WhirledView

A Small Contribution to the Fitzgerald Investigation

by CKR

If you want real analysis, you’ll have to go down the hall to Dr Tyree’s class…I mean firedoglake or The Next Hurrah. They’re doing such a thorough job that there’s not much point in my trying to figure this all out.

One thing that scientists like me are good at, though, is seeing those little pieces that don’t quite fit or got shoved off in the corner. I’ve got three of those to contribute.

1) Josh Marshall pointed out that Silvio Berlusconi is coming to visit President Bush on Monday. Now Berlusconi is saying that he didn’t like the idea of the Iraq war all along. Italy’s secret service, SISMI, seems to have had something to do with those Niger forgeries. So exactly what is it that Berlusconi and Bush will be talking about? I still think that finding out who did those forgeries will tell us a lot.

2) John Ashcroft began the investigation, then recused himself. What did he find? Has he spoken to the grand jury?

3) Although the pundits are having a wonderful time with the history of second-term presidencies, the activities that led up to Lewis Libby’s indictment took place in George W. Bush’s first term. This probably doesn’t make a difference, but it points to a simple explanation of that second-term problem: the chickens come home to roost.

There are now hundreds of people in the blogosphere poring over all the documents they can find on this subject. Fitzgerald's friday press conference didn't answer all the questions by a long shot. This ain’t gonna end any time soon.

Women Can Change, Men Can't

by CKR

That seems to be the assumption behind Maureen Dowd's article in the Sunday Times magazine.

All that feminism stuff that happened in the sixties and seventies--wrong!

MoDo gives a rundown of how women are to get a man: the old story of letting him think he's the hunter. Oh dear.

It seems that female success in business turns men off, while paying for their date's dinner turns them on.

It's the tiredest stuff I heard when I reached puberty.

Women have changed their lives from home-oriented to business. They've called men for dates and waited at the telephone or for the IM envelope on the screen. They've alternated tactics. They've worn lace and jeans, high heels and Birkies, no makeup and the full-face press.

But men haven't had to change. They still work in the office and still want to be in charge. So women will have to adapt to that.

The biological explanations are adduced. Men just can't perform sexually unless they're in charge, all those millennia of evolution, you know, have produced those "eggshell egos."

I guess I had that funny idea that being human, having the powers of thought and expression, allowed us to work together to move ourselves in the behavioral directions we chose. Seems like women have managed that in the last several decades. And some men have come along, caring for the children and doing housework.

It's not in MoDo's article explicitly, but it's all through it: women can move in those behavioral directions, men are dominated by evolution.

Please.

Protecting Sources 101

By PLS

“Scooter” Libby has been indicted. His (alleged) crime: perjury. He lied when he said, repeatedly, under oath, that his info about Valerie Plame had come from reporters, to others of whom he, in turn, generously passed on the juicy tidbits.

In fact, he obtained those attention-distracting tidbits from his own desperate colleagues in the Executive office, for whom he may now be taking the fall.

So Libby was playing games with reporters, but reporters played straight with him. Their instinct was to protect him, and they continued to do so even as it became obvious that he had toyed with them.

The Great Mother of Us All

by CKR

I can’t claim to have followed this sort of thing all that carefully, but a letter in the 23 September Science suggests to me that I may not be completely off base.

The BBC gives some of the background on “mitochondrial Eve.” As far as I understand, their explanation is pretty much correct. Mitochondria are organelles within cells that are passed down through the female line; similar studies can be done of the male line with the Y chromosome.

By considering the distribution of mitochondrial DNA throughout a population, conclusions can be drawn as to who our ancestors were. The distribution of mitochondrial genes seems to indicate that all humans now alive can trace their ancestry to a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. This is the woman referred to as “mitochondrial Eve.”

I’ve got no complaint with that. [Nor, I probably should say in these contentious anti-evolution times, do I have with the theory of evolution. Everything I say in this post is based on evolution. Raising questions about the application of a theory is not the same as questioning its basis.]

I see several problems with the name, though. First, the Biblical Eve was a woman who lived with one man, no other people around until they had children. My first reaction when I heard about “mitochondrial Eve” was that the idea of a single woman, presumably accompanied by one or more men, was absurd. Our ancestors must have lived in groups.

Something Works! Congrats, St. Vincent's!

by CKR

PLS and I got our flu shots this morning. Early this morning.

Shots were supposed to start at eight, but the line was beginning to snake around the sidewalk by 7:30 in the drizzle, so the staff started letting us in when they were ready.

Long tables of candystripers to explain the forms and get our signatures. As we lined up after the tables, signed forms in hand, we were urged to bare our upper arms. This is not easy when you are holding an umbrella, a purse, a shoulder bag with a thermos of coffee and two cups, and the signed form.

But we shed one side of our jackets and pushed our shirts up just in time to be directed toward a free nurse in a room that must have held thirty of them and hundreds (thousands?) of hypodermics.

"Are you allergic to eggs?" echoed around the room, and we duly assured the nurses we were not and pulled up our sleeves a little higher. Wrinkle nose, close eyes.

A steady flow of us made our way back to the parking lot.

Helpful people with wheelchairs were bringing the oldest people to the front of the line. As we headed toward the car, a traffic officer suggested we exit via St. Michael's Drive. Cars were coming in from the other direction, where another traffic officer kept them going in the right direction.

It gave me a little more confidence that in Santa Fe, anyway, we'll have a chance at dealing with whatever flu epidemic may show up. Not only is a flu clinic like this a confidence-builder for the public, it gives St. Vincent's experience in delivering large-scale inoculation.

That is, if there's enough vaccine. That question is, unfortunately, in the purview of a federal government that thinks it's the problem. Except for waging wars.

Human Rights: Look Who’s Leading Whom These Days

By PLS

What is it about Dick Cheney that makes him care so little about human life? What is it about George W. Bush that allows him to follow his Vice President's lead?

As Governor, Bush himself seems to have been execution happy. As President, he gave the nod to defining categories of antagonists to whom the protection of the Geneva Conventions could be denied. And, now that Congress has belatedly caught on to the fact that those who torture cannot claim a right to moral leadership, GWB's Vice President is trying to create a loophole the size of a gulag in the anti-torture legislation that John McCain has pushed relentlessly to fruition. If the military can’t torture, Cheney says, non-military entities should be able to do it instead.

For some perhaps deep reason Dick Cheney and George W. Bush---and Donald Rumsfeld as well---have been unable to grasp the three absolutely basic things about torture.

1. It is wrong. It is bestial and uncivilized.

2. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t provide reliable information.

3. It is poor public relations, the ultimate cynical objection whose truth resonates around the globe. The U.S. is no longer respected. The great beacon on the hill has been extinguished.

And now the leaders of our own client states are making headlines as champions of human rights. They’re teaching the teacher a few lessons about being civilized.

Is Ahmadinejad Playing With Fire?

By PHK

The Bush Administration is not alone in forgetting that communications have become global and often instantaneous - and that messages designed for domestic consumption have a way of immediately entering the most politically sensitive international debate in real time.

Earlier today newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former student radical and supporter of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, inserted monstrous feet in oversized mouth – when he told a group of conservative Iranian students that “Israel must be wiped off the face of the map” and he did so in front of the cameras. The LA Times reported that Iranian state-run television quoted the president as saying “anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the first of the Islamic nation’s fury.” This kind of irresponsible rhetoric may have proven popular with Ahmadinejad’s religiously conservative and nationalistic Shiite audience, but it even went beyond former Iranian president Rafsanjani in 2001 when he “called for a Muslim state to annihilate Israel with a nuclear strike.”

Whew!

By PLS

Harriet Meirs has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme Court. Thank goodness. Her resignation letter shows what we have been saved from. Here’s the telling passage:

...[M]embers of the Senate have indicated their intention to seek documments about my service in the White House in order to judge whether to support me....[I]n lieu of records, I would be expected to testify about my service in the White House to demonstrate my experience and judicial philosophy....Repeatedly...I have streadfastly maintained that the independence of the Executive Branch be preserved and its confidential documents and information not be released to further a confirmation process....

Like others I have been anxious about the future of Roe v. Wade. But what has worried me more is the degree to which the Judiciary would be subordinated to the Executive under the GWB nominees. This letter confirms the validity of that concern.

Meirs will not (or dare not) admit that the confirmation process involves more than senatorial prerogative judiciously or injudiciously exercised. The hearings she is ducking would have allowed us all to ponder the implications of a judicial philosophy that could shape our polity profoundly for decades.

In short, if a nominee can’t tell us what she’s been doing or thinking for the past six years, we’re in the position of accepting a pig in a poke, which is stupid even when a pig is only a pig.