Saturday Open Thread [3.22.2014]

Let’s have an Open Thread! So what are you doing today? Last weekend, I was out cleaning up and pruning roses — because you should do that around St. Patrick’s Day. Two days later it was freezing and snowing again and I’m hoping my roses are none the worse for wear. Today I was going to prune a tree, but heck. Why bother? Anyway, here’s an Open Thread to play in.

How about that Dianne Feinstein? Looks like she and her husband are making bank on the closing of some Post Offices. Coincidence? Probably not — her husband’s firms made a good deal of money during the BushCo too:

Between 2001 and 2005, Feinstein vetted and approved $1.5 billion in defense contracts for Perini Corp and URS Corporation – both owned by her husband, Richard Blum. In 2009, Feinstein successfully introduced a bill that routed an additional $25 billion to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), some of it for the purpose of marketing foreclosed property owned by banks that had gone under with the housing and markets crash. In a curious twist, CBRE later received a $108 million FDIC contract to market foreclosed property.

Byrne’s research also found that in 2007, Feinstein directly intervened in a development project in which her husband’s company stood to benefit. In 2005, Lehman Brothers had approved a $252 million loan to the real estate partnership Heritage LLC. One member of the partnership was the Miami-based Lennar Corporation, which planned to develop 3,723 acres of real estate for commercial and residential property at the El Toro Marine Corps Airstation in Orange County, California. Lehman Brothers’s bankruptcy filings later revealed that CBRE was in charge of performing “due diligence” for the El Toro project, which included appraisals for non-residential property.

In 2007, when the U.S. Post Office was planning to build a mail processing plant on a $7.5 million, 26-acre plot in nearby Aliso Viejo, Calif., the city’s mayor wrote a letter to Senator Feinstein complaining that the plant would be too noisy. Sen. Feinstein wrote to the postmaster general and asked him to consider “alternative sites” for the project, mentioning the El Toro project being developed by Lennar. She remained careful, however, not to disclose the role her husband’s company played in its $1.4 billion development.

And now for the good news — a Michigan judge ruled that state’s gay marriage ban (and adoption ban) unconstitutional. Before you yawn and walk away, note that this judge was particularly dismissive of the testimony of one anti-gay Fox Noise “expert” who pretends to use social science to claim that gay people are not fit parents or something:

Michigan’s trial was unique because it included testimony from a panel of experts, and the state brought in several researchers that have been responsible for fueling conservatives’ claims that children of same-sex couples fare worse than those raised by a married mom and dad. Outlining the case’s findings of fact, Judge Friedman rejected the anti-gay researchers’ claims, saying in particular of Mark Regnerus’s testimony that it was “entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration”:

Marks, Price, and Allen all failed to concede the importance of “convenience sampling” as a social science research tool. They, along with Regnerus, clearly represent a fringe viewpoint that is rejected by the vast majority of their colleagues across a variety of social science fields. The most that can be said of these witnesses’ testimony is that the “no differences” consensus has not been proven with scientific certainty, not that there is any credible evidence showing that children raised by same-sex couples fare worse than those raised by heterosexual couples.

These people cannot crawl back under their rocks fast enough for me.

Speaking of more people who need to crawl back under rocks — right wing creationists are having a snit that the reboot of the TV show Cosmos doesn’t include their “views”. Hey people, when your “views” become science, you get a place at the table. This is how science works.

Over at the pro-“intelligent design” Discovery Institute, they’re not happy. Senior fellow David Klinghoffer writes that the latest Cosmos episode “[extrapolated] shamelessly, promiscuously from artificial selection (dogs from wolves) to minor stuff like the color of a polar bear’s fur to the development of the human eye.” In a much more elaborate attempted takedown, meanwhile, the institute’s Casey Luskin accuses Tyson and Cosmos of engaging in “attempts to persuade people of both evolutionary scientific views and larger materialistic evolutionary beliefs, not just by the force of the evidence, but by rhetoric and emotion, and especially by leaving out important contrary arguments and evidence.” Luskin goes on to contend that there is something wrong with the idea of the “tree of life.” Tell that to the scientists involved in the Open Tree of Life project, which plans to produce “the first online, comprehensive first-draft tree of all 1.8 million named species, accessible to both the public and scientific communities.” Precisely how to reconstruct every last evolutionary relationship may still be an open scientific question, but the idea of common ancestry, the core of evolution (represented conceptually by a tree of life), is not.

What interests you today?