Survey of the damage

And here's The Onion with a hilarious hurricane-like report on the damage done to the nation by the Bush presidency:

* * * * *

Nostrobamus

He saw this coming from a mile away:

(H/T: Digg for "Nostrobamus" line)

Seth is here!

Seth Elliott Morgan was naturally born this Sunday morning at 4:58 am (9/21/08). [surprise!]

He weighed 6 lbs, 12.4 oz, was 19.75 in from head to toe, and is in excellent health.

Mom and baby are doing great!

View some pics of Seth and family here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/s.daniel.morgan/Seth

They'll be updated frequently.

Palin's dangerous ignorance on foreign policy

Sitting at home watching this, I knew that Charlie referred to the justification given by Bush for pre-emption. Sarah Palin didn't. I know more about key foreign policy stances than her. Perhaps I should run for VP?

She doesn't know what pre-emption is and is willing to start World War 3 with Russia if they invade Georgia. How awesome! Let's put her in the WH!

McCain at Saddleback and the "POW card"

Saddleback was a loser for Obama from the start. The framing of the questions and the crowd were obviously not in his favor, and he is a thoughtful conversationist while McCain literally recites bullet-point-type responses that are trite. ("The moment of conception" being one of the clearest.) Besides the fact that no one catches the logical contradiction in McCain on his support for IVF and stem cell research, while saying that these viable embryos have "human rights", it is a tired and arbitrary way to frame the debate. Why not say that sperm have human rights?

Then, the news that McCain was not in the "cone of silence" seemed to confirm a lot of suspicions that McCain was a little too quick with his responses, and that they were far more cogent than his usual fumbling, bumbling talking points. Which is not to say that they weren't just talking points, as even Jack Cafferty rips him for.

Besides his uncharacteristic quickness and coherence, there were two particular things that struck me about McCain's performance that seems to indicate he had the questions in advance:

1. He jumped ahead of Warren on the Supreme Court justices:
   

   MCCAIN: A union -- a union between man and woman, between one man and one woman. That's my definition of marriage.
   
   Could I -- are we going to get back to the importance of Supreme Court Justices or should I mention --
   
   WARREN: We will get to that.
   
   MCCAIN: OK. All right. OK.
   
   WARREN: You're jumping ahead...

2. He answered a question on education in exactly the format that Obama was given the question, although Warren had not yet given him the full question.

   [Warren with Obama]
   
   Q. OKAY LET’S GO TO EDUCATION. AMERICA RIGHT NOW 23 RANKS 19TH IN HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION. WE’RE FIRST IN INCARCERATIONS.
   
   A. NOT GOOD.
   
   Q. NOT GOOD. 80 PERCENT OF AMERICANS RECENT POLE SAID THEY BELIEVE IN MERIT PAY FOR TEACHERS.
   
   1. I’M NOT ASKING DO YOU THINK ALL TEACHERS SHOULD GET A RAISE.
   
   2. DO YOU THINK BETTER TEACHERS SHOULD BE PAID BETTER?
   
   3. THEY SHOULD BE MAKING MORE THAN POOR TEACHERS?
   
   [Warren to McCain]
   
   Q ABOUT 80 PERCENT OF AMERICA SAYS THEY SUPPORT MERIT PAY FOR THE BEST TEACHERS. NOW, I DON’T WANT TO HEAR YOUR STUMP SPEECH ON EDUCATION?
   
   A YES. YES. AND FIND BAD TEACHERS ANOTHER LINE OF WORK.
   
   Q YOU KNOW –
   
   A CAN I –
   
   Q YOU ARE ANSWERING SO QUICKLY.
   
   A CAN I –
   
   Q YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME OF POKER?

Even Warren notes how he seems to be reading his mind (poker). This is a little too convenient for me.

You can read the transcript here to confirm the accuracy of this.

The relevant section of the video for the education policy is between 2:00 and 2:56 --

Now, another thing I'd point to is this ridiculous response by the McCain campaign that for him to have cheated is unthinkable...because he was a POW:

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.

“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Now, apparently, it's not unthinkable for him to have been a POW, come home, cheated on his wife and left her, gotten involved in politics using his new wife's family money, gotten involved in a lobbyist-favor scandal (Keating 5)...

But it's unthinkable that he would've had a BlackBerry or iPhone and gotten the questions early. Riiiiiiight...they're using the POW card more frequently these days:

Last week, when the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a close Bush ally, publicly questioned McCain’s character, the McCain campaign responded by highlighting McCain’s background as a prisoner of war. When Dems attacked McCain’s healthcare plan in May, McCain responded by noting his background as a prisoner of war. Asked by a local reporter about the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks of Pittsburgh, McCain responded by talking about his background as a prisoner of war.

And all of this, of course, dovetails with the McCain campaign running multiple television ads talking about McCain’s background as a prisoner of war, literally including interrogation footage in the commercial.

This hard-sell wouldn’t be quite so odd if McCain didn’t go around saying that he’s reluctant to talk about his Vietnam experiences.

McCain became visibly angry when I asked him to explain how his Vietnam experience prepared him for the Presidency.

“Please,” he said, recoiling back in his seat in distaste at the very question…. McCain then collected himself and apologized for his initial reaction.

“I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences,” he said, noting that he has huge admiration for the “heroes” who served with him in the POW camp and said the experience taught him to love the U.S. because he missed it so much.

“I am always reluctant to talk about these things,” McCain said.

McCain’s service demands respect and the nation’s gratitude. But he’s clearly crossed the line into shameless exploitation.

Indeed. No one can prove that McCain cheated, unless someone from his campaign steps up and admits to feeding him the questions (fat chance, since Rove's protégé is now running the McCain campaign). But just watch the video, read the transcript, and compare McCain's response time to everything else he's done in the past two years, and see if you have some doubts too.

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?

13 things you should know about McCain's 3rd attack ad

Check out Bill Bradley's deconstruction of McCain's baseless latest, 3rd straight, attack on Obama.

Also, I have posted the new Obama ad pushing back against McCain's lies below:

The Good and the Bad-Fugly

This new video of McCain is good. Damn good.

Digg It!

Ben Smith explains why the GOP's attempt to smear Barack with a mock facebook app is lame. Check out the reviews written on it there, especially the one I just wrote entitled, "McDumb as Bush"...

Media Matters fights back against McCain mendacity

Recently, McCain complained (smirk) about favorable media coverage for Obama, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including a recent report from The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University showing that news coverage has been tougher on Obama. Today, Media Matters fights back with fact:

YouTube link

CBS News edits McCain Interview

Okay, okay, this isn't a politics blog, but I just can't let some things go without mention. The guy whose love affair with the media was recently chronicled in a long book now accuses Sen. Obama of being a "media darling" despite the 24-7 loops of Jeremiah Wright and all the other inconvenient facts. Contrast this against the media's effusive praise of McCain...and their accusations of Obama "flip-flopping" when he really didn't, with zero mention of McCain's looooooong flip-flop list.

...and this un-fuc*ing-believable item, wherein CBSNews edits a McCain interview to make him look better when he gaffes big time on the facts of the surge, proving Obama right.

Dan Rather refers to Obama as "an Osama bin Laden"

Dan Rather makes a bumbling idiot of himself while breaking an irony meter. He is talking about how today's 24h news cycle means anything you say, even when you aren't supposed to be live, is fair game for the sensationalistic news to use. Then, he defends Jesse Jackson by saying that, "...he was important in paving the way for an Osama bin Laden to appear..."

Stop and think about this for a moment: what in the hell does Jesse Jackson have to do with terrorism? Nothing. What else could Rather have meant? Obviously, that Jackson's run for the presidency in 1988 paved the way for Obama's candidacy today. So, Dan Rather confused not only the name, "Obama" with "Osama", which is bad enough, he confused, "Obama" with "Osama bin Laden". JFC...

H/T: I saw this at FiveThirtyEight.com, my favorite polling site. Also, check out their current projections and electoral map:

Religulous, randomness

I am quite anxious to see Bill Maher's "Religulous", coming out 10/3/08, according to Wikipedia. Here's the trailer via YouTube:

Lionsgate has registered a domain, disbliefnet.com, and God is it a funny spoof of beliefnet.com.

Speaking of funny spoofs of religion, and in the vein of "Every sperm is sacred", my second favorite Monty Python clip, The Onion has a hilarious article on Hothouse Effects:

On a complete tangent, the John McCain official flip-flop list that I mentioned before now has a new URL and a new graphic. It's great!

On another complete tangent, our health care system's failure is documented. Again.

Gimme that ol' time religion

I know this is old, but it's hilarious:

Feynman on doubt and uncertainty

Voltaire once said:

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

I found a great video of Richard Feynman talking about living with uncertainty:

For those of you who can't watch video or have slow connections, here's the transcript:

Richard Feynman: You see, one thing, is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing then to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don't know anything about; such as whether it means anything to ask, "Why we're here?" and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and then if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a strange universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.

I'm tempted to go a step beyond Feynman here and say that not only is it possible, or okay, to live with doubt and uncertainty, but that it is a given. The only question is whether or not we place those doubts and uncertainties below a thin layer of a faith claim. When people say, "I know God exists and created the universe," they know no such thing. They believe it and have faith in it, but they don't have warrant to have "justified true belief," which is the definition of knowledge. And so no religion gives knowledge, they simply give a measure of certitude, proportional to how much a person decides they'll put "faith", or unjustified belief, in something.

Two funny irreverent things

Okay, so when the huge spawn of twisters killed lots of people throughout the SE, and when a huge spawn of twisters killed lots of people in KS and AL, I asked for some logical consistency: the fat self-righteous religious right kooks needed to step up to the plate and claim that God hates TN, or KS, or AL...just as they did when Katrina hit LA. Finally, someone has stepped up to the plate, blaming Iowa for God's wrath -- Jason Werner. PS: See this take-down at the Secular Philosophy blog of arguments based on the idea that God sends wrath down on specific locales when God gets pissed.

See this hilarious spoof of Expelled, just substitute Intelligent Design Creationism for Astrology and Biology for Astronomy and you get the joke:

Note on Appalachia & Obama

When I said a few days ago that I know the Appalachian region all too well, as I lived my first 20 years there, I spoke about the racism that I know played into Obama's significant electoral losses in the region. Boy, I wish I'd known that the Daily Show video had come out the night before on this exact issue.

For those of you who can't/won't watch the video, Jon Stewart basically cuts through the "white working voters" bullshit to get to the heart of it -- race and ignorance. Voters were interviewed who repeated the nonsense about Obama being a Muslim and simultaneously (with no hint of irony or detection of illogic) an atheist.

As much as the Bible Belt section of Appalachia sucks, and as I've pointed to every conceivable fact to support that statement, I wanted to point out something of a little more substance: the NPR interview that exposed a lot of this racist nonsense and its closing statement in particular.

Exit polls from Tuesday show that 22% of voters admitted that race was a factor in their decision. For 8% of voters, race was the most important factor. And almost all those voters went for Clinton. Sometimes, voters say that they aren’t racist – but their friends and neighbors are. Here’s Anna Sale again talking to Brian Blankenship, a Logan County barber.

Blankenship: Well they’re saying Hillary, and if Hillary don’t, they’re saying McCain.
Sale : So they don’t like Obama
Blankenship: No
Sale : And what are the reasons
Blankenship: I’d say because he’s black, most of them.

Finn: And sometimes, voters have no problem saying it themselves.

Cooper: You know I didn’t vote for no colored.
Sale: Who did you vote for?
Cooper: What’s her name?
Sale : Clinton.
Cooper: Clinton, yeah.

Finn: That’s Morris Cooper, an 80-year-old man from Lincoln County. In all these cases, the voters weren’t asked about race – they brought it up themselves.

None of this surprises William Turner. He grew up in Harlan County, Kentucky, and is now chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College. He says there’s no one single factor that explains Obama’s trouble with voters in Appalachia. It’s his race, it’s his name, it’s his upbringing in far-off Indonesia and Hawaii. And Obama’s message of change, which is so popular elsewhere, doesn’t resonate in a region that resists change.

Turner: How often I heard it said, Nobody likes change but a baby with a dirty diaper. So this kind of change is maybe just a little too much for people to absorb.

Finn: Some people think Obama can turn these attitudes around if he spends more time in West Virginia. In 1960, John F. Kennedy crisscrossed the state for three weeks, and even went down into a coal mine. It paid off – the mostly Protestant state helped select the nation’s first Catholic president. But Turner says Obama has a much tougher job than Kennedy.

Turner: I don’t think Barack could have in the short time he had change these long-standing stereotypes of black people or Appalachia. So what we need is just more education, more interaction, people getting to know each other better. And if he did nothing else but held up a mirror so we see ourselves better than we did last week, that’s good that he did that.

Finn: West Virginians, and other people in Appalachia, complain a lot about unfair stereotypes. But in this case, Turner says we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Indeed. Every hick they interviewed said the same ignorant things. It's enough to make me angry as hell and physically repulsed at the same time. All I can hope for is that more sunlight will work as a disinfectant; that the more people look at these sorts of attitudes, the more those holding them will be recognized for what they are and shunned. Education and liberal values are not going to work on the uneducated and staunch racists in Appalachia.

The same exact thing applies to eastern KY (where all of my dad's family is from and all still live) and there's a great video at Kos on it...also OH, PA, and to a lesser extent TN.

It will be so easy to beat McBush on issues of foreign policy, domestic policy and political ethics that I really think the only thing that can defeat Obama is the demographic he's struggled with for a a long time -- Southern or Appalachian whites & uneducated whites.

Monty Python: "O Lord Please Don't Burn Us..."

There are many very funny Monthy Python clips available online. Everyone has their favorites. My own all-time favorite is from The Meaning of Life: Part II -- Growth and Learning, at about 2:12, with the song, "O Lord, Please Don't Burn Us..." (lyrics)

On cell phones & brain tumors

Having a background in chemistry & physics, I am very skeptical of the new report that mobile phones cause brain tumors. Being a "good" scientist, though, I am willing to hear the detailed arguments and wait and see what evidence is brought forth to support the hypothesis.

The major cause of my skepticism is that electromagnetic radiation in the radio frequencies used by mobile phones (UHF) has wavelengths of around 10 to 100 cm. These energies are only high enough to cause bond rotation and vibration, not homolysis or ionization. If, on the physical level, this is true...what is the mechanism responsible for purported biological tissue damage? Government experts have agreed with this logic for decades.

Before people look at the UHF radiation, they should consider alternative explanations, nearly all of which could be fixed easily: I know that some heat is generated by the phones, and there can be some constructive interference, as well as issues with the batteries and materials in the phones themselves. If it is the case that cell phones cause health issues, I'll bet the ranch that one of these is chiefly responsible.

On a lighter note, check out this hilarious video about Expelled! It's supposed to poke fun at science & scientists, but as with everything else, it just makes creationists look stupid.

A few politics notes

W on climate change: Dumb president, or the dumbest president? We all know it's the latter.

It looks like the war's cost will continue to be stealing from our nation's crumbling infrastructure, until the failed occupation comes to an end. Barack has a plan to invest the war's capital into exactly this sector, establishing a national infrastructure bank.

One of the far-right's favorite hangouts, Town Hall, gets absurd (as usual) with "Would Jesus Carry Concealed?". Jesus' General has an intellectually-on-par response: of course! As I've pointed out before, "The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?" (1 Cor. 6:7 NIV) and Jesus said, "And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." (Matt. 5:40, NIV). Jesus also talked about turning the other cheek, walking an additional mile...&c. How different religious ideals seem from their practice in reality.

Tangentially, this article reviewing the first four presidents' views on church-state separation is great:

I've pointed out many times the basic split among the first four presidents on such matters. Washington and Adams were what might be called non-coercive accommodationists, while Jefferson and Madison were strict separationists. Washington and Adams believed that the government should provide a general and rhetorical support to religion through proclamations of days of thanksgiving and prayer, but only if those proclamations were kept non-coercive (that is, no one was required to follow them) and they were worded very broadly so as to encompass almost any religious belief, not merely Christianity.

As the general election looms, hanging Bush around McCain's neck is quite easily done. See the new ad, "McSame as Bush":

Hilarious Clinton vid by Slatev

I love it.

Hilarious.