So I was listening to the latest episode of “On The Media” on Mighty Ponygirl’s suggestion (because they have a great report on the Cult of Ayn Rand and how they’re trying to buy themselves credibility they can’t generate honestly), and I heard this story that I think should be an iconic example of how the Bush administration is both evil and stupid. It’s about the corruption in the Office of Special Counsel, which is a whistleblower protection agency. As you can imagine, the Bush administration is opposed to whistleblowing (and puppies and kittens and sunshine), so they went out and found the craziest asshole wingnut possible to head up this office: Scott Bloch. He did an admirable job of refusing to do the job he was appointed, and in proper BushCo fashion, this exemplar of malfeasance is now facing a cavalcade of subpoenas and general calls for his head.
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Filed under Conservatives Sure Are Funny, GLBT, Republican Scourge, Unintended Stupidity.
Via. Most of these that get passed around the internet strike me as hoaxes, but sabotabby got this one from an APA publication that seems to have vetted it for authenticity. Unfortunately, this only seems to be one page, so it’s hard to really get a good idea of your score. I don’t wear red nail polish and my seams are never crooked, but I think that’s probably not going to help me much because of the issues regarding church and children. Still, I agree that the cold fee thing is a sucky thing to do.
Below the fold so you can see the whole thing in all its glory.
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Filed under History, Marriage.
Update: I’m certainly sorry if this piece came across as insensitive to the desperate parents of autistic kids looking for answers to what is definitely a mystery of why autism exists. The reason anti-vaccination cranks piss me off so badly is they prey on this particular vulnerability. The fact that people with autistic kids are so vulnerable is why this particular brand of crankery is so nasty.
If my sympathy for the victims of anti-vaccination cranks and for parents with autistic kids wasn’t clear, I take responsibility. I should have been more overt about that.
The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.
I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks.
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Filed under Child development, Health, Science, Science For Choads.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling paranoid, I think the rumors that voting machines are rigged are floated to distract progressives from old-fashioned voter suppression tactics. I mention this, because there seems to be a trend lately of pushing for voter ID bills that are directly aimed at diverting legal voters from the polls, and now there’s one up in Missouri. I saw a presentation on this at the Texas ACLU conference, and the speaker Nina Perales from MALDEF really impressed upon me how many voters can be purged from a roll using these kinds of tactics. Often the types of ID required to prove citizenship are things that people don’t carry on them, or documents that native born citizens might easily acquire but naturalized citizens don’t have. I’m sure the document requirements vary from law to law, but the general rule of thumb is that it’s about putting obstacles between predominantly Democratic voting blocs and casting a ballot. A lot of people in targeted groups have reasons to want to minimize their contact with officials, so they will be rebuffed easily by the first person who turns them away at the polls, because they’re afraid to fight for their rights.
The voter ID bills are based on a faulty premise, which is that there are widespread problems of people imitating others to vote.
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Filed under Election 2008, I Fought The Law, Immigration.
Warning: It’s hard to consider this a political post, but still, I think it’s an issue of great importance
This article is well-intentioned, but kind of gave me an uneasy vibe. It’s about a trend I was blissfully unaware of until very recently, when I went out bowling with some friends to a place that plays loud music and videos, and suddenly this song came on—I can’t tell you which one—and like half the people at the bowling alley started to do some kind of line dance. As I stood there appalled, my friends explained that this is some new thing that’s really popular, and later one of them emailed out a video of a bunch of middle aged men doing the same dance in kilts….at a wedding of course.
In other words, you can blame the patriarchy for shitty dance crazes, at least in part.
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Filed under Music.
If pressed, most of us bicycling fans will say we do it for the exercise, to save money on gas, and for the environment. But now this Hungarian PSA promoting bicycling has exposed the truth. You might not want to play this where office mates can hear it. (Via, with translation.)
But I can’t help but think that as silly as it is, there’s a grain of truth to the claims. Lack of exercise is brutal to the sex drive, and something as well-rounded as bicycling to get exercise probably does have some health benefits that carry over to the bedroom.
Filed under Video.
Oh man, the more I hear about this movie Expelled, the funnier it gets.
The producers of “Expelled” spent two years interviewing scores of scientists, doctors, philosophers, and public leaders, including University of Minnesota biology professor P.Z. Myers, who does not support alternative theories of evolution. The clip of “Imagine,” which is audible for approximately 15 seconds, is used in a segment of the documentary in which the film’s narrator and author Ben Stein comments on statements made by Myers and others about the place of religion. In the documentary Stein says: “Dr. Myers would like you to think that he’s being original but he’s merely lifting a page out of John Lennon’s songbook.” This is followed by an audio clip of Lennon’s song “Imagine,” specifically, the lyrics “Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too.”
That wingnuts have held a grudge against that song for 37 years tells you how small their world really is. Did they really think the plebes could be sheltered from doubt in god if that damn former Beatle hadn’t penetrated the Berlin wall of religious censorship? Or do they really think John Lennon invented atheism?
The more I hear about this movie, the more clear it becomes that it’s patched together using email forwards.
Filed under Conservatives Sure Are Funny, Religion, Science.
Annejumps sent me this, and Cristina Page posted on it. Various anti-choice organizations are coming together and protesting the fact that many of you right now are not having to get abortions to keep from having more kids than you can handle. You know, because you use contraception.
There’s an entire bit of pseudo-science woo to explain how the birth control pill actually causes abortion, but there’s no actual scientific reason to think it. The only reason they grasp at this is that the anti-choice movement is not, and has never really been, motivated by concern for fetuses, but more concern for women’s ability to control our fertility, and subsequently our lives, control they don’t want us to have. The pill is protested because their magical beliefs would have it “killing babies”, but that doesn’t explain their opposition to condoms, opposition that has led to abstinence-only education and abstinence-only strings attached to HIV relief funds to the rest of the world. Maybe it kills babies when sperm are deprived of the opportunity to swim free?
Filed under Reproductive justice, Unintended Stupidity.
If you can’t get through an article about Indiana without mentioning a certain twenty-year-old sports movie, you aren’t qualified to write it.
One thing about Indiana is that it has a long history of competing ideas and interests. It’s not only the home of the KKK, but also of Eugene Debs, one of the founders of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World. Indiana housed some of the first two utopian societies in the United States, had several integral stops on the Underground Railroad, and additionally boasts one of the internationally known centers for Quaker society. Reynolds, Indiana, a twenty minute drive north of my house, was chosen as the first BioTown in the United States thanks to it’s proximity to major biofuel sources. Indiana is heavily based in manufacturing, moreso than in agriculture, and as such is heavily unionized. Where Indiana was once largely a white state, the African-American and Latino populations are growing exponentially, and hell, within the last decade the university in my backyard hosted the largest number of foreign students in all of the United States. But somehow, whenever you see an outsider write about Indiana, what you read about is corn, religion, grand dragons, and basketball.
Which brings me to this Salon article.
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Filed under Barack Obama, Democrats, Election 2008, Hillary Clinton.
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