I'd rather be Godless than insane

Sometimes -- not often, mind you -- I wonder about Ann Coulter. She seems to be a potential soul mate for Fred Phelps (the "God hates fags" guy). Both of them appear to be in the business of saying things that are as offensive as possible, and then playing the victim when people react to them. Fred Phelps makes sure NOBODY likes him, so he can make money by suing people who take a swing at him. Coulter, on the other hand, sells books, so clearly she actually has a target audience. However, the stuff she says is so stupid and insulting that it's hard to believe that even she believes it.

So I wonder about her. I haven't ruled out the possibility that she's deliberately created a character for herself, like Stephen Colbert. If she is a walking satire, she's not that funny and really, REALLY dedicated to it.

Take her latest book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Now, I happen to be a liberal AND godless, so the subject matter doesn't bother me as much as it undoubtedly will bother some other people. In fact I'm quite looking forward to seeing excerpts from the end of the book, most of which is supposed to be spent on Intelligent Design, and the usual tiresome charge that I worship Darwin. I'm sure the web will be rife with hilarious take-downs, and that's something I always enjoy reading.

Speaking of hilarious take-downs, recently Keith Olbermann devoted a segment to pummeling the crap out of a clip of her being interviewed. Watch the segment. I guarantee it won't disappoint you.

This is what Keith Olbermann was responding to. Coulter's book goes on a rant about the four "Jersey Girls" -- 9/11 widows who have become prominent political figures criticizing Bush on national security. They were at least partly responsible for the formation of the 9/11 commission.

Matt Lauer (reading from Coulter's book): "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, revelling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much."

Coulter: Yes.

Lauer: Because they dare to speak out?

Coulter: To speak out using the fact that they're widows. This is the Left's doctrine of infallibility. If they have a point to make about the 9-11 Commission, about how to fight the war on terrorism, how about sending in somebody we're allowed to respond to? No, no, no, we always have to respond to someone who just had a family member die.

Ann, of course, is completely full of shit. There is absolutely NO REASON why she wouldn't be allowed to "respond to them". I wouldn't hesitate to disagree with widows, if I didn't completely agree with them anyway.

Except that in Ann Coulter's twisted mentality, "respond to" is a synonym for "slander the character of." It's all that she has ever known how to do. And she is completely stymied by the Jersey girls, because when she attacks them, she sounds like a bitch from hell. Ann asks, "And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy." Cute. Classy. No, wait a minute, that makes her sound FUCKING EVIL.

But in a way, that's what she's complaining about. She's used to making character attacks and being basically shielded and supported by her fans, but when she says crap like this, nobody likes her. So that's how she came to the conclusion that she "can't respond to them" -- she lost the ability to "respond" in the only way she knows how: by screaming at them.

And she can't stand it. She doesn't know the difference between a legitimate discussion and a screech fest. She interprets this lack of support as inability to hold a discussion with them. But in fact, the reality is that she is incapable of holding a serious discussion with anyone.

Putting this shrew on TV only dignifies her. "Enjoying their husbands' deaths" indeed. In a sane world, the only possible response to that would be "Go fuck yourself." The fact that any other response is expected, frankly mystifies me.

You suck because you know stuff

Here we go again...

The Education Oversight Committee voted Monday to reject curriculum standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution.

The school reform panel wants the Board of Education to rewrite a portion of the standards to encourage high school students to critically analyze evolution.

Scientists who support teaching evolution reject the idea of adding the phrase "critical analysis" to the curriculum. They call it an effort by evolution critics to introduce creationism and intelligent design in the classroom.

State Senator Mike Fair says the change is necessary because science is always changing.

Both the oversight committee and the board of education must agree on the standards. Monday's 8-2 vote sends the issue back to the board of education.

"Critical analysis?" I thought that going through the rigors of the scientific method WAS critical analysis.

You know, it occurs to me that what's really at the heart of the "teach both 'theories'" movement -- and indeed, the heart of the whole fundamentalist/neocon rise to power -- is outright hostility to the notion that some people know more than other people.

Scientists are treated as "elitists" or "not in touch with the common people", as if it's a bad thing to spend a lot of time studying a subject and becoming informed on it. Meanwhile, the opinion of "common people" is treated as somehow more "pure" because their minds are unfettered by specific education.

By extension, in today's exciting world of neocon rule, generals who actually study war aren't the ones who plan our wars. Disaster management experts who study disasters aren't the ones put in charge of national disaster management agencies. Brilliant legal minds who have offered respected opinions aren't the ones who are put forth as the best supreme court candidates. Instead, we get people whose major qualification is that they are ordinary people who happen to be well connected. And then people who know things are slandered and ridiculed for being snobs.

Being called "ignorant" about something shouldn't necessarily be considered an insult. I'm ignorant about cars, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. There are guys who change their own oil and diagnose their own car troubles, but I am not one of those guys. When I have car troubles, I pay somebody who works on cars for a living to fix it. I try to understand as much as I can so as not to get ripped off, but in the end there's a point where I agree with the mechanic by default because he's interested in cars and I'm not.

People who approach their lives with the perspective that everything is "faith based" hate to admit that somebody knows more than they do (other than God, perhaps). Their point of view is that no one knows everything, therefore no one knows anything, therefore all opinions are equally valid. And if you claim to know more than they do about a subject, that's an attack, and you must have a sinister motive.

An Alito Filibuster?

So, it looks like John Kerry might be leading the charge to filibuster Alito. Good for him. Alito is a creep. The whole "unitary executive" spiel freaks me out, but there's more to it than that.

A few months ago, I wrote that the discussion of Harriet Miers was bothering me because the main argument in favor of her was "She MIGHT succeed despite her complete lack of credentials." No, that's not the point. We shouldn't have to guess whether a nominee will make a good Supreme Court candidate or not. The point of having hearings is so that Congress can ask questions and the nominee can answer them.

I watched some of the Alito hearings and they pissed me off. I am sick of this stupid game that all the Bush nominees have played -- a game called "Guess how to make me talk." Whenever Congress asks a direct question like "How would you be likely to rule on this issue?" we get one of these canned responses:

1. "I can't answer that because it might reveal what I think before I actually rule on it."
2. "That's already been ruled on, so it's been settled and I can't answer it."
3. "You can't read what I said I think as an indication of what I actually think."
   

You know how it goes...

Senator: "Judge Alito, you once wrote that you personally feel that abortion is the world's greatest evil and should be destroyed with extreme prejudice the moment we have the chance to do God's bidding."
Alito: "Well, first of all, I was only writing what my former bosses told me to write. And second of all, even if I ever did feel that way, it was a long time ago."
Senator: "Okay. How do you feel about it now?"
Alito: "Stare decisis. My opinion isn't relevant."

Can you imagine any other job interview where a candidate gets to act like this?

Interviewer: "How would you handle this hypothetical situation if we hired you for this position?"
Candidate: "I'm sorry, but I can't answer that question because it might have some relevance to how I would do this job."

For all the interviewer knows, this person MIGHT be supremely competent at handling the job. But there's no point in waiting to find out, because the candidate is an asshole, and the interviewer is completely justified in showing him the door.

And that's what I wish Congress would do. And keep doing it. And send a message to the president: "I'm sorry, but this idiot will not talk to us. If you're serious about getting a nominee approved, please send us someone who will answer the questions."

Alito should damn well SAY: "No, I changed my mind about this unitary executive stuff. I don't believe it, and if the president overstepped his boundaries, I would rule against him." And if he won't say it, after being pointedly asked, then there's no reason not to assume the worst.

If Bush and Co. want an anti-abortion candidate badly enough, can't they at least be honest about it? Let them send a guy who will say "I disapprove of Roe v Wade and I mean to do all I can to undermine it, if not overturn it." If they want somebody who will assign the absolute power of a monarch to the president, let them send a guy who will say that.

He'll lose, of course. But he deserves to lose if he can't get 60 votes. As I said about Miers, the vast majority of people have NO business being on the highest court in the land, and the nominee gets the burden of proof on whether he is one of those uniquely qualified individuals.

Unlike Harriet Miers, Judge Alito is not a clueless groupie. He knows the law. But that's not enough. I want the guy who will serve on the Supreme Court for most of the rest of my life to have at least two qualifications. I want him to be competent, AND not evil. One or the other doesn't cut it.

I don't think that's a high bar to set. Nor do I think it's unreasonable to expect the candidate to openly and honestly demonstrate that he meets those expectations.

Republicans against creationism

Two recent articles by conservatives criticize Intelligent Design, one by George Will and one by Charles Krauthammer.

In a nutshell, Will and Krauthammer are extending a plea to the religious zealot wing of the Republican party: "Hey guys, could you please shut up about the intelligent design thing? You're hurting us and making us look dumb."

My opinion? It's not so much a problem with a small fringe group as it is with the way that the Republican party has intentionally chosen to structure themselves. You have the economic nerd wing of the Republican party, such as Will and Krauthammer, as well as probably guys like Rumsfeld and Cheney. Smart guys with a political philosophy that can be summed up as "screw the poor."

Then you have the religious zealots, who are intent on demolishing the rift between church and state -- many of whom ARE poor.

The economic nerds are the guys who aspire to power, and are smart enough to get it. But to do that, they need to get a majority of voters on their side, and they fill out their base by pandering to the zealot wing. These are people who probably wouldn't vote Republican if it weren't for the lip service they received to their agenda (i.e., overturn Roe v Wade, stop them uppity queers, and teach kids their religion in disguise as ID). I'm not saying they would vote for Democrats if these things were not on the table, but in all probability many of them simply wouldn't vote.

So those like Will and Krauthammer have a real problem. Their financial ideas (like supply-side economics, which is essentially the economist's version of creationism) have gained some measure of perceived respectability, but they simply aren't popular enough to win elections on their own without the support of the religious right. But then the religious right goes around making themselves highly visible and making the nerd wing look ridiculous.

Part of me wants to cheer for the Republicans who are now telling creationists to go jump in a lake. Then there's another part of me that says that their image problems are of their own making, so let's grab some popcorn and enjoy the fallout.

Please, Bill, put me on your enemies list!

To: Bill O'Reilly [oreilly@foxnews.com]

Dear Bill O'Reilly,

Please put me on your enemies list.

I am an atheist and I want to STEAL CHRISTMAS! Bwahahahahahahaaaaa!

Sincerely,
Russell Glasser
http://kazimskorner.blogspot.com

The Truth (With Jokes)

I bought Al Franken's new book, The Truth (With Jokes) today at Barnes & Noble before lunch. Wouldn't even wait a few days to get it shipped from Amazon. I believe it came out yesterday. I'm such a fanboy.

I haven't been reading nonfiction for the last several months. I was enjoying it for a while, but then it started to depress me. The last nonfiction I was reading was Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is REALLY depressing. I think I quit reading shortly after learning that the residents of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico turned to digging up corpses and eating them when farming could no longer sustain them.

That book now graces my bathroom, where I can take it in small doses of two or three pages at a time. In its place, I've been dividing my time between Shadow of the Hegemon by Card, and the long slog that is the "Dark Tower" series by Stephen King. (I kept hearing that this is something you're supposed to read. So far, at 3/4 through the first book, I'm not sure if I'm impressed enough to get the next one.)

Anyway, these will take a back seat as I'm already a couple of chapter's into "The Truth" since lunch. I didn't much enjoy reading a recap of election day, but he did manage to make it both dramatic and funny. He even laid out bits of the script they had planned for the next morning, based on the arrogant assumption that Kerry would definitely win by a lot.

An excerpt from that chapter:

A clap of thunder rumbled in the distance. Ah, I thought. A good omen. Mother Earth was about to be replenished, just like our drought stricken political culture.

My phone rang. Felt. Mark Felt.

(Footnote: "Mark Felt" is the alias I'm using in order to protect the identity of my real source, Judith Miller.)

Later in the book there's an entire chapter devoted to Terri Schiavo. That should be interesting.

The war against objectivity

"Some people today would say that there is no true reality, only perceptions and opinions.

...Today we often hear phrases like 'that may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.' To those that hold that there is no absolute truth, truth is seen as nothing more than a personal preference or a perception and therefore cannot extend beyond a person’s boundaries."

Thus sayeth Josh McDowell - Christian apologist, youth minister, and author of popular religious books such as "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" and "More Than a Carpenter". As a masochistic listener to Christian radio, I've heard him and many like-minded Christians repeat this charge many times over the years, generally following it up immediately with an assertion that this is bad news for religion and undermines faith.

What surprises me is how much I agree with the underlying principle. There ARE a lot of people who seem to think that truth is nothing more than opinion, and it is a serious problem for everyone who likes to deal with logical debate. Where I disagree with Josh is that I don't think the cause is atheism. On the contrary, subjective reality is fundamentally a faith based proposition.

The dictionary definition of "faith" in the religious sense is "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence." The Bible declares that "faith is he substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Mark Twain, through the mouth of Pudd'nhead Wilson, said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." Any way you slice it, having faith means coming to a conclusion first, and then filtering the facts to match your expectations.

I argue on message boards a lot, and I notice a trend among certain types of people. Often I go to considerable trouble to research an argument, make sure there are no holes in my reasoning, and prove beyond all reasonable doubt that I am making a solid case. Yet hours of work are tossed aside with a single dismissive comment, such as, "Well, that's some pretty good research, but I still believe what I believe. You're welcome to your opinion, though."

Or, "You can't trust polls / mainstream news sites / that website, they're biased!"

That's depressing because there's no real response to it without getting into a whole metaphysical argument about what constitutes evidence, and whether there really is a difference between fact and opinion. I expect to have to deal with mistakes on my part. I expect to be taken to task for my own misinterpretation of the facts. At the very least I want some kind of canned response to refute my points. But instead, I get "thanks for sharing, that's just your opinion." Or as one of Josh McDowell's students might say, "That may be true for you, but it's not true for me."

Except these aren't liberals I argue with (most of the time). They're Christian conservatives. Hence, they've made up their mind, and even acknowledging any serious flaw in their argument would be tantamount to heresy or treason, depending on the subject.

I think this is an absolutely poisonous attitude that goes beyond some bandwidth wasted on a message board or blog; it's something that infests our national debate. One way that it manifests itself is in the way they attempt to undermine the perceived accuracy of any and all forms of media.

Sometimes even a relatively straightforward link to a reference site, such as Wikipedia will lead into a whole can of worms about how everything Wikipedia says is automatically wrong because it's "open source". Now, I think that every skeptical person should be at least aware of what Wikipedia is, and not take everything they say as gospel. It's important to be aware of the review process, and make sure to check out their secondary sources, and use your own critical judgment to recognize the difference between fact and opinion. But those are general concerns that everyone should have about every source: some are less reliable than others, do your homework.

That's not how this kind of person argues, though. They don't argue with the contents of a particular article, or explain why they find a particular claim to be likely untrue. They just dismiss the source outright, and refuse to read any further.

Now hang on just a second. I realize, of course, that NOTHING written by human beings is ever going to be 100% objective. That's a basic principle of scientific thought. But if everything in Wikipedia can be dismissed because there are multiple authors... and everything we read in newspapers can be dismissed because it's "liberal"... and (according to creationists) everything coming out of the "scientific establishment" can be dismissed because it's advancing the agenda of the scientists... what are we supposed to do?

Is it seriously the position of these people that there is NO WAY to know anything at all with even a tiny bit of confidence? Is it then absolutely impossible to arrive at something that we can refer to as "The Truth"? Is it a waste of time to even try?

This attitude comes pretty darn close to solipsism. Solipsism is defined as "The view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only thing really existent." I might call it weak solipsism, because they don't necessarily believe that the self is "the only thing really existent." But if you took their arguments seriously, it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that they think there is no truth or reality that extends beyond themselves.

Is that what they really believe? Well, probably not. I think that they believe in objective truth, or at least they believe that they believe it. What they really want is to overthrow research and investigation as a legitimate way of arriving at the truth. What does that leave? The answer can be summed up in a word: FAITH.

Faith in an ancient holy book. Faith in the administration. Faith in the fundamental and unshakable goodness of everyone whom they, personally, hold to be good and right. That is truth to them. Facts are fickle; they have this nasty habit of not supporting your most cherished opinions. But faith can never be undermined unless you want it to.

But, yikes! If there was EVER a method of knowledge that could be called subjective, it's faith. To judge the reality of the universe based on what you have decided is true, regardless of any sort of study or skepticism? Not only does that make no sense, but I would say that the odds are astronomically stacked against any pre-conceived belief system just happening to be the one that is in tune with reality.

What it does do is entrench power. If I can't hope to decide for myself what is real, then my only choice is to go down to my friendly neighborhood priest and ask him what to think. Then he'll be happy to open up his holy book, point to chapter and verse, and tell me that this sentence here is absolutely true and the answer to all your moral dilemmas. I can also go to the rabbi or mullah next door, and get a totally different answer that is also absolutely true. Ultimately, though, the sect with the most power will amplify itself and crush out the other absolute truths, until it's the only one left.

Unless we recognize the fact that there is such a thing as reality, which is not changed by our little beliefs. Unless we recognize that it is our job to FIGURE OUT and INTERPRET the available evidence, so that our beliefs might become more in tune with what's really out there beyond ourselves -- not rewrite the facts so that they better fit into what we believe.

Look, I know that all information-gathering organizations make mistakes, and many times even lie. The New York Times had their Jayson Blair incident. Dan Rather should have checked his sources better. But the solution to that is not to say "From now on, I shall never again believe anything that the New York Times or any other news source say, about ANYTHING AT ALL, just because they have printed it and they have been wrong." The solution is to treat each story with an appropriate level skepticism, try to cross-check and cross-reference their information, get as close to you can to the original sources, and accept that everything you know is tentative to a greater or lesser degree. But when all's said and done, you have to recognize that basing your beliefs on the evidence you can get is a better way of knowing things than basing your beliefs on your beliefs themselves.

In my opinion, the whole problem with our national discourse right now is how much people are buying into the idea that there are no facts that can be learned through observation; there are only opinions, and YOUR opinion is the one that matters. It cuts to the heart of the problem with batshit crazy fundamentalist types. It is on display every time we see another press conference in front of a pre-screened audience. It explains how people can hear about Terri Schiavo being brain dead and blind, and then immediately start off another quest to indict Michael instead of saying "Oh my God, we were wrong about her condition!!!" And it's why people hear reports of people being tortured by Americans, and they simultaneously say "That's not true" and "They deserve it!"

Qualifications? Why?

I was watching Washington Journal on C-Span this morning as a series of "experts" breezed through to offer their opinions on the nomination of Harriet Miers.

I find myself growing more and more irritated with the people who are acting as apologists for Miers. Over and over again, I keep hearing this argument: "Well, so-and-so was never a judge before his appointment to the Supreme Court, and he was a great justice." Or "Nobody could have expected this historical guy to amount to anything, based on his qualifications. But look how important he turned out to be."

Great. That's all fine as far as it goes, in the sense that it proves that there exist at least N people who did better than their record would indicate.

But it's a stupid, fatuous argument when it is applied to any particular case. What ticks me off is that this isn't an argument for why MIERS is a particularly good pick to be on the Supreme Court. It's as if all the experts are saying "Well, there's no particular reason I can think of why she should be approved, but in a cosmic sense, why shouldn't ANYONE be on the Supreme Court? Why put up any barriers?"

It's rather like Intelligent Design advocates who say "What do you care if we publish our results in scientific journals or not? Scientific journals are overrated, and they're biased against our work anyway."

Or it's like the crackpot inventor who tries to convince the world that his perpetual motion machine, or his eternal life rings, have merit. He says "Well they all laugh at me. But they laughed at Edison too!" Fine. So you have that in common with Edison. But what you still don't have is evidence that your whatchamacallit is of any use at all. Or as Carl Sagan put it: "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

And applying this to Supreme Court Justices: the fact that some brilliant legal minds had no credentials does not imply that all people without credentials have brilliant legal minds. Some people are just flat-out bad picks.

It's not about whether I personally think that Harriet Miers is a good pick or not. It's about the way all the people who defend her have nothing better to say than "You can't really tell anything at all about whether anyone is good, so you might as well just approve her and find out."

This sort of linguistic trick is nothing more than a kind of solipsism (I'll explain what I mean by that in more detail in a later post). It's not an argument, it's a concession. It's "I have no way to support what I say, but really we have no way of knowing anything at all. So you might as well admit that I'm right. I don't need a better reason."

You should always beware the kind of people who argue from solipsism. They may or may not know that they're wrong, but this argument stems from frustration that they can't figure out a better way to make their case.

In my opinion, Supreme Court nominees are not "innocent until proven guilty". There are far, far more people who *should not* be on the USSC than people who *should*. The burden of proof ought to be on Miers and her supporters to prove that she is one of the rare individuals who does have any business being on the highest court in the land.

But I can guarantee she won't meet that burden of proof. Just like John Roberts, we'll hear a lot of "I can't comment on this" and "That's not my problem". We'll get no substantial arguments at all. And she'll be waved through.

Cindy Sheehan

I live about an hour and a half from Crawford, TX. I heard about Cindy Sheehan and wanted to go down there on Saturday, but I couldn't make it because I was busy with the broadcast of my internet audio show, The Non-Prophets. I told my sister Keryn about it instead, and she went with her boyfriend and two other friends.

According to Keryn, there were about 200-300 people there supporting Cindy Sheehan, and about six counter-protestors on the other side of the road holding up pro-Bush signs. They met and hugged Cindy, and they also met Barry Crimmins who had been sent from The Randi Rhodes Show. They tell me that there was a huge pile of donated food and water, and everyone was free to go over there and take whatever they wanted. It was almost like a party.

The funniest part of their story was about the counter-protestors. They were organized by a local right wing radio station, but there were only a small handful of them. They held up signs saying things like "Don't the Iraqi people deserve their freedom?" It was a typical scorching hot day in Crawford. The people on the Cindy side of the road were jockeying for what little shade there was. The counter-protestors had no shade anywhere, and they hadn't brought any water either.

My sister's friend went across the street to them with bottles of water and said, "Here, would you like some of this?" They turned it down, saying, "The guys in Iraq aren't getting water."

Liars, truth tellers, and bias

My wife and I both argue politics on different message boards, and we both agree that there is a tendency for people to listen only to the sources they like and discount the sources they don't like. For instance, people who insist that "mainstream media" is automatically lying because of their "liberal bias", will in the next breath go on to confidently quote blatantly right wing sources such as Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, etc.

Now, admittedly, Ginny and I get a lot of news from left wing sources. And I'm not talking about Time, the New York Times, CNN, etc... the places that conservatives pretend are liberal when they aren't. I'm talking about Air America Radio, Daily Kos, Media Matters, and so on. Sources that are really liberal, and don't fear to say so.

Ginny asks me sometimes, "Do you think we do the same thing, but reversed? Do we just listen to those sources and form our opinions based on that, while ignoring the other side?"

My answer is no. Sure I listen to my favorite liberals, and I occasionally catch myself repeating what they say without checking it out first. But most of the time, if I want a new "fact" to enter my mental library, I go and check it out with as unbiased a source as I can find. If it's about something Bush said, I look at the White House page. If it's about world news, I try to corroborate it with several unrelated sources. If it's about science, I look for peer-reviewed material, or at least direct references to peer-reviewed material. And whether the answer is what I want it to be or not, I accept the results of my best research efforts.

Al Franken likes to tell an anecdote about himself and Rush Limbaugh. He repeats it a lot, so if you listen to his show then you've almost certainly heard it. In case you haven't, I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I repeat it one more time. From an interview:

A few months ago, Rush was talking about the minimum wage. Conservatives like to portray it that no one has to raise a family on the minimum wage, the only people who get the minimum wage are teenagers who want to buy an i-Pod. So Rush says, "75 percent of all Americans on the minimum wage, my friends, are teenagers on their first job." And one of the researchers brings this to me, with a smile, and I say, "Well, can you look it up?" And they look it up, the researcher goes to something called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 60.1 percent of Americans on minimum wage are twenty and above. 39.9 percent, then, are either teenagers or below twelve (laughs). I had several jobs as a teenager, so you figure, what, 13 percent might be teenagers in their first job. Not 75 percent. So where did Rush get his statistic? Well, he got it directly from his butt. It went out his butt, into his mouth, out the microphone, into the air, into the brains of dittoheads. And they believe this stuff.

So we get our labor statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He gets his from the Bureau of Rush's Butt. And that's the difference. We don't do that. That's one of the main differences.

That is a big difference in my book. It's not that I think Al Franken does flawless research; he's wrong sometimes. But the point is that he actually CARES whether his information is correct or not, he is willing to go to a credible source and not just use rhetoric. That very attitude sets him miles apart from Limbaugh.

Even so, I'm not sure that it is correct to say that Limbaugh is "lying" when he says something like "75 percent of all Americans on the minimum wage are teenagers on their first job." That is because in order to really be lying, you have to actually know whether what you're saying is true or not. If you don't know, then you're just mistaken.

I heard an anecdote -- almost certainly not true -- about an asylum inmate who was hooked up to a lie detector. He was then asked, "Are you Napoleon?" The inmate answered "No." The machine indicated that he was lying.

You can be right and still be lying, if you don't think that you are right. And you can be wrong without lying.

In that spirit, I don't know for sure that Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Hannity ever lie. I think it is far more likely that they just don't care whether they say things that are true or not. There is a difference. They care whether they say things that agree with the construct they've made of the world, but they don't see a difference between lies and non-lies. That's why they tell you that the media is biased, that polls don't matter, that scientists all have a nefarious agenda, etc, etc. They want to rule out the possibility that anything could contradict them and still be accurate.

How American Are You?

I'm not very American, at least not according to the author of this quiz.

But then, the quiz ought to be called "How Conservative Are You?" Note that answering that your favorite president is Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter will both net you less points than Ronald Reagan, and answering that you like American music and movies actually hurts your American-ness. Where's the answer to the sports question for people who don't watch sports? And what is the guy's deal with cheese? Are sheets of yellow plastic the only other type of cheese besides brie and bleu? I think maybe they make some other kinds of cheese in Wisconsin, and they're Americans there.

The author, whether in jest or not, is buying into the myth that people who are religious, outdoorsy, macho, simple, and humble are true Americans; while people who are educated, cultured, complex, godless, and progressive are not.

Whether or not it's a joke, the myth is bullshit. I am an American. I like rock music and big summer action blockbusters. I like to read long non-fiction books and play video games in "hard" mode and solve puzzles on the internet. I like not having an official religion, or an official category of religions. I like it that minorities can vote and women can work, even though I am neither. I like speaking out against my government when they deserve it.

If "true Americans" can't accept that those things are part of what America is all about, then they should leave my country.

Were Bush's WMD claims enough to justify war?

There is an email that has been making the rounds since 2003, and it pops up from time to time on message boards whenever a Democrat says that we should never have gone to war due to the fact, now pretty well established, that Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction and didn't pose a threat to the US. The mail cites a bunch of quotes by prominent Democrats -- such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Ted Kennedy -- saying that Saddam Hussein had weapons. The point of the message seems to be that even if Bush was mistaken or lying about WMD's as a sufficient reason to go to war, it wasn't his fault, because the Democrats thought the same thing.

The full text of the message can be read at snopes.com, where it is classified as "true", but with some pretty serious reservations about how the quotes were taken out of context. While snopes does a pretty good job of examining each quote, I haven't seen a really good response to the overall point of the message, which is that Democrats and Republicans alike supported the war because they believed that Saddam Hussein posed a nuclear threat to the United States.

The facts are not nearly as cut and dried. I'm not going to rewrite the entire snopes link, which you should read for yourself before continuing with this entry. But I would like to single out one of them as a representative example.

Hillary Clinton said:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.

As the link points out, the rest of the speech is left out. She went on to say:

Some people favor attacking Saddam Hussein now... However, this course is fraught with danger. We and our NATO allies did not depose Mr. Milosevic, who was responsible for more than a quarter of a million people being killed in the 1990s. Instead, by stopping his aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo, and keeping on the tough sanctions, we created the conditions in which his own people threw him out and led to his being in the dock being tried for war crimes as we speak.

If we were to attack Iraq now, alone or with few allies, it would set a precedent that could come back to haunt us. In recent days, Russia has talked of an invasion of Georgia [obviously the one in the Former Soviet Union, not the US] to attack Chechen rebels. India has mentioned the possibility of a pre-emptive strike on Pakistan. And what if China were to perceive a threat from Taiwan?

I need to point that out, because it strongly highlights the difference between the approach that Democrats were urging Bush to take, and the approach that he actually took. While many Democrats such as Hillary Clinton recognized the possibility that Iraq had or was developing some weapons, they also stated at the time that there was not enough solid evidence to launch a full out war on them. Bombing a country, or combatting an invasion like in Kuwait is one thing. But starting a war and occupying the place, and trying to fill a void by toppling their entire government, is something else entirely. In fact, Bush's dad made this very clear when he explained why he didn't depose Saddam after dealing with Kuwait in 1991.

Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

--George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft
Time (2 March 1998)

Pretty uncanny how accurate George H. W. Bush's predictions turned out to be.

Of course, we know that Saddam Hussein had WMD's at one time. That's because the United States sold them to him during the Reagan administration. In case you've forgotten about that little detail, here is Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, during a trip intended to set up friendly relations with Iraq. But Saddam was ordered to disarm after he lost the first Gulf War, and all evidence right now indicates that he did. Yes, Hussein kicked out the inspectors in 1998, and it's likely that he wanted to rebuild. But "wanting to" and "doing it" are not the same thing. Bill Clinton's response was immediate. He launched Operation Desert Fox, bombing suspected weapon sites but not endangering any American troops.

In other words, he pursued a policy of containment and responses to actions, not "pre-emption" against actions that hadn't happened yet. At this point I should remind you that the policy seemingly WORKED, based on the fact that no WMD's were found in Iraq in 2003. This is something that even Bush administration officials have acknowledged at this point.

For all these quotes about how Saddam Hussein kicked out the weapons inspectors and wouldn't let them back in, it's funny how none of them date after late 2002. Guess why? Because in early 2003, Saddam Hussein let the weapons inspectors back in. And they didn't find any weapons.

You remember that too, right? UN Weapons Inspectors, headed by Hans Blix, were on the ground in Iraq for three months. Their conclusion? No WMD's found, although they didn't rule out the possibility that they might find some. But immediately Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Miller, Larry Elder, and every other budding Republican comedian started repeating the joke, over and over again, that Blix was weapons inspector Clouseau. He couldn't even find the weapons in Iraq! And it just kept getting funnier every time. :)

Of course, the reason poor Inspector Clouseau couldn't even find any weapons in Iraq was because there weren't any. Remember, even Bush officials agree. We couldn't have known that at the time, but Blix's point was that more time was needed to gather evidence. They didn't get it. It wasn't Saddam who kicked them out. It was America, who said, in effect "We don't care what the evidence is, we are commencing the attack."

Let's also not forget that it's completely bogus to say that Bush was misled into attacking Iraq by bad intelligence. The administration was making plans to attack Iraq within hours of the September 11. Richard Clarke, former White House counter-terrorism czar, reported that Bush was pressuring the CIA to justify an attack on Iraq, not the other way around.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer.

Colin Powell, who later testified so skillfully before the UN, said in 2001 that Saddam "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

It was because his own intelligence wasn't giving the answer he wanted, that Bush formed the Office of Special Plans as an alternate intelligence agency to come up with the answers they wanted.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact

Much of the faulty information that "misled" Bush into war came from this office that he set up for the express purpose of doing whatever they could to make a case for going to war.

It's true, of course, that some (not all, or apparently even most) of the Democrats on the list spoke persuasively about Saddam's WMD's as a justification to go to war. Those Democrats absolutely share responsibility with Bush for the situation we find ourselves in now. However, it can't be overemphasized that the White House was pushing hard for war, before the dust from the World Trade Center had settled, and that they presented their case to Congress based on faulty intelligence that they had engineered by way of the Office of Special Plans, and against the judgment of many of the standard channels of intelligence gathering.

In other words, many people were misled into supporting the war by the president, and their primary mistake was trusting that what the president said was accurate.

Why you should care about Terri Schiavo

So Terri Schiavo's autopsy was released. Not only was she in a persistent vegetative state, not only was her brain half the size of a normal brain, not only were there no signs of the "abuse" that her husband supposedly subjected her to, but SHE WAS BLIND.

Which is just fascinating, considering how everybody insisted that she could follow a balloon around with her eyes and everything.

Now, many people might say that this is a subject best left for the cable news talking heads to screech about, and normally I'd agree wholeheartedly. Back when the Schiavo case was considered real news, I managed to totally ignore it until it was almost over. Same way I mostly ignored the Michael Jackson trial, the OJ Simpson trial, the Peterson case, and all the other stuff that passes for news nowadays. Because really, who gives a damn about so much irrelevant pulp?

But the religious right MADE it real news by virtue of their interference. Those bastards saw the opportunity to use the Schiavo case as a launching point to rant about the "culture of death" and "activist judges" and Uncle Jeb decided it would be a swell move to conradict everything the doctors and the courts said by "saving" a life that had already been gone for many years. And they were willing to tell any number of lies about her husband. According to them, Michael was an immoral prick for living with another woman, and he was scheming to kill his perfectly healthy wife who could talk and sing and plead for her life, and any minute she was liable to leap out of her hospital bed and dance a jig.

I don't belong to a culture of death. I belong to a culture of evidence.

What sickens me about the news these days is this pervasive attitude that if one side says one thing, and the other side says something else, why then they're both opinions and who's to say what is true? Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. So let's let the doctors who examined her have their say, and let's let this nice nurse offer her own personal testimony that Terri is in perfect health while Michael is a monster, and then we've done our jobs by presenting both sides.

Sometimes the truth lies with the preponderance of evidence. It's a crazy idea, I know. Sometimes "faith" just ain't good enough to contradict reality. Sometimes when two sides say opposite things, one side is telling the truth based on the best information they could acquire, and the other side is just making crap up because it sounds good.

Compromise

I received this email from my dad this morning:

Russell,

I find the "agreement" reached by Senate "moderates" disgusting. The Democrats gave up everything they were fighting for in return for a promise by the Republicans not to invoke the nuclear option this time. The Republicans reserve the right to invoke it the next time they feel like it.

The closest parallel I can think of is Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich on September 30, 1938, waving a piece of paper signed by Hitler and proclaiming "Peace in our time." Chamberlain and Daladier had given Hitler half of Czechoslovakia in return for a promise not to demand more. 6 months later he took the rest of Czechoslovakia, and 6 months after that he invaded Poland, starting WWII.

Dad

Disregarding the fact that my dad has already invoked Godwin's Law, I'm torn about this subject. On the one hand, compromise is good. It's what reasonable people do. On the other hand, the judges who were waved through are all major assholes.

For instance, let me remind you who Bill Pryor is:

"The American experiment is not a theocracy. It does not establish an official religion," Pryor stated. "But the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are rooted in a Christian perspective of the nature of government and the nature of man.

"The challenge of the next millennium," Pryor continued, "will be to preserve the American experiment by restoring its Christian perspective."

Schumer castigated Pryor for his characterization of the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion-on-demand during all nine months of pregnancy, as "the worst abomination in the history of constitutional law."

The problem with compromise is it works well only if both parties believe in compromise. It reminds me of a favorite joke:


Two street urchins find a cake in a dumpster and argue about how to divide it up. One of them demands to have the whole cake, while the other says, "That's not fair, we should cut it in half and each get half."

As they argue, a mathematician wanders by and asks if he can help. When they explain the situation, the mathematician says "Gentlemen, the answer to your problem is compromise! I know exactly what you should do: give this one three quarters of the cake."


I know the right wing bloggers were griping loudly this morning about how betrayed they feel, but this is complaining by the kid who got only three quarters of the cake when he wanted the whole thing.

Paradox: the only way to have a fair society is to make sure that everyone can be reasonable. But when a reasonable person meets an unreasonable person, the reasonable one often gets the worse end of the deal.

Another paradox: in a free society, people are even free to support political agendas that go against other people's freedom. When you have a group that is determined to strip other people of rights, the only way to stop them is to limit their right to impose their agenda. I wonder, is "freedom" inherently a self-destroying concept?


Finally, I'm reminded of a great bit of dialogue from Life, The Universe, and Everything. I'm snipping out some really funny lines, so go read the whole chapter.

In this book, there are a bunch of insane religious fanatics who decide that their ultimate mission in life is to obliterate all other life in the universe. Slartibartfast wants to save the universe, whereas Ford is much more interested in going to a party and getting drunk. Slartibartfast asks Ford, haven't you understood the stakes?

"Yes," said Ford, with a sudden and unexpected fierceness, "I've understood it all perfectly well. That's why I want to have as many drinks and dance with as many girls as possible while there are still any left. If everything you've shown us is true ..."

"True? Of course it's true."

"... then we don't stand a chance. The point is that people like you and me, Slartibartfast, and Arthur - particularly and especially Arthur - are just dilletantes, eccentrics, layabouts, fartarounds if you like."

Slartibartfast frowned, partly in puzzlement and partly in umbrage. He started to speak.

"- ..." is as far as he got.

"We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford.

"..."

"And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."

"I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty.

"Such as?"

"Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords."

"Would you die for them?"

"Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No."

"Well then."

"Wouldn't see the point, to be honest."

While I disagree with Ford's philosophy, it's hard to deny that there's a major problem with the fact that they're fanatics and we aren't. We don't WANT to be fanatics, that would make us just as evil as they are. But fanatics hold the upper hand, it seems.

Election Shrapnel by Adam Cadre

An excellent article, written by another atheist gamer like me, a week after the election.

It's not just that [Bush] proudly proclaims that he doesn't read newspapers, trumpets his bad grades at Yale to prove he wasn't tainted by higher education, mocks people for speaking foreign languages or using words outside his active vocabulary, and is regularly described even by his most ardent supporters as "incurious". It's his sheer hostility to unsolicited input. Even questions from reporters are invariably greeted by Bush with defensive whining; while John Kerry's town hall meetings during the campaign were come one come all, Bush's audiences had to sign loyalty oaths to get in. And then there's his approach to foreign affairs, in which the US says, "This is what we're doing; you can help if you want," and if other countries try to chime in with an opinion, the response is effectively, "Shut up — fuck you — we don't care what you think."

Al Franken live

Well, Austin, TX now officially has an Air America Radio station. To kick off, yesterday Al Franken came to downtown Austin to sit in the State Theater and do a live show. I played hooky from work so I could go with another my friend Jeff Dee and stand in line at 8 AM. We ran into another mutual friend, Linda from the Atheist Community of Austin. We hung around in line chatting with each other and the rest of the crowd for a few hours.

Actually it turns out there was no rush; they started handing out tickets at 9:00 and they weren't all gone until around 10. There were about 250 people at the theater. It was a small theater, and it looked to be about 2/3 full.

A local Fox News camera crew was there. They interviewed my two friends (Linda and Jeff), but the line started filing in the theater before they could get to me. They basically asked "Why are you here?" Linda used the opportunity to plug our atheist group -- I doubt they used it. Jeff summed up Al Franken's style, saying "It's hard to get intellectual arguments in a way that compels people to listen. Al Franken has the right idea by being intellectual and entertaining at the same time." I meant to watch the local Fox station that night to see if either of them was on, but I missed it. A couple more camera crews showed up later.

Hanging out with the crowd was a whole lot of fun. I felt really comfortable just chatting with random people standing near me. Obviously we were all big fans and shared the same political persuasion, so it was easy to find a topic to discuss. Linda brought along a couple of "Bibles" to read. They are basically copies of the New Testament, put in a glossy magazine format that looked like a teen fluff mag. There was a boy edition (trying to appeal to the "X-Treme" macho crowd) and a girl edition (for the "Vogue" crowd). They were pretty funny; you can click the links in this paragraph to see them at Amazon.

Al Franken warmed up the crowd with a few jokes, which everybody enjoyed. Katherine Lanpher was playing the crowd throughout the show. Whenever they came in from the commercial break, one of them would say "You're listening to the Al Franken Show live in Austin, Texas" and then Katherine would wave her arms to direct applause and cheers. During the "Oy Oy Oy Show" segment she started to mime clapping to get people to clap along with the Jewish music. Obviously it was all for the benefit of the radio audience, but the crowd was really into it.

I assume this doesn't happen in a studio, but when Al does skits for a live show, he actually does some minor prop comedy. During one scene, he pretended to be the head of a sleazy fictional Texas PAC, and at the end he pulled out a cell phone and started talking into it, then got up and walked away from the microphone as he talked.

Great guests. They interviewed the native Texan columnist Molly Ivins, then Anna Marie Cox who runs the blog wonkette.com, then former Texas Representative Chris Bell, who helped bring Tom Delay up on ethics charges.

It was personally interesting to me to see how a real radio show gets run, since I personally produce the amateur Non-Prophets twice a month. I was kind of pleased to see that they do almost the same things we do, just more of it. Their sound board and the microphones looked very similar to ours. The main difference is preparation and staff. They have at least four techies; we have half a techie. (I devote half my attention to keeping the show running and the other half to talking and staying in touch with the chat room.) Al Franken has a guy and a girl handling the timing and the musical cues; one guy running around with hardware (replacing bad microphones and such), and one guy staying on top of the web log during the show. Everyone has their own laptop, and there was another laptop on the table where Al, Katherine, and guests set. Presumably there were several more people in the studio in New York to receive the broadcast.

Another difference is preparation. They had scripts for many parts of their show. They discussed upcoming segments with each other during breaks, and made notes. Now, I can barely keep up with the need to collect half an hour worth of news and discussion points off the web once every two weeks. Can't imagine what it must be like to script key segments every day. But then again, I'm sure it would be different if that were a full time job. In any case, we learned a lot and came away with some pretty good new ideas about show preparation and formatting.

One seriously divided nation

The mood of this election scares me. Kerry may win, Bush may win, but the problem is still going to be there. The problem is that the nation will continue to be divided up into a "faith based community" and a "reality based community", as Ron Suskind put it. (If you haven't read this article from the New Yorker, go back and read it. I insist.)

Let's pretend, just for a minute, that Kerry will win AND he'll turn out to be the dream president for the reality based community. He fights for science, bases his policies on evidence, and actively seeks advice from true experts in the relevant fields before doing anything potential stupid. And the economy rises, people start getting jobs and raises again, the stock market goes back up, etc. The Supreme Court gets a few more guys who believe in civil rights and free speech. Iraq is saved and becomes a utopia. (Just remember, this is my fantasy, not my prediction.)

Even in this rosy scenario, you still have a lot of faith based people who are angry at Kerry for deposing the guy they see as "God's man". Facts are inconvenient but meaningless trifles and will continue to be so. The economy? It's Bush's doing. Iraq? Bet you libs are GLAD we invaded now, look how grateful they are!

And still they're going to be angry about everything, because God's man is gone, church leaders will whip them into a frenzy about gay marriage, stem cells, abortion, evolution in schools, etc.

It's time to own up to the fact that the non-reality based community is not some fringe group of wackos; they are half our country. And they really want a fight. I have a strict "live and let live as long as you don't bug me with your craziness" philosophy, but they HATE me. They have signs and web sites saying they hate me. They've declared a "culture war" on me. I didn't declare that war, but apparently I'm in it now.

What do I do? Well, I have no idea.

An unfair and unbalanced media rant

I've been reading a book called "The Republican Noise Machine" by David Brock, who formerly worked for an affiliate of the Washington Times and is now a regular on the Al Franken Show. The subject of this book is the so-called "echo chamber effect" that occurs in the right wing media. To quote the book's introduction:

Because technological advances and the race for ratings and sales have made the wall between right-wing media and the rest of the media permeable, the America media as a whole has become a powerful conveyor belt for conservative-generated "news," commentary, story lines, jargon, and spin. It is now possible to watch a lie move from a disreputable right-wing Web site onto the afternoon talk radio shows, to several cable chat shows throughout the evening, and into the next morning's Washington Post -- all in twenty-four hours. This media food chain moves phony information and GOP talking points -- manufactured by and for conservatives, often bought and paid for by conservative political interests, and disseminated through an unabashedly biased right-wing media apparatus that follow no rules or professional norms -- into every family dining room, every workplace, and every Internet chat room in America.

As I may have mentioned, I have a morbid fascination with the creationist movement. I'm not very far into the book, only 60 pages or so, but I see a pattern being outlined that looks very similar to the way modern creationism is trying to worm its way into our education system.

It seems that in the late 60's, some of the best and brightest in the Nixon administration decided that the press was being unreasonably hostile towards them. Those annoying reporters were always running stories claiming that Vietnam was a disaster (which it was) or that Nixon authorized illegal activities to get himself reelected (which he did). So they started to form think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation that would try to push their way into the public consciousness and demand that the conservative side of every story be heard on every possible occasion. The charge that the media is liberal didn't just come from nowhere; it was a meme that was intentionally dreamed up and pushed out there.

Fox News uses the slogans "fair and balanced" and "We report, you decide." It seems that they are trying to appeal to some mythical gold standard of journalism whereby you report both sides of every story, with no comment or bias whatever, and then let the audience decide for themselves who is right. Not only does Fox (obviously) fail to achieve this lofty goal, but in my opinion, the goal itself is crap.

You can't inform the public by just presenting everything that could possibly be presented and then saying "Well, decide for yourself." When presenting a blatant lie, journalistic integrity would imply that you should state that it's a lie. The media isn't there to post non-judgmental stories like "Adolph Hitler: was he right?" If George Bush and Karl Rove issue a press release stating that the earth is flat, it's not the media's responsibility to run a "fair and balanced" headline screaming "Shape of earth in question! Is it really a globe? Our studies reveal that many people disagree." Of course that would be dumb. People can disagree all they want, but the shape of the earth is an irregular sphere.

As Dan Rather recently demonstrated, it's really important that the media check their sources and decide whether a story is credible BEFORE they run with it, rather than just reporting "We heard that blah blah blah". But there is a major double standard at work, because CBS has a reputation for having journalistic ethics, while Fox does not. When Fox runs a picture of John Kerry at a podium with Jane Fonda, which later turns out to be an extremely clumsy Photoshop job, people say "Oh, that's just Fox." When Matt Drudge breaks the story that someone is having an affair with an intern, and we learn that he pulled the story completely out of his butt, nobody cares. When Rush Limbaugh cites "statistics" that he totally made up, he pleads "I'm not a news show! It's just entertainment!"

But the line between entertainment and news has really gotten blurred, and I think it's at least partly due to this very deliberate effort that the Republicans have made since the 70's to demand that the media show no "bias", not even a bias towards being correct. (I think it's very revealing that Fox News' slogan is NOT "Fair, balanced, and accurate.") All that matters is that it be "balanced", meaning that if you have one person on TV saying that we really landed on the moon, you must have a crackpot appear at his side claiming that it was all a government conspiracy. And furthermore, the program must not identify this guy as a crackpot, because that would be biased.

This reminds me of what I witnessed at the textbook hearings in here in Texas last year. Creationists go from state to state, demanding what? That we teach creationism? No no no, that is so eight years ago. What they want us to do is "teach the controversy." They want us to teach our students that SOME people disagree with the theory of evolution, and the jury is still out. Never mind that the "jury" are not scientists who do research; they're ideologues who are openly pushing a religious agenda. But to point that out would not be "fair" and "balanced" because it's passing a value judgment.

But that's bull, because science is all about passing value judgments. It's important and necessary for scientists to come up with crazy ideas that MIGHT be true, but then those explanations have to be tempered by reality and experiment. This is the part where you filter out the ideas that are crazy because they're innovative from the ideas that are crazy because they're ridiculous. Science will always be beset by crackpots who believe that they've invented a perpetual motion machine or "proven" the existence of ESP that mysteriously vanishes when somebody tries to measure it. But because science is a selective process, ideally the enormous number of crazy ideas are supposed to get winnowed down to the ones that are true. Same thing that evolution does in selecting for traits that have survival value.

That's how science is supposed to work, and in my opinion, that's also how journalism should work. Journalism is not, and should not be, about being a mouthpiece for every lie, every slander, every conspiracy theory that happens to be in the public consciousness. It should be about wading through the marketplace of ideas and selecting the ones which appear, to the best of our investigative understanding, to be accurate. Journalists should NOT be fair to con artists and hucksters. They should NOT be balanced by giving an interview to one liar for every truth teller.

What journalism should be doing is the science of information. It should find out the truth and report it. This is obviously an idealistic goal. Science doesn't always "work" the way it's supposed to because you have bickering and internal politics and desire for personal glory among scientists. And also because human knowledge is always going to be limited, so what we regard as "true" will only be the best guess given the available evidence. Likewise, I don't expect journalists to be infallible; only that they do more than pay lip service to reporting on real stories.

Journalists need to quit worrying about being fair and worry more about being right.

What does Kerry stand for?

A lot of people are saying that they don't plan to vote, and they justify their decision this way: "I don't like George Bush, but I don't know what John Kerry stands for. I can't identify anything that he believes in. I don't know what his guiding principles are."

This charge come straight out of the Bush camp, to be echoed word for word by not only rank and file Republicans, but also self-proclaimed "undecided" voters. It's often spoken in wise tones, as if the opiner is staying above the fray, and as if it's actually some kind of opinion.

But in my ever-so-humble opinion, this whole line of complaint just smacks of intellectual laziness. I mean, come on, this is the information age. All you have to do in order to find something out is to go and look for it. A quick trip to johnkerry.com explains the platform, but I've gotten messages dismissing the entire thing by saying, essentially, "It's long." What that means is, "Not only do I not understand the choices involved, but I can't be bothered to read about them." What else do Democrats need to do, strap you to a chair and read the platform through a bullhorn?

Refusing to vote, or voting for a write-in, does not make you politically savvy and it does not make any statement of any sort whatever. Whether you like them or not, either George Bush or John Kerry is going to be sworn in on January 20. If you choose not to decide, that's still a choice. If you think that you're going to regret a Kerry, vote for Bush. Otherwise, the outcome IS your fault, no matter who winds up in office. If you think about voting for Kerry, but don't, and then Bush wins, and it turns out badly, then you should regret that.

By abstaining from participation in the process, you forfeit your right to bitch about the result. So unless you feel that you honestly don't care who runs the country and it makes no difference at all to you what kind of policies will be passed in the next four years, maybe it would behoove you to actually take it upon YOURSELF to go read about where both candidates stand on the issues, and then figure out which one would be better -- or less bad, if you wish. Democracy only works if there is an educated electorate, and when you say "I don't know where he stands" all I hear is "I'm not educated about the candidates and I don't even care."

Air America Radio

I've been listening to Air America Radio at various times since it began. In case you hadn't heard Air America is the new privately funded liberal radio network that is meant to compete with all the right wing talk shows. It's on radio stations in five cities, as well as XM radio. I live in Austin, TX, which is not in one of the sweet spots, so I have to go listen to it via RealAudio on their web site. Al Franken, former Saturday Night Live Veteran and author of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, is host of "The O'Franken Factor" at 11:00 (noon eastern time), a title intended solely to piss of arch-rival Bill O'Reilly. I try never to miss an episode of O'Franken when I'm at work, and I occasionally catch bit of other shows, particularly The Majority Report with my favorite underrated movie babe, Janeane Garofalo.

Quite honestly I think Al started a bit weak but ramped up very quickly. On day 1 he felt a lot like he was relying too much on rehearsed material and an awfully large percentage of his jokes fell flat. (Except when he brought in Bebe Neuwirth -- "Lilith" from the show Cheers -- to play Ann Coulter. That was a riot.) But each day has been exponentially better than the last, and I know that Al will make a great host in the long run.

I'm happy to have a real liberal media for a change. I hope a station will open in Austin soon. Years ago when I first moved here, there was a fun, witty, slightly left of center host named Shannon Burke (a guy) on one of the local AM stations, sandwiched between Dr. Laura and G. Gordon Liddy. One day without warning, the whole station got shut down and changed overnight into a crummy oldies station. As far as I know, the poor guy just showed up for work one day and they told him, "This station doesn't exist. Go home."

One thing that has been a real downer for me is trying to find a place to discuss the show. When I like something, I want to get together with like minded people and just chat about it. However, finding a place to discuss the show on the net has been tricky, because every conversation quickly gets loudly commandeered by conservatives presenting such deep and well-thought out arguments as:

1. He sucks.
2. He's not funny.
3. Ha ha, liberals don't get it.
4. I give it six months, tops.
5. It will be so sweet when George Soros loses all his money.
6. U suck.

Of course I expect a certain amount of discussion on this level. It's the internet. But in this case, the focus of right wingers is so strident that you'd think it was the Second Coming of Clinton or something.

I'm a long time member of the Motley Fool message boards. The main place where people talk about Air America is on the appropriately named "Political Asylum" board, where half the contributors are screaming raving Bushies to begin with. And a quick search for "o'franken" on Google Groups will quickly reveal that the place where Al discussions are MOST popular is alt.fan.rush-limbaugh. Nuff said, right?

I know this is how modern conservatives operate. As Michael Moore, Tim Robbins, the Dixie Chicks, and Valerie Plame will be the first to tell you, ever since Bush took office the first order of business for dissenters is to shout them down. It's not "I respectfully disagree with your opinions," it's "HOW DARE YOU talk back to me when I'm telling you the way things are?!?"

The comical thing about all this is that after years of angry blowhards on talk radio, the number one comment you hear about Air America hosts is "They're SO NEGATIVE!"

A close second is "What these lefties just don't get is that you can't just have a popular radio show for your agenda... you have to be ENTERTAINING." This bit of brilliant advice is usually delivered by competing radio hosts in a wise tone of voice that indicates they've just revealed to you the meaning of life. Yeah guys, no shit!!! And here I thought that Air America just got on the air so they could broadcast policy discussions on tobacco imports from Zimbabwe.

There's actually two funny things about this claim when it comes from conservative talk show hosts. The first is that people like Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly are RARELY funny to anyone who doesn't already agree with them. Their idea of highbrow humor is "liberals suck", followed closely by pointing out that some liberal woman is not terribly attractive, if you know what I mean. Most consistently unfunny comic strip? Mallard Fillmore. When you think of the comedy greats, who generally pops to mind first? Monty Python? Lenny Bruce? George Carlin? One key element of comedy is a certain irreverence for society's sacred cows. That DEFINITELY does not mesh well with right wing ideology.

The other silly thing about the claim that "You can't set up a radio network just because you have an agenda" is that this is EXACTLY what conservatives did when they set up their media empire. Rupert Murdoch didn't just wake up one day and say "Hey, I'll start buying up a whole lot of TV and radio stations and newspapers, and maybe a few of them will just happen to promote a right wing message." Limbaugh was nothing before he started getting backing from political groups like Capital Cities and ex-Bush adviser Roger Ailes. So I just don't buy it.

Nevertheless, it's hard to listen to all the slams on Al and Air America and not get a little pessimistic. I want this station to do well. I want to be able to turn on my radio and be able to hear something that is neither Rush nor a RushClone. It worries me that this effort will actually fizzle for whatever reason, and it will be even harder for anyone else to ever attempt such a thing again.

And finally, I don't believe any of the other stereotypes about liberals that are suddenly popping up in the wake of Air America's launch. You know... liberals are too policy oriented, and they don't care about entertainment. Liberals are a bad target market. Liberals don't listen to talk radio.

If I myself am any indication, liberals like to laugh. And we DO have an interest in talk radio. It's just that we've been listening to Limbaugh and Hannity for years -- in small doses -- because there's NOTHING ELSE ON. Sometimes I do, in fact, listen to the above just to get myself irritated. But don't think for a moment that this means I wouldn't rather listen to somebody who's right. Nevertheless, I will not be at all surprised to find that a large part of Air America's demographic is conservatives, for the same reason that I listen to Limbaugh (when I can stand it).