As I listen to the first debate between John Kerry and George Bush, I sense that my preconceptions color my assessment of the two men's performance and must acknowledge that it is in fact possible that John Kerry has not wiped the floor with the President of the United States. I then check out some admittedly unscientific polls at CNN's site and MSNBC, both showing Kerry winning with more than 70% of respondents giving him the nod, and feel more confident than in a few days the polls will show Kerry has won hands down.
Let's take a look at some impressions I got tonight.
Framing the debate: the solution to the height problem was an interesting one. In 18 of the last 21 elections, voters have chosen the taller candidate, possibly due to perceptions of tall men as strong and authoritative, and some observers worry that television debates magnify what is basically a problem of perception. Kerry is significantly taller than Bush, so it needed to be addressed. Tonight the candidates, though at podiums of equal height on flat floor, were displayed on split screen with their heads at equal heights. Good choice, in my opinion.
The rules of the debate allowed the moderator to extend discussion on a given question by giving each man another 30 seconds to address something particular; Kerry and Bush both asked for these extensions several times. Interestingly, Bush got his requests more often than Kerry. Bias? Far from it. Kerry would genteelly raise a finger and nod in a polite "May I?" gesture. Bush would just rush in with a loud "Let me address that...". Much easier to notice; a bit annoying personally. But people who consider Bush an uneducated boor probably aren't undecided still.
On to the debate itself. Fascinating start. Kerry started by responding to the moderator's question with "Yes," followed up with a short opening thanking the organizers and expressing sympathy for victims of the recent hurricane in Florida (where the debate was set), and proceeding to answer the moderator's question more fully. Bush began his response with similar thanks and sympathies, and the next words out of his mouth -- the first ones of any content related to the debate -- were "September the 11th." Am I surprised? No. A bit saddened that it was so blatant. There wasn't even really any political skill to appreciate.
Challenged to explain what he would truly do differently on Iraq, Kerry did so, pointing out not only what he would have done differently to date but also laying out goals for the future. Interesting response from the President; rather than saying it wouldn't work, he alluded to tax hikes saying of these goals that "we know how he's going to pay for it." (The "we" is intended to mean him and the audience, which was not permitted to respond tonight; this line is from his stump speech.) I have to wonder how strong this rebuttal is... isn't the President running on his security platform more than his domestic policy? Aren't the swing voters this year supposed to be the "security moms," who want to remain safe? Isn't the President yet willing to ask Americans to sacrifice something other than fundamental civil liberties, to the tune of taxes meant to pay for defense, and wouldn't the voters both parties want be willing to do that? That's a lot of rhetorical questions, I know... I just think the President missed a call there.
Personal style was interesting here. Analysts have pointed out before that President Bush uses a focused, direct speaking style, leaning forward and emphasizing main points vigorously (he certainly pounded the podium a lot tonight) in a way that bodily conveys engagement. I didn't get that sense tonight. When the two men were not speaking, President Bush often seemed uncomfortable and possibly irritated. He didn't respond much to anything Kerry said, except on occasion; Kerry would much more often smile, nod, welcome a question, even agree with a point or two made by his opponent. (Much as we'd like to think so, our political opposition is usually not an incarnation of evil on Earth.) Kerry, on the whole, seemed much more animated and engaged tonight.
An experience I kept having as I listened tonight was that of thinking, "Kerry should respond by saying this and such; he hasn't been so clear on that before," and then hearing him say that, in one case in the exact words I thought it. There would be a question about the effects of our strategies on terrorism, and I would think, "Kerry should say that we need to stop giving terrorists easy propaganda; we need to deny them recruits," and he said exactly that, that we need to deny them recruits. Bush would hit what he called flip-flops, and I firmly believe that complexity and adaptability are essential to a modern American president; that monolithic stubbornness is not strength. Kerry's been trying to come up with a good response to this for a long time, and he did it tonight: "It's one thing to be certain. But you can be certain and be wrong."
In other words, this was the night Kerry got in the game. It can be frustrating for an intellectual to contest ideas with someone of dimmer intelligence; the intellectual must make a deep point or a subtle argument("Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him," says Proverbs), and his opponent by his sheer weakness fails to realize he has been hit, and his followers think because of this that he has not been hit. Tonight, he showed great debating skill: he not only made his points, he made them in the pithy, sharp style necessary for not only a debate but a campaign. ("Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit", also says Proverbs.)
My brother, bless his soul, is a loyal Republican. He seems to think the debate was a tie. This is the verdict from the Bush camp as well: status quo, no gain for either candidate. I find it interesting that Kerry's camp claims victory, and Bush's doesn't, except in the sense that status quo would be a win for someone leading in the polls. If it really were a draw, I think both sides would be claiming victory. The best test will be in the polls in the days to come (give it three to seven days to filter through the polling process, for the most part), but based on what I've seen tonight and what I'm hearing from the pros, the clear winner was John Kerry.
My call: Kerry dominated this one, mainly by just looking like he had his shit together. He was calm, collected and managed to answer questions without screwing up. Bush, on the other hand, spoke very poorly (even for a man famed for not being the best public speaker) and didn't seem to have a very good grasp of anything that wasn't directly on message. Also, he kept trying to get the audience to laugh, but they didn't bite at any of his usual pre-scripted joke points.
I'm not entirely sure what Bush or his handlers were thinking -- were they really so arrogant about their foreign policy stance that they let The Candidate improvise? I mean, we all know that Bush's weak point is improvisation, so why let him do it live on national TV? All in all, somebody at BC04 needs to be taken out back and shot for poor preparation skills.
That said, I was impressed by Kerry's performance. It wasn't a big showy firebrand thing like Howard Dean or Clinton would have given, but then that's not how Kerry operates. I think he did quite well in applying pressure and making his case to the general public. Kerry has a tendancy to build momentum quietly, and I think that's exactly what he was doing.
To wrap up, Kerry wins this one, Bush's rep as a master debater (insert joke here) goes into the dustbin, and we'll see you on Tuesday when John Edwards dismantles Dick Cheney.
Via JWZ, it's Presidential Debate Bingo! Hit reload. It changes.
Just turned on the debates in the middle of them, and Bush is getting his butt whipped. Kerry is strong and forceful in calling for a stronger military with more special forces, while Bush is umming and ahhing and having trouble putting two phrases together without pausing as if he's reading his lines for the first time.
Bush finally starts talking clearly when he accuses Kerry of changing his "core values" on Iraq, an outright lie. Kerry did not defend himself against the attack until after Bush repeated the charge, instead at first choosing to retaliate by complimenting Bush's family.
Kerry scores again by making a forceful speech about nuclear proliferation, pointing out that Bush cut funding for nuclear containment.
Bush scores, or at least fails to give many points to Kerry, by talking clearly in opposing Kerry's proposal to establish disarmament talks with North Korea by claiming that this would exclude the possibility of multilateral talks including China.
Kerry starts to break up for the first time in talking about Russia, then recovers nicely by citing George Will and going on about foreign policy.
In sum, Kerry wiped the floor with Bush in the half hour that I saw, but a lot of that is the behavioural cues coming through on the television. Bush will look much better in a written transcript. Bush also gains the advantage of having the final concluding remarks (wherein he notably pledged not to hold a draft) and of obviously having rehearsed this part more than the rest of his lines.
An odd note: As Kerry and Bush went to shake hands, CNN showed a close-up for a split second before going back to alternating between a high-angle wide view and close-ups of the individual candidates. It's interesting that they would so quickly cut away from a good camera angle. Is CNN avoiding showing a close-up of the two together so that Kerry's height doesn't make Bush look small?
Despite the best efforts of the evil, hairless savannah-monkeys of Sol III, I remain alive, and here I am to prove it by actually crawling out from under my nice, comfortable rock to post to you all this evening.
So what's up? Well, as you've seen a few hours ago, I've been voluntold by the Fourth Man to talk a bit about Mike Melvill's flight this morning. Now, There's certainly no shortage of articles about the flight, so I won't bore you by recounting the launch and landing themselves in much detail. You can see for yourself at the semi-infinite pile of news stories sprouting via Google News. Either way, I'm doped up on cold medication right now, so while I'm spaced out I might as well stick my head in the clouds and share my hallucinatory insights with you all.
I had the mixed blessing of being home with the Plague today, so I got to follow the entire launch, separation, and landing live through a few seperate sources, mainly NASA TV's coverage, which actually failed to suck this time around. The flight itself was something else, especially since Melvill seemed briefly about to drill a hole in the desert when he briefly lost control. Regardless, he went back to showing the world just why he's that paradox that's called an old test pilot and brought it through alright. Before and after - especially after - there were quite a few noteworthy goings-on, mostly your standard Statements of Vision (which, unlike certain peoples' statements, can now be said to have some deed dripped over the words), as well as challenges for upcoming years.
The space-advocate community - both those who were there, and those like myself who came after - have sharp and still-painful memories of the decline of the first part of the space age, between the final Apollo missions and the Challenger disaster. While the realization that (shock! Awe!) it isn't perfectly safe - and the Soviet Union's decline killing the need for oneupsmanship - did a lot to turn the public, and through it the space agencies themselves, off major manned operations, there's also the simple fact that the movement ran out of steam. From Sputnik through to Apollo 11, there was always Something To Do Next that people actually acknowledged was The Next Thing. After the moon landing, that petered out. Some people thought the contest was won and that we should all go home; others looked to orbital facilities like Skylab; still others wanted to go further, either taking a shot at Mars or continuing to work with the Moon. The first option obviously sucks, and the third would be preferable to most of the serious advocates, aside from the cost and lack of a "then what?" attached. As a result, we've frittered away a generation and most of another bumbling around in orbit, aside from the admittedly spectacular unmanned missions that are still going on.
With the current crop of people hanging around or participating in the X-Prize project, there seems to be an almost desperate desire to avoid that trap. As a result, we're seeing something that's rare in large-scale advocacy or even commercial groups - something to the effect of intelligent, layered plans. The X-Prize itself set a specific, attainable goal that is already starting to spin off some commercial enterprises[1]. There's implications of followup steps, both from the X-Prize organizers and from some of the teams - especially Scaled Composites, who have been hinting that they have a Tier Two (or Three or..) to complement their Tier One sitting around in the design phases. The prize method has been demonstrated to be somewhat successful, and so we're already seeing the next step in this with a $50 million prize offered for an actual orbit. On top of that, things like the X-Prize Cup, the perverted - yet glorious! - love-child of the X-Prize itself and professional racing - give even the losers of the current competition something to shoot for. Someone who came in second - or, say, twelfth - this time around could stand to win some notoriety and success in 2006, or 2007, or 2010, should the enthusiasm to keep this up maintain itself.
On top of that, though, there's the long-term vision. Rutan's made it clear he wants permanent manned space presesnce. Many of the speakers - most of those names I missed through a fusilade of sneezes, unfortunately, but I'll try to dig them up - said similar things. Everyone has the long-term goals of industrialization or settlement sitting in their more distant crosshairs, however. The important thing is that they're not talking like they're going to jump straight to it.
A lot of really, really ambitious space programs have been proposed or even arrogantly announced in the past twenty years. Most of them have had two problems: they lack any semblance of incremental steps, and they tended to have no point, no "then what?" President Bush's announcement of a Mars-shot (which, it appears, the NFZ has been on the ball with as far as our initial criticism went) has these problems - straight into a fairly lofty program, boom, we're on Mars. "Then what?" The question has no real answer, and as a result the whole affair starts to come off feeling rather pointless. Political statements aside, it wasn't going to go anywhere significant because it wasn't meant to.
On the other extreme are the projects that Have A Point, however vague - "industrialize space," "spread humanity throughout the cosmos," "terraform Mars so we don't have to venusiform Earth," etc. These are good plans, both in the pragmatic and in the noble sense. The problem is, most of the people throwing them around fail to provide the slightest hint of a path to their end point. If we're going to, say, settle Mars, we need some heavy industry to build stuff to get there, as well as to build stuff once we're there. Hell, we'll need some way to get that industry into position in the first place. A lot of this is just handwaved into place, in a kind of underpants-gnome-esque "Step three: profit!" sense. This attracts as much (deserved!) derision as a program which has no particular useful point to it in the first place.
This time around, we might be seeing something different. These are small steps - first we'll send three people a hundred kilometers up and down safely. Then what? Well, let's try something a little harder. Say, three to orbit, or thirty to a hundred kilometers, or maybe hurl ten people from London to Beijing in two hours without a stopover. Then what? Well, we'll try something a little harder, all the while building on what's been established before, all the while growing a little more ambitious, all the while gaining a few more benefits, first commercial, then humanitarian or industrial, from what we've done so far. It's not as dramatic as "Hey! Let's spend the next ten years doing nothing but preparing for a Mars shot!" of course, but it's a whole lot more possible.
There's a lot going on on a lot of time scales. There's the stuff the current crop of activists and engineers are being challenged to do Right Now. There's the obstacle the next hill over, which people are certainly preparing for already. Just in case those aren't enough to occupy folks' attentions and enthusiasms, the movers and shakers of the current movement have some real, specific long-term goals, for ten or twenty or fifty years from now, that are worth pursuing and will become more attainable with every baby step the new crop of spacers take each day.
The last time the dreams of space exploration went beyond the dreamers' reach, we grew jaded and cynical, started looking in on ourselves, and preferred to romanticize the Apollo or Shuttle programs instead of trying something new. This time, there seems to be something a little different. The big dreams are still far beyond our current reach. However, a lot of talented, adventurous, and longsighted people - and even some who are "just" wealthy or opportunistic, but they're helping too - are building a ladder made of lots of little dreams to that big one, and they're building it in such a way that each goal just might be within reach of the previous one, all the way to the top.
It's not such a bad way to do things.
1 - Please don't hurt me for that.
SpaceShipOne makes a successful first flight in competition for the X-Prize
Brother Zibblsnrt or one of the other Zoners will have more analysis on this later, or if all else fails I'll do a dissection of the whole race for the X-Prize once SpaceShipOne does its second flight, but for now the picture says everything it really needs to.
So, yours truly has volunteered to man a polling place on Election Day out here in Redstateville, California. And I mention this in a chat channel a lot of the Zoners hang out on, and get this response from Calculus:
[18:06] * Calculus suddenly ponders dressing up in a Clippy costume..."Hi! It looks like you're casting a ballot!"
Anyway, I'll post on that when it comes around, and I'll post on Jon Stewart's latest America (the Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction when I get through it. But I had to share that funny moment.
I increasingly wonder if I have not by some freak of probability been flung into a strange hallucinatory construct taking its characteristics from the fiction I enjoy reading. Perhaps it mimics an alternate universe wherein the local Western civilization never came up with many of the common aphorisms of my own, like "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Perhaps it is trying to be sci-fi time travel, with a mad scholar whispering to the daring investigator, "It is all happening again!"
Daring investigator, listen to my tale: in my world, my President did a strange thing. We were involved in a war; we were occupying a country and working to shape events there as best we could. Ours was Afghanistan, yours seems to be Iraq. Oddly, the President began talking about the threat posed by a second country, and its supposed weapons, or ability to acquire weapons, or ability to use weapons, or somethign of this nature (it was never all that precise). Ours was Iraq; yours seems to be Iran. (It does look like your intelligence on Iran is much better than ours was on Iraq, though. Ours turned out to be wrong later. If we came across the same situation in Iran, I imagine we'd have trouble with our credibility trying to do something about it. You wouldn't have that problem, right?) We shrugged and kept fighting where we were.
He accused this second country of supporting terrorism in other countries: our President accused Iraq of wanting to give weapons to al-Qaeda; yours is apparently accusing Iran of aiding Islamic rebels in Iraq. Somewhat troubling, if true, but something to be dealt with through investigative channels at the moment; we had much bigger fish to fry. (Frankly, our Iraq was pretty well contained and not much of a threat to anyone outside its borders.)
He started putting pressure on this second country, talking about facing up to evil and throwing around a lot of tough-guy rhetoric. His people quoted a previous President's policy of "regime change" in Iraq and started acting like it was suddenly important. I notice that one of your local Republicans, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has proposed that the same "regime change" notion be made policy for Iran -- Senate bill S. 2681, currently in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Go ahead, check out thomas, it's a great resource in both our worlds. I also imagine it's the same in both our worlds that telling someone you want to remove them from power is, shall we say, not exactly conducive to obtaining their cooperation through nonmilitary means. (Technically you could read "regime change" as something else - that's the point of couching it in those terms - but any serious reader knows what it means.)
Now, the guys leading the charge for this push into Iraq, which didn't really have anything to do with our current war, were an odd lot: some guys named Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, etc. Cheney in particular considered himself the chief "examiner of worst-case scenarios." That's the kind of job that can turn you a little paranoid. Never good for decision-making. Say, did you hear that John Bolton's being called "the self-appointed tip of the spear" on Iran discussions these days?
Where the public didn't know, there were some other things going on. We were getting some human intelligence on the ground, and they were telling their sources that we were ready to move. We were shifting troops into the region, theoretically so that we could be ready to go quickly if the word was given. Problem was, our President didn't seem to know enough about the nature of leadership (he wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the bunch; not very curious, or introspective, or given to nuance) and advisors who examine worst-case scenarios and planning cycles, because once all this backend stuff had been building up, not pulling the trigger and invading this country was suddenly next to impossible.
Of course, we only found this out later. Hard to know about that kind of thing when you're a civilian. So through all this, and especially since we didn't know much about the secretive stuff (our President was a pretty close-mouthed guy when it came to divulging anything to the public), we were thinking, "Surely our President's not so insane as to just drop the mission in Afghanistan and go invade Iraq. We're stretched already, and we've got work to do in Afghanistan." Still...
If the personalities involved here are anything like they were in my world, the backend process is probably pretty similar. Maybe if you had a different President you could expect something different. But even without that....
Surely your President's not so insane as to just drop the mission in Iraq and go invade Iran. You're stretched already, and you've got work to do in Iraq.
Right?
If I laugh, just a little bit...
So, the United States government stopped an evil Islamic terrorist from getting to Washington, DC tonight. They took the plane down in Bangor, Maine, pulled the terrorist off the flight, and shipped him back to his home country. All in a day's work in keeping the country safe, right?
Well, the man was Yusef Islam. Sounds terrorist to you, you say? It's not that simple. Much like Mohammed Ali was once Cassius Clay, Yusef Islam had another name. Unlike Mohammed Ali, that other name is the more famous one.
Yes. The United States Government diverted a flight and pulled Cat Stevens off a flight, and shipped him back to Britian. Care to guess Mr. Stevens' crime? Giving to Islamic charities. This put him on the watch list -- y'know, that one that won't let such luminaries such as Ted Kennedy fly?
But to add to the comedy of errors, they apperantly didn't pick up that he was on the watch list until he had boarded his flight and they were on their way to the United States.
Does anybody feel safer, or can we just dismantle the TSA for the joke that it is?
oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world/ it's hard to get by just upon a smile...
The newspaper I tend to read on a daily basis, the Chronicle-Herald, is usually pretty good for a local paper. They attract a variety of good writers, the most brilliant political cartoonist you or I will ever encounter, and a good variety of subjects given even-handed treatment. In short, I consider it a worthy article, unlike some of the major national papers.
Anyway, one of the writers for the Herald is a guy by the name of Scott Taylor, a military correspondant who handles other publications, including the military affairs magazine Esprit de Corps and a few books. For the most part, he's one of those oddballs in military news writing - someone who (A) knows what they're talking about, (B) tends to witness what he's talking about, and (C) is considerably more moderate than a lot of the other major commentators (whether this is due to (B) or not is an exercise for the reader).
Well, Taylor tends to make a lot of visits to conflict areas, and this of course includes the Middle East, where he's been nobody's darling for quite some time. Many Arab countries consider him a Mossad agent, Israel considers him an Arab agitator, and the United States military has taken potshots both verbal and leaden at him on a few occaisions for being as outspoken as he tends to be. Just to establish the four-point hat-trick in the region, Taylor went and got captured by a resistance group in Iraq last Thursday and proceeded to have an eventful few days indeed.
The gist of deadtree and radio reports I've gotten say that he convinced his captors that he really wasn't a Mossad spy or something, and his release was ensured when one of the convincees - who wanted to release him - was killed in action against US forces shortly thereafter, turning his vague statement into a martyr's final wish. What's actually going on has yet to fully come out, of course; the Canadian government is keeping its mouth shut, Taylor is understandably still In A State, and so on.
I'll probably have more to say on it than I do at the moment, as (or if) more information comes out. Suffice to say, I'm glad he's alright, and I definately look forward to his next column in the Herald to say the least.
As always, the world remains a busy place, with lots of stuff happening in just about every level of life. Every now and then though, someone pulls something that makes me doubletake and go, "What the hell?" For the past day or so, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been eliciting that reaction from me - and probably most of the rest of the world.
In the wake of the botched hostage rescue in Beslan recently (the question of just who botched what remains up in the air), Putin has - wholly understandably! - decided to Take Measures to try and shake up Russia's security apparatus. Having been rocked by any number of major attacks over the course of a few short days, the implication is that such reforms are needed.
Some of the reforms, however, seem to leave much to be desired. Much of what Putin is preparing makes sense - come down on corrupt officials, improve international cooperation, and so on. Other parts, however, don't, such as making the regional governors appointed (by Putin, nyatch) rather than elected by regional populations, and otherwise changing electoral law to weaken minor parties. On top of this, Putin is adopting a doctrine of pre-emption similar to the Bush doctrine, which might even be acceptable provided it's applied for the right reasons - which it may or may not be, by which I mean will probably not.
Some quick glances through the news show that reactions to this seem to be more than a little bit concerned across much of the world. When it gets to the point that Powell is willing to criticise Russia over its actions ("...said he wanted to discuss the measures with Moscow"), something significant's happened, and I don't think anyone can deny that Putin's changes are a cause for concern.
On the one hand, it's a whole lot less subtle than PATRIOT Acts and screening airline passengers for potentially subversive books. On the other hand, Putin apparently doesn't feel a need to be subtle about this, and is running through large-scale reforms that have little relevance to freedom or security. While Putin has at least addressed the idea of combating the root causes of terrorism - poverty, helplessness, oppression - the fact that he is taking the opportunity to sieze powers which will do little to solve those problems is a cause for concern indeed.
Tomorrow, if I get the time, I'll do a quickie about a local reporter who managed to, just a little more than he usually does, make a name for himself in Iraq.
Some of us will not be able to walk by a Time Magazine newsstand without flinching for the next week. The remainder may consider yourself blessed in your naievete.
(filched from original source image)
A friend of mine just pointed me at this article from AlterNet, talking about the large-scale protests which have gone on in the United States for the past few years. Mark Taibbi takes what seems to be a dim view of the current crop of protestors; he argues that they march more for their own sakes than their causes' in a case of "irreverent chest-puffing," but more importantly that they simply Don't Get It:
We are raising a group of people whose only ideas about protest and opposition come from televised images of 40 years ago, when large public demonstrations could shake the foundations of society. There has been no organized effort of any kind to recognize that we now live in a completely different era, operating according to a completely different political dynamic. What worked then not only doesn't work now, it doesn't even make superficial sense now.
While the 60's-style mass protests composed of a variety of kooks and oddballs, each stranger than the rest, had a tremendous impact on the far less individualistic culture of the time, Things Have Changed. The problem is, they've changed faster than popular responses to them have. While Taibbi paints a bleak picture of the protest scene today, he points out that it doesn't have to remain this way, saying that people opposing some of the actions of the current government need to become a Force in Concert, rather than just a group of individuals who happen to be in the same place.
So folks still have to organize; they just have to do it well for a change.
I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything the article has to say. Anything I put here will just be summarizing for the time being. Suffice to say, it's worth reading, and worth thinking about, especially if you're the type who actually gets out to Oppose now and then.
Just some MLPing while I dwell on the brilliance that led me to register for three(3) honors-level seminars in the same year.
First and most impressively in my opinion, the Genesis solar probe, which drilled a hole in the desert instead of being recovered in midair, seems to have salvageable sample material on-board. This flies in the face of a whole lot of common sense, considering what the thing went through, but if they manage to pull a success out of this, my hat remains off to the boys at NASA.
And the boys down in Chile have done something noteworthy too: they have come up with what is probably the first photograph of an extrasolar planet. Not just a hint that the thing's there, but a decent enough shot that you can see what color it is. It's red, anyway. Now, if this is confirmed, then great. Sure, it's a really big planet, but it's also really far out. I wonder what's going to be picked up on next, considering the rate at which we're finding extrasolars. Amazing that only nine years ago we started getting hints that these things might exist. Shortly before that, some people seriously claimed there were no extrasolar planets, and now there's lots in the puny corner of the town we can see.
I believe "What's next?" is the appropriate question.
To start this entry off on a good note, I just watched Miracle tonight. To those not up on that movie, it's about the US's improbable victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York. And while I knew how it would end (you can't be a sports fan and *not* know about the Miracle on Ice), I was impressed at how well the movie worked despite the fact I *knew* how it would end.
And, in the words of Al Michaels at the end of that game: "Do you believe in miracles?" I do, and not just on the hockey rink, I believe in miracles in the political scene. I believe in John Kerry and John Edwards. I believe, that in the end, Americans are good and decent people, and they'll see through Shrub.
Speaking of Shrub, poking at Steve Gilliard's blog shows me that he is, again, being a complete and utter coward. What this time? Well, they don't want to do one of the debates -- the one in St. Louis. Why? Well, "...campaign officials were concerned that people could pose as undecided when they actually are partisans."
Can we roll that tape again for the excuse? "A presidential adviser said campaign officials were concerned that people could pose as undecided when they actually are partisans."
...right. And the Bush team is so adamant about this, that they're sending the Bush clan's fixer extraordinare, James Bakker, to go negotiate the Kerry campaign down to two debates.
I like Steve Gilliard's advice to the Kerry campaign here:
Meet Jim Baker.Argue about the format of the other debates, come to a deal, whatever.
Look Baker in the eye and say "we'll be in St. Louis for the debate. If your man won't be, that's not our problem. We will. Good day."
Bush doesn't have to show up. But if he wants to give Kerry an open forum, fine.
And since it seems to be a good day for the good, the bad, and the ugly, here's a bit of ugly. From Slacktivist comes this article on evangelical college students not grasping the transcendent. Slacktivist is worth reading on general principles, but he really hits it out of the ballpark on this article. While you really ought to read the whole thing, here's the key point:
There is a Liliputian quality to evangelical faith. It seems to imagine God lying on the beach of our little kingdom, bound up with the cords of our propositions about him. That which is transcendent -- truth, beauty, goodness, Bjork -- is too large for our categories and propositions. Too large for our idea of God.The idea that God might be bigger than we think -- bigger than we can know or imagine or explain -- can be terrifying. What if God should arise from the beach, shrugging off our tiny chains? Then we would no longer be in control.
Isn't that the whole point of what's going on in this country? The folks in the White House and elsewhere are afraid to admit that God (or something else, if you're not the sort inclined to admit belief) is not only bigger than we think, but bigger than we can imagine?
It's something worth thinking about when you get a chance.
The writers of the Nuke Free Zone wish to take a quiet moment to pay our respects to the soldiers, now numbering over one thousand, who have fallen in Iraq.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
--John 15:13
Describing how malpractice suits (all of those which succeed are "frivolous") are the sole cause of all that is wrong with the US medical system, George W. Bush said this:
"Too many ob-gyns aren't able to practice their... their love with women all across this country."
Insert Freudian analysis here. Via tbf and jwz.
As for Kerry, the National Shooting Sports Foundation accuses him of an amusing gaffe, but the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence says it ain't so.
In other news, Slashdot now has a politics section.
As a Democrat, my overarching belief is that the government is my government. I am part and parcel of my government. The government budget is my budget. I paid into it, and so did you, and hundreds of millions of other people, to address my priorities, and yours, and hundreds of millions of other people. The parks are my parks. The forests are my forests. I paid for them, those trees are mine. When some lumber company treks onto my land and chops down my trees and sells the timber to Japan and I get nothing for it, I think that's theft.
Daniel M. Laenker gives us a quick history lesson:
Laura Bush is a good woman, and certainly an intelligent woman. So I can't understand how she can say, apparently credulously, that "no American president ever wants to go to war".
A brief glance at American history summarily belies that: there's Tyler and Polk, grooving on annexing a third of Mexico...
A funny thing happened in Venezuela a few years ago. The South American country's elected President, Hugo Chavez, is a real left-winger of the sort never seen in U.S. politics. He condemned the U.S.'s retaliatory attack on the Taliban, al-Qaeda's protectors, after the September 11 attacks as "respond[ing] to terror with more terror", causing the U.S. to withdraw its ambassador in protest. He maintains close ties to Cuba's Communist dictator Fidel Castro. His chief economic policy is to forcibly seize the land of wealthy farm owners and distribute it to the impoverished and unemployed for no other reason than that the rich had the land and the poor did not.
When Chavez refused the offer of a loan from the International Monetary Fund and the attached requirement of extreme Laissez Faire economic policies that have proved ruinous in most countries to take these loans, El Nacional newspaper reported on an IMF declaration that the IMF would support a transition government in Venezuela if Chavez were forcibly removed from office. Shortly thereafter, in April of 2002, Chavez fired several of the state-run oil company's managers for being too capitalist, causing large-scale pro- and anti-Chavez protests in the streets. When a sniper attacked a pro-Chavez protest, killing about a dozen and leading to more factional violence, the Venezuelan army arrested Chavez and announced that he had resigned and the new President was Pedro Carmona, a business leader nowhere in the line of succession.
Here is where it begins to get funny. In a "patriotic act reaffirming and recuperating the democratic institutions and reestablishing Constitutional legitimacy" and to "guarantee respect to human rights and democratic institutions", the new "democratic transition government" decreed:
In the name of Democracy and the Constitution, Carmona had dismantled the very institutions which serve to protect these things, and granted himself the powers of a dictator. This was enough for the same army which removed Chavez in favour of Carmona to now oust Carmona and rush Chavez back into place. These events in a faraway land serve as a warning to us, to not only listen to a politician's words and promises but to also observe their actions.
The word "Democracy" is a funny word. It used to have a clear, strict meaning: rule of the majority in a popular vote. As an unknown cynic once put it, democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner, and Winston Churchill memorably called democracy "the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried". This traditional definition of democracy has given way to a popular definition which demands democracy not only be a government of the people, but one for the people. The "three wolves and a sheep" scenario becomes impossible in the new meaning of democracy, which expects equal respect and equal rights for all the people. With that positive ideal in mind, the word is further abused to mean whatever a speaker wants it to mean, only that the listener will have happy thoughts whenever a speaker invokes the word.
It is in this context that I ponder what George W. Bush means when he says that there are two new democracies in the world in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that he is bringing democracy to the world. Is Bush speaking of the traditional definition of government by popular will, the modern definition of government for popular benefit, or the Pedro Carmona definition, which is no kind of democracy at all?
Afghanistan is a factionalized realm of independent fiefdoms controlled by warlords and the Taliban, who act as dictators over their territories. The recognized government in Kabul, backed by the U.S. and growing in power, is the exception. President Hamid Karzai was appointed by the Loya Jirga, a body comparable to the Continental Congress, in a process resembling the methods of a traditional Republic. Planned elections have been delayed several times due to the lack of security hampering voter registration efforts, but with about 65% of the voting age population finally registered, Afghanistan's first elections are scheduled for October 9th.
Iraq is a more distressing case. One of Bush's first actions upon taking control of Iraq was to cancel the civil elections that many cities had independently held to replace Saddam's appointed enforcers, instead replacing Saddam's appointees with Bush's own. After the much ballyhooed transfer of power, the Allawi government seems more concerned with supporting U.S. sovereignty than its own, defering to U.S. wishes when prior agreements had clearly granted Iraq authority in the situation. Disturbing reports from the Oregon Army National Guard 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry show that the new Iraqi government is not above torturing its own people like Saddam did. Neither the Allawi government nor the U.S. has any control over the Sunni fundamentalist controlled Falluja area in north-central Iraq or the independence-seeking Kurdish regions in the far north.
Although Iraqi elections are planned for about the time of the U.S.'s own transfer of power in January, the U.S.'s constant meddling in internal Iraqi affairs raises the question of just how free and democratic Iraq will be next year. Saddam also had elections, not that they meant anything or were in any way valid or democratic. Afghanistan may be on track to become a democracy, but to call both Afghanistan and Iraq democracies right now is analogous to counting chickens before they've hatched.
Just a quick blip of a post here; I've been busy with school preparations the past couple days, along with some other commitments, and should be able to start actually properly contributing here again over the course of this next week (famous last words).
Despite that, though, this was simply too cool a space mission not to mention:
The Genesis probe is a week away from the dramatic conclusion to its mission: returning to Earth a sample of the solar wind, particles from the Sun....
To preserve the delicate cargo, it will be captured mid-air using helicopters flown by Hollywood stunt pilots.
It is the first return of material to be retrieved from beyond the Moon.
As far as sample return missions go, this one seems pretty impressive. Alas, Martian sample returns remain awhile away, but nabbing a fistful of the Sun itself counts as cool.
No wonder this is being released to the press on a Friday evening before Labor Day weekend.
According to this article in the NYTimes, "federal officials announced the largest premium increase in dollars in the Medicare program's history, raising the monthly expense by $11.60 to $78.20."
This after Medicare premiums went up 14% last year.
And, the best part...
Dr. McClellan acknowledged that about $1.75 of this year's $11.60 premium increase results from the billions of dollars Medicare is paying insurers to encourage them to offer private plans. Many in Congress refused last year to support the new Medicare drug benefit legislation unless the program did more to lure patients into such private plans.
Amazing. We're raising people's Medicare premiums to pay drug companies to give them the benefits we should already be giving them.
Equally astounding...
Medical costs have been rising faster than inflation for more than a decade, reflecting innovations and better care for patients. Medicare is not immune to such increases, although program administrators have long tried to slow such increases with measures that often amount to price controls. These controls have so enraged many health care providers that they appeal directly to Congress, where doctor groups and others have sought more money for treatments. Such appeals led Congress last year to roll back expected cuts in many payments to doctors and instead to order that such payments increase 1.5 percent, an important reason for this year's premium increase.
The latest group to make such an appeal is cancer doctors, who say Medicare will soon sharply reduce payments to them under a new system that changes the way Medicare pays for cancer drugs. Some oncologists have threatened to reduce services to patients or give them older, more toxic therapies unless Congress increases payments to them.
Am I reading that right? Cancer doctors are threatening to force patients to use less effective, more toxic anti-cancer drugs because they want Medicare to pay them more?!
I understand the free market, and that these people have to make a living too... but Jesus H. Christ on a crutch. What happened to the Hippocratic oath?
(A side note about the private drug discount plans mentioned in the article: Pfizer just cancelled theirs. Funny thing about voluntary discounts; they're voluntary. Yeah, this is a great substitute for a real prescription drug benefit. Great going, Republican Congress...)
The war in Iraq carries on, terrorists strike boldly in Russia, and the economy is gamely pressing forward, and I'm going to take a moment to mourn a library.
Whenthe article explains about the thousands of irreplaceable books lost and gets about five paragraphs in before adding, gee, and by the way a 16th century rococo palace was, of course, damaged by the fire, you know something important is gone. Nuts.
In better news, Frances downgraded to a Cat II last I checked, so the U.S. space program is a bit safer. Let's hope its materiel survives the storm intact.
The nation of Russia mourns after suffering the loss of 200 children and adults in one of the most horrific and despicable terrorist attacks in history, an attack on an Ossetia school during Den Znaniy, the Day of Knowledge holiday celebrating children, teachers, and learning. The children of Russia were the intended targets of the attack, and their deaths are not any kind of mistake or collateral damage. This is like the Yom Kippur War or Olympics attack, except against children.
Given the reports of attacks of the past few years, I've come to consider that the goal of some of these terrorists attacking Russia is to commit genocide against that near-superpower. As Osama had declared it al-Qaeda's goal to exterminate the billion Indians and there has been much crossover between Qaeda and the Chechen groups, plus the Chechens' history of being victims of genocide at the hands of the Russians, it is not out of the question.
An intriguing sidenote to this, throwing every early analysis out of whack, is that half of the terrorists have been confirmed as foreigners, not Chechens or Russians. In other words, the people who attacked a school and killed over a hundred Russian children in the name of Chechnya may have had no personal stake in the Russian-Chechen conflict. Who sent them there and where do they, and the Chechen groups in general, get their funds? the latest report suggests al-Qaeda involvement in this attack, which would not be surprising, though it might still be speculation.
On September 2, the President gave his nomination acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention, setting his pieces for the two months remaining in the campaign by describing the agenda and record on which he will be running. So what did he say that was new, old, surprising, and otherwise?
Here's the overview. This was a mostly Kerry-free speech focusing on the President's own platform. It was split fairly evenly between domestic policy and foreign, though the foreign policy revolved entirely around terrorism. The domestic policies didn't surprise me, which I suspect means they won't grab many new voters, and the section on terrorism was mostly playing defense(ironic, given the content). Also, I suspect the speech was deliberately written to avoid one particular word as much as possible. I only had to twitch at the pronunciation "nukular" once. ;^) My convention bounce prediction... 5% or less, with the usual fade for the incumbent as Election Day approaches.
And now for a more in-depth look:
The speech was essentially first-half domestic policy, last-half terrorism. But since terrorism is Bush's trump card, he tipped it to begin the speech, referencing 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq before moving on to hold forth on his domestic platform, interjecting one more intimation of tragedy in the middle before finally moving on fully to his terror policies.
The speech used two slogans which I'm pretty sure we'll hear as the campaign continues. The major theme tying domestic and foreign policy together, "a safer world, a more hopeful America," echoes Kerry's theme, "stronger at home, respected in the world" so closely as to be nearly a paraphrase. A more particularly domestic slogan was "nothing will hold us back."
On education, he touted No Child Left Behind, and cited a record level of funding from the federal government for schools (which, by the way, is true, though he somehow neglected to mention that this is nevertheless less than No Child Left Behind budgets for and requires districts to spend). He called for increasing local control of schools and strengthening of standardized testing, rather making one wonder how the two are supposed to mesh. More specific proposals included a standardized test for graduation, funding for early intervention for at-risk high school students, doubling the number of people in job training, increasing funding for community colleges, and an expansion of Pell grants for low- and middle-income families.
Naturally, he happily pointed to his large tax cuts, claiming them as stimulus for an economy which is "growing again and creating jobs." It may not create jobs fast enough for him avoid presiding over a net loss thereof, but at the moment it does seem to be creating jobs. He called for making his tax cuts permanent; as readers may recall, the estimated cost of the tax cuts was initially decreased significantly by giving them expiration dates after which taxes would return to their previous levels. The President is calling for the repeal of these expiration dates. This becomes important when analyzing later proposals, many of which have significant costs(for example, "American Opportunity Zones," modeled on similar initiatives at the state level, free businesses locating in a geographic region from taxes and simultaneously spend money on training workers for jobs), especially in light of the large deficits under which the economy is currently operating. Does the President consider the debt levels thus generated sustainable, or does he plan to make large cuts in other programs? He mentioned neither scenario.
Taxes were an opportunity for one of the few mentions the President made of his opponent, pointing out that Kerry had said he would raise taxes. This statement is true, though it may sensibly be qualified with Kerry's own promise to preserve and even cut taxes on the middle class, while repealing the tax cuts President Bush provided to the upper 1% of taxpayers. Interestingly, the President revived the "tax-and-spend" label for Kerry. (What label suits the President, then... spend-invisible-money?) A simpler tax code got an surprisingly big cheer from the audience, and is an idea I'd be happy with.
The President did call for restraining federal spending, though he offered no pointers on how he intended to achieve this. The call was encapsulated in a line on making America more business-friendly, including a reduction in regulation. Observers of the Administration's regulatory policies have noted that the Bush Administration has imposed fewer rules, especially when counting regulation repeals and rollbacks, than any other recent administration, including Ronald Reagan's and the first Bush administration. The environmental impact of this regulatory stance -- overwhelmingly tending to greater human footprint in the environment -- is the closest thing to an environmental position the President struck in his speech tonight.
One point that perked my ears was that the President said America must be "less dependent on foreign sources of energy." There was no clarification; the best estimate of his meaning is that he was calling for drilling in regions like the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. It seems unlikely that, like Senator Kerry, who made energy independence a substantial theme in his platform, he would be looking to increase the economic viability of alternative sources of energy and new energy production technologies like wind and solar power.
Twice the President called for reducing lawsuits, on companies and doctors, though no digs at trial lawyers were heard that I recall so it may or may not have been intentionally aimed at Democratic Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards. This fits with his greater stance giving preference to businesses over other entities, like consumers.
A series of health care initiatives including lauding the prescription drug benefit in the recent Medicare law (of which few seniors have yet taken advantage, apparently because of confusingly written legislation), and ensuring every poor county in America has a clinic or health center. A push to enroll eligible but unenrolled children in government health programs does make sense. An initiative to require that small businesses be able to purchase health insurance for workers at the same rate as large businesses sounds interesting at first glance, but a wary look at economies of scale makes me wonder how it would work. He enthusiastically described the claimed benefits of his health savings accounts, which give tax credits for accounts intended to pay for health benefits: that is, if a family can afford to put some money away for health expenses beyond any insurance they are paying for, they can save a percentage of it they otherwise would have spent on taxes. A similar proposal is his Social Security accounts, which would allow people to put away Social Security taxes in private accounts rather than simply paying them to the government -- essentially, lowering taxes paid to Social Security (no word on how the income shortfall would be made up) and lowering benefits payouts on the assumption that a private account can generate equal or greater income (likewise, no word on what to do for the many investors who find trouble in private investments).
Several social initiatives were touched on very briefly, though often in oblique wordings. Specifics included comp time and flex time for workers, a continuation of his Faith-based Initiative (a policy that allows government to provide funds to religious institutions for charitable work, usually freeing up funds for the institutions' core religious duties; though theoretically nonspecific about religions, to my knowledge penny 1 has yet to be given under this plan to a non-Christian religion), and welfare-to-work programs currently in place. A call to "make a place for the unborn child" is presumably a pro-life stance, which I unabashedly share, though the President was completely nonspecific as to what that entailed. Then there was gay marriage.
"I support the protection of marriage against activist judges." The President will get some flak on this, I think. It's deliberately noncommittal and will not only fail to satisfy but I think actually dissatisfy both sides of the gay marriage issue. If you think gays should be able to spend their lives in a recognized union with someone, then of course you didn't want to hear the President say they shouldn't; if you're against gay marriage, you probably wanted to hear the President say how you support something against judicial decisions, which is to pass an amendment to the Constitution. When your biggest attack against your opponent is a love of nuance and complexity you label "flip-flopping," trying to straddle a middle position leaves you open to a nasty boomerang.
In the latter half of the speech, he took up the issue of terrorism. Several points were very interesting to me here. First off, there were practically zero new foreign policy initiatives. He mentioned "staying on the offensive", staying in Iraq until the nation is sufficiently stable, and "working to advance liberty in the broader Middle East," and essentially ran through every previous defense of his run-up to war in Iraq, adding in several justifications for Afghanistan. The first part of this likely refers to his doctrine of "pre-emption," the national security position that explicitly says the U.S. reserves the right to aggress upon other nations if it feels that it could be threatened by groups within those nations. Much has been made of the legality of this under international law when the threat is not imminent, and on the surety of intelligence required to take such drastic action (see for example the disproving of many of the U.S.' intelligence conclusions before the Iraq war). A brief call for intelligence reform was made; both candidates agree on the need for this, and Kerry seems to be devoted to the idea, using a significant portion of his platform to describe reforms. I'm uncertain how far the President really desires to go on the issue.
A second interesting point was a tactic of conflating the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts when justifying his operations. The war in Afghanistan was widely seen as justified retaliation and punishment for the masterminds behind the 9/11 attacks and the regime which harbored them, taking place with broad support both domestically and internationally. The Iraq war, far more tenuously tied to the war on terror, was much less clearly necessary, and sparked significant resistance both at home and abroad. Making the justifications for going into Afghanistan, then, and lumping in Iraq as a similar situation, is an easy rhetorical device to color the poorer justification of one with the clearer justification of the other. Another device he used, as he has before, is the dualistic choice between complete trust of Saddam and complete war, when there are of course intermediate courses with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Thirdly, Kerry was much more mentioned in this half of the speech. Clearly the President, using his most significant issue, wished to drive home as much difference as possible between himself and Senator Kerry. The standard progression of stump remarks on the $87bil funding bill was brought out (he voted against it, it included paying for body armor, he said "I voted before it before I voted against it", he said "it's complicated, and finishing up with "There is nothing complicated about supporting our troops."). Kerry's remarks against the prosecution of the war were construed as denigrating our allies -- curious, as Kerry's platform throughout maintains the need to strengthen ties with our allies.
Probably one of the biggest benefits for the President politically from this speech will be some immunization against the ubiquitous "dumb Bush" jokes; a bit of personal self-deprecating humor about his verbal foibles, and acknowledging his own arrogant simple-mindedness in terms of Texas swagger and straight-shooting bluntness, can go a long way toward neutralizing acerbic one-liners(though dissing the New York Times with a sixty-year-old editorial might not have been the wisest media-relations move).
In summary, the new stuff was small, the old stuff was a rehash, and the same questions about jobs, deficits, and security are still in the air. The mere fact of a convention, giving the President another stage from which to project his views, may give him a boost in public opinion, but I can't see it being dramatic. The campaigns are on level funding ground now, and I suspect the race will still be tight, Iraq will still be contentious, and if domestic policy gets much play Kerry may well have enough advantage to get over the incumbent's position.
Game on.
Zell Miller, invoking the loa of Pat Buchanan and becoming the Godwalker of the Demagogue last night at the Republican Convention, claimed that God would not turn an indifferent eye towards the United States. Problem is, "indifferent" doesn't automatically mean "positive."
This not-indifferent-eye would, perhaps, explain the monster hurricane that's bearing down on Florida as we speak. Several million people are being told to abandon state, including the entire population of Miami Beach.One thing that's not being evacuated in the path of Frances is the American manned space program:
NASA may soon have to deal with a new set of problems in its tedious, time-consuming and expensive quest to return the space shuttles to flight: the aftermath of Hurricane Frances.
With the three remaining space shuttles, the dozens of unique space station components and modules and billions of dollars worth of launch facilities and assembly hangars, the Kennedy Space Center sits uncomfortably close to the predicted path for Hurricane Frances, a Category Four storm barreling toward Florida's east coast.
Kennedy Space Center, despite sitting on the east coast of Florida for the last 40 years, has never taken a direct hit from a full-fledged hurricane before. Either the planners were that good or that lucky. The buildings and other facilites can withstand a fairly impressive amount of wind force; all of them can take over 100mph winds and remain intact. Problem is, Frances is a good deal stronger than what the KSC facilities are designed to withstand.
The big problem here is that KSC currently has the entirety of the US manned program's hardware stored there. If any of that is significantly damaged or destroyed, continuing the program becomes somewhere between unlikely and impossible, depending on the damage. If the shuttles themselves are wrecked, that's it. Congress won't fund replacements, and there's nothing else on tap that can deliver and install any ISS components that remain.
So, sometime in the next 72 to 96 hours, we'll find out if NASA dodged a bullet or not. If not, then it's up to Burt Rutan and John Carmack to carry the torch for a continued American presence in space. I hope they're up to it.
But the prosecution of terror is a big bump for Republicans, because throwing around fear keeps the sheep cowering while the Administration gets to look strong and leaderly and presidential and protective.
Unless they massively screw it up, of course. Then it just looks like they were so eager for headlines and/or convictions that they blithely whipped up an empty case against quickly-chosen targets without regard to little things like facts and constitutional liberties. (Temp URL on that; I'll hunt down a permalink soon.)
In this particular instance, the prosecution was so riddled with holes that even the Justice Department decided they couldn't have this on their record, and asked the judge to ignore most of the charges, setting up a retrial on the heinous and horrific offense of document fraud. But the interesting part is that they did this on September 1, smack dab in the middle of the Republican Convention, when the press and the airwaves are filled with glowing coverage for the Administration, and the headline "Justice Department Admits Egregious Errors, Drops Terror Case" would be unlikely to appear above the fold on the front page, or in the top five minutes of the news.
Nope. The Justice Department under Bush isn't at all politicized. We need have no fear at all of being arrested and prosecuted for political reasons.
