Nothing Is The Matter With Kansas After All

A Win for Science in Kansas 

So. apparently. the Kansas State Board of Education voted to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a new science curriculum that treats evolution and climate change as fact and promotes hands-on learning. The board passed the new standards in an 8-2 vote, and encountered significantly less opposition to evolution and climate change principles than in the past.

Recall that the state voted to weaken evolution teaching in 1999 and 2005, although it adopted an evolution-friendly science curriculum in 2007. What does this mean?

Progress.

Good Point

Attacking Syria May be the Right Thing to Do, but There Will Be Consequences...

It's amazing what short memories people have. John McCain is calling Obama's failure to act on Syria "disgraceful." But a decade ago, John McCain and George Bush had their way: they invaded Iraq based on false claims of "yellowcake" and a pack of lies told us by an Iranian spy (Ahmad Chalabi) and an informant named "Curveball" (who the Germans knew was lying).

Now Iraq is an Iranian ally and China is getting all the Iraqi oil we "liberated" from Saddam.

Osama bin Laden ran planes into buildings on 9/11 because we had left American troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. The Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon because they were angry about the innocents Americans had killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nearly all the recent terrorist attacks (Fort Hood, Times Square, etc.) have been in retribution for the wars. And we can't forget the almost 10,000 American troops who have died, and the hundreds of thousands who have been maimed and scarred for life.

Attacking Syria will mean killing Hezbollah fighters who are coming from Lebanon to help Assad. Americans will be directly responsible for the deaths of Hezbollah fighters. Thus far Hezbollah has left Americans pretty much alone unless we've stationed troops there. Remember Saint Ronald's biggest foreign policy disaster was his response to the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Almost 300 American and French troops were killed by Hezbollah. Reagan talked tough, but eventually turned tail and pulled them all out. The attack was apparently motivated by the deaths of innocent by-standers by an American missile.  Sound familiar?

If we attack Syria in any significant fashion, we will kill hundreds if not thousands of innocent Syrians, as well as Hezbollah fighters and, potentially, Iranian and Russian advisers. The survivors will be angry and will want revenge. It may take 10 years, as it did for bin Laden and the Tsarnaevs, but we know for certain that some number of these angry young men will attempt to take revenge on America for these deaths. And we know for certain that some of them will succeed.

We are, at the same time McCain is demanding we invade Syria, deciding that the illusion of safety is more important than our privacy: we think it's okay for NSA to watch every single thing we do. Yet McCain is proposing an action that will inevitably endanger a whole new generation of Americans by making a whole new generation of Middle Easterners in yet another country hate us.

If we make war on Syria, we will make more terrorists. In five or 10 years, those terrorists will eventually try blow up the Pentagon or open fire on crowds of children at Disneyworld with AK-47s they can buy without background checks at gun shows in the United States. (Which they can buy with using a cell phone or the Internet.) Dozens if not hundreds or thousands of Americans will die because of an invasion of Syria. At that point millions of oblivious Americans will wail, "Why do they hate us so much?" just like they did after 9/11.

Well, this is why: when Americans kill people, their friends and relatives want revenge. Obliviously, Americans think that those people should be thanking us for freeing them from tyrants. But they don't see Assad as a tyrant: many Syrians are tied to his regime by inescapable political, family and religious ties. They perceive his acts of cruelty against Syrian rebels as necessary to protect their safety (sound familiar?).

Helping the Syrian rebels might be the right thing to do. But directly attacking Syria with American planes, ships and troops will have consequences: not only will American troops die, but eventually terrorists seeking revenge will kill innocent Americans here at home. And will the people who take power after Assad is gone be any better than he is? Is the current prime minister of Iraq any better than Saddam? Based on the number of Iraqis still getting blown up in the streets every day, it would seem not.

So, I wonder: why is the risk of American deaths from waging war on Syria so much more preferable to the risk of American deaths by having the NSA butt out of our personal lives?

Direct Military Aid to Syrian Rebels

I don't know if this is a good idea at all. I realize the president is feeling pressure from all points across the political spectrum to do something but do we really know who these guys are? There are various reports that claim that they Syrian rebels have been infiltrated by Al Qaeda. We've done this dance before in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s and that didn't turn out so well.

And speaking of Russia, the fact that they are now sending missiles to aid the Assad government is perhaps more troubling. So, now Putin is arming the Syrian government and we are arming the rebels. Does anyone else think this situation is likely going to massively blow up at any moment.

No Shit

And....Back to Rape...

GOP congressman: Rate of pregnancies from rape is ‘very low’

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), whose measure banning abortions after 20 weeks was being considered in the House Judiciary Committee, argued against a Democratic amendment to make exceptions for rape and incest by suggesting that pregnancy from rape is rare. “Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject — because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low,” Franks said.

Rape is like catnip to these guys....they just can't stop talking about it!

The Way out of Poverty!

Did you hear the one about Stephen Fincher, the Tennessee Republican congressman who quoted the Bible to justify cutting poor people off food stamps? From The Tennessean:

During the Agriculture Committee hearing last month, Democrats protested the food stamp cut, citing biblical verses about the need to care for the poor.

Fincher responded, “The Bible says a lot of things.” He added, “So we have to be careful how we pick and choose verses out of the Bible.”

In supporting the food stamp cut, the Tennessee member emphasized verses such as “Matthew” 26:11, in which Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” He also pointed to “2 Thessalonians” 3:10, which says “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

That's bad enough, but that isn't the worst:

Fincher has received $3.48 million in federal farm subsidies since 1999, according to the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group that annually obtains figures from the Agriculture Department. In 2012, he received $70,574.

He ranks first among current members of Congress in receipt of such money, according to the group.

and

Fincher said in 2010 that farm subsidies don’t go into his pocket because he uses them to pay off agricultural loans.

(The FEC has also found Fincher in violation of federal campaign regulations for accepting a $250,000 loan from his father's bank without disclosing it on his filings.)

So, giving food stamps to hungry Americans is bad, but giving farm subsidies to a rich congressman to pay off a big bank is just fine.

Fincher has discovered the way to end poverty! Poor people should just take out big loans from banks and then get the federal government to pay it back.

But wait -- didn't that just happen five or six years ago to millions of Americans who took out home loans from big banks, only to lose everything when the economy tanked?

The federal government bailed out the banks -- and Fincher -- but the vast majority of Americans got the shaft. Now many of those people who lost their jobs and their homes are on food stamps, and Fincher wants to starve them out as well.

Did They Miss It?

Interesting piece from Martin Sandbu about the Occupy Movement. To a certain extent, I agree with him. They had a chance to become the left's equivalent of the Tea Party but the very structure of the organization lent itself to not quite get there. With the "no leader" pledge, they pretty much set themselves up to be irrelevant in the current socio-political framework.

Yet, they did leave behind the "Legacy of the Percent" meme which ended up defining Mitt Romney (the 47 percent). I think Sandbu and many people who chuckle at the "death" of the Occupy Movement aren't reflecting on just how much awareness they raised about inequality in this country. It's part of our political vernacular and has about as much chance of going away as the words "bloated and ineffective" being used in juxtaposition with "government."

And they remained true to their vision and did not sell out to corporate interests unlike the Tea Party. I certainly thought they would so I was clearly wrong on that one. My chief frustration with them still remains their insistence that physical protesting in the age of social media is still relevant. It isn't. If they want to truly "occupy," something, it should be the next version of Twitter or Instagram. That would get people's attention.

How about an Occupy App? :)

Snowden Shows NSA Can't be Trusted with Our Secrets

Looks like I was wrong about the NSA phone records scandal -- it is all Bush's fault. The massive surveillance programs that Edward Snowden revealed to the world all started under Bush.

Some people are angry about these domestic spying programs: Rand Paul is starting a class action suit (aren't conservatives against frivolous lawsuits?). Apparently Snowden is a big Ron Paul supporter; he appears to have donated $500 to Paul's 2012 campaign. And the ACLU has been beating the NSA drum for years.

But a lot of people don't care, especially on the right. They seem to be just fine with the NSA watching every phone call you make and every single thing you do on the Internet. Which is weird considering how bent out of shape they are over the IRS profiling conservative political groups filing for tax-exempt status (apparently something that a conservative Republican IRS employee started). But people like Marc Thiessen insist that there's no danger from  the NSA because "Big Brother is not watching you."

The thing is, Little Brother is watching you. A lovestruck FBI agent messing with this kind of data took down David Petraeus. There have been numerous stories of state employees rummaging through drivers license records looking at hot women.

The people calling Edward Snowden a traitor and a criminal are missing the larger point. By revealing the secret of this massive surveillance program, Snowden -- a low-level computer system administrator -- proved without a doubt that the "safeguards" against exposure of sensitive data are completely inadequate. And if we can't keep this kind of data safe, should we even be collecting it?

Had Snowden really been the villain his detractors say he is, he could have used his access to look at the phone records and Internet activity for Republican senators, conservative pundits and, say, the offices of right-wing political organizations applying for non-profit status -- data that could help determine whether those groups are really "social welfare groups" or just political operatives trying to evade taxes. Or he could have gotten their credit card and bank account numbers and passwords. Or sold that information to the FSB or Chinese intelligence or the Russian mob.

Even if you put aside worries of rogue government employees blackmailing you or selling your data, there's always the problem of theft, mistakes and incompetence. How many times over the past few years have we heard stories about hackers breaking into websites to steal credit card numbers? How many times have sysadmins screwed up and left a firewall open, or put a file full of critical data on an open website, or lost a laptop with the names and Social Security numbers of thousands of people?

Finally, this incident also shows how flawed the idea is of having massively overpaid corporate contractors handle critical government work. Snowden worked for a private company called Booz Allen Hamilton that gets billions of dollars in contracts from the government every year. Snowden has worked for both the CIA and Booz Allen, recently pulling down $200,000 a year as a computer systems administrator. Snowden doesn't have a college degree; he didn't even graduate from high school. Yet he was paid two to four times the regular salary for such a position. Apparently money does not buy loyalty.

However, there's good news: if you're a sysadmin there's a job opening at Booz Allen that pays really well!

Surprised

Flying under the radar of nearly everyone was the recent SCOTUS ruling on Arlington vs. FCC. The essential question of the case was this: if the law is ambiguous, who gets to interpret it? My local paper details why this ruling was nothing short of stunning.

The divisions within the court defied the usual ideological predictions. In a powerful opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s majority ruled that even when an agency is deciding on the scope of its own authority, it has the power to interpret ambiguities in the law. Scalia was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas.

Are you FUCKING kidding me? Clarence Fucking Thomas is saying that a government agency has the power to interpret ambiguities in the law? How can this be?

For almost three decades, the court has ruled that when Congress gives a federal agency the power to issue regulations, that agency is usually authorized to interpret ambiguities in the original legislation. For example, does the word “source” in the Clean Air Act mean each smokestack in a plant or the entire plant? The court has ruled that the agency is entitled to interpret such ambiguities as long as its interpretation is reasonable. The idea is that by giving rulemaking authority to agencies, Congress implicitly delegated interpretive power to them as well. The court also has noted that, compared with the courts, the agencies are politically accountable and have technical expertise.

Scalia contended that Roberts was quite wrong to say that courts could identify a separate category of cases — those involving the scope of an agency’s authority. The question is always whether the agency is acting within the bounds set by Congress. “There is no principled basis for carving out some arbitrary subset of cases,” Scalia wrote. Forcing lower courts to draw ad hoc lines would make the law unpredictable and produce chaos. Scalia also insisted that the danger of agency overreaching is to be avoided, not by an arbitrary carve-out, but by requiring agencies to respect congressional limits on their authority.

So, the government agencies must be watched by Congress, not the courts. This means that the Congress has to start doing its fucking job and actually govern which makes me very, very happy.

The Question They Can't Answer

Simple question, via Salon.com...why are there no libertarian countries?

My answer has always been this: the same reason why socialist fantasies never work in reality is the same reason why libertarian fantasies never work in reality...people. They really suck. If the state planned everything, they'd have too much power and corrupt people would be naturally drawn to it. If the state planned nothing and let the free market just sort everything out, the corrupt people would get away with everything they wanted.

Michael Lind, the writer of the piece, makes a few interesting points on this subject.

When you ask libertarians if they can point to a libertarian country, you are likely to get a baffled look, followed, in a few moments, by something like this reply: While there is no purely libertarian country, there are countries which have pursued policies of which libertarians would approve: Chile, with its experiment in privatized Social Security, for example, and Sweden, a big-government nation which, however, gives a role to vouchers in schooling. But this isn’t an adequate response. 

Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.

Yet they can't do it. It's been my experience that these same people are often "based in science and logic" and require "hard evidence" before they can justify something. Thus, it's quite odd that they continually perpetuate this myth that a libertarian society would be the best. Where is the proof?

While the liberal welfare-state left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.

But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.

Exactly right and there's a reason for that perfectly summed up in one word: anarchy.

Meanwhile...

Oh Really?

An Unwarranted (But Not Warrantless) Invasion of Privacy

The Guardian reports that the NSA has been collecting data on all phone calls placed through Verizon:

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

Based on the timing this appears to be in response to the Boston Marathon bombings, which took place on April 15th. At that time it wasn't clear whether the Tsarnaevs were acting alone. Given that, it's likely that all carriers are providing the NSA this data; the other court orders simply haven't been leaked yet.

While this total surveillance of everyone all the time is ethically and morally wrong, it isn't illegal, thanks to the Patriot Act that the Bush administration rammed through Congress. That wasn't good enough for George W. Bush, who broke the law and simply issued an executive order for the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance of Americans without warrants from FISA.

People like Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have long been warning against this kind of government surveillance, and they opposed the Bush administration when after 9/11 Republicans used the fear of terrorism to arrogate themselves unlimited surveillance powers.

Republicans are sure to pile on Obama with this. Which is totally ridiculous, because the NSA is acting completely within the laws that Republicans crammed down our throats. Republicans did this, in part, because men like Karl Rove had fooled themselves into thinking that they would have a permanent Republican majority and could never be dislodged from power again. Presidents, when they're Republicans, should have unlimited executive power, but when Democrats exercise that exact same latitude it's an abomination.

If Mitt Romney's NSA had been caught doing this Republicans would be falling over themselves telling us how absolutely necessary this was to protect ourselves from the likes of the Tsarnaev brothers and another Boston bombing. They would be saying, "better safe than sorry," and "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette."

But even at their worst, the Democrats are still bloody amateurs at privacy invasion compared to the professional Republican lawbreakers who never bothered with FISA in the first place.

Truly Disgusting

In looking at all the recent criticism of President Obama, this travesty is noticeably absent and I'd like to know why. The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces and, on his watch, sexual assaults have gone up by 30 percent. Why?

It's truly disgusting to me on a number of levels. The president claims to be a huge supporter of women's rights but he can hardly claim that after 26,000 incidents of unwanted sexual contact. 26,000....are you fucking kidding me?!? I'd say that this is, hands down, his biggest mistake since he took office. Grade=F.

The media also pisses me off here because they have largely ignored this story and have focused instead on the "scandals" that will generate the most viewers (see: retired old people who have nothing better to do than foam at the mouth about Blackie McBlackerson). Conservatives are also full of crap on this one because they'd rather leave the sacred cow of the military alone not to mention the fact that they probably think this kind of assault is somehow legitimate or that the women were somehow asking for it.

It's one giant shit show from top to bottom with most Americans not really caring at all which, in the final analysis, is truly the most despicable part of all of this.