An ancient apocalypse at Osiris?

NASA and Nature revealed yesterday that the first direct spectroscopic observations of extrasolar planets have been made - of the repeat favorite HD 209458b (unofficially a.k.a. Osiris) and HD 189733Ab (getting reported as HD 189733b).

From today's issue of Nature: "A spectrum of an extrasolar planet"

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7130/abs/nature05636.html

NASA press release:

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2007-04/release.shtml

The results were totally off the wall. Here's the best part:

"Superposed on this continuum is a broad emission peak centred near 9.65 microm that we attribute to emission by silicate clouds."

Silicate clouds in a gas giant are of course previously unheard of, and I would assume, not yet having read the full Nature article, are dynamically unstable. What would put a silicate dust cloud into the outer atmosphere of a gas giant at 0.045 AU semimajor axis - but a terrestrial planet! One that got too close and plunged headlong into a Jupiter, getting tidally shredded through the Roche limit.

I'm sure it's been depicted in some science fiction novel at some point - but here is evidence of it happening for real. Jeez, can you just imagine? How I would have loved to have sat in a stadium seat with a soda and popcorn to watch that one - from a craft at an appropriate distance.

Also a nice new wet towel to throw at the next person who waxes illogical on the anthropic principle.

I have to wonder if significant amounts of silicate dust in the outer atmosphere is a short-term, dynamic feature, with a characteristic persistence time in only the millions of years after collision of another terrestrial body before the denser rock settles into the inner depths, and we are happening to see Osiris in an era when it relatively recently ate one or more of its rocky brethren. Otherwise, perhaps the rocky material in the HD 209458 system was disrupted from accumulation into planetary-sized bodies from the beginning, a magnification of our own asteroid belt likely due to the constant gravitational pestering of Jupiter in the formation of the solar system; there would have been ample opportunity for either kind of disruption if an almost-Jupiter sized body migrated from the outer solar system to just a few million miles above the star's surface, although Osiris has had plenty of time to settle into its hot-as-hell orbit with eccentricity of about zero.

But, this planet has all kinds of strange new properties; we need to learn more. And each new discovery should be a fresh reminder of the foolish lack of imagination in old models that assumed planets outside our own solar system would be minor variations on the templates of the already familiar planets.

Countdown to the striking down of the Military Commissions Act, volume 1

Jack Balkin has now posted a great, vitally needed second look at the "Military Commissions Act".

Without going into his comments specifically, the thing that stuck out to me as soon as I first skimmed the Act is that it suspends habeas corpus as a matter of course. Its language therefore creates a suspension of habeas that is far broader and more permissive than the specific provision in the Constitution for habeas to be suspended in a rebellion or invasion that creates an emergency situation in which public safety requires the suspension. In a nutshell, then, this Act is therefore per se unconstitutional, and destined to get struck down.

The scary, anti-American and antidemocratic nature of this Act was driven home to me when, just a couple days after it was passed, I read a news article about the FBI investigating potential links between terrorists and traditional organized crime. Despite the first impression the article gave, it indicated there is no evidence for such a scenario any more substantial than an episode of the Sopranos, and the vigorous speculations of the FBI that seem to be encouraged from the highest levels. And thus we see, already, the effort underway to drive the machinery of the Military Commissions Act toward application to ordinary domestic crime, and to blur any distinctions between suspected terrorists and suspected criminals, or between the dictatorial powers of the Military Commissions Act and the Constitutional criminal procedure that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Thankfully, the tireless Center for Constitutional Rights is already filing habeas petitions on behalf of 25 Bagram Air Base detainees that were crafted specifically as a vehicle to challenge the Military Commissions Act, before the President has even had a chance to sign it into law.

The sad thing is not only that the media have given precious little attention to the Military Commissions Act, but that even when they cover it they betray an insufficient understanding of how extreme it is. While they have described the Act as defining anyone who materially supports hostilities against the United States as an unlawful enemy combatant who therefore qualifies to have his Constitutional rights stripped away, they have failed to report that the Act gives equal potential for someone to be defined as an unlawful enemy combatant purely by being labeled as such by a status review tribunal constituted under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense, with no objective standards or stated procedure, and with this determination being dispositive. This appears literally to purport that a tribunal set up by the President or Secretary of Defense, under absolutely whatever procedures they feel like following, composed of whomever or however many people they feel like appointing - even just their own selves, would have the statutory authority to strip anyone else of their normal constitutional rights and instead label them as an enemy combatant, who may then be statutorily imprisoned for any length of time with no charges and no trial - and with no possibility of judicial review of the determination by the tribunal.

It sounds too extreme to be true of any government this side of Burma or Sudan. But go read the Act our Congress just passed, and see for yourself.

October Surprise! Mark Foley, Chairman of the House Exploited Children Caucus. No really, I'm serious

With everyone's wagers now cast as to how many days or hours Dennis Hastert has left before being forced to resign, and whether John Boehner or Tom Reynolds will beat him to it, what is left to be said now of Mark Foley. (Glenn Greenwald has really gone to town on this.)

The only surprising thing about this story is that anyone is still surprised that there is any vice the Republican legislature is not willing to foster and cover up among their supremely hypocritical ranks, and turn around and pretend they are the world's great crusaders against that vice.

From the GOP's perspective, it's pretty bad when their scandals are breaking so fast that they actually get relief from attention on Condie Rice being contradicted by her own State Department about being warned, in the summer of 2001, in the gravest terms, by George Tenet and Cofer Black, about an imminent al Qaeda attack - but that relief only coming at the price of apparently an even more damaging scandal.

The depressing thing about this story is that a House leadership cover-up about one of their own members sexually harrassing and exploiting underage victims, as serious as that is, generates a lot more public outrage than the passage of the "Military Commissions Act" by the House the day before the Foley scandal broke.

The exciting thing about this story is that, over the following days and weeks, more and more information may be coming out about how far Foley's crimes went, and how many of his fellow GOP congressmen knew all about it and kept it hush-hush to avoid political damage, and potentially even conspired to cover it up as an ongoing concern, exposing them not just to political fallout but also to criminal liability - so that, out of this strange tragedy, America can shake off its corrupt Republican masters and get back to being American.

The gleeful thing, the schadenfreude, about this story will be watching all the Republicans keep contradicting each other and then turn on each other and come out with more and more stories to shift blame onto each other, hopefully right up to cutting deals with prosecutors to spill the beans in exchange for leniency.

And hopefully the GOP rank and file will finally shake loose their tinfoil hats and realize that a party leadership that conspires to cover up lying this country's way into a war of aggression is going to cover up absolutely anything.

Early analysis of our new Torture Statute

Some excellent analysis of our new Torture Statute is out:

• Analysis: Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill, a nice, accurate rundown by the Washington Post, which quotes Sanford Levinson at Balkanization calling the bill a mark of a "banana republic", and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh saying that "the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it's not clear that most of the members understand what they've done";
  
• a critical analysis signed by 609 law professors;
  
• analysis from Aziz Huq;
  
• analysis by Jack Balkin; and
  
• a few comments by Glenn Greenwald on the Senate passage of the bill.

On the other hand, the NY Times and Washington Post editorial pages are both silent on the matter. I can only assume, because they just commented on this right before the Senate took it up, and they are saving up post-passage whoppers for their Sunday editions.

Senate Also Votes, 65-34, for Arbitrary Detention, Torture, Admissibility of Evidence Produced by Torture, and Denial of Habeas Corpus

The Senate Voted, 65-34, for a bill that authorizes arbitrary detention, torture, convictions based on evidence produced by torture, denial of habeas corpus, and retroactive immunization from prosecution for past torture.

The voting was live-blogged here, with the good folks of firedoglake.

As one of the commenters said: Writ of Habeas Corpus: 1215-2006. It was nice knowing you.

Yes, 65-34, the absent Senator being Olympia Snowe (R-ME), meaning eleven Democrats lined up with the Republicans to betray the American Constitution. They included both Senators from New Jersey, both Nelsons, Landrieu, and of course, Lieberman.

And after all the huffing Specter did about the bill being clearly unconstitutional, he lined right up with the GOP when it came time to vote.

Now that the Senate has passed essentially the same bill as the House, it will be signed into law probably by next week.

Why such a strong reaction?

Although this bill is filled with antidemocratic provisions, such as the admissibility of evidence produced by torture, the worst of it is probably the combination of the following two provisions:

1. Enemy combatants are denied the writ of habeas corpus.

2. An enemy combatant is defined, in one option, as anyone deemed to be an enemy combatant by a tribunal constituted by the President or the Secretary of Defense, and their determination is final - with no standards of crimes or evidence thereof such a tribunal is required to observe.

So, the administration is now statutorily authorized to lock up anyone, whether a citizen or not, whether in this country or not, forever, without ever bringing charges against them, constrained by nothing but the administration's own whims.

The bill is certainly unconstitutional. It also purports to place enemy combatants beyond judicial review, and thereby purports to place itself outside of judicial review. To the extent any judge buys that, it will at least slow down the process of getting this odious legislation struck down. But nonetheless, an attorney for a detainee should be able to file a habeas petition based on the constitution with an argument that the statute plainly contradicts the Constitution and is void.

But no thanks to the Senate for creating this mess out of our democracy. This is the single worst law passed in U.S. history.

Torture Bill Protest at John Kline's Office

From the Dump John Kline blog:

"Protests against Kline's 'Torture Bill' will be held Thursday (9/28) from 7-9 a.m. at the office of John Kline. A media alert will be sent. Kline's office: 101 W. Burnsville Pkwy #20, Bring signs. Suggestions:“Kline Sponsored Torture Bill" “Tell XXX NO to Torture” “Call Rep. Kline: 952-808-1261" read on: ..."

"a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy"

So says the New York Times editorial board of the "Military Commissions Act of 2006" that was passed by the House today. This editorial is a must-read. It runs down the frightening litany of dictatorial powers granted by the Military Commissions Act, including the authorization for indefinite detention for anyone at the executive branch's whim, with no possibility of judicial review other than at the whim of the executive.

House Passes Military Commissions Act, With Authorization for Arbitrary Indefinite Detention

Here's the bill, H.R. 6166 (pdf), was passed by the House today, complete with authorization for arbitrary, indefinite detention. Here is the rundown on how each House member voted, including some notable defectors from both parties from the party lines.

Some Constitutional law experts have already emphasized the point that this bill, as it was changed in the House before passage, appears to give administration-appointed combatant status review tribunals authority to designate anyone at all an unlawful enemy combatant, making anyone vulnerable to indefinite, arbitrary detention.

Look at sections 948a and 948d(c), on pages 3 and 8 on the above pdf file. An enemy combatant is defined in either of two ways, the second being "a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense." (Section 948a.)

Once that determination is made, it is dispositive, i.e. it is settled or determined as final: "A finding, whether before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense that a person is an unlawful enemy combatant is dispositive for purposes of jurisdiction for trial by military commission under this chapter." (Section 948d(c).)

So an enemy combatant is anyone the tribunal appointed by the administration says is an enemy combatant - end of story. Other parts of the act specifically remove the right to speedy trial, etc. Presto, there you go: authorization for arbitrary, indefinite detention.

Is it any wonder that Charles Taylor adopted the GOP's "enemy combatant" rhetoric to crack down on dissidents in Liberia, to the complete neglect of law and order? Such a nice fit for dictatorships.

The administration and its mouthpieces like John Cornyn love to accuse anyone who worries about any standards of law and order of coddling the enemies, without ever acknowledging a possible distinction between being accused of being a terrorist and actually being a terrorist. I guess the wording in the House bill just accurately reflects that equivalence in the minds of its proponents: accusation equals guilt - the same standard all to familiar from the Inquisition and the trials for witchcraft.

Never mind that a large majority of the people held at Guantanamo were not captured by U.S. forces at all, but turned in by locals in exchange for hefty bounties, and many of whom have been definitively shown and acknowledged to have been perfectly innocent. This bill cures what the administration has apparently seen as the grave defect of those persons' innocence coming to light.

Although the House has already passed this grave offense to the core ideals of America, the Senate is taking it up for debate. The current Senate version, though bad enough, still does not have the worst provisions that were added to the House bill in its final maneuvers. Now is the time to rain down our concerns on the members of the Senate. Call them, email them, fax them, let them know the abuses this bill would allow, and urge them not to pass it - either to make dramatic changes, or far better, just to hold the thing up for the short while it would take to keep this odious bill from going anywhere before the coming recess. I've already called my senators. Now is the time. It's hard to think of a single worse blemish on the history of the U.S. House of Representatives than its passage of this bill today. Don't let the Senate make the same mistake.

GOP Presidential Convention Headed to Twin Cities, Home of Shotgunfreude

This ought to be fun. I guess they figured taking the battle directly to the stomping grounds of Shotgunfreude was the key to the '08 elections.

Stay tuned right here in September 2008 for the Shotgunfreude live blogging of the GOP Presidential Convention.

Republican Campaign Strategy Spoiled by Reality and its Well-Known Liberal Bias

"Bush to Declassify Parts of Intelligence Assessment on Iraq"

"President Bush said today he has grudgingly ordered declassification of parts of a leaked intelligence report that concludes that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has fueled Islamic extremism and contributed to the spread of terrorist cells...

"Bush charged at the news conference that political opponents leaked select parts of the National Intelligence Estimate to media organizations last weekend 'to create confusion in the minds of the American people' in the weeks before the Nov. 7 mid-term elections."

The fulcrum of both the national GOP campaign, and of the justification for this presidency, is flatly contradicted by the consensus of all sixteen federal intelligence agencies - clearly, this is just a confusion of the mind. Lie down with some smelling salts and Fox News for a few hours, and you'll feel much better from that confusing brush with "reality". Pay no attention to those facts behind the curtain.

It gets even better. How do we know the invasion of Iraq actually supported rather than exacerbated the "war on terror"?

'"You know, to suggest that if we weren't in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience," Bush said. "We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren't in Iraq and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside your country, Mr. President. We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993."'

Keep in mind, Bush admitted just a couple weeks ago that Iraq had "nothing" to do with 9/11. But now, we had not invaded it prior to those attacks, ergo, because we have invaded, attacks like that will be prevented.

You know, we also had not invaded England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Estonia, Uruguay, Botswana, Bhutan, or Vanuatu when we suffered those attacks. How can we remain safe even though we still leave them uninvaded and unoccupied - just like they were on 9/11?! In fact, some of the 9/11 hijackers had actually studied in Germany, giving that country a closer tie to the attacks than Iraq. How can we leave these other nations dangerously uninvaded?

On the occasion of those prior attacks, we also did not have colonies on Mars, we had not completely eliminated the estate tax and social security, and we still allowed political parties other than the GOP to remain organized in the United States. Yet we persist in not ensuring those differences in some aspect of the world relative to the state of existence prior to 9/11. How can we leave these changes undone, under the inexorable logical force of post hoc ergo propter hoc?

Or could it be that the president is once again insinuating without explicitly claiming that Iraq was behind 9/11, after conceding repeatedly that there is no such link? How else do you explain "We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th... We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993"? Who is "they" here?

Taken with the president's prior explanations, we're supposed to fill in the blank, that the "they" two words away from the word "Iraq", with no mention of other entities, refers to terrorists unconnected with Iraq. But the GOP campaign depends crucially on one sleight-of-hand above all others - conflating Iraq with the defeat of the pre-existing terrorists. So, the president persists in being incapable of discussing national security in the role of the president of the United States, providing leadership on actually defending our country, and instead can only talk in the role of Republican campaigner-in-chief.

Some good news: "Congress unlikely to pass wiretapping"

"Congress is unlikely to approve a bill giving President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program legal status and new restrictions before the November midterm elections, dealing a significant blow to one of the White House's top wartime priorities."

We'll see how President Bush's top priorities are handled in January when the House Judiciary Committee chairman is John Conyers.

Mark Kennedy: the reek of desperation

Minnesota Senate candidate Mark Kennedy laid out an interesting new theory in his televised debate yesterday: he accused the Star-Tribune of completely fabricating its recent poll showing Amy Klobuchar ahead of him by 24 points. (The Star-Trib reports on his comments here.) Apparently, in the world inside Kennedy's mind, the editors of the Star-Trib gathered together and conspired to publish a "pure fiction" of a polling result, to favor Klobuchar's campaign.

What would have led a group of senior editors to betray their duty as journalists, and a for-profit corporation in California to risk discrediting the newspaper it owns? Because Klobuchar's dad was once a columnist for the Star-Trib, of course. And he was such a great guy, or somehow exerts such control over his former employer, that it is willing to lie, cheat & steal to help out his daughter's political campaign.

Kennedy protested that if his father's company had published a poll, it would have shown him to be ahead. Is that because your dad is also adept at publishing complete fictions, Mark?

His ludicrous, childish attack on this poll can only damage Kennedy more than the poll itself did. Who does he think he's going to persuade when his best response to negative news about his campaign is with wild, no-evidence conspiracy theories?

John Kline and his district director issue belligerent non-apologies for use of racial epithets

As the Star Tribune discloses, John Kline's campaign manager, Mike Osskopp, was caught on film harrassing veterans attending a Coleen Rowley event and complaining about how many of them drove a "Jap car". (Hey Mike, I've got two "Jap" cars. Want to come over to my place and scream about them through that megaphone?)

Naturally, once he is actually caught in the act of his slimy take on campaign tactics, Osskopp had no choice but to publicly apologize. But how did he phrase this apology?

"I apologize if my words offended any Americans of Japanese descent, including my sister-in-law," Osskopp said. "I allowed my emotions to get the better of me and used a phrase commonly used in my youth, but which is now inappropriate and offensive."

That's right... it's not really a slur at all, you see, it was perfectly acceptable in the past, and I just have a hard time keeping up with these crazy politically correct novelties they've rolled out the past few years, he implies. Apparently he really doesn't think slurring Japanese is a problem at all - it's the damn PC police that are the problem.

Pretty classy "apology", Osskopp.

Kline also "apologized" with the same sort of belligerent non-apology:

"That's unacceptable now," Kline said. "We've all seen the John Wayne movies about World War II, and then it was acceptable. Now it's not, and [Osskopp] knows that."

See, back in our day, it was perfectly acceptable. But I guess if you crazy bleeding-heart liberals insist on condemning it, we'll be okay with that...

Sorry Kline, that is worse than the original epithet. You might recall a whole lot of other racial slurs that were entirely "acceptable" fifty years ago that are now universally recognized as abhorrent - but that does not mean they were any less offensive to their targets, and morally abhorrent, when they and the attitudes they reflect were considered acceptable by a wide range of the socially advantaged.

The Star-Trib article keeps getting better: it also reveals that Kline's congressional office keeps a file on at least one critical constituent of his, Paul Bartlett, in which they save not only the emails he has sent to Kline - but Kline also has a staffer searching the Internet for and saving the same guy's blog posts critical of Kline (hat tip Inside Minnesota Politics.) As Bartlett points out, this appears to put Kline alongside J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon in the exclusive club of American officials who felt the un-American need to keep an "enemies list". And all on our tax dollar - another terrific "fiscally responsible" expenditure by a charter member of the party that is spending away our children's future earnings like drunken sailors, and that dares not utter the phrase "fiscal responsibility" for apprehension of reminding everyone of back when they could claim to be the champions of fiscally responsible without getting laughed out of the room.

And to top it off, as the Star-Trib reports, Kline's chief of staff compared Bartlett to David Duke - because Bartlett complained about the racial slur.

So let's get this straight: Kline "apologized" for his district director's use of racial slurs by objecting that no one had a problem with the slur in the good ol' days, and has his chief of staff smear someone who objects to the slur by comparing him to David Duke.

Until recently, I was pretty neutral about Kline. I had tremendous respect for him as someone who had served our nation as a Marine, and I didn't really see anything about him that was worse than serving as a spear-carrier in the general GOP decline into subservience to K Street and a dictatorial administration. He seemed like just the sort of decent, mainstream Republican I would have been excited to vote for back in the '90's, when the GOP still stood for something.

Now I see I am represented in Congress by a guy who issues a non-apology not-too-subtly assigning blamelessness to an aide using a racial slur, and using my tax dollars to troll for and compile secret files on people who make negative blog posts and commentary about him - which I suppose includes me, if this is a halfway serious effort. (Hi there, McCarthyist Kline staffer! Sleeping well?) Well congrats, John; I wasn't really focused on my House race before, but you've made a dedicated Rowley campaign activist out of this former Republican.

When can the Minnesota Second get a representative that cares about anything at all other than passing whatever shameful tax giveaways it takes to keep the cashflow coming in from the lobbyists and from his convicted-felon-fellow-Congressmen?

Will the Democrats take over the House... by more than 40 seats? Or only by 20 or 30?

It cracks me up to see prognosticators still wondering whether the Democratic Party will gain a majority in the House of Representatives or not. The Cook Political Report lists 44 House races (pdf) in the "lean" or "toss-up" ratings as of their last update - with 35 of those currently held by the GOP and 9 by the Democrats. They also list 11 "likely Democrat" races and 20 "likely GOP" races.

But even at that, their ratings are probably still skewed to give the GOP too much benefit of the doubt. For example, on the Senate side they still list Minnesota as a "toss-up" (pdf) - even though every single poll I know of has shown Amy Klobuchar with a double-digit lead that has only grown over time, to a 24-point spread in the latest Star-Trib poll. It's an odd sort of "toss-up" that is discerned from a nearly two-to-one spread.

Another example is the Minnesota Second district, which was solidly blue until four years ago, and where the latest poll shows Coleen Rowley within three points of incumbent John Kline - effectively a tie, since the margin is about the same size as the sampling error. [UPDATE - This poll was taken in only part of the district.] Considering that virtually no incumbent House member was re-elected with less than a five or ten point spread in the last few elections, and the anti-GOP prevailing wind, and the state's and district's traditional Democratic lean, and the fact that Kline's campaign manager was shouting racial epithets at veterans going into a VFW station the other day... this is a damned competitive race.

And yet, the Cook report doesn't even have MN-02 listed at all, even as likely Republican - meaning they haven't even considered it to be competitive.

MN-02 is a genuine toss-up - but apparently it is still less competitive than the sixty GOP-held seats that the Cook Report considered competitive enough to list so far.

Given that, the only big question left in the House elections are how many dozens of seats the Democrats will have to pad their majority.

As an aside... I watch almost no television, but I happened to be in a restaurant yesterday that was showing Fox News, and an ad ran for the Kennedy campaign where he spends the whole ad smiling and snuggling with senior citizens. Which of course immediately raised the question: what does it tell you about his confidence in his own campaign if a GOP candidate feels like he has to spend money to appeal to senior citizens who watch Fox News? That is the most telling indication I have yet seen that the Kennedy campaign faces certain doom.

To follow along with the Minnesota races, here is a round-up of a few other Minnesota blogs. Check out Follow John Kline's Money, MN Publius, Dump John Kline, DFLSenate blog, minvolved, the Power Liberal, Centrisity, and for Minnesotan diversion, Pharyngula.

Is McCain alienating Republicans... or is Bush?

It's almost a pointless game these days to point out pro-administration bias in the Washington Post (inconsistently at least), but this biased headline deserves special mention: The Washington Post gives us a clear McCain's Stand On Detainees May Pose Risk For 2008 Bid - Opposition to Bush Could Alienate Republican Base. Is that the other Republican base that does not include John Warner, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Hagel Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, Colin Powell, and every traditional Republican who cannot recognize the massively intrusive government and unprecedented budgetary freefall that have been championed by the weird legion that has taken over both Washington and the GOP the past six years?

How about this headline: "McCain leads ever-widening rift of traditional Republicans shown to be alienated by Bush".

Actually Mr. President, that's the Third Great Snooze Button

Joel Achenbach at washingtonpost.com achieved this week's High Point in Blogging with a post that made my brain smile.

After discussing a report on observing galaxies at a new record proximity to the origin of galaxies and stars, and a new book on our second-most underappreciated Founding Father of America, George Mason, Achenbach ties such hallmark Enlightenment legacies into contrast with George Bush's world:

The president says we are having a Third Great Awakening...

Here are a few things we didn't know when Jonathan Edwards & Co. ushered in the First Great Awakening:

1. The world is billions of years old.
2. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and at least tens of billions of galaxies and the whole shebang is expanding at an accelerating rate and there may even be other universes outside our own.
3. Life evolves and all living things come from a common ancestor.
4. Continents drift.
5. Complicated stuff involving Relativity.
6. Really complicated stuff involving Quantum Mechanics.
7. Stuff so complicated it cannot even be alluded to.

Maybe the real awakening will come when, after staring into a telescope at a galaxy 12.88 billion light years away, and studying the world around us, we finally grasp our humble place in the universe and our good luck in having evolved in a place that has remained habitable for something like four billion years. And then we'll decide to take better care of it.

Thank you Joel!

Hooray for Keith Ellison, Mike Hatch, and Lori Swanson!

Congrats to Keith Ellison, Mike Hatch, and Lori Swanson on their primary victories yesterday. Minnesota DFLers made absolutely the right choice in each of these three races.

The Swiftboat Path to 9/11 Exploitation

David Brin compellingly turns the tables on ABC's right-wing propaganda exploitation of national tragedy, "Path to 9/11" (which Bill Clinton has now blasted), which prompted me to respond thus (cross-post):

As for the potentially libelous depictions of Democratic officials that are apparently featured in ABC's Swiftboat Path to 9/11, John Dean made a compelling argument two years ago that Kerry should have immediately sued the "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth" - not only for the direct purpose of the disinfecting sunlight a court can bring to bear of the otherwise hopeless disputes between different flavors of truthiness, and dissuading against the use of similar tactics in the future, but also to immediately prove a public relations point - that we are confident enough that you are lying your ass off that we are sure the truth will come out on our side.

The various defamed Clintonistas should have filed just such a suit against Disney as soon as the facts on this came out, with a motion for a temporary restraining order against showing it and seeking relief in the form of a permanent injunction to the same effect, and in case it is shown, for a massive damage award and an injunction against further distribution and to issue public retractions. I don't think there's any really good argument against this plan, and again on a public relations perspective, it would give the public the idea, like no amount of bloviating and indignation would, that there is something seriously wrong with the way the facts are being depicted.

And, if one of the defamed officials can come up with standing to sue in someplace like the U.K. or Australia with far more severe standards and penalties for defamation, which shouldn't be too hard, we could compound ABC's reasons to regret their September Surprise.

As for the idea of more reverse September/October surprises, like the new Senate report showing the intelligence indicated no connection, and in fact active enmity, between Saddam and al Qaeda, the release of which was apparently engineered by the Senate Democrats - anyone want to venture what other closet doors Democrats, journalists, or critics of the administration will be able to yank open before the election?

On the other hand, the GOP Congress is pretty effectively pulling a September Surprise against itself - when their political lives are on the line, they've accomplished far less this term than the infamous Do-Nothing Congress of 1948, and the nation is beset with compelling concerns - they parody themselves with a torrential debate about what to do with aging horses, for what even the GOP majority leader referred to as "the horse-shit bill". Are they just trying to get swept? (For what it's worth, I used to eat fried horsemeat on a stick from the corner friet stand when I lived in Belgium. Naturally, it tastes like chicken.)

Dana Milbank puts this Congress's lotus-eating in shocking perspective:

"Even before the horse bill, House leaders had been a bit sensitive about their legislative pace. The People's Representatives have been in session for all of 80 days this year, and with 15 days remaining on the legislative calendar, the House is on pace to shatter all records for inactivity. The "Do-Nothing" House of 1948 was positively frenetic by comparison, passing 1,191 measures in 110 days in session.

The current House has passed barely 400 measures..."

Come to think of it, it seems like the Disney shareholders may also have a decent lawsuit to bring against Disney, for its officers violating the business judgment rule and their duty to maintain and increase shareholder value, by (apparently) pouring tens of millions of dollars into a knowingly defamatory program that is fraudulently represented as being true to the 9/11 Commission Report despite factually contradicting it, and that any reasonable manager would have foreseen would offend and alienate from Disney the two thirds of Americans who disapprove of the Bush administration, thereby damaging the goodwill and customer loyalty attached to Disney and restricting the market for its products and services.

This would be all the more damaging if it turns out, as it now begins to appear, that Disney's production was effectively co-opted by an internal group explicitly dedicated to right-wing propaganda - you know, as opposed to profits, which the corporate officers are responsible for protecting and generating.

Disney might mitigate that liability if they yank the miniseries, although the money has been spent and the damage is already underway.

Of course, shareholder lawsuits aren't my thing, but I'm looking forward to seeing what a corporate lawyer type thinks of this.

Quality Advertising is Job One

One of the great things about Slate is its fierce dedication to witty titles and captions. Today they gave us this charmer: "Have you driven out a Ford lately?"

It was terribly embarassing and an ill omen to hear Alan Mullaly, in his introduction as the new honcho, respond to the inevitable question of what he drives right now: "A Lexus... but I can't wait to drive a Ford." He could not quite come anywhere near pulling off an impression of sincerety in that patently ridiculous assertion. And knowing the inevitable need for him to trade down, and with them having had a few months to prepare for this, could he not have picked up a Ford ahead of time? Taken an early lifestyle hit for the sake of his new corporate charge?

Although the greedy UAW deserves some blame too for overreaching, I remain convinced the old Big Three American automakers were maimed into permanent decline by decades of poisonous American management culture - one that regarded technological products as static commodities, scoffed at R&D, and put all effort and emphasis into salesmanship - the attitude of the new executive who takes over a company and says, "I have no idea what a [widget X] is, but we're going to sell more of them!" (This is a straight paraphrase from an incoming manager at one of America's largest corporations about 25 years ago.)

Meanwhile, Toyota and Honda had the radical ideas that cars are technological works in progress, that you can sell more in the long run if you do the R&D to make them better - and while your focus is on engineering instead of vacuous, no-value-added, quarterly-earning-obsessed sales gods, it makes sense to have engineers promoted from within also running the company.

And who knew, but pouring your effort into constant betterment through engineering also happens to make for a more efficient economy.

Besides other recent failures - thinking genetic dynasty was somehow a qualification to run one of the world's largest companies, thinking the SUV craze was going to fly indefinitely in the face of long-term trends in oil prices and public attitudes toward the environment - the question is, when, if ever, will Ford and GM complete the cultural shift to the Honda mindset that they need to survive? Probable answer: when Kerkorian succeeds at clearing out the top spot at GM to make room for superhuman auto executive Carlos Ghosn - who happens to have risen up through the ranks of engineering R&D.

Shorter GOP: concern for national deficit or for crunch on nation's middle class = "class warfare"

Another cross-posting from comments to The Fix - if there's one trope I can't stand that I haven't said anything about yet, it's the GOP rhetoric that any opposition to their squeezing out the middle class and grinding the nation's finances into the most ludicrous debt in the history of the world, is "class warfare". Jeez. Real class warfare in the 1800's meant French peasants and servants taking up arms against the aristocrats and both slaughtering each other - kind of like actual "warfare". But naturally the same people who insist the sectarian bloodbath in Iraq "is not a civil war!" have no problem slinging around rhetoric of "class warfare" to shut down any debate on Congress's feverish addiction to filling out every credit card offer they get for another Great Big Bank of China Credit Card.

Who's actually waging class warfare while casting blame elsewhere, as opposed to being blamed for it? The Bush-GOP Congress team has done more damage to the U.S. Gini coefficient than at any time since George III, thanks in large part to tax breaks overwhelmingly tilted to the highest incomes coupled with a deficit-fueled decline of the dollar and passing on the tax burden to the states with unfunded mandates, and in large part to this GOP crew's fervent practice of cronyist economics as opposed to actual free market capitalism - how many hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars have they doled out to their good buddies among the wealthiest few through sweetheart corporate welfare tax breaks, no-bid contracts, federal land natural resource extraction leases at pennies on the market value dollar, and federally legislated windfalls for big pharma (medicare part D) and wall street (privatized social security, they hope) - right down to the ludicrous tax avoidance / wealth transfer scam of Barbara Bush earmarking a "charitable donation" to be funneled to Neil Bush's Ignite software company by way of the Katrina (Slush) Fund.

That is the difference between the classically liberal free market economics of Adam Smith and of the U.S. laissez-faire conservative tradition, as opposed to the wealth-accumulation-by-government (i.e. central planning economics) of the current GOP, who have gone full circle in their economic philosophy back to what was considered "conservative" in Adam Smith's day - for the lion's share of economic rewards to be doled out by diktat to the nobles and the king's other buddies in the form of royally granted monopolies, import patents, and sinecures. Sound familiar?

The reality is, the economic policy that emerged from Clinton-Gore and a less extremist GOP Congress forced to work together was a thousand times more faithful to free market capitalism than the disastrous all-GOP Bush/extremist-Congress team has been.