Today's assignment is to compare and contrast two stories in today's Los Angeles Times:

A 13-million-year-old fossil of an ape, discovered in Spain, is from the last probable common ancestor of humans and great apes, Spanish researchers reported this week in the journal Science. [Link]

 

American high school seniors rank 16th among 21 industrialized nations when it comes to achievement in science, and you can bet a frozen mastodon that the leaders — Sweden, the Netherlands, Iceland and Norway — got there with a stronger curriculum and better-trained teachers, not with endless court fights over creationism. [Link]

Also in the Los Angeles Times:  "Textbook publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston agreed to the [Texas] education board's demand earlier this month that the publisher's middle-school textbooks for Texas define marriage as the 'lifelong union between a husband and wife.'"

I've done considerable time in the textbook publishing industry, so I can speak from experience.

Texas is an "adoption" state, meaning that any textbook used in the public schools there must be adopted by the state education board. Because Texas is a big market peopled by flaming wingnuts, for many years textbook publishers have been putting out special editions for Texas. Usually, the graphics and page layout in the Texas and national editions are identical, but the text is different.

Most of the time this is accomplished by means of a black plate change. When the printer is finished running the national pages and is ready to run the Texas pages, the black plate (which prints the text) is changed but the yellow, magenta, and cyan plates (which print the rest of the colors) remain the same.  Sometimes parts of the Texas editions are entirely different, graphics and all, but publishers try to stick to black plate changes because it's easier and cheaper. 

Texas isn't the only "adoption" state. In fact, there's been a trend toward more and more states demanding adoption. Ten years ago the only adoption states that really mattered were Texas and California. But in my most recent textbook gig there were special editions for Indiana, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and some other states as well. Plus, there was talk of creating editions specialized for some cities. 

As a rule, the differences in the texts are subtle and mostly involve adding innocuous state-specific content. But sometimes ideology does intrude. People on the state education boards are nearly always appointees of the state governor, and what the education boards do can reflect politically on the governor. So there's a tendency to give the voters what they want.

State boards tend to be weenies about evolution, at best, and hostile to it at worst. For this reason, publishers tend to tiptoe around evolution in the "national" editions of science textbooks. This means they limit discussion of evolution to very few pages so that the text doesn't have to be entirely re-written for the "hostile" states. But since understanding of evolution is the foundation of all study of all living things, this means textbooks do not support the proper teaching of biology anywhere in the U.S.

Even if the national editions are very good, changes in the state editions can result in a ghettoization of education. Some students aren't getting the same information as other students. And this ghettoization isn't just in science textbooks, as the example in the Los Angeles Times illustrates. After science, the teaching of history is probably the next biggest wingnut target, but there are state textbook editions for every discipline, including math and music.

This "adoption" nonsense also cranks up the cost of textbooks for everybody. Usually with any manufactured item, the more items are manufactured, the lower the per-unit cost. With books, most of the costs are incurred up front -- writing, editing, graphics, type composition. Even with printing, most of the costs are incurred up front, in the setup to print. Once the printer's setup is done and the plates are ready, the only addtional costs are in paper and ink, which are relatively cheap. With four-color printing (how most "full" color books are printed) it costs about as much to set up to print 1,000 books as it does to set up for 1 million books. If you've only got 1,000 books to sell, you've got to raise the price a lot to make a profit.

(Once upon a time I worked briefly for a fool who wanted to publish a four-color book, but he only wanted to print 500 copies. I got estimates from half the printers in North America but couldn't get the manufacturing cost under $600 per book, and that didn't include binding.) 

Back in the days that publishers printed hundreds of thousands of identical textbooks to sell throughout the country, textbook publishing enjoyed economies of scale. But if the print runs must be fractured into many state editions, the cost per book increases for everyone.

(Schools could save themselves enormous amounts of money if they'd settle for black-and-white textbooks, but who wants black-and-white textbooks? Especially in elementary school?)

There's one more wrinkle. New digital print technologies promise to lower costs for small print runs in the future. We aren't quite there yet, but I understand that soon it will be possible for printers to handle micro-print runs of a few hundred full-color books relatively cheaply. When that happens, will every bleeping school board in America demand customized textbooks?

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Kerry's problem wasn't his policies; it was his personality. The guy was simply too cerebral, too equivocating and too out of touch with Middle America to wrest enough purple-state voters from even a seriously tarnished Bush. Sure, his Vietnam medals were pretty, but no Democrat who attended Swiss boarding school, hails from Massachusetts and raves about his love of French skiers had a snowball's chance of unseating good ole W.

So we ran an unlikable candidate, and we lost.

Since Election Day, I have suffered through multiple discussions with giddy conservatives all but drooling over a Hillary run. They--like most liberals I know--all assume Senator Clinton is the horse to beat in 2008. But unlike discussions with liberals, my Hillary chats with conservatives typically begin with a variation on, Have your people gone completely insane? I'd like to take offense, but I can't, because nominating Hillary would be insanity. It's not that she's a bad gal. And she's surprised most of the Beltway crowd by turning out to be a relatively moderate, low-key, collegial, workhorse senator. Factoring in her high name recognition, her mythic status with the base, her ability to energize female voters, and, of course, her easy access to the greatest natural politician of our time, it's easy to see Hillary's appeal. Looked at rationally, she'd make a crackerjack presidential candidate.

(1) Righties are obsessed with Hillary, because righties by definition are people who are terrified of strong women because they have unresolved issues about their mothers. They are certain Hillary is behind every dark anti-Republican plot in America. When she's dead and buried they'll believe she's returned as a vampire. Sensible people recognize psychosis when they see it and ignore it. (2) Most liberals Cottle knows want Hillary to be nominated? Is there a Cottle Society for Lobotomized Liberals? I spend half my life online communicating with other liberals, and I know no one who wants Hillary nominated in 2008. I have never seen such an idea expressed anywhere in the Left Blogosphere. It's, like, completely off the radar.  (3) "Relatively moderate." Exactly. She's still playing by the old Clinton script that you have to win by moving right. That's why, outside the beltway, there is an utter lack of interest in nominating her in 2008.

So how come the Blogosphere is populated by intelligent, insightful people (not necessarily me) who write intelligent, insightful commentary without pay, and an airhead like Cottle is a senior editor for a national magazine?

The "stupid" bug has also bitten Fred Kaplan, who in the past has written some good stuff. But in typical leftie "it must be my fault" mode, Kaplan concludes that the reason so many red staters don't like Democrats (or liberals, or progressives, or whatever it is that is not liked in the red states) is that the Dems (et al.) don't like them. It's our fault that a rightie propaganda machine going back to Nixon ... nay, Joe McCarthy ...  has demonized liberals in the public mind lo these many years. It's our fault that mass media "pundits" get away with lying about Democratic candidates and frightening voters into the arms of corporate rapists.

I guess we should crawl, groveling, to the Right and beg its forgiveness for their abuse of us. If we are lucky, maybe they'll kick us and spit on us some more. It's what we deserve.

Instead the administration plans to push major amendments that would shield interest, dividends and capitals gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment and take other steps intended to simplify the system and encourage economic growth, according to several people who are advising the White House or are familiar with the deliberations.

The changes are meant to be revenue-neutral. To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the advisers said. [Washington Post]

If you receive health insurance benefits from your employer, please pay attention to this ad. According to (expert), as many as x-million working Americans will lose their health benefits because of a law passed Tuesday by Congress. Effective (date), employers will no longer be able to take a business tax deduction for the cost of employee health benefits.

 

This measure was proposed by the Bush Administration. 7th District Congressman Roy Blunt voted in favor of this bill, as did Senators Bond and Talent of Missouri.

 

If you lose your health coverage in the next few months, please remember who is responsible. For more information, please visit www.radiofreeheartland.com.

American foreign policy today has little to do with diplomacy, but rather is based on unilateral doctrine of telling the offending nation what we want it to do, and then if it balks, sending in gun boats to enforce our rule. It's succeeded in turning much of the world against America when we need all the support we can get. The dollar continues to lose value against the euro. Our trade deficit is higher than ever. Our debt is soaring. At a recent auction of treasury securities, foreigners who hold about half of the U.S. debt, refused to even bid on our bonds because they are so lousy.

True to form, Bush let the hog into the kitchen garden again. He put Porter Goss, a nasty, arrogant man, in as DCI with orders to “weed out” any and all CIA agents who have been leaking negative information about him. Goss, who has the intelligence and sensitivity of a pit bull, is doing what the Master told him to but with utterly disastrous  results. The CIA has very few really competent agents these days and most of them are going to resign, either singly or en masse. What is really worse is that many of them have made off with the most secret of reports proving that the CIA warned the Bush ninnies in plenty of time about the Iraq situation but Bush/Rove chose to ignore them. I have seen some of these papers and if the disaffected agents make good on their intentions of sending them off to the media, both domestic and foreign, Bush will be lynched by an enraged public and they will find some kind of a hoist to haul the bloated and thrashing body of Karl Rove up right beside him.

What the dominance of right-wing propaganda in talk radio has meant has been a relentless campaign of hatred and demonization directed at liberals, one specifically geared toward a rural audience. And it has worked, largely because Democrats have blithely done little or nothing to counter it.

The radio talkers, Limbaugh and Savage especially, feed their audiences a steady diet of venom and bile. Liberals look down on people in farm country, they are told, constantly. They don't share your values. They have nothing but contempt for you. As far as they're concerned, you all can just go extinct.

It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it's palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.

One of the keys to this dynamic is that both sides have been portraying the conflict in terms of broad stereotypes of urban, suburban and rural dwellers. When the red-state ideologues view the political landscape, they see pockets of godless, atheistic crypto-socialists populating the blue urban centers. For blue-state ideologues, the results of the 2004 election are proof that rural America is populated largely with gun-toting, Bible-thumping moralists who condone bigotry.

It's clear that conservatives have neither the incentive nor the intention of breaking this cycle; after all, they have benefited from it. It is indeed entirely by their design. If liberals are interested in breaking the cycle, they're going to have to discard their stereotypes.

... we should never forget that the enemy is a mysteriously paradoxical phenomenon. It has both a subjective and an objective face. While failing to acknowledge our own culpability in creating enemies puts us at risk of becoming executioners, being blind to the objective facticity of evil contains the danger of rendering us its victims. As Albert Camus said, our task as human beings is to be neither victims nor executioners. This requires the courage to renounce both the extreme of punctilious rectitude that perceives only those evils external to itself, and the extreme of romanticism that reduces evil to an internal and solely subjective event.

The Administration is clearing the decks for the second term. Out with the old & tired,, in with new ideas, etc. How’s about the mainstream media does the same? Burn up half the deadwood, ease the ossified elements off the stage, bring in new writers and editors and announcers and producers. If they can do it at State, they could do it at CBS.

Yes, yes, I know. The State Department is just that. But CBS is the news.

No worries, Lileks. I'm sure the Bush appointees at FCC will be sure that the only reporters who are loyal to President Bush will be allowed to keep their jobs. But I wonder what "new ideas" he thinks the White House can think up, now that they've eliminated anyone who actually thinks?

 

Here's a terrifying glimpse into the darkness that is the faith-based reality brain: Condi v. Hillary, 2008.

 

This Glenn Reynolds post is alarming on several levels.

President Bush is obviously very comfortable with her [Condi] and with her judgment, and she's undoubtedly up to speed on events.  And they're used to working together in secrecy.  I'm reminded of this interesting bit from Bush's surprise trip to Baghdad last Thanksgiving:

Bush slipped away from his home without notice Wednesday evening with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, both of them disguised with baseball caps.  Bush told reporters that they looked like a "normal couple."  Bush then flew to Washington to pick up aides and a handful of reporters sworn to secrecy.

The white President and his black female National Security Advisor, looking like a "normal couple."  And, of course, they did.  There was a time, not so long ago, when not many people would have imagined those words coming unconsciously from the lips of a Republican President from the South.  (The Democratic Party still thinks we live in that time, which is one reason why it lost the election.)  As I said, Bush is comfortable with Rice, and that's an advantage.

I'm not sure what time Glenn thinks the Dems are still living in. Is he saying the Dem party is more racist than the Rep party? And what percentage of the African-American vote did Bush win on November 2? Did he hit double digits?

 

(A few months ago I was in a small restaurant in midtown Manhattan with a very racially mixed clientele. There was a TV at the bar. Condi's image came on the screen. Every African-American in the place booed.) 

 

Glenn also says the Purge is good because some new people "might bring in a new perspective." Not when the "new people" are the President's "old people" chosen on the basis of how slavishly they agree with Dubya's every fart, they won't. 

 

The best response, though, is the Rottweiller's. If the nice doggie's guest poster g. turner were deliberately writing irony, it would be brilliant irony. Unfortunately, he isn't.

 

The comments are priceless, too. Just be warned not to read any of this before breakfast or on a very full stomach. A stiff drink might help. But if you have a weak heart or high blood pressure, you might want to skip it altogether.

 

Meanwhile, the crew at Little Green Footballs (to which I'm not linking) is working overtime to justify a U.S. marine's shooting of a wounded and unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque. 

I don’t know the full story yet, but the mujahideen are well-known for fighting until martyrdom, blowing themselves up, hiding weapons, and treachery, and I am extremely skeptical of this report. A quick Google lookup on Kevin Sites [the NBC correspondent who caught the shooting on film] reveals quite a bit of admiration at lefty sites for his past work, which causes my antennae to tingle.

In one short paragraph we go from blaming the prisoner for getting shot to blaming the report itself on "lefty" news media bias.   

 

I admit, part of me wants to just abandon the nation to these goons and let them run it into the ground. There are still a few misbegotten souls (i.e., Joe Lieberman) who think that somehow these people can be worked with. I suppose you can work with a rabid pit bull, also, but I'd advise against it.

 

U.S. officials and foreign policy analysts said Monday that by agreeing to Powell's departure and approving a purge by new CIA chief Porter Goss, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney appear to be eliminating the few independent centers of power in the U.S. national security apparatus and cementing the system under their personal control.

Powell and his State Department team - quietly backed by the intelligence community - argued often for a foreign policy that was more inclusive of allies and that relied on diplomacy and coercion rather than on force to deal with adversaries.

They lost more battles than they won.

Powell, who friends said had hoped to stay on a little longer, is virtually certain to be replaced at the State Department by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who is far closer personally to Bush.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a major architect of the Iraq war along with Bush and Cheney, appears to be staying for now, signaling that the White House believes its much-criticized Iraq policies are on the right track.

"Letting him go would be an admission of failure," said one senior administration official who, like others, requested anonymity because of the White House's distaste for dissent.

"Now," the official said, "they've got no one left to blame but themselves if things don't go right."

"We are seeing the consummation of the revolution," said Ivo Daalder, a scholar at the Washington-based Brookings Institution and author of a book on Bush's foreign policy.

"Anybody who thought that a `Bush 2' foreign policy would be a more moderate, multilateral, (John) Kerry-like foreign policy just doesn't understand this president, or this election," Daalder said.

Goss, a former Republican congressman from Florida, and a team of four aides he brought from the House Intelligence Committee, have begun a post-election purge of the Operations Directorate that's infuriated and alarmed current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

Many officials believe that the CIA, particularly the DO, as the Operations Directorate is known, is in dire need of reform. The agency was largely unable to penetrate either al-Qaida or Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime and critics charge that it's become too risk-averse and bureaucratic.

But, they said, the way Goss and his aides have proceeded has caused turmoil during heightened intelligence-gathering challenges. It smacks of partisanship and retaliation for the agency's production of analysis that doesn't support White House policy, they said. ...

"What Goss has done with his four minions is just appalling because it strikes at the heart of morale, which was not good to begin with," said Stanley Bedlington, a counterterrorism expert who spent 17 years at the CIA. "To upset the intelligence machine to the extent that it has been upset is the height of foolishness."

On every significant point of conflict between the Bush administration and the country's cadre of intelligence professionals, the Bush political appointees turned out to be wrong. Often very wrong, and with disastrous consequences. Sometimes the intel folks were wrong too; but when that was so, the appointees were always more wrong.

This is not argumentative or hyperbole or even up for much serious dispute.

And the upshot of all that we've seen, the result of all those struggles over the last three years is that the 'appointees' are purging the 'professionals'. Another way to put it is that the folks who were always wrong and often catastrophically wrong are rooting out the folks who were often right and sometimes somewhat wrong. The answer to politicized intelligence, it turns out, is a more thorough politicization of intelligence and the elimination of those who resisted political pressure.

The day after the election, the Times reported that Bush's new CIA director, the politically programmed Porter Goss, was moving to undercut and alter an 800-page report by the supposedly independent CIA Inspector General. The IG was asked by Congress in 2002 to determine "whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable" for any mistakes that might've contributed to the failure to stop the attacks. The report was finished in July but was never turned over to the intelligence committees that mandated it, and now Goss wants it whitewashed of names. Goss even spurned 9-11 family members who met with him in September to seek its release, as well as the Republican chair of the House committee. Of course, two other Iraq CIA studies—one in Congress and one by a new Bush commission—have also been mothballed.

Bush has to keep the CIA under control to cover his own butt. I only hope the officials who are leaving write big, fat books. 

... conservatives have complained about "activist" judges who allegedly impose their own liberal dictates on the country with no legal basis. Taking up this rallying cry is one way Republicans won the South. Even southern conservatives don't publicly complain about Brown anymore, of course. But denouncing activist judges is now Republican boilerplate.   

What the record shows is that in the broad area of civil liberties -- gay rights, abortion, affirmative action, establishment of religion -- Bush's record of judicial appointments is the most conservative of any modern president, according to an academic analysis of 70,000 district court opinions by Robert Carp of the University of Houston and other scholars.

Bush's judicial choices are more conservative than Republican Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, Carp's analysis showed.

These judges are "extraordinarily conservative, the most conservative of any president I have data for," on civil liberties cases, Carp said. "There is a very, very significant difference, even from Reagan and Bush Sr. judges."  [Link]