Last night I went to bed before I looked at the new SWIFT Agreement giving the US access to all of Europe’s finance data to track for terrorists. Here’s that agreement and here’s a Q&A document about what the agreement does. The agreement is instructive both for what it suggests about the negotiations between the US and EU, but also for what it suggests about the protections the US is willing to grant citizens of other countries that it is not extending to its own citizens.

Question: What’s the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?

Answer: A used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

I was reminded of this old joke when reading Jim Hoggan’s book “Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming” on the campaign to obscure what science tells us about global warming: it’s happening and we’re causing it. Hoggan tells us about the cast of characters involved in this campaign and I found myself classiying them into two
categories: those who don’t know they are lying and those that do.

We’re going to be putting up a poll this week about health care and we want your suggestions. What issues do you feel the strongest about? What aspects of the Senate and House health care bills do you find the most important/most disappointing? How do you feel about the leadership that has been shown? How do you feel that the influence of money in politics has affected the outcome?

After a series of debacles, the WaPost should’ve barred George Will from ever writing about climate change again, but I guess, in the wake of CLIMATEGATE!11!, he can’t help himself.

A mid-Twentieth Century economist who pioneered the study of market failures suggested taxing activities that have a larger individual benefit than the benefits to society. The Tobin Tax is an good example. Treasury Secretary Geithner is opposed. Naturally.

It’s a hard moral contradiction to live with. My ethical aspirations among family and friends have no place in my political life. “One is neither to claim uniqueness for oneself nor to deny it to others,” advises Stanley Cavell. It is a worthy goal, but one our culture confines to private life. In political life, we must do just the opposite.

It should be bizarre, but is in fact grimly typical, how the whole phony “climate-gate-scandal” has played out so far. Hundreds of emails between climate scientists were hacked — stolen — from servers at East Anglia University. The stolen materials were then misrepresented, distorted, and lied about, and the scientists involved abused, insulted, and accused of everything from deliberate fraud to acting as the willing dupes of the shadowy liberal-fascist “global warming industry.”

Look out! The Theocratic Christians are on the move.

Well. Never let it be said that Karzai’s interests don’t align with Obama’s.

Sorkin, Karzai, Clinton, Feingold, McCain!