July 8, 2006 New York Times

By CARL HULSE. Excerpts:

WASHINGTON, July 7 — Moderate Republicans say a planned summer push by the House leadership on conservative causes like gun rights and new abortion restrictions threatens the re-election prospects of embattled centrists, who are key to the party's drive to hold Congress.

Frustrated and angry, they say the leadership's new American Values Agenda, a list of initiatives heavy on ideological themes, seems short-sighted and ill-timed considering that few conservatives are at serious risk in November.

"It was stupid and gross," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut. "They have this obsession to satisfy conservative Republicans who will probably be re-elected no matter what happens. They get job satisfaction, but they are making it more difficult for me to win my race."

Mr. Shays and others said the announcement of the agenda took them by surprise, particularly after House Republicans seemed to be back on track after a few strong weeks of emphasizing new fiscal controls and a push on national security issues. House moderates have also been supportive of the leadership's hard line against the idea of potential citizenship for illegal immigrants, saying that reflects public sentiment.

But they fear that this new agenda could backfire by stirring independent voters to reject centrist candidates....

In the latest review of House races by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, more than 20 of the 35 Republican seats considered most threatened were closely divided areas of Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania and districts in Arizona, Colorado and Florida where independents could be crucial. Thirteen of the 35 were carried by the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004.

"If you took the top 10 to 20 targeted races, it probably helps about three of them," said Mr. Shays, who said he was so upset by the leadership's agenda that he skipped a meeting of House Republicans rather than risk losing his temper over the initiatives.

In announcing the agenda, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois said that it would allow lawmakers to vote on basic values like the "sanctity of life" while defending the nation's founding principles.....

July 8, 2006

Ukraine's Coalition Unravels in a New Setback

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

MOSCOW, July 7 — President Viktor A. Yushchenko of Ukraine, a Western-leaning reformist who led a wave of popular protests to office, only to stumble badly when tested in parliamentary elections, suffered a new political defeat on Friday when his fragile coalition collapsed in acrimony two weeks after it was formed.

His opponents, joined by a former ally of the president, announced a new coalition and pledged to nominate as prime minister the man Mr. Yushchenko ultimately defeated after those protests overturned a rigged presidential election in 2004.

Friday's events, three and a half months after his party's humiliating showing in parliamentary voting in March, cast new doubts on Mr. Yushchenko's presidency, undermining his efforts to steer Ukraine on a course more closely entwined with Europe....

are neatly "icon-ized" in in this North Korean propaganda poster that someone pointed out to me several years ago.

If you're interested in propaganda, that comes from a good site for more images:

NATIONALISTIC THEMES IN THE ART OF NORTH KOREA.

Having checked that out, and much more of similar, including a rudimentary study of pagentry imagery, in the past, my first thoughts on hearing the missile test news was what wonders might be in store for the engineers responsible for the castration/failure of the long-range uber-phallus missile.

This comment by "Mary from R.I." clearly does not deserve the zero rating you gave it.

Josh Marshall's Basic Guidelines on Comment Ratings:

"....readers should never down-rate comments simply because they disagree with the views expressed.

Readers trying to participate in discussions in good faith should never be given ratings of 1s or 0s. Those ratings are reserved for clearly inappropriate behavior or content -- obscene or offensive language, ethnic slurs, spam, disruptive behavior, extreme ad hominem attacks. This isn't an exhaustive list. But the key point is that you do not give a 1 or 0 to someone's comment just because you think their comment is stupid or because you strongly disagree...."

If it's the result of some ratings war between you and "Mary from R.I.," who I know to have had abused the ratings system in the past, both please stop.

Don't you (and her, if she is also still rating people so ridiculously) see what mockery you make of the ratings system by doing that? The whole point of ratings is not to vote against individual people, no matter what they say, as if you own the website & are able to ban them, but to show them what the community finds as acceptable discourse, hoping that they will adjust their style. When they do adjust their style, and offer civil comments and reasonably interesting debate, the idea is that they no longer deserve downrating. You mock this, you make the system of no possible use to the rest of us, if you participate in silly ratings wars that obviously have nothing to do with the quality of the comment. As the quality of the discourse here deteriorates further from the site's early days, the last thing we need is people making the ratings system a personal tool in some childish war of resentment. I can't see any other possible reason for rating such a comment "zero."

excerpt from June 22 New York Review of Books, Freeman J. Dyson reviewing

"Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" by Daniel C. Dennett:

Let me state frankly my own philosophical prejudices in opposition to Dennett. As human beings, we are groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange universe into which we are born. We have many ways of understanding, of which science is only one. Our thought processes are only partially based on logic, and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires and social interactions. We cannot live as isolated intelligences, but only as members of a working community. Our ways of understanding have been collective, beginning with the stories that we told each other around the fire when we lived in caves. Our ways today are still collective, including literature, history, art, music, religion, and science. Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental or spiritual universe that transcends the material universe. To understand religion, it is necessary to explore it from the inside, as William James explored it in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The testimony of saints and mystics, including the young lady at Sergiev Posad, is the raw material out of which a deeper understanding of religion may grow.

The sacred writings, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran and the Bible, tell us more about the essence of religion than any scientific study of religious organizations. The research that Dennett advocates, using only the scientific tool kit that was designed for a different purpose, will always miss the goal. We can all agree that religion is a natural phenomenon, but nature may include many more things than we can grasp with the methods of science.

Another excerpt that will be of interest to those also interested in the controvery over Barack Obama's speech (note that this article was published considerably prior to the speech):

The control of education is the arena in which political fights between religious believers and civil authorities become most bitter. In the United States these fights are made peculiarly intractable by the legal doctrine of separation of church and state, which forbids public schools to provide religious instruction. Parents with fundamentalist beliefs have a legitimate grievance, being compelled to pay for public schools which they see as destroying the religious faith of their children. This feeling of grievance was avoided in England through the wisdom of Thomas Huxley, a close friend of Charles Darwin and a leading proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution. When public education was instituted in England in 1870, eleven years after Darwin's theory was published, Thomas Huxley was appointed to the royal commission which decided what to teach in the public schools.

Huxley was himself an agnostic, but as a member of the commission he firmly insisted that religion should be taught in schools together with science. Every child should be taught the Christian Bible as an integral part of English culture. In recent times the scope of religious instruction in England has been extended to include Judaism and Islam. As a result of this policy, no strong antagonism between religious parents and public schools has arisen, from 1870 until the present day. The teaching of religion in public schools coincided with a decline of religious belief and a growth of religious tolerance. Children exposed to religion in public schools do not as a rule take it seriously. We do not know whether Thomas Huxley foresaw the decline of religion in England, but there is no doubt that he would have welcomed this unintended consequence of his educational policy.

It is unfortunate that Huxley's solution of the problem of religious education is not available to the United States. Every country is different, especially in matters concerning religion, and no single solution to the problem of religious education fits all. In each country, a workable solution has to be found by political compromise between conflicting views, within the rules imposed by the local culture. To be workable, a solution does not need to be scientifically or philosophically consistent. When I was a boy in England long ago, people who traveled on trains with dogs had to pay for a dog ticket. The question arose whether I needed to buy a dog ticket when I was traveling with a tortoise. The conductor on the train gave me the answer: "Cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs but tortoises is insects and travel free according." The rules governing religious education should be administered with a similar freedom of interpretation.

Latin American journalists who investigate corruption, drug trafficking and other big-bucks crimes are routinely killed. This is especially true in rural areas, but even prominent journalists in capital cities must live as if behind bars and occasionally go into hiding......

In many countries, journalists must also contend with laws that make libel a criminal offense, and use a very broad standard to define libel. Venezuela criminalizes expression deemed disrespectful to public officials even if completely true.

Under pressure, most publishers and editors in Latin America need little convincing to abandon such journalism. After all, serious investigative reporting eats up staff time and the paper's money.....Governments have also learned that bribes can be even more effective than threats....

Despite the obstacles, good investigative reporting exists in Latin America, even at regional newspapers....But there has been a notable decline in reporting from Argentina, Colombia and Peru, all places with strong investigative traditions....

from

New York Times Editorial Observer

Published: July 2, 2006