"Hate crime" legislation is intended to increase penalties for people who commit felonies based on the victim’s race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.
Why are so many religious groups on the right threatened by it? Are these people intending to commit crimes?
President Bush, yesterday:
“First, I’m pleased that we’re funding cancer research. We’re up about 25 percent or 26 percent since 2001; it’s a commitment that I made when I first came to Washington, it’s a commitment we’re keeping. And the reason why it makes sense to spend taxpayers’ money on cancer research is that we can make some good progress, and have.”
ABC News Medical Editor Timothy Johnson, a few hours later:
[Link provided by me, not, Dr. Tim]“[W]hen the administration tries to take credit for increased spending, per se, I think they’re misleading. It is true that the total budget for the National Cancer Institute has gone up by $1.2 billion since 2001. But most of that occurred in those early years under a Clinton initiative. The budget was actually cut last year and the projected budget for this year is to be cut even further. So, I think it’s a real tragedy that we are cutting the budget for the National Cancer Institute at a time we’re on the verge of many exciting discoveries.”
Just so you know, Dr. Timothy Johnson is no anti-Bush liberal. What’s more, he’s an ordained minister from the Evangelical Covenant Church.
Here’s my attempt at an answer:
Look, with all that is going on in the world, and with the importance of the next President affecting your finances and (in many ways) your life, if a candidate’s smoking habits (or lack thereof) operate as a relevant factor for you, then you should simply be denied your right to vote. Plain and simple. You’re not a serious enough citizen to exercise your franchise. We’ll let you vote for American Idol contestents on your cell phone, but that’s it.
Of course, the issue here isn’t Obama’s smoking habit (which, unlike Bush’s lack of intellectual honesty, can be permanently terminated) — it’s the right-wing media attempt to tarnish Obama with, you know, something since he is becoming the Great Hope of 2008.
Expect to see a lot more of this fear-mongering from the right. Some of it will be outright lies:
Note that Obama’s biological father from Kenya was a terrorist-espousing Muslim. His mother is an avowed atheist. Obama spent two years as a youngster in a terrorist-oriented Muslim school. He spent two other years in a Catholic school.
The basis for these allegations? Well, there is none. This is a question of differing interpretation — this is just plain, unadulterated bullshit.
The truth: Obama’s biological father was a Muslim, but — like most Muslims — not "terrorist-espousing". In fact, he had disavowed the Muslim religion before Obama was even born. His biological father and mother divorced when Obama was two, and his biological father had little influence on him thereafter.
Furthermore, although Obama attended a "Muslim school" for two years, it was one of many schools he attended as a child. While living in Indonesia, Obama attended several schools, including a Catholic one (for two years), and the Muslim one (for two years). The reason? His mother wanted him to have the best education possible.
His mother, by the way, was an atheist, but saw value in religion. That’s why she gave Obama a wide religious education (which included the Muslim faith, but also Catholicism and — well, you name it). She took him to Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, Hawaiian burial grounds, etc. so that he might be exposed to all religions, rather than become indoctrinated into one.
"Facts" about Obama like the ones seen in the above-linked column typically come from Internet emails, and have been thoroughly discreditted.
But that’s not going to stop them from trying. So future voter, beware. You’re going to be lied to — again.
Not only is Bush’s current approval rating lagging in the sub-40’s — the worst treand of any President in modern times — but he’s not very popular as a soon-to-be ex-President.
The Bush Presidential Library [insert "My Pet Goat" joke here], like all presidential libraries, is intended to serve as a respository of all the great things and writing of the Bush presidency [oh, the jokes are everywhere, aren’t they?].
What’s more, it is supposed to serve as a "think tank" in which the Bush policies are (it is hoped) further advanced into the future politics of American. [Good luck with that].
And it’s supposed to be housed at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
Well, Methodists have a huge problem with an association of their university and their religion to Bush and started an online petition today directed at the SMU Board of Trustees to stop the project/library. Some comments already from petition signers (including a vast number of clergy):
It is unconscionable that a man who boasts about his Christianity can not only advocate war as a first option in his foreign policy actions toward Iraq, but also actively authorize and condone the torture of individuals. A Christian institution like SMU should condemn these actions, and should not seek to put a Bush Library anywhere on its campus.
Wesley United Methodist Church, Rochester, NY –John Wesley is spinning in his grave. Bush’s policies have diametrically opposed Wesley’s vision of social outreach, equality, justice and peace.
Policies of the George W. Bush administration run counter to the principles of the United Methodist Church. UMs reject war, do not condone torture, support human and civil rights for all, and recognize care for the environment as a sacred trust. It would be inappropriate for a UM institution to glorify the Bush presidency by hosting a library, museum and think tank.
We are Christians who attend local Methodist churches and believe that what Bush’s view of Christian life is, …is so awful. Torturing people, incarcerating w/out representation, starting war based on lies, and simply being mean to others who may have a different view is not Christian.
Grace United Methodist Church I think George W. Bush is an abomination to our faith as Methodists. I have been born and raised into the Methodist faith my entire life and confirmed all my children in my Church as such. He does not have the same Christian grace, conscience and philosophy that I was taught and consequently taught my children along the way as good Christian believers. Nothing could be further from the truth from this Administration. They are a disgrace. Let another University and faith claim them. We should not.
And so on and so on….
UPDATE: The SMU faculty is protesting, too.
Death By Camera tracks down the MySpace pages of those losers on American Idol — you know, the ones who are so horrible that they get national exposure on television so we can (a) laugh at their complete lack of talent, and (b) watch them cry when they can’t can’t can’t understand why Simon and Randy and Paula hate them so much.
Death By Camera also notes that at least one talented contestent (who was asked to go to Hollywood) had to quickly purge her MySpace page of a survey in which she admitted to taking "one" illicit drug (Which drug? – We don’t know), and containing very un-Idol-esque language like "Who the f__k doesn’t have instant message?"
Sadly for the contestent — Michelle Steingas of Excelsior, Minnesota — there’s such a thing as Google cache, which preserves "snapshots" of "old" webpages.
Tweaked the Live Webcam on the right column:
Found is a website (and magazine and book) devoted to, well, found things: notes, photos, whatever. For example, people buy a used book and find some cryptic note or picture wedged in the pages.
The "object", if there is one, is to think about those small things we leave behind. Each found object is a story, although (of course) we don’t know what the story is.
A good site to browse. Here’s some found items —
Found in an antique cookbook in rural Wisconsin:
Found in a Wal-Mart:
Found on a gazebo on the Duke campus:
A few more below the fold….
I Tivo’ed it, and over the past few days, I’ve watched/skimmed through it, and I’ve decided I want to see/rent:
Ugly Betty (it’s a TV show, yes?)
Babel
The Departed
Pan’s Labyrinth
Both Clint Eastwood films about Iwo Jima
and yes, even The Queen. And Dreamgirls, someday.
Borat, on the other hand, not so much.
Not long ago, Buchwald was diagnosed with cancer. He retired his column, and checked into a hospice for his final days. There, according to reports, he lived life to the fullest — partying with old freinds and colleagues. And apparently, by doing so and not dying, he eventually left (or, as some say, was asked to leave).
Art Buchwald, humorist and columnist, died last night.
The site Shelley The Republican is so outlandishly hilarious that I’m not quite sure if it is a parody site or not. Here’s a smattering — Shelley’s take on Iowa Governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack. For those who don’t know, Vilsack was orphaned and placed in a Catholic Church orphanage, alter raised by adoptive parents. The highlighted sentences are mine.
If there’s one thing you can say about us Conservative Christians it’s that we love our babies. We love our babies so much that we ain’t gonna have sex until we get married cuz we don’t kill God precious pre-borns and we sure ain’t gonna bring no bastards into this world. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for adoption but if Liberals stopped having sex with everybody they laid eyes on then the only kids that’d need adopting would be the ones whose parents died.
Instead, all sorts of wicked people have meaningless sex, wind up pregnant and either kill their beautiful pre-born child before he or she has a chance to even take its first breath or give the child up for adoption. And while you may wanna say, “well, at least they didn’t kill the poor pre-born” in the end they still broke God’s law and two wrongs don’t make a right.
You may feel sorry for the poor bastard child, but how many of you want a bastard in the White House?
I sure as heck don’t.
And doubly so if that bastard is Tom Vilsack, probably the first bastard governor of a state. Tommy don’t know nothing about his mommy and neither do we. We don’t know nothing about his daddy, either. She might have been a full blooded Navajo princess. His daddy could have been a Communist spy. We know that President George W. Bush comes from a family that takes its commitiment to serving the United States of America seriously. We know that Bill Clinton’s family was white trash and he wound up marrying a lesbian that killed Vince Foster. You tell me who was the better President.
Oh, that’s it. Shelley’s on my blogroll!
(1) I’ll just let Greenwald speak for himself on the subject of GOP disillusionment with the sudden Bush reversal on FISA oversight:
If you were a Bush follower, and you were told (and, of course, by definition, believed) that the President’s violations of FISA were not just legal but critical to our Survival and Ability to Defeat The Terrorists, and then suddenly one day, the administration, once Democrats took over Congress, announced that they could, after all, comply with FISA, wouldn’t you feel betrayed, too, as though everything the administration was telling you all along about what is vital for our security was . . . . completely false and insincerely expressed?
For Bush followers who kept insisting that (a) The New York Times "blew the cover" on a vital national security program and (b) our ability to stop The Terrorists would be impeded by compliance with FISA, where does this leave them?
Greenwald points to a clearly disillusioned Captain Ed, longtime supporter of Bush’s warrentless surveillance program:
This change of policy will surely raise a few eyebrows. One of the arguments the Bush administration made was that it could not reach accommodation with the FISA court on expedited authorizations for wiretaps on international conversations with one point inside the US, on phone numbers already flagged as potentially related to terrorists. It discouraged Congress from drafting legislation mandating a process for such actions, stating that the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) granted them all of the authorization needed for such surveillance.
…Now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has done what the Bush administration said they could not do, which is to construct a process for expedited requests with FISA — and they’ve already used it once.
On one hand, having this process remain in our counterterrorism arsenal is great news. However, for those of us who supported the White House on this contentious point, the speed in which they reached accommodation with FISA will call into question that early support. By my count, we’ve had ten entire weeks since the midterms and they’ve managed to scale a mountain that they claimed was insurmountable for the previous five years.
Perhaps more explanations will be forthcoming. I, for one, will be waiting…
(2) But there is a note of caution as Greenwald writes about here. Simply put, all we know is that the Bush Administration has agreed that their warrentless surveillance program is subject to approval by the FISA Court, and the FISA court has given its approval. But, what does this mean? Nobody can say. In any event, there seems to be growing doubt that the Bush Administration is in full compliance with FISA.
For example, Prof. Orin Kerr has suggested that perhaps the FISA court has simply given "blanket approval" to all warrentless wiretaps without required individual inspection and consideration of each one. If this is the case, then the Bush reversal isn’t a reversal at all, and the same concerns about invasion of privacy exist as before. As Greenwald says:
If what happened here is what Kerr is [speculating] — some sort of agreement to give broad authority to the President’s plainly illegal program — then that is an agreement which would be plainly inconsistent with both the letter and spirit of FISA.
In another post, however, Kerr offers an alternative theory about the FISA court, i.e., that the judges have agreed to approve "anticipatory warrants" — warrants that become valid when certain triggering factors occur:
An anticipatory warrant lets the government conduct surveillance when a specific set of triggering facts occurs. The judge agrees ahead of time that if those facts occur, probable cause will exist and the monitoring can occur under the warrant. The idea is that there isn’t enough time to get a warrant right at that second, so the warrant can be "pre-approved" by the Judge and used by the government when the triggering event happens.
I am less troubled by this, although I would hope that there is some "back end" review to make sure that the government isn’t abusing this "conditional approval", and that the triggering events did, indeed, occur.
Anyway, this may be a story where the details are never know. Let’s hope not. As the Carpetbagger says:
Just to be clear, I’m encouraged by what we learned yesterday, and I’m not suggesting that the news is necessarily some kind of charade. The administration did back down, almost certainly for political reasons, sidestepping a fight the Bush gang was probably going to lose.
But some of these unanswered questions need answers. Rep. Wilson told the NYT that “Congress needed to investigate further to determine how the program is run.” Sounds like a good idea.
Rasmussen Zogby SV-Georgia Gallup
Hillary Clinton 22 29 27 29
Barack Obama 21 14 20 18
John Edwards 15 13 15 13
Al Gore 7 13 11 11
John Kerry 4 4 3 8
Joe Biden 2 7 2 5
Wesley Clark – 1 4 2
Bill Richardson – 1 1 3
Chris Dodd – – 1 1
Joe Lieberman – 2 – –
Tom Vilsack – – 1 –
Ed Rendell – – 1 –
Dennis Kucinich – 1 1 –
Al Sharpton – – – 1
Now, these aren’t terribly surprising, being nation-wide polls, and most people aren’t really paying attention yet. However, from what I’ve been reading, the landscape changes when people start paying attention. In Iowa and New Hampshire, where they are already in pre-election mode, Clinton’s popularity goes down and Edwards and Obama go up. Also, I’ve noticed that within the netroots category, Edwards is way up.
Of course, most surveys don’t include Al Gore, whose decision to run is a legitimate open question. Still, I predict that by "Super Tuesday", we’ll see a tight race between Clinton, Obama, and Edwards (and Gore, if he decides to run). The rest of the pack should save their time (and ours) and go home now.
WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM TO 6 PM EST THURSDAY
UNTIL 6:00AM EST
Urgent – Winter Weather Message National Weather Service Raleigh NC 1000 PM EST Wed Jan 17 2007
Person-Forsyth-Guilford-Alamance-Orange-Davidson-Randolph-Stanly- Montgomery- Including The Cities Of… Roxboro… Winston-Salem… Greensboro… High Point… Burlington… Chapel Hill… Lexington… Asheboro… Albemarle… Troy
… Winter Weather Advisory Remains In Effect From 6 AM To 6 PM EST Thursday…
A Winter Weather Advisory Remains In Effect From 6 AM To 6 PM EST Thursday.
Light Snow Is Expected To Develop Across The Region Around Or Shortly After Daybreak Thursday. The Light Snow Will Become A Mixture Of Light Snow And Sleet By Mid Morning… Then Light Sleet And Light Freezing Rain By Noon. Light Freezing Rain Will Continue For Much Of The Day With Temperatures Expected To Remain 32 Or Below For Much Of The Day.
Snow And Sleet Accumulations Are Expected To Remain Less Than An Inch And They Will Be Mainly Confined To Grassy And Elevated Surfaces. Warm Soil Temperatures Should Prevent Significant Accumulation Of Snow On Roadways. A Glaze Of Freezing Rain… Averaging Around A Tenth Of An Inch Is Expected On Elevated Exposed Objects Such As Trees And Power Lines. Slick Spots May Also Develop On Untreated Bridges And Overpasses.
A Winter Weather Advisory Means That Periods Of Snow… Sleet… Or Freezing Rain Will Cause Travel Difficulties. Be Prepared For Slippery Roads And Limited Visibilities… And Use Caution While Driving.
Cold weather contributes to colds.
People say that’s an old wive’s tale, and to some extent, they’re correct. Yes, viruses are the direct cause of colds. But current research suggests that inclement weather makes you more susceptible to those viruses:
A study by Dr. Ron Eccles and his colleagues at the Common Cold Centre at the Cardiff School of Biosciences in Wales suggests exposure to cold weather is indeed a major contributing factor. According to their study, being outside in winter without a hat, or getting your feet wet, makes people more susceptible to catching the cold.
"Chilling causes a constriction in the blood vessels in the nose, and this reduces our resistance to infections within the nose," Dr. Eccles said.
Dr. Eccles and his colleagues studies about 180 healthy participants who were split into two groups. Both were asked to remove their socks, and one of the groups was told to put their feet in a bowl of cold water.
Over the next four or five days patients in the chilled group caught approximately 10 to 12 per cent more colds than the controlled group.
The study suggests that the best precautions for avoiding a cold are still the ones mom recommended: wearing a warm hat and keeping your feet dry.
I mention this for several reasons: (1) I have a cold that I can’t seem to shake; and (2) I had a debate just last evening on this very subject.
I also mention this because today, there is a mini-breakthrough in science which may some day lead to — wait for it — a cure to the common cold:
Scientists have identified a protein that could help them understand why symptoms of the common cold such as sniffles and congestion last for a limited time.
The previously unknown protein called carabin cranks up the immune system response during an infection and then shuts it off when it has done its job so that it doesn’t harm healthy cells.
"We found an important missing brake within white blood cells that keeps the system in check so it doesn’t override itself to cause problems during an virus infection or in the common cold," Professor Jun O Liu, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said in an interview.
***
"This is an important brake, but most likely, it is not the only brake. We think it plays a very prominent role," said Liu, adding that it controlled the duration and the extent to which the immune system is activated.
"It basically sheds new light on how the immune system is controlled. The deregulation of the immune response is responsible for many, many human diseases," he added.
If further studies confirm the importance of carabin as a major inhibitor of immune response, Liu believes it could have important implications for understanding and treating auto-immune diseases.
This seems to be a good news day for health — there’s the immune system story here, and the cancer story here.
