Foo Bar

The Bush Administration Funds Sex Ed For Kindergartners

Rudy Giuliani appeared on Meet the Press yesterday and defended McCain's "sex ed for kindergartners" attack on Obama. He tried to make the bill sound as icky as possible by pointing out that it mentioned HIV-AIDS education for grades K-through-12, i.e., starting in kindergarten (of course, he didn't note that the bill called for any such education to be age-appropriate).

I pointed out over at DailyKos that the New York City public schools included HIV instruction for kindergartners. Now, I suppose someone defending Giuliani against hypocrisy charges could argue that he didn't have complete control over the NYC education system at the time. Regardless, that got me wondering about other education systems which support HIV education starting in kindergarten.

Well, the great state of Tennessee (not the most socially liberal of states) has a state Board of Education that includes HIV education for kindergartners in their policy statement (see page 6):

The HIV prevention education program shall:
• Be taught at every level, kindergarten through grade twelve;
• Follow content guidelines prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC);

Whoa! Not only does Tennessee call for HIV education to be taught in kindergarten. It does so on the basis of CDC guidelines! Could it be that the Bush administration supports such guidelines?

Apparently so! The CDC website says it funds the National Association of State Boards of Education. Here's what NASBE is doing with the funding:

Providing HIV-related information and guidance to state boards of
education and other education stakeholders on policies that promote
effective HIV prevention for kindergarten through 12th grade students in
schools across the nation.

What are NASBE's policies regarding HIV education?:

The goals of HIV prevention education are to promote
healthful living and discourage the behaviors that put people at risk
of acquiring HIV. The educational program will:

• Be taught at every level, kindergarten through grade twelve;

Look at how similar the NASBE language is to the Tennessee language. It seems likely that the Tennessee policy propagated down from the CDC and NASBE.

John McCain likes to portray himself as an opponent of wasteful and inappropriate government programs. Well, where he was he when the Bush administration was funding sex education for kindergartners? If he really objects to this kind of program, maybe he should have been going after Bush before he started going after Obama.

Is it really a death sentence?

Given that someone like John Geoghan didn't last too long in prison, I wonder what the prospects are for this Abu Ali guy.

Testing

Just wondering if my account still works.

666? Sorry, Wrong Number

Stryper will have to change their logos now to display 727.

ACLU: Rush Limbaugh's ally

The ACLU is supporting Rush Limbaugh in his fight against Florida's seizure of his medical records for their investigation of the painkiller controversy.

I wonder if Rush will be returning the favor on his radio show in the future.

Amnesia for Everyone

Michelle Malkin digs up lots of quotes that make various Democratic Senators look hypocritical for supporting the filibuster of judicial nominees at the moment after complaining in the 90s that some of Clinton's nominees weren't given up-or-down votes. "Lots of amnesia going round,", she says. Fair enough, I agree that this looks like hypocrisy, as I've noted before.

Aren't Republicans equally hypocritical for preventing those up-or-down votes in the 90s and complaining now about Bush's nominees being denied an up-or-down vote? Am I missing something here? 

Actually, We're Still Stingy

Instapundit points to the fact that the U.S. has hit the $1 billion mark in private donations to tsunami victims as proof that initial allegations of American stinginess were wrong. That's great that we've given a billion, but on a per-person basis we still don't look good in comparison to most of western Europe.

$1 billion is a little over 3 bucks per person. This post shows the per-person private donations totals for various countries as of way back in January (January 8th, to be precise). After doing the conversion from Danish Kr at 5.7/dollar, we find that Norwegians as of early January had already given $13 per person, and most of the countries had already given more than $3 per person.  I don't know what the totals for the other countries are as of now, but surely they're much higher than they were as of January, so we'd probably look even worse if we had up-to-date numbers for Europe.

Granted, we probably don't look as bad if you factor in the non-monetary logistic support we supplied via our military (hard to know how to value that) but I would argue on the whole we're still looking kinda miserly in comparison to the rest of the First World.

A Wholphin Begets a Dolphin-Wholphin

I thought by definition animals of different species cannot interbreed and have fertile offspring (e.g. horse + donkey=mule, but mule is sterile).  I guess I'm wrong.

Caribou Wife-Hunting

I was watching Republican congressman Louie Gohmert from Texas speak in favor of the energy bill on CSPAN last night. He tried to undermine the credibility of environmental lobby opposition by pointing out that warnings back in the 1970s that the Alaskan pipeline would hurt the caribou have been proven wrong. The caribou herd has in fact thrived since the pipeline was built. The highlight was watching him try to explain, in a way that wouldn't offend his Bible Belt constituents, that the warmth from the pipeline makes the caribou horny. He said that when caribou go looking "for a wife" they go towards the pipeline. Hey, Rep. Gohmert, if caribou can have wives, why can't lesbians?

I read the same factoid about inaccurate caribou population predictions recently in an NYT column by the reliably liberal Nicholas Kristof, who was arguing in that column that environmentalists need to rethink their strategies. OK, I've heard this twice now, from both sides of the aisle. I'm intrigued.

It intrigues me because it illustrates a characteristic of environmental debates that distinguishes them from most other political issues: for the most part, environmentalists and their opponents disagree about facts, rather than values. Sure, occasionally you'll hear a values dispute along the lines of "who cares about the spotted owl when loggers are losing their jobs?". By and large, though, Republicans implicitly acknowledge that e.g. global warming, if real, would be bad- they just question whether it's real.

The nature of these disputes allows for the possibility in some cases that one side or the other can ultimately be proven right in a fairly indisputable way. Now that drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge is going to happen, I hope that both sides of the argument are on record in a clear, verifiable/falsifiable way about what the environmental impact will be. I have to do more research about the predictions, but if the forecasts are that environmental damage will be clearly observable relatively quickly, then fairly soon (within a decade?) we'll get to see who was right and who was wrong.

I'm instinctively sympathetic to the environmental movement, but it needs to be grounded in facts and accurate predictions or it's going to lose its credibility. I'm gonna do some more digging to see whether in fact environmentalists in the 70s have been proven flatly wrong about the impact of the pipeline (I heard someone make the argument that a caribou population explosion is also a bad outcome- maybe so, but that's not what was predicted). Now, environmentalists can make a "better safe than sorry" argument after the fact- we thought there might be damage caused, and we shouldn't have taken the risk- but if that's not how they phrased it ahead of time then they still look less credible. When no WMDs were found, Bush loyalists argued that the president had to make a tough call given uncertain facts and couldn't take any chances with Saddam. Fine, but that's not the argument that was made ahead of time. We told the UN there was no doubt he had WMDs. That's unquestionably a credibility hit. The same goes for the environmental lobby. Don't go predicting certain doom for an ecosystem unless you're really certain.

Karl Rove says media not so liberal

Hidden towards the end of an AP article with the seemingly unnewsworthy headline Rove Decries Media Approach To Government is the following gem:

Rove countered the general notion among conservatives that mainstream media outlets skew liberal. He said the press corps is "less liberal than it is oppositional"...

Karl Rove has just handed every left-of-center TV pundit a handy rejoinder to whip out every time a right wing commentator complains of liberal media bias. "Liberal bias in the media? Karl Rove doesn't think so. What? Don't you think Karl Rove knows anything about news coverage?".

Now, you could certainly argue "oppositional" is functionally equivalent to "liberal" at the moment, with the White House and Congress both controlled by Republicans. Still, I think Rove's comment  essentially supports the argument made by many centrists and liberals in response to "liberal media" accusations: if the media are biased, they're biased in favor of a good story. The failings and the hypocrisy of those in power generally make for good stories, so the media try hard to look for such stories.

This is a particularly valuable quote if the Democrats win back the White House in 2008...