I assumed you’d been gone for so long because you were poring over your 2004 posts to prove that you are not a hypocritical moron, and would bring back your 2004 post(s) condemning Bush’s appointment of Simonson.
Perhaps you forgot.
I can wait.
Hey Adaher, same challenge to you. You were here then. Can you show us your howls of outrage at the appointment of Simonson?
…“Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.”
From here:
Success of Stimulus Bill Is Noteworthy as Another Is Weighed - The New York Times
Nope, Clothy, still wrong.
On the lighter side, an idiot columnist for the Denver Post on the new train/bus station in Denver not being diverse enough.
That’s a white person’s train station if I ever saw one.
I don’t see where adaher opposed this appointment on “not a doctor” grounds.
Did you read the article? It is about the old historic station that was converted into a high end mall and how it appears to cater to a much less diverse clientele than would be expected. Is the dumb idea that a publicly owned space should reflect the diversity of the public it serves? Or that the architecture could be part of the cause?
I think the first is perfectly valid line of consideration. Is it less diverse just because it is high end, or is less diverse than the upper middle class in general in the city? Who had input into which stores and restaurants would come in?
The second is a little more problematic. I could be wrong, but it seems unlikely that, assuming the less than scientific surveys are truly representative, the chief cause is the way the building looks. I would guess that the lack of inclusion of elements of the more diverse culture is more a symptom than the cause.
“Hey, dawg, you wanna hit up Union Station?”
“Nah, man, I don’t play that Greco-Roman shit.”
Seems a bit of a stretch.
Yeah, everyone knows minorities are all about post modern design. Bauhaus however is making inroads into the hood but many feel it could be embraced in an ironic sense and not an actual appreciation of it’s design elements.
Adaher: An ex cabinet official, governor, or even mayor would be better for that than a career political operative. Campaigns are much smaller operations and he never actually ran a campaign. He’s spent most of his time as chief of staff or a lower level staffer. His highest position was as Biden’s chief of staff. Exactly how big is the VP’s staff and what do they really have to do? Post 2630.
Not explictly, but in a ‘but he’s an administrator’ kinda way. Still want to see how he responded to Bush’s Bird Flu czar.
Where to begin. How about government grants for any of the following:
Watching grass grow in Florida
Teaching college students to laugh
A cultural exchange for “nose flutists”
Humiliating terrorists with angry tweets
Studying “hangry” (hungry and angry) spouses as they stick pins into voodoo dolls
Teaching monkeys to play video games to unlock the secrets of free will
Studying the effect of Swedish foot massage on rabbits
I can’t speak to any of the items on that list, but it echoes the old Golden Fleece award Senator Proxmire used to give out. Except that he was full of crap. He’d condemn things like, “Paying people to sort rabbit poop” or the like…without the context: studying signs of malnutrition in rabbits on variant feeding programs, to measure caloric intake.
i.e., legitimate science, which he would spin to make sound foolish.
I’ll bet a pickle that some of the items you just listed are, in fact, valid and productive, and the article’s writer simply isolated parts of the studies’ descriptions to make them sound more foolish than they are.
Let’s have a look at a few of those, shall we? And rather than use a crappy Chicago Tribune link that requires registration, why don’t we go directly to Senator Coburn’s 2014 Wastebook. You can download the full document (PDF) from that web page.
Here’s what the Wastebook tells us about this project:
What the Wastebook fails to reveal, but can be found in one of the sources they use for the report, is that the grass in question is a crucial component of an estuarine region that generates millions of dollars in economic activity every year:
Spending $10,000 to help preserve a quarter-billion dollar annual resource? Sounds like a pretty wise use of government money to me.
Complete misrepresentation. The Senator’s own report belies the dishonest title. These are not “laughing classes.” One of the two course funded is described thus in the report:
I understand that some might find this sort of stuff pointless, but unless you’re just an ignoramus who believes that all liberal arts education is a waste of time, then this class is no less valuable than any other humanities class in teaching students skills of analysis, critical thinking, writing, argumentation, etc., etc.
Another horrendously dishonest title. The $90 million in alleged waste here is devoted to State Department programs in cultural exchange. According to the Department’s own website, the aim of the Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau is:
Given the amount that we spend spying on, bombing, shooting and threatening people around the world, spending ninety million on some good relations seems like small potatoes. As for the alleged “nose flutist” exchange, the report is here referring to a $1.5 million musical exchange program that features:
One of the participants last year was apparently a nose flutist. Big fucking deal.
Note also that the total cost of the three examples given above is just over $90 million, and the total cost of all of Senator Coburn’s alleged boondoggles comes to about $25 billion. I wonder if he was as concerned about spending $10 billion a month in Iraq a decade ago, or with the $4-6 trillion projected cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? And that doesn’t even include the newest efforts against ISIS, which Coburn strongly supports.
One of the biggest single areas of waste, according to the report, is $4.2 billion lost to identity thieves “stealing tax returns from unsuspecting taxpayers.” The IRS should, of course, do everything possible to prevent this, but a GAO Report (PDF) on the problem notes that some of the measures it recommends to combat fraud, including things like adjusting W-2 deadlines and delaying refunds, would also leave the IRS open to criticism for placing greater burdens on employers, and also for hanging onto taxpayers’ money. In addition, the law requires that the IRS pay interest on refunds not issued within 45 days, meaning that one of the measures designed to prevent fraud could also end up costing the government extra money in interest payments (see esp. pp. 14-24 of the report).
Another large area of waste that is dishonestly represented in the report headlines is $3 billion allegedly spent on “Golf Club Testing, Elementary School Experiments Aboard the International Space Station.” Of course, these little experiments constitute a tiny portion of the $3 billion that the US spends on the ISS. There are reasonable debates to be had over US spending on the space station, but dishonesty is not the place to begin those conversations.
I lost interest in following up on the rest of the stupid claims, but the blatant misrepresentation is the main takeaway from Coburn’s report. Reasonable people can disagree over the need for programs like this, and there are intelligent debates to be had over what the government spends money on, and how much it needs to spend in total. But it seems that Senator Coburn is more interested in dishonest sensationalizing than in rational discussion, and when the whole debate is couched in such dishonest terms, it’s hard to take the person making the claims seriously.
Fucking awesome post, mhendo. Well done.
Stupid liberal idea of the day? To imagine that dolts like D’Anconia have the capability or desire to fight their own ignorance.
I can picture silly experiments like this being considered necessary for the mental health of the station crew, i.e. giving them a chance to do something that isn’t mission-critical or stressful, just kinda fun.
Thanks mhendo for taking on the task. It is pretty much always the case with these fucking things.
I wish conservatives weren’t such reliable liars. If deceit and ignorance were my stock in trade, my conscience would be troubled.
That link doesn’t require registration. In fact, I just double-checked, and it works fine for me. Sorry that your browser sucks.
There’s no might about it. It’s de facto pointless. If colleges want to offer such nonsense, and pay “teachers” to run them, and the students pay for that, no skin off my nose. But why should the government take other people’s money to pay for that crap?
That’s nice, except that in the real world, there’s no such thing as a nose flutist.
Do you mean like how Obama strongly supports it? I haven’t seen your criticism of the President. I don’t expect I ever will.
“Just a tiny portion” is no excuse for wasting taxpayer money. Were you against the IRS Star Trek video? I’m sure that was a tiny portion of the overall IRS budget. :dubious:
Relevant article on this subject from last year:
Why I Study Duck Genitalia
Aye, that was fucking awesome; there is no other phrase that is even close to adequate.