Harper's Quickies

From May's Harper's Index:

Last calendar year in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained in value : 1999
Last period in which the Dow declined for four consecutive years : 1929-1932
Percentage change since 1968 in the real value of the U.S. federal minimum wage : -37
Ratio of the price of a barrel of oil in March to the price of a body bag from the U.S. military's supplier : 1:1

And the kicker from March's:
Rank shared by Jesus Christ and Bill Clinton among "the greatest Americans of all time," according to Americans : 13

Of course, since March, the Justice Department arrested and deported Jesus after a secret hearing along with a few hundred of his fellow Middle Easterners, so he may not technically qualify as an American any longer...

Just a reminder

A healthy dose of perspective from the comments section of this Calpundit post:

If the cable news media were dominated by the left, we'd be getting sick of seeing, every night, the likes of Chomsky, Parenti, Ivins, Moore, Franken, Naomi Klein, Alexander Cockburn, Bill Moyers, Arianna Huffington, David Corn, Robert Scheer, Eric Alterman, James Ridgeway, Harold Meyerson, Robert McChesney, John Nichols, Paul Krugman, Robert Kuttner, Matthew Rothschild, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Greg Palast, George Monbiot, Will Hutton, Robert Fisk, Vandana Shiva, Phyllis Bennis, Stephen Zunes ...

How often do you see *any* of these people, compared to the pervasive presence of O'Reilly, Hannity and Scarboro?

Compared to the roster of the true left above, Judy Woodruff, Mark Shields and Margaret Carlson are right of center. The center has moved so far to the right in this country that most people who rely on cable news for their political consciousness don't have a clue where to locate the true left.

Best of luck...

Philip Gourevitch has a short commentary in the New Yorker with a strong argument that the real test of the United Nations is not oil-rich and well-located Iraq, where it was never in question that the United States would get its way, but Congo, which has "no compelling strategic or economic interest for the United States or for any of the other veto-wielding members of the Security Council." The orgiastic slaughter taking place in parts of that country makes life under Saddam Hussein look like a paradise.

Accounts of the horror in Ituri have the quality of Hieronymus Bosch's grotesque tableaux of apocalypse: torched villages; macheted babies in the streets; stoned child warriors indulging in cannibalism and draping themselves with the entrails of their victims; peacekeepers - mostly Uruguayans - using their guns only to drive off waves of frantic civilians seeking refuge in their already overflowing compound; a quarter of a million people in frenzied flight from their homes. For nearly five years, such suffering has plagued much of the eastern Congo along the tangled battle lines of warring political and tribal factions, stirred up and spurred on by the occupying armies of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese have been killed in the fighting, and many more have died as a consequence of the displacement, disease, and hunger that attend it.

It's Rwanda, but with violence even more psychotic, as impossible as that may seem. What country would want to commit troops into the middle of this? You know full well that American troops won't be putting a boot onto Congolese soil any time soon, and I've no problem with that decision. What a nightmare. In light of that, the countries who have volunteered troops for the new force - France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Britain, Canada and South Africa - deserve serious, deep respect and gratitude. But if they fail to stop the carnage there, then the question at the end of Gourevitch's piece will be even more chilling.

It is for such people and such places - places that nobody in what Kofi Annan likes to call "governments with capacity" can find any political grounds to care about - that the U.N.'s system of international humanitarian law matters most. The idea behind that system is that common humanity ought to be reason enough to take an interest in preventing such terrors as extermination campaigns. And the premise behind that idea is that, while action may be costly, the price of inaction must finally be greater. But is that really how the world works? What if the ultimate horror of the Congo nightmare is that there is no price for ignoring it?

No Child Left Behind...

...except those 12 million over there. The Bush administration's true disregard for working families (you know, the ones who don't have money to contribute to political campaigns) comes right out into the open when you start examining the details of the new tax cut debt raising package. One of the line items they like to mention the most is the $400 extension of the child tax credit. But as the NY Times reports, "Because of the formula for calculating the credit, most families with incomes from $10,500 to $26,625 will not benefit [...] those families include 11.9 million children, or one of every six children under 17."

Right. So to attach some numbers to that, if you make below $5.05/hr (assuming 40 hours a week for 12 months), you pay no federal taxes and you get no child tax credit. If you make anywhere from $5.05/hr to $12.80/hr, you do pay your normal federal taxes and you get no additional rebate. If you're lucky enough to have a salary from there up to about $40K, it's a shiny new check for you!

Why the folks who are struggling the most get omitted from the largesse is a mystery to us all, but just try and get an answer out of lame duck Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. He simply babbles on and on about not giving the refund to those who don't pay income taxes, steadfastly refusing to address the 12 million children in families that do. An incensed Tarek at the Liquid List excerpts this exchange where Ari tries to change the subject so furiously that it makes your neck hurt:

Q: Is it fair to say that the White House, not members of Congress, not senators, but the White House at the end of the day thought that to make progress, the benefit for these 11.9 million children should go in order to, in part, save the dividend benefit for investors?

MR. FLEISCHER: Keep in mind, investors are across-the-board in terms of income groups, include many senior citizens, whose only source of income is their investment, because they don't have an income since they retired. And that's aimed at creating jobs. And so there are a variety of economic factors that go into the tax bill in terms of giving it the oomph to create jobs, which is what this is about. And I think economists can argue, they will differ about which provisions help create more jobs. And that's a debate that will go on.

Q: No, but you had to make a choice, and I just want to make sure that you are saying that the White House agreed to make the choice to leave these children behind.

MR. FLEISCHER: Many, many choices get made. For example, people of different income levels don't even get a child credit. There are many people who don't qualify because their income levels are too high to even get a dollar's worth of a child credit, and they pay considerable amount of income taxes. The President wanted to have a zero percent dividend exclusion. He got less of a dividend exclusion.

Translation:
Ari, what was the logic behind the decision to deny this benefit to the poorest working families?

Hey look, there are some rich people who didn't get it either. What are these folks complaining about? You know, the president didn't get everything he wanted. Sheesh, the nerve of these ingrates...

What color is an orange?

Yes, the color-coded terror alert system is less than meaningless. And perhaps the clearest proof is that it produces headlines like this: Terror threat level lowered to 'elevated'

"A Nixonian Stench"

I have written in this space on more than one occasion that Bush resembles no previous US president quite so closely as Richard Nixon. Now Florida senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham has picked up the thread. After starting in on the buried $44 trillion treasury report, he continued:

Graham said there are other examples of the administration withholding information, including documents detailing deliberations on Bush's energy policy, memos written by judicial nominee Miguel Estrada, a congressional report on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the projected cost of war with Iraq until it was about to start. He also cited Bush's executive order to keep millions of government documents sealed that were due to be declassified after 25 years.

"There has been a Nixonian stench to the continued practice of putting the American people in the dark," Graham said in a conference call with reporters.

Testify, brother Bob! Can I get a witness? Much to my surprise, Graham is quickly emerging as the Democrat in the field most willing to take the gloves off and take bare-knuckled swings at the administration's jaw - a much-needed trait that the Democrats have inexplicably seemed to feel was somehow inappropriate. He is moving up quickly in my personal primary.

If he keeps on this track, then I'm dying to see him in a one-on-one debate with Bush. Steve Soto has been writing recently about the need to attack Bush directly on the issues of personal integrity and trust, and I think he is absolutely correct. Bush/Rove haven't had to defend against that attack before, and it's a ridiculously easy argument to make. Every Democrat in the field should be pounding this issue every time a microphone appears. If the Republicans have proved anything over the past twenty years, it is that simply repeating something ad nauseum successfully fixes it in the minds of most voters.

Pissed Off Spies

Nicholas Kristof's op-ed in today's NY Times looks at the growing outrage in the intelligence community toward the Bush administration's distortion of their work to promote specific policies.

The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that wrote to President Bush this month to protest what it called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."

"While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes," the letter said, "never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war."

Ray McGovern, a retired C.I.A. analyst who briefed President Bush's father in the White House in the 1980's, said that people in the agency were now "totally demoralized." He says, and others back him up, that the Pentagon took dubious accounts from émigrés close to Ahmad Chalabi and gave these tales credibility they did not deserve. Intelligence analysts often speak of "humint" for human intelligence (spies) and "sigint" for signals intelligence (wiretaps). They refer contemptuously to recent work as "rumint," or rumor intelligence.

"I've never heard this level of alarm before," said Larry Johnson, who used to work in the C.I.A. and State Department. "It is a misuse and abuse of intelligence. The president was being misled. He was ill served by the folks who are supposed to protect him on this. Whether this was witting or unwitting, I don't know, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt."

You know, when the freaking CIA is castigating you for lying, you have reached levels of mendacity to which mere mortals can barely aspire. This is starting to have some real political repercussions for Blair in the UK and Howard in Australia. When are Americans going to begin holding our government to the same standards of honesty and accountability? At least a few Democrats are finally beginning to wake up and showing a little backbone on this issue. Better late than never, I suppose, Senator Rockefeller. Would have been nice if you'd been asking these questions before you voted to authorize this.

UPDATE (11:07 am): Speaking of bad intelligence, remember the bunker we bombed just before the invasion began? The attack that occasioned much breathless speculation about whether we had killed Saddam? Well guess what? There wasn't any bunker there.

The Battle Over GM Foods

At Quark Soup, David Appell has posted an interesting, fair, and balanced article about the global debate over genetically modified foods. I am very much in the middle on this issue. These are vital techniques that we should be studying and implementing if we plan to feed an ever-increasing population that needs ever more land on which to live. And reducing the amount of chemicals that are sprayed on crops (and by extension, farm workers) is an unquestionably good thing. On the other hand, the sorts of protections and safeguards that should be in place while these methods are being tested are haphazard and inconsistently enforced and the political games around GM foods are unsavory, at best. Anyhow, excellent reporting on an issue that doesn't get nearly the attention that it should.

Briefly...

I've been quite busy recently with work, parenting, and other responsibilities, so haven't had much chance to write here. Maybe tomorrow. I'll do the quick highlights of stuff you oughtn't miss:

Daily Kos links to an article from the anything-but-liberal Financial Times. Seems the Bush administration buried a report prepared by their own Treasury Department that predicted chronic deficits that will total 44 TRILLION dollars of additional national debt. That's about a 750% increase in the national debt, which is already unconscionably gigantic. Tell me again how Democrats are fiscally irresponsible?

The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn in current US dollars.

The study, the most comprehensive assessment of how the US government is at risk of being overwhelmed by the "baby boom" generation's future healthcare and retirement costs, was commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. But the Bush administration chose to keep the findings out of the annual budget report for fiscal year 2004, published in February, as the White House campaigned for a tax-cut package that critics claim will expand future deficits.

The study asserts that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or a painful mix of both are unavoidable if the US is to meet benefit promises to future generations. It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66 per cent across-the-board income tax increase.

And while we're running down the Pennsylvania Avenue dissembling, be sure to catch Billmon's list of administration quotes regarding Iraq's WMD. Now that's backpedaling.

William Beeman, director of Middle East Studies at Brown University has an excellent op-ed in Lebanon's Daily Star about the many holes in the administration's "case" against Iran.

Nearly everything you heard about Jessica Lynch was a lie, that much is certain. Now that the falsehoods are becoming obvious, the cover-up is in full swing. Her father: "We're really not supposed to talk about that subject. It's still an ongoing investigation and we can't talk about nothing like that." As for the military, "spokesmen for the Navy SEAL, Army Ranger and Marine commando units involved in the rescue declined requests to allow participants to be interviewed."

And the next time some knuckle-dragging right-winger starts in about the cowardly French who love dictators, ask him why they are the ones going into the Congo and the Ivory Coast to help end the most horrific civil wars on the planet. But then, maybe Bush's supporters are just "objectively" pro-cannibalism.

Or maybe they're objectively pro-boiling-prisoners-alive. How else would you explain the 180 degree turnaround from denouncing Uzbekistan as one of the worst human rights offenders in the world to giving half a billion dollars in aid last year to this police state? Oh right - they're part of our coalition of the willing. Remember this next time they go on about liberating oppressed Iraqis being the reason we invaded.

Oh, and some good news (unless you're a Bush supporter): MyDD.com notes that Bush is quickly losing the 18-29 demographic. I wondered how long this would take; in my experience young people tend to have the most finely-tuned bullshit detectors, and nobody has ever shovelled it with such glee and vigor as these guys.

Anyhow, if you are a frequent blog reader, none of these will be news to you, but if you're not, go get caught up.

Screaming for a caption...

...but it's two in the morning and I'm too tired to come up with one.

No, your eyes do not deceive you. It's Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown kickin' it with Ariel Sharon. Leave me some cleverness in the comments, if any strikes you. Must...sleep...

Tiny black holes

Looks like physics is about to get very exciting.

It's a common misconception that you have to have a huge amount of mass to create a black hole. Any amount of mass will do, as long as you cram it into a sufficiently small space. A super-massive black hole with the mass of a billion Suns might be the size of our Solar System, but the Earth could be a black hole too if you packed it into the volume of a marble. Even a person will do, although you'd have to cram them into the space occupied by a single electron.

This line of reasoning has led scientists to the inevitable: If we really want to observe black holes and how they radiate, we'll have to whip them up in our own laboratories. And that's exactly what we are on the threshold of being able to do. Now, there is no kind of technology with the ability to physically crush matter to black hole densities, but there's an easy away around that. Einstein showed us that matter and energy are equivalent, so you can also make a black hole by pushing a huge amount of energy into a tiny volume. For those kinds of experiments, there's an obvious choice: particle accelerators. And the next generation is just about to be unveiled.

Amazingly, scientists are becoming increasingly confident that they will be able to create black holes on demand, in quantity, using the new atom-smashers due to come online in the next five years. Some estimates suggest that the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN -the acronym is in French) will be able to create an average of one black hole each second. LHC will bombard protons and antiprotons together with such a force that the collision will create temperatures and energy densities not seen since the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. This should be enough to pop off numerous tiny black holes, with masses of just a few hundred protons. Black holes of this size will evaporate almost instantly, their existence detectable only by dying bursts of Hawking radiation.

[...]

If it makes you feel any more comfortable, we're pretty sure that if the LHC can produce black holes, then so can cosmic rays, high-energy particles that smash into our atmosphere every day. There are probably a few tiny black holes forming and dying far above you right now.

Wow. If you want all the dense, theoretical details, you can find them here. It's, uh, not exactly light reading. And while we're on the topic of particle accelerators, Japanese researchers believe they can melt down nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet without triggering a reaction by aiming a sufficiently powerful neutrino beam at it - right through the earth, even. Aside from the fact that the accelerator would need to be over a hundred times more powerful than CERN's, a few technical obstacles remain:

[T]he "muon storage ring" generator needed to propose the neutrino beam would need to be 1000 kilometres wide. It would also require 50 gigaWatts of power to operate - the same as used by the entire UK - and would cost an estimated $100 billion to construct. Weber says the first stage of a generator might be feasible within 10 to 20 years, but he reckons the main problem is that the neutrino beam produced would be just a few metres wide. This means a target would need to be very precisely located beforehand. He adds that the beam would produce dangerous alpha and neutron radiation in any living thing in its path.

Who Would Jesus Deceive?

I live in a state where Jesse Helms won five straight Senate elections, so I try not to make sweeping generalizations about any other state. But after enough stories about Texas, I'm beginning to wonder whether they're blending lead paint in the baby formula down there.

Texas approved one of the nation's most sweeping abortion "counseling" laws Wednesday, requiring doctors, among other things, to warn women that abortion might lead to breast cancer -- a correlation that does not exist, according to the American Cancer Society and federal researchers.

Critics say the law is a thinly veiled attempt to intimidate, frighten and shame women who are seeking an abortion. Proponents say they are merely trying to give women as much information as possible, and they argue that research into the alleged link between abortion and breast cancer remains inconclusive.

"They don't care what science says," said Claudia D. Stravato, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle. "It's like talking to the Flat Earth Society."

The bill's author, state Rep. Frank Corte Jr., a San Antonio-area Republican, said he called the bill the "Women's Right to Know Act."

Well, as long as we're being helpful and providing as much information as possible, let's go ahead and give these patients some details about the still remote but markedly less theoretical possible outcomes of taking the pregnancy to term.

A government study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and released in 1999, found that the maternal mortality rate is still problematic. The national rate is 7.7 per every 100,000 women: the death of one woman for every 12,987 who give birth. That's more than twice the goal set by the federal government under its Healthy People 2000 initiative (3.3 deaths per 100,000 women). And big disparities also exist; among African-American women in New York, for example, the study found that 28.7 of these women die for every 100,000 pregnancies.

And those numbers simply reflect maternal mortality - the number of women who died in pregnancy or 42 days after giving birth. That's not counting the number of women who survived the various serious complications that can occur during and after pregnancy. Dr. Jeffrey C. King, head of the Maternal Mortality Task Force of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, reported that for every maternal death there were an estimated 3,100 hospitalizations for pregnancy-related complications.

And I'm guessing they probably don't do any slideshows on delivery-related fistulas either. Or even post-partum depression, though I'm sure post-abortion depression comes up several times. But Texas is just trying to give women as much information as possible when they must, by law, warn them of a link to breast cancer that has been debunked.

There is a moral argument that can be made against abortion that is perfectly internally consistent; I think it is based upon faulty assumptions, but it is at least sincere. If you must be completely intellectually dishonest to promote your beliefs in a free society, then perhaps the time has come to sit down and evaluate whether your belief system deserves your adherence.

Maybe he meant "can't believe"

Timothy Noah's Whopper of the Week:
"I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons."
-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at a hearing of the Senate's appropriations subcommittee on defense, May 14

"We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
-Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC's Meet the Press, March 16

Say it with numbers.

Should you find yourself in the middle of an all-heat, no-substance argument and want to bury the opposing side in a mountain of verified numbers to back up your point (no matter what your point is), the University of Michigan's list of links to Political Science Statistical Resources on the Web is a fine place to start. Very, very useful for fact checking. It's permalinked over on the side.

What have we become?

Cowboy Khalil links to a couple of articles that should give everybody in this country pause. And after the pause, it's your call whether the next feeling is disgust or shame.

First:

THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber. Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday. The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians. The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months.

Then:

The United States is illegally holding thousands of Iraqi prisoners of war and other captives without access to human rights officials at compounds close to Baghdad airport, The Observer has learnt. There have also been reports of a mutiny last week by prisoners at an airport compound, in protest against conditions. The uprising was 'dealt with' by the Americans, according to a US military source.

The International Committee of the Red Cross so far has been denied access to what the organisation believes could be as many as 3,000 prisoners held in searing heat. All other requests to inspect conditions under which prisoners are being held have been met with silence or been turned down.

There is circumstantial evidence that prisoners are being gagged and hooded, in the manner of the Afghans and other captives held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - treatment in itself questionable under international law. Unlike the Afghans in Cuba, there is no doubt about the status of these captives, whether PoWs or civilians arrested for looting or other crimes under military occupation: all have the right, under the laws of war, to be visited and documented by the International Red Cross. 'There is no argument about the situation with regard to the Iraqi armed forces and even the Fedayeen Saddam,' said the ICRC's spokeswoman in Baghdad, Nada Doumani.

This is not the America I was taught in school. This is not the America for which our soldiers have died over the decades. This is not an America recognizable to anybody who has read the documents upon which we are founded. This is not America. It is time to call the facts what they are: whomever's service the Bush government is in, it is neither the people nor the ideals of this nation. This is a government of power tie thugs and starched shirt criminals that defecate on the flag and what it stands for every time they wave it.

The unpleasant truths nobody wants to admit

1. A Palestinian peace plan that Hamas does not sign on to is meaningless.
Let's be honest. They are clearly the main combatant and the Palestinian Authority has been so thoroughly decimated over the past two years that they are utterly unable to restrain Hamas. The AP reports that:

In the first stage, the Palestinians are to rein in militants and get them to halt terror attacks that have killed hundreds of Israelis. Abbas is trying to do it by persuasion, while Israel wants him to disarm and arrest the militants and says it will not meet its first obligations, including a withdrawal from Palestinian towns, until he does.

"Now the ball is in the court of the Palestinians," said Tzipi Livni, a Likud minister. "If they succeed in eliminating terror, maybe there is a chance for the Palestinians to live in a state."

But as Arafat has noted, "the Israelis have destroyed all our prisons, except the one in Jericho. And if we want to transfer a criminal there, we must ask the Quartet for a car, so as to be able to pass the Israeli checkpoints!" There is also the small problem that Israel will not withdraw from Palestinian towns until the violence stops and the violence will not stop while Israel remains in Palestinian towns. So re-read Livni's quote, which translates to, "If they achieve the impossible, then maybe there is a chance for the Palestinians to live in a state." Not there is a chance, but maybe there is a chance - see unpleasant truth #3 below.

2. A peace plan that maintains the settlements is doomed to fail.
And the settlers have no intention of leaving. If the Israeli government defies everybody's expectation and agrees to dismantle them, they will have to uproot the settlers by military force. The chances of this are approximately zero.

3. The Cabinet vote accepting the Road Map was nothing more than political theater.
Don't take my word for it, ask Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who voted for it: "We did not vote on an international agreement. In fact, this is not a legal document, there is no sort of commitment here, rather this is a declaration of diplomatic intentions." (emphasis mine) Meaning roughly, we will give this lip service now as a favor to President Bush's campaign, but we all know this diplomatic ship will founder on the rocks of the details.

Sigh. The more things change...

What is Paul Wolfowitz smoking...

...and where can I find some? Testifying about the situation on the ground in Iraq to Congress last Thursday, he asserted:

-Electric service is better than in the past 12 years.

"Six weeks after the war ended, Iraq remains a torn and divided country. Crime still threatens. Hospitals run at quarter-speed. Water, sewer and electric systems remain broken or inconsistent." (yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

-The situation in Iraq had improved recently and was better than it was before the war and that primary schools had reopened.

On Baghdad's streets, Iraqis have little praise for Bremer's fledgling administration.

"Things have become worse since he arrived [May 12th]. Gas lines are longer, garbage is piling up, there's no electricity, and security is so bad that people are too scared to allow their children to go to school," said Alaa Rasul, 47, a Baghdad handyman with five children. "This is not freedom," he said. "This is chaos."

Although no crime statistics are available, during the past week there appeared to be less gunfire on Baghdad's streets. Still, the appearance of bodies killed in overnight robberies or confrontations is routine. (today's Cleveland Plain Dealer)

-That the water system was at 60% of prewar levels and that there were no health crises.

The BBC's correspondent in Baghdad, Richard Miron, said the city was still a dangerous place with few people venturing out after dark. Looting has damaged the infrastructure, making the supply of water and electricity unreliable. As a result, aid agencies say, sickness is an increasing problem. (today, from the BBC)

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee also expressed astonishment as Wolfowitz held both hands in front of him and repeatedly pulled the thumb off one hand and replaced it. Spontaneous applause erupted a few minutes later when he demonstrated his magic "rubber pencil." Following adjournment, committee chair Richard Lugar and ranking minority member Joseph Biden excitedly displayed to members of the media the Mystical Senate Trolley boarding passes sold to them by Wolfowitz for $6.95.

"I didn't even know we had a Mystical Senate Trolley!" exclaimed Lugar.

Wolfowitz is scheduled to testify again to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next week about the recent successful invasion of North Korea and the administration's plan to peacefully end the standoff with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.

BLAM! hisssssssssss...

About twenty minutes ago, while reading the news, my outrage meter blew a gasket. Just go read it; it's so breathtakingly, grotesquely absurd that it defies commentary. Anyhow, I needed a laugh while I waited for the oddly short yet suspiciously burly technicians to come and refit me for a replacement. Slugged back a good snort of Nyquil, took off my socks, and was wandering through The Modulator's familiarly understated blog, where I came across a link to HappyFunPundit's Top Ten Things I Hate About Star Trek, which even if you know nothing about Star Trek, is still funnier than hell.

Apparently, it generated a tidal wave of traffic through his site, so on his next post, three days later, he listed the top ten blog entries he'd be writing soon based on those numbers:

10. Why I think Fox Mulder is gay.
9. Best science fiction movie ever: Laserblast.
8. Linux: Operating System For Little Girly Boys.
7. I love the RIAA.
6. The best captain on Star Trek ever: Commodore Decker.
5. It's a good thing the two young lesbians on Buffy the Vampire Slayer were killed off.
4. The vampire Lestat is a big weenie. The only thing that saved the character was Tom Cruise's acting.
3. Saddam Hussein: Misunderstood Genius.
2. The second trilogy of the Star Wars films is WAY better than the first.
1. Who should play the next Indiana Jones? Carrot Top.

Heh heh. Oh, there's the doorbell; techs are here. I'll be back once the anaesthesia wears off...

The Senate's Last Great Orator

During the 2000 campaign, I saw Robert Byrd several times on this or that Sunday morning news show and thought he looked a shadow of his former self. He seemed two steps slow and his rhetorical power, which ranks among the greatest the United States Senate has ever witnessed, was fading. It wasn't surprising - he was an 83 year old man entering his 43rd year in the Senate, after all. He had cast well over 16,000 votes, more than anybody else in Senate history; he had a right to be tired.

But this presidency seems to have awakened, energized, and focused Senator Byrd with a passion sorely lacking throughout the rest of the party. Since he carried 1963 of West Virginia's 1970 precincts last elections and is at the twilight of his career, Byrd is free to say whatever he damn well pleases and nobody in American politics today says it much better. His May 21st speech on the Senate floor was the most succinct yet comprehensive damning of Bush's foreign policy and the wreckage left in its wake that I have read. After a searing, detailed indictment of the administration's special blend of dishonesty, incompetence, and hubris, he closes with this:

As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress are reluctant to ask questions which are begging to be asked. How long will we occupy Iraq? We have already heard disputes on the numbers of troops which will be needed to retain order. What is the truth? How costly will the occupation and rebuilding be? No one has given a straight answer. How will we afford this long-term massive commitment, fight terrorism at home, address a serious crisis in domestic healthcare, afford behemoth military spending and give away billions in tax cuts amidst a deficit which has climbed to over $340 billion for this year alone? If the President's tax cut passes it will be $400 billion. We cower in the shadows while false statements proliferate. We accept soft answers and shaky explanations because to demand the truth is hard, or unpopular, or may be politically costly.

But, I contend that, through it all, the people know. The American people unfortunately are used to political shading, spin, and the usual chicanery they hear from public officials. They patiently tolerate it up to a point. But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink for a time, but eventually it will appear in dark colors, tinged with anger. When it comes to shedding American blood - when it comes to wreaking havoc on civilians, on innocent men, women, and children, callous dissembling is not acceptable. Nothing is worth that kind of lie - not oil, not revenge, not reelection, not somebody's grand pipedream of a democratic domino theory.

And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often of late by the "powers that be" will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for just so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall.

When history courses teach this period - and I do believe that this invasion is a watershed historical event - this speech will be in every textbook. He is one of the only voices in the Democratic Party that I hear loudly speaking what should be the central focus of their message on foreign policy: what we have done is immoral, illegal, unwise, sold through outright lies, and utterly beneath the ideals of America. We are a better nation than this and it should be reflected in our dealings with the rest of the world, but instead we have the put the very worst tendencies of America on display - paranoia, militarism, deceit, and arrogance.

The Senate - and the nation - will miss Robert Byrd when he finally takes his leave of it.

Never thought I'd call DeLay "chum," but...

Tom DeLay seems to have stepped in it. The Texas Public Safety folks destroyed all the records of l'affaire Ardmore at what was probably his behest (except, amazingly, the e-mail ordering the destruction), and Tom Ridge is refusing to hand over Homeland Security documents regarding it. When the DC press corps sharks begins smelling blood in the water about this, which should be happening right about now, Josh Marshall will probably get his feeding frenzy. House speakers seem to be especially vulnerable to it - Jim Wright, Newt Gingrich, Robert Livingston. But DeLay is a particularly dislikable fellow in a way that none of those three was, and I expect the piling on to be downright brutal.

And I am going to enjoy every minute of it. Live by the sword, die by the sword...

Science!

Using fossil and DNA data, an entomologist has determined that army ants have remained basically unchanged for 100,000,000 years. "Biologists have wondered why army ants, whose queens can't fly or get caught up by the wind, are yet so similar around the world. Army ants have evolved only once and that was in the mid-Cretaceous period," says Sean Brady, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher.

Also from the world of tiny predators, the Departments of Chemical and Mechanical Engineering at MIT are collaborating in an attempt to reproduce spider silk.

The focus of the work is on creating materials that could create the high-strength fibers needed for artificial tendons, specialty textiles and lightweight bullet-proof gear. A light, tough material like spider silk would be ideal. But unlike sheep or silkworms, spiders cannot be penned in together or raised as a group, making them difficult to domesticate. "They're territorial and cannibalistic," explained Pollock. Hence scientists' interest in producing artificial fibers with similar properties to spider silk.

Spider silk is known to be a polymer with two distinct alternating regions. One region is soft and elastic; the other forms small, hard crystallites. It is assumed that this unusual structure is largely responsible for spider silk's remarkable properties.

Basically, the chemical engineers are trying to get the soft region down while the mechanical engineers build the hard region. But dig this: "Scientists at Nexia, a small startup company, have been able to harvest spider silk from the milk of genetically altered goats." [pause...] What?

Baylor researchers are using a "camera pill" to view effects of drugs on parts of the digestive tract inaccesible to normal endoscopes.

The capsule endoscope, developed by Given Imaging, allows medical professionals to view the entire small intestine. The system uses a disposable miniature video camera contained in a capsule, which the patient swallows. The capsule passes through the digestive tract, transmitting color images, without interfering with the patient's normal activities.

That's a picture of it from the manufacturer's website. Tiny, ain't it? But if you really want to look closely, you need a microscope.

A UC Irvine research team has received a five-year, $1.4 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop a microscopic probe for detecting and treating pre-cancerous and malignant tumors in humans. Similar to the miniaturized vessel that explores a human body in the science fiction movie "Fantastic Voyage," this nano-sized probe would be inserted into a patient and then guided through the esophagus, stomach and colon to determine if tumors are growing on the wall of the intestine. The probe would be remotely controlled by a surgeon operating [...] an endoscope.

[...]

To view a tumor, the probe incorporates a technology called optical coherence tomography. This technology can create a visual impression of tissue structure and blood flow with a sharpness not possible using current scanning methods. "We have developed optical coherence tomography techniques that can show,in detail, blood flow through tiny vessels as well as microscopic changes in tissue," said Zhongping Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering at UCI's Beckman Laser Institute. "By coupling this imaging technology with a scanning microdevice that we can control with an endoscope, we may have arrived at an effective alternative to biopsy and visual screening for cancer."

And moving from the deep inside to the way outside, NASA released the first photograph ever taken of Earth from the Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter.

Cabinet Cleaning

Most of the discussion of the resignation of Christine "wind dummy" Whitman from the Environmental Protection Agency has centered around her reasons for leaving and her replacement. One of the names that has been floated by the administration is Josephine Cooper, the chief operating officer of the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers. Yes, you read that correctly. Hunter Thompson couldn't make this stuff up.

As to Ms. Whitman's reasons for leaving, I think TAPPED is probably onto something here.

But in truth, it won't really matter whom the White House picks to replace Whitman, for the very same reason Whitman resigned: With few exceptions, senior appointees at the cabinet departments and agencies have little role in forming policy anymore. The Bush administration, more than any in recent memory, has shifted decision-making away from senior appointees and towards K Street lobbyists; most big policy packages are put together behind closed doors, in meetings between senior White House personnel, industry officials, and the congressional leadership. For the most part, committee chairs, citizens groups, and senior appointees are have been frozen out.

How much influence did Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham have over the Bush energy plan two years ago? Zip. Secretary of Education Rod Paige was a bit player on Bush's education bill, which was forged by White House aides Sandy Kress and Nina Rees. Nobody in Washington thinks that Treasury Secretary John Snow is anything more than a spokesman for tax cuts ginned up in the West Wing. And of course, Whitman found herself overruled early and often by the White House.

In many ways, this is really a sea change in Washington culture. It used to be that cabinet jobs were, to some extent, plum positions for up-and-coming politicians and a stepping-stone of sorts. That was what Whitman thought she was getting into. And there are still exceptions, primarily in foreign and military affairs: There, a secretary with enough prestige or influence, like Donald Rumsfeld, can actually build a power base and accomplish something on his own. But on domestic policy, the cabinet secretaries are increasingly irrelevant. In Bush's Washington, where government appointees don't actually make much policy, they are depositories for no-name hacks and mediocrities.

I imagine it has been a very dispiriting couple of years for Ms. Whitman. EPA chief is a post that takes tremendous heat from somebody, no matter what the policies are and now you don't even get to influence the policies? How degrading would that be? With this administration, she was more of a tackling dummy than a wind dummy. I really do feel sorry for her. Not as sorry as I feel for the environment, but still...

I'm still waiting...

...and lunaville is getting impatient.

Cracks in the facade

From Republican senator Richard Lugar's op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post:

But transforming Iraq will not be easy, quick or cheap. Clearly, the administration's planning for the post-conflict phase in Iraq was inadequate. I am concerned that the Bush administration and Congress have not yet faced up to the true size of the task that lies ahead, or prepared the American people for it. The administration should state clearly that we are engaged in "nation-building."

Bush during the 2000 campaign:

"The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation-building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. [...] If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."

Lugar should watch his back. I imagine the knives are being sharpened on Pennsylvania Avenue as we speak.

"Warren G. Harding Is My Solace"

Of all the Christians who write overtly about their faith, I have always found Anne Lamott to be one of the most consistently thoughtful, humane, and touching. Her latest column at Salon finds her both optimistic and pessimistic about America.

When I got back, a lot of people were going around saying that the war in Iraq was over. Karl Rove said we didn't win the war in Iraq, we won the Battle of Iraq. In any case, now we're in the less festive, "everything has turned to shit" stage, the "granny getting wheeled off to the hospital in a wheelbarrow" stage. People are starting to badger us into "admitting" that the war was a good thing; also, that Bush is not as dumb as a lot of us think. I'd like to point out nicely that they also tried to get us to "admit" this about Ronald Reagan. What can you do in the face of this but just smile prettily? The important thing to remember is that we survived Ronald Reagan, and we will survive Bush. It gives me hope to remember this, because that was really scary -- under Reagan's happy-go-lucky demeanor was true malevolence. [apostropher: Now he's just one of the several thousand delusional people in this country who thinks he was actually President of the United States.] On the other hand, I don't think Bush can pull it off. He just doesn't have it. He's Alfred E. Newman in "Top Gun." He's still just a bad boy trying to redeem himself and his father.

Anne, I respect you and your opinions, but I see a mile-wide streak of malevolence in GWB that even that creaking gasbag Reagan couldn't muster. Bush strikes me as the type that swerves to hit cats, and I grew up around enough of those people to recognize it. But I stand side by side with you on this: there will be no "admitting" that this war was on balance a good thing or that Bush is a smart man. I have yet to see evidence of either.

Another thing that gives me hope is knowing that historically, what is done in secret will be brought to light. You can ask Jesus, or J.Edgar Hoover, or Clyde. This should scare our little Republican friends to death. History promises that the pendulum will swing back to the left. The truth of this smoke-and-mirrors, smirky, smug, pimping White House will be exposed. Everything always is. Even Warren Harding was popular when he died. We've been wearing glasses scratched with fear for nearly two years, but with no WMD, no Saddam, no Osama, people are beginning to see better.

I feel more despair in some areas, though. The White House actually seems to believe that it is fighting a holy war. By the same token, so did Pope Urban II. He thought the first crusade would be a breeze, that his forces were noble and heroic and of God, and that they would rescue everyone. He did not think about the aftermath, what effect the ripples from his rock would have on the pond. For 90 years people thought he'd won, and then we got a thousand years of rage between Christians and Muslims, endless death and brutality in the name of sanctimony and obsession.

[...]

But what gives me the most hope of all is that the more suffering and bullshit there is, the more good you see called forth -- caring, generosity, courage. For awhile, everyone seemed so afraid that they went along while our liberties were being stolen. But recently it's been possible to bank again on the knowledge that the American people really, truly love freedom. I think things will be harder for the right again. They've been crystal clear for a long time now on what they are up to, from Ashcroft trying to make the PATRIOT Act permanent, to Bush flogging his obscene tax cut and then landing on the aircraft carrier with his pleased-as-punch little turtley smirk. What's not clear is how many of us there are, and how hard we're willing to fight for this unbelievably touching, vulnerable experiment called democracy.

Hear, hear. I'm sick of seeing these smug pretenders proclaim that anybody who doesn't swallow their prescriptions hook, line, and sinker is somehow un-American. They don't get to redefine what "American" is and their program is profoundly undemocratic, to boot. They want you to believe that America was founded as a "Christian" nation, when nothing could be further from the truth. America was founded by Christians, along with a motley band of deists, agnostics, atheists, and the rest, and nearly all of them came here to escape "Christian" nations where the government and religion had become hopelessly entangled. And in every case throughout history where this entanglement has happened, religion, government, and the people all came out decidedly worse for the experience.

Bush and bin Laden are both fundamentalists staring across a theological divide at one another, perfectly willing to sacrifice both their own people and each other's because their god has told them to do so. If there is a Hell, they will be roommates in their own private Sartrean eternity where they can fight each other hand-to-hand. In the meantime, it's the rest of the world that gets to suffer through it. I still believe that Bush is deeply vulnerable in 2004 and that he stands no better than a 50% chance of winning a second term, but that doesn't mean that he hasn't made the world immensely more violent and dangerous for at least a generation. He has.

The toll rises. And rises. And rises.

The Bush administration and their cheering section have spent considerable time and energy publicly patting themselves on the back for the reportedly low rate of civilian deaths during the latest war in Iraq. Or rather, formerly reportedly low. The Christian Science Monitor reported today that a much more unpleasant picture has begun to emerge.

Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war, according to researchers involved in independent surveys of the country. None of the local and foreign researchers were willing to speak for the record, however, until their tallies are complete. Such a range would make the Iraq war the deadliest campaign for noncombatants that US forces have fought since Vietnam. Though it is still too early for anything like a definitive estimate, the surveyors warn, preliminary reports from hospitals, morgues, mosques, and homes point to a level of civilian casualties far exceeding the Gulf War, when 3,500 civilians are thought to have died.

[...]

A full accounting could take months, says CIVIC coordinator Marla Ruzicka, and the group is still compiling its data. But its volunteers have already recorded more than 1,000 civilian deaths in the southern town of Nasariyah, and almost as many in the capital. "In Baghdad, we have discovered 1,000 graves, and that is not the final figure," says Ali Ismail, a Red Crescent official. "Every day we discover more" where local residents say civilians were buried. Researchers say they have found particularly high levels of civilian casualties along the Euphrates River, between Nasariyah and Najaf, where US Marines fought their way toward Baghdad.

The administration tried desperately (and successfully) to convince the American public that this war was a response to the 2001 terrorist attacks, despite the fact that no evidence existed to link Iraq in any way to those events. Outrage over the loss of roughly 3000 innocent American lives was leveraged into support for a military operation that took at least twice as many innocent lives in a country that was utterly unrelated to the attacks.

There are no estimates of military deaths, but they are surely much higher. And that speaks to a larger issue that has troubled me since the beginning of the war: I understand why people make a distinction between the two, but how valid of a distinction is it in a country with a mostly conscript army? Those thousands of invisible Iraqi soldiers were people with children and wives and parents and friends, and we are talking about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of shattered families. And as Russell Smith writes in the NY Review of Books, the media blithely adopted the Pentagon's linguistic avoidance of this fact.

CNN was more irritating than the gleefully patriotic Fox News channel because CNN has a pretense of objectivity. It pretends to be run by journalists. And yet it dutifully uses all the language chosen by people in charge of "media relations" at the Pentagon. It describes the exploding of Iraqi soldiers in their bunkers as "softening up"; it describes slaughtered Iraqi units as being "degraded"; some announcers have even repeated the egregious Pentagon neologism "attrited" (to mean "we are slowly killing as many of them as we can"). I don't know if I'm more offended by the insidiousness of this euphemism or by the absurdity of its grammar.

To recite from a Pentagon press release that an Iraqi division has been "degraded by 70 percent" is an astounding abdication of journalistic responsibility. A journalist these days must not just report the facts, but also explain the news, give it color and significance. The graphic reality of "degradation" is a large pile of dismembered bodies. Surely some picture or explanation of what the wiping out of an entire division with high explosives actually looks like is called for.

Many readers and watchers of the news were baffled as the battle for Baghdad came suddenly upon us without any large-scale engagement with the dreaded Republican Guard. What happened to those three or five divisions that were supposedly ringing the city? The facts of their destruction were grudgingly mentioned almost in passing. They were destroyed from the air. This did not make a glamorous or even central story to anyone's coverage of this war, because there were no embedded reporters with the Iraqi troops. It's hard to get a TV camera into a line of trenches that is being puréed by bombs. Instead of reporting that this peripeteia in the war's narrative was happening, and that it entailed thousands of deaths leading to the rapid collapse of the Iraqi regime, the television and the press simply downsized the story. No pictures, no story. This is the real meaning of "degradation."

Rumsfeld boasts of our "precision bombing" but makes no mention of the extensive use of cluster bombs in civilian areas - decidedly imprecise bombs that send shrapnel over an area the size of a football field. These are the same bombs that have left unexploded bomblets scattered across Iraq and continue to kill and mutilate children. He speaks of eliminating WMD threats, but ignores the depleted uranium shells that showered a dry, windy country with radioactive dust - shells that have in the past shown to be contaminated with plutonium, a substance 100,000 times more toxic than uranium.

In other words, even as high as the death toll has been so far, it has not finished climbing. That doesn't even take into consideration the present and future avoidable deaths resulting from the collapse of the Iraqi medical system and the inaccessability of clean drinking water. So before any of us join in the government's orgy of self-congratulation for their "humane" war, we should examine just how humanitarian the situation actually is. And CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews are utterly unreliable examiners of that. They now bear more than a passing resemblance to Brezhnev-era Pravda.

Can I pay my Visa with my Mastercard?

Choice bits from Bill Moyers' interview with Molly Ivins:

MOYERS: This has come across, this fugitive flight of the Democrats, as some kind of, you know, Larry King's BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS meets the Texas legislature… it's sort of cornpone. But there are some serious issues here. I mean, you've got a $9 billion deficit down there. That's bigger than the budgets of many countries around the world.

IVINS: I know. And it's actually probably bigger than nine billion. And the Republicans because they have all got elected saying, "No new taxes. We'll never vote for new taxes." Now we've gotta try and take... basically $10 billion out of the state budget that's tighter than a tick to begin with.

I mean, you know, Texas prides most is that sometimes we're ahead of Mississippi. It's not as though there were a lot of fat in Texas government to begin with. And our state's motto has always been, "Low taxes, low services." And that's just the way we do it.

We barely tax people in Texas and they barely get any services. And Governor George W. Bush went off and, first of all, he did two huge tax cuts when he was governor. And then he walked off to Washington and left the state broke with no money in the Rainy Day Fund. Now, if we'd had six or seven billion in the Rainy Day Fund which is what states set aside for exactly this kind of economic downturn, we'd be a lot better off. We wouldn't be in such real pain. But getting $10 billion out of a state budget is real pain.

[...]

MOYERS: In fact, even as we talk here, the President, President George W. Bush, former Governor of Texas, is getting his second tax cut in three years. There are people who say that Texas under George W. Bush was the blueprint for the nation under George W. Bush. Do you think that's an apt comparison?

IVINS: I think the whole country's been turned into Texas. And Texas has always been the national laboratory for bad government. I mean, if you want to see a bad idea tried, we've tried it. Texas public policy is kind of like Hungarian wine. It does not travel well. You should not try taking it across the Red River.

Exactly. Had Bush actually had to run on his Texas record, not even the Supreme Court could have pulled out a victory for him. However, as governor of Texas, Bush was at least required to submit a balanced budget. Freed of that restraint, he and his merry band of men are busy doing some real damage. Yes, the Texasization of the federal government proceeds apace, as exemplified by Bush's drive to raise the federal debt limit:

The bill raising the debt limit is needed because the government has reached its current $6.4 trillion borrowing cap. The Treasury Department says it has run out of room for freeing up cash by shifting funds from various federal accounts, and must have the legal authority to borrow more money by May 28.

The $984 billion increase, to $7.38 trillion, would be the largest ever. Underlining how rapidly the government's books are deteriorating, Congress boosted the old debt limit by $450 billion only last year, following several years in which surpluses stabilized and actually shrank the debt slightly.

That makes almost 1.5 TRILLION dollars in new debt approved in just two years. "The bill raising the debt limit is needed." Or you could just submit a budget that actually was within the government's means instead of madly cutting taxes while furiously raising spending. "The Treasury Department says it has run out of room for freeing up cash by shifting funds from various federal accounts." Translation: we have run out of accounting tricks that hide the true size of the deficit, which is even larger than the catastrophe to which we'll admit.

Republicans want as little as possible to do with the borrowing spree because it angers many conservatives who form the base of their party. Accentuating that, the GOP-run House reinstated a rule this year — initiated years ago by Democrats — that makes House approval of an increased debt limit automatic when Congress completes the final version of its annual budget. Thus, the House never had a direct vote this year on boosting borrowing, but has signed off on doing so.

In another sign of the political heat involved, the proposed $984 billion boost likely would provide enough money to carry the government until late next year. That would let Congress avoid the issue again until after the November 2004 elections, when Bush will seek re-election and the GOP will defend its House and Senate majorities.

In other words, pay no attention to what we do, only to what we say, and what we say is whatever it takes to get re-elected. Are there any fiscal conservatives left in the Republican Party? If so, they are deep undercover. This all would be bad enough, but Daily Kos notes that it's even worse than meets the eye:

And speaking of the tax cut, check this out:

Many of the cuts are scheduled to expire after a few years, despite the overwhelming likelihood that lawmakers never would let that occur and be accused of raising taxes. A reduction in the taxes people pay on corporate dividends and capital gains would end in 2009; other cuts in individuals' income taxes would last only through 2004.

We all knew they would use sunset provisions to make the tax cut fit into the artificial $350 billion Voinovich needs to cave in to Bush gracefully. But note what gets sunsetted -- not the dividend and capital gain reductions (which help the wealthy), but the individual income tax reductions. That's because it would be relatively easy for Congress to repeal the corporate tax decreases. Those cuts in the personal income taxes will not be repealed in a million years. This plan will cost our treasury hundreds of billions more.

You pair this kind of drunken borrowing/spending orgy with Ashcroft, the PATRIOT Act, etc., and I have to wonder how the Republicans ever get even one vote from anybody with libertarian leanings. I can make sense of it only if the issue you care about above all others is owning an automatic weapon. Because on every other single issue, the Democrats are demonstrably more libertarian than the Republicans - less socially restrictive and entirely better economic stewards. You might think you get taxed less with the GOP, but when it's all being borrowed, you'll end up paying for it eventually. With interest.

UPDATE (7:21 pm): My Libertarian boss says, "And health care." Which I reckon is correct. However, he goes the pox-on-both-your-houses route and votes for Libertarians, so he can't be plausibly accused of logical inconsistency.

GOP = Growth Optional Party

A commenter at Daily Kos linked to this MSNBC story that contains a chart of the various recessions the US economy has undergone since WWII. He added in the party that occupied the White House during each recession and the results show:

'45-'53 D (Truman) 11 months
'53-'61 R (Ike) 27 months
'61-'69 D (JFK/LBJ) 1 month (ended at start of JFK)
'69-'77 R (Nixon/Ford) 27 months
'77-'81 D (Carter) 6 months
'81-'93 R (Reagan/Bush) 24 months
'93-'01 D (Clinton) 0 months
'01-'03 R (WBush) 6+ months

Add them up and you get 18 months out of 28 years for Democrats and 84 months out of 29 years for Republicans. That's 5% of Democratic years in recession versus 24% of Republican years in recession, or a year and a half versus seven whole years. Being intellectually honest about all of this, the causes of recessions are rather more complicated than simply which party occupies the executive branch. However, intellectual honesty (or for that matter, honesty of any sort) has never been a hallmark of this administration, especially during an election campaign. This is a soundbite worth repeating. And repeating. And repeating.

UPDATE (3:13 pm): Or, over 82% of the time that the US economy has been in recession since WWII has been during a Republican administration.

Jiminy Cricket!

As I drove in to work this morning, the BBC was reporting on the controversial cricket match between England and Zimbabwe. While I understand the political controversy surrounding the match, the details of the game itself may as well have been delivered in Swahili for all the sense it made to me (and most Americans, I suspect). Here's a sample from an earlier match between Australia and the West Indies:

Andrew Symonds and Michael Clarke both struck good half-centuries as world champions Australia scored a competitive 258 for four off their allotted fifty overs in the third One-Day International against the West Indies in St Lucia. After being put into bat, Symonds hit 75 and Clarke struck an unbeaten 75 as Australia milked a under-strength bowling attack, lacking Vasbert Drakes. Symonds hammered nine fours in his 82-ball knock and Clarke hit six boundaries in his 100-ball knock. Symonds and Clarke shared in an 99 run fourth-wicket stand before Symonds was clean bowled middle and leg stump with a full length delivery from Chris Gayle in the 36th over.

Umm, okay. Granted, I could talk in depth about basketball or football and it would sound like total gibberish to anybody unfamiliar with those sports as well. But the question that struck me was: are we the only part of the former British Empire that doesn't play cricket? So I looked, and of course, there is a USA Cricket Association and apparently the second National Championship will take place in Chicago this August. Who knew?

While wandering around the USACA's website, I came across this page of universities with cricket clubs, which contained the lead sentence: "Cricket is still the sport of choice for many students in most of Universities in the United States of America." I guess it all depends on your definitions of the words "still," "choice," "many," "most," and "in."

Big Brother's Even Bigger Brother

Few things have come issuing from the bowels of the Washington security apparatus creepier than DARPA's Total Information Awareness program, which would collect huge amounts of information on US citizens. It created something of an uproar, and justifiably so, as the information they would be collecting on you and me and everybody else includes airline ticket purchases, library records, online activities, financial, education, medical and housing records and anything dealing with fingerprints, the irises of eyes, facial shapes and gait. And it is run by that paragon of trustworthiness, John Poindexter, who was convicted of lying to Congress. This is beyond Stalin's wildest dreams.

So do they scale it back, or even better, eliminate it outright? No, of course not. They just change the name to Terrorist Information Awareness. No, I'm not kidding. "Silly paranoid boy, it's only terrorists that have anything to worry about from this." But wait, it gets even more disturbing. Noah Shachtman reports at Wired News on another Pentagon project starting up, LifeLog.

The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.

All of this -- and more -- would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health.

This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to "trace the 'threads' of an individual's life," to see exactly how a relationship or events developed, according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog's sponsor.

DARPA's own proposal page on the program is here. Eek.

MCI stands for...

...May Create Insolvency.

After committing the largest fraud in the history of corporate accounting, to the tune of 11 billion dollars in fake reported earnings, MCI/WorldCom gets a fine of $500 million, and the US government awards them a contract to build a cellular phone network in Iraq, despite the fact that the company "has never actually built a mobile phone network before, and most countries offering new telecoms licenses tend to require that bidders have previous cellular network operating experience."

...McCarthyism Creeps In

But of all the reasons not to do business with MCI/WorldCom, the Danny Glover flap is the very dumbest. I was staggered to hear otherwise mentally unchallenged people make the argument that opposing an invasion of Iraq equalled supporting Saddam. Now we have to hear it about Cuba as well? You don't have to like Fidel to think that invading Cuba is a bad idea. After the past year, I believe it's time for the right to officially put their "political correctness" hobbyhorse out to pasture. They used to have a point, but they have moved so far beyond boring old college campus political correctness that they make it seem quaint and charming by comparison. "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last?"

Quick hits

Recommended reading:

At the Whiskey Bar, Billmon recounts the United States' bloody recent history in Latin America and how the men with the bloodiest hands of all are now running our Middle East policy.

Daily Kos runs down the evidence and it's a slam-dunk, open-and-shut case: on both the federal and state level, Democrats are the more fiscally conservative party.

Wampum puts the smack down on the argument that Republican administrations are better at creating jobs. In fact, they have a terrible record at it. Example:

The Collective Lounge links to this invaluable and comprehensive rundown of the evidence behind all of the myriad Bush scandals. Definitely worth a bookmark for future reference.

At the Left Coaster, Steve Soto looks at the misuse of the Department of Homeland Security to track down the missing Texas Democrats. Tom Ridge announced an internal investigation of the matter, and guess who he appointed to lead it: an unsuccessful Republican Congressional candidate from Houston. It's not like he'd have any personal interest in Texas redistricting, eh?

Jeanne D'Arc looks at the Bush administrations much-touted AIDS package and finds that when you get past the rhetoric and down to the numbers it is actually a funding cut. Quelle surprise.

And finally, Baghdad blogger Salam Pax has just returned from a three-day humanitarian tour through southern Iraq and is back with a long post and pictures. Don't miss it.

First, stop digging.

In addition to being a gross violation of privacy, drug testing high school students doesn't slow down their drug use one bit.

[T]he new federally financed study of 76,000 students nationwide, by far the largest to date, found that drug use is just as common in schools with testing as in those without it.

"It suggests that there really isn't an impact from drug testing as practiced," Dr. Lloyd D. Johnston, a study researcher from the University of Michigan, said. "It's the kind of intervention that doesn't win the hearts and minds of children. I don't think it brings about any constructive changes in their attitudes about drugs or their belief in the dangers associated with using them."

The prevalence of drug use in schools that tested for drugs and those that did not was so similar that it surprised the researchers, who have been paid by the government to track student behavior for nearly 30 years and whose data on drug use is considered highly reliable.

[...]

The same pattern held for every other drug and grade level. Whether looking at marijuana or harder drugs like cocaine and heroin, or middle school pupils compared with high school students, the fact that their schools tested for drugs showed no signs of slowing their drug use.

Imagine that - kids behave just like adults and learn how to beat the tests. So these incredibly expensive programs that accomplish precisely nothing (not unlike the results-free D.A.R.E. program) and that administrators and school boards are petrified to axe will just keep right on eating up educational dollars that could be used for, say, teachers' salaries or library books or fixing crumbling buildings. Instead, a bunch of officeholders get to go home and run on the misbegotten notion that they were tough on drugs and helped clean up our schools. Lovely.

Pie-rotechnics

A few days back over at The Poor Man, Andrew Northrup posted a 750-word rant wherein he very forcefully made the case that water boils more quickly if the pot containing said water is covered. And he means it, dammit.

I know most of you think that a pot lid is just a decorative accessory that is included with your pot for some arcane reason known only to pot manufacturers and enthusiasts, but most of you don't have the brains God gave a styrofoam cup. So you can believe my explanation and empirical data or not, but if I ever see you boiling water without using a pot lid, I'm going to beat you to death with it, and no jury in the world would convict me.

It may be time for Andrew to adjust his coffee bean mix to half decaf, but that's not for me to say, nor is it a salient point of this post. I have no dog in the lidded versus lidless fight as it pertains to water preparation (eyes are another matter altogether), but should I ever find myself making instant oatmeal for Mr. Northrup, I'll be sure to cover the pot to most efficiently speed its rise to 212°. Being beaten to death with one's own cookware seems a particularly ignominious way to shuffle off this mortal coil.

What his screed did remind me of, however, was my own scientific/culinary discovery from a couple of years ago. I was dating a woman that was very much a partisan of the Mrs. Smith's Razzleberry Pie - one of those big frozen mothers that takes about an hour in the oven. Until now. I proved beyond a shadow of doubt that it takes only 1/3 of that time if and only if you are in possession of the magic formula.

1. Set the oven temperature to 375° Fahrenheit.
2. Get very distracted - in my experience, Bombay Sapphire London Dry Gin helps significantly with this step - and turn the dial to broil instead of bake.
3. Place the pie on the center rack of the oven and engage in conversation. If you are alone in your house, television may serve the same purpose, but I have not tested the process under those conditions, so your mileage may vary.
4. When you begin to smell smoke (and believe me, you will), carefully remove the pie from the oven with flameproof mitts, run to the back porch, and break off the black, smoldering crust around the edges of what will now be an extremely unfrozen pie.

Vanilla ice cream proved subsequently to be a worthy companion to (a surprisingly edible) charbroiled pie. Remember - I get royalties if you publish this in a cookbook.

Spin the lazy susan...

...bring on the new spinwhore.

Ari Fleischer Resigns

It would be good news if it mattered one bit. But it doesn't.

I'm sensing a pattern.

Lies.

Lies, lies, lies, lies.

Lies.

Lies.

Lies.

What's the word? Oh right, pathological. So where's the so-called liberal media on this? I guess when you have your nose shoved that far up Bush's butt it's difficult to get the microphone in front of your mouth.

Least Surprising Headline Ever

NY Times: In Reversal, Plan for Iraq Self-Rule Has Been Put Off

Today's decision to extend allied control indefinitely over the governing of Iraq was conveyed to Iraqi political figures as the United States and Britain worked assiduously at the United Nations to win broad international consensus for a resolution to lift economic sanctions on Iraq, in order to begin selling oil to finance reconstruction.

Key word: indefinitely. The sanctions have always been a bad idea; they harmed nobody but civilians and entrenched Saddam in power by making the entire state dependent upon the government for distribution of necessities. Of course they should be lifted. But calling a spade a spade, lifting of sanctions is primarily to direct those oil profits to Bechtel, Halliburton, and the rest of our corporate carrion-eaters. They don't work for free, you know. Ever.

So the cantakerous part of me would like the U.N. to say, "George, Tony, you can have the sanctions removed just as soon as you can definitively prove that Iraq is completely free of banned weapons. And Rumsfeld's axiom that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' will be the standard of proof. Now get to work proving it and by the way, pay those guys out of your own national budgets."

Y'know, you broke it, you fix it with your own money is pretty much standard. Oops, we don't have any! Fresh out, wouldn't you just know it? Hey guys, sorry about all those sewer systems, water mains, power grids, hospitals, schools, roads, television stations, telephone systems, radio towers, and bridges, but don't sweat it, you guys have a ton of money in the ground to pay us to fix it all back up. We'll get that knocked out in, oh, an indefinite amount of time. Don't y'all worry 'bout a thing.

Speaking of Rumsfeld, here's an excellent rundown of his prior dealings with Saddam Hussein and Iraq's military, and let's just say that while his knowledge of Iraq's chemical weapons program goes back a long way, his denunciations thereof do not.

The Bill Is Due

Atrios reminds us of this quote from Bill O'Reilly:

"If we don't find weapons of mass destruction in a week....allright?...and tons of them...I'll apologize to the American people...hell, I'll resign."

Let the emails begin! Write early, write often. Forward this to your friends. Put it on your blog. Make their inbox groan. oreilly@foxnews.com

UPDATE (1:13 pm): That quote is not accurate. Here's the actual quote: "And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again, all right?" All the same, nothing has been found and the ones doing the searching, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, has given up and left, so I want my apology and a pledge not to trust this administration again.

Stripped and Plastered

Sculptor Antony Gormley has an exhibit opening this weekend in England called Domain Field.

For his latest project Gormley took [plaster] moulds of a cross-section of naked people from the ages of two to 85 to act as the base for hundreds of metal sculptures. [...] The moulds were used as the foundation for Gormley to then produce metal sculptures from thin stainless steels strips which will fill an entire floor of the gallery.

"They have been welded together to create 'T' patterns to create what I call a random matrix within the volume of the mould of each person," the artist told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "Its kind of like an energy field or a kind of electricity that is created by these trajectories."

I love large, abstract works like this, and this one looks just gorgeous, but what caught my eye about this article was the following quote from one of the models: "You're never normally asked on a Tuesday morning to get stripped off and covered in cling film and then get plastered." True enough. The times I've been stripped and covered in plastic wrap, I was generally plastered already (insert rimshot).

You should also take some time and wander through Gormley's website to help put this work in perspective. He's been working with representations of the human form for many years, and many of the photographs of his other installations are hauntingly beautiful, despite their vaguely disturbing edge. Gormley wrote the following about his 1999 work The Insiders:

What is an Insider? An Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body - attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture - to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate.

The idea is that the pieces carry in concentrated form the trace of the body and its passage through life. This has a direct relationship to pain. I see these reduced forms as antennae for a particular kind of resilience that exists within all of us, that allows us to bear suffering but is itself created through painful experience. There is no judgement about this. Their bareness is not the nakedness that reveals the flesh, it is the result of having had the flesh taken away, a loss which is not sentimentalised, but accepted. The Insider tries to up the ante between being and nothingness.

This process of objective mathematical reduction leads to a particular form of abstraction, a found object never revealed before and certainly not invented. It is a body that lies within all of us. The Insider suggests also that the most intimate is the most strange, that inside each of us is a self that we would maybe rather not recognise and constitutes a kind of third man, the Insider as alien witness.

(BBC link found at t-melt)

Uri Avnery on Arafat

Israeli peace activist (and former soldier and Knesset member) Uri Avnery, who has a long personal relationship with Yasser Arafat, explains how the American and Israeli attempts to shunt Arafat to the side have ended up doing precisely the opposite.

But the main thing is that Arafat's standing with his own people is now stronger than ever. Curiously enough, it is the appointment of a Prime Minister that has caused this. The appointment of Abu-Mazen, which was intended by Sharon and Bush to "weaken" Arafat and to "push him aside", has had the opposite effect.

This requires an explanation. For years now, a continuous and concentrated campaign to demonize Arafat has been conducted in Israel and the West. In the ten years since Oslo, millions of words have been spoken and written about him in the Israeli media, and I don't recall one single word of praise. He has been systematically described as a terrorist, tyrant, dictator, corrupt liar, a cheat and what not. In particular he was represented as the man who said "no" to the unprecedentedly generous offers of Ehud Barak and President Clinton, which "proves" that in reality his aim is to destroy Israel. Those who have been fed with this propaganda cannot understand why Palestinians adore him. The answer is: for the very same reasons.

In the eyes of the Palestinians - almost all of them - Arafat is a fearless leader, who stands firm in the most difficult circumstances; a man who has the guts to say "no" to the demands of the mighty of the world to betray fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. He has confronted the rulers of the Arab world without flinching; at Camp David he stood up to immense pressure from Clinton and Barak without yielding; he held out in the terrible conditions of the siege of his Ramallah compound without breaking.

Palestinians, like all Arabs, like all peoples, admire personal courage. Arafat has proven his courage in conditions that no other leader in the world has had to face. He has come to symbolize the steadfastness of the whole Palestinian people. That is the source of his authority, even in the eyes of his many critics on the right and on the left.

This authority is essential for Abu-Mazen's political effectiveness. Unlike Arafat, Abu-Mazen is popular in the West. He radiates moderation and readiness for compromise. This is the face the West wants to see. The two of them are a bit like Ben-Gurion and Sharett in the early days of Israel. Ben-Gurion was the idol of the Israeli public, while Sharett was popular on the international stage.

Abu-Mazen is accepted by the Palestinian public. If another person had assumed office under such circumstances, he would have been suspected of being a collaborator. But Abu-Mazen is known as a Palestinian patriot, and is respected as one of the founders of the Fatah movement. Even in extreme demonstrations, I did not hear shouts of protest against him. However, he is not a charismatic leader and has no solid political base.

That is why Abu-Mazen needs Arafat. Without his solid backing, Abu-Mazen will neither be able to make concessions abroad nor to act forcefully at home. More than ever, Arafat is essential for progress on the road to peace.

Abu Mazen can't make peace without Arafat and Sharon will never make peace while Arafat is there. And we are right back to square one. When Sharon was elected, I said to my friends that it was the beginning of a permanent state of war. I have a more dim view of Arafat than Avnery does, but I also realize that he really is the only person with whom substantive negotiations could occur. Israel, on the other hand, is not embodied by Sharon in the same manner. It looks to me as though the standoff will continue until a new Israeli prime minister comes to power.

He looks cold.

Stoutdem links to this, this, um, this bit of, er -- well, damn, words fail me. Just go look at it. I'm assuming it is satirical, but with the current crop of GOPers, you really can never be sure.

Grassroots Journalism

Over at Quark Soup, David Appell is asking 40 readers to donate $5 to finance an investigative article he's been researching on Big Sugar instead of shopping it around to magazine editors (and he's a well-published writer).

I've decided to try an experiment in independent journalism.

About two weeks ago I wrote about the Sugar Association's claim that a recent World Health Organization study on diet was not the full story. The Sugar Association is lobbying Congress to pressure WHO, asking them to hold back their approximately $400 million in annual funds.

In other words, this is big politics, big science, and big money.

I've been investigating this story, and have talked to several nutritionists, have read the papers, and have listened to the Sugar Association. There is more to this story than what you've read so far, information I haven't seen presented anywhere else.

This concept was employed successfully by Christopher Albritton to finance his recent journalism from Iraq. You see "Take Back the Media" bumper stickers all the time, but this is the real deal: the democratization of information. I've made my donation.

President Vader Speaks

Go see gwbush04.com's re-edit of Bush's speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Sure, it's over the top, but isn't that the point of satire? And really, is it any sillier than Bush's mooseknuckle? The socks go on your feet, George.

UPDATE (5/15, 12:44 pm): In the comments, Stu from t-melt.com pointed me toward another very funny GWB re-mix, this one from the State of the Union address. Somehow I'd missed it, but it's worth the download time as well.

Judicial Jujitsu

Ellen Goodman, who is usually a tad too milquetoast for my tastes, is on target with her latest.

At the White House last week, Bush declared a crisis in the judiciary. "Highly qualified judicial nominees are waiting years to get an up-or-down vote from the United States Senate." He blamed it on "obstructionist tactics."

Well, first of all, declaring a crisis doesn't make a crisis. We aren't looking at empty seats all over the federal courthouses of America. The number of vacancies is the lowest in 13 years. As for obstructionists, the Senate has already approved 98.4 percent of his nominations -- 22 circuit court nominees and 101 district court judges.

And this isn't just politics at play. Priscilla Owen and Miguel Estrada are getting all the limelight at the moment due to the ongoing filibusters, but they are only the tip of iceberg, and the submerged part is even uglier. Remember, these are lifetime appointments we are discussing here.

Consider California's Carolyn Kuhl, a judge who dismissed a claim that a woman's privacy was violated when her doc invited a drug company rep to witness her breast exam without consent. Or James Leon Holmes, the former president of Arkansas Right to Life who wrote "the wife is to subordinate herself to her husband." Or William Pryor, the current Alabama attorney general who believes that "God has chosen through his son Jesus Christ, this time and this place for all Christians... to save our country and save our courts." Are these mainstream jurists who should be waved onto the higher bench with nary an unkind word?

Why no. No, they are not. They are largely fundamentalist wackos (yes, I know, Department of Redundancy Department) who shouldn't be allowed within 200 yards of a gavel. Bush can complain all he likes - and apparently he likes it quite a lot - but the Democrats have been more than accomodating, and entirely more so than the Republicans were with Clinton's appointments.

But the award for the most brazen hypocrite on the issue of federal judges? Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Orrin Hatch and his amazing mutating blue slip policy.

But do they like show tunes?

I guess the Boy Scouts won't be visiting the Zurich Zoo this month.

People who consider homosexuality to be "unnatural" might be forced to reconsider after a visit to Zurich zoo. As part of the city's "Warm May" festival, the zoo is offering guided tours dealing with homosexuality among animals.

[...]

Unfortunately the decision to schedule the tour for the early evening meant that most of the zoo's inhabitants were favouring sleep over any form of amorous activity. But, despite the lack of first-hand evidence, tour guide Myriam Schärz assures her audience that gay and lesbian activity is a common part of animal life.

"I don't know of any species that is exclusively heterosexual," says Schärz. "There are studies of this going back hundreds of years, although scientists were previously reluctant to explore the matter further for fear that they would themselves be branded gay."

During the entertaining one-hour tour, Schärz recites evidence from American biologist Bruce Bagemihl's groundbreaking 1999 study "Biological Exuberance" which documented homosexual activity in more than 450 animal species.

So much for the "crime against nature" argument. And before the American Talibanis trot out the same tired rejoinders, they are all knocked down pretty effectively here. Which brings to us the central question: why does the issue of homosexuality, above all others, get those folks so inflamed? As someone who grew up in Southern Baptist churches, I can assure you that it certainly doesn't have anything to do with scripture:

An Engineering professor is treating her husband, a loan officer, to dinner for finally giving in to her pleas to shave off the scraggly beard he grew on vacation. His favorite restaurant is a casual place where they both feel comfortable in slacks and cotton-polyester blend golf shirts. But, as always, she wears the gold and pearl pendant he gave her the day her divorce to her first husband was final. They're laughing over their menus because they know he always ends up diving into a giant plate of ribs, but she won't be talked into anything more fattening than shrimp.

Quiz: How many Biblical prohibitions are they violating? Well, wives must be "submissive" to their husbands (I Peter 3:1). And all women are forbidden to teach men (I Timothy 2:12), wear gold or pearls (I Timothy 2:9) or dress in clothing that "pertains to a man" (Deuteronomy 22:5). Shellfish and pork are definitely out (Leviticus 11:7,10), as are usury (Deuteronomy 23:19), shaving (Leviticus 19:27) and clothes of more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19). And since the Bible rarely recognizes divorce, they're committing adultery, which carries the rather harsh penalty of death by stoning (Deuteronomy 22:22).

That's right, eating shellfish is listed as an "abomination" as well, but I don't see Fred Phelps out picketing the Red Lobster. Well, I've always had my own theory about why this gets their panties in such a wad, and now the American Psychological Association agrees.

Research by US psychologists suggests that 80 percent of men who are homophobic have secret homosexual feelings. This finding lends scientific support to the long-standing speculation that those who shout the loudest against homosexuality have something to hide. The research results were published in the prestigious Journal of Abnormal Psychology, with the backing of the American Psychological Association.

In tests conducted by Prof. Henry E. Adams of the University of Georgia, homophobic men who said they were exclusively heterosexual were shown gay sex videos. Four out of five became sexually aroused by the homoerotic imagery, as recorded by a penile circumference measuring device - a plethysmograph. Prof. Adams says his research shows that most homophobes "demonstrate significant sexual arousal to homosexual erotic stimuli," suggesting that homophobia is a form of "latent homosexuality where persons are either unaware of or deny their homosexual urges."

[...]

Prof. Adams tested a group of men who expressed homophobic attitudes, and who said they were exclusively heterosexual and had never had any homosexual experiences or fantasies. He wired these men to a plethysmograph. This is a calibrated, elasticated band which is fitted around the penis and detects any change in its size. Prof. Adams then showed the men three sets of sexually-explicit videos: heterosexual, lesbian and gay male.

In response to the gay sex videos, Prof. Adams found that 20 percent of the homophobic men showed no erection, 26 percent showed moderate erection, and 54 percent showed strong erection. By comparison, a control group of non-homophobic straight men produced very different reactions: 66 percent didn't get aroused, 10 percent got slightly turned on, and 24 percent had definite hard-ons.

The response to the heterosexual video was also interesting. The homophobic group got less aroused by the heterosexual porn flicks than the non-homophobic group; which suggests that homophobia correlates with dysfunctional heterosexuality and impaired heterosexual erotic capability.

I'll take Delicious Irony for $1000, Alex.

iLoo, uLoo, We All Loo for iLoo

Yes, yes, I know, three posts is entirely more attention than this story deserves, but it's just so damn strange. Microsoft has retracted its statement that the iLoo was a hoax and admitted that it was a real project that they pulled after folks like me cued the laugh track.

On Monday, the world's largest software maker had said the "iLoo," which was described in minute detail in an April 30 press release by its British subsidiary, was a hoax and apologized for any "confusion or offense."

But on Tuesday Microsoft switched its story and said that the iLoo had been a legitimate project by its British MSN Internet service that was terminated after the initial announcement prompted controversy, ridicule and disgust.

Concept sketch is here.

In Perpetuity

As an undergrad in the late eighties, I spent a couple of years working at a late-night greasy spoon called Hector's. For Chapel Hill locals, this was when it was on the ground floor, before it burned and was rebuilt upstairs. The restaurant was owned by three brothers from Greece - Steve, Mike, and . . . Mike (no, I'm not making that up - they were Americanizations of Sevastros, Nomikos, and Mikhael) - and about 3/4 of the employees were Arab.

I was closest to a fellow named Ali, who had recently arrived in the US from Morocco and had just begun learning English, though he picked it up with nearly superhuman speed. The first Palestinian intifada was in full swing and I was enrolled in a couple of Middle Eastern polisci classes, so I asked Ali what he thought it would take for peace to take root there.

He looked at me as though I were making a joke, then replied, "Russ, there is no solution. For the rest of your life, there will be blood in that sand. If God himself came down to make peace, he would be shot at by both sides. Holy lands make people crazy." He then laid out his three reasons:

1. There would never be a two-state solution that both sides could accept and the current situation could never bring peace.

2. If the Israelis pushed all the Palestinians out, they would never have peace with the rest of the Middle East.

3. The Palestinians would never be strong enough to expel the Israelis and if they somehow did, they would then just turn their guns on each other.

I understood his argument, but my idealistic 20-year-old brain simply could not accept such a glum appraisal. There just had to be a workable solution. Fifteen years later, I may reluctantly be joining his camp. Neither side can oust the other, and peaceful co-existence seems unachievable. Bush's road map is deader than a doornail, because Sharon knows Karl Rove intends to wrap up the pro-Israel vote and therefore will not enforce any concessions. Peacekeeping troops only make sense when there is some measure of peace to be kept and the zealots on both sides don't want peace in any event.

The web is filled with nasty, name-calling arguments over this where both sides consider the other nearly sub-human. Atrocities on one side are countered with atrocities on the other, and the looniest factions from both sides are regularly trotted out as evidence of the moral inadequacy of an entire people. Somehow, the Palestinian cause has become equated with leftism and the Israeli cause with rightism, though the associations are barely tenable at best. Regardless of the accuracy of the labels, unsubtle streaks of racism are beginning to invade the words of both.

All the attempts to claim a moral high ground for either side are absurd - the extreme military disadvantage of the Palestinians does not equate to a moral advantage and the Israelis cannot honestly claim that the other side is alone in terrorizing civilians. Two nations are at war, they are each using what means they have available, neither shows any real restraint in exercising them, and innocent people from both sides bear the brunt of it all. The Israeli demand that the PA control violence is ludicrous after the IDF has destroyed their ability to do so. The Palestinian demands for Israel to return to indefensible borders amidst the violence make just as little sense.

Sometimes problems have a null solution set. Unfortunately, this seems to be one of them. The majority of Israelis and Arabs are good, decent people who just want to be left alone to live their lives and raise their children, and yet, year after year, decade after decade, they are consistently trumped by the zealots. And with every death, the zealots on each side grow stronger.

Overly pessimistic? Well, I sure hope so. My imagination has certainly failed me before (for example, I thought I would never see a president worse than Reagan). I want to believe, but the level of discourse about the whole situation has sunk to such levels of bile and venom that I just want to turn away from the entire thing. And that's here - halfway around the world from the conflict.

Holy lands make people crazy.

Iranian Blogging

I've been pretty absorbed recently by BlogShares, the fantasy stock market where you buy and sell shares of blogs rather than companies. The NBA season is almost over and I don't do fantasy baseball, which would mean a long fantasy-geekless summer waiting for the NFL to start. Go ahead, laugh - I'm used to it. I broke the six-figure mark today, which ain't too shabby for starting with $500 three weeks ago. Too bad the real market isn't so easy to game.

But one thing I have noticed is a staggering number of blogs that are subdomained under persianblog.com. I mean a freaking tidal wave. They are all in Farsi, so I can't read a single word on any of them, or even glean what topics are even being addressed. I'm curious, though...

Killer D's

Over at Political State Report, Charles Kuffner details the editorial response to the Democratic walkout in Texas from papers around the Lone Star State, and finds them mostly laying the blame at the feet of the Republican Party. And writing from Austin, Molly Ivins weighs in, opining that "stopping the legislature from functioning at this point is high public service."

We all knew going in that some terribly hard choices would have to be made, but what in the name of heaven was the governor thinking when he had handicapped people arrested? These were citizens who came to their capital to protest budget cuts affecting them, and they get arrested. Maybe it was because they were in wheelchairs -- don't even have to be hauled away, they can just be rolled away.

Most of us thought it was pretty funny when Rep. Debbie Riddle popped out with her now-classic statement: "Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell."

Amusing as that was, the House has been doing its dead-level best to destroy both public education and public health. They've taken 250,000 poor children off the Children's Health Insurance Program, and the schools are in dire straits. As the Austin American-Statesman pointed out in an editorial, these same fine thinkers did manage to find $10 million to appropriate for cow research and $300 million for Gov. Perry to woo companies to Texas.

Of course, there have been some lovely moments we can celebrate, like the day Speaker Tom Craddick decided that the new ethics reform law should be debated in a backroom, closed-door session. Amazingly enough, the proposed ethics law was weakened and watered down behind the closed doors.

I think a special salute for clear thinking should go to the House for its amazing decision to cut the program that pays for medications for mentally ill people who are out of prison on probation or parole. Is this brilliant? Now these people will be wandering around the state without their meds.

The latest flap is over a congressional redistricting map that is so bad it's actually funny. Of course, the thing was passed without public hearings, because as Rep. Joe Crabb explained, "The rest of us would have a very difficult time if we were out in an area -- other than Austin or other English-speaking areas -- to be able to have committee hearings or to be able to converse with people that did not speak English." Sometimes you have to wonder what planet these people are from.

It is high time Democrats started fighting back. This might seem like a state issue, but the redistricting plan comes straight from Karl Rove's DC strategy room, as did the Colorado one, and if Democrats should take any lesson from 2-1/2 years with GWB at Pennsylvania Avenue, it is that cooperating with this generation's Republicans will earn you nothing but a knife in the back. Just ask Max Cleland.

There was a time that the national Republican Party was full of people with whom I disagreed, but still respected as honorable men and women who voted their consciences (the state parties have always been an entirely different basket of nutjobs). But the Bob Doles, George Schultzes, and Howard Bakers are long gone, replaced by scaly thugs like Tom DeLay, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Cheney. The Lee Atwaterization of the GOP is complete, and the party has been remade in the image of Richard Nixon: paranoid, amoral, vengeful, above the law, and with an enemies list never more than an arm's length away. And nobody is channelling Nixon harder than the man currently living in the White House.

Puh-leeze...

You have got to be kidding me.

PHOENIX (AP) - The local branch of cable provider Cox Communications has refused to air a television commercial critical of President Bush's tax cut plan that re-enacts a blood plasma drive held to help pay a teacher's salary.

The spot was turned down because Cox officials in Phoenix found the commercial "in poor taste," said Andrea Katsenes, company spokeswoman.

The ad recreates an event in Eugene, Ore., last month in which 50 parents lined up outside a clinic to sell their blood plasma to help pay a teacher's salary.

In poor taste, huh? Unlike, say, a close-up of chewed-up beef jerky hitting a truck windshield? Unlike a clown drinking Bud Light through his ass then asking for a hot dog? Unlike Cedric the Entertainer knocking a portapotty down a hill with his girlfriend inside? Somehow I don't think poor taste was the criterion being applied here.

Damned liberal media.

Oh yeah, in case you'd like to tell them what you think, here is the Phoenix contact page.

(original link via Atrios)

UPDATE (6:15 pm): A friend of mine beat me to writing Cox Cable about this, and got back the following email:

-----
Dear Mr. XXXXXXX:

Thank you for your recent e-mail to Cox Communications.

We appreciate your feedback regarding the MoveOn.org advertisement opposing proposed tax cuts.

Please be assured that Cox Communications' initial decision not to run this advertisement had nothing to do with political affiliation or taking a position on the tax debate.

To clarify, Cox Communications representatives based their initial decision not to run this advertisement on the script received. After viewing a tape of the advertisement, we have reversed this decision and will be airing the advertisement.

Thank you again for contacting us via e-mail. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Tamela
E-Care Specialist
Cox Communications - Phoenix
www.cox.com/phoenix
-----

Well, whaddaya know? Writing works! And here's the ad.

Debunked

Not surprisingly, the iLoo turns out to be a hoax, but oddly enough, one perpetrated by the British division of MSN.

Stating the Case, Casing the States

Looks like things are about to get ugly in the Texas legislature, where 51 Democratic legislators are planning on leaving the state in order to break the chamber's quorum and bring all pending legislation to a halt.

"I guess we will be called obstructionists, or maybe worse. But we are making a statement," said the South Texas legislator. "If this is going to be the only way to stop bad legislation from being rammed down our throats, then so be it."

Legislative leaders have three weeks left in the regular session and major pieces of legislation still pending. The breaking of a quorum hasn't been used in more than 20 years as a parliamentary maneuver, officials said.

Such a move would require at least 51 members to be absent from Monday's session, scheduled to convene at 9 a.m., for House activity to be brought to a halt. The Texas House cannot convene without at least two-thirds of the membership, or 100 members, present on the House floor under legislative rules.

Republicans, in major legislative battles thus far, have used their majority among state representatives to aggressively push major legislation, such as the reorganization of state government, House Bill 2, and the school finance bill, House Bill 5. Those and other Republican-promoted measures must pass out of the House and be sent to the Senate by Thursday or risk dying.

Twenty-four years ago this month, a group of 12 Texas state senators defied then-Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby by refusing to show up at the Capitol. The "Killer Bees," as the 12 came to be known, hid out in a West Austin garage apartment while Department of Public Safety troopers, Texas Rangers and legislative sergeants-at-arms unsuccessfully combed the state for them.

Seems to me that this is a strategy you adopt only if one of two conditions exist: either 1) the legislation coming to the floor is truly abhorrent, or; 2) you have resigned yourself to a very long stay in the minority and have nothing to lose. In this case it seems the Democrats are going nuclear (or as nuclear as one gets within Robert's Rules of Order, anyhow) mostly over Texas House Bill 2, which would redraw the court-approved federal congressional districts to GOP advantage and grant much wider powers to Texas' constitutionally weak governorship. They see it as fulfilling condition 1 above, because passage would lead to condition 2. A less partisan objection is that the GOP is trying to push it through by the Thursday deadline, but the 418-page plan is so complex that even House Speaker Tom Craddick admitted, "I don't think anybody knows what's in this bill."

Umm, I'd say sufficient reason to table debate exists when even its supporters don't know what they are supporting. Anyhow, many of us get so focused on federal goings-on that we neglect state-level politics. Daily Kos pointed out yesterday that state politics today are the clearest predictor of national politics tomorrow, and that the playing is field is more Dem-friendly than the current state of DC suggests.

For political news from the individual states, I cannot recommend highly enough Kos' side project, Political State Report, which collects reports from bloggers about their own states and includes the interactive Electoral College Calculator. Great fun, if you're a borderline obsessive-compulsive political geek like yours truly. It will be permalinked in the sidebar over there, so hit it often as the campaign season gets cranking.

If this had been Clinton...

David Neiwert has the goods on Bush's military shenanigans, and the links therein are all worth following. The Boston Globe has a good rundown left over from the 2000 campaign of the blatant discrepancies between Bush's biography and what military records had been uncovered. Let's be clear about one thing. There is no reading of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that allows Bush to deny this central fact: he deserted the military during wartime. It is not disputable; the law is crystal clear. As is the punishment: "Death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct."

It is no coincidence that Bush refuses to release his military records. As Senator Daniel Inouye, who left a limb in Vietnam, stated, "At the least, I would have been court-martialed." Now, it would be a colossal waste of time, money, and energy to bring charges, but given the fever pitch at which this administration hurls accusations of disloyalty and undermining of troops, there is no reason not to trumpet this from the rooftops. At the very least, it's worth a letter to your local paper.

It would be funny if it weren't so scary.

As our president would say, go getchoo some Murrikan products! Be sure to scroll to the bottom, because Confeddy Freddy is the money shot. Then look at the real products available elsewhere on the Web and decide whether satire has become impossible. Then, with all that in mind, go read Ben Tripp's hilarious and frightening tour de force up at Information Clearinghouse about the other F word.

These people are fascists, and they make Mussolini look like a mezzafinook. There is no component of American liberty of which they are unwilling to relieve us, and no aspect of American life upon which they are unwilling to relieve themselves. Where to begin? First, we must define 'fascism'. It is a term like 'love', about which it can be said that everybody knows exactly what it means, and nobody knows what they're talking about. Luckily I know everything and so can clear the matter up, particularly if I consult Mussolini's own diary, which I picked up on Ebay for a song (the song was 'That's Amore' as sung by Dean Martin). For those not fluent in Italian, I will paraphrase the definition before me in Il Duce's crabbed hand:

Fascism is an extreme right-wing ideology which embraces nationalism as the transcendent value of society. The rise of Fascism relies upon the manipulation of populist sentiment in times of national crisis. Based on fundamentalist revolutionary ideas, Fascism defines itself through intense xenophobia, militarism, and supremacist ideals. Although secular in nature, Fascism's emphasis on mythic beliefs such as divine mandates, racial imperatives, and violent struggle places highly concentrated power in the hands of a self-selected elite from whom all authority flows to lesser elites, such as law enforcement, intellectuals, and the media. What a rush. Must buy Clara a new hat.

I couldn't have said it better myself. If we accept this general definition of fascism, we can be forgiven for rushing to the bedroom and throwing some clean underwear into a portmanteau ere catching the next train to Toronto. But we must stand our ground, however eroded it may be. Our freedoms have been undermined at home. Our nation has engaged in an outrageous military adventure overseas, the tissue-thin justification for which has disappeared completely, leaving America in the awkward position yclept 'hostile invader' by entities such as the United Nations (you remember them, those nice colored folks over on 39th Street?) Meanwhile our states have mostly gone bankrupt, the first tax cut during wartime since the 1840's ­ more wealth for the wealthy - is in the works while corporate feudalism runs rampant, our ability to respond to authentic terrorist threats has been hobbled, the voting system has been co-opted by digital pirates in the Republican party, the electoral system in general is hostage to big money, our healthcare system is in meltdown, our national budget is so far in the red we have to import ink from China just to keep up; the prison population is exploding while our schools implode, civil rights are verklempt and vivisepulturated, our businesses are folding by entire sectors while the military-industrial complex thrives, and our environment is sinking into crisis with the North Pole melted and environmental regulation evaporating like so much ozone. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ is sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom.

But because the American media has ceased to make its own news, relying instead on a kind of government-hosted charabanc tour for journalists, nobody is questioning this lunatic national retrenchment in a public forum - instead, we demonize Arabs and teenagers and black people and homosexuals and poor folks and drug users and anyone, God bless them, who has ever performed fellatio. And that's only the tip of the scheisseberg. These are all harbingers and symptoms and outcomes of fascism. But still, fascism is such an extreme notion. Once could argue that these many fresh hells are the result of simple criminal mismanagement, and for some time I have been so inclined (to argue thus, not to criminally mismanage. For the latter I'd need an MBA.)

What specific enormity cemented the notion of Bush and his cabal as 'fascists' in my mind? If I could sit out all of the above, surely nothing could compel me to apply the scarlet 'F' to these vendible quantum-larrikins and their erstwhile leader, the Ivy-League demagogue bogtrotter George W. Bush. I can tell you the very moment, and if you missed it, it's worth finding a dog-eared copy of the video and viewing it entire, although I caution you to keep a bucket handy - these images are too graphic for many American stomachs.

You can probably guess what that moment was, but you should still go read the rest.

Two Gentlemonkeys of Verona

I think I could have predicted this one and saved them the trouble:

Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."

In a project intended more as performance art than scientific experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they waited.

At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it. Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.

Do you think they got a grant for this? I like monkeys and all, but really...

Meanwhile, back in MeatSpace...

Kevin Drum and a host of other bloggers break up the politics occasionally with "cat blogging," where they post pictures of their pets in order to remind us anonymous readers and writers that we are all real people with real lives and more than just our pedantic opinion-spouting. I think it's a lovely custom, as it's entirely too easy to reduce your political opponents to their stands and forget that if we were all standing around a grill with beers in hands, we'd likely find ourselves agreeing more often than not.

Alas, I have no pets and were I to post pictures of my houseplants (recently revised to down to the singular houseplant), the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Flora would be picketing my house and screaming, "Shame!" I can be plausibly accused of many things, but possession of a green thumb wouldn't make the list. I do, however, have a son who will turn six at the end of this month and what could be more humanizing that that?

Accordingly, here's the junior apostropher tearing it up at his very first soccer game. And yes, he gets the red hair from me.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled agit-prop, already in progress...

Tell us what you really think.

Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London and apparently a fellow with a reputation as something of a rhetorical bomb-thrower, doesn't seem to think too highly of George W. Bush.

"George Bush is just about everything that is repellent in politics," he told the gathering.

The meeting moderator asked Livingstone to explain why he had made a personal attack on Bush, when he himself dislikes answering personal questions.

"I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the 20s," Livingstone replied, referring to Warren Harding, whose 1921-23 administration was regarded as one of the most corrupt in U.S. history.

"He is not the legitimate president," Livingstone said, apparently referring to the vote-counting controversy that preceded Bush's official election as president.

Livingstone added: "This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown, as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown."

Now if some of our Democrats would just pick up the tune...

Hoosier Daddy? Part II

Yesterday, I noted the resignation of Bush's budget director, Mitch Daniels, supposedly to run for the governorship of Indiana. But is there another reason? Well, maybe. Steve Soto speculates that Daniels may have been pushed out in advance of this story breaking. The state of Indiana has issued subpoenas to many Indiana business bigwigs as a result of an investigation of shady insider trading with an Indiana utility company, where over $71 million worth of stock got dumped just before the stock tumbled. Included in the list of subpoena recipients is none other than Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., who accounted for nearly a million and a half of the sum.

I yield the floor to Mr. Soto:

No matter how much Karl tries to bury the insider trading taint of this administration, going all the way to the top with Bush’s own Harken sleaze papered over by his dad’s SEC, bad apples will keep appearing. It would take an enterprising member of Congress (hello Henry Waxman) to have a dedicated staff to start digging through records and see how many current and former Bush Administration officials have profited from similar transactions. Such information could then be used to roll out and reintroduce this issue for next year’s election so that the issue of trust and integrity can be place front and center with Bush, and chip away at a cornerstone of Rove’s strategy.

As I said, Rove has never had to face an opponent who went right after Bush on the issue of trust and integrity. He has always been able to smear opponents through surrogates (see McCain, John - South Carolina) while keeping Bush from overreacting and creating more problems. It is time to develop this information and possible line of attack further and use the information gained to come after them relentlessly on it.

Salam Pax is back

A lengthy update covering the past few weeks (15 posts total) has appeared at the Dear Raed blog from Iraq. Good to know he's alive.

Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don't let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don't think about your "imminent liberation" anymore.

Viral Smart Bombs

A team of researchers at the University of Texas have developed a "viral smart bomb" therapy that completely eradicated brain tumors in mice, while leaving normal surrounding brain tissue unaffected.

The therapy, known as Delta-24-RGD, is thought to be the first treatment for malignant glioma, the deadliest form of brain cancer. It is a new-generation "replication-competent oncolytic" adenovirus therapy –– defined as a therapeutic virus that can spread, wavelike, throughout a tumor, infecting and killing cancer cells. There is no adequate treatment for these deadly brain cancers and, before this study, few experimental therapies tested in animals have shown much improvement.

The findings, published in the May 7 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, are considered so promising that the National Cancer Institute is providing financial support to produce, in its own labs, a drug-grade version of the therapy to test in humans, possibly by late next year. The researchers are also collaborating with the federal Food and Drug Administration on the treatment.

"We believe this therapy has a lot of potential, but one that needs much more study," says lead author Juan Fueyo, M.D., an assistant professor in M. D. Anderson's Department of Neuro-Oncology and the study's lead author. "We've never seen this kind of response before with any other treatment tested in either animals or humans."

Delta-24-RGD is designed in such a way that it can replicate only in cancer cells, not healthy tissue, in order to reproduce itself while killing the host cancer cell. It moves on to contaminate other tumor cells, and when no more cancer cells are left to infect, the virus itself dies.

In 1987, a malignant glioma killed my father a week before his 41st birthday. Here's hoping this therapy proves to be as effective in humans. Good work, Dr. Fueyo, et al, and what a novel approach.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Vote

It goes without saying that any story that appears on newsmax.com (motto: tastes just like FoxNews, with only half the journalistic ethics!) should be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, when they are reporting on the far right, they do bring an insider's perspective. Therefore, I am oh so heartened to read that the Christian right is making noises about bolting the Republican Party in 2004 in retaliation for dereliction of its divinely-commanded gaybashing duties.

"If Republican leaders cannot mount a vigorous defense of marriage, then pro-family voters perhaps should begin to reconsider their loyalty to the party," warned Ken Connors, president of Family Research Council and a close affiliate of Dobson’s Focus on the Family.

Along with other leaders of the politically powerful pro-family movement, Connors was appalled at the "muted defense" of Santorum, R-Pa., who has been under attack by the gay rights lobby and its liberal allies in the media and the Democrat party. That failure, Connors said ominously, raises the question whether the GOP is the best vehicle for resisting the Democrats' radical political agenda.

[...]

Dobson chastised the Republicans for getting too cozy with the gay lobby. He complained that Racicot met secretly with the homosexual group Human Rights Campaign but failed to disagree with it on the major issues. Connors said that Racicot didn’t utter one word in defense of marriage and failed to make the case that the Republican platform makes – that marriage should be limited to one man and one woman – he simply went with the message of so-called tolerance and inclusion.

[...]

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of Traditional Values Coalition was also angered by Racicot's meeting with HRC. He warned that "this has caused concern among conservatives that Republican leaders are going to sell out on the issue of homosexuality."

[...]

Mike Farris, chairman and general counsel of Home School Legal Defense Association and one of the leading pro-family activists on Capitol Hill, told NewsMax.com: "Nobody who cares about these issues is going to go the Democrat party … this is a question of enthusiasm versus inactivity. Enthusiasm is going to wane if there’s not solid support for the fundamental principles that this nation was founded on."

[...]

Famed and influential activist Phyllis Schlafly, who single-handedly took down the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, told NewsMax.com she was disturbed by the Republicans' failure to rally around Santorum. She called the administration’s defense of the Pennsylvania Republican "pretty limp" and "most cowardly.”

"There’s no reason for Santorum to apologize or back off. What he said was almost word for word what Justice Byron White said in his Supreme Court opinion in the previous gay rights case a number of years ago,” Schlafly said.

“I think the party and the administration’s statements are pretty generally recognized as weak-kneed and that they’re not backing up the constituency that elected George Bush. I think they’ll pay a price for that."

Now, there's a very good chance that these are all just warning shots across the bow intended to get the administration to "straighten" up. But the economic and religious wings of the GOP have never really trusted one another, and Jesus' shock troops feel (with some justification) that they have gotten little more than lip service over the years despite carrying the Republican Party electorally.

They bit their tongues through the '90s in order to regain the seat of power and now are anxious for their payoff, which puts the GOP in a sticky situation, especially with their more libertarian camps. I'd recommend they read this article, because it's not Republicanism I have a problem with, it's Republican acts.

Some religious zealots have called for compassion in the treatment of Republicans, noting that some practitioners such as Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, while declared Republicans, attempt to disengage themselves from actual Republican acts. “We must love the practitioner, while hating the practice,” one fundamentalist independent noted.

Still, Democrats believe that practicing Republicans are not born that way. They believe something in their upbringing brings them to unspeakable acts such as demanding tax cuts during time of war. “Chances are that Republicans suffered from a weak father that took them to country clubs during an impressionable age and pressured alumni organizations into placing them within an Ivy League college,” one Democrat insisted.

Touché.

Urinal Skeet!

Those wacky kids at MIT have created a urinal-mounted video game called You're In Control that uses, well, I'm sure you can imagine what's being used for the controller. You can read the white paper and see (ahem) streaming video of it being demoed here (yes, it's safe for work). Probably more fun than the old standby, Disintegrate the Cigarette Butt.

If it catches on, though, there are some serious Title IX implications...

Update (2:25 pm): A friend just sent me more technopotty news from Salon's techwire:

The iLoo being developed by the MSN division of Microsoft Corp. in Britain is a standard portable toilet -- a "loo" to the English -- with a wireless keyboard and extending, height-adjustable plasma screen in front of the seat.

There would also be a "Hotmail station" with waterproof keyboard and plasma screen on the outside for those waiting in line.

MSN officials say they're negotiating for the manufacture of toilet paper imprinted with Web addresses that users may not have tried.

(Thanks to Rick and Jim for these)

Hoosier Daddy?

The Boston Globe reports that Bush's Budget Director Mitch Daniels is stepping down to pursue the governorship of Indiana, and quotes Bush as saying, "This administration's loss is the gain of the people of Indiana." I suppose that's true in the same sense that the national perception of the collective IQ of Indiana probably shot up when Dan Quayle disappeared from the national scene (no hate mail, please, the same held true for my state of North Carolina once the withered husk of Jesse Helms finally slithered into retirement). But if Daniels is serious about becoming governor, you could only call it a gain for Indiana if you made little fingers-in-the-air quotation marks and rolled your eyes when you hit the word "gain."

As head of the Office of Management and Budget since January 2001, Daniels oversaw a federal budget that went from surpluses to record deficits. His tenure was also marked by pitched battles with both Republicans and Democrats over the administration's tax and spending priorities. [...] Daniels also drew fire from Republicans, including [Alaska senator Ted] Stevens, who once accused the budget office of using ''Enron-type'' accounting tricks.

As economic stewardship goes, putting Mitch Daniels in charge of your state coffers is roughly akin to hiring Roman Polanski to babysit your daughter. "Daniels's supporters say he made tough budget decisions during the toughest of times." Tough decisions? Tough? "F*ck it, we'll just engage in the biggest unfunded spending orgy in the history of the Union and let the Democrats fix it when they make it back to office, just like last time." Yes, that was a tough decision, alright, in the sense of, "You want Social Security when you retire? Well, that's just tough."

¿Dónde están?

From last night's Late Night with David Letterman:
Top Ten President Bush Excuses For Not Finding Weapons of Mass Destruction

10. "We've only looked through 99% of the country."

9. "We spent entire budget making those playing cards."

8. "Containers are labeled in some crazy language."

7. "They must have been stolen by some of them evil X-Men mutants."

6. "Did I say Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? I meant they have goats."

5. "How are we supposed to find weapons of mass destruction when we can't even find Cheney?"

4. "Still screwed up because of Daylight Savings Time."

3. "When you're trying to find something, it's always in the last place you look, am I right, people?"

2. "Let's face it -- I ain't exactly a genius."

1. "Geraldo took them."

The Crying of Lot 1984

The Guardian has "an edited extracted from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to the new Plume (Penguin US) edition of George Orwell's 1984, published next week." I cannot imagine how daunting it must be to write an introduction to a work with the stature of 1984, especially for an edition being released on what would be Orwell's hundredth birthday. But then again, it's Thomas Pynchon. One passage I found particularly striking:

Orwell seems to have been particularly annoyed with the widespread allegiance to Stalinism to be observed among the Left, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the evil nature of the regime. "For somewhat complex reasons," he wrote in March of 1948, early in the revision of the first draft of 1984, "nearly the whole of the English left has been driven to accept the Russian regime as 'Socialist,' while silently recognising that its spirit and practice are quite alien to anything that is meant by 'Socialism' in this country. Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which words like 'democracy' can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously."

We recognise this "sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking" as a source for one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse - the identification and analysis of doublethink. As described in Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a dangerously subversive text outlawed in Oceania and known only as the book, doublethink is a form of mental discipline whose goal, desirable and necessary to all party members, is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time. This is nothing new, of course. We all do it. In social psychology it has long been known as "cognitive dissonance." Others like to call it "compartmentalisation." Some, famously F Scott Fitzgerald, have considered it evidence of genius. For Walt Whitman ("Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself") it was being large and containing multitudes, for American aphorist Yogi Berra it was coming to a fork in the road and taking it, for Schrödinger's cat, it was the quantum paradox of being alive and dead at the same time.

The idea seems to have presented Orwell with his own dilemma, a kind of meta-doublethink - repelling him with its limitless potential for harm, while at the same time fascinating him with its promise of a way to transcend opposites - as if some aberrant form of Zen Buddhism, whose fundamental koans are the three party slogans, "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength," were being applied to evil purposes.

The consummate embodiment of doublethink in this novel is the Inner Party official O'Brien, Winston's seducer and betrayer, protector and destroyer. He believes with utter sincerity in the regime he serves, and yet can impersonate perfectly a devout revolutionary committed to its overthrow. He imagines himself a mere cell of the greater organism of the state, but it is his individuality, compelling and self-contradicting, that we remember. Although a calmly eloquent spokesman for the totalitarian future, O'Brien gradually reveals an unbalanced side, a disengagement from reality that will emerge in its full unpleasantness during the re-education of Winston Smith, in the place of pain and despair known as the Ministry of Love.

Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries which run things in Oceania - the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named "the department of defence," any more than we have saying "department of justice" with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present "balanced" coverage, in which every "truth" is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed "spin," as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time - it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.

Besides the ambivalence within the left as to Soviet realities, other opportunities for doublethink in action arose in the wake of the second world war. In its moment of euphoria, the winning side was making, in Orwell's view, mistakes as fatal as any made by the Treaty of Versailles after the first world war. Despite the most honourable intentions, in practice the division of spoils among the former allies carried the potential for fatal mischief. Orwell's uneasiness over the "peace" in fact is one major subtext of 1984 .

"What it is really meant to do," Orwell wrote to his publisher at the end of 1948 - as nearly as we can tell early in the revision phase of the novel - "is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of Influence' (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran conference) . . ."

American Dialectics

Geez, I oughta just put up a redirect to the Whiskey Bar, but it keeps getting better by the day. Billmon has penned a relatively long piece examining 227 years of American history through the lens of dialectical materialism. Not nearly as dry as that description makes it sound, it really should not be missed, and the ending question of what new dialectic is being born from the synthesis of interest group liberalism and Reaganism is an important one.

The Dao of American Politics, Part 1 and Part2.

When the going gets weird...

Lyndon LaRouche is running for president for the eighth time (related story: in waterways across the nation, fish spent the day swimming). One more run and he'll tie Harold Stassen for the league record. Sure, he's always good for a laugh, what with his accusations of Queen Elizabeth being a drug dealer and everybody else being a Soviet spy (I wonder for whom they are spying now). But he has amassed 3.7 million dollars in campaign donations, which beats everybody in the Democratic field except Kerry and Edwards, and leads everybody by a wide margin in the reported number of donors and unitemized (under $200) contributions.

Weird, isn't it? But the numbers make me wonder, "Who the heck are all these people?" The text of some Q&A with his unsubtlely creepy California Cadre School can be found here. My favorite questions:

How can I learn to stop acting like Hamlet?

When the Iraq War started, you said that we were experiencing a Riemannian phase-shift, could you elaborate?

Why did God design the voice with register shifts? How do we come to know the real mind of Plato?

And if you think the questions are odd, they have nothing on the replies.

It's (still) the economy, stupid.

For the first time in eight years, the unemployment rate has hit six percent, roughly 8 million people. But this number is quite a bit lower than the actual unemployment rate, since 74.5 million adults (36.1% of the adult population) are considered outside of the labor force, an increase of four million over 2001. Even taking out the 33.3 million that are over 65, that leaves over 40 million people who aren't working (or aren't working legally), but aren't being counted as unemployed. As Nathan Newman notes:

[S]ince 1990, the number of people receiving disability pay has nearly doubled, to 5.4 million and we now have 2 million people in jails and prisons today, up from 1.1 million in 1990 and 500,000 in 1980. What you find is that the miracle job economy of the US is really a disability welfare state and a prison-industrial system which kept the unemployment rate down in the 1990s by keeping unskilled workers out of the labor pool to make the numbers look good.

I should note that most of the numbers in this post come from this US Census Bureau table, and it's no big secret that the census undercounted minority groups, which bear a disproportionate share of the nation's unemployment and underemployment, so the numbers are likely higher still. Not to mention that vacancies created by the reservists called up to active duty are soaking up some of the otherwise unemployed. At some point, this will start to eclipse war fever as the biggest election issue.

The W stands for Winky

Much discussion has occurred about Bush's jet landing photo-op on the aircraft carrier. Sure, it would have been cheaper and more logical to use a helicopter and the irony of a guy who went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard playing fighter pilot for the cameras smells suspiciously like Dukakis-in-a-tank, but nobody seems to be addressing the true mystery of the entire affair. Namely, what were the TeleTubbies doing on the USS Lincoln?

Update (May 6, 1:58 pm): An astute reader reminded me that Bush was not AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. According to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, he deserted during wartime, which is actually punishable by death. Now doesn't Whitewater seem insignificant?

That takes cojones.

Enron, Qwest, WorldCom, and HealthSouth, the first team All-Stars from last season's Embezzlement Derby, have either filed or are considering filing for some very large income tax refunds or credits. Their justification? Since the profits they reported were fraudulent, the taxes paid on them are overpayments.

Now that is brazen. Nobody's asking me (I know, I can't figure it out either - like Ashcroft can't pick up a phone book), but seems to me any refunds coming back on that ought to go to recoup the costs of the investigations and prosecutions.

Late night weirdness

Every picture tells a story but for the life of me, I can't come up with stories for these:
1. Boing.
2. Pissed off.
(from cruel.com and calpundit.com, respectively)

The Japanese seem to have a much broader palette when it comes to ice cream. I'm intrigued by the wasabi, but squid? eek.

And if you're ready to waste some serious time, cmdrtaco.net has a little webapp that will create free verse poems from the content of a blog. I plugged in apostropher and got back:

office building, along with the fellow who
warned Democrats not be better an attempt
to troops. But
the cells Shi'a sack
and sent to disrupt
March 2003 Good news. station for abortion
services now crashed our private
lives. and
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Not bad! I hit reload and:

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And then on the third try, it started channeling Allen Ginsburg:

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Dutch.
word for abortion
services or promiscuous sex. without properly
protecting yourself, then they
have not be a downtown
Washington, Monthly story The
depressed economies in the problems all
free! Now do them, Mr. Bush.

Why, I could sit and do this all day long (link from boingboing.net).

What are the odds?

Everybody and their brother has blogged the Washington Monthly story that moral crusader Bill Bennett has lost over 8 million dollars at casinos over the past decade. On the one hand, this is a non-story: gambling is legal (in the states where he's doing it) and it's his money. If he wants to use piles of twenties to light his barbecue grill - and playing his preferred $500 slots leads to pretty much the same outcome - that's nobody's business but his own.

"I view it as drinking," Bennett says. "If you can't handle it, don't do it."

Exactly. But therein lies the rub. Most of the rest of the behaviors that he has made his millions decrying operate in the same manner. If you can't handle drugs responsibly, don't do them, Mr. former Drug Czar. If you can't engage in promiscuous sex without properly protecting yourself, then keep it in your pants, Mr. Book of Virtues. Gambling and drinking ruin just as many lives and families as drugs or promiscuous sex. Far more, I'd wager, and I'll give him entirely better odds than Bellagio (just not a credit line). But since Mr. Bennett engages in those vices, they escape his scornful finger-wagging as choices adults can make.

But as Kevin Drum has pointed out, the bigger issue here is that Bennett is clearly lying (which for DC Republicans is like saying he is wearing pants) when he says, "Over 10 years, I'd say I've come out pretty close to even." Bullshit. Not playing the slots, you haven't. If you think anybody really has a chance to break even over a long period gambling against the house, fly into Vegas at night some time and try to calculate what the collective power bill alone must be.

Mr. Bennett, we'll all give you a pass on the gambling, as soon as you quit lecturing the rest of us about our private lives. But since lying is one of the Ten Commandments you endlessly flog, I'm going to leave that one to you and your priest.

Update (May 4, 9:46 pm): Uggabugga agrees, with visual aids.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick's dripping goo

Over at the increasingly crowded Whiskey Bar, Billmon has deconstructed Wednesday's Washington Post article about US attempts to stifle debate at the United Nations. And to great comedic effect, I should add.

Preaching between the lines

This should help us convince the Middle East that we aren't waging war on Islam:

The U.S. government this week launched its Arabic language satellite TV news station for Muslim Iraq. It is being produced in a studio -- Grace Digital Media -- controlled by fundamentalist Christians who are rabidly pro-Israel. That's Grace as in "by the Grace of God."

Grace Digital Media is controlled by a fundamentalist Christian millionaire, Cheryl Reagan, who last year wrested control of Federal News Service, a transcription news service, from its former owner, Cortes Randell. Randell says he met Reagan at a prayer meeting, brought her in as an investor in Federal News Service, and then she forced him out of his own company.

Grace Digital Media and Federal News Service are housed in a downtown Washington, D.C. office building, along with Grace News Network. When you call the number for Grace News Network, you get a person answering "Grace Digital Media/Federal News Service." According to its web site, Grace News Network is "dedicated to transmitting the evidence of God's presence in the world today."

"Grace News Network will be reporting the current secular news, along with aggressive proclamations that will 'change the news' to reflect the Kingdom of God and its purposes," GNN proclaims.

Sounds like FoxNews to me.

WMDs

Imad Khadduri is a former Iraqi nuclear scientist, educated in the US and the UK, who worked for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 until 1998, when he was able to leave Iraq. Dr. Khadduri, now living with his family in Toronto, says that the whole WMD argument was rubbish from the get-go.

His lips are moving...

...so you know he's lying. Urging Congress to pass his $15 billion global AIDS package, Bush announced that these funds should not be subject to the "gag rule," which bars any overseas group that provides abortion services or counseling or lobbies for abortion rights from receiving U.S. family-planning money. It seemed an odd stroke of good sense from an administration notoriously lacking in the same. But in keeping with his broad Orwellian tendencies, Bush's words are an end run around his actual policy.

The gag rule has never applied to AIDS funds. So Bush is lifting a restriction that never existed. Instead, he is adding some. Under this bill, groups that provide AIDS prevention as well as abortion services now must keep their abortion and family-planning programs financially and physically separate from its AIDS prevention work. In other words, they can take the money, but they can't do AIDS work and family planning in the same facility.

If this legislation passes through Congress unchanged, poor and rural communities that have only one clinic would have to build a new one in order to separate their AIDS work from their family-planning work -- an unlikely development, given the depressed economies in the targeted African and Caribbean countries. Or they would have to shut down their family-planning clinic altogether in order to qualify for the AIDS money.

[...]

In Africa, where more than half the AIDS victims are women, separating the women's clinics from the AIDS clinics makes no sense. Sometimes the best and most trusted health care in poor communities is found at women's clinics.

[...]

The word in Washington is that some congressional Republicans will introduce riders to the AIDS bill in the House today. Expect one to call for removing all references to condoms.

Pro-life, my ass.