A Common Enemy: Politics aside...

... as someone who catches his White House briefing almost daily, I have to express a sense of genuine concern for Tony Snow, and hope he beats this thing, and stays positive, as he commended Elizabeth Edwards for doing, after her announcement just last week:

"As somebody who has been through this, Elizabeth Edwards is setting a powerful example for a lot of people, and a good and positive one," Snow said from the podium. "She's being aggressive. She's living an active life. And a positive attitude, prayers, and people you love are always a very good addition to any kind of medicine you have. So for Elizabeth Edwards, good going. Our prayers are with you."

Cancer is the enemy of us all, and an insidious enemy. I hope one day we'll collectively, as a species, put it out of commission.

As if they don't have enough to deal with...

... fighting in Iraq, once the lights go out, women soldiers live in constant fear of being raped by their male counterparts in the latrines, if they are unfortunate enough to need to use them after dark, according to Col. Janis Karpinski (demoted from general after taking much of the blame for Abu Ghraib.) So apparently many of the women avoided drinking water after a certain time in the afternoon, thus causing dehydration-related deaths, which, surprise, surprise, were hushed up.

Karpinski published a book about her life in the military called One Woman's Army.

Interesting: the role of emotion in moral judgment

This article in New Scientist discusses research on why, apparently, both Kant and Hume may be vindicated by neuroscience with regard to how impaired emotional processing affects moral judgments.

Let's play "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

... for the gazillionth time this year, and it's only March.
Wouldn't want to be Tony Snow. The press is just so mean, wanting to know stuff, pointing out obvious holes in a story before Karl Rove even has a chance to set it straight, off-record and unsworn in, if the Congress accepts what one saucy correspondent called the White House's E.G.O. (for "extraordinarily generous offer.") Yes, they were all pretty cheeky today.

from today's White House Press Corps briefing:.

ED HENRY, CNN: Earlier, you were saying, when I asked about, "Well, was the president informed of this decision; did the president sign off on the U.S. attorneys being fired?," you said the president has no recollection of being informed of all of this.

SNOW: Right.

HENRY: So were his advisers really advising him on this, or is this really privileged communication involving the president and his advisers, if the president wasn't looped in, you're saying, on this decision?

SNOW: Well, that's...

HENRY: So, other people...

SNOW: That also falls into the intriguing question category.

HENRY: But, I mean...

SNOW: You're asking me to -- look, there are a number of complex legal considerations in here, and I'm not going to try to play junior lawyer. These are the sort of things that people are going to have an opportunity to talk about.

HENRY: But you can't have it both ways, if you're saying the president wasn't in the loop, when he just cited executive privilege for the president's...

SNOW: No, what you are saying is, "Are conversations that didn't take place privileged?"

Well, no, they didn't take place.

HENRY: So what are you protecting?

SNOW: Well, no, we're not -- what we're trying to do is to protect the ability of the American people to see folks in Washington get at the truth without, in fact, engaging in the kind of unseemly partisanship that has too often been a factor in recent political life.

Quote du Jour: NASA's James Hansen on the media's current conception of "balance" (again, no kin to moderation, IMO)

from today's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on possible political interference with government climate change scientists:

REP. DARRELL ISSA (R-CA): Among scientists, you appear to believe that the debate about any aspect of science being settled, that you think is settled, has a chilling effect on people's understanding.

You said so in your opening remarks here today. You said that the American people were confused by these contrarian opinions.

I guess we could be talking about Senator Jimmy Inhofe, who says that there isn't global warming. You say that it's settled science. Is that correct?

JAMES HANSEN, DIR., GODDARD INSTITUTE FOR SPACE STUDIES, NASA: I wouldn't state it the way that you just did.

ISSA: Please rephrase...

HANSEN: What I would refer to is the fact that, very often, the media -- sometimes with pressure from special interests -- will present "balance." And "balance" means we have one person describing the science and one person who disputes it, even in cases where the science is 99 percent certain.

And both of them speak in a technical language, which the public often -- sounds like they're, you know, technical scientists -- and they don't understand the language.

And so it looks like a 50/50 thing even when it's not.

Complicated Woman

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a guest, Thursday night, on The Colbert Report, which, prior to my working in the news media industry, was one of my primary sources of news (and now I realize how hilariously misinformed I was) but it's still one of my primary sources of entertainment.
I was impressed with how self-possessed and poised Ali remained (it's hard to be poised seated opposite Stephen Colbert playing Bill O'Reilly) while discussing her controversial views on Islam and religion in general.
What wasn't discussed in the interview, and which I was surprised to read later, was that Ali, a feminist and atheist, works at the American Enterprise Institute. It's easy enough to understand why she would have taken the job when it was offered, given that she was under threat of death from Muslims in the Netherlands after her collaboration with Theo Van Gogh, who was assassinated -- and also suddenly unwelcome in the country itself (where she had been a member of the Dutch parliament) for fabricating her reasons for seeking asylum there as a young girl fleeing an arranged marriage.
It's a fascinating story, which Ali recounts in her new book, Infidel.
But with this knowledge in mind, I thought it was interesting that SC asked her whether Christian fundamentalists should use the "fire with fire" approach in combating the violent element of Muslim fundamentalism (the new buzzword is "Islamo-fascism.")
This is the perfect question to have asked because it isolates what separates Ali's views from some of her neocon colleagues. But maybe not all of them, as I might automatically assume. Maybe it is possible to be a feminist and atheist at the American Enterprise Institute. As my significant other pointed out, at least it provides a little diversity over there. And at least it's genuine diversity, i.e. diversity of worldview versus merely the skin-deep tokenism so beloved of the neocons.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day...

... or perhaps dishonor, this was interesting. Apparently the current inhabitants of the British Isles (does Ireland resent being called a "British" Isle? I bet they do; can't they come up with a more, or would that be less, inclusive term?) Anyway, apparently, the British, Scottish, Welsh and Irish all share the majority of their genes, owing to a prehistoric population, speaking a language similar to Basque, that have lived there for the last 16,000 years.

Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, introduces several theories that would turn long-held assumptions about British history on their head if they are further verified.

But he doesn't hold out much hope for shared ancestry healing old rivalries (maybe policymakers should take a hint from this kind of pessimism when considering other populations, say, in the Middle East):

If the people of the British Isles hold most of their genetic heritage in common, with their differences consisting only of a regional flavoring of Celtic in the west and of northern European in the east, might that perception draw them together? Geneticists see little prospect that their findings will reduce cultural and political differences.

The Celtic cultural myth “is very entrenched and has a lot to do with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity; their main identifying feature is that they are not English,” said Dr. Sykes, an Englishman who has traced his Y chromosome and surname to an ancestor who lived in the village of Flockton in Yorkshire in 1286.

Dr. Oppenheimer said genes “have no bearing on cultural history.” There is no significant genetic difference between the people of Northern Ireland, yet they have been fighting with each other for 400 years, he said.

As for his thesis that the British and Irish are genetically much alike, “It would be wonderful if it improved relations, but I somehow think it won’t.

Quote du Jour: Peter Pace, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

Can you guess what the general is speaking about in this quote from an interview with the Chicago Tribune?

"I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.

Yep, it's the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy about exposing covert CIA agents -- I mean, about whether we let them torture people in secret prisons -- I mean, no, I guess it's about whether an Arabic linguist in the Army is gay or not. I forgot that "moral" has become an exclusive synonym for "heterosexual," losing any of the other meanings it previously held.

Budget Paradox Case in Point: No Child Left Behind

In that "lowest common denominator" school of bipartisanship that's becoming more and more the rule -- not to be confused with moderation! -- Bush's No Child Left Behind compromise policy was well-meaning but too top-down and short-sighted; and then, of course, he refuses to pay for it, rewarding schools' improved performance with less and less funding each year, according to educators. No wonder they're peeved about it.

from the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies (yes, that's an abbreviated version of the committee name) hearing on federal funding for the No Child Left Behind Act on Wed., March 14:

JOHN JENNINGS, CEO, CENTER ON EDUCATION POLICY: The other point is, for years, since I've worked in this area, I have heard folks say, business people, politicians, well, there would be more money for education provided when there's more accountability.

Well, today, you won't find an educator in the country who will tell you that the accountability isn't coming from No Child Left Behind. And so the accountability is there, but the money isn't there.

SEN. TOM HARKIN (D-IA): That's right.

JENNINGS: And so it seems time for the Congress and the administration to own up to its responsibility to provide the money. And what we heard earlier today from the secretary, well, we only provide 8 to 9 percent of the money and we can't provide any more -- that's not the answer.

The answer is that, if the federal government wants all this, the federal government has to help to pay for it.

HARKIN: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And that's what we're trying to get at. And that's this ridiculous, crazy budget that we have, that's sent down to us. And to try to get adequate -- no, not adequate, I wouldn't say adequate -- we've got to get a big increase to education -- not adequate, that's not the right word.

We need to have funding of education that would match exactly what we want to get out of it. And, as I said at the beginning, the teachers I talk to on this stuff -- the ones that I hear that are really griping about No Child Left Behind -- it's not that they don't want to do it. They can't do it. They're just -- they're frustrated. And look how many teachers we're losing in the first or second year now.

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish: Rockefeller pretty much sums it up...

... speaking broadly on the administration's fiscal attitudes at today's Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation hearing on FAA Reauthorization

SEN. JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV (D-WV): My own predilection is that America's making a tremendous mistake, right now, by doing everything short-term and incrementally, that we're not looking at the big picture, that we have to virtually reconstruct America from every single point of view, from our education system, to our transportation system in all of its forms, to a war on terror, to homeland security. I mean, the list never ends.

But -- and I think we have about a 10 to 15-year window in which to do this. The next question is: How can you afford that?

I have absolutely no idea. But I do know this, that when President Clinton left office, he had a $5.6 trillion surplus.

He may not, because of his Congress at the time, have been able to get away with it, but he could have figured something out with his lawyers, to take that $5.6 trillion, not use it into paying down debt but to use it to, for the one time in our recent life, in generational life, to create a construction fund, you know, a "build America" fund, everything from education to transportation to everything else.

We have enormous needs. We are not meeting them. At the rate that we are going, we will not meet them.

We have become a Congress and a society of incrementalists because we are forced to do that by our economic situation and by various things going on in the world and the rest of it. And we're not going to make it, in my judgment.

Just speaking as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I don't think we're going to make it. I don't think we have the time to make it, unless we do these things in a fairly short period time.

Second Chance (search for this book by title, not author)

The author's name, Zbigniew Brzezinski, (who was the national security adviser to President Carter) doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. But he's a frequent guest (often along with Henry Kissinger, who affectionately refers to him as "Zbig") on the Sunday morning talk shows, and I've always been very impressed with his frank, well-expressed opinions on foreign policy. They seem like some of the soundest opinions around, so I'd feel safe recommending this new book just based on that, although I know it's a bad habit to recommend books one hasn't read yet... so little time in the day.

Anyway, since books are usually shelved by author, not title, there's always Amazon:
Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

The best thing the 108th Congress ever did...

... was pass the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Yeah, it left out some provisions that maybe should have been in there, and vice versa, but from a personal perspective, it's the Best Act Ever, all due to the Daylight Savings Time provision that pushed back the start of that magical time of year three weeks, to make it effective today.
This guy disagrees, but I don't trust people who are against sunlight, so who cares? Besides, they said on the NewsHour that he's an English professor, so what does he know about energy policy? ;)
All I know is that now is the time of year when the last drop of vitamin D drains from my body, and that, thanks to this act, I can get up from my computer and go out there to enjoy the sunshine for one hour longer each day, starting right now. Theoretically.

P.S. The new look is in anticipation of spring fever. Once it hits, I won't be able to stay inside customizing my blog. Bring it on!

From the Walter Reed hearings this week...

... here is Clinton (formerly known as H. Clinton) from one of yesterday's hearings, following up on a congressional proposal that is so obvious, practical and commonsense that it shouldn't have taken Congress to come up with it. You'd think someone in the Army itself could have suggested it. Of course, they probably did, and were soon abruptly fired for incompetence while the leadership just got shuffled around and continued to act like things were just fine.

Just why is Kiley still there, anyway? Someone in today's House hearing (sorry, I forget who it was -- Hobson seems to ring a bell, but don't quote me on that) suggested it was because he had an "angel" watching out for him, but I'm guessing it's someone with more insider clout.

But I digress...

CLINTON: We've already heard about the disconnect between the Department of Veterans Affairs schedule for rating disabilities that doesn't adequately address the current nature of wounds like TBI and PTSD and amputations and hearing loss and diseases.

In the audience is Steve Robinson. He and I worked together a couple of years ago, in trying to get a pre- and post-deployment physical exam done so that we could actually tell what was the condition of a soldier before being deployed and the condition of that soldier when he returned.

And one of the things we could not get through was a mental exam assessment, before someone was deployed.

We're now hearing that people who are reporting with TBI and PTSD are being told it was a pre-existing condition.

You know, if the proposal that I had made and that others had lobbied for had been accepted, we might have a baseline to figure out what actually happened to these young men and women during their deployments.

Also in the "Go On, Girl" file, earlier in the same hearing, newbie Sen. McCaskill (D-MO) was the first to pointedly ask Kiley if he thought he should resign. (I'm sure you can guess his answer.)

And on a lighter note, this reflection on his own post-WW2 rehabilitation from Senator Inouye (D-HI) in today's Senate hearing:

INOUYE: I had to learn to play a musical instrument. Before the war, I played a saxophone and the clarinet, but that was impossible, so then they tried a trumpet, and they said, no, your lips are too soft for that.

And so they said, how about the piano?

I said, you must be out of your mind, but I passed the test. Some day I'll demonstrate to you.

(LAUGHTER)

They even taught us how to make love. Some day I'll say so in public, not for the record here, but I can assure you it was the best lesson I ever got.

(LAUGHTER)

I've never made a mistake since.

Unit 731

This article on Japanese biological warfare experiments on the Chinese during World War II makes me want to finally join Amnesty International, something I have been meaning to do for too long. This is truly horrifying (warning: the article is quite graphic) and one is always reminded in reading things like this that if they have been done at all by human beings, they could be done again, if power were to fall into the wrong hands. In parts of the world off this nation's radar, in fact, they could be happening now.
On that note, what's also horrifying is the fact that these war crimes, unlike those of the Nazis, were excused by the U.S. government in exchange for the research data (the Cold War mentality of getting a hold of it before the Soviets did.) And they were virtually unknown to the world community until after it was too late for the Chinese to seek legal redress for these particular crimes.

I Don't Heart Huckabee, and other Highlights from CPAC

The thing is, Mike Huckabee used to be my favorite Republican contender (ever since John McCain's Bush-calls-this-a-troop-surge?-I'll-show him-a-troop-surge push.) But this statement is scary as hell:

Here's what I don't understand. For those who say we shouldn't amend the Constitution, they seem to be more than willing to amend the Holy Bible, the Koran, as well the Talmud. I'm not sure why we would take a sacred Biblical text and amend it and not be willing to amend the Constitution to be consistent with the very texts upon which that Constitution was based.

Unsurprisingly, this guy, Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-OK, who gave an anti-Al Gore (I'll call it "An All-Too Convenient Fancy") PowerPoint presentation at the conference, isn't running for president:

Why are politicians so afraid to tell the truth about man-made global warming?

It's because the families are subjected to every conceivable insult and attack. I have been called -- my kids are all aware of this -- "dumb," "crazy man," "science-abuser," "Holocaust denier," "villain of the month," "hate-filled," "warmonger," "Neanderthal," "Genghis Khan," and "Attila the Hun."

(LAUGHTER)

And I could just tell you that I wear some of those titles proudly, considering where they're coming from.

P.S. It's hard to read conservative activists sometimes, but I would say that Rudy Giuliani at least came close to stealing the show. If he can keep up that momentum, he may have a shot, despite his much-discussed liabilities. If I agreed with more than 20 percent of what he was saying, I would have been sold myself. He has a way of inspiring confidence.