in practice, rape and the notion of sexual conquest persist for the same reason that warfare persists: because the human animal— especially the male animal— craves drama as much as food, shelter and clothing. Conquering an unwilling sex partner is about as much drama as a man can find without shooting a gun— and, of course, guns haven’t disappeared either.

Earth to liberated women: When you display legs, thighs or cleavage, some liberated men will see it as a sign that you feel good about yourself and your sexuality. But most men will see it as a sign that you want to get laid.

Now, I think the best response to this lazy thinking was comment number 12 at Murhta’s original response:

I, personally, want to get laid. Cause it’s fun. That’s why I’m dressing up sexy and going out tonight. Conversely, I do NOT want to get raped. Cause it’s NOT fun. How is that confusing?”

I’d like to build on that for a minute, because Dan’s argument is incredibly dishonest and pernicious. It excuses inexcusable behavior by wedding it to men’s well-known susceptibility to visual stimulus. Dan’s argument is that the desire to rape is hard-wired into men. We see legs, tits, and ass, we get horny as hell, our dicks stiffen up, and we want to go rape. Sadly, many of us, Rottenberg argues, give in to our “rape urge” and the next thing you know there’s a woman crying in an alleyway.

But Rottenberg has it all wrong. Yes, men are hard-wired to be visually stimulated. Every day on my way to work, I see more beautiful women than I can count. And yes, I admit when I see tits and ass and all those other awesome parts of a lady, I get horny. And yes, I want to do all sorts of beastly, dirty, FILTHY things until my balls are drained dry. Sometimes I even want to do these things outside the confines of a relationship or during a one-night stand.

But these very instinctual, physical feelings do not constitute a desire to RAPE, but a desire to FUCK. Those are two very different things.

When I see an attractive woman that I’d like to fuck, the general hope is THAT SHE WOULD WANT TO FUCK TOO. She would be a willing participant in our debauchery, coming up with all sorts of beastly, dirty, FILTHY ideas of her own that will make everything more pleasurable for both of us (three or more if she brings a friend/s). That’s the thing about fucking: it’s about mutual pleasure. It’s consensual. I hope that most men I know feel the same way.

Rape is none of these things. It is not, as Rottenberg claims “as much drama as a man can find without shooting a gun.” It is a violent act that is no different from beating the shit out of someone weaker than oneself. There’s nothing sexy about crying, hysterical shrieks of pain and terror, and an unwilling partner who’s desperately trying to get you to stop hurting her. NOTHING. For that matter, Dan’s idea of conquest gets it all wrong too: any man knows you win a woman with your charm, your wit, your good looks to “conquer” women with physical force or trauma.

If it was about men’s uncontrollable libido and “conquering an unwilling sex partner”, shouldn’t we see more incidences of gay men raping straight men in our streets? But no: the only incidences of homosexual rape you ever hear about are those perpetrated in prison, typically by the strong against the weak. And in those incidences, no one ever pretends its about anything other than the brute application of force and power.

There’s one other bit of thoroughly-discredited nonsense in Rottenberg’s column that sadly still needs to be addressed, because it’s obvious some men just don’t get it:

Earth to liberated women: When you display legs, thighs or cleavage, some liberated men will see it as a sign that you feel good about yourself and your sexuality. But most men will see it as a sign that you want to get [raped].

Left all but unstated is the corollary: “so if you want to avoid being raped, cover up your legs, thighs, and cleavage. That way the men won’t be stimulated, and then you won’t get raped.”

This is the worst, most despicable, and most small-minded kind of victim blaming, and also the easiest to refute. Even if Dan’s hypothesis were true, that seeing women’s lady-bits make men’s worst instincts kick in, well so fucking what? We, men and women alike, have LOTS of unpleasant instincts that we manage to control in order to live in a safe and decent society. For example, I REALLY have to take a shit right now. Now, I suppose I COULD give in to my instinct and just shit in my pants (or maybe on the floor), but instead I’m going to exercise what’s called “self-control” and wait until this paragraph is done to make a quick trip to the loo, the socially accepted place to take a crap.

[...]

OK, I’m back. Here’s another instinct we all have: greed. Anyone who has kids knows what a challenge it its to teach your them to share, to not be grabby. It’s hard-wired into us, which is why we parents work so hard teach our kids differently. But by Dan’s logic, there’s no point to it. Instinct is instinct, and there’s nothing to do but give in. Thus, Dan’s logic absolves the mugger who stole your watch or the pickpocket who walked off with your wallet: it is the crime victim’s fault for flaunting his wealth, setting off the instinct to be grabby.

And don’t get me started on the human instinct to fight and kill, which is so deeply rooted in our primate past. Dan’s beliefs about rape set off my instinct to punch him in the face until his teeth break: would that be OK? Or the urge to cheat (the instinct for sexual variety can be found in both men and women): if Dan’s wife were to initiate sex with me, would THAT be OK?

So just to recap: “wanting to get laid” is not the same as “wanting to get raped”. Human beings are capable of making rational choices. And criminals, not their victims, are who we hold responsible for crimes. It is a damned shame that these points even have to be made.

Post script: over at Broad Street Review, Rottenberg whines that he’s being treated unfairly by close-minded people who have no respect for ideas. But by Dan’s own logic, he deserves what he gets: he went out of his way to provoke a response, and now his reputation has been savaged, raped if you will. I think he was asking for it.

UPDATE: Self-proclaimed genius Scott Adams (creator of “Dilbert”) also buys into the “rape=sexual” desire lie. Really? It doesn’t take a genius to understand what a flawed position that is to take. But then, Scott Adams really isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.

Hi,

New Yorkers and people across America are paying over $4 a gallon for gas. Should we give Big Oil another few billion dollars on top of that, too?

That’s what we’re doing right now in the form of huge taxpayer-funded subsidies, and it has to change.

Taxpayers currently spot Big Oil over $2,000,000,000 a year in subsidies that are fueling our nation’s deficit without helping pump prices.

Some of my fellow Democratic senators and I have introduced legislation to strip oil companies of their subsidies, but the oil companies are using all their Washington influence to stop us. And the vote to strip oil subsidies is scheduled for TODAY at 6:15 p.m. Eastern.

We need to build more support, and we have no time to lose. We need your help right now.

Sign the petition I started with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) to build support for stripping oil company subsidies today.

Executives from the five biggest oil companies came to testify before Congress this month and beg to keep their taxpayer handouts.

But as I told them at the hearing, they’d have an easier time convincing the American people that a unicorn flew into the hearing room than that these big oil companies need taxpayer subsidies. That’s the real fairy tale.

These are especially egregious when we’re doing everything we can to reduce the deficit. We need to make cuts, and this is definitely something we can cut.

If you’d rather see cancer research funding and student financial aid cut, do nothing.

If you want cuts to Big Oil’s taxpayer giveaways, fight for them now. Sign the petition Senators Whitehouse and McCaskill and I are circulating.

Thanks for your support,

I have an easier time believing “that a unicorn flew into the hearing room” than that Charles Schumer’s electioneering stunt will go anywhere. In fact, I’m pretty sure Chuck’s trafficking in fairy tales himself:

[B]efore you can take up a bill, you have to get the Senate as a body to agree that that’s what they want to do. Bills don’t just come to the floor by magic. If you’re lucky, you can get unanimous consent to do it. But if not, then you have to actually make a motion to proceed to consider the bill you want (a “motion to proceed” for short), and get a Senate majority to agree to your motion.

Thing is, the motion to proceed gets a debate of its own. And that debate is subject to the filibuster. And if you can filibuster the motion to proceed, then what you end up with is a debate on whether or not to end debate on the question of whether to start debate on the bill you actually wanted to bring to the floor….

What we have in this situation, however, is what I call a “painless filibuster.” Because one or both sides in the fight over whether or not S. 940 should be brought to the floor know that there are at least some opponents who are willing to threaten a filibuster, but nobody really wants to sit there and see how long those opponents can hold out, nor have to waste the time it takes to file for and invoke cloture, everyone agrees (in a unanimous consent agreement) to simply require 60 votes in order to pass the motion to proceed, rather than go through the hassle of actually having the filibuster fight. So the 60-vote threshold is built right into the vote. If you can get 60 for the motion to proceed, then it’s assumed that you’d have been able to get them for a cloture vote, too. And vice versa, of course. So everyone saves time by agreeing to these “painless filibusters.”

One of these days, some clever Senator is going to realize the well of trust is all dried up, and the only confidence Americans have left in Congress is that the whole process is a confidence game.

Schumer is building his mailing list. You can also tell t’s a scam because Claire McCaskill’s name is on it.

Sure you’re gonna end those subsidies Chuck. Sure you are. And after you do that, I am going to sprout wings like a bee-yoo-tee-ful butterfly, and flit around from flower to flower drinking nectar, before migrating with the Monarchs to Mexico for the winter.

Does an afternoon of leisure with senior administration officials violate journalistic ethics? To many, the self-evident answer is: “Absolutely.” I have a different view, although perhaps it’s a way to rationalize my own decision to attend the Bidens’ first beach party for journalists. Later today, I’ll lay out some thoughts about the ethics of all of this, but to whet appetites, here’s a bit of video I recorded. The players include the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, David Sanger of the New York Times, and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Note the teasing banter between Emanuel and Sanger. (Note, too, that shortly after I shot this video, Emanuel sprayed me in the shirt with his Super Soaker. I have a picture of that, too.)

is it a breach of ethics for me to copy Ambinders article wholesale? To many, the self-evident answer is: “Absolutely.” I have a different view, although perhaps it’s a way to rationalize my own disgust at watching a so-called “journalist” attend the Bidens’ first beach party for journalists, which is something that shouldn’t be happening.

if you want to know why our press is SO bad, Ambinder’s article is the textbook example. if you opened a dictionary to the word “ethics”, the antonym would be Mark Ambinder, and the illustration would be Marc with Rahm Emmanuel dropping a junk shot in Ambinder’s gaping mouth.

Greenwald has more about the washington press corps whores, but put it this way: our journalists make the stars of bukkake films look like dignified models of personal integrity:

I personally don’t think that these types of interactions “violate journalistic ethics” because I don’t think such a thing exists for them. Rather, all of this just helpfully reveals what our nation’s leading “journalists” really are: desperate worshipers of political power who are far more eager to be part of it and to serve it than to act as adversarial checks against it — and who, in fact, are Royal Court Spokespeople regardless of which monarch is ruling. That’s why they’re invited into the heart of Versailles to frolic with the King’s most trusted aides: it’s their reward for loyal service as Court courtiers. Just marvel at the self-abasing joy in which Ed Henry wallows by virtue of getting to play water sports with Emanuel and the Bidens. He sounds like a gushing pre-adolescent who just met his favorite boy band idol and got his water gun signed. Digby asks, quite rhetorically: “do you think this sort of thing makes it easier or more difficult for journalists to maintain their independence?”

I can’t access the kind of picture I need to truly illustrate Marc Ambinder, but that’s because we have a firewall that blocks pr0n0graphy sites at work. i’ll have something suitably disgusting later today.

The congressman from Delaware County was able to portray Specter as a Washington insider, even though Sestak himself is a two-term incumbent.

Sestak’s had two terms. Arlen Specter was elected DA in Philadelphia in 1965, ran for Mayor and lost in 1967, was re-elected DA in 1969, was defeated as DA in 1973, spent the 1970s running for senate and governor of the state, was elected to the US Senate in the 1980s, where he served for 30 years. He also ran for president. When he jumped to the Democratic party, he was IMMEDIATELY endorsed by the Governor, by Pennsylvania’s other senator, by the state party leadership, and by the US President himself, all of who told Sestak to bugger off.

Which one sounds like the insider to you?

Specter’s five terms of service have been distinguished and meaningful.

The Anita Hill hearings were distinguished? The Clinton impeachment was meaningful? Sending thousands of American troops to die in Iraq waged for no good reason: was that distinguished, or does that count as meaningful? Endorsing McCain/Palin was meaningful? Voting in favor of the Military Commissions act of 2006, which repealed habeas corpus and legitimized torture was distinguished? Cutting the president’s economic stimulus plan to the point that it hasn’t accomplished anywhere near what it was supposed to do, and putting PA’s most vulnerable citizens in peril was distinguished?

Seriously, I could go on like this all day.

The recession, combined with voter anger at soaring government spending and debt, evident in the rise of the tea-party movement, have spurred these results.

The tea party people aren’t a movement: it’s a right-wing GOP operation run by Dick Armey’s Freedomworks. They represent a tiny fraction of people, and do not represent the majority of Pennsylvanians who are angry because they are out of work. Nearly 650,000 Pennsylvanians are unemployed and probably won’t get an extension because the elites that run country think the recession is over. It wasn’t the Tea Party that elected Joe Sestak: the Tea Party would never vote for a Democrat, ever. DUH.

Specter, who always had an uneasy relationship with conservatives, set in motion his move to the Democratic Party in February 2009, when he voted for President Obama’s $787 billion economic recovery package. He was one of only three GOP lawmakers in Congress to vote for it; the reaction from the right against him was swift and forceful.

That reaction was already coming, and in fact arrived in 2004, when Bush and Santorum had to save Specter’s ass. After that, Specter obeyed his masters: his “uneasy” relationship with conservatives translated into an 84% reliability rating as he voted lockstep with his party on almost everything. Furthermore, the Inquirer again leaves out the important fact that Specter, as a Republican, cut the President’s recovery package by $100 billion dollars, and bragged he wanted to cut more. That robbed the state of $1.6 billion, which would have closed our budget gap. Funny how that never gets mentioned.

Specter’s internal polling told the five-term incumbent that he would likely lose the Republican primary to Toomey. So Specter announced in April 2009 he was switching parties.

It wasn’t because he disagreed with the Republicans, seeing as he spent 2008 campaigning for Grampa and the Crazy Lady, and openly hoped that PA voters were racists. It was because he couldn’t win with the Republicans, so he arrogantly assumed that the Democrats would accept him.

Specter’s entry into the Democratic Party was smoothed by Gov. Rendell and Obama, who endorsed him.

If it was “smoothed”, why did he lose to a two-term, relatively unknown backbencher in the House?

Sestak questioned why the party should simply hand the nomination to a lifelong Republican, and decided to challenge Specter’s candidacy without the support of the party establishment.

Sestak proved to be an aggressive fund-raiser. He aired TV ads questioning Specter’s liberal credentials, and highlighting his support for the policies of Republican President George W. Bush. Those ads also accused Specter, in his own words, of switching parties to get reelected.

This is called “burying the lede”, and it is the only accurate statement in the entire editorial.

The total cluelessness is not surprising from a newspaper that thinks Rick Santorum and John Yoo have anything worth reading. Big time FAIL.

I am reluctant to sell China short, not because I think it has no problems or corruption or bubbles, but because I think it has all those problems in spades — and some will blow up along the way (the most dangerous being pollution). But it also has a political class focused on addressing its real problems, as well as a mountain of savings with which to do so (unlike us).

And here is the other thing to keep in mind. Think about all the hype, all the words, that have been written about China’s economic development since 1979. It’s a lot, right? What if I told you this: “It may be that we haven’t seen anything yet.”

…I got worried, because Tom Friedman is ALWAYS wrong.

According to Economist’s View, he’s wrong on cap and trade.

At vanity Fair, they’ve got Friedman’s five biggest mistakes, including a pretty dumb prediction about China:

In October of 2000, Friedman decided that the Chinese regime would soon find itself threatened by a major unemployment crisis caused by an influx of American wheat and sugar into that country. In fact, American wheat and sugar failed to make any inroads whatsoever, while Chinese unemployment figures (however unreliable they may be) remained at low levels for a period of seven years.

He’s also big on China’s autocracy, which honestly isn’t all that surprising.

If you google “tom friedman wrong, you get more than 700,000 results in .11 seconds. that’s a lot of wrong.

Tom’s wrongness has also been deadly to millions: I’m speaking, of course, about his advocacy for invading Iraq, summed up in three words: “Suck. On. This.”:

And now here comes Little Tommy Friedman, saying of China, “What if I told you this: “It may be that we haven’t seen anything yet.””

But Tommy has been saying “It may be that we haven’t seen anything yet” for years: in fact, he says it so much, he’s had an entire term named after him: the Friedman Unit,

“a tongue-in-cheek neologism… in reference to the discovery by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of journalist Thomas Friedman’s repeated use of “the next six months” as the time period in which, according to Friedman, “we’re going to find out…whether a decent outcome is possible” in the Iraq War… Friedman had been making these six-month predictions since November 2003.”

So if Tom Friedman’s saying “don’t short China”, I think basic common sense says you should question that advice. Stopped clocks are right twice a day, but it has been far longer than that since Tom Friedman was right about anything.

Personal Not to the New York Times: I can make up shit just as well as Tom Friedman, and for a fraction of the price. Just sayin’…

It may be a little early to start putting up youtube clips of Dave Chapelle as Black Bush, but check out this trip down memory lane:

The Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $241,000 to help promote President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law on the air, an arrangement that Williams acknowledged yesterday involved “bad judgment” on his part.

In taking the money, funneled through the Ketchum Inc. public relations firm, Williams produced and aired a commercial on his syndicated television and radio shows featuring Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige, touted Bush’s education policy, and urged other programs to interview Paige. He did not disclose the contract when talking about the law during cable television appearances or writing about it in his newspaper column.

Congressional Democrats immediately accused the administration of trying to bribe journalists. Williams’s newspaper syndicate, Tribune Media Services, yesterday canceled his column. And one television network dropped his program pending an investigation.

Everyone was very upset about Armstrong Williams, because he had basically been acting like a neutral expert, when really he was a paid shill.

So today, I am wondering when those same Democrats who were angry about Armstrong Williams will have anything to say about Jonathan Gruber’s interesting undisclosed contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services:

MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber has been the go-to source that all the health care bill apologists point to to defend otherwise dubious arguments. But he has consistently failed to disclose that he has had a sole-source contract with the Department of Health and Human Services since June 19, 2009 to consult on the “President’s health reform proposal.”

He is one source for the claim that the excise tax will result in raises for workers (though his underlying study is in-apt to the excise tax question). He is the basis for the argument that the Senate bill reduces families’ risk–even if it remains totally unaffordable. Even Politico stenographer Mike Allen points to Gruber’s research.

But none of the references to Gruber I’ve seen have revealed that Gruber has a $297,600 contract with HHS to produce “a technical memorandum on the estimated changes in health insurance coverage and associated costs and impacts to the government under alternative specifications of health system reform. The requirement includes developing estimates of various health reform proposals on health insurance coverage and cost. The alternative specifications to be considered will be derived from the President’s health reform proposal.”

Oh, did I say $297,600? I meant $392,600.

Marcy Wheeler asks rehtorically if Gruber’s defense:

“Moreover, at no time have I publicly advocated a position that I did not firmly believe – indeed, I have been completely consistent with my academic track record”

..is substantively different from Armstrong Williams’, so I looked up what Bush’s shill had to say when he got caught:

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but “I wanted to do it because it’s something I believe in.”

.

Changey hopefulness, or new boss-old boss? You tell me.

Comment from Bill Hangley: “This is largely on Gruber, tho’, not Obama’s people – there’s nothing wrong with DHS giving people money to help develop policy, and unlike Armstrong Williams, he wasn’t being paid explicitly to promote the policy in op-eds etc. But he absolutely should have disclosed his payments in any op-eds, and O’s people should have told him to, precisely to avoid this kind of stupidity.”

Duly noted. Although as the resident expert, Gruber should have disclosed he was a paid consultant. that opens the administration up to all sorts of charges about transparency.

Oh dear. Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky is having a temper tantrum about bicycles. Let’s take a look and see if we can count the inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and mistakes in his latest “when-I-was-a-boy-we-ate-wool-and-we-liked-it” freakout.

JUMP ON MY handlebars. Let’s go for a ride.

Almost guaranteed to be a fiction: in all probability, Stu didn’t ride a bike anywhere.

In September, the city surrendered one of two traffic lanes on Spruce and Pine streets in Center City to cyclists.

What kind of a perverted quota system gives 50 percent of any city street – designed for cars – to bikes, which account for 1.2 percent of Philadelphia commuters?

Philadelphia gives all of TWO streets -out of a network of THOUSANDS- this kind of access for bikes. TWO. Stu’s freakout is based on a presumption that cars take precedence over bikes.

Kenney would dramatically hike fines for illegal biking. DiCicco wants bikes to be registered, like cars.

At a time when the city is BROKE, why does Stu want Council to adopt a policy that has been determined to be unworkable, and which has been repealed everywhere it’s been tried? Why is he trying to cost the city money?

Cyclists showed up at City Council howling like scalded dogs. They want nothing changed – except they want more and more of the roadway. What’s needed, they said, is “enforcement.” (Should we actually get enforcement, I predict they will be crying about being “singled out.”)

Lie. We don’t want more and more of the roadway, we want our bike lanes and our access. We don’t want to risk death to bike to work.

Let’s license adult bikers as we do motorists, to assure that they are competent and know the law.

No details about how this is to be accomplished, of course. That’s because it can’t be. You’re talking an enormous new bureaucracy in a state that is fairly hostile to big government. And over at Philly Bike Insurrection’s Facebook page, Su Shulman makes an even better point:

[Y]our definition of parity seems less about equal treatment and responsibilities than about subjecting bikers to laws that were designed to limit the damage that cars bring to a city. Registration, insurance, traffic laws and parking fees were created because cars are dangerous and consume valuable space. Everyone can surely agree, without being accused of having a morally superior attitude, that bikes are significantly less so.

Stu keeps ranting:

Let’s put more on the table. If you want parity with cars, how can you not agree to be insured? Last month two people were killed by cyclists. That was rare, but if we get more cyclists, as seems to be the city’s wet dream, we’ll get more injury and death.

A) Bicyclists don’t need insurance because bicyclists don’t typically kill people. Stu cites two deaths: what he leaves out is the comparison to deaths at the hands of drunk and reckless drivers. This is deliberate, because Stu knows that bikes are way safer than cars when it comes to pedestrians, and he knows that if he showed how many people are run down every day in Philadelphia, he’d look like the disingenuous idiot he is.

B) Many people who bike to work do so not out of preference, but because they can’t afford a car: just ask the immigrants who work in the city’s kitchens. So what Stu is proposing is, in effect, a regressive fee that will affect the poor more than it does anyone else.

C) Stu proves the lie to his claim that he’s “for cars sharing the road with bikes”, with snide remarks like “the city’s wet dream”. if anyone wants “nothing changed”, it’s Bykofsky, who can’t imagine a Philadelphia with fewer cars and more bikes. But as someone who spent a lot of time in Amsterdam and in Montreal, I can tell you that it’s possible, and makes for a much healthier population. Amsterdam is set up specifically to encourage biking and walking, with separate traffic signals and lanes for the cars, the trams, the bikes, and the pedestrians. Pity Stu is so small-minded… but then, you know what they say about old dogs and new tricks.

No more parking anywhere you want for free. Like cars, you will park only in designated areas. You will feed a meter or pay for space on a rack, in a lot or garage.

Here, Stu erupts in a petulant and jealous rage. Earth to Stu: the reason we meter cars and make them park in garages is because they take up A LOT of space. Bikes do not. Don’t like feeding the meter? Buy a fucking bike you lazy old man.

Again, I’ll cite Sue Shulman’s comments from facebook:

[B]ikers would gladly pay for parking, if the city made any effort to provide some (instead of making us lock to car-related infrastructure such as meters and parking signs.) We would happily pay for the square footage our bikes take up for a price proportionate to that devoted to a car space.

Furthermore, I want to know how Stu expects to enforce all this? There’s no way it can be done: first you’d have to implement a city-wide licensing system for bikes (at a time when the city can barely keep the libraries open and is losing events like the Dad Vail regatta). hen you’d have to make people participate, which would take countless police man-hours, in a city that just dealt with another average weekend:

On Friday alone, a man killed his mother with his bare hands, two home invasions resulted in slayings and a feud between two barbers ended with fatal gunfire, according to police.

In separate incidents on Saturday, two babies, neither of whom was a full year into life, were taken to area hospitals with serious and suspicious injuries. One of the children did not survive, police said.

And that doesn’t even take into account riders who take the train into 30th Street Station and Market east before continuing to work on their bikes: unless Stu’s proposing a statewide registration system, the licensing would only apply to Philadelphia residents, constituting two tiers of enforcement.

In short, it’s not gonna happen. It’s the printed fever-dreams of an angry old man who writes like he’s got a bad case of constipation. And, as if to put the lie to all his concerns about safety, Bykofsky lets the cat out of the bag. Here’s what it’s all about:

(Special note to Mayor Greenjeans: Added revenue!)

Stu knows what this is all about: generating much-needed revenue for a city that can’t meet its obligations, and flailing around anywhere to get it. He just doesn’t want to say so, because that would make for a much shorter column, and the guy’s got a word count to worry about.

Did I mention that your bike must have a horn or bell, brakes, a rear-view mirror, front and rear lights, all of which will be tested annually in a city-licensed bike shop? You will wear a helmet and reflective tape for safety.

Don’t forget the streamers on the end of the handlebars, Stu. Or a deck of cards on the spokes for that neat-o keen motorcycle sound.

The next paragraph I’d like to have sympathy with:

As already is required by law, you will stop at red lights and stop signs, signal for turns, ride on the right and in the same direction as traffic and stay off the damn sidewalks.

…because YES, riders should use turn signals, ride on the right, and go with the flow of traffic.

But it’s equally clear that Bykofsky doesn’t understand the concept of the rolling stop, its wide use among bicyclists, and how requiring bikers to obey the exact same laws as cars is a bad idea. One of his commentors gets it though:

I don’t know about you guys but I would not want to be behind a bicyclist who is following the rules of the road to the letter. You want to be stuck behind someone who can only go up to 15-20 miles per hour? I think not. You want bicyclists to stop at all red lights? What are you going to do when you have 5 or 10 of them at the light and there is no room for you to go around them when the light turns green? Be careful what you ask for.

Stu just doesn’t get that in Philadelphia’s 400-year old streets, where two lanes are crammed into space meant for one lane, cars can’t even get up to the 25 MPH speed limit, creating a maze that bicycle riders have to navigate. Couple that with all the drivers who use the bike lanes as a place to double-park or a passing lane, and throw in the people who slam open their car doors without looking for oncoming traffic and the city’s potholes, which have been known to break car axles, and you’ve got a situation where bicyclists get forced onto the sidewalks, fleeing injury or death.

Stu continues that because the police don’t have the time to enforce the laws, “If we want enforcement, give it to the Philadelphia Parking Authority. We’ll get enforcement out the wazoo.”

To which I respond, “How?” If bicyclists don’t have licenses or license plates, and there’s no city ordinance requiring the general public from carrying identification, how’s the PPA going to enforce this? It’s a joke!

Can we be real? Bicycling is good recreation, good for the environment and for the waistline, but it will never be a serious mode of transportation in and around Philly. Bikes will always be bit players.

And here we have the old standby, “failure of imagination”. In other news, man will never walk on the moon, people will never be able to fly between continents, ordinary families will never be able to afford computers (much less find space for the damn things), the steam engine was a bad idea, and a band made up of session musicians like Jimmy Page would go over like a lead balloon.

The fact is that if bicycle travel was subsidized and supported the way automobile travel is, bikes could easily dominate inner-city travel. Once you take into account traffic jams, the limited maneuverability of cars, the stop-signs and stop-lights, and the pedestrians, a bike is WAY faster than a car in the city.

Stu may think that “bikes will always be bit players”, but that’s not the truth (warning, pdf) as a few minutes of research demonstrate:

Bicycling has increased at an impressive rate since 2005. In three years between 2005 and 2008, bicycling doubled at counted locations (including all Schuylkill bridges and two intersections). Bicycling increased 104%, or roughly 35% a year. Prior to 2005, bicycling was increasing at a slower pace, roughly 6.1% a year, and it took fifteen years for bicycling to increase 98% between 1990 and 2005. Since 1990, bicycling in Philadelphia has increased 300%.

The same study shows that while only 1.2% of Philadelphians commuted by bike in 2006 (well before the gas shocks of 2008, which substantially increased the number of people finding alternate transportation to work), that’s still 11,000 daily commutes. The same study also found that “Between 2006 and 2008, the total number of bikes per hour counted on five Schuylkill Bridges (South, Walnut, Chestnut, Market and Spring Garden) jumped 40%. One of the most dramatic increases in bicycling occurred at the Spring Garden Bridge, which had a 95% increase in bicycle traffic since 2006.” Bit players? Hardly, Mr. Bykofsky. And since I’m irritated with you, let’s jam a few more FACTS up that snout of yours, eh?

According to a 2007 report by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission cited by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, “61% of Delaware Valley bicyclists surveyed use bikes for utilitarian purposes (commuting to school or work, work –related, social visits and errands)”. So much for the “recreation” nonsense. According to Managing Success in Center City: Reducing Congestion, Enhancing Public Spaces, a report issued by the Center City District, “Bicycling is faster than driving, walking or taking the bus across Center City”. So much for biking “will never be a serious mode of transportation in and around Philly”.

So there you have it: on all counts, Stu Bykofsky is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, and then WRONG AGAIN about bicycles and Philadelphia. He has no credibility to write about the topic, and as a result no one should pay his worthless temper tantrum of a column any mind whatsoever.

Bob Brady will say whatever the biotech industry tells him to.

In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress…

It is unusual for so many revisions and extensions to match up word for word. It is even more unusual to find clear evidence that the statements originated with lobbyists.

And match up they do! Marcy Wheeler has a stunningly awful-and-yet-hilarious list of identical quotes from Republican and Democratic finger puppets.

Unfortunately, most of the critics of our contract with Yoo have their facts wrong.

But that happens when your information comes from those bloggers who never let the facts get in the way when they’re trying to whip people into a frenzy to boost Web site hits.

It’s a shame that one blogger who disseminated poor information is actually a full-time journalist for a sister publication in The Inquirer building.

Harold Jackson is writing about journalist and Daily News-sanctioned blogger Will Bunch, who responds here:

A newspaper that make such an overt (and unforced, and unnecessary) hire as John Yoo is normalizing torture to its readers and the world, stating that waterboarding and other violent interrogation tactics are just another one of those “on one hand, on the other hand” kind of things. I find this torture normalization highly offensive, as do scores of other people who have written the Inquirer….

“Poor information”? That’s a bizarre accusation considering that the primary source of information for my original blog post was…Harold Jackson. Thanks to my communication with Harold, I was able to report accurately that Yoo had been offered a contract in 2008 (He told me “late last year,” although he later told the New York Times more specifically October). My piece also reported factually that a) there was no formal announcement of Yoo’s column either by way of a press release or a standalone article, as had been the case with several other high-profile columnists and b) I, and others I spoke with who work at either the Daily News or Inquirer, were not aware that Yoo was a regular monthly columnist. I didn’t make any kind of broader accusation along those lines — frankly that whole section of my original post was not even that central to the post, but merely to explain why I (and some other bloggers) were speaking aggressively about Yoo now, several months into his contract. (Ironically, it wasn’t me or one of “those bloggers” who made a big deal about a possible disclosure issue, but a reporter for the New York Times. I’m sure we’ll all discuss it at our next “blogger ethics panel.”) I do still find it odd, however, that the bio line at the end of Yoo’s columns doesn’t mention that he worked for the Bush Justice Department, his main “qualification,” — but Harold didn’t address that.

One of my pet peeves about my colleagues in mainstream journalism is that they so frequently accuse bloggers of getting facts wrong — yet almost never, ever provide an example, even though that should be easy to do if it happens so often, right? But the good thing is that if a blogger does make a mistake, it’s usually corrected right away. So if Harold Jackson or any of my friendly commenters knows of something in my blogging about John Yoo that’s inaccurate (something that no one has done so far in a week of bashing by conservatives, by the way), or explain what he means by “poor information,” please let me know right away, and I’ll happily fix it.

So here we have the editor of the op-ed page publicly claiming that Bunch got his facts wrong, when Bunch got them directly from Jackson. Meanwhile Jackson won’t address his colleague by name, pretending that Bunch is some random guy whose blog isn’t written on Philly Media Holdings dime or the Philly.com website, rather than someone who’s a journalist first and a blogger second (which even will acknowledges). Hell, when i first met Will Bunch he wasn’t blogging at all! Who has their facts wrong NOW Harold?

Maybe instead of a bloggers’ ethics panel, we need a mainstream journalists’ ethics panel. I have the feeling harold jackson (and many more) need a refresher.

Diane McNulty diane.mcnulty@nytimes.com>

Dear Mr. Skwire,

Thanks for writing — and for reading The New York Times. Regarding Maureen Dowd’s column, behind almost all “pork” projects, one can usually find something of worth, including jobs. What makes them “pork” is that they are inserted into bills by Senators often as a favor for constituents and to repay donors, without any real debate or any give-and-take about what makes them valuable for society — in particular what makes them of more general value than other items that wind up getting deleted from the budget to make room for these items. “Pork” has never had the meaning of utter pointlessness. It has always meant an item that is of interest to a particular constituency that is inserted into budget legislation through a non-transparent process.

Maureen’s point is that Mr. Obama said he wanted to do away with a lot of things, including this process, and his failure to do so leaves him open to this sort of attack by John McCain.

Sincerely,
Diane M.

Diane McNulty
Executive Director of Community Affairs and Media Relations
THE NEW YORK TIMES
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10018
T: 212.556.5244
E: diane.mcnulty@nytimes.com

My response:

Frankly Ms. McNulty, this isn’t good enough. My point was that Ms. Dowd did not do her homework: she relied 100% on the words of John McCain, who lost the election to the person responsible for the budget. Did it ever cross Dowd’s mind that maybe, just maybe, John McCain has a highly partisan opinion? Or that he might be happy to take shallow political potshots at the man who defeated him?

Dowd did not do any fact checking whatsoever: that was confirmed to me by several of the people I talked to. If you’d like, I can call each of them back and ask them specifically if Dowd or anyone from the Times contacted them. My bet is the answer will be “no”. Would you care to take me up on this wager? I will be happy to spend tomorrow as I have spent today: writing 13 times the columns that Muareen Dowd writes, all of it checked for accuracy, while successfully fulfilling the responsibilities of my day job. I made my deadline for a grant for ESL classes in a low-income neighborhood of Philly while doing Dowd’s job for her! Or is that pork?

I stand by my postiion: Maureen Dowd is lazy; she relies on dubious sources (perhaps for her next column she can rely on the chairman of Exxon for an article on why global warning isn’t real); she doesn’t check her facts; and by doing so she leaves the New York Times open to ridicule.

I suggest you fire her, and hire me. My rates are better, I work from home, and I do my homework.

Sincerely, Brendan Skwire

You tell me who’s correct here. McNulty, who thinks that by funding these projects Obama is breaking a promise, or me, the guy pointing out that Dowd never did the legwork to find out if these projects were worthwhile? And for your reference, wiki’s deifnition of “pork”:

Typically, “pork” involves funding for government programs whose economic or service benefits are concentrated in a particular area but whose costs are spread among all taxpayers. Public works projects, certain national defense spending projects, and agricultural subsidies are the most commonly cited examples.

Citizens Against Government Waste outlines seven criteria by which spending can be classified as “pork”:

Requested by only one chamber of Congress;
Not specifically authorized;
Not competitively awarded;
Not requested by the President;
Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding;
Not the subject of congressional hearings; or
Serves only a local or special interest.