RichardH

Rand Paul: Obama’s criticism of BP ‘un-American’

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Rand Paul: Obama’s criticism of BP ‘un-American’.

“What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'” Paul said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”

The Obama administration has used the “boot heel” phrase to describe its commitment to holding BP accountable for the spill and its cleanup.

-RichardH

Let’s give a few Republican Senators some praise

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Senate – approves – financial overhaul.

Four Republicans — Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine — broke ranks with their party to support it.

Furthermore, Senators Brown, Snowe, and Collins voted for cloture (cutoff of the filibuster).

They deserve our praise and thanks for voting independently from their party and acting in the best interests of our economy.

If you feel so inclined, send them all a “thank you” note.  I have.

Note: Regarding the bill itself, it may not be perfect but it is a step in the right direction.

UPDATE: Former allies tee off on Brown.

-RichardH

Kleiman-The Party of Knowledge vs. the Party of Ignorance

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On 16 May 2010, UCLA Public Policy Professor Mark Kleiman posted The Party of Knowledge vs. the Party of Ignorance.

Not only do the conservative movement and the Republican Party hate new knowledge, they hate the people who produce it. The latest maneuver in the House – where the Republicans used an obscene little trick to kill a bill to provide more funding for research and for science education – illustrates the point.

The bill was ready to pass the House when the Republicans offered a “motion to recommit with instructions.” The minority is allowed one such motion per bill. So the Republicans offered a motion that would have gutted the bill by freezing all the increased funding until the Twelfth of Nev – until the Federal budget was balanced. Easy to defeat, no? Not when the Republicans also included a change to fire federal civil servants who view porn “including child pornography” – at work. (…)

Obviously, the GOP didn’t want to debate science funding on its merits, so they resorted to a dirty trick. And none of the folks involved seems to want to talk to the press about it. The Democrats pulled the bill, and will try to regroup next week.

-RichardH

The Fires This Time–Joe Flood on Managing New York City (Ambinder) 5

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Sobering thoughts for us techno-geeks.

On 13 May 2010, Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic) wrote The Fires This Time–Joe Flood on Managing New York City”, interviewing Joe Flood on NYC’s 1970’s fetish on efficiency and “how its overreliance on smart guys and computer formulas turned out be a disaster, especially when it came to the withdrawal of fire protection from poorer neighborhoods” with an abundance of fires.

One of the big appeals of using numbers to understand complex problems is getting counterintuitive results, which by definition go against common sense. After all, why spend all the time and money on a study that will only tell you what you already suspected? (…) Those are the kind of results the city hired RAND to produce, and that’s what they got.

Quoting Bill James in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball,

“Any new metric should tell you 80% what you already knew, and 20% what you didn’t. Less than 20% and it’s not very useful, more than 20% and there’s probably something wrong with the numbers.”

Perhaps Governor Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts supporters of subsides for casinos should read Joe Flood’s forthcoming book, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities.

-RichardH