Morning News Roundup (26 September)

A Word for our President

• Keith Olbermann's latest special comment from his MSNBC Countdown program focuses on this last weekend's falderal over President Clinton's boiling over in his interview with FoxNews' Chris Wallace (whom KO refers to as a "monkey posing as a newscaster"). The video and transcript of the lengthy (at 10 minutes), somewhat rambling comment is over at Crooks and Liars--but it's worth viewing. It ends with this:

  The "free pass" has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush…
  
  You did not act to prevent 9/11.
  
  We do not know what you have done, to prevent another 9/11.
  
  You have failed us — then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.
  
  You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.
  
  And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.
  
  And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture — which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.And there it is, sir:
  
  Are yours the actions of a true American?

A Special Thanks to the "Rebel Republicans"

• Republican lawmakers and the White House agreed over the weekend to alter new legislation on military commissions to allow the United States to detain and try a wider range of foreign nationals than an earlier version of the bill permitted.
  [...]
  [H]uman rights experts expressed concern yesterday that the language in the new provision would be a precedent-setting congressional endorsement for the indefinite detention of anyone who, as the bill states, "has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" or its military allies.
  
  The definition applies to foreigners living inside or outside the United States and does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant. It is broader than that in last week's version of the bill, which resulted from lengthy, closed-door negotiations between senior administration officials and dissident Republican senators. That version incorporated a definition backed by the Senate dissidents: those "engaged in hostilities against the United States." [WaPo]

BushCo's Wars

• At yesterday’s Democratic Policy Committee hearing on Iraq planning, retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, the former commander of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said the administration’s “plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today.” He and retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton declared that Rumsfeld must go. “He knows everything, except ‘how to win,’” Batiste said. Click here to see highlights of the hearing. [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]

Climate Crisis

• The Earth’s temperature “has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals,” the National Academy of Sciences reported. “This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution,” NASA’s James Hansen said. [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Texas utility companies are proposing to build 17 new coal-burning power plants and one petroleum-coke power plant over the next four years. They have the support of the governor, but mayors in some of the state's largest cities are putting up a fight (including Laura Miller in Dallas and Bill White in Houston). Miller wants the utility companies to utilize the cleaner "integrated gasification combined cycle" technology, but all of the proposed power plants in Texas plan to use traditional coal technology. [NPR, which includes audio and text of the story]

And one more thing... be sure to check out the latest from Ward's Sutton Impact at the Village Voice.