The Bush administration has ignored and undercut two Treasury secretaries in a row (O'Neill and Snow). It isn't known for giving any real power to the man in that seat.

I do think that this guy is sincere about the environment, and is about as good a nomination that we can expect from the Bush administration. But the anti-environmentalists don't have anything to worry about, I'm afraid; the guy isn't going to have any influence.

"White House budget director Rob Portman suggested to the New York Times that Paulson might not be eager to restrict economic activity for the sake of the environment."

The powers that be want to tell you that we either have to be dirty or poor. They ignore the facts, like that Toyota is kicking GMs ass, mainly by building clean, efficient automobiles rather than gigantic gas guzzlers. Or that, generally speaking, pollution is waste, and that if you can find a way to get more production from less energy input, not only do you generate less greenhouse gases, but your costs go down. If the US continues to resist Kyoto and similar efforts and our competitors don't, our products will be too dirty to buy, so everyone will buy from elsewhere.

I remember the wars about automobile pollution and efficiency regulations during the Reagan days. The prevailing view in Washington was that there was a conflict between the goal of a clean car and a fuel-efficient car. They thought this because of the Detroit approach to meeting Clean Air Act standards: take a really crappy engine that spews unburnt hydrocarbons and CO, and put a massive catalytic converter on the back, which immediately clogged up and killed the engine performance. People were illegally disconnecting the catalytic converters because of the terrible effect they had on performance. And then Honda came out with cars with engines that burned so clean that no exhaust system was needed to meet the standards, and they got terrific gas mileage. That's because pollution is waste, and an engine that is designed right produces almost nothing but CO2 and water, and relatively little of that.

There's a lot of money to be made in greenhouse gas reduction. The transition will hurt only those who are unwilling to invest in it.

Hezbollah isn't Hamas or Islamic Jihad. They aren't a ragtag band of isolated cells of terrorists that mix up bombs in their mothers' basements, as you suggest. They are a mass movement with about a million followers (in addition to their paramilitary role they are also the largest Shi'ite political party in Lebanon). They have missiles that can hit Haifa and beyond. Their fighters drove the Israeli army out of Lebanon, and those fighters don't have to hide out in cells, because South Lebanon is basically a state within a state. They operate in the open. But since you make up a scenario of a Hezbollah fighter hiding in Mom's basement, you then think that you've justified the killing of the fictional mother.

However, Israel is launching attacks in the north of the country, where there is no Hezbollah. Those attacks are killing civilians in large numbers, over 200 at this point (less than 20 Israeli civilians have died). As Prof. Cole says, it appears that the strategy is to get other Lebanese to fight Hezbollah. Unfortunately, it doesn't work; for some reason, when you're bombed, you tend to get angry at the people who are bombing you, not at the other people who first attacked the bombers.

Israel was attacked. They would be perfectly justified in counterattacking the people who attacked them. That would be Hezbollah, or Hezbollah's bases in the south of the country. A massive land, sea, and air blockade of the whole country and the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure is wrong.

During the Kosovo conflict, Milosovich was accused of war crimes for driving the Muslim population out of Kosovo. He was doing so as part of his battle against the separatist movement there. As Kosovo was legally part of Serbia, he was justified in fighting against the separatists, but driving a population out of a territory is considered a war crime, even a form of genocide (though I think this is abuse of the term, that's what the charges at The Hague called it).

If Israel were to warn the South Lebanese population that they should take shelter because attacks are coming, that's legitimate and proper. But that's not what they did: they said that the population should flee, wholesale, to the north. If their plan is to try to create a permanent, depopulated buffer zone like the Korean DMZ, on Lebanese soil, that would be equivalent to the Serbian actions of the early 1990s.

When we finally settle this thing, there is going to have to be some kind of buffer, but not at the expense of the civilian population.

One colleague I am close to has family in Beirut. Another has many friends in Haifa. Latest word from the Bush administration is that they think it's just peachy that the slaughter go on another week, and then they'll step in. This is monstrous; hundreds more civilians will die and Lebanon will become a basket case.

Israel is not going to "put a final stop to Hezbollah". If they couldn't do it in 18 years of occupation (1982-2000), why do you think that a couple of weeks of attacks will do the job now? The only thing that will be accomplished is the creation of Gaza North: another failed state on Israel's border, with millions devoted to the cause of killing Israelis. This is not in Israel's interest.

There was a Tiptree story that I read more than 20 years ago that still sticks in my mind, about the screwed-up connections between sex and violence against women. It's powerful.

It turns out that the story is online, at

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheldon/sheldon1.html