News June for 17

The Mid-week Mix

Today we fly below the radar to look at some headlines that aren’t necessarily resonating in the mainstream media, but we won’t be sticking to any overarching themes.  We’ll take a look at the war supplemental in Congress, what’s going on in relation to Iran, news from around the global war front, political identifications, and a glimpse into the world of science and technology.

Enjoy!

War Funding Bill Hits Congress

The latest supplemental to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are in the Congressional mix and there is a whiff of uncertainty in the air.  Opposition in both parties is lining up to oppose the bill supported by the White House and Democratic House leadership.

Why Vote ‘Yes’ for the War and the IMF?  |  The Beat :: The Nation

The Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are aggressively whipping House Democrats to support the 2009 war supplemental bill that seeks to steer another $10o billion in US tax dollars into the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan while at the same time squandering at least $5 billion on the failed economic schemes of the International Monetary Fund.

But the more than 51 Democrats who opposed an earlier version of the supplemental are giving her a hard time and that’s making the project a hard sell for Pelosi.

And rightly so. This is a very bad bill.

The cost of supporting the troops  |  Democracy in America :: The Economist

REPUBLICANS are balking at a supplemental war-funding bill because it includes $5 billion (which used to be a lot of money) for the International Monetary Fund. Steve Benen smells hypocrisy, with a subtle bouquet of political opportunity.

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Or maybe here’s a case of hypocrisy shaking a party to its senses. It was always foolish to pretend that a vote against a war-funding bill, especially one that everyone knew was going to pass, was some kind of Doltschuss against GI Joe. Because war-funding bills are so impossible to oppose, they’re always larded with special projects and money that didn’t make it into some other bill. If this is what it takes to expose that, great. If it takes the defeat of this bill and the negotiation of a clean one, even better.

Speaking of wars…

Meanwhile, other news ranging from Afghanistan to the Korean peninsula rolls in this week.  War casualties are up and new questions about nuclear security are in the air.  Tip of the hat to Truthdig for the leads.

Afghan violence ‘worst since 2001′  |  Al Jazeera

General David Patraeus, the head of US Central Command, said the number of attacks in the country spiked to its highest point last week, and he predicted that the trend was very likely to continue.

“The past week was the highest level of security incidents in Afghanistan’s history, at least that post-liberation history,” Petraeus told a forum in Washington DC on Thursday.

S. Korea Seeks Assurances From U.S. of Nuclear Shield  |  Washington Post

Shortly after the North detonated its first nuclear device in 2006, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld assured his South Korean counterpart of the continuation of the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But South Korea now wants the promise in writing from the White House, according to South Korean published reports citing unnamed officials in Lee’s office. A North Korean newspaper taunted Lee on Monday for “begging” for American protection. The Rodong Sinmun, the main newspaper of the North Korean Workers’ Party, also accused Lee’s government of an “atrocious scheme to wage a second Korean war with nuclear weapons on the back of its U.S. boss.”

Iran in the Aftermath

With all of the post-election buzz in around centering around polls, violence, and the possibility of rigged elections, some of the voices tempering the optimism are pointing to earlier polls indicating that incumbent President Ahmadinejad held a 2 to 1 lead over reformist opponent Mousavi.  Questions are now being raised about the polls that were raising questions about the election.  Plus, a new wave of electronic protests are now overloading the websites of government agencies and pro-government media outlets and organizations.

About Those Iran Polls  |  Behind the Numbers :: Washington Post

Now, a competing poll conducted by two American groups is being used as part of the pushback. In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty write-up the results of their telephone poll carried out in mid-May, showing Ahmadinejad ahead “by a more than 2 to 1 margin – greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.”

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More to the point, however, the poll that appears in today’s op-ed shows a 2 to 1 lead in the thinnest sense: 34 percent of those polled said they’d vote for Ahmadinejad, 14 percent for Mousavi. That leaves 52 percent unaccounted for. In all, 27 percent expressed no opinion in the election, and another 15 percent refused to answer the question at all. Six  Eight percent said they’d vote for none of the listed candidates; the rest for minor candidates.

Web Attacks Expand in Iran’s Cyber Battle  |  Danger Room :: Wired.com

What started out as an attempt to overload a small set of official sites has now expanded, network security consultant Dancho Danchev notes. News outlets like Raja News are being attacked, too. The semi-official Fars News site is currently unavailable.

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But the tactic of launching these distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks remains hugely controversial. The author of one-web based tool, “Page Rebooter,” used by opposition supporters to send massive amounts of traffic to Iranian government sites, temporarily shut the service down, citing his discomfort with using the tool “to attack other websites.” Then, a few hours later, he turned on the service again, after his employers agreed to cover the costs of the additional traffic. WhereIsMyVote.info is opening up 16 Page Reboot windows simultaneously, to flood an array of government pages at once.

Politics on the Home Front

Gallup takes the spotlight as we look at who Americans think speak for the two major political parties and what new polling data suggests about the relationship between women and the Republican Party.

Who Speaks for the Parties?  |  The Monkey Cage

So Gallup asked this topical question about who speaks for the parties. The graphs above plot the responses of Democrats and Republicans. Obviously, the graphs show more uncertainty about who speaks for the GOP than who speaks for the Democrats. But my favorite finding is that partisans of both stripes, when asked about the opposite party, are more likely to name what we could call “bogeymen” (or women). Democrats are more likely than Republicans to name Cheney and Limbaugh as speaking for the GOP.  Republicans are more likely than Democrats to name Pelosi as speaking for the Democratic Party.

Are Republican Female Voters Going Extinct?  |  Women’s Rights :: Change.org

It doesn’t surprise me that fewer women are identifying as Republicans given the behavior of the GOP toward women’s issues and females in general. But what do you think – are republican female voters going extinct? That is my question after reading this survey from Gallup.

Speaking Scientifically

Moving away from the political realm and into the scientific, a look at how scientists study same-sex relationships in animals raises the question of narrow interpretations of the data, and in news of the bizarre (but perhaps useful, since you’re reading this on your computer) an Australian university is warning against using Apple’s new “high gloss” screens.

Keeping an Open Mind to Animal Homosexuality  |  Wired Science :: Wired.com

But though the origins and evolutionary consequences of homosexuality are varied, biologists tend to oversimplify such behavior, write University of California at Riverside biologists Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk in a same-sexuality review published Tuesday in Trends in Ecology & Evoloution.

Beyond searching for mechanistics explanations in simple creatures like fruit flies — who rely on smell to recognize each other, and aren’t very good at it — biologists have focused on homosexuality as a paradox, write Bailey and Zuk. They’ve tended to explain homosexuality as an adaptation that serves to strengthen social bonds, reduce sexual competition and refine mating technique.

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Such explanations are sometimes useful, but only to a point. In the Laysan albatross, for example, where monogamy is common but females outnumber males, nearly one-third of all couples are female-female pairs. They’re better at rearing chicks than single females, and their coupling reduces the likelihood of single females luring married men from the nest.

Homosexuality benefits the Laysan albatross community at large. That’s also one possible consequence, albeit unmentioned in this study, for human homosexuality. Perhaps communities in which some non-reproducing, same-sex-preferring members devoted their energies to caring for unrelated individuals have historically been healthier than those in which heterosexuality was absolute.

Australian University Deems Apple Glossy Screens Unsafe  |  Cult of Mac

Queensland University of Technology, one of the largest universities in Australia, has published health and safety concerns about Apple Macintosh glass or high gloss monitor screens, and recommends students and school employees “consider the purchase of other types of monitors which are not high gloss.”

Because reflections on the screens “could cause the operator to adopt awkward postures when viewing the monitor screen and using related equipment,” which awkward postures “may in turn lead to an injury,” health and safety officials at the university have come out against the controversial Apple products and published detailed computer safety guidelines for members of the university community.