Current Affairs

By Edward

UPDATE: Protestors storm presidential palace. Akayev is in hiding (OK, so he’s reportedly in Russia now). Opposition takes over TV station. Jailed opposition leader freed. It’s a full-fledged revolution.

The ray of hope in all this is that the opposition leader set free, Felix Kulov, might just be the person to unite the protesters. Kulov, who had been arrested on what his supporters called politically motivated embezellment charges after he announced his intentions to run against Akayev for the presidency, has the personal story most frustrated Kyrgyz folks can probably relate to. At the moment, though, it’s a waiting game.

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As I predicted a few days ago, the protests in Kyrgyzstan have reached the capital city, Bishkek, and President Akayev is threatening to use force:

Riot police have broken up a protest in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, the first since anti-government demonstrations swept the country’s south. Up to 200 people gathered in Bishkek’s main square, but police broke up the rally before it could get going.

Police reportedly hit some of the crowd with sticks and arrested 10 organisers.

It is not clear how closly the event was linked to protests in the south, where the cities of Osh and Jalal-Abad are under effective opposition control.

The new Kyrgyz Interior Minister, Keneshbek Dushebayev, warned protesters in the south that the authorities could use force to restore order.

"The law gives us every right to take action, including by using physical force, special means and firearms," he was quoted as saying.

Despite the success of similar protests in Georgia and Ukraine, however, there are reasons to be worried about the current state of things in Kyrgyzstan. As I noted before, the opposition is not unified:

In most of Central Asia, however, the absence of a cohesive opposition group is encouraging regionalism and chaos, said political activist Alymkulov Berdi, who protested when his candidate was disqualified from Kyrgyzstan’s February elections.

"Today all we have are regional leaders and that is a dangerous situation because people are frustrated and furious but they don’t have one leader to guide them," Berdi said.

And the threat I didn’t want to tempt fate by naming before is now looking more real as well: this leadership vacuum has not gone unnoticed by Islamists. Back in 2000, Kyrgyzstan stood strong against an attempt to turn them into the next Taliban haven:

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By Katherine (posted by Edward)

I’ve been struggling unsuccessfully to explain why I am so furious about and disturbed by Congress’ actions in the Schiavo case. So I decided to follow the first rule of writing: show, don’t tell.

The following excerpts are taken from last night’s House debate, as recorded in the Congressional Record.

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By Edward

Well the color has yet to be decided for definite, but the revolution in the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan is in full swing:

Thousands of protesters, some armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, seized control of key government buildings and the airport in Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city Monday, prompting security officers and local officials to flee and loosening the government’s grip over a swath of this former Soviet republic.

The opposition also took control of government buildings in four other cities and towns across Kyrgyzstan’s impoverished south, Interior Ministry spokesman Nurdin Jangarayev said. Protesters burned and stomped on portraits of President Askar Akayev and seized protective shields from police. Others were seen running through the streets carrying bottles of flammable liquid.

Driving even the more moderate among the protesters (who are now burning down government buildings and taking over entire towns) are fears that Akayev, who currently has a significant majority in the newly elected (although highly controversially so) parliament, will use this advantage to change Kyrgyz law to allow him to run for another term this fall, or at the very least orchestrate the elections so that a member of his family gets the presidency.

The protests have not yet reached the capital (where my partner’s family lives), but it’s growing daily and unless Akayev’s offer to meet the protesters’ request for a probe into allegations of widespread vote-rigging  quells them, or Akayev strikes out against the protesters, that seems only a matter of time (both, reaching Bishkek and Akayev striking out). The opposition leaders are not leaving Akayev much wiggle room either, calling for his resignation, and some are being right down confrontational:

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by hilzoy

As I type these words, the US Congress is preparing to meet in extraordinary session to decide whether to pass a bill granting Terri Schiavo’s parents the right to take her case to federal court. This is an amazing spectacle on any number of counts. But one of the most striking to me, as a bioethicist, is that so many people are talking as though Terri Schiavo is the victim of some alarming new indignity. Thus, ABC News (video clip here; ‘Questioning Intentions’) showed Rep. Dave Weldon saying, on the floor of the Congress, “To order the withdrawal of food and water from somebody — it’s never been done before to my knowledge.” There are only two ways to take this claim: either Rep. Weldon is lying or he has not bothered to inform himself even minimally about what he’s talking about. In fact, the only thing about Terri Schiavo’s case that’s at all unusual is the amount of attention it has received.

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By Edward

Via Daily Kos

The family of a gay San Diego nightclub owner who died of heart congestion at age 31 is being denied a funeral in any of the the Roman Catholic diocese’s churches by its Bishop because he disapproves of the business the dead man owned.

The owner of a popular local nightclub with a gay clientele can’t have a funeral in the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego because the church has deemed his business "inconsistent with Catholic moral teaching."

None of the 98 Catholic churches in San Diego or Imperial counties will be allowed to provide services for Club Montage owner John McCusker as a result of the decision by San Diego Bishop Robert Brom.

The Church is hiding behind a very flimsy argument on this, IMO:

The diocese issued a statement yesterday, saying: "The facts regarding the business activities of John McCusker were not known by church officials when arrangements were requested for his funeral. However, when these facts became known, the bishop concluded that to avoid public scandal Mr. McCusker cannot be granted a funeral in a Catholic church in the chapel of the Diocese of San Diego."

Chancellor Rodrigo Valdivia, a diocese spokesman, said the bishop’s order applies to all 98 parishes within the diocese’s jurisdiction.

Valdivia wouldn’t comment when asked to specify which of McCusker’s business activities violated church doctrine. He emphasized that the church’s decision had nothing to do with the sexual orientation of McCusker, who was gay. Instead, the decision was based on McCusker’s "public activity" as a businessman, Valdivia said.

"We received information that the business he was involved with was inconsistent with Catholic teachings," Valdivia said.

But when pressed on how frequently the Church refuses funerals based on this policy, the spokesman said he couldn’t recall any other examples. As one commenter on Kos noted, the Roman Catholic Church would not do this to a member of the mafia, but a gay nightclub owner, that violates church doctrine.

Sure to follow in the wake of growing fury this is causing in the gay community are further investigations into Bishop Brom’s alleged molestation history:

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By Edward

Ever have something you read bother you but not recognize immediately why?

While writing this post on Gale Norton’s scandalously misleading op-ed in The New York Times yesterday, something about her rationale lodged itself in the confusion corner of my brain (yes, that’s an opening, let your inner stand-up comedian have at it).

The troubling idea was contained in the central thesis of her essay on why we "must" drill for oil in ANWR (I broke it down for myself to see if I could figure out what was amiss with it):

[1]As part of a comprehensive energy strategy of [2] promoting conservation and [3]reducing dependence on foreign oil, [4]we must increase our energy production here at home.

It took my brain a few hours to do some shuffling of those four ideas, but eventually it all congealed to illuminate for me that the notion that BushCo has a strategy of promoting conservation that (as Norton implies it should) morally balances the necessary evil of breaking our national oath with regard to protecting ANWR is pure grade-A horseshit. Seriously. It’s total manure.

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By Edward

If there’s one important lesson Rove teaches his boss and his staff it’s how to stay on message no matter what. Assimilate your critics’ rhetoric within your statements as best you can, so that to the casual observers it looks as if you’re moderate, but don’t budge from the "solution" you want to see enacted, regardless of the facts. If you don’t get what you want, just wait a while, and then start the whole process up again with the same "solution" and arguments slightly warmed over.

Gale Norton has apparently learned this lesson well. After having been told "No!" to drilling in ANWR, the Interior Secretary is once again hawking the same tired arguments with a new coat of fresh "moderation" but the same old expected outcome. She begins her op-ed in the Times today with a prose so relatively romantic even Byron would have been embarrassed to offer it (I’ll highlight the more ludicrously poetic bits):

Even though it is noon, the landscape is pitch black. The wind chill stands at 70 below zero. A lone man drives across a vast frozen plain on a road made of ice. He sits atop a large, bug-like machine with enormous wheels. He is heading for a spot on the tundra pinpointed by satellite imagery to explore for oil. When the spring thaw comes and the road melts, any evidence that a man or a machine ever crossed there will be gone.

Ahh…if you close your eyes, you can almost hear the approving whispers of the caribou in the wind. Look at the lone man. It’s absolutely amazing that the technology has advanced so far that oil can be extracted by one man and his one machine (and even more amazing is that we’re left assuming this one man built the ice road himself as well). Norton continues her fairy tale:

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By Edward

In response to growing public and political pressure to hand over the IRA members who brutally murdered 33-year-old father of two, Robert McCartney, the terrorist organization offered to "shoot" the men responsible. Uh, hello!!! You’re not quite understanding what’s happening here. As the BBC’s Mark Simpson points out though, this alarming disconnect on the IRA’s part is not surprising:

Few people in Belfast were surprised to hear that the IRA’s answer to recent problems was to reach for its guns.

After all, that is what the IRA knows best.

In spite of the peace process, it remains a terrorist organisation with thousands of weapons and, when pushed, it is not afraid to use them.

So it was no great shock to find out how the leadership responded when faced with the embarrassment of IRA "volunteers" being involved in the murder of a Sinn Fein supporter, Robert McCartney.

Instead of politics, the IRA preferred pistols.

Rather than calling on the killers to go to the police, it preferred "justice" from a firing squad.

The big surprise was that the IRA made this position public.

The greater shock is that the IRA can’t seem to appreciate how public opinion is turning against them. According to the NYTimes report:

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by Charles

It’s one thing for LA Puppy Trainer Times staff writer Barbara Demick, in the unrelenting quest to find newsworthy material, to get so dazzled by an "affable" North Korean "businessman" that she in effect becomes a mouthpiece for Kim Jong Il’s propaganda.  It’s another thing altogether when editor John Carroll puts the North Korean party line in undiluted form on the front page, without even a whiff of skepticism or suspicion or doubts.  I’m sure the current California governor would have been thrilled to have gotten such fawning press treatment in the run-up to the recall election.  The piece, titled From North Korea With Love N. Korea, Without the Rancor, is an astounding example of either monumental bias or ignorance or worse.

The opening teaser:  "A businessman speaks his mind about the U.S., the ‘nuclear club’ and human rights issues."  How does Ms. Demick or Mr. Carroll know that Mr. Anonymous is a businessman?  They don’t.  They just accept it at face value.  What is the man’s stated background?  He "spent much of his career as a diplomat in Europe."  If this is true, you don’t get to be a diplomat unless you’re a high-ranking official in Kim’s Kommunist Klub.  How can Mr. Anonymous be a "businessman" when he has "been assigned to help his communist country attract foreign investment."  When you’re assigned to a task by your authoritarian government superiors–thereby rendered no choice in the matter–the term "businessman" is profoundly misleading.  There is no delicate way to put this:  Ms. Demick and Mr. Carroll are misleading its readers by uncritically calling this government apparatchik a "businessman".

How did Mr. Anonymous come into contact with Ms. Demick?  She doesn’t say.  Where did they meet?  In Beijing, at a restaurant/karaoke bar owned by the North Korean goverment.  Why did Mr. Anonymous come forward but withhold his name?  "He said he did not want to be quoted by name because his perspective was personal, not official."  Yet this agent’s "personal views" did not depart one jot or tittle from current North Korean dogma.  The only difference between the Dear Leader and Mr. Anonymous was that the latter packaged his views in prettier, more "affable" packaging.  Here’s how the reporter and the operative interacted regarding North Korea’s abysmal human rights record:

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hat tip to constant reader wilfred for this item
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Solar Towers are making the news again thanks to a deal in Australia that just might see the first major one get built.* But what is a Solar Tower, you ask? A Green energy generating system (see this image) that works off the fact that heat rises.

If built, it will be nearly double the height of the world’s tallest structure, the CN Tower in Canada.

The Solar Tower is hollow in the middle like a chimney. At its base is a solar collector — a 25,000-acre, transparent circular skirt. The air under the collector is heated by the sun and funneled up the chimney by convection — hot air rises. As it rises, the air accelerates to 35 mph, driving 32 wind turbines inside the tower, which generate electricity much like conventional wind farms.

But the Solar Tower has a major advantage over wind farms and solar generators: It can operate with no wind, and 24 hours a day. Thanks to banks of solar cells, the tower stores heat during the day, allowing it to produce electricity continuously.

The standing argument against building Solar Towers essentially has been the costs. But the costs are beginning to look more attractive all the time. As TocqueDeville (on Kos) states:

It will cost about 500 million bucks. Standard coal powered plants that generate 200MW cost around 750 million and that doesn’t include the cost of mining, processing, and transporting coal.

Alternative Energy Blog, however, suggests the cost will be more, but only initially:

EnviroMission and SBP estimate the cost of their first 200-megawatt solar thermal tower at $670m, and say the cost of subsequent towers would fall. An engineering infrastructure, materials manufacturing plants and trained workforce would be in place and the design and construction would have been refined.

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About a month ago, I was procrastinating on the web, and I stumbled on the news that Saparmurat Niyazov, President for Life of Türkmenistan, had published his third book of poetry, whose “every page, every line is pierced by feelings of the inescapably burning love of the great son of Türkmen soil for his roots.” Cool, I thought: every line pierced. Sort of like Saint Sebastian, only a book. After that introduction, I had look for his poems online.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find them. (No doubt he wants me to pay for the book.) But I did find out a lot about Niyazov. Until I started Googling, I didn’t know much about him. I knew that of the two really ghastly dictators in the Central Asian republics, Karimov of Uzbekistan was more brutal (he’s the one who boils people alive), and Niyazov was crazier. But there’s nothing like a serious Google session to give substance and detail to the thought that someone is completely and hopelessly mad. I collected a lot of links for a post, but never got around to finishing it. Today, however, news of Niyazov’s latest bizarre move has made me dust it off and finish it.

I’m putting the rest of this below the fold, but you should definitely read it, if only to find out the answers to such questions as: how many months has Niyazov renamed after himself, his relatives, and his books? What form of body hair has he outlawed? And if you want to observe the official holiday he has declared to honor melons, what day should you set aside?

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“Granting a request by the Bush administration, the Supreme Court said yesterday that it will decide whether the Justice Department may bar Oregon doctors from prescribing lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who have chosen to die under that state’s 11-year-old Death With Dignity Act.

In a brief order, the court said it will review a lower court’s decision preventing enforcement of a November 2001 statement of Justice Department policy by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. The directive said that assisting suicide is not a “legitimate medical purpose” under federal drug-control law and that the Drug Enforcement Administration could strip the prescribing rights of any physician who authorized drugs to help someone die.”

This will be a very interesting case. First of all, it will be interesting to see who takes what position on the federalism issues involved. I have never really thought there was much to be said for the idea that there’s anything particularly liberal or conservative about views on federalism — I think that as far as the left is concerned, our opposition to federalism had a lot more to do with its use by southern states trying to avoid discrimination laws, and to some extent with the civil war, than with Constitutional doctrine — and I have for this reason often taken positions at odds with other liberals. (I did not think the Violence Against Women Act could plausibly be thought of as an attempt to regulate interstate commerce, for instance.) But it seems to me that many conservatives’ views on federalism ought to lead them to side with Oregon, and it will be interesting to see how many of them do.

It’s also interesting because the Oregon Death With Dignity Act is (to my non-lawyer’s eye) very well constructed. It provides a lot of safeguards, and does a good job of anticipating and preventing a lot of potential problems with physician-assisted suicide. For this reason, I would think, the court is more likely to take an actual position on physician-assisted suicide than it would have been had the act had a lot of unrelated problems.

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by Edward _

Via Crooked Timber

Having read this absolutely nightmarish story of passengers on a charter flight who were arrested for complaining about the way French Police were handling the deportation of a hysterical, young Congolese man, I…well, I want to be really angry at somebody, but I don’t know where to start.

Franco La Cecla, one of the arrested passengers, offered this account:

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There was a stand-up comedian with a bit that went more or less like this:

About every 5 years or so I do a bit of reflection on my life, looking back at how I talked, dressed and acted, and invariably I come to the same conclusion: I was a total idiot back then. Really, what was I thinking? After doing this enough times, though, it’s occurred to me that most likely I’m being a total idiot right now. This is why older people tend to be so quiet. They’ve figured this out.

This is how I feel about most scientific theories. From the discoveries of Galileo to the assertions of Heisenberg and beyond, we keep realizing that what we were so certain about a century or even a decade ago was in fact idiotic. Therefore it behooves us to be a bit quiet, or at least modest, in declaring we know this or that to be true.

In the debate on evolution vs. creationism, this advice cuts both ways.

As a theory, creationism has so many holes in it that I can’t accept it as science. Even with a bucket of faith, it strikes me that it has to be mostly metaphor. But evolution also leaves more questions unanswered than answered for me. More than anything, it seems that life forms would have needed gazillions of years to "evolve" into the assembly of perfectly in-tune organs and systems represented by humans. Truly, some of the most recent discoveries of cellular activity so boggle the mind they virtually scream for an intelligent designer to explain them. I don’t have any answers there, but I don’t think creationism does either. So I’ve been intrigued by the notion of the supposedly straddling theory of "Intelligent Design," but the more I read its advocates try to dress it up, the more I think it’s got a long way to go as a theory, if it has any merit at all.

In today’s New York Times, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (called in some quarters a "conservative Christian thinktank"), offered an explanation and defense of "Intelligent Design." Professor Behe has credentials as solid as most scientists arguing about the topic, from what I can find. And I totally agree with him that those insisting evolution be taught as if Gospel have it wrong.

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While everyone is preoccupied with Social Security, another Bush agenda item is moving quietly forward. From the LA Times:

“Emboldened by their success at the polls, the Bush administration and Republican leaders in Congress believe they have a new opportunity to move the nation away from the system of employer-provided health insurance that has covered most working Americans for the last half-century.

In its place, they want to erect a system in which workers — instead of looking to employers for health insurance — would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible “catastrophic” insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts.

Elements of that approach have been on the conservative agenda for years, but what has suddenly put it on the fast track is GOP confidence that the political balance of power has changed. (…)

Critics say the Republican approach is really an attempt to shift the risks, massive costs and knotty problems of healthcare from employers to individuals. And they say the GOP is moving forward with far less public attention or debate than have surrounded Bush’s plans to overhaul Social Security.

Indeed, Bush’s health insurance agenda is far more developed than his Social Security plans and is advancing at a rapid clip through a combination of actions by government, insurers, employers and individuals.

Health savings accounts, known as HSAs, have already been approved. They were created as a little-noticed appendage to the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill.

HSAs have had a strong start in the marketplace. Although regulations spelling out how they would work were not issued until mid-2004, as of Sept. 30, about 440,000 people had signed up. And more than one-quarter of employers say they are likely to offer them as an option.

The accounts are available only to people who buy high-deductible health insurance, either through an employer or individually. Consumers can set aside tax-free an amount equal to their deductible. Employers can contribute to workers’ HSAs but do not have to. Unused balances can be rolled over from year to year, and employees take their HSAs with them when they switch jobs.

The idea that losing one’s job would not automatically mean losing protection for medical costs has bipartisan appeal. “Portability” was a key feature of President Clinton’s ill-fated healthcare reform plan. But the GOP approach is significantly different: Whereas Clinton would have required all employers to chip in for universal health insurance, Bush wants to leave responsibility primarily to individuals.

“This is certainly getting a lot of attention from employers,” said Jack Rodgers, a healthcare analyst for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

One reason is potential cost savings to employers.

A typical catastrophic health insurance plan carries an annual deductible of about $1,600 for an individual when purchased through a large employer. That means the worker pays the first $1,600 of healthcare expenses each year. By contrast, under the more comprehensive, employer-provided health insurance programs common today, the company begins to pay after about $300 in expenses have been incurred. Deductibles for families are considerably higher under both types of plans.”

This is a very, very significant change. One of the considerations driving it is a desire to do something to contain the cost of medical care. Oddly, though, this shift does not affect the health insurance plans the government actually runs. What it does affect is the health insurance available to the rest of us through our employers.

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