Andy’s whereIstand Blog

CNN has been making some calls, and going nuts with these polls, but I’m not complaining - maybe November could make us as blue as we are:

President Bush’s approval ratings have sunk to a personal low, with only a third of Americans saying they approve of the way he is handling his job, a national poll released Monday said.

In the telephone poll of 1,012 adult Americans carried out Friday through Sunday by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN, 32 percent of respondents said they approve of Bush’s performance, 60 percent said they disapprove and 8 percent said they do not know.

That’s a significant drop from the way Americans perceived the president a year ago. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll carried out April 29-May 1, 2005, Americans were split on their assessments of Bush’s performance, with 48 percent saying they approved and 49 percent saying they disapproved.

CNN’s poll has a sampling error of plus-or-minus 3 percentage points for most questions.

I knew it would be the gas prices that got the people going - trust the suburban grocery hauler brigade to get pissed when the pump drains their retirement plans.

This has been Andy D.

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I thought part of the whole GOP/Bush Corp strategy was that they maintain at all times that everything is under control and going exactly according to plan, then what exactly does Bolten have to fix?

Now as President Bush’s second chief of staff, he is suddenly in the spotlight. Last week he appeared before large groups of worried aides in a White House theater, where Bush occasionally holds press conferences, to convince them that a few discomfiting changes, along with a lot of harder, smarter work, could turn around a second term that has disappointed so many of them.

"We have a thousand days to get the job done," he said, according to attendees. The rearranging of staff in the Administration, which has included moving out some loyalists from Texas and is likely to continue, reflects the President’s insistence that Bolten rethink an enterprise that had a series of horrible quarters. The real deadline is not 1,000 days from now, when Bush leaves office. The marker that is uppermost in the minds of Bush’s inner circle is Nov. 7, when Republicans could lose control of the House and even the Senate. "If we don’t keep Congress, there won’t be a legacy," said a presidential adviser. "The legacy will be investigations and fights over Executive privilege" with newly empowered Democrats.

So the White House is now on a survival footing, and Bolten is essentially planning a six-month campaign that will not only prevent a Republican hemorrhage in the fall but might even produce accomplishments for Bush in his lame-duck years. The new chief recognizes that he needs to show results quickly, since aides have claimed to be rebooting the second term so many times (at least three, by TIME’s count) that even their allies have lost track.

See? Is this a new strategy - to acknowledge the investigations and the executive privilege? What is up with all the open-door honesty. Get your truth-o-meters and decoder rings out super sleuths to see what clues of the new spin-ster strategy we get next.

This has been Andy D.

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Of course Bush is the deciding factor on Rumsfeld, but the voting populace is the deciding factor on the strength of his party’s future - so why defend one guy so much, he’s turn team players into scapegoats for far less:

President Bush sharply defended Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday, saying the embattled Pentagon chief is doing a "fine job" despite calls for his resignation from six retired military generals.

Despite a practice of not usually commenting on personnel moves, the president told reporters Tuesday that his vote of confidence for Rumsfeld was an effort to stamp out speculation about his status.

"You can understand why, because we’ve got people’s reputations at stake," Bush said of his usual aversion to speculation about personnel matters.

"And on Friday I stood up and said, ‘I don’t appreciate the speculation about Don Rumsfeld; he’s doing a fine job; I strongly support him.’ "

People’s reputations at stake - like Abramoff and De Lay - Bush Corp wasn’t sticking up for them unless disavowing all knowledge of ever knowing one is a vote of confidence. You know what though - people’s lives are also at stake - all the people Rumsfeld and Bush have sent to Iraq to possibly die. This is CIndy Sheehan’s whole point. And it should be all of our points.

This has been Andy D.

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So there is some new blood at the White house - I wonder if he’s the new scapegoat-in-training or if those he may be re-staffing will garner that honor:

President Bush’s new chief of staff said Monday it was time to "refresh and re-energize the team," and he told senior White House aides who might be thinking about quitting this year to go ahead and leave now.

Taking charge in a time of crisis, with Bush’s poll ratings at their lowest point ever and Republicans anxious about the November elections, Bolten laid down his pointed directive at his first meeting with top presidential aides.

He did not ask for anyone’s resignation, and none of the senior aides stepped forward to say they would go, White House press secretary Scott McClellan reported later. But Bolten has Bush’s full authority to make changes to the president’s staff, and McClellan said he would expect announcements soon.

One of the first jobs to be filled is that of budget director _ the position that Bolten left to become chief of staff. The job of domestic policy adviser at the White House is open as well. Further changes are clearly on the horizon, and Bolten gave top aides the option of leaving first.

"He wanted to make sure he had the team in place that is going to be here for a minimum of the remainder of the year," McClellan said. "And he said if people are thinking about leaving, that now is the time to come to such a decision."

Bolten told the staff that he was assuming his new job at a challenging time when the United States was engaged in a war on terrorism. With U.S. casualties rising in Iraq, Bush faces sagging public support, Republican angst about the midterm election and struggles with a Congress that has been resistant to some of his top priorities.

So if they want to escape clean - well as clean as they are now, they best bail out on this lame-duck admin right now. Pretty civilized.

This has been Andy D.

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Okay, to answer this issue - first, I think that we will never have artificial intelligence because we have not and cannot quantify what real intelligence is, let alone fabricate this in a robot. Part two, here’s a simple solution - don’t make robots that smart. We have robots now on automated assembly lines. In an ideal situation we will have robots doing all of our crap work while humans reap all the benefits. That said, we may still have to do some things ourselves:

Noelle’s given birth in Afghanistan, California and dozens of points in between. She’s a lifelike, pregnant robot used in increasing numbers of medical schools and hospital maternity wards.

The full-sized, blond, pale mannequin is in demand because medicine is rapidly abandoning centuries-old training methods that use patients as guinea pigs, turning instead to high-tech simulations. It’s better to make a mistake on a $20,000 robot than a live patient.

The Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates that as many as 98,000 U.S. patients die annually from preventable medical errors.

"We’re trying to engineer out some of the errors," said Dr. Paul Preston, an anesthesiologist at Kaiser Permanente and architect of the hospital chain’s 4-year-old pregnancy-care training program, in which Noelle plays a starring role. "We steal shamelessly from everybody and everywhere that has good training programs."

See, robots are just good practice.

This has been Andy D.

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• Will Artificial Intelligence eventually become a danger to humanity?

Playing god or not, stem cells are not only the cures to dozens of horrible diseases but they are basically the key to incredibly long life. Sure we need to be careful with it , like any technology but what people perceive as playing god, is just that - a point of view, not really truth. "Playing god" is impossible, scientists in this field are very much playing human - taking dominion over our accumulation of knowledge and the resources of our understanding of life:

The Pope will deliver a blistering attack on the “satanic” mores of modern society today, warning against an “inane apologia of evil” that is in danger of destroying humanity.

In a series of Good Friday meditations that he will lead in Rome, the Pope will say that society is in the grip of a kind of “anti-Genesis” described as “a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family”. He will pray for society to be cleansed of the “filth” that surrounds it and be restored to purity, freed from “decadent narcissism”.

Particular condemnation is reserved for scientific advances in the field of genetic manipulation. Warning against the move to “modify the very grammar of life as planned and willed by God”, the Pope will lead prayers against “insane, risky and dangerous” ventures in attempting “to take God’s place without being God”.

While some will regard their emphasis on sin and the dark side of human nature as retrograde, others will welcome them as a sign of the strong and conservative leadership that Pope Benedict XVI was elected to provide.

Even the most liberal of Popes is still pretty far on the right. A conservative one - and alarmist at that - is just damn frightening.

This has been Andy D.

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• Is man infallible?

Cindy is back - not sure where she’s been - but she’s back on the Drudge Report and just in time to save me from Jesus egg-laying day:

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan returned to Texas on Wednesday for another war protest near President Bush’s ranch, although he was to spend the weekend at Camp David.

The anti-war demonstrators accused Bush, who has spent every Easter at his Crawford ranch since he was elected, of running from them and their message to bring the U.S. troops home from Iraq immediately.

"We chased him away from his ranch," said Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004. "We protest all over the country without him being in attendance, so I don’t think it takes away (from this vigil) a bit because he never met with us anyway. It wasn’t even like we ever sat down and had sweet tea together."

But the White House said Bush’s plans had nothing to do with the protesters and that he often spends holidays at Camp David with his family.

Fraidy pants.

I seriously love this woman. If Jesus were alive, or even real at all, her son would be the first to deserve a Lazarus-like stunt.

This has been Andy D.

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Is Bush Corp seriously still kicking this dead horse? Still no WMDs? Let’s make scurrilous claims against random recreational vehicles:

The White House on Wednesday reacted angrily to a report that President Bush had cited trailers suspected as biological weapons labs as proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after intelligence officials knew that the trailers were not part of a WMD program.

"The reporting I saw this morning was simply reckless and it was irresponsible," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "The lead in The Washington Post left this impression for the reader that the president was saying something he knew at the time not to be true. That is absolutely false, and it is irresponsible."

The article said Bush’s comments on May 29, 2003 — in which he said that two trailers had been found in Iraq that were mobile biological laboratories — were made despite a May 27 report from a Pentagon-sponsored mission that concluded the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.

And of course Scott McClellan said this, he is A-number one president bitch boy.

This has been Andy D.

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In the NYT today, a report was published that casts the Boston archdiocese’s reaction (or lack thereof) to the child abuse scandals of recent years:

Efforts to change the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in the aftermath of the crisis of sexual abuse by clergymen have been hampered by diminished resources, according to a report issued Friday.

"The greatest challenge presented to the archdiocese in 2005-6 is the slow pace of organizational and cultural change in the face of diminished human and financial resources," the report, compiled by an independent panel over two years, said. "This challenge is ignored at the peril of the church."

The report found that the archdiocese had taken significant steps to insure that children were protected. But, it added, the archdiocese has also suffered from spotty carrying out of many policies, most noticeably community healing and outreach, internal and external communication and preventative education programs. While the archdiocese has made a "solid beginning," the report said, "continuity and assimilation are serious tasks ahead."

The archdiocese has succeeded on several fronts, the report said: reaching settlements with hundreds of people who say they were abused by priests; establishing a network of therapists; running background checks on teachers and volunteers, and creating teams for preventing child abuse.

This is interesting particularly in light of progressive decisions in predominantly Catholic countries like Ireland and Spain.

This has been Andy D.

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• What legal rights to a relationship of consenting adults should be available for same-sex couples?

So it’s not just the clergy getting in trouble over a predilection for underage sexuality. Now we have more secular creepshows running around, like the spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security - Brian J Doyle facing 23 counts - he joins the head of NASA and a trio of teen girls in being tried for horrific pedophiliac perversion:

A deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday at his Maryland home on charges he used his computer in an attempt to seduce a child and transmitted harmful materials to a minor, according to the Polk County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office.

Brian J. Doyle, 55, is charged with seven counts of use of a computer to seduce a child and 16 counts of transmission of harmful material to a minor, according to a sheriff’s office statement.

In interviews with police, Doyle confessed and has agreed to waive extradition to Florida, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.

On March 12, according to a police statement, Doyle contacted a Polk County computer crimes detective posing online as a 14-year-old girl "and initiated a sexually explicit conversation with her … Doyle knew that the ‘girl’ was 14 years old, and he told her who he was and that he worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security."

Judd said that Doyle, in the first conversation, told the detective his position with DHS and "started immediately into pretty vulgar language. He explained in graphic detail the sexual acts he wanted to perform with this 14-year-old."

As the two continued chatting online, police said, Doyle gave her his home and office phone numbers, and the number to his government-issue cell phone. He also had explicit telephone conversations with a detective posing as the girl, authorities said.

It’s a bummer that Myspace will probably get more flak for stories like these. Oh what a den of illicit love you have bought Rupert Murdoch.

This has been Andy D.

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