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  • Joe Arpaio – Vile and Rotten

    Joe Arpaio - Vile and Rotten

    Why is this guy still in business? Sheriff Joe Arpaio's volunteer investigation into documents pertaining to President Barack Obama's place of birth and citizenship now includes the services of a taxpayer-funded ...

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  • Romney The Liar

    Romney The Liar

    The lies roll off the man's lips like music off Yo-Yo Ma's cello. Both are virtuosos - one a cellist, the other a liar. A partial list. Bush had nothing to do ...

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  • Late Night Political Humor

    Late Night Political Humor

    Happy Friday. The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor. "Barack Obama supports same-sex marriage. Mitt Romney doesn't even support same-sex car pools." –David Letterman "The head of ...

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  • Another Unexceptional Republican Claims Obama Is Not An American

    Another Unexceptional Republican Claims Obama Is Not An American

    Republican Rep. Mike Coffman at a Saturday afternoon fundraiser in Colorado. I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don't know that. But I ...

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  • Idiot Quote of the Day: The “Gayer” Obama

    Idiot Quote of the Day: The Gayer Obama

    Rand Paul: Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his [Obama's] views on marriage could get any gayer. We won't call Rand cynical. Ignorant, bigoted asshole is more fitting. An adult using ...

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  • Late Night Political Humor

    Late Night Political Humor

    Happy Friday. The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor. "President Obama came out with approval of same-sex marriage. He said that over the years, he has ...

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  • What The Hell Is The Problem With Gay Republicans?

    What The Hell Is The Problem With Gay Republicans?

    I've never understood Log Cabin Republicans - gay conservatives who give their support to a homophobic political party that derides their sexuality and refuses to grant them equal rights under ...

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  • Obama – Same-Sex Marriage and Doing The Right Thing

    Obama - Same-Sex Marriage and Doing The Right Thing

    Finally. “I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own ...

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  • Another Day, Another Vote – Indiana, NC and Wisconsin

    Another Day, Another Vote - Indiana, NC and Wisconsin

    Election roundup: Indiana. As polls forecast, the Tea Party's efforts to cleanse the GOP of any impure conservatives has Dick Lugar out and teabagger Richard Mourdock in. Mourdock is the new Republican ...

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  • ‘Romney – The Man Who Saved The Auto Industry’ and Other Fairy Tales

    'Romney - The Man Who Saved The Auto Industry' and Other Fairy Tales

    There are lies...and then there are lies. My own view, by the way, was that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what ...

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  • A Madman and Fox News

    A Madman and Fox News

    From the papers captured last year at Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideout comes this. Like any public figures, bin Laden and his advisers were mindful of the media. Adam Gadahn, one ...

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  • Late Night Political Humor

    Late Night Political Humor

    The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor. Happy Friday. "Today Mitt Romney visited a firehouse here in New York City. Of course, he was disappointed ...

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  • New GOP Logo

    New GOP Logo

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  • Can Obama Be Swift-Boated?

    Can Obama Be Swift-Boated?

    It happened to Kerry. Can it happen to Obama? Nope says Margaret Carlson. Obama’s belief system -- in that hopey-changey business and the post-partisanship thing -- has been altered by reality. ...

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  • Quote of the Day: The Gay Republican

    Quote of the Day: The Gay Republican

    Sullivan: What do Republicans call a gay man with neoconservative passion, a committed relationship and personal courage? A faggot. Exactly right, but then could one expect anything different from a political party that ...

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  • Christian Pastor: Fixing Gay Is Like Squashing a Cockroach

    Christian Pastor: Fixing Gay Is Like Squashing a Cockroach

    And they claim that atheists are immoral? The ugly side of religion shows its face once again. The words below were spoken at a Sunday sermon by Sean Harris, a pastor ...

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  • GM Alive, bin Laden Dead

    GM Alive, bin Laden Dead

    It's been fun watching conservatives and Romney twist themselves into pretzels trying to undo Mitt's past words on GM and bin Laden. Romney, April 2007: It’s not worth moving heaven and earth ...

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  • Republicans Are The Problem

    Republicans Are The Problem

      In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, a couple of scholars from liberal and conservative think tanks, discuss the state of American politics. We have been studying Washington politics and ...

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  • Marco Rubio – Just Another Weasel

    Marco Rubio - Just Another Weasel

    Romney's VP-in-waiting, Marco Rubio, is perfecting the conservative sleaze play. He has proposed his version of the Dream Act in which people who entered the country illegally as children will be ...

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  • Obama’s Move Forward

    Obama's Move Forward

    Beyond the rhetoric, the political BS, the lies - that is, the concerted effort by the right-wing noise machine to distort and misinform at every opportunity - is the very ...

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Creationism And The Right-Wing’s March Backwards

Goodbye science. Hello 1925. The right’s relentless effort to keep the youth of America ignorant carries on.

A controversial bill that protects teachers who discuss with students “weaknesses” in evolution and other scientific theories is on its way to [Tennessee] Gov. Bill Haslam, who is under pressure from prominent scientists to veto it.

Scientists in Tennessee and across the nation charge the measure is a “backdoor” attempt to allow discussions of religion-based views such as “creationism” and “intelligent designs” in science classrooms.

The House approved the bill Monday night on a 72-23 vote that included changes made last week by the Senate bill’s sponsor, Bo Watson, R-Hixson. There was no debate.

Watson has said he tried to address scientists’ concerns with new language that directs science teachers to discuss evolution, climate change and other areas within the state’s science education “framework.”

Three prominent Tennessee scientists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences charged Monday in a letter published in the Tennessean newspaper that state lawmakers are “doing the unbelievable: attempting to roll the clock back to 1925 by attempting to insert religious beliefs in the teaching of science.”

Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) responds in a clip from Inherit The Wind, the film adaptation of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial where a Tennessee science teacher was fined for teaching evolution in a state-funded school.

Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!

They didn’t understand then. They sure as hell don’t understand now. Fixing stupid, they say, is never easy.

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(The chimp source photograph is Wikimedia Commons licensed media. The Rick Santorum source photograph is a Creative Commons licensed image from photographer Gage Skidmore. )

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Dear, The Printer is Out Of Cells

Amazing. The age of organ donors is being supplanted by technology and innovation which strives to perfect the science of lab-grown organs.

Some researchers are excited by the potential organ-building capabilities of three-dimensional (3-D) printers. These devices are modified versions of everyday inkjet printers that squirt living cells rather than drops of ink. Layer by layer, they can make three-dimensional structures such as organs and, as of September last year, the blood vessels they contain. [Anthony] Atala is developing this technique – he wowed the audience at a TED conference last year by printing a kidney on stage (although not a functional one).  He says,For the level four organs [heart, lungs, etc.], it’s just a matter of time,” says Atala. “We’re still a long way from full replacement, but I do believe that these technologies are achievable.”

Dr. Atala’s TED talk.

 

(h/t: The Dish)

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A Flutter of Wings and Art

It’s been a rough couple of days so allow me ease into this week with some majesty, beauty and art – an amazing clip from filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg’s “Wings of Life”.  It uses high-speed images and time lapse photography to uncover the hidden world of pollination.


Here is Schwartzberg’s introductory talk at TED.

 

TED should be a favorite for anyone interested in the ideas which are changing our world.  Love it.

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Republicans Rewriting Science

Conservative, anti-science, knuckle-dragging ignorance is alive and well in Texas.

Top environmental officials under Perry have gutted a recent report on sea level rise in Galveston Bay, removing all mentions of climate change. For the past decade, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), which is run by Perry political appointees, including famed global warming denier Bryan Shaw, has contracted with the Houston Advanced Research Center to produce regular reports on the state of the Bay. But when HARC submitted its most recent State of the Bay publication to the commission earlier this year, officials decided they couldn’t accept a report that said climate change is caused by human activity and is causing the sea level to rise. Top officials at the commission proceeded to edit the paper to censor its references to human-induced climate change or future projections on how much the bay will rise.

[...]

TCEQ even deleted a reference to the fact that the bay is currently rising by 3 millimeters a year—five times faster than the long-term average. The edited version that TCEQ sent back also killed a line noting that the bay’s “future will be strongly regulated by the now rising sea,” as well as the factual assertion that the disappearance of the wetlands is “due mainly to direct human intervention.” The officials also cut out the statement that the water level rise “is one of the main impacts of global climate change.”

The degree of willful ignorance on the part of GW deniers is astounding.  Fossil fuel lobbyists line the pockets of politicians as they go about the dirty business of censoring scientific research on the causes and effects of climate change.  None of this is new to conservatives and Republicans.  From day one, the Bush administration blatantly censored government funded research which ran counter to the story they were promoting.  From 2007.

The Bush administration was yesterday accused of systemic tampering with the work of government climate scientists to eliminate politically inconvenient material about global warming.

At a hearing of Congress, scientists and advocacy groups described a campaign by the White House to remove references to global warming from scientific reports and limit public mention of the topic to avoid pressure on an administration opposed to mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions.

Such pressure extended even to the use of the words “global warming” or “climate change”, said a report released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project. The report said nearly half of climate scientists at government agencies had been advised against using those terms.

And here’s a 2006 piece on James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s top climatologists.

…this imminent scientist says that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is little point in discussing climate change with your run-of-the-mill, Fox News parrot.  These people are clueless.  Enough of them would believe that the earth is flat and the center of our solar system if Bill O’Reilly believed it to be so.  If these fools are unwilling to accept the scientific consensus of 98% of the world’s climatologists over that of a lying monkey, it’s fair to assume that anything anyone else has to say on the matter will have little impact on their beliefs.  It’s an old line but true nonetheless – you can’t fix stupid.

The focus needs to be on ensuring that as many as possible of the politicians who push an anti-science, GW denying agenda, remain out of power.  If there’s no Rick Perry or George W. Bush to appoint officials with the authority to censor and make a mockery of science, then maybe, truth and common sense can win out.

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Republican Bob Inglis Lectures His Tea-Mad, Anti-Science Party

Bob Inglis is the type of conservative you wished the Republican party had a few more of within their ranks.  He’s the type of rare conservative who makes the term ‘reasonable Republican’ appear to be a little less of an oxymoron and more of a possibility.

Bob Inglis served six term in the U.S. House of Representatives as a member from South Carolina before finding himself a casualty of the Tea Party train wreck in the 2010 midterms.  In the run-off for that year’s Republican primary, Inglis got decimated by the Tea Party favorite in a 71-29 percent landslide.  Despite posting a solid conservative record in his 12 years in Congress, it was determined that Inglis had crossed party lines once too many times – a definite no-no for a political party where simply having one of their members agree with a liberal on the time of day is enough to demand that the person be drawn and quartered.

Inglis’ had committed the unforgivable sins of voting for the TARP bailouts in 2008 as well as siding with Dems in opposing the Iraqi troop surge in 2007.  He was also one of only 7 Republicans to side with Democrats in voting to disapprove fellow SC Rep. Joe Wilson for yelling out “liar” during President Obama’s 2009 address to Congress.  Obviously, Bob Inglis had made the decision to maintain his right to think for himself over any attempt to pursue pure partisan politics.

And despite Inglis’ willingness to compromise and side with Dems on a few, specific issues, he still maintained a “93.5% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union and his endorsements from the National Rifle Association and National Right to Life.”  But alas, it was not enough to save Inglis from the Tea Party Inquisition, especially in light of the fact that Inglis was determined to hold on to the one belief which makes all teabaggers, wingnuts and Fox News personalities cringe in horror and uncontrollable rage.  The very conservative Bob Inglis, a 12 year member of Congress, had the audacity to…(gulp!)…to…to…believe in science!!!

Bob Inglis, when given a choice between staying true to his innate intelligence or siding with the mentally deficient crazies who now controlled his party, opted for the former.  In the end, he was mocked for it and it was a factor in his loss of position within the Republican party.

One year later, Inglis has not given up in trying to educate his fellow Republicans and conservatives.  Here’s an excerpt from a piece Inglis wrote in Bloomberg on Monday.

The National Academy of Sciences says, “Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks.” Several recent studies have found that 95 percent of climate scientists are convinced that the planet is rapidly warming as a result of human activity. But a George Mason University-Yale University poll in May found that only 13 percent of the public realizes that scientists have come to that conclusion.

You would expect conservatives to stand with 95 percent of the scientific community and to grow the 13 percent into a working majority. Normally, we deal in facts, we accept science and we counter sentiment…

OK, there’s some BS in the above.  No, conservatives do not, for the most part, deal in facts.  It’s simply not something these people do well.  It might be a genetic defect, I don’t know, but if you need better convincing, tune in to the next Republican primary debate for a true example of what a lie-fest is all about.  It’s a sight to behold.

But that aside, Inglis’ message to conservatives is clear and intelligent.  He’s asking them to wake up and return from their decades long journey into the nether regions of insanity – a journey which has gotten a little more unreal with each passing day…

Alright, alright, maybe he’s not saying all of  that, but Inglis has issued a warning to conservatives.  Here were his parting words to his party after his 2010 loss at the hands of a Tea Party candidate.

“It’s a dangerous strategy, to build conservatism on information and policies that are not credible.”

It certainly is but unfortunately for Inglis, his Republican party and, I imagine, an entire nation, his fellow conservatives are just not listening.

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