Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Deliver Us

by digby

Assuming that any future Democratic president will be unfairly pounded by the Republicans for all the things the Bush administration did for eight years, it seems to me that there should be an opening for sincere (if there are any) small government conservatives to vote for the Democrats.

Check this out:

Under Clinton from 1992 to 2000, according to Princeton political scientist David Lewis, political appointees in the federal government dropped by nearly 17 percent – from 3,423 to 2,845. From 2000 to 2004, that figure climbed back up 12.5 percent to 3,202. Similarly, political scientist Paul Light found that after holding steady during most of the Clinton administration, the number of senior title holders increased by 9 percent, to 2,592, between 1998 and 2004 — the vast majority of which occurred under Bush. Light also found that 14 departments added new executive titles between 1998 and 2004. The Department of Veterans Affairs topped the list with six additional titles, followed by Defense, Education, Energy, and Justice with four, and Labor with three. Light wrote, “The fastest spreading titles continue to be ‘alter-ego’ deputies, including chiefs of staff to secretaries, deputy secretaries, under secretaries, deputy under secretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, associate deputy assistant secretaries, associate assistant secretaries, administrators, deputy administrators, associate administrators and assistant administrators.”

The Democrats will never be allowed to do this. It’s impossible to even dream that they could create a massive new patronage machine and bureaucracy like the Department of Homeland Security with a Democratic majority or expand the government the way the Bush administration has. In fact, if the Dems win in 08, they will come almost immediately under pressure to shrink the government. It’s like an inverted sort of Nixon China thing. The Democrats will be forced to do the Republicans’ unpleasant work for them.

The broadcast and cable media, by the way, will help the Republicans do this by failing to ever properly put into perspective the fact that all the things the Republicans will be accusing the Democrats of, they did themselves. They are already failing to inform their audience, even though the print media have put it out there:

To President Bush, they are “pork-barrel projects completely unrelated to the war,” items in the House and Senate war-spending bills such as peanut storage facilities and aid to spinach farmers that insult the seriousness of the conflict and exist only to buy votes.

But such spending has been part of Iraq funding bills since the war began, sometimes inserted by the president himself, sometimes added by lawmakers with bipartisan aplomb. A few of the items may have weighed on the votes for spending bills that have now topped half a trillion dollars, but, in almost all cases over the past four years, special-interest funding provisions have been the fruits of congressional opportunism by well-placed senators or House members grabbing what they could for their constituents on the one bill that had to be passed quickly.

[…]

The 2005 emergency war-spending bill included $70 million for aid to Ukraine and other former Soviet states; $12.3 million for the Architect of the Capitol, in part to build an off-site delivery facility for the Capitol police; $24 million for the Forest Service to repair flood and landslide damage; and $104 million for watershed protection — the lion’s share meant for repairing the damage to waterways in Washington County, Utah, at the request of the state’s Republican senators.

The fight this year over $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fisheries in the Gulf, $74 million for peanut storage facilities in Georgia, and $25 million for California spinach farmers devastated by an E. coli scare is louder than past disputes but is substantively not much different, budget analysts said. Virtually all of the $3.4 billion in agriculture spending in the House bill had been worked out by farm-state lawmakers long before Democratic leaders settled on the Iraq troop-pullout language at the center of the White House’s showdown with Congress, Lilly said.

I have no doubt that the tax and spend mantra will continue to be used by shameless, hypocritical Republicans to keep Democrats from funding the government they way it needs to be funded. I don’t think it has the salience it once had, for obvious reasons, but it’s still a good line that everybody in the country is comfortable nodding their heads and agreeing with over the kitchen table. After all, the GOP treated Bill Clinton like he was Lyndon Johnson when he was actually more like Nelson Rockefeller (which maybe was worse, in their minds…)And they will do it without any sense of irony or self-awareness and the majority of the media will never confront them on it. Indeed, when Democrats bring up Republican corruption and pork barrel politics under Bush they will be greeted with eye-rolling and head shaking from the punditocrisy for “living in the past” and “failing to solve the problems real Americans care about.” It’s a very predictable process.

So, my feeling is that the Dems should make a virtue of this somehow. Since they will simply not be allowed to get away with anything close to what Bush has done, both because of existing stereotypes and the massive mess the Republicans have made, they should at least make a case for being effective and efficient with the taxpayers money. (The PR on this supplemental “pork” thing doesn’t give me a good feeling…) After Clinton and Gore’s successful streamlining effort, watching this Bush trainwreck these last few years might convince a few of the last non-ideological, fiscal conservatives out there that Democrats are always the better choice to run the government. You wouldn’t think you’d even have to make the argument — a high school student council could have done a better job than Bush and boys — but it’s hard to break habits in politics. Dems have to put the nation’s economic house in order and do necessary things like universal health care and deal with global warming and they are going to have to think of some way to do that while the Republicans and the lazy portions of the press corps ding them mercilessly from the sidelines about “pork” and “special interests” and “tax and spend” in a way they never did during the dark GOP majority years. Personally, I would like to see a case made for government that delivers. I’ll be very interested to see how the presidential candidates approach this.

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Brownie Points

by digby

In response to Steve Benen’s post about Bush’s rambling, incoherent answers at that Townhall yesterday, one of his commenters pithily replied:

Bush leveraged a national tragedy into reelection. He’s seeded the federal government with true believers, expanded executive authority while marginalizing Congress and appointing 2 radically conservative SC judges. He’s expanded government surveillance of our phones, e-mails, libraary borrowings, bank accounts and medicine cabinets. He’s stalled efforts to curb global warming, cut protections once provided by the EPA, FDA, and silenced scientists who dare refute the literal word of bible or the backward beliefs of those who claim to know the mind of the almighty. The US can now torture, imprision without providing cause and prosecute without allowing a reasonable defense. He’s built bases in the middle east, and fattened the bank accounts of those whose bank accounts were already obscene. The middle class — the masses — have not been so economically impotent in decades.

For such an idiot, this guy has been awfully successful.

That’s worth thinking about. He’s only been an epic failure in terms of keeping the nation secure, safeguarding our constitution and making America more prosperous and successful. When you look at it from Bush’s perspective, however, he’s done a heckuva job.

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Trust ‘Em?

by digby

Via Christy’s righteously indignant post this morning, I read this column from the Chicago Tribune on the ramifications of Rove’s influence on the justice department:

A DOJ process that exalts partisan political loyalty over independence and fairness is a fundamentally flawed one. Political blinders are critical to a prosecutor because, without them, important decisions about how cases are investigated and prosecuted can be hijacked by improper considerations with tangible (even tragic) consequences. Naturally, this is most critical in political corruption cases, the legitimacy of which hinges on the political independence of the prosecutive team’s work.

It reminded me of something that someone said the day that the Department of Justice raided Congressman Jefferson’s office. Everyone knew that Jefferson was worthy of suspicion, but members of both parties protested the raid because of the separation of powers issues it raised. It was, in fact, unprecedented, as such issues had previously been dealt with by the more common use of subpoenas rather than a Saturday afternoon raid which resulted in the DOJ seizing Jefferson’s papers and computers.

Most people at the time thought the bipartisan congressional hoopla was ridiculous. Here we had a sitting congressman who had been found with piles of cash in his freezer. Are you telling us that the FBI doesn’t have the power to go into his office and seize his papers? It sounds rather absurd.

Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

I am quite sure that Congressman Jefferson is nobody I want to defend (for his politics and much as his criminality.) But the FBI and the executive branch have a long sordid history of using their power for political ends. (Even Hoover never believed they could raid a congressman’s office, however.)

Recently, the FBI’s conservative culture has led to some in the bureau covertly helping Republicans as we saw during the Clinton years. Convicted spy Robert Hanssen had a relationship with Robert Novak that seemed to be based upon his political loathing of Janet Reno, although as with so many of these cases, it’s hard to tell what motivates individuals. But history shows that the FBI can be used by any party for nefarious purposes which is bad enough and requires constant vigilance and oversight. When it is used for partisan reasons directly against the congress you have a problem of an even greater dimension.

The reason to be against this is political (and constitutional), not legal. It’s entirely possible that the warrant they got was proper and that their cause is just. And I have no doubt that Hastert had a hissy fit and got Bush to seal the documents to cover his own ample ass. But the bigger issue is something that someone wrote in an email a couple of days ago:

This Republican Justice Department, led by a lifetime Bush loyalist and good friend to Karl Rove now has every Democratic strategy memo that ever came across Congressman Jefferson’s desk. Trust ’em?

Uh, no.

It never really made much sense to me that of the long line of GOP corruption cases that came through the congress in past few years, the only one in which the DOJ took the unprecedented step of raiding their congressional office and seizing their papers was the lone Democrat. Very odd, don’t you think?

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“Death Is Terrible”

by digby

Just shoot me in the face. I missed this earlier and once again I am gobsmacked that a man who is less sophisticated and intellectually mature than the broccoli eating baby hamster is running the most powerful country on earth. It still amazes me. Every time.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, how would you respond to the rather mistaken idea that the war in Iraq is becoming a war in Vietnam?

BUSH: Yes, thank you. The, there’s a lot of differences. A first, the Iraqi people voted for a modern constitution. And then set up a government under that constitution.

Secondly, that’s as opposed to two divided countries. North and south. The, in my judgment, the vast majority of people want to live underneath the constitution they passed. They want to live in peace. And what you’re seeing is radical on the fringe, creating chaos and order to either get the people to lose confidence in the government or for us to leave.

A major difference as far as here at home is concerned as far as the military is it’s an all-volunteer army. We need to keep it that way. By the way, the way you keep it that way is to make sure the troops have all they need to do their job and to make sure their families are happy.

And there are some similarities, of course. Death is terrible. There’s no similarity, of course, is that Vietnam is the first time that a war was brought onto our TV screens to America on a regular basis. Looking around, looking for baby-boomers, I see a few of us here. A different, for the first time, the violence and horror of war was brought home. That’s the way it is today.

Americans rightly so, are concerned about whether or not we can succeed in Iraq. Nobody wants to be there if we can’t succeed, especially me. And these violence on our TV screens affects our frame of mind. Probably more so today than what took place in Vietnam.

I want to remind you that after Vietnam, after we’d left, the millions of people lost their life.

I guess while we were there is was like a spring day in Indiana.

Check out the YouTube of this is you haven’t seen it over on Eschaton. It’s even worse watching him struggle and stall and try so hard to figure out what he’s supposed to say.

I will say it again. When a politician appears to be this stupid (and he seems exactly the same as he did when he was running for president in 2000) it’s not a good idea to assume that it’s just an act. Look at the results.

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Not Good Enough

by digby

I ran across this article in the course of researching the post below and I hadn’t seen it before. (Perhaps it’s been everywhere and I just missed it.) I found it pretty amazing:

Voter Probes Raise Partisan Suspicions
Democrats, Allies See Politics Affecting Justice Department’s Anti-Fraud Efforts

By Jo Becker and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 20, 2004

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in New Mexico launched a statewide criminal task force to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the upcoming presidential election. The probe came after a sheriff who co-chairs President Bush’s campaign in the state’s largest county complained about thousands of questionable registrations turned in by Democratic-leaning groups.

“It appears that mischief is afoot and questions are lurking in the shadows,” Iglesias told local reporters.

Civil rights groups say Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s focus on minority registrants is meant to deter likely Democratic voters.

But Democratic Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, named to the task force to allay concerns that the probe was politically motivated, said the investigation is unnecessary.

“This is just an attempt to let people know that Big Brother is watching,” Vigil-Giron, New Mexico’s chief elections official, said in an interview. “It may well be aimed at trying to keep people away from the polls.”

The probe is one of several criminal inquiries into alleged voter fraud launched in recent weeks in key presidential battlegrounds, including Ohio and West Virginia, as part of a broader initiative by U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft targeting bogus registrations and other election crimes. The Justice Department has asked U.S. attorneys across the country to meet with local elections officials and launch publicity campaigns aimed at getting people to report irregularities.

The focus on registration problems comes amid a fiercely contested presidential race and at a time when many Democrats are still angry over the 2000 election, in which ballot irregularities in Florida prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the winner. And it puts the Justice Department in the middle of a charged and partisan debate over when aggressive fraud enforcement becomes intimidation.

Justice officials say it is the department’s duty to prosecute illegal activities at the polls, and stress that civil rights lawyers are also working to ensure that legitimate voters can cast their ballots without interference. Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said that “the department must strike a proper balance and we cannot be deterred from investigating allegations of criminal voter fraud.”

Civil rights advocates and many Democrats, however, complain that the department is putting too much emphasis on investigating new voter registrations in poor and minority communities — which tend to favor Democrats — and not enough on ensuring that those voters do not face discrimination at the polls. More attention should be given to potential fraud in the use of absentee ballots, which tend to favor Republicans, the critics say.

They also charge that announcing criminal investigations within weeks of an election — as was done in New Mexico on Sept. 7 — is likely to scare legitimate voters away from the polls.

“I’m concerned that the Justice Department is being overtly political,” said Nancy Zirkin, deputy director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “Bells are going off for me because searching for voter fraud has often been a proxy for intimidating voters.”

The Justice Department’s guidelines say prosecutors “must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself.”

Iglesias did what he was supposed to do in 2004 like a good Republican boy. He held press conferences just before the election and and said all the right things about “questions lurking in the shadows.” Except, of course, the questions were all trumped up GOP scare tactics to keep Hispanics and native Americans from voting. Not illegal, just low and snakelike.

Unfortunately for him, by 2006, Rove was panicking and that wasn’t good enough. He was supposed to actually indict somebody (see: Wisconsin) and he refused. He got his head chopped off.

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Hans Across America

by digby

Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been writing about the same things over and over again for years and it never adds up to anything. But in the case of this “voter fraud” issues, I have been concerned about what the Bush administration was up to for some time and it appears to be adding up to something quite huge. (Of course, I’m not the only one who was following this — many people knew it was happening.)

Today, McClatchy has a barn burner of an article about the Bush administration’s efforts to suppress the vote. It’s no longer possible to argue with a straight face that they didn’t use the power of the Justice Department for partisan reasons. The Bush administration has been pursuing phony voter fraud like it was a massive scourge, helping states enact all kinds of specious laws that only result in disenfranchising legitimate voters — the kind who tend to vote Democratic. (I wonder why?)

Read the whole article and then come on back and we’ll unpack just a tiny little piece of it, blog style.

Longtime readers will recall that way back when I wrote a bit about “Buckhead” the man who miraculously discovered in a few short moments that the kerning and fonts of the Dan Rather memos were “off” and put his “findings” up on Free Republic. You all know the results of his magnificent bit of internet sleuthing. In researching Buckhead, whose real name is Harry McDougal, I found out that in addition to being a member of the Federalist Society and someone who helped write anti-Clinton briefs for Kenneth Starr, he was a member of the Fulton County elections board which ruled that the extremely dubious Sonny Perdue and Saxby Chambliss wins in 2002 were perfectly a-ok. The guy got around.

It turned out that another interesting Republican fellow had previously been on that elections board by the name of Hans von Spakovsky, whom you just read about in that McClatchy piece. He was hired by the Bush Justice Department’s civil right’s division shortly after his stint down in Florida during the recount. Anyway, Von Spakovsky is not just another Atlanta lawyer. He had for years been involved with a GOP front group called the “Voter Integrity Project” (VIP) which was run by none other than Helen Blackwell, wife of notorious conservative operative Morton Blackwell. (Many of you will remember him as the guy who handed out the “purple heart” bandages at the 2004 GOP convention but he’s actually much better known for years of running the dirty tricks school “The Leadership Institute” and is even credited with coining the name “Moral Majority.” Let’s just say he’s been a playah in GOP circles for a long time — and the VIP is one of his projects.

Salon published a piece on the Voter Integrity Project back in 2000:

VIP chairwoman of the board is Helen Blackwell, also the Virginia chairwoman of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, whose husband, Morton, serves as executive director of the conservative Council for National Policy. It took lumps for being partisan earlier this year from Slate writer Jeremy Derfner. “In fact, almost everything about the Voting Integrity Project makes you wonder. Though VIP’s members assert that they are both independent and nonpartisan, the organization is essentially a conservative front,” Derfner wrote.

VIP has vigorously opposed efforts to liberalize voting procedures — railing against everything from Internet voting to Oregon’s mail-in balloting to the Motor Voter bill. But it is VIP’s involvement in partisan political fights that makes Democrats charge the group is a Republican front group.

VIP sent investigators into largely black areas in Louisiana after Mary Landrieu’s 1996 U.S. Senate victory over Republican Woody Jenkins.

“The VIP conducted its investigation over a 10-day period from December 26 through January 4, during which time they concentrated on the Orleans Parish voting activities,” a VIP release says. “The VIP examined and independently verified substantial amounts of evidence gathered by the Jenkins campaign, as well as gathering its own evidence concerning vote buying, vote hauling and improprieties by elections officials tasked with protecting voting machines.”

VIP chairwoman Helen Blackwell told the Senate Rules Committee, “Many claims of the Jenkins campaign have merit and should be investigated to the fullest extent of the law.”

In a few short years, former VIP lawyer Von Spakovsky, who had made his name calling for voter roll purges in Georgia, was working in the Justice Department, with the full resources of the federal government behind him.

From the McClatchy article:

In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division’s Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration’s Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.

One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.

Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act’s confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.

In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn’t impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.

Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors’ approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters’ rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division’s top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.

Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article back in 2004 about this subject which everyone who is following this case should read (or re-read) to see just how pervasive this “voter fraud” initiative was in the Bush Justice department. Karl Rove was almost certainly running it from the white house. But it was being pushed from throughout the Republican establishment that had recognized for years that they couldn’t win fair and square. I think 2000 scared the hell out of them. If it hadn’t been for Ralph Nader and Jebby and Poppy’s political machines they would have lost that one and they had put everything they had into winning it.

So where is our friend Von Spakovsky now?

Saturday, December 17, 2005

President Bush nominated two controversial lawyers to the Federal Election Commission yesterday: Hans von Spakovsky who helped Georgia win approval of a disputed voter-identification law, and Robert D. Lenhard, who was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Von Spakovsky and Mason are Republican appointees, while Lenhard and Walther are Democratic picks for the bipartisan six-member commission.

In a letter to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) wrote that he is “extremely troubled” by the von Spakovsky nomination. Kennedy contends that von Spakovsky “may be at the heart of the political interference that is undermining the [Justice] Department’s enforcement of federal civil laws.”

Career Justice Department lawyers involved in a Georgia case said von Spakovsky pushed strongly for approval of a state program requiring voters to have photo identification. A team of staff lawyers that examined the case recommended 4 to 1 that the Georgia plan should be rejected because it would harm black voters; the recommendation was overruled by von Spakovsky and other senior officials in the Civil Rights Division.

Before working in the Justice Department, von Spakovsky was the Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Ga., and served on the board of the Voter Integrity Project, which advocated regular purging of voter roles to prevent felons from casting ballots.

In a brief telephone interview, von Spakovsky played down his role in policy decisions in the Civil Rights Division. “I’m just a career lawyer who works in the front office of civil rights,” he said. He noted that the department has rules against career lawyers talking to reporters.

That takes some gall, don’t you think? He actually tried to pass himself off as a career lawyer for the justice department when he was nothing but a political hack from the moment he hit DC. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Bush gave him a recess appointment a month later. A couple of months after that, this came out

I’m sure everyone is aware by now that the recent study by the NY Times pretty much takes voter fraud off the table as anything but a partisan Republican tool for suppressing the Democratic vote:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Frankly you had to be something of an historical illiterate not to recognize from the beginning that these folks are up to the same tricks they’ve been using for decades. They tried mightily, with everything they had, the federal government, the Republican Lawyers Association, the country awash in patriotic paranoia, and they still couldn’t prove this case — even crookedly they couldn’t do it. In fact, their insistence on finding it where there was none is what has caused their whole edifice to crumble.

Oh, and by the way, von Spakovsky has now been formally nominated by Bush to the FEC and will have to undergo Senate confirmation. Here’s a blistering critique of his performace at the DOJ as well as his predictably awful tenure on the FEC from a former attoreny in the civil rights division. He concludes:

But even putting aside his controversial tenure at DOJ, von Spakovsky’s performance at the FEC over the last year independently raises questions of whether he is worthy of Senate confirmation. His comments at FEC meetings have often been caustic and extraneous to the issue at hand. He has consistently scoffed at the spirit of campaign finance laws, thumbing his nose at the law as he seeks to help create routes of circumvention. He even accuses those reformers who seek regulation of the role of money in our political process as attempting to take us back to the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This is an easy accusation to make, and von Spakovsky has employed it a number of times, and it certainly is easier to attack those he disagrees with rather than to explain principled reasons for his own actions.

The Senate Rules Committee hearings will begin soon. When they do, the American people have the right to know all the details of von Spakovsky’s roles in both the Texas and Georgia matters, and his handling of FEC matters as a recess appointee. That record, if compiled, will make the vote on his confirmation quite easy.

Let’s hope so.

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Not A Bug

by digby

Perlstein gives us a little historical perspective on Alberto Gonzales:

He wouldn’t be the first right-wing attorney general to be a sinister man willing to break the law out of a twisted means-justifies-the-ends morality. He’s not even the second. John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, boasted proudly in 1972 that “this country is going so far to the right you’re not even going to recognize it,” then did his part to make it so by helping lead the Watergate conspiracy to steal the 1972 president election as Nixon’s campaign manager. And here’s an amazing story about the nation’s next right-wing attorney general. It was told in Lou Cannon’s latest Reagan biography, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, though it’s not widely known. Reagan had a close advisor named Phil Battaglia that a cabal of Reagan’s other advisors, including chief of staff Edwin Meese, wished to get rid of. (One of the reasons they wished to get rid of him was that he was insufficiently right-wing.) They suspected he was a homosexual. So they bugged Battaglia’s hotel room in order to get the goods. They failed. But it’s astonishing to think about. This is the man Ronald Reagan made the chief law enforcement officer of the United States–where he turned out to be the subject of an investigation by the United States Office of the Independent Counsel.

Republican politicians are crooks. Always have been. Always will be. Never forget it.

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Update: Fergawdsakes. Please amend my statement to say modern Republican politicians are all crooks. (Although if you add “incompetent” you can go all the way back to harding and that’s quite an impressive run.) I stand by it. They aided and abetted and are accessories pretty much across the board. Hell, nobody even said a word when they didn’t fire Scooter Libby until the day he was indicted and they’re still defending the convicted liar. I can’t think of even one Republican since Richardson and Ruckleshaus who resigned in protest at the illegality, immorality or even the incompetence of any Republican administration in the last 30 years.(I could be wrong and if you think of some, please let me know.) It seems that rather than distance themsleves from the actual criminals in their midst, the party applauds them.

Yes, Lincoln was a great man and the first Republican president. I suspect his little contretemps back in the 60’s (the 1860s) would not make him a member in good standing of the southern dominated GOP, however. In Dixie he was for over a hundred years the most unpopular man in history. In fact, one of them killed him over it.

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Framing Science: The Same Old Thing And Also Something Completely Different

by tristero

Lots of good commentary on this earlier post on the debate over re-framing science touched off by Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney. Again, to be clear:

Much, but certainly not all, of the differences in opinion are between people who agree on the basics, namely that (1) science and, more broadly, the importance of reality-based decision making, is under serious attack by far right extremists; (2) the writing skills of the average scientist could stand improvement; (3) science reporting and advocacy also can be much better; and (4) when writing about science, it is important to take into account for whom you are writing – a paper in a physics journal assumes a different level of expertise in its topic than an article on physics in Newsweek Magazine.Therefore. the argument with Nisbet/Mooney hinges on whether scientists, when speaking to a lay public, should emphasize science – ie data, and the inferences and theories from it – or emphasize things non-scientific.

So what do Nisbet/Mooney have in mind? It’s a little unclear from the op-ed but fortunately, in an interview Nisbet offers some concrete examples of exactly what he has in mind:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: … what is it that you’re asking the scientists to do? How are they supposed to change the way they present [science] in order to confront this political reality?

MATTHEW NISBET: You start recasting the issue in ways that are still true to the science but, in fact, actually you’re not talking about the science. You’re engaging with business leaders and CEOs. They’re talking about the promise for innovative technology, again, the market potential for that. They might activate that moderate Republican base that reads The Wall Street Journal and says, hey, suddenly I care about global warming ‘cause there might be investment potential here.

You recast the issue as really a moral duty, not just in a religious sense but saying, look, this is like credit card debt. We’re passing the buck on to future generations if you don’t do something now. The science is there. This is an urgent problem. We need to take action.

Let’s unpack this from the back first. Passing the problem on to future generations is just a variation of a classic Madison Ave. guilt-trip ad technique – think of your co-workers and use Dial brand soap! It’s a bit skeevy but that’s not what’s wrong with the suggestion. Nisbet is claiming that this is a change of frame when it is an argument made all the time by environmentalists. There’s nothing new or original in his suggestion.

As for his first example, I really don’t know how to say this without sending a little, maybe a lot, mean, but Nisbet is hopelessly naive if he thinks businessmen haven’t beat him already to the punch to see whether there “might be investment potential” in catastrophic global warming.* There are things like the groovy Tesla Roadster, a nifty sportscar that’s affordable (I read they were $100,000, which is cheap these days if you happen to be European) and runs quite nicely on a large bank of modified laptop batteries. And, of course, there are also plenty of other products out, or coming out, that are of more immediate utility to us little people.

But even worse than Nisbet’s naivete is, I think, his failure to undertstand that those on the forefront of research into global warming aren’t necessarily going to be the same people who have great ideas for money-making technology that addresses it. I know James Hansen’s time is ill spent trying to do end runs around the likes of Bush-appointed christianists. I’m really not sure his time is any better spent pitching get rich quick schemes to air conditioning manufacturers.

In short, global warming scientists can change the frame all Nisbet wants and they still won’t be listened to. So they might as well talk about global warming. At least when they do so, they’re talking from expertise.

Enough with the negativity! Let’s briefly look at what may be a real frame changer for how science is portrayed to the public. But to call it that is already to impugn the sheer entertainment value of the show, and that is its main objective. I’m speaking of MythBusters. If you’re not familiar with the show, grab it. But a word of advice: Avoid the episodes where they blow up dead pigs (you’lll understand once you’ve seen it.)

Anyway, most science shows that I know deal with faits accompli. The science is long done and they already intone the results as the scientist(s) walks in medium longshot down a remarkably uninteresting corridor. Or an overly enthusiastic host dangles for no good reason from the top of the George Washington Bridge to introduce a mediocre animation segment on, well, I can’t remember because I’m too busy trying to figure out why that guy is so cheerful when a strong wind could knock him off the platform to a ghastly death.

Well, Mythbusters is (are?) different. They pose a question and proceed to find out if it’s true. The questions usually run the gamut from the ridiculous (how exactly can you find a needle in a haystack?) to the genuinely insane (if you use gasoline to get a raccoon out of a culvert, can you inadvertently become a human cannonbal)? The Mythbusters then proceed to test these questions and in the process develop hypotheses, build experimental models and other apparatus, collect data and draw inferences for conclusions.

Rather than avoiding talking about the science and finessing the often long, tedious process of running an experiment (what happens to plants if you yell at them 24/7 for six weeks?), Mythbusters revels in it. And rather than trying to pretend that the main hosts are somehow like “you and me,” it is clear that they are very strange people who you want nowhere near your microwave, your car, or your bug spray.

Most importantly in terms of re-framing science, the experiments and tests are messy and often fail (they also look like a blast to do.) Things go wrong, sometimes because they failed to anticipate problems, sometimes because they spaced out (the plants died before the yelling experiment ended ’cause someone didn’t notice a broken water timer) and sometimes the experiments have to be completely reconfigured in midstream. Sometimes, they even get hurt (never seriously, they are, as the show says, “what you call experts” and are exceedingly cautious at their craziest). And sometimes they go way over the top(the Chinese water torture was horrific, and, by the way, the closest the show’s gotten to political/social commentary: it was clearly a thinly-veiled response to Abu Ghraib). Oh yeah, and sometimes they work perfectly.

By showing us not only the successes but the messiness of failed experiments and their attempts to salvage at least something from the results, Mythbusters shows us laypeople that science (well, engineering science, at least) is a lot more trial and error than many of us might suspect. There are times the “coldly rational” host gets it dead wrong while the manically silly one is spot on. Other times, Jamie – the rationalist – barely manages to rescue Adam – the histrionic – from a total catastrophe.

I suppose Nisbet and Mooney are right, that Mythbusters isn’t for everyone but I can’t imagine who they might be. Doesn’t everyone stand to benefit from knowing which is better at removing bloodstains: straight rum or human urine?. And I dunno, maybe real scientists have major league problems with the actual science they do – some of their sound tests seemed a bit off to me – but I haven’t heard any other than critiques of certain methodologies (hate those exploding pigs). But I do think the series demonstrates that science can be made exceedingly interesting not by avoiding, but actually celebrating both the process and the results.

Hell, forget what I wrote. Just watch it.

*[Warning! Gratuitous snarky comment ahead.] And why shouldn’t businessmen profit handsomely off the End Of The World As We Know It? Somebody has to. When you think about it, drug companies find huge investment potential in potentially fatal diseases, after all.

Hmm…on 2nd thought, let’s not go there.

Killing The Morally Corrupt

by digby

I’m sure Dinesh “Enemy At Home:The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11” D’Souza is in favor of applying some of this good stuff to American jurisprudence. After all, the Islamic fundamentalists do have some good points:

The Iranian Supreme Court has overturned the murder convictions of six members of a prestigious state militia who killed five people they considered “morally corrupt.”

The reversal, in an infamous five-year-old case from Kerman, in central Iran, has produced anger and controversy, with lawyers calling it corrupt and newspapers giving it prominence.

“The psychological consequences of this case in the city have been great, and a lot of people have lost their confidence in the judicial system,” Nemat Ahmadi, a lawyer associated with the case, said in a telephone interview.

Three lower court rulings found all the men guilty of murder. Their cases had been appealed to the Supreme Court, which overturned the guilty verdicts. The latest decision, made public this week, reaffirms that reversal.

“The objection by the relatives of the victims is dismissed, and the ruling of this court is confirmed,” the court said in a one-page verdict.

The ruling may still not be final, however, because a lower court in Kerman can appeal the decision to the full membership of the Supreme Court. More than 50 Supreme Court judges would then take part in the final decision.

According to the Supreme Court’s earlier decision, the killers, who are members of the Basiji Force, volunteer vigilantes favored by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, considered their victims morally corrupt and, according to Islamic teachings and Iran’s Islamic penal code, their blood could therefore be shed.

Sounds about right:

“Those few abortionists were shot or, depending on your point of view, had a procedure with a rifle performed on them,” Coulter told her audience, which responded with laughter.

“I’m not justifying it,” she continued, “but I do understand how it happened.”

Update: Well, damn. I thought I was being facetious.

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Keeping It Straight

by digby

This column by Eric Boehlert is worth bookmarking or otherwise keeping handy as you confront the reflexive up-is-downism of the right when it comes to matters of established fact. In this case, Boehlert does us all a favor and lays out all the ways in which the Swift Boat Liars were discredited and rebutted in response to Powerline’s ridiculous assertion that they were telling the truth.

I have been coming across a lot of statements lately saying “they were right” and it’s only a matter of time before it makes its way into the mainstream going into 2008. Just the other day, NY Magazine referred to the VoteVets organization as a “Swift Boat veterans” of the left, which is complete nonsense: the VoteVets haven’t pushed any bogus smear campaigns against anyone.

Just keep it handy. It’s going to be needed.

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