Liberals argue that the conventional definition of "news source" used in studies of journalism should be broadened to include opinion programs, so that conservative talk radio and Fox News commentary will be counted. If that definition is adopted, the bias is still overwhelmingly liberal. For example, the viewership of the liberal-biased network evening news is by itself more than all of Fox News and conservative talk radio combined, and when everything is totaled there is more than three times as much liberal slant in media as conservative.

Today President Obama spoke before the American Medical Association, explaining his plans to “reform” the medical care system in the United States. You can tell I’m skeptical, because I put “reform” in quotes. I hold open the possibility that not all plans to spend huge sums of taxpayer money are actually reforms. If the health care plan actually saves money, then it should be funded entirely from the savings achieved. I’ll grant some startup costs, but after a few years money should be flowing into either the Treasury or into the pockets of taxpayers. That, however, is not a part of the plan.

President Obama has taught us that the words used to say something are not nearly as important as who says them and how they are said. Unfortunately, Darth Vader is unavailable to do the job, so Vice President Cheney will have to suffice. What Cheney would say is not substantially different from what any other representative would say. The message is in who is saying it. The move would have the greatest potential for resolving the situation peacefully by causing Dear Leader to back off.

There is a religious doctrine of Young Earth Creationism (YEC), whereby some people believe that the Bible says that the earth was literally created about 6,000 years ago. I am not arguing that that doctrine is necessarily false. I am arguing that if it is true, then when God created the earth he put in place a vast amount of evidence that the earth is many millions of years old. Moreover, the evidence is well coordinated, in that diverse evidence points to a consistent time line for events in the earth’s history. The evidence cannot be explained by scientists having made just a few key mistakes.

President Obama: I need a calculator, and I’d like to get a good one. Do you have the models that talk and have artificial intelligence?

Clerk: Yes, Mr. President. We feature the Autoconglomerator Ultra Turbo 971B. It’s one of the best. We call it the Aut9 for short.

PO: Very good. I’d like to interview it to see if it meets my needs.

My method in building the spread sheet was to begin each year with the balance from the previous year, adjust the balance with investment gains or losses, and finally add the contributions for the year. … The stock market provided more excitement than Treasury Bills. The $216K in contributions grew steadily to be worth $613K at the start of 2009. The stock investments lost a heart-stopping plunge from $1,740K last year, but nonetheless still had $1,093 at year end. So despite the worst market year in the 45 year period, the stock investment was still 78% ahead of Treasuries.

Today, House Speaker Pelosi gave her fifth version of what she knew and when she new it with respect to disclosure of enhanced interrogation techniques. Her various accounts have been contradicted by other members of Congress and by the records of the meetings. She has consistently claimed that she was told by the Bush Administration that they had determined that specified enhanced interrogation techniques were legal, but that she was not told that they were actually used. Other members of Congress maintain that it was clear they were being used. Moreover, a later briefing disclosed information obtained from Abu Zubaydah through concurrently acknowledged use of waterboarding.

It is nonetheless not clear that Speaker Pelosi is lying. It may well be that what she is saying is just how she remembers it. …

There is renewed interest, and actual progress, in building new nuclear power plants in the United States.¹ A news broadcast last nigh covered plans to build a new plant near existing ones on the Chesapeake Bay. The broadcasters provided an opportunity for a spokesman from the Union of Concerned Scientists to opine that such a power plant could produce an incident like Chernobyl. He specifically claimed that a loss of coolant would result in a spread of nuclear material just like Chernobyl. This claim is nonsense.

There was not too much new in the memos. We all knew that waterboarding had been used, and that seems to be more of an issue than the revelation that a caterpillar, pre-certified as harmless, was used to scare a terrorist. The harm is making it abundantly clear that there is negligible downside risk to being a terrorist. Before making it official and pounding the point home through international publicity, terrorists had some reason to worry about being caught.

If the values of two observations tend to rise and fall together over time, the observations are correlated. For example, the rise of violent crime in American society in the 1960’s and 1970’s matched the rise in violence on television. That lead to speculation that violence on television caused the increase. It is fair for correlation to raise such suspicions, but the correlation falls short of proof. Measures of violence on television continued to rise in recent decades, but crime rates have fallen. Young people commit more crimes, and the baby boomer population surge reaching maturity was the more likely cause of the the rise and fall.