Guess Who is Coming to Central Illinois?

That’s Right!

WASHINGTON —

Sarah Palin is coming to Five Points Washington on April 17.

The former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor turned best-selling author and political commentator will be the first speaker in Five Points’ “Lessons from Leaders” series.

“You Don’t Need a Title To Make a Difference” is the topic of Palin’s 8:15 p.m. talk in the 1,000-seat Caterpillar Performing Arts Center.

Palin’s speech is expected to last for about 30 minutes. After her address, she’ll hold a 30-minute question-and-answer session with questions submitted in advance by audience members.

Prior to the Palin’s speech, she’ll be the guest of honor at a 7 p.m. banquet and private reception.

Ticket prices range from $75 to $200. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Five Points capital projects fund and provide scholarships for area students.

Five Points officials and Washington Mayor Gary Manier are ecstatic about landing Palin as the kickoff speaker for the series.

During a news conference Monday at Five Points, a black curtain was dramatically lifted off a poster announcing Palin’s speech.

“Our goal with this series is to bring in nationally known speakers once or twice a year to talk about what leadership means to them, and we’ve certainly done that with Gov. Palin,” said Sherril West, president of the board of directors that operates Five Points.

“Whether or not you voted for Gov. Palin in 2008, this is a home run for our city to get her to come here,” Manier said.

Emphasis mine.

I give up. I live in an insignificant, two-bit hick area.

26 January 2010

Workout notes Yoga with Ms. Vickie (stiff), 4000 yards (15 x 200; first three were about 3:45, 40, 35, 12 on the 3:30. Then 500 of drill/swim (fins), 500 cool down.

Then weights; first sets were a bit off; was able to handle 25 curl, 45 military, 70 bench press (all with dumbbells; one in each hand); lat pulls, pull ups, yoga leg lifts.

Mathematics/education

I remember seeing something similar to this in the College Mathematics Journal; this is similar:

Reuters today released a hilarious account marking the collapse of the Antarctic shelf. According to Reuters,

The Antarctic Peninsular has warmed by 36 degrees Fahrenheit over the past half century, far faster than elsewhere on the ice-bound continent or the rest of the world.

Huh? If the Antarctic shelf had warmed 36 degrees over the last 50 years, the shelf would have collapsed a long time ago. So how did the moron who wrote this arrive at this figure?

Ah, you see, the actual warming was only about 2.5 degrees Celsius.

Can you guess what happened?

I used this in class yesterday; most of my “off semester “brief calculus”" students were stumped though one got it right away.

Groan, 25 January 2010 edition

OH NOES, PRESIDENT OBAMA IS JUST LIKE PRESIDENT HOOVER!!!

Obama Embraces Hooverism
by eugene

From the diaries. Susan.

There are no words to describe how disastrous this news is from TPM:

President Obama will propose freezing non-security discretionary government spending for the next three years, a sweeping plan to attempt deficit reduction that will save taxpayers $250 billion over 10 years.

Really? Huffington Post (under a banner screaming “Mr. Freeze”) reports:

President Barack Obama will ask Congress to freeze spending for some domestic programs for three years beginning in 2011.

The proposal comes as Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress face public anger over growing deficits.

Administration officials told The Associated Press on Monday that the freeze would apply to a relatively small portion of the budget. It would affect money available for domestic agencies whose budgets are approved each year.

Exempt from the freeze would be the Pentagon, veterans programs, foreign aid and homeland security. [...]

Repeat: to. freeze. spending. for. some. domestic. programs.

Wonder why many don’t take Daily Kos seriously? (I quoted from a front page article, not a diary).

Oh sure, there is some legitimate opinion there too:

John Cole:

Why is it that all the people who claim to be the base turn out to be self-serving, self-promoting jackasses who have very narrow agendas and love to inform us that if the Obama administration does just what they want them to do right when they want them to do it, they will “keep the base.” Otherwise, if they don’t fulfill their agenda right then and there, they will “lose the base.” And strategically, it always works out so well- see demanding the public option be put in the Senate Bill and shutting down the Snowe negotiations.

John is a friend, so I say this with genuine respect — yes, the Democrats have a base problem. And no, it’s not because of Ed Schultz, me, Jane Hamsher, or anyone else. Let’s be real, we’re just not that powerful.

Daily Kos gets about 2 million unique visitors per month, plus maybe a couple more million reading other progressive blogs. Ed (and Olbermann and Maddow) probably get that many watching their shows every month. There’s overlap, so let’s say 3-5 million progressives reading blogs and watching MSNBC’s prime time lineup — a pittance compared to the 16 million or so that listen to Limbaugh every week, and the 2-4 million that watch Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck every night. Huffington Post is getting about 16 million unique monthly visitors these days, but 80 percent of that is entertainment, and the other 20 percent is split among business, sports, living, style, green, technology and finally politics.

Point is, our media machine is tiny. We don’t have the power to move our base around.

Kos goes on to point out that many in our base, most who haven’t a clue (or a care) that we even exist, simply aren’t motivated to show up and vote due to the fact that we haven’t show results.

Note also that the President remains popular with Democrats (myself included, though I wish he were more aggressive at promoting progressive agenda items) but he is wildly unpopular with Republicans:

Republicans have turned overwhelmingly against President Obama, while Democrats are still largely supportive — leading to the most polarized approval ratings ever recorded during a president’s first year in office, a new report by Gallup finds.

Over the course of this past year, Obama has averaged a job approval rating of 88 percent among Democrats and just 23 percent among Republicans, according to the study released on Monday morning. That year-one 65-point margin is the largest that the public opinion research firm has ever recorded.

At the end of his first year, former President Bill Clinton averaged a smaller 52-point gap — not because Republicans liked him any more than they like Obama, but because Democrats didn’t like him as much. President George W. Bush averaged a 45-point gap; during his first year, he had almost universal support from Republicans, while nearly half of Democrats were still giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Looking at the data going further back in history, it’s evident that the country has grown far more polarized since the age of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.

Of course, it hasn’t helped that the Republicans have sold themselves out to the bat-shit crazy wing of their party. There are Republicans (David Brooks, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, Fareed Zakaria, even George Will at times, when he is not attempting to speak about science) who have stuff worth listening to, but they are not in control of their party.

Religion Richard Dawkins skewers those who enable the Pat Robertson’s of the world:

The religious mind, however, restlessly seeks human meaning in the blind happenings of nature. As with the Indonesian tsunami, which was blamed on loose sexual morals in tourist bars; as with Hurricane Katrina, which was attributed to divine revenge on the entire city of New Orleans for harboring a lesbian comedian, and as with other disasters going back to the famous Lisbon earthquake and beyond, so Haiti’s tragedy must be payback for human sin. The Rev. Pat Robertson sees the hand of God in the earthquake, wreaking terrible retribution for a pact that the long-dead ancestors of today’s Haitians made with the devil, to help rid them of their French masters.

Needless to say, milder-mannered faith-heads are falling over themselves to disown Pat Robertson, just as they disowned those other pastors, evangelists, missionaries and mullahs at the time of the earlier disasters.

What hypocrisy.

Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonized theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable ‘mystery’, or who ‘see God’ in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti , or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God ‘suffering on the cross’ in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.

Where was God in Noah’s flood? He was systematically drowning the entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for ‘sin’. Where was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock stock and barrel, as punishment for ‘sin’. Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated Christian, your entire religion is founded on an obsession with ‘sin’, with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the obnoxious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus’ incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the ‘sins’ of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the ‘sin’ of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed? To quote the President of one theological seminary, writing in these very pages:

“The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on the globe.”

You nice, middle-of-the-road theologians and clergymen, be-frocked and bleating in your pulpits, you disclaim Pat Robertson’s suggestion that the Haitians are paying for a pact with the devil. But you worship a god-man who – as you tell your congregations even if you don’t believe it yourself – ‘cast out devils’. You even believe (or you don’t disabuse your flock when they believe) that Jesus cured a madman by causing the ‘devils’ in him to fly into a herd of pigs and stampede them over a cliff. Charming story, well calculated to uplift and inspire the Sunday School and the Infant Bible Class. Pat Robertson may spout evil nonsense, but he is a mere amateur at that game. Just read your own Bible. Pat Robertson is true to it. But you?

Of course, the truly liberal find ways to rationalize away much of the “historical” claims of the Bible and to dismiss much of the embarrassing claims as the result of ignorance of the times. But in all honesty, people who do this ought to give themselves another label as what they are practicing in no way resembles Christianity.

Some of them allow their deity a “ration of miracles” and then dismiss the rest of it (eyeroll).