Year: 2006

Dems Should Begin by Rewriting Bush’s Bad Science

Buck Banks

Scary Experiments: The Bush administration’s approach to science has had an oddly alchemical aspect to it. Like those who sought to change lead into gold, Bushco’s minions have been extremely successful at transforming scientfic truth into conservative political ideology.

Federal agencies have repeatedly knuckled under to the anti-science Luddites of the Bush administration in order to make ideology into policy.

The latest was last week’s report from the Government Accountability Office regarding abstinence-until-marriage education programs in the United States. Although they receive about $158 million annually from the Department of Health and Human Services, these programs are not reviewed for scientific accuracy before being granted funding, according to the GAO. Why? Because there’s no scientific basis for the assertion that abstinence-until-marriage is the best birth control method available. It’s just the one that Bushco believes in.

But the GAO’s abstinence report is just the latest in a long series of findings that the administration of President George W. Bush has systematically manipulated science to comply with ideology. Inter Press Service News Agency provides a comprehensive run-down of how federal agencies have repeatedly knuckled under to the anti-science Luddites of the Bush administration in order to make ideology into policy.

On the subject of abstinence education, the administration changed sex education performance measures to produce the appearance that scientific evidence supports abstinence-only programs.

President Bush has consistently supported the view that sex education should teach “abstinence only” and not include information on other ways to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. Until recently, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) initiative called “Programs That Work” identified sex education programs that have been found to be effective in scientific studies and provided this information through its Web site.

All five “Programs That Work” provided comprehensive sex education to teenagers, and none were “abstinence-only.” But the CDC later ended this initiative and deleted information about these proven sex education programs from its web site. Information about condom use and efficacy was also deleted from the CDC web site. The CDC replaced a comprehensive fact sheet on condoms with one that emphasised condom failure rates and the effectiveness of abstinence.

In banning federal funding for research on new stem cell lines, President Bush stated that “more than 60 genetically diverse” lines were available for potential research. Soon thereafter, then-HHS Secretary Thompson acknowledged that the correct number was 24 to 25. Still later, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni told Congress that only 11 stem cell lines were widely available to researchers.

Global warming reports by the Environmental Protection Agency on the risks of climate change have been suppressed. The White House added so many hedges to the climate change section of the EPA’s report card on the environment that then-administrator Christie Todd Whitman deleted the section rather than publish one she felt was scientifically inaccurate.
[…]

On This Date – November 27

Jon Ponder
  • 1978 – San Franciso Supervisor Harvey Milk, a pioneering openly gay elected official, was gunned down at City Hall. The same gunman shot and killed Mayor George Moscone. More: The Assassination of Harvey Milk.
  • 1973 – The United States Senate voted 92 to 3 to confirm Gerald Ford as Vice President of the United States under Pres. Richard Nixon. (On December 6, the House confirmed him 387 to 35). [Wiki]
    – Ford replaced Vice Pres. Spiro Agnew, who had resigned to face corruption charges related to his term as governor of Maryland. Vice Pres. Ford assumed the presidency on August 9, 1974, when Pres. Nixon resigned in order to avoid impeachment during the Watergate scandal. [JP]

Olbermann Will Attack Dems Too

Jon Ponder

I’ve been a fan of Keith Olbermann since the early 1990s when he was a sportscaster on local news here in Los Angeles. I am the opposite of a sports fan and yet he somehow made football, baseball and the rest seem almost interesting.

This year, Mr. Olbermann did as much as anyone in the media to soften up the Republicans in advance of the midterm elections.

But Mr. Olbermann’s “special comments” about Bush Administration’s malfeasance gave the cover of mainstream legitimacy for criticism of the president and his party to spine-challenged liberal pols. The editorials also helped make his “Countdown” show the top-rated live news program at last-place MSNBC.

But Democrats should not count on Olbermann to look the other way if they whiff their opportunity to lead:

“If the Democrats don’t undo a lot of the things that have been done, like the Military Commissions Act and many of the other infringements on freedom, as I see it, there will be a special comment with their name on it,” Olbermann vowed.

I believe him. And the Dems had better believe it, too. Democratic leaders should consider Mr. Olbermann to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If he starts to squawk, I hope they’ll listen.

Dubya’s Presidential ‘Lie-Berry’ to Cost Half a Billion Dollars

Jon Ponder

Now we know the real reason Cheney is visiting the Saudis. He’s begging for millions for Bush’s presidential library.

The Worst President Ever will spend the rest of his time in office raising $500 million to build the most expensive presidential library ever constructed:

Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential “mega” donors … The rest of the cash will come from donors willing to pony up $25,000 to $5 million.

The library and think tank will be built at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The number of books this man has read could probably fit in a small sized storage bin. Can he even pronounce “lie-berry” correctly?

I couldn’t stifle a guffaw when I read that Dubya’s library will also include a “think tank.” Why would a president whose signature accomplishment has been suppressing dissent need a think tank? And does he know that “library” is not pronounced “lie-berry?”

The number of books this man has read could probably fit in a small sized storage bin, leaving one to wonder why on earth he needs a $500 million library.

The answer, of course, is that Bush and his team are out to create a false legacy of his presidency, and rewriting reality costs money. The exaggerated scale of this project smacks of historical revisionism on a level that would make Stalin blush — a gigantic Potemkin memorial (to mix Russian political analogies) to a 43rd U.S. presidency that never happened.

How will this presidential library deal with Pres. Bush’s extraordinary record of incompetence — including dividing the country before taking it to war, the losses in this unnecessary war of hundreds of thousands of lies and billions of taxpayer dollars, his apathy and incompetence in the face of the Katrina disaster, skyrocketing deficits and foreign debt, enabling polluters, flagrantly breaking laws on eavesdropping and turning the United States into a global pariah – -just for starters?

It won’t deal with them, of course. They’ll be swept under the rug.

This final project of his term in office is emblematic of the life and career of George W. Bush. He gained the presidency with little or no experience, preparation or even aptitude for governing. Six years later, he has made a colossal mess of things. So now — just as he did with his business failures along the way — he is calling on his wealthy friends and his father’s supporters to bail him out, this time to the tune of a half a billion dollars, which is an obscene amount of money to build a monument for a man with such meager talents and so few accomplishments.

Turns Out Mitt Romney Is Just Another Massachusetts Liberal

Jon Ponder
It’s one thing to be a homophobe out of ignorance. It’s another to be a homophobe for political gain. In 2006, the former is inexcusable while the latter is despicable.

Republican outgoing Gov. Mitt Romney got himself elected in Blue State Massachusetts by portraying himself as a liberal Republican. Now that he’s running for president, he has done a complete reversal, trying to make his name synonymous with “homophobe.”

It’s one thing to be a homophobe out of ignorance. It’s another to be a homophobe for political gain. In 2006, the former is inexcusable while the latter is despicable.

Anyone thinking of supporting Romney’s bid for president because of his socially conservative views on gay people should know a few things about the governor. When Romney ran against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, he wrote a letter to the Mass Log Cabin Club in which he pledged: “[A]s we seek to establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent.” During the same campaign, when he was accused of having once described gay people as “perverse” during a religious meeting of Mormons, Romney’s campaign issued a forceful statement decrying the accusation as false and reiterating that Romney respected “all people regardless of their race, creed, or sexual orientation.”

[…]

On This Date – November 26

Jon Ponder
  • 2002 – Françoise Ducros, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s communications director, resigned after she was overheard, on 20 November at the NATO summit meeting in Prague, saying about President George W. Bush: “Quel crétin!” [On This Date]
  • 2002 – WorldCom and the government settled a civil lawsuit over the company’s $9 billion accounting scandal. [NYT]
  • 2000 – Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified Republican George W. Bush the winner over Democrat Al Gore in the state’s presidential balloting by 537 votes. [NYT]
  • 1986 – President Ronald Reagan appointed a commission headed by former Sen. John Tower to investigate his National Security Council staff in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair. [NYT]
  • 1975 – Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, Manson-family devotee, was found guilty by a federal jury of trying to assassinate U.S. president Gerald Ford. Fromme, 27, had attempted to shoot the president in Sacramento, CA, September 5, 1975, with a hand gun. Secret service agents wrestled the weapon from her. [TWTD] – Read an interview with Squeaky. [Outer Shell]
  • 1973 – Rose Mary Woods, U.S. President Richard Nixon’s personal secretary, told a federal court she had accidentally erased over eighteen minutes of a ‘Watergate tape’ made June 20, 1972. The recording was of a crucial conversation at an Oval-Office meeting between Nixon and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman just three days after the Watergate break-in. [TWTD]

    • Crossposted: Scandalopolis

Christian Terrorist Attempts Bombing of Assembly

Jon Ponder

Christo-facsists:

The loyalist [Protestant anti-Catholic] murderer Michael Stone forced the suspension of the inaugural meeting of Northern Ireland’s transitional assembly yesterday, when he stormed into the entrance hall of the parliament building armed with a knife, a handgun and what police said was a “viable” bomb.

The extraordinary scenes – as security staff wrestled him to the ground and politicians were evacuated into the rain – overshadowed political rows in the chamber where Ian Paisley was deemed to have signalled the Democratic Unionist party’s conditional assent to power sharing with its republican opponent Sinn Féin. Between six and eight devices were recovered after Stone’s attack. They were defused by the army’s bomb squad.

New Producer of Fox News’ Troubled Comedy Show Is Limbaugh’s Viagra Party Pal

Jon Ponder

Earlier Attempt Starring Laura Ingraham Apparently Failed

Rush Limbaugh is America’s funniest conservative, hands down. So when the Fox News Channel needed someone to produce a rightwing version of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” who else would they turn to but a friend of Rush Limbaugh.

Fox has hired Joel Surnow who, besides being an FORL, is a co-creator and producer of “24.” If his name sounds familiar, it’s because he was one of three guests at Rush Limbaugh’s viagra stag party on a Caribbean island last July.

Development on the show apparently stalled earlier this year after a misbegotten attempt hosted by Laura Ingraham apparently didn’t fly. Turns out sneering at liberals isn’t funny.

For the moment, the show is titled “This Just In” (but that will change because AOL has a show with the same name). It has two hosts who are both unknowns, Susan Yeagley and Kurt Long. (Dennis Miller was busy.) She has some impressive comedy credits, including bits on “Reno 911,” and his resume includes hosting a game show and a few sitcom appearances.

Seriously though, dying is easy, comedy is hard. Mr. Surnow’s “24” is a successful, suspenseful weekly drama. But producing a daily comedy show about current events uses a different set of creative muscles.

Even with Mr. Surnow onboard, this show will never work. Conservatives can’t do satire because truth-speaking to power is abrasive to their authoritarian worldview. Conservatives can’t tell the difference between satire and sarcasm. Satire can certainly get laughs but scarcasm — as anyone who’s ever spent time around thirteen-year-olds will tell you — just ain’t funny.

Racism Rears Its Ugly Head Outside the South Yet Again

Trish

If anyone still needed proof that racism against blacks isn’t just a Southern thing, this week offered plenty.

First, there was the video of Michael Richards, whose Seinfeld character, Kramer, was the personification of New York City quirky. It’s hard not to get queasy watching the video, and harder still to come up with any reasonable explanation for the outburst other than…racism.

This was brought home to me the other night. I work at UPS part-time and a group of us — all white — were discussing the incident when an African-American supervisor walked up. Catching the tail-end of the discussion before silence descended, he asked us to elaborate. “He used the n-word,” someone said. “Oh, well,” the supervisor said, as if to say, “What’s new about that?” “But it wasn’t like a white person trying to be all cool rap,” someone added. “How was it different?” he asked. As everyone looked at their feet, I answered, “Because he said, ‘If this were fifty years ago, you, James, would be hanging from a tree with a fork up your ass.'”

Yeah, we’re talking way beyond tossing out the n-word for street cred.

The report that poor downtrodden white frat boys in Boston are fighting back frosted it.

Joe Mroszczyk, president of the College Republicans at Boston University, admits he set out to stir up a hornet’s nest when he came up with the idea of offering a whites-only scholarship at the school…

All the media attention is focused on a $250 Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship offered by Mroszczyk and the BU chapter of the College Republicans…

According to Mroszczyk, his group is offering the scholarship to point out “how ridiculous it is to have any sort of racially based scholarship.”

Well how very — pardon the expression — white of him to point out this particular sentiment in this unique way. Actually, Mroszczyk admitted he didn’t think it all up himself. He was inspired by a similar scholarship offered a couple of years ago at Roger Williams University in, not Montgomery, Alabama but Bristol, Rhode Island.

My “said it until people are ready to put a bullet in my head to get me to shut up about it” position continues to be that as long as America uses the South as a scapegoat for the racism rampant across the land — to neatly compartmentalize it and refuse to own it — we will never get any closer to solving our national dilemma. To me, it begins with admitting we are all sinners and going forth from there. But as long as the Michael Richardses and Joe Mroszczyks of the world can feel themselves superior to our backwards Southern asses, nobody’s getting anywhere.