Republicans Are Crap Weasels

Republicans Are Crap Weasels and Even If You Tell Them, It Won’t Change Anything! Lo, and behold, the lowly crap weasel! This creature is of indeterminate numbers, and stinks to high heaven because of its singularly smelly style of smearing itself with its own squishy fecal matter. Such is the current Republican Party in America. No one can know how many Republicans there are in America as the numbers dwindle as they cover themselves with banners supporting Wall Street (not Main Street), torture, more tax breaks for the rich, Oil Companies and their other corporate masters, and vote with near unanimity against every attempt by President Obama and the Democratic Party to right the economy, fight our enemies (not US citizens’ rights) and restore integrity to our foreign policy. Curiously, the Urban Dictionary definition of “crap weasel” also applies to the GOP;

“Any worthless individual [sic] who tries to steal credit for someone else's work; also someone who tries to pass blame on others.”

I mean, who can forget that only three GOP members voted for the stimulus plan. And, the three GOP Senate members who voted for the plan will likely now have far right primary opposition in their upcoming elections. Thank you Senators Specter, Collins and Snowe!

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Socialism is Good for your Health

A new study from the Cato Institute finds that Portugal's policy on drug decriminalization is paying health dividends. Portugal decriminalized possession of all drugs on July 1, 2001, including heroin and cocaine. Trafficking in drugs is still a criminal offense. The study clearly indicates rehab is a major component of the success of the decriminalization policy, and that such rehab needs to be available to all. Successful rehab is thus only possible when health is a public service. Without a public health program, most users (who are poor) would be unable to afford rehab (which tends to be relatively expensive), thus removing any possibility of improved public health outcomes - users will remain as users with increasing incidence of STD & death. Unfortunately, the US would rather spend untold sums on the War on Drugs, and on the incarceration of users. Apparently it is still un-American (to some) to invest those sums in public health.

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As If We Didn’t Know

Politics dictated FDA policy? Say it isn't so! According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda. What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call. The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue. I mean, really---it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them. You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one's own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one's life free from government meddling. Handing both men and women the tools---provided by the free market, to boot---to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives. They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger. What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism. Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol' fashion American Values! It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children. How did this happen?

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The value of public anger

Glenn Greenwald finds virtue in public anger:

[The] anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong. The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing . . .

It's a universal dynamic that elites want to keep the masses in a state of silent, disengaged submission, all the better if the masses stay convinced that the elites have their best interests at heart and their welfare is therefore advanced by allowing elites -- the Experts -- to work in peace on our pressing problems, undisrupted and "undistracted" by the need to placate primitive public sentiments.

Consider that it is now well established that emotions are not incompatible with rationality.

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A Master’s in Creationism

LOL*cough* Excuse me. I nearly choked on a handful of almonds. My created/intelligently designed oesophagus is just a little too close to my trachaea, making it very easy to block the latter with particles of chewed food whilst laughing my arse right off its hinges when I read stuff like this FOX article:

State Rep. Leo Berman (R-Tyler) proposed House Bill 2800 when he learned that The Institute for Creation Research (ICR), a private institution that specializes in the education and research of biblical creationism, was not able to receive a certificate of authority from Texas' Higher Education Coordinating Board to grant Master of Science degrees.
So. "Education" and "research" (grin) of biblical creationism (chortle). OK, well, although I'm no theologian or creation scientist (snort) , allow me to sum up the entire proposed course for you: Education: God did it. Research: it says in the Bible that God did it. Thesis: the Bible says God did it; the Bible is always right because God wrote it; God is always right; the evidence for this is in the Bible which God wrote; my conclusion is that God did it (and is always right, just like the book He wrote). Well done, here's your diploma & whimsical "WWJD" t-shirt that all the kids are wearing. That'll be several thousand dollars. Hmm?

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