Here and There

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I grudgingly created a category for Election 2008. As much as I’d rather not, I will write about candidates from time to time, so why not have a category?

Hard to say what it is exactly. Perhaps at this point, most importantly, it’s his non-Obama or -HIllaryness. I’d like to see his numbers keep rising in the polls. And though it’s probably not realistic, I’d love to see him enter the top tier.

Here he is chatting with Jon Stewart (Flash required, I believe):

Yesterday, my brother sent me a link from The Onion’s recently launched News Network. The piece is hilarious, and instantly brings to mind that other fake news networky enterprise thingy.

The benefit of The Onion’s fake news is anonymity. You don’t recognize the faces bringing you the fake news, so it seems a little more real.

But those pros for The Onion don’t necessarily translate as cons for The Daily Show. We’re dealing with apples and oranges, really.

Slate has an insightful story on the two today.

Though this site doesn’t always live up to the standards, headlines are oh so integral to good journalism.

Take for example the story, reported by both The New York Times and The Washington Post, of the Saudi Arabian King’s address to an Arab summit.

The Times’s headline: “Saudi King Condemns U.S. Occupation of Iraq”
The Post’s headline: “Saudi King Criticizes Arab Divisiveness”

Side note: With the loss of Saudi royal alliance and the planned pullout of British troops from Iraq, who does the U.S. have left?

The president has withdrawn the nomination of Sam Fox for Ambassador to Belgium following congressional Democratic backlash over the fact that Fox contributed $50,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Remember them? They put out “truthy” ads ahead of the 2004 election questioning John Kerry’s Vietnam War injury stories.

I’m waiting for Bush to actually accomplish something. What a streak he’s on …

This from Websurdity on the “coincidences” involved in the destruction of the Death Star.

Funny stuff. And good-looking site.

I sometimes forget to check Slate.com.

Today, I found their Gonzo-Meter, turned up all the way to 75 percent (certainty that he’ll either be fired or resign this week).

From Crooks and Liars … Fox News gets it the way they want it, again.

Not that I trust weather predictions, but …

I’ve loved statistics since as far back as I can remember. In a bizarro world, I know I’m a statistics major, a number-crunching whiz doing really important work. But alas …

I even recall still checking out the sports stats page after I rejected sports altogether for a life of skateboarding and punk rock rebellion that led me to … here. But I digress.

I’ve been following, to the best of my or anyone else’s ability, the scandal circus that the Bush Administration has become, and in the back of my head, I’m hoping to see the president’s approval ratings plummet even further. I know, not good for the country, but good for history buffs like me. I want Bush to be the two-term president with the lowest average approval ratings ever.

So I was surprised to see some of the latest numbers (from the last month):

March 27, 2007, Rasmussen: 39 percent
As recent as March 25, 2007, Polling Report: 34 percent (USA Today)
March 22, 2007, American Research Group: 32 percent
March 16, 2007, Newsweek: 30 percent
March 5, 2007, Zogby: 30 percent
February 28, 2007, Fox: 34 percent
February 27, 2007, CBS: 34 percent

You get the point.

The Walter Reed scandal broke in February. The U.S. Attorney scandal really came to the fore this month. Yet, there is no corollary further slide in the president’s approval. Damn! Maybe he’s gone as low as he’ll ever go.

Sorry, I’m just looking for the nerdy silver lining in the fact that Bush has nearly two more years left in office.

I was in downtown San Francisco the other day when I came across this:

If you can’t tell, it’s a USPS mailbox. On the back of the box was the web address http://www.uspsjedimaster.com. I snapped a photo, but wasn’t able to look up the site until later.

I’m thinking Wednesday’s announcement has to be Star Wars stamps. Awesome. Either way, R2D2 mailboxes are good enough, too.

At the risk of appearing to the world to be a lame lover of U.S. Presidential history …

The other day, I asked a co-worker and fellow Wikipedia-phile what he had been reading about on the site as of late. “Well, there’s Tecumseh’s Curse.” “Huh?”

Tecumseh’s Curse is a superstition born out by history from 1840 to 1960. It holds that U.S. Presidents elected in years ending in “0″ will die in office. It’s given the moniker “Tecumseh’s Curse” because its first victim was William Henry Harrison, who gets credit for defeating the Shawnee leader at the Battle of Tippecanoe. Harrison would eventually acquire the nickname “Tippecanoe,” thus leading to the campaign of 1840’s slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.”

After delivering the longest inaugural in U.S. history, on a frigid winter day in March 1841 in Washington, D.C. During that shivering speech, Harrison developed a cold which eventually led to his death not even an entire month later.

Longest inaugural. Shortest term. Tecumseh wins.

Ronald Reagan broke the curse with his victory in 1980, and subsequent successfully served-out term eight years later. And now George W. Bush seems to have thrown more dirt on Tecumseh’s grave by surviving his time in office. Of course Bush’s term isn’t over yet. Were he to perish in the White House, Reagan could become a statistical anomaly.

I’ve heard the argument before that “this country is conservative. It’s a fact.” I’ve also been witness to the expression “no, no, it’s a liberal country. They proved it.”

My gut tells me, just looking back at congresses and presidents over the years, it’s a moderate country. But if we’re looking for hard numbers, Pew Research Center for People and the Press has provided a 20-year analysis of Americans and their political views.

Leaving party politics aside, Americans began this period more or less “liberal.” Most were found to express the belief that government should help those who can’t help themselves. Then Clinton came in and got us a Republican Congress (1994), at which point the same sentiment dipped in the polls, but never below 50 percent. It’s been back on the rise ever since.

If we’re talking donkeys versus elephants, it’s a little closer. Well, it used to be, anyway. The trends are a veritable roller coaster, and not always what you’d expect. Even during those first six years of the Bush Administration, when Congress flipped and came back (and due to a party defection, and subsequent electoral correction), Americans overwhelmingly identified themselves with the Democratic Party.

Why, then, you might ask, did we elect George W. Bush (no comment) and a Republican Congress in 2000 and 2004? Big news here, but I blame the Democrats’ lack of direction and ability to connect with voters. In fact, I’d say that existed in 2006, it’s just that even the average American had woken up to the fact that the alternative had screwed things up beyond recognition and maybe it was time for them to go.

This study does not bother predicting the future. But it does bode well for those of us who believe in a level playing field, who believe in a socially responsible business class, who believe in a strong central government whose interest rests in the betterment of all its citizens.

If you want to skip WaPo and go straight to Pew’s report, click here.

I have this problem. I work at a newspaper that, handicaps and all, does a pretty job with its limited local coverage, draws state, nation, and world stories almost exclusively from the wire, has a solid sports reputation, ditto business, but, when it comes to its two pages of editorials, well, let’s just say those pages also have a solid reputation.

It happens to be a socially conservative, libertarian reputation, and a deserved one.

More than a few editorials have come across the copy desk that repulsed me to the point of wanting to quit the job in protest. But I suck it up, remember that I need that paycheck to pay rent, and pass the page off to someone who can stomach it.

But the other day, we ran this, about a British program countering Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and going on about why the notion that global warming is caused or accelerated by human activity, and that we must thus take action to counter the effects, is hogwash.

I could let you read this completely unscientific, cherry-picked nonsense for yourself, but that would be like cheating. So here are my main issues:

1. The author, S. Fred Singer, says, “… the Antarctic is cooling while models predict warming.” Okay, I’m no scientist, but NASA has shown (and explained) why Antarctica “warmed around the perimeter from 1982 to 2004, where huge icebergs calved and some ice shelves disintegrated, it cooled closer to the pole.” One possible explanation is that “the warmer temperatures in the surrounding ocean have produced more precipitation in the continent’s interior, and this increased snowfall has cooled the high-altitude region around the pole.” Other explanations are more complex. Read what NASA has to say.

2. Singer says, “Observations in ice cores show that temperature increases have preceded — not resulted from — increases in CO2, by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2.” While that may be true, it has never been within a species’ control to limit the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. With humans, obviously, it is. And please don’t dispute the fact that CO2 levels are rising, or that because water vapor is simply more abundant in terms of greenhouse gases, it’s more relevant. NOAA states that greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and other trace gases from human activity, are increasing. And the U.S. government’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center clearly states that “both hemispheres were warming at a rate of 0.5°C/100 yrs.”

3. From such very flimsy bases, Singer then posits that warming is part of a natural trend dating back millions of years. That’s analogous to saying, “Never mind the stock market crash and the evaporation of all your money. Historically, the market trends upward.” It also brushes over the causes of the warming.

4. The point of the op-ed is counter the idea that we have to do something about the warming now. That we must alter our planetary behavior to reduce the damage we’re doing to the atmosphere and the planet and all life on it. If you proceed from the basis that we’re not causing the warming, your conclusion is given. No need to limit or control CO2 releases; no need for “uneconomic” alternative energy sources (aha! the motivations reveal themselves).

One thing I may never understand is the economic argument. If demand shifts to renewable energy, isn’t there money to made there? I mean, can’t the five white guys who own everything now simply sell their stakes in fossil fuels and reinvest in wind, tidal, solar, ethanol, and hydrogen sources (and the like)?

One other thought: It’s a misnomer to say that the warming happening now isn’t natural. Humans are part of nature, too, right? The point is that the evidence is simply overwhelming now that humans are causing the chain reaction causing climate change, and anyone calling themselves a scientist should look at their own paycheck and question the rigorousness of their evaluations.

Related links:
Pew Center on Global Climate Change
Australia’s Uranium Information Centre
NASA’s list of climate change resources
More from NOAA
U.S. Climate Change Science Program
RealClimate
Science magazine
The Environmental Protection Agency