NBC is refusing to air PETA’s adorable commercial of a young girl offering a Thanksgiving prayer. I know it’s hard to believe once you’ve seen it, and hopefully it won’t put you off your dinner.

Personally, I support PETA, but only where the acronym stands for: People for the Eating of Tasty Animals. So stuff those butts and get those birds in the ovens!!

Obama kicked off a program this week to “energize and excite America’s students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” His stated goal is to show young people how cool science can be. Further, two local CEO’s were tapped to be on the team of five business and thought leaders to lead the $260 million program.

On the one hand, this is great news. I’m all in favor of anything that gets our kids engaged in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers. As I’ve argued before, I think this is essential to the economic success of America moving forward. What I can’t tell from any of the news is how this program really helps. I can’t see that Antonio Perez or even Sally Ride doing public service announcements about why science is cool will convince a lot of kids to give up their plans of being a rock star, a fireman, or a fashion model to take up physics. And for $260 million, I think about all you’re going to get is an ad campaign.

Still, the sentiment is in the right place. I’m just skeptical the execution will make a difference. But I’m still hoping.

It seems that no one will be giving Catherine Ashton, the EU’s new foreign minister, any trouble. She has a full size Dalek sitting in the corner of her office.

I would assume she’s also packing a sonic screwdriver, so the EU should be ship-shape in Bristol fashion in no time.

There has been a maelstrom of news and opinion recently about the revised guidelines for mammograms and pap smears. On the one hand, it is either abysmal or fortuitous timing for these recommendations to emerge during a national debate on healthcare reform legislation. This is playing right into the hands of those who would have you irrationally believe the government is trying to ration your care in an effort to kill you. The reality is that timing aside, these recommendations and other scientifically based statistical studies are released all the time. And not just the government, but the insurance companies who already effectively control your access to healthcare make coverage decisions based on such studies.

The real issue here is the recommendations shine a glaring bright light on the reality that any insurance based healthcare plan balances the needs of the many against the needs of the few. This is not specific to government run vs. privately run plans. This is the reality that no group plan can afford to give everyone every last bit of diagnosis or care they might desire at a price we can collectively afford.

This is easy to understand at an impersonal level. It would be a waste of money to test everyone who came to the doctor with a cough for tuberculosis. The cough is weighed with other symptoms, including the clinical as well as the statistical likelihood the person could have been exposed. The reality is that this process misses a small percentage of cases that could have been caught early if everyone were tested at first phlegm. But the cost, anxiety, false positive rate, and inconvenience of all that testing is balanced against the actual number of cases slipping through the cracks. It’s impossible to seal all the cracks of all the diseases and conditions. Every doctor, every insurance company, every hospital, makes a cost benefit decision to determine the point of diminishing returns. They do this in full recognition that they are statistically condemning some small number of people to being undiagnosed.

This all makes sense at the dispassionate level of statistics. Any group health plan needs to draw the lines somewhere. Everyone cannot be entitled to unlimited care. But at the personal level, I want my family, my friends, my loved ones, even my-self to have access to the best of everything. If I could have my way, we’d all have one of those two-minute Star Trek medical scans every week to check for every known condition in the Star Fleet data bank, regardless of the cost to the insurance company. But in practice, if such a scan existed, and I was paying out of my pocket, and the scans cost $5000 each, would my kids get one every week? Every month? Every year? Just to be sure? Probably not.

All this puts me in a difficult position. I do understand the trade-offs, the statistics, and the economics of the situation. However, I have personally benefited from some aggressive, probably not statistically justified medical diagnostics. A few years ago, I went to the doctor for something unrelated and just mentioned in passing that I had an odd ringing in one ear. She knew it was probably nothing, but sent me to a specialist anyway. He concurred, but just to be sure, he sent me for an MRI because some insignificant portion of 1% of people with that symptom have a small brain tumor. They found and removed my tumor a few months later.

To be honest, had I been paying out of pocket and they had asked to run $5000 worth of tests to diagnose a ringing ear, just to be sure, I’d have probably said no thanks. If I had to appeal to an insurance company to cover the tests, I’d have probably acquiesced to the math and waited until my symptoms worsened. This would have resulted in treatment delays, a much worse prognosis, and I wouldn’t have the quality of life that I enjoy today. But it’s probably how it should have panned out.

The cruel reality is that all healthcare is about economics. Someone has to bear the cost of your care. Whether that cost is borne out of your pocket, your paycheck, or your taxes, it’s still a question of how much we can afford. There simply is a point where the cost is too high. The implication of that ceiling is that no matter where we put it, some small number of people will wind up sicker than they would have been if we’d pushed the ceiling a little higher. And we’re all okay with that as long as those “few people” are strangers in a statistical database.

Thomas Jefferson said, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” And it would seem the we are brewing up what may be a batch of rebellion for 2012. That is, assuming that the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl doesn’t bring the world to an end, which would be maybe a bit too much rebellion.

American politics seems to be fracturing in interesting ways. On the far right, we have tea-party rock stars like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the Fox pundit crew. They seem to have a solid hold on about 25% of the population, a non-trivial chunk of folks who would follow them off a cliff. Further, they have been driving moderates from their ranks in an effort to purify the herd into some sort of army of malcontents. They are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore. They don’t have a plan for anything better, but whatever this is, it has to stop.

There is some danger this could morph from a political rebellion into something more militant. Recently, there has been an emergence of the slogan, “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.” The psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” But precedes the more ominous passage, “May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.” Former, right-wing evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer worries that this could be trolling for assassins. If some would-be soldier of God takes up this call, it could come back against the teabaggers, or it could cause them to bond even further. Either way, it looks increasingly like this group is going to become it’s own political party.

Should the Tea Party emerge, it will garner much news coverage because love them or hate them they are great entertainment. But they are unlikely to be directly relevant. They will be a permanent minority who’s main agenda will be to oppose whatever anybody else wants.

We are seeing aspects of the results of this today. The Republican minority is not really a functional adversary to the Democrats, and this has resulted in the Democrats fracturing internally between their liberals and conservatives. For lack of opposition, they’ve created their own. Add to this, the defection of moderate Republicans like Arlen Specter and the disenfranchisement of moderate Republicans in general and it would seem we have the recipe for a split of the Democratic party where moderate Republicans and Blue-Dog Democrats would bind and form a new right of center party.

This could create an interesting situation for American politics. Historically, when a new party rises, one of the old parties fall. But I can’t imagine the Tea Party folding in to any other organization. And with a quarter of the population locked in to irrelevance, the two functional parties are left such that neither can ever have a controlling majority. They would be forced to cooperate at some significant level to accomplish anything. And that would be a refreshing change.

Such is the nature of multi-party legislatures in other countries, and I’m curious if we could adapt our systems here to permanently accommodate multiple parties. It might just be the little bit of rebellion we’re looking for.