From the NY Times:
Going for Broke
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Acording to advance reports, George Bush will use tonight's State of the Union speech to portray himself as a visionary leader who stands above the political fray. But that act is losing its effectiveness. Mr. Bush's relentless partisanship has depleted much of the immense good will he enjoyed after 9/11. He is still adored by his base, but he is deeply distrusted by much of the nation.

Mr. Bush may not understand this; indeed, he still seems to think that he's another Lincoln or F.D.R. "No president has done more for human rights than I have," he told Ken Auletta.

But his political handlers seem to have decided on a go-for-broke strategy: confuse the middle one last time, energize the base and grab enough power that the consequences don't matter.

What do I mean by confusing the middle? The striking thing about the "visionary" proposals floated in advance of the State of the Union is their transparent cynicism and lack of realism. Mr. Bush has, of course, literally promised us the Moon — and Mars, too. And the ever-deferential media have managed to keep a straight face.

But that's just the most dramatic example of an array of policy proposals that don't withstand even minimal scrutiny. Mr. Bush has already pushed through an expensive new Medicare benefit — without any visible source of financing. Reports say that tonight he'll propose additional, and even more expensive, new initiatives, like partial Social Security privatization — which all by itself would require at least $1 trillion in extra funds over the next decade. Where is all this money going to come from?

Judging from the latest CBS/New York Times Poll, these promises of something for nothing aren't likely to convince many people. It's not just that the bounce from Saddam's capture has already gone away. Unfavorable views of Mr. Bush as a person have reached record levels for his presidency. It seems fair to say that many Americans, like most of the rest of the world, simply don't trust him anymore.

But some Americans will respond to upbeat messages, no matter how unrealistic. And that may be enough for Mr. Bush, because while he poses as someone above the fray, he is continuing to solidify his base.

The most sinister example was the recess appointment of Charles Pickering Sr., with his segregationist past and questionable record on voting rights, to the federal appeals court — the day after Martin Luther King's actual birthday. Was this careless timing? Don't be silly: it was a deliberate, if subtle, gesture of sympathy with a part of the Republican coalition that never gets mentioned in public.

A less objectionable but equally calculated gesture will be Mr. Bush's demand that his tax cuts be made permanent. Realistically, this can't make any difference to the economy now, and it makes no sense, given the array of new spending plans he will simultaneously unveil. But it's a signal to the base that any seeming moderation needn't be taken seriously, and that the administration's hard-right turn will continue.

Meanwhile, the lying has already begun, with the Republican National Committee's willful misrepresentation of Wesley Clark's prewar statements. (Why are news organizations letting them get away with this?)

The question we should ask is, Where is all this leading?

Some cynical pundits think that Mr. Bush's advisers plan to leave the hard work of dealing with the mess he's made to future presidents. But I don't think that's right. I can't see how the budget can continue along its current path through a second Bush term — financial markets won't stand for it.

And what about the growing military crisis? The mess in Iraq has placed our volunteer military, a magnificent but fragile institution, under immense strain. National Guard and Reserve members find themselves effectively drafted as full-time soldiers. More than 40,000 soldiers whose enlistment terms have expired have been kept from leaving under "stop loss" orders. This can't go on for four more years.

Karl Rove and other insiders must know all this. So they must figure that once they have won the election, they will have such a complete lock on power that they can break many of their promises with impunity.

What will they do with that lock on power? Their election strategy — confuse the middle, but feed the base — suggests the answer.

From the NY Times:
The God Gulf
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Religion may preach peace and tolerance, yet it's hard to think of anything that — because of human malpractice — has been more linked to violence and malice around the world. And now as we enter a new campaign year, it's time to brace ourselves for a new round of religious warfare and hypocrisy at home.

America is riven today by a "God gulf" of distrust, dividing churchgoing Republicans from relatively secular Democrats. A new Great Awakening is sweeping the country, with Americans increasingly telling pollsters that they believe in prayer and miracles, while only 28 percent say they believe in evolution. All this is good news for Bush Republicans, who are in tune with heartland religious values, and bad news for Dean Democrats who don't know John from Job.

So expect Republicans to wage religious warfare by trotting out God as the new elephant in the race, and some Democrats to respond with hypocrisy, by affecting deep religious convictions. This campaign could end up as a tug of war over Jesus.

Over the holidays, Vice President Dick Cheney's Christmas card symbolized all that troubles me about the way politicians treat faith — not as a source for spiritual improvement, but as a pedestal to strut upon. Mr. Cheney's card is dominated by a quotation by Benjamin Franklin: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"

It's hard not to see that as a boast that the U.S. has become the global superpower because God is on our side. And "empire" suggests Iraq: is Mr. Cheney contending that in the dispute over the latest gulf war, God was pulling for the White House and fulminating at Democrats and others in Beelzebub's camp?

Moreover, Mr. Cheney's card wrenches Ben Franklin's quotation from its context and upends the humility that Franklin stood for. If you read the full speeches Franklin gave to the Constitutional Convention, including the one with the sparrow line, you see that Franklin is not bragging that God is behind him but rather the opposite — warning that the framers face so many difficulties they need all the help they can get, including prayer.

Meanwhile, Howard Dean is grasping for faith in a way that is just as tasteless as Mr. Cheney's Christmas card. Dr. Dean bragged to reporters that he knows much about the Bible — and proceeded to say that his favorite New Testament book is Job. Anyone who cites Job as a New Testament book should be scolded not just for religious phoniness but also for appalling ignorance of Western civilization — on a par with Mr. Bush's calling Greeks "Grecians."

After talking to Mr. Bush's longtime acquaintances, I'm convinced that his religious convictions are deeply felt and fairly typical in the U.S. Mr. Bush says the jury is still out on evolution, but he has also said that he doesn't take every word in the Bible as literally true. To me, nonetheless, it seems hypocritical of Mr. Bush to claim (as he did in the last campaign) that Jesus is his favorite philosopher and then to finance tax breaks for the rich by cutting services for the poor. If Dr. Dean should read up on Job, Mr. Bush should take a look at the Sermon on the Mount.

With Karl Rove's help, Mr. Bush has managed a careful balance, maintaining good ties with the Christian right without doing so publicly enough to terrify other voters. For example, Mr. Bush doesn't refer in his speeches to Jesus or Christ, but he sends reassuring messages to fellow evangelicals in code ("wonder-working power" in his State of the Union address last year alluded to a hymn).

Republicans are in trouble when the debate moves to the issues because their policies often favor a wealthy elite. But they have the advantage when voters choose based on values, for here Republicans are populists and Democrats more elitist.

As we move into the religious wars, I wish we could recall how Abe Lincoln achieved moral clarity without moral sanctimony. Though often criticized for not being religious enough, Lincoln managed both of the key kinds of morality — in personal behavior, which conservatives care about, and in seeking social justice, which liberals focus on. To me, each seems incomplete without the other.

Or there's the real Ben Franklin — not the one counterfeited by Mr. Cheney — who warned each of the framers of the Constitution to "doubt a little of his own infallibility." That would be a useful text for Mr. Cheney's Christmas card next year.

From the NY Times:
Holstein Dairy Cows and the Inefficient Efficiencies of Modern Farming
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Sixteen years ago, I met a Holstein cow named Juniper-Mist Bell Paula. She lived in splendid solitude in a stone-walled paddock on a venerable Massachusetts farm. Bell Paula was, in fact, more chicken than cow. Her job was to produce eggs, not milk. Several times a year, she was given hormones that caused her to super-ovulate — to release many eggs instead of one. These were flushed from her, fertilized and implanted in receptor cows as near as the next stone paddock or as far away as China and Japan. The reason was Bell Paula's milking record. At the time, an average Holstein in America — the ubiquitous black-and-white dairy cow — gave some 16,000 pounds of milk a year. Bell Paula could give 31,000 pounds a year when she was still being milked.

If Bell Paula represents one end of the Holstein spectrum — the long-lived queen of the hive, so to speak — the Holstein in Washington State that was found last month to be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, represents something much closer to the middle. She was unusual only in the disease she carried. When it became clear that she was unhealthy, she was slaughtered. And, under a testing regime that was changed only last week, her carcass, once tested, was presumed to be safe and fed into the system, instead of being held until the test results were in.

There was nothing anomalous in that Holstein's slaughter. Beef cattle and dairy cattle represent two different types of animal, but their fates are identical. What most Americans do not realize is that nearly every dairy cow eventually becomes either hamburger or the cheaper variety of steak when her profitability drops. Holsteins are frequently culled for slaughter when they are between 5 and 6 years old. When you figure that a Holstein first gives milk when about 2 years old, that means a productive life on the dairy farm of about three years. In that brief life span, everything is done to maximize yield, including the regular use of antibiotics and the feeding of high-protein concentrates of the kind that used to contain meat and blood meal from other Holsteins, a practice that has since been banned.

After poultry and pigs, the dairy industry has become one of the most concentrated forms of agriculture in America. The old mental picture of a herd of Holsteins standing hock-deep in pasture bears no relation to the way milk is produced in much of America. Some herds, especially in the West and Southwest, number in the thousands, which means the animals spend their lives in barns on cement where they are milked automatically, in some cases on huge rotating platforms that look like something out of science fiction.

For all their adaptability, even Holsteins can put up with only a certain amount of this. By the time they mature, at around 5 years old, many begin to break down from leg and foot problems. Dairy organizations distribute locomotion charts to help workers assess lameness, which can lead to reproductive failures — another reason for culling animals. Other cows begin to fail from the stress of carrying an udder that can weigh as much as a full-grown man. To prepare them for slaughter, the cows must be given time to get any residue — the word means traces of drugs — out of their systems.

As always, the goals of industrial agriculture create a perverse logic. Instead of adapting the agricultural system to suit the animal, we try to adapt the animal to suit the system in order to eke out every last efficiency. We may take it for granted that dairy cows will eventually be slaughtered. But strange as it sounds, it makes greater financial, ethical and social sense if we subscribe to the cows' notions of efficiency, which do not include living on concrete or eating anything but grass and grain, rather than to ours. The animals would be healthier, their milk would be better, and we would not have to worry quite so much about what was in our food.

At some point Americans will begin to judge agriculture not by its intentions but by its unintended consequences. The intention in the dairy industry has always been to streamline, modernize, automate, all in the interest of greater profits. But the consequence has been to concentrate power and money in the hands of a few, to drive down prices and to create a national surplus of milk that forces small dairy producers out of business. That, in turn, frees former dairy land for development, for suburban sprawl. The consequence has also been to breed an animal that can barely sustain the way she is forced to live.

The river of milk in America brings with it a river of ground beef made from dairy cows, a river that is almost impossible to inspect adequately in a deregulated industry. The problem isn't just a concentration of meat. It's a concentration of political power that hamstrings any calls for closer inspection. The industry has been quick to point out that far more people die from salmonella and E. coli than from mad cow disease. That's not exactly a reason to stand up and cheer.

It's possible that the Washington State Holstein may have had the only case of mad cow disease we come across. But if so, it will have been luck rather than good planning. According to the philosophers at Cow-Calf Weekly, an online journal for the beef industry, "Perception is reality." That's the sort of thing one says when the reality is too unbearable to look at.