Playing by the rules

The Wall Street Journal had a story the other day about a conservative advocacy group known as Move America Forward which pretty much serves the same function on the right that MoveOn.org does on the left.

That would be fine and all, except there is one big difference between the two organizations. While MoveOn.org is a registered political action committee that must disclose its donors and their contributions for public scrutiny, Move America Forward pretends to be a non-partisan, non-profit group and thus gives its donors not only anonymity, but also the right to deduct their donations from their taxes. In other words, the rest of us taxpayers are being forced to subsidize the right-wing group, while the liberal group has to scrape along under the strict reporting requirements for PACs.

Needless to say, this is not fair. But it is also not surprising that the so-called “conservative” group would lie and cheat while the liberal group plays by the rules. They are just following the example set by the current Republican administration.

Limbo in limbo

Interesting story in the NYTimes today - Vatican Considers Consigning Limbo to Oblivion

Limbo, that netherworld of unbaptized babies, worthy pagans and even a few Muslims, is very much on the way out...
This month, 30 top theologians from around the world met at the Vatican to discuss, among other quandaries, the problem of what happens to babies who die without baptism.

Frankly, I think such a move is long overdue. It is nothing short of cruel for the church to tell a mother who just lost a baby that her infant is going anywhere other than to be with God. But I can also see why they have been hesitant to do so up until now.

How can you convince people that they have to be baptized without the fear of hellfire and damnation? If you make an exception for babies, how far does that exception go? At what age can they declare that a child has been consigned to hell for not being cleansed of its “original sin” ? Such a quandry!

The idea of sending innocent babies to hell has always been hard for most people to stomach. But sending them to limbo isn’t much better. So what will they do now? Admit that the church doesn’t have the official rulebook from God that says who does and doesn’t get into Heaven? That’ll be the day!

So I will be interested to see what these Vatican theologians come up with. My guess is that they will take the same stance as doctors dealing with terminal diseases. They will highly recommend baptism for babies, but won’t make any guarantees that it is the final arbiter of salvation.

Bring back Star Trek (and Buffy)

A survey of British TV viewers shows Star Trek as the most missed show on TV today.

It topped a poll of more than 1,000 viewers commissioned by UK interactive TV firm Home Media Networks. Here are the top 10 most missed programs from the survey:

1. Star Trek
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
3. Friends
4. Fawlty Towers
5. Blake's 7
6. The X-Files
7. Babylon 5
8. Stargate
9. Seinfeld
10. The A-Team

Blockbuster consumption

Like lemmings we all tend to run with the crowd and watch essentially the same movies every year. In looking at the blockbuster movies of years past (films that earned more than $100 million in domestic gross reciepts), I’m struck by how many of them I have seen either in the theater, on video or on TV.
Since 1990, the year I more or less got out of college, there have been 264 blockbusters. Not counting this year, the total is 247. Of those, I have seen all but 59 for about a 75 percent rate of blockbuster consumption.

The films I have not seen, with a few notable exceptions, are ones that I am likely never going to watch because they have no particular appeal for me. Here is the list (* marks movies I still intend to watch someday).

1990 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Dick Tracy
1991 - Beauty and the Beast*
1993 - Indecent Proposal
1994 - The Flintstones
1996 - 101 Dalmations (live action); Scream
1997 - George of the Jungle; Scream 2
1998 - The Rugrats Movie
1999 - Big Daddy; The Blair Witch Project; American Beauty; Analyze This; The General’s Daughter; American Pie
2000 - The Perfect Storm; Meet the Parents; Scary Movie; Traffic; The Nutty Professor II; Big Momma’s House; Remember the Titans
2001 - Hannibal; American Pie 2; The Fast and the Furious; Black Hawk Down*
2002 - Austin Powers Goldmember; Scooby Doo; XXX; The Santa Clause 2; The Ring; Mr. Deeds; Road to Perdition*
2003 - Bruce Almighty; Elf; Cheaper By the Dozen; Bad Boys II; Anger Management; Bringing Down the House; 2 Fast, 2 Furious; Something’s Gotta Give; SWAT; Spy Kids 3-D; Scary Movie 3; American Wedding; Daddy Day Care; The Cat in the Hat; Charlie’s Angels 2
2004 - The Passion of the Christ*; Meet the Fockers; The Day After Tomorrow; The Polar Express*; Ocean’s Twelve; 50 First Dates; Dodge Ball; The Village; The Grudge; Million Dollar Baby*

As for the 2005 blockbusters so far, I can already say that I have little interest in seeing Wedding Crashers; Mr. and Mrs. Smith; The Longest Yard; The Pacifier and 40 Year Old Virgin.

Box office blues

2005 has been a bad year for the movie industry. Lots of stories have been written on the topic, but I think this chart I compiled from the invaluable Box Office Mojo Web site helps make the point pretty clear. The figure on the right is the number of movies that broke the $100 million barrier in domestic box office revenues for that year (not counting foreign box office and video/DVD sales).

2005 - 17
2004 - 24
2003 - 29
2002 - 24
2001 - 20
2000 - 22
1999 - 21
1998 - 18
1997 - 16
1996 - 15
1995 - 10
1994 - 12
1993 - 8
1992 - 11
1991 - 8
1990 - 9

As you can see, 2003 was a peak year so far. But 2005 could be the worst peformer of the decade. In fact, you have to go back to 1997 to find a year that had fewer mega-blockbusters. Of course, the year is not over and there is a chance that a few more 2005 releases could cross the finish line at some future date (Walk the Line is a possibility). But there just aren’t that many more potential blockbusters on the movie industry’s bench this year.

I think one of the problems for Hollywood is that I have stopped going to movies these past few years. My movie watching for this year has been so limited that I don’t even need to update the list I made on Sept. 13 of 2005 films I’ve seen so far this year.

I didn’t realize until now how much Hollywood depends on me, but the evidence is clear. Since the birth of my first child in mid-2003, they have been on a precipitous slide downward. I’m not sure what to tell them. Perhaps if they put daycare centers at the cineplex’s it would lure more of us new parents back into the fold. But whatever they do, they need to do it quick. Now with the birth of my second child last month, I will likely be absent from the local matinees for several more years to come.

Christmas commercialization

I was about to write a post about why I think the commercialization of Christmas is actually a good thing on the grounds that any publicity is good publicity. But then I found this article on the Web that pretty much says everything I was going to say.
So I will shamelessly copy this fellows article and reprint it here:

“You periodically hear Christians complain about how Christmas has become commercialized or secularized. It's not about Jesus Christ any more; it's about Santa Claus. It's not about God's love for us; it's about having fun with our friends. It's no longer celebrated at church; it's celebrated at the mall.

As a Christian, I can only look at this and say: Good thing.

Compare Christmas to other Christian holidays. Logically, our biggest holiday of the year should be Easter. After all, lots of people are born, but very few come back from the dead. There is very little secularization of Easter: A little playing around with Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies, but nothing like the secular stories and traditions built up around Christmas. I am hard-pressed to think of a single story or song about the Easter bunny; I can easily rattle off dozens about Santa Claus. Easter has largely remained a purely spiritual holiday, celebrated almost exclusively through songs and symbols that focus directly on what the holiday is all about -- the resurrection.

So why is it that Easter gets so much less attention than Christmas? Not just in the secular world, but even within the church? Perhaps your experience is different, but in churches I've attended, not only will the Sunday before Christmas be dedicated to the holiday, but at least several Sundays before we will be singing Christmas songs, lighting advent candles, etc. There is usually at least one special service scheduled to celebrate it, on Christmas or Christmas Eve or the Sunday evening before. Somewhere in there will be a big special program for Christmas, with planning and rehearsals begin months in advance.

Easter? The church may have a sunrise service, that is, the service starts earlier than usual that day. And that's about it.

I offer a simple theory: Christmas is a big holiday precisely because it is a mixture of the pious and the practical. The pious element gives the holiday reason and meaning. The practical element gives it action and vibrancy. The pious element makes it profound. The practical element makes it fun.

To the Christian, all the little rituals and traditions give him something to do to celebrate the holiday. Easter should be the most exciting day on the Christian calendar, but it is, to put it bluntly, boring. It is boring because there is nothing in particular to do about it. There is nothing to look forward to, nothing to plan, nothing to get excited about.

At this point I don't doubt that some deeply spiritual person will say, "How shallow! You've missed the point. You should be excited about the thought of the resurrection. You should be overjoyed at the knowledge that Christ has saved you." Etc.

I reply, Maybe we should, but we don't. Because all you are talking about is thinking. And I can think these thoughts at any time, there is nothing about Easter that makes them particularly special. I do not have to eagerly anticipate thinking about the resurrection like a child has to anticipate opening his presents at Christmas. To think about thinking something is to think it. And for many people -- myself included -- the fact that they can do these things whenever they want means that they rarely do them at all.

Why do you think stores advertise a sale as "one day only" or "while supplies last"? Presumably they are making money off this sale or they wouldn't be doing it. So why not do it all year long and make more money? Aren't they afraid that there are people who would like to come but won't be able to make it the day of the sale, and so won't bother to come at all? The answer, as any marketing person will tell you, is, sure, they might lose some sales because they made the sale too short. But by making it short, they get many people to think, Wow, if I want to get this, I'd better go right now. If the sale was on 365 days a year, there are many many people who would say, I'll go tomorrow, and the next day they'd again say, I'll go tomorrow, and they'd keep on saying that, and never get there.

Christmas is a special day because there are specific things we do that day that we do not do on other days. And so we plan, and prepare, and anticipate.

But more important, Christmas, as presently celebrated in America, serves as a bridge between the Church and the world outside. It is precisely because Christmas has been secularized that people with little interest in spiritual things celebrate it anyway. Christians created all sorts of fun activities to celebrate Christmas: giving presents, eating a fancy meal with friends and family, decorating the house, etc, etc. Non-Christians see that these things are fun and want to participate ... and they can't help but occassionally hear and think about what the holiday is really celebrating.

It is precisely because Christmas has been commercialized that stores and shops all over the country spend hundreds of millions of dollars talking about Christmas. At what other time of year do you see television commercials that make any reference, however indirect, to Jesus Christ?”

Christmas music

My list of favorite Christmas music hasn’t changed much from last year. The only significant addition to the rotation this year is The Chipmunks Christmas, one of my wife’s records from her youth that I burned onto CD. It is now highly popular with my son.

Today, Christmas music is a major industry. Every artist, it seems, is obligated to put out a Christmas album. But does anyone remember who started the whole thing?

Guess what the first commercially successful Christmas recording was.

White Christmas? No, that came later.

It was Silent Night, recorded by Bing Crosby in 1935. The record became Crosby’s biggest hit of the 1930s. But Crosby was uncomfortable with the idea of profiting from a popular Christmas carol, partly because of his devout religious faith, and opted to donate all the proceeds from the song to charity.
Silent Night was the top selling Christmas record until it was eclipsed by Crosby’s recording of White Christmas in 1942, which became the highest selling record of all time.

It’s a shame today that Crosby gets so little respect in our popular culture. To understand just how big a star Crosby was in his day, here is a synopsis
compiled from Gary Giddins’ book, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams – the Early Years 1903-1940,
published by Little, Brown in 2001.


• He made more studio recordings than any other singer in history.
• He made the most popular record ever, “White Christmas,” the only single to make American pop charts twenty times, every year but one between 1942 and 1962. 
• Between 1927 and 1962 he scored 368 charted records under his own name, plus twenty-eight as a vocalist with various bandleaders, for a total of 396.  No one else has come close; compare Paul Whiteman (220), Frank Sinatra (209), Elvis Presley (149), Glenn Miller (129), Nat “King” Cole (118), Louis Armstrong (85), the Beatles (68).
• He scored the most number one hits ever, 38, compared with 24 by the Beatles and 18 by Presley.
• In 1960 he received a platinum record as First Citizen of the Record Industry for having sold 200 million discs, a number that doubled by 1980.
• Between 1915 and 1980 he was the only motion-picture star to rank as the number one box-office attraction five times (1944-48).  Between 1934 and 1954 he scored in the top 10 fifteen times.
• He was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor three times and won for “Going My Way”.
• He was a major radio star longer than any other performer, from 1931 until 1954 on network, 1954 until 1962 in syndication.
• He financed and popularized the development of tape, revolutionizing the recording industry.
• He created the first and longest-running celebrity pro-am golf championship, playing host for thirty-five years, raising millions in charity, and was the central figure in the development of the Del Mar racetrack in California.
• He made the largest number of V-discs and army broadcasts of any American entertainer and raised $14.5 million in war bonds (a “Yank” magazine poll declared him the individual who had done more for GI morale during World War II).

Scrooge McCheney

Merry Christmas from Scrooge McCheney and the GOP!

The Scrooge cut short his Middle East tour to serve as the tiebreaker on a noxious budget bill that pretends to reduce the deficit by slashing programs for the poor and elderly.

The legislation would allow states to impose new fees on Medicaid recipients, cut federal child support enforcement funds, impose new work requirements on state welfare programs and squeeze student lenders.

Hey, but at least we are finally getting some fiscal discipline, right? Wrong.

According to budget experts, the bill would barely dent the federal deficit, cutting less than one-half of 1 percent from an estimated $14.3 trillion in federal spending over the next five years.

And what is worse is that the projected $40 billion in savings over five years has already been wiped out by the $56 billion worth of tax cuts that Republicans pushed through earlier this year.

Opponents of the bill, including all Democrats and five honest Republicans, said “the poor would bear the brunt of the cuts -- especially to Medicaid, child support enforcement and foster care -- whereas original targets for belt-tightening, such as pharmaceutical companies and private insurers, largely escaped sanction.”

Under the provision, student loan interest rates would be locked in at 6.8 percent and could not be refinanced as commercial rates fluctuate.
"They could give students a lower interest rate, but their choice is to keep interest rates high," said Luke Swarthout of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "They're asking students to pay for tax cuts."

History repeats

Richard Nixon - “I’m not a crook.”

George W. Bush - “I’m above the law and can do whatever I want.” (or words to that effect).

I think it is important to distinguish legal domestic spying by the NSA which goes on all the time and is indeed important in the war on terror, from the secretive, illegal spying that Bush has authorized.
Joshua Micah Marshall touches on that distinction

...it seems the White House and some editors are taking to arguing that surveillance or domestic wiretapping is necessary for national security, that it saves lives.
Of course, it does. What a stupid thing to say, or for the White House, what a disingenuous thing to say.
Wiretaps are conducted around the country every day. The FISA Court alone approves something like a half a dozen a day in highly classified national security or espionage related cases.
The only issue here is why the president decided to go around the normal rules that govern such surveillance, why he chose to make himself above the law.

and Redhedd at firedoglake goes more in depth.

Suffice it to say that we already have provisions in place to allow for emergency spying when security issues are at stake. Why does the Bush administration still feel that it has to circumvent the law this many years after 9/11 and not allow the FISA court to oversee their spying operations?

I Spy

Why are we even bothering with a debate over the Patriot Act if President Bush is just going to do whatever the hell he wants to do anyway?

The National Security Agency has eavesdropped, without warrants, on as many 500 people inside the United States at any given time since 2002, The New York Times reported Friday.
That year, following the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush authorized the NSA to monitor the international phone calls and international e-mails of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of people inside the United States, the Times reported.

Update

I have to agree with this poster at Daily Kos:

I think the last few days of revelations regarding multi-agency spying on American citizens comes as no surprise. In an administration that has authorized secret prisons, planted propaganda, fought restrictions on torture, and argued consistently for the right to detain whomever is deemed suspicious without recourse to trial, spying on American citizens seems both obvious and pedestrian....

...for true rank-and-file conservatives, this should bring on a crisis of conscience and self-examination. Distrust of the government and its motives runs deep in American conservatism; witness the recoil from relatively benign "nanny state" interventions such as social welfare programs and anti-smoking laws. How much more repugnant is wiretapping, surveillance and massive record-keeping by the feds?

So, are there any ‘true conservatives’ left in this country?

Maybe a few. Instapundit isn’t too happy about it.
And then there are a few Republican senators still willing to stand up for freedom, liberty and the rule of law in our own country:

"There is no doubt that this is inappropriate," said Specter, R-Pa., calling hearings early next year "a very, very high priority." He wasn't alone in reacting harshly to the report. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the story, first reported in Friday's New York Times, was troubling.

But for the most part it would seem that true conservatism is dead, or at least comatose, and has been replaced with a right-wing radicalism that likes to masquerade as conservatism.

Levee repair

Now that the horses are all gone, the Bush administration is finally getting around to fixing that barn door.

Maybe $3.1 billion is enough to do the job right, I don’t know. But I can’t help but point out that it is less than we spend each month on our never-ending mission to rebuild Iraq.

Redistricting fiasco revisited

Republicans should be very worried about the Supreme Court's decision to revisit the Texas redistricting fiasco. They have a much weaker case than many of them assume.

There have been a few significant developments since a three-judge panel (2 Republicans and 1 Democrat) approved Tom DeLay's dream map for keeping himself in power.
First, there is the little matter of Tom DeLay being indicted for the money laundering scheme that helped get his map into law in the first place. Second, and more significant, we now know that the judges were lied to when told that the Justice Department said the map did not violate the Voting Rights Act. The non-partisan experts in the Justice Department were unanimous in saying that the plan would dilute minority voting strength, as indeed it has.

The Washington Post looks at why that is...

The voting rights suits point to two districts in particular, Doggett's old 10th District, which covered one county and now stretches eastward to Houston, and Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla's 23rd District.

In 2001, the voting-age population of the 10th District was 55 percent non-Hispanic white, while Latinos and blacks made up 39 percent. Now, the white voting-age population is nearly 70 percent, while minorities are just over 25 percent. A district that gave Doggett 84 percent of its votes in 2002 gave Republican Michael T. McCaul 84 percent two years later.

The federal courts had deemed the 23rd District a Latino opportunity district, but Latino groups have said that white voters gave Bonilla his razor-thin margin of victory in 2002 over a Latino Democrat. That year, the voting-age population of his district was 63 percent Latino and 33 percent non-Hispanic white.

For Republicans in Austin, Bonilla's victory was too shaky. After redistricting, he cruised to victory with 69 percent of the vote. That time, the Latino population was 51 percent, while the white population had climbed to 45 percent.

"To dismantle a Latino-majority district for the explicit purpose of making sure they can't elect a candidate of their choice is a violation of the Voting Rights Act," said Nina Perales, southwestern regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Bolstering that case are the Justice lawyers. A December 2003 memo obtained this month by The Washington Post shows that six staff lawyers and two analysts from the voting section concluded that the Texas plan should be rejected because it would harm black and Hispanic voters. Senior Justice officials overruled that recommendation and issued an approval a week later.

People need to remember that the Voting Rights Act is concerned with the voters in the district and not with who they elect. A majority white district can elect a minority candidate, but that does not make it a minority district. My City Council District, for example, is overwhelmingly white, but nevertheless elected a black man, Art Hall, as our representative. But that doesn't mean you could count my district as a minority voting district.

Despite the election of one additional black following the re-redistricting process, the fact remains that in the end two minority voting districts were eliminated to help give Republicans their ultimate partisan advantage. Once the power of incumbency wears off as established members leave office, the full impact of the GOP scheme will become evident.
The Supreme Court will be hard-pressed not to knock this down when faced with the opinion of the Voting Rights experts at Justice who were muzzled by political hacks these past few years.

Very, very good news

Supreme Court to review Texas political map


WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court said Monday it would consider the constitutionality of a Texas congressional map engineered by Rep. Tom DeLay that helped Republicans gain seats in Congress.

I’ll have more to say about this in a bit.

Redefining terms

So what is a "conservative" today?

This letter in the New York Times the other day makes a good point about how the definition of conservative has changed over time.

To the Editor:

Re "Running Out of Steam," by David Brooks (column, Dec. 8):

There's a simpler explanation as to why the conservative agenda has stalled. Conservatives are no longer conservatives.

Twenty years ago, I was a conservative and believed in balanced budgets, limited foreign intervention and limiting the government's encroachment upon individual liberties and freedom. Today, I believe in balanced budgets, limited foreign intervention and limiting the government's encroachment upon individual liberties and freedom, but now I'm called a liberal.

Conservatives of yesteryear respected state sovereignty and believed that torturing prisoners was only what the Communists did. Today's conservatives have no compunction about using their federal muscle to overrule state courts. It's repugnant that we are even debating the merits of torture.

Joel S. Peskoff
Baldwin, N.Y., Dec. 8, 2005


I think the answer is quite simple, really. The radical right has usurped the term for their own sake even though there is very little in their activist agenda that could truly be described as conservative.

Two good editorials

A pair of excellent editorials today, one in the NYTimes and one in the San Antonio Express-News.

The NYTimes explains why torture is bad aside from just being illegal and immoral. It has been demonstrated many times over that it produces bad information as well.

The Express-News editors get it right on the Texas redistricting scandal.

Tortured reasoning

Funny they didn't mention this earlier...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.
The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

Bad policies beget bad intelligence which begets bad justifications for a bad war....
But wait! Let's not say it's a "bad war." Rather, it is the wrong war fought at the wrong time and led by incompentent and corrupt officials who did not know what they were getting into and therefore planned poorly for it.

Ann Coulter IS smarter than you

I don't like Ann Coulter. I think she is arrogant, mean and contemptible. But I also think that is part of her shtick and she plays it up as part of her persona.

Nevertheless, I wish these student groups would just let the woman talk and quit giving her all the extra publicity.
By booing and shouting her down and not allowing her to speak at these campus events they are just making her more sympathetic and making themselves and their cause less so.

As for her reported statement that she is smarter than her audience, I would have to agree. At least at the time and place when she is speaking she can easily demonstrate that point by noting that she is being paid to be there and her audience is not. So who is smarter?

Tom DeLay, meet Tom Foley

The Hammer is apparently being smashed flat in the latest opinion polls to come out of his Sugar Land district. He will most likely share the same fate as another former House Majority Leader - Thomas Foley of Washington - who was swept out of his seat in 1994. And Foley wasn't even involved in any significant scandals at the time!

Meanwhile, DeLay's hopes of making a quick return to his leadership post were dealt a serious blow the other day when the judge in the case refused to throw out the most serious charges against him. That means the case will go to trial and won't be completed until after House Republicans hold new elections for their leadership.

Failing grade for Bush administration

In what should have been the most important and most pressing measure by which to judge our nation's leadership these past three years, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have recieved a big, fat F.

A final report from the former 9/11 Commission on Monday gave Congress and the White House a blistering review of their work to secure the nation, warning that terrorists will strike again and could cause catastrophic destruction with nuclear weapons.

Some of the sharpest criticism of this administration came from the Repubican members of the bi-partisan commission:

"The American people ought to demand answers," said James R. Thompson, a Republican commissioner and a former Illinois governor. "Why aren't our tax dollars being spent to protect our lives? What's the rationale? What's the excuse? There is no excuse."

Wow! Imagine if Al Gore had been president when 9/11 occurred and then three years later we still have no idea where Osama bin Laden is and a report like this comes out. Needless to say, Repubicans would be writing up articles of impeachment as we speak.

Abuse of power

Damn right there needs to be an investigation into this!
Why even bother to have staff attorneys at the Department of Justice who are experts in various fields if their opinions ultimately carry no weight?

What I want to know is what does it mean specifically under the 1965 Voting Rights Act for states to get Justice Department approval for redistricting maps? Does it mean that a political flunky can just rubberstamp any old plan that suits the partisan purposes of the party in power without regard to how it effects minority voting rights? I somehow don't think that was the intent of the law.

This is really sad if they can actually get away with this. For people who think our government system is screwed up today, here is a classic example of why.
And let's not forget that this is not an isolated case. There is a clear pattern of this abuse of power happening continuously with this administration:

In recent weeks, developments in the Justice Department and elsewhere in the government have involved instances in which political appointees countermanded the judgment of professional staff experts whose conclusions were not in line with the administration's philosophy.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department lawyer who has led the civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry for five years announced that she was retiring because of disagreements with supervisors.

"I didn't feel like I had the support at all times of the political team," the lawyer, Sharon Y. Eubanks, said.

Last month, the nonpartisan examiners at the Government Accountability Office said that the Food and Drug Administration had relied on politics and ideology rather than science in rejecting over-the-counter sales of the morning-after contraceptive Plan B.

In broadcasting, the inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting found that its former chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, had repeatedly crossed boundaries in the law intended to protect public television and radio from political interference.

And to think we have three more years of this garbage to contend with. I just hope people get good and sick of it by then.