Congress has cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, an engine for research in science and technology, just two years after endorsing a plan to double the amount given to the agency.
The $388 billion spending bill for the current fiscal year, approved by both houses of Congress on Nov. 20, provides $5.473 billion for the National Science Foundation, which is $105 million less than it got last year and $272 million less than President Bush requested.
"I am astonished that we would make this decision at a time when other nations continue to surpass our students in math and science and consistently increase their funding of basic research," said Mr. Ehlers, a former physics professor who is chairman of a technology subcommittee. "
The National Science Foundation supports technological innovation that is crucial to the sustained economic prosperity that America has enjoyed for several decades."
While cutting the budget of the science foundation, Congress found money for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in Birmingham, the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, bathhouses in Hot Springs, Ark., and hundreds of similar projects.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
More Evidence of Republican disdain for Science
Monday, November 29, 2004
Anti-Matter: The Bush Doctrine
There's the obvious:
The importation of faith into the public sphere. This is different from religion. Religion has always held a place in the public sphere, in the sense that religion is protected, tolerated, and meant to be separate from the State. But faith as a concept was never an American ideal. Americans were always trained pragmatists, scientists and workers. For a far more salient commentary on the rejection of science and the scientific method in America today, see Small Precautions.
The NY Observer has a great piece on this very subject, from a political point of view. Money quote:
The cost of destroying a secular public life will, if allowed to proceed, undermine the stability of American democracy. All these people on their knees holding candles may not appreciate it, but public religion, not private religious formation, is the enemy of our kind of government. Even in the long-past era when most Americans were some brand or other of Calvinist, religion had to be pushed into the corners of politics so that a nascent secular culture could nourish democracy. In the first half of the 19th century, the battle to drive religion out of the political forum and into the home was not easily nor ever entirely won. Waves of religious mania battered the country and threatened democratic institutions and practice. They still do.Now you can add Bush's approach to immigration to this list, for which I will keep a running tally. Really, there are two policies here. Given illegals who cross the border temporary working visas. Keep students out. Does anyone see how stupid this is? Raise your hands. Joseph Nye Jr. writes about this in today's NY Times.
The Christians and their churches, which are using their temporary, strategic, electoral-minority position to gain majority dominance, will live to wish that they hadn’t labored so long to put "people of faith" in the driver’s seat. Other than dogmatism and a built-in resistance to reason, logic and science, sectarian religions have nothing in common except a potential antagonism for each other—one which holds the threat of someday ripping the country to shreds. "Religion" and "faith" are pushing ahead on a common front now, but in due course they will fall on each other with mortal fury. History teaches that the one thing religions hate more than secularism is other religions. With each year that religions are encouraged and given a preferential place, they become more demanding and more truculent in claiming more power and deference. As more members of more religious organizations adopt peculiar and distinguishing forms of dress, headgear and hair, the lines harden and the probability of physical conflict between these groups of faith-based fanatics
grows.
Money quote:
Last year, the number of foreign students at American colleges and universities
fell for the first time since 1971. Recent reports show that total foreign student enrollment in our 2,700 colleges and universities dropped 2.4 percent,
with a much sharper loss at large research institutions. Two-thirds of the 25
universities with the most foreign students reported major enrollment declines.The costs to the American economy are significant. Educating foreign students is a $13 billion industry. Moreover, the United States does not produce enough home-grown doctoral students in science and engineering to meet our needs. The shortfall is partly made up by the many foreign students who stay here after earning their degrees.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Congress is the last refuge of scoundrels
Bravo to the Gray Lady for publishing Earle's Op-Ed today.
The main point is that regardless of how partisan he may be, it is a grand jury of citizen peers who will decide whether or not to indict him, NOT Ronnie Earle. And they will indict him if he committed a crime, and there is enough evidence to convince them that he should at the very least answer some questions.
And as a side note, of the 15 people Ronnie Earle has prosecuted, 12 were Democrats. Quite simply, Texas was a Democratic state until recently, and as Earle put it, "most crimes by elected officials involve the abuse of power; you have to have power before you can abuse it. "
Friday, November 19, 2004
The Looming Iranian Crisis
From today's NY Times:
A European diplomat familiar with the British-French-German initiative said they were also pessimistic that Iran would back off its nuclear ambitions, but that they had no choice but to engage Iran because military options were distasteful or impractical after the troubled invasion and occupation of Iraq.
American policy is truly non-existent. They literally have their heads up their ass. They have no idea what to do, who to turn to (they've even contemplated working with the UN!!), or how to get the Iranians to come to the table.
On the other hand, many in the administration say that Iran is not likely to enter into talks with the United States, as the Europeans want, because the revolutionary clerics who control the government are unalterably opposed to engaging with a country it considers the enemy.
Great.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Running on empty
From the Center for American Progress:
Conservatives waited until after the election was over to breach the country's debt ceiling. Although the country actually reached $7.4 trillion in debt in early October, Treasury Secretary John Snow employed a host of accounting tricks to technically avoid breaching the limit. One trick even including suspending investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. Snow's moves were directly designed to prevent conservatives in the House from having to vote on such a politically sensitive matter in the weeks before the election.
From today's NY Times:
But what does all this mean? Our debt is not owned by Visa. It is owned by our trading partners, which puts us in a very awkward, un-American position. John Kerry had this to say on the Senate floor:The bill, if approved by the House in a vote expected on Thursday, would authorize the third big increase in the federal borrowing since President Bush took office in 2001. Federal debt has ballooned by $1.4 trillion over the past four years, to $7.4 trillion, and the new ceiling would allow borrowing to reach $8.2 trillion.
With no end in sight to the huge annual budget deficits, which hit a record of $412 billion this year, lawmakers predicted on Wednesday that the new ceiling would probably have to be raised again in about a year.
"To pay our bills, America now goes cup in hand to nations like China, Korea, Taiwan and Caribbean banking centers," Mr. Kerry said. "Those issues didn't go away on Nov. 3, no matter what the results."In 2002, the Bush administration received a debt limit increase of $450 billion dollars. The next year the Treasury requested, and Congress delivered, a $984 billion dollar credit line, the largest in history. That amount exceeded "all of the debt inherited by President Ronald Reagan, which was all of the debt accumulated from Bunker Hill [1776] to 1981." The Bush administration and its conservative allies have blown through nearly a trillion dollars in just 18 months.
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, if President Bush succeeds in passing his 2005 budget – which includes an extension of expiring tax cuts – the government will rack up about $6.2 trillion in additional debt between now and 2014, nearly doubling our current debt ($7.38 trillion) for a total of $14.5 trillion.
Interest payments on the mounting debt, which exceeded $321 billion in fiscal year 2004, also squeezes out funding for other priorities like education and health care.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Doc Rice? REALLY!?!
Israel/Palestine?
The announcement of Russia's new nucular missle?
Saudi Arabian terrorist financing?
The Iranian/EU deal? It seems the National Council for Resistance in Iran has announced that the Iranians are lying. We don't like the NCRI, but they're good at gathering intelligence.
How about the bombings in Argentina this morning?
No, wait, how about Margaret Hassan?
Poor Condi.
And in other news, Zarqawi has moved to Mosul. Things are calm now, apparently. Another battle won?
And the NY Times editorial about why we can't win against an insurgency is fascinating.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Maragaret Hassan believed dead
A few thoughts:
- Strange that they would shoot her, and not behead her, as they have done others.
- Why did they wait until after the American elections? Is it presumptuous to assume that they would be cognizant of the American political calendar? Am I a horrible person for wondering how this would have influenced the election had she been murdered two weeks ago?
Exchanging a pearl for a lollipop
Are they serious?
Here, we'll give you whatever you want. More trade? More money? What do you need? Just please stop enriching uranium (so openly) or Uncle Sam will get really really mad at us for being such shitty negotiators. But don't worry, he's too weak to do anything to you. We know you want WTO membership, but Uncle Sam said no. You kidnapped some of his kids 30 years ago, and he said you can't trade with us. But we'll trade with you anyway. Just please stop embarrassing us.
Buried at the end of the article is the money quote:
Making concessions on its nuclear program has been widely unpopular inside Iran, and Mr. Rowhani was put on the defensive by conservative Iranian journalists.
When a reporter for the official Islamic Republic News Agency remarked, "The reason Iran has given so many concessions is because the Iranian team was weak," Mr. Rowhani replied that the country's best diplomats had conducted the negotiations and "this is the outcome of our best diplomacy."
Another Iranian journalist cited an interview in an Iranian newspaper that accused Iran of giving "a pearl in exchange for a lollipop."
"That's not true," Mr. Rowhani shot back.
Friday, November 12, 2004
The Budget Deficit according to WSJ
Shockingly, the majority cited the "yawning budget deficit" as their biggest concern.
"...the economists caution that the deficit is likely to be a persistent long-term problem and they don't expect the president to have as much success in dealing with the deficit as he will have in addressing other economic issues."
"The budget deficit is a particularly intractable issue, economists say, because of continued spending demands."
""The bottom line here is, if we don't get a significant narrowing of the budget deficit, you're going to have increasing upward pressure on interest rates. That will increase private savings in the economy, but it will also slow the rate of the growth of the economy."
Told ya so.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
It's NOT the Culture, Stupid!
Money quote:
If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.
Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").
None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a great deal." The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs.
Iran, Forrest, Iran!!!!
Everyone's GOT to have an opinion on Iran these days. Where to begin? There's not much to say. We're screwed. They're going to make promises to the Euros, they'll stall for time, and go nucular. There's not much more to it. And there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
Iraq has been such a fiasco that we have lost total threat credibility. If we threaten them, I guarantee that their response will be, "Go ahead! We dare you!!". Since we know "for a fact" that there will be no draft, where are we going to get the soldiers? We also know we can't pay for another invasion/occupation. Not to mention that Iran is 4 times the land mass and three times the population of Iraq. AND we don't even know where the reactors are. At least in Iraq, we sort of knew because of 10 years of inspections. AND, I am willing to bet money that we will get NO COALITION.
William F. Buckley agrees.
As does the Economist.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
The Iraq War - State by State
For instance, New York State has paid $13,000,000,000 for the war in Iraq (of which New York City paid $4,000,000,000) but has only received $4,250,000,000 in funding for Homeland Security. In other words the NY State government is spending three times more to keep Iraqis safe than it is to keep me safe. And No Child Left Behind? Only $1,830,000,000. So we're stupid AND in danger.
This disparity is even greater in states without terrorist magnets like New York. Texas paid $11.5B for the war, but only got $1.93B for Homeland Security and $1.81 for No Child Left Behind!!
Flamboyant Republican Arthur Finkelstein Bashes Bush
Arthur Finkelstein, NY Governor Pataki's top political advisor and successful advisor in several Israeli elections, was interviewed last Friday in the Israeli paper Maariv and basically tore Bush a new one. Among his many claims was that the Republican party, and therefore the American government, has been hijacked by the far-right.
Shocking? Hardly.
"Bush's victory not only establishes the power of the American Christian right in this candidacy, but in fact established its power to elect the next Republican president."Finkelstein also accused Bush of trying to "dictate to America how to live and what to believe in." Other notable points: Bush is more interesting in banning abortion than he is in winning the war in Iraq; more interested in banning gay marriages than improving the American economy.
Ouch.
My favorite part in the NY Post article part is at the end:
Interesting choice of the word "flamboyant". Finkelstein is gay.A prominent Republican familiar with the interview called Finkelstein's comments "a big embarrassment for Pataki.
"Arthur isn't comfortable being a Republican anymore when he's so unhappy with our success and that's why he's so flamboyantly bashing the president."
I have to admire Republican party operatives' discipline in sticking to message. They don't excoriate their losers, but they murder dissenters. When somebody dissents, they discredit him (in this case by highlighting his homosexuality, which in the Republican party, is reason to be discredited). It's the polar opposite of Democrats. They welcome debate, but eviscerate election losers, although in this case Kerry might be disprove that theory with a victorious return to the Senate.
Update: NY Times writes about it a day later.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Dean & Deluca are hurting the economy
Money quote:
Agriculture, one of the few big sectors of the economy that could be counted on to produce trade surpluses, has recently generated monthly deficits -- a development that could worsen the nation's already significant trade imbalance....
But the problem with the widening overall trade deficit is that it is sustainable only as long as foreigners are willing to lend the U.S. large amounts of money. Many economists warn that this isn't likely to continue, and if they're correct, the risks are growing for a market-rattling crash in the value of the dollar....
The overall trade deficit widened to $54 billion in August, the most recent monthly figure available. That was the second-biggest gap on record after June's $55 billion.
During the 1990s, the agriculture sector's ability to single-handedly cut the trade deficit by as much as 16% some years gave it political capital in Washington, helping justify billions of dollars in annual farm subsidies. Now, agriculture's shrinking impact on the trade scene, plus the swelling federal budget deficit, could make it harder for the farm lobby to protect those subsidies.
The U.S. is still the world's biggest agricultural exporter. But the agricultural-trade surplus is evaporating so quickly that some economists in the Bush administration are quietly speculating that the sector might generate an annual trade deficit as soon as the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2005. That would be the first since 1959, when postwar Europe re-emerged as a major farm power.
Rumors of Kerry Redux
But rumors are flying that he may again reach for national office, having seen the chalice up so close.
From the LA Times:
"There's a tradition," said Robert Farmer, who was campaign treasurer for Dukakis in 1988 and Kerry this year. "Nixon ran and lost and then won, Reagan ran and lost, then won. In this case, you'll have to look at the field and say to yourself, 'Could another candidate have won states that John Kerry didn't win?' And my sense is that I don't think anybody could have done much better than John Kerry did."
From the Washington Post:
Aides said Kerry is relishing the prospect of renewed combat with President Bush, fighting such measures as the president's proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Kerry has spent most of the past two years on the campaign trail, meaning that his return to Capitol Hill will be something of a reintroduction to colleagues.
Kerry's plans contrast starkly with the approach taken by former vice president Al Gore, who all but disappeared from the political scene after losing to Bush in the disputed 2000 presidential election.
Several Democrats expressed skepticism about Kerry's plans, saying they believe the party needs a fresh face and must turn a corner. One well-known Democratic operative who worked with the Kerry campaign said opposition to Bush, not excitement about Kerry, was behind the senator's fundraising success. "If he thinks he's going to capitalize on that going forward, he's in for a surprise," said the operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Exurbs - Yuck
Money quote:
On the one hand, people move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives. They leave places with arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, broken families and stressed social structures and they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality. That's bourgeois.
On the other hand, they are taking a daring leap into the unknown, moving to towns that have barely been built, working often in high-tech office parks doing pioneering work in biotech and nanotechnology. These exurbs are conservative but also utopian - Mayberrys with BlackBerrys.
The Republicans won in part because Bush and Rove understand this culture. Everybody is giving advice to Democrats these days, and mine is don't take any advice from anybody with access to the media - including me, just to be safe.
Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It's a new world out there.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
It IS the Economy, Stupid
Excerpts today's NY Times:
Empowered by his own victory and stronger Republican majorities in Congress, Mr. Bush has pledged to push an economic agenda that could be more ambitious than the $1.9 trillion worth of tax cuts over 10 years that he signed in his first term.
The challenge ahead can be seen in the fiscal decline that took place between Mr. Bush's first inauguration in 2001 and his second one on Jan. 20, 2005. Federal tax revenue was $100 billion lower this year than when Mr. Bush took office, but spending is $400 billion higher.
Foreign investors have thus far been willing to finance the United States' borrowing, but most of that has come from central banks of Asian nations rather than private investors. If foreign appetite for Treasury securities wanes, interest rates would have to rise to make such investments attractive enough to keep money flowing into this country.
Making the job more difficult, politically as well as economically, is that higher oil prices have slowed American growth even as job creation continues to languish. Consumer and business confidence have slipped markedly in the last few months. And while oil prices declined modestly over several days until a $1.26-a-barrel rise on Wednesday, most forecasters are expecting economic growth to slow to 3 percent in 2005 from about 4 percent this year.
Mr. Bush has also promised to make his tax cuts permanent, which would add nearly $1 trillion to federal debt by 2014. And to avoid a huge tax increase for the upper middle class, he hopes to re-engineer the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax that was created to prevent wealthy people from overusing tax deductions but that is expected to engulf as many as 30 million families by the end of this decade. That could cost more than $500 billion.
The biggest problem of all is the one that begins at the end of this decade: the looming retirement of 76 million baby boomers, which is expected to add trillions of dollars in new costs for Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Budget analysts say Mr. Bush can no longer blame slower economic growth or a weak stock market for the budget deficit, as he has in much of his first term, and he cannot count on faster economic growth to close the gap over the next four years.
"Policy choices will determine where we go,'' said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. "We will not grow our way out of this. It is no longer the case that we can blame everything on the economy.''And that does not count the $500 billion for repairing the alternative minimum tax. Mr. Bush ordered the Treasury to come up with a comprehensive solution by early next year, and that proposal could form the basis of a broader plan to overhaul the income-tax system. Even if the costs of repairing the tax are submerged in a larger plan, they will be difficult to avoid.
More ominiously, said Mr. Holtz-Eakin, who worked in the Bush White House before becoming head of the Congressional Budget Office, there is little room for error. Almost any unexpected shock - a new recession, or a new military crisis - could push budget shortages higher than the gloomiest forecasters are predicting now.
The Coalition Falters
Bowing to internal pressue, another member of our grand coalition in Iraq has announced plans to leave. Hungary announced today that it would withdraw its 300 troops. Even worse, Doctors Without Borders is leaving due to "escalating violence".
To summarize, of the 32 countries that provided a whopping 22,000 troops:
- Spain withdrew its 1,300 troops
- The Dominican Republic withdrew 302 soldiers
- Nicaragua withdrew 115
- Honduras withdrew 370
- Costa Rica has no soldiers
- The Philippines withdrew its 51 in July
- Norway withdrew 155 military engineers
- New Zealand is withdrawing its 60 engineers
- Thailand has said it wants to bring home its 450 troops
- Singapore has reduced its contingent to 33, from 191
- Moldova has trimmed its force to 12, from 42
- Bulgaria's Defense Ministry said it would reduce its 483 troops to 430 next month
- Poland, the fourth-largest contributor, with 2,400 troops, says it intends to withdraw by the end of next year
- The Netherlands, with 1,400 troops, said this week that the latest rotation of troops would be its last contribution to Iraq
15 countries down. Who's left anyway? Well, newly re-elected US President George W. Bush's list of about 50 countries that openly backed the March 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein was once easily found by following this link. No more: A visit to the White House web site found that the list has disappeared, and that the link that led to it -- "Who are the coalition members?" -- is gone as well.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Buck Up
The Outcome
Bush only won by 3.5M votes against the most liberal Senator from New England, in the middle of a war, both military and cultural, and with certain economic indicators stabilizing. Furthermore, if you look at the state margins, an interesting pattern emerges. That's a powerful indictment against the strength of Bush's incumbency and mandate. This was NOT a Johnson/Goldwater defeat. For bottom liners, this may not mean much; but as members of the opposition, this should be heartening.
What really gets me angry is when pundits say that this proves that liberals are out of touch with what people in the Midwest think. Last I checked, we got 49% of the vote against an incumbent, and this includes 3-to-1 votes against gays, with the support of security moms and the soldiers. You could just as easily say that the Midwest is out of touch with what people on the Coasts think. The 3.5M vote gain was made up, in large part, of conservative increases in coastal, blue state suburbs. The margins in many of the red states actually tightened since 2000, which means that the Democrats made enormous inroads in the red states. With a little extra turnout and mobilization, New England may act glib in 2008.
The Mandates
Bush has an enormously difficult mandate as a member of the GOP. He has to ensure Republican succession, which means stabilizing Iraq, getting jobs, repairing diplomatic relations, privatizing social security, ensuring we are not attacked again, stopping a meltdown of the real estate market, keeping interest rates low, lowering the price of gas, strengthening the dollar, all while healing partisan divisions. This may be hard, to say the least, especially for a man of Bush’s character who doesn’t do subtlety, press conferences or transparency.
But more importantly, the Democratic Party also has a mandate. We must balance grace and ferocious determination. We must support the troops and hold the President accountable for massive strategic failures. We must spotlight economic folly and uphold our ideals in the face of a virtually identical but undeniable majority.
The Next Four Years
The Republicans have to find a successor. That is not going to be easy. Jeb Bush? Senators make bad candidates (McCain, Kerry). Will they resort to another Manchurian candidate? Mitch Daniels? Matt Blunt? Despite the 11-state sweep, gay marriage is likely to be a hot button issue in 2 years when MA rejects a constitutional amendment, and may only work more in the Republicans’ favor when CA, NY, NJ and OR add some sort of recognition to their books. It will be interesting to see how Democratic strategy adjusts to this.
Of a few things, I am certain: the Democratic candidate in 2008 MUST NOT BE a wealthy, liberal Senator from New England (Hilary included). We have shown that we can hold on to the Blue States even in the face of Karl Rove and his thugs, but, what we have not been able to do is turn some of those small Republican victories in the heartland into small Democratic victories. We need to find a candidate who can stand up to the neo-Cons on war and the economy, but more importantly on morality, in an effort to bring 3.5M voters over to the Democrats. A general repositioning of the Democratic Party as a party of faith might do it, and this includes faith-based ideals such as charity, equity and tolerance. This doesn’t mean pandering to Evangelicals. But it does mean highlighting Democratic relationships with the faithful, such as the eloquent and brilliant Obama. Read his acceptance speech to see what I mean.
We have four years to organize, fund raise, protest and mobilize; and more importantly, to pick a better candidate and run a stronger campaign. We can do it. We will do it. (NO NADER!!)
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