Texas bound

In a day or two, we head down to Texas. Let’s just say that this is a rest week for me; I’ll be thinking about nutrition during ultras.

Friend and fellow ultra runner (ok, I am a walker) Damon sent me a fact sheet with suggestions which have helped him overcome his stomach problems.

I don’t have much to add to the blogosphere but I’ll just point toward some blogs that I find interesting (many, many different topics, from athletics, personal topics, politics (of course), science, society and religion.)

I’ll just add one thought of my own:

I gave a “no calculator” calculus I exam and asked the following problem:

Suppose you had a tall building with an 8 foot tall fence that was 4 feet away from the building. You wish to run a ladder (rigid) from the ground outside the fence, over the top of the 8 foot fence, and reach the wall of the tall building. What is the shortest ladder you can use?

Note: there are two basic approaches; one goes much easier (in terms of algebra) than the other. Note: no one got it.

Athletics Here is what someone who is training for the US Olympic 50 km Racewalking trials is doing in training. I don’t do squat!

Politics

Clinton vs. Obama Factcheck weighs in.

In the latest debate among the Democrats, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparred over their plans for health care and Social Security. We found both presidential candidates guilty of exaggerations and questionable claims:

* Clinton said that Obama’s health care plan would leave 15 million Americans without insurance, while her plan provided universal coverage. Obama countered that his proposal would cover everyone in the country. Clinton’s plan will likely cover more people than Obama’s, but it’s doubtful the difference between their very similar proposals would be as high as the figure Clinton cites.
* Clinton implied that firefighters would be affected by Obama’s proposal to raise the income limit for Social Security taxes above $97,000 a year. Obama implied that his proposal would tax only the “upper class.” We found both claims misleading.

Obama also said an employer has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of being prosecuted for employing an immigrant who’s in the U.S. illegally. That turns out to be pretty close to the truth. [...]

Clinton: His plan would leave 15 million Americans out. That’s about the population of Nevada, Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire. I have a universal health care plan that covers everyone.

Obama: Well, let’s talk about health care right now because the fact of the matter is that I do provide universal health care. … [W]e’ve put forward a plan that makes sure that it is affordable to get health care that is as good as the health care that I have as a member of Congress.

Clinton uses a dubious statistic when she claims Obama’s plan would leave out 15 million of the uninsured. But Obama’s statement that his proposal provides “universal” health care is also suspect.

Clinton based her claim on a column by The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, who loosely estimated Obama’s plan would leave 15 million uninsured:

Cohn (The New Republic, June 3): The best studies out there — by Urban Institute researchers, the RAND Corporation, and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber — suggest that, without a mandate, improving affordability will cover roughly one-third of the people who don’t have coverage. Mandating that kids (but not adults) have coverage bumps that up to about a half. Obama’s advisers think that, by really loading up on the subsidies … they can goose that up to two-thirds. But that’s getting optimistic — and, even then, you still have around 15 million people who are uninsured.

Clinton and ObamaCohn makes it clear here that he is offering an estimate based on the best information available, not a hard and fast calculation. And the best available information doesn’t always agree. [...]

It’s true that Clinton’s plan would likely lead to somewhat higher levels of coverage than Obama’s, according to the research we’ve seen. But the difference in outcomes may not amount to much. The main distinction: Clinton calls for a mandate that would require all individuals to have health insurance; Obama requires only that children have coverage and that dependents be covered under their parents’ insurance up to age 25. Of the estimated 46.5 million uninsured in the U.S., 9.4 million are children and 37 million are adults, according to an analysis of Census data by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured and the Urban Institute. But neither candidate has provided enough detail for analysts to predict confidently how many might be left uninsured under either plan.

* Sara Collins, an assistant vice president at The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that calls for higher quality and accessibility in health care, says that the Obama and Clinton plans (as well as Edwards’) are “very, very similar in structure.” Studies show that mandates make a difference, but Collins says the “15 million” seems like too big a number based on past analyses.

[...]

Clinton called Obama’s proposal to raise Social Security taxes on earnings over $97,500 per year, the current upper limit on which any tax is levied, a trillion-dollar increase on “middle class families.”

Clinton: I do not want to fix the problems of Social Security on the backs of middle class families and seniors. (Applause.) If you lift the cap completely, that is a $1 trillion tax increase. I don’t think we need to do that. [...]

Obama: I’ve heard you say this is a trillion dollar tax cut on the middle class by adjusting the cap. Understand that only 6 percent of Americans make more than $97,000 — (cheers, applause) — so 6 percent is not the middle class — it’s the upper class.

Clinton responded by saying that some of her New York constituents would still find the increase burdensome. “I represent firefighters. I represent school supervisors,” she said.

“Upper Class” Firefighters?

It’s hard to say who’s being more misleading here. The base pay of a New York City firefighter is $68,475 after five years on the job, and even with overtime, holiday pay and other differentials the total pay is $86,518, well below the level affected by Obama’s proposal. So Clinton is being misleading to suggest that a rank-and-file firefighter would be affected.

On the other hand, FDNY captains make $140,173 with overtime, according to the department. For them, Obama’s proposal could amount to a $2,646 tax increase, not counting what the city would have to pay for the employer’s share of the added payroll tax. As for school administrators, in New York state there are few that make less than $100,000 a year, and some superintendents make more than twice that, according to the New York State Education Department. Are fire captains and high-school principals considered “upper class” financially? If so, it would be news to us.

Obama may be correct to say that only the top 6.5 percent of earners would be affected. That’s based on that same analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice that we mentioned earlier. But we judge that Obama is being misleading to say that his proposal would tax only the “upper class.”

Emphasis mine.

Of course, to some of the more unreasonable Clinton supporters (most Clinton supporters are reasonable people, but some are not), any criticism of Clinton is “taking a page from the Republican playbook“.

Sure: accusing Senator Clinton of being too heavily financed by corporate lobbyists to be neutral is being right wing?

Democratic presidential front-runner Sen. Hillary Clinton is being taken to task by her two closest rivals for accepting $400,000 in campaign contributions from Washington lobbyists. Over the weekend, Clinton was booed by an audience of liberal bloggers in Chicago when she defended taking money from Washington lobbyists, something both Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards have vowed not to do.

“I don’t think, based on my 35 years fighting for what I believe in, anybody seriously believes I’m going to be influenced by a lobbyist or a particular interest group,” Clinton said.

“A lot of these lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans. They actually do. They represent nurses, they represent social workers — yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people.”

Yeah right, Senator. Why would these companies give you this money if they didn’t think that they had some influence on you? Are they doing this for charity? (no, campaign contributions are NOT tax deductible)

Politicians think that we are idiots. Well, maybe we are.

More on Clinton-Obama From our local blogosphere:

Link

CNN hits bottom and digs: All six debate questioners appear to be Democratic Party operatives. So much for “ordinary people, undecided voters”. To paraphrase Junior Soprano, CNN is so far up the DNC’s hind end, Howard Dean can taste hair gel. In a nutshell, CNN’s six “undecided voters” were:

A Democratic Party bigwig
An antiwar activist
A Union official
An Islamic leader
A Harry Reid staffer
A radical Chicano separatist

Wow. This looks “rather” like a scandal. Hot Air:

…You’d think the network’s audience might want to know who among the questioners has had a paid, formal relationship with the party.

…I went back to the beginning of the debate to see how Blitzer introduced the format. Did he offer any details on who’d be doing the questioning? Why, yes. After mentioning that the debate was sponsored by the national party — something likely understood by most viewers as a mere formality — he described them as “ordinary people, undecided voters.” Note: not even “undecided Democrats.” Just undecided.

Word on the street is that Hillary’s staffers are extremely pleased with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for his softball questioning of Sen. Clinton during Thursday’s Las Vegas debate. Blitzer “was outstanding, and did not gang up like Russert did in Philadelphia. He avoided personal attacks, remained professional and ran the best debate so far.”

Who were the questioners upon whom Blitzer called? According to CNN, they were “ordinary people, undecided voters.”

Note to Bill Dennis: yes, I like your blog, but no, I am not fascinated by you.

(note: I am just joking; he wasn’t talking about me in this post)

Huckabee

Yes, he is a woo who doesn’t believe in modern science. But he does have a sense of humor. Yes, his campaign made this video; if you don’t believe me, go to his campaign’s youtube site.

I have to admit, this video had me laughing, and not in a “bad, I’ve got contempt for you” way. I thought that it was genuinely funny.

But that brings up a major point: the person I want running the country isn’t always going to be the person that I like personally. There is one person that I like quite a bit; in fact, I even love her in a way. But she is absolutely convinced of the existence of ghosts; she claims that the ghost of her mother pushed her down the steps of her mother’s old farm house.

I tried to explain to her that the poor visibility, the steep farm steps, and the two glasses of wine that she just drank had something to do with it, but she really believes it was her mom’s ghost. I wish that I were making a joke here!

Anyway, I’d never vote for her for public office; one needs to be well grounded in reason and logic in order to be effective, in my opinion.

Science Cosmic Variance has a cool post about a particle physicist who recently died: Sidney Coleman. He sounds like someone I wish that I had met.

Some light personal stuff

I’ve mentioned Shalini before: here she has some photos of a recent trip to a Secular Society and its Enemies meeting.

Love the shirt! Many more photos there.

A person describes the pain of being unemployed but looking for a job. And yes, it is worse if you are African American, because you also have to deal with the mental anguish that comes with wondering if your race had something to do with it; unfortunately that is reality for our darker skinned neighbors.

I am not saying that racism happens all of the time. But it has been demonstrated that it does happen some of the time, so when YOU are the one who doesn’t get the job and you are a part of a group that has been discriminated against, you can’t help but wonder if this was one of those times, even if it wasn’t.

Someone else is “down in the dumps”; I admit that that happens to me from time to time, even without good reason; in fact, mostly without good reason!. I have to admit that, unlike this person, I’ve never wished for a matching “bra and pantie set”.