I just want to put out my perspective, which is violently opposed to the "we will get complacent" sentiment. First, I think we are going to win. The question now is only how big? Will we win 10, 20, 30, or 40 House seats? Will we take 4, 5, 6, or 7 Senate seats? Permit me to use a sports metaphor. For the past 12 years the dems have been losing to the republicans, but now it is clear that the dems are winning 28-0 going into the last 10 minutes of the game. I have been in such situations in games. At that point your have two choices, you can lay off and not run up the score, or you can go for jugular and make it as painful as possible.

Senator Kohl,

Another thought. Before the Iraq war, the democrats had a chance to stand together against a war that I knew was clearly wrong even from the beginning. Many democrats, fearing the political consequences, voted for the resolution. Imagine if every democrat had voted against the resolution. They would seem prophetic now and would have likely already won the presidency, if not one house of congress. However, because so many democrats were complicit in this war, they could not effectively oppose the president. Kerry is the poster boy for this problem.

For those interested in influenza, the January issue of Emerging Infectious Disease is full or articles about the virus, avian influenza, the chances of a pandemic and much more all written by experts in the field. If you want to learn more about the virus and its disease, this is a must read.

It has become so obvious that the increases in greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are causing world temperatures to increase, that even the far right anti-science types can no longer deny it. They have now retreated to a position of claiming what we are observing is the variation of a natural cycle in carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. Lucky for us, a new report, just published in science, blows that argument completely out of the water.

Jim Doyle is doing well in the St. Norbert College survey in contrast to recent Survey USA polls. A survey by Wisconsin Public Radio & St. Norbert College Survey Center shows Governor Doyle has high job approval numbers (62%) and would easily beat both challengers if the election were held today.

I have found St. Norbert surveys to be reliable in the past so this looks like good news. It appears this election is his to lose, but we are still a full year out. Hopefully this will make it more difficult for Walker and Green to raise serious money for a challenge.

A favorite piece of data that advocates for keeping the tax rate where it is and not raising taxes on the rich, is to claim that the rich pay a higher percentage in income taxes. While this is true, it ignores other taxes that the rich don't pay much of. Here is a table with FICA, Sale and Medicare taxes included.

[I apologize for the wide table]

The latest news form the research area is pretty heartening. Two important developments were reported this week in the research journals. One deals with developing a vaccine to avian flu, the other with subclinical (symptomless) infections of avian flu in humans during a flu outbreak in Netherlands. Join me on the flip.

This week we focus on tracking the avian virus through birds, the spread of the virus through wild birds and a recent report detailing large-scale sequencing of viral genomes.

It may be news to many, but scientists have been tracking avian influenza for five years. Vincent Munster at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam runs a large surveillance program, getting more than 8,000 samples a year. Understandably, their work has become of great interest to the world at large because of the avian influenza outbreak. More about this work is detail in the October 21st issue of Science (Vol 310, issue 5747, pp 428). An interesting note from the article, between 1 and 20% of all captured ducks are infected with influenza, most without symptoms.

In this installment we look at a recent paper in the October 7^th issue of Science Magazine by Terrence M. Tumpey and coworkers that examines the properties of the 1918 Spanish Flu virus that killed 50 million people world-wide. This is an important paper because it investigate the last really nasty flu virus that jumped from birds directly to humans. Understanding the properties of this virus will help us defend against the bird flu (H5:N1) that is now spreading across the globe. In this important study, the 1918 H1:N1 virus was reconstituted using reverse genetics to yield an active virus. Before we get into the details, it might be wise for you to go read a background on flu virus available in my microbiology textbook.

In this installment of this week in influenza I am going to walk through a paper that came out this September in Vaccine ( Vaccine, Volume 23, Issue 38 , 7 September 2005, Pages 4678-4684) by Ghendon et. al. from Russia. For those wanting to read the article the PubMed abstract is available for free. They describe a cell culture procedure for the growth of influenza strains that can then be used to manufacture vaccine.

This story is cross-posted at the Microbiology Blog

I have decided to start reporting, hopefully weekly, developments in influenza, especially focusing on avian flu. I plan to continue these reports as long as a potential pandemic is lurking out there, with the possibility of it affecting the health and well-being of the human population. While I do not do research on influenza, I am familiar with the field, and hope to distill and translate the latest information about influenza and potential outbreaks. This information is cross-posted at my microbe blog

I have broken out my comparison of the period to the present with purple boxes to try to help make the prose more clear. It's long, but I hope people find it useful.

More below

I just finished reading a Anxious Decades, America in Prosperity and Depression by Michael Parish. I found this to be a balanced and interesting perspective on the 20's and 30's. I thought it would be useful to share some observations with the community because we can learn much about where we are headed by what happened then. I will present this in the form of two diaries. The first compares the current administration to the three that preceded the Great Depression, the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations. For those in a hurry, the punch line is that, Bush in my opinion takes the worst of each of these presidents. Note the similarities from observations from the book. These are my own syntheses, relying heavily on what Parish wrote, and are summaries, not exact quotes.

I also happen to keep a close eye on my budget using Quicken. Just for fun, I grabbed a few catagories and thought I would see what our expenses have been over the past few years and whether they have increased or decreased. Graphs on the flip if you are interested