The chair of the committee said if Murdoch doesn't show on Tuesday, he would be in contempt of Parliament -- though there was confusion about what that actually means since its rarely ever been implemented. The BBC said it was "unchartered waters,"given that Murdoch is a non-Brit.

"If they have any shred of sense of responsibility or accountability for their position of power, then they should come and explain themselves before a select committee," the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, said today (referring to Murdoch and his son James, who has also declined to testify Tuesday).

The Murdochs are most likely trying to buy some time, hoping the media frenzy dies down a little before they are forced to talk publicly -- in what is likely to be a very hostile setting. (James said he'd be willing to testify in August).

In the meantime, things aren't going any better for Murdoch in his home country -- the United States -- nor in Australia, his place of birth. The scandal has truly taken on a global dimension.

United States: Today, there were more calls for a congressional investigation. Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA), a powerful member of the House oversight committee, accused Murdoch's company of potentially engaging in "political espionage or personal espionage."

He joined Republican Peter King, who yesterday called on the FBI to look into whether journalists tried to tap into the phones of 9/11 victims. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said earlier in the week he suspected a U.S. probe would "find some criminal stuff."

A U.S. criminal investigation -- though unlikely -- would be disastrous for Murdoch, who's empire is based in the United States. It would put the company -- and its many holdings, including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the New York Post,under a microscope like never before. Even beyond illegal activity, embarrassing or less-than-exemplary practices could be exposed.

Eliot Spitzer, for one, believes more shady dealings will emerge -- and will likely include Murdoch properties based in the United States. "Given the frequency with which he shuttled his senior executives and editors across the various oceans-Pacific as well as Atlantic-it is unlikely that the shoddy ethics were limited to Great Britain," the former prosecutor, governor, CNN anchor, and expert on shoddy ethics wrote in Slate.

Australia: Speaking of the Pacific, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard today said she was open to initiating a probe of Murdoch's Australia holdings -- which comprise nearly 70 percent of the country's print media and a good chunk of its TV market. 

Gillard said she was "disgusted" by the extent of the scandal in Britain.

The head of News Limited, Murdoch's Australian media arm, John Hartigan, said there would be an internal review of the company's practices, but said it was "offensive and wrong [to] connect the behavior in the UK with News Limited's conduct in Australia."

So, where does that leave Murdoch? Maybe China, where he's been expanding his footprint lately, is looking like a good refuge. His wife, Wendi, just produced a movie that is a hit there.

In fact, she told the Los Angeles Times -- apparently without any sense of irony -- that she had little trouble raising money for the movie: "Everybody in China wanted to give us money," she told the paper. "In China, everybody knows who I am. It definitely helped. They have confidence in me."

In a decidedly hawkish foreign policy speech this week at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty called out members of his party who "now seem to be trying to out-bid the Democrats in appealing to isolationist sentiments. This is no time for uncertain leadership in either party."

Last night, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren asked Pawlenty to name names. The former governor wouldn't get into specifics, but said "there are several candidates for president and several leading voices in the party beyond that in Washington arguing for going further than the president in terms of an accelerated withdrawal, arguing that we have no business and he has no authority in Libya, arguing we should do nothing in Syria, arguing that we should not have any role in Iraq and beyond," he said. 

On the campaign trail, several contenders have raised doubts about the extent of our mission in Afghanistan and Libya, including former U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, Rep. Ron Paul, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and -- to a lesser extent -- former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

The Huffington Post quoted Rep. Paul's son, Senator Rand Paul, attacking Pawlenty's use of the word isolationist.

"It's not a valid term. It's a pejorative term. It's name calling," Paul told the website. "Isolationism would mean that you're nowhere any of the time and you're completely within a walled-in state. I don't know anybody who's for that."

Americans largely support Obama's Afghan plan

Though the GOP field is somewhat divided on the president's Afghanistan withdrawal plan, a majority of Americans polled recently by Gallup, backed what he's doing. 72 percent supported his plan, while 23 percent opposed it. 50 percent of Republicans said they agreed with his decision to pull 10,000 troops out this year.

When the poll got into specifics of numbers, it found that 29 percent wanted more troops to come home, 19 percent said the number of troops Obama mentioned was too high. 43 percent thought the figure was just right.

NYT/CBS Poll on Republican candidates: Great news for "Anyone else"

Meanwhile, in another poll, likely Republican voters seemed unimpressed with their field of candidates so far. Only 23 percent said they were satisfied with the people in the race. 71 percent said they wanted more choices.

67 percent could not name a single candidate they were excited about. While Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann both had 7 percent saying they were enthusiastic about their candidacies.

The poll wasn't all bad news for Republicans. It found that Democrats are less enthusiastic about the race in general than Republicans.  Only 24 percent of Democrats said they were more excited for 2012 than they were for 2008. 33 percent of Republicans were more excited this year and self-described Tea Party supporters were 44 percent more excited.

Perry to Justice Department: Stop Gaza flotilla

Gov. Rick Perry hasn't announced he's running for president yet, but he's already wading into international issues and sounding a lot like a candidate. This week he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to do more to stop a planned flotilla of ships to Gaza, which are carrying humanitarian supplies. Israel has a maritime blockade against Gaza.

"As an American citizen and governor of one of its largest states...I write to encourage you to aggressively pursue all available legal remedies to enjoin and prevent these illegal actions, and to prosecute any who may elect to engage in them in spite of your preemptive efforts," Perry wrote.

Perry said participating in the flotilla would violate U.S. law because it would provide "material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization," meaning Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is on the U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations. 

According to the Houston Chronicle, Perry has visited Israel several times in the past and "has touted what he calls its ‘special kinship' with Texas."

Afghanistan was obviously front and center on the minds of the Republican hopefuls today. With the race for the nomination heating up, the potential candidates wasted little time weighing in on Obama's plan. Here's a look at where they came down -- plus, some of today's other foreign-policy news from the field.

GOP Candidates: Obama went too far... or he didn't go far enough

The candidates' reactions to Obama's Afghanistan troop drawdown speech has been overwhelmingly negative. But they've been critical for different reasons.

Newly declared candidate Jon Huntsman wants a more rapid drawdown, and Ron Paul said Obama's plan is "too little, too late."

On Obama's right, Tim Pawlenty seemed to go the farthest, saying on Fox News after the speech he was deeply concerned about Obama's plan. "When America goes to war, America needs to win," he said. Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, and Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, agreed. "President Obama speaks of winding down our engagement in Afghanistan, but he does not emphasize the need for victory," Santorum said. Cain said Obama's plan "could embolden our enemy and endanger our troops."

Front-runner Mitt Romney took a more middle-of-the road view in a statement after the speech. "We all want our troops to come home as soon as possible, but we shouldn't adhere to an arbitrary timetable," he said.

Sarah Palin not going to Sudan

The former Alaska governor was supposed to travel to war-ravaged Sudan next month on a tour with the evangelical leader Franklin Graham and Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, but she pulled out this week. Sources close to her told the Washington Post it was because of scheduling conflicts, but it might also have had something to do with security concerns. One U.S. official told the paper that safety would prove to be a challenge. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might be forced to cancel a trip there -- planned to coincide with South Sudan's independence ceremony next month -- for security reasons.

Graham told the Post he hoped Palin could reschedule the trip soon. "She would be a very good person to help draw attention to the plight of the Christians in South Sudan," he said. "We've got George Clooney, we've got some Hollywood-type people. I'm very grateful for what Mr. Clooney has done. But we need everybody we can find."

Palin previously traveled with Graham to Haiti to tour the earthquake devastation there.

Jon Huntsman consults with Republican heavyweights

In an interview with Politico, the former ambassador to China and the newest entrant into the presidential field reveals he has been consulting with some heavy-hitters of the Republican national security establishment. According to Politico, the list includes former National Security Advisor to George H.W. Bush Brent Scowcroft, former Deputy Secretary of State to George W. Bush Richard Armitage, and former director of policy planning for the State Department under W. -- and current head of the Council on Foreign Relations -- Richard Haass. All three are known for their realist views and past criticisms of the Iraq war. The nature of the consultation wasn't characterized, but their foreign-policy philosophies would seem to mesh with that of the candidate, who also said in the interview he would support a fast drawdown of troops in Afghanistan. Huntsman didn't give numbers, but said he would lay out his plan when he gives a "major foreign-policy address" later this summer.

It isn't often that an undocumented immigrant in the United States outs himself to the world, risking the wrath of the justice system. And rarer too is it for that person to be an award-winning journalist.

So Jose Antonio Vargas's compelling essay in the New York Times Magazine today is worth noting. The former Washington Post reporter shared a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.

When he was 12 and living in the Philippines, his mother put him on an airplane to go live with his grandparents in California, he writes. He didn't realize he was living in the United States illegally until he tried to get a driver's license when he turned 16. The DMV told him his documents were fake.

I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.

I've tried. Over the past 14 years, I've graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I've created a good life. I've lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don't ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

What's going to happen to Vargas now that he's made his story public? The Atlantic spoke to an immigration lawyer who said he could be detained and put through deportation procedures, but the very public nature of his revelation might actually work in his favor.

"He's outspoken in The New York Times, he's drawn considerable attention to his story. It's very difficult for the immigration machinery to operate in front of someone that's that public,"  David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Atlantic.

The more immediate ramifications could be on his career. Vargas -- who has also written for the Huffington Post and the New Yorker -- might have trouble getting publications to pay him, now that he has outed himself as illegal.

"You can't hire an independent contractor knowing he's undocumented," Leopold told the Atlantic.

In a bit of unfortunate timing, the C.I.A.'s website was shut down for a couple of hours yesterday evening in an apparent cyber attack. It was only a week ago that Leon Panetta, the C.I.A.'s outgoing director, warned senators that cyber warfare could be the next big battleground for the United States.

"The next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyber attack that cripples our power systems, our grid, our security systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing to replace Bob Gates as secretary of defense.

Yesterday's attack on the C.I.A. was in the form of a denial of service, meaning the hackers flooded the site with requests for access, effectively shutting down the server. While it certainly doesn't rise to the level of causing crippling damage, it is an embarrassment for the agency and highlights just how vulnerable our cyber infrastructure is.

The hacker group claiming responsibility for the attack calls itself LulzSec and describes itself as "the world's leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense." They claimed credit via twitter yesterday with the message: "Tango down - cia.gov-for the lulz."

The group has also claimed responsibility for a string of other high profile attacks in recent weeks on the U.S. Senate, Sony, and PBS.

A U.S. official said it was important to keep in mind the site wasn't technically "hacked" since the attackers weren't able to get into the system, but acknowledged the two-hour episode was "annoying."

"These kind of issues can affect any website," the official said. "In this case it was resolved quickly."

President Obama deserves some credit for declaring the improvement of the United States' global competitiveness the focal point of the last half of his term in office. Competitiveness underpins everything else -- jobs, rising standards of living, budget surpluses in place of deficits, and the ability to project power globally. Without being economically competitive, the United States cannot be the United States. So a big nod to the president for finally focusing the American  attention on the main game.

But that is as far as my praise can go. The substance of the State of the Union speech was a list of knee jerk conventional wisdom proposals that not only won't make us more competitive but that are at odds with the budget austerity the president also proposed. Let's start with the knee jerk proposals.

Right up front was innovation. The U.S., said Obama, must out-innovate other countries if it is to stay in the lead and create the new jobs needed to replace the old factory jobs the president suggested are gone forever. Okay, innovation for sure is a good thing. Nobody's against it and it plays so well to the American self-image of being smarter, more entrepreneurial, more flexible, and more dynamic than anybody else. But has anyone noticed that we've been leading in innovation for the past thirty years and that has not prevented us from suffering an erosion of our industrial and technological leadership or from running up enormous trade deficits while suffering loss of jobs and stagnation of wages and living standards. This despite the fact that we have innovated with the deployment of the Internet, the evolution of start-ups like Google and Facebook, and the development of smash-hit new products like the iPad.

Of course, innovation is to be desired and promoted. But one of this century's great innovators, former Intel CEO Andy Grove, pointed out in a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek  that innovation is not enough. I actually gave a copy of Grove's ideas to the president, but it didn't sound last night as if he had read them. In any case, Grove has a set of graphs showing that the United States continues to innovate pretty much at the pace it always has. What has changed, notes Grove, is the pace of moving to mass production and commercialization. We don't do that much in the U.S. anymore because our companies take the innovation and move the production and commercialization offshore. Indeed, increasingly they are moving the innovation offshore as well -- in part because once you stop producing and commercializing it becomes increasingly difficult to innovate.

Next was education. Good stuff that education. Just like innovation we need more of it and we need it to be better. No arguments about that here or anywhere else I guess. But just as with innovation, for most of the past thirty years we've had, on average, the world's best educated work force. Certainly, companies aren't moving their factories to China because its workers are on the whole better educated than American workers. The movement of U.S. production to offshore locations has taken place despite the generally superior educational level of the United States. And, even if we fix education, which we definitely should do, we won't feel the effect for twenty years, by which time our competitive fate will have long ago been determined.

Infrastructure was next on the list and its renewal and modernization actually is a good, immediate idea.  But that gets us to the big internal contradiction in the speech. Innovation, education, and especially infrastructure all cost money. But in the second half of the speech, the president said he was going to freeze government spending for five years on all non-entitlement expenditures. So he seemed to be offering with one hand while taking away with the other.

Completely unaddressed were the questions ironically raised just last week by announcements surrounding the visit of China's President Hu Jintao to Washington. First, General Electric announced that it was forming a joint venture with China's state owned Avic corporation to produce avionics products in China for China's new commercial jet liner that will compete with Boeing jet liners. The avionics technology will be transferred to the joint venture from GE. Unsaid, but obvious was the fact that GE believed it had to transfer the technology to have a real shot at selling any avionics to China in the form of exports from the United States even though the United States has a comparative advantage in such exports. Then a few days later, the White House announced the GE Chairman Jeff Immelt had been appointed as President Obama's chief outside economic adviser.

So I'm left wondering how we are supposed to be innovative when our top companies transfer important technologies to would-be foreign competitors and how we are supposed to deal with those foreign competitors when the president's chief outside economic adviser is among the chief transferers.

Many believe that America's greatest export is its culture; from blockbuster Hollywood films and TV series to jeans and iPods, there is little doubt that American cultural products have profound dissemination and market consumption around the globe.

But few would have imagined that one day Turkish citizens would be cheering on pro-wrestlers in Istanbul.

That's right, WWE SmackDown went to Turkey.

Much like American parents, though, many Turks were quite reticent in allowing their children to watch shirtless men in costumes beat each other up on stage. As Hurriyet reports,

Many parents who brought their kids to the WWE show... [expressed] reluctance about exposing their children to something that could contribute to violent tendencies.

As someone who remembers the glory days of "The Rock" and the playground simulations which inevitably followed, I can say with certainty these parents have a point.

Costa Rica and Nicaragua are in the midst of a highly tense standoff after Nicaraguan troops crossed into a contested border region and set up camp, taking down a Costa Rican flag. Costa Rica, which has no standing military, has called for an emergency meeting of the Organization of American States.

In a very 21st century twist, Costa Rica's La Nacion newspaper reports, it seems that a Google Maps glitch may be to blame. The Seach Engine Land blog (which also created the composite image above) explains:

La Nacion -- the largest newspaper in Costa Rica -- says the Nicaraguan commander, Eden Pastora, used Google Maps to "justify" the incursion even though the official maps used by both countries indicate the territory belongs to Costa Rica. Pastora blames Google Maps in the paper:

See the satellite photo on Google and there you see the border. In the last 3,000 meters the two sides are from Nicaragua.

The paper points out that Bing Maps shows the correct and officially recognized border.

See FP's Geopolitics of Google Earth list for more unintended consequences. 

In an inspired bit of YouTube surfing, Gawker has assembled a compilation of military recruitment commercials from around the world. There are a few clunkers -- three minutes is an awful long time to watch a Russian paratrooper sort of rapping in front of an obstacle course -- and I have my doubts that this Japanese ad is not an elaborate sophomoric hoax, but on the whole they make for pretty fascinating viewing.

Watching these as an American, the most immediately noticeable thing is how little time most of the ads spend overtly appealing to patriotism. There's Estonia, which does it cheekily, and Lebanon, which does it with a slow-motion sentimentality that would be cloying under other circumstances but is actually quite poignant in the context of a country that is eternally trying to keep things together. France and India, meanwhile, both hearken back to the U.S. military ads of the pre-9/11 era, in which we mostly see the life-advancing stuff that enlistment is supposed to get you, with a minimum of actual warfighting. (A career in the Indian army evidently prepares you for a lifetime of golfing and competitive diving.)

The Ukrainian army opts for an admirably straightforward "you'll get girls" approach. Singapore features a naval vessel transforming into a giant robot, presumably developed to contain the same giant lava monsters that have long plagued the U.S. Marines. Britain's jarring entry -- which a student of post-colonialism would have a field day with -- looks like it was directed by Fernando Meirelles. (This kind of "I dare you" approach to recruiting must work in the U.K. -- back in the '90s, when the U.S. Army was mostly promoting itself as a way to pay for college, the Brits ran magazine ads showing a Royal Marine eating worms as part of a survival training course.)

But the real winner here, I think, is Sweden, which is promoting military service to young women as a means of avoiding working as an au pair for awful Americans:

If you've ever considered paring a fresh garden salad with a hearty serving of mealworm quiche, you may be in luck. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is reviewing a policy paper, written by a Dutch entomologist Arnold van Huis, which argues for consuming more insects. His rationale is entirely logical: Bugs are cheaper to feed; high in protein and calcium; and much less of an environmental burden than livestock like cows, pigs, and chickens. Insects are also biologically different from humans, thus less susceptible to contagious diseases. And - there are about 1,400 edible bugs in the world.

In the first phase of the program, van Huis proposes feeding more insects to farmed animals and then gradually introducing bugs to Western diets: "We're looking at ways of grinding the meat into some sort of patty, which would be more recognizable to western palates," he said. Van Huis is also partial to cricket pies, fried grasshoppers, and mealworm quiche. "Sauced crickets in a warm chocolate dip make a great snack," he said in an interview.

U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization has already started a pilot program in Laos. About 80% of the world already eats insects - now it's just a matter of convincing those who don't. While this may be entirely sensible, good luck to the unfortunate public relations person at the U.N. who's in charge of making this idea appealing.

The members of the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team officially gave up in their attempt to attend the sport's world championships in Manchester, England last week.

Players were stuck in New York, battling a diplomatic traffic jam that touched at the heart of tribal sovereignty issues. The team--consisting of a 50-person delegation from tribes in both the United States and Canada-- was supposed to arrive in Manchester, England last Monday to play their first highly anticipated match against England on Thursday. But by the weekend, the team was still grounded in New York, camping out in a Comfort Inn. Yesterday, some players began to return home to upstate New York and Canada.

"While we are deeply disappointed that we could not bring our talented team to the world championships, there simply was no way we could accede to the recommendation that we accept either American or Canadian passports to travel," the team's chairman, Oren Lyons, said in a statement.

The Federation of International Lacrosse considers the Iroquois Confederacy to be a full member state, like the U.S. or Canada, with a lacrosse team ranked fourth in the world. The problem is that the United Kingdom does not and will not accept the players' Iroquois-issued passports. The United States also refused to honor these passports, until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally intervened to allow for a special one-time waiver to travel without United States passports.

What's really at issue here is the sovereignty of tribal nations. The U.S. government has a trust responsibility with the tribes, meaning that it has to look out for the welfare of tribal members. This relationship is a result of various treaties between the tribes and the U.S. government, as well as a a historic perception of 18th and 19th century Americans that American Indians "were not able to look after their own affairs." The general trust concept has since become standard policy and law.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is principally charged with maintaining federal trust responsibility, which includes the protection of Indian trust lands, the provision of basic services for tribal members, and the protection of tribal sovereignty and the rights of self-governance. According to Thom Wallace, Communications Director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the sovereignty of tribal nations is constantly being brought into question around the country. Along with its work with the Iroquois Nationals (NCAI President Jefferson Keel wrote British Prime Minister a personal letter last week requesting that the team members be able to travel with their own passports), the organization is also involved with the Carcieri Supreme Court case, advocating against a 2009 ruling that made it harder for Native Americans to set their own rules for the use of tribal lands--including a parcel owned by the Narrangasett tribe in Charlestown, Rhode Island.

Wallace noted that the Iroquois Nationals' situation attests to a trend in improving relations between the U.S. government and the tribes. "The fact that Secretary Clinton moved so quickly to grant a one-time travel waiver to the team on Thursday is an important indicator of the support this Administration has for working on issues important to Indian Country," Wallace said. However, NCAI is continuing to work to emphasize the importance of Indian Nations as sovereign ones through dialogue and policy development. "The effort of every Administration needs to be focused on this legal obligation."

President Keel's letter to Prime Minister Cameron also emphasized the historical importance of lacrosse to Iroquois culture: "As you are aware, the game of lacrosse is indigenious to Native Americans," he wrote. "In the view of Native peoples, denying entry to game's historical and cultural emissaries is a troubling scenario." The once every four years Championships is a rare recognition of tribal sovereignty.

Travel regulations have intensified in the post-9/11 world, and not only for tribe members. According to the AP, new U.S. passports contain embedded radio-frequency identification chips. While the Iroquois passports look like U.S. passports, they lack these chips. According to Wallace, tribes have been working with the Department of Homeland Security to address airline security and identification issues. Tribal IDs are currently accepted by the Department of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration for both domestic travel and at the Mexican and Canadian border crossings.

Meanwhile, the Nationals will continue their fight to travel abroad with their Iroquois passports. Other international tournaments are upcoming, including the Federation of International Lacrosse's World Indoor Box Lacrosse Championships in the Czech Republic next year.

Maybe it was all the excitement with the Russian spies last week, but somehow we missed one of the more intriguing things to grace the Wall Street Journal's letters page in a while: A full-throated defense of Hamid Karzai's brother, Mahmood Karzai, written by Gerald Posner. Posner, you may recall, was an investigative reporter for the Daily Beast until February, when he resigned after being caught plagiarizing from the Miami Herald and other news sources. In the letter -- which concerns an unflattering recent story about Karzai ferrying cash out of Afghanistan -- Posner identifies himself as "Gerald Posner, Attorney at Law," and refers to Karzai as "my client." Huh?

FP spoke this afternoon with Posner (above left), who says he isn't just representing Mahmood Karzai (above right), but also the other two Afghan presidential siblings, Hamid's younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai and older brother Qayum Karzai. It's an odd twist on the disgraced plagiarist-fabulist rehabilitation story, which often involves a legal career but not usually in the service of a beleaguered Central Asian ruling family. "They are really proud of the reputations that they have earned," Posner says of the Karzais, "and sort of in shock that they are viewed with such disdain in a country that is their ally in this process."

Read on

As Congress reconvenes the most recent of the BP executives' unenviable appointments in Washington this afternoon, a word about Tony Hayward's current inquisitor: California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. There's an interesting symmetry between today's hearing and one that Waxman held a quarter century ago, when he was a subcommittee chairman. The news peg, then as now, was an unprecedented environmental catastrophe: the December 3, 1984 chemical leak at Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, which killed over 3,000 people. And then as now, Waxman (whose committee drafted the House climate change bill last year) was engaged in a protracted, long-odds battle for a game-changing piece of environmental legislation: the expanded pollution regulations that would eventually be signed into law as the 1990 reauthorization of the Clean Air Act.

Among the pollutants that Waxman was hoping to regulate were the same categories of air toxics that had caused the Bhopal disaster, and shortly after the incident he and his staff pulled together a field hearing in West Virginia, near another Union Carbide plant that produced the same chemicals as the one in Bhopal, and posed similar risks. It was a canny political set piece, and while the Clean Air Act reauthorization wouldn't make it into law for years, the spectacle whipped up by the Bhopal hearing prompted Congress to pass a precursor law requiring chemical plants to inventory and disclose their toxic emissions. It was a milestone in environmental regulation in the United States: Never before was anyone but the chemical companies understood the sheer quantity of the toxic pollutants, 2.7 billion pounds of which were emitted in 1987 alone.

I bring all of this up because in several ways, Waxman is working from the Bhopal playbook today. In The Waxman Report, the autobiography he published last year, the congressman distills the lessons of Bhopal for the sort of long, grueling legislative crusades that are his stock in trade:

In contrast to what many people imagine, legislative debates rarely occur within fixed parameters, or at least not for very long -- the center is constantly moving. In the years it can take to pass a major piece of legislation like the Clean Air Act, the terms of debate often shift significantly. Sometimes the balance shifts gradually and by design, such as from a sustained lobbying effort. At other times, the shift happens suddenly and without warning, the consequence of a new president, a shake-up in Congress, or a major news event that recasts public opinion.

The BP spill has certainly recast public opinion on oil drilling, but its implications for broader environmental policy, particularly a future energy and climate change bill, are far from clear. At the New Republic, Bradford Plumer offers a particularly gloomy reading on the response to the spill among American politicians and the public; plenty of other pundits have noted that in his widely panned Oval Office speech earlier this week, President Obama was conspicuously reluctant to tie the disaster to specific policy goals.

But keep an eye on what comes out of today's hearing. Waxman and his House colleagues are less central to the future of a climate bill than their opposites in the Senate, or the president. Still, the guy knows how to make use of a disaster.

Via Kate Mackenzie at the Financial Times, a graph charting the not terribly surprising impact the Gulf oil spill has had on BP's image, once among the best in the industry:

It's from a firm called Covalence that calculates companies' ethical reputations and, on a neat mapping tool, tracks them against the amount of attention the companies are receiving in the media. (Methodology here.) From this report, a look at how different international industries have fared over the past half-decade, as the volume of information about them has generally increased:

Not only is the oil and gas industry in the basement, but it's one of the only industries whose reputation gets actively worse the more we know about it. For the largest oil and gas companies, the relationship is even starker -- spikes in attention track closely with drops in reputation.

On one level, this is probably just a measure of the very different reasons that different industries find themselves in the headlines. (When a tech company is in the news, it's because it's launching the iPad. When an oil company is in the news, it's because it has befouled a major ecosystem for a generation.) And energy companies are often particularly bad actors on the world stage.

But I suspect it's also a testament to the degree to which both the oil industry and the global public that depends on it are more comfortable when the latter knows less about how the former does its work -- the business of energy production is rarely pretty. Which is why all the unflattering attention is important: The best case for drilling domestically in the United States, rather than somewhere like Nigeria, is that the added scrutiny that operations here receive -- from the government, the media, and environmental organizations -- makes companies behave better than they do in the Niger River Delta, where oil operations are estimated to have leaked an amount comparable to the Gulf oil spill since the 1970s, and garnered a fraction of the international outrage.