Politics: Winning vs. Losing

It appears to me that many of my political friends would rather lose noisily than to win a series of incremental victories quietly.

Perhaps I am wrong?

13 April 2011: topics (no sweat and no spandex….)

I’ll blog a bit about two of my favorite non-sports and non-spandex topics: science and economics.

Science
Here is a post about an evolutionary mechanism called Lateral Gene Transfer; this mechanism involves one species taking genes directly from another. This doesn’t significantly affect the tree of life for eukaryotes (animals whose cells have a nucleus) but it can affect such trees for, say, bacteria.

Astronomy
This is a fun post from Daily Kos about a recently discovered gamma ray source directed at the earth (from a LOOOONG way away)

Politics
Economics
Taxes: Republicans often whine about the “poor not paying taxes”. It is true that some fall under the limit to pay income taxes. But there is social security tax, FICA taxes and sales taxes….and these take quite a bit of a bite out of the budget. Also the wealthy’s tax burden has done down…and while they might pay a disproportionate amount of income tax, this isn’t true of other taxes. See these (and other) facts here. I’ll provide a sample:

2. The wealthiest Americans don’t carry the burden.

This is one of those oft-used canards. Sen. Rand Paul, the tea party favorite from Kentucky, told David Letterman recently that “the wealthy do pay most of the taxes in this country.”

The Internet is awash with statements that the top 1 percent pays, depending on the year, 38 percent or more than 40 percent of taxes.

It’s true that the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 38 percent of the federal income taxes in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available). But people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government.

Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes (known as payroll taxes) are paid mostly by the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. That’s because, once you reach $106,800 of income, you pay no more for Social Security, though the much smaller Medicare tax applies to all wages. Warren Buffett pays the exact same amount of Social Security taxes as someone who earns $106,800.

Paul Krugman, Paul Krugman
Have you guessed that I am a big follower of his?
He has been hard on Paul Ryan for good reason: his plan is a sham:

I’m already hearing some people saying, “Why don’t you subject Obama to the same kind of criticism you leveled at Ryan?’

The answer is, because Obama doesn’t deserve it.

Any budget proposal will have things you don’t find convincing. I’d certainly like to know more about Obama’s proposed elimination of tax loopholes; I’d like to know how we’re going to manage with the low levels of domestic discretionary spending envisioned.

But Obama isn’t proposing to somehow make $3 trillion in tax cuts revenue neutral. He isn’t proposing to shift from Medicare paying 70 percent of bills to vouchers worth only 30 percent. He isn’t claiming that we can shrink government outside the major social insurance programs — but including defense — to Calvin Coolidge levels.

Really, those who defend Ryan’s plans (with his projections of sub 3 percent unemployment) are really similar to creationists!

Krugman also finds it interesting that, according to a recent poll, is the Democrats that are more interested in Medicare cost control than Republicans!

President Obama
Yes, on many places like Daily Kos, President Obama takes a beating from vocal liberals. But this vocal group is a minority and a small minority at that; in the Gallup Presidential Approval tracker the President has 70 percent approval from conservative Democrats, 74 from moderate Democrats and 80 percent from liberal Democrats (and these numbers have remained fairly steady over the past year).

Here is how he compares with President Clinton and President Reagan at a similar time in their administration:

And yes, there are those who understand this.

Of course there are those who think that we are being duped by President Obama; that is, that we let ourselves believe that President Obama really wants to achieve progressive goals but can’t…when in fact he has no desire to achieve them.

Actually, that misreads many of us. I never wanted a noisy “give ‘em hell but end up losing honorably” personality (e. g., Senator Bernie Sanders). I always thought of President Obama as a cold eye pragmatist who wants us to find solutions that work and that can be arrived at in a reasonable amount of time. He has ALWAYS been a compromiser and he campaigned on “bringing us together” and “embracing any idea that might work”. He has never been about selling a liberal vision to America. And darn it, we are getting some good things (e. g. Health Care Reform, so what if it was Bob Dole’s plan?)

I long ago accepted that I am to the left of him.

Ok, what of his big budget speech? You can read the text here. Yes, he calls for more taxes on the rich. Paul Krugman appears to be relieved (or at least not as upset as he feared that he would be)

13 April: working out and fun….

Workout notes: I ran my Bradley Park Cornstalk loop plus the lower loop course in 56:32 (5.4 miles, or about 8.8 km); the first mile was 10:30 and the last just under 9:30; hence the (easily ran) middle 3.4 (hilly) was done in 36:30 or so. I got to see the sun come up; most of what bothered me was that I was so blasted slow.

One thing was funny: there was a couple on a bike built for two and the woman on the back of the bike asked me if I was a “building steam” person. Building Steam is a program to get people to be able to finish the 4 mile run….I sure hope that I didn’t look THAT bad. Perhaps she meant “instructor”, but probably not.

On a side note: I sometimes get grumpy when I am pushing. If there is another runner or “attempting to walk fast” walker who is out there working, I return a smile or greeting by a hand wave. But the hardy “GOOD MORNING’s” from someone who is barely expending any effort irritate the daylights out of me. I run or walk fast mostly to get away from people; I prefer the impersonal atmosphere of, say, the Chicago Lakeshore path or the Austin Hike and Bike trail.

Workout Two: over lunch, I walked a 4.5 mile course (Markin to the W. Peoria Cemetery) in 1:06:28

Yes, that makes 9.9 miles for the day, but I counted these as “5 miles” and “4 miles” respectively. Why did I do the second workout? It was sunny and I had the time…the weather was too good not to. I figured that I could spend this workout working on my feet and having fun on the big hill in the cemetery.

Upshot: though my quack doctor (physician assistant) gave me a clean bill of health (and yes, I really like her and my doctor as well), my athletic performances this year have been PATHETIC! Ok, I haven’t run any races or walked any, but I just feel all gummed up inside when I try to run. It is as if my internals don’t work anymore. I know, I have to remember that I went from October 2009 to November 2010 without running and my walking, well, it isn’t that bad considering.

Ok, I need some cheering up….

Maybe I’ll see her on one of my walks?

(click to see the image at the source, where there is a much larger image available)

And yes, beach volleyball season is near:

Click on the above to see many more such shots at the source.

Pawlenty is in.

Cool! I am going to enjoy this.

12 April 2011 PM

Posts for the day
Bad Idea Revisited
Remember the awful movie Red Dawn (the movie that had the Russian army invade the US that marching across the Bearing Strait, through Alaska and Canada, and the whole world going Communist? Well, they are remaking it…with a North Korean enemy. The film makers didn’t want to offend the Chinese.

Economics
Krugman on Ryan’s 5 point plan: three points are fake; the two that aren’t: give the rich another tax cut, and cut social programs for the poor.

Of course, coming from a Republican that can speak in complete sentences, it must be “serious” no matter how crazy the ideas are (see this Tom Tomorrow cartoon)

Of course, the big driver of costs is Medicare; it isn’t as if there is a huge defense budget that we can cut and thereby balance the rest of the budget.

Of course, there is a reason that Medicare is out of control, and it isn’t because it is a socialized program:

Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.

You have lower back pain? Almost 95% of such cases are best relieved through physical therapy. But doctors and hospitals routinely do expensive MRI’s, and then refer patients to orthopedic surgeons who often do even more costly surgery. Why? There’s not much money in physical therapy.

Your diabetes, asthma, or heart condition is acting up? If you go to the hospital, 20 percent of the time you’re back there within a month. You wouldn’t be nearly as likely to return if a nurse visited you at home to make sure you were taking your medications. This is common practice in other advanced countries. So why don’t nurses do home visits to Americans with acute conditions? Hospitals aren’t paid for it.

America spends $30 billion a year fixing medical errors – the worst rate among advanced countries. Why? Among other reasons because we keep patient records on computers that can’t share the data. Patient records are continuously re-written on pieces of paper, and then re-entered into different computers. That spells error.

Meanwhile, administrative costs eat up 15 to 30 percent of all healthcare spending in the United States. That’s twice the rate of most other advanced nations. Where does this money go? Mainly into collecting money: Doctors collect from hospitals and insurers, hospitals collect from insurers, insurers collect from companies or from policy holders.

A major occupational category at most hospitals is “billing clerk.” A third of nursing hours are devoted to documenting what’s happened so insurers have proof.

Here is more Robert Reich:

Science

Sometimes an accomplished scientist can go bad:

To reword the old political slogan for science: fame corrupts, and huge fame corrupts hugely. This isn’t always true, but if a scientist achieves tremendous fame and adulation, there’s always the temptation to think that what you say on every topic bears special weight and consideration. Such solipsism is especially likely to develop in those who, like Margulis, have to push a correct theory against the entrenched doubt and scorn of their colleagues.

And Margulis has become corrupted in this way. In the last couple decades she’s been going around casting doubt on modern evolutionary theory. She has said, for example, that modern evolutionary biology is “a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology” and that “Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations), is in a complete funk.” Since she’s famous, she’s invited many places, and often uses these occasions to dump on modern evolutionary biology. In this respect she may be worse for science than creationists, since her scientific credibility remains high. You may also remember that Margulis “handled” (i.e., allowing it to be published despite dissenting referees) the Williamson paper positing a hybrid origin of the lepidopteran life cycle (caterpillar then adult) through mating of an ancestral volant butterfly with a velvet worm. (The paper was subsequently debunked.) I suspect she forced it into publication because it fits her notion that symbiosis—and I suppose you can consider hybridization as something akin to symbiosis—is the overarching factor in evolution.

Margulis and her son, Dorion Sagan, even wrote a book on speciation, Acquiring Genomes, suggesting that the criticial factor in the origin of species was endosymbiosis. I was asked to review it for The New York Times, but it was so dreadful, so completely ignorant of decades of work on speciation (including observations that reproductive barriers nearly always map to genes, not cytoplasmic organelles), that, although I enjoy writing for the Times, I refused on this occasion. I didn’t want to publicize such a misguided book.

I read the interview in Discover Magazine (I subscribe and really like it) and wondered if this wasn’t a case of a good scientist going crackpot It happens in all fields.

Speaking of science, some biologists created a self-replicating RNA molecule:

One theory of the origin of life suggests that RNA coding is what gave the primitive cellular structure of early Earth the catalyst they needed to become life. With a Universe chock full of sugar there’s no reason that early RNA worlds have not been evolving in their own unique ways in many of the 100 billion galaxies estimated to exist in the observable Universe.

Meanwhile, back on Earth at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, have created synthetic molecules that copy genetic material. The enzyme, tC19Z, that has been synthesised could be an artificial version of one of the first enzymes that ever existed on our planet three billion years ago — and a clue to how life itself got started. Their goal is to create fully self-replicating RNA molecules in the lab.

The dominant theory of how life started involves the emergence in Earth’s early history of a self-replicator — the original molecule of life was an RNA that could make copies of other RNAs, including itself.

As evolution advanced, this self-replicating molecule ceased to exist, with the majority of Earth’s organisms using DNA to store their genetic information while using other enzymes to copy itself. [...]

Who will the GOP run in 2012?

Dick Morris

He has Ms. Bachmann, Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Romney and Mr. Huckabee running with, as a guess, Mr. Gingrich winning. He calls Huckabee, Gingrich and Bachmann as “credible” and capable of beating President Obama.

Too bad this video doesn’t come with a laugh track.

I think that this guy is a better candidate:

Though he’ll have trouble getting the nomination.

This is Mr. Pawlenty’s announcement.

Note: of course, it is the GOP that got us into this mess to begin with.

12 April 2011 AM

I slept in; I finally feel caught up on sleep. I hope to get in a short run and stretching session to make up for the missed yoga class.

Update: I ran 5 miles (cornstalk course in reverse order to the exit and back; this was slow, somewhat painful and sluggish. It was sunny and windy (as usual). I just felt as if I had super glue in my joint and in my blood stream. This is one of those “will I ever feel good again” type of runs.

Only one article right now, but this is an important one: what to do about the national debt and current deficits. The biggest driver: Medicare. The problem: when you bring this up, the Republicans scream about death panels but then offer a plan to kill medicare? This is what is going on (via Paul Krugman)

The whole budget debate, then, is a sham. House Republicans, in particular, are literally stealing food from the mouths of babes — nutritional aid to pregnant women and very young children is one of the items on their cutting block — so they can pose, falsely, as deficit hawks.

What would a serious approach to our fiscal problems involve? I can summarize it in seven words: health care, health care, health care, revenue.

Notice that I said “health care,” not “entitlements.” People in Washington often talk as if there were a program called Socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid, then focus on things like raising the retirement age. But that’s more anti-Willie Suttonism. Long-run projections suggest that spending on the major entitlement programs will rise sharply over the decades ahead, but the great bulk of that rise will come from the health insurance programs, not Social Security.

Ok, so what to do about Medicare?

I mean getting behind specific actions to rein in costs.

By that standard, the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission, whose work is now being treated as if it were the gold standard of fiscal seriousness, was in fact deeply unserious. Its report “was one big magic asterisk,” Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. So is the much-hyped proposal by Paul Ryan, the GOP’s supposed deep thinker du jour, to replace Medicare with vouchers whose value would systematically lag behind health care costs.

What’s supposed to happen when seniors find that they can’t afford insurance? What would real action on health look like? Well, it might include things like giving an independent commission the power to ensure that Medicare only pays for procedures with real medical value; rewarding health care providers for delivering quality care rather than simply paying a fixed sum for every procedure; limiting the tax deductibility of private insurance plans; and so on.

And what do these things have in common? They’re all in last year’s health reform bill.

That’s why I say that Obama gets too little credit. He has done more to rein in long-run deficits than any previous president. And if his opponents were serious about those deficits, they’d be backing his actions and calling for more; instead, they’ve been screaming about death panels.

And yes, it means higher taxes especially on the wealthy (but for all of us as well).

But if the Ryan “end Medicare” plan is so great: DO IT NOW. They won’t because the Republicans benefit from the old people vote.

11 April 2011 pm

Workout notes
Slept in (sleep patters are still off) then lifted over lunch:
Squats (Smith machine): 10 x 45, 10 x 135, 5 x 185 (shallow), 10 x 155, 10 x 155
Curls: 3 sets of 15 x 20 lb. dumbbells.
Incline bench: 10 x 115, 8 x 130, 8 x 125
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120 (shoulder friendly grip)
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 220 (Hammer machine)
sit ups (4 x 25).

Sleep: my patterns are still a bit screwed up; I might skip yoga tomorrow morning.

Posts
Many times, woos and religious people accuse scientists of being arrogant for, well, dismissing claims that lack evidence. Nothing new here. But I like what Jerry Coyne says here:

Religionists’ claim that scientists are arrogant always amuses me. Really, who are the arrogant ones? Scientists are nearly always tentative in their conclusions. Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on evolution, and was struck by how often conclusions are qualified by words like “this suggests that” or “this conclusion should be regarded as provisional”. Many papers suggest additional lines of research that could support or falsify their conclusions. In the end, it is religious people who are the certain ones, the overbearing ones. How often do you hear, in religious discourse, that “my conclusion that there is god should, of course, be seen as provisional, subject to refutation by findings of unjustifiable evil,” or “maybe there’s a heaven, but maybe not; I don’t have much evidence.” If they relied at all on evidence, the faithful wouldn’t be able to say anything.

And it’s bogus to suggest that all scientific truth is ephemeral, for some truths of today will remain truths of tomorrow. A water molecule will still have two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom; AIDS will still be caused by a virus; the Earth will still go around the Sun. Although the concept of absolute and unchangeable truth is alien to science, we’ve found out a lot of things that are likely to remain “true” in that they’re unlikely to be overturned.

Blog Commentary…

Awwwww…

Aw.

Really, I was hoping that Sarah Palin would be the GOP nominee in 2012; in fact I was looking forward to voting for her in the 2012 primary. It. isn’t. going. to. happen.

My predictions for 2012: the Republicans lose House seats but retain a narrow majority (but perhaps a more moderate one) The Senate ends up 51-49 or 50-50 (not sure who would control the 51-49) and Mr. Obama cruises to reelection by roughly his 2008 level.