A 100 year old elm tree dating from the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt crashed to the ground late last night, narrowly missing the North Portico of the Whitehouse – showing once and for all what Morther Earth thinks of Messrs Bush and Chaney. Ann Compton of ABC News reports:

“The whole root ball came up out of the saturated ground,” she describes, noting that the tree is “at least 100 years old, planted around the time Teddy Roosevelt remodelled the White House in 1902. Its twin a few yards away was actually taken down within the last couple of weeks, dying of Dutch elm disease. The grounds crew here was worried about the big elm, and had recently trimmed it so that if it fell it would not hit the elegant columns of the North Portico or the wall along the driveway. It even missed what they call the Truman Hedge — boxwoods which line the driveway.”

Representatives of the Earth Liberation Front have not responded to requests for comment as of this time.
———————————————————————————————-

As a follow-up to my note yesterday, the Washington Post has coverage of how Jack Abramoff secretly funneled money from his clients through tax-exempt organizations:
Nonprofit Groups Funneled Money For Abramoff: Funds Flowed to Lobbying Campaigns

In addition to Grover Norquist’s “Americans for Tax Reform,”…

A second group Norquist was involved with, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, received about $500,000 in Abramoff client funds; the council’s president has told Senate investigators that Abramoff often asked her to lobby a senior Interior Department official on his behalf. The committee report said the Justice Department should further investigate the organization’s dealings with the department and its former deputy secretary, J. Steven Griles.

Steven Griles was the anti-environment slimeball in the Nth degree who Gale Norton brought with her to be her deputy at the Dept. of Interior. As a former lobbyist for extractive industries, such as oil, timber, gas and mining, Griles certainly had different priorities than protecting the interior. Exploit, exploit, exploit was the watchword.

The dirty side of Griles is also covered in this Rocky Mountain News article:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4801558,00.html
———————————————————————————————-

Bloomberg Media has an interesting article about several major economists dismissing the administration’s claims that immigrants are only taking jobs that Americans don’t want. The gist being that with the wages so severely depressed in certain market segments by the influx of immigrant labor, Americans cannot afford to take the jobs, or are not hired for them.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_us&refer=us&sid=abGKJMCzw2zg
———————————————————————————————-
While awaiting word from the Supreme Court on the legitimacy of mid-decade redistricting and partisan gerrymanders, Democrats in Texas have their day in Federal Court today. The lawsuit filed by the Texas Democratic Party which argues that Tom DeLay’s name cannot be replaced on the ballot despite his resignation from the House. A restraining order issued earlier this month has the effect of possibly postponing the naming of DeLay’s successor by the GOP.

This summer and fall promise to be an interesting time in Washington D.C. And not just from the sweltering heat. In a Senate panel’s report filed last week came an interesting string of connections between Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed (former head of Christian Coalition, current candidate for Lt. Gov. of Georgia) and Grover Norquist (all around anti-tax slimeball). It is well summarized here:

Abramoff, Norquist, Scaife and company: one big happy family

——————————————————————————————————————————————-
Do you know who Ben Stein is? He was part of the Nixon speech writing staff, along with Pat Buchannon (far-right gadfly and 2000 Presidential candidate who mysteriously got thousands of votes in heavily Jewish counties in Florida, which even he said pointed to vote counting irregularities) and William Saffire (New York Times language maven and former conservative columnist). More recently he has gained some renown as the droning history professor in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, for his game show “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and in an ad campaign for Visine.

Well, he is also a lawyer and economist, and writes a column for the New York Times Sunday Business section. His most recent column caught my eye for its very reasonable title:
Note to the New Treasury Secretary: It’s Time to Raise Taxes

His basic message:

Just to give you an idea what you are up against, Standard & Poor’s issued a warning not long ago. The caution was that if the United States government did not seriously alter fiscal policy, Treasury bonds would be downgraded to BBB, slightly above junk status, by 2020. This is a stunning piece of news for the world’s most highly rated security denominated in its primary reserve currency. The S.& P. report said further that if the nation did not make serious changes after that, by 2025 Treasuries would be junk bonds, like the bonds of less successful emerging-markets nations.

Oh goody, what fun. Maybe he should go back to game shows to make George the second more comfortable.
———————————————————————————————————————————————
The Times Bob Herbert wrote a love letter to John Edwards (former Sen., North Carolina and 2004 VP candidate) a few days ago. It is striking in that Herbert was not terribly supportive of Edwards when it might have mattered, but obviously something has changed his mind since then. In any event, it is a good read:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/opinion/22Herbert.html

This headline over at the Herald Tribune (of southwest Florida) caught my eye:
“Anti-GOP feelings may be affecting local races: Party officials complain that candidates are hard to recruit this year.”
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060619/NEWS/606190579/1017/POLITICS

The gist of the story:

  County GOP leaders say they have struggled more this year than any other to persuade qualified residents to put their names on the ballot.
. . .
“It’s volatile out there,” said Mark Proctor, a Republican consultant in Tampa. “There’s a general fed-up attitude with voters right now.”

It’s almost enough to make you feel bad for them.

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

An interesting piece in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly gives voice to concerns felt by William Niskanen, an economist in the Reagan Whitehouse who now leads the Cato Institute. The Atlantic column is here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200606/tax-cuts
but requires a subscription to view the whole article. It is well summarized in a Washington Post Op-Ed piece here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/07/AR2006050700924.html
The gist of the article is that contrary to Reagan era thinking, reducing taxes actually leads to growth in the size of government. In response to John Anderson stating, during a 1980 debate, that “…what I’m going to do is to bring federal spending under control first.”

Reagan scoffed. “John tells us that first we’ve got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes,” he said. “Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.” With that statement, Reagan performed one of the last century’s great feats of political prestidigitation.

In his piece, Jonathan Rauch points out that under Reagan’s tax cuts and spending increases government grew, while under Bush I and Clinton’s tax raises and spending cuts government shrank. Bush II follows in Reagan’s footsteps in the government growth department.

Rauch closes his column with the line “The beast is hungry and it has a credit card”
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

I recently wrote of quakes within the Republican establishment in Kansas. I have just been tuned in to similar goings on in South Dakota. As in Kansas, several Republicans have recently left the party to run as Democrats, and political extremism in the GOP has even lead to the development of a new MAINstream Coalition:
http://www.mainstreamsouthdakota.org/index.html
whose manifesto reads remarkably liberal.
The South Dakota Progressive blog has more on this development here:
http://www.sdprogressive.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=291&Itemid=2

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
It’s nice to see some more sanity sweeping the country. The Wall Street Journal has even started to notice, as reported in ABC News “The Note”:

The Wall Street Journal’s Brody Mullins detects a shift in giving among the Republican-leaning insurance, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries towards Democrats, signaling that “businesses believe Democrats will have more sway in Washington after the 2006 midterm elections or the 2008 presidential contest.”

Well, if you thought last night’s pairing of Paris Hilton and Will Shortz (NY Times puzzle editor) on The Late Show, with David Letterman, was strange… just wait until this Thursday, June 15th, when Jay Leno will host the Tonight Show with his special guests Ann Coulter – the female Newt Gingrich – along with George Carlin – who needs no further introduction.

There was an interesting column about Coulter in, of all places, the Times business section yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/business/media/12carr.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
David Carr’s second paragraph is this gem:

Ms. Coulter, who seems afflicted by a kind of rhetorical compulsion, most recently labeled the widows of 9/11 “harpies.” It is just one in a series from a spoken-word hit parade that seems to fly out of her mouth uninterrupted by conscience, rectitude or logic.

It was so much fun to see George Carlin play with Steve Moore (President of the conservative Club for Growth) on Real Time with Bill Maher back in 2004:
http://www.safesearching.com/billmaher/print/t_hbo_realtime_100104.htm
Moore looked like a cat’s play toy in Carlin’s hands. It will be interesting to see if he and Coulter actually share the stage for any amount of time on Thursday night. Even if not, that must be one interesting green room. (I wonder what Paris and Will talked about last night…)

Thanks to Russ for bringing this to my attention.

A funny thing happened on the way to the extreme right: The middle started to fall away.

In his 2004 book, “What’s the matter with Kansas? How conservatives won the heart of America.” Thomas Frank used Kansas as a metaphor to examine why so many working and middle-class Americans are willing to consistently vote against their own self-interest. I never fully accepted his thesis, since I think he made a fatal flaw by defining self interest in narrow, economic terms. Using his standards, one must also wonder why liberal icons (the Vanity Fair set, if you like) such as the Kennedys and Roosevelts vote for politicians who raise taxes just as you would wonder about Kansans who vote for social conservatives who cut them.

Now, however, we are starting to see the unraveling of the Grand Old Party in the Sunflower State. In the past few weeks more and more stalwarts of the party have jumped ship to the Democratic side, including the former party chairman, Mark Parkinson, now running for Lieutenant Governor alongside popular Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius.

Many moderates and business/fiscal conservatives are feeling unwelcome in today’s Republican Party, dominated as it is by the cultural conservative set. Vindictive reprisals against moderate positions have become so common and so strong that many seem to see no other way out. You can read all about this latest trend in Nicholas Riccardi’s wonderful article in the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-kansas13jun13,1,6259569.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true

Here are a few quotes from the article:

“A lot of people in Kansas are feeling lost right now,” said Parkinson, 48, who was invited onto the ticket by popular Democratic incumbent Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. “I decided I’d rather spend time building great universities than wondering if Charles Darwin was right.” (in reference to the Kansas State Board of Education decision to redefine science)
< . . . >
Ron Freeman, executive director of the state GOP, says the recent defections are due to the personal ambitions of the politicians, not because of any ideological shift.

“To say it’s gone way to the right, that’s not a fair analysis,” Freeman said, noting that two of the party’s four statewide officeholders back abortion rights.

One of those officials, Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger, is opposed in the GOP primary by a candidate opposed to abortion rights. Another moderate, Secretary of State Ron Thornburg, is facing a primary challenge from a female GOP state senator who was reported in 2001 as saying family values began to erode when women got the right to vote.

Some Kansas voters say they feel shut out. “I’m absolutely fed up with the conservative Republicans,” said Richard Meidinger, a retired physician in Topeka. “All the abortion stuff, gay marriage stuff doesn’t belong in the legislative debate.”

Martin Hawver has a name for lifelong members of the GOP like Meidinger: “failed Republicans.” The editor of a respected Kansas political newsletter, Hawver’s Capitol Report, Hawver counts himself among their number, occasionally doing the unthinkable and voting Democratic.

“It used to be you could never go wrong with voting for who the Republicans nominated,” Hawver said. “But that’s changing now. People are a little uneasy.”

Cindy Neighbor is one of them. A veteran member of her local school board and a moderate, Neighbor, 57, unsuccessfully ran against a conservative for an open seat in the statehouse in 2000. She narrowly lost, but won in 2002.

Neighbor wasn’t long for Kansas Republican politics, however. She backed an education bill that could have raised taxes, and party conservatives told her there would be retaliation. She lost the next primary to the same representative she’d ousted two years earlier. Another moderate Republican who’d co-sponsored her bill — Bill Kassebaum, the son of former Kansas U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker — was ousted at the same time.

Now Neighbor’s running for her old seat — as a Democrat.

“It was, ‘If you don’t like this — goodbye,’ ” she said of her struggles to stay in the Republican Party. As a Democrat, Neighbor added, “you can still have your ideas and you’re accepted.”

Let’s hope that this trend starts to be replicated across the country, and within the national parties. I have always thought that the marriage of business/fiscal conservatives with cultural conservatives was one more of convenience than of natural shared interests. It started over a quarter century ago – when the more libertarian Goldwater Republicans were banished from the party leadership, and Reagan melded Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” with the recently emboldened “Moral Majority” to forge a new alliance.

Now that the fiscal conservatives have gotten their tax cuts, even if they haven’t also gotten their spending restraint, they are more complacent. On the flip side, the cultural conservatives feel that they haven’t gotten enough – just a couple of Supreme Court justices – and they want more. Hence the Gay Marriage/Flag Burning nonsense in the Senate. The immigration debate may finally be the thing which forces a wedge between these two camps, only time will tell.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg gave a commencement address to graduates at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine on May 25th, and he struck a theme which was decidedly refreshing coming from a Republican – he spoke in vigorous defense of science.

His address may be found here: http://www.nyc.gov/cgi-bin/misc/pfprinter.cgi?action=print&sitename=OM

Or you may view video of it here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2006a/media/pc052506-Johns_Hopkins.asx
or here (high speed connection): http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2006a/media/pc052506-Johns_Hopkins300k.asx

Here is an excerpt:

Today, we are seeing hundreds of years of scientific discovery being challenged by people who simply disregard facts that don’t happen to agree with their agendas. Some call it “pseudo-science,” others call it “faith-based science,” but when you notice where this negligence tends to take place, you might as well call it “political science.”

You can see “political science” at work when it comes to global warming. Despite near unanimity in the science community there’s now a movement – driven by ideology and short-term economics – to ignore the evidence and discredit the reality of climate change.

You can see “political science” at work with respect to stem cell research. Despite its potential, the federal government has restricted funding for creating new cell lines – putting the burden of any future research squarely on the shoulders of the private sector. Government’s most basic responsibility, however, is the health and welfare of its people, so it has a duty to encourage appropriate scientific investigations that could possibly save the lives of millions.

“Political science” knows no limits. Was there anything more inappropriate than watching political science try to override medical science in the Terry Schiavo case?

And it boggles the mind that nearly two centuries after Darwin, and 80 years after John Scopes was put on trial, this country is still debating the validity of evolution. In Kansas, Mississippi, and elsewhere, school districts are now proposing to teach “intelligent design” – which is really just creationism by another name – in science classes alongside evolution. Think about it! This not only devalues science, it cheapens theology. As well as condemning these students to an inferior education, it ultimately hurts their professional opportunities.

Hopkins’ motto is Veritas vos liberabit – “the truth shall set you free” – not that “you shall be free to set the truth!” I’ve always wondered which science those legislators who create their own truths pick when their families need life-saving medical treatment.

There’s no question: science – the very core of what you have been living and breathing these past several years – is being sorely tested. But the interesting thing is this is not the first time that graduates of the School of Medicine have faced such a challenge. When the institution was founded more than a century ago, medicine was dominated by quacks and poorly-trained physicians. In that world, Johns Hopkins and its graduates became a beacon of truth, and trust and helped to revolutionize the field.

Today, in just a few hours you will each evoke that same respect – and with it, you will each bear the same responsibility: To defend the integrity and power of science.

Many people have been buzzing about the odds of Bloomberg making a run for the Whitehouse – speculation that his office is quick to put down, but still seems to oddly encourage. It is worth noting that though he ran for mayor (twice) as a Republican, he was a registered Democrat up until that time, and many of his positions – pro-choice, gay friendly, anti-smoking, pro-healthcare, pro-gun control, pro-science – are more traditionally associated with liberals. As a billionaire, many people expect that were he to run he would do so as an independent, so as to avoid the whole primary process.

Only time will tell, of course, whether such a run is in the cards. But, one can always hope that such fresh rhetoric – unapologetic, well reasoned, straight faced – will enter the public sphere more and more in the upcoming election cycles. I’m not endorsing a Bloomberg presidency, but I do hope he can stir up the pot, and force more politicians to face up to the zealots who are driving the fanatical religious agenda which thinks that its good policy to block access to life saving solutions such as Gardasil – the vaccine for cervical cancer (which has also been shown to be effective against other cancers) http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2006/06/03/p8582 – while claiming to be “pro-life.”