RALPH G. NEAS

He is the president of People for the American Way and until recently, I only knew him by name. His appearance on Hardball has turned me into a big fan. Here are some excerpts:

NEAS: Number one, Justice Sunday several months ago was one of the most disturbing incidents in recent American history. It was truly religious McCarthyism at its worst. Unfounded allegations about people who were trying to defeat the nuclear option and save the filibuster were accused of discriminating people of faith. It was reprehensible. The charges of Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council are false and inflammatory. And by the way, over the last 55 years, there have been 21 Supreme Court nominations. Fifteen of the 21, 70 percent have been Republican. Seven of the last nine have been Republican appointees. And the two Democrats were approved after consulting with Senator Orrin Hatch. We have had a conservative court that Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council are attacking.
They even want to impeach Anthony Kennedy and they call Sandra Day O‘Connor a betrayal to conservativism. That proves how extreme Tony Perkins is.

NEAS: I‘m not sure how it cuts. It certainly limits his options. I think he was considering a slate of candidates. But what we have said is that we want a compromise candidate. We like this consultation, we hope it is real and leads to a consensus; someone in the mold of Sandra Day O‘Connor, who obviously disagreed with us a lot, but was unpredictable and a solid mainstream conservative.
Someone in the mold of Scalia and Thomas, someone that Tony Perkins wants, and I think George W. Bush has promised Tony Perkins and the radical religious right someone in the mold of Thomas and Scalia, would overturn more than 100 Supreme Court precedents going back to the 1930s. This is a fight over judicial philosophy.

GREGORY: . or so you argue. We don‘t know that.

NEAS: No, no. We have done a study of every dissent and concurring opinion of Scalia and Thomas going back to 1991 and 1986 respectively. With one or two more like-minded justices, more than 100 Supreme Court precedents would be overturned, affecting privacy, affecting equal opportunity, the environment, and many other things.

JOBS SPIN

(Via Atrios)

In his radio address this week, Bush bragged that "Since May of 2003, we've added nearly 4 million new jobs. " That sounds pretty good unless you know the context. Because of population growth, we need at least 140,000 new jobs a month just to break even. 26 X 140K == 3,640K, so we are barely ahead of the break even rate for job creation. Another way to look at this is to examine the percentage of the labor force that is employed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this has declined from 66.3% in May 2003 to 66.1% in July 2005.

MEDIOCRE RESEARCH

Yup, I'm talking about me. I was probably first told to go to the original source and read all of it when I was in high school but I have all too often neglected to do so. For example, I have not read all of Novak's original column that outed Plame, so I missed this:

NOVAK:Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.

(Thanx to MediaMatters for bringing this to my attention)

Two points came immediately to mind:

1) The report that Wilson was sent to check out was not identified as being from the Italians. According to the SSCI report, the source is identified only as "foreign government service."
However, the "CIA sent a separate version of the assessment to the Vice President which differed only in that it named the foreign government service"

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/congress/2004_rpt/iraq-wmd-intell_chapter2.htm

2) If by "Italian report" Novak or his sources meant the forged documents, then they were wrong. Wilson's trip occurred months before the U.S. got the forged documents.

"ECONOMICAL WITH THE TRUTH"

I think I first heard that line when I was watching the old BBC/PBS show Yes, Minister and it came back to me as I was reading a WH press transcript:

Press Gaggle with Ari Fleischer and Dr. Condoleeza Rice
Aboard Air Force One
En Route Entebbe, Uganda
July 11, 2003
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030711-7.html

DR. RICE: If you got to the Secretary's statement, you will also see that on the aluminum tubes, the Secretary says that there's some disagreement about the nature of these aluminum tubes. That was also a consensus judgment of the NIA that the aluminum tubes were likely for nuclear centrifuges. The INR had taken an exception.

Well, it wasn't only the INR that objected to the aluminum tube claim:

In late 2001, experts at Oak Ridge asked an alumnus, Houston G. Wood III, to review the controversy. Wood, founder of the Oak Ridge centrifuge physics department, is widely acknowledged to be among the most eminent living experts.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Wood said in an interview that "it would have been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges. It stretches the imagination to come up with a way. I do not know any real centrifuge experts that feel differently."
As an academic, Wood said, he would not describe "anything that you absolutely could not do." But he said he would "like to see, if they're going to make that claim, that they have some explanation of how you do that. Because I don't see how you do it."
In the last week of September, the development of the NIE required a resolution of the running disagreement over the significance of the tubes. The Energy Department had one vote. Four agencies -- with specialties including eavesdropping, maps and foreign military forces -- judged that the tubes were part of a centrifuge program that could be used for nuclear weapons. Only the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research joined the judgment of the Energy Department. The estimate, as published, said that "most analysts" believed the tubes were suitable and intended for a centrifuge cascade.
Majority votes make poor science, said Peter D. Zimmerman, a former chief scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
"In this case, the experts were at Z Division at Livermore [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] and in DOE intelligence here in town, and they were convinced that no way in hell were these likely to be centrifuge tubes," he said.

Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence; [FINAL Edition]
Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus. The Washington
Post. Washington, D.C.: Aug 10, 2003. pg. A.01

FOUNDATIONS

I've been puzzled about the Fundies insistence about the need for a strict adherence to their interpretation of the Bible for a meaningful life.
Thanks to commenter -R at NewsHounds, I think I've found the key to their motivation: anxiety, specifically anxiety about human freedom. -R supplied to following passage from an ID nut, Phillip E. Johnson, the patriarch of the "Intelligent Design" movement:

"If there is no Creator who has a purpose for your life, then there
is no such thing as sin," he said. "Sin would mean that you are in a wrong
relationship to your Creator. Well, you can't be in the wrong relationship
with the particles. They don't care. So you don't need a Savior, to save you
from the consequences of your wrong relationship with the particles. ...
"When you give away creation, you have given away everything." LINK

So, without a Creator, there are no rules. This reminded of a saying attributed to Dostoyevsky, "If there is no God, everything is permitted." It turns out that this wasn't written by Doestoyevsky but it does come close to the idea mentioned in The Brothers Karamazov (Garnett translation):

"I ask your permission to drop this subject altogether," Miusov repeated. "I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago, in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend Ivan Fyodorovitch's theories."
"Is that really your conviction as to the consequences of the disappearance of the faith in immortality?" the elder asked Ivan suddenly. "Yes. That was my contention. There is no virtue if there is no immortality." LINK

For Johnson, the existence of the biblical God ensures the validity of the morality expressed by not only the 10 Commandments but also by the many ancillary rules in Leviticus and elsewhere in the Bible. Like Ivan, Johnson feels the alternative to the Creator is untrammeled egoism and crime, certainly an anxiety-provoking outcome.

BANNED AGAIN!

It took a while but I've been banned from LGF! Here are some of the details:


#199

piniella 8/3/2005 06:43AM PDT

#2 Cali - "i agreed with the mission then and do now as well"
What was the "mission"?




#5 Cali - "why we did it "
"But make no mistake - as I said earlier - we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about." -Ari Fleischer Press Briefing 4/10/03
TO DATE:
KIA 1820 WMD 0




#21 Rayra - "You're a horrible little creature."
"But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer." - Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America," March 18, 2003
WHO'S "HORRIBLE"?



#97 nam grunt - "The only solution to Iraq is to put 50k American and 50k British Troops in there and lock the whole damn country down "
We don't have the troops and neither do the Brits.




# 117 ed - "Iran's growing nuclear weapons threat."
I don't think "growing" is the correct word:
Iran Is Judged 10 Years From Nuclear Bomb U.S. Intelligence Review Contrasts With Administration Statements
By Dafna Linzer Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 2, 2005; A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/01/AR2005080101453_pf.html

# 325 lanceboil -"then doesn't that make Bush even better? he's not only kept up with population growth"
54 months X 140K == 7560K new jobs.
Bush == 223K new jobs
As I used to say after running the table:
NEXT!

# 339 pax - "for the past twenty yeras, the census dept has told us our pop. growth is near zero!"
1980 226,504,825 source: http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1981-02.pdf
1985 237,505,000 http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1985-02.pdf
1990 245,386,000 http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1990-02.pdf
1995 260,000,000 http://www.census.gov/prod/1/gen/95statab/pop.pdf
I could go on but I'm sure by now you can get someone to explain these numbers to you.
#408

Charles 8/3/2005 08:03AM PDT
The ghoul piniella has posted its last comment at LGF.

#410

vxbush 8/3/2005 08:04AM PDT

408
THANK YOU, CHARLES!


#411

Goddessoftheclassroom 8/3/2005 08:04AM PDT

Oh, Charles, THANK YOU!


#412

USMC RECON 8/3/2005 08:04AM PDT

Thank You ,Charles!


#413

not neo just conservative 8/3/2005 08:04AM PDT

#408 Charles
Thank You


#414

Dirk Diggler 8/3/2005 08:05AM PDT

The ghoul piniella has posted its last comment at LGF.
Thank G*d!

ANOTHER U.S. AL-QUEDA LEAK

Exclusive: British, American security services clash over terror intelligence
Michael Smith

American officials compromised another intercept operation during the investigation into the September 11 attacks when they leaked details of two mobile telephone conversations between al-Qaeda members that with hindsight appeared to refer to the attacks.

The conversations sent immediately before the attacks had not been processed until the day after because of the amount of material that was available and as a result became a controversial part of the evidence of intelligence failure.

British intelligence had barred its US counterpart from releasing details of the actual telephone conversations because it would alert those who made them to the fact that not only their phones but the phones of the people they were talking to were being monitored. But they were leaked anyway, cutting off another potential source of intelligence on al-Qaeda activities.

HACKETT

It looks like Paul "lost" but we need to put the numbers in a historical perspective. The Ohio 2nd Congressional District has voted heavily Republican in the recent past:

1994 Rob Portman (R) 77%
1996 Rob Portman (R) 76%
1998 Rob Portman (R) 76%
2000 Rob Portman (R) 74%
2002 Rob Portman (R) 74%
2004 Rob Portman (R) 72%

These results could be primarily due to a personally very popular candidate instead of an ideological preference so let's look at previous results:

1992 Willis Gradison (R) 70%
1990 Willis Gradison (R) 64%
1988 Willis Gradison (R) 72%
1986 Willis Gradison (R) 71%
1984 Willis Gradison (R) 69%
1982 Willis Gradison (R) 63% (4 way race)

I'd say that a 52-48 defeat was a remarkable achievement in this heavily Republican district.

MISSING BOOKS

The Old Testament is composed of 39 books but there may be as many as 23 others that are missing. The lowest estimated number of missing books is 6. Here are a couple of examples:

The Book of Jashar is quoted in Joshua 10: 12-13 and Samuel 1:18. These are poems and antedate the books they are found in.

The Book of the Wars of the Lord is quoted in Numbers 21:14. This poem is so old that it it very difficult to translate into meaningful terms.

It seems odd that God would allow some of his handiwork to disappear.

SOURCE: The Bible: A History - the making and impact of the Bible by Stephen M. Miller and Robert V. Huber, Good Books, Intercourse PA 17534: 2004.

ANOTHER PLAME?

Spy's Notes on Iraqi Aims Were Shelved, Suit Says
By JAMES RISEN
August 1, 2005

WASHINGTON, July 31 - The Central Intelligence Agency was told by an informant in the spring of 2001 that Iraq had abandoned a major element of its nuclear weapons program, but the agency did not share the information with other agencies or with senior policy makers, a former C.I.A. officer has charged.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court here in December, the former C.I.A. officer, whose name remains secret, said that the informant told him that Iraq's uranium enrichment program had ended years earlier and that centrifuge components from the scuttled program were available for examination and even purchase.
The officer, an employee at the agency for more than 20 years, including several years in a clandestine unit assigned to gather intelligence related to illicit weapons, was fired in 2004.

In his lawsuit, he says his dismissal was punishment for his reports questioning the agency's assumptions on a series of weapons-related matters. Among other things, he charged that he had been the target of retaliation for his refusal to go along with the agency's intelligence conclusions.

The former officer's claims concerning his reporting on the Iraqi nuclear weapons program were not addressed in a report issued in March by the presidential commission that examined intelligence regarding such weapons in Iraq. He did not testify before the commission, Mr. Krieger said.

A former senior staff member of the commission said the panel was not aware of the officer's allegations. The claims were also not included in the 2004 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on prewar intelligence. He and his lawyer met with staff members of that Senate committee in a closed-door session last December, months after the report was issued.

In his lawsuit, the former officer said that in the spring of 2001, he met with a valuable informant who had examined and purchased parts of Iraqi centrifuges. Centrifuges are used to turn uranium into fuel for nuclear weapons. The informant reported that the Iraqi government had long since canceled its uranium enrichment program and that the C.I.A. could buy centrifuge components if it wanted to.

The officer filed his reports with the Counter Proliferation Division in the agency's clandestine espionage arm. The reports were never disseminated to other American intelligence agencies or to policy makers, as is typically done, he charged.

According to his suit, he was told that the agency already had detailed information about continuing Iraqi nuclear weapons efforts, and that his informant should focus on other countries.

THE WALMART FAMILY CAN'T GET ENOUGH...

Wal-Mart family lobbies for tax cuts
By Jim Hopkins, USA TODAY
Posted 4/5/2005 10:31 PM Updated 4/5/2005 11:21 PM
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2005-04-05-waltons-usat_x.htm

Now, in a little-noticed move, the company's founding family has plunged into a fight to pass income tax changes and other legislation that could preserve its grip on the USA's biggest business and the family's $84 billion fortune. The Walton support for Bush and other fiscal conservatives assumed new urgency last month when Wal-Mart sweetened its dividend - boosting Walton dividend income above $1 billion a year.
Bush's dividend tax cut, enacted two years ago and set to expire in 2009, will save the family as much as $51 million this year.

WALMART AND MORALITY

Some time ago, a state senator was trying to find out how many Walmart employees were on Medicaid, known as AHCCCS in Arizona. Well, we now have the answer:

1 in 10 Arizona Wal-Mart employees insured through AHCCCS
By Howard Fischer
CAPITOL MEDIA SERVICES
Published: 07.29.2005
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/86402.php

PHOENIX - More than one of every 10 Wal-Mart employees are getting their health insurance paid for by Arizona taxpayers, according to figures obtained from the state.

That means close to one person out of every 50 working adults who are enrolled in the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System listed their employer as Wal-Mart. Put a different way, Wal-Mart employs about 1.1 percent of all Arizonans. But the percentage of their workers on AHCCCS is twice as high.

The numbers came as a surprise to state Sen. Richard Miranda, D-Phoenix, who tried earlier this year to get a law requiring DES to disclose the employers of people on AHCCCS. That measure was defeated amid opposition from corporate lobbyists, including Rip Wilson representing Wal-Mart.

Other large companies are included in the list.
For example, 721 people applying - and being found eligible - for health benefits listed themselves as being employed by the Basha's grocery chain. That company, the third largest private employer in the state, includes Basha's and Food City markets. That amounts to about 5 percent of the company's workforce.

That number is in line with Safeway, though the figure for Albertsons was below 3.5 percent. Safeway publicist Kerry Luginbill said her company does provide benefits to workers. She said there are "various reasons" an employee might be getting care through AHCCCS, such as how soon after they are hired that they become eligible for company-provided health insurance.

A call to Basha's was not returned.

Target, a Wal-Mart competitor, also had 5 percent of its employees enrolled in AHCCCS. A company publicist did not return a call.

For Walgreen Co. the figure is closer to 4 percent.