Because I am busy and it looks like Tim and Tom are as well.
Feel free to fill me in on what I have missed.
by John Cole| 18 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Because I am busy and it looks like Tim and Tom are as well.
Feel free to fill me in on what I have missed.
by Tim F| 22 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
Sad.
Conservatives who supported President Bush’s reelection have joined liberal groups in expressing outrage over his administration’s broad use of anti-terrorism laws to reject asylum for thousands of people seeking refuge from religious, ethnic and political persecution.
The critics say the administration’s interpretation of provisions mandating denial of asylum to individuals who give “material support” to terrorist groups is so broad that foreigners who fought alongside U.S. forces in wars such as Vietnam can be denied asylum on the grounds that they provided aid to terrorists.
[…] “It’s outrageous,” said Barrett Duke, vice president of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “I think it’s essentially a reaction of fear to the current terrorist danger.” The language in the laws, he added, is “a knee-jerk reaction.”
Gary L. Bauer, president of American Values, a conservative public policy group, said the anti-terrorism thrust of laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the Real ID Act is supported by most conservatives, “but the enforcement of it has lapsed into ludicrousy. The concept of material support is being distorted, and even the definition of the term ‘terrorism’ is being turned on its ear.”
Read the whole story to get a sense of the awful way that countless vulnerable individuals have been handled by our security beaurocracy. If there is any upshot, I guess that Gary Bauer now understands why some of us have always been skeptical of this government, even when they propose things which are not prima facie idiotic. It hurts that much more when the Michael Browns screw up something you like.
Naturally it gets worse. At least most refugees get a hearing; applicants from Iraq have virtually no chance because our government apparently prefers to pretend that the crisis doesn’t exist.
by Tim F| 122 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Divulge your secrets. John and Tom and I pledge total confidentiality.
Also, be nice to John Hinderaker for a while. He’s probably feeling a bit silly about this.
by Tim F| 99 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Two recent articles in the NYT and the journal Science suggest that our current budget gridlock will cause major problems for science, including one of the President’s better policy proposals. Announced during his 2006 State of the Union address, the American Competitiveness Initiative proposed to double the American spending on the physical sciences over the next 10 years. The ACI also proposed about $300 million for educational initiatives which garnered mixed reviews (judgments roughly tracked people’s opinions of NCLB), but the investment in physical sciences was long overdue.
You won’t hear a life scientist, me for example, say that the life sciences are overfunded (check the Science link if you want to hear someone else saying it, or at least implying it). On an emotional level it’s hard to argue with research that makes people live longer, cures a disease or makes a strawberry glow in the dark. Compared with the guys promoting massive particle-smashing installations whose purpose even many of us with advanced degrees only partially understand, our lobbyists just have an easier time of it. It is also a shame that even a crucial physical science projects like fusion energy often takes a huge investment and a very long development time before it changes the world. That’s a long horizon for the political process to support. Given how badly we need progress in energy and materials science, that is a problem and I’m glad the President moved to rectify it.
The President’s 2007 budget request included funds for the ACI proposal. Relevant agencies – NSF, DOE, NIST and NASA – made plans accordingly, which became a problem when the 109th Congress spiked 9 out of 11 necessary budget bills before it adjourned in December.
Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.
Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare, the federal health-care program for the elderly and disabled.
[…] “There are individuals who want to blow up the tracks, and there are more of those individuals in the House,” said one Senate leadership aide.
The GOP’s bitter move stalls more than the President’s ACI plan. Stopgap bills held government budgets to 2006 levels, which amounts to a 3 to 4% cut after inflation. Unfortunately the details of research funding can make small funding cuts more painful than they sound. Not counting one-time ‘startup’ grants like the R03, funding cuts disproportionately shut young researchers out of the process since they lack the ‘pull’ of their more senior competition. A weak couple of years for funding is that much time when the most promising young talent leaves research and finds work somewhere else. Another disproportionate victim is collaborative projects which depend on precisely aligning the schedules of X number of very busy people. Both articles give several examples of those, including the Fermilab collider in Illinois and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven in New York.
Now, science won’t grind to a halt because research budgets aren’t increasing. Many of the setbacks will come from ACI-related proposals that are still only in the plannnig stage, which is annoying but not fatal. Other cuts might actually hurt. From the NYT:
Missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are also threatened, with $100 million in cuts. Paul Hertz, the chief scientist at NASA’s science mission directorate, said potential victims included programs to explore Mars, astrophysics and space weather
Right now NASA does some extremely cool things, for example robotic exploration of our neighbor planets. NASA also does some extremely useful things like understanding climate change through careful observation of the Earth. Unfortunately there is a third category, massive vanity projects that won’t happen and already suck resources from the useful missions. Hertz could mean that the budget shortfall will cut back the third kind of mission, which would be cool. Boots on Mars will not add any mission capabilities that robots can’t or won’t soon be able to do. But I suspect that Hertz is really talking about the former kind of Mars mission, which when you think that one of our robots just found evidence for running water near the surface of Mars strikes me as a small tragedy.
***
On a semi-related note, the Iraq war costs America roughly $600,000 6,000,000 per hour. FYI.
Science, One Casualty Of The Budget WarsPost + Comments (99)
Noticed this tragic tale via Memeorandum:
The Army said Friday it would apologize to the families of about 275 officers killed or wounded in action who were mistakenly sent letters urging them to return to active duty.
The letters were sent a few days after Christmas to more than 5,100 Army officers who had recently left the service. Included were letters to about 75 officers killed in action and about 200 wounded in action.
“Army personnel officials are contacting those officers’ families now to personally apologize for erroneously sending the letters,” the Army said in a brief news release issued Friday night.
The Army did not say how or when the mistake was discovered. It said the database normally used for such correspondence with former officers had been “thoroughly reviewed” to remove the names of wounded or dead soldiers.
“But an earlier list was used inadvertently for the December mailings,” the Army statement said, adding that the Army is apologizing to those officers and families affected and “regrets any confusion.”
While a tragic mistake, it is understandable. The Army is composed of humans, and those humans have huge databases to contend with, and inevitably something like this happens. Drawing a larger point about the competence of the military from this incident would be silly and unfair. It was a mistake, and mistakes happen. While regrettable, it can be explained and, to some extent, excused.
What can’t be excused are the future letters that will be sent to the parents of children killed in Iraq. It is pretty clear to everyone but the most addle-brained that our Iraq policy is and has been a disaster. The region is slipping further and further into chaos, aided by administration incompetence, Congressional indifference, and Presidential inadequacies. We have pursued a failed policy for nearly four years, and we have pursued this flawed policy in the most ham-handed manner possible. In short, we took a bad idea, added a little incompetence, and made it worse.
As I write this, the President is, in secret, mulling over a plan. Putting aside the fact that I have no confidence whatsoever in his or his administration’s decision making capacity, I find that it is disgusting that the plan is being crafted behind closed doors rather than in the open. Each day another ‘leak’ appears highlighting what the President is ‘planning’ to do, and to date, the plan appears to range from a slight increase of troops so small that it would be inconsequential to a larger increase in troops that we simply do not have.
That is, apparently, the deep-thinking being done behind closed doors, and it is disgusting. That is no plan- that is more of the same. Presenting those options as if they represent some breakthrough is borderline criminal, and almost as bad as the fact that this ‘plan’ is being crafted behind closed doors for purely political reasons. There is no need for secrecy in this situation; it is being in private solely to stop any criticism or vocal opposition. Saner heads will have no say until the decider presents us his new folly during the State of the Union, and by then, as it almost always is with this administration, it will be too late. The decider will have made his decision, and more young men and women will march onward into the meatgrinder in Iraq in pursuit of Bush’s legacy.
And unlike the accidental mailings this week by the Army, that will be no accident.
by John Cole| 24 Comments
This post is in: Sports
I don’t know what this means for the future of the Steelers:
Bill Cowher resigned as the Pittsburgh Steelers’ coach Friday, stepping aside to spend more time with his family one year after winning the Super Bowl title he had chased since 1992.
The 49-year-old Cowher left with one year left on his contract following an 8-8 season that was a disappointment, especially after last season: The Steelers became the first team to win three playoff games on the road and then the Super Bowl as a sixth-seeded AFC team.
“History will look back on Bill Cowher as one of the great coaches of all time,” Steelers chairman Dan Rooney said.
The Steelers will begin a coaching search immediately to replace the departing Cowher, who called Rooney on Thursday to inform him of his decision.
I liked the guy, and he will be missed.
This post is in: War, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
Bill Ardolino has filed his first offical report from the ground in Iraq.
Nothing ground breaking, just a sort of puff piece on Navy Corpsmen, but at least he is there, and he is actually walking the streets. Good for him. Plus, while the whole situation is a disaster, our troops deserve a puff piece here and there. Most of them are doing everything they can to make this a success, so I can handle some glowing pieces about them.