The Next Hurrah

The Only Issue is (Still) Iraq

by emptypockets

A month ago there was a spate of "sky is green" articles claiming that Iraq is no longer an important issue for voters:

Iraq War Fades as an Election Issue (NPR, Dec 6) "...concerns about Iraq remain, but the war is not the only top-tier issue among voters. Many have turned their focus to domestic issues such as health care, energy, the mortgage crisis and immigration."

Pocketbook issues push past Iraq in poll (USA Today, Dec 28) "More than half the voters in an ongoing survey for The Associated Press and Yahoo News say the economy and health care are extremely important to them personally. They fear they will face unexpected medical expenses, their homes will lose value or mortgage and credit card payments will overwhelm them."

Domestic issues now outweigh Iraq (NY Times, Jan 3) "...the war is becoming a less defining issue among Democrats nationally, and it has moved to the back of the stage in the rush of campaign rallies, town hall meetings and speeches that are bringing the caucus competition to an end. Instead, candidates are being asked about, and are increasingly talking about, the mortgage crisis, rising gas costs, health care, immigration, the environment and taxes."

The funny thing is, when this voter sees "health care," "mortgage crisis," "rising gas costs," "the environment," and "taxes" I read them all as a single four-letter word: Iraq.

Help this NOLA Family

by emptywheel

Scout prime hasn't forgotten NOLA, even if George Bush has. Today, she's encouraging people to donate to a fund helping out a NOLA family that has lost its house twice--once in Katrina, and once through a terrible accident.

Two weeks ago I posted about the Joseph family who lost their Lower 9th Ward home for the second time. Kellie Joseph and her 6 children lost their home to Katrina. The rebuilding of their home was nearly complete when it was tragically destroyed by a fire after someone abandoned a stolen car in their backyard and lit it aflame to destroy evidence. The flames engulfed the home.

A group of Tulane medical students who heard of this devastating news decided to help the family rebuild again and started a website called Hope in Grace for what is called Project: Bring Miracle. Recently the students contacted me. The online donation effort has reached a standstill after some initial local media attention. It is their hope to reach a wider audience through the Internet. 

Here is where we can help. We as individuals and bloggers can not rebuild the great city of New Orleans but perhaps we can help to rebuild the home of one family that has now fallen through the cracks. The family had invested their Road Home grant of $138,000 to rebuild their home. That is now lost. Unfortunately the maximum they can receive from their insurance to rebuild their home a second time is $12,000. At this point, after donations and insurance, $132,000 is needed to rebuild the Joseph's family home. Donations can be made online to a rebuilding fund specifically restricted for use only in reconstruction.

If you can, please consider donating to help the family out.

Newt Gingrich Told Me To Blog This

by emptypockets

Somtimes, I question my own intentions. Do I really think it's in Americans' interest to pay me to do basic biology research, or do I just like getting paid? Is the NIH anything more than welfare for academics? When such moments strike, I like to turn for advice to a liberal luminary, an advocate of the power of Big Government doing big jobs for the common good. Someone like -- Newt Gingrich?

NIH funding has been flat since 2004, undermining the gains earned through the doubling of the budget and slowing the pace of progress in biomedical research. The Bush administration's proposed fiscal year 2008 budget would cut $329 million from last year's allocation of $28.6 billion. Biomedical inflation significantly compounds the impact of this reduction. This is exactly the wrong course for the country. Investment in the NIH should be expanded, not cut.

[...]

The National Institutes of Health Reform Act, approved by Congress in 2006, contained the authorization of an increase of 8 percent for the agency in 2008. The House Appropriations Committee vote on June 7 calling for a 2.6 percent increase for NIH does not go far enough. The House, Senate and the Bush administration should follow the 8 percent increase authorization, and make a choice now to secure longer, healthier lives for Americans with this as the benchmark for future years.

Those paragraphs, emphases mine, are from an op-ed Gingrich co-authored in the June 24 San Francisco Chronicle. As I recently posted, the current Senate and House plans increase the NIH budget by only 3.5%, compared to an inflation rate in the life sciences of 3.7% (detailed numbers here). The current plans also shift funding obligations around within NIH in a way that leaves most Institutes with increases of less than 2.5%, a stunning real dollar cut relative to inflation. At this point, let me stop and ask, what upside-down, ass-backwards planet am I living on when Gingrich advocates government spending on medical research while the Democratic Congress wants to starve it out?

Let's Rebuild America First!

By Mimikatz

The awful bridge collapse in Minneapolis is a tragedy, but it is also, as Rick Perlstein comments, a "teachable moment."  Rick has been writing for months about the costs of conservatism, both in terms of crumbling infrastructure and the crumbling regulatory safety net (his e. coli conservatives).  It is not hyperbole to call the bridge collapse, as Rick does, part of the "tax cut death toll."

The bridge-collapse tragedy is a teachable moment: This is your government on conservatism.

This year two Democratic Minnesotan legislatures passed a $4.18 billion transportation package. Minnesota's Republican governor vetoed it because he had taken a no-new-taxes pledge, Grover Norquist-style. That's just what conservative politicians do.

The original bill would have put over $8 billion toward highways, city, and county roads, and transit over the next decade. The bill he let passed spent much less.

Now four people are dead, and counting.

Infrastructure collapse is easy to understand, but what about the e. coli conservatives, the ones who have gutted our regulatory system to pad their portfolios?  Here's David Goldstein from The Nation:

For decades our government has been dominated by a conservative ideology that claims to despise big government, abhor regulation and adhere to an unswerving faith in the infinite wisdom of the market. Rick Perlstein dubs this philosophy "E. Coli Conservatism," and in practice it is not only flawed but corrupt: a calculated conservative project intended to gut our regulatory systems in the interest of sheer corporate greed. We eat adulterated food not because we cannot adequately regulate the industry but because to do so would eat into the profits of the corporations our regulators serve.

In the six years since 9/11, food-borne pathogens and toxins have quietly killed ten times the number of Americans who died in the terrorist attacks. How many more Americans must conservatism kill before our leaders embrace a more responsible ideology?

So as we contemplate the costs of the Iraq War and what it has cost each of our communities, keep in mind that this is all by design.  A key part of the Bush/Cheney/Rove project is not just to redistribute wealth, but to make Americans mistrust the ability of their government to solve real problems and improve their lives, because that will undermine the Democrats' key appeal, their ability to actually govern more or less in the public interest.  Not only have Bush/Cheney spent our money and our children's money on their mendacious and ill-conceived war, they are robbing us of the means and the collective will to rebuild our own country, our crumbling infrastructure and our regulatory safety net, let alone address problems like global climate collapse. 

Ironically, these are all areas where we could put millions of Americans to work in decent jobs here at home, rebuilding our social capital, developing new technologies and binding us together as a nation, thus reinvigorating our economy.  Instead, we may see any "peace dividend" from ending the Iraq War, like the last "peace dividend" under Bush's father, going to bail out financial institutions, in this case those who bought excessively risky loans made by greedy mortgage brokers. 

That's conservatism, folks!

Will Democrats help stem cell research?

by emptypockets

Are Congressional Democrats really going to support stem cell research, or were stem cells simply a political device for the campaign trail?

We have seen that stem cell research is a useful political wedge to separate fundamentalist candidates, beholden to the extreme religious right, from an electorate of mainstream Republican voters (who support stem cell research). Democrats have done a great job stumping on stem cells and using legislation sure to be vetoed as a means to get incumbent Republicans on record voting against the publicly popular research.

But their policy action so far is disappointingly mixed. Democrats have continued to champion federal funding of stem cell research as a legislative matter -- that is, they have passed legislation aimed at reversing Bush's directive to the NIH and thereby freeing up federal money for the research. (A similar bill was also passed by the Republican-controlled House in May 2005 and the Republican-controlled Senate in September 2006.) However, when it comes to appropriating funding that would pay for that research, the current budget bills show a meager allocation for NIH, on par with the 2004-2006 budgets set by Republicans.

Not Quite the Energy Task Force

by emptywheel

I get the feeling today's installment of Cheney started out as a story about the Energy Task Force. It also tells the story of the Klamath fish kill and snowmobiles in Yellowstone. The big news, though, is Christine Todd Whitman's side of several issues, where Cheney blindly put business issues ahead of environmental requirements. In some ways, last week's Rolling Stone article on Cheney's involvement in climate change--which relies heavily on FOIAed documents--provides a valuable complement to the WaPo story, so I'm going to read them in conjunction. Doing so, I believe, closes the circle, shows how Cheney's unwavering ties to the energy industry drive the rest of his actions.

The WaPo describes the Energy Task Force as an unquestioning affirmation of business assertions that environmental regulations hamper business and energy development.

Sitting through Cheney's task force meetings, Whitman had been stunned by what she viewed as an unquestioned belief that EPA's regulations were primarily to blame for keeping companies from building new power plants. "I was upset, mad, offended that there seemed to be so much head-nodding around the table," she said.

Whitman said she had to fight "tooth and nail" to prevent Cheney's task force from handing over the job of reforming the New Source Review to the Energy Department, a battle she said she won only after appealing to White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. This was an environmental issue with major implications for air quality and health, she believed, and it shouldn't be driven by a task force primarily concerned with increasing production.

Directly out of that effort, Rolling Stone suggests, arose the propaganda campaign that served to undercut EPA itself.

President Bush on Breast Cancer

by emptypockets

Last week, President Bush signed into law a reauthorization of the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, an admirable health program that helps pay for breast cancer screenings for low-income women. He took the opportunity to say a few words about his own contributions to the field of cancer research:

I appreciate working with the United States Congress to fund breast and cervical cancer research and prevention. The span of my administration, we have spent, along with Congress, $6.7 billion. My budget for 2008 includes another billion dollars for research and prevention activities. We'll continue to work to ensure that every American woman has access to the screenings she needs to detect the cancers in time to treat them.

President Bush didn't mention, for some reason, that one of the ways he has "continue[d] to work" to help Americans overcome cancer was by being the first president since Nixon to cut funding for the NIH. Even the National Cancer Insititute, one of the best-funded of the institutes that comprise NIH, had its budget increased only 1.5% in FY2005 (the most recent year for which I find numbers), while inflation raises the cost of doing science around 4% annually. The money going into R01 grants, the core funding units distributed to US labs by NCI, actually dropped 2% from 2004 to 2005. As noted in the April Public Policy Briefing from the American Society for Cell Biology (pdf), one of the top breast cancer researchers in the US, Joan Brugge of Harvard, recently testified to Congress, "Four years of flat funding have had a devastating impact on the trajectory of cancer research." So, thanks for your hard work, President Bush.

He also didn't mention, of course, his decision to veto -- not once but twice -- bills that would allow the NIH to fund stem cell research. The cells that give rise to a breast cancer (or any other cancer) are in many ways like out-of-control stem cells: like a stem cell, they can divide indefinitely and "self-renew," meaning each daughter cell has the full developmental capacity of the mother cell, but unlike stem cells their growth has become unregulated. (There are also some ideas that some breast cancers arise directly from the normal population of stem cells, not differentiated cells, in the breast.) Understanding those basic mechanisms of self-renewal and how these special cells, with such enormous capacity to produce more cells, are usually held in check by developmental regulators, is absolutely fundamental to learning how cancers start and how to treat them. Unfortunately, most of that research has been frozen in time since 2001. Thanks again, President Bush.

President Bush did talk about his mother-in-law, Jenna Welch, who survived breast cancer. He said, "As a result of her mom's battle with cancer, Laura has devoted a lot of time and energy to raising awareness about breast cancer through efforts like the pink ribbon campaign. She managed to get me to wear pink. (Laughter.)" Thanks for wearing your awareness ribbon, President Bush, even if you are afraid it will make you look like a homosexual (ha, ha). It's good to know you are aware of the existence of breast cancer.

He didn't mention what Mrs. Bush or her mother Mrs. Welch thought of his interest in trying to link breast cancer risk to whether a woman has had an abortion, a notion outside the medical mainstream and for which major studies have found no support. President Bush has been using federal funds to pay for national "pregnancy centers," which were not paid by the government before 2001, and which incorrectly counsel women considering abortion that they will put themselves at high risk of cancer if they get one. The President's administration also forced the National Cancer Institute itself to remove correct information from its website -- an explanation that the idea of an abortion-breast cancer link had been settled in the late 1990s with large studies, including a major study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 -- and replace it with a misleading "fact sheet" that "erroneously suggested that whether abortion caused breast cancer was an open question with studies of equal weight supporting both sides." (The link and quote are from the website of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Following a political skirmish, the NCI was able to restore the correct information to its website.) So not only has President Bush blocked real research, he also has actively worked to promote falsehoods and misperception about what's already known. Thanks for your work, President Bush.

The bill that was signed Friday, sponsored by Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin and Republican Congresswoman Sue Myrick, is a good one. Seeing Bush associated with it, though, reminds me of some of what's so deeply wrong with his administration: such reluctance to do the right thing, and such obstinate refusal to try to understand root causes. It's great that low-income women will continue to benefit from subsidized cancer screenings. I'm just very worried, for those who are diagnosed, that their options for treatment will be limited because we simply are not learning about the disease fast enough, in large part because this country's biological research program has been suffocating under Bush for the last six years.

The coming Justice Department disaster

by Kagro X

How deep are we in it over the politicization of the Justice Department (and probably others) under the Bush "administration?"

Way deep.

This is a planned disaster. A burning of all bridges and a scorching of all escape routes. In other words, the routine Republican m.o.: destroy all paths back to the status quo, so that even if our theories don't pan out, nobody can pull them out by the roots -- they can only tinker with the ruins.

The invaluable Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe (he of the "signing statements" reportage) has a new blockbuster (the same that emptywheel pointed to earlier) on the role played by Pat Robertson's Regent University in the politicization of the federal government bureaucracy, and specifically the Department of Justice. And as emptywheel told you, Josh Marshall has the key paragraph and what it means.

Reading and Discussion: Constitutional Hardball

by Kagro X

Whenever I'm looking to put the political plays of the Bush "administration" in long-term context, I point people to "Constitutional Hardball," (PDF) a law review article written by Georgetown now Harvard Law Prof. Mark Tushnet. I think it's a real eye-opener for those who might otherwise advocate simply waiting out the Bush gang, and "fixing" the problems they've created at the ballot box. What is constitutional hardball?

A shorthand sketch of constitutional hardball is this: It consists of political claims and practices -- legislative and executive initiatives -- that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.³ It is hardball because its practitioners see themselves as playing for keeps in a special kind of way; they believe the stakes of the political controversy their actions provoke are quite high, and that their defeat and their opponents' victory would be a serious, perhaps permanent setback to the political positions they hold.

----------

³ By this I mean the "go without saying" assumptions that underpin working systems of constitutional government. They are had to identify outside times of crisis precisely because they go without saying. (An alternative term would be conventions.)

How do you know when it's happening?

One way to distinguish periods of ordinary politics from periods of transformation is that during the former pre-constitutional understandings are taken for granted, whereas during the latter such understandings are brought into question.

And what's really going on when it's happening?

The idea is that the institutional arrangements characteristic of a particular constitutional order -- characteristic, that is, of each specific period of ordinary politics -- are the presuppositions accepted by all politically significant actors in that period, whereas the whole point of constitutional transformation is to alter the previously taken-for-granted institutional arrangements. Of course the proponents of transformation are going to place pre-constitutional understandings in question, because they want to replace those understandings with others.

How does this relate, exactly, to today's situation? Read on after the jump.

The Wages of Inequality

By Mimikatz

The Times has a piece this morning entitled "Why Are There So Many Single Americans?" in which we learn that a bare majority (51%) of adult women are not living with a spouse, and nearly as many (49%) men are not.  The fact that women live longer, and thus typically live as widows for several years is one factor.  But the main factors appear to be class and its surrogate, education.  It used to be that educated women were considered unmarriageable.  (Remember that canard?)  Not so.  It turns out that educated men do want someone with whom they can talk intelligently after all (or at least, someone intelligent to raise the children). 

Statistics show that college educated women are more likely to marry than non-college educated women — although they marry, on average, two years later. The popular image might have been true even 20 years ago — though generally speaking, most women probably didn’t boil the bunny rabbit the way Ms. Close’s character [in "Fatal Attraction"] did in 1987. In the past, less educated women often “married up.” In “Working Girl,” Melanie Griffith triumphs. Now, marriage has become more one of equals; when more highly educated men marry, it tends to be more highly educated women.   

Educated women also seem not only more likely to evntually marry, but to stay married.  Why does this "marriage gap" between the classes rise with age? 

Why have things changed so much for women who don’t have the choices that educated women have? While marriage used to be something you did before launching a life or career, now it is seen as something you do after you’re financially stable — when you can buy a house, say. The same is true for all classes. But the less educated may not get there.

“Women are saying, ‘I’m not ready, I want to work for a while, the guys I hang around with don’t make enough money and they don’t want a commitment,’ ” Mr. Jencks said. “It’s the same thing a lot of African-American women in poor neighborhoods are saying."

The marriage gap between the classes is not so great among younger men.  Both educated and uneducated young men are typically averse to commitment, the author states.  But after 35, the percentage of married, educated men is 12 percentage points higher than the percentage of married but uneducated men. 

Why should we care?  Among other reasons, because marriage attaches a person to society as a whole, and unattached males are much more likely to engage in anti-social behavior than women or attached men.  Marriage, by contrast, makes people happier (on average) and more stable.  (It has reportedly even been used to defuse terrorists.)  By making marriage difficult for less educated (read, lower class) people, we are creating yet another source of social instability.  (Interestingly, this is also the best policy argument for gay marriage--if marriage is good (on balance) for individuals and society, why deny its benefits to a whole class of people?   Doesn't this actually hurt society as well as the individuals involved?)   

The decline of marriage among the less educated creates philosophical dilemmas for both liberals and conservatives.  The difficulties in entering into and remaining in a marriage are psychological and cultural as well as economic, but economics surely plays a major role.  For conservatives who see marriage as the core social institution, supporting economic policies that provide a safety net and are more family-friendly brings them into direct conflict with pro-business free marketeers.

But the studies that document the stabilizing effects of marriage on adults as well as children may give pause to liberals as well.  Witness the turnaroud on divorce among educated women, 65% of whom now think divorce should be made more difficult.  And it also exposes the lie at the core of libertarianism--we are not islands, but social beings who need connection and thrive in communities.