Return Ben Stein’s Money

I’m a bit disappointed with Al Franken. Ben Stein has donated to the Franken campaign, and he has accepted the money — come on, Al, let’s see some principles. Stein is a dishonest fraud who is peddling Intelligent Design creationism in his upcoming movie, Expelled; he’s a former Nixon speechwriter, and he defends Nixon. I know they might be friends in their personal life, but this is politics — Franken should stand up for his liberal ideas and courteously refuse to take money from a stupid right-winger.

Besides supporting pseudoscience in the schools, here’s another reason to reject Stein. There’s a letter that’s been going around for some time, purportedly from Ben Stein. According to Snopes, only part of it is, so I’ll just tackle the part that we can assign to Stein’s feeble brain.

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Don’t lick that envelope!

Tara has a real horror story: a geneticist failed to follow procedure in mailing some samples, sharing some harmless commercial strains of some innocuous and common bacteria with an artist, the kind of thing that a bureaucrat would reasonably respond to with a hand-slap and insistence that the mistake not be repeated. Except that in this case the federal government has charged in under the pretext of anti-bioterrorism laws (thanks, Patriot Act) and…

Normally, this would be an issue handled between Ferrell (and his university) and ATCC; however, under the broad definitions of mail and wire fraud under the Patriot Act, the government stepped in and charged Kurtz and Ferrell with mail and wire fraud–felonies that, since they’re being charged under the Patriot Act, could carry a possible 20-year sentence.

The whole thing is a ham-handed mess, mismanaged by utterly clueless federal law enforcement agencies who basically freaked out over a vial of ordinary soil bacteria. Be careful not to sneeze anywhere near your income tax returns, or you could be guilty of biological warfare against the IRS.

Congratulations, Al

Al Gore and the IPCC have won the 2007 Nobel Peace prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

Now run for president, Al — we need someone with the respect of the international community to repair all that our current chief nitwit has broken.

Christian-Fascism Awareness Week

David Horowitz (you all remember him, right? Deranged anti-intellectual wanker?) He has declared 22-26 October to be Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, to be represented with talks by such towering intellects as Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity.

Brian Leiter has a complementary suggestion: the week after should be Christian-Fascism Awareness Week.

Now I don’t want to interfere with Horowitz’s effort, which is in the spirit of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan:  "fundamentalism is the enemy of all civilized humanity."  So one week devoted to Islamic fundamentalism seems right; but why not devote the next week to Christian fundamentalism?  The rise of Christian Fascism has gotten some attention lately, but not nearly enough in our "politically correct" culture.  Sure, the Christian Fascists aren’t quite as scary, since they rarely commit terrorist acts (except against abortion service providers); on the other hand, they’re right here in our midst (even in the White House some say), while the Islamic Bogeyman-In-Chief is in a cave somewhere in Pakistan.

I’d suggest that the Christo-Fascists have done far more damage to our country than any Islamo-Fascist — after all, the Islamic hordes haven’t been responsible for stripping away our civil liberties, nor did they force us to spend trillions on a fool’s war, nor did they turn Jesus into Mammon, nor did they replace education and science with ignorance and piety.

I’m all for this suggestion. I’m sure that Santorum, Coulter, Hannity, Dobson, Perkins, Robertson, etc., etc., etc. will all happily join us in fighting this grave threat to American security and freedom, too.

Bachmann: another Republican against poor children

I wouldn’t normally just publish a press release here, but in this case, 1) it’s an important issue, the Republican squashing of the SCHIP bill to reauthorize a health insurance program for poor children, 2) it’s about Michele Bachmann, a truly contemptible creature of the far right wing, and 3) my son Alaric has been working with Americans Against Escalation in Iraq on turning out the opposition to Bachmann — so it’s a good cause, a wretched villain, and a little family connection.

The story is that Cruella deVille Michele Bachmann was one of the conservative drones who voted to let poor children suffer; worse, she afterwards tried to claim that she was actually a supporter of SCHIP, that the bill would have benefitted the wealthy so she really wasn’t trying to hurt poor kids, and that her critics should “bring it on”. The Star Tribune editorialized against her position, and there have been vigils outside her office to try and persuade her to change her vote and override the president’s veto.

The argument that this bill would have advantaged the already rich means Michele Bachmann has joined the ranks of the repellent Republicans who gleefully attack children.

The press release is below the fold.

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Lazowska on the politicization of science and our uninspiring educational system

This is an excellent brief overview of the crucial problems in American education by Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Washington who also served on an advisory committee under GW Bush. From his first hand view, he does not seem kindly disposed towards Republican policies in science.

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New Christian fascism and hate

We’re seeing an ugly form of intolerance creeping into the western states, carried with slavic evangelicals who hate homosexuals.

A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has “made an injection” of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. “In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin,” Kusakin said.

That’s a mild example of their rhetoric. Under the cloak of their odious religious beliefs, these holy thugs are on a hate-crusade against gays, and they’ve already killed at least one person, Satender Singh, for the ‘crime’ of not being heterosexual enough.

The Box Turtle Bulletin and Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion have more on these rather nasty immigrants … and their American enablers.