Politics
pharyngula | April 13, 2009Well, almost. A panel of judges has ruled Franken the winner over Coleman, finally, declaring the election fair and complete. That ought to finish it, but Coleman does have the option to appeal…and obnoxious ass that he is, you know he will, futilely dragging out the whole process to his inevitable final defeat.
drorzel | April 13, 2009Howard "Yaaaaah!" Dean, the former governor of Vermont, Presidential candidate, and head of the DNC, will be speaking on campus tonight. It's exceedingly unlikely that I'll ask him any questions, because I prefer to leave that to students when possible, but if anybody has any really brilliant suggestions of things he ought to be asked, leave them in the comments, and I'll see what I can do.
ddobbs | April 13, 2009
This report on Olympia Snowe's position suggests he might (if he doesn't get too many Democratic defectors). Snowe's importance to Obama's agenda was made clear in her support of the stimulus package -- she was one of 3 GOP senators whose support allowed the bill to go through. It appears she supports substantive action on health-care reform as well.
Via Ezra Klein:
Last Friday, an alert reader linked Steve Benen to this The Bangor Daily News writeup of Olympia Snowe's health care listening session. This quote, in particular, caught his eye:
"We have a totally dysfunctional system now,"…
pontiff | April 12, 2009I am always greatly amused by the display of frustration in which one threatens to leave a country if things don't change. During the end of the first term of Bush the Second, it was common in the United States to hear liberals express their anger as: "If he wins a second term, I'm going to move to Canada." (If you go too far to the left, you end up in Canada?) The expression reached spectacular heights, in my opinion, however, when Tina Fey said of Sarah Palin that if McCain/Palin won the presidential election, Fey would "leave Earth."
But now that the evil liberals have taken over the…
bioephemera | April 12, 2009
Zombie Stomper by Iron Fist, via Haute Macabre
Yup - Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is the project the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is doing next. While my review of P&P&Z was pretty positive, I'm not sure I can in good conscience encourage this trend.
Also, note that while P&P&Z has surged to the top of the bestseller list, the New Yorker was not as charitable in its review as I was. Perhaps these shoes by Iron Fist might serve as a litmus test for whether you are likely to enjoy P&P&Z. Tongue-in-cheek fun or thoroughly foul? You be the judge!
catdynamics | April 11, 2009The FDIC has solicited comments from bankers and investors on the massive "Legacy Loan Program"
One comment in particular summarises the issues well and proposes a way forward that may be acceptable to the investment community
Must read.
h/t CR of course
ddobbs | April 10, 2009Via Tyler Cohen's Marginal Revolution comes this amusing anecdote -- and, perhaps, helpful example -- from the life of Peter Orszag, Obama's very brainy budget director. To motivate himself to train for a marathon, he somehow set up a penalty if he didn't hit his training targets: His credit card would make a contribution to a charity or cause he hated:
]"If I didn't achieve what I wanted to, a very large contribution would automatically come out of my credit card and go to a charity that I very much didn't support," Orszag says of his training strategy. "So that was a very strong motivation…
jrosenhouse | April 10, 2009Glenn Beck is not happy with the Obama administration:
Glenn Beck is so outraged by President Obama's immigration plan that he was forced to ask on his show Thursday, “President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire?”
In his “The One Thing” segment Thursday (that was picked up and hammered by Media Matters), Beck imitated Obama pouring gasoline on the “average American” by dousing Red Eye's Bill Schulz with water out of a red jug.
Beck railed against Obama's budget, his speech to France, his quasi-bow to the Saudi King, the closing of Gitmo, developments in Cuba, and finally Obama's new…
drorzel | April 10, 2009Over at the Intersection's new digs, Sheril has posted a rather long list of fellowship programs for people interested in science policy. Sponsors include government agencies, private universities, professional societies, and private foundations, and cover pretty much every branch of science. If you'd like to take a look inside the sausage factory and spend some time trying to help make better science policies, check out the list.
Sadly, the list doesn't seem to include any of the programs Chris Mooney called for, where science-friendly billionaires donate money to support people to become…
ddobbs | April 8, 2009When you propose that we are overdiagnosing PTSD in vets, you run into not only a lot of flak but many offerings of evidence suggesting that we're missing a lot of cases. Since publishing my article on PTSD, I've received those arguments directly in comments, and on Wednesday, April 8, Salon published an article, "I am under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD," by Michael de Yoanna and Mark Benjamin, that offers unsettling evidence that at least some doctors working for the VA are being pressed to not diagnose PTSD in combat vets.
So which is it? Are we under- or overdiagnosing PTSD in…
catdynamics | April 8, 2009The report by Prof. Elizabeth Warren heading the Congressional Oversight Panel for the TARP loans to large US banks is out.
Report is at cop.senate.gov (151 p. pdf)]
It makes interesting reading.
Section C has a discussion of European handling of the current crisis, with C.1 providing a succinct discussion of Iceland.
Section D is on the way forward.
Short version:
Transparency: swift action to ensure integrity
Assertiveness: willingness to take aggressive action ...
2) shutting down those banks that are irreparably insolvent
Accountability: willingess to hold management accountable and…
pharyngula | April 8, 2009The National Organization for Marriage could be a spoof, they're so silly…but they seem to take themselves very seriously. They have an ad out against gay marriage now that should win a prize for attempted dread.
They try to sound so open to the idea of gays marrying each other, but the real threat is some mysterious plan they have, which is never mentioned, that will force heterosexuals to change their lives. Near the end, some sad-looking woman says, "I will have no choice." No choice for what? Are you cruel homosexuals planning to force Suzie Spinster to marry a lesbian or something?…
razib | April 8, 2009David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward John's position. I give Brooks credit for attempting to inject insights from the new cognitive sciences into contemporary political commentary. Politics is a phenomenon which manifests on a grand scale, but its ultimate roots are at least in part in individual human psychology. The empirical…
pharyngula | April 8, 2009One of the peculiarities of our media right now is that, as everyone knows, the best political reporting is being done by a couple of comedy shows on cable. Another source that has been surprising me is Rolling Stone, which has unshackled a couple of wild men, Tim Dickinson and Matt Taibbi, to go after the corruption and insanity of American politics — one of those things we once upon a time expected our newspaper journalists to do. I guess the powers-that-be think it's safe to let the drug-addled hippies and punks (and college professors) who read Rolling Stone to know about the failures of…
gregladen | April 7, 2009According to news reports, the Minnesota Election Contest Judicial Panel finished their review of votes, counting just under 400 absentee ballots that were previous excluded. These votes were included as the result of Former Senator Norm Coleman's legal challenge to the election. With Senator Al Franken's lead over Former Senator Norm Coleman rising from 225 at the start of the process to 312 as of a few moments ago, it would appear that Coleman's challenge has backfired.
The judicial panel still has a few more issues to rule on.
One of the issues os the ca 130 votes that were lost in a…
pharyngula | April 7, 2009Could it be the start of an avalanche? The Vermont legislature has overridden a governor's veto to sign into a law a bill recognizing gay marriage. Civil rights expanding after so many years of repression? There are conservatives turning purple and screaming all over the country right now, I expect.
drorzel | April 7, 2009Via Matt Yglesias, a new CBS/ New York Times Poll has been released, accompanied by quite possibly the stupidest graphics ever. The pseudo-pie-chart at right is one of three, all of which have the same glaring flaw as this one.
Somebody really ought to lose their job for this. There's just no excuse for putting out "pie charts" that are this incompetent.
Sadly, this probably went through two or three people before hitting the web, and nobody noticed. It's hard to think of a better example of how deeply innumeracy has penetrated the media.
clock | April 7, 2009In TIME, a couple of days ago - How Obama Is Using the Science of Change:
Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!"
Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample…
pharyngula | April 6, 2009President Obama speaking to the Turkish press:
I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.
This is going to be fun.
gregladen | April 6, 2009The three judge panel convened for the purpose of addressing the Coleman challenge of the Minnesota Senate Election won by Al Franken (after a detailed recount) will meet today to examine ballots they had asked brought to the court. The panel had asked for four hundred ballots, but a small number of these (just over a dozen) had already been included in the recount and thus will not be examined.
The panel will examine the 387 or so ballots today, and decide which should be counted. Tomorrow, in a two step process the ballots will be opened by the judged (step one) and counted by court…