More on the Religion of Science July 31, 2008

Science is fast becoming a religion, and a militant one at that.  We talked earlier about science’s broad acceptance of certain principles of global warming as Articles of Faith.  What I said in that post was: look, I accept that those principles may be true.  I even accept that they are probably true.  What I cannot figure out is why the scientific community would shout down those with the opposite opinion, and even those with opposing data.  This vilification of unbelievers — the creation, essentially, of a heretic class — runs counter to the principles of real science.

Similarly vilified among scientists are those in their ranks who choose to believe in God.  I recently read my friend Henry Eyring’s excellent biography of his grandfather, the great theoretical chemist of the same name.  Henry suggests, as many others have before him, that his grandfather’s puzzling failure to receive the Nobel Prize (for his groundbreaking Absolute Rate Theory, a theory on which several Nobel-winning chemists have based their work) was largely because of his religious convictions.

PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, is a crusader for science against religion.  Perhaps it is because he is at the University of Minnesota at Morris, but in any case Myers has a knack for self-promotion: he recently posted on his blog what he calls the “Great Desecration Caper,” in which he pierces a communion wafer with a rusty nail (acerbically noting, “I hope Jesus’ tetanus shots are up to date”) and throws it in the trash with coffee grounds and a banana peel.  The nail also pierces a copy of the Quran and Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.”  Then he took a picture and posted it on his blog.

Myers is ecstatic.  He wrote, “Nothing must be held sacred.  God is not great, Jesus is not your Lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet.”  He warns us that religion is dangerous, and breeds hatred and idiocy.  The only truth, according to Myers, is in looking at the world with “fresh eyes and a questioning mind.”

Well.  I can’t tell you how invigorated I am to have a 51-year-old associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota – Morris (school motto: “I’d expound on this concept more, but my lips are frozen together!”) explain all of this to me.

Francis Collins, who once headed up the Human Genome Project, wrote a book called “The Language of God,” in which he attempts to reconcile his belief in God with his knowledge of science.  Scientific American’s review of the book features the following: “What sounds like a harmless metaphor can restrict the intellectual bravado that is essential to science. ‘In my view,’ Collins goes on to say, ‘DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God.’ Evolutionary explanations have been proffered for both these phenomena. Whether they are right or wrong is not a matter of belief but a question to be approached scientifically. The idea of an apartheid of two separate but equal metaphysics may work as a psychological coping mechanism, a way for a believer to get through a day at the lab. But theism and materialism don’t stand on equal footings. The assumption of materialism is fundamental to science.” (My italics.)

I want to focus for a minute on the italicized portion above, because I think it reveals an important fact about the arguments science is making against religion.  If we assume that the reviewer speaks broadly for the scientific community with that statement, we have a real problem: science is committing a logical fallacy in arguing against religion.

The fallacy is that of the circular argument, also known as “begging the question” or “petitio principii.”  In it, the proposition to be proved (in this case, that theism is an inferior knowledge to materialism) is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one or more of the premises.

The typical structure of the circular argument is as follows:

-   p implies q

-   suppose p

-   therefore q

A simple example would be this: “The study of literature is worthwhile because literature repays close reading,” which sounds okay until you realize that the statement could be rephrased as “The study of literature is worthwhile because literature is a worthwhile subject.”

The structure of Scientific American’s argument can be reduced to the following tautology: “Materialism is a superior way of knowing, because theism and materialism don’t stand on equal footings.”  In other words, it’s better because it’s better.

Oh.  Now I get it.

This hole in the collective logic has given rise to a blindness, I think, to other holes: the scientific community pokes fun at religion’s reverence for the miraculous, then requires its own miracles which need a lot of explaining.  In Oxford chemist Peter Atkins’ wonderful book “The Creation,” he goes back to the beginning.  In a time before time, he says, there was nothing.  Less than nothing, in fact.  He says it was an “absolute void, not merely empty space.”  No carbon, no helium, no matter of any kind.  He borrows from Genesis 1:2 and suggests that “the universe was without form, and void.”  Eventually, of course, stuff appears, and Atkins’ explanation is that “by chance, there was a fluctuation.”

A fluctuation.  In nothing.  I’m reminded of the old joke about the Big Bang: “In the beginning there was nothing.  Which exploded.”

Now, I’m not saying he’s wrong.  I’m really not.  I’m on record as fundamentally believing in evolution.  I’m absolutely not a creationist.  All I’m saying is: there’s a hole there.  This needs explaining.  It’s a little premature to suggest that all the answers are there, when a huge part of the answer is missing.

Finally: one of science’s (and more generally, mankind’s) arguments against religion is simply that it has produced bad results.  People kill each other in the name of religion, so we’d be better off without it.

There is some merit to this argument, though it involves a weighing of good and bad results that could take us forever to calculate.  But the fallacy in this argument is that of the non sequitur (Latin for “it does not follow”).

The absolutely true statement that religion has been the cause of much suffering in the world does not show that the suffering would not have arisen from another origin, if religion were not around.  It is clearly possible, as we see in Darfur right now, that ethnicity or tribalism (as we saw in Rwanda) or jealousy over resources or any number of other factors could have produced the same results as we have seen (or worse).  A scientific concern for the diversity of all life could lead to vegans blowing up the Safeway meat department using the tortured logic that drives religious nutjobs to do the same to abortion clinics.

Scientists and religionists will need to get comfortable, I think, with this critical notion: religion will never be proveably false, just as science will never be proveably false.  It is silly to enter into arguments that cannot ultimately be won.

Obama’s Berlin Speech July 25, 2008

Just because, you know, you have to see it.  This gave me hope (and chills):

Barack Obama’s Berlin speech, part one:

Part Two:

And the final part:

Of course… of course, conservative political commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly tore into Obama.  He is “arrogant” (Beck) for giving the speech in the first place.  On O’Reilly’s program, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham actually made fun of the notion that having a President who is popular overseas is a good thing.  Predictably, Limbaugh (a buffoon if ever there was one) seized on Obama’s even-handed confession of America’s imperfection not as a hand reaching out in peace, but as a horrifying cave-in to the Germans.

A response:

1. Obama is being accused of arrogance… by Glenn Beck?
2. Nothing could be more obvious, Ms. Ingraham, than the incredible advantage it would be to us (in terms of national security, most of all) to have a president who is popular in places like Germany and the U.K. and Italy and the like.  It’s a little hard to miss this point, frankly: Strong allies good, weak allies bad.
3. Contemptuous, vainglorious unwillingness to admit to obvious flaws is not a path to cooperation and friendship, Mr. Limbaugh.  Humility and honesty will do the trick.  (I can understand how this point would be abstruse to Rush Limbaugh, though.)

Why Our Government is Always so Big July 24, 2008

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity.

To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and many millions developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300°.

The Russians used a pencil.

Mormons and “Fundamentalist Mormons” July 24, 2008

When Texas authorities descended on the polygamous community at Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas and seized over 400 girls from the compound, mainstream Mormons were faced with a problem that rises up once in a while: how do we respond to the inevitable media attention focused on one of the least favorite parts of our church’s history?

Aggressively, it turns out.  That, at least, was the church’s semi-official response: there were press releases, Youtube videos, you name it.  Lots and lots of people spent lots and lots of time explaining to the world that those people in Texas aren’t Mormons.

And the church has an excellent point: it has been well over a century since the church’s renunciation of polygamy as a practice, and no one in the mainstream Mormon church practices polygamy today.  To do so would risk excommunication from the church, in fact.  All of the barbs regularly directed at members of the church (“how many wives do you have?  Hahaha…”) fall a little flat.  It’s not unlike walking up to someone from Atlanta and saying, “How many slaves do you own?”  It’s just nonsensical and stupid when we are separated from the practice by multiple generations.

The LDS church has every right to express its opinion that there is no connection, too: although Southern Baptists are in the family tree of the Roman Catholic Church (as a break-off from the Anglican Church, which itself broke away from Roman Catholics), the Roman Catholic Church has every right to point out that Southern Baptists are now a very long way away in terms of doctrine and practice from the Holy See.  Failure to recognize the distinction is harmful to Roman Catholics, who could be badly misunderstood; to Southern Baptists, who would if anything be even more adamant about the differences and who long ago expressed their desire to be separate; and to the public at large, who would fail to be educated without clarity on the distinct nature of the two churches.

But those who would blur the distinction with respect to these polygamist sects have a point, too: what else do you call them, really?  If they’re not fundamentalist Mormons, what are they?  They read the Book of Mormon.  They revere the early prophets of the Mormon church.  They claim, rightly or wrongly, that they are the true branch of the LDS church.  How else are we to refer to them, then?

And, let’s not mince words: the Mormon church did practice polygamy, all those years ago.  It did.  As a formal doctrine and practice.  Though it may make current Mormons (like myself) feel all icky and uncomfortable inside to admit it, it’s true.

(To be completely fair and accurate to the church, it should be pointed out that: (a) Polygamy was never widely practiced in the church.  Conservative estimates suggest that it was limited to as little as 2 or 3 percent of the membership, and more liberal estimates peg it as high as 20 percent.  Either way, somewhere between 80 and 98 percent of Mormons did not engage in the practice.  And (b) maybe just as a point of interest, many of the unions were nonsexual.  Brigham Young famously had 56 wives, but most of them admit that the relationship was platonic.  He had 56 children by nineteen of those wives.  Not that nineteen non-platonic relationships isn’t a lot — I just think it’s interesting that many of these relationships were, one presumes, either spiritual or pragmatic in nature.)

Pointing out that these people seem creepy and odd to regular Mormons doesn’t help, either: Christian churches have to sheepishly admit some fairly creepy folks all the time.  For all of our distaste for snake-handlers and other strangeness, we sort of have to admit that, yeah, we guess they’re Christian.  We think they’re doing it all wrong, yes, but we have to confess that they’re the oddball cousin at the family picnic.

Similarly, it’s not quite fair to act like these polygamist groups are not “related” to the LDS church.  They are.  Third cousins twice removed, maybe, but related.  It’s not exactly accurate to suggest that they have nothing whatsoever to do with us, since without the Mormon church’s original stance they simply wouldn’t exist, at least not in their current configuration.

What to do, then?  As usual, probably the best place to meet is somewhere in the middle.

The media should probably change their nomenclature: “Fundamentalist Mormon” at some level implies a relatively direct connection — fundamentalist Christians are, after all, Christian and fundamentalist Catholics are, one presumes, Opus Dei or something.  Still in the church, in any case.  For accuracy:

1. These sects have no current relationship of any kind with the LDS church, whatever they may want to say about it.
2. In fact, if one of these families were to show up in an LDS congregation, they could not be baptized as members of the church unless they changed their ways.
3. Their doctrines are not simply a far cry from current church doctrine — many of them are miles from any doctrine ever formally accepted by the church.  (By “formally accepted” I mean: please let’s not have someone I don’t even know write to me about how some church leader once wrote something in a letter to their cousin, or stated thus-and-such in a talk to the Fruit Heights Ward, or whatever.  Please.  I know what my church’s doctrines are, and what they were, and I try to be fair-minded about them.  Don’t try to teach me.)

It would be more accurate to call them “breakaway Mormons” or simply to drop the Mormon designation altogether and call them a polygamist sect.  Certainly the slightest suggestion that there is some relationship between the mainstream LDS church and these sects is extremely misleading.

But the LDS church would do well, I think, to get a little less worked up when people (unintentionally, I think) mislead.  These are our weird cousins, after all, and while it’s fair to point out that we didn’t grow up together, it’s also inaccurate to suggest that we don’t share a great-grandfather.

Our unease with the relationship can have unintended consequences that don’t speak well for us, I think: it was reported that a Texas judge asked local LDS leaders for some help in monitoring FLDS prayer times. This help was apparently refused, as a local leader responded that he was “baffled” by the judge’s request.

Well.  I guess.  But still: baffled?  Why, have you got somebody better in mind?  While their doctrines and practices might very well have been as strange to us as to anyone else, it nevertheless seems likely that the most sensitive folks in Schleicher County, TX to the FLDS practices were probably attending a mainstream Mormon congregation.  The judge wasn’t being insensitive, she was being practical.  And ultimately, even if their prayers were wildly different from ours, couldn’t we have helped (so long as the FLDS were willing to accept that help)?  Wouldn’t that be, well, Christian of us?  I think so.

Like most nuanced issues, we can draw distinct lines without over-worrying ourselves when others use broad brushes.  The paint won’t stick.

The Ultimate Reason to Vote Obama July 23, 2008

Bill Bradley, talking once about the flawed Electoral College, suggested that a good way to select a president might be to take everyone to a basketball court, line the candidates up at the top of the key and have them shoot for it.

Frankly, fine by me.  Here is a video of Barack Obama in Iraq a couple of days ago:

Obama Nails the Three

Why, Exactly, is Obama not Ready as Commander-in-Chief? July 17, 2008

A recent Gallup poll highlighted some interesting things with respect to the country’s perception of Barack Obama’s readiness (or lack thereof) to serve as our Commander-in-Chief.  A few snippets:

• 80% of Americans feel that John McCain “can handle the responsibilities of commander-in-chief of the military.”  55% feel that Obama can handle them.
• This is split very starkly along party lines, at least for Obama: 77% of Democrats think he can, while 69% of Republicans think he cannot.  While only 26% of Republicans think that Sen. Obama can handle commander-in-chief responsiblities, 60% of Independents say he can.
• Things get murky when we start to ask a critical specific question of the actual job of the commander-in-chief: when asked which of the two candidates they would trust to make the decision about whether or not to send our troops into combat, it gets closer: 53% of adults say McCain, and 40% say Obama.  This is absolutely split along party lines: 87% of Republicans say McCain, while 67% of Democrats say they’d trust Obama.
• When you get even more specific and ask which of the two we’d prefer to make a decision about sending troops into Iran, you end up with a statistical dead heat.  In this case, Republicans prefer McCain by the same margin as before — 86% would prefer McCain in making that decision.  Both Independents and Democrats prefer Obama.

I’m in the Obama camp on this one (as I am on many things).  I feel much safer with Barack Obama as Commander-in-Chief, than I do with John McCain in the same chair.  I’ll give you a few reasons why:

• I cannot imagine the good reason to invade Iran right now.  To do this without provocation strikes me as an honest-to-goodness impeachable offense in a President.  Obama simply will not invade; McCain might.
• The Iraq war has been an unmitigated disaster since the famous declaration of victory by Pres. Bush.  John McCain intends to stay and “finish the job”; Barack Obama will turn our attention to fighting terrorists (which I support).
• They see the Iraq War differently, and Obama’s vision is right while McCain’s is wrong.  Obama sees our presence in Iraq as fundamentally mediating a civil war, all the while diverting our attention from a real and present danger in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  McCain sees Iraq as a central battleground in the war on terror, which it is most certainly not and never was.

I wonder, too, if John McCain’s exemplary military background creates a man who knows how to wage war, but who does not know how to wage today’s war.  I wonder, in fact, if his experience isn’t more of a hindrance than it is a help.

It’s not rhetoric: we really do have the finest military on the planet.  There is noplace on earth that we cannot invade if provoked, and there is no military who can stand up to ours, face to face, for more than a few months.  No one will engage with us in that way, because they know that they will get their a** kicked.

This overwhelming force is what McCain understands very, very well.  He knows how to wield it better than Barack Obama does.  But it’s not even half of the story anymore.

This is what we did in Iraq, after all: we blew into the country, within a few days we so completely overwhelmed the Iraqi military that they completely fell apart, and then…

Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it?  Then what?  This is the point: Having overwhelmed an opponent, George Bush and Dick Cheney and John McCain have no idea what to do next. They can win wars.  What they cannot do, is the more delicate task of winning transitions and winning peace.

Sen. McCain supported the surge in Iraq, while Obama did not.  We hear a lot about the surge “working,” and if that means that American casualties are down, then I could not be happier about that.  But I wonder if we know what “working” really will mean.  What I worry about is this: is overwhelming an opponent all we know how to do? Is the surge simply re-overwhelming Iraq, putting us right back where we started (meaning: not knowing what to do next)?  I fear that it is.

International security strategist Thomas Barnett gave a half-hour primer recently on the challenges of the new military, suggesting some changes along the way.  Click the link here to see the talk, which is intelligent and sensible and bracing in its straightforwardness.

Listen to it, and see if you agree: Barack Obama is more ready to follow something akin to Barnett’s proposals than John McCain is.  It’s new war versus cold war, and I want to be ready.

Lies and Statistics July 16, 2008

It’s hard to imagine a blog post that could be less interesting to most of those who know me than a post about statistics.  The old joke goes: a statistician is someone who is interested in numbers, but doesn’t have the personality to become an accountant.  But, let us admit, I am fundamentally and deeply a geek; and whether or not statistics interest you, they interest me.  And this blog is a collection of things that currently interest me, so there you are.

One thing in particular interests me about statistics: how the fact that almost everyone is bad at statistics can contribute to real misunderstanding, even producing tragic results.  I listened to a talk recently by Oxford mathemetician Peter Donnelly that sensitized me to the topic, so I thought I’d share.

Take this example from Donnelly’s speech: Let’s say that there is a fairly rare disease (we’ll call it Mosman’s disease, which would obviously be a disease in which the sufferer is suddenly afflicted with a deep and abiding oddness).  The good news is: we have a test for the disease, and it’s a good one.  It is right 99% of the time.  A person you know just took the test, and it came back positive — it indicates that they have the disease.  What are the chances that the person actually has the disease?

99%, right?

Nope.  The answer, really, is “it depends.”  And what it depends on, is: how rare is the disease?

Play out the example: let’s say the Mosman Disease afflicts one in every 10,000 people.  In a population of a million people, this means that 100 people actually have it.  If everyone in a population of a million people take the test, the test will produce a positive result for 99 of those 100.

But that’s only half the story, isn’t it?  What’s really interesting here is what else happens: In addition to the 100 people who have the disease, we tested another 999,900 people – and the test would get it wrong one percent of the time on that remaining population.  So, one percent of 999,900 people could get a positive result — and not have the disease at all.  And because 999,900 is a lot of people, it turns out that these “false positives” can matter a lot.  In case you can’t do the math in your head, 9,999 people out of the million we started with will test positive for the disease without having it at all (one percent of 999,900 = 9,999).

In total, then, we’d have 10,098 people with a positive result, but only 99 of them actually have the disease. This suggests that getting a positive result on the test only means that you have a 0.98% chance of actually having the disease, which is still much higher than the general population’s 0.01% chance of having it, but I think we’d agree that it’s not very likely.

This kind of statistical/logical error that almost all of us make, all the time, can have tragic consequences in courts of law (apropos to my family): Donnelly points to a woman in Britain who was convicted of killing her children, who both died of SIDS, when a pediatrician suggested: (a) that the likelihood of having two children die of SIDS in the same household was 1 in 73 million; and (b) that this meant that the likelihood of the woman being innocent was 1 in 73 million.  Neither one was statistically accurate; in fact, both were horribly wrong.  Only after a newspaperman with a little background in statistics challenged the pediatrician’s math, did the woman get off (after spending years in prison).

I’m just sayin’ this: that all of my lawyer/judge family members should review their math notes from college.

Enron Loophole Nonsense July 13, 2008

When I used to coach basketball teams, I rarely had a problem with the refs.  I used to say that I didn’t mind when a referee just didn’t see a play the same way I did, even if I knew he was wrong.  What would make me furious, though, was when a referee didn’t even know the rules.

I feel this way about the much-discussed “Enron loophole” that Congress wants to close.  Frankly, I don’t care whether they close it or not; I don’t think it will have much effect on gasoline prices either way.  What bothers me is: it seems like nobody in Washington grasps even the most basic principles of futures markets.

The Enron loophole refers to a bill passed eight years ago, largely at the behest of current McCain aide and former senator Phill Gramm, that exempts energy futures traders who place their trades electronically from U.S. government regulation.

I get on Republicans a lot, but the silliness of this one falls squarely in the laps of Democrats, who are up in arms of a sudden as gas prices have skyrocketed.  Looking for a scapegoat, they now point to “energy speculators.”  Listen to my own senator, Barbara Boxer of California, referring to the Farm Bill that seeks to close the Enron Loophole:

“This bill is really our best bet to deter unscrupulous traders from
manipulating energy prices and engaging in excessive speculation. This
has been a long, hard road – and this is a major legislative victory,” she says.

Sounds great.  Only, well… umm, there’s really no such thing as “speculation,” at least as I’d define it, in the oil futures market.

Commodities futures markets aren’t like the stock market at all, and I think that’s where Congress gets confused.  In the stock market, it is possible for everyone to win (in a bull market) or everyone to lose (in a bear market).  This is not possible in any commodities futures market.  In a futures market, investors do not actually buy oil or rice or oranges — they buy a contract on the price of those commodities, say, six months into the future.  So they’re not manipulating the actual price of the goods, since they don’t actually buy anything.

“But perhaps their ’speculations’ on the future price of the goods drive those prices,” you say.  Except… and this is where futures markets differ from the stock market… it is a matched market: for every single contract that says that oil will go up, there is another contract that says that oil will go down.  If you can’t get anyone to take your bet, there is no bet (no futures contract).

Can you see how it would be difficult to “speculate” (in the traditional sense) in the market, when you must find an opposite-minded taker for every speculation you might make?  It just doesn’t work like that, and it’s surprising when you see Sen. Boxer (and, to be fair, Sen. Obama) seem to completely misunderstand the workings of the system.

Something is driving up oil prices, to be sure.  And that something is: worldwide, people want more oil than we’re refining.  (And to be even-handed, I should note that Pres. Bush and Sen. McCain’s notion that we could drive prices down by drilling is equally stupid, since our refineries are running at capacity.  Let’s get this clear: drilling more oil in the U.S. will do nothing at all to increase our supply of refined gasoline, and therefore will have no effect on prices.  Period.)

Put simply, in 1999 we had a surplus of 5 million barrels per day of oil, on a total consumption of 76 million barrels per day.  Now our consumption has grown to 86 million barrels per day, and the surplus is 2 million.  (And it was noted in a recent Newsweek editorial that much of that 2 million is high-sulfur crude that won’t yield gasoline, anyway.)  Increasing demand.  Decreasing supply.  Anyone out there unclear on what that will do to prices?  Anyone?  (Cue sound of crickets chirping.)

To quote an old comic strip character, Pogo the Possum, we have seen the enemy and he is us, at least the worldwide “us.”  Oil prices are not about some rogue speculators.  They’re about our insatiable need for oil.  Supply and demand.  Just what they taught you in high school econ class.

The Least Conservative President in our Nation’s History July 12, 2008

From Dictionary.com:

Conservative – disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.

Or from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary:

Conservative – 1. One who, or that which, preserves from ruin, injury, innovation, or radical change; a preserver; a conserver.

And the American Spirit Political Dictionary has the following to say: “conservatism – a political philosophy that tends to support the status quo and advocates change only in moderation. Conservatism upholds the value of tradition, and seeks to preserve all that is good about the past. The classic statement of conservatism was by the Irishman Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which he attacked the French Revolution. He compared society to a living organism that has taken time to grow and mature, so it should not be violently uprooted. Innovation, when necessary, should be grafted onto the strong stem of traditional institutions and ways of doing things: “it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society.”

It strikes me as I read these: President Bush has been perhaps the least conservative president in our nation’s history.  He has enacted a web of policies that has literally undertaken to transform our Constitutional system of government and policies that have been in place for generations.  Journalist Sidney Blumenthal, author of “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime,” argues not only that President Bush has not been conservative, he says that Bush is the “most uniquely radical president we’ve ever had in the White House.”  Let’s go over just a few of the institutions he has pulled to the ground:

1. At the most basic level, he seeks to overthrow our constitutional system of government.  He has moved, over and over, toward consolidating unprecedented power and lack of accountability in the office of the chief executive.  The recent amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed with the (tragic) aid of a Democratic (!) congress, is just the latest example.  It cuts the heart out of the fourth amendment, and is fundamentally about removing the need for the government to be accountable.  Think of it: A lot of attention has been paid to the immunity from prosecution granted to telecommunications companies who allow wiretaps and other electronic surveillance even if that surveillance breaks known law.  But here are some other provisions of the amendment: It permits the government not to keep records of searches, and to destroy records.  (Does that sound American, anyone?)  It removes requirements for detailed descriptions of the nature of information or property targeted by the surveillance.  (Are we kidding?)  It increased the time allowed for warrentless surveillance from 48 hours to 7 days.  (The difference between surveillance on a real suspect and going on a fishing expedition.)  Just for example.
2. Even as he paints the Democratic Party as elitist, he is the most elitist president of my lifetime.  He and his senior advisors, in particular Vice President Cheney, have enacted policies that clearly point to the belief that the population of the United States simply should not have any say in decision making.  One could argue economics as a method for pointing out the fundamental elitism of this administration, too: at the close of the Clinton administration, we were just coming off of a 25% decrease in poverty in America, and a 15% increase in real wages — the largest such increase in a generation-and-a-half.  The past seven years have wiped out all of those gains, and have managed somehow to take the largest budget surplus in the nation’s history and turn it into the largest deficit (in violation of what I thought were basic Republican principles of economic restraint and prudence).
3. He adopted, in Iraq, a formal policy of preemptive, first-strike attack that was openly rejected by Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower.  Blumenthal suggests that Bush has “overthrown a sixty-year consensus on foreign policy.”
4. The man who famously claimed to be “a uniter, not a divider,” has been the most polarizing and openly partisan president in my memory.  He has politicized the most basic questions of peace, security, and civil liberty.  A shocking part of the politics of this administration has centered on being against others (the “liberal media,” Democratic elitists, etc.).
5. At some basic level, this administration has ruled by terror.  I cannot remember a presidency since Nixon’s that has so clearly and openly simply fired people who expressed disagreement with their policies, even when those disagreements were relatively private.  Starting with the suspect firing of U.S. Attorneys all the way through the merry-go-round of senior military people, this administration has made it known that you agree with their policies or your job is on the line.  Contrast this with Lincoln, who hired his rivals into cabinet positions.
6. He has exhibited more hostility toward science than any president in history has ever displayed.
7. Torture.  Are you kidding me?  Some have asked me when, if ever,  I’ve been embarrassed to be an American.  I’ll tell you: I have been, and it was when our current Attorney General was asked if waterboarding was torture, and he said that he couldn’t really say.  Meanwhile, I can answer that easily, and I’m just some dude sitting at his keyboard: waterboarding, which amounts to nearly drowning a person, is absolutely torture.  There’s a separate question that is hard: is there ever a time when we should use it?  (To which I’d say: yes, there is.  If you knew that there was a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, and this person knows where it is, and it’s gonna blow today… do whatever you’ve gotta do.  So we’ve established that there are times; now it’s a matter of detailing when those times are, and when they’re not.)  But what is not a hard question is, is nearly drowning someone torture?  That’s easy.  And the only reason not to answer it directly and honestly is that you’re trying to protect prior mistakes.  It’s chicken, it’s wrong, and it’s embarrassing, especially in an Attorney General who should know better.
8. He has abrogated international treaties, and ignored the wishes of every single ally of the country.
9. This is getting ahead of ourselves, but we are now apparently on the brink of war with Iran.  This despite the fact that our own 2007 National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iran halted its nuclear program in 2003.  If this happens, please note that it would be expressly without the approval of Congress, in whom war powers reside.  (The president is the Commander-in-Chief, but this is not supposed to allow unilateral acts of war without Congress’ approval.)

This is a conservative?  Seriously?