At Random, 2/7/06

Thinking about "un-American." Thinking about how people who want to gut the Bill of Rights, impose their own worldview on the rest of us (not through the free interchange of ideas, but by stifling dissent and free expression for everyone else), who want to rewwrite the bases of our culture, are so ready to call the rest of us "un-American." (Actually, see my comments below about cartoons.)

Think about that for a while.

Ethics Reform, McCain/Obama Version:

From the Chicago Tribune.

Last Wednesday, a group of seven Republicans and three Democrats met in McCain's office to work through proposed lobbying reforms. One day later, Obama sent a letter thanking McCain for his efforts, but suggested that "creating a task force to further study and discuss these matters" would cause an undue delay and said the Democratic plan seemed the best approach.

It was that letter, aides said, that infuriated McCain. When he returned from a weekend conference in Germany, he fired off a letter to Obama in which he accused him of "self-interested partisan posturing."

The fact that the House Republicans have chosen John Boehner as their new Majority Leader is more-or-less indicative of how seriously the GOP takes ethics reform, which is to say, what we'll get from them is a whitewash and business as usual. Boehner reportedly is at least as tainted as anyone else in the House (well, not as tainted as DeLay, but DeLay is an exceptional man). From Obama's record, his plan probably is the best one, which means in this Congress it will never see the light of day.

If you'd like to see statesmanship in action, read the excerpts from Obama's response at the end of the article. Yes, he's my senator, but I don't agree with all his positions and I think he can be a little wishy-washy (but then, he's a Democrat), but the alternative was Alan Keyes.

I should note that I lost a lot of faith in John McCain when he sold himself to campaign for Bush in '04. Look at the history there: to campaign for someone you know from first-hand experience is a sleazeball in order to maintain the power of a party that is hell-bent on destroying the country is a little much.


Some Thoughts on Cartoons:

There have been, needless to say, not only a spate of headlines about the Muslim reactions to the Danish cartoon of Muhammed, but a plethora of comments on the blogosphere and in discussion groups. There was also a briefer but almost as sharp set of reactions to the Tom Toles cartoon in WaPo criticizing Rumsfeld. The comments seem to run the gamut, but center on ideas of fairness, freedom of expression, "good taste," offense to religious beliefs.

What I don't think anyone has mentioned is the way that personal beliefs, particularly of the religious variety, shape our world views. The majority of Americans, for example, are, at least nominally, Christian. I suspect that's one reason that a substantial number of Americans feel that the First Amendment goes too far. I've probably broached this idea before, but relgions that rely on received wisdom and an almighy creator are not going to be sympathetic to the spirit of open inquiry (you do remember Galileo, do you not?). The scientific method, on which so much of Western thought is based, runs "evidence-analysis-interpretation-answer." The thinking of hierarchical religions seems to run "authority-answer-evidence."

What this means in terms of real life, like burning embassies and such, is that authority has what I can only consider undue influence in such a system, and let's face it -- they're only human, so their perceptions can be just as warped as anyone else's. Thus we get so many Catholics actually thinking the Pope can find his butt with both hands on questions of sexuality and morality, and your local neighborhood mullah calling jihad on the target-du-jour. A Witch, on the other hand (and I'm not really doing any special pleading here -- this attitude is one reason Witchcraft makes so much sense to me) is more likely to look at what's actually happening and draw conclusions from that. (Not that I'm completely rationalistic -- those observations are going to be filtered through my own attitudes, of course. It's just that I'm so much more reasonable than most people.)

So the Muslims in question don't necessarily see freedom of the press as an overriding concern, just as many Americans think that public discourse should be tailored to their attitudes.

I think it was Andrew Sullivan, or one of his correspondents, who pointed out that you need a thick skin to survive in a democracy. There you have it.

NASA Update:

George Deutsch, the science-in-the-service-of-Bush boy from NASA, has resigned. It seems he didn't actually graduate from Texas A&M. (Of course, his resignation has nothing to do with that or the major embarrassment he's proven to be to NASA.) How strange. (You can follow this story in some detail at The Scientific Activist, which was instrumental in outing the flack.) Deutsch was, of course, a Bush appointee whose main qualification seems to have been that he was a Bush supporter. Start to sound familiar?

Deutsch has been all over the blogosphere lately, but the most entertaining summary of his career is at World O'Crap.

Later. . . .