Troglodytes at Play
jfiore | January 30, 2009The other day, perennial political tool Rush Limbaugh was on CNBC defending his now infamous "I want Obama to fail" comment. His argument went something like this (paraphrasing):
Yes, I want him to fail. His policies are liberal policies and I want liberal policies to fail. I want conservative policies to succeed.
I find this to be a stunning argument because what it really says is "I am an unrepentant partisan ideologue. I am a political clown." It's a shinning example of us-versus-them, as-long-as-my-side-wins-at-any-cost hackery. I guess it's nice to know that his position isn't personal…
bushwells | December 27, 2008Correspondent SDC, reporting in from the Land o' Hoosiers, offers an awe-inspiring account of a recent visit to the famous Creation Museum, located "just seven miles west of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport."
A teaser follows. The rest of the article (including photos), copiously dusted with SDC's dry sardonic humor, may be found here: Elitist Liberals Visit The Creation Museum.
I am not particularly unusual in wanting to be there when history is unfolding. Last month I was excited about playing a tiny, tiny role in Obama's victory over John McCain. A few weeks ago, I…
jfiore | November 5, 2008Norm Coleman never ceases to amaze me. No matter how much of a scoundrel you may think he is, he can always manage to go one better. For example, consider this story from CNN describing the election results. In an excruciatingly close election, we find Coleman barely ahead with 42 percent of the vote and Al Franken at a hair less. Out of nearly 2.5 million votes cast (not including a third party), they are separated by a mere 720 votes. As far as I can determine, once the result is within 0.5 percent (about 15,000 in this instance), a recount is triggered. But what does Norm "The Weasel"…
jfiore | November 3, 2008I picked up the newspaper the other day and found a short article declaring that the news media have been biased toward Obama and against McCain. The article claims that reporting was favorable to the Democrats about 2/3rds of the time and that the only relatively "equal" outlet was Fox News. Hmmm.
The article referred to a report produced by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a self-proclaimed non-partisan watchdog group. A quick look at SourceWatch and even Wikipedia shows that this is no non-partisan group. The group was founded with seed money from notable conservatives such as Pat…
jfiore | October 31, 2008So North Carolina Democratic hopeful Kay Hagan is suing Elizabeth Dole over a TV ad in the race for US Senate. I really have mixed feelings about this story. The implication is that Hagan is an atheist (or at the very least is strongly associated with atheists) and that's patently untrue as she is an elder in her Presbyterian church. But, Hagan's suit declares that "the advertisement ... injures (Hagan's) good name and reputation in the community". The Dole camp counters that this information is something that Hagan is trying to keep quiet.
See? You don't even have to be an atheist to be evil…
jfiore | September 21, 2008No, not literally (yeow, there's an image I don't need). Harris had some wonderful commentary in Newsweek on the Republican VP candidate. Of particular worth is the following comment regarding "elitism" in US politics:
Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of…
jfiore | September 13, 2008Michael Medved's speech at the "Values Voter" Summit in Washington was a wonderful example of lunacy and demagoguery. I'll bypass the entire concept of a "values voter" to begin with as it implies that there's a voting segment that has "no values" (even Adolf Hitler had values, just not ones that most sane people share). I caught a chunk of his speech last night on CSPAN.
At one point Medved was discussing the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. He stated that Republicans agree on the big issues. For example, while there might be some disagreement in the Republican…
jfiore | August 30, 2008Did Steve Doocy of Fox News really say what I thought he said about Sarah Palin?
Yep. She has "international experience" because Alaska is right up there, you know, next to Russia! Sure. And I must be fluent in French because I don't live that far from Quebec.
jfiore | August 11, 2008"Once religion takes hold in a society it can't be stopped." So says President G W Bush in an interview with Bob Costas at the Beijing Olympics. Let's all hope that such is not the case.
You can find the video here. The section in question is about 3:15 in. There are plenty of other moments to make you cringe as well.
jfiore | June 18, 2008If you happened to be watching C-SPAN last night you got to see a parade of conservative Republicans prattling on about House Resolution 284 (AKA National Year of the Bible) and related concerns. It's gotten to the point that a showing of middle-aged and older conservative white guys from Texas, in all their doughy glory, has become a caricature of itself. You know what they're going to say and you know it's usually full-tilt crazy. But Texas isn't alone and folks sometimes forget that. Take Ohio. Last night, representative Jim Jordan had the floor for a few minutes and spoke about his…
jfiore | June 6, 2008Congressman Rohrabacher (R-California) gave a presentation yesterday concerning global warming which was carried live on C-SPAN. I have not been able to find either video or a transcript but here's the gist of it: Rohrabacher resides firmly in the lunatic fringe. He's a global warming denier and a conspiracy theorist. He plays fast and loose with the facts and apparently has no problem with misrepresenting them. In layman's terms, he's bat-shit crazy.
Rohrabacher denies the existence of global warming outright and obviously, any link that humans might have to its cause. It should be pointed…
jfiore | May 28, 2008You gotta love Glenn Beck. This guy knows how to bring the crazy. On last night's show he had a segment on hydrogen-powered cars. You can find a transcript here, about 2/3rds in (you'll probably want to avoid the first section featuring Ben Stein unless you have vomit buckets handy). So Glenn checks out the car and we come to...
BECK: Yeah, it's a great car. However, I saw the filling station, and there is giant power grid, you know, sitting there. You're using all this electricity. How are you going to -- how are you not just using electricity, and how are you not going to have…
bushwells | January 11, 2008So I dusted off the Pitiful and Laughable Intelligent Design Creationist Dissemblers links today and found a classic Luskinism in which Casey takes Nature to task for its brown-shirted propaganda campaign to defend evolution at all costs (scroll down to sidebar for link).
Excerpted from Luskin's article:
In his acclaimed book Evolution: The History of an Idea, the respected historian of evolution Peter J. Bowler explains that the journal Nature was originally founded in the late nineteenth century by T. H. Huxley and others for the express purpose of promoting a "campaign" to support…
jfiore | December 28, 2007Astrology. Classic woo. Not much to say about it other than the fact that for some very strange reason a lot of people still believe in it, at least a little. Maybe it's because almost every newspaper in the country still has an astrology column. I don't know. For the sake of my students, several years ago I wrote a little analysis on astrology and why it's utter bullshit. You can find it here. To be blunt, no one should put any stock in astrology.
Today I stumbled across an explanation of why astrology is to be ignored, but from a completely different perspective, namely that of the…
jfiore | December 6, 2007Mitt Romney gave his speech on religion today at the George Bush library. Read it here. It's filled with the usual horseshit that one might expect from a man like Mitt:
"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
Really? Freedom requires religion? What a novel concept. It always appeared to me that religion suppresses freedom. Does anyone really need to subscribe to dogma in order to "discover (their) most…
jfiore | December 4, 2007A new Pat Condell video regarding the "inappropriately named teddy bear" fiasco in the Sudan. As usual, it's vintage Condell:
bushwells | November 13, 2007Salon has jumped on the bandwagon that acknowledges the two year anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision on the teaching of intelligent design as equal to the theory of evolution. In the The evolution of creationism, Gordy Slack writes that intelligent design adherents continue to find avenues to attack the teaching of evolution and, well, good science.
Gordy is a little late to the party, but nonetheless here are excerpts of his article below the fold. The full article is available va Salon Premium or whatever genuflection a casual user must perform to get…
jfiore | October 13, 2007What happens when an end-of-times pastor meets a CNN bobble-head? One thing is for certain both science and rationality will be chucked out the window. John Hagee, head of a Texas mega-church had some truly crazy things to say on Glenn Beck's Friday evening show (October 12, 2007). You can get the complete transcript here. A few select outtakes can be found below the fold.
Hagee is one of that (fortunately) small number of Christians who seem both sure, and in a perverse way, delighted, that Armageddon is upon us. His proof is based solely on his interpretation of Revelations coupled with…
jfiore | October 11, 2007Recently I received emails from two associates regarding a "get rich quick" scheme. It's made the rounds before and quite frankly I was surprised to see it poke its ugly head up again. While these hoaxes are mildly irritating, it only takes a moment of thought to determine that they absolutely must be false. Why don't people think?
The premise of this particular scheme is that Bill Gates has teamed up with AOL to create a new email tracking system. It must be true, the message says, because the author heard it on Good Morning America. In essence, you forward the message to a bunch of people.…
bushwells | September 20, 2007Speaking as a mother who breastfed both of my kids and was a card-carrying member of LaLeche League (an uneasy relationship since I worked outside the home but valuable all the same for many other reasons), I figured I'd weigh in on this, but not from the Facebook angle. There are plenty of other offerings among my SciBlings on the Facebook debacle, and I am sure you can find them via the main page so I am not linking them here. I can't say I am surprised at FB's reactionary response to the photos of the mother in question. Breastfeeding is ridiculously sexualized in the US.
So here I…