Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Palin

[Arthur Dent]

How's Obama Going to Raise $4.3 Trillion?

Interesting that this article chooses to only consider Obama's plans. The Tax Policy Center, the source of many of the article's figures, concludes that Obama's tax changes would reduce revenue over the next decade (with respect to current law) by $2.95 trillion. This figure is reported. In the same table, the TPC concludes that McCain tax cuts would reduce revenue by an even larger $4.17 trillion over the same period. How's McCain going to raise that money?

It's not all that interesting that the article only considers Obama's plans. He's the one promising the moon, so how's he going to pay for making it happen? If it really is going to cost 4.3 trillion, how is he going to do that AND reduce the deficit. Sconorb posted the plan from Obama's site, and it's only specifics is that he'd like to close tax shelters which supposedly will regain $350 billion. Now that's a pretty big sum, but it still leaves him $3.82 trillion left to fund. I'm not sure closing "special interest corporate loopholes" is gonna fill that gap.

My point was that if Obama is promising the moon, McCain is promising Mars. His plans are even less fiscally responsible than Obama's.

[BW23]

Neither guy will do what they're claiming right now. I don't know why anyone pays attention to these plans.

[jim]

[S]cientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for..nerve cell connections to form and function correctly.

The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism.

If they are doing research at UNC why are we giving money to France for the same thing? Why not give the money to UCLA to run the same studies? Shouldn't the French gov. be funding their own research?

Science is global. I work in the sciences with a variety of funding sources. I currently am active on four different projects with the following countries involved: Chile, Germany, France/Switzerland. (France/Switzerland are really the same place, the place literally straddles the border where part is in one country and part the other). In some cases, the funding is coming from outside for the work. For example, one of my projects is basically handling gobs of astronomical data that is being trasferred from a telescope in Chile to the Univ of Illinois. We get involved because of our expertise, and they pay the bill. On another project, the France/Swiss folks don't pay a dime. I basically donate my time and effort to be able to work with them. We are getting value from it, but on the surface it might not appear that way. There has been a large US contribution to the LHC at CERN.

On a daily basis, I hear Russian, Chinese, Italian, French, and Spanish at my workplace. In our newsletter recently they listed the languages spoken where I work. Hint to visitors: If you come for a tour, just walk through the cafeteria at lunchtime. Not only will a few Nobel Prize winners be walking around, but you will probably here a good sampling of the following languages spoken at my workplace:

Assyrian
Belorussian
Bengali
Cantonese
Catalan
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
Flemish
French
Gaelic
German
Georgian
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Leccese
Luxembourgish
Mandarin
Marathi
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Spanish
Swedish
Tagalog
Taiwanese
Turkish
Urdu
DZero
Afrikaans
Arabic
Armenian
Assyrian
Bangla
Bengali
Cantonese
Croatian
Chinese
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
French
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Kannada
Korean
Latvian
Limburgs
Malayalam
Mandarin
Marathi
Megrelian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Russian
Romanian
Serbian
Spanish
Swedish
Tamil
The Queen's English
Tulugu
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese
Welsh
Wolof

I am extremely proud of the work I do, and the international cooperation that goes into it. I hope that this continues for the advancement of science.

And I will flat out tell you that a McCain/Palin white house is absolutely a terrifying thought for science imo.

[jim]

[S]cientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for..nerve cell connections to form and function correctly.

The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism.

If they are doing research at UNC why are we giving money to France for the same thing? Why not give the money to UCLA to run the same studies? Shouldn't the French gov. be funding their own research?

Science is global. I work in the sciences with a variety of funding sources. I currently am active on four different projects with the following countries involved: Chile, Germany, France/Switzerland. (France/Switzerland are really the same place, the place literally straddles the border where part is in one country and part the other). In some cases, the funding is coming from outside for the work. For example, one of my projects is basically handling gobs of astronomical data that is being trasferred from a telescope in Chile to the Univ of Illinois. We get involved because of our expertise, and they pay the bill. On another project, the France/Swiss folks don't pay a dime. I basically donate my time and effort to be able to work with them. We are getting value from it, but on the surface it looks like the U.S. govt. is paying to build things there. There has been a large US contribution to the LHC at CERN.

This is true for me, too. We collaborate with Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan.

Also, the French government is supporting that research. The French researchers
are pretty excellent; so if we can aid them, why not? Good science isn't cheap.

I am also proud to say that my institution gave away some of our time and effort to help this guy.

Tim came to our institution and talked about his new invention so that he could efficiently share information between us and CERN. We humored him for a while, I think it paid off.

Science should have no borders.

[fulldeck]

I am not saying we should stop funding research at all. What I am saying is that I don't like farming out the jobs or money overseas for studies that could be done here. We can continue to collaborate without funding their research on top of our own. I know how difficult it is for smaller colleges and labs to get funding for research in this country.

[jim]

I am not saying we should stop funding research at all. What I am saying is that I don't like farming out the jobs or money overseas for studies that could be done here. We can continue to collaborate without funding their research on top of our own. I know how difficult it is for smaller colleges and labs to get funding for research in this country.

I think you are looking at it too narrowly. I tried to show how it works both ways. Science should be (and often is) collaborative.

[fulldeck]

I am not saying we should stop funding research at all. What I am saying is that I don't like farming out the jobs or money overseas for studies that could be done here. We can continue to collaborate without funding their research on top of our own. I know how difficult it is for smaller colleges and labs to get funding for research in this country.

I think you are looking at it too narrowly. I tried to show how it works both ways. Science should be (and often is) collaborative.

Like I said before, we can all share ideas and findings without having to fund their research.

[jim]

I am not saying we should stop funding research at all. What I am saying is that I don't like farming out the jobs or money overseas for studies that could be done here. We can continue to collaborate without funding their research on top of our own. I know how difficult it is for smaller colleges and labs to get funding for research in this country.

I think you are looking at it too narrowly. I tried to show how it works both ways. Science should be (and often is) collaborative.

Like I said before, we can all share ideas and findings without having to fund their research.

From my experience, your statements are understandable but maybe too simplistic. I don't know the details of what you are referring to with this funding.

While we are on the subject of the Sciences, don't think for one minute that Iraq hasn't played a big role in the U.S. slipping. The subsequent project to the LHC is called the ILC, and this time last year I would have said that U.S. was at least a 50/50 shot of getting it. However, due to war spending, we got the legs cut out from underneath of us and now I would say our chances are very small of getting it. The international science community has been paying attention to what has been going on, and they aren't too crazy about dumping loads of money into something where they aren't sure the host is committing to.

I was happy to take a couple of weeks furlough last year because of the funding cuts, no problem. But the message it sent to the world was bad.

IMO, McCain/Palin would be horrible for the sciences.

[clevername]

agree with everything jim's said, but also agree with fulldeck in some respects.

it all comes down to who will fund the research and part of the problem for science in this country right now is that funding isn't easy to come by. Until the US starts supporting its homegrown researchers more you're going to see plenty of setups like that.

[GatewaySnayke]

Daily Kos posted this just to show how ignorant Sarah Palin is. I mean, this is really frightening.

Brian Williams: Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition?

Sarah Palin: (Exasperated sigh.) There’s no question that Bill Ayers by his own admittance was one who thought to destroy our U.S. Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There is no question there. Now others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that it would be unacceptable to, I don’t know if you’re gonna use the word "terrorist" there.

And here are a list of the anti-abortion non-terrorist victims:

Donald L. Catron
Claudia Gilmore
Shot 12/28/91 at
Central Health Center for Women in Springfield, Missouri
Victims: Wounded

Dr. David Gunn
Shot 3/10/93 at clinic in Pensacola, Florida
Victim: Murdered

Dr. George Tiller
Shot 8/19/93 at clinic in Wichita, Kansas
Victim: Wounded

Dr. Wayne Patterson
Shot in Mobile, Alabama
Victim: Murdered

Dr. John Britton
James Barrett
June Barrett
Shot 7/29/94 outside clinic in Pensacola, Florida
Victims: Murdered (John and James) and wounded (June)

Dr. Garson Romalis
Shot 11/8/94 at home in Vancouver, British Columbia
Victim: Wounded
Terrorist: At large.

Shannon Lowney
Leanne Nichols
Shot 12/30/94 at clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts
Victims: Murdered
Terrorist: John Salvi.

Anjana Agrawal
Antonio Hernandez
Brian Murray
Jane Sauer
Richard J. Seron
Shot 12/94 at clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts
Victims: Wounded

Dr. Hugh Short
Shot 11/10/95 at home in Ancaster, Ontario
Victim: Wounded

Dr. Calvin Jackson
Stabbed 12/96 outside the Orleans Women's Clinic in New Orleans, Louisiana
Victim: Wounded

Unidentified Victims
4-7 victims of 2 bombs 1/16/97 outside the Northside Family Planning Services clinic near Atlanta, Georgia
Victims: Wounded

Unidentified Doctor
Shot 10/28/97 at home in Perinton, New York
Victim: Wounded

Dr. Jack Fainman
Shot 11/11/97 at home in Winnipeg, Manitoba
Victim: Wounded

Officer Robert Sanderson
Bombed 1/29/98 outside New Woman, All Women Health Care Clinic in Birmingham, Alabama
Victim: Murdered

Emily Lyons
Bombed 1/29/98 outside New Woman, All Women Health Care Clinic in Birmingham, Alabama
Victim: Wounded

Dr. Barnett Slepian
Shot 10/23/98 at home in Amherst, New York
Victim: Murdered

How Sarah Palin can honestly say that she doesn't consider these acts of terrorism is mind-boggling. She is a despicable human being.