¿Habla usted español tambien, Elsie?

With all the fuss over hurricanes, Supreme Court nominees, and the probable indictments this week of high-ranking Bush administration criminals, the
"intelligent design" trial taking place in Harrisburg, PA, is getting little attention from the mainstream media.

This is a shame. The entertainment value of watching biblical creationists scrambling to unearth some kind of probative evidence to back up their naked opinions -- which, of course, is what a court trial requires -- is a lot higher than, say, mundane photos of Judith Miller being let out of prison or Karl Rove being hauled off to one.

Almost daily some good reporting in the small town York Daily Record (home of the Dover, Pennsylvania school board) spins off into obscurity, unnoticed by most of the rest of us on Earth. Staff reporters Lauri Lebo and Michelle Starr are doing some mighty heavy lifting, trying to provide conventionally balanced 'on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand that' reporting when there isn't much "on the other hand" to it. Still, the Daily Record doesn't want to offend the local Neanderthals intelligently designed bible-thumpers. That's a job better left to columnist Mike Argento, who puts the case in context three times a week in his humor column.

A running transcript of the actual trial testimony is available on Talk Origins.org. The defendant school board members -- or at least those who remained on the board after the smarter ones quit in disgust or embarrassment -- began the defendant side of the case last week.

It's been a tough go so far. Quite a few defense expert witnesses seem to have bailed out after it became apparent they wouldn't be allowed merely to deliver one-sided Oral Robert-style lectures to a credulous audience, but instead they'd have to endure cross-examination by card-carrying Darwinian lawyers who know something about logic, reality, proof, and the scientific method. According to blogger Panda's Thumb, the first defense witness, Michael Behe, was so thoroughly discredited that his career may have been 'terminally demolished'.

"Will all the rest of the [defendant's] scheduled experts actually show up for a big helping of what Behe had?" Panda's Thumb asks. Unhappily enough for the school board, it seems a few will. In the end, the defendants may wish they'd all stayed home.

Yesterday, Defense Witness No. 2, Steven Fuller, took the stand. He's an obscure sociology professor who teaches "philosophy of the social sciences" at Warwick College in England.

Fuller wound up testifying "at the moment, evolutionary theory is a better explanation of the biological world." His only argument seems to have been that Darwinian evolution is so broadly accepted by so many scientists that "affirmative action" is needed to keep so-called 'intelligent design' notions from being "marginalized in cult status."

"[I]ntelligent design," the York Daily Record reports he said from the witness stand, "sits on the fringe of science."

And, that was a witness for the anti-Darwinists on the school board!

Fuller told the court that one of the problems of science is with the very definition of 'scientific theory,' which is the idea of well substantiated explanations that unify a broad range of observations. He said by requiring a theory to be 'well substantiated,' it makes it almost impossible for an idea to be accepted scientifically.

Get it? The problem with science is it requires that crackpot theories be subjected to rigorous scientific testing before they are palmed off on school students. What is education coming to?

As reporters Lebo and Starr correctly point out, in proposing that so-called 'intelligent design' theory be taught in school, "Fuller was actually proposing the definition for hypothesis — an untested idea... ." Or, as columnist Mike Argento puts it less politely:

What Fuller was suggesting ... is that science won't let intelligent design in merely because it doesn't meet the requirements of a scientific theory, as far as science is concerned.

In fact, he said to call intelligent design a scientific theory, you had to change the definition of a scientific theory. The last defense witness who did that said his definition of a scientific theory included astrology.

Fuller said intelligent design is, essentially, a half-baked idea, pretty much something the intelligent design guys have whipped up without doing much in the way of producing evidence.

And that's why it should be taught to ninth-graders in Dover.

"You know," the columnist reflects, "I can come up with a lot of half-baked ideas that no one in their right mind would want to teach to kids in Dover. Let's see. How about this? Cows think in Spanish. Discuss.

Wilma Waves, Power Fails

A cool north wind kept all of Hurricane Wilma away from Pensacola Beach, except for the vigorous waves.

An estimated 3.2 million customers across Florida lost power. Among them was Derk Ortt, the News Journal's hurricane consultant. He is based in south Florida.

On the other hand, Tampa blogger Sticks of Fire survived a rainy, windy day in a city as deserted "as if it were a typical Saturday."

Would someone please rush a hot cup of coffee over to Bark Bark, Woof Woof?

Rosa Parks Dies

Detroit News

"There are quiet victories and struggles, great sacrifices of self, and noble acts of heroism ... done every day in nooks and corners, and in little households, and in men's and women's hearts ... ."
-- Charles Dickens, The Battle of Life

Rosa Parks Museum

Montgomery, AL.

Talking to the Portraits

Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, still on her knees transcribing for the White House:

"[E]ven as White House officials and Republicans say that Mr. Rove is human and that the leak investigation has taken an enormous toll on his family, they also insist that everyone is focused on the work at hand, and that Mr. Rove is good at compartmentalizing his life."

David Gergen,once upon a time White House communications director:

"Bill, I was in the Nixon White House during Watergate, and we pretended that we were all about business as usual. And we had a president who was talking to the portraits. It was not business as usual, but you have to say it."

New Yorker Update

The promised New Yorker article that everyone's waiting for hasn't yet been posted in full text on the New Yorker's web site. Not yet, anyway, although sooner or later someone's going to do it, copyrighted or not.

But Washington Note has extensive excerpts -- useful for anyone who's not accustomed to reading the New Yorker's typically lengthy and absorbing feature articles. (Here's a pitch: subscribe to the New Yorker. It really is the "best magazine in the world.")

Meanwhile, you can test your memory at Paul Salanky's Return of the Bush Quiz in the often humorous "Shouts & Murmurs" department. And the world's best baseball writer, Roger Angell, has an uncharacteristically short article titled White Sox Nation in which he contemplates the central truth of baseball: most of the fun is in "getting over it."

Could this be true of politics, too?

Newsblogging Wilma

Ft. Myers News-Press

Blogging:

Bark Bark, Woof, Woof

Dasicourse Net (Miami)

Interstate 4 Jamming

Just My Thoughts (Miami)

Hyku (Winter Haven)

My Little Corner of the World

The Wisdom of Funky Bugs (Lakeland)

Nick Starr.com (Tampa area)

Pamibe (Pompano Beach, on the Atlantic side)

Blog Wima.com (Boca Raton, on the Atlantic side)

On The Third Hand (evacuated)

Newsblogging

Reporting in the Eye

Naples News

Ft. Myers News - Message Board (strictly speaking, not a blog)

CNN's Hurricane Wilma Blog

Cat 3 Wilma Makes Landfall

Blogging from "inside" Wilma is Bark Bark, Woof, Woof.

Also, from the NHC:

AT 630 AM EDT...THE CENTER OF HURRICANE WILMA MADE LANDFALL VERY NEAR CAPE ROMANO FLORIDA. THIS POSITION IS ABOUT 20 MILES WEST OF EVERGLADES CITY FLORIDA. MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS AT LANDFALL WERE ESTIMATED TO BE 125 MPH...A STRONG CATEGORY 3 HURRICANE.

Indictment Bingo

Backup Brain has your Fitzgerald Indictment Bingo cards. Enjoy.

Wilma to Florida in 36 Hours

The 1 a.m. tropical storm discussion at the National Hurricane Center reports Hurricane Wilma has moved off the Yucatan coast line and should start racing notheastward "in the next 12-24 hrs." Landfall somewhere between the Florida Keys and Port Charlotte is projected for Monday. Current guess-timates are it will be a Catwegory 2 or 3 when it makes landfall in Florida, but will weaken quickly.

The Dangers of a Cabal

"[N]either Powell nor Armitage had or has much trust or respect for Rice, and they share with other senior Republican wisemen the conviction that Rumsfeld is quite literally mad, and Cheney a dangerous, vindictive monomaniac."

-- The Nelson Report, 20 October 2005, reprinted at Washington Note

Cenk Uygur at the Huffington Post and political reporter Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post both complained this past week that too few news outlets paid attention to the extraordinary speech by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. It was delivered to a mixed audience of policy experts, journalists, and academics at the New America Foundation, a politically independent Washington public policy institute.

Col. Wilkerson's resume is long and impressive. He has been Executive Assistant to U.S. Navy Admiral Stewart Ring, Director of the U.S. Marine War College, professor at the U.S. War College, and Chief of Staff for the U.S. State Department under former department Secretary Colin Powell. He is said to be a Republican, although he's served in every one of the last four administrations.

As Froomkin said, the speech "didn't make the front page... but it seems to me that it's a big deal when a former top administration official declares that a secret cabal led by the vice president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy, inveigled the president, condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to respond to emergencies."

Brian Knowlton's report in Friday's The New York Times was typical of what little news coverage there was. Just like Froomkin, he focussed on those parts of Wilkerson's address which harshly criticized the Bush administration for its through-and-through incompetence:

"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

One can understand the emphasis of the newspaper accounts. It was a week that began with a hoaxed-up terrorism scare about New York subways and ended with a number of heavyweights in the Republican Party itself, perhaps most notably David Gergen ("This is a presidency that has almost collapsed") speaking out against the Bush administration's war policy, cronyism, the Miers Supreme Court nomination, and still bumbling emergency management.

But there was much more to Wilkerson's speech than the headlines and snap quotes convey. New America Foundation has the live video. The Washington Note has the transcript. Listening to or reading the entire speech puts the truncated quotes used by the media in an enlightening historical and contemporary context.

This was no cheap political potshot, as some may assume. Col. Wilkerson is sounding the alarm for all who value American democracy. At the core of the speech, he articulates three convictions and draws some hugely important implications.

Wilkinson's three convictions:

(1) The National Security Act of 1947 was fashioned as much to guarantee popular democratic control of U.S. diplomacy and the strategic use of miltary force (to the maximum extent possible in the post-W.W.II world) as it was to reorganize intelligence gathering and analysis within the government itself;

(2) The framers of the Act were every bit as far-sighted as the revered Framers of the U.S. Constitution. They had lived through war years when national power necessarily was concentrated, as never before, in a president and a tight circle of trusted military advisors. Franklin Roosevelt was a brilliant, benign, and beloved leader. But in the future, these modern 'Framers' knew we were unlikely to be so lucky. Accordingly, they sought to ensure that "the fundamental decisions about foreign policy should not be made in secret." In fashioning the 1947 National Security Act, they --

didn’t want the secrecy, they didn’t want the concentration of power, they didn’t want the lack of transparency into principal decisions that got people killed, even though they’d been successful in arguably one of the greatest conflicts the world has seen. And so they set about trying to ensure that this wouldn’t happen again.

(3) All of this was and is threatened by the "cabal" of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Condoleeza Rice should have carried out the duties of National Security Advisor as they have evolved under the 1947 Act, to be a "balancer," to "make sure all opinions got to the president ... every dissent got to the president ... ." Instead, she "actually was a part of the problem," Wilkerson says. Instead of being a "balancer" who made sure the president knew all sides and views, "she made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president."

And so what you had... you had this incredible process where the formal process, the statutory process, the policy coordinating committee, the deputies committee, the principal’s committee, all camouflaged – the dysfunctionality camouflaged the ... secret decision-making process.

As for implications, Wilkerson makes no bones about the fact that "America is paying the consequences."

You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences, whether it is a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or whether it is the situation in Iraq, which still goes unexplained.

The army, he says, is in such "bad shape" it likely will have to be rebuilt anew. The detainee abuse problem is, he argues, another concrete example. Never before in our history have we had "presidential involvement, a secretarial involvement, a vice-presidential involvement, an attorney general involvement in [giving] our troops essentially carte blanche... ." In time, he says, we will look back and be "ashamed of what we allowed to happen."

Essentially, Wilkerson says that we've screwed things up so much in Iraq that it is a near-certainty we will have to "mobilize the nation, put 5 million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East within a decade. That's what we'll have to do."

There is one last implication, an undercurrent in Wilkerson's speech rather than an explicit statement. Left unchecked-and-unbalanced by Congress or another branch of government, he seems to be hinting, the Cheney-Rumsfeld secrecy cabal is undermining the very democracy that our Founding Fathers created and the authors of the 1947 National Security Act sought to ensure as our enduring legacy.

Wilkerson's message is that as a nation we can survive incompetence, secrecy, and even stupidity in our leaders. But our civil liberties, and democracy itself, cannot survive if the "checks and balances" built into the National Security decision-making system are not revived and repaired by Congress.

Welcome to Alpha House

You know the world's weather is changing dramatically when storms are given names that sound like a fraternity house.

The National Hurricane Center cordially welcomes you to Alpha House. In itself, no threat to land.

Metaphorically, it's a monument to the Animal House of hurricane years.

Bush To Bash Bush

Although some dullards and knaves now are claiming in behalf of all journalism "we were all wrong" about WMDs in Iraq, as Arianna Huffington pointed out earlier this week the truth is that a lot of journalists got it right -- and early.

Two in particular (whom Huffington inexplicably overlooks) deserve special mention: Seymour M. Hersh and George Herbert Walker Bush.

As for Hersh, he and other colleagues were writing in-depth articles for the weekly New Yorker Magazine that covered Bush's Iraq War policy earlier, more accurately, in more depth, and with truer balance than anyone else. Period.

Fortunately, their work going as far back as the year 2000 is conveniently archived on line.

Even before George W. Bush settled in at the White House, and well before 9-11, New Yorker Magazine reporters were writing that the new administration lusted for war against Iraq. They were describing how the evidence for weapons of mass destruction was weak. They were explaining how the White House Iraq Group was deliberately ignoring intelligence to the contrary. And they plumbed in depth how the WHIGs were badgering CIA analysts (and anyone else) who turned in reports that did not agree with their preconceptions.

Also well before the war began, Hersh and other contributors laid out for New Yorker readers in detail how the administtration was not planning for post-war reconstruction -- and, indeed, had fired those who were most involved in it; they reported that the administration was ignoring signs of incipient urban guerilla opposition, and how the administration was planning for a danerously low troop strength far short of what would be needed. They described how dangerous to our national interests even a quick military victory could be and how unstable a peace-gone-wrong would become for the whole of the Middle East.

Regrettably, much of what the New Yorker was reporting has come to pass. The same can be said for the warnings issued by George Bush's father, the 41st President.

The Memory Hole has preserved his early warning in the form of a Time Magazine article co-authored by George Herbert Walker Bush and Brent Scowcroft:

We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

Sound familiar?

What brings all of this to mind is today's advance alert by United Press International that:

The Bush administration is bracing for a powerful new attack by Brent Scowcroft, the respected national security adviser to the first President George Bush.

* * *
The article also contains some critical comments on the handling of U.S. foreign policy by the current President Bush from his father... .

Scowcroft's article appears Monday. Guess who's publishing it?

The New Yorker Magazine.

'Misleading Miller'

The Associated Press reports on New York Times' executive editor Bill Keller's email culpa to the staff:

"Judith Miller's boss says The New York Times reporter "appears to have misled the newspaper's editors about her role in the CIA leak controversy."

And she lied to "the Times' Washington bureau chief Bill Taubman." And she apparently lied to the grand jury when "the reporter told prosecutors at first that she did not believe the June meeting would have involved Plame." Which means she lied to Times' readers when she wrote about "My Four Hours Testifying In the Federal Grand Jury Room."

Miller denies it all. But can you believe her?

Firedoglake sees all of this as a sign the Times is ready to "Throw Judy From the Train." And why not? A prevaricating reporter whose editor doesn't even believe her is hard for readers to credit.

We're likely to see more Timesly knives coming out tomorrow when Public Editor Byron Calame publishes his promised 'assessment' after interviewing Miller, Keller, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Wilma Stalls; New Storm Brewing?

Saturday morning satellite view

After slamming Cozumel and Isle de Mujeres, Hurricane Wilma is moving at a painfully slow pace over the Yucatan peninsula. This is very bad news for the low, flat, heavily forested limestone shelf that makes up most of the Yucatan.

But it's good news for south Florida. Early Saturday morning the NHC was saying:

It is becoming more and more definite that Hurricane Wilma will cross Florida in a hurry on Monday. The longer that Wilma remains nearly stationary... the chances become greater for a more East-Northeasterly track as indicated by some guidance.

The intensity of Wilma while crossing Florida is highly uncertain and the best estimate is that it will likely be a category one or two at landfall. Wilma's wind field will probably expand as it crosses the Florida peninsula. Therefore... the tropical storm force winds will likely cover a large area.

Based on the track forecast and the large area of tropical storm force winds associated with Wilma... a hurricane watch will likely be issued later today for portions of central and south Florida and the Florida Keys.

There is bad news brewing, however. A tropical wave in the eastern Caribbean "has become more concentrated about 200 miles south of Puerto Rico," the NHC reports. "Conditions appear to be favorable for a tropical depression to form during the next day or so as it moves West-Northwestward... ."

As of 8 a.m. EDT, the NHC reported, "This system has become better organized and has the potential to develop into a tropical cyclone within the next 24 to 36 hours."

The Music Ends

The great jazz vocalist, Shirley Horn, has died.