I doubt McCain agrees(personally) with most of what he’s said recently but this election is his last chance to score in the history books and he’ll do whatever the Repub. shills tell him to do. Too bad he didn’t win in 2000.

I know several bright people who are uncomfortable with Obama,(including my brother) mainly because they wonder who, in the back ground, are supporting him. One should note, Ted Kennedy represents one of the old guard power brokers. I’m sure there are more but I don’t know them. At least, Obama has the balls to say science is a valid human endeavor and evolution really is the way things work.

For that ALONE I support him,,,

GAry 7

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This is the same thing that happened to one of the antivaxxer posts and the Ed Mitchell post that Michael Horn posted on. Do you have control over this, or is it censoring by Discover?

Wow. Great. Still with the projector, huh? Who’s bringing the fiddle?

How about a discussion on how science and skepticism can help us avoid a global financial crisis in the future? You know… something relevant to the population at large?

QUOTE: “While we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks he [Senator Obama, or "that one"] voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects. Including $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?”

a) Obama’s sponsorship of the $3M earmark for the projector suggests he would vote for it. The fact he didn’t vote, in the scheme of exaggerations to which politicians are prone makes this less than trivial. To present this as a “lie” of any significance is really petty. By that standard one could argue that Obama’s omission to vote for this earmark indicates his ‘two-facedness’ willingness to say one thing & do another — he pretended to support the planetarium but when it counted he abandoned them for his own self-serving reasons. That’s what some blogs are saying & that’s a lot worse that McCain’s reporting of what was, by then, ancient history.

b) ANYBODY with a modicum of familiarity with how legislative process works could NEVER conclude from the above statement that the $3M projector earmark was actually voted for AND granted (authorized & appropriated). The statement is a partial report. Until a definitive statement is made regarding the actual outcome, only a neophyte (that’s well below a ‘political hack’) could or would extrapolate. Saying McCain lied because he said the funding was granted is itself a lie…or a conclusion developed from ignorance. As other’s have stated, one should stick to one’s area of expertise. Making amateur mistakes out of misunderstanding how something works & then attributing those mistakes to the other party only highlights one’s ignorance.

c) A Democratically-dominated Congress rejected the earmark. In an era when most concur that earmarks are out of control, that indicates the $3M planetarium earmark was generally considered egregious as the party rejected its own member’s sponsorship. You know this. McCain (more likely his staff) garbage-picked this earmark example from the legislative detritus. McCain then reported this bit of ancient history. That history, ending with McCain’s remarks, on this particular topic does not even begin to support the conclusion that McCain is “anti-science,” etc. There may be reasons for concluding that, but this earmark planetarium thing is definately not one of them.

d) The projector projects stars, etc. on the planetarium’s dome, which is located overhead — in layman’s terms that qualifies as an “overhead projector,” a fancy one to be sure, but still an “overhead projector.” I made an informal survey of some technically illiterate numbnuts that didn’t hear the debate or this subject & every single one immediately assumed the “overhead projector” was the sort of high-tech equipment it is — and that includes some people that never set foot inside a planetarium & couldn’t care less. This suggests one of two things: 1) this blog’s audience is really dumb to fall for this, or 2) the author is exaggerting a triviality to make build a really weak rationale for rejecting McCain (which in itself isn’t too swift, reasons follow).

And by the way–taking issue with the label “overhead projector” is beneath petty semantics & is no different than calling a Stradivarius violin a “fiddle” — which would infuriate a musician, but which would not confuse anybody. Get over it. If the ignorant & indifferent numbnuts get it, that aspect is NOT an issue. If the readers are confused by that, you might want to seriously consider if you really want to dumb-down your blog to that level as it ultimately reflects on you.

Making such weak attacks on McCain serve to strengthen him in some eyes (e.g. ‘if that’s the best attack you can come up with he can’t be that bad in this area’). There’s a lot of good reasons to attack him on science-related issues and picking this earmark planetarium thing as something substantive isn’t. In fact it maybe or is serving to reinforce McCain in the eyes of some of those that are still undecided. THAT group can still make or break the election (I did a somewhat detailed review of yesterday’s polling data & while Obama is projected to have a substantive electoral college win, digging underneath the numbers among different voting groups the same data shows McCain with a greater popular vote (though within the margin of error) — thus, the presentation of the polling data is skewed by the press to favor Obama and, other things being equal & remaining constant, and assuming the poll data is accurate, it is possible that Obama will win with a minority of the popular vote. Its also possible he’ll lose). This is a very tight race still.

My opinion, you need to be targeting those that are undecided–these are the make-or-break wildcards–and not those that already agree with your position (i.e. don’t waste your time “preaching to the choir,” that’s just cheap intellectual masturbation). Attack McCain on substantive issues–there are plenty of weak points. Mounting a weak attack on trivialities grounded in part in your ignorance speaks more about you & won’t change any opinions and may even have the opposite effect.

Here’s the comments from the earlier post for easy reference:

Well, shock of shocks — it turns out McCain’s characterization of this was all wrong. In fact, I would call it a lie. He knows it wasn’t for an overhead projector, a piece of classroom equipment that costs a couple of hundred dollars. That money was for Adler’s Zeiss Mark VI star projector: a venerable piece of precision fabricated equipment that projects the stars, constellations, and other objects inside the planetarium dome. Adler’s Zeiss is 40 years old, and desperately needs replacing. These machines are pricey, and replacing them difficult.

Adler needed money to do this. They asked local politicians, and eventually were able to get a request in a budget submitted by Obama. However, Obama never even voted on that budget, and Adler never got that money — thus making, again, McCain a liar.

T

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/07/31/religion_science/