May 26, 2005
Science and health vs. fanaticism
We know the Dems are playing defense. Part of what comes with that role is that you don't get to set the agenda. You have to play each game with your eye on the scoreboard to see what everyone else is doing. You can't just win - your opponents have to lose. They have to make mistakes. Mark A. R. Kleiman thinks George Bush is making a big mistake by planning to veto the stem-cell bill:
Perfect. Just what we need. Take an issue where public sentiment is clearly with the Democrats, and set it up so the radical conservatives of the Texas Republican Party are standing between sick people and miracle cures. Exectly the right issue for the 2006/2008 elections: science and health v. fanaticism.
Liberalism lost public favor mostly because it came to appear to many voters that electing liberals meant having the government get in the way of stuff they wanted to do. I'm delighted to see the right making the same dumb mistake.
May 25, 2005
A Tax Backgrounder: The Bush Tax Time-Bomb
Just a bit of a "backgrounder" on a looming Republican political crisis:
Even if the Democrats continue to fail to come up with a vision of their own, the key Bush tax cuts have always had built into them a "time-bomb," which is bound to do heavy damage to the Republicans in congress. It is hard to see how more than a year or two can go by before the issue comes politically front and center.
In the Bush scheme, two competing priorities were "Left Till Later." Later is getting to be be Now.
1. The key cuts for the wealthy were passed with short life spans. That allowed for headline numbers on ten- year budget projections that were relatively more digestible, because they could count these cuts as being in effect for only about five of the ten years.
2. The Alternative Minimum Tax, established years ago so that the wealthy, even if their tax favors would normally wipe out all their taxes, would have to pay at least a (differently calculated) Minimum Tax.
The level at which this kicks in was not "indexed" to rise with inflation. So each year it affects, in addition to the Wealthy, more and more of the Very-Well-to-Do.
It is indispensable to the Republicans that the Wealthy and the Very-Well-to-Do have common interests in their respective levels of privilege. But the total budget will not sustain both. So there is going to have to be a trade-off, a choice, a schism: Either make the key cuts "permanent" or raise the ever-declining--and broadening--level where the Minimum tax kicks in.
So now we get to see how this unfolds. I think it's going to be fairly traumatic for the GOP.
May 14, 2005
Grand-jury perjury angle to Valerie Plame case
I've been thinking this could turn out to be Watergate 2.0 - a first-term scandal that bears fruit in the president's second term. Or maybe not. Here's an update from Quoting from Mark A. R. Kleiman:
David Ignatius speculates in the Washington Post that Patrick Fitzgerald's pursuit of journalists' testimony might indicate that he has shifted attention from the revelation of an undercover intelligence officer's identity to the cover-up, and in particular to possible perjury before the Plame grand jury.
That could well be so. But I question the premise of Ignatius's column: that the revelation itself is next-to-impossible to prosecute because the Intelligence Identities Protection Act has such a tough-to-prove set of elements. I continue to think that a prosecution under the Espionage Act would be a slam-dunk, given proof of the mention of "Valerie Plame" and "CIA operative" in the same breath to anyone without the very high security clearance required to know the identity of an intelligence officer acting under non-official cover.
May 13, 2005
The president's bike is missing
A White House press briefing quoted at length in Editor & Publisher (via The Smirking Chimp) goes on and on in this vein:
Q: The fact that the president wasn't in danger is one aspect of this. But he's also the commander in chief. There was a military operation underway. Other people were in contact with the White House. Shouldn't the commander in chief have been notified of what was going on?
McCLELLAN: John, the protocols that we put in place after Sept. 11 were being followed. They did not require presidential authority for this situation. I think you have to look at each situation and the circumstances surrounding the situation. And that's what officials here at the White House were doing. ...
Q: Even on a personal level, did nobody here at the White House think that calling the president to say, by the way, your wife has been evacuated from the White House, we just want to let you know everything is OK?
McCLELLAN: Actually, all the protocols were followed and people were -- officials that you point out were taken to secure locations or evacuated, in some cases. I think, again, you have to look at the circumstances surrounding the situation, and it depends on the situation and the circumstance. ...
Q: Nobody thought to say, by the way, this is going on, but it's all under control?
End of story. Nothing to see hear. Keep a-moving. The protocols were followed.
May 5, 2005
What If This Had Been a New Pill Made by Bayer?
And what if, among a huge proportion of the at-risk population, this new pill made people 23 percent less likely to die from any cause...30 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 49 percent less likely to die from cancer? What if it were devoid of side-effects? And immediately available?
I know you can't compare the whole extended FDA process with a report, even from a respectable journal. And I know that preliminary studies are preliminary. Nevertheless, even at this stage, the buzz should be tremendous. The stock market should be atwitter. And many millions should be redeployed for competitive research, based on the potential profits from the patent.
But there is no Bayer here, no pill, no patent, no millions. And, so far, no buzz!
Well, let's see what follow up we hear from this on the news. Meanwhile, here are some excerpts from the story. The boldface is mine.
Meditation...Lengthens Life
SOURCE: American Journal of Cardiology, May 2, 2005.
Increasing evidence suggests that transcendental meditation may not only reduce stress, but also may help adults with high blood pressure to live longer, according to a new study. "There are many non-drug techniques for reducing blood pressure, but none...extend life," study author Dr. Robert H. Schneider....
Transcendental meditation is a technique...to allow individuals to enter a state of "restful alertness," in which the body is awake but the mind is not engaged in conscious thought....
The new report, published in this month's American Journal of Cardiology, is based on a review of data from two studies that....included 202 men and women, about 72 years old on average, who had pre-hypertension or mild hypertension. They were assigned to a transcendental meditation group, or to various comparison groups of other relaxation techniques.
Participants in the two studies were followed for about eight years on average -- a maximum of nearly 19 years -- during which 101 individuals died.
Overall, men and women who practiced transcendental meditation...were also 23 percent less likely to die from any cause,...30 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 49 percent less likely to die from cancer.
The "integrated holistic" transcendental meditation technique does not have any harmful side effects, Schneider said.
Schneider is the director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Instant Economic Impact Lad
I was talking to this Republican I know earlier today about the economy. And I was, you know, speculating about when exactly it would stop being the Clinton recession and Bush would actually take ownership over our economic mess.
And this Republican feller says: War time! etc etc, and all that. And then he says: Well you know, the President really has very limited impact on the economy!
And here are my two responses to that point, several hours later. Just in case you run into the same argument in your travels/travails:
(1) OK, so if the President can't really impact the economy much, can he at least stop giving all our money away. I mean, if it's not really going to change things one way or the other, he might as well not bankrupt us. So much.
(2) I know this is going a long ways back, but it seems like, energy crisis and all, President Carter was held pretty responsible for stagflation back in the '70s. Didn't hear much about the the President's limited impact on the economy when Reagan was waxing poetic about the old misery index.
I guess Carter was just an unusually powerful man. A mutant, perhaps. Instant Economic Impact Lad. Whereas W's brilliant economic plan is clearly going to finally bear fruit oh, I'm guessing 2 years after the next Democrat takes office. And don't you know folks like me will want to give that Democratic President all the credit! Really, it's not easy being George W. Bush.
May 3, 2005
Why I don't give a shit about Laura Bush's jokes
Quoting from Attytood: W.'s "runaway bride" and the 'gotcha' story that wasn't gotten:
Laura Bush telling a scripted joke isn't news anymore than is a troubled woman walking out on a wedding and panicking. There's one striking thing we didn't see on all the First Lady video overkill, and that was any of the guffawing journalists -- that pack of predators -- bolting from their fancy tables to cover a big breaking news story.
Because there was one. Oh, yeah. Didn't you hear? The president lied to the American people. He started a war on false pretenses, and more than 1,500 Americans -- and an untold number of Iraqis -- died.
Well, OK, you sort of knew that already, didn't you? But there wasn't a smoking gun...until now. The Times of London got hold of the secret memo from Tony Blair's pre-war deliberations that show that in the summer of 2002 - months before the Colin Powell charade at the UN - that Bush had decided to invade Iraq ... he just hadn't decided why. The story broke right around the time that Laura Bush was telling a joke about her husband jerking off a horse.
Pardon my French.