God-damned GOP

With the open-air Obama speech a success by all accounts and Hurricane Gustave bearing down on the US Gulf Coast forcing possible changes to the GOP convention this coming week, do you think that the asshole praying for rain in Denver is starting to think God might be a Democrat?

-kvd

Update: I note that Michael Moore has issued his own prayer to not smoke New Orleans again. You’d think that if the Dobson people seriously believed that prayer worked, they would save it for things that really mattered.

It just keeps getting better…

It appears that the Sarah Palin story is a bottomless mine of wonderful nuggets.

 

Nugget 1: Dan points out in a comment that she is under investigation for an Alaskan government official after he fell out of favour with his ex-wife, who happens to be Palin’s sister.  Ah, the smell of illegal hiring/firing practices is so redolent with au de Justice Department (tinged with petty bitterness), that you just know she’ll fit in perfectly! You liberal Democrats should please stop drawing comparisons with the Bush administration right now – it’s just not fair. After all, she’s an Alaskan woman, not a Spanish-American man. Puh-lease!

 

Nugget 2: She’s open to the teaching of Creationism in public schools, that treasured little chestnut of the hyper-Right. To whit:

Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information….Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both. And you know, I say this too as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject — creationism and evolution. It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.

What does she mean by both? If we’re opening up the teaching of science to myths and fairytales, are there only two? Hell, there are a handful of Native American creation stories that are far more entertaining than Adam and Eve and no less realistic, so why only two? It’s pretty obvious that her science teaching parent didn’t get much into her head on the topic of, well, science. I’m not against teaching Creationism per se, but please, let’s put it in a religion class where it belongs – it has no place in a science class being not science and all.

 

As I, and others have written, she is a person who stands a very good chance of sitting in the big chair in the next few years. The next administration is likely to replace one, and maybe as many as three Supreme Court judges, so her appointment becomes all the more important. The election this November looms more and more as a watershed moment for the USA – a vote to step into the future or one to cling desparately to the past.

Commander-in-Chief Sarah Palin ????

The other night during his acceptance speech, Barack Obama took on John McCain’s chief attack on him straight-on: that he (Obama) does not have the experience or judgment to be president, or, as Americans prefer to refer to their president, Commander-In-Chief. (What’s with that, anyway?) To whit:

John McCain has voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time.

Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but, really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the time?

Judgment.

It’s interesting to see how John McCain chose to demonstrate this impressive judgment of his when his first chance arose after Obama uttered this challenge – he chooses for his vice-presidential nominee a person who has been governor of a rural state for less than two years. As the official sidekick of a 72-year old candidate that has had four bouts with cancer, Palin stands a very, very good chance of actually being president in the next four years, and John McCain chose her. By the only standard we can use to produce a positive “judgment measurement” for John McCain, age, she has less “judgment” than Obama, being three years younger. Hell, she’s even younger than McCain’s bankroll wife!

Maybe he’s trying to harness more of the anti-Obama PUMA vote that we’ve talked about of late? I suppose picking a female veep is a better lure than calling his wife a cunt…

-kvd

Update: It looks like she has at least one fan. Too bad he’s been indicted! h/t

If you only see one movie this year…

…make it Religulous!

A review (from Variety)

In a string of frank, often hilarious but always well-considered conversations with various Christians, Maher incisively asks them what skeptics always ponder about religion in general and Christianity in particular. To John Westcott of Exchange Ministries, which tries to “convert” gay men, Maher asks, given that Jesus never once talked about homosexuality, why is it such an issue for New Testament Christians? To churchgoers in Raleigh, N.C., he notes there’s no firm proof that Jesus Christ ever actually lived. Perhaps most profoundly, he asks Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), a devout evangelical, “Why is faith good?”

To the film’s credit, Maher never engages in Michael Moore-style gotcha tactics, but rather asks questions that raise more questions, in the form of a Socratic dialogue. To believers expecting a blind hatchet job, this will prove both thought-provoking and a bit disarming; skeptics may be surprised (as Maher is) by the occasionally smart replies to his queries.

While he examines the Big Three religions of the West at length (Eastern faiths get a pass in “Religulous”), Maher even gets in some choice stabs at Mormonism (whose tenets may astound those not in the know) and Scientology.

Ending minutes, though, will catch auds up short: Suddenly, the laughs die down, and as in his closing monologues on “Real Time,” Maher turns deadly serious with a final statement that will stir raging arguments in theater lobbies.

Actually, make it The Dark Knight. Make this number two.

update (from kevvyd): Here’s the trailer:

Whiners and PUMA’s and Dem’s – Oh My!

For the sake of the Democratic Party, I hope Hillary Clinton put the PUMA’s down last night with her speech in Denver. I just listened to a recording of it and it wasn’t bad at all – she has thrown her weight fully behind Obama and challenged supporters of her campaign to do the same. I say “for the sake of the Democratic Party”, but if these PUMA’s really are Democrats, well just watch Chris Matthew’s brief interview with two of ‘em and determine for yourself if they really should should be suffered to live considered a serious political force:

The woman on the left in the video is actually the co-founder of the Clintons 4 McCain organization. She has that angry look of the momentarily deranged throughout the piece, and resorts to all but “nyah nyah nyah” when challenged for evidence of her claims. I hope she enjoys her fifteen minutes, though she comes off like an absolute idiot.  (Actually, if she wants to extend her moment in the spotlight, FoxNews might be interested.) If these guys are not funded by the Necropublicans directly, they certainly are on the side.

If Clinton’s speech last night is the first step in uniting the party before the November elections, it is only the first step – Clinton’s campaign fought hard, but it fought low and those wounds are harder to heal on both sides. Hillary badly damaged her political capital by hanging on for an appeal to the decision on Michigan and Florida, a decision she initially supported, and the mud-slinging all but destroyed what’s left of Bill’s legacy. (Not to mention providing fodder for later GOP attacks.) Getting up in front of the convention and stating her support for Obama has got to be hard, but she did it, and if she can follow up with active campaigning on his behalf, then maybe there is hope that all but the most freakish of the PUMA’s will come onboard by November.

-kvd out

A question for the crowd

I’m passively paying attention to the Democratic convention this week and couldn’t help but notice the media crush is on for Clinton Day, which is today.

All day.

She (they) has (have) essentially taken over the convention with her (their) whining and self-pity. Hoping (as I do) that the Democrats win in November, but fearing (as I do) that they won’t, I have to think that stealing Obama’s thunder at this crucial time is not a smart thing to do. Unless of course, the Clintons actually want Obama to fall on his face in November, giving them one last chance in 2012.

Sigh.

Here is the question: if the Democrats lose in November, would you vote for Hillary in 2012? If you, like me, can’t vote, then do you think that she’d be able to win?

Here’s my feeling – she and Bill have done very little to campaign for Obama, spending most of their energy trying to recoup campaign debts, so the betterment of the party is not what’s in the forefront of their minds. I can’t help but feel that it would be no different in four years.

-kvd out

Have a The The weekend!

Glenn Beck, philosophy professor

This is good even for Glenn Beck – America’s poorest cities are poorest because they repeatedly vote Democrats in for mayor. Willfull ignorance of the rules of logic is not new to the Beckster, but this one is pretty nice.

 

-kvd out

Barack Obama is *such* an elitist

This is pretty fucked up. Barack Obama is elitist but John McCain needs to have his people tell him how many homes he owns.

 

-kvd out

How Hebron reveals John McCain’s little lie

The big news on this coast yesterday was the announcement in Newfoundland that the Hebron field is going into production, meaning potentially billions for Newfoundland and more than a few jobs in construction both before and after first oil. Construction is set to begin in four years and production should begin in 2017.

Read the last sentence in the paragraph above. I’ll flesh it out a bit – construction will only begin after all of the technical hurdles are understood as well as possible and the appropriate gear can be acquired – four years. Construction and on-site prospect development will take another five years. Nine years from this moment to production. In a known, relatively well-understood basin that has been studied for over forty years for oil potential, this process will take nine years.

And yet John McCain has been claiming that new oil can be brought to market through the addition of new leases in unstudied areas “within a matter of months… In some cases, it would be a matter of a year”.

This is such an outrageous statement that John McCain reveals himself both as a fool and a liar. Contrary to what you read coming out of Necropublican Central, there are no known oil fields waiting to be tapped in ANWAR. The seismic data in some areas of the Arctic indicate the potential for thick sediments, favourable for the accumulation of oil and gas, but no fields have been found in ANWAR because no exploration has been done due to the restrictions currently in place. Therefore what John McCain is talking about is taking a virgin prospect about which almost nothing is known and somehow hastening the process that took thirty years on the Grand Banks to get to Hibernia, a few more for Terra Nova, and then another fifteen or twenty to Hebron.

And this is going to be done in seas that are ice-choked for half of the year? Within a year we are going to discover, test-drill, delineate a field, and then spud a well in ocean floor subject to permafrost and untold and as yet not well-understood engineering hazards in a year? IN A YEAR? Perhaps McCain means to imply that Americans can somehow do this work much faster than we pokey, how’sitgoinbuddy Canadians can? Maybe, but wait, who’s names do I see on the Hebron lease? Is that ExxonMobil and Chevron?

John McCain is a disingenuous fool, who obviously knows nothing about the industry that has him in its pocket. Undoubtedly, this is just how the oil industry likes it’s presidents, but do you really think you want four years with someone this out-of-touch at the helm?

Okay, four more?

-kvd out