More disillusioned conservatives

Missouri Republican John Danforth (onetime US senator and then UN ambassador) laments the state of our national leadership.

The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.

Indeed.

(via Body and Soul)

Question of the day

From Jeanne at Body and Soul:

I know we're living in George Bush's America, but words do still retain some sort of conventional meaning, don't they?

(It's about the word games being played about who moves detainees where, and with what goals, and under what possible principles . . .)

Glimpses of spring

I thought the other day, How we enjoy a warm and pleasant day at this season! We dance like gnats in the sun.

Henry David Thoreau
journal entry, 25 March, 1859

(via Thoreau Blog)

Note: It's worth visiting this poem by kurt on the same theme...

Yelling into the wind

A large number of former diplomats have officially gone on record as opposing Bolton's nomination as Ambassador to the UN. Best of luck with that...

If Nobel laureates can't win an argument for real facts, and a heap of decorated generals are ignored when they say Gonzales is a bad choice for State, why would anybody think that our leaders care about the opinions of diplomats? Don't these folks know that diplomacy is quaint, outdated stuff? Note that the response to this letter is the remark "we look forward to his getting to New York to do the nation's business." Because, you know, the U.N. is all about America's business . . .

A blog for our (financial) times

Via several sources, an interesting new blog on personal credit issues in the news (or under the radar). Worth checking in on from time to time, to share the author's self-education process.

A glimpse inside the black box

Here's a little daliance for anybody with an interest in psychology and neuroscience: Cognitive Daily, a website that presents a few articles per week on recent news, tailored for the interested layman. It manages to be both educational and fun. I recommend the article on why Mona Lisa's eyes seem to follow you around the room, but really any one of them is a satisfying pursuit of basic curiosity.

(via NowThis)

Blowin' in the wind

Civil liberties and even the rule of law appear to be increasingly under attack these days. Paul Krugman does a good job of pulling together a number of disparate examples and showing the ways that they show the increasing power of extremism in our society -- the rest of us seem to scuttle out of its way, motivated by either misguided tolerance or simple fear. But as he points out,

nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.

And this is increasingly what we see, as the President's aides declare him above the law, the legislature expresses scorn for our constitutional balance of powers, religious leaders condone assassination, and judges, lawyers, and citizens who find themselves in the news suddenly need professional security protection. I wish I were seeing more outrage from the silent moderate majority...

(via Medley)

Who's the pinko now?

At some point (maybe after the Schiavo case fades from the news; maybe because of it), Americans are going to have to discuss health care again. Medicaid is now looking considerably less healthy than Social Security, and the state of private insurance is, if anything, worse than when Clinton campaigned on fixing things. Insurance agencies have a vested interest in getting wider business for their current structure, but a number of things indicate that there might be better ways. A recent article at Slate argues that we have empirical evidence that socialized medicine works, in the example of the long-running Veterans Health Administration.

The superiority of VA hospitals is so obvious that by now it ought to be common knowledge. But it isn't, because an insane political consensus that firmly opposes turning health care over to the government—because the government is presumed incapable of doing anything well—doesn't want to hear that government hospitals are outperforming private hospitals.

Surprisingly, much of the success results not from the patients (who are a more at-risk cohort than the Medicare patients they were compared to), nor to simple efficiencies of scale (although those control costs dramatically), but from the fact that patients are tracked over the long term, meaning that health care decisions are (a) made with more complete medical records at hand, and (b) made in the interest of long-term outcomes, not just quick turnaround. Investing in technology to follow up on chronic patients, for example, will only benefit organizations that can be fairly certain of having those patients in the future; what is the benefit to a private company whose more healthy patient may be a gift to a different health plan in a year or two? Interesting things to mull...

(via rc3.org)

Winners and losers in the world of law

Two random recent stories from the legal realm caught my notice:

• An appeals court granted visitation rights to a lesbian co-mom, denying the effect of tensions between the separated women. (Anybody ever divorce without them?)
  
  
• A federal judge in Alabama has decided not to take any more clerks from Yale because he's upset with the Yale Law School's restrictions on campus military recruitment. Somehow, I think those students will struggle their way to success, despite his, um, courageous stand...

Ya' win some, ya' lose some.

(via How Appealing)

Quote of the day

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

-- Noam Chomsky,
linguistics professor and political activist (1928- )

(via A.W.A.D.)

The log in our own eye...

Suburban guerilla provides a tragic story of a Rescue Mission in Charlotte so blinded by bigotry that it loses track of its own larger reason for existing . . .
Your humanitarian efforts not welcome here.

Too much of a crappy thing

Apparently the TSA administrators have been sniffing a few too many jet fumes, because they (a) have been lying about their use of information, and (b) intend to roll out a new security screening system even though it hasn't yet measured up to the standards that they themselves set for it. I love the idea of lots of private data being thrown around in a half-assed system, especially given our respect for the civil rights of terror suspects these days...

Of course, plunging ahead with unsuccessful systems is a tried-and-true procedure for our current leaders.

(TSA story via Rebecca's Pocket)

Civil war, law enforcement-style

Not getting coverage amidst the circus is some scary action in the Schiavo case:

Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted -- but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The Herald has learned.

Jeez, things are pretty bad when it's not just crazed citizens threatening to storm the citadel, but an actual show-down over who's willing to uphold the legal system. Shades of George Wallace over this kind of thing, but here the local police (in a tiny and beleagured town) appear to have been the heroes.

(via Talking Points Memo)

Heh (gender-wars installment)

Atrios has a couple of pointed remarks about the look of the punditocracy these days... (Don't miss his caption suggestion down at the bottom of that first piece!)

(p.s.) Blogger is having a bad couple of weeks. Many potential posts getting eaten or clogged in the works. We hope they will work it out...

Stretching for material

In addition to the recent discovery that Cheney can't get support for the Administration's Social Security scam even among hand-picked loyalists, it now seems that the only way that they can show support among the general populace is by taking quotes out of context. Guess these guys just don't know a dead horse when they see one...

(via Atrios)

Scientists get snarky

A great editorial (excerpted extensively here) from the Scientific American editors, in response to criticism of their "unfair biases" in reporting, you know, facts.

We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong.

Wow, that must have been building for a long time. Go, read the rest of it -- it's all that good! Whew!

(via Alas, a blog)

What those pictures are saying

Check out this fascinating site, called BagNewsNotes. They take vivid images from the news -- usually the paradigmatic image of a major story, but sometimes minor pictures from the edges of coverage -- and dissect them in meaningful ways: what is the subtext? what imagery is being chosen, and whose agenda does it implicitly advance? who or what is absent from these images, and what can we tell from things at the margins of the shot? They do a good job, and give readers a lot to think about. Don't be surprised if you find yourself wandering the archives and learning new things about past news stories...

(via fellow Philly blogger, A Tattered Coat)

Sinking like a stone

Apparently Vice President Cheney has taken over from Bush and Santorum on the Social Security schmooze tour. But, despite all the prescreening of "town hall" participants, these meetings aren't going very well. In fact, so badly that the transcripts aren't showing up on the Whitehouse website. hmmm...

(via Atrios)

On the nose

A long but excellent article from Digby today on the culture wars by way of a series of telling examples. He makes a bunch of good points along the way, but probably the take-home message for anybody who wants to push the pendulum the other way is this:

It's just this simple: The Republican party wants to tell you how to live your personal life while they systematically remove all government cooperation in ameliorating the risks this fast paced world creates. The Democrats want the government to leave you to make your own personal decisions while having it help you mitigate the social and economic risk our fast paced world creates. It is a stark choice. There is no reason we cannot begin to make the affirmative case for ourselves on this basis.

Make the time to read the entire piece.

Who will save the children?

Alabama is next in the stupidity parade: the state legislature is considering a bill that would prohibit gays from adopting children. It's likely to pass, but I suppose also likely not to pass muster with the courts.

What bothers me is that children in Alabama already wait an average of almost two years to be adopted -- why would anyone want to make that situation worse? Adoption is about finding loving parents for children, not about placing a societal stamp on couples or fulfilling their family dreams. The right-wing is so busy rushing to judgement of people they don't like that their principles are bouncing out of their pockets.

(via Atrios)