Independent Rant

That's 72 hours for W with his thumb up his butt. I know that it takes time to develop a plan, put the pieces into place, and move the U.S. disaster relief machine into action, but there is no excuse for W not to have come forward within a couple of hours of the earthquake/tsunamis hitting to say, "Our hearts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We are working on an assistance plan and are in touch with the local governments. We are calling the appropriate people back from their holiday leaves so that we can help bring substantive relief to the affected areas as quickly as possible."

Then again, Sri Lanka doesn't have any electoral votes so maybe it really doesn't count.

The official administration reaction to this disaster is an embarrassment. Unfortunately the press has given W a free pass once again.

In a continuing display of unmitigating gall, the Reps in the House are moving to make it more difficult to launch ethics investigations of members. The Reps are also making noises about removing Representative Hefley as chairman of the ethics panel after he allowed reports critical of Tom DeLay to be issued by the panel. These are yet more moves to cover DeLay's butt (he must have pictures of everyone naked in order to get this much support) and make our representatives less accountable for their actions. Funny how they didn't feel this way when Whitewater was the alleged ethics violation du jour.

Let your representative know that this outrage cannot be allowed to go forward.

On other notes, hats off to late actor Jerry Orbach. He had a fine talent and was a regular guy despite his recent fame thanks to Law and Order.

The Oak Room at the Plaza is closing. I can't say that I've eaten there in ten years, but it was always good to know that grand old dining rooms like that were around when you needed them. Now there'll be one less on the menu. The restaurant at the original Ritz in Boston is also closing.

The tragedy in Asia continues to grow in magnitude as the flood waters of the tsunami recede. I was overjoyed to learn that friends of mine who are vacationing in the region are alright. The need for assistance, however, is enormous. Here are a couple of ways to help:

International Red Cross and Red Crescent Society joint effort

Save the Children

May we all be humbled by this tragedy. You can find more on this blog.

My wife and I went out to the theater the day after Christmas. The first big storm of the winter was raging and everything was shrouded in white and the streets were almost silent -- it felt like a 19th century painting (only colder). Despite the weather, we dressed for an evening out because we both agreed that such an event calls for more than jeans and a flannel shirt.

We stopped by the Four Seasons for a pre-theater cocktail and were shocked to see that even there jeans and flannel shirts were not hard to see. Are we the last people to think that dressing up shows respect both for oneself and for others? We're not talking black tie, but a blazer and dress trousers for me; tailored separates for my wife.

I feel like I'm turning into my father with a "kids these days" attitude, but I don't think it's a bad idea to have standards for appearance and behavior but we are very much in an everything-goes day and age. I'm anachronistic once more...

The Bush administrationn has announced that it is putting more discretion into the hands of local Forest Service employees to green-light development projects on federal land. The Washington Post calls it, "the biggest change in forest-use policies in nearly three decades" The administration say this will give greater flexibility to respond to local needs and put control where it ought to be. The new rules place equal emphasis on economic interests with the need to keep the lands ecologically sound.

Of course, what it also does is lessen public involvement in decisions affecting the national parks and preserves that we all own. Fewer environmental reviews will be mandatory and much more will be left in the hands of unelected officials. Fewer checks and balances will be in place to ensure that no one has undue influence over the decisions that affect taxpayer assets.

The Bush administration has also been aggressively moving to make the case for privatizing the forest service (even though few opportunities to save money while doing so have been found in the extensive studies that have been done). The Bushies have moved to double and even triple logging in national forests and their repeal of the roadless rule opens All told, the Bush record is a soulful love song to the timber industry and other commercial interests.

I'm all for decalcifying state and federal regulations but wholesale gutting without the proper oversight protections is simply wrong. Flexibility and responsiveness are good things -- but only when all interests are represented fairly. Pushing the public out of the process makes it easier for commerical interests to hold undue sway. The privatization process facilitates removing officials whose first loyalty is to the forest with those who serve corporate interests. Agencies such the forest service should be as de-politicized as possible.

When it comes to public lands, preserving ecological viability has to have the highest priority; economic activities must first "do no harm." Teddy Roosevelt's desire in creating the national parks was to preserve the great American wilderness. We should hold true to that mission.

New financial aid guidelines will make it harder for 80 - 90,000 mostly low income students to get Pell Grants for college. Up to 1.2 million students are estimated to see their grants cut as well. The result -- they'll either have to turn to loans or not go to college.

One of our bedrock values as a nation has been that education is the best route up the economic ladder. Those who are better educated tend to make more, pay more taxes, and rely on fewer government services, thus spending to help people realize a college education is an investment. Yes, the program has gotten quite expensive (an estimated $12 billion annually) but cutting students off the bottom hardly seems like the right efficiency move. College costs have grown dramatically in recent years -- regularly outpacing inflation -- putting ever more families on the brink of not being able to afford to send their kids.

One study shows that 48% of college qualified seniors are unable to attend a four-year institution and 22% more unable to attend college at all because of costs.

I guess this is just one more change we needed to make in order to be able to afford massive tax cuts and a hugely expensive adventure in the Middle East. One again, the little guy is getting kicked in the teeth.

Today's NYT reports that "In one of the first signs of the effects of the ever tightening federal budget, in the past two months the Bush administration has reduced its contributions to global food aid programs aimed at helping millions of people climb out of poverty."

The story goes on to say, "...the administration has told representatives of several charities that it was unable to honor earlier promises...the cutbacks, estimated by some charities at up to $100 million, come at a time when the number of hungry in the world is rising for the first time in years and all food programs are being stretched."

The administration is continuing to support emergency food programs for places like Sudan. The programs being cut were intended "to help the poor feed themselves through improvements in farming, education, and health." Catholic Relief Services says they have "five to seven million people affected by the cuts." Save the Children is another charity affected.

These programs help build long-term capacity for food production in developing countries and thus help decrease the need for emergency food relief over time. They reward individual effort and foster self-sufficiency -- values that I thought played well in the White House these days, but apparently not quite as well as the desire to give Americans a few extra bucks for the down payment on an SUV.

So, if you are giving thanks for your tax cut as you trawl the mall this holiday season, remember that some portion of it may have come from the mouths of a starving family on the other side of the world.

I'm in Washington this morning so I watched CNN along with my in-room coffee. Jack Cafferty was going on about America "losing Christmas to political correctness" because towns call their decorations "holiday trees" and public school choirs sing secular rather than religious carols. Jack thinks we all need to remember that Christmas is about the baby Jesus.

Two quick points: First, Christmas is celebrated on December 25 not because it is the day Jesus is reported to have been born, but because early Christians could practice their forbidden faith while their Roman neighbors were engaged in the celebration of Saturnalia. The most traditional celebration at this time of year is this pagan harvest festival timed to the solstice. So if Christians are unhappy sharing the season with Hanukah, Kwanza, or anybody else, perhaps they should give it back and pick the true date for a purely religious holiday.

Second, if Christmas has been lost it has been lost to capitalism, not political correctness. Christmas has become a 6 - 8 week orgy of consumer spending, endless seasonal songs piped into malls, coffee shops, and airport lounges across the nation. The holiday has lost meaning because it has become an excuse for extended hours, special sales, blockbuster movie releases, and seasonal product offerings. I was sick of the whole thing two weeks ago -- my Christmas prayer is for the whole thing to be over with.

Georgia, Kansas, and Pennsylvania are leading the renewed charge to put religious theory into the science curriculum of public schools. Ohio, Alabama, and even Wisconsin have their own nascent movements. Emboldened by the Bush victory, they are pushing to either remove the teaching of evolution from biology classes or add creationism as an alternative theory.

This march toward theocracy needs to be stopped before we go back to the days when those who were audacious enough to claim that the world was round could be jailed as heretics.

According to the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, "The vast majority of scientists agree that evolution is a proven major unifying concept in science and should be not only included in science education in kindergarten through 12th grade but also better embedded in school standards."

Science class should be based on science with fact, theory, and suppositions presented as such. That some of the well-documented facts are at odds with the Bible shouldn't enter into it. Period. We need well-educated students who are ready to push forward our knowledge in science, not trying to make the facts fit the picture painted in the a book written thousands of years ago.

I know that W isn't the first POTUS to do something, but it still angered me to see a Presidential Medal of Freedom being hung around George Tenet's neck on the front page of yesterday's NYT. Here's the guy who was shamed from office after his "slam dunk" intelligence on WMD in Iraq turned out to be bogus (oh, wait, he resigned to spend more time with his family) being given our highest civilian honor for that same work.

Mr. President, more than 1,000 U.S. service people are dead and more than 9,000 have been wounded in this folly. Tens of thousands of others have died. Have some respect. Wait until the shooting is over before you pass out the balloons.

Meanwhile back in our new mandate-driven nation, groups in Kansas and Pennsylvania are working to put alternatives to evolution in the biology curriculum. The PA group is getting more subtle, pushing "intelligent design" rather than creationism, but neither have much scientific support. People can believe what they want, but let's keep the science in science class. I'm all for teaching religion in school if we can teach a survey course of the major religions and their beliefs.

Boston's beloved radio talk show host David Brudnoy passed away late last week. His intelligent, civil, and curious voice will be missed. David was more conservative than me on many issues but he never resorted to the name-calling and badgering that are so prevalent in our public discourse. He was interested in serious discussion of important issues and that is something harder and harder to find. Ann Coulter, Jay Severin, and the rest of the blather crowd haven't half the intellect, wit, or debating skills of the always articulate Brudnoy. He stood his ground as firmly as anyone but was always respectful to those with whom he disagreed. It was a pleasure to hear him -- I now wish I'd tuned in more often.

So long, David.

Almost as depressing as the results of November 2nd is the decline in the quality of The West Wing. It was the only network show I looked forward to each week, but boy has it jumped the shark.

Did they hire the writing team from ER?

But I did find this cool continuity guide.

There are two startling stories in today's NYT about education (or the lack thereof). A p. 1 piece cites a report that states that "a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending $3.1 billion on remedial training." Even among many highly educated manager, the lack of an ability to construct coherent sentences and paragraphs is apparent.

In a related piece, the U.S. ranks 28th out of 40 countries where the math skills of 15 year-olds were tested. Hong Kong ranked #1. The study also showed that the U.S. has the poorest outcomes per dollar spent on education. The first finding shows that we just aren't getting the job done; the second shows that throwing more money at the problem is not the answer.

I think that one of our biggest challenges is to abandon our boast that we have the best education system in the world. This claim, much like the boast that we have the best healthcare system in the world, simply isn't true in the broad sense. I don't doubt that you'll find the best teachers, the best individual schools, and even the best administrators in the world here, but that micro excellence doesn't translate at the macro level. If we can't spread best practices so that our overall achievement will continue to lag.

The first of our twelve steps has to be to acknowledge the problem. Our highly educated population is a key source of competitive advantage, but it won't last if we don't commit ourselves to excellence. China and India are making massive investments in education and there is no guarantee that we'll lead the world in education forever unless we make the effort to do so.

The second is to start demanding that the money we spend produces measurable results.

I pass this on my pal John:

"We’ve talked about the current use of “Democrat Party” (rather than "Democratic Party" among Republicans and conservative pundits, haven’t we? And we bemoaned how there wasn’t comfortable/snappy equivalent for GOPers? I had a flash of inspiration in the shower this morning: Republicanish Party.

I have the vague recollection of some cracker explaining that the Democratic Party isn’t truly democratic since it’s the party of the liberal elite, blah, blah, blah. One could say in return that the Republicans have lost sight of the Republic as such, that they’ll lead us into (if they haven’t already) a plutocracy or oligarchy. So I give you The Republicanish Party."

I love the thinking behind this though I might suggest "Republicish Party" or "Republic-lite Party." Thoughts?

I follow education reform at a respectable distance (always wanting us to improve our schools but, without school-aged kids, relying on secondhand accounts and media reports of what schools are like today) and was shocked at the amount of bureaucracy desribed by Phillip Howard in his piece on today's NYT OpEd page. I'm going to go searching for his book, The Collapse of the Common Good.

It was a truly fascinating day on the NYT OpEd page today. This piece on how Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" almost didn't make it to market was great reading.

Speaking of great reading, check out the new magazine, Worthwhile. It has high aspirations to chronicle the quest to align passion and profits at work. I'll be contributing to its blog along with Halley Suitt, David Weinberger, Tom Peters, and others.

I went to an interesting discussion forum on "who owns the Web" led by David Weinberger last night. My friend Halley Suitt was along for the ride, too, and I'm not reading either of their blogs until I finish this post (maintaining the purity of my thoughts).

The discussion largely focused on how one feels relative to the Web and the sites on it: do you feel like it is "yours," "theirs," "no ones," or "everyones." The example that kept coming up was Google -- people seemed to feel more benevolent toward it and invested in it because its simple graphics reflect the "true" aesthetics of the Web, seems to be focused on doing what it is supposed to do rather then selling you something, and is made possible, in part, by the information supplied by all of the users of the Web.

David spent time differentiating the "real" world from the "Web" world -- or at least probing to see if they are different. Is the Web infinite and thus each new page is addititive while the physical world is finite and thus each new development subtractive? I felt us going way deep into the Existential weeds.

My moment of insight came while talking with Halley after the event. We half-jokingly agreed that what one thinks of as "yours" is that which can, in some way, help you get laid. Later it hit me that we were on the mark. Greatly simplified (and it wouldn't be the first time I've been accused of over simplifying), here is my theory on what makes anything feel like it is "yours":

- If it operates based on values you can embrace, or at least accept, it can be "yours"
- If it operates based on rules which are to your advantage, or at least not to your disadvantage, it can be "yours"

Where you are comfortable on the embrace/accept or advantage/non-disadvantage continuums (or is that continua?) is a determined by a) how much you care and b) how much your interaction is neccessary vs. optional (you'll put up with being farther from the ideal for interactions in which you have to engage).

Thus if you believe in the Web as a rich, communal resource built by common effort that should be open to all, you are likely to believe that Google is "yours" because it gives you unfettered access to all of the content and makes searching faster and more fruitful than typing random urls in to your address window. You like finding the unexpected. If you believe that the Web is a dark hole full of spammers, pornographers, scam artists, identity stealers, and compilers of useless information, you are likely to believe that AOL is "yours" because its structure and filters make the Web a more controlled, less frightening and more comfortable place for you to be.

So "ours" is in the eyes of the beholder.

One of the reasons that I love October and November, aside from the foliage and crispness of the air, is that the Supreme Court is back in session. Watching the cases before the Supremes reveals a lot about where we are as a country in any given year -- seen through the cases that are heard, how they are argued, and who lines up on which sides of a given case. When cases are being argued I look forward to Nina Totenberg's reporting on the proceedings each evening on NPR and then reading Linda Greenhouse's take on it in the Times the following morning. These two women are the press at its best in their coverage of the Court.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Administration on the side of the plaintiff in the Title IX case as they can't always be counted to take the side of whistleblowers; I wish they'd lighten up on the medical use of marijiuana.

After a long, cold winter will come spring -- and the chance to see now the Justices rule in the cases they are hearing now.