Barack Obama: why I like him so much and others don’t.

Great article here:

IF YOU have waited to see Barack Obama lose his cool, your moment has come. After the president finished giving the interview published in the October 15 issue of Rolling Stone, he charged back into the room to deliver a parting salvo. Stabbing at the air, Obama berated Democrats for “sitting on their hands complaining.” He even questioned their motives. “If people now want to take their ball and go home,” he said, “that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

How has it come to this—the president publicly doubting the motives of his own political base? Consider the grievance that stoked his anger: that progressives are unwilling to make the compromises necessary to achieve anything. Obama mocked the Left’s attitude toward health care reform: “Well, gosh, we’ve got this historic health care legislation that we’ve been trying to get for 100 years, but it didn’t have every bell and whistle that we wanted right now, so let’s focus on what we didn’t get instead of what we got.”

Saying this aloud may not help Obama. But his point is revealing. Obama and America are disenchanted today less because they have different values within the American political spectrum than because they have different orientations toward politics as a whole. More than any American president within memory, Barack Obama embodies the “ethic of responsibility” identified by the sociologist Max Weber in his lecture Politics as a Vocation. Obama weighs possible consequences carefully and tries to produce the best result. This comes in contrast to the “ethic of ultimate ends” favored by large swaths of the American public.

The president’s detractors—from the Tea Party to his progressive base—prefer moral imperatives to the weighing of consequences. Do what is right, they say, and if others lack the insight to follow, that’s their problem. Foreseeable consequences are beside the point. To Obama, this posture has always seemed like empty moralizing masquerading as morality, a rejection of politics itself. What seems truly right, to him, is to act in ways likely to make this world better, not to insist on noble extremes that will backfire. [...]

Follow the link to more examples. I should put forth the caveat though: sometimes, the correct answer is at one extreme or another; e. g., I agree with Paul Krugman that the stimulus was too small to be successful.

But take health care: sure, I’d like “single payer” but if things were fixed so that poor people could see a doctor when they needed to, I am happy. Yes, I know, the devil is in the details (would care be overused? what sort of rationing? etc.)

When You Hear “Obama has X Democrats” in Congress Remember…

Many of those (so called) Democrats are like this:

“57 Democrats” is nothing, nothing, nothing, like 57 Republicans.

Hmmm

A study finds that there is a positive correlation (in women) between anal sex and orgasms. Hmmm, this doesn’t make evolutionary sense.

My guess is that this subset of women don’t have hemorrhoids.

In all honesty, lots of conjectures are tossed around; I came to it via a friend’s facebook post.

What evidence would make you believe in God?

Jerry Coyne asks the question; if this interests you, surf here and jump in.

I gave an answer in terms of believing in a sky-daddy, request granting deity (e. g., I’d believe if, say, I was given a ‘blessing” and all of a sudden I could bench press 600 pounds, run a 2:10 marathon, do Nobel Prize winning physics, or if I were shown 10-20 SPECIFIC, highly improbable predictions (e. g., someone told me NOW that, say, a magnitude x.y earthquake would strike location z at 1345 GMT on December 3, 2010), or if, say, 1000 amputees in New York City were instantly healed as we all watched.

As far as “creative force” deities: I am more of a skeptical agnostic here; that would be a harder sell than a wish-granting sky-daddy deity.

IL-18 US House Race

Any Democrat who runs in the IL-18 faces an uphill fight; the district has gone Republican once over the past 100 years or so.

Here is who I am backing:

I don’t understand why she doesn’t explain her own background, which IS impressive. She doesn’t even attack Shock’s actual voting record either:

This attack ad is ok:

But these are pretty lame:

She does say something about the issues here:

Hirner criticized Schock for arriving at some events in the district in a helicopter.

“That’s not how people live,” she said. “He has focused on himself, on his own media and marketability rather than focusing on the needs of the people who he was elected to represent.”

Schock’s campaign did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Hirner said a lot of the discussion around President Barack Obama’s health care was “hyperbole” and said she favors much of the health care bill, particularly provisions that bar children who have pre-existing conditions from being denied health insurance and prevent insurers from dropping people when they get sick.

She also favors Obama’s plan to extend the Bush tax only for families making under $250,000 and individuals making under $200,000 and would vote for more government spending to create jobs.

While many believe government should have to balance its budget just like a household, they also should consider that everyday people take on debt themselves to buy homes and cars, she said.

“That’s a deficit,” Hirner said.

Schock voted against Obama’s stimulus plan, wants all of the Bush tax cuts extended and wants to repeal the health care reform law Congress passed late last year.

This is how I wrote about her:

I’d like to call attention to D.K. Hirner, who is running for the congressional seat in the 18th District.

Ms. Hirner has an unusual mix of professional experiences ranging from two stints as executive director of the Illinois Environmental Regulatory Group to having top jobs for two governors (Mel Carnahan and Bob Holden in Missouri). She is also a member of the Illinois Bar Association.

She is used to fighting for people and understands that while personal responsibility is important, it isn’t always sufficient in these harsh economic times. Her effort is definitely a bottom-up, grass roots campaign; if she wins she will not be beholden to any political or special interest group.

If you think that the answer to our current economic problems is not another tax cut for the wealthiest among us, and if you think that our representative ought to work with the president rather than merely obstruct, she is your candidate!

11 October 2010 Rehabilitation

I mostly lifted today:

Squats, single legged (Smith machine): 10 x 45, 10 x 95 10 x 95
Squats, both legs: 10 x 135 (got depth)
Leg press (kept the legs slightly bent!) 30 x 180, 20 x 270, 20 x 360

Sit ups 4 x 25 (on the incline, 1, 2, 3, 4 as usual)
back exercises
Leg extensions: 3 sets of 10
Leg curls: 3 sets of 10
toe: 3 sets of 20
back: 3 sets of 20
leg lifts (vertical) 3 sets of 20

Arm bike (4 miles; did 13 minutes anyway)

arm curls: 3 sets of 15 with 15 (dumbbells)
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 with 120
rows: 8, 8, 7 with 90 on each arm (180 total)
military press: 20 on the machine, 20 x 20 with dumbbells
bench press: 30 x 25 dumbbells
rotator cuff: used the pulleys, dumbbells (5) and loose plates (2.5)

Yes, the weights are very, very, very light but I need to build up at a snails pace

11 October 2010 (AM)

Religion

Christopher Hitchens: explains why there may well be a core truth to the Jesus of Nazareth story (e. g., some “Jesus” did exist)

Politics/Economy

This really reflects that we are NOT a national party; 48 Democratic House seats and 13 Democratic Senate seats are in McCain Congressional districts or in red states.

Economy
In the job misery section: employers can be hyper-selective in this market; just because the jobs are being advertised doesn’t mean that they are being filled.

Of course, being unemployed is a nightmare for someone my age or older.

And of course, there is the “purple squirrel phenomenon”.

So the problem is that government has gotten too big and spent too much, right? Wrong.

Here’s the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can’t create jobs.

Here’s what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn’t kicked in yet, so that can’t be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. Where’s all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened.

To be fair, spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, has risen — because, in case you haven’t noticed, there has been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help. And there were also substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions, although it appears that the government will get most of its money back. But when people denounce big government, they usually have in mind the creation of big bureaucracies and major new programs. And that just hasn’t taken place.

Consider, in particular, one fact that might surprise you: The total number of government workers in America has been falling, not rising, under Mr. Obama. A small increase in federal employment was swamped by sharp declines at the state and local level — most notably, by layoffs of schoolteachers. Total government payrolls have fallen by more than 350,000 since January 2009. [...]

This fact, however, raises two questions. First, we know that Congress enacted a stimulus bill in early 2009; why didn’t that translate into a big rise in government spending? Second, if the expansion never happened, why does everyone think it did?

Part of the answer to the first question is that the stimulus wasn’t actually all that big compared with the size of the economy. Furthermore, it wasn’t mainly focused on increasing government spending. Of the roughly $600 billion cost of the Recovery Act in 2009 and 2010, more than 40 percent came from tax cuts, while another large chunk consisted of aid to state and local governments. Only the remainder involved direct federal spending.

And federal aid to state and local governments wasn’t enough to make up for plunging tax receipts in the face of the economic slump. So states and cities, which can’t run large deficits, were forced into drastic spending cuts, more than offsetting the modest increase at the federal level.

The answer to the second question — why there’s a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn’t — is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been effective in part because the Obama administration hasn’t offered an effective reply.

If you are a liberal, VOTE, Dammit!

10 October posts (pm)

Moral dilemmas: humans tend to be consistent at how they respond to these. Here is an interesting article.

Thanksgiving: the religious types don’t seem to understand those who don’t believe in deities that require thanks be given to them. I admit that reminding myself of the good in my life or the good luck that I’ve had IS a useful thing to do, but there is no imaginary deity to “thank”.

Jerry Coyne: here is his op-ed on how science and religion are incompatible:

[...]The religious approach to understanding inevitably results in different faiths holding incompatible “truths” about the world. Many Christians believe that if you don’t accept Jesus as savior, you’ll burn in hell for eternity. Muslims hold the exact opposite: Those who see Jesus as God’s son are the ones who will roast. Jews see Jesus as a prophet, but not the messiah. Which belief, if any, is right? Because there’s no way to decide, religions have duked it out for centuries, spawning humanity’s miserable history of religious warfare and persecution.

In contrast, scientists don’t kill each other over matters such as continental drift. We have better ways to settle our differences. There is no Catholic science, no Hindu science, no Muslim science — just science, a multicultural search for truth. The difference between science and faith, then, can be summed up simply: In religion faith is a virtue; in science it’s a vice.

But don’t just take my word for the incompatibility of science and faith — it’s amply demonstrated by the high rate of atheism among scientists. While only 6% of Americans are atheists or agnostics, the figure for American scientists is 64%, according to Rice professor Elaine Howard Ecklund’s book, Science vs. Religion. Further proof: Among countries of the world, there is a strong negative relationship between their religiosity and their acceptance of evolution. Countries like Denmark and Sweden, with low belief in God, have high acceptance of evolution, while religious countries are evolution-intolerant. Out of 34 countries surveyed in a study published in Science magazine, the U.S., among the most religious, is at the bottom in accepting Darwinism: We’re No. 33, with only Turkey below us. Finally, in a 2006 Time poll a staggering 64% of Americans declared that if science disproved one of their religious beliefs, they’d reject that science in favor of their faith.

‘Venerable superstition’

In the end, science is no more compatible with religion than with other superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don’t talk about reconciling science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it’s the most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially powerful.

Why does this matter? Because pretending that faith and science are equally valid ways of finding truth not only weakens our concept of truth, it also gives religion an undeserved authority that does the world no good. For it is faith’s certainty that it has a grasp on truth, combined with its inability to actually find it, that produces things such as the oppression of women and gays, opposition to stem cell research and euthanasia, attacks on science, denial of contraception for birth control and AIDS prevention, sexual repression, and of course all those wars, suicide bombings and religious persecutions.[...]

Economy What gives with the scapegoating? Robert Reich:

Yet Democrats are entering the same terrain when they blame China. According to the New York Times, House speaker Nancy Pelosi has been encouraging Democratic candidates to go after China, after internal polls showed voters increasingly willing to blame China for our problems and strongly in favor of eliminating tax breaks for companies that do business in China.

Democrats must know high unemployment in America has little or nothing to do with China. Yes, China should allow the yuan to rise further against the dollar. But China’s under-valued currency isn’t the reason we’ve lost 15 million jobs since the end of 2007. No, the tax code shouldn’t reward companies for relocating jobs there. But this tax break is barely relevant to the situation we’re in.

Our jobs crisis is due to the collapse of demand in the U.S. after the housing bubble burst. No longer able to borrow against the rising value of their homes, the vast American middle and working class can no longer spend enough to keep the economy going.

If Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) want to blame something, blame America’s record level of inequality – an almost unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top, and a smaller proportion for the vast middle.

The evidence is all around us. It’s no mere coincidence that 1928 and 2007 marked historical high-water points for shares of national income going to the top 1 percent. Today’s median wage is now 5 percent lower than it was at the start of the decade, taking inflation into account, while top earners are doing better than ever. The core assets of most Americans are their homes, whose values are now 20 to 40 percent below what they were three years ago, while the key assets of America’s wealthy are shares of stocks and bonds, whose values have declined far less. The official rate of unemployment is 4.4 percent for college graduates but 10 percent for those with only high school degrees and almost 15 percent for high school dropouts.

I’m not suggesting Democrats blame the rich for their success. Most came by their high earnings and wealth honestly. And surely a vibrant economy requires that entrepreneurs be rewarded for hard work and valuable insight.

He goes on to warn against the appeal of xenophobia.

Am I THAT bad?

Women are now sending me photos like this one:

and this one:

Am I THAT bad?

10 October 2010 Rehabilitation

Well, decided to walk a loop at McNaughton Park (10 miles) to remind myself of the course. The knee felt fine though it got a bit gimpy at about 9-9.5 miles into it.

The “bottoms” and the next section were the toughest for me; I didn’t have the confidence to jump over things and there were a few leafy areas.

Still, there was almost no mud and the creeks were about as low as I can remember them.
The course took me 3:22 (50 minutes at Totem, 1:19 at the Bridge, 2:40 at the second bridge).

I am icing my shoulder and knee though nothing is really that wrong…I am merely out of shape.

I had the trail to myself (save some disc golfers toward the end) and saw some deer. Pretty day.