Politics
oracknows | August 18, 2007You know, the current crop of Presidential candidates has me bored to tears. None of them inspire, and the one that comes closest to maybe inspiring is too inexperienced and definitely not ready for prime time. Couple that with the fact that the election is nearly 15 months away but the campaign has been going on since at least January, and terminal ennui sets in. I'll probably want to shoot myself by the time Election Day 2008 rolls around.
Fortunately, I found a little tidbit that demonstrates a method of picking our next President that would at least get my interest. Hey, it can hardly be…
j7uy5 | August 17, 2007How refreshing: a Presidential appointee speaks out
unequivocally
against Administration policy. This is from a Medscape
News article (free registration), which is from
Reuters Heath Information. The report quotes a professor of
Immunology who is on the
href="http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/ADVISORY/pcp/pcpchr.htm">President's
Cancer Panel at the
rel="tag">National Cancer Institute.
href="http://www.mdanderson.org/departments/immunology/print.cfm?displayPrint=1&id=6BA754F9-6AD2-4220-93954E0F8682EE69&method=displayfull&pn=082E88E7-B295-43D1-94D38FA20872EC4E&PrintPage=…
j7uy5 | August 16, 2007Not much commentary needed on this graphic. HT to
href="http://flprogressive.blogspot.com/2007/08/progressivism-is-not-dead-but-its-on.html">Blast
Off!.
Most of the liberals are actually conservative.
Some of the Republican
candidates are close to being as authoritarian as Hitler or Stalin.
I thought Ron Paul would have been in the lavender zone.
It does not surprise me, though, to see most of the
Democratic candidates falling to the right of center.
Update: John Lynch posted about this before I did. Good comments there.
jlynch | August 16, 2007
Last time I took the Political Compass I scored Economic Left/Right: -9.5 / Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.31. That puts me fairly clearly in the far Progressive Left. The above thus is interesting: putative scores for the Presidential candidates - clearly there isn’t a candidate like me out there! More importantly, it is clear that the Democratic front runners (Obama, Edwards and Clinton) are clearly not really on the Left at all, either economically or socially.
(From Blast Off! via Crooks and Liars)
j7uy5 | August 16, 2007At first you would not think that pirates would try to
establish a base
in Utah. There are not a lot of coves or bays there.
Even so, it is the first State to have an official pirate
base. They have a logo. They are even circulating a
petition to gain official recognition as a political party.
They may be the first band of pirates to have a
href="http://www.pirate-party.us/node/370">web site.
PPUS
announces registration in Utah
Submitted by Andrew Norton on Thu, 2007-08-09 00:39.Utah
PRESS RELEASE
The Pirate Party of the United States
announces it is now accepting…
tsmith | August 16, 2007I've not mentioned this yet because I hadn't had a chance to see it myself, but C-SPAN did broadcast this year's YearlyKos Science Panel. You can see Chris's talk on hurricanes and global warming here; Ed's talk on fighting creationism by running for school board here, and Sean's talk on dark energy and dark matter over yonder. I have the videos of the final parts--the Q&A session--after the jump.
pharyngula | August 16, 2007Gary Farber has oodles of dread-inducing discussion of the surveillance capabilities of satellites — all in the hands of bureaucrats who don't seem to value privacy, but urge us to trust them.
drorzel | August 16, 2007A couple of days ago, Brad DeLong hoisted a proposal from comments (originally suggested by Bernard Yomtov):
A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.
Kevin Drum isn't sold on the idea:
Man, does this seem backward. If you asked me what was wrong with big-league political reporting in this country, I'd say its biggest problem is that is has too much in common with big league sports writing. Reporters like Adam Nagourney and John Harris don't lack for expertise in politics, after all.…
clock | August 14, 2007That must be this one:
Rove quitting to spend more time with his iPhone:
Rove is considered one of the nation's foremost experts on e-mail deletion, although he - like the rest of us -- is relatively new to making things disappear from the iPhone. Rove has long been an innovator in leveraging the phone for "competitive advantage" in the often rough-and-tumble world of national politics.
Paul adds:
The funniest "Rove resigns" entry may be the most factual. I do hope he figures out how to do mass email deletions on the iPhone and that he shares that info with the rest of us.
oracknows | August 14, 2007It's that time of year again! Time for the one Center of the NIH dedicated to studying "remedies," regardless of how scientifically implausible or lacking in evidence to support them, the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to put forth its budget request for FY 2008. What's the bill for government-funded studies of woo?
$121,699,000.
Depressing. Let's see what the possible justification is for sending $121 million on studying things such as homeopathy:
Large numbers of American health care consumers are using CAM modalities in an effort to preempt disease and…
grrlscientist | August 13, 2007tags: Iraq War, Dick Cheney, streaming video
This streaming video shows part of an interview with Dick Cheney from April 15th, 1994, where he discusses why invading Iraq would be a bad idea. He refers to invading Iraq as "creating a quagmire" and he claims that "not very many" American soldiers' lives were worth losing to take out Saddam during the Gulf War. So what happened since then? Did his brain rot out of his head? [1:22]
Incidentally, don't forget that ChickenHawk Cheney never had to worry about ever being killed in combat: HE took 5 deferments in order to keep from even serving. Who…
jlynch | August 13, 2007One of the reasons that I canceled my subscription to Skeptic was that it was giving a mouthpiece to Frank Miele and his odious defences of Arthur Jensen and putative links between race, intelligence and IQ. Miele as an undergraduate contributed to the racist journal Mankind Quarterly, has collaborated with eugenicist Richard Lynn, and has received funding from the eugenicist Pioneer Fund. Which makes the following all the more ludicrous.
Over at Uncommon Descent, Dave Springer (a.k.a. "DaveScot") has approvingly linked to an overwrought article by Miele which decrys Newsweek for its coverage…
jrosenhouse | August 13, 2007As much as I despise the Republican Party and believe that Democrats do a vastly better job of running the government, there is one area where I think the Republicans have it all over the Dems. They are much more convincing on television. When I see Republican politicians on the various political chat shows, I am usually left with little doubt as to where they stand. They speak confidently, and they make their points with a certian amount of forcefulness. The Democrats usually look surprised by whatever question they were just asked and fumble around for some wimpy, half-baked and often…
denialism | August 13, 2007Via Pandagon we see that at least one administration official knew ahead of time the types of troubles we would encounter trying to occupy Iraq.
denialism | August 13, 2007Karl Rove quits.
I wonder what this means? This administration has so little transparency one always feels like interpreting their actions is like trying to read tea leaves. Does this mean they realize Karl Rove's advice isn't pulling Bush out of his terrible approval ratings? Is Rove trying to avoid going down with a sinking ship? Is it to avoid trouble with congressional subpoenas over the AG firings?
tsmith | August 13, 2007There have been some interesting updates in the field of HIV politics and denial recently. First, after having several months of moving forward with a real plan to combat AIDS in South Africa, the deputy minister of health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, has been fired. For those who follow this area, Madlala-Routledge stepped into the limelight when she took over for her boss, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, while she had surgery. Tshabalala-Msimang, you may recall, is the one who sided with President Thabo Mbeki regarding causes of AIDS (and cures for it), advocating treatments such as a recipe of…
jlynch | August 12, 2007
Cheney in 1994: "And the question for the President in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got that right."
Full transcript below the fold
"Because if we’d gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us - it would have been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to…
j7uy5 | August 11, 2007
The headline:
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/10/AR2007081001204.html">Federal
Deficit Sharply Lower.
The text: The lower year-to-date
deficit was the
result of a record of $2.12 trillion in revenues. Spending, however,
was higher -- $2.27 trillion, which also marked an all-time high.
So we spent more than we brought in, but the deficit is lower?
No,
the rate of increase in the deficit is lower.
The deficit is still getting bigger. Last year the
deficit went up $239 billion. This year it is
was projected to be "only" $205 billion. I say was…