Saturday Open Thread [3.16.13]
Recent research has determined that we will never have a real life Jurassic Park movie, because DNA molecules decay too quickly to make it a reality:
“We believe this is the last nail in the coffin,” of claims that scientists can get DNA from million-year-old fossils, says Morten Allentoft, a scientist from Copenhagen’s Natural History Museum who worked on the project. Even in ideal preservation conditions, the scientists calculated that every single DNA bond would be broken at 6.8 million years: The youngest dino fossils are 65 million years old. And because scientists need long stretches of DNA to replicate it, they estimate that the oldest usable DNA will actually be one to two million years old. The record holder right now is DNA found in ice cores, at 500,000 years old.
Kim Ghattas, author of The Secretary, tells Politico the secret to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s incredible stamina was hot chili peppers “that make you sweat.” Said Ghattas: “It wakes you up. It flushes your system, maybe from whatever viruses are there.”
Jeffrey Toobin: “Judicial appointments represent one of the great missed opportunities of the Obama Presidency. In his first term, especially in the first two years, Obama himself bore much of the blame for this. When Democrats controlled sixty Senate seats, Obama was slow to nominate lower-court judges, and his moment of greatest leverage passed. But, since the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans have been at fault, almost entirely. Most nominees are not formally stopped, as Halligan was, but rather are delayed and delayed. Bush’s nominees got votes within weeks; Obama’s take months, even for uncontroversial selections”
Steve Kornacki: “There are remarkably few recent examples of Senate incumbents losing in states where their party enjoys the kind of edge Republicans now have in Kentucky. And Judd figures to be a particularly ripe target for the GOP, given the very liberal views she’s already staked out. It would probably take a huge Democratic tide or an indictment of McConnell (or maybe both?) to propel her to victory in ’14. And that’s a lot to hope for.”
Roll Call points out that Paul Ryan is required by law and all that is holy to get down on his knees and praise President Obama and his policies, for without him and them, his budget plan would be nothing.
Ryan’s budget eliminates the deficit in 2023 not because of large new spending cuts relative to his past budgets, but because he’s keeping hundreds of billions of dollars a year of President Barack Obama’s own budget policies in place.
Ryan’s claim to a balanced budget rests entirely on the 2010 health care law, known in GOP circles as “Obamacare.” Ryan’s budget keeps the tax revenue from the health care law, as well as its $700 billion-plus Medicare trims and other cuts. Ryan included those Medicare cuts in his previous budget blueprints but campaigned against them when he joined Mitt Romney’s GOP presidential ticket last year.
Ryan’s budget also would not balance without the $600 billion-plus increase in taxes extracted by the president in the fiscal cliff deal.
What Ryan would repeal is the $1.8 trillion in new spending on the health care law, which primarily subsidizes the purchase of private insurance. That includes $263 billion in spending on the law in 2023 alone.
