Policy
mikethemadbiologist | February 22, 2011Over at The Washington Post, Nick Johnson by way of Ezra Klein clarifies Wisconsin's budget crisis (italics mine):
- Wisconsin's budget problems are real. The state has a $137 million shortfall in the current fiscal year - after taking into account the need for an additional Medicaid appropriation to get through the end of the year. The state has a $3.6 billion shortfall in the upcoming 2011-13 biennium (the two-year period that starts July 1, 2011). As always, we measure shortfalls as the gap between projected current-law revenues, and the cost of providing a continuing level of services,…
pharyngula | February 18, 2011We have an informal request here at scienceblogs that everyone avoid putting profanity in our article titles, since those may appear on everyone's site, and some people find it objectionable. Fair enough; unfortunately, in this case, all I could think of to put up there was a paragraph's worth of obscenities. So I left it blank.
House Rethuglicans have just voted to deny all funding to Planned Parenthood.
As part of their stated mission to focus on jobs (specifically, the job of preventing women from getting healthcare), House Republicans this afternoon voted 240-185 to bar federal funding…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2011A study showing that many people who receive assistance from government programs don't believe they have done so has been making the rounds once again (you heard it here first! Months ago!). My favorite idiocy is how 43% of Pell Grant recipients--federal aid for college--don't realize it's a government program (one does wonder how that 43% successfully graduated from grade school). I argued that this delusion was willful:
This seems a case of willful ignorance by definition. Government aid is for lazy slackers, for 'welfare queens', and, in some people's minds, for those people. Decent,…
tfk | February 7, 2011Jason Rosenhouse takes a level-headed look at a brewing coynetreversy (a coynetroversy, like the verb, to coyne, involves adding heat, not light, while casting maximal aspersions, ideally to create a controversy where none need exist). Jason explains the situation:
Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers (here and here respectively) have taken note of a session at the upcoming AAAS Annual Meeting entitled: Evangelicals, Science, and Policy: Toward a Constructive Engagement. They object to this intrusion of religion into a science meeting. In the comments to their posts, Nick Matzke has been gamely…
tlambert | February 3, 2011Fred Pearce is going down the David Rose road publishing fabricated quotes. Gavin Schmidt in a letter to New Scientist (so far unpublished there) writes:
In the piece entitled "Climate sceptics and scientists attempt peace
deal"
Fred Pearce includes a statement about me that is patently untrue.
"But the leaders of mainstream climate science turned down the gig,
including NASA's Gavin Schmidt, who said the science was settled so
there was nothing to discuss."
This is completely made up. My decision not to accept the invitation to
this meeting was based entirely on the organiser's initial…
stoat | February 3, 2011 I suppose I could have made him a tosser, but I decided the the traditional rhyming slang was better.
Fred Pearce seems to have made a bit of a career out of being rubbish recently, but has now stooped to just making things up (or, just possibly, that good old journo standby, being so clueless as to what you're talking about that your paraphrases are so inaccurate as to descend into lies).
Anyway, Pearce's current lies [Update: as DC notes, the Newt updated its page on 2011/02/07, but without apology. Whether that means Pearce accepts his error or has been bludgeoned by the Editors, we don'…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2011Recently, I claimned nothing in movement conservatism makes sense except in the light of creationism. One example is Paul Krugman's recent observation:
It's kind of shocking if you think about it. Here we have a huge, hard-won intellectual achievement [the recognition that depressions are caused by inadequate demand], one that accounts very well for the world we actually see, and yet it's being thrown away because it doesn't go along with ideological preconceptions. Once that sort of thing starts, where does it stop? The next thing you know, the theory of evolution will get the same…
cmonforton | February 1, 2011The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (LCSP) is known for challenging the status quo. Its scientists and policy analysts refuse to accept we have to live in a world where parents are worried about toxic toys, or companies feel forced to choose between earning profits and protecting the environment. Leave it to LCSP researchers to describe six cases of systemic worker health and safety failures, yet manage to identify small successes or opportunities to create them. That's the Lowell way:"...infuse hope and opportunity into a system that may appear severely broken."
In "Lessons…
mikethemadbiologist | January 31, 2011The most awful thing about the proposed bill, "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" (H.R. 3), is, well, the bill itself:
With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to "forcible rape." This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion....
Given that the bill also would…
mikethemadbiologist | January 27, 2011It would be for the best.
First, some general thoughts. I had the distinct sense Obama was trying to run the clock out. He knew he had to say something, but has no room to maneuver. Thanks to his mediocre first two years and his enabling of conservative talking points (which one wonders if that's not strategic, but ideological), the Democrats lost control of the House and have been boxed into a corner rhetorically. Related to that, he set the stage over and over again to box Republicans in, but then he mostly chickened out and rarely offered concrete proposals that would put them in a…
jtoney | January 25, 2011
Tonight, President Obama will give his State of the Union address at 9 pm with a new twist: using the latest online technologies, including streaming visual aids, with charts and statistics relevant to his comments. What a wonderful way to engage and educate the public!
See you online.
From Senior Advisor to the President David Plouffe:
Good morning,
Tonight at 9 p.m. EST, President Obama will deliver the State of the Union Address and outline his vision for putting aside the politics that divide us and moving forward to create jobs, up our game to out-compete in the global economy, and…
kbonham | January 23, 2011Mark Henderson of The Times is embarking on (what I think is) a great project - highlighting the contribution that the science savvy can have and are having on public discourse.
The intersection of science and politics is a growing interest of mine, though I don't have nearly as much credibility as many others around the blogosphere (but give me a break - I'm still in grad school). Go help him out, he wants to know
* What are the best examples of geek activism, what have they achieved and what can we learn from them?
* What else can geeks do to hold politicians and civil servants to…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2011But not for the reason you're probably thinking. Loughner's ideas are a ludicrous hodge-podge of conspiracy theory, libertarianism, and anti-government sentiment, but what's striking about them is how incoherent they are. This incoherency isn't limited to Loughner either:
...the strange thing is that so much of this furious opposition to activist government appears to be make-believe. The American Enterprise Institute did a poll of self-identified conservatives and found that "only 3 percent of respondents favored reforming Social Security and Medicare." The 2010 elections put a lot of new…
bioephemera | January 19, 2011Psychologist Robert Kurzban's new book promises to explain Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite. It's a bold promise, and I was skeptical when first invited to review it. But Kurzban delivered - hilariously, entertainingly so. Although since I agree with almost everything he writes, I may not be the most objective of critics. (FYI: this is a long review, so if you're short on time, you can skip to the end of the post, and watch the author's short video trailer about the book. Cheers.)
For starters, Kurzban has convinced me to be more careful when I talk and write about my brain (and yours).…
tfk | January 18, 2011The other day I laid out a bit of my position on the importance of being self-consciously political, and Amanda Marcotte has a great post on a related issue:
Nowadays, however, the verb âto politicizeâ is used, 90% of the time, to suggest that politics and government are silly little trifles that shouldnât be involved when something really serious is on the table. Thatâs how the word has been used in the past week, by right wingers trying to deflect criticism of their very serious actions by suggesting that this massacre is too serious to involve politics. But you see it a lot, and sadly not…
esiegel | January 16, 2011"Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree." -Terry Pratchett
With a high unemployment rate and many people having stopped looking for work, it's pretty hard to live in the United States and not be aware of the struggles many people are facing. Here's a song by Loudon Wainwright III to set the tone,
The Home Stretch.Although many people have their theories, it's worth asking just what the income disparity is in America. Thankfully, Catherine Rampell's NY Times article earlier this week came loaded with data from Rachel Johnson of the Tax Policy Center. Specifically, they…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2011Obama has finally gotten around to choosing a replacement for Larry Summers, and named Gene Sperling director of the National Economic Council (why he didn't prioritize this with nearly 10% U3 unemployment is puzzling). This has been controversial since Gene Sperling, like many of Obama's closest advisors, has ties to Wall Street. David Corn describes those ties:
At some point, according to a source familiar with the episode, Goldman Sachs approached Sperling for advice on globalization. He took this opportunity to pitch the company an idea in sync with his nonprofit work: the firm ought to…
kbonham | January 10, 2011Lately, I find myself disagreeing with PZ far more than I used to on a number of matters. Today though, I think he's 100% correct:
What we have here is an attempted assassination of a politician by an insane crank at a political event, in a state where the political discourse has been an unrelenting howl of eliminationist rhetoric and characterization of anyone to the left of Genghis Khan as a traitor and enemy of the state...and now, when six (including a nine year old girl) lie dead and another fourteen are wounded, now suddenly we're concerned that it is rude and politicizing a tragedy to…
oracknows | January 9, 2011I've written a lot about Mike Adams, the man who founded NaturalNews.com and has been one of the most prominent promoters of quackery on the Internet. Indeed, Mike Adams appears to be battling it out with Joe Mercola for the title of owning the biggest quackery website on the Internet. There's one area, however, where Mike Adams clearly reigns supreme, and that's latching on, ghoul-like, to major tragedies in order to promote his pro-quackery agenda. For example, when former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died of metastatic colon cancer a couple of years ago, Mike Adams was right there…
mikethemadbiologist | January 2, 2011While I don't agree with Mike Konczal that Obama's greatest disappointment is his inability to lose well, for me, it's probably the second greatest disappointment (the greatest being the inability to focus on the employment deficit). At least, I did agree, but now I'm pretty certain I don't.
A while ago, I wrote about the strategic importance of losing:
This is something that the too-smart-for-their-own-good Democratic political operatives and their progressive apologists always fail to understand: you have to create your own opportunities for good politics. If you think a policy is a good…