October 13
This article in Sunday's Pioneer Press sums up neatly just why Iraq has gone wrong. The reporter, Tom Lasseter, interviewed soldiers and generals, and it was like they were observing two different wars. In brief, the soldiers said things like, "People in the Green Zone are always trying to paint a rosy picture," referring to the forified area in Baghdad which holds the Iraqi government and American overseers. The generals say, "There are indeed areas of Iraq that are relatively safe and secure, and those people in those provinces are working their way towards a peaceful society." That would be a half-truth, since safety outside the four most violent provinces is better, but compared to a stable society they're pretty dangerous. Probably a majority do want a peaceful society, but isn't that true in the areas with the most insurgent activity too? The general who said that was trying to give the impression the insurgency is limited or contained, which contrasts with the soldiers' impressions that it's strong and growing. Considering how the rosy view espoused at the top of the armed forces and Bush administration have proven consistently wrong, my inclination is to believe the soldiers. Unfortunately, the guys with the unrealistic view are the ones who chose the war, made the plans such as they were, carried them out, and have screwed up every step of the way. Oh yes, they're still the ones in charge, and likely to remain so until we come to our senses and remove Bush and the corrupt Congress.
I used to have a job scoring standardized tests, and I became skeptical of their utility, at least in terms of high stakes testing. Seems like a ridiculous standard for graduation, and I saw enough dreadfully designed tests to be grateful high stakes testing wasn't around when I was in school. I've suspected for a while it's an ineffective use of money that could be better spent on other things, like, say, teachers and books, not to mention the qustionable long term benefits of teaching to the tests. Especially when the basis for Bush's program turned out to be based on fake results, I'm glad to know there's a study that shows it's a waste of money. I recall hearing recently that when people in Mississippi think about their poorly regarded schools, they say, "Thank God for Texas."
October 11
So you thought the rampant corruption eating the Congress would stop a while in the wake of Katrina? Silly boy. Or girl, whatever you are. Point is, it hasn't stopped a bit. Louisiana's senators put together a panel to put together a reconstruction plan to submit to Congress. It consisted mostly of, guess what, industry lobbyists! It's time to loot the treasury, er, make the reconstruct the Gulf Coast. One of the few non-lobbyists was shut out after pointing out that this was, not to put too fine a point on it, crooked. Ivor van Heerden, director of a hurricane public health research center at Louisiana State University said, "I was basically shocked. What do lobbyists know about a plan for the reconstruction and restoration of Louisiana?" Perhaps readers would less surprised at this if they knew that corporate special interests have long been able to get Louisiana's congressional delegation and local officials to consistently put "economic development" above preparing for hurricanes. Right before Katrina, Sen. David Vitter was simultaneously warning about hurricanes and holding up the legislation to do something so he could help loggers get access to his state's cypress forests that perform such functions as absorbing flood water from hurricanes.
I suppose though if you still don't believe our all-Republican government has become as corrupt as it's ever been, you're ready to believe Tom DeLay still doesn't act as majority leader even without the title. You may not care that his successor, Roy Blunt, was best known for trying to insert a provision controlling contraband cigarettes on the internet into the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security for the sake of Altria. No doubt he honestly felt cigarette sales on the Internet were a vicious threat to national security. By "no doubt", I mean bull*&&%.
October 10
What was I just saying yesterday? I know he wrote his column almost two weeks ago, but I just found out about it. A Christian fundamentalist state senator in Alabama blames the sin of the people on the coast for Hurricane Katrina. I thought in terms of God hitting the whole of the affected states, but Hank Irwin parsed it further so it's just the strip clubs of New Orleans and the casinos of Mississippi that was hit. Funny, I thought the hurricane hit far inland too. This is however the occasion for something rare, namely, a bit of praise for a couple hosts on Fox New Channel. Rich Lowry and Alan Colmes took Irwin apart, leaving him to imagine twists of realty as biblical literalists do when confronted with contradictions, such as the battering of innocent poor people while sinful Las Vegas went unharmed. According to Irwin, the wrath of God sometimes catches innocents, being apparently an imprecise wrath. Irwin laments that America ignored the warnings of godly preachers. He might lament that America ignored the warnings of earnest scientists and engineers, who were much more precise in their warnings. Meanwhile, it's worth a laugh when Colmes confronts Irwin with the contradiction that the area that didn't flood was the salacious French Quarter, and Irwin plaintively asks twice if the French Quarter wasn't flooded at some point. No senator, it wasn't, but as consolation, have a Take the Red Pill Award.
October 9
Was the earthquake in Pakistan God's punishment on Pakistan, or on Muslims? And if God is punishing Muslims, why do hurricanes keep hitting the US Bible Belt? It doesn't make sense that a God wanting to punish sinful America would hit the most religious area, or that the earthquake would a religiously conservative area like Pakistan instead of relatively secular Muslims in other countries. Does God just have it in for the most pious people? That seems backwards. Maybe God is just inaccurate or bad at geography and hit the wrong end of the river by flooding New Orleans instead of liberal secular Minneapolis. Here I am, sitting in liberal secular blue-voting land, and these disasters are on TV instead of out my window. Should I conclude the people hit by hurricanes and earthquakes are sinful and we must somehow be virtuous?
How's this for a heretical notion: maybe these disasters are just natural phenomena and not God's punishment at all. It's not just that a wrathful but logical God would say in a booming voice "This is what you're being punished for. Stop it." If we're sitting on Earth trying to figure out the meaning and coming to different conclusions, it would seem the lesson is lost and God would certainly figure that out. Maybe, just maybe, Pakistan got hit because that's where the Indian plate is slamming into the Asian plate. Maybe, just maybe, the southeastern US is getting hit because that's what happens when certain weather patterns come in contact with warm water in the Gulf and Caribbean. The hurricanes that went up the Atlantic coast hitting red states and then turned away before hitting blue states were just storms, not punishment for electing Bush.
I was thinking about how ancient people ascribed everything in nature to some deity. Raging seas were Neptune's wrath, thunder was the sound of Thor's hammer, etc. We know far more about nature than they did, but are we really much different? Look at modern religion, which still tries to see the wrath of God in natural disasters. What caused the disaster? We don't know, so it must be a sign of the end times. It's all the same thing. The moderns and the ancients share the same difficulty with accepting there are things unexplained. If you've been reading much of this blog, you know I'm no fan of organized religion, and a part of that transformation from being a religious conservative was accepting there are things I don't understand and won't. Someday earthquakes will be predictable, but probably not in my lifetime. I accept I can't predict where tornados will hit, or why they hit one place instead of another. It's tough to accept a world that's unknowable and unpredictable, and that I submit is why when there's a gap in our understanding, we plug in gods. Is there really a difference between a myth of conflict among gods to explain changing seasons, and the advocates of intelligent design who fill in all the missing bits with a designer who can't be proven or tested for? I wonder if believing in angry gods actually adds an element of controllability to nature. If a flood was caused by our sin, then by not sinning we can control flooding, or we can end a drought by being moral enough. It's a basic psychological impulse to explain and control our world, something we all feel and always have. I wonder if without this impulse, we would have ever invented religion.
October 8
When Bush said in his speech last week, the one recycled from the sales campaign for the invasion of Iraq where he tried connecting Iraq and Al Qaida, he mentioned the nice round number of ten attacks had been foiled. Predictably, his spokesmen at first said they couldn't tell us what they were except for mentioning Jose Padilla, who has still never been charged, tried but is nonetheless still imprisoned. Later they came out with a vague list. Remember, this is the administration that never saw a success that wasn't cause for a press conference. If these ten incidents amounted to anything, we would have heard about it at the time in every media outlet, just like we did when Padilla was caught.
I don't get why some Senate Democrats are defending Miers. They admit anonymously they like seeing Republicans tear into each other, and I'll say it less anonymously. I long wondered when the awkward coalition of wealthy economic conservatives and religious conservatives was going to fracture. I thought it would be when the religious conservatives, being generally working class, would realize how much they're getting screwed and start demanding a sane medical system instead of worrying about homosexuals. Instead, the break is over a religious conservative who is a lousy nominee. Last night on Real Time with Bill Maher (episode highlights not posted at this time), Andrew Sullivan was ripping into the acting president with the zeal of a convert, which of course he is having been a Bush backer until now. Even Ann Coulter was critical of Bush, even if she did have to include her snippy "liberals have no principles" remark. What Maher sees in her I don't know. More to the point, the senators, the ones who actually get to vote, are blowing it. They could just play it straight up and say someone so close to Bush will never make an objective judge. They could say that picking another crony after all the scandals shows Bush can't learn. The criticism Republicans are making provides political cover for the invertebrates worried about the right wing propaganda machine's charges that they'll oppose anybody at all Bush proposes. If I can add an I told you so, they can't demand to see Miers' papers from the last few years when they backed down on seeing Robert's papers from the first Bush administration, at least not without looking somewhat hypocritical. Nonetheless, the principle is important enough that I ask them to swallow hard and admit a mistake letting it go in Robert's nomination, and demand the documents regarding Miers.
Those Republican ethics strike again, if the allegations are true. According to Salon, Fritz Wendel, a reporter for the Toledo Blade who used to be a political operative for the Republican party in Oregon and went on to be a mud-throwing consultant for Jean Schmidt, might have been told about coingate but sat on the story. For those of you not following it, without getting into details, this has been huge scandal in Ohio which has linked to other ethical problems and might demolish Republicans' complete control of the Ohio government. This came to national attention earlier this year. Possibly, if Wendel knew about it and followed it up, it would have come out before the 2004 election. Given the damage suffered by the GOP since the scandal broke and the narrowness of the election, this might have given the state and the presidency to Kerry. It looks like this former reporter followed the usual GOP code of ethics that says winning is all no matter what. Of course, if you've read much of this blog or been following the story about the election in Ohio, you already might be suspicious that no amount of voters switching to Kerry would have changed things since the fix was in anyway. We'll never know. We can however conclude that the Ohio Republicans have copied the arrogance and corruption of the national party, which means only one thing --- Ohio is where the GOP will go for recruits once the Texas cabal is gone.
October 7
It's been the lack of time that stopped me commenting on the events of the last few days, not the lack of material. So I guess here come a few things.
It's amusing to see the non-religious conservatives (economic conservatives, intellectual conservatives, neocons, call them what you will) so upset about Bush's choice of Harriet Miers. What choice did they expect? Hey guys, you're the ones who foisted this buffoon upon us. You gathered the big money behind him for the 2000 primaries. You purged Florida blacks from the registration roles to steal an election for him. While angrily accusing Democrats of considering going to court, you went to court to let your majority on the Supreme Court guarantee your boy's selection. You swift-boated (it's a verb now, a synonym for "smear") Kerry and made sure the voting machines were unauditable. After all you did the get Bush into the White House instead of the two smart guys who actually won the election, you get upset that the buffoon makes a buffoonish choice. I'd pull out the sarcastic air violin if it weren't that all of us have to live with it. May I suggest you join in my call for Bush's impeachment. If you support that not because he's a crook but because you want a smarter conservative to take his place, okay.
Last month while commenting on the New Orleans flood I mentioned that the rivers have been diked all along the Mississippi River. I just received an e-mail from a friend who was working with the Red Cross in Louisiana, and he included this statement: "Mother nature is not to be trifled with. I have heard people say that it's stupid to build a city in a 'bowl' like New Orleans is - that Dikes are not to be depended on... and the residents of New Orleans are to be blamed for living where one shouldn't be living... and then I realize that less than a block from where I work in Saint Paul there's this thing called a "dike" that keeps the Mississippi river from flooding us out. Hmmmm.... makes me think." His office is on the Mississippi across from downtown St. Paul, and much of this area was a flood plain. When the flood plain gets diked, the water has to go somewhere, and all along the river the dikes compete to avoid being the ones that are too low. The levees in New Orleans are not the only ones that have to be built always higher, and that's not strictly because of how the river is managed near New Orleans.
The story about the reconstruction of the 1918 flu connects to a couple ongoing stories. Researchers discovered the 1918 flu was a bird flu with some similarities to the current bird flu. They are seeking treatments and vaccines for modern flus by studying the deadliest flu in history and how it evolved. Yes, this is a practical application of the theory of evolution, just like the computer you're reading this on is an application of electrical theory. Point being a theory is not a guess, it's an explanation of lots of facts which includes assertions that can be proven or disproven. This research into the 1918 flu could not have happened without this theory.
The other story is global warming. Bear with me. The linked article said, "Researchers also used lung autopsy material from an Alaskan killed by the flu and buried in 1918 in the permafrost." The permafrost is melting. There may have been a short time when the corpse that provided the virus sample could have been recovered. What else is going to be lost? It's not probably the biggest effect of global warming, but it makes the point that we don't know how much will be lost, and literally millions of humans might die as a consequence. So if you're not moved by polar bears starving as the ice cap disappears, then just save yourself from the flu without a vaccine.
October 3
When I first heard Harriet Miers Was not only in charge of the search for Supreme Court candidates and White House Counsel, but had also been the acting president's personal attorney, I figured it just figured. Typical Bush. Unfortunately I couldn't get to the blog this morning when that could have been my own original thought. With the speed of modern media that's old news already, even though she was announced only today. So let me join in the call for Senate Democrats to show more backbone than when Bush would release relevant records about John Roberts, which should have been enough principle to warrant at least unanimous opposition if not a filibuster. How it can not be obvious that caving on this will have huge implications with future nominees is beyond me. In this case, this nominee is so clearly an unqualified crony that no political courage should be required.
I managed to get a question in to Friday's first hour of Midmorning, when the topic was Confidence in the economy slipping. I was Eric from Minneapolis pointing out that a reason for confidence slipping is the rapid increase in the national debt an annual deficit, and the refusal of the acting president and crooked Congress to do anything about it. I had to squeeze it into just a few words for the online form, but they got the point and I effectively steered the conversation for quite a while onto the deficit. Sometimes we can have an effect with a wee bit of effort. I added a quote from one guest, V.V. Chari, over on the right, but just to save you looking for it: "I think Eric is dead on. This has been an administration and a congress who have been remarkably fiscally irresponsible. This is about as irresponsible an administration and a congress as I have seen, as I have ever studied. ... So I think Eric's concerns about the federal government seem very well warranted." He mentioned some specific spending. The one issue I would take with him is that I put the war in Iraq high on the list of things driving the deficit. It's not something thrust upon him. Even without the war however, there is plenty of growth in the deficit, and while don't recall what the guests said, I put much of it down to the upper class tax cuts.
OK, here's a story I've noticed before it's talked about everywhere. I mention it because it shows something about Cheney's character, or lack thereof. Responding to Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY, who has been questioning whether Cheney is healthy enough to remain vice-president, Cheney said, "I don't know what I did to offend him, but he's gotten pretty nasty lately.... I think Charlie is a lot older than I am, and it shows.'' The Guardian was quoting him from an interview with Rush Limbaugh, who I'm sure asked Cheney if he thought that was an appropriate response. That's "I'm sure" in the sense of "don't believe for a moment." Maybe Cheney is sure he's fine, just like the insurgency was in its last throes, Reagan showed deficits didn't matter, and there was no doubt Saddam had WMDs. For those who don't get sarcasm, it's a rare day Cheney is right. Always authoritative sounding, rarely right.
