News and Politics

Great response from Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to Karl Rove’s attack:

Via Minipundit: Carpetbagger is reporting that the U.S. House has passed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning the burning of the American flag. The margin more than satisfied to two-thirds requirement for such amendments.

Congress loves to spend time on meaningless “feel good” nonsense like this instead of issues that really matter to their constituents. They’re also grabbing at any opportunity to piss on the constitution and turn it into a worthless piece of paper. Crap like this simply doesn’t belong in the constitution.

This is yet another example of the government being out of touch with the people and no longer representing us. Ask 100 Americans what they consider the most important issues facing the country and I’m sure flag burning won’t be anywhere on the list. How about putting as much effort into health care or education?

Salon: Americans’ fear of a terrorist attack is at its lowest since 9/11.

Any predictions when the terror alert level will be raised?

Greg Anrig, Jr. proposes four goals at TPM Cafe that would make the country better off in meaningful ways while appealing to a broad spectrum of the population (and really, really angering highly vocal groups, mainly but not exclusively on the right).

1. Extend health insurance to all citizens.
2. Restore order to the immigration system – for our security, our economy, and an end to lawlessness. The plan would look a lot like the McCain-Kennedy proposal.
3. Make the income tax system more simple and fair by following the Reagan model of 1986: tax all income from investments the same as earnings (outside of a simplified savings-promotion account) and wipe out the countless loopholes that benefit only small numbers of companies and mostly high-income individuals. (These reforms would help pay for universal health coverage).
4. On the social issues that motivate the religious right, minimize the involvement of government and courts in the private decisions of citizens while respecting established practices and legal precedents. Change should generally arise through political consensus at the state and local level rather than judicial edicts.

The Right is still trying to trivialize Nixon’s crimes. This handy table from Media Matters compares the misdeeds of Clinton & Nixon:

Getting a BJ in the Oval Office is not comparable with a corrupt administration that broke into its opponent’s headquarters and bugged their offices. It also doesn’t compare with lying to get us into an unnecessary war and making the situation in the Middle East more dangerous than it was before he meddled. This is another instance of the conservatives worrying more about who someone sleeps with than things that matter like foreign policy or the economy.

From Village Voice:

Supporters of 21-year-old O’Neil Walker label his predicament a disgraceful case of racial profiling. Just before graduation this spring from Middlebury College in Vermont, the African American senior from the Bronx was thrown out of school for allegedly entering a classmate’s dorm room last winter without permission.
Nothing was taken, and nobody was hurt—except for Walker and his good reputation.

In April, the school held a private hearing and suspended Walker indefinitely for “behavior unbecoming of a Middlebury College student.” In early May, that ruling was upheld by an appeals board. Both hearings were closed to the public. School officials insist that they have strong evidence, but Billy Murphy, a Baltimore lawyer brought into the case by the father of Nolan Weltchek, one of Walker’s classmates, tells the Voice, “It was a kangaroo court. No lawyers were allowed in, and the burden of proof was set very low.”

A last-ditch attempt by Walker to get a court injunction against his suspension failed, and he was left on the outside, looking in.

Last week, while many of Walker’s classmates were heading to beach homes and celebratory trips abroad, Walker was sitting in his mom’s tiny apartment in the Bronx. Hyacinth Newby works as an attendant to the elderly; her son would have been the first in his family with a college degree.

“They threw him out like garbage,” she says. “It really hurts, it’s really painful. I’m proud of my son anyway.”

He still intends to go to law school. Sad, but composed, Walker says, “I just want the degree I’ve put years of work into. That’s the important thing now.”

Read the full story here.

Via Daily Kos: A great post by PZ Myers about the Kansas evolution “debates”.

There is a geological formation in Kansas called the Niobrara Chalk. Actually, it’s not just in Kansas; it extends all the way up into Canada, but the Niobrara has been exposed by erosion over much of northwestern Kansas, making it easy to dig into.

Chalk is interesting stuff. It’s made of a mineral calcium carbonate, that is formed into the shells of microscopic, one-celled golden brown algae. These Chrysophyceae are photosynthesizing organisms that float in large numbers at the surface of the sea, gather sunlight for energy and scavenging calcium dissolved in the water to build their protective shells. They occasionally shed the the minute calcium plates, and when the plants die, their skeletons drift slowly downward. The seas have a slow, soft, invisible rain of tiny flecks of calcium carbonate that very, very slowly builds up at the bottom.

The Niobrara Chalk formation is 600 feet thick. The inescapable conclusion is that Kansas was under water during the age of the dinosaurs. During the Mesozoic, the world was warm and the oceans were at a high level, and the entire central part of North America was a great, shallow, inland sea, a warm soup rich in microorganisms that were busily living and dying and slowly accumulating into deep dense chalk beds on the bottom.

During the course of the hearings, the lawyer on the side of science, Pedro Irigonegaray, asked several of the witnesses for Intelligent Design creationism what they thought the age of the earth was. It’s a simple, straightforward question with a simple answer: about 4.5 billion years. The Intelligent Design creationists found it difficult. Some answers were ludicrous, such as Daniel Ely’s and John Sanford’s assertion that the earth was between 10 and 100 thousand years old. Others were evasive: Stephen Meyer and Angus Menuge refused to answer. Some of these “qualified witnessesâ€? were embarrassingly ignorant: William Harris could only say, “I don’t know. I think it’s probably really old.â€?. All of this is in line with the intellectually flaccid position of the godfather of the Intelligent Design movement, Phillip Johnson, who has bravely announced that “I have consistently said that I take no position on the age of the earthâ€?.

Mention “Niobraraâ€? to these people and their eyes will not light up. At best you might get dull-eyed incomprehension, and more likely you will see shifty-eyed evasion. Yet these are the characters who want to dictate the scientific content of our children’s educations. I swear, if there were any truth to their metaphysical codswallop, the shades of Cope and Marsh and the Sternbergs would have manifested in that courtroom to denounce them, and the floor would have cracked open beneath their feet to allow a spectral tylosaur to rise up and gulp them down.

There are greater truths in the stones of Niobrara than in the dissembling and ill-educated brains of the fellows of the Discovery Institute. We need to teach the evidence, not this phony, ginned-up controversy from a gang of poseurs and theocrats.

Read the whole article here.

Via morons.org:

Once again the Republicans play the religion card, and once
again the Democrats are silent…

It’s not about religion. That’s what the Democrats ought to be
screaming and shouting on every morning news show and every
evening cable news program. Opposition to judges like Priscilla
Owen is not about her religion. It’s about her extremism.
It’s about her judicial activism. Why can’t the Dems get their message out there?

Senate majority leader Bill Frist wants to get his Fristians to believe that opposition to Owen is because she’s a Christian, and there’s a Democrat atheist conspiracy attacking judicial nominees because of their faith. It’s a red herring of course. What about the other 200 or so judicial nominees that were approved by Democrats? Are we to believe that none of those other Bush appointees were religious or Christian? That’s patently absurd. Frist knows the opposition to Owen has nothing at all to do with her religion and everything to do with her being so far out of the mainstream that the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court has sharply criticized many of her decisions. You know if you’re so far to the right that Republicans start thinking you’re out-there that you’re really not dealing with a mainstream, independent judge.

Where are the Democrats? Aren’t nearly all (if not all) of the Democrats who would be voting for or against this woman self-identifying Christians? Why are they letting Bill Frist accuse these Christians of being anti-Christian? Even their nemesis from the last election, Senator John Kerry, is a practicing Catholic. Why have they let Republicans promulgate this myth that only Republicans have an exclusive lock on religion and morality? Let’s hear a little about the religious left, guys! I know we even have some religious left on our very own staff.

Why aren’t the Democrats on CNN and CNBC and Good Morning America and the Daily Show explaining their opposition to this woman in simple terms that are easy to understand: she makes decisions based on her own personal feelings, not the law. Or better yet, make a bumper-sticker slogan out of it: Priscilla Owen Mocks the Law. I know it makes you feel dirty to distill complex issues down into sound bites, but that’s the world we live in, folks.

Pat Robertson: Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists.

“Over 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that’s held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings,” Robertson said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
“I think we have controlled Al Qaeda,” the 700 Club host said, but warned of “erosion at home” and said judges were creating a “tyranny of oligarchy.”

Confronted by Stephanopoulos on his claims that an out-of-control liberal judiciary is the worst threat America has faced in 400 years – worse than Nazi Germany, Japan and the Civil War – Robertson didn’t back down.

“Yes, I really believe that,” he said. “I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together.”

I’m speechless. I can’t fathom how greater freedom can be a threat to our country. These same people decry religious tyranny in Muslim countries but they can’t see the tyranny of their own desire to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else.

Andrew Sullivan:

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.” – president John F. Kennedy. At the time, the speech was regarded as an attempt to refute anti-Catholic prejudice. Today, wouldn’t the theocons regard it as an expression of anti-Catholic prejudice? Wouldn’t Bill Frist see president Kennedy as an enemy of “people of faith”? Just asking.

(via Talking Points Memo)