Politics
emjohnson | July 4, 2009On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Rochester's Corinthian Hall entitled, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro":
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of…
emjohnson | July 4, 2009Danny Schecter asks, how independent are we?
"This isn't just about Madoff. This is about the system in which Madoff's scam took place. This is about systemic fraud and malpractice, the cultural trade of due diligence for easy profit. It's about conflicts of interest where companies paid ratings agencies for their ratings. It's about ideological blinders that let regulators and the Federal Reserve look the other way while banks turned into betting parlors."
Amy Goodman looks into the overthrow of independence in Honduras.
The first coup d'etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century…
sa smith | July 4, 2009Via DAM10N, video from Kerns 'morality proclamation' that is both nauseating and inspiring :)
So, Im starting the betting pool: What is Sally Kern/her psycho hubby going to be outed with?
Oxycontin?
Boinking babies?
Maybe theyre illegal immigrants!
Normal people dont behave like Sally. Normal people arent obsessed over these things. Its just a matter of time before we find out the root cause of Sallys abnormal behavior, and you know its gonna be good.
*evil grin*
*giddy laugh*
I can hardly wait!!
EDITED TO ADD: Local news coverage, also via DAM10N.
pharyngula | July 3, 2009There is a strange correlation: most of the atheists I know are straight, yet when I post a pointless poll like this one, I know with near certainty which way the godless hordes of Pharyngula will try to skew it.
Do you agree with President Obama's decision to extend certain benefits to gay partners of federal employees?
51.38% Yes
48.62% No
It goes further, too. We atheists tend to strongly favor women's rights and equality in the marketplace, yet only about half of us are female. I could bring up an article like this one, in which conservative democrats demand that abortion services not be…
pharyngula | July 3, 2009That wacky know-nothing up north, Sarah Palin, has quit her job as governor. She doesn't give a good reason why; in an annoyingly chipper speech, she whines about the way she was being scrutinized for ethics violations, and the fact that she was currently an ineffective lame duck governor, and then announces that she's stepping down from office. It makes no sense at all, and it does say something about the weakness of her character.
Brave Dame Sarah ran away.
("No!")
Bravely ran away away.
("I didn't!")
When danger reared it's ugly shead,
She bravely turned her tail and fled.
("no!")…
ddobbs | July 3, 2009It's been 26 years since health-care reform failed. Does the debate reflect anything that's happened since?
From The Columbia Journalism Review:
"The idea that we've made a great breakthrough just isn't so," says Jonathan Oberlander, a health-policy expert at the University of North Carolina. "Most of the plans today are direct descendants of what was proposed for the '93-'94 debate. The debate reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day.
With few exceptions, like the fine series last summer by NPR that explained how a number of other countries handle health care, the press has…
razib | July 3, 2009Palin announces resignation:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced Friday that she was resigning her office later this month, a stunning decision that could free her to run for president more easily but also raises questions about her political standing at home.
Palin disclosed the surprise news Friday afternoon from her home in Wasilla with her husband, Todd, and Lt. Governor Sean Parnell, who the governor said would take over the state on Saturday, July 25th.
By not running for re-election, Palin liberates herself from the political constraints that come with running for president while still…
emjohnson | July 3, 2009Human nature is one of those concepts that, like "common sense", everyone knows what you mean but no one knows how it's defined. Ironically, the most insistent proponents of human nature are often those who have benefited from the status quo in society and prefer people to remain just as they are.
June 27 (the day before my son was born) was the birthday of the famed feminist, author and political radical Emma Goldman. I had the opportunity to spend last summer at the Emma Goldman Papers in Berkeley, California to study her unpublished speeches and correspondence. As someone who was…
ddobbs | July 3, 2009Opponents of a public health-insurance plan pose two main objections: that it will create an 'unlevel playing field' that will harm the private market for insurance (an odd objection, since that playing field already tilts quite sharply away from patients' pockets and health and toward the wallets of the health-insurance industry); and that government involvement will raise costs.
These objections seem to hold sway to the degree we limit our discussion to what already exists in the U.S. As with squabbles about the problems with our educational (non)system, the picture gets clearer if we…
ddobbs | July 2, 2009Helen Branswell delivers some sobering news:
Swine flu viruses are missing at least two key features seen in all flu viruses present and past that transmit well among people and yet the viruses are spreading quite efficiently, two new studies suggest.
The research groups which produced the work differ slightly in their views of the degree to which the novel H1N1 virus is spreading, with one finding transmission isn't yet as efficient as with human flu viruses while the other finding transmission rates are in lockstep with those of seasonal flu cousins.
There is no disputing the evidence,…
pontiff | July 2, 2009DARPA, you know the people who invented the internet ("100 geniuses connected by a travel agent"), has a new director:
The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is the principal agency within the DoD for research, development, and demonstration of concepts, devices, and systems that provide highly advanced military capabilities for the current and future combat force. In this role of developing high-risk, high-payoff projects, DARPA compliments and balances the…
oracknows | July 2, 2009Last year, a seeming victory for the protection of human subjects from being subjected to pseudoscience. It began when Kimball C. Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; and Wallace I. Sampson, MD published a lengthy criticism of the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) in Medscape, pointing out that it was a boondoggle that was not only not based on sound science but was in fact risky to patients and riddled with conflicts of interest and administered by highly dubious practitioners. If you want to know just how bad the National Center for…
gregladen | July 1, 2009Dear MSNBC,
I know it is appropriate to have a range of opinions among the talking heads representing a news agency, and MSNBC certainly does have a range. Pat Buchanan, regular commentator on two or three MSNBC news shows, probably serves at the most conservative individual in the MSNBC panoply.
But he has to go now.
This letter comes as a reaction to Buchanan's most recent column, which addresses Darwinian theory and evolution in an over the top intellectually dishonest, inaccurate, and offensive manner. I will not discuss the details of his absurd column; several of my colleagues on…
sa smith | July 1, 2009Yo!
Tomorrow at noon, OK Capital, some folks are meeting up to protest Silly Sallys 'proclamation of morality'.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
God, she is so weird!
Too bad for her the 2011 Evolution meeting is going to be in Norman. Kern has 2 years to get out of OK to avoid Gaaaaaawds wrath!
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2009Dear Reader Tom Stinnett alerted me to a really doom-laden article about Sweden in yesterday's Guardian. Says Ruben Andersson (apparently a Swedish expat and anthropologist),
Sweden's conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social services and healthcare are eroding. The Sweden Democrats - the equivalent of the BNP - are on the rise. The social state is failing. The Swedish dream is no more. ... Sweden's homemade financial meltdown of the 1990s ... finally killed off the dream. Poverty was added to the pessimism. Savage cuts…
pharyngula | June 30, 2009The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled against him, and finally Norm Coleman has conceded the Minnesota state senate race to Al Franken. Hooray for Al, we have a new senator!
gregladen | June 30, 2009UPDATE: COLEMAN CONCEDES
The Minnesota Supreme Court has rejected a legal challenge by Norm Coleman, thereby leaving the vote count determined by an election contest judicial panel placing Franken in the lead standing.
The basis of the Coleman legal challenge is was essentially that all abentee votes shoudl be counted no matter what, because they are, after all, votes.
The reason that is bad election procedure and bad law is that absentee voting is subject to serious abuses, and thus demands a certain amount of procedural control. This has been established previously. The absentee…
emjohnson | June 30, 2009Peter and Billy Getty over at City Brights write:
There are slews of people richer than we are, just in this neighborhood. We're more famous for being rich than we really are rich. But we have enough to belong to the leisure class, meaning we get to spend very little of our time doing anything we don't feel like, and we have means to sample, if not to gorge on, pleasures that most people, sad to say, won't likely ever share in -- things like yacht trips and safaris, ludicrously expensive wine, and private jet travel. You can be richer than we are, but you can't live a whole lot better without…
drorzel | June 30, 2009Firday's quick and sarcastic post came about because I thought the Dean Dad and his commenters had some interesting points in regard to high school math requirements, but we were spending the afternoon driving to Whitney Point so I could give a graduation speech. I didn't have time for a more detailed response.
Now that we're back in town... well, I still don't have time, because SteelyKid has picked up a bit of coxsackie virus, meaning that nobody in Chateau Steelypips is happy. But I did want to offer at least a partial response to some of the comments both here and elsewhere.
To start off…
catdynamics | June 29, 2009This is going to hurt...
Not a lot of people know it, but the Pennsylvania State University is not the State University of Pennsylvania - along with Pitt, Temple and Lincoln, we have long existed in a mixed state, oscillating gently between the private and state eigenstates, maximizing uncertainty.
Now we get bitten - not only is PA's governor proposing a 13% cut in our state contributed budget (which is less than 1% of our actual budget, but cuts hurt on the margin), but the gov is claiming the stimulus funding does not apply to these four, only the State University.
I somehow don't think…