Policy and Politics
tfk | May 19, 2009Who just said:
You know it’s real. You can see it, and you can feel it. This change, my friends, is being delivered in a teabag. And that’s a wonderful thing.
Was it:
Teabagging aficionado Neal Pollack?
Sex advice columnist and teabagging expert Dan Savage?
Or chairman of the Republican Party, former Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele?
If the Republican party didn't exist, we'd surely have to invent it.
tfk | May 13, 2009In his inaugural address, President Obama promised to "restore science to its rightful place." What exactly that place was became a subject of much discussion in the blogs, and we learned more on March 9, 2009, when the President issued a memorandum ordering agency heads to develop policies, under supervision of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), headed by John Holdren, the President's science advisor. The order noted that "Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues," and emphasized that "[t]he public…
tfk | May 12, 2009Calitics is pretty excited. Polling, most recently from SurveyUSA, shows that a series of amendments meant to solve this year's California budget crisis are likely to fail. All get less than 50% support, with only one seeing less than 50% opposition (and a lot of undecideds, obviously).
In the abstract, I'm glad. The problem in Sacramento is twofold. First, property taxes are capped in ways that have progressively starved the state over the last 30 years. That means you have to raise taxes every year in order to simply keep up with inflation and population growth. Which brings us to the…
tfk | May 11, 2009Shorter Bruce Chapman:
Have you ever noticed that critics of the "war on science" don't criticize animal rights terrorists? Also, why don't proponents of a "war on poverty" cheer Jack the Ripper's contributions to the effort?
For what it's worth, actual Bruce Chapman:
Where are the protests against violence-supporting opponents of medical experiments, not to mention those who want to stop irradiation of grain to prevent disease and those who prevent the use of genetically modified crops in such hungry regions as Africa?
Well, one can find them this way or this way.
Or check the index to…
tfk | May 8, 2009Roger Pielke, Jr. is a respected scholar of science policy, but he's got a contrarian streak a mile wide that gets him into trouble occasionally, as for instance his feud with Joe Romm of Climate Progress. It is also apparent in his survey of a fight over oyster farming off the coast of Point Reyes. His title, "The War on Science Continues" is, he insists, "a bit of irony, of course, as there never has been a 'war on science,' just politics as usual, sometimes played more hardball than others, especially by the previous Administration."
His example of an ongoing war on science involves…
tfk | May 7, 2009Martin Cothran takes a break from defending Pat Buchanan's anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial to pick a fight over the definition of the Holocaust. All you need to know is that the definition employed by Yad Vashem, the Anti-Defamation League, historians at the Holocaust History Project, and Wikipedia (for what it's worth) all use is now my "pet definition of the Holocaust."
Apparently he also thinks I "sa[id] that Focus on the Family defends Holocaust denial," which I never did (a typo in an earlier post could have been misinterpreted to indicate that, so I've clarified that post). I did…
tfk | May 6, 2009I generally agree with Kevin Drum, but he periodically says things that make me think he lives in an alternative universe. For instance, here's what he thinks would happen if we implemented recommendations of a commission to "save" Social Security:
Even Republicans agree that privatization is off the table right now, which means that a bipartisan commission might very well come up with an acceptable set of tweaks that would balance Social Security's books. And there's a genuine upside to this: at a fairly low cost it would take Social Security off the table for good. No more endless…
tfk | May 5, 2009I've been curious how close Disco. Inst. blogger and Focus on the Family stooge Martin Cothran would get to defending Holocaust denial in the abstract, rather than defending the Holocaust denial of Pat Buchanan specifically. In comments at his blog, Cothran inches closer. I observed that:
You say Buchanan "does not deny the Holocaust." I've offered the generally accepted definition of the Holocaust, and shown that Buchanan denies it. You've offered no definition of the Holocaust, and point only to the fact that Buchanan uses the word.
This is like the old joke:
Q:If you call a tail a leg,…
tfk | May 4, 2009I grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, and I'm thrilled to see that two kids from our county seat wrote winning essays in the Alliance for Science essay contest. Teacher Carol Zepatos of the Bergen County Academies is clearly doing something right. All of the winning essays are spectacular, of course, and all the winners fully deserve not only the generous prizes offered by AfS, but the congratulations of science fans everywhere.
tfk | May 4, 2009Kansas Jackass reports that newly installed Governor Parkinson will allow a coal plant in Holcomb:
At a just concluded press conference, Governor Mark Parkinson announced he has reached an agreement with Sunflower Electric Power Corporation that will allow for the construction of a brand new massive coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, Kansas.
Parkinson will allow air quality permit that had been blocked by Kansas Department of Heath and Human Services Secretary Rob Bremby to be issued and pave the way for the construction of one one 895 megawatt plant provided the Kansas Legislature passes a…
tfk | May 1, 2009If Martin Cothran is to be believed (and naturally he isn't):
The paleocons, almost as a matter of definition, opposed the war [in Iraq], and opposed it harshly.
I opposed the war in Iraq, and opposed it harshly, so "almost as a matter of definition," I'm a almost paleocon, just like Pat Buchanan, and unlike William F. Buckley, who only opposed the war tepidly, and that was only after it actually started.
In my newfound (almost) paleo-conservative state, I can say with (almost) no underlying political animus that Pat Buchanan, (almost) ally though he may be, is an anti-Semite and a Holocaust…
tfk | April 30, 2009Freedom Singer and civil rights icon Bernice Johnson Reagon:
If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.
Relevant, I think, to the kerfuffle over evolution/religion accomodationism.
Also relevant to note that most scientists are not incompatibilists of the Dawkins/Coyne/Myers school.
tfk | April 30, 2009Both the mammalogist and the political junkie in me wish we could see this:
rumors are flying like monkeys and squirrels, which, of course, clouds the issue
A literal cloud of flying monkeys and squirrels would be quite a sight.
tfk | April 30, 2009In attacking the Obama administration's response to the swine flu outbreak, "Brownie" reveals more about the past administration than the current one:
I think they want to raise this level because that gives them more attention, it gives them more, you know, more legitimacy, and allows them to get out there and say ‘oh look at us, we’re in control we've got this thing taken care of.’ It legitimizes what they’re doing.
For eight years, the Bush team tried desperately to make everything seem like a crisis, hoping that fear would keep them in power. The Obama administration has been calm and…
tfk | April 29, 2009
Shorter every conservative everywhere (RNC Chairman Michael Steele or disgraced former Representative Jim Ryun's sons or Martin Cothran, for instance):
Arlen Specter, pfft. The Republican Party needs to abandon Ronald Reagan's Big Tent approach so that Republicans can have more leaders like Ronald Reagan.
BTW, why can't Martin Cothran spell? "Barrack Obama"? "Arlen Spector"?
tfk | April 28, 2009There's a kerfuffle under way in which Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, Richard Hoppe, and a host of others are debating whether NCSE is too nice to theists. Since I work for NCSE, I'm trying to stay out of this, and my comments about NCSE will be based on publicly available information, not any internal discussions; I will also avoid referring to NCSE as "us" to avoid confusion on this point. As the disclaimer to the left says, nothing here reflects NCSE's official position, and if you disagree, your disagreement is with me, not NCSE.
While I don't intend any comprehensive or systematic reply to…
tfk | April 28, 2009Ending obstructions thrown up by wingnuts who think that abortion is more important than a global pandemic, the U.S. Senate confirmed Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Sebelius has resigned as Governor of Kansas and is moving into her office. Lieutenant Governor Mark Parkinson is now the Governor.
Sebelius won her nomination on a 65-31 vote, with Republican Kansas Senators Roberts and Brownback joining the entire Democratic caucus (including newly Democratic Senator Specter), and Republicans Kit Bond of Missouri, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Judd…
tfk | April 27, 2009Steve Benen observes that the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees our response to pandemics like swine flu, is currently without its Secretary. Governor Kathleen Sebelius, whose own state had some of the first cases of swine flu in the US, is waiting for Senate confirmation. The delay? Anti-abortion activists couldn't kill her nomination, but extracted the delay as a compromise. It doesn't actually get them anything tangible, but it makes them feel tough. Benen writes:
I'm not arguing the U.S. response to the swine-flu problem is necessarily less effective because…
tfk | April 27, 2009Martin Cothran's difficulties with basic reading comprehension continue.
I'm putting most of this response below the fold, because sometimes someone on the internet is just wrong. All you need to know about Cothran's commitment to the truth is this reply to my claim that "I find [William F.] Buckley's condemnation [of Buchanan] significant because his political interests would have been best served by defending an ally against such charges."
Cothran insists that:
No one who is even vaguely familiar with the infighting that goes in the conservative movement could say that about Buckley (a…
tfk | April 24, 2009Shorter Longer Martin Cothran:
If you ignore all the comments Pat Buchanan has made claiming that the Jews (not just Israel, but the Jews per se) are a shadowy force secretly controlling world affairs, geofinance, and Hollywood, and if you ignore his invocation of the blood libel, and you ignore his denials that the Holocaust happened, and if you ignore that he blames Churchill (not Hitler) for what Jewish deaths one must acknowledge having happened during World War II, and if you ignore that he defends every Nazi war criminal he can find, and if you ignore his hiring of neo-Nazis to advise…