I paid way more in taxes than Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney seemed proud, proud I say, that he paid “about 13% in taxes”. We have no way to know if that’s true or not, nor is it clear what taxes on what income he is referring to. Does that mean income taxes, did he include state taxes, was sales tax somehow factored in, perhaps he didn’t include any comp that ended up in his $100 million IRA as income? Or, seeing as Mittens has lied about his taxes before and been stone cold busted, it could be complete bullshit through and through. But here’s the thing, even if it’s true, I pay more income taxes percentage wise than Romney. Odds are so do you. [Read more…]

Hey Kentuckians, are those students a’lern’n evolushun?

I was born in Lexington, but moved to Austin decades ago as a kid with the first wave of IBM immigrants traveling from blue grass to lone stars. Austin’s great, but Kentucky to Texas is not exactly a political improvement for a budding rational atheist. Because sadly, in many ways they’re the same, including creationism: [Read more…]

Mars fakery in full swing

Michael Shermer once noted in the book Why People Believe Weird Things that science is not always kryptonite to pseudoscience, rather pseudoscience raises and falls in tandem with the real stuff. So it is with Mars fakery. The better images and data we get the more the alien conspiracy buffs and NASA cover-uppers come out of the wood work. The image above is an easily debunked fake making the usual rounds right now, supposedly of a double sunset on Mars. Click it to see the real story over at Bad Astronomy, and stay skeptical my friends.

Polls tighten, the race is on

There’ll be much relief and fanfare in wingnuttia this week. Polls showing Obama with a slight edge in critical swing states two weeks ago now show the race tied. It’s a reasonable inference this represents conservatives coming home for Ryan. That was the whole point in picking the granny starver. From here on out it’s We the People vs a mountain of conservative zillionaire cash, a pack of voter supression laws, and bald-faced breathtaking whoppers designed to trick the uninformed into voting against themselves and their families: [Read more…]

Bain to the soon to be ousourced: So long and xièxie for all the fish

If you work hard you will succeed. That’s been the clarion call for Mittens et al, often wielded against Obama in hope of stirring up working class resentment. But in the nit and grit of Ryan-Romney’s real America, coming soon to a community near you if they win in November, hard-working lifetime employees at an electronics factory have one last job before they hit the unemployment lines: training their Chinese replacements: [Read more…]

Saving liar Ryan

It’s been a pile on Paul Ryan ever since news of Romney’s VP pick was released on news dump Friday and announced publicly on the day of closing ceremonies for the Olympics. Odd timing to say the least. But the pile on, it’s both good to see and seems to have taken the GOP by surprise. It shouldn’t have, this split has been brewing for a long time: [Read more…]

The end of cursioity

Don’t worry, Mars Curiosity the rover is alive and well and on the verge of beginning the mission it was so ably designed to do! There’s every reason to expect Curiosity will perform brilliantly, and that’s good, because there’s nothing much slated for Mars after it. When Curiosity finally seizes up, likely frozen in place, starved for power and heat and mobility while examining an undisclosed ancient, dusty lakebed, and the mini sat network above stops talking to its creators, it is an end of sorts to our curiosity, until we do something about it: [Read more…]