One more reason I have no choice but to vote for Obama

He just dissed Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a “you’re on your own” society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.

I read some Rand when I was in my teens, too, and I also saw through it and gave it up when I was older. About 10 minutes older, when I threw that badly written piece of crap away.

Somebody give that man a geography lesson

Who in their right mind would trust Romney with foreign policy? In last night’s debate, he claimed that Syria was “Iran’s route to the sea”, which is just plain weird.

Making it even weirder, he has made this claim multiple times while campaigning, and has been told many times that it makes no sense, but he’s never bothered to look at a map?

Using MittLogic, Central America better watch out, because Canada is eyeing Mexico as its route to the sea, too.

My worry is that Romney is preaching his garbled version of geography to Americans who are about as ignorant of what a map looks like as he is.

Romney lied, again

I tuned out last night’s debate — my wife watched it, but I put on my headphones and listened to some industrial rock to drown out the drone. I knew I’d be able to get the highlights the next day.

And I did! Apparently Romney was asked about his role in hiring women, and he claimed to have worked hard to bring more women into leadership positions.

ROMNEY: Thank you. An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I — and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are — are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?"

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women’s groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

Nice story. Good for him. Except that it isn’t true.

What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

…

I will write more about this later, but for tonight let me just make a few quick additional points. First of all, according to MassGAP and MWPC, Romney did appoint 14 women out of his first 33 senior-level appointments, which is a reasonably impressive 42 percent. However, as I have reported before, those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn’t care about — and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything. None of the senior positions Romney cared about — budget, business development, etc. — went to women.

Secondly, a UMass-Boston study found that the percentage of senior-level appointed positions held by women actually declined throughout the Romney administration, from 30.0% prior to his taking office, to 29.7% in July 2004, to 27.6% near the end of his term in November 2006. (It then began rapidly rising when Deval Patrick took office.)

Third, note that in Romney’s story as he tells it, this man who had led and consulted for businesses for 25 years didn’t know any qualified women, or know where to find any qualified women. So what does that say?

The man is great big smilin’ bag of lies, isn’t he?

You can tell a lot about a neighborhood by its…

…ads.

It’s another travel day for me — there have been too many of these lately, and no respite in sight — and I just now got off the road, the usual I94 to the Minneapolis/St Paul airport, and I noticed a remarkable change in the character of the billboards as I passed Albertville and entered the outer ring of middle class suburbs that surround the city. Suddenly, in addition to the usual billboards advertising gas, food, hotels, and the evils of abortion (seriously, people, don’t get too excited about those sporadic atheist signs, because Pro-Life Across America has saturated the rural Midwest, at least, with Smilin’ Baby ads), I saw jewelry stores, Colorado ski vacations, and cosmetic surgery ads everywhere. I had entered Michele Bachmann’s district.

The place was also full of billboards touting the perfidy of Amy Klobuchar (Democrat, don’t you know), urging me to vote for the anti-gay marriage amendment, and even more irritating, ads claiming that Minnesota is number one in voter fraud, and we must do something about it. The ad didn’t give specifics, but I wondered how many handfuls of cases it takes to reach #1.

What bugs me about those ads is their frothing rabid indignation at the thought that a few people, not enough to make any significant difference, might place a vote they are not entitled to…in the complete absence of any concern about the tens of thousands sanctioned Republican voter fraud might disenfranchise. But at least you can see where the priorities of Bachmann’s base lie.

Hypocrisy alert

Representative Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee is a fanatical Tea Party Republican who campaigns on his fanatical pro-life stance and his fanatical ‘family values’ who fanatically touts the importance of traditional marriage.

You know exactly where this is going, don’t you? I could just stop writing right here and you’d be able to fill in the rest of the story.

Yep, his marriage fell apart thanks to his philandering, and now we have a recording of a phone call with his ex-mistress in which he’s urging her impatiently to get an abortion. The only thing we’re missing so far is a gay fling and voting “yes” on a Democratic health care bill to confirm his demonic status.

Not that it matters. He’s still leading in his election campaign. The Tea Baggers don’t actually give a damn about their so-called values — you don’t have to live them if you just shout them angrily enough.

Give me more politicians with this kind of passion

I’m off to another long day of meetings, but at least I begin inspired by Julia 'badass' Gillard. This is so awesome.

Please. Someone tell Barack Obama to sit down and watch this speech a few dozen times until he realizes that this is the tone he must take in his debates with Romney. Gillard not only addresses endemic misogyny, but rebukes Tony Abbott for the actions of his whole party: “Has he taken any responsibility for the conduct of other members of his party?”

Uh-oh, he’s on to us!

Rats. Paul Broun (Ridiculous, Ga) sees right through us.

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.

So…this guy gets elected down there in Georgia?

Nerd life forever

Oh, no, there are more reasons I can never run for public office in the United States.

Colleen Lachowicz is a Democrat running for the state senate in Maine. The Republicans are running attack ads against her, arguing that she isn’t fit for office because she plays an orc rogue in World of Warcraft. It’s not clear whether she’d be OK if she’d been playing an elf paladin.

Alas, I think I’m worse. I play an undead warlock. Also, I’m an atheist. Doooomed.

Oh, no! I just noticed in that picture…I’m also wearing a dress! Crap, I’m just going to have to resign myself to spending the rest of my life sucking at the public teat, never contributing anything, aren’t I? I’d move into my mother’s basement, but she doesn’t have one.

Christian zealots really can’t identify with anyone else

The Canadian government is firing all their non-Christian prison chaplains. Not all their chaplains, which would be a move that would be both smart and fair, but just the ones who don’t love Jesus enough.

The federal government is cancelling the contracts of all non-Christian chaplains at federal prisons, CBC News has learned.

Inmates of other faiths, such as Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jews, will be expected to turn to Christian prison chaplains for religious counsel and guidance, according to the office of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is also responsible for Canada’s penitentiaries.

Toews made headlines in September when he ordered the cancellation of a tender issued for a Wiccan priest for federal prisons in B.C.

Toews said he wasn’t convinced part-time chaplains from other religions were an appropriate use of taxpayer money and that he would review the policy.

In an email to CBC News, Toews’ office says that as a result of the review, the part-time non-Christian chaplains will be let go and the remaining full-time Christian chaplains in prisons will now provide interfaith services and counselling to all inmates.

"The minister strongly supports the freedom of religion for all Canadians, including prisoners,” the email states. “However, the government … is not in the business of picking and choosing which religions will be given preferential status through government funding. The minister has concluded … [Christian] chaplains employed by Corrections Canada must provide services to inmates of all faiths."

I’d like to know how Vic Toews would react if all the Christian chaplains were kicked out of the prisons and all the Jebusites had to turn towards “interfaith” services provided by rabbis and imams. I suspect he’d suddenly see a major problem with such a decision.

One other interesting note: Canada has about 15,000 prisoners, and their religion breaks down like this:

There are nearly 15,000 inmates in federal custody and a large majority of them identify themselves as Christian:

  • 37.5% are Catholic.

  • 19.5% are Protestant.

  • 4.5% are Muslim.

  • 4% First Nations spirituality

  • 2% are Buddhist.

  • less than 1% are Jewish.

  • less than 1% are Sikh.

Hang on, that adds up to less than 70%. What are the other 30%? Polls show that less than 20% of the Canadian population has no religious affiliation (recent polls bring that up closer to 30%). Have we finally found a country where the criminals are as godless as the general population?