Politics
drorzel | June 27, 2011We spent Sunday morning introducing SteelyKid to one of my favorite places in the world, Jones Beach on Long Island. She was ok with the water until an unexpected wave sideswiped us and splashed her in the face, but enjoyed the sand quite a bit. And I got to swim in the ocean and body-surf on some reasonably good waves. I was too busy swimming to remember to snap cell phone pictures of SteelyKid at play, so you'll just have to use your imagination.
A lot of liberal-ish bloggers will invoke the name of the city planner Robert Moses as practically a curse-- he's blamed for enabling "car culture…
pharyngula | June 24, 2011This is a German scandal: Sylvana Koch-Mehrin was recently found to be guilty of extensive plagiarism in her doctoral thesis, such a blatant abuse of scholarship that the University of Heidelberg took the remarkable step of revoking her doctoral degree. Before that happened, she had been marching up the ladder of the European political cursus honorum, reaching the rank of vice-president of the European Parliament until her disgrace forced her to resign.
But now a very odd thing has happened: this ex-scholar, this impeached student, this deplorable fraud has been appointed as a full member to…
pharyngula | June 22, 2011Matt Taibbi is giving me nightmares. Read his long political biography of Michele Bachmann, with this terrifying conclusion.
Even other Republicans, it seems, are making the mistake of laughing at Bachmann. But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more "viable" boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again — and it's Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.
It could…
pharyngula | June 22, 2011She's done. She's been on this cross-country bus tour to promote her folksy ways, and now she has quit halfway through. This is a woman with a very short attention span and a complete lack of discipline and focus; she couldn't complete her governorship, she can't finish a bus tour, there's no way she could cope with a grueling presidential campaign. And if, by some bizarre fluke, she were to actually get elected, I think she'd get bored halfway through the presidential oath of office and decide to go moose hunting, instead.
jtoney | June 20, 2011On Father's Day, I received an email from the First Lady celebrating an exemplary father giving back to his community. One line at the end of the message struck me, referring to the "Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee authorized by Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee."
We aren't funded by Washington lobbyists or corporate interests. We rely on donations from people like you.
Is this really true? What do you think? I noted the specificity of the term "Washington lobbyists," and wondered about other qualifiers. Consider this:
From a February 15, 2008…
pharyngula | June 20, 2011I often pick on Texas — that is one screwed-up, backwards, insane state, you know — but just for a change I thought I'd mention a few good people working there and doing what they can to improve the dump.
Aron Ra, of course, who is one of the best purveyors of scientific information on youtube.
Dr Michael Soto, who is on the Texas State Board of Education and is one of the few people there who promotes teaching kids good science instead of that hackneyed medieval crapola other board members peddle. Keep him on the board, please, and elect more like him.
All the scientists working in…
pharyngula | June 18, 2011The Minnesota Senate's loudest voice against climate change, it's chief denialist, is a Republican (of course) named Michael Jungbauer.
Sen. Jungbauer is fond of making pronouncements from on high regarding the scientific weakness of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He takes positions in direct opposition to 98 percent of published and peer-reviewed climate, atmospheric scientists and glaciologists. But the water and sewer treatment specialist by day is, apparently, quite knowledgeable on all manner of science. It certainly appears to be. He uses big words…
esiegel | June 18, 2011"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -Alfred Whitney Griswold
Those of you who read my weekend post have some inkling that I'm a bit of a sucker for beautifully done covers of songs.
But when they give me chills listening to them, that's when I know I've really found a special one. This week, I'm proud to introduce Rebecca Loebe to you, whom I discovered while watching her audition at NBC's singing competition: The Voice. Have a listen…
jrosenhouse | June 15, 2011Chris Mooney has has a new article in The American Prospect about the Republican war on expertise. There are a lot of interesting nuggets, but Chris somehow manages to avoid making the really obvious point.
First, let's set the tone:
Increasingly, the parties are divided over expertise--with much more of it residing among liberals and Democrats, and with liberals and Democrats much more aligned with the views of scientists and scholars. More fundamentally, the parties are increasingly divided over reality itself: over what is actually true, not only about hard science but also social…
pharyngula | June 15, 2011Be afraid. She could make it to the election for the presidency. The Daily Beast has an excellent article on Michele Bachmann's background, with little hints about how she manages to get elected — she's specifically tapping into evangelical Christian lunacy.
On Monday, Bachmann didn't talk a lot about her religion. She didn't have to—she knows how to signal it in ways that go right over secular heads. In criticizing Obama's Libya policy, for example, she said, "We are the head and not the tail." The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 28:13: "The Lord will make you the head and not the tail." As…
pharyngula | June 14, 2011Once again, politicians are going on little, petty crusades to help the government economize, and as usual, they go for cheap shots that do nothing, other than to reveal their screwed up priorities. Here's Joe Biden, letting us know where the real problems lie.
Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?
And I bet you didn't know that your tax…
jrosenhouse | June 14, 2011Over at The American Prospect, Paul Waldman has a helpful rundown of the views of the Republican Presidential candidates on religion. Here's a sample:
But if you're a Republican voter looking for the most devout candidate, you've got yourself an embarrassment of riches. There's Tim Pawlenty, who left the Catholic church for an evangelical megachurch in Minnesota. He and his wife were married by their pastor Leith Anderson, who is now the president of the American Association of Evangelicals. Pawlenty's campaign book is peppered with dozens of quotes from the Bible. There's Michele Bachman,…
pharyngula | June 14, 2011I'm home! I even got a good night's sleep! And just to fire me up, Jeff Sparrow replies to my criticism of his article claiming that the New Atheists are a gang of neo-fascists. Bracing!
It's especially fun since he begins the piece by disavowing one of my criticisms: "I do not think that the New Atheists are fascists, and nowhere did I say that they are." No, he's cleverer than that. He argued instead that the New Atheists were replacing anti-semitism with anti-Muslim racism, that they were converging with the populist right (does this mean we can invite Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush…
pharyngula | June 11, 2011Jeff Sparrow is very worried about the Global Atheist Convention coming to Melbourne, Australia next April. Why? Because we're all goose-stepping fascists come to destroy liberal and progressive dreams with our "very, very right wing" atheistical fanaticism. Which leaves me baffled and confused. Don't I count? I'm a guy who finds Barack Obama to be far too conservative (I know, that's setting the bar low), surrounded by wanna-be theocrats in a land straining to escape the Enlightenment, with the giant heads of O'Reilly, Beck, and Hannity howling at me from the television, and somehow, I am…
jtoney | June 11, 2011Data mining of the more than 24,000 Gov. Sarah Palin's emails released June 10 is an interesting test case in national news media using crowd sourcing to mine a large database. The example I found today is interesting indeed, providing insight into the preparation process of a politician for a news media interview - in this case with Glenn Beck.
Source Crivella West.
Unknown
From: gov.sarah@yahoo.com
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 7:25 AM
To: Morgan; Katryn L (GOV)
Cc: Perry; Kristina Y (GOV)
Subject: Fw: Talking Points for National Interviews
Importance: High
Pis print
Sent from my…
jtoney | June 10, 2011Yes, I know that thousands of bloggers have been mining through the more than 24,000 emails released today from Sarah Palin's time as Governor of Alaska. I could not resist some data mining myself.
Here's my pick, for now:
If you would like to explore the direct source - not through major news media - here it is, from Crivella West, a firm that funded the enormous efforts of digitizing all of these documents from hard copies. Click here.
Note that you will find a number of her emails that include major portions blanked out, marked as "redacted."
I have highlighted issues of environmental…
jtoney | June 6, 2011This is incredible, from The Wall Street Journal!!
"I panicked and said I was hacked," said Mr. Weiner at the late afternoon news conference at a midtown Manhattan hotel.
What was he thinking?
See my previous post, giving him the benefit of doubt. So much for the dangers of hacking and computer privacy in this case, but it's all too real.
Excerpts:
New York Rep. Anthony Weiner on Monday admitted sending sexually suggestive photographs to women online but said he doesn't plan to resign from Congress because of the scandal.
"I panicked and said I was hacked," said Mr. Weiner at the late…
jtoney | June 4, 2011"An explosive power the size of a Hiroshima bomb - once a week."
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Like most Americans, I would love to be able to drive without having to fill up with increasingly expensive gas - costly not only to our wallets, but to the environment and to geopolitics. Why not switch to a hybrid vehicle or even better, an electrical vehicle? Wouldn't an electrical vehicle offer a better, cleaner approach?
I imagine parking my new electrical vehicle in the garage, plugging it in overnight to recharge for a new day, unfettered by gas and oil, sleeping soundly. If only it could be so…
pharyngula | June 1, 2011Recently, Rand Paul and Sean Hannity got together to talk seriously about politics.
Stop laughing! They said they did, anyway.
Paul tossed out a pleasant little comment about how he would run the country.
I'm not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they've been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they've been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn't be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the…
oracknows | May 30, 2011Why is it that so many bloggable items tend to pop up right before holidays? Whatever the reason, whether my perception that this is the case is accurate or simply the result of confirmation bias on my part, last Friday a little tidbit of popped up that seriously tempted me to blog about it. But I was good (mostly). I resisted, figuring that, first, readership plummets during holiday weekends anyway and, second, anything worth giving an Orac-style dissection to will still be worth giving an Orac-style dissection to three days later. If it isn't, then it probably wasn't worth the full Orac…