Monthly Archives: January 2008

Election

The Audacity of Hope

A Margin That Will Be Hard To Marginalize – washingtonpost.com, By Alec MacGillis, Washington Post Staff Writer

“I did not travel around this state and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina,” he said. The election, he said, “is not about rich versus poor or young versus old, and it’s not about black versus white. This election is about the past versus the future.” …

“Don’t let people make you afraid,” he said in Kingstree. [mjh: Obama is the anti-Republicans. Republicans preach constant fear.]

Election

Sheep No More?

This Time, McCain Defused Conservative Attacks – washingtonpost.com, By Juliet Eilperin and Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writers

[Notorious gasbag Lush] Limbaugh led the way with a verbal blitz, not just against McCain but against his closest rival in South Carolina, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

“I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party. It’s going to change it forever, be the end of it,” Limbaugh fumed on his radio show Tuesday. It was a line of argument that he kept up all week long.

DeLay resurfaced on Fox News Friday to excoriate McCain for working with “the most liberal Democrats in the Senate,” for passing an overhaul of campaign finance laws that “completely neutered the Republican Party,” and single-handedly thwarted oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of,” said DeLay, the former House majority leader, who was personally damaged by McCain’s Senate probe of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a probe that implicated numerous DeLay associates.

Conservative blogger Patrick Ruffini, on the Web site of popular radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, implored South Carolina Republicans on Friday to vote for Huckabee, simply to extend the nomination fight in hopes that another candidate could derail McCain.

And Jim DeMint, South Carolina’s ardently conservative senator who is backing Mitt Romney, issued a message Friday to “fellow conservatives,” warning that “Washington experience is the problem, not the solution. We cannot afford to have a President who has fought for amnesty for illegal immigrants, voted against the Bush Tax Cuts, and curtailed our First Amendment rights in the ill-conceived campaign finance legislation.” He never mentioned McCain’s name, but his meaning was clear.

The assault may well have narrowed McCain’s lead over Huckabee, but it was not enough to revive the ghosts of 2000, when an insurgent McCain campaign slammed into a wall in South Carolina, and Bush, the establishment’s candidate, cruised to the White House.”

Election

Defeat White

What’s Wrong With This Picture?: ACLU Is On the Loose by M.G. Bralley

Sheriff White doesn’t get it, or doesn’t care. The violation of the Constitutional rights comes from allowing the group of supporters to be closer than other citizens based on their message.

Sheriff White fails to understand the rationale behind the legal exception that allows for restricting parts of the First Amendment, specifically: speech, peaceable assembly and the right to petition government for a redress of grievances. Both protesters and supporters have equal rights. …

Sheriff White cannot get past the first criteria, content neutrality. He tries to use security as an excuse, but to do so, he has to judge the nature of the messages, pro and con.

Sheriff White was the 2004 Bush Bernalillo County re-election coordinator, when Vice President Cheney came to Rio Rancho High School to speak at a public gathering. Apparently, using “Section V. Crowd Raising and Ticket Distribution” of the Advance Manual, “Proper ticket distribution is vital to creating a well-balanced crowd and deterring potential protesters from attending events.” Sheriff White required citizens, wanting to attend, to sign a loyalty oath to the Republican Party to obtain tickets for the event.

http://mgbralley-whatswrongwiththispicture.blogspot.com/2008/01/aclu-is-on-loose.html

Election

Whose Stimulus Makes the Grade?

Ruth Marcus – Whose Stimulus Makes the Grade? – washingtonpost.com

One of the benefits of an extended presidential campaign is that it presents real-world tests for candidates. Some take the form of pop quizzes assessing contenders’ instincts in a crisis. Others are more like take-home exams — the latest, and perhaps most revealing, being competing plans for an economic stimulus.

In practical terms, this is irrelevant: The moment for stimulus will be long past by Inauguration Day. But as a way of judging how candidates view government’s role, how they balance politics and policy, and how sound their thinking is on economic policy, the proposals offer a revealing report card.

My grading starts with President Bush, because he sets the curve.

George W. Bush: B-minus. …

Barack Obama: A-minus. I criticized his previous tax plan, but Obama is at the head of the class with an intelligently designed, $120 billion stimulus plan. He would speed a $250 tax credit to most workers, followed by another $250, triggered automatically, if the economy continues on its sour path. Obama would direct a similar rebate to low- and middle-income seniors, who are also apt to spend and could get checks quickly. One demerit: Obama omits any increase in food stamp benefits, which Moody’s estimates would have the greatest bang for the buck, $1.73 for every dollar spent.

John Edwards: B-minus. …

Hillary Clinton: C-plus. Clinton, too, raised the issue early, then turned in a faulty first draft with a $70 billion stimulus plan that didn’t provide much immediate stimulation. It included a $25 billion increase in the program to help low-income Americans with heating costs — an excessive amount (the current program is under $3 billion) that probably wouldn’t kick in until next winter. Even worse was her housing plan, including a five-year freeze on subprime mortgage rates that could produce higher interest rates and reduce liquidity.

Four days later, Clinton said she would immediately implement a $40 billion tax rebate plan she had put in reserve in her first draft. Fine, but overall, the Obama plan devotes a far greater percentage to spending that is more likely to jump-start the economy.

John McCain: D-plus. …

Mitt Romney: D. …

Mike Huckabee: D-minus. …

Rudy Giuliani: Incomplete. …

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/22/AR2008012202614.html

Dump Duhbya

Impeach DUHbya

Iraq: The War Card – The Center for Public Integrity
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

NADA, Uncategorized

Oh, gawd, Huckabee is worse than I thought

3 Comments

The Raw Story | Huckabee: Amend Constitution to be in ‘God’s standards’ by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Huckabee_Amend_Constitution_to_meet_Gods_0115.html

[hattip to newmexiken.com]

Uncategorized

That’s My Clone, Not My Twin

Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells – washingtonpost.com, By Rick Weiss

Cloning involves fusing an ordinary body cell with a female’s egg cell whose DNA has been removed. Chemical factors inside the egg reprogram the body cell’s DNA so that the newly created cell develops into an embryo that is a genetic twin of the person or animal that donated the body cell.

I’ve long had a question about cloning. As I understand the process, you take one cell (typically an egg cell), remove its nucleus and insert a nucleus from another cell, creating a clone of the cell the nucleus came from. If the cell into which this nucleus was inserted is an egg, you grow a cloned individual.

What I never hear discussed in this is mitochondria. Mitochondria are the so-called powerhouses in cells, responsible for converting fuel into energy. Oddly, mitochondria reproduce themselves separately from the more famous mitosis. As I understand it — and I’m no scientist, as may be more than obvious to one — your mitochondria all come from your mother. Which is to say, mitochondria come from the egg.

So, my clone and I are not exact duplicates. I have my mother’s mitochondria (as would my twin). He does not. Is the explanation simply that lay-people misunderstand the word ‘clone’ to mean an exact duplicate? Or do scientist simply shrug this off because — as far as we know now (the key phrase in science) — mitochondria are irrelevant to individuality? mjh