Worst. Congress. Ever.

Matt Taibbi writing in Rolling Stone has a great must-read article titled, "The Worst Congress Ever". Even I, being more or less a political junkie and throughly disgusted with the current Republican Congress, was shocked by some of the stuff that was in there. A small sampling:

Last year, [Republican James] Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

"Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good turnout anyway."

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.

"He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

[...]

[Republican Bill] Thomas is also notorious for excluding Democrats from the conference hearings needed to iron out the differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. According to the rules, conferences have to include at least one public, open meeting. But in the Bush years, Republicans have managed the conference issue with some of the most mind-blowingly juvenile behavior seen in any parliament west of the Russian Duma after happy hour. GOP chairmen routinely call a meeting, bring the press in for a photo op and then promptly shut the proceedings down. "Take a picture, wait five minutes, gavel it out -- all for show" is how one Democratic staffer described the process. Then, amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the meeting. "More often than not, we're trying to figure out where the conference is," says one House aide.

[...]

They don't work many days, don't pass many laws, and the few laws they're forced to pass, they pass late. In fact, in every year that Bush has been president, Congress has failed to pass more than three of the eleven annual appropriations bills on time. ... In the Sixties and Seventies, Congress met an average of 162 days a year. In the Eighties and Nineties, the average went down to 139 days. This year, the second session of the 109th Congress will set the all-time record for fewest days worked by a U.S. Congress: ninety-three. ... And even those numbers don't come close to telling the full story. Those who actually work on the Hill will tell you that a great many of those "workdays" were shameless mail-ins, half-days at best. Congress has arranged things now so that the typical workweek on the Hill begins late on Tuesday and ends just after noon on Thursday, to give members time to go home for the four-day weekend. This is borne out in the numbers: On nine of its "workdays" this year, the House held not a single vote -- meeting for less than eleven minutes. The Senate managed to top the House's feat, pulling off three workdays this year that lasted less than one minute. All told, a full fifteen percent of the Senate's workdays lasted less than four hours.

[...]

From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct, reviewing more than 2 million pages of government documents.

Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George Bush took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the number of open rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of appropriations bills passed on time.

And it goes on and on. As they say, read the whole thing. And then vote.

I Voted

I took advantage of the early voting we have here, and went ahead and cast my ballot today. There was no line but all of the booths were being used. How's that for efficient allocation of resources?

In addition to the candidates for office (which were easy to decide on -- if they had a D by the name you checked it, if they had an R, you stayed away), there were a number of ballot initiatives and amendments. There were something like 15 of these statewide, and another 4 municipal. Luckily, they send you a "blue book" with a comprehensive explanation and analysis (including bullet points pro and con) for each of the amendments, and I studied it and filled out my "cheat sheet" to bring with me. Even still, it's not easy to make up your mind on all of these. My rule is, when in doubt, vote no. And that included all of the municipal ballot initiatives for which I didn't have a blue book.

Pelican Eats Pigeon

Awesome.

Stupid Clemson

Who gave them permission to lose?

Looks like I'll just have to engage in that favorite past time of Clemson fans, which is pinning your hopes on next season.

Scientists and Engineers for America

As I mentioned previously, there is a new political organization called Scientists and Engineers for America, which fights against the anti-science lobby. They've been making a splash in the media lately.

Nobel laureate Peter Agre appeared on the Colbert report, which you will watch here.

Susan F. Wood appeared on NPR's Science Friday, which you listen to next here.

As you might imagine, the Colbert segment is the more entertaining, and the NPR segment is by far the more informative.

Where where these Teachers when I was in School?

China seems to have a bit of a problem keeping its teachers under control.

Two girls plied with liquor as punishment

A Chinese teacher forced two schoolgirls to drink a bottle of liquor between them as punishment for neglecting their studies, Chinese media reported on Monday.

Doesn't sound like punishment to me. Brear Rabbit comes to mind. But this was only for neglecting their studies. Apparently the teacher found a hair curler and a letter among their belongings, and this was enough to reward them with booze. If you go so far as to contradict the teacher, however, you get a beating:

A schoolboy who spoke out against the punishment was beaten by the same teacher, it said.

Forcing two young girls to down a bottle of hard liquor and beating a kid who objects is one thing, but this last incident is just a little over the top:

In September, a history teacher in central China beat an 11-year-old student senseless and threw her from a fourth-floor classroom window, killing her in a so-far unexplained frenzy.

It brings a whole new meaning to the term "strict disciplinarian". I'll bet though that none of the students ever crossed that teacher again.

More Zaniness From Poland

Thank God for Kent Hovind. Otherwise, the USA might have to relinquish its title as home of the world’s looniest creationist crazybags.

Neanderthal man walks among us, Poland’s far-right says

Poland’s far-right League of Polish Families (LPR), which is part of the coalition government, claims Darwin’s theory of evolution is all wrong, that humans lived alongside dinosaurs and that Neanderthal man is still among us.

Last week, Poland’s deputy education minister Miroslaw Orzechowski, a member of the LPR, bluntly rejected British naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and his postulate that man is descended from apes. […]

This weekend, Orzechowski was given some high-level support when European lawmaker for the far-right party, Maciej Giertych – the father of LPR leader Roman Giertych – told a seminar that Neanderthal man still roams the planet, notably in the United States where examples can be spotted in a boxing ring.

“A scientist showed me a picture of an American boxer. He had all the traits of Neanderthal man. These people are among us. They are part of the human race, probably more prevalent once upon a time, but who still exist,” Giertych, who has a doctorate in biology, told the seminar.

Taking up the mantra of creationists – who have a strong following among Christian fundamentalists in the United States, but whose theory that God created all living creatures at the same time has not won a huge following in Europe – Giertych also propounded that man and dinosaurs roamed the earth together.

“Research shows that dinosaurs and man were contemporaries. In every culture, there are indications that we remember (dinosaurs). The Scots have Loch Ness, we Poles have Wawel dragon (in Krakow), Marco Polo spoke of an imperial carriage in China which was pulled by a dragon,” Giertych said.

I… just don’t know what to say.

(Cross-posted to the Panda's Thumb.)

One thing I don't miss about South Carolina

One thing I don't miss about SC is people throwing puppies on barbecue grills. We don't seem to have that happen very often here in Colorado, so I'll have to give the higher score to my new home on that specific issue.

Deputies have arrested the person they think is responsible for burning a puppy on a grill in Columbia on October 1st. [...]

Adan Gonzalez was arrested Wednesday evening. He lives in the same mobile home park as the dog owner. The sheriff's department says he admitted to throwing the puppy on the grill but doesn't know why he did it. He is charged with a felony count of animal cruelty.

People, if you're goint to throw a puppy on a grill, at least have a reason.

It looks like my Clemson Tigers beat the... Yellow... something of whatever. 31-7. Maybe that'll give Clemson a top 10 ranking, but every top-ten team that had a game today won, so we'll have to see. Clemson would be in charge of the ACC Atlantic division, but for Boston College who beat Florida State today. BC needs to drop a game, and hopefully either Miami or Wake will do it to them. If that happens and Clemson doesn't lose to Virginia Tech, we should be in the ACC campionship game.

We Won the War but Lost the Peace...

Matthew Yglesias dispells this oft repeated phrase in a brilliant short post.

It starts out with Clausewitz's classic book On War home of the famous aphorism that "war is the continuation of politics by other means." There's actually a very good reason why Clausewitz is so famous and why this line, in particular, is famous. "Politics" in contemporary usage tends to denote "partisan politics" or "electoral politics" so perhaps it's better to think in terms of the word "policy." The point here is that going to war, prosecuting a war, continuing a war, ending a war, etc., are all policy decisions. They are policy decisions undertaken to achieve policy goals. The goal of the VC/NVA military campaign was to persuade the United States of America to stop backing the Republic of Vietnam regime in order to precipitate the collapse of the ROV government and unite the Vietnamese nation under the leadership of the Communist government in Hanoi.

The Tet Offensive did not, on its own, accomplish any of those things. It did, however, achieve major strides in that direction. It was, therefore, a success. It wasn't a "military" failure but a "political" success, it was just a success. There are no military failures that succeed politically, nor military successes that fail politically. All military operations are policy initiatives, and the only criterion for success or failure is success or failure in achieving policy objectives. [...]

You see this not only in the conduct and discourse of war supporters, but in some characteristic modes of criticism. The oft-repeated phrase that Bush had a "plan to win the war" but lacked "a plan to win the peace" is a manifestation of the same problem. Wars are undertaken to achieve policy goals. The policy outcome of a war is determined by the state of the peace -- the end of the war. If you don't have a plan to achieve your objectives, you don't have a plan to win the war at all. When you invade Afghanistan and manage not to achieve most of your key objectives -- the capture or killing of the al-Qaeda/Taliban leadership and bringing the entirety of Afghan territory under the control of anti-al-Qaeda forces -- you didn't "win the war" but then screw some stuff up. You lost the war. If your goals in Iraq were to (a) eliminate Saddam's nuclear program, and (b) construct a stable, pro-American regime in Iraq, and it turns out that Saddam had no nuclear program and you can't construct a stable, pro-American regime in Iraq, you've lost the war.

Friday Animal Blogging

New pet edition.

I decided that I needed a pet, and since I can't get a cat or a dog, and iguanas are out of fashion, I went with parakeets:


One green and one blue. Here they are at their food dish, their favorite place:


And here are some close-ups. The green one comes in more clearly because he knows how to hold still (though he's a biter), while the blue one ducks and dodges all over the place.



I don't have names for them yet. For now I just refer to them as Green and Blue, but of course that's going to have to change.

It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know

This is a bit stale by now, but Laurin Manning referred to this article about SC Governor Mark Sanford's appearance before the NAACP. When addressing a question about what to do about the pay gap between blacks and whites, Sanford's advice was that black folk should make better use of their rich friends and family:

When members of the NAACP asked Gov. Mark Sanford how the state should handle pay disparity problems between black and white workers, he talked about getting ahead the old-fashioned way.

"If you want to have greater opportunities, it's got to begin somewhere. And generally it begins with somebody knowing someone else," Sanford said Thursday night, eliciting grumbles in the crowd of about 70.

During a discussion at the civil rights group's convention, Sanford was asked what he'd do in a second term to address pay gaps. The meeting was held in Augusta because the South Carolina NAACP is boycotting the state until the Confederate flag is removed from a pole on the Statehouse grounds.

"Let me answer it this way," Sanford said. "I've got this brother who got his first job in New York because my dad knew the guy that he ultimately went to work for."

It wasn't anything sinister or evil, Sanford said. But because of that opportunity, his brother "worked for the company that traded penny stocks and ultimately that led to another opportunity down the road" and buying a company. "Then he spent seven years trying to basically pay off some debt on that company," Sanford said.

"He's a success in life because of personal relationships," Sanford said.

If only all black people would use Sanford's daddy's connection, they'd have no problem getting good paying jobs. And if that didn't work out, they could always off-load their Florida real estate, or own the Texas Rangers and run an oil company for awhile. If you just know the right people or have the right parents, you can do these things without any experience or even basic competence.

I wish Gervais were still blogging, he'd have a field day with this. What can you say about a self-described libertarian governor who thinks that the solution to the inequities of the marketplace is more cronyism and nepotism? The phrase "out-of-touch" doesn't begin to describe it.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Via Tim Lambert, I came across this page featuring the 10 dumbest Congressmen in America, with of course some amusing exposition for each. Tim focuses on global warming denialist and all around goof-ball James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), who clearly deserves his #3 spot. Before reading this, I would have ranked Inhofe even higher, but after seeing the number 1 and 2 spots, I'm not so sure.

Katherine Harris (R-Florida) has earned top billing. Enough said on that. If you haven't been laughing at Harris' many comical screw-ups, then you don't pay much attention to politics. But the #2 spot, Donald Young (R-Alaska), has got to be my favorite. I can't believe I had never heard this before:

The scene: Fairbanks, Alaska, 1994. Congressman Don Young, already in office for 20 years, is on the stump preaching the virtues of Newt Gingrich's Republican revolution to a group of high school students. Just look at all the wasteful things the federal government does with taxpayers' money, he tells them. The National Endowment for the Arts, for example, funds art involving "people doing offensive things ... things that are absolutely ridiculous." One student asks, "Like what?"

"Buttfucking," replies the great scourge of obscenity and instructor of youth.

Young's performance remains a classic in the annals of congressional idiocy, offering that rare, supremely unselfconscious moment in which one of our nation's legislative solons lets his addled mind graze freely.

That is just funny, funny, funny. Oh, and sad. Yes, very sad (tee hee hee).

Irony Is Still Dead

So I was reading the print edition of the Rocky Mountain News during lunch, and there is this interesting story.

I live in Colorado's 7th Congressional district. It was just vacated by Bob Beauprez (R) who is now running for governor, so it's an open seat. And it's one of the few truly up-for-grabs races in the nation. Democratic candidate Ed Perlmutter currently has a very slight lead over Republican Rick O'Donnell, but of course that could change. And I'm glad I'll be voting in a race whose outcome isn't already predetermined.

But anyway, there's this 527 group running an attack ad against Perlmutter. In the ad, they accuse Perlmutter of having pushed for legislation defining services for illegal immigrants when he was a state Senator. There's only one slight problem. The legislation was for legal immigrants, not illegals.

Okay, so the ad was dishonest. It's hardly the only one out there. But here's the catch: The 527 who paid for the ad is called Americans for Honesty on Issues. Yes, that's really their name. And who could possibly create such an Orwellian group? Why none other than Bob J. Perry, the guy who bankrolled the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, the group which made all those scurrilous accusations against John Kerry which turned out to be false.

You just can't make this stuff up. I mean, if I sat down and tried to come up with the most amusingly ironic and disingenuous name for a group that produces blatanly false attack ads, I could do no better than Americans for Honesty on Issues.

Snow

It's currently snowing outside. Hard. It's not cold enough for it to stick, so most of it's melting as it hits the ground. There's only a light dusting for now. But still... It's mid October.

When I lived in the South Carolina upstate, we probably got snow on average about once a year. Some years we didn't get any, and others we might get it twice. That made it mostly an occasion to get out of school and have some fun, since the whole area would shut down at the slightest hint of snow. But it would never happen before January.

When I lived in Charleston, it simply didn't snow at all. In the nearly 12 years I was there, I can recall it snowing exactly once. It produced a light dusting where you could still see the green of the grass blades poking through, and it was gone by the next day. And it still made everyone freak out.

Salon Interview with Richard Dawkins

Salon has an interesting interview with Richard Dawkins here:

The flying spaghetti monster

It's mostly about Dawkins' views on religion (he's against it) and only touches on evolution insofar as it's relevant to the first question. I haven't entirely wrapped my head around whether Dawkins is fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong in his treatment of religion, but I tend towards the Dawkinsian view that the question itself may be meaningless.

But I do have one major quibble, and strangely enough it doesn't come from Dawkins at all, but instead comes from the interviewer in his introduction:

[Dawkins] first made his name 30 years ago with his groundbreaking book "The Selfish Gene," which reshaped the field of evolutionary biology by arguing that evolution played out at the level of the gene itself, not the individual animal.

That's just plain wrong. Dawkins didn't come up with this view, he simply popularized it. Here's what he says 1989 preface to the book:

The gene's-eye view of Darwinism is implicit in the writings of of R.A. Fisher and the other great pioneers of neo-Darwinism in the early thrities, but was made explicit by W.D. Hamilton and G.C. Williams in the sixties. For me their insight had a visionary quality. But I found their expressions of it too laconic, not full-throated ehough. I was conviced that an amplified and developed version could make everything about life fall into place, in the heart as well as in the brain. I would write a book extolling the gene's-eye view of evolution.

And while I can't find it in my edition, I have read before where he wrote in the book (or at least about the book) that while the view he expresses may be unfamiliar, even shocking to lay audiences, it's the sort of thing that evolutionary biologists had long since accepted.

Again?

I'm starting to wonder, are there any Republican Congressmen who don't try to molest pages?

Sources: Inquiry opened over Kolbe, male ex-pages

The U.S. attorney in Arizona has begun a preliminary inquiry into a 1996 camping trip that included Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Arizona, and two male former congressional pages, according to two federal law enforcement officials who are familiar with the issue.

The officials said the initial assessment stems from a single allegation regarding Kolbe's behavior on the trip.

It looks like William Kerr has his work cut out for him -- that's two more pages he'll have to expose and slander.

World's Smallest Genome

It clocks in at just under 160 kilobases. To put that into perspective, the human genome is over 3 gigabases.

And it has all of 182 genes.

How small can a genome get and still run a living organism? Researchers now say that a symbiotic bacterium called Carsonella ruddii, which lives off sap-feeding insects, has taken the record for smallest genome with just 159,662 'letters' (or base pairs) of DNA and 182 protein-coding genes. At one-third the size of previously found 'minimal' organisms, it is smaller than researchers thought they would find. [...]

This is encouraging news for synthetic biologists who are hoping to make designer bacteria from scratch, which could perform useful functions such as synthesizing pharmaceuticals or fuels.

Sounds like fun. And this discovery gives us some insights into the evolution of larger, eukaryotic cells as well:

C. ruddii seems even more extreme. "Its gene inventory seems insufficient for most biological processes that appear to be essential for bacterial life," write Atsushi Nakabachi at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Masahira Hattori at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and their colleagues. At the moment, the researchers are not sure how C. ruddii copes, although they speculate that some of the necessary genes may have been transferred over evolutionary time to the genomes of the host.

That is precisely what is thought to have happened during the evolution of the compartments called mitochondria in our own cells, which are responsible for energy production. These are believed to have once been symbionts that lost all autonomy by relinquishing most of their genes to the host (mitochondria still have their own DNA).

Andersson says that C. ruddii might be analogues of mitochondria, caught in the process of changing from separate but dependent organisms into structures that will be engulfed and incorporated into the host cells.

In spite of the fact that creationists like to bring up the hypothesized endosymbiosis of mitochondria or chloroplasts as a problem for evolution, the fact is that we find intermediates between fully autonomous prokaryotes and full endosymbionts all over nature. (My favorite example is Wolbachia.) It appears that they go through an intracellular parasitic stage and, like with many parasitic relationships, both the parasite and the host evolve to cope with each other. In the case of endosymbionts, they become increasingly more cooperative until they become inseparable.

(Cross-posted to the Panda's Thumb.)

Friday Animal Blogging Embargoed Again

I found a trial version of Photoshop that I downloaded and installed this morning, but by the time I did all that I had to leave for work. Next week, I swear!

It's Worse Than You Think

Well, I recently posted about the Bush Administration allowed James Dobson and company to screw around with international aid funds. Now there's a new book out by the number two guy at the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives that shows the whole thing to be a rotten mess of cronyism and political gamesmanship. Here's the low-down:

The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.

Entitled "Tempting Faith," the book is not scheduled for release until Oct. 16, but MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" has obtained a copy. [...]

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as "the nuts."

"National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous,' 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy,'" Kuo writes.

So far, I'm with Rove. Except I wouldn't have said those things behind their backs.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly "nonpartisan" events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory “at least partially … to the conferences we had launched two years before."

Absolutely shameless.

The money that was appropriated and disbursed, however, often served a political agenda, Kuo claims, with organizations friendly to the administration often winning grants.

More pointedly, Kuo quotes an unnamed member of the review panel charged with rating grant applications as saying she stopped looking at applications from "those non-Christian groups," as did many of her colleagues.

Shocking.

If that's not enough, it's worth checking out the Keith Olberman videos here and here.