Category: Ignorance & Chutzpah
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Babies and cute animals sell products. Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona set out to take that marketing ploy a bit too far, in fact nauseatingly so. During last Saturday's debate on health care reform, he used an infant like a ventriloquist's dummy to make his case against publicly funded medical insurance. Even by the low standards of honesty and decency set by the Republicans, Rep Shadegg's exploitative grandstanding was…
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The New York Times has an article about someone who thinks the higgs boson is traveling back in time to stop the Large Hadron Collider (where I do my research) from working. As evidence, we are reminded of project delays, the fact that the Superconducting Super Collider project was canceled in the nineties, and that…
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Right wingers have always been very good at vilifying any organization whose politics don't match theirs, especially if those groups are advocates of the poor, minorities, women, immigrants or homosexuals. At one time or the other, groups like the NEA, ACLU, Planned Parenthood and even government welfare programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps have been objects of anger and derision. A favorite (and effective) tactic is to pick a…
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Superstition ridden medieval Europe condemned cats as witchs' agents and slaughtered them. Nature's pay back for that brutal and dastardly act came in the form of the Black Plague when the rat population proliferated in the absence of a natural feline pest control. A similar but less deadly fate may be in store for Egypt whose president Hosni Mubarak, in a heartless, mindless and misguided moment of inspiration, ordered all pigs killed in order…
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The taxi winds around the narrow maze of roads leading up to the fort. It's a very democratic cross-section of the population that lines up to enter the grounds: at Rs.10 per ticket, this is a poor man's park, not just the haunt of the well-heeled. The lawns near the entrance are surprisingly green, well-watered…
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A couple of months ago, an otherwise cheerful neighborhood block party on our quiet street caused some agitation among the attendees when one of the neighbors began to describe President Obama as un-American, a socialist and a terrorist. He was angry with Obama's economic stimulus and distrustful of his health care plan. Even though there were only three people at that gathering who…
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Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's answer to Health Care Reform sounds awfully like "It's your fault if you are sick or dying." The rest is all about letting private insurance companies do their thing without government mandates. The last few paragraphs are especially irritating. Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address…
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Paul Krugman sums it up.
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The distasteful, disgraced and now mercifully resigned, Tom DeLay, the former US Congressman from my voting district has a new gimmick up his sleeve to get back into the public eye. The Hammer will be dancing with the stars. Update: From the Houston Chronicle : WASHINGTON —Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, better known for his hard sell than his soft sole, is…
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If you wish to believe that certain certain kinds of conservatism are caused by bugs in the brain, I offer up some tentative evidence: Recently, Mark Krikorian at the National Review has decided to bless us with the insight that vegetarianism is immoral: The problem is that none of this is vegetarianISM, which, if words…
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For thousands of years men have built security barriers to keep out menace, real and imaginary. History tells us that while the track record of walls and fences to keep out a wily enemy is mixed, political barricades almost always generate paranoia and a misguided sense of power among those who guard them. A week ago I wrote about the wall that Israel has erected to keep out Palestinians and the ridiculous commercial…
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