Politics
pharyngula | October 9, 2008This is truly a thing of beauty: Sean Hannity, after using the tawdry guilt-by-association gimmick against Barack Obama, gets the same thing done to him. Watch the man squirm in frustration!
Bonus! The clip is presented by Keith Olbermann!
Double bonus! It's got Rachel Maddow commenting on it!
Super duper triple bonus! John Cleese sent in a poem about Hannity!
Ode to Sean Hannity
by John Cleese
Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You're a profanity
Hannity
Time for a group liberal smirk…
pharyngula | October 8, 2008Elizabeth Dole is continuing her campaign in North Carolina of smearing her opponent, Kay Hagan, for simply associating with atheists. We atheists are the "most vile, radical liberals in America," out to wage war on Christmas and stock boy scout troops with homosexuals, and we actively support political candidates who are atheists. I know … how dare we.
I have a personal reason to be offended, however. The Dole ads cite endorsements by two atheists, FriendlyAtheist.com and DaylightAtheism.org. Now hang on…what's so scary about the Friendly atheist? And Daylight Atheism sounds positively…
drorzel | October 8, 2008
A Colbert Report re-run about the financial crisis has just ended, so I turn the tv off, grab my jacket and the leash, and head out for a walk with the dog. She's oddly pensive as we head up the street. After a little while, she stops and asks, "What was that all about?"
"All what?"
"All that 'crisis' and 'bailout' stuff. It sounds scary."
"Well, a bunch of banks made a bunch of really bad loans, and people have lost a lot of money."
"I got that," she says. "I may be a dog, but I'm not stupid. I'm asking how they lost a lot of money."
"Well, it's complicated, but I'll try to explain. Let's…
pharyngula | October 8, 2008Perhaps this image will help fix the differences between the candidates in your minds.
j7uy5 | October 8, 2008Computer experts have been weighing in for years about design flaws in
electronic voting systems. Now a computer expert goes a step
farther, saying the whole system is flawed.
From
href="http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/stranger-in-strange-land.html">Linus'
Blog:
That's when you also notice that the whole US voting
system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing
(winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that
looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland,
government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties,…
jrosenhouse | October 7, 2008In the first debate I thought McCain had slightly the better of it. Basically a draw, but McCain seemed a bit more forceful and confident. Then the polling over the next few days showed that most people thought Obama was the clear winner. Yay!
I hope, though, that I am not similarly out of touch with my country on this one. I thought McCain made an absolute fool of himself in this debate. Carnage. The calculus exams I was grading while watching were less gruesome than McCain's performance.
Obama was his usual super-composed self, delivering one solid answer after another to the…
pharyngula | October 7, 2008We have another debate coming up shortly, so here's an open thread for you all to chatter on…if the software lets you.
There will be no drinking games allowed that encourage alcohol consumption every time POW is mentioned.
<sigh> If ever I hear the words "my friends" again, I shall gag.
Defining moment for me was when McCain insisted that Obama was dangerous because he would speak too loudly (while later castigating him for advocating diplomacy), and Obama came back to point out that McCain was the one singing "bomb bomb bomb, bomb Iran". In other words, McCain was a desperate fraud…
gregladen | October 7, 2008They are now inciting threats of terroristic acts. I want them locked up in Gitmo now. I am not fucking joking. We are starting to hear people yelling "Terrorist, Kill Him" or just "Kill Him" at rallies. Few good examples have been trapped on tape yet, but there are at least two different ones, one at a Palin rally, one at a McCain rally. Watch:
And this.
I ask you this: Imagine two or three black men in their 30s yelling "Kill McCain, Kill McCain" at a political rally of any kind where secret service are in attendance. They would be questioned. Were these people questioned? I do…
grrlscientist | October 7, 2008tags: The Simpsons, election2008, Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama, streaming video
I know this is meant in jest, but I find it to be somewhat frightening since this very scenario (somewhat modified) already happened eight years ago! In short, Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama and gets a nasty surprise.
gregladen | October 7, 2008The Replace Michele Bachmann Carnival #2 is up at Tangled Up in Blue Guy.
pharyngula | October 6, 2008The reason you shouldn't vote for the McCain/Palin ticket is the odious John McCain himself. Talk about sleaze — the man has been a creepy, bullying, spoiled beast his whole life.
Similarly, in local politics, Michele Bachmann is corrupt. How these people achieved such a high position in our country's leadership is incomprehensible.
jstemwedel | October 6, 2008The past couple years in California have been scary ones for academic researchers who conduct research with animals (as well as for their neighbors), what with firebombs, home invasions, significant intentional damage to their properties and threats to their safety.
In response to a ratcheting up of attacks from animals rights groups, universities have lobbied for the Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28.
As described in Inside Higher Ed:
The law is part of a campaign, including litigation against animal liberation groups…
gregladen | October 6, 2008McCain's recent history (September 13th, 2008)
Why is the distant history of John McCain as a prisoner of war always part of his resume, but his more recent history in the savings and loan failings of the 1980s and 1990s is never mentioned?
McCain was one of the senators in the Keating 5 who took $1.3 million in campaign contributions from Michael Keating. Those five senators then used their influence to get regulators to back off their investigations of Lincoln Savings and Loan, owned by Keating.
Way back then McCain showed his propensity for working across the aisle as the other four…
drorzel | October 6, 2008I got email this morning from the Obama campaign, bearing news that will no doubt have the more rabidly partisan Democrats of blogdom dancing with glee: The Obama campaign as prepared a video about the Keating Five scandal (Wikipedia link, not the campaign video), and John McCain's role in it. The video will be released at noon today.
Some bloggers have been demanding this for weeks, now, but I can't say it makes me happy. I don't like seeing the Obama campaign go there, and it's particularly disappointing because I don't think they need to go there.
Yeah, fine, the McCain campaign has…
gregladen | October 6, 2008In response to the Palin/McCain accusations that Barack Obama is a terrorist,* there is now a documentary called "Keatining Economics: Johh McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis.
Below is a short preview. The full documentary will be available at 12 noon today (October 6).
Here is a summary of the documentary:
'The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain's attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. Nothing illustrates the danger of his approach more clearly than his central role in the savings and loan scandal of the late…
gregladen | October 6, 2008 Michele Bachmann Three born again Christians ... a member of the US Congress, the President of the United States, and a convicted felon now under investigation ... have been caught in a complex conspiracy involving money and a Presidential Pardon. At the very least, this is an excellent example of how religion distorts and corrupts personal and professional judgment, governance, and one's sense of justice.
In 2008, Craig Howse contributed $3,000 to the Michele Bachmann campaign, in four installments. Howse is or was a lobbiest for Frank Vennes. Frank Vennes is a convicted felon who…
illconsidered | October 6, 2008This was Palin's response when asked about climate change in Thursday's vice-presidential debate:
I think the (rather blindingly) obvious point to any with the slightest sincere interest in this issue is that despite what she says the cause of the current climate change is completely central to the question of what to do about it. Real Climate makes this point whether you are wholly in the adaptation camp or wholly in the mitigation camp.
She mentions magical cycles as a possible explanation, one of the standard, easily debunkable lines. But as a young earth creationist, what cycles is she…
grrlscientist | October 6, 2008tags: Sarah Palin, Katie Couric, parody, humor, streaming video
If you haven't seen this yet, I know you are going to enjoy it. If you have seen it before, you'll love seeing it again -- incidentally, I worked at the "goofy evolution museum" [6:49]