Politics
gregladen | November 28, 2007well, he got his own name right, at least...
I think he also mispronounced "people" ...
gregladen | November 28, 2007Asked if he would ever nominate a Muslim for his cabinet, he replied:
"...based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."
In a way, I agree. When it comes to Mormons, anyway. This country is just not ready for a minority (Mormon) president.
[source]
pharyngula | November 28, 2007I almost feel sorry for Guillermo Gonzalez. The Discovery Institute is turning him into a political football, and making his denial of tenure a far greater mess than is warranted. They're going to hold a press conference on Monday.
The fight will rage on over Iowa State University astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez, who advocated for intelligent design, the theory that disputes parts of evolution, and lost a bid for tenure.
Advocates for Gonzalez said in a release distributed Tuesday that they will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. Monday in Des Moines. There, they said, they will discuss…
pharyngula | November 27, 2007On the one hand, Mitt Romney wants questions about his lunatic religion off the table; on the other, he thinks representation in government should be proportional to the popularity of their religion, which he uses as an excuse to exclude Muslims for consideration in his cabinet. I don't think this means he's going to allow the roughly 10%+ of the population who are atheists/agnostics to be represented, though—after all, he considers only people of faith fit to govern.
Oh, heck, it's probably not fair to call him a hypocrite. He's a consistent religious bigot, he's just unwilling to admit it.
evolvingthoughts | November 26, 2007
This is kicking a man when he's down, but the iPod popped this up to me last night, and I thought how appropriate it is to the election outcome:
I'm looking through you
Where did you go
I thought I knew you
What did I know
You don't look different
But you have changed
I'm looking through you
You're not the same
Your lips are moving
I cannot hear
You voice is soothing
But the words aren't clear
You don't sound different
I've learned the game
I'm looking through you
You're not the same
Why, tell me why
Did you not treat me right
Love has a nasty habit
Of disappearing overnight
You're…
clock | November 26, 2007I'll be there, of course:
Join Congressman Brad Miller for a discussion hosted by Ruby Sinreich of OrangePolitics.org and Brian Russell of Yesh.com about the impact of blogging on today's political environment.
When: Thursday, November 29, 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Where: Mill Town Restaurant, 307 E Main St, Carrboro
Suggested Donation: $10
Cash Bar
Congressman Brad Miller (www.bradmiller.org) is currently serving his third term representing North Carolina's 13th Congressional District. He has often blogged on many progressive sites, including the DailyKos and Blue NC. Congressman Miller serves on the…
tlambert | November 25, 2007John Quiggin writes about the culture warmongers:
Third, and most importantly, the factoid-based, point-scoring, style of argument that goes with the culture wars eventually leads to complete insulation from factual reality. Any proposition, no matter how ridiculous, can be defended in this way, long after the average person has seen through it. This has been most obvious in relation to climate change and Iraq, but there are a whole string of issues where the culture warriors have imprisoned themselves in an orthodoxy every bit as constricting as the largely imaginary monolithic leftism they…
tlambert | November 25, 2007Caroline Overington has topped her previous effort with this:
Top journalist Caroline Overington has denied hitting George Newhouse, the Labor candidate for the Sydney seat of Wentworth - but he insists he was slapped, and it hurt. ...
A Labor campaigner, who witnessed the alleged slap, said Overington had her children with her.
"She came over and slapped him on the right side of the face as he was on the phone. It was really strong. It forced his head back. She then walked past him to vote."
And:
It was parental concern that inspired the exchange. A witness said Overington was upset that…
evolvingthoughts | November 24, 2007
As I watched the total collapse of the conservatives in the federal election, and the landslide of Labor wins, I mused...
Nobody in the media is saying it, but I think there are a number of reasons why the Howard government collapsed. They are: Tony Abbott, Phillip Ruddock, Peter Costello, Brendan Nelson, Amanda Vanstone and Kevin Andrews [Late note: and Julie Bishop]. These ministers have run an extremely virulent form of conservatism, kow towing to religious interests and trying to impose (variously) Catholic, Evangelical and Fundamentalist values on the body politic.
Abbott tried to…
pharyngula | November 24, 2007You've managed to remove your li'l Bush clone.
Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia's combat troops from Iraq.
Labor Party head Kevin Rudd's pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush's staunchest allies.
All the articles I read on the Australian elections used the lovely phrase "humiliating defeat." I like it. Now we just…
j7uy5 | November 23, 2007Turkey is considering adding the letters "Q," "W," and "X"
to their alphabet. The idea is that it would appease the
Kurds.
href="http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=127794">
class="detaybaslik-font">Gov’t reform envisages
including X, Q, W in Turkish alphabets
Changing
the Turkish alphabet to include the letters Q, W and X to appease
Turkey's Kurds, who have previously faced prosecution for using these
letters, might be amongst the "surprise reforms," mentioned by Foreign
Minister Ali Babacan earlier this week, says a senior official from the…
pharyngula | November 23, 2007Since George W. Bush no longer owns a baseball team, he can take credit for whoever wins the World Series this year. After all, somebody will win despite his absence.
George W. Bush is a friend of the oil industry who has shown little interest in cultivating research into alternative energy or conservation—therefore, when (or if) someone develops a strategy for providing energy as the oil supply declines, George's heroic boosterism for oil will be remembered as the stimulus for the future.
The Bush administration dallied when Katrina struck, but New Orleans is still there, and George W. Bush…
evolvingthoughts | November 21, 2007
So now, I think it's worth asking what we really can achieve by doing sociobiological investigations, and some of the traps in previous attempts.
Humans are animals. They are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and apes. Like other animals, their behaviours are formed, constrained, and in most cases fully dependent upon their biology, but the confounding factor in doing sociobiology is the trap of taking one's own culture, the culture of the researcher, as being "normal" and treating all other cultures as less than normal, or primitive, or in some other manner less than worthy, treating biases…
jrosenhouse | November 21, 2007From Tuesday's show::
OLBERMANN: Yes, I understand that. You know, one of the other you's in there is Karl Rove that story about him possibly being in charge of the presidential library, the creation museum of presidential libraries then. What does this tell us about the relationship of the truth to now not the administration of George W. Bush but the legacy of George W. Bush? (Emphasis Added)
illconsidered | November 21, 2007Army bribes soldier with signing bonus to risk life and limb. Soldier cripled for life and can't fight any more. Army wants its signing bonus back because soldier has not completed tour of duty.
I mean what the hell planet do these people come from?
From DemocracyNow! headlines today:
Army Wants Wounded Soldiers to Return Bonuses
The Pentagon is forcing thousands of wounded veterans to return signing bonuses they received for joining the army. The military says the injured soldiers aren't entitled to the money because they didn't complete their full tour of duty. Jordan Fox of Pennsylvania…
pharyngula | November 21, 2007
A recent discovery in stem cell research is no minor event: researchers have figured out how to reprogram adult cells into a state that is nearly indistinguishable from that of embryonic, pluripotent stem cells. This is huge news that promises to accelerate the pace of research in the field.
The problem has always been that cells exist in distinct states. A skin cell, for instance, has one set of genes essential for its specific function activated, and other sets of genes turned off; an egg cell has different patterns of gene activation and inactivation. Just taking the DNA from a skin cell…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2007
The African apes don't get much good news these days. But the Congo has just announced they are setting up a preserve to protect the bonobo. The size of the Sankuru Nature Reserve is 11,803 square miles (in real money, 30 569.629 square kilometers), which makes it nearly half the size of Tasmania, or bigger than Massachusetts or Hawai'i.
This is a cooperative venture between a partnership involving American and Congolese conservation groups and government agencies, and they are addressing the local practices of hunting bonobos as well. All bonobos in the wild live in the Congo.
Hat tip…
j7uy5 | November 20, 2007Here is a part of a screenshot, showing the most-viewed
pages:
Notice that the page on homosexuality has 78% as many visits
as the main page. The site?
rel="tag" href="http://www.conservapedia.com/Special:Statistics">Conservapedia:
"The Trustworthy Encyclopedia." It is a wiki, like
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="tag">Wikipedia,
but for conservatives.
See the entire screenshot
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/conservapedia-screenshot.JPG">here.
This was posted on
href="http://politics.reddit.com/info/611rb/comments/">Reddit…