Abdi Jeylani Malaq Marshale must have been an awesomely brave person. He lived in Somalia, he was a comedian, he made fun of Islamists, and he worked to dissuade young people from joining the insurgency.
So someone shot and killed him.
And it’s not just comedians!
So far this year, at least one Somali journalist has been targeted and killed each month.
I would have thought that it was a relief, a minor bit of unconcern, that Mitt Romney nominally supports evolution (he’s one of those waffly theistic evolutionists, so he doesn’t really…but at least he wouldn’t be brazenly contradicting all of the evidence). But there’s a potential problem looming: who will he pick for vice president? Who does he turn to advice on education? Ken Miller discusses the situation, and points out that his key advisor on education reform and potential VP pick is…
Bobby Jindal, creationist governor of Louisiana.
Jindal has an elite résumé. He was a biology major at my school, Brown University, and a Rhodes scholar. He knows the science, or at least he ought to. But in his rise to prominence in Louisiana, he made a bargain with the religious right and compromised science and science education for the children of his state. In fact, Jindal’s actions at one point persuaded leading scientific organizations, including the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, to cross New Orleans off their list of future meeting sites.
What did Jindal do to produce a hornet’s nest of “mad scientists,” as Times-Picayune writer James Gill described them? He signed into law, in Gill’s words, the “Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), which is named for what it is designed to destroy.” The act allows “supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials” to be brought into classrooms to support the “open and objective discussion” of certain “scientific theories,” including, of course, evolution. As educators who have heard such coded language before quickly realized, the act was intended to promote creationism as science. In April, Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Science at Louisiana State University, testified before the Louisiana Senate’s Education Committee that two top scientists had rejected offers to come to LSU because of the LSEA, and the school may lose more scientists in the future.
And now Jindal is poised to spend millions of dollars of state money to support the teaching of creationism in private schools.
But don’t panic! Jindal is currently just one possibility for VP, and there are plenty of other Republicans Romney might pick…like Nikki Haley, or Rick Santorum, or Michele Bachmann…
OK, panic. There’s no way we’ll be happy with anyone he chooses.
He just praised a universal health care system.
"Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the G.D.P. in Israel? Eight percent,” [Romney] said. "You spend eight percent of G.D.P. on health care. You’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our G.D.P. on health care, 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military — our military which is 4 percent, 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of G.D.P. We have to find ways — not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs.
Why does Mitt Romney hate America?
That man is a dangerous lunatic. He’s got a theological dedication to insisting that the US must be run exclusively by the 18th century principles of the Founding Fathers — even when he’s willing to consider limitations on the ownership of weapons, he gives it an unbelievable twist.
The justice explained that under his principle of originalism, some limitations on weapons were possible. Fox example, laws to restrict people from carrying a "head axe" would be constitutional because it was a misdemeanor when the Constitution was adopted in the late 1700s.
What the hell is a “head axe”, I wondered. So I looked it up. Here’s a picture:
OK, that looks nasty. I’m glad the Supreme Court will think that casually carrying around a deadly looking thing like that is not reasonable behavior.
But then look where his reasoning takes him:
"What about these technological limitations?" Wallace wondered. "Obviously, we’re not now talking about a handgun or a musket, we’re talking about a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute."
"We’ll see," Scalia replied. "Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that can not be hand-carried. It’s to ‘keep and bear’ so it doesn’t apply to cannons."
Oh, good. We can restrict people’s ownership of cannons…because he interprets the Constitution with a Ken Ham-like literal-mindedness that says the only weapons that count are carried.
"But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to — it’s will have to be decided," he added.
So no head axes, and no artillery…but the right to keep and bear arms can be extended to fucking rocket launchers.
I give up. Our legal leadership consists of brain-damaged, narrowly literal-minded amoral morons who worship an 18th century scrap of paper.
We both have something in common — we both tend to get vilified regularly, although I have to admit, lawyers have it worse — there isn’t a whole category of atheist jokes where the punch line is always something about how they have to die horribly. So I feel it’s only fair to acknowledge that we do need lawyers, and they deserve some credit.
So today I got letter from an ebullient lawyer and regular reader who wanted to tell a tale of triumphant justice. And I thought you might enjoy it, too. The names and details have been changed and obscured to protect the innocent.
Also, it’s about a dreadful rape case, and it does discuss some of the horrific consequences, so some of you may want to avoid it. Let me reassure you, though…it has a happy ending!
Mitt Romney is off touring England like a boss, and he’s already pissing everyone off. And then this quote from one of his books has just emerged.
England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn’t been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler’s ambitions. Yet only two lifetimes ago, Britain ruled the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of humankind. Britain controlled a quarter of the earth’s land and a quarter of the earth’s population.
This is great! I hope he visits more strange little foreign countries before the election!
This could be a daily feature — but it won’t be, because I’m already gagging at the thought of it. The latest news from Romney is that he’s making political hay out of the fact that Obama made a speech declaring the importance of a national infrastructure — roads and bridges, for instance — to businesses, and he dared to say to businessmen that “you didn’t build that”. So of course Romney is lining up Republican businessmen to say, “I did too build my own business!”, a claim Obama did not dispute.
But here’s the funny bit: one businessman Romney featured in an ad is not only ignoring what Obama actually said, but is the recipient of millions of dollars in government loans. I guess he didn’t build his own business after all, but had an awful lot of help from us taxpayers.
And one more thing: Sally Ride has died, and we now learn something new: she’s been in a committed lesbian relationship for 27 years. Romney is now praising her, without acknowledging that his anti-gay policies would deny her the dignity and benefit of recognizing that relationship. What an asshole.
You’re not actually going to vote for that guy in November, are you? I’m extremely lukewarm about Obama, but I’m going to poke that paper ballot to spite Romney, if nothing else.
We won a poll to determine what questions Julia Gillard would have to answer — or try to slickly dodge — and she’s going to be doing it live on the web at 11am AEST … which is in about a half hour! Go to the Deakins University channel for live streaming.
Oh, by the way — while we voted entirely fairly and within the parameters of the poll, I am still getting a lot of hate mail and a few tweets from wingnuts bitterly complaining about how we “stacked the vote” (I think that means “outvoted”) and how it was more American imperialism. Sorry, guys, we voted on an atheist issue, and we atheists are global, and besides, atheists are a larger percentage of the Australian population than the American. So suck it up.
Also, your pal Andrew Bolt is an inflamed dingleberry denialist, so scientists (another international community) were quite happy to see his global warming denial FUD squeezed out of the victory circle. Ha ha and all that. Stuff it, pseudoscientists.
Isn’t it always convenient how God’s law (as interpreted by his earthly propheteers) is always expected to trump secular law, even when the secular law is intended to protect the safety of mere mortals?
This is an account from Connie Schultz’s facebook page, so I’ll put the whole thing here for you fb-haters.
Email from conservative blogger, dated July 9, 2012:
Dear Ms. Shultz,
We are doing an expose on journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials they are assigned to cover. We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him.
Care to comment?
An exposé! Of the elite media! And he’s got the photographic evidence! It sounds so Breitbartian. And the followup is a classic Breitbartian pratfall.
Response, dated July 10, 2012:
Dear Mr. [Name Deleted]:
I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He’s really cute.
He’s also my husband.
You know that, right?
Connie Schultz.
I’m sure this will make headlines at the Drudge Report or the Daily Caller or The Blaze or some similar right-wing schlock factory.
