Minor Thoughts from me to you

This made me snicker.

But then, when I look at the field of candidates, I get that "Directed by Michael Bay" feeling. It's not as bad as I felt in 1996 when it was clear that Bob Dole was going to be the nominee. That was like watching Stephen Hawking heading out to sea on a surfboard. You didn't know exactly what would happen, but you knew it would end badly.

-- Jonah Goldberg, in today's G-File, on the field of potential 2012 Presidential candidates

Senator Rand Paul's (I love saying that) earlier remarks were a welcome contrast to remarks offered last summer by members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

• Henry Waxman: "Do these companies have researchers that are adding to the information that will help us have these breakthroughs? ... Are they adding to the scientific knowledge? ... If they're all closed down then so be it. ... They don't really serve a useful purpose."

• [Parker Griffith]: "I don't think that the companies that are in question here would, if they disappeared tomorrow, would impact the scientific community and our desire to do research into genetics. ... This is nothing more than the snake-oil salesman revisited again. ... It's very difficult to protect the public from itself in its desire to be healthy ..."

That's in relation to companies that help you to sequence your own genome and see what genetic risks you might or might not have. How perfectly, condescendingly, lovely.

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I'd like to see more of this in Congress. Senator Rand Paul harangues the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Efficiency about crappy toilets, low-watt CFL light bulbs, and the desire of busybodies to micromanage our lives.

I think there should be some self-examination from the administration on the idea that you favor a woman’s right to an abortion, but you don’t favor a woman or a man's right to choose what kind of light bulb, what kind of dishwasher, what kind of washing machine.

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Minority Leader Miller made it quite clear, in a letter to Majority Leader Fitzgerald, that the Democrats had no intention of returning until and unless the collective bargaining provisions were stripped from the bill.

Senator Taylor requested an absentee ballot for the April 5 spring election.

Republican senators were convinced that the Democrat 14 weren't interested in true negotiations, only in posturing and obstruction. So they voted to pass the bill anyway, after making sure that the slightly altered bill was legal.

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There was some discussion today about the notice provided for the legislature’s conference committee. In special session, under Senate Rule 93, no advance notice is required other than posting on the legislative bulletin board. Despite this rule, it was decided to provide a 2 hour notice by posting on the bulletin board. My staff, as a courtesy, emailed a copy of the notice to all legislative offices at 4:10, which gave the impression that the notice may have been slightly less than 2 hours. Either way, the notice appears to have satisfied the requirements of the rules and statutes.

Link bonus: The text of Senate Rule 93 and the text of Wisconsin's Open Meetings Law which says that the Senate rule takes precedence over the Open Meetings Law.

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Sen. Jim Holperin said Thursday that he was on his way home to Conover and other Democrats were either on their way back or would be leaving soon.

He says there was no reason for them to stay away any longer since Senate Republicans passed the bill without them on Wednesday night.

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The U.S. ran a $233 billion deficit, just in February alone. Fun fact:

As noted in the Washington Times, the GOP's proposed $61 billion in spending cuts is about 27 percent of the monthly deficit, while the Democratic plan — $6 billion — is just 3 percent of that figure.

Senator Rand Paul wants to cut $500 billion from the budget. No one in Washington is taking him seriously. And, yet, his proposal would still leave us with a budget deficit for 10 months out of the year.

Are there any adults in Washington? Any at all?

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Iowahawk returns to the subject of whether or not Wisconsin's unionized school system trumps the non-unionized nightmare that is the Texas public school system.

Spoiler: it doesn't.
Further spoiler: Wisconsin is not doing well, at all, in educating minority students.

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Did you know that cigarette manufacturers used to compete with each other to see how nasty, vile, and unsafe they could make each others' products look? And that they actively competed on making healthier, safer cigarettes? And that the Federal Trade Commission told them to knock it off, leaving them with no choice but to make cigarettes look cool?

True story.

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Wisconsin public unions have been saying for weeks now that they had agreed to Governor Walker's benefit cuts and that the Governor should leave their collective bargaining "rights" alone.

Well, they've been busy signing new 2-year contracts that either don't include the cuts or (in some cases) actually have pay and benefit increases. Guess they haven't been quite honest with people of Wisconsin after all.

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Iowahawk steps out of character for a moment to set Paul Krugman straight. Krugman has been claiming that Texas, without collective bargaining, has an education system that ranks far, far below the education system of Wisconsin, which does have collective bargaining.

It turns out that, once you control for the ethnicity of the overall population, Texas students out perform Wisconsin students, ethnicity by ethnicity.

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Scott Walker has intended to cut state spending by $2.4 billion all along. The Budget Repair Bill, that limits collective bargaining, was intended to give local governments more tools to reduce costs besides just eliminating programs.

Christian Schneider details some of the ways that Walker's repair bill will help cut costs.

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This is pretty cool. Teams around the world are working on plans for building indoor farms on the moon. These farms would scrub CO2 out of the air, produce about 500 pounds of oxygen a year, and produce food for the astronauts. And, most of it could be run by robots.

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Should (a) the "Cadillac tax" on employer-sponsored plans not be implemented as scheduled in 2018, and should (b) half of the Medicare savings provisions be repealed or otherwise not implemented the law will increase the deficit by up to $500 billion in its second decade.

That doesn't look good. Raise your hands if you think the government will really implement the "Cadillac tax", given that it would apply mostly to union benefits. And raise your hand if you think that the government will really crack down on Medicare, when old people are the most reliable voters in existence.

Anyone?

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Bill Gates is helping to fund a start-up called TerraPower LLC. The company hopes to build a nuclear reactor that can run for 50-100 years on the stuff that we currently consider to be nuclear waste.

Instead of storing it in Yucca Mountain, why don't we use it to generate clean electricity instead?

One big road block: getting a national government somewhere to allow someone to actually build and operate such a reactor.

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A look at the top 10 political donors.

That's five unions to two businesses and three other groups. Five out of ten is half, by my always-suspect English-major math. And who are those other groups? ActBlue is a Democratic clearinghouse, the trial lawyers are super-lopsidedly Democratic, and four out of five of the Realtors' top campaign-cash recipients are Democrats.

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Wisconsin's Senate Democrats have finally proposed their own financial fixes, for the 2009-2011 budget shortfall. The Recess Supervisor pokes fun at it.

In other words, $79MM in additional cuts made by DOA that they say they can't find yet, $43MM of payments delayed to the 2011-13 budget that will cost us $7MM to execute, and a $43MM raid on the statutory balance requirement.

Man, this would make Jim Doyle blush.

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Ramesh Ponnuru ponders what a Sarah Palin vs. Mitt Romney primary battle would look like.

He thinks it would probably be an ugly battle that could injure the party in a general election.

I think it'd be nice if neither one of them won. The one doesn't realize that she gives half of the country the screaming heebie-jeebies. The other can't admit that RomneyCare was a bad idea and is virtually indistinguishable from ObamaCare.

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PPP's recent poll of Wisconsin voters appears to overcount union voters by 6% and undercount Walker voters by 6%. It may not be trustworthy.

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Richard Posner on the problems that come with increased tests for preventative medicine. Are we going too far?

The tendency has been to move the goalposts: to screen for lesser and lesser abnormalities, even though the lesser the abnormality the lesser the expected disease cost to the patient and so the less likely the screening and follow-up treatment are to provide net benefits. Moreover, mild abnormalities are far more common than severe ones, so that moving the goalposts greatly increases the number of persons who have to be screened. When the threshold for excessive cholesterol was lowered from 240 to 200, the number of Americans with excessive cholesterol increased by almost 43 million and all of them are recommended to take drugs to reduce their cholesterol, even though the benefits for persons who are not at high risk of heart disease for other reasons are highly uncertain—yet many of these persons are taking the drugs along with persons who can anticipate a significant benefit. The increased prevalence of screening and preventive treatment has increased the health awareness of Americans and by doing so has increased the innate anxiety that people feel about sickness and mortality.

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