It seems a winning no brainer, Obama proposes rasing taxes on zillionaires. The public is behind this by a margin of three to one or more. Republicans will stall and stamp their feet of course. But then all of the sudden, out of left field, a democrat starts running intereference for the wealthy. What’s going on?

To understand why it’s so hard for politicians to raise taxes on the rich, and so tempting to defend them no matter what, you have to understand what a politician does all day. Before I started hanging out with people who manage modern campaigns, I had this generic picture of the politician giving speeches, meeting with other politicians and making deals, meeting with constituents, doing an occasional interview, that kind of thing.

They do that stuff, but it turns out most politicians, candidates or incumbents, spend the majority of their day fundraising. For most of them this means cold calling or warm calling. It means the candidate sits in a room and calls people from lists prepared by staffers, sometimes with accompanying dossiers on the prospects, for as many hours a day as a campaign manager can keep them in the chair. Five to seven hours a day is common and persuasive staffers can often keep their guy or gal on the phone even between campaign events, sneaking in donor calls on the campaign bus or in the minutes between speeches or events. Indeed, in the heat of the campaign season, speeches and other activities may be a candidate’s only break from call time drudgery.

The boiler room strategy is done because federal contribution limits are currently $2,500 per person, per cycle (This may confuse some readers who remember past election limits of $2,400, but the limits are indexed to inflation in odd-numbered years and have since gone up). Typically, you ask big donors to max out for both primary and general election — that’s 5 grand right there folks! Do the same for a spouse and that’s 10,000 bucks. Add kids or grandkids and their spouses, and a single phone call to a wealthy family can result in $30,000 or more. Even in high profile races with national visibility, a call netting 10 to 30 grand is a huge score. If a candidate only closes on one or two such calls a week the campaign war chest grows.

Think about what that means: all day long the candidate is talking to people who can give serious loot, in many cases he or she has called before, maybe several times, and struck up a relationship with the prospect. The candidate is having dozens of in-depth conversations a day with very wealthy people, asking them what they want to see in politics, trying to convince them that s/he sincerely cares about their day-to-day problems, and affirming if the donation is made and candidate successfully elected the prospect’s political wish list will come true.

Campaigns are happy to take smaller donations too, money is money, and smaller amounts move the average amount down in such a way as to help the candidate claim they are a people-powered movement. But a 20 dollar check goes by webpage or call center, there’s no interaction with the power, not even close. So it’s not surprising that after a few months of this crazy, non-stop, sleep deprived campaign lifestyle the candidate simply no longer knows what regular people think, but is intimately aware of any wacky rumor or anecdote making its way through the privileged class. This applies to democrats too.

The only way for us regular non wealthy people to over come this is for the candidate to be more afraid of us voters than the rich donors.

A team of planetary scientists from Tucson, Arizona have identified at least two locations on Mars that may have once been ideal environment for simple microbes. The sites are much younger than the Noachian formations associated with most of Mars’ ancient, wetter past:

The troughs were discovered at Noctis Labyrintus, also known as ‘the labyrinth of the night’ – a region that is noted for its system of deep, steep-walled valleys. “We discovered these locations that show many kinds of minerals that formed by water activity,” says Catherine Weitz, lead author of a paper featured in the journal Geology and a senior scientist at the Institute. “The clays we found, called iron/magnesium [Fe/Mg]-smectites, are much younger at Noctis Labyrinthus relative to those found in the ancient rocks on Mars, which indicates a different water environment in these depressions relative to what was happening elsewhere on Mars.”

The circumstantial evidence for life on Mars has grown fairly interesting. It seems a reasonable speculation that microbes might be passed back and forth between early earth and Mars and that some of those microbes could survive on the surface of the smaller world. Whether that happened or not, or how the organisms fared afterward, is a big question.

Greg Paul has an article up today on the WaPo blog titled Atheism on the upswing in America which includes this interesting bit:

According to the tabulations of the World Christian Encyclopedia, the globe was fairly consistently religious circa 1900. It no longer is. The WCE concludes that atheists from committed to agnostic currently number about a billion. Pew calculates that some 1st world countries are only a quarter or a third as religious as are the most pious 2nd and 3rd world nations. In some of the secularized democracies large pluralities and even strong majorities qualify at atheists–including agnostics, while the devoutly religious are small minorities, and those churches that are not nearly empty on most Sundays have been converted to other uses.

I can understand why people were religious in times past, for one thing they lived in a world surrounded by inexplicable miracles and the science that would one day resolve them as natural events was in its infancy. What I don’t get is how or why religion persisted beyond that point. Is religion replicating itself in the menome like parasitic DNA, does it offer cultural adaptive value or is it a consequence of some other behavior which has adaptive value, is it running on social inertia and near the end of the road?

I sure as hell can’t figure it out. Anyone want to take a crack at it?

This time lapsed photography was made of the Aurora Australis as the ISS traveled over Australia and New Zealand at 200 miles in altitude. Enjoy!

Here’s an interesting example of how the flat-earthers think. Welsey J. Smith writes at Secondhand Smoke:

If they weren’t trying to destroy the economy of the world, keep destitute countries mired in poverty, undermine national sovereignty, and misusing science as a club to promote favored political policies, I might have some sympathy for all of the failed hysteria. You know what I mean, anytime there is an extreme weather event–small hurricanes, heat waves, snow storms, arctic chills, etc.–the usual suspects start bleating, IT’S GLOBAL WARMING. WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE UNLESS WE TURN EVERYTHING OVER TO THE SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGICAL ELITE!

Mr. Smith appears to be deeply confused. Hardly surprising if he consumes industry propaganda and wingnut misinformation in place of legit science. But here in the reality-based world I can’t remember a single credible science writer who covers global warming who has said 1) that some small weather event was the piece of evidence that nailed the case shut — the case has been nailed shut on global warming ever since the globe begin to warm, or 2) said we’re all going to die, or 3) wants to turn everything over to some monolithic science-technological elite. If anyone is being hysterical here it’s Wesley.

But you know what I do remember? The usual suspects commenting on just about every major winter blizzard over the last several years and using them to mock climate science. I remember plenty of cable news pundits and wingnut bloggers following suit. Why I even recall snowmen made to look like Al Gore. Would anyone be surprised if Smith and his buddies were in the thick of that?

Pointing to a blizzard as evidence against global warming is evidence for dishonesty or ignorance. Whereas a record heat wave actually contributes heat to the global temperature record, the converse is not true of a blizzard. Record cold and record snowfall are different phenomena. The only thing snow tells us about temperature is that it’s cold enough for water to freeze. Doesn’t matter if it’s 30 above or 30 below.

In fact, says climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University, warmer winters can mean more frequent record snowfalls because warmer air holds more water vapor than colder air. “As long as its cold enough to snow in the U.S. during winter–which it well be in any foreseeable scenario for the next century,” said Mann, “Global warming may actually lead to more blizzards in many parts of the U.S.”

Controversy continues over the cost and schedule of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Congress seems supportive even in this environment of budget cutting mania. But some NASA scientists are split over whether JWST is worth it or not:

But the astronomy community as a whole isn’t sure this is good news. Some now fear that the behemoth telescope, which is 7 years late and vastly over budget, will end up devouring money allocated to other planetary science and solar physics projects. When JWST, the heir apparent to the Hubble Space Telescope, was named a top priority for NASA astrophysics in 2001, it was supposed to cost $1 billion and launch by the end of this year. It is now expected to cost at least $8.7 billion for launch and operations and to launch no earlier than 2018, a dramatic overrun that prompted Congress to propose axing the telescope.

Meanwhile, a new addition planned for Paranal Observatory in Chile already housing the sharpest optical telescopes on earth could rival the JWST in resolving power and undercut the cost of the space based telescope by billions of dollars:

When it is completed in 10 years, it will be the most powerful eye on the sky anywhere in the world. The size of a football stadium, its main mirror will be 138 feet wide. That is four times bigger than the mirrors on any existing telescopes anywhere. … The telescope will cost about $1.5 billion, weigh over 5,000 tons and will be made to withstand major earthquakes, a serious consideration in Chile. Astronomers say the images it produces will be 15 times sharper than those sent to earth by the Hubble.

Of course in a sane nation we’d be willing to pay what it costs us to fund Bush’s asinine Iraq War for a few days to put a next generation infrared telescope into space. But given our budget priorities and the argument raging today about whether or not teachers and police officers should pay a higher tax rate than billionaires, it’s pretty clear we do not live in a sane nation. Fortunately this addition to the Paranal should be able to do some of the same science JWST would be capable of, and for a fraction of the cost.

A Baptist theologian from the neoconfederacy (Where else?) writes about the two schools of thought on Islam and then:

[G]ives his own reasons why Islam is a bad religion doomed to ruin: “When you start with an adulterous warrior-profit, who is literally anti-Christ (though touting a non-biblical version of Jesus), mix in generous helpings of totalitarianism and the marginalization/persecution of women and non-Muslims, and cultivate tribalism, legalism, and victimism, you have a recipe for disaster.”

I might have had more respect for the author if he or she just wrote “My religion is better than your religion, neener neener neener.”

It brings up a good topic of discussion though, because I sometimes find myself conflicted when it comes to Islam. On the one hand it’s a colorful and historically significant collection of primitive supernatural myths starting in the Bronze Age about magic invisible sky wizards and super heroes, and anyone who actually believe that stuff today is as good a target for pity and skepticism as any other. The same could be said for Christians beliefs of course, and yet that’s exactly where some of the best (And by far the worst) criticism for Islam originates.

I’m sure if I lived in Saudi Arabia or Egypt I would fear right-wing Muslim bullies, they would represent the dominant mythical madness after all, but I don’t live there, I live in America, so I fear right-wing dominionist bullies. So like many of you reading this, I find myself sticking up for Muslims when they’re being bashed from time to time even though their religion is as implausible to me as any other, and even though some of the fundamentalist regimes based on it frankly give me the creeps.

President Obama is scheduled to speak at the White House in an hour on his new deficit reduction plan:

Mr. Obama will call for $1.5 trillion in tax increases, primarily on the wealthy, through a combination of closing loopholes and limiting the amount that high earners can deduct. The proposal also includes $580 billion in adjustments to health and entitlement programs, including $248 billion to Medicare and $72 billion to Medicaid. Administration officials said that the Medicare cuts would not come from an increase in the Medicare eligibility age. Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on some of the details of Mr. Obama’s proposal said that the plan also counts a savings of $1.1 trillion from the ending of the American combat mission in Iraq and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

Republicans, who have been feigning hysteria over deficits ever since Obama took office, are now switching gears and pretending to be outraged by the idea that Paris Hilton might have to pay slightly more in taxes. Already the usual suspects led by the dreamy manly Paul Ryan have been on the attack. Which brings up a good question: Do scumbags like Ryan know they’re scumbags and just not care, or have they managed to convince themselves that stealing from the middle class and poor to give to the billionaire class is somehow noble?

It looks like Americans have finally relinquished our beloved cars as the number one accidental cause of death in the United States. The new leader:

Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States, a Times analysis of government data has found. Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Data like this will fuel the drug war hysteria, perhaps result in even more Draconian prison sentences and obstacles for people suffering severe pain or other easily treatable maladies. And none of it will do a damn bit of good either, just as it hasn’t in the past. Short of shutting down international commerce, managing web access like China, and violating every amendment in the Bill of Rights, there’s nothing federal or local governments can do about this. Nor should they try. Some things come with risk. Drugs can kill you just like cars or fatty food. We accepted that risk with cars for decades, now that drugs have taken the lead expect an episode of collective amnesia followed by senseless over reaction.

The Dawn Spacecraft is slowly spiralling in, closer and closer, to the surface of Vesta. In the image taken above the spacecraft was about 1500 km from the asteroid’s surface (Click the image to rebigulate at the Dawn homepage). A year from now Dawn will be making the closest approaches of the mission, as low as 175 km, increasing resolution by a factor of almost one-hundred.

But Dawn won’t be done then, it has another trick up its sleeve. Thanks to the revolutionary ion rocket engines, the spacecraft will be able to break orbit around Vesta, and head of for a rendezvous with the mysterious dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. For now our best images of Ceres, such as the one right taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, show almost no detail at all even though it is the largest asteroid in the main belt.

The plucky little spacecraft is blazing a trail in more ways than one: Dawn may be the prototype of a new kind of spacecraft that do much more for way less. If such probes were mass-produced rather than built one at a time, the price could be lower still. In 20 years it’s possible we could have a fleet of a dozen or more ion-powered spacecraft ranging through the solar system for decades on end, all for less than the cost of a single decent-sized tax cut for billionaires.