Mike Pence. Establishment politician. There to add a little gravitas — as much as a wingnut Republican can — to the chaos of the Trump ticket. So what’s the calm one saying?
GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence on Thursday predicted that Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, would be overturned if Donald Trump is elected president.
I’m pro-life and I don’t apologize for it,he said during a town hall meeting here.We’ll see Roe vs. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs.
OK, the Republicans were already the lunatic party, do they need to keep re-emphasizing it?
Meanwhile, Jill Stein is making vague anti-vaccination noises.
I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases — smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication,Stein said.Like any medication, they also should be — what shall we say? — approved by a regulatory board that people can trust. And I think right now, that is the problem. That people do not trust a Food and Drug Administration, or even the CDC for that matter, where corporate influence and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of influence.
You know, vaccines aren’t the big money cash crop for the pharmaceutical companies that the anti-vaxxers think — and Stein ought to know that — and accusing the FDA and CDC of being in the pocket of Big Pharma is a rather strong accusation. But then, she sees an opportunity to get out of the tenth of a percent bracket in the coming election, so she is pandering madly to the ignorant lefty vote right now.
Should I mention Gary Johnson, as long as I’m looking at the competition? Nah, not worth it. Libertarian, <hiss> <makes sign of the cross>
On the positive side, Amanda Marcotte makes a good case that Hillary Clinton has a winning strategy.
Donald Trump gave Clinton a huge gift with his ridiculous “I alone” line from his convention speech last week. It allowed her to portray herself as the opposite: A team player, a listener, a coalition-builder, and humble public servant. She literally said of being a public servant that “the service part has always come easier to me than the public part”.
“None of us can do it alone. That’s why we are stronger together,” Clinton added. It was a masterful stroke. By framing the presidency in terms of service and community, Clinton both contrasted her vision with Trump’s narcissistic one and fought back against stereotypes that hold that ambitious women are heartless shrews who don’t care about anyone else.
It’s also a good look next to Pence’s anti-woman stance.
OK, enough politics. My wife is taking me out to see Ghostbusters shortly, obviously because she wants to indoctrinate me in this silly idea that women can do the same things men can do. Like catching ghosts.
These are two different issues but at least she’s clear on the vaccine part.
“As a medical doctor of course I support vaccinations. I have a problem with the FDA being controlled by drug companies.”
https://twitter.com/drjillstein/status/759142652243644416
Well, Pence is from Indiana. We’re all crazy here, regardless of politics. Some are just a better kind of crazy, and others are better at hiding their crazy.
And while Stein has stated she supports vaccines, she’s also saying stuff about GMOs now, so I dunno.
Meanwhile a number of people close to Clinton or in the business sector seem to be certain Clinton will reverse on TPP and head back to the center. Only time–and bucket of pundits–will tell.
All that has to be said about Johnson is the Samantha Bee piece on him was fun, but his economic policies are untenable. Some other stuff probably is, too.
Although the more I think about it the more Sanders’ situation was like Trump’s in that both probably would have fit in a 3rd party more but figured that would get them nowhere. Would not be surprised if going with a big party will have the saaaaame resuuults.
Colbert noted that “it’s about time a woman became president ever since women broke the ghostbuster ceiling” [paraphrased badly, oops, you know wat i mean eh]
Hmm…I seem to remember a $100,000,000 fine to Abbott Diagnostics for their failure to update one of their tests to current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP), despite repeated warnings. It cost them dearly to bring the whole process and test from the 1950’s up to 2000 standards in a couple of years. Much cheaper if they had followed the guidelines themselves as they tightened over the years.
Anybody who says FDA is in the pocket of Big Pharma lies. What they don’t want to admit, is that the cGMP (derived from ICH) is actually a quality program that makes for constant improvement in manufacturing, testing, and quality of drug products.
Big Pharma is nothing but a Boogie Man, some faceless entity to scare the uneducated with.
@1
That doesn’t preclude being anti-vax. Alex Jones is on the record agreeing with vaccines on the whole – he just happens to think our vaccines are the product of an evil big pharma that is in cahoots with the globalist-run FDA.
Stein is also anti-GMO. She doesn’t just favor labelling them; she wants a moratorium on them until they are “proven safe.”
Make sure you stay all the way to the end of the credits, PZ!
I’ve voted for Stein before. Why? Stein still has a better record of supporting women, LGBTQ rights, other minorities, and corporate regulation. And you have to love a candidate that releases a 250 page PDF manifesto covering any conceivable question you might have of her policies, opinions, and about twelve years’ worth of proposed legislation. And who can forget the disenfranchisement of the two-party system (in my state you can’t even work the polls without belonging to red or blue for 6 months), and making election day a paid holiday to improve voting turnout at least beyond that of the last Iranian election. So it is especially sad to see statements like this: they are certainly pandering, but they are certainly pandering to anti-vaxxers.
Up to now my only problem with Stein was her stance on Israel, which is dangerously solidarious. I want a president capable of threatening to cut off favor to any country breaking international law (fucking Turkey) and actually follow through with that. Of course, Clinton and Sanders have the same opinion, and it wasn’t exactly a voting deterrent. With these recent statements, maybe she’s just trying to make it easier for people like me to vote for Clinton?
Accepting the logic in voting Clinton doesn’t make it any easier, for me it’s like the ritual I go through to overcome deer-in-headlights arachnophobia every time I have to kill a spider. I’ll get there in the end, but it takes a fat heavy object and a lot of effort. So, thanks, Ms. Stein, for that fat heavy object.
To clarify: all her recent statements annoy me, including comparing Clinton to Trump.
I’m deeply concerned about the hackings and the public response to them. A foreign government has likely broken into Democratic organizations and is selectively and manipulatively releasing stolen information (potentially including fake documents) in order to get their preferred candidate/stooge elected. It’s true that the US has been interfering with elections, sponsoring coups, sabotaging economies, creating crises, kidnapping presidents, and installing puppet tyrants for decades. People in other countries can understandably ask how it feels now that the shoe’s on the other foot (not at all good – should be a learning experience for Liberals and people in the media who help them to oust democratically elected leaders in Latin America and elsewhere). But a presidential candidate is openly encouraging them to do it, and his supporters are excited about it – anything to defeat and “expose” his opponent, and hopefully to destroy her.
He’s now saying he agrees with the chants to “lock her up” – a presidential candidate publicly calling for his opponent to be jailed after she and others criticized him. And I read comment after comment on articles about it, including from some Sanders supporters, welcoming the “help” in demolishing Clinton and claiming that a focus on this is a distraction from the real issue of the fucking DNC emails and Clinton’s nefariousness. Not only are they happy to cheer on someone like Trump for the presidency of the United States, they’re fine with handing our government to Putin and with Trump openly rooting the Russians on while calling for his opponent to be imprisoned.
There seems to be no regard at all for domestic elections, checks on power, or sovereignty, or even the consequences of a Donald Trump presidency. There’s just hatred and rage and viciousness. And only a handful of Republicans will even say anything about it. It’s probably the scariest and most dangerous election we’ve ever had.
You might be relieved to know that it is basically never necessary to kill a spider.
Because nothing says “trustworthy” like a brand-new, untested, regulatory agency that was brought in to do the exact same thing an already-existing agency is doing?
Also, what exactly will be unique about this new agency that puts it beyond the reach of pharmaceutical companies? And why can’t we just apply that feature to the FDA and the CDC?
Make sure you give Ghostbusters a lukewarm endorsement so you can get spammed with pingbacks from cishet white dude philosophers who pontificate on the evils of “punching up.”
If you have arachnophobia it is often very necessary to kill a spider. Leaving them is intolerable and the prolonged contact required to catch and move them (not to mention the possibility of failing to catch them) makes that untenable.
The pessimist in me worries about this. I don’t necessarily believe that portraying one’s self as being a team player is an election winning strategy. A lot of people, whether they admit it or not, favor authoritarianism (so long as it’s their authoritarian in power), and I don’t think that the more reasonable (and more effective) cooperative tack is going to have the same appeal. People like simple answers to complex questions. Hell, plenty of Trump supporters will openly admit they don’t care if he actually fulfills his promises, they just like the cut of his angry orange jib.
I haven’t seen the new Ghostbusters yet. I can’t say that I was enthusiastic about the prospect a a reboot/remake/whatever. I didn’t even think they should have made GBII. The original was perfect on its own. I’ll probably catch it when it hits streaming.
@Akira MacKenzie (#15)
It really is the best sort of remake. Just enough similarity to the original to be pleasantly nostalgic for children of the ’80s, but other than hitting a few key notes, it is a significantly different story that stands on its own quite well.
Siobhan wrote:
I wonder how many of the new Ghostbusters haters actually bothered to see the movie. I’m guessing it’s close to none.
It seems to me that if Trump is going to make Hillary-bashing the centerpiece of his campaign, it will backfire on him. The more he bashes her and she either bashes back or ignores it, the stronger she will seem for not buckling under the barrage. Perhaps I’m being optimistic, but I think everyone has a soft spot for the underdog, which is what Trump will transform Hillary into by beating on her all the time.
I have no problem with people who want to vote for the candidate they prefer, even if that means voting for someone who hasn’t even a remote chance of being anything more than a footnote in the Wikipedia entry for the election.
I just wish more of them had realistic expectations. Bernie supporters were ecstatic when it was revealed that Stein had made overtures to him about a joint campaign. They seemed to believe that they would somehow sweep to victory on a joint ticket, or at least throw the election process into enough turmoil that it would be ever changed for the better. Neither prospect was at all likely. Best case scenario – throws election to Trump, Democrats regroup and dig in for 2018 and 2020 and nothing has changed.
In a two party system, unless you have a once in a century political phenom running for president on an independent ticket (i.e. a Perot with the charm of Reagan and the charisma of Obama), the electoral system is so locked down by the duopoly of the Democrats and the Republicans that only an inside insurgency has any hope of achieving the types of reforms that most of us around here would want. (And even if we got an independent president, unless by some miracle he/she was able to appoint a majority on the Supreme Court, the party machines would resist any effort to erode their built in advantage and would have the power to do it.)
Right-wing conservatives have already shown what can be done. The Tea Party insurgency came out of nowhere to sweep over 50 of its members into office at the federal level. Even then (mostly because they are nuts) they’re struggling to achieve any of their stated goals, though they have scored the head of John Boehner and Paul Ryan might be heading the same way.
So, like it or not, the only serious chance at major reform we on the left want to see comes from within Democratic Party. There have already been some victories — Blue Dog Democrats are a dying breed these days as more progressive candidates are selected — but as President Obama said so eloquently in his speech this week, change is never easy and takes a lot of hard work, with numerous setbacks along the way. It means working for years in obscurity at the local and state level, it means making compromises with more centrist fellow Democrats (yeah, even voting for Hillary Clinton as president), and it means putting in the hard miles to win people’s hearts and mind — shift public opinion enough and the odds of success go up.
None of this promises success at the end of the road. Those who join the party machine become subject to the same pressures as their longer serving colleagues, and may end up helping to reinforce the system, but unless we happen to stumble upon someone who is the second coming of Jesus (figuratively speaking), then it’s the only realistic path.
Those who want to blow up the whole system by electing Trump have no regard for the millions who could be hurt by such folly. In any case, for anything approaching a revolution, things would have to get far far worse, and the toll in terms of lives and the economy could be enormous, with zero guarantee that it would be any better when the smoke finally cleared. In fact, it would likely be even worse for a very long time. The more likely outcome of a Trump term would be a Republican controlled House and Senate rolling back every single piece of progressive legislation passed in the last 25 years, and a safe conservative majority on the SCOTUS yet another generation. Even if the Democrats retook the majority in 2018 the damage would have already been done.
Being Nerd myself (MIT alumnus) I was mandated (so to speak) to maintain sharp eye for MIT references sprinkled throughout the movie. MIT helped write the science behind the story {(so to speak)^2}. for example. Erin is shown practicing a lecture about advanced theoretical physics in front of a lecture whiteboard covered in equations. Turns out those equations are not just random scribbles to overwhelm the audience from examining. They are actual equations of General Relativity and String Theory written on the board by an actual physicist. Later, Erin is seen wearing an MIT sweatshirt, later in the scene at a lunch table, it can be glimpsed that she is wearing a Brass Rat (our class ring) on her right hand (the proper location, btw).
he only thing I objected to about the movie was Bill Murray’s inglorious exit [no spoilers]. Very unnecessary and added little to the story (his exit was objectionable, not his presence).
The story did seem a little more plausible than the original, which was mainly just SNL satire at the rise of the occult popularity and jabbing at the EPA’s perceived overreach. This story had [spoiler alert] an actual bad guy producing the ghosts while the original had the ghosts being overwhelming backfire from a useful device.
oops, this not a GB thread. apologies for derailing into sharing my critique of the movie.
oh yeah… like earlier quipped. Sit through the credits, the final appended scene is worth it (slightly).
Vivec @5
Although she isn’t full on anti-vax by any means, Jill Stein is dog whistling to the anti-vaxxers
The head of our (Canadian) Green Party has embraced the wifi fear mongering which was also the hobby horse of a (hopefully not re-elected) Conservative MP.
Oh my god did she really bring up the thiomersal thing? Okay, if that quote’s legitimate, I think she officially qualifies as a crank.
Acting like the removal of a perfectly safe preservative agent that the WHO, FDA, CDC and UN determined posed no actual health threat and that actually made Vaccines safer was a positive thing is full on anti-vax kookery.
Stein has also been supportive of homeopathy.
Stein, as leader of the Green Party and a qualified doctor, should also repudiate the platform of her party because of its, frankly, magical thinking
source for quotes: Michael Stone on Secular Progressive Humanist
As Orac has pointed out repeatedly, many anti-vaxxers say they aren’t opposed to vaccines / vaccinations, the “problem” is the “toxins” in the vaccine, or a “lack” of evidence of safety (or efficacy or something), or “too many too soon”, or wrong eye of an endangered newt, or… — there’s always something, often(?) somethings (plural), so they won’t vaccine, but no, no, really, they aren’t opposed to vaccines / vaccination, it just that reasons…
I’m afraid the only thing PZ is going to see by watching Ghostbusters 2016 is that women can make badly written and paced movies with no chemistry just as ably as men. Which was such a letdown, because none of them are bad! Kirsten Wiig in particular is brilliant!
Matthew Facciani at Patheos made a similar post. Of course, the comments section got overrun by bernie bros who would rather see the world burn down. I don’t want to spare anyone here this absolute baffling piece of delusional grandeur, which perfectly exemplifies their pathetic movement and their absolute moral depravity:
If it is outside, there is no reason. I inside, simple jar/cup+postcard+window allows you to remove it with contact. Unless I guess squishing a harmless arachnid’s blood and guts and then cleaning it up is less “contact” than than the aforementioned escape process.
I mean personally I kill wasps if extra annoying, simple catch, break neck/stun and squash on floor because it’s quicker than catch and release and the wasp will come back. But then I guess I just have a soft spot for arachnids and all the good work they do hunting pesky insects by my side.
Hillary leaves me unenthusiastic, but this is a great point.
in a democracy, the polticians lead or should anyway. They don’t dominate or dictate.
This is true even of Donald Trump, the fascist. Without millions of low education, struggling white males, he would just be a crackpot on Alex Jones or Fox NoNews. Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
Hard to imagine that Mike Pence is going to do anything for the Trump campaign.
He is an unlikeable religious fanatic. Basically, a Puritan witch hunter several centuries out of place. News reports say he wasn’t even that popular in Indiana, a state not known for its progessiveness.
Then again, we are through the looking glass into Crazyland. Who knows what can happen in…Crazyland.
raven wrote:
He might be able to attract some disillusioned Cruz supporters. i.e. The other unlikable religious fanatic that was in the race.
@30 raven
The choice of Pence was sound strategy. Out of all of Trumps shortcomings as a candidate, of which there are an innumerable amount, he fell flat on his face hardest trying to woo the religious right. Pence made sense. Picking a running mate in the area you are weakest. There is still a strong religious right voter base that the Republican party has been grooming for decades. They would have been crazy not to pander to it.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/174134/religion-remains-strong-marker-political-identity.aspx
oh man, so much this have I seen. My eyes are bleeding from it.