Politics
tqa | October 11, 2007
It looks like Nancy Pelosi might be getting just a wee bit frustrated with the Democratic base. It also looks like she's got a lack of understanding of the proper relationship between politicians and the people that sorely needs correcting. At a recent press lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, she said this:
Activists who want to target congressional Democrats for lack of action on the war are misguided, the speaker argued. "I think it is a waste of time for them to go after Democratic members. They ought to just persuade Republican members who are representing areas that are…
jlynch | October 10, 2007PZ says something good in agreement with a post by Brian Leiter:
I’d suggest that the Christo-Fascists have done far more damage to our country than any Islamo-Fascist -- after all, the Islamic hordes haven’t been responsible for stripping away our civil liberties, nor did they force us to spend trillions on a fool’s war, nor did they turn Jesus into Mammon, nor did they replace education and science with ignorance and piety.
Truth be told, we do have less to fear from Bin Laden than from Bush and his cronies. But I will add that not all Christians are "Christo-Fascists."
pharyngula | October 10, 2007David Horowitz (you all remember him, right? Deranged anti-intellectual wanker?) He has declared 22-26 October to be Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, to be represented with talks by such towering intellects as Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity.
Brian Leiter has a complementary suggestion: the week after should be Christian-Fascism Awareness Week.
Now I don't want to interfere with Horowitz's effort, which is in the spirit of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan: "fundamentalism is the enemy of all civilized humanity." So one week devoted to Islamic…
pharyngula | October 10, 2007I wouldn't normally just publish a press release here, but in this case, 1) it's an important issue, the Republican squashing of the SCHIP bill to reauthorize a health insurance program for poor children, 2) it's about Michele Bachmann, a truly contemptible creature of the far right wing, and 3) my son Alaric has been working with Americans Against Escalation in Iraq on turning out the opposition to Bachmann — so it's a good cause, a wretched villain, and a little family connection.
The story is that Cruella deVille Michele Bachmann was one of the conservative drones who voted to let poor…
j7uy5 | October 10, 2007Fred
Thompson's campaign site has the following quote on the home
page:
"We are steeped in the tradition of honor and sacrifice for the greater
good. We are proud of this heritage. I believe that
Americans are once again ready to achieve this greater good, which is
nothing less than the security, prosperity, and unity of our country."
In contrast, there is a rather damaging article about Fred Thompson on
the ABC News site, The Blotter.
href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/10/nixon-on-thomps.html">Nixon
on Thompson: 'Dumb' but 'Friendly'
October 09, 2007 9:06 AM
Fred…
oracknows | October 10, 2007One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I'm not sure if it's cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper's banner and not have it reflect on their reptuation, but reputable papers have in some cases allowed some seriously credulous people to spread misinformation in a seemingly respectable form.
This thought occurred to me when I was made aware of a blog entry by…
evolvingthoughts | October 9, 2007
It seems that almost nobody can mention Jews without making an inadvertent or deliberate ass of themselves. Most recently, Richard Dawkins put his foot in it in this Guardian article. He said:
When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.
Now, I know what he's trying to say here…
pharyngula | October 9, 2007This is an excellent brief overview of the crucial problems in American education by Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Washington who also served on an advisory committee under GW Bush. From his first hand view, he does not seem kindly disposed towards Republican policies in science.
Presidential scientific advisory committees have been politicized. I have seen this firsthand. The general denigration of science emanating from the White House, and the near completee failure of the President's Science Advisor, Jack Marburger, to speak out, is poisonous. Right…
pharyngula | October 9, 2007We're seeing an ugly form of intolerance creeping into the western states, carried with slavic evangelicals who hate homosexuals.
A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the…
pharyngula | October 9, 2007Happy news for Stevens County: Senate Candidate Al Franken will be speaking in Morris this Thursday (Oct. 11) at 7:00 in the Science Auditorium on the UMM campus, in a talk is sponsored by the UMM College Democrats. No charge, open to the public, everyone should come.
I'll be there!
jrosenhouse | October 9, 2007It seems that Larry Craig is not resigning:
Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho, defying the wishes of many in his own Republican Party, said Thursday that he would remain in the Senate through next year despite a court ruling against him in Minnesota, where he had sought to rescind his guilty plea stemming from an undercover sex sting.
Shortly after a judge denied his request to withdraw the August plea admitting to disorderly conduct, Mr. Craig said he had reversed his previously announced decision to leave the Senate if he could not get the plea thrown out. He said he would instead serve out…
neurophilosophy | October 9, 2007
The vilification of Arabs in American popular culture serves an ideological purpose: the dehumanization of America's "enemy" in the "clash of civilisations".
(Via Woman of Color Blog)
pharyngula | October 9, 2007Another Republican has been caught playing footsie in a bathroom stall. And he's got such a perfect Republican name — Joey DiFatta — and such a perfect Republican look — pale and plump — that I hate to see him go.
There's only one thing we can do. We have to make toe-tapping illegal. It's obviously the root cause of a lot of vice and criminal activity.
I don't even want to think about the horrible things Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire must have done. And Shirley Temple…!
tsmith | October 9, 2007If you thought botflies were bad, check out Bug Girl's post on tumbu flies.
The adult flies lay their eggs on wet laundry hanging out to dry, or in the soil or sand. Within two days, larvae hatch, and can remain alive for up to two weeks. During that time, if they come into contact with skin, they burrow in.
Oh, don't worry, there's more...check out the link to see how vaseline and ironing your underwear come into play.
jrosenhouse | October 8, 2007From the stopped clock department, two of my least favorite New York Times columnists have managed to get it right on the subject of Clarence Thomas.
Here's Frank Rich:
This could be seen most vividly on “60 Minutes,” when he revisited a parable about the evils of affirmative action that is also a centerpiece of his memoir: his anger about the “tainted” degree he received from Yale Law School. In Mr. Thomas's account, he stuck a 15-cent price sticker on his diploma after potential employers refused to hire him. By his reckoning, a Yale Law graduate admitted through affirmative action, as he…
tqa | October 8, 2007
One of the alleged facts that President Bush loves to point at when he's trying to justify his veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) expansion is that the new bill would have allowed New York to enroll children from families making up to 400% of the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that works out to an annual income of about $83,000. The President and his staff appear to find $83,000 to be a very impressive number. It's certainly one that they talk about a heck of a lot - as far as I can tell, everyone from the White House who has said anything about the…
drorzel | October 8, 2007It's a public holiday here in the US, which means it's an Open House day on campus, as Admissions brings in a whole herd of high-schoolers to try to convince them to apply and enroll. This messes up the parking even more than usual, and also requires a bit of extra faculty effort to chat with students and parents, and give lab tours and the like. There's no rest for the wicked.
Anyway, in honor of the holiday that I'm not getting (Kate has the day off), here's a totally non-controversial question to discuss:
Who is your favorite "discoverer" of North and South America?
Today is Columbus day…
clock | October 8, 2007Kirk Ross in this week's 'Carrboro Citizen':
Jim Neal, a key Democratic Party fundraiser, is on the verge of announcing a run for U.S. Senate, sources close to Neal say.
Neal, a native of Greensboro who now lives in Chapel Hill, will head to Asheville this weekend for the Vance-Aycock Dinner, a traditional gathering of Democratic Party movers and shakers and a place where potential candidates often test the waters. He is expected to file official paperwork as early as this week.
Neal was a top fundraiser for the John Kerry and John Edwards ticket in 2004 and a major supporter of Gen. Wesley…
oracknows | October 7, 2007Richard Dawkins really should know better.
That's why it's frustrating to see him put his foot in his mouth in a big way in a recent interview. Indeed, he did it in a way that leaves himself wide open to charges of anti-Semitism:
In an interview with the Guardian, he said: "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence…