In a possible face-saving move, the score for Kazakhstan isn’t included. But the US is beaten soundly by Romania in a new report about evolution. Here’s the nugget sentence, from page two of this morning’s Post:
WASHINGTON POST (1/16/07): The United States has a smaller proportion of people who accept evolution than any other country except Turkey, according to a 34-nation survey by researcher Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University.A graphic lists the 34 countries. For the record, 40 percent of American adults said that the following statement was true: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” In Romania, 55 percent agreed with a similar statement. Iceland led the 34 nations, with 85 percent acceptance. The UK scored 75 percent.
Category: Issues of the Day
Once More Into the Security Breach
A remarkable airport security tale by Kathryn Harrison from Monday’s Times.
Airport security is an expensive charade.
Porn stars, Walter, the Farting Dog, and bookstores
An interesting post from our very own Natalie on books, bookstores, closed-minded people and such at her blog, Petroglyph Paradox. Natalie titles her posting How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, but it’s more interesting that that.
Go here, see the Morans
From Shakespeare’s Sister, photos of morans.
A Risky Game of Risk
W. always acts like he’s upping the ante in a board game where you roll the dice and bet your plastic army divisions on the outcome. This doesn’t surprise some of his old classmates at Yale, who remember Junior as the riskiest Risk player of them all, known for dropping by the rooms of friends, especially when they were trying to study for exams, for extended bouts of “The Game of Global Domination.”
Junior was known as an extremely aggressive player in the venerable Parker Brothers board game, a brutal contest that requires bluster and bluffing as you invade countries, all the while betraying alliances. Notably, it’s almost impossible to win Risk and conquer the world if you start the game in the Middle East, because you’re surrounded by enemies.
. . .W.’s best friend when he was a teenager in Houston, Doug Hannah, told Ms. Sheehy: “If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15.”
Counting the Days
The Worst President Ever has spent 365 days, that is one full year of his six as president, at Camp David.
Source: The Caucus
Another Destructive Idea
A really, really good essay from Functional Ambivalent. Read it all, but Tom includes this:
Bad as the Bush Administration is — and it is historically, massively, terrifyingly bad — and stupid as the President’s Iraq strategy is — bone-chillingly, take-your-breath-away stupid — part of our system is that the President is the Commander in Chief. Centralizing that command has, history shows, worked very well. Changing the way we fight forever to solve the temporary, though huge, problem of George W. Bush is not something we should do any more than we should toss out the First Amendment because we don’t like Howard Stern.
Seriously: Anyone out there think, in the long term, that it’s a good idea to let Congress run a war?
Good stuff, Tom.
Fair and balanced political poll
The previous poll concerning New Year’s resolutions is off to a lopsided — not to say dumb — start so I thought of another burning issue.
In light of President Bush’s obstinacy in pushing for more troops in Iraq despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, would you say that —
{democracy:10}
Best line of the day, so far
President Bush said, “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people – and it is unacceptable to me.”
Now that you mention it, you President Bush are unacceptable to me, too.
What the agenda should be
Franklin Roosevelt gave us a platform 63 years ago that is just as valid today:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.
[Excerpted from Franklin Roosevelt’s January 11, 1944, State of the Union Address]
Casualties of War
[Actually the number of American “casualties” in Iraq exceeds 25,000. The term means: “One injured, killed, captured, or missing in action through engagement with an enemy.” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)]
Nearly three hours
“President Bush worked nearly three hours at his Texas ranch on Thursday to design a new U.S. policy in Iraq, then emerged to say that he and his advisers need more time to craft the plan he’ll announce in the new year.” (Forbes.com)
Nearly three f***ing hours. The poor son-of-a-bitch. As Crooks and Liars put it, “You know, I spent more time wrapping gifts this Christmas than Bush has spent meeting with his advisers over a war that has lost us 3,000 troops and more than half a million Iraqis.”
Worst president ever.
It’s better to give
Christmas shopping in the U.S. has been a reliable source of anxiety and stress for well over a century. “As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is eaten, the great question of buying Christmas presents begins to take the terrifying shape it has come to assume in recent years,” the New York Tribune wrote in 1894. But recently millions of Americans, instead of trudging through malls in a desperate quest for the perfect sweater, have switched to buying gift cards. The National Retail Federation expects that Americans will buy close to twenty-five billion dollars’ worth of gift cards this season, up thirty-four per cent from last year, with two-thirds of shoppers intending to buy at least one card; gift cards now rival apparel as the most popular category of present. This is, in part, because of clever corporate marketing: stores like gift cards because they amount to an interest-free loan from customers, and because recipients usually spend more than the amount on the card—a phenomenon that retailers tenderly refer to as “uplifting” spending. But the boom in gift cards is also a rational response to the most important economic fact about Christmas gift giving: most of us just aren’t that good at it.
James Surowiecki in an interesting little essay on gifting. There’s more including this key point: “My idea of what you want, it turns out, has a lot to do with what I want.”
Librarian Discusses World Events
On MSNBC this morning, Norah O’Donnell asked Laura Bush about a new poll that found “only 2 in 10 Americans approve of the job that the president is doing on Iraq.”
Mrs. Bush placed the blame squarely on the media. She said, “I do know that there are a lot of good things that are happening that aren’t covered. And I think that the drum beat in the country from the media, from the only way people know what is happening…is discouraging.”
Unfrigginbelievable
“How about that Heisman Trophy winner, Troy Smith, from Ohio State, huh? You know, he was taking his Heisman Trophy home with him and they wouldn’t let him through airport security. Yeah, we can’t get Bin Laden, but we’ve got the Heisman, by God.” — David Letterman
Sometimes NewMexiKen realizes just how screwed up everything is and I just want to cry. But, of course, I don’t cry because I’m a man, and even if I did go to the ballet I don’t want you to think I’ll be weeping over everything.
You can keep your shoes on
I suppose this is no different than paying extra to fly in first class, but somehow it just seems wrong.
The U.S. government approved new technology that will automatically scan shoes and boots for bombs, and promises that travelers will soon be spared the trouble of scurrying through security in their socks. But the new machines will be available only to travelers who pay to join a special program, at least at first.
The shoe-scanner approval will give a crucial boost to the Registered Traveler program, which is designed to provide faster airport security screening, via a special security line, to travelers who sign up in advance and undergo a background check. But the program, to be run by private companies under the supervision of the Transportation Security Administration, has languished for years, and currently is operating only in Orlando, Fla.
The shoe scanner is expected to draw customers to the program because not only will it speed up lines. It will also offer another perk — remaining shod — to attract customers willing to pay annual fees of about $100.
Best line of the day, so far
I bring this up for this reason: A new CBS News poll indicates that 21% of Americans believe that President Bush is doing a good job on Iraq. That’s one point above the Crackpot Threshold, which is well within the 3% margin for error.
To put that into perspective, on the defining issue of George W. Bush’s Presidency, the President is now supported by the same percentage of people who believe that astrology is a science, that NASA faked the moon landings, and that the Constitution guarantees our right to own pets.
Best line of the week, so far
The Report’s narrative passages add up to a comprehensive condemnation not only of the conduct and consequences of the Iraq war but also of the Administration’s over-all foreign policy, a condemnation all the more stunning coming from a panel led by [James] Baker and including [Sandra Day] O’Connor, who, perhaps more than any other two people on earth, were responsible six years ago for promoting Bush from loser of the popular vote to President of the United States.
Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker
Two Christmases
Atrios (Duncan Black) offers a point of view. What do you think?
Look, it’s very simple. There are two Christmas holidays. One is the secular holiday, decreed by the federal government to be a national holiday, which is celebrated and marked with festive displays of trees, lights, fat guys with beards, and elves, along with lots of shopping and the giving of gifts. The other holiday involves a celebration of the birth of the Messiah, and is celebrated with religious rituals and displays of nativity scenes and other religious imagery.
Public displays of secular Christmas imagery? fine.
Public displays of religious Christmas imagery? less fine.
Christmas trees in airports? fine.
Baby Jesus scenes in airports? less fine.
The Discussion of Racism
… continues with Malcolm Gladwell:
They Say the Good Die Young
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was 91.
Homecoming
NewMexiKen favorite Charles Pierce is back where he belongs with Eric Alterman.
I rise again to present, by way of a relevant comparison, my argument that my colleagues in the sportswriting business do their jobs better than most members of the elite political media. Last year, Bud Selig appointed former senator George Mitchell to run the in-house investigation of what is perceived to be the problem with performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Almost immediately, the choice came under criticism that centered on the fact that Mitchell’s probe would not have any real power to compel testimony or documents, and that Mitchell himself had been tied into several major-league baseball franchises — most notably, the Boston Red Sox — and, finally, on the very simple grounds that any in-house investigation started out in Credibility Gap given major-league baseball’s inability to police itself.
I don’t agree with a lot of these criticisms, but they have some merit, and the fact that they were mustered so widely and so quickly stands in stark contrast to the reverential coverage of the Iraq Study Group and its hunt for the pony in the pile. For example where was the instant and withering contempt from our courtier political press over the presence on the ISG of a useless old vampire like Edwin Meese, who started his career calling for detention camps to be set up to house student demonstrators at Berkeley, and ended it, two steps ahead of the law, by giving the Iran-Contra crowd just enough time to shred what they needed to shred? And, anyway, what in the name of Christ’s sweet strawberry preserves does Edwin Meese know about Iraq? Why not just hire him to re-wire the space shuttle and design the new levees in Louisiana while he’s at it? County commissioners go to jail for putting their idiot nephews on county road crews, but, on the bloodiest question of the past 30 years, supposedly educated people wait with their tongues hanging out for a viable solution to emerge from what appears to be the Petrified Forest, and nobody points out the absurdity that’s sitting right there, listening to its arteries harden.
That’s What We Need, A Nice Civilized Discussion
The One-armed Commission
The Daily Howler has this startling, but not surprising, observation from Senator Feingold:
The fact is this [Baker-Hamilton] commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that’s who is doing this report.
Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism. So this is really a Washington inside job and it shows, not in the description of what’s happened—that’s fairly accurate—but it shows in the recommendations. [Emphasis Daily Howler]
One-armed, because there was no one there to say, “On the other hand.”
Defining a Racist
Malcolm Gladwell attempts to bring some rationality to an irrational subject.