Cut federal spending in Texas

I had reported the House GOP had stripped lesbian (and other) protections out of the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. Those protections are back in -- and the House passed it. Now on to Obama's desk.



The Washington Post reports that women now earn 80.9% of what men do. They also broke it down by type of job. In blue collar jobs, the pay tends to be comparable. That is in contrast to professional jobs where women do much worse. For example, women cafeteria workers are paid 97.9% as well as their male counterparts but women surgeons are only paid 67.6% of their male colleagues.



Newsweek has a report on an article by Daniele Fanelli in Nature about the lack of accuracy in scientific research. Why is so much research so wrong? The source of the mess is such things as sloppy research, misunderstood statistical methods, ignoring outlying data, a system that rewards statistical flukes and not findings that can be replicated, and journals that only want to publish positive results.

The solution is to expand academic misconduct from fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism to include "distorted reporting" -- failure to report all information that would allow someone else to reproduce the findings.



Peter Beinart, also in Newsweek pokes at the question: How much power should a president have? Depends on who you ask and the party affiliation of the guy in office. When Bush II was in power Democrats decried the "Imperial Presidency." Now that Obama is in office, Democrats like a strong president.



Paul Begala's turn in Newsweek. He lists why the budget cuts slated for tomorrow are entirely the fault of the GOP. Then he takes it one step further. Want to shut down the government, as Ted Cruz of Texas is willing to do? Let's start by shutting down federal spending in Texas, which is 32% of the state's budget. Why not move gigantic Fort Hood to a state that would appreciate it, such as Harry Reid's Nevada? Perhaps we should move the huge FAA center from Oklahoma to, say, San Francisco?

How about we enforce the budget cuts only for those states that refuse to support the taxes that pay for the spending they want in their own state?