Consumption of open space is taking a back seat as an issue to carbon footprint, and with reason -- nothing else matters quite so much when you wake up to find your town is now under mean sea level and a billion something displaced refugees are at your door asking if you have anything to eat.

But the single biggest ecological impact humans have is simply through clearing land, building roads and homes, and settling our fat asses down. We have renewable energy resources in abundance, sufficient for all Earth's people now and still to come, if we learn how to use them. But no matter how sequestered our carbon or efficient our energy the vanished habitats will still be gone.

One answer to that problem is cities. Agriculture will always take its toll as long as there are so many of us, but does suburbia need to as well? Urban populations concentrate land use and minimize the overall ecological impact of a given population. So if we want to ameliorate the human population footprint in the long term, learning to live with each other in close quarters is a must-have skill.

Ironically, some recent research seems to suggest that kids who grow up with siblings are better able to negotiate individual boundaries as adults than are only children. The best strategy, then, for raising an urban, eco-friendly future generation would appear to be to have big families.

Or, you know, build transorbital boarding schools and kick the little buggers up the gravity well. Discuss.

The strait is also considered to be something of a cyclone magnet.

Call it Mother Nature, call it Chaos, call it Lord Rama -- a higher power is a higher power. Don't say you weren't warned!

Bush is constitutionally incapable of not pushing for Ted Olson (not to mention that if anyone truly nonpartisan gets confirmed as Attorney General the Bush regime is over -- you johnny-come-latelies might even get your impeachment). It's not a question of daring. It's just his nature.

What's good about it for the Democrats? In theory Bush could have used the opportunity to send up someone ineffectual and relatively uncontroversial, and score points by seeming to have everything under control without expending any of his remaining political capital.

Instead he's given his grassroots opponents something to rally around, and his critics in Congress a basis for consolidating their bloc. Yes, there's a potential for distraction from other issues, but the worst case scenario -- a failure of nerve by Senate liberals -- will make clear to the grassroots how much work they have yet to do to succeed in 2008, and inspire them further.

A better strategy for Bush would have been to lull his adversaries into complacency with some innocuous-seeming right-wing fellow-traveler. Fortunately for the rest of us, he's in a tight enough situation now that he can't afford to.

And hey, pat yourselves on the back, progressive Americans -- the reason why is because you all have been hard at work for so long. Now don't let up!

"Derivative" is not the half of it.

"A good artist borrows, a great artist steals."

I'm looking forward to reading this one. Miller's review makes it out to have shades of Robertson Davies as well -- it will be interesting to look out for that.

Mukasey is exactly the kind of compromise the Democrats have most to fear from Bush. Olson was the "bad cop" by comparison with whom Mukasey will be judged a moderate, rather than the right-wing loyalist that he is.

Unfortunately I was wrong about Bush's stubbornness. You could say I misunderestimated him. But I still stand by everything else I wrote before Olson was off the table, which bears repeating:

http://letters.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/09/14/ted_olson/permalink/6b7465ea0438cd1a4c91da11712cf160.html

"In theory Bush could have used the opportunity to send up someone ineffectual and relatively uncontroversial, and score points by seeming to have everything under control without expending any of his remaining political capital. ... to lull his adversaries into complacency with some innocuous-seeming right-wing fellow-traveler."

And so he has.

Perhaps the chief virtue of a chairman of the Fed is a light touch -- to intervene in monetary policy as infrequently as possible, and without telegraphing what it is you intend to do next. The more the banking industry cruises along the highway of natural market forces without looking over its shoulder and making plans based on what's coming down the line from the Fed, the better.

In this respect Greenspan was a mediocre chairman at best. No matter how he tried, he couldn't ever resist for long the urge to make public pronouncements about the state of the economy, Federal spending priorities, how Americans should conduct their personal financial lives, and so on.

And he drove the prime rate right down to nothing, seriously curtailing the flexibility of the money market in responding to economic trends. Greenspan may have truly been unable to predict that mortgage rates would thereafter go back up (as if they could go anywhere else!), but the banking industry itself clearly showed no such similar myopia.