A modest proposal, perhaps.

It’s been entertaining watching American public “discourse” since the election. (I use that word in its broadest, most ridiculous sense, since nothing that hinges so completely on self-absorption, rank ignorance and pathological dishonesty can be accurately characterized by such a noble word. But indulge me. I’ve been working on my irony lately.)

On the one hand you have conservatives fainting dead away that we’re now in the clutches of a “socialist” president. Never mind that these folks wouldn’t know a real socialist if he was gnawing their balls off. Never mind that most of these folks think “socialist” is the French word for Negro. Never mind that Obama demonstrably is to socialism what Joe the Plumber is to brie-sucking Northeastern intellectualism. As arch-conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert says, “this is a fact-free zone.”

On the other you have the righteous outrage of the progressosphere, which feels six different kinds of betrayed by a president who promised them the moon and stars and has now left them to what looks like at least a four-year walk of shame. If I might borrow from an old fraternity joke, imagine the following scene from the Oval Office: Full Story »

• Early deaths cost Appalachia more than coal jobs earn
• Emission of strong GHGs exceed IPCC emissions scenarios and expected to continue to do so
• Raytheon testing oil shale tech to sequester CO₂

Appalachia has some of the most impoverished communites in the United States. The entire region is economically depressed as compared to the national average. But coal communities in Appalachia are even worse off than the rest of the region, a fact that runs counter to the idea that coal jobs support local communities. A new study out of the Institute for Health Policy Research at West Virginia University and published in Public Health Reports looked at this discrepency and found that, even using conservative assumptions, the economic costs of coal mining in Appalachian communities far outweighed the benefits from having a coal mine in the community. Full Story »

What do all these things have in common: Cash-for-clunkers, IMF funding, pandemic flu preparations, and anti-narcotic aid to Mexico? They’re all considered “supplemental war funding” that the Senate approved in a late-night session July 18^th.

Excuse me, Mr. President, but I thought I heard you promise not to use supplemental war funding bills any more. Apparently, according to PoliFact, I misheard (thank Bush for only funding Iraq and Afghanistan through September, 2009, instead of the whole year). But still, I’d really like to know how those programs are related to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, that’s right. They’re not. Full Story »

In Colorado, you are allowed to enroll your children in school without them having had all their supposedly required vaccines. Instead, Colorado parents are allowed to sign a waiver and then enroll their children. According to a KCFR/Colorado Public Radio interview with a medical researcher working for Kaiser Permanente, this fact partly explains why Colorado has about 800 cases of pertussis (aka whooping cough) a year, one of the highest rates in the country.

Kaiser Permanente (KP) is a large HMO that maintains its patient records in electronic form, a fact that makes the records very useful for researching disease. A new study performed by researcher Jason Glanz of KP finds that children who have never received a pertussis vaccine are 23x more likely to catch the disease than children who have been vaccinated. Of the approximately 800 cases of pertussis per year, that works out to 767 children who might not have caught pertussis if they’d been vaccinated, while only 33 children would have caught pertussis even after receiving the vaccine. Full Story »

You’re a coalition of multinational corporations. Imagine this deal: Invest $1 in lobbying. Get a return on investment of $220. Save $100 billion on taxes, too. Nice, eh?

That’s the conclusion of three University of Kansas professors who undertook an empirical analysis of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 to study rates of return for money spent on lobbying, reported The Washington Post in an April 12 story by Dan Eggen.

This law — this shady excuse for a law with a name only charlatans could love — allowed companies that had earned profits overseas to inexpensively bring that money back into the States. The customary tax rate on such profits was 35 percent. But this elegantly named process — repatriation of profits — gave companies a one-time chance four years ago to haul the money home, paying only 5.25 percent.

The act was a tax holiday sought by a coalition of companies, primarily big pharmaceutical and high-technology corporations, all because they sought to pay little or no taxes on profits generated overseas — and they concocted a successful scheme to pull it off.
Full Story »

A couple of weeks ago author and NYU media theory lecturer Douglas Rushkoff penned a provocative essay for Arthur Magazine. Entitled “Let It Die,” the essay explains why we should stop trying to save the economy.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. Full Story »

Have you ever stumbled into a situation where something made you crave your long forgotten bad habit or addiction again, just one more time? You’d repeatedly proven yourself stronger than your old needs or patterns and were no longer even tempted. But then, perhaps because of the phase of the moon and the alignment of the planets, you found yourself suddenly and unexpectedly thrust back to the threshold of that need?

That happened to me earlier this week. For the first time in 14 years, I smelled cigarette smoke and it smelled good…. Full Story »

Imagine a hearing room in the U.S. Senate. Imagine men and women trying to navigate the issues that surround health care in America and negotiate a solution.

Now imagine that the doors to the room are closed, and that the participants remain unidentified, and that, in fact, “Senate aides had threatened to expel anyone who divulged details of the work group,” reports The New York Times:

Since last fall, many of the leading figures in the nation’s long-running health care debate have been meeting secretly in a Senate hearing room. Now, with the blessing of the Senate’s leading proponent of universal health insurance, Edward M. Kennedy, they appear to be inching toward a consensus that could reshape the debate.

The 20 or so people in that room sitting around tables arranged in a square, says The Times, “include lobbyists for AARP, Aetna, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the Business Roundtable, Easter Seals, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the United States Chamber of Commerce.”

Well, I’m not inside that room, and neither are you. And we should be, because President Obama said we would be.
Full Story »

In an article titled Two-Thirds of Hispanic Women Discover Breast Cancer Themselves at U.S. News & World Report on Thursday, Feb. 5, Amanda Gardner writes:

Two-thirds of breast cancers in Hispanic women are detected by a self-exam, while only 23 percent come to light through a mammography and another 6 percent through a clinical exam. Yet screening mammography rates were 83 percent among U.S.-born Hispanic women and 62 percent among non-U.S.-born Hispanic women.

That Hispanic women are both receiving mammograms and beating mammography to the punch with self-exams is encouraging, especially considering the often poor education of the non-U.S.-born subgroup. However, there’s more to the story. . . Full Story »

In a June 1st, 2003 article by Catherine O’Mahony, published by The Sunday Business Post Online, Joey Mason, founder and managing director of Eumom is quoted as saying,

“This is really going to make us a player. For advertisers, we want to get higher quality interaction with the women they are targeting. We want them to be able to choose when and how they speak to their target customers.” He further says, “We know we are a new kid on the block and that we need to prove ourselves.” (emphasis added)

Where will Mr. Mason’s firm be a player? In 2003 Eumom was awarded a three year contract worth at least €2.4 million to provide promotional materials to Dublin’s three maternity hospitals. Eumom replaced the 25 year veteran Bounty Euro RSCG.

Full Story »

In this season’s eighth episode, Boston Legal - the relentlessly liberal ABC dramedy starring William Shatner and James Spader - lobbed an absolute bomb at those of us on the pro-choice side of the Roe v. Wade question. The bunker-buster was posed, predictably enough, by Crane Poole & Schmitt’s resident conservative, the gleefully Republican Denny Crane, portrayed by Shatner. BL fans know Crane to be positively Cheney-esque in his politics (although he did finally cross the aisle to vote for Obama because even he couldn’t stomach four more years like the last eight), and he routinely plays the straw man for the passionate liberalism of Spader’s litigator par excellence, Alan Shore.

This time, though, Crane (who’s battling through the early stages of Alzheimer’s) breaks through to a moment of pristine, Emmy-worthy clarity. Full Story »

• Cave record suggests AGW changed monsoons since 1960
• Heritage Foundation’s math wrong on green jobs
• American Medical Association: address climate disruption
• Australia considers large scale desalinization
• Rev. Cizek lobbying on environment in Australia
• Expectations on Obama’s changes to energy and climate policy

Stalactites are rock formations in caves that hang down from the cave ceiling, and they’re formed by water containing dissolved minerals as it drips penetrates the cave ceiling and drips to the floor (stalagmites are basically the same thing but sticking up from the floor instead). Given that stalactites and stalagmites are formed by water, you might expect that they grow faster or slower with the seasons, at least in areas where the climate includes seasonal variations in precipitation. After all, heavy rains add water to the water table and increase the growth rate of the stalactite as more water penetrates the cave. For similar reasons, you could probably expect that year to year variations growth rate variations would occur if there were rainy periods and droughts.

According to a Nature News article, a stalagmite has been found in a Chinese cave that, when analyzed, was found to contain 1800 years worth of monsoon information. Full Story »

The city council of San Francisco has issued an ordinance that pharmacies are not allowed to sell tobacco products. The intent is to eliminate mixed messages about a pharmacy, ostensibly devoted to healing people, selling unhealthy tobacco. But two companies are suing the city of San Francisco in federal court to overturn the ban. The first, Walgreens, is suing because only stand-alone pharmacies are affected by the ban - grocery stories and big-box stores with pharmacies are not affected. Their legal logic is that the tobacco sales ban is discriminatory toward stand-alone pharmacies, and they have a point. Whether it’ll hold up in court is another question (the federal judge refused to delay the ban, due to start on October 1, while the lawsuit is being heard), and one I’ll not even attempt to address.

The second company, Philip Morris, is suing using a totally different legal logic. They say it’s an unconstitutional abridgment of their First Amendment right to free speech. Full Story »

by Nan Rhyner

How DARE you stand on that stage, on the shoulders of generations of women who have struggled and sacrificed to allow a woman to achieve what you have, and spit in their faces the way you have done over the past few weeks? For a serious candidate for vice president to turn in such a poor performance in interview after interview that the fact that you managed not to pee on the stage meant that you exceeded many people’s expectations is a crying shame. Full Story »

Link of the Week (as opposed to the Weakest Link):

From American Raj, a new book by Eric Margolis: Abdullah Azzam “ran a dingy little rooming house next to his office for Muslim mujahedin headed for Afghanistan that came to be known as ‘the base’ or ‘the centre,’ and in Arabic, ‘al-Qaida.’ Rarely in history has an international revolutionary movement sprung from such modest origins.” From humble beginnings, a little acorn grows.

From “Reversal of Fortune” by Joseph Stiglitz at Vanity Fair: “We learned from the Depression that markets are not self-adjusting — at least, not in a time frame that matters to living people.” There’s only so long you can put off your retirement because of a down market.  Full Story »

Back in February, Andrew Revkin, climate and environment reporter for the New York Times (and fellow SEJ member) wrote in his DotEarth blog that there were a number of people and organizations hoping to have the Presidential candidates debate on various science topics. The group most directly involve in trying to organize this debate was Science Debate 2008, and while they were unable to get Barack Obama and John McCain to agree to a science debate, they were able to get a list of 14 questions submitted to the campaigns, and responses to those questions back.

The 14 questions were, with the help of several science organizations, culled from 3400 questions submitted by scientists and engineers representing nearly every American science organization, Nobel laureates, and over 100 universities. I’ve excerpted the questions and answers below in an attempt to understand and explain why the questions, and the candidates answers to each, matter. If you want to read the complete questionnaire and the actual answers to each instead of my summaries, check out this link. Full Story »

That’s the debate I’ve been having with an old college friend whom I’ve recently reconnected with. He’s become a Catholic since we knew one another back in the ‘80s, and is a deep-thinking, deeply principled man. He will not be voting for Barack Obama in November. Nor will he be voting for John McCain. He will vote, but he will cast a blank ballot. He urges me, if I am serious about my moral commitments, to do likewise. Neither candidate, in his opinion, cares enough about ‘life issues’ to merit an affirmative vote.

The New York Times reports that other Catholics are struggling with what do with in the upcoming election. The most troublesome issue for many remains abortion. Some, like Joe Biden, believe we must make accommodations for differing views in a pluralistic society, despite his own embrace of personhood at conception. Others, like my old friend, see Biden’s support for legal access to abortion as no different from espousing the Holocaust – if not in deed, then in complicity.

Can a Catholic possibly vote for a Democratic candidate who has regularly received a 100% approval rating from Planned Parenthood and indeed, as a state senator, voted against an Illinois version of the Born Alive Infant Protection bill passed by Congress? Can I, as a person of faith who believes all life is sacred? I am going to answer ‘yes,’ and in so doing, proclaim myself also a utilitarian and a realist, with all the moral conundra that pragmatism involves. Full Story »

Due to the large size of this week’s Carboholic, I’ve busted it up into sections for readability.

Science

When you’re talking about Antarctica and global heating, there are some serious problems. The few satellites that are in polar orbits to monitor the poles can’t directly detect how thick the ice shelf is, or what the salinity and temperature of the water beneath the ice shelf is. Floating sensor buoys can’t get beneath the ice shelves and are rather limited in their operational depth. And sending people out to drill deep holes and manually measure temperature and salinity is far too expensive and dangerous. And given that what the water under floating ice shelves is doing may be key to understanding how Antarctica will respond to global heating, the problems represent serious limitations. Which is why the key to understanding what’s happening immediately around and beneath the Antarctic ice shelves may well be elephant seals. Full Story »

Though polls indicate a tightening gap between Obama and McCain, especially in swing states like Colorado, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not worried. Speaking at a Politico/Denver Post/Yahoo! News breakfast panel this morning, she told the crowd that Obama’s strength lies with many voters who are not within the ranks of those previous “likely voters” polled, including younger voters and those who have never voted before.

Pelosi is confident that economic issues will move an election victory in Obama’s direction. Full Story »

I believe I recall Barack Obama quoting Otto Von Bismarck’s edict that “politics is the art of the possible,” and evidence of that optimism abounds everywhere I look in Denver today. The two words we seem to be hearing more than any others are “hope” and “change,” and we saw a wonderfully eloquent articulation of this enthusiasm last night in Wendy Redal’s post on starstruck idealism.

There’s no question (among rational people, anyway) that change is sorely needed, and after the last eight years hope is a precious and endangered commodity. Hope is the fuel of change, and sadly a lot of our traditional reserves are running dry.

I want to hope, and I’m being implored to hope, but really, should I? Full Story »