demo-plat

The democrats are in the process of working to develop their "core" issues/positions. The sites that I ahve discovered on this are:

• Stand Up Democrats are collecting ideas from December 14th through January 14th. We will take the best 100 ideas and submit it to the new Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman and to every Democratic U.S. Senator, Member of Congress and Governor.
  
  
• "Co-Sponsor the Senate Democrat's Opposition Agenda"
  A more organized, aggressive Senate caucus kos Jan 25th, 2005 at 11:13:11 PST
  
  
  
  • Senate Bill 11: Standing With Our Troops.
    
  • Senate Bill 12: Targeting the Terrorists More Effectively.
    
  • Senate Bill 13: Fulfilling Our Duty to America’s Veterans.
    
  • Senate Bill 14: Expanding Economic Opportunity.
    
  • Senate Bill 15: Quality Education for All.
    
  • Senate Bill 16: Making Health Care More Affordable.
    
  • Senate Bill 17: Democracy Begins at Home.
    
  • Senate Bill 18: Meeting Our Responsibility to Medicare Beneficiaries.
    
  • Senate Bill 20: Putting Prevention First.
    
    
    Senate Democrats coordinate message, attack on Bush -- Rick Klein, Globe Staff | January 25, 2005
    
    
    
  
  
• Questions for DNC MoveOn.org -- Currently at 700+ submitted...
  
• Remarks by Governor Howard Dean Accepting the Chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee -- Feb 12, 2005
  

hubble

Link to MSNBC "The fight for Hubble’s life begins anew" -- As of now 76% of those responding were in favor of keeping the Hubble alive

07/13/2004 NASA urges that NASA commit to a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope that accomplishes the objectives of the originally planned SM-4

12/08/2004 Space Shuttle Should Conduct Final Servicing Mission To Hubble Space Telescope

01/16/2005 NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced his decision to call off ... Servicing Mission 4" -- Hubble's Future, HubbleSite NewsCenter

Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space Telescope: Final Report (2005) -- Space Studies Board, Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board



1. NASA should commit to a servicing mission to the Hubble...
   
2. NASA (should) pursue a shuttle servicing mission...
   
3. A robotic mission should be pursued solely to de-obrit Hubble...
   
   

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As I felt we should support the telescope, if practical, I asked the following, and after looking at the NASA site, I am discurraged, in that it looks as though NASA is recommending that the HUBBLE be killed because human repairs are too risky and robot repairs are not practical at this time.

. 1) Does NASA have any estimates of the cost, risk, and probable success of repairing it, via robots or humans? -- NASA seems to feel that a human effort is justified and should be done

. 2) Is NASA determining that it is not cost/risk effective to repair it, if their funding is not increased as expected, or is this a determination by the White House -- It seems that the decision to kill the Hubble is that of the administration not NASA

. 3) If it is a NASA determination, then what are their other priorities so that we could decide if they are right in their priorities and how much more would they need to decide that the repair was justified?

. 4) Would there be some way to set up a Charity that would pay NASA to repair the Hubble? (I assume that "1)" would tell us what we would need to put into it), and if we were able to do so would the government and NASA accept the money or is this decision a Done Deal, and not about money

Statement Of Senator Mikulski On Necessity Of Hubble Servicing Mission -- contact her

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she expects the U.S. space agency to heed the will of the Congress and keep preparations for a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission on track

Updates:

Budget rumours hint at Hubble trouble 18:41 24 January 2005 NewScientist.com news service

Blogs

Mark A. R. Kleiman -- Killing Hubble
uggabugga -- Hubble update:

optout

Opt-out or Ownership society

One way of looking at the Left/Right conflict is whether a person is concerned with helping the least amoung us or advancing the society as a whole. There are plenty of ways of expressing this, and of course mine may not be appropriate.

The "World's Smallest Political Quiz" seems to me to be a way to characterize the general orentation of people, positions, parties. This suggests that there are two dimentions in American's political life, e.g. Peresonal and Economic , and that people can want to have the government be involved in neither, either or one and not the other.

The following are some currently interesting articles from the Left opposed to Bush's Ownership Society

The Opt Out Society: The GOP Threat to National Unity and the American Social Contract -- the Perrspectives, June 15, 2003

Cheers For Bush's Ownership Society: Robert B. Reich's "spin" on how the liberal objectives are actually achieved by a broad ownership society
January 20, 2005

"Corporate Americans" By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. -- Jan 18, 2005. -- Bush's overship society represents a populism born in the Hobbesian belief that we all struggle alone in a world where life is nasty, brutish and short.

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On the other hand, there are some currently interesting articles from the Right in favor of Bush's Ownership Society.

Neoconomy -- Daniel Altman explains the intellectual roots of the Bush administration's economic policy {Mother Jones Interview}, {Amazon}

Defining an Ownership Society -- an ownership society values responsibility, liberty, and property -- David Boaz, Cato institute

What Bush Needs to Do: The Ownership Society -- Stephen Bainbridge, Tech Central Station

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Finally there are a set of subscriber accessable articles in the Economist that discuss the meaning and failure of Corporate Social Responsibility, The Good Company. The conclusion is:

All things considered, there is much to be said for leaving social and economic policy to governments. They, at least, are accountable to voters. Managers lack the time for such endeavours, or should do. Lately they have found it a struggle even to discharge their obligations to shareholders, the people who are paying their wages. If they want to make the world a better place—a commendable aim, to be sure—let them concentrate for the time being on that.

quiz

There are a number of quizzes that are starting to appear:

• The 40 Question Reality-Based Community Quiz -- A "Right Wing" interpretation of what the "Left" believes
  
  • Answers from "Left"
    
  • Answers from Pandagon
  
  
• The 8 questions, "A FEW WEE QUESTIONS" Kevin Drum's, Political Animal,
  
  • Answering 8 Questions from the Right Wing News
  
  
• Are you a neoconservative? Take this quiz to find out. Christian Science Monitor (May time bomb out)
  

Winning the Future -- Newt Gingrich's: Where do you stand on the great and growing gap between traditional American values and the secular liberalism of the Left?

Advocates Self Government test, other similar tests, My favorite

Links-16

America beyond Capitalism Gar Alperovitz’s new book portrayes promising grassroots economic alternatives in the United States and around the world, many have forwarded visions of what an alternative to capitalism might look like, and many have analyzed the recent sharp rightward turn in American politics.

• America beyond Capitalization site and audio.video's
  
• MetaFilter discussion
  
• Dollars and Sense site
  

Wikipedia open-source encyclopedia-like reference site that anyone can edit.

• The Wikipedia Debate from Decembrist
  
• Wikipedia Faces Growing Pains article from WIRED (Jan. 10, 2005)
  

Death and Taxes: a graph of where out discretionary budget is spent, by deviantART
Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.

• "What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?"
  

Church-State Separation in the United States: Religion in Public Schools and the Legal/Off-Courtroom Strategies of the Christian Right (One site's opinion) -- eRiposte! A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community

epic

EPIC -- "Dig This: Watch this fascinating, and kind of chilling, 8-minute Flash 'history' of the Internet through 2014" (From PC World)

[MLL: GREAT idea, slow, 8 min, flash -- Concept highly recommended]

Links

• The police did not need court authorization when tracking Moran from afar. A federal judge in New York ruled last week
  [MLL: I think that this is an un-reasonable invasion of a person's private property, if the society needs to track a person, they should be required to get a warrent and notify the person in a timely mannor, even if use remote direct observation and even more so if they "invade" the person's property]
  
  
  
• Blogifying the DNC on BlogPac,
  [MLL: a Democratic eGovernment site]
  
  
  
• 5 Tips for Buying Consumer Technology Wisely Online -- shopozola
  • Search and ye shall find!
  • Take someone’s word for it!
  • Do your product homework!
  • Make sure you get the “total” price.
  • Shop on your own time
  
  
  
• TopTenREVIEWS provides a central location for free up-to-date, quality product reviews and additional resources to help the average consumer make educated buying decisions. Our motto: We do the research so you don’t have to™
  
  
  
• Bad Book Covers -- from PunkRockPunguin/waste/entertainment
  

Blogs-11

list of blogs that interested me.

• Ask the White House archive (Chuck Blahous, Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, answering questions about Social Security
  
  
• Here's a link to the Duelfer Report, just in case you've only read the NYT version. Recommend beginning with the Key Findings document.
  Posted by: tbrosz on January 12, 2005 in the Washington monthly.
  
  
• The Claremont Institute's Center for Local Government aims to restore republican government at the local level. -- Faith Based, Not Bureaucracy Bound How Religious Institutions Can Fight Government Regulations.
  
  
• Moving Ideas, A project of The American Prospect
  
  
• Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior, who prefers to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary.

List of sites discussing our Economy>

• The next great battle between socialism and capitalism health care -- Jan 11, 2005 -- Mahalanobis
  
  
• Toward a Post Cold-War Political Economy, Elizabeth Anderson -- Jan 9, 2005 -- Left2Right
  

My Comments:

• A Progressive Framework for Social Security Reform by Gene Sperling, Jan 10, 2004 -- Center for American Progress
  
  
• Social Security And Freedom -- Matthew Yglesias
  • my SS proposals: Minor Adjustments, 100% matched 401k+, 50% Recovery tax. -- January 11, 2005 07:07 PM
  
  
• Social Security link page, Updated WeMatter
  
  
• Soft term limits comment on: constitutional amendment from "Really not worth archiving" by Samuel Johnson.
  

malresult

Thomas Szasz has written in the Reason WEB a proposal that patents be able to purchase "Malresult" insurance. This allows the patients to be compensated for "improbable" bad medical outcoms without having to place blame on the doctor, thus eliminiating the Tort law problems in most cases.

. It looks as though it is a useful proposal.

My thought is that it also allows reasonable pressures "against" bad doctors because:

1) The rates, within a field, could reflect the evaluation of the doctor so that the patient could see which doctors seem to low risk.

2) Since the Malresult insurance company would want to "get its money back" it might try to collect from doctors whose Malpractice caused a bad result. This would mean that one Insurance company might try to collect from another without involving the patient, thus might well be more acceptable as a Free Market activity to the current administration than the current patient Malpractice legal situation.

Note: Slate has now written an article that also discusses the concept of what we have called MalResult insurance:

Malpractice Mess -- Do the Swedes have a faultless fix for the malpractice mess? -- By David Dobbs, (Feb. 22, 2005, Slate)

MORE ON MALPRACTICE....Today comes word of yet another study showing that the rise in medical malpractice premiums has almost nothing to do with an actual increase in malpractice payouts. (July 7, 2005 Washington Monthly)

education

It seems to me that one thing all of us can agree about is the value of education/training. The future of our country, and the world depends, at least in part in having the highest educated (trained) individuals and we should try to reduce the barriers and increase the motivation of all our citizens to being educated.

On the other hand, I ran across the following discussion Is Public Education Working? How Would We Know? that suggests that, much as it goes against what we have read, our education is getting better despite a number of major social factors that should have lead to worse education.

Not that I think we are doing enough, but if this is true, it suggests that the money and programs that we have enacted in the last decades have been effective and have achieved some of the improvements that they were designed for.


Some other articles that I think are interesting are:

• The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom -- Thought I may not agree with all the components and the value of Economic Freedom vs Quality of life, this study does at least quantizes the Free enterprise factors of a large number of countries.
  
  
  
• Interview: Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project in 1984, -- After 20 years Stallman is still a controversial person, but he also has important things to say about the past and current state of "open source" software.
  

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new-platforms

Now that we are starting a new cycle of the government there are starting to be proposals for new platforms (for the two main parties) The following are initial pointers to these:

• Platform for a Party of the Left A forum for discussion of civic life, Belisarius
  
  
  
  • We can employ everyone;
    
  • We can feed everyone;
    
  • We can provide medical care for everyone;
    
  • We can educate everyone;
    
  • We can reward excellence.
  
  
  Also see: Doing the doable: King of Zembla, Full Employment, Fair Care: The Sideshow
  
  Note: I believe that the Full Employment, Fair Care approach, though reasonably interesting as a democratic objective, is more idealistic than the Equality and Educational excellence set of objectives.
  
  
  
  
• Winning the Future Newt Gingrich lays out the plan for America’s greatness, Amazon
  
  
  
  • including how to win the war on terror,
    
  • reestablish God in American public life,
    
  • reform Social Security,
    
  • restore patriotism, and
    
  • make American health care the global standard for excellence and accessibility.
  
  
  Take the following test. -- Where do you stand on the great and growing gap between traditional American values and the secular liberalism of the Left?
  
  An area on his WEB site that discusses the various sections, contains details, etc.
  
  A mailing list subscription for those who want to keep informed.
  
  
  Original Contract with America"
  
  
  
  
  
  • 1) require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
    
    
  • 2) select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
    
    
  • 3) cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
    
    
  • 4) limit the terms of all committee chairs;
    
    
  • 5) ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
    
    
  • 6) require committee meetings to be open to the public;
    
    
  • 7) require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
    
    
  • 8) guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.
  
  

equality

Effective equality failure

I believe a CORE belief of a liberal society is that the society should be based on effective equality of opportunity, both in "practice" and in "result". One concept that relates to that of the "Veil of Birth", VOB. Note: I suggest that there is a strong VOB and a weak VOB principal. The strong one is discussed by Debate Central, and assumes that there should be an equality even for different genetic characteristics. The weak one says that there should be an equality at least for groups that are not distinguished by relevant genetic characteristics.

Without proscribing the solutions, e.g. Non discriminatory laws, elimination of legacy college admission, etc. I suggest that a society has failed if two groups have demonstrably different societal rewards that are not explained by genetic characteristics.

Thus if for example, "Blacks" are on the average poorer that "Whites" then the society has FAILED. We may be able show why this occurs, Lack of schooling, Lack of Motivation, etc. but the society, environment, is such that a Black has less expectation of obtaining the societal benefits than the White.

Thus once we agree that a society has failed, we can discuss various ways of reducing this failure, More religion, encouragement of marriage, improved head start, etc. but if we believe in this principal, then we should first admit that such a society has failed..

The Economist magazine article linked to at the head of this entry discusses the failure of American society with respect to parental wealth and states that the spread between the richer and poorer is increasing and that the mobility between these classes is decreasing, thus that America has failed.

Note: The "Free Enterprise" believers do not, as I understand, it think that this principal is important. Their argument is that the important thing is not the spread between the groups, classes, or the rigidity of the groups, but that there is improvement of all the groups and that there are instances of movement between the groups

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A CORE belief of a liberal society should be that the society should ensure "effective equality of opportunity" both formally and in result.

A moral justification of this is the "Veil of Birth" principal, VOB, which suggests a "People should not excessively benefit or suffer as a result of their birth characteristics." Note: there seem to be a strong a weak VOB principal. The strong principle is discussed by Debate Central, and assumes that there should be an equality even for different genetic characteristics. The weak principle says that there should be an equality at least for groups that are not distinguished by relevant genetic characteristics. One result of such a situation is that we, the society does not benefit from the best of its citizens, but just from the Best who happened to be born in the right groups.

Thus, for example, if "Blacks" are on the average poorer that "Whites" then the society has FAILED. We may attempt to explain some of the factors that may have caused this, Lack of schooling, Lack of Motivation, etc. and the practices that can be taken to improve the situation, e.g. more religion, encouragement of marriage, improved head start, etc., but the fact is that the society, environment, is such that a Black has less expectation of obtaining the societal benefits than the White and thus has failed.

The Economist magazine article linked to at the head of this entry discusses the failure of American society with respect to parental wealth and states that the spread between the richer and poorer is increasing and that the mobility between these classes is decreasing, thus that America has failed.


Note: The "Free Enterprise" believers do not, as I understand, it think that this principal is important. Their argument is that the important thing is that there is improvement of all the groups and that there are instances of movement between the groups, and that it might be nice if the law did not discriminate, but once the formal legal governmental barriers are eliminated, it is inappropriate to discuss inequality.