This may be premature, but today’s news suggesting that the president is placing the U.S. behind a move to expand the international peacekeeping presence in Darfur is very welcome, and perhaps the first thing the man has done in, oh, a couple of years that I personally feel I can say something positive about.The proposal, according to Jim VandeHei and Colum Lynch of the Washington Post, is to match the current African Union force of 7,000 with 7,000 more troops under United Nations command, with NATO supplying logistical support for both. This kind of force can hardly stop the killing or starvation in Darfur, but it would save many lives, help provide international aid agencies with the security they need to stay involved, and perhaps ratchet up international pressure on the criminal government in Khartoum.Is this a flip-flop by Bush on Darfur? Here’s what the Posties says:

Bush brushed aside the resistance of some senior policymakers and sided with White House adviser Michael J. Gerson and others who have been lobbying for more assistance to Darfur. Bush this week also proposed $500 million for Darfur as part of a larger special budget request to Congress.There is some bipartisan support for intervening in the troubled region. Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) plan to introduce a resolution in Congress calling for NATO troops to help the African Union “stop the genocide” in the Darfur region.

In his remarkable book on Darfur, which I reviewed in the latest issue of Blueprint magazine, Gerard Prunier notes with some contempt that the Bush administration’s early interest in Darfur seemed to abruptly end once the 2004 elections ended. Maybe this is another election-year phenomenon, fed by Christian conservative interest in the subject. But if it leads to tangible help for the crucified people of Darfur, then I’m grateful for it.

Need something to get yourself really wide awake this morning? Check out Shankar Vedantam’s front-page story in today’s Washington Post about new scientific data on the melting of glaciers in Greenland, and the implications for sea levels and weather patterns. It’s like plunging an electric cattle prod into your morning bathwater.Here’s the lead:

Greenland’s glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth’s oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

Some of you may recall that the break-up of the Greenland ice cap was the hypothetical cause of all the calamaties depicted by Hollywood in The Day After Tomorrow. While that movie exaggerated and telescoped the potential impact of a big meltdown in Greenland, flooding of low-lying coastal areas all around the world and an accelerated increase in crazy, violent weather are real possibilities.You might think this ever-growing risk would be a very big deal to national policymakers, eh? But of course, the GOP Congress and the Bush administration have systematially rejected any course of actionthat might do some good, from participation in the Kyoto climate change negotiations, to a cap on carbon dioxide emissions, to action to improve automobile fuel efficiency.In particular, Bush’s “progress” on coming to grips with climate change has been, well, glacial. Early in his presidency, he denied there was any real evidence of human contribution to climate change. Towards the end of his first term, he grudgingly admitted something might be going on, but that doing anything about it was simply too expensive. Most recently, he’s embraced voluntary industry action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At this rate of response, we won’t get a serious national climate change policy until Pennsylvania has oceanfront property.The Post piece concludes with a nice quote about the new data on Greenland, from an eminently respectable source:

“This study underscores the need to take swift, meaningful actions at home and abroad to address climate change,” said Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

The data highlight the lack of meaningful U.S. policy, she added: “This is the kind of study that should make people stay awake at night wondering what we’re doing to the climate, how we’re shaping the planet for future generations and, especially, what we can do about it.”

If this news doesn’t make people in Washington stay “awake at night,” it should at least jolt them into attention in the morning.

There’s little doubt the Bush administration has long hoped that Americans would forget the word “Katrina” and all it connotes about a federal government asleep at the wheel, a president more interested in photo ops than action, the terrible human cost of incompetent government, the consequences of the “starve the beast” ideology, and the unkept promises made by the president himself on national television from Jackson Square. A report about to be released by a House Republican task force on the Katrina response–nicely amplified by a Senate Homeland Security Committee interrogation of a feckless Michael Chertoff–shows that even the most partisan GOP inquiry into the disaster produces stomach-churning revulsion and serious fears about the federal government’s ability to deal with a future terrorist attack. You can read about it in today’s New Dem Dispatch. If the Bushies were praying for a distraction from the vice president’s Lethal Weapon ’06 drama, the Good Lord answered them quite righteously.

I first heard about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident via a scratchy A.M. radio transmission last night, and no kidding, my first thought was: Dick Cheney shoots a lawyer…. I didn’t know the Onion had a radio show.Now I don’t want to make light of an incident that nearly cost someone his life, but it did remind me that Master Hunter Cheney took the lead back in 2004 in mocking John Kerry for hunting geese on the campaign trail:

“My fellow sportsmen, this cover-up isn’t going to work,” Cheney said, speaking to supporters in an upscale Toledo suburb that borders the Ohio-Michigan state line. “The Second Amendment is more than just a photo opportunity.”The National Rifle Association has endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket.Kerry has a camouflage jacket but bought a new one for the outing because he was on the campaign trail. Cheney seized on the fact that the jacket was new.”Which did make me wonder how regularly he does go goose hunting,” the vice president said.

You can only imagine what Cheney would have said if Kerry had splattered a bystander with buckshot. But more to the point, maybe the NRA should offer its lifelong ally one of those Eddie Eagle gun safety courses before he’s allowed to return to the woods with shooting irons.

This weekend the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states got clobbered with a major snow storm. I was luckily down in Central Virginia, and got to see the Blue Ridge beautifully dusted with powdered snow. And with most chores beyond feeding apples to the horses and seed to the birds snowed out, I read a lot. On Sunday morning, unable to get across the mountains to Grace Episcopal Church, I did penance by finishing Stephen Bates’ fascinating if painful study of the Anglican Communion’s rendering over the ordination of gay priests and bishops, A Church At War. Bates, a religion correspondent for The Guardian, does not pretent to be an impartial arbiter of the politico-sexual agony of Anglicans in recent years. He clearly views the whole crisis as having been engineered by conservative evangelical Anglicans, especially in England, who chose sexual issues as just another weapon with which to promote their quasi-fundamentalist drive for power in a faith community that has for centuries balanced Protestant and Catholic traditions and habits. Indeed, Bates almost certainly goes too far in suggesting that the African and Asian bishops who insisted on a condemnation of homosexuality at the Lambeth Conference of 1998 were just instruments of an intra-British ecclesiastical fight. But he knows the Anglican landscape well, and his profiles of the two unintentional protaganists of the current war over sexuality–the unsuccessful candidate for Bishop of Reading, Jeffrey John, and the successfully confirmed Bishop of New Hamphsire, Gene Robinson–are exquisitely wrought. As an Episcopalian, I also took pride in Bates’ argument that Americans handled the subject of gay and lesbian ordinations more honestly, and with greater theological depth, than their British counterparts. At a time when both the religious and secular conventional wisdom holds that conservative movements are the only vibrant and authentic trends in all the great faith traditions, Bates makes a strong case that the conservative ascendancy in Anglicanism is temporary, opportunistic, and ultimately incompatible with the future of the Communion. From what I know of Anglican Episcopalians, even those deep in the heart of Protestant Virginia, I think he’s right.

My ears perked up this morning when I heard on NPR that the president would be discussing the situation in Darfur today with Rebecca Garang, widow of the southern Sudanese leader John Garang, and a government official in her own right.So far as I can tell, the meeting produced no news or public statements. The White House web page showed a photo of Bush and Garang’s meeting, but provided nothing else. And in yesterday’s White House press briefing, there was this depressing exchange:

Q: On another subject, Kofi Annan says that he wants to ask the President next week for troops and equipment for Darfur. Has the administration’s views on that changed at all? Are you more willing to consider that?MR. McCLELLAN: Let me check and see if there’s an additional update on that. Obviously, Sudan and the Darfur region is a high priority for this administration. It’s something that we have led the way on and pushed the international community to address. And Secretary General Annan is someone who is committed to addressing it, as well. That’s why we supported helping get the African Union forces in there, and I think we’ve continued to work with the international community on how best to address the situation moving forward. And I’ll just see if there’s any additional update. I don’t have it at this point.

“I don’t have it at this point” is a nice summary of the Bush administration’s entire approach to Darfur for the last three years.If you’re interested in Darfur but don’t know much about the background, you can check out my review of Gerard Prunier’s book on the subject, which came out yesterday in Blueprint magazine. Prunier’s pessimistic predictions about Western attitudes towards Darfur have so far been sadly spot on.

The quote of the day comes from Ezra Klein over at TAPPED, linking to Josh Marshall’s account of the unlikely success of former FEMA director Michael Brown in facing down Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN):

Reports have Senator Norm Coleman being bested by disgraced FEMA chief Michael Brown in this morning’s hearings. Brown joins George Galloway on the list of contemptible public figures who’ve publicly humbled Mr. Coleman. Quite a shame to see the legendary Paul Wellstone’s seat pass to an empty suit most notable for making the odious look better in comparison to himself.

Let’s please don’t let any Iranian government officials get close to an encounter with Coleman, eh?

Via DKos, I just read an article from The Hill that warms the cockles of my heart: a technical screwup in the budget reconciliation bill recently rammed through Congress by the GOP and signed by Bush could theoretically force a re-vote. All Congressional Dems have to do is object to a unanimous consent motion to fix the problem. They should.Just before the hurry-up House vote on the obnoxious measure, Mark Schmitt provided a good analysis of why it was important to defeat it. Those reasons have been strengthened by the subsequent, aggressive Republican effort to push more tax cuts–far offsetting the “savings” in the budget measure–and by Bush’s new budget proposal for next year, which continues the let’s-cut-taxes-and-let-the-military-fight-it-out-with-every-other-national-priority-for-what’s-left fiscal philosophy of this administration. Democrats have one more shot at some really bad and important legislation. They should lock and load on this one.

A new issue of Blueprint magazine came out today, and it’s chock full of good political news. Mark Gersh (the congressional number-cruncher supreme) and I did a forecast of how U.S. House races are beginning to shape up, and concluded a Democratic takeover is no longer a big reach. As a sidebar to Gov. Tom Vilsack’s cover story on the successes of Democratic red-state governors, I did a brief and even more optimistic evaluation of this fall’s gubernatorial contests. And you might also want to check out Gov. Tim Kaine’s first-hand report on how he won Virginia in 2005.

The continuing saga of “Cartoongate”–the publication and republication in European newspapers of cartoons maligning the Prophet Muhammad, and the spasm of anger and violence that greeted it across the Muslim world–is obviously exposing a lot of misperceptions on both sides of the battle-lines. I am hardly an expert on Islam, but do think one important point about the reaction to the cartoons, and the reaction to the reaction in the West, is worth emphasizing: the basic nature of the offense to Muslim sensibilities.About half the stories in the U.S. press solemnly inform readers that the cartoons are considered “blasphemous” by Muslims, on pretty much the same grounds that Christians would consider cartoons mocking Jesus might be considered “blasphemous.” And that’s got it exactly backwards. The Prophet Muhammad warned against physical representations of human beings generally, and of himself in particular, in order to avoid temptations to idolatry, the worship of anything other than Almighty God. That reinforced the radically transcendent nature of Muslim theology–the insistence on strict submission to the sovereign will of God without the kind of human or quasi-divine intermediaries common to both pagan and Christian traditions. Now I don’t think anyone is under the misapprehension that the authors and publishers of these cartoons were trying to promote an idolatrous worship of the Prophet. So while the cartoons did violate a deeply embedded Muslim antipathy towards physical representations of Muhammad, that’s not the source of the offense: it’s the contemptuous misrepresentation of what the Prophet taught in terms of legitimate Western concerns about Islamic Jihadism. And that’s why non-Jihadist Muslims are if anything more offended by the cartoons than anyone else. Maybe this point is of less importance than the free-speech aspects of this saga, but it’s worth keeping in mind, particularly among those who constantly look for Christian or Judiaic parallels to poorly-understood Islamic beliefs.