The Costs of War

How many lives were lost this weekend?

When we economists talk about costs we mean the value of what is lost because resources were used in one way rather than in the next-best alternative use. This meaning of costs is not the one accountants use. Accountants are interested in only those costs that the institution they work must pay. Economists tend to be interested in the costs of some activity wherever they happen to fall, or at least in a wider definition of costs than the accounting one. For example, while a U.S. government cost accountant would calculate the costs of taking care of the war-wounded based on what the government will pay, an economist would add the costs that the rest of the society must pay towards the treatment of the wounded veterans.

Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz have written an article about the costs of the Iraq war using the economic definition of costs. Their final conservative estimate puts the total measurable costs of the Iraq war at one trillion dollars. One trillion dollars. And this estimate does not include the value of foreign lives lost or any of the costs falling to Iraqis or other nationals but Americans. It also doesn't include some hard-to-measure costs of the war. How would you put a monetary value on the loss of American prestige in the world?

All this means that the trillion dollar total is an underestimate of the true costs of the war. But it is a much bigger estimate than anything the U.S. government has come up with. The government estimates would not take into account the costs that fall to the families of the military personnel, for example, or the impact the war has had on oil prices. Or the economic value of the American lives lost in the war. Neither do the government estimates appear to allow for the future costs of this war, in the form of greater health care costs of the wounded veterans. But even allowing for these differences the administration estimates are still far too low. The important question to ask is whether the administration even knew what the true costs of the war would be, even if costs are given the narrower accounting definition. And if they did know the magnitude of these costs, did they believe that the war was worth them? And how do they justify spending like this while trying to make the tax breaks for the wealthy permanent?

Slick Seats

Religion has entered political space in a big way, medears:

Insisting that God "certainly needs to be involved" in the Supreme Court confirmation process, three Christian ministers today blessed the doors of the hearing room where Senate Judiciary Committee members will begin considering the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito on Monday.

Capitol Hill police barred them from entering the room to continue what they called a consecration service. But in a bit of one-upsmanship, the three announced that they had let themselves in a day earlier, touching holy oil to the seats where Judge Alito, the senators, witnesses, Senate staffers and the press will sit, and praying for each of the 13 committee members by name.

"We did adequately apply oil to all the seats," said the Rev. Rob Schenck, who identified himself as an evangelical Christian and as president of the National Clergy Council in Washington.

I get visual images of large bottoms sticking to the chairs and only removing themselves with an audible "plop". I get visual images of dark stains on the backsides of politicians. And of large dry-cleaning bills, all sent to Rob Schenck.

For the sake of fairness they should now let me and my snakes enter the rooms and put some counterspells in place. I could send Ares over, too. And Aphrodite. If we are going to have religion in politics my folks are definitely interested and ready.

Frank Rich In Righteous Anger On Snoopgate

Rich's New York Times column is behind a paywall. You, my dear readers, have paid for me to get past it so I can comment on what happens on the other side. In hindsight this was not the cleverest of arrangements, and I may decide to stop blogging on articles that are only available for some.

But not before I give you the gist of Rich's newest. He's blowing hot and cold and saying most excellent things about the president's defence of the illegal wiretapping of Americans:

That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.

Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials had served as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and not just to The Times. Sooner or later we'll find out what the White House is really so defensive about.

Does Rich have something more than guesses as the ground for the last sentence? If so, I would have loved to hear it.

How To Write in Blogosphere

I once wrote a funny post about picking a style for a blog. But this one is meant to be more serious, what with the New Year and all, and a smidgen of sternness is called for. So imagine me typing away in my best bib-and-tucker, with a frozen look on my divine face.

The above paragraph is an example of the voice I picked for this blog. It's not the easiest of voices, and if I had known that I would have picked something else, something that requires less energy to manage, something that would allow me to use a little longer sentences and to be less snarky. Though I could have picked an even harder voice if I had decided to write pure comedy like Jesus's General or the gentle folks of Fafblog. Then there are the inimitable but immediately recognizable voices of Amanda at Pandagon and Jeanne d'Arc at Body and Soul.

The voices bloggers pick probably is not a topic of great interest to anyone but other bloggers. I started thinking about it because of the Koufax awards and the class of Best Writing. Because how well someone writes also depends on the voice that person chooses, and different voices are either easier or harder to do. Which is a long way of saying that everybody should have voted for my blog in that category because I'm in need of adulation. - See how I now keep falling into the Echidne-voice even when I try not to?

And that is the problem with a voice. It grows on you, and then it's hard to change into a different scale. I think I can still do it, but it's easier in my other writings than on the blog.

A voice is not an artificial add-on to blogging. Echidne's voice is one of my natural voices, and I'm not lying to you when I write in that voice. But I have other voices, too, and they clamor to be heard, especially the Weepy-Winifred one. I try to keep her under control because the last thing people want to read is more wailing and tooth-grinding. The wingnuts give us quite enough of that.

Probably the best voice to pick would be a neutral one, a journalistic type or a scientific one. These would be easier to write than snark, too. Snark is both fun and irritating at the same time, to write, at least. I'm not sure how it is to read.

But picking a snarky voice has a problem I didn't anticipate, and that is the problem of snark coming across as non-objective, even when the facts are neutrally expressed. It's hard to know how to correct that, though what I do is cut back on the snarkiness when I give numbers and stuff. But then the whole post comes across as boring. Decisions, decisions, and none of them of any interest to readers.

But Will The King Listen?

The first nonpartisan assessment of Bush's eavesdropping policy has concluded that it is not legal:

A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.

The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.

The findings, the first nonpartisan assessment of the program's legality to date, prompted Democratic lawmakers and civil liberties advocates to repeat calls yesterday for Congress to conduct hearings on the monitoring program and attempt to halt it.

There you go.

Moonbat Media

We don't have one. Moonbats, for those of you who have never heard the term, are us: liberals and lefties. I like the term. It brings to mind lovely moonlit nights with the dark shadows of brave fliers silhouetted against the full moon, until, suddenly, they swoop! "Moonbats" and "wingnuts" are political terms of endearment for the other side.

A moonbat media would be something like what the wingnuts have been telling that the United States has. It has never existed, and the media today is pretty much in the backpocket of the Republican party. The media is also very dependent on the advertising income they get from corporations. This makes it tough to criticize the government or the firms. The safe thing to criticize is moonbats.

A real moonbat media would be a move against this. We do need one, though we also need a neutral media. But we are not going to get the latter, so the next best thing would be to have at least a tiny moonbat media to counteract all that wingnut fairandbalanced propaganda. Air America Radio is an attempt to do that, and perhaps it will end up working. But talkshows is not really the sole answer to what we need. Pacifica is not enough, either.

Now a new television network is being planned: Independent World Television. It will not take advertizing which makes it immune from commercial pressures. But not taking ads means that the network will need other sources of income, like donations. You can donate at the link.

I believe that Independent World Television would aim at being a neutral network. But if it turned out to be a moonbat one I'd be almost equally delighted, for the reasons spelled above. Because we really need to have an opening for all voices to be heard and for all types of news to be forecast. If the traditional media won't have us then we can't have just the traditional media.
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Laura Flanders is great, by the way, if you are looking for well-done radio with a liberal slant.

The End of the deLay Era

Tom deLay is not going to return to his post as the majority leader. He wrote a letter which is available in the Washington Post. This bit is especially interesting:

During my time in Congress, I have always acted in an ethical manner within the rules of our body and the laws of our land. I am fully confident time will bear this out.

...

While we wage these important battles, I cannot allow our adversaries to divide and distract our attention.

Who are "our adversaries"? I bet you anything that he doesn't just mean the terrorists. DeLay has always practised politics as if it was war, and probably assumed that everything is allowed in such a war. But he is mistaken. Politics is not war and there are rules to the game. Heck, even war has rules. Too many wingnuts these days think that the game of politics is all about changing its rules. As long as you don't get caught.

Money News

If true, this could be worrisome news for the United States:

China has suggested it may diversify its foreign reserve holdings away from a current heavy focus on the US dollar.

'We will perfect the management of our foreign exchange reserves and actively explore new ways to use our reserve assets even better,' State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) chief Hu Xiaolian said in a statement late last night.

'We will further improve the currency and asset structure in the foreign exchange reserve portfolio and continue to broaden the investment channels for our reserves,' he added.

The statement, posted on SAFE's website, said the diversification would serve the twin purposes of strengthening risk management and boosting the yields of currency reserve assets.

China is currently holding a lot of dollar deserves. If this changes, the value of dollar might drop. And you know what that means.

Elsewhere, Bush is touring to celebrate the "strong" economy. Against all evidence and economic logic he argues that things are good and that they are good because of the tax cuts to the superwealthy:

Their appearances were to follow the government's release of its employment report for December, which most economists forecast will show a net gain of about 200,000 payroll jobs for the month. That would be slightly less than the 215,000 jobs created in November - unless that number is revised downward - but would still represent another decent month for the U.S. jobs picture.

Economists also predict unemployment to hold steady at 5 percent and believe there will be modest job gains throughout 2006.

...

``The tax cuts that we passed are working to create jobs and economic opportunity,'' White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

Democrats, on the other hand, note high prescription drug costs and confusion about the new Medicare prescription drug plan, high heating bills, displaced workers in the Gulf Coast and rising federal deficits.

The economy isn't terrible, true. But it's not doing wonderfully. Never mind, the definitions of "a strong economy" and "a victory in Iraq" are different now. But do keep in mind that the Chinese are funding a large share of this economy...

Friday Dog Blogging

This is a Wheaten Terrier. A very nice Wheaten Terrier, after a nice play in the mud.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the local veterinarian hospital, waiting for Hank's chemotherapy session. She is still doing well.

Imagine an emergency room waiting room, only with less shininess and patients which mostly just pant in fear rather than moan, and you have the waiting room of this particular animal hospital down pat. It's really not a nice experience to wait there. But I met a lovely little girl with the Red Ruby Shoes from the Wizard of Oz and a cat called Oreo (who was in for a routine spaying), because the little girl loves Oreo cookies which she showed me by stuffing about a ten in her mouth in one go. Then she did the tour of the waiting room bothering everybody and asking to ride the big dogs (which she wasn't allowed, of course). And suddenly we were all talking to each other and sharing the worries and the reliefs.

Scooter Libby Finds A Soft Nest

He has been hired by the Hudson Institute, a conservative propaganda tank. Next time you read about some quasi-research results from the Hudson Institute, remember that Scooter works there.

The wingnuts do take care of their own, don't they? A nice job with a good salary and a pulpit from which to still affect American foreign policy. Plus, there is even time for extra consulting!

I chose the wrong political stance. That pesky conscience!

IRS Tracking Party Affiliation

Hesiod on Atrios threads linked to an article about the Internal Revenue Service tracking the party affiliation of tax payers:

As it hunted down tax scofflaws, the Internal Revenue Service collected information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an "outrageous violation of the public trust" that could undermine the agency's credibility.

IRS officials acknowledged that party affiliation information was routinely collected by a vendor for several months. They told the vendor last month to screen the information out.

"The bottom line is that we have never used this information," said John Lipold, an IRS spokesman. "There are strict laws in place that forbid it."

My bolds in the quote. Now how can you write irony when real-world commentary does it better? Not fair.

Now we need a good, independent study on the correlations between belonging to the Democratic party and getting audited. And by a good study I mean one which controls for all the other reasons to get audited.

Iraq

A bad day today:

IN ONE of the darkest days in Iraq in recent months, insurgents killed about 130 people in a series of deadly explosions targeting Shia pilgrims in the south, Sunni police recruits in the west and US soldiers.

The slaughter was the worst in Iraq since the December 15 elections, and came only a day after guerrillas killed more than 50 people, mostly Shia mourners blown up at the funeral of a bodyguard who was shot dead in an assassination attempt on a local politician.

How would Pat Robertson interpret the wrath of God here, hmh? And has more blood shed recently than oil? Does anyone know?

Remind me again how much better off we are now that Saddam is no longer in power.

This post explains why I don't write much about Iraq. I get too upset and angry.

And God Punishes...

Interesting, given my earlier post on disasters as God's punishment, and the comments on the attached thread about Pat Robertson not really saying that New Orleans got a hurricane to punish its citizenship for the lesbianity of its famous daughter, Ellen deGeneres. Because now Robertson seems (see how careful I am here?) to have said that Ariel Sharon got a stroke because of his crimes:

The Rev. Pat Robertson said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being punished by God for dividing the Land of Israel. Robertson, speaking on the "700 Club" on Thursday, suggested Sharon, who is currently in an induced coma, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995, were being treated with enmity by God for dividing Israel. "He was dividing God's land," Robertson said. "And I would say, Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the E.U., the United Nations or the United States of America. God says, This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone."

Sharon is also 77 years old, of course. But perhaps God would have let him go on for ever if he had acted according to Robertson's wishes.

It's stupid to write about what Pat Robertson says. I would never comment on him if we lived in a reality-based world.

Some Recess Appointments to the Royal Court

Bush has taken advantage of the vacation lull to appoint lots of controversial people, many of them without any debate. A royal act, wouldn't you say? Here is a list:

Floyd Hall, of New Jersey, to be a Member of the AMTRAK Reform Board.

Enrique J. Sosa, of Florida, to be a Member of the AMTRAK Reform Board.

Nadine Hogan, of Florida, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of
the Inter-American Foundation (Private Representative).

Roger W. Wallace, of Texas, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of
the Inter-American Foundation (Private Representative).

Gordon England, of Texas, to be Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Benjamin A. Powell, of Florida, to be General Counsel of the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence.

Ronald E. Meisburg, of Virginia, to be General Counsel of the National
Labor Relations Board.

Julie L. Myers, of Kansas, to be Assistant Secretary of Homeland
Security (Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Tracy A. Henke, of Missouri, to be Executive Director of the Office of
State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness at the
Department of Homeland Security.

Arthur F. Rosenfeld, of Virginia, to be Federal Mediation and
Conciliation Director at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

Ellen R. Sauerbrey, of Maryland, to be Assistant Secretary of State
(Population, Refugees, and Migration).

Dorrance Smith, of Virginia, to be Assistant Secretary of Defense
(Public Affairs).

Robert D. Lenhard, of Maryland, to be a Member of the Federal Election
Commission.

Steven T. Walther, of Nevada, to be a Member of the Federal Election
Commission.

Hans Von Spakovsky, of Georgia, to be a Member of the Federal Election
Commission.

Peter N. Kirsanow, of Ohio, to be a Member of the National Labor
Relations Board.

Stephen Goldsmith, of Indiana, to be a Member of the Board of Directors
of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

I have blogged about Julie Myers and Ellen Sauerbrey before. Neither has experience in the field that she will direct. But Myers is related to Bush cronies and Sauerbrey is a pro-life wingnut needing to be rewarded. And here is what Washington Post says about a few of the other appointees:

Bush appointed Tracy A. Henke as executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness. She had been accused in her politically appointed post at the Justice Department of demanding that information about racial disparities in police treatment of blacks in traffic cases be deleted from a news release.

...

For the Federal Election Commission, Bush picked Justice Department employee and former Fulton County, Ga., Republican chairman Hans von Spakovsky for one of three openings. Von Spakovsky is widely viewed as a key player in two disputed Justice Department decisions to overrule career staff in voting rights cases.

A Democratic vacancy will be filled by union lawyer Robert D. Lenhard. He has provoked opposition because of his participation as an attorney for the American Federation of State, Council and Municipal Employees in efforts to have the Supreme Court rule that the 2002 McCain-Feingold law is unconstitutional. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) indicated that he would fight the Lenhard nomination when Democratic leaders first announced it in 2003.

I suspect that democracy is legally dead now. Long live the king!

Fighting Homosexuality

Wingnut style. One way is to attack the Barbie website:

A poll on the Barbie Doll's website asks children to select their gender, and there are not two, but three choices. ''I don't know'' is the third option, and Christian ministries point out the homosexual agenda behind this latest move made by Mattel, the toy company that owns Girl Dolls, Fisher-Price, and Hot Wheels.

This new feature by the iconic and trend-setting Barbie Doll can cause gender confusion among children, according to Concerned Women for America (CWA).

Director of the ministry's Culture & Family Institute, Bob Knight, gave the inside look behind this latest move.

"It's the idea that well, maybe people aren't born a particular biological sex, or they are but that shouldn't determine their gender identity," Knight said. "And that's a very big component of the homosexual activist agenda now."

There's also a little diatribe against the Barbie as not contributing towards the proper Christian view of how women should behave.

The other way is to preach against homosexualism from the pulpit or in the political arena. Here is one example:

Lonnie Latham, senior pastor at South Tulsa Baptist Church, was booked into Oklahoma County Jail Tuesday night on a misdemeanor charge of offering to engage in an act of lewdness, police Capt. Jeffrey Becker said. Latham was released on $500 bail Wednesday afternoon.

Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Latham was arrested and his 2005 Mercedes automobile was impounded, Becker said.

Calls to Latham at his church were not immediately returned Wednesday.

When he left jail, he told Oklahoma City television station KFOR:

"I was set up. I was in the area pastoring to police."

I'm not sure which of the two approaches are more effective...

Carnival of Feminists, No. 6

It is out now and you can get it here.

The Disappearing Amanpour

This is all over the blogs. It seems that NBC is changing its transcripts from what actually went on in an interview about Bush's illegal eavesdropping program which was supposed to net only terrorist suspects, not, say, professional journalists like Christiane Amanpour. Kos , for example, gives us the original:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

Now the second question and its answer have been deleted. Which of course just strengthens the rumors that Amanpour might have been spied on.

Disasters as God's Punishment

The Sago mine explosion. Many hopeful prayers and statements about God and miracles. When it was thought that twelve out of the original thirteen miners had survived we heard on television how God is great. When the grim truth of just one survivor was revealed did these commentators call God small? Not on the whole, though some relatives did voice their anguish:

News of the 12 deaths came hours after church bells pealed and friends and family of the miners celebrated and sang hymns when word spread that 12 miners had survived. West Virginia's governor said there were indications within 20 minutes the initial report of 12 survivors was wrong. Friends and family were not told for about three hours.

"It hit people's hearts so hard ... One guy said what in the hell has God done for us, but just a few minutes before that we was praising God, because they believed that they was alive," John Casto, a friend of the miners, said on CNN.

Virginia Dean, whose uncle was in the mine, said: "Only one lived. They lied."

But mostly people don't put the blame of natural disasters on God acting immorally. In our arrogance we believe that it was something we did that caused the disaster, and sometimes it was, of course, but the belief is usually not based on things like perhaps badly maintaining a mine. It is based on the belief that the moral fiber of humans has failed and that God is punishing us all, indiscriminately, for the sins of the few.

The outcome of such blaming is not too bad when all it does is make the survivors go around in hairshirts and whips, to be used on their own bodies, as happened after some of the horrible plague epidemics of the past. But it can get very frightening very fast when the blaming is used to attack the traditional scapegoats of the society.

In the United States, Pat Robertson is a good example of this medieval mindset*:

Hollywood – Pat Robertson on Sunday said that Hurricane Katrina was God's way of expressing its anger at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its selection of Ellen Degeneres to host this year's Emmy Awards. "By choosing an avowed lesbian for this national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God's wrath," Robertson said on "The 700 Club" on Sunday. "Is it any surprise that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss Degeneres' hometown?"

The conclusion Robertson wants us to draw is a sinister one: if only we could discipline the gays and lesbians in our midst God would stop sending us hurricanes.

In Indonesia, it is the women who caused the tsunamis:

MARLUDDIN JALIL, a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women for not wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: "The tsunami was because of the sins of the people of Aceh."

Thundering into a microphone at a gathering of wives, he made clear where he felt the fault lay: "The Holy Koran says that if women are good, then a country is good."

A year after the disaster which many see as a divine punishment, emboldened Islamic hardliners are doing their best to eradicate sin — and women are their prime targets.

With reconstruction slow, irrational fears of a second tsunami high, and nearly 500,000 still homeless along 500 miles of coastline, the stern message falls on fertile ground. A Sharia police force modelled on Saudi moral enforcers enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers for public humiliation.

"Enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers". Yes, there is enthusiasm in all this, a feeling that, finally, it is a good thing to act viciously, that God wants it. What a coincidence that it is someone else who is to blame for the disaster, someone who in any case deserves to be controlled, restrained or punished. How nice that the sins are the sins of others.

It remains to be seen whom Robertson will blame for the Sago mine disaster, but it's unlikely to be the mining company.
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*Ok, so Robertson maybe didn't say this. But Falwell did blame the ACLU and abortionists for 911 and Pat concurred.

Digby Makes It Clear

I'm quoting a tiny snippet of Digby's excellent post on the way many in the media try to argue that the Abramoff scandal is not really a Republican problem but just a bad apple problem. Like Lynndie England, you know. And Democrats do it, too, so it's a bipartisan problem. Isn't it wonderful to be all bipartisan suddenly?

Well, Digby is having none of this:

This characterization of the scandal as being "bi-partisan" is typical bad mainstream journalism, particularly the emphasis they are placing on the very small handful of Democrats who've even been mentioned (much less included in any legal procedings.) Not only are they creating some equity and illegality where none exists, by doing it they are missing the real story, as usual.

This isn't a story about power corrupting or about a few bad apples. This is about a corrupt political machine --- a system of money laundering and public corruption on behalf of one political party. It's about a party that has used every tool to legally and illegally enrich itself and enhance its power. It's right there. It's unravelling before our eyes.

The Republicans have also had a conscious policy of refusing to deal with lobbying firms which employ Democrats. This means that most of the lobbyists in Washington are Republicans and when they bribe someone it's going to be another Republican. A funny outcome from a policy which was aimed at destroying the Democrats.

What's This Thing Called Love?

One quote in Tierney's column struck me with unusual vividity. It is by an evolutionary psychologist David Buss:

"Of course, some women marry for love and find a man's resources irrelevant," Buss says.

Color me naive but I assumed that most people in the western world who marry do so at least believing that it is for love. Am I totally mistaken in this? Is it true that only "some women" marry for love and that the others, presumably, marry for money? I don't know a single case of anybody, man or woman, marrying for money amongst my acquaintances but perhaps my acquaintances are atypical?

The Sago Mine Explosion

I fervently hope that the miners will be found alive, and that similar accidents will never happen again. For the latter hope to be realized we need to learn what caused this explosion. Though the causes may have been unpreventable, this daily Kos diary and especially the first comment in the thread by the diary writer suggest (though obviously only suggest) some other troubling possibilities.

Abramoff

Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who has had legal trouble pleads guilty:

Jack Abramoff will plead guilty to three felony counts in Washington today as part of a settlement with federal prosecutors, ending an intense, months-long negotiation over whether the Republican lobbyist would testify against his former colleagues, people involved with the case said.

Mr. Abramoff, 46, is pleading guilty to fraud, public corruption and tax evasion, setting the stage for prosecutors to begin using him as a cooperating witness against his former business and political colleagues. In exchange, Mr. Abramoff faces a maximum of about 10 years in prison in the Washington case.

...

Now, after more than two years of investigations, prosecutors have developed a list of at least a dozen lawmakers, congressional aides and lobbyists whose work appears suspect and who are now at the core of the case. With Mr. Abramoff's cooperation, the Justice Department will have a potentially critical witness to alleged patterns of corruption or bribery within the Republican leadership ranks, which in some cases they believe also took the form of campaign donations and free meals at Mr. Abramoff's downtown restaurant, Signatures.

Already, prosecutors have a key witness in Michael Scanlon, once press secretary to Mr. DeLay. Mr. Scanlon reached a plea agreement last year, putting pressure on Mr. Abramoff to reach his own deal. Now that Mr. Abramoff has done the same, one person involved in the case said: "When some people hear about this, they will clamor to cut a deal of their own."

Bolds are mine, and they point out the important bit in this quote. The fun is just beginning. Though as Atrios points out, there is already talk that the corruption isn't especially about Republicans. Which would mean, naturally, that there is no point in changing the party in power...

Firedoglake has more legal analysis.

Read This

A Life, Wasted
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Via this Kos diary.

Woman-Bashing Week?

It might be the topic that the top wingnuts have handed down to their underlings this week. How else can one explain not one but two New York Times topics on the sad and lonely lives of successful women? I wrote about David Brooks's column below. I am not going to write about John Tierney's column as it's even worse. But the gist of it is that we must create affirmative action for men in college admissions. And why? Because otherwise all those educated women won't be able to marry!

Tierney really is a misogynist. I don't call people that lightly but I have never read this man write a single column on women which didn't have the intention of somehow hurting us or at least ridiculing and stereotyping us. Yet the Times gives us both his and Brooks's warnings about the dangers that women face if they veer away from the path traditionalists hold as the ideal one for women, a path which, not coincidentally, also keeps women in the position of nursemaids for men like Tierney and Brooks. These guys are scared shitless. Of us. And the solution seems to be to make us non-threatening.

But the fear these men feel is no excuse for the Gray Lady to have their gender matters addressed by two patriarchs. It is time to stop subscribing to the Times, or at least time to tell them that you will stop unless the coverage gets more objective.

You can contact the Times at letters@nytimes.com

What Would You Do?

I have sometimes wondered if I'd have the courage of these Italian women who refused to be released by the kidnappers until the two men in their company are released, too. I hope that I could do what they are doing but I can't tell for sure. They are admirable:

Three Italian women kidnapped in north Yemen have refused to go free until their abductors release two Italian men held with them, Yemeni tribal and state officials said Monday.

The Italian tourists were abducted Sunday in Marib Province, about 75 miles northeast of the Yemeni capital, San'a. Hours later, officials said the kidnappers had released the three women after a government negotiator convinced them that abducting women violated tribal values.

But the women declined to leave the kidnappers' hideout until the tribesmen freed their male colleagues, tribal authorities and security officials said on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to address the media.

The kidnappers, who have a history of abducting foreigners and Yemenis, want the government to release eight members of their tribe. One of the eight faces murder charges and was extradited to Yemen from the United Arab Emirates.

Power Is In The Kitchen

The holidays are now officially over. David Brooks is back typing away with his mitten-covered hands. Today's topic is Linda Hirshman's article about the need of women to fight harder for the option to have a career (on which I blogged earlier here and here) and how Hirshman is wrong because power is in the kitchen so women should stay there. Not that David is planning to join the powerful, of course. He is quite happy writing his little powerless column about the powerless guys waging war in Iraq.

Here are some meat-and-potato quotes from Brooks about why Hirshman is supposedly wrong:

First, she's wrong with her astonishing assertion that high-paying jobs lead to more human flourishing than parenthood. Look back over your life. Which memories do you cherish more, those with your family or those at the office? If Hirshman thinks high-paying careers lead to more human flourishing, I invite her to spend a day as an associate at a big law firm.

Second, she's wrong to assume that work is the realm of power and home is the realm of powerlessness. The domestic sphere may not offer the sort of brutalizing, dominating power Hirshman admires, but it is the realm of unmatched influence. If there is one thing we have learned over the past generation, it is that a child's I.Q., mental habits and destiny are largely shaped in the first few years of life, before school or the outside world has much influence.

Children, at least, understand parental power. In "Eminem Is Right," a Sidney Award-winning essay in Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt notes a striking change in pop music. "If yesterday's rock was the music of abandon, today's is the music of abandonment." An astonishing number of hits, from artists ranging from Pearl Jam to Everclear to Snoop Dogg, are about kids who feel neglected by their parents. This is a need Hirshman passes over.

Her third mistake is to not even grapple with the fact that men and women are wired differently. The Larry Summers flap produced an outpouring of work on the neurological differences between men and women. I'd especially recommend "The Inequality Taboo" by Charles Murray in Commentary and a debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke in the online magazine Edge.

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people. (You can come up with your own Darwinian explanation as to why.)

Ok. Let's summarize David. His three points are that staying at home is more fun than working, that staying at home is where the real power is and that women are wired for that kind of power whereas poor men are not. If you read me regularly you already know how I resent this false dualism of "work-vs.-home"; most people need and want to have both children and meaningful work, but some of us are not allowed to have both by people like Brooks.

But leaving that aside, the question of where human beings flourish best is not one that can be answered by inviting someone to spend a day as the law associate of a big firm without also letting that person get the income of the law associate and the respect that person gets as well as the exciting problems he or she is invited to analyze. Likewise, David himself should be invited to spend a day with four children under ten in an isolated suburban home, with laundry to wash and three meals to prepare. All I did here was a reversal of his argument; I'm not arguing that staying at home with children isn't fun and rewarding, too. But so is being a law associate in a large firm.

The question of power at home is interesting. This is an old argument: The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Rules The World. If this were actually true we'd see mothers and nannies blamed for the Iraq war and the illegal wiretappings in this country. It is not true, for the simple reason that no cradle-rocker has influence over more than just a few children, whereas anybody running the United States has power over most of the world. And that it is not true is the reason why David Brooks is not in the kitchen.

David's third and grossest mistake is to refer to Charles Murray as an expert on race and sex differences. Charles Murray! Now a New York Times columnist recommends Charles Murray's ravings and rantings as a good source of scientific information! Your liberal media in action, my dear readers.

Let's give a little more attention to one of David's wholesale conclusions, this one:

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people.

If this is true, shouldn't women be running all political systems in the whole world? And how would you divide fields such as medicine? After all, people have things inside them. People also do things. So confusing, isn't it? Much easier to argue that women are more interested in people and that means that women are better suited to rearing children and men for everything else.

Cathy Young discusses some of this on her blog in a different context. In particular, she talks about the monkey study which wingnuts love, because it seemed to tell us that girl monkeys like to play with saucepans and dolls and boy monkeys with cars. Which tells us, naturally, that even girl monkeys are genetically wired to be in the kitchen, even if girl monkeys don't yet have kitchens. And boy monkeys will all be cab drivers one day. As all wingnuts knew to be true to begin with, except that we are not supposed to have evolved from the same ancestor as monkeys. Oops! But I digress. What the monkey study actually found was this:

Of the 88 laboratory-living vervet monkeys in the study, 33 males and 30 females had some contact with one or more of the toys they were offered (playing with a toy or picking it up and examining it).

For the males, about 16% of the contact was with a toy police car. For the females, the corresponding figure was about 8%. Another toy rated as "masculine," an orange ball, was handled by males about 20% of the time and by females about 10%. (The figures are approximate because the article shows them as bars on a diagram, not as specific numbers. The graph can be found here at Obsidian Wings.)

A red pan, also classified as a "girl toy," accounted for about 27% of the females' contact with the toys. And for about 17% of the males'.

The biggest difference was in the handling of a doll. About 22% of the females' toy contact consisted of picking up, handling, and examining the doll. The corresponding figure for males was about 8%. (There were no significant gender differences in monkey interest in a furry dog toy.) It should be noted that among vervets, adult males do not participate in infant care at all, though juvenile males apparently handle infants; the females' behavior toward the doll was rather similar of female vervets' handling of infants.

Let's say that all these differences are solid and related to gender and biology (though I find it hard to believe that female monkeys would perceive a pan as a "feminine" object -- last time I checked, monkeys don't cook). They still clearly show a great deal of intra-gender variation. So why is it that, if male monkeys play with a toy car 16% of the time and female monkeys 8% of the time, this is translated into "boys love trucks"?

Incidentally, there was no overall difference between male and female monkeys in favoring "object toys" versus "animate toys" (the doll and the dog). So much for the notion that females are person-oriented and males are object-oriented.

Put that in your pipe, David Brooks, and then do something politically incorrect with it.
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Read Amanda's take of the article here.

Ah! All Has Been Made Clear!

By our dear leader. This is what he said about the necessity for illegal wiretapping by his administration:

President Bush on Sunday strongly defended his domestic spying program, saying it's a limited initiative that tracks only incoming calls to the United States.

"It's seems logical to me that if we know there's a phone number associated with al-Qaida or an al-Qaida affiliate and they're making phone calls, it makes sense to find out why," Bush said. "They attacked us before, they'll attack us again."

It seems logical to me to point out that nothing stops him from doing this. He just needs to tell the courts, and he can even delay that part 72 hours. Nobody is trying to stop him from wiretapping terrorists, as long as he stays within the law.

It also seems logical to me to point out that there are better things for Bush to do than twiddle his thumbs while waiting for a phone call from al-Qaida, and I don't mean clearing brush. He could go and get the terrorists. You know, guys called Osama bin Laden.

Lastly, it seems logical to point out that Bush's whole argument would sound lacking and immature if it came out of the mouth of a five year old.

Condi, Hillary and Mr. Bush

Can you tell what this post is about? I bet you can; it's all in the title. For some odd reason powerful women get called by their first names on television and radio whereas powerful men get called Mr. powerful-man's-last-name. And what does this mean?

Take a guess. I think it is a way of trivializing these women's messages, a way of making them less powerful. It could also be that they are seen as more approachable than their high-and-mighty male equivalents. But I doubt that.

Interesting, in any case.

James Comey

So nice to begin the new year by writing about a Republican who is ethical. James Comey is one of those rare creatures:

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.

With Mr. Comey unwilling to sign off on the program, the White House went to Mr. Ashcroft - who had been in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital with pancreatitis and was housed under unusually tight security - because "they needed him for certification," according to an official briefed on the episode. The official, like others who discussed the issue, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.

Funny how every leaker now prefers to stay anonymous. Does this tell us something about the current government's attitude towards whistleblowers? Or are all programs now classified? Same difference, really. - In any case, Mr. Comey refused to rubber stamp possibly illegal maneuvers by this administration, and he is to be applauded for that.

Read firedoglake for more on Mr. Comey.

Happy New Year From Henrietta And Hank!

Henrietta here. This is an early picture of me. I managed to get rid of the scarf, don't worry.

May you all have a happy and healthy new year. Until we dogs take over, that is. These are our enemies:







But we are willing to live in peace with them. Sort of. Something for the wingnuts to learn, eh? I hope you have all the bones you can chew and that all the other dogs bow in front of your great esteemity. Yours, in solidarity,

Henrietta.

Writing About Sex Well

It is very hard. That's one of the reasons I don't do it much on my blog. The other one is that I don't know enough! Must get more experience first, you know.

That may be the problem with the sex descriptions in the many books American politicians have written. Maureen Dowd's column gives us some of these:

Conservatives are having fun e-mailing around the sex scenes in Barbara Boxer's new novel, "A Time to Run." A particular favorite is the equine entwine on Page 210, when "these two fierce animals were coerced into their majestic coupling by at least six people."

"The stallion approached, nostrils flared, hooves lifting with delicate precision, the wranglers hanging on grimly," Ms. Boxer wrote with her co-author, Mary-Rose Hayes. Soon, "the stallion rubbed his nose against the mare's neck and nuzzled her withers. She promptly bit him on the shoulder and, when he attempted to mount, instantly became a plunging devil of teeth and hooves."

Ok. That's a liberal attempt at describing animal sex. Here is Scooter Libby giving us the wingnut view of animal sex:

When Scooter Libby got in trouble over Valerie Plame, The New Yorker dug out his 1996 book, "The Apprentice," and reviewed its sex scenes. Lauren Collins took note of its homoeroticism and incest, and compared some passages to Penthouse Forum.

Scooter had his own animal erotica: "At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest."

These are enough to make celibacy look most interesting, even for the majority of us who don't think of animals as possible sex partners for humans. And Libby is one sick puppy. Sick.

But writing about sex is not easy. To prove it, I will give you my worst poem of all times. It was an attempt to objectify the penis as a fruit, like melons or peaches are used to denote women's breasts. Here it goes (ducks head in shame):

Bananas are yellow. Bananas are sweet.
They slake my thirst.
The bees buzz.

Bananas are mellow. Bananas are meat.
Their skins burst.
The bees buzz.

And the golden fuzz on my arms
stands erect.

Heh. I think I have turned all of you off sex for the night.

My Christmas Vacation (by G. Bush)

Today I had a good time clearing brush.

More on the Pew Study about Gender and the Web

The post below discusses some of my general concerns with the Pew study. This one gives an example of how the popularization of findings warps their meaning and serves to reinforce existing gender roles. This example applies to some of the study findings where the differences between men and women were found to be statistically significant. As I point out in my next post the study found no gender differences on a vast number of questions.

I'm going to excerpt a piece from one of the newspaper articles about the study results. It goes like this:

But she said online behavior reflects traditional offline behavior among the sexes. Women like to go online to use e-mail to nurture and build personal relationships, look for health information, get support for health and personal problems, and to pursue religious interests. Meanwhile, men go online to check the weather, read news, get do-it-yourself information, check sports scores, investigate products and download music.

Notice how women do certain things and men do other things? Here are the actual percentage differences as found in the study:
-using e-mail*: women 94% men 88%
-seeking health information: women 74%, men 58%
-getting support for health problems: women 66% men 50%
-pursuing religious interests: women 34% men 25%
-checking the weather: women 75% men 82%
-reading the news: women 69% men 75%
-getting DIY information: women 50% men 60%
-checking sports scores: women 27% men 59%
-investigating products: women 75% men 82%
-downloading music: women 20% men 30%

Now re-read that little paragraph above. Can you see the enormous distortion?
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*The percentage using e-mail may not measure whatever the nurturing and building relationships might mean, but it was the figure directly preceding the others quoted here.

Gender and Web Use

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a new report on gender differences in the use of the Internet. It is fascinating to analyze the way this report is discussed in the popular media. Here are some tidbits:

Deborah Fallows, senior research fellow at Pew and author of the study, told the Chicago Sun-Times, "There has been a 'feminization' [of the Net] in the sense that women took a different fork in the Internet road from men. Men use and appreciate the Internet more for the experiences it offers -- to do things -- and women use it and appreciate it more for the human connections they build."

Steve Jones, an Internet researcher and communication professor based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the report demonstrates that "Net users are not some kind of monolithic 'them' and the Internet is not just a giant mass medium. The Internet is a multi-medium, which men and women use differently."

Fallows expected that the Net would free the sexes to behave in "unstereotypical ways," such as men acting more "touch-feely" and women being more comfortable exploring new technologies.

But she said online behavior reflects traditional offline behavior among the sexes. Women like to go online to use e-mail to nurture and build personal relationships, look for health information, get support for health and personal problems, and to pursue religious interests. Meanwhile, men go online to check the weather, read news, get do-it-yourself information, check sports scores, investigate products and download music.

Fallows found that women like to use the Net to send e-mail and e-cards and are pulling ahead of men in use of instant messaging and text messaging on cell phones, while men are more likely to use online chats and discussion groups and to make Net-based phone calls.

Or this one:

"If there is an overall pattern of differences here, it is that men value the Internet for the breadth of experiences it offers, and women value it for the human connections," Fallows said.

And then we generalize one more step and come up with this headline:

Men want facts, women seek relations on Web - survey

Interesting. Let's see what the study actually says, what the basis for these generalizations might be. I am going to do something that is not usually done with studies which analyze gender: I am going to give you a small example of all the things in which no gender differences were found by the researchers, and this is only a tiny sample. You can pick almost any table in the study and find only one or two statistically significant gender differences.

Here it goes:
Men and women are equally likely to log on from work, to have internet sessions of varying length, to access the net daily or only every few weeks, to have dial-up at home or at work. Men and women are equally likely to use a search engine, to get information on hobbies, to get travel information, to buy a product on the Internet, to buy or make travel reservations, to watch videos or to listen to audios, to visit a government website, to look up phone numbers or addresses, to take a virtual tour, to instant message, to bank, to play online games, to get information on where to live, to get information on someone, to share files, to read a blog, to download computer games, to donate to charity, to send e-invitations, to create a blog, to take classes for credit, to play lottery or gamble and to order from spam.

And this is just from the first section of the study report. But because the purpose of the study is to find differences, differences are all we are going to hear about.

Let's look at the difference which became that last headline I quoted, the one about men wanting facts and women seeking relationships on the net. Here is what the study says on this question:

More men, 30%, than women, 25%, said the internet helped them a lot to learn more about what was going on, while more women, 56%, than men, 50%, said it helped them connect with people they needed to reach. These differences are statistically significant.

The results are statistically significant, yes, but are they practically significant? We are not talking about all men looking for facts and all women looking to connect; we are finding a fairly small percentage difference in the answers of men and women to questions about facts vs. connections.

And this difference of roughly five percent becomes....what? It seems that it becomes a wholesale judgement on all women and all men who use the net.

For the sake of fairness I should note that the contents of this quote are not the sole basis of the researchers' conclusion that men prefer facts and women connections. They also use the small percentage differences in various answers to e-mail questions. And a biased way of viewing what "facts" might be, I might add. After all, seeking support for a health problem on the net does not preclude also learning many useful facts from the very same support group. Likewise, action and relationships in general are really not mutually exclusive categories that can be easily assigned to male or female interests. Mostly they overlap. Just think of sex. Well, think of sex after you finish reading my post.

I very much doubt that Deborah Fallows, the senior researcher of this study, actually expected not to find what she "found", for it is her interpretation of the findings more than the findings itself that cause the impression of greater sex differences than actually exist. The only really sizeable difference* in the whole study is in the percentage of men and women who use the net to find sports scores, by the way.
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*On second reading I found another largish difference in the percentages of men and women looking up financial information on the net.

On Scientific Scandals

The Korean stem cell scandal is still growing:

The scandal surrounding disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk deepened today as an investigator told reporters in Seoul that none of the 11 tailor-made cell colonies Hwang claimed to have created earlier this year actually exist.
Korean news outlets also reported that the ongoing probe into one of the biggest scientific frauds in memory had broadened to embrace allegations that government officials -- concerned about the shame such revelations could bring upon their country -- may have attempted to bribe scientists who were considered potential whistleblowers.

Scientists are supposed to be ethical. Like clerics, aren't they, in some ways? Those of us who don't believe in religious ideas often have the same kind of blind belief in science. Thus these scandals that crop up once in a while are a good reminder not to take anything as a matter of blind faith.

The scientific system has many built-in checks for problems in someone's research project, but they are not perfect. Having to present papers in conferences and having to offer the research to unknown reviewers are not only fun ways of harassing other researchers; they do have a point in trying to keep them honest. But none of these safeguards is perfect as the Korean story reminds us. Then keep in mind that most political think tanks don't even use these basic safeguards. A good reason to read very critically indeed.

What research gets to be published can be biased even in the absence of any actual fraud. We have a tendency to focus on the unusual findings, on differences, on a new drug being successful as opposed to it being a failure. Published research therefore overstresses findings of a particular sort and understresses other types of findings.

In the field of gender research these biases mean that what we tend to hear about are new findings of differences between sexes, and especially those new findings which can be easily popularized. Research that doesn't find any differences between men and women will not even get printed in the obscure academic journals, let alone discussed all over the popular press.

All of this is good to keep in mind when leafing through scientific publications. Another nice check on our desire to take new findings at face value is to do some historical research. For example, go to the library and see what the popular scientific publications touted in, say, 1975 as absolute truth. You will be very surprised.

King Kong and Feminism

Men are not from Mars, after all. They are King Kongs! And women have the job of civilizing these monsters. A movie review of King King with the title I gave this post tells us so:

In a way, all men are King Kongs: powerful, brooding, potentially destructive creatures waiting for a woman to touch their hearts and tame them.

And all women are Ann Darrow, simultaneously fragile and compelling, possessor of the magic to transform primitive males (monsters-in-waiting) into protectors and the builders of families and civilizations.

This is a very old myth Don Feder, the writer, brings us, and a very appealing one, because it tells the men that nothing they do is really their fault; it's the women who failed in transforming them into something useful. And it tells the women that they really do have power, an enormous, humongous power, to rule over the men. Too bad that the myth is rubbish.

But the wingnuts love this myth. It makes their worldview into a coherent and logical whole and also explains very clearly why women must act a certain way. For if women leave their civilizing tasks undone the society will collapse. Men will be monsters and they will eat up or rape the women. Only if women agree to be these tiny willowy creatures who can do nothing but sigh on their own will the Western civilization stand. This is Feder's message to us feminists. We have destroyed the world by trying to empower women. But if women are empowered men will be monsters. You take your pick.

Luckily, you don't have to, because this myth is just a myth. Men are not monsters, Don. It's a movie, for Chrissake.

Santorum

He is quite vile as I have mentioned before. But he is even viler than I thought, because it seems all to have been a political veneer. Now, I can have some respect towards a wingnut who holds his values truly. At least he is logically consistent. But Santorum now burns with an urgency to drop all his talk about Attila-the-hun's family values and the beauty of creationism. And why? Just so that he could get re-elected. This is despicable.

Remember the Dover creationism case? Santorum used to be on the advisory board of the law firm that represented the wingnuts in the case. Now he has resigned:

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) withdrew on Thursday his affiliation from the Christian-rights law center that defended a school district's policy requiring the teaching of "intelligent design."

Santorum, the Senate's third-ranking Republican, is facing a tough reelection challenge next year. Earlier, he praised the Dover Area School District for "attempting to teach the controversy of evolution."

But the day after a federal judge ruled that the district's policy on intelligent design is unconstitutional, Santorum told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was troubled by testimony indicating that religion motivated some school board members to adopt the policy.

Santorum was on the advisory board of the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, which defended the district's policy. "I thought the Thomas More Law Center made a huge mistake in taking this case and in pushing this case to the extent they did," Santorum said. He said he will end his affiliation with the center.

The leading Democratic challenger in Santorum's 2006 reelection bid, state Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr., accused him of backtracking. Casey spokesman Larry Smar said that Santorum's statements were "yet another example of 'Election Year Rick' changing his positions for political expediency." Casey has led Santorum in recent polls.

What it boils down to is this: Rick Santorum was willing to destroy this country by his religious extremism for the sake of getting elected. When this turned out not to be the case he changed his stance towards a more moderate one. So it was all an act.

You should be ashamed, Rick.

The Worst Headline Ever

Bird Flu Fails to Take Wing

On Tolerance

A long time ago I saw Karl Popper speak on tolerance. This was before his death, of course, but it was fairly close to it and Popper wasn't at his best. Then there was the strawberry wine I enjoyed before the event. All this makes my recollection of Popper's message tinged with fond memories and light-hearted fuzziness. But I'm pretty sure that he said not to tolerate the intolerant.

Tricky, that whole question. Isn't it usually the intolerant that most benefit from the tolerance of others? The shield of tolerance lets them go on building their edifices which will ultimately ban other beliefs. Yet not to tolerate the intolerant takes away the whole point of tolerance, which to me is to allow peaceful cohabitation. Leben und Leben Lassen.

Religious extremists have been skilled in exploiting the societywide value of tolerance (or of multi-culturalism) in the West. Tolerance has allowed them to continue existing in sub-societies where other Western values such as gender equality are completely ignored. Tolerance allows some religious groups to take their children out of school at a younger age than is otherwise legally required, or it allows these children to be taught biased history. Even the organizing activities of Islamic radicals have benefited from the tolerance of secular nations. Yet if any of these groups came to general power the first thing to be banned would be behaviors that conflict with their values. They would ban tolerance.

Tolerance carries the seeds of its own destruction. What are we to do about this? Popper's answer was to refuse to tolerate intolerance, to make tolerance a reciprocal concept. I will tolerate you if you tolerate me, but if you don't...

There is a nice symmetry to his idea, but its practical applications would mean that we would no longer tolerate anybody very different, because most of those groups are intolerant themselves. My head goes dizzy at this point.

Even the meaning of tolerance is often unclear. Is there a tinge of condescension in tolerance? Do we tolerate other values the same way we tolerate a boil in the butt? Or is tolerance something purer, something respectful and courteous? And does tolerance by a powerless person towards a powerful one matter at all?

I don't know. John Gibson, the author of The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought recently gave a radio interview which revealed his definition of religious tolerance very clearly:

From the November 17 edition of Salem Radio Network's Janet Parshall's America:

GIBSON: The whole point of this is that the tradition, the religious tradition of this country is tolerance, and that the same sense of tolerance that's been granted by the majority to the minority over the years ought to go the other way too. Minorities ought to have the same sense of tolerance about the majority religion -- Christianity -- that they've been granted about their religions over the years.

PARSHALL: Exactly. John, I have to tell you, let me linger for a minute on that word "tolerance." Because first of all, the people who like to promulgate that concept are the worst violators. They cannot tolerate Christianity, as an example.

GIBSON: Absolutely. I know -- I know that.

PARSHALL: And number two, I have to tell you, I don't know when they held this election and decided that tolerance was a transcendent value. I serve a god who, with a finger of fire, wrote, he will have no other gods before him. And he doesn't tolerate sin, which is why he sent his son to the cross, but all of a sudden now, we jump up and down and celebrate the idea of tolerance. I think tolerance means accommodation, but it doesn't necessarily mean acquiescence or wholehearted acceptance.

GIBSON: No, no, no. If you figure that -- listen, we get a little theological here, and it's probably a bit over my head, but I would think if somebody is going to be -- have to answer for following the wrong religion, they're not going to have to answer to me. We know who they're going to have to answer to.

PARSHALL: Right.

GIBSON: And that's fine. Let 'em. But in the meantime, as long as they're civil and behave, we tolerate the presence of other religions around us without causing trouble, and I think most Americans are fine with that tradition.

PARSHALL: I agree.

GIBSON: In other words, they'd like it in return.

The bolds are mine.

Gibson likes the idea of tolerance as a reciprocal concept, though he believes that the Christian majority has not been tolerated in the past. To put it that way makes Gibson sound ridiculous, and he is. But his point is not ridiculous; it is ominous, because for Gibson tolerance means suffering the presence of the alien infidels, the believers in the false gods, those who will go to hell one day. This is not the tolerance of a compatriot with different beliefs but the tolerance of a commander who has declared a momentary peacefire. It is tolerating the enemy.

And how do you tolerate the enemy?

Meanwhile, in Japan

The Japanese government wants to have more women in management positions. It even wants to have more gender equality! More daycare!

Isn't that wonderful? The only not-so wonderful part of the whole campaign is that its origins have nothing really to do with women's rights but with other concerns, important concerns. That's how women usually get rights: as a side-effect of something that is not seen as trivial women's matters. In the case of Japan it's the dropping birth rates. The Japanese want to make having more children appealing for women and they also want to have more women working. That requires making these options more attractive for women.

Only ten percent of the Japanese upper management currently consists of women, by the way. Two thirds of Japanese women stop working after they have children, though the average number of children per family is very low. This counterintuitive combination hints at the possibility that so many women drop out of the labor force because it's a hostile place for Japanese mothers to be.

The Hard Lives of CEOs

Long working hours, little respect. Who would want to run a company in such a world? Well, there are compensations. One is the weird fact that firms which might be doing very poorly for their workers are not always so niggardly with their managers:

A typical chief executive at the biggest U.S. companies was last year awarded $5.74 million of compensation, 30.2% more than in 2003, according to a survey released by the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research group in Portland, Maine.

The average CEO at companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index was paid even more — $11.71 million.

The median increase was more than nine times last year's 3.3% rise in U.S. consumer prices, and double the 15% increase a year earlier. The average increase was 91%, a number distorted by the 27 CEOs whose compensation swelled more than 1,000%.

"We're seeing the kinds of pay increases we saw in the 1990s," said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library, in an interview.

Yet these firms didn't all have such great years. Hmmm. I bet you anything that the average worker of these companies didn't see thirty percent rises in their pay packets. A lot of them probably didn't even see the boot that kicked them in the ass.

But what about the high taxes these executives must pay out of their swollen salaries you might ask. Well, even that has been made a little easier:

More than half the nation's largest companies are giving their top executives extra money to pay taxes due on corporate perks such as luxury cars and even on capital gains, according to a published report.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a study the paper ordered from compensation-research firm Equilar Inc. found that 52 percent of the nation's 100 largest public companies revealed that they gave the extra payments to cover taxes, known in the industry as "gross-ups," to one or more top executives last year.

Most of those disclosures are buried in footnotes or attachments of other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and are not easily apparent, according to the report.

That practice is spreading, the paper reports, as only 38 percent of the companies made those kinds of payments in 2000.

While some of the payments were only a small portion of executives' pay, other senior managers received millions.

I want to share their pain, I do. To first read about Christmas in New Orleans and then this!

The wingnut response to my criticisms would be an appeal to the Almighty Market (the wingnuts have two religions, one believes in an angry fundamentalist guy and the other one believes in the invisible hand, or claw, as the case might be), and it would go something like this: "If the CEOs get these kinds of salaries it's what they must be worth in the Market. If they didn't deserve these kinds of salaries the firms they run would get rid of them. As they haven't done so it means that the CEOs are worth their remuneration. They worked hard and deserved it."

This is an answer worth an "F" grade, unless the markets we are talking about are perfectly competitive, which means that the products traded should be very homogeneous, information should be near-perfect and the number of firms should be quite large. The industries in which these CEOs operate don't satisfy these conditions. For example, the international petroleum industry is an oligopoly (with just a few large firms), and firms like Exxon have price-setting powers. Besides, they are in bed with the government which isolates them from the limited market pressures they'd otherwise have. No, economics doesn't absolve anything here.

Then there is the whole moral question: How can anyone really argue that one person is worth this kind of money for working very hard when some other person is working two or three jobs and barely staying alive?

I'm not advocating communism. I appreciate the incentive efforts that exist within a modified capitalistic society. But I'm also acutely aware of the societal problems that enormous income inequalities create. Do we really want to create a country in which the rich must live in gated communities with armed guards because they fear the large hungering masses? Yet this is the direction in which we are heading.

Blocked

Not really the dreaded writer's block, but I can't find anything that makes me itch to write about. So instead of something profound I will give you something totally trivial: a picture of the gingerbread castle I baked last year:



The icing looks bad because I did it with a spoon rather than with proper implements. It's a fairly big castle; the tray it stands on is a little bigger than your average tray.

The squirrels ate the castle last year. It didn't seem to hurt them.

Dictionary of Republicanisms

This is something funny for you to read in the post-Christmas haze. The Nation has put a list of words and defined their meaning for the wingnuts. An example:

woman n. 1. Person who can be trusted to bear a child but can't be trusted to decide whether or not she wishes to have thechild. 2. Person who must have all decisions regarding herreproductive functions made by men with whom she wouldn't want to have sex in the first place [Denise Clay, Philadelphia, Pa.].

The other definitions are giggleworthy, too.

Too Rich For Me

And I am not talking about all the chocolate I have devoured in honor of this Christian holiday. Which by the way now has turned into Boxing Day or St. Stephen's Day. Why is there a war against both of these honorable days (which happen to fall on the same day)? Hmm.

I must call Bill O'Reilly about this. Maybe next year he can do a long propaganda campaign on the wars against Boxing Day and St. Stephen's Day. But I digress, because of all the chocolate I have eaten.

The richness I started with has to do with all the possible evildoing of this administration. That is a strong word to use, "evildoing", but it's kosher because the administration uses it in exactly the same way as I plan to do here.

Like this: It appears that the president has a habit of calling journalists in to try to stop the publication of articles he doesn't like. Sometimes he is successful (like last year with the New York Times), sometimes he is not:

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.

The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.

Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, would not confirm the meeting with Bush before publishing reporter Dana Priest's Nov. 2 article disclosing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe used to interrogate terror suspects. Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, would not confirm that he, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman had an Oval Office sit-down with the president on Dec. 5, 11 days before reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that Bush had authorized eavesdropping on Americans and others within the United States without court orders.

But the meetings were confirmed by sources who have been briefed on them but are not authorized to comment because both sides had agreed to keep the sessions off the record. The White House had no comment.

I have no comment, either. I am quite wordless.

But wait, there is more! It also appears that the administration has the habit of paying journalists who agree to write government propaganda without calling it that. I have posted on this before, of course, but I wanted to start this paragraph with that wonderful sentence I hear on the television all the time. In any case, the names here are virgin ones (on my blog, at least):

The admission by two columnists that they accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff may be the tip of a large and rather dirty iceberg.

Copley News Service last week dropped Doug Bandow -- who also resigned as a Cato Institute scholar -- after he acknowledged taking as much as $2,000 a pop from Abramoff for up to two dozen columns favorable to the lobbyist's clients. "I am fully responsible and I won't play victim," Bandow said in a statement after Business Week broke the story. "Obviously, I regret stupidly calling to question my record of activism and writing that extends over 20 years. . . . For that I deeply apologize."

Peter Ferrara of the Institute for Policy Innovation has acknowledged taking payments years ago from a half-dozen lobbyists, including Abramoff. Two of his papers, the Washington Times and Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, have now dropped him. But Ferrara is unapologetic, saying: "There is nothing unethical about taking money from someone and writing an article."

"Nothing unethical about taking money from someone and writing an article." It must be nice to believe that if one is Mr. Ferrara. It guarantees sound sleep and peaceful thoughts.
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Added: As Eric Jaffa points out in the comments, the journalists took money from a lobbyist, not from the administration, this time. The ethical problems are pretty much the same, though.

Christmas After Katrina

Desolation. People living in tents or trailers, fighting the insurance companies, waiting for the tardy government aid and fearing that they have been forgotten. Here are some images from a Post-Katrina Christmas:

One tent city built by the Army, dubbed "the Village," sits in the center of the small town of Pass Christian, some 30 miles west of Biloxi and at ground zero for Hurricane Katrina and its assault on the Gulf Coast.

The Village is a gloomy grid of 70 tents, 10 numbered rows of seven each, housing about 150 people - old, young, black, white, poor, middle-class, some so ill that their tents are marked "Oxygen in Use." After four months, some of the shock of loss has worn off and the people go quietly about the daily challenges of securing a warm, private shower, washing whatever clothing they have left, and hoping that their children do not fall ill.

They are grateful for the dry bed and the free food. Everyone knows someone who is worse off, or dead. With tens of thousands of Mississippians displaced and living with families or friends around the country, the residents of the Village at least have their children with them and they are close to home.

A handful of tents are decorated for the holidays, but it seems almost cruel to ask a young mother what she's planning for Christmas.

"We're leaving," she says without hesitation. "Getting out of here for a day or two."

All who are able plan to leave and find a relative. Last year, they were stringing lights and wrapping gifts and waiting for Santa. This year, the great Christmas wish in the Village is to finally get a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Indeed, one reason the place exists is the backlog of homeless people who need trailers. When FEMA closed the shelters and stopped paying for motel rooms, something had to be done. Thus, the tent cities.

Don't ask why it's taking so long to get a trailer because there is no answer. More than 24,000 temporary housing units have been delivered, but 10,000 more are needed. The delays are maddening. A woman in the nearby town of Necaise went to the FEMA office on Aug. 30, the day after the storm, and requested a trailer. She did the paperwork, answered all the questions. She is epileptic; her daughter is diabetic; her husband needs back surgery; their situation is urgent, and she has explained all this to FEMA many times. Four months later she's still waiting. Her story is not unusual.

Plastic snowmen sit among mountains of rubble in nearly deserted neighborhoods. Refrigerators spray-painted with "Merry Christmas" lie on street medians. And signs in front of crumbling houses implore, "Santa, stop here."

In many places, time seems to have stood still since late August when Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast.

The upended cars and sludge-covered refuse suggest that the hurricane hit hours – not months – ago.

The Crescent City remains a shell of its former self this Christmas, with only slivers of the city up and running.

Still, residents are reviving holiday traditions while trying to rebuild their lives.

At Lakeside Shopping Center, mallgoers surveying the Christmas village notice something missing: "Where are the FEMA trailers?" one woman asks.

Things are no better in Mississippi than in Louisiana, even though the Republican governor of the former state pretended at first that everything was just dandy there. Now he sounds disgruntled:

Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour, has said his state needs $34 billion to rebuild. The state's annual budget is about a 10th of that, with virtually nothing set aside for such emergencies. The bold promises made in the heat of the moment after the storm have so far been pathetically empty. Congress has so far authorized nearly $100 billion for emergency relief and cleanup, but only a third of that has hit the ground.

Not lost on the people here was the recent rush to pass more tax cuts for the rich. And a question often heard is, "Why are we spending billions to rebuild Iraq and not a dime down here?"

Why indeed. Of course the real answer has to do with the (supposed) election of George Bush to run this country as he pleases. And he pleases to spend money in Iraq and to give tax cuts to the rich. That's the kind of Christianity he represents.

But maybe we should finally also learn to set some money aside for emergencies. Not every spare penny needs to be returned to the wealthiest of taxpayers. Or given to the business pals of the party in power.

A Coptic Prayer

I have posted this last Christmas, too. I like it.:

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek
after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, not your
hearing.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time.
Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.,
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband,
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.

I am the ruler of my offspring.
But he is the one who begot me before the time
on a birthday.
And he is my offspring in due time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,
and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.

I am the knowledge of my inquiry,
and the finding of those who seek after me,
and the command of those who ask of me,
and the power of the powers in my knowledge
of the angels, who have been sent at my word,
and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,
and of spirits of every man who exists with me,
and of women who dwell within me.
I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,
and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace,
and war has come because of me.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
I am the substance and the one who has no substance.