October, 2009 archive
Festival 0
I have only three more days to get to the big show.
Greater Wingnuttery XLIII 0
Field has the recap.
Must. Stop. Brain. From. Exploding. 0
Trying to follow Republican reasoning (emphasis added):
You were born a Christian, not born gay. Religion is not a choice.
Or so the spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) would have you believe. Questioned about why the House’s top Republican opposes a hate crimes bill penalizing violence against gays, his spokesman said he “supports existing federal protections (based on race, religion, gender, etc) based on immutable characteristics,” just not protections for things like being gay — which conservatives occasionally claim is a choice.
. . . thereby saying that religion is an immutable characteristic.
Guess all those missionaries might as well come home and get jobs at Mickey Dee’s.
(Given the hate-full antics of some who call themselves “Christian,” I can well understand why some who were born with that “immutable characteristic” have indeed chosen not to label themselves as such, despite the immutable fate imposed by their Boehner-Boner Christian gene. I still remember the surprise on the faces of some of my leftie friends when I mentioned that I had a pastor.)
Why on earth anyone would chose to be homosexual is beyond me. And thinking that sexual orientation is a choice, rather than a trait, betrays a gross failure to understand the world.
I don’t know any heterosexual persons who have ever been able to describe “choosing” to be straight; they just knew.
I do know gay persons who fought the knowledge that they were gay for years, often with great pain and loss because of bad decisions they made to pretend, to themselves and others, to be something they were not.
Trying to dress bigotry in reason and make it presentable in polite company makes for unreason.
The Internet Is a Public Place 0
The moral of this story is that, if you are a fugitive on the lamb for bank fraud, don’t “friend” U. S. Government employees.
In fact, it’s probably not a good idea to Facebook at all.
Baseball as It Should Be 0
Played by men of iron with bats of wood.
Twits on Twitter 0
At the Guardian.
Truth in Spending 0
John Cole suggests a means for a sense of perspective on the health insurance biz:
Lies, Damned Lies, and Republicans 0
Mendacity in Virginia.
Bob McDonnell, Republican candidate for governor and graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regents University, makes stuff up. It is a Republican tradition.
From Fact Check dot org (emphasis added). Follow the link for the full analysis:
Smackdown 0
Federal Court smacks down Orly Taitz, dentist and lawyer extraordinaire. Glomarization has the details.
Stray Thought 1
Related to the previous post:
The persons claiming that the government somehow intends to “ration restrict access to” health care clearly do not understand what the phrase “in network” means in the health insurance biz.
Insurance Companies Decide against Reform 0
And this surprises us how?
And they proceed to produce a study based on data as carefully researched as General Mills’s now-withdrawn claim that Cheerios reduce cholesterol.
Remember, the health insurance industry is the same bunch that 30 years ago was claiming that, if they could just force everyone into HMOs, health care would be peachy keen and affordable until hell froze over.
Well, hell has frozen over and they want to just keep on ice fishing.
Via Atrios.
How Can They Teach Students To Think . . . (Updated) 0
. . . when they can’t think for themselves?
Granted, a six-year old should not be trucking around unsupervised with a Boy Scout knife, even if it’s just because he’s excited about joining the Tiger Cubs. At the same time, divining someone’s intent without taking into account behavior, but only from measuring the size of the knife, is really dumb.
It would not be allowed in criminal court; that’s why there is a difference between “involuntary manslaughter” and “first degree murder.” But schools know not due process.
It is typical of many policies in schools and in other organizations, private and public. It relieves the persons who are paid the middle-sized bucks to make the middle-sized decisions from having to, well, decide and then be held accountable for their decisions. (The rule was made so arbitrary because administrators were making bad decisions. Easier than expecting them to make good ones.)
“We have to follow the policy as it is written consistently because this is the code of conduct that is applied to all of our students in our district,” she said. “It’s never a question of a child’s character or comparing one child to another.”
The sophistry is mind-numbing. I guess the rules sprang full-blown from the mind of Zeus and are therefore immutable.
Brendan Writes a Column . . . 0
about the failure of the local rags to cover the local HCAN protests and finds a double standard, nay, a triple standard even, as Snagglepuss would have said. A nugget:
What Makes a Blue Dog Blue 0
Shaun Mullen has some ideas.
Follow the link; you can spare five minutes to read the whole thing:
Why, you may ask, have the Democrats lost a few steps? Because they have become as addicted to the lobbyist’s crack pipe as their brethren across the aisle.
That begins to explain why Obama’s health-care reform initiative is in trouble although passage in more or less the form the president has laid out would be a ginormous economic stimulus, deficit reducer and, in an indirect but very real way, an income gap closer.
The initiative is being held hostage not by naysaying Republicans but by Democrats personified by Senator Max Baucus, who represents one of the most sparsely populated states but in the last two years has received $453,000 from 109 health-related lobbyists who represent a Who’s Who of opposition to reform, including Amgen, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, Aetna, Astra Zeneca and the American Hospital Association.
Invalid Syllogism 0
I was busy yesterday, but I stored this to come back to because it is stunning in its irrationality.
George Will starts with rude behavior in a parking lot and concludes that, therefore, since persons behave badly in parking lots, standing up for rights is a bad thing:
He must think that those folks who wrote the Declaration of Independence were truly insufferable rabble.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Republicans 0
Congressman Grayson: “If Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich for lunch, (Republicans) will try to ban bacon.”
Paying No Price 0
The rewards of failure in American politics is continued income. Frank Rich in the Toimes:
But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.
Making an error, very human.
Persisting in error, guaranteed Sunday network talk time.
