A quantum of umbrage: What are you, cracked?

In the beginning, there was Ken Ham of the creationist shop Answers in Genesis, also head of the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. He was an anti-science loon, but no one outside of his little fundamentalist niche had any idea who he was. And it was good.

Then Bill Nye unwisely agreed to <airquotes>debate</airquotes> Ham, an otherwise-pointless exercise in which Nye's credentials and name recognition gave Ham the PR boost he needed to attract attention with silliness like this.

And last week, when Ham should have been whiling away his time doing the daily crossword in pencil and waiting for the phone to ring, he uncorked this bit of wisdom.

On Sunday, Ken Ham, president and founder of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis (best known for debating Bill Nye), wrote a blog post calling for the end of the U.S. space program.

Why? Well, according to Ham, who also runs the Creation Museum in Kentucky, there’s no point in spending money on finding extraterrestrial life for a couple of reasons: First, the search is a deliberate rebuking of God, and second because aliens are already damned to hell.

“I’m shocked at the countless hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent over the years in the desperate and fruitless search for extraterrestrial life,” Ham wrote.

“Of course, secularists are desperate to find life in outer space, as they believe that would provide evidence that life can evolve in different locations and given the supposed right conditions!” Ham continued later in the post.

Apart from the fact that it's not very many degrees of separation from this argument back to the one that the church used to condemn Galileo when he got crossways with them, at least we can take comfort from the fact that no one in any authoritative position today will bother to get themselves tied up in the question of whether or not extraterrestrials have souls as Christians understand the notion. Right?

Sigh. Apparently not:

Pope Francis has said that he would be willing to baptise aliens if they came to the Vatican, asking “who are we to close doors” to anyone - even Martians.

In a homily yesterday dedicated to the concepts of acceptance and inclusion, Francis recalled a Bible story about the conversion of the first pagans to Christianity, according to reports on Vatican Radio.

He said Catholicism was a church of “open doors”, and that it was up to Christians to accept the Holy Spirit however “unthinkable” and “unimaginable” it appeared.

Describing how, according to the Bible, Peter was criticised by the Christians of Jerusalem for making contact with a community of “unclean” pagans, Francis said that at the time that too was “unthinkable”.

“If, for example, tomorrow an expedition of Martians came to us here and one said ‘I want to be baptised!’, what would happen?”

Clarifying that he really was talking about aliens, the Pope said: “Martians, right? Green, with long noses and big ears, like in children’s drawings.”

Well, as long as the "unthinkable" and "unimaginable" aren't extended to include ordaining women, I suppose it's okay.

Actually, many people think it's more likely to be Zeta Reticulans than Martians when the aliens come, although I'm sure for many Christian Americans it doesn't matter as long as they're not Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, or El Salvadoreans.

But I'd like to imagine that all of this fooforaw about whether aliens have a soul would display at least the Scholastic dignity once given to debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But it doesn't even clear that bar, first of all because of all the other things to which many of these folks are eager to ascribe souls – and religious rights under the Constitution.

But mainly because it all feels just too much like this:

Vern: Do you think Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman?

Teddy: What are you, cracked?

Vern: Why not? I saw the other day. He was carrying five elephants in one hand!

Teddy: Boy, you don't know nothing! Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman's a real guy. There's no way a cartoon could beat up a real guy.

Which actually, come to think about it, sounds a lot like Ken Ham debating Bill Nye.

Quote of the day: Special privileges

The “Black Mass” is merely a satanic parody of the Catholic mass — which, while it may be offensive to some Catholics, is totally harmless in practice. Of course, the idea of Catholics demanding special privileges is not rare, but to be expected; one wonders if Satanist child abusers could claim that their church would deal with the matter internally.

- Sean McElwee, cataloging the discontents of fundamentalism and its selective hijacking of the Enlightenment.

And this is why Bill Nye did none of us any favors

Ken Ham was far along the road to to well-earned obscurity. Now, fueled by the publicity of his debate a few weeks ago with Bill Nye, he's a Name again, bookers have rediscovered his phone number, his Dinosaur Dressage Dude Ranch has gotten an influx of money, and Time.com is not merely acknowledging his existence but giving him a platform from which to biblically nitpick the upcoming "Noah" movie like it was an episode of classic Star Trek. None of this represents progress for humankind.

And here's the joke: He's upset that the physicaly impossible events portrayed in the Genesis story are being retold – in a Russell Crowe movie! – with insufficient respect for the facts.

But ["Noah" director Darren] Aronofsky has been clear that he intends for the film to appeal to believers of all faiths as well as nonbelievers. He told the Reporter that he wanted to create “this fantastical world à la Middle-earth that they wouldn’t expect from their grandmother’s Bible school.” After all, the movie is a little more than two hours and the story in the Bible is all of four chapters, the majority of which dwells on the construction of the ark and the duration of the rain.

So even though "Noah" is, by Aronofsky's admission, one of the biggest-budget pieces of obvious troll-bait to come along in quite a while, Ham is getting his fifteen minutes over this, and he was only there to be found because the debate with Bill Nye gave him his own little PR renaissance (although he might object to the icky secular overtones of the word).

You do not "win" a debate with a professional fact-denier like Ham, a man who boasted that no facts could make him change his position on evolution, any more than you could "win" a debate with the anti-vaccine crowd. You simply do what you can to keep them from rubbing off on your clothes.

Probably the only reason this didn't happen sooner is because it couldn't: It was only episode #1.

Via Raw Story (whose use of the phrase "appeared to be an editing error" after this incident happened on a FOX affiliate in Oklahoma shows a touching, almost child-like faith):

In what appeared to be an editing error, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma managed to remove the only mention of evolution from Sunday night’s Cosmos science documentary by cutting only 15 seconds from the broadcast.

The much-anticipated reboot of Carl Sagan’s legendary Cosmos premiered on Sunday with an overview of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the advent of humans.

It wasn’t until the last 10 minutes of the show that host Neil deGrasse Tyson hinted at human evolution. “We are newcomers to the Cosmos,” he explained. “Our own story only begins on the last night of the cosmic year.”

“Three and a half million years ago, our ancestors — your and mine left these traces,” Tyson said, pointing to footprints. “We stood up and parted ways from them. Once we were standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated on the ground. Now, we were free to look up and wonder.”

But for viewers of KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City, that 15 second paragraph was replaced by an awkwardly-inserted commercial for the evening news. The edit was caught on video and uploaded to YouTube by Adam Bates.

Before/after videos available at the link.

When I heard that the "Cosmos" reboot was going to be on FOX, I wondered how on earth it could work without a hitch. Asked and answered, I suppose.

The unforgiving minute: Awkward

This story has several payoffs:

(1) The grudging admission by the evangelical megachurch leaders involved that an outbreak of measles in 2013 in the United States “is a really big deal.”

(2) Their newfound conviction that Jesus, in his wisdom, has abruptly declared an ad hoc suspension of his previous rule about vaccination.

(3) The calling to mind of that great Mark Twain simile: “as nervous as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis” (emphasis added):

"We're going to talk about some things affecting our church, and as we go through it, we remain steadfast that Jesus is more than enough," she told the congregation. "There has been a ... confirmed case of the measles from the Tarrant County Public Health Department. And that is a really big deal in that America, the United States has been essentially measles free for I think it's 10 years. And so when measles pops up anywhere else in the United States, the health department -- well, you know, it excites them."

Pearsons went on to say that the church was offering free vaccination clinics, and urged those who did not attend to quarantine themselves at home for two weeks.

But the call for vaccinations was made awkward by the fact that Pearsons' father, televangelist Kenneth Copeland, has promoted the idea that vaccines may lead to autism, according to the Dallas Observer.

Although why people like this aren't ridden out of town on a rail remains a mystery to me.

Minute's up.

Seven years ago at p3: “This isn't a concept open to interpretation or debate, it's the law.”

I was pleased to report that Oregon's educational system doesn't teach about Adam and Eve riding a dinosaur:

While Oregon's once-excellent public education system is woefully underfunded, thanks to 15 years of diligent work by the anti-tax fetishists, at least what our kids are managing to learn is from the 21st century, not the 14th.

Quote of the day: Where the money is

Here's Charles Simic on the end of the American value of knowing very much:

[T]here’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.

Must read.

House GOP budget priorities: Walking the fine line between "doomed" and "less-doomed"?

You can't make this stuff up:

A group of Republican lawmakers have written to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and its Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee recommending that funds for NASA's climate change research satellites be shifted to human spaceflight, reports Space News today.

The letter to Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) reportedly was signed by Reps. Pete Olson (R-TX), Bill Posey (R-FL), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Sandy Adams (R-FL), Rob Bishop (R-UT), and Mo Brooks (R-AL). All have districts with interests in the human spaceflight program.

Many Republican Members of Congress are skeptical that climate change is human-induced and in the past have not been particularly supportive of NASA programs focused on climate change research. Recommendations to cut those programs thus are not surprising, whether the money is reallocated to other space activities or to deficit reduction.

The House Republican leadership is expected to introduce the latest Continuing Resolution (CR) later this week, perhaps Thursday, with a vote anticipated next week.

As TPM dryly observes about the "Abandon Earth letter:"

Although the signatories don’t explicitly state that the goal of shifting funding from climate research into manned spaceflight is to find a new home for the 350 million people of the United States, one can only assume that they support that goal.

The logic might run approximately as follows: Rather than spend all that money on climate-change science (in someone else's district) in a futile effort to rescue our doomed planet, we should divert the funding to manned space flight projects -- bringing more federal money to their own districts in the near term and presumably allowing us eventually to move to another, less-doomed planet later on.

Well, actually, as it turns out, you really can make this stuff up:

Surprising as it feels to say it, the Abandon Earthers could be onto something here. The only question is: Who do we put in the B Ark?

Personally, I think it would be really nice to know I'm going to be relocating to a planet where someone had already established limited government and low taxes for us. Don't you?

(Note to Facebook friends: If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post, below, to see this video clip.)

Query, re: textbook selection in Texas

Twenty years ago, I directed a master's thesis on the evolving structure, strategies, and tactics of the conservative Christian 'creationist movement' through the lens of the battle to control textbook content. The thesis was quite good, a tribute to the smarts and hard work of the candidate more than to any unusual gifts on my part as advisor.

The big whack of the textbook market controlled by Texas (then as now), and the Lone Star State's receptiveness to culture-war rhetoric of the era, made the Texas public school system's textbook selection process a critical leverage point for conservatives.

The thesis writer uncovered one odd little wrinkle: When the State Board of Education committee charged with textbook selection decisions heard testimony about any particular book, it was their practice only to allow testimony against whatever book was currently in adoption, not in support of it.

This had the predictable effect of creating a cottage industry for disciplined citizens who regularly appeared at the hearings to expose supposed liberal/secular bias in textbooks currently in use (which, at the time, meant approving references to the theory of evolution). No testimony in support of the book in question would be heard--and since the creationist textbooks were not under review, no discussion of their shortcomings was in order. Creationism wasn't, as a result, introduced into most textbooks, but the one-sided process did help push major publishers to begin simply watering down or omitting discussion of anything to do with the origin and differentiation of species.

("Half a loaf," indeed. The parallels to the August health care town halls and their aftermath are pretty hard to ignore. But I digress.)

I've been trying--without success--to find out if that negative-comments-only rule is still part of the textbook selection process in Texas today. Does anyone know?

The unforgiving minute

And if students wore Nike shirts, would this improperly associate the school with controversial theories like gravity?

T-shirts worn by members of the Smith-Cotton High School band have been recalled by the school district because they contained images of evolution. The t-shirts featured an image of a monkey holding a brass instrument and progressing through various stages of evolution until eventually becoming a human. “I was disappointed with the image on the shirt,” said Sherry Melby, a band parent who teaches in the district. “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”

I think we can put your fears to rest on that one, Ms. Melby.

Minute's up.

Pierce's 'Idiot America' hits the book stands

I featured the original Esquire article by Charlie Pierce as a p3 Reading 'way back in 2007. In a sentence, his thesis is this: America is hosting a war on expertise--and expertise is losing.

"Idiot America" the Esquire article has become Idiot America the book (subtitled "How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free"), and if it signals bad times for our country, at least we get the fun of catching Pierce making the media rounds this month hawking it.

(In fact, he took part in the Book Salon this morning at FDL.)

Whether the subject is climate change, evolution, stem cell research, sex education, AIDS prevention, or any of a number of other topics where you'd think expertise and the factual record ought to have the rhetorical upper-hand, the trend is the same: Public discourse in America, driven by anti-intellectual fire-breathers, cynical opportunists, and garden-variety cranks--and abetted by the lazy journalistic conventions of sapheaded objectivity--is being hijacked by people who want you to think that education and expertise are the enemy.

Idiot America, says Pierce, is not the collection of people who, for example, believe that Noah's flood created the Grand Canyon and believe that the gift shop at the Grand Canyon should sell books that advance this point of view. Those are just cranks, members of the propeller-hat brigade, and America's always had 'em. In fact Pierce shows a surprising fondness for cranks. Rather, Idiot America is the set of conditions that encourage--often require--these people to be taken seriously by the rest of us, and not as the cranks they are.

Check it out.

Coming next: Idiot America: The Movie?

One of p3's favorite writers, Charlie Pierce, is turning one of our favorite pieces of his, about the rise of "Idiot America" (see the p3 post here), into a book-length treatment.

The only problem, says Pierce? That the idiocy won't stop, or even take a breather, long enough for him to reach a quitting-point for the manuscript.

An embarrassment of riches, you might say.

Maybe it's for the best that Florida's delegates won't count at the Democratic National Convention

Unless perhaps it's the Democratic National Convention of 1692.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic.

Poe's Law: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.

From the Sunshine State comes this sad story:

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land 'O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

"I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, 'Jim, we have a huge issue. You can't take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,'" he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he'd hoped.

"I said, 'Well Pat, can you explain this to me?' 'You've been accused of wizardry,' [he said]. Wizardry?" he asked.

Tampa Bay's 10 talked to the assistant superintendent with the Pasco County School District who said it wasn't just the wizardry and that Piculas had other performance issues, including "not following lesson plans" and allowing students to play on unapproved computers.

Note that well: The original accusation of wizardry (my mind boggles, just typing that) was not dropped; the school assistant superintendent simply said the issue "wasn't just the wizardry." There's still the wizardry, of course, but now there's other stuff about not following lesson plans too.

But mostly, yeah--it's the wizardry.

(The Tampa TV station's web site has no embeddable links to the story, but it's available here.)

At the risk of being waterboarded myself--the technique was invented and perfected by the Spanish Inquisition for moments just like this, you know--I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Here, courtesy of IIJustinPwnzII, is the technology that this school's administrators were unable to distinguish from magic:

Yes, there you have it: The advanced technology of Scotch Tape, indistinguishable from supernatural power.

(Handy hint for school administrators: If you tie IIJustinPwnzII to a chair and throw him in the pond--and he doesn't float--that's good news; it means he isn't, or wasn't, a witch. Although you'll need a lot of chairs and a pretty big pond to be sure: My YouTube keyword search for "toothpick magic" turned up dozens of clips explaining the trick, many of them by young people, showing just how far Satan's familiars are willing to sink to further their nefarious ends. It's going to keep you awfully busy, tracking them all down; perhaps robes and hoods would be useful to keep administrative morale up. Torches would be a nice festive touch, too.)



Irony abounds in a story like this, the most glaring of which being that Piculas's career may be over not because he believes in wizardry, but because the administrators do, or at least are unwilling to contradict whoever (a parent?) reported the allegedly supernatural incident.

(Perhaps they're keeping their powder dry, waiting to see if this whole "Enlightment" thing will blow over.)

Meanwhile, one imagines the administrators of Rushe Middle School during a solar eclipse, running onto the playground, banging pots and pans together to chase away the dragon devouring the sun.

There are not words harsh enough to express the contempt this behavior deserves. Substitute teacher Piculas should not have to forfeit his job and career over this; the school administrators who allowed this to happen should. These are "educators" who've looked at 500 years of intellectual progress and said, "enough of that." Any parents who caused this to happen, or remained silent while it did, deserve no less contempt and ridicule.

Imagine what would happen if these self-congratulatory know-nothings, these finest of minds from the Fifteenth Century, these latter-day Theodorics of York, found out that some teachers actually have in their homes a magic box that can conjure up the dead in its ghastly, flickering bluish glow? Elvis! Right there! Singing and dancing on the Ed Sullivan Show!

"Necromancy! Witchcraft!"

"Burn them!"


(Image of the Salem witch trials via Wikipedia.)

Postscript: If you haven't yet read Charles S. Pierce's "Greetings from Idiot America," now would be a good time.


[Want to share/recommend this post to others? Click the Digg button below.]

Oppression and resistance at your local bookstore

Who knew that the dominant paradigm we would have to subvert was the Dewey Decimal System?

Comes now Portland State grad student Barbara Shaw, who discovered while working on her doctoral dissertation on the evolution of sloths, armadillos, and anteaters (Hey, hey! Don't laugh! That's a totally down-to-earth topic compared to mine!) that Powell's bookstores, like almost bookstores and libraries, follow standard cataloging conventions (Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress) to shelve their books by topic.

On the face of it, that's no bad thing. The alternative would be anarchy. Do you hear me? Anarchy!^*

Problem is, both of those cataloging systems lump intelligent design, creation science, and their ilk in with serious, actual books on science.

The Merc's Amy Ruiz picks up the story from here:

Books on intelligent design—or, the idea that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection," according to the conservative Christian Discovery Institute think tank, a leading proponent of the notion—shouldn't be in the science section, Shaw argues.

"They're not science. Intelligent design by its very definition is invoking supernatural powers," she adds. The problem is, libraries and bookstores use the Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress' systems to shelve books, and both systems lump intelligent design books in with science. A more appropriate Dewey Decimal location would be the "science and religion" section, Shaw argues.

Indeed, the issue of whether intelligent design is science or religion—and, specifically, whether it should be taught in public school science curriculums—has been addressed in the federal courts, with Judge John E. Jones III ruling in December 2005 that intelligent design "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

According to the story, Shaw and others are petitioning the Library of Congress to reclassify "intelligent design" and "creation science" somewhere away from "science"--perhaps to "speculative fiction." (Oregon Department of Education rules specifically prohibit teaching "creationism and/or 'intelligent design'" in the science classroom.)

But the coolest part of the whole story is this:

Shaw has heard there are "guerilla evolutionists" around the country who sneak around libraries and bookstores, re-shelving books.

Good luck to Barbara.

^*Although I posted it this morning, I wrote this yesterday, Guy Fawkes Day; I had to work the A-word in somehow.

(Image via Sticker Giant.)

A sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice

News item:

The White House significantly edited testimony prepared for a Senate hearing on the impact of climate change on health, deleting key portions citing diseases that could flourish in a warmer climate.

The White House on Wednesday denied that it had “watered down” the congressional testimony that Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had given the day before to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But a draft of the testimony submitted for White House review shows that six pages of details about specific disease and other health problems that might flourish if the Earth warms were not delivered at the hearing.[…]

"It was eviscerated," said a CDC official, familiar with both versions [...]

Amazing: Event this late date, with crimes still to cover up and wars still to instigate, they've still got time to meddle with things like this. You have to admire their determination to watch over the details (unless, of course, it's billions of dollars lost by the Provisional Authority, or by one of the government contractors, etc.).

What a frustrating thing it must be: To work your whole life in your profession, finally making it to the point where you're the one who gives expert testimony in your field to Congress, only to see it censored to pieces by some 22-year-old Regent University biblical history grad, or an industry hack, simply because you had the bad historical luck to hit your career peak during the Bush administration.

I think that, assuming a Democratic president after the next election, they should have a prominent web site called This Week in Lost Science: "This week, the government released the following information that had been kept from you for seven years . . ." Likewise, the press secretary could begin each press conference by announcing that morning's Uncensored Fact Of The Day. And bits of Uncensored Science could be repeated in white lettering across the obligatory blue background when all government officials speak on camera. (Let's get subliminal persuasion working for us on this thing.) And so on.

(Hat tip to Doctor Beyond.)

House to investigate Klamath salmon kill-off

Here's good news:

The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee said today his panel will hold a hearing into the role Vice President Dick Cheney may have played in the 2002 die-off of about 70,000 salmon near the California-Oregon border.

Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., said the Democratic-led committee has been examining what he called the Bush administration's "penchant to favor politics over science in the implementation of the Endangered Species Act."

In light of allegations made about Cheney's role in developing a 10-year water plan for the Klamath River that courts later called arbitrary and in violation of the Endangered Species Act, a hearing is worthwhile, Rahall said. He and other Democrats charged that Cheney's action resulted in the largest adult salmon kill in the history of the West. [...]

West Coast Democrats called for the hearing Wednesday after the Washington Post reported that Cheney may have played a key role in the 2002 salmon die-off.

"The ramifications of that salmon kill are still being felt today as returns to the Klamath River are so low that commercial, sport and tribal fishing seasons have been curtailed for the past three years," 36 House Democrats said in a letter to Rahall calling for the hearing.

The article includes my favorite observation about this business to date:

"It certainly appears this administration will stop at nothing to achieve political gain from natural resources disasters," Rahall said.

Amen to that.

Smith and the salmon: If everyone's interests lie in the same direction, do you really need a conspiracy?

TJ at Loaded Orygun has exposed and connected more dots in the Gordon Smith/Klamath Basin affair.

On one side, you've got Dick Cheney, for whom the Klamath Basin decision was all about using his bureaucratic powers to curb agency regulation of corporate activities in general. On the other, you've got Karl Rove, for whom the overriding concern was the electoral math for 2002, 2004, and beyond.

And somewhere in the middle is Oregon's junior Senator who, as LO shows, seems to be almost prescient in his ability to politically surf the waves Cheney was creating (as well as being ready to seize any local advantage Rove's political calculus would create for him).

We're finally there. I've been waiting for weeks to say it:

What did Gordon Smith know, and when did he know it?

Stay tuned.

The IG's 2004 report to Kerry re Northwest water policy

Following up:

Here's the (apparently) complete text of the Interior Dept.'s IG 2004 report, at the request of Senator (and then presidential candidate) John Kerry, into the decision-making by the Interior Department behind releasing Klamath Basin water, needed by protected Coho salmon, for irrigation on local farms:

March 1, 2004

The Honorable John F. Kerry
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510-2102

Dear Senator Kerry:

This is in response to your August 6, 2003 letter in which you requested that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) conduct an investigation into the Department’s management of water resources in the Klamath Basin. You directed our attention to a July 30, 2003 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Oregon Water Saga Illuminates Rove’s Methods with Agencies” and called into question the Interior Department’s ability to meet its legal responsibilities in the Klamath Basin.

In your letter, you aptly observe that “[c]ommercial fishermen, Native Americans, irrigators, conservationists and federal officials have been engaged in a contentious regulatory proceeding over water management in the Klamath Basin that dates back several years.” Clearly, the management of the water resources in the Klamath River Basin Project by the Department of the Interior has been fraught with criticism and contention from all sides, two of which are within the Department of the Interior itself. The concerns you advanced based on the issues raised in the Wall Street Journal article, as well as those raised in other venues, made the Klamath matter ripe for investigation by the OIG.

As outlined in my letter to you dated August 28, 2003, the OIG focused its investigation on three areas:

1. What would be the normal regulatory process in a matter such as this, assuming that this was an Administrative Procedures Act-governed regulatory matter.

2. What actually did happen in the administrative process in the Klamath Basin matter.

3. How the Klamath Basin matter deviated from the norm (if at all) with special attention being paid to:

a. The science
b. Any suppressed information
c. Any evidence of political interference

In conducting our investigation, we interviewed all of the key individuals – some of them several times – who were involved with the Klamath River Basin Project. These individuals represent all aspects of involvement in the Klamath Project – from staff-level employees of the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) to the highest-level decision makers within the Department; the independent scientists charged with reviewing competing reports and information; and the government scientist who filed for Whistleblower protection with the Office of Special Counsel. We reviewed hundreds of documents, including the documents contained in the Administrative Record supporting BOR’s final decision regarding the Klamath Project’s Operations, as well as documents filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California where suit had been filed challenging BOR’s decision-making process.

As a result of our investigation, we found fiercely competing interests among the Klamath Tribes, irrigators, fishermen, environmentalists and even among opposing Federal officials relating to the use and/or conservation of limited water resources in the Klamath Project. We also found that these interests have highly charged differences of opinion concerning what constitutes the best scientific and commercial data available, how the Project should be operated, and how to accommodate specific, diverse and competing interests. Unfortunately, when the competing interests are mutually exclusive of one another – as in the Klamath matter – accommodation becomes impracticable.

We determined that the administrative process followed in this matter did not deviate from the norm. Our review of the available documents and the rulings of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California support the conclusion that the Department had compiled the necessary information to support its various decisions related to the Klamath Project.

None of the individuals we interviewed – including the Whistleblower – was able to provide any competent evidence that the Department utilized suspect scientific data or suppressed information that was contained in economic and scientific reports related to the Klamath Project. To the contrary, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences in its Final Report, issued October 2003, specifically disagrees with the criticism that had been directed against the Federal agencies for using “junk science”. This position is bolstered by the findings of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which concluded that in light of the conflicting state of scientific evidence, the decisions were based on the best available science at the time.

Finally, we found no evidence of political influence affecting the decisions pertaining to the water in the Klamath Project. The individuals at the working-levels denied feeling pressured at all. Based on our experience in past OIG investigations, these would have been the most likely sources to provide evidence of such influence. Higher-level decision makers, both political and career, also denied feeling any political pressure to render a decision one way or another. Collectively, these decision makers described a process of thorough and thoughtful consideration of all the competing interests and requirements, although frustrated by the fact that certain interests and requirements were mutually exclusive. The consistent denial of political influence by government officials was corroborated by the view of the outside scientists and one former DOI official, all of whom denied feeling any pressure – political or otherwise.

While we confirmed a passing reference to the Klamath River Basin Project during an otherwise-unrelated presentation to senior Interior officials, we found nothing to tie Karl Rove’s comments or presentation to the Klamath decision-making process. The former DOI official, who had spoken to the Wall Street Journal about Rove’s presentation, clarified to our investigators that his use of the term “chilling effect” was not related to the Klamath Project. Of the multiple DOI officials we interviewed who attended the presentation, only one person specifically recalled the context in which Rove mentioned Klamath. This official recalled that Rove merely cited Klamath as an example of the complex problems the Department had to deal with.

The complexity of the issues involved and the ferocity of the debate clearly fueled the flames of suspicion and distrust in this matter. Based on the results of our investigation, however, we conclude that the Department conducted itself in keeping with the administrative process governing the Klamath Project, that the science and information utilized supported the Department’s decisions, and that no political pressure was perceived by any of the key participants.

I hope this information puts to rest your concerns. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call me at (202) 208-5745.

Sincerely,


/signed/
Earl E. Devaney Inspector General

United States Department of the Interior
OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL
Washington, DC 20240

At a whopping 1064 words, this could easily be mistaken for the cover letter to an actual report, but carrying the tiny thing over to the light we discover that this is, in fact, the complete works.

(Actually, it appears that if you request an investigation from the IG and, in his judgment, he comes up with nothing, you get a brief, detail-free letter like this, but if there appears to be something potentially actionable--if, say, it looks like the owner of the Washington Redskins is cutting down trees he shouldn't be--you get more specifics, although sometimes more redactions, too.)

You'll notice this report is conspicuously short on proper nouns--like names. Rove's name is mentioned in passing, but there's also no indication that anyone at the White House was contacted directly in connection with this (although we know that both Gordon Smith and Greg Walden contacted the White House about it at the time).

Many questions here: What to make of the competing science claims upon which the final DOI decision was (and wasn't) based? How diligently did the IG look into "evidence of political interference?

But I'm still curious about this: There's considerable evidence now indicating that by 2002 Karl Rove was happily throwing compliance with the 1939 Hatch Act (its full name, by the way, is "An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities," and now you know why)* under the train.

But how aware was Smith that Rove was blurring of the political/civil service lines here in Oregon as he was running for re-election?

(Hat tip to TJ for helping bag this. The boy does love his work.)


*And yes, that would be the same Hatch Act that fuming Clinton- and Gore-phobes pointed to in 1996 in that flap about Gore using White House phones for making donor calls.

Where's the outrage now, guys?

Salmon don't vote. Dead salmon, doubly so.

Last week we were looking at how the dead-fish smell of Karl Rove's plan to wring the maximum Republican vote-getting potential out of ever cabinet department (starting with throwing the Hatch Act out the window) made its way, via the Klamath River, into the 2002 re-election of Gordon Smith.

In a nutshell: Rove's traveling PowerPoint show in early 2002, revving up cabinet department and agency support for GOP candidates that fall, stressed Gordon Smith's re-election vulnerability. Some weeks later, the Dept. of the Interior apparently overruled and overrode science in hand to make sure Klamath River water would be available to area farms (part of the GOP base in Oregon), even at the cost of the endangered Coho salmon whose survival depended on the river running at full.

Over at Loaded Orygun, TJ does a nice bit of assembling a the suspects in the drawing room, and comes up with what I think might be the real dog that didn't bark in the night:

An investigation [by the Interior Department's inspector general, at the request of Senator John Kerry] was done into the possible influence of the White House--but the prime target's top aide can't even remember that there was one, and no pertinent emails outside of White House channels were ever reviewed.

Nobody ever said that an IG investigation has to feel like a full cavity search, but when its occurrence escapes the target's notice, it's fair to wonder if perhaps it might have been carried out with a little too much of the lace hanky touch.

LO's post features a nice document dump, linking to a lot of good background reading on the whole megillah.

Me, I'd love to see that IG report too. Especially in view of Earl E. Devaney's testimony last fall to a House Government Reform subcommittee:

Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior. [...] Ethics failures on the part of senior department officials -- taking the form of appearances of impropriety, favoritism and bias -- have been routinely dismissed with a promise "not to do it again."

Earl E. Devaney is the Interior IG who signed off on that March 1, 2004 report to Senator John Kerry concluding that there was "no basis" for claims that Rove was meddling in the Klamath Basin decisions.

"Short of a crime?" We'll see.

Bush to 27 million Americans (and counting): Drop dead.

(Updated below.)

President Bush, who probably still can't tell you what a blastocyst is, today vetoed a bill that would have increased federal support for stem cell research--thus returning to the scene of his very first ever presidential veto last year.

Well. Let's add up some number on the back of the old envelope, shall we?

21 million Americans with Diabetes
1 million Americans with Parkinson's Disease
5 million Americans with Alzheimer's Disease

So in round numbers, let's call it 27 million Americans (not counting the many who are going to be at risk in the next few years while this opportunity is being pissed away) for whom some of the most promising research toward a cure will go largely unfunded in this country.

Remember when America led the world in things like that?

And all for the sake of that hollow little man in the Oval Office and his ever-dwindling band of supporters, enablers, and fixers.

So if you, or a loved one, have one of these medical conditions, or your medical history says you're likely to face it in the years to come, George Bush has a message for you.

Want to guess what it is?

As John at Americablog notes, it appears the remainder of Mr. Uniter-not-a-Divider's term in office is going to be devoted to "saying no" to the Democrats, regardless of the specifics, regardless of the cost to Americans.

It's all he's got.


(Updated 6/21/07: And the Oregon House Republicans don't have anything more to show for themselves, either.)