Month: June 2007

Here They Come

Illegalrallydavidmcnewgetty

"You know, I’ve heard all the rhetoric – you’ve heard it, too – about how this is amnesty. Amnesty means that you’ve got to pay a price for having been here illegally, and this bill does that," – president Bush, today. Mock him all you want, he’s pushing this bill forward. You can read the conniptions on the right here.

(Photo: David McNew/Getty.)

Taranto and Detention

He smears those defending the constitution and habeas corpus as making "efforts on behalf of enemy fighters." Er: we’re trying to ensure that there’s some fair basis for their being named as "enemy fighters." He threatens that if we do not junk habeas and enforce torture, the public will one day demand even worse. I think that’s called mob rule. I’ll take my chances with the constititution, thank you. Brendan has a long archive of noting Taranto’s far right excesses. Enjoy.

Face of the Day

Johnstonabidkatibgetty

BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston appears wearing a body belt, which he said contained explosives, in this image taken from a short video, entitled "Alan’s Appeal", released by Jaish al-Islam (‘Islamic Army’ or ‘Army Of Islam’) on June 25, 2007. Johnston entreated Hamas and the British Government not to use force to free him or his captors would carry out their threat to detonate the explosives strapped to his body. By Abid Katib/Getty Images.

Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton

They do have one thing in common: a pathological passion for secrecy. Arianna explains:

It’s not just that she’s a private person. There are plenty of public servants who are zealous about guarding their personal lives and equally zealous about keeping their public lives – and public policies – transparent. But, like Bush and Cheney, Clinton seems devoted to secrecy for its own sake.

As Bernstein shows, what was most shocking about her handling of the health care fiasco during her husband’s administration wasn’t that she kept the plan secret from its critics, but that she kept it secret even from those who would have been champions of the plan had they known anything about it.

This passion for concealment is a pattern that, as Bernstein demonstrates, has been repeated throughout Clinton’s life. It was there in the head-scratching decision to hide her college thesis from public view because it was about radical organizer Saul Alinsky. It was there in her refusal for 30 years to admit that she had failed the bar exam the first time she took it. It was there in the way she glossed over in her memoir her summer internship at the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein — one of the most renowned left-wing law firms in the nation. It was there in the way she handled the Whitewater and Travelgate investigations, which, as Bernstein told me, "ended up unnecessarily prolonging them."

Bernstein quotes Clinton lawyer Mark Fabiani as saying of Hillary and Whitewater: "She would do anything to get out of the situation. And if that involved not being forthcoming [in releasing documents and other materials] she herself would say, ‘I have a reason for not being forthcoming.’" And he reports that then-White House advisor George Stephanopoulos described Hillary’s responses to the various scandals of the Clinton presidency as "Jesuitical lying."

One way to continue and compound the secrecy and paranoia of the Bush-Cheney years is to put Clinton back in the White House.

The Genetics of Race

Not to pick at old wounds, but I remember distinctly at a New Republic editorial meeting over a decade ago that the idea that there was a biological component to race was described as an absurd and wicked anachronism. We all knew now that race was entirely a pernicious social construction that had no meaning whatsoever in biology or science. Moreover the notion that there might be subtle, genetic bell-curve differences in intelligence between what we identify as races was itself a form of neo-Nazi propaganda, as despicable as it was unfounded. Read this piece in the Science Times today and see whether you think this orthodoxy does not warrant some skepticism. Of course, race is a terribly problematic term. As miscegenation increases and we head toward a more multi-colored world, such concepts will hopefully become meaningless. But not yet. Race makes biological sense in broad categories:

A genomic survey of world populations by Dr. Feldman, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues in 2002 showed that people clustered genetically on the basis of small differences in DNA into five groups that correspond to the five continent-based populations: Africans, Australian aborigines, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians, a group that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent. The clusterings reflect "serial founder effects," Dr. Feldman said, meaning that as people migrated around the world, each new population carried away just part of the genetic variation in the one it was derived from. The new scans for selection show so far that the populations on each continent have evolved independently in some ways as they responded to local climates, diseases and, perhaps, behavioral situations.

The concept of race as having a biological basis is controversial, and most geneticists are reluctant to describe it that way. But some say the genetic clustering into continent-based groups does correspond roughly to the popular conception of racial groups.

The differences are subtle, and bell curves apply. There’s massive overlap between different populations. Focusing on the minor differences while ignoring the huge similarities is a strange emphasis. But that such subtle differences exist, and that we will soon be able to measure them rather clearly, is something we’re just going to have to deal with at some point. From skin color (which seems to have become pale for Caucasians as recently as 7,000 years ago) to lactose tolerance to variants in disease and even hearing, the genetics of race are clear. And yes why would they not also affect cognitive functioning as well? Money quote:

Another puzzle is presented by selected genes involved in brain function, which occur in different populations and could presumably be responses to behavioral challenges encountered since people left the ancestral homeland in Africa.

But some genes have more than one role, and some of these brain-related genes could have been selected for other properties.

Two years ago, Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, reported finding signatures of selection in two brain-related genes of a type known as microcephalins, because when mutated, people are born with very small brains. Two of the microcephalins had come under selection in Europeans and one in Chinese, Dr. Lahn reported.

He suggested that the selected forms of the gene had helped improved cognitive capacity and that many other genes, yet to be identified, would turn out to have done the same in these and other populations.

Neither microcephalin gene turned up in Dr. Pritchard’s or Dr. Williamson’s list of selected genes, and other researchers have disputed Dr. Lahn’s claims. Dr. Pritchard found that two other microcephalin genes were under selection, one in Africans and the other in Europeans and East Asians.

Even more strikingly, Dr. Williamson’s group reported that a version of a gene called DAB1 had become universal in Chinese but not in other populations. DAB1 is involved in organizing the layers of cells in the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions.

I don’t believe these scientists are racist.

Honor Students Against Torture

They were invited to the White House as the cream of their class. And they rose to the occasion. They gave the president a letter signed by fifty of them that read:

"We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants."

Bush, of course, lied to them. Anderson had a segment last night: