She’s slowly moving up in my estimation

Hillary Clinton, that is. She’s made some concrete statements about what she’d do for science as president: take steps to depoliticize science agencies, lift limits on stem cell research, invest in alternative energy and global warming research, subordinate manned space missions to earth science research (not entirely happy news there, but at least she’s being realisitic), and she’s pro-evolution! (That last is utterly shocking, I know.) She’s also going to push to have congress restore the Office of Technology Assessment.

Of course, she also threw in a sop to the deluded: “I believe that our founders had faith in reason and they also had faith in God, and one of our gifts from God is the ability to reason.” I will excuse her useless pieties as long as they don’t interfere with her practical efforts to support good science. I’ll also rub the noses of the trolls in that every time they whine about coupling evolution and godlessness, since our politicians seem to have no qualms about coupling evolution and superstition, so it will be rhetorically useful for my purposes.

Now, let’s see the other Democratic candidates follow suit and be as forthright in stating their support for science. That doesn’t mean they should compete with her to outdo the stupid god and faith part of her statement — I could well imagine that some might — but that they should outline their specific science proposals and state without reservation their support for basic science. And now that the media has broken the ice with Clinton, let’s see all of the other candidates probed on these same issues.

It’s a safe bet that I won’t be voting for McCain

Just watch the little suck-up grovel for the Religious Right. It isn’t pretty.

McCain: I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, ‘Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?’

Whenever I see these pious testimonies to “Judeo-Christian values”, I always wonder…how many Jewish founding fathers were there? How many Jewish presidents have we had? I have no objection to electing a Jewish president, but it always seems to me that these claims that toss in the word “Judeo” are made solely to put up a pretense of inclusiveness — they really mean “conservative Christian,” and they include an invisible, unnamed token Jew to hide their real narrowness.

Truly gagworthy

Young America’s Foundation is giving away a poster of the ‘heroes’ of the Conservative Movement — the usual roster of dunderheads shipped in to the photo shoot by way of the short bus — for nothing but the cost of shipping and handling. I guess they were having a tough time finding anyone who wanted to hang a picture of Dinesh, Michelle, Novakula, Ann, etc. anywhere in their home. But in case you want one for a dart board or something, just follow the link.

Myself, I don’t need one. I already have many copies of pictures of my conservative heroes. They’re all blank, white, and hanging from a roll in my bathroom.

Countrywide? I’ve heard of them…

Alright, I want you people to school me real quick. I’ve been reading these stories about the Countrywide mortgage company getting mean and nasty with foreclosures, and the Countrywide CEO leeching huge personal profits from the company — Krugman even compares Countrywide to Enron.

Now normally, financial news just flies by my bleary eyes and is ignored, but the name in this case perked me up: the mortgage on my house is through Countrywide. Do I have to worry?

I wouldn’t think so. We got our mortgage at a good, low fixed rate some years ago, we haven’t had any problems keeping up on the payments (the cost of living in Morris is wonderfully low), and we don’t foresee any reason to trouble a lender in the future. But I have noticed an annoying uptick in dunning phone calls from Countrywide “offering” to renegotiate the mortgage (we neither need nor want to), and now all this chatter has me losing confidence in them.

I know there are economics wizards and smart legal minds among the readers here. Reassure me.

Larry Craig’s real crime

I wrote of my fondness for salmon the other day, and now I learn of a strange and rather satisfying coincidence: Larry Craig was an enemy of the salmon.

The surprising fall of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, removes a longtime obstacle to efforts by Democrats and environmentalists to promote salmon recovery on Northwest rivers.

Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from endangered salmon to public land grazing.

I don’t think he should have resigned over stupid sexual behavior, but that he was one of those rats who fought to destroy the environment…that ought to be a hanging offense. It’s not an entirely happy story, though. I find myself a bit peeved that in this country you can lose your job for waving your hand under a toilet stall divider, but accepting money from industry to allow them to poison the land and circumvent reasonable ecological restrictions…pish. That’s nothin’.

Where could we possibly find $4 million?

Hmmm. Estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq range from $4.4 to 7.1 billion per month. If I assume about $5 billion, it looks like we’re throwing away about $7 million per hour in that effort; so it looks like a little bit more than a half-hours worth of bloody war costs us $4 million. So let’s just stop for about 40 minutes, OK?

What was the point of that calculation? The government is threatening to shut down the Arecibo Observatory unless they can cough up $4 million dollars for its operating budget for the next three years. Wow.

The National Science Foundation, which has long funded the dish, has told the Cornell University-operated facility that it will have to close if it cannot find outside sources for half of its already reduced $8 million budget in the next three years — an ultimatum that has sent ripples of despair through the scientific community.

Shall we trade three years of science for less than an hour’s worth of war? That sounds like a no-brainer to me. The observatory doesn’t even kill anybody in normal operation. Or is that considered a strike against it?

Huckabee heaven

As many of the readers here know, one of the most common criticisms of us uppity atheists is the idea that the religion we critize doesn’t exist: that the true power of faith is thoughtful, intelligent, and deep, and plucking out random weird beliefs isn’t really representative. When I hear that (and I have, often), I just have to roll my eyes and give the apologist a scathing look — if they believe naive god-wallopers weren’t the dominant form of religious belief on the planet, then I can at least castigate the self-declared ‘sophisticated’ theology for being an exercise in willful blindness.

But here’s another case. This is a presidential candidate. He has an audience eating out of his hand with his speech on how much he looooooooooves his guns, how the UN should float away, and other fodder for wingnuts. And of course, with gun love comes the love of Christ.

“watching ducks land on a lake in Arkansas in the winter is about the closest to Heaven as you can find on this earth… and as someone who believes, according to my faith, I will go to Heaven when I die, I am pretty sure that there is duck hunting in Heaven!”

Pretty deep thinking there from Mike Huckabee. Shallow, stupid git. But that is what American religion is: wish-fulfillment for the gullible.

Besides, as everyone knows, there is duck hunting in heaven. Every day is opening day, and when the Great Mallard opens his bill and quacks the signal, all of the ducks start hunting … hunting the souls of expired ‘sportsmen’.

That’s easy to say in San Francisco

Mark Morford has an exceptionally optimistic — dare I say, “triumphal” — article on the collapse of the religious right today. People are reacting (in the right way, so far) to the tremendous damage the Bush presidency has done to our prestige, our security, our economy, our rights, and the legacy we’ll leave to our children, and every reasonable person that Morford knows is reveling in the growing political morbidity of the Republican party. And it was all so inevitable.

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