Politics
clock | August 29, 2006Previously unopposed, "...the most notorious creationist on the Ohio State Board of Education, Deborah Owens Fink, has a challenger in the Novemeber 7th election." The election is non-partisan and the serious challenger is Tom Sawyer. You can get all of the details from Ed Brayton (as well as additional views by Chad, John and Kevin). Ed writes:
"Sawyer is the former mayor of Akron, a former state legislator and an 8 term US congressman from Ohio. Sawyer's bonafides for a board of education seat are impressive. He is a former school teacher, and husband of a school teacher. He was the…
pharyngula | August 29, 2006Chris has his latest, greatest cartoon. It's correct: you're either nuts, short-sightedly stupid, or venal to an extreme if you support the Republican party in any way anymore.
pharyngula | August 29, 2006This Newsweek article on the latest innovation in stem cell research is infuriating. The author, Michael Gerson, is a Republican hack with no competence in biology, which seems to qualify him to be a serious judge of science to this administration.
The issue of stem cells was the first test of the infant Bush administration, pitting the promise of medical discovery against the protection of developing life and prompting the president's first speech to the nation. His solution--funding research on existing stem-cell lines, but not the destruction of embryos to create new ones--was seen as a…
clock | August 29, 2006My SciBling Chris Mooney, the first science blogger I ever discovered (and whose blogroll let me into the scienceblogging world) is the author of one of the most important books of last year, The Republican War On Science.
I have read the hardcover as soon as I got it (and my copy was shipped in the first batch) and intend to read the paperback as soon as it arrives in my mailbox - which should be today or tomorrow as the book started shipping yesterday. Until your own copy arrives in the mail (and it will be soon, of course, as you are about to order it), you should check out the book…
tsmith | August 29, 2006 As has been mentioned elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, Ohio creationst Deborah Owens Fink is facing a challenge for her seat on Ohio's school board this coming November 7th. Fink has been one of those who, when I've contacted the Board members to urge them to support good science, I've not even bothered with--it's a waste of keystrokes. Ed has the lowdown on the situation, and the Columbus Dispatch has more:
This year, pro-evolution members prevailed in efforts to strip a provision from highschool science standards that they said promoted the teaching of intelligent design.
"They got what they…
revere | August 29, 2006It's hard for a lot of us to understand how the rich get richer by giving money away, but here's one way.
Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and his relatives have claimed millions of dollars in tax deductions through a type of charitable foundation they created that until recently paid out very little in actual charity, tax records show.
Instead, much of the foundation's money has been invested or lent to the family's business interests and real estate holdings, or contributed to the Leavitt family genealogical society.
The Leavitts used nearly $9 million of their assets to set…
oracknows | August 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
jlynch | August 28, 2006The maintenance of intellectually sound K-12 science standards involves the work of people at many levels - scientists, educators, school board members, and the general public. I have been privileged to work with numerous great people over the years here in Arizona on just this issue, one such individual being Steve Rissing who is now at Ohio State University. Steve continues to fight the good fight, and if you are in Ohio, you too can help him and the people at Ohio Citizens for Science.
If you're in Ohio, please read this post by Ed Brayton and act on it. As Ed notes, school board elections…
drorzel | August 28, 2006Here's the other quote from Chuck Klosterman IV that I mentioned earlier, this one from an essay in Esquire on people who feel betrayed by pop culture:
Do you want to be happy? I suspect that you do. Well, here's the first step to happiness: don't get pissed off that people who aren't you happen to think Paris Hilton is interesting and deserves to be on TV every other day; the fame surrounding Paris Hilton is not a reflection on your life (unless you want it to be). Don't get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren't on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn album and play "Maps" all…
drorzel | August 28, 2006It feels a little silly to quote Chuck Klosterman as some sort of Deep Thinker-- this is a guy whose whole claim to fame revolves around the expression of weirdly absolute opinions about pop culture ephemera, after all. Then again, the best political reporting being done these days is done by a pair of comedy shows, so maybe it's not so stupid.
Anyway, there were two passages in his new collection, Chuck Klosterman IV, that really struck a chord when I read them the other night. Well, OK, there were more than two, but there were two that struck me as worthy of blog posts. Here's the first:
It…
tsmith | August 28, 2006 Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. coturnix and others are collecting strories from around the blogosphere on the aftermath in New Orleans and elsewhere; the cleanup effort (still ongoing, barely begun in some areas); rebuilding (likewise; lagging far behind where even many pessimists thought it would be by this time); and moving back into the area (not an option for many). The area, it seems, will never be the same.
I've discussed problems with disaster preparedness previously on this blog; therefore, I won't use this as another soapbox to discuss…
j7uy5 | August 28, 2006This is from a recent White House press conference. The
href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060821/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_text">transcript
is on Yahoo News.
QUESTION: A lot of the consequences
you
mentioned for pulling out seem like maybe they never would have been
there if we hadn’t gone in. How do you square all of that?
BUSH: I square it because imagine a world in which you had
Saddam
Hussein, who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who
was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who had relations with
Zarqawi.
You know, I’ve heard this theory about, you know,…
stcynic | August 28, 2006Stepford Senate candidate Katherine Harris attempted to "clarify" what she meant last week when she told the Florida Baptist Witness that separation of church and state was a lie and that God decides who gets elected. Here's her explanation:
Harris' campaign released a statement Saturday saying she had been "speaking to a Christian audience, addressing a common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government."
The comments reflected "her deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values," the statement said, adding that Harris had previously supported pro-Israel…
drorzel | August 28, 2006Word has reached me[1] that, "me that the most notorious creationist on the Ohio State Board of Education, Deborah Owens Fink, has a challenger in the Novemeber 7th election." For the politically inclined out there, some information:
The challenger is former Ohio congressman Tom Sawyer. She is asking for help from the other Citizens for Science groups in getting the word out and encouraging people to donate and get involved with the campaign...Collectively, we likely have several thousand readers in Ohio that we can encourage to get involved and support Sawyer's campaign. So I'm asking all my…
pharyngula | August 28, 2006The Florida Baptist Witness got various candidates for office to answer a few questions. They're bad questions, almost entirely focused on the issues of the religious right, but Katherine Harris clasped them to her bosom and ran with them. It's actually kind of creepy.
The Bible says we are to be salt and light. And salt and light means not just in the church and not just as a teacher or as a pastor or a banker or a lawyer, but in government and we have to have elected officials in government and we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the…
jlynch | August 27, 2006
I first posted this picture on September 8th 2005 in the wake of the ineptitude shown by the administration with their handling of Hurricane Katrina. As we approach the anniversary of the hurricane's second landfall on August 29th 2005 at Louisiana, we've little to convince us that the boy king hasn't been "one of the worst disasters to hit the U.S." If anything, Bush's resume is looking worse and worse.
As Maureen Dowd wrote last year:
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," [Bush] told Diane Sawyer. ... Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into…
clock | August 27, 2006Last year, there was so much blogging about Katrina, I thought that the best thing I could do was create a large linkfest of everyone else's posts. That is what I did - check it out here, a nice one-stop-shopping for the analysis and opinion at the time. If you need to refresh your memory that is the place to go. You can also find most of the iconic images collected in one place here.
But I did not entirely abstain from commenting myself, though I was trying to look for angles nobody else covered and news nobody else had - which was hard to find at that time. So, I blogged about how…
clock | August 27, 2006Yup, the Katrina blogswarm is supposed to be tomorrow, but Publius and The Science Pundit could not wait.
pharyngula | August 27, 2006This Connecticut mess is doing a great job of highlighting the structural incompetence of the Democratic party, isn't it? Sisyphus Shrugged quotes Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on the current situation with both Ned Lamont, the official Democratic candidate, and Joe Lieberman, sanctified egotist candidate, running in the November elections there.
"Explain to me how two Democrats running is bad," Mr. Emanuel said in an interview.
Setting aside the whole issue of the fact that Lieberman is not running as a Democrat…wait. Let's not set that aside…
pharyngula | August 27, 2006A neurobiologist at UCLA, Dario Ringach, has stopped doing research on primates. The reason?
Colleagues suggested that Ringach, who did not return e-mails seeking comment, was spooked by an attack on a colleague. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals. The explosive was accidentally placed on the doorstep of Fairbanks's elderly neighbor's house, and did not detonate.
Whoa. Incompetence and thuggish violence—what a combination. I love animals and think…