Sunday, March 24, 2013
Saturday, March 23, 2013
I'm choosey
about who I let in or near or make decisions about my lady parts. That does not include anyone from the government or the right wing hypocrites who lie about opposing big government, and who hate women, sex and sexuality.
They will lose; it is only a matter of time. The conservatives are ALWAYS on the wrong side of history.
They will lose; it is only a matter of time. The conservatives are ALWAYS on the wrong side of history.
History will judge harshly
How many people died, how many people were injured, how much destruction was there -- and how much money taken from the American people through tax payer dollars transferred to no-bid contract corporations like Haliburton and its many subsidiaries? And what resulted? Only failure...except for a few greedy bastards.
Tea Party hot, Tea Party cold, Tea Party crazy
The Tea Party wants cuts to spending on everyone but themselves - stupid, selfish bastards.
Even Conservatives think Bachmann is wrong - and crazy
Rumor has it that the MN GOP is getting ready to primary Bachmann with a new conservative candidate to run for Congress in CD 6 next election cycle. On the other side, it looks like Jim Graves will run again, either against Bachmann - or whoever wins the primary.
Between her narrow squeak of a win in the 2012 election, and her disgraceful dumping in the 2012 presidential primaries, and the fact she had to raise most of her money for that election outside the state, and spend 12 times more than her opponent, the right seems to be losing faith in Michele 'Crazy Eyes' Bachmann.
From the MN Progressive Project:
Even conservatives think Bachmann is wrong
Someone should explain to Michele Bachmann that running for office is a metaphor, not a literal track and field competition. She’s been running away from people at considerable speed, while ducking and dodging conversations with others.
When you have to hoof it for the hills, you’re doing something wrong.
Last night Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly lit into the Congresswoman for wrongly attacking Obama over her false claims about extravagant living. The WaPo fact checkers gave her their harshest rating, 4 pinnochios for her false claims about the president – like her crazy claims about his trip to India during his first term.
We tend to expect people who deal in facts, rather than the right wing alternate reality bubble, to call out Bachmann, as they also did for her crazy, factually deficient rant at CPAC as well. After all, Bachmann is pretty much a 24 / 7 fountain of right wing ideology without any contamination of reality.
It’s entirely different to see the right wingers at Fox News going after tea party queen Bachmann, calling her crazy. They are as chronically inaccurate and misleading as she is, a genuine pot/kettle blackness competition. It strongly suggests her star has fallen faster than the recent asteroid crashing in Russia.
As noted by Raw Story
I would argue the problem is not ‘small ball’ but big factual failure.
The attack by Bill O’Reilly raises the important question, what will Bachmann do to try to regain her right wing status? Her grandstanding over an attempt to widen I-94 in her district looks like a failure, so what will she try next? Her chances are looking less rosy to win a second time against Jim Graves, so will she try for a more prestigious office short of the Presidency again – like Senator or Governor? I’d bet she would have even less chance succeeding at that, but bad odds did not discourage her from trying to be the GOP candidate. Other candidates and wannabes have ended up on Fox News, it is like the right wing safety net for failures like Herman Cain and Sarah Palin — but if they’re going after Bachmann, like Palin she might be too dumb for even Fox News to be willing to take her on in the future. That could be a factor in what she decides to do in 2014, with diminishing options available to her.
Between her narrow squeak of a win in the 2012 election, and her disgraceful dumping in the 2012 presidential primaries, and the fact she had to raise most of her money for that election outside the state, and spend 12 times more than her opponent, the right seems to be losing faith in Michele 'Crazy Eyes' Bachmann.
From the MN Progressive Project:
Even conservatives think Bachmann is wrong
Someone should explain to Michele Bachmann that running for office is a metaphor, not a literal track and field competition. She’s been running away from people at considerable speed, while ducking and dodging conversations with others.
When you have to hoof it for the hills, you’re doing something wrong.
Last night Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly lit into the Congresswoman for wrongly attacking Obama over her false claims about extravagant living. The WaPo fact checkers gave her their harshest rating, 4 pinnochios for her false claims about the president – like her crazy claims about his trip to India during his first term.
We tend to expect people who deal in facts, rather than the right wing alternate reality bubble, to call out Bachmann, as they also did for her crazy, factually deficient rant at CPAC as well. After all, Bachmann is pretty much a 24 / 7 fountain of right wing ideology without any contamination of reality.
It’s entirely different to see the right wingers at Fox News going after tea party queen Bachmann, calling her crazy. They are as chronically inaccurate and misleading as she is, a genuine pot/kettle blackness competition. It strongly suggests her star has fallen faster than the recent asteroid crashing in Russia.
As noted by Raw Story
On Tuesday, Bachmann had fled CNN cameras after reporter Dana Bash confronted her about the claims she had made at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend.I would argue that Bachmann has the same problem being perceived as running away from reporters with tough questions that tripped her up in her presidential run — and that was a challenge to other Republican candidates that dodged the hard questions from reporters. The Romney / Ryan ticket was notoriously light on details when pressed, which did not impress voters, clearly. Ryan ended interviews that had hard questions. Romney tap danced like Fred Astaire around questions relating to his off-shoring jobs, and his not so private donor ’47%’ comments. Bachmann ran away from hard questions every time, cutting off any reporter who asked her something she didn’t like – notably on the gay reparative therapy her clinic offered, and the blunder on papilloma virus vaccine causing mental retardation. I don’t think anyone believes people who dodge the hard questions are potential good leaders who can deal with a crisis, they're just cowards and crazies.
As the congresswoman briskly walked away, she claimed that the speech had been about the president’s failures in Benghazi.
During his Wednesday broadcast, O’Reilly said that Bachmann had also refused to talk to him.
“This would be much ado about nothing if not for the fact that trivial attacks on President Obama obscuring serious problems in this country,” the Fox News host explained. “[E]very other president in history has lived in comfort, and it looks like President Bush the younger had a bigger White House budget than Barack Obama does. This is a trivial pursuit and Michele Bachmann made a mistake pursuing it.”
“Mr. Obama is entitled to convenience, protection and comfort as he runs the nation,” O’Reilly added. “Congresswoman Bachmann and all opponents of Mr. Obama should zero in on what’s really important: the president’s failure to deal with out-of-control spending and his core belief that America’s not a fair country. That’s what’s important, not who’s walking the presidential dog. By the way, that’s the gardener who walks the dog. And he’s always walked the dog!”
I would argue the problem is not ‘small ball’ but big factual failure.
The attack by Bill O’Reilly raises the important question, what will Bachmann do to try to regain her right wing status? Her grandstanding over an attempt to widen I-94 in her district looks like a failure, so what will she try next? Her chances are looking less rosy to win a second time against Jim Graves, so will she try for a more prestigious office short of the Presidency again – like Senator or Governor? I’d bet she would have even less chance succeeding at that, but bad odds did not discourage her from trying to be the GOP candidate. Other candidates and wannabes have ended up on Fox News, it is like the right wing safety net for failures like Herman Cain and Sarah Palin — but if they’re going after Bachmann, like Palin she might be too dumb for even Fox News to be willing to take her on in the future. That could be a factor in what she decides to do in 2014, with diminishing options available to her.
What Fox News won't tell you about President Obama's trip
Friday, March 22, 2013
Planck - the mission, not the exercise, this is awesome
from facebook's I fucking love science:
Analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Planck mission has found out some pretty cool new things about our universe, including:
- It's older than we believed, at about 13.81 billion years.
- It's expanding more slowly than we expected.
- It's made up of 4.9 percent normal matter, 26.8 percent dark matter, and 68.3 percent dark energy.
- And finally, that it's a tiny bit lopsided.
Read more here: http://slate.me/Yci6Bi- It's older than we believed, at about 13.81 billion years.
- It's expanding more slowly than we expected.
- It's made up of 4.9 percent normal matter, 26.8 percent dark matter, and 68.3 percent dark energy.
- And finally, that it's a tiny bit lopsided.
and from the same site, which puts the above in a very real and sobering context:
Surrogacy, religious fanatics, and liberty
 |
| IVF, from sciencemag.org |
The Minnesota Family Council apparently hates infertile couples who seek help in starting families. In North Dakota, they’re trying to abolish fertility procedures AND to outlaw some of the most popular forms of contraception.
Approximately 60,000 babies are born through In Vitro Fertilization aka IVF. The ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, back in 2009, " found no persuasive evidence that children are harmed or disadvantaged solely by being raised by single parents, unmarried parents, or homosexual parents. It did not support restricting access to assisted reproductive technologies on the basis of a prospective parent's marital status or sexual orientation."
The legislators from the religious right that, sadly, dominate the legislature of North Dakota don't care what the science and scientists, the experts, have to say. They want to oppress people with their beliefs, in their minds for our own good, no matter how evil they are in practice.
I’m struck by how the right, despite their abuse of the word Freedom, are consistently the ones who try to trample the rights of other people. They believe, apparently, that they are superior to the rest of us, that their imaginary moral superiority entitles them to force their religious beliefs on everyone else. The reality is that they have NO moral superiority, and that they have no justification either in belief or in science for coercing anyone else to conform to their ugly ideals. The right doesn’t even conform to their own ideals. The party that asserts they are against big government, intrusive government, are the hypocrites who are expanding government, and expanding that intrusion.
This is not only the action of a party that trusts people to make their own decisions, to act according to their own moral compass; this is the party of prudes who hate and fear sex, and fail to show any factual understanding of it. This is the party that distrusts people to think for themselves, that punishes anyone who defies their efforts to coerce conformity. The right is not in any way shape or form the party of liberty, patriotism or personal freedom. It tries to remove freedom to control our own bodies, make our own decisions, or to respect REAL religious freedom of conscience. The right is the party of superstition that attributes hurricanes to human sexuality.
No intelligent person should vote for people who make such badly informed decisions that have such destructive and unsuccessful outcomes.The Minnesota Family Council uses the motto “strengthening families, advancing truth” but does neither. In a mass email mailing earlier this week on surrogacy. Surrogacy allows infertile couples to have children, either their own children through in vitro fertilization of the mother’s ova and the father’s spermatozoa, or through the use of one parent’s contribution with donor material, either egg or sperm, using a host mother. Ive known women who have been host mothers to other people’s embryos from IVF. I’ve known families with IVF kids. It is NOTHING like their fear mongering in this email:
Please, contact members of the Minnesota Senate Judiciary Committee and ask them to oppose SF 370 which gives legal effect to surrogacy agreements, “baby selling” in Minnesota. A hearing on this bill will happen Thursday or Friday of this week, so there is no time to waste.What is surrogacy? Surrogacy agreements are between person(s) who hire a woman to use her uterus to carry and deliver a child for another couple or persons.What’s the problem with surrogacy?Do we do any kind of bacground checks before parents conceive NOW? No. Do you want to see every pregnancy have that kind of intrusion? No. What is this REALLY about? In part it is about preventing single parents and same sex couples from having children, just as the bigoted homophobes on the right try to obstruct same sex oriented individuals and couples from adopting. No state law, no change in the proposed legislation treats human beings as a commodity; we DO need legal recognition of surrogate agreements to protect all parties concerned including the children. But the notion that low income women are being exploited for this process is unsupported by any evidence, as is the notion that this turns reproduction into a commodity. This isn’t about protecting anyone; this is about an attempt to use the legal process to try to harass a group of people the conservatives hate and malign.
What would this bill do?
- Children are treated as commodities to be bought and sold.
- Surrogacy agreements exploit women for reproductive purposes. Surrogates are usually poor, low income women who sell their reproductive abilities for cash.
- This bill includes no regulation of the surrogate process, e.g. background checks on intended parents under the contract, criminal checks, health considerations, all done in the adoption process to ensure the best interests off child are protected.
In the same time period, in NoDak next door, we have the attempt to pass a fetal personhood law which would do the same thing – eliminate fertility clinic service. Consistently, the majority of Americans support the right to an abortion and to easily accessible, affordable contraception. The actions of groups like those in North Dakota and in Minnesota to oppose that right succeeds not because they are the majority but because they are a rabid, fanatical extremist minority.
According to the STrib earlier this week:
Dr. Stephanie Dahl, a Fargo infertility specialist, said Monday that the personhood measures could ban in vitro fertilization and force doctors to leave the state rather than face health care restrictions or possible criminal penalties. In vitro fertilization, or IVF, involves mixing egg and sperm in a laboratory dish and transferring resulting embryos into the womb.The Strib went on to note:
“This is something that would affect the patient and doctor relationship,” Dahl said at a news conference with a group of doctors who oppose the measures. “That’s somewhere we want to keep the government out of.” Legislators claim that they don’t wish to end IVF, but clearly many on the right do want to end this reproductive option. As the Strib further noted, the reproductive medical community rejects these assurances because of the efforts to criminalize aspects of the process, “But Dr. Steffen Christensen, who founded an in vitro fertilization clinic in Fargo 19 years ago, said he can’t put himself or his workers at risk of legal action. The concern is that this is criminal negligence if anything should happen to an embryo,” he said.”
Opponents also noted that the North Dakota Medical Association is against the bill and a group of 26 students from the University of North Dakota medical school signed a letter to the state Senate against it.Banning abortions and the end of fertility services in North Dakota would mean more women, more couples, coming to Minnesota for those services. Ending such services here or restricting them would affect not only Minnesota but our larger region.
Dr. Ted Kleiman, a Fargo pediatrician, said the law would set North Dakota back to “the stone age” of medicine.
“This is abhorrent in the highest degree,” he said.
Other legislation passed in North Dakota restricts abortion to six weeks, well before some women even know they are pregnant – women athletes for example often have irregular or missed menstrual cycles – and forces women to carry to term regardless of rape, incest, or the life or health of the mother. North Dakota is also one of the 31 states that give rapists parental rights to their children conceived through rape, allowing the rapist to prevent the mother from seeking an abortion from rape, and forcing her to share custody throughout the child’s life. What kind of a father do you think a rapist would be? Other states have tried formally to strip rapists of any parental rights, but not those states which see it as a way to obstruct the right to an abortion.
Here’s a hint to those who want to see families protected – value women. Don’t force women to give birth, don’t give rapists parental rights, don’t complicate or criminalize abortion or surrogacy. Respect ALL families, because same sex parents are good parents single parents can be great parents. Those who do not make good families are people who are forced or coerced into parenthood. There are plenty of heterosexual couples who are terrible parents; sexual orientation is not a goo predictor of parenting or family success. While two parent households, either same sex or heterosexual, tend to be better for kids, there are other factors that are more critical than number of gender or sexual orientation of parents to successful parenting and healthy happy families.
The right needs to be told to butt the hell out of people’s lives, their medical decisions, their relationships with doctors, clergy and family members. THAT is not the appropriate role of government. That is the worst kind of BIG government, intrusive government. They are the worst kind of intrusion of fear, intolerance, ignorance, superstition, and the rejection of science. Respect ALL people, all families, and especially respect women if you want healthy children, healthy relationships, healthy well-adjusted adults. The right wing way is the way of oppression, hatred, and it is just plain wrong in every respect.
We must oppose the tyranny of conservative prejudice and ignorance and superstition. Most of all we need to end the tyranny of conservatives over women and our bodies.
Women Power
By way of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. We need to end gender discrimination - this is why; women have a great deal to offer, in every aspect of our lives.
World Water Day 2013
We have a problem with global warming / climate change, and increasing drought. Drought causes famine, drought conditions causes larger areas to become arid, and causes increased frequency and severity of forest fires.
Here in Minnesota, drought over the past several years has resulted in increased irrigation for agriculture, which in turn has dramatically reduced the levels of water in our aquifers.
2013 is the year of Water Cooperation. We need to conserve it, including preventing pollution; we need to address the problems related to glacial melt and the resulting changes to our oceans; we need to address the problems in our country from the lack of adequate snow pack in our western states, and we need to address how that affects our food supply and the food supply of the world, including both availability and affordability.
Famine/food scarcity and rising food costs were a huge factor in the overthrow of governments across Africa in the Arab Spring revolutions and civil wars. Food insecurity, a $20 word for hunger, is a very real problem for an increasing number of people here in the United States at a time when conservatives are cutting the funding for the social safety net that addresses that problem. Students cannot learn in school when they are hungry or fed, but with inadequate nutritional content.
Economically we pay our agricultural and food industry workers badly, in many cases not enough to feed themselves or their own families. As the availability of water continues to become more scarce, this will be an increasing problem economically and socially.
In transportation, our rivers are no longer able to handle shipping traffic as effectively as before. So, if you think water is not an issue that affects you, think again. The message from Ban Ki Moon:
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)