Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds

At Climate Progress, Joseph Romm writes:

^{Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb}

The Phone Call — based on a true story

Major cable network: What do you think of T. Boone Pickens’ latest energy plan ?

Climate Progress: Half of it is great, the big push on wind power. Heck, even the Bush administration says wind power could be 20% of U.S. electricity. But the notion that we would use the wind power to free up natural gas in order to fuel a transition to natural gas vehicles makes no sense. Why would we go to the trouble of switching our vehicle fleet from running on one expensive fossil fuel to another expensive fossil fuel? Any freed up natural gas should be used to displace coal....

Major cable network: I was hoping you liked the whole plan. That way we could use you on the show.... You don’t have any ideas of who might like the whole thing?

Climate Progress [Long pause, crickets chirp, the wind sighs, sea levels rise a few meters]: No. The people who will like the renewables part probably won’t be thrilled about the fossil fuel part, and vice versa.

Major cable network: Thanks. I’m sure we will find some reason to use you soon.

I am thinking about working that into a screenplay about a mild-mannered blogger for a great metropolitan progressive think tank who sacrifices his chance to be on television because he refuses to endorse an inane idea. I was looking at Matt Damon to play me, especially now that he has put on a little weight.

You can read about Swiftboater Pickens's energy plan here or straight from the horse's mouth here and what Man is 5 and other Kossacks have to say here, and A Siegel has to say here.

Romm's take on the subject is the most complete so far, however, and it is devastating:

The Pickens Plan, however, is based on the utterly impractical idea that "Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel."

Uhh, never gonna happen, T. Boone. Never. The most obvious reason is the gross inefficiency of the entire plan.

Right now, "We currently use natural gas to produce 22% of our electricity." Most of that electricity comes from gas burned in combined cycle gas turbines at an overall efficiency of up to 60%. Why in the world would the federal government — or anyone else — spend billions and billion of dollars on natural gas fueling stations and natural gas vehicles in order to burn the gas with an efficiency of 15% to 20%? Natural gas is simply too useful and expensive to squander in such a fashion.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Open Thread and Diary Rescue

Today's Rescue Rangers are vcmvo2, PaintyKat, Got a Grip, dopper0189, and shayera, with YatPundit at the controls of the streetcar.

• testvet6778 details some of the personal struggles Post-war veterans experience because of PTSD in order to illuminate the monumental need to provide treatments for our soldiers returning from war in After the Battle, Fighting the Bottle at Home. (PaintyKat)
• Melody Townsel shares the joy of having something precious returned long after it was believed forever lost in Talk about your Independence Days! (Got a Grip)
• 4thepeople relates her personal struggle with cancer, betrayal, and forgiveness in What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding? (vcmvo2)
• Eric Zencey dissects John Locke's theories of property rights and government in coping with a finite planet: takings law and finds they would only work on an infinite planet. (dopper0189)
• Using their own words, Chris Rodda creates an enlightening and amusing conversation between Thomas Jefferson vs. George W. Bush. (Got a Grip)
• dday explains in this link-rich diary Why Working Americans Are Scared. (vcmvo2)
• hekebolos tells Kossacks that The LA Times attacks a candidate on the economy. Guess who? (shayera)
• TocqueDeville highlights why the FISA capitulation would have been Nixon's Wet Dream. (shayera)
• jimstaro reports on and analyzes various sources in order to define A Just Foreign Policy. (vcmvo2)
• A Timetable Twofer: LithiumCola suggests Maliki's demand for an American troop withdrawal timetable might require additional examination on several points to rule out a hidden agenda in Maliki's Timetable Demand: Things to Watch For (PaintyKat), and dday has Some Context On Iraqi Leaders' Call For A Timetable For Withdrawal. (shayera)
• rontun sees a blue political sky in sunny New Hampshire in Red to Purple to Blue! Who knew? (Poll) (Got a Grip)
• Troutfishing brings us a story of how YouTube caved to pressure on the copywriting of political speech inYouTube Censors Videos Exposing Pro-War Propaganda & Hate Speech. (dopper0189)
• NYBri invites all Netroots Nation attending Kossacks to an event in Calling All Candidates. Netroots Nation Celebration....Again. (shayera)

As always, feel free to join Diary Rescue by suggesting your own choices in the Open Thread.

My own totally crazy thought

re: Civics   [Markos Moulitsas Zúniga]

A totally crazy Tuesday-morning thought: Wouldn't George W. Bush make an awesome super hero? Wouldn't it be something if his post-presidential life would up being that kind of post-service service? How's that for a model? Who needs policemen, firemen, and high-end secret service security? How about the Justice League? (Or wherever?) Reach out and touch the young (non-sexually, of course!) before they are hurt or killed by bad guys, and by giving them a hero to root for, he can break them of the cynicism pop culture and possibly their parents have passed down to them. Whatever you think of President Bush, he's a likable guy in love with himself who looks great in an ironman or Batman suit with a monster codpiece.

Like I said, crazy. Tuesday. Have a good one.

Those FISA IG reports

When you come right down to it, advocacy for the new FISA bill pretty much hinges on the provision that four inspectors general will investigate and report to Congress regularly on the warrantless surveillance programs. The problem which nobody wants to talk about is that the four IGs are not capable of policing these programs.

Inspectors general, contrary to popular belief, are not fully independent. Neither should anyone ever assume that they can uncover the full 'Truth' about any program. There are a range of institutional problems that IGs face. This excellent report from POGO summarizes the issues well. Inspectors General often are a surprisingly (and poorly understood) weak link in governmental oversight. Even when they're at the top of their game, inspectors general have to surmount daunting hurdles.

I spoke to POGO's lead investigator for that report, Beverly Lumpkin, who agrees that it's far from certain that any IG investigations will uncover the information needed to hold the government accountable for warrantless surveillance.

For one thing, as POGO documents, many IGs can be pressured by agency heads in various ways, even to the point of being investigated by the agency they're supposed to keep watch on.

Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden, in perhaps the most astonishing known infringement of an IG’s independence, launched an investigation of the agency’s Inspector General, John Helgerson...it appears the main complaint against the IG was that his subordinates had been too harsh in questioning CIA officers about their activities. The IG had earlier issued highly critical assessments of agency employees’ activities in pursuing terrorists, and it is hard to escape the appearance of retaliation in this launching of a “management review.”

With such tenuous independence, drafts of IG reports frequently go to the agency head for comment and 'correction' before being finalized.

In any case, IGs lack subpoena power. Outside their own agencies, they cannot force anybody to talk to them. In addition (as I'll discuss) their resources are limited and usually stretched to the breaking point. So it's naive to assume that they can in practice get to the bottom of a large issue.

Indeed, an inspector general doesn't know what he doesn't know. With classified programs that have many tentacles, what is the chance that an IG will happen upon somebody who's both able and willing to point to all the things that need to be investigated, and the people who ought ideally to be interviewed? With this massive program, IG investigators will truly be feeling their way in the dark.

The FISA bill presumes in any event that IG staffers will be given the security clearances they need to dig into the government's most closely guarded secrets. This is information that Congress has been denied! And yet George Bush denied the necessary security clearances to staffers at DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility specifically to thwart OPR's investigation of warrantless surveillance. Advocates of the FISA 'reform' bill just assume that cannot happen a second time. After all, we've seen many times with the Bush administration that history does not repeat itself.

"All of those IGs recongnized that in investigations of very senior officials or in audits of programs dear to the agency head, the statutorily protected independence of the Departmental IG was critical to both the integrity of the inquiry and to the credibility of the findings in the Department, on Capitol Hill, and with the American public. I could not help but recall those conversations when I read reports last year that the oversight of what has been referred to as NSA's "terrorist surveillance program" had been handled by the NSA IG, who has limited resources and no statutory independence, and not by the Department of Defense IG."

So the involvement of the NSA and DNI IGs is not reassuring...if anything, the opposite. Their failure to investigate the programs before the NYT made them public speaks volumes about their credibility as whistleblowers on warrantless surveillance.

The DOD and DOJ IGs have their own problems. To begin with, the DOD OIG does not have its own legal counsel. As POGO's report highlights, the IG is forced to rely on the advice of the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel. With programs as sensitive and legally complex as these, that lack of legal independence is devastating to the DOD IG's ability to render an authoritative verdict. Indeed, the Pentagon Office of General Counsel repeatedly has been involved in exceptionally shady affairs, especially in facilitating Bush's torture regime.

That's the office that will play a major role in framing the legal investigation of the warrantless wiretapping under the current FISA bill. Yes, it ought to shock you.

Furthermore, both DOD and DOJ OIGs have been complaining for years about their lack of resources. No IG can conduct careful investigations of this sort without applying major resources to them. And yet the 2 IGs that do at least have statutory independence cannot meet their offices' current needs. POGO has obtained a new report from DOD IG complaining that its resources are increasingly inadequate to keep on top of current, unclassified Pentagon programs. Indeed, this spring the GAO reported that known DOD problems keep getting worse, despite the IG's best efforts.

Not by chance, DOD Inspector General Claude Kicklighter announced last week he's resigning, though he'd originally promised to stay through the end of the Bush administration. Rumors are swirling in Washington that his reason for leaving early is that his office's profound lack of resources make it nearly impossible to do his job.

DOD OIG has been a huge embarrassment for years, what with one extremely shady IG who resigned in disgrace (Joseph Schmitz), and a nominee to replace him who was utterly unqualified (David Laufman). Now comes news that the man nominated to replace Kicklighter, Gordon Heddell, plans to do the job half time while continuing as IG for the Labor Department. That is some indication of how seriously the current administration treats the critical Office of Inspector General of the Pentagon; there ought to be half a dozen IGs at DOD, perhaps, whereas Bush & Co. are giving us one half of one.

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