Hate crimes up nationally, lowest in a surprising place.

The FBI released statistics showing that hate crimes rose nationally by 7% over the previous year.

Nationally, 7722 hate crimes were reported. Hate crimes are defined as crimes in which the motivation is the victim's race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

The majority of the hate crimes reported were racially motivated. Of these, 2/3 of them involved a black victim. 20% of them involved a white victim, and the remainder involved a victim who was targetted for being of some other race.

19% of hate crimes involved religion. Of these, nearly 2/3 involved attacks against Jews.

Approximately the same percentage as religion being the motivation were carried out against victims based on sexual orientation, with male homosexuals the most frequent targets.

There is one silver lining in all of this, and it is a most unexpected one. The states with the fewest reported hate crimes, in fact none in one and only one in the other for the whole year, were Mississippi with no hate crimes reported, and Alabama with one.

Yes, you read that right. Mississippi and Alabama.

Mississippi was the state whose racism was famously associated with the movie 'Mississippi Burning,' about the murders of three civil rights workers by the Klan in 1964. It was the home state of such notable racists as depression era Governor Theodore G. Bilbo, who liked to write books comparing blacks with monkeys.

Alabama has always been associated by most of us with racial intolerance, of the most violent and malignant variety. The home state of George Wallace was the state where marchers were brutally beaten at the Edmund Pettis bridge, the state where Bull Conner's police dogs attacked peaceful demonstrators, and the state where klansman murdered four black girls by bombing a Baptist church in 1964.

Mississippi and Alabama have always been considered backwards, racist and a hotbed of racial hatred. Hardly the kind of place you'd expect to see setting a national standard for tolerance.

But that's what we see. Let's recall the words of Dr. King in his 'I have a Dream' speech:

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice...

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I'm sure there are still some racists around in Mississippi and Alabama, as there are every place. I'm sure there are still a few klansmen there, just as for that matter there are some klansmen here in Arizona. But for whatever reason, they have become more tolerant, at least when it comes to resorting to violence, than the rest of the country.

And I call that a miracle. Maybe the rest of the country should see what has changed there.

Bush doctrine: we support democracy-- except where we don't.

Today the Supreme Court of Pakistan threw out five of the six complaints that had been lodged against the election last month of General Pervez Musharrif as President of Pakistan.

Of course, the whole thing is a sham. The 'election' was carefully conducted only among three hundred or so assembly members, virtually assuring that Muharrif would be re-elected. However the opposition to Musharrif, who seized power in a coup nearly a decade ago and has steadfastly refused to give any of it up, complained to Pakistan's Supreme Court and asked that the election be declared illegal. On the eve of the ruling, which would have gone against Musharrif, he declared 'emergency law' and summarily dismissed all of the Supreme Court justices who refused to sign a loyalty oath to him. He then filled the vacancies with his hand-picked replacements, so that the decision rendered today might as well have been written by Musharrif personally.

President Bush has asked that Musharrif leave the army. So he will. That doesn't make him any less of a dictator, nor does it do any more to legitimize his 'election' than the rump Supreme Court decision we saw today. (I could add an acerbic comment here about Bush and elections and Supreme Court decisions, but you all know what I'd say, so I won't.)

What it does is point out in stark relief two things.

1, The support of 'democracy' everywhere that Bush pledged in his second inaugural speech is null and void in countries where the dictator kisses up to us.

2. Bush was a fool for fashioning our whole policy in Pakistan around Pervez Musharrif. There is no 'plan B,' and now State Department officials are feverishly trying to craft one in case someone other than Musharrif emerges from the present crisis as being in control in Pakistan. Sound familiar?

FOX News owners sued by publisher who said they ordered her to lie.

We already know that Rudy Giuliani wants to keep as much distance as he can from Bernard Kerik. We already know that in 2000 he was briefed on Kerik's ties to known mobsters and chose to hire him as police commissioner anyway.

We also well know that Rupert Murdoch's 'fair and balanced' FOX News network tilts strongly to the right.

But we learned today about just how far they are willing to go to keep the Giuliani-Kerik link out of the news.

A publisher was ordered by network executives to lie to Federal investigators to protect him. Of course, lying to Federal investigators is a felony, as we recently saw in the case of Olympic sprinter Marion Jones who is facing prison time for lying to investigators during a steroid investigation.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Senior executives at News Corp. urged publisher Judith Regan to lie to investigators about ex-New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik in order to protect Rudy Giuliani's presidential ambitions, Regan alleges in a lawsuit filed this week.

The lawsuit does not name the executives or cite any documents to back up her allegation. News Corp., which is led by Rupert Murdoch and is the parent company of the Fox television network and cable news channel, called the suit's claims "preposterous" Wednesday.

But Regan says she was the victim of a smear campaign "to save the reputation of Kerik and, by association, Rudy Giuliani."

Regan says she had an affair with Kerik that began in 2001.

The 70-page lawsuit was filed in a state court in New York just days after Kerik's indictment on federal corruption charges in a case that has fueled criticism of Giuliani, his longtime patron.

We will see how this plays out. But we've already seen multiple instances of FOX being willing to lie or stretch the truth on a story on the air in order to help Republicans. So this is hardly a surprise, unfortunately.

Turns out that there may be something real about the 'Da Vinci Code.'

In the book and the movie "The Da Vinci Code," a secret code is hidden within paintings created by the Renaissance master which hold the keys to deadly secrets that are protected by a fanatical secret society.

There may be no such deep and dark secret at work here, but an Italian musician named Giovanni Maria Pala appears to have uncovered a musical code within one of Da Vinci's most famous paintings, "The Last Supper" (pictured above). The painting depicts the last Passover meal shared by Christ and the twelve disciples before his betrayal by Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve.

Pala discovered that if he put five parallel lines in the mode of a musical staff across the picture and looked at the positions of the hands of the people in the picure and the bread on the table, and replaced them with musical notes, they fit exactly into the scale. When he tried to play it, it did not make any sense, until he remembered that Da Vinci, a lefthander, wrote sometimes from right to left instead of left to right. When he read it backwards, the music formed a tune remiscent of requiems played at the time. In other words, Da Vinci, if he put it in there on purpose, must have figured that someday someone would figure out the code, and play the music with the picture.

It is perhaps most amazing that after waiting for four hundred years to be discovered, this would be discovered within a couple of years after a movie came out speculating on the possibility of Da Vinci hiding clues in his paintings.

Sometimes reality does mirror fiction, more than we think.

The first brick in the wall.

Last night Democrats took control of the Virginia State Senate for the first time in twelve years.

The victory is significant because it is the first elected individual or group who will help redistrict Congress after the 2010 census (Republicans though their majority was cut in half retained control of Virginia's House of Delegates, but unlike the Senate members of that body serve two year terms so Democrats will have another crack at that one in 2009 along with trying to win re-election for Governor Tim Kaine.)

After the 2000 census, Republicans controlled redistricting in most large states (including Virginia.) How districts are drawn is of critical importance.

To give you an idea of how much the control of Congress is dictated by gerrymandering, consider what happened last year in the twenty districts which are not gerrymandered (eight in Arizona and five in Iowa drawn by citizens redistricting commissions and seven at-large districts that cover entire states.) In those twenty districts, four changed partisan hands (actually five, since Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont was replaced by a Democrat, but I'm not even counting that as a party change since Sanders caucused with the Democrats anyway.) If this rate is projected to the entire house, last year Democrats would have picked up 87 seats instead of thirty. So clearly gerrymandering, based on this admittedly small sample (and we have our issues with redistricting here in Arizona too) limited the turnover in Congress.

And the truth is, Tom Delay and the Republicans built themselves a pretty effective wall during the early part of the decade. That wall is now crumbling for a variety of reasons, but it underscores how important it is for Democrats to control the redistricting process in as many states as possible (or at least prevent Republicans from having total control).

But at least for right now, one thing is certain. And that is that Democrats will control the Virginia state Senate in three and a half years.

Thompson can tell the difference between a crook and a former crook; Rudy can't.

It's very rare that I am complimentary towards a Republican. It's even rarer that I would be complimentary towards a Republican running for President. It's most vanishingly rare that I would be complimentary towards a rabid right-wing Republican running for President like Fred Thompson. In fact in my only post specifically devoted to Thompson, back when he was higher in the polls as a not-yet-announced candidate than he has been since he announced, I poked some fun at him while pointing out his deficiencies.

But I'm going to say he is doing the right thing today. And it's not about any laughing matter. Specifically, he is standing by Philip Martin, who is the co-chair of his campaign. It was reported over the weekend by the Washington Post that Martin has a criminal past, which between 1979 and 1983 included convictions or guilty pleas for selling marijuana and cocaine.

In today's 'gotcha' environment, many politicians would immediately sever all ties with Martin. But I'm glad that Thompson is taking a stand and not severing them, especially now that the campaign is entering a critical stage. We will see how intense the heat is and whether he continues to stay with Martin, but it does speak well that at least Thompson's initial reaction was to stand behind Martin.

So why am I applauding Thompson for standing by Martin, especially when I've been very critical of Rudy Giuliani's decisions to hire mob associate Bernard Kerik, coke dealer Thomas Ravenel or child molester Alan Placa?

First and foremost, it's a matter of time. I wrote a post once, called the prison that follows prison that dealt with how hard it is for a convicted felon in America to become a productive member of society, or for that matter to be anything other than a convicted felon in the eyes of most people. For that matter, unless he's had his rights restored, Philip Martin would not be allowed to vote in most states. But look, his last conviction was TWENTY-FOUR years ago! TWENTY-FOUR bloody years ago! Do we EVER forgive anybody, or let them move ahead with their lives? The man has kept out of trouble for nearly a quarter of a century, and some people want to haul up what he did in 1979 or 1983. Guess what? Besides it being a long time ago, he was also a lot younger then. Sometimes younger people do foolish things, and then they learn from them. All the evidence is that Philip Martin did learn from his mistakes. I'd expect that the Thompson campaign probably did a background check on him (or maybe he's known Thompson for some time) so what this says is that Fred Thompson actually can recognize that people can change if they have the opportunity (now if only that would give rise to a progressive social policy when it comes to prison reform and rehab programs.)

In stark contrast, as was reported in the March 30 New York Times, Giuliani hired Kerik as police commissioner in 2000, shortly after he was advised that Kerik was very closely associated with known mobsters (and as we now know he was getting 'free' work done by them for him while he was police commissioner.) It is true that Rudy may not have known about Ravenel (who resigned from Rudy's campaign after being busted for dealing coke), but Placa, whose association with Rudy goes back to high school, was hired by Rudy's law firm after he was suspended by the Catholic Church from continuing to practice as a priest following the 2002-2003 investigation by the Suffolk County Grand Jury into child molestation in the Diocese of Rockville Center, in which Placa figured prominently. Unfortunately the statute of limitations has run out on many of the crimes which Placa was tied to in the investigation (you can read more in the link I provided above if your stomach is strong enough) but that is hardly the same thing as Martin having plead guilty on the cocaine charge and paid his debt to society.

With the recency of the crimes, and in particular Rudy's being willing to hire a guy with known mob ties as police commissioner, it seems as if Rudy Giuliani just doesn't care about whether he hired criminals or not, and it raises some serious judgement issues.

And that's where it is also an issue. Giuliani has demonstrated poor judgement by continuing to hire criminals who have committed crimes in the very recent past (or are under suspicion at the time of continuing to commit them, as the March 30 Times article made clear in the case of Kerik) while Thompson is giving a second chance to a guy who has kept his nose clean for 24 years. I call that compassionate, and that's very, very rarely a word I'd ever put in a sentence with Fred Thompson.

New GOP strategy is to attack Congress for inaction-- but how accurate is it?

Recently the Republicans have begun claiming that this Congress is a 'do-nothing' Congress, in an attempt to undermine the Congressmen and Congresswomen that we have worked very hard to elect.

That is however, absolutely false.

This Congress has passed and the President has signed at least three major pieces of legislation, all on issues that had been languishing and unattended to since the beginning of his administration:

1. Minimum wage increase. This represented the first increase in the minimum wage since 1998. Previous attempts in the GOP Congress had failed every single year.

2. College financial aid bill. With skyrocketing tuition costs and students leaving school tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they even have their first full-time job, this bill cuts interest rates in half and helps school boards with limited budgets recruit qualified teachers by giving college graduates a way to be forgiven of some or all of their debt if they step into the classroom for a few years, and it will cost the local school boards nothing.

3. Ethics reform bill. We saw the 'culture of corruption' last year in Washington, and as we've seen this year some of it still has to be rooted out. So Congress passed the most sweeping ethics reform bill since the Watergate era. Critics like to point out the loopholes that still remain. Sure, but those which remain also remained when the GOP Congress did absolutely nothing about ethics reform (other than DeLay's attempts to 'fix' the problem by packing the ethics oversight committee with his cronies).

There are also three other important pieces of legislation that haven't gotten passed mainly due to the President's veto and/or Republican-led filibusters and opposition in the Senate:

1. An Iraq bill which mandates withdrawal deadlines. The American people are quite bluntly put sick and tired of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars down this rat-hole when there are crying needs to pay for here. And on top of that, we are borrowing money to pay for it, but the GOP members of Congress won't even consider a supplemental tax to pay for Iraq, preferring instead to pass the debt on to future generations (with interest, of course.)

2. A stem-cell funding bill. Our policy restricting research in this area is just one of many examples of the administration's disdain for science and scientific research. Other examples include cuts to alternative fuel programs and backing the teaching of creationism in public schools. The result is that the pace of progress for American science, which had effectively lapped the rest of field by the end of the Cold War, has slowed down considerably so that we are now living on 'borrowed time' until the rest of the world catches up (and they are not so far back anymore.) The stem-cell bill was of course only a piece of this whole but it is the piece where the battleground was drawn with Congress. In fact, even last year's Republican Congress realized how important this was and passed a stem-cell funding bill, but the President, who seems to live in a world of his own where science plays second fiddle to dogma, vetoed it.

3. SCHIP. The GOP has been misleading about this from the get go. SCHIP is not a Federal program except for residents of the District of Columbia, but rather a bunch of 'block grants' to states (recall that is something that the Republican Congress did with many Federal programs in the 1990's). Congress must give some guidelines to make sure the money is being spent appropriately, but it sets intentionally broad parameters as to what those limits are in order to allow the states the flexibility to tailor their programs to the specific needs within their state. Keep in mind this is a Republican reform. But opponents of SCHIP renewal are now implying that it is the federal government that would be paying for it (i.e. 'national' healthcare) and quote the maximum allowable limits for any state (intentionally set high to allow states to cover high-cost of living cities like NY and SF if they exist within the state) and imply that would be the limit for everybody. Of course if you live in most places, $81 thousand for a family of four sounds like a ridiculously high limit and in most places it is, but it would not be in, for example, downtown San Francisco where even small economy apartments can run upwards of $2500 per month plus utilities. In a place like where I live that would be two or three times the typical mortgage, so there is little comparison. But count on Republicans to take a good idea like flexibility to the states which they should be taking credit for and twist it into a way to deny funding for kids health insurance (at current levels, Maine and several other states will soon begin running out of funds as health care costs have continued to accelerate rapidly).

4. Comprehensive mmigration reform. We can't get a handle on the problem without including a market based solution that addresses the reason why illegal border crossers keep coming-- our own job market (unemployment is at historic lows, so the idea that they are taking jobs from Americans is just not true.) This was one bill that the President would have signed, but it was blocked primarily by Republicans in the Senate (though with the misguided defections of a handful of Democrats.)


So on these bills, the Democratic Congress passed six out of seven, and three of those were signed. Not good enough, but certainly not the 'do-nothing' title that GOP strategists are claiming (that title would belong to the previous GOP Congress which failed even to pass nine out of eleven spending bills in 2006, virtually guaranteeing that this Congress would get off to a slow start as they had to finish last year's work.*)

What needs to be done now? Well, getting larger Democratic majorities in Congress would be a very good start, especially in the Senate where the balance of power hangs by a thread. A veto-proof majority would be nice but probably a very high hill to climb (but not absolutely impossible-- on SCHIP 44 Republicans voted to override, leaving about fifteen short.) And this should make it absolutely clear that we will need a Democratic President next year, someone who will sign these bills if Congress passes them.

*-- the more conspiratorially minded among us might even wonder, given the current assault on Congress in the right-wing media, whether this was actually part of a grand strategy that began last year to gum up the works and lay the foundation for the kinds of charges we are now seeing.

Sounds like they don't want a trial that might spill the beans.

The State Department has promised immunity for Blackwater employees involved in last month's shooting in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqis dead.

This brings up two troubling questions at the outset:

1. Other than diplomatic immunity (and it has never been suggested that Blackwater Employees are diplomats) the State Department has no authority to grant immunity against prosecution in a U.S. court. That is the prerogative of the Justice Department. This could be the first real test of the new Attorney General, to see whether Mukasey points this fact out to the State Department and then how he proceeds from there;

2. The FBI is not yet done investigating, so the quickness of the State Department to grant immunity not only continues and expands on the unilateralism that has been a hallmark of George W. Bush's administration, but also suggests that they are hiding something and fear that a trial might bring it out into the open. What are they hiding?

More than a fund source.

I recently received a call (in fact, several, based on the phone numbers of calls I had missed but which showed up on my caller ID so they really wanted to get hold of me) from an outfit which had evidently been hired by one of the leading Democratic campaigns (I will decline at this point to identify the campaign, other than to say it is one of the candidates presently ahead of Bill Richardson, who I support and who is presently running fourth). They got right to the quick of things and asked if I wanted to donate money to that campaign.

I told them I support Bill Richardson, so they thanked me and presumably will call again if their candidate ends up being the nominee.

Now, forget for a moment the fact that I'm not in any position to donate money, since I have kids who will be starting college in a few years, or that I am making two mortgage payments (my daughter and son in law rent from me and pay part, but not all, of what I would need to offset that mortgage payment). To be honest, whether I was in a position to donate money or not, I give what used to be considered much more useful than money.

I give time, effort and energy. I have taken the time to be elected as a precinct committeeman, and I work hard for the candidates who I work for. I also stay in with them until the end, whether that is a good end or a bad end. Several years ago I agreed to support a candidate who was running for Congress. It turned out that he was running his campaign pretty much alone out of the back room of his house; his (homemade) campaign literature listed 'campaign accomplishments' in lieu of any real accomplishments and talked about where he had gone to visit-- and in the end he got 1.8% of the vote to finish last in a field of unknowns in our oversized congressional district (the largest city in the district is about 50,000 people and it covers an area the size of the state of Illinois.) But I worked my tail off for him anyway, put in the time and the miles, and on the day of the primary although he didn't win, he did get votes in our county that I'm sure he (not having been here) would not have gotten, and at least in my precinct he did get more votes than the person who actually won the primary district-wide. So if I don't have money to give, I believe I have a lot to give that is not money.

However, by not asking whether I would be willing to volunteer first, I believe that the campaign of that candidate is missing a step (even though in my case, my answer would be identical, that I am committed to working for Governor Richardson.)

Paul Tsongas once said while running for President in 1992 but scraping by for funds, "Money is the mother's milk of politics." And in fact, that year I felt inspired to give $20 to Tsongas, and later it turned out that many of his contributions were embezzled by a campaign worker. That disillusioned me on giving any campaign donations at all for a long time, at least a decade (well, I worked hard for that twenty bucks, and I gave it to Paul Tsongas so he could get his message out, not to buy some crook a Mercedes.)

Nobody wants to be thought of as nothing more than a source of free cash, and that is the message I got from the call. Further, if they asked if the people they contacted wanted to volunteer first, they could still ask for cash later in the call (either, 'Great! Thank you for agreeing to volunteer! Would you like to also make a donation today?' or, 'I'm sorry you're too busy, would you be able to show your support with a monetary donation instead?') Doing it that way would get you a local volunteer list, still give you a chance to ask everyone who isn't otherwise committed for money, and make people feel like you want them to do more than just write a check to your campaign.

I am also volunteering for another candidate who is running for another office. Recently I asked about whether that candidate had some literature available for an event I was working at. When I called, the phone representative answered that they didn't have any literature yet, or really any well developed campaign, because at this point in the campaign, they were focusing on raising money. Well, I'm glad they are raising money, but was it really worth missing a chance to get your name and information out to hundreds or even thousands of potential voters? The whole point of a campaign organization is that you can have some people raising money while other people are out there organizing, canvassing and talking to voters-- it is possible to do both at the same time.

One guy I will mention that I worked for (and for that matter gave a few dollars to) is Paul Babbitt, in 2004. He raised $2 million, and never really got his message out (but at the end of the campaign, there were boxes and boxes of unopened Babbitt literature). So he got thumped by 22 points. He could just as easily have done that with no money, and frankly if the focus had been on getting him out there more, Rick Renzi's misleading attack ads might not have been as effective.

Republicans have for a long time held a significant edge in fundraising (they after all have a lot more wealthy donors, who can simply write a check for the max, and then go get the same from all of their friends.) One of their problems during the past few years is that Democrats have become more effective at raising funds, and the GOP was so addicted to simply getting a bigger megaphone by spending more on ads than Democrats that they didn't know as well how to campaign when they were behind in the cash totals. Now, that can be a good thing for Democrats, but only if we make sure we don't fall into the same trap as Republicans did. We can't disconnect with our own base and volunteer network simply for the blind pursuit of funds.

Genarlow Wilson released from prison. Finally.

A few months ago, I put up a post on the case of Genarlow Wilson, a Georgia man who was sentenced to ten years in prison because when he was seventeen he had consensual sex with a fifteen year old girl who went to the same high school he did. He would also have had to register as a sex offender upon being released from prison.

Aside from questions about whether this prosecution ever would have happened had Wilson not been black or if it were the girl who was two years older instead of himself, there was a question about whether the laws originally intended to protect minors from child molesters went too far in the case. There were also those who simply hate the idea of teen (or other premarital) sex and wanted to punish Wilson to the nth degree to make him an example for other high school students.

Well, today the Georgia Supreme Court ordered Wilson released unconditionally, ruling that ten years for teenage sex was 'cruel and unusual punishment.'

I agree. It shouldn't have taken this long, but at least someone in Georgia had a lick of sense.

Is Rudy really a simpleton, or is he just talking like one?

GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani is claiming that he can end illegal immigration in three years.

OK. So that means he can probably end global warming in four years, and probably end hunger, disease and poverty. Heck, he can probably get us out of Iraq in-- oh, never mind-- like the rest of the leading GOP candidates he has no plans for getting the U.S. out of Iraq, ever.

He suggests he can do it by an enforcement only mechanism, of walling off the whole border and beefing up the border patrol. He says if people show up at the border they will see the wall and turn around. The exact quote is,

"If you do this for two or three years, you'll change behavior... If people come to the border and figure they can't get in, they'll stop."

Yeah. I guess he figures that no one will have the ingenuity to come in via shipping container (like thousands of Chinese do every year) or by boat like the Cubans and Hatians, or by getting on a cheap flight to Canada first (or does he plan to wall off that border too?) or sneaking in hidden among the crates in the trailer of one of those many thousands of Mexican trucks that the Bush administration has generously allowed to operate all over the U.S. What a simplistic moron Rudy is if he actually believes that.

He says he can do it 'like he brought down the crime rate in New York.'

Uh, note to Rudy: While he was mayor of New York, the crime rate dropped sharply NATIONALLY. That was after the Clinton crime bill was passed in 1993 that put 100,000 cops on the streets, and was roundly criticized by Republicans (remember, 'midnight basketball?') and which was passed despite their fighting it tooth and nail. Well, guess what? It worked. It worked in New York. It also worked in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, Detroit, and all over the country. So maybe if Rudy wants to 'end illegal immigration' like he 'ended crime' in New York, what he means is that he plans to find a way to take credit if someone else figures out a way to bring it down.

Or, maybe that isn't it either. We know that Rudy likes to hire criminals, as I've blogged on before featuring his hiring of mob associate Bernard Kerik, cocaine dealer Thomas Ravenel and child molester Alan Placa. So that seems to be his crime plan, just hire them all. From which we can surmise that it may be that his plan for getting rid of illegal immigrants is to give them all government jobs, or working for his campaign.

Rudy is spewing simplistic rhetoric, and either he knows it, or he is himself too simple to be President. I suspect it is the former.

Does anyone notice a contrast between the evacuees we see today and those from two years ago?

It's always tough for people facing evacuations. Everything they have may be gone, and they can only wait and hope and pray. And then wait some more.

And the evacuations now under way in southern California are no different. I hope that the people affected are able to return home soon, and that those who in fact have lost their homes are able to begin rebuiliding very quickly.

Nevertheless, it does give me cause to ponder, especially when I see stories about the thousands now packed into Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego. Not that I am suggesting that they shouldn't get the attention they now are getting, with rock-and-roll bands providing free entertainment, gourmet foods being served on buffet lines and even massage therapists providing 'stress-release' service for evacuees. And I think that all of this is wonderful. I am glad that they are getting all this service.

However it is hard not to compare the way these people are getting along with the complete lack of attention and deplorable conditions that reigned in the New Orleans Superdome, and later at the Houston Astrodome, two years ago after Katrina. Former first lady Barbara Bush (and the mother of the current President) even visited the Astrodome and said of the Katrina evacuees who were then occupying stadium seats there

Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.

She said this, and then giggled.

Well, now we know where George W. Bush gets his ideas about 'compassionate conservatism' from.

I wonder if the reason why the Katrina evacuees were treated so much worse is that unlike the evacuees in Southern California, they were mostly poor, black and while some owned homes they weren't even close in value to the million dollar houses that are now exploding in flames all over Southern California.

As I said at the outset, the purpose of this post is not to question any of the attention being given to the current evacuees. I certainly feel lucky not to be in any of their shoes today. And the response of government officials at all levels in the current situation has been very good. But it is to question whether a person's economic status and possibly race is directly related to how high a priority they are when it comes to helping them in their time of need.

James Watson is not only a bigot, but he is a fraud who stole his biggest moment from the woman who deserved it.

Likely we all know by now that Nobel Laureate James Watson, who was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in biology for his 1953 paper published jointly with Francis Crick on the structure of DNA, once again stuck his foot in his mouth by saying that blacks were genetically inferior and less intelligent.

And this is hardly the first time that Watson has made such idiotic and prejudiced statements, among others suggesting that if there is a gene for homosexuality that women found to have a fetus with the gene should be 'allowed to have an abortion' (from which one can also infer that he feels that other women should not be allowed to have one) or suggesting that the idea of the 'Latin lover' is genetically based and that people of Hispanic descent have genetically based superior sexual prowess. In a British documentary, Watson suggested that there was a genetic basis for stupidity and it should be treated medically.

Well, I have one question for James Watson: Is dishonestly of the most horrifyingly immense proportion a genetic disease, or did he learn it from someone else? The discovery of the helical structure of DNA is rightly regarded as one of the two or three biggest scientific achievements ever. Only Mr. Watson is wrongly credited with it. Let me introduce you to the real genius behind the research, and one who has been stripped of the recognition which she so richly deserves and cast into historical obscurity by the betrayal of one of her closest colleagues, which in turn was paired with James Watson's basic dishonesty to change the face of scientific history, and perpetrate a great fraud:



The photo you see here is of Rosalind Franklin. It was Franklin, a trained chemist, who while working for Dr. Maurice Wilkins at King's College, took numerous x-ray photos of the DNA structure, and in particular one now known as 'photo 51', which clearly showed the structure and which she was quite close to figuring out on her own. According to an article written by Dr. Lynne Osman Elkin, a professor of biological sciences at California State University, Hayward,

NOVA: How close did Franklin actually come to deciphering the structure of DNA?

Elkin: She was very close. She had all the parameters of the helical backbone. She was the one who figured out that there were two forms of DNA, which made solving the whole structure possible. She had figured out that backbone of the A form is antiparallel. It wouldn't have been very long before she figured out that the B form backbone was antiparallel as well.

Only she couldn't have guessed the evil designs that lurked within her very lab. Her trusted partner and mentor, Maurice Wilkins, secretly and without her knowledge took photo 51 and showed it to James Watson. Wilkins then described in detail to Watson over dinner how research at the college was progressing and what he and Franklin were thinking.

Watson himself described the exact sequence of the betrayal, in his book, The Double Helix, where he writes,

Walking down the passage...[Wilkins] revealed that...he had quietly been duplicating some of Rosy's and Gosling's [Rosalind's assistant] X-ray work...Then the even more important cat was let out of the bag: Since the middle of the summer Rosy had had evidence for a new three-dimensional form of DNA...When I asked what the pattern was like, Maurice [Wilkins] went into an adjacent room to pick up a print of the new form they called the "B" structure. The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race. The pattern was unbelievably simpler than those obtained previously...and Maurice told me he was now quite convinced she [Rosalind Franklin] was correct.

Wilkins got his thirty pieces of silver, sharing in the recognition by the Nobel committee with Watson and Crick. Franklin, who actually deserves to be credited with discovering the structure of DNA more than any of the other three, had died by then, and in fact it is quite likely that the price for her research was indeed her life-- she got ovarian cancer likely after exposure to the large number of x-rays her research entailed.

James Watson for his part, has acted the part of a man who actually knows he is guilty, that everything he has is based upon stolen research. He has missed few opportunities since then to attack Franklin's reputation and alternately described her using everything from 'frumpy and uncommunicative' to 'very intelligent' but off the track (which is utterly false-- Aaron Klug discovered a March 17, 1953 draft by Franklin written concurrently with Watson and Crick's paper which makes it clear that she was still able, despite the betrayal to figure it out at the same time as Watson and Crick-- and let Watson's own words quoted above about his meeting with Wilkins contradict his later denials.)

I first learned about Rosalind Franklin from a college biology instructor who had actually met James Watson. My biology instructor called him, 'a lech,' apparently having reason to believe that he was too horny for his own good. But having delved deeper into this, my own belief is that not only should James Watson refrain from making any more of the bigotted statements that he seems to be so famous for, but he should count his blessings that few have publically pointed at him as being a first magnitude fraud and thief.

In a just world, schoolkids would learn who the real discoverer of the structure of DNA was: Rosalind Franklin. But the world is rarely just.

Empty Words

A few months ago during the Michael Vick imbroglio, basketball player Stephon Marbury defended dogfighting as 'a sport.' I took Marbury to task for his choice of words, and wrote,

Well, I suppose that you can call anything a 'sport,' no matter how barbaric it is, even dwarf-tossing or Russian roulette.

And I suppose you could refer to a Volkswagen as a Rolls Royce, but at the end of the day it remains a Volkswagen.

Marbury's comments were however a tiny transgression compared to what we have heard from both the Bush administration and from wordsmiths on talk radio and elsewhere on the far right.

I don't have to, but I will remind you of the unfunded mandate that has resulted in schools encouraging underachieving students to drop out for fear of the budgetary consequences of that child remaining in class, that is called, 'no child left behind,' and of the legislation that increases the amount of pollutants in our air called, the 'clear skies act' or in the water that is called the 'clean water act,' or of the clear-cutting bill called, 'the healthy forests act.'

We've seen 'support the troops' become a buzzword for 'support the President's foreign policy,' even while the same administration works feverishly to cut funding for the VA and denies disability claims for thousands of vets wounded in Iraq, who come home with life-altering injuries.

And recently we've seen that the right likes to refer to the U.S. healthcare system as 'the best in the world.' But that is simply not true. People in other industrialized countries such as Canada live longer than we do, have lower infant mortality and in fact, as I wrote about recently, avail themselves of our so-called 'superior' system in vanishingly small numbers, while many, many times as many Americans have bought prescription drugs from Canadian sources, despite the best efforts of our government to prevent it. Of course Americans can't use Canada's healthcare system because they bar us from it. In fact, our healthcare system is worse than those in Europe or Canada, plus it is much more expensive in terms of our GDP, but those on the right continue to delude themselves that they can call a turkey an eagle.

And today, the house will certainly vote not to override the President's veto on SCHIP. All along, they've been questioning the income limits. But here is the dirty little secret: the income limits are the same as they are in the current authorization of the program. And for that matter, the number bandied about ($83,000 for a family of four) is not the federal limit on income, that is the maximum that a state can request be eligible for the program but the President has to approve the request. Other wise the eligibility cap remains where it is at the Federal level, about fifteen thousand dollars less than that. But you won't hear that on right wing radio, they'd much rather smear a twelve year old whose family, despite what they make, will soon lose their home because of medical bills.

But I suppose all this wordsmithing works well for conservatives who don't want to spend a dime on anything.

Words are cheap.

Our ancestors were-- party animals.

I found this story very interesting:

early humans threw clambakes.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In one of the earliest hints of "modern" living, humans 164,000 years ago put on primitive makeup and hit the seashore for steaming mussels, new archaeological finds show.

Call it a beach party for early man.

But it's a beach party thrown by people who weren't supposed to be advanced enough for this type of behavior. What was found in a cave in South Africa may change how scientists believe Homo sapiens marched into modernity.

Sounds like they will have to rewrite the books on this stuff.

I bet that pretty soon, they will find a sample of early writing, and it will say,

"Heya, Fred, how's Pebbles?" and the next line will be,

"A regular one, Barn. Don't forget bowling tonight, right?"

Yabba, Dabba, Doo.

Verizon gets cought pitching cookies out of the jar.

A story out today about a major cell phone provider is pretty disturbing. The story indicates that Verizon gave tens of thousands of private and personal records to various governmental agencies without a court order.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Verizon Communications says it has provided federal, state and local law enforcement agencies tens of thousands of communication and business records relating to customers based on emergency requests without a court order or administrative subpoena.

In an October 12 letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, a senior Verizon official says that from 2005 through this September there were 63,700 such requests, and of those, 720 came from federal authorities.

Verizon defends this decision by citing the case of a pedophile who was caught as a result.

That seems a thin defense. I'm not arguing that these records don't contain information that could be useful in stopping criminals, but by circumventing the established rule of law (as expressed in a court order or warrant) they are violating the right to privacy that a phone customer should expect. We all know that we could legally be subject to surveillance if there is a court order, but to obtain one there has to be some evidence that we are engaged in illegal or dangerous activity. That fact serves as a balance against unchecked state authority.

I've heard people say that they don't care because they are doing nothing wrong. But in so doing they completely miss the point. It's not a matter of whether there is a reason to conduct surveillance or not, but a matter of whether the civil authorities follow a procedure, one which is broad enough to allow them to catch the guilty but has safeguards to protect the innocent aganst the broad intrusion of federal and state (not to use too fine a word) spying. If they do not have to follow procedure, that's where we all could potentially stand in jeopardy.

I'm not surprised frankly that if a cellular company engaged in this kind of practice, it would be Verizon.

Congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide

The Bush administration is worried about the reaction that a congressional committee resolution that states a simple fact-- that the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1917 was a 'genocide,' will cause in Turkey.

The Turks of course claim that these events, which happened before nearly anyone alive today was born, were simply a matter of inter-ethnic fighting.

First, let's dispense with that fiction. The Ottomans, who felt threatened by Christian Armenians because they were well aware that the colonial powers, France and England, planned to divide up the spoils of their empire if the side Turkey was on lost World War I (which they eventually did) wanted to get rid of their non-muslim population from an area in the eastern part of the empire. So following the orders of the so-called 'three Pashas' (leaders in the Ottoman government) Turkish troops and irregulars embarked on a campaign to systematically eradicate the Armenian population. Mehmet Talat Pasha, who held the position of Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, is known to have issued the order,

"Kill every Armenian man, woman, and child without concern".

On the orders of Mehmet Talat Pasha and others, Armenians were simply butchered by armed soldiers in their villages, the villages themselves were burned to the ground and those who managed to flee were pursued and mercilessly slaughtered when caught. Some were temporarily spared and let go in remote regions of the desert to die a slow death of starvation. Thousands of others avoided the soldiers but had to flee across the border into Russia where some survived but others froze to death, starved to death or were killed by local gangs of marauders-- not surprising at that, as the Christian Armenians have always been about as 'welcome' among their various Muslim neighbors as a cat in the dog pound. In fact, in many ways the Armenian genocide provided a blueprint for Hitler's Holocaust against those he considered undesirable-- primarily Jews, a generation later.

It is also true that while the Ottoman empire was carved up and shrunk down to its Turkish core (plus a third of Kurdistan-- more on that further down) and the British and the French demanded that the Turks pay some reparations, the one act of war that the Turks were never held accountable for was the Armenian genocide. It turned out that the Turkish concern about the Christian British and French colonialists was misplaced-- they did indeed divide the Ottoman empire, but in creating territories (which eventually became nations) like Iraq, Syria and Jordan, they just drew lines on a map, thinking in terms of plunder, not people. The peoples of these lands were artificially divided by lines drawn in London or Paris and often forced into new political entities which made no sense historically, culturally, or ethnically (much of our present problem in Iraq springs from this fact.)

Of course the powers that won WWI did not consider genocide to be very serious to begin with. Britain and France were guilty in their long colonial past of everything from the slave trade to plundering and carrying out extreme acts of brutality against indigenous peoples all over the world. For that matter, the United States was only a generation removed from Wounded Knee and would not have wanted to have its past history involving the Nez Perce or Cherokee, for example, scrutinized very closely. So the world simply forgot.

But now, ninety years too late, but still better than never, a committee of the United States Congress has forwarded to a floor vote a simple, non-binding resolution which contains no specific actions or recommendation for action. It simply acknowledges that the Armenian genocide was in fact a genocide-- and by any modern definition it meets the definition of one.

The Bush administration has questioned the timing of this resolution. They are worried that Turkey may invade northern Iraq to fight against Kurdish rebels operating from the region. To date Kurdistan has been the one area of Iraq that has been relatively peaceful so the administration is worried that a war going on in Kurdistan would complicate their already-unattainable goal of to winning a 'victory' in Iraq.

But to question the timing is ridiculous. For years they've had a rubber stamp Congress and one that would never have considered such a resolution. A Congress with the fortitude to do so was seated only nine months ago. And this is one of the first nonbinding resolutions they've taken up (and seriously, hasn't Turkey been threatening to invade Iraq for at least the past three years? The same argument would have been made at any time since January if the resolution was put forward).

Now, I don't mean to claim that Democrats are blameless when it comes to plowing under the Armenian genocide. After all, our party has controlled Congress before, and never passed such a resolution. However, we haven't since 1994, and even back then the issue hadn't reached such a stage of consciousness. Further, while I would argue that in general Republicans have been worse about showing moral clarity on human rights issues (except of course when the perpetrators were communists), Democrats have failed as well-- Jimmy Carter, for all his well-earned reputation as a champion of human rights, does have one huge blot on that record-- as President he supported Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge maintaining a seat in the United Nations and did not speak out or oppose Pol Pot, who was the biggest genocidal murderer of that day. And Bill Clinton did not speak out about, let alone take action to oppose the biggest genocide to have occurred on his watch, that in Rwanda.

Nevertheless, Carter and Clinton at least deserve credit for being willing to speak up against erstwhile allies like the Shah of Iran and some of the Latin American dictatorships for human rights abuses. Republicans' stands on human rights can best be related by a letter I wrote once to Jon Kyl (in 1988 or 1989 when I lived in Phoenix and he was my congressman.) I was concerned about reports that the government in Sudan (then technically a U.S. ally) was involved in the slave trade, supporting the kidnapping of African men, women and children who were then sold as slaves in Saudi Arabia and other countries. Kyl 'got back to me' with a response, and it was exactly word for word the lie that the Reagan era state department was perpetrating that the Sudanese government was doing everything they could to stop the slave trade. Of course everyone knew that wasn't true, they were hip deep in it (as they are today). But then today they are both failing to stop the slave trade and today's biggest genocide-- in Darfur, and the Bush administration again does as little as they can get away with.

Which leads us back to the Turkish situation involving the Kurds. It is true that the Turks feel threatened by Kurdish rebels, operating from what has become a free and autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. However, Kurdistan itself is effectively a nation that has been divided up into three parts, Turkish, Iraqi and Iranian. When the colonialists drew their lines on the map, they separated the Iraqi and Turkish Kurds from each other, so that families and whole communities were torn asunder. And instead of allowing open travel and passage across that border, the Turks have elected to prevent it. And so they face a restless Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey, with a military resistance that has bases in Iraq. However, perhaps instead of invading Iraq, perhaps the Turks should consider establishing a separate autonomous region in southeastern Turkey, which could then peacefully remain in Turkey but have an open border with the Iraqi Kurdish region. In fact, this might also serve U.S. interests as well since the logical third piece of the equation would be for Iran to do the same thing with their third of Kurdistan, and they would certainly feel pressure to do so. But instead, Turkey has brutally suppressed any Kurdish aspirations for greater autonomy, and so they have certainly bought themselves more trouble.

But that is no reason why our Congress shouldn't take the time to state facts. And the Armenian genocide is a historical fact.

Why I will vote Democratic for President regardless

Rarely do I get spurred to write something by a comment by an anonymous commenter, but I will respond to one I got on my last post, in which I questioned whether Hillary Clinton (who is presently leading in the polls) by taking a hawkish position on both Iraq and Iran was in tune with the majority of the voters.

In the post I wrote,

"As a partisan Democrat I will support the nominee no matter who it is,"

to which the commenter responded,

Would you support Newt Gingrich if he switched parties and ran under a Democratic banner? Would you have supported George Wallace because he was a Democrat? Would you support Charles Manson if he ran for office as a Democrat?

Of course not.

But let's limit the discussion to reality here. Newt Gingrich would never get a Democratic nomination because his views are so diametrically opposed to what almost all Democrats stand for. George Wallace (I assume 'anonymous' means the old Wallace, the segregationist) tried to get a nomination and failed, and that was when there were still some Democrats who agreed with segregation in the party. And that was decades ago. Charles Manson? Where did that come from?

Of the candidates who are running for the nomination, Hillary Clinton is probably my last choice, for reasons I described in the last post. However, let me say why I said what I did.

To begin with, look at the obvious. While I discussed the potential opening for a third party candidate her positions could create, history shows us that the next President will in the end almost certainly be a Democrat or a Republican. If I think that Hillary is too hawkish, how would having any of the leading Republicans, all of whom sound just like George W. Bush on Iraq in pledging to remain and fight it out, be better? In fact, it would be worse. Not only has Hillary at least talked about withdrawing some troops from Iraq and been critical at times of the war, but if Congress were to pass a bill like they did this year (and which she voted for) detailing withdrawal plans, she might sign it. She might not either, but I will take 'might' over the certainty that a President Giuliani, Thompson, McCain or Romney would veto it.

There are certainly those who claim that she is a 'Republican lite,' and at times I've agreed with them. But then we've had six years of a real Republican, and look where that has taken us. Besides, many people said the same about Al Gore in 2000, and many progressives either stayed home, did not cast a vote for President, or voted for Ralph Nader. And then it turned out later that Gore in reality was a progressive, but like many politicians he ran to the center in order to get elected. Who knew? Those who had read his first book, 'Earth in the Balance.' And Hillary's earlier books do show a progressive mindset, especially in terms of community and social structures, education and issues affecting women and kids. Her new healthcare proposals, while not as far reaching as the first set she offered in 1993, are certainly an improvement over what we have now. It could be that she could be a pleasant surprise, and certainly in some areas at least she would be.

There are those who would be attracted to an anti-war third party candidacy, as I mentioned in the last post. However, if we assume for the moment that it was a Bloomberg/Hagel ticket, keep in mind that Bloomberg is certainly not a guy who either understands or is likely to support anything that would involve making life easier for ordinary people, and Chuck Hagel, while he has done a fabulous job of speaking out in favor of leaving Iraq, has been a standard issue conservative Republican for most of his career in the Senate.

Further, even if it were a progressive anti-war ticket that ran on a third party platform what we have seen is that unlike in a parliamentary system, where a group of parties form a governing coalition, and a vote for a particular small party may strengthen that party and move the needle of the coalition closer to the positions of that party, in the American two-party system, third parties exert a negative influence, often electing the party that least agrees with them by siphoning votes from the candidate who more closely matches their position. We saw that in the 2000 Presidential race, and in fact a dirty little secret about Democrats' control of the present Senate is that our margin was made possible by a Libertarian candidate in Montana siphoning 10,000 mostly fiscally conservative (and likely Republican) votes in a race that John Tester won by 2000 votes.

Beyond that, I haven't always been such a partisan Democrat as I am today. During the Clinton era, I even flirted with voting for Republicans. However, the excesses of George W. Bush helped me realize why I am a Democrat, and I haven't voted for a Republican in almost a decade. For that matter, when I did vote for Republicans I almost always lived to regret that vote (if you live in Arizona, you will understand what I mean when I tell you that the last Republican I voted for was Calamity Jane-- and believe me, it didn't take long before I regretted it.)

It may be that voting for Hillary Clinton is like settling for Meat Loaf when you wanted a steak. But that's better than a soup line, which is about the equivalent of what the GOP is offering.

Does Hillary understand that this is a nation sick of war?

Yesterday at a campaign event in North Hampton, Iowa, Hillary Clinton had a testy exchange with an anti-war member of the crowd.

Referring to her recent vote in the Senate supporting the Bush administration in its attempts to get us into a military confrontation with Iran, as well as her 2002 vote in favor of going to war in Iraq and her continued refusal to admit being wrong about that vote, the attendee, Randall Rolph asked,

"Why should I support your candidacy, if it appears that you haven't learned from your past mistakes?"

Sen. Clinton's response was particularly concerning to me as a Democratic voter:

After defending the vote, Clinton finished by saying about the question, "somebody obviously sent it to you."

Rolph responded, "I take exception. This is my own research. Nobody sent it to me. I am offended that you would suggest that."

"Let me finish," Clinton answered, "I apologize. I just have been asked the very same question in three other places."

OK, I'm glad she realized right away that she had stepped over the line in making the accusation and apologized. But on a larger level, she just doesn't seem to get it.

There is a reason why she has been asked the question frequently. It's the same reason why Democrats, especially anti-war Democrats did very well in elections last year. The reason is that most people are sick and tired of the Iraq war, most people are sick and tired of the apparently reflexive reaction by the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress (which has included, unfortunately, Hillary Clinton) to take a hardline hawkish view towards everyone who disagrees with us, and most people are sick of the administration's unwillingness to consider alternative courses of action.

Further, in poll after poll after poll we have seen that most Americans want the U.S. out of Iraq, on a timetable if not immediately. Clinton may well be able to win the Democratic nomination, largely because those of us who want the U.S. out of Iraq are split between Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Biden and Kucinich, but to be honest, while I support Richardson myself (among other reasons, because he is the highest candidate in the polls who has promised to get every American all the way out of Iraq and is also the most qualified to be able to deliver on that promise), if it were a two person battle between Clinton and any of the above, I would support any of the above for the nomination. So she is lucky that the majority of the Democratic party is split so many different ways, but still is likely the last choice of most Democrats, and specifically so for one and one reason only-- Iraq.

But Iraq will be the central issue in next year's election, just as it was in last year's. And it is not only most Democrats who want us out of Iraq, but most voters. And that is where Hillary is definitely on the wrong side of things.

She may be gambling that in a race against a Republican, who certainly will sound like, if not embrace, George W. Bush on Iraq, saying we have to stay there until the cows come home, she can afford to take a hawkish stance and win the votes of liberals by talking about health care, education, etc.

But if so then it is not a wise gamble. I've blogged before about the dangers of the frontloaded primary system, in which we will have the nominees for November chosen by just forty-eight hours after the Super Bowl.

One huge problem with this is that it presents an enormous window of opportunity for a well-funded independent or third party candidate to jump in during the late spring or early or even mid summer, especially if the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees have just spent all spring attacking each other until most people don't want either of them. And in fact, this is not a theoretical scenario-- current NY mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who would not need to raise a dime, has dropped hints about running, possibly with Chuck Hagel, a retiring Republican Senator from Nebraska who is a Vietnam veteran and has come out strongly in favor of withdrawing from Iraq.

Such a scenario could result in a hawkish Hillary Clinton being in a very difficult position. Strong war hawks would likely continue to support the Republican nominee-- she might be lucky to pull off a handful but not enough to make much difference. On the other hand, Bloomberg or some other third party candidate would have the advantage of being able to triangulate an Iraq stance that favored getting out of Iraq-- hence agreeing with 2/3 of the electorate on the number one issue of the campaign while Hillary and the Republican were left to fight over the other one third.

As a partisan Democrat I will support the nominee no matter who it is, but I have to admit that I have a lot of reservations about whether Hillary Clinton either understands just how angry and frustrated most Americans are about Iraq, or frankly gives a hoot. Her response to Mr. Rolph's very appropriate question, ranging from flippant to arrogant, makes me thinks that she does not.

The 'flood' is a trickle.

Conservatives love to berate the Canadian health care system, ignoring such inconvenient but documented facts as the fact that Canadians live longer than we do. They claim that if Canadians are in good health, it is likely because of the flood of Canadians pouring across the border to get elective procedures in the United States that they can't get in Canada.

How much of a flood is this?

Well, I ran across an answer while perusing shrimplate's blog earlier today. In his post he cites Kate Steadman's health care blog in which she links to a study done in 2002 of how widely Canadians availed themselves of the opportunity to cross what is still an open border and have their health care needs taken care of here in the good ol' U.S. of A. The study concentrated on border areas of Quebec, but there is no reason to suppose that Canadians in Quebec love their health care any more than Canadians in other parts of the dominion.

The results are eye-popping-- for what they show isn't happening.

A 2002 Health Affairs paper examined hospitals near the border, as well as national surveys to tease out how many Canadians actually visit the U.S. to receive elective procedures.

In terms of hospitals along the border offering advanced treatments or special diagnostic technology (i.e. CT scans and MRIs), about 640 Canadians were seen, along with 270 for procedures like cataract surgery. They compare this to about 375,000 and 44,000 similar procedures in the region of Quebec alone during the same period. If you divide the total number of Canadians seeking those treatments in the US, divided by the number in Quebec alone that's about 0.09%. Not even a tenth of a percent.

Steadman goes on to cite data from 1996:

But the most striking stats come from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS). From the article:

Only 90 of 18,000 respondents to the 1996 Canadian NPHS indicated that they had received care in the United States during the previous twelve months, and only twenty had indicated that they had gone to the United States expressly for the purpose of getting that care.

Only 20 of 18,000 sought care in the United States. (apparently less than those who were treated in the U.S. without seeking it, such as those involved in accidents or experiencing a medical emergency while visiting the U.S.)

Now, 1/10 of one percent is after all, one in a thousand. This is indeed a flood. I mean, I bet you could probably find one person in a thousand who given a choice would prefer driving a Yugo to a Cadillac. Or perhaps one person in a thousand who believes that the Apollo landings were all filmed on a stage in Hollywood, or maybe one person in a thousand who believes that Britney Spears is a good role model. Now, I don't mean to suggest that one person in a thousand is unimportant, but this hardly constitutes the 'flood' that the right would have you believe it is.

Steadman also gives us some context involving a poll of Americans who buy prescription drugs:

polling data from 2003 (approximately a year after the Health Affairs article) indicates that 8% answered YES to the following question:

"Have you ever bought prescription drugs from Canada or other countries outside the United States in order to pay a lower price?"

If 8% of the 18,000 Canadians polled in NPHS had expressly sought care in the United States, that would be 1,440. Not 20, as the survey showed.

In other words, we have 72 times the number of Canadians seeking care in the US going to Canada (or at least calling there) to get prescriptions.

Maybe that explains why pharmaceutical companies found it necessary to (successfully unfortunately) lobby Congress and the President to find ways to prevent Americans from buying the same drugs from the same factories from Canadian sources that they buy at twice the price in America. Note that the concerns of Canadians about not being able to come into the U.S. without a passport if/when we ever close the border because they will be inconvenienced in seeking American medical care haven't even come up in the debate. That is because it is such a vanishingly small number of Canadians who even come to the U.S. for elective procedures.

Leading from a weak hand.

One of the hallmarks of George W. Bush has been his stubborn refusal to change course no matter what, even when he is clearly way off track. We have seen it over the years in everything from his legislative agenda to his steadfast and unswerving determination to invade and then remain in Iraq, no matter what it has cost us.

It has even occasionally won him political victories, such as in the continuing funding of the Iraq war over this past summer (after all, arguing with Bush about this is a little like playing a highway game of chicken with a blind man.) But such victories have been pyrrhic. The cost to his presidency, his party and the nation have far outweighed the dubious benefits of whatever he believes he has gained.

And so we see now with the SCHIPS program, which President Bush promises to veto. He certainly will veto it, and claim that he is therefore standing for 'fiscal responsibility.' Of course vetoing a five year, $35 billion expansion of the program that covers medical costs for poor and uninsured children is dwarfed by the half trillion dollars he has already poured down a real rathole in Iraq, not to mention the nearly $200 billion in new Iraq spending he is seeking.

In fact, it is a good thing that the college aid bill that I wrote the last post on passed at about the same time as the SCHIPS fight was gearing up. The President, while expressing reservations, signed it. And the reason is clear-- he had a choice of either standing against the SCHIPS bill OR the college bill, but he did not have the political capital left, even within his own party, to be able to make a veto stand on both. So he quietly signed the college aid bill even though it is certainly a bill which would never have either been passed nor signed during the past six years of Republican control over the House.

That is however why I am optimistic that regardless of what this President thinks, sooner or later he will lose on Iraq and have to bring the troops home. His party would not support him on two vetoes, and the one he chose was arguably the more politically damaging of the two-- despite attempts to falsely spin it as an attack on the elderly (though most elderly are smart enough to remember which party it was that actually did try to privatize Social Security two years ago) there is no question that Republicans will have to answer why they were unwilling to increase the tax on a cigar anywhere upward from a nickel in order to pay for kids health care. Certainly not a question they will want to have to answer.

Iraq funding will certainly come up as well next year. And as the election draws closer it will be harder and harder for wavering war supporters to stick with their Hawkish President. And sooner or later they may well abandon him when it matters most. His unwillingness to bend dooms many in his own party.

Well, when it happens I will just heat up some popcorn and enjoy the show.

New student aid law a huge step forward.

Today President Bush signed a landmark piece of legislation that was sent to him by the Democratic Congress. The legislation, called the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, does what the Republican Congress failed to do: help financial aid keep up with the skyrocketing costs of college that have made it unaffordable for millions of would-be students.

The bill will expand the PELL program by $11.4 billion over the next five years and increase the maximum PELL grant from $4,310 in 2007 to $5,400 by 2012. While this is not everything that it could be (with many students even at state universities having to pay upwards of $25,000 annually for tuition, fees, books, room and board, and other expenses), it does represent a realization of how fast college costs have been increasing as state and federal budget cuts force college boards to increase tuition and fees by large amounts and on a yearly or almost yearly basis.

Beyond that, the bill does a lot of other things. For example, it allows active duty members of the military to defer their payments while they are in the service, and even for a year after they leave. It is amazing to me that with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this had not been attended to earlier, but I guess it takes a Democratic Congress to do more for our servicemen and servicewomen than just say nice things about them and wave a flag around. It also cuts the interest rate on Federally backed student loans in half, making repayment easier for students who leave college with a mountain of debt and then have to pay it back while they are just starting on their careers.

In fact, if those careers involve teaching, the bill goes even farther-- it gives students the option to actually have student debt forgiven if they teach for at least a few years after college. Local school districts are limited by their budgets and often cannot afford to compete for the best talent from universities because they can't pay as much as they could earn in the private sector. But this provision in the law amounts to a huge strengthening of the hand of school boards, as a teaching job will now be much more competitive with private sector jobs even though the school board may not have to spend a dime more than they would have. More to the point, this represents a real and concrete investment in education.

The President issued a terse signing statement in which he expressed his displeasure with certain aspects of the law (though he did sign it) but nevertheless it is a law today.

And don't let anyone lie to you-- this was a huge achievement by Congress with the reluctant agreement of the President. It is a very big step forward.

More thoughts on the Jeffs verdict, polygamy and child abuse.

I would like to clarify something regarding the last post I put up regarding the conviction of Warren Jeffs as an accessory to rape, as well as several others (notably the post I did on the Lost Boys of Colorado City and Hildale) in which I've been quite critical of Jeffs and the FLDS Church (which I will again mention has nothing at all to do with and has been completely disavowed by the mainline LDS Church, of which I am a member and which banned polygamy over a century ago.)

One of the jurors who served on the Jeffs jury (identified in today's Arizona Republic as Jerry Munk) summed it up best when asked about the defense argument that the victim, Elissa Walls, never cried rape or talked to her family members about her experience or feelings about it while it was happening.

"She was fourteen," Munk said. "She didn't have to say anything for a rape to occur."

Exactly. And I will even say that I think that Utah's law, which grants a three year near-age exemption in the case of underage children makes a heck of a lot of sense, especially when compared, for example, to the Georgia law that is responsible for Genarlow Wilson continuing to sit in prison and rot and then register as a sex offender for having consensual teenage sex with another student at the high school he went to.

I've always said that I don't care what goes on between consenting adults. My problem with FLDS is that they are responsible for a great deal of evil in the lives of their own children, forcing teenage girls to be raped and abandoning teenage boys to make their way in the world with practically no preparation or knowledge about how to survive in it.

Polygamists, including FLDS are free to practice their religion. But they can let their children wait until adulthood to be able to make adult decisions. To be honest, I've never thought that polygamy itself should be a crime (especially since it leads to many grey areas, with the worsening economy making it more and more common for more than two unrelated adults to live together, with or without any of them having a formal marriage; are they going to make it a crime only if some of them are having more than a monogamous relationship within the household? And how do they determine that?) For that matter, many people, including muslims (1/5 of the world's population) belong to religions which allow the practice of polygamy. If a muslim man with three wives were to come to America from someplace else, are his wives no longer married to him? According to our own laws, they can't all be, but likely he has a valid marriage certificate for each of them from whatever country they were married in.

This case is not, however, about freedom of religion. It's about a crime involving children. There are already legitimate examples of where laws do limit what churches can do. For example, if a church believed in human sacrifice the person who carried it out and those who helped them could still be held liable for murder (for example, Sara Maria Aldrete, who was the high priestess of a bizarre cult located in Matamoros, Mexico and who is known to have murdered several people in ritual sacrifices including a University of Texas student named Mark Kilroy who was kidnapped for the purpose.

However, I know of no doctrine within polygamous religions which mandate that children younger than eighteen must be married. They can wait until eighteen. At that, I would point out that eighteen is indeed an arbitrary number-- I've certainly known some fourteen year olds who probably knew more about sex and its consequences than a lot of older adults, and I've also known thirty year olds who are remarkably ignorant about it (likely that group also includes many FLDS-raised men, who were cast out as Lost Boys in order to unbalance the gender ratio for the benefit of polygamists, years ago with no social skills at all, having never been permitted to talk to a female other than their mothers and still survive just on the edges of society). But since there is no test for maturity, we as a society have set eighteen years old as the age at which we consider a person to be an adult. So at the very least, I hope that the FLDS realizes from yesterday's verdict that children at least must be protected and nurtured, and with that perhaps even educated so that they can make their own decisions or survive in the world outside of the confines of the border straddling community.

One can hope that, anyway. Though knowing what I do about FLDS (which is more than many people know) my belief is that they will consider it an act of persecution by the outside world and maybe even a step towards the apocalypse.

Bush suggests opposing junta in Myanmar, three years after his campaign broke the law to buy campaign wear from there

Today George Bush tried to shift the focus away from his botched job in Iraq and focused on the demonstrations led by Buddhist monks in Myanmar (formerly Burma) against the dictatorship there.

I would love to see the junta go, and there is no doubt that they are among the worst violators of human rights in the world, but it is interesting that the President should discover this now.

He certainly didn't care about it in 2004, when his campaign broke the law to purchase campaign gear from Burma!

The official merchandise Web site for President George W. Bush's re-election campaign has sold clothing made in Burma, whose goods were banned by Bush from the U.S. last year to punish its military dictatorship.

The merchandise sold on www.georgewbushstore.com includes a $49.95 fleece pullover, embroidered with the Bush-Cheney '04 logo and bearing a label stating it was made in Burma, now Myanmar. The jacket was sent to Newsday as part of an order that included a shirt made in Mexico and a hat not bearing a country-of-origin label.

Poor Bush. I'd call him a hypocrite for this, but I'm not sure that's the whole story. The truth is, he's accumulated so much crap by now that he can't even keep track of it all.

Warren Jeffs convicted.

Breaking news: The jury up in St. George has convicted FLDS leader Warren Jeffs of being an accessory to rape. Justice has been served in the case of Elissa Walls, who at the age of fourteen was forced into a marriage with her nineteen year old cousin by Warren Jeffs.

I don't expect that despite the conviction the FLDS will just disband and go away, and we have to keep in mind that it remains as it always has been, a very closed and tight-knit community. However, this is nevertheless a victory for justice, and it sends a clear message that whatever the polygamists do (and I've said many times that I don't care what kind of relationship consenting adults have, including polygamous ones), that children should be left alone and allowed to make their own decisions.

America's Hessians may also be involved in arms smuggling.

Hot on the heels of the alleged killings of over 20 Iraqi civilians by mercenaries employed by Blackwater USA, comes a new allegation, that Blackwater Hessians are involved in illicit arms sales. Specifically, the probe focuses on evidence that some mercenaries employed by Blackwater bought assault rifles and other weapons while they were home in America and sold them to willing buyers in Iraq-- which I'm sure it isn't hard to find some. The company itself has denied involvement and called claims that the company itself was involved in illegal arms sales 'baseless' but has pointedly not said the same about its employees, in light of a statement by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard this week which seemed to confirm an ongoing investigation into arms smuggling by Blackwater employees.

Of course after a brief suspension following the shooting incident Blackwater was ordered back to work over the objections of the Iraqi government and is back to doing the same tasks it has done in the past-- tasks involving security and escorting of convoys, including military supply convoys and individuals that normally in past wars have been assigned to the military. And the truth is that our already overstrained military, overextended even farther by the 'surge' to a troop level that they cannot maintain permanently (hence the call for a troop reduction back to pre-surge levels by the Bush administration despite the failure of the Iraqi government to make any progress towards a political solution-- the stated objective of the 'surge.') Hence the reliance on mercenaries (most, but not all of the Blackwater employees are Americans, but there are also many foreign mercenaries, some former members of armies known to have committed large scale atrocities in the past.) Bill Berkowitz' expose in March of 2005 (a month before the infamous Fallujah incident involving the death of four Blackwater employees) focused on their recruiting efforts among the armies of the former apartheid regime in South Africa and the Pinochet regime in Chile-- both well schooled in human rights violations.

Well, is this latest news about gun-running surprising? When you hire mercenaries then you have to expect them to act like--- well, mercenaries.

When I first wrote abou Blackwater, back a couple of years ago, I wrote,

What has changed is that mercenaries today are no longer 'independent contractors' as they traditionally have been. Because they are now managed and formed into commando units by companies like Blackwater (as well as DynCorp and a few others), it is only necessary to contract with the company. Because rules of engagement for paramilitary forces are not well defined, our government has found them useful in missions that the traditional army might not be able to undertake for political reasons, for example, operations that carry a high risk of civilian casualties, military operations within the borders of the United States or against U.S. citizens, or operations in which it is foreseen that some of the traditional rules of engagement might not apply. If the mercenaries break some of the rules, there is either the benefit of deniability, or the ability to fire the 'security contractors' without admitting guilt.

And that may be the case here. Blackwater can in fact deny direct involvement in either the shooting incident or the arms smuggling, and fire the employees found to be directly responsible while setting the tone and officially following the same loose 'hands-off' policy that the Defense Department claimed to be following when the Abu Graib scandal broke.

Warren Jeffs Trial

I wrote last year upon the occasion of the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS polygamist cult,

So Warren Jeffs has presided over a community in which 13 year old girls are raped, and 13 year old boys are dumped on the street with nothing and told not to come back....

Over the past three years, under the leadership of Arizona authorities, primarily Attorney General Terry Goddard, along with authorities in Utah, progress has been made in gaining control over the group. The resources of the church (which includes all the polygamist homes-- none of the people who live in them actually own their building) have been ordered by a judge to be controlled by a group of outside trustees for the benefit of the community and individuals within it. Where crimes are discovered, they have been prosecuted, and in particular Jeffs will now be prosecuted.

And that will hopefully be the beginning of the end for this nightmare of what amounts to sexual slavery, or of exile, for the children of Colorado City and Hildale.

As I've said many times, I don't care what any consenting adult does with any other consenting adult, but in this case, there is much justice that needs to, and I hope will, be served in our court system.

Jeffs is specifically being tried in St. George for his role in forcing a then-fourteen year old girl to marry her cousin. Today his defense got their turn and tried to undermine the testimony of the victim (who is now 21 and has fled the church) by getting her to say she never cried 'rape.' In fact, her case is somewhat unusual in that she was actually her cousin's first wife, and her cousin was 19 at the time, while some young girls have had to marry men as old as in their sixties and become plural wives.

WHAT?! That's supposed to be a defense? How likely is it that a fourteen year old, who has been told by someone who she believes is a prophet of God (Jeffs) that she will be eternally damned if she does not go along with it, will scream 'rape' when she is being ravaged by someone who as far as she knows is her lawful husband? I'd like to ask whether any female children growing up in Colorado City or Hildale were ever advised to scream, 'rape' if they were married against their will.

Warren Jeffs is simply put a man who has done a great deal of harm to the young people in his community. Two years ago, I blogged on The Real Lost Boys: And it's Usually Not a Happy Ending about the young teenage men of Colorado City and Hildale who are dumped out into the world possessing rudimentary construction skills, zero social skills and in many cases have never read any book other than the Bible or the Book of Mormon. Many of them end up in prison, on drugs or dead, while others live on the fringes of society in small groups all over southern Utah looking for whatever work they can find.

And the Lost Boys continue to be an overlooked issue (though last year Jeffs and his associates settled a civil suit filed by six of them). However this trial is focused on what happened to the girls.

And that is just as ugly, if not uglier than what he has done to the boys. Young girls forced to marry, often to men old enough to be their father (and then being their fourth or fifth wife at that.) They are raped, and forced to obey, with the knowledge that they will be beaten if they do not (and with the always present admonition from Jeffs that damnation awaits them if they don't obey.) Then later they have to raise their own daughters to a similar fate, and pray that their sons are among the lucky few who get to stay.

I hope that this prosecution is successful. Deconstructing the web of lies, bondage and misery that is at the core of FLDS will take time, but a successful prosecution of Warren Jeffs will be a giant step in that direction.

I hope God has a sense of humor. Otherwise, I'd want to avoid Nebraska right now.

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers is suing God. He is claiming that God has made and fulfilled numerous terroristic threats, including "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like." Anyway, at least we know Senator Chambers has a pretty good onomatopoedic vocabulary.

He says he wants to make a point about frivolous lawsuits.

Yeah.

I wonder if God was also trying to send Senator Chambers a message Saturday when the Cornhuskers lost at home, 49-31 to number one Southern California.

President outfoxes us and gets us to 'stay the course.'

Last December I wrote a post called, Don't buy into George Bush's Iraq trap.

In it, I discussed what were then new plans for a so-called 'troop surge.' While I was wrong in predicting that the proposed troop surge would never even occur, it seems that I was right in my basic premise-- that it was all about framing the argument in a way that would allow the administration to 'stay the course.'

I wrote back then,

is shifting the frame of the debate. Instead of it being between 'stay the course' (his position) and 'withdraw' (the progressive position) which he would certainly lose, what he plans to do is try and get people debating the 'surge' (i.e. ratcheting up the war.) Those opposed are then debating against increasing troops, and as such are by default arguing only to not increase them (i.e. maintaining current levels-- 'staying the course.') He knows he doesn't have the votes in the new Congress to win, but what he is trying to do is play the Democrats for chumps, and get people to forget that we were talking about how to get out. Then he can lose the vote in Congress but still end up 'staying the course' (what he wants anyway). Only then that will become the the Democratic position (because it was in opposition to his 'new' position), and then if Iraq continues to deteriorate (as it will) and we continue to lose American troops (which we will) then it becomes the fault of Democrats.

In other words, he is trying to unload his lemon onto us.

If we fall for that, then we really are stupid. But unfortunately, based on what I've heard, there are some on the left who seem ready to take up this no-win debate.

Fast forward to today. The 'surge' is well underway, and this week the President announced that there will be a reduction of 30,000 troops by the middle of next year-- in other words back to the level they were at just before the 'surge'! Yup, you got it-- he is well on his way to maneuvering us into staying the course!!

Militarily, it could be argued that the surge has achieved some objectives, but then the same could be said of the initial 2003 invasion of Iraq as well. Politically the reconciliation which the surge was supposed to ensure still has not happened. If sectarian killings are down it is largely because so many predominantly Sunni or predominantly Shi'ite areas have been 'purified' (as Iraqis call it) and segregation created by driving out those minorities who did live there. On top of that, August showed an uptick in the number of civilian deaths. While this figure may to a degree reflect a series of bombings that killed 500 in one day in northern Iraq, it is clear that the surge has not stopped violence in Iraq, but at best has given it a brief respite. And even the most heralded 'success' in Iraq, the Sunni leaders in Anbar banding together to drive out al-Qaeda, was already happening before the 'surge' began and really has little to do with it.

But let's be clear what this was. It was a maneuver to buy a year for the President's failed policy so he could run out the clock on his mess, and it is no more or less than that.

Bush unifies the world, America-- against him.

Six years ago, nearly everyone in the world was united in support of the U.S. and President Bush. Six years ago he had 90% approval.

Today most people in the world are united again. And so are most of the American people. In opposition to the same President and his ruinous war in Iraq.

The only real claim that comes close to the elusive 'victory' they can point to after six months of the surge is that Sunni sheikhs in Anbar province have kicked out al-Qaeda. But that was already starting to happen before the surge, and the political reconciliation that was supposed to happen, has not happened.

Meanwhile, American deaths and maimed continue to pile up, and the cost of the war is rapidly approaching half a trillion dollars. I hope that when the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2010 that Democrats have the fortitude to respond to righties who claim it will be a 'tax increase' by simply saying, "all that the previous administration spent on Iraq was borrowed, and now it's time to pay the bill for it."

That line would even find a lot of supporters for returning to the Clinton tax rates.

See, isn't Bush a miracle worker? Everything he touches turns to garbage-- and it's something you can count on.