del.icio.us

This is a very impressive website (http://del.icio.us/) that does for bookmarks what Flickr does for photographs. At its simplest level, it stores bookmarks on the web so that you can get to them from any computer you are using. But more importantly, it makes Firefox and IE bookmarks unnecessary by providing an alternative product that is usable. Like Flickr, the key is that each bookmark can be flagged with as many descriptive tags as you can imagine. When you go to your del.icio.us page you see all of your tags and clicking on anyone of them generates a list of each of your bookmarks with that tag. No more searching through the old bookmarks listing trying to figure out how you indexed them in the past.

You can also create bundles of tags so all tags having something to do with a general subject will be displayed within the bundle. To make its use easy, there is a Firefox extension that places two icons on the Navigation Toolbar. One takes you to your page on the del.icio.us site and the other lets you tag the Internet site you are looking at if you want to add it to del.icio.us.

Finally, instead of just searching your tags to get to your bookmarks, you can do a universal search, which will produce both your tags and everyone else’s who has used that same tag in setting up their bookmarks. This serves as a search tool that can supplement Google.

One slightly awkward feature gives you the ability to search your bookmarks using multiple tags. If you want to do a multiple tag search, you need to click first on one tag, then look at the “related tag” section on the right of the screen. However, instead of clicking on the name that you want, you must click on the “+ sign” preceding the name. If you do that you will pare the selection of bookmarks down each time you click.

Logging After Forest Fires

Following the devastating Biscuit fire in Oregon four years ago, President Bush said: “We must quickly restore the areas that have been damaged by fire. He called it "common sense." The Bush administration believes loggers should move in quickly, cut marketable trees that remain and replant a healthy forest. But not surprisingly, the Bush administration is following its mantra of ignoring science while supporting big business interests.

As The Washington Post reports today, common sense may not always be sound science. An Oregon State University study concludes that logging burned forests does not make much sense.

Logging after the Biscuit fire, the study found, has harmed forest recovery and increased fire risk. What the short study did not say -- but what many critics of the Bush administration are reading into it -- is that the White House has ignored science to please the timber industry. The study is consistent with research findings from around the world that have documented how salvage logging can strip burned forests of the biological diversity that fire and natural recovery help protect.

The study also questions the scientific rationale behind a bill pending in Congress that would ease procedures for post-fire logging in federal forests. This, in turn, has annoyed the bill's lead sponsor, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who has received far more campaign money from the forest products industry than from any other source, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Logging after fires is becoming more and more important to the bottom line of timber companies. It generates about 40 percent of timber volume on the nation's public lands, according to Forest Service data compiled by the World Wildlife Fund, and accounts for nearly half the logging on public land in Oregon.

But there is much more to the dispute than money. The Oregon State study was published in Science, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal. It appeared after a group of professors from the university's College of Forestry, which gets 10 percent of its funding from the timber industry, tried to halt its publication.

Professors behind the failed attempt to keep the article out of Science had earlier written their own non-peer-reviewed study of the Biscuit fire -- a study embraced by the Bush administration and the timber industry. It said post-fire logging and replanting were exactly what was needed to speed growth of big trees and suppress fire.

A couple of weeks after the Science article appeared and infuriated the forest industry, the federal Bureau of Land Management, which footed the bill for the study of the Biscuit fire, cut off the final year of the three-year, $300,000 grant. BLM officials said the authors violated their funding contract by attempting to influence legislation pending in Congress.

After the cutoff, Democrats in the Northwest congressional delegation complained about government censorship, academic freedom and the politicization of science in the Bush administration. Within a week, the BLM backed down and restored the grant. Oregon State University has officially scolded the forestry professors for inappropriate behavior and praised the authors of the Science article.

Visa Denied to Terrorist Threat

Continuing to make incompetence the theme of the Administration, it was announced today that an eminent Indian scientist, Goverdhan Mehta, invited to lecture at an international conference at the University of Florida was denied a visa because his expertise in chemistry was considered a national security threat. Indians are enraged and the American science establishment is embarrassed. Mehta was a director of the Indian Institute of Science and is a science adviser to India's prime minister. He has previously visited the US dozens of times. The timing of this action is impressive as it comes just prior to the President's visit to India where he intends to improve relations.

The Arabs Are Coming

Dubai Ports World, the Middle Eastern Company based in The United Arab Emirates, is an international company managed by an American executive with senior management from Australia, India, and Turkey. The UAE invested seed money and apparently has little to do with managing the company other than getting a return on its investment. If awarded a contract to manage operations in six major Eastern ports in the US, they will replace a British company that currently holds the contract. The work involves loading and unloading cargo in ports. It has nothing to do with security, which continues to be the responsibility of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard.

Anytime Congress acts with alacrity and almost unanimous agreement, which includes the leadership of the Senate and House, warning flags should spurt up with bright red colors. Of all the stupid issues to overcome the normal partisan disagreement, this is almost humorous.

Lest anyone forget, the US is heavily involved in business activities throughout the world and if Congress cancels this deal, this action will intensify the stereotype of an arrogant power thinking it can do whatever it wants in the world, while wondering why so many people and nations despise us.

The Administration today admitted that they inadequately briefed Congress. Apparently they have not figured out how weak their leadership position has become and so they still forge ahead thinking they can act with impunity and their base will follow. If the Democrats don’t start speaking everyday, with example after example, about how incompetent this Administration is, they will forgo major opportunities in 2006 and 2008. But their actions in this case, don’t help their position.

Land Management

The Bush pattern of ignoring the public welfare in order to favor commercial interests continues unabated. Despite the evidence of scientists in and out of the government, the Administration continues to pursue policies that contradict objective findings. Just review recent articles on the use of carbon monoxide, global warming, generic drugs, and mine safety. Today’s Washington Post provides yet another example:

The Bureau of Land Management, caretaker of more land and wildlife than any federal agency, routinely restricts the ability of its own biologists to monitor wildlife damage caused by surging energy drilling on federal land, according to BLM officials and bureau documents.

The officials and documents say that by keeping many wildlife biologists out of the field doing paperwork on new drilling permits and that by diverting agency money intended for wildlife conservation to energy programs, the BLM has compromised its ability to deal with the environmental consequences of the drilling boom it is encouraging on public lands.

For years the BLM has reallocated money Congress intended for wildlife conservation to spending on energy. A national evaluation by the agency of its wildlife expenditures found three years ago that about one-third of designated wildlife money was spent "outside" of wildlife programs. The sum effect of these diversions, the study said, has damaged the credibility of land-use planning by the BLM. These findings were echoed last year in a report by the Government Accountability Office, which said that BLM managers order their field staff to devote increasing time to processing drilling permits, leaving less time to mitigate the consequences of oil and gas extraction.

"It has become almost a cultural practice in the BLM to spend money that is appropriated for one purpose for whatever purpose somebody deems is a higher priority," said a senior BLM official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he said he would be fired for speaking publicly. "There is really no penalty for this."

In the Pinedale, Wyoming BLM office, as in agency offices across the West, monitoring and research on the impact of drilling on wildlife are almost never done by staff biologists, according to Roger L. Bankert, associate field manager for lands and minerals. "This is an energy office, and our biologists don't have time to do the monitoring," Bankert said. He said it is "done by private consultants who are hired by the energy companies," with BLM approval.

Carbon Monoxide

The meat industry has begun to spike meat packages with carbon monoxide. The gas, harmless to health at the levels being used, gives meat a bright pink color that lasts weeks. The hope is that it will save the industry much of the $1 billion it says it loses annually from having to discount or discard meat that is reasonably fresh and perfectly safe but no longer pretty. FDA officials defend their actions while consumer groups scream. In a battle between big business and consumers, is it any surprise which one the Administration supports. Today’s Washington Post reports:

The growing use of carbon monoxide as a "pigment fixative" is alarming consumer advocates and others who say it deceives shoppers who depend on color to help them avoid spoiled meat. Those critics are challenging the Food and Drug Administration and the nation's powerful meat industry, saying the agency violated its own rules by allowing the practice without a formal evaluation of its impact on consumer safety.

At the core of the issue is how the FDA has assessed companies' requests to use carbon monoxide in their packaging. It started about five years ago, when Pactiv Corp. of Lake Forest, Ill., urged the FDA to declare the approach "generally recognized as safe," or GRAS -- a regulatory category that allows a firm to proceed with its plans without public review or formal agency "approval." The FDA told Pactiv in 2002 it had no argument with the proposal. In 2004, Precept Foods received a similar letter, and recently Tyson did as well.

[Consumer advocates] note that the European Union has banned the use of carbon monoxide as a color stabilizer in meat and fish. A December 2001 report from the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Food concluded that the gas (whose chemical abbreviation is "CO") did not pose a risk as long as food was kept cold enough during storage and transport to prevent microbial growth. But should the meat become inadvertently warmer at some point, it warned, "the presence of CO may mask visual evidence of spoilage."

How is it [advocates ask}that something can be deemed "generally recognized as safe" when there is enough scientific debate over the issue to warrant a ban in Europe? "I just picture a refrigerator truck breaking down in Arizona and sitting there for an afternoon. Then, 'Hey, we got it repaired and nobody knows the difference,' and there you go."

Opponents also say the FDA was wrong to consider carbon monoxide a color fixative rather than a color additive -- a crucial decision because additives must pass a rigorous FDA review. They note that freshly cut meat looks purplish red, and that the addition of carbon monoxide -- which binds to a muscle protein called myoglobin -- turns it irreversibly pink.

The agency has never formally approved the gas's use, but rather looked at information provided by the companies and decided not to object. That is what has opponents most upset.

"The FDA should not have accepted carbon monoxide in meat without doing its own independent evaluation of the safety implications," Elizabeth Campbell, former head of the FDA's office of food labeling, wrote in a statement released in November.

Religion and Iconoclasm

Edward Rothstein in a New York Times review today of "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" by Daniel C. Dennett writes:

An ant climbs a blade of grass, over and over, seemingly without purpose, seeking neither nourishment nor home. It persists in its futile climb because its brain has been taken over by a parasite, a lancet fluke, which, over the course of evolution, has found this to be a particularly efficient way to get into the stomach of a grazing sheep or cow where it can flourish and reproduce. The ant is controlled by the worm, which, equally unconscious of purpose, maneuvers the ant into place.

Mr. Dennett, anticipating the outrage his comparison will make, suggests that this how religion works. People will sacrifice their interests, their health, their reason, their family, all in service to an idea "that has lodged in their brains." That idea, he argues, is like a virus or a worm, and it inspires bizarre forms of behavior in order to propagate itself. Submission is what religious believers practice. In Mr. Dennett's view, they do so despite all evidence, and in thrall to biological and social forces they barely comprehend.

Now that is iconoclasm — a wholehearted attempt to destroy a respected icon. "I believe that it is very important to break this spell," Mr. Dennett writes, as he tries to undermine the claims and authority of religious belief. Attacks on religion, of course, have been a staple of Western secular society since the Enlightenment, though often carried out with far less finesse (and far less emphasis on biology) than Mr. Dennett does; he refers to "the widespread presumption by social scientists that religion is some kind of lunacy."

Mr. Dennett understands, too, that iconoclasm, with its lack of deference, can also give offense. But not even he could have imagined the response to the now notorious Danish cartoons that have so offended Muslims around the world, leading to riots, death and destruction. It was as if the problem of religious belief in the modern world had been highlighted in garish colors. If Mr. Dennett's attack is a premeditated spur to debate, the Muslim riots shock with their primordial force. Together, they leave us with a tough set of intertwining questions: Can religion — with its absolute and sweeping assertions — make any claim on a society whose doctrines require it to defer, in part, to all, even to blasphemers? Can religion be as dramatically shunted aside as Mr. Dennett desires? If not, what sort of accommodation is needed?

The issues, though, remain intractable and unrelenting. But it may be that the United States has already offered one kind of an answer, creating a society in which faith and reason continually cohabit in uneasy proximity, and iconoclasm is as commonplace as belief.

Republican Science

Given that President Bush believes intelligent design deserves the same respect in science classes as does evolution, news of the administration’s muzzling of science that does not agree with its political agenda is not a surprise. David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist and president of the California Institute of Technology, commented on the Bush administration’s misrepresenting scientific findings to support its policy aims. He told an audience of fellow researchers Saturday

It's no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of scientific freedom. It's part of the theory of government now, and it's a theory we need to vociferously oppose. Far from twisting science to suit its own goals, the government should be the guardian of intellectual freedom.

Recently, NASA attempted to stop one of its leading climate scientists, James Hansen, from speaking about global warming. Once this was made public, a President-appointed press officer, who was instrumental in censoring scientific information at the agency, resigned in disgrace when his false academic credentials were exposed.

The 2/20/06 New Republic, in an article written by John B. Judis, related a similar suppression story at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). At a November news conference, agency officials responding to a question on whether global warming affects hurricanes said that the storm's intensity was:

part of the multi-decadal signal that we see. It's not related to greenhouse warming. … there was simply no conceivable connection between global warming and hurricanes.

Their denial of a link echoed the statements of other top NOAA administrators and those posted on the organization's website.

But as Judis reports:

Many respected climate scientists, including some who work for NOAA, believe the organization's official line on the link between global warming and hurricanes is wrong. What's more, there is reason to believe that NOAA knows as much. In the broader scientific community, there is grumbling that NOAA's top officials have suppressed dissenting views on this subject--contributing to the Bush administration's attempt to downplay the danger of climate change. Says Don Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "There are a lot of scientists there who know it is nonsense, what they are putting up on their website, but they are being discouraged from talking to the press about it.

In the last year, two important studies have suggested that there is an observable link between global warming and the growing intensity of hurricanes

Perhaps the most telling indictment of NOAA comes from Jerry Mahlman. Mahlman joined NOAA in 1970, the year it was established, and served from 1984 to 2000 as the director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Retired from NOAA, he is now a senior research associate at the National Climactic Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. Mahlman, who has continued contact with NOAA scientists, says that dissenting scientists are being intimidated from talking to the press and that their papers are being withheld from publication. Mahlman tells me, "I know a lot of people who would love to talk to you, but they don't dare. They are worried about getting fired."

Death Squads

The Washington Post today reports that 22 men have been arrested and are being investigated as members of an Iraqi police death squad that is targeting Sunni Arabs. Sunni officials estimate that 1,600 people have been killed since Iraq was invaded with the incidence of violence increasing since the middle of last year.

We have always said that men in police and Interior Ministry commando uniforms use Interior Ministry vehicles, raid our houses and arrest our sons," said Adnan Dulaimi, a leader in a coalition of Sunni parties. "After a short time, we find some of them tortured or killed and thrown either on a sidewalk or in the river. We have warned all the officials and the American forces, but they did not respond to our calls until the American forces found this group.

The Bush Administration treats the Iraq Sunni insurgency as made up of terrorists, who in the President’s often repeated phrase ‘hate our freedoms.” It apparently is a bit more complicated if the above story is true. The Sunnis obviously do not like losing power in the new Iraq and may not be enthusiastically looking forward to their weakened status. But if they are being tortured and murdered by the existing Shiite leadership, they may be fighting back in the only way they can.

What this demonstrates again is the failure of the Administration to understand what motivates our enemy, which makes the perilous situation we are involved in, even more difficult to resolve. I have to believe there are some people in the Administration who are capable of a sophisticated understanding of what motivates people in the Middle East. But why isn’t that complexity communicated to the American People? It denotes either an Administration ignorant of the facts or a cynical disdain that telling the truth is unnecessary. The Republican base rarely criticizes Bush and the opposition lets the simplification remain unchallenged. And we continue with the same meaningless words and incomplete strategies that don’t address the real problem.

How to Solve the Iraq Insurgency Problem

We’ve been haunted since the first weeks of the invasion of Iraq with an insurgency problem that continues to persist despite our most determined efforts. But as of this past weekend, a solution guaranteed to effect a major change has been uncovered. I believe we should send Vice President Cheney to Iraq armed with his trusty 28-gauge shotgun and unleash him in the countryside. Wandering around and firing at will, he will bring terror to the terrorists. I think this will be a popular program for all Americans. The NRA should support one of its own taking this leading role. The Administration will be spared hearing impeachment claims for Cheney’s role in instructing his staff to release classified documents. Cheney can now assert that the insurgency is in “its last throes” and know from personal observation that it is rather than having to rely on US intelligence and their antipathy to his office. The Democrats will be happy that he is now too busy to accuse them of being unpatriotic because they don’t agree with every Administration position. Definitely a win/win solution.

Conservative Rationality - Not a Contradiction of Terms

There may be hope after all that logic will sometimes trump agenda. Of course it is probably only Bush and the GOP’s low poll numbers that led to these two reports countering the usual orchestrated Karl Rove message.

The Washington Post published a story based on an advance copy of the Congressional report on Katrina. The Democrats boycotted this effort but the Republicans appear to have gone forward courageously.

Here are some of the key quotes from the Post:

Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government's failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives.

A draft of the report, to be released publicly Wednesday, includes 90 findings of failures. Weaknesses identified by Sept. 11 investigators -- poor communications among first responders, a shortage of qualified emergency personnel and lack of training and funding -- doomed a response confronted by overwhelming demands for help.

"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination then Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership," the report's preface states. "In this instance, blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror."

The report said the single biggest federal failure was not anticipating the consequences of the storm. Disaster planners had rated the flooding of New Orleans as the nation's most feared scenario, testing it under a catastrophic disaster preparedness program in 2004.

Given ... warnings [that were received 56 hours earlier], the report notes Bush's televised statement on Sept. 1 that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," and concludes: "Comments such as those . . . do not appear to be consistent with the advice and counsel one would expect to have been provided by a senior disaster professional."

The council's "failure to resolve conflicts in information and the 'fog of war,' not a lack of information, caused confusion," the House panel wrote. It added that the crisis showed the government remains "woefully incapable" of managing information, much as it was before the 2001 attacks

In another striking news account, The Post reports that 450 Christian Churches are planning to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 197th birthday. 10,000 Christian clergy members from denominations including Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Congregationalists, United Church of Christ, and Baptists have a signed a letter that states:

We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

Conservative Political Action Conference

All the well-known conservatives and their lobbyists gathered in Washington this past week to hear their favorite speakers, including the Vice President who goaded them to campaign this fall as the only party that could protect the US from Al Qaeda. The one sour note came from Bob Barr of all people. He is the former Congressman from Georgia who led the Clinton impeachment effort, but is now strongly criticizing Bush for actions over NSA spying, much to the anguish of the attendees. In a debate with Viet Dinh, one of the authors of the USA Patriot Act, Barr said:

Are we losing our lodestar, which is the Bill of Rights? Are we in danger of putting allegiance to party ahead of allegiance to principle? Do we truly remain a society that believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country? I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say yes.

He also elicited a concession from Dinh: that the administration's case for its program comes down to saying "Trust me." Dinh said:

None of us can make a conclusive assessment as to the wisdom of that program and its legality, without knowing the full operational details. I do trust the president when he asserts that he has reviewed it carefully and therefore is convinced that there is full legal authority.

Obviously less than half of the country is presently willing to believe assertions by President Bush. The majority are beginning to review his record and claims on Iraq, Katrina, the economy, the environment, and health and conclude that trust is the last attribute they associate with this administration.

Memory Loss

It was a good day to clearly see Bush inconsistencies in action: react to the crisis of the moment even if it contradicts what you have argued previously; criticize your opponents but disregard the same actions committed by your staff; mislead whenever you think it will be to your benefit to avoid criticism or to hide incompetence.

After AG Gonzales repeatedly refused to divulge to the Senate details of the NSA spying program, in many cases when the questions appeared to have no relevance to revealing operational secrets, the President yesterday disclosed in a speech details of how we thwarted a supposed planned Al Qaeda attack on Los Angeles.

The administration response to the NSA story has been to concentrate on what they see as the dastardly act of leaking the story to the New York Times. Federal prosecutor’s reveled yesterday that Lewis Libby was told by “superiors” to disclose classified information about Iraq. Last I heard Libby worked for Cheney. How long before the Administration supporters call for an investigation into that leak?

Congressional investigators have reported that the White House knew of the severity of the New Orleans levee break the night of the storm. The next morning the President was quoted as saying that New Orleans "dodged the bullet".

NSA Program Contradiction and Confusion

The FISA Court was told at the start of the eavesdropping program that following its probable cause standard would make it impossible to find terrorists who might attack the US following 9/11, and although having reservations about the program, the head of the Court and his subsequent replacement acquiesced in the Court having no role..

In their recent public defense of the program, NSA Director Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales proceeded to obliterate that position, while trying to justify their actions, according to today’s Washington Post:

Hayden and Gonzales claimed that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.

To make their present justification even more unbelievable, the Post reported that FBI Director Mueller and Justice officials went to the Court on September 12, 2001, and got agreement for expedited FISA warrant procedures

The requirement for detailed paperwork was greatly eased, allowing the NSA to begin eavesdropping the next day on anyone suspected of a link to al Qaeda, every person who had ever been a member or supporter of militant Islamic groups, and everyone ever linked to a terrorist watch list in the United States or abroad, the official said.

Addicted to Oil

Thomas Friedman in today’s NY Times responds to Dick Cheney’s view of how to deal with our dependence on oil:

Listen to Mr. Cheney's answer when the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham asked him how he reacted to… urgings for a gasoline tax to push all Americans to drive energy-saving vehicles and make us energy-independent — now.

"Well, I don't agree with that," Mr. Cheney said. "I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. ... But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. ... This notion that we have to 'impose pain,' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there."

What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It's controlled by the world's largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.

Also, why does Mr. Cheney have no problem influencing the market by lowering taxes to get consumers to spend, but he rejects raising gasoline taxes to get consumers to save energy — a fundamental national interest.

Don't take it from me. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, who recently retired as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 3 about his New Year's resolutions: "Everyone hates taxes, but the government needs to fund its operations, and some taxes can actually do some good in the process. I will tell the American people that a higher tax on gasoline is better at encouraging conservation than are heavy-handed [mileage standards]. It would not only encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, but it would encourage them to drive less."

Mr. Cheney, we are told, is a "tough guy." Really? Well, how tough is this: We have a small gasoline tax, but Europe and Japan tax their gasoline by $2 and $3 a gallon, or more. They use those taxes to build schools, highways and national health care for their citizens. But they spend very little on defense compared with us.

So who protects their oil supplies from the Middle East? U.S. taxpayers. We spend nearly $600 billion a year on defense, a large chunk in the Persian Gulf. But how do we pay for that without a gas tax? Income taxes and Social Security. Yes, we tax our incomes and raid our children's Social Security fund so Europeans and Japanese can comfortably import their oil from the gulf, impose big gas taxes on it at their pumps and then use that income for their own domestic needs. And because they have high gas taxes, they also beat Detroit at making more fuel-efficient cars. Now how tough is that?

Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.

How tough is it, Mr. Cheney, to will the ends — an end to America's oil addiction — but not will the means: a gasoline tax? It's not very tough, it's not very smart, and it's going to end badly for us.

A Strategy for the Democrats

From Andrew Sullivan’s blog today: a recipe for Democratic opposition that the Democrats don’t seem to be able to marshal on their own.

Let me find that tiny violin. It's around here somewhere. I'm not a Democrat and don't think I ever could be, but here's what I'd say if I were in opposition right now. These guys are corrupt and incompetent. They have screwed up the Iraq war, turned FEMA into a joke and landed the next generation with a mountain of debt. We're for making the homeland safer, winning back our allies, and taking on the Iranian dictatorship. We're for energy independence, universal healthcare and balancing the budget again. Now, let Rove do his worst. Hey, we need Democrats who relish the fight, not timid ones who cower at the prospect. Bring back the happy warriors. Please.

2007 Budget

The 2007 budget was released by the Administration yesterday and immediately pronounced dead on arrival by members of Congress, economists, and commentators. It contains few surprises unless you are one of those dedicated Bush supporters who believe all his public utterances. Defense and security are to be increased over present spending by 51%. The following agencies will receive percentage cuts: Education 3.8% (so much for the SOTU science and math emphasis); Justice 7.2% (since Attorney General Gonzales told the Justice committee yesterday that the President can do what ever he wants, we no longer need Justice lawyers justifying Administration actions or, disloyally, taking issue with them); EPA 4.0% (global warming is really making the winters a lot more bearable); Transportation 9.4% (keep buying those cars and keep using Middle East oil); and Labor 3.9% (of course!).

The budget actually contains money for Iraq and Afghanistan in a rare fit of honesty compared to prior budgets that just ignored those expenditures. However, it is only $50 billion. So far this year we are going to spend $120 billion. Does this mean a troop reduction? Nope, probably just a supplemental request in the middle of the year that never gets compared to the original deficit.

The budget deficit is $350 billion, although this is really a misleading figure. Social Security will take in $884 billion and payout $586 billion. This leaves a surplus of $298 billion - to be used to cover the looming Social Security crisis (remember last year’s SOTU proposal). That is a nice thought, but that is not how it works. The surplus just gets tossed into the income side of the budget and is used to offset 2007 expenditures and we create a Treasury promise to pay the $298 billion, with interest, sometime in the future after this administration is out of office. If we really budgeted honestly, the 2007 deficit would be $350 billion plus the social security surplus of $298 billion for a whopping $648 billion deficit.

Flickr

I discovered the Flickr photographic web site a few weeks ago and am very impressed with the many things it does. You can upload photos to the site and use them solely for your own purposes of storing them as backup and viewing them when you please. It also allows you to share photos with anyone you specify and limit viewing to those people. But the real fun starts when you make photos public, which allows them to be seen by anyone who uses Flickr. Each photo can be assigned as many descriptive tags as you like and Flickr’s search feature then lets you find photos by tag. Finally, you can place your photos in Groups of similar subject matter. Flickr tells you when a new photo has been added to one of your groups.

There are over a million photos on Flickr. It has been in operation for two years. Many of the images are beautiful and serve as a good photographic education. You can mark any public photo as your personal favorite and see them presented to you in a slide show.

As impressive as these many features are, even more enjoyable are Groups that will comment on and suggest improvements to your photos. The C.A.F.E group allows you to enter any of your photographs and members of the group than suggest changes that they think will improve it as a photograph. It is an immense value to a budding photographer and a great opportunity to learn from knowledgeable people.

I submitted my photo of three umbrella carrying people outside the Miho Museum in Kansai. (You can see it if you click on the 2nd group of Flickr pictures labeled My Photos on the right sidebar.) A number of people made excellent comments; some even redid the cropping to demonstrate their approach. This led me to redo the photo and resulted in a much better photograph.

The process made me realize something about the difference between good photographs and pictures taken to provide personal memories. I always liked the original of this photo because it reminded me of my experience visiting the Miho Museum near Kyoto. It was built on the top of a mountain and a major effort was made to preserve the remote natural environment (shearing the top of the mountain off, erecting the building, and recreating as much of the natural scenery as possible as 75% of the museum was placed underground}. My picture reminded me of the setting and that is what I see when I look at it. But that personal meaning doesn't necessarily translate into a good photograph that will interest someone else who doesn’t bring similar personal memories to bear. A good photograph better stand on its own. I guess I will just keep both of them for different reasons, but it is clear that the revised photo is the much better photograph.

NSA Surveillance

How many US Citizens have had NSA listening in? Bush and Scott McClellan have said or implied this is a limited program. Today's Washington Post reported that the actual number is over one thousand with one analyst claiming 5,000. More importantly, the Post reports that almost all of the conversations failed to demonstrate any link to terrorism once NSA analyzed the conversations. Fewer than ten were worthy of further review. This never stopped Vice President Cheney from stating that the program "has saved thousands of lives."

Apparently the large activity is computer analysis of 'metadata', which is information associated with origin and destination of message, but does not contain content. This could be a rational for changing present FISA laws that the administration currently subverts. But they have put themselves into a position where, as usual, they cannot admit a mistake and, therefore, they may eventually lose the ability to use this program. Why they didn't request this when they had everyone's support, is ignorance, arrogance, or both.

We Will Get Fooled Again

This is the recurrent theme underlying five years of the Bush Administration. They make a public stirring claim about a program or initiative and then quietly do the opposite. Marc Kaufman in today’s Washington Post wrote that “the Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mark B. McClellan, said in an interview this week that an ever-growing number of generics is essential to controlling the cost to the government and seniors of the new Medicare prescription drug program.”
Kaufman’s article went on to describe the backlog of 800 generic drugs waiting for FDA review. Once the patent for a brand-name drug expires, generics hit the marketplace at a 60-90% reduction in cost, as soon as they are approved by FDA.
The FDA says they have no plans to increase their review staff despite the backlog and the increase in requests expected in the future. They have 200 staff reviewing 800 requests for generic drugs compared to 2,500 staff reviewing 150 new brand-name drugs each year.
So just who benefits from this situation, which keeps the brand-name drug in the market as a monopoly beyond the term of the patent? Consumers? No. Big pharmaceutical companies? You got it. Where have you heard this one before?

SOTU Day 2

The President was on the road yesterday redelivering the SOTU in Tennessee. But back in DC reality hits home. The Republican Congress, with no fear of a veto from Bush, passed a budget package that will save $40 billion dollars over the next five years. The deficit does need to go down but the method chosen is revealing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicaid changes will raise costs on 13 million poor recipients and end coverage for 65,000 enrollees. Child support payments in the billions will be eliminated, but Medicare insurers will save $22 billion over the next 10 years. It will also allow interest rates on some student loans to rise and fall with the market. I guess only those who can afford tuition will be able to take advantage of the new scientific programs heralded yesterday. And don’t worry, this saving will be eliminated or exceeded as soon as the Republicans make the tax cut permanent.

One Thing at a Time

The limited goals put forth in the SOTU are the result not only of Bush’s weakened political position, but also an administration recognition that the presidency can only handle one major effort at a time. For this administration that is Iraq and its conflation with terrorism. In selling that program the new theme is that we cannot become isolationist. Anyone opposed to the Iraq war will now be vilified in those terms. I don’t hear anyone arguing for that position or talking about it other than Bush. This is a classic red herring.

Being opposed to Iraq is not synonymous with isolationism. It is the exact opposite. Fighting terrorism, which most of the world and all of the US agreed was warranted after 9/11, has been thwarted by our immersion in Iraq. We lost the support of allied countries and became a catalyst for terrorist recruitment. It is nice to be rid of Saddam, but that was a sidebar to what should have been our overwhelming strategy of defeating terrorism and its root causes.

Warrantless Searches

Bush continues to defend his use of NSA to listen to US conversations by stating that he told Congress and that, therefore, is proof that he was not “trying to pull a fast one”. What he doesn’t say is that the briefing was to four Congressional Intelligence leaders, two Republican and two Democrats, but that they were restricted in discussing the subject with any members. In fact, Senator Rockefeller sent his objections to the program to Cheney and was ignored.

Katrina

The GAO issued a highly critical report on the government’s response to Katrina. They especially criticized the failure of the White House to name a single individual, accountable to the President, to oversee all governmental efforts. An internal Administration review has identified 60 flaws in the Federal government’s response plan. Representative Tom Davis (R-Va.), who requested the GAO study said:

The director . . . of the National Hurricane Center said this was the big one, but when this happened . . . Bush is in Texas, Card is in Maine, the vice president is fly-fishing. I mean, who's in charge here?

Congress as Seen by Those Who Know

Congressman John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), who is the dark horse candidate for Tom DeLay’s leadership position, in criticizing the proposals to change lobbying rules said the Congress only knows how to do two things well – nothing and overreact.

State of the Union

Speaking as a weakened national leader with severely limited resources and most of his “political capital” squandered, President Bush made a relatively conciliatory State of the Union Speech. Most people agree that the reliance on Middle Eastern oil is deleterious to the well being of the United States and that an emphasis on science education is imperative.

The problem of course is how do you believe any thing he or the administration says given their history of misleading statements or grand proposals that are then not subsequently funded. Until a budget proposal is formulated and acted on, you have to remain skeptical about the follow through on his ideas.

Even the mild attempt to lower political divisiveness has to be measured against the statements that are immediately contradicted by facts. It doesn’t seem to phase him to keep repeating assertions that have been disproved or are just wrong. With a base and an electorate that doesn’t seem to care, he continues to get away with it.

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post today wrote an analysis pointing out the errors in the more egregious statements:

Bush strongly suggested that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks could have been prevented if the phone calls of two hijackers had been monitored under the program. This echoes an assertion made earlier this year by Vice President Cheney. But the Sept. 11 commission and congressional investigators said the government had compiled significant information on the two suspects before the attacks and that bureaucratic problems -- not a lack of information -- were the main reasons for the security breakdown. The FBI did not even know where the two suspects lived and missed numerous opportunities to track them down in the 20 months before the attacks.

In other sections of his speech, Bush omitted context or made rhetorical claims that are open to question.

Referring to Iraq, he said the United States is "continuing reconstruction efforts." He did not use the word "spending" because officials say the administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request to be submitted to Congress this month. About $18 billion was previously budgeted, and $16 billion of that has been committed, but nearly a third was devoted to security and law enforcement.

At another point, Bush said the number of jobs went up by 4.6 million in the past two and half years. There was a reason he chose not to start from the beginning of his presidency -- that would have brought the net number of added jobs down to 2 million over the five-year period.

Bush also made a pair of contradictory pledges on the budget. He said the budget deficit -- which has soared during his presidency -- is on track to decline by half by 2009. But he also urged a permanent extension of his tax cuts, due to expire in five years. The Congressional Budget Office says this would send the budget deficit soaring after 2011.

He repeatedly warned against the dangers of "isolationism," but the Democratic leadership has not called for isolationist policies, and polls show that the American public has little interest in them.

Bush ended his address with a stirring image that "every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing." But then he said, "The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe, and been complicit in the oppression of others."
This is historically misleading. At the end of World War II, the United States allowed the division of Europe between Soviet and Western spheres, though it drew the line at giving up West Berlin. And the United States permitted the Soviet Union's grabbing of large parts of other countries -- or even whole countries, such as the Baltic States.