Policy and Politics
tfk | June 12, 2008Disco. Inst. head Bruce Chapman takes a dip in denial. Global warming isn't an issue, he seems to believe, because:
We're having the coldest winter, er, spring in 100 years in the great Northwest. There's new snow in the mountain passes and even freak frosty flecks in Seattle's hilliy suburbs.
Meanwhile, the Arctic is melting at least as fast, if not faster than, last year:
As for Chapman's claim that "while mean world temperatures have fluctuated yearly, in the past ten years, overall, they've gone nowhere," I must insist: Sadly, No!
The red line is a 5 year moving average, which smoothes…
tfk | June 12, 2008Excellent news! Barack Obama "is quite literally moving swaths of the DNC to Chicago to create a unified organization with the sort of party-wide message discipline that has eluded Dems in the past."
TPM cites this as an example of what Obama is doing to avoid the split between his campaign and Terry McAuliffe's DNC in 2004, but it has other benefits. DC is a weird place, where rumors and obsessions with personality conflicts tend to dominate the conversation, and the actual feelings of the voting public can get lost in the shuffle.
Two years ago, I said:
If any candidate for DNC chair…
tfk | June 12, 2008Among the many Republican congresscritters not backing McSame, Todd Tiahrt truly stands out. Tiahrt claims to represent the Wichita area, and his refusal to back his party's nominee probably doesn't mean he backs Obama. He may well think McCain is too nice to immigrants, or is insufficiently Bush-like, or perhaps he's looking for a candidate who shares his anti-mother sentiments.
Then again, he's facing a tough challenge by Donald Betts, a popular black state senator who opposed the war early on. Perhaps Tiahrt doesn't want to make it too easy to draw the obvious analogy – Betts:Tiahrt::…
tfk | June 12, 2008Not content with mangling basic science and history, MediaMatters points out that Stein is misrepresenting Barack Obama's tax plan:
On Fox & Friends, Ben Stein misrepresented Sen. Barack Obama's tax plan to raise the capital gains tax rate on the wealthiest earners, stating: "[P]eople that have incomes in the five digits ... that's crazy to increase their capital gains tax." In fact, Obama has said he would not raise the capital gains tax on individuals with income of less than $250,000.
Stein writes about economics for the New York Times, and is the author of How to Ruin Your Financial…
tfk | June 12, 2008Not just by being a double-dealing hack. He also Toverrode the best advice Hillary got about Iraq. The former chief pollster and lead strategist for the campaign explains:
the rest of the campaign didn't want to tackle Iraq. They always felt that that was a losing proposition for her, and they always pulled it back.
....Why do you think the rest of the team was afraid to go after him?
I think they thought that her position on Iraq wasn't strong enough to sustain a debate on Iraq.
Or popular enough.
Right. But her position, remember — we went through the early discussion of "Was it a mistake…
tfk | June 11, 2008SB 733, a creationist bill in the Louisiana legislature, was approved on a lopsided vote in the Louisiana House of Representatives today. It now moves back to the Senate, where small differences between this bill and the Senate version must be reconciled before it can go to Governor Jindal. Jindal is a leading contender for John McCain's vice presidential nomination.
In response to this and other attacks on the teaching of evolution in Louisiana, the indefatigable Barbara Forrest (author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design) and other activists in the Pelican State…
tfk | June 10, 2008Barack Obama's victory over the nation's racist history may be impressive, but unlike John McCain, he never had to face Rudy Giuliani or Law and Order's Fred Thompson.
Interestingly, Gerson is the author of President Bush's phrase about "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
tfk | June 10, 2008Johnny West, associate director of the Disco. Inst.'s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, is upset with the New York Times:
Message to New York Times Editorial Page: Hire a Fact-Checker ... The Times apparently hasn't been paying attention to Texas during the past decade, because ... the "strengths and weaknesses" language the Times' editorialists so fear has been part of the Texas science standards since at least 1998! In short, the Texas State Board of Education isn't considering whether to add "strengths and weaknesses" language; it's the Darwinists [sic] who are trying to…
tfk | June 10, 2008Living in the O! urges us to Save Transit at the Local, State & Federal Levels:
I hadn't realized that transit's being attacked by all levels of government this week. Luckily, there are three ways you can take action to stop these attacks.
1. LOCAL - This Wednesday, the AC Transit Board of Directors will be discussing the four plans [for fare increases on Oakland buses] and likely voting to implement one of them. This may be your last chance to speak out against fare hikes - especially the increases for monthly passes. Here's the hearing info:
AC Transit Board of Directors Meeting
2nd…
tfk | June 9, 2008Clownhall.com columnist Jackie Gingrich Gingrich Gingrich Cushman Gingrich is worried. Diving boards are in decline:
Steve Moore, in his Wall Street Journal June 23, 2006 article, "Off the Deep End," blames the decline in diving boards in the United States on the trial lawyers...
Moore believes that this shift to ensure that everyone stay safe is cultural as well as legal. "We Americans have become so risk averse when it comes to our children that we now see unacceptable dangers from even the most routine activities.
"It's not even clear that all these risk-reducing measures keep us safer…
tfk | June 6, 2008The Kansas Republican party is bringing out the big guns:
Friday, June 20 The Johnson County Young Republicans are hosting Karaoke Night at Famous Sam's in Shawnee. Famous Sam’s is located in the strip mall on the southeast corner of Shawnee Mission Parkway and Pflumm. For more information email jcyoungrepublicans@yahoo.com.
Speaking of music, here's your Friday Random Ten:
"Bicycle" by The Jellydots from the album Hey You Kids! (2006, 3:30).
"The Two Bums" by Utah Phillips (R.I.P.) from the album We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years (1993, 0:54).
"Chain around My Leg" by Woody Guthrie from…
tfk | June 5, 2008After it became clear that we invaded Iraq to rid it of stuff that didn't exist there (WMD, terrorists, African yellowcake uranium, imminent threats), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI, or "sucky" to its friends) agreed to hold hearings on what went wrong. The report was divided, so that first SSCI would evaluate the failures of the intelligence committee, and then look at the way that intelligence was used and abused by public officials selling the war. Phase I was finished pretty fast under the chairmanship of Senator Pat "Memory Pills" Roberts, and while it softpedaled a…
tfk | June 5, 2008Pencil Nub:
I think I’ve come up with a solution to the controversy over guns that we’re having in this country.
We need to petition the FDA to approve firearms for use as devices to perform abortions.
Of course, there would be risks to the woman undergoing the firearm abortion, but that’s the case with any type of abortion.
The size of the fetus, as well as that of the woman, would determine the caliber of firearm used.…
Since abortion was construed to be a constitutional right in 1973, and virtualy any restrictions on abortion are verboten, approving firearms as a method of performing…
tfk | June 3, 2008My friend DarkSyde makes an important point:
The cliche is, 'we are watching history being made.' But that's not quite it, not tonight, not for us. We are part of making history. We will remember this evening for the rest of our lives.
This primary season stretched over months, and hit every state. Every Democrat, and quite a few non-Democrats in states with open primaries or caucuses, had a chance to weigh in. And for the first time ever, we as a party have put forward an African-American as the nominee to be the next president. That's stunning, in its own right. In November, he'll be…
tfk | June 3, 2008The AP's need to send out news stories before events happen is odd, but often enlightening. For instance, their basis for concluding that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination:
The AP tally was based on public commitments from delegates as well as more than a dozen private commitments. It also included a minimum number of delegates Obama was guaranteed even if he lost the final two primaries in South Dakota and Montana later in the day.
Which no one seems to think will happen. So, at last, our long national nightmare is over. The primary is done. Hillary Clinton will eventually…
tfk | June 2, 2008If you don't want 400 words about who to vote for if you happen to live in Oakland, read no further. Californians are reminded to vote against Prop. 98, and (reluctantly) for 99. Both suck, but this is the only way to minimize the suckage.
After long and studious consideration, I'm gonna recommend that you vote for a dude who shot a man. Alas, he did not shoot the kid just to see him die; he insists that it was self-defense. Whatever. That's not why I'm voting for him. I'm voting for him because literally everyone endorses him, and they do so for good reasons. Patrick McCullough for…
tfk | June 2, 2008Dr. Waldo Fielding revisits memories of the time before Roe v. Wade. There are a number of important reminders in it, the first being that women seeking abortions were, and still are, in dire straits. These are not women making an idle choice (the arrogant assumption underlying state laws requiring women to view an ultrasound before an abortion). The patients he saw were not women seeking abortion, but those seeking treatment for the consequences of unsterile, back alley abortions:
The patient also did not explain why she had attempted the abortion, and we did not ask. This was a decision…
tfk | June 2, 2008New York's experiment in organ donation is intriguing:
with a $1.5 million grant over three years from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, a team of medical experts and bioethicists is looking to expand the city’s donor pool by deploying a “rapid organ-recovery ambulance” to collect and preserve the organs of people who die of cardiac arrest. The plan — modeled on a successful program in Spain — is for the ambulance to trail regular ambulances that try to save people’s lives, then to swoop in if patients die and to maintain the bodies in stasis for several hours at a…
tfk | June 2, 2008Neil Sinhababu writes:
It's good to see Nancy Pelosi get some positive coverage. I wish the article went into more detail on what's probably the grandest achievement of her political career to date -- holding the Democratic caucus together to destroy Bush's Social Security Privatization initiative in 2005.
Of the 200+ Democrats in the House, only one defected to Bush's side. Without bipartisan cover on an issue where Democrats have historically had the most credibility, and without enough Democratic support to make up for differences within the GOP caucus on how to make the finances work out…