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Defending their toxics – Industry pushes to protect its preferred chemicals under the new TSCA

 The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21st Century was signed into law with a general sigh of relief that finally, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would have the authority needed to evaluate and regulate the tens of thousands of commercial chemicals it oversees in the U.S. But as the EPA begins implementing the new law, the chemical industry is already busy pushing the agency to limit scrutiny of various widely used, highly toxic chemicals. Among the EPA’s first tasks under the Lautenberg Act is to enact rules outlining how it will prioritize chemicals for review…

Blacklisting? Hardly. Congressmen exaggerate Obama’s Executive Order for government contractors

I’m getting tired of Members of Congress describing Obama’s Executive Order (EO 13673) for government contractors “blacklisting.” Merriam-Webster defines blacklisting as “ a list of persons who are disapproved of or are to be punished or boycotted." The Cambridge dictionary defines it as “to decide that you will not do business with an organization or person.” That’s not at all what the “Fair Pay and Safe Workplace" Executive Order says and it’s not what is described in the guidance document to implement it. That guidance document was published in the Federal Register on May 28. Yet the…

"Perfect nails, poisoned workers" and where is the law?

[Update below (5/15/15)] by Cora Roelofs, ScD Kudos to Sarah Maslin Nir for shedding light on the working conditions faced by nail salon workers in her recent two-part New York Times exposé “Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers.” I and others across the country have been working to document and illuminate the effects of the systematic failures that produce the unhealthful conditions faced by these workers and, many times, their employers as well. As described in our investigation of nail salon conditions in Boston, despite tremendous evidence of bad conditions and symptoms related to work in these…

2012 train derailment, first responders and "indefensible actions"

This week’s MMWR includes a report on the experience of volunteer firefighters, police and other personnel who responded to a November 2012 train derailment in Paulsboro, NJ. The Contrail train twisted off a movable bridge and three tank cars containing vinyl chloride landed in Mantua Creek. About 20,000 gallons of vinyl chloride were released, resulting in a noxious vapor cloud. Among those responding to the early morning incident were individuals with the Paulsboro Fire Department, and HAZMAT teams from the PBF Energy’s Paulsboro Refinery, Gloucester County, and Conrail. It wasn’t long…

Contraception the Next Big Target?

The Chicago Tribune had an article this weekend by Judith Graham that indicates that the religious right is now broadening their focus on abortion to include opposition to contraception itself. Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement's success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal group of Christian conservatives is arguing that it's time to mount a concerted attack on contraception. Their voices were raised in Rosemont on Friday and Saturday at an unusual anti-abortion meeting that drew 250 people from around the nation to condemn artificial birth control. Experts at the…

Why I Like the Judiciary

I was watching TV last night and a campaign commercial came on for Debbie Stabenow, the Democratic incumbent US Senator from Michigan. Like most campaign commercials, it was just a medley of scenes of her shaking hands and talking to people with the appropriate look of concern on her face. And the voiceover features her talking about how great Michigan's workers are and how they can compete with anyone. It ends with her saying, "This isn't about Republicans and Democrats, it's about our Michigan way of life, and I'm fighting for it every day." You can actually see the commercial on the front…

Sears on Gay Marriage

In the creation/evolution debate, the religious right loves to argue about missing links; in the debate over gay marriage, they seem to specialize in arguments with missing links. In column after column, we see the same argument repeated - gay marriage will "destroy" marriage - without any of them bothering to fill in the missing link. What is the causal link between allowing gays to marry and "marriage" (they always use the word as though it was an actual physical entity) being "destroyed" or "weakened" or "gravely damaged"? One of the silliest columns I've read is this one by Alan Sears of…

Rise of the Health Nazis

Yes, yes, I know - Godwin's law and all that. But the term is so perfect that I choose to use it, even while recognizing that the analogy is obviously absurd. I refer, of course, to the full range of health and longevity fetishists who push for ever more intrusive regulation of what we eat, drink or otherwise take into our bodies. The folks who are encouraging more lawsuits against fast food restaurants on behalf of people who claim McDonald's made them fat - as though Ronald put a gun to their head and made them eat big macs and fat-saturated fries 3 times a day. The latest target of my ire…

Kapitano's Continued Obtuseness

The poster named Kapitano, who took issue with me about the Danish caricatures in a thread below, has his own blog and he's decided to continue the argument there. The problem is, he's completely misrepresenting my position in the process. The first paragraph of his attempt to address it is just riddled with both misrepresentations and logical errors. The dominant position seems to be that the cartoons were a valid (if crude) criticism of the whole of Islamic faith and politics, and as such are justified under freedom of speech. Oh and by the way the response of the homogenous islamic world…

Algebraic Intervention

I really don't mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen's idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks...). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing that I'd like to address comes from Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, who asks about the student whose plight started this whole thing: Were there just so many kids to get through, and so little in the way of support (on the extra-help/shifting to a different course/evaluating…

Top Eleven: Rudolf Moessbauer

The penultimate experiment in the Top Eleven brings us up to the first nominee who's still with us.. Who: Rudolf Moessbauer (1929-present) (that's Mössbauer with a heavy-metal ö), a German physicist. (The Wikipedia link is for consistency with the other posts, but contains very little information. A better bio is available from the Nobel Prize site.) When: 1957-58. What: This one requires a bit of background, so there will be more below the fold, but basically, he's nominated for discovering an effect that makes it possible to do precision spectroscopy of nuclear transitions. Spectroscopy is…

Plan 8 from outer space

The Mystery of Equation 8 refers, and offers me my title. For a while now, there has been some weird septic stuff floating around about how the planet is warmer-than-it-would-be-without-an-atmosphere not because of the greenhouse effect or anything like that, but because of gravity. Nikolov and Zeller I think, though for all I know others are thinking the same. There are several threads, and vast piles of comments, at WUWT - for example, this one; or the original. Since it was all obviously septic nonsense wrapped up in equations, I didn't even bother to think about it, in much the same way…

Obligatory Age of Ultron Comments

So, Kate and I hired a babysitter last night, and went to see the new Avengers movie. You might not have heard of it, it's kind of obscure... (There will be some mild SPOILERS below; if you're intensely opposed to that sort of thing, don't read the rest of this...) So, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a big mistake to watch this excellent video about Jackie Chan's style yesterday morning: (in a sorta-kinda related vein, this Max Gladstone blog post is also very interesting...) Having watched that video in the morning, and its discussion of how Jackie Chan's fight choreography and…

Jim Boeheim

It's the absolute peak of college basketball season, and it still seems weird to be almost completely disconnected from the game. This is not, by the way, the result of any principled objection to the manifest hypocrisies of the NCAA, or anything like that, but a practical effect of having kids. If the tv is on, it's either showing one of their cartoon shows or drowned out by the pleading for cartoon shows. And by the time they're asleep at night, I'm generally too wiped out to watch anything. But as a long-time fan, though, I feel I would be remiss if I didn't say something about what's been…

Important new meta-study of sea level rise in the US.

This is not a peer reviewed meta-study, but a meta-study nonetheless. Reuters has engaged in a major journalistic effort to examine sea level rise and has released the first part (two parts, actually). It is pretty good; I only found one paragraph to object to, and I'll ignore that right now. There are two reasons this report is important. First, it documents something about sea level rise that I've been trying to impress on people all along. The effects of sea level rise do not end at one's perceived position of a new shoreline. Here's what I mean. Suppose you are standing on a barrier…

How to talk to your uncle who thinks global warming is a hoax?

So, you accept the science of climate change and global warming as legit. But you often encounter people, at family gatherings, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, at social events, etc. who don't. Do you keep your mouth shut when someone says something clearly wrong that brings the science into question illegitimately? If you do, and others are listening, then one voice, a denialist voice, is influencing people. Probably better to say something. The problems is that the denialist schtick involves having a lot of different arguments, with absolutely no regard as to legimacy, against the…

Alaska, Washington, and Hawaii Democratic Caucuses: Results, Updated

Today and tomorrow we have the Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington Democratic primaries. According to the model I developed prior to the last primary, which predicts future primaries using information about primaries to date (which I've not updated from last Tuesday), Sanders will win all three primaries. That model suggests that the delegate spread by the end of the day will look like this: However, I also developed an alternate model which assumes that Sanders' over performance (in relation to the afore mentioned model) requires an adjustment. That alternative model suggests that this will…

The Truth About Syria and Obama

In case you were wondering, Trump is telling you lies. Syria is run by a horrible dictator. He is the kind of dictator that makes you want to bring back assassination of foreign leaders. The idea of putting him down is hardly an extreme one, once you know what he does and has done. There was a moment in time, in 2013, when Obama tried to stand up to Assad, but failed to push back when Assad pushed him. Assad read the US system better than most foreign dictators do, it seems. You see, in the United States, a president can't just go to war. Congress authorizes war. Once that authorization…

OpenOffice May Close The Door

The history of what we call "OpenOffice" is complex and confusing. It started as a project of Sun corporation, to develop an office suit that was not Microsoft Office, to use internally. Later, a version became more generally available known as Star Office, but also, a version called "OpenOffice" soon became available as well. The current histories say that Star Office was commercial, but my memory is that it never cost money to regular users. I think the idea was that large corporations would pay, individuals not. This was all back around 2000, plus or minus a year or two. In any event,…

What I had for lunch

This is one of those "what I had for lunch web log entries." Old fashioned style, and I'm not talking about the drink. Probably. You'll notice that I've not blogged for half a month. For the last three months, Amanda, Huxley, and I have been engaged in a very time consuming operation. We fixed up our old house (it needed nothing more than cosmetic fixing, but we did ALL of that), then searched for a new house, bought one, and then moved into it. We then immediately ran into some delays and difficulties in getting settled, and are no where near normal, but we are getting there fast and in…

The 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season

This year's Atlantic Hurricane season will be stronger, forecasts suggest, than that of the previous two years, and stronger than the average year. The Atlantic Hurricane Seasons starts on June 1st. But, there was a hurricane that happened already, either late in last year's season or very early in this year's season, called Alex. That hurricane had to go somewhere, and I suppose the keepers of the records had already put their spreadsheet to bed when Alex came along on January 7th, so that storm gets counted as part of the season that will nominally start at the beginning of next month.…

Hey Hubble, Thanks for 20 years of Awesome

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. -Henry D. Thoreau 20 years ago tomorrow, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit. It doesn't look that impressive, and maybe it shouldn't. After all, what is a space telescope? It's a couple of mirrors, a camera, some stabilizing gyroscopes, some electronics and an antenna, all wrapped in a reflective coating and powered by some solar panels. Doesn't sound so hard, does it? But Hubble has vastly increased our understanding of the Universe, and I'd like to share with you some of the…

Yahoo, Star Trek, and the "Impossible"

Let's get something out in the open: not all science fiction is scientifically possible. Some of it is possible, but the laws of nature are pretty strict, and they prevent us from doing a number of things that -- in principle -- would be incredible to do. Examples on both sides, please? You got it. Wall-crawling like Spider-Man? Totally possible. Just graft enough gecko fibers onto a person and not only will you be climbing walls, but also ice, oily surfaces, and even teflon! Shrink rays? A la Fantastic Voyage? Completely impossible, unfortunately. Protons, neutrons, and electrons are stuck…

dlamming's Continued Lies

This guy is quite a piece of work. He's kept up his string of lies over at BigC's blog in this comment. He writes: Ed B has now expanded upon his original argument, and speaks against these people being treated as authorities - but that wasn't my original point, and isn't what he orignally said, either. Read his post again, if you will. He implied in his last paragraph that the list was worthless not because their position was a minority one, but that it was worthless due to the presence of engineers and chemists. And he wonders why he's been "insulted" - he's been insulted because of his…

Comparing Two Dembski Answers

Wesley Elsberry has an interesting post up where he details a question and answer exchange with Dembski at a conference last weekend. I think it's worth highlighting for the same reasons Wesley does. First, because it has Dembski saying that he thinks putting ID into high school science classes is "premature" - while simultaneously cheering on President Bush when he says ID should be taught in high school science classes and offering $1000 to any teacher in Wisconsin who will teach ID to break a prospective new law. Second, because it shows how completely differently Dembski answers questions…

Graubart on the Varieties of Judicial Conservatism

Noah Graubart has an excellent essay on the varieties of judicial conservatives, particularly in respect to the Alito nomination. Unlike most commentators, he recognizes that there are different varieties rather than casually lumping Scalia and Thomas together. That alone is refreshing to read. He writes: Of course Bush has selected a nominee who is hostile to Roe v. Wade (any who doubt that Chief Justice Roberts is equally hostile are fooling themselves). But, does Judge Alito share Justice Thomas" belief that the president"s commander-in-chief powers are virtually unbridled, or does he…

Unusual Church/State Ruling

Or rather, an unusual chain of events leading up to a solid ruling. A Federal District Judge in New York has granted summary judgement in favor of a church who was denied the right to rent a public school facility in New York to hold church services on Sundays. Nothing unusual about that, of course. Churches and religious groups are allowed to rent public facilities under the same rules that govern renting to any other group. But this case has gone on for ten years now and I'm a bit baffled by the court's previous rulings. Here are the facts of the case. In 1994, this church inquired about…

Federal Marriage Amendment Snafus

The Washington Post is reporting on the framing of the Federal Marriage Amendment, which has been proposed in Congress to ban gay marriages nationwide, that it is so poorly written that even its proponents don't know what it would prevent and what it would allow. The article begins: In the spring and summer of 2001, a group of conservative legal scholars including former Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork hammered out the proposed text of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Participants say it was an informal, somewhat "messy" process conducted by e-mail and telephone so…

And Other Bloggers Think We Have Too Much Freedom?

On the heels of Josh Claybourn quoting another blogger quoting a third blogger about the dangers of unrestrained liberty leading to chaos, I have 3 stories that illustrate that the impulse to control is still alive and well. Example #1: The first story comes from The Great Separation, a blog I took to task a few days ago for calling the city councilan who put up a 2000 pound Ten Commandments monument in front of city hall a "hero". But this time, I'm in complete agreement with him on an issue. He has an entry pointing to a resolution that is being submitted to the UN by someone named Anthony…

An Intelligent Design Creationist Tells the Truth

Intelligent Design Creationists are actively working in several states and at the federal level to get their ideas into public school science classrooms. In their famous Wedge Document, the Discovery Institute's strategic blueprint for overthrowing materialistic science, Phase 1 was supposed to be "Scientific Research, Writing and Publication." Indeed, they say that without this, everything that follows will be hollow: Phase I is the essential component of everything that comes afterward. Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to…

Pat Robertson and Miss Cleo

Yes folks, Pat Robertson has once again been confabbing with God and he has reported on the 700 Club that God has told him that Bush will win the 2004 election easily: "I think George Bush is going to win in a walk. I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004." And lest you think God is merely in the business of handicapping elections, Pat even implies that Bush is in office because God wants him to be, that God has raised him up intentionally: "The Lord has just blessed him. I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn'…

Political Discourse

"Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - HL Mencken Mencken certainly would not be surprised by how little the average American understands about the constitution or the nature of the American political system it was intended to establish. Anyone who has frequented internet political chat rooms can attest that that understanding is very shallow indeed. In a conversation I watched this afternoon concerning prayer in schools, one chatter kept repeating over and over "but what about the will of the people?", arguing…

Bill Nye and Evolution Discussed on Fox 9

I did this thing: Minneapolis News and Weather KMSP FOX 9 A few notes: Ross Olsen is a retired physician who is a principle player in our local Young Earth creationist group, which produces the local creation science fair (this search will get you most of my posts on that). When I said second amendment I meant first amendment. But maybe I was really thinking about ... oh, never mind. My intent was not to debate Evolution, although Ross clearly had a different idea in mind. Ross was asked to this discussion by the producers after they (the producers) contacted me to talk about Bill Nye's…

Michele Bachmann: Waiting for the other shoe to drop?

Michele Bachmann. Photo by Flickr User Gage Skidmore. Or, maybe just waiting for a pin to drop, to break the silence? Bill Prendergast at Minnesota Progressive Project has floated an interesting, if somewhat complicated, hypothesis. He notes that Michel Bachmann has been very silent, out of the news, since the election which is now (though it seems like yesterday) nearly a month in the past. He suggests that the GOP establishment has shut her down, something they may have wanted to do for some time but would have been able to do because of her independent support from the coalition of…

Meteorologist Paul Douglas on Atheist Talk This Sunday

This Sunday morning, on Atheist Talk radio, I’ll interview Paul Douglas, America’s favorite meteorologists (at least when the weather is good). When I first moved to Minnesota, which happened to be during a period of intense Spring and Summer storminess for a few years in a row (including this event which wiped out Amanda’s dorm long before I ever met her), I spent a bit of time while searching for a place to live watching the local news, to get a feel for the place. Coming from the Boston area, where the main local news stations aggressively compete with each other using their…

Can Monckton Put His Money Where Is Mouth Is? NO! it turns out (UPDATE)

Climate science denialist Christopher Monckton wrote a post at WUWT blog in which he describes the non-existent stall in global warming. At the end of the post he writes: Meanwhile, enjoy what warmth you can get. A math geek with a track-record of getting stuff right tells me we are in for 0.5 Cº of global cooling. It could happen in two years, but is very likely by 2020. His prediction is based on the behavior of the most obvious culprit in temperature change here on Earth – the Sun. My friend and Colleague, John Abraham of St. Thomas University (he blogs here) wrote the following letter:…

I get email…and so does everyone else!

It's my afternoon for getting lots of whiny right-wing Christianist email, I guess. This one is notable, not for its content (which is predictable, humorless, and indignant, and just like most of the complaints I get), but for the fact that it was also sent to my chancellor and every member of the biology faculty. Nice work, spammer. "Man-whore" - PZ Myers "He (Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University) is such a man-whore for creationism..." - PZ Myershttp://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/"Man-whore."  Do you use such language in your department meetings at the University of Minnesota? How…

ERMAHGERD! ERVALANCH! ERVs and Placentas

The connection between ERVs and placentas is already well established. Without a shadow of a doubt, the ability of mammals to generate placentas was, in part, accomplished by domesticating an endogenous retroviral env protein.  In humans, we call this protein syncytin, or ERVWE1. This new paper in Nature Genetics takes the ERV-Placenta connection a step further: Endogenous retroviruses function as species-specific enhancer elements in the placenta. Even though all mammals have placentas, mammalian placentas are different, even between species we would think should be very similar, like the…

Experimental anti-malaria vaccine accidentally makes malaria worse :-/

The Evolutionary Consequences of Blood-Stage Vaccination on the Rodent Malaria Plasmodium chabaudi The concept of vaccination is, superficially, simple-- Safely mimic 'infection' so your immune system learns how to fight a pathogen, without needing to get sick from the genuine pathogen.  Then if you are ever exposed to the real, scary pathogen, your immune system already knows how to deal with it. But things dont always go according to plan... In 1966, a novel vaccine against Respiratory Syncytial Virus was a tragic failure.  The lucky kids didnt respond at all.  The unlucky kids made a…

Links for 2012-03-26

Tutorial and Critique Services -- Debra Doyle, Ph.D. Now-a-days, lots of folks are self-publishing. I'm doing it myself. If you're planning to self-publish, and if you haven't yet heard the advice that since you're now a publisher you need to hire an editor, well, you will. Other folks want to learn to write. A one-on-one session with an experienced teacher can teach you to fish. If you know what I mean. Therefore: I am putting my writing and teaching expertise up for sale. What I will do: Critique and line-edit your novel. A critique generally runs 3-5 pages, and covers structural and…

Roller Slide Physics Explained

On Monday, I posted a short video and asked about the underlying physics. Here's the clip again, showing SteelyKid and then me going down a slide made up of a whole bunch of rollers at a local playground: The notable thing about this is that SteelyKid takes a much, much longer time to get down the slide than I do. This is very different than an ordinary smooth slide, where elementary physics says we should go down the slide at the same rate, and empirically I tend to be a little slower than she is. So what's the difference? First of all, let's be a little more quantitative about this. Here's…

The politics edition, post-election special

In the pre-election special I said1: The most likely result is a Tory victory with a (perhaps marginally) increased majority. But that would be dull, so why not speculate? A possible result is a hung parliament with – if my fellow electorate are not too foolish – the possibility of a Tory-LibDem coalition having a majority. Part A of my speculation was fine; part B was Utopian. Well, in my defence I was trying to find a bright side to look at. But instead we get the DUP4. The initial reaction to all this is that Theresa May looks like the idiot that she is; and that it is a disaster for the…

Brexit means Brexit?

Post-referendum thoughts, and indeed Say no to Brexit refer. But so do Timmy's NO, DON'T LET MPS HAVE A VOTE ON BREXIT (Timmy is very shouty, as you'd expect) and The Brexit Conundrum - Freedom Of Movement Means Only Hard, Or Clean, Brexit Is Possible (so perhaps it is the ASI that is shouty. Well, you know what they're like). Before we get into all the messy and unpleasant politics, here's a picture. Chamois against the Pelvoux, seen from where the glacier Jean Gauthier used to be. You should see my close-up of a marmotte. Anyway, onwards. [Far too late update: I've now added the question…

Experiments Are Not Afterthoughts

There's been a bunch of talk recently about a poll on quantum interpretations that showed physicists badly divided between the various interpretations-- Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, etc.-- a result which isn't actually very surprising. Sean Carroll declares that the summary plot is "The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics, which I think is a bit of an overreaction, but not too much of one. I do strongly disagree with one thing he says in explaining this, though: Not that we should be spending as much money trying to pinpoint a correct understanding of quantum mechanics as we do looking for…

How the NBA Ruins Our Pick-Up Games

In which I get a little ranty about basketball. ----------- Over at Slate, Matt Yglesias has a column about why everybody ignores the Spurs.: America—at least in its own imagination—stands for certain things. For the idea that hard work and sound judgment bring success, and that success deserves celebration. That winners should be celebrated as long as they play by the rules. That teamwork, leadership, loyalty, and excellence all count for something. And that’s why the San Antonio Spurs, currently riding a stupendous run of 19 straight victories, are America’s favorite professional basketball…

Did I ever tell you how exciting snails are?

Did I ever tell you how exciting snails are? No, wait, don't go away... Oh well. Now the rest of you have settled down, I'll continue. My pic, incidentally, shows some Sphacterian snails I met in Greece this summer, which exhibited this odd clustering behaviour I've not seen before. But that's nothing to do with this post. I was reading the Times, as one does in Waitrose cafe when one can't find the Torygraph, and came across an interesting article which is paywalled, so in revenge I won't point you at it. Extinct snail re-discovered at Aldabra Atoll will do instead, and its rather more…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 18

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 17 Table of Contents Chapter 19 Chapter 18 Amazon, Sept. 29, 2055 Have you ever wondered what is the logic of your life? Sometimes I feel like a piece of flotsam bouncing on the waves of a river whose depth and currents I cannot fathom, whose path I do not know, whose destination, short of the ocean, is a mystery. This feeling caught me as I contemplated Olivia. It was equally true of the happy accident that I just happened to notice the odd red-green plant years before when Doc Y and I were on a sampling tour in the B.C. interior. I got my…

Panel Discussion on ID and Evolution in Schools

One of the longtime Dispatches readers, Dave Snyder, sent me an email yesterday telling me that there was a panel discussion on evolution and ID in public schools at Central Michigan University, where he teaches. I decided to attend the discussion to do a little recruiting for Michigan Citizens for Science. We don't have many members in that area of the state and it's only about an hour drive for me, so what the heck. Plus it gave me the chance to meet Dave for dinner beforehand, which was pretty cool. It boosted my ego a bit (not that it needs boosting, obviously) to see that he has a post…

Bush Backing Away from Anti-Gay Amendment

Another part of Bush's interview with the Washington Post the other day that was fascinating was this exchange on the Federal Marriage Amendment: The Post: Do you plan to expend any political capital to aggressively lobby senators for a gay marriage amendment? THE PRESIDENT: You know, I think that the situation in the last session -- well, first of all, I do believe it's necessary; many in the Senate didn't, because they believe DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act] will -- is in place, but -- they know DOMA is in place, and they're waiting to see whether or not DOMA will withstand a…

Microcredit and the Nobel Peace Prize

Let me join Jason Kuznicki in applauding the Nobel committee for choosing Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Yunus is the man who pioneered the concept of microcredit, small loans that conventional banks would not give, targeted to the poorest of the poor to enable them to start their own businesses. It started in the 1970s when Yunus loaned $27 to a group of Bangladeshi women who started a business making bamboo stools. That gave him the idea to start Grameen Bank to do that all over Bangladesh, and it has spawned similar efforts all over the world in poor…