As Revere points out, Michael Moore gave Sanjay Gupta a whomping. What I missed in the Moore-Gupta match, though, was the big picture. Basically, they argued over details: Gupta put together a “fact check” that claimed Moore fudged various numbers, while Moore showed that his numbers were legitimate. What appalled me, though, was the spin put on it, the spin that Gupta did not acknowledge.
The six health care workers in Libya who were accused of intentionally infecting children with AIDS have had their death sentence confirmed. According to Revere, this is good news. It means the case now moves to the High Judicial Council, which has the power to commute the sentence, and which is also government controlled … and the government has just accepted (or, more accurately, “extorted”) a deal for lifetime care of the affected kids. We may know as soon as next week that the falsely accused doctor and nurses will have been released to their home countries. We hope.
That quote from Henry Waxman can’t possibly be a surprise, can it?
For example, he said he wasn’t allowed to make a speech at the Special Olympics because it was viewed as benefiting a political opponent. However, he said was asked to speak at events designed to benefit Republican lawmakers.
“The reality is that the nation’s doctor has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget, and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas,” said Carmona, who served from 2002 to 2006.
This administration wants to sign on a new surgeon general: James Holsinger, a religious homophobe who has received the endorsement of the Reverend Fred Phelps. Ironically, part of their defense against the accusations of Carmona is that the surgeon general has “the obligation to be the leading voice for the health of all Americans,” although it seems to me that they meant to say the voice for the health of wealthy heterosexual Republicans … but then, that’s a phrase I think you can substitute for “American” any time a right-winger uses the word.
It’s just another datum in the history of the politicization of science and medicine by the repugnant Bush administration.
(via Angry by Choice)
Phil reveals his man-crushes, and I have to respond in kind. Fortunately, it’s easy. I’ve just seen something that endears one particular gentleman to me…
He batters that smug silver-haired rodent, Wolf Blitzer. I wish he’d been given a chance to kick Lou Dobbs’ ass. He rakes the entire American news media over white-hot coals for their continued failures to investigate and report honestly on the war as well as on health care. C’est magnifique.
He doesn’t ask the obvious question — “do you believe in evolution?” — even once! I guess when you interview the serious candidates, you don’t need to ask the stupid baby questions.
It’s not a bad interview; Edwards says all the pro-science and pro-education stuff, favoring increased investment in public education, respect for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, strict standards to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, increased funding for NIH, etc., but I confess to being suspicious and not at all won over. That’s what you’d expect a candidate to say in an interview with a science blogger. I like science! I like education! We’ll do more of it if I’m president! Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of details on how he’s going to do it, and where he does sketch out specific ideas, like his free tuition for one year to all college students, he doesn’t spell out how he’s going to pay for it, or what part of government gets cut to compensate.
I note he also doesn’t commit on certain contentious issues. He deplores the Bush treatment of stem cell research, but doesn’t come right out and say he’ll endorse the use of human embryos in research.
He also supports one major boondoggle: ethanol. It’s a farm subsidy, not an answer to our energy problems.
What an attractively symmetrical graph:
People who don’t go to church mostly disagree with GW Bush; people who do go to church regularly mostly agree with GW Bush. Unfortunately, these results are from a poll taken in 2005, so it may have lost some of that symmetry since—I certainly hope it has, and that all of the bars in “agree for the most part” category have since gotten smaller.
OK, Blue Gal, you’re weirding me out a little bit. I agree that Kucinich is a progressive candidate, and that Glen Beck is a smarmy, disgusting little creep who made deeply offensive remarks about Kucinich’s sex appeal, but…
…well, maybe he is looking a little bit cute and adorable.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a poll right now — pick your favorite cartoon about the politicization of science. You’ve got 12 to choose from.
Mark Morford is wonderfully excited about the prospects for biological research, and I don’t blame him. Consider what the world was like in 1900 and how physics and engineering changed it by 2000; from horse-and-buggy and steam locomotive to interstates and jet planes, from telegraph to world-wide communication networks. We’re going to see a revolution of that magnitude in the coming century, too, and you can expect biology and medicine to be at the forefront. Well, maybe. As Morford writes, the alternative is to
…hold tight to the leaky life raft of inflexible ideology (hello, organized religion), to rules and laws and codes of conduct written by the fearful, for the fearful, to live in constant low-level dread of all the extraordinary changes and radical rethinkings of what it means to be human or animal or male or female or hetero or homo or any other swell little label you thought was solid and trustworthy but which is increasingly proven to be blurry and unpredictable and just a little dangerous.
We know which side GW Bush and the Republican party are on: with the knuckle-draggers and antique hierarchies of organized religion. Our president has vetoed a bill to support stem cell research. This is remarkable: he has only vetoed three bills in his entire presidency, and two of them have been with the intent of killing stem cell research. Just as remarkably, our representatives in congress haven’t been able to muster the numbers to override that veto. Imagine if the American government had voted to censure the Wright brothers and to outlaw the internal combustion engine at the turn of the last century, or if they’d decided to condemn the kinds of radical and dangerous physics being pursued at places like Princeton and Chicago. It wouldn’t have changed a thing about the natural world, or the discoveries that were made; it might have slowed the pace a bit, but the changes would still have come from England and France and Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union … the biggest difference would be that the United States would be an irrelevant backwater.
That’s what the Republicans are doing to this country right now: damning us to a future as a backward, corrupt mess, a big, blundering headache for the world. In 2100, will the rest of the planet see us in the same way Turkey was seen in 1900?
Two videos with surprising similarities: Richard Dawkins and Digby. Both discuss being vilified by conservative forces for being “strident”, and both explain that it’s all about passion for a cause—Digby for progressive politics, Dawkins for godlessness.
