Creedocide (via Pharyngula)

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First Exam Day Spring 2009

Workout notes 4000 yard swim; 500 easy, 1500 worth of 25 drill, 75 swim, 10 x (fly/free/back/free) on 2 (barely), 400 IM (8:31), 400 fins (drill/swim), 100 paddle.

Then I did my yoga/ab/therapy routines. These things ARE helping my piriformis tingles.

No, today’s wasn’t much; I hope to have a special workout tomorrow. We’ll see.

Academia and math teaching: Exams in Linear Algebra and in Differential Equations. I am being reminded that students often find the level of abstraction in linear algebra to be very difficult; to me the idea of linear independence, spanning sets and basis is the most natural thing in the world. But that is far from true for many.

As a result, I’ll have my nose in my papers most all weekend long; I’ll also have to prepare my seminar talk (which I am giving Thursday).

Academia: professors share their pain at having classes of students who wear very little clothing. Here is a sample:

I teach at a commuter school in a subtropical clime whose students are as likely to work at a strip club as they are to work at an Arby’s. I’ve never had a student come into class in pasties, but that’s about all I haven’t seen. Spangled bikini tops with an open button-front shirt thrown over, daisy dukes with 5-inch platforms, thigh-high patent leathers with necklines so low you see the UNDER-cleavage, and girls whose idea of “professional dress” is to show off their their DD boob-job with a wonder bra under a camisole and painted-on jeans. I’ve been flashed by the pantiless more times than I can count, and I’m a hetero female prof — I’ve asked my male colleagues how they handle this stuff and “by din and disciplinary committee, DON’T LOOK!” is the universal answer… which must be very hard, because, well, how do you NOT look when she’s sitting in the back row in a miniskirt opening and closing her knees like the mini-golf queen? Halfway through my lecture, I’m mentally lining up my putt.

I have to admit that the brutal Illinois winters have mostly solved that problem. But, I do have some memories from my days as a graduate student at the University of Texas.

Politics Nate Silver suggests that having “open primaries” (that is, one primary election in which all candidates from every party runs with the top two going on for a run off) might be a way of reducing the partisan differences between parties. He backs up his conjecture with a simulation.

Stimulus and Home owner Bailout: Robert Reich’s ideas:

On the mortgage bailout:

Expect the usual grousing about “moral hazard,” especially from Republicans who normally grouse about normal hazard. And under normal circumstances, they have a point. The government should not be bailing out mortgage lenders who should never have lent money to people unlikely to be able to repay, or borrowers who should never have taken out a mortage loan. Under normal circumstances, government shouldn’t be bailing out bankers, either. But these aren’t normal circumstances. We’re in an economic crisis. And a failure to put millions of homeowners on a firmer footing would send more shock waves throughout the economy. Not only will more people lose their homes. Surrounding homes will lose value as well, as neighborhoods become blighted with more empty houses. And lenders, worried that even more borrowers can’t repay loans, will stop making additional ones.

Stimulus:

One of the oddest of right-wing claims is that FDR’s New Deal didn’t pull America out of the Great Depression, so Barack Obama’s “New New Deal” won’t, either. While it’s true that the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression, three points need to be impressed on the hard-pressed conservative mind:

1. The New Deal relieved a great deal of suffering by establishing social safety nets —

2. FDR’s public works spending did help the economy somewhat. By 1936, U.S. the economy was showing some life. Unemployment was declining and consumers were beginning to buy. [...]

3. The Second World War pulled the nation out of the Great Depression because it required that government spend on such a huge scale as to restart the nation’s factories, put Americans back to work, and push the nation toward its productive capacty. [...]

See the post for details. Just remember that when you hear the Republicans whine, that they are Republicans! It was their ineptitude that got us into this mess to begin with and there is absolutely no reason to listen to them now.

Close of the day: 19 February 2009

Humor: surf to Evolved/Rational’s blog for a line drawing showing the difference between ordinary logic and fundie logic.

Coolness: Hat tip to Sandwalk for alerting us to this gem of a science ad

(click for a larger version)

Speaking of drawings and cartoons: the New York Post recently ran this cartoon:

This cartoon caused a bit of an uproar in liberal circles. (note: recently New York police officers had to shoot a pet chimp that had turned on its owner).

Frankly, I saw this as a “the stimulus bill was so bad that even a chimp could have written it” and nothing more than that. But others saw this as a racist slam on President Obama.

Ok, fair enough. But someone on the Daily Kos said that the outrage was a bit too much (and I agree; it was) and he got slammed for saying that; he was accused of living in “white privilege”, etc. But the guy who said that is African American!

Anyway, I feel this guy’s pain; from time to time I’ve been accused of “acting white”, “selling out to the man”, etc. for not being sufficiently outraged enough by a perceived slur, insult, etc. or for not making excuses for my lack of real accomplishment.

In fact, I was condemned for saying that my race has never held me back!

Oh well; we (liberals) are far from perfect.

Giving the Conservatives a Voice:

Here is a conservative video talking about the need for West Virginia to define marriage as being between “one man and one woman”.

Never mind their use of “god” is undermined by the fact that Biblical marriage was often plural and often included concubines.

Get a load of the sniper screen and of the whining about this issue somehow undermining religious liberty! (The liberty to do what: push your warped morals off on others?)

Hat tip: Right Wing Watch.

Denmark’s Novel Approach to Speeding « The Legal Satyricon (NSFW)

You have to love it….in Denmark they use “boobs” to help stop “boobs” from speeding.

Note: the “video warning” is because they show women with no shirts on. It is nothing most of us haven’t seen before.

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19 February 2009

Workout notes yoga with Ms. V. (I was distracted) followed by my Sprindale/Glen Oak course in 1:08:51. I had made it a goal to do the upper loop (Adams to Adams) in under 30 minutes and I got 30:45.
Weather: 14 F with a moderate wind; needless to say it was cold though the footing was excellent.

Even though it was cold, it was sunny and pretty; this still beats the treadmill! I cooled down with a 1 mile walk….ok “froze down” would be like it.

Of course, when I drove home, all of the frozen “stuff” on my face started to melt; that was gross beyond words!

Other odds and ends:

Michelle Bachmann:

Science: birds have the ability to move their bodies while keeping their heads still:

Academia: There is some truth in this article: too many students expect to be awarded for effort rather than for results:

Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.

Aaron M. Brower, the vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered another theory.

“I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.” [....]

In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

Sarah Kinn, a junior English major at the University of Vermont, agreed, saying, “I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.”

Here is how I attempt to handle such things: I ask them: “when you go to choose a product to buy, what factors do you consider?” They tell me things like “quality and price”. I then ask them: “you don’t take into account the amount of effort that went into the product”?

I also ask them that if an engineer designed a bridge that collapsed, did it matter that he/she tried hard? Or, if the patient dies during surgery, does the surgeon get an “A” for effort?

Of course, since I teach mathematics, there isn’t as much subjectivity in my grading; when I tell them that “no, the derivative of e^x is not x*e^(x-1)” the usually believe me and don’t argue.

18 February 2009: Final Post of the Day

Humor, intentional and unintentional

I resent the implication!

Auto Security

see more pwn and owned pictures

Academic Deans: do they really moonlight as bicycle thieves?

Seen at a Michelle Malkin event (she is a wingnut)

Now is this clown saying that Nazis back Obama? They’d be surprised. Or is he calling Obama a Nazi? Perhaps he is a Clayton Bigsby fan?

What an idiot.

Other topics:
Did you know the following:

Here’s one excerpt:

So, I saw this U. of Minn. survey that came out a while back. Perhaps you saw it as well. It asked Americans, who do you trust? And they broke it down into categories: Do you trust a Christian? Most said yes. In fact, Christians were at the top of the list. Do you trust a black person? A Muslim? A homosexual? etc.

The group that came out at the very bottom of the list — and I’m talking about below terrorists, below sexual predators, below the guy who skins babies alive and wears the skin as a mask and then dances in the moonlight while gargling the blood of his infant victim — after that guy, was atheists.

The blog article I linked to gives some suggestions at how atheists might improve their image. What I find funny is that the vast majority of people do trust atheists (as most elite scientists are atheist or agnostic); they just are unaware that they trust them.

And speaking of atheists: did you know that there are still laws on the books in some states (mostly southern…what a shock) that require office holders to “believe in god”? Of course these laws are unenforceable by means other than that of the ballot box.

A state legislator in Arkansas is trying to get that changed in that state. I wish him luck; I’ll be very surprised if the woos don’t come out of the wordwork on this one.

Evolution and Creationism
This is how you respond to creationists who ask for a debate (I am reproducing a small part of the letter, which was written by a scientist who was asked to debate a creationist

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren’t members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.

Politics
Robert Reich warns us to not confuse American Companies with American jobs:

Do not confuse American companies with American jobs.

The new stimulus bill, for example, requires that the money be used for production in the United States. Foreign governments, along with large U.S. multinationals concerned about possible foreign retaliation, charge this favors American-based companies. That’s not quite true. Foreign companies are eligible to receive stimulus money for things they make here (as long as the nations where they’re headquartered have signed the WTO procurement agreement). [...]

I’m not arguing against an auto bailout. But it ought to be focused on helping American auto workers rather than helping global auto companies headquartered in America. Why pay the Big Three billions of taxpayer dollars to stay afloat when, even after being bailed out, they cut tens of thousands of American jobs, slash wages, and shrink their American operations into small fractions of what they used to be?

That’s backwards. The auto bailout should help American autoworkers keep their jobs or get new ones that pay almost as well.

In the same article, Reich also warns against protectionism.

Stimulus Bill

This is Recovery.gov.

So, what say the Republicans? Well Dick Morris says that, well, Obama should lie more?

It’s rare to criticize a politician for being all action and no talk, but that’s one of the big things that’s wrong with Obama’s battle against the economic crisis. One of the key variants in any stage of the economic cycle is what the president says is happening. If he talks down the economy, it drops. If he is bullish and optimistic, the markets are likely to listen. Particularly early in his term, when his credibility is high and the spotlight is shining on him, a concerted effort by Obama to inject optimism into his economic commentary could have a very positive effect.

Unfortunately, the president is so anxious to use the bad economy as an excuse to get every last little bit of government spending in the budget, he has pushed the markets down by a nonstop drumbeat of bad news and harsh predictions. When the president says that we may be entering a downturn from which there is no ready escape, investors, consumers, producers and businesspeople tend to listen and avoid any spending or risk. Obama has spent so much time warning of the disaster ahead that he is doing little from his bully pulpit to avert it.

Pessimism comes naturally to the party in opposition, and it takes a while for its members to get the message that they need to embrace optimism once they take power.

Actually, I’d rather a politician tell it to me straight. We’ve had 8 years of “its going to be ok” even if the signs showed otherwise.

But that’s just me.

18 February 2009

Workout notes 4000 yard swim, yoga on my own afterward. I am up to 20 leg lifts.
Swim: 5 x 200 to warm up; I did the first one on the 3:45 and gradually squeezed the rest down to finish the set in 17:45.

Then 1000 in 16:31 (8:15 half way). I admit that I had planned 10 x 100 on the 1:45 but a swimmer in the next lane had to be put in his place; during my warm up he sped up to pass me so when I started what was supposed to be the 10 x 100 set, I found myself gaining on him rapidly, so I just kept going. I passed him and attempted to lap him but I could only gain one length lead before he gave out.

But I continued on.

Then I did 10 x (25 free, 25 back, 25 fly, 25 free) on the 2:10, then 2:05, 2:05 then the rest on the 2 (5-10 seconds rest). Drills and paddle sets finished it up.

Ah, the “competition between incompetent swimmers! (note to those who are unfamiliar: my times are very, very slow in comparison to a good swimmer; a solid master’s swimmer could have done that 1000 in about 12 minutes, a college swimmer in about 10 and an Olympic swimmer in less than 9)

I have fun though.

More Fun: His Noodleness gets acknowledgment on the Rachel Maddow show!

(hat tip: Legal Satyricon)

Not Fun: Man sets up a group to promote tolerance of Islam. He ends up beheading his wife.

Of course, murdering one’s spouse is hardly limited to Muslims. And no, plenty of women murder their spouse too; depending on which statistics one uses (FBI or Department of Jusitice), 33 to 41 percent of murdered spouses were men.

Politics

Stimulus: Nate Silver rebuts the oft-repeated claim that the Republicans had any intention of compromising on the stimulus plan.

He also has a handy step by step discussion of the bank bail out. It is a bit depressing, as it appears that

1. We are in uncharted territory
2. We have no idea if these plans will work or not and
3. We have to try something; it is almost as if we are trying to mitigate the effects of an economic disaster than to make things “good”.

Poe Blogs

The Good Kentuckian has an interesting post about Rachel Maddow going ballistic over a Peanut company head. Evidently he KNEW there was a problem when he shipped his product out but did nothing because it would have been expensive to do so.

Have you ever seen a better demonstration of corporate greed?

Norma Jean also talks about the environment; the basic idea is that, since the Rapture is coming soon anyway, it is senseless to do anything to prevent long term damage. No, I am not making that up; in fact the PBS show NOW (update: it was Bill Moyers; see the comments for the link and the transcript) had a guest who said such things. In fact, Ronald Reagan appointed such a person to the Secretary of the Interior:

Greg Wetstone, who was the chief environment council at the House Energy and Commerce Committee during the Reagan administration and later served as director of advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Watt was one of the two most “intensely controversial and blatantly anti-environmental political appointees” in American history. (The other was Anne Gorsuch, head of the EPA at that time.)[4] According to the environmental groups, Watt decreased funding for environmental programs,[5] restructured the department to decrease federal regulatory power,[5] wished to eliminate the Land and Water Conservation Fund (which had been designed to increase the size of National Wildlife Refuges and other protected land),[5] eased regulations on oil[5] and mining[6][5] companies, and favored opening wilderness areas and shorelands for oil and gas leases.[5]

Watt resisted accepting donations of private land to be used for conservation purposes.[7] He suggested that all 80 million acres (320,000 km²) of undeveloped land in the United States be opened for drilling and mining in the year 2000.[7] The area leased to coal mining companies quintupled during his term as Secretary of the Interior.[7] Watt proudly boasted that he leased “a billion acres” (4 million km²) of U.S. coastal waters, even though only a small portion of that area would ever be drilled.[7] Watt once stated, “We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber.”[8]

Watt periodically mentioned his Christian faith when discussing his approach to environmental management. Speaking before Congress, he once said, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.”[9]

Yes, this is none other than James “A black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple” Watt.

This nut-job would fit right in the current Republican party, wouldn’t he?

Blog Fame, Higgs Bosons, Economic well being and other topics

First, the fluff.

Postsimian (BlargenBlog) has received an honor from Friendly Atheist!

Blogger Vigilantism: Some teenager decided to abuse a pet cat and put the abuse on youtube. Many bloggers didn’t react kindly. Yes, law enforcement has been informed.

More substantial stuff

Do you want to know which income classes did well in which administrations? There are some facts that aren’t surprises (that the rich tended to do best under Republicans and that most everyone did lousy under Bush II). But there are some surprises. And yes, Bill Clinton’s had by far the most successful recent administration.

There’s a lot to look at in this little chart. Under Nixon/Ford, the very wealthiest did reasonably well, but oddly enough, so did the very poorest (this may have been LBJ’s Great Society programs belatedly kicking in rather than anything Nixon/Ford did). But the middle class was left out of the mix, their incomes barely growing over eight years. [...]

Under Clinton, by contrast, the economy was a rising tide that lifted all boats. The poor, finally, did quite well for themselves, their incomes appreciating at about 2.5 percent annually, but the rich did just about as well — in fact, the rich did better under Clinton than they had under Reagan and Bush. The rich/poor gap, if measured as a ratio, did not increase appreciably under Clinton. The 10th percentile saw their incomes increase by about 17 percent during his tenure, and so did the 90th percentile.

There is much more there, including a cool chart.

Science. The race for the discovery of the Higgs Boson is on this year; read this article in Cosmic Variance to find out about it.

If you don’t know about the Higgs Boson, here is the place to start. There is a postulated “Higgs field” that is supposed to permeate all of space-time (not the aether) which would explain things like gravity.

Surf to the article for an explanation; note that the symmetries of matrix groups are used. I am tempted to bring this up to my linear algebra class.

17 February 2009

Workout notes Yoga with Ms. Vickie; then a slow as all get out 8 plus mile run (normal course plus the mausoleum in Springdale Cemetery.) That took me 1:29; weather was sunny, cold (20s) and breezy. I walked a couple of miles afterward.

My legs were all but dead for the entire run but revived during the walk.

Science Do you want to see what scientists argue about? Professor Moran gets on a botanist who misused the term “natural selection”. Many feel that “natural selection” should refer to mutations that become fixed in a population because they provide some advantage to the organism in their present environment.

Climate Change George Will writes a bad column on climate change. Nate Silver points out some of the errors here, and Kos points us to some criticism from the science community:

George Will, liar. From his latest column:

According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Reality, from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center:

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

A couple of climate change “crock of the week” videos:

Politics

DC based journalists are living in a bubble: they claim that the GOP did itself some good with the public by opposing the stimulus. But in fact, the opinion of the Democrats went up and the opinion of the Republicans went down; the Democrats were given credit for trying.

Are the Democrats doing the right thing? Paul Krugman thinks that the stimulus is helpful but not large enough and that the bail out plan is confusing:

In practice, however, the policies currently on offer don’t look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won’t do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation. And the much-awaited announcement of the bank rescue plan left everyone confused rather than reassured.

There’s hope that the bank rescue will eventually turn into something stronger. It has been interesting to watch the idea of temporary bank nationalization move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance, with even Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham conceding that it may be necessary. But even if we eventually do what’s needed on the bank front, that will solve only part of the problem.

If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.

Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion — our decade at Bernie’s — will be a long, painful slump.

Robert Reich says that some banks should be allowed to fail (possible bail out money to those with accounts but none to shareholders) and some banks could make it if they could be tided over until things got better. However nationalization might be the answer:

The only way to make sense of Tim Geithner’s “stress test” for banks is to assume a kind of triage. Banks that are reasonably healthy right now — whose assets are fully adequate to fund their liabilities, and can make new loans — don’t need a bailout. And banks that are too far gone to save –- whose loans when realistically valued won’t make them solvent even when the economy recovers — shouldn’t be bailed out. They should be put under receivership that pays off depositors, wipes out shareholders, and then closes the bank.

This leaves a third category of bank that could be salvaged — whose assets are likely to be enough to make them solvent when the economy turns up again — but that need bailouts in the meantime. Money from the Treasury and Fed will be used to lure outside investors to buy up these banks’ bad loans and clear up their balance sheets so they can make new, responsible loans.

At least, that’s the only sense I can make of it.

But how much of our financial system falls into the “too-far-gone-to save” category, and how much into the “might be saved with taxpayer help?” And how will Geithner and his colleagues at the Treasury be able to tell? After all, we got into this mess because banks were fiddling with their numbers and making bets off their balance sheets. And most still aren’t willing to write down their bad loans to realistic market values.

It would be far cheaper, quicker, and safer for the government to just take over every questionable bank. This is the only way we can get the truth about which should be shut down. And the way taxpayers who will be bailing out salvagable banks can ever recoup our costs. Why should any upside gains go to private shareholders who made bad bets or to bank executives and directors who got us into this mess in the first place?

Peoria Democrats Dinner

Last night I went to the Peoria Democrats Dinner; it is the annual fundraiser put on for the Peoria Area Democrats.

The dinner is held in Itoo Hall (a large place where people have your typical fish-frys); on this evening we had a buffet which had fried chicken, green beans, etc.

The place was packed; this was the largest crowd I had seen since coming to these events (yearly since 2005).

There was a large cut-out of Barack Obama and there was a great deal of left-over Obama stuff for sale.

U. S. Senator Roland Burris was there; he was received politely and got a couple of standing (but polite) ovations; this wasn’t the reception that Senator Dick Durbin got a couple of years ago.

Senator Burris did circulate throughout the place even going back to the “open seating” tables where I sat. He shook hands (including mine).

His talk was about the stimulus bill; frankly he isn’t a great speaker; in fact he wouldn’t stand a chance at getting elected for this office, even without the controversy.

We had lots of media there too.

The main event was an FDR impersonator who spoke about the New Deal; basically he reminded us that government intervention in economic matters could be a good thing.

From the Peoria Journal Star:
(this is Senator Burris with State Senator Koehler)

The Journal Star Story:

[...]

Before the dinner, Burris greeted many of the roughly 450 guests laughing, smiling and exchanging jokes. He posed for pictures and gave autographs to many well-wishers in the crowd.

Peorian Zeda Evans said the $30 per plate dinner is a show of Democratic strength and that she isn’t judging Burris based on the most recent media reports. “I think Republicans are pissed off and digging for whatever they can get, whether it’s true or not.”

Opening to a standing ovation from the audience, Burris discussed only the economic stimulus package and its benefit. He cautioned results may not be seen immediately.

Peoria County Democratic Party Chairman Billy Halstead said it’s too early to rush to judgment.

“I haven’t heard one concern, comment or statement from the local Democrats. There’s no doubt it needs to come to the surface and knowing Sen. Burris, I think it will,” Halstead said. “There’s no doubt that if it does come out that there was any wrongdoing, it’s definitely not going to be good. But it’s all in the details.”

State Sen. Dave Koehler, D-Peoria, said focus should be kept on legislation for ethics and campaign finance reform.

“If he perjured himself, then there are consequences to that. If he did not, well then I guess the voters have the last word on that,” Koehler said. “We need to let the process work and find out that answer. Right now I don’t know. I don’t think there’s been any conclusive evidence on that.”

Clearly, this is a black eye for us, and we’ve already absorbed many body blows. Personally, I wished that we had a special election.