Obama reminds me of Clinton. I remember thinking that Clinton would be a liberal Reagan in that he, too, could be a “great communicator.” I thought that because he seemed to communicate with the public so well as a candidate. But once he was in office, he stopped. And the Republicans controlled the message. Soon Clinton was declaring the era of big government over.
Obama seemed to be able to communicate as a candidate and seems to not be able to do so as a President. The Republicans control the message and Obama is trying hard to sound more centric in the State of the Union address.
It is interesting that when polled about specific elements that make up (one of?) the health care reform bill, the majority of Americans are in favor of almost all of them. http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/upload/8042-T.pdf
In other words, if people understood what was in the legislation, there would be a lot more support.
You have one chance. Pass the senate health care bill.
The public does not differentiate between the house bill and the senate bill.
You already voted for the house bill.
Your republican opponent in the fall is going to pin that vote on you incessantly.
And those who support reform are not going to be all that enthusiastic because you did not pass it.
So you have the worst of both worlds: blame for the vote, and no credit for passage.
The republicans had one goal: prevent the passage of health care.
They have almost succeeded.
The only bills (of any consequence) that will pass between now and January 2011 (if not later) are bills through reconciliation. The republicans have zero incentive to cooperate with anything. Obstruction has served them very well in the polls.
Health care reform cannot be done solely through reconciliation.
Pass the senate bill and then fix what can be fixed through reconciliation.
So the Supreme Court knocked down (large?) portions of McCain/Feingold. Spending is speech and Congress will make no law etc.
Generally I am a liberal, so I guess I am supposed to be outraged that the Court did what it did.
But I am not outraged. I applaud the decision. I have felt for some time that all the regulation of campaign spending is not constitutional. Now, I did not make a mission out of trying to undo it (I do not look forward to all of the commercials), but I have long thought it made no sense.
Part of my problem with campaign finance laws goes back to a universal truth. Create a rule and there will (immediately!) be those out there looking for a way around the rule. This creates another rule, and the process continues ad nauseum. Soon (a long time ago), the regulations are so complex that it is simply too easy to break them even with the best of intentions. All of that for rules that are unconstitutional in the first place and, lets face it, did not do much to keep money out of politics as was intended.
I think anyone should be able to give as much money as he or she (or it) wants to give to any candidate desired.
The one catch I would have is that all candidates must publish who gave (with occupation) and how much.
This kind of transparency is part of the current scheme and is the one part that strikes me as effective. I have on several occasions listened to a news story on how a given candidate received a donation from a sullied donor and the candidate returned the money. This works. And the internet makes it easily doable. Post the info and the press and the bloggers will let us know if there is cause for concern.
Somehow it already feels like ancient history, but the reader perhaps remembers the hubbub surrounding the book Game Change when it was published eight days ago. Harry Reid was quoted talking about Obama’s lack of a Negro dialect. Sarah Palin is also depicted negatively in the book.
Reid’s response was to stand up and admit he said what he said. And he apologized.
Palin’s response was to simply state that the book was full of lies.
One might look at the two responses and draw conclusions about who is leadership material.
On the other hand, both of them responded in the way that their politics required of them. Politics required Reid to man up and apologize. Politics requires Palin to just declare the book to be lies. (Maybe they are lies. I don’t know).
With 63% of precincts reporting, the Republican Brown is defeating the Democrat Coakley in the Massachusetts senate race 53% to 46%. It is not looking good.
Now the Democrats are faced with the question of what to do with health care reform. Are they leaders or are they craven cowards to the political breeze.
The irony is that if the Dems listen to the lesson of Massachusetts and fail to pass health care, they will lose a lot more this fall then they will if they stand tall and pass the bill. They already voted for it.
If Coakley does indeed lose, it probably means the end of Cap and Trade. With luck the global warming deniers are correct.
John Durant is a meat eater. The New York Times has an article on his return to a caveman diet. My understanding is that the New York Times will soon require money to access content, so I will quote:
The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.
Mr. Durant, 26,…is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.
Or as he and some of his friends describe themselves, they are cavemen.
The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.
These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.
This diet is based on our cave dwelling ancestry. Fair enough. But it ignores evolution. One of the first things I notice here is that a given organism is successful if his or her genes are passed on. Among cavemen, this would require a lifespan of thirty years maybe? Also it is my understanding that there is a pretty good body of evidence that red meat is really not good for us (but I’ve not researched this, so don’t take my word for it).
As soon as I saw the article I remembered reading something about evolution and human’s diet. It was at John Hawk’s Weblog; a post entitled You are what your ancestors ate, part 1. In this post, Professor Hawk briefly discusses “reporting on an interdisciplinary conference on recent human diet evolution”. He quotes from an article in Science*. I give you the same quote:
The agricultural revolution favored people lucky enough to have gene variants that helped them digest milk, alcohol, and starch. Those mutations therefore spread among farmers. But other populations remained more carnivorous, such as the Saami of frigid northern Norway, whose ancestors herded reindeer. Among Saami ancestors, genes to digest meat and fat efficiently were apparently favored. One gene variant, for example, makes living Saami less likely to get uric acid kidney stones—common in people who eat high-protein diets—than are people whose ancestors were vegetarian Hindus and lack this gene variant, says geneticist Mark Thomas of University College London (UCL).
In other words, there has been more than enough time for humans to adapt to an agrarian civilization.
I guess it’s possible that Mr. Durant is descended from the Saami of northern Norway.
Finally, credit where credit is due, I found the New York Times article from the discussion about it at Althouse.
* The article is by Ann Gibbons. It is unavailable without paying.
In the summer of 1982, I was managing a Domino’s Pizza store that served a small college campus. I had taken over the store right after the college had dismissed for the summer, so business was a bit slow. One of the first things I did was to chart the weekly sales.
One Monday in July the supervisor arrives with a bit of burn going on. He pulled me aside and asked me if I knew that the week just ended had had the lowest sales of any week so far that year. I just smiled and asked him to follow me to the office where I directed his attention to my sales chart. The week just ended had had the lowest sales of the year every year the store had been open. My sales were higher than the year before (as they had been every week), but not higher than the week before. I had no idea why that particular week was historically bad, but it was.
That one moment made charting the sales worth it.
In the off year, the political party in power loses congressional seats. There may have been an exception or two, but that’s it. The day the democrats achieved sixty votes in the Senate, anyone who knew anything knew that they would no longer control sixty seats after the 2010 elections. All of the media talking heads know this. But why mess with a good story?
There is a bit of drama in Massachusetts in the battle for Kennedy’s senate seat, but other than that the only “newsworthy” items concerning political power in the senate reflect the difficulty the republicans face:
Moving is a disruptive activity. It made sense that I didn’t get to blogging while we were actually in the process of buying and moving. But we have been living here now since late October and I am only now returning to the blog. We now live in a beautiful, old home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I imagine there will be a few posts about the house in the near future.
Our computer died while we were getting ready to move. So we live in a new (96 year old) house, with new computers, new isp, and now a new year.
Along with all that we purchased a new bed and had it delivered as soon as we had possession of the house. We brought up a card table and a couple of folding chairs and then we spent a couple of days here cleaning before the move (not that the house needed much cleaning, the previous owners left it clean). That first night we retired to the bedroom and turned out the lights.
But the room did not go dark.
We’ve lived in the country for the past twenty years. At that house, when the lights are turned out at night, the room goes dark. Eventually the eyes adjust and one can barely see by what starlight makes it through the window.
But not here. Here the room is still lit as the light from the streetlights comes threw the shades. A dramatic difference.
It is no big deal. We can sleep almost anywhere. But it was startling.
I immediately thought of my father.
I grew up in the same house my father grew up in. While growing up, I never even knew which room was Dad’s (Dad wasn’t much about telling stories of his past). Then one day Mom made a comment about Dad not being able to sleep in a totally dark room because he grew up sleeping in a room with light from the streetlight coming through the window. Based on that bit of info, I have since assumed that Dad’s room was the room by brother had and that I moved into the day he left for college (kind of rude of me, really).
This is what I remember. I can not swear every detail is true.
I vaguely remember reading this explanation of the name at the time. I gave no thought to where the name might have come from beyond that.
On page 405 of Coming Into the Country, McPhee is discussing the cabins of Dick and Donna.
The shanty that Dick and Donna use on stopovers in Eagle is only a little up from squalid…Their fish camp down the Yukon can be discouraging, too–a dirty, fetid, lightless cabin astink in aging salmon. These more manifest habitations long ago earned Cook a reputation as a sloven–among people who have never been here. This secluded cabin (his home of homes) is neat and tidy–in fact, trig.
Upon reading this, I immediately thought about the Palin baby. Visiting dictionary.com I find the following definitions:
neat, trim, smart, or spruce.
in good physical condition; sound; well.
to support or prop, as with a wedge.
to act as a check on (the moving of wheels, vehicles, etc.)
That is a complicated four letter name. With luck the ironies will shift and multiply as he grows.
The Secret Service examined the four one hundred dollar bills that the bank teller identified as counterfeit and declared them to be authentic American currency. Several days later, the money was credited back to Debby’s account.
So the suspicion of fakery resulted in a seven day loss of $400.