Bear with me?!

I hope you’ll bear with me, folks… I’ve got four term papers to write and a grant deadline to help meet, and I learned this week that our landlord will be selling the house we’ve been living in for 10 years. Things are feeling a little out of control. But this too shall pass! (At the very least, I’ll have lots of books to recommend - or not recommend! - when these papers are done.)

No Report, No Problem (Part II)

While a troublesome terror report is getting the ax, an environmental report is being gutted:

The Bush administration’s program to study climate change lacks a major component required by law, according to Congressional investigators. The program fails to include periodic assessments of how rising temperatures may affect people and the environment.

The investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, conclude in a report to be released today that none of the 21 studies of climate change that the administration plans to publish by September 2007 explicitly address the potential effects in eight areas specified by a 1990 law, the Global Change Research Act. The areas include agriculture, energy, water resources and biological diversity.

Without such an assessment, the accountability office said, “it may be difficult for the Congress and others to use this information effectively as the basis for making decisions on climate policy.”

Read the rest here. (Thanks, B!)

The Day After Just-Us Sunday…

I’ll beg your patience and understanding for yet another skimpy week, but in the meantime, please don’t miss Thom Hartmann this week! He begins:

Why would a multi-multi-millionaire Senator, who consistently votes to harm the hungry and the poor who so concerned Jesus, join forces with religious fundamentalists to stack this nation’s highest courts? Could it be because he and his wealthy Republican friends see huge financial benefits for themselves and their corporate patrons in a compliant court?

And gets better from there. Do read it! Kudos to Rev. Robert Edgar - if he was the first - for ingeniously renaming the “Justice Sunday” farce.

While it may be difficult for some in the reality-based community to understand how evangelicals can feel so “oppressed,” it’s not news to anyone who read Chris Smith’s American Evangelicals: Embattled and Thriving, as I had to recently for one of my classes. Smith shows several other times over the last century-plus, when Evangelicals have launched similar campaigns - always designed to invigorate and animate members around a sense of oppression, marginalization, and disentitlement. It’s the primary tactic through which they form a “sub-cultural identity”; it gives them meaning and determination. The evangelicals quite literally thrive on it, as Smith shows, and as their repeated use of the tactic demonstrates. (I don’t have the book at hand in order to list the four previous episodes, but I’ll try to add that later.) But it really does begin to strain credulity when the “oppressed minority” can be shown to have most of the Republican Party in their back pocket.

I’m beginning to quite literally thank God for Harry Reid. I wasn’t sure what to think when Harry Reid became the Senate Minority Leader. But with each passing week I respect him even more. Via Daily Kos and AmericaBlog, Reid directly challenged Cheney’s lies last week…

“In the span of three minutes, the vice president managed to reinvent 200 years of Senate history and ignore the fact that Congress has already approved 205 of this administration’s nominees. Apparently, a 95 percent confirmation rate is not enough for this president. He wants it all, even if it means shattering the checks and balances in our government in order to put radical judges on the bench.

“Last week, I met with the president and was encouraged when he told me he would not become involved in Republican efforts to break the Senate rules. Now, it appears he was not being honest, and that the White House is encouraging this raw abuse of power.

“It is disturbing that Republicans have so little respect for the separation of powers established by our founding fathers. Based on his comments last week, I had hoped that the president was prepared to join Democrats in taking up the work of the American people, but it is clear this is no longer the case. If the White House and Congress insists on proceeding down this road, Democrats will do all we can to ensure that Congress pursues an agenda the American people can be proud of.”

Here’s a great post from Josh Marshall on the Republicans’ sudden and desperate efforts to get the media to stop saying “nuclear option” (a piece of bait the LA Times has already bitten into). He’s got more history here. And Atrios has an amusingly rich round-up of all the recent times Republicans used the phrase “nuclear option.” If any other journalist falls for the Republican “that’s what the Democrats want you to call it” line, then we’ve got more Jeff Gannon-like Pseudo-Journalists out there than we care to know.

Oh, and Via Chuck Currie… The theocrats are even planning to remove sitting judges. Read the whole frightening story.

Girls necessary afterall

At the risk of reducing a complex cultural, historical and political issue to the merely biological… did this little fact of life not occur to anyone? My mother sends the following item from the latest not-accessible-by-internet “Women’s Network News” (edited and published by Rachel Conrad Wahlberg, 5804 Cary Dr., Austin, TX 78757; this story reprinted from: NY Times International, Jan. 31, 2005 )…

“Everyone knows about the one-child policy in China. Its purpose was to limit the population – which is now 1.3 billion people.

For years many families have been using prenatal scans and selective abortions to make certain that the child is a boy – not only for his labor, but tradition holds that a son must care for his parents. A son is often compared to a pension.

Demographers predict that in a few decades China could have up to 40 million men unable to find mates.

But now – there is such a glut of boys – roughly 134 for every 100 girls – that the Chinese government is having second thoughts. It has decided to pay families who already have girls.

Some schools now have a Care for Girls program. Now there are billboards promoting the latest propaganda campaign – RESPECT GIRLS. A school official explains the program is supposed to build the self-esteem of girls.

In one rural community the pressure for sons had been so enormous that one mother, Liao Yanquing, said that she contemplated suicide because her second baby was another girl.

Now, she and her family have received a government grant – money they have used to buy a new house and a small restaurant. And both girls go to school free.

“It’s been quite a dramatic change,” she said.

Sweet deal

From a Washington Post editorial:

U.S. sugar policy stands for all that’s bad about our political system. The government restricts imports through a series of quotas, pushing U.S. sugar prices to between two and three times the global market rate. As a result, a handful of sugar producers, notably in Florida, a battleground electoral state, pocket $1 billion a year in excess profits. To protect this cozy arrangement, the sugar barons plow a chunk of their revenue back into the political system. During the 2004 election cycle, two Florida sugar companies gave a total of $925,000 to election coffers.

This corruption has victims. Producers’ enviable profits come straight out of consumers’ wallets, so that ordinary supermarket visitors are made to subsidize welfare for corporations. At the same time, efficient foreign sugar producers, many of them in poor countries, are denied a fair chance to export their way out of poverty.

Meanwhile there is an environmental cost: In Florida, sugar cane production has contributed to the degradation of the Everglades. Sugar-using industries are losers too. As Kimberly A. Elliott notes in a paper for the Center for Global Development, some candymakers have closed U.S. factories rather than pay crazy sugar prices.

The biggest cost of the sugar racket is to free trade itself, and therefore to all producers and consumers. Blatant protection of sugar barons undermines U.S. trade negotiators’ credibility when they seek to open foreign markets, and pressure from the sugar lobby is now holding up free trade with Central America. Sugar accounts for a minuscule share of U.S. farm output. But because Big Sugar is politically ruthless, it has the power to hold trade hostage.

No report, no problem

Remember early last summer when the State Department terrorism report ballyhooed the worldwide decline in terrorism, then quietly retracted and restated the results to reveal an increase (scroll down to “about that clerical error”). Well, terrorist attacks are up even higher this year, so Condi cancelled the report. That’s right… It just won’t be published anymore. No report, no problem.

What to do if you’ve been exposed to Time Magazine this week

Kevin Drum provides an emergency antidote to this week’s Time Magazine cover horror (so horrible I won’t even link to it). So does Think Progress. And Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media. (Update: fixed the Think Progress link.)

Social Justice Sunday

Fresh from pronouncing his expert diagnosis of Terri Schiavo’s medical condition from a 30-minute videotape provided to Congress, Sen. Bill Frist is set to join James Dobson to rally the militant theocrats in a simulcast event this Sunday, at which opponents of Frist’s plan to destroy the Constitution will be labeled enemies of people of faith. Religious progressives are organizing their response — see George Lakoff’s Daily Kos post and consider joining the Clergy and Laity Network’s National Prayer Vigil.

For some historical context on the “nuclear option” Frist and the Republicans are pursuing, see this LA Times editorial:

In the last half-century, conservative politicians have mounted three dramatically different attacks on the federal judiciary. The first attack, in which they emphasized the need for judicial restraint, was principled and coherent.

The second, which called on judges to consider the original meaning of the Constitution, was more radical but still had honorable goals: to promote stability, neutrality and the rule of law.

The third attack, however, is the most worrisome: a large-scale challenge to judicial independence, and we are now in the midst of it.

Read the rest.

Aye-aye-aye!

Aye-aye-aye
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

Me, after finishing taxes and financial aid forms at 2 a.m.?

– or –

“Kintana, a four-day-old aye-aye, is revealed by Bristol Zoo Gardens in the UK after becoming only the second to be born and reared in captivity. Aye-ayes, from Madagascar, are the world’s largest nocturnal primates.” From the BBC’s Day in Pictures. (Read more about aye-ayes here!)

(Update: for some reason this posted twice; I just deleted the second one!)

Hey!

It just occurred to me that Left At The Altar turned one year old over the weekend! And we’ve had just over 4800 visitors during the last year. Sorry, but I can’t do cake for 4800…