The Next Hurrah

Beer and Turkey Thirty

by emptywheel

I just turned in the paper I've been working on. Luckily I've got a couple of these stashed away in the basement.

So I'm off to clean the house--I've got house guests coming in five hours. And then, tomorrow is Turkey Day for me--an odd little custom some friends and I have adopted that makes the whole process less stressful. We got the full Heritage Turkey thing this year; I'll let you know if it's worth its considerable price tag.

All of which means there'll be light posting until Sunday (rumor has it the football has already started for the weekend, but you wouldn't know it by what's on the TV).

But keep track of the site anyway. I've got an announcement or two in the next couple of days that may be of some interest. And Monday, I get to start my blog and bill paying frenzy I've been warning you all about.

Domestic Spying

by emptywheel

I've got more questions about the Patriots spy scandal than I do answers.

• Will the Pats do measurably worse now that the league is going to be watching for them videotaping their opponents defensive calls?
• Are the great halftime coaches really just users of illegal spy techniques, as is the logical progression of Brian Dawkins' thoughts? Or is it just the Pats?
• Unlike some commentators, I consider $750,000 in fines and a first round draft pick a light penalty. With Belichick's ability to pick talent, losing the draft pick is much less to pay than losing his coaching for, say, the first quarter of the season. Is the light penalty just an attempt to scare everyone else spying as well to cut it out? Because it sure seems designed to bracket further inquiry, rather than make the Pats pay.
• What's up with Eric Magini's silence on the issue? Magini's not the only former Pats Defensive Coordinator who has to compete against Belichick now--though he is the one with the crappiest relationship, as far as I know. But Mangini's silence sure suggests Mangini learned of the spying practice when he was in New England.

So those are my questions. As to great commentary about the spy scandal, for once Governor Richardson is right on the money:

Democratic Presidential candidate Governor Bill Richardson, campaigning today in Iowa, issued the following statement regarding the recent "spying" incident involving the National Football League's New England Patriots:

"The President has been allowed to spy on Americans without a warrant, and our U.S. Senate is letting it continue. You know something is wrong when the New England Patriots face stiffer penalties for spying on innocent Americans than Dick Cheney and George Bush."

Other than that, I'm just wondering if, for the second weekend in a row, Michigan will be treated to the spectacle of the Lions outperforming the Wolverines...

It's Going to Be One Heckova Political Year in Football

by emptywheel

Just a few weeks away, too! I can't wait to turn the satellite back on.

It's going to be an interesting year in football. Not only have the Patriots loaded up on targets for Tom Brady. But the following issues have arisen since the end of last season:

• Keith Olbermann will be returning to sportscasting in NBC's Sunday night prime time slot. He's not likely to be overtly political--though I do hope it'll get Joe Sixpack to consider tuning into his show. Olbermann will be accompanied by the conservative but very very pretty Tiki Barber, so the show has something for every ... woman, at least.
• A number of veterans are trying to get the NFL to help get documents relating to Pat Tillman's death. In any case, the ongoing controversy with the Administration's cover-up of the real reasons for Tillman's death might begin to attract some Joe Sixpack  attention as the season gets into gear.
• George Bush has appointed the gay-hating (but brilliant) Tony Dungy to a Presidential Council.

Hopefully, that last item, tied to Bush's disappearing support, will convince Americans everywhere that the Colts are not America's team.

Which is my way of warning you all that there might be an undue amount of football posts this fall, as we all hope the Patriots take away the title from George Bush's team.

YearlyKos Timing

by emptywheel

I'm madly cleaning the house (trust me, a very rare event chez emptywheel) in some kind of mad guilt for leaving mr. e-dub and McC alone again while I'm in Chicago at YKos. So I thought it a good time for a last post until I get to Chicago tomorrow mid-day (well, you know how promises like that go).

I'm hoping I'll get to put more faces to names among our readers (heck, I hear some of my blog-mates may come out of the woodwork, too). Our "Live-blogging the Libby Trial" (me, Christy, and Shelly Snook from the Courthouse, along with Jeralyn keeping us in line) is at 9:30 on Thursday, which is likely before a lot of you get in. Then, rumor has it, I'm doing a book-signing at 2PM on Thursday. Other than that, I'll just be wandering the halls aimlessly, mourning the chocolate fountain I bitched about last year.

Drop a note in the comments if you'll be at YKos, so I know to keep a look-out for you.

A Good Day to Celebrate Protesting Women

By Meteor Blades

Today, March 8, is the 150th anniversary of a protest by garment and textile workers in New York City. Those workers, as you might guess from their jobs, were women. Bad working conditions, a euphemism for the reality of their Dickensian factories - and appallingly low wages - pushed these previously powerless women into the streets.

The cops acted for the plutocrats and their legislative puppets, attacking the protesters and forcing them off the public thoroughfare in a fine example of the bloody reality which so often has accompanied the ideals enshrined in our nation‘s great documents, but has been frequently ignored by state authority right up to the present day.

The protesters responded by forming a union before the end of May.

Saturday Stew: Delicious Bloggy Morsels

We're beginning a weekly round-up of blog posts that struck us as especially trenchant, articulate, passionate, or just plain good. We're going to miss a lot of the best ones, so we're counting on TNH readers to fill in the rest. Please add your favorite posts from around the web this week in comments, or talk about the ones below.

At "Huffington Post," Paul Rieckhoff, who started the veterans organization for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, begins a series of "think out of the box" solutions to Iraq.

Revere at "Effect Measure" looks into "local testing" of Indonesian bird flu cases and finds they are done in local labs, with little funding, and often without positive or negative control samples. Not surprisingly, some results were found by the WHO to be unreproducible. Indonesia has not recognized there is a problem.

Revere again, on human-to-human avian flu transmission: "If the Ministry of Health official walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like a duck, it doesn't mean the seven family members in the Sumatran cluster got it from a duck. It means the official is a quack."

Kevin Beck at "Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge" delivers a five-part series about American obesity. Part 1 covers the sometimes-misguided sometimes-valuable campaign by the National Association To Advance Fat Acceptance to reframe obesity not as a bad habit or disease but as just another personal trait. (Read on to Parts 2 | 3 | 4)

Eternal Hope catalogs, one by one, how each Amendment in the Bill of Rights has been broken by recent Republican administrations -- mostly by the current one.

Tara Smith at "Aetiology" explains how microevolution of one type of pathogen takes place within single patients (take that, ID'ers!) and presents the surprising conclusion that the mutations that help a bug to maintain chronic infection can be different -- even opposite to -- the mutations that help it mount an acute infection, something to think about for any disease.

And if you didn't already read it, don't miss eRiposte at "Left Coaster" who lays out the evidence of the second forged Niger document -- the one nobody's seen -- as emptywheel linked yesterday with some additional background.

What have you been reading this week?

H5N1: The Risk Communication Dilemma

by DemFromCT

Here's an interesting op-ed story from the SF Chronicle:

THE WAR ON HYPE

The deadly terror lurking around the corner may not be such a big, ominous threat after all

Since James A. Lewis is director of the technology and public policy program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, this sounded interesting. After all the smallpox vaccination program for civilian heath care workers was a complete failure (23 page .pdf):

Three key failures are responsible for the continuation of this serious gap in biodefense:

• Sufficient resources were not allocated nor requested in time for public health agencies to properly implement the program, leaving state and local agencies without the funding to manage vaccinations without cutting other health services.
  
• An adequate compensation plan to compensate volunteers who may suffer side effects from the vaccine was not in place when vaccinations began
  
• Healthcare workers, first responders, and the public at large are not persuaded that smallpox is a serious threat that warrants participation in a limited vaccination program.

But I was rather surprised to find avian flu at the top of Lewis' hype list, even though homeland security issues fill the rest of the article (as they should), and avian flu is not amongst this fellow's expertise.

TNH Book Club: The Republican War Against Science

by DemFromCT

In the last few weeks, we've been chatting in the open threads about a book club. We tossed some ideas around, and our first entry will be Chris Mooney's The Republican War Against Science.

IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, long before his reelection and even before he became a "wartime president," George W. Bush found himself in a political tight spot. He responded with a morsel of scientific misinformation so stunning, so certain to be exposed by enterprising journalists (as indeed it was), that one can only wonder what Bush and his handlers were thinking, or whether they were thinking at all. The issue was embryonic stem cell research, and Bush's nationally televised claim—that "more than sixty genetically diverse" embryonic stem cell lines existed at the time of his statement—counts as one of the most flagrant purely scientific deceptions ever perpetrated by a U.S. president on an unsuspecting public.

If you haven't read it, you can sample some Mooney essays (and an interview or two) here and here.

From the Rockefeller University interview:

Mooney’s thesis is that the Republican Party is addicted to the misuse and abuse of science, and the party’s domination by the modern conservative movement drives this addiction. Corporate interests and religious conservatives oppose the scientific community’s norms and products. The corporate sector resists any effort to restrict profits (e.g. the tobacco, pharmaceutical, and energy industries), and religious conservatives flatly reject the scientific worldview (e.g. intelligent design). This opposition has led to the systematic misuse of scientific information. The response of the Republican Party includes President Bush’s statements regarding human embryonic stem cell lines, the elimination of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and attacks on climate scientists who present ‘inconvenient’ analyses of global warming. Mooney points out that such malfeasance obstructs the ability of the government to make informed policy decisions, and will result in negative consequences for the American public.

Check the science link at TNH and control F search for stem cells, just to see some recent examples from Missouri and otherwise, or look at the Intelligent Design posts for a more dramatic example (one can argue which is the more important of the two, but they're both key). The important thing is that the policy set by both local and federal Republicans is deliberate, insidious and hurtful to Americans, especially in a long term sense.

End Times

by DemFromCT

Some scattered thoughts and subjects this am... I'm away until Sunday and blogging while I pack. But reading about still stricken New Orleans and suddenly stricken Paris, I have to note the increase in emails and random posts that Jesus Christ is coming. Without getting too much into theology, let's just say that'll require concrete evidence of same (including fingerprints and passport) as well as proof of resistance to avian flu. But it certainly feels like things are falling apart this month more than usual.

Interestingly, the left and right parts of Blogistan have handled their focus a tad differently (I'm shocked):

As the week opens, conservative bloggers have kept their focus on the unrest in France, which has now been going on 11 nights. Meanwhile, liberal bloggers continue pressing numerous questions about the WH and pre-war WMD intel.

For conservatives, the former is a troubling, if vindicating, example that Muslim immigrants are a bigger problem than Europe admits; among the liberals commenting, most point to unemployment and social inequality as the real problem. And re: the latter issue, Dem-leaning bloggers want the Dems and MSM to keep pushing for answers about various intel claims that proved incorrect; to the extent that GOP-leaning bloggers are looking at the same issues, they focus more on the credibility of the admin's accusers or how it's being covered by the MSM.

Law and order vs. root causes. A falso dichotomy, because both sides have a point and ignoring the other side is not constructive. Apply that to immigration, the coming hot issue, and you see the same split. This is a debate that hasn't happened yet, and one doesn't need omniscience to know this is going to be one hell of a political issue down the road. Likely French riots will "prove" whatever simple-minded solution one wishes to put forward in the US, but as always reality is more complicated than that. If anything, with maneuvering between Villepin, Chirac, Sarkozy, business hiring practices and other issues, "politics is local" was never more true, even when applied to Europe and their restive populations.

Well, whatever the solution, I certainly don't see the Minutemen as being part of it. But absent a real discussion, it's likely that Minutemen-style 'local solutions' will fill the void (another example of how not talking about problems doesn't solve them). Something to look forward to, I suppose.

If you find reasonable immigration discussions or analysis (Euro or US), post them here. in the meantime, check in with Dave Neiwert, who's done a great job of chronicling the Minutemen issue and the seamy side of immigration reform for months.

See you Sunday.

Bits and Pieces

by DemFromCT

While waiting for Fitzgerald, here's a sampling of other stories to follow. There's the Miers mess, e.g. The WaPo had a couple of stories from Friday that make you wonder if there'll be any possiblility of success. First this story:

At one key juncture after another, Miers has faltered where Roberts glided. Her courtesy calls on the Judiciary Committee's top two senators prompted conflicting tales of curious comments that she may or may not have made. Her answers to the committee's questionnaire included a misinterpretation of constitutional law and were deemed so inadequate that the panel asked her to redo it. She revealed one day that her D.C. law license had been temporarily suspended -- and said the next day that the same thing had happened in Texas -- because of unpaid dues.

And from the Post's SCOTUS blog:

It is apparent now that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are trying to tell the White House that Miers, as one member put it, is going to have a "tough" time in the hearings.

While such language is not explicitly a recommendation for withdrawal of a nominee, it comes close, considering the fact that committee members are traditionally circumspect in their pre-hearing comments, generally adopting some variation of "wait and see."

Any mistakes in her hearings will be an enormous embarrassment for any and all involved. Who's gonna tell George if she screws up?

Meanwhile, Steve Clemons has back-to-back scoops, first on Lawrence Wilkerson, then on Brent Scowcroft. These guys are so far off the W reservation they're in another country.

The revered-in-tons-of-corners former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft definitively breaks ranks with the Bush administration in an article by nearly the same name, "Breaking Ranks," appearing in the upcoming Monday issue of The New Yorker.

The article will outline what decisions and events have built up to turn Brent Scowcroft against this Bush administration. Yes, that's right. . ."turned Brent Scowcroft against this Bush administration."

Jeffrey Goldberg, the author of the piece, has pulled off a stunning coup by not only getting Brent Scowcroft to talk -- but also getting some incredibly juicy commentary from President George H.W. Bush on the performance of his son's national security team.