2008 US Election

I haven't read a lot of this post, so aplogies if I am repeating. Where do you think government responsibility should stop?

Should education for example be privatised?

The problem I have with McCain repeating Bush' policies for the last 8 years is that they haven't worked. The more wealthy you are, the easier it is to get richer. 30% of £15k is lower compartively than 30% of £500k in relation to how much money you have left over and what that money can do for you. Tax cuts for the rich and the trickle down re-distribution of wealth don't work. Tax cuts don't create jobs - demand does. By reducing tax for the 'middle class' and less well off, you create demand and therefore jobs. Higher profits for richer companies tend to end up over seas.

Good Education and Health are unfairly on offer to those with wealthy parents. It is not a case of the harder you work you richer you get, but the more opportunity you have. By re-channelling money in this area you create opportunity for the less well off & more chance of the less wealthy living the American dream.

great post mike

and onto more pressing matters. the US has decided to infringe on syrian territory...

and yet there are still people who dont realise it's shit like this that make people in the middle east want to blow up soldiers and fly planes into US buildings.

Anyone else just aching for this to be all over right now?

Anyway, this will only be preaching to the converted, but Hitch was on form in Slate today.

Sarah Palin's War on ScienceThe GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET

Sarah Palin. Click image to expand.Sarah PalinIn an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Government responsibilities involve the government spending money. Unless something is specifically listed in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, it is illegal for Congress to spend money on it. Anyone who votes for an expenditure of money not approved by the US Constitution should be arrested. Once we return to a real rule of law, then we can start talking about what ELSE the federal government should take on in the way of responsibilities.

I don't think privatising education is possible. Public schools are never going to be privatised.

On the other hand, IIRC, the average amount spent per pupil in the US is something like $10,000, per year. Some areas spend more, some spend less. We're spending more than ever before, and public schools are seeing some drastic declines in achievement. Private schools are doing at least as good, if not better, for on average less. Home schoolers also do very well with a much lower average spent. I think education can be handled better (way better), and I think private schools need to be an important part of that.

Adrian

i'm going to need some figures before i come anywhere near to believing that public schools spend more per pupil than private schools.

for a start i can't think of any private school i know where the fees are remotely near $10,000 per year. some cost more than that per term...

Palin against science:

http://tinyurl.com/5draou

An amusing rant:

http://www.****johnmccain.com/

Love the McCain rant Mike.

And yes - I will be very happy when it's all over next week. This has seemed like the longest campaign ever - or maybe I just paid attention to more of it since so much is at stake.

Is the constition not then enforcable anymore?

Nevermind whether it is 'legal' or not based on a 200 year old document without the ability of hindsight, the £750b bailout bill was a necessity.

Isn't that then a form of socialism?

But opportunity needs to be given to the people born into poor families who cannot afford private education. Who is going to give that to them?

I was in Canada for the last two weeks and got a big dose ot it - it is like a soap opera or an extended version of X-Factor you can't help but be sucked in.

And Jim - they don't learn do they!?!?

think yourself lucky. one of my best mates is in west virginia just now and will be up till the 8th.

the only silver lining is he's pulling a 14 hour shift 50 or so feet underground on the actual night of the election