The usual perfidy, but what's up with the Wall Street Journal?

Star-Telegram.com - Molly Ivins

You may recall this little charmer from last year -- the Bush proposal to "update" the Fair Labor Standards Act...

Now, in another typical move, the administration plans to bypass Congress altogether and issue the new regulations as an "administrative rules change" to go into effect in March.

The administration claims that the new regulations will extend overtime pay to an additional 1.3 million low-income workers. That would certainly be a good thing, except for the fact that it would exempt another 8 million workers from getting overtime by reclassifying them as management or professionals.

Another great deal for the corporations: They get to cut overtime for a lot of higher-paid workers and only have to add a few lower-paid workers. Do you really have any doubts about whom this administration is being run for?

We will, of course, have to listen to the president tell us how wonderful his Medicare drug coverage bill is. The bill includes a special tax subsidy to encourage employers to retain prescription drug coverage for their retirees.

But (oops) The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House quietly added "a little-noticed provision" that allows companies to severely reduce or almost completely terminate their retirees' drug coverage without losing out on the new subsidy.

And guess what? The major backers of that "little-noted provision" are all major donors to Bush and the Republican Party.

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More of the same, except the bit about the WSJ. This is the second time in a week they've exposed Bush lies. The other was the budget. If you can't trust the WSJ, who can you trust?

Can Bush rely on a 2 month American memory? Krugman on the Bush rewrite of history.

NYT: Krugman: Get Me Rewrite!

Right now America is going through an Orwellian moment. On both the foreign policy and the fiscal fronts, the Bush administration is trying to rewrite history, to explain away its current embarrassments.

Let's start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.

A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."

... Now let's turn to the administration's other big embarrassment, the budget deficit.

The fiscal 2005 budget report admits that this year's expected $521 billion deficit belies the rosy forecasts of 2001. But the report offers an explanation: stuff happens. "Today's budget deficits are the unavoidable result of the revenue erosion from the stock market collapse that began in early 2000, an economy recovering from recession and a nation confronting serious security threats."...

The trouble is that accepting that excuse requires forgetting a lot of recent history. By February 2002, when the administration released its fiscal 2003 budget, all of the bad news -- the bursting of the bubble, the recession, and, yes, 9/11 -- had already happened. Yet that budget projected only a $14 billion deficit this year, and a return to surpluses next year. Why did that forecast turn out so wrong? Because administration officials fudged the facts, as usual.

I'd like to think that the administration's crass efforts to rewrite history will backfire, that the media and the informed public won't let officials get away with this. Have we finally had enough?

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Delong has popularized the phrase "I'll stop calling this administration Orwellian when they stop using 1984 as an operations manual". Krugmans is picking up that meme. Good. Orwell would approve.

Historically, excluding people directly impacted by war or disaster, the length of the American memory has been two months. As a culture we have severe short term memory loss. Has that changed?

There's only one new thing I can think of. The blogosphere (awful word) has a longer memory buttressed by cross-linking and enabled by Google. The combination of connectivity, the blog format, and Google may be producing a new kind of meta-memory, a sort of emergent cognitive phenomena. Yes, only a tiny minority actually read these blogs (in my case my wife and my mother) -- but journalists read them. In the last month I've seen at least two very well read commentators cite an external memory based on blogs. Fascinating.

Corporate maneuvers migrate into Episcopal/Anglican struggles?

Memo discloses AAC’s strategy for replacing Episcopal Church

The Washington Post on January 14 disclosed a confidential memo written by one of the American Anglican Council's (AAC) chief strategists that reveals the organization's ultimate goal is to replace the Episcopal Church governed by the General Convention with its own confessionally-based jurisdiction.

"Our ultimate goal is a realignment of Anglicanism on North American soil committed to biblical faith and values, and driven by Gospel mission," said the memo [see below], dated December 28, 2003 and signed by the Rev. Geoffrey Chapman, rector of St. Stephen's Church in Sewickley, the largest parish in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. "We believe in the end this should be a 'replacement' jurisdiction with confessional standards [and] closely aligned with the majority of world Anglicanism… We seek to retain ownership of our property as we move into this realignment."

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I suspect that behind these maneuvers are people with quite a bit of experience in the material world of corporate acquisitions and hostile takeovers. Of course the corporate world merely rediscovered the techniques of Machiavelli and the machinations of Papal Italy.

History is nothing if not the cyclic reexpression of the fundamental aspects of human nature.

The other struggle here is between the evangelicals and the (nearly defeated) rationalists, mirroring our current political combat. There is little new under our sun.

See also Georgian evolution and the Yahwhites and the Jesites.

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online - Staring at the Sun

[Page 750] Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online

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This is curious in so many ways. Wolfram thinks science took a wrong turn around the time oF Leibniz and that it needs to be redone using models of recursive numeric rules. He's wealthy, so after 20 years of reclusive labor he published a massive and beautiful book.

He's a certified genius (the genuine article), so people read the book. It got mixed reviews. In addition to being wealthy and brilliant, he has an ego to rival Rumsfeld's. I guess it's easy to see how that coud happen. His ego does not make for easy reading. He's been credibly accused of repurposing published ideas without citing the source. That's not good.

Now he's put the entire massive book online. Very curiously, he chose to represent every page as a GIF image! Google can't parse them. Maybe that was the idea. Despite this odd choice the text is relatively easy to read and the website is a masterpiece of intelligent hyperlinks. (Maybe registration allows one to view the material in another format. I submitted the registration form but have not received the promised registration info.)

I read the page on consciousness. I think he's been staring at the sun a long time. On the other hand, there's increasing evidence that we live in a bizarro universe, perhaps a certain amount of madness is an unavoidable consequence of extensive contemplation of reality.

I think he is guilty of presenting well discussed topics as though he was the first to think of them. It may well be that for him it was de novo discovery, but he is rather well read. Still, this is one web site that can stretch the mind every single day. It should, however, have a warning label of some kind ... Danger: Don't stare directly at the sun.

Mad Cow Disease is American Now

Ban Urged on All Animal Protein for Cattle

Dr. Ulrich Kihm, a Swiss veterinarian, said the United States 'could have a case a month' of mad cow disease if it was doing enough testing, Reuters reported.

...Decisions about what animals go into cattle feed are made by the Food and Drug Administration, which last week banned feeding cow blood, chicken waste [jf - shit] and restaurant scraps to cattle, but continued with rendered hogs and chickens. Industry critics objected, saying hogs and chickens eat rendered cattle, so the disease could pass through.

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It's here, we've got it, our children are eating infected cattle. As risks go it's not a high risk, it does not appear to be very contagious -- yet. Who knows, maybe some new strains will turn out to be more contagious than those we've seen so far.

All avoidable. Such a stupid waste. I can't even blame this one on Bush.

The American cattle industry deserves the devastation heading their way. They could have avoided this by pressing for stronger safeguards.

Salon.com | Antonin Scalia has no more credibility than the US government

Salon.com | The Democrats' secret weapon

... If Cheney's relationship with Halliburton represents the evils of crony capitalism, then his relationship with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia epitomizes the evils of crony democracy.

It's not just that Cheney and Scalia had dinner and went on a duck-hunting trip together while the Supreme Court was being asked to overturn a lower court's decision requiring Cheney to reveal the names of his energy task force members. It's that these guys can't, for the life of them, see why anybody would have a problem with this overly cozy state of affairs...

'I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned,' said Scalia, responding to questions about the propriety of a sitting judge rubbing elbows -- and blowing small game birds out of the air -- with a named party and material witness in a case he's about to hear...

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Once upon a time the supreme court actually had a reputation to uphold.

Kaplan: A half trillion dollar military budget is too much

Trimming the Fat - How to put the military budget on a diet. By Fred Kaplan

...The U.S. Navy currently has 55 perfectly capable nuclear-powered attack subs. The only mystery is what their crews do when they go out on patrol. They don't track Soviet subs like they did in the old days, and they don't play cat-and-mouse games with enemy anti-submarine-warfare assets for the simple reason that there are no naval enemies and, if there were, they don't have ASW assets. Similar questions can be directed to much of the U.S. surface fleet.>

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By Kaplan's estimate Bush is presenting the largest military budget since the height of the Korean war. One suspects it has something for every Bush consituency, especially the swing states.

Only Slate has any reasonable coverage, the rest of our media seems to have given up.

This is really nuts.

Geoghan: capital punishment by the back door

Inquiry Lists Errors in Killing of Pedophile Priest in Prison

The death of John J. Geoghan, the defrocked pedophile priest who was killed in his prison cell last summer, was largely a result of a series of mistakes and failures by the state prison system to treat him fairly and responsibly and to protect him in jail ...

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The published report, behind euphemisms and gentle words, paints a picture right out of The Shawshank Redemption. Geoghan was murdered by his guards and their supervisors at two prisons; the prisoner who did the dirty work was basically a tool.

The explosive report is still pending -- a review of the entire Massachusetts prison system. I think most people are confident that the Geoghan case will turn out to be fairly typical.

If we were to repeat the same study in every state in American, I suspect they'd come to the same conclusion. No, I haven't spend time behind bars, though 20 years ago I was a moonlighting medical resident at a couple of prisons. I base my prediction on a culture which has swung towards vengeance and "Evangelical Sharia" over the past two decades. In that context, with continued cutbacks in legal resources for the indigent (includes almost all prisoners), institutional abuse is as inevitable as sunrise.

I hope the authors of the system report quote a bit of Dickens in their introduction.

Ricin and the Post Office

NYT Science: Ricin Poses Postal Risk, but Different From Germs

The postal system is particularly vulnerable to poisons because its main defenses are all aimed at killing or detecting harmful living organisms, like anthrax, which is a bacterium. Irradiation machines, which sterilize all first-class mail bound for Washington government offices, work by disrupting an organism's DNA. They have no effect on poisons, which are simply molecules that happen to have devastating effects on human physiology.

Moreover, though the Postal Service is installing air sampling systems to test for anthrax spores around sorting machines at 280 regional mail hubs, these systems, to be ready starting in March, will not initially be able to test for poisons or other harmful substances.

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After the anthrax scare I was pretty sure the postal service was finished. Others agreed, Adobe got a boost in its share price because its Acrobat technology is an alternative to mailed documents.

Didn't happen. Turned out there really aren't that many competent whackos out there. I'd have to guess that only a half dozen Americans combine both reasonable intelligence and insane malevolence (see the Unabomber, a victim of paranoid schizophrenia). Even al Qaeda, I suspect, is having a very hard time finding competent fanatics -- not the least because a large number of their "best" are dead (including the 9/11 hijackers or in captivity).

The Ricin could be al Qaeda, but even they would know that no-one in the US Government opens their own mail. I suspect it's another paranoid schizophrenic, and that's probably who the FBI are looking for. On the other hand, Richard (the shoe) Reid was both was probably a threefer -- developmental delay, paranoid schizophrenia, and al Qaeda.

Kristof joins the ranks of the shrill

Kristof: Sex, Lies and Bush on Tape

I'm sorry if I sound screechy. But my first beat at this newspaper, in 1984, was covering the Latin American debt crisis. Later I lived in Japan as its economy went from a global juggernaut to a global laughingstock. After you've seen how quickly national leaders can bungle national economies, and how difficult it is to put Humpty Dumpty together again, you have less patience for high-risk intellectual dishonesty like Mr. Bush's fiscal policy.

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Eventually, all the rationalists reach a breaking point, when they realize Bush is not just another exceptionally partisan president. He is not demented as was Reagan, and so we can't rely on hidden hands to guide the nation. He is if full possession of his power, and he's off the deep end.

Why does Apple keep releasing Java updates?

Mac OS X Java Runtime Environment

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Apple keeps releasing Java updates. You have to wonder why -- there are few client applications for OS written in Java.

There's rumor than the next release of OS X will support many more Linux API calls. At the same time Sun and IBM are major supporters of both Linux and Java.

One has to wonder if Apple, IBM, Sun and Red Hat are moving towards a unified Java/Linux API platform ...

Scandal in LA: Poor Hospitals Deliver Poor Care

Yahoo! News - Report: L.A. Nurses Left Patients Alone

Nurses at a public hospital serving the poor in south Los Angeles left critically ill patients alone for hours and were ordered to lie about patients' conditions, according to a federal report.

The unreleased report obtained by the Los Angeles Times could lead to a criminal investigation and the loss of the hospital's federal funding, a county official said.

Federal inspectors had previously reported that nurses failed in providing basic patient care, doctors allowed problems to fester and Los Angeles County was guilty of poor oversight at Martin Luther King Jr.-Drew Medical Center...

...The hospital, established as a response to the 1965 Watts riots, is the only public hospital in the south Los Angeles area and serves a largely poor population...

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We could repeat this study across the nation and find a hundred such facilities. Few would be as bad, but many would come close.

I'd assumed people knew that poor underfunded institutions delivered very poor care to poor people. Heck, relatively well funded teaching hospitals used to deliver poor care to "charity" cases (they're somewhat better now).

Alas, there will be no outrage and no call for a national examination of care for the poor. We've succumbed to so some vile meme that the poor deserve only to be ignored.

We need a modern Dickens to stir our outrage.

TIME.com: So Much For the WMD: Greed, Corruption and power

TIME.com: So Much For the WMD -- Feb. 09, 2004

What CIA analysts imagined to be dispositive evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions turned out, in Kay's judgment, to be proof of plain, old-fashioned greed. For months the Administration claimed that finely machined aluminum tubes, imported with ever higher tolerances—that is, precision in their specifications—were part of a campaign to produce gas centrifuges for the production of weapons-grade nuclear fuel. But after examining the tubes and talking to the scientists who procured and used them, Kay became convinced that the increasing tolerances were to meet not technical requirements but financial ones. The ever changing tolerances meant new purchases, which in turn meant that the engineers who were working on Saddam's missile programs, for which the tubes were in fact destined, had continuing contracts from which to skim money. Kay concluded, 'An analyst looks for rational explanations and usually finds them in the technical realm they're used to, but Iraq was almost like a parallel universe. The explanations were driven not by technical reasons but by the moral and personal depravity engendered by the regime. A rational person would look at it one way, and it would be completely wrong, because in this parallel universe there was a different set of rules.

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Greed, corruption, telling the powerful what they want to hear, a ruthless ruler who expunges the disloyal, a mystique of faith, power and confidence rather than reason and rationality, yes, it's easy to see how Americ... err, I mean, Iraq could have deceived itself.

Remember when the CIA claimed that the Soviet Union was close to acheiving missile superiority? That was in the Reagan administration, just prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Later we found that their military was in an advanced state of collapse.

I wonder when someone will make the connection between the mistakes made in Iraq and those made 20 years ago. Maybe after the investigations are complete, and we read internal CIA documents making exactly this comparison. I'm willing to bet that there were intelligent and honest analysts who suspected what was happening, and that their careers have not gone well.

WaPo: Chemical and bioweapon attacks on planes

Flights Cut on Fear Of Al Qaeda Attacks (washingtonpost.com)

Intelligence indicating that al Qaeda terrorists are seeking to release a chemical or biological agent aboard an airliner, or transport a radiological device in cargo, was one of the factors that prompted the cancellation of six international flights scheduled for today and tomorrow...

Small amounts of chemical, biological or radiological material would be difficult to detect...

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Difficult being an understatement. I've long wondered why al Qaeda hadn't yet released a bioweapon or chemical agent on an airplane. It doesn't require any imagination, just a passing familiarity with movies. I've supposed that al Qaeda has indeed been very distrupted.

In 2001 there was talk of an accelerated program to develop chemical and bioweapon detectors that could be placed in public places and on airplanes. It's obvious one cannot prevent such an attack -- I don't think even Israel's El Al could do it. The goal needs to be early detection. I wonder what happened to those detectors? If there was a "Manhattan Project" to develop such detectors it was kept very secret -- so secret that they're not now available.

Maybe Rove felt such programs would generate negative vibes, and thereby impair someone's reelection.

Fighting AIDS: Bush is more hat, less cattle

Bush Scaling Back Dollars for Third World

President Bush plans to scale back requests for money to fight AIDS and poverty in the third world, putting off for several years the fulfillment of his pledges to eventually spend more than $20 billion on these programs.

Hardest hit would be the United Nations-supported Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, whose contribution from the United States would drop to $200 million in fiscal year 2005 from $550 million, according to Congressional officials who have been briefed on the president's budget proposal.

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I'm shocked, shocked, to hear that a grand promise will be broken. Were I less naive, I might suspect that the residual funds are earmarked for Bush campaign donors.

GWB's lack of integrity is not noteworthy. This is significant because GWB's actions constitute a major threat to our national security. If we don't control HIV in Africa our children will pay the price.