The house passed a version of the stimulus package sent back in a slightly revised form by the Senate. The bill will raise the American national debt by an additional $168 billion. (10^9). Here is CNN’s writeup.

The plan will provide tax rebates of up to $600 for individuals and up to $1,200 for couples filing jointly, with an additional payment for families of $300 a child, and a minimum payment of $300 for individuals who pay less than that in income taxes.

Payments will be reduced for individuals with adjusted gross incomes above $75,000 and couples with incomes above $150,000, with the wealthiest taxpayers receiving nothing. The Treasury Department said checks would be distributed beginning in early May, after the crush of the tax filing season.

The rebates and the business incentives, including a doubling to $250,000 from $125,000 in the amount of expenses businesses can immediately write off, are intended to jolt the slowing economy with new spending.

I do not think that this a good idea, but I am not going to decline the check if I get it. I think that raising the debt even more is not an appropriate answer to our economic woes. I know it is complicated. Trying to take advantage of complicated and convoluted processes is what got the banks in this mess as it is. If you aren’t aware, the United States economy is doing a little woefully after a large swath of badly sold mortgages began going late and being foreclosed on. Part of the reason for the mess is called a CDO. Here is a story about Merrill Lynch on CNN that does a fair job explaining what those are. Anyone hoping to defeat pretenses about the viability of fully free markets need only look at the current mess, the growing disparity between rich and poor, and how much money has been sent to other countries to the detriment of most Americans. The worst part of all of this is that there are enough resources for just about everyone to live comfortably, but a few ultra rich, the top .25%, hoard enough money that it could provide for most or all of the bottom 20% that can’t afford to lead a reasonable life.

After more districts have been forecast and due to complicated methods of apportioning delegates, MSNBC’s leader board now has Obama in the lead by an insignificant number, 861 to 855. McCain is still trouncing the other Republican candidates. MSNBC’s numbers are the estimates of voted upon delegates, and are not including superdelegates.

CNN’s Election Center is currently giving different estimates of delegate counts. The Republican situation looks much the same, and the voter delegates are Clinton’s 840 to Obama’s 831. With supers, it is 1033 for Clinton to 937 for Obama.

Finally, ABC news has delegate counts that appear to include estimated voter chosen delegates along with pledged superdelegates. Clinton has 1038 to Obama’s 941, and McCain is still listed as far in the lead.

Mitt Romney has dropped out now, but the delegate counts above have not yet been updated. I do not know how this will affect the delegates, really. I’m fairly certain that McCain will still come out on top, but it is possible that the Romney voters may significantly move in the direction of Huckabee. Many of the upcoming states with primaries are at least somewhat moderate, so I still don’t think McCain has too much to worry about. Ron Paul has been soundly trounced, and it’s time for people to move on. People that think Ron Paul stands for freedom (a mistaken opinion) should move to Obama, and people that like the theocratic stance will probably move to Huckabee.

I found another page with a good, hopefully accurate, listing of current delegate counts.
Clinton with 866 voter delegates and Obama with 877. Hillary is ahead including superdelegates, 1077 to 1005.

*Updated: 08 Feb 2008 10:33ET

Two new studies have concluded what I believed to be the case all along. Biofuels release more greenhouse gases than standard fuels. The reason being is that there are environmental costs of requiring new fields to replace the food production that was displaced by earmarking a crop for ethanol production. These extra carbon figures have not, in the past, been properly correlated with biofuels. If you’re driving an E-85 Tahoe, you’re causing even more damage than if you just went with the Gas version. Murphy’s at the Walmart in my town has 10% ethanol in the gas. That means it is more polluting than standard gas.

Personally, I think the answer to the greenhouse problem lies more along the lines of our power generation than with our cars anyway. Switching our coal plants to nuclear may be the best answer of them all. Some, like this, think that coal and nuclear are equally bad, but most are not so disingenuous. Once people get past the activism and false propaganda floating around about how difficult and dangerous nuclear is, they tend to switch sides. Coal burned for energy production is the single largest contributor in the US, and China’s use of coal has pushed it ahead of the United States in greenhouse emissions.

Pretty graphs to follow! Source.

The first graph is general sources of greenhouse gases produced by the US.

This graph is a breakdown of the biggest line, the one that was truncated, from the above graph.

Once again, in my opinion, the two biggest bars from this second graph can be handled. I think the way to do so is to significantly reduce our reliance on coal for electricity by switching to nuclear generation at central locations, and requiring new and remodeled buildings to include some self energy production, primarily solar. The best ways to reduce the transportation usage, is to require cleaner, more economical diesels for transport trucks and to require smaller vehicles with higher fuel economy for regular transportation. It is difficult and expensive to retrofit effective mass transportation onto cities, but more people driving fewer vehicles would help a lot.

People who, like in the link above about neither coal nor power, advocate against all forms of electrical generation, really just hate all humans and want to move us pre-industrial revolution while killing most humans on earth. They are not so much into saving the planet, but rather, killing the humans.

I called Ron Paul a theocrat on a political quiz, and someone called my bluff. Let’s see if I am convincing, or if I am mistaken.

There is a missive on house.gov by Ron Paul, entitled “Christmas in Secular America“. There is a choice quote or two here.

“The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion. The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life.”

Well, hallelujah. First, he says the constitution is “replete with references to God”. Guess he never read it. The closest it comes to a reference to a god is this: “in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven”.

“[O]ur Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.”

Patently false. There were arguments, but with many of the pre-United States colonizers having come here to avoid religious persecution, they were inclined to desire to keep religion out of their new governments. In fact, the phrase “building a wall of separation between church and state” was coined by Thomas Jefferson in a January 1, 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. When the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and contributor to the constitution has that to say, you start to see how unfounded the opinions wielded by Paul are.

Through perverse court decisions and years of cultural indoctrination, the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our nation that religion must be driven from public view.

That is a seriously stinted view of someone aiming for President, though it is probably shared by GW Bush and Mike Huckabee.
He also apparently does not realize that the Christians stole Christmas from many other religious groups. It is a pagan holiday celebrating the winter solstice. If Christmas is taken from the Christians, then it only serves them right.

note: Thomas Jefferson is also one of my favorite sources of Atheistic quotations.

Apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed that Ron Paul is a theocrat. The Lew Rockwell link on there is a renaming of the Christmas in Secular America article.

Dr. Paul also sponsored or proposed amendments to the constitution that would basically short circuit the first amendment.

Paul sponsored a resolution for a School Prayer Amendment:

H.J.RES.52 (2001), H.J.RES.66 (1999), S.J.RES. 1, H.J.RES.12, H. J. RES. 108, & H. J. RES. 55:

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit individual or group prayer in public schools or other public institutions. No person shall be required by the United States or by any State to participate in prayer . Neither the United States nor any State shall compose the words of any prayer to be said in public schools.

H. J. RES. 78 (1997):

To secure the people’s right to acknowledge God according to the dictates of conscience: Neither the United States nor any State shall establish any official religion, but the people’s right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage, or traditions on public property, including schools, shall not be infringed. Neither the United States nor any State shall require any person to join in prayer or other religious activity, prescribe school prayers, discriminate against religion, or deny equal access to a benefit on account of religion.

* Proposed Legislation:H.J.RES.52, School Prayer Amendment, 6/13/2001 (Murtha)
* H.J.RES.12, School Prayer Amendment, 2/7/2001 (Emerson)
* S.J.RES.1, School Prayer Amendment, 1/22/2001 (Thurmond)
* H.J.RES.108, Voluntary School Prayer Amendment, 9/21/2000 (Graham)
* H.J.RES.55, Voluntary School Prayer Amendment, 2/13/1997 (Stearnes, Hall, Watts)
* H.J.RES.78, Amendment Restoring Religious Freedom, 5/8/1997 (Istook, et. al.)

Also, Ron Paul is an evolution denier. Check the video. I realize that not everyone that denies the validity of the theory of evolution is a religious nutter, but it seems that the vast majority are. A denial of this theory means that your opinion is that most science is a farce. I don’t want someone like that making decisions.

More fun quotes can be found here.

To the secularists, this was John Paul II’s unforgivable sin– he placed service to God above service to the state. Most politicians view the state, not God, as the supreme ruler on earth. They simply cannot abide a theology that does not comport with their vision of unlimited state power. This is precisely why both conservatives and liberals savaged John Paul II when his theological pronouncements did not fit their goals. But perhaps their goals simply were not godly.

But really, when looking at these things, consider my position. I do not know what you believe, but the Christian faith is easily disproved if the source of proof is the Holy Bible. [Was Jesus born when Herod the Great was king (before 4 BCE) or when Quirinius (also Cyrenius) was governor of Syria (after 6 CE)?] So, for someone like me that does not believe in God, and does not find the pursuit of religion to be noble, but rather as a threat to my way of life, how should I perceive the way he feels mythology and government should intertwine? I’ll tell you: He is a theocrat and would be an enemy.

The votes are in and now it’s time to figure out if we have any winners.

On the Republican side, McCain appears to have pulled into the lead and is currently estimated by CBS to have about 599 of the 1191 delegates needed to win the RNC nomination. That number may change. In a surprising twist, Huckabee is currently projected to have a slightly higher delegate count than Romney. 159 vs. 152.

For the Democrats, nothing has been decided between the two current front runners. They are basically in a dead heat. CBS is predicting 689 delegates voted, 900 total, for Hillary, and 696 voted, 824 total, for Obama.

Remember that all of the delegates for the Democratic National Convention are proportionally decided, so not all delegates will go to the winner. That rule is primarily to make sure the voting actually elects a winner. Obama has won soundly in Georgia, but the delegate split depends on proportions in different districts. The Republican delegates, however, are often decided in pseudo-winner take all states. In Georgia, Mike Huckabee the theocrat won with a mere 34% of the vote and he will get most of the the delegates.

A large number, 43%, of white voters in Georgia that voted in the Democratic primary have chosen to vote for Obama. I think that this is a good thing. I am one of them. He won significantly in the under 44 set. He also won overwhelmingly with black voters. I hope that his run continues throughout the night. To me, he is the best chance we have for a sane and progressive president. His victory here with young voters gives me some hope that the future will not be as bleak as it could be. When the older voters that vote for the establishment are fewer, maybe there will be more hope for America to become freer and more progressive.

I just saw a commercial that states McCain called for “the surge strategy in Iraq that is working”. I’m not sure where they get their information, but unless what I know is seriously wrong, that is a flat out lie.

In other news, the spat between McCain and Romney is making me laugh on the inside. McCain didn’t win in West Virginia, and Romney came in with a plurality vote on the first go round, but Huckabee ended up winning on the recast. Romney is accusing McCain and Huckabee of colluding to defeat him. I guess that it is a good thing, because McCain is the best of the worst on the side of the neoconservatives, and he is only marginally worse, in my opinion, than Hillary. I am glad that the “conservatives” are having a hard time deciding which form of terrible they want to force on us next time.