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Another installment of “Things you couldn’t make up”

Saturday, April 28, 2007

From Thinkprogress:

Former U.S. AID director Randall Tobias, who resigned yesterday upon admitting that he frequented a Washington escort service, oversaw a controversial policy advocated by the religious right that required any US-based group receiving anti-AIDS funds to take an anti-prostitution “loyalty oath.”

Aid groups bitterly opposed the policy, charging that it “was so broad — and applied even to their private funds — that it would obstruct their outreach to sex workers who are at high risk of transmitting the AIDS virus.” But President Bush wouldn’t budge. He signed a 2003 National Security Presidential Directive saying prostitution “and related activities” were “inherently harmful and dehumanizing.”

Several groups and countries had their funding cut due to the policy. Brazil lost $40 million for “one of its most successful anti-AIDS strategies, persuading sex workers to use condoms or other measures to stop spreading the disease.”

During an “Ask the White House” online chat in 2004, Tobias defended the policy, saying the U.S. was “partnering with communities” to begin “fighting sex trafficking and prostitution, while still serving victims of these activities.” Tobias added that he was overseeing several “highly successful” relationship programs “aimed at men and boys to help them develop healthy relationships with women.”

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Follow up-please

Saturday, April 28, 2007

This post at Atrios, along with this article from the San Franciso Chronicle to which it links, bring to mind a problem with our discourse that seems so easily fixed in one case, and hard in another. As a lawyer I find it particularly grating. One might call it the case of the missing followup.

In the article an anonymous (they’re always anonymous) Democratic consultant:

But one key state Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of concern for riling the netroots crowd, warns that such efforts are potentially positive and negative.

Netroots commentary can frequently be intensely personal, even “totally mean and irrational,” the strategist said, with some bloggers finding power in their ability “to assassinate political characters online.”

“It’s amplified by the anonymity, and it can be scary that it’s so irresponsible,” the insider said. “And it’s pulling the mainstream media in that direction.”

Now, I am not going to argue that there are no irresponsible bloggers, though I would maintain that there are fewer on the left than the right (at least proportionally), but it seems to me that the obvious follow up to a question like this would be: “who are you talking about-give me an example”. I have a feeling that, like the Georgia Congressman who couldn’t recite the 10 Commandments he wanted posted in public buildings, that strategist would be unable to give a concrete example, and if he could it would be an isolated comment or an obscure blog. It’s not just Democrats that do this, and it’s not just bloggers that are the targets. Bush is a past master at attributing statements to unnamed Democrats, and he is never asked to specifically identify the (often non-existent) people to whom he alludes.

Maybe politicians can get away with making these sort of statements because there is some sort of tacit agreement between politicians and the media that they will never explicitly call each other on these fact free statements. I have yet to hear of a politician respond to one of those “some say” questions (e.g., Some say that you, John Edwards, are displaying insatiable ambition by running for President when your wife has cancer) by asking the interrogator to identify some of the sayers. Why, for instance, didn’t Edwards ask Katie exactly who those people were? He was a litigator-would he ever let an opening like that go by in a courtroom (Okay, I know the old saw about not asking courtroom questions when you don’t already know the answer, but in real life you often have to take a deep breath and do it). This seems so very odd, because if the standard response to such a question were: “Oh really, who are you talking about”, some of the sillier questions might stop.

This problem could be easily fixed if only, depending on the interrogator, the media person or the politician would follow up.

The more intractable problem involves those cases in which the media person speaks for him or herself. The comment about bloggers is a good example. The same type of statement has been made by media types about us horrible bloggers. In that case, there’s no one to follow up, even in theory. If a media person wants to dismiss bloggers as a bunch of pre-pubescent kids living in their mom’s basement eating ice-cream sandwiches” there’s no one in a position to follow up and point out how fact free that is.

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More on Limbo, short this time

Saturday, April 28, 2007

I am indebted to a commenter with the appropriate name of Gloria, who directed me to this site run by some Catholics who agree with my alarm at the passing of limbo. According to them, and I most humbly agree, the abolition of limbo is heresy, just one of many that they have documented:

All Heresies from Benedict XVI used in past Heresy of the Week columns are found in the Heresies of Benedict XVI File. Other past Heresies of the Week are probably found in either the Heresy of the Week Archive or the “Some of the Recent Articles” section.

That’s right, they feature a heresy of the week, and have a whole raft of them on Benedict. And no, unlike my post, this is no joke. These folks take no prisoners. Their argument on Limbo is here, and while I agree with them that Benedict is a heretic, I must sorrowfully condemn them as heretics as well, since they appear to reserve Limbo to babies only, meaning, basically, that all non-Catholics go to Hell, unless they manage to live a sinless life, original sin excepted. Now, I’m as ready to condemn sinners to burn until the end of time as the next guy, but I really think it’s a bit harsh to make someone with a few venial sins burn even after the end of time. No, I insist that Limbo is also for the goodly heathens, like Socrates and the other guys in Dante’s poem. So I must, unfortunately, condemn the good folks at the Most Holy Family Monastery to Hell as heretics of the highest order, right along with Pope Benedict. It’s beginning to look like Hell is going to be so jam packed with Catholics that the rest of you will have to beat down the door to get in.

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Bill Moyers reports on media complicity in selling the war

Thursday, April 26, 2007

I just finished watching Bill Moyer’s Journal, in which he chronicles the media’s failure to do its job (with some honorable exceptions) during the run up to war. What I found interesting was the excuses so many of them made: that the information wasn’t out there, or if it was, that the political momentum toward war was irresistible, and that saying anything critical of the war would have left them too exposed to a mindless juggernaut of public opinion that would have crushed them.

As to the first argument, it’s total nonsense. The information was out there. The second argument is nonsense as well, but its one that many people have a tendency to accept, because we have talked ourselves into believing that there was overwhelming public support for the war at the time it was started.

That’s just not true. There was a great deal of skepticism in the country prior to the initiation of hostilities, as well as a desire that inspections be allowed to run their course. The degree of skepticism was remarkable, given the fact that the average American was relentlessly exposed to pro-war propaganda, and to very little skeptical reporting. Had reporters done their jobs, there is every reason to believe that the number of Americans opposing the war would have been even higher. After the war started, of course, public opinion solidified behind it so long as things were going well. That was to be expected, as was the gradual and steady disilllusionment once the scope of the much predicted disaster became clear.

So folks like Dan Rather and Bob Simon of CBS are a bit disingenuous when they excuse their lack of public skepticism by citing their fear of getting ahead of the curve. They helped create a curve that only barely existed, and helped prevent a highly skeptical public from being even more skeptical. When the existence of skeptics was acknowledged, they were dismissed and derided.

The Beltway folks believe we’re stupid, and conduct themselves accordingly. We see it now as they convince themselves that Harry Reid blundered when he said what everyone knows: that we’re losing the war. They believe the public will turn on him, and, once again in service to their Republican masters, they’re doing their best to make that happen, but the people feel differently.

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Housekeeping details

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

This new blog site, besides being far easier to manage than I thought (though I’m still working out the bugs) allows for other contributors to easily log on and put up stuff of their own. So far I’ve got at least one person who has expressed a willingness to contribute, but so far nothing concrete. Anyway, if you someday see a post by someone else (and hopefully I’ve set things up so it will be somewhat obvious), don’t be surprised.

Tomorrow we have a meeting of the Groton Democratic Town Committee, after which my wife and I must be off to New London to meet our eldest, who will be arriving on an energy saving train. No posting tomorrow.

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New Real Estate

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I haven’t seen anything about this in the U.S. Press, though maybe I’ve just missed it, so I’ll pass it along just to spread a little cheer. According to the Independent, there is some new ocean front property available in Greenland:

The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland’s enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.

Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland’s remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea.

Shaped like a three-fingered hand some 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it has been discovered by a veteran American explorer and Greenland expert, Dennis Schmitt, who has named it Warming Island (Or Uunartoq Qeqertoq in Inuit, the Eskimo language, that he speaks fluently).

The US Geological Survey has confirmed its existence with satellite photos, that show it as an integral part of the Greenland coast in 1985, but linked by only a small ice bridge in 2002, and completely separate by the summer of 2005. It is now a striking island of high peaks and rugged rocky slopes plunging steeply to a sea dotted with icebergs.

…

But it is only one more example of the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, that scientists have begun to realise, only very recently, is proceeding far more rapidly than anyone thought.

The second-largest ice sheet in the world (after Antarctica), if its entire 2.5 million cubic kilometres of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 metres, or more than 23 feet.

That would inundate most of the world’s coastal cities, including London, swamp vast areas of heavily-populated low-lying land in countries such as Bangladesh, and remove several island countries such as the Maldives from the face of the Earth. However, even a rise one tenth as great would have devastating consequences.
…
Until two or three years ago, it was thought that the break-up of the ice sheet might take 1,000 years or more but a series of studies and alarming observations since 2004 have shown the disintegration is accelerating and, as a consequence, sea level rise may be much quicker than anticipated.
…
A study last year by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology showed that, rather than just melting relatively slowly, the ice sheet is showing all the signs of a mechanical break-up as glaciers slip ever faster into the ocean, aided by the “lubricant” of meltwater forming at their base. As the meltwater seeps down it lubricates the bases of the “outlet” glaciers of the ice sheet, causing them to slip down surrounding valleys towards the sea,

The latter process, if I recall correctly, was described by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Filed in Environment | | Comments (1)

Catholics on the Court

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I’m so confused. As I said a few days ago, I have a theological degree from Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School, but even I can’t figure this out. When John Kerry was running for president, Catholic Bishops pretty much threatened him with excommunication for his views on abortion. They made it clear that they expected Catholic politicians to adhere to Catholic Doctrine in matter of public policy:

Sen. John Kerry’s defiance of his Church’s condemnation of abortion and approval of gay marriage is not only a problem for him and Catholic bishops, but for individual Catholics as well, according to a leading Catholic layman and editor.

He says Catholic priests should refuse to give Holy Communion to Kerry even if their bishops have not specifically warned the senator that he is not to receive Communion.
That demand of excommunication for Kerry is made by Deal Hudson, editor of Crisis magazine, the nation’s leading intellectual Catholic journal.

…

“It’s in the hands of his ordinary [bishop] – and when his ordinary has spoken and said that politicians should refrain from communion, he’s alluding to the fact that someone like Sen. Kerry should not consider themselves part of the Catholic community.”
…
St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke has specifically warned Kerry to avoid receiving communion when visiting his archdiocese. In Kerry’s home archdiocese, without mentioning him by name, Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley has said that Catholic politicians who do not vote in line with Church teachings “shouldn’t dare come to Communion.”

…

Asked if he believed that the bishops individually or together should tell renegade Catholic politicians such as Sen. Kerry that they must not receive communion and that they are excommunicating themselves by so doing, Hudson said: “I think that it’s what’s happening, little by little. When a bishop says that someone should refrain from receiving communion without using the word excommunication, he’s implying it. I think they are beginning to speak up, and Kerry’s ordinary has spoken up, although he hasn’t specifically mentioned Kerry as has Archbishop Burke. (Emphasis added)”

Well, that’s all perfectly reasonable.

Here’s where I get confused though. Apparently, when anyone suggests that Catholic politicians are “vot[ing] in line with Church teaching”, just like the Bishops expect, they are anti-Catholic bigots. Witness the reaction to Rosie O’Donnell’s recent statements:

“You know what concerns me?” O’Donnell asked last week on ABC’s “The View.” “How many Supreme Court judges are Catholic?”

“Five,” said host Barbara Walters.

“Five,” O’Donnell said. “How about separation of church and state in America?”

which drew this reaction:

The comments sparked immediate outrage. Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Laura Ingraham has led the battle against O’Donnell, urging listeners to e-mail ABC to protest what she calls O’Donnell’s “anti-Catholic bigotry.”

“‘The View’s’ Rosie O’Donnell continues on her tear down the path of the Rich and Unhinged, this time with an anti-Catholic rant against the Supreme Court,” Ingraham wrote on her Web site. “Could she ever get away with denigrating the Muslim faith this way?”

Witness also (from the same article) the reaction to this cartoon from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

f550ede3-efac-472f-99e6-06ce49f2162a.gif

Joseph Cella, president of the Catholic-based organization Fidelis, called the cartoon “venomous, terribly misleading and blatantly anti-Catholic.”

“The Supreme Court did not ‘follow marching orders’ from the Vatican or the bishops in the United States,” Cella said. “Instead, the court deferred to deliberative judgment of the people’s elected representatives protected by the Constitution.”

If Catholic Bishops demand that Catholic politicians vote in a manner consistent with Church teaching then it cannot be anti-Catholic to state or imply that a Catholic politician is doing just that. Not unless it is anti-Catholic to accuse someone of being a good Catholic.

In the case of Antonin (“fool for Christ“) Scalia and Clarence (just plain fool) Thomas, both of whom are reputed members of Opus Dei (as is Alito and probably John Roberts), it’s a joke to contend that Catholicism has nothing to do with their votes. You don’t join Opus Dei because you want to have a few drinks with the guys.

The Catholic Church has come a long way. In 1960 it was the Catholic candidate that upheld the separation of Church and State. Now the Church demands that Catholic politicians take their marching orders from the Church. It can’t complain when people assume that maybe that’s exactly what some of them are doing.

Note: It is apparently impossible to conclusively confirm that any of the justices are members of Opus Dei, since it is a secret society and no one in the Senate has the good sense to ask questions of nominees about membership in this society. Nonetheless, there is good reason to believe that the four named Justices are members.

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Coming soon to a neighborhood near you

Monday, April 23, 2007

Someone in the Pentagon has a past, or a promising future, on Madison Avenue. The euphemistic heights have been reached, perhaps someday to be equalled, but never to be surmounted. As someone who dabbles in writing I can only doff my hat to the person who came up with the idea of calling the walled ghettos we are creating in Iraq “gated communities”. Both the Courant and the Times report on the use of the term, though in the Times the Defense Department, for some mysterious reason, appears to back away from the policy, but not the term. From the Courant:

Biometric scanning devices that can record residents’ fingerprints and eye patterns are among the technology the U.S. military is counting on – along with the more usual concrete barriers – in a plan to wall off at least 10 of Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods, creating what officers call “gated communities” in an attempt to carve out oases of safety in this war-ravaged city.

From the Times:

The military does not have a new strategy of building walls or creating “gated communities,” the spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said in a written statement. He described it as a tactic being used in only a handful of neighborhoods and not an effort to divide the city, much less the country.

Even Orwell would be in awe of a person who could use such a term to describe a policy of totalitarian ghettoization. Here’s the translation of the term for those who have still not learned to expect the worst from Bush and all it touches:

…American military officials said last week in a statement that the Adhamiya wall was “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy.” They also said that the wall was aimed at separating Sunni Arabs in Adhamiya from Shiites to the east.

Apartheid, anyone?

For myself, this all brings to mind the words of Robert Frost, who in a dim and distant age, by way of drawing a no longer existing contrast between this nation and its adversaries, read these words at another Wall:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offence. 
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 
That wants it down!”

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Clinton makes them do it

Monday, April 23, 2007

A look into the mind of a Republican stalwart, local style, in this morning’s Day. One Frank Wolf writes to the Editor to spew venom on the Democrats, ending his screed by taking a shot at the liberal Day (you know, the paper that wanted Bill Clinton’s resignation but can’t see the problem with keeping a war criminal in the White House):

[a] request of The Day: Could it please run a lead story that provides the details of any attorney firings that occurred under the Clinton administration? I believe this would provide valuable perspective to the current situation. I am having a hard time remembering any significant coverage, but that could just be my failing memory.

Here we see a stellar example of the modern conservative mind. In all cases, blame everything on Bill Clinton, and if you get caught with your hand in the cookie assure all and sundry that you were only taking the last cookie; Bill Clinton had taken the rest, and the fact that Clinton had done it somehow justifies it.

In this particular case, Mr. Wolf is implying that the Day has a duty to justify all Bush transgressions by seeking out Clintonian precedents and drawing false equivalencies between Clinton’s acts and Bush’s crimes. In this particular case the poor Day would have a great deal of difficulty satisfying Mr. Wolf. Maybe his “failing memory” is responsible for the fact that he seems to have forgotten that Clinton’s Attorney General was Janet Reno, who was so politically motivated that she authorized the Ken Starr witchhunt in the Lewinsky affair. Like all presidents, Clinton replaced all the U.S. Attorneys at the beginning of his term. There’s no record of him having done anything like what Bush is doing now. But for folks like Mr. Wolf, facts don’t matter. Truthiness is all.

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Spring Flowers

Monday, April 23, 2007

Still having a bit of trouble posting pictures. They tend to get distorted on the homepage, but appear to do better on the archive pages. I’m going to look around for a plugin to manage them better.

Anyway, by way of experiment, here are a couple of pictures of our daffodils, which have finally arrived in force, later, I think than normal.

daffodil-one.jpg

For some reason, I can’t seem to get the pictures separated, so I’m inserting this text. I’ll have to work on this.

daffodil-two.jpg

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