As Morris goes, so goes the nation

Turn off your TVs. Don’t bother watching the election coverage. I know you’ve all been wondering how little rural Morris, Minnesota, population 5000, would vote in the super Tuesday voting.

Turnout was heavy, with between 400 and 500 people showing up for the caucus, and the results were … (drumroll, please) … about 2:1 in favor of Barack Obama. A landslide victory!

The full, final, official tally for Morris:

Biden 1 0%
Clinton 139 26%
Dodd 0 0%
Edwards 8 1%
Kucinich 2 0%
Lynch 1 0%
Obama 387 72%
Richardson 0 0%
Uncommitted 2 0%

We had a turnout of 540 people, over 10% of the residents of the town. For a caucus. The Democratic base is motivated and ready to get out and change things. Now all we have to do is get the Democratic leadership to go along.

Cafe Scientifique tonight

Come on out to Morris this evening — at 6:00, at the Common Cup Coffeehouse, Van Gooch of the biology discipline will be talking about bioluminescence and other phenomena in our Cafe Scientifique. The title of his talk is “Light Giving Life: Real and Artificial,” and I know he’s planning to bring sample organisms to hand out to the attendees.

Tune in Sunday morning

Remember—every Sunday at 9am, you Minnesotans (and clever others) can listen to the Minnesota Atheists radio program on Air America. Tune in tomorrow — it’s especially important since I’ve heard that Air America has actually already lost one advertiser because they had the gall to actually allow atheists to broadcast on their show. We’ll have to demonstrate that the program can get a strong audience, so listen in, call in, and if you have a business that you advertise on the radio, think about buying some time on the show. And if you’re in the area, patronize the businesses that are open-minded enough to advertise there (I noticed that the Q. Cumbers restaurant was one such advertiser — try it sometime).

By the way, we’re revamping the format a little. My “Moment of Science” got cut short last week, so the new idea is to give it a whole 10 minutes every two weeks, instead of 2-4 minutes every week. So I won’t be on tomorrow — listen anyway — but August Berkshire and I will have a more substantial conversation next week, on resources for people interested in learning about evolution.

Also, Minnesota Atheists will be meeting tomorrow afternoon at the Roseville Public Library, to hear Jen Tudor discuss Sex Across the Curriculum, where you’ll get to hear about “politics, pleasure, queer identity, lubrication, masturbation, and religion.” I wish I could go, but it’s -10°F right now and expected to drop down to -25°F tonight, so traveling is to be avoided…and there’s also this nagging nuisance of a new semester starting on Tuesday.

I really don’t understand Republicans

Somebody has to explain the logic of certain Republican values to me. Introducing something called the “Middle Class Job Protection Act” (which is actually, of course, nothing but a massive corporate tax cut), our own Little Miss Chipper Crazypants, Michele Bachmann, thinks this is good news:

I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.

Once upon a time, we had this thing called the 40 hour work week — the idea was that it was good for the middle class to be able to get a living wage from a reasonable amount of effort. Now we’ve got Republicans handing out corporate welfare and getting excited because the working class has to labor for longer hours in order to make ends meet. I don’t get it. Do they think their local mechanic likes having to put in longer hours grubbing in grease and barking their knuckles and wrenching their backs?

I remember a few rough years when my father had to work two jobs, a day job reading water meters for the city and then doing custodial work in the evenings. It wasn’t because this was a fantastic opportunity to achieve prosperity — it was because he was desperate to pay the rent and keep food on the table. When people are having to work harder, it’s not a sign that the middle class is thriving.

I’ll have to remember this one for when Bachmann tries to run for reelection.

(Hat tip to John McKay)

Snow!

How nice that we should start the first of December with a howling snow storm.

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This is prairie winter: not your big fat flakes falling gently, but hard icy snow slicing horizontally with a stiff wind; no quiet hiss of steady accumulation, but the rushing roar of wind and weather blowing billows of crystals everywhere. We’ll have thick drifts against the house before this is done.

I’m glad to be sitting quietly in a warm house, and I think I’ll put on another pot of hot coffee. Later, when it dies down though…then comes the cold feet and the tired shoulders that go with shoveling snow. At least this stuff tends to be dry and light and fairly easy to heave.

I thought I smelled something foul…John West is coming to Minnesota

As fellow Minnesotan Greg Laden warns, we’re getting a visit from another dishonest hack of the Discovery Institute, John West. On Friday, 30 November, at 7:00 in Room 155, Nicholson Hall on the UM campus. I may just have to stop by. He’s going to be babbling about an extended argumentum ad consequentiam: “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: The Disturbing Legacy of America’s Eugenics Crusade”. Yeah, once again, we’re going to be told that reality is dehumanizing.

One thing that greatly peeves me is the sponsoring organization. This is a parasitic religious organization that sucks leechlike on academia: the MacLaurin Institute. I despise those guys. They were also responsible for bringing Behe to talk on campus — that kind of rot is what they bring to the university.

I do like the honesty of their motto, though. Here comes John West, representative of the ‘secular’ Discovery Institute, under the imprimatur of an organization with the goal of…

Bringing God into the marketplace of ideas by
communicating the Christian worldview
with its transforming potential.

Right. Bringing lies to our students certainly does have transforming potential, only I wouldn’t be proud of it.

Road trip!

One of our Minneapolis Christian talk radio stations, KKMS, is organizing a trip.

Join Jeff & Lee as they travel with Heartland Tours & Travel to the Creation Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio! Jeff & Lee will be doing a live broadcast from the museum, and you can be there to see it all happen! of course, there will be other great stops along the way – Chicago (and famous Chicago pizza), the Wisconsin Dells with it’s huge waterpark, shopping at the Tangier Outlet Mall and more! this is a tour that will inspire your faith and make lasting family memories.

Don’t you think they could really use a scientific guide to go along with them? Call me, Jeff & Lee — I’m willing to waive my usual fee to accompany your bus as a consultant.

I am rather amused that what will inspire their faith is Chicago pizza, a tacky amusement park, and shopping.

(h/t to Eva)

Our local newspaper embarrassment

My fellow Minnesotans know what I mean when I groan over our local conservative columnist at the Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten. Her latest column is a tirade against the horrible culture of victimhood in our universities, citing a recent incident in which a student newspaper editor decided to decorate the office with a handmade noose to motivate his black co-workers. Kersten thinks this is just awful. Not the insensitivity of the editor, of course — being ignorant of history is par for the course for Republicans, as is race-baiting. No, she’s appalled that he was fired.

The column is a hoot. She even obliviously quotes the guy making a “but my best friend is black!” excuse.

Cafe Scientifique — tonight!

Tonight’s the night for the inaugural meeting of Café Scientifique-Morris for the 2007-2008 school year. The topic is:

Food or Fuel? A simple multi-scale integrated analysis of agroecosystems

It will be presented by Abdullah Jaradat of the North Central Soil Conservation Research Lab; I suspect he’ll be talking about their research into newer, better crops for the production of energy. It should be good, come on down to the Common Cup Coffeehouse at 6!

Unfortunately, this will be one I have to miss. I have to catch a plane to San Diego for the Beyond Belief conference (perhaps I shall be live-blogging it tomorrow…or perhaps I’ll be too busy and you’ll have to wait for my summary in the evening). Instead of me doing the introductions, the delightful MC Skatje will be hosting tonight’s event, which will improve it immensely.