What the future needs!

Is he as special as he thinks he is? From AAPS:  Obama himself spoke for 119 minutes, longer than the 110 minutes used by Republicans from whose ideas he purportedly wanted to learn. (Other Democrats spoke for 114 minutes.) But as Obama said, he can go overtime: “I’m the President.”

Nice commentary from Ed Brayton over at Science Blogs.

Mr. Obama promised us change, but there's much about him that reminds me of his predecessor. George W. Bush was famous for being stubborn and impervious to evidence. I notice the same trait in our current president. For instance, consider this analysis of the healthcare summit, courtesy of Grace-Marie Turner from the Galen Institute: Rational arguments and facts are discarded. When Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) detailed at the summit the budget gimmicks in the bills that would put executives of private companies in jail, the president just brushed past his remarks and said he “disagrees.” That means Mr. Obama disagrees with the Congressional Budget Office and the chief Medicare actuary whose analyses are based upon the facts of his double-counting of Medicare savings, ten years of taxes with six years of spending, creation of new budget-busting entitlements, one-fifth of Medicare providers going out of business and jeopardizing care for seniors, and health-insurance premiums rising e...

Via the Washington Post: Poverty will be measured two ways in the coming cencsus, using both the old formula and a new formula. Here's how that turned out in New York . . . Two years, ago, New York City became the nation's first jurisdiction to adopt its own way of measuring poverty, also based on the academy's work. A report issued Tuesday by New York's Center for Economic Opportunity shows that its new approach produces a higher poverty rate. For 2008, the report found, the city's poverty rate was 22 percent under the new formula, compared with slightly less than 18 percent using the official federal definition.

A good summary article from the Washington Times, includes this: It's sometimes tough to see how the jobs math adds up. The administration has estimated that the $862 billion stimulus act would create up to 3.5 million jobs, which would seem like a bad deal if a $15 billion highway funding extension could create 1 million jobs alone, as Mr. Reid has said on the Senate floor. Mr. Reid also has said a health care overhaul "would create 400,000 jobs a year," and that his travel promotion bill "will create tens of thousands of jobs in the service industry."