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According to Army Brigadier General Mark Scheid, Donald Rumsfeld refused to listen to anyone who suggested that a plan was needed for what to do in Iraq after invasion, and even threatened to fire the next person who brought up the subject: Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday. In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a post-war plan.Rumsfeld should be held accountable for the thousands of deaths this choice has caused.

Science writer John Horgan (author of the excellent book Rational Mysticism) weighs in on Jerry Adler’s “The New Naysayers” in Newsweek, an article about Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris: As I expected—can it be otherwise for a mass-market essayist?–he panders to his audience, which is after all predominantly religious. (Adler notes that a recent Newsweek poll found that 92 percent of Americans believe in God and only 37 would vote for an atheist for President.) He does a fair job of summarizing the “highly inflammatory” arguments of Dennett/Dawkins/Harris, namely, that religions make false and contradictory claims and spur people to commit destructive acts. But Adler not-so-subtly distances himself from the skeptics’ viewpoints. … And what is Adler really saying here? Just this: we must give a pass to delusional beliefs that are held sincerely by millions of people, especially if they are Newsweek subscribers. I have my differences with Dawkins et al, but I admire their courage, especially compared to the cowardice that afflicts pop-culture intellectuals like Adler when they write about religion.P.Z. Myers has are more detailed critique of the Newsweek piece here.

John McCain continues his pandering to the religious right by endorsing Republican candidate for Governor of Arizona, Len Munsil. Munsil, who attended Arizona State University at the same time I did, was editor of the ASU newspaper, the State Press. Now he runs an extremist religious right policy organization, the Center for Arizona Policy, which opposed the removal of Arizona’s laws banning cohabitation and oral sex. (They were removed anyway, by a moderate female Republican Governor, Jane Dee Hull.) Munsil drafted Arizona’s law on marriage (which defines marriage to preclude gay marriage) and is behind Proposition 107, the Protect Marriage Arizona Amendment, which amends the Arizona Constitution to prohibit the creation of civil unions or the granting of any legal status for unmarried persons that is similar to marriage. I’ve previously written about Munsil here, where I describe how he refused to print a letter to the editor I wrote criticizing factual errors in an editorial he wrote in the State Press. You can find out more about Munsil and his supporters and detractors at this Arizona Republic blog entry, “Munsil: I’m a Reagan, Kyl-style Republican." I’ve left a number of comments there. ...

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R, AZ District 8) is not running for re-election, so there are five Republicans seeking the nomination. Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, in a meeting with four of those five and a representative of the fifth in Tucson on March 30, told them that the RNC would not intervene in the primaries, but rather would devote its funds to assisting the campaigns of whoever the local Republicans of District 8 selected to represent them. The RNC changed its mind, however, and spent $122,000 on advertising for candidate Steve Huffman, its preferred candidate. Randy Graf, who is the current front-runner for the nomination, issued a joint press release with the other Republican candidates (minus Huffman) condemning Mehlman and the RNC for their dishonesty and broken promise. Huffman has criticized Graf for being slow to fire a campaign manager who had a conviction for “corrupting young girls” but has in turn been embarrassed by allegations that his own campaign treasurer, Bill Arnold, took photos through the windows of the home of Huffman’s ex-wife, state senator Toni Hellon. The photos were used to create a website apparently designed to discredit her if Huffman were to have run against her for her state legislative position. Hellon has sued Arnold for invasion of privacy, but apparently supports her ex-husband’s nomination. Graf is also a member of the Minuteman Project. District 8 is fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, with the former having about a 5% advantage. Looks like it will be a dirty race.

KTLA (Los Angeles) reporter John Mattes was attacked by Assad “Sam” Suleiman and his wife, Rosa Amelia Barraza, while attempting to interview Brian Phillips about Suleiman’s violence directed at Phillips. Suleiman had been the subject of a July story by Mattes, showing that he had forged documents to purchase homes with the identities of other people, and was renting or leasing them out. Mattes ends up with a bloodied face and cuts to his eye from Suleiman attempting to gouge his eyes out. Barraza keeps up a nearly continuous stream of verbal abuse after pouring a bottle of water on the camera, hitting Mattes in the face with it, stealing a microphone from the cameraman, and threatening to get a gun and to send Mattes to Tijuana or Ensenada.

It was just a matter of time, but the “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, not a crocodile or a poisonous snake. While filming his show at Batt Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia, he swam up too close on a stingray and the poisonous barb at the end of its tail penetrated his chest and heart. CPR was administered by crew members, but Irwin was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. He was 44 years old. ...

Orac at Respectful Insolence recently commented on how he first got involved in responding to Holocaust deniers. In reading his commentary, I was reminded of my own limited involvement on GEnie and Usenet’s alt.revisionism in responding to the Holocaust deniers, at a time when Bradley Smith’s organization, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) was placing full-page ads in student newspapers at universities across the United States. I did a Google Groups search and found this posting that I made on alt.revisionism in response to some people who were attacking Holocaust deniers using namecalling and without offering facts or evidence to refute their claims. As it turns out, Orac was also a contributor to this thread, as were the Scientology-supported “random poetry” bots, which forged the names of major contributors to various newsgroups in an attempt to drown them out and make the groups unreadable. (Read Scientology defector Tory Bezazian’s account of the spamming of Usenet.) This posting led to a short debate with science writer Andrew Skolnick, who strongly disagreed with me–his opinion was that Holocaust deniers should get nothing but ridicule, and no one should bother trying to respond to them. I think this is the wrong approach to Holocaust denial, the wrong approach to creationism, the wrong approach to 9/11 conspiracy theories, and the wrong approach to Scientology, for reasons I give below. I do agree that it can be a bad idea to give advocates of crackpottery wider exposure or a respectable forum, but there are plenty of fora on the Internet and elsewhere where these bad ideas should be responded to with good and accurate information. From: James J. Lippard Date: Fri, Sep 24 1999 12:00 am Email: lipp…@discord.org (James J. Lippard) Groups: sci.skeptic, alt.revisionism ...

I guess the skeptics were wrong on this one. Turns out the aliens were in Hangar 1083, not Hangar 18. (Via jwz’s blog.)

In 2000, an article about “The Secret FISA Court: Rubber Stamping Our Rights” created outrage and prompted comments like this: This is beyond frightening. Thank you for this find. This does not bode well for continued freedom. Franz Kafka would have judged this too wild to fictionalize. But for us - it’s real. and this: Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back? It sounds amazing on its face.But today, when there’s warrantless NSA surveillance that makes the FISA Court look like significant judicial oversight, the comments are like this: Privacy is a false argument and has been for some time. Your insurance company and the credit bureaus have more on you than the feds do and you can do nothing about it. I would rather be secure knowing that the feds were looking over my shoulder and keeping me safe. I have nothing to hide, and in times of war, these steps are necessary.So when Clinton engages in eavesdropping (rubber stamped by the FISA Court), it’s a threat to the republic, but when Bush does it (without any judicial oversight), it’s no problem. Hat tip to Gene Healy at Cato, by way of The Agitator. ...

The Technology Liberation Front is a blog I’ve been reading for a few months for its quality contributions on issues involving technology, regulation, copyright, digital rights management (DRM), network neutrality, and so on. It covers a lot of the same topics as Ed Felten’s excellent Freedom-to-Tinker blog, with a strong libertarian bent. What a disappointment it was to see that the newest contributor, Hance Haney, comes from the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute. While Haney is in Washington D.C. and is not affiliated with the intelligent design wing (the Center for Science and Culture), crackpot George Gilder is a senior fellow of the TDP. I commented to this effect at the Technology Liberation Front, which prompted a response from Lewis Baumstark: As I have no previous knowledge of Hance or the Discovery Institute, I prefer to allow him to live or die here on the merits of his debate and analysis, not on his link to a pro-ID institution.Lewis should remedy his ignorance of the Discovery Institute before coming to a conclusion about whether such an association taints Hance’s reputation and credibility–surely he would not have said the same if Hance was a representative of the (in some ways more honest) Institute for Creation Research or International Flat Earth Society. As readers of this blog know well, the Discovery Institute has a long history of dishonest and deceptive public statements and attempts to influence public opinion, public policy, and educational standards. Do a Google search for “Discovery Institute site:lippard.blogspot.com” or “Dembski site:lippard.blogspot.com” for numerous examples at this blog; many more can be found at scienceblogs.com (especially Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Pharyngula) or The Panda’s Thumb. Jim Harper of TLF responded to Lewis’s comment by writing “And the winner is . . . Lewis Baumstark! Curious. Courteous. Way to go, Lewis!” How odd that he would declare Lewis the “winner” when Lewis claimed ignorance of the Discovery Institute, or call him “curious” when his comment betrayed no interest in rectifying that ignorance. “Courteous,” I’ll grant. I agree with the comment at TLF from Cog (of the Abstract Factory blog): ...