Sometimes, men really suck. Amanda horrifies me with this wife-beating video: a horrible little man browbeats, strikes, and briefly chokes his wife while having their children videotape the whole thing. I guess he felt that she deserved it.
I couldn’t help but noticed that the wretched Y-chromosome-bearing thug was also prominently wearing a bright, sparkly cross around his neck the whole time.
Remember, we’re supposed to be pushing for the restoration of the Office of Technology Assessment. Have you written or phoned your senators and representatives yet?
Everyone: get on your email or your phone, contact your representative, and tell them to support HR2826, the house bill to restore habeas corpus. You can find the text of the bill here (search by bill number for “HR 2826”). This is an opportunity to tell your congresspeople to support a positive action to restore a little bit of respect for the constitution, instead of the usual desperate call to oppose some odious scrap of legislative defilement coming out of the far right reaches of political hell.
While Revere is showing a rerun of that glorious anti-religion riff (it’s worth listening to again!), here’s another clip of Marcus Brigstocke being right in every particular once more.
By the addition of a new candidate who actually believes in God. Yes, everyone, Alan Keyes has entered the race.
Dear jebus, why is the race for the election of the president of the most militarily powerful country on earth such a ludicrous joke? Shouldn’t this be an office for serious people with serious plans and serious expertise, and shouldn’t certifiable lunatics like Keyes be given the cold shoulder? (Oh, right: they can’t do that, because if sanity were a prerequisite, the entire Republican slate would evaporate.)
Our country seems to have killed at least a million Iraqis at the whim of George W. Bush and his cabal of neocons.
I know that his former friends have started disowning him — he’s no True Conservative now — but since he is officially a mass-murdering monster, can we also expect them to retroactively declare him an atheist?
Mark Hoofnagle is urging everyone to get behind a simple, non-partisan goal that would greatly benefit science policy: bring back the Office of Technology Assessment.
It used to be, for about 30 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of budget cuts, but the cost in terms of damage to the quality of scientific debate on policy has been incalculable. Chris Mooney described it as Congress engaging in “a stunning act of self-lobotomy” in his book the Republican War on Science.
Spread the word. Build a drumbeat of support for this idea in the blogs. Write to your congresspeople. Write op-eds for your newspaper. It’s a simple idea that everyone should agree on: we want our government to be well-informed and to be able to make decisions based on evidence, and having an advisory office dedicated to providing information from the scientific community would be a real boon.
It’s not happy Roy, but cynical Roy … but then, these are cynical times.
Now, can we give the troops some real support? Like, by bringing them back home?
Here’s another online petition you can sign — this one is to censure Kathy Griffin’s censorship. Go ahead and sign, although I’m beginning to wonder if the reason people aren’t marching in the streets and fending off flying teargas canisters and roaring angrily in person at the bad guys is that they’re too damned busy filling out all these forms on their computers, instead.
Maybe I need to create a new category here: “futile, impotent political posturing” or something. But at least it feels a little bit good.
(via Greg Laden)
The appropriate testimonial would be to disband the thugs at TSA.
While we’re at it, impeaching Bush/Cheney and repealing their damage to our civil liberties would also be a good start.
I’m not impressed with moments of silence or candlelight vigils or noble rhetoric about this event. If you want to do something to remember that tragedy, the best thing to do is to simply stop living your life in fear.
