So, Bush is finally realizing that, hmm, the war in Iraq isn’t going over well with the American public any more. His response? To schedule a series of speeches where he says nothing more than he has already said.

Senior aides say Bush will attempt to portray the Iraq conflict in the context of long wars like World War II, which U.S. forces fought from 1941 to 1945.

They said the president also will invoke the September 11, 2001, attacks, arguing once again that the insurgents battling American troops in Iraq share the same ideology as the al Qaeda operatives who crashed hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Wonderful. More 9/11 references coupled with more vague talk about ideology.

I suspect that the speeches will go over as well as his last one earlier this summer. My sense is that the public is looking for more than philosophy. They want concrete things they can latch onto and understand. Things like timetables or checklists or other things that allow people to measure progress. Will the President put any of that on the table and be honest with the American people? Unlikely.

While the link is in last night’s link dump, I think the issue is important enough to break out into it’s own post. The Republican Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has sent letters out to the scientists whose research forms a critical part of the third IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR). The IPCC is the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the TAR is their periodic report on the state of research into global climate change. This report, specifically some of the studies cited in it, found that there was significant evidence that the global climate had warmed in this century and that the change was caused by human factors. The study is controversial among those that believe global warming doesn’t exist. Others have issues with the methodology of the study.

The interesting thing is that with all things the Republicans do (or, I should say, politicians in control of both Congress and the White House do), this seems to be a coordinated event. A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed section opened fire on the same study. Congress also has been working on the energy bill which contains little climate change policy and in general chooses for the U.S. to go it alone. Not surprising considering the administration.

The Journal OpEd makes the same claims as the Congressman, so read the RealClimate article for a rundown of the issues.

What makes the Congressman’s move pretty patently biased is that he hasn’t requested similar information from the other side of the debate. If the Committee was interested in learning about the issue, they would probably ask both sides to prepare defenses of their research since both sides have already responded to each other in various studies and articles. The Committee could just read those if they were interested in the research. Instead, they’ve identified the key scientists behind the studies in the IPCC TAR and decided to harass them. Why does the committee need background information on the funding that the scientists have received unless they’re “suggesting” that an investigation is possible?

What the hell is going on in our country?