June 18 - 24, 2007

New Gallup Poll (link): 30% of Republicans say they believe in evolution, next to 61% of Independents and 57% of Democrats. It's ironic, but I guess unsurprising, that the least-evolved human beings - who with their own persons prove evolution best - are incapable of believing it.

Yuk yuk. Let's all laugh ourselves straight back to the Middle Ages.

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Speaking of which, Bush vetoed stem-cell funding again. However, the Democrats are expected to tie it to "must-pass" spending measures later this year. Good. They should send it back to his desk every single week.

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Continuing on the theme of cro-magnon man, I heard some of Sean Hannity's radio show last Tuesday and was amused to hear him beating up on White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. Honor among thieves. Anyway, it seems that the Nativists (conservatives) of our fair country don't like Bush's immigration plan. They don't oppose it for the good reason for opposing it - that by importing 250,000 new workers a year into low-skill positions, we're obviously going to (further) undermine the state of labor in this country. What's the use of, say, a minimum wage if you're going to throw up a shadow labor market where those same jobs are hired out for less? The plan's a baldfaced handout to business interests at the expense of Americans who actually work for a living. You want to help out Mexicans who actually work for a living too? Write some labor standards into your trade agreements.

Dream on, Marc. Anyway - none of that has anything to do with what upsets Sean Hannity. He's upset because he wants the 700-mile wall barricading us from Mexico to be 30 feet taller than Bush does. Or something.

But in all of this there is a ray of light - nobody can stand Bush now. For as you know, he is a U-nighter.

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Dick Cheney is so determined to refuse to obey the law saying that his official records be retained for posterity, that he responded to years of requests to subject those records to examination by the National Archives only by attempting to get the bit of the National Archives that was doing the requesting, eliminated. He stopped providing the records in '03, tried to axe the department the next year, and has been in a continued state of noncompliance since. Henry Waxman revealed the story this week. Cheney's argument is that he doesn't have to follow this law since he's not a part of the Executive Branch: constitutionally, he's also President of the Senate. Which is cute, I admit. It should be borne in mind the next time the budget's drawn up for his office.


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The Iraqi refugee crisis is mounting. Two million Iraqis are displaced; graciously, we've decided to let 7000 move to the U.S. But hell, it's not like we started the mess over there or something.

Heard a very moving story this week on the radio show "The World" about a woman, now living in Jordan, who'd previously worked as a translator with the Americans in Iraq. Her son was kidnapped, and though he was released for a ransom, the woman's husband then left her because he felt she was responsible for the imbroglio. Anyway, there are plenty (thousands or tens of thousands) of cases like this, and America is - here comes a big surprise - not doing right by these folks, who have exposed themselves to the some of the grimmest risks imaginable to support the Americans in Iraq.

And then on the other hand, on the other hand, on the other hand. It's hard to imagine insurgents haven't been infiltrating every institution possible over there. It sure would be ironic now to put one of these moles into the witness protection program, so to speak, and hand'm a first-class ticket to Denver. Which, I am sure, is not likely (I guess). But still, consider this: two million displaced persons in the greater Near East is a lot of movement and a lot of confusion, over a lot of area, over a long time. It can and will provide cover to some terrorist gang someday - probably to gain access to Europe.

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Who knows? Maybe the economy's getting ready to fall apart. But I suppose it always seems like that.

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Onions can kill you.

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Overhyped this week: Michael Bloomberg's run for President, which (he at least claims) isn't even happening; and Hillary's godawful campaign song.

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The Rundown:

Palestinians are too busy fighting one another to remember to blow up Irsaelis.

Iraqi Sunnis are remembering quite handily to blow up the Shi'a. This stimulates the Shi'a to keep up doing that thing they like to do - you know, where they drill holes in Sunnis' heads before dumping the bodies around town? (That's what they mean when they say, "signs of torture", you know).

Afghanistanis have put it at the top of their to-do list to blow up Americans. And Germans and Britons.

And that's what makes the world go round.

--Hey, you know, one good thing about the end of oil, whenever we get there: these folks won't be able to build their bombs anymore. (Or, perhaps, they'll go nuclear.)

Can you build a "green" bomb? Perhaps it's telling that this would be difficult. The sun already is a bomb of sorts, of course, and will devour Earth and its neighbors in 7.5 billion years. Doesn't that make everybody happy enough? Why blow ourselves up prematurely when we have that Big One coming?

Some people are so impatient.

The definition of terrorism

Are right-wingers who perpetrate acts of public violence to affect public policy, terrorists? Or is that term just for Osama bin Laden and... the Earth Liberation Front?

Back on June 4, this came up on "Talk of the Nation". The reason was that a few Earth Liberation Front'ers are facing extended sentences for burning down some buildings. Whether they get the heavier sentences depends on whether the judge chooses to define their acts as terroristic.

The "Talk of the Nation" discussion, focusing as it did on left-wing groups, put me in mind of an old pet peeve. When Eric Rudolph (Atlanta Olympics bombing, attacks on numerous women's reproductive health clinics) was brought to trial in 2005 after hiding in the woods like Rambo for a couple of years, none of the reporting at the time referred to him as a terrorist. When it comes to left-wing extremists, we aren't so peevish. And though the last thing I'm going to do is make excuses for ELF or their burning down of buildings, they've at least sought to avoid hurting people: Rudolph hasn't been quite as circumspect.

And what about the other right-wing lunatics? It's always driven me nuts that in the heat of our search for WMDs in Iraq, back in 2003, we found a large cache of chemical weapons - sodium-cyanide chemical bombs, to be exact - in a storage warehouse in Tyler, Texas. The only catch was that the bombs had been stockpiled not by Islamic extremists, but by a clutch of white supremacists. Ergo, zero news coverage. Was the threat less? Anybody out there remember Timothy McVeigh?

So I emailed a comment to "Talk of the Nation" on a lark; Neil Conan read it on the air. Here's an audio clip (~1:15 minutes).

...I see that Eric Rudolph's wikipedia entry does describe him as a "domestic terrorist", but to be honest, my on-air comment was the first time I have ever heard that word applied to him in the national media.

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Richard Rorty died last week. On the trvial side, this kind of thing's a personal occasion to mourn roads not traveled - namely, that I never went for a Philosophy Ph.D. The debates in which Rorty was involved are, I think, an enviable place in which to live out one's mental life; and his positions in those debates were, I think, enlightened and worthy of admiration. Even if he was a little less hip to science than my own disposition might have it. (Daniel Dennett, who went back and forth with Rorty in this area, jestingly defined "rort" as "rort, n. m. (1) an incorrigible report; hence, rorty, adj. incorrigible.")

There's a promising but incomplete deathbed interview with Rorty in the current Progressive. Worth taking a look at. It opens with a discussion of his place in the western intellectual tradition, including a little farrago of name-drops that might not mean much to you unless you're somebody who almost went for a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Dewey, Gadamer, etc.): but the brunt of this (too-short) conversation is very general-audience-directed, like much of Rorty's writing was in the first place.

I was especially stirred to see Rorty point out this greatest concern he holds for the world's political future. I share it. But it's so fearsome a thought that I don't think a lot of folks ever bring themselves to contemplate it seriously:

The Bush administration has now been repudiated by US public opinion, and the Iraq debacle will make future European governments hesitant about following America’s lead. But I still think that the end of democracy is a likely consequence of nuclear terrorism, and I do not know how to guard against this danger. Sooner or later some terrorist group will repeat 9/11 on a much grander scale. I doubt that democratic institutions will be resilient enough to stand the strain. (ital. mine)

Inaugural Post

For a couple of weeks now I've been collecting my thoughts on how to approach this blog - listing examples to myself of the kinds of news items I might like to summarize, pondering broader political topics on which to hold forth: and etc. All of which I will get to soon enough.

But it seems clear that I should start out by addressing something much more important. Namely, just how much Rudolph Giuliani looks like that Nasonex bee from the television commercials:



(With thanks to Lauryl for first making this observation.)