Mar
26
ICCI roundup – 3/26/09
March 26, 2009 | 1 Comment
- Now they tell us: For the second day in a row, the AP actually does its job and questions some of the claims made by the Obama administration.
If space exploration were conducted like the job forecasts under the government’s new stimulus law, man surely would have missed the moon. But this isn’t rocket science.
No promise from President Barack Obama is more important to the wounded economy than his vow to save or create some 3.5 million jobs in two years. In support of that bottom line, the government even tells states how many jobs they can expect to see from the spending and tax cuts.
But precise trajectories are impossible to plot and even approximations can be wildly off, as the authors of these forecasts acknowledge, usually more readily than the policymakers who use them to promote the plan.
Flip through the stacks of economic analyses underpinning the stimulus plan and you find a lot of throat-clearing qualifications and angst:
_”Very uncertain.”
_”Difficult to distinguish among alternative estimates.”
_”We confess to considerable uncertainty.”
_”Subject to substantial margins of error.”
In other words, who really knows?
- Ed Morrissey is running a feature akin to this, called the Obamateurism of the day. Today Ed takes Obama to task for his response during his Tuesday presser to a question about stem cells.
I think that the guidelines that we provided meet that ethical test. What we have said is that, for embryos that are typically — about to be discarded, for us to be able to use those in order to find cures for Parkinson’s or for Alzheimer’s or, you know, all sorts of other debilitating diseases, juvenile diabetes, that — that it is the right thing to do.
Alzheimers? Would embryonic stem cells hold promise for Alzheimer’s? Let’s ask one of the men Barack Obama has on his short list for the Office of Science and Technology, former Washington Post reporter and analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress Rick Weiss. After all, if anyone in Obama’s administration should know whether this is true, it would be someone working in Science and Technology, right?
But the infrequently voiced reality, stem cell experts confess, is that, of all the diseases that may someday be cured by embryonic stem cell treatments, Alzheimer’s is among the least likely to benefit. …
But given the lack of any serious suggestion that stem cells themselves have practical potential to treat Alzheimer’s, the Reagan-inspired tidal wave of enthusiasm stands as an example of how easily a modest line of scientific inquiry can grow in the public mind to mythological proportions.
It is a distortion that some admit is not being aggressively corrected by scientists.
“To start with, people need a fairy tale,” said Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”
People need a fairy tale. Apparently, that includes our President. Since he’s using fairy tales to justify the destruction of human life, it gives a whole new meaning to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?
- And yet another would-be Obama appointee bows out of consideration due to ethics concerns.
President Barack Obama’s nominee to be the No. 2 official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Jon Cannon, withdrew Wednesday after it was disclosed that he was on the board of a nonprofit group faulted for mishandling federal grant money.
“Today I am voluntarily removing my name from consideration to be Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency,” Cannon said in a statement released by EPA. “It has come to my attention that America’s Clean Water Foundation, where I once served on the board of directors, has become the subject of scrutiny. While my service on the board of that now-dissolved organization is not the subject of the scrutiny, I believe the energy and environmental challenges facing our nation are too great to delay confirmation for this position, and I do not wish to present any distraction to the agency.”
Then again, considering the effectiveness of the guys who do wind up finally getting through, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to see another one bite the dust.
As if the dollar didn’t have enough problems, Timothy Geithner took China’s bait yesterday and said he was “quite open” to its suggestion this week to displace the greenback with an “international reserve currency.” The dollar promptly fell and stocks followed, before the Treasury Secretary re-emerged to say “the dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency. I think that’s likely to continue for a long time.”
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