30 April 2011 am

Well, later I’ll run (or attempt to run) a university 5K. It is in honor of a friend who died of cancer last year.
Though it is not raining, it is windy (20 mph, gusts to 25 mph); we’ve just had so much wind around here. True, we haven’t had the monster storms that have pounded the states and regions south of us. But the weather has been unstable all year long.

I’ve read conclusions of the “this is due to climate change” variety. Of course, isolated storms or weird weather is NOT in and of it self evidence of climate change. But having a long period in which one averages far more storms than normal would be evidence.

So many, including those who accept the fact that we’ve had climate change, don’t understand the difference between weather (what we see when we look out the window) and climate (long term average of the affects).

Posts

The President speaks of energy and subsidies for oil and gas companies.

The Senate: beware of these compromise bills which are really just about embracing what the Republicans want:

That’s the proposal emerging in the Senate from Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee and also Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri. It would get the deficit down not by raising taxes on the rich but by capping federal spending.

If Congress failed to stay under the cap, the budget would be automatically cut.

According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the McCaskill/Corker plan would require $800 billion of cuts in 2022 alone. That’s the equivalent of eliminating Medicare entirely, or the entire Department of Defense.

Obviously the Defense Department wouldn’t disappear, so what would go? Giant cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and much of everything else Americans depend on.

It’s the Republican plan with lipstick. It would have the same exact result. But by disguising it with caps and procedures, Republicans can avoid saying what they’re intending to do.

President Obama: no, he isn’t a Republican:

Rather than being an early 1990s moderate Republican, Mr. Obama is a prototypical, early 2010s Democrat. And although a 2010s Democrat shares more in common with a 1990s Republican than with the Republicans of today, they are still far from alike. [...]

A system called DW-NOMINATE, developed by a group of six political scientists, rates each member of Congress on a scale from negative 1 (very liberal on economic issues) to positive 1 (very conservative) based on their roll call votes. The system also creates a score for each president based on cases in which the outcome he desired from a vote in Congress was clearly articulated.

According to the system, the score for the average Democrat in the 111th Congress was -0.382 (negative 0.382), although there was a fairly significant range, from very liberal Democrats like Dennis Kucinich (-0.612) and Barbara Lee (-0.743) to moderates like Heath Shuler (-0.100) and Ben Nelson (-0.030).

Mr. Obama’s score of -0.399 was very close to the average, splitting the difference between his party’s liberal and moderate wings. Mr. Obama typically does leave some room to his left. On initiatives ranging from health care to financial regulation, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, as well as many liberal bloggers, thinkers, and activists, have complained that his positions concede too much to the Republicans. But Mr. Obama’s positions also generally draw some complaints from moderate, Blue Dog Democrats, and do not always win their votes.

I’ll repost a chart from this Nate Silver article, but I highly recommend reading all of it:

More Politics: Here is an article about Ron Paul and how he does NOT run away from financial support from KKK-Neo Nazi types. It is true that this support is only a small fraction of his support and that, in general, his supporters don’t approve of the KKK-racist points of view. But Mr. Paul doesn’t give them their money back either though he does say that he doesn’t approve of them:

Such is the luxury of those who have no chance of winning.

Advertisement