Secret Codes of the Right Wing

This is truly absurd.. ...but it does make sense.

Economists Love GWB (ok, not really)

A group of 169 business-school professors, including two Nobel laureates, have sent George Bush a letter criticizing his economic policies. Similarly a poll taken by The Economist of 100 academics shows Kerry winning in nearly every issue polled.

Bush "Forgets" His Manners

Here (thanks to Oliver Willis's blog, Like Kryponite to Stupid) is a clip of President Bush at his less-than-best moment of the debate.

Bush "Forgets" Tree Company

Yes Mr. President, I would like to buy some lumber. According to Factcheck.org (the same site that Vice President Cheney tried to refer to at the Tuesday debate), President Bush owns part interest in "LSTF, LLC, a limited liability company organized for the purpose of the production of trees for commercial sales." According to Factcheck.org and demonstrated by President Bush's own financial disclosures, Kerry was entirely correct to suggest that under President Bush's definition of "small business" is so broad that the President himself qualifies.

Afghans -- Are You Ready for Democracy?

Scott Baldauf of CSM asks that question in this piece. Baldauf also describes the concern of the United Nations that there are multiple registrations and safety issues that call into question the legitimacy of today's elections before they have even taken place. According to United Nations figures cited in the article, there are only 9.8 eligible voters in the country, yet as President Bush and Vice President Cheney have observed in the debates there are over 10 million Afghans registered to vote.

BBC News reports this morning that there were some additional problems with the election. Beside general concern for safety, 15 candidates claimed to be boycotting the election because of voting irregularities. To avoid multiple voting, election officials put ink on the thumb of each voter after he had cast his vote. In some cases the ink was washable.

The BBC article reports that only two candidates beside Hamid Karzai did not participate in the boycott--but they "stood down in [Karzai's] favour on the last day of the campaign."

Bremer Begs Forgiveness

Bremer authored this op-ed in yesterday's NYT. My favorite graf:

It's no secret that during my time in Iraq I had tactical disagreements with others, including military commanders on the ground. Such disagreements among individuals of good will happen all the time, particularly in war and postwar situations. I believe it would have been helpful to have had more troops early on to stop the looting that did so much damage to Iraq's already decrepit infrastructure. The military commanders believed we had enough American troops in Iraq and that having a larger American military presence would have been counterproductive because it would have alienated Iraqis. That was a reasonable point of view, and it may have been right. The truth is that we'll never know.

Re: Athiesm Gets a Facelift -- Its Future Looks Bright

I'm not sure how far Dennett's movement is going to get. He and Richard Dawkins and others have been preaching these same ideas for many years without gaining much traction. Ultimately I don't think they need to. The trend-line of popular belief has been going in their direction since the dawn of empiricism, and while it has moved painfully slowly, we'll get there eventually. As Dennett points out, the numbers are growing significant, and politicians are, if nothing else, well aware of demographics. I don't think we'll be seeing a repeat of George H. W. Bush's statement that "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots" statement any time soon.

On to the Roger Wright stuff. Wright's arguments seem to suffer from the ex post flaws of any other design argument. His grand triumph over Dennett was to get Dennett to admit that there was a probabilistic tendency for modern society to develop in the universe. He concludes that the universe was therefore designed to create that result. He seems, like other design advocates, to be working backwards from the feeling that modern human society is really neat and therefore must have been the "goal" of the universe. He plays fast and loose with his terminology in the whole discussion and dresses it up a lot, but that's the basic jist of it. At times he speaks of the design as being evolution ("the 'designer' was natural selection"). Later he comes back and refers to evolution as evidence of a design ("to the extent that evolution exhibits directionality of the kind I've just described, there is at least some evidence of design"). It's all very convoluted and he ends up chasing his tail.

What I think comes out of the interview is that Wright is arguing that evolution is directional and leads to modern human society (which I believe Dennett supports to the extent that evolution tends towards the most competitively successful organisms, which, to date, is us) and that the laws of the universe are such as to allow for evolution, therefore the universe was designed to create us. This is really no different from the basic design argument as it has been argued by post-Darwin theists. This argument has been well addressed by Dawkins and others

Athiesm Gets a Facelift -- Its Future Looks Bright

This is a rather old op-ed piece by Daniel Dennett, originally published in the NYT on July 12, 2003. It's worth taking a peak at the Brights' homepage too. (I don't remember whether they have come up here before, but even if they have it is worth the reminder.)

Author/Philosopher Robert Wright offers this response (Beliefnet) to Dennett. Beliefnet also has video of Wright interviewing/debating Dennett on whether evolution has a purpose (and it also has some video teachings by the Dalai Lama, although I have not yet watched them myself).

The Next Bloated Lobbyist-Feed Bill

The Washington Post editorial board put on their pork police hats for this editorial against the corporate tax bill, which follows in the grand tradition of the energy and medicare bills of handing out many billions of dollars to corporate allies while accomplishing little or nothing of any value. If I recall correctly, there is also a similar transportation uber-bill also winding its way through congress...

More on X-Prize

Here's a great quote from Rutan, as reported in this Seattle Post-Intelligencer story:

"I was thinking about how they're feeling, that other space agency ... the Boeings and the Lockheeds ... I think they're looking at each other now and saying, 'We're screwed.' "

Bremer Criticizes Administration

The WP has this story. It won't be long now before we see a headline that reads, "Bremer Banished from Island."

From Good Cop to Bad Cop

Spencer Ackerman of The New Republic spots a new poll of Iraqis that shows a majority of respondents no longer support the authority of the Iraqi police. As Ackerman notes, this is a major shift from earlier polls. (Today's Papers on Slate cued me in to this post.)

Up and Away

Some happy news today, on the 47th anniversary of Sputnik touching off the space race, Team Rutan's SpaceShipOne successfully returned to space for second time in a week, winning the X Prize. The next objective for private spaceketeers: the $50 million American Space Prize for the first team to send a craft into orbit.

And the Punishment for Illegally Selling Nuclear Technology Is...

Weapons for everybody! Slate reports that Pakistan is to be rewarded with $1.5 billion in shiny new American weapons. That'll teach that dog Musharraf to sell nukes behind our back.

A Waste of Time

Since the early days of the War On Terror, when Camp X-Ray was created at Guantanamo Bay, many charges have been leveled that the conduct there violates humans rights standards and many American and international legal standards. The Bush administration has consistently answered such charges in the press and in the courtroom by claiming that the actions they have taken are a necessity in their efforts to make the world secure from terrorism. Now Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, a military intelligence officer, is claiming in a new book by David Rose, that the interrogations held at Guantanamo Bay have yielded no useful intelligence. Christino states that not a "single terrorist attack" has been prevented by these interrogations.

Information Failure

This Annenberg Center study on the impact of late night shows on political awareness has already been mentioned here. It was also mentioned in the slashdot discussion discussed below. There an astute reader pointed out just how bleak the data from the study is. They asked participants six simple (one might say blindingly obvious) questions relating to Bush and Kerry. They were:

'Who wants to privatize Social Security?'
'Which one doesn't like assault weapons?'
'What is the cutoff income for Kerry's tax increases?' (50k, 100k, 200k, or 500k)
'Who is a former prosecutor?'
'Who favors making the recent tax cuts permanent?'
'Who wants to make it easier for labor unions to organize?'

Note that for 5 of the questions there are two possible answers (Bush or Kerry), and for the tax question there are four. If, then, you selected answers completely at random you should get 2.75 questions correct. The controls in the survey were people who did not watch late night comedy shows. On average they scored 2.6 correct answers. In other words, their responses were worse than random. It may now be said in all honesty and candor that a monkey could score better in a quiz on American politics than the average America. This coincides with another study posted here which found that more a person watches Fox News, the more likely they were to answer a quiz on the Iraq war incorrectly. Is it any wonder that the results of our political elections seem absurd to any informed observer? I say again that failures of the press are just as dangerous to this nation as failures by the CIA or any other part of our government. Our media cannot be regarded as simply another industry competing for market share.

Re: On Tubes and Niger

This story has hit slashdot, and in 6-7 years of regularly reading that site, I don't think I've ever seen this many comments on an article.

Bush Foreign Policy In Perspective

There is an interesting Think Again feature on Foreign Policy Magazine's web site (which I think has been there a while) by UVA professor Melvyn Leffler on Bush's foreign policy. Much of it strikes me as wrong-headed, but this article, as well as an interview I found with Leffler with the Council On Foreign Relations provide some insight in recasting the issue with a focus on the Cold War. I'll take up a few points from the Think Again.

Leffler argues that Bush's policy is not revolutionary, but rather a continuation of the policies of presidents Jefferson, Wilson, (Franklin) Roosevelt, and Kennedy. I find little value in the comparison to Jefferson (how is reviving 200 year old imperialist policies not radical?), and on the others, even if some objectives remain the same, the shift in context is such that Bush's implementation remains new and adventurous. Certainly the US's Cold War policies, particularly early on, sought an America with a global influence and presence to push back against the communist threat. However, the differences between JFK's vision and the neo-con plan are as striking as the similarities. Kennedy stated in as many words that what he pursued was "not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war". While the neo-cons hope to achieve the same spread of American ideals that Kennedy did, in their realpolitik version American military force provides the impetus for the spread of American values. Wilson championed the League of Nations, Roosevelt the UN. To assert this trio of presidents as role-models for Bush's unilateralism seems to miss the mark.

Next Leffler cites Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida and Teddy Roosevelt's incursions and the Monroe doctrine as examples of preemptive war doctrine. They smack more of imperialism and power politics to me. Spanish Florida, Cuba, and the other Latin American nations posed no true threat to the security of the US (in this perhaps they were a good precedent for Bush). Leffler also raises FDR's World War II policies as an example of preemptive actions. This seems absurd given that WWII is consistently the top example employed to illustrate the danger of not acting preemptively. Finally, as before, Leffler mentions US actions during the Cold War, which I think do serve his purpose. The US initiated many interventions in order to slow or halt the spread of communism, which was certainly considered a threat to the security of the nation.

Leffler refers to charges that Bush's policies are a departure from Clinton's as "lovely nostalgia". For this he cites statements by Clinton that he would take unilateral action if necessary. That is a far cry from choosing unilateral actions when the threat is not clear and other options exist. Clinton's measured foreign policy demonstrates that he considered such actions to be the option of last resort. Clinton generally upheld the policies established by Bush I of wielding the US's new found power through the mechanisms of multilateral authority. That Clinton would have employed unilateral military force if necessary does not change the fact that the broad sweep of his policy clashes with the policy implemented by Bush.

Relying on campaign statements by Condi Rice and statements of pre-war hype by Don Rumsfeld, Leffler concludes that Bush's foreign policy was transformed by 9/11. I would argue that the principles of the policy were only mildly affected, and rather it was the change in the domestic political atmosphere which gave rise to Bush's aggressive post-9/11 action. Bush had clearly established a belligerent unilateral foreign policy prior to 9/11 through rejecting Kyoto, the ICC, the ABM treaty, and various other multilateral initiatives. Moreover various administration insiders have disclosed that Bush was maneuvering towards military action against Iraq even prior to 9/11. Most of the prominent features of the post-9/11 foreign policy had already been established before the attack.

Where Leffler is most interesting is in his comparisons with Reagan and Cold War policy. At the end of the Think Again article, Leffler finds that Bush attempts to emulate Reagan's exercise of "moral clarity and military power". As mentioned he also draws parallels in Bush's preemptive strategies and unilateralism to Cold War policies. It's also notable that most of the neo-con group were prominent Cold War hawks. Even Condi Rice was formerly a Soviet Union specialist. Bush's policies can aptly be viewed as the right-wing Reaganesque Cold War policies updated for a world without an Evil Empire. All of the key elements are present: the grand idealistic moralism juxtaposed with realpolitik callousness, the focus on military might, the domestic promotion of nationalism. It is a good framework from which to view the Bush foreign policy. That these tactics seem poorly suited for the new context I'll leave for another essay...

On Tubes and Niger

NYT has phenomenally comprehensive coverage of the case the Bush administration made for war, and Vice President Cheney does not look so good. What a shame -- and right before the debates!

Re: This Is Your Brain on Jon Stewart

There's good interview with Jon Stewart online from Fresh Air yesterday.