Strange bedfellows

Well, well, this bankruptcy bill isn't really looking good to anybody these days -- even the Instapundit has qualms (along with many conservative commenters there), and nobody seems to be able to figure out what the arguments in support of this legislation might be. It's easy to see that the credit card companies hope to profit, and that any number of regular folks with decent money sense will get burned, but where's the drive coming from?

(via kos)

Terri Schiavo and "medical experts"

A great post by Ampersand today (at Alas, a Blog), dissecting the medical testimony in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case and really getting at what it means to claim "expert consensus" (or a lack thereof). Basically, all of the doctors testifying for the parents' claims simply don't address the fundamental issues and arguments of their opponents. You can't claim to be winning an argument in which you're not actually participating.

Very very busy!

That seems to be my constant state these days, and it's partly true, partly the illusion created by the myriad ways in which I can waste time (on seemingly substantive pursuits). All the more reason to value the occasional reality-check, such as this one from the inestimable Bill Watterson:



(click to enlarge)

Update: Sorry! they just changed their policy such that you can't look back more than two weeks. You'll have to squint at my shrunken version, since the blow-up is no longer available...

Once-in-a-lifetime in the true sense

There have been record rains in the last two months in California, causing any number of problems and grousing. But meantime Death Valley is abloom with flowers and other life forms that may flourish here only once a century...

(via Suburban Guerilla)

Apropos of nothing

It turns out that those "low-low" Walmart prices are just an illusion. In fact, they offer cut prices on a handful of things that people buy frequently enough that they know a discount when they see it, and then the rest of the stuff they sell at average or higher prices (and you just extrapolate from, say, the cheap milk to the assumption that "everything is cheap here"). So it's not just the employees getting screwed...

Sure, why not...

Via The Rittenhouse Review, this latest installment of lunacy:

President Bush has chosen Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, a longtime critic of the United Nations and a hard-liner on arms control, to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, according to government officials.

(emphasis mine)
We don't even try to hide our scorn for the rest of the world anymore...

Update: MyDD has more on the absurdity here, including some anti-UN Bolton quotes.

Because it didn't explain anything then either

Via R, a short Inquirer opinion piece pointing out that the tenets of Intelligent Design (very trendy in, say, York, PA just now) were debunked a couple of centuries ago by none other than David Hume.

(Of course, this requires that you be interested in Enlightenment philosophy and its logic of rationality. Not much evidence for that these days.)

Bankruptcy bill play-by-play

Hunter at dailyKos provides an excellent summary of the tragic bankruptcy bill that seems on its way to approval in Congress -- no only of what the bill itself does (stripping away protections offered by consumer bankrupcty filings while exempting corporate bankruptcy), but of the host of very reasonable-seeming amendments proposed and rejected (complete with notes on Democrats who voted with the Republican bloc on thse matters). Among these squelched amendments were protections for people whose problems were caused by identity theft, as well as those crushed by medical bills, and others to discourage predatory lending practices or help elderly people keep their homes.

How inhumane does a result have to be before it elicits sympathy from these Values Republicans?? And yet most of this seems to be below the national radar . . .

Update: Hunter further suggests viewing this legislation in the context of a larger GOP legislative war on the middle class. He's brainstorming ideas for how to make this point to the American public.

Just how easy is it to get a press pass?

Fishbowl DC spent a frustrating week (see links to each day's story) trying to get a pass but never even getting their calls returned. It appears now that they have actually been cleared for a one-day visit to the pressroom today (nothing like Gannon/Guckert's multi-year daily wavers, but hey). After that, actually getting to ask a question would almost be anticlimactic. Good luck, guys!

Update: Hah! anticlimactic was exactly their description, as well as "meta," as he found himself being interviewed about being the first blogger in the pressroom (almost more than he was interviewing the others there). Too silly. The day's experience is summarized in several posts there.

Santorum goes after the working stiff

Santorum is pushing some new legislation on minimum wage, which appears to raise the base rate substantially, but actually radically decreases the number of companies who are required to pay their workers at minimum wage, and also loosens workplace protections and requirements for overtime pay.

The upshot: while 1.2 million workers could qualify for a minimum wage increase, another 6.8 million workers, who work in companies with revenues between $500,000 and $1,000,000 per year, would lose their current minimum wage protection.

And an even larger number of businesses, those with revenues under $7 million, would be exempt from fines under a range of other safety, health, pension and other labor laws. Essentially, the realm of unregulated sweatshops would be expanded and legalized under Santorum's bill. . . .

Amazing. PA is one of the states considering raising its minimum wage above the federal minimum, something Santorum's bill would also disallow. I hope that this will be another prime weapon to turn back against him in 2006! He may be winning love in DC, but I don't think he's warming hearts at home...

(via dailyKos)

Yeowch!

It's no-rhetorical-holds-barred as former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy writes an open letter to Condoleeza Rice about her recent tantrum-related decisions cancelling visits to Canada (and then rescheduling them later, etc.):

I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.

But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can't quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.
...
Coming to Ottawa might also expose you to a parliamentary system that has a thing called question period every day, where those in the executive are held accountable by an opposition for their actions, and where demands for public debate on important topics such as missile defence can be made openly.

Wow! I don't think there are even many wacky tabloid editorialists in this country who would sling the verbiage that freely. Could it be that our peace-loving northern friends are self-righteously pissed?!

(It does calm down as it goes along, but is making no bones about the need to "speak truth to power." If only power were interested!)

(via boing boing, of all places)

No really, looks are just a side benefit

Apparently nutter Senator Tom Coburn is up to more wacky fun, this time opining on the health benefits of breast implants. I'll just let fellow Philly-blogger Noblesse Oblog give you the highlights...

More from Reid, the unexpected bulldog

This time it's a slam on Alan Greenspan, who looks less an less like a wise nonpartisan financial czar and more and more like a politician with every passing cycle.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan generally gets accolades for his public pronouncements. Yesterday he got a brickbat from Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who blasted Greenspan as "one of the biggest political hacks we have here in Washington."

Reid ripped Greenspan during an interview on CNN's "Inside Politics." He said the Fed chairman has given President Bush a pass on deficits that have built up in the past four years and should be challenging Republicans on their fiscal policies, rather than promoting Bush's plan to introduce personal accounts into Social Security.

About right. For more on Greenspan's hackery, see this bit from Krugman.

. . . Until the 1970's conservatives tended to be open about their disdain for Social Security and Medicare. But honesty was bad politics, because voters value those programs. So conservative intellectuals proposed a bait-and-switch strategy: First, advocate tax cuts, using whatever tactics you think may work - supply-side economics, inflated budget projections, whatever. Then use the resulting deficits to argue for slashing government spending.

And that's the story of the last four years. In 2001, President Bush and Mr. Greenspan justified tax cuts with sunny predictions that the budget would remain comfortably in surplus. But Mr. Bush's advisers knew that the tax cuts would probably cause budget problems, and welcomed the prospect. In fact, Mr. Bush celebrated the budget's initial slide into deficit. In the summer of 2001 he called plunging federal revenue "incredibly positive news" because it would "put a straitjacket" on federal spending.

To keep that straitjacket on, however, those who sold tax cuts with the assurance that they were easily affordable must convince the public that the cuts can't be reversed now that those assurances have proved false. And Mr. Greenspan has once again tried to come to the president's aid, insisting this week that we should deal with deficits "primarily, if not wholly," by slashing Social Security and Medicare because tax increases would "pose significant risks to economic growth." Really?

Keep tellin' it, boys!

More signs of the witch-hunt

In addition to a generally crazy cultural misunderstanding of academic freedom (exchange of ideas, anyone?), there are increasing signs of efforts by the right to muzzle liberal professors or subject them to some sort of standard of what can and can't be taught (or required of students; see the rantings at SAF). The latest development is a series of threats based on accusations of communism.

The way this was done, with stealth at first and with the star so prominent, was very much in the brownshirt tradition of the last century. A lot of things come to mind when walking down a corridor of academic offices and seeing 'stigma' postings on individual doors identifying Heretics.

Yeah, and most of them make my skin crawl . . .

Who's calling the shots?

The New York Times is reporting new poll numbers that indicate that a significant majority of Americans no longer think that Bush shares their priorities, either domestically or in foreign policy. Strangely, these sentiments have yet to change his approval rating -- I guess that "he's our President, so we have to support him" thing must have real legs.

For just the highlights of this story (or to avoid NYT registration), see the excerpts over at dailyKos. But there are all kinds of interesting tidbits throughout the original piece.

For now I see in a glass darkly

Kermit the Blog points up an intriguing essay about American "self-certainty" and the real message of Christianity. It is a good call to self-re-examination, particularly for people of faith (and even more particularly for Christians)...

When the Bible is viewed primarily as a collection of devotional thoughts, its status as the most devastating work of social criticism in history is forgotten. Once we've taken it off its pedestal long enough to actually read what it says, how does the principality called America interpret the gospel? In an age when many churchgoing Americans appear to view the purposes of the coming kingdom of God and the perceived self-interests of the United States as indistinguishable, what does faithful witness look like?

I recommend the original essay (which is a longish exerpt from a book called The Gospel of America) to anybody who wrestles with these issues. It has a kind of rhetorical earnestness that will probably put off those with no background in the pews, but it's the voice of the liberal church trying to be heard in the storm.

As Karl Barth noted, applying the gospel to our vision of the worlds unfolding before us will involve a yes and a no. Yes to the hope of a new day coming and the watchfulness required to see it. No to the suggestion, sometimes only dimly hinted at even to ourselves, that our own good intentions or pure hearts will hasten its coming or that we are knowers (rather than learners) of the Creator's good purposes.

(via the Daou Report)

A little mid-week randomness

Via boing boing, this delightful tale of a wiseacre who bent the brains of some state employees by testing the limits of what he could pass off in place of normal payment for his $1 toll (say, two pictures of rapper Fifty Cent. or an array of not-explicitly-banned foreign currency). tee hee

Update: also worth checking out are his experiments with varying his signature on credit card slips -- not just the style, but the language (pictographs?), the name, and more . . .

Another reminder that hate often wears our faces

Not all terrorists are from overseas -- you'd think Oklahoma City would be demonstration enough of that, but I think it's too easy to forget our homegrown brand of crazies. Not so easy for Joan Lefkow, who became a target of white supremacists when she (a federal judge) was assigned a case having to do with a lawsuit against them. First one of them plotted to kill her (but was caught first), and now her husband and mother were shot to death in her home. Terrible.

Original story at the Times (registration required) here, or read the summary over at dailyKos.

Update: via mimi smartypants, we find that somebody else killed the judge's family. A different brand of crazy, but no less terrorizing...

Hanging on hints of spring

Between the weather and the flu, February felt like it was sucking the life out of me, and I take the arrival of March as a sign of hope. This is perhaps a universal sentiment...

We talk about spring as at hand before the end of February, and yet it will be two good months, one sixth part of the whole year, before we can go a-maying. There may be a month of solid and uninterrupted winter yet, plenty of ice and good sleighing. We may not even see the bare ground, and hardly the water, and yet we sit down and warm our spirits annually with distant prospect of spring. As if a man were to warm his hands by stretching them toward the rising sun and rubbing them.

-- Henry David Thoreau
March 2, 1859

(from The Thoreau Blog)

No more youths on death row

The Supreme Court has just abolished the death penalty for those under 18, ending a practice in 19 states.

The ruling continues the court's practice of narrowing the scope of the death penalty, which justices reinstated in 1976. Executions for those 15 and younger when they committed their crimes were outlawed in 1988. Three years ago justices banned death sentences for the mentally retarded.

Tuesday's ruling prevents states from making 16- and 17-year-olds eligible for execution.

Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision (which differs from the ruling 16 years ago that juvenile capital punishment was *not* cruel and unusual punishment).

Juvenile offenders have been put to death in recent years in only a few other countries, including Iran, Pakistan, China and Saudi Arabia. Kennedy cited international opposition to the practice.

"It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty, resting in large part on the understanding that the instability and emotional imbalance of young people may often be a factor in the crime," he wrote.

The dissenters deny the presence of a trend in public opinion, and say that the issue should be left to the states. Victims rights decry the limitation of their options for revenge justice. I think that's everybody.

Except me. This seems like a blow in favor of civilization to me. I feel for the prosecutors (and victims) faced with seeming child psychopaths, but I'm not convinced that killing them is really getting to the root of the problem. (For that matter, I'm not convinced that killing anybody improves any measurable outcome, except perhaps the size of the stick that prosecutors bring to plea bargains. There are just too many examples of the wrong person ending up on death row for me to sleep well supporting our government's putting a permanent end to their appeals...)