Rehashing the bullshit

Will Peter Canellos use the death of every old Republican hypocrite (redundant?) to "raise questions" about the Clintons? (You'll notice there's no mention of Hyde's own "youthful" indiscretion - when he was 41.) Well, Whitewater nostalgia is easy crap to write when you're on deadline, so unless the Globe rips him outside the Beltway, I'd guess yes. Then, he'd just audition for Fox.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

Seriously, how do I get a job like the sinecure Canellos has?

Price of freedom

I have no problem with vigilance, nor with continuing international pressure. But, seriously, it's a warning sign that Iran suspended its nuclear program? You'd think Duhbya was the first one ever to recognize that proliferation is a bad thing. I suppose I should stop complaining and just be glad he has finally come to understand that.

So, Iran has/has no nuclear weapons program, and "nothing's changed". Yep, that's about right. No facts could ever make a dent. Of course, Condi still justifies going into Iraq because of decades-old behavior. Any day now, I'm expecting Duhbya to rescue the Tutsis in Rwanda.

Of course, Iran, like Iraq before it, wanted its adversaries (including us) to think it has WMD, especially nukes. They're trying to take on protective coloration so the price of attacking appears too high. Then again, even without their having WMD, attacking Iraq proved too expensive in blood and treasure. Hey, how about Sudan! Ha.

Forty years of phosphorus

I can't believe we're still not clean on phosphorus. Of course, I'm guilty, too. I only recently switched to a green dishwasher detergent, which I supplement with a small amount of Cascade if I need a little phosphorus and chlorine to get the dishes clean. But nearly 40 years ago, eutrophication was a known problem due to phosphorus run-off. Those radicals at National Geographic reported on it.

The Globe story is not very good. First, there's the nonsensical mention that phosphorus is a "natural element". True, but it's the artificial phosphorus that matters. The reporter at least mentions that later, but he never gives any sense of the relative magnitudes of the human sources.

Then, the story meanders back and forth. Its narrative is so confused that it's hard to imagine any remedy other than starting over from scratch.

Ah, so it was a photo op

Duhbya's trying to have a legacy in the Middle East that's not about the sandy quagmire in Iraq. He certainly doesn't have anything to burnish. Of course, it was just a photo op. That's what these guys do.

Of course, Bill Clinton tried pretty much the same thing, the difference being that he actually had paid attention to peace before the last year.

Venezuela chooses

... against strongman rule - by a hair. Chávez says, "For now, we could not do it." (emphasis added)

My guess: He'll be back with another proposal that includes provisions intended to mollify just enough of the opposition coalition. All he needs is 50% plus 1, after all.

Carnage in perspective

The Boston Globe has a Google mash-up of homicide data for Boston. With a month to go in 2007, there have been 63 homicides in Boston, which is arithmetically convenient for a city of about 630,000 (metro Boston is much bigger). That's a risk of 1 in 10,0000.

More than 40,000 Americans will die in car accidents this year. Thus the risk to all 300 million of us in America of dying in a car accident is substantially greater than 1 in 10,000, more like 1 in 7,000.

No one I know avoids car travel because of this, but the last time I went to Dorchester people who were supposed to go decided it was too risky to spend one day working on a Habitat for Humanity project.

We as a society can't tolerate murder. But unreasoning fear is not going to help us eliminate it.

The future grows out of today

MIT's curriculum is on line. There are big changes coming for higher education. They won't all be good, but they're coming.

Education is labor intensive. American colleges and universities deliver it via very highly trained and hence very expensive professors. They have already responded to this expense by adding an exploited middle tier of Ph.D. instructors who have no chance at tenure, no job security, and low pay for arduous hours - pretty much the condition of the rest of the American labor market in these days when every worker is expected to tolerate a much greater degree of risk than was true in the four decades after WWII.

Information delivery is a critical part of education. Those nostalgic for the allegedly golden age of McGuffey's Reader may think that's all there is to it, but there's also the more important aspect of learning how to use that information. Even in the humanities, it's not enough to memorize what the dead white guys said and wrote. It's also important to reason about that, to assess other voices, to compare and contrast, and then to generate the next set of questions and proposed answers.

Both these rough categories are communication, and telepresence technology more and more permits them to be done without sharing physical space. Most large corporations use telepresence every day, even if they do try to accomplish it on the cheap with commodity facilities such as phone conferences, video conferences, and desktop sharing.

Here are some possibilities:

• Many more low-residency programs - What's good for MFA programs in writing will work for the sciences as network bandwidth permits better sharing of virtual spaces.
• Exploitation of economies of scale - A lot more people can go to elite institutions if they don't need dorms or classrooms. This of course would mean a brutal shakeout of lesser institutions and the usual attendant reduction of variety.
• The further mean marketization of the academic life - If you want a career in education that can't be done remotely, and you're not sure you're among the intellectual elite, I'd recommend K-12 teaching or college tutoring that fills the gaps left by distance learning.
• More Internet instruction with an Indian accent - Phoenix University is working out the paradigm domestically, but there's no reason it can't be extended overseas. A population of a billion produces a lot of smart people, even if my experience with engineers educated in India suggests over-reliance on memorization and authority to the detriment of some aspects of critical thinking.
• Narrowly targeted training - Republican and business interests will try to exploit the economics to kill the independence and freedom of the academy.
  

One percent doctrine

Under Darth Cheney's one percent doctrine, America should invade any country that has a 1% chance of conveying nuclear weapons to terrorists. So why aren't we in Pakistan? Good question.

A sane one percent doctrine would prepare for 1% chances, war game them, create mitigation plans and scenarios, build infrastructure, keep some resources ready for rapid deployment, etc. The war gaming at least appears to be what the Pentagon is doing without any White House sponsorship (though it is possible the White House just couldn't acknowledge it), and I say good for the Pentagon.

One of the bonuses of being in Afghanistan is that we're right next door to the single most likely source of nuclear weapons for Islamic terrorists. I hope that we have a go team standing by at all times for possible interdiction or rescue. That would be a hell of a thing to try to put together on the fly. I'd rotate the duty, too. No team can stay sharp if it's sitting around the base yawning about alerts that always stand down.

Further, if we're not directing all the best of our satellite and electronic intel into Pakistan, we're idiots. Which is yet another reason to fear the results of having such incompetent morons in the White House.

Sunday comics blogging

Too many laughs not to embed this, and belly laughs, not just small chuckles!

The whole Tom Tomorrow comic is here, and Tom's take on Keith Olbermann's hilarious segment is here, where I saw this in the first place.

Good manners - feh!

What's wrong with Democrats? Even after what the Bushists and especially Karl Rove did to him, Tom Daschle still says:

Rove either has "a very faulty memory, or he's not telling the truth"

When the hell would Daschle ever bluntly state the obvious truth, "Karl Rove is a liar, has always been a liar, and will always be a liar. There's no point in anyone listening to a single word he says."

Would that be too goddamn impolite? And David Broder can shut the hell up on that subject.

When the news doesn't make sense

So, the AP has a White House document that indicates Duhbya's last budget (hallelujah!) will/might/plans to slash the parts of the homeland security appropriation that actually protects the homeland. Why?

Well, port security mainly helps blue states. That couldn't be it, could it?

Congressional Republicans do have a huge need to separate themselves from Duhbya. Could this be a gift to them, a painless way for them to distance themselves from an unpopular president?

Of course, the Republican reflex is to cut any budget, no matter how useful the expenditure, so long as it can't be directed to a crony. Probably, the reason this appropriation is in the Bushists' sights is that the funding is directed by other people.

Wouldn't a new attack help the Republicans at all levels? Surely that's too farfetched even for this bunch of criminals. Even our lazy press would notice if al Qaeda exploited the elimination of port security funding.

Once the best in the world

More on how we got here...

We Americans, like any people, have a history of believing in falsehoods. Every people has its founding myths, for one thing. We want to believe the stories we learned in childhood about George Washington - the cherry tree and the silver dollar (before dollars existed). We're not so keen to hear that Washington brewed small beer or adopted military tactics he learned from Indians.

Similarly, we cherish Thomas Jefferson's lovely, high-flown words in the Declaration about the natural rights of all men. But we're not so interested in Sally Hemings and her descendants, who are now known to be related to TJ and possibly to be his direct descendants. Most of us white people had already chosen to ignore Jefferson's ignoble failure to observe his own principles and free his slaves from unconscionable bondage.

Further, at least when I was in school in the South, we glossed over the devil's bargain of the "Great Compromise". My teachers framed it in terms of federal representation in the Senate and the Electoral College, not also in the House of Representatives, where slaves were "represented" at a discounted, subhuman rate by the same white landowners who enslaved them.

Americans in the late twentieth century, however, started having trouble distinguishing truth from fiction about subjects that were less abstract and historical. The media abdicated any attempt to referee any fact that either side deemed "controversial".

I recall throwing out Time magazine for the last time in the early 1980s. Every story was balanced in the way of too-young Ivy League grads who thought themselves worldly for their experience putting the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News to bed. The writers wrote he-said-she-said stories with a little verbal shrug at the end as if news were all just an in joke and we the readers could only be cool if we agreed to find it as funny as they so knowingly did.

As a young Ivy grad myself, I preferred the hard facts of some old, fat, bald guy in a polyester suit who chewed on cheap cigars and drank too much young whiskey, but who couldn't be fooled by a large vocabulary or common club membership. That old reporter might not even have gone to college, but he could write strong subject-verb sentences, and he was loyal to his readers' desire to know what actually had happened.

Other readers must not have noticed. They were probably busy watching TV news, and they didn't notice that the factual, responsible old school journalists epitomized by CBS were being replaced. Roger Mudd had a face for radio, and the culture was turning to superficial values that would reign supreme when Connie Chung did her turn as Dan Rather's co-anchor. (Rather himself pretended to be old school, but he was really a blow-dried blowhard, even if his desire was to report legitimate news.)

In any case, Americans lost their frontier skepticism in the face of the boggling beauty of TV productions and personalities. Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism that "the medium is the message" may not have been true in the infancy of television, but it had certainly become true.

In the face of anchors like Brian Williams and Katie Couric and celebrity, helicopter journalism even outside the studio, viewers lost track of facts among all the flash. And at every turn, Brent Bozell and his pressure groups were there to flay anyone who got off script into distinguishing lies from truth. Most Americans didn't notice, apparently, since most came to believe that the media was in fact biased in favor of liberals. The truth of course was that TV was biased in favor of good pictures.

But we were learning to enjoy being spoon fed. It was so much easier than getting up from the comfy chair.

Once our bullshit detectors were the best in the world. No longer. The world changed, and most of us didn't keep up.

Rudy Giuliani, cheating on YOUR taxes

Part of the DailyKos name-that-scandal contest.

When it's ripe

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

After all, bullshit is important to me.

(Hat tip Philosoraptor.)

NYTimes off the reservation

The New York Times treads right up to the line and, though it doesn't quite say openly that Rudy Giuliani is a compulsive liar, cheat, and bullshitter, nowadays, that's close enough for plaudits.

Here's the clearest of many illustrations:

In a recent radio advertisement by the campaign about his health care proposal, Mr. Giuliani repeated another false statement that he had been using on the campaign trail.

Frank Luntz's take on the Republican attitude toward bullshit is also instructive:

“When he talks about New York, people see it,” Mr. Luntz said of Mr. Giuliani, “and they feel it, and if a number isn’t quite right, or is off by a small amount, nobody will care, because it rings true to them.”

Whether something's true or not doesn't matter. Only fooling the people with their feelings matters.

There's also some compulsive reportorial "balance". Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama get dinged. (I bet John Edwards wishes he were in the story, too, even to get corrected!)

Obama exaggerated the degree of increase in the public debt. He said "doubled". The Times should have served its readers better by noting the facts: From Jan. 20, 2001 to today, the national debt has increased from $5.7 trillion to $9.1 trillion, an increase of a mere 60%.

No time at the moment to check Hillary's NIH statement.

Update: Hard to be sure what Hillary said or meant to say without context, but it is true that NIH funding has increased in every area under Duhbya.

Ten bucks on the Washington Spectator

OK, I have plenty to read, and I usually toss all the offers right into the recycle bin. But the Washington Spectator started its offer letter this way:

I won't mince words. Our government is run by criminals and liars, the opposition party lacks a backbone, and the corporate-controlled media gave up reporting most real news a long time ago.

Tic-tac-toe!

So, I'm going to have a first hand look. Sadly, I can't help Molly Ivins, but at least I can send a check in the direction of Lou Dubose.

Middle school

Mike Huckabee wants to be a political Jackie Gleason, "Boom, Hillary, to Mars." Personally, I'd prefer to have grown-ups in charge, after eight years of the Bushist faux grown-ups. But Huckabee correctly assesses the maturity of the core Republican voters, many of whom never graduated emotionally from middle school.

And, of course, CNN calls Huckabee's juvenile taunt "witty". Not just a quip, but witty! I can't believe how debased our national conversation is.

Perfect illustration

Hillary is toying with asking Colin Powell to help restore America's reputation. Huh? He had his chance, and he completely blew it. This is the perfect illustration why I don't like Hillary. For cryin' out loud, can we please have a goddamn change!

Boltin' from Bolten

Tattered remnants of Josh Bolten's Labor Day deadline to follow the rest of the Norway rats (Rove, Gonzo, ...). The AP lives Memento every day but doesn't take notes. Or maybe it doesn't read them. Whatever.

Al Hubbard worked on Social Security, SCHIP, global warming, and a proposal I had not previously heard about to tax health insurance benefits. Yeah, that's good for the middle and working classes. Good riddance!

One popular idea

On the Republican platform.

Republicans love tax cuts. They especially love cuts that help what Duhbya lovingly called his base when he appeared in black tie before a very wealthy donor group in 2000.

It's ironic that only when Duhbya is joking are his words true. It's inexplicable that the Democrats have not played that clip over and over again. Someday I'll hunt it up and link to it. But I digress.

Of course, the GOP loves tax cuts. Who doesn't? Even liberals like me would prefer to pay less - fairly, of course - if only all other things would remain equal. Opposition to taxes is the policy position where the Republicans are best aligned with Americans at large.

The Republicans love tax cuts so much that they live in a universe where two plus two may not equal four. Their rhetoric frequently changes the plain meaning of numbers, not just words. In their lexicon, a vote not to raise taxes is a tax cut. On the other hand, a Democrat's vote not to cut taxes is a tax increase. Then, the GOPers count these instances up, including all the procedural votes as if they were distinct proposals. Ordinary people would call this sleight of tongue lying, but the press plays along.

I can't wait for the Republicans to take this one step further. I don't see why they would scruple against saying that a tax that continues in force from a previous year is not a tax increase this year. After all, they seem to think that the only legitimate tax rate is vanishingly above 0%. I once played poker with a seemingly good guy who proposed in all seriousness that even a flat tax was unfair to the rich - that each person should be assessed the same dollar amount regardless of income, much less wealth. Of course, he worked in the rarefied world of private finance, where the only poor people he ever saw were beggars on the streets of Boston.

I suppose the government should live off nothing like an air fern. Well, except for the military-industrial complex - they can't be expected to survive without public funding.

The Republicans are not satisfied to distribute their tax cuts evenly. That's not what they're about. They want to change the tax burden of the wealthy, and you just can't do that if all you're rebating to them is $300. Those greedheads need five figures at least to notice.

What the GOP has found, however, is that your average middle class American can be bought off for $300. Normal people do notice a couple of days wages.

Best of all, this chicken feed is hardly noticeable to the Treasury, which is under dramatically more duress from the self-entitled wealthy.

It's shocking that the American middle class acquiesces to this bad bargain. Even capuchin monkeys show outrage at unfair treatment - if one gets a grape, they all want grapes, not some lesser treat. Yet we Homo sapiens accept a few crumbs from the floor around our betters' table!

The press does notice this, especially conscientious stalwarts like Paul Krugman. It's hard to imagine that anyone who is paying attention could miss the brute, incontrovertible fact that the Bushist tax cuts tilted overwhelmingly to the rich - and overwhelmingly again to the very rich. But that's just the problem: Americans are not paying attention. If they were, they'd be in the streets with pitchforks.

In any case, the press doesn't let a few numbers interfere with the tax cut narrative of something for everyone. Reporters never call bullshit on their captiously deceitful source of Republican spin. They seem to think that spin is valuable to them and that the spinners wouldn't bless them with it if they were to evaluate it as semi-numerate adults. Or maybe it's those exclusive cocktail parties again that the reporters are just dying to be invited to, like uncool teenagers who want the jocks and cheerleaders to like them. As if!

If the Republicans really wanted to help everyone, they wouldn't have started with the inheritance tax. Grover Norquist labelled it the death tax, and the Democrats didn't respond by calling it the Paris Hilton tax or the billionaire playboy tax. Allowing the tax-free passage of estates worth more than $3 million to heirs who didn't earn them and making that a pseudo-populist issue is a dramatic accomplishment of wool-pulling. Oh, those poor, poor trust fund babies, how they have suffered!

Sincere broad-based tax cutting would start with FICA and Medicare, the slightly regressive, mostly flat payroll taxes that fund Social Security and health care. Instead, Republicans tell us that all those trillions we've paid since Social Security taxes were responsibly raised in 1983 to anticipate the demographic bulge of the baby boomers went to fund the rest of the government and we won't pay them back. That stance is the only rationale for claiming that SSA is in financial trouble.

Sincere broad-based tax cutting would have long since relieved the middle class from inflating into the sights of the alternative minimum tax. But the Republicans haven't done that, have they? They prefer that middle class taxpayers feel the bite of a tax intended to make sure the wealthy pay fairly, in hope that they'll stay in the bad bargain that delivers those tiny crumbs.