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UPDATED: Consolation? Not in This Crisis: Richardson is the Man

Mercury, god of commerce, in the Capitol Rotunda

The days of the Commerce Secretary being some guy that no one can name are over. Yesterday Obama announced Bill Richardson as his nominee for Secretary of Commerce. There are reports some Latino groups are miffed that after voting for Obama in droves, the President-Elect did not name Richardson to the pearl post: Secretary of State.

And of course, the media are chomping on the alleged rift and perpetuating the erroneous claim that Commerce is somehow a low-profile, low-prestige post.

Well, that’s crap, and everyone needs to take a lude. First, the Department of Commerce does quite a bit, and second, we should all sigh in relief that Richardson — a skilled politician and statesman — will be at the department’s helm.

Commerce oversees — in part — trade, business development, and statistical activity for the federal government. This means Richardson will have the International Trade, the Economic Development, and Economic and Statistics administrations in his charge. All three of these organizations are going to be critical to ensuring everything from national security to economic recovery. Trade issues are always in play when foreign aid and alliances are the focus. As we heard ad infinitum during the presidential campaign, communities are in trouble and business development is key to economic recovery and growth. The decennial census is coming up in 2010. The 2000 census had many innovations, namely the expansion of racial measures, and the increasing complexity of American demographics requires inspired measurement refinements. We need a presidential administration and a secretary that care about meaningful statistics.

With the economy in the tank and our international relations in shambles, Richardson is going to have to work exhaustively with the State Department, Treasury, and Obama’s Economic Recovery and Advisory teams, of course, in addition to performing his regular duties. (Commerce oversees the Patent and Trademark Office, which is a major player in medical research, especially with respect to gene patents. Patenting the human genome is going to have to be addressed if we are going to effectively deal with exorbitant drug and health-care costs.)

I’m glad Richardson will be in this post. I admit, I wanted him at State; Hillary never blipped on my radar for the post, but I warmed to Richardson as Commerce Secretary much more quickly than I did Hillary at State. Richardson is a workhorse, exceedingly capable and intelligent. He can make Commerce a critical force operationalizing Obama’s platform.

If you never cared about Commerce before, today is not too late to start.

(Oh, and I totally agree with Obama: Richardson should’ve kept the beard. I hope he grows it back.)

UPDATE: The NYT editorial today outlines the crisis the 2010 census is in due to neglect (shocking!) by the Bush Administration. January 20 can’t come soon enough.

Evolution & the Bible: No Conflict

Ray Comfort – a webevangelist bent on showing those durn atheists a thing or two, and debunking evolution along the way – is a strange little man. He also – it seems – is quite the fan of dishonestly mischaracterizing the debate between evolution and creation. Per one of his later posts:

The contention between Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Bible’s account of creation is extremely significant. This is because if evolution is true, the Bible is a fallacy.

While PZ Myers gleefully agrees, seeing it as a chance to kill two birds with one stone, I have to disagree. It may be that “the Bible is a fallacy,” but if it is, evolution isn’t the proof PZ is looking for, and it isn’t the threat that Ray thinks it is. Make no mistake, if evolution is true, a literalist, rigid, unflinching reading of the Bible is patently false. But I – like most theologists throughout history – believe that the Bible, like any text, is more than the plain, dead sum of the words on the page. The literalist, “fundamental” interpretation of the Bible so in vogue among the avowedly religious today would hold any deeper meaning in the Bible hostage to the literal truth of a few chapters, intended as parables and at odds with observed evidence. This is bad science, yes; it’s even worse religion. Not for nothing did Saint Augustine, in De Genesi ad Litteram (“The Literal Meaning of Genesis”), condemn, in harsh language, those nominal Christians whose faith depended upon a counterfactual scientific narrative:

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. ((I’ve lost my notes from the relevant class somewhere. This is a nice stand-in.))

As Augustine would argue, Ray should be ashamed of the shallowness of faith. For the truly religious, faith shouldn’t be about forcing reality to conform to one man’s notion of God: rather, it should be about seeing God in reality. Then again, what do you expect from a guy who imagines that, for one part of the Bible, a “day” is one literal twenty-four hour day, but in another, is 1,000+ years?