Republicans kill women

It really is that clear and simple. Republican policies lead to women dying of neglect and abuse, and they don’t care. Tom Levenson does the estimates, just using their recent opposition to Planned Parenthood as an example — and that’s a legislative jihad that has a body count.

Planned Parenthood does lots more than screen for gynecological cancers, of course. This is just one example of the real commitment to saving lives, to life, that marks that organization. But this story makes the point well enough: when you cut poor and vulnerable people’s access to health care real harm results.

Which means that Mitch Daniels is presenting his bonafides to the Republican electorate with an action that will lead directly to the deaths of women whom he doesn’t know – whom he and we cannot know. That anonymity, the statistical nature of the crime, means that Daniels will almost certainly never pay any price, let alone a criminal one, for his role in their deaths. But they will be on his hands, and should be on his conscience.

And to go larger than just one politician whose ambition has swamped his capacity for moral reasoning, this is why we must work for more than just an individual electoral defeat for today’s Republican party. Mitch Daniels may indeed by the best they’ve got over there. That’s as damning an indictment as I can imagine.

I know there are reasonable, rational conservatives; I also appreciate that progressive policies are not all certified guarantees of success, so there should be a check on government action. But the current Republican party is a nightmare of stupidity and thuggish vileness, and they must be defeated at the ballot box, even at the cost of some sensible politician’s careers. Shut them down. Do not vote for any Republican, ever. The party has to be demolished, or the adults in the group have to rise up and slap down the idiots, the teabaggers, the Breitbarts and Palins and Bachmanns.

Why education suffers

Eggers and Calegari have an excellent op-ed on the problem of American education: in short, it’s the money, stupid.

When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

I’ve been getting a bit annoyed lately at the deference paid to the military. I keep seeing special acknowledgments paid to servicemen — on a recent shuttle ride to the airport parking lot, for instance, a fellow shouted out to the driver that he should drop off the guy in uniform first, to thank him for his service to the country…and then the driver had to take an awkward route through the lot, passing by other passenger’s cars, to drop this one fellow off first. It was extremely annoying — and to the credit of the fellow in uniform, he was also clearly uncomfortable with this pointless special treatment — but the guy who shouted out the demand sure looked smug and pleased with himself the whole way.

I do not lack appreciation for our soldiers, but seriously — they are not an elite caste. They are working class people like many of us. Why doesn’t someone shout out for special attention to cooks, or park rangers, or high school teachers? They all do great work for us, and the teachers in particular do an invaluable service at budget rates. But for some antiquated reason, we still think it more important to give Gomer Pyle a gun than to give a teacher the tools to do her job.

Also, you’d be financially deranged to go into teaching.

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

Isn’t this absurd? It’s also not just a matter of averages: teachers in prosperous suburban schools get paid more than teachers in poor inner city schools. Those who need education the most get it the least. There ought to be a greater commitment to public education and more respect given to those who deliver it.

I know what you’re thinking, and so do the authors.

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

It’s going to take a great deal of political will to accomplish this sort of change. Right now, the biggest obstacle to a better school system is a creaking, useless mechanism for funding schools that comes right out of the 18th century, and simply doesn’t work: the local tax levy. Schools should all be funded at the state level, at least (preferably at the federal level) and the game of bi-yearly begging for pennies on a property tax should end. Instead, though, our government is full of awful, anti-common-sense ninnies who prattle about vouchers and private schools instead, who want to reduce investment in education.

Osama Bin Laden dead

There isn’t much information available, but apparently Osama Bin Laden has been killed and his body recovered. I’m expecting his head to be mounted on a pike outside the White House now.

So…are we done? Can we bring the troops home and call off the war on terror?

Some people don’t seem to realize that my words above are sarcastic. Allow me to clarify.

While it’s necessary to stop terrorists, sometimes with violence, it is barbarous to gloat over the execution of an enemy. I find the chanting crowds cheering over the corpse disturbing, and the triumphal tone of our leaders is misplaced. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and threw away trillions of dollars, and our trophy is the bloody corpse of one old man? There’s no victory in that.

I’m also cynical. What was the point? Nothing will change. We live in Idiot America, which is also Fearful America, which is also Paranoid America, which is also Solve-Our-Problems-With-A-Gun America. One figurehead is dead, now the focus of our country’s fear will shift to some amorphous mass of generic Muslims, and the troops will continue their destruction, and we’ll still flag our cowardice with pointless color changes at our airports, and we’ll continue to sacrifice our civil liberties at the altar of national security. Nothing was accomplished, our purpose is as vague and tyrannical as ever, we’ll need to continue to kill more to feed our illusion of safety.

Oh, there is one thing we’ve got now. A few more politicians will cloak themselves in the blood of our enemies in the next election, and victory will be achieved for Blowing Shit Up in the name of Getting Things Done. And we’ll perpetuate the violence because it appeals to our citizen savages.

He’s not a racist — he’s just a Patriotic Tea-Partier

Say hello to Grady Warren, presidential candidate representing the Florida Tea Party. He’s not a racist, he says, he’s just “tired of Blacks, nigras, Muslims, and Hispanics, especially the illegals, calling us racist for trying to save the America that we love.”

I bet you can’t make it all the way to the end of this video. I only got about halfway before I shut it down.

That’s our Michele!

Michele Bachmann opened her mouth again. She compared increasing the tax rates for the rich to the Holocaust.

She said she was shocked to hear that many Americans weren’t aware that millions of Jews had died until after World War II ended.

Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden.

“I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action,” she said, referring to the Holocaust. “But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to.”

Shorter Michele Bachman: “Expecting me to bear a fair share of my civic responsibility is like gassing me to death!”

Ellen Lewin tells it like it is

Ellen Lewin is a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Iowa. Like all of us, she is constantly dunned with email announcing this, that, and the other thing at our universities, and sometimes we get email that makes our blood boil. In this case, she got mail from the College Republicans, announcing a “coming out” party (like Republicans in the midwest are a closeted and oppressed minority…) that featured some hagiographic movie about George W. Bush (that ignorant ass), an “animal rights barbecue” and other such joyful shenanigans to celebrate the party of morons and thugs and self-destructive ideologues.

Ellen Lewin had enough. Ellen Lewin got angry. Ellen Lewin fired off a one-sentence reply.

FUCK YOU, REPUBLICANS.

I think I’m in love with Ellen Lewin.

She later apologized for losing her temper — and I can sympathize with that, too — but I hope she never backs down in her righteous contemptuous opinion of the Republican party. I share it. I think her response was relatively mild.

Now, of course, the right-wingers are outraged. How dare she disagree loudly with an entire party of mouth-breathing, sanctimonious idiots? Read the Free Republic for examples of their response; the first comment sarcastically complains that “Liberals are SO CLASSY!!”, and then the rest, with no sense of irony, posts a picture of her and proceeds to call her a “pervert”, a “lesbian”, a “cow”, a “demonic lesbian demon”, a “bitter, old, ugly, lesbian with a hairy lip”, and suggests that she has sex with dogs.

And more! Those delicate little flowers, the College Republicans, are so hurt by her unkind words that they are filing an official complaint.

Ginty, 21, a junior, filed her complaint with the provost and the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity. In the complaint, she states that the April 18 email from professor Ellen Lewin and Lewin’s followup “halfhearted apology” violate general standards of decency, respect for civility in public discourse and the university’s antiharassment policy.

Ginty’s complaint says “there is little doubt that the university would not tolerate a similar string of emails by a member of the faculty targeted at a number of other student groups.”

She has a point. It wasn’t civil or respectful (although turning a brief outburst into a case of harassment and a “string of emails” is a bit much). But you know what? I approve of incivility and disrespect towards organizations that deserve it, and the Republican party is currently the party of know-nothings, hypocrites, liars, and greed — it’s the stagnant, festering slime towards which all the worst elements of society now gravitate. The problem isn’t college professors snarling at them, it’s that the party itself encourages short-sightedness, idiocy, and hatefulness. So, until the grown-ups wake up and clean out the bigotry and ignorance from their own house, I think it’s only fair for us to air our vigorous disgust with them.

I stand in solidarity with Ellen Lewin.

FUCK YOU, REPUBLICANS.

This is not a poll

Well, it is, but I don’t recommend voting on it. It’s on WingNutDaily, and the only way to vote is to register with them…which is not recommended. Them folks is craaaaazy! They were asked their opinion of Obama’s birth certificate.

Sound off on Obama’s release of his purported long-form birth certificate

The most compelling eligibility arguments deal with parental citizenship, and this document shows Obama’s father was not a U.S. citizen, making Obama ineligible 40% (93)

Now that Obama is so willing to be open, let’s hear him explain why he has a Connecticut-based Social Security Number when he and his parents never lived there 12% (28)

I’m with Trump in calling for the rest of Obama’s vital documents that he’s been concealing for years 9% (21)

I suspect the image released by Obama is a forgery 8% (19)

I know the image of the document is a fake, just like Obama 8% (18)

If the document is so innocuous, why did Obama take so long and spend a fortune on attorneys preventing its release? 8% (18)

The release is opening up a can of worms and is creating more questions than answers 3% (8)

Obama blinked. I can’t wait to see what happens next 3% (6)

The birthers will never be satisfied no matter what documents are released 3% (6)

All I can think about is Lt. Col. Terry Lakin rotting in prison because Obama refused to release this document before now 2% (5)

Let’s hope this signals an end to this nutty birther nonsense once and for all 1% (3)

Thanks to WND and Trump, Obama was forced kicking and screaming to release his document 1% (3)

Face it, Obama has outsmarted the birthers and completely destroyed their issue now 0% (1)

Good, let’s move on, there are far more important issues for the country to deal with 0% (1)

If it had been a poll I could have voted on, I would have picked the very last entry above. Trust WND readers to favor the nuttiest of the choices!

This is a game Obama cannot win

The president has announced that he has an American birth certificate, like this was really an issue. If he thought this would end the yammering inanity, he was mistaken.

Donald Trump is preening.

He should have done it a long time ago. I am really honored to play such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of this issue.

Playing the role of a prancing moron who promoted the issue is nothing to be proud of, Donny.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are playing a game of pretending they didn’t never call Obama’s parentage into question, no how.

In a statement after Obama spoke, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called the issue a distraction — and yet blamed Obama for playing campaign politics by addressing it.

“The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy,” Priebus said. “Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority — our economy.”

A Republican…chastising someone else for not being serious? Watcha gonna do, gomer, fix the economy by shutting down Planned Parenthood, praying, and giving rich people more tax breaks? Yeah, that’s serious.

I agree that Obama shouldn’t have wasted his time with this nonsense. Besides, you know that wingnuts are next going to argue that his birth certificate is a high-tech fake cobbled up by the geniuses at the NSA. Conspiracy theories simply do not die when presented with evidence — they absorb the evidence and claim that it’s further evidence of an even more elaborate conspiracy.

Jerry Coyne’s open letter

Go read Open letter to the NCSE and BCSE. Or read it here:

Dear comrades:

Although we may diverge in our philosophies and actions toward religion, we share a common goal: the promulgation of good science education in Britain and America–indeed, throughout the world. Many of us, like myself and Richard Dawkins, spend a lot of time teaching evolution to the general public. There’s little doubt, in fact, that Dawkins is the preeminent teacher of evolution in the world. He has not only turned many people on to modern evolutionary biology, but has converted many evolution-deniers (most of them religious) to evolution-accepters.

Nevertheless, your employees, present and former, have chosen to spend much of their time battling not creationists, but evolutionists who happen to be atheists. This apparently comes from your idea that if evolutionists also espouse atheism, it will hurt the cause of science education and turn people away from evolution. I think this is misguided for several reasons, including a complete lack of evidence that your idea is true, but also your apparent failure to recognize that creationism is a symptom of religion (and not just fundamentalist religion), and will be with us until faith disappears. That is one reason–and, given the pernicious effect of religion, a minor one–for the fact that we choose to fight on both fronts.

The official policy of your organizations–certainly of the NCSE–is apparently to cozy up to religion. You have “faith projects,” you constantly tell us to shut up about religion, and you even espouse a kind of theology which claims that faith and science are compatible. Clearly you are going to continue with these activities, for you’ve done nothing to change them in the face of criticism. And your employees, past and present, will continue to heap invective on New Atheists and tar people like Richard Dawkins with undeserved opprobrium.

We will continue to answer the misguided attacks by people like Josh Rosenau, Roger Stanyard, and Nick Matzke so long as they keep mounting those attacks. I don’t expect them to abate, but I’d like your organizations to recognize this: you have lost many allies, including some prominent ones, in your attacks on atheism. And I doubt that those attacks have converted many Christians or Muslims to the cause of evolution. This is a shame, because we all recognize that the NCSE has done some great things in the past and, I hope, will–like the new BCSE–continue do great things in the future.

There is a double irony in this situation. First, your repeated and strong accusations that, by criticizing religion, atheists are alienating our pro-evolution allies (liberal Christians), has precisely the same alienating effect on your allies: scientists who are atheists. Second, your assertion that only you have the requisite communication skills to promote evolution is belied by the observation that you have, by your own ham-handed communications, alienated many people who are on the side of good science and evolution. You have lost your natural allies. And this is not just speculation, for those allies were us, and we’re telling you so.

Sincerely,
Jerry Coyne

Richard Dawkins has also commented on it.

I really feel that the NCSE has lost its way on this issue. I want to support the NCSE, but it has become increasingly hard to do. I have heard these arguments over and over again that they have to coddle religious believers because they need them to support science. They don’t. As we’ve said repeatedly, we aren’t asking that the NCSE give atheists even as much support as they do the religious: imagine if they had “atheist projects” or an “atheist coordinator”—there’d be rejection from the Christian community. We’re not stupid, and we know that the NCSE has a delicate political game to play as well, so all we ask is that the organization we’d like to support should be genuinely secular, and stay entirely out of the religion/atheism argument. It’s what they say they’re doing, but it’s not what they’re doing. And the hypocrisy is corrupting.

Nothing will change in what atheist scientists are doing. We will continue to support science and science education, but that doesn’t mean we will feel obligated to support the NCSE.

It’s funny. The organization has such a finely tuned political sense and diplomatic strategy to promote science to the whole of the United States, and have managed to profoundly alienate that segment of our society that is most dedicated to promoting science. That’s quite an accomplishment. Maybe we should stop supporting them because they’re that incompetent at the political side of their mission.