After languishing as the replacement for Dan Rather on CBS News, Katie Couric is finding her groove and doing what other so-called journalists should be doing, that is, asking the tough questions.

Via Reuters:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama was pinned down on Tuesday on whether he credits an increase in U.S. troop levels in Iraq — known as the “surge” — for helping stabilize the country.

Obama was asked repeatedly on “CBS Evening News” whether the surge has worked.

He explained why he would still oppose a troop increase in Iraq, saying it does not meet the long-term U.S. strategic goal and that the emphasis on Iraq had taken a toll on the U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

“If we have shifted away from the central front of terrorism as a consequence of enormous and continuing investments in Iraq, then that’s a poor strategic choice,” the Illinois senator continued.

Pressed once more on whether he gives the surge any credit for reducing violence in Iraq, Obama said he did, as one factor of many.

“”No, no of course I have,” he said. “There is no doubt that the extraordinary work of our U.S. forces has contributed to a lessening of the violence, just as making sure that the Sadr militia stood down or the fact that the Sunni tribes decided to flip and work with us instead of with al-Qaeda — something that we hadn’t anticipated happening. All those things have contributed to a reduction in violence.”

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A survey on the English football website Footy-Boots has voted Colombian goalkeeper René Higuita’s famous scorpion save from the England v Colombia friendly match played at Wembley on September 7, 1995 as the best football trick in football history. The save garned 20% of the vote and finished just ahead of Ronaldinho’s flip flap.

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Hugo, Vladimir and Dimitri

One has to wonder as to the sanity of Hugo Chávez. It is as if he single-handedly wants to relive the Cold War, though no doubt the Bush Administration is not helping matters by forcing the Czechs and the Poles to accept anti-missile defence shields of dubious merit on their soil. Still, the Czechs and the Poles are members of an existing alliance, NATO. There is no rationale for stationing Russian troops in the Western Hemisphere. What purpose would they serve?

Here is Chávez’s statement today in Moscow:

“Rusia tiene muchas posibilidades de posicionarse en el mundo. Si las fuerzas de combate rusas quieren erigir bases en Venezuela, son bienvenidas”

“Russia has many possibilities to position itself in the world. If Russian combat forces want to build bases in Venezuela, they are welcome.”

Other highlights of Hugo’s dementia include telling the Russians that he will propose that OPEC stop denominating oil in US dollars and opt for the Russian rouble instead. At least, Saddam Hussein pushed for the euro to replace the US dollar and look where that got him. Chávez also is following in Hussein’s footsteps by purchasing Russian anti-missile Tor-M1 systems. In addition, Venezuela will purchase three Varshavianka-class submarines and six Amur-class submarines, 20 Il-114 turbo-prop aircraft, 10 Mi-28N helicopter gunships and 10 cruisers and unspecified number of tanks. The total bill is to run at least $1 billion and perhaps as much as an estimated $2 billion US.

Additionally, Venezuela signed accords with Russia that awarded exploration and exploitation rights to three Russian firms — LukOil, Gazprom and TNK-BP (a joint Russian-British firm).

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It is with sadness and fond remembrance that I mark the passing of Estelle Scher who performed as Estelle Getty and best known for her role as Sophia Petrillo on the US sit-com The Golden Girls. She was 84.

Getty won an Emmy Award in 1988 for her portrayal of the feisty octogenarian. For her role as Sophia, Getty also notched a Golden Globe Award in 1986. She also received an American Comedy Award. She was a vocal supporter of gay rights and active in fund-raising for AIDS research.

Getty co-starred on Golden Girls from 1985-92 and reprised the tart-tongued Sophia on four other TV series: The Golden Palace, Nurses, Empty Nest and Blossom. Getty was two months younger than Bea Arthur, who played her daughter, but the illusion of her age was maintained through makeup, costume and her deportment.

I have always wondered why the Golden Girls has such a gay following. No doubt, there is a high camp factor and priceless comedy but there is, I believe, a deeper more personal reason for the gay attachment. Dorothy, Blanche and Rose plus Sophia were all cast-offs from their families and forced to make their own familial arrangements. Not just roommates, they became a family going through thick and thin together. That mirrors the lives of many gay men. For years, my gay roommates were my support network and we could relate to the antics and love shared. For the record, in my 30s I was Blanche Devereaux without the accent. Now, I am more like Dorothy Zbornak.

Thank you Estelle.

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Using Frankie Valli’s 1960’s love song, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” as the soundtrack, the McCain campaign on Tuesday took a direct aim in a new Web video at what it called the media’s “bizarre fascination with Barack Obama.”

Clinton should have done this but didn’t. Good for the McCain camp.

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Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

Indian Prime Minister Manhoman Singh has comfortably won his trust vote in India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha. The final tally was 275-256. The Indian National Congress Party led coalition can now remain in office until May 2009 when new elections are due. In parliamentary systems, snap elections may be called at any time but must be called within a certain time frame. In India’s case, this government must call them within five years from the last election.

For more background on this story including an overview of the US-India Nuclear Agreement, please see my post from yesterday, The Big Vote. For the full text of India’s Nuclear Agreement with the IAEA, please visit IAEA Agreement (pdf.) To be quite honest, this is a huge victory for the Bush Administration to secure Indian cooperation on nuclear issues. India has long resisted in sharing its nuclear capacity and this agreement fosters increased US-Indian cooperation. It is likely not well received in Islambad or Beijing.

More on the trust vote in India from The Hindu:

The UPA Government on Tuesday scored an emphatic victory in the confidence vote in the Lok Sabha with a comfortable margin, ending the political uncertainty that will enable the ruling coalition to push ahead with the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal.

The motion, which was forced by the Left parties’ decision to withdraw support to the Government on the deal, was adopted with sizeable cross-voting from Opposition members including at least one visibly from Telegu Desum.

There was erosion in opposition numbers with only 256 opposing the motion against 275 supporting it.

In a House with an effective strength of 541, the Government needed 271 and in the ultimate result it got four more than the half-way mark, belying predictions of a cliffhanger of a contest.

The day was marred by high drama when BJP members shocked the House displaying bundles of currency notes claiming Rs one crore was given to them as advance by a Samajwadi Party leader to abstain from voting.

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Let me start off that I have never been a fan of the DailyKos. Something about that site always made uneasy and I have rarely frequented it. My intuition was confirmed this past January when the DailyKos started advocating that Democrats in the state of Michigan cross over into the Republican primary and disrupt the democratic process by voting for Mitt Romney so as to prolong the GOP contest. In my book, that’s not just wrong and reprenhensible but it strikes at the core of the rights of conscience. One votes one’s conscience. To actively disrupt an election makes you a thug. I monitor elections the world over and I have never heard of such an obscene affrontery to the democratic process. I am offended. The DailyKos is no better than the right it claims to abhor.

So now comes this disturbing piece of news:

The Austin American-Statesman caved to pressure from the Daily Kos-Netroots Nation and pulled an article from the newspaper’s website that poked fun at the liberal convention being held in Austin last weekend.

The article, entitled Gore’s Surprise Visit Highlights Netroots Conference was published on the front page of Sunday’s paper.

It was written by feature writer, Patrick Beach–meaning the article was not a straight news piece (think Dana Milbank.)

Greg Mitchell, a writer for Editor & Publisher who blogs at the Daily Kos attended the conference as a panel speaker.

He brought attention to the article by posting about it the Daily Kos. Mitchell says that Austin Kossacks claiming to know people at the American-Statesman promised to “work their magic” on the paper.

By Monday the article was pulled from the American-Statesman’s website, with the message: “The page you’ve requested is not available.”

An editor’s note by Editor Fred Zipp was posted to the American-Statesman’s website Tuesday:

“Readers expect front-page stories to speak directly and clearly about events and issues. Eliminating the possibility of misunderstanding from our work is a critical part of our daily newsroom routine. When we communicate in a way that could be misinterpreted, we fail to meet our standards.

“Our front-page story Sunday about the Netroots Nation convention included doses of irony and exaggeration. It made assertions (that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might find herself at home politically in Beijing, for example) and characterizations (”marauding liberals” was one) meant to amuse. For many readers, we failed.

“In trying for a humorous take on the Netroots phenomenon without labeling it something other than a straightforward news story, we compromised our standards.”

Rather than re-label the story on the web version, the cowards at the American-Statesman gave in to the Kossacks and pulled the article entirely. So much for liberals’ respect for the First Amendment.

Here’s the article from the cache at the Austin American-Statesman that the DailyKos tried to quash.

Gore’s surprise visit highlights Netroots conference
Former vice president speaks at Austin convention for liberal bloggers.
By Patrick Beach

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Name-dropping Al Gore and his call for a switch to clean, renewable energy within 10 years was enough to pull whoops of approval from the 2,000 or 3,000 marauding liberals gathered for Netroots Nation at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday morning.

So when the former vice president and Nobel Prize co-winner made a surprise — and cleverly scripted — appearance during U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s talk, it looked like the conference might turn into a faint-in.

Talk that Pelosi (who is arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing) would have a Very Special Guest had been buzzing about the conference of liberal bloggers, pols and media types since it began Thursday (it concludes today). But it wasn’t clear to attendees that something was afoot until a schedule change handed out Saturday morning indicated the speaker’s talk would last 45 minutes longer than previously indicated.

Not that Gore’s appearance was necessary to whip up the troops.

From the beginning, it was clear these people were convinced the electoral map would be repainted with a brush sopping with blue paint come November.

The believers will tell you it’s morning, that they smell the napalm. And it smells like, oh, yes, victory.

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My $99 USD a year dot mac e-mail and world wide web services remain at best intermittent. At times, I can log on, at other times no such luck. Even when I am able to log on, I can’t send emails and even reading them can take minutes to open if the server doesn’t go down which it usually does after 10-15 minutes. Having been a life-long Apple customer, this is not the Apple to which I am accustomed. I have rarely had problems with my dot mac service, now it is a daily travail. So yes, I am pissed.

Computer World takes up my cause with its article MobileMe users seethe over four-day e-mail outage :

Apple Inc.’s MobileMe online service continued to tick off customers today as users blasted the service for outages that have kept them from accessing e-mail for several days.

“I could not receive any e-mail (sending seemed to work OK though) on my MobileMe Mail account between Friday morning CDT and midday on Monday,” reported one of the calmer users, identified only as M&C, on an Apple support forum today. “I still can’t believe Apple [hasn't] posted explanatory information about this on the MobileMe site.”

The support site does include a notice from Apple. “1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail. We apologize for any inconvenience,” the notice under the “System Status” section reads. The message has been unchanged since Saturday, according to users.

That notice has been taken to heart by customers unable to access their .Mac or MobileMe services: Some subscribers have taken to calling themselves “1%ers.”

“I’m a 1%er (which is bull),” said Joemac1960 on another support thread. “I think a lot of folks who are in the same boat as I am (no e-mail for 3-1/2 days) don’t come to this forum anymore because they know that until the server is fixed its just ’standby to standby.’ ”

Other users were irate, or worse. “This is ******* ridiculous!! 5 days without mail, and I’m even on the shorter side of the delay from others,” said a user tagged as Smellslikecinnamon on another forum. “Is anyone out there ******* awake!! Can’t you at least reach those of us with alternate e-mail addresses outside of Apple, just so we know what the **** is going on?!?!?!”

Apple has had problems migrating subscribers from its original online service, .Mac, to the new MobileMe while cranking up the latter to accommodate existing users and new customers who signed up to take advantage of the iPhone’s new “push” syncing capabilities.

The day before the July 11 iPhone 3G launch, .Mac customers complained about a longer-than-expected outage as Apple shifted to MobileMe. The process was to take just a few hours but stretched through most of a day.

Last week, others blasted Apple for touting all of MobileMe’s synchronization as “push,” or nearly instant, when it wasn’t immediate to and from Macs and PCs on the one hand, and the iPhone and MobileMe servers on the other. Apple issued an apology to users and credited them with an additional 30 days of service for their troubles.

The e-mail problem has some MobileMe customers stressed out and suspicious. “Like most of us, I haven’t had access to my e-mail since Thursday around 1 p.m. and have waited for long periods of time without success to chat with Apple support,” said Joe Holley in a message posted Sunday to the service’s support forum. “It is obvious that they do not have a solution and can’t provide an ETA and that the problem is much larger than the 1% of users they claim. I, like most of us, are feeling that Apple is being less than honest about the % of affected users and scope of the problem.”

Others pointed out that MobileMe is a cornerstone of the iPhone’s push to compete head to head with business-oriented smart phones like Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, but that the reality doesn’t match Apple’s promises. “You know, when BlackBerry goes down that stuff hits the news, the world stops and they fix it lickity split,” said “Vanaman” on the same thread. “This is ridiculous and offensive to those who rely on Apple for a serious service — ‘Enterprise for the rest of us.’ Yeah, right.”

MobileMe was touted as “Exchange for the rest of us” by Apple executives, including CEO Steve Jobs, when it was unveiled in June. The reference was to the new synchronization features it will offer iPhone users who don’t grab mail or update calendars and contacts lists through their companies’ Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers.

The service also provides new Web-based e-mail, contact and scheduling applications, as well as 20GB of storage space, double .Mac’s allowance, for an annual fee of $99.

Apple did not reply to a call for comment on the MobileMe e-mail outage and the service’s continued problems.

All my contacts are gone. Yes, I have a back up but I now have to import them off an older computer and I am not sure how many will have been lost when all is said and done. And as is often the case with Apple, tech support is web-based. And this case, it’s been non-existent. This One Percenter has throw $50,000 at Apple over my lifetime so yes I am still pissed at Apple.

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The Los Angeles Times has published a piece on peak oil entitled Why the oil crunch may grow worse.

With gasoline and oil costing once-unthinkable barrels of cash, the notion that things in our petroleum-addicted world soon will get worse — maybe much, much worse — is spreading fast.

Fear pushed oil to $131.04 a barrel in New York futures trading Monday, closing $2.16 higher after tumbling more than $16 last week. Supply concerns drove the increase as the market fretted about the potential for Tropical Storm Dolly to harm Gulf of Mexico oil operations.
But behind today’s oil mania lies a deeper dread: that the world has found all the easy-to-reach oil, and the daily supply of the essential black goo will fall further and further behind escalating global demand.

“As much as you’re uncomfortable with today’s oil prices, these are going to be the good old days,” oil expert Robert L. Hirsch told a recent Santa Barbara gathering of policymakers and environmentalists. “We’re talking about pain here that is unimaginable.”

The day-to-day cost of oil reflects a sharply weaker dollar, market speculation and geopolitical events such as unrest in Nigeria and other oil-exporting countries. At the same time, producers are barely slaking the world’s energy thirst, and the market increasingly is fixated on the long-term supply picture.

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The New York Times declined to print an op-ed written by the GOP hopeful Senator John McCain that was written in response to Senator Obama’s op-ed earlier in the week. Here is the McCain op-ed:

AS he took command in Iraq in January 2007, Gen. David Petraeus called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80 percent to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation is full of hope - but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due mainly to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Sen. Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent.

“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on Jan. 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Now Sen. Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted. Perhaps he’s unaware that the US embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.”

Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks:

* More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists.

* Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has found the will to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City - dispelling suspicions that he’s merely a sectarian leader.

The surge’s success hasn’t changed Sen. Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale.

In a New York Times op-ed and a speech last week he offered his “plan for Iraq” (in advance of his first “fact-finding” trip to Iraq in more than three years): It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months.

In 2007, he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we’d taken his advice, the war would have been lost. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

The New York Times may have done John McCain a favour by not printing the op-ed. The McCain camp is now receiving more coverage as a result.

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