In case you were still worried that there’s too much science going on in the White House:

Asked about the [Council of Economic Advisors’] 2.6 million jobs forecast, McClellan said, “The president is interested in actual jobs being created rather than economic modeling.”

“We are interested in reality,” McClellan said

I’m interested in actual jobs too. I’d be especially interested in, say, 2.6 million new ones. But don’t hold your breath.

The Bush White House “has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.”

Says who?

Says a bunch of Nobel laureate scientists:

Together, the two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.

Howard Dean ends – not suspends – his Presidential campaign, and commits himself and his supporters to continue building a movement to transform American politics:

I am no longer actively pursuing the presidency. We will, however, continue to build a new organization using our enormous grass-roots network to continue the effort to transform the Democratic Party and to change our country.”

…The bottom line is that we must beat George W. Bush in November, whatever it takes…We have exposed the dangerous radical nature of George W. Bush’s agenda. We have demonstrated to other Democrats it is a far better strategy to stand up to the right-wing agenda of George W. Bush than it is to cooperate with it. We have led this party back to considering what its heart and soul is, although there is a lot of work left to do.

CNN is citing a source reporting that Dean will announce this afternoon that he’s leaving his name on the ballot but “suspending” his campaign. This strikes me as a “not with a bang, but with a whimper” way to go out, which is disappointing from a campaign whose great achievements are all, well, bangs.

Good news out of City Hall:

With an eye toward influencing state legislators, the New Haven Board of Aldermen unanimously passed a resolution last night in support of a public financing system for city elections.

The so-called New Haven Democracy Fund has now earned the backing of both the full board and Mayor John DeStefano Jr., who have argued that it will encourage local participation in politics…
Ward 29 Alderman Carl Goldfield, who authored the resolution, said creating a public financing system was a necessary step toward assuring New Haven residents that local politics are not driven by money — especially in the wake of corruption scandals in both state government and in cities like Waterbury and Bridgeport.

Credit goes to my girlfriend, Ana Munoz, and all the other hard-working folks organizinhg on campus and in the community. Now the fight moves to Hartford to get authorization from the state for New Haven to implement campaign finance reform that would make it a national leader. The Governor, fortunately, is not in much position to resist.

CNN has just called WI for Kerry. It’s still Edwards’ night. On the other hand, with the race moving to the North, to several states in quick succession, and to closed primaries, it may be downhill for him from here. It is clearly not, alas, Howard Dean’s night.

The Democrats get the 2004 election off to a great start:

Soundly defeated in last year’s governor’s race, former state attorney general Ben Chandler on Tuesday easily won the House seat of the man who beat him, ending a long Democratic losing streak in congressional special elections.

With 100 percent of precincts counted, Chandler had 83,890 votes, or 55 percent. Kerr had 65,300 or 43 percent. A third-party candidate trailed.

Opinion polls from
Wisconsin:

…a majority of voters are opposed to the war in Iraq, want the Bush administration’s tax cuts repealed and are sharply divided over whether or not the relationships of gays and lesbians should be recognized under the law.
The surveys also revealed that a majority of voters had not made a decision about who to vote for until sometime during the past week.

Four in 10 voters said the issue that mattered most in determining their vote was a candidate’s ability to create jobs and improve the economy…About 20 percent of voters interviewed said health care was the issue that mattered most to them, and another 20 percent said the war in Iraq was of paramount concern, the exit surveys found.

The civil service civil disobedience continues – and the controversy builds:

The assessor-recorder, Mabel S. Teng, said on Monday that her office, responsible for issuing the $83 licenses, performed 825 weddings that day, bringing the number of same-sex marriages to about 2,425 since the city opened the gates to gay couples on Thursday, with many couples camping outside overnight and braving chilling rain.

The clerk’s staff, the sheriff’s department and volunteers from other offices worked through the three-day holiday weekend without pay, Ms. Teng said, adding, “It’s purely out of love and commitment to equal rights.” At least 200 city workers, with additional help from the public, kept the doors to City Hall open over the weekend, but the staffing was expected to return to normal levels on Tuesday.

In today’s YDN Shalini Uppu responds to Jessamyn Blau’s column and articulates one of the reasons undergraduates care about their institution’s support for its graduate students:

…what is of even greater concern to me as an undergraduate is although TAs account for a large bulk of the teaching in Yale College, most are equipped with shamefully poor institutional resources and support to do their jobs well. Blau writes that “GESO members make suggestions for improving TAing that are beyond preposterous.” Is it “beyond preposterous” for graduate students to ask for paid teacher training to make them better instructors? If that is what it takes for better sections and labs, let’s put aside the politics and consider the idea. Is equal pay for equal work also “beyond preposterous”? Should a seventh year American Studies TA with considerably more teaching experience get paid $2,000 less than a third year TA for doing the same amount of work? Finally, is it “beyond preposterous” for TAs to demand basic things like office space to hold office hours, so undergraduates can discuss papers and exams without the distractions of a crowded coffee shop?

…if graduate teachers themselves had greater input in the placement process — if it wasn’t merely a unilateral departmental decision — then maybe, just maybe, we might have outcomes that better suit the needs of everyone involved, especially undergraduates…The administration’s steadfast refusal even to discussing the possibility of a union leaves graduate students with few options, and leads one to wonder what the Yale administration is so afraid of.

Read more about these issues here.