Governor Gibbons sees the light

I am sure it was my call that made the difference. :-)

Nevada's governor has decided to accept all of the federal stimulus funds allocated for our state. He had previously stated that he might not take money for extended unemployment benefits.

Here is the press release his office sent me:

Governor Jim Gibbons today announced he will accept all unemployment funds available to Nevada in the Stimulus Package. The total amount available to Nevada in unemployment insurance stimulus dollars is over $291 million. Governor Gibbons has already accepted a large segment of Stimulus Package funds to provide extended benefits to unemployed men and women in Nevada . The Governor was reluctant to accept $77-million dollars that would require an expansion of coverage to people not previously eligible for unemployment benefits. The Governor was concerned that Nevada businesses would be left to cover the cost of expanded coverage when stimulus dollars run out. However, the federal government has recently assured states that the expanded coverage base can be retracted in the future, before funding for such coverage becomes a permanent state obligation.

“As our economic crisis deepens, Nevadans are suffering because of layoffs, business closings and other cutbacks,” Gibbons said, “We have the responsibility to do everything we can to help our unemployed workers get through these difficult times, even if that means passing legislation that we would not necessarily approve during prosperous times.” Gibbons noted, “I’m willing to approve this expanded coverage with the understanding that the issue will be revisited in a future legislative session before federal dollars expire. Our citizens deserve all the help we can find while they try to cope with unexpected misfortunes.”

Governor Gibbons will work with legislators to develop a plan that will provide financial relief to those in need now, without penalizing businesses in the future.

Not only is torture wrong...

but it's also pointless:

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

The full story is in today's Washington Post.

A song that resonates right now

(Video link)

Recession watch: Portland

I miss my days in Portland... and I think I'll live there again at some point. The New York Times has an article on how the Rose City is handling the recession.

The Obamas take DC

The first family has been far more visible in Washington than has been the norm.

I lost my heart to Olivia Newton-John

When I was a kid, I think my first crush was on Olivia Newton-John. I used to fight with my friend Troy over who liked her more. (Maybe, secretly, I liked him more.)

This was the song that got me:

(Video link)

And don't even ask me about Xanadu.

Detroit in decline

My friend Bette sent me a link to these haunting images of Detroit in decline. (Here are some more images, though not nearly as beautiful as the first set which have such a post-apocalyptic feeling to them. They left me wondering if this is where we're all headed...)

No more Day to Day

I just learned this morning that NPR's Day to Day is going off the air. Budget cutbacks. Sad.

Today they had an entertaining segment on movies that feature scenes with people being laid off. It's worth a listen.

Anger and AIG

Gail Collins has me laughing this morning... I'm growing to really appreciate her humor. Read her column about anger and AIG.

Speaking of, the House just passed a bill that would tax the bonuses of anyone working at a company that has received $5 billion or more in bailout money. It would only apply to people making over $250,000 a year and receiving a bonus of more than $100,000.

The tax rate for these bonuses? 90%

Thank you, President Obama

It is hard to believe, but former President Bush refused to support a UN resolution urging all countries to *decriminalize* homosexuality. He wasn't being asked to support gay marriage but simply to add the U.S.'s voice to every other industrialized nation in saying that people should not be imprisoned or otherwise punished simply for being who they are.

It is now 2009, and the Obama administration is going to sign this resolution. Thank you, Mr. President!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29745175/

The bottom line on prostate screening

New research from Europe and the U.S. finds that prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening in men over 50 provides minimal if any benefit. If you are over 50 and are treated after a positive test, you have about a one in 50 chance of avoiding death ten years down the road. Considering the significant side effects of treatment, it's not a great deal.

AIG's CEO speaks

Ed Libby, the CEO of AIG, spoke before a Congressional committee today. It's important to note that he has only been on the job for six months. He took over after the government had already bailed out AIG, and he's only being paid $1 per year.

He testified that AIG has only received $78 billion from the government, not the $160-170 billion figure often quoted in the media.

And with respect to those $165 million in bonuses, he made these points:

• No performance bonuses are being paid. These are purely retention bonuses.
• When AIG failed, they had about $2.7 trillion of liabilities on their books. They've gotten that down to around $1.6 trillion. The reason they want to retain their current staff is the desire to wind down the rest of their obligation in an orderly manner and to avoid further deterioration in the financial markets.
• While 50 of the approximately 460 bonus recipients are no longer with the company, their bonuses were designed to pay them to stay until their specific responsibilities were complete. More people will leave the company as the remaining $1.6 trillion portfolio is reduced to zero.
• They have considered the Federal Reserve their primary regulator. They involve representatives from the Fed in all significant decisions, including the decision to go forward with these bonuses. They have relied on the Fed to keep the Treasury Department and Congress informed. They now realize this hasn't been happening as Liddy spoke to Treasury Secretary Geithner about these bonuses only last week, and Congress clearly hasn't known what was going on.
• Oh, yeah, one more: He's asked bonus recipients to return at least half of their retention bonuses, and a few have done so already.

All in all, I felt like I understood the situation a lot better after his testimony. While it doesn't make me any happier about the bonuses, I do see where they are coming from. They were basically willing to spend $165 million to help ensure that $1.6 trillion was handled responsibly.

Various opinions on those AIG bonus contracts...

And whether they can be broken, as compiled by the New York Times.

Raise taxes!!!

This is one new tax I could support: a tax on AIG bonus recipients.

I don't really understand why we can't instead re-work their existing compensation contracts. I mean, if AIG had gone bankrupt, wouldn't the bankruptcy court have done that?

An explanation of why we had to bail out AIG

Market Movers over on Portfolio.com explains the original rationale behind bailing out AIG. AIG sold insurance to other financial institutions that protected them when particular assets (like mortgage-backed bonds) dropped in value. When the bottom fell out of the housing market and foreclosures shot up, AIG was unable to make good on its insurance contracts... and it wasn't clear what the fallout would be:

Here's the fear: AIG goes bust, and can no longer make good on the promises it made when it said that it would pay out on a CDS [credit default swap] contract in the event that a certain credit defaults. Default protection sold by AIG, in other words, becomes worthless. Now let's say you're a CDS desk at, say, JP Morgan. You're buying and selling default protection all the time, and so long as the amount you've bought, on any given credit, is equal to the amount you've sold, you reckon that you have no net exposure.

The minute that AIG fails, everybody else's net position alters substantially, and in a very unpredictable way. The protection that JP Morgan bought from AIG is worthless, while the offsetting protection that JP Morgan sold to some hedge fund remains outstanding. So JP Morgan now has a large position it never wanted.

Now there's a good chance that JP Morgan will have hedged its counterparty risk to AIG -- but that doesn't make the risk go away, it just shunts it elsewhere in the financial system. And the web of connections between the thousands of counterparties in the CDS market is so complex that no one really has a clue who would have ended up holding the multi-billion-dollar bag. All those AIG losses which are currently being borne by the government wouldn't have disappeared if AIG had failed: they would simply have turned up somewhere else in the financial system.

And since bank regulators were trying to prop up the entire financial system (not only in the U.S. but with all of our financial partners), saving AIG was the best solution:

What's more, bailing out AIG had the pleasant side-effect of putting the entire global CDS market on a much stronger footing. Remember that CDS, like all derivatives, are a zero-sum game: for every loser, there's an equal and opposite winner. Very few institutions were net sellers of protection; AIG was by far the largest. So what that means is that the rest of the CDS market, ex AIG, is now a net winner to the exact extent that AIG is a loser: a hundred billion dollars or more. Given worries about the fragility of the CDS market and the systemic risks that it posed, bailing out the single largest net seller of protection essentially meant injecting a large amount of government cash into the part of the market that regulators were most worried about. It was quite an elegant solution, in its way: rather than trying to unpick the CDS knot institution by institution, you could just bail them all out at once by backstopping AIG.

IF NOTHING ELSE, hopefully this disaster will bring an end to the absurd concept of "too big to fail" with new regulations that prevent institutions from becoming that big in the first place. Once upon a time (i.e. the 1990s) we still had laws that limited the ability of banks to work across state lines. While I'm not sure what the original logic behind the rule was, it did have the useful effect of keeping banks from growing so large that... they were too big to fail.

Here are some thoughts on the subject that were offered last fall by Robert Reich and Matthew Yglesias.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

And to celebrate it, here are some James Joyce quotes:

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.

-- notes in Exiles

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

-- "The Dead," Dubliners (I highly recommend seeing John Huston's film adaptation if you can find it)

-- Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the opposite of that that is really life.
-- What? Says Alf.
-- Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

-- Ulysses

Why you have to watch Fox News now and then...

Why? To catch them in outright lies.

They've taken a video of Joe Biden from last September, pulled out a clip of him speaking the words, "The fundamentals of the economy are strong," and broadcast it as if 1) he made the comment this past weekend and 2) he was making the statement himself (he was actually quoting John McCain!).

You can watch the Fox News segment and the original video from last year here.

UPDATE

After being caught, Fox News has admitted the mistake.

A video report on the aftermath of proposition 8

And my friend Scott was interviewed at the 46 second mark. :-)

(Video link)

Tales of U.S. torture leak out

Andrew Sullivan has a bunch of posts today about new details coming out on U.S. torture of detainees. I'll simply link to them: one and two (reports of what detainees experienced), three (a comparison of U.S. and Gestapo techniques), and four (the involvement of medical doctors).

More on how the finance industry collectively ran off of a cliff

Conde Naste's Portfolio has a great article on a key factor that underlies the entire finance industry mess that has hobbled our economy. Turns out that in 2000 mathematician David Li came up with a formula for simplifying the process of determining the risk of a pool of assets. The banks, hedge funds, rating agencies, and other financial institutions all adopted his so-called "Gaussian copula function."

Turns out that doing so was a recipe for disaster, as the formula only produced useful information as long as certain key assumptions remained true.

Such as, you may ask?

Such as the idea that house prices will keep going up.

Some time ago, Li himself had this to say about his formula: "The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it."

Hmmmmm.

It's a three page article, and rather than excerpt it I'll just link to it here. It's a good read and really helped me to understand the collective mindset that allowed so many otherwise smart people to totally screw us all. (UPDATE: the same article is in Wired but comes with a graphic showing the actual formula.)

And one final thought: Li grew up in China but studied and worked in Canada (eventually for Barclays Capital, though I'm not sure where). He's now employed back in China.

I'm no Chinese xenophobe... but I have to admit to having "Manchurian candidate" thoughts. Hey, we're all capable of a little idle conspiracy theory spinning now and then, no? :-)

ALSO IN PORTFOLIO, an article on the housing mess makes this observation with respect to the comparative risk of investing in the stock and housing markets:

The house-price decline that we've seen to date feels particularly bad because so many Americans bought or refinanced their houses during the boom years, leaving a thin sliver of equity which has long since evaporated. If you put your life savings into buying a house, then a 20% price decline can wipe those savings out entirely; if you put your life savings into an S&P 500 index fund, then a 50% price decline still leaves you with half your money.

How AIG got here

Here's some background on how AIG got into this mess (with a little help from Congress).

Earmarks?

Listening to Eric Cantor drone on about earmarks in the spending bill that just passed, I couldn't help but think that if earmarks were as big a deal to Americans as he'd like to believe, I'm sure we would have elected John McCain rather than Barack Obama last November.

And for the record, earmarks made up 2% of the total spending in the budget bill that Cantor is complaining about.

A victory for the Pakistani people

Yousaf Gilani, the husband of Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan's new Prime Minister, has bowed to pressure from the Pakistani people and re-instated a Supreme Court Justice that Musharraf had removed. Gilani pledged to do so during the election but has never kept his word until opposition leaders organized mass demonstrations over the weekend.

Given that one of those leaders, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has been talking about "revolution," hopefully Gilani's move will reduce tensions there.

More on antibiotic-resistant bacteria in pork

Nicholas Kristof continues to highlight the problem of antibiotics in animal feed:

We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics....

Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.

The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population. [emphasis added]

Methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA) has been showing up in pork in our food supply:

Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.

Regardless of whether the bacteria came from the pigs or from humans who handled the meat, the results should sound an alarm bell, for MRSA already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.

Anger, AIG, and bailouts

It's easy to get angry at AIG and the other financial institutions that have contributed so much to our current economic mess... and to resent them for the taxpayer dollars that we're spending to avoid a total banking system meltdown.

But anger won't solve the problem. We've got to keep our heads.

As for this crap about AIG having contracts with its employees that obligates it to pay bonuses despite it losing billions and billions of dollars last year, I say get a court order abrogating those contracts. These bonuses were supposedly structured to keep AIG from losing key employees. My view on the matter: with the mess Wall Street is in, where are they going to go?

More here and here.

Cheney supports Obama's plan to exit Iraq

On CNN's State of the Union today, former VP Dick Cheney told Jon King that he thinks Obama's plan to remove most U.S. troops by August, 2010, will be succesful. He also approves of the Presiden'ts decision to leave around 50,000 troops as a force after that date until a complete exit in 2011. And he thought Obama has done a good job of balancing his campaign promise to withdraw from Iraq with listening to commanders on the ground.

You'd never know any of that from reading CNN's story on the interview, though, which focuses on Cheney's belief that Obama is wrong for ending the torturing of detainees.

Obama: between a rock and a hard place

On one hand, the government has to spend money to stimulate the economy that's already in recession and could potentially get much worse.

On the other, increasing the U.S. deficit worries investors in U.S. Treasuries... most notably, China:

China, the world’s biggest holder of United States government debt, on Friday expressed concern about the safety of those assets as American deficits have ballooned with costly stimulus and bailout packages aimed at rescuing the economy.

The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said he was “worried” about its holdings of U.S. Treasuries and called on the United States to provide assurances that the investment was safe. His remarks came at a news conference in Beijing after the final session of the National People’s Congress, the Chinese legislature.

China has the world’s largest reserves of foreign exchange thanks to years of double-digit growth in the years that preceded the financial crisis that began in the United States in 2007. Beijing has been deploying much of its reserves in increased purchases of U.S. Treasuries and the financing of major investment projects designed to prop up flagging growth at home.

MUST SEE: John Stewart interviews Jim Cramer

Wow, I just watched Jon Stewart interview Mad Money's Jim Cramer on The Daily Show. It was unbelievable. Stewart aggressively took Cramer (and the rest of CNBC) on for hyping the stock market as a place for making fast money while knowing all along that hedge fund managers and others who work behind the scenes were manipulating the markets to their own advantage. The loser: you, me and everyone else with a 401(k).

I thought of the movie Frost/Nixon while I was watching Stewart/Cramer. While Cramer is no Nixon, it's fun to imagine how a Stewart/Nixon matchup might have gone.

Congratulations to Jon Stewart for engaging in some serious journalism.

Here is the interview (parts one, two, and three):

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Interview Outtake Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Interview Outtake Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Interview Outtake Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

UPDATE

Here is CNN's story on the interview.

McCain to the rescue

Meghan McCain, that is. John McCain's daughter is standing up for the Republican Party and trying to help it achieve some sort of relevancy to her generation (she's 24).

She's even taken on Ann Coulter in a hard-hitting piece on The Daily Beast.

Meghan also appeared on the Rachel Maddow show this week:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(Video link)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(Video link)

I have to say she sounds rather refreshing.

Transcript of Obama's business roundtable

President Obama met today with CEOs and other business leaders to discuss the economy, trade issues, healthcare, and whatever else came up. I love how Obama is totally comfortable and confident engaging in Q&A sessions with just about anyone. So different from any president I've ever seen!

If you can catch it on video, it's worth a watch. If not, here is a story from CNN as well as the complete transcript.

NPR blitz

I heard quite a few interesting stories on NPR yesterday so I'll post them all here.

On Fresh Air, Uwe Reinhardt made the observation that Americans display a lot of cognitive dissonance when it comes to healthcare. Basically, we don't want the government to force us to buy health insurance, but we expect to get medical treatment if we're hurt in an accident but are uninsured. We resist the idea as a society, we're all in this together. And we want every pill and every test and we want them now, but we want them to cost less.

On All Things Considered, Gillian Tett, an assistant editor for the Financial Times, used a great metaphor for all of the toxic mortgage assets that have hobbled our banking system. She talked about how mortgages were cut up like various meats (of varying quality) and stuffed into nice pretty sausages. The problem is, no one knows what's in each sausage, and because no one knows, everyone is afraid to buy them. Banks are stuck with all of these mortgage-backed assets, and no one knows what they are really worth because everyone is cared to take a bite.

ATC also reported on smog--specifically, the ozone in smog--and how chronic exposure appears to increase your chances of dying of respiratory disease by 30%. You can also see a map showing the worst U.S. cities for smog here. Las Vegas is in that category, unfortunately.

And finally, ATC had a segment on the fungus that has been killing bats in upstate New York. The disease has now spread to a number of other states. Like bees, bats are responsible for pollinating a lot of plants, including some crops. To me it's more evidence that the natural world around us is under a great deal of stress, and this ecosystem is the only one we've got.

Obama to business leaders

"The best way to avoid protectionist tendencies is to make sure workers are sharing in the benefits of trade."

Well said!

President Obama's business roundtable is underway now.

Letter to Governor Gibbons

Here is the letter I sent to Governor Gibbons regarding the possibility that he may reject some of the federal stimulus money:

Governor Gibbons,

I was outraged when I read in the Las Vegas Sun yesterday that you were considering rejecting some of the federal stimulus money that recently become available through ARRA.

I read your letter to President Obama, and I agree with you that Nevada is getting less than its fair share on a per capita basis.

However, I must say in the strongest possible terms that it would be a grave mistake to turn down federal funds for extending unemployment benefits. This money is meant to serve as a temporary solution to a real and current problem: high unemployment in this terrible economy. Nevada already has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and it would be cruel and unusual punishment to forego money that could help both individuals and families whose breadwinners are out of work.

I will be watching your actions carefully. I urge you to accept all federal money to which Nevada is entitled. Any other path will be disgraceful.

I also called his Carson City number, (775) 684-5670. His email form is here. You can also sign a petition here.

Why I read Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan wrote a great post on living an examined life today over at the Daily Dish. It is his willingness to share his own internal conflicts and his desire to understand the mystery of it all that makes his perspective on the world so interesting to me.

Worrying signs: passing antibiotic-resistant germs between people and animals

Nicholas Kristof had a piece in the New York Times today about a cluster of methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA) cases in a small farming town in Indiana. The town is surrounded by pig farms, and it looks like people and pigs are passing the germ back and forth.

It's not a new story, though. The Boston Globe reported on the problem a year and a half ago. It's been observed in Europe for even longer.

And earlier this week there was a report of MRSA being passed between an elephant and staff at the San Diego Zoo.

All of this is worrisome for a number of reasons. We feed farm animals a lot of antibiotics, both to keep them from getting sick due to overcrowding and also in low doses as growth factors. That's a practice that is perfectly designed to breed antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. And those strains can be spread to farm workers and possibly to consumers.

It's also worrisome because a number of big killers have made the leap from being animal diseases to becoming human diseases. Think HIV which originated in monkeys.

All the more reason to reform our farm practices, something that Congress is looking at... though they've got a tough job in front of them.

Vitamin D deficiencies in teenagers

A new study found a link between low vitamin D levels and a variety of health issues in teens:

Teens in the study with the lowest vitamin D levels were more than twice as likely to have high blood pressure and high blood sugar. They were also four times more likely to have metabolic syndrome, defined as have three of more conditions that contribute to heart disease and diabetes — including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, big waists and high cholesterol.

While 15 minutes of sunshine will allow your body to make what it needs in the summer, it's a lot harder to get enough that way in the winter.

The article went on to say:

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently doubled its recommended amount of vitamin D for children and teens to 400 units daily — the equivalent of drinking four cups of milk. The pediatricians group said kids who don’t get enough should take vitamin supplements.

The teen study looked at about 3,600 boys and girls ages 12 to 19 who took part in a government health survey from 2001 to 2004. The researchers used measurements of vitamin D from blood tests.

On average, none of the teens were getting enough vitamin D. Whites had the highest levels, blacks had the lowest levels and Mexican-Americans had levels in between.

More here.

Clean coal?

I don't know if clean coal is an achievable goal, but given how much of it we have, it's definitely worth researching. Right now burning coal is one of the key sources of the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change.

The government was working on a public-private partnership to build a model clean coal power plant until George W. Bush abruptly canceled it in December, 2007, citing cost increases. However, the Washington Post reports:

The Bush administration's decision to halt production of an experimental power plant that would capture and store carbon dioxide emissions underground may have set back "clean coal" technology in the United States by as much as a decade, according to a congressional report released at a hearing yesterday.

Also, cost estimates used as justification for killing the commercial-scale project known as FutureGen were grossly exaggerated because Energy Department officials did not account for inflation, according to a Government Accountability Office report, also released yesterday....

The Bush administration killed plans to build the plant in December 2007, just hours after Mattoon [Illinois] was chosen over two sites in Texas, triggering allegations that the move was political.

OUTRAGEOUS: Nevada's governor may reject federal stimulus money

Jim Gibbons, worst governor in America, has joined the idiotic chorus of Republican governors who are talking about not accepting some of the dollars allocated to their states as part of the federal stimulus package that just passed. One pool of money he might reject: dollars for extending unemployment benefits. And that in a state with unemployment over 9% and rising! In a state that already has a very low per resident share of the overall stimulus package:

In total stimulus funds, the state [of Nevada] has a per capita rank of 50th out of 51 (that's 50 states plus Washington, D.C.); in education funding, it's 51st; in transportation, it's 48th; and in Medicaid funds, it's 47th.

From the Las Vegas Sun:

Gov. Jim Gibbons sent a letter to President Barack Obama today notifying him that Nevada might reject part of the federal stimulus package.

Governors have a 45-day window, beginning Feb. 17, to claim funds allocated to the states. In his certification letter today, Gibbons said he is a believer in smaller government and has concerns about the size of the stimulus package.

"With these concerns in mind, I would like to also provide notification that there may be portions of the stimulus package that Nevada will reject, due to the constraints and current matching or future funding expectations that the funding would require," Gibbons wrote.

You can share a piece of your mind with this dope by email here or by calling (775) 684-5670 or (702) 486-2500.

Simply outrageous.

UPDATE

You can read the letter that Gibbons wrote to Obama here. I just did, and I will agree with him on one point: Nevada isn't getting its fair share of the stimulus money. The state has been really hard hit by the downturn, and Gibbons makes the case that we are sending more money to Washington than we are getting back. I don't know if he is correct on that, but I wouldn't be surprised.

The Presiden't Council on Women and Girls

President Obama today created the Council on Women and Girls to ensure that the federal government is addressing the needs of women (and girls) in America.

He opened by saying:

I sign this order not just as a President, but as a son, a grandson, a husband, and a father, because growing up, I saw my mother put herself through school and follow her passion for helping others. But I also saw how she struggled to raise me and my sister on her own, worrying about how she'd pay the bills and educate herself and provide for us.

I saw my grandmother work her way up to become one of the first women bank vice presidents in the state of Hawaii, but I also saw how she hit a glass ceiling -- how men no more qualified than she was kept moving up the corporate ladder ahead of her.

I've seen Michelle, the rock of the Obama family -- (laughter) -- juggling work and parenting with more skill and grace than anybody that I know. But I also saw how it tore at her at times, how sometimes when she was with the girls she was worrying about work, and when she was at work she was worrying about the girls. It's a feeling that I share every day.

And closed with this:

So now it's up to us to carry that work forward, to ensure that our daughters and granddaughters have no limits on their dreams, no obstacles to their achievements -- and that they have opportunities their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers never dreamed of. That's the purpose of this Council. Those are the priorities of my presidency. And I look forward to working with all of you to fulfill them in the months and years to come.

Jon Stewart is brilliant

His "war" with Jim Cramer continues. :-)

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Basic Cable Personality Clash Skirmish '09

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

More from Ezra Klein.

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger...

Thomas Friedman rings the alarm:

Our country has congestive heart failure. Our heart, our banking system that pumps blood to our industrial muscles, is clogged and functioning far below capacity. Nothing else remotely compares in importance to the urgent need to heal our banks.

Yet I read that we’re actually holding up dozens of key appointments at the Treasury Department because we are worried whether someone paid Social Security taxes on a nanny hired 20 years ago at $5 an hour. That’s insane. It’s as if our financial house is burning down but we won’t let the Fire Department open the hydrant until it assures us that there isn’t too much chlorine in the water. Hello?

Meanwhile, the Republican Party behaves as if it would rather see the country fail than Barack Obama succeed. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto G.O.P. boss, said so explicitly, prompting John McCain to declare about President Obama to Politico: “I don’t want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.” The G.O.P. is actually debating whether it wants our president to fail. Rather than help the president make the hard calls, the G.O.P. has opted for cat calls. It would be as if on the morning after 9/11, Democrats said they wanted no part of any war against Al Qaeda — “George Bush, you’re on your own.”

As for President Obama, I like his coolness under fire, yet sometimes it feels as if he is deliberately keeping his distance from the banking crisis, while pressing ahead on other popular initiatives. I understand that he doesn’t want his presidency to be held hostage to the ups and downs of bank stocks, but a hostage he is. We all are.

Why gray? Why salt & pepper?

Scientists are working to unlock the mysteries of gray hair:

What’s intriguing about skin and hair cells is that while most of the body’s cells are programmed to turn themselves off when exposed to harmful stresses, certain skin and hair cells are much tougher. A few years ago, Harvard researchers reported that graying occurred when the stem cells that govern hair coloring lost their hardiness and shut down. The hope is that research into those cells may ultimately lead to treatments for melanoma, a skin cancer that can be fatal.

One of the many mysteries of gray-hair research is why some people have salt-and-pepper hair. “If it was purely based on one’s antioxidant system or the ability to handle oxidative stress, then you still have to explain why some follicles can produce perfectly pigmented hairs in a sea of white hairs,” said Desmond J. Tobin, associate dean of research and knowledge transfer at the University of Bradford.

Dr. Tobin notes that the skin is the only major organ that is directly exposed to environmental stress outside the body and the changing environment inside the body.

The industrial production of food...

Is a good way to spread a little contamination far and wide. There's a growing bipartisan consensus that something needs to be done:

The House has held nearly two dozen food safety hearings over the past year, focusing on contamination in peanut butter, spinach, tomatoes, jalapeño peppers, pet food and seafood, manufactured both in the United States and abroad.

A panel of experts from consumer groups and the industry largely agreed that broad changes were needed. For industry, the growing number of food-poisoning incidents have become enormously expensive. Thomas E. Stenzel, chief executive of the United Fresh Produce Association, said an entire crop of spinach was discarded in 2006 during a salmonella outbreak.

“In fact,” he said, “we now know that the only contaminated product came from one 50-acre farm, packaged in one processing plant and only on one production shift.” Yet spinach sales continue to suffer, he added.

Worst governor in America watch

Nevada's Governor, Jim Gibbons, has put another feather in his cap by proposing a budget with a nearly $300 million tax increase (specifically, an increase on the hotel room tax). The budget that passed in the legislature includes a smaller ($233 million) increase, but the Governor is saying he will stick to his "no tax increase" pledge and refuse to sign it, instead allowing the bill to become automatically after five days.

Talk about spineless.

Freeman post-mortem

Charles Freeman had this to say after withdrawing his name from nomination to head the National Intelligence Council:

"The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East," he wrote.

"The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth."

And:

"I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so," he wrote. "This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States."

Full post-mortem from Ben Smith at Politico here.

I'm actually a bit dismayed about the Obama administration's failure to make the case for and defend Freeman. If his expertise and intelligence qualified him to head the NIC--and if Obama is dedicated to changing Washington--more effort should have been made to counter the arguments that were lobbed against him.

David Brooks takes the GOP to the woodshed

Brooks is totally underwhelmed by the Republican Party's baffling response to our economic crisis:

The G.O.P. leaders have adopted a posture that allows the Democrats to make all the proposals while all the Republicans can say is “no.” They’ve apparently decided that it’s easier to repeat the familiar talking points than actually think through a response to the extraordinary crisis at hand.

If the Republicans wanted to do the country some good, they’d embrace an entirely different approach.

That's not to say that he approves of everything Obama and the Democrats are doing. He doesn't. But he at least respects their efforts to address an economic crisis which might become a depression without government action.

The need for education reform

Four years ago I was having lunch on a normal workday. I was reading an article titled "Still Separate, Still Unequal" in Harper's magazine. I learned that schools are just as--or more--segregated than they were 25 or 30 years ago. And then I read this:

High school students whom I talk with in deeply segregated neighborhoods and public schools seem far less circumspect than their elders and far more open in their willingness to confront these issues. "It's more like being hidden," said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel [name changed] I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and schools. "It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."

I asked her if she thought America truly did not "have room" for her or other children of her race. "Think of it this way," said a sixteen-year-old girl sitting beside her. "If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?"

"How do you think they'd feel?" I asked.

"I think they'd he relieved," this very solemn girl replied.

I remember beginning to cry. I read on about Success for All, a scripted educational system for grade schools that is built on the same B.F. Skinner-inspired ideas that are used in prisons and drug rehab programs.

I walked to my car in a daze; I called my mother. For a minute or two I wasn't able to speak; I simply wept. Finally I choked out, "There's something horribly wrong with our country." It just seemed unbelievable to me--and tragic--that we could do no better for our children than to teach them as if we were dealing with criminals.

THE PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN EDUCATION are not confined to inner city schools. Obama today announced his plans for improving education in the United States. I don't know of anything that is more important for ensuring the long term health of our country.

Learn more about Obama's proposals here.

Glenn Greenwald on the Freeman withdrawal

From his Salon.com blog:

In the U.S., you can advocate torture, illegal spying, and completely optional though murderous wars and be appointed to the highest positions. But you can't, apparently, criticize Israeli actions too much or question whether America's blind support for Israel should be re-examined.

The amazing animal world

Unbelievable, but a certain kind of caterpillar "sings" a song that mimics that of an ant queen so well that the worker ants feed and care for the imposter:

Using miniature microphones hooked up to an MP3 recorder, Thomas' team captured the tunes made by queen and worker ants, as well as by the butterfly larvae and pupae. Auditory analysis showed similarities in key acoustic features of the ant and butterfly sounds, such as resonant frequency.

The researchers then used Lilliputian speakers to audition the various songs to workers. When they listened to their own songs, the workers perked up. "Instead of running away or acting with aggression, the speakers attracted the worker ants to them and they tapped them with their antennae with great interest," says Thomas.

The recording of a queen's song inspired even more interest. Workers surrounded the speaker and refused to budge. Amazingly, Thomas' team observed nearly the same behaviour when they played the butterfly songs to the ants - suggesting that auditory mimicry is the key to the butterflies' ascendancy.

Sometimes conservatives floor me

I was talking to Dad about this but forgot to post it. During CPAC a couple of weeks ago, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said this about the Employee Free Choice Act:

This bill is a mortal threat to American freedom and we will never forgive somebody who votes for cloture or for passage.

Think about that. A bill that would simply allow employees to express their preference for union representation by checking a box on a card is somehow a threat to "American freedom."

Get a life, Newt.

The difficulty of modern medicine

We have countless diagnostic tests, but they aren't always that good at actually predicting disease progression. Take this new research on the PSA test for prostate cancer:

As many as two of every five men whose prostate cancer was caught through a PSA screening test have tumors too slow-growing to ever be a threat, says a new study that raises more questions about the controversial tests.

The work "reinforces the message that we are overdiagnosing prostate cancer," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society, who was not involved in the new study.

More than 186,000 U.S. men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year, and nearly 29,000 will die, according to cancer society estimates. Most men over 50 have had a blood test that measures prostate specific antigen, or PSA, mostly for routine screening.

There begins the list of problems: Most men who undergo a biopsy for an abnormal PSA test don't turn out to have prostate cancer; high PSAs often signal a benign enlarged prostate. Of those who do have cancer, there's no proof yet that early detection saves lives -- as most prostate tumors grow so slowly that had they not been screened, those men would have died of something else without the anxiety.

And then there was that study from Norway which suggests many breast cancers disappear on their own.

Andrew Sullivan on the Freeman withdrawal

From the Daily Dish:

The second [thing worth noting] is that Obama may bring change in many areas, but there is no possibility of change on the Israel-Palestine question. Having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden. Even if a president wants to have differing sources of advice on many questions, the Congress will prevent any actual, genuinely open debate on Israel. More to the point: the Obama peeps never defended Freeman. They were too scared. The fact that Obama blinked means no one else in Washington will ever dare to go through the hazing that Freeman endured. And so the chilling effect is as real as it is deliberate.

Our unquestioning policy towards Israel

The U.S. can support Israel without having to reflexively back every one of their actions. While the American public was split roughly 50-50 in whether they approved of Israel's recent invasion of the Gaza Strip, the Senate unanimously backed a resolution supporting the Israeli incursion, and only five Members of Congress dissented.

Now Charles Freeman, an otherwise well-qualified former ambassador--chosen by Obama to lead the National Intelligence Council--is being labeled an extremist because he is willing to ask tough questions about America's interests in the Middle East and how they intersect with Israel's.

I've read a fair amount about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (including all 800 pages of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001), and I also have a personality that is open to seeing most situations from more than one perspective. While I have tremendous sympathy for the plight of the European Jews in the 20th century and am well aware of the horrors that have been witnessed inside Israel, I can't simply ignore the plight of the Palestinians. Historical grievances have weight, yet contemporary ones must outweight them. Balancing the competing needs to recognize how we've gotten to where we are and facing the realities of today is essential. I know I don't have the answer, but I'm confident it can't be found by only addressing the concerns of one of the two parties in conflict. In order for our nation to play a role in the Middle East process, we have to be willing to listen to both sides... and willing to ask tough questions.

Freeman seems like the kind of guy who can do that.

More background from Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, and Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE: Immediately after completing this post, I saw that Freeman has withdrawn his name from nomination. Sad.

Finally... an up day for the markets

The Dow was up almost 6%, the NASDAQ was up 7%, and the S&P was up over 6%.

Thank god.

Torqopia... now on Twitter

Torqopia blog posts are now available on Twitter under username torqopia. Check it out here.

What's going on in Pakistan

Juan Cole summarizes the risks in Pakistan on Informed Comment. He's not concerned about the Taliban taking over. The real danger, he says, is that disagreements between the two major political parties could result in the country being partitioned.

The Pakistani Taliban are not going to take over the Pakistani government. That worry doesn't keep me up at night. They are small, and operate in a rugged, remote area of the country. They can set off bombs and be a destabilizing force. But a few thousand tribesmen can't take over a country of 165 million with a large urban middle class that has a highly organized and professional army.

In contrast, the increasingly rancorous conflict between the left of center, largely secular Pakistan People's Party and the right of center, big-landlord Muslim League, has the potential to tear the country apart.

He goes on to say:

For Pakistan's two major civilian parties, who only 7 months ago rid the country of a military dictator, to go mano a mano at each other like this is potentially tragic. If they destabilize the country, they could tempt the military to come back out of the barracks and make yet another coup. Short of that, there could be faction-fighting in villages and cities.

Pakistan is a nuclear state, so this degree of instability is especially worrying. The danger is not a take-over by the Taliban, but rather a coup (led by whom of what views?) or blood in the streets.

Nationalization vs. national pride

It occurred to me while reading Ezra Klein's post on the political risks of bank nationalization that nationalization wouldn't be such a big issue if we were talking about corporations other than Citigroup, Bank of America, and their brethren.

Back in the late 80s when the S&L meltdown happened, I doubt that there was as much concern about the government taking over insolvent savings and loans. And there's not much outcry now when the FDIC takes over smaller institutions during this crisis.

My guess is that a lot of the resistance to putting the big U.S. banks into receivership has to do with them being symbols of American power. Their failure would suggest to some that our financial might is diminished... and you know how men feel about being made to feel small. :-)

Stem cell correction

I was wrong yesterday when I wrote that Obama's executive order removing Bush-era restrictions on stem cell research would only allow the use of embryos that were going to be destroyed in any case.

His executive order doesn't actually say that; he's left it up to the National Institute of Health to formulate guidelines, presumably for his review. As this Washington Post article reports, Obama says he will require strict safeguards on the use of cells from embryos.

Gay bashing: sad but true

Here's a sad reminder that gay men and lesbians are still assaulted and killed all the time. I've been to Blake's in Atlanta, and if someone on the street asked me if I was gay, I'd answer "yes." So this hit home.

Last Sunday a 28yo man was assaulted after leaving a bar. Hope he recovers quickly... and that the creeps are caught.

Tanning beds, aging, & vitamin D

Tanning beds are pretty common even in a sunny place like Vegas, but apparently they outnumber McDonald's and Starbucks locations in some cities. And despite the warnings about the heightened risk of skin cancer from UV radiation, plenty of people still use them.

I spent a fair amount of time in tanning beds, especially back in the first half of the 90s when I was going on cruises almost every year. I wish I could have those hours back now, lol... I'm sure they did not help my skin. I wear SPF 45+ sunscreen when out in the summer sun these days. It's important to wear a broad spectrum UVA/UVB formula as I've read that UVA, long considered to be the "good rays," may actually be more likely to cause the type of damage that can lead to skin cancer. From a June 2007 article in NewScientist:

While sunburn is mostly caused by the part of the ultraviolet spectrum known as UVB, there's growing evidence linking melanomas to UVA. Older sunscreens allowed people to stay out in the sun longer without burning but provided little protection against UVA, so they increased people's exposure to these wavelengths.

If UVA really is responsible for melanoma, a whole generation may have been misled into thinking sunscreens allowed them to soak up the rays with impunity. Lawyers in the US have filed a class action lawsuit against a number of sunscreen makers alleging that labels such as "sunblock" are misleading, because the products do not "block" the whole UV spectrum and often imply equal UVA and UVB protection.

Unlike the people quoted in the tanning bed article, however, I'm still a believer that exposure to some natural sunlight each day is the best way to get enough vitamin D.

And if you've overindulged in the sun (or those pesky tanning beds), some early research suggests that skin peels of damaged tissue may head off skin cancers.

More on stem cells

As I noted yesterday, I think embryonic stem cells are going to be of limited use for actual therapeutical use. But for research to get farther down that path, they may be more essential serve a more critical purpose in the short term.

From the New York Times:

However, the president’s support of embryonic stem cell research comes at a time when many advances have been made with other sorts of stem cells. The Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka found in 2007 that adult cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic state with surprising ease. This technology “may eventually eclipse the embryonic stem cell lines for therapeutic as well as diagnostics applications,” Dr. Kriegstein said. For researchers, reprogramming an adult cell can be much more convenient, and there have never been any restrictions on working with adult stem cells.

For therapy, far off as that is, treating patients with their own cells would avoid the problem of immune rejection.

Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.

In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.

Michael Pollan needs your help

Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food (my related posts here and here), is starting a new project to document the common sense food wisdom of regular people:

“Eat your colors,” an Australian reader’s grandmother used to tell her; now we hear the same advice from nutritionists, citing the value of including as many different phytochemicals in the diet as possible....

I want to create a compendium of such rules, across cultures and also time. Some of the rules readers have sent me so far are specifically about navigating the modern food landscape: “It’s not food if it comes to you through the window of a car.” “Don’t eat at any restaurant of which there is more than just one.” “A snack is not the same thing as a treat.” “If a bug won’t eat it, why would you?” and so on.

Will you send me a food rule you try to live by? Something perhaps passed down by your parents or grandparents? Or something you’ve come up with to tell your children – or yourself?

When I was a kid, my mother made her own bread & butter pickles (with all that mustard seed in the bottom of the jar, yum!), canned peaches and other fruit, and baked so much fresh bread that we stopped eating it. My dad made homemade ice cream in a hand-cranked ice cream maker. Once my parents even used an antique butter churn to make our own butter (with cream from the unhomogenized whole milk that we got straight from a dairy farm).

It was good stuff, and I've often thought that it's sad that so few people do these things anymore, especially the pickling and canning. Pollan's project to collect our food lore seems right on to me.

You can post your contributions as comments here.

WRITING THIS POST I was reminded of an article I read in the August 2005 issue of Harper's. It looked at the largely organic and highly sustainable methods that Cuba's small farmers and gardeners have had to improvise in response to their economic isolation. From "The Cuba diet: What will you be eating when the revolution comes?":

In so doing they have created what may be the world's largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn't rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth. They import some of their food from abroad—a certain amount of rice from Vietnam, even some apples and beef and such from the United States. But mostly they grow their own, and with less ecological disruption than in most places. In recent years organic farmers have visited the island in increasing numbers and celebrated its accomplishment. As early as 1999 the Swedish parliament awarded the Organic Farming Group its Right Livelihood Award, often styled the “alternative Nobel,” and Peter Rosset, the former executive director of the American advocacy group Food First, heralded the “potentially enormous implications” of Cuba's new agricultural system.

The island's success may not carry any larger lesson. Cuban agriculture isn't economically competitive with the industrial farming exemplified by a massive food producer across the Caribbean, mostly because it is highly labor-intensive....

There's always at least the possibility, however, that larger sections of the world might be in for “Special Periods” of their own. Climate change, or the end of cheap oil, or the depletion of irrigation water, or the chaos of really widespread terrorism, or some other malign force might begin to make us pay more attention to the absolute bottom-line question of how we get our dinner (a question that only a very few people, for a very short period of time, have ever been able to ignore). No one's predicting a collapse like the one Cuba endured—probably no modern economy has ever undergone such a shock. But if things got gradually harder? After all, our planet is an island, too. It's somehow useful to know that someone has already run the experiment.

Alcohol tastes sweeter...

When you're exposed to it in the womb (at least if you're a rat):

Alcohol may taste sweeter if you were exposed to it before birth, suggests a study in rats. The findings may shed new light on why human studies have previously linked fetal alcohol exposure to increased alcohol abuse later in life, and to a lower age at which a person first starts drinking alcohol.

More from NewScientist.

Nevada looks at cashing in on its sunshine

The Las Vegas Sun looks at the potential for solar energy to bring jobs and potentially tax revenues to the state.

Chris Matthews on Rush Limbaugh

Chris Matthews just shared his theory on MSNBC's Hardball that Rush Limbaugh is a "support group for white guys who drive around in their cars all day."

LOL!

A chimp that stockpiles weapons

A chimpanzee that lives in a Swedish zoo has a habit of stockpiling stones and other small objects that he can throw at visitors when a crowd begins to form. It's an unusual instance of an animal planning ahead for a future contingency:

"Many animals plan. But this is planning for a future psychological state. That is what is so advanced," said Mathias Osvath, director of the primate research station at Lund University and author of the paper in the journal Current Biology.

The animal's preparations include not only stockpiling the stones he finds, but more recently also fashioning projectiles from pieces of cement he has broken off artificial rocks in his habitat.

Others have observed great apes planning, both in the wild and in captivity. Some birds in the corvid family that includes jays and ravens also plan for future contingencies. In general, though, planning by animals is thought to occur only when the payoff is immediate and more or less certain.

"People always assume that animals live in the present. This seems to indicate that they don't live entirely in the present," said Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research.

Wilson Cruz speaks out on "effeminate" criticism

I haven't seen He's Just Not That Into You, but apparently out actor Wilson Cruz has received some criticism for portraying a gay character in too effeminate a manner. This is what he had to say:

“Some people had something to say about the fact that I may have been too effeminate or other people in the film may have been too effeminate but I celebrate that fact that we can do that in 2009,” the actor said when we spoke before the screening of Pedro Saturday night at Outfest Fusion 2009 in Hollywood. “I want to see more effeminate men on television and in film. I think there is a lack of that. The more we see effeminate men on screen, the more we can help those young people who are exactly that feel okay about it. And that’s really the whole point of my career.”

...

“I was happy with what I did, I was very proud of my portrayal of a gay man,” he says. “I know that there was some controversy about some of the portrayals of gay men in the film. I felt like as a whole, the film did a good job of showing a spectrum of gay men. some of the controversy came off as self-hatred to me in the sense that we do have a lot of effeminate men in our community. I celebrate that. And I celebrate the fact that they should be willing and able to be exactly who they are.”

Good for you, Wilson.

Joe Lieberman, the chameleon from Connecticut

After bashing Obama at the Republican National Convention and by John McCain's side on the campaign trail, Joe Lieberman has changed his tune:

Sen. Joe Lieberman has changed his tune on Barack Obama. After campaigning across the country for Republican John McCain in 2008 and attacking Obama as naive, untested and unwilling to take on powerful special interests, Lieberman now showers praise on the popular new Democratic president.

"He's shown real leadership," Lieberman told The Associated Press in an interview. "Bottom line: I think Barack Obama, president of the United States, is off to a very good start."

The Connecticut independent, who faces re-election in 2012 in a state where Obama is popular, is eager to mend fences with Democrats still fuming over his criticism of Obama during the general election campaign.

Lieberman has applauded Obama's national security team. He gushed over Obama's "inspirational and unifying" inaugural. Lieberman even played a key role helping Obama win Senate passage of the economic stimulus plan.

As if to underscore the point, Lieberman has even clashed on the Senate floor with his pal McCain over the stimulus plan and a District of Columbia voting rights bill.

Newsweek polls America on bank nationalization...

And the results: 56% of Americans prefer temporary nationalization to further bailouts. Here's the poll and here is Nate Silver's analysis at FiveThirtyEight.

Virtual Sistine Chapel

It's way cheaper than a flight to Rome... but of course viewing it will make you want to get there in person. :-) Check out this virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel which doesn't leave out the ceiling (just scroll upwards).

Note that I had to enable pop-up's for this website in order for it to work for me.

When Dad and I were in Rome in 2002, we arrived at the Chapel just minutes after it had closed for the day. And since we were taking the train to Munich the following morning, I still need to get back there to see it.

Thanks, Jack!

As the U.S. moves left...

Ross Douthat at The Atlantic examines the emerging center-left politics in Obama's America.

The political benefits of earmarks

The bloggers at The American Prospect are looking at who benefits politically from earmarks and whether the Democrats would be smart to take away the only thing that Republican lawmakers can take home right now: pork.

Ezra Klein isn't sure if local spending projects matter to constituents and doesn't see evidence that those in Congress who refuse to insert earmarks--John McCain, for example--are penalized for it at the ballot box. But a smart commenter said what I was going to say :-) ... namely that as long as there's an earmark system in place, you can play the game either by securing money for your district or by railing against the system.

"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry"

Rahm Emmanuel's wet dream, channeled via Saturday Night Live:

(Video link)

Shakespeare?

This painting is now believed to be the only image of William Shakespeare created while he was alive.

More here.

Post-conspicuous consumption?

I'm not sure America is really ready to close the door on a long era of conspicuous consumption, but at least people seem to be thinking about the issue:

In just the seven months since the stock market crash, the recession has aimed its death ray not just at the credit market, the Dow and Detroit, but at the very ethos of conspicuous consumption. Even those who still have a regular income are reassessing their spending habits, perhaps for the long term. They are shopping their closets, downscaling their vacations and holding off on trading in their cars. If the race to have the latest fashions and gadgets was like an endless, ever-faster video game, then someone has pushed the reset button.

“I think this economy was a good way to cure my compulsive shopping habit,” Maxine Frankel, 59, a high school teacher from Skokie, Ill., said as she longingly stroked a diaphanous black shawl at a shop in the nearby Chicago suburb of Glenview. “It’s kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can’t buy, like the well being of my family. I’m just not seeking happiness from material things anymore.”

I wrote a little bit about this yesterday, and the Story of Stuff talks a bit about "planned obsolescence" and "perceived obsolescence," two ways that the people who make stuff get us to buy more of that stuff.

Obama eases restrictions on stem cell research

President Obama signed an executive order today allowing more research on human embryonic stem cells. His predecessor had limited testing to a handful of existing stem cell lines, but problems with those lines have made the restriction even tighter than Bush had planned.

Obama's move will allow stem cell lines to be developed only from embryos that would have been destroyed anyway. And his order does not remove all restrictions; it's up to Congress to do that. There's been bipartisan support for doing that in the past, and polls show that upwards of 60% of Americans support this research. My guess is that ultimately we'll find the best therapeutic results with stem cells from our own bodies, whether they are taken from our umbilical cord or from our adult bodies, but only more research will let us know for sure.

More from the New York Times:

The Bush administration, in a careful compromise eight years ago, allowed tax dollars to support studies on a small number of existing lines, or colonies, of stem cells that had already been derived from embryos, though not on creating new lines. That meant that a provision renewed by Congress every year since 1996, banning research in which embryos are destroyed, no longer stood as an absolute barrier to the stem cell work.

Mr. Obama’s new executive order will open the door wider, but not as wide as Congress would if it were to remove its legislative restrictions.

Because embryonic stem cells are capable of developing into any type of cell or tissue in the body, many scientists believe they hold the possibility for treatments and cures for ailments as varied as diabetes, Parkinson’s and heart disease. Some researchers say stem cells may someday be used to treat catastrophic injuries, such as spinal-cord damage.

UPDATE

Nancy Reagan said she is "very grateful" for Obama's move and went on to say, "Countless people, suffering from many different diseases, stand to benefit from the answers stem cell research can provide."