He’s not just a do-nothing governor who sits around with his hands in his lap begging an invisible man to save Texas. He does stuff, too. Like cut fire department funding by 75 percent. You know, reducing funding to the volunteer fire departments that have to battle the catastrophic wildfires breaking out in the state.
But then, how could he possibly know that if God didn’t bring rain, the plains might dry out and become more flammable? That’s like science, or cause-and-effect, or somethin’.
I think this is the most brilliant segment Jon Stewart has ever done — I watched the whole thing with the most peculiar mixed feelings of rising incredulity, desperate laughter, and freakin’ rage, and you should experience those feelings, too. If you haven’t already, watch The World of Class Warfare Part I and Part II. He nails it: the injustices of the Republican party, and the smug, blithe evil of Fox News pundits scurrying to find solutions in taxing the poor more.
I’m in awe. It’s the perfect combination of the comedy genius of Stewart and the obliging straight men and women at Fox and the GOP happily setting up the jokes for him. If only there weren’t so much to joke about…
Also, if only the Democratic Party could seize the gift given to them.
It’s Labor Day in America — a strange time and a strange place, given the campaign the Republican party has been waging to destroy unions. Now a 30-year veteran of the Republican party gives up in despair. He’s got the party’s number: it’s all about money (same as the Democrats), a “libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries”, and “pandering to fundamentalism”.
Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)
It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.
I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them.
I think it’s entirely appropriate that we all feel a little depressed this Labor Day.
The Christian Science Monitor has just posted an article titled “As an American Muslim, I am disgusted by the 9/11 coloring book“. It’s hard to believe someone considered this pile of violent jingo to be an appropriate subject for a kid’s coloring book.
“We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom,” was just released by Wayne Bell, publisher of Really Big Coloring Books Inc. in St. Louis. It begins with big graphic black-and-white drawings of bin Laden plotting the 9/11 attacks, then shows the burning towers, the hunt for bin Laden, and ends with a Navy SEAL shooting bin Laden as he hides behind a woman in Islamic garb.
Remember, kids, if you draw the effect of those bullets hitting the bad man, use your Scarlet crayola if you think there should be arterial spray!
You know, I think I’m disgusted by this as a human being; it doesn’t matter what your beliefs about religion are, this is simply the glorification of bloody violence.
There’s a reason I really despise Libertarianism…but still find them hilariously twisted. Here’s a case of a columnist defending the science of Rick Perry. You know that evolution stuff? It’s not that important. Creationism is a waste of time and it makes Perry look “unsophisticated”…but so what? There’s a real problem here, and it is all those liberals who’ve fallen for the junk science of “global warming”.
It is interesting watching the nation’s defenders of reason, empirical evidence, and science fail to display a hint of skepticism over the transparently political “science” of global warming. Rarely are scientists so certain in predicting the future. Yet this is a special case. It is also curious that these supposed champions of Darwin don’t believe that human beings–or nature–have the ability to adapt to changing climate.
Like 99 percent of pundits and politicians, though, I have no business chiming in on the science of climate change–though my kids’ teachers sure are experts. Needless to say, there is a spectacular array of viewpoints on this issue. The answers are far from settled. There are debates over how much humans contribute. There are debates over how much warming we’re seeing. There are debates over many things.
But even if one believed the most terrifying projections of global warming alarmist “science,” it certainly doesn’t mean one has to support the anti-capitalist technocracy to fix it. And try as some may to conflate the two, global warming policy is not “science.” The left sees civilization’s salvation in a massive Luddite undertaking that inhibits technological growth by turning back the clock, undoing footprints, forcing technology that doesn’t exist, banning products that do, and badgering consumers who have not adhered to the plan through all kinds of punishment. Yet there is no real science that has shown that any of it makes a whit of difference.
It’s perfect: the author is trying to set himself up as a defender of good science, but he does it by 1) trivializing the importance of the most fundamental concept in biology, and 2) being a denialist about climate change. Scientists are certain (to a reasonable degree) about predicting the future in this case because all the data points in this direction — you have to willfully reject the evidence in order to disagree. Maybe if he were a little less blasé about evolution he’d also realize that this isn’t an issue of capacity to adapt — trust me, you don’t want to live under an intense selection regime that changes the population’s mean physiology in a few generations — but of a common sense recognition that rapid climate change will be disruptive and have a severe economic cost.
And the answers are settled. Ongoing climate change is a fact. Pretending there is a serious debate about it is what the creationists do.
I suppose one solution would be to blow up all the factories and return to a 15th century lifestyle…if we didn’t mind killing a few billion people in the process, and wanted to live lives of hard labor in squalor. I don’t see anyone on the left advocating that, though. Instead, I see advocacy for sustainable energy policies and a demand that industry factor in all of the invisible, long-term costs that they’ve been hiding — which is, of course, anathema to Libertarians who believe in giving corporations a free ride at the expense of human beings.
(Also on FtB)
There’s a reason I really despise Libertarianism…but still find them hilariously twisted. Here’s a case of a columnist defending the science of Rick Perry. You know that evolution stuff? It’s not that important. Creationism is a waste of time and it makes Perry look “unsophisticated”…but so what? There’s a real problem here, and it is all those liberals who’ve fallen for the junk science of “global warming”.
It is interesting watching the nation’s defenders of reason, empirical evidence, and science fail to display a hint of skepticism over the transparently political “science” of global warming. Rarely are scientists so certain in predicting the future. Yet this is a special case. It is also curious that these supposed champions of Darwin don’t believe that human beings—or nature—have the ability to adapt to changing climate.
Like 99 percent of pundits and politicians, though, I have no business chiming in on the science of climate change—though my kids’ teachers sure are experts. Needless to say, there is a spectacular array of viewpoints on this issue. The answers are far from settled. There are debates over how much humans contribute. There are debates over how much warming we’re seeing. There are debates over many things.
But even if one believed the most terrifying projections of global warming alarmist “science,” it certainly doesn’t mean one has to support the anti-capitalist technocracy to fix it. And try as some may to conflate the two, global warming policy is not “science.” The left sees civilization’s salvation in a massive Luddite undertaking that inhibits technological growth by turning back the clock, undoing footprints, forcing technology that doesn’t exist, banning products that do, and badgering consumers who have not adhered to the plan through all kinds of punishment. Yet there is no real science that has shown that any of it makes a whit of difference.
It’s perfect: the author is trying to set himself up as a defender of good science, but he does it by 1) trivializing the importance of the most fundamental concept in biology, and 2) being a denialist about climate change. Scientists are certain (to a reasonable degree) about predicting the future in this case because all the data points in this direction — you have to willfully reject the evidence in order to disagree. Maybe if he were a little less blasé about evolution he’d also realize that this isn’t an issue of capacity to adapt — trust me, you don’t want to live under an intense selection regime that changes the population’s mean physiology in a few generations — but of a common sense recognition that rapid climate change will be disruptive and have a severe economic cost.
And the answers are settled. Ongoing climate change is a fact. Pretending there is a serious debate about it is what the creationists do.
I suppose one solution would be to blow up all the factories and return to a 15th century lifestyle…if we didn’t mind killing a few billion people in the process, and wanted to live lives of hard labor in squalor. I don’t see anyone on the left advocating that, though. Instead, I see advocacy for sustainable energy policies and a demand that industry factor in all of the invisible, long-term costs that they’ve been hiding — which is, of course, anathema to Libertarians who believe in giving corporations a free ride at the expense of human beings.
(Also on Sb)
It’s just his latest effort in Slate — I’m not unimpressed with Hitchens the man at all. It’s just that I did not find his subject particularly interesting, since it’s a discussion about whether Rick Perry is actually sincere about his religious beliefs, or whether he’s only pandering to the rubes.
I don’t care. Not one bit.
All that matters is what he actually does, not his motivation for doing it. Given that he’s promoting idiotic policies and giving support to foolish beliefs, it wouldn’t matter if he was doing it to support starving orphans in Africa.
Hitchens seems aware that his motives don’t matter. So why write about them?
Is it better to have a candidate who actually believes in biblical inerrancy and the extreme youthfulness and recency of the Grand Canyon, or a candidate who half-affects such convictions in the hope of political gain? Either would be depressing. A mixture of the two—not excluded in Perry’s case—would lower the tone nicely.
Perry is accomplishing that, at least, in collaboration with Bachmann.
I like Cuttlefish’s take on Perry better, even if it does include Texas yodeling.
There she goes, claiming God sent Hurricane Irene.
I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.
Hey, maybe God’s secret message is that he’s really pissed that Americans are stupid enough to promote Bachmann and Perry as candidates. How would you know?
She’s already straining to do damage control, and her campaign is claiming that it was “just a joke”, that old excuse. Was it funny? Are we to believe that Michele Bachmann now openly mocks the Power of the Lord?
After the event, a reporter asked Bachmann about the comments. She said: “Our hearts and prayers go out to the families of the victims. This isn’t something that we take lightly. My comments were not meant to be ones that were taken lightly. What I was saying in a humorous vein is there are things happening that politicians need to pay attention to. It isn’t everyday we have an earthquake in the United States.”
Well, make up your mind, Michele. Was it not meant to be taken lightly, or was it said in a humorous vein?
And actually, we do have earthquakes every day. There have been 2901 earthquakes in the US so far this year; there were 8493 total in 2010. It looks like, on average, there’s an earthquake above magnitude 4 every day, somewhere in the US.
Watch the doublespeak dribbling out of Obama’s mouth: he’s making up excuses for the extra-legal prolonged confinement of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, all in the name of the Constitution. He’s sounding more like George W. Bush every day.
This is all in the name of our profligate and pointless anti-terrorism policy. Fear is sown to justify weakening the law…just like the Republicans want it.
I’d ask how all of you out East were holding up in the big storm, but apparently three million of you are without power and aren’t going to be able to read or reply for a while. When you do finally get back online, at least you’ll find this entertaining.
Fox News thought it would be clever to invite an atheist on, ask him what he was doing to prepare for the hurricane, and then sneer at his spiritual poverty. Unfortunately for them, they got David Silverman, who proceeded to show that the talk show hosts were cretins. Shrill, angry, obtuse cretins.
And if you really want to see more Fox News inanity, here’s an opinion piece in which a couple of thinktank troglodytes argue that we don’t really need a national weather service. Why? Because it’s sometimes wrong, because if it really was useful then private industry would provide the service, because it’s exploited for political purposes, and because it costs too much. It’s all bog-standard libertarian bullshit.
Weather is complicated and you’re never going to get perfect accuracy: the weather is always predicted with an awareness of the range of error possible. Commercial weather agencies rely on data from the wide range of federally established monitoring stations — not just locally, but internationally, at sea, and in space. The private agencies don’t actually want NWS/NOAA to end, they just want them to stop distributing their information to the public for free (amusingly, AccuWeather has tried to copyright forecasts taken verbatim from the National Weather Service).
The accusation that the NWS/NOAA service is used for political purposes is asserted without evidence, but I can guess what they’re talking about: Republicans and Libertarians hate the fact that there’s all this data pouring out of weather services that supports the fact of climate change. In their minds, reality is a conspiracy to undermine their ideology.
These pundits also expect their audience to be innumerate.
As it stands today, the public is forced to pay more than $1 billion per year for the NWS. With the federal deficit exceeding a trillion dollars, the NWS is easily overlooked, but it shouldn’t be.
Yes? So the cost of the National Weather Service is equal to less than 0.1% of the budget deficit?
These goons are only outdone by Ron Paul, who sees no virtue in forecasting and emergency response plans from agencies like FEMA: he thinks “We should be like 1900“. Hands off, just let people cope as well as they can in areas affected by natural disasters.
They could sit around and pray without federal assistance, after all.
