Conservatives
mikethemadbiologist | October 23, 2008The National Republican Congressional Committee is pulling its ad support for Michelle Bachmann (italics mine):
Five days after Rep. Michele Bachmann went on a McCarthy-esque rant suggesting Barack Obama was unpatriotic and urging the major newspapers of the country to investigate anti-American sentiment in Congress, the national Republican political parties are running for cover.
Two sources aware of ad buys in Minnesota say that the National Republican Congressional Committee is pulling its media purchases from Bachmann's race. If true, it is a remarkable fall for a congresswoman who, until…
mikethemadbiologist | October 21, 2008...and the internetz should get the credit. From thereisnospoon:
First, the DCCC has taken notice and decided to up the ante in a big way by spending $1 million on the race:
The race for the 6th District just keeps getting bigger and more national. Thanks Michele Bachmann!
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will spend more than $1 million in TV ads against Rep. Bachmann, according to Minnesota Public Radio. The race is getting newfound national attention after Bachmann asked the media to investigate members of Congress with anti-American views.
Keep in mind that Tinklenberg…
mikethemadbiologist | October 17, 2008Well, the leaders suck pretty bad too. Having just spent two weeks in Virginia, this account of a meeting of McCain/Palin supporters rings true:
I immediately realized that the McCain/Palin folks were having a little meeting....I sat down at the table next to the group just as they were starting their meeting.
As soon as the last member of their group came in, they prayed. In their prayer they begged that God "deliver the country from the evil socialists" and even prayed that "Obama find God"...
....The next person lamented that their whole office was voting for Obama. The McCain/Palin…
mikethemadbiologist | October 16, 2008Last night, "Joe the Plumber" (who's kinda like Conan the Barbarian, except that he's not) was featured front and center in the debates. So what did the actual Joe the Plumber think? By way of Jesse Taylor, from Politico:
"McCain was solid in his performance," he says. "I still don't know where he stands," he says of Obama. "I'm middle class. I can't have my taxes raised any more."
He also says he actually isn't in the bracket where Obama would raise his taxes -- but he's worried that Obama will shift the bracket down.
He also said that, in his encounter with Obama, the Illinois Senator […
mikethemadbiologist | October 12, 2008Watching the slow-motion public meltdown is fascinating in a sort of macabre way. Amanda asks:
In all seriousness, it's genuinely hard to believe that these people could be for real. I have no idea how it got this bad.
I do! The Mad Biologist has an answer: the wingnuts have decided that Republican rallies are a 'safe space.'
Anyone who has been involved in any kind of community organizing has probably lived through the sorry experience of watching an organization be taken over by nutters who are more interested in using that organization for their needs (including psychological) and…
mikethemadbiologist | September 23, 2008...John Bircher? By way of ScienceBlogling Ed Brayton, I came across this Salon article describing Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's claim that she is a young earth creationist (or, at the very least, believes that human and dinosaurs lived at the same time, which is fucking stupid enough). But it gets even more insane. From Dave Neiwert, we learn that she very well might be a John Bircher:
What's striking, as Michael points out, is the article in front of her: It's a piece about the "Con Con Call" -- one of those hysterical non-issues that conspiracy theorists of the far right in 1995…
mikethemadbiologist | September 8, 2008Conservative writer David Frum has an article in the NY Times magazine where he attempts to understand why wealthy areas like Fairfax County, Virginia, and Beacon Hill, MA are trending Democratic, or even becoming Democratic strongholds. The article would be informative, were it based in any way, shape, or form on what actually happened in Virginia (we'll get to Boston later). Since Frum is describing a change that I lived through, I thought I would offer my reasons why Northern Virginia has changed.
First, Frum omits the most obvious change: the (slowly) decaying influence of racism. I…
mikethemadbiologist | September 4, 2008First, Roland Martin attacks Palin for her comments about community organizers:
And ScienceBlogling Matt Nisbet has the quote of the day:
Weren't Jesus and Mother Teresa community organizers? Didn't they, in the words of Palin, have "actual responsibilities?" Aren't Evangelicals such as this group "Christians for Community Organizing" or this group "Evangelicals for Social Action" dedicated to community organizing? Aren't faith based initiatives built on community organizing?
Matt is absolutely right on the merits, but, make no mistake about it, "community organizers" is code for 'uppity…
mikethemadbiologist | September 3, 2008Because nothing says compassionate conservatism like not helping hungry people. While many people have noted the incongruency of Palin's slashing funds for assistance to unwed mothers, her halving of a budget item to help the Fairbanks food bank has gone unnoticed.
The specific item:
Fairbanks Community Food Bank-Computer Upgrade, Utility Assistance, and Refrigeration Improvement
Here's the image:
This was cut from $50,000 to $25,000.
It's a goddamn food bank. Asking for help in keeping food refrigerated and for paying the utility bills isn't 'pork.' Good thing the economy's tanking--it's…
mikethemadbiologist | August 1, 2008More fallout from Bushist apparatchik Monica Goodling. Her political hackery weakened our ability to prosecute terrorists:
In one disgraceful example, Goodling refused to hire "one of the leading terrorism prosecutors in the country" because his wife was a Democrat:
He was an experienced terrorism prosecutor and had successfully prosecuted a high-profile terrorism case for which he received the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service. ... The candidate's wife was a prominent local Democrat elected official and vice-chairman of a local Democratic Party. [...]
[Executive Office for…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2008...I think he's right (don't tell driftglass). From the NY Times:
For a time, it seemed as if we were about to use the bright beam of science to illuminate the murky world of human action. Instead, as Turkheimer writes in his chapter in the book, "Wrestling With Behavioral Genetics," science finds itself enmeshed with social science and the humanities in what researchers call the Gloomy Prospect, the ineffable mystery of why people do what they do.
The prospect may be gloomy for those who seek to understand human behavior, but the flip side is the reminder that each of us is a Luxurious…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2008From the NY Times editorial page comes this explanation of a government healthcare boondoggle (italics mine):
Private health plans were promoted in the 1980s and 1990s in the belief that they could reduce costs and improve care through better management. And for a while they did. But policy changes that were championed by the Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress led to exactly the opposite outcome.
These private plans -- that now cover a fifth of the total Medicare population -- receive large subsidies to deliver services that traditional Medicare provides more cheaply and…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2008...the Crazy Twenty-Sevens. From driftglass:
If you replay the video, and listen under Stephanopoulos' interruption, this is point Koppel was trying to get across:
"And I think there is just a small but significant fraction of Americans for whom...the truth in this instance is never going to matter."
Which sounds like a small thing, but for me it was almost a cultural event, because it is almost the only time in my memory when a Big Time Newscritter sat in front of a camera and called bullshit on some specific, identifiable group other than "bureaucratsinwashington" or "liberalelites".…
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2008Who woulda thunk it? It's already well-established that the good souls of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives had a 'No Jews need apply' policy*. Now it turns out that, like so many bigots, they're also corrupt (italics mine):
A former top official in the White House's faith-based office was awarded a lucrative Department of Justice grant under pressure from two senior Bush administration appointees, according to current and former DOJ staff members and a review of internal DOJ documents and emails.
The $1.2 million grant was jointly awarded to a consulting firm run by Lisa Trevino…
mikethemadbiologist | June 30, 2008In a very good post about elitism and Republicans, Maha asks:
John McCain's recent mangling of Barack Obama's famous "bitter" remark is also illustrative:
"We're going to go to the small towns in Pennsylvania and I'm gonna to tell them I don't agree with Senator Obama that they cling to their religion and the Constitution because they're bitter," said McCain, who might have been referring to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. "I'm gonna tell them they have faith and they have trust and support the Constitution of the United States because they have optimism and hope... That's what…
mikethemadbiologist | June 25, 2008If Republicans claim that oil pipelines are good for caribou, I wonder what they'll make of the blackfly outbreak in Maine. About the first half of the previous sentence--that's not hyperbole. Really (by way of Digby):
During a radio interview on Wednesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attempted to argue that drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) would be beneficial for Arctic wildlife. Bachmann claimed that drilling would cause not only an "enhancement of wildlife expansion," but that the area around oil pipelines would also "become a meeting ground and '…
mikethemadbiologist | June 18, 2008For the last two decades, give or take, charter schools have been a cause celebre for conservatives. Yet they seem to have abandoned them as a political issue. Here's one reason why (italics mine):
Bill Burrow, the associate director of the Office on Competitiveness under the first President Bush, has noted that school choice is "popular in the national headquarters of the Republican Party but is unpopular among the Republican rank-and-file voters who have moved away from the inner city in part so that their children will not have to attend schools that are racially or socioeconomically…
mikethemadbiologist | June 15, 2008I've discussed Republican rising star Bobby Jindal's public support for creationism before. What's galling is that his idiocy can't be laid at cognitive deficiency or ignorance. I was in the same graduating class as Jindal, and I know that every biology major had considerable exposure to evolutionary biology.
Clearly, Jindal is being willfully ignorant to avoid theologically inconvenient reality. Now Jindal is further attempting to lower the value of my degree: he performed an exorcism, and believes that it cured the 'possessed' woman of cancer.
(Don't tell Orac, or his head might explode…
mikethemadbiologist | June 13, 2008So we know Ben Stein lies about evolution. Now, Stein is lying about economics (italics mine):
During the June 11 edition of Fox News' Fox Friends, conservative commentator and actor Ben Stein misrepresented Sen. Barack Obama's tax plan to raise the capital gains tax rate on the wealthiest earners. Stein stated, "I'm very worried about increasing the capital gains tax, unless you want to just increase it on people that are terribly wealthy," whom he defined as "people that have an income of $5 million a year or more." He added, "But people that have incomes in the hundreds and the low…
mikethemadbiologist | June 12, 2008Wolfrum at Shakesville alerts us to The New Right's attempt to lay our failed energy policies every but at the feet of Republicans:
Take the post "How did the GOP get stuck "Defending Big Oil" again?"
Now, this post could have been just five words long: "Because that's what they do." But the post is more about how to change the oil debate to make the GOP look better rather than on how to do anything about oil prices:
First, I don't see any reason at all we need to keep getting stuck with the "defending tax breaks for big oil" charge over and over again. Subsidies are not a free market…