Blue State.

2004-10-18T09:59:00.000-07:00

a little bird told me

Why is the allegation that Dear Leader was wired (in more than his usual sense) during the debates not tinfoil hat territory? Because he's had advisors whispering sweet nothings in his ear before, as in this "unscripted" press conference. From Avedon Carol.

2004-10-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

In the interest of multimedia fixation, the following is submitted for your review.

http://home.earthlink.net/~houval/gopconstrm.mov

2004-10-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

And the award for best first debate wrap up goes to:

http://www.oddbits.com/audio/bush_mixtape1.mp3

I mean, it lets the man speak for himself.

2004-09-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

There's hope! Does Kerry even need to campaign while Bush is making speeches like this?

Published on Tuesday, September 7, 2004 by Reuters

Bush: OB-GYNs Kept from 'Practicing Their Love'

POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. - President Bush offered an unexpected reason on Monday for cracking down on frivolous medical lawsuits: "Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

The Republican president, long known for verbal and grammatical lapses, included the anecdote about obstetrician gynecologists in his stump speech attacking Democratic presidential rival Sen. John Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, a former trial lawyer.

At a rally of cheering supporters in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, Bush made his usual pitch for limiting "frivolous lawsuits" that he said drive up the cost of health care and run doctors out of business.

But then he added, "We've got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

Unfazed, Bush went on to deride his rivals as "pro-trial lawyer," and concluded, "I think you've got to make a choice. My opponent made his choice, and he put him on the ticket. I made my choice. I'm for medical liability reform now."

© Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd

2004-08-12T05:54:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago after a screening of Control Room, I was standing outside doing the smoking thing and ran into some folks from the local chapter of the international socialists. Well spoken, well informed - all of them (well all but one, but I guess every movement has their hanger-ons). The intriguing thing was that they were all dead set on a Nader candidacy. To a person, their vote is going to Nader this November. We did the back and forth, and all things considered, it was one of the best political conversations I've had in this otherwise somewhat slow and conservative town. It was also the most disappointing.

I'm not a party kind of guy (well at least political parties) but I can't dismiss their complaint that the left looks a hell of a lot like the right. I don't know personally how to fix it. I do know this however. Anyone, I mean absolutely anyone who thinks that a vote for Nader is somehow the right thing to do this November needs to realize that they are personally accountable for a Bush victory.

Yes, I agree that we need a third party. Actually, I think we need six or ten or twenty, however many it takes to split the moribund hegemony we've been in the midst of for so many decades. Yes, Democrats look a lot like Republicans. And maybe Kerry really is the lesser of two evils. But all things considered, I'm willing to take my chances as I don't see how it could possibly get any worse.

So, if the only right thing for you to do this November is cast (or write in) your vote for Nader, then do - for God's sake, at least your voting. But if the only time you lodge your protest is in the voting booth, if you're sole attempt to change the system is by throwing your vote to a candidate whose only real claim is that he's not them, then accept the unmitigated fact that it is you who puts GW in the White House for four more years. In that eventuality, you'll have to cross an ocean to talk to me, cause I'm leaving.

2004-07-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

Wednesday Funnies

A coworker sent out a link to this New Yorker column, which made me happy.

I'm also fond of this page. I'd like to have a shirt with Bush on the front and Cheney on the back, although my depressing non-Orwell-reading blind date from a few weeks ago wouldn't understand it.

Sigh. My mother would say that that's why I'm a spinster: I'm an intellectual snob. Oh, well. I'd rather be a snob than be ordinary.

2004-07-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

I don't know why this post, published 3 days ago by Christian, didn't take. So I'm re-posting it now.

Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape

Salon is carrying a piece today regarding a speech at the ACLU by New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh. The headline above, pretty much sums it up. More here and here. Original streaming video of the speech here. (Hersh begins at about 1:07.)

As of right now, I have nothing to say about this execept it sure as hell better not be true.

2004-07-13T16:18:00.000-07:00

funny.
The temperature at which book paper burns.

2004-07-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

point well made.
The President makes a strong argument here. I mean, Edwards is just a one-term senator from a relatively small state, with little prior political experience.

Of course, compared to a failed Texas business man who used family connections to wangle everything from posh jobs to avoiding military service in Vietnam, I'd say this Edwards chap is eminently qualified to be Commander-in-Chief.

2004-07-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

proof, part the second.
Just when you thought that the story of Noah's flood (or, as our creation science friends call it, the Noachian Deluge) was a beautiful parable about man's responsibility to his planet and his fellow man, or perhaps just a bunch of superstitious hooey, finally there is an explanation that melds it and the fossil record:

Lecturing to a rapt audience of 20 like-minded Christians after a hard day in the field, Russ McGlenn, a self-styled amateur archaeologist and palaeontologist and head of Adventure Safaris, said: "Heavenly Father, we thank You for the evidence of a catastrophic flood event. We thank You for the time to study Your creation. Heavenly Father, we thank You for the evidence of a catastrophic flood event."

(Catch by Chris Mooney, science journalist extraordinaire.)

2004-07-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

proof.
Did working for two successive Bush administrations suck all of the blackness out of Colin Powell's soul? You be the judge.
(Click on "Colin does YMCA" on right.)

2004-06-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

They're about much more than oatmeal ...

I've gotta love those Friends. For one thing, I've learned that they were the primary movers who won me the right to vote against George Bush (and to vote for or against anything else I like, for that matter). In my travels out east last summer, I found that they have comfy meeting houses, brilliant tour guides, and quaint little cemetaries. And, one hundred years after they were instrumental in the abolition of slavery in the U.S., The American Friends Service Committee (also called the Quakers, of course) is still out there working to repair the stupid mistakes the U.S. tends to make. Here are some activities they'd like our help with, from their current email newsletter:

You can electronically sign a letter, apologizing to the Iraqi people for what we've done to their country, including the deaths, the tortures, the destruction of museums, libraries, and other infrastructures. The plan is to collect as many American signatures as possible by August 1, translate the letter into Arabic, and then broadcast it in as many Iraqi media outlets as possible.

You can also help Amnesty International in their campaign to free Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia Castillo. After six months of combat service in Iraq, Sergeant Castillo, a National Gaurdsman, was so horrified by what he'd seen that he refused to return to the "illegal and immoral" (in his words) war in Iraq. Although he has filed for Conscientious Objector Status (a noble idea, I think, since it would still require him to serve, but in a civilian capacity), and that application has not been fully processed, he has already been given the maximum sentence (one year in prison) for "desertion."

Amnesty International makes it easy to send letters or emails in Sergeant Castillo's defense to Acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee and to Major General William G. Webster Jr. According to the Amnesty site, "A member of his defense team, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, spoke of the 'incredible irony that we’re prosecuting soldiers in Iraq for violations of international law and we’re prosecuting a soldier here because he refused to do the same things.'"

And finally, you can visit the American Friends Service Committe's Web site to see the amazing things they're doing to help everyday Iraqis rebuild their lives. I really like those Quakers.

2004-06-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered what an interview with Bush would be like with a reporter that detested him? Get your kicks here. The perverse thrill I got out of this was indescribable. AP has info on the interview here if you're bandwidth or streaming video challenged.

Meanwhile, from the Fahrenheit 9/11 front, our local theater sold out of tix for opening night. Earliest we could score tix was late afternoon, Saturday. I strongly encourage everyone to see it this weekend. In my view, the stronger the box office receipts, the quicker the media organizations will realize there's an untapped demographic of people who hate our fearless leader.

2004-06-21T14:29:00.000-07:00

dude, where's my country?
I mean, seriously, it was right here just a little bit ago:

MSNBC: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people do not have a constitutional right to refuse to tell police their names.

British Medical Journal: Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness (Admittedly, after reading the article it seems that the headline is a bit overblown & misleading, but still... "New Freedom Initiative???" Creepy.)

2004-06-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

a few bad apples
Attorneys for several soldiers charged with abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib will be allowed to call the accuseds' commanding officers as witnesses, the New York Times reports. And Reuters is reporting today that the soldiers' lawyers will also try to get Dear Leader and Zen Master Donald Rumsfeld to testify as well.

By the way, the trials should start early this fall, NPR reported this morning.

And Seymour Hersh says of the prison torture scandal, "You haven't begun to see evil..." Because of Bush et al's assiduous efforts to keep information about Abu Ghraib from the public, we can expect a slow, steady trickle of increasingly more awful revelations--with the truly horrible stuff coming out probably this September and October.

Have a happy election season, you arrogant pricks.

2004-06-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

I cannot fucking believe what a truth-immune asshole this guy is.

And Ansar al-Islam was based in Kurdistan--essentially a protectorate of the U.S. since 1991.

Update: Ditto what this guy said.

2004-06-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

blech.
You probably shouldn't read this post from Billmon about our possible military junta future. It's too depressing:

It doesn't necessarily happen all at once, or as the result of a traditional military coup d'état. The story of the German army's entry into politics after World War I - first as a source of weapons and freelance talent for right-wing militias (the so-called "Freikorps") then as an actor in the parliamentary conspiracies that brought the Nazis to power, and finally as a key player in the "Night of the Long Knives," which consolidated Hitler's personal rule - may not be directly relevant to contemporary America, but its a powerful lesson in how gradualism can obscure some truly revolutionary institutional changes.

Also pretty depressing is this NY Times story about military recruiting in my hometown.

"You see, according to President Bush, he's going to hand power over in Iraq on June 30," Mr. Nelson explained, as he sat on his front porch. "I expect Iraq will be over before I even get out of boot camp."

A long, depressing article on our new American policies regarding the fundamental okay-ness of torture is here. A depressing analysis of such policies is here.

This, however, brightens the world considerably. As does this.

Now that you feel better, why don't you do something productive like tell your senators to oppose torture by supporting the Durbin Amendment to a defense appropriations bill now being considered. (And how creepy is it that "opposing torture" is enough of a political football that we actually have to call our elected officials to get them to do so?!?) You can look up your senators' phone numbers here. And if you live in Colorado, perhaps you'll also want to help collect petition signatures for this effort. (My former boss's generally lame response to having a state's electoral votes divvied up proportionally rather than winner-take-all, can be found here. Poor Mike! He's been so partisan for so long that now all he cares about is winning. He argues positions now that he never would have taken in his more reasoned past. Save us all from his fate.)

2004-06-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

dj culture
"Now, what President Bush is thinking," a promo on my favorite commerical radio station begins. Then, over a very light and flowery instrumental, you hear a voice with a Southern twang intone things like, "I wonder why nobody ever told me that Condi is black. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I think people who are a different color than white can still have democracy...I wonder if Condi knows that Colin Powell guy. I've never met him, but I hear he's black, too." Meanwhile, Lazlo, the afternoon drive-time dj on this station (and the top-rated afternoon drive-time host in the Kansas City area), spends virtually every Friday listing that week's Bush administration atrocities. Lazlo, like Howard Stern, was set off on his extended anti-Bush tirade largely by the Michael Powell-led FCC's overzealous prosecution of their anti-obscenity mandate and their pandering to media giants like Clear Channel. I don't know if Lazlo's ranting is having any impact on swing-state Missouri's presidential politics, but it seems Howard Stern's is:

Nationwide, 17 percent of likely voters listen to Stern's radio show, according to the poll released Thursday by the New Democrat Network, a Washington-based group. They favor Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 43 percent, and by 59 to 37 percent in 18 battleground states.
Of the likely voters who listen to Stern, 1 out of 4 is a swing voter who hasn't decided how to vote in November. That means that about 4 percent of the national swing vote up for grabs this fall listens to Stern, according to the poll.

So while Karl Rove has been advising Bush to suck up to the religious right ever more blatantly to get those 4 million fundamentalist Christians who didn't show up at the polls last time to show up this time, in doing so Bush may have alienated a much, much larger group of potential voters--who may not have voted in 2000, either, but certainly will this year. And not the way Uncle Karl would like them to.
Meanwhile, Colorado's oldest talk radio station, the Clear Channel-owned, strongly pro-Bush 850 KOA has dropped a precipitous 1.7 points in the last quarter--from a share of 6.4 to 4.7--in the latest Arbitron ratings, Advertising & Marketing Review reports (sorry, paper only, no link). Colorado, which went sharply for Bush in 2000, has now unexpectedly been predicted to be a swing state by many pollsters. And Howard Stern and Lazlo, with stable high ratings, rant on.

2004-06-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

the cruciatus curse
The Wall Street Journal has
obtained one of the infamous Pentagon/Department of Justice memos on how you, too, can enjoy torturing another human being and avoid prosecution under the Geneva Conventions or any of the many U.S. laws banning torture, as I e-mailed yesterday. The fact that these memos make arguments that would rescind the Magna Carta, let alone the U.S. Constitution, naturally remains of little interest to the mainstream media. The blogosphere is all over it, though:

Digby at Hullabaloo reflects on what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil" and the torture memo:

it shocked me not because of its endorsement of torture, we knew something about that already, indeed we've seen pictures of it. No, strangely, it shocked me because it was the product of a bureaucratic "working group" and it was delivered in the dry prose of a government report on the legality of setting aside an executive order on train travel requirements. But this "working group," consisting of lawyers from throughout the executive branch, was tasked with something a little bit different than your average government project. Its job was defining the legal limits of the president's authority to order people to be tortured.
They had meetings at which I'm sure they all believed very sincerely that they were doing important work on the War on Terror. I'm sure they worked long hours and diligently analyzed the law and offered their advice to the president and secretary of defense with nothing but the good of the country in their minds. And they produced a 50+ page paper from which, I understand, only one person --- the state department representative -- dissented.
....
What was the process by which they came to these dry legalistic definition of when, how and where on is allowed to inflict terrible pain as long as it doesn't reach the level of intensity that would accompany serious physical injury or organ failure? Did they discuss this around a conference table over a take-out Chinese dinner? Did they all nod their heads and take notes and write memos and have conference calls and send e-mails on the subject of what exactly the definition of "severe pain" is? Did they take their kid to school on the way to the meeting in which they finalized a report that says the president of the United States has the unlimited authority to order the torture of anyone he wants? Did they tell jokes on the way out?

And Fred Clark at Slacktivist has an intersting anecdote about "moral relativism." It seems that, at least to one of Fred's coworkers, you're a shady "moral relativist" if you don't absolutely support the United States in its immoral actions:

In the same breath he both condemns and advocates a "moral relativism" -- the idea that to be "good" merely involves being better than the bad guys.
....
Scratch any complaint about "moral equivalence" and you will find, just below the surface, the advocacy of evil means -- of torture, murder and lawlessness -- in the supposed defense of the good.

And check out Fred's entry on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire also. I'll add that there are, in the books, some spells that are never to be used by good witches and wizards--their very use makes their users bad people, practioners of the "dark arts," by definition. One of those is the cruciatus curse, the spell that inflicts pain for the purpose of torture.

2004-06-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Over the past week, while watching the love fest for the dearly departed unfold, I've been asking myself how much all this pomp is costing. Factoring in the time off for the national day of mourning, I've got a rough calculation of about half a billion (LA Times).

When ostentatious displays and honorific celebrations are proffered for dead leaders of dubious import, I am left with only one conclusion. We are the new Roman Empire.

2004-05-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

Harbinger
A charming story from the Land of Enchantment:

Bill Nevins was suspended for not censoring the poetry of his students. Remember, there is no obscenity to be found in any of the poetry. He was later fired by the principal.
....
Posters done by art students were ordered torn down, even though none was termed obscene. Some were satirical, implicating a national policy that had led us into war. Art teachers who refused to rip down the posters on display in their classrooms were not given contracts to return to the school in this current school year.

2004-05-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

New & Improved
Hope you like the changes to the blog. Also, sorry I've been AWOL for so long, but I promise I wans't helping with a senatorial campaign in Alabama.

2004-05-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

So that explains it ...

Andy Kaufman, or a big fan doing a great homage (How can we ever know for sure? And why would we want to? I'm thrilled to be believing both ideas at once) has a blog here.

Why am I so happy to see an Andy Kaufman presence in the world again? Well, as some of you know, I'm also very weird, can be really annoying, and have a sometimes incomprehensible sense of humor. Besides, "Andy" writes blog entries like this:

Ann Coulter Rumors
I am in fact Ann Coulter.
Coulter is Kaufman.
Kaufman is Coulter.
I am not George Bush, as some had suspected.
Whatever you hear, do not believe the one about me masterminding 9/11 as a giant conspiracy where no one actually died. For the last three years, I have definitely NOT been hanging out with 343 FDNY firefighters in the Caribbean. Do not believe that one. I am Jewish, though.

2004-05-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

yay for math!
As someone who voted against the forces of evil in 2000, I was delighted to find this bit of trivia via TBogg.

It is a striking pattern. But as someone who knows that there's no connection between Iraq and 9/11 and that no WMDs have been found in Iraq, I was also clever enough to realize that an apparent pattern may not be significant. Humans are inclined, ahem, to see what we want to see in any data set.

So I ran a quick rank-sum test on this data. Since I had only mean IQs, and no standard deviations, I thought this would be the best, and certainly most conservative (in at least two different senses of that word) analysis.

In conclusion, T=5.9, so p<0.0001. The probability that the true mean IQ is the same in red states and blue states is less than one-onehundreth of a percentage point. Since statistical significance is usually defined as p<0.05, we can refute the null hypothesis.

I hope that this analysis will not offend any red state readers of Blue State. But since they probably won't know what it means, I suspect it won't.

(Speaking of smart people, or the lack thereof, the U.S. doesn't have enough scientists to go around, the New York Times reports, which could lead to us losing our dominance in technology. This would be a long-term disaster for our economy.)

2004-05-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult
Our friends the neocons get called on being the cult that they are:
By Ambassador Joe Wilson:

This enterprise in Iraq was always about a larger neoconservative agenda of projecting force as the means of imposing solutions. It was about shaking up the Middle East in the hope that democracy might emerge -- what I had heard Charles Krauthammer call "the coming ashore in Arabia." Whatever one may conclude about the desirability of using our military to bring democracy to the Arab world, the fact is that we went to war without first testing the thesis in serious national debate.

Democratization is a noble goal. I was involved in democratization efforts for most of my diplomatic career. It is a long and hard road that requires institution-building and a significant investment on the part of the local population in a new and different system of governance that is often at odds with tradition. The best description I have heard for the process is that it is like a fine English lawn: you must seed it, you must water it, an
d if you want it to look really good, you must roll it -- for six hundred years. It is not a task that comes naturally to our military, however excellent that institution is.
....
The neoconservatives who have taken us down this path are actually very few in number. It is a small pack of zealots whose dedication has spanned decades, and that through years of selective recruitment has become a government cult with cells in most of the national security system. Among those cells are the secretive Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense (reportedly now disbanded) and a similar operation in the State Department that is managed in the office of Under Secretary for Disarmament John Bolton.

(part two of the Salon series of excerpts from Wilson's The Politics of Truth, which discusses Wilson's wife's outing as a CIA NOC by alleged journalist Bob Novak, here.)

And by George Will (!):

This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts. Thinking is not the reiteration of bromides about how "all people yearn to live in freedom" (McClellan). And about how it is "cultural condescension" to doubt that some cultures have the requisite aptitudes for democracy (Bush). And about how it is a "myth" that "our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture" because "ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit" (Tony Blair).

And by Paul Krugman:

Much has been written about the damage done by foreign policy ideologues who ignored the realities of Iraq, imagining that they could use the country to prove the truth of their military and political doctrines. Less has been said about how dreams of making Iraq a showpiece for free trade, supply-side tax policy and privatization — dreams that were equally oblivious to the country's realities — undermined the chances for a successful transition to democracy.
....
In Iraq, however, reality does matter. And thanks to the ideologues who dictated our policy over the past year, reality looks pretty grim.

And even one of the truest believers in the Mysteries of Babylon, Robert Kagan, is starting to have second thoughts:

All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now. Consider Fallujah: One week they're setting deadlines and threatening offensives; the next week they're pulling back. The latest plan, naming one of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard generals to lead the pacification of the city, is the kind of bizarre idea that only desperate people can conjure. The Bush administration is evidently in a panic, and this panic is being conveyed to the American people.

The wonderful thing about reality is that it exists. Ignoring it will not make it go away. Reality will, in the end, always teach the solipsists humility.

The terrible thing about reality is that it is unjust. Almost 900 coalition soldiers and thousands of Iraqis have died to teach the neocons humility, and they're only just starting to learn.

(A very good article on Ahmed Chalabi's duping of the neocons can be found here. Just go read. Too much to excerpt.)

2004-05-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

another day, another breach of international law
From The Guardian:

The US-led coalition in Afghanistan has distributed leaflets calling on people to provide information on al-Qaida and the Taliban or face losing humanitarian aid.

The move has outraged aid organisations who said their work is independent of the military and it was despicable to pretend otherwise.

Medécins Sans Frontières, the international medical charity which passed the leaflets to the Guardian, said the threat endangered aid workers. Fourteen aid workers were killed in Afghanistan last year and 11 so far this year.
....

Kenny Gluck, (MSF's) director of operations, said he did not know whether the leaflets technically breached international law but said they contravened the spirit of the law.
He said it was dangerous enough for aid workers in southern Afghanistan without being linked to the military in this way.

"We have to go back to the population and say 'This is not how we work'," he added.

Go learn more about the winner of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize and an "A" rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy here.

2004-05-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

Here is more encouragement for my new, gallbladder-healthy, "I'm terrified of fat" diet: Unlike the majority of sufferers from gallbladder disorders, I am not overweight, but God only knows why not. Until my side started hurting every time I tried to digest a meal, I'd been eating like an American, with plenty of fast food, plenty of fried stuff, plenty of sugar, and plenty of fat.

Now a documentary, "Supersize Me," is coming soon to a theater near you to address this very problem. Morgan Spurlock, the anti-Jared Fogle, decided to try eating three meals a day (and nothing else) from McDonald's for one full month to see what it did to his body. In between supersized Value Meals, he also interviews experts on nutrition and America's obesity epidemic, and "explores the horror of school lunch programs, declining health and physical education classes, food addictions, and the extreme measures people take to lose weight and regain their health."

Check out the Web site here. So the vegetarian broke my heart. I, for one, am still going to be eating a lot more broccoli.

Update: (from Rachel) An article about "Supersize Me" and an interview with the film's producer can be found here.)

2004-05-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

just in case you needed another reason...
Colin Powell's best friend has this to say about Powell's continued tenure with the Bush administration:

"My considered opinion is that he is..." His voice trailed off. "He's tired. Mentally and physically. And if the president were to ask him to stay on—if the president is reelected and the president were to ask him to stay on, he might for a transitional period, but I don't think he'd want to do another four years."

(from an exceptionally well-researched GQ article)

In 2000, we were told that it was okay to elect a president who was not terribly bright or well-informed about the world, because he'd surround himself with good people. We've seen for the past 3.5 years what the result of that is. Now it appears that if Captain Flightsuit is reelected, he will have not a single voice of moderation, however neglected, to advise him. The last grownup is leaving this administration. If Bush wins in November, who will be in charge of the most powerful nation on planet Earth?

2004-05-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

bloggity goodness
Cool, albeit somewhat dated, stuff from other blogs:

Billmon at Whiskey Bar uncovers the online diary of a CACI Iraqi interrogation contractor/one-time Minnesota shock jock. Billmon's entry, "Iraq Prison Diary," here. Google cache snapshot of the original diary, since removed by its owner, here.

David Neiwert of Orcinus offers an interesting perspective on why a presidential run by Judge Roy Moore of Ten Commandments fame may be good for the left in the short term, but a disaster for the Republic in the long run.

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post on witch hunts, secularism, and terrorism. Something I had never really thought about before: the fact that the founding fathers wrote free exercise of religion into the Constitution shows how deep their naturalist philosophy ran. For all the modern-day hoo-hah about the U.S. being a Christian country, founded by religious believers, Washington, Jefferson et al. could not have believed in the supernatural--at least they couldn't have believed in they power of prayer, incantations, etc. to affect miracles, to change the world. If they did believe in such miracles, they wouldn't have written the free exercise clause into the First Amendment--as doing so could be suicidal. Go read the post & you'll see what I'm talking about.

2004-05-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

Moore vs. the Mouse
From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, May 4 — The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday.
...
Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor.

(thanks Christian.)

2004-05-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

that's not very funny

This reminds me of how I felt when Dear Leader was holding his insipid "press conference" a couple of weeks ago. "Can you tell the difference?" I joked with my husband. "He's starting to glow." --a reference to a conversation Caligula has with Claudius upon his glorious transformation.

Last Thursday, Frontline discussed the impact of Bush's religious beliefs on his, ah, leadership. Bob Woodward's new book, and subsequent comments report that our president chats with a "higher Father" about how to proceed in Iraq, and not the man who raised George Jr. and won a war with Saddam Hussein a dozen years ago.

Penelope notes in comments to the recent entry on Condi and 9/11 that it's getting increasingly difficult to tell the difference between stories from The Onion and those from, say, The New York Times.

That's really scary, and, no, not very funny at all.

2004-05-03T09:08:00.000-07:00

good Lord....
My gerrymandered state senator helpfully explains the source of his legislative vision in yesterday's Lawrence Journal-World:

Lyon said he drew on the Bible for his guidance. "Civil law needs to be consistent with biblical law. I don't think we should sanction immorality," he said.

Other Bob Lyon legislative highlights: sponsoring a bill to save marriage from nasty, money-grubbing family-law attorneys, and favoring legislation to mandate teaching young-earth creationism rather than evolution in public school science classrooms.

That's why I'm working to help this retired Methodist minister get elected to Sen. Bob's seat this fall. Because she's not interested in forcing her morality on anyone, outside of her church.

2004-05-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

finally.
Condi Rice explains why 9/11 could not have been prevented.

2004-05-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

I wanna be just like you
Private contractors in Iraq encouraged U.S. soldiers to torture prisoners, Seymour Hersh reports. (More, from The Guardian, here.)

Meanwhile, in Macedonia, police murdered seven immigrants, so they could claim they were killing terrorists, so they could show us that they're serious about this War on Terror thing.

2004-05-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

it's a hell of a catch, that Catch-22
The title says it all: Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act

2004-05-01T15:28:00.000-07:00

stuff you already knew

Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man. He's like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation. He talks to his trousers. You know the type. They let wasps nest in their hair so they can lure weasels, trap 'em and eat 'em slow over the summer.

From Heather Malick of the Toronto Globe and Mail.

2004-05-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

Falluja
More bad news:

From the New York Times:

"We are doing what we can to find the least violent possible outcome to the situation in Falluja," said a senior administration official. "We've done that for three weeks, and the troops are responding only when attacked."

Analysis from ex-CIA station chief for Saudia Arabia Ray Close from Juan Cole's blog Informed Comment:

The proposed plan to turn over control of the Fallujah security situation to an Iraqi force under the command of four retired generals is much more significant than might at first be apparent.

2004-05-01T15:01:00.000-07:00

Weird science

Tomorrow, I'll teach my first adult Sunday School on evolution and faith. I'll focus on the beautiful, extremely evolution-friendly Genesis 1, and also discuss some passages in Job, and the lovely existentialist book of Ecclesiastes. More on that later, I hope.

But if objective reality isn't really your thing, and you'd prefer to believe that the world as we know it was created in a blinding flash of glory 6000 years ago, have we got a theme park for you.

Mr. Hovind, a former public school science teacher with his own ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, and a hectic lecture schedule, said he had opened Dinosaur Adventure Land to counter all the science centers and natural history museums that explain the evolution of life with Darwinian theory. There are dinosaur bone replicas, with accompanying explanations that God made dinosaurs on Day 6 of the creation as described in Genesis, 6,000 years ago. Among the products the park gift shop peddles are T-shirts with a small fish labeled "Darwin" getting gobbled by a bigger fish labeled "Truth."

Creationism: it's crappy science and crappy theology. But the rides are nice!

2004-04-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

What's the matter with Kansas?
Go read the April Harper's, which, distressingly, is not available online.

The lead essay by historian Thomas Frank describes how faux-conservative values have led the rural poor to participate in their own degradation. The analysis is spot-on.

Read the Lawrence Journal-World article about the Harper's article, including the predictably lame Republican response, here.

2004-04-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

I see crazy people
So here's the thing...Our Middle East policy is being driven by people who are hoping to hasten the end times battle on the plain of Meggido so the Christ Triumphant can finally kill Satan, while the bodies and the souls of the righteous are raptured up to heaven.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.

....

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.

This is why I'm nervous about this November's election.

2004-04-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

kapos
I don't even know where to begin with this.

There's the fear, expressed by Zweibon in this article, that if the Israelis and Palestinians brokered a peace deal not to the liking of millennialist Christians in the U.S., they might go anti-Semitic on his ass. Why this is a compelling reason to suck up to folks who seem to need the merest of excuses to indulge their inner anti-Semite, I have no idea.

Then there's the reiteration of the absurd importance of voters who believe we should do everything in our power to usher in the bloody end of days to the Bush reelection strategy.

And since I'm so close to Missouri, I'm bound to see some of these lovely billboards. Fabulous.

In other news, my church (scroll down to page 4) is expected to get a visit from Fred Phelps this Sunday.

More later.

2004-04-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

Who has his paw on the pulse of the nation? Who cried into his towel when Douglas Adams died (Well, who didn't? But still ...)? Who gave blood after Septemeber 11, and attended a memorial to honor brave firefighters? Well, now he's taking a long look at how the war in Iraq is affecting the real people who are our soldiers, as this week, beloved Cousin Willie is coming home. Go to "Get Fuzzy" and read the patriotic adventures of Satchel the dog!

2004-04-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, part the second
Who knew that Buzz McCoy's band name would be so prophetic?

More evidence that, to the current administration as well as to the artist of "Nervous Xians", "reality is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes."

"The 'reality based community'. You all believe that the answers, the solutions will emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality." a White House Staffer recently lectured journalist Ron Suskind.

What does it mean that the most powerful nation on earth is led by people who believe that their personal actions and ideas define reality? Nothing good.

2004-04-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

Baghdad boil
Cutaneous leishmaniasis is on the rise among U.S. troops in Iraq, CNN reports:

Doctors at Walter Reed have seen 653 cases of leishmaniasis, and the
hospital's infectious disease wards, until recently, overflowed with
soldiers undergoing a 20-day treatment regimen. "We see a few cases every year, but not the numbers we saw come out of Iraq," said Col. Dallas Hack, chief of preventive medicine at Walter Reed.....

In Moore's unit of about 750 men, more than 200 came down with
leishmaniasis during a 10-month tour that ended in Mar 2004. He was
relatively lucky. He has only one quarter-sized sore on his left arm.
Others had lesions all over their bodies, he said.

Lots of cases of leishmaniasis also coming out of our forgotten war in Afghanistan. Leishmaniasis is endemic throughout the middle east; I recently read that 12% (!) of Kabul's adults are infected.

This article doesn't address the more deadly visceral leishmaniasis, which affects a fraction of those infected with the leishmaniasis parasite and for which little can be done.

2004-04-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

about the MoveOn bakesale
Our bakesale on Saturday raised $604.40, which I sent in yesterday.

A man coveted a pan of brownies on our table. "How much for the brownies?" he said.

They were $5.00.

He got out his wallet. "Now, what's this go to?" he asked.

"We're with MoveOn.org," Adrienne replied.

A flicker of recognition stole across the man's face. "Is that that group that did those horrible ads, about Bush and Hitler?" he asked.

"MoveOn never aired those ads, but yes, that may be where you've heard of us," I said.

The man considered. "Those butterscotch chips on those brownies?"

"Yes, they are."

"Well, I guess I can sell out. You're wrong, you know," he said, handing me the five dollar bill and taking the plate of brownies with him.

2004-04-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

it's funny because it's true
From today's Onion:

"In the past four years, America's national debt has reached an all-time high," the ad's narrator said. "And who's responsible? You are. You're sitting there eating a big bowl of Fritos, watching TV, and getting fatter as the country goes to hell. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

Also, Bush is burning through cash like it's going out of style. Oh. I guess it is going out of style...I mean really, do you know anyone who has money these days? That's, like, so 1999.

2004-04-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

sleep tight
Bed bugs are back and better than ever, The Scotsman reports:

Bed bugs are staging a big come-back in developed countries around the world, including Britain.... Once common, the blood sucking insects were virtually driven out of bedrooms by the 1980s. But since 1995 there has been an unexpected increase in reports of bed bug infestation in Britain, the United States, and other developed countries.

ProMedMail, the news service that alerted me to this tidbit, adds:

The 2 common bedbug species that feed on humans are Cimex lectularius, widely distributed in tropical and non-tropical countries, and Cimex hemipterus, commonly called the tropical bedbug, is essentially a species of Old and New World tropics, although it is found in warm areas of some non-tropical countries such as Florida in the USA.

It is true that since about 1995 bedbugs seem to have increased not just in the UK, but elsewhere in Europe and in the USA. Several decades ago during slum clearance in inner cities in the UK, people who were rehoused in newly built homes were again soon pestered by bedbugs, because they took them with them in their beds, mattresses, and other furniture, and to a lesser extent in hand-baggage such as suitcases.

Although hepatitis B surface antigen can exist for about 6 weeks in bedbugs and be passed out with the feces, thereby seemingly posing the danger that it may be scratched into skin lesions, there is no evidence that such transmission is important, or even occurs. Similarly HIV can survive on bedbug mouthparts for about an hour, but there is no evidence that HIV is transmitted by the bugs.

Nevertheless, repeated feeding by large numbers of bedbugs have been reported as causing anemia in infants, while their persistent biting can cause sleepless nights, and in some people also severe allergic reactions. Bedbugs also feed on pigs and poultry; C. lectularius sometimes becomes a pest of commercial poultry in North America and Europe, causing anemia in the birds.

Bedbugs have developed resistance to several insecticides including, as reported in the press releases in some areas, to pyrethroid insecticides. For example, in Tanzania, there have been reports of resistance to alphacypermethrin and permethrin, insecticides commonly used for impregnating bed nets for control of anopheline vectors of malaria.

According to my medical entomology professor in undergrad, bedbugs have been endemic in American movie theaters for years. It's really weird that bedbugs don't seem to transmit any diseases among humans--I think that makes them the only blood-feeding arthropod that isn't capable of transmitting something. Of course, it pains me deeply to see a potential infectious disease niche going unexploited. The waste!

In other science news, girl chimps are smarter than boy chimps, at least when it comes to learning fine-muscle coordination, as in fishing termites from mounds for snacks. Full-text pdf of the original study can be found here.

2004-04-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

grrr. (part the second)
Watching last night's press conference, I was comforted to remember that all the world's great cultures have held that pride goeth before a fall. And often, when virtually every human culture believes something, that something is true. So perhaps the Bush administration's fall is right around the corner. One can hope. After all, Bush does win the Google race for hubris. (Search for your own word. It's a fun way to distract yourself from the miserable state of the world right now.)

When you're done being distracted, read this article by William Saletan. Pride at its extreme is solipsism; if you ignore it long enough, external reality will always teach you that it does, indeed, exist. (Unsurprisingly, Bush wins the solipsist award, too.) This is why pride goeth before a fall, though I pray that the fall will be Bush's alone, and not our whole nation's.

2004-04-12T16:12:00.000-07:00

grrr.
Leave it to a sorority to screw up something as basically decent as giving blood:

In an e-mail sent last Tuesday to about 170 members of Gamma Phi Beta, Christie Key, the chapter's blood donation coordinator, wrote: "I dont care if you got a tattoo last week LIE. I dont care if you have a cold. Suck it up. We all do. LIE. Recent peircings? LIE."

And they're from Missouri, too. Figures.

2004-04-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan
Can anyone tell me where we were fighting al Qaeda after 9/11? Anyone? Something -istan? Anyone? Bueller?

The Bush administration seems to have forgotten, too.

Go read this article by Seymour Hersh. Too much disturbing information to summarize. Just go read it.

2004-04-05T14:15:00.000-07:00

money talks

As the bodies of Americans burn in Fallujah, Barbara Ehrenreich offers a truly disturbing report on the financial situation of our men and women in uniform:

Military families on food stamps? It's not an urban myth. About 25,000 families of servicemen and women are eligible, and this may be an underestimate, since the most recent Defense Department report on the financial condition of the armed forces--from 1999--found that 40 percent of lower-ranking soldiers face "substantial financial difficulties." Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, reports hearing from constituents that the Army now includes applications for food stamps in its orientation packet for new recruits.

As the Army Times editorialized last July,

Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas, who notes that the House passed a resolution in March pledging “unequivocal support” to service members and their families, puts it this way: “American military men and women don’t deserve to be saluted with our words and insulted by our actions.”

Translation: Money talks — and we all know what walks.

But I'm sure it will make that soldier single mom on welfare feel better to know that John Kerry was at a rally with Jane Fonda in 1972. Support our troops!

2004-03-26T17:58:00.000-08:00

Miscellany

This cartoon pretty much encapsulates how I feel, although I'm still in love with Clark, and am finding it hard to work up too much passion for a guy I, too, am using for his war record and political prowess.

Speaking of hunks named Clark/e, please do contact the 9/11 commission and tell them to not let Condi Rice chat with them privately about how she thinks Richard Clarke is a meanie. Kevin Drum explains why private testimony, not bound by oath, gives Condi a license to slander Dick Clarke. Not that the Bushistas need a special license to slander their opponents. Practice makes perfect.

Anyway, here's who you can write or call to demand that Condi testify publicly and under oath:
Al Felzenberg
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States
afelzenberg@9-11commission.gov
Telephone: 202-401-1725
Cellular: 202-236-4878
Fax: 202-296-5545

Thanks for your support...you...pedophiles.

2004-03-23T11:23:00.000-08:00

disgruntled

Five days before the war began in Iraq, as President Bush prepared to raise the terrorism threat level to orange, a top White House counterterrorism adviser unlocked the steel door to his office, an intelligence vault secured by an electronic keypad, a combination lock and an alarm. He sat down and turned to his inbox. .... He stared at the color-coded threats for five minutes. Then he called his wife: I'm quitting.

Reads like the lede to a story about ex-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, huh? It's not--it's a story from the June 16, 2003 Washington Post, this one about Rand Beers.

Clarke's being smeared by the Bush administration for being a partisan hack dedicated to getting Kerry elected in 2004. (This in spite of the fact that Clarke was appointed by Reagan, and is a Republican.) The evidence offered for this smear is the fact that Clarke is friends with Rand Beers, who now advises the Kerry campaign on homeland security. But before Beers worked for Kerry, he worked for Bush--in fact, Beers took over for Clarke after Clarke left the administration, in disgust, two years ago. Beers ended up quitting in disgust, too, just a few months later:

"The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure," said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent about leaving his National Security Council job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out."

....Shortly after that, Beers joined the Kerry campaign. He had briefly considered a think tank or an academic job but realized that he "never felt so strongly about something in my life" than he did about changing current U.S. policies.

To recap:
John DiIulio.
Paul O'Neill.
Rand Beers.
Karen Kwiatkowski.
Richard Clarke.
Why does the Bush administration keep hiring cynical Democrat operatives who have posed as conservatives for decades, just waiting for a chance to destroy all that is good, holy, and pure in this country by quitting their jobs and betraying our Leader to the lie-beral media elite? Because this sure seems to be happening a lot.

(Richard Cohen wonders the same thing.)

2004-03-16T14:16:00.000-08:00

Good news!

"Get divorced, quit your job, switch parties and get leukemia in one year—this is not a recipe for success." So says John Weaver, and I hope he's wrong.

Weaver, the brains behind John McCain's "Straight Talk Express" (and who, if the Fates had looked more kindly on my man Clark, would have been accepted as the Clark campaign adviser--alas, it was not to be...) is now advising the Kerry campaign:

Referring to the Bush campaign, Mr. Weaver told The Observer: "They’re going to drop pianos on Kerry’s head. It’s going to be very distasteful, and you’re going to see as negative a campaign as you’ve ever seen on the Bush side."

But,

....The 43-year-old Mr. Weaver is unusually qualified to understand, and anticipate, Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign. Before he signed on to Mr. McCain’s underfunded, maverick bid four years ago, he worked for two decades in the trenches of Texas Republican politics. He served as executive director of the Texas Republican Party and ran the Texas arm of George H.W. Bush’s 1988 Presidential campaign. He grew so close to Karl Rove—now the President’s senior adviser—that the two thought of going into business together in the 1980’s before they had a bitter falling-out.

so there's reason for hope.

Kerry/Weaver '04: We know where the bodies are buried.

Excellent.

2004-03-16T11:56:00.000-08:00

it's poetry, baby

Check out the beautiful, beautiful interview of Donald Rumsfeld on Face the Nation last Sunday:

SCHIEFFER: The--the president ordered this invasion, as the world knows, because he said there were weapons of mass destruction, and he said they posed a threat to this country. Knowing what we now know, Mr. Secretary, do you think it was still wise to take this invasion? Did Iraq pose an immediate threat to this country?

Sec. RUMSFELD: Bob, the answer is I do believe it was the--it was the--the right thing to do. And I'm--I'm glad it's done. The 25 million Iraqi people have been liberated. A regime, a vicious regime, is gone after decades of repression and death squads and--and mass graves and mass killings, a country that used chemical weapons on its neighbors and on its own
people, that fired ballistic missiles into several of its neighboring countries. It's a good thing they're gone. And--and...

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase `immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. The president went...

SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.

Sec. RUMSFELD: I--I can't speak for nobody--everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.

SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The...

Sec. RUMSFELD: Not--if--if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says `some have argued that the nu'--this is you speaking--`that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: And--and...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s--suppose I've...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know. David Kay said we're about 85 percent there. I don't know if that's the right percentage. But the Iraqi Survey Group--we've got 1,200 people
out there looking. It's a country the size of California. He could have hidden his--enough chemical or biol--enough biological weapons in the hole that--that we found Saddam Hussein
in to kill tens of thousands of people. So--so it's not as though we have certainty today. But what--think what happened. There were 17 UN resolutions. There was unanimous agreement that he had filed a fraudulent declaration. The final opportunity was given with the last resolution, and he didn't take it. He chose war. He didn't do what Kazakhstan did.
He didn't do what South Africa did. He didn't do what Ukraine did. He--he didn't say, `Come in and look and see what we have.' He was engaged in active deception. We'll ultimately know a great deal about what took place.

SCHIEFFER: Well, you know, David Kay--you mentioned David Kay--he said last week that the president should simply come clean with the American people. He said--he told The Guardian newspaper in--in England, `The president should say, "We were simply mistaken and we're determined to find out why,"' and he said, `Until we say that, it's going to hurt
American credibility and delay reforms in intelligence which simply need to be done.'

And if you're in the mood for more Rumsfeldian verse, go listen to soprano Elender Wall sing such hits as "Known Unknowns" set to music.

2004-03-16T11:55:00.000-08:00

patriot act

Here is a pretty comprehensive and well-documented mainstream media examination into some of the reasons Captain AWOL might have been grounded in 1972.

Meanwhile, the groundwork is being laid to draft folks between the ages of 25 and 44 with expertise in languages, computers, or healthcare, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.

Because it's always an honor to sacrifice for one's country.

2004-03-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

cool stuff

Michael Chabon writes in the current New York Review of Books:

Build your literary house on the borderlands, as the English writer Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by booksellers, as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter, to children who cannot (one hopes) fully appreciate it, and to adults, disdainful or baffled, who "don't read fantasy." ....I have resisted trying to summarize, and thereby spoil, the vast, complicated plot of His Dark Materials, which runs to more than twelve hundred pages.

For those of you who haven't read these yet, do take Mr. Chabon's advice and purchase them from your local independent childern's bookshop as soon as you've got a chance. For those of you who have, pat yourselves on the back for liking Lyra's daemon before Lyra's daemon was cool.

The New York Review of Books also had this nice piece on Sheldon Krimsky's Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? in their previous issue:

....Subtle yet insidious changes to the rules of engagement between science and commerce are causing, in Krimsky's view, incalculable injury to society, as well as to science.

Good stuff.

2004-03-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

Please forgive my absence...

I've been off meeting Wesley Clark and writing this speech for the graduate fellowship that I, alas, will soon no loger be a part of. Also, I got elected as an "alternate" for Kerry to the Kansas Democratic Convention in April at last Saturday's caucuses (from there, one hopes, on to the nationals, though it's unlikely I'll be so lucky.) I feel like such a rock star!

Now, if only my adviser felt the same way about the importance of my various extracurriculars. She doesn't, which sadly makes it difficult to indulge in them, or in this blog, while at the lab.

An entry with some substance soon, I promise.

2004-03-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

Why I supported Clark
Interesting article from the New America Foundation about why the increasing disillusionment of the American military with Bush's foreign policy does not translate into an electoral advantage for Democrats:

As the south and west have grown increasingly Republican in political orientation, they have accounted for an ever-growing share of US military personnel - while the new Democratic heartland of the north-east has contributed fewer and fewer soldiers over time to the military. The result is that the US military has become strikingly Republican in partisanship. Soldiers are not compelled to divulge their party loyalties. But the leading students of the subject believe that Republicans outnumber Democrats in the US military by a factor of 2:1 - and, in the officer corps, by as much as 8:1.

It sure would have been nice to have a southern military man carrying the Democratic banner this time around. Alas.

Meanwhile, you should go give some money to our nominee, or, if you can't stomach that, to MoveOn.org. It's going to be a hell of a tough fight.

2004-03-16T11:51:00.000-08:00

Amusements

Finally, a resolution to the controversy surrounding Bush's National Guard service.

Don't try this at home, or this either. Dr. Atkins was obese at his death, you know, and Nietzsche died of syphilis.

2004-03-16T11:49:00.000-08:00

Happy happy joy joy!
Guess where I'm going to be this Friday?

2004-03-16T11:46:00.000-08:00

the day after
Mad tinpot dictators with massive arsenals of nuclear weapons? We didn't find that in Iraq. But perhaps, with the help of Pakistan's A.Q. Khan, we'll be able to find just that. All over the world. And we've traded a prosecution of the nuclear arms dealer for help in finding something else we've been seeking to no avail--Osama bin Laden. The inimitable Seymour Hersh reports in the current New Yorker:

Many experts fear that, with Khan’s help, the world has moved closer to a nuclear tipping point.

...“Khan was willing to sell blueprints, centrifuges, and the latest in weaponry. He was the worst nuclear-arms proliferator in the world and he’s pardoned—with not a squeak from the White House.”

Why?

According to past and present military and intelligence officials, however, Washington’s support for the pardon of Khan was predicated on what Musharraf has agreed to do next: look the other way as the U.S. hunts for Osama bin Laden in a tribal area of northwest Pakistan dominated by the forbidding Hindu Kush mountain range, where he is believed to be operating. American commanders have been eager for permission to conduct major sweeps in the Hindu Kush for some time, and Musharraf has repeatedly refused them. Now, with Musharraf’s agreement, the Administration has authorized a major spring offensive that will involve the movement of thousands of American troops.

Interesting.

2004-03-16T11:45:00.000-08:00

ain't no such thing

There's no such thing as a free lunch, as many an economist will tell you. Like f=ma, it's not just a good idea, it's the law. Too bad Bush's advisers weren't aware of this immutable law of the universe when they designed his social security plan, Ron Suskind writes in Slate:

During the 2000 campaign, candidate George W. Bush seemed particularly confident about his ability to pay for Social Security reform. Despite independent estimates that creating the kind of "voluntarily" private accounts he envisioned could cost more than $1 trillion, Bush consistently took the position that he could reform Social Security for free, without undermining promises to baby boomers anticipating retirement over the next several decades.

....For the first nine months of the administration, this was called the "free-lunch" plan—a painless way to convert to a blended, private-accounts model. Inside of the Treasury Department and the Council of Economic Advisers, however, officials were befuddled by it. Lindsey seemed to have never called upon analysts inside the Social Security Administration to run the traps on his idea. Treasury and CEA did—and the numbers didn't even come close to working out. But that didn't stop Lindsey, or the president, from believing in and promoting the "free-lunch" plan.

2004-03-16T11:44:00.000-08:00

"Trading with the enemy"?

It's now illegal for Americans to insert missing commas in manuscripts from Iranian authors, the New York Times reports.

Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace "inappropriate words," according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months.

.... Laws and regulations prohibiting trade with various nations have been enforced for decades, generally applied to items like oil, wheat, nuclear reactors and, sometimes, tourism. Applying them to grammar, spelling and punctuation is an infuriating interpretation, several people in the publishing industry said.

.... Nahid Mozaffari, a scholar and editor specializing in literature from Iran, called the implications staggering. "A story, a poem, an article on history, archaeology, linguistics, engineering, physics, mathematics, or any other area of knowledge cannot be translated, and even if submitted in English, cannot be edited in the U.S.," she said. "This means that the publication of the PEN Anthology of Contemporary Persian Literature that I have been editing for the last three years," she said, "would constitute aiding and abetting the enemy."

.... Tara Bradshaw, a Treasury Department spokeswoman, confirmed the restrictions on manuscripts from Iran in a statement. Banned activities include, she wrote, "collaboration on and editing of the manuscripts, the selection of reviewers, and facilitation of a review resulting in substantive enhancements or alterations to the manuscripts."

.... Esther Allen, chairwoman of the PEN American Center's translation committee, said the rules would also appear to ban translations. "During the cold war, the idea was to let voices from behind the Iron Curtain be heard," she said. "Now that's called trading with the enemy?"

2004-03-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

Nader trading

Today's David Broder:

Nader has claimed in interviews that his candidacy opens "a second front" against Bush and would appeal greatly to disillusioned conservatives and Republicans. That is malarkey. Republican pollster Bill McInturff surveyed likely voters last month and found that the subgroups most prone to consider voting for Nader were "younger white men, liberals and Democrats, particularly in the mid-Atlantic and Pacific regions," the Democratic heartland. "This data makes it clear that Nader's entry into the presidential race will have no impact on Republican or Bush voters," he wrote.

This man must be stopped, or at least his impact on the general election neutralized. Timothy Noah at Slate thinks there's a fair chance Judge Roy Moore can be induced to run, because, among other reasons,

Bush's recess appointment of William H. Pryor to the 11th Circuit, though generally a disaster for liberals, is a great boon in one largely overlooked respect. It has very likely enraged Roy Moore. It was Pryor who, as Alabama's attorney general, helped give Moore the boot when Moore refused to remove his famous monument to the Ten Commandments from his courtroom. (Pryor's conservative detractors say Pryor did it to shore up support for his judgeship in the Senate.)

So please do, if you get a chance, write Roy a nice, mock-conservative missive about how he should run for president.

All of the old Nadertrading websites appear to be gone now, but if some get started again, I'll post their addresses.

Update: Scott Aaronson of VoteExchange.org has e-mailed to say that he'll restart his site if it appears the general election will be close...Which it will be.

2004-03-16T11:41:00.000-08:00

Bush solves massive budget deficit!

Excellent news.

2004-03-16T11:40:00.000-08:00

Happy Lent!
In the classic horror film "The Haunting" (not the dreadful Catherine Zeta-Jones remake), none of the angles are square. The set was constructed so that the parallel lines aren't really parallel, and the perpendiculars aren't really perpendicular. That's one of the reasons why it's such a scary movie, even though there's not a single violent scene. The whole film just seems, on some deep visceral level, wrong.

"The Passion of the Christ," (or, for alternate titles, see here) on the other hand, is apparently nothing but one really long, really violent scene. No word on whether the angles are square. But I keep feeling, on some deep, visceral level, that things are just wrong.

From the hype surrounding this theologically sketchy Gibson torture porn flick, to Bush's declaration of war on Log Cabin Republicans, I'm starting to feel like Bill O'Reilly is right in his incessant rambling about an impending war between "secularists" (a word he inflects with the same venom as "Islamists," who, ironically, feel the same way about the "secularists" as Bill does) and theocrats (a word Bill does not use.) (More Bill-goes-to-the-movies-and-sees-evidence-of-the-coming-civil-war here.)

The dialogue in this country, insofar as it exists, just feels creepy and wrong. It feels like there's something dreadful lurking just beneath the surface. It feels like all of the angles are off.

I learned today via TBogg that a church in Denver is advertising that "the Jews" killed Jesus. Oddly, I've had a longish (for talk radio) coversation with pastor Maurice Gordon, the man who's responsible for bringing the blood libel to the Mile High City. When I was on the Mike Rosen Show about a year ago discussing the Michael Dini case and evolution generally, the last caller was Rev. Gordon. (I'll let you figure out for yourself what the good reverend's stance on evolution was.) Rev. Gordon said he "pitied" me for my understanding of evolution, but kindly offered to pray for my soul. No such offer was extended to the talk show host, Mike Rosen--even though he's a believer in evolution, too, and presumably in as much need of saving.

I see that Rev. Gordon was also the guest today on Mike's show. I wonder how that went. KOA doesn't provide transcripts or audio archives, so there's no way of knowing.

I do know that Mike's received a number of anti-Semitic calls in the past year, and a threatening note, although I don't know how this year's talk radio anti-Semitism compares to that of years past. I do know that anti-Semitism and anti-secularism run hand-in-hand, although I don't know why.

Anyway, I'm being too dark and pessimistic, I know. I'm sure we won't have a civil war between theocrats and secularists, no matter how much Bill O'Reilly wants one.

It's just that everything feels so wrong right now, so haunted by our unseen, bloody past.

2004-03-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

A changing climate, indeed
You know things are weird when there's a story in Fortune magazine about the Pentagon's dire predictions regarding global climate change:

Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it. The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

A very shrill take on the same story can be found here.

On the other hand, the Pentagon report could be cause for optimism. After all, many in the Department of Defense thought that Saddam Hussein was an imminent danger to Americans. So we'll probably be fine.

2004-03-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for.

So says lifelong conservative and retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski in a revealing and disturbing interview in the current LA Weekly:

...Developing policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that’s more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon — to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States.

The Soldiers for the Truth archives of Ms. Kwiatkowski's previously anonymous coulmns can be found here.

2004-03-16T11:36:00.000-08:00

Unsafe at any speed
Is there any better example of hubris, megalomania, solipsism, and sheer mad irresponsibility than Ralph Nader?

No, I didn't think so.

You could write Ralph a note telling him he's a goddamn fool, but since he's blissfully deaf to the pleas of people who, you know, would like to have a republic four years from now, that's probably a waste of your time.

Write a nice letter to Judge Roy Moore instead. Because if Ralph can run, Roy can too.

2004-03-16T11:34:00.000-08:00

MoveOn is gone...or not...

I really don't know what this story, from today's Washington Post, means:

The FEC voted 4 to 2 to warn Americans for a Better Country that activities that "promote, attack, support or oppose" a federal candidate must be paid for with hard money, a type of political donation that, unlike soft money, has tight restrictions on sources and amounts.

....Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, in contrast, said the ruling will put out of business "groups like America Coming Together [ACT], the Media Fund, Partnership for America's Families and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund."

....Harold Ickes, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and now head of the Media Fund, accused Gillespie of misconstruing the consequences of yesterday's FEC decisions to "inhibit our supporters and donors by his willful misreading."

.....On philosophical, not partisan, grounds, two of the Republican commissioners -- Chairman Bradley A. Smith and David M. Mason -- voted against regulation of the Democratic groups, rejecting pressure from the RNC. "If Republicans think they can win by silencing their opponents, they are wrong," said Smith, and "they are going to deserve to lose."

A previous Washington Post story had indicated that Gillespie's interpretation is correct...But the actual FEC ruling, the one reported on today, may be different than the one predicted in the earlier Feb. 12 article.

Interpreatation of the FEC ruling will be key to whether Democrats have any hope whatsoever of winning the White House this November. Gone, perhaps, is hope of George Soros blowing big piles of money on ousting Bush, or of Teresa Heinz Kerry starting her own personal "that'll larn ya fer attacking my husband" 527.

Much, much better analysis than I could ever do and more information over at VoteLaw.

2004-03-16T11:31:00.000-08:00

Jesus Christ!
Lent is just one week away. Last year, my friend Sandie told me she was giving up religion for Lent. Might not be such a bad idea for the whole country....

It's the end of the world as we know it, today's Christian Science Monitor reports:

Fundamentalists represent a minority of Christians - an estimated 25 million - but the interest in end-times prophecy has spread beyond their circles, and is not only shaping people's lives, but, say supporters and critics, even influencing US foreign policy."

......

"Those who dispute the theology, however, say it often encourages fatalism and escapism. A prominent premillennialist, Dwight L. Moody, famously asked, "Why polish the brass on a sinking ship?"

Barbara Rossing, who teaches the New Testament at Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, gets calls for help from pastors with congregation members who are avid readers of the Left Behind series. She tells of a friend who mentored a confirmation student at her church who'd read all the novels.

As my friend talked with her about world problems, the student said, 'I don't have to worry about that because I'm going to be raptured before things get too bad,' " Dr. Rossing says. "People think they don't have to worry about the environment or other situations because God is going to take them away from it."

(And, as Slacktivist points out in his close textual analysis of the first Left Behind book, all this apocalypse nonsense is really crappy theology, because it pretends that there's a magic get-out-of-death-free card that believers have, with the implication that this life--the only life anyone has any guarantee she actually gets--is worthless. As some famous philosopher and the book of Ecclesiastes observed, all true philosophy is a mediation on death. More Rachel ranting on death and theology here and here, on an old online diary of mine.)

Death, apocalypses, cataclysms & whatnot occur with some regularity in the natural world, accounting for extinctions and the evolution of news species. Or maybe the only major biological catastrophe was the Great Flood, and the only speciation event was when God zapped life on earth into existence 10,000 years ago, if 61% (!!!) of Americans are correct in their beliefs:

An ABC News poll released Sunday found that 61 percent of Americans believe the account of creation in the Bible's book of Genesis is "literally true" rather than a story meant as a "lesson." Sixty percent believe in the story of Noah's ark and a global flood, while 64 percent agree that Moses parted the Red Sea to save fleeing Jews from their Egyptian captors.

(From yesterday's Washington Times, which is a production of the Unification Church. Another production of the Unification Church is anti-evolutionist author Jonathan Wells, so there's that. The original poll, however, is by the more respectable ABC News, so this story is still pretty troubling.)

It really makes one contemplate, WWJD? Probably move to Europe.