Category Archives: Politics

Assessing the Writers

This post by Dean Baker goes to the notion of assessment.

Neither the Post nor NYT articles on the new $286 billion 5-year farm bill (approximately 1.8 percent of spending or $190 per person per year) passed by the House would provide readers any basis for answering this question. Both articles notes some of the largest subsidies, but neither tries to sum them up and tell us whether the total is more or less than in the last bill. The NYT was kind enough to tell us that most of the money in the bill, $30 billion a year, goes to food stamps.)

The comparison with prior bills is essential If someone is interested in assessing the effectiveness of the Democratic Congress in restraining porkbarrel spending. No one could have thought that it would fall to zero with even the most determined leadership, so the question is are they making progress? Readers of the NYT and Post have no idea.

Lying Liar

The Veracifier video of Gonzales testimony here is just outrageous.

Josh Marshall is right on here, too:

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn’t apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

I think that the future and the past have already connected with this “precedent” or the conditions that provide for its proliferation. Entertainment news, disingenuous schooling, willful forgetfulness, arbitrary government decision-making, inimical government, and scorn for creative problem solving and intellectual pursuit. On a grand scale, we must chose to play by rules and not pervert the very notion of that choice by corrupting agreements. The Constitution is a fragile thing and will only keep if we use it wisely.

Rome did fall.

Spazeboy on VBing

Spazeboy has published his Guide to Political Video Blogging.

There are a few reasons why I undertook this project:

* Videoblogging is a powerful way to document local government

Take, for example, MattW’s video of a recent Energy Policy Forum featuring State Representative Steve Fontana. Not everyone could attend that meeting, or knew that it was taking place, but because Matt filmed it and published it online, we all benefit.
* Videoblogging provides a way to hold our leaders accountable

Look no further than Connecticut Bob’s October 6, 2006 encounter with Senator Lieberman. Bob asked about Lieberman’s use of the words “partisan frenzy” and Lieberman denied it. Not only that, Lieberman went one step further, saying that in fact those were Ned Lamont’s words. All Bob had to do was splice in the 3 seconds of video from the day prior wherein Lieberman says “partisan frenzy” and the case was closed.
* There’s a need for this kind of a guide

There are many tutorials and guides on the web that teach you how to do this or that with your video camera or editing software, but I was unable to find any guide that addressed the needs of the political videoblogger from gearing up to uploading.

On Veracity

These days it seems that politicians must choose a narrative and stick to it. I don’t think they want to do this, but, then again, they may. Here’s Sam Brownbeck explaining himself

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

I disagree “wholeheartedly” with everything here and am, honestly speaking, stunned by the illogic. Brownbeck claims that “we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason.” He “believes” that “there cannot be any contradiction between the two.” This is pure nonsense. Reason doesn’t require that faith provide substantiation or, as Brownbeck puts it, supplement. He may “believe” that this is true, but reality doesn’t agree. If the color red appears to me on a tree in the form of an apple, I don’t have to believe in the color red to acknowledge the fact. Nor is reason, on the other hand (and this is where Brownbeck’s logic falls short), required as a supplement for faith in The Great Lettuce Head. This last point is what Brownbeck wants but will not say outright. Brownbeck wants science to support the intangible but he won’t say this because it would sound childish. Science and faith are not complimentary. Brownbeck sees this as critique of his faith. I don’t understand why. That an apple is not an orange does not diminish the taste or the essence of either.

Brownbeck claims that science cannot “help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love.” This an absurd statement. Brownbeck supplies no examples of faith helping us to understand anything. Faith has been argued as its own kind of understanding. Here’s what Luther said on the issue

Instead, faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever. He stumbles around and looks for faith and good works, even though he does not know what faith or good works are. Yet he gossips and chatters about faith and good works with many words.

Luther argues that faith is a state of being; it’s not something you can control; it’s an external force acting through the human medium. Others would argue that faith is more linked to trust. Others, just to close this, such as Saint Augustine, would argue, that faith is a “form of knowledge” whose authenticity derives from its independence from the observable.

Blest are they who have not seen and have believed

Human suffering can be understood in many ways, even via a method of reasoning, such as “opening one’s eyes” and connecting suffering to “action” like assisting communities in the revitalization of schools and providing care to those who cannot afford the cost of surgery.

To close, here’s Coyne on questions that require the raising of hands:

Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said “no”? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? And all the more shocking coming from those who aspire to run a technologically sophisticated nation.

Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate. When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they “didn’t believe in evolution,” three hands went into the air—those of Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo. Although I am a biologist who has found himself battling creationism frequently throughout his professional life, I was still mortified. Because there is just as much evidence for the fact of evolution as there is for the existence of atoms, anyone raising his hand must have been grossly misinformed.

I don’t know whether to attribute the show of hands to the candidates’ ignorance of the mountain of evidence for evolution, or to a cynical desire to pander to a public that largely rejects evolution (more than half of Americans do). But I do know that it means that our country is in trouble. As science becomes more and more important in dealing with the world’s problems, Americans are falling farther and farther behind in scientific literacy. Among citizens of industrialized nations, Americans rank near the bottom in their understanding of math and science. Over half of all Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun once a year, and nearly half think that humans once lived, Flintstone-like, alongside dinosaurs.

Evolution and Belief

I have not and will not be following any of the debates for so-called president, but I read that three grown men didn’t get the memo on evolution.

Three of the candidates indicated that they did not believe in it.

None is a front-runner but even so there will be American scientists who will feel deeply depressed that serious politicians in 2007 can be disputing the entire thrust of modern knowledge about how the world was formed and how it, well, evolved.

What does it mean “not to believe” in evolution. This may be the kind of thing that people will often say to express disagreement.

“I don’t believe in _____________” means “I disagree” with it. (In the case of a political debate, I’d have to assume that disagreement is always political.)

But what, then, does it mean to disagree with evolution? “I don’t believe” mixes obstinacy with the inability to supply facts and logic to a claim, especially when the science is both deep and nuanced. What member of the glass-eyed class could stand in front of a crowd and piss off just about everyone with hard-nosed reason? I’d vote for her.

Open Borders

I’m an advocate of open borders. I’d like to see gates and walls come down and any plan to maintain and build structures along the US Mexico border cease. This is, of course, a position of hypothesis that asks: what would happen if border gates, walls, and barriers were removed? And why would a particular a set of results happen given conditions? I enjoy conjectural tests and simulations.

If A results then what policies and positions would prove correct or incorrect? How would the idea and arguments behind nationalism and protectionism change? Why let oranges and poetry through and not people?

It’s a serious prospect. The United States invests billions in maintaining its borders, as do other countries, billions that could be spent in better, more constructive ways, such as on increasing the imagination of people. We know that walls will not keep people out. But can the arguments for borders ever go beyond vague comparative analysis without flexible spatial change?

Source:http://aviewtothesouth.blogspot.com/2006/10/mexico-us-helped-create-migrant-flow.htmlImage source: Leftside.

Border walls remove a huge swath of landscape from human vision. They hinder sight, seeing, travel, distance, and the imagination, a wasted canvas. They construct difficult metaphors to overcome in debates about identity, safety, economics, and law.

Futures Investment

Emily Gertz has this to say about future investment in clean tech, which bring back to mind Connecticut’s plans for the future.

Are clean technologies the investment opportunity of the 21st century? That was the breathless question at the panel I went to on Thursday, the second day of the “Advancing Sustainable Prosperity” conference in Boston. And some of the answers suggest to me that however much the private sector comes around to acting to slow, stop, and even reverse climate disruption (and let’s hope that’s 100 percent), we can’t rely wholly on market forces to transition to a low or no-carbon energy future.

The information the panel shared was dizzying from an investor’s perspective: clean technologies have accelerated rapidly over the last four or so years to become a $70 billion market worldwide, according to Kenneth Locklin of Clean Energy Group (a trade group representing power generators and distributors advocating for sustainable energy generation, that has worked closely with CERES on its Investor Network on Climate Risk), and current growth rates this will get close to $100 billion by the end of 2007. This year biofuels are one of the most exciting investment arenas, Locklin said, displaying a graph showing skyrocketing amounts of ethanol production.

Politics and PBS

It’s good to have Bill Moyers back online at PBS after some pretty crude political shenanigans and yet another example of cultural conservativist hypocrisy about the “marketplace” of ideas. Nice interviews too with Josh Marshall and Jon Stewart. Moyers’ MO has always been to provide space for people to speak, a kind of media space that’s almost evaporated from conventional news’ formats.