Yes, but that chromosomal error is catastrophic, and would be avoided by writing the genome yourself, so what's your point? If you want to be nit-picky, it's spelled "chromosome" and "Trisomy."Zelknolf wrote:Tisomy 21 is the presence of an additional chromisone (namely, three of #21). They are, individually, unmutated.
WaPo wrote:"Retirement is the best!" says Jerry Decker, 73, one of the Sawdust Engineers tinkering in the wood shop at this over-55 retirement community of 19,000 residents outside Tampa.
But the tranquillity of palm trees and wine gatherings that sustained Decker's dreams all those years in the snow has been upended by the financial crisis. Even here in paradise, nothing is for sure anymore.
"Who isn't afraid of getting a 'Dear John' letter from GM saying your pension is in danger?" he asks. "You look at all these companies and what they are doing. We worked so hard to put them first, and it's just not right for them to be reneging."
The other men share the outrage, spitting out the names of corporations and their golden parachutes and lavish indulgences.
"I wasn't invited to the AIG spa weekend, were you?" one asks aloud. "You didn't get the manicure?" another asks.
"If we ran a household like they ran their company, you'd be bankrupt in five months."
The Sawdust Engineers should be an easy sweep for Republican presidential nominee John McCain. All five are Korean War veterans and registered Republicans. George W. Bush nailed every one of their votes. But three weeks before the election, only three of them are supporting McCain.
"I'm ready for a change," says Ed Bearer, a retired public school teacher from Delaware who recently received a letter saying his wife's medical expenses may no longer be covered under his pension plan. "McCain turns me off. I can't explain it," he says. He's voting for Obama.
That leaves Jerry Decker. Last week, during the second presidential debate, Decker kept waiting for McCain to come out swinging. "What he should have said was 'We're going to prosecute AIG to the fullest extent,' " Decker says. Instead, only vague promises to clean up corruption.
It's easy to see why Decker wants more heat from a candidate when his own steady discipline is compared with the reckless indulgence of Wall Street. For years, Decker brown-bagged his lunch, even when he went over to the corporate tower as a director of human resources for Formica Corp. His wife, Jeannie, was his barber. The Deckers had one son and the family lived fully but frugally: They were the ones on the side of the ski mountain with their lunch and cans of soda packed from home. Jeannie watched the budget, and for more than two decades she gave her husband $25 each Friday for his weekly spending money.
"It wasn't a sacrifice," Decker says. "We had a game plan to spend our retirement together."
But the game plan for many of the couple's friends at Sun City Center has been jeopardized by the financial meltdown. Decker hears the stories in the wood shop. Guys who took their company's advice and converted their pensions to 401(k) plans only to watch their holdings diminish by half when the market plunged. Jeannie tells him that some of the women are skipping their weekly trips to the beauty parlor and letting their hair go gray. More people their age are bagging groceries at the nearby Publix supermarket, and foreclosure signs, once unthinkable, are popping up in the trim Bermuda grass.
"I still believe in our country," Decker says. "But Jeannie and I don't have time to rebound. When you are 72 and 73, you don't have time to recoup."
The one common experience that sears the majority here is the Great Depression. The tanked economy has transcended their usual single-issue focus on health care or Social Security. They are worried, even mournful, about the country that is being passed on to their children and grandchildren. The surface anger is directed at reckless corporations and lack of oversight, but the deeper emotions eventually come out.
"Our debt is in the trillions," Decker says. "Is this a nice legacy for our kids? We're worried about our granddaughter, the kind of medical care she'll have. Will there be a Social Security for her? Will there be pensions?"
Both voted for Bush but felt somewhat duped when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. "Being an old Army guy, I remember saying to Jeannie, 'I hope he's right, but we gotta support him 100 percent,' " Decker says. "Turns out the weapons weren't so mass after all."
Meanwhile, a widow friend of the Deckers just learned that her husband's benefits plan with a Big Three automaker is dropping her medical coverage.
"Doggone it, this was the agreement at the start, that we'll take care of you," Jerry says. "You didn't mind working for 35, 40 years because you say to your wife, 'Honey, we are gonna get all of these things in retirement.' "
Well, they both have a chance tonight.With his $25 allowance in his wallet, Jerry Decker takes the golf cart up to Home Depot. He whirs along the smooth roads, waving to friends, adjusting his baseball cap. Retirees used to move to Sun City Center and pay cash for their houses. Now mortgages are common; more than two dozen homes are in foreclosure.
When Jerry was a boy in the 1930s, his father told him that the bank had come for their furniture because of a missed payment of $2.50, and the lesson stuck with him: Don't rely on the government and don't rely on credit.
What he wants is a commander who will address the country and talk honestly. He and his wife will watch the third and final presidential debate and try to make up their minds. More pieces of the puzzle.
"Jeannie said it best," Jerry says. "She said, 'No one has stood up and said: I made a mistake.' "
My point is that it couldn't. The genome is just fine in our naturally-occuring cases, my bad spelling entirely aside (sorry, I'm dyslexic; I do the best I can, but identifying characters and where they are in a word isn't exactly my strong suit.Mulu wrote:Yes, but that chromosomal error is catastrophic, and would be avoided by writing the genome yourself, so what's your point?Zelknolf wrote:Tisomy 21 is the presence of an additional chromisone (namely, three of #21). They are, individually, unmutated.
) -- the error has nothing to do with the contents of the genome. Unless you mean to suggest that each zygote would be engineered to its individual chromosones, in which case I'd say that your suggestion is even less feasible.It would have to be. How else would you eliminate 10,000 potential mutations and dozens of potential chromosomal abnormalities? Trisomy 21 isn't the only chromosomal abnormality out there. Fragile X comes to mind, as does Super Y. There are many others.Zelknolf wrote:Unless you mean to suggest that each zygote would be engineered to its individual chromosones, in which case I'd say that your suggestion is even less feasible.
Or in a nutshell: Republican policies have failed, McCain knows he's toast, so he did a pep rally for the base to try to hold onto at least a few seats in Congress, which is pretty much what I predicted he'd do: Save face and try to save down ticket campaigns.The U.S. economy is plummeting into recession with the global economy tumbling after. President Bush is unpopular to an almost unprecedented degree and perceived as dangerously irrelevant. Ever since the mortgage mess became the financial meltdown, the advocates of deregulation and unfettered free enterprise have been in free fall. The fortunes of the GOP have followed suit.
The salient questions of the evening were: What will you do to restore the credit and banking systems? How will you bring the markets back? Can you fend off or at least minimize the coming recession?
With few exceptions, the candidates stuck to the scripts their parties have followed for decades. McCain advocated tax cuts for the investing class, Obama saw the country rebuilding prosperity from the bottom up. McCain blamed the problems on a greedy few and a corrupt government. Obama said there had been much too much greed and far too little oversight from Washington.
For the moment, at least, the mood of the country seems to be swinging toward the Democratic prescription. McCain knows this and touts his aisle-crossing cred. He notes he voted for Supreme Court justices who favored abortion rights. He offers to allow unemployment benefits to go untaxed in the current crisis.
But by and large, McCain's economic plans aim to refurbish investment and the private sector while restraining government. Despite a record budget deficit this year (in nominal dollars), one that could balloon to $1 trillion in the coming recession, McCain insists that "no one's taxes should be raised."
That would mean all the money for all the bailouts and rescues the government has agreed to, plus all the wars and other commitments, must come from existing or lowered taxes -- and borrowing. That is the supply side solution, to be sure.
Whipsawed by critics who told him to "take the gloves off" one week and "fire his campaign" the next, McCain could not please his core backers and the larger electorate at once. It was time to make a choice. Keeping the base united and excited could mean everything for statewide and down-ballot GOP candidates throughout the country. And with the current economic and political climate turning colder by the day, pleasing the larger electorate seemed less and less realistic.
So McCain chose shelter in the issues, philosophy and tactics that have powered his party since its smashing midterm victories in 1978 (halfway through Jimmy Carter's presidency) and its sweeping landslide in 1980 (the start of the Reagan era).
EZRA KLEIN | October 16, 2008 | web only
The most telling poll result from last night's debate was not the CBS survey of uncommitted voters that found Obama trouncing McCain, 53 percent to 22 percent. It was not a Fox News focus group conducted by conservative pollster Frank Luntz that decisively favored Obama. Rather, the most telling result was a subquestion asked in a poll conducted by CNN. "Who spent more time attacking during the debate?" They asked. Seven percent said Barack Obama. Eighty percent said John McCain. It was no surprise, then, that Obama won their poll, too: 58 percent to 31 percent.
John McCain has an anger problem. But not the one many political observers presumed he'd have. He has not lost his temper at a questioner, blown up at a reporter, or exploded during a debate. Rather than a swift detonation, he has settled into a slow burn. He seethes. His debate performances have been shot through with contempt and resentment. The first meeting saw McCain unable to meet Barack Obama's eye, or begin a sentence without first attaching, "what Senator Obama doesn't understand." The second saw him tumble into a Grandpa Simpson moment, smirking wildly at the camera and referring to Obama as "that one." Last night's meeting, however, was McCain's worst: The seated setting led to split-screen coverage, and McCain's face was alive with fury. He grimaced and smirked and sighed. He rolled his eyes and bulged his neck and shook his head. What he said aloud was not nearly so damaging as what his expressions silently betrayed. And so he lost.
John McCain has every right to be angry. He should have beaten George W. Bush in 2000. He lost to the money and smears of a lesser man, and then had to watch that man occupy the most historic presidency of modern times. Imagine McCain, a man who has spent his life thinking about war and honor and duty and sacrifice, observing Bush exhort us to shop after 9/11. What must he thought of that moment? How often must he have thought of what he would do with that moment?
But the years were kind to John McCain, and by 2004, he was arguably the country's most popular politician. The Democrat begged him to be his vice president; the Republican incumbent needed his endorsement. If it had been an open field, he would have won in a walk. And so he made a judgment: He would yoke himself to the Republican Party. He would play the good soldier, and in 2008, he would be promoted to command.
But the world changed on John McCain. The Republican brand is shot. The threat of terrorism has receded from the public imagination. Economic insecurity has come to occupy center stage. Americans are afraid, yes. But what they fear is not what John McCain knows how to fight. You cannot -- or at least, should not -- bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb the economy. You cannot fix Wall Street with a draft. You cannot prop up median wages by gleefully bucking your party on the Sunday shows. This is a year that favors health care plans and regulatory schemes and unemployment benefits. It is not a year that favors John McCain.
And so it is that George W. Bush now looks like he will beat McCain twice. McCain will have lost to the ruthless aptitude of Bush's campaign in 2000, and to the inadequacies of his presidency in 2008. It must be a wrenching realization. Caught between the hard realities of the moment and the sharp failures of George W. Bush, he has done the only thing he can do: Attack. And so he has. He has attacked Obama as inexperienced, as unsettlingly eloquent, as a mere celebrity. He has attacked him for consorting with terrorists and plotting with ACORN. He has attacked him on offshore drilling and abortion and taxes and folksy aphorisms.
He attacks because it is the only strategy open to a candidate down eight points, with 19 days left in the election. Because he doesn't have the policy answer that will vault him ahead of Barack Obama, and because after years in the public eye, there is little left for John McCain to say about John McCain. And as he attacks, he seems ever more inadequate to the moment. Wall Street tumbles, and he speaks of 1960s radicals. Americans lose their homes, and he complains of harsh words from John Lewis. Nine out of ten American express displeasure with the direction of the country, and he cries that Barack Obama did not take public funding. For a man who built his career atop a slew of brave causes and a sense of national purpose, this is an indignity indeed. And so he is angry. But at the wrong things. Viewers see him berating Barack Obama but speaking haltingly about health care. His furies do not match their own.
John McCain's best moment in last night's debate came when he heatedly declared, "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." So too should John McCain. But he did not run four years ago, nor accept John Kerry's offer of a partnership. And so the only man John McCain really has cause to be angry at is himself.
Able to differentiate between propaganda and one's true beliefs? A politician leading a nominally Christian country like 1930s' Germany will say lots of Christian-sounding stuff to maintain popularity. His recorded conversations are another matter;Mulu wrote:
And Vael, we've already gone over the Nazi's and their Christianity once before.
Okay, I'll bite. Got a source for your "nominal" number of Christians in 1930's Germany? All I've ever seen suggests between 60-70% which is hardly nominal.Vaelahr wrote:A politician leading a nominally Christian country like 1930s' Germany will say lots of Christian-sounding stuff to maintain popularity. His recorded conversations are another matter;
Self-centered p[censored]RS wrote:He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to "bilge out" because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy's commandant stepped in. Calling McCain "spoiled" to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.
"He was a huge screw-off," recalls Butler. "He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather — they couldn't exactly get rid of him."
McCain's self-described "four-year course of insubordination" ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom — 894th out of a class of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.
/
The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier's 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship.
As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal."
The article covers a lot more ground, it's a good read. And in other news, sinking in the polls, the GOP decides to blow itself up.RS wrote: Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. "Wait a second here," Cornyn said. "I've been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You're out of line." McCain exploded: "Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room." The incident foreshadowed McCain's 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly "suspended" his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.
At least three of McCain's GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain's "temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him." Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn't "want this guy anywhere near a trigger." And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that "the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded."
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"He's going to be Bush on steroids," says Johns, the retired brigadier general who has known McCain since their days at the National War College. "His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it through the barrel of a gun."
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In September 2002, McCain assured Americans that the war would be "fairly easy" with an "overwhelming victory in a very short period of time." On the eve of the invasion, Hardball host Chris Matthews asked McCain, "Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the postwar scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq, or at least a large number of them, will treat us as liberators?"
McCain was emphatic: "Absolutely. Absolutely."
Today, however, McCain insists that he predicted a protracted struggle from the outset. "The American people were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach," he said in August 2006, "which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking."
