Category: Blastocyst Liberation • Conservatives • Funding
...the money. Over at Pandagon, Jesse Taylor, on the subject of the Focus on the Family anti-legal and safe abortion ad, asks (italics mine):
The question is instead this: if the anti-choice position is so true, so mainstream and so critical to the future of our nation, why did Focus on the Family spend $2.5 million to avoid saying anything whatsoever about it? Pam Tebow's lines were all oblique references to her choice not to have an abortion, but if FotF felt the need to couch her story in such coded and oblique terms that it could have been an ad for Wii Family, doesn't that say something incredibly telling about how weak and radical their position actually is?
This is why I think the ad won't be successful. I think the ad was never designed to change people's minds--the Super Bowl is the wrong place to run that kind of ad. So why run the ad?
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Posted by Mike at 4:12 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Antibiotics • CDC • Fucking Morons • Funding • KPC • The War on Science
(from here)
By way of Maryn McKenna, we find that the Obama Administration has decided to massively cut the funding for the CDC's antimicrobial resistance and vaccination efforts. I thought this was the kind of anti-science bullshit that the Bush Administration did. From the IDSA (pdf):
Under CDC's proposed budget, the agency's already severely strapped Antimicrobial Resistance budget would be cut dramatically by $8.6 million--roughly 50 percent. This vital program is necessary to help combat the rising crisis of drug resistance, a critical medical problem that the agency deems "one of the world's most pressing public health problems." Yet the President's FY 2011 budget would allow CDC to target only 20 state/local health departments and health care systems to be funded for surveillance, prevention, and control of antimicrobial resistance, down from 48 this past year. It would also eliminate all grants to states for the successful Get Smart in the Community program to combat improper uses of antibiotics.
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Posted by Mike at 10:12 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Big Shitpile • Democrats • Economics
If you're looking for a good primer on Big Shitpile and other recent economic events, I highly recommend Peter Goodman's Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy. It's well written, and does what many other books about the recent economic collapse fail to do: puts it into a larger context. But this small excerpt from Past Due hits the nail on the head as to what our problem is:
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Posted by Mike at 10:50 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Fucking Morons • Vaccination
Over at DailyKos, there's a very good post about anti-vaxxer idiocy (I believe in rewarding non-science blogs with links when they take this stuff head-on). The author's motivation illustrates just how murderous this lunacy is:
Part of what infuriates me about this issue is that I'm aware of a case where a child was infected with Measles before he was old enough to be immunized against it. The source of the infection was an older child at a day care whose parents decided against vaccination.
The child's Measles progressed to subacute sclerosing panencephalitis from which his brain deteriorated, eventually causing loss of body function, and an all-around horrible death. All of which could be traced back to abject human stupidity.
As the kids say, read the whole thing.
Posted by Mike at 5:13 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Basic Human Decency • Conservatives • Healthcare
A recent question posed by NY Times columnist demonstrates just how far to the Palinist right our political and social discourse has shifted:
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Posted by Mike at 10:01 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mad rantings about politics, evolution, and microbiology. Comment policy: say what you want, but back it up with an email address. I don't like anonymous trolls.
