Politics
hrynyshyn | August 28, 2007Robert Fisk does not deserve to be the inspiration a net-derived term describing a point-by-point debunking of one's argument. He has consistently brought his readers insightful stories about the real world of the Middle East. But my admiration for his skills as a witness to history suffered a near-lethal blow yesterday as I read his latest Independent column, in which he tackles allegedly unanswered questions surrounding the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Again, I must emphasize that in my opinion, until now Fisk has been a remarkably astute observer of current events in in Lebanon, Israel,…
j7uy5 | August 27, 2007William Rivers Pitt argues that what the President, Cheney, and Gonzalez have done is not illegal. Apparently, it is not illegal for the President to declare himself and his administration to be above the law. The idea is so outrageous that it never occurred to anyone to make it illegal.
jrosenhouse | August 27, 2007Have a look at this op-ed from today's Washington Post, by Susan Goodkin and David Gold :
With reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act high on the agenda as Congress returns from its recess, lawmakers must confront the fact that the law is causing many concerned parents to abandon public schools that are not failing.
These parents are fleeing public schools not only because, as documented by a recent University of Chicago study, the act pushes teachers to ignore high-ability students through its exclusive focus on bringing students to minimum proficiency. Worse than this benign…
tsmith | August 27, 2007Yes, that's actually the argument made by the Orwellian group, PRISM ("Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine"):
Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by:
* undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it;
* opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record;
* subjecting the…
pharyngula | August 27, 2007Classes start this week at UMM and next week at our branch campuses in the Twin Cities, and it looks like we might get to deal with a clerical workers' strike. AFSCME Local 3800 is taking to the picket lines to protest the inadequate pay raises offered to them. We're all tightening our belts in our underfunded universities — we've had salary and hiring freezes in the few years I've been here, and we're seeing cuts to library services and teaching lab support; you could argue, I suppose, as university president Bruininks does, that we're all in this together and that everyone should compromise…
oracknows | August 26, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 26, 2005 and is the fifth ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Führer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster ultimately became. Enjoy!
The Hitler zombie's been a busy undead Führer the last three weeks (1, 2, 3, 4), and it's time (I hope) for him to go back into…
oracknows | August 25, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 23, 2005 and is the fourth ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Fuhrer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster became. Enjoy!
It would be no fun at all to write this blog if everyone always agreed with me. (Of course, it would be even less fun if everyone violently…
oracknows | August 25, 2007Vacation time! While Orac off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 22, 2005 and is the third ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Führer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster evolved into. Enjoy! (Note: I did not check all of the links; if some of them are now dead, I'm sorry.)
I've been wanting to write about Senator Dick…
jrosenhouse | August 24, 2007But when it comes to brain-dead venom-spewing, Kristol is an amateur compared to Town Hall columnist Lisa De Pasquale. How bad have things gotten for the right? Well, let's have a look.
A standard criticism of the phony machismo that is the stock-in-trade of right-wing politicans is that they are unwilling to see their own children fight in the wars they are so fond of starting. This is often presented as a slam-dunk argument exposing their utter hypocrisy. That's precisely what it is. The question “Would I be willing to serve, or see my children serve, in this war?” is one every…
jrosenhouse | August 24, 2007Now that it has become obvious to all that every stated reason for the Iraq War was either an outright lie or a gross exaggeration, and that any hope for a successful outcome was squandered by the incompetence and myopia of the Bush administration, the Right's know-nothing political lackeys have been reduced to bleating about the left's hatred of the military.
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol offered up his version a few weeks ago in this editorial, subtly titled, “They Don't Really Support the Troops:”
With the ongoing progress of the surge, and the obvious fact that the vast majority…
pharyngula | August 24, 2007Our Minnesota Health Commissioner, a Republican appointee who was supported by our Republican governor through a number of startlingly clueless incidents, has finally resigned. Here's a short summary of her career:
This summer, Mandernach was criticized over her suppression of a state study about 35 cancer deaths related to taconite mining on Minnesota's Iron Range.
In 2004, her credibility suffered when a website posting by the department suggested that abortion might have a role in breast cancer. Critics denounced those claims as junk science, and the wording was removed from the website.…
evolvingthoughts | August 24, 2007
As part of the "War on Drugs" an entire family of hydroponics sellers, selling legally available material, were sentenced to prison without parole. Gary Tucker has just been released after a ten year stretch and confiscation of all his goods and money. His brother Steve died of cancer in prison. Why? He refused to allow the DEA to install surveillance cameras in his store to identify his customers.
"This isn't Nazi Germany" he said. One wonders... read the rest. It's harrowing.
Hat tip to the Lippard Blog
oracknows | August 23, 2007This story's been floating around the blogosphere for a few days now, and I've been wanting to weigh in. Basically, Medicare is saying that it will no longer pay for conditions and treatments that result from hospital errors. Sounds reasonable on the surface, right? After all, if a surgeon leaves a sponge in a patient, why should the patient or the patient's insurance company have to pay for the extra operation that it takes to remove the object and the additional hospital time? Most surgeons, at least, don't charge a fee for the reoperation to remove a retained surgical instrument or object…
oracknows | August 23, 2007You know, even though I know he's been a Republican talker for a long time, that he worked for the Nixon administration as a speechwriter and lawyer, I've always kind of liked Ben Stein. My wife and I used to like to watch Win Ben Stein's Money, and he was quite amusing as the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He's always come across as a pleasant doofus, even though I know that image appears to be carefully calculated one.
Now I learn that he's the narrator and a driving force behind a pro-"intelligent design" movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which is due to be released…
denialism | August 22, 2007Multiple news outlets have been reporting on the sudden increase in cost for birth control prescriptions at health centers on college campuses.
The cause?
Health experts say the price bump for college students was inadvertent -- a byproduct of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, a federal law that went into effect in January. The law alters how drug makers calculate Medicaid-related rebates paid to states, but it ultimately made it expensive for companies to offer schools such deep discounts on birth control. As a result, brand name prescription prices for campus clinics rose from about…
j7uy5 | August 22, 2007Senator
rel="tag">Dick Durbin has started a project using
an innovative method of writing legislation:
href="http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=318">What
should be America's national broadband strategy?
by: Dick Durbin
Sun Jul 22, 2007 at 13:06:58 PM EDT
(This diary will remain at the top of the page for the next day. New
content will continue to appear below. For example, check out Jenifer
Fernandez Ancona's The Role of Candidates in Movement-Building, and
Matt's Why Are Men Overrepresented in CNN/Youtube Debate Submissions? -
promoted by Chris Bowers)
Today I'm…
pharyngula | August 20, 2007This sounds like it's got to be a spoof, but it's so weird it could also be true. Karl Rove's adoptive father was a cover model … for a magazine about genital piercing. That's fine by me, it's just that it does make me wonder what's going on in Karl Rove's head — an honest biography of the man would be fascinating.
evolvingthoughts | August 18, 2007
I do not care if a politicians visits a strip club. In fact, a politician that did it and owns up without embarassment would be a good choice to pick, because you know he's not going to pull that family values crap in the future. But a politician who visits one, owns up, and then apologises? You know he's going to try to have it both ways.
Too many Australian politicians are playing the religious card lately. Rudd is one of them. C'mon folks, we're Australians, not Americans. We should be like the French or Italians and cheer anyone who shows he's human, male and occasionally stupid. Stop…
voltagegate | August 18, 2007
I blogged about a study of tropical dry forests in southern Madagascar a while back where the researchers found that the rates of deforestation had dropped in recent years. The challenge was to find out exactly why.
Ecologists studying deforestation in the Amazon may have a similar challenge. The Brazilian government is claiming that new legislation and increased policing of their portion of the forest has reduced the harvest by 25 percent.
They're right about one thing. Deforestation is at its lowest since they started recording rates - only 14,000 kilometers cut down between 2005 and 2006…