As a man who considers fealty to facts and logic one of the highest virtues a human being can posses, I am currently in humble and abject awe of Barney Frank:
All laughing aside, the good Congressman is making a deeper point here, one that has been touched on in other forums: There really are two Americas; one of people for whom facts are objective and universal, and a second made up of those for whom they are not. For those of us in the “reality based” America, holding a national conversation with those in the second is a pointless endeavor. Continue reading…
Rick Santorum is running for President. The man who said overturning sodomy laws would open the door to incest thinks that four years after the American electorate voted Barack Obama into the White House, it will do the same for him.
In an interview with FOX News, Santorum dodged the 2012 question, but told Greta Van Susteren:
And you know, yes, I went to Iowa because I’m very concerned about what’s going on in America right now. And as you know, I mean, I come on here on FOX and I write and I do radio and I do a lot of things because I’m very concerned about the direction of this country. And I do know this, and I certainly have known it for the last 24 hours, that when you go and give a speech in Iowa, people pay attention to what you’re doing and what you’re saying, and that’s what I hope to accomplish.
This man will never be President
So he’s not willing to state the obvious outright but he will admit to wanting people to “pay attention to what [he's] doing and what [he's] saying,” so he’s not necessarily running, but he’d like us to keep him in mind when the time comes, thank you very much. Continue reading…
When protesters take an image so clearly tied to anarchy and label it socialism, it exhibits an intellectual laziness that typifies the central flaw that will soon collapse the birther/deather movement. [...]
A party without a vision and carrying out a stupid strategy.
I wish I could be in the room for some of the GOP leadership’s strategy sessions these days, because, in all honesty, I haven’t got a clue what they think is going on.
The latest economic numbers have unemployment down slightly for the first time since April of ‘08, GDP fell less than expected, the stock market has climbed to levels we haven’t seen since last November and the dollar rose against both the Yen and the Euro. Sure, there’s a lot more to these numbers the further into them you delve, but, as has become abundantly clear over the course of this recession, emotional responses matter just as much as salient details. The Republicans, fresh off their effort to sell this as Obama’s economy, now face the problem of convincing the public of the exact opposite, that improvements in a number of indicators have, in fact, nothing to do with the President’s efforts. No one saw that possibility coming? Is their ideology so blinding that they never even considered that the stimulus could, in fact, have a beneficial effect on the economy? And here I was thinking the planning sessions for the Iraq War were a fluke. Continue reading…
Freedom from religion is not the same as freedom of religion. It is a specific instance of freedom of religion. Consider the freedom of speech. This freedom necessarily entails the freedom to refrain from speaking if one so chooses. How about freedom of assembly? Does this mean that we can assemble with whomever we choose, but we must always be in some way assembled? Not at all. [...]
