Politics
gregladen | December 12, 2008Next week, probably over a four day period, the ad hoc State Canvassing Board will go through all the recount data and look at the 3-4 thousand contested ballots and come up with a final number in this very close Minnesota senate race. But today they are expected to make a couple of decisions that may have an even larger effect on the outcome.
One of the most important decisions they will make today is what to do about the 133 ballots that are "missing" (read: a Coleman supporter hid somewhere, most likely) in one Minneapolis district. Without these votes in a Franken-supporting area,…
j7uy5 | December 11, 2008
href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16514.html">Senate
rejects auto bailout
By DAVID ROGERS | 12/11/08 11:15 PM EST
A White House-backed bailout for ailing automakers collapsed in the
Senate Thursday night, pushing General Motors Corp. closer to almost
certain bankruptcy absent a major intervention by the Treasury
Department.
The 52-35 roll call fell well short of the 60 needed to cut off debate,
and appeared to doom any chance of legislative action until a new
Congress convenes in January.
“We’re not going to get to the finish
line,” said Majority Leader Harry Reid…
gregladen | December 11, 2008On the eve of a key State Canvassing Board meeting on the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Al Franken presented affidavits today from 62 Minnesotans who said their absentee ballots were improperly rejected.
With Franken behind in the official Senate recount, the affidavits were the latest attempt by the campaign to increase the pressure on the board to count absentee ballots that were improperly rejected. The affidavits followed the release of a web video Wednesday by the campaign that portrayed the stories of seven Minnesotans whose ballots were improperly rejected. A campaign spokesman said the…
jstemwedel | December 11, 2008Back at the end of November, Martin wrote a post on the ethics of overpopulation, in which he offered these assertions:
It is unethical for anyone to produce more than two children. (Adoption of orphans, on the other hand, is highly commendable.)
It is unethical to limit the availability of contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption.
It is unethical to use public money to support infertility treatments. Let those unfortunate enough to need such treatment pay their own way or adopt. And let's put the money into subsidising contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation…
pontiff | December 11, 2008Well I'm sure the physics blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Steven Chu is expected to be named by President-elect Obama to head the Department of Energy. Wait let me look. Yep: heisendad, varyingsean, chunothsu, angryphysicist, nanodude, lubotic, toinfinityandbeyond and thedeterminantsnotzero. (OK that last comes from non-physicists, but I couldn't resist a linear algebra joke.)
Since I have little to add besides the fact that laser cooling rocks, I present the first few lines of a song that was sung by a band at Berkeley concerning the person Chu shared the Nobel prize with, Cohen-…
sa smith | December 11, 2008Steven Chu is going to be nominated for Obamas Secretary of Energy.
He is Steve #75.
*breathes a little easier*
clock | December 11, 2008In today's NYTimes:
As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed "secretary of food."
A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.
Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy -- all while…
clock | December 11, 2008For instance, to protest Creationist bills in state and local legislatures:
clock | December 11, 2008Under Bush, Science Learned It Must Speak Up:
Barack Obama received a relatively quiet endorsement on Aug. 23 from 61 of the country's Nobel laureates in physics, medicine and chemistry -- scientific heavyweights who used the occasion to both call for a scientific renewal in America and critique the state of American science at the end of the Bush era.
"During the administration of George W. Bush," their open letter charged, "vital parts of our country's scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government's scientific advisory process has been…
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2008At the other blog here and here , the latter a plea for a Human Rights Act.
drorzel | December 10, 2008Cosmic Variance (among others) reports that 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics Steve Chu will be the next Secretary of Energy. Sean gives a good run-down of the many reasons why this is a Good Thing.
Like Sean, I've met Chu in person. Unlike Sean, my one meeting with him doesn't shed any light on anything.
I met him at a reception at the National Academy of Sciences in honor of the American science laureates (Chu, Bill Phillips, and... somebody else). I was talking to Paul Lett, one of the permanent members of Bill's group about something or another when Chu stopped to say hi to Paul.
He was…
gregladen | December 10, 2008Wait -- my headline is wrong. Coleman isn't stealing the election, and neither is Franken. Both sides are going to fight the recount battle all the way to the end, and that's the way it should be.
And the election isn't in chaos. Routine problems are being handled routinely, with one precinct still up in the air. It's just an unbelievably close election, and no one knows who will win.
What is happening, though, is that the national Republicans (Ann Coulter, Powerline, Wall Street Journal) are setting the stage for a "stolen election" claim. ...
This post is dead on. Here at GLB, we monitor…
ddobbs | December 10, 2008From Knight Science Journalism Tracker:
Phil. Inquirer: Four part series disembowels the Bush White House version of the EPA
Many reporters have dived pretty deep into the legal and regulatory changes wrought at the EPA in the last eight years and into the scientist-administrator Stephen Johnson who imposed them at the behest of the George W. Bush administration... But no other newspaper that the Tracker knows of has torn into the agency with as thorough, focussed and full-hearted a pummeling as seen in the Philadelphia Inquirer for four days this week. ....
Sometimes it’s good to let one’s…
sa smith | December 10, 2008Stewart relentlessly confronts Huckabee on gay marriage.
*/
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Mike Huckabee Pt. 2
Barack Obama InterviewJohn McCain Interview
Sarah Palin VideoFunny Election Video
Damn! Thanks, Jon!
pontiff | December 10, 2008Guffaw!
Mr. Blagojevich seemed not to mind earlier news reports that his conversations had been recorded. "I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it," he said, though he added that those who carried out such recordings sneakily, "I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate."
drorzel | December 10, 2008Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I'm bothered by the last paragraph:
Now, there's no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it that "society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?" The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater…
ddobbs | December 10, 2008I frankly don't know what the right call is on bailing out Detroit. On one hand, smart people are saying that not doing so could dangerously deepen the recession. On the other, if business idiocy had a three-strikes policy, these companies would be doing life. While going to school in Ohio car country in the late 1970s, I got a glimpse of the pain that area felt when the industry collapsed because it failed to adjust to a world that wanted smaller, better cars; tremendous unemployment rates, lots of idle people, most of them decent as hell, wishing they had something constructive to do. It…
awild | December 9, 2008I can't help but feel gleeful at this morning's news.  Back in January I had landed, I thought, a postdoctoral position at the Illinois Natural History Survey. It was a dream job. I've been itching for years to figure out what's really going on with the evolutionary history of Camponotus, a hugely important ant genus with a godawful mess of a taxonomy. The State of Illinois had finally provided the wherewithal, an independent postdoc to do research on a project of my choosing. That would be Camponotus.
So forgive me if I seem petty when I explain that's exactly when Mr. Blagojevich…
pharyngula | December 8, 2008Please go away, Mr Bush. And please, President-elect Obama, clear away the rotting debris of this ghastly administration. The latest example of dreadful Bush appointees: Stephen Johnson, head of the EPA. Asked about the evolution/creation debate, this is what he had to say:
It's not a clean-cut division. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes.
Wobble and waffle. Religion and science, it's all the same to him.
Now you might say that maybe this is irrelevant — as the EPA chief, he's just a…