Two week wrap

A few interesting news items this past two weeks:

• Became a dad - welcome BAF!
  
• Rep. Michele Bachmann continues to lie when it suits her, discussing swine flu or the budget reconciliation process  in Congress.
• Friedman thinks it's a decent compromise to out those who tortured but not push for prosecutions, but Krugman says it's nothing short of keeping our legal and moral standards to fully prosecute.
• Opponents to climate change legislation tend to think markets are best to solve everything, except carbon emissions (too costly!).  Gotta love the smell of cognitive dissonance in the morning.
• We may have moved beyond "she asked for it" in our perceptions of rape, but the U.S. shows poor attention to justice when it leaves "rape kits" untested for years.
• A nice chart on income concentration in the U.S. shows that we're (hopefully) coming off the peak of another Gilded Age (Roaring Twenties).  Both this period and the prior one were highlighted by spectacular financial speculation and shenanigans.
  

2008 Campaign: Some media are aware of the lies

A stunning piece in TIME Magazine looks at the persistence of lying the presidential campaign, singling out Senator McCain for:

a ceaseless assault on his opponent's character and policies, featuring a consistent—and witting—disdain for the truth.

It's not as though the Democratic campaign and Senator Obama are innocent of the typical political monkeying with truth, but McCain has taken the lying to a new level by unreproachfully repeating falsehoods even when confronted with truth. 

John McCain has raised serious questions about whether he has the character to lead the nation. He has defaced his beloved military code of honor. He has run a dirty campaign.

Cleaning Blog House - #2

I started this in July and clearly hold my career in too high a regard to prioritize a reduction in my "I should blog this" bookmark folder. Well, here's the second post. At this rate I'll be done in 2023.

So now the administration knows that it can make unsubstantiated claims, without paying a price when those claims prove false, and that saber rattling gains it votes and silences opposition. Maybe it will honorably refuse to act on this dangerous knowledge. But I can't help worrying that in domestic politics, as in foreign policy, this war will turn out to have been the shape of things to come.

Paul Krugman, writing in 2003 about the domestic impact of the Bush Administration's success with lying into Iraq.

How to lie with numbers, from the WSJ

Tip to Paul Krugman for this funny and yet not funny illustration of how you can lie with numbers.

The WSJ chart on defense spending (note the title):

And here's Krugman's correction:

Bush is smart - he plays word games

President Bush may have been informed that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program, but that hasn't stopped him from insinuating one.

Why coal is as dirty as ever

If you listen to public radio, you've probably heard one of the "clean coal" interludes. There's a bunch of hooey about domestic energy and then a lovely line about "increasingly clean" coal. Well, my good friend Chris over at Energista had something to say about "clean" coal.

No amount of technological improvement on the consumption end - scrubbers or electrostatic particulate removers - will improve the mining process. Terms like "sludge dam," "hilltop removal," and "black lung" come up frequently in a discussion of coal mining, an "ongoing dirty" technology.

Even the promised technologies to make coal "increasingly clean" on the back-end haven't really reached fruition. The biggest liability of coal in a global warming world is that it's the most carbon-intensive method of producing energy and technologies such as carbon capture sequestration - where we theoretically bottle up the CO₂ and inject it underground - aren't even commercialized.

The Energista analysis also points to a discussion of local justice in energy production, as wind projects are springing up in the same Appalachians that the coal mining has ravaged. While wind promises to have a significantly smaller impact on the environment, practically and aesthetically, the wind farms are all developments of energy companies from outside the area. The locals, screwed over so long by the coal mining, are naturally suspicious of someone else taking advantage of their local resource at their expense.

Bush lied

Putting these two words together seems to elude most major media outlets, even when the President ponies up. An excellent analysis of the media's pathetic revisionism shows that even when Bush admits he's a liar (having determined that Rumsfeld would in fact be resigning before the election while saying the exact opposite - a lie), the media like to give him the "benefit of the doubt." Folks, the doubt has run out. In fact, continuing to use these silly euphemisms like "untruth" is insulting. He's a liar.

Note: I didn't really closely enough to realize my friend at 28th Ave linked to the same analysis I just did. He's my source on the second link on newspeak.