Politics
gregladen | September 4, 2008Former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been sentenced to four years in prison for corruption.
A Washington court found Abramoff guilty of trading expensive gifts, meals and sports trips in exchange for political favours.
bbc
In a possibly related matter ...
A review of campaign finance filings shows that .. Arizona Republican [John McCain] has accepted more than $100,000 in donations from employees of Greenberg Traurig, the very firm where Abramoff once reigned.
source
razib | September 4, 2008PalMD has a post, Science is politics. I would respond that science is normative. Or, more precisely, the practice of science intersects naturally with our normative presuppositions. There's a big universe out there, and the stuff we study is skewed toward topics which interest humans. For example, there's a whole science, anthropology, devoted to humans. Why? Well, because we humans think we're mighty important. This isn't a scientific assessment. You could reply that we are important in terms of how we impact the biosphere, but privileging the biosphere of the third planet in the Sol…
clock | September 4, 2008By: Jace Perrodin:
Best Video winner of the 2008 Election Multimedia Contest
clock | September 4, 2008Compare this:
to this:
Question: which one of them more strongly and sincerely supports the candidate of his party?
clock | September 4, 2008Do they really forget what they said publicly a couple of months ago? Or is it something more sinister? Like, for instance, total lack of scruple and morals:
oracknows | September 4, 2008
I'm a Detroit guy.
I was born there and raised there for the first ten years of my life. After that, my family moved to the suburbs, but still Detroit's my hometown, even though I spent 20 years away from southeast Michigan. Consequently, I really, really hated what has been happening there since January. That's when text messages revealed that Detroit's lying, philandering mayor Kwame Kilpatrick revealed that he and the woman with whom he had been having an affair, Christine Beatty, had lied under oath about their affair in a whistle-blowing trial.
Now the chickens are finally coming home…
drorzel | September 4, 2008Fade in on an Old, Balding White Man reading the paper at the breakfast table.
OBWM: I don't know. I'm really worried about the economy. Rising fuel prices, increasing costs of everything...
Cut to his Younger Blond Wife, sipping tea
YBW: I know. And the mortgage crisis, all these home foreclosures. It's terrible.
Cut to his Perky Teenage Daughter, eating cereal
PTD: Don't forget the rising cost of college.
Return to OBWM, in a wider shot showing that he is alone at the table. A plasma tv on the wall shows YBW and PTD, having breakfast in the kitchens of two of his other houses.
OBWM: And if…
drorzel | September 4, 2008We're in Boston to visit Kate's parents, and while we wait for SteelyKid to wake up and demand food, we're watching "Mike and Mike" on ESPN2 (the live simulcast of the radio show). They've been talking about how tonight's NFL kick-off (our long national nightmare is over...) was pushed up so as not to conflict with the Republican Convention.
I can't help thinking, though, that given John McCain's charisma (or lack thereof), the Republicans might be better served by having the football game run opposite McCain's speech. That way, their core audience will opt for watching the game live, and…
pharyngula | September 4, 2008Palin scares me, but what worries me more is that we will screw up again and hand the executive office over to another gang of losers, and we can't afford that anymore. Now look at the open thread I set up last night, and you'll see why I'm concerned. What did people do? They got distracted by irrelevancies, such as the opportunity to exercise a little macho sexism, and then that turned into a nasty, full-blown knife fight with everyone snarling at each other. This is exactly what the Republicans want, writ small on this little tiny island of the blogosphere.
That's not how we're going to…
pharyngula | September 3, 2008OK, I see people are talking about it anyway in other threads, so here you go: say what you think of Palin's speech at the RNC. I caught a few minutes of it, and found it unbearable…so I won't be contributing. When I heard her declare that Obama doesn't want to find new energy sources and wanted to surrender in Iraq when we were on the verge of winning, I gave up.
tqa | September 3, 2008
Matt "Framing Science" Nisbit has a post up that asks a somewhat very loaded question: "Did the Far Left Blogs Turn Lieberman Into a Republican?" In fact, now that I look more closely at the question, I'm starting to notice that the question isn't just loaded; it's loaded on multiple levels. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Matt is a communications guy, and he knows what to do to shape a message (even if he doesn't always manage to do it successfully).
Matt seems to see part of his mission in life as a voice in the wilderness, pointing out all the ways we communicate wrong, and all the…
illconsidered | September 3, 2008I was just kidding about that Sarah Palin-osmosis-experience crack...but apparently Frank Gaffney at TownHall.com takes it all seriously!
As that state's governor, Sarah Palin would know more by osmosis - if nothing else - about the necessity for U.S. anti-missile systems than either Messrs. Obama or Biden.
(h/t to Science Avenger from the comments]
pharyngula | September 3, 2008Texas now has a law that requires all public schools to offer an elective course in the Christian bible, thanks to a bill authored by Warren Chisum, who will for all eternity be remembered as the "Bible-thumping dwarf from Pampa," a phrase by Molly Ivins. This is a tricky one; I'm not opposed to teaching the bible as an example of literature, since it is, and is a rather widely used source in addition, but there's more here than a Texas hick acquiring a sudden and previously unexhibited appreciation for literature. He may have to be remembered for something else — a palpable knack for…
pharyngula | September 3, 2008You can find them at Greg Laden's Blog — it's a little dense with legalese and unfamiliar acronyms, but it sounds like he was kicked out of the student senate for "wrongful performance of a normally lawful act", whatever that means. More information is promised for later.
purepedantry | September 3, 2008I don't want to get into the issue of whether the nuclear storage site at Yucca Mountain is a good idea. (The folks over at SEA know a whole lot more about the subject than I do.) My gut instinct is that the whole thing will cost a fortune -- and likely much more than the estimates -- but if we are committed to carbon-free power, then we must be prepared to make sacrifices.
However, it is satisfying to see that a final decision about whether to build the thing is proceeding speedily along:
After twenty years of study by more than 2,000 scientists and engineers about the feasibility of…
gregladen | September 3, 2008Just so you know. Bob Dylan's original name was Bob Zimmerman and he is from the Iron Range region of Minnesota. He actually named (it is said) the busy business student neighborhood by the main campus here at The U: "Dinkytown" ... because he thought it was like a town, and it was dinky. The Watchtower (as in "All along the...." is a big ol WPA (I guess) built stone tower overlooking University Avenue in the elite Prospect Hill neighborhood. And so on.
Roy Zimmerman is much funnier than Bob Dylan, and he is here in the Twin Cities making fun of the Republicans. (Hat Tip PZ Myers).…