Friday, February 20, 2004
Politicizing Science: James Glanz's NY Times piece captures the degree to which the Rove Team has politicized much more than global warming.
More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement yesterday asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.
The sweeping accusations were later discussed in a conference call organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. On Wednesday, the organization also issued a 38-page report detailing its accusations.
The two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.
According to the report, the Bush administration has misrepresented scientific consensus on global warming, censored at least one report on climate change, manipulated scientific findings on the emissions of mercury from power plants and suppressed information on condom use.
The report asserts that the administration also allowed industries with conflicts of interest to influence technical advisory committees, disbanded for political reasons one panel on arms control and subjected other prospective members of scientific panels to political litmus tests. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/politics/19RESE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Moyers Retiring: The rumors had been there; now it's official. From the AP report:
Bill Moyers, whose weekly magazine "Now" on PBS has capped a 30-year career in TV journalism, is leaving the broadcast after the November elections.
His next venture: Writing a long-planned book about Lyndon Johnson, whom he served before and during Johnson's presidency.
"It isn't because I feel old," Moyers, 69, told The Associated Press of his decision to move on, which was made official Thursday. "It's because I feel compelled to do something else now, that only I can do - which is that book." http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040219/ap_on_en_tv/tv_bill_moyers_3
Jobs: Decent take from Bob Herbert in today's NY Times reminding us that this is not just a Democrat-Republican issue, that neither party has the answers:
The simple truth, as Mr. Pardon and so many others have found through hard experience, is that enormous numbers of well-educated, highly skilled white-collar workers are having tremendous trouble finding the kind of high-level employment they've been trained for and the kind of pay they feel they deserve.
The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.
These advocates are sounding more and more like the hapless Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield," who could never be swayed from his good-natured belief that something would "turn up."
We've allowed the multinationals to run wild and never cared enough to step in when the people losing their jobs, or getting their wages and benefits squeezed, were of the lower-paid variety. Now the middle class is being targeted, and the panic is setting in.
No one really knows what to do, not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/20/opinion/20HERB.html?hp
Jobs, II: Jonathan Weisman's article in the Washington Post mined a similar vein: Democrats Can't Get Firm Grip on Jobs Issue:
Democratic presidential candidates have made the loss of U.S. jobs to international competition the centerpiece of their campaigns, but even some of the candidates' economic advisers acknowledge that remedies offered -- such as closing tax loopholes on overseas income and offering tax breaks for domestic hiring -- would probably do little to stop the bleeding.
The movement of jobs to low-wage countries such as China, India and Mexico has been driven by powerful forces of economic globalization that may be beyond a politician's control, economists say. The two leading Democratic candidates have fallen back largely on one economic factor that Washington does control: the tax code.
http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=e3dca0a9bcc70ee75d728092b0ad0146&lat=1077201923&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW1RH05DC0B51C4672B7593E55E74D
Jobs, III Rove Team Retreats: Richard Stevenson's NY Times piece summarized:
The Bush administration backed away on Wednesday from a forecast it made public only last week predicting average job gains of more than 300,000 a month for 2004 but said it remained confident of robust though unspecified job growth for the year.
In two news briefings, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, repeatedly declined to endorse the forecast, which was in the Economic Report of the President, a 417-page book sent to Congress last week under Mr. Bush's signature.
"The president is not a statistician," Mr. McClellan said at one point.
Asked why he would not stand behind the forecast, Mr. McClellan replied: "I think what the president stands behind is the policies that he is implementing, the policies that he is advocating. That's what's important." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/politics/19BUSH.html
Environmental Re-write: Grist magazine illustrates how the Rove boys improve our environment.
Just before Valentine's Day this year, the Bush administration gave the North Dakota electric industry a sweetheart deal, agreeing to a plan that will pave the way for new coal-fired power plants to be built in the state near Theodore Roosevelt National Park -- the same picturesque terrain where its namesake discovered his calling as the godfather of the American conservation movement.
Since 1999, the U.S. EPA and North Dakota officials have sparred over air quality in the park, with the EPA saying that pollution has exceeded federal clean-air standards and state and industry representatives trying to refute the charge. According to state air-evaluation reports from 1999, the region's power plants were pumping out about 66,000 tons more sulfur dioxide each year than permitted under federal rules. In 2000, EPA officials in Region 8, which includes North Dakota, confirmed this finding. But suddenly, as of Friday, North Dakota's power-plant emissions have been deemed acceptable by the Bush EPA -- despite the fact that no significant efforts have been made to reduce pollution in the state.
What gives? Well, what always gives when industry demands run up against pollution standards these days? The standards. The EPA agreed to let North Dakota change the methods it uses to estimate air pollution, altering the criteria within its pollution modeling software that dictate what baseline years are used and how the pollution data is averaged. http://www.gristmagazine.com/muck/muck021904.asp
What's Happening, Iraq: The New York Times ran an excellent editorial on Tuesday concerning the Administration's politicizing of intelligence. William E. Jackson, Jr. takes them to task, however, as they, like most of the U.S. media, failed to question the obvious distortions perpetrated by the Rove Administration.
The New York Times offered a sharp editorial Tuesday critiquing the indisputable role of the White House in distorting the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and in stampeding Congressional and public opinion by spinning worst-case scenarios -- "inflating them drastically" -- to justify an immediate invasion last March to repel an alleged imminent threat to the United States. Indeed, the logical implication of the editorial might well have been to charge senior officials -- in particular the vice president -- with an impeachable offense.
However, strangely missing from the paper of record was any indictment of the national press, starting with the Times, for its obvious role in gravely misleading the institutions of government and the public when hyping the WMD threat.
Times reporters and editors bear a heavy responsibility, as far back as September 2002, for having raised the nuclear specter that could materialize in the form of a "mushroom cloud." National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney took some of their talk-show lines on the nuclear danger from the Times article of Sept. 8, 2002 by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts."
Moreover, over the years, the Times had frequently reported that the threat from Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs was real and ominous. Defectors and exile groups, such as the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi, were prime sources for the Times.
Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler recently reminded us that the press is about the only way to find out more than what the government chooses to tell us ("Not Everyone Was Wrong," Feb. 14). Therefore, it is disingenuous of the Times to now place the burden of blame for bad intelligence at the feet of the intelligence community, as the Bush administration is doing, or even to hold solely responsible the senior policymakers for misuse of same. It seems fair to ask: who hoodwinked whom in the process of what Sen. Bob Graham has called "incestuous amplification?" http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2093445
What's Happening, Iraq, II: The Disappearing of the Dead:
Kudos to the Boston Globe for reporting on the Project for Defense Alternatives' report, Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a "New Warfare," which is a an indictment of the Pentagon's calculated "perception management" campaign to disguise the real human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon pretends to not track civilian deaths, so there is ostensibly nothing to report, and it extols its "precision warfare" to reassure us that such casualties must be minimal. From the original:
During the course of the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts the US Department of Defense (DoD) conducted "perception management" campaigns that obstructed the public's appreciation of the wars' human toll. The casualty issue was not alone in suffering such treatment during the prologue to the Iraq conflict. Distortion and miscalculation affected the official discourse on many of the key issues surrounding the war, including: the nature, magnitude, and immediacy of the threat; the likely financial cost of the war; the troop requirement for both the combat and post-war phases of the operation; and the difficulty and expense of post-war reconstruction and stabilization efforts.
The casualty issue is one of strategic import. In addition to US and allied losses, approximately 18,000 Afghan and Iraqi combatants and non-combatants were killed during the main combat phases of the two wars. (About one-third of the total were non-combatants.) This toll bears directly on (1) the threat environments in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan; (2) the regional and global reactions to US operations, (3) the prospects for building multinational security cooperation on Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism; and, (4) the appeal, influence, and growth of terrorist organizations and extremist movements.
Official efforts to shape the public's appreciation of the issue may have included the pre-war placement of suspect stories meant to cast doubt on subsequent casualty reports. During the wars, perception management included efforts to "spin"or frame casualty incidents and stories in ways that minimized their significance, cast doubt on their reliability, or shirked responsibility for the occurrence of casualties. DoD and armed services officials often (but inconsistently) refused to divulge casualty estimates, although relevant intelligence was available at every level ranging from the Office of the Secretary of Defense down to field units.
DoD and other US officials also promoted more general concepts to frame public discussion and media coverage of the casualty issue. One of these frames -- the concept of a new low-risk "precision warfare" -- created unrealistic expectations that war would produce very low casualties on all sides. Another frame -- what might be called "casualty agnosticism" -- implied that it was impossible to derive usefully accurate estimates of casualties, despite the presence of prodigious investigative resources in the field (both governmental and non-governmental). DoD was fairly successfully in projecting these framing concepts into US media coverage of the wars and war casualties. http://www.comw.org/pda/0402rm9exsum.html
The Globe report (Bryan Bender)
By refusing to make public its estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has undercut international support for the US campaigns in those countries and has made the postwar stabilization of the two societies more difficult, according to an independent report to be released today that accuses the Pentagon of appearing indifferent to the civilian cost of war.
The analysis by the Project on Defense Alternatives, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, concludes that the Pentagon has not fully disclosed in recent years accidental deaths and injuries inflicted upon civilian populations by American military forces. Its failure to do so has made it more difficult to predict how local populations will receive the United States after a conflict, the report said.
According to the report -- "Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a `New Warfare' " -- the Pentagon's stance has also distorted the national debate over whether to go to war.
The report says the US military has wrongly given the impression that its high-tech form of warfare is extremely low risk, creating unrealistic expectations that war produces very low casualties.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2004/02/18/report_says_military_distorts_war_deaths?mode=PF
Edwards the Populist?:
Perhaps not of the progressive type. Kerry has returned to his previous stiff, stentorian manner, many of us in Massachusetts have been at least disappointed in him for years, and Edwards is both an impressive campaigner and has a solid Two Americas message. But me thinks Edwards (and Hillary) voted for the awful bankruptcy bill that strips protection for "average Americans". [Kerry voted against it].
-R
More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement yesterday asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.
The sweeping accusations were later discussed in a conference call organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. On Wednesday, the organization also issued a 38-page report detailing its accusations.
The two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.
According to the report, the Bush administration has misrepresented scientific consensus on global warming, censored at least one report on climate change, manipulated scientific findings on the emissions of mercury from power plants and suppressed information on condom use.
The report asserts that the administration also allowed industries with conflicts of interest to influence technical advisory committees, disbanded for political reasons one panel on arms control and subjected other prospective members of scientific panels to political litmus tests. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/politics/19RESE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Moyers Retiring: The rumors had been there; now it's official. From the AP report:
Bill Moyers, whose weekly magazine "Now" on PBS has capped a 30-year career in TV journalism, is leaving the broadcast after the November elections.
His next venture: Writing a long-planned book about Lyndon Johnson, whom he served before and during Johnson's presidency.
"It isn't because I feel old," Moyers, 69, told The Associated Press of his decision to move on, which was made official Thursday. "It's because I feel compelled to do something else now, that only I can do - which is that book." http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040219/ap_on_en_tv/tv_bill_moyers_3
Jobs: Decent take from Bob Herbert in today's NY Times reminding us that this is not just a Democrat-Republican issue, that neither party has the answers:
The simple truth, as Mr. Pardon and so many others have found through hard experience, is that enormous numbers of well-educated, highly skilled white-collar workers are having tremendous trouble finding the kind of high-level employment they've been trained for and the kind of pay they feel they deserve.
The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.
These advocates are sounding more and more like the hapless Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield," who could never be swayed from his good-natured belief that something would "turn up."
We've allowed the multinationals to run wild and never cared enough to step in when the people losing their jobs, or getting their wages and benefits squeezed, were of the lower-paid variety. Now the middle class is being targeted, and the panic is setting in.
No one really knows what to do, not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/20/opinion/20HERB.html?hp
Jobs, II: Jonathan Weisman's article in the Washington Post mined a similar vein: Democrats Can't Get Firm Grip on Jobs Issue:
Democratic presidential candidates have made the loss of U.S. jobs to international competition the centerpiece of their campaigns, but even some of the candidates' economic advisers acknowledge that remedies offered -- such as closing tax loopholes on overseas income and offering tax breaks for domestic hiring -- would probably do little to stop the bleeding.
The movement of jobs to low-wage countries such as China, India and Mexico has been driven by powerful forces of economic globalization that may be beyond a politician's control, economists say. The two leading Democratic candidates have fallen back largely on one economic factor that Washington does control: the tax code.
http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=e3dca0a9bcc70ee75d728092b0ad0146&lat=1077201923&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW1RH05DC0B51C4672B7593E55E74D
Jobs, III Rove Team Retreats: Richard Stevenson's NY Times piece summarized:
The Bush administration backed away on Wednesday from a forecast it made public only last week predicting average job gains of more than 300,000 a month for 2004 but said it remained confident of robust though unspecified job growth for the year.
In two news briefings, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, repeatedly declined to endorse the forecast, which was in the Economic Report of the President, a 417-page book sent to Congress last week under Mr. Bush's signature.
"The president is not a statistician," Mr. McClellan said at one point.
Asked why he would not stand behind the forecast, Mr. McClellan replied: "I think what the president stands behind is the policies that he is implementing, the policies that he is advocating. That's what's important." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/politics/19BUSH.html
Environmental Re-write: Grist magazine illustrates how the Rove boys improve our environment.
Just before Valentine's Day this year, the Bush administration gave the North Dakota electric industry a sweetheart deal, agreeing to a plan that will pave the way for new coal-fired power plants to be built in the state near Theodore Roosevelt National Park -- the same picturesque terrain where its namesake discovered his calling as the godfather of the American conservation movement.
Since 1999, the U.S. EPA and North Dakota officials have sparred over air quality in the park, with the EPA saying that pollution has exceeded federal clean-air standards and state and industry representatives trying to refute the charge. According to state air-evaluation reports from 1999, the region's power plants were pumping out about 66,000 tons more sulfur dioxide each year than permitted under federal rules. In 2000, EPA officials in Region 8, which includes North Dakota, confirmed this finding. But suddenly, as of Friday, North Dakota's power-plant emissions have been deemed acceptable by the Bush EPA -- despite the fact that no significant efforts have been made to reduce pollution in the state.
What gives? Well, what always gives when industry demands run up against pollution standards these days? The standards. The EPA agreed to let North Dakota change the methods it uses to estimate air pollution, altering the criteria within its pollution modeling software that dictate what baseline years are used and how the pollution data is averaged. http://www.gristmagazine.com/muck/muck021904.asp
What's Happening, Iraq: The New York Times ran an excellent editorial on Tuesday concerning the Administration's politicizing of intelligence. William E. Jackson, Jr. takes them to task, however, as they, like most of the U.S. media, failed to question the obvious distortions perpetrated by the Rove Administration.
The New York Times offered a sharp editorial Tuesday critiquing the indisputable role of the White House in distorting the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and in stampeding Congressional and public opinion by spinning worst-case scenarios -- "inflating them drastically" -- to justify an immediate invasion last March to repel an alleged imminent threat to the United States. Indeed, the logical implication of the editorial might well have been to charge senior officials -- in particular the vice president -- with an impeachable offense.
However, strangely missing from the paper of record was any indictment of the national press, starting with the Times, for its obvious role in gravely misleading the institutions of government and the public when hyping the WMD threat.
Times reporters and editors bear a heavy responsibility, as far back as September 2002, for having raised the nuclear specter that could materialize in the form of a "mushroom cloud." National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney took some of their talk-show lines on the nuclear danger from the Times article of Sept. 8, 2002 by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts."
Moreover, over the years, the Times had frequently reported that the threat from Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs was real and ominous. Defectors and exile groups, such as the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi, were prime sources for the Times.
Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler recently reminded us that the press is about the only way to find out more than what the government chooses to tell us ("Not Everyone Was Wrong," Feb. 14). Therefore, it is disingenuous of the Times to now place the burden of blame for bad intelligence at the feet of the intelligence community, as the Bush administration is doing, or even to hold solely responsible the senior policymakers for misuse of same. It seems fair to ask: who hoodwinked whom in the process of what Sen. Bob Graham has called "incestuous amplification?" http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2093445
What's Happening, Iraq, II: The Disappearing of the Dead:
Kudos to the Boston Globe for reporting on the Project for Defense Alternatives' report, Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a "New Warfare," which is a an indictment of the Pentagon's calculated "perception management" campaign to disguise the real human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon pretends to not track civilian deaths, so there is ostensibly nothing to report, and it extols its "precision warfare" to reassure us that such casualties must be minimal. From the original:
During the course of the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts the US Department of Defense (DoD) conducted "perception management" campaigns that obstructed the public's appreciation of the wars' human toll. The casualty issue was not alone in suffering such treatment during the prologue to the Iraq conflict. Distortion and miscalculation affected the official discourse on many of the key issues surrounding the war, including: the nature, magnitude, and immediacy of the threat; the likely financial cost of the war; the troop requirement for both the combat and post-war phases of the operation; and the difficulty and expense of post-war reconstruction and stabilization efforts.
The casualty issue is one of strategic import. In addition to US and allied losses, approximately 18,000 Afghan and Iraqi combatants and non-combatants were killed during the main combat phases of the two wars. (About one-third of the total were non-combatants.) This toll bears directly on (1) the threat environments in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan; (2) the regional and global reactions to US operations, (3) the prospects for building multinational security cooperation on Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism; and, (4) the appeal, influence, and growth of terrorist organizations and extremist movements.
Official efforts to shape the public's appreciation of the issue may have included the pre-war placement of suspect stories meant to cast doubt on subsequent casualty reports. During the wars, perception management included efforts to "spin"or frame casualty incidents and stories in ways that minimized their significance, cast doubt on their reliability, or shirked responsibility for the occurrence of casualties. DoD and armed services officials often (but inconsistently) refused to divulge casualty estimates, although relevant intelligence was available at every level ranging from the Office of the Secretary of Defense down to field units.
DoD and other US officials also promoted more general concepts to frame public discussion and media coverage of the casualty issue. One of these frames -- the concept of a new low-risk "precision warfare" -- created unrealistic expectations that war would produce very low casualties on all sides. Another frame -- what might be called "casualty agnosticism" -- implied that it was impossible to derive usefully accurate estimates of casualties, despite the presence of prodigious investigative resources in the field (both governmental and non-governmental). DoD was fairly successfully in projecting these framing concepts into US media coverage of the wars and war casualties. http://www.comw.org/pda/0402rm9exsum.html
The Globe report (Bryan Bender)
By refusing to make public its estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has undercut international support for the US campaigns in those countries and has made the postwar stabilization of the two societies more difficult, according to an independent report to be released today that accuses the Pentagon of appearing indifferent to the civilian cost of war.
The analysis by the Project on Defense Alternatives, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, concludes that the Pentagon has not fully disclosed in recent years accidental deaths and injuries inflicted upon civilian populations by American military forces. Its failure to do so has made it more difficult to predict how local populations will receive the United States after a conflict, the report said.
According to the report -- "Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a `New Warfare' " -- the Pentagon's stance has also distorted the national debate over whether to go to war.
The report says the US military has wrongly given the impression that its high-tech form of warfare is extremely low risk, creating unrealistic expectations that war produces very low casualties.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2004/02/18/report_says_military_distorts_war_deaths?mode=PF
Edwards the Populist?:
Perhaps not of the progressive type. Kerry has returned to his previous stiff, stentorian manner, many of us in Massachusetts have been at least disappointed in him for years, and Edwards is both an impressive campaigner and has a solid Two Americas message. But me thinks Edwards (and Hillary) voted for the awful bankruptcy bill that strips protection for "average Americans". [Kerry voted against it].
-R
