I believe the memo was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike"

Japan warned over nuclear plants, WikiLeaks cables show

Warnings about the safety of nuclear power plants in Japan, one of the most seismologically active countries in the world, were raised during a meeting of the G8's Nuclear Safety and Security Group in Tokyo in 2008.

A US embassy cable obtained by the WikiLeaks website and seen by The Daily Telegraph quoted an unnamed expert who expressed concern that guidance on how to protect nuclear power stations from earthquakes had only been updated three times in the past 35 years.

The document states: "He [the IAEA official] explained that safety guides for seismic safety have only been revised three times in the last 35 years and that the IAEA is now re-examining them.

"Also, the presenter noted recent earthquakes in some cases have exceeded the design basis for some nuclear plants, and that this is a serious problem that is now driving seismic safety work."

The cables also disclose how the Japanese government opposed a court order to shut down another nuclear power plant in western Japan because of concerns it could not withstand powerful earthquakes.

Keep watching. Sooner or later we'll read about a TEPCO emergency response plan that somehow involves a Gulf Walrus.

On a more serious note, yesterday I posted a video clip of Barrack Obama telling a town hall meeting in New Orleans after the BP Macondo blowout,

There's no reason why, technologically, we can't employ nuclear energy in a safe and effective way. Japan does it and France does it, and it doesn't have greenhouse gas emissions, so it would be stupid for us not to do that in a much more effective way.

At the very least these cables should make it clear that the President was making statements that had no factual basis according to current U.S. intelligence. In this case, the President was telling a crowd of people concerned about one energy producer poisoning their coastline that maybe they should think about investing in another poisonous means of energy production, all while lying through his teeth.

Update: And also as well and such (via Digby)

Back in November, President Obama was in India pushing that country’s government to pass legislation exempting GE from liability for nuclear “accidents.” That idea is probably not going to go very far now.

Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and CEO of GE and a big friend of Obama’s (he was named to an unpaid post as “jobs czar” by the president earlier this year, despite the company’s long record of exporting US jobs to places like China and India), says it’s “too soon” to assess the impact on the company’s nuclear business prospects of the nuclear “accidents” in northern Japan.

Also from the department of disturbingly appropriate names: Immelt.

Our world is run by scoundrels and their stories are told by courtiers

What Athenae said. Bill Keller spent eleventy kabillion words reminding us that he and his prize-winning reporters are clean and good enough to make the icky product of the "bag ladies" tolerable to the king.

Courtier journalism

Remember to clear everything with all of the censors and secret police before publishing.

Funny thing about public corruption

In municipal cases like, the Meffert-St. Pierre-Nagin business for example, it really doesn't do us a lot of good to see the criminals prosecuted once they've left office. I mean, it does allow us to say "I told you so" and shake our fingers and stuff but at the end of the day those guys go to jail, our lives aren't any better because of it, and the next group of corrupt bastards is well into the next corrupt scheme. Putting these people in jail only make a difference if they stop the damage from being done while it's happening which never happens. It can get very frustrating after a while.

I am open to arguments based on maintaining rule of law and shining a light on the nefarious workings of government for the benefit of the citizenry and so forth but we live in a world where that cow is clearly well out of the barn anyway.

Ignorance is Strength

US to federal workers: If you read WikiLeaks, you're breaking the law

Oh I do enjoy a good old-fashioned prohibition against reading.

Early afternoon link dump

Because I want to get to the football as soon as possible.

• Getting back to the "books-I'm-reading" meme I started yesterday, one criticism I have of Tom Bower's Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century is that it reads like an extended Fortune profile on the careers of major oil company CEOs. While Bower doesn't flatter his subjects or hide uncomfortable facts, the reader still gets the impression that we're almost supposed to be rooting for these executives as they struggle to buy off the appropriate Russian oligarch or downplay the appropriate spill or execute the appropriate Nigerian rebels and so forth. In any event, it's worth slogging through.
  
  Also worth a look, WikiLeaks cables: Shell's grip on Nigerian state revealed

  The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.
  
  The company's top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew "everything that was being done in those ministries". She boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.




• How many Gulf shrimp must you eat in one sitting to exceed the threshold by which FDA has declared them safe? Four Also if you're a child eating shrimp, you'd better be a fat child.

  Critics of the FDA program have also questioned using 176 pounds as the average weight of consumers in establishing the levels of concern for PAHs. Sixty percent of respondents to the NRDC survey said they weighed less than 176 pounds.
  
  "That weight obviously also doesn't protect children," said Solomon. "Once again, we're not telling people not to eat Gulf seafood. What we are asking is for the FDA to do the science right, bring truth to local diets."

  Note: Please do not fatten your children up by feeding them excess shrimp.



• SHOCKING BREAKING NEWS: Fox News is a Republican propaganda machine

  Media Matters has obtained leaked emails that show how a top Washington editor at Fox News directed his journalists not to use the phrase "public option."
  
  Instead, Bill Sammon, Fox News' Washington managing editor, told staffers to use the phrase "government option." This happens to be the exact phrase that Republican pollster Frank Luntz had advised Republicans to begin using to describe the public option -- on Sean Hannity's show, no less.




• Speaking of propaganda, I'm all for the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center taking a stand against discrimination, but can we please not ruin young childrens' reading time in the process?



• And, speaking of children and books and the like,
  
  BESE approves Pastorek's plan for the future governance of New Orleans public schools

  The Pastorek plan allows schools meeting an academic threshold to choose whether to return to local control or stay in the RSD. The plan also allows for the creation of a new local governing board in place of the Orleans Parish School Board.

  According to the Twitterings from The Lens, this follows upon a very contentious public meeting last night. Can't wait to read their report.

Tipping point

It's been coming for a while but this Wikileaks saga is hurrying the heavily censored and closed internet out into the world beyond just China. In a few years it will basically just be another conduit for TV shows.

Adding: Yes, Twitter restored the account. The point, though, is look how easy it is to squish people if you want to.

6:00 Link Dump

Salon's "Best Non-Fiction of 2010" lists six titles only one of which I've read (The Big Short by Michael Lewis) and another I'm waiting to read (The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson) So I can't really comment much other than to say The Big Short is so character-driven that it could make a halfway decent movie and that I saw Wilkerson interviewed on Book TV this year and was interested in her subject but hope her writing isn't as boring as her personal presentation.

Anyway it's December and 'tis the season for "Best of" book lists. Book TV has several of these compiled in the "News about Books" window on the front page of its website. I've been looking through the lists all day and have found that I've read, checked out and not read, or am planning to read only a few of these selections. In addition to The Big Short and The Warmth of Other Suns I've also checked out Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition but had to return it because I was reading something else at the time. It will go back in the queue and I'll get to it eventually. Also on one of these lists (Library Journal's) I noticed The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption which I had just checked out a few days ago. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is near the top of everyone's fiction lists. I read the first chapter of it last night and am not surprised that I already want to punch Franzen in the face along with each of his stupid neurotic yuppie characters nobody should care about.

I guess I should put together a list of books I read in 2010 just for comparison's sake. Maybe later. Meanwhile here's what I read on the internet today.

• Here is a NOLA Defender item on yesterday's Inspector General's report on New Orleans Hotels who don't pay their fair share of occupancy taxes.
  
  Here is a Times-Picayune editorial opining that they probably should do that.



• Good round-up from the New York Times of discussion about a primary challenge to Obama in 2012.
  
  New York Times analysis of the tax cut deal helps explain why there's so much of that talk today.

  The proposal does not include an extension of Mr. Obama’s signature tax cut, the Making Work Pay credit, which provided a credit of up to $400 for individuals and $800 for families of low and moderate income. Instead, the plan creates a one-year reduction in Social Security payroll taxes, which are generally levied on the first $106,800 of income. For an individual earning $110,000, that provision would reduce payroll taxes by $2,136.
  
  Although the $120 billion payroll tax reduction offers nearly twice the tax savings of the credit it replaces, it will nonetheless lead to higher tax bills for individuals with incomes below $20,000 and families that make less than $40,000. That is because their payroll tax savings are less than the $400 or $800 they will lose from the Making Work Pay credit.




• Meanwhile TNR has this "Inside the Obama White House" thing up that everybody read today but I don't think was very helpful. Did they have to call it "Loose Change"? Just.. blech.



• Also read this Matt Taibbi post which is ostensibly about the fact that David Gergen confused Taibbi with NYT's Matt Bai, but it's really about the schmaltzy-smug pseudo-centrist media creatures who feed us our lies each day.
  
  

  Bai is one of those guys -- there are hundreds of them in this business -- who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning "centrist" pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing "unrealistic" liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it's like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you're in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you've got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won't be long.





• Senate votes to remove Judge Thomas Porteous from office
  
  

  Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the lead House impeachment manager, told senators Tuesday that Porteous had demanded payments and gifts from lawyers and bailbonds executives to help support "a lifestyle which he couldn't otherwise afford" that included frequent gambling at casinos. Schiff said Porteous so corrupted the system that in a complicated federal hospital case one of the parties felt a need to bring in a "crony" of the judge to its legal team because the other side already had hired a Porteous friend.
  
  "Everyone around the judge has fallen," Schiff said. "The bailbondsmen have gone to jail, the other state judges he helped recruit have gone to jail, the lawyers who gave him the cash lost their law licenses and (have) given up their practices. The judge is a gambler and he is betting that he can beat the system just one more time.





• Everyone was also talking about John Lennon today. Here you can watch Howard Cosell announce Lennon's death on Monday Night Football.
  
  Or you can just listen to your choice of Working Class Hero or Watching the Wheels



• Lastly, and this is a doozy, Wikileaks Reveals That Military Contractors Have Not Lost Their Taste For Prostitutes I guess only some sex scandals are relevant here though.

6:00 PM Link Dump

It was pointed out to me sort of by accident that I spend a lot of time posting links on Facebook and Twitter where they kind of go to die if I don't put them somewhere I can find them later. So I'm going to try to start collecting the mess on the blog more frequently. Here's the first shot at it.

Today in links:

Greenwald: Anti-WikiLeaks lies and propaganda - from TNR, Lauer, Feinstein and more

Gulf Oil Spill: Why Size Mattered From the Very Beginning, Especially for BP

BP faces billions in fines for the oil that spewed from its damaged Macondo well into the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year. So, it was hardly shocking to hear that BP disagrees with the government’s estimates of how much oil flowed into the Gulf. Here’s where it get wacky: BP believes the government was off by as much as 50 percent.

N.O. inspector says hotels aren't paying fair share

The cash-strapped New Orleans city government is likely losing millions of dollars each year from hotels that either do not pay sales taxes or under-report their revenue, according to an analysis released today by the city's inspector general.

Borders trying to buy out or merge with Barnes & Noble:

Revulsion of the Day: Here's an edition of Pat Robertson's 700 Club from Sept 7, 2010 featuring Drew Brees talking about his book and his faith and keeping your chin up and positivity and other such crap.



Here is an otherwise mediocre interview between Stephen Colbert and new Hornets "owner" NBA Commissioner David Stern from Nov 15 where Stern makes a very telling slip in describing himself as an "internationalist" which he defines as different from "American".

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
David Stern
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

It's a revelatory comment in that Stern cannot nor can anybody in his above-the-law class identify in any meaningful way with sports fans whose passion derives from pride in their sense of place. Not only does someone like Stern not care about franchise relocation, he's fundamentally incapable of even empathizing with the fans who lose out as a result.

After the NBA assumed ownership of the Hornets, Stern estimates the franchise's value jumped by $50 million. Obviously he's looking to shop the team to an "internationalist" pool of potential buyers.

Meanwhile, Deadspin: The New Orleans Hornets' Sad Financial Documents

Speaking of selling out, read this impassioned speech by Hillary Clinton back in January about "Internet Freedom" just for laughs.

Pro-science textbooks win this time around in Louisiana

The Lens: Gusman won’t be charged in woman’s restraining death

Gambit: Some clueless Mormon tourists think "Katrina did New Orleans a World of Good" Which is... idiotic of course, but it's an occasion to remind ourselves that it makes more sense to worry about the people who actually live here and hold positions of power and influence who frequently display the same attitude. And I'm not just talking about Erroll Laborde. Katrina gave a lot of plutocratic New Orleanians the opportunities they thought they'd never have to break the teachers' union, to privatize school management, to reduce access to affordable housing.

There was a time when the perceptions of outsiders mattered but that media war has already been lost. Time to focus on the real problem.

Watch Cornell West say it. Barack Obama doesn't care about jobless people.



And finally, The Lens: Don’t plan on recycling bottles from New Year’s Eve bash

The much-touted recycling program for most of the city, announced as a sweetener in the recent contract negotiations with Metro Disposal and Richard’s Disposal, will not start with the new year, an attorney for the companies said, and it’s unclear just how soon residents will be putting out their paper, plastic and glass.

Dangerous People of the Internet

Joe Lieberman: Freedom warrior.

A leading US senator suggested tonight that the New York Times and other news organisations publishing the US embassy cables being released by WikiLeaks could be investigated for breaking American espionage laws.

Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate homeland security committee, told Fox News: "To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department."

Remember back nearly a year ago now when mayoral candidate John Georges got all upset because some bloggers were writing about some embarrassing things in his past and recording him at speaking engagements where he made an ass of himself? Imagine if Georges had been able to have those bloggers censored by Cox and investigated by NOPD. Because that's pretty much what's going on right now with regard to Wikileaks.

As Digby points out here, it's pretty much why we have a First Amendment in the first place.

Hey shouldn't somebody stop this?

Joe Lieberman doesn't get to tell people what they can or can't publish. Not in this country anyway. Maybe one of these companies should tell him to fuck off.

Must read on Wikileaks

If you read one article about the Wikileaks fallout this week, please make it this Greenwald post.

Before setting forth why these WikiLeaks disclosures produce vastly more good than harm, I'll state several caveats as clearly as I can. Unlike the prior leaks of war documents, there are reasonable concerns about this latest leak (most particularly that impeding diplomacy makes war more likely). Like all organizations, WikiLeaks has made mistakes in the past, including its failure to exercise enough care in redacting the names of Afghan informers. Moreover, some documents are legitimately classified, probably including some among the documents that were just disclosed.

Nonetheless, our government and political culture is so far toward the extreme pole of excessive, improper secrecy that that is clearly the far more significant threat. And few organizations besides WikiLeaks are doing anything to subvert that regime of secrecy, and none is close to its efficacy. It's staggering to watch anyone walk around acting as though the real threat is from excessive disclosures when the impenetrable, always-growing Wall of Secrecy is what has enabled virtually every abuse and transgression of the U.S. government over the last two decades at least.

Much more. Just go read.

The best defense is belligerence

I'm starting to think maybe Sarah Palin really could be President. Because these days leadership is basically defined by making stupendous ignorance a virtue to rally around. And Palin has a special talent for this.

Good Whiskey

Not telling you what to do with your Sunday but reading through the reporting on the Wikileaks revelations might be worth your time.

Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable details.

For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is nonetheless breathtaking.

“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemeni forces had carried out the strikes.

Mr. Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country, Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided it’s good whiskey.”

Update: A good place to keep track of the releases and the reporting on them is at Greg Mitchell's The Nation blog.

Upperdate: See also Simon Jenkins' essay in The Guardian about the documents and the ethics of reporting.

America's foreign policy is revealed as a slave to rightwing drift, terrified of a bomb exploding abroad or of a pro-Israeli congressman at home. If the cables tell of the progress to war over Iran or Pakistan or Gaza or Yemen, their revelation might help debate the inanity of policies which, as Patterson says, seem to be leading in just that direction. Perhaps we can now see how catastrophe unfolds when there is time to avert it, rather than having to await a Chilcot report after the event. If that is not in the public's interest, I fail to see what is.

Clearly, it is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets. Were there some overriding national jeopardy in revealing them, greater restraint might be in order. There is no such overriding jeopardy, except from the policies themselves as revealed. Where it is doing the right thing, a great power should be robust against embarrassment.