Reducing science budgets until Norquist could drown them in a bathtub

I have gotten into the habit of scanning ScienceDaily.com. The write ups are short and generally good at conveying the impact of a journal article to a general audience but hey, its not war and politics they write about so how stimulating could it be? [or didn't y'all notice your volitional reading is geared to stimulation? Conditioned stimulus perhaps, but stimulation all the same!] Well, the writing is not always dry and the writers tap the right notes when the know they have more than science to report.
If you think the only class of people Bush and company cut adrift by neglecting Katrina-ravaged NOLA where the poorer and mostly black and Democrats..read this. A significant research team got its progress demolished there and the scientists finally got the message they should go elsewhere because the administration was never going to come through for the reconstruction of New Orleans. You may not understand all the talk of introns and RNA in which the remarkable findings are couched. Its not confirmed but a key mechanism of animal cell division appears to not so much evolved as arisen from a symbiosis in the very dim and remote past. I was quite stirred by the back story of a major biology research insight worthy of a PNAS paper clawing its way back to life through the dozens of generous acts of fellow scientists and the dedication and vision that it took to reconstitute the research using literally the kitchen sink if that could be spared to make a little progress.

Science Daily is not on my blogroll but maybe it should be.

Hair of the dog

It is not too far fetched to say that America is a high risk debtor. Long before the sheriff comes to evict a man who has habitually borrowed more than he can pay and squandered it on luxuries, his borrowing habits show a pattern. It is essentially the pattern of addiction. Among people addicted to alcohol, the expression hair off the dog that bit you is a junk rationalization that has turned into an accepted bad practice: having a drink in order to dull the pain of a hang over. That practice looks like the only line our nation's money mavens can recite.

Here is an article from Asia Times that is quite clear about the world's disdain for Fed policy. I don't think highly of it myself.

We have been a vocal critic of interest rate cuts in the US because, in our assessment, they do much more harm than good: subprime borrowers or holders of illiquid debt instruments are shunned from the markets in the current environment because of general risk aversion, not because of the level of interest rates. Lower interest rates, however, may cause inflationary pressures to build further and may cause further downward pressure on the dollar.

I don't have that informed an opinion but if the current mess in bank liquidity is largely the blowback of Greenspan's shortsighted means of putting off the credit drought caused by a trillion dollar republican borrowing spree, how on earth is enabling yet more dubious borrowing a solution? I suspect the certainty of inflation has been accepted as a collateral damage if it comes. The current administration can blame inflation on oil prices and, in any case, it will fall more heavily on the next administration. That overdue and oft forestalled recession would hit soon if not expensively repelled and dent McCains Same Talk express.

the only thing that matters

Bush supporters would never read anything I write anyway but I particularly advise any such supporters who have stumbled upon this page to hit the back button. Changing your minds must be sooo very painful. McCain promises to continue the ruinous idiocy I am looking at here and besides, the matter is in the hands of Bush appointees who will not be up for a vote...


I am coming to the impression that the only thing that matters to the people at the helm of the economic ship, where you and I are in steerage with subprime bilge up around our knees about now, is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I got out of stocks three years ago because I thought Greenspan was letting us all go down between the shoals of debt and inflation. I thereby missed some profits and was baffled that the market defied all the economic gravity of our situation.

Something that should matter just got kicked to the curb: the going price of our treasury bonds took an instant hit because of the Fed's move. Those bonds are the means by which your government borrows money. Via that means, for instance, the Chinese have lent us about a trillion dollars. You think they want to do that much longer? I wonder if they are tolerating such stupidity because they know the money is being spent on useless military adventures in the middle east...which have paved the way for the Chinese to access the Arab oil resources. That would be the oil our brilliant Commandeer in Chief was told his war would secure for the US! In any event, the rising price of borrowing money [and borrowing money is all the Republican president who knows how to run oil companies into the ground can understand of finance... not the repaying] means the amount of your taxes spent keeping our country's creditors happy must go up.

Historically the market was basically an ever upward trending thing. But that is not a given any more than the superior fortunes of white males is a given. It was a trend based on an America full of jobs with few foreign competitors and a vast stock of cheap resources the ends of which we thought we'd never see. I see now that brief swing at 13000 was economic smoke and mirrors. The liquidity they pursue is made of ever more frail and less substantial inventions...now your sorryassed over-mortgaged house is being put up by the bank and the only outfit willing to take it at face value for collateral is the guys in charge of making the economy appear sound. You just watch what happens in the next few days after the stock market is jonesing for another money fix and the rest of the world has to decide if it would rather be holding euros or dollars in light of yet another dilution. It is not a dilution of the dollar so much as of the faith that the dollar is representative of sound financial infrastructure rather than one swamped in debt. Just watch. I am on the sidelines just watching and grateful that tax-free municipal bonds and money markets based on them have not yet disappeared.

Granted there is an appealing unambiguous sense of the "score" or the "bottom line" about that one stock market number as a metric. Symbols and simplifications are a reliable road to error. It is a metric that matters in a direct way only to investors. Most of us are only indirectly investors in securities and far more affected by the percentage of our taxes that go into debt service and wars as compared to education, infrastructure and health care. The debt has mounted astronomically under the last three Republican administrations. Sucking all the real money out of the economy and making up for it with Federal reserve bank policy and Treasury bond sales that try to substitute borrowed money, has helped replace our factories with financial houses of credit cards institutions like Bear Sterns and Countrywide Home Aloans.

America's part in the course of the world economy had to contract in any fair scenario. Our G7 and latter participations in planning globalization is necessary to make the vast populations of other countries more equal as players in the economy. Although industries shape these policies, they seem unaware that economies are ultimately just the tools by which we dispose and share the bounty nature left us. That is why I do not complain that our trading partners have become our equals and betters in capitalism. What I object to is that we as a country decided to forget about balancing our own checkbook and, to please a swaggering neocon minority and an insecure uneducated majority, simply continued to run a quasi-colonial foreign policy. Do you remember what Afghanistan did to the Soviet government? Do you think George Bush remembers Gorbachev?

I would recommend to those who wonder why so much is going to hell in our country's finances "in spite" of the Federal Reserve Bank's desperate measures and Bush's assurance that we are just in a little "slowdown" that you read a bit more widely. Asia Times is particularly valuable both for the political insight into important rising Asian nations and for the variety and depth of its economic writers. Even AT's conservative columnists, like Hutchinson, called the Fed's predicament quite accurately months ago. Agonist also has some very informed perspectives. Brad DeLong is prolific and I find him sometimes over my head but worth the time.

A question to billionaires from Wall Street and elsewhere who have had a perpetual picnic with republican tax cuts and pour a huge [to us it is huge] amount of cash into GOP campaign coffers: Do you have somewhere to hide all the money and continue to make money in this economic environment? Are you sure the Bush league and its policies are your best friend? Do you feel no pain at all? Sustainability is not just a concept for ecologists, you know.

And for the rest of us, yes, fellow voters, I do think it is teh stupid economy. What makes you think the other errors of our leadership have not grown so enormous as to become entangled in our financial lives?

Power also comes out of the end of a breadline, if you let it get long enough.

Gimme a break

I wanted to shut up for a while and see what quiet felt like but damn, there is such sick folly afoot.

The NY Times, you don't need me to tell you, has a mixed record on getting their facts straight but when they report congressional testimony of several recent Surgeons General to the effect that the Bush league routinely pressured them to water down any health policy or reported findings that didn't look good for Rethuglican supporters, I assume that the Surgeons General have not garbled their facts. It is a fresh provocation to see old lies and disservices to the republic laid out afresh like the corpses of so many dead truths unearthed.


As Seen on the Internets: turning over a rock so that you won't have to...

I was still coming down from a bit of a high I had over the great turnout for Live Earth/Party for the Planet last weekend, when this horrid pile of lies crashed me jarringly back to the realities of the fight for our planet. I don't know if I should have done them the favor of a link but rather than go there, just see a few of their headlines:

Origins of Environmental Religions
Jay Lehr, Ph.D. - July 12, 2007
Conventional religions have been under attack for some years from liberals who have drifted into secular humanism and away from any devout belief in God. ...

Global Warming Scapegoat
James M. Taylor - July 09, 2007
Regarding “Officials discuss health, climate change” (July 2), it is amazing how global warming is becoming this generation’s version of UFOs; anything that a cursory analysis doesn’t immediately explain must be a UFO… or global warming....

And there is much more merde where that came from...they get some ignorant liar to write a crank letter to the WaPo and then publish it in their little web page of bought and paid lies as if it were news that bore repeating. Who is this "Heartland Institute"? Pretty much the spewers of specious conclusions that only bush league supporters could swallow. Herbert J Walberg, from the Hoover institute, heads their board of directors. He managed to get in a career in academic psychology before he found it more appealing to denounce school desegregation and argue that total free market treatment would leave no child with a behind. Joseph L Bast, frequent contributor of articles and co-author with Walberg did not even earn his stupidity: he is blatantly a paid liar who just repeats the lies of others.

How very Bush League of them: a PhD adviser to the department of education with his name all over a web zine of utter rubbish denials of well established science on the environment.

What is congress waiting for?

Found at Talking Points Memo: The will of the people is to be rid of Cheney. And Bush is not far behind. I you have been paying attention my Google News toy on the sidebar, you'd notice it is defaulted to fetch whatever is brewing about Cheney...and the pace and the ire have been notching up slowly for most of the past month. I see the occasional blog there but of late, its editorials from LA Times and plenty of other "establishment" sources...and they hate the guy. In a fair and sane republic, Cheney would have resigned, [as Olberman has urged ] some time ago.

Gonzo underlings caught red handed

This bit appears to be a TruthOut exclusive at the moment: Kyle Sampson deleted presumably damaging emails after congressional committees began asking for documents. Strictly speaking, that is not legal. But then in Gonzo's perverted version of the nation's law enforcement branch, neither "strict" nor "legal" mean what you and I would assume they mean.

no holiday for upsetting news.

Hit counter has gone to sleep. Nation has gone to the beach. But that is always a good time for bad news to slip by.

The bad news:

This just sucks. Bush has tried to avoid the appearance of saying there is nothing wrong with what Libby did for Cheney and Rove...and Bush. But for my money, he has not succeeded. One more board for the impeachment gallows. Maybe the Imperror thinks the Putin punch in his approval rating is the best time to try and slip this dagger into an already damaged justice system. Of course Bush's lose-lose options were discussed weeks ago and I don't think anyone is too surprised. Just disgusted. Suggest taking names of those who were urging a pardon. Those fans of Libby are all contemptible creeps who despise rule of law. Virtually any liberal blog that covers the political beat will point out the instances of strict and maximal punishment Bush has routinely delivered. As Texas governor, he found death not too harsh for 150 men and two women yet 30 months in jail for covering up an act of treason [that is more or less the category for blowing the cover of a valuable secret agent working to stop traffic in nuclear weapons materials] was "excessive". The Imperror said back when Plame was exposed that he would demand ruthless prosecution of those responsible. Yeeaah, riiight, Mr. President. Bush is a liar who will blithely contradict his tough talk if the alternative is doing anything untoward to his cronies. Firedoglake and TPM are among the better original reporting news and analysis blogs and if you want the details on this national embarrassment, start there.

News that is only bad for people you probably don't like anyway:

Meanwhile, some pesty scientists have been fixing to pull the rug out from under that Bio tech Venture Capital market: This story has been brewing in the labs for a while. By now, if you head over to the science blogs of Seed magazine, you will find some helpful elaborations of the scientific impact of this dawning realization: the one-gene-one-protein-one-biological-function idea is not always right. Networks of genes, through the interaction of their individual effects, produce end-result biology and medical consequences at least in some cases. From a combinatorial argument, it says something awesome about the economy of Darwin's great machine: 22,000 genes seemed puzzlingly small for the hundreds of thousands of different functions our bodies execute like clockwork when we are well. But the combinations of 22,000 things taken two or three or five at a time is a staggeringly big number. Ownership of genetic ideas, gene patents, are going to be shaken hard now. Notice that this is a Business story listed in the science section...all the questions about whether big pharma has enough financial incentives to undertake billion dollar drug discovery get a bit hazy when intellectual property has to be reassessed and companies might have to collaborate the way the genes they "own" have been collaborating. Silver lining?: if the drugs ever do get produced to effect illnesses stemming from networks of genes, maybe no company will have a monopoly and the prices will reflect actual production costs....nah, not in my lifetime.

Let's give Bush a 3rd term!

I am about half serious here. Just think of how it would play out...

If it doesn't kill us all, Cheney and his chimp are not only their own worst enemies but supply endless proof of the toxic consequences that grow from the polluted "principles" and vacuous "values" hacked up from conservative stink tanks over the last two decades. Leave these cowards and corrupters no room to claim they were stabbed in the back. That would indulge one of their favorite political passion plays involving their martyrhood which is a recruiting tool of savage effectiveness. Don't let them see even the appearance of an excuse that they were held back from fully implementing their "reforms". Leave the "reformers" now in jail where they are. But, since one of the things struck and killed by the triumph of conservative will is the US Constitution, wink away the 22nd amendment and insist that the blame duck serve his nation as farsightedly as ever, insist that his looting lieutenants ignore reality until the last soldier dies or deserts and the Chinese foreclose on our national debt.

The 25% who still suck up to him and his coterie of fascists might be reduced to 10% in another three years. There will always be some small percentage who will go down into the bunker with Cheney at the end, bearing cans of gasoline for their gotterdammerung bonfire. That remnant we can kick to the curb and get on with the impeachments. The die-hard dimwit conservatives of Rove's patchwork coalitions will be slow to learn what a majority of us have been appalled at for the last 6 years. But it may be worth the pain of more deaths in Iraq and more Katrina-sized domestic neglect to open the eyes of an undeniable majority, larger than the 51% who "lost" the election in 2000. It may be useful to have a yet deeper and even more dramatic divide between the small wealthy class, who might think Bush an idiot but a very useful idiot, and the rest of us who earn our shrinking dollars. The rest of us may be ready to dine on the one percent who will be able to actually afford health care in a third Bush term. Change will finally flow from every vein rather than be coaxed by wily political stratagems. We must do better than having only the Thom Hartmann's and a few economists join the hardy liberals in wonder at a tapped out nation with its staggering no-growth economy in the shadow of a record Dow Jones average. If we just leave the corpse of neoconservative administration to hang right where it its lines to heaven have tangled around its neck and leave it there long enough, the stink will be undeniable and inescapable.

It is a shame. Many of us wised up long ago or were never fooled at all but not enough of us. It will be a much healthier country when a solid 80% or more of us repudiate the warmongering and the privatizing: the dumbass foot dragging congress will be gone and the obstructions to peace, the sabotage of domestic infrastructure and education can be steamrolled. The whiny neurotics like Jonah Goldberg who have made a living for the last 20 years scripting and enabling our nascent tepid American fascism will have the truth shouted in their faces even by children: a majority of the people who want their taxes spent for the common good is NOT fascism.

Nothing like a long painful hangover to give you a long term aversion to drinking...or picking a president primarily because you thought he'd be more the more fun guy with whom to share a drink.

---

Note from my shrink: Greensmile, you did not have enough time to do any proper blogging or gather corroborating links this week but events and news have wrought their usual toll on your equanimity. Even without benefit of any particular factual news items or insight, it will do you good to rant as though fresh and specific outrages burn you up. What are blogs for anyway?

Be careful where you say "Yamamah"

Looks like a "culture of corruption" is not unique to our upstart new world empire: The LA Times reports today that a Saudi minister of influence peddling and the British Military Imperialist Complex have been exposed engaging in a kind of baksheesh, about two billion in baksheesh to be imprecise. This story is not one of simple greed, to hear British officials tell it. Fear is invoked for its explanatory magic:

The Serious Fraud Office's decision to close its probe led to charges that Britain was attempting to shore up its negotiations to sell a $20-billion new fleet of Eurofighter Typhoon jets to the desert kingdom.

But British officials said their real fear was losing Saudi Arabia's cooperation in the war on terrorism. Atty. Gen. Peter Goldsmith told Parliament the heads of Britain's security and intelligence agencies, as well as the nation's ambassador in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, had warned that the investigation could seriously damage relations.

...riiiight. The Saudi's, awash in dollars we poured into the gas tanks of our SUVs, hardly need a few more billions. Arms dealers plying them with money seems suspect. The Saudi royals can already afford a huge dole to the Wahhabists to buy political stability...and in turn the Wahhabists can fund their fundamentalism world wide. That is not to equate Wahhabism with Islamic terrorists in the overstated manner of a report such as this in a web zine for the arms trade . But it would be naive to say there is no relation between making Saudi royals rich and fomenting extremism. The money defense contractors have to plow into such "marketing" programs ultimately must come from governments and thus from taxes we insignificant blog readers pay. The money we spend filling the skies with hawks in search a dove to eat would be better spent defusing the petrodollar time bomb and the festering sore that is Palestine/Israel. Shortsighted ideas of defense, built on fear rather than on understanding, are breeding grounds for misdirected monies and corruption.

BTW, don't tell Gonzo about this Britishism, "Serious Fraud Office". Until we stop the unethical and probably illegal flow of influence between Cheney, Rove and the DoJ, we can't be sure they won't try to bury any real investigation of unseemly political influence in civil service with a new "Run-out-the-clock Fraud Office". [Really now! Do you suppose they have a "Frivolous Fraud Office" or a "Comical Fraud Office" in the UK that creates a need for the semantic distinction of a Serious Fraud Office? One begins to understand Monty Python as a perfectly sane response to a daffy strain of Brit bureaucracy.] Here, let Josh Marshall spell out exactly how eager DoJ is to not answer questions and yet, how serious the questions are.

Loose cannons lose canon

The vice president of the US does NOT have the power to make foreign policy on his own. He does NOT have the power to start wars on his own. The president does not even have sole discretion in these matters, at least not on paper. The story that Cheney is pulling strings to get us into a shooting war with Iran has been bubbling around the blogosphere for a few days now but not much heard elsewhere. When I searched the news, only blogs and partisan press sources touched the story. Echo chamber or not, my repetition of this alarm is due.

How certain are we that Darth Veep is up to something? How alarming is it? The original source is Steve Clemmons in the Washington Note, much respected by my most trusted writers like Josh Marshall. But is anyone outside the liberal circle concerned? One web zine, far enough to the right that it has to devote pages to refuting assertions that it is obsessed with the threat that immigration poses to our America ethnic purity, is convinced and packs this story of reckless warmongering in with a fairly complete broadside against the undemocratic operation of this administration. And while I have avoided reading him lately because he is so damn depressing, I always double check a story with middle eastern players and consequences by reading Juan Cole's take on the matter: he considers Clemmons absolutely credible.

So this is way beyond wingnut zeal and incompetence. This activity of the Cheney gang, as distinct now from the rest of Bush's cabinet, is extremely dangerous and probably impeachable. If 72% of polled Americans think the administration has driven the war on Iraqis into a ditch, what are they going to say about a war on Iranians? Cheney shows neither knowledge or respect for the laws that define his role in government. Efforts to impeach Cheney have a broad base but they should be supported and accelerated and the conspirators and sycophants Cheney planted among DoD and other agencies should be purged...he is just that bad for us.

Is anybody out there listening? Or would you all just rather not know about this? If we ever elect this kind of "leadership" again, we could loose not just our soldiers and our stature as a benign power, we could loose world peace entirely. What does it take? The current war really has not come home for most Americans, financially or in the form of any other hardship. But by the time grievous personal effects of war are felt in the suburbs, we will be totally screwed.

------ light posting alert --------

I have to wire, plumb and install a couple of hot water heaters this weekend and I have wrecked my schedule to put this post up. If a miracle happens and I finish the homework, I have a much less echochamberish post in draft...but right now, things are leaking in the basement....

Republicans would steal votes even if they could earn them

I should be working but when I saw this thing on caging in my Truthout feed I combed the MSM outlets via Google News to see who covered it and who omitted it.
This is all the NY Times finds this morning in the Goodling testimony. Even editors highly critical of the clumsy DoJ political reprisal operation don't see a problem with Griffin.

Aside from the vanity, one of the strong and enduring motives for my reading blogs and other alternatives to MSM and spreading some of the things I find there is that I am well convinced and constantly reconfirmed that we, the American public are effectively being lied to about truly vital matters. The alternative press watch dogs are on the case, however. From my favorite, Truthout, we hear that this is what Greg Palast sees And Huffington Post, for another example, gets wind of the deep rot and skulduggery that DoJ was engaged in for Rove and the Republicans.

If you are not prone to stroke or heart attack from spiking your blood pressure, you really should read that Palast BBC piece to learn who the Republican stooges cheated out of their voting rights. You will be furious. Rove should be in the docket. His boss should too. Gonzo should be in chains breaking rocks or picking up roadside trash...I hear there are a few empty cells at Gitmo.

Deja Vu and nausea

The year was 1953. A kid named Elvis Aaron Presley had begun recording in Memphis studios and the CIA was working like mad behind the scenes to topple Mohammad Mossadegh and re-install a constitutional monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, more to the liking of US and British oil companies. The fomenting of a coup against one of the most democratically elected leaders of a Muslim country should have been a disgrace at the time. But it was 1953 and you could sell it as "stopping communism" with three weeks of leaking the right information to the media...we all went back to discovering Elvis and never discovered what our own government was capable of when forced to chose between oil and authentic democracy. We, the US via the CIA, set in motion a chain of events: enabling a despot, exiling Ayatollah Khomeni, the rise of Savak...and so on, but then seemed to be collectively mystified as to why the Iranians mistrusted and disliked us.

The year is 2007 and there is only one closet full of neocon morons left in the whole world who think we can just do 1953 all over again. If the rush to possess the bomb is the Iranian response to the threats the US has already made to Iran, why on earth are further threats and hostile acts expected to have a different effect? Its almost too late to try the carrot rather than the stick, almost. This administration should be in jail, listening to "Jailhouse Rock" endlessly.
[and you, dear reader, should send a little cash to Truthout.org]

Wolfie finally gets his clue

I have less than no time to post this week but I so like short stories that have a moral...

One of the authors of Dubya's Debacle in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, has managed to disgrace himself thoroughly enough by conflict of interest as president of the world bank that the only choices left to him were resign right now or be fired. He has resigned. That NY Times article has a tidy little time-line box if you are interested in the blow by blow of how the man brought himself down.

The most amazing thing to me is how radically sentiment about the man's qualifications differs between bloggers like me and the accidental president with the subnormal IQ. Long before he left the Pentagon to run the world bank, Wolfowitz was almost uniformly criticized as a clumsy conservative ideologue by writers outside of the charmed circle of neoconservatives. Nothing has happened in the years since he planned the reconstruction of Iraq [how's that going?] to do anything but reinforce that opinion. Bush gave Wolfie the world bank job as a sop when it was clear he was damaged goods to the Pentagon and too rough a customer even for the Bush whacking school of governing. We could ask of Dubya, "What was he thinking?" but the answer is plainly "not much".

Posters and commenters on the blogs I read readily quipped "OMG! He has an actual girl friend" when the Shaha Ali Riza salary shenanigans came to light. I was surprised that he even has friends. The word "friend" appears seven times in the text of Steven Weisman's NYT article. But here is the heart of the illness that is Bush League conservatism: Lacking competence or a decent respect for arguments that proceed from facts, this administration relies on friendships and unexamined reputation. Friendships then, must be of the most honest and psychologically healthy sort if they are the glue that holds where ability is lacking. The character of the friendships on which the Bush white house runs aren't, can't be, much better than the character of the players in that tragedy. The "friendships" have a strongly conditional aspect and many operate on a mafia-like dynamic of reward and punishment:

But others say Mr. Wolfowitz repeated the mistakes he had made at the Pentagon: adopting a single-minded position on certain matters, refusing to entertain alternative views, marginalizing dissenters.

“Wolfowitz unsettled people from the outset,” said Manish Bapna, executive director of the Bank Information Center, an independent watchdog group. “His style was seen as an ad hoc subjective approach to punishing enemies and rewarding friends.”

Though he was one of the original coterie of "Vulcans", and had a few accomplishments in foreign service to his name when Bush took him on, Wolfie had demonstrated his incompetence by the time he was given the World Bank job. Why this is not a mark against Bush in more minds is a mystery to me. Wolfie cosponsored some of this young century's most abject and inhumane failures and, like Bush himself, met competence with conflict if it did not fit his ideology:

His time at the Pentagon was characterized by infighting, especially with the Central Intelligence Agency, which he thought underestimated Iraq as a threat to the United States. He clashed with Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, and others who warned — correctly, it turned out — that the United States would need more forces in Iraq. His vision of democracy in the Arab world also ran aground in Baghdad.

You may think I am mistaken here: aren't the stubborn shows of fidelity such as retaining Rumsfeld far past his usefulness at least a sign of closeness or faithfulness that real friends should enjoy? But I maintain that friends don't let friends govern drunkenly: these "friends" could not criticize effectively or listen to each other if the messages were not positive. They are stuck with each other more than they are friends.

Bush and his supporters have claimed that you should choose leaders based on character. They may be right, we should try it some day in this country. Until then, give me a brain trust that actually has some brains.

Yet another incompetent Bush hire

Lindsay and Larisa dug out the dirt on the man Bush chose to oversee the federal support for family planning...he turns out to be a quack with very inflated credentials and an accused medicare fraud. Go read. He was obviously "qualified" because he is against birth control, abortion or even sex education.

Everybody gets to have an opinion.

I don't use the word "ho" to describe anyone. I don't think I know anyone to whom the word actually applies...but then I was not at White house press conferences in 2003. Because I don't know anyone of whom I think such things, I do not use that word. Ask Don Imus again why he uses that word. And why, of all things, he uses it to describe college educated and athletically gifted young women. Apology works better when sought for out-of-character things one does. What he said was not out of character, just a little bit to the right of the out-of-bounds line.

The man strung up his own noose. I would not advise the Rutgers Women's basketball team to entertain Mr. Imus' attempt to get forgiven and duck the abiding contempt his entire career has miraculously avoided so far. It might be too late anyway: the real powerhouses of America's public conscience, soap and stationary have just given a thumb$ down. Leave him swinging. He does not operate his mouth differently than me or anyone else: he said what he said because at some level, that is who he thinks those women, or all women, or black women are or he has a very sick sense of how to sound "cool".

Everybody gets to have an opinion. Who doesn't have to be responsible for their own opinion?

---

This post is gratuitous piling on. I didn't go to Rutgers. I don't follow basketball. I never listened to more than a minute of Imus at any time in my life...that was about as much as I could stand. For people who get rich pandering to ignorant angry middle aged white men, all the negative Google hits are deserved, so here is mine. Now, bring on those GOP candidates that want into the Imus spotlight.

the same old top ten list

Two years ago, I complained that a particular sample of people who should care about the ills done by the Bush administration did not care or seem to recognize the shit list even as they stepped through it.
Last year I was encouraged that that same sample had woken up a bit.
This year, we have indictments, we have a new congressional majority, we have a guilty verdict or two. I just attended that same Seder where I have been surreptitiously polling the previous two years. This time the list of plagues got general comment as looking rather like the headlines of the New York Times.

The origins of that progressive's list of plagues predates Bush. The authors have not received their due. It took a bit of googling to find the originators of the widely copied list. I found this copy in Australia:

Many Haggadot contain modern day plagues, such as AIDS, breast cancer, child poverty, domestic violence, environmental destruction, homelessness, homophobia, hunger, illiteracy, and racism. Consider the following reading from A Common Road to Freedom, A Passover Haggadah for a Seder conducted with both Jews and African Americans:

Each drop of wine is our hope and prayer that people will cast out the plagues that today threaten everyone, everywhere they are found, beginning in our own hearts:

1. The making of war
   
2. The teaching of hate and violence
   
3. Despoliation of the earth
4. Perversion of justice and government
   
5. Fomenting of vice and crime
   
6. Neglect of human needs
   
7. Oppression of nations and peoples
   
8. Corruption of culture
   
9. Subjugation of science, learning, and human discourse
   
10. The erosion of freedoms

And the citation in that haggadah led me to Amazon where it seems the most obscure text in the world:

A Common Road to Freedom: A Passover Haggadah (Hardcover)
by Leonard Fein (Editor), David Saperstein (Editor), Leonard Fein et al. (Author)
Availability: Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this title will be in stock again.
# Publisher: Religious Action Ctr of Ref Judaism; 2nd edition (1996)
# Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,020,420 in Books

And Mrs. Greensmile's excellent memory recalls that very list in the so called "Baskin Haggadah" of 1974. Baskin was the illustrator. Where editor Herbert Bronstein found that list of plagues I do not yet know. It was a borrowing 22 years old in 1996.
So it is clear, the list was not made up as a reaction to Bush, but as a more general sort of admonition that liberals have...because these are the horrors they understand to be possible if the best of religious and universal social norms and values are treated to empty lip service. In fact, the Bush administration has egregious faults and blood on their hands in every category of plague. Match them up with news stories you have read and continue to see daily:

1. Bush and Cheney lied us into an awful war in Iraq
2. Starting with "axis of evil", we have been told to be afraid. "They hate us for our freedom" is what you say when you wish people to then think: "so we must hate them back".
   
3. The administration sought to quash efforts to stem global warming, choosing instead to push for oil drilling in unspoiled forests
   
4. DOJ has been operated as a political revenge unit.
   
5. Inner city murder rates, on the decline for years, are trending up again. White collar crime is now institutional, on a vast scale with Halliburton and defense contractors and lobbyists so sloppily buying and congressmen so sloppily selling influence that some representatives are already behind bars.
   
6. Katrina, for but one instance
   
7. Iraq looks more oppressed than liberated. Iran has been told it is next.
   
8. One of the greatest disseminators of culture for the average American, far from major cities, too poor for concert tickets has been PBS and NPR...and Bush has tried several times to decapitate its leadership and make its content more to his neocon liking
   
9. From NASA to the Forest Service, scientists have been muzzled by conservative ideologues with no expertise beyond Bushlove and Bible knowledge. When the whole congress accepted the need for stem cell research, Bush vetoed it.
   
10. FISA is shredded, the FBI and NSA have carte blanche to intercept any communication foreign or domestic that strikes their fancy. No less a person than the Attorney General thinks Habeus Corpus is a dispensable nicety.

I peruse the news for youse

Cargo cult, American style. There is nothing good about this new jumbo jet unless it's flying means an equivalent tonnage of less fuel efficient planes are kept out of the air. All this adulation and excitement is a tad shortsighted. I was a youngster attending the Reno Air Show when the Boeing 747 took one of its debut flights for the crowd. It was impressive, forcing ooo's and aahh's when we finally exhaled. It was especially impressive when the pilot rolled the monster on its back an streaked across the sky upside down. Nice. But have you any idea how many million tons of carbon that line of planes have enshrouded our planet with in the years since that flight? How incomplete is the thought of markets! Fuel consumption This one's based totally on comparisons that may be tough to imagine. The plane is said to consume about four litres of fuel per passenger for every 130 kilometres it flies. Airbus claims given its size and the number of people on board, it's actually as fuel efficient as a filling up an "economical family car." If the claimed fuel efficiency of the new plane is no better than that of a car, and that automotive efficiency is what brought our planet to its current overheated condition, what's to celebrate? Since its something I am good at, let me do the math for you: My Honda Civic Hybrid, loaded with 4 adults, gets at least 40 mpg. That makes 4*40 = 160 person-miles/gallon. Your Airbus-for-elephants gets 130 passenger-km/4 liters or (130 * 3.785liters/gallon)/ (4liters * 1.60934km/mile) = 76.4366 person-miles/gallon The take-away for innumerate: Airbust sucks my Honda's tailpipe....and it will suck the air out of our skies.

Filthy rich people don't have any climate problems Big voices and Little voices like mine, the Gray Lady, more specially informed voices like Shokai's, Real Climate Authorities, Career climatologists and most science journalists in any area of geoscience have been sounding this alarm for years so there is nothing whatsoever new in this news except for the high rank of bush bum that is confessing it. A chieftain in the oil tribe whom Bush thought would be the best upholder of the science of air quality has confessed to snipping up the science that came across his desk: THE Bush administration diluted scientific evidence of global warming, one of its former high-ranking officials has admitted. Philip Cooney, an oil industry lobbyist now working for Exxon Mobil, conceded during a congressional hearing yesterday that while he was chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality he watered down reports on the adverse effects of man-made emissions on the planet's climate. "My sole loyalty was to the President and advancing the policies of his administration," Mr Cooney told the house government reform committee.... Documents released by Democrats yesterday revealed that in 2003 Bush administration officials made at least 181 changes to a plan to deal with climate change that were aimed at playing down the scientific consensus on global warming. There were another 113 changes that made less of the human causes of climate change, and even changes made to herald potential benefits to higher temperatures. "These changes must be made," according to a note in Mr Cooney's handwriting. "The language is mandatory." That coverage is from The Australian but most papers had coverage that surfaced in Google news. NYTimes stuck to the facts and that is damnation enough, but you should read the journals like New Scientist. One publication that is loosely labled and losing millions a year as a newspaper chose to cover only Hansen's testimony and then treat it as suspect and just one man's belief. The Washing Times can't launder out the stain of politics or spin away the tampered science. They see no cover up and report as if only Hansen sees it. If there were a god, as the owner of the washing times profess, the mention of "liberal bias" in that ink wasting article would have brought down at least a bolt of lightning. That rag is a harmful and clumsy propaganda organ if used for anything but paper training your puppy. [And I would suggest that sort of warpped coverage and the late exposition by most outlets of how extensively our government has lied to us is why you NEED to be reading TruthOut or any of a dozen green blogs.]

Abu Gonzales gets the "yer doin' a heckuva job" call There are about 1000 straight forward reports that Google finds on the web this morning concerning Gonzales state of knowledge and involvement in the firings and retentions of US attorneys based on their adherence to political agenda. Many of them top off with the report that the sonofabush has just given a call of "firm support" for his embattled Atty General. Its interesting then, that even Google puts a Wonkette post on the matter at the top of the page. When the sarcasm rings more like the truth than do the facts, whose fault is that? [And I would suggest that sarcasm is not coming from the sources who first asked the questions with which Congress is now battering DoJ, but the from the bizarre discrepancies in the emerging answers.]