12.01.09
Catching up/Items of interest
Jason Embry has a great post today on GOP Gov. wannabe KBH’s education plan, sans $$$, Hutchison education plan avoids discussion of costs. (Hank has a funding plan [.pdf])
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison took to the campaign trail Monday to promote her education plan, which she first unveiled a couple of days before Thanksgiving.
But there are two major elements missing from her plan: a discussion of how schools can cope with a shortage of money from the state, and an explanation of how she would pay for the new initiatives she has proposed.
When she laid out the plan last week in the Dallas area, Gromer Jeffers of the Dallas Morning News wrote, “Hutchison’s plan calls for no new money for public education, and no raise in teacher pay. She said existing dollars would be put to better use by demanding that school districts be more efficient.”
Just what school districts want to hear.
Sarah Palin, just another GOP “internal convulsion”, North Star – Populism, politics, and the power of Sarah Palin.
Internal convulsion is an essential rite of the modern Republican Party, dating back to 1964, when grassroots activists, rallying behind the Presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, routed the Party’s East Coast leadership and realigned the Party along the Sun Belt axis. It happened again in 1976, when Ronald Reagan battled the incumbent Gerald Ford all the way to the National Convention; and in 1992, when Pat Buchanan harried George H. W. Bush during the primaries and then, in a televised address at the Convention, in Houston, thundered, “There is a religious war going on in this country.” A similar revolt is under way today, though as yet no insurgent tribune has emerged—except, possibly, Sarah Palin. Polls taken last November showed that she had alienated centrists, and a majority of people still eye her with mistrust. But this is beside the point. Populists, from William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long through Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, have always been divisive and polarizing. Their job is not to win national elections but to carry the torch and inspire the faithful, and this Palin seems poised to do. That she is the first woman to generate populist fervor on such a scale enhances her appeal—and makes her, potentially, a figure of historic consequence.
Have you heard about the hacked emails on climate science? If not get up to speed (Rolling The Dice, How Important Are Those Stolen Climate E-mails?, and More Insight on Those Leaked Climate Change Emails [with many links]). But this seems to be the consensus:
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.
Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.
Krugman CBO has good news about insurance premiums in Senate bill.
The Congressional Budget Office has released its much-awaited estimate on how the Senate health care bill would affect premiums. It’s good news from the point of view of reform advocates: premiums would stay about the same for people with group coverage, while falling significantly for most of those in the small-group or individual markets.
Which is good news for Texans, Rising Health Insurance Premiums in Texas Reinforce Need for National Health Reform.
Texans with health insurance today through their jobs stand to benefit greatly from national health reform that makes coverage more affordable, stable, and secure for employers, employees, and employees’ families. This Policy Page examines trends related to employer-sponsored health insurance and ways national health reform can shore up employer-sponsored health insurance to establish stable and secure coverage Texans can count on.
Another report for the Texas Forensic Science Commission to deal with, Coming to grips with unscientific forensic practices.
The Fort Worth Start Telegram yesterday published a lengthy, remarkable piece from Yamil Berard titled “Stakes are high as doubt is cast on forensic lab techniques.” The article is one of the first published in the MSM in Texas to fully explore the implications of conclusions published earlier this year by the National Academies of Science (NAS) that many common forensic techniques had no scientific basis and their validity had never been tested – particularly comparative disciplines where individual technicians seek to match patterns in everything from fingerprints to tire tracks to ballistics to bite marks.
GOP state Rep. Todd Smith’s primary opponent should be ashamed of himself. See EOW previous reporting on this issue, A good bill passed the house yesterday, and Rep. Smith hammers Gov. Perry for vetoing HB 3148.