get back to the house,” Cheryl told the filmmakers behind Frontline’s “The Old Man and the Storm” (premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 6, on PBS; check local listings). At first glance, the documentary looks like another uplifting, ultimately hopeful story about how Hurricane Katrina laid bare one man’s will to persevere against all odds.

Sadly, though, Gettridge’s experience is anything but positive. First there’s the heart-wrenching discovery that his house has been all but destroyed by floodwaters. Even so, Gettridge gets to work, living without electricity, drinkable water or a bed. His wife is still in Wisconsin and longs to be home with him, but the house isn’t ready for her yet, and since she’s in poor health, it makes more sense for her to stay with her daughter.

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From Tom Dispatch
By Tom Engelhardt

It may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE.

From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting — in almost comic strip-style — various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the “body count.”

So I learned recently by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious Pharaohs).

Hand it to art museums. Is there anything stranger than wandering through one and locking eyes with a Vermeer lady, a Van Eyck portrait, or one of Rembrandt’s burghers staring out at you across the centuries? What a reminder of the common humanity we share with the distant past. In a darker sense, it’s no less a reminder of our kinship across time to spot a little pyramid of heads on a frieze, imagine an Assyrian scribe making his count, and — eerily enough — feel at home. What a measure of just how few miles “the march of civilization” (as my parents’ generation once called it) has actually covered.

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From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

It’s not uncommon for Presidents to embellish their accomplishments upon leaving office, but George W. Bush, who will exit the White House leaving the country in the worst shape since Herbert Hoover, has gone a step further, moving past exaggeration into outright lying.

Last month, trying to change the emerging historical consensus about a failed presidency, the White House published two lengthy reports, “Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush,” and “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record.”

One of the surprising claims that stood out among the combined 90 pages of so-called accomplishments was the White House’s glowing assessment of Bush’s record on veterans’ issues. Bush claims he “provided unprecedented resources for veterans” over the past eight years and provided “the highest level of support for veterans in American history.”

“The President also increased the benefits available to those who have served our Nation and transformed the veterans health care system to better serve those who have sacrificed for our freedom,” both reports claim, adding that he “instituted reforms for the care of wounded warriors … and dramatically expanded resources for mental health services.”

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From The NY Times
By Bob Herbert

The economy is obviously issue No. 1 as Barack Obama prepares to take over the presidency. He’s charged with no less a task than pulling the country out of a brutal recession. If the worst-case scenarios materialize, his job will be to stave off a depression.

That’s enough to keep any president pretty well occupied. What Mr. Obama doesn’t need, and what the U.S. cannot under any circumstances afford, is any more unnecessary warfare. And yet, while we haven’t even figured out how to extricate ourselves from the disaster in Iraq, Mr. Obama is planning to commit thousands of additional American troops to the war in Afghanistan, which is already more than seven years old and which long ago turned into a quagmire.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, wrote an important piece for Newsweek warning against the proposed buildup. “Afghanistan will be a sinkhole,” he said, “consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste.”

In an analysis in The Times last month, Michael Gordon noted that “Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain.”

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From The Raw Story
By David Edwards and Muriel Kane

The eight years of Dick Cheney’s memorable vice-presidency will be over and done with two weeks from now, but MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann remains determined to get in his parting shots at “Crazy Vice-President Gate.”

On Monday, Olbermann found his opportunity in Cheney’s remarks on Face the Nation when asked whether we are better off than eight years ago.

“I think we’ve done some very good things in the course of the last eight years,” Cheney replied. “Defending the country against further terrorist attacks like 9/11 I think’s a major accomplishment, for example.”

Olbermann was clearly offended by Cheney’s claim that preventing another 9/11 meant the nation was now better off than before 9/11, but it was the remarks which followed that really got him steamed.

“There’s no question about what the new administration … are going to have their hands full with,” Cheney went on to say. “The new set of problems, if you will, centered especially on the economy … just as our task when we came in was ultimately to deal with the aftermath of 9/11.”

“Listen, you fatuous, condescending lunatic,” Olbermann erupted. “Your task was not to deal with the aftermath of 9/11 — it was to prevent 9/11.”

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From TruthDig
By Marie Cocco

I am supposed to be typing out words that articulate a highly audible and terribly alarmed tsk tsk. Instead, I am laughing with unrestrained amusement at the farce that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has engineered for what looks to be the flamboyant coda to his undistinguished career.

Honestly, I haven’t had this much fun since New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s implosion and resignation from office in a scandal involving his patronage of high-end prostitutes.

Democrats dutifully wring their hands over the political fix the ethically challenged Blagojevich has created in naming Roland Burris to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Why, the Illinois governor—target of a federal investigation into his alleged effort to sell the Senate vacancy to the highest bidder—outwitted some of Washington’s canniest political foxes in using his perfectly legal authority to appoint not just a politician who seems legitimately entitled to take the seat, but an African-American as well.

A cacophony of issues and events more rightfully demands our attention and concern—the resumption of war between Israel and the Palestinians, the worst economic crisis in decades, the upcoming inauguration of the nation’s first black president. Still, I’ll own up to an unseemly sentiment: Blagojevich and the chaos he has cunningly provoked are blessings from the media gods.

There is nothing quite like the spectacle of scandal to remind journalists why we got into this business to start with. Yes, most reporters are inspired by the urge to serve the public, to expose governmental wrongs, and through good work—and no small dose of good luck—to help right them.

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From The Guardian UK
By Ian Williams

Personally, I thought New Mexico governor Bill Richardson should have been Barack Obama’s secretary of state, so it is even more galling that his appointment as commerce secretary should be derailed by an investigation into an alleged pay-for-play scandal in his state.

When the owners of building site hoardings put up signs saying “Bill Stickers will be prosecuted,” wags used to add the declaration “Bill Stickers is innocent!” Frankly, I would not be quite so declaratively definitive about Richardson. He is, after all, an American politician. But “Bill Richardson is innocent(ish)” I could happily put on my placard, and I still think he would be an asset to Obama’s cabinet.

Being investigated, even with the investigators leaking like a drunk after two six-packs of Bud, is not the same as being guilty. Richardson himself has not been charged, or so far even implicated, in the alleged influence-peddling under his New Mexico administration. But is it Pollyannish or Casablanca-ish that everyone should be shocked, shocked that those who provide billions of dollars of campaign financing often seem to benefit from subsequent government action?

Hence my instinctive sympathies for Illinois governor Rod Blagojevic. Here he is, his official decisions threatened with overturning, facing possible impeachment, and yet how many elected politicians in the US could put their hand on their heart and without risk of their pants catching fire, declare that their decisions had been totally uninfluenced by campaign contributions? That they had never, ever, ever made a deal on voting in return for favours from their colleagues? Blagojevich was indeed indiscreet, and if he had any sense he should have realised that the FBI was tapping his telephone, but if he simply concluded his business with a wink and nudge in the country club or over a dinner table no one would have even noticed the revolving door as he or his wife took up a sinecure after appointing a senator.

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From The Washington Post
By E.J. Dionne Jr.

The message sent over the weekend may have been unintentional, but it was nonetheless powerful.

While the candidates to chair the Republican National Committee prepared for a debate held yesterday by the Reagan-era group Americans for Tax Reform, the Democrats leaked word that their next national chairman would be Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

The message: While Republicans are looking inward and focusing on appeals to the party’s activist base, President-elect Barack Obama wants Democrats to concentrate their energies on recently acquired political terrain and the new converts who were central to his party’s sweep last year.

Of course, one can be too grand about the business of who leads a party’s national committee. Obama, not Kaine, is the real head of the Democratic Party. Governors and members of Congress, not the national committee chair, will define the next Republican Party. Moreover, the offer of the national chairmanship to Kaine was widely interpreted as a kind of consolation prize for one of Obama’s earliest and most fervent supporters.

But that understates the meaning of the choice. A top Obama adviser, using trademark Obama language, described Kaine as “a pragmatic progressive, less concerned about orthodoxies than about getting things done.”

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From The Baltimore Sun
By Sherry L. Mueller

President-elect Barack Obama’s intent to help “reboot” America’s image in the world is most welcome. But as the U.S. retools its efforts to reach out beyond governments to foreign audiences, not all is what it seems.

In recent years, there has been an avalanche of academic studies, government reports and think tank analyses that offer various “fixes” for U.S. public diplomacy. Despite unprecedented attention, however, myths prevail:

Myth 1: The main goal of U.S. public diplomacy is to improve America’s image in the world. That and countering anti-Americanism are certainly part of it. But the overarching goal is to build a web of human relationships that provides a context for traditional diplomacy - and outcomes commensurate with long-term U.S. interests.

Myth 2: Everyone needs to get on the same page. A communications strategy is important. But reciprocity is at the heart of truly successful public diplomacy. We must listen as much as we transmit messages.

Myth 3: Public diplomacy is the government’s job. Undeniably, there are appropriate and indispensable roles for government. But unless we accept the fact that each American has a role to play in putting Uncle Sam’s best foot forward, we underutilize our best resource. As The Ugly American (a provocative and instructive novel published 50 years ago) put it, “Average Americans, in their natural state … are the best ambassadors a country can have.” We must do more to encourage individuals to embrace their roles as citizen diplomats, to accept their part in helping to shape foreign relations one handshake at a time.

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