Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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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...
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.
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?
...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...
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
...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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
...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 busi