Pat Buchanan: Watch out for the Mexicans!

Oh No!!! I am a threat to America!

more about "Daily Kos: State of the Nation", posted with vodpod

Give the Republicans Some Cheese

Ok, I am such a good sport, I’ll post a NRSC video:

See, President Obama is failing!

Oh wait…much of the AIG bailout money came from the TARP bill that was passed before Obama became President.

What about that budget? Oh wait…that is a transitional budget left over from the previous year:

I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it is necessary for the ongoing functions of government. But I also view this as a departure point for more far-reaching change. — President Barack Obama

Yesterday, Congress passed the final part of last year’s budget — an omnibus bill that combined nine funding bills required to keep the government running. Included in the $410 billion dollar spending bill were nearly 9,000 earmarks, totaling nearly $8 billion. These earmarks are unrelated projects inserted into the bill by members of Congress, designed to benefit individual legislators’ districts.

President Obama decided to sign the bill, which was inherited from the previous administration, rather than compromise government operations in a time of crisis. But he took the opportunity today to call for widespread earmark reform and a new approach to the appropriations process:

Now, let me be clear: Done right, earmarks give legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects that benefit people in their district, and that’s why I have opposed their outright elimination. I also find it ironic that some of those who railed the loudest against this bill because of earmarks actually inserted earmarks of their own – and will tout them in their own states and districts.

But the fact is that on occasion, earmarks have been used as a vehicle for waste, fraud, and abuse. Projects have been inserted at the eleventh hour, without review, and sometimes without merit, in order to satisfy the political or personal agendas of a given legislator, rather than the public interest.

And yes, many of the earmarks were inserted by Republicans.

What about those campaign promises? Actually, he is doing well with those.

(huge tip of the hat to Muzikal203 at the Daily Kos)

But I should give the Republicans some credit. They are making progress….toward putting creationism into the public school curriculum.

The Texas Board of Education is led by Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist and plagiarist who believes that the earth is only 6000 years old.

Just stop there and savor it. The man who wants to dictate what all of the children in one of the largest educational systems in the country should learn about science believes his pathetic and patently false superstition supersedes the evidence and the informed evaluation of virtually all the scientists in the world. There is no other way to put it than to point out that McLeroy is a blithering idiot who willingly puts his incompetence on display. His job is not at risk, and he’s even advancing his freakish agenda with some success.

It’s a marvel, isn’t it? A fellow just wants to laugh and shoo him back to his church and his dental practice, but instead, he’s been given all this power over the education of American children, and it’s hard to laugh, because it is so damned terrifying.

But wait! The unbelievable insanity is not yet complete! The Texas school board is debating and will vote on a revised curriculum this week, a curriculum in which the uninformed, uneducated doubts of this arrogantly ignorant man will be enshrined in the lesson plans of every child in Texas. And the board is about evenly split!

There’s a deeper problem here than the simple superficial fact that we’ve got influential people trying to push nonsense into science classrooms. It’s that somehow, we have a system that gives flaming incompetents this kind of power — that we willingly hand over important decisions about the education of our children to people who aren’t qualified, who have no understanding of science, and who want prioritize a page and a half of vague, poetic metaphor from a ragged old hodge-podge of a book of mythology over the concrete, well-tested, and well-documented body of modern scientific information.

Add that to the freakshow that is the Oklahoma State Legislature and well….you have….Red America.

Hey Conservatives: are you feeling down? Are your feelings hurt?

I’ve got something for you right here:

Less Lethal Superstitions….

Workout notes yoga, then 6 miles on the treadmill. 1 mile warm up (10 minutes), a 9:40 mile, then (at a grade of 1) I upped the speed every .25 miles: 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0 then 7.0 for 1 mile. I stopped after that, got a quick drink, and ran 2 in 19:10 to cool down.

I am not quite right yet, though I actually felt my knees lift while running.

Superstition: Yes, I know that Africa has problems with superstition:

see more pwn and owned pictures

And, even worse, some are being killed over witchcraft.

But what the Pope said was, well, ironic:

Pope Benedict XVI has urged Catholics in Angola to woo people “living in fear of spirits” into the church.

In a Mass celebrated in Angola’s capital, Luanda, he said Catholics should reach out to those who believe in witchcraft and spirits.

Human rights groups say many children in Angola have been abused after being accused of possession by spirits.

The pontiff, who arrived in Angola from Cameroon on Friday, is on the last stop of his week-long African tour.

He will later meet youths at a city football stadium.

On Friday, he made a powerful attack on corruption, which analysts say is rife in oil-rich Angola.

The climax of the visit will be on Sunday, when two million people are expected to hear the Pope address an outdoor service.

‘Threatening spirits’

The Pope urged Angola’s Catholics to reach out to those who had joined the burgeoning number of sects.

“Today it is up to you, brothers and sisters, following in the footsteps of those heroic and holy heralds of God, to offer the risen Christ to your fellow citizens,” the Pope said to 1,500 Angolan clergy and laypeople at Luanda’s Sao Paulo church.

“In today’s Angola, Catholics should offer the message of Christ to the many who live in the fear of spirits, of evil powers by whom they feel threatened, disoriented, even reaching the point of condemning street children and even the most elderly because – they say – they are sorcerers,” he said. [...]

True, condemning people for sorcery is bad. The Catholic Church has grown out of that. Sort of.

He also said:

The Pope also warned of a threat to the Catholic Church in Cameroon from evangelical movements and from the “growing influence of superstitious forms of religion”.

Something reminds me about a saying concerning pots and kettles.

Speaking of the Catholic Church, the University of Notre Dame has invited President Obama to speak at its graduation (as did my alma mater). Not everyone is happy about it:

Barack Obama will give commencement speeches at the U.S. Naval Academy, Arizona State, and the University of Notre Dame this year. The Naval Academy has received the news with little dispute, and Arizona State actually moved its ceremony to accommodate the president.

But when the president isn’t sticking it to a certain Naval Academy graduate and Arizona senator, he’s riling the Catholic community at Notre Dame. Critics say that Obama’s honorary degree is an affront to the school’s Catholic teachings, citing the president’s stances on abortion, gay rights, and embryonic stem cell research. Groups like the Cardinal Newman Society and the Pro-Life Action League have encouraged all Catholics to flood the university with phone calls and to sign online petitions (which have tens of thousands of signatures already).

The Rev. John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, defended the choice, saying that it has been a standing tradition to invite the U.S. president to speak and that he was “honored” that Obama accepted the invitation.

“The invitation of President Obama to be our Commencement speaker should in no way be taken as condoning or endorsing his positions on specific issues,” Jenkins said. “We invited him because we care so much about those issues, and we hope for this to be the basis of an engagement with him. You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade, and if you cannot persuade them, show respect for them and listen to them.”

What is hilarious is how some wing nuts have reacted:

TS justifiably makes fun of this K-Lo sentence:

[Notre Dame] took a giant step away from their identity as “Catholic.” They rather be of this world than the one they supposedly exist to bring people toward.

But sentence structure aside, this line really says everything you need to know about conservatives — they’re angry when people live in “this world” — you know, the real one! — rather than in the fantasy one they wish existed.

Famous Last Words…

Update: the stomach still isn’t 100 percent but it getting closer. Digestion is still tough. I might run 6 miles on the treadmill after yoga and call it a day, in terms of working out.

Politics

President Obama on Energy (speech at MIT)

Note: the first 6-7 minutes of the video features the President of MIT. Then the CEO of Serious Materials talks for a couple of minutes; he discusses the Federal Research and Development Tax Credit. Direct implications of the stimulus bill on energy is discussed. The President starts talking at 10 minutes into it.

Remember this?

Now we have this:

The Mount Redoubt volcano erupted five times overnight Sunday and Monday, sending an ash plume more than nine miles into the air in the volcano’s first emissions in nearly 20 years. Residents in Anchorage, the state’s largest city, were spared from falling ash, though fine gray dust fell on communities north of there. Ash from Alaska’s volcanoes is like a rock fragment with jagged edges and has been used as an industrial abrasive. It can injure skin, eyes and breathing passages, and can also cause damage engines in planes, cars and other vehicles. Mount Redoubt, which has an altitude of 10,200 feet, is about 100 miles southwest of Anchorage.

Memo to Republicans: there are many things that we can’t do with our own money that we can do together, collectively.