Bush's pro-polluter Clear Skies Initiative is stalled in committee. Couldn't happen to a nicer piece of legislation.

This is a funny piece on Chief GOP Language Strategist Frank Luntz. The timing is perfect. Yesterday I heard Rick Santorum (R-PA) on Meet the Press utter the banned "privatization" word: he was explaining the benefits of what he called - oopsie! - "private accounts". But Mr. Objective Moderator, Tim Russert, helpfully corrected Santorum to get him back on message with a follow-up question. Here's that part of the exchange:

SEN. SANTORUM: ...That's what private accounts solve. They give us the ability to have higher benefits without tax increases in the future because you pre-fund the liability and let the miracle of compound interest solve that problem in the future.

MR. RUSSERT: But private accounts, personal accounts, Senator, alone do not solve the solvency problem...

LA Times' Jonathan Chait, on what happens when you cross the Bushies. Apparently Bush's "buddy" Doug Wead, who secretly taped all those conversations with Bush, is the latest victim.

Once again, I apologize for the lack of "freshening." I was working on a short paper, but I didn't want to post a "sorry, but I'm working on a short paper" message because every time content is freshened here, it "pings" the, um, "pingers" on other sites with links to this one. Then readers click through and are greeted with the equivalent of "sorry, nothing to see here!" So stuff just sits here getting stale and moldy until I can attend to it again. (But help, in the form of two able-minded colleagues, is on the way. Really.)

I've been trying to get my hands on the Christopher Hitchens article in the March Vanity Fair since I first heard about it a few weeks ago, and I finally found a copy today. Contrary to what at least one of my rightward-leaning friends believes (OK, I only have two rightward leaning friends), Hitchens does not strike me as a "liberal" journalist by any stretch of "media bias" imagination. The subheader on this article even finds it necessary to disclaim: "No conspiracy theorist, and no fan of John Kerry's, the author nevertheless found the Ohio polling results hard to swallow..." There is not a lot of new information in it, if you've followed the Ohio story at all, but it is effectively assembled and discussed. It's not available online, so I'm typing in some choice segments:

(from p. 216)But here are some of the non-wacko reasons to revisit the Ohio election.

First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discrepancies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general-and probable-one nationwide and statewide.)
[---]
In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. This is to say that that many people waited to vote but, when their turn came, had no opinion on who should be president, voting only for lesser offices. In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75 percent more undervotes than Republican ones.

In Precinct 1B of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the "glitch" had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him.

In Miami County, a Saddam Hussein-type turnout was recorded in the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts, which boasted 98.5 percent and 94.27 percent turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush. Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day.

In Mahoning County, Washington Post reporters found that many people had been victims of "vote hopping," which is to say that the voting machines highlighted a choice of one candidate after the voter hard recorded a preference for another. Some specialists in election software diagnose this as a "calibration issue."

Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbably outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.

He also discusses the suspicious "lock down" at the Warren County administration building, when Republican election administrators suddenly announced concerns about terrorist attacks - citing FBI reports which the FBI denies making - and blocked reporters from monitoring the vote count. And he declares:

(p. 218)Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many "vote hopes" the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed.

To those who say that a vote tampering enterprise of this magnitude would require "a dangerously large number of people," Hitchens says he spent time with an anonymous expert involved in the manufacture of voting machines, who did not happen to believe that tampering took place, but who assured him that it could be done by a very, very few people:

This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. "Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were 'in control' and no comparison studies," she explained. "The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded." In these circumstances, she said, it's possible to manipulate both the count and the proportion of votes...The Ohio courts are currently refusing all motions to put the state's voting machines, punchcard or touchscreen, in the public domain. It's not clear to me, or to anyone else, who is tending the machines meanwhile...

Hitchens concludes his story:

The Federal Election Commission, which has been a risible body for far too long, ought to make Ohio its business. The Diebold company, which also manufactures ATMS, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable. And Americans should cease to be treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise.

Saturday I mentioned the bizarre lawsuit brought against The Gorilla Foundation. Today, the fabulous Bad Reporter has at it. (But for the record, y'all, Koko likes guy nipples, too.)

It probably doesn't bode well that I'm just four weeks into the semester and am already scrambling to keep up? I seem to have not only gotten older (in the 15 years since I last attended graduate school), but less efficient. And this afternoon is my French translation exam (the language I've chosen for my required competency); I haven't studied since October. Que sera...

A plea to my brother: If this legislation passes, please get my beloved niece and nephew out of that state while they can still think.

Just read it. (I mean, "please.")

I read about The Tapes in the Times on Sunday, and I have to say that I wasn't as excited about them as others seem to be. Some said they "don't appear to reflect too good" on Bush, many got excited about the Big Pot Revelation (still waiting for the Big Coke Revelation). Yes, he came across as calculating and manipulative, but we knew that already. I wish he was as moderate today as he sounded then (when he referred to recognizing the need for using "code words" with "this crowd" - referring to evangelicals). But Howard Fineman picked up on some exemplars of a well-known Bush trait, the "Win At Any Cost" factor:

Bush’s response (to the threat posed by Steve Forbes in 2000)? To Wead – who might pass word along to Forbes – Bush threatened to take his ball and go home, then wait for the moment of payback. Were Forbes to win the GOP nomination by attacking him too hard, Bush told Wead, he could forget any support from the Bush family, including from his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida. Forbes “can forget Texas,” Bush tells Wead. “And he can forget Florida. And I will sit on my hands.” In other words, Bush would rather see the Democrats win the White House than a Republican who humiliated him by defeating him in the nomination race.

While he fretted that Forbes might play too rough, it was of course okay for Bush himself to do so. Taking the measure of Al Gore in the summer of 2000, demonizing him as “pathologically a liar,” Bush was getting an angle on his foe – and cited family tradition. In 1988, then Vice-President George H.W. Bush ran a campaign that used cultural “wedge” issues to savage the candidacy of Democrat Michael Dukakis. “I may have to get a little rough for a while,” Bush the Younger tells Wead. “But that is what the old man had to do with Dukakis, remember?” Of course he remembered: Dubya and Wead had worked together on that campaign.

See Josh Marshall's post on the tangled web involved in the administration's planned attack on the AARP.

They've got no one to blame but themselves...

...A series of layoffs and mill closures culminated earlier this year with Pacific Lumber warning that it was on the brink of bankruptcy.[---]
The demise of Pacific Lumber — with its own town and the world's largest privately owned groves of ancient redwoods — would strike Humboldt County like a 300-foot redwood toppling to the forest floor.

Pacific Lumber remains the biggest taxpayer and private employer, with friends and former employees in key places in county government and the state Capitol. The company supports charities and community affairs — and offers college scholarships to employees' children.

Since the early 1990s, Pacific Lumber has been at the center of one of the country's longest and most volatile environmental battles over the fate of some of the world's tallest trees and the wildlife they support.

To end the strife, six years ago, the state and federal governments made a $480-million deal for 7,500 acres of Pacific Lumber's oldest, grandest trees, creating the new Headwaters Preserve. The deal also required the firm to limit logging on its remaining 200,000 acres. But now the company contends that the terms are a huge financial burden and that it can't get enough logging permits to turn a profit.

"We're 140 years old … and we're about to go bankrupt because of overlapping and duplicative regulation," company President Robert Manne said in a recent interview.

Company officials warn that if they have to declare bankruptcy, monitoring and remedial work on its lands would be dramatically scaled back, to the detriment of wildlife and water quality. But state officials say that terms of the agreement would have to be followed no matter what.

Environmentalists and other critics argue that the company has only itself to blame for its difficulties. They point out that financier Charles Hurwitz, whose Texas-based Maxxam Corp. acquired Pacific Lumber in a contentious takeover in 1985, soon liquidated hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, including a welding division and a farming corporation.

"They have taken so much money out of the company and their debt is so high that without the logs … they are hurting," said Richard Wilson, who was former Gov. Pete Wilson's forestry chief when negotiations for the Headwaters deal were underway.

Under Hurwitz, Pacific doubled logging volumes, spawning years of costly protests by activists who blocked logging roads and perched in trees to prevent them from being cut. There have been hundreds of arrests, numerous injuries and one death.

Since the mid-1990s, a number of Pacific Lumber's neighbors have contended that excessive logging along steep slopes has triggered landslides, filled streams with sediment and flooded their property.

Before the 1999 Headwaters deal, the California Department of Forestry suspended the company's license for repeated forest rules violations...

(Read the book The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street Over California's Ancient Redwoods for some history.)

The UK Guardian published a disturbing excerpt from a new book that looks at the process behind Britain's decision to join the US in invading Iraq. See the accompanying commentary, also. I know Tony Blair has some big fans among Left At The Altar readers, but I remain flummoxed: what was he thinking?

This kind of talk can create unemployment. But Tom Regan rounds up world press opinion that journalists, while not being specifically targeted by the US military, are left vulnerable by virtue of "negligence and indifference."

Two articles this weekend wonder how the US military can continue to function without a draft: in World Press Review and the Christian Science Monitor (which actually provides a round-up of other articles). I didn't know this about the reprehensible No Child Left Behind act (from the WPR story):

A provision of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act allows recruiters special access to the names, phone numbers and addresses of high school juniors and seniors. People can opt out, but it is like a form of negative option recruiting — one has to take the initiative to be taken off the list. The neighborhoods of children whose parents have opted out at greater rates are often in wealthier and more educated parts of a state.

Body and Soul posted about the intensified recruiting efforts; there are some interesting comments to the post, as well.

Very interesting series in the Christian Science Monitor on religion in modern-day Europe and how public expression and participation differ from the US. An "enlightening" excerpt:

The differences are rooted in the 18th century, when the Enlightenment, the philosophical revolution that laid the foundations of the modern Western world, was interpreted quite differently by Americans and Europeans in one crucial respect.

In Europe, says Grace Davie, an expert on religion at Exeter University in England, "the Enlightenment was seen as freedom from religion ... getting away from dogma, whereas in the [US] it meant freedom to believe."

In America, a country founded in part by religious dissidents fleeing an oppressive government, "religious groups are seen as protecting individuals against the interference of the state," says Mr. Weil.

In Europe, on the other hand, the post-Enlightenment state "is seen as protecting individuals from the intrusion of religious groups," Weil argues, after centuries during which the official church, be it Catholic or Protestant, had always been closely identified with temporal powers.

While religion and democracy have always been intertwined in America, where churches were at the forefront of battles against slavery and in favor of civil rights, this has by no means been the case in Europe. There, estab-lished churches in countries such as Spain and France long opposed political reform.

European mistrust of public religion is heightened even further, however, when it is mixed with patriotism in the kind of rhetoric that President Bush often uses.

"God and patriotism are an explosive mixture," cautions Nicolas Sartorius, an éminence grise of the Spanish left who spent many years in jail during Gen. Francisco Franco's dictatorship. The dictator's guiding ideology, he recalls pointedly, was known as "Catholic nationalism."

After a tortured, centuries-long history of wars fought over religion, in whose name millions died, Europeans are deeply skeptical today of patriotic exhortations infused with religious meaning, says Karsten Voigt, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's adviser on relations with Washington.

And nowhere is this truer than in Germany, he adds. "The mixture of patriotism and religion is anathema and heresy in German religious life because it was misused and went too far in the past," Mr. Voigt explains. "Remember, German soldiers in World War I wore belt buckles reading 'Gott Mitt Uns' [God With Us]."

Dominique Moisi, one of France's most respected political analysts, agrees. Viewed from this side of the Atlantic, "the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening," he says. "We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare."

It's a three-part series - the third part yet to be posted.

From a Buzzflash editorial on the GOP-spin on Jeff Gannon, aka "Bulldog":

But the real issue here is that the White House Republican noise machine has now come out in defense of prostitution -- and gay prostitution in particular -- as a private issue, which Republicans are entitled to practice without being exposed by mean bloggers. Maybe the White House is scared of Gannon's little black book filled with client names? Or we've just always misunderstood that they were earnest and committed supporters of gay hookers.

So, let's hear one for the Republicans, the hobgoblins of hypocrisy. Who would have thought that they would have embraced gay prostitution as a personal choice and privacy issue?

I sure hope Chris Mooney is right when he says "reality will prevail."

While we're exporting freedom and democracy, we're installing a man who condones torture as Attorney General, and we'll soon have a death squad coordinator for Intelligence Czar. Update: do see Father Jake's informative post on Negroponte (mysteriously dated Tuesday, February 22, though I'm reading it on Sunday, February 20). (Update to the update: the date's fixed.)

Those of us in the Reality-Based Community still believe that weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq, but Chris Cox, a representative of the Create Your Own Reality Community, knows otherwise:

"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," he crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq."

As Michelle Goldberg notes, "Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation." (She was reporting from the Conservative Political Action Conference.)

The wierdness of this story notwithstanding, I have some quibbles with it. I have taken care of every kind and size of nonhuman primate from marmosets to gorillas (including - full disclosure - a stint at the organization in question) and - this might sound shocking to folks of such apparently delicate sensibilities - it's kind of an "unsanitary" job. People who take care of animals are going to come in contact with feces and urine and regurgitated food and God knows what else. Does that need to be spelled out better in the classified ads? "Warning: people grossed out by poo and pee need not apply." It doesn't clean itself up, y'know. As for the "fetish" - it isn't news to anyone who's heard Robin Williams riff on late night television about his visit with Koko. Wierd and irritating, yes. "Bestiality"??? That's a stretch. (And let's just get this established: Yes, Koko asked; no, she didn't get to see them. And despite my priggishness, I kept my job for several years and left on my own volition.) Frankly, I find the whole complaint hard to believe. A question for the expert at the Cleveland Zoo: How would you know if you ever encountered a gorilla with a nipple fetish? To the best of my knowledge, Koko is the only one who can talk about it...

So far, so bad. Barack Obama's been in the Senate for how long? And already he has voted FOR limitations on class actions suits and FOR Condoleezza Rice? Gee, he sure sounded like a Democrat at the convention.

I was checking the site for comments and realized that I left an item off my longer post earlier this week. It was going to be my "last" link to anything having to do with "Jeff Gannon, Ace Press Release Duplicator," as the story just gets wierder. The great Americablog posted a set of (warning: not for weak stomachs) pictures from Mr. Gannon's (aka "Bulldog") escort sites, and, well, it certainly gives new meaning to the Bush ManDate. Meanwhile, there've been spot-on columns/features by Joe Conason and Eric Boehlert, and then - gasp! - Howard Kurtz took note, and Maureen Dowd took aim ("I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?"), but John Aravosis is Absolutely Fabulous when he says this.

Terrific new Joan Chittister column, "Is this kind of Christianity Christian?" Here's the last part of it:

This month we saw "compassionate conservatism" -- all that concern we're told this government has for moral values and life and Christian identity -- show its real face. Now that the election is over, abortion and school prayer have suddenly disappeared from this administration's agenda, but the release of the Bush White House budget makes the administration's values clear. Furthermore, because the budget impinges on every citizen in this society, the values cannot be dismissed on grounds of personal moral commitment.

National budgets are a nation's theology walking.

In an era in which we call poverty "low-income" and hunger "lack of food security," the number of poor, according to the U.S Census Bureau, is increasing and the number of hungry in the richest country in the world has been rising steadily for four years. To pay for a war we should never have fought -- at least not for the reasons they gave us -- this budget is slashing domestic programs.

The budget of this Christian presidency cuts food stamps. It reduces support for subsidized housing. It suggests pillaging social security. It reduces environmental enforcement programs and scientific research in a scientific age. It even reduces veteran's health benefits.

Clearly, the country is in danger of going the way of all oligarchies; power and wealth are sucked to the top, while those on the bottom bleed. We can call it "Christian" as it collapses.

And all the while, we watch more food lines forming, more homeless on the streets, more environmental degradation and more of the elderly living destitute lives.

More than that, according to the budget analysis done by Bread for the World, (www.bread.org) while we honor our tax breaks to the rich in this country, we are not keeping our promise to fight HIV/AIDS around the world or to support the Third World development programs that might really make us secure in the future.

From where I stand, it seems that the poor who will be most affected by these budget cuts have no political voice with which to protest them and the rich can hardly be expected to object since they are benefiting from them.

I wanted to link to this the day I posted about the Kyoto Protocol launch, but of course didn't get to it. The author says it's too late to prevent global warming. Carbon dioxide - the primary component of greenhouse gases - has a "lag effect" of 50 to 100 years: "So even if humanity stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the planet would continue warming for decades." Another way to think of that is that the severe effects we're already seeing have been in the making for 50 to 100 years, and we've continued (and increased) emissions all that time! So, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions,

"...it is imperative to prepare against the climate change already on its way... Preparing to live through the global climate change bearing down on our civilization will be an enormous undertaking. It will require immense financial resources, technical expertise and organizational skill. But perhaps what's needed most of all, especially in the United States, is fresh thinking and political leadership -- an acceptance that climate change is inescapable and requires immediate counter-measures."

Speaking of showing leadership, cheers to CalPERS.

Very cool -- fossils found by Richard Leakey in 1967 have been re-analyzed by dating the materials in which they were found, and they turn out to be 35,000 years older than originally believed. This pushes back the emergence of Homo sapiens (that's us) to about 190,000 years ago.

One Nation, Under Smog

One Nation, Under Smog
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

(This ad is in Roll Call today. Go here for more information on National Call-In Day, and for some good educational resources.) What will the US government be doing when the Kyoto Protocol goes into effect on Wednesday? "Debating" Bush's Clear Skies Initiative, which permits even more industrial air pollution. Call the White House and let them know what you think: 1-800-675-9703. Call your senator, too: 1-800-349-0885.

I'm stuck on a little problem at work, trying to import a data set that won't even do me the courtesy of kicking, screaming, throwing its arms and legs across the portal, and mutating irreparably on its way in. Instead, it sits grumpily in the file directory, taking up a lot of space, and ignoring each plea ("command" implies too strongly that I retain some degree of control over this process) that I type.

So I took a break and scanned headlines for a few minutes. This one caught my eye:"Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision"... Oh, come on! I don't have time to do the googling, but how many experts can we remember warning that this is exactly the kind of government the Iraqis were likely to elect?

...in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.

And speaking of Iran, I made myself read Thomas Friedman again this week, instead of waiting for someone to tell me it was worthwhile. And darned if I don't agree with him again!:

(Excerpt) By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that?

The neocon strategy may have been necessary to trigger reform in Iraq and the wider Arab world, but it will not be sufficient unless it is followed up by what I call a "geo-green" strategy.

As a geo-green, I believe that combining environmentalism and geopolitics is the most moral and realistic strategy the U.S. could pursue today. Imagine if President Bush used his bully pulpit and political capital to focus the nation on sharply lowering energy consumption and embracing a gasoline tax.

What would that buy? It would buy reform in some of the worst regimes in the world, from Tehran to Moscow. It would reduce the chances that the U.S. and China are going to have a global struggle over oil - which is where we are heading. It would help us to strengthen the dollar and reduce the current account deficit by importing less crude. It would reduce climate change more than anything in Kyoto. It would significantly improve America's standing in the world by making us good global citizens. It would shrink the budget deficit. It would reduce our dependence on the Saudis so we could tell them the truth. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) And it would pull China away from its drift into supporting some of the worst governments in the world, like Sudan's, because it needs their oil. Most important, making energy independence our generation's moon shot could help inspire more young people to go into science and engineering, which we desperately need.

Sadly, the Bush team won't even consider this. It prefers cruise missiles to cruise controls. We need a grass-roots movement. Where are college kids these days? I would like to see every campus in America demand that its board of trustees disinvest from every U.S. auto company until they improve their mileage standards. Every college town needs to declare itself a "Hummer-free zone." You want to drive a gas-guzzling Humvee? Go to Iraq, not our campus. And an idea from my wife, Ann: free parking anywhere in America for anyone driving a hybrid car.

But no, President Bush has a better project: borrowing another trillion dollars, which will make us that much more dependent on countries like China and Saudi Arabia that hold our debt - so that you might, if you do everything right and live long enough, get a few more bucks out of your Social Security account.

The president's priorities are totally nuts.

This delightful exchange from the president's social security stomp in Nebraska has been captured on a number of blogs (I can't remember which ones, but I know I saw it several times last week), but if you missed it, indulge yourself:

THE PRESIDENT: Mary is with us. Mary Mornin. How are you, Mary?

MS. MORNIN: I'm fine.

THE PRESIDENT: Good. Okay, Mary, tell us about yourself.

MS. MORNIN: Okay, I'm a divorced, single mother with three grown, adult children. I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I have two daughters.

THE PRESIDENT: Fantastic. First of all, you've got the hardest job in America, being a single mom.

MS. MORNIN: Thank you. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: You and I are baby boomers.

MS. MORNIN: Yes, and I am concerned about -- that the system stays the same for me.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

MS. MORNIN: But I do want to see change and reform for my children because I realize that we will be in trouble down the road.

THE PRESIDENT: It's an interesting point, and I hear this a lot -- will the system be the same for me? And the answer is, absolutely. One of the things we have to continue to clarify to people who have retired or near retirement -- you fall in the near retirement.

MS. MORNIN: Yes, unfortunately, yes. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I don't know. I'm not going to tell your age, but you're one year younger than me, and I'm just getting started. (Laughter.)

MS. MORNIN: Okay, okay.

THE PRESIDENT: I feel great, don't you?

MS. MORNIN: Yes, I do.

THE PRESIDENT: I remember when I turned 50, I used to think 50 was really old. Now I think it's young, and getting ready to turn 60 here in a couple of years, and I still feel young.

I mean, we are living longer, and people are working longer, and the truth of the matter is, elderly baby boomers have got a lot to offer to our society, and we shouldn't think about giving up our responsibilities in society. (Applause.) Isn't that right?

MS. MORNIN: That's right.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but nevertheless, there's a certain comfort to know that the promises made will be kept by the government.

MS. MORNIN: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: And so thank you for asking that. You don't have to worry.

MS. MORNIN: That's good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.

THE PRESIDENT: You work three jobs?

MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)

"Uniquely American"? Is that really something the president wants to boast about - the fact that a single mother needs three jobs to raise her family? Does he ever listen to himself? Apparently not... Here, he explains his social security program:

"Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the—like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate—the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those—if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."

Got that?

A related item... I'm under no illusions that I'll be able to retire before I'm dead. But these folks were laboring under that illusion:

Since the mid-1990's, older people have become the fastest-growing portion of the work force. The Labor Department projects that workers over 55 will make up 19.1 percent of the labor force by 2012, up from 14.3 percent in 2002.

Until recently, most economists said that older people were being lured back into the labor force largely because of opportunities growing out of the vibrant economy of the 1990's. But these days, they say, many such Americans are being drawn to work out of necessity rather than choice.

Apparently at a loss for something to write about this week, Nicholas Kristof shows just how embarrassing a (very) little knowledge can be. He appears to be quite taken with a new book by Dean Hamer, called The God Gene, which - misleading title notwithstanding - proposes to have identified a gene for "transcendant experiences" or "spirituality" (not specifically for belief in God). OK, he's not completely taken with the book; he does acknowledge "There's still plenty of reason to be skeptical because Dr. Hamer's work hasn't been replicated, and much of his analysis is speculative." But he goes on to make such ridiculous sweeping statements (regularly using "faith," "spirituality," and "religion" interchangeably along the way) that one wonders if that particular sentence wasn't a cautious editor's afterthought. For example: "any genetic predisposition isn't for becoming an evangelical, but for an openness to spirituality at a much broader level. In Alabama, it may express itself in Pentecostalism; in California, in astrology or pyramids." Well, there, that accounts for environmental variability. (Because out here in California, you know, we're all into astrology and pyramids. Why, we keep a pyramid right up there on the altar at my Lutheran church. And we've swapped our lectionary for star charts.) He goes on, "Still, it's striking how faith is almost irrepressible. While I was living in China in the early 1990's, after religion had been suppressed for decades, drivers suddenly began dangling pictures of Chairman Mao from their rear-view mirrors. The word had spread that Mao's spirit could protect them from car crashes or even bring them sons and wealth. It was a miracle: ordinary Chinese had transformed the great atheist into a god." But I think my favorite throwaway paragraph is this one: "Genes that promote spirituality may do so in part by stimulating chemical messengers in the brain like dopamine, which can make people optimistic and sociable - and perhaps more likely to have children. (Dopamine is very complex, but it appears linked to both spirituality and promiscuity, possibly explaining some church scandals.)" Is that supposed to be funny? I hope he was trying to be funny, and not trying to be an evolutionary psychologist. In either case, he really should keep his day job (which clearly needs a more precise description). You're good at one thing, Nick, which is writing about genocide. Everytime you venture into domestic politics, culture, or religion, you sound like you're writing filler for a bad church newsletter or a diner placemat. Spare us, please.

Oh, you meant that early warning about al Qaida? (Via the Daily Kos diaries, I encountered "I Want Condi," a very clever remake of the Bow Wow Wow classic.)

William Rivers Pitt shows us exactly what programs are being cut or crippled by the new Bush budget. Do look at his list of terminations.

I missed news of this National Academy of Science report last month. Those partisan eggheads at the NAS think the president's Clear Skies plan will lower clean air standards! The Post writer sure had to work hard to come up with this careful formulation: "The Bush administration's bill to curb air pollution from power plants would reduce air pollution less than the current Clean Air Act rules, according to apreliminary report by the National Academy of Sciences released yesterday." I guess that's not exactly the same as saying "it will cause more pollution."

Are these attempts to debilitate the Endangered Species Act really necessary when the administration is already pressuring Fish and Wildlife scientists to "alter or withhold findings that would have led to greater protections for endangered species"?

Several friends have asked me "offline" how I can stand reading and digesting enough news to continue posting it here. My answer is that I can't - not always. Sometimes it just makes me sick and despondent, and that's when it's very helpful to have several hundred pages of assigned reading in my classes: homework sharply curtails the time one can spend following this administration's daily assaults on democracy, human rights, and the environment.

Unfortunately, it also makes for brownouts here on the blog for several days at a time. I apologize for those.

First... on Saturday I mentioned (scroll down to the item that begins "I guess there's a reason I think of them as the White House Press Release Corps") that another suspected press shill had been identified. Well, (via Salon) he's not holding up well under close inspection. (Whatever would a guy be doing with a domain name like Hot Military Study? My goodness, that sounds almost... Why, has he been watching Sponge Bob Squarepants?!)

Congratulations to Karl Rove, who is now officially in charge of everything. Now can we just unplug Bush's battery pack and put him away? Or at least set him on "mute"? I really can't bear another press conference.

Yes, I've been reading about the budget, but there's nothing I can say that others haven't already (e.g., David Corn). But here's where we get a little insight into why Bush was such a spectacular failure as a businessman (Ok, he was very talented at getting associates to bail him out when the businesses went bankrupt): while all effective forms of education are going to be debilitated, the totally ineffective abstinence-education programs actually get MORE money. Here is a useful site where you can look at the "nutshell" version of specific recommendations for specific departments and programs. (Thanks, B!)

George Monbiot provides a jaw-dropping overview of US-facilitated corruption in Iraq.

Ernst Mayr, 1904-2005

I knew this guy's dad! When I was in college, I did an internship at the Columbus Zoo and spent a good many hours observing Oscar, father of Oscar Jonesy (OJ - as he was known then - had already been moved). If I remember correctly, Oscar Sr. was the son of Colo, the first gorilla born in captivity, which of course makes Oscar Jonesy her grandson. He's got her cheekbones.

In one of my classes we're reading Richard Baxter's People or Penguins: The Case for Optimal Pollution. Setting aside, for the moment, the difficulty of getting one's head around the notion of "optimal pollution" --- I'm trying hard to appreciate what was apparently a groundbreaking model for analyzing the costs and benefits of controlling pollution. But this has been difficult, since I'm repeatedly compelled to fling the pages as far from me as I can get them. Baxter begins from the premise that nonhuman life and "resources" (some of which are also known as "habitats") have no intrinsic value - only what is assigned to them by humans (as, I suppose, sources of medicine, outerwear, elegant deck furnishings, fossil fuels, and places to drive snow mobiles). I can't "get there" mentally, so the rest of his system is, for me, like doing math with no concept of zero: I'm not on the same scale. Still, I recognize that his model has shaped public policy on the environment - for better or worse - for the last 30 years (see here, for an example).

I land on the side of "for worse." For that reason, I'm probably going to have to read Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse. I read what was probably an excerpt sometime last year (the year before?) in Harper's Magazine and was fascinated. The excerpt began:

One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians, realize that a primary cause of the collapse of those societies has been the destruction of the environmental resources on which they depended. Fewer still appreciate that many of those civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth, and power.

Recent archaeological discoveries have revealed similar courses of collapse in such otherwise dissimilar ancient societies as the Maya in the Yucatán, the Anasazi in the American Southwest, the Cahokia mound builders outside St. Louis, the Greenland Norse, the statue builders of Easter Island, ancient Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. These civilizations, and many others, succumbed to various combinations of environmental degradation and climate change, aggression from enemies taking advantage of their resulting weakness, and declining trade with neighbors who faced their own environmental problems. Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact—approaching the limit at which impact outstrips resources—we can now understand why declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks.

Here is a detailed review of the new book, from Grist online magazine.

While we're on the topic, take heart in this Washington Post story, "The Greening of Evangelicals."

You'd think this would be bigger news:

...After a marathon session, a widening rift between Europe and the US was thwarted in the final stage of discussion when Gordon Brown announced that finance ministers from the G7 had in fact for the first time expressed firm willingness to provide as much as 100 percent debt relief for the world’s poorest countries.

I did finally spot the item in the NY Times International news, where we learn that the devil is - as usual - in Mr. Bush's details.

First came heat. Now, code-worthy wiring and electrical capacity! A real, "live" electrical outlet in the bathroom and TWO live outlets in the rooms with computers, stereo, TV and power-sucking kitchen appliances! Gone are the elaborate daisy chains of insulated extension cords and surge protectors! (OK, more like neural networks than daisy chains. The electrician nearly had to be defibrillated when he saw my handiwork.) Three leaky, fragile windows are being replaced next week.

What's next for our charming little 1929 rental home?! (A "For Sale" sign?)

I have to admit that I have not yet been able to read the text of Bush's "State of the Union." But who hasn't seen the big "spontaneous" moment when a US mother who lost her son in Iraq hugged an Iraqi woman who voted for the first time on Monday? A Daily Kos diarist was curious about the Iraqi woman, and did a little googling. (Does anyone remember a guy named Chalabi? As the diarist notes, he sat in that special guest seat last year. Do you think Karl Rove knows about Google, yet?)

Do read this article on the unvarnished truth about the administration's 2nd term agenda: political dominance.

NIH employees will be barred from excepting payments (stocks, consultancies, directorships, etc) from pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies. Shh... this is a rare sighting of applied ethics...

I think I've linked to this Bad Reporter comic before, but a friend had saved the hard copy for me (thanks, B!), and it's a perfect lead-in to this story on the "controversial new theory" of intelligent design. A couple of quibbles: (a) not new, (b) not a "theory" - which is something designed to organize and explain facts and observations.

The brilliant Pennsylvania senator who believes that gay marriage will lead to man-on-dog sex (I can't make these things up; I simply don't have the imagination) also calls evolution one of the "big social issues of our time," along with abortion and gay marriage. Evolution? Big Social Issue? Where is this headed? Are scientists going to be forced to recant their work in theocratic inquisitions?

(An aside: sadly, they're aren't many compelling reasons to read the San Francisco Chronicle, but Bad Reporter is one.)

It so happens that one of my assignments this week was a reading on the process of creating the NRSV. So this item in The Revealer caught my eye. Priests for Equality has produced an Inclusive Hebrew Scriptures and an Inclusive New Testament that is giving Richard Ostling conniptions. He refers to PFE as "militant feminists." I'm wondering if I would know a militant feminist if I saw one: do they where identifying uniforms and carry weaponry?

I guess there's a reason I think of them as the White House Press Release Corps... I wonder if this one - the latest to raise suspicions - happens to be the same guy who lobbed the following editorial softball to Bush at his press conference last week: "Q Mr. President, Senator Ted Kennedy recently repeated his characterization of Iraq as a, quote, "quagmire," and has called it your Vietnam. And the questioning of Alberto Gonzales and Condi Rice in the Senate has been largely used by Democrats to criticize your entire Iraq program, especially what you're trying to do postwar. I wonder if you have any response to those criticisms? And what kind of an effect do you think these statements have on the morale of our troops and of the confidence of the Iraqi people that what you're trying to do over there is going to succeed?"

Not that it does any good to point out conservative hypocrisies, because they are so untroubled by them, but Daniel Macguire does so elegantly here. The picture that he quotes Sr. Joan Chittister's description of was on Truthout last week or maybe the week before, but it was so upsetting that I couldn't even find words to introduce it here. Body and Soul nabbed it and linked to it, though.

Catching up on Sirotablog I just saw this item: in 1978, then running for Congress, one George W. Bush claimed that unless Social Security was privatized, it would go broke by... 1988.

I'm thinking maybe I'll start a fun little feature where, from time to time, I'll just post a "says it all" kind of sentence grabbed from a story somewhere, with no introduction or explanation other than it's being part of "a fun little feature where, from time to time, I'll just post a 'says it all' kind of sentence grabbed from a story somewhere." I'm thinking I'll call it "A Fun Little Feature Where" -- well, I'll work on that. Here's today's: "Mr. Watt said Mr. Bush seemed surprised by some of the statistics he was given on how black Americans were lagging in income, employment and health insurance coverage."

Absolutely shameful: six Democrats joined Republicans in confirming Gonzales for Attorney General. (And of course Bush's new favorite Democrat Joe Lieberman was among them.)

"...it's a hell of a lot of fun to to shoot them."

Read this story about the military grade .50-caliper rifle that California is wisely banning. And take note of the end:

Under the Brady Bill, sales records of guns used to be kept for 90 days, which enabled the FBI to check the names of gun purchasers against terror watch lists.

A year ago, at Attorney General John Ashcroft’s initiative, Congress reduced the period of record keeping from 90 days to 24 hours. That’s the policy that’s in effect today.

A sad truth about California schools and the lottery...

It's the second day of my new semester, and I spent it at home with some kind of flu bug that set in during class last night and made the 45 minute subway ride home far more harrowing than usual. But by this afternoon, I was feeling peppy enough to tackle the "bug" that invaded an aging (all of 3 years old) laptop. Three hours later, I was consumed with hatred for computers - despite their making things like this blog possible. Whatever my computer caught awhile back, it first killed the antiviral software, then made it impossible to install any other. The firewall has worked, but who knows what viral and spyware devilspawn got in during the (I'm not going to say how long) time the other defenses were down. I ran a spyware detector, then a registry cleaner, lathered, rinsed, repeated... Finally I decided to reinstall the drivers with the manufacturer's reinstall disk. That didn't work, so I next reinstalled XP (swearing the whole while that I will convert to Linux one day), and watched as the process wiped out the graphics card so that, upon rebooting, there is nothing to look at -- only those lovely little Windows loading chords to listen to.

All this to say that any of the nifty links I had stored up on that particular computer (between work, home and school, I'm spread out over several) to share with you are gone.

Can't wait to see what kinds of extortionist politics Bush cooks up for this: The UK is trying to secure his support for African debt relief.

Juan Cole has a good article in Salon (access by subscription, or by watching a short ad) on what to expect in the short term from the Iraq elections. He also had a slightly skeptical blog post Sunday which gives some history of Bush's political machinations leading up to this election. In the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, of course, Bush is going to tell us tomorrow night - as others have observed (and here) - that the whole point of the invasion was to give Iraqis the right to vote. I wish we could think the media won't let him, but since they've given him a pass on every other lie (as a recent example, his made up "study" demonstrating the superiority of two-heterosexual-parent-families), it's probably moot.

I don't always remember to check Keith Olbermann's blog, but once in awhile something points me back to it. This time it was a story in the Revealer (also The Village Gate). Last week, Olbermann did a segment on his show Countdown on James Dobson's bizarre warnings about Sponge Bob (warnings which Dobson is now claiming were mischaracterized). His blog documents the hilarious retaliation campaign launched by the Focus on the Family website, here, here, and here. Enjoy.

Now that the election is over, Utah is reconsidering its draconian gay marriage ban. Wonder what Ohioans are going to think when they confront the same realities?

Taken literally, Utah's provision could deny hospital visitation or survivor's property rights to children being brought up by grandparents, or to senior citizens who live together but do not marry for financial reasons. Siblings living in the same household also could find themselves without customary rights.

Utah's Legislature - overwhelmingly Republican and Mormon, and one of the most conservative bodies in the nation - ignored warnings from the state's Republican attorney general that the amendment went too far. Utah voters ratified it with 66 percent approval in November.

Now, in a moment of sober reflection, the same lawmakers are looking at giving back to adults who live together but are ineligible to marry - a category that includes same-sex couples - some of the rights of husband and wife...

More on social security: Paul Krugman crunches the right's magical numbers (big surprise - they don't add up:"They can rescue their happy vision for stock returns by claiming that the Social Security actuaries are vastly underestimating future economic growth. But in that case, we don't need to worry about Social Security's future: if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come... Alternatively, privatizers can unhappily admit that future stock returns will be much lower than they have been claiming. But without those high returns, the arithmetic of their schemes collapses."), and Farhad Manjoo parses the phrase book ("...in the campaign that the White House is about to launch, the numbers won't count for much. What will count, as Republicans suggest in their playbook, are language and media, and public relations spinners will matter far more than economists").

This just makes me sick:

...In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue.

Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities...

Further on:

There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors, that evolution on earth has been going on for billions of years and that evolution can be and has been tested and confirmed by the methods of science. But in a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."

And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea. According to the foundation report, polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools.

These findings set the United States apart from all other industrialized nations, said Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University, who has studied public attitudes toward science. Americans, he said, have been evenly divided for years on the question of evolution, with about 45 percent accepting it, 45 percent rejecting it and the rest undecided.

In other industrialized countries, Dr. Miller said, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, most of the others say they are not sure and very few people reject the idea outright.

"In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution," he said. Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution, he said. "It has not been a Catholic issue or an Asian issue," he said.

In the October 11, 2004 "Non Sequitur" comic strip (archived on U Comics, but you'll need a subscription - or a trial registration) the little kid and her pony friend are studying the campaign debates on TV. She explains what she has learned to her father: "it's more important to demean the opponent's integrity than to be right about anything... and never ever admit that you're wrong." Her dad tells her she was born for this era, and she says, "I just hope some stupid 'age of reason' doesn't come along by the time I grow up." Sadly, I must agree with her pony: "Oh, I don't see much chance of that..."

Happy 49th birthday, Rudy!