Hasn’t he gone away yet?

I was startled to see that John McCain hasn’t been retired to the WaxWorks Museum of Irrelevant Political Figures yet — he’s still making speeches. Could somebody tell him that he’ll never, ever have a shot at the presidency again?

Anyway the subject of his speech was to sneer at fruit fly research again, and mock lobster research. What’s with the hatin’ on invertebrates, Mr McCain?

At least we don’t have to care what he says anymore: he is officially nobody, a washed-up politician who let himself get upstaged by his airhead running mate.

The ways of the Bush administration are inscrutable and stupid

Thankfully, these are the waning days of the awful, incompetent, no-good Bush/Cheney presidency, years we will try to forget in the decades to come. What will help is that we don’t have a good name for this decade — The Oughties? Bleh — and we’re just going to have to refer to them as the years with a couple of zeroes in the middle.

This odious administration is not going out gracefully, however, but is instead leaving with a flurry of last-minute knifings of our country. Some are exploitive efforts to pay back interests to whom the conservatives are beholden, such as the stripping of environmental protection laws (which the next administration may be disinclined to roll back). Others just seem inexplicably arbitrary and petty, the work of small-minded tyrants who want to get in one last poke while they can.

Here’s one such example: the Department of Justice is redefining “service animal”. They’ve redefined “animal” to mean “dog”! I’ve got nothing against dogs, but there are people who use non-canine animals as service animals, and suddenly they are going to be stripped of the legal rights associated with service animal use.

Don’t ask me why. I think it’s just because they can.

I’m not so sure about this pick

It looks like Obama has picked Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general. He seems a bit of a lightweight, to me — he’s mainly known as a congenial talking head on television news. He’s also an apologist for US health care, which does not give me any confidence that we can expect the slightest effort towards health care reform. I suspect Obama has just picked a pleasant smiling face to act as a placeholder, and that disappoints me.

We’ll have to see how that ol’ conservative, Orac, reacts to this news.

SENATOR Al Franken!

This is the day the Canvassing Board will announce their decision in the Minnesota senate race, and since he is ahead by 225 votes, that means Al Franken will be declared the victor.

Expect 5-alarm histrionics from the right wing, howls of outrage on talk radio, and the wing nut blogs to go ballistic. Also expect the Coleman campaign to charge the state supreme court and demand to be handed the office. It will be very entertaining. The freakout is only warming up.

Holidays: officially over

I have just returned from my last long drive of the season, finally and regretfully shuttling the last beloved member of the Myers clan off to the distant Minneapolis transportation hub. Now, at last, I can relax, shed of my patriarchal obligations (speaking of which, the hair is getting a bit long and wild, and the beard is looking a bit ferocious…I may have to do something to tame them). I’ve also feeling the fatigue of waging the war on Christmas — my trigger finger is all calloused, and the recoil bruises on my shoulder would make you weep to see them — so it’s nice to have a little armistice until they start up again, six months from now. I’ve even got a little time to catch up with the neglected blog!

Here are a few quick tidbits.

  • The quixotic Michael Newdow is suing to have godly invocations dropped altogether from the presidential swearing-in ceremony, and our very own Minnesota Atheists have joined in. I don’t think they stand a prayer. It’s still a good thing to keep speaking out about it, so I support them wholeheartedly.

  • You need a poll to crash. How about one from Lynchburg, VA, home of Liberty University, where they are asking, Atheist group files suit to keep religion out of inauguration. Okay? So far, 17% say OK, 83% say not OK. That might change soon.

  • A bus matron who was supposed to be assisting a young man with cerebral palsy, Ed Wynn Rivera, abandoned him on the bus, still strapped to his seat, while it was parked in the depot…for seventeen hours. She had a good excuse, though.

    Hockaday admitted to knowing that Rivera was still on the bus when it was locked up on one of the coldest nights of the year. Her rationale for leaving? She apparently didn’t want to be late for church.

  • Good news from Texas! The final draft of the state science standards is done, and by all accounts, it is good.

    But with the “weaknesses” requirement removed and a new definition for science, the new plan makes it clear that supernatural explanations like creationism and intelligent design have no place in public classrooms, said Dan Quinn with the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based nonprofit group that opposes religious influence on public education.

    Good work, Texas scientists and educators!

I hope you all enjoyed your godless holiday. It was much more pleasant than the religious one.

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Clear Vision For A Pure America

They have a vision. They have a dream. They know what shape they want America to take. And they have formed an “organization inspired by the principles of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the Evangelical and Christian Reconstruction movements”. And completely oblivious to the irony, with no hint that they understand the associations it will inspire, they have named this organization…the PALIBAN.

2012 is going to be so much fun.

And by “fun”, I mean “loaded with despair and exasperation and disappointment in my fellow citizens.”

(Read their blog and you might suspect a Poe, though. It’s just a little too all that.)