Politics
drorzel | December 21, 2009Paul Krugman had a post today calling Obama the WYSIWYG President:
There's a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn't the man progressives thought they were voting for.
But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that
(a) There wasn't a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders
(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive
Now it's true that many progressives were ardent Obama…
pharyngula | December 21, 2009Wow, we're surrounded now. When will the US follow suit and join Mexico City in the 21st century?
That article has other interesting information: Uruguay has legalized civil unions throughout the country, and several cities scattered throughout South America have done likewise. Good for Latin America, a region working on being more progressive than our little backwater.
sa smith | December 21, 2009I dont purposefully watch Bravos 'Real Housewives' series.
I mean, if its on, I leave it on as background noise, I dont actively turn it off, umm...
*looks shadily back and forth*
Anyway, theyve got the series in Orange County, New Jersey, New York City, Atlanta-- I think they should do a version in OKC.
You might think, "What the hell? There is a rich-people-party-scene in OKC? 'Make it rain' steaks and corn husks?"
Dont be so judgmental. Apparently there are a lot of exclusive, swanky things bored, rich, privileged, uneducated housewives can do in OKC every day, like interfering with…
jrosenhouse | December 21, 2009Democratic (!!) representative Bart Stupak, apparently concerned that the Senate health care bill is insufficiently misogynistic, might be willing to try to kill health care reform unless the anti-abortion language is strengthened:
Stupak's continued opposition to the Senate plan, despite those conversations and intense pressure from the White House, suggests that reconciling it with the House bill may prove politically challenging.
The Senate language represented "a dramatic shift in federal policy," said Stupak, adding that he remained hopeful that the differences could be resolved in…
pharyngula | December 21, 2009I live in Minnesota; Tim Pawlenty is our governor, and he's got his bland and uninteresting gaze fastened on the White House. Don't be fooled. He's just another Republican hack who has been drifting ever right-ward towards increasing lunacy. He was interviewed in Newsweek, and this will give you an idea of what kind of waffly worthless panderer he is.
Well, you know I'm an evangelical Christian. I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was. The Bible says that he created man and woman; it doesn't say that he created an amoeba and then they evolved into man and woman…
drorzel | December 21, 2009Janet has a typically thoughtful post about tuition benefits, following on a proposal to eliminate tuition benefits for employees of the University of Illinois. Janet does a great job of rounding up the various pros and cons of the benefit and its possible elimination.
It takes no time at all for the "Tuition benefits are unfair to people without kids" argument to pop up in comments. This is, as always, pretty stupid, because the same logic leads to thinking that health insurance benefits are unfair to people who don't become catastrophically ill. Tuition benefits are basically kid insurance…
oracknows | December 20, 2009If there's one thing that irritates me about the anti-vaccine movement, it's the utter disingenuousness of the movement. How often do we hear the claim from anti-vaccine loons that "we're not 'anti-vaccine'; we're 'pro-safe vaccine'"? I've tried to pin such people down time and time again to answer just what it would take in terms of scientific studies and evidence or in terms of what "toxins" would have to be removed to convince them that vaccines are sufficiently safe that they will have their children vaccinated? Inevitably, the answer involves levels of evidence that are beyond what can…
jrosenhouse | December 20, 2009For an eloquent statement of what I have been trying to say for the last few days, have a look at this essay by Yale University Political Science Professor Jacob Hacker. Hacker is generally considered the father of the public option. In his view, the Senate health care bill still does more good than harm, and provides a needed platform for future reforms:
As weak as it is in numerous areas, the Senate bill contains three vital reforms. First, it creates a new framework, the "exchange," through which people who lack secure workplace coverage can obtain the same kind of group health…
revere | December 20, 2009We're only just learning some of the crap that's in this health care deform compromise/giveaway to the insurance industry, but some of it has come out (via the Manager's Amendment .pdf [and I admit I don't exactly know what this is except it contains legislative language allegedly in the bill]). For starters, rest easy. Your fucking guns are safe. If you are a woman, no similar concessions to your uterus (h/t McJoan at DailyKos).
One of the things we are told by apologists for this monstrosity is that it has all sorts of great provisions for prevention and wellness promotion. I'm in public…
jstemwedel | December 20, 2009Via Kate Clancy on Twitter, a news story about how one Illinois legislator wants to save his state some money. As reported in The News-Gazette
State law allows employees who have worked for one of the Illinois' public universities for seven or more years to receive a 50 percent waiver of their children's tuition costs.
Employees would lose that benefit if legislation (HB 4706) introduced earlier this month by state Rep. Dave Winters, R-Rockford, is eventually signed into law.
"I think a lot of the universities have been using this as part of their compensation package," said state Rep.…
grrlscientist | December 19, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, christianity, SPAM, MysteryBox, streaming video
A hardcore atheist finds God when he wasn't even looking for God. It's a touching story with a happy ending.
Although the star is having a bit of fun in this video, the point that the video star making is serious. The world is full of people making exactly the sort of logical mistake he's making in the video. As a result the world is filled with people thinking they have had a personal experience of their version of god yet all these people believe conflicting notions and have no real evidence for their beliefs.
revere | December 19, 2009We are on record as favoring single-payer health care and taking certain things like vaccines out of the market system, but beyond that we don't do much health care politics here. But we have opinions, like everyone does, opinions formed by working for more than four decades within the health care and public health professions. Other than that, we are like most of you. Consumers of health care with our own particular view of the world. And since everyone else seems to be talking about it, so will we. At least we will today.
Everyone knows that what Republicans hate and fear about health care…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2009As I think I have made clear in my last two posts, I am as annoyed as anyone about the way the health care debate has played out in Congress. But there is one line of complaint that I do not understand. That is the idea that somehow Obama is to blame for the compromises in the bill. He did not “fight hard enough” for a public option, you see.
Here's a typical example:
While many House Democrats have expressed anger with the Senate for the watered-down bill, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) argued that it was really Obama who let centrists take control. “Snowe? Stupak? Lieberman? Who left…
jstemwedel | December 18, 2009The better half and I were trying to decide this morning whether there was a way to follow the progress of "health care reform" in the U.S. Senate without getting really mad or really sad. (Conclusion: It seems logically possible that such a way exists, but we haven't found it yet.)
The one player that seems likely to get much of what it wants in all this seems to be the insurance industry. Given that the folks working out who gets what are politicians, this does not surprise me.
So it occurred to me that maybe we shouldn't be trusting politicians to achieve health care reform.
Instead…
oracknows | December 18, 2009Since I happen to have fallen into the topic of anthropogenic global warming, before I move back to medical topics I might as well have a little fun. Certainly, I could use some, given that I just wrote two posts in which I felt forced to criticize someone whom I admire greatly. Besides, it's been over a week since I last blogged about vaccines on this blog. that has to be some sort of record. Why wreck it now? It feels good to take a break from the topic, and there's always next week. I have no doubt that the anti-vaccine movement will produce something begging for some not-so-Respectful…
drorzel | December 18, 2009I've been dimly aware that physics in the UK was being hit hard by a financial crisis for a while now. It seemed to be a bit deeper than what people in other countries complain about, but I hadn't given it much thought until I read this Physics World story on the latest cuts, which includes the following explanation:
The origin of the cuts can be traced back to December 2007 when the STFC announced that it had an £80m budget deficit for the UK government's current spending round that lasts from 2008 to 2011. It is thought that the deficit emerged by an accounting mistake was made when the…
clock | December 18, 2009As many of you, my readers, are interested in Open Access publishing and have given it quite some thought over time, I think you are the right kind of people to contribute to this in a thoughtful and persuasive manner. Please do it.
From everyONE blog:
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has invited comment on broadening public access to publicly funded research and they want to hear from you. Please post your contributions to this blog.
Their Request for Information (RFI) lasts for just 30 days and expires on 7 January 2010, so we'd like to encourage you to get involved…
sastyk | December 18, 2009A while back I argued that there's a rule - when the US spends a whole lot more and uses a whole lot more than everyone else, what we usually get back isn't just less than everyone else gets for the same buck, it is dramatically worse. I called it my rule of 10 times the price = 10 times crappier. It applies to an astonishing range of American actions - from our military budget and its results to the oil we invest in agriculture.
Back then, one of my examples was healthcare, which I pointed out was at least 4 times crappier (and at least 10xs or more for those who can't get it at all, an…
grrlscientist | December 17, 2009tags: Women: Don't Drive!, entertainment, comedy, satire, funny, fucking hilarious, BBC Worldwide, Harry Enfield, streaming video
More homework. Actually, even though blind agreement with whatever a man tells me is part of my social etiquette homework, I must point out that women are much safer drivers than men, based on miles driven. Better yet, this research was carried out by a man, so it must be true.
razib | December 17, 2009Megan McArdle has a post up where she follows up on her disgust with home owners who "walk away" from their mortgage obligations when they can continue to pay them. In California, and many other states, the bank can't come after you if you walk away, so if your home is "underwater" then it is often a "rational" decision.
Megan makes the point that our economic and social system does not rely purely on rational self-interest, but also on an accumulated capital of norms which lead to virtuous cycles. My family is from Bangladesh, and I have seen this first hand. Corruption & nepotism in…