January 2009 Archives

Tom Daschle, President Obama's pick to run the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services, also has some tax issues:

Daschle filed amended tax returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007 to reflect additional income for consulting work, the use of a car service and reduced deductions for charitable contributions. He filed the returns after Obama announced he intended to nominate Daschle to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Most of the additional taxes resulted from unreported income from the use of a car service provided him by a close friend and business associate, Leo Hindery Jr. The unreported income for that service totaled more than $250,000 over three years.

Daschle also had unreported consulting income of $88,333, in 2007. He also had reductions to charitable contributions totaling about $15,000 over the three years covered, according to the Senate Finance Committee document. The document, marked "Confidential Draft," is a committee statement concerning Daschle's nomination.

The White House insists that this "stupid mistake" won't derail the nomination, as does the Democratic leadership. But given that Obama's (self-imposed, strictest in history) lobbyist rules are also getting bent a bit, the tax flap is giving critics of the Administration plenty of ammunition to gleefully play with. Going to bat for Daschle invites a lot of distraction from the aggressive domestic agenda that Obama seeks to implement, and Daschle (a veteran Senator with many post-Senate "consulting" affiliations and other associations) may simply have too much baggage to be effective in pushing that agenda through. The sheen of technocratic comptence that is so critical to building popular support for bold policy starts to wear thin when your Cabinet picks keep making "stupid mistakes" (direct quote from an unnamed White House upper-up).

What was Daschle's qualification for HHS, anyway? I am aware of his legislative record and policy expertise, but Daschle remains firmly within the old guard of the Democratic Party, the same generation as John Kerry (whose nomination for president didn't exactly light a fire under America's collective consciousness). It's great to have the grizzled voices of experience and senior expertise in the diplomatic sphere (which is why I applaud the choice of Holbrooke and Mitchell as envoys - under Secretary Clinton's direction). But in terms of executive leadership, we need new blood.

The argument for Howard Dean as Secretary of Health and Human Services is quite straightforward. He's a medical doctor, and has more executive experience than anyone else in Congress or the White House. In his six terms as Governor of Vermont he paid off the state's public debt, expanded health insurance for children, lowered taxes, signed civil unions into law, and delivered a balanced budget every year. And of course as Chairman of the DNC he implemented the 50-state strategy that gave Obama the foundation for victory.

The only reason Dean wasn't tapped for HHS outright? Rahm Emmanuel, who bitterly opposed the 50-state strategy that brought his new boss to victory. As I mentioned earlier, Dean's name was excluded from consideration quite early on, citing Dean's "partisan background" and lack of congressional experience. That argument is total nonsense - and applies far more to Daschle than it does to Dean anyway. 

It's time to acknowledge that Howard Dean is the right choice for HHS.

There is a school of Islamic interpretation called Qur'anism that I hadn't heard of before, which adopts a Qur'an-centric approach to religious practice with a liberal mindset towards reform and political freedom. Naturally, they are being persecuted for it - even in Egypt:

Many Americans do not realize that there is a war being waged in Egypt against Muslim reformers. These reformers call themselves "Koranists" because they focus solely on the Koran and advocate a modern interpretation of Islam that rejects Shariah law.

These self-declared leaders of the "Islamic Reformation" number in the thousands and are connected globally through the Internet. For nearly a decade, as this movement has gained momentum, they have come under increased attack from the Egyptian government for their religious ideas. Al Azhar University, which is based in Cairo and is the leading center for conservative Sunni learning in the world, has rejected the views of the Koranists and has sought to systematically dismantle the movement.

There is an interesting and vibrant discussion on the topic of Qur'anism over at Talk Islam, including some actual Qur'anists themselves. It is a great debate to gain insight into some of the variety of religious thought within Islam, since the audience at Talk Islam is quite diverse.

Twitter is THE source for following the RNC Chair vote right now. And in a shocking upset, Mike Duncan and Michael Steele are tied in the second round of voting. You can follow the debate in real time via twitter search on the #rncchair hashtag.

My prediction is that Michael Steele will be RNC Chair. Republicans like him, and Christine Todd Whitman (whose essay on the Republicans being a party of solutions, not ideology, was excellent), are the way for the party to become politically relevant again. The "Palinist" wing of the GOP is going to go into a paroxysm of anger if Steele wins, but such splenetic conservatives are more harm than help.

@PatrickRuffini is probably the best person to keep tabs on right now. Developing... stay tuned.

The following is a guest post by my friend Aamer Jamali.

Having recently returned from Hajj, I am bombarded by that well meaning question by all of my friends and loved ones... "How was it?"  Unfortunately, all I can answer is an inadequate "fine", or even "great".  Why?  Words can't really describe the experience, especially hastily chosen words in a usually hurried conversation.
 
How was Hajj?  Was it awesome?  Was it a life changing experience?  Was it spiritually fulfilling? Was it physically rigorous?  Yes.  All that for sure... But even that seems to leave something out.  Not in the level of superlative, but in the level of quality.
 
To me, Hajj was best described as a journey through death and back.  How would you describe that?  You simply can't.
 
The first thing you learn, even before you leave, is that your Hajj is your own, and no one else's.  Your experiences, your hardships, your prayers, your choices are all unique to you alone.  So it makes sense that this interpretation of Hajj is mine alone, and may not be the experience of others.  It may not even be 'correct' in the sense that I have not gleaned it (to the best of my knowledge) from any sabaq or sanctioned text.  Yet to me, it is as plain as day.
 
Hajj, in many ways like death, is a pinnacle, a climax of a Muslim's life.  Something to be looked at with equal parts excitement, respect, and trepidation, mixed with a healthy dose of downright fear.  And yet you realize that though you may fear it, your life is marching inevitably towards it as a farz (required) act.  For me, I felt a call, so clear it was almost physical, that this was my year to go.  And when that hit, there really was no choice but for me to make the trek this year.
 
The first true act of Hajj is putting on Ehram clothes.  For men, two simple pieces of unsewn, unadorned cloth, wrapped around your body in much the same way as a traditional burial shroud.  You shed every accoutrement and accessory of this world.  Everyone looks the same.  The cardiologist from Los Angeles was sitting next to the street sweeper from Bangladesh (really!), and nobody could tell one from the other.  This was a powerful moment, saying goodbye to the worldly station you have worked so hard to achieve.
 
The trip to Arafat is the climax of the act of Hajj.  You stand before the sun and pray.  Much like Muslim beliefs of qiyamat (the day of judgement), you stand before Allah and you pray.  You pray with an intensity you have never before experienced.  The most fitting description I have read (but cannot take credit for) is that you stand before your God naked.  Stripped naked of every crutch or protection you have come to rely on.  There are no worldly accessories.  It doesn't matter how much you make, or what you own.  It doesn't matter who your dad is, or your mom.  You may stand next to your spouse, but you are utterly and completely alone.  Standing there in your burial shroud, praying before God, with only your Iman (faith) and your Amal (works) to speak on your behalf, stripped of every conceivable comfort or connection of the world.  This is an accurate description of Arafat day, but it is also an accurate description of what Muslims are taught will happen to each of us when we are called to account after death.
 
Arafat day is the most exhausting of Hajj.  Though it is not the most rigorous day, the trip down from the mountain of Arafat is a mixture of feeble jubilation with intense spiritual, psychological, and emotional fatigue.  Your trip through death is over.  Your accounts have been settled.  You have been cleansed of sin.  But you have been left with nothing in this world, you sleep under the stars, exposed to the elements.    It is time for rebirth.
 
On your return, you shave your head, just as we do for newly born babies.  You begin your new life with a tawaaf (a trip to the kaabah), hopefully beginning things on the right foot.  What better way to start off your new life than with an act of total obedience and submission to God's will?  You return home, and remove your (by now dusty and dirty) Ehram clothes to begin your life anew.
 
When I finished, my number one feeling was one of traversing the plains of death, facing its trials and tribulations, and returning reborn. 
 
How do you sum that up in a hallway when a colleague asks "How was your trip?" There's only one realistic answer.  "Fine, thanks".

Aamer H. Jamali, MD, FACC is a cardiologist in Los Angeles.

Partly because I just went to Africa and flew over (but did not have a chance to actually visit) the Great Rift Valley (also known as the Cradle of Mankind), I've been thinking a bit about evolutionary theory of late. I am a scientist, but not a biologist - my field is medical physics. Still, my background makes me biased towards the scientific establishment and I am an ardent believer in the scientific method. While technically as a deeply religious person I do believe in "intelligent design" (in the abstract) I don't believe in Intelligent Design as promoted by the various evolution-denialists in the political arena. I am quite strictly against introducing religious theories such as ID into the science curriculum.

All that said, I still am unable to accept the blind assertion that genetic mutation is the sole source of speciation. Note that I am not talking about the origins of life, but rather the evolution of life afterwards from species to species. It strikes me that the evolutionary dogma can be reduced to the idea that DNA is "read-only". Contrast this with the (discredited) ideas of Lamarck who argued that the environment can introduce changes to an organism that are then heritable by its progeny; given that DNA is indisputably the mechanism by which species reproduce, that implies that DNA is "read/write".

From an engineering and aesthetic perspective, I have trouble with the idea that a system so complex as DNA and gene expression can be so rigid. My intuition is that DNA does not posess enough degrees of freedom to "encode" life as we know it. But how can I test that intuition without getting a PhD in genetics? I think I've come up with a way, though of course it is crude and rife with bland layman assumptions. Still, bear with me (and I hope to attract some attention to this from experts so we can refine it).

Let's take some basic numbers. There are about 20,000 genes in the human genome, with an average size of 50 kilobases (ie, 50,000 base pairs. Remember DNA is a double-helix, unlike RNA). Also, we are often told that humans and chimpanzees differ in their genomes by only 1%. Actually, that figure is only for genes where humans and chimps totally differm but there are some genes where the variation between teh species might not be so absolute. I'll use 5% instead. Finally, we know that according to best estimates, humand and chimpanzees diverged from their common ancestor about 5 million years ago.

Taking these bits of data, we can actually estimate the required rate of evolution in terms of point mutations in DNA needed to turn a chimp into an ape. Of course, humans did not evolve from chimps, so we would then halve the rate we calculate to get the change from the common ancestor of both to humans (or chimps). So, let's do the math.

20,000 genes x 50,000 base pairs = 1 billion base pairs
5% difference between humans and chimps = 50 million base pairs
rate of change = 1/2 * 50 million base pairs / 5 million years = 5 base pairs per year

So, to go from the common ancestor of humans and chimps, to modern humans, the average rate of mutation required would be 5 base pairs per year. This seems like a very high rate to me; if we discretize into generations of 25 years each, then we are talking about 125 base pairs every generation.

It seems that this is a number that can be tested over time. You'd need to collect DNA data from thousands of people, over a few centuries, to get an idea of the actual rate of change. But it is definitely something that can be tested (and the exact number of people you'd need to test, and how many generations to test, is something that can be estimated by statistical theory to ensure that the results have statistical significance).

I am sure there are many objections to the methodology above - one that is immediate is that humankind has historically had very small populations, unlike other species like insects or rodents etc. That means that other species have a lot more raw genome floating around. But that kind of supports the contention that human evolution must be very rapid indeed to support the observed evolution over the past few million years, given our far smaller gene pool.

The implication of such rapid evolution is that we should actually notice it on human timescales. And that there is actually is some mechanism of action that is actually driving the mutations themselves - cosmic rays? transcription errors? normal statistical variance?

It seems that if we aren't mutating at a rate comparable to above, then some sort of alternative mechanism must also be operating to accelerate the changes in DNA required to evolve from one species to another. There's certainly some evidence that there are such "neo-Lamarckian" processes at work, The case of the humble water-flea certainly is not explicable by normal Darwinian processes.

You could go even further and compute the total information content of the human genome, and then try and see whether that is sufficient to describe a human being. But that is a task I'll leave for later, or someone else. I think I've ventured far enough out on this limb for now :)

via Clammyc at Daily Kos, here is a partial list of what the House Republicans voted unanimously against in refusing to support the stimulus package that passed without them.An increase in the maximum benefit under the former food stamp program...

It is official - by unanimous vote, Rod Blagojevich is no longer the Governor of Illinois. In fact he has been barred from seeking public office in the State of Illinois forever. The Chicago Tribune has a fantastic live-blog of...

This is wonderful and weird. I think it's wonderful because it is so weird. Perhaps we are seeing the rise of Obollywood?...

Gary Farber sounded the alarm last month about President Obama's nominee for National Intelligence Director, Denis Blair, who was complicit in genocide in East Timor during the Clinton Administration. Unfortunately, no questions were asked about East Timor during Blair's confirmation...

Further to the debate at Talk Islam earlier, I think that it is critical that the broader foreign policy principle of democracy promotion not be discredited by the imperialism-lite of the neoconservative movement.Liberal interventionism is not a purely military effort,...

Guest post by G. Willow Wilson. Over at TalkIslam, we've been having an ongoing debate about the merits of liberal military intervention around the world. The debate was sparked by an entry about the Shabab Islamist group, which is growing...

Bill Kristol's year-long stint as columnist at the New York Times has ended. His last column, entitled "Will Obama Save Liberalism?", begins with the line:All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a...

The following anecdote is written by my friend Aamer Jamali, via email a few weeks ago (prior to the Inauguration). I have his permission to reprint it here.Of all the things to remember about my Hajj trip (and there are...

I am frustrated, because in the past few weeks I've received various email forwards from many people I respect that are laden with anger and frustration at Israel's campaign of collective punishment in Gaza. These are intelligent, tolerant people -...

I don't begrudge Sarah Palin this at all: Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin wants to write a book and is looking to Robert Barnett, the same high-powered DC attorney who represented Barack Obama and both of the Clintons while they were...

Obama's inauguration speech certainly set a high bar. Can his Administration live up to it? Or the expectations of Obama's supporters? President Obama himself has been careful not to promise the moon, but rather emphasized that the job ahead is...

I'm not a big fan of the "100 day honeymoon" period for new presidencies - if anything, the tone on day one is probably predictive of the entire term. In that regard, I don't have a lot to complain about...

The Belief-o-Matic quiz here at Beliefnet is a really interesting resource that I think deserves some attention. I took the quiz, as did several others at Talk Islam (muslims and non-muslims alike), and we are discussing the results from the...

Incendiary Dutch politician Geert Wilders will be brought to trial for comparing Islam to Nazism:Geert Wilders made headlines in March 2008 for his short-film Fitna, which juxtaposed shots of the 9/11 attacks on the US with quotations from the Quran,...

I am a huge fan of the China Rises blog written by Tim Johnson, Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers. Johnson has a great catch about how Chinese censors reacted to the following paragraph in Obama's speech:"Recall that earlier generations...

Having just returned from my trip to Kenya, I saw firsthand how Obama's Kenyan roots are a matter of national pride there. Obama's face graced the papers almost every other day, and our taxi driver proudly told us he was...

The ACLU has obtained a copy of the draft order to close Gitmo. I am embedding the document (PDF) below. Publish at Scribd or explore others: Other Academic Work obama GitmoThe ACLU will have an analysis soon. UPDATE: The Politico...

Blame this on Chief Justice Roberts - Obama had a do-over today:WASHINGTON - After the flub heard around the world, President Barack Obama has taken the oath of office. Again. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the oath to Obama on...

My friend (and accomplished writer) G. Willow Wilson spent several years living in Cairo after converting to Islam. In her Journal at Talk Islam she relates her observations about the differences in how Islam is lived in breathed in Cairo...

Change came to the virtual White House as well as the physical one yesterday - WhiteHouse.gov has re-launched in true Obama fashion by featuring a blog as its centerpiece and promises to publish legislation and executive orders online for the...

I posted President Obama's inauguration speech video and transcript earlier, but I just want to highlight the part where he directly addressed the muslim world:We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped...

(click to enlarge)This is the transcript of President Obama's inauguration speech. I have edited out the applause lines and made other cosmetic changes for clarity. My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for...

Part 1 of 2:Part 2 of 2:...

now, Mr. President - get to work.UPDATE: here's video of President Obama's inauguration speech (in two parts) from YouTube. And here's the transcript and word cloud....

Barack Obama strove to avoid race as a defining issue for his campaign. Part of this was pragmatic; running as an explicitly "Black" candidate would have hurt his electability beyond the racial silo, not because of racism per se but...

It is easy to focus on the negative, but sometimes it is important to remind ourselves of the good news for a change. To that end, Juan Cole has compiled a list of ten good news stories from the Islamic...

My friend Ali Eteraz calls the Inauguration a "secular hajj" for America:The theological comparison isn't far-fetched. Emerson, Whitman, Dewey, and Rorty all suggested that politics is America's civil religion. This makes the constitution the country's holy text. The division of...

My friend Razib has started an interesting debate on the meaning and value of the concept, "Judeo-Christian" - his initial post attracted a vigorous discussion, a response from Ross Douthat at The Atlantic, and lively discussion at Talk Islam. Frankly...

The following is a statement of principles written by Richard Silverstein of the blog Tikkun Olam and other American Jewish writers (many of whom contributed to the landmark collection of essays, A Time to Speak Out) regarding the ongoing Israeli...

As Israel's war against Gaza rages on, the foreign media must watch from the sidelines. Israel has barred access to the Gaza strip for journalists and human rights monitors, as part of an attempt to impose political control on the...

Having just returned from an overseas trip, I am particularly sensitive to the issue of racial profiling of muslims by airlines. Or more colloquially, "flying while brown". There are any number of innocent things you can do on a plane...

The idea of the state of Israel is one I support wholeheartedly. A nation for the Jewish people, a homeland where they can engage in the same right of self-determination and chart their own destiny. However, this right and this...

I'm sure that was the pessimsitic sentiment in some circles. Such naysayers were proven wrong, of course - or at least, mostly wrong:WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Portions of the frostbitten United States are feeling the coldest air so far...

It's difficult to leave Africa - literally, our flight kept getting delayed and we barely made our connection to Amsterdam. But also in a philosophical sense, it is hard to leave, because some piece of Africa stays with you. This...

As I discussed in an earlier post, free media and unbiased media are not the same thing. Current coverage of the situation in Gaza by American press is a perfect example of this discrepancy. But an op-ed by Professor Rashid...

Typically, it is quite difficult for me to fast outside of the month of Ramadan...I love my coffee WAY too much (it's now decaffeinated, though). But, there are a few days during which I am happy to do so. Two...

Recently at Talk Islam, we've been having a discussion about the Islamic attitude toward environmental conservation. It started when blogger Umar Lee, an anti-conservationist, posted this entry at his blog. When Talk Islam blogger Thabet called Lee's attitude "ignorance dressed...

This is a guest post by Muslim comics writer and essayist G. Willow Wilson. One of my literary heroes, Neil Gaiman, is an ardent supporter of free speech. In this entry of his blog, he discusses an issue that has...

(This is a guest post by my friend and Islamsphere scion Ali Eteraz)I woke up this morning and found a comprehensive Middle East peace plan being offered by Saudi Arabia in the pages of the Washington Post.Putting aside whether or...