Policy and Politics
tfk | August 22, 2006Fellow Sber Shelley Dpicks up on a discussion of billionaires stepping up to fund basic research originally from Forbes. The most unfortunate passage reads:
(Dr.) Melton landed enough money to start a separate lab, and he works on turning his stem line into insulin-producing cells to study where they go wrong in diabetics. But half his budget goes to redundant lab gear and overhead he wouldn't need if it weren't for the NIH rules against stem-cell funding. His stem-cell colleague at Harvard, M. Wiliam Lensch, uses only private funding from Harvard but worries about getting in trouble if he…
tfk | August 22, 2006So says the Red Headed Stranger.
"I Couldn't Believe It Was True" by Willie Nelson from the album Red Headed Stranger(1975, 1:32).
tfk | August 1, 2006Reposted from the old TfK, where it was picked up by the Dailykos, MSNBC, and many others.
For the Board of Ed:
Waugh won re-election. There's no Republican challenge, so that seat remains safe.
Cauble appears to have beat Morris! Only 68% of the precincts have reported (with several urban centers that will back Cauble experiencing technical problems), but the trend seems to be holding. If so (keynehore) a lightning rod on the conservative side got burned. Apparently it doesn't cut it to badmouth your colleagues and use government money to fund a Florida vacation. Tim Cruz will still…
tfk | October 10, 2005A repost from the archives.
At last I got a chance to read the last few pages of the book I've been pimping in the sidebar for a few months now. I've made some broad comments drawn from it before, but it's nice to be able to see the full sweep of the book.
Chris Mooney's argument in RWoS is more complex than it might seem from the title. He isn't decrying the lack of scientific basis for policies per se, but the ways in which the Republican Party in particular misrepresents the state of science and the nature of science in order to promote certain actions or forestall other actions.
I'll…
tfk | September 17, 2005A Repost of some classic TfK.
I missed the Bush speech the other night, and from the coverage, I can't say I care. The idea of making No Man's Land an "enterprise zone," like the idea of auctioning off "surplus" federal lands, only justifies the fears expressed by some locals that the wealthy would be taking over the former homes of the (black) low-income residents of New Orleans. It's bad politics and bad policy.
It's indisputably true that we have to think twice about how the new New Orleans will be built, but planning to integrate low-income housing with middle class homes and commercial…