Political Commentary

Missed Opportunities

Here’s a whiny piece from the LA Daily News, with at least two questions not asked (nor are they ever asked in pieces like this, or if they are, it’s rare):

President George W. Bush’s lean $2.57 trillion budget plan to beef up the U.S. military comes at the expense of Southern California’s ability to hire more cops, help battered women and clean its drinking water.

The proposed 2006 budget slashes programs considered vital by local officials, including Los Angeles’ Community Oriented Policing program, used to hire more police, and community block grants that fund low-income housing and other social services.

Boo.Hoo.

First unasked question: Why is it the responsibility of a taxpayer in Wyoming to provide clean drinking water for Los Angeles residents? Or pay cops’ salaries?

How did this come to be within the purview of the federal government? These are local issues, that should be locally funded.

On to the next:

Getting California’s fair share of federal tax dollars has long been on the agenda of Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders of both parties, with all five of them scheduled to be in Washington on Feb. 17 to meet with the state’s 53 congressional members to see whether the current situation can be improved.

Estimates currently peg the state’s take at 77 cents for every dollar paid to Washington by California taxpayers, and Democratic leaders in Sacramento said Monday that the president’s budget doesn’t bode well for rectifying that imbalance.

Our intrepid reporters report this as though it’s a perfectly sensible notion that each state should get back exactly as much (if not more–though then that would beg the question of which state wasn’t getting back as much to pay for the overage) as it pays in federal taxes, in the form of federal outlays.

The purpose of federal taxes is not to get them back in benefits to the state in proportion to the taxes paid. In fact, that would be impossible, since just the overhead costs of sending them to Washington and back would dictate that the total amount going back to the states would have to be less than that sent to Washington. It also ignores the funding that’s sent overseas (embassies, military activities, foreign aid, etc.) that can’t be spent in any of the fifty states. So when California insists on getting back all one hundred cents of its federal tax dollar, it’s really saying that at least some, if not all other states should get less.

I’ve got an idea. Instead of state officials lobbying to get the gummint to spend money in their states, howzabout they lobby to reduce federal taxes, so that the people who live in the states have more money to spend on their own states, and don’t have to rely on benefactors in Washington to pay for their police departments and womens’ shelters after skimming their umpteen percent off the top?

Science And Society

The ID Wars Rage On

John Derbyshire has been fighting the good fight over at The Corner. He describes why I’m always hesitant to get into this subject, and why the battles never end over at Free Republic:

I like a good knock-down argument as much as the next person, but I must say, ID-ers are low-grade opponents, at least if a bulk of my e-mails are any indication. They are still banging away with the arguments I first heard when the whole thing first surfaced 10-15 yrs ago. “What use is half an eye?” “The odds against this are a trillion to one!” etc. etc. There is nothing new here. I understand why biologists get angry and frustrated with ID-ers. All the ID arguments have been patiently refuted many times over. The ID-ers response is to come back with… the same arguments.

Derbyshire co-blogger Jonah has some thoughts as well.

War Commentary

A New Sheriff In Town

Condi Rice committed the gravest diplomatic sin of ignoring Arafat’s grave:

Unlike a long line of other leaders who paid some kind of homage to Arafat’s grave at the entrance to the Mukata, when visiting PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Rice’s car simply pulled into the compound, passed the grave and Rice got out and walked into the building.

On the way out, she also made no acknowledgment of the grave, unlike other leaders, like EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana who laid a wreath or British Prime Minister Tony Blair who walked by and nodded.

History will record that the major (in fact only) contribution that Yasser Arafat ever made to peace in the Middle East was shuffling off this mortal coil. He didn’t do it willingly, of course, but still, credit where credit’s due.

Technology and Society

We Start Them Out Young In The Great Lake State

A four-year-old Michigan boy drove his mother’s car to the video store and back. It was closed, unfortunately:

Osga then discovered the boy, whose mother told police her son tried to drive the car earlier after she let him steer the vehicle from her lap.

“He’s 4 years old, his mom didn’t even know he was up,” Heugel told The Grand Rapids Press for a Sunday story. “I don’t think he even realizes what he did.”

No charges will be filed against the boy or his mother, Heugel said.

It was the third time in six weeks that a west Michigan child was caught driving a vehicle.

Hey, when you’re one of the leading producers of the product, you want to get them started early.

Seriously, growing up in Michigan, and particularly in Flint, Michigan, which was then (and still remains largely today) a one-industry town, there was a lot of emphasis on driver’s ed. There used to be a miniature town in Kearsley Park, with little blacktop roads, stop and yield signs, one-way streets and traffic signals. It was called Safetyville, USA, sponsored by the Industrial Mutual Association (IMA) of Flint. There were small electric cars that children could drive around on the streets, but before you could get a “license” to do so, you had to go through driver’s training, and learn the road rules.

Apparently, it’s still there, but without the cars. It was a great idea, and I’m a little surprised that it didn’t survive, or spread to other communities.

Philosophy

How Can They Know?

There’s a new study seemingly funded to (among other things) justify fishing with live bait, that purports to prove that worms on a hook feel no pain. It also says that lobsters don’t suffer when put into a pot of boiling water. Apparently, the authors of the study think that these critters are too dumb to hurt.

Now, I don’t know how to get into the head of a crustacean, let alone a night crawler, but I’m always a little suspicious of such firm pronouncements on subjects that truly are ultimately unknowable. They sound more like rationalization than science (like the old theory, that’s unfortunately not all that old, that the medical profession had that newborns were also insensate to pain, and that their cries and wails during unanaesthetized surgical procedures was just a reflexive response). It may be that worms wiggle mindlessly, but I suspect that if a lobster being put in a pot of boiling water didn’t mind, one wouldn’t have to work so hard to keep them in it.

Space

This Week’s Space Review

Jeff Foust has taken some pictures of the new annex to the National Air and Space Museum out by Dulles Airport. There are also interesting articles at today’s The Space Review by Sam Dinkin, about the prospects for O’Neillian space colonies (with a little historical perspective of the concept), and by Stephen Ashworth on the vital need for NASA to work cooperatively, rather than adversarially, with private enterprise. Finally, Jim Oberg has a first-hand account of how technical organizations become sloppy, with potentially deadly consequences.

Space

This Week’s Space Review

Jeff Foust has taken some pictures of the new annex to the National Air and Space Museum out by Dulles Airport. There are also interesting articles at today’s The Space Review by Sam Dinkin, about the prospects for O’Neillian space colonies (with a little historical perspective of the concept), and by Stephen Ashworth on the vital need for NASA to work cooperatively, rather than adversarially, with private enterprise. Finally, Jim Oberg has a first-hand account of how technical organizations become sloppy, with potentially deadly consequences.

Space

This Week’s Space Review

Jeff Foust has taken some pictures of the new annex to the National Air and Space Museum out by Dulles Airport. There are also interesting articles at today’s The Space Review by Sam Dinkin, about the prospects for O’Neillian space colonies (with a little historical perspective of the concept), and by Stephen Ashworth on the vital need for NASA to work cooperatively, rather than adversarially, with private enterprise. Finally, Jim Oberg has a first-hand account of how technical organizations become sloppy, with potentially deadly consequences.

Media Criticism

Slightly Missing The Point.

There’s an interesting op-ed about the Columbia Journalism Review over at the new DC Examiner. However, the author misses an important point when she writes:

Blogs these days are holding the MSM’s feet to the fire, forcing newspapers and TV news shows to reflect the country’s politics more accurately.

Yes, they’re doing that, but even more importantly, they’re holding the MSM’s feet to the fire in an attempt to get them to do honest and informed reporting, instead of agenda-driven, ignorant (and often illogical) hackery, of which the subject of the article, Corey Pein’s piece on Rathergate, was a textbook case. The op-ed in fact demonstrates this quite clearly:

Newcomer, who voted for Sen. John Kerry in November, was baffled. When I spoke with him recently, he told me that The New Yorker once called his wife, a botanical illustration expert, to ask whether a certain plant could grow in a certain area, because a fiction writer had mentioned it in a piece. That was fact-checking. CJR “did not do any fact-checking,” he says. Pein did spend weeks researching his story, even traveling to Texas to report it. He wrote that CBS screwed up. But the suggestion that blogs were “guilty of many of the very same sins” that CBS committed, and that Newcomer did not know what he was talking about, set the blogosphere howling.

The point of the blogosphere is not so much to get the media to, in the words of the former Clinton administration in another context, “look more like America,” but rather to get them to actually provide balanced and informed newsreporting. For too long have they been allowed to get away with laziness and incompetence. That’s what we are attempting to provide a corrective for, not just the (obvious) political bias.

[Update at 9:30 AM]

Case in point can be found here:

James Watt has written to Bill Moyers, asking him to apologize for the lies in his Star Tribune article. After quoting Moyers’ statements about him, Watt wrote:

I have never thought, believed or said such words. Nor have I ever said anything similar to that thought which could be interpreted by a reasonable person to mean anything similar to the quote attributed to me.

Because you are at least average in intelligence and have a basic understanding of Christian beliefs, you know that no Christian would believe what you attributed to me.

Because you have had the privilege of serving in the White House under President Johnson, you know that no person believing such a thing would be qualified for a Presidential appointment, nor would he be confirmed by the United States Senate, and if confirmed and said such a thing would he be allowed to continue in service.

Since you must have known such a statement would not have been made and you refused or failed to do any primary research on this supposed quote, what was your motive in printing such a damnable lie?

Before the advent of the blogosphere, Bill Moyers–arrogant, rich, powerful and well-connected–would merely have thrown Mr. Watt’s letter into the trash. Today, he may still do so. But he and his friends in the liberal media no longer have a monopoly on information, and those who have been defamed by them, like James Watt, now have the means to make their voices heard.

Yes, Bill Moyers is a leftist, vastly out of touch with Red America, but the real issue is that for years he’s been getting away with these kinds of slanders and libels.

The blogosphere exists to (among many other things, of course) finally allow the truth to come out, ripping open the comfortable cocoons of media polemicists of all stripes. That most of the ire is aimed at so-called progressives is not because the blogosphere has it in for people of that political persuasion per se, but rather because, given the monoculture of the MSM, there are largely only one species of fish in the barrel. As Jim Geraghty says, it’s not ultimately about right and left. It’s about right and wrong.

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