I hope you’re enjoying a weather-event free weekend. We can leave the house this time! I am in Philadelphia, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, previewing the Picasso exhibit. Let’s get rolling. I declare this thread open.
The birth of a political dynasty?
Dan Quayle’s son is running for Congress.
Ben Quayle announced Friday that he will seek the Arizona House seat being vacated by retiring Rep. John Shadegg.
“My generation is going to have to clean up the mess made by the politicians in Washington,” Quayle said in a statement. “The reckless spending and crushing debt burden must be stopped.”
Of course, Dan Quayle is still a moran:
Former Vice President Dan Quayle appeared on Fox News this afternoon to chip in his two cents on the health care debate. Namely, he warned that using the reconciliation process would set a “very bad precedent” because a simple majority is just unconstitutional.
“They’re gonna go to budget reconciliation, which I believe would set a very bad precedent, because essentially — if they could do it, and I don’t know if they can do it, but if they could do it — what you have done, effectively, is to take away the filibuster in the United States Senate,” Quayle said. “So, therefore, you have 51 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate. That is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. That is not the constitutional process.”
There are, of course, no rules in the Constitution about super-majority requirements in the Senate. There is also no provision for direct election of Senators, either.
Coincidentally, Skeptical Science has just become available today as an iPhone or iPod app. The app lets you use an iPhone or iPod to view the entire list of skeptic arguments as well as (more importantly) what the science says on each argument. To download the app, go to http://itunes.com/apps/skepticalscience
How it happened was a few months ago, I was contacted by Shine Technologies, a software development company from Melbourne, Australia. The owners of the company are passionate about climate change and were interested in getting the science from Skeptical Science onto mobile phones. This is a good idea for two reasons. Firstly, because now more than ever it’s imperative that the climate debate focuses on science so the more readily available the science, the better. Secondly, well, an iPhone app is pretty cool.
So for the last few months, the boffins at Shine have been developing the app with Apple approving it today. How does it work? You browse arguments via the Top 10 most used arguments as well as 3 main categories (“It’s not happening”, “It’s not us”, “It’s not bad”):
Best of all: it’s free! I’ve already downloaded it to my iTouch.