Their only persuasive claim remaining

The GOP primary in Wisconsin by the numbers, conservatives dislike their candidates

In spite of the high voter turnout there is a lack of enthusiasm for both of the leading GOP candidates that was on show in the primary in next-door Wisconsin.  A lack of enthusiasm was responsible for the failure of Mitt Romney in 2012.  A different way of saying essentially the same thing is that Trump - and Cruz - have high unfavorability ratings in polls.

Once again we are being treated to unsubstantiated accusations that Cruz 'stole' Trump's election. Trump never had a likely win in Wisconsin.  I will be the first to acknowledge that Cruz has used dirty tricks, but it's not like Trump is any more honest in his campaigning than Cruz either.  Both have a record of playing dirty.

To be fair, Hillary Clinton has a higher unfavorability level than is healthy for her success in either the primary or the general election too, but they are nowhere near as high as Trump's.  And typically a higher turnout benefits Dems in ways that don't have appear to hold true for Republicans.

It is true, at this point, Trump has more delegates than Cruz and Kasich combined; Kasich isn't going to get out of the race ahead of the Ohio convention.  Because he has so many more delegates, he believes, he FEELS, the nomination is his -- another example of faulty right wing entitlement he has persuaded his supporters to share with him. 

The WaPo has an excellent map here of the voting distribution by candidates; Kasich did not win a single county.

However many of Trump's supporters who are aggrieved, it won't make a significant difference to those who disapprove of him.  And the level of enthusiasm won't give him a guaranteed win - Trump appears to demand a so-called coronation that he is not likely to get.

Even before the Wisconsin primary, Trump has been making some false statements that his supporters were turning out record numbers of voters; NEW voters.  No surprise, that doesn't appear to be the case if you look at the findings of Factcheck.org.  Factcheck.org correctly analyzed the numbers, while Trump was misrepresenting those figures.

Trump Touts GOP Turnout

• By Robert Farley
• Posted on March 22, 2016

In making the case for his electability in the general election, Donald Trump said that when it comes to primary voter turnout so far “the Democrats are down 35 percent, whereas the Republicans are up over 70 percent.”
Actually, both Republicans and Democrats are seeing higher primary voter turnouts compared with 2012.
But in fairness to Trump, a comparison with 2008 makes more sense, given it was the last time both parties had contested primaries at this stage. And by that measure, Trump is nearly accurate, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center of primary voter turnout for each party going back to 1980.
But 2008 was an outlier for Democrats, far outpacing primary voter turnout over the last several decades. With the exception of 2008, Democratic turnout this year is higher than any year since 1992. Meanwhile, Republican primary turnout is the highest it has been going back to at least 1980, when Pew began tracking primary voter turnout.
As for Trump’s larger point, experts warn there is no evidence that high primary turnout leads to general election success.
Trump made his claim about primary voter turnout on ABC’s “This Week,” in response to a question about the possibility of a brokered convention and whether the Republican Party ought to give Trump the nod even if he falls short of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination on a first ballot.
...The analysis also found that in four of five elections, the party with the larger raw increase in primary voter turnout from the previous election lost the popular vote in the general election. And in terms of percentage change, the party whose primary turnout improved the most won the popular vote in the general election only two out of five times.
There are examples that back up Trump’s point, such as in 2008, when very high Democratic turnout preceded a Democratic victory in the November general election. But there are as many instances when the reverse happened. In 1988, for example, Democrats had a much higher primary turnout than Republicans, but the Republican, George H.W. Bush handily defeated the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, in the general election.
In other words, Burden said, “There’s no relationship at all.”
Sometimes, high primary turnout is driven by enthusiasm for opposing candidates in a tight race. That was the case in 2008 when voters were choosing between the potential for the first woman president or the first African American, Burden said. Other times, though, it can be a sign of party turmoil, which can spell trouble in a general election, he said.
Republicans are setting records now for primary turnout, Burden said, and some of that is enthusiasm for the candidates. But some of it, he said, is being driven by a desire among some to stop Trump from getting the nomination.

Proving the point, Conservatives have a completely failed set of priorities and fears, and badly failed values as well

Not to mention an utter failure to grasp cause and effect.

It's science, stupid!

The gun-obsessed insist on a faulty reasoning, that if you restrict guns, only criminals will have guns.  That is not true, in nations where guns are much more restricted than in the USA, there is lower rates of crimes with guns and lower rates of gun violence.  Gun restrictions keeps firearms OUT OF THE HANDS OF CRIMINALS.

I have yet to see a solid, reasoned or valid peer review (one which is supported by other experts in an appropriate related field) which validates the claims of the gun obsessed.  The Journal of the American Medical Association is no lightweight organization/publication.

From ScienceNews.orgMagazine issue:

Vol. 189, No. 7, April 2, 2016, p. 5

Guns, drugs, cars. Sounds like a formula for an action movie, but the list may explain why American men don’t live as long as men in other high-income countries.

In the United States, average life expectancy among men is 76.4 years — about two years shorter than men who live in Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and nine other countries. Deaths due to injuries are the reason for much of the gap, researchers report in the Feb. 9 JAMA.

An analysis of U.S. and World Health Organization data revealed that deaths from injuries due to firearms, drug poisonings and auto crashes account for 48 percent of the difference in men’s life expectancies. These causes of death are less of a problem for American women, the researchers found.

  

Conservatives either Don't KNOW the basics of biology, or they are eager to DENY IT - and to make denial LAW

I have long contended that conservatives generally, and Minnesota conservatives specifically, do not have a good grasp of basic biology - the stuff you should be able to pass in K-12. They don't do too well on other science subjects either, like seismology (earthquake science) or evolution, geology, and archeology.  (It is worth noting the latter legislator is nominally a democrat, but in fact another conservative. He likes to focus on....sigh..Bible principles and the United States Constitution; in other words, another know-nothing-and-proud-of-it.)

We are lucky if a conservative doesn't believe God plants babies in cabbage patches, to avoid the fact that babies result from SEX. 

Sadly, conservatives also seek to dumb-down others.

So long as conservatives don't understand basic anatomy, or reproductive biology, sex, gender, sexuality or sexual orientation, they have no legitimate business passing any kind of legislation relating to those topics.

That I am correct in my contention has been widely demonstrated, most recently in the state legislature with the proposed anti-trans bathroom bill, legislation which is not only badly misinformed but likely unconstitutional.  And it is demonstrated again with the recent research cited in the Minnesota Daily (h/t to my colleague at MN PP for alerting me to this story).

Conservatives lie about abortion; they try to force states to promote their lies to women as if they were factual.  They are not.

Here is, via the MN Daily, a list of the many things about which these conservatives have lied, including here in MN.  It's worse in states with a greater proportion of conservatives in power.  I have to disagree with the headline however, while Minnesota is one of the states reviewed, Minnesota was not targeted per se, and all state identifying information was removed for the review.

Study targets Minnesota abortion information

Twenty percent of content in state literature is inaccurate or misleading, the study said.

A fifth of the information in Minnesota state-produced pamphlets given to women seeking abortions has been deemed medically inaccurate by new academic research.

The study examined pamphlets produced by states that have “Woman’s Right to Know”  laws. Under this law, Minnesota requires that before moving forward with an abortion, women must receive a Minnesota Department of Health pamphlet on risks associated with abortion and fetal development, as well as information on resources if she decides to carry to term.

Rutgers University researchers looked at 23 of the 29 states with the law for the study, which will be published in print next month in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. Researchers later added information on three more states to their study online.

Minnesota was among the states with the least amount of inaccuracies, with 51 out of 250 statements deemed incorrect by professional anatomists. 

After stripping the statements of state identifiers, the panel of fetal development experts used two scales to assess the accuracy or misleading nature of each statement.  

Study co-author and Rutgers University Ph.D. Candidate Grace Howard said that in all 26 state handbooks studied, there were inaccuracies — usually descriptions of a fetus as more developed than it would be at that stage or unrealistic size and weight measurements. 

“We saw in fetal development information a tendency to describe the fetus as more advanced developmentally than it was,” she said. “You can often see that in statements about viability, size and potentiality of a fetus.”

The last few pages of the MDH pamphlet describe abortion methods, medical risks and long-term side effects, including the “emotional side of abortion” and “fetal pain” — both contentious national issues.

“We have better research on the effects of abortion, like breast cancer, fertility and mental health problems,” Howard said. “The science has been clear that abortion doesn’t actually affect these things. There is new research that very much confirms that abortion does not cause mental health problems.” 

Of all the pamphlets from the 26 states studied, the study found the most complete inaccuracies in the statements about the first trimester, during which many women get an abortion. 

For example, the panel unanimously ranked “arm and leg buds present” during the second week of pregnancy as entirely medically inaccurate, according to the study.

“A fetus doesn’t actually have fingers, toes, legs [early in the pregnancy],” Howard said. “But a statement in the brochure might say this part is forming or will form.”

Across all states, one-third of all the statements were found to be inaccurate, the study said. 

The research didn’t assess the lasting impact medical inaccuracies and misleading information has on women, but similar studies — examining women’s responses in states that offer ultrasounds or the chance to hear a fetal heartbeat before abortion — show that the vast majority of women still move forward with the procedure. 

For some women, a lack of knowledge of how abortions affect women’s health and well-being leads them to agree with statements that aren’t backed up by science, Roberts said.

We need to fix this, and conservatives will fight accurate information every step of the way. Better yet, we need to leave medical education of patients entirely up to their doctors, and butt out of this kind of informational requirement entirely. But it will take a clear majority of Democrats, and a Democratic governor for that to happen.

John Oliver correctly identifies what is wrong with Trump on Nukes Use

The right consistently goes with emotion over reason.

The right is belligerently anti-intellectual; they are at best antagonistic to knowledge and to people who have knowledge.  They call them elites and intellectuals, they distrust these people who know more than they do, and they resent any need on their part to acquire knowledge and skill in critical thinking.

This is why they like simplistic answers, no matter how wrong they are.  Remember the Ebola scare, where the right wing nuts were running around like a character out of Chicken Little claiming the sky was falling? The simplistic - but WRONG - solution they demanded was to ban travel from Africa.  This was widely popular among the base on the right, and it was broadly articulated by prominent right wing populist leaders.  While it was a solution that medical experts insisted would not KEEP people safer from an epidemic, it made the right FEEL better that they would be safe.

The right consistently goes with emotion over facts and reason.

Obama did not do that, and as a result we had a couple of cases of Ebola, that were well managed, except for that one case in Texas.  Swaggering, inept, cheapskate Texas - enough said.

And conservatives were persuaded that if we did not ban that travel, we were all going to die, en masse, with blood gushing from every orifice in an apocalyptic nightmare.

It did not happen.  It did not happen because the person in power - President Obama - made his decisions based on knowledge and reason and the advice of medical science experts.

The anti-Muslim and anti-Europe positions of the right, as articulated by right wing leaders and propagandists,  FEElS good to emotion driven conservatives.  They don't want no stinking information, they don't want to have to think critically, and most of all they don't want the advice of thoughtful and informed experts on the subject.

Which is why Trump and Cruz and the rest can say stupid, irresponsible things on foreign policy and military strategies, and they will be embraced by the right wing nut base. 

John Oliver calls it wonderfully.

Sack Nails IT

Hooray for the Green Nineteen + 1

There are real problems for our own state from climate change.

There is a real problem with fraud from the well funded oil interests and other fossil fuel energy interests.

ASSLaw, so aptly named, although Greedy ASSLaw would have more truth in advertizing

Conservatives promote their own alternate economics schools to promote wealth and income inequality policies

ASSLAW.

 I did not make this up.

I swear, I did not make this up. It appears to be a real name change, bought and paid for with conservative cash.  ASSLaw is the abbreviation for Antonin Scalia School of Law, formerly known as George Mason Law.

George Mason was a founding father of some distinction.

Other than being propped up by Koch bucks, I would venture the opinion that over time Antonin Scalia's SCOTUS legacy will be very poor, and not at all distinguished.

It is a toss up as to which is worse, the timing of the announcement, the aptness of the acronym, or yet another example of the Koch brothers buying ideological educational entities where they can cheat honest education.

The right has contrived their own echo chamber world, with fake professional organizations like the bogus American COLLEGE of Pediatrics, media that promotes a less factual worldview and which encourages conspiracy theories and other nuttery, and of course their own skewed world view in educational institutions. 

This is how you grow an ideology that embraces Trump.  You literally contrive an alternate, ignorant, misinformed and disinformed world. Like this.
From 'Above the Law'

George Mason was a founding father. He was one of the men who was responsible for the Bill of Rights — he wouldn’t sign the constitution without it (or at all, ultimately). Now, the law school at the university that bears his name is changing its name to the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University. Amazingly, this is not an April Fool’s joke. Richard Kelsey, Director of the Mason Law Community, tweeted out the news.
Good lord. You are deemphasizing the name of a founding father to honor a man who fetishisized the beliefs held at the founding? A guy who didn’t go there, or have any connection to the school, who wouldn’t have hired a George Mason law student as a bathroom attendant, much less a Supreme Court clerk? That’s the guy you are renaming your law school after? Your Twitter hashtag is now #ASSLaw (Antonin Scalia School of Law).
Who was in second place, Donald Trump? Is there any reason for this? (followed by this tweet from Ian Milhiser)

 It's good that they will stop pretending to be anything other than a conservative policy shop with students.12:08 PM - 31 Mar 2016

If George Mason just wanted to appeal to conservative students, they could have called themselves the Chick-Fil-A School Of Lawsauce, and still pocketed the money.

Money, of course, is the other factor in this change.

From the WSJ:
The school expected to unveil the name change Thursday afternoon, along with an announcement that it has received two donations totaling $30 million, including a $10 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation.

LOL… the Koch brothers, man. They want so desperately to spread the gospel of conservative values that they’re willing to shove aside a founding father to make their point. I hope all of you soon-to-be “Scalia Alums” enjoy having that follow you around for the rest of your life.

And from the actual George Mason official announcement, by way of Above the Law:

The gift includes $20 million that came to George Mason through a donor who approached Leonard A. Leo of the Federalist Society, a personal friend of the late Justice Scalia and his family. The anonymous donor asked that the university name the law school in honor of the Justice. “The Scalia family is pleased to see George Mason name its law school after the Justice, helping to memorialize his commitment to a legal education that is grounded in academic freedom and a recognition of the practice of law as an honorable and intellectually rigorous craft,” said Leo. The gift also includes a $10 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation, which supports hundreds of colleges and universities across the country that pursue scholarship related to societal well-being and free societies.

 [Also from the official announcement, here is one of the scholarships:]

F.A. Hayek Law, Legislation, and Liberty Scholarship – Named in honor of the 1974 Nobel Prize winner in economics, this scholarship will be awarded to students who have a demonstrated interest in studying the application of economic principles to the law.

Scalia must be grinning in his grave, while many others above the ground are spinning, or at least their heads are.

The Audacity of Privelege

In school I generally detested writing and in high school I struggled with writing..   I still sometimes struggle to translate the thoughts I see so clearly in my mind into words on a page.    It is maddening.  My solution has too often been to throw more words at the idea in a "Dennis Leary" style stream of consciousness.  Too rarely is the synthesis concise, too rarely is it clear to the point of easy understanding.  Would that it were.

By contrast, sometimes we all engage in conversation which is unclear on purpose, in writing or in person.  Sometimes we  dissemble.  We say things which are opaque and so can be construed to mean one thing or another.  I think most will admit that dissembling isn't something we admire nor is it something to which we should aspire to engage in.  It's kissing cousins to sophistry, it's lying in a subtle way, but it is lying.

In our society today we have few candidates for President who didn't come from a privileged background or who, like President Obama, didn't attend a top tier school.  They were steeped in an education which carried a requirement to speak and write well, to speak and write with purpose.  To be successful in business I can speak with some authority that clear communication is an absolute requirement.  Lack of clarity, especially by a leader, leads only to chaos and uncertainty.   It leads to inefficiency and it leads to failure.  Many articles by CEOs name clear communication and integrity as the two greatest keys to their own success, so if you don't want to take my word for it, take theirs.  My education was comparatively pedestrian, yet I learned that stating things with clear purpose and intent was essential in school, and I learned later that it was essential in life.  My education wasn't at Oxford, I didn't learn to be so eloquent and clear in my expression that my words are going to go down in history as profound, in fact maybe only children and theirs will remember any of them.

But how should we evaluate a presidential candidate?  How should we judge someone seeking to be the top executive of our government?  Should we think of someone who has made a habit of speaking only in generalities, in making no detailed or substantive policy statements as ready? What would the world think of such a person?  Would they find him/her trustworthy.  In a world where every word the President says is examined and scrutinized, what would be the reaction to someone who says one thing one moment and quite often something very different the next, be?  What would they think of someone who said he or she would not honor prior promises and would casually violate treaties which had been struck?  Could they trust them, would they trust us, as a nation, ever again?  Even more, how do we evaluate a candidate whose words are such a jumble of incoherent incomplete sentences that it's difficult to know what he or she meant to say or would do?

Donald J Trump attended some of the top schools in the United States.  He attended the New York Military School, a private preparatory boarding school (not West Point, let's be clear).  He then started at Fordham University but transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an ivy league school, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in  Economics. Wharton, is considered one of the 3 best institutions for Economics in the country.  When someone says they wen to Wharton, everyone understands what was meant.  Mr. Trump had to express himself in complete sentences, probably even eloquently, to perform his college coursework and receive his degree from Wharton.

Over the past couple of decades Mr. Trump has weighed in on various political topics despite recently claiming he was "not a politician prior to 6 months ago."  That statement is false of course since he ran for President in 2012 and made similar overtures before that.  When expressing his opinion he has done so using language which was so vague as to be virtually meaningless.  If you read a transcript rather than heard him speak, seriously, you would struggle to know what he was trying to say.  He also has made comments which so extreme that they were immediately divisive and  unbelievably offensive.  He wanted to sound like he stood for something extreme, seemingly because it attracted followers and made him "look strong." Yet, nearly every time he spoke, he then would make a statement which allowed him to claim he didn't mean it or didn't say it.  Such as when he sarcastically called John McCain "a hero" but then said he wasn't really one because he'd "only been a hero because he was a prisoner."  When he was called out on it he said, "But I said he was a hero."  Sure he did, in a mocking questioning tone.

Mr. Trump is clearly a clever and bright man.  He has to know this is dissembling, he has to know it's lying.  Is this conduct some sort of reflection of the arrogance the privileged sometimes show toward those they see as their lessers or simply the arrogance of Trump himself?  If you think that's an unfair statement, please read on.  Mr. Trump's audacity is incredible, just in this one story, but that's my opinion, judge for yourself.  That the man capable of being clear but now opts to speak as if he were a third grader, lacking clarity, consistency or structure, seems prima fascia evidence that he knows better but respects his supporters so little that he feels he can lie to them bald-faced and won't get caught or at least won't be held accountable.  They claim he's "a straight shooter" but when told he lied seem not to care.

So, for them I offer one example, of Mr. Trump's fatuous self-aggrandizing pomposity. It speaks volumes about this man's unreadiness to be our commander-in-chief.  If you don't like Trump because he's made openly bigoted statements, good; you shouldn't.  But if you like Trump because you think he "tells it like it is" and sticks to his guns, read the following and then try to reconcile rationally this example against your emotions in response to Trump.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/in-2002-donald-trump-said-he-supported-invading-iraq-on-the#.iwwG3M3qA

The gist of this story is simply this.  Trump said three things about Iraq.  The first, before we invaded he said in 2002 when he said we should invade Iraq.  The second, again before we invaded was said in early 2003 where he said if wee were going to do so we should go in and stop equivocating.  He was less committal but did say Bush was doing a "great job", a statement he later contradicted by saying the administration did a terrible job.  The last was said months after the invasion and war had started, not before, in the early fall of 2003.  He didn't tell Bush "not to go" or "don't go", he said after the fact, that it was a mistake.  It was typical Trump hindsight, claiming to be brilliant after the fact.  He said it was a mistake only after it turned out it wasn't going to be the cake-walk others predicted, presumably including Trump himself by saying we should go in 2002.  Now he says he said we shouldn't have gone in, he "slips" and says he said "Don't go" implying he said it before the war started when he didn't, when he really means to be saying is that he said "you shouldn't have gone in" after it had started to fail.  He was an early Republican of those saying this, but hardly the only one saying that in the late summer of 2003 as there were MANY Democrats saying the same and many others were questioning our actions when our forces failed to find any active WMD programs and/or large caches of usable WMD munitions. 

But the truth was that Trump was convinced, like Bush, that we should invade in 2002.  He didn't say "Don't go", he said "invade" and then he said "invade or not, but stop wasting time." When that became an inconvenient truth Trump did what he always does.  He spoke out of both sides of his mouth, trying to have it both ways.  That is dishonest, that is deliberate deception too.   He wasn't "right" about Iraq any more than he was "right" about President Obama having been born in Kenya.  He may have been "right" after the fact but  he wasn't right when it mattered, he wasn't right at the time. 

He wants to re-write his own history, he wants to rewrite our national history.  He flip-flopped on one of the most important foreign policy actions of the modern age.  He's no great military mind, he's no strong leader, and worst of all, he speaks in lies and confusion to delude his supporters.

This is not unique to the topic of Iraq, this is the modus operandi of Trump on every issue.  Trump makes dangerous statements about nukes, about our allies, about our treaties, about abortion and religion.  And then as he finds it convenient, he pretends otherwise.

Trump has made many such claims over the years from his birtherisms which he walked back and said "I don't know" once the evidence showed him to be a fool, to claiming incorrectly that an American General shot a prisoner with bullets coated in pig dung (which would have been an illegal act).  He made that claim as part of claiming it was a successful tactic to deter Muslim fighters. Not only was it NOT, as proven in India when done by the Brits, it proved to be wildly inflammatory making the situation worse.  No matter, to one Donald J. Trump, if it sounds good and tough, that's all that matters.  If it fails or you get caught and called out, well point to something else you said and say it wasn't true that you hadn't said it in the first place.  This is not a man the world will trust, it is certainly not a man the world will respect and absolutely not a man the world will agree to "make deals" with or sign treaties with.  He's untrustworthy to his core, what he says one moment he'll deny the next.  He talks about tearing up treaties others have made, why not his own if inconvenient, but most disturbing of all, his grasp of the world and of the military realities within it is equally immature and fluid.  One day he'll support an ally, the next seeming, he'll abandon them.  If you want to know the kind of President he'll be seen as, there is one word, utterly and supremely dishonest.

Children have little patience for lies.  They have a rudimentary but very black and white sense of justice, it's why they so often utter the obvious truth even when doing so is embarrassing.  They don't like sophistry or dissembling because they don't understand it.  I think children would call Trump a big fat liar, the question for his supporters is this.  If a child can see his dishonesty, why can't you?

No foolin'

A little bit of Friday Fun for April Fool's Day 2016

Even while being entertained, one should beware manipulation and continue to think critically.

The video, while charming, is a rear projection. It is not affected by anything in the front side of the box.

The 'industrial light' provided is dark, not lit, and even if it were lit, those are not the kind of shadows it would create.  People making the light swing are not making any difference to the projection whatsoever, yet people continue to move the light as if they were causing some kind of change.  It appears as if their participation in this art increased their emotional enjoyment, gave them a sense of creativity and even joy, as well.

Not precisely April Fool, but perhaps a pleasant but cautionary tale against being fooled.

I found that a thoughtful outcome of this art. I hope you do as well.

Colbert - Nobody does it better, cable OR broadcast

Right wing nuts promoting Islamophobia, part 2

We saw it last fall, when some dumb bunny conservative bigot parent in Florida didn't want her kids learning "Ay-rabic Numerals".  That would be the same set of numerals we use every day in the west, with a zero, as distinct from Roman numerals; the zero is essential to performing modern maths, and has been in use in Europe from the 14th and 15th centuries to present.  It is technically an Arab/northern African refinement on an Indian numeral concept, that we learned from the Muslim world centuries ago.  Dumb-bunny mom clearly is in serious need of not only Ay-rab math, but a good world history course.  Although like leading a horse to water while unable to force it to drink, one could educate but not get past the determined bigot prejudice.

And here is another example of hate-peddling Islamophobia from the right, from Rush Limbaugh, who is now facing his radio network going belly up out from under him.  This is an older example, dating back in 2010, which underlines how this bigotry pushing and revisionist history has gone on over time.

an Excerpt from Rush Limbaugh's own transcript:

RUSH intro: ...Now, remember what NASA has become under Obama. No longer about space exploration, we're going to ground the shuttle fleet, we're going to lease space for astronaut flight on Russian spacecraft. NASA has been told to focus on global warming, and now we have the NASA administrator on al-Jazeera last Wednesday who said this.

BOLDEN: Before I became the NASA administrator he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math. He wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.

RUSH: Now, a lot of people are saying, "Rush, the guy really didn't mean it, he's just out there, this is just a bunch of pap for the al-Jazeera audience, didn't really mean it." Of course he meant it, and of course Obama said it. There's no question. Why would he say it if he didn't mean it? He certainly meant it for the Muslim audience and al-Jazeera. And, by the way, would somebody show me any Nobel prizes for math or science from the Muslim world? I'm going to get in a lot of trouble for this, but that's what we do here, we make the complex understandable, we deal with the truth. Most of these claims about Muslim contributions to science and math are myths. Even, folks, the so-called Arabic numbers were actually invented by the Hindus in 500 AD. I looked this up this weekend. It was even before there was such a thing as Islam. The Hindus created the so-called Arabic numerals and you can find this in Wikipedia if you want to believe it. Charles Bolden, NASA administrator, he was asked, "Why are you here in the region?" "Well, I'm here to spread the Muslim outreach." He said it, he meant it. "He couldn't possibly have meant this." He did mean it.

First of all, why is reaching out to Muslim nations a problem? They are in many instances our allies, notably Turkey in NATO and in the Saudi Arabian peninsula where we have key military bases, and where those nations are important trading partners as well. India has a large Muslim population and is very important to the US. That is a legitimate outreach, for which Limbaugh offers no LOGICAL OR RATIONAL reason against doing so.

Secondly, the space shuttle fleet was retired because they were old and dilapidated and had exceeded their original term of service.  They were no longer safe to fly.  Further, the private sector is in the process of providing the replacements - which means those necessary replacements are not coming out of the NASA taxpayer budget.  If the Russians have space vehicles that do the job, where it the benefit to our duplicating that?

Thirdly, while ol Rushbo was over browsing Wikipedia, he should have looked up Muslim recipients of the Nobel prize, of which there are quite a few, including for science, such as Mohammad Abdus Salam of Pakistan in 1979 for physics, and Ahmed Zaweil for chemistry in 1999, and just last year Turkish scientist, Aziz Sancar.  Wikipedia has their own separate entry just for Muslim Nobel laureates, which underscores why one should never take at face value what purports to be conservative factual research.

Further, the Nobel prize has been awarded since 1895; to use that award to the exclusion of other scientific awards or other scientific recognition during the height of the Muslim world's accomplishments as the metric for establishing contributions is the worst kind of cherry picking.

Limbaugh is dismissive of the extremely well documented accomplishments of Muslim scientists and innovators across history, accomplishments not only in math, but in medicine, astronomy and any other fields.  These are NOT myths.  When Rush Limbaugh claims that Arab numbers were invented by Hindus, he is being dishonest and NOT accurately representing even the Wikipedia article content. (emphasis added is mine - DG)

The decimal Hindu-Arabic numeral system was developed in India by AD 700.^[7] The development was gradual, spanning several centuries, but the decisive step was probably provided by Brahmagupta's formulation of zero as a number in AD 628.

The numeral system came to be known to both the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, whose book On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals written about 825 in Arabic, and the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi, who wrote four volumes, On the Use of the Indian Numerals (Ketab fi Isti'mal al-'Adad al-Hindi) about 830. Their work was principally responsible for the diffusion of the Indian system of numeration in the Middle East and the West.^[9] In the 10th century, Middle-Eastern mathematicians extended the decimal numeral system to include fractions, as recorded in a treatise by Syrian mathematician Abu'l-Hasan al-Uqlidisi in 952–953. The decimal point notation was introduced by Sind ibn Ali, he also wrote the earliest treatise on Arabic numerals.
A distinctive West Arabic variant of the symbols begins to emerge around the 10th century in the Maghreb and Al-Andalus, called ghubar ("sand-table" or "dust-table") numerals, which are the direct ancestor of the modern Western Arabic numerals used throughout the world. Ghubar numerals themselves are probably of Roman origin.^[10]

We do NOT use Hindu numerals, which is evident from a comparison between those numeral systems, and our western Arabic numbers.  What we use is the ARAB / MUSLIM version they created from earlier Hindu figures and shapes.  It is profoundly dishonest to claim that Muslims did not devise what we now use as western Arabic Numbers.  It is stupid to reject learning those numbers or the history behind them.

To draw an analogy, what Limbaugh does here is similar to acknowledging that a cow provides the milk that goes into a bowl of ice cream, but then denying the company that turns that milk into ice cream deserves any credit for the ice cream, in spite of clearly having contributed a significant development and transformation of the raw material. It would be accurate to assert that an ice cream company MADE the ice cream, just the same as Muslims made our modern western numbers.

Join me in pushing back against conservative lies and hate.

Right wing nuts promoting Islamophobia, part 1

Too often I find that what I write is prompted by a catalyst or inspiration to repudiate some hateful ignorance I find promoted by faulty  right wing media, including the right wing blogosphere.  That is the case here, pushing back against conservative promotion of revisionist history, factual misrepresentation, bigotry, and intolerance.  There is a sampling below and in part 2 of three examples.

Their willingness to gin up hate, fear and especially to create an unjustified sense of being the victims of groups of people they are attempting to exclude, marginalize, ostracize, and penalize is particularly abhorrent.  Worse, these are the actions one associates with fascists and other forms of authoritarian tyranny, NOT freedom or democracy.

Nothing promotes antagonism and division, or retaliation, more than the right wing premise that inferior groups of people are somehow obtaining protected class status, that they are getting something conservatives are being denied, at the expense of conservatives.  This appears to be a driving force in the 2016 election cycle on the right along with pushing terrorism fears.

An example this week was a right wing blog that made the unverified claim that Somali Muslims in St. Cloud were being given special prayer privileges and special cafeteria consideration, while Christians were being denied the full and equal practice of their faith and culture.

A word press blog with no apparent credentials for facts or fairness called the Extract was circulating this, which appears to be part of their routine promotion of Islamophobia.  From there it circulated more widely in the right wing blogosphere. 

I have no idea what the author meant by 'corporate Christian prayer', but this has all the elements of an attempt to create outrage over pro-Islam religious bias. 

There is no evidence of FACT that the Muslim students are receiving special treatment, or that any other group has ever requested space for prayer.  It is also worth noting that there is no claim that any employee of the school district is LEADING the Muslim prayers, or even an indication that Somali students sought or are making use of either the menu options or prayer options. 

However, as to food service in public schools, I can certainly recall growing up Protestant in a public school where there was consistently fish or other non-meat menus on Fridays in deference to the dietary preferences of Catholic students.  The accommodation for Muslim students in the cafeteria is pork free options - which arguably benefit any Jewish students who wish to avoid pork as well, but you won't find any acknowledgement of that.  I would also point out that the menu selections has long been one that favored white Christian Minnesotan tastes, people who are the dominant and powerful element in St. Cloud.  Expanding selections does not detract from serving that white Christian student constituency, contrary to the sense of  white Christian victimization the Extract is promoting.

What is also missing is any acknowledgement that the students and their families in St. Cloud Minnesota have been treated badly previously, a larger context to efforts by the school system.  That pertinent fact would diminish the ginned up false outrage.  It underlines the deliberate intent to be unfair and to be biased.

Here is that context provided by the original PBS article; take a good look before reading the anti-Muslim blog post further down.

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a federal civil rights complaint against the St. Cloud school district in 2011, alleging a hostile environment for the district’s Somali students that included widespread and frequent harassment based in large measure, on religion. The majority of the Somali community is Muslim.
Five years later, remnants of that tension remain.
“The St. Cloud school district is a long way away from really being a place where all students feel completely welcome,” said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the council’s Minnesota chapter.
“When you’re separated, it’s really hard to feel like you’re a part of the community,” assistant superintendent Marsha Baisch said. “You feel different, you feel other.”
Some students still feel that way.
A 2011 settlement ending a federal civil rights investigation of the treatment of Somali students in St. Cloud requires the school district to report all allegations of harassment.

That last paragraph strongly suggests a finding of harassment and other problems were found to exist, and the efforts made were to correct problems for people who were genuinely victimized.

Again quoting from the PBS article - legitimate journalism - it is worth noting that the contributions of Somali students to the school were omitted.

Somali student-athletes played key roles on Apollo High’s 2014 state championship soccer team, and track and field teams have drawn plenty of Somali participants. The district has partnered with the University of Minnesota to develop uniforms for female athletes who wear hijab, the headscarves worn by some Muslim girls and women.

And here is the hate-blog take on the PBS article; how it promotes an unbalanced view of right wing white Christian victimization should be obvious from both what is included and what is omitted. The other posts on the blog show that this is no isolated but rather a persistent pattern of hate peddling. Conservative bigots seem particularly outraged when their efforts at bigotry are undone or obstructed. They want no obstruction, no let or hindrance to their bad and hurtful behavior.

Minnesota district restores prayer to public school — but only for Muslim students

Buried deep in a PBS article about how the St. Cloud, Minn., school district is accommodating a large Somali population was a telling example of religious bias. While public schools have appropriately been barred from leading students in corporate Christian prayer, this district is going out of its way to satisfy the desires of the Muslim community.

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“In the district’s middle and high schools,” the report stated, “Muslim students have access to private rooms with prayer rugs for the five daily prayers.”
Furthermore, Muslim kids will have access to special lunchroom menus and other faith-based perks not extended to students of other faiths.

We should be proud of St. Cloud's response to a problem of bigotry and bullying, and we should be proud of the national recognition for Minnesota as a decent place to live for all citizens, including immigrants, and for our religious tolerance.That justifiable pride has to include pushing back against the bigots wherever they promote hate, fear, intolerance and exclusion.  The right is rife with it, it is a persistent meme, a leitmotiv.

Violence on the Right, Misogyny on the Right

And for those who are wondering about this stripper chomping attorney working for the top spot campaign manager of the Trump campaign who appears to have been widely videoed committing assault, here was the original story:

I believe this might qualify as birds of a feather..........

The failure of Republican math and Trump's macroeconomics plan

potential economic downward spiral
under proposed Republican candidatess policies
especially, Donald Trump/Drumpf's

Let me be clear; I have no doubt that those who write the legislation that continues to increase wealth and income inequality for the benefit of the wealthy 1% (or fraction thereof) know full well what they are doing.

They are deliberately embracing short term gain and greed over legislation that benefits the majority, the ordinary every-day citizens of the United States. Those conservatives voters in that majority don't appear to understand fundamental macroeconomics.  To those who think simplistically and who believe what they want to hear without critical evaluation of it are gullible.

There have been plenty of color commentary pieces which argue that there are some, if not lots, of college educated voters, including current college students, among Trump/Drumpf supporters.  But there is nothing in those fluff pieces which demonstrate any competency at the most basic level of economics 101 on the part of Trump supporters, nor have any of those fluff pieces demonstrated those with higher levels of education have any depth or breadth of knowledge about Trump/Drumpf's experience or record.

Rather they presume he is successful in business - that is mixed success at best, and failure in many respects.  They presume he is knowledgeable in foreign matters because he has sold his name to entities overseas.  That is not the same as having EITHER foreign affairs knowledge or knowledge in economics, not among voters, not among legislators or other elected officials, and not among candidates.  It is foolish to equate the capacities the way these right wing nut voters are doing, and it reflects wishful thinking rather than rational thought.

It is abundantly clear that it is also true that conservatives don't know, or more precisely choose to ignore and deny, that immigrants, including illegal immigration, have actually been GOOD for the nation, far exceeding any costs equated with them.

There is always a problem with cognitive bias, which translates as a refusal to believe whatever factual information does not agree with one's existing beliefs, and that this is far more the case when those beliefs are also part of one's perception of identity.

Moody's Analytics is a subsidiary of Moody's Corporation which is the umbrella corporation that also owns Moody's Investment Services aka the credit rating agency that rates bonds, like the downgrades of New Jersey, Louisiana, and Kansas under poor Republican governance.  So to be clear, they are different entities but part of the same whole.  Moody's Analytics is known for it's research on risk and performance - and they are generally regarded pretty highly as being good at what they do.

So it is nothing to sneeze at when Moody's Analytics came up with the following analysis of how VERY BADLY the proposed policies of Trump/Drumpf (and those of other Republican candidates to the extent they are similar) would affect our economy.  It is not bad enough that Republican governance reduces our growth and overall economic health; Trump/Drumpf's policies would sink us back into another Great Depression, and take other nations (and arguably the rest of the world) with us.  A recession in Mexico, wall or no wall (and it would likely be no wall) would only INCREASE the number of people south of the border attempting to immigrate, legally or illegally.

Donald Trump’s trade war could kill millions of U.S. jobs

Trade has been one of Donald Trump's great selling points on the campaign trail. China and Mexico are killing us, he has told crowds on his way to the lead position for the Republican presidential nomination, and if Trump wins the White House, he will fight back. The implication is that getting tough with our trading partners -- by taxing their exports as they cross America's borders -- will bring jobs and prosperity to the United States.
An economic model of Trump's proposals, prepared by Moody's Analytics at the request of The Washington Post, suggests Trump is half-right about his plans. They would, in fact, sock it to China and Mexico. Both would fall into recession, the model suggests, if Trump levied his proposed tariffs and those countries retaliated with tariffs of their own.
Unfortunately, the United States would fall into recession, too. Up to 4 million American workers would lose their jobs. Another 3 million jobs would not be created that otherwise would have been, had the country not fallen into a trade-induced downturn.
The amount of predicted economic damage surprised Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics, who prepared the model. He said it is magnified by the precarious -- and historically unusual -- state of the U.S. and global economies right now: Under the Moody's model, the Federal Reserve has little power to slow the recession, because interest rates remain near zero. Congress refuses to enact any stimulus measures, such as spending increases or tax cuts, that might increase the federal budget deficit further.
What results, in the model, is a downward spiral of reduced economic activity. Prices rise on imported goods from China and Mexico, which has the effect of reducing spending power for American consumers. If China and Mexico retaliate, U.S. exports fall, forcing layoffs at American companies that sell to those foreign customers. The ensuing growth slowdowns spread to other trading partners, particularly in Europe, and cause stock markets to plunge, which in turn slows growth even more.
...Zandi said that the forecasts undercut Trump's contention that trade is an area where some countries "win" at the expense of others. From a broad economic perspective, he said, shutting down trade is "a lose-lose" for the United States and its trading partners -- and one that could have consequences in other areas of concern for Trump and his supporters: If tariffs cause Mexico to fall into recession, Zandi said, "you'll have a lot more people knocking on the door" to immigrate to America.

Conservative governance and policies are failures.  Educate those who support candidates on the right as to the realities of their candidates policies - if you can get past their cognitive bias.  You should have more success with the better educated, except that it appears the better educated revert to an even stronger cognitive bias against dissenting information.  So....... good luck, and let us profoundly hope that Trump does not advance, or at best splits conservatives for a sound loss.

Our economic lives depend on it, and arguably as a result, so does the security and stability of the world, which is more vulnerable the less successful economies are.

Hat tip to Pharyngula - The American COLLEGE of Pediatricians is bogus, the American ACADEMY of Pediatrics is a legitimate professional scientific org.

In writing earlier today about the hatred on the right for anything related to sex, gender and human sexuality, the following is worth sharing from Pharyngula.  It deals directly with the right wing attempt to fake they are an accredited genuinely scientific group, when their real purpose is to promote false information about children specifically and the LGBT community more generally.

We can expect to see sources like the bogus American COLLEGE of Pediatricians quoted in the upcoming anti-trans bathroom use legislation promoted by the intellectually dishonest MN GOP.  Lying is for losers, and it is what the MN GOP does when the facts are not on their side; they fake the facts and they lie outright.  They are not above using the work of bogus groups to do so.

For those of you not familiar with Pharyngula, they are a well-respected Minnesota blog that does an excellent job of science reporting and commentary.

From Pharyngula:

Speaking of bad science, never trust the American College of Pediatricians

I know! It sounds so official and sciencey! It’s got “college” in it, which is formal and academic, and “pediatricians”, which are a kind of doctor, and you can never go wrong slapping “American” on your brand label. But they are a lie.

It’s also because the ACP is not a legitimate medical organization; its name is designed to be mistaken for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a national organization with some 60,000 members. The ACP, by contrast, is estimated to have no more than 200 members, and it has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-LGBT positions.
“The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex,” the statement reads. “Facts – not ideology – determine reality.” The “facts” that follow actually reflect a social conservative ideology that rejects the very reality of what transgender children experience.

They’ve issued a statement that transgender kids are being harmed, based on claims that believing you are of a gender other than the one you were born with is a mental disorder (psychologists disagree), that it’s just a phase kids go through (nope, again — that’s based on some bad studies), and that sex reassignment surgery, rather than discrimination and hatred, triggers suicide at a high rate (you can figure that one out).
I’m all in favor of facts. Unfortunately, painting the word “fact” on a lie does not make it true.

Republicans don't just hate PP, they hate sex and women.

One of my colleagues, Dan Burns over at Minnesota Progressive Project (disclaimer, I also write for them) wrote an interesting piece today on the MN GOP assault on Planned Parenthood.

You can read it here - and I suggest you do.  Not only preventive health care for women would be adversely affected; PP provides health care services for men as well.  That men receive care is something that I suspect few MN GOP members or supporters know.



I felt my comment to the Dan Burns piece merited a repeat here as a separate post:

Republicans hate sex, and want to stamp it out. That explains their position on not only Planned Parenthood regarding abortion, but also their anti-contraception position.

If that means to stop people having sex, you have to let them get sick in their ‘lady parts’ and die, fine with Republicans, so long as that sick-suffer-and-die and/or go bankrupt with medical bills stuff only happens to women. In the apparent thinking of the right, human beings are men, male is the default basic setting or version, and women are an aberration. That is what is suggested by the continued funding of boner pills and prostate care, etc. for men remaining in place would show.

Of course, very few Republicans appear to know that men are also provided services at planned parenthood.

It is what was clearly the intent of Republican mega-donor Foster Friess believed when he suggested an aspirin between women’s knees was all the contraception you required — just DON’T HAVE SEX. Sex and gender scare the right, even as it makes raging hypocrites of them.

I would go so far as to argue that at least a part of the antagonism on the right for Hispanics (legal or otherwise) is that they have a higher birthrate than other ethnic groups — certainly higher than the white Right. That must mean they are having S-E-X!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A desire to eradicate sex, and a hate and fear attitude for sex also goes a long way towards explaining the right wing antipathy towards any gender issue, particularly trans in bathrooms, gay marriage, any LGBT protections including from bullying, and a part of the right’s resistance to hate crime law.
Guns and gun violence are fine with the right, but NO SEX or SEXUALITY.

I would argue that the right is incapable of engaging in sane risk assessment, and so long as they have this hate-on for human sex and sexuality, they won’t appropriately consider health risks any more than they do other risks.  That reflects a truly f*cked set of priorities and values.

It puts the ultimate hypocrisy to claiming to be the pro-family and family values party.  It is just one more way in which the right cannot govern effectively or wisely.