March 12 2009 Chilly Evening

Some posts to warm cyberspace

Political Humor:
Red State Update on the current Republican Party:

Science
A Senator had put a hold on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and Office and Science and Technology picks; they have now been approved in committee:

The two nominees — John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco — cleared the committee in a unanimous vote this afternoon as part of an unannounced, closed-door markup, a committee aide said. The panel’s approval sends the nominees to the Senate floor, where they should pass by unanimous consent within the coming week, according to leaders of the committee from both sides of the aisle.

“They’re going to be confirmed,” said Commerce ranking member Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas). Hutchison said there are no Republican holds on the nominees.

Human like behavior: a chimp who had been abused by his owner killed him by hitting him with a coconut; he threw it from a tree.

A book that claims that human evolution was accelerated within the last 10,000 years or so has appeared. This isn’t claiming that the number of mutations went up due to the exponential increase in population but rather that the “per human adaptation rate” has gone up, presumably due to the pressures of civilization.

Many are skeptical of this claim; I haven’t done the meta-research to have an informed opinion.

Education
Here is President Obama’s speech on education; it is 33 minutes long.

Social:

Mano Singham makes the case that the internet sites (such as facebook) has lead to the contraction in the numbers of people who belong to a church. He also points out that many people who claim to be believers are, in effect, “acting atheists”. This is what I think that he means by this: one might believe in some deity but not believe that this said deity will interfere in the affairs of this universe; that is, what happens in our world is merely the result of our interacting with natural laws.

This is a Pat Condell video. Yes, he is British, but what he says here goes for me. Yes, I believe in free speech, but part of free speech is my having the right to say that I don’t like your protest.

Politics

Robert Reich talks about President Obama’s plans. On one hand, the individual changes that he proposes are incremental and hardly revolutionary. On the other hand, the view that the economy grows from the bottom up (rather than from the top down) is a big change from the way things have been done recently.

Democrats acting badly
This isn’t good at all:

Top federal regulators say they were taken aback when they learned that a California congresswoman who had helped set up a meeting with bankers last year had family financial ties to a bank whose chief executive asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at One- United, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms. Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 of its stock.

Treasury officials said the session with nearly a dozen senior banking regulators was intended to allow minority-owned banks and their trade association to discuss the losses they had incurred from the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But Kevin Cohee, OneUnited’s chief executive, instead seized the opportunity to plead for special assistance for his bank, federal officials said.
[...]
Ms. Waters declined on Tuesday to comment on the meeting, or to say whether her husband still owned shares of OneUnited. Her staff released two letters that showed the meeting was initially called to discuss industry concerns broadly.

Ms. Waters, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, did not disclose her ties to OneUnited to Treasury officials, who said they learned of them only later.

This is unacceptable.

Republicans behaving well

Ok, I’ll give some Republicans some credit.

Megan McCain appeared on the Rachel Maddow show.

I agree with her. This might sound strange but I don’t like it that the Democrats all but have a lock on my vote; the current Republicans are so far out there I wouldn’t consider voting for any of them, even if we ran a complete idiot. I’d love to have a choice which included an Eisenhower, T. Roosevelt or a Rockefeller or even a Christine Todd Whitman. This group appears to have the right idea.

Senator Sam Brownback. Yes, he is a creationist woo. But he has reached out from time to time; he did some work with then Senator Obama on Darfur and recently he went to bat for Kathleen Sebelius, even though he caught flack from his own party.

Republicans Behaving Badly

Illinois: Chair of the Cook County (Chicago) GOP party gets his wife arrested for battery. Why? She was upset that she caught him with a couple of hookers at their home.

David Vitter: R-La. Yes, this is the diaper and the DC-madam Senator.

Yes, evidently he had a meltdown when he was late for a flight and tried to get through a closed security door.

Yes, he criticized President Obama for having earmarks in the spending bill (to keep the government afloat) while loading it with many of his own.

But look at what some of these earmarks were for:

And since we’re on the subject of David Vitter, there’s this…we know that he voted against the Omnibus bill because he didn’t like the earmarks. We know he had scads of personal earmarks in there. (He’s number 5 in total dollar amount.) But you may have fogotten the failed earmark he shot for two years ago – it was for:

[A] Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system.

David Vitter. Airline Passenger. Hypocrite. Anti-science moron. Senator from Louisiana…
DocJess :: David Vitter, so many things…

Oh yes, never, never mention that 9-11 happened on President Bush’s watch.

So now we have revisionist history on the Bush administration. But back to the 9-11 claim, one commenter (named mllamoreux) on the blog that I got the video from made the following observation:

9-1-1 could have happened to anyone. It was Bush who decided to use it to trash the constitution rather than to cement our friendships around the world.

Republicans and the economy

Oh yes, now the CEOs are victims!

Yes, the Republicans are trying to blame Obama for the current dip in the stock market.

The pink represents the Bush administration and the yellow the period after Obama had won the election but hadn’t become President yet.

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