Politics
clock | March 6, 2007You may have heard that Libby was found guilty today. Apparently, the decision for the jury was easy.
But what do you think the FoxNews-watching mouthbreathers are hearing? The official spin, of course. Which they will continue to believe for years to come. As in "Libby not guilty":
Keep it simple: somebody in the White House lied and as a result we went to Iraq. Period.
grrlscientist | March 6, 2007You can't call yourself a thinktank if all your ideas are stupid ... Bill Maher explores this idea a little further in this streaming video.
grrlscientist | March 5, 2007Our nation's long-range fiscal situation is in grave peril, according to David Walker, and our deficit is growing daily. If nothing changes, the federal government will only be able to pay for the interest on the accumulated debt, and will be unable to cover health care, social security, education, national defense, homeland security, and other perks. Walker, the nation's top accountant and head of the Government Accountability Office has gotten tired of being ignored by government officials so he now is taking his message directly to the taxpayers as you will see in this streaming video.
clock | March 5, 2007Via Pam and Melissa, from Nation, the CPAC: The Unauthorized Documentary - must-see video showing what conservatism is:
clock | March 5, 2007And you don't even have to believe in dinosaurs to share their fate.
From here. And the preceeding paragraph? Another great quote:
"You know how taking so long to end slavery is a shameful part of our history, and how long it took us to give the vote to women is a shameful part of our history? Well, I think in 20 years, we're going to think that denying marriage to gays for so long is one of the great shames of our nation, too." That's from a teenager in Redneckville. She's our future--and Donohue, LaBarbera, and company are just desperate dinosaurs.
jlynch | March 5, 2007I really have to stop paying attention to Ann Coulter, but this quote that Steve highlights just shows her as the ignorant troll she really is:
Professors are the most cosseted, pussified, subsidized group of people in the U.S. workforce. They have concocted a system to preemptively protect themselves for not doing their jobs, known as "tenure." They make a lot of money, have health plans that would make New York City municipal workers' jaws drop, and work -- at most -- fifteen hours a week.
Were that it be true that I worked "at most" 15 hours a week! But there is a certain irony in this…
j7uy5 | March 5, 2007A
while back, I wrote (twice) about the nettlesome issue of
rel="tag"
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/endocrine_disruptors.php">endocrine
disruptors. A more detailed post was offered at
href="http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/02/lavender_and_tea_tree_oils_may.php">Terra
Sig. The reason this is a nettlesome problem is
that it is an area with potentially huge implications, but with not
enough hard data.
The huge implications come in two forms: if we are not cautious enough,
we could be inadvertently lowering our fertility by exposure to
chemicals that…
clock | March 4, 2007In most cases below comment threads are more interesting than the posts, but let's see when Anne Coulter will show up on TV or at a conservatives' meeting next time, so we can ask "Why?"
John Edwards
Elizabeth Edwards
Glenn Greenwald
David Neiwert
Mick Arran
John McKay
John Lynch
Neil the Ethical Werewolf
Ed Brayton
Ed Cone
The Malcontent
Pam Spaulding, and again here (more comments here and here)
Kagro X
Pioneer111
(Yes, there are gazillions of Diaries on Daily Kos about this, some good)
Lindsay Beyerstein
Aldon Hynes
Mustang Bobby
Matt Stoller
Nancy Scola (and again)
...and unrelated, but…
evolvingthoughts | March 4, 2007
What do you do with a lawyer who attacks detention without charge, who defends habeus corpus, denies that retrospective legislation should apply, and criticises the thinness of evidence against his client?
You'd give him a legal award, wouldn't you? After all, he is defending not only his client, but the entire jurisprudence on which liberal democracy is founded, right?
Not so in Amerika today. Maj. Michael Mori, who is the militarily-appointed defence lawyer for David Hicks, the Australian who stupidly went to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to train as a freedom fighter before 9/11, is…
j7uy5 | March 4, 2007Point one: when sanctions were imposed upon Iraq after the first Gulf
War, Iraqi children began starving. But we did not blame
ourselves. After all, it was Mr. Saddam Hussein who chose to
spend money on more palaces, rather than on feeding the children.
It was not our fault, that he did not spend his money wisely,
after his source of funding was reduced.
Fast forward to today, and consider point two: Currently, the US and
its Congress are debating whether to reduce funding for the military
effort. Some people object, saying that would leave troops
with out armor, without necessary…
grrlscientist | March 3, 2007Sulky, sullen Joe Lieberman plans to deliver the Democrats' radio response to President Bush today and urge the president and Congress to "hold the Pentagon and Army chain of command accountable for the neglect of our soldiers at Walter Reed".
-- Yes, that Lieberman, the crybaby who stomped his little foot and said he was going to defect from the Democrat party if he didn't get his way.
Absolutely unbelievable.
jlynch | March 2, 2007Ann Coulter's one woman crusade to bring civility back to American politics took a turn for the worst today. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, she had this to say:
I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I -- so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards.
Stay classy, Ann.
pharyngula | March 2, 2007Tim Lambert summarizes an informal survey of 59 right-wing bloggers: 100% of them deny the idea that humans are the primary cause of global warming, contradicting the scientific evidence. They were also asked about other issues—the majority approve of the "surge" in Iraq, think Bush is doing an acceptable job in foreign policy, and believe Democrats like the idea of losing the war in Iraq, but only on global warming is their unanimity.
It's too bad the survey didn't ask about other science issues. I'd like to know if they are similarly wrong about evolution, HIV as the cause of AIDS, and…
grrlscientist | March 2, 2007Is Bush suffering from presenile dementia? Is this the result of Alzheimer's Disease or is it the result of brain damage due to excessive drug and alcohol use? Your guess is as good as mine.
Or maybe there is genius behind the stupidity, as you saw earlier? (just to remind you of the previous video)
grrlscientist | March 1, 2007
Any ideas of where George W Bush and his minions fit into this scheme?
grrlscientist | March 1, 2007Below the fold is a streaming video where we learn more about the genius behind the stupidity that is otherwise known as "the W."
mixingmemory | March 1, 2007While I think it's obvious to anyone with eyes (a category that seems to grow smaller by the day) that within the anti-religious bigotry today there is an underlying feeling of superiority, an unliberal belittling of the little guy, a feeling that "Joe Schmoe" is stupid and to some extent worth less than the intellectually righteous secularist, there is another element to rabid atheist criticisms of religion that I find both disturbing and puzzling. As many of the comments to my recent post and Pharyngula's post on the same topic illustrate, these criticisms of religion are largely based on…
pharyngula | February 28, 2007Hey, you mean America isn't the sole refuge of pious war-mongers? I was sent this remarkable quote from Cardinal Meisner of Köln:
Einem Gott lobenden Soldaten kann man guten
Gewissens Verantwortung über Leben und Tod anderer
übertragen, weil sie
bei ihm gleichsam von der Heiligkeit Gottes mitabgesegnet sind … Wem käme es in den Sinn, Soldaten, die auch Beter sind , dann
noch als Mörder zu diskriminieren. Nein, in betenden Händen ist die
Waffe vor
Mißbrauch sicher.
It begins "One can in good conscience give a God-praising soldier responsibility over the life and death of others" and ends with…
pharyngula | February 28, 2007Well, not really—but the UK government will tolerate and support research into human-animal hybrids. No one is interested in raising a half-pig/half-man creature to adulthood, but instead this work is all about understanding basic mechanisms of development and human disease.
Scientists want to create the hybrid embryos to study the subtle molecular glitches that give rise to intractable diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and cystic fibrosis. The researchers would take a cell from a patient and insert it into a hollowed out animal egg to make an embryo, which would be 99.9% human and 0.…