Centerblue.org

I’m usually the type who’s “live and let live” when it comes to the role of religion in society–but I do get upset when religious belief tries to take the place of rational science.

Apparently there is a brouhaha brewing over the Grand Canyon involving what the National Park Service can say as to its geological age, and regarding what materials are available for sale at a nearby Canyon-related bookstore. In short, the NPS must give a “no comment” answer to any queries about the Canyon’s geological age, at the same time allowing the sale of a book at the bookstore claiming that the Canyon came about as a result of the Flood and Noah’s Ark. From the news release by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

In a letter released today, PEER urged the new Director of the National Park Service (NPS), Mary Bomar, to end the stalling tactics, remove the book from sale at the park and allow park interpretive rangers to honestly answer questions from the public about the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. PEER is also asking Director Bomar to approve a pamphlet, suppressed since 2002 by Bush appointees, providing guidance for rangers and other interpretive staff in making distinctions between science and religion when speaking to park visitors about geologic issues.

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

Park officials have defended the decision to approve the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, claiming that park bookstores are like libraries, where the broadest range of views are displayed. In fact, however, both law and park policies make it clear that the park bookstores are more like schoolrooms rather than libraries. As such, materials are only to reflect the highest quality science and are supposed to closely support approved interpretive themes. Moreover, unlike a library the approval process is very selective. Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item — the creationist book.

Come on, people. The Grand Canyon is not the right forum for arguing Creationism. The rocks speak for themselves. The tendency of the Bush administration to gag science it doesn’t like is disturbing (the gagging of NASA scientists over the global warming issue comes to mind).

Saddam Hussein has been executed. Fantastic.

While I question the taste of photographs and videos going around showing his final moments, I fully approve of his execution. The world has to send a powerful message that it will not support, and will actively hunt down and kill, brutal dictators who mercilessly execute their own people through torture, starvation, gassing, or whatever. Death is the only thing these people understand, and it is the only thing that will serve as a deterrent.

Whether we like it or not, the penal systems of cultures throughout history have always reserved the right to mete out the worst punishment of all–death–to those members of society that they deem to be a severe detriment because of the behavior of the condemned.

When I visited Colonial Williamsburg earlier this year, I was given an overview of the colony’s penal system. Defendants accused of the worst crimes were imprisoned until the court came into session twice a year. At that time the evidence was presented and the defendants were sentenced if found guilty. At the option of the court, a first-time offender who would have been sentenced to death could instead be branded in a prominent place with a symbol indicating his crime and would then be freed, given another chance at life. Anyone who would deal with that person thereafter would see the symbol and be aware of the person’s crime. If that person committed another crime, or if a person did not receive the mercy of the court the first time, that would be it–he’d be marched right to the gallows. There were no lengthy appeals or cries for mercy. He would be taken out to the back of the courthouse and hanged. It was brutal, it was efficient, and it worked fantastically as a deterrent.

We deem ourselves a more “advanced” society now, with due process of law. That’s a good thing–we should be very damn sure of a person’s guilt before executing him. But once we get to that point, we should not be squeamish about carrying out the retribution of society against those who have hurt us the most. We simply cannot and must not tolerate crimes against humanity and each other of rape, murder, and the like….and someone who inflicts that on someone else does not deserve to live.

Saddam Hussein did not deserve to share the planet with the rest of us. If there is one good thing that has come out of the Iraq disaster, it has been putting this cur out of his misery.

Good riddance.

I love California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don’t care if he’s a Republican. Yes it’s true his record on some liberal issues is less than stellar, such as on gay rights/marriage, though he’s still better on those than most Republicans. But on the issue of the environment, which I consider to be the single most important issue of our time, there is no politician of either party that even comes close to Arnold’s stewardship.

Defying Bush and many Republicans, he has embraced the global warming crisis and has used California’s clout as the world’s sixth largest economy to impose tough restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. The rest of the country benefits from this–if carmakers, for example, are forced to build more fuel-efficient vehicles for California they are better off doing it for the whole country rather than keeping different sets of standards by state. This becomes even more true as more and more states follow California’s brave lead on this issue.

He has vowed to restore California’s emission levels to 1990 levels by the year 2020, and bypassed Bush entirely by meeting with Tony Blair recently to get California to participate in the same carbon “cap and trade” program being used in Europe.

He is determined to inject the global warming debate into the 2008 presidential election, even though he’s not eligible to run himself because he wasn’t born in America:

“There is a whole new movement because of the change of people sent to Washington [referring to Democrats]. “We want to put the spotlight on this issue in America. It has to become a debate in the presidential election. It has to become an issue.”

He is being so influential in Republican circles on the issue that GOP contenders for president are calling him to consult about the issue.

He is also wise enough to see how leadership on the environment can serve to repair America’s image in the world that has been so badly tattered by Iraq:

“The war has dragged us down. There’s no reason to get political, that’s just the way it is. But you can balance it by being a great leader in the environment. The more America shows leadership in that area, the more we will be loved for that as much as they love us for our hamburgers and for our jeans and for our movies and for our music.”

I hope he is successful in what he’s seeking to do–and if I were a Californian he’d be the first Republican I ever voted for. It just goes to show that good common-sense politics can span both parties–even if it’s unfortunately rare.

Besides, the tech geek and transhumanist in me is a huge fan of his “Terminator” movies.

Little noticed in the cacophony of Christmas, celebrating Democrats, and a wardrum-beating President was this report from the United States Treasury. Its conclusions summed up in one sentence: America is insolvent, bankrupt, unable to meet its obligations. Yes, America–the most powerful empire in the history of the world, stands to go bankrupt trying to make good on its promises and yet the band plays on, blithely unaware.

The report doesn’t mince words, with language readily available for anyone to see if they cared.

Despite improvement in both the fiscal year 2006 reported net operating cost and the cash-based budget deficit, the U.S. government’s total reported liabilities, net social insurance commitments, and other fiscal exposures continue to grow and now total approximately $50 trillion, representing approximately four times the Nation’s total output (GDP) in fiscal year 2006, up from about $20 trillion, or two times GDP in fiscal year 2000.

As this long-term fiscal imbalance continues to grow, the retirement of the “baby boom” generation is closer to becoming a reality with the first wave of boomers eligible for early retirement under Social Security in 2008.

Given these and other factors, it seems clear that the nation’s current fiscal path is unsustainable and that tough choices by the President and the Congress are necessary in order to address the nation’s large and growing long-term fiscal imbalance. (emphasis added)

Do you know how much $50 trillion is? If you sold every piece of property in America, every house, every skyscraper, every factory, every highway, every power plant–and left the land in the pristine condition discovered by Christopher Columbus, you would generate approximately $50 trillion. That is the magnitude of the hole in which the country finds itself in.

With regards to the federal entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid:

The net social insurance responsibilities scheduled benefits in excess of estimated revenues indicate that those programs are on an unsustainable fiscal path and difficult choices will be necessary in order to address their large and growing long-term fiscal imbalance.

Delay is costly and choices will be more difficult as the retirement of the ‘baby boom’ gets closer to becoming a reality with the first wave of boomers eligible for retirement under Social Security in 2008. (emphasis added)

There is no way to just “grow” out of this problem. As Dr. Chris Martenson over at Financial Sense University points out, the report’s statement of liability is assuming a steady 5% growth in the economy each year through at least 2011. That assumes there will be no recession during that time period–and even this year’s sub-par growth alone shows that 5% is not sustainable. Furthermore, the country’s liabilities more than doubled between 2000 and 2006, from $20 trillion to $50+ trillion. No amount of growth can overcome such a gargantuan increase in such a short time.

The net result of all this is that our national wealth and standard of living is set to take a precipitous decline in the years ahead. Let’s face it–the government is not going to default…it’s going to have to make some painful choices at some point. Someday some hapless president is going to sit before the cameras and tell the American people that he’s very sorry, but the country has promised far more than it can deliver, and that Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security are from now on either cancelled entirely, or severely pared back along with a drastic tax increase.

Those of you not saving up for retirement, hoping that these programs will carry you through old age: prepare to live under a bridge, because that’s about all the government will be able to afford for you unless it does something pretty drastic very soon.

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This massive problem is why, despite the opposition of my friends on the Left, I actually favored exploring Bush’s plan to create private spending accounts for Social Security (they’d do nothing for Medicare and Medicaid, but let’s solve one problem at a time)–accompanied by removing the $94,200 cap on yearly income subject to federal entitlement withholding (which he did not propose and should have). We have to do something, and the approach taken by the Democrats during that debate–the “do nothing” approach–is simply not acceptable.

Bush’s plan would have given everyone the option (not the obligation) to have their own withholdings diverted to a private account they could then manage through investments in the stock or bond markets. People who opted to do that would then be entitled to either draw less or not at all from the government upon retirement. Anyone who opted to keep paying to the government would be guaranteed his entitlement in full upon retirement.

Personally I’d love to manage that money myself; I’m confident I could earn a better return than the government could. Nevertheless, liberals came up with some very bad excuses as to why this wouldn’t work:

1) It’s risky to invest in the stock market given its ups and downs. Yea well it’s risky to promise everyone a retirement safety net that the government simply can’t afford. The risk of that is that you’ll get little or nothing. How does that compare to the risk of investing in the stock market, where for every 30 year period in the past the market has been higher than it was 30 years prior regardless of wars, deficits, and other problems?

2) If you invest unwisely, you’ll be stuck/starve. OH WELL, too bad. That’s the risk I took, fully aware of the consequences. I’ll starve just as much if we do nothing and the government can’t pay…so I might as well try to do something about it.

3) If too many people leave the system, there won’t be enough to pay those who don’t. This may have a grain of truth to it, but it’s addressable. I would want to see a study done on this, but it’s certainly possible that the higher income earners are the ones most likely to leave the system and invest privately, leaving less money from lower income earners in the pool to distribute among those who remain. This is easily addressable, however: set a sliding scale such as the higher your income, the less you can funnel to a private account..until that amount eventually dwindles to zero and goes entirely into the federal system. Those CEO’s making $40 million bonuses don’t need social security anyway…and neither does anyone with a substantial income that is better able to save for retirement himself….so say that anyone who makes more than $200,000, for example, has all his social security tax diverted to the government instead of to private accounts (this assumes the lifting of the $94,200 cap). Problem solved.

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We need some bold ideas to deal with some drastic problems–and we have yet to hear of a plan for Medicare/Medicaid. Democrats either need to come up with a better plan for social security, or they need to shut up. Doing nothing is just not acceptable and is a disservice to our country’s future. Let’s leave the “do nothing” label to the Republicans, under whose watch all the nation’s liabilities more than doubled in just six years.

Christmas is looking especially rich this year on Wall Street.

• Total Wall Street bonuses this year: $23.9 billion.
• Change from last year: +17%
• What the top “golden 25″ execs at Goldman Sachs will get as bonus: approximately $25 million each.
• How much Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns are giving out: an amount equal to $300,000 per employee (distributed only to a privileged few in the company, of course.)
• Morgan Stanley CEO’s bonus: $40 million in stocks and options.

And:

• Average salary of New Yorker working outside Wall Street: $56,634 in 2005.

Conservatives are panicking that the federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, long a bastion of loony-Right ridiculousness lording it over Maryland, the Virginias, the Carolinas, may become more liberal in the wake of many vacancies occurring as the Democrats take over Congress.

This court has been the source of some really questionable rulings:

• it struck down a law allowing rape victims to sue their attackers in federal court;
• it prevented the FDA from regulating tobacco;
• in 1999 it overturned the Miranda Rights requirement for an interrogation (!), forcing the Supreme Court to overrule that decision;
• it has been the circuit of choice for Bush to push his national security agenda of detaining what it deems to be enemy combatants.

You’d think that after decades of stacking the federal courts with mostly conservative judges that the Right would be satisfied–but nope, they want nothing less than to dominate the legal discourse everywhere…and feel as threatened as cornered rats when more moderate common-sense voices might actually have a chance to be heard.

For a while now I’ve considered myself rather libertarian where it comes to regulation of the marketplace–that is, the view that what’s “best” should be determined by the market forces of supply and demand. When something “bad” or “expensive” is bandied about, inevitably someone else will offer a competing product that is cheaper, better, whatever…and solve the problem.

On the other hand I’ve also passionately advocated government regulation in certain other areas, most notably the environment and global warming. This non-libertarian view was a contradiction I intuitively embraced, but found hard to defend when debating libertarian principles. An article in today’s New York Times (“The Cost of an Overheated Planet”) crystallized the issue for me and resolved the contradiction.

Market competition requires that alternatives carry a cost that can be compared against other alternatives in order to judge what is “best.” The problem with carbon emissions and global warming is that while the costs are very real over the long term in terms of land loss and desertification, decrease of agriculture, etc. they are not quantified or recognized by the market. Why not? Because spewing carbon dioxide into the air is absolutely free.

Because pollution is free and there is no incentive to account for future costs, there is also no incentive to do anything different. Free always beats an alternative of any cost whatsoever. Why should the market push for costly energy alternatives, increases in efficiency, and decreases in emissions when the alternative cost of doing nothing is nothing?

The market, then, is doing exactly what it’s supposed to–it is encouraging that which is “best” and least costly. Until that changes, there will be little headway in tackling carbon dioxide emissions. The failure here, then, is in a wrong value of $0 being put on the pollution alternative–it’s not a failure of the market itself or of libertarian principles.

The answer, then, is to make carbon emissions NOT free, so that the cost of polluting can then be compared against other alternatives in a fashion that takes into account the very real long-term costs posed by global warming. That’s where carbon taxes and carbon trading systems come in–they impose a penalty where none existed before, and depending on how punitive it is it may or may not encourage alternate technology and efficiency.

Under a carbon tax regime, you simply fine companies for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted. A $14 per ton tax would amount to about a 100% tax on coal, and a 12 cent tax per gallon of gasoline. It would generate $80 billion a year for the United States, which would ideally be put to fund research into “green” energy alternatives. The disadvantage of this approach is, unfortunately, the political repercussions of a flat-out tax increase.

Under a carbon trading/”cap and trade” system, an absolute limit on emissions is decreed, and all polluters are granted permits with accompanying carbon quotas. Companies able to operate at below quota can sell their excess carbon capacity to other companies who cannot. Since permits are the equivalent of cash, governments will gain support from those who stand to profit (i.e., low emitters) and doesn’t need to justify a tax increase. This system has also been used successfully in other scenarios such as reducing acid rain.

Under either system, polluting companies will suddenly have an incentive to invest in clean technology and energy efficiency so as to reduce the costs for pollution they are paying or being forced to pass on to consumers. Rather than being free, emitting carbon will bring with it the acknowledgment that a very real cost is being imposed on the marketplace as well as our environment.

I love it–a market-based policy that is environmentally friendly!

Even though Bush has his head stuck in the sand about global warming the same as he does about everything else, the incoming Democratic Congress along with the positions taken by both Republican and Democratic candidates for president in 2008 promise to lend new life to imposing a cost on carbon pollution. If you care about global warming and are wondering what to do about it, one great way to start is to make sure that whatever candidates you support are in favor of making sure the market deals fairly with carbon dioxide by imposing a cost on it that accounts for the damage being done to the Earth and future generations.

Given that the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group report were not to his liking, Bush has now sought out the counsel of academics and retired generals who have predictably advised him not to draw down troops from Iraq and to not reach out to Iraq’s neighbors. They also advised him to increase the military’s budget without explaining where the extra money would come from.

The advice given was long on the unrealistic ideals of creating a stable democracy and “defeating extremism”, while short on in depth research into the nitty gritty consequences of keeping our troops in harm’s way.

This is vintage Bush–seeking to discard any and all evidence/advice except any that bolsters his personal views. Does that sound familiar? It should–the discarding of intelligence showing no WMD’s in Iraq was what led to the confrontation in the first place. He just never learns..and his ignorance comes at the expense of the American people, the taxes they pay, and the loss of their prestige around the world.

The people spoke forcefully in November that they want a change in Iraq and they want it now. Bush refusal to listen is at his and his party’s peril, making them look exactly as deluded and out of touch as they actually are.

A new poll shows that a whopping 70% of Americans now disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraq. 61% say the war was not worth fighting. The latest numbers mark a notable deterioration since October. The fact that the Iraq Study Group called Iraq a problem that is “grave and deteriorating” surely didn’t help. Predictably, Iraq is acting like an anchor on Bush’s approval ratings, with only 36% of the public approving generally of his performance, while 62% disapprove.

I wish that all these people who are now waking up and disapproving of Bush’s incompetence had been paying more attention during the 2004 election. The seeds of the current morass were evident even back then–from Abu Ghraib to beheadings to a rising insurgency to the mounting death toll–all signs that Bush’s unilateral Iraq adventure was destined to be a monumental failure.

We Kerry backers hate to say we told you so, but we told you so.

The ink is barely dry on the Iraq Study Group’s report and Bush is already pooh-poohing parts of the report he doesn’t like while cherry-picking the parts that he does. He prefers instead to stick with his grandiose vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East, a desire called unrealistic and naive by the report itself.
One of Bush’s biggest concerns is engaging Iraq’s neighbors in dialogue as to how to resolve the situation. That’s not surprising–Bush doesn’t like to eat crow, and he’ll have to eat a lot of it before he could reach out to “axis of evil” member Iran. As for Syria, he prefers to make demands that Syria back off meddling in Lebanon before talking. In typical Bush mode of having his head stuck in the sand, he appears not to realize that he’s really not in a position to be demanding anything at this juncture…and that he’ll be lucky to get any cooperation at all out of countries that he has previously sought to have cast out into the international wilderness.

As study group author and Democrat Lee Hamilton observed in the Washington Post article, “How do you solve problems without talking to people?” Indeed. Bush may not like it, but the entire region’s interests are intertwined in finding a final solution for Iraq that satisfies everyone–or that is the least odious among a menu of odious choices.

The other sticking point is the report’s recommendation to withdraw troops from Iraq by early 2008. The report sees what Bush does not: that keeping troops in the country that are not able to control the situation is only worsening the problem and putting them in harm’s way. Troop involvement should be re-defined to a supportive role that assists in educating the Iraqis to police themselves.

Withdrawing troops would, of course, be the final nail in Bush’s legacy as a failure in his Iraq adventure and will therefore resist it. This is where the Democratic Congress can exert its pressure with full knowledge that it has the backing of a solid majority of the American people, and it is Bush himself who can be portrayed as outside the mainstream, out of touch, and more concerned with a failed legacy than anything else.

It’s way past time to face the realities of Iraq, acknowledge it for the huge mistake it was, do the best we can among a suite of bad choices, swallow bitter medicine, and do what it takes to get our troops home…..because frankly the lives of our troops are way more precious and valuable than Bush’s pathetic legacy.