End of November 2007

Football I was flipping through the channels and came across the Fresno State-New Mexico State football game. It is pouring down rain and not much is at stake for New Mexico State; it was 13-8 Aggies when I tuned in.

The game eventually got to 30-13 Bulldogs when I started to blog. But with about 5 minutes left and the Aggies have cut the lead to 30-23; the game is now getting interesting.

Fresno State drove the ball down to the 3 yard line with 1:23 but missed a short field goal (in the driving rain; the kicker is now 20 out of 22, so this was a rare miss) so now New Mexico State is attempting to drive; they are now at their own 33 with 26 seconds remaining.

I’d say that this one is over, but given this season who knows? 14 seconds remaining and they are on their own 38. Miracle time? Nope, they turned it over on downs.

More Football: Terry Bowden talks about the Army-Navy game and points out that, while other teams have had the pain of having a teammate die, this has happened all to frequently to those who played for Army or Navy.

I hadn’t planned on blogging again, but there was some interesting stuff out there so here goes:

Politics
Republicans continue to whine and whine about the last Republican Debate.

Dear Duncan, Fred, John, Mike, Mitt, Ron, Rudy, and Tom:

The CNN-YouTube Debate was a disgrace. The blame lies largely with CNN, which wanted Republican voters to meet their Republican candidates but only on Democrats’ terms. They did so by portraying the GOP as women-arresting, gun toting, confederate flag-waving simpletons.

Isn’t that merely an accurate portrayal of Republicans???

There is a reason that, according to a Republican source, the percentage of people calling themselves Republican has dropped from 37 to 31 percent (this Daily Kos diary quotes a National Review article)

Joe Biden: will push to impeach Bush if he attacks Iran. This is the source of the quote.

Sen. Joe Biden, the loquacious long-shot Democratic presidential candidate, warned President Bush Thursday that he would move for impeachment if the president unilaterally authorized a military strike against Iran.

“The President has no authority to unilaterally attack Iran and … if he does, as foreign relations committee chairman and former chairman of judiciary, I will move to impeach him,” Biden told a crowd of about 100 potential voters at a campaign stop in New Hampshire.

Biden said he is meeting with constitutional law experts and plans to send Bush a legal memo formally outlining his warning, according to Seacoast Online, which reported his comments.

The senior Delaware senator told the crowd that calls for Bush’s immediate impeachment were valid but may not have enough constitutional support to make them viable. He added that Bush wasn’t the only White House figure who deserves to be booted.

“If you’re going to impeach George Bush, you better impeach Cheney first,” Biden said, garnering applause from the crowd.

Nice. I hope that he means what he says.

Politics: margin of error on political polls. Read the first comment on this thread; it is quite interesting. What do you think? I might make a blog post about this; the article that it is talking about is here.

Huckabee: a scientist weighs in.
In this post, the blogger discusses this video (along with the Chuck Norris one):

A phone call from God! Quite the thigh-slapper. Huckabee artfully includes an assurance that God doesn’t take side during elections — although we all know his preferences, apparently.

I understand that it’s a joke. But there are moments of solemnity during the “phone call,” when Huckabee is being perfectly serious. One of those is at the 2:00 mark, where we are reminded that the President talks to God. And then we receive a list of instructions, including “protecting marriage.” (It needs to be protected from The Gays, for those who don’t have your decoder rings.) George W. Bush himself has occasionally mentioned talking to God, although usually in private meetings where it’s difficult to get objective verification, and admittedly his theology is somewhat unsystematic.

A lot of people who don’t really believe in the old-fashioned supernatural nevertheless think it’s a good idea to appropriate spiritual terminology for their own uses — re-defining “faith” as “any hypothesis that has not yet been proven,” or “God” as “the warm feeling I get when contemplating the universe,” or “religion” as “a nice kind of social club that brings people together to reinforce each other’s goodness.” It’s not a good idea. These are words, and they have meanings when you say them — people think they know what you have in mind. When you say “God,” most people think of the dictionary definition — “the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.” They’re not thinking of “the laws of nature.” And they honestly believe in this dictionary-definition God. And they let that belief affect, or at least justify, how they govern the country. Shouldn’t every non-religious person be deeply alarmed about this state of affairs? [...]

Evolution: Professor Moran talks about an article on a free access online journal, which should be of interest to those interested in evolution. There is a fight going on in the comments section to this post; the on line journal can be accessed here.

From the discussion of a Kos diary:

Humor
How can you deny the truth of evolution after reading this?

Neurobiologist and anthropologist Michael Platt of Duke University is studying differences in how the sexes respond to pictures in general. On average, his research shows, men will pay to see images of women. But you have to pay women to look at images of men!

Platt started with similar studies in monkeys.[...]

Platt found that male macaques strongly preferred to look at pictures of females’ rear ends [...]

A funny off-color joke… from Sex Whispers…

SMART ASS ANSWER OF THE YEAR 2007
A college teacher reminds her class of tomorrow’s final exam.

* “Now class, I won’t tolerate any excuses for you not being here tomorrow. I might consider a nuclear attack or a serious personal injury, illness, or a death in your immediate family, but that’s it, no other excuses whatsoever!”

A smart-ass guy in the back of the room raised his hand and asked,

* “What would you say if tomorrow I said I was suffering from complete and utter sexual exhaustion?”

The entire class is reduced to laughter and snickering. When silence is restored, the teacher smiles knowingly at the student, shakes her head and sweetly says, [...]

For the rest, go to the site.