What McCain must do to win election

All he has to do, is be a good little puppet... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

What Ayers story reveals about Obama

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

October 15, 2008

Any day now, I expect Barack Obama to call a news conference, wag his finger to the cameras, and announce with all the sincerity he can muster: “I did not have a substantive relationship with that Weatherman, Mr. Ayers.”

Of course, the way things are going, Obama may not have to lift a finger, let alone wag one. He might be able to run out the clock and avoid comment on continuing questions involving his involvement with a Hyde Park neighbor and unrepentant domestic terrorist, William Ayers.

Saying nothing would be smart. And, up to now, with few exceptions, Obama has been pretty smart in dealing with the Ayers issue by trying to deflect questions, minimize the friendship and change the subject.

Obama did all three on April 16 when ABC's George Stephanopoulos brought up Ayers during a Democratic debate in Philadelphia and noted that Obama's campaign had acknowledged the men were “friendly.”

In response, Obama casually described Ayers as simply “a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from” and certainly “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” Obama acknowledged that Ayers had “engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago” but insisted that this had nothing to with him and his values. Obama noted he is “also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate.” He also criticized “this kind of game” where he is linked to the views of “anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is” and expressed confidence that “the American people are smarter than that.”

At that same debate, Hillary Clinton was smart enough to keep her eye on the ball. She noted that Obama and Ayers had served on a board together and their relationship continued after Sept. 11, 2001, when Ayers was quoted in The New York Times as saying he wasn't sorry for planting bombs in the 1970s and wished he could have done more. Clinton also suggested the Obama-Ayers relationship was “an issue that people will be asking about” and one that “certainly the Republicans will be raising.”

Have they?

Sarah Palin recently characterized Obama as “someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect . . . that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” But those comments wound up being twisted by the other side, as when Rep. John Lewis characterized them as some sort of racist attack, which was just another way to change the subject.

John McCain, to the frustration of supporters, hasn't spoken much about Ayers. That's because he's caught in an impossible position. If he ignores the issue, his base could lose enthusiasm for his candidacy. But if McCain makes Ayers an issue, he risks coming across as out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans, which at the moment have less to do with an aging leader of the Weather Underground than with how to survive the economic storm we're facing. Beyond the Republican fringe – the sheltered folks who stand up at McCain-Palin rallies and declare Obama “scary” and insist that he is “an Arab” – no one cares much about Ayers.

Having said that, here is what the voters should care about: Obama's truthfulness, which is now in question. Over the last few months, we've learned that Obama and Ayers had more than just a “flimsy” relationship that included Ayers hosting a political gathering at his home for Obama when he was running for the Illinois Senate and the two serving together on various panels and boards. Ayers was also a founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school-reform group. Obama served as chairman of its board from 1995 to '99, using the position to launch his political career.

Recently, Obama pulled back the curtain an inch. He told reporters that, during his association with Ayers, he had heard about the English professor's radical past but assumed Ayers had been rehabilitated. Ayers' ghoulish comments about not setting enough bombs suggest otherwise.

I put no stock in the politics of guilt by association. And even associating with ghouls should not hurt someone's bid for the presidency. But lying about it is another story. It could be a warning of things to come.

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me@rescam.org

Big government is coming soon

DAVID BROOKS
THE NEW YORK TIMES

October 15, 2008

We're in the middle of a financial crisis, but most economists say there is a broader economic crisis still to come. The unemployment rate will shoot upward. Companies will go bankrupt. Commercial real estate values will decline. Credit card defaults will rise. The nonprofit sector will be hammered.

By the time the recession is in full force, Democrats will probably be running the government. Barack Obama will probably be in the White House. Democrats will have a comfortable majority in the House and will control between 56 and 60 seats in the Senate.

The party will inherit big deficits. David Leonhardt, my colleague at the Times, estimates that the deficit will sit at around $750 billion next year, or 5 percent of GDP. Democrats had promised to pay for new spending with compensatory cuts, but the economic crisis will dissolve pay-as-you-go vows. New federal spending will come in four streams.

First, there will be the bailouts. Once upon a time, there were concerns about moral hazard. But resistance to corporate bailouts is gone. If Bear Stearns and AIG can get bailouts, then so can car companies, airlines and other corporations with direct links to Main Street.

Second, there will be more stimulus packages. The first stimulus package, passed early this year, was a failure because people spent only 10 percent to 20 percent of the rebate dollars and saved the rest. Martin Feldstein of Harvard calculates the package added $80 billion to the national debt while producing less than $20 billion in consumer spending.

Nonetheless, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promises another package, and it will pass.

Third, we're in for a Keynesian renaissance. The Fed has little room to stimulate the economy, so Democrats will use government outlays to boost consumption. Nouriel Roubini of New York University argues that the economy will need a $300 billion fiscal stimulus.

Obama has already promised a clean energy/jobs program that would cost $150 billion over 10 years. He's vowed $60 billion in infrastructure spending over the same period. He promises a range of tax credits – $4,000 a year for college tuition, up to $3,000 for child care, $7,000 for a clean car, a mortgage tax credit.

Fourth, there will be tax cuts. On Monday, Obama promised new tax subsidies to small business, which could cost tens of billions. That's on top of his promise to cut taxes for 95 percent of American households. His tax plans aren't as irresponsible as John McCain's, but the Tax Policy Center still says they would reduce revenues by $2.8 trillion over the next decade.

Finally, there will be a health care plan. In 1960, health care consumed 5 percent of GDP. By 2025, it will consume 25 percent. In the face of these rising costs, Obama will spend billions more to widen coverage. Obama's plan has many virtues, but the cost-saving measures are chimerical.

When you add it all up, we're not talking about a deficit that is 5 percent of GDP, but something much, much, much larger.

The new situation will reopen old rifts in the Democratic Party. On the one side, liberals will argue (are already arguing) that it was deregulation and trickle-down economic policies that led us to this crisis. Fears of fiscal insolvency are overblown. Democrats should use their control of government and the economic crisis as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make some overdue changes. Liberals will make a full-bore push for European-style economic policies.

On the other hand, the remaining moderates will argue that it was excess and debt that created this economic crisis. They will argue (are arguing) that it is perfectly legitimate to increase the deficit with stimulus programs during a recession, but that these programs need to be carefully targeted and should sunset as the crisis passes. The moderates will stress that the country still faces a ruinous insolvency crisis caused by entitlement burdens.

Obama will try to straddle the two camps – he seems to sympathize with both sides – but the liberals will win. Over the past decade, liberals have mounted a campaign against Robert Rubin-style economic policies, and they control the congressional power centers. Even if he's so inclined, it's difficult for a president to overrule the committee chairmen of his own party. It is more difficult to do that when the president is a Washington novice and the chairmen are skilled political hands. It is most difficult when the president has no record of confronting his own party elders. It's completely impossible when the economy is in a steep recession, and an air of economic crisis pervades the nation.

What we're going to see, in short, is the Gingrich revolution in reverse and on steroids. There will be a big increase in spending and deficits. In normal times, moderates could have restrained the zeal on the left. In an economic crisis, not a chance. The overreach is coming. The backlash is next.

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me@rescam.org

Anger and Understanding in the 2008 Election

by Edward Hudgins, Ph.D.

Important truths about human nature and morality have been on display in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Voters are angry as they watch the stock market and their retirement accounts collapse. They are angry as they see CEOs of collapsed financial institutions walking away with huge compensation packages, seeming rewards for their failures. And they are angry at Congress and the Bush administration further rewarding them with a $700 billion bailout.

Voters are venting their anger principally on Republicans who they see as responsible for the current financial mess. Republicans deserve what they get, but not because they bear most of the blame for trashing the economy; Democrats in this case are much more culpable. Rather, they deserve the wrath of the voters because John McCain and company do not offer them what will change anger into constructive action and help as well to create a political culture more conducive to freedom: an actual understanding of the causes of the situation.

In the first two presidential debates and the one vice presidential debate, Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden respectively began by blaming the current Wall Street and banking crisis on a failure of eight years of deregulation by the Bush administration and John McCain, and they offer us the same old class warfare rhetoric and big-government solutions. For their part, McCain and his VP nominee Sarah Palin have countered by denouncing the greed of Wall Street and declaring that they will crack down on it.

McCain's use of the emotive and confusing word "greed" offers not understanding but further obfuscation. Does wanting to be prosperous and rich constitute "greed?" If so, most of us are greedy and greed is a good thing. Does it mean wanting to become rich by stealing from others? In that case it's certainly wrong. But it is absurd to suggest that the current crisis is simply a matter of a bunch of Wall Street brokers and bank executives somehow using force or fraud to enrich themselves.

This use of the word "greed" simply stokes anger against individuals who might or might not deserve our wrath-we simply don't know. Ignorance and uncertainty about the real causes of the crisis leads to a sense of helplessness and fear. This, in turn, can lead to a desire to strike out blindly at any convenient enemy, in this case the "greedy rich." McCain seems to hope that voters will turn to him to do the clubbing.

But this game of bashing the rich is the modus operandi of the Democrats. So why vote for McCain out of fear? Why not go with the real pros?

It might be the case that McCain himself doesn't understand the nature of the current crisis. He appreciates some aspects of how free markets operate but not enough to offer the voters a consistent picture that will illuminate the current crisis. Or perhaps McCain's understanding might be impaired by his anti-individualism and belief in a common good that requires us to work for some cause beyond ourselves.

By contrast, what would be possible if McCain or any other politician accepted the moral right of individuals to live for themselves and understood the fundamentals of economic liberty? How could they help voters think about the financial crisis? Sure, the current crisis is complex and has a number of causes. But even a candidate in a debate or TV spot can offer clarity.

Try this:

"The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which was amended a number of times in the 1990s, in the name of stopping alleged racial discrimination in mortgage lending, allowed federal regulators to induce and force banks to make very risky loans. Banks were to disregard sound lending practices and to ignore the fact that borrowers couldn't make normal down payments and didn't have income that would best ensure that they could meet their payments."

You can recite those sentences in 30 seconds and they allow the listener to understand that a principal factor in the current crisis was government regulation rather than deregulation.

Let's try another one:

"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises. Got it? Government sponsored enterprises! They purchase and resell bundles of risky loans with implicit government guarantees. Without Fannie's and Freddie's implicit guarantees, many of those bad IOUs would not have been purchased by so many banks that now are collapsing as defaults rise."

Again, under 30 seconds and now the listener has a bit more crucial knowledge.

Let's go for three:

"Private enterprises-banks, investment houses-risk their owners' money and that risk gives owners a strong incentive to act soundly without government regulations. On the other hand, governments with all their offices and agencies, departments and divisions, wield political power, that is, the use of force. In a free society, they must be subject to lots of constraints, limits, checks, and balances if they are to protect rather than endanger individual freedom. Government sponsored enterprises are technically private but, really, are neither fish nor fowl. They enjoy special government favors, are exempt from many regulations that restrain government agencies but aren't completely subject to market discipline. And that was the problem with Fannie and Freddie."

Okay, that was a bit longer, but still only a minute. And it added yet another piece of information that now has the listener thinking, "What the hell are the Democrats talking about when they damn 'eight years of deregulation'?"

It seems that McCain just doesn't understand what's going on in the financial sector. The Democrats probably understand the crisis better. They should. After all, they are strong supporters for the Community Reinvestment Act and they blocked attempts in recent years by the Bush administration to place restrictions on Fannie and Freddie. But their ideology favors control of the economy and stifling of economic freedom. Thus they are happy for the confusion about the current crisis that allows them to blame freedom and greed and to assert the need for even more government control.

Ignorance about the causes of the financial crisis gives us insights into the broader and crucial role of critical thinking and understanding in political culture. It is through the use of our minds and critical thinking that we understand the world around us and thus can act for our own survival and happiness. And because we need to understand and act, we require individual liberty in society with others and should deal with one another based on mutual consent rather than the initiation of force and fraud. In the absence of freedom, in a society that is dominated by government regulation and regulators, individuals won't need to understand or think because they won't be able to act for their own well-being in any case.

On the other hand, a political culture that supports freedom depends upon citizens who understand universal moral truths; who understand that "economic freedom" is simply another way of saying "free to think and act as you choose"; and who understand the dangers of allowing the institution called "government"-which is meant to protect individual freedom-to have extensive and unchecked powers to regulate.

Understanding these truths is no guarantee of right moral action. Often those who obfuscate do so because they know that their own moral premises are questionable. They want to run the lives of others by force. That is pretty much the program of the Democratic Party-and the Republicans are not that far behind. But understanding strips away any disguise, reveals real goals and motives, and makes it more difficult for others to deceive us.

So let's first and foremost be angry at ignorance and strive to promote the understanding and critical thinking that will head off government-created crises in the future.
The Atlas Society - The Center for Objectivism

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

Rivals’ Visions Differ on Unleashing Innovation
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and CORNELIA DEAN
NY Times

For decades, the United States dominated the technological revolution sweeping the globe, The nation’s science and engineering skills produced vast gains in productivity and wealth, powered its military and made it the de facto world leader.

Today, the dominance is eroding. In 2002, the nation’s high-technology balance of trade went south, and it never came back. By 2007, the annual gap between high-tech exports and imports had grown to $53 billion. The gap this year is expected to be the largest ever — approaching $60 billion.

Both presidential candidates, in their careers and in their campaigns, have made detailed arguments for how the nation should deal with technology rivals, sharpen its competitive edge and improve what experts call its “ecology of innovation.”

Yet their visions are strikingly different. They diverge mainly on the appropriate role for the federal government in education, in spending on research, and in building, maintaining and regulating the complex infrastructure on which innovation depends. The visions both face tough questions on their viability amid the nation’s deepening financial crisis.

Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, seeks to encourage innovation by cutting corporate taxes and ending what he calls “burdensome regulations” that he says inhibit corporate investment. But Mr. McCain has also repeatedly gone up against business if he sees a conflict with national security, for instance, in seeking to limit sensitive exports.

In Senator Barack Obama’s view, the United States must compete far more effectively against an array of international rivals who are growing more technically adept. Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, looks to the federal government to finance science, math and engineering education and the kind of basic research that can produce valuable industrial spinoffs.

The personal styles of the candidates also contrast. Mr. McCain says his leadership of the Senate commerce committee has versed him in technology issues, but he also jokes about his ignorance of personal computers and e-mail. Mr. Obama, an avid BlackBerry user, commenced an aggressive drive for campaign donations over the Internet.

Mr. Obama embraces the theory of evolution and argues that the teaching of intelligent design and other creationist ideas “cloud” a student’s understanding of science. While Mr. McCain says he personally believes in evolution, he has also said children should be taught “all points of view.”

Mr. McCain has written five books, starting in 1999, but none discuss in any detail how the nation might respond to technical rivals — a central theme of Mr. Obama’s second book, published in 2006. Mr. Obama posted a detailed set of technology proposals on his Web site late last year; Mr. McCain did so in recent months.

It remains to be seen how the candidates would pay for their proposals.

At the request of The New York Times, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, estimated the annual costs of the plans and put Mr. Obama’s at $85.6 billion and Mr. McCain’s at $78.8 billion, excluding his proposed reductions in corporate taxes.

“The pressures of an unfolding fiscal crisis make these priorities recede on the list of what politicians want to do,” said Robert Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995.

Nevertheless, there is wide agreement among economists and other experts that the capacity to innovate is central to growth, quality of life and success in the global marketplace — a point on which the candidates agree.

“If we don’t have an innovation agenda, if we don’t invest in science research, if we don’t provide encouragement for our kids to pursue careers in math and science, I don’t see where our country can go economically in the future,” said John Edward Porter, a Republican former congressman who is the board chairman of Research!America, an advocacy group.

Several experts faulted both campaigns for failing to give the innovation issue higher visibility, despite their many plans and proposals.

“I understand the immediate pressures and vicissitudes of elections,” said Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But I’d like to see them raising the discussion on this, which is absolutely fundamental to the future of jobs and the economy.”

Restoring the nation’s competitive edge is urgent, said Norman R. Augustine, a former chief executive of the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin who led an influential innovation study by the National Academies.

“If we don’t wake up,” Mr. Augustine said in an interview, “there’s a high chance that the generation of children we’re leaving behind will have a much lower quality of life.”

McCain as Committee Leader

The golden age of American invention began after World War II, when the government and industry poured big money into research and produced advanced goods like the transistor, the laser, new drugs, fiber optics, new kinds of jets and spacecraft, modems and the desktop computer. All were exported in vast quantities.

Signs of trouble appeared in September and October of 1995, when the nation registered its first negative balances of trade in advanced technology goods, according to the Foreign Trade Division at the Census Bureau.

In 1997, Senator McCain, of Arizona, became chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, beginning a tenure that, with an interruption in 2001 and 2002, went until early 2005.

Though often approving of business and deregulation, he could reverse course if the issue impinged on what he saw as national security. An early initiative of his sought to restrict American exports of certain high-tech goods, even as the Clinton administration pushed for trade liberalization.

“It’s critical that safeguards are in place,” he said in opening a 1998 hearing on missile and satellite exports to China. Later, Republicans charged the Clinton administration with dangerous irresponsibility in allowing the Chinese to import high-performance computers. Getting the export issue right, Mr. McCain said at a hearing in 2000, is “one of the greatest challenges of our time.”

The drive helped tighten export regulations. But technology analysts faulted the attack as political and the tightening as unnecessary.

James A. Lewis, an export specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, wrote in 2001 that the new system “expends enormous resources on trivial and unimportant security risks” and threatens to damage important sectors of the economy, like the defense industry. The Republicans “closed off space exports,” he added in an interview this month. “So, many countries started their own space programs to get around the export controls.”

Domestically over the years, Mr. McCain’s committee sought to spur things like Internet development, the private space industry and the commercial licensing of federally owned inventions.

But in 2002, for the first time, the nation registered negative balances of trade in advanced technology goods for a whole year. “Time to wake up,” Representative Donald Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, said as he led a hearing in July 2003 on preserving the defense industrial base.

Mr. McCain, who held no hearings on the issues, did push for new innovations. For instance, he introduced a bill in 2005 to limit heat-trapping gases that sought to spur the development of green technologies.

A few months later, the National Academies issued its influential report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.” The academies, the nation’s most eminent scientific and engineering organization, called for an urgent effort to strengthen American competitiveness.

The report said industries like chemical, semiconductor and automotive were growing in other countries while comparable American efforts atrophied. The patent office issued most of its information technology patents to foreigners. The United States ranked 17th among industrialized nations in high-school graduation rates, and the country had become “a net importer of high-technology products,” many from China.

The report added that corporations were cutting back on basic research and eliminating in-house laboratories.

Among other things, it proposed that the government finance 10,000 scholarships for math and science teaching careers and 30,000 scholarships for college-level study of science, math and engineering; increase the basic research budget by 10 percent a year for seven years; and establish programs to make broadband available nationwide at low cost.

Representative Sherwood L. Boehlert, a New York Republican who was chairman of the House science committee, praised the report at a hearing and said, “Complacency will kill us.”

Outlook in Obama Book

In October 2006, Mr. Obama, who had been elected to the Senate from Illinois two years earlier, published his second book, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.” He wrote of visiting Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., where, among other things, he saw a map of the world with lights showing where Google searches were going on. Swaths of Africa and South Asia were dark. But so were portions of the United States, he wrote, where “thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.”

Many of the engineers Mr. Obama met at Google were from Asia or Eastern Europe. “As far as I could tell, not one was black or Latino,” he wrote. His guide told him that finding American-born engineers of any race was getting so hard that American companies were setting up shop abroad, in part for access to talent.

America, Mr. Obama wrote, cannot compete with countries like China and India simply by cutting costs and shrinking government. “If we want an innovation economy,” he added, “one that generates more Googles each year, then we have to invest in our future innovators — by doubling federal funding of basic research over the next five years, training 100,000 more engineers and scientists over the next four years, or providing new research grants to the most outstanding early-career researchers in the country.”

He acknowledged that his plan would cost about $42 billion over five years — “real money, to be sure, but just 15 percent of the most recent federal highway bill.”

The next year, Mr. Obama joined other senators to introduce a bill that built on the recommendations of “The Gathering Storm.” It eventually drew 69 co-sponsors from both sides of the Senate aisle; Mr. McCain was not among them.

Mr. Obama then offered amendments to the bill intended to increase federal support of science education, particularly among women and underrepresented minorities. “If we do not tap the diversity of our nation,” he said on the Senate floor, “we will diminish our capacity to innovate.”

The Senate passed the bill 88 to 8. Mr. McCain abstained. President Bush signed the bill, the America Competes Act, into law. But Congress has yet to finance its programs, estimated to cost about $43 billion for the first three years.

Candidates’ Platforms

Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama acknowledge the importance of scientific research. The two men, for instance, advocate making research and development tax credits permanent. They would move the presidential science adviser back into the close orbit of the White House, a position it occupied until 2001, and they support the human exploration of space.

Though their approaches differ, both call for changes in the operation of the patent office, agree that access to broadband must be expanded and advocate steps to encourage technically trained foreigners to enter and stay in the United States.

But Mr. Obama looks to encourage basic research with infusions of federal cash. Mr. McCain says easing regulatory and tax burdens will encourage private spending on research. (Experts say industry now tends to focus on near-term applications, while government finances more basic research that has greater breakthrough potential.)

Mr. Obama has proposed doubling federal financing for basic research in physics, life sciences, mathematics and engineering over 10 years. He has promised to review export rules he calls outdated and sees as having “unduly hampered the competitiveness of the domestic aerospace industry.”

By contrast, even before the current economic crisis, Mr. McCain proposed freezing, at least initially, almost all discretionary federal spending — a budget category that includes federal research efforts.

And he makes hay on the stump by citing, as an example of wasted money, a study of the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana, wondering aloud why anyone would think bears were involved in paternity suits or criminal activity. (In fact, the project, undertaken by the United States Geological Survey, intended to find ways of estimating the region’s population of grizzlies, endangered in the lower 48 states.)

The McCain campaign has said he will encourage corporate research by reducing the capital gains and corporate taxes and promoting “conditions favorable to investment.” In response to a survey by Science Debate 2008, a private group that tried to arrange a debate on science issues, he cited “burdensome regulations” as inhibiting innovation in the United States and said he would work to remove them.

“I am uniquely qualified to lead our nation during this technological revolution,” he said in the survey response, pointing to his Navy experience with advanced technologies as well as his leadership on the Senate commerce committee. “Under my guiding hand,” he added, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that prompted the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology.

Seeking to reduce the government’s role in choosing technologies and to increase that of entrepreneurs, Mr. McCain has now proposed federal sponsorship of a $300 million prize to encourage the development of a revolutionary new battery for electric cars.

Mr. Obama supports expanding research on human embryonic stem cells. The research is regarded as a promising avenue toward novel treatments for serious diseases. But because such research involves destruction of early stage human embryos, opponents of abortion rights oppose it. Mr. Bush severely restricted the work in 2001.

Mr. McCain has voiced support for this research, but he now adds that he hopes it will soon be unnecessary to use these cells. In his response to the Science Debate 2008 questionnaire, at sciencedebate2008.com, Mr. McCain said the nation should refuse “to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for scientific progress.”

Mr. McCain’s campaign did not respond to repeated requests for information. According to the journal Science, he has “no formal structure” for seeking science advice. It reports that Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economic adviser and head of the Congressional Budget Office under Mr. Bush, serves as Mr. McCain’s “point man” on science, having been in touch with experts on climate, space and “science in general.”

On the other hand, Mr. Obama established a science advisory committee led by Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate who is president of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Varmus said the group’s leaders communicated almost daily with the campaign’s policy leaders. And this month, the campaign announced that 61 American Nobel laureates in science had endorsed Mr. Obama. (When Martin Chalfie, a Columbia biologist, learned last week that he had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, he said one of the first things he did was to call one of the 61 to ask how to add his name to the list.)

Dr. Varmus acknowledged that finding the money to pay for the Obama innovation agenda “is not an easy question.” But he said Mr. Obama would focus on federal spending on high priority areas “and among the things he mentioned as being central to economic recovery are science and technology.”

Experts agree that the immediacy of the financial crisis is overshadowing the innovation debate and predict little headway until a new president has settled into office and confronts budgetary realities.

“The problem,” said Mr. Boehlert, the former chairman of the House science committee, who left Congress last year, “is that it takes an immediate investment that won’t pay immediate dividends, and people are looking for an instant fix.”

Kenneth Chang contributed reporting.

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“The problem,” [snip] “is that it takes an immediate investment that won’t pay immediate dividends, and people are looking for an instant fix.”

They didn't have any problem creating an instant mess, that's for sure... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

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me@rescam.org

“The problem,” [snip] “is that it takes an immediate investment that won’t pay immediate dividends, and people are looking for an instant fix.”

They didn't have any problem creating an instant mess, that's for sure... ;)

It wasn't an instant mess. I remember back in about 1995 [uh who was president?] starting to hear a lot of commercials for these sub-prime mortgage brokers on the radio commuting to work. Zero down loans. Option payment loans. ARM [and a leg] loans. Stated income loans. Interest only loans. We get you money in two days! Free money!

The brokers who sold them didn't care who bought them, just so they got their commission check. The banks they sold them to didn't care, house prices were going up and a foreclosure got them all their money back. I think that is when the mess began. As long as Mr. Greenspan held interest rates at rock bottom numbers the fools who took out these loans could pay them off. When he saw inflation coming and jumped interest rates up fast, he popped the bubble. Suddenly loans got hard to come by and that slowed the housing market. Now prices were falling and the rest is history.

Gary

MEDIA ALERT: Prophet Yahweh Predicts Spaceships Will Appear Oct. 31st in Support of Senator Obama

Las Vegas, NV (PRWEB) October 17, 2008 -- According to Prophet Yahweh: Some time before Nov. 11, 2008, more than likely before the presidential elections, and possibly on October 31, 2008, at approximately 12 noon, spaceships will start appearing, on my summons request, and hover over my school for all Las Vegans and media to see and film.

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Calm Chaos Forum...Join Calm Chaos Now

MEDIA ALERT: Prophet Yahweh Predicts Spaceships Will Appear Oct. 31st in Support of Senator Obama

Las Vegas, NV (PRWEB) October 17, 2008 -- According to Prophet Yahweh: Some time before Nov. 11, 2008, more than likely before the presidential elections, and possibly on October 31, 2008, at approximately 12 noon, spaceships will start appearing, on my summons request, and hover over my school for all Las Vegans and media to see and film.

Now that's possibly the most interesting and remarkable post I've ever seen on any forum anywhere :D

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

;)))

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

Ted kennedy speaks for Emmanuel Goldstein? I thought O'Brien was his spokesman... ;)

(But hey, it was only a book.)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

Latest Sarah Palin video

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me@rescam.org

Latest Sarah Palin video

Rock out to the Palin Rap!

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me@rescam.org

The elites' disdain for the people

WILLIAM KRISTOL
THE NEW YORK TIMES

October 21, 2008

According to the silver-penned Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, “In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics.”

Leave aside Noonan's negative judgment on Sarah Palin's candidacy, a judgment I don't share. Are we really seeing “a new vulgarization in American politics?” As opposed to the good old non-vulgar days?

Politics in a democracy are always “vulgar” – since democracy is rule by the “vulgus,” the common people, the crowd. Many conservatives have never been entirely comfortable with this rather important characteristic of democracy. Conservatives' hearts have always beaten a little faster when they read Horace's famous line: “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.” “I hate the ignorant crowd and I keep them at a distance.”

But is the ignorant crowd really our problem today? Are populism and anti-intellectualism rampant in the land? Does the common man too thoroughly dominate our national life? I don't think so.

Last week, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released its latest national survey, taken from Oct. 9 to 12. Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country and of course concerned about the economy. But, as Pew summarized, “there is little indication that the nation's financial crisis has triggered public panic or despair.”

In fact, “There is a broad public consensus regarding the causes of the current problems with financial institutions and markets: 79 percent say people taking on too much debt has contributed a lot to the crisis, while 72 percent say the same about banks making risky loans.”

This seems sensible. Indeed, as Sept. 11, 2001, did not result in a much-feared (by intellectuals) wave of popular Islamophobia or xenophobia, so the market crash has resulted in remarkably little popular hysteria or scapegoating.

And considering what has happened, the vulgar public on Main Street has been surprisingly forgiving of those well-educated types on Wall Street who devised and marketed sophisticated financial instruments that have brought the financial system to the brink of collapse.

Most of the recent mistakes of American public policy, and most of the contemporary delusions of American public life, haven't come from an ignorant and excitable public. They've been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites.

Needless to say, the public's not always right, and public opinion is not always responsible. But as publics go, the American public has a pretty good track record.

In the 1930s, the American people didn't fall – unlike so many of their supposed intellectual betters – for either fascism or communism. Since World War II, the American people have resisted the temptations of isolationism and protectionism, and have turned their backs on a history of bigotry.

Now, the Pew poll I cited earlier also showed Barack Obama holding a 50 percent to 40 percent lead over John McCain in the race for the White House. You might think this data point poses a challenge to my encomium to the good sense of the American people.

It does. But it's hard to blame the public for preferring Obama at this stage – given the understandable desire to kick the Republicans out of the White House, and given the failure of the McCain campaign to make its case effectively. And some number of the public may change their minds in the final two weeks of the campaign, and may decide McCain-Palin offers a better kind of change – perhaps enough to give McCain-Palin a victory.

The media elites really hate that idea. Not just because so many of them prefer Obama. But because they like telling us what's going to happen. They're always annoyed when the people cross them up. Pundits spent all spring telling Hillary Clinton to give up in her contest against Obama – and the public kept on ignoring them and keeping her hopes alive.

Why do elites like to proclaim premature closure – not just in elections, but also in wars and in social struggles? Because it makes them the imperial arbiters, or at least the perspicacious announcers, of what history is going to bring. This puts the elite prognosticators ahead of the curve, ahead of the simple-minded people who might entertain the delusion that they still have a choice.

But as Gerald Ford said after assuming the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974, “Here the people rule.”

One of those people is Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber. He's the latest ordinary American to do a star turn in our vulgar democratic circus. He seems like a sensible man to me.

And to Peggy Noonan, who wrote that Joe “in an extended cable interview Thursday made a better case for the Republican ticket than the Republican ticket has made.” At least McCain and Palin have had the good sense to embrace him. I join them in taking my stand with Joe the Plumber – in defiance of Horace the Poet.

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me@rescam.org

By Orson Scott Card October 5, 2008

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe --and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

Taken from this page.
I heard this on Rush today, and Mr. Card is a democrat.

2 Convicted in Denmark of Preparing Terror Attack

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"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me