Republican Ideas

I’ve seen David Frum a couple of times and have decided to subscribe to his page newmajority.com.

No, I am not a Republican but I think that a legitimate opposition party is a great idea and good for the country. I checked out his page and yeah, I disagree with many of the ideas but the stuff there is issue driven; no “Obama is Hitler” stuff, etc.

So I’ll check them out just to see what smart conservatives think.

George Stephanopoulos: David Frum, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, George Will

Roundtable: Obama Approval Ratings

Shared via AddThis

This takes 21 minutes but is pretty good. Most of this is about the health care debate; some is about the economy and a little bit is about Afghanistan.

23 August 09 (am)

Workout notes Same 20 mile course as last week, though I added one goose loop lap (about .36 miles) and it was much cooler. 2:15 at the mile 10 turn off but finished in 4:38 (5 minutes faster); it was the coolness that made this go better. Still, I am always about 10-15 minutes slower the day after a hard 5K race (even a running one).

I got to see much of the marathon training group (runners) and another group; there were smiles and waves all around.

Injury I had a bit of trouble with the behind the knee area of my right leg (as usual); it was aggravated by poor posture. I need to work on my core strength.

Science In some species, brainy males get more females. Score one for the nerds!

Politics
The Republican field for 2012 is shaping up!

Sean Hannity is open to the call from his deity!

So is Michelle Bachmann!

Of course there is Sarah Palin.

But now we can look to Livonia, Michigan (near Detroit) and find city council candidate Glenn Moon:

Is he the perfect Republican or what?

Sam Harris on Bill Maher

More on Francis Collins:

The new director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) laid out his priorities today, spending his 1st day on the job speaking to his staff and reporters. Physician-geneticist Francis Collins said he plans to emphasize five “themes,” including health care reform and translating research into medicine. Collins also sought to allay perhaps the biggest concerns about his nomination last month by President Barack Obama, saying that he will protect investigator-initiated science and that his religious interests will not influence how he runs the agency.

Collins, who in 2008 stepped down after 15 years as director of NIH’s genome institute, spoke publicly about his ideas for the first time since his name surfaced as the leading candidate to head the agency. In a town hall meeting with NIH staff, he said he now has an “exciting, daunting, and perhaps the most amazing job that anybody could ever ask for.” He assured his audience that “the mainstay” will be the individual investigator; anybody who thinks otherwise “need look no further” than the genome institute’s intramural program, where research is “driven by ideas” and where he will keep his lab.

At the same time, large biology projects are one of Collins’s five priorities. He will promote high-throughput technologies in areas that are “poised for this kind of approach,” such as gene transcription and autism studies. He expects to emphasize translational research, such as a new NIH program to develop drugs for rare diseases. The three other themes are health care reform, including research comparing treatments, which he said NIH “should embrace”; global health; and “empower[ing] the biomedical research community,” which he said includes sustained funding, encouraging young investigators, and funding innovative research.

Speaking of “beyond belief”: there are a ton of videos here. That should keep me entertained for a while.

Video: Christopher McDougall: Born to Run | The Daily Show | Comedy Central

A discussion on the Tarahumara Indians who can run very long miles.

more about "Video: Christopher McDougall: Born to…", posted with vodpod

You can’t make this up: opponents do the darndest things!

Yes, this is a 10 minute clip of Ronald Reagan speaking out against “socialism”. Why? He was opposing Medicare!
Gee, Medicare passed and is currently very popular and all of those scary things he said would happen….well…didn’t.

But a well intentioned but hopelessly ill informed conservative put this out as being an argument against current attempts at health care reform!

President Obama’s Forum with Organizing For America

This is the forum where President Obama addressed his supporters.

This is Beth, one of the Organizing For America organizers. Yeah….I think that she is HOT. She is pretty smart too; that is part of the “hotness” in my book.

Here is a 5 minute highlight video:

Here is the full 1:17 video

Yes, I took part in the whole thing.

22 August 09 AM

President Obama’s Weekly Address:

Health care: here is a handy guide of information and rebuttals against common arguments and misconceptions.

Here is a nice synopsis of why we need reform…and yes that includes those of us who have health insurance:

Health insurance is already becoming unaffordable for families and businesses, with premium inflation outpacing wage increases. Between 1999 and 2008, employer family health insurance premiums rose by 119 percent, while the median family income rose by less than 30 percent. As a result, average family premiums for group policies have risen from 11 percent to 18 percent of median family income. And if Congress fails to pass health reforms that control health care costs, premiums are projected to rise to 24 percent of a family’s income by 2020. (Click on image at right to open chart.) In any economic climate, but especially in today’s recession, most families cannot afford to devote a fourth of their income to insurance coverage, nor can businesses afford their share of insurance premiums in addition to raises for employees.

In light of this reality, it is important to remember the principal goals of comprehensive health reform: 1) to cover the uninsured, 2) to enhance the affordability of insurance coverage for everyone, and 3) to slow the rise in health care costs. Achieving the first goal without the second and third is a recipe for long-term failure.

The Public Plan: The Leverage to Set Rates
Although the Obama Administration may be scaling back its support for a public plan, Commonwealth Fund and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyses show that offering a strong public health insurance choice as well as private plans through a health insurance exchange will help all Americans, not just the uninsured, by slowing the growth in premiums. A recent Fund analysis found that offering a public plan alongside private plans to all individuals and employers is our most effective weapon in combating health care costs. The study found that cumulative health system savings between 2010 and 2020—compared with projected trends for that period—could be as high as $3 trillion if reform includes a public plan that adopts innovative payment methods that reward value and uses its purchasing leverage, along with a reformed Medicare program, to control costs. The annual growth rate in health system spending would fall from 6.5 percent to 5.2 percent – consistent with an industry coalition pledge to slow spending by 1.5 percentage points annually over the next decade.

The CBO estimates that a public plan premium would be 10 percent lower than those of typical private plans offered in an insurance exchange—a cost break that would provide much-needed relief to families and businesses in every state in the country. The average family would save $2,200 per year by 2020 with reforms that include a public plan. President Obama pledged during the presidential campaign to save American families $2,500 a year through health reform. This goal needs to be on par with a deficit-neutral health reform plan.

The public plan would achieve these savings because it would use the federal government’s power to set prices for health care providers and control the rate of increase in these prices over time. It would be most effective if it were linked to Medicare, either paying at or somewhat above Medicare rates. Today, nearly all hospitals and physicians choose to participate in Medicare, rather than lose the 20 to 30 percent of revenues or more they derive from such participation.

There is more here including a discussion on alternate methods (e. g., regulated private insurance).

Here is a view of why this fight is going to be so difficult: too many don’t see this as a problem that is affecting or going to affect them. That is, they don’t see the rising costs (they just see a stagnant or shrinking paycheck) and, unless one hasn’t been unlucky enough to get a major illness, hasn’t felt the sting of rescission:

This health care reform paradox is the core reason why Democrats are finding it increasingly difficult to rally the public behind their dramatic effort to overhaul the nation’s medical system.

About three-in-four Americans believe the nation’s health care system requires major reform. Most Americans view U.S. health care as flawed.

But public support for reform significantly declines when associated with taxing high-end health plans, adding to the deficit, increasing personal costs or decreasing personal flexibility.

At least a quarter of those who support fundamental reform appear unwilling to accept significant personal cost to enact that reform, or risk worsening the status quo.

Health reformers, in fact, never had a clear mandate for major reform.

In late July, a Time magazine poll found that 55 percent of Americans rate their health care system as “only fair” or “poor.” Six-in-ten have a negative view of private health insurance companies’ job performance. But 86 percent of Americans still said, when asked, that they were satisfied with their own health care plan. [...]

Democrats are left with a public that supports overhauling the nation’s system but they lack a public personally invested in that overhaul. The public supports reform but have come to believe reform will not support them.

This explains why the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll found that only 41 percent of Americans approve of how Obama is “handling the issue of health care reform.”

But the same poll proceeded to detail a plan that Obama will likely support. Pollsters described a plan that requires: pre-existing condition coverage, most employers to cover the uninsured, tax-credits for those who cannot afford insurance and a plan that raises taxes on the wealthy. Americans supported the plan by a 56 to 35 percent margin.

Polls show a majority of the public will support raising taxes on the ultra-rich or even the wealthy to fund such reform but that is, of course, because a majority of Americans don’t see themselves as wealthy or rich.

President Obama: he is having trouble with his base. Here is some discussion as to why:

Paul Krugman (note: Krugman backed Hillary Clinton mostly because she was seen as a “fighter”)

According to news reports, the Obama administration — which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives.

Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.

A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach.
[...]

That said, it’s possible to have universal coverage without a public option — several European nations do it — and some who want a public option might be willing to forgo it if they had confidence in the overall health care strategy. Unfortunately, the president’s behavior in office has undermined that confidence.

On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat who talks of “bending the curve” but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform. Mr. Obama’s explanations of his plan have gotten clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula; his speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee.

Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed progressives with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy.

And then there’s the matter of the banks.

I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money. When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters.

[...]

Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Bob Herbert (who backed Obama from the start)

Barack Obama is a guy who is easy to underestimate. Six years ago hardly anyone outside of Illinois had ever heard of him. Now he’s America’s first Zen-master president.[...]

The American people are worried sick over the economy, which may be sprouting green shoots from Ben Bernanke’s lofty perspective but not from the humble standpoint of the many millions who are unemployed, or those who are still working but barely able to pay their bills and hold onto their homes.

This is the reality that underlies the anxiety over the president’s ragged effort to achieve health care reform. Forget the certifiables who are scrawling Hitler mustaches on pictures of the president. Many sane and intelligent people who voted for Mr. Obama and sincerely want him to succeed have legitimate concerns about the timing of this health reform initiative and the way it is unfolding.
[...]

It’s still early, but people are starting to lose faith in the president. I hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle. Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in.

More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.

People want more from Mr. Obama. They want him to be their champion. But they don’t feel that he is speaking to them in a language that they understand. He is seen as more comfortable speaking the Wall Street lingo. People don’t feel that the voices of anxiety are being heard.

Paradoxically: Barack Obama was elected, in part, because he promised to try to bring people together. Now he is being hammered because he is trying to keep his promise! Groan….

But you know what? Let’s see the end result; I am not as pessimistic as many others are.

In fact, here is what I wrote as a comment on Daily Kos to this article:

Yes, I still feel the same, and I liked him to begin with. Yes, I get irritated that he doesn’t appear to have “Harry Truman” in him, but remember that Truman faced challenges, made mistakes, and at times had terrible approval ratings (and yes, he didn’t get health care done either)

Yet he is currently remembered as a good president (and correctly so).

I didn’t think that President Obama would have an easy time of it and I figured that his bending over backwards for “bipartisanship” would have me reaching for the pink bismuth at times. I also knew that he would occasionally water down the effectiveness of a policy to get more support for it.

That being said, I still think that we are in good hands and that the direction of the country is changing, albeit not as quickly as any of us would have hoped.

I know this from ultra running: when you go up some steep, slippery hills, at times you will fall down, at times you will back slide and the progress is always way slower than you think it should be. But progress it remains and, if you stick with it, you’ll be successful.

But there will be agony, pain, and times of doubt.

Academia: This is an honest post from a professor who wanted a research job but didn’t get it; now she is trying to make the best of things. This is roughly where I was at that stage of my career.

Frogs: Yes, there is another cool frog photo and more:

The foremost students of these frogs have been Chuck Myers of the American Museum of Natural History, and his colleague John Daly. During a visit to the Museum some years ago, Chuck kindly showed me the terribilis he kept in his office, but I did not take any pictures, hence the Wiki photo. Their studies have shown that there is considerable individual, geographic, and interspecific variation in the poisons present in the frogs, and that individual frogs may contain multiple toxic compounds. Some of this variation results from the fact that the frogs obtain the alkaloids, at least in part, by uptake from arthropod prey.

In some cases, the frogs, when bred in captivity, were NOT poisonous and the reason is that, in the wild, they were getting their poison from the ants that they ate. So you might say that they were poisonous due to their ability to eat poisonous insects without harm.

I wonder if the poisonous golden toads that were taken to Australia, which were killing the dingos that ate them, would have eventually lead to a poisonous dingo or a poisonous other predator?

Humor

see more Fail Blog

Other topics
This is what can happen when proper police procedures aren’t followed (Texas)

Here is one upside to having creationists/IDiots talk to young biology students.

Medal of Honor standards: have they become more difficult with time?

Nazis: why Hogan’s Heros isn’t funny to someone who was actually a POW of the Nazis.

Yates City 5K 2009

Workout notes: 2 mile warm up, 5K run in 24:07, 1 mile cool down walk.

Basically, this was a small race (only 39 runners) and I finished 12′th; 3rd in the 40-49 age group. Yes, I have only 1 week left in this age group, but I would have been an even more distant 3rd in 50 and up.

The course starts on the main street (good traffic control), turns down a side street and takes you outside of the small town past some corn fields, right past more fields, then right again on a road that takes you to the highway that takes you back into town.

I didn’t feel great at the start though I did have a good warm up and it was reasonably cool (60 F, 80 percent humidity).

The first mile was marked and I took that in 7:42; I was trying to relax and not go out too fast; there was this guy in an orange shirt, a guy in the Rock Island 1999 50K shirt, a young woman and a male kid that I was tracking. I move past them at mile one and we made the turn. Then came the uphill at around mile 2; it was about 800 meters long and gradual; I was able to work up that and had something left to push.

Then came the final turn back into the town; I had about .5 miles to go. I was trying to pick up the pace as I didn’t feel THAT bad; it was sort of a 10k-ish kind of pain. But I didn’t have that pick up; I mostly kept from slowing way down. The younger woman nailed me with a kick in the last 100 meters or so and beat me by 3 seconds.

So, this season’s best: 24:00 (late May), 24:09 (last week), 24:07 (this week). I am starting to get annoyed. I can’t break out of this 24 rut…then again I am not running enough to do so.

So this is the current record:

March 28 5K : 24:41
April 12: muddy 100 miler in 47:55 (”staged” style)
April 25 5K: 26:30 (Wildlife Prairie Park)

9 May 5K 24:29 5K
17 May Marathon walk 5:14:26
23 May 5K 25:40
25 May 4 mile 31:58

30 May 5K: 24:00 (blankey-blank-blank!!!)
6 June: 24 hour, 66 miles (50 miles in 12:46)
20 June: 15K in 1:27:23 (just wanted to finish without walking)

(9 July: 6:42 mile (downhill)

18 July: 5K in 24:59
(22 July: 1600 track in 7:03, solo)
2 August: 12 hour trail (11:36 for 29.3 rocky trail miles)
(5 August: 1600 track in 7:19)
8 August: 5K in 27:21 (grass)
11 August: 5K in 26:30 (track, after 800 in 3:18)
15 August: 5K in 24:09
22 August: 5K in 24:07

21 August 09 Evening

Workout notes 2200 yard swim; so-so; 5 x 100 free on 2, 10 x (25 drill/swim) no fins, 4 x 250 on 5 (4:18, 16, 14, 15), 200 cool down with fins.

Posts

President Obama’s Ramadan address:

Watch for the tin foil conservatives to go around saying “Obama is a Muslim”

(rational conservatives: I am not talking about you!)

Frogs: Yet another frog post from Why Evolution is True
Here is a thumnail of one of the frogs; surf to the post to see the full image and to see another one!

Terrorists Many are inept and many times we give them too much credit. Most of the time, they serve as a foil to let governments keep us scared and make us more willing to give up our civil liberties.

Science New experiments suggest that honesty is the “default” position of some people and that others have to think about whether to lie or not.

Greene and Paxton have just published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that attempts to get at the subconscious underpinnings of morality by recording subjects’ brain activity as they make a decision to lie. Under the fMRI, subjects were asked to predict the result of a coin toss and were allowed to keep their predictions to themselves until after the coin fell, giving them a chance to lie. As motivation, they were paid for correct predictions. For comparison, the researchers ran tests in which they asked subjects to reveal their predictions before the coin toss. The scientists then analyzed the subjects’ success rates using statistics: The dishonest were identified as those who guessed the results of the coin toss more times than chance would dictate.

Greene and Paxton had hypothesized that if deciding to be honest is a conscious process—the result of resisting temptation—the areas of the brain associated with self-control and critical thinking would light up when subjects told the truth. If it is automatic, those areas would remain dark.

What they found is that honesty is an automatic process—but only for some people. Comparing scans from tests with and without the opportunity to cheat, the scientists found that for honest subjects, deciding to be honest took no extra brain activity. But for others, the dishonest group, both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.

Pretty telling, no?

Politics As you know, each state, no matter how large or small, gets two U. S. Senators. Hence, Wyoming is going to be overrepresented compared to, say, New York or California. So, when you compare the size of the states and the number of votes, nearly twice as many people voted for the 60 who caucus with the Democrats (58 D, 2 I) than voted for the Republicans. So if the Rs whine and moan about being rolled over: hey, blame the voters:

Here’s the numbers, including votes cast for appointees’ predecessors in CO, DE, IL, and NY:

* Votes cast for the 40 Republican senators: 44.2 million
* Votes cast for the 60 Democratic senators: 82.3 million

If you subtract votes cast for the 5 Democratic senators who would consider supporting filibuster, their vote total drops to 79.8 million. Whether or not you do that, though, the bottom-line is that nearly twice as many people voted for Democratic senators as Republicans.

The next time Republicans want to whine about getting disenfranchised, they oughta’ take it up with the voters who put the Democrats in office.

Here is a link to Rachel Maddow mocking the cry-baby Rs who now say that the health bill ought to get 75-80 votes.

Health Care Here is a handy list from DemConWatch that has links to articles about common misconceptions, lies and deceptions that are being tossed around.

Nate Silver: does an interesting analysis of progressives and blue dogs: will progressives back up their talk about voting “no” on any health care plan that is otherwise good but doesn’t include a public option?

What about the blue dogs: will they vote yes on a bill that they otherwise like but DOES have a public option?

Here is an interesting statement:

That notwithstanding, let’s go back to the branch on the tree where both proposition (A) and proposition (B) are both true: a sufficient majority of the Congress prefers a bill without a public option to the status quo, but also a majority prefers a bill with a public option to the status quo. This is where things get interesting and where a lot of the game-theory stuff comes into play. And if this is the case, then I would not underestimate the progressives.

From progressives’ point of view, they have been waiting many, many years for this moment — for an ostensibly fairly liberal Democratic president, an ostensibly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, an ostensibly lock-solid majority in the House, and a discredited opposition party. For a variety of reasons, the situation isn’t as good for progressives as it appears on paper and never was. But that doesn’t mean that expectations aren’t very high. And yet they’ve seen little progress on climate change, on gay rights, on torture policy, on regulating the banks — and now they’re running into a stiff headwind on health care. It’s 1994 all over again. To the progressive mind, it seems to be — pardon my French — the same old bullshit re-asserting itself. The moment is on the verge of being lost.

In poker, one of the situations when a player is most prone to go on tilt is when he had been on a winning streak and then begins to lose. It’s one thing when you simply aren’t getting cards all night and lose money slowly and steadily. When this happens, most poker players are pretty good at accepting that it just isn’t their night and will continue to play reasonably well, if perhaps a little overcautiously. But if you had been winning — if you had already “booked” the win in your mind — and then you start losing, things can get really, really ugly. You’ll make bold, rash, irrational gambles. Your big win will turn into a small win and, if you’re not careful, into a big loss.

In short, it is possible that we might get a bill that, say, tightly regulates the insurance industries that take part in the national menu (affordable premiums, no lifetime caps, no pre existing condition exclusions) that would give us a German or Swiss type system. If that happened, I’d say vote YES but many might go “do or die” based on the public option.

He notes that some of the blue dogs who say they are against the “public option” are actually just against reform, period.