Obama made a Lincoln’s birthday speech, and a fine speech it was. It was a call to work for the common good, for strong government, and for investment in things I happen to value: education and science. It also includes a brief nod to Charles Darwin.
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If only he’d left off the ‘god bless America’ nonsense at the end, it would have been perfect.
Jon Stewart is so good at drawing blood from his targets.
Would you believe that a Swedish politician has suggested that their prime minister should end all of his speeches with “God bless Sweden” (translation)? It’s got to be a joke. She explicitly points to the US as a model — why any country would want to emulate the United States’ greatest flaw, its ignorant religiosity, is a mystery to me.
The answer is in: it’s Howard Dean.
That strange sound you hear popping in the distance is the percussive explosion of wingnut crania everywhere.
I think it’s an excellent choice. Dean is a smart guy who gives excellent speeches, he’s a centrist-to-conservative Democrat so he’s not a political extremist, and he has a lot of regional relevance.
Read this: wherever Obama has proposed stimulus spending for science, conservative senators propose chopping back massively. The increase in support for NSF? Gone completely. NASA’s boost? Cut in half. And on and on.
These cuts have not passed yet, but they will soon if you don’t howl at your senators.
Obama is about to lift the gag order that prohibited federal funds going to international groups that performed abortions.
He has ordered a review of all of Bush’s last-minute policy acts, stopping them cold.
And look at this:
President Obama is expected to loosen the restrictions [on stem cell research], which many researchers and advocates have complained severely set back work toward curing disease such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.
Okarma said Geron did not use any federal funding for its research, and that the Bush restrictions had “devastated the field.”
This is something else, when an incoming president can, in his first week, simply say “no” to all the bad policies of the prior White House occupant and achieve great good. It’s as if any idiot could do this job better than George W. Bush.
I imagine it will get harder, though.
I have my reservations about Obama, but I am seeing clear differences between him and the previous tenant of the White House already — good changes.
US President Barack Obama is expected to announce that he is ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within a year.
He is also expected to order a ban on abusive interrogations and a review of military trials for terror suspects.
Why do I suddenly feel this unfamiliar sensation? Is this what they call “hope”?
Late last year, the New Humanist podcast was taking nominations for their Bad Faith award, given to the most “deluded fantasist” of the year. It was my honor as one of the Americans on the roster to nominate our very own Sarah Palin.
Either I was extremely persuasive or my nominee was so patently fit for the award that none could oppose her. Sarah Palin wins! I am very pleased to say that it is the only thing she has won, and that it is well deserved.
If you want to see the consequences of the recent wave of attempts to endorse “provider conscience rules”, in which health care providers are permitted to freely exercise their whims and biases in providing clients and patients their services, read this story. As usual, it’s all about controlling the reproductive choices of women: we’ve had politicians blocking access to Plan B contraception; laws that would allow doctors to deny care if it was against their religious beliefs; and pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. Beyond simply passive denial of giving a patient what they need, though, we now have gone to the next step: wingnuts actively removing birth control devices against the patient’s will. Nurse practitioner Sylvia Olona of the Presbyterian Medical Services Rio Rancho Family Health Center in New Mexico has been taking it upon herself to yank out the IUDs of patients in her care.
Having the IUD come out was a good thing [because] I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don’t know how you feel about abortion, but I am against them. …What the IUD does is take the fertilized egg and pushes it out of the uterus.
What Olona is doing is a violation of ethics, a consequence of shameful ignorance, and ought to be criminal. At the very least, she ought to be fired.
That is not what an IUD does. An IUD is a small, typically T-shaped piece of metal or plastic that is inserted into the uterus, where it interferes with conception. In essence, what it does is induce a low-grade, local inflammation in the reproductive tract that causes changes in cervical mucus, hindering the passage of sperm. The device itself also seems to block sperm activity, and some IUDs also slowly release progestin, a hormone that suppresses ovulation. It is not an abortifactant. It is basically a kind of barrier method. Most of the uninformed complaints about the IUD are built on the fact that it also induces changes to the uterine lining which would inhibit implantation if sperm somehow managed to fertilize an egg.
How about firing this bozo because she is ignorant about the facts of her job?
Olona is a serial offender. She is currently being sued by a woman who went in for a trivial adjustment of the IUD, and instead had it completely removed by Olona…by ‘accident’, the nurse claims, but she apparently has a reputation for doing this.
Everyone in the office always laughs and tells me I pull these out on purpose because I am against them, but it’s not true, they accidentally come out when I tug.
Ladies, welcome to your future. A future in which others will decide whether you may have children or not. Don’t worry, though: they will never say “not”. And don’t feel like your choices will be taken out of your hands, you still have a choice. If you don’t want to get pregnant, just never have sex, you slut.
It’s inauguration day, and in a fine old American tradition, every event must be associated with a commercial tie-in. Krispy Kreme dougnuts is offering a free choice of a doughnut in honor of the change in presidents.
Did you hear that? Free choice of a doughnut?
Get it? Choice?
Yeah, I know, most of you aren’t obsessive lunatics, so it’s not obvious. You need to see the press release sent out by the American Life League.
The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that ‘choice’ is synonymous with abortion access, and celebration of ‘freedom of choice’ is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand.
Buying a doughnut is now interpreted as endorsing abortion. This is insane.
Unfortunately, another fine American tradition is the compounding of the insanity. Krispy Kreme caved and rewrote their advertising copy to carefully spell out at the end that “the Inauguration Day promotion is not about any social or political issue.”
I’m sorry, world. Some Americans are flaming morons, and the rest of us fall ass-over-ankles to cater to them.
