9 September 09 PM

Why I am not a UU.

Basically, UUs more or less have many of the social values that I have. But there is a tolerance of nonsense. Reason is welcomed, so long as it is used in deriving private spirituality. But it is not welcomed if one uses it to judge/weigh the beliefs of others; for example saying that, say, “dousing is nonsense” would be a faux pas there.

Nate Silver: does a detailed analysis of where the public option is likely to be supported, and supplies a cool electoral style map.

Jerry Coyne: hilarious cartoon about how “intelligent design” works.

Space telescope: back on line…and doing its job! Surf there to see a cool image.

Social Conservative Family Values!

Workout notes I still have a cough, so I took it easy and just swam.
5 x 100 on 2 (easy), then 1000 in 16:29 (4:09/4:07/4:06/4:07); stayed steady. This was my fastest 1000 since January 23 (ok, I’ve been pretty slow) and in line with what I was doing last fall.

Republican Family Values

More here:

SACRAMENTO–Freshmen legislators arriving in Sacramento receive advice from veteran
 politicians about the intricacies of working in California’s capital. One of those tips is to remember that microphones broadcasting legislative debates can also capture embarrassing, career-ending personal admissions if a politician isn’t careful. Michael D. Duvall, Orange County’s 72nd Assembly
District representative, must have forgotten the warning.

In July–two days after Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Republican leader Sam Blakeslee put Duvall on the Rules Committee that oversees member ethics–the second-term, conservative, Republican assemblyman sat in a public hearing and vividly described lewd details about his trysts with a female lobbyist whose clients had business before another committee on which
 Duvall sits.


Duvall, speaking to a relatively mum Republican colleague seated to his left, apparently had no idea his dais microphone became live beginning about a minute before the start of a cable-televised committee hearing. He was captured in the middle of recounting portions of an affair.


“She wears little eye-patch underwear,” said Duvall, who is married with two children. “So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!”

Yes, this clown is a full “family values”, protect the sanctity of marriage moron.

During his political career, Duvall has unabashedly espoused conservative
 principles and is known as a partisan Republican with a knack for theatrics:
 He has noisily driven his Harley-Davidson motorcycle to functions. In 2008, 
Duvall blasted efforts to condone gay marriage. Legislatively, he has 
proposed bills to aid the insurance industry and government contractors 
feeding off the state’s massive transportation kitty.
 He has offered a law to alter the First Amendment rights of Americans by
 banning anti-war activists from putting the names of fallen soldiers on 
T-shirts with messages such as “Bush lied” on the front and “They died” on the back; he observed that the dead soldiers fought to protect freedom, and “opportunists” should not be allowed to “exploit” the sacrifices with political messages opposing war.


Such thinking impressed certain constituencies. Earlier this year, the man who never graduated from high school received “100 percent” approval scores 
by the California Republican Assembly, the state’s leading conservative outfit, and the Capitol Resource Institute (CRI), a fierce guardian of traditional family values.


Health Care Videos…short and sweet

Health note: the cough persists though it is slightly better. I’ll swim later.

Oh yes, watch Tancredo call someone a “goofball”. Pot, meet Kettle.

Education: people talked about President Obama’s speech, which as generic and actually quite good when it came to telling students to take responsibility for their own learning.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also gave an education speech:

SECRETARY CLINTON: I am so happy to be here today. And I thank your principal for that wonderful introduction. And I’m so pleased that I had a chance to be here with you on the first day of school for the Manhattan Charter School. I know tomorrow all the students from PS142 will be here, and this building will just be filled with boys and girls who are ready to learn a lot.

And it is exciting for me to have this chance to come here today to talk with you and answer your questions. Now when I walked in, one of the boys here said, “I have a question for you.” So I hope a lot of you have questions for me because – oh, I see the papers (inaudible). I want to talk with you about what is on your mind.

But first, let me thank your principal. Thank you so much Principal DePolo for your leading of this school, all of the faculty and staff of the Manhattan Charter School. I also want to thank the board of the school which is here. I want to recognize Mike Mulgrew from the UFT, and so many others who really work hard every day on behalf of the education of our children – Christina Grant, Ira Greenberg, William Colavito, Michelle Lewis, Jonas Chartock, Paul O’Neill – and all of you who are part of making sure that every boy and girl has a chance to live up to his or her God-given potential.

Now, I would imagine that many of you are thinking about what this year is going to be like, what are you going to learn, what plans are you going to make, what you believe you’re going to be learning and doing and (inaudible) as the year goes by. Well, there is somebody who really does care a lot about what happens to our young people, and that’s our President, Barack Obama. And he is going to give a message to students all across the United States later today. And he’ll talk about how important it is what our teachers and our students do, because ultimately, how much you learn, how you feel about yourself is really up to you. And so President Obama wants to talk with you about his own experience and about what he hopes that each of you can achieve. He asked me to come today to speak personally with you because your education is so important to our country.

Now when I was your age, I think I was in fifth grade. Are there any fifth graders here? Oh, good. When I was in fifth grade, we had a president by the name of President Eisenhower. Now President Eisenhower gave us a very important message when I was a fifth grader. He basically said that he hoped that the boys and girls of America would study more math and science because our country needed people who could help us send a man to the moon, help us have breakthroughs in new kinds of scientific discoveries. And my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Kraus, came into our classroom one day and she said, “Boys and girls, the President of the United States wants you to learn more math and science.” Well, I was pretty excited to think that the President of the United States, way over in Washington, D.C. in the White House, was hoping that we would learn more.

Well, President Obama hopes that each of you will learn more. Now, I was never great at math or science, but I felt like it was important that I try my best. And that’s really what President Obama and I want each of you to feel, because there are so many opportunities for those who get an education.

How many of you want to grow up and graduate from high school? How many of you want to go to college? That’s wonderful. Well, I hope that all of you understand because it’s important not only for yourselves, but for each and every person in our country that our young people like you get the very best possible education you can. Your parents and your grandparents, your big brothers and sisters and everybody knows that it’s important that you’re here today. And I hope that this year will be the most exciting year that you’ve had.

8 September 09 (pm)

Posts
Here is rational Republican response to the Obama school speech.

Bad Political Reporting (from Nate Silver): don’t expect headlines to get it right:

“Obama is fast losing white voters’ support”.

A reasonable person might expect the punchline to be either that the manifest decline in Obama’s approval ratings is particularly steep among white voters, or that race-related issues are responsible for Obama’s current slump. A reasonable person would then click on the chart accompanying the article and discover…

That President Obama’s drop in approval ratings among almost every subgroup of white voters is between 9-11 points among white non Republicans and 12 points among white Republicans. The overall drop: 10 points. Duh.

Health Care

Paul Krugman: what should the President do during his speech tomorrow:

President Obama will give his big health-care speech tomorrow. Let’s hope he does it right.

What does that mean? It means not playing professor; it means not having the speech read as if it were written by a committee (like that woefully weak op-ed in the Times a couple of weeks back); it means showing real passion about health care, which has been sadly lacking so far. [...]

Oh, and about the public option: yes, it should be in the speech — and not just because it will lower costs. From personal discussions I know that the individual mandate really gets peoples’ hackles up,because they see it as a giveaway to the insurance industry (you may recall that many Obama supporters made precisely that case during the primary). Yet the individual mandate is necessary — so it’s crucial to have the counter-argument that look, people can choose the public option. Yes, some senators will fight against that option tooth and nail — but that’s for later.

What I hope Obama realizes is that this speech should not be aimed at Kent Conrad or Susan Collins. A national address is not where you do your backroom deals. This speech has to be aimed at regaining the trust of the American people. It needs to be something with vision and sweep, not an item-by-item detailing of what the administration is prepared to concede.

He notes that we should call the Republicans out on their claim that somehow they are the defenders of Medicare.

What about the public option:

Paul Krugman:

The first is that I suspect that Ezra and others understate the extent to which even a public plan with limited bargaining power will help hold down overall costs. Private insurers do pay providers more than Medicare does — but that’s only part of the reason Medicare has lower costs. There’s also the huge overhead of the private insurers, much of which involves marketing and attempts to cherry-pick clients — and even with community rating, some of that will still go on. A public plan would probably be able to attract clients with much less of that.

Second, a public plan would probably provide the only real competition in many markets.

Third — and this is where I am getting a very bad feeling about the idea of throwing in the towel on the public option — is the politics. Remember, to make reform work we have to have an individual mandate. And everything I see says that there will be a major backlash against the idea of forcing people to buy insurance from the existing companies. That backlash was part of what got Obama the nomination! Having the public option offers a defense against that backlash.

What worries me is not so much that the backlash would stop reform from passing, as that it would store up trouble for the not-too-distant future. Imagine that reform passes, but that premiums shoot up (or even keep rising at the rates of the past decade.) Then you could all too easily have many people blaming Obama et al for forcing them into this increasingly unaffordable system. A trigger might fix this — but the funny thing about such triggers is that they almost never get pulled.

How do we get a public option in? Robert Reich:

The White House is looking for a way to be in favor of a public option but also get enough Blue Dog Democrats — many of whom hail from swing districts and states, and therefore need some cover — to vote for it. One such cover is a Republican Senator from Maine, named Olympia Snowe. If she votes for the bill, Blue Dogs can calm their constituents — who have been worked up into a lather by the right — by saying “you see? Even a prominent Republican senator is voting for this.” [...]

The beauty of Snowe’s proposal is that it seems to offer Blue Dogs a way out and liberal Democrats a way in. Nobody has to vote for or against a public option. The public option just happens automatically if its purposes — wider coverage and lower costs — aren’t achieved. And the trigger idea seems so, well, centrist.

The problem is twofold. First, it’s impossible to design airtight goals for coverage and cost reductions that won’t be picked over by five thousand lobbyists and as many lawyers and litigators even if, at the end of the grace period, it’s apparent to everyone else that the goals aren’t met. Washington is a vast cesspool of well-paid specialists who know how to stop anything resembling a “trigger.” Believe me, they will. [...]

The best way to give Blue Dogs cover is for the President to explain clearly and boldly why the public option is essential to health care reform, and why he’s ready to veto any bill that doesn’t include it. That’s also the only way to give the nation a good chance of getting true health care reform. Hopefully, that’s what he’ll do Wednesday evening.

As an aside, Reich has a nice summary of previous attempts.

Here is a pessimistic view of what might happen.