Message of Greatness

The Obama administration has hit on what should be a winning idea for the foreseeable future. As a country we need to be about the business of positioning the country fol global competition in the 21st century. This means strengthening the economy by plowing money and effort into education, infrastructure, health care, and other strategic investments. Democrats should continue to find ways to do this. Republicans, on the other hand, just want to prevent big government at all costs.

I Think This is Huge

One of the diseases with the largest impact around the world is malaria. A new vaccine is safe and effective for children.

Natural quantum computing

It seems the common process of photosynthesis involves a bit of quantum computing. Fascinating.

Republican Amnesia

Rachel followed that up with an interview with Barney Franks. Here are his zingers.

In a Republican strategy memo the idea is to link any legislation they don't like to the bank bailout, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. You know, that outfit chartered to protect consumers from credit card abuses, overdraft abuses, payday lending abuses, and so forth.

The bailout of AIG, the TARP for banks, the automobile company bailouts was all done under George Bush.

The agencies that are exempted from the protection agency oversight were exempted by Republican votes.

When it came down to voting on financial reforms, there was no additional regulations that got a Republican vote. Not any regulations on derivitives. No restrictions on risky loan practices.

The original AIG bailout allowed the Bush adminstration to give out the money anyway they wanted to. That has since changed.

When the final financial reform bill came to a vote, the minority party has an opportunity to offer whatever amendments they wanted. The only amendment the Republicans offered was "strike all after the enacting clause". Essentially that means kill the whole bill. They wanted no reform whatsoever leaving us with the system that caused the meltdown in the first place.

In 2007 and in the current bill, the House passed a bill to restrict bad loans, to forbid loans to people who couldn't pay for them. Republicans voted against it both times. They say that liberals wanted people to buy houses they couldn't afford but the Republicans had a chance to stop it from happening and they voted against it.

One of the things that led to the housing meltdown is that the people who lent the money were able to sell those loans. Essentially they were able to pass the risk of the lending off to some other poor shmuck of a banker. So they had no incentive to make sure the loans were good. The system made it easy to for the originators to make lots of money off bad loans at no risk. Financial reform would close the door on that.

[So whenever you hear a Republican expressing righteous anger about bank bailouts and bad financial practices, remind him or her that it was Republicans who voted against policies that could have prevented the meltdown, it was Republicans who asked for the bailouts, and it's Republicans who continue to vote against reforms to prevent a repeat of the meltdown.]

The Obama Effect

It seems that all it takes to make Republicans change their position is for Obama to come out in support of it. Yesterday Rachel Maddow gave a nice list.

- Bipartisan Fiscal Commission: orginally supported by Sam Brownback, Mike Crapo, John Ensign, Kay Bailey Hutchison, James Inhofe, and John McCain. All voted against it after Obama supported it.
- Pay-as-you-go: John McCain, George Voinovich, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe supported it until Obama, then no.
- Cap-and-trade: John McCain and Lindsey Graham, yes then no.
- trying terrorism suspects in federal courts: under Bush yes, under Obama no.
- cutting taxes for 95% of working families and small businesses: same story.

It appears that the political thwarting of Obama is more important to Republicans than policy. They are more concerned about who wins than governing well. Many of us had that figured out years ago. Then it was an inference from the way campaigns were run. Now it's right out there in the open. Voters will get what they deserve if they continue to allow themselves to be bamboozled by this behavior. And Democrats will likewise get what they deserve if they don't raise the alarm.

Obama Budget and Tax Increases

Evidently there's a meme going around that in the rollback of the Bush tax cuts taxes are going to go up across the board at all income levels. This Bloomberg report says otherwise.

"The administration budget released yesterday would reinstate 10-year-old income tax rates of 36 percent and 39.6 percent for single Americans earning more than $200,000 and joint filers making more than $250,000 as part of a broad $1.9 trillion tax increase proposal. It proposes to eliminate preferences for oil and gas companies, life-insurance products, executives of investment partnerships and U.S.-based companies that operate overseas."

So not only are the Bush cuts remaining in place for middle and lower income folks, new cuts for them are in the budget.

Obama proposed $143.4 billion in new tax cuts for individuals who earn under $200,000. While the budget sets out $93.5 billion in gross tax reductions for businesses, overall they would face a net tax increase.

“The proposed budget’s $300 billion in tax relief over the next 10 years for individuals, families, and businesses is mostly targeted and limited, often to people who don’t have to pay any taxes,” said Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee. “The tax increases in the budget dwarf the tax relief.”

It's difficult to have a serious discussion about the budget when folks are reporting things that simply aren't true.

The Party Of ?????

Paul Krugman:

The moral here is that right now the GOP literally has no ideas about how the nation should actually be governed.

And the scary thing is that lack of ideas seems to be a winning platform.

It may look like a winning platform for the moment but I think people are beginning to get it.

More Prop 8 Case Analysis

Eskridge and Spedale have a nice analysis of the respective positions of the sides on the Prop 8 case. It boils down to whether the state has a rational basis for denying a portion of the population equal protection under the law. Just because the majority has sufficient prejudice to pass a constitutional amendment isn't sufficient. The US Constitution's equal protection clause trumps and the amendment can be ruled unconstitutional.

2nd Generation Fusion

While a milestone has been achieved on the pellet smashing front, a new form of plasma confinement has entered the stage:

"Summarizing the difference between the two approaches, Kesner explains that in a tokamak, the hot plasma is confined inside a huge magnet, but in the LDX the magnet is inside the plasma. The whole concept, he says, was inspired by observations of planetary magnetospheres made by interplanetary spacecraft. In turn, he says, for planetary research the experiments in LDX can yield 'a lot more subtle detail than you can get by launching satellites, and more cheaply.'"

Darn those Canadians

When faced with the same economic circumstances as the US in the meltdown days and with essentially only 5 banks, Canada weather the storm quite nicely. How? regulation, regulation, regulation.

This tendency to react to the mere mention of Canada with either yawns or guffaws may be why, as the world struggles to figure out what went wrong in 2007 and 2008, not much international attention is being devoted to figuring out what went right in Canada. Canada is the only G7 country to survive the financial crisis without a state bail-out for its financial sector. Two of the world’s 15 most highly valued financial institutions – a list dominated by China – are Canadian and a recent World Economic Forum report rated the Canadian banking system the world’s soundest. Even Barack Obama, on the eve of a visit last year to Ottawa, the Canadian ­capital, admitted: “In the midst of the enormous economic crisis, I think Canada has shown itself to be a pretty good manager of the financial system and the economy in ways that we haven’t always been.”

A Milestone for controlled nuclear fusion

That's right. The good people at Lawrence Livermore have been successful at squeezing dummy fuel pellets to the shape, heat, and density needed to ignite a fusion reaction. Now they are taking a break to install the heavy concrete needed to shield out the neutrons fusion reactions will eventually produce. If all goes well they could be lighting them up by the end of the year.

Damn those documents

Document came to light in court today make it clear that despite protestations to the contrary, the Mormon church gave direct help to the Prop 8 campaign. The documents even explain how to do it so that there would be plausible deniability. So much for that moral high ground. Welcome to the swamp.

Update: Here's a link to telling portions of the transcript.

Making a List, Checking it Twice

When something as simple as a checklist can reduce major surgery complications by 36% and deaths by 47% there is genuine hope for qualitative improvement in health care without higher costs. What are the systems and processes in your life that could be improved by a systematic checklist?

Avatar and real-life science

It may seem that Pandora is a creation of fantasy but there is some pretty decent science behind all that. Floating mountains, bioluminescence, a life-bearing moon. All are possible.

Getting It Right in Afghanistan

My hero,Greg Mortenson, talks to Bill Moyers about what is actually working in the parts of the country our troops don't dare enter. It's not revolutionary. It's just genuine respect for the local leaders who have the will of the people behind them.

Cell Phone Radiation Reverses Alzheimer's and Boosts Memory

Rather than being a danger, cell-phone radiation may actually have brain health benefits.

Running without injury

Kick off those fancy shoes.

Productive Carbon Sequestration

Terra Preta is interesting stuff. As a soil it is highly productive. Pre-European Amazon civilization flourished in an area with notoriously poor soil because of it. Research has shown that not only is it productive, it actually can gradually sequester more carbon from the surrounding organic material and become more and more productive. It entices one to start building one's own garden with it. And extending the thought, what would the impact be if large agricultural operations began to use it?

The Reach of the "Family"

From Jeff Sharlet on "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power"
All the following folks are part of this fundamentalist Christian organization. It's noteworthy that the stated goal of the organization is to accumulate as much power as possible in the name of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, from their actions it's clear that Christian morality has little to do with their methods. The Machiavellian ends-justify-the-means method tends to dominate their practices.
Players include:

John Ensign (R Sen-NV)
Mark Sanford (R Gov-SC)
Chip Pickering (fmr R Cng-MS)
Doug Coe (longtime leader)
Joe Pitts (R Cng-PA)
Sam Brownback (R Gov-KS)
Suharto (dictator-Indonesia)
Siad Barre (dictator-Somalia)
Chuck Grassley (R Sen-IA)
Todd Tiahrt (R Cng-KS)
Jerry Moran (R Cng-KS)
David Kuo, former special assistant to President George W. Bush and deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives,
James Inhofe (R Sen-OK)
Tom Coburn (R Sen-OK)
Jim DeMint (R Sen-SC)
Lindsey Graham (R Sen-SC)
John Thune (R Sen-SD)
John Ashcroft (fmr R Atty Genl)
Ed Meese (fmr R Atty Genl)
Pete Domenici (fmr R Sen-NM)
Don Nickles (fmr R Sen-OK)
Joe Pitts (R Sen-PA)
Frank Wolf, (R Sen-VA)
Zach Wamp, (R Cng-TN)
Robert Aderholt, (R Cng-AL
Ander Crenshaw (R Cng-FL)
Todd Tiahrt, (R Cng-KS)
Marsha Blackburn, (R Cng-TN)
Jo Ann Emerson, (R Cng-MO)
John R. Carter, (R Cng-TX)
Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, known for putting the Ten Commandments in public places
Mark Pryor (D Sen-AR)
Chuck Colson (fmr Nixon aide)
Steve Largent, (R Cng-OK)
Mike Doyle, (D Cng-PA)

Quite a list. And it contains some of the biggest obstructionists around.

Biological Highway Designers

In Britain someone used slime mold to design what an efficient highway system would look like.