Great news in yesterday’s New York Times. According to public health officials, “AIDS among infants, which only a decade ago took the lives of hundreds of babies a year and left doctors in despair, may be on the verge of being eliminated in the United States.” The statistics are hopeful: back in 1990, about 2,000 babies every year were born infected with HIV. Today, that number is just over 200. Why the turnaround? Scientists thank better drugs and more aggressive public education. Also topping the list: “a greater awareness of the necessity of safe sex practices.” Luckily, the message is strong enough to get past White House efforts to muzzle the teachings of safe sex. President Bush, kowtowing to ideological right-wing interests, has pushed for sex education to not include information on ways to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. Here are some right-wing claims debunked:

RIGHT-WING FALSEHOOD: Abstinence-only programs have tried to discredit the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HIV, saying “in heterosexual sex, condoms fail to prevent HIV approximately 31% of the time.” This conclusion is based on a seriously flawed 1993 study that the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) charge was based on “serious error” and contradicted by other more recent, larger studies.
TRUTH: According to the CDC, the scientific consensus is that latex condoms, used properly, “are highly effective in preventing the transmission of HIV.”

RIGHT-WING FALSEHOOD: Another abstinence-only program teaches students that HIV and other STDs can “pass through” condoms.
TRUTH: The CDC scientifically concluded that “latex condoms provide an essentially impermeable barrier to particles the size of STD pathogens.”

RIGHT-WING FALSEHOOD: President Bush Administration appointed a prominent advocate of abstinence-only programs, Dr. Joe McIlhaney, to the Advisory Committee to the CDC’s Director. In April 2002, Dr. McIlhaney announced “there is precious little evidence” that comprehensive sexual education programs are “successful at all.”
TRUTH: In fact, the opposite is true. A study by Advocates for Youth, a non-profit group, found there were “few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact” from abstinence-only programs. In fact, abstinence-only programs’ emphasis on the failure rates of contraception, including condoms, “left youth ambivalent, at best, about using them.”

Q: Scott, is Tony Blair right when he says the U.S. has to get on board with the agenda of countries who see climate control as a major priority?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I’m not sure that that’s an accurate way to describe what he’s saying.

Let’s go to the transcript…

TONY BLAIR: If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda too… What would be the subject matter of a common agenda?… Fourth and fifth are the two issues we have set aside for our Presidency of the G8: climate change and Africa. [Special address at World Economic Forum, 1/27/05]

The Bush administration is getting increasingly worried about the fallout from paying off conservative journalists to pump its policies. How do I know? At first, the White House wasn’t willing to pin blame on the Department of Education for the Armstrong Williams flap. On 1/10/04, this is the strongest thing White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was willing to say:

“[Q]uestions have been raised about that arrangement. It ought to be looked into…”

But at the press conference yesterday, President Bush threw the Department of Education under the bus:

Q: Mr. Williams made a mistake. Did the Department of Education make a mistake?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. They did.

For good measure, a not so thinly veiled shot at his good friend Rod Paige:

Q: What will happen to the people that made this decision?

THE PRESIDENT: We’ve got new leadership going to the Department of Education.

More on Ambassador John Negroponte’s shifty explanation of Iraqi security forces that Jon Baskin touched on earlier:

On Jan. 12, the State Department released its Weekly Iraq Status Update, which states on page 5 that Iraq’s army consists of precisely 4,159 individuals. That was the report referenced by Sen. Joseph Biden during his questioning of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. You might think the U.S. ambassador to Iraq would be familiar with the report’s contents before appearing on national television, particularly considering the report is easily accessible online. Of course, you’d be wrong:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Joe Biden, Delaware Democrat, said this week in Washington that there are only 4,000 fully trained and capable Iraqi soldiers in the Iraqi armed forces. Is that accurate?

AMB. NEGROPONTE: Well, I think that really understates the accomplishments of the Iraqi army and police forces. They’ve had a number of successes in the past several months in Najaf, in Samarra, in eastern Baghdad. There are some 75 or 80 Iraqi battalions that are currently trained and operating, so I think that that 4,000 figure understates the progress that has been made by Iraq’s armed forces in the past six months.

Negroponte manages to dodge Russert’s simple question — “Is that accurate?” — in four different ways.

First, Negroponte mentions “Iraqi army and police forces.” Iraqi police currently number more than 50,000; Russert asked only about the soldiers in the Iraqi armed forces (i.e., the army). Negroponte then plays up the recent “accomplishments” and “successes” of the Iraqi forces, implying Russert had questioned the soldiers’ competence; he actually asked about the pace at which the U.S. is training new forces. Next Negroponte mentions Iraqi successes in places like Najaf and Samarra, actually referring to the Iraqi National Guard (not the army or the police), which was used heavily in those operations. Finally, Negroponte claims the number used by Russert — which is, to repeat, released by the State Department and updated weekly — “understates the progress that has been made by Iraq’s armed forces in the past six months.”

John Negroponte: wildly ignorant, or a shameless spinmeister?

On 9/10/01, Donald Rumsfeld called a news conference to discuss his number one priority as defense secretary: he declared “war on the Pentagon bureaucracy.” A few excerpts from that speech:

“Our challenge is to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way we conduct our daily business. Let’s make no mistake: The modernization of the Department of Defense is a matter of some urgency. In fact, it could be said that it’s a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American’s….

“Waste drains resources from training and tanks, from infrastructure and intelligence, from helicopters and housing. Outdated systems crush ideas that could save a life. Redundant processes prevent us from adapting to evolving threats with the speed and agility that today’s world demands…The men and women of this department…know the taxpayers deserve better….

“Let me conclude with this note. Some may ask, defensively so, will this war on bureaucracy succeed where others have failed?…this effort will succeed because it must.”

A new GAO report shows that Rumsfeld’s effort has not succeeded. The report indicates that, three years after Rumsfeld’s speech, the Pentagon is the U.S. department most prone to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement, “raising concerns about the effectiveness of many of its programs.” The Department of Defense accounts for eight of the 25 federal programs, functions or offices that appear on the GAO’s 2005 “high-risk” list.

Areas of concern include financial and contract management, the personnel security clearance program, management of military bases and other infrastructure, and modernization of computer systems, the report found.

Society has a selective memory when it comes to history. Or perhaps some events just have more eye-popping names. For example, the influenza pandemic that ripped around the globe in just one year (1918-1919) killed more people than four years of the infamous Bubonic Plague. Responsible for the deaths of between 20 million and 40 million people, “La Grippe” took more lives than World War I. And while it may not have yet received much mainstream notice, the candidate most likely to cause the next global flu pandemic is waiting in the wings, so to speak.

The warnings about avian flu have been building, but little attention has been paid by the mass media. Back in January 2004, the World Health Organization threw its weight behind fears of avian flu. Though WHO pointed towards the Southeast Asia region as potentially under a “serious threat,” it was only a few months later that Ottawa “ordered the slaughter of 80 per cent of the farm poultry in B.C. in an attempt to contain an outbreak of avian flu.”

Though “experts agree that another influenza pandemic is inevitable,” President Bush has yet to address the issue. Considering his handling of this past year’s flu shot shortage, citizens are understandably wary about how he will handle this growing threat, for which we have no vaccine, even though it could potentially kill 70 million people. When the new secretary of Health and Human Services comes into his position, it is imperative that bio-preparedness be on the list of priorities, just as the outgoing secretary realized in hindsight that it should have been on his own.

They say that you catch more flies with honey than with threatening rhetoric. Both Iran and South Korea, two of the three “axis of evil” countries Bush named in his 2002 State of the Union address, have expressed unwillingness to talk with Washington because of its hostile policy and confrontational attitude.

After weeks of the Bush administration and its neoconservative cronies hinting at strikes on Iran, an Iranian cabinet secretary has fired back, “We have said that if anyone wants to talk to us in a threatening language, we will adopt the same tone.” Abdollah Ramazanzadeh, who also acts as an Iranian government spokesman, has stated his government’s unwillingness to negotiate with the Americans is in large part due to the continual threats and demeaning manner in which the Bush administration has treated Iran. (Meanwhile, the European Union, which has been actually using the diplomatic approach, is making significant headway with Iran.)

Last year, North Korea put a grinding halt to the seemingly productive six-party talks, citing the United States’ “hostile policy” as the reason, and claiming that the success of the talks will depend on Bush’s foreign policy. Already seven months into a standstill, some diplomats are worried that the deadlock will lead to the failure of the negotiations. And though Bush points to nuclear proliferation as the single most serious threat to national security, the White House has set no deadline for resuming the talks.

This is not a call for coddling dangerous leaders, but there needs to be recognition that “Do it or else” cannot continue to be implemented as a one-size-fits-all policy.

The Congressional Budget Office just released its latest projections on the federal budget. Things aren’t looking good. The CBO projects the federal government will rack up “$855 billion in debt between 2006 and 2015,” and $365 billion this year alone. But that doesn’t even begin to describe the scope of our budget problem. Through a combination of Bush administration trickery and legal technicalities, the CBO numbers don’t include:

1. The $80 billion Bush just requested for Iraq and Afghanistan (including, as Atrios notes, an astounding $1.5 billion for a U.S. embassy in Iraq).

2. Assumes no spending on Iraq or Afghanistan over the next 10 years. This omission reduces the deficit by as much as $1.4 trillion.

3. Bush’s $2 trillion Social Security privatization scheme.

4. $2.5 trillion over ten years to make Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, a stated priority.

Here is the really scary part: even with all this chicanery, Bush still doesn’t meet his promise of cutting the actual deficit in half by 2009.

As the finagling over Social Security privatization lingo continues, it would be worthwhile to ask President Bush why he himself has changed his song.

As Dan Froomkin recently pointed out:

“The past several weeks, Bush has been calling Social Security at various times a crisis (see my Jan. 10 column) or a problem (see my Dec. 10 column). And he’s been getting a lot of heat for calling it a crisis.

“Yesterday, I’m guessing everyone got together and agreed: No more crisis! Say problem instead! In his talk, Bush only used the word crisis once, when mocking his critics. Problem, he used 29 times.”

This from a president who last year claimed, “If I tried to fine-tune my messages based upon polls, I think I’d be pretty ineffective. I know I would be disappointed in myself. … And as to whether or not I make decisions based upon polls, I don’t. I just don’t make decisions that way.”

Someone might ask President Bush: Do you no longer believe that Social Security faces a funding crisis? And if not, why have you stopped using the word?