Politics
evolvingthoughts | August 11, 2006This week's question is
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?...
I was in my sexually active 20s when AIDS hit, but it was a distant thing, something that affected gays and IV drug users, and I was not in the vulnerable categories. But I watched as partners of acquaintances died of it, and I now have several friends who either contracted it and died, or whose partners or children did. I am greatly more worried about it now than I was in the 1980s.
What worries me is not that I or my family might get it - Australia…
jlynch | August 11, 2006Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing:
Here's a question: Does Tony Blair get to bring his laptop on his government plane? Can Laura Bush keep her lipstick with her on Air Force One? Does Dick Cheney take off his shoes and get them x-rayed before he flies? How about Condi Rice's knee-high lace-up boots? Is her mission to Israel delayed while she tries to re-lace them while balancing her laptop bag on one shoulder and trying to get her watch back on?
It seems to me like our glorious leaders are pretty good at setting out the "minor inconveniences" that the rest of us have to put up with, but when…
clock | August 11, 2006 Before the days of Times Select, David Brooks used to provoke long rants twice a week. This post from October 24, 2004 is one of those.
David Brooks is so predictable. Every week or so, he comes up with a new scheme to explain the polarization of America. Each time he uses what seems to be different criteria, but are really just different terms. The funniest (and the worst) so far was the division into "spreadheet" and "paragraph" people (link: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/9660863.htm?1c ). This week, he came up with yet another one (link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
pharyngula | August 10, 2006Our local chapter of Drinking Liberally will be meeting at a special place and time tonight: it will start at 7:00, at the American Legion Beer Garden at the Stevens County Fair. After everyone has had enough beer, we will adjourn to the Tilt-A-Whirl to relive those sensations we all experienced in the 2004 elections.
stcynic | August 10, 2006Here's how a partisan hack spins election results. From Tony Snow's press conference yesterday:
One of the interesting things that happened in this Connecticut race, by the way, was there appeared to be some buyer's remorse as election day approached. Maybe the polls were rigged; maybe the polls were bad. But at least the lead that Mr. Lamont had went from 13 points to six to four on election day. That indicates that even in a fairly liberal state like Connecticut, where this is the one issue, where you had a well-financed candidate who had more money than the incumbent, that you still had a…
clock | August 10, 2006 This - "Apart From Being An Idiot, Horowitz Is Also An Unwiped Anal Orifice With Hemorrhoids" - is the worst and nastiest blog-post title I ever used. But I was furious. See why.... (first posted here on March 05, 2005, then republished here on December 10, 2005):
Chris is so nice. Way too nice. And naive. He actually contacted David Horowitz and offered to do a study that has a potential to PROVE Horowitz's claim that conservatives are discriminated against in the Academia. Read the whole episode here.
As you can see, my title is just an euphemistic version of what Horowitz called Chris!…
clock | August 9, 2006Publius
Lance
my wife
Mike Dunford
Ezra, Ezra, Ezra, Ezra
Nicholas Beaudrot , Nicholas Beaudrot
Mike
John
Ed
Jim
Vintage
Mbair
BlueinMo
ChrisinDet
Shar
MGC
Shakespeare's Sister
Echidne
Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay
Pam, Pam
Ed Cone, Ed Cone
Josh
Drum, Drum
stcynic | August 9, 2006This post demonstrates perfectly why I like Radley Balko's writing so much. He pulls no punches while puncturing the nonsense put out by the partisans in both parties. First he tells us why Lieberman was a lousy senator:
Look, Lieberman is a likeable guy (in the same way, as the lefty bloggers have noted, that Willie Tanner was). But he embodies so much of what's wrong with Washington. He's the prototypical David Broder candidate, a big government liberal who's willing to engage in magnanimous gestures of bipartisanship . . . on issues where Republicans also support big government. So he's…
stcynic | August 9, 2006Yesterday was primary day, not only in Connecticut, where the media has been in a frenzy over the Democratic contest between Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont, but in Michigan as well. We had an interesting fight going on in the Republican primary for the Senate, where Keith Butler, who looks for all the world like a corrupt evangelist in the Jim Bakker mold, is running for the chance to face incumbent Debbie Stabenow in November. It looks like Michigan was smart enough to reject this looney.
The Triangle Foundation has put out a document branding Butler as a fanatic and documenting his fraudulent…
j7uy5 | August 9, 2006James Robbins, contributing editor at the National Review Online,
thinks global warming is a good idea. This is proclaimed in
his article, Hooray for Global Warming.
This is another version of the "CO2
is life" meme. And like "CO2
is life," it is utter nonsense. Anyone who would say that
fails to grasp a critical point about climate science. I've
never actually done a fisking, and I do not particularly care for it as
a literary form, but this one begs for it...
href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTJmNWI4N2Y2NTBmY2E3ZTIzZjcxM2IzM2ZjNjRkYWI=">Hooray
for Global Warming
Surf’…
clock | August 8, 2006Lindsay is liveblogging from the Lamont HQ. My wife, who is not interested in nitty-gritty details of everyday politics and has no idea where Lieberman stands on any issue and has not heard a single word spoken by Liebermann, said that Joe's loss is totally unsurprising to her. She said that Joe lost today's race two years ago when the whole nation saw how weak he is - 'weak' in every sense of the term, as a person, as a politician, everything. Whoever remembers the pitiful scenes of Joementum from the 2004 primaries, even if completely uninterested in politics since then, cannot possibly…
j7uy5 | August 8, 2006I like this article on The Nation website so much,
I'm going to copy it in its entirety. It's from their blog, The
Notion, so I think it is OK to do that.
href="http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=109333">Lieberman
Cancels Campaigning, Fox Carries On
John Nichols
Tue Aug 8, 4:48 PM ET
Joe Lieberman canceled his scheduled campaign events on Tuesday
afternoon, with his campaign announcing that the embattled senator
would spend the rest of primary day making get-out-the-vote calls.
Depending on one's perspective, that's either a sign that the senator
is confident, or a sign…
clock | August 8, 2006I refuse to write blog posts about the Middle East for a variety of reasons. No matter what I say, there will be a flame war in the comments - if you think that flame-wars in comments are bad when dealing with creationists, animal rightists or Wingnuts, just try tackling Israel! I'll be acused of being a self-hating Jew and anti-semite and Zionist and anti-Zionist, perhaps simultaneously all of those by the same person in a single sentence.
I do not know enough history of the region and the conflict.
I do not know the specialized terminology - a minefield of seemingly normal English language…
oracknows | August 8, 2006The other day, I posted about the reaction in the white power ranger blogosphere to Mel Gibson's little anti-Semitic tirade. Apparently a blogger by the name of Occidentalist took umbrage in the comments at my having pointed out that the rantings about "the synagogue of Satan" contained on an anti-Semitic blog were, in fact, anti-Semitic and downright un-Christian:
Ya know the Talmud says Jesus Christ is boiling in hot excrement for all eternity, right?
Besides being irrelevant, that statement has nothing to do with the contents of my post. (I don't recall mentioning the Talmud, Jesus, or the…
clock | August 8, 2006 Do you want to know more about my kids and how we are raising them? If so, this post from March 21, 2005 may be interesting to you.
I have two kids: an 11-year old son (Coturnix Jr.) and an 8-year old daughter (Coturnietta). They are really smart and cool kids and I love talking with them about all sorts of things: school, science, music, computers, video games, Boy Scouts, ...whatever they want to talk about (or the good old days when I was a kid and had to walk to school ten miles uphill both ways - to which they yawn and run away). But we never talk about politics or religion. Sure, when…
pharyngula | August 8, 2006What do you do with a local politician who claims that public education is her #1 issue, while accepting money from supporters of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State? That's our Michele Bachmann, claiming to be a supporter of education while endorsed by people who say this:
I proclaim publicly that I favor ending government involvement in education.
Take a look at the people who favor completely gutting public school education at the Separation of School and State site, too: D. James Kennedy, Tim LaHaye, Tom Monaghan—it's like a chorus line of the freaky religious right. And…
stcynic | August 8, 2006Calling John Bambenek, the STACLU contributor who claimed that the 5th circuit court of appeals case that Tom DeLay lost last week was proof of "differing application of the law" to Republicans than Democrats and of "judicial activism"? I wonder what he'll say now that none other than Justice Scalia has refused DeLay's request for a stay of that court order? It took him only 3 hours to deny the request. I guess Scalia is just motivated against Republicans too, eh? Or maybe Bambenek was peddling nonsense from the start. The Teas Republican Party has dropped their bid to replace DeLay on the…