There was a long, detailed story in Sunday’s Washington Post about how government weapons experts kept telling the White House there was no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, even as the White House was telling the opposite to the rest of the world.

What if the situation was reversed? What if experts from throughout the government told top administration officials that Americans faced a grave threat from terrorists and the White House chose to ignore the warnings? Actually, that’s what happened in the weeks leading up to the September 11th attacks, but let’s put that aside for a moment. That was a different era; that kind of tragic mistake couldn’t happen again, could it?
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On Sunday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the rounds of the political talk shows, making the link between the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s Al Quaeda. He said the Islamic fundamentalists who comprise Al Quaeda were outraged in the early 1990s by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia is home to Islam’s most sacred shrines, which are allegedly desecrated by the presence of infidels. The Americans were using Saudi air bases to launch sorties over southern Iraq, so if Saddam hadn’t been running Iraq, then the Americans would not have had to bomb him and would not have gone to Saudi Arabia and desecrated the Muslim holy land. By Mr. Wolfowitz’s logic, the link between Saddam and Osama is the U.S. Air Force.
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Claudette arrived in Texas this week, coming ashore as a weak hurricane. She is not Andrew or Camille, one of those storms that’s remembered for a generation; but she arrives at a turning point in weather history.

Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization announced that temperatures and storms across the planet are becoming more extreme than ever. The WMO is a UN agency, comprising the weather services of 185 nations. Unlike the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the WMO is not in the business of monitoring greenhouse gases and global warming. Usually the WMO just releases a group of weather statistics at the end of the year. A mid-year announcement on extreme weather trends is unprecedented for this stodgy bunch of scientists, but then, so is the weather.
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Out in California, they’ve got an economic crisis. The new fiscal year has begun for the Golden State, no budget is in place and there’s a $34 billion deficit. State offices are closing or cutting back, state services are being stopped for lack of available funds. Because of the budget shortfall, it will be a long time – if ever – before they return. California’s high tech industries were hit hard when the technology business bubble burst in 2000. Since then, the federal government has been passing its responsibilities along to the states at an accelerating rate. As California is the most populous state, it has the largest burden of services to pick up when the feds drop them.

California can’t raise its taxes. Democrats control the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature, but they don’t have the supermajority needed to pass a tax increase. Republican leaders vow political death to any GOP legislator who dares throw the Dems a lifeline.
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