Politics
aardvarchaeology | January 9, 2009ScienceBlogs.com, including Aard, has received left-wing newspaper The Nation's seal of approval and been listed as one of its recommended web sites in a book that's just out. To my Swedish readers, this isn't likely to mean much, as left-wing US politics is what our conservatives advocate: such as when Prime Minister Reinfeldt endorsed Barack Obama. To US readers, however, this underlines the fact that most of us at Sb are screaming pinko dirty commie hippies. And gay-loving potheads. The rightwingedmost among us, like Orac of Respectful Insolence, are in fact centrists in the US perspective…
oracknows | January 9, 2009During the confirmation hearings yesterday for Tom Daschle, who is to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services, there was this exchange:
J. REED: As you grapple with health care reform, you're also grappling with the budget, so good luck on both matters. But if you could pay particular attention to Title VII, that would be very appreciative. In a similar vein, Section 317 of CDC's program on immunization is so important. It's been estimated that we need to provide these about $1.1 billion to cover all the recommended vaccines for eligible children and adults. And frankly, we provided…
clock | January 8, 2009Steve Mirsky in Scientific American fisks McCain and Palin campaign anti-science statements (not that the remaining Republicans are any better, but these two were in the spotlight):
You're not supposed to kick a guy when he's down.
Of course, in reality, when he's down is the perfect time to kick him. He's closer to your feet, for one thing. But the particular kicking I have in mind should be thought of as tough love. These kicks at the freshly defeated McCain-Palin ticket, as I write in early November, are an attempt to knock some sense back into the group of my fellow Americans who seem…
ddobbs | January 8, 2009
This post by Science's Jennifer Couzin at ScienceInsider suggests how much serious overhaul the FDA needs.
Looks like some scientists at the Food and Drug Administration are doing what they can to influence president elect Obama's choice of their new boss. Nine scientists have written to Obama's transition team pleading with him to restructure the agency and lamenting manipulation of scientific data there. The biggest worry cited in the letter is around review of medical devices. Obama reportedly has his eye on some candidates who would likely shake up the FDA, including agency critic…
gregladen | January 8, 2009The TV told me to "youtube" the Australian leader Rudd's Parliamentary statement tearing Howard a new one in regards to his statement about Obama and the American Democrats. So I did, and I thought I'd share it with you. Kinda fun:
Mr Howard later lost the election to Mr. Rudd. Oh, and Obama and the Democrats won in the US. And we all lived happily ever after.
sheril | January 8, 2009In case you missed today's speech at George Mason, President-elect Barack Obama wants to double the production of alternative energy within three years and make over 75 percent of federal buildings and 2 million homes more energy-efficient. It's a move that will create jobs immediately and save money for homeowners and businesses down the line. His new infrastructure push would also support the construction of a smart grid to save money, protect power sources, and collect and distribute renewable energy.
While the actual plan has yet to be officially unveiled, the draft provides more detail…
oracknows | January 8, 2009As much of a completely disgusting sleazebag as I think he is, at some level I grudgingly have to admire Larry Flynt. He never misses an opportunity for self-promotion and annoying the hell out of politicians, and he's back now, promoting himself and annoying the hell out of politicians.
This time, he's asking for a $5 billion bailout for the porn industry:
Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a…
oracknows | January 8, 2009This blog is primarily about medicine, the scientific basis of medicine, and general skepticism and critical thinking. As part of my interest in skepticism, a particular form of pseudoscience and pseudohistory that I first took an interest in about a decade ago, namely Holocaust "revisionism," which is, of course, in reality Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is the denial or minimization of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime, in particular the industrialized genocide of European Jewry. The reasons, as I've discussed time and time again, virtually always boil down to a combination of…
clock | January 7, 2009Responses by political, med- and science-bloggers range between mild optimism, meh and yikes:
Can Gupta Manage?
Dr. Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General? Yawn.
I'm not so sure about this pick
Orac on Gupta
Gupta for Surgeon General? Cool.
Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General? Here's My Gripe
Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General
Why I think Sanjay Gupta is a good pick for Surgeon General
Refining thoughts on Sanjay Gupta - gravitas
Surgeon General Gupta?
Sanjay Gupta is a possible Surgeon General
Quick Thoughts on Sanjay Gupta and CNN Science
The post of Surgeon General of the United States: the 'most…
gregladen | January 7, 2009The government of Iran sucks.
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei are two Iranian physicians who have reportedly been detained in Iran by Iranian authorities. The physicians, who are brothers, were apparently arrested at the end of June, 2008 and their current whereabouts are unknown. Physicians for Human Rights calls on the government of Iran to disclose their whereabouts, provide them access to lawyers and family, and either to charge them with an internationally recognized crime or release them immediately.
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei have played a role in putting…
pharyngula | January 7, 2009Short summary: unimpressed.
But then what else could you expect from a running dog reactionary old guard supporter of bourgeois ideology?*
*Let us not linger over the uncomfortable fact that I actually agree with him in this case.
oracknows | January 7, 2009One of my favorite novels of all time is George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. When it came to imagining the end to which totalitarianism could take us, no one before or since has written a more compelling book about living under such a regime.
One aspect of Oceania, the fictional totalitarian state ruled by Big Brother, that still stands out when I think about the book is how Big Brother dealt with inconvenient news and history. In the book, Winston Smith, the protagonist, works at a government agency called the Ministry of Truth (also called Minitrue), one of the…
terrasig | January 7, 2009Just another quick note reflecting further on my 8-minute gut reaction yesterday to word that Sanjay Gupta might be nominated as Surgeon General in the Obama administration.
I still contend he's a great communicator but realize that the "both sides of the story" aspect of journalism has made some uneasy about where he'd actually stand on issues as a government leader of public health. In my post yesterday, I also neglected to consider some of the more controversial moments in Gupta's past stories as elegantly and comprehensively pointed out by my colleague and surgeon, Orac.
I was also…
sheril | January 7, 2009Yesterday, President George W. Bush set aside 195,000 square miles of Pacific ocean habitat under executive authority granted by the Antiquities Act. He created three new national monuments which ban seafloor mining, most commercial fishing, and limit recreational and indigenous harvest.
The new areas include the waters surrounding Howland, Baker, Jarvis and Wake islands; Rose, Palmyra and Johnston atolls; Kingman Reef; the three northernmost Mariana Islands; and the deep seafloor of the Mariana Trench.
And with a stroke of his pen, W. protected more ocean than any other political leader in…
grrlscientist | January 7, 2009tags: Bush's Lies, politics, streaming video
Eight years of lies .. almost over. Finally. Almost. [1:41]
pharyngula | January 7, 2009Thankfully, these are the waning days of the awful, incompetent, no-good Bush/Cheney presidency, years we will try to forget in the decades to come. What will help is that we don't have a good name for this decade — The Oughties? Bleh — and we're just going to have to refer to them as the years with a couple of zeroes in the middle.
This odious administration is not going out gracefully, however, but is instead leaving with a flurry of last-minute knifings of our country. Some are exploitive efforts to pay back interests to whom the conservatives are beholden, such as the stripping of…
gregladen | January 7, 2009And other Republican Hypocrisy.
The long term plan is to keep Franken out of the Senate forever. Not likely to work. The short term plan is to "taint" Franken, so that morons like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan (MSNBC) and Ann Coulter can constantly refer to "Franken" and "Tainted" in the same sentence again and again and again.
Which will not be a big problem, really, because this is an old and tired strategy that no on cares about any more. But it is their strategy.
Now, about the law suit: We have the Republicans hitting all the same exact issues that have been hit before. Of these issues…
oracknows | January 6, 2009As I was sitting in the O.R. lounge yesterday afternoon between cases, the television in the lounge was tuned to CNN. One thing I noted was some rather fawning coverage of President Bush regarding the military that seemed as though it belonged on FOX News rather than CNN. Not long after that, Wolf Blitzer breathlessly reported that CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, had apparently been approached by the Obama Transition Team about becoming the new Surgeon General. I thought to myself, "Hmmm. That's interesting." And then I went back to the O.R. to finish up my schedule.…
gregladen | January 6, 2009Activists from Texas who call themselves the Austin Informant Working Group have added their voices to the chorus denouncing Brandon Darby, who gave information to the FBI while posing as a protester to infiltrate groups planning demonstrations against last November's Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.....
Read the rest here.
Here's the Brandon Darby Information site. Very interesting reading.
gregladen | January 6, 2009The Wall Street Journal published an editorial yesterday called "Funny Business in Minnesota" which is so full of inaccurate innuendo and fallacious factoids that when I read it I thought I was reading a piece of junk mail from Ann Coulter.
Well, the honorable web site Five Thirty Eight has torn the WSJ a new one with a brutally accurate deconstruction of the editorial. There really is virtually nothing in this editorial that can be salvaged from the bright light of actual truth. Shame on the Wall Street Journal.
Read the commentary from Five Thirty Eight here.
Thanks Mike for the tip.