das_motorhead:

My first concern is the volume of unreplicatable studies.  Remember that the Amgen double-check was of supposedly landmark studies, where you would expect the number of bad studies to be zero.  Instead it was 47 of 53.  If we turned over every rock, what would the rest of science look like?

My second is the rarity of determined verification effort like those of Amgen and Bayer, which would not have happened except that major private money was about to be risked developing products.

My third concern is that there is a major disincentives within the scientific community to conducting verification exercises.  Papers that go over old ground -- whether they fail to verify or actually confirm old findings -- do not advance careers, at least within science's academic precincts. So inadequate verification is done.

My fourth concern is that, as we saw with the global warming issue,  government-funded science is designed to advance an already established and uncritically accepted consensus.

My fifth concern is that there is a feedback loop: government grants create a constituency for a consensus; the consensus leads to the approving of more grants, leading to more pressure for maintaining the consensus and so on.

drlorentz, you say:

Science is all about the replication of results. That's why there are scientific journals in which methods and results are published. 

Yes, of course, replication is what science is all about.  But consider this from a 3.28.12 Reuters report:

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature....

Scientists at Bayer did not have much more success.... Of 47 cancer projects at Bayer during 2011, less than one-quarter could reproduce previously reported findings, despite the efforts of three or four scientists working full time for up to a year. Bayer dropped the projects.

These replication reviews were focused on one high-dollar field.  But similar reports have surface in enough fields to say science has a problem.

Here at Ricochet, I wrote a couple of weeks ago that bringing same-sex couples under the marriage contract as it stands will prove untenable.  

The contract's demand of sexual fidelity and the power it gives to partners who have been wronged is unjust on its face to a same-sex couple.  

Changing the contract will be unjust to women, whom it is intended to protect and generally does, though high-priced lawyers can sometimes persuade courts to change the scope of the protections.

It has also been used -- a surprise in first-through-the-door Massachusetts but no one can say that now -- to bring same-sex couples under the equal protection laws.  As this has proven unjust to many religious groups, leading to the kinds of efforts King describes and that Joe suggests are likely inadequate.

Apparently the Equal Rights Campaign -- a same sex marriage advocate -- has counted something like 1,600 federal laws that mention marriage.  Each state surely has as many.  How many legal surprises will changing the definition of marriage bring forth from them?

Do the courts -- and wronged wives -- take a harsher view of philanderers whose affairs produce children?  We know they do.  But what I am getting at does not start tabula rasa and proceed to "should."  I am asking what is the marriage contract historically and now, why so, and where might it go?  Walking more or less on the same road, playwright David Mamet recently wrote:

[T]he presumption of courts [is] to award custody of small children to mothers; and California's community property law, which, however much it presents itself as gender neutral, is, effectively, an acknowledgment that a woman's period of nubility is limited and irreplaceable... [T]he cultual understanding that women and infants must be protected is so deep and ineradicable that even in a climate of supposed "gender neutrality"..., the law [acts] in order to serve the underlying goal....

So here's the question: if the focus of the marriage contract is "women and children must be protected" (same  as Blackstone saying it's the wife's "protection and benefit"), does moving same-sex couples into that picture require refocusing the lens?  Can such a refocused contract be just to both kinds of couples?  

Intellectually lazy is putting it politely.  But, yes.

Your point about "war on women" makes my point.  The Ds offered plenty of bogus detail.  Where was the rebuttal?  

During the campaign, every time I posted an article on a site with a comment facility, their guys (with message points identical to the White House's) were there with replies.  That kind of effort was going on everywhere.

As to Romney's 59 points, OK, there were too many points.  But had they used the web aggressively, the number could have become a virtue, at least on line.  What did they do to promote all those points?  Nothing.

Scarlet Pimpernel: I guess it depends on where you studied and who your professor was.

I endorse Paul Raye's comment, with this addition.  The term "Article 3 court" has entered our governmental lexicon, reflecting that much judicial activity is now housed outside the regular courts, mostly in the agencies that promulgate and enforce regulations on which the administrative law judges rule.  This strikes me as an equally dangerous violation of the separation of powers doctrine, one that Mauritius seems to sense in his comment.

Frederick/Deveraeux:  We have had a partisan press and unregulated immigration before.  But have we had a citizenry that didn't know or care?  Not so sure.  And do we now?  Not sure about that either.  I mean that response literally, not as a sly way of saying we don't have such a citizenry but as a direct way of saying, I don't know.  The outcome of the last election doesn't tell us much one way or another.  The limited government side refused to engage on key issues and ran an inept campaign.  But in your comments you would find a friend in Lincoln, what said, as you do, "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher."

The Second Amendment strikes me as particularly anti-federalist in origin and construction.  

Critics of the new constitution did not believe that the machine would run reliably of itself.  They wanted to import guarantees from the English Bill of Rights, including, both for public and private safety, the right to keep and bear arms -- but with a difference.  

In Britain, gun rights were qualified by class and confession, entirely unsuited for the new nation based on universal rights.  Then, too, Britain's government was unitary, while under the new American charter sovereignty was divided.  

As did no other protected right, the British gun right traversed federal and state sovereignties.  For example, invoking private safety would have implied federal police powers.  How to guarantee this universal right without implying that the national government possessed powers not intended for it -- and that anti-federalists especially were determined it not acquire? 

 The answer?  With these phrasings:

• "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" kept the amendment within the limits of federal reach;  
• "the right of the people" established universality;
• "shall not be infringed" incorporated into the U.S. Constitution the full sweep of British protections. 

King:  Sorry for the confusion.  Yes, now we're on the same page.  Re. Congress fending off any extension, I wish I could be optimist about the legislative branch's understanding, will or ability. But Hill Democrats as a group are economically illiterate, particularly on matters of banking and finance (either public or private).  Though broadly free market, many, perhaps most, congressional Republicans have little more comprehension of financial issues than the Ds.  Only dimly grasping the stakes, they can be intimidated into going along with very bad ideas --  particularly when a populist wave gets going.  Sarbanes-Oxley is a case in point.  Meanwhile the Obama White House is ready to use regulation in place of, even in defiance of, legislation, comfortable that its allies can block congressional intervention. Besides, all along it has been the Fed's policy partner (or maybe it's the other way around).  The intransigence of Tea Party members helps put the breaks on fiscal issues.  But they tend to see banking questions not in terms of  maintaining monetary aggregates but of croneyism toward a special interest.  I hope you're right, but I can see how things could go badly.

King:  The review will apply to the 19 US banks covered by Basel, as well as to Basel-included non-US banks with operations here.  In addition, with regional banks being brought under Basel, I would not be surprised if now or later, it were extended to at least some regionals.  I did not mentioned in the posting, but perhaps you have seen the talk from various quarters of the government that reserve standards as currently measured are inadequate and that a much more stringent liquidity standard should be adopted.  In any event, I am suggesting that the review continues and extends the policies and pressures that have contributed to the run-up in reserves and that, I am suggesting, will push them up further.

Liberal Jim: You read a lot into my posting, including attributing to me opinions I don't have.  Maybe you should calm down.  Then we can discuss.

After a distracted few days, I've come back on and been impressed by the conversation.  Here are a couple of replies:

• To Peter, who asks the odds of going over the cliff:  75% of going over, if the House GOP holds firm, much lower if they start to splinter.
• To dittoheadadt/Howellis on marginal rates: Officially both Ds and Rs assume the method of taxing  has no impact on economic growth. Accepting that assumption, their plans yield roughly equal revenues. However, once you lower personal deductions, whether your business grows bigger or gets smaller, your taxes on a new dollar business profit will be unaffected by the change. Meanwhile, if tax rates are kept lower, you will keep more of each dollar of future business profit than you would have with higher rates.  So looking ahead for the economy as a whole, with lower rates, more business concepts will look profitable enough to be funded. Each successful business' cash flow will be larger, allowing faster expansion. Put another way, one approach looks at today only.  The other looks at today and tomorrow.

To Scott and to WI Con:  Medved and you may also be right, particularly in the industrial midwest.  It may also be that some of those to whom you point are among those I am talking about, too.

To R. Craigen: Interesting data. Thanks for posting it.  No, I do not believe the reaction to the Tea Party is more significant than the Tea Party itself.  But I do feel that many who share the Tea Party agenda are put off by the Tea Party itself.  That's a problem to take seriously if we are going to build a winning coalition -- under whatever banner.

To a number of commenters: Did Obama's negative campaign hurt? Yes.  Was it effectively rebutted?  No.  But if his banner had been raised earlier, carried more steadily and borne bolder colors (particularly on spending, debt and the size and role of government), Romney might nevertheless have prevailed.

To Michael Hinton:  Yesterday we were looking at two upticks in a row, the first very large.  Today's number don't give us a third uptick, but don't fall back from Monday's big news either.  It suggests to me that Gallup's spread (placing Romney over 50%) is real, by their methods.  But on Election Day will that spread turn out to be real?  The first question to answer is, why the gap between Rasmussen and Gallup?  I'll dig into that one and get back to you if I find anything worth reporting.

To Paul Rahe:  Thank you for the compliment.  And I did not know about the Pennsylvania poll.  Wow!

To liberalJim: Description of how debates function is well taken.  What you say about the cluelessness of the dismissive media is right, too.

To all who discussed CA Electoral College law:  Thank you.  My 2 cents -- The consensus in the 1787 convention was that the method of electing the executive should work against "cabal and corruption."  By forcing broad national campaigning, the winner-take-all Electoral College system leans against cabal.  We are fighting over a wide range of states, not maximizing turnout in NY, LA and a handful of metro areas.  The system also leans against corruption. If in 2000 we had a popular vote that was as close as it was and we had not had the college, Gore's people would have had every ballot in the country examined for hanging chads.  Corruption of the process would have been massive... probably would be in every election.

To Richard O'Shea: I feel Romney has needed successive victories, to confirm his standing in waverers' minds.