John McCain has finally had enough of his Republican teabagging cohorts, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
In the latest expression of Republican frustration with conservative GOP colleagues, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) ...
Our friend, John Liming, wonders how God might deal with two conflicting prayers of a political nature.
I have been reading an article on the website, Raw Story, where it is ...
Item 1:
The Oklahoma tornado disaster has killed at least 24 people, left hundreds injured and caused millions of dollars in damage. But that has not stopped a senator from that ...
If you're new to right-wing think, here's an easy to remember rule of thumb to help you along; any and all evil in the world can be attributed directly to ...
From a political party overflowing with sociopaths and creeps, none other than Dick Cheney encapsulates to a greater degree what it is the Republican party has become. The blood of ...
It can be debated as to whether the filibuster came about as a political accident or was created to give minority parties a stronger say in opposing specific legislation they ...
While gun nuts sink a little deeper into madness with each passing day, Seattle is turning guns into bricks.
The Seattle Police Department collected more than 700 guns during a buyback ...
Had enough of right-wing political crap and find yourself with a deep desire to get as far from the madding crowd as you can?
Read on...
The opportunity to travel to Mars ...
Here's the full quote from Charles P. Pierce.
If your "way of life" involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should ...
A guest post from James Fidlerten.
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After September 11, 2011, America became united, as it grieved the loss of so many lives on American soil. The tragic event also changed so ...
I'm not sure that 'crazy' is strong enough an adjective to describe the many (or few) who go to the absurd lengths they do in defending America's out-of-control gun culture. ...
When an enabler of sexual abuse directed at children sits on the threshold of sainthood, you know you're living in a world of screwed-up priorities.
The canonisation of Wojtyla is getting ...
Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, ponders Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 presidential election.
Looking back, O'Connor said, she isn't sure the high court should have ...
Barbara Bush on a Jeb run in 2016.
"We've had enough Bushes."
An entire planet concurs.
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Today we learn...
The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the ...
The above is in response to Maureen Dowd's ridiculous assertion that President Obama is incompetent for failing to get the 60 votes the Senate required to move the gun background ...
In desperate need of an excuse for voting against background checks, here's the one an unnamed Democratic senator is using.
“Guns, gays and immigration — it’s too much. I can be ...
The vote came in at 55 to 45 in favor of expanding background checks for gun sales. In most institutes of democracy, that would have been more than enough to ...
Fed up with trying to deal with climate change deniers morons in your circle of family and friends who have an endless supply of idiotic and baseless claims to support their denialism? Nonsense like, “In the 70s, scientists predicted an ice age” and “Hey, global warming has to be a hoax. We just had a snowstorm!”
Well, Skeptical Science to the rescue. They’ve put together one-liner rejoinders to just about every dumbass argument deniers have in their arsenal of ignorance. They also provide links to the in depth explanations. Examples:
Denier Argument:The sun is causing the planet to warm. Response: In the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions [link].
Denier Argument:Climate has changed before. Response: Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant force. [link].
We’ve all heard this one a thousand times
Denier Argument: There is no consensus among scientists. Response: 97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming. [link].
Good stuff. Check it out and be ready the next time you’re at a family gathering and your Fox News-loving idiot cousin tries to lay a little denialism your way.
In desperate need of an excuse for voting against background checks, here’s the one an unnamed Democratic senator is using.
“Guns, gays and immigration — it’s too much. I can be with you on one or two of them, but not all three.”
Apparently, asking some politicians to do the right thing more than twice in the same time period crosses the line of reasonable demands. Getting votes triumphs doing the right thing every single time.
…this isn’t just an explanation for a vote. It’s a salve for a guilty conscience. This is not the sort of rationalization that would be leaking from the chamber if senators were confident they’d done the right thing. It’s a rationalization for people who feel they did the wrong thing, and want to tell themselves it’s the cost for doing the right thing later, on an even larger scale.
Noam Scheiber of the New Republic writes an excellent piece on what it is that makes politicians turn their backs on sensible gun control.
…guns tend to be remote from the experience of most gun-control supporters. This is true even after a horrific act of gun violence like Newtown. Though every parent was briefly traumatized by the thought of their child being massacred at school, only a small fraction of parents (and especially parents who vote) are directly or even indirectly affected by such crimes.
This means that, even when overwhelming majorities of Americans support a specific gun-control measure, their support is shallow. Guns and gun violence just aren’t something they spend a lot of time contemplating. The voters who oppose gun control, on the other hand, (hunters, shooting enthusiasts, crazy people) devote a good bit of mental energy to firearms. As a result, they’re easily mobilized by the interest groups who spend all their time on the matter (namely gun-makers and lobbyists).
Scheiber makes the case that the same logic applies to other issues – notably, global warming. While most of us have an understanding that weather has been chaotic over the last number of years and that global temperatures are on the rise, relatively few have been negatively affected in a big way by climate change. On the other hand, big oil understands only too well the implications that comprehensive carbon regulations would have on the bottom line. Therefore…
…voters who work in the fossil fuel industry or whose states depend on it—have no trouble picturing the downsides of making oil, gas, and electricity costlier. As with guns, the people who spend all their time thinking about this (your friends at Exxon Mobil and BP) can rile them up pretty easily.
Be wary of using words like ‘politician’ and ‘courageous’ in the same sentence.
Texas Rep. Joe Barton doesn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change. That’s partially because he is firmly in the pocket of Big Oil. The oil and gas industry is the largest contributor to Barton’s warchest.
…
However, Barton’s fervor to deny that humans have anything to do with climate change has taken a new direction. In a bizarre reference to the Great Flood of the Bible, Barton is using that as evidence that hydrocarbons don’t change the climate. How Barton draws that comparison is going to have to be left to the imagination. Barton doesn’t elaborate on what forty days of rain in antiquity has to do with the present-day earth warming.
Perhaps he is thinking that today’s rising sea levels are the same challenge that Noah had building an ark. If only the answer to climate change was so simple. Here is the great environmental insight from Barton:
“I would point out that people like me who support hydrocarbon development don’t deny that climate is changing. I think you can have an honest difference of opinion of what’s causing that change without automatically being either all in that’s all because of mankind or it’s all just natural. I think there’s a divergence of evidence.”
“I would point out that if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”
It’s probably impossible to pack more stupid into a single statement but that won’t stop Barton and his fellow Texas Republicans (Rick Perry, Louie Gohmert, Ted Cruz, Steve Stockman – to name a few) from attempting to do that very thing the next time they find themselves in front of a microphone. You can count on it.
When historians look back at the defining issue of our time, it won’t have anything to do with the failing economies of European nations or the wars and revolts plaguing the Middle East. It won’t be about nuclear threats or terrorist threats. It’ll be about none of these.
It’ll be about climate change.It’ll be about a generation of leaders who were coerced into not taking action on global warming even though scientific consensus warned of the catastrophic consequences of not doing so.
And it’ll be about a small group of greedy lying bastards who used money, power and influence to thwart the will to save our planet. It’ll be about David Koch, Charles Koch, CEOs of the fossil fuel industries, politicians like Jim Inhofe and the conservative media who without fail, have done their bidding.
A new documentary, Greedy Lying Bastards, opens today in theaters. It deals with those very issues.
ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch brothers, electric companies like Southern Company and a new posse of anonymous donors have collectively dumped millions of dollars into front groups and think tanks they could prompt to say and do things they couldn’t be caught dead saying or doing themselves. The corporate puppeteers knew that sowing doubt and uncertainty would buy them time. A stay of execution. The free market front groupers had hit pay dirt and feel that taking action on climate change is some UN conspiracy to shackle their god given free market freedom.
Treat a denier to a screening of the film. It might not help but it beats doing nothing.
The word is that some Republicans are finally catching on to the fact that they need to rebrand their image if they ever hope to win the White House any time soon. The Dr. Evil / Mr. Hyde persona they’ve been carrying around for the last few decades appears to be wearing thin on voters. And so we have Eric Cantor coming out yesterday in favor of proposals for immigration reform that sound suspiciously similar to what Democrats have been saying for years.
“It’s no secret that there are more than 11 million people here illegally, many of whom have become part of the fabric of our country,” he [Cantor] said. “They, like us, have families and dreams.”
and…
“It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home.”
If Cantor’s newly evolved position on immigration sounds exactly opposite to Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” position that was supported by Republicans during the election campaign, it’s because it is. It’s amazing what 70 percent support for Obama by Hispanics can do to Republicans’ long held beliefs.
But don’t bet the farm on Republicans evolving into rational fact-based 21st century beings just yet. It won’t happen any time soon as exemplified by Marco Rubio’s take on climate change at a BuzzFeed event yesterday.
The question is if man made activity is what’s contributing the most to it. I know people said there’s a significant scientific consensus on that issue, but I’ve actually seen reasonable debate on that principle.
Bullshit. Marco Rubio is a liar. There is no “reasonable debate” on the issue of whether human activity is the prime cause of global warming. When 97 percent of climatologists are in agreement on man’s role in climate change, it’s a fair assumption to say that there’s a scientific consensus out there – a consensus that the liars and deniers refuse to acknowledge.
You can take Rubio’s word on climate change…or you can listen to what the The National Academy of Sciences has to say on the issue:
“Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is due to human activities.”
Is that not clear enough?
Throw in the right’s views on creationism, marriage equality, gun control, women’s reproductive rights and countless other issues and what you’re left with is a political party that refuses to alter its beliefs and join the rest of us in the 21st century. And as long as Republicans refuse to do so, the GOP will continue their downward slide into irrelevancy no matter how enlightened Eric Cantor appears to have become on the immigration issue.
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