Due to the kindnesses extended by friends and family, my daughter and I will now be able to attend Tom’s memorial service next Saturday. Which is also my Mom’s 81st birthday.

My Saturday began with a call from my sister, asking “Hasn’t the family had enough to endure?” And it was downhill from there.

Matt, the coke-addict brother, saw his wife sentenced to a year in jail last week. This morning, a call came that he had been in a traffic accident last night and was life-flighted to a Tampa hospital, where he was in ICU, unconscious and on a ventilator.

My Mom, a brother, and Matt’s two sons hopped in the car for the drive an hour away. They discovered he was critical but stable, sedated to keep him out due to a small hematoma, his breastbone’s broken and he may have breaks in his spine. But the early prognosis is no paralysis has occurred and we think he’ll recover.

The rest: He was DUI, and either out of anger or on purpose, with a passenger involved, was driving erratically, lost control, went down into a culvert, back up and broadsided a parked van. But for a couple of hours, I thought I might lose two of my three brothers in the same week.

The Gods must be angry, eh?

To: Earl, Copeland, Palamedes, Riggsveda, Avedon, KC, Flamingo, Susie, Jenny, Sarah, Becky G, BitchPhD, Hesiod, Emma, Rod, Ayn, Elise, eRobin, Annie, Morgaine, all the others who emailed, and especially Melanie, Fred, Lorri…..Thank you for your kind thoughts and prayers. Every bit of support has helped.

Today’s Sermonette is a special edition for a special election in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District.

Draws on the cautionary tale of Jean “File Card Memory” Schmidt, whose encyclopedic recall for names and faces didn’t extend to Coingate’s Tom Noe or, even more unfortunately, to the paper trail connecting Noe and Schmidt.

Some people ask why we should be good without God. Secularist Mark Twain offers one of the many good reasons to be moral whether you believe in a higher power or not:

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.–Mark Twain

This morning Republican congressional hopeful Jean Schmidt told the CBS 12 “Newsmakers” program that she had never met Tom Noe, the Republican activist who stole millions from the state of Ohio in the “Coingate” scandal.

Bob Brigham of the Swing State Project explains:

In an effort to cover up Jean Schmidt’s involvement in the scandalous culture of corruption, Schmidt said she didn’t know Tom Noe. Schmidt said she’d never met Tom Noe. Schmidt said she had never even heard of Tom Noe. [Emphasis added.]

As an Ohio state legislator, Schmidt chaired the Higher Education Subcommittee of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee . During the same period Tom Noe was a member of the Ohio Board of Regents.

Official state documents dated March 21, 2002 show that Jean Schmidt had met with the Ohio Board of Regents the day before. Noe attended the March 21 meeting of the Ohio Board of Regents when the following report was delivered on the Jean Schmidt’s involvement with the Board:

Yesterday, the Inter-University Council Presidents and the Ohio Board of Regents had a retreat and the focus was on how we communicate the higher education message to legislators, business entities and influencers. We invited Rep. Jean Schmidt to our committee meeting for the purpose of gaining her perspective on how the Legislature sees higher education and the initiatives in which we are interested. […] There are a number of areas where we are totally lined up with her thinking. In any event, the conclusion is that we need more contact, more often.

Additional official state documents establish that Tom Noe testified before Jean Schmidt’s committee on March 18, 2003.

Never heard of the guy, eh? How stupid does Jean Schmidt think we are? Typical Republican hubris.

Maybe even less than a clue, but interesting … Massimo Calabresi writes in Time magazine that it appears “White House officials” knew about Valrie Plame weeks before Joe Wilson’s famous New York Times op ed. If so, it is more likely that Karl Rove learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from a journalist. Read the rest of this entry »

our buds at resident bush send us this from mcsweeneys :

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, William D. Rubinstein, a history professor, embarrassed himself with his very public ignorance about evolutionary biology. At this strange website called Social Affairs Unit, he has a new defender, Myles Harris, who has written another bizarre and rambling broadside at biology titled Bishop Dawkins’ Priest Holes—or what are the evolutionists afraid of? He begins by telling a story of a devout Marxist who stuck by her beliefs no matter what horrible things happened in East Germany, and then asserts that those darned “radical Darwinists” are just like her.

That argument rests on the fact that his East German Marxist was in denial of the reality around her, however, and the comparison would actually be more appropriately directed at Rubinstein and the creationists. The people who are actually studying and testing theories in evolutionary biology are finding it powerful and useful and productive…it’s only clueless twits who get their biology from books by Michael Behe who think there is some kind of jarring discord between reality and what biologists are describing.

Harris presents Rubinstein’s anti-evolutionary diatribe as if it were merely reasonable disagreement on issues of fact.

Two months ago Professor William D Rubinstein challenged Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. He made no claim to scientific expertise, denied being a creationist and declared himself quite happy with the idea that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. His objections to the theory were that there were gaps in the fossil record, very few transitional forms and that he found it hard to believe in species transformation. These are doubts often expressed by lay people, much as they express doubts about the theory of Big Bang or confess themselves unable to understand quantum theory.

Unfortunately, that’s not what he wrote, and Harris has inaccurately reduced the absurdity of Rubinstein’s claims. The Rubinstein article consists mostly of a long list of his objections to evolution, all of which are appallingly ignorant errors of his own. He suggests that evolution implies cats would give birth to kangaroos or raccoons, that there are no fossil intermediates, that no one has observed evolution in action, that the examples of evolution in the textbooks are fraudulent, that transitional forms can’t possibly occur, that food chains disprove evolution, that punctuated equilibrium is saltationism, and that life is too complex to have formed without intelligent guidance. When I took this apart before, I pointed out that it’s like a “parade of creationist cliches”—these were bad and oft-refuted arguments.

The objection to Rubinstein’s article wasn’t to the conclusion that he reached, but that his reasoning was so stupid and uninformed that it was a disgrace for a professional scholar to publish it. He was trading on his reputation as a professor to spew out ridiculous tripe as if it had some credibility. It is true that he has no scientific expertise—a fact he demonstrated in his article—but it is not true that he was making no claim of authority. His entire opening paragraph is a plea to respect his opinion, even if he doesn’t have any scientific background.

Myles Harris seems to be continuing in the Social Affairs Unit tradition, talking out of his ass and making up lies to support his points. That’s the only way I can interpret this unreal mess:

Nowadays people are not only terrified of attacking the theory of natural selection, (it is professional suicide to do so in a university biology department) but even fear mentioning the possibility that it might not be a complete description. Listen to any discussion of Darwinism on the radio or TV and sooner or later you’ll hear on of the participants hastening to assure us that they believe 100%, (perhaps 200%?) in the theory of natural selection, and that nobody of any repute in the biological sciences doubts it.

There are observations of the natural world that you would have to be “ignorant, stupid, or insane” to argue about—the earth is roughly spherical, you cannot leap off of tall buildings and fly unaided, and the earth has a long, long history of organic change—but it is plainly and simply a lie that evolution is a lump of static dogma with no active questioning going on. We do have standards such that the babbling idiocies of William D. Rubinstein do not constitute respectable dissent, but it is absurd to claim that biologists are afraid of criticizing the theory. Has Harris never heard of Brian Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman, Lynn Margulis, or Mary Jane West-Eberhard? These are all respected voices in the scientific community who have been actively offering challenges and alternatives to unadorned natural selection (which, by the way, is not synonymous with evolution). The difference between them and hacks like Harris and Rubinstein is that they are actually acquainted with the data and the principles they are criticizing, and tend to marshal actual, testable evidence in support of their viewpoints.

Harris tries to present the late John Maynard Smith as one of the gatekeepers of Darwinian dogma. Has he never heard of Stephen Jay Gould? Maynard Smith and Gould were in blistering disagreement on many aspects of evolutionary theory. It didn’t seem to hurt either one’s career.

Harris does not seem to be aware of reality, and his article degenerates even further before the end. Citing the concerns of Richard Dawkins about the growing political strength of creationism, Harris just closes his eyes and pretends it isn’t true:

Reading this you get the impression of an organised conspiracy against evolution, a world in which the lights are going out on rational thought, a world in which evolutionists are an embattled minority. In fact, rather than being embattled, the evolutionists are winning the argument and the battle for the public mind.

I can forgive him a little bit for this belief, since he’s in academia and in England…but if he were living in America, where social pressure has all but expunged evolution from public school classrooms and where the Republicans are trying to pass laws to mandate the teaching of creationism, it’s an argument that would make him certifiable. Of course, it’s also curious that he and Rubinstein are making creationist arguments yet claiming that creationism isn’t winning the battle for the public’s mind.

This, though, is simply nuts. Evolutionists have invented creationism?

My feeling is that Creationism is evolution’s straw man. There is a good reason why some of Darwinism’s more obsessed and insecure defenders feel it necessary to set it up. Like Marxism, the attraction of the theory of natural selection is that it can imprison thought in an epistemological straight jacket. Marxists tried to imprison economics in a rather similar mechanical, reductionist formula. Darwinists - terrified of the implications of modern discoveries in biology and physics - long for the comforting certainties of Victorian science.

So, like, the NIH set up the Discovery Institute as a front? Harris has just accused scientists of being conspiracy theorists, but his alternative is that the millions of creationists in the US are lackeys of the Darwinists, and the attempts to insert creationism into curricula are cunning wag-the-dog ploys to increase support for the scientific establishment.

I wish. Now that is a mind-boggling conspiracy theory.

That kind of kooky thinking does make it easy to dismiss the rest of his article, though, in which he somehow babbles on about quantum consciousness and the universe. I have no idea how that relates to the rest of the article, but that kind of rambling is one of the hallmarks of the clinically insane, so maybe it is of a piece—this is Harris’s attempt to mimic a schizophrenic.

What of William D. Rubinstein, the author of the original nonsense? He has a new article in Social Affairs Unit, too, in which he argues for the truth of stories of ghosts, reincarnation, and near-death experiences.

Reports of ghosts have been made innumerable times down the ages, in every culture. Apparently, about ten per cent of the British population claims to have seen a ghost. While, needless to say, many of these reports can be dismissed as nonsense, fraud, wishful thinking, misreporting, or the product of spirits in a glass bottle rather than the supernatural kind, there is a residuum which can simply not be explained away.

Ah, right…this is the kind of argument that would also allow us to argue for the existence of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Ever had a Christmas present that lost its tag, and you weren’t sure who it came from? That’s the residuum that shows jolly old Saint Nick is real.

I’ve also heard that the halls of academe are full of pretentious, empty-headed stuffed shirts with dotty ideas, and that England is populated with weird old eccentrics. Rubinstein and Harris seem to be that residuum who demonstrate the germ of truth behind those prejudices, too.

When I heard that James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, had died, I wasn’t inspired with any profound thoughts about Star Trek, Scotty, science fiction, or the importance of great character actors. I felt a little sad for his family, and a little sad for all of us. Doohan was 85! How did he get to be so old? By living 40 years more after Star Trek premiered, that’s how! Tempus fugit, I thought with a sigh, because I often think in Latin. Sic transit gloria mundi. Momento mori. Carpe diem.

Dominus vobiscum.

Et cum spiritu tuo.

Doohan was from all accounts a nice guy. (See this post by Domoni at Temple of Me for a story illustrating his nice guyness.) The world needs all the nice guys it can get. But I still I didn’t think much about his passing until the other night when the Mannion family gathered around the old pizza box to watch Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan for family movie night. Then it occured to me just how important Scotty was to Star Trek.

I don’t mean just to the plots, where he was always a mechanic ex machina. I mean to the Star Trek dream of the future.

Everybody knows that Star Trek was the last great Liberal TV show. By the time MASH aired, just a few years later, Liberalism had gone into a defensive crouch. But when Star Trek was on the air, it was possible to dream of a future in which Earth would be at peace, international cooperation would be the norm, progress was a given, and—this is where Scotty came in—all problems could be solved.

Not long before the show went on the air President Kennedy had said, “Our problems are man-made—therefore, they can be solved by man.”

He went on:

And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable–and we believe they can do it again.

Star Trek seemed designed as an illustration of what a future based on JFK’s hopeful speech would look like.

Three things occur in The Wrath of Khan that provide lessons that all children need to learn and all adults need to re-learn everyday. The first thing is that Kirk defeats Khan because he listens to Spock. Khan loses because he won’t listen to his first officer. Kirk accepts advice. He understands that he needs help, that he can’t do it all himself, and that he is not ever the smartest person in the room. Khan puts all of his faith in his own superiority.

The second thing is that Kirk learns from his mistakes. Kirk wins because he listens, in the end, after he almost lets the Enterprise be destroyed because he did not listen. When the Enterprise encounters the Reliant, the starship Khan has stolen, they approach it unwarily, thinking the reason the Reliant isn’t repsonding to messages is their communications equipment has failed. Lt Saavik tries to warn Kirk to put the shields up. He doesn’t listen and the Enterprise is almost fatally wounded. The first thing Kirk does after they escape is tell Saavik he was wrong and in the future she should make sure he pays attention to her suggestions.

Khan, on the other hand, makes one mistake after another and never learns from them. When we first met him in the original TV show, in the episode Space Seed, he hadn’t learned anything from his defeat back on Earth. He’d lost then because he’d overestimated his own abilities and underestimated his enemies’. When he tries to take over the Enterprise, he makes exactly the same mistake. When we meet up with him again in the movie, he sets off to revenge himself on Kirk, and right from the start overestimates himself and underestimates Kirk. Kirk escapes and in doing so manages to inflict serious damage on Khan’s ship. But Khan comes back and does the same thing all over again. Then he does it again! And this time his own arrogance finally destroys him.

If you want to see any parallels between Khan and George W. Bush I won’t object. Just as long as you realize that, sadly, the Democrats are not Kirk and the Enterprise.

Another way Khan is like Bush is that, as Spock points out, he thinks two-dimensionally. Khan sees all conflict as being between him and an enemy who is his mirror image. In his mind the fight is always between himself and Kirk. His own crew and Kirk’s don’t matter to him. The presence of Spock, and Scotty, aboard the Enterprise doesn’t register on him and he never takes them into account when he plans his revenge.

This is one of the ways he underestimates Kirk. He sees Kirk as a solitary man. He doesn’t see Kirk as being not a one, but a many. Kirk is stronger than Khan because he has allies. Khan, even though in his own person he is in fact superior to Kirk—he is smarter, he is stronger— is weak because he insists on going it alone.

But the third important thing that happens in Wrath of Khan I don’t mean to have any partisan, political implications. The third thing is that every problem has a solution. Not every solution is easy, and the final one is made at a great cost. Spock dies solving it. But the problems are solved. There is no such thing as a no win situation.

And this is what made Scotty so important to Star Trek.

Scotty was a great one for doubting his own abilities. “She kinna take any more, Captain.” “If I give her inny more she’ll blow!” But he managed to fix things despite himself.

And this wasn’t just a matter of convenient plotting, of the cavalry arriving in the nick of time to save the day. Scotty’s ability to solve problems was a result of Gene Rodenberry’s building into his creation the idea that solving problems and fixing things was what people do and that problems are a part of life so we need to be prepared to deal with them. Roddenberry believed in Murphy’s Law. And he created a future in which everybody believed in it too and ordered their lives and designed their machines accordingly.

In episode after episode, the Enterprise would seem to be damaged beyoned all saving, and yet Scotty, or Spock, or Kirk, would come up with a fix, seemingly out of thin air. But Rodenberry’s Enterprise had been designed with the idea that it would break down. That everything that could go wrong, would go wrong at some point. So every piece of equipment on the Enterprise had a back-up system or a manual override. The back-ups had back-ups, and those back-ups had back-ups. And when all the back-ups had failed, everything could still be operated by hand.

In Rodenberry’s future, technology was a wonderful thing, but he was no technocrat. Technology was unreliable. But people…

People could always be counted on.

And that was Rodenberry’s most progressive idea. In the future he envisioned, everybody mattered. Everybody had an important job. Nobody was redundant. Nobody was a mere cog in the machine. What were all those people doing on the Enterprise, anyway? By the mid 1960s it was possible to see how computers would come to be able to do many jobs that people then did but do those jobs faster and more reliably and with fewer errors, with the bonus that the computers would not need to be paid.

Rodenberry saw such a future as a nightmare.

But it’s his nightmare that is becoming the world we live in.

Our homes are full of technology that we need but we can’t rely on and which cannot be fixed when it fails. We are more and more dependent on the corporations that make the devices and less and less dependent on the devices themselves, and certainly less and less dependent on our own abilities and skills.

And our economy is more and more based on the notion that people aren’t just redundant, they are a nuisance.

It’s not just that we are building a world in which Scotty would have no job to do. What’s the need for a repairman in an economy in which nothing is meant to be repaired?

It’s that we’re building a world in which Scotty would be an actual threat to the economy. First, by fixing things that were designed to be thrown away and replaced at increased cost. Second, by requiring to be paid well for his talent and skill. Third, by simply knowing things that the corporations running the show don’t want anybody to know because it would undermine their monopolies.

In the Star Trek future, everybody has a talent and a skill. Everybody is necessary. Everybody contributes.

In the future we seem to be building, everybody is useful in so far as they can buy things. Otherwise, they’re pretty much just in the way.

World Not Set To Deal With Flu
Strategy for Pandemic Needed, Experts Say

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 31, 2005; A01

Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades — the H5N1 “bird flu” in Asia — is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.

If the virus were to start spreading in the next year, the world would have only a relative handful of doses of an experimental vaccine to defend against a disease that, history shows, could potentially kill millions. If the vaccine proved effective and every flu vaccine factory in the world started making it, the first doses would not be ready for four months. By then, the pathogen would probably be on every continent.

Theoretically, antiviral drugs could slow an outbreak and buy time. The problem is only one licensed drug, oseltamivir, appears to work against bird flu. At the moment, there is not enough stockpiled for widespread use. Nor is there a plan to deploy the small amount that exists in ways that would have the best chance of slowing the disease.

The public, conditioned to believe in the power of modern medicine, has heard little of how poorly prepared the world is to confront a flu pandemic, which is an epidemic that strikes several continents simultaneously and infects a substantial portion of the population.

Since the current wave of avian flu began sweeping through poultry in Southeast Asia more than 18 months ago, international and U.S. health authorities have been warning of the danger and trying to mobilize. Research on vaccines has accelerated, efforts to build up drug supplies are underway, and discussions take place regularly on developing a coordinated global response.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will spend $419 million in pandemic planning this year. The National Institutes of Health’s influenza research budget has quintupled in the past five years.

“The secretary or the chief of staff — we have a discussion about flu almost every day,” said Bruce Gellin, head of HHS’s National Vaccine Program Office. This week, a committee is scheduled to deliver to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt an updated plan for confronting a pandemic.

Despite these efforts, the world’s lack of readiness to meet the threat is huge, experts say.

“The only reason nobody’s concerned the emperor has no clothes is that he hasn’t shown up yet,” Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, said recently of the world’s efforts to prepare for pandemic flu. “When he appears, people will see he’s naked.”

Other scientists are sounding the alarm as well.

The most outspoken is Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. In writing and in speeches, Osterholm reminds his audience that after public calamities, the United States usually convenes blue-ribbon commissions to pass judgment. There will be one after a flu pandemic, he believes.

“Right now, the conclusions of that commission would be harsh and sad,” he said.

In hopes of slowing a pandemic’s spread, public health specialists have been debating proposals for unprecedented countermeasures. These could include vaccinating only children, who are statistically most likely to spread the contagion; mandatory closing of schools or office buildings; and imposing “snow day” quarantines on infected families — prohibiting them from leaving their homes.

Other measures would go well beyond the conventional boundaries of public health: restricting international travel, shutting down transit systems or nationalizing supplies of critical medical equipment, such as surgical masks.

But Osterholm argues that such measures would fall far short. He predicts that a pandemic would cause widespread shutdowns of factories, transportation and other essential industries. To prepare, he says, authorities should identify and stockpile a list of perhaps 100 crucial products and resources that are essential to keep society functioning until the pandemic recedes and the survivors go back to work.

At last, front page Sunday treatment of this story. Of course, if you’ve been reading Just a Bump in the Beltway for a while this is not news to you.

Charles Roten put up a list of resources if you want further information back in June. And, of course, there is The Flu Wiki, which has now become the gathering place in English for all things flu. If you read nothing else, study CanadaSue’s imagined scenario for her hometown, Kingston, Ontario.

The Post article, while lengthy, doesn’t spend any time on 1. why this is important; 2. the potential sequalae of such a pandemic; 3. the miserable failure of the government to do any planning. Mike Osterholm is hardly the only scientist who has been screaming bloody murder about H5N1 for some time. That said, I heard NIAID’s Tony Fauci on Diane Rehm’s NPR show last week, and half of what he said was talking out of his ass (or covering it.) If I know that, and I’m no scientist, what else are we missing? It will show up on The Flu Wiki, for sure.

The claim:

BOSTON (MarketWatch) - In his weekly radio address early Saturday, President George W. Bush said he will tour seven states during August to discuss the state of the U.S. economy.

“I will talk to Americans about our growing economy,” said Bush. “Thanks to the tax relief we passed and the spending restraint, our economy today is growing faster than any other major industrialized country.”

Bush asserted that the nation’s unemployment rate is down to only 5%, lower than the average rate of the 1970s through the1990s. He said 2 million jobs had been created during the past 12 months.

“We have more to do, and I will not be satisfied until every American who wants to work can find a job,” said Bush. “I look forward to talking to the American people about our plans to continue strengthening the economic security of America’s seniors and working families.”

The Facts:

1961 - 6.69
1962 - 5.57
1963 - 5.64
1964 - 5.16
1965 - 4.51
1966 - 3.79
1967 - 3.84
1968 - 3.56

Unemployment rate average during the Kennedy/LBJ years = 4.85

1969 - 3.49
1970 - 4.98
1971 - 5.95
1972 - 5.60
1973 - 4.86
1974 - 5.64
1975 - 8.48
1976 - 7.70

Average during the Nixon/Ford years = 5.84

1977 - 7.05
1978 - 6.07
1979 - 5.85
1980 - 7.18

Average during the Carter years = 6.54

1981 - 7.62
1982 - 9.71
1983 - 9.60
1984 - 7.51
1985 - 7.19
1986 - 7.00
1987 - 6.18
1988 - 5.49
1989 - 5.26
1990 - 5.62
1991 - 6.85
1992 - 7.49

Average during the Reagan/Bush41 years = 7.13

1993 - 6.91
1994 - 6.10
1995 - 5.59
1996 - 5.41
1997 - 4.94
1998 - 4.51
1999 - 4.23
2000 - 4.02

Average during the Clinton years = 5.21

2001 - 4.79
2002 - 5.78
2003 - 6.0
2004 - 5.5

Average during the Bush43 years, so far = 5.52

So technically, his statement is correct. But the fudge factors include:

1) Only LBJ, Nixon and Clinton had lower unemployment rates

2) Only Clinton achieved it without committing hundreds of thousands of troops to a major war, as war shrinks the available labor pool.

3) Changes in the formula for calculating the definition of unemployed occurred during the Reagan years and Bush years, discounting many. And the ‘discouraged’ group that no longer gets counted is at record levels.

4) Wage growth is stagnating, on the heels of the period of greatest wage growth in the past half century.

The President gains no political advantage from telling the whole truth. He could have said “Unemployment’s only a little worse than it was under my predescessor,” but where’s the selling point in the reality?

Then again, we expect the fudge factor from the King of Fudge. We wish we could count on the corporate media to filter out the propaganda, though. They’re the ones that are supposed to be marketing reality.

[Please see update at the end of this post.]

It’s fun to check in with Memeorandum now and then to see what the righties are linking to. Yesterday they were swarming like flies to a carcass to a story that appears to be phony.

I say “appears”; maybe it isn’t. It’s hard to tell, for reasons that I hope become apparent as you read this post. The point of this post is not to prove or disprove certain allegations, but to illustrate how, shall we say, uncritical reading and writing can create a lot of smoke without there necessarily being a fire.

So, here we go:

An editorial in the Washington Times alleged that Air America Radio is stealing money from poor children and sick old people. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s hear it for the U-nited States Senate, which last night voted to keep us all safe from each other and from ourselves and from own thoughts by unanimously passing a permanent extension of 14 of 16 provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act . Despite the rantings of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas, the extension did not include a provision for warrantless agency subpoenas, without judicial review, to be authorized, and in order to avoid irritating legislative battles involving librarians, the provisions that would have permitted the Government’s willy nilly seeking of library records was removed (along with one that authorized roving wire taps).

Still and all, you have to admire a country that is willing to kill tens of thousands of people overseas (including nearly 2,000 of its own people… and counting) to bring them freedom … that is also so darned willing to trounce upon the freedoms of its own people, first chance it gets. And by unanimous consent at that. As noted, the only limitation on the trampling of our constitutional rights pretty much remains “political”: in this case, its about libraries, because those sound and look bad at Congressional election time (think about Democratic opposition candidates staging protests in front of them)… Besides… our beloved First Lady Laura was once a librarian.

Note that there are still numerous provisions in the bill that might make it a crime, for example, to engage in (unpopular, of course) political activism… Well, as they say on Capitol Hill, that’s not really a bug… it’s more of a feature…

Silly me. I was thinking that maybe a filibuster here might have been a tad more appropriate than, for say, some cabinet appointment or federal lower court judge… No wonder no one ever asks me… Viva La Patriot Acte!

Every survey indicates that She Who Must Not Be Named already has the Democratic nomination for President all but locked up. Why, then, did she offend her loyalists by bothering to speak at the DLC convention? That stands, in practice if not yet in name, for Democrats Loving Corporations — a group after my own heart, if someone must be a Democrat at all. Sadly for them, the last Democratic President who really did more than give lip service to their views was Grover Cleveland. Her husband also notably used them for ideological cover in his own campaign, but since then their relentless denunciation of the party has made them pariahs of the lefty web, and she has been catching flak for pandering to these “shills for subsidies and outsourcing”.

Again, why does she think positioning herself as a “moderate” is so important, since she knows that she would have universal support from the left, and even (horrors!) some Republican women, as the ultimate affirmative action example? It’s because she knows she may not be able to count on those votes. She may even face a woman opponent in 2008. Ponder this image:

This picture is taken from a site spotted by Travis of Rain Storm, who could not tell if this was “high-concept satire or the real deal,” namely Americans for Dr. Rice (”Dedicated to Drafting Dr. Rice for President”). I assure you it is a very real deal. Every poll of Republicans that includes her name shows her as their first choice for the nomination. Fearful GOP stalwarts, trembling before the junior Senator from New York, have suggested that whichever middle-aged white male they nominate should pick someone like Rice as their Veep candidate to defuse voting booth sisterhood. That timid half-measure won’t work. Proof? Mondale tried it for the Democrats in 1984, and his symbolic gesture of that year is today almost as little remembered as William Miller. (That other New York Congressman ran with Goldwater twenty years before, and later would up making an ad for a credit card company asking “Do you know me?”)

Everyone on the right is apoplectic at the prospect of Mrs. The Clenis returning in vengeful glory to the White House. What we have to do to keep her out is not head-on opposition, which her blind loyalists will denounce as sexist, but judo. Give in to the Democratic hatred of Our Noble Lame Duck, and put others in her own party in a position to stop her.
Read the rest of this entry »

A White House Source has revealed the following communication within the Bush family to the American Street on “super-secret background.” Do not reveal the contents of this letter to anyone unless you have national security clearance or have access to some revealing photographs.

Dear Poppi:

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. But then, I’m not Catholic, so I suppose I can just sin away.
I’m about to start another grueling summer vacation here at Camp Kennebunkport South in Crawford. Boy, do I need it this year. It’s not that there isn’t good news. Rummy tells me the insurgency is almost over — the last remaining Democrats will be defeated by next November if my friends in the state election office have anything to do with it.

And they will.

Being President though, is hard work — like I tried to point out to that pointy-headed Massachusetts liberal deserter I ran against last year. You have to search under the rocks of every national park to find the kind of staff I brought to my administration. It’s kind of like being casting director for Animal House.
Then you have to nurture them, kiss their boo-boos and make sure that they’re not calling book publishers in their spare time. Usually, you assume they’re all toilet trained and won’t take a leak in the press room.

Speaking of leaks, I’m now told there is a tumor in my brain — something like the cancer Nixon suffered in the White House. I’m not a doctor, but I kind of, sort of, feel like this might be a bad thing. So, I’m having a team of White House spin doctors take a crack, so to speak. Of course we can’t comment about this while they are still investigating.

I’m a little worried about the Space Shuttle program. The same Halliburton subcontractor that couldn’t fix the debris falling during launch, made the containers for the ballots we’re still holding from the Florida 2000 election. If these ballots are ever launched, we better hope that Mars is really a RED planet.

I’m starting to think about my legacy after I leave this office. I think it will be said that I left the entire world looking like Crawford, Texas. Barren landscapes, extreme heat and rednecks everywhere — what more could Jesus do?

Yours in kinship,
43

It seems that Pennsylvania’s Senatorial opponent of interspecies outreach is recovering from a case of Candidatus Interruptus.

Two days after saying he had no intention of running for president in 2008, Republican Sen. Rick Santorum said Wednesday there was a slight possibility he could run after all. …

Separately, he said he wanted to “leave this little window open” because he didn’t know what might happen between now and the election….

I’m sure that all the liberals will welcome his return to the firing range. If he did not exist, they would have had to invent him. As a sign of their joy, one has even posted a new theme song for him.

Mickey Kaus offers the following speculation about Judith Miller:

“[M]aybe she had no “source” as such, but directly observed Plame’s CIA activities in the course of her previous reporting on WMD. For example, if she interviewed Plame.”

I must say, that is quite an insightful and interesting bit of guesswork.

The only problem is, I came up with it first!

Now, the normal response to a serendipitous occurrence like this is to assume that such a logical inference would be obvious to more than one person. “So Mickey Kaus had the same bright idea you did, Hesiod? What’s the big deal?”

Normally, I would agree that it’s not a big deal.

However, in this case, I am 100% certain that Mr. Kaus directly ripped that idea off from yours truly.

The reason I am 100% certain, is because I sent Mr. Kaus the very link I provided above to my post MAKING that speculation. I also suggested that Valerie Wilson/Plame might have been one of Judy Miller’s sources for her many WMD articles in the 1990’s — in the e-mail I sent to him.

“But surely,” you might exclaim , “he gets hundreds of e-mails a day, and there is no guarantee that he even read yours.”

A perfectly reasonable assumption, that just happens to be 100% dead wrong in this case. I know he read my e-mail, because he responded to it!

And not only that, he didn’t say: “Yeah…I had the same idea.” On the contrary, he actually ignored my speculation and dismissed the idea that Miller could just plead the 5th amendment and avoid jail time. He said that it would kill her career.

A notion I found laughable, incidentally, given the lucrative career reporters can have as pundits.

The important issue, of course, is that Kaus KNEW about my speculation two weeks ago. And, today, he offers it up as though it were his own — without any attribution.

Needless to say, I e-mailed him a “reminder” of our previous exchange. Let’s see if he adds a link and gives me credit for the idea. Or at least aknowledges that I was the first blogger to actually go public with it.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus has now added a link to my earlier post.

For the record, he also says he forgot about my e-mail to him from a couple of weeks ago.

In the Bush Administration’s never-ending public relations war, top officials have decided to change the name of the “War on Terror” to “Struggle Against Global Extremism.” War sounds pretty macho, but I suppose struggle makes it seem less scary, like when you struggle with getting your pants off in the dark after a long night of drinking. The following are rejected names for the War on Terror:

Armed Forces World Tour 2003-2047

Red, White, and Blew Up the Bastards

Battle of the Global Network Stars

Getting Medieval on Your Assassins

Leg Wrestling the Snakes of Radicalism

World-wide Quest for Republican Votes

Star-Spangled Jihadi Ass-Whooping

Leave No Halliburton Contract Behind

Punt, Pass, and Kick Some Terrorist Ass!

AmeriGod vs. IslamiCon

Add your ideas in the Comments…

having once played major general stanley in his college production of the pirates of penzance (to rousing acclaim), skippy could not resist finishing the song that atrios has started more than once on his open threads…

with apologies to gilbert and sullivan (and mad kane )…to the tune of “i am the very model of a modern major general”

You may have heard about Paul Hackett, U.S. Marine and Iraq War veteran, who is running for a congressional seat against a right-wing opponent, Jean Schmidt, in Ohio.

What I didn’t realize until yesterday is that I used to know Jean Schmidt. This was a long time ago, but I’ve done some checking and I’m sure this is the same Jean Schmidt.

From about 1978 to 1983 or so I (and my now ex) lived in a suburb of Cincinnati, and the two houses next door were occupied by twin sisters (Jean and Jennifer) and their husbands. The twins’ father owned several acres of the neighborhood–former farmland–and had built most of the houses, including the twins’, who’d been given the houses as gifts.

I remember the twins as friendly, very pretty, about my age, and pleasant people to live near. We were never chummy, mostly because I found their interests (clothes, money, and the Indianapolis 500) not entirely compatible with mine, plus neither was the sharpest tack in the box. But friendly girls, they were.

I’ve been wondering whether I should even mention that I once knew the twins, but just now I read about something Jean said that really pissed me off. So now I’m dishing the truth about Jean Schmidt. Read the rest of this entry »

City Pages Blotter has a quick interview with Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a soldier killed in the Iraq war who was featured in Fahrenheit 9/11. She’s on a nationwide speaking tour sharing her thoughts on the war and those who favor it:

You know, people that have not lost anybody in this war, it hasn’t touched them. And so, they sometimes seem to be very opinionated about the war. And the reason that I’m out there is so the war doesn’t end up touching them. I don’t want them to have to learn things the way I had to learn things in losing a son. You know, and I still say, ‘you know, we live in America, and America was founded on democracy, and they have a right to their opinion just like I do.’ But don’t be afraid to come to the table and have a conversation.

Read the rest of the interview here.

I thought that Tony Blair may have forgotten what “symbolism” meant when I read that he’d said:

“If it is concern for Iraq then why are they driving a car bomb into the middle of a group of children and killing them?”

But then I read his next line:

I am not saying any of these things don’t affect their warped reasoning and warped logic

..and I thought, to myself, that this was nothing we didn’t already know.

It certainly means that Mr. Blair recognizes that Iraq is a part of the warped reason that terrorists are striking innocent people in his nation.

When Mr. Blair says much of the world had dropped its guard to the threat of terrorism after the “wake-up call” of the 9/11 attacks of 2001, he may be right in some ways. Over 3000 people dead in one attack in America is certainly a candidate for a new Western-based consciousness (*the people of the Middle East and Europe have gone through these troubles with terrorism for years).

New York City’s wake-up call came years before, however, when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. To many jaded New Yorkers, 9/11 was expected (although no one expected the towers to fall - which is still a much-talked about mystery).

If world leaders used the “wake-up” call of 9/11 to unecessarily remove precious liberties from freedom-loving people, then it can safely be said that those freedom-loving people got a “wake-up” call after 9/11 as well. The alarm screamed “Hold fast to your freedoms lest they be stolen away by radical rightwing interests in the name of fear and terror!”

We, the people, must all be careful in this new age. If life is no good without freedom, then terrorists win by killing our spirits with the willing aide of leaders who employ fear. The terrorist wields fear and the leaders employ fear. It seems that the only one with secure and robust employment these days is ‘old Mr. Fear.’

Do not read this as a voice against good government. Above all, do not consider this to be a support of any kind of violence against our fellow man. Take your politics out of it and hear the voice of freedom telling you to be cautious of that which you choose to rally around.

Mr. Blair’s complicitous involvement in the Iraq war planning, which we learned about in the leaked Downing Street memos, has sent up a caution sign about anything he may say to defend his leadership on Iraq and the terror that has followed in London.

I’d like to put these misspent and sorrowful days in Iraq behind us and move on, with governments we can trust and who are willing to work with each other to end poverty, genocide, unjust wars, and disease. We need to end the bitter division between right and left. “Iraq” is not a fitting reason for killing innocent people in London, just as sure as “imminent threat” was not a fitting reason for the damage we’ve caused to the nation and the people of Iraq.

I think, with the greatest sorrow, of mothers and fathers who have lost sons and daughters in Iraq. If I could tell them anything, I would tell them that their children were honorable soldiers who were loyal to the ideals of their nation. Even as I talk about the ones who, in shadows, found a way to convince their nations to go to a war that was not necessary, I will never diminish or demean the lives of the men and women who, like so many Americans, trusted in the good faith of their leaders.

Now they are looking for a way to pull out of the awful mess they led us into. I am very angry - and I can imagine that those families must feel the confusion and anger far deeper than I do.

Have you seen the video of BushCo’s pre-CAFTA passive agressive “fuck you” to the corporate media? What do you think? Is he cracking under the pressure? Is he drinking again? Simply drunk with the power of the presidency and the impotence of the corporate media who love him? Did he forget that profanity and aggression isn’t a Christain value or did he count on people understanding on a subconscious level if nothing else, that Christian values are closer to a prop closet for him than an actual code of behavior. Did he reveal his utter contempt for the people he governs or did he just share a joke with his supporters, who hate the corporate media as much as he fears what it can do if it chooses to? What are you going to do about it?

I’m not going miss the opportunity to get in the Conservative’s Culture War kitchen and use BushCo’s craven profanity to expose the rot on the Right that is destroying public discourse in America. I’ve already written to five editors of local papers using the PFAW Action Center to get the email addresses. I put a copy of the letter I wrote, and which you can feel free to modify and use yourself, below the fold. In two minutes, I’m going to call my representatives in Congress and the White House to ask for an apology for BushCo’s staggeringly inappropriate behavior. I suggest you do the same.

cross-posted at my blog

Read the rest of this entry »

Iraq Wants Quick Pullout of U.S. Troops

When I was a kid, this was known as ‘the rhythm method’, a sort of faith-based way to take the fear out of getting screwed. Often resulting in an abortion.

But at least we’ve made Iraq safe for Iranian mullah democracy.