The Raven' s Blog, Web Log of Eric Ferguson: First Half of May Archive

Now will McCain's pastors get attention?
May 10

If you can think way back to life before the Jeremiah Wright controversy, you might recall how Wright received no attention before the video of some sermons was played on TV. Obama's church was mentioned in blogs, usually it appeared by Clinton supporters warning (correctly, it turns out) that Obama's church would be a problem. It appears it took video played on TV to make Wright an issue.

It appears the same will be true of McCain's pastors. Their sociopathic statements have been out in blogs for a long time, but have gotten precious little TV coverage outside of Bill Moyers and Countdown. People relying on the TV networks and news channels might have no idea these lunatics exist, or that they're anybody but mainstream white pastors. Maybe that will soon come to an end. Mother Jones and Brave New films put together some of Rod Parsely's greatest hits. He saying exactly the same things he said in print, except this time, he's on camera. It shouldn't make a difference, but it sure seems to.

Take the Red Pill Award for Spiritual Water
May 10

This Take the Red Pill Award goes to Spiritual Water, which is selling bottled water, the same stuff that comes out of a tap in one place, poured into a bottle, and shipped off some other place to be sold for more than gasoline. With Jesus on it. Yes, Spiritual Water slaps a northern European-looking Jesus on a bottle instead of "Aquafina". One of the owners, Elicko Taieb, sounds serious when he says, "The ingredients are the image and the prayer, which is for your body and soul. It's water from God. It purifies your soul and helps you to think positive." Water from God ---- and from a faucet in Santa Ana, CA. But be careful sinners, because it comes with a warning: "Warning to sinners: if you are a sinner or evil in nature, this product may cause burning, intense heat, sweating, skin irritation, rashes, itchiness, vomiting, bloodshot and watery eyes, pale skin color and oral irritations." Now if you've actually read the bible, you've learned that we're all sinners and fall short of the glory of God, he who is without sin let him throw the first bottle, remember? So I guess this is meant for rehydrating after a Church Lady superiority dance. Of course, the owners might not really deserve the award, since they may just be shysters taking advantage of the people who buy useless crap as long as it has a cross or angel on it. So buyers, in a special offer good only until the resurrection, your bottle comes with your own Take the Red Pill Award.

Why conservatives assume the nuns were Democrats
May 7

Conservatives were angry that the nuns turned away in Indiana planned to vote Democratic. Only in an update did it occur to Kathryn Lopez that the nuns might have planned to vote Republican. That link came from Glenn Greenwald, who found other examples. What did they have to go on to assume the nuns were Democrats? Only that they were turned away by the photo ID law. This indicates that Republicans know, on a high subconscious level if not consciously, that the law was intended to disenfranchise Democrats. Uh oh, Republicans weren't supposed to be stopped from voting --- so they must have been Democrats! Don't they know Catholics aren't allowed to vote Democratic?!

We obviously don't know who the nuns would have voted for, but the real difference between Republicans and Democrats on this is Democrats try to protect the voting rights of people targeted by these laws, while Republicans do the targeting. Republicans assume the targeted voters are Democrats, while Democrats don't care. I'll accept the premise that the nuns, being nuns, are almost surely religious conservatives with intentions of voting Republican. It would still be difficult to find a Democrat who wouldn't protect their voting rights. Yes, poor elderly women tend to vote Democratic, as do the other groups disenfranchised by these ID laws. Hasn't it occurred to Republicans that maybe their targeting of suspected Democrats is why those suspected Democrats vote Democratic?

Dead Polar Bear Award for "the conference to nowhere"
May 5

You assume when you hold a scientific conference that you invite experts in their field and see what their research came up with. According to some Republican state legislators in Alaska, you would be wrong. They propose a conference to highlight climate change deniers. Yes, before finding scientists, they've come up with the conclusion, and now they're looking for scientists to fit. House Speaker John Harris showed he doesn't quite get the idea when he said, "You know as well as I do that scientists are like lawyers." Apparently he comes from the Richard Viguerie school of conservatism, which holds that in journalism there's no such thing as fact, just opinion. Harris must think this applies to science too.

"This truly is the conference to nowhere," said University of Alaska researcher Rick Steiner. Steiner told the reporter that he has been trying to get the Palin administration to reveal this sound science they claim to have. Surprise surprise, they won't release it. If they have anything, they're holding onto it tightly. Likewise, they are free to hold tightly to their Dead Polar Bear Award.

Isn't this the smoking gun?
May 1

Recently, the acting president told ABC reporter Martha Raddatz, "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Hmm, protecting the American people ... was he talking about finally fixing our neglected roads and bridges? No. Perhaps he meant finally protecting us from bankruptcy and needless suffering from lousy or absent medical insurance. Maybe he was referring to restoring lapsed consumer protections, or workplace safety laws to reduce workplace deaths. No. The rest of the quote is, "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

"This issue" is the news that his top national security officials, including Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell, and Tenant directly approved the use of torture, including methods for individual detainees. If someone had told me two years ago, when the acting president was less than halfway through his second term and a Democratic Congress was just a good possibility, that he would admit approving torture and a Democratic Congress wouldn't jump to impeach, I'd have thought that person crazy. On second thought, no I wouldn't, since one can never be too cynical where Bush is concerned, but it should have been crazy. Crazy or not, Bush's admission was hardly a blip. Other than maybe Countdown, I don't know if a single national TV news program has mentioned it. Must have been busy waiting for Obama to go bowling again (fortunately Obama figured out he needs to let the cameras show him playing basketball, where he passed out of a doubleteam by much younger and bigger players, and this is what parentheses were invented for). Of course, again besides Countdown, no TV has covered the revelation that former military officers acting as TV analysts since the sales campaign for Iraq started have been working for contractors who benefitted from the war, meaning these former officers made money too besides their network fees, and they knowing followed Pentagon talking points. Of course, neither the "analysts", the news channels, nor the Pentagon saw fit to tell the public these shills weren't objective. Nor did the networks see fit to put anti-war voices on TV except Phil Donohue, who was fired for it, and Bill Moyers, who was nearly run of TV for it. Though mainstream media thinks anyone who has a minor criticism of how the invasion was done qualifies as a critic, the real critics were saying "DON'T DO THIS", and took to the streets to try to get the media to listen. They didn't. Other than Phil Donohue and Bill Moyers, who were fired and nearly fired for it, no one on TV included war opponents.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guant�namo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.

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