Blaming the poor for the financial crisis

There's a good article in The American Prospect, "Did Liberals Cause the Sub-prime Crisis?" which takes on the falsehoods being peddled by the right-wing that we can basically blame poor people and minorities for the current crisis. Don't buy the lies.

The fact of the matter is that Fannie and Freddie have had the same standards of lending for poor people since 1977, when the Community Reinvestment Act was passed, but we obviously didn't see the housing bubble even begin forming until around 2001. How can you blame a 25-year old policy for something that just started? Scapegoating black people, of course!

The problem with this argument is that CRA didn't even apply to 50% of subprime lending, and applied very little to another 30%! That's because CRA still had regulatory structure and transparency in lending, while the mess we have now is due to lack of standards and the shadiness of transactions involving mortgage-backed securities. So long as banks were on the hook if a mortgage failed, they had a vested interest in abiding by the standards of CRA. It was only in finding a way to magically pass on risk to others that predatory lending took off and the bubble was born. How did this happen? Fancy shuffling on Wall Street.

The fundamental issue is this: in 2000, a de-regulation bill called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act passed by McCain's right-hand man, Phil Gramm allowed for new fancy ways for banks to get around risk containment with mortgages, best summarized by the image of a bunch of fat cats with chainsaws tearing up regulatory law. In 2004, Bush and the GOP Congress pulled even more lenders out from under the regulatory structure of the CRA! Thus Gramm's "credit default swaps" legislation fueled the bubble and led to the free-for-all on Wall Street that we're paying for now. Paul Krugman explains that financial institutions were allowed to gamble with trillions of dollars with little to no regulation, and when risk became "spread" through the ability to bundle and sell mortgage-backed securities and investment vehicles, people went a little beserk by ignoring the serious risk that still existed and pretended that house prices would soar indefinitely. Financial institutions were allowed to play like banks, without the regulation that banks must submit to, and now are being bailed out like banks.

As Nouriel Roubini says, this is GOP welfare: privatize profits and socialize losses.

Don't buy the spin that this is the fault of liberals who wanted poor people and minorities to have houses. There were still rigorous standards of who could be lent money and at what rates, and transparency as to the creditworthiness of mortgage-related securities at that time. It was in 2000 that this changed, and it was directly thereafter that Wall Street began its party.

Call me a bleeding heart liberal

Go ahead. Call me a bleeding heart liberal if you want to. But supporting this grotesque mockery of "sport" -- shooting wolves from airplanes -- is just abominable. And Palin supports it.

There's hunting for food then there's bloodsport. I'm all for the 2nd Am protecting gun rights and all, as well as reasonable hunting laws. However, these beautiful animals are viciously tortured, not cleanly and painlessly killed for any good purpose.

That's ignoring all the other reasons to vote against the McCain-Palin ticket.

Corsi's "Obama Nation" trash gets shredded

Being the target of a sustained whisper campaign by Karl Rove & Co., in concert with McSame, Barack now has pushed back against the latest smear by Kerry smear merchant Jerome Corsi:

1. Here is Obama's response to Corsi's hit piece (full .pdf version)
2. Here is Media Matters' response

The supposedly most damaging material in Corsi's smear book is either false or completely distorted, and it reaches bestseller status through what is known as the "wingnut welfare" effect: the listing on the NYT bestseller is accompanied by the dagger symbol -- † -- which is described as: "A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders."

Conservative book clubs buy up these books in order to drive them up the lists in order to drive up media reporting. Forget the free market; capitalism at discount costs!

PS: Check out the new YouTube sensation: Baracky II

Focus on the Family poon video #2

The last time we saw this poon Stuart Shepard, he was against helping the poor (like Jesus, I guess). This time, he's asking God to smite the Democratic convention with rain. Olbermann had him as the "Worst Person in the World" last night:


You can see the YouTube video of his imprecation below the fold:

I mean, sure, people are starving to death and dying of disease all over the place, but why waste your time asking God to do something about that?

A few politics notes

Some politics-related stuff...

• Paul Krugman gives us reason to hope in the fall: here and here. He demonstrates that general election results (early polls are to be ignored) are almost entirely predictable on the basis of election-year economics and the sitting president's popularity:
  
  The above shows net POTUS approval: approval minus disapproval, and how much of the vote the sitting president's party got that election year.
  
  This shows (obviously) election-year GDP growth plotted against how much of the vote the sitting president's party got that election year.
  
  This shows (obviously) election-year real income growth plotted against how much of the vote the sitting president's party got that election year.
  
  Krugman's analysis:

  Also, a number of models find that there’s an 8-year itch: voters tend to turn against the incumbent party if it has held the White House for two or more terms.
  
  Right now, GDP is flat (falling in the monthly estimates); Bush has a negative net approval of 30 percent or more; and people are tired of Republicans. So it ought to be a smashing Democratic victory. When I plug current numbers into the Abramowitz model (making a guess about 1st-half GDP and assuming that Bush approval in June will be about where it is today), it says 57-43 Democrats.
  
  What about current polls showing a race that could go either way? Never mind, say the poli-sci people: GE polling this early tells us almost nothing.

  Keep your fingers crossed!

• The credit card debt I worried about a few months ago has grown:

  Consumer credit increased by $15.3 billion for the month to $2.56 trillion, the biggest monthly rise since November, the Federal Reserve said today in Washington. In February, credit rose by $6.5 billion, previously reported as an increase of $5.2 billion. The Fed's report doesn't cover borrowing secured by real estate, such as home-equity loans.
  
  Consumers are turning to credit cards after banks tightened standards for home-equity loans and other borrowing. The March figures brought U.S. consumer borrowing in the first quarter to $34 billion, the most since the first three months of 2001, when the economy entered its last official recession.
  
  ``Consumers are strapped as incomes are not keeping up with inflation and this is leading them to rely increasingly on credit to see them through the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression,'' said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi in New York. ``The days of extracting cash from one's home to spend on goods and services are long gone.''

  Divide $2.56 trillion by 96 million and you get $26,667 in credit card debt per household. Also, inventory buildups, rather than consumption, were probably responsible for the tiny amount of GDP growth that did occur, according to Krugman.

• According to Pentagon records, “[m]ore than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway.” Veterans groups say this “reliance on troops found medically ‘non-deployable’ is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million servicemembers to the war zones.”

• Joe Klein gets down to business by excoriating the media (complicit: himself) on their lack of balance between substance and bullshit this campaign season:

  Clinton's paste-on populism changed absolutely nothing. The demographic blocs that had determined the shape of this remarkable campaign remained stolidly in place. Blacks, young people and those with college educations voted for Obama; Clinton won women, the elderly, whites without college educations. Clinton's slim margin of victory in Indiana was provided, appropriately enough, by Republicans, who were 10% of the Democratic-primary electorate and whose votes she carried 54% to 46% — some, perhaps, at the behest of the merry prankster Rush Limbaugh, who had counseled his ditto heads to bring "chaos" to the Democratic electoral process by voting for their favorite whipping girl.
  ...
  And with good reason. The formerly charismatic Obama had undergone a transformation of his own: from John F. Kennedy to Adlai Stevenson, from dashing rhetorician to good-government egghead. He derided the gas-tax holiday as the gimmick it was, gambling that Democrats would see through the ruse. He trudged through the Wright debacle, never allowing his impeccable disposition to slip toward anger or pettiness. On the Sunday before the primaries, he gave a dour, newsless interview to Tim Russert, enduring another 20 minutes of questions about the Reverend Wright. Meanwhile, Clinton was spiky and histrionic in her simultaneous duel with George Stephanopoulos. She made alpha-dog power moves, standing up to talk to the live audience while Stephanopoulos remained seated, forcing him to stand uncomfortably beside her and then, later, embarrassing her host by reminiscing about his liberal, anti-NAFTA, Clinton-staffer past.
  
  It wasn't until I read the transcript that I realized that Clinton's bravado had masked a brazenly empty performance. Stephanopoulos nailed her time after time, mostly on matters of character.
  ...
  In retrospect, it was easy to see that Clinton was desperate, willing to say almost anything to get over. At the time, she just seemed strong, certainly stronger than Obama on Meet the Press ... at least she did to me and many members of my chattering tribe. And our knee-jerk reactions — our prejudice toward performance values over policy — could infect the campaign to come between Obama and John McCain, just as it has the primaries.
  
  Clinton's apparent loss of the nomination was a consequence of her campaign's incompetence, but it was also a result of her reliance on the same-old. The shameless populism that seemed a possible game changer to media observers, micro-ideas like the gas-tax holiday, the willingness to go negative — which Obama tried intermittently, in halfhearted reaction to Clinton's attacks — appeared very old and clichéd to Obama's legion of young supporters, who were the real game changers in this year of extraordinary turnouts. That, and the fact that Democrats have been the party of government, tragically hooked on the high-minded: they don't react well to flagrant pandering or character assassination. This has been a losing position these past 40 years, and the media — like pollsters and political consultants — tend to look in the rearview mirror and pretend to see the future.
  
  In his victory speech after the smashing North Carolina results came in, Obama went directly after both McCain and the media. "[McCain's] plan to win in November appears to come from the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election," Obama said. "Yes, we know what's coming. I'm not naive. We've already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along."
  
  That may have been unfair to McCain, since the Senator from Arizona won the Republican nomination in much the same way Obama has triumphed — as an outsider, an occasional reformer, a pariah to blowhards like Limbaugh. But it's also true that McCain has a choice to make: in the past month, he has wobbled between the high and low roads, at one point calling Obama the Hamas candidate for President after a member of that group "endorsed" the Senator from Illinois. If McCain wants to maintain his reputation as a politician more honorable than most, he's going to have to stop the sleaze.
  ...
  In the end, Obama's challenge to the media is as significant as his challenge to McCain. All the evidence — and especially the selection of these two apparent nominees — suggests the public not only is taking this election very seriously but is also extremely concerned about the state of the nation and tired of politics as usual. I suspect the public is also tired of media as usual, tired of journalists who put showmanship over substance ... as I found myself doing in the days before the May 6 primaries. Obama was talking about the Republicans, but he could easily have been talking about the press when he said, "The question, then, is not what kind of campaign they will run; it's what kind of campaign we will run. It's what we will do to make this year different. You see, I didn't get into this race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics, but I am running for President because this is the time to end it."
  
  Politics will always be propelled by grease, hot air and showmanship, but in the astonishing prosperity of the late 20th century, we allowed our public life to drift toward too much show biz, too little substance.



• The virtual media blackout on the Pentagon war propaganda-PR program that involved sending supposedly objective military analysts to media outlets still remains. But, now some of the junk is getting out:

  RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm.
  
  UNIDENTIFIED 1: But we would love — I would personally love — and I think I speak for most of the gentlemen here at the table — for you to take the offensive, to just go out there and just crush these people so that when we go on, we’re — forgive me — we’re parroting, but it’s what has to be said. It’s what we believe in, or we would not be saying it.
  
  [crosstalk]
  
  UNIDENTIFIED 1: And we’d love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy.

  The rest of the junk is here.

Finally, a non-politics issue: just how FUBAR is Scientology? It's hard to even quantify.

The "liberal media"

Every time I hear "the liberal media" for the next few months, I'll think of these two things:

1. the media blackout on the use of White House and Pentagon propaganda in Big Media
2. the media's complete absence of balance in comparison of Rev. Wright to Evangelical pastors who say similar (or worse, depending on your perspective) things and enjoy the respect of news organizations during interviews and coverage; this includes Hagee's endorsement of McCain

PS: Frank Rich on 5/4 had a great column about issue #2.
PPS: It appears that a few House members are demanding an investigation on #1.

Obama's comments & the sociology of cultural conservatism

An Obama supporter's take: the infamous comments by Obama meant that people who had been left in dire economic straits throughout both GOP and Democratic administrations turned to an emphasis upon cultural issues to guide them in their voting. Nothing too outrageous when stated thusly, and this type of thinking has been around for a while in the Democratic party: that working-class people have voted against their economic self-interests partly out of frustration with politicians and partly on cultural conservatism.

I think the question of why so many people vote against their own best interests is definitely one worth exploring and arguing about. Are those people convinced that they are economically better off voting the way they do, or do they think cultural conservatism is more important than economic liberalism?

The argument that the GOP has been exploiting cultural conservatism in order to distract the electorate from economic realities is a fairly old one that has found new vigor in recent years. The old "God, guns and gays" joke has a little truth to it, I think. Why do working-class voters vote for economic conservative politicians who act against their own best interests?

Two liberal researchers have looked at the question from opposing vantages and have written on it from an objective perspective -- one who blames "God, guns and gays" and another who doesn't:

Larry Bartels wrote "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age", the one with the really neat chart on income inequalities under GOP & Dem presidents, and he argues that the working-class doesn't really lean conservative, and that instead, they often don't vote or are outmaneuvered during campaigns. He's convinced Krugman.

Thomas Frank wrote "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and he argues that people are suckers for cultural conservatism. Here's his reply to Larry Bartels.

If what Obama (and Frank) said is in fact true, then it isn't "elitist" to say so. If it isn't, then perhaps it is. Either way, let's assume Obama's an arrogant asshole. This says literally nothing about his ability to run the country, and given the last few years of the "guy you want to have a beer with" and how he's f*#&$d up the country, isn't it worse to have a humble idiot than someone who is arrogant but competent? I'll take an elitist who can solve our problems over a likable idiot any day.

Perhaps the demographics supporting Obama explain his "elitism":

"Obama’s lead over Clinton among white college-educated Democrats (and Democratic leaners) has risen from 7 points to 12 points. Among those with post-graduate degrees, it’s exploded, from an 8 point lead to a 29 point lead. But among white voters with a high school degree or less, his deficit has barely budged, from 33 points to 30 points. As it stands, the educational chasm is stark."

Maybe he's giving up on that demographic. I've argued before that I think the Democrats should do so.

I've ripped on the South before, and its well-known issues:

• poverty
• low minimum wage
  
• poor health care quality (or here)
  
• poor education quality (esp. here in SC)
• horrid work environments
  
• obesity (and here)
• religiosity (or here)
  
• higher STD rates
• highest divorce, teen pregnancy rates (p.10) (or here)
• higher crime
• &c.
  

Now, I found a guy who uses some great sociological data to show correlations between religiosity and other factors:

1. Church attendance and income by state:





2. within-state correlations between rich & poor church attendance





3. affluent voters seem to be more influenced by religion than the working class

So the take-home lesson purports to show that it's the richer right-leaners who make the difference, and that "working-class" people are not as influenced by cultural conservatism as we have been led to believe ... rather, the more upper-middle classes and affluent classes are those most swayed by cultural conservatism. Also, check out Polarized America (H/T: Paul Krugman) for amazing graphs showing the correlation of income inequality to political polarization.

No time for science

Nobel Prize winners comment on how there will be no Science Debate 2008. Hey, how could we have time for that kind of debate, since we spent Wednesday's debate on all the bullshit?

So busy, in fact, with bullshit, that none of the following were mentioned:

The financial crisis
The collapse of housing values in the US and around the world
Afghanistan
Health care
Torture
The declining value of the US Dollar
Education
Trade
Pakistan
Energy
Immigration
The decline of American manufacturing
The Supreme Court
The burgeoning world food crisis.
Global warming
China
The attacks on organized labor and the working class
Terrorism and al Qaeda
Civil liberties and constraints on government surveillance

Contrast: "Biblical Science" v. Science

This is fantastic:

(H/T: PZ)

Atheist aphorisms

Below the fold I've assembled some good short quotes and aphorisms in general for bumper stickers and T-shirts relating to religion and science.

Top Fifty Atheist T-Shirt and Bumper Sticker Aphorisms

1. Abstinence Makes the Church Grow Fondlers
2. Honk If Your Religious Beliefs Make You An Asshole
3. Intelligent Design Makes My Monkey Cry
4. Too Stupid to Understand Science? Try Religion.
5. There's A REASON Why Atheists Don't Fly Planes Into Buildings
6. "Worship Me or I Will Torture You Forever. Have a Nice Day."­ God.
7. God Doesn't Kill People. People Who Believe in God Kill People.
8. If There is No God, Then What Makes the Next Kleenex Pop Up?
9. He's Dead. It's Been 2,000 years. He's Not Coming Back. Get OVER It Already!
10. "All religion is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry." Edgar Allen Poe.
11. Viva La Evolución!
12. Actually, If You Look It Up, The Winter Solstice Is The Reason For The Season
13. I Wouldn't Trust Your God Even If He Did Exist
14. Cheeses Is Lard. Argue With THAT If You Can.
15. People Who Don't Want Their Beliefs Laughed at Shouldn't Have Such Funny Beliefs
16. Jesus is Coming? Don't Swallow That.
17. Threatening Children With Hell Is FUN!
18. GOD - APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD!
19. Jesus Told Me Republicans SUCK
20. God + Whacky Tobacky = Platypus
21. God Doesn't Exist. So, I Guess That Means No One Loves You.
22. When the Rapture Comes, We'll Get Our Country Back!
23. Q. How Do We Know the Holy Ghost Was Catholic? A. He Used the Rhythm Method Instead of a Condom.
24. You Say "Heretic" Like It Was a BAD Thing
25. I Love Christians. They Taste Like Chicken.
26. Science: It Works, Bitches.
27. "Intelligent Design" Helping Stupid People Feel Smart Since 1987
28. I Found God Between The Sheets
29. I Gave Up Superstitious Mumbo Jumbo For Lent
30. My Flying Monkey Can Beat Up Your Guardian Angel
31. Every Time You Play With Yourself, God Kills a Kitten
32. If God Wanted People to Believe in Him, Then Why Did He Invent Logic?
33. Praying Is Politically Correct Schizophrenia
34. ALL Americans Are African Americans
35. I Forget - Which Day Did God Make All The Fossils?
36. I Was An Atheist Until The Hindus Convinced Me That I Was God
37. The Spanish Inquisition: The Original Faith-based Initiative
38. If we were made in his image, when why aren't humans invisible too?
39. JESUS SAVES....You From Thinking For Yourself
40. How Can You Disbelieve in Evolution If You Can't Even Define It?
41. Q. How Can You Tell That Your God is Man-made? A. If He Hates All the Same People You Do.
42. Every Time You See a Rainbow, God is Having Gay Sex
43. I Went to Public School in Kansas and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt and a Poor Understanding of the Scientific Method.
44. WWJD = We Won. Jesus Died.
45. The Family That Prays Together is Brainwashing the Children
46. Oh, Look, Honey Another Pro-lifer For War
47. Another Godless Atheist for Peace and World Harmony
48. God is Unavailable Right Now. Can I Help You?
49. "When Lip Service to Some Mysterious Deity Permits Bestiality on Wednesday and Absolution on Sundays, Cash Me Out." Frank Sinatra.
50. No Gods. No Mullets.

The following I pulled from the comments section:

1. What schools need is a moment of science.
2. The last time we mixed politics and religion, people got burned at the stake.
3. "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." (Treaty with Tripoli, June 7, 1797)
4. "I cherish everyone's right to their religious beliefs, no matter how comical." Herman Melville
5. Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church.
6. Apes evolved from creationists
7. If we're all God's children, then what makes Jesus so special?
8. Jesus saves! The rest of us use credit cards.
9. Militant Agnostic: I don't know, AND NEITHER DO YOU!
10. Born right the first time, thanks!
11. Reality > Belief
12. There's a Sucker born every minute, but the real money is made from those Born Again.

And from here:

1. "If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia." Thomas Szasz
2. "Beware the man of one book." St. Thomas Aquinas
   
3. "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell
4. "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Napoleon
5. "Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet." Napoleon
   
6. "The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr." Prophet Muhammad
7. "Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?" Nietzsche
8. "Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful." Nietzsche
9. "In Christianity, neither morality nor religion comes into contact with reality at any point." Nietzsche
10. "If god created us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment." Voltaire
11. "It is hard to free fools from chains they revere." Voltaire
    
12. "Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities." Voltaire
13. "The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool." Voltaire
14. "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty." Thomas Jefferson
15. "If you understand everything, you must be misinformed." Japanese proverb
16. "The believer is happy; the doubter is wise." Hungarian proverb
17. "Religion is not merely the opium of the masses; it's the cyanide." Tom Robbins
18. "Nothing overshadows truth so much as authority." Leon B. Alberti
    
19. "To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly." Julian Ruck
20. "Nothing brings people together more, than mutual hatred." Henry Rollins
21. "The church tries to save sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture." Elbert Hubbard
22. "Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin." Robert G. Ingersoll
23. "Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them." Peter Ustinov
24. "The death of dogma is the birth of morality." Immanuel Kant
25. "If you would be a real seeker after truth...doubt, as far as possible, all things." Descartes
    

Nice.

Hilarious: whitehouse.org

I found this on whitehouse.org and had to share it:

President Addresses Nation on the Way Forward to Surging Back Towards Desperately Spinning the Clusterfuck That is Vietraq

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. In the life of all imperialistic military empires, there come brief, fleeting moments that decide the direction of a multinational corporation masquerading as a democratic nation, and reveal the character of its blue-blooded aristocrats, conniving religious hucksters and corrupt, back-slapping robber barons. We have now been suspended in such a moment for over six calendar years.

Fantastic Intelligent Design posters

Some great ID posters from Touchstone @ banninated.blogspot.com; he calls these "Inspired Designs":

Precious.

It's hard to "win" the GWOT and frighten us all too

Heh, Steve and I are on the same page. I said this myself a while ago, in different words:

But the real significance is that Bush just didn’t know what to do with the question — he wants to boast that AQI is losing, but he can’t emphasize it too much, because if people believe AQI has been defeated, then there’s no reason to stay in the middle of a civil war.

Keeping people afraid serves an obvious purpose: it facilitates the consolidation of power under the "unitary executive" that Bush has been pushing for since even before 9/11. The question is, what has he done with all this power? What has the president done to actually catch the main people behind 9/11 now that he scared people into giving up essential civil liberties under the guise that it was necessary for Osama's capture?

Well...

1. It's been 2223 days since he vowed to bring Osama in, "dead or alive"
   


2. Bush failed to catch Osama at Tora Bora:

U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight
Failure to Send Troops in Pursuit Termed Major Error

By Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 17, 2002; Page A01

The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.



3. In 2002, only a few scant months after 9/11, Bush removed troops who were searching for Osama in Afghanistan to send them to Iraq, where Bush chose to begin an immoral war founded on lies, completely unrelated to the war on terror:
   

Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions
By Dave Moniz and Steven Komarow, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — In 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures.



4. In 2005, Bush dismantled the CIA office in charge of hunting for Osama:

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden
By MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times
July 4, 2006

WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.



5. Bush doesn't think much about Osama and isn't worried about him. At a March 13, 2002, WH press conference:

Q Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that? ...

THE PRESIDENT: Deep in my heart I know the man is on the run, if he's alive at all. Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not; we haven't heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is -- really indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission.

...

So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong...

...


Q: But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

BUSH: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

These are your "winners" in the war on terrorism?

I'll stick with the "losers". And please give me back my civil liberties, while we're at it. You're squandering them on nothing at all.

Purity Ball

More on the "purity balls" of the RR.

Scary, and our tax dollars pay for this shit.

Whether it's the creepy pseudo-incestuous dad, the mom remarking that women were "created to feel accepted by men," the girls offering themselves "as a priceless gift" in the purity pledge, or the headless bride and suit of armor behind Leslee Unruh--the message is clear. Girls' worth and value as people is determined by their sexuality.

Religion Today

Faith-based programs are nothing but a sham to buy the votes of religious-right knuckle-draggers. These programs have no evidence to demonstrate their veracity, and in some cases, evidence to the contrary (i.e., "abstinence-only education" -- "According to a study released in March at the National STD Prevention Conference, 88 percent of 12,000 teenagers who took an abstinence pledge reported having sexual intercourse before they married. Although they delayed intercourse for up to 18 months, when they became sexually active, those who signed pledges were less likely to use condoms and less likely to seek medical help for STD infections than their peers.").

Now, we find that Jebus doesn't make criminals less likely to end back up in prison. Surprise, surprise:

A study prepared for the Oklahoma Sentencing Commission by the Criminal Justice Resource Center “shows little difference between recidivism among participants in Genesis One and other inmates leaving the prison system,” the AP reported.

One of my favorite most roundly-criticized theocrats is now signing off -- D. James Kennedy.

I guess some hope remains for these RR troglodytes: they could pray their opponents into an early grave.

Fighting poverty is liberal and thus anti-Christian

Only in the bizzaro world of the Religious Right can one find such tortured convolutions of logic as evidenced in the video below, in which Focus on the Family Action attempts to argue that helping the poor is a liberal cause that should be opposed and the only way to help poor people is to get rid of those goddamned queers and fornicators...while maintaining their staunch Christian credentials throughout, of course:

Quoting Jesus (Matt 25:31-46 NIV):

The Sheep and the Goats

31"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

37"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

40"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

41"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

44"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

45"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

46"Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

Carnival of AiG's Creation Museum

**UPDATE: Check out this amazing compilation of resources debunking the lies and silliness of AiG's grand experiment in "How We Can Waste $27M on Human Ignorance": DefCon presents
http://www.defconamerica.org/creationmuseum/**

Tomorrow morning at 10 AM the glorious Creation Museum of AiG is opening to the public. America's collective IQ will dip ~20 points, and progress in public understanding of science will be rolled back about 300 years.

PZ set up a "creation carnival" of posts related to AiG and its pseudo-science in general. It has 65 entries! Check it out.


Read these for some background:

• Yabba-dabba science, LA Times
• Adam and Eve in the land of dinosaurs, NYT
• NCSE resource
  
• The Rally for Reason
• Chris Hedges' report at Truthdig
• Petitions by DefCon

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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Sectarian Bible Curriculum in Public Schools Brings First Lawsuit

There's a new legal challenge to the supposedly-objective Bible study program promoted by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS). I wonder why?

A little while back, some rotten ol' liberal analyzed the NCBCPS curriculum and found that:

In both the curriculum and other NCBCPS materials, teachers are urged not to impose religious beliefs upon their students. In my professional judgment as a biblical scholar, however, this curriculum on the whole is a sectarian document, and I cannot recommend it for usage in a public school setting. It attempts to persuade students to adopt views that are held primarily within certain conservative Protestant circles but not within the scholarly community, and it presents Christian faith claims as history:

• The Bible is explicitly characterized as inspired by God.
• Discussions of science are based on the claims of biblical creationists.
• Jesus is presented as fulfilling “Old Testament” prophecy.
• Archaeological findings are cited as support for claims of the Bible’s complete historical accuracy.

Furthermore, much of the course appears designed to persuade students and teachers that America is a distinctively Christian nation — an agenda publicly embraced by many of the members of NCBCPS’s Board of Advisors and endorsers.

Okay, fine, so the reviewer of the curriculum was Dr. Mark A. Chancey, who teaches biblical studies in the Department of Religious Studies in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Not exactly a typical liberal, so maybe we ought to pay attention to his assessment. Just maybe...

Then again, Chuck Norris is on the Board of Directors, and D. James Kennedy is on the Board of Advisors with the NCBCPS. What more needs to be said? That's pretty much all we needed to know to realize how objective this curriculum would be, and that it's a tool for mass proselytizing in the public school system, at taxpayer expense.

In recent years, many prominent educators have urged U.S. public schools to teach the Bible as part of literature or culture classes, contending that students need to understand the book's influence on literature, history and current events. More schools are starting to offer such classes, in some cases with a push from their state legislatures. Georgia last year passed a law providing money to encourage high schools to offer Bible electives. This month, the Texas House of Representatives almost unanimously approved a bill, now in the state Senate, that would offer training to teachers leading classes on the Old and New Testaments.

But the spread of Bible instruction is raising questions about the separation of church and state. That is particularly true in school districts that have adopted the National Council program, one of two competing national curricula now available.

The curriculum sold by the Greensboro, N.C.-based National Council concentrates on the Bible's role as literature and as an influence on American history. Founder Elizabeth Ridenour says that nearly 400 districts have adopted the National Council curriculum since 1992. (WSJ)

Beautiful. The NCBCPS has fired back a response (.doc, click HERE for .pdf) to the Texas Freedom Network, my favorite line is,

"The NCBCPS curriculum has never been legally challenged." (paragraph 5)

Maybe then, but not anymore, praise the lard! :-)
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Church-state, Politics

Cameron and Comfort Hit New Low with Rank Dishonesty

I was reading Comfort/Cameron's reaction to the ass-whipping they took on the upcoming ABC special for their "proof" of God's existence, and happened to notice the mention of a website in the press release:

http://www.intelligentdesignversusevolution.com/

Curious, I looked it up...Jesus Christ on a pony, are these kooks not only pathetic, but lying for Jesus!

On their front page, they feature a video of a creationist interviewing Dawkins, and I know that video. And that's why I call them dishonest/liars.

They dug up the canard about Dawkins' inability to answer a question about genomic information increases via evolution -- a subject they've been thoroughly responded to on, but stammer on mindlessly about. What's sad in this case is the deception that was involved in both shooting the interview and in the selective editing used to piece it together. Basically, it's a creationist hit job on Dawkins.

Usually, people like Comfort/Cameron are just stupid, (i.e. argumentum ad bananum) but here they're playing to rank dishonesty and exposing their complete lack of integrity.

I have compiled a very useful list of papers (continually revised), covering abiogenesis, the evolution of genetic information, the origin of the genetic code, and human evolution. I will list some of those papers below.

For more on the evolution of information in the genome:

1. Natural selection as the process of accumulating genetic information in adaptive evolution, M. Kimura (1961)
2. Rate of Information Acquisition by a Species subjected to Natural Selection, D.J.C. MacKay
3. Evolution of biological information, T.D. Schneider
4. The fitness value of information, C.T. Bergstrom and M. Lachmann
5. Review of W. Dembski’s No Free Lunch, J. Shallit
6. The Evolution and Understanding of Hierarchical Complexity in Biology from an Algebraic Perspective, C.L. Nehaniv and J.L. Rhodes
7. On the Increase in Complexity in Evolution, P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho (1976)
8. On the Increase in Complexity in Evolution II: The Relativity of Complexity and the Principle of Minimum Increase, P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho (1981)

In addition to these papers, I wanted to highlight six other recent reviews that give a great overview of the present scientific thinking towards the origin of the genetic code:

1. "Selection, history and chemistry: the three faces of the genetic code.", Trends in Biochemical Sciences, Volume 24, Issue 6, 1 June 1999, Pages 241-247 (full-text .pdf)
   
2. "Genetic code: Lucky chance or fundamental law of nature?", Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 1, Issue 3, Dec 2004, Pages 202-229 (full-text .pdf) [low-quality pub, but expansive overview of the subject]
   
3. "Stepwise Evolution of Nonliving to Living Chemical Systems.", Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, Volume 34, Issue 4, Aug 2004, Pages 371–389 (full-text .pdf)
4. "The Origin of Cellular Life.", Bioessays, Volume 22, Issue 12, Dec 2004, Pages 1160-1170 (full-text .pdf)
5. "The Origin of the Genetic Code: Theories and Their Relationships, A Review.", Biosystems, Volume 80, Issue 2, May 2005, Pages 175-184 (full-text .pdf)
6. "The Origin and Evolution of the Genetic Code: Statistical and Experimental Investigations.", Robin D. Knight, Ph.D. Dissertation, June 2001.
   

And three more about evolution and complexity:

1. Understanding the recent evolution of the human genome: insights from human-chimpanzee genome comparisons, Human Mutation, 28(2):99-130, Oct 2006, Download PDF
2. The origin of new genes: Glimpses from the young and old, Nature Reviews Genetics, 4(11): 865-875 Nov 2003, Download PDF
3. Evolution of biological complexity, PNAS, 97(9):4463-4468, April 2000, Download PDF

There are answers. Do the creationists know that they exist? Mostly not. Would they understand them if they did? Mostly not. How much knowledge is required before creationists admit that we have sound scientific answers to all of their objections? There will never be enough. Ever.

The sad thing is that they think that their non-answers and ignorance (not knowing how things happen) equals evidence that scientists/science cannot provide answers or knowledge. IOW, they use the classic argument from incredulity/ignorance. If they don't know or understand something, then it means god did it. Longest-running theme in creationism.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Where is Pat Robertson Now? Where is Falwell? Wasn't this God's Wrath?

Whenever something terrible happens that can, in any conceivable way, be blamed upon liberals or non-Christians, people like Pat "Midas Touch" Robertson and Jerry "Fat F@$#er w/ Foot-in-mouth" Falwell are ready to deliver their prophecies of hate -- explaining how it was God's wrath.

But when tornadoes hit KS or AL, they remain silent. When they destroy churches, not a peep from our master prophets. Why?

When it happens in the Bible belt, and to churches, and to children, these purveyors of doom are less ready to give God the glory, aren't they?

I'm not one to like using tragedy to preach my message, ie I am not going to claim that these terrible stories disprove God's existence:

1. the 27 killed in a church collapse during services in Uganda last March (link)
2. a baby abducted, raped and killed in the baptismal pool during a service while everyone went on praying and worshipping completely unaware (link)
3. four teens killed on church bus on the way to youth camp (link)
4. 23-month old dies in van, forgotten after church by parents, found as they prepared to return to church (link)
   
5. Waco, TX pastor killed by electrocution during baptism service in front of 800 people (link)
   
6. and more (ffrf)
   

If I'm not using these things to "disprove" a good or loving God, why do you use 9/11 and the tsunami to "prove" God is mad as hell?

Some sick bastards, like this one, will assign credit to God for these acts -- mostly Calvinists. I don't think particulars like these need to be used to try to bolster your case one way or another -- use general examples (25,000 people starve to death a day).

What I'm asking for here is fairness. Jerry and Pat: next time you want to blame liberals or infidels for tragedy, don't forget to give credit where credit is due, and give God the glory for all the natural disasters and tragic accidents. Hell, why stop there? Give the Lawd the credit for anencephaly and leukemia while you're at it (survival rate of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML): 20.4 percent overall; 53.1 percent for children under 15), you sick bastards. Don't just use the VT tragedy to your advantage to preach anti-evolution, then ignore spina bifida. Take all of God's handiwork as evidence of his love and goodness and power...

If you're going to use demagoguery, at least be logically consistent with it.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Philosophy