Month: July 2008

Marc writes about the faith and government initiative:

Obama’s principle is clear, but how he’d put them into practice is not clear. Would Catholic charities be allowed to refuse to hire gay people for federally-funded programs? Obama thinks they shouldn’t be able to, but it’s not clear how or whether Obama would intervene to prevent them from doing so. It’s also clear that Obama wants to expand the Bush initiative and rebrand it a bit. His new name for it is the Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Rasmussen’s tracking poll is remarkably stable: Obama’s five-point national lead has barely budged in weeks.

Arianna is pissed:

I can unequivocally say: the Obama campaign is making a very serious mistake. Tacking to the center is a losing strategy. And don’t let the latest head-to-head poll numbers lull you the way they lulled Hillary Clinton in December…Realpolitik is one thing. Realstupidpolitik is quite another.

Nate Silver has a point:

Unless the Washington Post has access to Obama’s FICO score — and unless it has rented an apartment to him, it probably doesn’t — it is missing a pretty important piece of information on what Obama’s mortgage rate ought to have been. What was Obama’s FICO score? I don’t know, but considering that…

* Obama had just gotten a $2.27 million book deal from Random House — about $1 million more than the value of the mortgage.
* The Obamas each had exceptionally secure jobs that paid them a combined annual salary of about $500,000 per year.
* The Obamas had just sold their condo, on which they had realized a $137,500 profit.
* The Obamas were prominent public figures whose political futures depended in part on maintaining a reputation for responsibility and trustworthiness.
* The Obamas are known to be relatively thrifty and have no credit card debt but substantial savings.

…I would think that the Obamas were exceptionally creditworthy. So indeed, Obama received a "discount" — the same discount that any borrower in his position would have received.

Greenwald is livid:

Feeding distortions against someone like Wesley Clark in order to please Joe Klein and his fact-free media friends, or legalizing warrantless eavesdropping and protecting joint Bush/telecom lawbreaking, or basing his campaign on demonizing MoveOn.org and 1960s anti-war hippies, is quite harmful in many long-lasting ways. Electing Barack Obama is a very important political priority but it isn’t the only one there is, and his election is less likely, not more likely, the more homage he pays to these these tired, status-quo-perpetuating Beltway pieties.
 

Atrios complains:

One thing about blogging during the campaign is that you end up pissing people off on all sides. There are those who, understandably, think it’s vitally important that Barack Obama be elected and so important that asshole bloggers like me should refrain from any and all criticism lest my mighty blog powers cause Obama to fail. And there are those that get mad because I’m completely in the tank and don’t criticize Obama enough. And everyone in between.

I know the feeling. I’ve grown to like it, actually.

It’s working in a way:

A survey of 17 countries has found that despite its punitive drug policies the United States has the highest levels of illegal cocaine and cannabis use. The authors found that 16.2% of people in the United States had used cocaine in their lifetime, a level much higher than any other country surveyed (the second highest level of cocaine use was in New Zealand, where 4.3% of people reported having used cocaine). Cannabis use was highest in the US (42.4%), followed by New Zealand (41.9%).

And the high drug use becomes the reason to keep at it. Perfect if you like endless war – and Washington clearly does. It’s more powerful that way.

Michael Scherer discusses America’s flip-flop obsession:

The core message of the Obama/DNC campaign is that McCain has flip-flopped on all his old maverick image. The key message of the McCain/RNC campaign is that Obama is an opportunist who will flip-flop when it helps him politically. And so it goes. Every day, flip-flop charges bang up against the political press like moths on a screen door. And we let some of them in, sometimes with the unexamined conceit that any shift in position is a window into the candidate’s lack of character, toughness or principle.

It’s often a completely idiotic way to analyze a candidate. Sometimes a flip-flop is a sign of real maturity in a politician responding to new events or facts. And sometimes, rigid consistency is disastrous. If Bush had flip-flopped on the Iraq occupation two years earlier, the world would be a much better place. And if he’d flip-flopped on torture and detention after the initial panicked over-reach, he would have been spared an awful and self-defeating ordeal.

People kill people with guns. Mainly themselves:

Suicides accounted for 55% of the nation’s nearly 31,000 firearm deaths in 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The future gets closer:

In this new study, a team of neuroimaging researchers led by Hagmann used state-of-the-art diffusion MRI technology, which is a non-invasive scanning technique that estimates fiber connection trajectories based on gradient maps of the diffusion of water molecules through brain tissue. A highly sensitive variant of the method, called diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI), can depict the orientation of multiple fibers that cross a single location. The study applies this technique to the entire human cortex, resulting in maps of millions of neural fibers running throughout this highly furrowed part of the brain…

"We found that the core, the most central part of the brain, is in the medial posterior portion of the cortex, and it straddles both hemispheres," Sporns said. "This wasn’t known before. Researchers have been interested in this part of the brain for other reasons. For example, when you’re at rest, this area uses up a lot of metabolic energy, but until now it hasn’t been clear why."