Radley Balko writes:

In addition to the divided government argument, and it’s sister “Republicans-are-most-principled-when-they-aren’t-running-government argument, Bush needs to lose because politicians need to be held accountable for the way they govern. President Bush needs to be told that if he isn’t going to hold anyone accountable for September 11, for the WMD intelligence failure, and for the myriad of other mistruths and failings his people have moved blame on down the line for, then we’re going to hold him accountable. The Bush Doctrine needs to be invalidated by the electorate. Republicans seem to think that senseless pork projects, selling out on trade, campaign finance reform, and bloated government are acceptable so long as they pass half-assed tax cuts and hold the line at gay couples getting hospital visitation rights. Republicans need to be told that that isn’t okay, and they need to be slapped around a little at the polls for ever thinking it was.

Here’s what Andrew Stuttaford and Radly Balko have to say about obesity and medicare:

Andrew Stuttaford makes an excellent point about the Medicare-obesity decision:

…by apportioning some of the costs of the so-called obesity crisis onto the taxpayer, the White House is paving the way for food mullahs to argue for ever more regulation of

Here are Esquire’s Brutally Honest Personals. Enjoy.

I hate when websites, like the NY Times, Washington Times, LA Times, etc. ask me for personal information to read their websites. So do a lot of other people. As a result, a guy has create the ingenious webiste bugmenot.com which provides logins for 14,000 websites. So next time a website asks you for personal information, make sure to check Bug Me Not and see if you can give them bogus information.

Here’s Gene Healy on the voice of John Kerry:

In the hallway outside my office, somebody has the TV on and John Kerry’s giving a speech. I can’t make out what he’s saying, but Gahd, that voice. Pompous, monotonous, dripping with feigned sincerity and condescension, conveying all the electricity and joie de vivre of a constipated schoolmarm. That voice is going to be tough to listen to for four years.

Via Instapundit:

The media

Many people say that the reason that some people are racist is because they haven’t gotten to know people of other races or ethnic backgroud. Does that apply to Spike Lee’s comments about NASCAR. According to Lloyd Grove:

“I just imagine hearing some country-and-Western song over a loudspeaker at NASCAR: ‘Hang them n– up high! Hang them n– up high!’ I’m not going to no NASCAR,” Lee vows in the August issue of Playboy.

Here’s an interesting article in FT about how public spending on R&D fails to increase economic growth. Terence Kealey writes:

The OECD has since provided additional evidence for these findings. In its report Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries (2003) it performs a detailed analysis of the data from all its member states and finds that “publicly performed R&D crowds out resources that could be alternatively used by the private sector, including private R&D”.

But the OECD report is even more damning of the public funding of science. In my book I had shown in a series of national studies (the US, the UK, Germany, France and Japan) that, contrary to the popular view, the inauguration of government funding for science had never stimulated a country’s rate of economic growth. Only the pri vate funding of R&D stimulated growth. The OECD analysis confirms this. “[Statistical] regressions including separate variables for business-performed R&D and that performed by other institutions (mainly public research institutes)”, it says, “suggest that it is the former that drives the positive association between total R&D intensity and output growth.”

The OECD complains that “the negative results for public R&D are surprising”. They are only surprising, though, if you subscribe to the myth that science is a public good – that, in other words, once a paper is published everyone else can read it freely, so no one else has an incentive to do the original research. But have you cloned an organism recently? Or etched a silicon chip? Nor have I. Even though the relevant papers are freely available, only a handful of specialists have the knowledge required to understand them.

According to the NY Times:

The collapse of the Earth’s magnetic field, which both guards the planet and guides many of its creatures, appears to have started in earnest about 150 years ago. The field’s strength has waned 10 to 15 percent, and the deterioration has accelerated of late, increasing debate over whether it portends a reversal of the lines of magnetic force that normally envelop the Earth.

Personally I doubt that scientists can say with any confidence that the poles are going to reverse. All they can say is that the magnetic field has weakened 10 to 15 percent. But it makes an interesting story to think that the magnetic north might not exist any more.

The New York Times reports today that:

The federal government’s color-coded threat system is too vague and confusing to help many local and state law enforcement officials prepare for possible terrorist attacks, Congressional investigators said Monday in a report that prompted leading members of Congress to call for an overhaul.

The report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, cited widespread concern among federal, state and local officials about the quality and timing of threat information they received from the Department of Homeland Security. A survey sent to 84 agencies, states and United States territories as part of the study found that the warnings were often vague and inadequate, and had “hindered their ability to determine whether they were at risk” and what protective measures to take in response.

Representative Christopher Cox, the California Republican who leads the House homeland security committee, said in releasing the report that the officials overseeing the threat system needed to “make it work better or get rid of it.”

I disagree that the color-coded warning system doesn’t work. The system does exactly what it is supposed to do–it is a bureaucratic way for the administration to cover its butt if there is another attack. If there is an attack, the Department of Homeland Security can just say, “we warned you.” It doesn’t matter that the warnings are of little or no value, what matters is that people are warned. That is all the system was designed to do.