You are on your own.
Archives for February 2010
In Case I Have Not Stressed It Enough
As Nick Baumann points out, Harry Reid probably knows perfectly well by now what procedural steps he needs to take to amended a bill through reconciliation. If Reid wants to wait a little longer, the most likely explanation is that he doesn’t have 50 reconciliation votes yet but he thinks he might have them in a week.
You know what to do. (202) 224-3121.
Teabaggin’ Money Honey
Someone loves the jam, the jet, and the mansion:
Later this week I’ll head to Nashville, where I’ll have the honor of speaking with members of the Tea Party movement. I look forward to meeting many Americans who share a commitment to limited government, common sense and personal responsibility. This movement is truly a grassroots, organic effort. It’s not a top-down organization; it’s a ground-up call to action that already has both political parties rethinking the way they do business.
If it is such an honor, why is she charging over a hundred large? She never seems to mention the fat loots she is getting, does she?
Where We Stand
* Barack Obama continues to urge Democrats to do something, although exactly what to do is apparently up to them.
* Nancy Pelosi insists that the House can and will pass the Senate bill, but the Senate has to pass some fixes first.
* Key Senators like Max Baucus and both Virginians have publicly ruled out reconciliation. Unless we can whip 50 Senators into line (get calling!) Pelosi may be on her own.
* The Senate is not completely dead. Others like Kent Conrad (!) and Arlen Specter (!!) back reconciliation with surprising enthusiasm.
* Has anyone heard from Harry Reid? Maybe someone should swing by his office to see if the lights are on.
Overall the scene still reminds me of watching a married couple in a Noel Coward play try and fail to work out their differences. Having seen a few of those, I’m not encouraged.
***Update***
Via Kevin Drum, Harry Reid thinks that reconciliation might happen, but…(pause for dramatic effect)…the House has to vote first. Surprise.
No End to the Bullshit
Rush Limbaugh, who spent the last eight years fluffing C+ Augustus so much that he voiced relief when he no longer had to defend them, is now taking to Fox News attacking Obama for… not doing his own work in college and law school and that other people wrote his law review articles:
Gotta love that affirmative action dog whistle- “turn his c’s into a’s.” Limbaugh dropped out of college after two semesters of flunking every course he took .
Not getting it
Shame on me for linking to Ace of Spaces, but his misunderstanding of the Lancet retraction is good illustration of people not understanding how scientific studies work. Ace writes:
Unless I’m reading this wrong, and I may be, the problem isn’t so much that the study’s data set was fudged, but that the researcher behaved unethically in getting it.
He then excerpts (from a CNN article about the retraction):
The General Medical Council, which oversees doctors in Britain, said that “there was a biased selection of patients in The Lancet paper” and that his “conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible.”
A biased selection process is a form of “fudging your data.” I would think that even wingers would know this.
Ace also writes:
The left doesn’t like the “anti-science” vibe they believe is going on with the MMR-autism link; they have this weird desire to establish scientists as some kind of technocratic fourth branch of government. And they hate when people don’t listen to scientists. (Except when scientists say things they disagree with, of course.) And they also hate the idea that vaccine avoidance is a much bigger phenomenon on the right than the left.
Is it true that anti-vax stuff is bigger on the right than on the left? I wasn’t aware of this.
What’s happening out there?
Anything interesting going on anywhere on the intertubes? I can’t find anything.