More politics and science

The Scientist has a thought provoking editorial on how ideological policies in the federal government affect science development in this country. It's not surprising that ideology impacts all facets of a society, but this particular administration seems to impart more of a conservative religous tone towards science policy. Stem cell research, and the blocking of federal, taxpayer dollars towards embryonic stem cell research, is a good paradigm for this policy and Bush's "compassionate conservative" theme. This theme includes the failure to embrace the science behind global warming (and anthropogenic [man-caused] climate change), to fully support AIDS research, or the view that resource utilization trumps environmental stewardship.

This president didn't have a mandate to do much of anything after the 2000 election. 9/11 gave him a mandate, based on people's fears, and the Republicans have run with it, affecting deeper change in our society than they would have been able to otherwise. They still manipulate the populace using fear of terrorism as a tactic. Yes, terrorism is real and yes, it has to be dealt with in a very permanent way to make us all safer. But I believe the threat of terrorism can be reduced without invading countries that did not pose a threat to the United States. So far, it seems all we've really done is create a new breed of terrorist with no end in sight.

We can only hope that 11/2/04 reverses the ideology in power. The election of John Kerry will go a long ways towards reversing some of the extreme conservative changes and corresponding inroads on personal freedoms, as well has removing religion-based restrictions on science in this country. It will also remove the use of fear as a method to further a political agenda.

NY Times Endorses Kerry for President

I hadn't seen this earlier but the NY Times has endorsed John Kerry for President in an October 17 editorial. I think it's the most comprehensive and cogent list of arguments why the Bush Presidency has been nothing short of disasterous for the country and why Kerry has the ability and wherewithal to be a very effective and strong Commander-In-Chief. The Bush economic policies of tax cuts and more tax cuts (mostly for the wealthy and large corporations), combined with tremendous increases in spending and the war in Iraq, has made our country vulnerable.

Spending on education is down, Homeland security is not even close, civil liberties have been degraded, the American military is stretched to the breaking point, science is underfunded and abused, and the environment is being raped. This has truly been four years of ineffecutual leadership. People appointed to power like Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Wolfewitz are ideologues of the worst order, with agendas that only pay lip service to American values of truth, freedom, and civil liberties.

The tight Presidential race could be decided by....!

With all the daily polls on the 2004 Presidential election, it gets really hard to pay attention to their results. Each poll uses slightly different questions, sampling size, etc., to make their predictions on who's ahead, what population demographic supports which candidate, and so on. However there's one growing segment of the US population that will not be included in any poll, and that's those who use cell phones as their primary form of telecommunication. And who are the most likely to fit this demographic? Young people, newly registered voters. Presumably many of these (e.g., college students) are more likely to be a little more liberal in their thinking, to be more against the war in Iraq, and to be more educated and pro-active in social and environmental issues. Robert Cringely discusses this in his latest I, Cringely column --he calls this the Diddy Factor, the reason which is made clear in his essay.

Now, couple the Diddy Factor with the extensive voter registration drives targeted at first time voters this year (see Rock the Vote or Democracy for America to name a few). The hope (at least by me) is that the number of pro-Kerry voters are continually being under counted in the various polls. With predictions of an election as close as the disputed 2000 one (where Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College), a strong turnout by the cell phone crowd could/should lead to a John Kerry win over George Bush.

Heads in the sand

On NPR's Talk of the Nation program today (oh yes, that bastion of left-leaning liberal media biase) there was a story about a study that shows that the majority of Republicans and Bush Supporters still think Iraq has (had) WMD (audio story link). The study, carried out by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), shows that the majority of Bush supporters had WMD and or a major program to develop WMD that was supported by al Qaeda. Not too surprisingly, the majority of Kerry supporters believe the opposite. And again not surprisingly, supporters of both candidates agreed that the US should not have gone to war without definite proof that such a program or actual WMD existed in Iraq in the first place.

But this is where it gets interesting. Even after the Duelfer report (CIA) to Congress that says Iraq did not have a viable WMD program, the majority of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq did, and in fact, perceive that the 9/11 Commission actually concluded the exact opposite! Bush supporters want to believe that the US went to war for justifiable reasons and want to believe the Administration. However, what do they do if the facts and what the President says doesn't agree? In a quote from the PIPA director Steven Kull:

"To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq."

In other words, they're soooo confused!

The complete report (go here) is well worth reading.

Flip Flop or Spin?

I'm not sure that I can remember a nastier presidential election race. Or one that's as full of untruth, innuendo, and falsehood.

Through the proxies of the Republican National Committee, blatantly false charges that purport to describe how Kerry's valor during his Viet Nam service was not how it has been described in the supporting documents for his purple hearts, and his bronze and silver stars for bravery. No real evidence was ever supplied. Unfortunately there are people out there that buy this crap. The Republicans and Bush stay on the attack by characterizing everything that Kerry says as promoting terrorism, or changing his mind, or not being strong enough for America. Cheney spouts off that if Kerry is elected, America will surely be attacked by terrorists (this is the same well-reasoned Vice President who recently so eloquently told a US Senator, in public, to go fuck himself!). While Kerry has been having to spend precious campaign time defending himself against these lies, he's finally been able to start fighting back.

The one I like the best over the past week is when Kerry describes the President as living in his own little world of positive spin. According to the President and his advisors, going to war means never having to say you're sorry.

Bush criticizes Kerry for voting to invade Iraq and then changing his mind. Kerry points out that he voted (along with most of the House and Senate) to give the President the authority to go to war as a last resort. As a last resort!!. When you think about this carefully, the vote was the same as a union voting to grant their representatives a strike authorization during a labor negotiation. It strengthens the hand of the one(s) in authority in the negotiation--if the union negotiators can't reach a resolution, they are authorized to call the strike. In the case of the congressional authorization for invading Iraq was only given in the event that all reasonable solutions had been examined, including the completion of the U.N. weapons inspections. This doesn't even take into account that the vote to authorize the President to go to war was based on faulty intelligence combined with a rush to create a rationale for the invasion. Bush says he would do the exact same thing again. Kerry says he would have made very sure that the rationale for going to war was beyond reproach. Gee, if that's a flip flop, then I'm flopping.

I bought the whole "Iraq was dangerous because of WMD and this must not be allowed" argument. So did most of America. Looking back, where was Sadaam going to go? He wasn't a danger to the U.S. He was bottled up. Economic sanctions were allowing him to line his pockets yet everyone knew this couldn't go on forever. Eventually, some pissed off Iraqi (and there were millions) would have finally gotten to him. Was putting him in jail worth the price we've paid, and are continuing to pay. this doesn't even inlcude the price paid by the millions of Iraqi people caught in the crossfire of militants and their continued terrorism against both Iraqis and the coalition forces. Again, where are the WMD? Why are we in this quagmire?

Bush says he would do it again. So much for learning from your mistakes. In the mind of Bush, to admit otherwise shows a lack of strength. And as I write this, on the TV news two more American soldiers are being reported as killed. I want their sacrifice to mean something. But it has to mean more than the what's being given us.

Attack Dogs

As with probably 99.9% of all bloggers, I pretty much have come to the realization I don't have a lot to say that would interest the idle reader. However, after opening up the Blogger app tonight, I remembered I had saved a quote that I had wanted to use.

Right now it's the night after the end of the Republican Party National Convention. As with all such conventions, there was much chest thumping for achievements, real and imagined. And there were a considerable number of attacks on the character, intelligence, and leadership abilities of the Democratic challenger, John Kerry. Maybe it's a matter of perception; since I support Kerry's candidacy, but the attacks seem to have become extremely personal, bordering on the outright nasty.

I'm not naieve--I know that the people running the Democratic Party campaign aren't above such nastiness. But at this point in time, and maybe it's because the RNC really believes they are vulnerable, all semblence of decency seems to have gone out the window. The attacks range from lies and innuendo about Kerry's very real and heroic Viet Nam service record (even my Dad has fallen for the "Swift Boat" bullshit) to the truly personal snide remarks about Kerry's wife.

So I end this with the following quote from the Kerry nomination acceptance speach. Yes, it's a little personal as well, and I can understand if it makes a staunch Republican a little hot. However, these statements are truly based in fact, a point that an honest person will have trouble denying.

I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war. I will have a vice president who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the best advice of our military leaders. And I will appoint an Attorney General who actually upholds the Constitution of the United States.
John Kerry, during his acceptance speech as the Democratic National Party nominee for President of the United States, July 29, 2004

I suspect the next few months will truly bring out the best in America.

The digital age

Is it a new age in war reporting? Not that different perhaps, except maybe with the rapidity that information, whether it be text, photos, or video can be posted to the web from almost anywhere in the world. Paul Andrews published a piece in today's Seattle Times entitled "Digital Age reveals war's brutal details". In the column, Andrews discusses how the administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, failed to see how visual proof of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq would inflame world wide public sentiment far more than any written report. Rumsfeld is supposed to have said (and I paraphrase) that he had no idea how powerful the pictures could be. They seemed so much worse than the report he'd had since January. I sometimes wonder if this is just another example of the conceit continuously exhibited by members of the Bush Administration, or is it just that they're naive?

Now Seymour Hersh reports (in the New Yorker) that the intimidating and degrading treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror became policy after 9/11. Of course this is being denied, but I suspect that it will be shown that harsher interrogation methods became the norm, sanctioned all the way up the Defense and Justice lines of responsibility. The privates, specialists, and sargents all caught in the photos will take the brunt of it. They're in the pictures (how dumb was that?!), and soldiers,while required to follow orders justly, also have the responsibility to not carry out illegal orders. But they will argue that these methods of "softening up" of prisoners to make them more amenable to interrogation was acceptable practice.

One thing is obvioius. There needs to be accountability all the way up the chain of command, all the way to Rumsfeld. Yet the President and VP say that Rumsfeld is doing a great job. Rumsfeld flies to Iraq and tells troops at a rally that he doesn't read the newspapers anymore, insinuating that news organizations aren't presenting the truth, and gets a big cheer.

The conceit of power. Americans deserve more than that.

thoughts of color

This past week I spent three days in Washington DC to attend a NOAA workshop on OHH at our headquarters in Silver Spring MD. I ended up getting a room at a hotel located almost due south from the capital dome, but with Interstate 395 in between. I could see the dome from my room, albeit with several industrial type buildings and the freeway in the foreground. As usual, getting around was not difficult because of the Metro system (including from the airport), although after arriving I did get off at a train station that was much farther from the hotel than I thought, and it took me quite a bit longer trekking through some rather seedy looking territory to get there.

While the meeting went well, and I got a chance to sightsee a little on my last day, that's actually not the reason I'm writing this. The point is more that I was in a largely black part of DC and it was clear that the neighborhood was a little rough. The plexiglass shield protecting the wait staff at a Taco Bell and a local gas station attest to that. It did tend to make me feel a little more vulnerable than usual. This made me wonder. Did I feel this way because of any real physical danger? Probably not, at least no more so than some parts of downtown Seattle. Being a white liberal, I would like to think that I would have no feelings of discomfort around people of color. But I have to admit, getting on a crowded subway train when you're the only white person, does feel different. I think this is where many of us may begin to understand what racism and prejudice feels like. I don't mean to suggest that I experienced this in any overt way. But I certainly felt what it means to be a minority.

After a day of this, I really felt more relaxed. Of course I was still wary. Not because of color. It still was a rough neighborhood.

Update for April

There's still almost two weeks left in April and now the US military death toll in Iraq is up to 100 for the month. There's not much else to say except that the insurgency shows little in the way of a decrease in intensity.

Failure is an option

I was planning to write this on Monday (April 12th) when US combat deaths in Iraq had reached 73 for the month of April. Today I hear it's over 90.

9-11, or at least the conditions and security breakdowns that lead to 9-11, was no-one's fault. Wait, make that the other guy's fault. Oh, what possibly could we have done differently?!