Republican Howlers: July 5, 2011 Edition

First we have this:

Former Washington Times columnist Eliana Benador, who was fired for writing a piece speculating that former Rep. Anthony Weiner had converted to Islam and was pushing a “socialist political agenda,” has found a new home for her controversial work: Tea Party Nation.

RightWingWatch.org, a watchdog for conservative media that is part of political activism group People for the American Way, excerpted Benador’s debut column on the conservative social networking site, meditating on the “invasion of America” by “non-European immigrants.”

“As we celebrate America’s Independence Day, it’s noteworthy that the percentage reduction of original American voters, might have been a defining factor in the election of someone like the current president, who among other goals, seems to be keen in opening further our borders to endlessly increasing numbers of immigrants who, regardless of their skin color, are bringing in a whole new texture of culture, 100% foreign to what America’s origins were as its wonderful adventure began back in 1776,” Benador wrote.

Tea Party Nation has previously published writings that warn of the impending “extinction” of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population.[...]

So….now guess who is “considering” running for the GOP nomination? Think: “elite academic institution that is known for basketball success”. You guessed it!

Poll after poll indicates that GOP voters are not particularly happy with the field of candidates that are vying for the 2012 GOP nomination. But how would they feel if white supremacist David Duke jumped into the race? Well, since polls also put a high premium on electability, I’m guessing they’d feel even more dispirited about it. But we’ll have to see if anything comes of the news today that Duke is mulling getting into the presidential fray, as Eve Conant reports for The Daily Beast.

Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke.

Yikes! That’s not good news. But before we get too deep in to speculating, I’ll point out that Duke doesn’t exactly have imminent plans to file with the FEC or anything. Rather, he’s embarking on “a tour of 25 states to explore how much support he can garner for a potential presidential bid.” So, we are in the purely embryonic stage of an official Duke candidacy.

What a sideshow!

But back to the more “mainstream” candidates: a conservative commentator at Fox News (no less) is less than impressed with Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin:

Fox’s Saturday conservative commentator Liz Trotta came out swinging this weekend, taking down both Rep. Michele Bachmann and colleague Sarah Palin for their historical inaccuracies. Quoting Ezra Klein and Matt Taibbi, Trotta joked the two shared an alma mater in “Fleabag U,” and that “as far as flubs go, they are leading the field.”

Trotta didn’t seem surprised that Rep. Bachmann and Palin were being compared: “it’s almost preordained because it seems to be they both took the same american history course, and it may have been at Fleabag U.” She chided them for both their latest gaffes– the Paul Revere comments that sparked controversy from Palin, and Rep. Bachmann’s “Lexington and Concord and in New Hampshire” quip. Using various quotes by Taibbi and Ezra Klein (“Rep. Bachmann is the candidate that Sarah Palin is supposed to be”), she argued that “they can’t get away from these criticisms, and even laughed at Rep. Bachmann’s claim that she has a “scholarly background.”

Obama Gets Realistic About America after visiting Denny’s

(hat tip: Randazza)

Quick Midday Comments (5 July 2011)

Science People who live in certain areas of the south are more prone to stroke and memory loss:

People in a large area of the American South have long been known to have more strokes and to be more likely to die from them than people living elsewhere in the country.

Now, a large national study suggests the so-called stroke belt may have another troubling health distinction. Researchers have found that Southerners there also are more likely to experience a decline in cognitive ability over several years — specifically, problems with memory and orientation.

The differences to date in the continuing study are not large: Of nearly 24,000 participants, 1,090 in eight stroke-belt states showed signs of cognitive decline after four years, compared with 847 people in 40 other states.

But the geographic difference persisted even after the researchers adjusted for factors — like age, sex, race and education — that might influence the result. The most recent data from the study were published in Annals of Neurology.

None of the people with cognitive decline in the study had had detectable strokes.[...]

Hmmm, what is going on: food? weather? (is freezing your butt of for several months of the year actually good for you?) I’d be interested in finding out.

Atheist Conferences
I’ve never been to one. Evidently, there has been a flap over someone complaining that being asked out for coffee in an elevator made them uncomfortable; see here.

Ok, things happen; any group of passionate human beings will generate some dissent from time to time.
But one of the blogs I regularly read pointed us to this post. At the latter post, one can read such gems as:

In sum, men who corner women know what they’re doing. And yes, they are relying on the fear of rape to grease the wheels towards getting laid. Rebecca may not have put it that way, but being a mean ol’ feminist bitch, I’m happy to say it.

and

And I also know, being a feminist for many years now, that whenever a bunch of dudes start freaking out on a woman who called out some egregious sexism, there are a bunch of women willing to back those dudes up in order to get that coveted male approval and attention. I call this move Pulling An Althouse.

In short, this person purports to “know” a great deal including how other people think . Moral: being an atheist doesn’t make you rational.

This demonstrates why such conferences do not interest me. I like math and science conferences because people gather there for a common interest, and there is a bit of self selection going on there. Most people there have met some sort of intellectual standard and, not surprisingly, the participants happen to me more atheistic than the population at large.

Getting into the swim: 5 July 2011

Workout notes Yesterday’s 5K “run” meltdown was discouraging. My time was horrible and when I saw the video of the finish I was horrified (see: 6:20-6:25 or so; I am as far away from the camera as possible and I look as if I am walking illegally):

But today was a new day and my swim was very encouraging.

Yoga with Ms. Vickie followed by 2200 yards of swimming:
10 x (25 3g, 25 fist), 6 x (25 front, 25 free) with fins.
10 x 100 free on the 2: (1:41, 1:41, 1:41, 1:40, 1:41, 1:39, 1:38, 1:39, 1:38, 1:38) average: 1:39.5
4 x (25 back, 25 breast)
4 x 50 fly kick with fins. Yes, I sensibly talked myself out of doing butterfly…
Yes, the 10 x 100 set was work…I was feeling “the heaviness” in my muscles about mid way through the set. I had to bear down and focus.

No, this wouldn’t have a great swim prior to my shoulder problems in 2010, but it is the best I’ve done in well over a year.

For past reference here are my 10 x 100 on the 2 averages:
5 July 1:39.5
21 June: 1:41.3
15 June: 1:42.4
1 June: 1:44.6
29 May: 1:49.7

Again, a real swimmer would ask “is this a kick-board set” or just laugh. But for me, it is good progress…and my shoulder doesn’t hurt. Then again, I am being diligent with my weight lifting and rotator cuff exercises..and I’ll have to do that, like it or not, for as long as I want to swim.

Yoga: taking that photo set was useful; it was humbling (I didn’t realize that I looked so bad) but it made me concentrate on my poses this morning. I was asking myself the right questions (e. g. “where is my knee?” “am I extending out through the heel?”)

Posts
Politics Frank Rich made some fair criticism of President Obama but this is a fair “counterpoint” to Mr. Rich’s article.

My quick summary of the back and forth: Rich: President Obama is not seen as doing enough for the working class but rather seen as sticking up for big money. This is My Time (at Daily Kos): Hey, the man isn’t a magician and he has done a lot.

Sidenote: someone sent President Obama a blistering e-mail message and got a hand written response! Dang. Maybe *I* should sent President Obama a nasty e-mail message!

Republicans
David Brooks thinks that the Republicans have a great chance to win one some of their issues but are going to blow it:

Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.

Moreover, many important Democrats are open to a truly large budget deal. President Obama has a strong incentive to reach a deal so he can campaign in 2012 as a moderate. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion if the Republicans meet him part way. There are Democrats in the White House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues.

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases. [...]

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it. [...]

Read the rest. Now Paul Krugman says “I told you so…but did you believe me…..NOOOOOOOO”.

Well, why not? Well, Dr. Krumgan won a Nobel Prize and that actually diminishes him in the eyes of many; had, say, Ted Nugent or Kim Kardashian said this, well, more might believe it.

But here is something else: why, why, why do so many of my liberal friends want President Obama to act just like the Tea Party members (except for liberal causes)????

Science and human evolution
Our desire for a fair society might be ingrained:

Among the Ache hunter-gatherers in eastern Paraguay, healthy adults with no dependent offspring are expected to donate as much as 70 to 90 percent of the food they forage to the needier members of the group. And as those strapping suppliers themselves fall ill, give birth or grow old, they know they can count on the tribe to provide.

Among the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari in Africa, a successful hunter who may be inclined to swagger is kept in check by his compatriots through a ritualized game called “insulting the meat.” You asked us out here to help you carry that pitiful carcass? What is it, some kind of rabbit? [...]

Darwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match. As Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has pointed out, you will never see two chimpanzees carrying a log together. The advent of agriculture and settled life may have thrown a few feudal monkeys and monarchs into the mix, but evolutionary theorists say our basic egalitarian leanings remain.

Studies have found that the thirst for fairness runs deep. As Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and his colleagues reported in the journal Nature, by the age of 6 or 7, children are zealously devoted to the equitable partitioning of goods, and they will choose to punish those who try to grab more than their arithmetically proper share of Smarties and jelly beans even when that means the punishers must sacrifice their own portion of treats. [...]

Note: there were some studies that suggest the evolutionary roots:

A sense of fairness is both cerebral and visceral, cortical and limbic. In the journal PLoS Biology, Katarina Gospic of the Karolinska Institute’s Osher Center in Stockholm and her colleagues analyzed brain scans of 35 subjects as they played the famed Ultimatum game, in which participants bargain over how to divide up a fixed sum of money. Immediately upon hearing an opponent propose a split of 80 percent me, 20 percent you, scanned subjects showed a burst of activity in the amygdala, the ancient seat of outrage and aggression, followed by the arousal of higher cortical domains associated with introspection, conflict resolution and upholding rules; and 40 percent of the time they angrily rejected the deal as unfair.

That first swift limbic kick proved key. When given a mild anti-anxiety drug that suppressed the amygdala response, subjects still said they viewed an 80-20 split as unjust, but their willingness to reject it outright dropped in half. “This indicates that the act of treating people fairly and implementing justice in society has evolutionary roots,“ Dr. Gospic said. “It increases our survival.”

Interestingly enough, this “fairness” vision really doesn’t vary by liberal versus conservative. The article goes on to point out that when Republicans and Democrats were given the opportunity to map out what the distribution of wealth would look like if society were just, both came up with the same map (similar to Sweden’s). The Republicans and Democrats differ on how to get there rather than where we should be.