TPM published the following item titled "Like cats to water":

The House last night voted to create an outside panel to review ethics complaints. Let's just say that it passed over very strenuous objections from some quarters.

We've put together some of the best quotes from the debate.

My favorite, from Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS): "If you have a single ounce of self-preservation, you'll vote no."

Tiahrt was an actual employee of Boeing before he got elected to the House. No doubt he'll be back on the payroll, with a substantial raise, when we finally get rid of him. Meanwhile, he's been so far up Boeing's corporate ass even Bush has taken to calling him Tanker Todd. He's also been deep into Tom DeLay, who gave him an Appropriations Committee seat. In turn, Tiahrt kicked some of his Boeing money into DeLay's slush fund. I've never gotten the impression that Tiahrt's fingers are particularly sticky, but clearly he knows how money works in Washington. He's a hardcore ideologist, but he doesn't assume that God looks out for him. He's done a lot of practical and expedient things to keep getting re-elected in what isn't a sure Republican district. The one thing he takes more seriously than any principle is self-preservation.

PS: Salon's War Room also singled out Tiahrt's quote.

Michael D Shear and Matthew Mosk: McCain staff tied to Airbus lobbying. The Kansas political world, which is totally in Boeing's hip pocket, is livid over the Air Force awarding its $35 billion tanker boondoggle to Airbus (technically, Northrop Grumman) over Boeing. Caught in the crossfire is John McCain, one of whose few good deeds was working to derail Boeing's previous scandalous one-bid tanker contract in 2004. McCain still cites his role there as preventing $6 billion in fraud. Several Boeing execs wound up in jail as a result, and the whole thing got restarted, with Airbus lobbying hard to get in on the graft. Looks like they won the contract at least partly on merit, but it no doubt helped that they've made major strides in playing Boeing's political game. And while I believe McCain when he says that he never personally lobbied on the issue, it turns out that he's close enough to plenty of lobbyists that it isn't hard to connect dots.

McCain has spoken out for years against the influence of special interests in Washington, but his campaign includes a number of prominent Washington lobbyists, including campaign manager Rick Davis, who founded a lobbying firm.

McCain finance chairman Tom Loeffler and Susan Nelson, who left Loeffler's lobbying firm to be McCain's finance director, both began lobbying for the parent company of Airbus in 2007, Senate records show. William Ball, a former secretary of the Navy and frequent McCain surrogate on the trail, also lobbied for Airbus, as did John Green, who recently took a leave from Ogilvy Public Relations to serve as McCain's legislative liaison.

The conspicuous presence of lobbyists in McCain's campaign has been noted elsewhere, but hasn't really sunken into the public mind, which has conveniently forgotten that McCain only started wearing his scruples on his sleeve after getting caught up in the savings and loan scandal as one of the notorious Keating 5. Given how much play this is getting in Kansas, where Boeing's congressional flunkies are all Republicans, you can imagine how it'll play in Washington, where Democrats predominate -- both support Boeing slavishly, but the exporting jobs issue plays to their base instincts, and they have no reason to cut McCain any slack.

Meanwhile, Wichita Eagle editorial cartoonist Richard Crowson has been groping with the question of why Boeing's having such a hard time competing with Airbus. An earlier cartoon suggested several reasons, like the old saw about government subsidies. (You think Boeing is unsubsidized? Aside from all the cost-plus, reuse-the-technology Defense deals, Kansas has financed Boeing with billions of dollars in state-backed bonds, and every city, state, and country Boeing builds or contracts in has had to pony up for the privilege.) But today Crowson settled on health care costs, and picked an appropriate way to represent them. The little dog in the lower left corner says: "Didn't I see you in Detroit?"

I'm not sure that really explains it in Boeing's case, but then I know some folks Boeing laid off for being diabetic, so I figure they're pretty much on top of their costs there, as they are elsewhere. (Boeing is self-insured, so they have a lot of incentive to grind those costs down.) Still, Crowson is right in general, and it's good to see the point made.

The Eagle also published a letter today from a Merlin C. Hussey, under the title "Boeing is not without blame." It's worth quoting in its entirety:

Some media and politicians argue that awarding the tanker contract to Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. would compromise our national security and American jobs. This may be true, but what has Boeing done to negate either of those factors? Twenty percent or more of the 767, including the wing box, is built by Japanese companies in Japan.

In a 2005 paper, authors David Pritchard and Alan MacPherson demonstrated the loss of jobs and transfer of aircraft development technology to Japan by Boeing. They contended this was a result of Boeing's contracts with Japanese airlines and Boeing's low level of research and development and capital investment compared with Airbus.

Example: In 2003, Airbus allocated 9.5 percent of its total revenues toward research and development, compared with 3.5 percent for Boeing. In the same year, Boeing allocated only 0.97 percent of its total revenues to capital investment, compared with 9.1 percent for Airbus. In addition, a minimum of 35 percent of the 787, possibly up to 70 percent, will be built in Japan.

Adding to our selective reasoning is the focus on France and the rest of the European Union while still ignoring the impact of China on U.S. jobs and national security. In 2007, imports from China exceeded exports from the United States by a whopping $256 billion. In 2007, our trade deficit with the entire EU was only $107 billion.

Shouldn't we be asking if the tanker issue is real, or whether we are trying to compensate for our federal government's foreign trade and economic policy failures?

One thing I haven't seen pointed out at all here is that Airbus is working at an enormous disadvantage given how badly the dollar has fallen vs. the euro -- as I recall, the euro has gone from about $0.90 to $1.50 since Bush took office. That in itself makes European labor more than 60% more expensive that it already was, which it already was given that Europe has more effective unions. Boeing is in a constant state of whine about how they have to get their costs down to compete, but it never shows up in the prices of their products, least of all when the US government is buying. Rather, Boeing's entire "competitive advantage" has hitherto been their superior ability to grease political palms. They built this game, and now that they've lost a hand it's hard to see anyone else to blame -- not that they haven't been trying nonstop since the contract dropped, pulling out every stop, even the very real problem of exporting manufacturing jobs, which is something else they've pioneered.

Of course, at this point I hope they do manage to scuttle the Airbus deal. The last thing we need is more tankers able to project American power to the far corners of the earth, imbrogling us in more disastrous wars.

Big local news yesterday was that the Barton Solvents plant in Valley Center, KS -- about 9-10 miles north-northwest of where we live -- exploded around 9AM and burned the rest of the day, spewing toxic fumes, mostly blowing north away from Wichita. Valley Center had to be evacuated. The plant had 36 large tanks of chemicals -- mostly degreasers and paint strippers -- and all 36 burned. The soot was noted as particularly corrosive. The company has played down the long-term risks of the chemicals, some known to be carcinogenic. This is the second major industrial accident turned ecological disaster in Kansas in the last few weeks, following a flood at a Coffeyville oil refinery that spread thousands of gallons of oil and chemicals throughout the town.

This isn't enough data to generalize into any assertions about how the right's pursuit of deregulation and underming of labor, job safety, and environmental regulations may be kicking back at us. But it is clear that whenever anything like this happens, everyone -- industry included -- looks to government to clean up the mess. Whether the Bush administration has stacked the deck to make such accidents more likely is something to look into, but it's certainly the case that Bush has made it harder to respond appropriately to such events.

On the world news, these events were overshadowed by a nuclear power plant in Japan, which leaked radiation due to damage from an earthquake. That's one of those things that critics of nuclear power have warned against for decades now. Offhand, the damage appears to be far less than one could imagine, but the costs to clean it up will no doubt be enormous. The earthquake was rated at 6.8, which is substantial but far from the top of the scale. Japan is very prone to earthquakes, but supposedly also skilled at building around them.

Nuclear power plants, oil refineries, solvent factories -- these have become necessary hazards of everyday life. Under the best of circumstances it is hard to evaluate the real risks they pose. Having them run by private companies in states dominated by crony capitalism makes it all the more difficult. The usual methods of risk assessment, like insurance costs, seem to be falling apart. One wonders whether anyone knows the real risks and potential liabilities of disasters anymore.

I'll be posting a quote from Tony Judt's Postwar on Chernobyl and the ecological disasters in the Soviet Union, which were far worse than anything listed above. Those cases were deeply rooted in the Soviet system, but that doesn't guarantee they can't happen here. Bush capitalism strikes me as converging on some of the worst aspects of the Soviet system: economic command systems outside of public scrutiny and regulation, protected by a cult of secrecy; the belief all problems are political, even to the extent that ideology trumps science; a cynical dependence on propaganda; a cavalier acceptance of corruption. It seems to matter least whether the polluters are private owners or state apparatchiks.

It seems rather appropriate that the Fourth of July celebration here in Wichita got rained out. Mother Nature is hardly the only one putting a damper on America's penchant for self-celebration lately. Rain has become a constant feature here this month, as if someone else's monsoon has gotten lost and wound up on the edge of what used to, and most likely will again, be called the Great American Desert. As it is, much of southeast Kansas is flooded, including an ecological disaster in Coffeyville, where the toxic waste of one of America's smaller oil refineries has been spread about town. This will most likely lead to another large, unbudgeted cleanup bill -- Bush has already bankrupted the Superfund meant to cover environmental disasters.

A few weeks ago we went out to dinner at Thai Tradition, a very nice Thai restaurant on Carriage Parkway (off Central east of Edgemor) here in Wichita. I got to talking to the waitress about a favorite Thai dish I used to order in Brookline, MA: panang curry duck. She offered to make it next time I came in. Thai Tradition offers panang curry with pork, chicken, etc., and they have several duck dishes -- I usually order the red curry duck. Anyhow, we dropped in last night, she remembered and made the same offer again, I ordered, and it was wonderful: just roasted, chunked duck in a thick, rich peanut sauce -- a little hotter than I like, but as with kung pao, peanuts can handle quite a lot of heat. The Brookline dish came with spinach and chick peas and a thinner curry. I found a recipe like that and made the dish once -- my duck fell apart, but still made for a tasty dish. Just thought that if you're in Wichita, you might seek the restaurant out and try ordering the panang curry duck. Especially recommended to my nephew.

While on the subject of Wichita restaurants, let me also offer a plug for Cafe Istanbul, on West just north of Douglas. It's a small Turkish restaurant. It doesn't exactly have my two favorite Turkish dishes -- yogurtlu kebap and imam bayildi -- but their "Alexander style" chicken and doner kebabs come close enough to the former to qualify as utterly delicious, and I've never been able to duplicate their eggplant salad. I also recommend the cizbiz kofte and the cigar boregi. There are lots of pretty good middle eastern restaurants in Wichita -- N&J's, Byblos, as well as Lebanese-based French- or continental-oriented places -- but Istanbul far surpasses them.

President Bush came to Wichita yesterday. The ostensible reason was to appear at the dedication of a new Boys and Girls Club building built by a group run by Russ Meyer, former CEO of Cessna Aircraft. The club is one of those community favor things to help soft-peddle the effects of a larger urban renewal project, meant to cut a cordon sanitaire on 21st St. through the old Wichita ghetto. 21st is the main east-west street through Wichita's north side, extending east past Andover and west past Maize. Closer in, it connects Wichita State University to I-135, a stretch that can now be traversed without recognizing that you're in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood. Further developments are planned heading west, offering the same courtesy to predominantly Mexican neighborhoods, with enclaves of Vietnamese. When complete, 21st will be Wichita's "multicultural" business corridor.

What Bush gets out of this is a photo-op with bunches of black children and a chance to rub shoulders with his base. The latter took place at a $500/plate fundraiser for Sen. Pat Roberts, where Wichita's haves got a chance to give thanks to their staunchest advocate in Washington. Given Roberts' critical role in squashing any Senate investigation of Bush's Iraq War intelligence, Bush had reason to give thanks as well. The local media covered the visit as a big deal, even to the point of recognizing local antiwar protestors. The Wichita Eagle caught the spirit: the front cover featured a color picture of Bush surrounded by smiling black kids, while inside they gave half a page to pictures of well heeled white folks lining up for the trolley to the Roberts fundraiser.

Warren Theatres, the big local chain, closed their Premier Palace theatres this week. For the last five years that's been the main place in Wichita to see what they call Art Films -- movies with low budgets and passable intelligence. Half of the movies I've seen in the last five years were viewed there. Supposedly, they'll show some similar movies in their large Warren East complex in the future, but the promise of "one or two" theatres is a big drop from the eight they've just closed. Warren runs all but one of the movie complexes in town, so they pretty much have a stranglehold on the art here. You can chalk this up to the dumbing down of America even if you don't know what's happening to the Premier Palace buildings, but I might as well tell you: they've been sold to a small Baptist church, which currently has 175 members but expects to grow with their new space and more suburban location. When Bill Warren first announced his plans to sell Premier Palace, he cited "higher use" as the reason: he was making money there, but figured the land was worth more than he could make showing movies, so he could sell it profitably and move his business elsewhere. At the time I figured that meant converting the space to a car lot or a mini-mall with some high-end chain restaurants. But this church deal is bizarre, even in its economics. We live in strange, unfathomable times.

Short item from the Wichita Eagle today, titled "Comic books go boom at county garage," by Joe Rodriguez:

A "suspicious device" left inside the Sedgwick County parking garage on Thursday turned out to be a foot locker filled with comic books.

The Wichita Police Department bomb squad was called to the parking garage at Elm and Main at about 4:30 p.m., when someone discovered the box stuffed behind a vehicle on the third floor of the garage.

Authorities closed the garage and the streets around it, forcing people who were parked there to wait more than two hours to return to their vehicles.

The box was detonated at about 6:30 p.m. An investigation is ongoing.

"The times we live in, I'd rather be safe than sorry," said sheriff's Capt. Sam Houston. "I know we inconvenienced a lot of people today, but you just never know.

Chalk this up as a hidden cost of the Global War on Terror, which is itself a cost of running America's global empire and military-industrial complex. It's often said that Americans, in the "homeland" at least, are never asked to sacrifice for their nation's wars, but this is one such sacrifice. The question is whether it will be properly accounted for.

I also have to wonder whether blowing up an unidentified, uninspected box is a good way to dispose of it. That may be relatively safe if the box is a conventional bomb, but a box of chemicals could be made more dangerous by explosion. Such predictable behavior would itself open up opportunities for terrorists.

It is easy to see how unthinking rule-based behavior leads to stuff like this. We had an unrecognized person knock on our front door last night, so following our new rules of engagement didn't open the door. It was an awkward, impolite moment, and chances are very slim that engaging him would have resulted in anything worse than a minor waste of time. On the other hand, I worry about becoming prisoners of our own rules. And I worry that obsessing on preventing past disasters will keep us from thinking coherently about the unexpected future.

The Master of Disaster came to Kansas yesterday -- first to gawk at the tornado destruction in Greensburg, then to pose for pictures wielding a chainsaw and hugging smiling Republicans. He was probably telling them, this was just an Act of God -- you should have seen what I did to Fallujah. Then he left, secure in the knowledge that FEMA will find some way to route the government's disaster money to Halliburton. There are, after all, oil wells in the vicinity.

Even as nowhere as Greensburg is, Bush's photo-op was just one of many ways it's connected to Iraq. As the Governor pointed out, the Kansas National Guard and most of their equipment are out in Iraq now, hard-pressed to respond to events back home. It also turns out that Greensburg was quickly set upon by looters. The first four arrested were US soldiers from Ft. Riley, who evidently picked up some bad habits in Iraq. I wonder whether, had they resisted and been shot, they'd get their mugs pasted on those "Fallen Heroes" TV roll calls.

Seems like a few dozen tornados hit western Kansas each year. In most cases, it's the best place for them. Aside from a few grossly polluted meat factory towns, there's damn little to hit out there. The southwest corner is once and future desert, temporarily irrigated as a tax shelter for profits from a sizable natural gas field. But the water comes from the soon-to-be-depleted Ogalala aquifer -- not that the gas is going to last much longer. The northwest corner has neither gas nor water -- just enough shortgrass to graze cattle on. But Friday night a tornado, and a big one at that, managed to hit something: a town called Greensburg, or should I say former town? Aside from the grain elevator, there's not much left standing. (See pictures.)

Greensburg is 120 miles straight west of Wichita. I've driven through town at least a hundred times, mostly on my way to visit relatives in Kinsley and Dodge City. (My father was born on a farm near Spearville, about midway between Kinsley and Dodge City. His grandfather, I believe it was, homesteaded there in the 1870s.) Greensburg is the seat of Kiowa County, which otherwise is empty farmland. The latest census reported 1574 people lived there, but my recollection is that during the '50s more than 3000 lived there. Other little factoids I remember include that Kiowa was one of the four Kansas counties still dry in the '60s, and that it was one of the 3-5 most heavily Republican counties. Those things may have changed as well: one newspaper report noted that the "pub" was one of the few building still standing, and the Democratic Party minority leader in the state senate comes from Greensburg. One other thing that changed was that the signs pointing to the World's Largest Hand-Dug Well have gotten smaller and fewer over the years, although you couldn't miss them. Presumably the well itself went unscathed, but the museum and gift shop are splinters now.

The tornado was rated EF-5, which is to say it was off the Fujita scale that was recently Enhanced to measure more powerful tornados. This one left a footprint 1.5 miles wide and 22 miles long, with wind speeds in excess of 200 mph. I've lived here over 30 years, through many tornado reports, but none that huge. FEMA's on the case now, but the odds that Greensburg will be rebuilt aren't good. It's not so much that anyone fears it might happen again, although clearly such storms are likely to happen elsewhere. It's just that the area was already dying. Rural America limps along living off its depreciation, while new investment goes elsewhere. And the long term trends, already evident in the last 25 years, are against it: the farms consolidate and depopulate; the small towns create few new jobs, offer little in the way of attractive services, and age; the aquifer is running dry; and global warming models promise hotter and dryer weather -- western Kansas will become eastern New Mexico without the elevation to lower the temperature. Twenty-some years ago there was a big flap over a couple of New Jersey academics arguing that the best thing to do with western Kansas in the long run would be to turn it into a Buffalo Commons. That's still in the cards.

A couple of years ago I drove around north of Dodge City and Spearville and searched out the houses of two of my father's uncles -- places I hadn't been since the early '60s. Both houses still stood, but hadn't been inhabited for decades. Uncle Otto's was pretty decrepit even when he lived there, and had turned into little more than a pile of rubbish. Uncle Jim's was a nice place when we would visit there, but while it was more intact, it too had worn down to bare wood and broken windows. That's what usually happens -- call it entropy. I also drove through Kinsley, which was about half the town it used to be: not that it shrunk physically, but it sort of caved in on itself, like what old age does to you. Greensburg was like that too, but entropy isn't always gradual. This time the long, slow, imperceptible decay got compressed into a few horrifying minutes. The only good news is that now at least some people will notice. The irony is that what made Greensburg seem so pathetic all these years was how hard they tried, mostly in vain, to get anyone's attention. And now it's too late.

A pair of recent events underscore how far removed Bush politics is from most everyday conceptions of what democracy means in America, and how vulnerable the latter are to the machinations of the former. One is the derailing of the Senate's anti-surge resolution. Clearly, the popular support for the resolution exists all across the country, and absent White House arm twisting that would be reflected in the Senate. But the Senators feel stuck having to navigate between a non-binding resolution on the one hand and the taboo against not "supporting the troops" on the other. Moreover, Senate Republicans are particularly susceptible to whatever pressure is being applied, as they scatter incoherently on procedural votes. None of which has the slightest effect either in Iraq or in the polls here. The real question at stake is whether the Senate can muster the guts to stand up for the people who elected them and against an administration that has come to claim dictatorial powers. But even Bush knows that claims hold only when they are unchallenged. They've managed to get away with it thus far, but not without looking underhanded and pathetic.

Another event is the defense decision not to put either Libby or Cheney on the stand in Libby's trial. That at least saves them from risking further perjury charges, but it denies us the opportunity to hear them testify under oath in response to a competent prosecutor. No one in this administration has had as much difficulty with truth as Cheney, which may well be why they decided to cut their losses. That probably sinks Libby. We'll see what his payoff is.

What these events remind us is that all that matters for this administration is what they can get away with. The idea that a democratic government should respond to the will of the people is clearly laughable to them -- they take their fraudulent success at the polls as, quite literally, a license to kill. The effect of this is that the government has become utterly untrustworthy. Nor is this the work of a few bad apples, starting with Bush, Cheney, and Rove. Here in Kansas, the State Board of Education voted today to change its science curriculum for the fourth time in eight years. What happens is that people don't pay attention to who's running and a bunch of creationist crackpots sneak in. When the voters figure this out, they vote them out and patch up the damage. But next election the stealth creationists sneak back in. They, too, get voted out. Clearly, most Kansans simply don't want to have to worry about a bunch of extremists, but the latter keep conspiring to take over and wreak havoc.

Another example is Phill Kline, who lost his reelection bid as Attorney General to Johnson County Attorney Paul Morrison, a Republican who switched parties to run against Kline. That left Morrison's office open. Under an obscure law, Morrison's replacement was chosen by a caucus of the Republican party, since that was what Morrison was initially elected as. So fewer than 500 Republicans got together and voted Phill Kline to be Morrison's replacement. Now, Johnson County has a population of about 500,000, and Kline a couple of weeks earlier got 35% of the vote there. He won the caucus by 35 votes, then cleaned house by firing seven Morrison assistants.

Democracy, like sportsmanship, requires respect for the losing side, and a measure of modesty and generosity from the winners. The Republicans have stopped playing by those rules -- like Vince Lombardi, they assert that winning is the only thing that matters. And from Nixon to Bush, they seize every option they have to unlevel the playing field. That's been their game all along. The only thing different now is the air of desperation, caused less by our growing recognition of how they cheat than by how disastrous their victories turn out. Once again, Bush's only victory in the Iraq campaign has been on Capitol Hill. But even there his luck's not likely to last.

Front page news in the Wichita Eagle today: Senator Sam Brownback supports the American flag. Also the pledge of allegiance -- he really likes the "under God" part. All the other national and world news, starting with Bush's joyride to Baghdad, got filed on page four. At least, all that fit. Also in the paper today was a report on the net worth of the Kansas Congressional delegation. Brownback took honors in that piece as well: he's far and away the richest. Of course, he got his money the really old fashioned way: he inherited it.

As for Senator Pat Roberts, considering how much money he funnels to agribusiness, his net worth at a million-plus-change must give him one of the best ROIs in Congress. Poor Jim Ryun brought up the rear, confirming reports that he's too dumb to steal, even. That's what he gets for giving it all away.