Wonkette points out that the Bush administration appears to operate along a different space-time continuum from the rest of the world.

Kos brings to our attention new documentation of Scalito's Pro-life beliefs.

Alito really starts looking like an ideologue on the issue of abortion, but as always I think this dead horse of an issue just distracts people from the more sinister pro-business, child-stripsearching side of Alito's record. Besides, at Give Up blog we welcome the Republican party to fall on the abortion sword. They will lose women forever, their party will implode, they will simultaneously lose their best irresolvable issue and alienate half the population. Abortion is only a good issue for Republicans as long as it remains legal, once it's gone, they're screwed. I, for one, welcome their self-destruction.

So Pope Benedict doesn't like gays but CNN reports on these silly edicts like they are something new. Like before this guy showed up gays were accepted by the Catholic church.

Anyway, the article is pointless, but the picture is priceless.

What is up with those cardinals? They look like they're all constipated and embarrassed to be around this pope.

So, I added thought bubbles.

This image from CNN on the Montreal Conference on climate change says it all.



This is why progressive protesters never get taken seriously. Between the puppets, the dolls, the jackass anarchists wearing black, and the obnoxious retro-hippy majority, progressive causes will always be ignored. I've been to enough protests to know, the desire to replicate the worst aspects of the 60s protests makes most of these rallies a joke, and a turn-off to the people whose minds you are trying to change.

What exactly do you think you accomplish by wearing a bear suit to a protest? World peace? No, here's what you accomplish:
1) You are giving the police a permission slip to beat you
2) You are giving everyone who then sees your photo permission to ignore your message
3) You make an important and necessary movement look like a silly game

Seriously guys, you want people to start paying attention to your protests? Start showing up wearing suits like the MLK protesters did. Police don't want to beat people wearing suits. People reading newspapers might actually be interested in what respectable-looking people have to say, and it doesn't make your movement look like an excuse for a bunch of kids that hate their parents to play dress up and run around like idiots for a day.

Jennifer Moses has written a prescient Op-Ed for the WP raising a important point. Isn't the disaster in New Orleans what the "starve the beast" types in the Republican party want? Isn't this what Grover Norquist wants when he says he wants to starve the federal government until it can be "drowned in a bathtub"? Louisiana, if you remember from the Relative Tax Burden map, receives about $1.49 back on each federal tax dollar they pay, and given how they can barely make ends meet for their state, a starved federal government would be a disaster for them even if their largest city hadn't been crushed by a hurricane. So why does Louisiana vote Republican? Why does it vote to starve the beast that feeds them?

The short answer is probably somewhere between gay marriage and abortion. But still, red staters should be calling these starve the beast types to task, and point out that the current and persistent mess in New Orleans is what we have to look forward to after they've crippled the federal government. Further, it won't be the blue states that suffer under a weak federal government. Check out the tax and GDP maps, they're the ones making the money.

I saw this article in this week's Nature but I didn't pay much attention to it.

What I didn't realize is that the authors apparently have a sense of humor and don't like ID either. Check out one of the first images they made with their new Bacteria film (image and article in the New Scientist)









It's the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

I'm really impressed. We should encourage more scientists to figure out ways to mock ID with their data. I can't think for the life of me how I could manage it, it may have to remain a goal for materials scientists for now.

Recently, the Idaho state legislature took time away from driving their little red state even deeper into the ground to pass a resolution honoring the makers of Napoleon Dynamite. Some gems from the resolution:

WHEREAS, Napoleon's bicycle and Kip's skateboard promote better air quality and carpooling as alternatives to fuel-dependent methods of transportation;
...
WHEREAS, the "Happy Hands" club and the requirement that candidates for school president present a skit is an example of the importance of theater arts in K-12 education; and
WHEREAS, Pedro's efforts to bake a cake for Summer illustrate the positive connection between culinary skills to lifelong relationships
...
WHEREAS, Napoleon's tetherball dexterity emphasizes the importance of physical education in Idaho public schools
...
WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" and run the risk of having the "Worst Day of Their Lives!"


Perhaps they should keep passing meaningless resolutions. It's a wecome break from the usual gay-bashing.

Read the entire thing here.

Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-California) has plead guilty to charges of tax evasion, mail fraud and wire fraud and admitted in court to accepting bribes in exchange for influence.

In particular note in this article the MZM defense contracting firm that was behind this fraud. They are tied to a bunch of politicians, including Jerry Kilgore and Virgil Goode in Virginia.

Having trouble keeping up with all the indictments, probes, and convictions of GOP politicians and lobbyists? Well, check out this immensely helpful scorecard of GOP corruption being offered by the Wayne Madsen report. The sheer number is stunning.

Via kos.

Getting to Science late this week but everyone should take a look at the climate science in this week's issue.

Two basic messages are apparent in this extended history of the atmosphere. First, even with this longer perspective, the modern atmosphere is still highly anomalous. At no time in the past 650,000 years is there evidence for levels of carbon dioxide or methane significantly higher than values just before the Industrial Revolution. Second, the covariation of carbon dioxide and methane with climate, strikingly evident in the Vostok record, follows essentially the same pattern in the earlier time period. The muted climate cycles (as indicated by the deuterium content of the ice) are accompanied by equally muted cycles of carbon dioxide and methane (see the figure). This relationship reinforces the view that the large-scale cycles in Antarctic temperature have global importance, and that climate and greenhouse gas cycles are intimately related.

It's impressive, we have atomospheric concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide about twice as high as they have ever been in 650,000 years and over this time period changes in greenhouse gasses have correlated perfectly with global temperature(for subscribers see the figure.) For the global warming deniers (*cough* polluters *cough*) this is pretty damning evidence, but nothing will convince them except, well, global climate change.

SFGate has this article discussing our national debt which has exceeded a record 8 Trillion dollars. Rock bottom is right around the corner, and Bush is driving us there at full speed.

Brian Riedl, chief budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the Bush administration is expected to return to Congress within the next few months to ask lawmakers -- once again -- to raise the nation's debt ceiling so we can borrow even more.
...
You heard right. The top number cruncher at the Washington think tank that's arguably friendliest to the Bush administration has come to the conclusion that our debt has gotten so out of hand, it may never go away.

At best, Riedl said, the national debt will be held to "a manageable level" as a percentage of the overall economy and thus won't completely ruin us.

But that too might be wishful thinking.

The federal budget deficit is now $319 billion. In other words, we had to borrow an additional $319 billion this year just to make ends meet, which is why the total amount owed by the government is higher than ever.

Riedl estimates that the annual budget shortfall will reach $873 billion 10 years from now. Two years after that, he predicts, the annual deficit will hit $1 trillion.

By the time that happens, Riedl's calculations show the national debt doubling to about $16 trillion, or a staggering 74 percent of the country's projected gross domestic product of $21.5 trillion.

"And it continues to worsen after that," Riedl said as he scrutinized his spreadsheet. "After 2017, we'll be looking at deficits of $2 trillion a year."

Nature's article on Blue state environmentalism last week was interesting and it looks like there is further evidence for Blue states emerging as leaders in improving environmental quality for the whole country. The NYT writes:

Ten states follow or plan to follow California's air quality rules, which have previously focused on auto emissions that cause smog, and the latest set of rules would for the first time limit carbon dioxide emissions. And as the largest of the 10 states, New York is being closely watched as it institutes the new rules.

If all 10 states and California succeed in enacting the rules, they will form a powerful alternative regulatory bloc accounting for about a third of the nation's auto sales.

"That is so much of the market it should reach a tipping point," Mr. Doniger said. "It won't make sense for the automakers to build two fleets, one clean and one dirty."

Give Up's hero, Eliot Spitzer, is ready for challenges from automakers who have opposed every single attempt at regulating their industry for the common good from seat belts to air bags.

Judith Enck, a policy adviser to Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, said she expected more challenges on many fronts, with automakers battling New York every step of the way. "We're ready for them to file a lawsuit if the state sneezes," she said.

Think I'm making that up? Well look what the UCS is quoted as saying in the same article.

"They said that seat belts would put them out of business; they said that air bags would put them out of business; they said fuel economy and emissions regulations would all put them out of business," said David Friedman, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

It's true, they have never accepted any form of regulation without a fight, even such undisputedly good ones such as seat belts. It's like they have a protocol they engage in every time a regulation is suggested. First, you say that the industry is self-regulated or is only serving the public interest by offering an inferior/unsafe/polluting product. Then they say the regulations will bankrupt them. Then they say the regulations need to be phased in over two decades because the economy is slow. Then they implement the regulations and come out with touchy-feely ads describing the extraordinary efforts they undergo to make safe and efficient products but never mention this is only after they've fought the regulations every step of the way. Truly, the last step of the protocol is to always take credit for the good effects of the regulations as if it was their idea in the first place. The coal industry is another example of this.

Ultimately this article is proof of the Give Up principle in action. Blue state federalism is so powerful that no amount of idiocy from the red states will every fully prevent progressive policy in this country. The sheer power of the combined economy of these eleven blue states (California, New York, Maine, New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Pennsylvania) will force the auto industry to implement these standards for the entire country. So Give Up on federal politics, the Blue states will provide!

This Abramoff stuff is spreading like plague. Ohio local politics in particular seems to be taking a hit. What is remarkable about the scams Abramoff was engaging in are that they were remarkably unsophisticated. Basic kickbacks, harebrained schemes etc. we're the rule. I don't understand how he thought he was going to get away with this stuff, and the dupes that fell for it were either obviously in cahoots or helplessly naive.

In other good Give Up news, Roe is about to get a spanking from the Supreme Court. Really any restriction put on abortion is likely to galvanize women for the next election. If we're lucky the Supreme Court will uphold New Hampshire's notification law, but the more likely result will be that O'Connor will leave the court after Scalito is confirmed (which will happen) forcing the case to be re-heard next year.

Then there is this gem from the Katrina disaster. Jim Amoss writes fro the WP

President Bush flew into New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. His staff had to fire up giant generators to bathe St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square in floodlights, as a backdrop for his promise that he would "do what it takes" to rebuild New Orleans.

"There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans," he said, "and this great city will rise again."

Then the lights went out, and the president left. Vast swaths of the city have been in darkness ever since.
...
What is lacking is political will in Washington and the determination to bring our engineering know-how to bear upon the problem. Without a substantial levee system, homeowners won't muster the confidence to rebuild, and businesses will not see fit to invest.

President Bush was still smarting from the embarrassing federal response to Katrina when he stood in the heart of our city and made his promise to rebuild. It would be a greater embarrassment to an entire nation if that promise went unfulfilled.

To which I say, what makes you think anything you say or do will make this administration do anything to help you? The inability of Americans to learn from experience is pathetic. Wake up. Bush will not help you, congress is building bridges to nowhere and Americans can not gather the sustained political will to help poor black people. This is irrational optimism. If you want New Orleans to be rebuilt try electing a Democrat next time Louisiana.

Some of us here at Giveup spent the holiday in the deep, deep south. The local paper here is a bit regressive; a staple of the Op-Ed pages is "God, guns, and dogs". Two days ago, this little gem crossed the pages in a letter to the editor. Sadly, I don't have the whole thing to quote verbatim, and the AJC requires registration to log in, but it boiled down to this:

"I'm so tired of reading about the anti-war liberals saying 'we told you so'. If you guys were against the war in the first place, why didn't you say anything back then? Only now that it's going badly are you saying anything."

Why didn't we say anything back then? Are you f'ing kidding me? Has this guy spent the last three years with his hands over his ears yelling 'lalalalalala'?

Well, things have slowed down over turkey weekend. However, interesting articles of Give Up-related content have continued to surface.

For instance, Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi has asserted that the U.S. Occupation is as repressive and abusive as Saddam's government. Ouch. This means that the Iraqis are now saying that Saddam treated them just about the same as Bush or better. Now, that's cold.

There is also a beautiful give up story on education and testing. Surprise surprise, red states are fudging their state tests so that they comply with No Child Left Behind, but when an independent tester (the federal government) comes in an administers a test, the results are off by as much as 400%. Ha!

After Tennessee tested its eighth-grade students in math this year, state officials at a jubilant news conference called the results a "cause for celebration." Eighty-seven percent of students performed at or above the proficiency level.

But when the federal government made public the findings of its own tests last month, the results were startlingly different: only 21 percent of Tennessee's eighth graders were considered proficient in math.
...
In Mississippi, 89 percent of fourth graders performed at or above proficiency on state reading tests, while only 18 percent of fourth graders demonstrated proficiency on the federal test. Oklahoma, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Alaska, Texas and more than a dozen other states all showed students doing far better on their own reading and math tests than on the federal one.

It just goes to show, there are only a few real metrics of educational success. They include functional literacy, high school graduation rate (although many states like Texas still fudge this) and college matriculation rate. Tests are for the birds, they are a cynical political scam that make do-nothing legislators look like they care, but depending on how they are formulated and implemented can show whatever you want from year to year.

It's not schadenfreude. But when the ex-head of FEMA, pushed out of his job for nearly unprecedented incompetence, starts an emergency planning consulting firm to "help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job", I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Is a baby cage! It's way better than the baby leashes you see around town!

Anyway, a recent PhD has come to the same conclusion as Give Up Blog on intelligent design and written to Nature describing his joy at no longer having to do experiments.

My life would be so much easier! Suddenly, I can come up with sweeping conclusions without doing boring experiments. I am fascinated by fine mechanistic questions in biology and I previously thought such enquiries required rigorous research methods. Now, I realize that biochemical reactions occur because some 'designer' said that's how they should happen.

This could really work in our favour, fellow scientists. Since the news from Kansas, I have finished two 'scientific' manuscripts! I think I can do about ten per week and never have to go to the lab! There's bad news, however. I will scoop all of Nature's readership by next Christmas.

Not to mention the technological achievements we could attain with the power of intelligent design science. No more time consuming creation of worlds over billions of years, we could harness the power of intelligent design and create the earth again in a single day! We could harness the power of design science to allow for the instant creation of food, natural resources, and weapons of unimaginable destruction. Just like knowledge of the atom gave us the atom bomb, design science will give us the power to smite our enemies at will! Just think of the applications!

Be sure to check out the December issue of Harper's Magazine, where Stanley Fish explains how the Intelligent Design droids have borrowed from the left in order to promote a debate on creationism: by making appeals to relativism. He concludes:

...the right itself, whose members now recite the mantras of "teach the controversy" or "keep the debate open" whenever they find it convenient. They do so not out of a commitment to scrupulous scholarship (although that is what is asserted) but in an effort to accomplish through misdirection and displacement what they cannot accomplish through evidence and argument.

For those who enjoy mocking the intelligent design hypothesis, I direct you to The Panda's Thumb. This is an excellent site on evolution and the debate over teaching real science in schools run by a whole cohort of scientists (real ones).

Remember that Friday is Buy Nothing Day. Spend your post Thanksgiving haze not mobbing shops for useless crap you don't need.

And, if you are going shopping anyway, remember not to buy anything from the Red companies. By the way, all gas should now be bought a Citgo, given Chavez's wonderful generosity to our blue friends.



Instead try to send your money towards the blue companies listed below.



For a complete list of CEOs, Founders, Owners etc. of corporations who donated to the Bush campaign in 2000 and 2004 see www.whitehouseforsale.org Data on contributions are available from the Federal Election Commission and Open Secrets

Finally, the Bush threats to Al-Jazeera have hit the mainstream.

Daily Kos has some great coverage of Republican and Democratic polling in individual congressional districts that deserves coverage. I'm pleased to see that Ehrlich is in trouble vs. O'Malley for the MD governorship. It shouldn't be surprised, Ehrlichman has accomplished nothing in 4 years, not even his pathetic attempt to bring the horrors of gambling to the more or less untainted state.

He also has a Give Up worthy map of Bush's approval ratings. That map, readers of this blog will notice, tracks with all the worst things in this country. Remind me to blog the infant mortality rate map sometime soon.

I don't know why, but every time John Stewart plays the monkey bathing a cat I just die laughing. Monkey washing a cat! I could watch this all day.

The question is, why is Chavez only offering aide to the blue states (MA and NY)? Has Chavez been reading Give Up?

Hola Presidente Chavez! Gusta usted "Give Up"? Donde esta la zapataria?

So, some interesting Give Up-related news stories.

First comes this bizarre story that Bush may have planned to bomb Al-Jazeera in Qatar but was discouraged from doing so by Blair. Now, at first this story seems to have no credibility whatsoever considering it appeared in the Mirror. But now comes this story in the Guardian indicating the British government is trying to block the release of secret memos from the Bush-Blair meeting using their Official Secrets Act. Blowing up Al-Jazeera? The closest thing to a free press that the Middle East has? From the guy saying he's trying to spread freedom and democracy? Interesting.

Then there is the distinct sound of barbarians at the gates for the Republican party. Many are predicting that Scanlon's plea for a lesser sentence for fraud is a bad omen for many Republican lawmakers including Tom Delay and Bob Ney. Already one low-ranking member of the Bush administration David Safavian has been forced to resign for lying to investigators in the Abramoff/Scanlon scandal. Next, according to the news stories will likely be Ohio Republican congressman Bob Ney who many people believe is "Representative No. 1" in court documents. Ultimately Delay will likely get screwed considering Scanlon used to be his top aide, even crafting this gem email which I love.


Then, there is more evidence that if Hilary runs in 2008 we are doomed for 4 more years of Republicanism, so get ready to maintain your Give Up mantra if she gets the nomination. She doesn't have the sense to advocate for some form of withdrawal from Iraq. Sorry, but she'll never win, too many people just hate her irrationally, and you can't argue them out of hating anything Clin-ton. It may end up irrelevant however, as the Iraqi government may end up giving Bush the out he needs to leave with his head held high. After all, if the Iraqi government asks us to leave, it's not like we're cutting and running.

Finally, for the Give Up incompetence file, are signs that post-Katrina rebuilding is already in arrears. That is meant to be said with a thick Maine accent by the way. Just another sign that there is no need to go out of your way to criticize the Bush administration, all you have to do is describe what they're doing (or not doing). They don't need any help embarrassing themselves.

Atlanta just opened up a new aquarium. It has all sorts of state-of-the-art amenities, including bass boat rentals, a store to buy your waders, and a fully-stocked armory for all your dynamite fishing needs. The whole thing is fully stocked, and they even have cleaning stations and grills so you can cook your catch! Yeeee haw!

Kos has dug up some interesting information on the White Phosphorus debate. In particular this Pentagon intelligence document describing the alleged use of WP as a chemical weapon on the Kurds.

PRESIDENT SADDAM ((HUSSEIN)) MAY HAVE POSSIBLY USED WHITE
PHOSPHOROUS (WP) CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST KURDISH REBELS AND THE
POPULACE IN ERBIL (GEOCOORD:3412N/04401E) (VICINITY OF IRANIAN
BORDER) AND DOHUK (GEOCOORD:3652N/04301E) (VICINITY OF IRAQI
BORDER) PROVINCES, IRAQ. THE WP CHEMICAL WAS DELIVERED BY
ARTILLERY ROUNDS AND HELICOPTER GUNSHIPS (NO FURTHER INFORMATION
AT THIS TIME). APPARENTLY, THIS TIME IRAQ DID NOT USE NERVE GAS AS
THEY DID IN 1988, IN HALABJA (GEOCOORD:3511N/04559E), IRAQ,
BECAUSE THEY WERE AFRAID OF POSSIBLE RETALIATION FROM THE UNITED STATES
(U.S.) LED COALITION. THESE REPORTS OF POSSIBLE WP CHEMICAL WEAPON
ATTACKS SPREAD QUICKLY AMONG THE KURDISH POPULACE IN ERBIL AND
DOHUK. AS A RESULT, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF KURDS FLED FROM THESE
TWO AREAS AND CROSSED THE IRAQI BORDER INTO TURKEY.

That seems pretty conclusive. The Pentagon considered WP a chemical weapon when Saddam used it, but now we're accused of using it on civilians and it suddenly is no longer a chemical weapon.

What's also strange is that it's like there's some rule that if you are in control of Iraq you must torture and use chemical weapons on the people. They must be asking for it, wearing those sexy chemical weapons suits and pretending they have a high threshold for pain.

I suppose that everyone's already seen this article, about how our allies in the 'we don't use torture' brigade, um, well, torture their detainees. With power drills. To death. Holy shit - this makes waterboarding look like a fun ride.

Militia-dominated police, who were recruited by Britain, are believed to have tortured at least two men to death in the station. Their bodies were later found with drill holes to their arms, legs and skulls.

Drilling through the skull is tough work, and would take a pretty sharp drill bit. One has to wonder what the hell we're not hearing about, if this is the stuff that we are.

The Post this Sunday told the story about the mini-boom in real, honest-to-goodness mansions outside of D.C. these days. People actually think that buying a 14,000 square foot house an hour or more outside of the city with 100% financing is actually a good investment. Then you have such decorative nuggets as these:


Inside, the foyer soars three stories to a small dome that is being painted with cherubs but is now just chubby heads floating in a cloud of blue.
...
"Look in here!" he said, waving toward the dining room and its reproduction of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. "You ever seen seating for 20?!"

When the bubble bursts, these people will be the first with their backs to the wall.

Read the whole article here.

Penn Jillette, everyone's favorite Cato Institute fellow, wrote an Op-Ed for NPR's little touchy-feely "This I Believe" segment. Usually it's about how some grandma learned to trust young people again after a firefighter saved her fuzzy cat, or how finding a seashell on the beach reminded some Midwesterner about the hugeness of the world. Blech.

But this one is actually quite amusing. Usually, they make the individual state a declarative sentence of belief. So here goes:

I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond Atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

...

Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less.

What two words might those be? Oh, yeah.

Read the entire post here.

Last year, almost to the day, I started telling everybody to Give Up. It was a terrible time, none of us could believe it happened...again. But the Give Up philosophy has been a boon to my friends and loved ones as they've learned that there is no need to be upset about losing in politics. We are right, and the truth will out. If we really believe that progressive policies are the better way to do things, the logical outcome of Republicans running the joint is that everything will go to crap.

We should stop trying to prevent their policies from being implemented, because people have to experience them undiluted and unsoftened by Democrats before they realize that the ideology of the right is empty of morality and common sense. So, stop opposing tax cuts, they help the blue states! Stop opposing their Supreme Court nominees, allow the Republicans to piss-off women forever! Stop opposing medicare and Social security reform, no gray-hair will vote republican again as long as they live!

Once things go to crap and we hit rock bottom maybe people will get over this Republicanism crap and let progressive government show these chumps how it's done.

It's a little bit like having a child that is a drug addict. You don't want bad things to happen to your child, but at the same time, you know the sooner they reach rock bottom, the sooner they can get into rehab. And it's almost time for this country to enter rehab.

Let's list the evidence we've nearly hit rock bottom.

Bush has created the largest government ever.

Bush has created the largest trade deficits ever (september set the record).

Bush has reversed the largest surplus ever into the largest deficit ever.

Bush is responsible for an intractable mess in Iraq with 2096 U.S. soldiers dead and 15,000 seriously wounded. Also, between 30-100,000 Iraqi civilians dead.

Bush has catastrophically mismanaged domestically, and his crony appointments are responsible for the greatest mismanagement of a national crisis in history.

Bush is responsible for the complete and total loss of the United States' good reputation worldwide with torture, secret prisons and detainee abuse scandals.

Bush's White House has lost credibility with his own party over leaks and exposed lies.


For these and other reasons Bush now has an approval rating in the 30s. If I had this list attached to my name I'd feel the only noble way out is suicide (I've been reading a lot of Roman history lately). Sadly, Bush isn't very noble.

Also, I think we're pretty close to rock bottom now. Future signs that our descent is complete may include:

Bush packs the court with pro-lifers. A Roe test case emerges that leads to it being overturned. The gender gap is reinstated and Republicans lose the women's vote for a generation.

Civil War breaks out in Iraq. Some have argued this has already happened, and the press just hasn't started calling it that yet. But 100 people dead in a single day yesterday suggests that maybe it's time.

Rove, Card and/or Cheney become the focus of Fitzgerald's new leak investigation, indictments ensue.

Video of torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons are released, thereby proving beyond all plausible deniability that the Bush administration does, in fact, torture.

Lack of revenue from tax cuts and overspending forces the government to cut medicare and social security and Republicans lose the old people vote for a generation (this has already begun).

Lack of revenue from tax cuts forces the US to withdraw from Iraq because operations become too expensive (they already are).

Documents from Cheney's energy task force are leaked or otherwise obtained, a Teapot Dome scandal clone emerges that shows this administration sold out the country to their corporate friends. Impeachment ensues. Think that's an exaggeration? Why did all of those oil executives lie in front of Congress last week unless they had something really big to hide?


Give Up has had a good first year because even the Bush administration can't hide incompetence. So don't worry everybody, let these retards sink the country as far as they can, and once everybody wakes up to the fact that Republicanism doesn't work, we can have a new New Deal. Celebrate Give Up's first anniversary by Giving Up!

It turns out Cheney really is a VP for torture.

Says Wilkerson:

Retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told CNN that the practice of torture may be continuing in U.S.-run facilities.

"There's no question in my mind that we did. There's no question in my mind that we may be still doing it," Wilkerson said on CNN's "Late Edition."

Further, smart people in the Senate are starting to wake up to the fact that there is more to jurisprudence than abortion. Apparently, Alito doesn't like reapportionment or the so-called "one-man, one-vote" decision in Baker v. Carr which allows gerrymandering to be challenged in federal courts.



Oh, and Texas killed an innocent man about a decade ago.

A whistleblower is claiming Iraq contracts have been rife with fraud and waste. Guess which subcontractor for Halliburton is being fingered by our whistleblowing fried? Why, Kellog, Brown and Root of course. What is with these guys? Why don't we just round them all up and indict them all at once to save time? Has any other business been so roundly condemned in the press for unethical behavior since big tobacco? They might even have big tobacco beat.

Greenhouse has testified that the contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown and Root represent "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."
...
One example given was the torching of new $85,000 trucks because of easily reparable deficiencies, such flat tires and clogged fuel pumps.

What have I been saying? These guys screw themselves, we don't need to expend effort to undermine the Republicans.

Delay's former aide, Mike Scanlon, will plead guilty to charges associated with the Abramoff lobbying fraud charges. What's amazing is that this doesn't even have anything to do with the Texas money-laundering stuff. Delay is surrounded on all sides. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) is in trouble related to these charges as well.

Then there's the news of Pat Fitzgerald convening convening a new grand jury ostensibly to deal with revelations from Bob Woodward. He's already indicted Libby, and Woodward says Libby wasn't his source. All signs point to either Cheney, Card, or Rove as the next target of the investigation.

The house of cards is coming down.

Tonight has been a night of high drama in the House. Republicans have introduced a resolution to withdraw the troops, which then failed overwhelmingly with only 3 votes.

Included were denunciations of cowardice from Republicans and accusations of shameful partisanship from Democrats. From the NYT

The battle boiled over when Representative Jean Schmidt, an Ohio Republican who is the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she had just received from a Marine colonel back home.

"He asked me to send Congress a message: stay the course," Ms. Schmidt said. "He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do."

Democrats booed in protest and shouted Ms. Schmidt down in her attack on Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Vietnam combat veteran and one of the House's most respected members on military matters. They caused the House to come to an abrupt standstill, and moments later, Representative Harold Ford, Democrat of Tennessee, charged across the chamber's center aisle to the Republican side screaming that Ms. Schmidt's attack had been unwarranted.

"You guys are pathetic!" yelled Representative Martin Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts. "Pathetic."

The measure to withdraw the troops failed in a 403-to-3 vote late Friday night.

Daily Kos has also had some excellent coverage. Looks like it just blew up in Republicans faces. Accusing Murtha of cowardice is pretty low, but then again, these are the people who name their think-tanks after Cato.

Scott M Liell give us reassureance that the founding fathers had to deal with this crap too. Specifically, Ben Franklin's lightning rods were blamed by religious crackpots for causing earthquakes. No shit.

While not present at this sermon, Adams wrote that he heard idle talk of the "presumption of philosophers in erecting iron rods ... attempting to control the artillery of heaven," and dismissed it a drunken nonsense. For his part, Franklin was amused by the reaction. Why, he wryly asked, was it acceptable to build a roof to keep out the rain but blasphemy to place a rod upon the roof to keep out the lightning?

Ha!

It is interesting to note though, all the innovations that have been condemned by religious zealouts that everyone luckily ignored. Airplanes were thought to be an incursion into God's domain similar to the 8-storey tower of babel. Religious zealots have challenged even the most benign technological innovations throughout history, though seemingly seem to have ignored the invention of gunpowder, high-explosives and machine guns.

Just in case you don't think the federal tax data was impressive enough, I prepared a map comparing the Gross State Product per capita across the states. These are the 15 states that have the lowest GSP. Not surprisingly, all but one are red. 15 of the 19 blue states are in the top 25, and if you look at the average GSPs, you see where the money is coming from.



Data were obtained from the Bureau of Economic Analysis www.bea.gov, GSP data for 2004 and from the U.S. Census bureau, www.census.gov, population statistics from 2004.

Congress has voted to extend the tax cuts but will Bush use his first veto to prevent higher taxes on oil companies?

I remind everyone again of this map:


Hooray for tax cuts! To hell with the red states that benefit from them. Santorum, a major advocate for maintaining the cuts says this is the "Tax Increase Prevention Act" even though his state, one of the few blue states that receives higher federal return in revenue than they pay, would be harmed by such measures.

We learn about how hummingbirds drive speciation of plants, the importance of timing in collecting stool samples, a possible genetic basis for schizophrenia, and what dung-eaters can tell us about dinosaur diets.

Overall another 5 articles directly or indirectly dealing with evolution.

This week in Nature is all about the climate change. However, there is some good news. In Environmental policy: Regional commitment to reducing emissions by Brendan Fisher and Robert Costanza (Nature 438, 301-302 (17 November 2005)) they make the argument that while the U.S. did not join the Kyoto protocol, enough states and municipalities are self-regulating to lower greenhouse gas emissions that it might not be as necessary.

Now, for the Give up part. Guess which states have decided to reduce emissions? See table 1. For non-subscribers the states are California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. These states represent 90 million people or about 30% of the population and national GDP. If you include the individual cities that have adopted regulations to prevent climate change the percent population rises to 40% and percent of national GDP to 50%, and these reductions alone would be equivalent to the reductions made by the second largest world economy of Japan.

It's like I've been telling ya. Liberals don't need the federal government. Just forget about it. The Blue states will provide.

In addition, Nature reports on how global warming will first dehydrate us and then sicken us. Yay!

Yesterday, Dan Savage had an Op-Ed in the Times. Instead of promoting the alternate uses of the word "Santorum", he was suggesting that progressives push to get a 'right to privacy' amendment. He's got an interesting point:

Problematically, however, a right to privacy is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. The majority in Griswold held that it was among the unenumerated rights implied by the Constitution's "penumbras" (which sound like something a sodomy law might keep you away from). The Griswold case didn't settle the matter, and the right to privacy quickly became the Tinkerbell of constitutional rights: clap your hands if you believe.

Liberals clap. We love the right to privacy because we believe adults should have access to birth control, abortion services and pornography as well as the right to engage in gay sex. Social conservatives hate the right to privacy for the very same reason, as they seek to regulate private behaviors from access to birth control to masturbation. (Think I'm kidding about masturbation? In Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, he wrote that the majority's decision called into question the legality of state laws against "masturbation, adultery, fornication.")

...

Well, if the right to privacy is so difficult for some people to locate in the Constitution, why don't we just stick it in there? Wouldn't that make it easier to find?

If the Republicans can propose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, why can't the Democrats propose a right to privacy amendment? Making this implicit right explicit would forever end the debate about whether there is a right to privacy. And the debate over the bill would force Republicans who opposed it to explain why they don't think Americans deserve a right to privacy - which would alienate not only moderates, but also those libertarian, small-government conservatives who survive only in isolated pockets on the Eastern Seaboard and the American West.

Check out the entire article here.

I've developed my own personal system for determining how conservative/fundamentalist columnists are in various newspapers around the country. I call it the George Will Ratio. Simply put, the George Will ratio is the number of times I agree with a column versus the number of times I don't.

Consider his wonderful Op-Ed for the WP today on how Dover should be a lesson for Republicans to stop trying to shove religion into science classes and cut out the damn pork. Now, of Will's 25 Op-Ed's since September I have agreed with his take on Miers 1 and Miers 2 and his article on the benefits of judicial activism.

That makes about 4 articles out of 25 which is close to my observed ratio of about 1 in 6 articles (or 17% agreement). From this benchmark one can then assess other conservative commentators. David Brooks of the New York times gets a similar score of about 1 in 7 or 14%, William Safire had a ratio of about 1 in 10 or 10%(This is inexact but I remember only agreeing with him about once a month), and to date I have never agreed with Max Boot of the LA times, that freak Charles Krauthammer (*cough* Dr. Strangelove *cough*) or Count Novakula (since discontinued) of the WP giving them approximate scores of 0.0%.

Why do I do this? I'm obsessive compulsive. There, I admitted it. But it's also a useful metric for whether or not someone is a true conservative and is intellectual about their opinions and positions on various topics. The lower the score, the more likely you're just a hack who will support anything the administration does. If the Bush administration decided to make internment camps for hippies tomorrow, I'm sure Krauthammer would have a glowing Op-Ed about how this makes Bush as great a president as George Washington, or maybe even Ronald Reagan. Think that's an exaggeration? Well, check out his wonderful apologia for Dick Cheney's "Go Fuck Yourself" incident and decide whether he has a any legitamacy as a commentator whatsoever. Krauthammer described the slur against Patrick Leahy as, "Cheney's demonstration of earthy authenticity"
Ha! What an asshole.

... one crayon at a time. In an era where they've been marginalized so much that the heirs of their founder came out with a hot sauce, it's interesting to see how the FBI used to fear the Panthers. Case in point - the CoIntelPro coloring book.

Consider this Reuters story "G.O.P. Strips Mandatory Funding for Two Alaskan Bridges"

Sounds like they just tightened their belts and cut some pork. Wrong!

Read the story, it's hysterical, they eliminate the "bridge to nowhere" but they keep the funding intact! Like the problem with the Alaskan pork project was that it was just too obviously a waste of money to fund, and next time they should try harder to disguise their theft of tax money? What do you think? And consider who in this country is really paying the burden of this pork? Hint: the Blue states. I wonder if anybody in red states like Alaska realize how silly it is for them to send jackasses to congress that lower their federal taxes, considering their states make far more money from taxes than they pay in.

This map shows the relative tax burdens of the individual states as measured by the return they get on every dollar they pay in federal tax. For instance, New Jersey gets $0.57 in federal money for every dollar in federal tax it pays. Similarly California, the worlds 5th largest economy, gets $0.78 in federal funding for every federal tax dollar it pays. Poverty-stricken red states then soak up the blue state surplus with states like Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama getting between $1.50 and $2.00 back for every dollar they pay. These states actually make money off of federal taxes! Why do they send tax cutters to congress?



Therefore I suggest this radical step. If we just allowed the Republicans to cut taxes like they want, and totally bankrupt the federal government, Democrats win on three fronts. First, blue states actually make money for the country rather than just suck it up, so they can raise their state taxes, pay for the services the federal government would have covered in their states, and at the same time by keeping the cash internal, build on their own infrastructure and create jobs. Second, once red staters realize they were really riding a cash cow when it came to federal funding they'll be pissed at the Republicans for strapping their states for cash. Third, no more money for wars!

Think of the red states as giant ticks that are all feeding on cash from the blue state coffers. The Republicans are tying a tourniquet around the blood supply feeding those ticks. Maybe we should let them.

From The Tax Foundation, Federal Taxing and Spending Benefit Some States, Leave Others Paying Bill, October 7, 2004, at www.taxfoundation.org.

Wonkette brings to our attention that gay marriage really has become a threat to straight marriage. Although I guess it's the lack of gay marriage is now a threat to straight marriage. Or is it the issue of gay marriage is now a threat to gay marriage? I don't know, you figure it out.

Well, maybe it's the rule that if you're in charge of Iraq you have to torture, run secret prisons and, this just in, use chemical weapons on the people.

Some good news, the Senate is starting to crack the whip on the Bush administration.

Update: The Christian Science Monitor has a good article covering the coverage of this story and allegations of use of white phosphorus on civilians.

Just in case you were wondering, that's German for The Boomers! The!

I challenge you to fully appreciate the many layers of humor in that sentence by reading Jack Shafer's hope-inspiring article in Slate on how we'll know when boomers have finally lost their selfish, nihilistic influence on the media.

Demographics should dictate how long boomer cultural hegemony will hold on. While still the largest single generation, the boomers are steadily dying off-or at least going to pasture. They peaked as a percentage of the population in 1980 at 35 percent and currently stand at about 27 percent, or 77 million self-absorbed individuals. But sooner or later, the post-boomers will give them the necessary nudge, push, and shove to sweep their rotting culture from the scene, and references to Beatles tracks will become as irrelevant as references to Mills Brothers songs.

Go Jack! You're my hero for the day

Well, Chavez and Vincente Fox appear to be at odds with one another after a spat at the Summit of Americas. Who to support? The mostly-democratic socialist with his insane TV show? Or, the guy who tries to arrest his populist political opponent on a technicality to avoid serious opposition?

No, really, it's true. Some of the suggestions from the article:

New Jersey: We'll Win You Over
New Jersey: It Always Smells Like This
New Jersey: Come Glow With Us
From Ol' Blue Eyes to the Boss: Jersey Is Singing Your Song
The Ocean, The Motion, The Magic (Note: WTF - something about the motion in the ocean?)

But what about actually using some of the lyrics from Bruce Springsteen?

"New Jersey: We gotta get out while we're young"
"New Jersey: It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap"

It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Hell, maybe that should be their slogan.

As in 'self-described cool mom'. Nobody thinks that their mom is cool. Especially when she's a M.E.L.F.

PLoS biology has an interesting review on the state of "Origin" science called, Jump-Starting a Cellular World: Investigating the Origin of Life, from Soup to Networks by Richard Robinson. It's written for a lay audience and like all good science writing opens with a joke:

A physicist, a chemist, and a mathematician are stranded on a desert isle, when a can of food washes up on the beach. The three starving scientists suggest, in turn, how to open the can and ease their hunger. The physicist suggests they hurl it upon the rocks to split it open, but this fails. The chemist proposes they soak it in the sea and let the salt water eat away at the metal; again, no luck. They turn in desperation to the mathematician, who begins, "Assume we have a can opener..."

I hadn't heard the metabolic hypothesis before, it certainly is interesting.

Also, some articles on evolution as always. In flies Divergent (Selection and the Evolution of Signal Traits and Mating Preferences), in bacteria (Exploitative and Hierarchical Antagonism in a Cooperative Bacterium), and in humans (Emergence of Young Human Genes after a Burst of Retroposition in Primates) and (The Case for Selection at CCR5-delta32).

I love intelligent design. It is my favorite kind of science, namely, science by analogy. I tell you, I've gotten sick over the years learning molecular techniques, biochemistry, genetics, and all those other things that actually allow me to perform science. Now I find out I don't have learn anything new, apparently everything is already known! And, you don't need to collect data, all you have to do is develop an adequate analogy or stupid gimmick to make your point. The WSJ writes: (sorry nonsubscribers)

AMES, Iowa -- With a magician's flourish, Thomas Ingebritsen pulled six mousetraps from a shopping bag and handed them out to students in his "God and Science" seminar. At his instruction, they removed one component -- either the spring, hammer or holding bar -- from each mousetrap. They then tested the traps, which all failed to snap.

"Is the mousetrap irreducibly complex?" the Iowa State University molecular biologist asked the class.

"Yes, definitely," said Jason Mueller, a junior biochemistry major wearing a cross around his neck.

That's the answer Mr. Ingebritsen was looking for. He was using the mousetrap to support the antievolution doctrine known as intelligent design. Like a mousetrap, the associate professor suggested, living cells are "irreducibly complex" -- they can't fulfill their functions without all of their parts. Hence, they could not have evolved bit by bit through natural selection but must have been devised by a creator.


The only problem I've found with my new love of intelligent design are the hundreds of siRNA experiments I've performed, (siRNAs eliminate expression of a single gene they are targeted against) that don't all kill the cells. If only I didn't know for a fact from my own experiments that all cells aren't irreducibly complex, I could believe they are irreducibly complex and retire. Stupid siRNA.

That and all those knockout mice in the literature that have no phenotype or have non-lethal phenotype. Shit, and I forgot about all those c. elegans, and yeast studies that knockout genes and the damn things survive.

Stupid nature. Now I'll never know everything.

Looks like some progressive groups are finally realizing that abortion can not be the exclusive focus of liberal politics and are actually thinking of challenging Alito based on the rest of his scary conservative court resume. The NYT writes:

A coalition of liberal groups is preparing a national television advertising campaign against the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. that seeks to move the debate over his selection beyond abortion rights and focus instead on subjects like police searches and employment discrimination, several leaders of the coalition said.
...
Among the issues raised by the poll was Judge Alito's support as a lawyer in the Reagan administration for an employer's right to fire someone who had AIDS. Another issue was a judicial opinion he wrote supporting a police strip-search of a suspected drug dealer's female companion and her 10-year-old daughter. Others included his votes as a judge against employment discrimination suits and an opinion overturning part of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Now, Give Up Blog has been ahead of the curve on this issue pointing out previously that Sam Alito thinks it's ok to strip search 10-year-old girls. You can read his minority opinion in this decision, here.

Today's WP editorial page writes:

REP. TOM TANCREDO (R-Colo.) has a bold idea to stop illegal immigration: Deny automatic citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants. "There is general agreement about the fact that citizenship in this country should not be bestowed on people who are children of folks who come into this country illegally," he told the Washington Times.

Wow. It's amazing how sometimes you see a politician who just doesn't get it. And by it, I mean America. As much as Republicans seem to hate everything French, this guy seems to want to import their style of immigration law.

So Fox has gone and done it. Damn them. Damn them to television hell.

Bill O'Reilly says, death to San Francisco.



"Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead," O'Reilly went on. "And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

What is it with ultraconservative religious people and their damn fatwah's today?

We get the following rant from Pat Robertson.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.

How can people keep taking this asshole seriously?

Today's NYT editorial on governors taking control of environmental issues is the give up theory in action.

We cannot rely on the federal government to regulate green house gas emissions while it is being run by oil and automotive interests. Even when the feds do get around to passing the needed regulation it is usually considerably weaker than, or purposefully undermines, state regulations. A good example is the Bush administration's opposition to California's attempt to get more hybrids and electrics on the road. So, give up on the federal government, the power of the blue states will provide (even when those states have "Republican" governors).

A bunch of Norskies bring the melting of Greenland's ice sheet to our attention. It seems while the outer portions of the sheet are melting and contributing to rising ocean levels, the middle of it may actually be increasing in size. Also, DNA sequencing from human bones over 7,500 years old tells us where Europeans might have come from (clearly another attempt by a certain mischievous deity to confuse us).

Finally Dr. Antonio Lazcano discusses why it's easier to teach evolution in Mexico than America.

I am always amused when I am asked by my American colleagues about the problems and pressures they imagine I face in Mexico because of my interest in life's beginnings. However, pressure to include creationism in public pedagogical and research settings has been primarily a phenomenon in the United States. Only twice during my 30 years of teaching about evolutionary biology and research into the origins of life, have I encountered religious-based opposition to my work. In both cases, it came from evangelical zealots from the United States preaching in Mexico. One of the little recognized U.S. imports into Mexico is a small flow of creationists, who, through religion, are trying to impose their fundamentalist beliefs and hinder the teaching of Darwinian evolution in all levels of schooling.

This week in Nature we have some interesting articles, worthy of Dr. Weird.


From Nature the physiology of Gay fruitflies based on a recent Cell paper in which the authors generated gay and lesbian flies (no shit). The news article in nature is here. Briefly:


The sexual behaviour of insects has been tweaked before by altering a gene called fruitless. Male fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster) that have mutations in this gene often fail to make a protein called Fru. These flies do not engage in the normal mating ritual of tapping and tilting movements that attract females.

If male flies have a milder mutation in the fruitless gene, resulting in production of small amounts Fru protein, they court male and female flies alike.

On the flipside, females engineered to carry the male-specific fruitless gene suddenly begin wooing other females with the tapping and tilting routine.

Although these behavioural switches intrigued researchers, any anatomical difference in the flies remained elusive.

...

The Japanese team show that homosexual females designed to produce the Fru protein develop an intact nerve-cell cluster. And males with mutations in the fruitless gene lack these nerve cells. The results of the study, which appear in Nature, suggest that the presence of this network in the insects' brains determines which partners they woo.

The Annals of Improbable Research Blog brings to our attention a new and important product, Hydra H2O.

Now, all my sciencey-type readers will get a big kick out of reading their "technical research paper" that answers all your questions on how their all-natural, all-water water additive improves your drinking water. Also, note their fastidious sourcing.

Fans of legitimate journalism will be glad to hear Judy Miller has decided to resign from the NYT.

She does, however, acknowledge her role as an innocent but gullible White House press core reporter in the wholesale acceptance of the WMD story in her letter to the editor.

Even before I went to jail, I had become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war. Several articles I wrote or co-wrote were based on this faulty intelligence, and in May 2004, The Times concluded in an editors' note that its coverage should have reflected greater editorial and reportorial skepticism.

That's big of her. However, this whole going-to-jail-to-protect-a-source thing is totally bogus. She wasn't protecting a source, she was protecting a character assassin. She was being used by Libby to attack political opponents of the White House just like she had been used to sell the WMD story. This is not the test case one should use to defend protection of journalistic sources, and I think the NYT realized they could do a lot better than Miller when it comes to covering the White House. Sorry, but if you're covering the White House for the NYT you need a better excuse than, "They told me there were WMDs! Cheney even pinky-swore that they were real in the hallway!"

Texas and Maine both had ballot initiatives on Gay Marriages this election. The Texas one, of course, passed, while voters in Maine have honorably decided not to write discrimination into law.

Now, for those who have Given Up, this is good news. Pointless ballot initiatives on the divisive issues such as homosexuality and abortion are a guaranteed method of getting your base out for an election. Which begs the question, why did the moron politicians in Texas choose to ban gay marriage on an off year? Why didn't they wait for the midterm elections? You only get to ban gay marriage once, they blew their "get the base out" wad a little early on this one.

I missed this article before, but it is worth reading. October's PLoS Medicine suggests direct to consumer advertising for SSRI antidepressents is false and misleading.

I had never read a review of the serotonin hypothesis before and it makes me think that doctors too are probably heavily influenced by the drug companies' push of the serotonin hypothesis. I would be willing to bet that a majority of psychiatrists probably buy into it, simply because the drugs are effective (the article doesn't really dispute that, just the scientific basis for how they work). I don't remember being taught this hypothesis as fact in Medschool, but I think it was suggested. Anyone else remember being taught the serotonin hypothesis?

Check out how the CA special election went. Poor Arnold. I'm a little sad about the redistricting vote though. Apparently now he's going to China.

And while Kansas has decided to go with the intelligent design hypothesis, Pennsylvanians have lived up to their blue-state status and roundly thrown out the dover school board.

It appears that Tim Kaine has defied the odds and taken Virginia's governership. Sadly, the lt. governer and attorney general look like they will be Republicans although they are very close races with margins less than 1%.

I rejoice for Virginia and New Jersey which have decided to stick with functional public servants. However, I still believe, overall, we should give up.

So everybody, big elections tonight in New Jersey and Virginia. Anyone want to make some Give Up predictions?

I'm thinking Corzine in NJ just because it's a democratic stronghold, but I suspect Kilgore will take VA based on his ingenious campaign of fear-mongering and appeals to red-state irrationality about taxes and property rights. We can hope that this will be the first time in US history that reason and sensibility will prevail over appeals to emotion and fear, but face it, it's unlikely.

Consider, VA is coming out of 4 beautiful years of leadership by a democratic governer with an 80% approval rating. If history is any guide it's about time for Republicans to take control, fuck everything up for 4 years, and then blame the Democrats for their own complete incompetence in governing.

Tell me what is wrong about this statement by George W. Bush in reference to Jerry Kilgore:

"The thing I like about this fella is he's from Virginia and he grew up on a farm," Bush continued. "That means he's a down-to-earth person. He doesn't have a lot of fancy airs, a person who knows how the common man thinks." Bush also urged the crowd to turn out other voters, saying, "It's your time."

It will be a beautiful day when people wake up and realize:
1. Bush is from Kennebunkport.
2. He does not know how the common man thinks
3. Rich boys with bad grades who get legacy admission into Yale and Harvard know nothing about being "down-to-earth"

I just love this common-man spiel. The Red staters just eat it up, and never seem to notice that there's a steaming pile of bullshit on their plate.

Then there was this gem from Kilgore:

The president "is very popular in Virginia. And he's coming off a successful South American trip," Kilgore said of Bush's overseas visit, which drew violent protests.

Umm, wow. That's a wopper of a lie. Anyone who considers that trip a success has no business being put in charge of a hot dog stand, let alone the state of Virginia.

Yet another reason to get rid of that behemoth in your driveway. Won't someone please think of the children?!?

For no other reason than I love this map, here's a reminder of why you should always wear a rubber in the red states.



Map adapted from:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance, 2003. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, September 2004.

That Walmart story from the LA times got me thinking about why WalMart loves the South so much, as do many other employers who like no worker protection regulation.

Consider this figure:



The unionized states have workers that make approximately 20% more than the states that are hostile to unionization. But then you ask, well, those what about unemployment? Don't unions drive out jobs? Again, not really.



There really isn't much difference between the right to work and all other states (the first two bars). If there is an effect at all it is slight and can't be justified given the standard deviations indicate the unemployment rates aren't significantly different. Further, when you evaluate the data by actual union characteristics (the 3rd-5th bars) you see unionization doesn't appear to negatively affect overall unemployment for a state at all. So, by all means red states, oppose workers rights and get paid less, see if we care. On top of that you get WalMart all over the damn place and at a Medicaid cost of $900 per worker per year, you'll bankrupt your states in no time.

Next we'll discuss why the red states just won't go bankrupt (hint: the blue states subsidize them outrageously).

Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002 and 2003 Occupational Employment and
Wage Estimates. www.bls.gov

Bureau of Labor Statistics, State and Regional Unemployment, 2002 and 2003 Annual Averages. www.bls.gov

The evil wing of Halliburton is at it again:

The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work.

Some of the work involved postwar fuel imports carried out by K.B.R. that previous audits had criticized as grossly overpriced. But this is the first time that an international auditing group has suggested that the United States repay some of that money to Iraq. The group, known as the International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq, compiled reports from an array of Pentagon, United States government and private auditors to carry out its analysis.

I'm telling you, it's not Halliburton, it's Kellog Brown & Root!

Here's the last new rule from this week's Bill Maher's Real Time:

Here's where turning over Roe v. Wade could be the best thing for the Democrats, because if you want to create more liberal voters, don't scare them with the possibility of terrorism, scare them with the possibility of parenthood. Because voters these days are all about the issues that affect me. They need to see how Bush's fuck-ups affect them personally. I mean think about it, other than the war in Iraq, the Katrina disaster, the deficit, the CIA leak, torture, stopping stem cell research, Homeland Security, global warming and undercutting science, we've yet to feel the negative effects of the Bush administration. (laughs)

But you know what voting block had the lowest turn out in last year's election? Young, unmarried women. And you know who will be the most affected if they overturn Roe v. Wade? Kobe Bryant. But after him, young women. Come on you're living in South Carolina and you need an abortion, you're gonna get on a bus and head to New York. Maybe next time you'll think twice about letting your older brother tuck you in. Because overturning Roe v. Wade won't make abortion illegal, the choice to allow it will just be returned to the states, in all likelyhood, the Blue states. The rest of you will just have to make a weekend out of it...

Wooha! Maybe now the whole country will get behind Giving Up!

The washington post reports that Army recruiting is now highly focused in Rural (red) areas. Who knows what effect this will have for the future of Republicans. Will it create thousands of disillusioned youth like Vietnam thus undermining the future of the Republican party?

More than 44 percent of U.S. military recruits come from rural areas, Pentagon figures show. In contrast, 14 percent come from major cities. Youths living in the most sparsely populated Zip codes are 22 percent more likely to join the Army, with an opposite trend in cities. Regionally, most enlistees come from the South (40 percent) and West (24 percent).

At the same time recruitment of Blacks has fallen significantly.

Blacks fell from 22.3 percent of Army recruits in fiscal 2001 to 14.5 percent this year; Hispanics rose from 10.5 percent to 13.2 percent, and whites, from 60.2 percent to 66.9 percent. Women dropped from 20 percent to 18 percent.

Personally, I wouldn't consider it wise politically to send too many of my future voters to Iraq. It just seems, um, self-destructive.

The LA times reports on the results of the independent academic conference held to assess the economic impact of Walmart stores. It was funded by Walmart but they turned all aspects over to an independent contractor so the studies would lack bias, and it looks like it worked to Walmart's dismay.


At least two concluded that Wal-Mart stores' pay practices depressed wages beyond the retail sector. Another found that states on average spent $898 for each Wal-Mart worker in Medicaid expenses.

One study concluded that Wal-Mart's giant grocery and general merchandise Supercenters brought little net gain for local communities in property taxes, sales taxes and employment; instead, the stores merely siphoned sales from existing businesses in the area.

It is also a wonderful Give Up story. Some people are dyed-in-the-wool defenders of WalMart, it's bizarre, but they're only screwing themselves by supporting the building of these stores in their area.

Worse yet, he wrote, is Wal-Mart's influence in the South, where it has its greatest concentration of stores. There, Neumark and his coauthors found, Wal-Mart has decreased retail employment and total employment.

Ha! A curse on you! A pox! A hex! A WalMart!

From reading the Daily Kos I picked up this gem.
Check out this email from Delay's aide, Mike Scanlon talking about how they got the word out to oppose these indian casinos for Abramoff.



Just goes to show what they think of their own base.

For those of you who missed Brownie's wonderful emails, they are no longer being served from Melancon's website.

However, they are now available from our friends at The Smoking Gun.

I'm serving the complete pdf here

So, the Republicans have gotten all fiscal-disciplinny on us saying, "we've got to cut the budget by some token amount so we don't look like reckless spenders! Lets cut prescription benefits for poor pregnant women!"

It's never the defense contractors that get cut. I mean, defense is something like a third of the national budget, and they can't find a single stupid program to cut? I just know they have some stupid shit being worked on at the pentagon like the development of banana-deployed switchblades, or a bomb that selectively blows up cabbage warehouses. Oh crap. I've said too much.

Not sure why, but I'm loving this WWII-era Serviceman's Guide to Iraq.

I love Brownie. He epitomizes why you need to do nothing to damn this administration, they'll do it themselves. Rep. Melancon has Brownie's emails during Katrina published on his site. They include these snappy statements:

On Monday Aug 29th
Re: It's early but...
"I got it at Nordstrom's. Email McBride and make sure she knows! Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I come home?"

Re: New Orleans update
"If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire you'll really vomit. I ama fashion God"

Between this and his emails trying to dodge reporter's questions about how he got fired from the Arabian Horse Association (I shit you not) his correspondence is hysterical.

Buck, in particular, will like the only email expressing concern for the hurricane victims was in regards to their pets. He really jumped on that one. And make sure you look at the dates, he gets one email about emergency transport of hospital patients on respirators, his one-line response goes out 4 days later.
Check them out!

As was pointed out in the comments, Alito seems to think unauthorized strip searches of 10-year-old girls is just fine. From the opinion of Doe v. Groody:

The officers decided to search Jane and Mary Doe for contraband, and sent for
the meter patrol officer. When she arrived, the female officer removed both
Jane and Mary Doe to an upstairs bathroom. They were instructed to empty
their pockets and lift their shirts. The female officer patted their pockets. She
then told Jane and Mary Doe to drop their pants and turn around. No contraband
was found. With the search completed, both Jane and Mary Doe were returned to
the ground floor to await the end of the search.

The search warrant was for the man of the house and the officers felt the need to strip search a 10-year-old just in case she was hiding coke in her anus. While the majority disagreed and felt, quite reasonably, that search warrants don't entail strip searches of any children in a house, Scalito dissented:

ALITO, Circuit Judge, dissenting:
I would reverse the order of the District Court and direct that summary
judgment be entered in favor of the defendants.
...
I share the majority's visceral dislike of the intrusive search of
John Doe's young daughter, but it is a sad fact that drug dealers sometimes use
children to carry out their business and to avoid prosecution. I know of no legal
principle that bars an officer from searching a child...

What a perve! Screw Roe, why don't the senators just harp on the fact that he supported strip searching of children without probable cause? Some drug dealers plant drugs on children so all warrants then justify strip searching children? Even if there is no PC to suggest contraband has been stashed inside a 10-year-old it's ok to just assume there is PC because someone else has done it? Besides being creepy, this is sloppy legal thinking. The lesson here? Don't hang out at a drug dealer's house or you may end up with some cop's finger in your ass. Also, Scalito and the drug warriors need to step back, take a deep breath, and ask themselves if this is all worth it.

After talking with a few people, I decided to update the maps to reflect their presidential vote in 2004. So, the maps now show the worst states for any given problem in red and blue. Check them out. It didn't take much effort, many of the maps don't even have a single blue state, or if they do, it's just one, usually Delaware.

More will be posted in the coming weeks.

One last piece of Halloween nostalgia, the scary jack'o'lantern of two years ago, Ashcroft'o'lantern!

Democrats forced a closed session of the Senate today, in order to push Republicans to move forward on investigating prewar intelligence.

Hear ye, O universe! Scalito's gonna have to wait in line; the White House no longer controls the agenda.

Fear not the coming total obliteration of the infamous wall between church and state. When God trumps all, he also trumps the federal drug laws.

That stoner kid mumbling under his breath down by the Kwik-E-Mart? He's not a loser, he's a prophet in the making! He's got this First Amendment stuff all figured out, and with a little luck, and an ever-more-godly Supreme Court, we too can ride out the remaining Red years in a total fog.

So the NYT has an article today detailing the woes over at Ford and GM. Basically, sales of all of their products are down almost 25% compared to last year, with some of their behemoths (i.e. the idiotic Hummer) down by more than 50%. So here are my few questions:

1). Did they actually think that those 'employee pricing' sales over the summer would work? It seems to me that they've irrevocably linked their brands to the mentality that they're not worth paying full price for. "Come to your Ford dealer, where our cars have all the quality of your Taco Bell value meal!"

2). It seems to me a bad business model, in an era of rising energy costs, to base your company's entire future on selling energy hogs. Moreover, didn't the American automakers go through this once already? Back in the 70's, when the embargo hit, didn't they get slammed by the Japanese companies because the American fleet was a bunch of gas-guzzling muscle cars?

Which begs the question - what do you do to someone who repeatedly fails to learn from their mistakes? Fool the US automakers once, shame on you. Fool them twice...

Roe is just a red herring. The real danger of this guy and Roberts is that they are so pro-corporation they make my teeth hurt. The WSJ Reports on Scalito's pro-business opinions:

Last year, Judge Alito wrote an opinion striking down a Pennsylvania law that barred alcoholic-beverage advertising in college newspapers. The law violated advertisers' First Amendment rights, he found, while doing little to prevent underage drinkers from seeing liquor ads, since they were prevalent in many other media to which students had access.
...
Judge Alito has insisted on enforcement of contract terms challenged as unfair or otherwise as void, such as provisions that require consumers to use arbitration rather than lawsuits to pursue complaints, said Larry E. Ribstein, a law professor at the University of Illinois. Such contract terms can be "a very useful technique that business has today in avoiding excessive litigation," said Mr. Ribstein
...
One potentially hot-button case was a 2001 opinion joined by Judge Alito that set aside Environmental Protection Agency orders to clean up ammonia from a fertilizer plant that polluted drinking-water wells in Lansing, Mich. In that case, the majority found the agency lacked a "rational basis" for the remediation it required of W.R. Grace & Co., the fertilizer-plant operator.
...
Yesterday, the advocacy group Earthjustice issued a statement claiming Judge Alito repeatedly has sought to scale back congressional power "to enact laws that protect our health and environment."


These are part of a much more insidious worldview than the narrow focus the NARAL types will lock in on. The idea that advertising is "speech", or that businesses can put clauses in contracts that totally screw consumers like required arbitration which even the WSJ has reported screws consumers as part of a credit card company plot. We should just ignore Roe so we can actually argue about this stuff that's gonna kill us, bankrupt us, or allow advertisers to claim free speech rights.