Bitter about spending another holiday in red-state land? Here's a little pick-me-up, courtesy of the late Phil Ochs. It pretty much sums up Give Up, with regards to the red states:

Here's to the state of Mississippi,
For underneath her borders, the devil draws no lines,
If you drag her muddy river, nameless bodies you will find.
Whoa the fat trees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes,
The calender is lyin' when it reads the present time.
Whoa here's to the land you've torn out the heart of,
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of!

Here's to the people of Mississippi
Who say the folks up north, they just don't understand
And they tremble in their shadows at the thunder of the Klan
The sweating of their souls can't wash the blood from off their hands
They smile and shrug their shoulders at the murder of a man
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

Here's to the schools of Mississippi
Where they're teaching all the children that they don't have to care
All of rudiments of hatred are present everywhere
And every single classroom is a factory of despair
There's nobody learning such a foreign word as fair
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

Here's to the cops of Mississippi
They're chewing their tobacco as they lock the prison door
Their bellies bounce inside them as they knock you to the floor
No they don't like taking prisoners in their private little war
Behind their broken badges there are murderers and more
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

And, here's to the judges of Mississippi
Who wear the robe of honor as they crawl into the court
They're guarding all the bastions with their phony legal fort
Oh, justice is a stranger when the prisoners report
When the black man stands accused the trial is always short
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

And here's to the government of Mississippi
In the swamp of their bureaucracy they're always bogging down
And criminals are posing as the mayors of the towns
They're hoping that no one sees the sights and hears the sounds
And the speeches of the governor are the ravings of a clown
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

And here's to the laws of Mississippi
Congressmen will gather in a circus of delay
While the Constitution is drowning in an ocean of decay
Unwed mothers should be sterilized, I've even heard them say
Yes, corruption can be classic in the Mississippi way
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

And here's to the churches of Mississippi
Where the cross, once made of silver, now is caked with rust
And the Sunday morning sermons pander to their lust
The fallen face of Jesus is choking in the dust
Heaven only knows in which God they can trust
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

The Justice department has decided to open up an investigation into the NSA spying scandal. No, not of the president and those who helped him break the law, but to determine who the whistleblower was that leaked it.

Now there's some misplaced priorities. kos has informed us that the Democrats new campaign slogan should be "give me liberty or give me death" which I like.

And BBC news is reporting that the UN is concerned that our force-feeding of Gitmo prisoners on hunger strike is tantamount to torture. Not because they're force-feeding them, but because they're doing it badly, leading to bleeding and vomiting. That's a good way to kill someone.

And Bush says that we don't torture? Check out these transcripts of memos that the British government has been trying to surpress. They are dispatches from their ambassador to Uzbekistan complaining that the Uzbeks were torturing people for the U.S., have 7,000 prisoners of conscience and a penchant for boiling people alive. And the information wasn't any good anyway.

Check out letter #3.

Letter #3

CONFIDENTIAL
FM TASHKENT
TO IMMEDIATE FCO

TELNO 63
OF 220939 JULY 04

INFO IMMEDIATE DFID, ISLAMIC POSTS, MOD, OSCE POSTS UKDEL EBRD LONDON, UKMIS GENEVA, UKMIS MEW YORK

SUBJECT: RECEIPT OF INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE

SUMMARY

1. We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.

2. I gather a recent London interdepartmental meeting considered the question and decided to continue to receive the material. This is morally, legally and practically wrong. It exposes as hypocritical our post Abu Ghraib pronouncements and fatally undermines our moral standing. It obviates my efforts to get the Uzbek government to stop torture they are fully aware our intelligence community laps up the results.

3. We should cease all co-operation with the Uzbek Security Services they are beyond the pale. We indeed need to establish an SIS presence here, but not as in a friendly state.

DETAIL

4. In the period December 2002 to March 2003 I raised several times the issue of intelligence material from the Uzbek security services which was obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA. I queried the legality, efficacy and morality of the practice.

5. I was summoned to the UK for a meeting on 8 March 2003. Michael Wood gave his legal opinion that it was not illegal to obtain and to use intelligence acquired by torture. He said the only legal limitation on its use was that it could not be used in legal proceedings, under Article 15 of the UN Convention on Torture.

6. On behalf of the intelligence services, Matthew Kydd said that they found some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror. Linda Duffield said that she had been asked to assure me that my qualms of conscience were respected and understood.

7. Sir Michael Jay's circular of 26 May stated that there was a reporting obligation on us to report torture by allies (and I have been instructed to refer to Uzbekistan as such in the context of the war on terror). You, Sir, have made a number of striking, and I believe heartfelt, condemnations of torture in the last few weeks. I had in the light of this decided to return to this question and to highlight an apparent contradiction in our policy. I had intimated as much to the Head of Eastern Department.

8. I was therefore somewhat surprised to hear that without informing me of the meeting, or since informing me of the result of the meeting, a meeting was convened in the FCO at the level of Heads of Department and above, precisely to consider the question of the receipt of Uzbek intelligence material obtained under torture. As the office knew, I was in London at the time and perfectly able to attend the meeting. I still have only gleaned that it happened.

9. I understand that the meeting decided to continue to obtain the Uzbek torture material. I understand that the principal argument deployed was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true – the material is marked with a euphemism such as "From detainee debriefing." The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured.

10. I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in and organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact

11. The torture record of the Uzbek security services could hardly be more widely known. Plainly there are, at the very least, reasonable grounds for believing the material is obtained under torture. There is helpful guidance at Article 3 of the UN Convention;
"The competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the state concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights." While this article forbids extradition or deportation to Uzbekistan, it is the right test for the present question also.

12. On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer:

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

13. Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.

14. I was taken aback when Matthew Kydd said this stuff was valuable. Sixteen months ago it was difficult to argue with SIS in the area of intelligence assessment. But post Butler we know, not only that they can get it wrong on even the most vital and high profile issues, but that they have a particular yen for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat. That is precisely what the Uzbeks give them. Furthermore MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment.

15. At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family's links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services.

16. I have been considering Michael Wood's legal view, which he kindly gave in writing. I cannot understand why Michael concentrated only on Article 15 of the Convention. This certainly bans the use of material obtained under torture as evidence in proceedings, but it does not state that this is the sole exclusion of the use of such material.

17. The relevant article seems to me Article 4, which talks of complicity in torture. Knowingly to receive its results appears to be at least arguable as complicity. It does not appear that being in a different country to the actual torture would preclude complicity. I talked this over in a hypothetical sense with my old friend Prof Francois Hampson, I believe an acknowledged World authority on the Convention, who said that the complicity argument and the spirit of the Convention would be likely to be winning points. I should be grateful to hear Michael's views on this.

18. It seems to me that there are degrees of complicity and guilt, but being at one or two removes does not make us blameless. There are other factors. Plainly it was a breach of Article 3 of the Convention for the coalition to deport detainees back here from Baghram, but it has been done. That seems plainly complicit.

19. This is a difficult and dangerous part of the World. Dire and increasing poverty and harsh repression are undoubtedly turning young people here towards radical Islam. The Uzbek government are thus creating this threat, and perceived US support for Karimov strengthens anti-Western feeling. SIS ought to establish a presence here, but not as partners of the Uzbek Security Services, whose sheer brutality puts them beyond the pale.

MURRAY

Via Kos.

Knight Ridder news service has this interesting piece about Kurdish militia infiltrating the Iraqi army in preparation for a civil war. And that's not getting ready in case a civil war breaks out, no, they're essentially planning a civil war that they're going to start once we're out of the way.

Maybe we will have to stay there forever. And you know if the Kurds are doing this the others are too (or will now).

Anyone reading any of the blogs this morning probably knows about this Washington Post story on Abramhoff. It is worth the read, definite schadenfreude, but hey, I'll take shadenfreude over weltschmertz.

Ah, German. The language where any two words crammed together is a new word!

Anyway, highlights from the article are that despite being "deeply religious" Abramhoff organized guerilla groups with Oliver North in the 80s and was in bed with the South African government during apartheid.

Shortly thereafter, Abramoff was running Citizens for America, a conservative grass-roots group founded by drugstore magnate Lewis E. Lehrman. Abramoff was in frequent contact with Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, the Reagan White House's Iran-contra mastermind, about grass-roots efforts to lobby Congress for the Nicaraguan contras, according to records in the National Security Archive.

One of Abramoff's most audacious adventures involved Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader who had U.S. support but was later found to have ordered the murders of his movement's representative to the United States and that man's relatives. With Savimbi, Abramoff organized a "convention" of anticommunist guerrillas from Laos, Nicaragua and Afghanistan in a remote part of Angola. Afterward, Lehrman fired Abramoff amid a dispute about the handling of the group's $3 million budget.

Abramoff also worked on behalf of the apartheid South African government, which secretly paid $1.5 million a year to the International Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group that Abramoff operated out of a townhouse in the 1980s, according to sworn testimony to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

At the same time, Abramoff dabbled as a Hollywood producer, shepherding an anticommunist movie, "Red Scorpion," starring Dolph Lundgren, filmed in Namibia, which was then ruled by South Africa. Actors in the film said they saw South African soldiers on the set. When the film was released in 1989, anti-apartheid groups demonstrated at the theaters. The movie ran into financial difficulty during and after production, but Abramoff produced a sequel, "Red Scorpion 2."

Anyone seen Red Scorpion? Doubt it. Think about it, Dolph Lundgren vehicle. Ha! Why would anyone ever hire this guy after he had that genius idea?

This never happens, I agreed with every piece in the Wall Street Journal's editorial page today. Usually I read it with the same attitude I adopt when I go to a zoo. I think, holy crap, they've got a red panda, a zebra, and a capybara! Where do they find all these weird animals?

Anyway today is like bizarro-WSJ day.
We have editorials supporting the death of the Byrd amendment, a somewhat esoteric scheme to send antidumping penalties to industries rather than to public coffers in what every sensible person regarded as a disgusting waste of money. They even chastise the Republicans who continued to support it:

In a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Idaho Reps. Mike Simpson and C.L. "Butch" Otter singled out Micron's Byrd winnings as a reason they would vote against any bill that contained Byrd repeal. Senator Larry Craig wrote to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to defend Byrd. All are Republicans.

Then they tear apart Tom Tancredo for wanting to build a wall sealing off the Mexican border in an editorial subtitled, "Trying to make the U.S. the world's largest gated community." Imagine that! The WSJ using "gated community" as an epithet, when the paper is probably the number one news source for gated communities.

First they mock current attempts to prevent illegal entry:

For the past two decades, border enforcement has been the main focus of immigration policy; by any measure, the results are pitiful. According to the Migration Policy Institute, "The number of unauthorized migrants in the United States has risen to almost 11 million from about four million over the past 20 years, despite a 519% increase in funding and a 221% increase in staffing for border patrol programs."

Then they criticize the bill for being too harsh on illegal immigrants.

Besides mandating the construction of walls and fences along the 2,000-mile Mexican border, the bill radically expands the definition of terms like "alien smuggler," "harboring," "shielding" and "transporting." Hence all manner of people would become criminally liable and subject to fines, property forfeiture and imprisonment -- the landscaper who gives a co-worker a ride to a job; the legal resident who takes in an undocumented relative; a Catholic Charities shelter providing beds and meals to anyone who walks through the door.

Finally they say, you're either with lady liberty or against her.

At some point, the president of the United States will have to get behind the Statue of Liberty or Tom Tancredo's wall.

The last editorial, I shit you not, is a backhanded thank you to the MTA unions for their strike last week. Further they say it was a critical service to the nation, because it raised awareness that states and localities have been ignoring the future costs of their workers' pension programs.

New York's beleaguered MTA at least deserves credit for trying to tackle this problem; ignoring it would in all likelihood have avoided last week's illegal strike. Roger Toussaint, the leader of the transit union, boasted he would not sell out the union's "unborn," workers yet unhired and baptized into his union, by burdening them with higher pension costs. But one way or another, it is unborn citizens who will pay for these public pensions unless the country starts taking their costs seriously.

This has all made me quite dizzy, I've got to go lie down now.

What two things do the following statements have in common?

"I am not a crook"
"Read my lips - no new taxes"
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman"
"We do not torture"

Answer: They're all short, declarative statements given by a president (or soon-to-be president). And they're all 100% dead wrong. As in flat out lies.

So here's the new rule:

If a president declares something, emphatically, in a manner of the above, he (or she) is automatically assumed to be lying until proven otherwise. Even if he (or she) is of your party, you must assume that she (or he) is lying his (or her) to our collective faces.

Discuss. Other examples are welcome, as well as corrolaries or contradictory statements that could help us refine this law.

The Washington Post informs us that in states that want to ban abortion, it has effectively already occurred. In fact, the resemblance to the pre-Roe era is striking. The main obstacle to abortion once again is not legality, but travel, money and convenience. Before abortion was legalized by Roe over 1 million abortions were performed a year in New York alone. Abortion was not really illegal, just inconvenient and available only to the rich or those who lived in places like California and New York. The right-to-lifers have effectively re-created this condition in places like Mississippi, Louisiana, South Dakota, North Dakota etc and the Alan Guttmacher institute has research indicating that about 60% of abortions to women in these states now occurs at out of state clinics.

So, the economic ban on abortion is re-established in the red states, why do we continue to rant and rave about abortion as a national issue? No one, not even NARAL thinks that we can pass federal legislation legalizing abortion, they're happy keeping it as an act of the courts. Now the situation is that a bunch of states, by trial and error, have pieced together obstructive (but ostensibly constitutional) legislation in concert with the pro-life movement's campaign of terror and intimidation (or like this recent attempted bombing of a clinic) and have created an effective ban on abortion in the deep red states.

I say we just give up on this as a national issue and let them ban abortion in the damn flyover states. I'm not saying to give up on abortion rights, only on abortion as a federal issue, we'll keep fighting for abortion rights in the blue states. Maybe then women in the red states will wake up and stop voting for these Republican assholes.

To make sense of this I will now introduce the idea of the abortion paradox. As long as abortion is legal it is a great issue for Republicans, they can rant and rave and make the religious right froth at the mouth and Democrats can say nothing or else be seen as "pro-abortion" aka a baby-killer. If abortion is illegal it is a great issue for Democrats because 60% of people are pro-choice and the so-called gender-gap gets reinstated as women finally realize these Republican jackasses really are going to pass laws to control their bodies. The only way we will ever resolve this issue is if the pre-Roe conditions are met again and instead of a court decision we elect enough Democrats to address the problem legislatively.

Ultimately do we really want liberalism to live or die by this single issue? I tell you I'm sick of this damn issue. If red states really want to wreck the lives of their citizens, maybe we should let democracy run its course and let them do it, maybe liberals should keep their nose out of the red states' business. I for one, if given the choice between presidents like Bush and a haphazard level of abortion access, and presidents like Clinton or Gore(or even Kerry) and access to abortion only in the blue states, I'll take the latter. After all, it's just a formalization of the system already in existence. Liberals will never accept such an idea however, their defining characteristic is an unnatural concern for the lives and well-being of people who they don't even know (especially those who don't live in their state or country). Screw that, lets see some blue state federalism, I'm sick of carrying these jackasses. And if you really feel like arguing with pro-lifers, knock yourselves out. You do realize they're the type of people that worship cinnamon buns don't you?

Robert Steinback has informed us that Osama Bin Laden has in fact won, but he had help.

Every once in a while it's nice to have a short little summary of what exactly has happened as a reminder of all we've lost.

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat -- and expect America to be pleased by this -- I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.

If I had been informed that our nation's leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas -- and call such procedures necessary for the nation's security -- I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.

If someone had predicted the president's staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy -- and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy -- I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.

If you want the total and complete details and an outline of every single dishonest thing this administration has done, then I can strongly recommend Congressman Conyer's recent Judiciary Committee minority report entitled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War." It is by far the most detailed, in-depth catalogue of all that has gone wrong in the last 5 years. Good reading to bring in the new year, or for that matter, for those Give Up Blog contributors dreading their red state holiday retreats. Rather than arguing with family, just print out the report as a stocking-stuffer. Or, read it during grace. Or even slip it under your parent's pillows like the toothfairy.

I'm hoping Ariel Sharon pulls through his heart surgery this week, but admit I'm awed that they suspect an atrial septal defect was the reason for his stroke. I mean, look at the guy (he's the blob on the left) have you ever seen a better candidate for high blood pressure and cholesterol? I'm sure the doctors worked him up, found everything normal, then called in a Dr. House to figure out what the hell caused his stroke, because otherwise they probably wouldn't have found this in routine screening. It must have been a zebra hunt.

Anyway, we need to sequence these guys like Sharon and Churchill, and figure out why they're living so damn long despite being so damn fat.

Go Ariel, and keep up the good Kadima work (if he hadn't decided to make a big change and become a peacenik I would be rooting for the clot).

A New Mexico woman somehow managed to get a restraining order against David Letterman. One might ask what horrible things he was doing to her. In fact, a judge might even ask that. I'll give you some quotes as listed in her court documents.


"Dave responded to my thoughts of love, and, on his show, in code words & obvious indications through jestures and eye expressions, he asked me to come east," she explained. A coded marriage proposal would follow, added Nestler, when Letterman announced on a show promo, "Marry me Oprah." The name Oprah, Nestler reported, "had become my first of many code-names."
...

Letterman subjected her to "bankruptsy, mental cruelty, sleep deprivation" She also requested that Letterman be ordered to cease thinking of her and stop his "mental harrasment & hammering."

Now Dorland's medical dictionary defines 'delusions of reference' as: a delusional conviction that ordinary events, objects, or behaviors of others have an unusual or peculiar meaning specifically for oneself.

It's most frequently seen in schizophrenic patients; in fact, Charlie Manson thought that the Beatles were speaking to him through the White Album. I'd be willing to guess that, if medicated properly, this woman's 'harassment' by Letterman would totally go away.

Daschle has re-emerged, as if from the dead, to blow apart the Bush administration and Justice Department's defense of domestic spying using the NSA.

To those not aware of these developments, here's what has happened in the last few weeks. The Bush administration, in response to the NYT article disclosing that their use of the NSA to spy on Americans making overseas calls claimed that the Congressional authorization for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gave him the power to do this. Subsequent revelations in the post indicated beyond listening in to international communications, the spying also extended to purely domestic communications. The Justice Department came out with a totally bogus "constitutional" justification of the president's new powers which are completely contradicted by legislation such as FISA, and claim that when congress authorized military force they also effectively made Bush a dictator who could then violate any law as he saw fit. Really, that's what this boils down to. They are saying that congress, by authorizing military force also "implied" that Bush could then do whatever he wants, whenever he wants in the name of protecting the nation. Where have we heard this before.

Anyway, the news today is that Tom Daschle has proof that this interpretation, besides being completely absurd to any reasonable patriotic American who believes in the rule of law, is also completely made up. The Bush administration asked for the power that they now claim was implied in the authorization, and congress rejected it. So, they rejected the language that would have given this president the power that he now claims they "implied" by giving him military authorization.

So, now the question is what shall we start calling Bush to reflect his new dictatorial status? If you can read any act of congress as "implying" that you have expansive executive powers, even when they specifically rejected such powers, then you are a dictator, no?

I would appreciate suggestions on his new dictator title. So far I've only come up with the rather tired and hackneyed BushenFuhrer. Please help!

All I can say is, I hope people are ready for our new future as sexual exhibitionists because it appears that even when we think we're in private, you might still be putting on a performance for dirty-minded cops. From the NYT.

A man and woman who shared an intimate moment on a secluded, dark rooftop one August night last year have learned that they were secretly watched, an intrusion made possible by increased police surveillance of protest rallies and other events and also by advanced technology intended to fight terrorists.

That night, police officers tracked bicycle riders moving through the streets of the Lower East Side from a custom-built, $9.8 million helicopter equipped with optical equipment able to display a license plate 1,000 feet away.

With the night vision of the helicopter's camera, and permission to make videotapes, an officer also recorded nearly four minutes of the couple on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse.

"When you watch the tape, it makes you feel kind of ill," said Jeffrey Rosner, 51, one of the two people. "I had no idea they were filming me - who would ever have an idea like that?"
...
"I'm very happy about cameras in public spaces," Mr. Rosner said. "If you're in a public space doing something inappropriate, I'm all for that. But if I'm in my house and you're using multimillion-dollar equipment to film me, not at all."


Can't say I blame the guy. But are we missing the forest for the trees? After all, we're upset they filmed some guy having sex in the privacy of his little rooftop terrace, but only because the cops got distracted from their surveillance of frickin bicyclists. I don't know, does it seem like we've lost a little perspective? Flying around in a 10 million dollar surveillance helicopter used for anti-terrorism to track the position of bicyclists who might ride around Manhattan together without a permit? HAVE WE LOST OUR MINDS?

It's not like we had no warning stuff like this would happen. This is what happens when you give cops toys ostensibly to track terrorists. When there ain't any terrorism happening they use them on protest groups, bicyclists, and music execs getting some rooftop nookie. Pathetic.

Is it just me or does this stuff only ever seem to happen in Florida.

Teen Charged With Murder Of Family Members, Sex With Body

Prosecutors charged a 19-year-old man Wednesday with the murders of his mother and grandfather.

Clifford Anthony Davis, 19, was also charged with one count of abuse of a dead human body, two counts of robbery and one count of grand theft of a firearm, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.

Davis told investigators he killed his 42-year-old mother, Stephanie Davis, then had sex with the body, Bradenton police said.

Hours later, after leaving his mother's half-nude body and going shopping, he came back to the apartment and killed his 77-year-old grandfather, Joel C. Hill, police said.

Man, the Daily Rotten is crazy. I'm thinking about starting a new study, that is to simply count the number of times crazy shit happens in red states versus blue states as listed by the Rotten. It's a fair indicator of what's happening among the insane and uncivilized, and my impression so far is that it might look a little like my map of gonorrhea.

I don't know why I find this so damn funny. Maybe it's just the way I imagine a guy dressed as Santa falling over and the resulting screams of hundreds of school children terrified they won't get their gifts this year.

HUBBARD, Ohio (AP) — A man playing Santa collapsed in front of about 750 elementary schoolchildren at a Christmas assembly.

John Rappach, 60, clutched his chest and fell near the end of the assembly at Roosevelt Elementary in Hubbard on Wednesday. He was in critical condition on Thursday.

School officials ushered in crisis counselors and assured students that Santa would be fine and ready for Christmas Eve, Superintendent Richard Buchenic said.

The children were sent home with letters explaining the situation to their parents, he said.

Via the Rotten.

Science has named it's breakthrough of the year, and it's an oldie but a goodie. It's evolution of course. Amazing how that evil agnostic conspiracy continues to be upheld by all the new findings.

From the issue:

The big breakthrough, of course, was the one Charles Darwin made a century and a half ago. By recognizing how natural selection shapes the diversity of life, he transformed how biologists view the world. But like all pivotal discoveries, Darwin's was a beginning. In the years since the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, thousands of researchers have sketched life's transitions and explored aspects of evolution Darwin never knew.

Today evolution is the foundation of all biology, so basic and all-pervasive that scientists sometimes take its importance for granted. At some level every discovery in biology and medicine rests on it, in much the same way that all terrestrial vertebrates can trace their ancestry back to the first bold fishes to explore land. Each year, researchers worldwide discover enough extraordinary findings tied to evolutionary thinking to fill a book many times as thick as all of Darwin's works put together. This year's volume might start with a proposed rearrangement of the microbes at the base of the tree of life and end with the discovery of 190-million-year-old dinosaur embryos.

...

The genome data confirm our close kinship with chimps: We differ by only about 1% in the nucleotide bases that can be aligned between our two species, and the average protein differs by less than two amino acids. But a surprisingly large chunk of noncoding material is either inserted or deleted in the chimp as compared to the human, bringing the total difference in DNA between our two species to about 4%.
...
2005 was also a standout year for researchers studying the emergence of new species, or speciation. A new species can form when populations of an existing species begin to adapt in different ways and eventually stop interbreeding. It's easy to see how that can happen when populations wind up on opposite sides of oceans or mountain ranges, for example. But sometimes a single, contiguous population splits into two. Evolutionary theory predicts that this splitting begins when some individuals in a population stop mating with others, but empirical evidence has been scanty. This year field biologists recorded compelling examples of that process, some of which featured surprisingly rapid evolution in organisms' shape and behavior.

For example, birds called European blackcaps sharing breeding grounds in southern Germany and Austria are going their own ways--literally and f iguratively. Sightings over the decades have shown that ever more of these warblers migrate to northerly grounds in the winter rather than heading south. Isotopic data revealed that northerly migrants reach the common breeding ground earlier and mate with one another before southerly migrants arrive. This difference in timing may one day drive the two populations to become two species.

...

Other researchers have looked within animals' genomes to analyze adaptation at the genetic level. In various places in the Northern Hemisphere, for example, marine stickleback fish were scattered among landlocked lakes as the last Ice Age ended. Today, their descendants have evolved into dozens of different species, but each has independently lost the armor plates needed for protection from marine predators. Researchers expected that the gene responsible would vary from lake to lake. Instead, they found that each group of stranded sticklebacks had lost its armor by the same mechanism: a rare DNA defect affecting a signaling molecule involved in the development of dermal bones and teeth. That single preexisting variant--rare in the open ocean--allowed the fish to adapt rapidly to a new environment.

Biologists have often focused on coding genes and protein changes, but more evidence of the importance of DNA outside genes came in 2005. A study of two species of fruit flies found that 40% to 70% of noncoding DNA evolves more slowly than the genes themselves. That implies that these regions are so important for the organism that their DNA sequences are maintained by positive selection. These noncoding bases, which include regulatory regions, were static within a species but varied between the two species, suggesting that noncoding regions can be key to speciation.


Now so far everyone says ok, basic science stuff, who cares? Well, people concerned about AIDS or flu pandemics for one.

Such evolutionary breakthroughs are not just ivory-tower exercises; they hold huge promise for improving human well-being. Take the chimpanzee genome. Humans are highly susceptible to AIDS, coronary heart disease, chronic viral hepatitis, and malignant malarial infections; chimps aren't. Studying the differences between our species will help pin down the genetic aspects of many such diseases. As for the HapMap, its aims are explicitly biomedical: to speed the search for genes involved in complex diseases such as diabetes. Researchers have already used it to home in on a gene for agerelated macular degeneration.

And in 2005, researchers stepped up to help defend against one of the world's most urgent biomedical threats: avian influenza. In October, molecular biologists used tissue from a body that had been frozen in the Alaskan permafrost for almost a century to sequence the three unknown genes from the 1918 flu virus--the cause of the epidemic that killed 20 million to 50 million people. Most deadly flu strains emerge when an animal virus combines with an existing human virus. After studying the genetic data, however, virologists concluded that the 1918 virus started out as a pure avian strain. A handful of mutations had enabled it to easily infect human hosts. The possible evolution of such an infectious ability in the bird flu now winging its way around the world is why officials worry about a pandemic today.

A second group reconstructed the complete 1918 virus based on the genome sequence information and studied its behavior. They found that the 1918 strain had lost its dependence on trypsin, an enzyme that viruses typically borrow from their hosts as they infect cells. Instead, the 1918 strain depended on an in-house enzyme. As a result, the reconstructed bug was able to reach exceptionally high concentrations in the lung tissue of mice tested, helping explain its virulence in humans. The finding could point to new ways to prevent similar deadly infections in the future.

Darwin focused on the existence of evolution by natural selection; the mechanisms that drive the process were a complete mystery to him. But today his intellectual descendants include all the biologists--whether they study morphology, behavior, or genetics--whose research is helping reveal how evolution works.

Amid this outpouring of results, 2005 stands out as a banner year for uncovering the intricacies of how evolution actually proceeds. Concrete genome data allowed researchers to start pinning down the molecular modifications that drive evolutionary change in organisms from viruses to primates. Painstaking field observations shed new light on how populations diverge to form new species--the mystery of mysteries that baffled Darwin himself. Ironically, also this year some segments of American society fought to dilute the teaching of even the basic facts of evolution. With all this in mind, Science has decided to put Darwin in the spotlight by saluting several dramatic discoveries, each of which reveals the laws of evolution in action.

Well, apparently that it should be a televised sport no less. How would that work, would there be judges to rate your technique or would it be a matter of decibel levels of screams from your victims?

Anyway, it's like I say, she might not be a Nazi, but it's awfully hard to tell that she isn't. Take the "Coulter or Hitler" quiz . Prove me wrong, post your score.

Via Wonkette:


In a wide-ranging interview, columnist Robert Novak will speak with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on the Friday, Dec. 23, edition of The Situation Room. Their conversation will air in the 4 and 7 p.m. hours of The Situation Room.

The interview marks the final CNN appearance for Novak, who concludes a 25-year career with the network at the end of the month.

Someone finally figured out what kind of holy water or cross or whatever works on a "douchebag of liberty." Good riddance to bad rubbish.

And that means just one thing:

Arguments at the dinner table with your conservative family members.

They're fully stocked with the most up-to-date BS talking points from O'Reilly, Boortz, Limbaugh, and the like. And they think that ID is a valid idea. So how do we argue back without totally alienating them? Is there a good primer that dismantles the stupid talking points of these guys? I know that those points are slickly packaged, so I want something that can work through their skulls.

Well, as suggested by early polling from the Iraqi vote, minority Sunni and secular parties were smacked down by Shiite religious voting blocks.

According the WP, these minority groups are calling the election a sham and a fraud.

And Saleh Mutlak, who headed an independent Sunni slate, said: "I don't think there is any practical point for us for being in this National Assembly if things stay like this.

"This election is completely false. It insults democracy everywhere. Everything was based on fraud, cheating, frightening people and using religion to frighten the people," he said. "It is terrorism more than democracy."

Maybe I'm wrong though, this sounds like one of our elections.

Anyway, the little boost Bush got from this little election is surely to come around and bite him in the ass. We've created another Iran, and the secular politicians in Iraq know it.

Senator Boxer wants to know if Bush admitted to an impeachable offence "Mr. Dean, who was President Nixon's counsel at the time of Watergate, said that President Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense." Today, Mr. Dean confirmed his statement." Mr Dean should know a thing or two about these things.

Boingboing has a story this morning from Scotsman.com about Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's attempts to cross humans and apes to make some kind of half man-half ape hybrid superwarrior.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.


According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."


I don't know about invincible, but the 'quality of food' requirement could have been satisfied much more cheaply by the average grad student.

(Or, as a particularly snarky aside, by the average Russian of the time)

CNN has reported on this critical new poll indicating Merry Christmas is the preferred holiday greeting of 69% of Americans. Note, that's roughly the percentage of Christians in the country (80%).

I however, have learned a new holiday greeting that I'm going to substitute for my old standby of Merry X-mas. From now on make sure to say, "Happy Celebration of the nativity of the Lord according to the flesh."

Ha! It's hard to remember, but I've been practicing. Go Jebus!

The NYT has a good editorial on why Bush's justifications for spying without warrants are total BS. The truth FISA gives him this power with minimal oversight already, even the ability to get warrants retroactively. So what possible excuse does he have for bypassing existing guidelines which were already incredibly lenient other than a warped belief that he is the ultimate authority who must answer to no one.

The 1978 law that regulates spying on Americans (remember Richard Nixon's enemies lists?) does require a warrant to conduct that sort of surveillance. It also created a special court that is capable of responding within hours to warrant requests. If that is not fast enough, the attorney general may authorize wiretaps and then seek a warrant within 72 hours.

Mr. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales offered a whole bag of logical pretzels yesterday to justify flouting this law. Most bizarre was the assertion that Congress authorized the surveillance of American citizens when it approved the use of "all necessary and appropriate force" by the United States military to punish those responsible for the 9/11 attacks or who aided or harbored the terrorists. This came as a surprise to lawmakers, who thought they were voting for the invasion of Afghanistan and the capture of Osama bin Laden.

ScienceNow reports just in time for the Dover decision that over 1800 genes in humans appear to have been recently modified by natural selection.

Now a team of scientists at the University of California, Irvine, has used a new computational approach--the "linkage disequilibrium decay" test--to search for signs of selection over the entire human genome. As a rule, the greater the linkage disequilibrium associated with a gene, the more likely that the gene has been under recent selection. Harnessing data from two existing databases of human diversity, the team found some 1800 genes that appeared to have been under selection during the last 10,000 to 50,000 years. According to team leader and genome researcher Robert Moyzis, this is between 10 and 100 times greater than the number found in previous studies (Science, 8 July, p. 234).

Somehow I don't think the Discovery Institute claims in the wake of the Dover decision that intelligent design science will blow evolution out of the water are of much concern. There still are no peer-reviewed research articles supporting ID after 15 years, despite what the Discovery Institute claims. All the papers on their list of so-called publications are either in non-peer reviewed journals, or are abstracts they've snuck into conferences as we've discussed for the past day or so. Overall, no real papers, like all us real scientists have to write and get reviewed.

From Salon:

The Dover Area School Board violated the Constitution when it ordered that its biology curriculum must include "intelligent design," the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled Tuesday.

The school board policy, adopted in October 2004, was believed to have been the first of its kind in the nation.

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy," Jones wrote. "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

Ouch. He called them the liars that they are.

Tom Giovanetti, of the Institute for Policy Innovation comments on my earlier post about policy wonks for sale:

The article in BusinessWeek that started this whole thing, upon which all subsequent articles and Paul Krugman's commentary are based, omitted important statements and resulted in a complete misrepresentation. All subsequent who have written on this topic are guilty of passing on misrepresentation without bothering to fact-check. You can view IPI's and Ferrara's statements at www.ipi.org

I stand corrected. Ferrara never wrote an article for Abramoff under the IPI masthead. He previously was supported by Abramoff.

Looks like they managed to get an abstract in this summer as well

Here's the abstract from MCB:


Engineering Cell Biology: Centrioles as Tiny Turbines
Jonathan Wells; Discovery Institute, Seattle, WA
Centrioles consist of nine microtubule triplets arranged like the blades of
tiny turbines. Except for their role in nucleating cilia and flagella, however,
their precise function remains unknown. Because all centrioles appear to
be equally complex, and there are no plausible evolutionary intermediates
with which to reconstruct phylogenies, centrioles have attracted little interest
from a Darwinian perspective. This and the genetic reductionism encouraged
by neo-Darwinian theory have led to an emphasis on identifying the
molecular constituents of centrioles rather than formulating testable theories
that relate function to structure. From an intelligent design perspective, by
contrast, centrioles are not fortuitous by-products of unguided evolution
but irreducibly complex wholes that are engineered to be microscopic
machines. In the theory presented here, which was developed from that
perspective, a centriole is a tiny turbine driven by dynein molecules that
turn a helical pump in its lumen. Orthogonally oriented centriolar turbines in
dividing animal cells would generate oscillations in spindle microtubules that
resemble the motion produced by a laboratory vortexer. The result would
be a microtubule-mediated polar ejection force that would tend to move
chromosomes away from spindle poles [Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum
98 (2005): 71-96]. The rise in intracellular calcium that accompanies the
onset of anaphase could regulate the polar ejection force by shutting down
the centriolar turbines, but defective regulation could result in an excessive
force leading to chromosomal instability and possibly to cancer.

The American Society for Cell Biology 2005 Summer Meeting on Engineering Cell Biology—The Cell in Context, July 15–18, 2005


This is a major failure of peer-review. There are all sorts of claims in this abstract that have absolutely no business being published. Where are the citations for these things he says? How much you want to bet that now that he's said them, he'll cite back to this reference to justify it?

For several years now, proponents of ID have been trying to get themselves taken seriously in the scientific community. It's a tough sell, since, according to some studies, upwards of 90% of scientists are agnostics or atheists. Scientists, as a whole, require data to be convinced.

The road to scientific acceptance runs roughly like this:
Step 1: Come up with an idea, preferably one that can be tested experimentally and that you can make some predictions as to the outcome.

Step 2: Test your idea.

Step 3: Take the results from Step 2, and show other scientists how they agree with your hypothesis from Step 1.

Step 4: Repeat, incorporating those new data into a new hypothesis.

The problem is, ID seems to be stuck at Step 1. They're like the Underpants Gnomes from "South Park," believing that the mere collection of ideas will win them profit in the end. It just doesn't work like that with scientists. And, lacking any testable hypotheses or actual data, they revert to metaphors and keep cramming a 'designer' into the nooks and crannies of the last few unknowns out there.

...

But now it appears that ID has taken a new tack. Lacking data, and therefore reputable publication, they seem to be moving more to a public relations campaign that gives a veneer of reputability while remaining as empty as their entire hypothesis.

This last week, some of us here at Give Up attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology. It's a fairly large conference, with approximately 10,000 attendees and around 2,500-3,000 poster presentations of peoples' research. All posters contain an abstract (a brief description of your hypotheses and your findings), and the abstracts are published in the Society's journal, which has an official-sounding name, is well-cited, and is peer-reviewed.

We happened to notice that one poster there was from Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute. If you're not familiar with Dr. Wells's past, check here. Briefly, he's a Moonie who got a PhD in order to "devote [his] life to destroying Darwinism." (his words). Why then, would he go into a lion's den of non-believers to present his ID theory?

The easy answer is that he didn't. The poster he presented was entirely fluff - a virtually untestable hypothesis and no data. It was titled in such a way to sound respectable but ultimately unnoticeable. In fact, the only people I ever saw standing in front of it were myself and the people in our circle that know who Dr. Wells is. He put the poster up overnight, stood in front of it for an hour and a half, and then left. Only one person that I know of actually confronted him, and it was fairly brief. An image of the poster is below. For a hi res image of the poster, abstract, or conclusion, click the links.



So we now have an outspoken Creationist, sponsored by the Discovery Institute, presenting a data-free poster at a large scientific conference. All posters from this conference are published as a supplement in what would normally be a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It's safe to say that the malarkey he proposes would be ripped apart during a real peer-review. But to the general public, there's little distinction between a supplement and the real deal. So be wary if you start seeing that the Discovery Institute has published its findings in Molecular Biology of the Cell, and that they've presented at ASCB. It's a load of crap designed to look like they're being accepted by the scientific community when in fact they exploited a loophole and flew under the radar.

I'll publish the abstract in the comments section if you want to read further. It sounds quite official, until you read it carefully and see that it sounds like one of those 'context free grammars' that are randomly generated to get into scientific conferences.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the early results of the Iraqi election. Guess what, secular parties are losing at about a 6:1 ratio. Oh well, nice try Mr. Bush.

The results show that the votes were divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. The commission didn't say how many people voted overall or provide further details.

In Baghdad province, results from 89% of the ballot boxes showed the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance ahead with 58% of the vote in Iraq's biggest electoral district. The electoral commission said the alliance received 1,403,901 votes, followed by the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance Front with 451,782 votes, and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National List ticket with 327,174 votes.

Baghdad is Iraq's biggest electoral district with 2,161 candidates running for 59 of parliament's 275 seats. The province is mixed but has a large Shiite population, with many of them living in the capital's sprawling Sadr City.

Results from southern Basra province, also mixed but predominantly Shiite, saw the clergy-backed alliance significantly ahead, winning 612,206 votes with 98% of ballot boxes counted. Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite, was in second place with 87,134 votes, while the accordance party trailed with 36,997.

Wow, Allawi, the secular candidate got about one sixth as many votes as the Shiite parties did in Basra. In Baghdad, which I'm guessing represents an Iraqi urbanite population, the secular candidates got about one fifth the number of votes as the religious Sunni and Shiite parties. Ouch. Let us welcome a new Iran to the world community of nations.

On Thursday we blogged about what happens to bad scientists.

Slate has an in depth piece on exactly happens to scientists who falsify. Now that's making people take responsibility. Even suspicion of falsification can be deadly for a scientist. If only there were a similar level of ethics and retribution in other walks of life, like say, presidencies.

Bush just said, "Democracies don't war, democracies are peaceful countries."

Ha!

Krugman writes in his Op-Ed Tankers on the Take that, as we have long suspected, right-wing policy tanks are implicitly and explicitly on the take. It seems so obvious, but he puts things in such clear terms.

For the most part, people employed by right-wing think tanks don't have to be specifically paid to support certain positions, because they understand that supporting those positions comes with the job. Senior fellows at Cato don't decide, after reconsidering the issue, that Social Security shouldn't be privatized. Policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation don't take another look at the data and realize that farmers and small-business owners have nothing to gain from estate tax repeal.

But it turns out that implicit deals between think tanks and the interests that finance them are sometimes, perhaps often, supplemented with explicit payments for punditry. In return for Abramoff checks, Mr. Bandow and Mr. Ferrara wrote op-ed articles about such unlikely subjects as the entrepreneurial spirit of the Mississippi Choctaws and the free-market glories of the Northern Mariana Islands.

And Krugman, wisely I think, predicts there will be a similar attack on liberal think-tanks.

First, if the latest pay-for-punditry story starts to get traction, the usual suspects will claim that liberal think tanks and opinion writers are also on the take. (I'm getting my raincoat ready for the slime attack on my own ethics I'm sure this column will provoke.) Reporters and editors will be tempted to give equal time to these accusations, however weak the evidence, in an effort to appear "balanced." They should resist the temptation. If this is overwhelmingly a story about Republican lobbyists and conservative think tanks, as I believe it is - there isn't any Democratic equivalent of Jack Abramoff - that's what the public deserves to be told.

He makes a very good point though when he says that it's been obvious for a long time that the conservative think-tanks are blatant hacks that write whatever their underwriters want. I agree, and I also think he's correct when he says this is likely to be a Republican/right-wing problem. Liberals don't believe what they believe dogmatically (except for dirty hippies), they base policy decisions on empirical data. Think about it. Liberals don't support sex-ed because they think teenagers should be getting laid more (although I bet it would stop some young Republicans in their tracks), they do it because the science shows, again and again, that it is more effective in preventing teen pregnancy and STDs than the abstinence education that has been the standby for millenia. Liberals don't support the right of women to obtain abortion because they're psychotic baby-killers, they do it because they know the bans are ineffective and only lead to more human misery. Krugman's got a good point, this is a story that could have some legs on exposing the pay-for-play side of Republican think tanks and is unlikely to snap back and hit Democratic/liberal think tanks.

Economists rejoiced today as a new form of services have been monetized: policy papers written by wonks at Cato and the Institute for Policy InnovationSee corrected post. The New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - A senior scholar at the Cato Institute, the respected libertarian research organization, has resigned after revelations that he took payments from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing columns favorable to his clients.

The scholar, Doug Bandow, who wrote a column for the Copley News Service in addition to serving as a Cato fellow, acknowledged to executives at the organization that he had taken money from Mr. Abramoff after he was confronted about the payments by a reporter from BusinessWeek Online.

[...]

The revelation caps a year of disclosures about partisan payments to seemingly independent writers, including Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist and television host, who received payments from the federal Education Department at a time when he was promoting the Bush administration's education policies in his columns. The administration has been under mounting pressure to become more transparent in its communications after accounts that it paid for and printed articles in Iraqi periodicals as part of its overseas propaganda effort.

[...]

A second scholar, Peter Ferrara, of the Institute for Policy Innovation, acknowledged in the same BusinessWeek Online piece that he had also taken money from Mr. Abramoff in exchange for writing certain opinion articles. But Mr. Ferrara did not apologize for doing so. "I do that all the time," Mr. Ferrara was quoted as saying. He did not reply to an e-mail message seeking comment on Friday.

CNN is reporting on the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy survey and gives us the headline that "1 in 20 U.S. adults not literate in English".

Now I hate the NAAL study because like all national educational surveys it is totally useless. By averaging everyone in the country into an aggregate set, they create a data pool of no value whatsoever. After all, education is a local issue. Who gives a damn about the national literacy rate.

Anyway, I only know of one study of state-by-state evaluation of literacy, and it's from a researcher who had access to the NAAL raw data. The data is old (it's from 1997) and illiteracy means inability to read English, so it overrepresents states with larger hispanic populations since they may be perfectly literate, just not in English. I took his data and made one of my maps. This is adult literacy, the bottom 13 states. The states with the lowest levels of adult literacy are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and Arkansas, take a look.



Now if the NAAL did this, the information might be of actual interest to the public, because we could actually see where the problem is, rather than just saying the literacy rate in the entire country is low. It's not low, except in the Southern red states, big surprise. (California and Texas are probably don't belong due to their high immigrant populations).

Source, Stephen Reder, Synthetic Estimates of Literacy Proficiency for Small Census Areas, Prepared for the Division of Adult Education and Literacy Office of Vocational and Adult Education, U.S. Department of Education, revised for internet publication 1997.

Count Novakula says Bush knows who the leaker is! Interesting, you'd think Novakula, given his history of political hackdom, woulnd't say something so damaging to the president. There must be another motive...

And the Daily Show played the best quote ever from Bush. How does he do it, I'll never know, but with Laura Bush standing behind him he says, "I couldn't imagine someone like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hannukah." Is this a new quote? My god, that man cracks my ass up.

In bad scientist news, the Korean researcher who wrote the paper demonstrating effective therapeutic cloning in humans for the first time appears to have falsified. At first it sounded like an error with Sciencemag itself, accidentally copying pictures of ES cell colonies rather than having pictures of the individual lines cloned. Now it sounds like he stole the lines from another researcher, then destroyed them, claiming they had become infected with a virus.

Well, he'll never be allowed to publish again. That's the nice thing about science. Gigantic screw-ups do occur. However, rather than just saying, "I take full responsibility" and having nothing happen to you, you are blacklisted for your lies for life. This researcher, Hwang, will never be allowed to publish again. If only, if only, politics were anything like science. Taking responsibility might actually mean something.

Sounds like McCain has managed to shame Bush into supporting his anti-torture bill. And in other GiveUp news, it sounds like the greatest generation is starting to catch on. According to the WSJ article "Republicans Risk Losing Key Voting Bloc, Senior Citizens' Unhappiness With Issues
Has Implications for Midterm Elections":

The new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll makes clear that Ms. Renfro has plenty of company. In a period of broad-ranging public discontent, that among senior citizens stands out as most worrisome for Republicans aiming to keep control of the House and Senate in the fall.
...
The results can be seen in Americans' attitudes toward Congress 11 months before Election Day 2006. By a 65%-19% margin, Americans age 65 and above disapprove of the performance of Congress; those under 65 are also negative but less lopsidedly, 58%-27%. Moreover, senior citizens say by 47%-37% that they want Democrats rather than Republicans to win control of Capitol Hill. Those under 65 prefer a Democratic victory by a narrower 45%-39% margin.

That disparity, like some other political differences between older and younger Americans, is relatively slight. But it has big implications for the 2006 campaign for two reasons.

One is that older voters, having given Mr. Bush slightly greater support than younger voters in his narrow 2004 re-election victory, have now become the most critical of his job performance. In the Journal/NBC poll, for instance, Americans under 65 disapprove of Mr. Bush's job performance by a margin of 16 percentage points, while those 65 and above disapprove by a margin of 20 percentage points.

The second is that older voters play an outsize role in midterm contests, because they traditionally turn out at higher rates while many young voters tune out campaigns not featuring a presidential contest. Voters older than 60 made up 24% of those voting in 2004, but a larger 28% in the 1998 midterm contest, the last such campaign for which exit-poll data are available.

They may be old, but they can still smell the bullshit.

Well this embarrassing story taints an otherwise good news day. Apparently Zarqawi was caught and subsequently released because Iraqi security forces didn't recognize him. Oh well, at least they're getting close. And how far away could he get? Hmm. Probably pretty far. Well shit.

Anyway, some good news today including good Sunni turnout in the Iraqi elections. I'm holding off hope until we see a secular majority or at least substantial minority elected. It would be unfortunate after all this death to only end up with another Iran.

And speaking of Iran, has anyone been paying attention to this Ahmadinijad jackass? As Jon Stewart has pointed out many times, it looks like our invasion might have been one letter off. It sounds like this guy has the potential to be, dare I mention the name, another Hitler. Think about it, ultra-right wing, anti-semetic, muslim fundie, making fiery speeches demanding Israel be wiped off the map and denying the holocaust while attempting to build a nuclear-weapons program. If we were to invade Iran because of this guy, I would not be surprised, especially if he isn't tossed out any time soon. All he needs is a Reichstag fire, some emergency powers, and an invasion into Iraq or Afghanistan and it could be a perfect shitstorm. Enough of foreign news though, it has little to do with giving up.

Richard Cohen writes a review of Syriana this week that indicates the movie fails as a political message because it suggests that greed and oil might be motivators of politics. He cites "The Assassin's Gate" to explain the real reasons the neocon's took us to war:


To read George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate" is to be reminded that the Iraq war is not the product of oil avarice, or CIA evil, but of a surfeit of altruism, a naive compulsion to do good. That entire collection of neo- and retro-conservatives -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and particularly Paul Wolfowitz -- made war not for oil or for empire but to end the horror of Saddam Hussein and, yes, reorder the Middle East.

Then he says that liberals are naive in explaining the causes for war and proof that this war was not for oil or enrichment of Halliburton is the fact that Bush got elected again:

The left's criticism of the war from the very start was too often a porridge of inanities about oil or empire or Halliburton -- or isolationism by another name. It was childish and ultimately ineffective. The war came and Bush was reelected. How's that for a clean whiff?

Did he forget the endless stories of corruption by the evil wing of Halliburton, Kellogg Brown and Root? I guess all those no-bid contracts, fraud and waste of taxpayer money was just a coincidence? And the evil dictator we chose to conquer just happened to be sitting on oil reserves? And the proof liberals are wrong about the motives of the morons behind this war is the fact that yet another election based on abortion and gays went to Republicans?

I guess all that torture we've been hearing about is just another sign of the administration's naive good intentions. Hmmm. Maybe he should reconsider the hypothesis that they really are just mad with power. Maybe Kos is right (check out Cohen's tag to see what other's at Kos think of him). Cohen is nuts.

While some of us were no doubt saddened by the decrease in the number of indictments against Delay last week, lovers of schadenfreude everywhere will rejoice in the news that Delay is now linked to the lobbyists that brought down the Duke.

If he gets off without any convictions from connections to this increasingly damning set of lobbyists we will have to figure out how to incorporate "slick" into Tom Delay's name. Slick Tom? Tom "Teflon" Delay? Tom "the Untouchable" Delay?

Maybe we should incorporate a greasy feel to his new nickname. Tom "Vaseline" Delay? Tom "Crisco" Delay? The Pomade Hammer?

However, Michael Kinsley has a wonderful law school logic-based response to those like Krauthammer who use the absurd ticking time bomb scenario to justify torture.

I really like it. It includes mockery of people who think that these impossible circumstances will ever arise:

Or what if an international terrorist planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, set to go off in an hour and kill a million people. You've got him in custody, but he won't say where the bomb is. Is it moral to torture him until he gives up the information?

Questions like these have been pondered and disputed since the invention of the college dorm, but rarely, until the past couple of weeks, unstoned.
...
Sure, if we could know the present and predict the future with certainty, we could torture only people who deserve it. Not just that: We could go door-to-door killing people before they kill others. We could lock up innocent people who would otherwise be involved in fatal traffic accidents.

He then moves on to a wonderful law school argument against salami slicing:

In law school, they call this second point, "salami-slicing." You start with a seemingly solid principle, then start slicing: If you would torture to save a million lives, would you do it for half a million? A thousand? Two dozen? What if there's only a two-out-of-three chance that person you're torturing has the crucial information? A 50-50 chance? One chance in 10? At what point does your moral calculus change, and why? Slice the salami too far, and the formerly solid principle disappears.

Finally, he comes to the conclusion anyone reasonable versed in the law should come up with, that is, torture is always bad and should never be tolerated, but if an episode of "24" is magically brought to life by your fairy godmother, you probably wouldn't be punished for saving a million lives, but that's no reason to lose the general rule. In other words, torture in that case is a little closer to civil disobedience. If this impossible circumstance were to actually emerge due to some oddball alignment of the planets anyone worth his salt wouldn't worry about the legal consequences of their actions, and would simply act to save the million lives. While illegal, it's worth whatever punishment you receive.

There is yet another law-school bromide: "Hard cases make bad law." It means that divining a general policy from statistical oddballs is a mistake. Better to have a policy that works generally and just live with a troublesome result in the oddball case.

I love this essay, he hits all the salient points on the head. An instant classic.

If you're reading this post, it's assumed that you're one of the minority of Americans who knows that there's no credible link between Iraq and al Qaeda. And now we've found the source of those data:

The Times today tells that a prisoner was captured by the US in 2002 and turned over to Egypt for questioning.


"While he made some statements about Iraq and Al Qaeda when in American custody, the officials said, it was not until after he was handed over to Egypt that he made the most specific assertions, which were later used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

...

He withdrew his claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda in January 2004

...

[The prisoner] later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials
...

The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons.


So now we have the first reports of a specific case where torturing a detainee was a really really bad thing to do. I wonder if this is just the tip of the iceberg?

Only in Texas...

A guy wins $25,000 in the lottery, loses the ticket, then gets the ticket returned to him. Quite a story. But I can't help but shake my head at the meaning he ascribes to the whole thing:

"I think God was telling me ... that I need to be dependent on Him and not on lotteries and jobs and anything else."

Jobs? Jobs?!? I can understand not 'playing' the lottery anymore after this. The guy had a lucky break, and doubly so since someone returned the winning ticket to him. But to take all of your eggs out of the 'jobs' basket and put them in the 'God' basket seems like poor planning to me.

Oh, and the entire article is here.

It's funny that this article on CNN emphasizes how the antropology professor at U. Kansas who had the audacity to refer to fundamentalists as "fundies" resigned from the chairmanship of his department, but glosses over the fact that he was beaten up by fundies.

From the bottom of the article notice:

On Monday, Mirecki was treated at a Lawrence hospital for head injuries after he said he was beaten by two men on a country road. He said the men referred to the creationism course. Law enforcement officials were investigating.

Hmmm, maybe he's onto something. But the real question I have is instead of titling the article "Anti-creationism prof quits department chair" why isn't it titled "Pro-evolution prof beaten up by creationists, forced to resign department chair."?

I love that headline from this CNN article. Apparently her ideas cause some revulsion among college students at U. Conn. Who can blame them, her beliefs are repugnant. In fact, if you were to compare her statements on liberals to Hitler's statements on Jews (and replace the word Jew with liberal to make it harder), I bet you couldn't tell the difference. I'm not saying Anne Coulter is a Nazi or a Neo-Nazi or whatever at all. I'm just saying, it's really hard to tell that she isn't a Nazi. Let's just settle for calling her a fascist and avoid a violation of Godwin's law.

I've replaced some of Hitler's pro-Aryan and anti-Semitic language with the words, "America", "Democrat", "liberal", and "the liberal media" to make the Coulter quotes a little more difficult to spot, answers to the quiz will be posted in the comments.
Now see if you can tell Coulter or Hitler! The quiz in which a lower score probably means you're a better person...

1. Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason...Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy.
   
2. We must study this vile liberal technique of emptying garbage pails full of the vilest slanders and defamations from hundreds and hundreds of sources at once, suddenly and as if by magic, on the clean garments of honorable men, if we are fully to appreciate the entire menace represented by these scoundrels of the press.
   
3. Taking these consequences into account, it is no accident that it is always primarily the liberal who tries and succeeds in planting such mortally dangerous modes of thought in our people.
   
4. Liberals are always wrapping their comically irrelevant charges in a haze of lies...
   
5. Hence it is that at the present time the liberal is the great agitator for the complete destruction of America. Whenever we read of attacks against America taking place in any part of the world the liberal is always the instigator.
   
6. It was a crushing defeat for the liberals, not because liberals were necessarily Communists, though many were, but because they had been morally blind to Communism...Liberal elites defended traitors. In response to the Soviet threat, the Democrats consistently counseled defeat, supplication, and retreat.
   
7. These scum manufacture more than three quarters of the so-called 'public opinion,'...To give an accurate description of this process and depict it in all its falsehood and improbability, one would have to write volumes.
   
8. The immediate consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was a wholesale abandonment of morals. Laws against divorce were loosened, promiscuity was encouraged, and marriage was demeaned as a "bourgeois institution." Providing a battle cry for the sexual anarchists, Vladimir Lenin had famously said that the act of sex should "be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water." American liberals have used their hegemonic control of...newspapers to create a charming world in which women apparently cannot bear to keep their shirts on.
   
9. As long as millions of the bourgeoisie still piously worship their liberal democratic press every morning, it very ill becomes these gentlemen to make jokes about the stupidity of the 'comrade' who, in the last analysis, only swallows down the same garbage, though in a different form. In both cases the manufacturer is one and the same liberal.
   
10. The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the possibilities in the use of falsehood and slander have always been the liberals...
    
11. The truth is another hateful "bourgeois institution."...liberals always seem to be enthusiastically defending liars. Lying is their most cherished human activity.
    
12. Here the liberal's procedure is as follows: He approaches the worker, simulates pity with his fate, or even indignation at his lot of misery and poverty, thus gaining his confidence...With infinite shrewdness he fans the need for social justice, somehow slumbering in every American man, into hatred against those who have been better favored by fortune...
    
13. Liberals always get a lot of credit for suffering, while never actually being made to suffer.
    
14. It is this press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.
    

These quotes were gleaned from her book Treason, and a couple of her opinion pieces, and the Hitler quotes are from Mein Kampf of course. And I shouldn't leave you without a couple of Coulter classics.

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." Anne Coulter, New York Observer interview, 8/20/2002

"Of course I regret it. I should have added, 'after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.'" Anne Coulter, Interview with John Hawkins, www.rightwingnews.com, 6/26/03.

Yale just fired an anthropology professor and self-proclaimed anarchist. That must have made faculty meetings interesting. But down at the bottom of the article it mentions that he carries an IWW card. I thought the IWW was disbanded after its entire leadership was killed or deported in the 30s.

The media will not save us, unless you count the Daily Show. They are the only ones left with any balls to speak truth to power, and they're on the comedy network. Sad.

The question is when faced with a story like this one, which describes the plight of some poor German guy picked up in Macedonia and then shipped to Afghanistan and tortured by the CIA.

Now I suppose we should be thankful for their reporting of something that's been in the foreign press for weeks, but the real question is, where are their balls when it comes to standing up to Bush? I really wonder why they don't just refuse to ask him any question other than why he continues to lie and lie and lie about how we don't torture, when all these credible witnesses are being produced that say things like, "on my way to Canada the CIA abducted me and tortured me in Syria," or "on my way to Greece the CIA abducted me and tortured me in Afghanistan." The press should not ask any other question of this administration except, "Why do you continue to lie to our faces about torture, when we have proven that it occurs, and you are responsible for it?"

Instead the press asks people about the stupid-ass 24 scenario in which you know some "radiologic device" is right about to kill all sorts of Americans, is it then ok to torture someone that you know has information on the device? Well, yes, it is, but that will never happen, so torture is not ok (all that question is the venting of a subconscious revenge fantasy all Americans have harbored since 9-11 in a form that will never occur). Instead what you end up doing isn't saving lives but detaining and torturing poor-schmuck German and Canadian tourists. Pathetic.

Advertising Age reports that our TV news is for sale:

Want a chatty local talk show host to dish about your product? More and more local stations are offering it up -- at $2,500 a pop.

Denver's KUSA was the first Gannett-owned station to introduce the advertainment format for its "Colorado & Co." morning show.
The trend is cropping up across a half-dozen Gannett stations in markets such as Atlanta, Denver, Cleveland, Phoenix, Sacramento and, most recently, Minneapolis. The midmorning shows, which replace local news, talk programs or syndicated fare, are a way for stations -- squeezed by network compensation, the costly and unpredictable nature of syndication and a soft local TV ad market -- to underwrite local programming while milking a little more moolah from their daytime schedule.

[...]

The shows have titles such as "Showcase Minnesota" and make no bones about the five- to eight-minute segments being sponsored. The shows are the property of the sales and marketing department rather than the newsroom and, at the end of each segment and again at the end of the show, a host mentions the segment was paid for by the advertiser.

But what if a viewer misses the last five minutes of the segment and turns off the show early?

Influence over news content

Al Tompkins, broadcast and online group leader at the Poynter Institute, recalls a pair of studies conducted by The News Directors Foundation in 1998 and one in 2001, in which eight out of 10 viewers polled said they believe advertisers have an undue influence over news content.

"Anything we do that helps to confirm that in their mind is detrimental to journalism," he said. "I understand they’re not calling this journalism, but it looks and smells a lot like journalism."

The trend is neither new nor isolated to Gannett. Such tactics have been tried, often in small markets, only to be overturned in favor of a 30-minute paid program that has no overhead for the station. And national syndication is no stranger to product placement, although the marketers are often woven more seamlessly into storylines -- think: Oprah's Pontiac giveaway or American Express' sponsorship of Ellen’s New York tour.

The viewer jury appears to be out. Ratings for such shows are tepid, with shares in the mid-single-digit range. (By contrast, a syndicated show is generally considered successful if it approaches double-digit shares.)

So, I'm at a loss. Rev. Dr, why should we not care about this development? Help me give up on this one.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at how accurate they were.

If you just happen to start drinking heavily, pork on an additional couple hundred pounds, or develop a disorder that requires frequent blood transfusions, you'll live longer than your alcoholic, obese, or hemochromatidic friends who don't have that daily cup of go juice! Read it here.

It's been over 4 years now and we still don't have our shit together on homeland security. I wonder why? Oh yeah, incompetence. Anyway, the report card does have this snippet of interest on one of our failing grades:

Allocate homeland security funds based on risk -- F

Congress has still not changed the underlying statutory authority for homeland security grants, or benchmarks to insure that funds are used wisely. As a result, homeland security funds continue to be distributed without regard for risk, vulnerability, or the consequences of an attack, diluting the national security benefits of this important program.

This is true, if you look at how homeland security funding is distributed it is very porky:



Why do states Wyoming get homeland security money at all? The only states that should get the cash should be states with unsecured borders and major cities. No one is going to bomb Jackson Hole. Trust me, I've been there, no one would notice.

Source: Homeland Security Department 2005 estimated total allocations to the individual states divided by the U.S. Census Bureau's 2004 state population estimates.

Well good news on the Delay front, the judge is keeping the case going though dropping the conspiracy charge. Check it.

AUSTIN, Texas -- A judge dismissed the conspiracy charges Monday against Rep. Tom DeLay but refused to throw out the money-laundering charges, dashing his hopes for now of reclaiming his post as House majority leader.

Mr. DeLay and two Republican fundraisers are accused of illegally funneling $190,000 in corporate donations to GOP candidates for the Texas Legislature. The direct use of corporate money for political purposes is illegal in Texas.


And Chris Hitchens has finally found something so atrocious he can't stand by it in this war. Ready for it? He is upset that the U.S. is lying to the Iraqis. It was ok, I suppose, when they were only lying to their own citizens about this war, but now that they are planting bullshit in the Iraqi media rather than feeding it to Judy Miller, now that's a crime. C'mon Hitch, we see you're trying to come back around but you can do better than this.

Update:
Kos has some unbelievable good news in the form of polling data from Delay's Tx-22 district. He's in trouble on more than one front.

Well, the Bush administration has overrun even the non-partisan aspects of the federal government. Today, more signs the EPA has been corrupted. And an update on Congress's response to the news that Justice lawyers were overruled by politically-appointed superiors on Texas redistricting.

This combined with recent news stories about how Justice doesn't pursue civil rights cases anymore, the FDA politicizing its decision on plan B and the failure of FEMA etc., seems to support my theory that this administration doesn't starve the beast as it has been accused (how could it, this is the largest government ever). Instead, this administration is slowly poisoning the beast by feeding it tons of antifreeze-laced ground beef. It's made critical federal agencies either bloated and ineffective like homeland security, or it has frozen hiring like at justice or has just appointed political hacks like those at NIH, Justice, FEMA, HUD, DOEd, and Treasury. The federal government might finally be ready for Grover Norquist to drown it in the bathtub like he's always wanted, but because it's become too fat and retarded, not too small. It's an alternative strategy to let the libertarian freaks can take over, purposeful sabotage of government to give it a bad name.

Don't expect the federal government to save you anymore my liberal friends, it has been overrun by partisans and incompetence. You must now turn to the blue state governments to save you (and they will).

Here's one for the unintentionally funny file. It turns out that Iraq has one more thing in common with Vietnam. Apparently, Vietnam was sold on false intelligence too. I realize that people have been questioning the Gulf of Tonkin attack's veracity for decades, but to have it finally, unquestionably debunked is darkly humurous.

If anything our intelligence agencies have improved since the 60s because at least this time, they didn't fudge the data, Cheney did.

It's amazing how South Africa, once the most racist nation in the world, is rapidly becoming one of the most liberal and progressive. Consider, they have now legalized gay marriage(WP also has an an article). It's gotta give us hope for our country, although this might mean we'll need the entire world to boycott and embargo us before we actually change anything.

In other good news, it turns out that Tom Delay's redistricting plan is a violation of the voting rights act.

"The State of Texas has not met its burden in showing that the proposed congressional redistricting plan does not have a discriminatory effect," the memo concluded.

The memo also found that Republican lawmakers and state officials who helped craft the proposal were aware it posed a high risk of being ruled discriminatory compared with other options.

But the Texas legislature proceeded with the new map anyway because it would maximize the number of Republican federal lawmakers in the state, the memo said. The redistricting was approved in 2003, and Texas Republicans gained five seats in the U.S. House in the 2004 elections, solidifying GOP control of Congress.

However, despite the unanimous decision by the justice lawyers that the plan was discriminatory (aka racist) senior officials blocked any federal action.

...senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.

Now how many times do we have to read that same exact damn sentence before congress investigates partisan political actions in agencies that should be strictly neutral? Justice might as well only prosecute Democrats for wire fraud. How is this any different?

Finally, Bill O'Reilly has been spouting off a lot lately about liberals and their war on Christianity/Christmas blah blah blah. What a load of crap. Now the Chinese on the otherhand, have a real war on faith. They're beating up nuns over there.

Not a whole lot of general interest except this Nature article describing how one of the predictions of global warming, the paradoxical slowing of transatlantic circulating currents, might be occurring. Nature also has a news article on this and for nonsubscribers a Guardian article.

I'm not convinced they've studied it for long enough as even the authors acknowledge the change is not very far outside the error in the measurements although they say the effect is "robust." The Guardian article strikes a slightly panicky tone in the first few paragraphs that isn't justified by the results (which they then acknowledge at the end of their article).

Science has an article on finding a well preserved archaeopteryx skeleton. Not super-exciting, but it's still one more article on actual evolution compared to a grand total of zero so far for intelligent design.

Oh and the Chinese might be lying about how many human bird flu deaths they've had.

A senior Japanese virologist and adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO) roiled the influenza field last week when he suggested--during what he believed was a private gathering in Germany--that China had concealed hundreds of human bird flu deaths. That's how several people, including two reporters, interpreted a talk by Masato Tashiro, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo. But Tashiro denies that he made any such allegation, saying he only meant to say that surveillance in China is poor.

According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper, Tashiro stunned an audience on 18 November that had gathered to mark the retirement of University of Marburg virologist Hans- Dieter Klenk. FAZ reported that Tashiro showed a table documenting several dozen outbreaks of the bird flu strain H5N1 in China, whose toll included at least 300 human deaths, seven cases of probable human-to-human transmission, and more than 3000 people in quarantine. "We are systematically being deceived," the story quoted Tashiro as saying. Official records list only three confirmed human cases of H5N1 in China, two of them fatal. Given the number of avian outbreaks, many virologists wonder why China hasn't seen more human cases, says virologist Peter Palese of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.