Policy and Politics
tfk | December 30, 2008Discovery Institute boss Bruce Chapman has some ideas about your financial future.
In September, while declaring that President Bush's stock was on the rise, Disco. frontman Chapman insisted the growing financial crisis was awesome:
The disappearance of Lehman Brothers and the transformation of Morgan and Goldman Sachs into heavily regulated commercial banks presents an opportunity for entrepreneurial risk taking by someone else. … The turmoil in the markets world-wide disagregates the economy and makes new entitites possible. …
Overall, is this not a political problem as much as an economic…
tfk | December 29, 2008Yet another study confirms what we've known for a long time, abstinence education doesn't work:
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.
"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health…
tfk | December 25, 2008Playwright, Nobel Prize-winner, and peace activist Harold Pinter passed away yesterday. Pinter was most famous for the Pinter pause, a stage-directed delay which allowed actors to reorganize themselves, and for the audience to take in the events on stage. It also contributed to the disquieting nature of his pieces.
More recently, Pinter took a role as one of the great proponents of peace, both in his literary work and as a public intellectual. In his 2005 Nobel acceptance speech, he explored the importance of speaking truth, and confronting those in power with truth, true sentiment, true…
tfk | December 24, 2008You remember Kenneth Starr, right? The prudish pantysniffer who invested millions of your tax dollars to figure out where and when Bill Clinton got sexual favors from an intern and then reported all the prurient details.
Anyway, he's been brought in by the anti-gay bigots seeking to enforce Prop. 8, and in particular to help their effort to forcibly divorce the 18,000 couples married during marriage equality's brief but beautiful reign in California.
That's right, the former opponent of extramarital intercourse now wants to force all those married gays to return to their out-of-wedlock…
tfk | December 24, 2008In the Wichita Eagle, we get Santa Claus and the Establishment Clause:
This time of year, every public school administrator has to know a simple fragment of Constitutional law. It has many implications in the school setting during the holiday season. "Jingle Bells" is OK. Christmas hymns with denominational themes are not.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." is part of the First Amendment. This segment is called the "Establishment Clause" because it prevents the government and all of its federal, state and local…
tfk | December 23, 2008Debra Saunders, in today's Chronicle, decries Intolerance 2009. She is trying to claim that it is hypocritical for groups seeking gay equality to oppose Rick Warren while supporting Obama. Both oppose gay marriage, you see. That Obama opposed Prop. 8 and has repeatedly stated his desire to see equality for his gay brothers and sisters, while Warren backed Prop. 8 and refused to allow gays or lesbians to join his church seems not to register.
Having ignored these actions, Saunders decries the fact that:
In the modern world, words speak louder than actions. And there is always an…
tfk | December 23, 2008Mike the Mad Biologist is, well, mad. In writing about Obama's science team, I commented that:
scientists often distinguish [technical challenges] from the challenges in testing our broad conceptual understanding of the laws of nature. While "test tube jockeys" often produce important results, there tends to be a certain skepticism of their work. Similarly, medical research is so focused on the practical application that scientists in other fields are dubious about regarding medical researchers as being engaged in the same sort of enterprise as a theoretical physicist or a landscape…
tfk | December 22, 2008Climate Progress's Joe Romm is upset with John Tierney. John Tierney pans Obama Science Advisor John Holdren for being on the opposite side from a range of high-profile climate change deniers, delayers, and equivalents. Romm responds (in part):
Tierney is easily the worst science writer at any major media outlet in the country. Pretty much every energy or climate piece he writes is riddled with errors and far-right ideology, including this one.
Amazingly, Tierney quotes CEI attacking Holdren. Now CEI is itself probably one of the top five anti-scientific think tanks in the country. It has…
tfk | December 20, 2008
In his weekly address, President-elect Obama says:
the truth is that promoting science isn't just about providing resources – it's about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States – and I could not have a…
tfk | December 18, 2008In an interview defending himself against justified charges of homophobia, Rick Warren insisted:
For 5,000 years, every single culture and every single religion has defined marriage as a man and a woman.
Not quite. As the polygamous founder of the polygamy-espousing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints noted, "ancient patriarchs and prophets like Abraham, Moses, Isaac, Jacob, David, and so on were permitted to have more than one wife," and "the Mosaic Law, which both Jews and Christians believe to have been inspired by God, makes provisions for polygamy (see Exodus 21:10 and…
tfk | December 18, 2008Speaking of Hells yes, Hilda Solis is to be Obama's Labor Secretary. And remember how I said that "Concern for, and a desire for serious and urgent solutions to, climate change seems to be the factor unifying much of Obama's cabinet"? Well, "Solis brings a reputation as one of Washington's leading proponents of green jobs."
She's also a fierce supporter of workers, even going so far as to take money out of her campaign warchest to fund a signature-gathering campaign for an initiative to raise the California minimum wage. Her appointment also brings white men to a mere 46.7% of Obama's…
tfk | December 18, 2008President-elect Obama named Jane Lubchenco to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. The Agency conducts research into marine mammals, climate change, the air and oceans, it runs the National Weather Service, and enforces regulations on treatment of marine mammals, various pollutants, and is responsible for enforcing limits on overfishing.
Lubchenco is a former president of the AAAS, a peerless marine ecologist, and a leading advocate of science-based responses to climate change. Her lab has also done key work to track the fluctuations of the massive dead zone off the Oregon…
tfk | December 17, 2008At the Inaugural ceremonies, the opening invocation will be given by Rick Warren, evangelical author of The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? and all-around wanker.
He called for political assassination, telling Sean Hannity that it is the role of government to "take [] out" leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and denying that the suggestion could be taken as "something dark, evil."
Given that attitude, it's hardly a surprise that he recently gave George W. Bush a Peace Award, though he later clarified that "the Peace Award was not about peace in domestic — or foreign policy…
tfk | December 16, 2008An unnamed major in Vietnam told correspondent Peter Arnett that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. That, in a nutshell, is how George W. Bush views the economy, telling CNN:
I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.
He is literally beyond parody.
tfk | December 15, 2008In announcing Steve "#75" Chu as Energy Secretary, President-elect Obama:
"My administration will value science," Obama said, in what sounded like a pointed reference to his predecessor. "We will make decisions based on facts."
Emphasis in the original. It's a nice change.
tfk | December 15, 2008I'm in the process of reworking my blog reading, and one area I'd like to expand is science education policy beyond the creation/evolution fight. I'm finding fairly slim pickings, alas. If you've got a favorite source of information (blog or non-blog) on science education policy, please leave your suggestion in the comments. It doesn't have to be a blog. Journals, newsletters, etc. are all welcome. I'm trying to cast a wide net.
tfk | December 12, 2008I can't say I've followed every nuance of the auto bailout. At first I was inclined to think that letting the Big Three go bankrupt and rebuild wouldn't be the worst thing ever, since they'd probably get restructured somehow into more viable entities. But in this business climate, who would buy them? And what would happen to all those workers? To all those pensioners? To all the families that rely on UAW insurance? To all the communities built around Big Three factories, or around factories for Big Three suppliers? Especially with the prospect of an honest-to-god depression on the…
tfk | December 12, 2008Atrios sez No We Can't:
It is a bit weird that in the supposed richest country in the world even contemplating things like new subway lines is practically unpossible.
And yet:
Central Subway given feds' green light
The proposed Central Subway project that calls for running light-rail service into San Francisco's Chinatown has received federal environmental clearance, city officials said Tuesday. On the same day, the Municipal Railway's governing board approved a $147 million-plus contract for program and construction management of the project. …
The $1.3 billion Central Subway, which would…
tfk | December 11, 2008Stephen Suh responds to the discussion of Stephen Johnson, the creationist EPA administrator:
Stephen Johnson, Bush's EPA Administrator, doesn't see a "clean-cut division" between religion and science.
This is actually not quite right. He doesn't, according to the original article, see a division between "creation" and "evolution." He told the Inquirer that "If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes." Which is true, but since he "declined to elaborate" on his own views, we don't really know…