watch this wattle-herding assclown claim epigenetic complexity that mainstream biology is only now discovering...,

whyevolutionistrue |  Here’s Discovery Institute Fellow Paul Nelson—who lives in Chicago and sometimes creeps me out by depositing Intelligent Design propaganda in my departmental mailbox—using a novel (but stupid) argument for Intelligent Design, aka God’s Handiwork. It’s based on embryology and teleology. Have a look at this 9.5-minute video on nematode development, which distorts the cool developmental biology of the worm (work that garnered a Nobel Prize) to make it seem like evidence for Design.

All the biology is accurate up to 4:58, although a bit repetitive, but that’s where Nelson begins to slip off the rails and argue that development can’t be explained by evolution because embryology looks like it has foresight—ergo Jebus. As he says, “The case for design could not be made more explicit.” But the argument for “design” isn’t even very sophisticated, and can be refuted with only an elementary knowledge of evolution.

I’ll leave it to the readers to educate each other on this one—it’s an exercise in using what you’ve learned about how evolution works to address creationist distortions . Do post below the reason why Nelson’s argument is fatally flawed. And watch the movie first. It’s a slick production, full of sophistry.

house republicans strip protections for people living in mobile homes

thinkprogress |  The House will vote Tuesday to repeal consumer protections for low-income borrowers in rural America who have seen the promise of affordable housing turned into a financial sinkhole by a mobile home industry that makes pre-manufactured houses far more expensive to buy than they need to be.

The bill is part of the GOP majority’s campaign to chisel away at specific pieces of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul that became law in 2010 but which left many details to be filled in later by regulators. In this case, it was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that did that filling. After long study of both publicly-available data and proprietary information from the industry itself, the CFPB began enforcing new consumer protections for people who borrow money for a manufactured home.

When Rep. Stephen Fincher’s bill to roll back those regulations passes on Tuesday, the rules will have been in force for barely 15 months.

The mobile home financing market is an esoteric landscape for a battle between consumer advocates, regulators, and politicians. Compared to the American Dream trappings that come with traditional homeownership, families in mobile homes don’t have much cultural cache.

“Lots of people deride these homes for their quality, which is unfair these days, or deride the people who live in them as white trash, which is horrifying,” said Doug Ryan, director of the Corporation for Enterprise Development’s Affordable Homeownership Initiatives. That stigma makes it easy to sell Fincher’s deregulatory package for mobile home financing, Ryan said. The public and many lawmakers “say, ‘Who cares how they get financed? They’re bad stuff anyway, and if that’s all you can afford you probably deserve this.’”

Just 6 percent of Americans who live in a house live in one of these pre-fab ones, but they are a vital low-cost housing option in rural communities, where they make up 14 percent of occupied housing. The all-in cost of living for the average manufactured home dweller is a full third below the average for traditional “site-built” homes. There are twelve states where the units make up over a tenth of the market, mostly in the South and West. In South Carolina, 17 percent of all occupied housing is manufactured.

The manufactured home population is whiter, poorer, less educated, and older than the traditional homeowner. The median income of a pre-fab household is just half that of the median family in a site-built house. Many mobile home families are still paying a larger share of their income for housing despite the significant savings in raw dollar terms. That’s a perverse outcome for what should, on paper, be one of the most affordable ways to put a dignified roof overhead. And it’s being driven by the extremely high price that the industry charges for credit.

Fincher’s bill will strip important borrower protections for thousands of families living in pre-fab homes, including prohibitions on predatory loan features and legal recourse for borrowers who get behind on very expensive loans.

pan-troglodytic deuterostems are simply incapable of being reasoned with...,

firstlook |  Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide. It’s the ultimate violation of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warning that “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded. … The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”

It is inconceivable that a substantial portion of Americans would want to support any other foreign country even where doing so was contrary to U.S. interests. Only Israel commands anything near that level of devoted, self-sacrificing fervor on the part of Americans. So it’s certainly worth asking what accounts for this bizarre aspect of American public opinion.

The answer should make everyone quite uncomfortable: it’s religious fanaticism. The U.S. media loves to mock adversary nations, especially Muslim ones, for being driven by religious extremism, but that is undeniably a major factor, arguably the most significant one, in explaining fervent support for Israel among the American populace. In reporting its poll findings, Bloomberg observed:

Religion appears to play an important role in shaping the numbers. Born-again Christians are more likely than overall poll respondents, 58 percent to 35 percent, to back Israel regardless of U.S. interests. Americans with no religious affiliation were the least likely to feel this way, at 26 percent.

The primary reason evangelical Christians in the U.S. are so devoted to Israel is simple: their radical religious dogma teaches them that God demands this. In 2004, Pat Robertson delivered a speech entitled “Why Evangelical Christians Support Israel” and said: “evangelical Christians support Israel because we believe that the words of Moses and the ancient prophets of Israel were inspired by God,” and “we believe that the emergence of a Jewish state in the land promised by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was ordained by God.” He added that “God’s chosen people” — Jews — have an obligation to God to fight against “Muslim vandals” so that Israel remains united in their hands

jew-hating misery conservatards like the ones opposing the preznit on iran...,

WaPo |  One month before his suicide, Tom Schweich announced that he was running for governor. He looked pale and tired, with dark crescents under his eyes, but he spoke with precision and force. He told supporters he had learned to fight liberals by attending Harvard and Yale, to fight corruption by serving as state auditor, and to fight terrorism by serving the U.S. government in Afghanistan.

“At the State Department, I negotiated with everybody from Chinese bureaucrats to Afghan warlords,” he said. “And I’ll tell you: Negotiating with Afghan warlords was really good practice for Missouri politics.”

On the morning of Feb. 26, Schweich put a .22-­caliber handgun to his left temple and pulled the trigger. He left behind a wife, two children and a Missouri Republican Party divided over the meaning of his death.

Four weeks later, Schweich’s loyal spokesman, Spence Jackson, also fatally shot himself. The two suicides stunned political observers far beyond Missouri’s borders and drew attention to the darkest undercurrent of a race that had quickly turned nasty: allegations that one of Schweich’s GOP rivals had made an insidious appeal to anti-Semitism.

The rival denied the charge, and a police report released this week found little evidence of a sustained campaign. But Schweich’s friends insist that the whispered bigotry was real and that it devastated the emotionally fragile Schweich — who, the report said, had threatened suicide in the past. As the governor’s race continues without him, his death has sparked a debate in Missouri over the ugliness and innuendo that pervade modern politics.

say mister, I love the way you wear that hat...,

RT |  The Tennessee House of Representatives has voted to make the Bible the official state book. Legislators backed the measure despite questions raised by the state’s attorney general about the bill’s constitutionality and the governor’s stated disapproval.

Republican state Rep. Jerry Sexton, a pastor for 25 years before being elected in November, sponsored the bill to make the Bible a state symbol. 

“History's going to tell us where we stand on this. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to have the side that I'm on,” Sexton said after the vote. “It may be kind to me in the future and it may not be kind, and that's OK. I made a decision for today and I feel good about it.”

 

The House was initially set to vote on the bill on Tuesday, but waited until Wednesday after receiving the state attorney general’s legal opinion on the issue, as requested by state Rep. Bill Sanderson (R). The legislation passed 55-38 over the legal objections of Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III. 

“Yes, designating The Holy Bible as the official state book of Tennessee would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution and Article I, § 3, of the Tennessee Constitution, which provides ‘that no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship,’” Slatery wrote in his legal opinion.

 

“When the legislature chooses an official state symbol, it is in effect saying that the symbol, whether it be a poem, a flag, a rock, or a glass of milk, stands for and represents the State and its values in a positive way,” Slatery wrote. “Thus, these designations of ‘official state symbols’ inherently carry the imprimatur and endorsement of the government.”

 

Rep. Marc Gravitt (R) said the attorney general's legal opinion made it clear Tennessee could spend millions of dollars in a losing effort to defend the measure if it becomes law, Reuters reported.

reactionary, seat-of-the-pants conservatard governance embarrases GOP and devastates constituents..,

theatlantic |  Now, Kansas's red ink has left the governor red- faced. Brownback is asking Republican state lawmakers to slow the income tax cuts over the next few years, raise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, overhaul school funding, and divert money from the state's highway fund in order to balance the budget. It's not as if he's abandoning his conservative economic philosophy—he still wants to replace the state's income tax entirely with consumption taxes over time. And like any politician on the ropes, he is preaching patience. "These things take time," he said last month. He also acknowledged the toll his stumbles have taken on his image. "We're in Lent season, so I'm giving up worldly things, like popularity," he joked to a small crowd. Brownback has blamed the budget shortfall in part on automatic increases in education spending (a subject of a long-running court dispute), and he's cited a recent uptick in job growth as evidence that the tax cuts, on the whole, are working. "Kansas is on the rise, and the state of our state is strong," the governor proclaimed in an annual budget address in January.

Yet Brownback's latest proposals represent at least a partial retreat, and it's unclear how many of them the legislature will approve. "He’s trying to figure out how to save face. I think that’s the bottom line," Rochelle Chronister, a former Republican state chairwoman, told me. Chronister has led the GOP opposition to Brownback's agenda through the group she founded, Traditional Republicans for Common Sense. A separate anti-Brownback effort led more than 100 current and former Kansas GOP officials to endorse Brownback's Democratic opponent, Paul Davis, in the 2014 election. Brownback won anyway, 50 to 46 percent. "He’s lived and died by this philosophy," Chronister said of the governor, "and it’s becoming more and more obvious that it is not going to be successful."

Lori McMillan, a law professor at Topeka's Washburn University specializing in taxation, said Brownback's latest proposals were "band-aids" and an example of a "reactionary, by-the-seat-of-your-pants fiscal policy." The original tax plan went awry, tax analysts said, not merely because it slashed rates but because it wasn't paired with deeper structural changes to the budget. The exemption for businesses wasn't tailored narrowly enough to encourage job creation, and so people rushed to take advantage of it without actually boosting employment. "They used a lot of adjectives I’m sure they now regret, like 'immediate' and 'shot-in-the-arm' and 'adrenaline,'" said Joseph Henchman of the Tax Foundation. "Just cutting taxes, and so deeply, without really any plans for how the state will pay for the spending that it’s not cutting–that’s proven to be a big problem there."

the conservatard canon on race

theatlantic |  THAT brings me to the issue of race consciousness. America in Black and White takes a very strong line in favor of what might be called "racelessness" for blacks (and whites). The authors castigate a black high school student for speaking of "my people" in reference to people of African descent. "His people" should be simply the American people, they suggest. Would that it were so. Public expressions of racial solidarity by blacks worry them. They call "racially divisive" a slogan one used to see on T-shirts -- "It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand." They go this far: The police in Boston, believing the story of one Charles Stuart, a white man who alleged that his wife had been killed by a black, laid down an invasive dragnet seeking the killer in a largely black community. Later it was learned that Stuart himself had slain his wife. The Thernstroms argue in this context that the credulity of the police was understandable, in part because rap-music lyrics declare all whites to be the enemy, and worthy objects of black violence.

The Thernstroms know that race relations are not at a happy juncture in America these days. They discuss the O. J. Simpson trial, a source of much recent racial disharmony, at length. (All they can find to say about that enormous expression of race consciousness, the 1995 Million Man March, is that Minister Louis Farrakhan, who called the march, gave a bizarre speech.) Their diagnosis of the problem places great weight on a syllogism that may now be outmoded, proposed originally by Shelby Steele: Blacks and whites are supposedly locked into a relationship of mutual psychological dependence and reciprocal cognitive dissonance. Blacks fear they may be inferior. Whites fear they may be racist. Blacks want status achievement while avoiding true competition, which might reveal their inferiority. Whites want to avoid a confrontation with black claimants over the basis of black status, so as not to appear to be racist. Blacks convey approval to whites, certifying them as morally fit; and whites provide status to blacks, protecting them from the reality of their competitive inadequacies.

This purported symbiosis accounts for blacks' aggressive displays of their sense of grievance. Thus

The relentless pretense that almost all whites are an enemy, that white racism remains a constant, serves a purpose. It invites whites who are nervous about their racial rectitude to remain supplicants. The result is an unending game (black anger, white guilt) in which the white score is always zero, and the illusion of power is bestowed upon a group whose members seem to live in constant fear that their hard-earned status is not quite real -- that they remain the "invisible" men and women they once so clearly were.

This was a new insight a decade ago. It has not worn well over time, however. Events like the publication of the 1994 elections, and the passage in California of Proposition 209 raise questions about the power of white guilt to drive political culture in this country. Is it not enough to cast an eye over the scene unfolding in inner-city America in order to grasp that blacks have real reasons to be angry, and that the white score in the game that counts is positive after all?

The authors of America in Black and White blame the existence of affirmative action -- in college admissions, in the drawing of voting districts, in employment -- for an excess of race consciousness among blacks. This, they say, gives blacks an incentive to sustain their belief in "the figment of the pigment." The authors consider recommending that official government bodies do away entirely with the use of racial categories in economic and social statistics, but ultimately reject the idea. They note that in 1993 a group of big-city mayors asked the U.S. Attorney General to cease collecting crime data by race, because this information was of no use to policy and fostered harmful stereotypes. These officials reasoned, not without some basis in experience, that if people are constantly told that most criminals are black, they may come to think that most blacks are criminal. The Thernstroms chide these mayors for inconsistency -- the mayors want the bad racial news suppressed, but welcome the collection of employment or education data showing that blacks are underrepresented in some desirable pursuit.

the only way to make any real money is to have a religion!

salon |  In America, salvation is big business, and he who dies with the most souls wins. Plenty of lives are wrecked along the way, but no matter. When consumer capitalism meets religious yearning, the sky’s the limit of what can you can get away with. That’s the subtext of Alex Gibney’s latest film, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and screened on HBO on March 29.

L. Ron Hubbard, or LRH, as he liked to style himself, was an American of unprepossessing origins in search of meaning and money. Possibly he found the first, and is just now cavorting with intergalactic spirits in the sky. Most definitely he found the second, riding a rocket ship of wacked-out ambition to create what is now essentially a tax-free shell company with $3 billion in assets and real estate holdings on six continents.

Gibney doesn’t give us LRH as a madman, or even a simple huckster. The penny-a-word pulp fiction writer could have just been another loser who couldn’t manage to finish college and whose less-than-stellar naval service went awry when he inadvertently used a Mexican island for target practice and was deemed unfit for command. Going Clear traces the young man’s early perambulations through California occultism and various hare-brained moneymaking schemes to the Jersey Shore, where he washed up exhausted and plagued by anxiety. Another man might have just given up. But not LRH.

Instead, he marshaled a smattering of knowledge from various strains of psychological and philosophical esoterica to gin up a mental health self-help system he named Dianetics, which he introduced in a hugely successful book in 1950. For a while it seemed like LRH had finally found his pot of gold, but alas, the Dianetics fad faded like the hula-hoop craze, its foundations disintegrating into debt and disorder.

Then came the epiphany, shared with his second wife Sara Northrup, who appears in the film as the shell-shocked survivor of LRH’s dreams. “The only way to make any real money,” he told her, “was to have a religion.”

africa's opium is the religion of others...,

mail&guardian |  For much of this week, our roads will overflow with cars, buses and minibuses full of pilgrims en route to African Zions and Jerusalems. Many local rivers will become Jordans in which the recently converted will be born again. Country valleys will echo with songs of gratitude from wretched souls singing: “Jo, ke mohlolo ha ke ratwa le nna [what a miracle it is for someone like me to be loved].”

Innocent villagers will be battered with amplified sermons on loudspeakers in all manner of fake American accents. With their stomping feet, the dancing masses will convert ordinary mountains and hills into sacred spaces. And the goats will catch hell on several fronts – they will be slaughtered either in celebration or in libation.

For more than 170 years, Karl Marx’s brief reference to religion as the opium of the people has proved hard to forget and harder to forgive. He probably did not have Africa in mind when he made the statement, but nowhere is this Marxist “dictum” in sharper focus. This is the continent whose people respected scholar and academic John Mbiti’s described as “notoriously religious”.

Nothing captures the tragedy and the wonder of the African continent better than the coexistence of poverty and religiosity, both in their most extreme forms imaginable. The question is whether the coincidence is merely casual or causal – and in which direction. Are Africans poor because they are religious, religious because they are poor, or religious in spite of being poor?

the symbolic "great father" was really just a demented old fool....,

NYTimes |  Even before Ronald Reagan became the oldest elected president, his mental state was a political issue. His adversaries often suggested his penchant for contradictory statements, forgetting names and seeming absent-mindedness could be linked to dementia.

In 1980, Mr. Reagan told me that he would resign the presidency if White House doctors found him mentally unfit. Years later, those doctors and key aides told me they had not detected any changes in his mental abilities while in office.

Now a clever new analysis has found that during his two terms in office, subtle changes in Mr. Reagan’s speaking patterns linked to the onset of dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his Alzheimer’s disease in 1994.

The findings, published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by researchers at Arizona State University, do not prove that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia that would have adversely affected his judgment and ability to make decisions in office.

But the research does suggest that alterations in speech one day might be used to predict development of Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions years before symptoms are clinically perceptible.

psychological science and social change? how you gonna manage the reptile brain?

NYTimes |  “I wanted the research I was doing to match the stuff I was thinking about,” he says. “And I just felt more and more that the most relevant level of analysis for generating social change was the psychological level.”

He started looking into conflict-intervention programs and discovered that there were hundreds more like the one he volunteered for in Ireland, and that hardly any of them had been scientifically validated. No one was really checking to see if the programs accomplished their stated goals, or even if their stated goals were the best ones for achieving the desired outcomes. “They have all these very straightforward metrics like building trust, and building empathy, that sound totally reasonable,”

Bruneau says. “But it turns out that a lot of those common-sense approaches can be way off-base.”

Increasing empathy seemed to be a key goal of every conflict-resolution program he looked at; he thought this reflected a misconception about the type of people who engage in political violence. “If Hollywood is to be believed, they’re all sociopaths,” he says. “But that’s not the reality. Suicide bombers tend to be characterized by, if anything, very high levels of empathy. Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber, was a volunteer paramedic during the second Intifada.”

Bruneau developed a theory to explain this paradox: When considering an enemy, the mind generates an “empathy gap.” It mutes the empathy signal, and that muting prevents us from putting ourselves in the perceived enemy’s shoes. He couldn’t yet guess at the mechanism behind the phenomenon, but he hypothesized that it had nothing to do with how empathetic a person was by nature. Even the most deeply empathetic people could mute their empathy signals under the right circumstances. And it was difficult to determine what role empathy played in group conflicts. Increasing empathy might be great at improving pro-social behavior among individuals, but if a program succeeded in boosting an individual’s empathy for his or her own group, he reasoned, it might actually increase hostility toward the enemy.

when the stupid go to stunting it can't end well...,

newyorker |  The Indiana law is the product of a G.O.P. search for a respectable way to oppose same-sex marriage and to rally the base around it. There are two problems with this plan, however. First, not everyone in the party, even in its most conservative precincts, wants to make gay marriage an issue, even a stealth one—or opposes gay marriage to begin with. As the unhappy reaction in Indiana shows, plenty of Republicans find the anti-marriage position embarrassing, as do some business interests that are normally aligned with the party. Second, the law is not an empty rhetorical device but one that has been made strangely powerful, in ways that haven’t yet been fully tested, by the Supreme Court decision last year in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. That ruling allowed the Christian owners of a chain of craft stores to use the federal version of the RFRA to ignore parts of the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, argued strongly that the majority was turning that RFRA into a protean tool for all sorts of evasions. As Jeffrey Toobin has noted, she was proved right even before the Indiana controversy.

Both of those factors have combined to produce real confusion about the Indiana law. Some people are not being straightforward about its implications, whether because they are calculating, mortified, or—in the case of opponents, some of whom have also been unclear about what the law means—alarmed, but it also inhabits novel legal territory, so it is genuinely hard to know what those implications would be.  Governor Pence has done much to muddle things even more. On Sunday, on “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos asked Pence “a yes-or-no question” about whether “a florist in Indiana can now refuse to serve a gay couple without fear of punishment.” He asked half a dozen times, but never got an answer:

Pence: This is not about discrimination, this is about …

Stephanopoulos: But …

Pence: … empowering people …

Stephanopoulos: But let me try to pin you …

Pence: … government overreach here.

Stephanopoulos: … down here though. … It’s just a question, sir. Question, sir. Yes or no?

Pence: Well—well, this—there’s been shameless rhetoric about my state and about this law and about its intention all over the Internet. People are trying to make it about one particular issue. And now you’re doing that as well.

when the unintelligent are in charge...,

WaPo |  There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview — and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol” — to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force.

Ripper: “Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?”

Mandrake: “Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.”

Ripper: “Well, do you know what it is?”

Mandrake: “No. No, I don’t know what it is, no.”

Ripper: “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?” 

The movie came out in 1964, by which time the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established and anti-fluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy. Yet half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013, citizens in Portland, Ore., one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking-water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay — a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brushers or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

To which some people in Portland, echoing anti-fluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative.

sock-puppets don't need no edumackation...,

WaPo |  Walker had decided to challenge Gwen Moore (D), an African American woman who represented a partly white and deeply Democratic state assembly district that surrounded Marquette, Hiller said.

Republican leaders welcomed Walker’s bid. He wouldn’t win, but he would still force Moore to spend money and time defending the seat. (Walker later moved to suburban Wauwatosa, and it was there that he won his seat in 1993.)

In 1990, the 22-year-old Walker spent days knocking on doors in the district, preaching a get-tough message. He wanted 200 more cops on the street and stronger mandatory sentences for drug dealers.

“The number one fear is crime,” he wrote in a letter to Marquette students, asking them, again, to vote for him. “For too long, we have ignored this issue and now it is time to do something about it.”

Moore, who is now a member of Congress, said: “His campaign was one big dog whistle.” She believed that Walker’s anti-crime message was a way to speak to white voters’ fears of blacks without saying them aloud. “He had sort of insinuated sort of the worst stereotypes about black people [and] innate criminality.”

Hiller, Walker’s campaign treasurer, said that Moore was entirely wrong about Walker’s message. “There was no racial angle,” he said. “It never crossed our minds.”

On election night, Walker’s chances looked so terrible that Walker and Hiller left the district and the city of Milwaukee behind. They started driving to Madison, the state capital, to attend parties for other Republicans who had a chance.

Then, for a minute, something strange happened.

“We’re listening to election returns on the radio, and the guy comes on: ‘In a surprise in the [7th District], Scott Walker is ahead of Gwen Moore,’ ” Hiller said. “Literally, I pulled off the road.”

The two young men sat there on the shoulder, blindsided by the idea that Walker — a politician who hadn’t won anything he really wanted — might be about to win.  Fist tap Vic.

giuliani crying the hon.bro.preznit don't love right-wing extremists..,

politico |  Rudy Giuliani went straight for the jugular Wednesday night during a private group dinner here featuring Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker by openly questioning whether President Barack Obama “loves America.”

The former New York mayor, speaking in front of the 2016 Republican presidential contender and about 60 right-leaning business executives and conservative media types, directly challenged Obama’s patriotism, discussing what he called weak foreign policy decisions and questionable public remarks when confronting terrorists.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

With Walker sitting just a few seats away, Giuliani continued by saying that “with all our flaws we’re the most exceptional country in the world. I’m looking for a presidential candidate who can express that, do that and carry it out.”

can softheaded yahoos and dingalings be scholastically maneuvered through their cognitive bottlenecks?

newrepublic |  Climate is changing and climate has always changed and always will,” Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a recent address to the Senate. “The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant to think they are so powerful they can change climate. Man can’t change climate.” Inhofe has been arguing for years that only God and His natural works—not the activities of humankind—can affect the climate. "[M]y point is, God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous," he said in a 2012 address given to a Voice of Christian Youth America radio program. And in his theological belief that the environment is outside of humanity’s control, Inhofe is not alone.

For evangelical Protestants, accepting climate change but attributing it to God’s direct or indirect intervention, rather than human activity, appears to be the new party line, despite the efforts of evangelical climate scientists like Katharine Hayhoe. Recent polls suggest evangelicals are more likely than any other religious cohort to chalk worsening natural disasters up to the apocalypse, instead of human impacts on the environment.

a little air and sunlight'll clear up that nasty turner diaries infection...,

anonymous |  Anonymous has revealed a list of KKK members in light of the Ferguson protests as part of #OpKKK and a cyberwar against the organization. The ‘de-hooding’ of Ku Klux Klan members has spurred threats and attacks against Anonymous over social media, with @KuKluxKlanUSA stating “You messed with us, now it’s our turn to mess with you.”

The threat comes in response to the campaign Anonymous began online, to name KKK members in the Ferguson and St. Louis area after it was discovered that the KKK members have been distributing fliers. The fliers warn Ferguson protesters of the consequences of a continuation of their fight, stating they have “awakened a sleeping giant,” and that they [KKK] will use “lethal force” against protestors if they continue. The fliers handed out justify the lethal force as a form of “self-defense.”

Anonymous won’t tolerate racism in any form, or the suppression of the right to protest. Many of the names listed are also accompanied by photos of the members without their hoods. One member is a known police officer, while another works in education. An image posted, displays a KKK member standing quietly amongst the Ferguson protestors.

Anonymous will continue to monitor the KKK servers and disrupt their websites. [1]

The list, accompanied by images, can be found here.

demoted cardinal raymond burke of st. louis was so flamboyant he would've made liberachi blush...,

stpeterslist |  Listers, it is no secret that St. Peter’s List has great adulation for our Prince of the Church, Cardinal Burke. Previously, SPL published a list of photographs from when the Prince visited the Notre-Dame de Fontgombault, in which there are wonderful shots the the Cappa Magna.

“On the feast of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, September 15, His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, visited the foundation of the Sisters Adorers in Switzerland on the first anniversary of its establishment. Located in the Diocese of Basel, Switzerland, quite near the border with France, the House of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus is nestled in the Alps, which provide a very appropriate atmosphere for prayer, work, and community, in the spirit of the Sisters’ Patrons, St. Francis de Sales, St. Jane Frances de Chantal, and St. Madeleine Sophia Barat.” – Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest.³

feeding the hungry vs. anti-gay activism: a double-standard for "religious" freedom?

religiondispatches |  If you’ve watched the news or been on social media at all this past week, you’ve by now probably heard that, along with two other ministers, 90-year-old WWII veteran Arnold Abbot, was arrested last week in Fort Lauderdale, FL for feeding the homeless, which he has done for over 20 years through his organization Love Thy Neighbor.

Created in 1991 as a tribute to his wife, LTN provides, among other things food, shelter, and counseling to Broward County’s substantial homeless population. The non-profit, interfaith organization cites as its motivation “two very simple concepts. We believe that ‘We are out brothers keeper’ and we should ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’”  Under the new ordinance, Abbot and his co-conspirators face up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine.

Although the city has received much deserved criticism we also wonder why the ordinance, and Abbot’s arrest for allegedly violating it, haven’t been portrayed in terms of religious freedom. The whole situation has been labeled as silly at best and coldhearted at worst. Nicki Grossman, who runs the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau, told the Sun Sentinel that she has received emails telling her that the city “has no heart.” But, at least as far as we can tell, it seems that virtually no one has pulled out the First Amendment in defense of Arnold Abbot.

We draw attention to this because, as RD has frequently noted, appeals to “religious freedom” have become commonplace in the face of perceived government overreach. Indeed, the weekend before last, thousands gathered at Grace Community Church in Houston for I Stand Sunday to draw attention to religious freedom in the face of perceived political intimidation. The immediate cause of the rally was the Houston mayor’s office’s recent subpoenaing of the sermons of five area pastors who supported a petition on a ballot measure to repeal an equal rights ordinance. The speakers at the rally widely interpreted that action—which, it is important to note, has since been limited—as a direct assault on their religious beliefs and violation of their freedom to practice them. Tony Perkins, president of the ultra-conservative Family Research Council, said that the mayor’s office was “trying to silence the voices of the churches and the pastors.”

Although we agree that the mayor’s office overreached, no one in Houston was or has been arrested, or even silenced. A rally is, by definition, a pretty loud, visible event, and if anything it draws attention to the fact that the freedom to gather and worship as one pleases is rather healthy in this country. And yet, when Arnold Abbot actually gets arrested for doing what he thinks his religion requires him to do, it’s unfortunate but not, for these same activists, a matter of religious freedom, despite the fact that Abbot seems to think it is. Commenting on the affair, Abbot has said, “It’s our right to feed people, it’s our First Amendment right and I believe in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and we should be allowed to feed our fellow man.” It’s hard to find a stronger—and more convincing—appeal to religious freedom and duty.

pope's deratzingerization on and popping...,

NYTimes |  Change is rattling the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, as the American bishops hold their annual fall meeting here this week. The vast majority of them were appointed by Francis’ two more conservative predecessors, and some say they do not yet understand what kind of change Pope Francis envisions and whether it is anything more than a change in tone.

The change is reflected not only in the bellwether Chicago appointment, but also in Francis’ call for the church to open discussion on sticky matters long considered settled, such as communion for the divorced and remarried, same-sex relationships, couples who live together without being married and even polygamists in Africa.

Some prelates, like Bishop Cupich, are exhilarated at the pontiff’s fresh message and the prospect of change, while others, like Cardinal George, are warier. A few have been downright resistant, including Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American in Rome who has publicly challenged Francis and was removed on Saturday from his position as head of the Vatican’s highest court.

“The pope is saying some very challenging things for people,” Bishop Cupich said in an interview Tuesday. “He’s not saying, this is the law and you follow it and you get to heaven. He’s saying we have to do something about our world today that’s suffering, people are being excluded, neglected. We have a responsibility, and he’s calling people to task.”

Bishop Cupich is seen as an able administrator with a pastoral approach, who has written and spoken on social justice for the poor and disenfranchised in tones that echo Francis. He said he had no idea how he was selected, saying, “Maybe someday over a nice glass of Chianti I’ll ask him.”