It’s been a while since I have written anything for the Seminal, but like the entirety of our writing team I have been reveling in Obama’s victory this past week.

However, during the intensity of the last few weeks of the election, and amid Americans’ (indeed, many non-Americans’) celebrations last week, the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) deteriorated dramatically. I wrote about the DRC’s history of violence last December, and noted that the northeastern part of the country, though tentatively peaceful, was in serious danger of devolving back into violence due to a rogue general named Laurent Nkunda. That threat of violence was realized in late August, when Nkunda began seizing territory in the northeastern Kivu provinces and surrounding the provincial capital, Goma — a city especially strategic for disseminating humanitarian aid. Since their advance began, Nkunda’s forces have been accused of killing hundreds of civilians in the area, prompting the UN to accuse the general late last week of war crimes. In addition, the advance has left the residents of Goma in crisis, as the NY Times explains:

Fighting like this has flared up several times in the past few days, threatening to plunge eastern Congo back into full-fledged war. In late October, just as the rebels were about to march into Goma, they declared a cease-fire. Since then, Western diplomats and top African officials have been meeting around the clock to solidify the cease-fire and find a more permanent solution.

On Friday, the presidents of seven African nations held a meeting in Nairobi and urged all parties to stop fighting and open corridors for aid workers. Many of the people displaced by the conflict are hungry and sick, and aid workers are now struggling to contain a cholera outbreak in the makeshift camps near Goma.

In 2005, Barack Obama successfully introduced a bill in Congress aimed at helping the DRC. This was an admirable undertaking for an ambitious young senator from Illinois, and it demonstrated Obama’s notable awareness and compassion toward a conflict scarcely known to the American public — one that was at the time heavily overshadowed by violence in Darfur.

Among other things, the resulting Democratic Republic of Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006 gave the Secretary of State the authority to withhold foreign aid money from countries believed to be destabilizing the country, as well as to withhold aid from the Congolese government should it act to undermine peace. It committed $52 million in foreign aid to the DRC and made it the official policy of the U.S. “to support efforts of the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), and other entities, as appropriate, to disarm, demobilize, and repatriate the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and other illegally armed groups.”

I point this out because, while it is abundantly clear that addressing the DRC will not be at the top of Obama’s “to-do” list come January 20, he can nevertheless act to stem some of the current suffering in the DRC once he is President. His own bill gives him a legal basis to “hold accountable individuals, entities, and countries” working to undermine peace in the country which, very broadly interpreted, could include “individuals” like Robert Mugabe, corporate “entities” such as De Beers, and “countries” like China. Perhaps more realistically, the Act requires the U.S. to use its influence at the UN, which administers MONUC, to promote peace in the DRC, and specifically to help make available “personnel, communications, and military assets that improve the effectiveness of robust peacekeeping, mobility, and command and control capabilities of MONUC.”

In other words, should the new president turn his attention to the violence in the DRC, he would find he has given himself a useful vehicle for taking swift and meaningful action.

Moreover, his overwhelming victory last Tuesday has given him further justification for directing American resources to the DRC. As recently as the second presidential debate, when Obama was asked his position on using American combat forces where humanitarian, but not national security issues were at stake, Obama expressed a willingness to deploy troops to stop ethnic violence — a sentiment that clearly didn’t hurt his candidacy. I for one was deeply impressed by Obama’s quick and confident statement that “we may not always have national security issues at stake, but we have moral issues at stake.” To be sure, the U.S. has a moral stake in addressing the endless suffering of the Congolese.

My hope to see improved the U.S.’s record of intervening to prevent ethnic violence and humanitarian crises where we can easily do so is one of the many reasons I proudly voted and canvassed for Obama. It also falls into the long list of lower-profile campaign assurances and policy areas — admittedly overshadowed by crises of the economy, of energy, and of healthcare — that I hope Obama will not neglect once he becomes President.

In sharp contrast to the rhetorical emphasis placed on federalism and states’ rights by Reagan/Gingrich era conservatives, George W. Bush has engineered a dramatic reversal of long-standing, bipartisan positions against federal preemption in many critical areas. Whereas his conservative predecessors endorsed a vision of federalism in which the federal government had little authority to overrule states, Bush’s administration has embraced a system in which federal action, or even federal inaction, trumps states’ efforts to protect their citizens’ health, welfare and environment from corporate misconduct.

Nowhere are the dangerous consequences of this approach more glaringly evident than in the current financial crisis.

This week’s proposed historic bailout of the US financial institutions is only the latest development in a broader, ongoing financial crisis, which largely started with the collapse of sub-prime mortgage lenders earlier this year.

Much has been made of the McCain/Palin campaign’s seeming immunity to fact-checking in the mainstream media; how despite plenty of evidence that statements in their speeches are either lies or blatantly misleading, John McCain and Sarah Palin seem to be rewarded for repeating them. This is what prompted CNN pundit Paul Begala’s well-founded criticism of mainstream media for failing to embrace and hold candidates to, at the bare minimum, the facts:

If John McCain and Sarah Palin were to say the moon was made of green cheese, we can be certain that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would pounce on it, and point out it’s actually made of rock. And you just know the headline in the paper the next day would read: “CANDIDATES CLASH ON LUNAR LANDSCAPE.”…

Facts are indeed stubborn things, but the McCain-Palin lies are more stubborn still. In the face of demonstrable, provable, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, McCain and Palin continue to assert that Gov. Palin opposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.”

But NPR aired an interesting “Truth Squad” story today — arguing that mainstream media has addressed this point, and voters still aren’t listening:

Pretty much wherever she goes on the stump, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin tells voters she killed Alaska’s now-infamous “bridge to nowhere” in portraying herself as an anti-pork-barrel reformer.

And yet, pretty much every time journalists have compared Palin’s record to her rhetoric on that proposed bridge, they’ve called a foul. The results — whether from CBS News, USA Today, the Anchorage Daily News, NPR or some other outlet — have been remarkably consistent. The surprising thing is how little effect that journalistic fact-checking has had on the campaign trail.

As the commentator reminds us, though Sarah Palin has repeated the line “I told Congress ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to that bridge to nowhere!” in virtually every speech on the campaign trail, the historical record reveals that not only did she support the bridge when campaigning in 2006, she later sought to keep the earmarked funds in Alaska for other projects when the bridge itself became unpopular.

Nevertheless, the line still draws loud applause every time she repeats it, and is “earning” her a reputation as the anti-earmark reformer.

What caught me off guard this morning, was this next comment from NPR:

“Most of the time in past campaigns, when major news organizations have come out and said that something is totally false, the candidate will drop it,” says [former LA Times Washington correspondent Jack] Nelson, who was a reporter for more than five decades. “In this case, they are repeating it over and over and over.”

But with so many other sources of information and opinion online, revelations in mainstream news organizations don’t pack the same punch that they once did.

To my knowledge, this is the first time I’ve heard anyone in the mainstream media identify the fervor and prolificacy of online opinion (i.e. blogs) as dulling the public’s ability to grasp the truth. Yet as a blogger, who generally takes the stance that the sense of plurality, transparency, access, and independence blogs bring to media coverage is a good thing, I found myself annoyingly in agreement.

Here is what I think…

Especially where mainstream audiences are concerned (i.e. those who get their news exclusively from mainstream media), the blurry lines between traditional and new media add a false sense of authenticity to campaignspeak — candidates can say whatever they want about themselves and their records, and voters can just assume that there are concurring and dissenting opinions out there that ultimately balance to keep the candidates honest. Moreover, the abundance of information and opinions changes the natures of “facts” — facts are no longer objective, but rather, they are always cherry-picked and spun to accommodate a specific line of punditry, until there is no such thing as an “indisputable truth.” Little do audiences realize that candidates and their spokespeople take advantage of the blurry mess to just assert whatever version of history works for them — for example, that Sarah Palin opposed the bridge to nowhere, that offshore drilling will relieve gas prices, that we are winning the war in Iraq, and so on.

The question then, for me, is what can blogs like The Seminal do to help prevent, rather than contribute to, the demise of “the fact” in media coverage. By putting forward our personal thoughts and opinions alongside those of thousands of others, how can we still encourage voters (including those who haven’t the time or interest to sift through all those thoughts and opinions) to still listen for and embrace the facts of a story?

More generally, are blogs part of the reason candidates can get away with repeating well-debunked lies in their campaign stumps? Or do blogs serve a crucial role by doing what mainstream media refuses to do itself — calling a lie a lie, rather than calling a lie a debate?

Seminal readers, what do you think?

Most of us who spent this weekend on the US Eastern Seaboard were only lightly affected by Tropical Storm Hanna. Despite causing some flooding and power outages in Virginia and the Carolinas, the storm caused little property damage and no reported loss of life as it quickly dissipated and breezed north to Canada.

Last Tuesday, however, the same storm hit Haiti, without so kind a passing. It was at the time the latest in a series of storms that have battered the Caribbean nation and its neighbors, where warmer waters and weaker infrastructure made Hanna a stronger and deadlier storm. From Fridays’ The Guardian:

More than 120 people have died, thousands are homeless and agriculture and transport networks have been washed away, prompting calls for emergency international aid…”There are a lot of people who have been on top of the roofs of their homes over 24 hours now,” the interior minister, Paul Antoine Bien-Aime, told Reuters. “They have no water, no food and we can’t even help them.”…

Tropical storm Fay started the crisis three weeks ago. Hurricane Gustav wreaked havoc last week by uprooting trees and triggering floods and mudslides that killed dozens. Tropical storm Hanna struck on Tuesday with 65mph winds, killing at least 61 people and flooding the northern Haitian city of Gonaives with two metres of water. Corpses and the carcasses of donkeys and cows - flies swarming over them - bobbed down streets turned into rivers.

When the floodwaters began to recede in Gonaives on Saturday morning, hundreds of human bodies emerged. Humanitarian agencies reported the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere was devastated.

Of course this morning we all know that Hanna was not their last round. Yesterday, Hurricane Ike, a fourth and far-stronger storm ripped through Haiti, leaving officials there with the grim task of distinguishing which deaths were the result of which storm. The Miami Herald reported last night that in Cabaret, a small town near Gonaives, the bodies of small children swept up in the latest flooding already lined the streets.

I point all of this out because I think it’s imperative to remember that hurricanes — even the same hurricane — affect countries differently, and that some countries have more power than others to both prevent and protect themselves from their devastation. The link between global warming and hurricanes has been studied and established, to the satisfaction of even conservative environmental policymakers. Global warming causes more intense and more frequent storms, the victims of which are overwhelmingly among the world’s lowest-ranked emitters of carbon.

That the world — and in particular the US — needs to aggressively work to reverse the current trends in climate change is self-evident. That the world — and in particular the greatest emitters of carbon — owes the relatively-innocent victims of climate change justice for their suffering should be self-evident as well. The environmental justice movement was born in wealthy countries when low-income and minority groups sought and won justice for environmental harm disproportionately imposed upon them. Today, the need for environmental justice has widened in scope — where as before the problem was one of waste and pollution disproportionately impacting poor communities, today it is one of waste and pollution disproportionately impacting poor countries.

To be sure, Americans are no strangers to tropical storms, droughts, and the other early environmental consequences of climate change. But outside a few of New Orleans’ poorest wards most of us are blissfully unfamiliar with the degree of suffering faced this weekend by Haitians, though we are in part, through both our actions and our inactions, responsible for creating that suffering. Global warming is more than an environmental crisis. It is an injustice, and amid our broader efforts to combat this crisis there is a need for a global environmental justice movement to at the very least acknowledge this fact.

Like many today I watched in semi-awe as Alaska Governor Sarah Palin graciously accepted the position of John McCain’s running mate.

Television pundits explained why the Palin “package” is so compelling to conservatives. Palin is a (very) junior Republican who has already earned herself an excellent reputation for fighting corruption, as well as an 80+% approval rating as Alaska’s governor. At 44, she is the mother of 5 children, the oldest of whom recently enlisted and will soon be deployed to Iraq. She is a lifelong NRA member, a hunter, a high school basketball champion, and a former runner up for Miss Alaska. She is vehemently pro-domestic drilling — including in ANWR — and as one pundit suggested, possesses a “keen sense of the geopolitics of energy.” Palin’s background is thoroughly middle-class, and her high-school sweetheart husband is a lifelong union member.

There can be no doubt that Palin’s selection is purely tactical — a decision based more on image and balance than on substance and qualifications. Palin’s youth, beauty, and distance from Washington were all chosen because they directly counter shortcomings of McCain. Her indisputable conservatism in areas where McCain has appeared moderate — abortion, the Second Amendment, drilling — as well as her “strength” in domestic issues, balances nicely with McCain’s flip-flopping war-focused campaign.

Perhaps most importantly, Palin’s nomination and election would be hailed as breaking down barriers. Indeed, today’s “it turns out the women of America aren’t finished” speech made clear that Palin’s job on this ticket is to recruit as many former Hillary supporters as possible.

But what was disturbing today was how clear it became that Palin’s job is not only to recruit women, but to simultaneously promote conservative notions of how women should be.

Palin is in many ways the perfect “family woman.” She has given birth to five children, and (even today, while standing next to her new running mate) publicly honors her husband as the man in this world she admires most. Putting herself in contrast to Hillary Clinton and even Michelle Obama, Palin identifies herself first as a “hockey mom” who never had any ambitions to enter professional politics. Arguably the two most important appeals of her candidacy involve her sons: Due to her oldest son’s enlistment she is soon to become the most high profile Iraq mom since Cindy Sheehan. And last year when she learned she was carrying a baby with Downs Syndrome, she elected not to have an abortion — a move that crystallized her endorsement by the Christian Coalition. Moreover, after her son’s birth this April, Palin returned to work three days later without requesting maternity leave.

For all these reasons, Palin’s selection as McCain’s VP is offensive, not only because there are far more experienced women out there who perhaps don’t “look” as good, but because her personal choices as a woman — as a wife and as a mother — are about to be scrutinized and politicized in a way that can only hurt women.

Palin’s pro-life stance combined with her personal history subtly reinforces the idea that there is no acceptable excuse for terminating a pregnancy — that education, healthcare, employment flexibility, and the presence of a reliable spouse or partner are incidental in the decision to have children, and anyway, are available to those who work for them. More specifically, it sends a message to women that if they become pregnant they should have the baby — regardless of whether they already have 4 children, regardless of whether they have a career they’d like to advance, and regardless of whether they know their baby will have Downs syndrome.

Similarly, Palin’s selection sends a disingenuous and alarming message to American mothers — that even if it puts their son or daughter in mortal, daily danger there is no reason not to support the war in Iraq; that gun control is unnecessary; and that this country makes it easy for women with five children (including a five month old) to have a successful career and even, say, run for Vice President.

I have zero doubt that Sarah Palin is an intelligent, capable woman who is truly dedicated to reforming government and eliminating corruption. I also have zero doubt that she lives the life she chooses — that there is strength and independence in her convictions on abortion, guns, and energy, that she really does see politics as public service, and that she truly loves and admires her husband and every one of her children without concern for how it makes her look.

But her profound lack of national experience serves as glaring evidence that she has not been selected for her qualifications, her courage, or her brain, but for the personal choices she has made for her family and for herself as a woman. Quite frankly, conservatives have rewarded a woman politically for deciding to keep a baby and for sending her son to Iraq. For this reason, Palin’s selection is a great disservice to women — and further evidence of how truly destructive a Republican victory will be for American women.

Last week the British agency that regulates broadcasting content, the Office of Communications, ruled a documentary aimed at debunking climate change broke industry rules to “be impartial” and “reflect a range of views on controversial issues.” From the BBC:

The Great Global Warming Swindle, a controversial Channel 4 film, broke Ofcom rules, the media regulator says…

The film’s key contentions were that the increase in atmospheric temperatures observed since the 1970s was not primarily caused by emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, and that the modern focus on climate change is based in politics rather than science.

It is seen in some “climate skeptic” circles as a counter to Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, and credited with influencing public perception of climate science.

However “Ofcom” ultimately let the broadcaster off the hook by ruling the documentary did not cause serious “harm or offense,” even though Channel 4 conceded it falsified graphs and data for the film. Curiously, Ofcom also ruled that the link between global warming and human activity had been settled before March 2007 (when the documentary aired) and therefore global warming was no longer “controversial” at the time of broadcast — basically saying Channel 4 gets away with airing the Great Global Warming Swindle because everybody would have known by that time it was crap!

(IPCC chair Sir John Houghton expressed outrage at this notion, saying he knew for a fact the film misled people who believed they could trust the information presented in the documentary.)

This ruling reminds me of Al Gore’s comments to NBC last year, in which he compared global warming deniers to people who think the world is flat — implying global warming is no longer a “debate” and therefore deniers should not get “equal time.”

Apparently, Ofcom agrees with Al Gore….. though more importantly, can you imagine a US agency ruling against an American broadcaster for violating impartiality obligations? (Can you imagine American broadcasters even having impartiality obligations?)

Seminal readers, what are you hearing today?

Two weeks ago during Netroots Nation, Nancy Pelosi said she thought it likely John McCain would flip-flop on his position on climate change, adding she felt meaningful climate legislation depended upon Barack Obama’s election.

Yesterday McCain surrogate (and economic adviser) Steve Forbes seemed to reiterate Pelosi’s sentiments, suggesting the Senator would dump his cap-and-trade policy if elected to office, while stating of similar market-based environmental policies “those things are not going to get very far:”

You’ll notice Forbes also praises McCain for reversing his position on offshore drilling and embracing nuclear energy, which Forbes outrageously calls “moving in the right direction.”

McCain of course was the first Senator to introduce a mandatory cap-and-trade bill in Congress back in 2002, a move that has let him get away with (falsely) claiming leadership on environmental issues. Yet besides his many position reversals against the environment in recent years, such as those on drilling and nuclear power, on cap-and-trade itself McCain is now dramatically toning down his rhetoric. Last month he denied that his cap-and-trade plan included any “mandatory” targets (even though it does, albeit weak ones) and asked journalists to please stop confusing the term “cap-and-trade” with “mandatory targets” (even though the latter defines the former).

As the Wonk Room notes:

On July 9, conservative journalist Larry Kudlow reported that he was told “on deep background” by a “senior McCain official” that McCain was off cap-and-trade…Forbes is signaling that Kudlow may be right, and McCain will follow in the footsteps of George W. Bush. As a candidate in 2000, Bush pledged to impose mandatory reductions of carbon dioxide, but reversed that position once he took the oath of office. In 2001, newly elected Vice President Dick Cheney said of Bush’s pledge, “It was a mistake.”

For the record a (mandatory) cap-and-trade scheme does not constitute a “gigantic tax” (though I personally would be in favor of a gigantic carbon tax…). It is by far the most flexible and industry-friendly policy approach available to us that will actually address global warming. Here’s hoping 2009 brings a climate plan no less stringent than Barack Obama’s proposed, IPCC-compliant, cap-and-trade scheme.

Couldn’t help but post this. Well done, Vanity Fair:

As TalkLeft points out, compared to the notorious New Yorker cover, at least the implications in this cover are factually accurate. McCain is indeed old, his wife did indeed take pills, and of course, McCain is far more likely to have a picture of George Bush over the mantle than Obama is Osama.

Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore visited Netroots Nation last week and talked about global warming. After her appearance Pelosi spoke to Grist.org, and made it clear she does not trust John McCain to tackle climate change if elected president:

I can’t even imagine how we go forward in many areas if we don’t win this election. There’s so much at stake. Barack Obama’s election is essential in so many ways…

John McCain has said he is interested in the climate change issue. He had said he opposed George Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy and changed his mind. He was the author of comprehensive immigration reform and changed his mind. And I don’t know how he will rally the Republicans behind something unless he has tremendous enthusiasm for it, and so far the two things he had enthusiasm for he has walked away from. So, the only answer to this is to elect Barack Obama president of the United States.

Pelosi also said she believes Al Gore’s JFK-esque call to phase out 100% of fossil-fuel based electricity in 10 years is “doable,” and praised his leadership in global warming. Last week in Washington the former Vice President challenged Americans to meet this goal, adding some truly progressive suggestions for how to go about it. From the Guardian:

Gore urged the US to institute a carbon tax that could be offset by reducing the payroll tax on employers.

“We should tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.

Underpinning Gore’s remarks, however, was a finely tuned sense of the economic anxiety that dominates American life 13 weeks before the next presidential election. He observed that the environmental, fiscal, and national-security dangers facing the country would be eliminated by a conversion to clean energy.

“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet,” Gore said to wild applause. “Every bit of that has got to change.”

I suppose it’s too much to hope Obama and Pelosi would go to bat for a carbon tax anytime soon, though Gore’s suggestion is certainly a great one.

Seminal readers, heard any straight talk today?