Politics
clock | February 21, 2007...Amanda Marcotte still supports John Edwards. Puts to lie the media framing of "bloggers vs. Edwards". It was all along "bloggers AND Edwards AND many more ordinary people vs. the Establishment (of both parties) AND the Right Wing smear machine.
oracknows | February 21, 2007Fellow ScienceBloggers Ed, PZ, Afarensis, Tim, and John have all been having loads of fun beating up on a rather amusing and pathetic project known as Conservapedia, which, according to its creators, is designed to "combat the liberal bias" in Wikipedia. There's not much for me to add, except that I noticed one particularly amusing howler in Conservapedia's Examples of Liberal Bias in Wikipedia page:
Wikipedia's entry for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a conservative group, features a rant against the group by a British journalist who was a former press officer for the…
pharyngula | February 21, 2007At least, I hope so. The "conservapedia" is supposed to be an alternative to Wikipedia that removes the biases—although one would think the creators would be clever enough to realize that even the name announces that Conservapedia is planning to openly embrace a particular political bias. Unfortunately, that bias seems to be more towards stupidity than anything else.
In fact, reading through it leads me to wonder if it isn't actually a parody site. Some people are getting the same impression of Overwhelming Evidence, the Intelligent Design site that was set up to cater to the teen crowd, but…
clock | February 21, 2007OK, they call it a 'forum' on economic issues only. In Nevada today at noon (local time - 2pm Eastern), streaming here (It will also be on C-SPAN live). Obama is the only announced contender who will be missing.
Not to be confused with the August 2007 debate in Nevada, which, believe it or not, will be hosted by FOX News as if it was a legitimate news channel! Why are the Democrats agreeing to this? Don't they remember the last time they endured a debate on Fox? Why are they legitimizing a Republican PR agency?
tsmith | February 21, 2007...I'm sure they'll be happy to see that Gambia's president is curing AIDS:
From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia's president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient -- a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.
He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.
"Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof," President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound…
pharyngula | February 20, 2007SWAT teams training for drug raids casually shoot target dogs, so guess what they do on the real raids? Fascist scumbags. In anything other than a police state, you'd expect the law enforcers to be held to the highest possible standards of conduct; in the US, the police with the biggest guns are unrestrained by ordinary decency. Slaughtering family pets is what I'd expect of a psychopath.
(via Jim Lippard)
pharyngula | February 20, 2007Ugh. Jim Wallis. That left-wing theo-nut.
Progressive politics is remembering its own religious history and recovering the language of faith. Democrats are learning to connect issues with values and are now engaging with the faith community. They are running more candidates who have been emboldened to come out of the closet as believers themselves.
What planet is he from? Have American politicians of any party been afraid to label themselves as religious at any time in the past century? We see the opposite problem: they all declare themselves best buddies with a god.
He also goes on to do…
jlynch | February 19, 2007Yet another reason why John McCain is increasingly less deserving of any respect. from anyone who once thought he was a moderate Republican:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, looking to improve his standing with the party's conservative voters, said Sunday that the court decision legalizing abortion should be overturned.
"I do not support Roe vs. Wade. It should be overturned," the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.
McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who "strictly interpret the Constitution of the…
oracknows | February 19, 2007Apparently some librarians and parents are upset that a children's book (which happens to have won the Newberry Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature) has, within its pages, the use of the word "scrotum." The book, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patronhas, been banned in some school libraries, mostly in the South.
Money quote:
"I think it's a good case of an author not realizing her audience," said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. "If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn't want to have to explain that."
Really, are…
pharyngula | February 19, 2007Nathan Newman asks a good question about Mitt Romney's rejection of the godless:
And at some level, why shouldn't a person's religious beliefs be relevant?
They should be. However, when one holds a minority belief about religion, one that is widely reviled, then it is to one's interest to insist that religion be off the table. That's a purely pragmatic concern. In addition, I think there's an element of resentment: we atheists have been told so often to sit down and shut up and keep our opinions out of the debate, even by people who don't believe in religion themselves, that we tend to get a…
clock | February 18, 2007Ed Cone has a new op-ed up: The way we politick now:
Use new media to influence old media, for example, and read the Web to find out what people are talking about outside the campaign bubble. Understand that the news cycle is dead and that stories don't just fade away anymore; the Web operates in an eternal present, where information gets posted in close-to-real-time and remains a click away forever.
j7uy5 | February 17, 2007I am taking my time with the next big post, and happen to be on call,
so I'm not getting enough sleep this week.
I know this is old, but it still amuses me.
terrasig | February 17, 2007If I live to 93 and someone holds a mirror up to my life, I wonder how proud or embarrassed I would be.
In my weekend reading, I realized that I never commented on the passing last month of former Florida Democratic Senator, George A. Smathers. He was 93 and left this world largely revered by today's Floridians.
I bring up Smathers because of my educational links to the State of Florida, my previous writing on Florida civil rights leader Stetson Kennedy, and the melding of Smathers and Kennedy by Woody Guthrie in a song written to drum up votes during Kennedy's unsuccessful write-in campaign…
clock | February 16, 2007After writing her side of the story in Salon, Amanda Marcotte is quite busy in the media these days, making various apperances on radio, including NPR's DayTo Day next week. She will also be joining TPM Cafe and has a post up on Huffington Post: Think Tanks, 503s and Rush Limbaugh--What's The Real 'Soft Money'
Now, Melissa McEwen published her take on the whole affair in Guardian: My life as a rightwing target. Check the comments and tell me that the Rightwingers are not delusional, dangerous psychopaths. And they are in the White House right now. (Oh, and if anyone thinks that Amanda and…
grrlscientist | February 16, 2007This list of 20 amazing facts about voting in America should make you think hard about the "moderinization" of voting machines and how easy it is to steal an election with them.
80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.
The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its…
clock | February 16, 2007This is less than a year old (March 05, 2006), but instructive now that the campaigning has actually started...Also, click on the spiderweb icon to see interesting comments on the original post.
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In his latest op-ed (here is a link from News and Observer: Edwards and poverty's character), George Will, writing in his typical "I-write-so-elegantly-you-will-never-detect-the-underlying-stupidity" mode, takes on John Edwards.
Was it a slow week, lack of inspiration, or was it a depeche from the RNC, only George knows, but it contains several points that need…
clock | February 16, 2007Escalating Truth:
Words have meanings; they express ideas and ideas are important. The word "surge" came with the idea of a relatively small short-term increase in force that would be effective. Such previous troop increases had been ineffective and the joint chiefs saw no reason that this one would be effective either. The actual proposal called a "surge" was the opposite of what the word meant. In short, the very use of the word "surge" was a lie.
People all over the country noticed the "surge" framing immediately, and quickly -- and accurately -- reframed the President's proposal as an "…
grrlscientist | February 15, 2007The Bush administration has made no secret of its disdain for science, especially science that pertains to global warming, stem-cell research and endangered animals and plants. The chilling effect this has on science, public health and on the public good is documented in Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2005, 2006), which was recently released in paperback.
As Mooney argues in this well-written book, disregard for scientists and the scientific method has been carefully nurtured by the modern conservative movement, which is a movement anchored in…