January 2006 Archives

Shortly before last year's State of the Union address I wrote that President Bush is a "uniter", as demonstrated by him receiving an absolute majority of the popular "vote" in the 2004 presidential election.

Sure, we're more polarized than ever, and many Democrats think President Bush is the worst thing since Hitler, but the thing to realize is that President Bush is reducing the number of Democrats. He received nine million more votes in 2004 than he did in 2000, and many of those people were Gore voters who decided to switch sides. Our parties may be more polarized than ever, but because of President Bush more Americans are uniting under the Republican banner than ever before.

I think it's fair to expect presidents to attempt to appeal to everyone in the population, but no one (except Saddam Hussein) can win 100% of the vote. For a politician, winning an absolute majority is about the best that can be expected -- President Clinton was elected twice with mere pluralities, after all.

However, I think it's disingenuous to expect judicial nominees to be "uniters". There are two aspects of being united: the first is that the politician must create a vision that appeals to a broad range of people, but the second is that the people must have desires that are reasonably satisfiable and not mutually exclusive. No politician, no matter how gifted, can unite pro-choicers and pro-lifers, for instance, so one side will ultimately lose. In our system of government, for better or for worse, the side with the fewest number of adherents is the side that loses when interests conflict. In the case of judicial nominees, the President has to nominate someone, and the conflicting desires of the electorate prevent him from unifying everyone with his choice. Those in the minorty should realize that this is how democracy is supposed to work.

But I digress. Critics of the President aren't exactly decrying him for making a divisive nomination, they're denigrating Samuel Alito for not being a "uniter".

Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, said later, "I must say that I wish the president was in a position to do more than claim a partisan victory tonight."

"The union would be better and stronger and more unified if we were confirming a different nominee, a nominee who could have united us more than divided us," Mr. Schumer said, according to The Associated Press.

Winning popular approval for your ideas is a political concern, not a legal concern. When the country is united it is generally because the desires of the population happen to line up in a particular way due to circumstance, not because some politician thinks of a brilliant idea that satisfies everyone who used to disagree. Justices, and judges, are expected to rule based on the laws that are created by politicians, not to be politicians themselves.

I do consider war correspondents to be brave people who risk their lives in dangerous environments to do their jobs, but I hardly think it's fair for Christiane Amanpour to characterize journalists as paying the price for the Iraq war without even mentioning the Coalition troops who have given their blood.

CNN'S CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: 'IRAQ WAR HAS BEEN A DISASTER' Mon Jan 30 2006 21:56:52 ET

CNN's top war correspondent Christiane Amanpour now says the Iraq war has been a disaster and has created a "black hole."

Amanpour made the comments Monday evening on the all-news network.

"The Iraq war has been a disaster, and journalists have paid for it," Amanpour explains to Larry King, a day after ABC NEWS anchor Bob Woodruff was injured by a bomb.

"This is not acceptable what's going on there and it's a terrible situation."

AMANPOUR: "It's a spiraling security disaster... And by any indication whether you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse and worse."

Worse than when Saddam was killing, by many accounts, thousands of his own people every month?

Ok, due to popular demand, here are a ton of pictures from the Williams' wedding.

In 2004 various pundits, including myself, predicted that the Israeli wall around the West Bank would lead to a Palestinian implosion, and it looks like things are finally coming to a head in the wake of Hamas' victory in the Palestinian election.

The leader of Hamas suggested Saturday that the Islamic group could create a Palestinian army that would include its militant wing - responsible for scores of deadly attacks on Israelis - in the aftermath of its crushing victory in parliamentary elections.

Israeli officials condemned the plan, demanding that Hamas renounce violence. Palestinian security officers, including loyalists from the defeated Fatah Party, said they would never submit to Hamas control.

"Hamas has no power to meddle with the security forces," said Jibril Rajoub, a Palestinian strongman.

The Hamas chief, Khaled Mashaal, reiterated that Hamas would not recognize Israel and indicated attacks on Israeli civilians would continue as long as Israel continued to target Palestinian civilians. "As long as we are under occupation then resistance is our right," he said.

And so forth and so on. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

It appears that hunches from 2003 that Saddam moved his WMD to Syria are turning out to be true: Iraq's #2 airforce commander says Iraqi WMD were moved to Syria in converted civilian jumbo jets disguised as relief supplies after a Syrian dam collapse in June, 2002.

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.

"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."

Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria." ...

The flights - 56 in total, Mr. Sada said - attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.

"Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming," Mr. Sada said. "They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians."

I'm interested as to why American intelligence agencies haven't leaked this sort of information during the recent deluge. Maybe they don't know about it? It doesn't seem like it would be hard to verify information involving 56 plane flights, there must be hundreds of people who know what happened, if anything.

Anyway, as I've said all along, the WMD angle was only one component of why we deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether or not there turns out to have been WMD, toppling Saddam's fascist regime was necessary for bringing real reform to the rest of the Middle East.

(HT: Clayton Cramer and Michelle Malkin.)

It seems some people are having problems implementing FlightGear's multiplayer network protocol, particularly the PlayerPosition array in the position message defined in mpmessages.hxx. Well, the solution isn't simple.

PlayerPosition is an array of three doubles that describe the location of the model in question in FlightGear's Cartesian coordinate system, as x, y, and z in meters from the center of the earth. This tidbit isn't explained anywhere in the source code, which means it might take you 2.5 days to figure it out. If your own representation is in WGS-84 geodetic coordinates then you'll need to convert to geocentric coordinates before converting to Cartesian coordinates, and this can be tricky. I recommend using the functions in FlightGear's "ls_geodesy.c" file, ls_geod_to_geoc() and ls_geoc_to_geod(). Note however that they use feet, not meters!

So it looks like the terrorist group Hamas is now the official Palestinian government, but this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has read my "Break Their Will" series of posts about the need to undermine the Palestinians' widespread support for terrorism. As I wrote and quoted:

This poll of Palestinians taken in September, 2002, is not very encouraging. Here are some stats:

• 52% oppose peace negotiations with Israel.
• 73% are pessimistic of a reaching a peaceful settlement to the conflict.
• 66% are opposed to the Oslo agreement.
• 80% support the continuation of the al-Aqsa Intifada.
• 53% believe that the Intifada will achieve its object.
• 65% support suicide bombing operations against Israeli civilians [the poll question specifically mentions civilians].

These poll numbers support my belief that the Palestinian people themselves are a part of the problem, and need to be cowed.

Dealing with the Palestinians as a real state for the past 15 years has only made the situation deteriorate, and now we're stuck trying to figure out what to do with a democratically elected terrorist govnerment. Don't forget: the Palestinian government, now Hamas, is almost entirely funded by charity from Western nations.

Overall, this seems like a self-destructive move by the Palestinian people. It's hard to see how a Hamas-controlled government will be able to gain any consessions from Israel or any civilized nation. More likely this election will just hasten the implosion of the Palestinian territory.

I don't get all the hub-bub about Joel Stein's recent admission that he doesn't support the troops.

And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who were for the Iraq war — supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.

But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

I think he's exactly right. Our troops are all volunteers, and it's totally disingenuous for someone to claim that they "support" the troops and yet think their mission is evil and imperialistic. Why would you support a volunteer engaged in such actions? It's nonsense. Even though I think Joel Stein is wrong in his assessment of the war and foolish for admitting his true feelings about the troops, I've got to tip my hat to him for being honest while most of the people on his side wrap themselves in hypocrisy.

Although I'm not a Catholic, it sounds to me as if Pope Benedict's recent encyclical about love is on the money (at least based on this summary).

In the 71-page document "God is Love," Benedict explored the relationship between the erotic love between man and woman, referred to by the term "eros," and the Greek word for the unconditional, self- giving love, "agape" (pronounced AH-gah-pay).

He said the two concepts are most unified in marriage between man and woman, in which a covetous love grows into the self-giving love of the other, as well as God's unconditional love for mankind. ...

"Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere," he said.

The Pope also made some important points about the different roles of churches and governments.

He rejected the criticism of charity found in Marxist thought, which holds that charity is merely an excuse by the rich to keep the poor in their place when the wealthy should be working for a more just society.

While the Marxist model, in which the state tries to provide for every social need, responded to the plight of the poor faster than even the church did during the Industrial Revolution, it was a failed experiment because it couldn't meet every human need, he wrote.

Even in the most just societies, charity will always be necessary, he said. ...

Benedict stressed that the state alone is responsible for creating that just society, not the church. "As a political task, this cannot be the church's immediate responsibility," he said. ...

"We do not need a state which regulates and controls everything, but a state which ... generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need," he wrote.

Interestingly, that sounds a lot like President Bush's "faith-based initiative" that is attempting to loosen the red tape that often hinders the involvement of American religious charities in government-sponsored programs.

Apparently it's news that political partisans don't have open minds about their positions, and now science can explain why. Isn't this what everyone else in the world means when they say, "I've made up my mind"?

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." ...

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

I don't see the problem. Strong political partisans have likely been exposed to a ton of political information through their lives, so why is it outrageous to discover that they're confident enough in their positions that they don't find it profitable or efficient to be continually rethinking them? Everyone acts this way in some regard. Religious believers may have at one time considered other systems of beliefs and then rejected them -- should they be expected to be constantly reconsidering their decision? Scientists don't continually re-prove well-accepted principles.

Sometimes a fixed belief can turn out to be detrimental if it actually does turn out to be factually wrong. If global warming isn't caused by humans, and if evolution isn't how we got here, then when those things are demonstrated a lot of people will look foolish. Likewise, if I end up in Hell when I die and the greeter tells me that Islam was right all along I'll be very disappointed. But meanwhile, if I'm convinced that I've considered all the evidence and come to the best possible conclusion, why should I live a life of constant doubt and waste mental energy going over old ground?

Clayton Cramer has long pointed out the connection between child sexual abuse, mental disorders, and homosexuality, but only now is California eliminating the "incest exception" that resulting in far lesser punishments for men who abused their own children rather than strangers.

Why would a crime that usually results in an automatic prison sentence ever have been given a free ride? Because two decades ago what was most crucial to many family activists was keeping families intact. Groups such as Parents United lobbied for the incest exception, claiming that relatives who abused children were "situational offenders," not pedophiles. Life stress was said to have induced them to abuse once or twice. With a little therapy, it was claimed, situational offenders would never abuse a child again.

Hank Giarretto, a psychologist and the executive director of Parents United in 1981, testified in Sacramento that lawmakers needed to be careful that the "father offender" who "had, usually, a very outstanding career both in industry and in his place in his community," was not mixed up "with the type of offender, the predator, the type of fellow who stalks his victims or who sets up situations through which he can molest these children."

By 1994, however, the American Psychiatric Assn. had rejected the idea of situational offenders, finding instead that there was no difference between a person who sexually abuses a stranger and one who sexually abuses his own child.

The awful irony of incest exception laws is that most sexual abuse of children 5 and younger occurs within families. Later, teachers, coaches, priests and neighbors join the relatives. Only 7% of child sex abusers are strangers.

In the posts I link to above Mr. Cramer discusses a longitudinal study of child sexual abuse in New Zealand that reports increased rates of depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and so forth among children who are abused.

I've heard this repeated as "fact", but is there any real evidence that the hospital death rate of potential organ donors is higher than the death rate of people who have not agreed to donate their organs? Are doctors quick to allow potential donors to die so as to improve the chances that the donor's organs will be more fit for transplant?

If not, then LifeShares may be an organization worth joining.

LifeSharers is a non-profit voluntary network of organ donors. LifeSharers members promise to donate upon their death, and they give fellow members first access to their organs. As LifeSharers members, you and your loved ones will have access to organs that otherwise may not be available to you. As the LifeSharers network grows, more and more organs may become available to you -- if you are a member.

The point is to give an incentive to people for donating their organs; increased access is one of the only possible incentives, since it's illegal to pay actual money for a body part.

With the Republicans in the House getting ready to elect a new majority leader -- who will hopefully rein in the outrageous spending spree that's taken place during the past five years -- it's fitting to remember once again that the only way to curb the influence of money in politics is to reduce the amount of money controlled by politicians. Unfortunately, both parties these days seem more interested in redistributing money to their supporters than in serving the voters.

Most local governments don't spend lavishly on gifts, but many are investing in taxpayer-funded lobbying. The number of companies hired to pursue earmarks has doubled since 2000, many of them retained by universities or cities to pursue federal dollars. Now the feeding frenzy has escalated to the point that some lobbyists, including many who used to work on Capitol Hill, are approaching local officials and suggesting they have the juice to get them an earmark, providing the lobbyist gets paid a hefty fee.

In 2004, Culpeper County, Va. (population 40,192), was hoping to build a local sports complex when the local newspaper reported it was "approached by a representative of Alcalde and Fay, a Northern Virginia lobbying group, who expressed optimism that funds for the $3.5 million sports complex could be tied to one or more federal appropriation bills." The lobbying group recommended a $5,000-a-month retainer, for a total of $90,000 over an 18-month contract. As Ron Utt, a former federal budget official now at the Heritage Foundation, points out. "Alcalde & Fay are, for all intents and purposes, selling federal taxpayer money for just 2.6 cents on the dollar. What local government wouldn't consider such an offer from a lobbyist?"

Politicians have long used taxpayer money to buy votes from those who pay less taxes, but now it's becoming an industry! What's more, politicians appear to be benefitting themselves by serving as lobbyists after retirement!

Some universities end up employing or being run by the very people who bring them this largesse. Last month Democratic former senator Dennis DeConcini was given a prestigious appointment as a regent of the University of Arizona. Mr. DeConcini retired from the Senate in 1995 after being tarred as one of the "Keating Five," a group of senators who improperly intervened with federal regulators on behalf of corrupt savings-and-loan owner Charles Keating. Mr. DeConcini then became--no surprise--a Washington lobbyist. He now admits he needs to be brought up to speed on education issues. But he had a ready explanation for his appointment: "I used to be very close to the universities. I was able to secure them millions of dollars when I was in the Senate."

The office of Gov. Janet Napolitano, who appointed Mr. DeConcini as a regent, agrees with his assessment. Spokeswoman Jeanine L'Ecuyer told the Arizona State University newspaper that the former senator "was selected for his experience on Capitol Hill, where he helped Arizona universities secure federal funding for research."

Greg Patterson, a Republican former Arizona state legislator, calls the DeConcini appointment outrageous: "Imagine if a former senator was appointed to the board of Boeing and said 'Golly, I don't know much about planes, but when I was in the Senate, I got Boeing a ton of contracts and now I've got this really cool job.' "

The only way to reduce this corruption is to reduce the power and funding of government. Rather than redistributing money from one person to another, the government needs to be restricted to providing core services.

Certain trends have been favoring the left for the past several decades. In the early 1960s, transfer payments (entitlements and welfare) constituted less than a third of the federal government's budget. Now they constitute almost 60 percent of the budget, or about $1.4 trillion per year. Measured according to this, the US government's main function now is redistribution: taking money from one segment of the population and giving it to another segment. In a few decades, transfer payments are expected to make up more than 75 percent of federal government spending.

Currently the federal government consumes about 20 percent of the GDP, which is another way of saying that about 20 percent of Americans' income, on average, is paid in taxes to the federal government. According to the Government Accountability Office, that is on course to rise to 30 percent by 2040. Most of that 30 percent would be redistributed as payments to other Americans, rather than spent on standard government services like law enforcement, transportation, defense, national parks, orspace exploration.

We're decending into European-style socialism, slowly but surely, and if we don't act to reverse our collapse then their fate certainly awaits us.

This excellent article about Osama Bin Laden's recent tape and the hunt for him in Pakistan contains two notable quotes from sources inside the American defense and intelligence forces.

The tribal region where Zawahiri was said to be has a long history of fierce resistance to central control, as both the British Raj and the Soviets who occupied neighboring Afghanistan found out. But none of those previous powers possessed similar technology to scour the countryside from the sky and to unleash remote-control missiles. The broad message of the Damadola strike, which flattened three houses and killed several families, is that tribesmen need to rethink their code. Those who are supposedly governed by the iron law of Pashtunwali—or automatic loyalty to fellow tribesmen or guests—now have to recalculate the cost of that, U.S. officials said. "The message to them is, 'You have to take a new measure now: your families are not safe if you protect the terrorists'," says one senior Pentagon official who would not speak about the attack on the record because the details are classified.

When terrorists hide behind civilian shields -- especially willing shields -- and those shields are killed, their blood is on the hands of the terrorists.

Although Zawahiri's wife is said to be a "Momand" Pashtun from that region—offering him considerable protection—the CIA has been having more success lately in developing sources in the area, with help from Pakistani intelligence. (According to several U.S. officials, the Pakistani intelligence service has allowed a large "liaison" team into the country, and has accepted a great deal of technical assistance.) Frank Anderson, a former CIA station chief in the region, says Pashtunwali goes only so far, especially with multimillion-dollar prices on the heads of top Qaeda suspects. "The noble savage whose word is his bond exists a lot more in literature than on the ground," he says archly.

It's good to hear that America's human intelligence is improving after being decimated during the Clinton years. For a nation as diverse as ours, it shouldn't be so hard for us to infiltrate operatives into other cultures.

This is the first in what will probably turn out to be a series of posts (as the political scene develops) about lawmakers attempting to take advantage of the recent personel changes on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

South Dakota Lawmakers consider banning abortion in the state.

The bill will be called the Woman's Health and Life Protection Act. It will ban abortion, but won't prosecute a doctor who performs one to save a woman's life.

And the lawmaker who's introducing the bill says he thinks now is the right time to try and over-turn Roe vs Wade.

Rep. Roger Hunt says, "Abortion should be banned."

Those four words will likely lead to many others in the South Dakota House and Senate as lawmakers will decide whether to criminalize abortion in the state. The bill's supporters are using findings from a controversial abortion task force report recently given to the legislature.

Hunt says, "DNA testing now can establish the unborn child has a separate and distinct personality from the mother. We know a lot more about post-abortion harm to the mother." ...

Sunday, Hunt and other anti-abortion advocates held an event promoting their legislation. They say now is the time to pass it, because other states are considering similar bills and because with new Chief Justice John Roberts, and possibly Samuel Alito, the US Supreme Court is changing.

I think the time is ripe for change, and as other pundits have pointed out overturning Roe v. Wade will actually be a political boon to the Democratic Party because it will reduce the impact of an issue that has dominated their party for decades, to the detriment of their political fortunes. When abortion is back in the democratic, state-level political arena, Democrats will be able to free themselves from the vice-grip that the far-left abortion industry has on them at the national level and begin to turn some attention towards other matters that are more attractive to the median voter.

Randy Kirk just celebrated his blog's first anniversary and thus considers it his prerogative to "tag" me with a question and compel me to answer! He wants to know what five questions I will ask Jesus when I meet him in Heaven, so here goes:

1. What am I supposed to do now that I'm in Heaven?
2. Do I have less free will now than I did when I was on earth?
3. Did I have more free will than God himself, who can't sin, or is that just semantics?
4. Am I still married to Jessica, and if not, can I still hang out with her?
5. Will you autograph my Bible?

As for tagging others... how about Francis W. Porretto, Jay McCarthy, Donald Sensing, Orson Scott Card, and Eugene Volokh.

I enjoy the first phase of the American Idol season as much as the next guy, and anyone who's seen it knows that the main attractions are the freakish, untalented losers who parade themselves in front of the judges and the cameras because they either think they can actually sing or because they just want the publicity. Either way, it's funny because we're laughing at them, not with them, because they're freaks. So it's pretty disingenuous for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to get their panties in a wad when sexually ambiguous freaks are made fun of along with everyone else.

Bosses at America's leading gay rights group are demanding a summit meeting with the producers of TV talent show AMERICAN IDOL after claiming the programme is "increasingly homophobic".

Officials at the Gay And Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) were appalled by homophobic remarks made by judges SIMON COWELL and RANDY JACKSON on the first show of the new season, which aired in America on Tuesday (17JAN06).

On the programme, Brit Cowell told one effeminate wannabe to "shave off your beard and wear a dress," while Jackson asked another audition hopeful, "Are you a girl?" Both contestants were rejected.

I saw the show, and they were rejected because they were terrible singers. The whole point of the show is to mock untalented people, and these wannabes knew that and went on anyway. So it goes. In addition to mocking for lack of talent, the judges also routinely mock people for being fat, ugly, having no style, or whatever the case may be. As for the "Are you a girl?" person, the question was entirely justified because he/she was wearing female clothes, was built like a breastless girl, but kept referring to himself/herself as a male. He/she wasn't mocked for being gay (if he/she even was gay), he/she was mocked because of his/her appearance and mannerisms. There are plenty of gay people (even most gay people, for all I know) who are not freaks.

Anyway, the point is simple: if you want to be "edgy" and "nonconformist" then go ahead, but don't expect us not to make fun of you for it. The whole point of "civilization" is to enable people to work together towards a common goal, and when you purposefully choose not to conform then civilization will rightly ostracize you for that choice. Not because we hate you or want to hurt you, but because you're disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. Most freaks are disruptive on purpose, so they shouldn't be surprised when they're socially punished for it. (Socially, not violently or with malice, except perhaps in extreme circumstances like the KKK or something.)

Unwilling freaks are an entirely different matter and shouldn't properly be classified as "freaks" in the same group with those mentioned above. Those who want to get along but can't because of physical or mental differences obviously need to be treated totally differently from those who are freaks by choice.

Despite the prophetic warnings of Dr. Venkman, the true sign of the apocalypse will not be dogs and cats but snakes and hamsters, living together!

Gohan and Aochan make strange bedfellows: one's a 3.5-inch dwarf hamster; the other is a rat snake. Zookeepers at Tokyo's Mutsugoro Okoku zoo presented the hamster - whose name means "meal" in Japanese - to Aochan as a tasty morsel in October, after the snake refused to eat frozen mice.

But instead of indulging, Aochan decided to make friends with the furry rodent, according to keeper Kazuya Yamamoto. The pair have shared a cage since.

"I've never seen anything like it. Gohan sometimes even climbs onto Aochan to take a nap on his back," Yamamoto said.

Assigning symbolic meanings to the snake and hamster is left as an exercise for the reader.

Alarmist environmentalism is being presented as an issue of race in a predictable self-parody of the stereotypical leftist headline, "World Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit".

Citing Katrina as a case-in-point, some environmentalists say global warming impacts minorities and the disadvantaged harder than other groups. If global warming gets worse, many African-American communities will be more vulnerable to breathing ailments, insect-carried diseases and heat-related illness and death. But asking Black folks to give up gas-guzzling SUV’s and other bling is a tough sell. ...

Relatively, Blacks are environmental Good Samaritans. Per capita, we emit approximately 20 percent less carbon dioxide than Whites – well below 2020 targets set by the U.S. Climate Stewardship Act. Not only do we use more energy-conserving public transportation, we spend considerably less per capita on energy-intensive material goods.

First off, the real claim here is about poor people, not black people. There's nothing inherent about skin color that affects the environment, as far as I know. Second, it depends on how you count it, but if you amortize the energy and pollution used and created by society to promote the welfare of poor people (of any race) I doubt that you can reasonably consider the poor to be "Good Samaritans" (except perhaps in comparison to the environmentally vain). Poor people in America have a far higher standard of living than people who produce just as much wealth but live in poor countries, and that increased standard of living costs energy and creates pollution that can be indirectly charged to the accounts of the poor.

And, of course, President Bush is to blame.

Yet Blacks are exposed to worse air pollution than Whites in every major metropolitan area. Some charge that the Bush administration has made matters worse by creating new policies, like the Clear Skies Act and the Healthy Forest Initiative, that allow utilities and industries to pollute more. President Bush enraged environmentalists when he opted out of the Kyoto protocol global warming treaty, saying it would harm the U.S. economy.

As I pointed out yesterday, the Senate pre-emptively rejected the Kyoto Protocol 95 to 0 in 1995 and President Clinton never signed it or submitted it for ratification. The Clear Skies Act and the Healthy Forest Initiative are too complicated to go into here, but it's pretty disingenuous to make a blanket claim that they increase pollution.

I have three.

Do hairs grow in gray, or does the grayness creep up existing hairs?

It's unfortunate that so many former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency are so out-of-touch with the science of global warming and the potential effects of the policies they advocate.

All of the former administrators raised their hands when EPA's current chief, Stephen Johnson, asked whether they believe global warming is a real problem, and again when he asked if humans bear significant blame.

Agency heads during five Republican administrations, including the current one, criticized the Bush White House for what they described as a failure of leadership.

Apparently these former EPA chiefs aren't aware that recent research has shown that plants are a significant source of greenhouse gases. There's a lot we don't know about how the environment works, but despite that lack of knowledge environmentalist alarmists are eager to cripple the world economy to combat this unquantifiable, mythical danger.

"If we wait for every single scientist who has a thought on the issue of climate change to agree, we will never do anything," she said. "If this agency had waited to completely understand the impacts of DDT, the impacts of lead in our gasoline, there would probably still be DDT sprayed and lead in our gasoline."

But if we strike out randomly without understanding the problem we could severely cripple the world economy for no reason. Plus, DDT is a terrible example to use to praise excessive caution: thanks to DDT bans, more than 3 million people die from malaria each year. That's a success?

Also troubling is the way that the Associated Press frames the article's mention of the Kyoto Protocol:

Bush also kept the United States out of the Kyoto international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases globally, saying it would harm the U.S. economy, after many of the accord's terms were negotiated by the Clinton administration.

Except, of course, that the Senate rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 1995 by a vote of 95 to 0 before President Clinton could even sign it and send it for ratification. To give President Bush credit for this wise move is nonsensical.