What makes a conservative

This from:
Viscount LaCarte.Blogspot.com

"It isn't that I trust government to do the right thing. I absolutely don't. It is that I trust powerful corporations to do the right thing even less. Why? Because in a Constitutional Republic, the government is accountable to the people, and politicians can be voted out of office.

A conservative will invariably argue, "Corporations are accountable to the people in the free market. When they misbehave, the consumer will spend their dollars elsewhere. The market takes care of itself."

And there in lies the rub. This is only true if the corporations are regulated by the government and forced to play fair. When corporations are free from regulations, you get powerful monopolies, price-fixing, workers being stripped of their rights. One only needs to explore how American corporations conduct themselves in third-world nations to confirm these words."

Love our troops to death

"Republicans think that the only way to support the troops is to let them die. That's what this debate is about tonight. If you love the troops, you should sit back, shut up, and watch George Bush and the Republican Congress send them to their deaths in a war that's already been lost."

Support our troops means bring them home!

"What the Republicans are saying tonight is that America doesn't lose wars, and when America starts a war it doesn't leave until the war is won.

And while that's cute and all warm and fuzzy, like puppy dogs and apple pie, it's downright idiotic as policy. We lost Vietnam. And we didn't lose because we withdrew. We withdrew because we lost. But the Republicans don't think America loses wars. They think you never withdraw because we never lose. So I guess we won Vietnam. Or do Republicans think the American withdrawal from Vietnam was a mistake?

The bottom line is that the Republicans love our troops to death. They're rather see American soldiers die than admit the Republican party screwed up. That's what this debate is about tonight. Just keep killing the troops so long as its saves face."

See John Aravosis at:

AmericaBlog.com

Things Andy Rooney never said

You may get specious email about racist remarks made by 60 minutes columnist Andy Roony.

They are, of course, false and just part of the fascist, right wing drivel we're seeing so much of.

Snopes.com has this to say:

Andy Rooney himself denied it in 2003, saying:

"About a year ago, I became aware of a more serious theft of my name and it is so hurtful to my reputation that it calls for legal action against the thief. Hundreds of people have written asking if I really wrote the 20 detestable remarks made under my name that have had such wide circulation on the Internet.

Some of the remarks, which I will not repeat here, are viciously racist and the spirit of the whole thing is nasty, mean and totally inconsistent with my philosophy of life.

It is apparent that the list of comments has been read by hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of whom must believe that it accurately represents opinions of mine that I don't dare express in my column or on television. It is seriously damaging to my reputation."

Mr. Rooney disclaimed the above-quoted piece again in his 60 Minutes segment of 23 October 2005, saying of it:

"There's a collection of racist and sexist remarks on the Internet under a picture of me with the caption 'ANDY ROONEY SAID ON 60 MINUTES.' If I could find the person who did write it using my name I would sue him."

Not Rooney

More not Rooney

How many lies — Let me count

Iraq on the Record

"Prepared at the direction of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Iraq on the Record is a searchable collection of 237 specific misleading statements made by Bush Administration officials about the threat posed by Iraq. It contains statements that were misleading based on what was known to the Administration at the time the statements were made. It does not include statements that appear mistaken only in hindsight. If a statement was an accurate reflection of U.S. intelligence at the time it was made, it was excluded even if it now appears erroneous."

17 Statements

There are still bodies in the Big Easy

Scout Prime:

"Five weeks after Katrina, New Orleans is calling off the house- to-house search for bodies. Teams have pulled 964 corpses from storm- ravaged areas across southeastern Louisiana. Authorities admit more bodies are probably out there. They'll be handled on a case-by-case basis. The count is far short of the 10,000 dead once predicted by New Orleans mayor. As of today, the death toll from Hurricane Katrina stands at just under 1,200.Searchers and residents insist there are still plenty of dead to find in New Orleans. Once again, they say the Ninth Ward is being ignored because it is poor and black."

Part I

Part II

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up.

Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.

To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common "scientific" arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom.

Scientific American

Lil' Bill and the Neo-Con Bullies

Billy O'Reilly is cut from the same cloth as Pat Robertson.

Here's his steam about San Francisco.

"If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it," he continued. "We're going to say, 'look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

"Let them all die!" That'll teach 'em!


CrooksandLiars.com

God's a Friggin' Bully

Proof from this funny little man:


If you don't teach smarty pants design:

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there."

The Video

Thugs for God

Adolf Hitler

The most famous Christian of the 20th century.

His morality.

He did not smoke or drink and he abhorred pornography and homosexuality.

His call for his nation to repent.

“Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell… And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech our almighty God that He may bless us, that He may give us the strength to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and the peace of our people. So help us God.” (March 1936)

(Terror Vacui by Maurizio Cattelan )

His stand against secularism:

“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith….” (April 1933)

His war on atheism:

“We were convinced that the people need and require [the Christian] faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” (October 1933)

The most Famous Christian of the 20th Century

By Robert Flynn

Carl Baugh

Indiana
GOP lawmakers want schools to teach 'intelligent design'

As if the gody creationists were not bad enough, here is some information about one of their kind from their own research.

Some of Carl Baugh's more outlandish claims, contained in his videotape Panorama of Creation, are as follows:

1. Before the Flood, the earth was surrounded by hydrogen which was so cold it was metallic and this collapsed when God shouted. This is nonsense. It is impossible that such a surrounding cloud of hydrogen could ever be cold enough, especially in such proximity to the earth.People could hear the 'singing' of the stars before the Flood. Apparently the metallic hydrogen (which could not have existed) enabled this to happen.


2. People could 'feel' the time before the Flood.


3. People can affect radioactive decay rates with their minds. There is absolutely no evidence for this.


4. Eggs do not hatch outside the earth's magnetic field. Baugh claimed that NASA did an experiment demonstrating this. Absolute nonsense.


5. Granites (which contain radioactive elements) are not exploding because they are in 'perfect balance'. However, radioactive elements do not normally 'explode' of course - that requires very special conditions which are not easy to arrange (if it were otherwise, every terrorist group would have atomic bombs!). Even pure radioactive elements will not 'explode', so the fact that granite does not has nothing to do with 'perfect balance' of the granite.


6. He argues that, in some way, radioactive minerals align themselves with the magnetic field, which is nonsense.


7. He says that people were smarter before the Flood, attributing this to a supposedly higher oxygen pressure. There is absolutely no evidence that high oxygen levels would make people more intelligent. He talked nonsense about 'four molecules of oxygen', linking this to his subsequent theories about oxygen saturation. Furthermore, there is no basis for his extravagant claims about the curative effects of high oxygen pressures - if it worked as he claims, paraplegics would be lining up to be treated (many hospitals have suitable hyperbaric chambers).

Baugh confuses many things. He confuses the pre-Flood and pre-Fall worlds in saying that there was no violence among animals 'before the Flood'. He confuses micro- and macro-evolution, getting them completely reversed.
Baugh exaggerates. For example, in discussing the Setterfield theory on slowing light, he says that it was calculated on 'the largest computer in Australia' (not true) and that scientists 'haven't been able to refute it'.

TalkOrigins.org

Rumsfeld To Profit From Avian Flu Hoax

Finally, the pieces of the puzzle start to add up. Last week, President Bush sought to instill panic in this country by telling us a minimum of 200,000 people will die from the avian flu pandemic but it could be as bad as 2 million deaths in this country alone.

This hoax is then used to justify the immediate purchase of 80 million doses of Tamiflu, a worthless drug that in no way shape or form treats the avian flu, but only decreases the amount of days one is sick and can actually contribute to the virus having more lethal mutations.

So the U.S. placed an order for 20 million doses of this worthless drug at a price of $100 per dose. That comes to a staggering $2 billion.

We are being told that Roche manufactures Tamiflu and, in yesterday's New York Times, they were battling whether or not they would allow generic drug companies to help increase their production.

But if you dig further you will find that a drug was actually developed by a company called Gilead that 10 years ago gave Roche the exclusive rights to market and sell Tamiflu.

Ahh, The Plot Thickens...

If you read the link below from Gilead, you'll discover Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was made the chairman of Gilead in 1997.

Since Rumsfeld holds major portions of stock in Gilead, he will handsomely profit from the scare tactics of the government that is being used to justify the purchase of $2 billion of Tamiflu.

For more on the nonsense of the avian flu hoax, you'll want to review my post from yesterday.
Gilead Sciences Inc.

This comes from Dr. Joseph Mercola Mercola.com.

The Doctor, unfortunately is a D.O., a chiropractor with prescription privileges, or sometimes referred to as a Dr. who is afraid of blood.

A good rumor can't go to waste.

No psychic, despite their claims, has ever helped the police solve a crime

Dr. Phil Plait:

I know a place where the Sun never sets.
It’s a mountain, and it’s on the Moon. It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it’s in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down on there day and night, 24 hours a day—well, the Moon’s day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours down there 708 hours a day.

I know a place where the Sun never shines. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point. This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the vent, and excrete sulfuric acid.

I know a place where the temperature is 15 million degrees, and the pressure would crush you to a microscopic dot. That place is the core of the Sun.

I know a place where the magnetic fields would rip you apart, atom by atom: the surface of a neutron star, a magnetar.

I know a place where life began billions of years ago. That place is here, the Earth.

I know these places because I’m a scientist.

Science is a way of finding things out. It’s a way of testing what’s real. It’s what Richard Feynman called “A way of not fooling ourselves.”

No astrologer ever predicted the existence of Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. No modern astrologer had a clue about Sedna, a ball of ice half the size of Pluto that orbits even farther out. No astrologer predicted the more than 150 planets now known to orbit other suns.

But scientists did.

No psychic, despite their claims, has ever helped the police solve a crime. But forensic scientists have, all the time.
It wasn’t someone who practices homeopathy who found a cure for smallpox, or polio. Scientists did, medical scientists.

No creationist ever cracked the genetic code. Chemists did. Molecular biologists did.

They used physics. They used math. They used chemistry, biology, astronomy, engineering.
They used science.

These are all the things you discovered doing your projects. All the things that brought you here today.
Computers? Cell phones? Rockets to Saturn, probes to the ocean floor, PSP, gamecubes, gameboys, X-boxes? All by scientists.

Those places I talked about before—you can get to know them too. You can experience the wonder of seeing them for the first time, the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, seen things no one has seen before, know something no one else has ever known.

No crystal balls, no tarot cards, no horoscopes. Just you, your brain, and your ability to think.
Welcome to science. You’re gonna like it here.

The MysteryInvestigators.com

Also see:
Open letter to 10 year old daughter

Bush kills 100,000

Iraqi Civilian Deaths Increase Dramatically After Invasion

Civilian deaths have risen dramatically in Iraq since the country was invaded in March 2003, according to a survey conducted by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Columbia University School of Nursing and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The researchers found that the majority of deaths were attributed to violence, which were primarily the result of military actions by Coalition forces. Most of those killed by Coalition forces were women and children. However, the researchers stressed that they found no evidence of improper conduct by the Coalition soldiers.

Pentagon Suppresses Details of Civilian Casualties

The study by US and Iraqi researchers, led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, surveyed 1,000 households in 33 randomly chosen areas in Iraq. It found that the risk of violent death was 58 times higher in the period since the invasion, and that most of the victims were women and children.

"Making conservative assumptions, about 100,000 excess deaths have happened ... Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths," said Les Roberts of the Baltimore institution. The researchers excluded Fallujah, the most violent area of Iraq, from their results, which would have made the toll higher. But the finding that air strikes caused the highest casualties casts doubt on US claims that air attacks allow pinpoint precision.

So far 2,ooo American service men have been killed.

Not that one is in anyway connected to the other, 2,752 died at the World Trade Center at the hand of a rogue group of Saudi hooligans.

GWB: "Do as I say"

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 (Iraq News Agency) - A delegation of Iraqi judges and journalists abruptly left the U.S. today, cutting short its visit to study the workings of American democracy. A delegation spokesman said the Iraqis were "bewildered" by some of the behavior of the Bush administration and felt it was best to limit their exposure to the U.S. system at this time, when Iraq is taking its first baby steps toward democracy.

The lead Iraqi delegate, Muhammad Mithaqi, a noted secular Sunni judge who had recently survived an assassination attempt by Islamist radicals, said that he was stunned when he heard President Bush telling Republicans that one reason they should support Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court was because of "her religion." She is described as a devout evangelical Christian.

Mithaqi said that after two years of being lectured to by U.S. diplomats in Baghdad about the need to separate "mosque from state" in the new Iraq, he was also floored to read that the former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, now a law school dean, said on the radio show of the conservative James Dobson that Miers deserved support because she was "a very, very strong Christian [who] should be a source of great comfort and assistance to people in the households of faith around the country."

"Now let me get this straight," Judge Mithaqi said. "You are lecturing us about keeping religion out of politics, and then your own president and conservative legal scholars go and tell your public to endorse Miers as a Supreme Court justice because she is an evangelical Christian.

PoliticalSports.com

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 19, 2005

Who are these Crooks and Liars

If your looking for links to videos and stories exposing the far right minority, see:

A well named Blog:

CrooksandLiars.com

The Real Deal

Tom Delay's real mug shot

Remember that cutesy grinning mug shot of Tom Delay?

This is the real one.

Tom Delay Uncropped



Slate.com

This is Godless America

Some great stories from This American Life on NPR.

Be sure to listen to Act 2:

God Said, Huh?
Julia Sweeney, a Catholic, tells the story of how her faith began to crack after reading a most alarming book ... called the Bible. Her story is excerpted from her play, "Letting Go of God," which ran in Los Angeles.


Godless America

Bombs — Pinter

The Bombs

There are no more words to be said
All we have left are the bombs
Which burst out of our head
All that is left are the bombs
Which suck out the last of our blood
All we have left are the bombs
Which polish the skulls of the dead

The Bombs

HaroldPinter.org

Guns Dont Kill People

Two year olds with their uncle's gun do

Hours after the shooting, the 2-year-old used his limited vocabulary to try to describe what happened.

"Pow, pow," he said to his mother, and then spoke his friend's name. Police said he shot and wounded his 4-year-old playmate while under the care of the 2-year-old's grandmother.

The grandmother had been caring for three children Monday morning and was busy with the youngest of them, an infant, when she heard a popping noise in the next room. The 2-year-old went to his grandmother upset, prompting her to investigate.

Police said the 4-year-old was shot in the right side and was in stable but guarded condition in the University of Chicago Comer Children's Hospital Monday night.

The 2-year-old's uncle, Juan Ramirez, 21, who lives downstairs in the two-flat in the 2200 block of South Drake Avenue, was charged with unlawful use of a weapon by a felon, felony defacement of a firearm and misdemeanor "firearm child protection," said police news affairs Officer Carlos Herrera. The weapon's serial number had been scraped away, he said.

Chicago Tribune

Boy uses his limited vocabulary to describe what happened

Does God Hate Us

There is No God (And You Know It)

Consider: the city of New Orleans was recently destroyed by hurricane Katrina. At least a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and over a million have been displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people spent their lives in the company of an imaginary friend.

Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm "of biblical proportions" would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that eighty percent of Katrina's survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.