I’ve been off at the big meeting, and it’s been a long and tiring weekend in Las Vegas. It’s been strange, too: we’re surrounded by slot machines and show girls, and our crowd hardly notices them; I took a moment to step outside, and I had to tell my wife, “the sunshine…it hurts…” and we went back in. We were intense, nerdly aliens in a neon world.
It was a good weekend, though. I’ll dump a few of my impressions below the fold.
Here’s more or less what I said at the YearlyKos panel today, assembled from my notes and with all the “ummms” removed. It’s very general, but hey, what can you do in ten minutes? Next time they should give me 30 minutes and I’ll flash up some genes and copulating squid and splutter out more blasphemy.
I’m here in sunny Las Vegas, hanging out in the lobby with the free wireless and watching all the funny blogger nerds with the orange badges walking by. Heh. Oh, hang on…I’m wearing an orange badge and blogging in a corner. Yeah, I’m such a nerd.
I don’t know how much time I’ll have for actually posting things here this weekend, but I’ve queued up a series of reruns to appear automagically at various times, so the site won’t be totally drying up. Half the liberal blogosphere seems to be here, so I’ve got to do something to keep a void from appearing.
Where’s your god now, Moses? Nyah.
It’s true, he always makes me laugh. It’s the bow tie, the strangled delivery (he always looks like he’s careful not to open his mouth too much, lest something fly in…or out), and his oh-so-prim-and-proper prudery.
Isn’t this so symptomatic of Republican stupidity?
…the FDA released an internal memo showing that one high-ranking FDA official was sincerely worried about adolescents forming “sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.” Seriously.
The evidence, which may not be relevant to the Bush administration, shows no link between access to Plan B and risky sexual behavior, worse yet “sex-based cults.” How Bush-appointed “scientists” come up with such nonsense is a mystery.
If the administration said, “We’re morally opposed to emergency contraception,” we could at least have a reasonable debate. If the administration said, “We could go for this, but the Dobson crowd would kill us,” we would at least be facing political realities.
Instead, the Bush gang insists on a bizarre approach, in which they claim to base decisions like these on science, but ignore their own experts, hide embarrassing facts, and then lie about it. In the case of Plan B, the result is more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions.
For reasons that are unclear, the GOP’s religious right base seems to think this is a great idea.
I have an idea. Instead of blindly restricting the use of a safe and useful contraceptive, how about if we increase the level of sex education so that these mythical kids planning imaginary “sex parties” would realize that Plan B actually has a fairly high failure rate and doesn’t block sexually transmitted diseases at all? Then they’d know that this whole idea was very, very bad.
Oh, wait…the religious right opposes that, too.
Second option: how about if we require FDA bureaucrats to get instruction in how sex and reproduction works? They could hire me to give the birds and the bees talk to a roomful of stuffed shirt Washington drones.
Barbara O’Brien is doing a guest post for Glenn Greenwald, and she’s chosen to talk about religion—you can guess what her position is from the opening paragraph.
…sometimes I find myself defending Christians from the religion haters among us lefties.
I confess. That’s me, religion hater. Go ahead and read the whole thing. It’s interesting. It argues that we should tolerate Christians (I’m all for that), and that some Christians have very sensible secular views, and that some American Christians have been responsible for social progress. Sure thing! No argument!
Do I believe that George W. Bush stole the last election and that the Republican party is run by criminals and traitors? You betcha. With his record of sloppy analysis, though, I just wish someone more trustworthy than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had authored that report.
I also don’t see much in the way of productive suggestions about what to do to prevent it from happening again. If Republican operatives are in a position to commit such sweeping acts of anti-Democratic corruption, what’s to prevent it from happening again this fall? What are we going to do if it does happen again?
Yesterday was a long, busy day of driving, ferrying offspring about, and I listened to a lot of NPR. All I heard, over and over again, was talk about Henry Paulson and his new position as Treasury Secretary. Not a contrary word was spoken: I heard all about his pro-environmental stance (good, but I don’t see how the Treasury Secretary’s opinion on a subject outside his responsibility was going to help), and there was much vague handwaving about how he was a feather in the Bush administration’s cap. There was nothing about what his position on economic issues was, which was a little weird.
My one thought all the time Paulson’s praises were being sung on that mouthpiece of the liberal media was, “If he’s so brilliant and impressive, what the heck is he doing signing on with the most incompetent administration ever? Why wasn’t anyone saying anything about his actual qualifications, other than chanting ‘Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs’?”
Score one for the blogosphere. Max dares to be critical. Now if only our media would put something of substance together.
Confirming my obvious un-Americanism, let me praise two things: Godlessness and Socialism. And here, watch a video that ties the two together.
(Actually, I’m not against America. I’m just for a godless America that cares about the welfare of its citizens.)
