At the Creation Museum, a fanciful Eden rises from the void. Adam appears, bearded and handsome, if slightly waxen. Eve emerges from his rib with luxuriant hair and a kindly expression. Trees blossom and creatures frolic, evidence that all started well in God's perfect world.Hey, what about equal time for Great Pumpkin, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Russell's teapot?
Elsewhere, as the story develops, Cain stands over his slain brother, Abel; life-size workmen build a replica of Noah's ark, and Methuselah intones: "With each passing day, judgment draws nearer.... I can tell you, whatever God says is true."
Despite the showmanship behind the $27 million museum opening here Monday, the evangelists who put it together contend that none of the gleaming exhibits are allegorical. God did create the universe in six days, they say, and the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
Biblical scenes are hardly a fresh phenomenon, either as expressions of faith or as missionary props. What separates the Creation Museum from its Bible-boosting brethren is the promoters' assertion that they can prove through science that the book of Genesis is true. All of it.
But in this latest demonization of Darwinian evolution, there is a sticking point: For the biblical account to be accurate and the world to be so young, several hundred years of research in geology, physics, biology, paleontology, and astronomy would need to be very, very wrong.
"This may be fascinating, but this is nonsense," said Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University and a vocal defender of evolutionary science. "It's fine for people to believe whatever they want. What's inappropriate is to then essentially lie and say science supports these notions."
Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, calls the sparkling facility "the creationist Disneyland."
Come Monday, when the museum opens for business not far from Cincinnati, protesters plan to gather at the gates for a "Rally for Reason." Scott's education group reported that 800 scientists from Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio signed a statement expressing concern about "scientifically inaccurate" museum content.
The Creation Museum, a project of the socially conservative religious organization Answers in Genesis, mocks evolutionary science and invites visitors to find faith and truth in God. It welcomes its first paying guests -- $19.95 for adults, $9.95 for children, not counting discounts for joining a mailing list -- just weeks after three Republican presidential candidates said they do not believe in evolution.
Polls suggest that about half of Americans agree. They dismiss the scientific theory that all beings have a common ancestor, believing instead that God created humans in one glorious stroke. Similar numbers of people say the world's age should be counted in the thousands of years, not billions, as established science would have it.
For the record, mainstream scientists currently estimate the age of the Earth at about 4.5 billion years, but don't try telling that to Ken Ham, an Australian-born evangelist and former high school science teacher who heads Answers in Genesis. The busy ministry and its staff of 160 produce a daily radio show, a magazine and 20 DVDs a year. Their offices are in the new museum, which has about 140 employees of its own.
"When you're talking about origins, you're not talking about science," Ham said as charter members snapped photographs in an early walk-through. "You're talking about belief."
- State of Flux: We may have a new star to add to the flag in the near future.
For the first time in nearly a decade, the U.S. House seems likely to pass a bill that would put Puerto Rico on a path to statehood or independence.Obviously Mr. Acevedo-Vilá has never been to Miami or Santa Fe...or he's forgetting his history: when New Mexico was admitted as a state in 1912, one of the concessions was that Spanish would have equal status as an official language for all government business. Seguro.
The latest of many efforts to definitively settle the four million islanders' ambiguous relationship with the United States comes as Congress struggles with an immigration overhaul to deal with 12 million illegal migrants, most of them Hispanics.
Sponsored by Reps. José Serrano, D-N.Y., and Luis Fortuño, R-Puerto Rico, The Puerto Rico Democracy Act of 2007 faces tough scrutiny in the Senate. But its backers have the support of President Bush and are optimistic that they can prevail, possibly securing a House floor vote as soon as next month.
"There's a good chance," said Fortuño, a statehood supporter and nonvoting member of Congress who is preparing a run at the governorship of Puerto Rico next year. "I've been talking to the leadership of both sides, and I truly believe that it is very doable."
The initiative, based on a White House task-force report on Puerto Rico's status issued in late 2005, establishes a two-stage plebiscite process. Islanders would first choose between maintaining their current status -- officially a U.S. territory but broadly known as a commonwealth -- or opting for a different and permanent arrangement.
If they choose the current status, Puerto Ricans would be asked to repeat the process every eight years until a definitive result is reached. If they want a permanent deal -- the most likely outcome, according to observers -- then islanders would vote again between statehood and some form of independence, which could be full sovereignty or a middle-of-the-road option known as "free association."
Congress, which has the power to decide Puerto Rico's status, has never mandated a plebiscite for the island.
Opponents of the Serrano-Fortuño bill say it is constructed to eliminate from the ballot one major option -- an enhancement of the current commonwealth arrangement.
"This is the first time I have seen a process in which the runoff election would be held between the second and third place," said Aníbal Acevedo-Vilá, governor of Puerto Rico and a proponent of enhanced commonwealth.
But the bill's supporters say this is the only acceptable formula to settle a question that dates back to 1898, when U.S. troops seized the island from Spain. Its people have been U.S. citizens since 1917. Residents do not vote in U.S. presidential elections and have one nonvoting member in the House, although those living on the mainland can vote in federal elections.
This limbo has its upsides. Island residents do not pay federal taxes and get federal transfers to the tune of $7 billion a year for programs like No Child Left Behind. Puerto Rico is home to a thriving drug manufacturing industry, and it has more trade with the U.S. than Brazil or Italy.
But Puerto Rico is poor by U.S. standards, with two of every five citizens falling below the federal poverty line. If it became a state, it would rank 25th in population and field two senators and seven House members.
Jeffrey Farrow, a former co-chair of an interagency task force on Puerto Rico in the Clinton administration, says rich Puerto Ricans would lose because they would pay federal taxes while most poor islanders would get more money from Washington.
But many islanders worry that becoming a U.S. state would compromise their identity.
"Puerto Rico is a Latin American nation," said Eduardo Bhatia, the governor's representative in Washington. "There's no question about it."
[...]
Then there's the question of how keen lawmakers are to give island residents the right to vote in federal elections at a time when Latino assimilation is an undercurrent in the ongoing debate over an immigration-policy overhaul.
As Acevedo-Vilá put it during a recent House hearing: "Are we planning to entitle the 51st state to keep forever the Spanish language as its principal language in public schools, in the local courts and in everyday business?"
- Voyage of the Damned, Part II: Frank Rich on how we've failed the people we were supposed to save.
When all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.Read the rest here courtesy of Welcome to Pottersville.
However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East. From “Stuff happens!” on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming “aliens” from Mexico.
Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”
It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.
But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.; it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.
Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden, which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all interpreters.
In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator Kennedy’s phrase, have “an assassin’s bull’s-eye on their backs” because they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of the administration’s most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had “absolutely nothing to do” with Saddam’s overthrow: “Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”
Actually, we haven’t fulfilled the obligation of giving them functioning institutions and security. One of the many reasons we didn’t was that L. Paul Bremer’s provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with unqualified but well-connected Republican hacks who, in some cases, were hired after they expressed their opposition to Roe v. Wade. The administration is nothing if not consistent in its employment practices. The assistant secretary in charge of refugees at the State Department now, Ellen Sauerbrey, is a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of Maryland with no experience in humanitarian crises but a hefty résumé in anti-abortion politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie was to Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.
Ms. Sauerbrey’s official line on Iraqi refugees, delivered to Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” in March, is that most of them “really want to go home.” The administration excuse for keeping Iraqis out of America is national security: we have to vet every prospective immigrant for terrorist ties. But many of those with the most urgent cases for resettlement here were vetted already, when the American government and its various Halliburton subsidiaries asked them to risk their lives by hiring them in the first place. For those whose loyalties can no longer be vouched for, there is the contrasting lesson of Vietnam. Julia Taft, the official in charge of refugees in the Ford administration, reminded Mr. Pelley that 131,000 Vietnamese were resettled in America within eight months of the fall of Saigon, despite loud, Dobbs-like opposition at the time. In the past seven months, the total number of Iraqis admitted to America was 69.
- Crazy Love: If you think your relationship with your spouse or significant other is unique, check out this couple.
When they aren’t swapping insults, shopping for clothes or sharing egg rolls at the local Chinese diner, Burt and Linda Pugach busy themselves reliving for visitors their famously and darkly convoluted love affair, one that began in the late 1950s and continues to evolve to this day.- No Doonesbury today; the link to the site is broken . Catch up next week.
It is a love-hate relationship, which is moodily tracked in “Crazy Love,” a documentary arriving in movie theaters in New York on Friday. Crazy love is not a condition to be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but the phrase aptly describes the arc of a romance that, off and on, has riveted the public for decades.
In the early summer of 1959, Mr. Pugach, who was then 32, began to court Linda Riss, 21, a Bronx-reared dark-eyed beauty in the Liz Taylor mold. Mr. Pugach, a lawyer who was also cock-proud of his small-time success as a filmmaker, wooed Miss Riss with flowers, nights out at the Latin Quarter and flights aboard his single-engine plane.
True, he was married, a matter of small consequence to him but naturally unsettling to Miss Riss. Tiring of his promises to divorce his wife, she ended the affair and became engaged to someone else. Mr. Pugach responded by hiring three men to throw lye in her face, leaving her disfigured and all but blind.
The crime and trial were tabloid sensations. But the Pugaches were merely at the end of Act 1. During 14 years in prison, Mr. Pugach nursed a fanatical ardor for Miss Riss, writing her love letters in a florid hand. Eight months after he was paroled in 1974, the couple renewed their courtship, and they were soon married. More headlines.
Today they live in a modest four-room apartment in the Rego Park, Queens. Most striking about their relationship is not Mrs. Pugach’s lingering resentment, not her husband’s less-than-evident remorse, and not even their mutual dependence, but the marriage’s frank descent into humdrumness.
