Politics
pharyngula | July 1, 2008This has to be seen to believed. John Conyers asks John Yoo a simple question: "Is there anything the president could not order be done to a suspect?" He can't give a straight answer. So Conyers reduces it to a simple hypothetical: "Could the president order a suspect to be buried alive?" He still can't answer! It's a yes or no question!
What can be done in the face of such a disgusting evasion of simple decency from the Bush administration? Not much, but laugh.
Gary Farber has invented a game, "Stump the Yoo". Go ahead, think of some outrage you would propose as a hypothetical to John…
pharyngula | July 1, 2008First, there was this awful news about Obama's support of "faith-based programs":
Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and -- in a move sure to cause controversy -- support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.
Gak. If that were true, he'd be at some risk of losing my vote, and would definitely be on the road to losing my campaign support. That was Fox News, though, so I held off until I heard more…although reporting that…
oracknows | July 1, 2008(Note Addendum before commenting, please.)
Is there any candidate who still supports the separation of church and state anymore? Heck, even Barack Obama seems to be pandering to the religious base these days:
CHICAGO -- Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and -- in a move sure to cause controversy -- support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.
Obama was unveiling his approach to getting religious charities more involved in…
oracknows | June 30, 2008I realize my post earlier today was a bit of a downer, but what can I say? Lately, there doesn't seem to be much good news on the ever-growing front in the war against quackery. However, in researching that piece I did come across something that made me smile. I found the campaign website for what to me appears to be the perfect embodiment of politics these days, for a leader who represents an exact fit with the mood of the times:
Locutus for President
You will be assimilated!
razib | June 30, 2008Chris of Mixing Memory is doing us the service of a chapter by chapter review of George Lakoff's The Political Mind. This should be fun! I told Chris that reading Lakoff talking about the minds of conservatives is kind of like me opining with supreme confidence as to the deep motivations behind why so many homosexual men prefer being "bottoms." The is fact that I'm not a homosexual male myself, nor have I read a great deal of literature on the topic, or even communicated with homosexual males about the issue and their motivations behind their preferences, is besides the point. Now only if…
tsmith | June 30, 2008I rarely talk politics here, but I received this email from a cousin the other day:
According to the Book of Revelations the anti-christ is: The anti-christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuassive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal.... the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destory everything. Is it OBAMA??
The email itself, unfortunately, isn't out of the ordinary; many of my family members believe we're in the End Times. What made this one…
razib | June 29, 2008A few weeks ago I read Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. One strange thing is that because I've watched Brink on BloggingHeads.TV on occasion could hear the prose with his particular cadence and delivery. Really weird. In any case, The Age of Abundance is a social history of the 20th century which makes the case that despite the persistence of a partisan divide our culture has operationally congealed around a rough libertarian consensus. In short, a free market of money and lifestyle choices. I think there is a strong argument…
drorzel | June 29, 2008Via Matt Yglesias, an interesting twist on the shuffle-play "meme":
1. Take out your iPod (or Zune, I guess...really, who buys a Zune?)
2. Press shuffle songs.
3. Answer the following: a) How many songs before you come to one that would absolutely disqualify you from being President? b) What is that song?
This sounds like fun. Whooosh goes the randomizer...
And I'm screwed. The first song up is "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" by Bob Dylan. He's a former hippie radical, much too divisive a figure to be associated with. Also the song is kind of a downer. And "Even the President of the…
j7uy5 | June 29, 2008On 6 June 2008, the Federal Register in the USA
href="http://www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2008-06-06-E8-12671">contained
a notice, that the Department of Homeland Security is
conducting a review. They are reviewing the National
Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP).
The Federation of American Scientists
href="http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2008/06/dhs_invites_public.html">points
out that DHS is soliciting public comment.
The NIPP is explained and documented at a DHS
href="http://www.dhs.gov/xprevprot/programs/editorial_0827.shtm">site.
one of the documents (1.3MB PDF) is…
oracknows | June 28, 2008Apparently there's a chiropracter named Billy Sticker running for President. His platform:
My platform:
To increase your patient count by 200% during my first term
To increase your income by 200%
Pass legislation designating Chiropractic the Official Health Care of America
Reduce our dependency on pharmaceuticals (because Chiropractic would be the official health care!)
He even has his own video coverage:
Say it ain't so! A woo-meister for President. That'd be a step down even from our current President! It's even worse than that, though. He's apparently a guy who sells marketing…
pharyngula | June 27, 2008A certain Brown University biology graduate has taken an unfortunate step, one that we asked him to avoid. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has signed a pro-creationism bill into law, all to pander to evangelical protestant hicks. We know this is a guy with national aspirations, so he's taking a big gamble that we aren't going to swing back towards a more sensible secularism, since the only people who could vote for him now are fundagelical god-wallopers who don't understand science. That may be a fairly big voting base, but I'm hoping that it's shrinking. Either Bobby Jindal is toast… or we all are…
hrynyshyn | June 27, 2008So much has come down the political pipe in the past few days I've barely had time to think about science. Plus, I'm just about to head off for a 10-day vacation back on Canadian Shield birthright, so I need to get this off my chest: The Second Amendment has to go.
Yesterday's ruling that gives individuals the right to own guns may or may not be good constitutional law. Ed Brayton and just about every one of his commenters seem to agree with it, despite the old conservative-progressive, 5-4 split that usually signals a lapse of intelligence by the majority. I don't know, and I don't think…
denialism | June 27, 2008I must admit I'm a bit surprised to see the Supreme Court overturning the handgun ban (full ruling - PDF). I thought the court would have to take the position that gun ownership may be a right but one in which the state had enough of a compelling interest to regulate that bans like DC's could stand. Any other decision would seem to suggest that the state couldn't regulate weapons at all, thus overturning the 1934 automatic weapons ban and other restrictions on ownership of highly dangerous equipment for the hunting of today's super deer.
However, as Ed Brayton discusses, they overturned…
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2008
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason.
There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution - Problems with Science for more.
Jesse Prinz has an essay on atheism and morality, which I think jumps the shark at the end (how can there be atheist charities? Atheism is the lack of some belief, so any charity that doesn't make theism part of its core mission already is atheist), here at…
jlynch | June 26, 2008Meet Kirstie Hartle, registered Democrat, Clinton supporter, and "a Republican all the way now":
She said she doesn't like Obama's name and thinks he has a questionable background. She also said she thought Obama was deceitful when he broke from his church after it hurt his campaign, and she doesn't trust him to handle the Iraq war.
"It sounds to me like a Middle Eastern type of name and whether or not he's born here in the United States, he doesn't seem like, to me, somebody who is trustworthy ... You can't trust anybody these days, so who's to say he's not a terrorist and we just don't…
pharyngula | June 26, 2008In Washington state, politicians can apparently freely decide what label they want to use for their party affiliation on ballots — you know, like "Democrat" or "Republican". Only the Republicans are all running away from the label "Republican". I wonder why?
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2008
On the one hand we have James Dobson declaring that Barack Obama isn't really Christian, because he distorts the Bible. Funny, I thought the Bible had some things to say about that [Matt 5:22, 7:1, Luke 6:37, Rom 2:1, 14:4, James 4:11, but then I'm not a Christian so I am probably misreading it by taking it literally here]. It is clearly un-Christian to make arguments for the arrangement of a secular society in a secular manner. How dare Obama make that argument in a secular society. But we know that the Christian right doesn't actually want a secular society.
On the other hand we have a…
drorzel | June 25, 2008From today's New York Times, and article headlined "White House Refused to Open Pollutants Email":
The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.
When asked whether this wasn't maybe a little immature, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said "Nunh-uh!" After trading "Is not!" "Is too!" statements with Helen Thomas for a while, Fratto covered his ears and…
evolvingthoughts | June 24, 2008
Here's a somewhat different take on the late great George Carlin, in an interview with Keith Olberman last year:
For me, though, he'll always be the hip Catholic Archbishop who brings about the end of the world in Dogma.
jlynch | June 24, 2008
(source; click for larger version)
So 60% of Republicans - versus 40% of Independents and 38% of Democrats - think that God created humans as is, 10,000 years ago. Let's get this clear - this isn't 60% accepting some form of "intelligent design" and allowing the archeological and fossil records to speak for themselves. This isn't some form of theistic evolution that may be compatible with some form of intelligent design (the numbers there are 32, 36 & 39% respectively). No, this is 60% of Republicans (and 44% of Americans) being abjectly ignorant and accepting a young earth creationist…