Come listen to a story about British Petroleum
A poor overegulated corporate citizen
Then one day a rig exploded offshore
And up came the crude from the ocean floor.
Oil that is. Military-industrial lifeblood. GOP Tea.
Well the first thing you know, BP's got a new role
Government said, "BP, plug that fucking hole"
"Fixing this shit is your responsibility"
So they loaded up some boats and put them out to sea.
Gulf of Mexico, that is. Natural beauty. Fish and shit.
Well it's time to admit the cleanup's not gone well
It's hard to plug a gusher three miles south of hell
But please don't worry there'll be more "drill, baby, drill"
Teabaggers take their tea with a little spill, baby, spill
The party Sarah Palin and Katrina, that is. Fucking Hillbillies. No such thing as global warming and evolution. God, guns and prayer. Let's kill shit.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, October 5, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
I'll Trade Him Gay Marriage for the Public Option
Gay marriage is a right, but healthcare isn't?
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
I don't believe an attempt to help more Americans to get their own health insurance implies that it is some kind of basic right that can be demanded of government. Some may believe that. I don't.
The unwritten rule: conservatives talk about their causes in stark, moralistic terms and progressives don’t
From the Nation:
After his GOP colleagues recovered from the shock of a Democrat actually calling them out, they demanded an apology.
Grayson returned to the House floor to announce that:
'I would like to apologize, I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven't voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.'"
Yglesias puts it perfectly:
I think the real issue—and the real import—of Grayson’s statement is that it involved breaking one of the unspoken rules of modern American politics. The rule is that conservatives talk about their causes in stark, moralistic terms and progressives don’t.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Yes, It's About Race
They're not talking about economic redistribution of wealth - they never have been. They've been talking about redistribution of privilege this whole time. They called MLK a communist because he wanted blacks to have the same rights as whites, and to them that was a redistribution of the privilege that whites had 'earned'.
...
It's why the protesters will decry socialism today but wouldn't have under Bush - it's all tied to race and other social objectives and has nothing really to do with taxation, deficits, and big government. You probably missed it when you came to the US, but this is pretty old game - particularly to guys like Carter that grew up around it.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Kamikaze Obstructionism
Ezra Klein Kamikaze Obstructionism
"45% approve of Obama’s handling of health care, while 46% disapprove, which is up from his 41%-47% score last month. By comparison, just 21% approve of the Republican Party’s handling of the issue."
But daddy, Ayyyyy want a remote controlled cyborg beetle!
Oh brave new world, that has such bugs in it:
Flight of the remote-controlled cyborg beetle : Neurophilosophy: "the development of an implantable radio-controlled neural stimulating device, with which they demonstrate, for the very first time, the accurate control of flight in freely flying insects."
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Right wing heresy: what happens when you just can't go all the way
Little green footballs has long been one of the most popular right-wing blogs on the Web -- one of the right-wing blogosphere's pioneers. And I mean right-wing.
Not any more.
After dissenting from Glenn Beckism and the white surpremicist Robert Stacy McCain, he has been excommunicated.
He goes the way of Andrew Sullivan, former W. "axis of evil"-coining neoconservative speechwriter David Frum, Colin Powell, and the rest of the fuddy duddies who haven't been able to keep up with the let's-suspend-habeas-corpus-and-torture-people Obama-is-a-socialist-fascist-muslim crowd.
In other words, he is now a left-wing lunatic.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Anti-Religion
More often than not, it is entirely irrational. A case in point : Robert Wright defends himself very effectively against a sloppy review of his book The Evolution of God in the New Republic.
Today it is just as good to do religious homage to science and rationality without actually engaging in them as to call oneself a "Christian" and ... you get the picture. Wright himself is an evangelist of science -- it's just that his lack of fervor (his agnosticism) is not enough for his reviewer (and would-be excommunicater), Jerry Coyne.
Science does not need hot-headed, partisan defenders who think they are doing it a favor by engaging in theological debates when they've never thought seriously about -- and in fact have no interest in -- theology and the philosophy of science. (That's you, Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens). The anti-religious tirades of these proselytizers are premised on an idea (among others) that can be wielded just as much to the detriment of science as faith: the claim that one is in conflict with the other. In fact, they are not in conflict, and do not even touch. Properly conceived, not a single inferential thread runs between them. Some light reading should clear it up: http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html.
This is not to say that it might not seem that way -- a claim that seems to pop up almost verbatim everywhere as if it is the one bit of their faith vs. reason Cliff Notes that all of them have read, as in Coyne's "Over its history, science has delivered two crippling blows to humanity's self-image." You know, Galileo and Darwin. Coyne seems to relish the blow as if he himself had delivered it. But seems is not enough. Self-image is not enough. How it made the 9/12 protesters of the day feel is not enough. The harder philosophical problems -- involving conflicts between God and evil, (morality-grounding) free will and mechanistic determinism -- arrived before Galileo, Copernicus, and Darwin.
(I say this as someone who is agnostic, science-loving, decidedly un-post-modern, and has little tolerance for organized religion).
A Day in the Life of a Republican
A response from the comments section of Krauthammer's latest WaPo column:
Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards.
He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised. All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too.
He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo.
His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.
Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree- hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.
He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.
If he drives to work it is 'socialism' that built the roads.
Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medicals benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards.
Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union.
If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he'll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.
It's noon time, Joe needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills.
Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.
Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.
Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dad's; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards.
He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans.
The house didn't have electric until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republicans would still be sitting in the dark)
He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to.
After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home.
He turns on a radio talk show, the host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good (He doesn't tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day). Joe agrees, "We don't need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I'm a SELF-MADE-MAN who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."
SOCIALISM == Roads, volunteer armies, drafted armies, schools, sanitation, water, electric, gas, railroads, emergency rooms, free vaccines, Medicare, Medicaid, Firemen, Police, Judges, Courts, Universities, airports, shore management, pollution controls, safety inspectors, construction standards, etc, etc, etc,
That's what socialism is. We're already a socialist-capitalist country.
Friday, September 18, 2009
When We Were Dolphins
No one knows why we became naked three million years ago -- theories concerning looking good to the opposite sex and cooling off have but debunked. But one of the more promising explanations described in a recent New Scientist article suggests that we might be relatively hairless for the same reasons that dolphins and whales are:
None of this affects Hardy's theory that humans lost their body hair during an aquatic interlude. But his theory claims to offer one explanation for a whole range of enigmatic human features: bipedality, hairlesslessness, fat layer, descended larynx, loss of olfaction, and so on. If it turns out that the big two - bipedality and nakedness - arose at roughly the same time, that might shift the balance of probability some little way toward Hardy.
Martinis by the pool, anyone?
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