Ambers relays the mood at the White House:
The more Republicans find their voice on the right, on what White House officials call the "Palin-Beck" axis, the better Democrats will fare after 2010, when they still should have their majorities, when they should have a sleeve of accomplishments, when it becomes clear that Republicans are unwilling or unable to build a genuine coalition.
Razib Khan counters Yglesias on one point.
Hoffman appears on Beck and slowly undergoes conversion therapy:
HOFFMAN: I have good mentors here.
GLENN: Wait, wait. Wait, wait. Are they mentors that will show –
HOFFMAN: I’m talking about you, Glenn.
GLENN: Oh, okay. I was going to say all right, as long as they are standing out from the shadows. […]
HOFFMAN: No. Yeah, well, I’m going to keep in touch with people like you so I don’t get infected with that disease.
Beck persuaded Hoffman that climate change is not caused by humans. Meanwhile, Palin is robo-calling Virginians. They're voting for "Sarah's Values" whatever those are.
Bruce Bartlett concisely describes why government stimulus was necessary to battle this recession. His bottom line:
The main differences between today's crisis and the Great Depression is that the deflationary pressure is less than a third of what it was in the 1930s and policymakers today reacted much more swiftly and more appropriately than they did after 1929. Those who think the government should have done nothing risked turning the current downturn into another Great Depression. Thankfully, their advice was ignored.
World and Olympic sprint champion Usain Bolt holds a cheetah cub at the headquarters of the Kenyan Wildlife Service in Nairobi on November 2, 2009. The triple Olympic and world sprint champion in both the 100 and 200 metres events arrived in the land of long-distance running on October 30, ahead of the launch of an environmental charity campaign to preserve local ecosystems. The cub was named Lightning Bolt. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images.
Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.
No wonder Hiatt fired him.
Women for Afghan Women (WAW), "a nongovernmental organization that runs women's shelters, schools, and counseling centers in three cities in Afghanistan," is calling for a troop increase. Michelle Goldberg:
To a large degree, the answer depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism. After the last eight years, that's a hard faith to sustain. Staying in Afghanistan seems indefensible. The trouble is, so does leaving.
A reader writes:
In your post you picked a section of Jerry Coyne's review where he suggests that observed changes in characteristics such as weight, cholesterol, age of menopause etc are "evolutionary change" and evidence that our species is evolving. My first two reactions were "wow, could they have picked a worse set of characteristics to study?" and "wow, how could he possibly draw that conclusion?" There is not a single characteristic listed which is not significantly affected by the lifestyle and environment of the subjects, something which any layman
can readily understand.
Despite his own caveats, where he notes that even the authors of the paper point out that the study was unable to differentiate between the effects of genes and culture, he still draws the conclusion that this is evidence that humans are evolving. The problem with his 'probable assumptions' is that they are speculations (by no less than his own admission), not science, which have been lent some air of authority due to the author's position as a prominent proponent of evolution. He also notes that these predictions will be hard (perhaps he should have said impossible) to verify due to the very same reason which I believe make them completely unreliable as indicators of evolution in the first place, namely that the behavior of the population effects these characteristics.
His conclusion also takes the concept of evolution completely out of context. He goes out of his way to let his readers know what evolution is in the review, that an individual will possess a trait which will increase the individual's chance of producing offspring and passing on an inherited advantage, but then goes on to declare these changes to be "evolutionary." The only way which this conclusion is reasonable is if you expand the definition of evolution to include learned behaviors, which he actually does in his first caveat, and introduces Richard Dawkins' idea of 'memes' without giving it the name, which is yet another area of speculation. By this reasoning a person who changes their diet and loses or gains weight has evolved.
Regardless of whether or not behavior is considered a part of evolutionary theory, it was not the point of the study, which was to find a connection between genes and the specified changes. This reminds me of Barack Obama's promise that the stimulus would "save or create" a certain number of jobs. A brilliant political move considering it is impossible to truly measure how many jobs are saved. Both of these cases demonstrate a common method of appearing to have successfully accomplished a desired goal by making goal posts sufficiently ambiguous as to make it possible to claim accomplishment where there is, in reality, none.
Scott Payne interviews Alex Massie:
I think the internet’s influence on the media and politics in Britain has taken time to build in part because the British press, for all its faults, is a much more open, raucous and cacophonous creature than its American counterpart. In other words, it shares some qualities with the blogosphere. In other words, there was less need for the blogosphere than there was in the US. At least in terms of holding politician’s feet to the fire.
Only $12,360 of the $265,341 he’s raised came from potential constituents. Hoffman collected money from donors in 35 states. Of the total 146 donors, only 22 were actually from within the district he hopes to represent. The campaign’s biggest backer is the Washington-based Club for Growth, accounting for more than one-third of all fundraising ($83,260).
The Dish 