Politics
choofnagle | April 21, 2008...because today, the first lobbying disclosure reports are due to be filed with Congress under new rules that flowed from the Jack Abramoff scandal. The new law requires quarterly reports, lowers the dollar amount of activity that triggers reporting requirements, and (my favorite), requires trade associations to identify their members in certain circumstances.
Let me expand on this last requirement--trade associations and coalitions (such as the American Chemistry Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the like) now have to identify the actual companies behind lobbying efforts when their…
j7uy5 | April 21, 2008
title="The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness"
alt="" src="http://www.worldnetdaily.com/images/misc/B1013.jpg"
align="left" height="226" hspace="2" width="132" class="inset">
A
while back, a guy named Lyle Rossiter wrote a book, The
Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.
I haven't read the book, so this is one of those posts that
is less than fully authoritative. Perhaps someone who has
read it can point out any errors I might have made.
The book was published by Free World Books, LLC, which is not exactly a
marketing powerhouse. In…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2008
Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather money from rich members of their faith community and start a public relations and political campaign to have the form-substance dichotomy (hylomorphism) taught as chemical science. What would be the outcome?
Well, for most people they would remain as uneducated on the topic as before. They may know, vaguely, there is a dispute of some…
gregladen | April 20, 2008Steve Mirsky does a little Darwin Quote Mining reversal exercise in a recent post called "Never You Mine: Ben Stein's Selective Quoting of Darwin:"
One of the many egregious moments in the new Ben Stein anti-evolution film "Expelled" is the truncation of a quote from Charles Darwin so that it makes him appear to give philosophical ammunition to the Nazis. Steve Mirsky reports.
Steve rightly corrects stein, but does not put the quote mining in sufficiently broad context. So I do:
The original text from Darwin that Stein refers to in Expelled! expresses Darwin's ambivalence about the social…
choofnagle | April 20, 2008The financial services industry pumps a huge amount of money into politics. So much so that the industry has special status and gets pretty much what it wants. Things are a bit different now, because the downturn in the economy and mortgage screwup has given Washington some leverage to examine some of the industry's worse practices, and look at what happens--
Imagine that you were invited to Washington DC to testify at a hearing on the "Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights." You travel to Washington, probably on your own expense, to share your frustrations with the one-sidedness of credit…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2008tags: satire, humor, comedy, outsourcing employees, presidency
A friend sent me this hilarious story, which I rewrote and updated and share with you here.
"I just don't understand why no one likes me," exclaimed a confused Mr. Bush.
Washington, DC -- Congress today announced that the office of President of the United States of America will be outsourced to India as of April 20, 2008.
This action is being undertaken to save economically-challenged American taxpayers the cost of the President's $500,000 annual salary, along with a record $9.37 trillion national deficit that Mr. Bush…
gregladen | April 19, 2008
The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist attack on April 19, 1995 aimed at the U.S. government in which the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in an office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The attack claimed 168 lives and left over 800 injured. Until the September 11, 2001 attacks, it was the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil.
...
The United States was represented by a team of prosecutors, led by Joseph Hartzler. In his opening statement, Hartzler outlined McVeigh's motivations and the evidence against him. McVeigh's motivation, he said, was hatred of the…
purepedantry | April 17, 2008This is Megan McArdle on Cindy McCain's gaffe. She passed recipes from the Food Network off as her own:
The honorable thing to do is attribute, of course, but the McCain team still seems to be intent on pretending that Cindy McCain derives all of her recipes from First Principles.
I visualize a Cindy McCain in a lab coat furiously writing down the results of experiments and mixing bisque in a Ehrlenmeyer flask.
When it comes to recipes we are all hacks. Unless you have genetically engineered a new foodstuff, you are doing something that someone has done before.
pharyngula | April 17, 2008Yesterday, two great pious leaders of the world met in Washington DC. President Bush has immense temporal power, leading one of the richest countries on the planet with the most potent military force. Pope Benedict is a spiritual leader to a billion people, with immense influence and the responsibility of a long religious legacy. What could they have talked about? Mostly, they seem to have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other on their commitment to superstition.
In remarks greeting the pope at the White House, Bush called the United States "a nation of prayer."
Bush was…
pontiff | April 17, 2008David Baltimore and Ahmed Zewail, both Nobel dudes, have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the presidential candidates choosing not to participate in a debate over science and technology policy:
All three candidates declined. Apparently the top contenders for our nation's highest elective office have better things to do than explain to the public their views on securing America's future.
Of course they have better things to do: bowling and taking shots and being under phantom sniper fire! Don't these Nobel prize winners read Fafblog? Without bowling and shots, where will America's…
gregladen | April 16, 2008Apparently, this did not used to be true. TV news viewers in the past did not pick their news station in a way that correlated with party affiliation in the US. But now, increasingly so, they do.
This is from a study from the University of Georgia, Athens, based on data from the Pew Center for the People and the Press from 1998 to 2006. In 1998, Fox News was watched byt 18 percent of Democrats and 14 percent of Republicans. But in 2006, 26 percent of Republicans watched Fox, compared to 19 percent of Democrats.
What I want to know is, why are these Democrats still watching Fox News?
The…
drorzel | April 15, 2008Mike Huckabee spoke on campus last night, to the second-biggest crowd I've seen for an on-campus speaker (the biggest was Maya Angelou, back in the fall, where a few hundred people were turned away). It was a very good speech in a lot of ways, but ultimately, the whole thing was kind of frustrating, both because of Huckabee himself, but also because of the audience.
As a speaker, Huckabee amply justified his reputation as the one Republican candidate with charisma. He was charming, funny, and self-deprecating, and knew enough not to give a regular stump-type speech with obvious predetermined…
grrlscientist | April 15, 2008tags: politics, electoral system explained, humor, comedy, streaming video
A lot of my readers are from overseas, and at times, they have expressed their overall confusion regarding the process used by Americans to elect our president. I have decided to link to this easy little tutorial where the entire process is explained in a nutshell, including a cute little flow chart graphic, too. [1:25].
gregladen | April 14, 2008Pangea Day is May 10th. Everybody is going to get together and hold hands to bring the world together. We'll call it "Hands Across the Mid Ocean Ridges..."
Well, OK, that may not work, but there will be events of interest. Today we have a little pre-Pangea Day warm up, with a selection of national anthems sung by one country for another country.
Kenya sings for India
France sings for USA
Japan sings for Turkey
jrosenhouse | April 14, 2008Here's Slate's Melinda Henneberger commenting on small-town political attitudes:
When I went back there, and visited similar small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, one thing I heard over and over--from registered Democrats!--was that their national party leaders were elitists who couldn't seem to relate to their struggles. Again and again, they brought up Kerry's windsurfing and polyglot wife and Hollywood friends and brand spanking new hunting attire as proof positive of the kind of elitism that was turning them into Republicans. Perhaps worst of all in their eyes was his…
drorzel | April 14, 2008Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will be speaking at Union tonight. This has provoked the predictable huffy reaction from the usual suspects, but I expect it will be an interesting event, and certainly better than David Horowitz or Pat Buchanan, who I'm told were the first two suggestions of the students pushing to invite a conservative speaker.
I'm not sure if he'll do a Q&A period after the talk, but if he does, I'm tempted to try to ask a question. My inclination would be something about the Republican governor (Alabama? Mississippi?) a few years ago who realized that…
jlynch | April 13, 2008Bush’s approval rating is now down to 28%, the lowest of his tenure as POTUS, and a drop of 62% from his high in September 2001. As Gallup notes, both Bush Sr and Jr went through 60% drops in their approval during their tenure. It must be genetic, I guess.
Strangely (or maybe not) approval among Republicans is at 66% (versus 24% for independents and 6% for Democrats). That’s some mighty strong Kool-Aid there.
The lowest ever for a President was 22% (for Truman in February 1952). If the economy continues to tank, I think we can expect that Bush will "reach" that mark.
jlynch | April 13, 2008Just this last week, my daughter had her first AIMS test (Arizona’s standardized test) - an annual week of tests on reading, writing and math. In preparation, all "superfluous" subjects - such as science and social studies - were abandoned in the weeks before hand. Failing students result in failing schools and funding being pulled. So the superfluous gets abandoned and that annoys me.
Equally as annoying is that, in a time where literacy in this country is sub-standard and schools are being forced to teach to the test thanks to the No Child Left Behind act, the Reading is Fundamental…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2008
I've been pretty preoccupied this week with lectures and meetings, so this is my first post for a bit.
Yesterday I attended a meeting at my university which pretty well aimed to wind up the disciplines of my school (history, philosophy, religion and classics) and present a single school with five majors and no departments. It set me thinking: why has it come to this? It's not unique to the university I work at - all around the world, the humanities, and in particular the "core" humanities like philosophy and history, have been increasingly wound back in favour of science, technology,…