Friday, February 28, 2003

Fundamentalism in a $1500 suit

Words fail me in trying to describe how wrongwrongwrong and dangerousdangerousdangerous is the man installed at the head of George W. Bush’s Justice Department.  John Ashcroft’s misunderstanding of American values and American ideals isn’t merely monumental ... given the position of power he holds, he has already wrought immense damage to the United States and to its Constitution, and every day he remains in that position he is likely to continue to wreak such damage.

Example number whoknowshowmany:

In response to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision not to take up the Pledge of Allegiance “under God” question, Ashcroft promises to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.  His statement, as quoted in Adam Liptak’s story in the NYTimes:

"The Justice Department will spare no effort to preserve the rights of all our citizens to pledge allegiance to the American flag.  We will defend the ability of Americans to declare their patriotism through the time-honored tradition of voluntarily reciting the Pledge."

Has he no understanding of the facts of the case?  Does he not know that the two words in dispute were added to the Pledge in June 1954, nearly 62 years after its origin?  Is he not aware that the Pledge of Allegiance that he recited when he was eight years old didn’t contain the words “under God"?

The case has absolutely nothing to do with patriotism, allegiance, or the flag.  It’s about the First Amendment, about the separation of church and state, about imposition of religion under public auspices.  In his fevered fundamentalist brain, John Ashcroft does not understand that the United States of America is not a Christian nation.

White powder and desperation

As the rush of news picks up ever greater velocity, and the tide appears to be turning in directions that the Bushies can’t possibly be happy with, out of left field comes an oldie but a goodie.  This time, the powder was sent to Republicans—House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and three freshman Senators (Norm Coleman, Saxby Chambliss, and Lamar Alexander).  Preliminary testing has produced negative results.

According to the CNN report, the four envelopes were all postmarked here in Seattle.  But for some reason, I keep thinking that a more likely site of origination might be, oh, say, Crawford, Texas.  Not that I’m suggesting that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are flailing about in search of a “crisis” to somehow elicit flag-waving support for their faltering program.  No one would suggest that such cynical manipulation could be carried out by this administration, would they?

Thursday, February 27, 2003

Science, schmience (part 2)

Leave it to the US House of Representatives to demonstrate the nation’s commitment to being at the forefront of scientific research in the 21st century.  By a roll call vote of 241-155, the House passed H.R. 534, a total ban on all human cloning.  That includes research into basic mechanisms of disease, opportunities for understanding and resolving genetically-related diseases, and much more.  The Senate has not yet considered this bill, so this isn’t yet the law of the land.

I’m sure it’s just an ironic coincidence that this bill was passed by Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay’s House of Representatives 50 years to the day after Francis Crick let it be known that he and James Watson had solved the structure of DNA.

A sad day in the neighborhood

Fred Rogers died today, leaving the world a less pleasant place.

I’m too old to have watched Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as a kid, and I don’t have any kids to have shared the program with while they were growing up.  But I lived in Pittsburgh for nearly 15 years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so I got to observe something more of Fred than what could be seen on his children’s show.

What’s amazing, really, is that the Fred Rogers you saw on his program was very much the same as the “real” Fred Rogers seen around town.  His gentle sensibility, his quiet dignity, his appreciation and acceptance of who you were and what you felt rang true.  Just as he never talked down to five-year-olds, he never talked down to adults either.

I can’t speak of Mr. Rogers from a parent’s point of view.  For that, read Body and Soul.  I’m sure there are, or will be, other blogs expressing similar thoughts and feelings.  But from this adult’s viewpoint, I always appreciated his deep and genuine authenticity.  His television show wasn’t divorced from the real world; when one of his supporting players died, Mr. Rogers calmly explained it to his young viewers, expressed his sorrow and sense of loss.  He didn’t try to “protect” children from the realities of life and death, from humanity’s rhythms.  Everyone knew that those comfortable sweaters he pulled on at the start of each program were knitted for him by his mother.  When she passed on, he told his viewers about it.

Once, I sat next to him at a Shakespeare play in the University of Pittsburgh theater.  Though he surely could have gotten himself a front-row-center seat just by asking, he instead folded himself into the kind of seat in the upper balcony that a graduate student (like myself at the time) could afford.  To be honest, I didn’t realize just who I was sitting next to until intermission, because he was completely unprepossessing and completely without the off-putting trappings of celebrity.  During the intermission, we talked about the performances—I don’t remember which play it was, but I recall that the setting had been transformed from 15th century Italy to some nameless mid-20th-century totalitarian state—and compared notes on the entire Shakespeare series that season.  Nothing about his television program, nothing about his fame ... just a pleasant conversation.  No one tried to cut into our discussion, no one even came over to ask him for an autograph on their playbill.  In Pittsburgh, Fred Rogers simply wasn’t treated as a celebrity.

If Mr. Rogers is now somewhere beyond this mortal coil, today is a wonderful day in that neighborhood.

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Budgeteering

In his comment on yesterday’s entry about the not-to-be-tested missile program, Scott mentions the importance of an item being specifically identified and mentioned in the budget.  Interesting that he should mention that, since my company has just had an experience with exactly the phenomenon he speaks of.

A special study we’re working on has been mentioned specifically in the 2003 joint appropriations resolution that’s currently awaiting GWB’s signature.  There’s no money figure attached to it, just a sentence saying that the conferees are aware of this project and another similar one, and would like to see them both continued beyond their current one-year timeline.

So all of a sudden, we’re asked to add data from another state (one with a powerful Senator) to our analytic dataset, it’s strongly suggested by the government folks we deal with that we should write a bread-and-butter note to the chairman of the Senate Appropriations committee, since (we’re told by our contacts at CMS) he and another Senator were the ones who put that sentence into the resolution, our data requests get higher priority than they had previously, and so forth.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you.  I’m the lead data analyst and researcher on the special study, so this mention in the budget directly affects me and my work status.  We work with good people at CMS, people who were there before Bush and will be there after him ... many, if not most, of whom fervently hope that that “after” will be in 2005 rather than 2009.  The special study is potentially of great value to the healthcare of Americans, and I know we’ll do really good work in carrying it out.

Still, it’s really interesting to see the effect of that one little sentence in the budget resolution.  I have to wonder, though, what sort of non-innocuous, non-pleasant, non-positive little items are sprinkled around in the massive volume that is a budget resolution?