Hillary Clinton and John McCain want to suspend the national gas tax for the duration of the summer, when travelers drive the most. And they’re jumping down Barack Obama’s throat for opposing the plan. The big reasoning for the suspension is to help Americans pay to fill their cars, but it won’t help very much even if it will seem like a big difference: At a meeting with voters in North Carolina on Monday, Mr. Read more

Marc Andreessen makes his case for Barack Obama: What about foreign policy — should we be concerned that you just don’t have much experience there? Think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States. Read more

Mark Hoofnagle on why Denialists (Intelligent Design proponents, Homeopaths, Holocaust Deniers, etc.) should not be debated. Academia and science are critically dependent on debate, this is true, but the prerequisite for having the debate is having people who are honestly interested in pursuing the truth and operate using the same rules of evidence and proof. It’s not about censoring dissent, which the cranks insist is the issue in their eternal pursuit of persecution. Read more

PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula (one of the Science Blogs, check them out) is very entertaining: People who think that merely believing in Jesus grants them redemption must also think that believing in evolution is a magic charm that grants them exemption from criticism of any nonsense they might hold. It doesn’t work that way. There is no get-out-of-criticism-free card.

My friends and I started a blog for our long running club of snobbery: Scotch & Politics. Brendan posted an excellent piece today entitled “Why I Don’t Like Blogs” and Mike brought his thoroughly engaging Daily Briefing into the mix. Check it out and let us know what you think.

From the why-kids-need-to-understand-natural-selection department: Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good. Unlike these traditional cleaners, antibacterial products leave surface residues, creating conditions that may foster the development of resistant bacteria, Levy notes. For example, after spraying and wiping an antibacterial cleaner over a kitchen counter, active chemicals linger behind and continue to kill bacteria, but not necessarily all of them. When a bacterial population is placed under a stressor – such as an antibacterial chemical – a small subpopulation armed with special defense mechanisms can develop. Read more

Kerri and I finished watching an American Experience episode about the Summer of Love this weekend. The main point of the program was that the Summer of Love in San Francisco was a great countercultural success at the beginning but eventually failed because there were too many people doing drugs and freeloading. <typo:flickr img=”478751292″ size=”small” style=”float:left;margin:0.5em”/> It occurred to me that simply saying that druggies and freeloaders showed up isn’t quite enough to explain why the whole big experiment failed. Read more

I have a very unhealthy obsession with Conservapedia. The New York Magazine has a proposed (Conservative) People’s History of New York City for inclusion in the right wing wiki.

The Copyright Royalty Board, a panel set up by the US Copyright Office to decide on issues having to do with royalty payments by internet broadcasters, recently issued a new set of royalty rates for internet radio stations. From the report at RAIN and a blog post by Radio Paradise‘s Bill Goldsmith it looks like the new rates could be as much as 125% of a large internet radio station’s revenues. Read more