Aging boomers clinging desperately to their youth should take note: Researchers say old age is actually the happiest time in life for most people.
Despite the inevitable pains and sorrows of aging, the University of Chicago study found that older people are more satisfied — the odds of being happy increase 5 percent with every decade. In part that’s because older people have lowered expectations about life. They’ve found the secret of happiness: being content with what you have.
So much for respecting one’s elders. A Democratic strategist’s Web site youngerthanmccain.com kicks off its exploration of the GOP nominee’s seasoned status with a video noting he’s older than Velcro, Indonesia and plutonium, among other things.
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Here’s an interesting Politico piece by Roger Simon looking at a largely unexamined but undeniable part of the primary demographic: the racist vote.
What percentage of voters are likely to vote against Barack Obama simply because he’s African-American?
In a recent AP-Yahoo poll, notes Simon, about 8 percent of white respondents said they’d be “uncomfortable†voting for a black candidate for president. But those are only the people willing to admit racism to a pollster. He cites a political analyst who guesses that the actual figure is closer to 15 percent.
That may or may not be a decisive swing vote, either in the primaries or general election, but it can’t be ignored, either.
As for Pennsylvania, Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher thinks the racist vote gave Hillary Clinton her comfortable margin. He cites a New York Times analysis of the exit polls: “Sixteen percent of white voters said race mattered in deciding who they voted for, and just 54 percent of those voters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election; 27 percent of them said they would vote for Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama was the Democratic nominee, and 16 percent said they would not vote at all.â€
A Missouri utility company has abandoned its plan to build a new coal-fired plant because of rising construction costs and an uncertain regulatory climate. But wait a second — supporters of the Holcomb power plant expansion claimed that Kansas Health and Environment Secretary Rod Bremby created regulatory uncertainty when he denied their permit. So how could there be regulatory uncertainty in Missouri, too? Simple — the regulatory uncertainty is the likelihood of federal carbon regulations, not anything Bremby did.
It was an weird week for political appearances on TV, Jay Leno noted on NBC’s “Tonight†show:
– “Well, earlier this week, all three presidential candidates made appearances on the WWE’s ‘Monday Night Raw.’ How many think having candidates for president appear on a wrestling show cheapens the political process? How many think the wrestling show was cheapened by having the candidates on?â€
– “And Monday night, President Bush made a surprise appearance on the TV show ‘Deal or No Deal.’ Yesterday morning, first lady Laura Bush was a guest host on the ‘Today’ show. I understand tomorrow, Vice President Dick Cheney is set to play his own evil twin on ‘Days of Our Lives.’â€
After weeks of silence, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright gave his first media interview on the firestorm over his controversial sermons and their impact on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The pastor says those who show inflammatory snippets of his sermons out of context have distorted his message.
“I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ,” he told PBS’ Bill Moyers in an interview that will be aired tonight. “And, ‘by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?’” he said, referring to Obama.
How did it feel to be portrayed that way? “I felt it was unfair,” he said. “I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt for those who were doing that, were doing it for some very devious reasons.”
Many media pundits are saying that Wright’s interview can only hurt Obama by reviving the controversy.
I disagree. If the excerpts released so far are any indication, many fair-minded people will come away from the interview with a far more sympathetic view of Wright.
The “compromise” plan for building two new coal-fired power plants near Holcomb really isn’t much of one, our editorial today argues. Legislative leaders proposed building two 600-megawatt plants instead of two 700-megawatt ones. But the smaller plants still would produce about 10 million tons in annual carbon dioxide emissions, while the vast majority of the power would still being going out of state. “I don’t see how that materially changes things,” KDHE Secretary Rod Bremby told The Eagle editorial board.
John McCain made a welcome post-Katrina promise to New Orleans and all Americans Thursday, declaring, “Never again, never again, will a disaster of this nature be handled in the disgraceful way it was handled.” He also said that if he’d been president when the hurricane hit, “I would’ve landed my airplane at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally.” His harsh assessment of “the perfect storm” of mismanagement at all levels of government was apt. But for the next president, the real test will be the next real storm.
“Congressional oversight committees have failed miserably to exercise prompt oversight. They’re at the root of the politicization of the intelligence apparatus. I would assert that Sen. Pat Roberts is the root of the problem,†Valerie Plame Wilson, the outed CIA operative, said during a recent visit to the University of Kansas. She blames the inaccurate intelligence that led to the Iraq war on the Bush administration but also on the Kansas Republican senator, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time.
In response, a spokeswoman for Roberts told the Lawrence Journal-World that Wilson “is not a credible source. Valerie Plame is hawking a book and appears willing to say anything to get media attention.â€
“Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’ ‘Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!’†wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “They could sing: ‘The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. . . . I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. . . . You can go in an old blue shoe. Just go, go, GO!’â€
Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, doesn’t appear to be making much progress in persuading Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a native Wichitan, that the Air Force tanker contract needs a pro-Boeing do-over. “All I can say is that I think it would be a real shame if the tanker were to get delayed yet again,†Gates said Monday in Alabama, where the Northrop Grumman-EADS tankers would be assembled. “We’re long past due in terms of getting on with this program.â€
Gates added that the Pentagon was required by law only to consider the technology, capability and costs of the bids. “I think that some things unrelated to what the law says we can consider are being thrown into the mix, at least on Capitol Hill . . . and that’s a concern,†Gates said.
Kansas claimed sixth place on an unenviable top 10 list this week: drunken driving. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 21.1 percent of Kansas drivers 18 and older said they’d been impaired by liquor at least once in the previous year while driving. That compares with the national average of 15.1 percent. Among Kansas’ neighbors, only Nebraska scored worse, with 22.9 percent. A Kansas Department of Transportation spokesman suggested to the Topeka Capital-Journal that the state’s alcohol numbers are improving, but leaders should seek other ways to drive down this dangerous number.
I haven’t seen “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the anti-evolution film by Ben Stein. The mainstream reviews certainly haven’t been good. The New York Times critic described it as “a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.” A number of reviewers said the movie doesn’t support its central premise: that all these academics are being persecuted because they question evolution or believe in intelligent design. There are a few people in the movie who claim they were persecuted but, according to the reviews, the film doesn’t present evidence of how widespread this is or whether what these people say is actually true. Were they really let go or denied tenure because of evolution, or were there other reasons? For example, the film suggests that one of these people lost his job at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History because of intellectual discrimination, but the Times reported that it “neglects to inform us that he was actually not an employee but rather an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term.” The film really goes off the rails, according to Time magazine, when it tries to link the theory of evolution to abortion and the Holocaust.
Have any of you bloggers seen the film? If so, what did you think?
John McCain Wednesday asked the North Carolina GOP not to run a 30-second ad that shows Barack Obama and an inflammatory snippet of a sermon by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and then intones that Obama is “too extreme” for America. The ad actually targets two Democratic gubernatorial candidates by linking them to Obama and Wright.
McCain said that the ad “degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats. In the strongest terms, I implore you to not run this advertisement.”
His plea, and that of the national party, apparently fell on deaf ears, though. State party chairwoman Linda Daves said the ad was “entirely appropriate” and would run next week, just days before the North Carolina primary.
Do McCain and the national party really have no influence over the state party?
Expect to see a lot of this swift-boating in the general election.
Barack Obama’s “bitter†comment has revived talk of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book arguing that lower-middle-class heartlanders vote against their economic self-interest when they vote Republican, the unfortunately titled “What’s the Matter With Kansas?†The author weighs in on the controversy in the Wall Street Journal, taking no side about what he calls Obama’s “tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch guns and irrationally oppose free-trade deals†but noting that it is conservatism that has spawned a “bitterness industry.†Frank concludes: “The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they’ve got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup.â€
Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said this week that he thinks primitive life-forms might exist somewhere in our galaxy. But he believes that advanced, intelligent beings are rare in the universe. And he discounted reports of UFOs.
“We don’t appear to have been visited by aliens,†he said. “Why would they only appear to cranks and weirdos?â€
We assume he’s including Dennis Kucinich?
Citizens Against Government Waste, a taxpayer watchdog group, is opposing attempts by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, and other lawmakers to reverse the Air Force tanker decision. “Any attempt by Congress now to overturn or undermine the Air Force’s tanker award would smack of . . . special-interest politics,†the group said. But Tiahrt responded in a letter to the group’s president that he is trying to protect taxpayers in opposing the contract to Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. “An honest assessment of the KC-767 and the EADS’ KC-30 shows that the KC-30 will cost the American taxpayer at least $40 billion more than the American tanker,†Tiahrt wrote, adding that the contract “is bad for America’s war fighters and bad for America’s taxpayers.â€
“Two billion dollars will be spent on the presidential campaign. People don’t give that kind of money out of the goodness of their hearts.†— former NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw, warning a recent audience at the Dole Institute of Politics in Lawrence about the “broken and inconsistent†U.S. presidential election system
Give Hillary Clinton credit for a hard-fought win in Pennsylvania. Her comfortable 10-point margin, while less than the blowout she needed, gives her some breathing room to continue her primary battle against Barack Obama.
But party officials must ask: To what end? Time is running out, as this Associated Press analysis points out, and she faces very long odds and dwindling campaign funds. Obama, flush with cash, is widely expected to win delegate-rich North Carolina on May 6, and he has a good chance of taking Indiana the same day.
Clinton has no chance now to overtake Obama in elected delegates, meaning that Obama must somehow collapse or be fatally crippled as a candidate for her to plausibly emerge as the party’s nominee.
The scenario that Clinton proposes – superdelegates handing her the nomination over the will of elected delegates and a majority of voters and primary states – would cause nothing short of a civil war in the party and leave Clinton’s touted “electability” against McCain much in doubt.
In short, how does Pennsylvania change the hard realities of the race?
Wichita’s BTK investigation was featured in a Washington Post article this week about catching criminals by analyzing the DNA of family members — without their permission. Wichita police were able to link Dennis Rader to the BTK crimes in part through his daughter’s DNA, which it obtained from her medical records through a court order. States want to expand this approach by doing DNA searches of criminal databases. If there is a near match with someone who is already in prison, that means a family member of that person may have committed the crime. Privacy advocates are concerned, the Post reported, that such searches turn family members into genetic informants without their knowledge or consent, and could subject thousands of innocent people who happen to be related to someone in a criminal database to “lifelong genetic surveillance.†Also, because minorities are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, minorities would face greater scrutiny.
America will be living with the human costs of the Iraq war for a long time.
As many as 300,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or serious depression, according to a Rand Corp. report released last week — and the costs could reach $6.2 billion in the next two years alone. About 1 in 5 vets of the war report symptoms of traumatic brain injury.
The study, titled “Invisible Wounds of War,†warned of “long-term, cascading consequences†for the country, including higher rates of veteran suicide, divorce, drug use and unemployment.
At the same time, the study found that major gaps in mental health care for vets remain: Only 53 percent of vets with PTSD sought professional help in the past year, and half of those who did get help received “minimally adequate†care.
