Some thoughts on Mitt Romney, Mormons and abortion.

I've been watching the recent news involving Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney and the whole 'Mormon question' with a lot of interest.

For one thing, like Romney, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (colloquially known as the 'Mormon church.') I disagree with Romney about virtually everything in his political platform, and the one thing that he did that I could support if he proposed it nationally, his universal health coverage plan in Massachusetts, he hardly ever talks about as he campaigns for the Republican nomination.

But the news has shifted to more and more coverage of the problems that some members of the 'Christian Right' have voiced with Romney's faith. That matters because they represent a group of voters which Romney had been courting and hoping they would choose him because of a desire not to see the GOP nomination go to the most socially liberal Republican, Rudy Giuliani. Instead, they appear to have found their candidate in Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, who claimed last week that his most unique qualification for the job was a degree in Bible studies from Ouachita Baptist College in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Interviews with many individual voters in Iowa who have recently opted for Huckabee over Romney make it clear that faith is a major reason why.

So pressure has been mounting on Romney to give a 'Mormon' speech, similar to the one that John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 to put to rest concerns about his Catholicism.

One thing the media has gotten wrong though: Romney is NOT the first Mormon to be a major candidate for a Presidential nomination. That would be Morris Udall, who was the runner-up to Jimmy Carter for the 1976 Democratic nomination. The error is understandable though, as most rabid anti-Mormons reside in the Republican party and among Democrats Udall's religion was never an issue. For that matter, after Al Sharpton made some intemperate comments about Romney and Mormons earlier this year, he backtracked quickly and apologized to anyone who had gotten the misimpression that he was biased against Mormons. That is in contrast to the anti-Mormon stuff that you hear from some fundamentalists on the right, which is never retracted but instead reinforced.

I don't know honestly whether giving such a speech would help Mitt or not, but I will say a few things here, primarily about Mormons and politics, not specifically about Mitt.

First, before every election a letter is read from the First Presidency (which consists of the President of the Church and his counselors) in which they reiterate that the Church is a religious, not a political organization. Church buildings, lists, and other Church properties or resources are not to be used for political purposes, and the letter makes it clear that the Church does not endorse political parties or candidates. The Church does, however, push for involvement in civic affairs and encourages members to vote, run for office and otherwise be involved in their communities. Though the Church does not endorse parties or candidates, it does occasionally take a stand on issues, such as opposition to abortion and to casino gambling.

Probably about 80-90% or more of active Mormons are Republicans, however. I have a friend who once said that Mormon Democrats are 'like a recessive gene-- it tends to run in families (like the Udalls, where Morris succeeded his brother in Congress and since Morris have had other members of their extended family elected to Congress in other states), and it sometimes pops up where least expected. But that is still only about 10-20% of active church members. And whether because it is a matter of what the Church encourages or otherwise, they do get out and vote. Since 80-90% of active Mormons vote for Republicans in most elections, and as part of the 'civic involvement' ideal includes running for office it goes without saying that the Udalls (and Senate majority leader Harry Reid) are exceptions-- nearly all church members who hold public office are Republicans. I am a Democrat and a Precinct Committeeman (and soon-to-be-former County Vice-Chair) but that is relatively rare among members of the church.

It was not always this way though. Early in the history of the Church, almost all of the members were Democrats (since the Democrats in states like Missouri and Illinois had generally been more tolerant towards the church in its early days than had their opponents.) In fact, in the late 1880's and early 1890's as Utah prepared for statehood, Church leaders encouraged some families to become Republicans because the prospect of a state with only Democrats was causing some hesitiation among Republicans in Congress who would have had to approve the creation of a new state. This pattern was replicated in Idaho, Arizona and other areas where there were a lot of church members. As recently as 1948, Utah joined the rest of the west in providing the critical flood of late votes that elected Harry Truman in an election where Thomas Dewey had swept most of the Northeast and produced the now-famous headline in the Chicago Tribune. Of course in 1964 Utah and Idaho went with most of the rest of the country during the Johnson landslide.

So what happened since? Two things have caused most active LDS members to become Republicans.

The first is that (like in the rest of the west) people who had supported FDR and the New Deal began to see the Federal Government as less of a friend for ordinary people and more of a bottomless pit for taxes. I don't myself subscribe to this view, believing that Government can be productive and helpful for solving problems. But in the west, where the Federal Government owns over 90% of the land in many counties, and then various environmental laws (some of which were ironically authored by Morris Udall) blocked or limited access to most of it, the whole rhetoric of the so-called 'sagebrush rebellion' got through to a lot of people. It may have been a phony 'rebellion' spurred by advertising financed by logging, mining and other industries but it hit a very real nerve-- and it doesn't help that Washington is a speck way out on the other end of the country. So the whole 'anti-Federal government' rhetoric that Republicans made their living on in the 1980's (with Ronald Reagan the exemplar of it) did help turn a lot of people in the west to the right. Though land use issues have become less of the focal point over the years, guns have replaced it as a way to keep voters Republican in small towns in the west. If you don't live in one, you wouldn't understand it, but I do and I can tell you that if you tell someone out here you want to take their gun away you might as well be telling them you want to take their kids away. Recently though other issues have caused most of the west to begin swinging back to the left.

But not Utah, and not LDS voters. Which brings us to the second reason why Mormons have moved to the right since the days of Truman. Social conservatism. The 'Christian conservative' movement which is now refusing to support Romney because he is a Mormon may be strongest in the deep south and may have a southern flavor, but it plays well in Utah and in small LDS communities throughout the west, such as the Arizona town I live in. For people who pray daily, are opposed to abortion and try to live a life free from sin, rhetoric which castigates the ACLU for 'driving God out in favor of Satanic humanism,' attacks supporters of keeping abortion legal as 'murderers' and bashes 'wicked gays, teenage sex and booze,' if shallow and hateful rhetoric which aims for the lowest of human emotions, does hold an appeal for those who are already disposed to thinking that way. And LDS people are no different than people anywhere else, a deceptively simple sounding way to wrap hate has been good enough to justify all manner of human persecutions in the long and tortured course of human history, including the persecution that early members of the Church suffered at the hands of mobs in Missouri and Illinois. I don't suggest that the rhetoric we hear on talk radio or from Republican politicians is going to bring out mobs with pitchforks and torches, but it is certainly sufficient to stir up people to support all kinds of laws against other people who are in some way 'different' that might not be supported in the absence of such rhetoric.

It is possible to reason with people of course, starting with pointing out just how hateful some of the rhetoric is. The west is not the south, and the west has a history and a tradition of tolerance. That is especially true of the LDS; it is a fact that Brigham Young, as governor of the Utah territory (which at the time was pretty much synonymous with President of the Church,) made and signed a number of agreements with neighboring tribes and he and his successors are the only major American leaders to sign treaties with native American tribes who stood behind their words and made sure that none were ever violated. But that history of tolerance has to be appealed to directly, not defensively. Tolerance does not mean liking someone or something, or even approving of it, but rather of deciding not to punish or intentionally cause problems for people who are not like we are or like we want to be.

On the issue of abortion, instead of looking like a zero-sum game (either you win and I lose or my side wins and you lose) we are today in a unique position to move beyond the debate. Bill Clinton was on to something when he said he wanted to see abortion 'legal but rare.' As I alluded to once before, liberals have since Clinton took office reduced the number of abortions quietly but efficiently by about 30% since the early 1990's. This involved a combination of education and the availabilty of birth control. Being against something does not mean that the only way to be against it is to ban it. The fact is this:

The number of abortions that liberals have prevented by pushing sex ed, family planning and birth control: Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions.

The number of abortions that conservatives have prevented by quixotic attempts to ban it: zero. (but they have made some lawyers very rich, at taxpayer expense.)

The obvious example of how to oppose something without banning it is smoking. Nobody has suggested that we make tobacco illegal, but a combination of education (especially in schools), aggressive support for smoking cessation programs (largely financed by taxing cigarettes, which taxes also discourage people from smoking) and reasonable restrictions on smoking have combined to 1. preserve the CHOICE people have to smoke, but 2. acknowlege that smoking is not good for society as a whole and therefore do what we can to encourage people to make the choice to not smoke.

I personally completely agree that abortion must remain legal (as Mitt Romney used to, not so many years ago) because let's face it-- if you don't own your own body, then do you own anything at all that somebody can't legislate away from you someday? Wasn't that what the Civil War was fought over? Now, there's a 'property rights' issue that might appeal to people in the rural west. That said, with the advent of the over-the-counter 'morning after pill,' I believe it will be less and less frequent anyway. We can, if we recognize that having another generation is beneficial to society, do as many countries in Europe have done and actively enhance social programs that promote childbirth (the French have been a model for this, and actually increased their birthrate, which had declined for decades.) For that matter, at one point, after reading a Guttmacher Institute study that made it clear that the cost of a hospital delivery, together with a lack of healthcare insurance and/or low income was a major reason why many women are forced to choose abortions that they don't even want, I've even proposed a program to pay for childbirth expenses for poor women, financed by a tax on abortions. This is pro-choice for two reasons: 1. it really does give all women a choice, while right now the study I linked to makes it clear that many poor and uninsured women are forced to have abortions by the financial realities of America's healthcare system (so there is effectively no choice), and 2. if you tax something, then you are acknowledging as a premise that it is legal (though conservatives have little choice, because in fact it is legal.) At the same time it is a measure which should appeal to the pro-life crowd because after all it does have the effect of reducing abortion by one of the same mechanisms that has helped reduce smoking.

But since that makes sense, I'm sure that everyone will be against it.

The BEST CASE scenario in Iraq: A Pyrrhic victory.

In 281 B.C., king Pyrrhus of Epirus (an island off the coast of Greece) landed in Tarentum with an army of about 30,000 men and 20 elephants. He was trying to defeat Rome, which was then threatening to conquer the southeastern end of the Italian peninsula, which had been colonized by Greek settlers. In 280 B.C., he won the battle of Heroclea, but according to the historian Dionysus at the cost of about 13,000 men including many of his best soldiers. The next year, he invaded Apulia and defeated the Romans in the battle of Asculum. He lost another 3,500 soldiers, including many of his best officers, from his already depleted army. After winning the battle, Pyrrhus is reputed to have said, "One more such victory will undo me!" In fact, after an unsuccessful foray into Sicily, Pyrrhus' army was no longer strong enough to even administer what he had conquered in Italy and he was forced to return to Epirus. He had simply taken too many casualties to be worth the relatively small tactical victories they had produced.

A victory of this type, in which the costs outweigh the gains has ever since been known as a 'Pyrrhic victory.' It is not limited to military battles (though the Germans won one famously in the Second World War, when they sacrificed their most dangerous unit, their airborne unit, in return for capturing the island of Crete from the British and the Greeks.) Other examples of what might be considered a Pyrrhic victory could be a football team that wins a regular season game but does so at the cost of an injury to a star quarterback who will be sorely missed come playoff time, a businessman who irretrievably damages his reputation by lying in order to close a business deal or perhaps a bidder at an auction who outbids his or her rivals but soon finds that the article is not worth at all what has been paid for it.

Lately we've heard the right claiming that the recent downturn in violence in Iraq portends some great 'victory.'

First, I'm not a bit convinced that the downturn is more than a temporary lull. We've seen downturns in violence there several times in the past, such as after the early 2005 offensive that retook Fallujah, and in the end it has proven a fleeting moment of relief. Other than al-Qaeda (which has however proven resilient in the past) all the other major players in Iraq-- Iran, the Shiite and Sunni militias, are still present and armed, and the Iraqi government has done absolutely nothing during the present 'breather' to make a breakthrough that will prevent a future civil war.

But let's even entertain for a moment the possibility that the right is right (I know, I know, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.) Suppose that in fact, everything does work out, that the Shiites and Sunnis do figure out their problems and that Iraq becomes stable. Let's even imagine a situation in which the Iraqi government comes together exactly as the Bush administration hopes it will.

Then let's consider what in this best case scenario the U.S. will have gained and lost from the Iraq war:

Gains:

* Saddam Hussein is gone. He would be seventy years old right now if we hadn't invaded.

* We inflict a military defeat on Al-Qaeda and reduce their numbers to maybe just a handful hiding out in a country where there only were a handful hiding out in 2003 anyway.

* American companies make a lot of money rebuilding Iraq and from exploiting Iraqi oil.

* We know for sure that there are no WMD in Iraq, and we didn't even need Hans Blix to finish looking for them to find that out.

* After a five year struggle, we can say that we won.


Losses:

* About 4,000 American troops dead, tens of thousands injured.

* $1.6 - 2 trillion (depending on the estimate) in combined actual outlays for the war and the effect of the cost of the war on our economy.

* Iran has become the most influential power in the region, and they get rid of their archenemy Saddam without firing a shot; an Iraqi government with close ties to Tehran, something the Iranians fought for a decade to achieve in the 1980's without success.

* Iran has become increasingly belligerent and been able to make substantial progress towards developing real WMD (nukes) while our army is tied down in Iraq and unable to seriously threaten Iran (as it will be for the foreseeable future even if this is a 'win'.)

* The aura of American military invincibility has been cast to the wind, guaranteeing more future challenges from who knows where (but we will be tested, of that you can be sure).

* Al-Qaeda given time and a chance to regroup (together with the Taliban) in the country where they were present before, because we shifted our focus to Iraq before the job was done in Afghanistan.

* The unquestioned international support for America which existed after 9/11 long since gone.

* With torture and other rights abuses practiced, America no longer has the moral authority to lead the world.

* Except for the 2001 tax cuts and the medicare drug giveaway, virtually none of the Bush administration and GOP domestic agenda realized as the administration spent virtually its entire political capital on stampeding into Iraq; for that matter even the tax cuts are still due to expire on schedule after the Republican Congress was unable to make them permanent. Now, granted I am a Democrat and don't mind seeing Republicans fail, but with it having been three quarters of a century since the previous time when the GOP had a majority in both houses of Congress and the White House (the 1952-1954 Senate was 50-50 with the GOP nominally in control by virtue of the Vice Presidency) they clearly sacrificed a great deal for getting us fixated on Iraq. Are you a Republican who voted for the GOP because you wanted to see Republicans reduce the size of government, for example? Then Wait another LIFETIME, Buddy!

In other words, even if conservatives were for a change 100% right, and the reduction in violence we see right now in Iraq is a real 'victory' and not just another temporary lull in a continuing cycle, the best they can claim is a Pyrrhic victory.

How much official outrage should we show?

There have been in the news recently two horrifying news stories involving rape that show how differently the rights of women are viewed in other parts of the world when compared with the United States.

In the first of these cases, a nineteen year old Saudi woman was brutally gang-raped. Initially, she was sentenced to ninety lashes and six months in prison; that's right, SHE was sentenced to this, for the crime of being in a vehicle with an unrelated male (a friend of hers). When she appealed her sentence, it was increased to 200 lashes, for daring to speak out (her lawyer, who spoke to Saudi media about the case, faces disbarment.) Her attackers, while they have been sentenced to prison, initially received sentences of between 10 months and five years; subsequently those have been increased but still they have received much shorters sentences than rapists typically get in the United States.

In the second case, a fifteen year old girl in Brazil who was arrested on suspicion of petty theft was placed in a jail cell with 20 adult male inmates, who raped and tortured her, while the local police ignored her screams for help and kept her there for three weeks, during which time she was burned as well as being raped multiple times. The police then pressured her father to falsify her birth certificate (presumably to claim her age was older than it was) and then threatened to have his paternity rights revoked when he refused to do so.

Both cases have provoked international outrage. The Brazilians have at least acknowleged that there is a problem (especially since the case has led to revelations of other women being put into male prison cells and raped) and they have appointed two commissions to investigate. The Saudis, in contrast, have proven particularly intransigent, justifying their sentencing by saying the woman in the case was involved in 'an illegal relationship.'

Of course, everyone including Presidential candidates have jumped on the cases and condemned them. Then again, it is easy for someone who is simply a candidate to do so, since there are no real consequences for whatever (s)he might say.

But what of the administration which does have to deal with the consequences?

If I were President, I'd be tempted to recall my ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as well as letting Brazil know I'd be keeping a real close eye on their investigation and would expect to see some heads roll. But then maybe it's a good thing I'm not the President.

On the other hand, I've been very, very disappointed at the complete lack of outrage expressed by the Bush administration. Other than some muted statements expressing disappointment they have said pretty much nothing.

First, let's make one thing clear-- there is public outrage (for public consumption) and there is actual outrage (behind the scenes). The textbook example of the difference came just after the Tianenmen Square massacre, when the first Bush administration publicaly expressed shock and anger at the massacre of unarmed demonstrators in the square by the Chinese army, while simultaneously dispatching Brent Scrowcroft to Beijing with a message that the statements were for American public consumption only, and should not be construed otherwise by the Chinese government.

And we well know that both Brazil and especially Saudi Arabia are very important to American foreign policy. We get nearly half of our oil from Saudi Arabia, and they also hold enormous amounts of American debt. So a real sudden and complete break with Saudi Arabia would be a severe, perhaps even deadly blow to the American economy. Like it or not, that is an unquestioned fact, as of today. Brazil doesn't send a lot of oil to the U.S., but with Latin America increasingly hostile to America, and with the most powerful politician in the region arguably Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, America needs Brazil as the dominant economic power in South America to provide a balance to Chavez.


That said, there are two things that the Bush administration should be doing but are not:

1. they should publically, in the STRONGEST terms condemn both sets of rapes. They must make it clear that the way these women were treated by the judicial systems in those countries is repugnant and that as civilized Americans we reject it completely. This is necessary because inasfar as the President speaks for all Americans, we must make it clear as a nation that we won't accept this; if we are as a nation silent on this kind of treatment of victims, do we retain any moral authority at alL?

2. behind the scenes if it is necessary to offer the Saudis a way out of their quandry it should be this: offer to grant the woman, her husband (a man she was engaged to at the time of the rape and who she has since married) and her lawyer (unless they will reconsider the actions they took against him) political refugee status in the United States and suggest that the Saudis commute the sentence to exile (which should be good enough to placate some of the hotheaded fundamentalists at home).

I don't claim to have all the facts about what we should do privately, but publically, to not condemn these actions is to condone them, and I as an American demand that my government condemn them. Because such behavior should never be condoned.

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.