I do believe that some of the criticism leveled against Expelled is legitimate -- or might be, if we overlooked the behavior of those proposing to care about such standards. For example, I am indeed convinced that a small number of people interviewed were unaware that the final production would be rather in favor of Intelligent Design. Perhaps, in a perfect world, people should always be up-front about their own intentions when interviewing people.

However, I have trouble taking such protests seriously given the apparent hypocrisy. For one, almost all investigative journalism is based on this same technique. You'd never be able to infiltrate a dictatorship or corrupt business if everyone had to announce their ultimate intentions and actions.

"Dear China: I will be visiting your nation soon, carrying a video camera and lots of media. But I am not a tourist, but am actually a journalist looking to document human rights abuses. I agree it would be wrong to mislead you about my intentions..."

Further, some of the people screaming the loudest are those who have used the exact same technique. Dawkins, for example, is protesting -- trusting naif that he is -- that he was "tricked" into appearing in the film. Yet it's seems abundantly clear that he was prepared for the interview, knew who he was talking to, had known in advance to bring along materials which reflected his point of view.

Even more humorously, it seems he has misled others regarding his true intentions, when making some of his own (extremely hate-filled, by the way) film productions:

Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.” She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry”. So I agreed and we fixed a date....

The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.

Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I’m don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped.

The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.

I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.”

Richard said, “It’s not a low grade debunking exercise; it’s a high grade debunking exercise.”

In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.

Hey, but it got him into the interview.

Interesting attempt by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic to position McCain as a die-hard conservative. What of his apparent hatred of American business? His desire to soak the wealthy? What of his unthinking embrace of global warming hysteria? His radical (and utterly failed) attempts to control political speech and spending?

To come up with this interesting outcome, Rauch focuses on (and misunderstands) a single thread in the tapestry of American conservativism -- the influence of Edmund Burke and conservatives' aversion to "revolution":

Alert Washingtonians...

Such as our dear author, no doubt. Not like you rubes reading this blog...

... were treated to an odd juxtaposition not long ago. John McCain was booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the big annual gathering of the right-wing tribes, while trying to establish that he was a conservative. On the same day, across town at the American Enterprise Institute—another conservative stronghold—Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, was warmly received when he touted a new book called Real Change. Never one to go underboard, Ging­rich called for “explosively replac[ing] the failed bureaucracies of the past.” [....]

Burke is the father of modern conservatism, and still its wisest oracle. Tradition-minded but (contrary to stereotype) far from reactionary, he believed in balancing individual rights with social order. The best way to do that, for Burke, was by respecting long-standing customs and institutions while advancing toward liberty and equality. Society’s traditions, after all, embody an evolved collective wisdom that even (or especially) the smartest of individuals cannot hope to understand comprehensively, much less reinvent successfully.

Rauch's implication is essentially that Reagan wasn't a conservative because he believed in "revolution" -- a significant change. To be a conservative today, you have to leave our (rather liberal) order of things alone, not reform it too much. So Gingrich, because he wants a significantly smaller government, is a radical, a revolutionary, and not "conservative", whereas McCain, who whined about "tax breaks for the rich" -- we conservatives should suddenly believe he is one.

(And so, I guess the thinking would go, American conservatives should have supported hard-line Communists in the USSR because they would have preserved the status quo there, too.)

But Burke wasn't against all revolution. He was sympathetic to the American revolution, which was a radical break with a long tradition of monarchy. And he didn't only favor blind incrementalism -- he also favored personal liberty and limited government. And I doubt he would have felt that the modern welfare state should be preserved in the name of maintaining the status quo.

Rauch seems to have overlooked his own thesis:

Above all, [Burke] abhorred utopian reformers, who, by disdaining real-world constraints and overestimating their own intelligence, invariably worsen what they seek to improve.

When American conservatives want to overturn recent changes to government, we're not relying upon a high impression of our own intelligence, and we're certainly not disdaining real-world constraints. (To the contrary, they often compose the entire point of our arguments.) We almost always have an example in the past (and sometimes in the present -- looking to state governments), of how our alternative policies can work. Reagan cut taxes, for example, and the economy improved, and tax receipts increased. We also have mountains of evidence of the harmful impact of long-term welfare programs and fatherless families. Attempts to change such trends aren't based on wishful blank-slate utopian imaginings, but on hard lessons learned, hard evidence gathered.

The left wants a perfect world that never was, based on policies which have never worked, or have never been tried. The right is more than willing to accept even radical changes if it brings us back to a better state, or a situation which has been shown, by some well-documented present or past experiment (preferably several such experiments, or even centuries of history), to be useful or beneficial. There's more to conservativism than mere incrementalism. And undoing a radical leap is not the same thing as enacting one.

Consider educational vouchers: If "conservative" means what Rauch believes, conservatives should oppose any significant change to the status quo of union-dominated government schools. Yet vouchers and school choice have been tried in many places and times, to good effect. So we "conservatives" support the idea, despite the fact it would be a radical change. (Vouchers also imply more individual control, and smaller government, two other important aspects of US conservativism.)

Even more amusingly, Rauch attempts to portray the US welfare state (begun in LBJ's "Great Society" programs which only kicked in at the dawn of the 70s) as the equivalents of Burke's "long-standing customs and institutions" -- yet he refers to Reagan's programs (initiated just one decade later, yet still almost 30 years ago) as "new-fangled." Liberal programs apparently become longstanding traditions the moment they are enacted, but conservative ideas -- even if centuries old and the norm around the world -- are "radical" if they're not the norm here, just now.

Indeed, according to Rauch, this is precisely when American conservativism stopped being conservatism -- when it dared to oppose brand-new liberal changes, back in the 1960s.

If Burke were around today, he might paraphrase Reagan’s famous witticism about the Democratic Party: Burke didn’t leave the conservative movement; it left him. Starting with Barry Goldwater’s campaign of 1964, American conservatism repositioned itself as a revolutionary movement, intent on uprooting illegiti­mate and ineffective liberal structures.

How Orwellian can you get? It's not conservative to oppose radical policies once those polices have been enacted. We must then instantly become supporters of such, apparently -- never mind that they're still brand new. Too funny.

So Rauch's script for US politics goes like this: the Democrats, true their tradition, should proposal radical and untested reforms. Then, even when found to be "illegitimate and ineffective", conservatives should support and defend these new institutions and policies, since they're now the status quo. Next, the Democrats will propose still more radical, untested changes... and so on.

Reductio ad absurdum -- but also a liberal's dream. To say otherwise would be to betray Edmund Burke, right? Hilarious! The man who defended individual rights would now support the Stalinist old guard, once they seized control. This is, apparently, the kind of pithy insight readers of The Atlantic have come to expect.

...utopian reformers, who, by disdaining real-world constraints and overestimating their own intelligence, invariably worsen what they seek to improve.

Who, by the way, is this Jonathan Rauch guy, who is attempting to tell conservatives what their own beliefs should be? Is he an "expert" conservative? One of us? A long-time stalwart of the conservative movement, that he can dictate its terms to others within and without?

No, he is not. He is a gay activist, proponent of gay marriage (which, right or wrong, is yet another one of those never-before-tested radical changes) and is a member of The Brookings Institution, a leftist think tank.

I love the kind of argument where some atheist opines on the real meaning of Christianity, and how their favored person or policy (generally leftist and secular) embodies it far more than some allegedly-Christian right-winger. (While making gross theological errors.) This is the political equivalent: "I, Rauch, being an 'alert Washingtonian', actually understand what conservativism means far more than these so-called conservatives -- Gingrich, Reagan, and most conservative voters."

What was that again, Mr Rauch, about the danger of having a high opinion of our own intelligence?

In truth, I don't mind the outsider lecturing the insiders on their own values: but the outsider must be correct. It can be an effective move, if done right (or done before an audience who can't tell the difference -- as is surely the case here). But if you fail by overlooking something obvious, which insiders easily recognize, you end up looking both uninformed and arrogant.

Via Outside the Beltway:

In an ideal world, the nation’s elite schools would enroll the most qualified students. But that’s not how it works. Applicants whose parents are alums get special treatment, as do athletes and rich kids. Underrepresented minorities are also given preference. Thirty years of affirmative action have changed the complexion of mostly white universities; now about 13 percent of all undergraduates are black or Latino. But most come from middle- and upper-middle-class families. Poor kids of all ethnicities remain scarce. A recent study by the Century–Foundation found that at the nation's 146 most competitive schools, 74 percent of students came from upper-middle-class and wealthy families, while only about 5 percent came from families with an annual income of roughly $35,000 or less.

This was my experience as well: Most the blacks I knew at my fairly-elite university were, in fact, from wealthy families. (My middle-class family was actually poorer than most of theirs, now that I think about it.)

This is a consistent result of such studies: "affirmative action" disproportionately helps the rich and upper-middle-class, and tends to discriminate against the poor. In this debate, "skin color" became a proxy (substitute) for talking about economic status. The reasoning went that minorities are more likely to be poor, so let's help minorities.

The problem is that when you create race-based policies, it is the rich and upper-class who are positioned best to take advantage of them. (Thanks, Harry.) This is true around the world: it is wealthy Dalits, for example, who are best able to take advantage of India's affirmative-action policies, not their poorer brethren who need it most.

Among the consequences of this situation are that (1) many reserved places go unfilled, (2) those places that have been filled have been filled disproportionately by the more fortunate members of the less fortunate groups and (3) those members of these groups who have gone on to higher education have usually gone to the less demanding institutions..., taken longer to graduate, and dropped out much more often than other students.

If you want to help the poor, there's a much simpler and more effective way to do it -- one which also happens not to be racist: Help the poor. If it's true that one minority is poorer than another, you'll then be helping that minority more. And when that's not true, why should we favor of one student who has a preferred skin color over a much poorer student who doesn't? Should we really favor an upper-class black student from New York over an impoverished white child from Appalachia because the former has the preferred skin tone? Are we going to punish certain impoverished children because they were born with the "wrong" appearance, through no fault of their own?

In America's "progressive" universities, the answer is "Yes".

"Social justice" always means doing quite a lot of individual injustice.

Really, there's nothing more to say than that.

The Malthusians were right after all. But only because they grabbed control. Mass starvation in this modern era is a miracle which is only possible through government intervention.

The Scotsman:

UN moves to head off food riots

THE United Nations' secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, yesterday said he was setting up a task force to tackle the global food crisis, in an attempt to avert "social unrest on an unprecedented scale".

"The immediate priority is that we feed the hungry," Mr Ban said after a meeting with UN agency heads and other leading international officials in the Swiss capital, Berne.... In a statement, the UN said that the dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into a challenge "of global proportions".

Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, told a joint news conference: "Though we have seen wheat prices fall over the past few days, rice and corn prices are likely to remain high, and wheat relatively so." ... Concern about soaring food costs and limited supplies has toppled Haiti's government and caused riots in parts of Africa.

Mark Steyn, who was charged as a criminal in Canada for writing a book:

In Haiti, Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office April 12. Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to "global warming" – or, at any rate, the "war on global warming" that Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since last summer and, as columnist Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty and affordable? Well, one out of three ain't bad.

Unlike "global warming," food rioting is a planetwide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.

So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the ecowarriors and introduced some of the "wartime measures" they've been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from "biofuels" by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The United States added to its 51 cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a fivefold increase in "biofuels" production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you've suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it's not "you" who's got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Hey, but at least we feel good about the environment. Al Gore was very proud to have cast the 1994 tie-breaking vote in the Senate mandating ethanol use. "The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be." The time for debate was, if I recall, over. As usual. Senator Paul Simon (of whom I was once a huge fan) argued: "The price of corn flakes isn't going to go up by one penny."

And understanding of simple economics is in short supply in Congress. Less corn, higher costs. What's so hard?

Answer: The need to feel good would be sacrificed.

Have a dirt cookie, Al.

"I do not in any way disagree with James Cone. Jim is a personal friend of mine." - Jeremiah Wright

Via John Hawkins, Jim Cone:

"Black theology," says Cone, "refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy."

That Barack guy certainly has some interesting friends!

From a comment on DailyKos: an argument that the Santa myth helps make children susceptible to conspiracy theories -- which is a good thing!

Two years ago my son (8 at the time) declared he was an atheist. Try as I might I couldn't gently lead him to see the comparison between his statement of disbelief in God and his statement of belief in Santa. So for 2 years I had a atheist in the household who believed in Santa.

Well, it turns out it was only one year and he held out for the other year, just in case. When I finally talked to him about it, I made him do all the work. It took almost 2 hours. He'd toss out argument after argument why Santa couldn't exist and I did my best to refute them - mostly pointing him back to not having done his research, etc. But at one point he accused grownups of a worldwide conspiracy to create and perpetuate the lie to children about Santa. He was actually pretty pissed about it and had been for almost a year that we were lying to him.

His first conspiracy theory! I was proud as all get-out, because he got it right! I hadn't thought of it in those terms, but he was essentially correct.

Next, he can move on to teaching his son about Bush's War for Oil. ;-)

The Washington Post:

But no matter how evil various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu ("Dallas, you merciless universe!" ran the French lyrics added to the wordless theme song), viewers in the nearly 100 countries that gobbled up the show, including in the Warsaw Pact nations, came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.

Joseph Stalin is said to have screened the 1940 movie "The Grapes of Wrath" in the Soviet Union to showcase the depredations of life under capitalism. Russian audiences watched the final scenes of the Okies' westward trek aboard overladen, broken-down jalopies -- and marveled that in the United States, even poor people had cars. "Dallas" functioned similarly.

"I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet] empire," Hagman told the Associated Press a decade ago. "They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, 'Hey, we don't have all this stuff.' I think it was good old-fashioned greed that got them to question their authority."

n Romania, "Dallas" was the last Western show allowed during the nightmare 1980s because President Nicolae Ceausescu was persuaded that it was sufficiently anti-capitalistic. By the time he changed his mind, it was already too late -- he had paid for the full run in precious hard currency. Meanwhile, the show provided a luxuriant alternative to a communism that was forcing people to wait more than a decade to buy the most rattletrap Romanian car.

I can't help but wonder if the writers had the same intentions: to portray greedy "capitalists" in a poor light, but ended up liking their creations a bit too much.

I love the anecdote about Stalin & the Okies. The great Okie migration, by the way, is a myth. Never happened -- not on the scale depicted. Steinbeck simply made it up.

True story: It's my junior year, and I'm attending a reasonably prestigious university with a reputation for being just a notch below Ivy League. I have a friend who's studying to be a doctor (as she is now). On the first day of her biology class, the professor announces that anyone asking questions implying something about 'creationism' will immediately receive an automatic "F" for the semester.

Now, at that point, I didn't know much about the debate. But I did know that's a sure sign of an unquestionable dogma in play -- as surely as the parochial school nuns other friends complained about, who handed out detentions for asking hard questions about God. How you handle dissent and honest questioning says a lot about your level of evidence and confidence for your proposition. And your level of tolerance for differing ideas.

Going back two years, my freshman year, The Panda's Thumb was required reading for all incoming Arts & Sciences students. Today, Stephen J. Gould is criticized for being too soft on 'religion' (as if atheism was an implication of biology) and his Mismeasure of Man has been somewhat discredited, some argue -- its errors arising from Gould's Marxist leanings and upbringing. But back then, The Panda's Thumb was the preferred tool for trying to instill a belief in neo-Darwinian evolution in those whose families might have taught otherwise.

And to ensure spiritual orthodoxy, freshmen were also required to take "The Bible as Literature", which was taught by an atheist who was openly and famously hostile to anything God-related. Having an intemperate atheist teach the bible is a bit like deciding one's Electrical Engineering courses should be taught by the Amish, or business administration classes taught by an ardent Marxist. Usually, you have someone who is sympathetic to a subject teach it, not someone who hates, hates, hates it.

So of course my college had a program of theological and philosophical indoctrination. And the worst was the biology professor who wasn't simply trying to expose backwoods rubes to alternative points of view, but was trying to make sure people weren't allowed to ask questions or imply something unorthodox in his classes. (And I don't imagine he adopted a different outlook regarding tenure reviews.) That was the 1980s; I don't imagine the climate has improved today. (If anything, I hear it has become worse.)

Aside from a brief foray into the probability of protein formation, Expelled spends almost no time discussing the details of the scientific debate between Intelligent Design and neo-Darwinism. The entire thesis and focus of the movie is simply: "Should people really be fired for simply making a passing reference to ID, or doing research which might lead that way? Isn't it kind of anti-American, not to mention against the spirit of academic freedom, to blackball people for espousing unpopular beliefs?"

So I wonder to what Chris Mooney is referring when he complains of scientific deception:

... this dishonest film is being placed before mass audiences, and I’m afraid that most viewers are not going to have nearly enough grounding in the unending evolution-ID battles to see why it’s so deceptive. Instead, they’re going to find Ben Stein funny (I saw the film; he is), and many of the anti-religion evolutionists featured pretty off-putting (I certainly did, and I’m not even religious). The result? A potential public relations black eye for the world of science, and the evolution community in particular.

You don't need to know the first thing about evolutionary biology to understand that the scientific "establishment" has become brittle and intolerant of dissent. As a point of reference, physics departments today are filled with crackpots who spin out non-disprovable theories of alternative universes, based in New Age metaphysics -- that's not even science, boys and girls, but nobody's demanding such people be fired. (To the contrary, Scientific American now devotes itself to such drivel; such theories, however unscientific, flatter the left's religious preferences.) Yet a student should receive an "F" for asking her professor to clarify a question "creationists" have raised? Please.

In not one critical review have a read a single description of what is "deceptive" about what little the film says about the science. The biggest complaint is that Ben Stein dared to point to the eugenics movement that Darwinists promoted in the early twentieth century.

True to form, our reviewer has exactly one antidote:

From Michael Crichton’s State of Fear to Stein’s Expelled, there is nothing to prevent the most awful, misleading drivel from reaching and influencing mass audiences. There are no standards. There is no filter. And the truth is not just automatically going to win in the competition of ideas when the playing field tilts against it.

We must have a "filter", some group of censors to "prevent the most awful, misleading drivel from reaching and influencing mass audiences"! What a wonderful antidote to a "deceptive" film which claims (outrageously!) that the scientific and media establishments want to squash dissent and control the dialogue. Boy, Chris Mooney sure proved that Ben Stein guy wrong.

(This reminds me nothing so much as the recent situation where Muslims around the world rioted and murdered people because, they felt, some had implied they were violent and intolerant.)

Of course, we could now brand Mooney a lone wacko, but he's writing on "scienceprogress.com", and his suggestion that we must stop such films from being distributed is resonating deeply with the denizens of DailyKos, who have placed it on the front page today, citing the paragraph I just quoted, quite approvingly. Yes: the answer to Ben Stein's false and deceptive claims of censorship is -- censorship!

"Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value."

So said a Canadian Human Rights Commission investigator. What a nice compliment, disguised as an insult. (How nice to be insulted by someone who thinks freedom of speech is a bad thing. Who wants the approval of such a person? I certainly don't.)

So what are "Human Rights" if they don't include, say, the right to speak?

Conservatives (classical liberals) view "rights" as individual, naturally-occurring, and passive (negative) -- the right to use one's possessions, to say things, to move about, etc. The left, on the other hand, views "rights" as collective, and active (positive) -- the "right" to be given things (at someone else's expense) the "right" to have certain feelings or have our feelings protected.

Of course the nice thing about the left's view of rights (if you're a politician) is that they're not naturally occurring. This gives an opening for an almost infinite transfer of power and wealth from private citizens to their rulers.

Say you have a "right" to an education: someone must be compelled to teach you. (Or someone else must have their money forcibly taken to induce a willing teacher.) And the "right" to experience certain feelings (and avoid others) means that the officials in charge have an unending power to rearrange society (and its members) at will, as each new feeling-crisis (real or imagined) presents itself.

I haven't read Mark Steyn's book "America Alone", but quotes like those above indicate there is something very different between America and Canada. America still generally believes in a number of ACTUAL human rights -- where many members of Canada's liberal ruling classes apparently do not; there is no such thing as "freedom of speech" there and nor do they want such a right. Nor in the UK, nor France, nor the Netherlands...

My fellow Americans, be very, very grateful for what you have, while you can still enjoy it.

The scientific establishment uses falsifiability the way postmodernists use deconstructionism: selectively, to tear down the ideas of their enemies but not to apply to their own ideas. The deconstructionist will happily deconstruct your ideas, but never his own. You say something about economic growth or Islamofascism, and he wants to talk metaphysics. Just don't bring up metaphysics when he condemns Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. We can't believe in God because religion is unfalsifiable. We can believe in an infinite number of other universes from which no information can ever reach us. Western governments literally spend tens of billions of dollars annually in support of such lunacy. [source]

Imagine a world (pun intended) where it was impossible to criticize anything because even quoting it, showing a small snippet from it, or alluding to the contents violated the law. (Scientologists and the NFL would, no doubt, be quite pleased.)

Well, Yoko Ono recently had a conniption because Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed used a tiny snippet of "Imagine".

Worse yet, the complaint alleges that "Internet 'bloggers' immediately began accusing Mrs. Lennon of 'selling out' by licensing the song to defendants." Having also been on the receiving end of such "bloggers"' wrath in the past, we deeply sympathize with Ono and hope her .029% share of Expelled's staggering $3 million opening gross covers the indignity of anyone thinking she would exploit her husband's legacy. [Defamer.com]

Sorry: but that was just too funny.

Robert Mugabe is a thug. He has destroyed his country's agricultural base, bringing the population to the brink of starvation, and he has recently lost an election, yet still clings to power.

At least he still has friends:

The Bush administration is intervening with governments in southern Africa to prevent a Chinese ship carrying weapons for Zimbabwe's security forces from unloading its cargo, The Associated Press has learned.

Gosh, am I thankful William Jefferson Clinton "normalized" our relations with China. They've certainly reformed, haven't they? Now, the thugs in power finally have enough revenue to support little projects like this one.

And soon, we'll be cheering them on in the Olympics. Hooray!

I saw a bumper sticker the other day which made me laugh:
"Don't act stupid. That's what we have world leaders for."

Sorry for being downbeat, but it saddens me to see China trying to prop up every nasty, insane dictator on our planet. I'm very thankful the Bush administration is doing the right thing by trying to thwart China's plans.

"Sleazy"
- The New York Times

"Bizarre and hysterical."
- The Village Voice

"Startlingly one-sided"
- USA Today

"An affront to viewers"
- TV Guide

"A hard-core, fundamentalist bit of right-wing propaganda"
- The Seattle Times

"[Ben Stein] seems to think [both you and I] are slobbering idiots."
- Newsday

"A cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives..."
- The Orlando Sentinel [So Ben Stein doesn't believe his own movie?]

Would you see a movie with those reviews? Normally, I wouldn't. But one of the more interesting movies I've seen in a while is getting precisely those ratings -- one star or so -- perhaps with that intention. (After all, we just saw a group of anti-war movies which bombed at the box office receive nothing but stunningly good reviews -- near 100% on Rotten Tomatoes -- so it's not a stretch to imagine that reviews today are more about ideological agreement than actual entertainment value.)

"These tactics are not only misleading, they're insulting and manipulative."
- The Boston Globe

I have to agree. Only the last reviewer is talking about movie, and I'm talking about the reviews themselves.

Last night, I watched Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Having done so, I have to wonder if some of the reviewers actually did too. The Boston Globe, for example, writes: "'Expelled' purports to impartially investigate the slugfest between proponents of Darwinism and creationism" -- though the film itself makes it clear, repeatedly, that it is focused on the debate between Darwinism and Intelligent Design, which it goes to pains to distinguish from bible-based creationism. The reviewer may personally reject this distinction, but instead he writes as though he's never heard it, prominent though it was in the film.

"In a sense, "Expelled" demonstrates some of the struggle between proponents of evolution and religion. The film gives ample screen time to scientists of faith who have tried to inject intelligent design theories into the classroom or their research and claim to have been expelled from academia."

Were these "scientists of faith"? For most, we never heard what their religious beliefs were. A few of those interviewed protested that they weren't even religious. Again, I have to wonder if the reviewer even watched the same film I just saw.

John Lennon's song "Imagine" is used to evoke a godless wasteland. Darwinism is equated with Nazism.

How wrong of Ben Stein to imply that "Imagine" says we'd be better off without religion. Quoting the lyrics? What a low blow; what a sneaky tactic. And how dare they show the only historical images we have of societies without any trace of religion. Unfair to show what Lennon's dream led to. (And Bill Maher ranting about the need to criminalize religion. How to win an argument: throw all those people who don't agree with you in jail.)

Like many of the reviews I've read, the Globe falsely insists that Expelled "equates" Darwinism with Nazism (or leads inexorably to it). But again, the film goes to considerable pains to clarify otherwise.

Through it all, anxiety-inducing background music imposes a false sense of drama.

Only during the sobering scenes. (And it's only "false sense of drama" if the viewer doesn't buy the premise in those scenes, such as the tragedy of the Nazi eugenic program.) To the contrary, the score included quite a lot of up-tempo pop music. (I've before never seen a film criticized for using tense background music; this has got to be a first.)

These tactics are not only misleading, they're insulting and manipulative.

Yes, actually, I'd have to agree. The Globe is certainly welcomed to think the film sucked, but it's wrong to deceive readers about the content.

That source of higher culture, E!, gave Expelled an "F".

Despite insisting "intelligent design" isn't pro-God propaganda, Stein argues we're waging a religious war (cut to cannon fire) with Darwinists smiting the faithful with—gasp!—atheistic ideas.

Nobody in the film said that Dawkins shouldn't be free to promote his ideas. Indeed, they (quite deliciously) gave him plenty of time and film in which to do so. The point is that many of those quoted didn't seem to think others should have the same freedoms.

MSNBC: "I haven't seen 'Expelled' yet, so it's hard for me to judge how wacky the movie really is" (note: not having seen it, he's sure it's "wacky" -- only the degree remains in question) "but plenty of other folks are already weighing in..." He then only provides links to the sites run by the very people being criticized in the film.

I wonder: When he reviewed a Michael Moore film, did he avoid seeing it, but then provide readers with links to pages written by Haliburton, the NRA, General Motors (Roger Smith), and the Bush family as a way of assessing it's reliability? Wouldn't that be sort of biased and stupid? Yes it would, but suddenly, it's sensible.

Even more amusing is USA Today's review:

Co-writer and host Ben Stein is startlingly one-sided in his unnatural selection of experts. The proponents of intelligent design are well-spoken and rational, and almost uniformly American. Those who believe in evolution often have foreign accents, are stuffed shirts or seem ready to foam at the mouth. This is propaganda, a political rant disguised as a serious commentary on stifled freedom of inquiry.

First (as usual), this is simply false: There are several segments where sympathetic figures are interviewed in foreign locations, including a Pole who says they have more academic freedom, and an American scholar who is able to freely espouse controversial views in France.

Second, the complaint itself is hilarious: Usually I hear that ID proponents can't hold a candle to such intellectual luminaries as Richard Dawkins and PZ Meyers. Now we hear that it's unfair to interview top neo-Darwinists and let them openly espouse their views and prejudices. Poor Dawkins, he's so easily intellectually exploited. All you have to do is let him talk.

(And Americans always think of scientists with British ("foreign", to this reviewer) accents as especially dim-witted, you know. Not.)

Many of the reviewers complained the movie was hyperbolic. So if hyperbole is bad, what are we to make of the The New York Times alleging it is "One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time"? If I recall correctly, Mssr. Moore regularly fabricates headlines, and makes up false quotes, draws tenuous connections, and generally deceives his audience at every turn. For example, "Roger and Me" was based on the premise that Roger Smith of GM refused to meet with him. In fact, Smith had done so, and Moore simply hid the footage and lied about it. In "Sicko" we learn that Cuba is a veritable healthcare utopia.

Apparently, none of that was sleazy to the Times, though.

So what was "sleazy" here? Did Ben Stein lie? Did he make it appear that people believed the opposite of what they really believed? Did he put false quotes in people's mouths?

Blithely ignoring the vital distinction between social and scientific Darwinism, the film links evolution theory to fascism (as well as abortion, euthanasia and eugenics), shamelessly invoking the Holocaust with black-and-white film of Nazi gas chambers and mass graves.

Wow! Can't be "linking evolution theory to fascism". That would be wrong. No, wait, "sleazy." (Never mind that it's a historical fact.) And as far as omitting vital information, the Times doesn't mention that the Nazis not only believed in social Darwinism, they were also quite enthusiastic about "scientific" Darwinism as well. When Dawkins and others testify that scientific Darwinism shaped their social and religious outlook, does the film need to be buying into and repeating the Times' "blithe" mantra that "scientific" Darwinism can never have social impacts?

The film suggests, for example, that Dr. Sternberg lost his job at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History because of intellectual discrimination but neglects to inform us that he was actually not an employee but rather an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term.

Oh, was it wrong to omit information, again? What of Sternberg's testimony that he was kicked out of his own office with almost no warning? That he was given reporting requirements which none of his peers received? That he was suddenly transferred to a hostile supervisor? That he was denied access to research materials and the museum? That his supervisors intentionally created a hostile work environment? That presents an entirely different picture than the Times' statement that his term merely expired. (In fact, the film says nothing about the specifics of Sternberg's employment, so it's hard to say they were misleading.) Only certain kinds of deception are bad, I guess.

Notice, not one substantial complaint leveled. But it's "sleazy" anyway.

Here's an even more deceptive review, from The Seattle Times:

Pop quiz: What is the real source of evil in the modern world? Greed? Intolerance?

Well, according to "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," it's Darwinism, described as a philosophy that posits the pointlessness of life and encourages the "de-privileging of human beings" — and as such is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.

Hey, I just watched the thing, and it says no such thing. It depicts Darwinism as one of the factors (necessary, but not sufficient) involved in the Holocaust, and instead depicts atheism as a philosophy that posits the pointlessness of life. (Well, actually, an atheist they interviewed did that for them.)

And I'm not quite sure what's wrong with linking Darwinism and eugenics when Darwin himself proposed the idea. Inconvenient truths galore here, apparently.

Critics depict the film as alarmist, but when I read a review like this one (from a guy who sounds like an average Joe), I realize our culture is indeed not facing reality.

The film goes so off the deep end though. They start talking about the moral undertones of science and religion. Come on. Scientists who want to usurp religion are not the majority either. Nazi parallels… well, Darwin didn't say to kill people genocidally. Stein even acknowledges that, but still suggests that it could be the slippery slope. He found a quote, but use some common sense. An abstract statement does not represent the entire science of evolutionary study.

The film continues to reach so that it's not even a science debate anymore. They say Planned Parenthood began as an attempt to encourage survival of the fittest, and prevent the birth of inferiors. Obviously, that's not their agenda now. So what, the film is pro-life too?

Ultimately, as the film unraveled, I found myself wondering what the point of figuring out where we came from even is. Who cares who it started? Let's work on fixing what's wrong!

It's "off the deep end" to talk about the moral undertones present in the scientific community? Certain elite scientists should talk, and we should be quiet. (Kind of the premise of the movie, actually.)

Yet the point wasn't that many scientists "want to usurp religion" -- undoubtedly, most don't. But when you hear Richard Dawkins, a leading voice, talk about the need to categorize religious parents as child abusers, can you really think that people who take him seriously will be strong advocates for freedom? Or that merely pointing to such trends is inherently "off the deep end"?

Sadly, like so many college-educated people today, the reviewer appears to know nothing about the history and origins of eugenics. It is a "reach" to imply that Margaret Sanger was trying to eliminate the "unfit" elements of society? Just read her own words. (The film never alleges that Planned Parenthood is still doing this today -- though some do. The point is only that Darwinism was essential to the eugenics movement, which itself was a very popular part of the American Left.)

"Who cares who started it?" Such a question makes all the difference in the world. If people are just machines, then it makes sense to forcibly remove the malfunctioning units. If people have intrinsic value, then such an idea is monstrous. "Fixing what's wrong" is impossible if you can't determine what's wrong, and where human beings fit in the grander scheme of things. If you can't look at Communism, or Nazism, and say: "This is an indicator of where we go wrong; let's learn why that happened" then you can't possibly hope to prevent similar atrocities in the future.

I can't say this is the best documentary I've ever seen, or that it didn't have some weak aspects. (I'll give a fuller review later.) But these "reviews" come off more as ranting and hysteria -- while pretending to decry ranting and hysteria. Insisting the movie is deceptive, they seem to need to deceive the readers even about it's mere content, much less its quality.

It would seem Ben Stein has indeed touched on something here, and it seems the media is making his case quite nicely for him: anyone who pokes at this particular sacred cow is going to have the media and scientific establishment come down on him or her like a ton of bricks, using the very tactics they insist they deplore.

ABC News:

As you'd imagine, the debate is the talk of the town here today, and not all of it is positive. The consensus seems to be that Sen. Barack Obama had a rough night, and many are objecting to the tenor of the questions... Today, the candidate literally brushed it all off, saying that this was simply old-style politics....

Yes, that's true: It used to be expected that candidates would have to answer questions harder than "exactly how bad are those nasty Republicans?" There used to be something called "depth" in politics, which consisted of slightly more substance than repeating the word "hope".

ABC News has heard from thousands of angry viewers. At least some of the negative reaction came from Obama supporters, among them the liberal group MoveOn, which has mounted an action campaign to send a message to the network....

"Stop asking our shallow candidates tough questions! It's totally unfair."

One viewer wrote, "This so-called 'debate' will be shown to my communications students as an example of what shoddy journalism looks like." "Shame on you, Charlie and George," wrote another viewer. "We deserve better."

That's true, actually. I have a friend who was a journalism major. He interviewed one candidate on camera and asked all sorts of hard questions. His professor praised him. Then he interviewed another, and asked the exact same kinds of questions. His professor rebuked him. Then he noticed the difference: the first candidate had been a Republican (hisss!) and the second, a Democrat.

Lesson learned? Don't corner the Democrat if you want a good grade. Softballs only.

But some were more positive. Among them, one viewer wrote: "Folks, if [Obama] can't deal with the hostile questions from George and Charlie, how do you expect him to deal with McCain and company in the fall?"

Clearly, that guy's a Rethuglican. Bring out the mind-wiping device. Too much of that, and people might learn about their candidates (from both parties) before they're elected.

Sorry for being snarky, but I get a bit tired of the endless whining when a Democrat gets asked a hard question. The press may typically handle their own with kid gloves, but the rest of the world -- containing sharp, pointy things like laws of economics, an unfriendly foreign press, and fanatics with explosives -- will not be similarly accommodating.

I'm currently watching the last few minutes of "Is Inequality Making Us Sick?" on PBS. The documentary examines evidence that unemployment causes health problems resulting from increased levels of cortisol. But though they're apparently deeply concerned with medical evidence, they make leaps utterly unwarranted by sound economic evidence: that "free markets" result in higher levels of unemployment than government-run economies.

In fact the shows whole premise is faulty: the evidence they present indicates that unemployment is bad for people, but the show's title claims that "inequality" makes people sick. So if a wealthy person moves into a house two blocks away from you, you'll suddenly get sicker! I guess people must have been very, very healthy in the Soviet Union, given that they had far less inequality than the West. And East Germany must have been much healthier than West Germany by the same token.

(I also have some beachfront property in Nevada for you, if you buy that.)

Sweden is presented (of course) as a utopian paradise: the average Swede lives three years longer than the average American. The only suggested reason is Sweden's massive socialist infrastructure. The reader is not told that different ethnic groups have different life expectancies, and that Sweden has a vastly different ethnic mix than the US. Nor is the reader told about Sweden's unemployment rate, which is officially given as just slightly higher than the US, but which many critics estimate to be two to five times the US rate. (More here.) So people will suffer fewer ill health effects from unemployment as long as the government fudges the numbers? They seemed quite focused on finding everything wrong with the US they could, but seemed utterly disinterested in probing too deeply into any Swedish social problems. Nor do they look at the UK, France, Italy, or other socialist European nations with a demographic profile more similar to ours, and admittedly much higher rates of unemployment.

I've been reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics; this program comes off as a textbook demonstration of each fallacy and economic mistake he describes. There's the fallacy of composition, where you focus only on, say "manufacturing job" (which are declining) and don't look at average wages or rates of employment across the economy. Vaguely that people are earning less than ever, but don't talk about their actual purchasing power. Use a few sad anecdotal stories (an unemployed family on lakefront property, whose taxes are thus going up -- poor dears, I could never afford to live on a lake) but don't present the overall statistical picture. (Nor do they mention that their burdensome taxes would inevitably be higher, not lower, with more government programs to feed.)

And of course, they're careful to trot out a few Christians, screened to tell the "red-staters" that "individualism" is the opposite of the gospel of Christ. (Jesus died primarily in order to compel Caesar to appoint large and wasteful bureaucracies, you know.)

The saddest part: if the show's key piece of evidence is true -- that unemployment causes ill health -- then following the show's advice has every prospect of producing far more of the "excess deaths" they say they lament.

"Wikipedia's zealots" describes how Lawrence Solomon attempted to correct a global-warming-related Wikipedia entry with additional information, and how his changes were immediately and repeatedly reverted by a not-so-disinterested editor. I read though the page history myself, and the story is quite funny: The editor/zealot claims a particular critic has recanted his views, admitting error. Solomon contacts said critic, who says he's done no such thing. Solomon changes the page to reflect this. The editor says he can't make said change, it's "original research." Of course, the previous false claim came from the editor herself, who had done no such research!

So I thought I'd see how Wikipedia is covering Expelled. As of this moment, the page is deeply saturated in a particular POV; false and misleading claims abound, as well as violations of Wikipedia's own alleged standards.

For example, the first four paragraphs of the "Overview" quote extensively from critics of intelligent design, but only obliquely reference arguments in favor it. (And the article should be about the movie anyway, rather than attempt to convince readers of the rightness or wrongness of ID.) Sadly, this pattern is repeated throughout the article.

Nazis!

Of course, it wouldn't be an Internet article without Nazism! The Wikipedia article asserts, seemingly over-broadly, that Expelled claims "acceptance of evolution leads to Nazism" -- as if Stein were saying all evolutionists were bound to become Nazis. Nothing like a nice straw man or two to enlighten your readers, eh? (It bases this claim on the opinion of a movie reviewer, rather than quoting the movie -- seemingly incapable of distinguishing the two.)

To refute this herring, the article deftly points out that antisemitism existed before Nazism (no kidding!) "particularly Martin Luther's book" (as if Martin Luther were particularly related to Nazism, or Expelled -- the topic, if I recall correctly).

The article also promulgates the absurd claims that Hitler was deeply opposed to the idea of survival of the fittest, and banned teaching evolution! Incredible. What next: The Nazis weren't racists either? Not committed to eugenics? (And where did their support for eugenics come from, if not Darwinism? Martin Luther again? You'll "learn" all kinds of interesting new 'facts' on Wikipedia, I suppose.)

This incredible claim is based on a single entry in a "Guide to Cleaning Libraries" which bans the teaching of "primitive Darwinism" and references Haeckel and "Monism". The Wikipedia editors conveniently overlook that part of their own footnote, but more information can be found here:

First of all, Matzke himself apparently realized that by modifying Darwinism with the word primitive, this list did not really mean Darwinism per se. Good observation, but then why does he persist in maintaining that Darwin's works were banned? Darwinian biologists (and Darwinian theory) under the Nazi regime were promoted, not silenced. There are many good scholarly books that clarify this issue, such as Ute Deichmann's Biologists under Hitler (Harvard UP, 1996)and Paul Weindling's Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge UP, 1989). These works and many others show that Darwinian biologists thrived under Nazism....

Haeckel's ideas were not universally well-received in Nazi circles. An essay I published in 2002 about the Monist League showed that Haeckel and the Monist League supported pacifism and feminism, which did not sit well with the Nazis. Also, the Monist League had many socialist members, making it suspect. No wonder the Nazis dissolved the Monist League when they came to power. But it had nothing to do with any supposed antipathy toward Darwinism.

Rather than a "just the facts, ma'am" kind of approach, the editors (and authors, often) want us to know that Darwinism was NOT, NOT, NOT important to promoting Hitler's eugenics.

"Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people." From a scientific viewpoint, any distorted misunderstanding of evolution incorporated in Hitler's thinking is irrelevant to the scientific validity of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Nope! Eugenics did not originate in Darwinism, and Hitler was not influenced in any way, shape, or form by eugenics. And even so, we're not supposed to discuss its social impacts, only it's scientific merits. That's a fact.

People presented in the film

After learning that Nazism was deeply opposed to the idea of evolution and survival of the fittest, we are now presented with list of people who were allegedly persecuted for their beliefs. As usual, "favored" claims include extensive quotes, but disfavored claims are referenced obliquely, if at all.

For example, here's the blurb about Richard Sternberg. Notice Sternberg's critics are quoted, and there is, apparently, nothing to be said in his favor:

... submitting his resignation in the previous year, he arranged for his last issue to include publication of a paper by leading intelligent design proponent Stephen C. Meyer. The review procedure was questioned and the journal subsequently declared that the paper "does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings" and would not have been published had usual editorial practices been followed.

(NB: I don't know anything about the Sternberg case. But you don't have to in order to detect an utter lack of balance.)

That's all I have time for. Undoubtedly, there are some useful tidbits buried elsewhere in the Wikipedia article. For instance: I haven't had time to investigate both sides, but it I find their case persuasive that the producer may have misled a few interviewees about the nature of the film. Though I don't notice similarly breathless protests in the articles about Michael Moore's films, which use similar tactics. (And I notice several things going on this article, itself, which are far worse than those alleged.)

But overall, well, I think Wikipedia is showing itself to be an excellent source of information for, um, what Wikipedia's editors believe -- however fantastic. The Nazis were opposed to evolution and survival of the fittest? All in a day's work at Wikipedia.

Andrew Stuttaford quotes a snippet of the UK's The Independent preaching about biofuels back in 2005:

At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a "biofuel obligation" on oil companies...

(Note the condescension -- any failure to adopt their preferred policy (biofuels) is equivalent to a lack of intelligence.)

And (of course) washing their hands of such advocacy this week:

The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world's environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?

I dunno, Independent. Complete mystery. Must have been those right-wingers.

... or so now say the people who foisted that couple on us throughout the 1990s. The Clintons are unethical? The Clintons are "divisive" and use dirty tricks? The Clintons will say anything to get into office! No! Really? Why did it take a decade for y'all to realize this?

(Of course, Obama will too -- he speaks as if he's been a centrist, but his actual voting record implies it's merely a head-fake -- but he's at least a bit classier about it; and he's the media's golden boy of the moment, so he is seldom confronted with tough questions, and the attacks of his supporters and affiliates -- like those linked above -- are not being associated with him.)

I see two narratives here being used in the attacks against Hillary. The first is that everything she does is "Republican". Did Wesley Clark run on his military service? Did John Kerry claim that Bush went AWOL and was unfit for command? Did Kerry likewise employ a martial theme at his nomination? That wasn't a "Republican" tactic in 2004, but when Hillary questions Obama's foreign policy or C-in-C bona fides, suddenly, she's gone over to the dark side, treading where no Democrat would ever go. How morally facile -- not to mention forgetful.

By far, my favorite comments noted there come from John Cole, who was once a Republican and now supports Obama. Note the gyrations he admits he put himself through:

I am well aware that I am beyond the point where I can discuss Hillary rationally, but I really can not stress enough how much I have grown to hate her. I really, really tried to give her a chance. I was a Clinton hater through the 90’s, although after she was elected to the Senate and was a non-factor in my daily life, much of that hatred waned (and it did not hurt Hillary that the disastrous Bush administration helped me to re-evaluate the Clinton Presidency)....

And I came to the Democratic party prepared to vote for her. When I left the GOP and registered as a Democrat, Hillary was the inevitable nominee. It was the number one question I was asked- “Are you going to vote for Hillary?” I always said yes.

When people say that this is nothing more than my old Clinton hatred bubbling up, and this is nothing more than my pathologies rising up, there is something to it. But I really did try to give this candidate a shot. I defended her when she was getting the shaft, I was skeptical of Obama and I mocked his supporters and thought Hillary was not getting a fair break with the media elites, and I really tried. But the past few months have shown me that while I may have a number of issues with Hillary, they are not because I was brainwashed by dips**s like Bill Kristol and Richard Mellon Scaife and the rest of the vast right-wing conspiracy who Hillary is now courting while parroting their rhetoric. I don’t like Hillary because of who she is. Hell, I spent months trying to blame everything on her advisors. But this isn’t just the putrid Mark Penn or execrable Howard Wolfson. This is just who she is.

She and her low-brow coterie of lackeys have left a trail of slime and unpaid vendor bills everywhere they have gone the past few months. They have lied, distorted, polled, and then lied some more. They attack viciously, then play the victim when punched back. There is literally NOTHING they will not do to win this nomination.... They bring out the worst in everyone around them, me included.

The author cannot discuss his political opponents rationally. Check. He hated the Clintons with an irrational hatred during the 1990s. Check. Yet he was willing to forget all that in order to oppose his bigger enemies, Republicans. Check. He was willing to blame those around her for her campaign's behavior, but wasn't willing to admit she bears responsibility, ultimately, for her staffing decisions. Check. He was willing to ignore character flaws, such as stiffing the small businesses her campaign contracted. Check. He uses obscenity frequently in his analysis, which appears to be driven mostly by emotion. Check.

In short, this seems to be a textbook example* of how to go from being a Republican to being an Obama supporter. Let your emotions drive you. Don't think about hard facts, like numbers of lives saved, or economic damage inflicted. Go with the flow, darn it.

There are a number of people who I sometimes find "on my side", but don't ultimately think they belong here. Certainly, I appreciate their vote on election day, but it's interesting to watch the shake-out, as people find their way to their true home. John Cole seems to work quite nicely as a Democrat. He's certainly got the cursing down.

(*I have another friend who has gone from supporting Republicans to Obama. He was initially driven to Republicans, he says, by his fear that the Democrats were trying to take people's money. But now he fears the "right wing" more because they're trying to take people's freedom. Never mind that many of the things he fears (Patriot Act) had bipartisan support; never mind that the media has distorted the contents of such; and never mind that controlling people's money IS the same thing as limiting their liberties. But being secular and being mainly driven by fear seems to be a combination which results in a leftward pull.)

Just returned from a trip to Mexico; more thoughts on that shortly, hopefully. For the moment, I'll just refer you to Gateway Pundit's notes on Obama's view of trade: Cuba, good; Columbia, bad. Whatever the underlying motive, the operative rule seems to be that it's bad to trade with nations which are pro-US, and desperately need our markets opened to them, but good to trade with anti-US nations, no matter how bad their human rights record.

I'm amazed the "violence against union members" thing is being entertained by anyone as a reason not to trade with Columbia. Such a statistic would only be meaningful if the violence were coming directly from the government, as a human rights abuse. Nobody is alleging that, of course. It's a bit like saying you're not going to trade with some small nation because they have too many cases of malaria. And as it is, the murder rate of union members in Columbia is apparently BELOW that of the populace as a whole, anyway.

So what's the real reason?

I can think of three. For one, as I've mentioned, there are a number of Democrats who are sympathetic to FARC and/or Chavez, and would prefer to see Columbia as a left-wing dictatorship. Others, I suspect, simply reflexively oppose any helpful* policy enacted by the Bush administration -- having no positive political program of their own, they're reduced to mindless naysaying. And of course Unions are reflexively against trade, though that can't be a serious effect, with Columbia constituting a mere 1% of our international trade.

(* When Bush wants to do something stupid, like his prescription drug benefit or immigration policy, they tend to remain silent and uncritical.)