What is wrong with this Picture (Dick Morris in action)

From here:

I have spent the last ten days out on the campaign trail in Colorado, Virginia, and Arkansas. Under the aegis of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative voter education group, I have been preaching the gospel that we cannot tolerate big spending liberals in Congress and that we need to elect conservatives who will oppose higher taxes.

Ok, so far. He is a conservative and thinks that taxes should be lower and government should be smaller. I disagree, but that is a position that many hold. That is why we have elections. But read on:

In Arkansas, the situation is just as positive. Democratic Congressman Mike Ross deserves a special place in Dante’s inferno for voting to pass Obamacare in committee, where his vote was the decisive one. Then, having passed on the opportunity to kill the bill when he could have, he blithely voted against it twice on the floor when his vote didn’t matter so he could fool his district into believing that he is a conservative. His opponent, Republican Beth Anne Rankin, http://www.bethannerankinforcongress.com, – a former Miss Arkansas – amassed a very strong record getting federal grants for Arkansas and developing innovative programs for education. If there is one race that deserves your support – and needs your donations – this is it!

Hmm, amassing a strong record for grants means that the government is funding something…and the money comes from…???? WHO is the conservative here?
(ps: why is being Miss Arkansas a political qualification? )

Such hypocrisy!

20 July 2010 (knee rehab)

30 minutes on the home treadmill: 2.3 miles or about 13 minutes per mile average. 10 minutes on the bike afterward; also crunches, leg lifts, scissor kicks, stretches. While completely warm I can touch the 2 CD case with the back of the knee but I can’t when “cold”.

Progress continues; there is still some warmth and swelling but less of it.

20 July 2010 (non-knee edition :-) )

Photos and stories: this story about “watching porn makes women more likely to be raped” is worth reading. Note: I have no stake in this; I don’t read/watch porn. The reason is that what I enjoy seeing is out there at any beach volleyball match, yoga class, swim meet or running race. But I understand that isn’t the same for everyone.

But I admit that I enjoy the photo that came with the article:

To be honest, when I see this photo, I don’t think of a woman watching porn; I see a woman on a business/conference trip just catching up on e-mail, facebook, browsing her favorite sites, etc.

Nutrition: it is a paradox that in the United States, many of the poor people are fat. One reason is that it can be expensive to eat nutritiously:

She noted that almost a third of U.S. children are overweight.

“Good nutrition at school is more important than ever,” she told the chefs. “A major key to giving our children a healthy future will be to pass a strong child nutrition bill.” [...]
n an exchange at a House hearing this month with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) raised other concerns.

“I have no doubt there are kids that go to school hungry,” he said. “But I have to admit, every time I hear that we have an obesity problem and everybody’s going hungry, how do you reconcile the two?”

Vilsack said they’re not all that different. He said there’s a similarity between low-income families trying to stretch scarce food dollars with high-calorie processed foods, “and youngsters who are just flat out not getting fed because their parents don’t have the resources to feed them.”

Cassidy said he wasn’t sure he followed that reasoning. And he might still be confused if he took a trip to the Williamsons’ kitchen in Carlisle, where contradictions swirl about like stew. The refrigerator and pantry are often filled with food — but the family sometimes has to go to the local soup kitchen to make ends meet.

Hard To Make Good Decisions When You’re Hungry

When asked, Alex says he worries about food all the time, and that he’s always hungry. But later, he admits he has enough to eat. It’s just not always what he wants. He says he especially doesn’t like it when his mother makes Brussels sprouts for dinner.

His 14-year-old sister, Beanna, tries to explain.

“He more or less just worries about if there’s going to be enough food that he likes or if we have something that he likes,” she says. “He’s really picky about what he wants.”

As Beanna talks, Alex goes to the refrigerator for some chocolate. He gets upset when his sister tells him he can only have one piece.

It’s not that uncommon for an 8-year-old to prefer chocolate over Brussels sprouts. But Livas, of the local food pantry, says a good diet is especially important for the poor, as a first step toward addressing their other problems, with things like work, health care and education. She says it’s hard to make good decisions when you’re hungry.

Think about it: I eat bagels (3.50 for 6), orange juice (usually on sale for 5 dollars a gallon), soy milk (3.25 for a half gallon), fresh bananas (50 to 70 cents a pound), apples, and sugar free peanut butter (2.75 per jar). Those prices add up if one has a large family.

But nutrition is one reason I can hold a job and stay physically active, which enables me to stay healthy (save a orthopedic injury or two that most of us eventually get).

More on health
Remember the controversy over breast cancer tests for women in their 40′s (yes, this headline is misleading, at best)? The idea is that testing women via a mammogram at too young of an age yields lots of false positives which might be causing more harm than good.

This article demonstrates one of the problems with false positives:

Now she was being told the pathologist had made a mistake. Her new doctor was certain she never had the disease, called ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S. It had all been unnecessary — the surgery, the radiation, the drugs and, worst of all, the fear.

“Psychologically, it’s horrible,” Ms. Long said. “I never should have had to go through what I did.”

Like most women, Ms. Long had regarded the breast biopsy as the gold standard, an infallible way to identify cancer. “I thought it was pretty cut and dried,” said Ms. Long, who is a registered nurse.

As it turns out, diagnosing the earliest stage of breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and case-by-case disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant, according to an examination of breast cancer cases by The New York Times.

Advances in mammography and other imaging technology over the past 30 years have meant that pathologists must render opinions on ever smaller breast lesions, some the size of a few grains of salt. Discerning the difference between some benign lesions and early stage breast cancer is a particularly challenging area of pathology, according to medical records and interviews with doctors and patients.

In short, even competent pathologists can do everything right and STILL make a wrong diagnosis; the diagnosis process itself, at too early of a stage, is plagued by randomness.

Science

It is the adults that have the problem with superstition:

Politics
This is a great ad by the Democrats:

19 July 2010: Posts for the day

Sarah Palin’s latest “hits”: yes, she really did say these things.

A sample:

“[Barack and Michelle Obama] have power in their words. They could refudiate what it is that this group is saying.”
—On the NAACP charge of racism in the Tea Party movement, The Sean Hannity Show, Fox News, July 14, 2010

“We have a President, perhaps for the very first time since the founding of our republic, who doesn’t appear to believe that America is the greatest earthly force for good the world has ever known.”
—Facebook note, June 30, 2010

Economics
The Republicans are claiming that President Bush left the economy in good shape. Paul Krugman writes:

OK, even by contemporary standards, this is rich: the official Republican stance is now apparently that Bush left behind a budget that was in pretty good shape. Mitch McConnell:

The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.

They really do think that we’re idiots.

So, that 3.2 percent number comes from here (pdf). Where’s the bamboozle? Let me count the ways.

First, they’re hoping that you won’t know that standard budget data is presented for fiscal years, which start on October 1 of the previous calendar year. So this isn’t the “last year of the Bush administration” — they’ve conveniently lopped off everything that happened post-Lehman — TARP and all.
[...]

Can we agree that the deficit in the first quarter of 2009 — Obama didn’t even take office until Jan. 20, the ARRA wasn’t even passed until Feb. 17, and essentially no stimulus funds had been spent — had nothing to do with Obama’s polices, and was entirely a Bush legacy? Yet the deficit had already surged to almost 9 percent of GDP. Even in 2009 II, Obama’s policies had barely begun to take effect, and the deficit was already over 10 percent of GDP.

What this chart really tells us is what you should have known already: the deficit is overwhelmingly the result of the economic slump, not Obama policies. But the usual suspects want to fool you.

I’d like to think that the raw dishonesty of this latest Bush defense would be obvious to everyone. But after the past decade, I’ve stopped believing such things. They think we’re idiots — and they may be right.

FAIL
Driving FAIL, but tight jeans WIN.

Parenting FAIL (aka “Natural Selection in action”)

Day Trip to Nauvoo, IL

Here are some shots of our daytrip to Nauvoo, IL. Note the swing bridge from Ft. Madison into Illinois. The Barbara and Olivia shot is at the Joseph Smith home on the Community of Christ site (formerly Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints).

Here are a few things I’ve noticed: both the “regular” LDS and the Community of Christ groups put a ton of emphasis on Emma Smith and none, zero on Joseph Smith’s other wives.

The LDS visitor’s center had a painting of Smith “translating” the Golden Plates. Missing were the seer stones. Also, Smith’s arrest was reported. Not mentioned was the press he had burned.

But, this was an important part of Illinois history, and turning Nauvoo into a city was an impressive engineering feat.

If you visit Nauvoo, I’d recommend visiting both church sites: the Historic Nauvoo Visitor’s Center (run by the LDS church, founded by those who followed Brigham Young after Joseph Smith’s death; they are in Salt Lake City) and the Community of Christ Joseph Smith Historic Site (those who followed Joseph Smith III; their center is in Independence, MO.).

Though both are full of superstition and woo, the Community of Christ, while much, much, much smaller in size and influence, appear to be more reasonable. They even ordain women into the priesthood.