This woman is from my state.

Bat.Shit.Crazy.

She's long been known to be rather nuts, but this takes the cake. Now, when you look at Congresswoman Bachmann's record of being a right wing nut, and the current beautiful shade of blue that the state is polling on the presidential election, you might wonder what the heck is going on. Bachmann is from the 6th district which is primarily the northern suburbs, from the Wisconsin border, up over the Twin Cities and west out past St. Cloud. A blend of rural and suburban that leans a little red. Bachmann was elected in 2006 and her reelection seemed well inside possible despite being, well, bat shit crazy. But apparently this little outpouring of McCarthyism has lead to a small surge in donations to her opponent. This might get interesting.

But there is something more here. When you look Bachmann's apparently sincere belief that Democrats and Democratic party's nominee for president might be anti-american, and put it in the same context as the vile things said about Obama at Republican rallies, there is an obvious theme. These are the equivalent of a Freudian slip. The party officials can only talk about "palling around with terrorists" for so long before their supporters make the logical connections and start saying the things the party officials could never get away with. Its one thing when supporters with only the power of the vote and their voice scream things at rallies. But you know the meme has grown bigger when an elected official, up for reelection no less!, thinks she can get away with saying this on a national cable channel.

One more thing, even the most liberal, left wing, progressive elected Democrat in the federal government believes in our democracy enough to try to change it from the inside. That faith that our government can be fixed, and is not fundamentally flawed, is proof enough for me of their pride in America and the American system of governance.

Addendum: I made that lol, what luck that Bachmann used Impact as her campaign font!

Babies Everywhere!

So by now we've all heard thatSarah Palin's daughter Bristol is pregnant. This was revealed to quash rumors that Mrs. Palin's youngest son was actually her grandson by Bristol.

The republicans have been trumpeting about how brave the senior Palin was in choosing to continue the pregnancy upon learning that the fetus had Trisomy 21, Downs syndrome. Now they're going on about how great and brave it is for underage Bristol Palin to not terminate her pregnancy.

But hey wait a minute, if Sarah Palin had her way her brave choice would never have existed. There would be no choice to make, brave or otherwise. And I wonder how much of an informed choice young Bristol was really offered.

Before being picked for the VP slot on the Republican ticket, Palin was going to talk at a lunchon here in St. Paul with Phylis Schlafly. Basically two hard working career women talking about how much women need to be at home taking care of the children. As we chanted out side the Xcel Center on Monday, "This is what hypocrisy looks like."

Welcome to the RNC

Authorities raid, search protesters' hub

Cops have raided the meeting site of the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anarchist group long planning to protest the RNC and the Republican warmongers infesting my fair city.

The Pioneer Press did not see the warrant. But witnesses quoted from the warrant, which was read aloud by authorities. They said authorities were looking for "items that could be used for direct action techniques, ranging from computers, Xboxes, Xbox games, Molotov cocktails and matchstick heads."

Okay, I may be 23, but I've never been much into videogames, anybody out there in internet land want to explain to me why the cops would want Xboxes? Did they break their Wii? Has Microsoft released some special tutorials on how to bomb the Xcel center that are only available on Xbox?

In related news, Downtown St. Paul was weird yesterday during lunch. There were more people out, but it wasn't really clear how many of them were cube dwellers gawking and how many were honest to god Republicans. Except for that one woman with really blond hair, really big pearls and a portly husband in a suit jacket and a cowboy hat; they stood out like a sore thumb, looking really confused and haughty.

All the mailboxes were taken out, and the mail in the office can't be over a certain weight and we have to hand it directly to the mail carrier. How exactly sister dearest will get to her coffee slinging job an hour earlier in the heart of the control zone is still being ironed out.

How graphs can lie to you

I want to discuss graphs for a bit. When we were wee first years at college, we spent a fair amount of time talking about how to make graphs well. Anyone can make a graph in Excel, but you need some knowledge to choose the right graphs for the right sets of data. You need to know when you need error bars and how to choose the right size error bars. Scale is an important aspect as well. Have a look at these two graphs.

This screen capture was taken Friday night, little before 7 pm central time.

The two graphs set the front runner as the whole and the other candidates as portions of that whole. No matter how many people are added, Obama and McCain stay as 100% of the available graph. But the more important issue is that it makes it look like Obama and McCain have the same amount of support, and that Hillary is way behind McCain. Thats part of the reason I started making my own graphs.

This graph is linked to the data on my google spreadsheet, it will update.

This graph puts all six of the candidates that ABC/Facebook is tracking on the same scale. Its pretty clear how huge of a lead Obama has among the Facebook crowd. Its also clear that Hillary is actually ahead of McCain by about 35,000 people, but thats rather hard to see since the difference is much smaller relative to Obama's lead.

So when you see a graph, look for the scale and just because two bars look the same doesn't mean that they're the same value.

NYT as a classroom with McCain as the example

The McCain Article
Not precisely DC drama, but rather a discussion about a story about DC drama.

The article included reporting on Mr. McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee led by Mr. McCain. Since publication of the article, The Times has received more than 2,000 comments, many of them criticizing the handling of the article. More than 4,000 questions were sent via e-mail to The Times on Thursday night and Friday. Editors and reporters who worked on the article answered some of the questions on Friday.

The journalists who worked on the article go on to tackle some of the questions that people raised. As they do that, they talk a bit about how a news paper is run and how journalists report on a story. When asked about the irony of the editorial page endorsing McCain while the news side was working on this story, their reply was this.

A. The short answer is that the news department of The Times and the editorial page are totally separate operations that do not consult or coordinate when it comes to news coverage and endorsements or other expressions of editorial opinion. We in the newsroom did not speak to anyone at the editorial page about the story we were working on about Senator McCain. They did not consult us about their deliberations over endorsements of the presidential candidates. I’m the political editor, and the first I knew of the McCain endorsement (and of the endorsement of Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side) was when I read them in the newspaper. In all of our internal discussions about the news story subsequent to the endorsement, I do not recall anyone bringing it up.

The fact that I already knew this isn't the interesting part. What interests me is that the paper took the time to sit down and explain this to the public. It felt like I was reading a journalism instructor patiently explaining things to a class. Answering these questions fully and carefully makes me respect the paper more than I already did.

On the internet, any wanker can pound out a bitchy letter about whatever is getting their panties in a twist. And more often than not, that bitchy letter is full of mistakes, in both logic and often grammar, and a fundamental misunderstanding of whatever it is thats pissing them off. Going through and addressing each problem is usually an exercise in futility, because even if you convince one person that they're wrong, there are hundreds more to take their place. So for the NYT to do this, and do it so well and so thoroughly is really classy. Sometimes I feel kind of bad for using the NYT for so many of the stories I comment on, but then they go and do something like this. This is why I read the NYT and this is why I don't feel bad about it.

Tomorrow I'll put up summaries of all the things I wanted to write about this week, but was too tired and busy to sit down and write. There were elections in Wisconsin and Pakistan, and how often do those things coincide?

When you get down to it, common sense has left the capitol.

Fighting for Safety

There are times when a issue gets weighed down with so many interest groups that the obvious answers get lost. Take this example, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (which has as many issues as the FDA) is trying to stop people's couches from catching fire when people fall asleep smoking.

For years, there has been an obvious way to address accidental fires: requiring tobacco companies to make cigarettes, which are the leading cause of fatal fires, self-extinguishing. But tobacco was exempted from CPSC jurisdiction when the agency was created in 1972, and a 1994 attempt to give the agency authority over cigarettes failed.
...
The alternative was to focus on the furniture that was catching fire. And the tobacco industry, which wanted to avoid further regulation of cigarettes, did its best to steer the CPSC in that direction.

You can stop the fire either at the origin or by controlling the fuel. (Technically you could control the oxygen, but that doesn't really work in this scenario.) That sets up the two main interested groups, the tobacco companies and the furniture makers. But then you look at how to make the furniture less flammable and you see that the most common way is to use brominated compounds. So that adds in the chemical companies that produce these brominated flame retardants (BFRs) have a stake in the game. But that pulls in the scientists that are worried about the effects the BFRs could have on the biochemistry of both humans and the environment. The scientists have some reason to be worried; before BFRs, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) were used as fire retardants and those have some serious heath issues.

Whew. The tobacco companies have historically been quite good at lobing the various branches of government to look past the obvious problems with their product. This is no different.

Increased awareness of the health risks of fire retardants, meanwhile, confronted the CPSC with a dilemma: how to strike a balance between the need to prevent fatal fires and the risk of exposing millions of consumers to potentially harmful chemicals. It was enough of a conundrum to drive away consumer groups, which in recent years have chosen to sit out of the upholstered furniture debate.

The answer is obvious to me. Add the risk of setting yourself on fire to the list of risks you take when you take up smoking. There isn't a good way out of this problem other than making the population less stupid. Getting the tobacco companies to do things takes too long and the chemical option is not safe. The only way out is education and coming to terms with the fact that there are some things that the government can't do.

Besides shouldn't the CPSC be focusing their energy on all the questionable products that are coming over from China? The ones with melamine and lead and who knows what else? I think that might be a better use of their time and our taxes.

Bush and Pepfar

In Global Battle on AIDS, Bush Creates Legacy

Nearly five years later, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — Pepfar, for short — may be the most lasting bipartisan accomplishment of the Bush presidency.

I don't know about that. This god damn war in Iraq had more support from congressional Democrats than any of them are willing to admit. Lets say that it may be the most lasting peaceful accomplishment of the Bush presidency. But even the peaceful things that this president has managed to do have not been unmarred by his illogical ideological roots.

Critics, including Mr. Kerry, are particularly incensed by the requirement that one-third of the prevention funds be spent teaching abstinence, despite a lack of scientific consensus that such programs reduce the spread of H.I.V.

When a Ugandan AIDS activist, Beatrice Were, denounced the abstinence-only approach at an international AIDS conference last year, she received a standing ovation. Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, an advocacy group here in Washington, says the Bush program has been hamstrung by “ideologically driven policies.”

Think about how much could have been done with that third that had to be spent on abstinence. The abstinence funding is only in there because the Christian right, like so many other fundamentalist groups, is anti-sex. And that Christian right is the base of Bush's popular support. There is no proof that abstinence education helps decrease premarital or extramarital sex, not here in the US among teens or else where to stop the spread of AIDS.

I will, grudgingly give Bush some props for sending money to help AIDS patients around the world. Some money, even money tied to the stupid abstinence programs, is better than none.

It wont make up for the god damn war though. And it wont make up for torture, trashing civil liberties, putting conservative judges on the SCOTUS, letting New Orleans drown and all the other shit he's pulled. Wont even come close.

Obama and Huckabee

Another story I shouldn't have to provide a link for; Obama and Huckabee win their respective primaries in Iowa. I'll do some health stuff tomorrow.

I have to admit that I didn't really have a preference among the top three Democrats. Clinton, Edwards and Obama all seemed like good choices. Sure there were differences, but in my mind those different strengths and weaknesses seemed to equal out. The results in Iowa are terribly close between Edwards and Clinton, with 744 and 737 state delegates respectively. As for the number of delegates that will be chosen to go on to Denver, Obama gets 16, Edwards gets 14 and Clinton gets 15. Every where I see is reporting that, but I don't see an explanation for the 14 v 15 numbers.

Huckabee's win is a bit more interesting. The demographics of the win show that much of his support was evangelicals. So the obvious question is how well is that going to work for him in New Hampshire? I don't really know, but the lack of passion for any of their candidates that the Republican voters are showing is probably not a bad thing for the Dems. Besides, Huckabee is kinda nuts. Its like going to the other party's primary and voting for the crazy you know your party can beat, except they did it themselves.

But keeping in mind the post earlier this week questioning how representative the Iowa caucuses and straw poll are, we have to remind ourselves that this is Iowa. While the people there take very seriously their role in the election cycle, it really isn't a very representative sample. No one state can be.

Sit tight, this is just getting good.

PS: I'm still giggling at Wonkette's Merry Fifth Place to Ron Paul.

The FEC is in Limbo

As Primaries Begin, the FEC Will Shut Down

So the gist of it is that there are supposed to be six people on the FEC's panel, with a vote of four to get anything done. When the year ends, three recess appointments will run out and the board will be left with only two people. There are supposed to be three from each party, but things are held up.

The potential for an FEC shutdown has been looming for weeks, as a handful of Democratic senators voiced opposition to one of Bush's nominees to the commission, Hans A. von Spakovsky. Their concern stemmed not from von Spakovsky's work on the FEC but from his tenure in the Justice Department's civil rights division.

His critics contend that von Spakovsky advocated a controversial Texas redistricting plan and fought to institute a requirement in Georgia that voters show photo identification before being permitted to cast ballots.

In return the Republicans are holding up the Democrats two nominees.

I wish I could get impassioned about this. The FEC is an important body that keeps track of the money that the campaigns get and spend. I understand the opposition to von Spakovsky; I come from a state with same day registration and I think that should be the way to do things, so this guy seems downright backwards.

But it all seems so many layers removed from hunger, homelessness, our civil liberties and international diplomacy that its hard to get worked up about it.

Bureaucracy is like an opiate. It dulls my response and makes me sleepy. And this sort of bickering makes me roll my eyes. Part of me wishes it didn't; the devil is in the details and there is so much detail at this level. At the same time I know if I cared too much I would burn out. You can only maintain that level of focus for so long.

I hate to assume the worst, but...

Bush Lawyers Discussed Fate of C.I.A. Tapes
Of course they did. I mean, did we really think that the CIA would do this without talking to someone in the White House first? We see the crap coming out of Washington and we are schooled enough in the vileness of this administration to recognize their particular style of crap when we see it. Whenever its got something to do with the torture of people who may or may not have anything to do with terrorism, its a damn safe bet that the White House was in there somewhere.

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

Guess who is on that list; Harriet Miers, John Bellinger, Alberto Gonzales and David Addington. Some of those names ring a bell, don't you agree?

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal.

I'm picturing lots of winking and nodding and knowing looks and in the end there very probably wont be anything solid other than the distinct impression that they all knew damn well what they were up to.

Ms. Perino’s statement said that other than President Bush’s comment that he had not known about the tapes, White House officials have declined to discuss the matter because of pending investigations by the Department of Justice and the C.I.A. inspector general.

Dur. Of course Bush didn't know about it, he doesn't seem to know about anything. This is like seeing a friend with a set of lock picks, seven cans of spray paint and a face mask and saying to yourself "I really don't want to have to lie about this later, so I'm just not going to ask."

Except in this case people were tortured. Thats a much bigger sin than tagging up some billboards.

Congress is suddenly so curious

Democrats Call for Inquiry in Destruction of Tapes by C.I.A.
Review of Iran Intelligence to Be Sought
But they are curious about very different things.

Angry Democratic lawmakers called for investigations today into the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction in 2005 of at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two [al] Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody.

On the other hand...

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources.

Democrats want to know why tapes interrogations of high level al Qaeda, interrogations that were probably quite harsh, were destroyed in the middle of questions about how interrogations are done. Needless to say, people are very suspicious of why this was done. Of the two topics, this is the one that needs more investigation.

In the mean time, Republicans are calling into question the National Intelligence Estimate that has effectively halted the Bush administration's war mongering with Iran. And while asking questions about the intelligence is good, this isn't about wanting to understand, this is about questioning the objectivity of the 16 intelligence agencies.

"Iran is one of the greatest threats in the world today. Getting the intelligence right is absolutely critical, not only on Iran's capability but its intent. So now there is a huge question raised, and instead of politicizing that report, let's have a fresh set of eyes -- objective, yes -- look at it," [Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.)] said in an interview.

What the hell is that? Really? He's really questioning the objectivity of these career intelligence officers?

The "jungle telegraph" is transmitting the message that "intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary" to get this NIE out to the public.

So on one hand we have the Democrats asking the CIA where the tapes went and the Republicans are questioning the objectivity of all 16 agencies. On top of that, they got taken for a ride regarding the Iraq intelligence back in 2003. Its got to be tense over there.

Scandal as a tease and a ghost.

Publisher: McClellan doesn't believe Bush lied

Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan's book in April, tells NBC from his Connecticut home that McCLellan, "Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him."

Hrmm. When things aren't totally clear, its best to go back to the original source document.

What Happened Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself.

The key word here seems to me to be "involved" in the last sentences. How could Bush be involved in "unknowingly passing on false information" and not be lying? Was Bush passing false information to the press secretary because he was told false information? Someone in that group of five people must have known the information was false.

There is another side to this. McClellan "Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him." Maybe not, but the publisher knew damned well the stir that those three short paragraphs would cause. A little bit of scandal helps hustle dead trees, everyone knows that. And that is the real reason for all this. The idea that McClellan might know who gave Valerie Plame's name to those reporters is a tease. A tease as surely as a flash of lace at the top of a stocking.

The scandals that haunt this administration do little more than haunt. They players get shuffled on and off the stage, get rearranged a bit, cause a little panic each time a new one shows up. But nothing substantial seems to have really happened. We still have no time table for withdrawal. We still have detainees being tortured I'm sure. None of these scandals seems to be able to solidify into anything that can throw the White House off track. All the ghosts of all the dead in Iraq don't even seem able to scare away the saber rattling with Iran. Maybe they've got some killer ghost traps over there.

Security costs money, money we don't have right now.

Security Funds For Conventions Tied In Stalemate

A stalemate in Washington is holding up money for security during next year's GOP and Democratic conventions and could force Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver to front tens of millions of dollars, lawmakers warned Monday.

This could also go under DC Drama, but since I am currently in the Twin Cities this is pretty local. St. Paul's downtown is tiny and Minneapolis is bigger, but its really not that big. Minneapolis, St. Paul and Denver don't have enough money right now to get the security contracts signed. I don't know about Denver, but St. Paul is trying to plan but running up against a lack of information. If you have enough time you can get planned enough for most things. You can even plan enough to be flexible for any strange things that might happen. But with no information and no money to get the ball rolling, you end up planning at the last minute. And thats fine for picnics and potlucks, but national political conventions for the two major parties should not be planned like a pot luck.

The bill that is being held up would give $25 million each to the Twin Cities and Denver. That is not a small bit of money. What happens if the cities don't get the money? I'm really not sure how things like this work. I guess the security contracts need to get signed. Where would the money come from? I could speculate, but I'd rather not. I'd rather see the feds or the respective parties cough up the money.

But lets not get too downhearted about all this. The mayors St. Paul and Minneapolis don't want this to be a riot, and there are promises that there wont be "pens" for the protesters. And some of the proof can be found at The Uptake. Good stuff.

Republicans and the Farm Bill

Farm Bill At Standstill After Vote

The immediate cause of the deadlock has been the insistence of Senate Republicans on their right to introduce a series of politically explosive tax and immigration amendments that Democrats deem not relevant. Harkin said yesterday that these include changes in the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, and a ban on issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

When I say that there needs to be changes to the Farm Bill, this is not what I had in mind. When I say that I want changes to the Farm Bill I would like to see changes that make healthy food less expensive than a Twinkie. I want this graph on one of those ridiculously big posters used in Congressional debates.

But rather than, Republicans are trying to add immigration stuff and all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with farming or food stamps. Bush is going to veto it anyway so why the Republicans are tacking on random stuff is a little confusing. Holding up the Farm Bill, with or without the kind of changes I would like to see is generally a bad idea. It just doesn't play well, the idea that you are "turning you back on rural America" just can't be spun well.

Really, the farm bill needs to be reworked so that the money is flowing in a way that actually encourages small farmers and farmers that grow food that is good for us and not simply made into high fructose corn syrup. Large Agribuisnesses that pretend to represent small farmers need to be called on their deception.

SCHIP and Timing

House Passes Revised Children's Health Bill, but Timing Irks GOP

But Republican leaders rallied their wavering troops around a new issue, whether the vote should have taken place when much of Southern California was on fire and nine House members were touring the disaster zone. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) insisted she had no choice but to move forward and give the Senate a chance to send the measure to Bush next week.

You know, this is exactly what I mean by Inside the Beltway Drama. Seizing upon the little things like timing to bitch. Really the Republicans would rather spend their time antagonizing other nations than spend money on keeping children healthy or people who lost their houses to the combination of drought due to global warming and arson. Should the California fires have gotten time before this version of SCHIP? Yeah probably, but if the Republicans had just shut up about waisting time and they had all just voted, maybe they could have done both. As someone who has lived (for a couple months) in a co-op, and has been my share of house meetings, sometimes you just have to shut up and vote in order to move on to the next topic.

Busy Saturday so I'm keeping it short.