I watched this ghastly video supported by the Koch brothers, and my jaw dropped and I said “Holy shit.” Literally. Not a metaphor.
They are trying to scare women away from getting a Pap smear and turning gynecological exams into a creepy episode, all in the name of squashing government-insured health care.
We’re just going to have to face it. Republicans are simply awful human beings.
My daughter moves to Boulder, and what happens? The worst storm in a century. I’m not saying there’s a causal relationship, but you know we sent her far far away for a reason, right?
Actually, I’m pretty sure she had nothing to do with it. But there are things we could have done and should be doing right now.
As I wrote late last week, thanks in part to climate change, the odds are shifting toward more frequent extreme weather events like this. We all watched as the Hurricane Sandy relief bill languished in Congress for months. An economy on the doorstep of recovery doesn’t need yet another surprise $20 billion tab to pick up. Action on climate change would also help to prevent future disasters.
However, perhaps a more ominous takeaway is that the torrential rain in Colorado wasn’t well-forecast. The first flash flood watch was only issued by the National Weather Service on Thursday morning, less than 24 hours before the peak flooding. At the time, the forecaster on duty remarked “rainfall amounts today not expected to be as great as those observed during the past 18 hours.”
At the very least, Republicans should stop trying to dismantle the national weather service. Optimistically, they should stop dragging their heels on environmental issues. Once upon a time, Republicans could be relied on to snap to attention when a problem threatened to cost big money if not addressed; no more. Ideology is all.
Good news: Larry Summers has withdrawn his candidacy for chairman of the Federal Reserve. Just the fact that Obama keeps propping up this banker mentality for his economic advisors calls his judgment into question, but at least this is one rich gomer who won’t be calling the shots. Let’s have no illusions: the rich have gotten richer under Obama, and the poor have only gotten poorer at a slightly slower rate than under the Republicans.
We’re also spared the spectacle of seeing the lady bankers shooed away to play with little pink dolls.
Ahh, that’s what I need. In a long day full of classes and meetings, it’s a breath of fresh air to see libertarians called on their baloney.
Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the Koch brothers: It doesn’t make any sense.
They call themselves “realists” but rely on fanciful theories that have never predicted real-world behavior. They claim that selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a mythical “free market” is better at everything than the government is, yet when they really need government protection, they’re the first to clamor for it.
It’s quite clear that libertarians are just “useful idiots,” pawns of the far right wing deployed whenever they want some stooge to claim that inequities are rational.
They need all the help they can get — having a festering boil like the Creation “Museum” in their midst is not conducive to a healthy educational system. They’re trying, though, and the Kentucky Senate education committee is poised to approve some Next Generation Science Standards.
But of course, some nitwit has to raise absurd objections to the fact that the standards include material on evolution and climate change, the two big hot button issues for ignorant conservatives. The nitwit also happens to be the chair of the Senate education committee, Mike Wilson.
Yeah, there’s a fundamental problem right there, that the Kentucky senate puts an idiot climate change and evolution denier in charge of education.
How about if you all flood this petition and get the message across that science must be supported in education…in Kentucky and in every state.
The Republican party is appallingly misinformed: there is a Wonk Gap .
But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.
It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.
There’s another place with a major wonk gap: the media. Television news is unwatchable, and even the major newspapers, like the one that publishes Krugman, are loaded with delusional timewasters and glib liars for conservative policies. How do those clowns get in control of government? Well, one way is that the media are indiscriminate and set up superficial apparatchiks like Friedman and Brooks and Will and whoever as arbiters of rational policy.
Oh, wait, I’m not a citizen, I don’t get to vote. But if I were a citizen, I know I could never vote for the Liberal party, because they put up billboards flyers like this:
We just had a long fight over same-sex marriage in Minnesota (we won!), and the conservative thugs and liars who opposed it here never sunk quite that low. And really, now that gay couples are getting married all over the place, the landscape is not littered with tearful abandoned children.
And then there’s this guy Rudd from the Labor party who said this in a debate the other day:
Labor it is, then.
Although Rudd doesn’t seem to think things through. He does consult his “Christian conscience”, but doesn’t he realize that his riposte — that he’s no more compelled to oppose gay marriage because of a Biblical injunction than he is to support slavery because “the Bible also says slavery is a natural condition” — is a knife to the heart of the whole notion of the Bible as any kind of moral authority at all? I’d be happier with him if he’d consider the logical consequences and simply abandoned Christianity altogether.
He might as well. I bet that pastor who asked the question, and his congregation, all think the billboard above is lovely and are going to vote Liberal anyway.
I keep looking at this 57 year old sign and my brain just kind of shuts down. The world has changed just over the span of my life, and in this case…not for the better.
(via Mike the Mad Biologist)
This is Bill Whittle, some weirdo far right nutbag I never heard of before. He is spinning out some metaphor about America and popular TV.
You see, once upon a time, we all loved Superman, and America was super-powerful. And then there was a transitional period when Gilligan’s Island was popular, and we didn’t learn the lesson that Gilligan ought to have been executed. And now we’re living in a Family Guy world, which is all “anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-morality”.
I think it’s actually a pretty good metaphor, he’s just reading it wrong. Conservatives think the ideal is to be an invulnerable, superpowerful brute who can solve all of his problems by punching them out; they don’t seem to be aware that the Almighty Superman was boring and a dead end, and everyone who wrote for the comic struggled to make the story interesting, and usually failed. The message of Gilligan’s Island was always…listen to the Professor. He can make anything given enough coconuts.
I don’t know about Family Guy. I’ve seen bits of a few episodes and didn’t like it much at all. I’m afraid you’ll have to fill in the proper interpretation of that part of his metaphor for me.
But ultimately, the most important message from Mr Whittle is that the proper place for right wingers is sitting in their E-Z Boy recliner, shouting at the TV.
The brain drain is beginning. Nearly 20% of American scientists would like to get out of this country.
New data compiled by a coalition of top scientific and medical research groups show that a large majority of scientists are receiving less federal help than they were three years ago, despite spending far more time writing grants in search of it. Nearly one-fifth of scientists are considering going overseas to continue their research because of the poor funding climate in America.
Why, you might ask? Because funding for research is drying up everywhere.
That could be fixed, you know. Divert that cash that’s being deployed to prepare to bomb Syria and other foreign countries, and we could probably rebuild our scientific and technological infrastructure before it’s too late.
Although, with all the idiots emerging from public education believing in nonsense while the media cheer them on, it might already be too late.
