Policy and Politics
tfk | September 23, 2006Anderson: Poll shows Barnett not a household name - CJOnline Blogs:
Overall, only one of the 10 people I approached this week in downtown Topeka for a random political poll could correctly identify Barnett as the Republican candidate for Kansas governor.
Five said they'd never heard of him. Four said the name rang a bell but admitted, when pressed, that they didn't know what office Barnett was seeking.
The one guy who was familiar with Barnett was a lobbyist.
This comes around the time that Barnett is running his first ads, a convoluted attack on drivers licenses for undocumented workers and…
tfk | September 21, 2006Via the inimitable Billmon, we learn that Torture reaches new depths in Iraq:
Torture in Iraq is reportedly worse now than it was under deposed president Saddam Hussein, the United Nations' chief anti-torture expert said Thursday.
Manfred Nowak described a situation where militias, insurgent groups, government forces and others disregard rules on the humane treatment of prisoners.
"What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand," said Nowak, the global body's special investigator on torture.
Horrors. Disregarding rules on the…
tfk | September 21, 2006Judge Restores Clinton's 'Roadless Rule':
A federal judge on Wednesday reinstated the "Roadless Rule," a Clinton-era ban on road construction in nearly a third of national forests.
This rule had prohibited development of various sorts in areas that were designated as roadless, meaning they were further than a certain distance from any sort of manmade road. The rule covered almost 60 million acres of federal land, but it was replaced with a half-assed system that the feds don't even seem to be applying consistently.
As it stood, the governors were going to be allowed to write their own rules…
tfk | September 21, 2006It's hardly news that Libya is not the best of places. Sure, they cleaned up their act as far as WMD, so they're back on the Bush administration's holiday Christmas card list.
But for over two years, a Palestinian doctor and 5 Bulgarian nurses have been on Libya's death row because of a farce of a trial, accused of intentionally infecting children with HIV.
European expert witnesses examined the children and found that most had been infected before their treatment. But the court tossed out the evidence, apparently because of a mistranslation. Nature's report on the case explains:
the…
tfk | September 20, 2006Bush announces climate change plan: throw money at the problem:
The Bush administration Wednesday proposed to address climate change through a new program that would provide billions of dollars to accelerate development of technologies needed to reduce emissions of Earth-warming pollutants.
In a vacuum of ideas, this would be better than nothing. But we've heard essentially the same rhetoric from him for decades. And here we still are. Apparently the plan sets goals for limiting atmosphere heating emissions, but doesn't actually have an enforcement mechanism, other than the hope that…
tfk | September 20, 2006A big new poll is out from USAToday/Gallup on Iraq. Some of the results are fascinating. Asked which of these options they most preferred: "Withdraw all troops from Iraq immediately. Withdraw all troops by September 2007, that is, in 12 months' time. Withdraw troops, but take as many years to do this as are needed to turn control over to the Iraqis. OR, Send more troops to Iraq," 48% preferred to leave within the next year (17% immediately, 31% in a year), while only 9% backed the administrations plan to send in more and more troops.
For the last 9 months, about 2/3 of the public thinks…
tfk | September 19, 2006As the Senate makes Bush's torture bill walk the plank, the New York Times reviews Not a Suicide Pact by Richard A. Posner:
the positions he takes in this volume will not only fuel his own controversial reputation but also underscore just how negotiable constitutional rights have become in the eyes of administration proponents, who argue that the dangers of terrorism trump civil liberties.
The very language Judge Posner uses in this shrilly titled volume conveys his impatience with constitutional rights…. He … declares that the absence of an Official Secrets Act — which could be used to…
tfk | September 19, 2006Th' excellent rereason looks at Republican angst, apparently a result of scurvy bastarrrrrds seizing the ship o' state:
Many of my very best friends are Republicans. For some reason, they don't talk politics much these days.
My friends, sensible, reliable, people you would be glad to have in your home, grew up on a Republican party that stood for high moral values. The party they supported stood for fiscal conservatism, personal responsibility, small government, and maximum personal freedom. They were from the proud tradition of Abraham Lincoln.
Theirs was not the pro-torture, pro-secret…
tfk | September 18, 2006Jim Ryun has some TV ads up attacking Democrats for their poor energy policy. This is, on its face, pretty silly. Add in the fact that he presents this attack while gassing up an SUV, and the comedy just gets better. He's at an E85 fueling station, one of 15 in Kansas.
He goes on to explain that "liberals in Washington have been blocking meaningful energy legislation for 30 years." I suppose the dearth of E85 stations is also the fault of liberals?
Here's a look at what's happened to energy prices. I adjusted the CPI gasoline series by the CPI series that excludes energy costs to get an…
tfk | September 17, 2006Many years ago, the University of Chicago invited Amartya Sen, who had recently won a Nobel Prize in Economics, to come and speak. He appeared beside Gary Becker, a distinguished professor of the University's famed economic department, and an adherent to the "Chicago School of Economics." At one point, after the speeches, a question was posed about how the two would define the role of economics in society. Becker gave what is probably his standard Econ 101 introduction, explaining how economics studies how rational human behavior influences the aggregate behavior of markets, etc. After…
tfk | September 15, 2006A year ago, Kansas Board of Ed. member Connie Morris got in hot water. She went to a conference on magnet schools, stayed in a hotel that charges as much per night as lots of people spend on monthly rent, and she doesn't even represent any magnet schools. In the midst of a scandal about the thousands of dollars the state was spending to import creationists, Connie was compelled to pay back some of the costs, especially when her receipts didn't add up. If she stayed in a hotel close to the conference, why did she need to spend money on a rental car?
Having lost her bid for re-election,…
tfk | September 15, 2006Democratic candidate Nancy Boyda claims that a poll puts her ahead of incumbent Jim Ryun:
The poll showed 42.5 percent favored Boyda; 41.2 percent favored Ryun and 16.2 percent were undecided. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 4.6 percent.
The sample was from voter rolls, and the poll was run by a local pollster who is handling other campaign work. Nothing unusual there.
The point here is not that Boyda is necessarily actually ahead. Campaign polls are only peripherally intended to tell the candidates who is winning over all. A good campaign poll ought to be accurate, of course…
tfk | September 15, 2006In a debate between incumbent Phill Kline and challenger Paul Morrison this exchange stands out:
"I have never, and never will, view a church as a political machine for me," Morrison said.
Kline responded by inviting the audience to come hear him speak Saturday at a Topeka church.
"The separation, so called, of church and state refers to government not imposing a religion," Kline said.
This is accurate, but the "so called" is an unfortunate little qualifier to attach. Given the way that various Republican officials like to trivialize the fundamental protections of the 1st amendment, I have a…
tfk | September 13, 2006As a retiring Republican state legislator endorses a Democrat to replace him, conservative activists go on the attack.
Hack Republican commentator and former Party County Chair John Altevogt whines: "It doesn’t matter. I've never had any use for Ray Cox. It would please me greatly if he would become a Democrat. I didn’t have any use for him when I was chair of the party up here. In fact, we tried to get him beat several times."
"Good riddance to bad rubbish," he added. "Sometimes you have to experience temporary losses to make long-term gains."
This is why observers see a likely swing of…
tfk | September 13, 2006After crunching the numbers on the trends in NIH funding, some interesting patterns emerge.
Clearly, the drop in funding of both R01 (initial grants) and R02 (renewals) are substantial over the Bush years. But intriguingly, the average size of a grant funded has risen. This may seem like a good thing. After all, more money is good, right?
Not necessarily.
The size of a grant will reflect various things, including how ambitious the project is, how technological it is, how many people are involved, etc. But it fundamentally reflects how much anyone is prepared to invest in it. Big grants…
tfk | September 13, 2006The Scientific Activist documents the atrocities. Basic research is the proper domain of government funding, because the benefits accrue broadly. Sometimes we learn something narrow enough to be patentable, but often the result is fundamental enough to open up whole new realms of opportunity, new fields for companies to compete in. The incentive to do that basic research doesn't exist for a lot of companies, even though they would benefit immensely from it.
Every year, the President asserts that he wants to raise science funding, but every year of his presidency, the amount spent on grants…
tfk | September 12, 2006DefCon Blog and Tom Sawyer's campaign report that efforts to promote bogus debates in science classes ("Challenge everything" was one supporter's battle cry) have failed for the nonce. Other ideas were debated until time for the debate proposal ran out, but it may still be revived. This is why it's so vital to boot Deborah "Fink" Owens-Fink off the Board, and replace her with someone qualified.
Owens-Fink is the one who wants to challenge everything. Presumably, she envisions children being assigned to teams, one of which would argue for gravity, the other arguing against.
Edited to…
tfk | September 12, 2006Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline wants you to think he's a spiritual man. He sues family planning clinics, tries to peek into women's medical records for evidence of sin, he even has his staff sort through donated CDs, making sure impure lyrics don't wind up in our libraries.
As the campaign against recent Democratic convert Paul Morrison heats up, Kline is reaching out to churches. It seems only natural. But he's not there for the spiritual solace, and he isn't interested in hearing lots of God-talk.
In a memo sent out by an anonymous "Concerned Citizen" Kline is quoted telling his…
tfk | September 11, 2006
What everyone seems to remember about 9/11 was how beautiful and clear the day was. Certainly it was lovely in Kansas, and across the Eastern seaboard, the sun shone brightly. As days go, it seemed like a good one. I woke up, as always, to NPR's Morning Edition. Who knows what exactly they were talking about when a report came through that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
That was interesting, and woke me up a little more. I assumed it was a small plane, and I knew that the Twin Towers had been designed to sustain an impact as large as a 707, so when I flipped on the TV, it was…
tfk | September 10, 2006First debate focuses on economy’s health. Jim Barnett asks a question we've all pondered "Why haven’t we not been keeping up?"
His supporters showed up dressed as cockroaches, a decision reported to have confused the audience.
Meanwhile, Sebelius focused on the way that our state economy has grown, and what has to be done to keep it on track for years to come. Strengthening schools is key to that, and she won her first election by promising to fund the state's commitments to the schools. Barnett's waffling on that point will make her re-election that much easier.