Nature discusses the US election

Good ol’ UK-based Nature has a special section dedicated to the US election. I’m not surprised — the whole world has a stake in this one, and I sure hope we don’t disappoint them, for our sake and theirs. Both presidential candidates were asked their opinion on various issues of science policy, and the answers are publicly available, in two parts. Unsurprisingly, only Obama bothered to reply; in an attempt to be fair, Nature dug through McCain’s old speeches to charitably cobble up the kind of answers he might have given if a) he weren’t an incompetent old coot who can’t get his act together, b) he actually cared what the universe outside the right-wing electorate thought, and c) he wasn’t going to heedlessly gut science as quickly as possible if given the opportunity.

If only they’d gotten Sarah Palin to submit something…but since Nature is not Punch, they probably thought that throwing a comedy routine into a prestigious science journal would be inappropriate.

I did like this short, sweet answer:

Do you believe that evolution by means of natural selection is a sufficient explanation for the variety and complexity of life on Earth? Should intelligent design, or some derivative thereof, be taught in science class in public schools?

Obama: I believe in evolution, and I support the strong consensus of the scientific community that evolution is scientifically validated. I do not believe it is helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny.

(Before you jump on him about using the word “believe”, read this.)

I also thought this one was very good. Science is an international enterprise, but it would be selfishly nice if my country did more to recruit and support it.

Would it make sense for more overseas students who receive PhDs at American universities to stay in the country and contribute to its research base and its wealth? What immigration reforms would you support?

Obama: I believe that we must enact comprehensive immigration reform to restore our economic strength, relieve local governments of unfair burdens stemming from an inefficient federal immigration system, ensure that our country and borders remain secure and allow a path to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented immigrants who are willing to pay a fine, pay taxes, and learn English. A critical part of comprehensive immigration reform is turning back misguided policies that since 9/11 have turned away the world’s best and brightest from America. As president, I will improve our legal permanent resident visa programmes and temporary programmes to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.

My enthusiasm is not unreserved, but I know exactly who I’ll be voting for in November.

I don’t want to be healed by Jesus, I want real medicine

We have a new euphemism and a potential new regulation from the Bush administration: “provider conscience rights”. What this is about is providing religious doctors with loopholes so that they can avoid responsibility for treating patients with the best possible care — so they can use religious excuses to justify neglect. You can read the press release, Regulation Proposed to Help Protect Health Care Providers from Discrimination, and of course the odious Mike Leavitt has mentioned it. This is a proposed new rule that if, for instance, a doctor with superstitious scruples is treating a rape victim, he would not only be allowed to refuse her emergency contraception, he wouldn’t even be required to refer her to someone who could give it to her, or even mention that the option existed. Apparently, the ignorant dogma of the health care provider supersedes the right of the patient to informed consent and appropriate care.

This is open for commentary for the next few days. Again, I notice the web page has a bizarrely twisted title: “Ensuring that Department of Health and Human Services Funds Do Not Support Coercive or Discriminatory Policies or Practices In Violation of Federal Law”. Now asking that doctors behave ethically with respect for the rights of the patient is now “coercive”. Who cares about the patient, though? Isn’t medicine all about the doctor imposing his or her will, right down to his arbitrary beliefs about deities, on the patient?

Lois Uttley, a well-known defender of patient rights, has spelled out a few general principles which are being defied by this new regulation. Maybe you could use some of these when expressing your objections.

Principles of a Progressive Response:

  1. The welfare of the patient must be at the center of medical
    decision-making and treatment.
  2. The religious/moral beliefs of a caregiver or religious doctrine of a
    health care institution cannot be allowed to obstruct a patient’s access to
    care.
  3. Patients must be able to make treatment decisions based on accurate
    medical information and their own ethical or religious beliefs.

Protecting Patients’ Rights: Five Key Principles

  1. A patient’s right to informed consent must be paramount. No information
    may be withheld.
  2. Health care institutions must provide emergency care immediately, without
    exception.
  3. For non-emergency care, referrals must be made if treatment is refused.
  4. The ability of non-objecting health practitioners to serve their patients
    must be safeguarded. No physician “gag rules” should be allowed.
  5. Institutional treatment restrictions must be disclosed to patients in
    advance.

Get out there and speak out for your right to not be bound by your doctor’s freaky religion. This is especially important for women, since anything to do with reproduction seems most likely to induce gibbering meltdowns among the religious right — and they’re going to use their delusions to deny you good healthcare.

We are all screwed, aren’t we?

Now that I’ve had the current banking disaster explained to me (short answer: the people responsible will be receiving a huge handout from the taxpayers), I can understand why Obama has decided to quit. It makes sense. Whoever wins the election is going to be in for a world of pain and hard work, if they take the job seriously.

Oh, wait…McCain has already signaled that he won’t be taking it seriously.

The McCain record on the environment

John McCain made some pleasant noises about supporting science in his Science Debate 2008 responses. They were outright lies, however. If you want to get pissed off at a politician, read the analysis of McCain’s voting record on environmental and alternative energy issues. His voting record is nearly indistinguishable from James Inhofe’s — he has routinely either skipped out on crucial votes or voted against renewable energy and environmental conservation.

And it’s not just the environment! If you want to be really frightened, read what he said about health care:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

He wants to do to health care what the Republican party has done to the economy!

Judge him by what he has done, not what he says he has done, because the straight-talk express seems to be a twisty bunch of lies and detours that never gets to its promised destination.

Palinology

Get ready for more fallout over Sarah Palin, who seems to be even crazier than I thought. There was an attempt to rehabilitate her from the accusations of pushing creationism recently, but the counterclaims got the facts all wrong. They claim that she only said that schools ought to “debate both sides,” but that’s the creationist position — pointing out that she was reciting creationist slogans does not somehow get her off the hook. And then there’s this litany of eyewitness stories from residents of her home town, who seem to be cheerfully trotting out to stick a knife in her campaign.

At one point during the hospital battle, passions ran so hot that local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside Dr. Lemagie’s office, in an unassuming professional building across from Palmer’s Little League field. According to Bess and another community activist, among the protesters trying to disrupt the physician’s practice that day was Sarah Palin.

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'”

Spare us. That’s crazy talk.

Another revelation: remember all the Republican buzz about “small town values“, and how Palin invoked them in her speech? The source for her quote has been tracked down, and it isn’t pretty, but it is fitting for a Republican thug.

“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,” the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous “writer,” which is to say, Pegler, who must have penned that mellifluous line when not writing his more controversial stuff. As the New York Times pointed out in its obituary of him in 1969, Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin “hit the wrong man” when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt.

This Pegler fellow has quite a reputation for fascist rhetoric:

He was also known for what Philip Roth described as his “casual distaste for Jews,” which had become so evident by the end that he was bounced from the journal of the John Birch Society in 1964 for alleged anti-semitism. According to his obituary, he’d advanced the theory that American Jews of Eastern European descent were “instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared.”

And Robert Kennedy Jr has grounds for finding Palin’s choice of sources distasteful.

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies.”

Jebus. What has Sarah Palin been reading in order to get her political education?

The only good news I’ve seen so far: The biggest political rally in Alaskan history was an anti-Palin demonstration. Not that the news media will cover it.

Presidential positions on science revealed…or not

You can now read McCain’s position, as well as Obama’s, on science policy at SEFORA and at Science Debate 2008. I tried to read them comparatively — the big differences that jumped out at me are that McCain wants to build lots and lots of nuclear power plants, and that McCain runs away from the issues of genetics and stem cells as fast as he can — but I just can’t care very much about McCain’s answers at all. I don’t believe anything positive he might say.

I just want to ask, if he is so pro-science, does that mean we can ask his running mate about the dinosaurs now?

“Small town values”

Once again, the Daily Show punctures the pointless vapidities uttered by politicians — in this case, the phrase “small town values” that was flung about with fervent abandon at the Republican convention, by lots of people who seem to have never been anywhere near a small town.

I live in a small town, I like living here, and there are definite advantages to it — it’s easy to get to know other members of the community, the life style is a bit more laid back, and a lot of the hassles of just moving around are absent. But small town values? The ones the Republicans are worshipping seem to be the narrow insularity verging on xenophobia, the judgmental meddling in other people’s affairs, the backward-looking reverence for the good old days (which actually weren’t that good), the worship of ignorance, the easy way authority can personally intrude on people’s lives without oversight, except by a coterie of good old boys. They seem to overlook the schools in neglect, the churches sprouting everywhere like poisonous mushrooms, the alcoholism, the spousal abuse, the kids who just want to get through high school and flee to a city where something is happening, the elderly piling up and outnumbering the young and being shuffled off to cheap complexes, the despair of people caught in dead-end menial jobs with few prospects for going beyond. That’s also small town America, and when I hear a Republican singing the praises of small towns, I have visions of a walmartized wasteland where everyone goes to church. It’s not good.

But I still like it here — I’m just not blind to the flaws, and I’m not some beltway lobbyist who thinks the country is a place from a Currier & Ives postcard.

I’ve also been to New York, and I like big city values, too. Everytime I’ve been there, I’ve felt the people were just as friendly and open as the ones in Morris, if not more so, and that they were also more diverse and far less afflicted with small town myopia. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are also part of America…except to the Republican party, apparently.

I hope the Daily Show also did something on the empty buzzwords of the Democratic convention. If I ever hear “god bless” or “godspeed” again, I’m going to ralph on someone’s shoes.