20 May 2011 PM….

This will be even more disorganized than normal….

The Republicans were confident that they would win in conservative Jacksonville Florida. They didn’t:

Republican leaders said over and over in recent weeks that a race for mayor of Jacksonville amounted to the first big Florida fight in the 2012 presidential race.

“The liberal organizers who want to keep the American people enslaved by wasteful spending and hideous deficits need to know that they have jumped the gun on 2012 and have awakened a sleeping giant,” Duval County Republican chairman Lenny Curry declared this month before handing a $50,000 check to Republican mayoral candidate Mike Hogan. “We’re going to send a message that Florida is red.”

Republicans better hope Curry is wrong about the race being a harbinger, because an African-American Democrat named Alvin Brown this week was elected mayor of Florida’s largest county. Across Florida and the country, stunned Republicans are struggling to understand the narrow upset in conservative northeast Florida.

“Jacksonville has always been a conservative stronghold for Republicans, and we’re going to have to really study what happened in this race,” said Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos, a U.S. Senate candidate who had expected Hogan to win handily. [...]

Bottom line: the Republican may have well been hurt by having to embrace the Tea Party. Of course, there is probably some local factors and I know that I am ignorant of those…but then again it was the knowledgeable “serious” Republicans who had been predicting victory.

International The Israeli Prime Minister may have misjudged Americans:

Update In the comments, Dr. A reminds me that “expect” can also mean “anticipate” rather than “demand”; e. g. I “expect” that Dr. A. will vote Republican even if they run a rubber chicken.

For whatever reason, I tend to react strongly when a foreign leader disrespects the United States, and its President. I didn’t like it when Hugo Chavez of Venezuela insulted President Bush; I don’t like listening to Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan lecture the U.S. on its sins, and I’m not happy when certain Pakistani leaders gin-up righteous indignation about American behavior when it was their country that served as a refuge for the greatest mass murderer in American history.

And so I was similarly taken aback when I read a statement from Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday that he “expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both House of Congress.”

So Netanyahu “expects” to hear this from the President of the United States? And if President Obama doesn’t walk back the speech, what will Netanyahu do? Will he cut off Israeli military aid to the U.S.? Will he cease to fight for the U.S. in the United Nations, and in the many international forums that treat Israel as a pariah?

I don’t like this word, “expect.” Even if there weren’t an imbalance between these two countries — Israel depends on the U.S. for its survival, while America, I imagine, would continue to exist even if Israel ceased to exist — I would find myself feeling resentful about the way Netanyahu speaks about our President.

Remember that on a cumulative basis, we’ve given more aid to Israel than any other country:

Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. From 1976-2004, Israel was the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance­, having since been supplanted by Iraq. Since 1985, the United States has provided nearly $3 billion in grants annually to Israel.

(via: the U. S. Congressional Research Office)

Ignorance: yes, some high school student challenged Rep. Bachmann to a debate about the Constitution. Nothing new here; anyone can challenge anyone to debate about anything (even though I think that Ms. Bachmann is profoundly ignorant or at least pretends to be). But now this student is receiving …..death threats?

CHERRY HILL, N.J. — A New Jersey teenager says she’s received threats since challenging U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann to a debate over the Constitution.

Ann Myers challenged the tea party favorite in a letter dated April 29. After it started getting media attention last weekend, commenters on tea party websites have threatened to publish her home address and some have threatened violence.

The 16-year-old from Cherry Hill says several commenters have called her a “whore.”

Her father, Wayne, says he’s concerned for his daughter’s safety.

But Cherry Hill Police Lt. William Kushina says anonymous online threats like these are usually empty.

Myers says the Minnesota congresswoman misstates or distorts facts about the Constitution. Bachmann’s office told The Courier-Post of Cherry Hill that it won’t respond to the debate challenge.

I wonder how many of these threats contained misspellings and grammatical errors?

More ignorance:

The key thing here is that this clown says that “every President, up until 2008, acknowledged Jesus…”
First: Thomas Jefferson was, at most, a deist; he even created the Jefferson Bible in which he stripped the Gospels of anything supernatural. Next: President Taft was a Unitarian; Unitarians denied the divinity of Jesus as an official part of their doctrine! He wasn’t the only one; there 4 altogether: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft.

Note: some atheists have tried to claim President Obama as “one of us”, but sadly, he really isn’t:

Key quote: 1:44 to 2:05. No atheist would say this; they would say something more generic like “I pray and read the Bible”, etc.

20 May 2011

Workout notes Walked 6.5 miles; 4.1 with Lynn. I started at 6 in the morning and we had GREAT weather. That will end this weekend.
I want to swim and lift over lunch but will force myself to moderate. I want to go long tomorrow and need to save some energy for it; I can swim and lift on Sunday.

Posts
General: if you like funny military sayings and cool photos of aircraft, check this out. It is a slide show of photos with pithy sayings.

Rapture

No, I mean the one that this article is talking about:

The Haddad children of Middletown, Md., have a lot on their minds: school projects, SATs, weekend parties. And parents who believe the earth will begin to self-destruct on Saturday.

The three teenagers have been struggling to make sense of their shifting world, which started changing nearly two years ago when their mother, Abby Haddad Carson, left her job as a nurse to “sound the trumpet” on mission trips with her husband, Robert, handing out tracts. They stopped working on their house and saving for college.

Last weekend, the family traveled to New York, the parents dragging their reluctant children through a Manhattan street fair in a final effort to spread the word.

“My mom has told me directly that I’m not going to get into heaven,” Grace Haddad, 16, said. “At first it was really upsetting, but it’s what she honestly believes.”

Thousands of people around the country have spent the last few days taking to the streets and saying final goodbyes before Saturday, Judgment Day, when they expect to be absorbed into heaven in a process known as the rapture. Nonbelievers, they hold, will be left behind to perish along with the world over the next five months. [...]

It is easy to laugh at these deluded idiots. But I have some pity too:

While Ms. Haddad Carson has quit her job, her husband still works as an engineer for the federal Energy Department. But the children worry that there may not be enough money for college. They also have typical teenage angst — embarrassing parents — only amplified.

“People look at my family and think I’m like that,” said Joseph, their 14-year-old, as his parents walked through the street fair on Ninth Avenue, giving out Bibles. “I keep my friends as far away from them as possible.”

“I don’t really have any motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore,” he said, “because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.”

Bottom line: “respecting religious beliefs” just because they are religious beliefs is just plain stupid.

Speaking of religion, here is an interesting critique of a The Good Delusion critique. (hat tip: Jerry Coyne). I’ll go a bit further: Dawkins’ book is on target because it attacks religion as it is practiced by the vast majority of believers. Very few believe in the word salad gods of the philosophers and theologians; they want a god that will cure their uncle’s cancer, keep their country from being attacked and get them a raise (or job). What kind of deity demands worship anyway?

Politics

President Obama and Israel
President Obama’s Middle East proposal is interesting:

President Obama has told aides and allies that he does not believe that Mr. Netanyahu will ever be willing to make the kind of big concessions that will lead to a peace deal.

For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has complained that Mr. Obama has pushed Israel too far — a point driven home during a furious phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday morning, just hours before Mr. Obama’s speech, during which the prime minister reacted angrily to the president’s plan to endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders for a future Palestinian state.

Mr. Obama did not back down. But the last-minute furor highlights the discord as they head into what one Israeli official described as a “train wreck” coming their way: a United Nations General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September.

Mr. Netanyahu, his close associates say, desperately wants Mr. Obama to use the diplomatic muscle of the United States to protect Israel from the vote, not only by vetoing it in the Security Council, but also by leaning hard on America’s European allies to get them to reject it as well.

The thing to remember is that our proposing something puts less pressure on Europe to act, and Israel will ALWAYS get a better deal from us. What we have: lots of foreign aid to Israel and a veto in the U. N. Security council.

This is a complex issue; here is an interesting take on it. There is more here than meets the eye.

Hulu – The Colbert Report: John Lithgow Performs Gingrich Press Release

Video description: Stephen enlists John Lithgow to read New Gingrich’s press release.

Hulu – The Colbert Report: John Lithgow Perform…, posted with vodpod

College Misery: College Grads Expect Coddling. A No “Duh” VidShizzle.

some truth here

College Misery: College Grads Expect Coddling. …, posted with vodpod

Newts and Lizards, Oh MY!!!!

First: some Newts (ok, A “Newt”)
Paul Krugman isn’t so much surprised at Newt Gingrich’s pathetic performance this past weekend (ending with his “if you quote me you are lying” (paraphrased) statement). He concludes:

[...] I never thought I’d miss Newt Gingrich — and maybe I won’t have to; such people are amazingly resilient. But anway, between this and Gingrich’s earlier declaration that anyone who quotes him correctly is lying, he’s been giving great entertainment.

Now you may ask, how did a once-powerful figure become such a clown? But that’s the wrong question: what you see now is what he always was. The real question is why so many media figures pretended, for so long, not to notice.

Emphasis mine. But hey, Dick Morris likes him.

Lizards: Jerry Coyne blogs about a recent discovery (fossil) which provides a transitional from between lizards and amphisbaenians (worm lizards; surf to the blog for a photo)

A paper published in Nature today by Johannes Muller and colleagues (abstract only) goes a long ways towards constraining our speculations. In the paper, they describe a new species of lizard from the Eocene Messel shale of Germany (Messel is a famous lagerstatte: a deposit with extraordinary fossil preservation) as a transitional form from ‘normal’ lizards to the amphisbaenians.

The evolutionary tree continues to be filled out, even as the Republican tournament to lose to Obama continues to wither.