Category: Issues of the Day

Easterbrook is trying to figure out “what possible reason–other than science illiteracy at the White House–there could be for George W. Bush to announce a plan to build a Moon base. Manned exploration of Mars is even crazier.”

One parting thought on the practicality of Mars. Spirit, the rover that just landed there, weighs half a ton. Spirit cost $410 million to build and place on Mars–and it’s about the size of a refrigerator, and does not come back. Mars-mission proponents want to send something to the Red Planet the size of an office building, and bring it back.

What NASA needs right now is not an absurd, bank-breaking grand mission: It needs to spend a decade researching a safer lower-cost alternative to the space shuttle.

And why might George W. Bush endorse a Moon base or Mars mission? Either he’s a science illiterate surrounded by advisors who are science illiterates, or it’s a blank check for aerospace contractors.

From Gallup

Gallup’s annual poll of the most admired people in the world shows George W. Bush receiving the distinction as most admired man in the eyes of the American public for the third consecutive year, and Hillary Rodham Clinton as the consensus choice for most admired woman for the sixth time, and for the first time since 2000. The Rev. Billy Graham once again finished among the Top 10 men, the 46th time he has done so, while Queen Elizabeth II of England appeared among the most admired women for the 39th time.

Near the end of each year, Gallup asks Americans to name the man and woman, living in any part of the world today, that they admire most. The question was first asked in 1948 and has been repeated nearly every year since then. This year’s poll was conducted Dec. 5-7.

Paul Krugman

The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled “Waking Up From the American Dream.” The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.

And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains–or even points out what is happening–as a practitioner of “class warfare.”

Krugman continues:

Put it this way: Suppose that you actually liked a caste society, and you were seeking ways to use your control of the government to further entrench the advantages of the haves against the have-nots. What would you do?

One thing you would definitely do is get rid of the estate tax, so that large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation. More broadly, you would seek to reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more. You’d also try to create tax shelters mainly useful for the rich. And more broadly still, you’d try to reduce tax rates on people with high incomes, shifting the burden to the payroll tax and other revenue sources that bear most heavily on people with lower incomes.

Meanwhile, on the spending side, you’d cut back on healthcare for the poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher education. This would make it more difficult for people with low incomes to climb out of their difficulties and acquire the education essential to upward mobility in the modern economy.

And just to close off as many routes to upward mobility as possible, you’d do everything possible to break the power of unions, and you’d privatize government functions so that well-paid civil servants could be replaced with poorly paid private employees.

It all sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it?

Excerpted from an article in the January 5, 2004, issue of The Nation.

Close up shows how far Saddam had gone to alter his appearance.

Seems about right.

President signing the Medicare Act

Dahlia Lithwick has an amusing and on-point essay on Slate.

Do you want to know what’s destroying the sanctity of marriage? Phone messages like the ones we’d get at my old divorce firm in Reno, Nev., left on Saturday mornings and picked up on Monday: “Beeep. Hi? My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I’m at Circus Circus? Room—honey what room is this—oh yeah. Room 407. Thank you. Beeep.”

It just doesn’t get much more sacred than that….

4. Misc.
Here’s what’s really undermining the sacredness of modern marriage: soap operas, wedding planning, longer work days, cuter secretaries, fights over money, reality TV, low-rise pants, mothers-in-law, boredom, Victoria’s Secret catalogs, going to bed mad, the billable hour, that stubborn 7 pounds, the Wiggles, Internet chat rooms, and selfishness. In fact we should start amending the Constitution to deal with the Wiggles immediately.

Here’s why marriage will likely survive last week’s crushing decision out of Massachusetts: Because despite all the horrors of Section 4, above, human beings want and deserve a soul mate; someone to grow old with, someone who thinks our dopey entry in the New Yorker cartoon competition is hilarious, and someone to help carry the shopping bags. Gay couples have asked the state to explain why such privileges should be denied them and have yet to receive an answer that is credible.

From washingtonpost.com

Gregg Easterbrook has written a superb piece on the gay marriage issue. “Marriage is, more than anything else, the expression of love. And if two people of the same gender love each other in the fullest sense and wish to express that love by joining their lives, why shouldn’t society be happy about that?”

Precisely.

Excuse me, but what a fake and a phony this guy is. His meeting with families of some of the 53 British servicemen killed in Iraq has been “billed as one of the centerpieces of his state visit to wartime ally Britain this week,” Reuters reports, and in pre-trip interviews the President “stressed his plans to meet the [British] families” and to “tell them their loved ones did not die in vain.”

How nice. But isn’t this the same American commander-in-chief who has declined to attend funerals for any of the more than 400 American soldiers killed in Iraq? (Instead, he has occupied his time with more than 75 fundraising trips.)

President Bush has had no shortage of opportunities to honor the men who have died for his mistakes, as in a few short months the war death toll has already exceeded that of the first three years of the Vietnam War.

Yet he has declined to send even a single White House official to a single serviceman’s funeral. He has banned ceremony and news coverage for returning coffins — they are to be shipped in furtively, guiltily, and not in body bags but “are not permitted ? anywhere near the grave site” at honor-guard Arlington funerals.

“Bush and his people sent them out to get killed and now you can’t get one of them in Washington to mention these dead,” notes Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin. “Your government would prefer that night falls and the dead are buried in darkness. We must keep them remote, names on a list, and concentrate on things like patriotism, exporting democracy and shipping freedom …”

Check out Breslin’s column, with it’s conclusion — “Here is your war so far this week,” followed by a shockingly long list of one week’s casualties. Or check out The Washington Post‘s “Mission Accomplished” banner it’ll drop to the cutting-room floor. Life goes cheerfully on for the “I travel in somewhat of a bubble” presidency.

Note: This article originally said President Bush did not meet the families of US KIAs, but that part was corrected Nov. 20; the President has reportedly met some family members in private.

From The Daily Outrage

Report from The Washington Post.

Massachusetts’ highest court today invalidated a state ban on same-sex marriages, ruling that the right to marry is “the right to marry the person of one’s choice,” regardless of gender….

It rejected the state’s chief argument in favor of the ban: that the purpose of marriage is “procreation.” That, the court concluded, is largely a cover for “persistent prejudices” against homosexuals.

It then took the extraordinary step of redefining the common law definition of marriage in Massachusetts.

Marriage, under the law, is not merely a union between a man and a woman, the court said.

Rather, it is “the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.”

By Charles Peters at the Washington Monthly.

The District of Columbia government has an Incentive Awards Committee that determines cash bonuses to city employees. Three percent of the employees get the bonus. Guess the percentage of committee members who get it? Fifty.
…

Emily Basile, a high school student in my hometown, Charleston, W.Va., got in trouble last winter for protesting the Iraq War. When her principal, an African American named Clinton Giles, objected, she told him, “Without Rosa Parks, you wouldn’t be where you are right now.”

Giles reacted by calling her “racist and bigoted” and suspended her from school. I think he should have hugged her and held an assembly in her honor. How many American high school students have any idea who Rosa Parks was, much less that her protest of segregation was an apt precedent for Basile’s protest of the war?
…

Gretchen Morgenson had a line about the recently retired president of the New York Stock Exchange that reminds one of what that institution is really about, when she described the “$140 million paid to Richard Grasso for his work as a casino greeter.”
…

William Robertson is my new hero. He’s suing Princeton to get back $525 million that his family foundation has given the university’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs. His reason for the suit-and the reason I’m all for it-is that Princeton officials knew that the money was given “to send students into federal government, and [the school has] ignored us.” Robertson’s foundation pays each student’s entire tuition. Princeton could easily require federal service in return for the tuition, but it does not. The result, reports Michael Powell of The Washington Post, is that “year after year, the [graduate] school has churned out bright young men and women who go to work in non-profit agencies and universities and private industry-just about anywhere but the federal government.”

This government desperately needs these bright people. Unfortunately, what is true at Princeton is true at practically every other prominent school of public affairs. At best, only a small percentage of graduates go into government. What’s sad about all this is that, if they got there, they’d find, as I did, that there’s a lot of interesting and challenging work, plus the enormous satisfaction of serving the public interest. So, why not encourage them to try it out by making any tuition subsidy dependent on their spending at least three years or so in Washington?

From the Arizona Daily Star: “An Arizona congressman wants Customs helicopters to be armed with heavy machine guns to prevent chases involving drug- and people-smugglers from reaching cities.”

From The New York Times

One of Mr. Kick’s recent digs involved an internal report from June 2002 that harshly criticized the Justice Department’s efforts toward diversity in employee hiring, promotion and retention. A version of the report was posted at the department’s Web site last month with about half of the material in the 186-page study blacked out.

But Mr. Kick discovered that the deletions were easy to restore electronically. Opening the document in Adobe Acrobat, a reader and editor for Portable Document Format, or PDF, Mr. Kick used the software’s “Touch Up Object” tool to select the black bars covering the text. He then hit the delete button. The black bars disappeared, leaving just the text.

“It was that simple,” Mr. Kick said. “I was kind of surprised, but we are talking about a government bureaucracy, so I wasn’t that surprised.” The uncensored report, posted at The Memory Hole on Oct. 21, has been downloaded more than 340,000 times.

The Memory Hole

The New York Times: “In her first public statements since her rescue in Iraq, Jessica Lynch criticized the military for exaggerating accounts of her rescue and re-casting her ordeal as a patriotic fable.”

NewMexiKen understands the impact when jobs move off shore. Nevertheless he thought that this brief essay at the Canadian National Post provided an interesting perspective: Upwardly mobile phone jockey… or ‘cyber-coolie’?.

“In India, which has been most successful in stealing call-centre business from the rich countries, companies teach their operators to understand American accents and imitate them. They watch American movies together, and those who can easily comprehend Sylvester Stallone’s dialogue are said to be approaching perfection. Some companies try to create an American ambience by putting little American flags on the desks and providing pizza.”

From The New York Times: Lawyers at E.P.A. Say It Will Drop Pollution Cases

“Congressional critics, environmental groups and officials in some Northeast states described the change as a major victory for the utility industry and a defeat for environmentalists, who had viewed the cases as the best way to require the companies to install billions of dollars of new pollution controls.

Representatives of the utility industry have been among President Bush’s biggest campaign donors, and a change in the enforcement policies has been a top priority of the industry’s lobbyists.”

Paul Krugman: This Can’t Go On

When they do, he predicts “higher import costs, a cutback in spending on cheap foreign goods, rising inflation, perhaps chaotic financial markets, a lower standard of living.” Something to look forward to….

Just as the federal government is in no immediate danger of running out of money, our forces in Iraq are in no danger of outright defeat. But in both cases, current policies appear to be unsustainable: we can’t go on like this indefinitely.

“America plans to spend $20 billion in Iraq next year—more than the entire world spends on aid to Africa, according to The Economist.”

From TOMPAINE.com:

From The Memory Hole — “The Memory Hole has posted a version with no redactions; instead, those sections are highlighted in yellow, so you can easily zoom in on the parts originally deemed too embarassing for us to see.”

Calpundit provides some background:

A couple of weeks ago the Justice Department, after finally acceding to a Freedom of Information request, posted a study on “workforce diversity.” However, it was heavily redacted: nearly half of the report was blacked out.

But in yet another example of utter cluelessness about how computers work, the report was posted on the web in PDF format. More specifically, it was posted in a PDF format called Image+Text, so while the viewable image was redacted, the underlying text (which allows you to search the document) was still there, buried in the innards of the file.

Not buried for long, of course. The good folks at the Memory Hole helpfully restored the text, and even highlighted the redacted parts so we can all see what it was that DOJ wanted to hide. Both versions are here for your viewing pleasure.

You know, I sure hope the guys working on terrorism are a little more clueful about computer protocols and file formats than these guys. This is pitiful.

See also Critical Study Minus Criticism of Justice Dept.