Category: Politics

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Bush’s War on Science

There is an excellent article in the New Yorker this week, but it is not available online. “Political Science,” by Michael Specter, investigates this administration’s unprecedentedly ideological approach to science. Happily, a Q & A session with the author is available online, and it gives a taste of the article itself:

No Administration is eager to hire people who are virulently opposed to its goals. Yet, in the past, there has usually been a general feeling that scientists are above, or at least on the sidelines of, politics, and that they should be given jobs based purely on their ability to carry them out. That is a little utopian, and, of course, it doesn’t always work that way. But this Administration, more than any in memory, seems very aggressive about making certain that its scientific advisors support its ideas. And, if they don’t, their advice is often ignored.

In the article itself, Specter recounts a conversation he had with Gerald T. Keusch, who “served at the N.I.H. as the director of the Fogarty Center, which concentrates on international health” from 1998-2003. Keusch describes this experience, which he had while trying to fill vacant seats on his board with qualified applicants:

I was told that Torsten [Wiesel] was rejected because he has signed open letters that were critical of the President . . . Geeta [Rao Gupta] was rejected because her organization is not opposed to abortion “which, we should not forget, is legal in the United States. And Jane Menken sat on the board of the Alan Guttmacher Institute . . . That is literally what was said to me. Then I received a bunch of C.V.s in the mail. One of them was from a professor emeritus of economics at an obscure college in California that I had never heard of. His entire publication record consisted of pieces in the Christian Science Monitor and a Catholic monthly that took politically charged positions. That was typical of the calibre: there was nothing scientific, nothing peer-reviewed.

This administration, for various reasons, has problems with facts. Scientists try to discover and describe facts. This conflict leads to the disastrous situation described above. The administration defines competence, not as the ability to perform a job well, but as ideological sympathy with the President. Thus Brownie can do a heckuva job, but eminently qualified scientists are not considered qualified. Disgusting.

Meanwhile, as David Ignatius points out at The Washington Post things here in the real world are deteriorating:

Every week brings new evidence that global climate change is real and that it’s advancing more rapidly than scientists had expected. This past week brought a report in Science that the Antarctic is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year. Last month researchers reported that glaciers in Greenland are melting twice as fast as previously estimated. One normally cautious scientist, Richard Alley, told The Post’s Juliet Eilperin he was concerned about the Antarctic findings, since just five years ago scientists had been expecting more ice. “That’s a wake-up call,” he said. “We better figure out what’s going on.”

Unfortunately, the real world will continue to operate in a fact-based manner, no matter what Bush wishes were true. Either we embrace science, and let real scientists do their jobs, or we continue on the path of ignorance, which leads to disaster.

If there are any conservatives out there, reading this, I’d like to take a moment and remind you: it’s Conservative Amnesty Month. You have the chance to be forgiven for the past, all it takes is voting Democratic one time.

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The Handling of Iran

This doesn’t look very good for anybody:

Iran’s chief negotiator renewed a threat to interrupt petroleum exports if the IAEA board of governors followed through on its vote last month to report Iran to the Security Council pending a last stab at a diplomatic solution. Iran is the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

“If we are referred to the Security Council, problems might occur for others as well as us,” Ali Larijani said at a news conference. “We would not like to use our oil as a weapon. We would not like to make other countries suffer.”

How mafia-esque of him. Don’t worry, the United States is always ready to descend to any dictatorship’s level:

“The Iran regime must be made aware that if it continues down the path of international isolation, there will be tangible and painful consequences,” Bolton said at the convention of a pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Reuters news agency reported. He said the United States was prepared to “use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat.” President Bush has repeatedly said the possibility of military strikes remains “on the table” even as Washington endorsed an intense international diplomatic effort.

While this dynamic is obviously unhelpful, it is worth unpacking the issues here to see just how badly Bush has handled this problem. If you have a large, oil-wealthy nation whose theocratic rulers are obsessed with appearing strong, proud, and courageous, and then you threaten them to bend them to your will, what exactly do you expect to happen? Mr. Larijani makes an enlightening statement at the end of the piece:

He repeatedly warned, however, that Iran would not tolerate the issue of its program being sent to the Security Council, given the humiliations neighboring Iraq endured during forced inspections through the 1990s.

“But we’re not willing to be like Iraq, to let them come into the country whenever they want and look in any corner they want,” he said.

This is the crux of the matter. Iran’s primary goal is to appear strong, and to retain their self-determination. We Americans can understand that. Rather than planting our feet and digging in on the nuclear issue, we must recognize that the problem here is the government of Iran, and until the Iranian people decide to change that, there is relatively little we can do. When we faced a similar problem with the USSR, we had a highly effective nuclear policy: Mutually Assured Destruction. Until political change comes to Iran, that is the way to keep them from wanting to develop nuclear weapons.

This New York Times piece tries to strike an optimistic tone, but really, the facts of the situation are not all that great:

In the past three years, Dr. ElBaradei noted today, the agency has been conducting intensive investigations of Iran’s nuclear program to provide assurances about its peaceful nature.

“During these investigations, the agency has not seen indications of diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices,” he said. “Regrettably, however, after three years of intensive verification, there remain uncertainties with regard to both the scope and the nature of Iran’s nuclear program.”

. . .

Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in November 2004 to voluntarily freeze all of its uranium conversion, enrichment and reprocessing activities. But when promised economic and political rewards were not forthcoming, Iran broke the agreement. It restarted uranium conversion last August and then began tests of enriching uranium on Feb. 11.

Iran believes it has the right to pursue nuclear research. The U.S. and Europe would really rather it didn’t. We are faced with bribing them, threatening them, or invading them to prevent this. Or we could admit that they will probably move ahead with the research no matter what, and focus on social and humanitarian efforts in Iran with an eye towards long term regime change.

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Conservative Amnesty Month

As you can tell from the title of my blog, I am a Liberal. While you might expect this to make me forever an enemy of conservatives, that just isn’t the case. I know that the conservatives out there must be having a hard time these last few weeks. Scandals have rocked their senate, their house, and even their White House. Their favored son has fumbled and bobbled so many of his jobs that it can be hard to find something he did right.

I’m here to open my arms to my conservative brothers and say: forgiveness can be yours. You have a chance in the upcoming election to erase the mistakes of the past and start out on a better path. That’s right, I’m joining other progressive bloggers in offering amnesty, as part of Conservative Amnesty Month. Whether you want to change parties, or you just recognize the disastrous calamity that has befallen our government as a result of your votes, I stand ready to accept you. There are so many places to find amnesty for your past votes:

  • Evil Bobby has mentioned that he will forgive you.
  • The Mad Prophet has also opened his heart
  • At Gray Does Matter the amnesty is open as well

Please, come back to the reality based community. Vote for your local Democrat and all will be forgiven. I think we can all agree that our nation needs a fresh start.

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George Will Explains Poverty

George Will’s column in the Washington Post this Sunday was as offensive as it was incoherent. His subject was John Edwards, specifically his efforts to fight poverty. At least, I think that was his subject. Hard to be sure:

Most Americans seem to regard as the only searing economic injustice the violation of their constitutional right — surely it is in the Bill of Rights — to cheap gasoline. But Edwards believes attacking poverty can be politically energizing if, by stressing “work, responsibility, family,” the attack “is built around a value system the nation embraces.”

What? After reading this a few times, I really don’t know what to say. The first sentence seems to be mocking Americans who are upset that gasoline prices are going up. The second sentence makes Edwards sound totally right–who doesn’t want to fight poverty by promoting “work, responsibility, and family?” But the million-dollar question is: why are these thoughts related? Why does Will think that this constitutes a coherent paragraph? The world may never know.

After the incoherence, the offense:

The new paradigm is of behavior-driven poverty that results from individuals’ nonmaterial deficits. It results from a scarcity of certain habits and mores — punctuality, hygiene, industriousness, deferral of gratification, etc. — that are not developed in disorganized homes.

Edwards, who does not recognize the name James Q. Wilson, may have missed this paradigm shift. Many people in public life, and almost all those with presidential ambitions, are too busy for the study and reflection necessary for mastering any subject.

This new poverty paradigm (i.e. the poor are lazy) results, according to Will, from “spending at least $6.6 trillion on poverty-related programs in the four decades since President Johnson declared the ‘war on poverty’.” I hypothesize a different possible explanation: Will is the one who lacks the necessary mastery of this subject, and Edwards, who has spent a great deal of time and effort acquainting himself with the realities of poverty in this country, understands that every American can and should be lifted out of poverty. Rather than blaming the victim, and making ridiculous generalizations that adumbrate–dare I say it–somewhat racist sentiments, Edwards is trying to make a difference.

Of course, the column wouldn’t be complete without a final incomprehensible graf:

But the idea that the candidate’s persona is primary and that issues are secondary is a mistake made by some Democrats who yearn for another John Kennedy. He was a talented but quite traditional politician whom many Democrats wrongly remember as proving that charisma trumps substantive politics. Edwards, who has been called Kennedyesque, has a stake in that yearning.

George W. Bush is the ultimate “character-driven” President, so I think Will is pretty overtly wrong here. Wrong, that is, insofar as I can decipher any particular rational thought at all.

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Reopening the Wiretapping Debate

This Washington Post story runs under the catchy headline:

Administration Revives Dispute Over Eavesdropping Authority

I was intrigued. Why, I wondered, would the administration want to talk about this any more? And what “debate?” Well, as I should have expected, the “debate” was silly and wholly irrelevant to the facts of the case.

the Bush administration yesterday reopened a dispute about whether it tried and failed to obtain direct congressional authority for use of the president’s war-making powers on U.S. territory.

So we aren’t actually debating whether the warrantless wiretapping was illegal or not. And we’re not debating the FISA law, or the fact that warrantless wiretapping occurred. What exactly are we debating? Essentially, whether or not the administration knew that their actions would not be legal. That’s the only thing the “asking for permission” factor would demonstrate. But warrantless wiretaps are illegal whether or not the President knows that they are.

The rest of the article is just he-said he-said journalism:

“Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote” on Sept. 14, 2001, Daschle wrote, the White House asked to insert the words “in the United States” into the use-of-force resolution. “I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority,” Daschle added. “I refused.”

. . .

Reached by telephone last night, [David] Crane [aide to Trent Lott, who Daschle’s office said brought the request to them] said he has “absolutely no recollection of that ever having occurred.” Though he took part in negotiations over the use-of-force resolution, Crane said, he had been reassigned to another task before the resolution reached the Senate floor.

Oh, good. No one knows what happened about an irrelevant question. What kind of news is this? Why not take a moment to talk about whether or not violating the law is illegal, or even doing a little background on whether it makes sense to classify wiretapping in the United States as a use of force?

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Catholictown USA

Reading this CNN article, at first it all seemed a little too silly to make a big deal of:

During a speech last year at a Catholic men’s gathering in Boston, Monaghan said that in his community, stores will not sell pornographic magazines, pharmacies will not carry condoms or birth control pills, and cable television will have no X-rated channels.

Monaghan is, of course, Thomas S. Monaghan, founder of Domino’s pizza. He plans to build a town around “Ave Maria University, the first Catholic university to be built in the United States in about 40 years.” While I try to decide whether this ridiculousness constitutes a graver sin than the amazingly terrible pizza Monaghan has inflicted on us for decades, read this:

Homebuyers in Ave Maria will own their property outright. But Monaghan and Barron Collier will control all commercial real estate in the town, meaning they could insert provisions in leases to restrict the sale of certain items.

No word in the article about what would happen to you if you drove into a nearby town to purchase condoms. Would there be checkpoints? It is an interesting approach to the problem, though. If I wanted to do something unconstitutional, I would need to do it in such a way that I never had to write any laws or ordinances, so the lease-provisions strategy is ingenious.

Not that it will necessarily work:

“If they attempt to do what he apparently wants to do, the people of Naples and Collier County, Florida, are in for a whole series of legal and constitutional problems and a lot of litigation indefinitely into the future,” warned Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

You’ll remember that this all seemed a little silly to be writing about. What changed my mind were these two quotes from elected officials in Florida:

Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist said it will be up to the courts to decide the legalities of the plan. “The community has the right to provide a wholesome environment,” he said. “If someone disagrees, they have the right to go to court and present facts before a judge.”

Gov. Jeb Bush, at the site’s groundbreaking earlier this month, lauded the development as a new kind of town where faith and freedom will merge to create a community of like-minded citizens. Bush, a convert to Catholicism, did not speak specifically to the proposed restrictions.

This does get my dander up. The word “wholesome” in particular shows that the attorney general is taking sides, that he believes this would be a good idea. For the governor to praise such a clearly illegal plan is shameful. How do these people get elected? I’ll give the final word to a more gifted speaker than myself:

“This is un-American,” [Frances] Kissling said. “I don’t think in a democratic society you can have a legally organized township that will seek to have any kind of public service whatsoever and try to restrict the constitutional rights of citizens.”

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David Broder: Bipartisanship for its Own Sake

This column from David Broder is full of wistful reminiscences about the good old days, when even though people disagreed everything in Washington was more or less peachy:

But on the hustings, he said, people hunger for a return to the spirit of the Reagan years, when Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan quarreled over policy but then shared stories and trust.

How nice. The conceit of Broder’s column is that the middle way is the best way, and that it makes people antsy when the political parties disagree with each other. The value-neutral measure of political success is just getting something, anything, done:

the Republican-controlled legislature ended its regular session in 2005 deadlocked over the state Supreme Court funding mandate, Sebelius, a Democrat, called the lawmakers into a special summer session. They cobbled together a $148 million fix, and when the court said that was still inadequate, something dramatic happened.

“The legislative leaders of both parties said, ‘We have to have a plan, and we want to be at the table when it’s hammered out,’ ” Sebelius said. The result: In February, a new, bipartisan proposal for a three-year boost in school budgets . . .

Associated Press reporter John Milburn wrote, “Unlike previous years, when school finance plans were hatched by dissident Republicans and a handful of Democrats and sometimes tended to reflect narrow interests legislative leaders put their heads together with Gov. Kathleen Sebelius from the get-go to find a solution.”

Let me get this straight. Republicans deadlock the legislature. The compromise fix is inadequate. Everyone thinks they look stupid. They are right. They come up with a budget that works. Isn’t it nice when everyone plays nice together?

Except, Broder seems to be forgetting who was at fault–the “Republican-controlled legislature.” It was they who deadlocked over the mandate, they who watered down the fix to make it inadequate, and they who finally had to do the right thing out of shame. When one party is in charge, i.e. the Republicans in Washington right now, they have the power to make things happen. Or not. For David to diffuse the blame for broken government around equally is dishonest.

And there is the requisite Hillary bashing:

But what about Hillary Rodham Clinton? She leads all the early polls for the Democratic nomination. But can she avoid being seen simply as a battle-scarred veteran of the partisan Washington wars? Is there anything in her record that speaks to the hunger for consensus?

Again, no mention of whether the battles that scarred her were noble and right, or not. The hunger for consensus, so lionized by Broder in this column, is not an end in itself. Compromise with tyranny, or with insanity, is not honorable–it is cowardly. Hillary knows that. Broder, not so much.

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Global Warming is Here Now

This story from the Washington Post is full of terrible news about Canada’s (soon to be formerly) lush pine forests, which are the foundation for its logging industry. From the story:

Millions of acres of Canada’s lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.

. . .

“It’s pretty gut-wrenching,” said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It’s now.”

More and more, recently, it has become apparent that the gloomy predictions of the past thirty years are beginning to happen. I blogged here about the acceleration of glacial melting that exceeded even the direst predictions. As the man says, Global Climate Change is here, now. It is occurring, with disastrous results.

The tiny beetle has always lived in high areas from Arizona to northern British Columbia, and occasionally populations have grown in limited outbreaks. In Canada, where the beetle’s favored lodgepole pine thrives, it has been controlled by winters with early cold snaps or long killing spells of 20 degrees below zero. But for more than a decade, forestry experts say, the weather here has not been cold enough for long enough to kill the beetle.

. . .

the beetle is moving eastward. It has breached the natural wall of the Rocky Mountains in places, threatening the tourist treasures of national forest near Banff, Alberta, and is within striking distance of the vast Northern Boreal Forest that reaches to the eastern seaboard.

It goes without saying that this infestation will damage the economy of Canada–logging is one of its mainstay industries. It is also an incalculable loss of habitat and environmental treasures. Tragedy. I sure wish my government were doing more than making up insane jargon to mask its total disregard for this global problem:

the President also is moving forward on our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas intensity. That’s the amount we emit per unit of economic activity, and we’re committed to reducing that by 18 percent over 10 years. So we are acting and leading the way when it comes to research and development, and investing in new technologies. While we work to continue to grow our economies

I get it. The administration cares more about growing our economy. I certainly agree that that is a worthy goal. But I would submit that it is totally bonkers to measure our greenhouse gas emissions in relation to economic productivity. That relationship has no bearing on climate systems whatsoever. It is as if I said “I want to lose weight, so I will try to reduce amount of pizza eaten compared to time spent watching tv. In this way I can watch more tv and be happier.” Idiocy. Here’s a definition of greenhouse gas intensity for you (halfway down). And here’s why such a measure is thoroughly, thoroughly stupid:

“This town is going to die,” scoffed Pat Karey, 62, who spent 40 years at the sawmill. Other men in the Quesnel cafe — “Smokers Welcome” said the sign in the window — nodded in assent.

“A mill job is $20 an hour, or $30 with benefits. The jobs they are talking about bringing in are $8-an-hour jobs,” said Del Boesem, whose runs a business dismantling heavy logging machinery.

Welcome to the future.

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Why Won’t FDA Approve Morning After Pill?

This great column in the Washington Post is the most eloquent, clear, and coherent statement about the current problems at the FDA I have read in some time. The author, Susan F. Wood, is a “former assistant commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration,” so she knows whereof she speaks. In her own words:

Time and again in my travels I am asked, “What happened to derail Plan B?” I have to answer honestly that I don’t know. The manufacturer agreed to take the “controversial” issue of young teens’ access to emergency contraception off the table in 2004; now we are talking only about adult access to safe and effective contraception. Over 98 percent of adult women have used some form of contraception. So what is the objection?

What indeed. This ongoing nightmare defies explanation. The morning after pill is “not RU-486, the ‘abortion pill.'” It is a contraceptive; millions of women use contraceptives all over the world. They are legal: in fact

emergency contraception has been used as a method to prevent unintended pregnancies for decades by women who had physicians advise them on how many pills in their regular pill pack to take. So people who are comfortable with oral contraceptives as methods of contraception should be just as comfortable with emergency contraception.

Of course, that’s the problem in a nutshell. There is a small but vocal group of voters who are not comfortable with contraception at all:

Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary

A big hand for Focus on the Family folks! This is really what’s going on in all this. Certain elements within the Republican party are opposed to contraception in all forms. They aren’t able to pursue the issue openly, because contraception is very popular, so they are trying to limit it as best they can. More people need to be bringing up issues like this:

It’s been nearly three years since the first application came in to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter, so that women, including rape victims, could have a second chance to prevent an unintended pregnancy and the need for an abortion. How many chances have we missed? I still can’t explain what is going on here, and why women 17 and older are still denied this product in a timely way. When did adult access to contraception become controversial? And why have we allowed it to happen?

Why indeed. As a great woman once said, “women’s rights are human rights.” Let’s protect them.

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Gasoline Tax Poll

I saw an interesting story in the New York Times, about a gasoline tax, and people’s feeling about said tax. There weren’t very many surprises in the facts of the article. For example:

Eighty-five percent of the 1,018 adults polled opposed an increase in the federal gasoline tax, suggesting that politicians have good reason to steer away from so unpopular a measure.

You don’t say. Not a real shocker that people don’t want to spend more money on gas for no reason, is it? Then:

55 percent said they would support an increase in the tax, which has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, if it did in fact reduce dependence on foreign oil. Fifty-nine percent were in favor if the result was less gasoline consumption and less global warming.

My question here is: what else could a tax increase possibly do? Higher tax would decrease consumption, thus lessening our dependence on all oil, regardless of where it came from, thus reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Similarly, since global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, a byproduct of (among other things) fossil fuel combustion, less use of oil would have to decrease human contribution to global warming. There is no other possible result of an increase in the gas tax, unless perhaps it makes people so excited that they drive their hummers all over the place for no reason. Not likely.

There are actually some legitimate questions about how to enact such a tax, like this:

Because increasing the gas tax is regressive, falling hardest on those who can least afford it, Mr. Borenstein would offset the bite by lowering income taxes in a way that would “make most middle and lower income people better off.” But they would end up driving less because of the rising cost of gasoline, some economists believe. By Mr. Borenstein’s calculation, a 10 percent increase in the price of gasoline reduces consumption by 6 to 8 percent “over the long run.”

Absolutely, a regressive tax like this needs to be counterbalanced appropriately, and the specifics of any plan should be debated and amended until the outcome is right. That, however, is not an argument against raising the gas tax. The other concern the article describes is also legitimate:

“The tax would have to be earmarked for certain specific projects,” one of the people polled, Rich Arnold, 54, a Republican . . . he added, “If it was a tax that would sponsor research for fuel cells or alternative fuel sources, I could buy that.”

. . .

Lisa Fisher, a 36-year-old yoga instructor in Chicago who described herself as a Democrat, wants any additional revenue earmarked.

“If the tax is increased and oil companies reap the benefit, I would be against it,” Ms. Fisher said. “But if the tax money went to the development of electric cars, I would favor the higher tax. It is important we are not dependent on foreign oil. We are over there fighting because we are dependent.”

This is another question that could be settled by policy debates. I agree that the extra income would have to be judiciously allocated, when it was not being balanced by tax cuts for the bottom 90 percent of the income scale. All of these micro-scale policy question aside, the article basically shows that a majority of Americans support increasing the gas tax provided the laws of physics and economics do not change drastically. So why aren’t we doing it right now?

Write your representative or senator today and ask them!