Thank God

Happy Friday.

As last week’s posting detailed, there is no doubt that the current administration is not having a “Happy Holiday” season. Neither is its devoted, brainwashed constituency. The religious zealotry upon which the current administration relies to seduce its otherwise desperate supporters took a severe hit this week when the theory of intelligent design was determined to be neither a theory, nor intelligent, nor well designed.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist., Case No. 04-cv-2628 (M.D. Pa. Dec. 20, 2005), Judge John E. Jones, III, a republican Bush appointee, lambasted the defendants and their attempt to impose intelligent design on the school curriculum.

At issue was this exerpted statement, adopted by the outcasted school board, to be read to ninth grade biology students before the teaching of evolution:

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

The defendant school board contended that this "disclaimer" did not endorse religion but merely encouraged students to "keep an open mind." After a lengthy, detailed review of the lay and legal history concerning failed attempts to incorporate a specific religious doctrine into public schools under the guise of science, the Court concluded that:

After a careful review of the record and for the reasons that follow, we find that an objective student would view the disclaimer as a strong official endorsement of religion.

Id. at 38. The Court when on to explain that:

In summary, the disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.

Id. at 49. Judge Jones could have stopped there. Instead, he continued by reviewing the legitimacy of intelligent design concluding that it was not a science:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three ifferent levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on volution have been refuted by the scientific community.

Id. at 64. Intelligent design has now been rejected by a court of law. While it is certainly not the last word on the issue, future proponents of the "idea" (having been downgraded from a "scientific theory") will have to contend with the reaility that an objective, third-party, republican jurist has "seen the light." Survival of the fittest indeed.

What A Mess

Happy Friday.

Karl Rove look out; Sybil is now dictating the current administration's policy choices.

Late last week it was revealed that the detainee who fabricated the current administration's pre-war claims linking al-Qaeda to Iraq did so while being tortured in Egyptian custody; having been delivered there through extraordinary rendition. (Bad.)

Yesterday, Dubbya finally acknowledged that torture is wrong submitting to Senator McCain's determined effort to outlaw the practice. (Good.)

Today, the current administration admitted that for the past three years the National Security Agency has been spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant. (Bad.)

Yesterday, the current administration agreed to double spending on flood protection for New Orleans promising a system that it said would make the city safe from catastrophic flooding from a storm as powerful as Hurricane Katrina. (Good.)

Also yesterday, Congress issued a report concluding that the current administration had access to more intelligence and reviewed more sensitive material than what was shared with Congress when it gave Dubbya the authority to wage war against Iraq--contradicting the president's lie that Congress had access to the same intelligence as he did. (Bad.)

I'm not even going to mention any of the fiascos resulting from the White House's "Holiday Card." Oops.

Obviously, all this evidences a very weak administration. The stalwart, dismissive, stick-to-their guns-right-or-wrong approach is being forced to make way for (gulp) compromise. Significantly, as McCain's success illustrates, much of the assault on the current administration is internal to the party (see, e.g., Senators Craig, Hagel, and Sununu's objections to extending the Patriot Act).

In short, people are starting to pay attention ... and those people are voters ... and the mid-terms are in eleven short months.

So, good news this holiday season: As the below editorial explains, "the Republican Party is fracturing before our eyes."
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The New Worn-Out Ideas
By E. J. Dionne Jr.Friday, December 16, 2005

Who is running out of ideas now?

It has been a cliche of American politics for more than two decades that those poor, tired liberals were bereft of big thoughts and wallowing in a swamp of old commitments, old ideas and old promises. Their allies in the Democratic Party were thought to be similarly geriatric.

In 1989 a headline in the Outlook section of The Post confidently rendered this diagnosis on the liberals: "Tired and Defensive, They're Out of Ideas." In 1997 Charles Bray, who was then president of the Johnson Foundation, argued that liberal anemia had created the opening for a conservative jolt. "[T]he entry of new ways of thinking into the American intellectual bloodstream after two generations of liberals' monopolizing the public-policy debate has been good for the country," Bray declared.

Let's accept -- for the sake of argument, but also because the critique contained some truth -- that at some point during the 1970s, liberalism became tiresome, arrogant, unreflective and hidebound. Let's further stipulate that this image gave conservatives their opening to seem fresh, creative, exciting and all those other virtues that marketers love to claim for their products.

It can be asserted beyond a reasonable doubt that each of the disapproving words about liberalism in the previous paragraph now applies to conservatism. The most compelling evidence for this is the contorted, contentious and incoherent struggle by Republicans in Congress to produce a budget.

The Republican leaders may or may not pass their cut-from-the-poor, give-to-the-rich budget. It takes a degree of political incompetence usually associated with Democrats for the side that wants to preserve the true spirit of Christmas to invite so many coal-in-the-stocking metaphors at this time of year.

But there is something more important about this failure. It marks the dead end of a worn, haggard argument that conservatives have been peddling for 30 years, ever since that energetic guru of supply-side economics, Jude Wanniski, published his first articles on the subject and his exciting 1978 manifesto, "The Way the World Works."

Supply-siders asserted that cutting taxes on the wealthy -- and especially on savings and investment -- would help everyone, including the poor, by promoting economic growth. Tax cuts would produce so much growth that they would pay for themselves. Since government programs were flawed, private investment was always more productive than government spending. And deficits, if they did come, need not worry us very much.

For many of us, this whole argument was always a highfalutin rationalization for giving the rich what they wanted, and often even more. Bill Clinton's economic policies should have definitively destroyed supply-side claims: Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and cut the deficit, and an exceptional period of economic growth followed.

But it took until this moment in 2005 for Republicans themselves to realize (even if many won't acknowledge it yet) that the help-the-wealthy, damn-the-deficits approach doesn't hold together, either as policy or politics. They are learning that the public doesn't buy the idea that cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains should take priority over providing health coverage and child care for struggling Americans. The tax cuts, it turns out, don't pay for themselves. The poor have not fared well since the big supply-side tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

And given how much Republicans want to spend on defense, farm subsidies, homeland security, roads, bridges, subsidies for energy companies, a flawed drug program for seniors and lots of other stuff, there's no way they can cut enough from programs for the poor to offset the costs of their tax giveaways.

As a result, the Republican Party is fracturing before our eyes. Moderate Republicans know these cuts in programs for the poor are unsustainable. Very conservative Republicans want to cut spending far more than the rest of the party (or its voters) will allow. Republican leaders tilt this way and that, juggling this tax cut with that spending cut. In the process, they alienate just about everybody. The old faith is dying.

It took liberals a long time -- too long -- to adjust to the popular sense all those years ago that they were just trying to sell the same old nostrums. I'd like to hope that today's graying of conservatism will invite liberals to a new era of innovation. What's clear is that if Republicans and conservatives keep trying to sell their long-playing supply-side records in the age of the iPod, they'll confine their audience to antiquarians and ideological hobbyists. It's the way the world works.

Regicide

Happy Friday.

This week the House of Representatives passed regressive, oh-so-republican tax cuts. One of the Bills, (colloquially know as the “Help the Rich Get Richer Bill”) drains “the Treasury of $56 billion of additional revenue over the next five years” supporting the current administration’s predilection for deficit spending. Nearly half that amount is intended to extend “special low tax rates for investors’ dividends and capital gains.” The target audience: People who make a million dollars or more a year.

At the same time, republicans “in the House and Senate are moving toward an agreement to cut as much as $45 billion over five years from domestic programs like Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and child-support enforcement.” As the below editorial from the Paper of Record concludes: “Rampant tax cutting must be stopped in the face of deficits, looming budget obligations and the painful sacrifices being demanded of the poor.”

After dinner and conversation last night with a good friend who is equally interested in political issues (although sometimes from the wrong side--I’m working on it), I realized that a theory I’ve been kicking around has legs. It’s Medieval, literally.

There has been much inquiry into why the poor and middle classes support an administration that so overtly disregards their interests in favor of the most wealthy in society. Here’s my theory: By denying people the basic resources to survive, the education to achieve, and the opportunity to excel, the current administration forces them into a desperate position wherein their only source of hope is found in religion. Then, the current administration presents itself as a bastion and protector of religious ideals seducing the desperate to align themselves with a self-indulgent oligarchy working against their interests.

A thousand years ago, we called this the feudal system. Today, it is called republican party politics.

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Tax Cut Showdown
Published: December 9, 2005

The House of Representatives passed two major tax-cut bills this week. One deserves to become law; the other deserves to die. It will be up to the Senate to make sure that happens.
On Wednesday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would shield millions of taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax next year. The relief is expensive - costing nearly $30 billion - but it's critical. Without it, many middle-class Americans, who were never the intended target for the alternative tax, would be suddenly forced to pay higher taxes when they filed their 2005 tax returns. (The alternative tax was intended to stop rich people with lots of shelters from escaping their tax burden entirely, but it has not been changed to reflect inflation or the tax cuts passed under President Bush.)

The good news ended there. The House irresponsibly neglected to include any offsetting tax increases to help pay for the tax relief. (The Senate's tax bill includes $19 billion in offsetting tax increases.) Even more egregious, the House passed yet another tax bill a day later that would drain the Treasury of $56 billion of additional revenue over the next five years. Of that total, $21 billion would be used to extend, through 2010, special low tax rates for investors' dividends and capital gains. Those rates are set to expire at the end of 2008.

The extension is both unaffordable and gratuitous. Most of the benefits would flow to taxpayers who make more than $1 million a year. That's morally reprehensible at a time when the House and the Senate are moving toward an agreement to cut as much as $45 billion over five years from domestic programs like Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and child-support enforcement. And it comes at a time when the government is already borrowing extensively for all manner of undertakings, like the war in Iraq and the new prescription drug benefit for Medicare.

The Republican House leaders are also plotting to make it easier to get the unnecessary tax cuts for investors through the somewhat more responsible Senate. To date, moderate Senate Republicans have blocked the budget-busting investor tax breaks. The Senate tax bill, passed last month, includes alternative tax relief, but does not extend the preferential rates for investment income.

In a cagey maneuver, the House leaders have organized their legislation so the popular measure on the alternative minimum tax can stand on its own when it gets to the Senate, while the unwise tax reductions for investors can be inserted into a fast-track tax bill, which will, under special rules, be protected against any filibusters when it comes up for a final vote in the Senate. That will make it far easier for senators to abandon all restraint and vote for the House agenda.

It's not certain that the Senate will go along with this plan. The right course is clear: responsible senators should approve alternative minimum tax relief, but stand firm against machinations that would tart up the tax code with additional giveaways for the wealthiest Americans. Rampant tax cutting must be stopped in the face of deficits, looming budget obligations and the painful sacrifices being demanded of the poor.

It's Still the Economy, Stupid

Happy Friday.

When people are brave enough to identify themselves as republican to me, I reasonably ask how they can continue to support a failed administration.

The answer is always, "I don't necessarily agree with Bush, I just support the economic ideals of the party." Of course, I note in response that Dubbya is the leader of the party and if they support it, they necessarily support him. Nice try.

I also ask what "economic ideals" they believe the party represents. Inevitably, it is something to the effect of "people working to make it on their own" (again, an odd thing considering the president's silver spoon and the party's position against the estate tax) and fiscal responsibility.

Ok, now we are getting somewhere. Fiscal responsibility: small government, controlled spending, budget surpluses, and a long-term outlook.

In fact, however, the current administration’s (voodoo) economics requires the country to borrow $782 billion a year--more than six percent of GDP--mostly from foreign governments and central banks (e.g. China). It is estimated that by the end of the year America’s indebtedness to other countries will reach 28% of GDP.

Of all the scandals plaguing the current administration, perhaps none is more severe than its mismanagement of the economy and the resulting threat to the nation’s future economic viability and security.

As the below article explains, the president's "faith-based initiatives" have no role in fiscally responsible government.

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Our Faith-Based Future
The White House remains unperturbed by the growing prospect of economic calamity
by Clive Crook

Once upon a time Democrats were big spenders and Republicans were fiscal conservatives. That was a while ago. Ronald Reagan's defense buildup and tax cuts caused deficits to soar in the 1980s, and it was Bill Clinton who brought the budget back into surplus in the 1990s, partly by curbing spending. But those fiscal role reversals were timid by today's standards. Since 2000 the Democratic Party has been left in the dust when it comes to spending.

The Republican Party is the new, undisputed champion of big government. The Bush administration has presided over an explosion of public borrowing, fueled partly by tax cuts but also by huge new outlays. Both sides of the public accounts were out of control even before the enormous increases in spending to cope with Hurricane Katrina and the persistently dire situation in Iraq (see "Disasters and the Deficit," next page). The administration's incompetent handling of the hurricane will exact its own price over and above disaster relief, as the White House tries to buy its way back up in the polls. The Republican Party's former reputation for prudent fiscal management is no longer merely compromised; it is ruined, perhaps for good.

Among Republicans in Congress squeaks of complaint are heard here and there. But the White House has drowned them out. Before Katrina, at any rate, the administration was still insisting that the budget deficit would fall over the next few years. That prediction might have been right if Katrina and Rita had not happened and if Iraq had come good—at least if one further assumed that no other emergencies would arise, that most of the administration's tax cuts would be reversed by the end of the decade (which the administration itself, of course, is determined to block), and that demographic pressures (which are causing the government to pile up vast liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) would magically abate. On this side of the looking glass the deficit will not shrink unless something bold is done.

For those who find its budget forecasts unconvincing the White House has another line—one that slightly undercuts its assurances of fiscal responsibility. It is that the deficit does not matter. Economists have been predicting fiscal meltdown for years, officials point out. It has not happened and it won't, they say, even if the deficit sticks. The reason is that foreign investors just love this country's assets.

The resulting flow of funds—a global vote of confidence in American capitalism—means that the government can borrow without strain. Spend more, tax less, be happy.

It sounds like a confidence trick, and in the end it is—though, like all the best scams, it contains particles of truth. For much of the past decade private foreign investors have poured funds into the United States because they saw faster economic growth and better returns than were available elsewhere. As long as that kind of investment keeps flowing in, the deficit can be financed painlessly. Government spending still has to be paid for eventually, mind you—it is only a question of taxes today or taxes tomorrow. But a willing inflow of capital means that the eventual, inescapable cost to American taxpayers can be postponed at little risk.

Another thing helps. America enjoys the rare privilege of being able to borrow what it needs—currently on the order of $782 billion a year—mostly in its own currency. Countries heavily in debt usually have to borrow in a foreign currency. If they later get into trouble and the foreign-exchange market drives their currency down, the burden of their debt, measured in local money, weighs heavier, pressing them into an even deeper hole. But if the United States got into that kind of fix and the dollar fell abruptly, the value of America's debt would not rise. Instead the countries that had lent the dollars would see the value of their investments (measured in yen, say, or euros) fall.

As far as the United States is concerned, this is an excellent arrangement. With foreign lenders choosing to carry more of the risk, a credit-hungry America can afford to be less cautious.

But not this much less. If America were borrowing at half the present rate, it could probably relax. But $782 billion a year—more than six percent of GDP—is outlandish. Such reckless behavior has made America's privileged place in the world economy as much a curse as a blessing. Foreign capital is no longer voting as confidently for America. Private investors are spending less than before on American assets. Lately the slack has been taken up by foreign governments and central banks, which are pursuing not profit but doubtful policy goals of their own. (China's holdings of dollar reserves are already far greater than makes sense for China.) At some point these lenders are going to curb investment in American assets. Should this happen suddenly, here are some of the likely consequences: a spike in interest rates as the government is forced to find new takers of its debt, at dearer terms; a surge in personal bankruptcies and a sharp curtailment of spending among America's heavily indebted households; a stock-market crash; an increase in inflation; and a slide back into recession.

The present course of fiscal policy is not certain to end badly, but the risks are increasing. This summer, before Katrina, the economist Brad DeLong put the chance of a major U.S. financial crisis at 20 percent. The former Fed chairman Paul Volcker puts it at 75 percent within the next few years if we don't change our policies. Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley (and a notorious pessimist), thinks it's about 90 percent. Whether any of these predictions is close to the mark is anyone's guess, but that's not the point. The point is that the chance of a bad outcome is substantial—and much higher than it needs to be.

Changing course now—before circumstances leave no choice—would be hard even if the administration believed it had to act. Starting from here, the combination of higher taxes and lower public spending required to bring the deficit down to manageable levels is politically daunting. Yet at the same time, Katrina has perhaps created a political opportunity to undo some of the fiscal damage this administration has wrought—by, say, curbing tax cuts and scaling back the Medicare prescription-drug bill.

Unfortunately, big-government Republicans see no need for such measures; they look at deficit hawks and see Chicken Littles. But this fiscal environment is more dangerous than any other America has faced in its modern history. Without corrective action the sky may fall.