Skulls in the Stars

Breaking news on CNN is that Bush has used his promised veto against expanding the S-CHIP program, which provides health insurance to children from poor families.  The expansion would increase the level of coverage to families of marginally higher income, in order to make certain that more children are covered.  Bush apparently was opposed to the bill not because S-CHIP is a miserable failure, but because it is so successful – heaven forfend people start to realize that government can provide affordable health insurance to its citizens!

If you really want to see the Republican mindset on this topic, watch neocon Bill Kristol talk about how great it is to deny kids insurance.

This is a little belated, but I was a little troubled by a post on Kevin Drum’s blog at the Washington Monthly.  The substance of the post is about interpretations of certain poll results:

A recent New York Times poll showed that 65% of respondents want to withdraw either some or all of our troops from Iraq. Hooray! The country is with us! But then the Times asked a followup question: “What if removing troops meant Iraq would become more of a base of operations for terrorists, then would you still favor removing U.S. troops from Iraq, or not?” Guess what? Of that 65%, only 30% still favored removal… The odds are that in real life — i.e., during a campaign in which voters were responding to actual arguments instead of casually answering poll questions over a telephone — there’s something like 30% who want to stay in Iraq, 30% who want to get out, and 40% somewhere in the middle who aren’t really sure what to do.

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While in Amsterdam, my girlfriend and I got into a political discussion with my post-doc advisor about the founding fathers of the United States. Basically, my advisor argued that the founding fathers (FFs) are treated essentially as religious figures, and given an unreasonable amount of deference in the U.S. political world.

The discussion started over the “Scooter” Libby pardon, and the question of why the President has the unconditional ability to pardon anyone he sees fit. My advisor argued that this power is simply a holdover from monarchical rule, while I suggested that the FFs intended this to be another ‘check’ in the system of checks and balances that makes the government run (of course, I also pointed out that it isn’t working quite as intended). This led right into the question of why we care so much what the FFs think in the U.S.: evidently there’s no other country in the world where a political figure’s thoughts are treated as ‘the ultimate truth’.

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