Bush Like Me - an anti-Republican puts on wolf's clothing

Bush Like Me - an anti-Republican puts on wolf's clothing
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6539082?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1097529183054&has-player=false
RollingStone.com: Politics - Bush Like Me

Republicans are everywhere, but everywhere is not a good place to look for them. For my purposes I wanted to try to catch them in their ideal habitat. That was why I chose Orlando. For me, it is hell on earth, the worst city on the planet, a place that would make me long for Kinshasa or Volokolamsk. But for Republicans, it is ideal: a scorching-hot paved inland archipelago of garish shopping malls and stadium-size steel-and-glass Baptist churches, a place with no nonhuman life apart from the caged animals at the theme parks, and an entire economy organized around monstrous temples to fake experience.

... Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."

"You could just shoot them," I said.

"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."

He went on.

"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."

"That's where folks like us would come in," I said.

"Exactly," he said.

Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.

... During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office -- Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don -- were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.

I saw this clearly one weekend at a local gun show, where we were manning a voter-registration booth. I rotated with Rhyan and Vienna that weekend, and all three of us were quietly freaking out at the sight of all these fat weirdos from the sticks buying huge assault rifles and Confederate bumper stickers with messages such as IF I'D KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN, I'D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.

"Man, I'm glad I'm a socially liberal Republican," whispered Rhyan at one point, laughing.

... . The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are...

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It's a curious article. In places he's sympathetic, in others caustic. He makes some interesting observations, but ends seeming rather puzzled and confused.

I do need to rise to the defense of Orlando. Disneyworld is not to my tastes, but there's still a bit left of the town of old Orlanda, and it's fairly interesting.

Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah (washingtonpost.com)

Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah (washingtonpost.com)

If accurate, it suggests the sensor guided missile strikes in Fallujah have been quite effective. It also suggests that Fallujahns, to some extent, have been repulsed by the cruel and brutal beheadings of foreigners and of non-Sunni Iraqis. If the "foreign terrorists" lose local support, it will be increasingly easy for the Iraqi and US forces to find allies willing to plant sensors near Zarqawi's forces.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Advertisers - Boycott Page

Sinclair Broadcast Group Advertisers

The Sinclair group is a set of networks owned by a group of radical Bush supporters. They're publishing an anti-Kerry slander that's probably illegal, but they know any consequences will be mild and will be post-election.

This site lists advertisers to contact.

Is this what Rove means by his "October Surprise"?

Boing Boing: Law enforcement memo of "imminent" terror attack?

... At the meeting of the Southern District of the Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council (ATAC) that was held yesterday in Houston, US Attorney Michael Shelby informed the group that a terrorist attack of 09/11/01 proportions was going to be carried out on US soil within the next 6 weeks.

Mr. Shelby stated that on 09/13/04, US Attorney General John Ashcroft had a conference call with all 93 US Attorneys, an event which is extremely rare. The US Attorneys were informed that without a doubt an attack was going to be perpetrated in the US within the next 6 weeks, prior to the elections. Mr. Shelby urgently requested that all law enforcement be aware of any situation that may be out of the ordinary and report the activity immediately. Mr. Shelby also requested that we get the word out to patrol officers and detectives to talk to their informants and report anything odd or remotely suspicious. Mr. Shelby ended this warning by saying that unless we get a bit of "luck" and the attack can be detected and prevented, that another attack of 9/11 scale will be carried out.

... A Democratic senator said he will close his Capitol Hill office until after the November 2 election, fearing a possible terrorist attack that could harm his staff or visitors.

Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota issued a statement Tuesday, citing a 'top-secret intelligence report on our national security' provided to congressional members by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee 'Based upon that information,' Dayton wrote, 'I have decided to close my office in the Russell Senate Office Building until after the upcoming election.

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Dayton's web site says nothing about his office closing, but CNN reports it has been shut. Weird.

Unfortunately Bush/Ashcroft/Rove vaporized any trust I had in them, so I can't say whether:

1. This is a typical anxiety induced response to a scam or a mangled rumor.
2. This is a rational assessment of a real threat.
3. This is a scam by Karl Rove to boost Bush in the polls.

I'm betting on all three.

Pre-eclampsia -- tracking down a terrible disorder

BBC NEWS | Health | Clue to pregnancy disorder found

The natural killer cells, which are part of the mother's immune defence system that fights infection and foreign invaders, help to set up the blood vessels in the placenta needed to feed the baby.

In pre-eclampsia, the blood supply is compromised for some reason.

The scientists found the women with pre-eclampsia had different genes controlling the chemical signals than the healthy women.

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This sounds like true progress. Over the past 5-10 years we may have begun to disentangle the mechanisms of a terrible disorder. Pre-eclampsia is usually managed successfully, but every so often a healthy woman dies in an particularly terrible manner.

Amazing to think that the cells we named "Natural Killer (NK)" help build the placenta. Maybe they could be renamed? (The consequences of naming in biology are manifold.)

There has been much speculation about the evolutionary basis of pre-eclampsia. Mostly it focuses on the degree to which a mother and a fetus are in a state of low level war, reflecting competition between parternal and maternal genes. The paternal genes want "more" from the mother's body, the maternal genes want "less". This is an ancient war -- and only the dynamic tension between the two permits a healthy baby and mother. If the paternal genes lose the baby dies, if the maternal genes lose the mother and baby die.

That's the theory anyway. Maybe we'll find out more soon. I'm not sure how the "intelligent design" folks explain there kinds of mechanisms.

ABC has a spine?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 03, 2004 - October 09, 2004 Archives: "The plain intent of the memo is to tell ABC reporters that they should feel neither obligated nor permitted to equate the level of deceptiveness of the Kerry and Bush campaign's if and when they are in fact not equal."

The perils of living with lackeys

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon?

... But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are "Rathergate" and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that John Kerry can't score in the debates because everyone knows he's an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren't aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast, that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent more viewers on a bad night than "The O'Reilly Factor" does on a great one (the Bush interview).

Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and lose touch with reality. You start making the mistakes Mr. Baker made - and more. The whole Bush-Cheney operation is less sure-footed about media manipulation than it once was. You could see this the week before the debate, when the president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged Washington appearances that were even less effective than his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi's State of the Union photo op with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being ridiculed as a puppet you don't put him on camera to deliver sound bites (some 16, by the calculation of Dana Milbank of The Washington Post) that are paraphrases of the president's much replayed golden oldies. The whole long charade played out like a lost reel of "Duck Soup."

...If anything, the first Bush-Kerry confrontation has given split-screen television a new vogue. Having defied the efforts of both campaigns to squelch its use on Sept. 30, emboldened TV news organizations can run with it at will. So we saw on the Sunday after that debate, when Condoleezza Rice appeared on ABC's "This Week."

There she was quizzed about the report in that morning's Times saying that in 2002 she had hyped aluminum tubes as evidence of Saddam's nuclear threat a year after her staff was told that government experts had serious doubts. Ms. Rice kept trying to talk over the soft-voiced George Stephanopoulos's questions, but he zapped her with a picture: a September 2002 CNN interview in which she had not, shall we say, told the whole truth and nothing but. As the old video played, ABC used a split screen so we could watch Ms. Rice, "This Is Your Life" style, as she watched the replay of her incriminating appearance of two years earlier. Maybe, like Mr. Bush at the first debate, she knew her reaction was being caught on camera. But even if she did, the unchecked rage in her face, like that of her boss three days earlier, revealed that her image and her story, like the war itself, had spun completely out of her control.

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Tom Friedman similarly ambushed Rumsfeld on camera. He was telling his usual incredible bold lies when Friedman quoted directly from a past Rumsfeld speech. I'm told Rumsfeld was filmed gasping for air.

By controlling the US media, by controlling the audiences they interact with, by controlling what they read, by speaking only to themselves, by consistently shooting the messengers, by their ruthless destruction of dissenters, Bush et al have created a hermetic fantasy world. It may yet work for them, but it will not work for our world.

It may be that the US media is waking up. One senior journalist tells me he feels the media was essentially asleep for the past two years, paralyzed by fears of the "liberal media" accusation, misled by false patriotism, trapped by conventions of "neutrality". He thinks those days are passing.

NPR : Secret Service Cleanses the Disloyal Voter

NPR : Morning Edition for Friday, October 8, 2004

An amazing story. We've known for some time that the Bush campaign has been allowing only the most loyal supporters to attend Bush rallies. Now we learn that the Secret Service has been the muscle for some of these screenings -- threatening anyone carrying Kerry paraphenelia with arrest and imprisonment as suspected terrorists.

Repeat. Some Secret Service agents consider anyone with less than full loyalty to George Bush to be a terrorist threat to America.

We are way past too far.

Bush and his remote control pod

Salon.com News | Bush's mystery bulge

Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may have begun using such technology [remote teleprompt with intra-otic mike] earlier in his term. Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to surprised viewers -- the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies -- notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's appearance. 'They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera,' Schechter said. 'The Democrats weren't doing that at their convention.'

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Bush had some device strapped to his back during the debates. What was it?

Note that rumor has it that Bush has also deferred his October medical into November. (I've no substantiating evidence on this.) Given the bizarre behaviors and intrigues of this administration, the story almost writes itself. Cheney has been poisoning Bush for years, inducing an organic brain syndrome. After the election Bush-bot receives a "thorough" exam and his dementia is detected. He shuffles off to a nursing home. Cheney takes power. A mysterious dirty bomb causes great panic; Cheney declares martial law. Opponents disappear. Quietly, Bush passes on. A new world begins ...

You gotta admit, doesn't Cheney look like he could do something like that?

Anyway, if some journalist can figure a way to tap the frequencies used for teleprompt devices they might break a good story at the next debate.

Innovators work for free - historically

Marginal Revolution: The returns from innovation

The implication is that “society” pays a paltry $2.20 for every $100 worth of welfare it enjoys from innovating activities.

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This may change with recent abuses of patent and copyright -- innovators may capture more of the value. On the other hand, it is pretty clear we'll get less innovation from an era of protected intellectual property.

Bottom line, innovators innovate because they have to. It's a compulsion. Some people need to run, some people need to innovate.

Edwards and Cheney -- revealed

Boing Boing: Best VP debate parody image EVAR

The truth will come out.

Identification of the 1918 pandemic's lethality factor

The New York Times > Science > Critical Gene a Suspect in Lethal Epidemic

By recreating the influenza virus that killed up to 50 million people in 1918-19, researchers may have identified the gene that turned it into one of the most lethal in human history.

The gene, one of eight in the virus, seems to have an unexpected capacity for sending the body's immune system into overdrive, causing inflammation, hemorrhage and death, the scientists report today in the journal Nature.

... Dr. Kawaoka, Dr. Taubenberger and others have been reinserting the 1918-type genes into ordinary flu viruses to see if they can pinpoint which of the genes made the virus so lethal and how it did so. In the latest of these experiments, which Dr. Kawaoka reports today, a gene called the hemagglutinin or HA gene seems to be largely responsible for the dire effects of Spanish flu, as the 1918 epidemic is also known.

... The HA gene studied by Dr. Kawaoka's team is well known to flu experts because it changes from year to year. Since the protein made by the gene is the one singled out for attack by the immune system, the body's defenses are caught off guard each year as flu virus arrives with a novel version of the protein to which the body has no prior immunity.

... What he has now found is that the Spanish flu version of the HA gene, in addition to its break-in and enter role, seems able to trigger the release of cytokines, the signaling agents with which the immune system gears itself up for massive attack against an infectious agent.

Uncontrolled overdrive can make the immune system kill the body in order to save it, through excessive inflammation. The virus carrying the Spanish flu version of the HA gene produced high levels of cytokines in mice, Dr. Kawaoka says, and this is probably what led to the inflammation and lung damage that killed them.

... Survivors of the 1918 epidemic have high levels of antibody to the engineered virus, Dr. Kawaoka reports, but people infected recently with a similar class of flu virus do not. "Thus, a large section of the population would be susceptible to an outbreak of a 1918-like influenza virus," he and his colleagues concluded.

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If this is borne out by further work, Drs Kawaoka and Taubenberger may share the Nobel prize. Of course by the time they get their prize, high school students will have the facilities to create viruses that make this one seem relatively benign.

Today in central China a baby boy was born. Sixteen years from now he'll swear revenge on an unfaithful lover -- and in heartbroken spite he'll create the pathogen that saves the earth from humanity.

And some people think we should worry about al Qaeda.

Steroids increase head injury death rate by about 15%

Study: Steroids useless for head injury

The study, coordinated at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, involved 10,008 adults with severe head injuries who were randomly given either a steroid drip or a placebo for 48 hours after being admitted to the emergency room.

Within two weeks, 21 percent of the patients given steroids had died, compared with 18 percent of those given the placebo. The results were the same regardless of how quickly the treatment was given and regardless of the type or severity of the head injury.

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The steroids may or may not have helped with brain swelling, but they are toxic and dangerous drugs. The net effect appears to have been quite harmful.

Once again we see the limitations of retrospective studies. Only a large randomized trial was able to expose this problem. This is very reminescent of the estrogen replacement therapy crisis, though here the harm seems greater (ERT therapy was only slightly more harmful than no therapy).

I'm left with a bad feeling about the basis of a lot of interventions that have been shown in smaller or retrospective studies to improve mortality by 10-25%. A LOT of our medical and surgical interventions have benefits in that range. I think we need to consider them all to be highly suspect.

Author and intelligence specialist on Bush and the misuse and abuse of the CIA

Salon.com News | "A temporary coup"

...Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that the Bush administration is responsible for what is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S. intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they corrupted, coerced or ignored have made extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our national security for years. By manipulating intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's intelligence capabilities.

"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the right thing to do. But everything since then has been a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis."

The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush administration -- a fact which Powers says reveals the urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief -- much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored to the policy goals of the Bush White House. The simmering tensions between the Pentagon, with its troika of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, and rank and file CIA personnel boiled over in July 2003, when the White House trashed the career of veteran CIA operative Valerie Plame by leaking her identity. The move was a crude retaliation against Plame's husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had exposed the Bush administration's specious claim that Saddam had sought "yellowcake" from Africa to build a nuclear bomb.

The struggle between the CIA and the Defense Department reached a bizarre climax a few weeks ago when Ahmed Chalabi's office was very publicly ransacked by officers working under the command of the CIA; the Iraqi exile leader was later accused of leaking vital information to Iran, among other allegations. The abrupt fall from grace of the man hand-picked by neoconservative policymakers to lead post-Saddam Iraq, says Powers, lays bare the brutal turf war between the two sides.

... Tenet was pushed out by the accumulating circumstances, not because he failed to do what Bush wanted him to do, which was essentially two things: The first was to not speak too clearly about the warnings that he'd given the White House before 9/11. You can be certain that it was not easy for Tenet to do that. Tenet has never spoken out clearly and said, "I told the president everything he needed to know to at least start responding to the threat."

... Secondly, Tenet hasn't spoken clearly on the reason why they got Iraqi WMD wrong. And it's not because people in the bowels of the agency had it all balled up, it's because in the process of writing finished intelligence -- which was required to extract a vote for war from congress -- it got turned on its head at the upper levels of the CIA. They found certainty where there wasn't any; the evidence for WMD stockpiles and programs was extremely thin. Who else could have created this situation besides the policymakers themselves?

... The agency is politicized to an extreme. It is under the control of the Bush White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis. It's somewhat like Iran-Contra, though on a totally different scale. The president wanted to go to war. He's supposed to have the support of the Congress. How did he get it? Well, his administration made up a scary story about imminent dangers.

... I think the truth about what happened at the policy level will eventually come out. We know, because it was on paper, that on Aug. 6, 2001 the CIA gave the president a very explicit warning. When 9/11 actually occurred, you would expect to look back and see, once the distress light was on, various U.S. intelligence and police organizations scurrying around frantically responding to the warning. But what do you find? Nothing.

It's a race

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

From the Wall Street Journal, today:
WSJ.com: The latest Zogby Interactive poll puts Mr. Kerry ahead of President Bush in 13 of the 16 closely contested states.... If the results on Election Day matched Zobgy's numbers, Mr. Kerry would win.... Mr. Kerry would have 322 electoral votes and the president would have 216.

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Ok, I'm guilty of figuring I was going to strive mightily and fall nobly in a hopeless cause. I didn't bank on actually having a chance of winning. Gee, kind of takes the fun out of hopelessness.