Health Care Bill before Congress

OpenCongress.org appears to be an interesting place to read this bill. Everyone needs to read it and understand what its approximately 1,036 pages contain.

I've added a widget in the right column that should take you there, or you can just use this link.

Another interesting way to look at this bill is to parse its content. A useful tool for that purpose, Wordle, generates a graphical depiction of the most common terms in a text. Here are the top 100 words of consequence from the bill:



I think it's very interesting that the most frequently used term is "Secretary," as in the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Most of what will come of this bill is in the hands of a Cabinet member, and the responsibilities created in the bill will add to the power of the executive branch. This will require further scrutiny.

Defense Budget Cut 10%

The problem: cut 10% from the military budget. How is it possible to slash $55 billion from our national defense accounts? The president has stated as one of his goals the need to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps. If that's to be realized, then his staff will provide some direction to Defense on how the cuts are to happen. I suspect they will think in terms of budget categories rather than services first. The distribution of Total Obligation Authority (TOA) may be able to give a starting point. Operations and Maintenance and Military Personnel make up 59% of the budget, so if they are left essentially unchanged the bulk of the cuts will fall to RDT&E and Procurement. (click for larger image)

I took a swag at one scenario, where the ground force growth increases personnel funding by about 2% in 2010 and O&M goes down by about 1%. To get to a $55 billion cut with those assumptions, each of the remaining accounts has to go down by 26%. In that case, we are likely to see $27 billion out of procurement and $21 billion out of RDT&E. (click for larger image)

What's the impact of that size cut? Twenty-six billion dollars out of the procurement budget, based on 2007 numbers, would eliminate 62% of Lockheed, 81% of Northrop Grumman, 95% of General Dynamics, or 122% of Raytheon. Add on half of the RDT&E cut (since the government labs do quite a bit of research), and you could put half of Raytheon out of work again. Looking at the number of people employed by these companies, that size cut will result in the elimination of between 122,000 and 137,000 jobs.

It's a good thing the “stimulus” package adds $36 billion in expanded unemployment “benefits” to make up for the $36 billion in valuable work that will be lost here. I know how important it is for the Democrats to make us all dependent on the government, and moving those highly-skilled defense workers from productive careers to the dole is just the ticket.

The future?

Speaker of the House
President of the Senate
Both women? Sounds fun!

The Barak Obama Vice Presidential Selection Process ...

... in haiku.

Need a running mate
who will make me look like more
than a neophyte.

Reach into the past?
Al Gore has experience.
But George Bush beat him.

Could be I will pick
Kathaleen Sebelius.
Nah. Wes Clark wants her.

Senator Clinton.
I beat the pantsuit off her.
No way she gets it.

Fast Eddy Rendell?
Could shore up Pennsylvania,
but he endorsed Her.

I like that Tim Kaine
but Republicans would shout
"It rhymes with Hussein!"

Bayh is pretty good.
Indiana's a Red State
Can he help me win?

I pick Joe Biden
to run for Vice President
cuz he's an old dude.

Exciting, Historic, But a Message Is Sent

From DelawarePolitics.net:

"Barack Obama has made an excellent choice in Joe Biden, for many reasons, and it is a proud day for Delawareans and the Bidens. A big congratulations go out to Joe, Jill, Hunter, Beau, Ashley, the Owens family and the extended Biden clan.

That said, there is a message in all of this.

When faced with an important choice between change (Sebelius, Kaine) and experience (Bayh, Biden), Barack Obama chose experience.

So should you."

They almost make it too easy, don't they?

Politics, Gender, and Bias

Michelle Malkin notes the search for Ellen Goodman's "intrepid graduate student" in trying to gain a better understanding Goodman's characterization of the blogosphere as a "Boys' Club." It seems that Goodman has data to support her analysis, but isn't willing to share it.

I sometimes consider myself an “intrepid graduate student,” although I do have a day job as well. For fun, I play a game called Blogshares that uses categorized blogs as a trading device. The players in the game vote on the blogs in the database, and it is actively maintained to try to keep things current. Gender categories are based on self-identification by the blogger, and where it isn’t clearly stated we don’t add the blog to a gender category. Blogs with no posts in the last six months are generally eliminated from the database by the players, although that does tend to lag. The database has something on the order of 6,200 categories, which you can find here.

The fun thing about all this is that the data is highly searchable, and this page lets you search for blogs in multiple categories, like Male, Female, Politics, etc. I did a little research this morning after seeing Michelle's item, and came up with some interesting results:

Category	Total Blogs	Male	Female	Delta (Male vs. Female)
All Blogs	6,357,524	37,620	36,171	4.0%
Politics	3,765	1,300	317	310.1%
Conservatism	684	211	65	224.6%
Liberalism	755	227	93	144.1%
Right Wing Politics	398	115	37	210.8%
Feminism	115	5	79	-93.7%
Progressive	541	172	55	212.7%
Democratic Party	39	14	7	100.0%
Republican Party	34	14	3	366.7%
Life	7,386	1,938	3,300	-41.3%
Journal	11,810	3,038	4,633	-34.4%

What conclusions can we draw from this? I’d say that

(1) Men in general are about as likely as women to maintain a blog, give or take 4%

(2) More men than women keep political blogs, by a factor of 3:1, and this is more-or-less true across the political spectrum. The Feminism category, unsurprisingly, breaks the pattern.

(3) More women than men blog about life or keep a journal online, by a significant 30%-40%

Are these differences a symptom of malice, as Ms. Goodman implies? Hardly. It seems pretty clear to me that this is a difference in passion. It takes a lot of work to write a blog and keep it active and interesting. Most women bloggers appear to care more about subjects other than politics, by at least 10:1. Contrast this with men, where ‘Life’ blogs outnumber ‘Politics’ blogs by only 1.5:1.

Unlike Ms. Goodman, I am perfectly willing to share my spreadsheet with the world. You can find it here. It contains not only the table above, but the names of the blogs in each category. I'd love to spend all day doing more research on this, providing link counts, etc., but the day job pays the bills and this doesn't. Let me just leave with this thought: If you visit Michelle's or Wonkette's blog entry in Blogshares and conclude that female bloggers don't get linked, you are either blind, insane, or so completely biased against men that you don't deserve to be heard in polite company.