Associated Press
Updated: 5:35 p.m. ET Nov. 8, 2005

TOPEKA, Kan. – Revisiting a topic that exposed Kansas to nationwide ridicule six years ago, the state Board of Education approved science standards for public schools Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The board’s 6-4 vote, expected for months, was a victory for intelligent-design advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that some aspects of the universe are so complex that their development must have been directed by an superintelligent agent.

Here’s the take on this by The Onion (link is on right for full text and other fun)

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
August 17, 2005 | Issue 41*33

KANSAS CITY, KS-As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
Full Article Link: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512

What do you think about this if you’re the head of the biology department at KU or KSU? How do you recruit professors to come to a school in the heart of American, no topology, great basketball, but with a student population dominated by local kids who think the world may really only be 6,000 years old and that the human eye must have been designed by God? Man, if I’m a parent in Kansas, I just became a big supporter of school vouchers. Vouchers are a shitty idea, but my damn kid is going to private schools that teach science in science class. And, if I do that, a thousand other parents are going to feel the same way and very soon there’s not just a digital divide, but there’s also western rationalists divided from occultists. Can anyone fucking say “Enlightenment”? Sure you can, boys and girls. Issac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, Boyle, you remember some of these names, don’t you? At this rate, we’ll be burning witches and a new Torquemada will be grilling “terrorists” in CIA prisons. What’s that? They already torture people in secret CIA prisons? Damn. Nevermind.

Associated Press

Updated: 4:09 p.m. ET Nov. 7, 2005
PANAMA CITY, Panama – President Bush on Monday defended U.S. interrogation practices and called the treatment of terrorism suspects lawful. “We do not torture,” Bush declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.

Bush supported an effort spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.

Guess the fucker missed class the day they were showing the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Hey! Dummy! Ever hear of Gitmo? Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? Ring a bell? Secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and Yemen? Buy a clue? Como se dici en Espanol “Short bus”?

FBI mines records of ordinary Americans

Under Patriot Act, feds probe lives of residents not alleged to be terrorists

By Barton Gellman

The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.

Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender “all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.

Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities — still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit — by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.

The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. “National security letters,” created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.(Emphasis Added by John)

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined.

(Note from John: I’ve cut a few paragraphs here. Later, you get this quote that I wanted included for those of you too lazy or apathetic to read the whole story)

“The beef with the NSLs is that they don’t have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny,” said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. “There’s no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat’s decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it.”

Read the whole story here:

The FBI is watching

THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS!!!

This “debate” between science and the notion of “intelligent design” as an alternative to the Theory of Evolution is troubling, don’t you think? This fight is raging through Kansas and is here, whether you know it or not. The Fundamentalist, usually evangelical, Protestant Christians who believe the universe was literally created by God in7 days are the political and theological drivers of this movement to have their notions taught in public school science classes. They also believe that instead of being billions of years old, the earth is only 6,000 years old. I’m not going to rail at the “religious right” this time, even though you’re expecting it and maybe even deserve a good old rant. No, I’m thinking about the wahhabbists that are the analog of these fundamentalist Christians except that they are the origin of the jihaddists within the larger Islamic world. We wonder at the can’t reason with them crazy and suicidal willing to go to extremes Muslims, and we make them out to be so foreign and alien from our culture…but, you know…I’m not so sure I don’t understand how a sizeable but small highly motivated religious minority can really kick up a fuss in any culture, including ours. I might add that this minority is very strong among those who have read — and are impessed with — the “Left Behind” potboiler series of novels about the Biblical Apocolypse. The apocolyptic branch of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are also driving a certain amount of our foreign policy with their attempts to fulfill the prophecies of the book of Revelations in the New Testament Bible. They are actually HOPING for an anti-Christ to arise in the Mid-East and for the Rapture to come. YIKES!!! Does that make jihad seem just the tiniest bit less looney? Lest we forget, this is the so-called Religious Right that is the core and base of the Bush presidency. They don’t want to argue about it because they have no faith in the scientific method or in western rationalism. They have the faith that they know the right answer because they have been told the right answer by God in the King James version of the Holy Bible. There is no room for discussion or compromise with the Word of God. Onward the Christian Soldiers, marching off to war, as the story below shows, they are willing to go to any length to impose their beliefs on America.

From the New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: November 5, 2005

HARRISBURG, Pa., Nov. 4 – The nation’s first trial to test the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design as science ended Friday with a lawyer for the Dover school board pronouncing intelligent design “the next great paradigm shift in science.”

His opponent, a lawyer for the 11 parents suing the school board, dismissed intelligent design as dishonest, unscientific and based entirely on “a meager little analogy that collapses immediately upon inspection.”

The conclusion of the six-week trial in Federal District Court on Friday made it clear that two separate but interconnected entities are actually on trial: the Dover school board and the fledgling intelligent design movement.

The board in Dover, a growing town south of Harrisburg, voted last year to read to ninth-grade biology students a four-paragraph statement saying that there are “gaps” in the theory of evolution, and that intelligent design is an alternative they should explore.

At the trial, board members repeatedly said they wanted to “encourage critical thinking.” But the parents presented evidence that the board’s purpose was religious and that the intelligent design statement was a compromise that the board settled for after learning it could not teach creationism.

Operating on another plane in the case were the dueling scientists, those who argued that intelligent design is an exciting new explanation, versus those who testified that it does not deserve to be called science.

The case, Kitzmiller et al v. Dover, will be decided by Judge John E. Jones III, who says he hopes to issue his ruling before the end of the year, or early January at the latest.

The scientists who advocate intelligent design explained that the complexity of biological organisms and the “purposeful arrangement of parts” are evidence that there is a designer. They said their theory is not religious because they are not claiming the designer is God, since that is untestable.

Scott A. Minnich, an associate professor of microbiology at the University of Idaho, testified for the defense on Thursday and Friday, likening intelligent design to seeing a watch and implicitly knowing that it had a designer – the argument the plaintiffs’ lawyer called “a meager little analogy.”

In his blunt closing argument, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Eric Rothschild, accused the intelligent design movement of lying, just as he said the school board members had lied when they testified that their purpose for changing the science curriculum had nothing to do with religion.

They lied, he said, when they testified that they did not make or hear religious declarations at board meetings, and when they claimed they did not know that 50 copies of an intelligent design textbook were bought for the school with money collected at a church and funneled through the father of a school board member, Alan Bonsell.

This week, the judge himself grew agitated as he questioned Mr. Bonsell about whether he had lied about the books. Mr. Rothschild reminded the judge of that interchange and said that the board’s dishonesty “mimics” the intelligent design movement.

“Its essential religious nature does not change whether it is called ‘creation science’ or ‘intelligent design’ or ‘sudden emergence theory,’ ” Mr. Rothschild said. “The shell game has to stop.”

A lawyer for the school board, Patrick Gillen, said in closing arguments that while some board members had strong religious beliefs, neither their “primary purpose” nor the effect of their policy was to advance religion.

The trial laid bare the fighting over the biology curriculum that went on between Dover’s board and science teachers for more than two years. Science teachers testified that they fought the change at every step, but Mr. Gillen said that the final result “has much more to do with the teachers’ input” than the board’s.

The campaign to teach creationism alongside evolution was largely driven by two school board members, William Buckingham and Mr. Bonsell, who both testified that they believe the Bible’s account of creation is literally true.

Michael R. Baksa, the assistant superintendent of the Dover schools, testified Thursday that when he started his job there in 2002, Mr. Bonsell handed him a copy of “The Myth of Separation,” a book by David Barton which argues that the founding fathers intended to create a Christian nation, not one in which church and state were separate.

In 2004, after the board passed its policy on intelligent design, Mr. Baksa received a cynical e-mail message from a social studies teacher saying that since the district was transformed from being “standards driven” to “living word driven,” maybe the social studies curriculum should change, too. Mr. Baksa responded: “Feel free to borrow my copy” of the “Myth” book “to get an idea of where the board is coming from.”

The big question now is whether the judge will base his ruling more narrowly on the specific actions of the Dover board, or more broadly on the permissibility of teaching intelligent design in public school science classes.

Robert Muise, a lawyer for the board, said his strategy was to present scientists as expert witnesses to prove that there is a complex debate among scientists. “It’s going to be difficult for the judge to decide” whether the pro- or the anti-intelligent-design scientists are right, Mr. Muise said.

But Mr. Rothschild said, “This isn’t really science against science because that would be two competing arguments based on evidence, research and peer-reviewed articles – and intelligent design has none of those.”

It seems more and more clear that Vice President Cheney is the originator of America’s shameful torture of prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention. He just replaced disgraced chief of staff Scooter Libby with a man who was one of the authors of the memos that gave “legal” justification for abandoning our century old ban on torture. Now, Colin Powell’s chief aide, Larry Wilkerson, who shocked me when he charged that Cheney and Rumsfeld had “hijacked” American foreign policy and punished any dissenters, has shocked me again by saying there’s a clear paper trail between the Abu Ghraib and Gitmo abuses and the Vice President.

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, November 4, 2005; 12:45 PM

Another shocking accusation by former administration insider Lawrence Wilkerson appears to be going under the media radar today.

On NPR yesterday, the former chief of staff to the secretary of state said that he had uncovered a “visible audit trail” tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney’s office.

Here’s the audio of Wilkerson’s interview with Steve Inskeep. The transcript is not publicly available, but here are the relevant excerpts:

“INSKEEP: While in the government, he says he was assigned to gather documents. He traced just how Americans came to be accused of abusing prisoners. In 2002, a presidential memo had ordered that detainees be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions that forbid torture. Wilkerson says the vice president’s office pushed for a more expansive policy.

“Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president’s office, began to create an environment — and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer, was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, what we’ve seen.

“INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they’ve investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president’s office, which is where you’re placing it?

“Mr. WILKERSON: I’m privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms — I’ll give you that — that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

“You just — if you’re a military man, you know that you just don’t do these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn’t matter whether it’s actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you’ve just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur.”

Addington, incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter Libby.

Outrageous, simply outrageous. I have this “nutty” idea that all Repugs are so sexually repressed that it dominates their politics, but for Dick Cheney to bring in his kinky DeSade fantasies into our foreign policy is just beyond the pale.

Richard Cohen’s column in The Washington Post today summarizes many of the reasons I’m opposed to the war in Iraq — it’s a failed war. Leading this country into such a terrible enterprise on the basis of twisted intelligence and conducting the war with such terribly bad planning is the highest crime and misdemeanor possible, the ultimate impeachable offense, a failure of leadership so great as to be treasonous. Cohen’s money quote from the conclusion of the commentary:

One could almost forgive President Bush for waging war under false or mistaken pretenses had a better, more democratic Middle East come out of it. But just as the 1991 Persian Gulf War introduced an element of instability in the region — the rise of al Qaeda in response to the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia — so might this one do something similar. A Shiite arc is forming, Iraq is infested with terrorists and coming apart, Syria might be going from bad to worse, and Saudi Arabia is complaining loudly that the war’s only winners are the Shiites and Iran. From here, it looks like a war that is already going badly for America could go even worse for much of the Middle East.

Mission accomplished?

Meanwhile, over on Slate, Jacob Weisberg takes note of an interesting historical parallel between Bush and Karl Rove and President McKinley and his political boss, the infamous and legendary Mark Hannah:

Hanna was the brain behind William McKinley’s political career in much the same way that Rove (“the architect”) is the brain behind Bush’s. McKinley was an affable, none-too-bright former congressman when Hanna helped elect him governor of Ohio. In 1896, Hanna raised an unprecedented amount of money and ran a sophisticated, hardball campaign that got McKinley to the White House. One could go on with the analogy: McKinley governed negligently in the interests of big business and went to war on flimsy evidence that Spain had blown up the USS Maine.

Maybe it’s the former history teacher in me, but the recycling of historical “mistakes” fascinates me. There’s that Santayana quote: One must know history or be doomed to repeat it. The GOP at the turn of the 20th Century had imperial dreams that expanded American influence worldwide and sowed the seeds of much of what we are experiencing in the 21st Century. Domestically, we’re back to the days of Social Darwinism even though we should know better.

FIRE KARL ROVE

Jonathon Alter at Newsweek takes note of Rove’s tenuous hold on national security clearances to be in meetings where classified materials are discussed, making his usefulness to the nation problematic at best. The lead of the story is enough for me:

By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Updated: 6:21 p.m. ET Nov. 2, 2005
Nov. 2, 2005 – The conventional wisdom in Washington this week is that Karl Rove is out of the woods. But while an indictment against him in the Valerie Plame leak case is now unlikely, he may be in danger of losing his security clearance.

According to last week’s indictment of Scooter Libby, a person identified as “Official A” held conversations with reporters about Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA operative, information that was classified. News accounts subsequently confirmed that that official was Rove. Under Executive Order 12958, signed by President Clinton in 1995, such a disclosure is grounds for, at a minimum, losing access to classified information.

President Bush promised us in 2000 that he would bring back “integrity” to the White House. Right

LYNCH MOBS ARE WRONG

Let me bring you up to speed. Tom DeLay, “The Hammer”, a former pest exterminator from Houston who rose to House Majority Leader on populist appeals to right wing social conservatism, stand indicted in Texas on political corruption charges. Simplisticly, he allegedly broke election finance rules when taking $190,000 in what would be if used for partisan purposes illegal corporate money into his Political Action Committee (PAC), a campaign slush fund, sending it to the Republican National Campaign Committee and then having them send it back in exact amount for use in partisan political campaigns as legal contributions. It was an “end around” the intent of the law, to keep corporate money’s political influence within reasonable limits. OK, so he’s charged with felonies, including a conspiracy to conduct this scheme. He drew a Democrat as a judge and had him thrown off the case as being biased by partisan political contributions to MoveOn.org. The prosecutor then had the Republican judge who replaced him removed for partisan political contributions to DeLay’s PAC. Now, he has a retired San Antonio judge appointed by the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, a partisan Republican.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, there’s more bad news for DeLay:

By JOHN SOLOMON
The Associated Press
Thursday, November 3, 2005; 3:23 PM

WASHINGTON — Investigators have unearthed e-mails showing Rep. Tom DeLay’s office tried to help lobbyist Jack Abramoff get a high-level Bush administration meeting for Indian clients, an effort that succeeded after the tribes began making a quarter-million dollars in donations.

Tribal money went both to a group founded by Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the Cabinet secretary Abramoff was trying to meet, as well as to DeLay’s personal charity.

“Do you think you could call that friend and set up a meeting,” then-DeLay staffer Tony Rudy wrote to fellow House aide Thomas Pyle in a Dec. 29, 2000, e-mail titled “Gale Norton-Interior Secretary.” President Bush had nominated Norton to the post the day before.

Rudy wrote Abramoff that same day promising he had “good news” about securing a meeting with Norton, forwarding information about the environmental group Norton had founded, according to e-mails obtained by investigators and reviewed by The Associated Press. Rudy’s message to Abramoff was sent from Congress’ official e-mail system.

Within months, Abramoff clients donated heavily to the Norton-founded group and to DeLay’s personal charity. The Coushatta Indian tribe, for instance, wrote checks in March 2001 for $50,000 to the Norton group and $10,000 to the DeLay Foundation, tribal records show.

The lobbyist and the Coushattas eventually won face-to-face time with the secretary during a Sept. 24, 2001, dinner sponsored by the group she had founded.

Abramoff’s clients were trying to stop a rival Indian tribe from winning Interior Department approval to build a casino.

Federal and congressional investigators have obtained the DeLay staff e-mails from Abramoff’s former lobbying firm as they try to determine whether officials in Congress or the Bush administration provided government assistance in exchange for the money Abramoff’s clients donated to Republican causes.

The assistance to Abramoff from DeLay’s staff occurred just a few months after DeLay received political donations, free use of a Washington arena skybox to reward donors and an all-expense-paid trip to play golf in Scotland arranged by Abramoff and mostly underwritten by his clients.

This Abramoff scandal is flying under the radar, but when it blows, it’s gonna blow UP!!!

Alito will be confirmed, the Dems will filibuster, GOP will “nuclear option”

Privacy Shattered Sharon and I agree it’s a done deal whether we like it or not. To expand on my own opinion, the guy was editor of the Yale Law Review and he’s been a judge for years. No, I don’t like his politics. But it goes both ways. I’d expect a Dem president to nominate someone who respected Roe v. Wade and tended to expand civil rights. He’s qualified, dammit. As much as I may disagree, I can’t say he’s looney or corrupt or anything like that. So, to be fair, he probably OUGHT to be confirmed. Sure hate to see Sandra Day O’Conner leave and be replaced by a “winger”, but that’s the consequences of letting Bush in for a second term and America will get what it deserves, even if I’m the one that gets screwed over in the process. Hope to see you in the concentration camps because if you don’t see me there, I’ve already been “re-educated” by a bullet to the brain. Lord protect us because we don’t know what we’re doing.