Politics
razib | August 7, 2006More political blogging from me over at Neo-neo-centrist weblog Nation Building on political & foreign policy issues. The short form is this: I am fast becoming convinced that many "hawks" are coming to resemble the child who beats up the nearest warm human body after being hurt from falling off a bike. From the Left every citizen born at home is equally capable of being a college graduate, while from the Right every enemy abroad is the potential seed for Götterdämmerung. I am haunted by the specter of looming potentialities never realized....
grrlscientist | August 7, 2006
Would you like to give GWB a brain? Well, so would I, so I found this game where you have ten chances to solve the world's problems by giving Bush a brain. Every time a brain plops into his open noggin, he rewards you with an intelligent and pithy quote, whereas missing his open skull creates a disgusting splash on your screen.
How much better can it be: lots of ookie gore combined with interesting thoughts!
stcynic | August 7, 2006Sen. Rick Santorum has been consistently behind in the polls in his race against Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and it looks like they're getting really desperate. They're trying anything they can to siphon support from Casey, including helping the Green Party candidate, Carl Romanelli. Paul Kiel examined all of the political contributions given to Romanelli's campaign and found that every single one of them, except one donation from Romanelli himself, came from Republicans. And now the Pocono Record is reporting that several Santorum staffers have been helping Romanelli gather signatures for his…
jlynch | August 6, 2006David Byrne on the documentary Jesus Camp:
Right wing political agendas and slogans are mixed with born again rituals that end with most of the kids in tears. Tears of release and joy, they would claim -- the children are not physically abused. The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an "army" to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the…
j7uy5 | August 6, 2006I almost entitled this post "Lying to Congress, Part II," to be
congruent with my
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/07/lying_to_congress.php">previous
post, but it has not been established conclusively that
anyone has lied. All we know at this point is that
information is being withheld, and it appears as
though someone is lying.
From Fox News:
href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,206967,00.html">Congressmen:
Dept. of Interior Fudged Oil Drilling Contracts
Thursday, August 03, 2006
WASHINGTON — Two congressmen said Thursday someone at the
Interior…
jlynch | August 5, 2006August 6, 2001, is the day that George W. Bush received the Presidential Daily Brief headlined, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." The PDB stated that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure in the U.S. that could aid attacks, that one idea was to hijack U.S. airplanes, and that the FBI had detected "suspicious activity," including surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The memo also noted that the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates had received a warning that Al Qaeda was preparing an attack in the U.S. with explosives.
On August 6, 2001, Bush was at his ranch in the…
jlynch | August 5, 2006Seen at Crooks & Liars:
In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, [Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter ] Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
A year after his "Axis of Evil" speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq's first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought…
terrasig | August 5, 2006Driving back home from the beach yesterday through the very red part of the state that surrounds my very blue hometown/county:
License plate on white Mazda Miata: THX GOD!
Bumper sticker on said Miata: "Support the Troops, IMPEACH BUSH"
Perhaps they just need to pray a little harder?
pharyngula | August 4, 2006Hillary Clinton is a politician who leaves me cold and disinterested, but I could warm to her, I suppose, if she continues to give Rumsfeld grief. Actually, showing any spine in the face of the current administration is one of the surest ways to my heart.
clock | August 4, 2006 This post from October 21, 2004 laments the lack of spatial and temporal context for Lakoff's theory of political ideology.
As I have complained before, Lakoff's theory leaves me wanting for a spatial and a temporal context. In other words, I believe that current analysis will remain untested without a comparative study between USA and other countries, as well as without a historical study of changes in two forms of worldviews over the past couple of hundred years of history here, as well as the past couple of millenia around the world.
The only reference to any differences between the…
grrlscientist | August 4, 2006
We the people
In order to form a more perfect union,
Establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility,
Provide for the common defense,
Promote the general welfare and
Secure the blessings of liberty
To ourselves and our posterity
Do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America.
This video should bring back a few memories for some of you, and it is an important lesson for the current administration, who behave as though they've never heard of the US Constitution.
.
tags: schoolhouse rock, education, teaching, streaming video
clock | August 3, 2006Intriguing, and I hope it's true, but Harry Reid denies it vehemently. Anything to get Hillary out of the Presidential race, I say. (Hat-tip: Shakespeare's Sister)
But what would Harry do? Replace Dean as DNC Chair?
jlynch | August 3, 2006On his radio show, Neal Boortz asked
[H]ow incompetent, how ignorant, how worthless is an adult that can't earn more than the minimum wage?... You have to really, really, really be a pretty pathetic human being to not be able to earn more than [the minimum wage.]
No comment.
(source)
clock | August 3, 2006A three-fer from Echidne:
Divorce -- Preparing For Travels in Wingnuttia
Christian Lady Blogging -- Part One Of Travels in Wingnuttia
Divorce: Part Two of Travels in Wingnuttia
oracknows | August 3, 2006Ron Rosenbaum on Starchild Abraham Cherrix and his choosing the Hoxsey treatment over chemotherapy:
Young Cherrix has expressed his feelings this way to the Associated Press: "I'll fight until I do die. I'm not going to let it go. I would rather die healthy and strong and in my house than die in a hospital bed, bedridden and unable to even open my eyes."
It's a moving and heartfelt plea, but a problematic one as well. My instinct to support young Cherrix on libertarian grounds is undermined by the not quite fully developed thought process this statement suggests.
Is the choice he faces really…
stcynic | August 3, 20063 years ago two Congressmen, Bob Ney of Ohio and Walter Jones of North Carolina, pushed through a rule changing the name of french fries and french toast in the Congressional cafeteria to "freedom fries" and "freedom toast" (liberty cabbage, anyone?). Now, the names have suddenly changed back, and no one is talking about why.
Neither Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio nor Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, the authors of the culinary rebuke, were willing this week to say who led the retreat, as it were, from the frying pan. But retreat there has been, as a casual observer can see for himself in the House'…
oracknows | August 3, 2006Now that Mel Gibson has apologized for his anti-Semitic tirade during his arrest for DUI last week and the ADL has accepted Gibson's apology, everyone is discussing what the fallout will be among the Hollywood elite, many of whom happen to be Jewish. Ever the contrarian, using my knowledge of the darker places of the Internet, where white power rangers spin ever more self-pitying tales of depradations at the hands of "the Jews," I thought I'd see what Gibson's other fan base thinks of the whole affair, in an unflinching effort to bring you a perspective that no other blogger would, mainly…
razib | August 2, 2006Over at Nation Building I make a plea for methodological rationality. But more importantly, I point to Noah Millman.
jlynch | August 2, 2006The ID reaction to Kansas is beginning to trickle in. Paul Nelson gives us a little fable claiming that the science standards don't matter anyway, and John West said the outcome would not stop people from learning about the "growing controversy" over evolution."
Let's face it guys -- up until last night, you saw the standards as being important Hell, you funded a media campaign with lecture tours and websites just to make that point.
And here's the rub, in conservative Kansas, in Republican primaries (surely members of your "natural constituency") you lost. That must hurt.
grrlscientist | August 2, 2006The Bush administration proves once again that they hate your Constitutional rights as much as Al Qaeda does.
U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill.
A 32-page draft measure is intended to authorize the Pentagon's tribunal system, established shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks to detain and prosecute detainees captured in the war on terror. The tribunal system was thrown out last month by the Supreme…