Politics
stoat | September 22, 2007So much cynicism just has to be correct. From CIP. Mind you, I think he is too kind to Petraeus.
pharyngula | September 22, 2007As many of the readers here know, one of the most common criticisms of us uppity atheists is the idea that the religion we critize doesn't exist: that the true power of faith is thoughtful, intelligent, and deep, and plucking out random weird beliefs isn't really representative. When I hear that (and I have, often), I just have to roll my eyes and give the apologist a scathing look — if they believe naive god-wallopers weren't the dominant form of religious belief on the planet, then I can at least castigate the self-declared 'sophisticated' theology for being an exercise in willful blindness…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2007Tim Lambert over at Deltoid links to this article, by Aaron Swartz, about the relentless right-wing smear campaign against Rachel Carson. Carson was the author of the 1962 book Silent Spring, where she argued, among other things, that pervasive use of pesticides such as DDT was leading to long-term, harmful effects on the environment. DDT was eventually banned in the US in 1972, in part because of the influence of Carson's book.
More recently, DDT spraying has been adopted as a cause celebre among many politicians and journalists. Swartz writes:
“What the World Needs Now Is DDT”…
pharyngula | September 21, 2007Mark Morford has an exceptionally optimistic — dare I say, "triumphal" — article on the collapse of the religious right today. People are reacting (in the right way, so far) to the tremendous damage the Bush presidency has done to our prestige, our security, our economy, our rights, and the legacy we'll leave to our children, and every reasonable person that Morford knows is reveling in the growing political morbidity of the Republican party. And it was all so inevitable.
But when you come right down to it, the Great Truism has been validated once again: Righteous fundamentalism, be it…
tqa | September 20, 2007
Gotta love it. The Senate today took a break from being paralyzed by Republican "No Up-Or-Down-Vote For You" obstructionists. They had to. You see, it's important for people to understand that the Senate isn't going to stand still when big mean Democrat netroots activists call a general a mean name. So they took time away from their busy schedule to pass a "sense of the Senate" resolution that reads:
To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks…
jrosenhouse | September 20, 2007I've just started reading Jonathan Chait's new book The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics.
One of the more remarkable developments in the last twenty-five years of American politics is the takeover of the Republican party by the lunacy of supply-side economics. Chait explains how a view of the economic world that is absurd on its face (that the behavior of a large, complex economy can be predicted solely on the basis of marginal tax rates) and has been proven to be false over and over again (for example, the uniform, and uniformly…
hrynyshyn | September 20, 2007Georetown University's Jacques Berlinerblau has some strange ideas, but they're usually provocative and sometime worth sharing, which is the case today with his slightly tongue-in-cheek proposal that atheists run a candidate for president. The goal: "This is not about winning or losing. This is about figuring out who nonbelievers are. This is about learning where they are." Hmmm.
Berlinerblau's list of possible candidates is perhaps too silly for his argument -- several of his choices don't qualify as they weren't born in the U.S. (Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushie). But what's really…
oracknows | September 20, 2007Mike the Mad Biologist posts a link to and excerpt from an article that he seems to think will make "M.D.'s heads explode."
It didn't. At least, not in the case of this M.D.
Basically, it's about physician reimbursement, a topic guaranteed provoke controversy, divided between those who think doctors are already overpaid (most non-physicians) and those who do not (most doctors). The article is by Shannon Brownlee and makes a proposal that is breathtakingly naive and poorly thought out:
...we don't end up saving any money by tightening reimbursements. But we do end up pissing off doctors, who…
clock | September 20, 2007Based in part on this study, lethal injection has been ruled (at least for now) unconstitutional in the state of Tennessee.
The executions by lethal injection have been on hold for several months now in North Carolina as well, until the legality of it is figured out. I hope NC follows in the footsteps of TN soon.
razib | September 19, 2007Over the past few years we've all heard about "Red" and "Blue" America. Pundits like David Brooks have written about how the two Americas are drifting apart through residential segregation in the real world or reading their own ideological media in the cyberworld. But over the past six months I've been involved in some political volunteer work relating to a local issue and I've seen voter lists with party registration, and I was struck by the number of Democrats and Republicans who lived in the same household! Husbands and wives, parents and children, and so on. There has always been a…
pharyngula | September 19, 2007People keep sending me interesting news stories! More than I can handle! So let me do a little linkdump here, and you can sort through them and see if anything is of interest.
Ben Stein is visiting Baylor! You knew they'd rush to squeeze in one more dramatic scene of the oppressive atmosphere at a Baptist university while the Marks/Dembski noise is still hot. The ass-prod, Mathis, is going to be cruising the campus for footage, and he claims the biology majors are reluctant to talk to him: "If you were a biology student, you wouldn't dare touch this." The implication is that biology majors…
tqa | September 19, 2007
Every time I read articles (like this one, this one, this one or this one) that talk about how the Democrats are having problems getting the 60 votes in the Senate that they need to move Iraq legislation forward, or how they won't be able to get the 2/3rds of both houses that they need to beat a veto, I get angrier. And not with the Republicans who are standing in the way.
The Democrats don't need more than a majority. The President can't spend money unless Congress lets him spend money. If Congress passes a spending bill and he vetoes it, he can't spend money. If Congress fails to pass a…
pharyngula | September 18, 2007Now the Catholic schools want to ban the HPV vaccine. I simply do not understand that attitude. I can understand wanting to protect your daughter from the entanglements and risks of too-young sex, but this is a vaccine to protect them 1) from a disease 2) transmitted by sex. My eyes tend to focus more on point 1 than on point 2; 1 has greater penalties and none of the joys of 2, and protecting against 1 does not entail that 2 will occur.
Is there something in those communion crackers that shorts out the logic circuits of the brain?
pharyngula | September 18, 2007Sometimes, men really suck. Amanda horrifies me with this wife-beating video: a horrible little man browbeats, strikes, and briefly chokes his wife while having their children videotape the whole thing. I guess he felt that she deserved it.
I couldn't help but noticed that the wretched Y-chromosome-bearing thug was also prominently wearing a bright, sparkly cross around his neck the whole time.
As if one shaming wasn't enough, Amanda also had to flaunt another example of male stupidity, a ghastly speech arguing that gender differences justify inequities — it goes on at length about the…
denialism | September 18, 2007I'm sad I missed the "Values Voters Presidential Debate", but I'm not alone. All the first-tier presidential candidates skipped it as well. The big winner was apparently Mike Huckabee according to the World Nut Daily, he apparently was the most hateful of them all. But the nuts are clearly upset at being snubbed by the candidates that actually have a chance of being nominated:
Debate panelist Rabbi Aryeh Spero of the Jewish Action Alliance asked, "How can we expect these no-show candidates to take on Osama bin Laden and other world leaders when they're afraid to show up and answer…
clock | September 18, 2007Blog about it, contact your Senators, and contact the Presidential candidates. Let's put some pressure on!
See what Mark Hoofnagle (and again) says.
Mike Dunford, PZ Myers (and again) and John Wilkins and their commenters have more (including all the contact information you'll ever need).
j7uy5 | September 17, 2007Look at these news briefs:
href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=cracking_down_on_corporate_abuses_abroad">In
March, Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, pled
guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to
making regular protection payments to Colombian right-wing paramilitary
groups totaling some $1.7 million between 2001 and 2004.
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/16/AR2007091601308.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter">The
Defense Department has picked five companies, four of them
from the…
choofnagle | September 17, 2007Mark is totally outperforming me on this blog for many reasons, but my newest excuse is that I went to Austin for the weekend to see the Austin City Limits Festival. W00t!!1!
So, I'm going to be covering some divine articles that appeared over the weekend. First up: Verizon, it's OUR network, baby! The Journal reports:
Verizon Wireless appealed the Federal Communications Commission's rules for a coming radio spectrum auction, charging the agency with exceeding its authority in requiring carriers to open their networks to any devices and cellphone applications.
Yes, you read that…
tqa | September 17, 2007
Once again, John "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" McCain went and said something stupid at a campaign stop. And, once again, he got caught on video doing it. This time, he went just slightly overboard in his criticism of the now-infamous MoveOn.org "General Betray-us" ad. Holding a blown-up, laminated copy of the ad, McCain said:
"It's disgraceful, it's got to be retracted and condemned by the Democrats and MoveOn.org ought to be thrown out of this country, my friends."
(And if you don't believe Time Magazine, CBS has the video footage.)
Unlike the "Bomb Iran" incident, this wasn't…
drorzel | September 17, 2007Before we bought our current house, coming up on five years ago, we looked at another slightly larger house that's literally just around the corner. It hadn't officially been listed yet, but our agent (who, weirdly, lives right next door) showed it to us, and we thought very hard about it. Unfortunately, it was about $20K more than the bank was willing to lend us, so we couldn't make an offer.
We looked at it on a Sunday, and talked to the bank on Monday. By Friday, it had sold, and for $10K more than the original asking price.
It was bought by a young couple, a professional contractor and…