Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Get ready for more fallout over Sarah Palin, who seems to be even crazier than I thought. There was an attempt to rehabilitate her from the accusations of pushing creationism recently, but the counterclaims got the facts all wrong. They claim that she only said that schools ought to “debate both sides,” but that’s the creationist position — pointing out that she was reciting creationist slogans does not somehow get her off the hook. And then there’s this litany of eyewitness stories from residents of her home town, who seem to be cheerfully trotting out to stick a knife in her campaign.
At one point during the hospital battle, passions ran so hot that local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside Dr. Lemagie’s office, in an unassuming professional building across from Palmer’s Little League field. According to Bess and another community activist, among the protesters trying to disrupt the physician’s practice that day was Sarah Palin.
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’
“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”
Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'”
Spare us. That’s crazy talk.
Another revelation: remember all the Republican buzz about “small town values“, and how Palin invoked them in her speech? The source for her quote has been tracked down, and it isn’t pretty, but it is fitting for a Republican thug.
“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,” the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous “writer,” which is to say, Pegler, who must have penned that mellifluous line when not writing his more controversial stuff. As the New York Times pointed out in its obituary of him in 1969, Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin “hit the wrong man” when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt.
This Pegler fellow has quite a reputation for fascist rhetoric:
He was also known for what Philip Roth described as his “casual distaste for Jews,” which had become so evident by the end that he was bounced from the journal of the John Birch Society in 1964 for alleged anti-semitism. According to his obituary, he’d advanced the theory that American Jews of Eastern European descent were “instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared.”
And Robert Kennedy Jr has grounds for finding Palin’s choice of sources distasteful.
Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies.”
Jebus. What has Sarah Palin been reading in order to get her political education?
The only good news I’ve seen so far: The biggest political rally in Alaskan history was an anti-Palin demonstration. Not that the news media will cover it.
You can now read McCain’s position, as well as Obama’s, on science policy at SEFORA and at Science Debate 2008. I tried to read them comparatively — the big differences that jumped out at me are that McCain wants to build lots and lots of nuclear power plants, and that McCain runs away from the issues of genetics and stem cells as fast as he can — but I just can’t care very much about McCain’s answers at all. I don’t believe anything positive he might say.
I just want to ask, if he is so pro-science, does that mean we can ask his running mate about the dinosaurs now?
The resemblance is uncanny and hilarious. She’ll be in great demand if a certain unqualified ignoramus stumbles into the White House.
After you’re done laughing, though, sober up to the horror.
Once again, the Daily Show punctures the pointless vapidities uttered by politicians — in this case, the phrase “small town values” that was flung about with fervent abandon at the Republican convention, by lots of people who seem to have never been anywhere near a small town.
I live in a small town, I like living here, and there are definite advantages to it — it’s easy to get to know other members of the community, the life style is a bit more laid back, and a lot of the hassles of just moving around are absent. But small town values? The ones the Republicans are worshipping seem to be the narrow insularity verging on xenophobia, the judgmental meddling in other people’s affairs, the backward-looking reverence for the good old days (which actually weren’t that good), the worship of ignorance, the easy way authority can personally intrude on people’s lives without oversight, except by a coterie of good old boys. They seem to overlook the schools in neglect, the churches sprouting everywhere like poisonous mushrooms, the alcoholism, the spousal abuse, the kids who just want to get through high school and flee to a city where something is happening, the elderly piling up and outnumbering the young and being shuffled off to cheap complexes, the despair of people caught in dead-end menial jobs with few prospects for going beyond. That’s also small town America, and when I hear a Republican singing the praises of small towns, I have visions of a walmartized wasteland where everyone goes to church. It’s not good.
But I still like it here — I’m just not blind to the flaws, and I’m not some beltway lobbyist who thinks the country is a place from a Currier & Ives postcard.
I’ve also been to New York, and I like big city values, too. Everytime I’ve been there, I’ve felt the people were just as friendly and open as the ones in Morris, if not more so, and that they were also more diverse and far less afflicted with small town myopia. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are also part of America…except to the Republican party, apparently.
I hope the Daily Show also did something on the empty buzzwords of the Democratic convention. If I ever hear “god bless” or “godspeed” again, I’m going to ralph on someone’s shoes.
I hope the Democrats cultivate some ferocity soon and start running ads based on this:
That’s a quote from Lou Engle in this video — and it’s actually kind of true. He thinks it will be a wonderful thing when people see this, and there probably are a lot of Americans who think the events portrayed are perfectly ordinary, and even commendable.
I see nothing but madness.
By picking Sarah Palin for a running mate, John McCain has turned over a rock to expose a festering, primitive insanity in our country. Look on the squirming horror, world, and learn that it does exist!
A further indictment: Juan Cole sees Palin through the lens of his expertise on the Islamic world.
John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.
At last, it’s a Palin we can all support.
When we were in Ecuador, much of the local political discussion was around their efforts to write a new constitution for the country. I’d heard that there were some significantly progressive elements to the work, but this is the first I’ve seen some of the articles being considered: as is perhaps unsurprising for a nation well-endowed with natural resources and reliant on maintaining those resources to support the economy, they’ve done something terrific: they’ve not only written rights for nature (personified as “Pachamama”), but they’ve acknowledged the importance of evolution.
Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is
reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and
regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in
evolution.Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to
demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public
organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will
follow the related principles established in the Constitution.Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral
restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation
on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people
and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including
the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources,
the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the
restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or
mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and
juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will
promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and
restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the
extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the
permanent alteration of the natural cycles.The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material
that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is
prohibited.Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and
nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and
form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its
production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the
State.
It’s awfully fuzzy on exactly how they’re going to protect the rights of Nature (will she have lawyers working on her behalf?), but the sentiment is excellent.
