EVOLUTION AND MEDICARE….I just have time for a couple of quick hits:
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Via Crooked Timber, Georgia’s state school superintendent has proposed removing the word “evolution” from the state curriculum:
[Kathy] Cox repeatedly referred to evolution as a “buzzword” Thursday and said the ban was proposed, in part, to alleviate pressure on teachers in socially conservative areas where parents object to its teaching.
“If teachers across this state, parents across this state say, ‘This is not what we want,’ then we’ll change it,” said Cox, a Republican elected in 2002.
It’s just a buzzword! And if parents don’t like it, we’ll remove it!
At least Cox deserves points for honesty. No prattling about how evolution is “just a theory” or some such juvenile nonsense. No, it’s just that parents don’t like it. Next up: parents dislike the proposition that white people used to enslave black people, so the word “slavery” will be removed from the Georgia curriculum. After all, it’s just a buzzword!
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In what will come as a shock to literally dozens of people, it turns out the Bush administration lowballed the cost of its Medicare legislation and now believes that its Medicare bill will cost $530 billion instead of $400 billion. This comes a mere two months after the legislation was passed.
Why the suddenly higher estimate? The official answer is “Give us a break, this stuff is really hard,” but the experts interviewed by the New York Times suggest that it’s because the law encourages participation in private plans. That’s funny, isn’t it? I thought that the wonders of the free market were supposed to make those private plans less expensive than government plans. I guess it didn’t work out that way.
That’s it for now, although I do have a question for my readers. I’m in our nation’s capital right now, and outside on the streets there is some peculiar white substance all over the place. It’s very cold to the touch, but if you pick it up it melts and becomes some kind of colorless, odorless liquid. Is this the long-awaited al-Qaeda WMD attack we’ve been worried about for so long? If so, the natives seem to be taking it very calmly.
