RASMUSSEN: “Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on eight out of 10 key electoral issues, including, for the second straight month, the top issue of the economy. They’ve also narrowed the gap on the remaining two issues, the traditionally Democratic strong suits of health care and education.”
Archive for 2009
July 10, 2009
MICKEY KAUS: Everybody Hates The Teachers’ Unions Now. “How can we know when the tide of respectable opinion has decisively turned against the teachers’ unions? When a panel that includes Father Hesburgh, Birch Bayh. Bill Bradley, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Roger Wilkins goes medieval on them, saying their resistance to reforms designed to hold schools accountable has hurt ‘disadvantaged students’ and led to “calcified systems in which talented people are deterred from applying or staying as teachers’ …”
TRYING TO FIGURE OUT the University of Wisconsin’s bizarre furlough policy. It has its own logic, of course, but it’s logic only a bureaucrat could love.
JOHN DEAN IS BACK: Watergate ‘hero’ threatens historian.
CALORIC RESTRICTION SLOWS AGING IN MONKEYS. I don’t think it will ever prove popular in humans, but perhaps we’ll learn enough to produce drugs that mimic its effect without the near-starvation part.
FIERCE MORAL URGENCY (CONT’D): NASA’s chief climate scientist: Obama’s climate bill “less than worthless.” He’s neglecting the superb opportunities for graft, though, in his assessment. Those make it very valuable indeed.
TRYING TO SILENCE TEA PARTIERS in Quincy, Illinois. Followup here.
MACHINES THAT HEAL: A look at the future of medicine.
HMM: Sotomayor Enters Confirmation Process with Miers-Like Numbers. “Sonia Sotomayor will begin her confirmation hearings next week with some of the highest levels of public opposition of any Supreme Court nominee in the last two decades, according to a new poll by the CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation. In fact, only one nominee had a higher level of opposition: Harriet Miers, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005. Miers later withdrew her nomination under questions about her qualifications from both the political left and right.”
But there’s the difference. With Miers, the President’s own party made the biggest stink. The left won’t say a single bad thing about Sotomayor.
MICHAEL TOTTEN on the future of Iraq.
ELECTRONIC BRAIN IMPLANTS: Vulnerable to hacking. “So far one’s brain is one’s private preserve. This won’t always be the case.”
Some related thoughts, here.
IN THE MAIL: From F.H. Buckley, Fair Governance: Paternalism and Perfectionism.
THE EXAMINER: Political Opposition Is Not A Hate Crime. It will be if some people have their way. Remember, this sort of thing is only a threat to everything America stands for if you do it to communists. Or, possibly, muslims.
BODY-LANGUAGE ANALYSIS: Obama vs. Sarkozy. Sorry, but it’s an unfair competition — this is what the French have been finely honing for centuries. . . .
THE JOE BIDEN TOUCH: “Joe Biden’s trip to Ohio pretty much guaranteed that every major news organization would mention the Quinnipiac poll and its findings that in the Buckeye State, Obama’s approval rating is 49 percent, his approval on the economy is 46 percent, that 48 percent disapprove of his handing of the economy, etc. …”
Plus, it gave the Cincinnati Tea Party folks a platform. Thanks, Joe!
ANDERSON COOPER stumped by Cool Whip. Seems like the kind of thing he’d have mastered.
WSJ: Few Economists Favor More Stimulus. I say cancel the unspent stimulus we’ve already got, replace with a payroll-tax holiday. That would really stimulate, instead of just lining politicians’ pockets.
HEALTH CARE AND RATIONING: Megan McArdle informs Kevin Drum.
DALE CARPENTER on Massachusetts’ challenge to the Defense Of Marriage Act. Challenge, schmallenge. Why not just repeal it? The Democrats control Congress and the White House, and they’ve promised to be gay-friendly.
HAPPY BEATLES DAY!
ARE WE SEEING A Singularity Backlash?
MICKEY KAUS: Fear of Rationing: Obama Asked For It. “They brought it up! It wasn’t the Republicans who billed health care reform as a cost saving, budget-balancing measure that would start to deny payments for treatments deemed ‘ineffective,’ or (as one acolyte put it) when ‘a person’s life, or health, is not worth the price.’ And to think when they heard that people started to worry about rationing!”
MORE ON THE MANCESSION.
With a scary graphic.
Why is it happening? That’s discussed here. Also here: “Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a ‘downturn’ for women but a ‘catastrophe’ for men. Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women’s groups has made it all but impossible. . . . Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan.”