Sadly, unlike my post a couple of hours ago, this is not an April Fools jest. Evolgen previously reported on the success of the Specter-Harkin Amendment in the Senate to change a completely flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget containing actual real cuts to the budget of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to one with a modest increase in fiscal year 2007. Both the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) and Genetics Society of America both weighed in when the budget was sent to the House in order to garner support in committee for adding an amendment similar to …
Category: Politics
My Bill of Rights
Maybe you’re like me, tired of a government that does not seem to respect one of the founding documents of our nation, namely the Bill of Rights. Maybe you’re tired of Christian fundamentalists who do not see the placement of monuments containing the Ten Commandments on government property as a government endorsement of a specific religious tradition (Judeo-Christian) and consequently as a violation of the First Amendment. Maybe you wonder why there are so many willing to place religious monuments on government land and why you so seldom see the document responsible for the religious freedom that allows these fundamentalists …
No Child Left Behind: Unintended consequences
How depressing. Right there on the front page of the New York Times this morning: SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it. Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes …
Is this what we’re fighting for? (Part II)
A few days ago, I wrote about Abdul Rahman, an Afghan man who converted to Christianity and was being prosecuted under Islamic Sharia law as an apostate, the penalty for which can be death. Indeed, the prosecutor was seeking the death penalty. It looks like someone finally came to their senses: KABUL, Afghanistan – An Afghan court on Sunday dismissed a case against a man who converted from Islam to Christianity because of a lack of evidence and he will be released soon, officials said. The announcement came as U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai faced mounting foreign pressure to free Abdul …
Oops, he did it again
Just yesterday, I commented about an article that analyzed President Bush’s penchant for using rather artless straw man fallacies when answering his critics. By an almost amazing coincidence, that very day he was busily engaged in doing more of the same in a press conference. For example, when asked about the terrorist surveillance program in which he used not one but two straw men argument in the same response: I did notice that nobody from the Democrat Party has actually stood up and called for getting rid of the terrorist surveillance program. You know, if that’s what they believe, if …
Good news
evolgen reports that that Specter-Harken amendment to restore some of the cuts to the NIH budget and provide a modest increase necessary to prevent the our biomedical research effort from slowly eroding. Support was broad, and it was bipartisan. (No doubt it doesn’t hurt that this is an election year.) However, this is just the first step. The House still has to vote on the Department of Health and Human Services budget, and then there will be a House-Senate conference committee. To preserve the progress made, we’ll have to turn our attention to the House. I’ll keep an eye out …
President Straw Man
Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a news analysis article pointing out a politician’s love of a logical fallacy: WASHINGTON – “Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day,” President Bush said recently. Another time he said, “Some say that if you’re Muslim you can’t be free.” “There are some really decent people,” the president said earlier this year, “who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care … for all people.” Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political …
Is this what we’re fighting for?
American soldiers are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan. It’s not nearly as many as in Iraq, and there aren’t nearly as many news stories about it, to be sure, but we are still spending blood and treasure to “stabilize” this supremely dysfunctional nation. The reason, we are told, is to bring freedom and to prevent the Taliban from coming to power again. Well, here’s what we’re spending our blood and treasure for: To protect a theocracy that punishes infidels with death: An Afghan man is being tried in a court in the capital, Kabul, for converting from Islam to …
Support cancer research by supporting the Spector-Harkin Amendment
Evolgen and I both wrote about this earlier, when the Genetics Society of America urged people to contact their Senators. Now the biggest organization dedicated to cancer research, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), has weighed in. Received in my e-mail today: To: All AACR Members From: Dr. Margaret Foti, Chief Executive Officer; Dr. William G. Nelson V, Chairperson, Science Policy & Legislative Affairs Committee Date: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 by e-mail Re:’Please Contact Your Senators TODAY or TOMORROW in Support of the Specter-Harkin Budget Amendment and the Feinstein-Mikulski Amendment-MAKE CONTACT BY 4:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, March 16 …
They’re not too bright, are they?
Excerpts from an e-mail to Professor Deborah Lipstadt criticizing her for taking Holocaust denier Arthur Butz to task during an interview on FOX News: Although I am not anti-semitic, your Jewish greed is overbearing and crippling. The world is beginning to see the collective Jewish attempt to control the world economy and world media. […] Another example: the recent killing of the French Jew raises interesting questions. There is no doubt that the world is beginning to feel the oppression of Jewish greed. Why have attacks on Jews been increasing in Europe and Russia? Why is the Jewish media pressuring …