Friday Cat Blogging

Robo-Kitty is my friend, but sometimes I just have to get it good.

"Sound Science"

Because I chose to read the New York Times this morning on the subway instead of the Washington Post, I missed this article that Chris Mooney points to about the EPA's new mercury regulations.

The EPA came out with their new cap-and-trade rule last week decked out in their best "sound science" outfit:

"This rule is about public health, and this rule is protective given what we know about mercury and how and why we get exposed to it," EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said yesterday.

It turns out that Ms. Bergman misspoke. The rule wasn't about what the EPA knows about mercury, but rather about what the EPA wanted to tell us about mercury.

When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a rule last week to limit mercury emissions from U.S. power plants, officials emphasized that the controls could not be more aggressive because the cost to industry already far exceeded the public health payoff.

What they did not reveal is that a Harvard University study paid for by the EPA, co-authored by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists had reached the opposite conclusion.

That analysis estimated health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA did, but top agency officials ordered the finding stripped from public documents, said a staff member who helped develop the rule. Acknowledging the Harvard study would have forced the agency to consider more stringent controls, said environmentalists and the study's author.

The article goes on to catch the EPA in a pretty blatant lie (although the reporter doesn't call it that, of course) about why they disregarded the study when promulgating the new rule.

I'm quickly running out of outrage when it comes to situations like this. The Bush administration isn't going to stop pulling this kind of crap as long as they're in charge. But what they are doing is wrong, and it's hurting people — that is the important thing to remember.

Leave Her Alone

Here are the facts in the Terri Schiavo case:

1. Schiavo is in a deep coma persistent vegetative state, and she's not coming back. There are no signs of conscious brain activity, and even if something in her condition were to change, her brain is too badly damaged for it to make any real difference. Everything that made her who she was is irretrievably gone. In all meaningful senses of the word, she is already dead.
2. The courts that have jurisdiction to settle this matter have settled it time and again. They have ruled over a dozen times in favor of the husband. Schiavo's parents want to keep her on life support, and they strung out the legal battle for as long as they could, but the proper process has reached it's end.
3. Tom DeLay is an ass. He is using Schiavo in a calculated political ploy to distract attention away from his own ethics woes, to send an ideological message of support to the Christian conservative base, and to bash the Democrats if they try to stop him. To "save" Schiavo, he has stripped her of her last shred of dignity and personhood and turned her into a thing to manipulate for his own benefit.

In a matter of days the President will sign a bill to send Schiavo's case to federal court. The bill is called a "compromise", but in this case, that simply means the bill is a incoherent and unprincipled mess. There was a lot of disagreement between House and Senate leaders about whether this bill should apply to Schiavo only, or to all people in her condition. The final result federal legislation specific to a single person with language saying that it could not be used as precedent. As Ed Kilgore notes, this focus reduces the bill to an exercise in "pure political exploitation." But the limited scope hasn't stopped people like Frist from bragging that this bill will "uphold human dignity and affirm a culture of life." In the end, the GOP leadership wanted to have its cake and eat it, too — talk about the principle of "life", but avoid the political fallout for supporting an idea with which most Americans disagree.

I'm not sure the GOP will be able to sweep this dispute under the rug, however. For the Christian conservatives who believe that it is never right to withhold treatment, even in hopeless cases, the issue does not end with Schiavo. And emboldened by Congress's action today, they will be back tomorrow with more voices and resources to push the issue further. They aren't concerned about narrow jurisdictional issues, or about the issue of explicit statements of intent, or about the distinction between treatment and life-support. As with abortion, they believe that you should have no choice when it comes to your own body, even when your body is all that you have left. I'm all for having this debate, but let's not close our eyes to what the issue really is.

And in the meantime, leave Terri Schiavo the hell alone.

Last Day

Today was my last day at the DNC. After 5 years and 352 days, it was time to call it quits.

I have never met a more dedicated and professional team than those who worked with me in the DNC Technology department. No job was too hard, no day was too long, and no goal was too high. Everyone did an extraordinary job under extraordinary circumstances, but I need to extend special recognition to my boss Doug Kelly, sysadmin Chuq Yang, and website editor Jesse Berney, who constantly impressed me with their drive and creativity. I will miss working with you all.

Incurious George

I was reading this post on Tapped about the Israeli government's involvement in illegal settlement activity when I saw this quote from an article about Natan Sharansky:

Natan Sharansky is George W. Bush's favorite author. Since his re-election, the U.S. president has used every opportunity to praise "The Case for Democracy," the new book by the former Soviet dissident, now an Israeli cabinet minister. "That thinking, that's part of my presidential DNA," Bush told The New York Times. Last Wednesday, appearing with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder in Mainz, Bush said: "Sharansky's book confirmed how I was raised and what I believe."

Now, I've long believed that the President's complete absence of curiosity is his greatest moral failing, but his remarks above still surprised me. It is certainly disheartening to hear Bush say with pride that he didn't learn anything new when reading his favorite author's latest book. But it is even more depressing to hear Bush say that he likes Sharansky's book precisely because it doesn't challenge any of his beliefs.

Most people who like reading enjoy the intellectual challenge of a good book, and look forward to the chance to encounter new ideas and perspectives. Perhaps Bush is not a person who enjoys that kind of experience. But given the awesome power of the presidency and the responsibility that entails, maybe Bush should give it a try.

Friday Cat Blogging

Sometimes I like to sit in the window and just watch the cars go by.

Compromising with Graham

In an alternate universe, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham might be someone the Democrats could work with on Social Security. But in this universe, the Republican leadership has made it perfectly clear that they have no interest in constructive engagement with the Democrats. Matthew Yglesias got it right from the Democratic perspective when he said:

The dynamics here are painfully familiar. First Lieberman will come up with a plan in collaboration with moderate Republicans. Then the GOP Senate leadership will "reluctantly" agree to line up Republican support for the moderate plan. Then the moderates and Democrats alike will be totally cut out from the conference committee, which will return a bill bearing no resemblance to what passed the Senate. At this point, the moderate Republicans will support the conference report, leaving the Democratic compromisers in an untenable situation.

You would think that Democrats had seen enough of these kinds of legislative tactics to avoid getting played the same way on Social Security, but with people like Lieberman, who likes to posit himself as the last non-political man in politics, you can't rule anything out.

Republican "moderates" like Graham, however, are coming at this from the other side. Graham knows his own party's playbook, and that means that he can have no illusions that any compromise he manages to hammer out with Democrats will ever make it to the President's desk. Democrats who want to work with the GOP on Social Security are either egotists or fools. But Republicans who want to work with those Democrats are two-faced.

In the modern GOP, the job of the moderate is to create the cover necessary for the far right to pursue their agenda. And Graham is doing that job admirably.

New Pew Report

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on the impact of the internet on the 2004 elections. It concludes:

The internet became an essential part of American politics in 2004. Fully 75 million Americans — 37% of the adult population and 61% of online Americans – used the internet to get political news and information, discuss candidates and debate issues in emails, or participate directly in the political process by volunteering or giving contributions to candidates.

A lot of the trend data is unsurprising (internet usage is increasing!), although there are some interesting tidbits, such as the numbers for the comparative use rates of different media. More surprising to me, though, is that 39% of online Americans claim not to have used the internet politically at all, which matches almost exactly the percentage of eligible voters who didn't cast a ballot in the Presidential race. While I couldn't find internet usage stats broken down by voting behavior in the Pew study, it might be that the conventional wisdom that internet users are more politically engaged is no longer correct.

It is also nice to discover that Democrats were more active online than Republicans. It certainly seemed that way to me during the campaign itself, but I'm hardly an unbiased observer.

Don't forget to read Michael Cornfield's commentary. In some ways, it's the most interesting part of the report.

Hack or Suck-up?

Smart politics or not, I'm giving Sen. Reid a lot of style points for saying what needed to be said: Alan Greenspan is a "partisan hack". But allow me to revise and extend those remarks.

Now, I don't have a problem with Greenspan getting involved in political matters — why shouldn't he? He's a public official, and he's called to testify all the time on political issues. If he says something that Democrats don't want to hear, well, so do a lot of people at government hearings organized by the GOP. And accusing Greenspan of impermissibly getting involved in partisan politics simply reinforces the conventional wisdom that he is an honest broker outside of the political sphere.

But he isn't. Under Bush, he has emerged as an unambiguous cheerleader for the president's "tax cut and spend" economic policies. His few cautions about the rising deficit don't seem to curb his appetite for additional tax cuts, even as his original surplus projections become more laughable.

My problem with Greenspan, however, involves more than his hackery — he's also clearly a big suck-up. There is no doubt he has much closer ideological ties to Bush than to Clinton, but Greenspan did help Clinton on a number of occasions, often pushing for policies he would later condemn under Bush. How he must have struggled during the 1990s trying to resolve these two conflicting impulses, and how comforted he must have been in 2001 when they came into perfect alignment.

So Reid is right — it's time to take the shine off this tarnished and tired politician.

Friday Cat Blogging

Sometimes I just love to sit in a basket.

Reluctant Like a Fox

According to the Washington Post, Senator Frist is none too anxious to have a vote on Bush's Social Security phaseout plan:

"In terms of whether it will be a week, a month, six months or a year, as to when we bring something to the floor, it's just too early," Frist said.

While Frist is described as "reluctant" to put off a vote until possibly next year, I don't think that's the case at all.

First, any victory for Bush is going to come at great political cost to the Republicans. For Bush to get the bill that he wants through Congress, it's going to take a long, painful, and ugly fight — and that's just to get the GOP in line. The Democrats seems to be pulling together even as the GOP splits apart, making the possibility of any bipartisan cover worthy of the name increasingly unlikely. No Senate leader in his right mind would be looking forward to such a hard slog.

Second, Frist isn't just any Senate leader — he's a Senate leader who wants to run for President. It was always a huge risk for him to run on a platform of helping to dismantle the most successful and popular social program in history, but with the polls against him and a hard row to hoe ahead, that risk comes to look increasingly like political suicide. That Frist (and probably many other Republicans) must be a little dismayed and angered by Bush's clumsy handling of the issue doesn't make encourage him to assume that risk on the President's behalf.

Third, though, Frist can't just come out against the President's signature domestic policy initiative; he has to be subtle if he wants to kill it and save himself. He knows as well as anyone that the window for changing Social Security during Bush's second term closes at midnight, December 31. And he's perfectly content to watch that date pass without a vote in the Senate.

Forcing the Zeitgeist

When covering controversial issues, the media in general has the unfortunate tendency to equate fairness with evenhandedness. But as frustrating as this kind of "one-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" reporting can be, it is doubly so when it comes from someone who should know better, and triply so when that person is an op-ed columnist who doesn't have to feign any artificial objectivity.

Case in point: Ron Brownstein's column yesterday in the Los Angeles Times. He's starts off by writing about USA Next's ad campaign against AARP's position on Social Security, and he correctly points to USA Next's scorched-earth approach.

…the USA Next attacks aim not to convert AARP, but to annihilate it. The ad seems designed to inflame antagonism and discourage negotiation. It ignores the truism that once moderated political rivalry: Any adversary today may be an ally tomorrow.

But Brownstein apparently has a larger point to make. The problem isn't just USA Next, he says, but politics in general. And for the criticism to be made general, we need a target on the left. Enter MoveOn, and the circle is made complete.

The tone wasn't nearly as venomous, but it's worth remembering that the giant liberal online advocacy group MoveOn.org encouraged its members to resign in protest from AARP when the group backed Bush's prescription drug plan.

The underlying message to AARP from both MoveOn and USA Next is the same: It must choose sides. That pressure tracks the rising criticism of the mainstream media from activists in both parties. On the left and right, the assumption is deepening that in this highly contentious political environment, no one can ever really operate as a neutral broker.

I've got news for you, Ron: politics isn't about neutrality, and to posit that as the standard paints all partisan actions with the same brush. There is a real and important distinction to be made between openly declaring one's intention of destroying an opponent, and urging people to resign from an organization if they disagree with it's policies. And the distinction isn't just quantitative, it's qualitative as well — one approach precludes a future relationship, the other doesn't.

Sometimes it's enough to tell a tale without making it exemplary of a forced zeitgeist. This should have been one of those times.