The Associated Press says the man detained in the Kansas City area is 51-year-old Scott Roeder of Merriam, Kansas, according to Law Enforcement authorities in the area.
Anti-Defamation League, a hate-group watchdog like the SPLC, pegs him as a former bomb maker and militiaman:
July 7, Kansas: Scott Roeder is sentenced to sixteen months in state prison for parole violations following a 1996 conviction for having bomb components in his car trunk. Roeder, a sovereign citizen and tax protester, violated his parole by not filing tax returns or providing his social security number to his employer.
Via the GOS, (and unconfirmed due to traffic outages) a "Scott Roeder" posted this on Operation Rescue's boards in 2007:
[May 19th, 2007 at 4:34 pm] Bleass everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside) to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller.
Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue states, "George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers intosurrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder. "Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches."[Emphasis mine.]
That's compassion. That's grace. That's dogma, and it's disgusting.
UPDATE:Why are you here when you could be reading Andrew Sullivan?:
He (Roeder) also wrote a post on the website ChargeTiller.com (Google Cached,they seem to have wiped the site. I can't imagine why), an Operation Rescue outfit:
Scott Roeder Mon September 03, 2007, 09:49:40
It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the “lawlessness” which is spoken of in the Bible. Tiller is the concentration camp “Mengele” of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgement upon our nation.
Below, Operation Rescue's agitprop vid "Tiller the Killer", warning, extremely graphic.
Their words:
"corrupt, alcoholic, drug addict, blasphemer, liar, defiler, butcher, perverse, foul, evil, unethical, murderer, malicious." and "You may be the difference between life and death for a child."
and today, again, they said:
"George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God."
Is there anything more villainous than when monsters suppose themselves to be righteous?
WICHITA - George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning inside the lobby of his Wichita church.
Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.
Police said they are looking for white male who was driving a 1990s powder blue Ford Taurus with Kansas license plate 225 BAB. The vehicle is registered to an owner in Merriam, which is in the Kansas City area.
On Friday, November 3, 2006, Bill O'Reilly featured an exclusive segment on his show, The O'Reilly Factor, saying that he has an "inside source" with official clinic documentation indicating that George Tiller performs late-term abortions to alleviate "temporary depression" in the pregnant woman. According to reporting data provided to the Kansas Board of Healing Arts for the year 1998, all of the post-viable partial-birth (dilation and extraction) abortion procedures performed in Kansas during that year were performed because "the attending physician believe[d] that continuing the pregnancy [would] constitute a substantial and irreversible impairment of the patient's mental function." Tiller responded to O'Reilly's statements by demanding an investigation into the "inside source" through which the information was leaked, suggesting that Phill Kline, then the Kansas Attorney General, was responsible. Kline denied the charge.
What do I think? I don't care, keep it legal. There are plenty of horrid things happening in the world that are less abstract and that present themselves to us with a larger moral imperative to address.
Tiller was murdered in church.
I don't mean to go all Giuliani, but do you remember, late afternoon on 9/11, when the news posted video recorded in the Gaza Strip? There were gatherings of Palestinian Arabs dancing in the streets with raucous fervor:
Like everyone who saw that footage, I wanted to jump through my TV screen, pummel those people, drag them to ground zero, and rub their faces in the smoldering wreckage.
Tiller has committed outrage after outrage and not only gotten away with it, he has made a fortune! Sooner or later this had to happen.
2 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:11:32 PM by Anti-Bubba182 [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies] --- To: upchuck
What goes around comes around... --- To: Gay State Conservative
One less nazi as far as I am concerned.
8 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:15:21 PM by imahawk (Life is tough.It's even tougher when you're stupid.) --- To: Anti-Bubba182
Hope the guy gets away.
10 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:15:31 PM by Turret Gunner A20 --- To: SnakeDoctor Thou Shalt Not Murder.
But, wasn't this just another late term abortion(?) 32 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:23:58 PM by The Duke (I have met the enemy, and he is named 'Apathy'!) --- To: ansel12
You, also, are entitled to your opinion. Equivocators and appeasers have something to say, too....Pardon me if it falls on deaf ears. --- To: Gay State Conservative
To: PapaBear3625 Take a look at how Daily Kos is covering reactions of FR.
I would worry about what those boneheads are saying as I would worry about what a monkey was thinking watching a chess match. (Hi, Kostards!)
162 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 2:06:17 PM by Carl LaFong (Experts say experts should be ignored.) --- To: calico_thompson Well, at least the perp didn’t rip his arms and legs off and then suck his brains out.
The best pot so far in this thread!!! 101 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:59:27 PM by Turret Gunner A20
Some of the commenters were advocating that murder is murder, and taking the general position that nothing justifies it, to their credit. The despicable thing to me is the smugness with which some people celebrate human suffering. It is not okay when it is an Arab jumping up and down on 9/12, and it is just as wrong when it is a Christian expressing glee over the murder of a doctor.
UPDATE:
"Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas." - Conservative Pundit, American Taliban Spokesman Robert Stacy McCain.
The National Right to Life Committee does the right thing:
NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE CONDEMNS THE KILLING
OF DR. GEORGE TILLER
Mike Hendricks: Columnist for the Kansas City Star (Read the whole thing):
However, the motive for the crime we can all surmise in light of the vitriolic campaign that has been waged against Tiller for more than two decades by anti-abortion groups.
And if we're right about that, then we already know the identities of his accomplices.
They include every one who has ever called Tiller's late term abortion clinic a murder mill.
Who ever called Tiller "Tiller the Killer."
The groups who spent decades fomenting hate toward a man who simply believed that he was serving a purpose by being one of the few doctors in the country performing late-term abortions.
Hate. Not heated opposition. Not strong disagreement.
But blind hatred.
The kind of hate that would prompt some maniac to take a gun into a church and shoot a man to death in front of friends and family.
His accomplices know they have blood on their hands, which might explain why they were quick to issue statements today expressing disapproval of Tiller's murder.
Moderates need to police their fringe elements, not the other way around.
ZOMGz! She's a Replicant! I'm thinking it's the Nexus-FAIL model:
Pris's hair and make-up:
Rachel's wardrobe:
And Roy Batty's rhyme-skills:
"Roy: Come on, Deckard, I'm right here, but you've got to shoot straight. [Deckard fires again.] Roy: Straight doesn't seem to be good enough. Now it's my turn. I'm gonna give you a few seconds before I come. One, Two. Three, Four. -- Pris... Deckard: Arrghhh. [Chase starts... Roy begins howling.] Roy: (singing) I'm coming. -- Four, five. How to stay alive. -- I can see you! -- (grasping hand) Not yet. Not... [Roy puts spike through hand and screams.] Roy: Deckard-- Yes... [Roy puts head through wall.] Roy: You better get it up, or I'm gonna have to kill ya! Unless you're alive, you can't play, and if you don't play... Six, seven. Go to hell, go to heaven."
The modern conservative endorses torture, even requires it as a linchpin component of a strong foreign policy.
The modern conservative decries the closing of Guantanamo Bay and the prosecution of its inhabitants by integrating them into the American Legal System is a parallel to appeasement, and weakening the security of our country.
The modern conservative wails at the thought of a Republican president being investigated for war crimes, or other violations of the law such as ordering the implementation of our intelligence gathering apparatus and infrastructure to expand blanket electronic surveillance to include all persons within the United States.
The modern conservative thinks habeus corpus isn't something that extends to human beings accused of terrorism.
If wingnuts think the law is something that doesn't apply to the way they have ran the country. If they think that all the legal mumbo-jumbo we are currently going through is just a bunch of liberal pussy hand-wringing by non-serious dirty hippies who underestimate what it really takes to defeat Jihadis (BALLS). Then why on Earth are they having a conniption over who is seated at the highest level of this country's Judicial branch?
Charles Krauthammer is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist and a prominent political commentator.[...]From 1970 to 1971, he was a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford. He later moved to the United States, where he attended Harvard Medical School. Suffering a paralyzing diving accident in his first year of medical school, he was hospitalized for a year, during which time he continued his medical studies.[5] He graduated with his class, earning an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975, and then began working as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. In October 1984, he became board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances.
WRONG.
The first is the ticking time bomb.
WRONG. You mean this ticking time bomb?
The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives.
WRONG. Dead wrong. The FBI interrogator of Abu Zubaydah (one of the 3 terrorists the Bush administration has admitted to waterboarding) has stated repeatedly, in print and under oath, that Zubaydah gave the FBI valuable information through traditional interrogation methods, and clammed up when torture was implemented.
UPDATE:
---- I bring this up because today, Charles Krauthammer was on FOX, advocating that Japan join the Nuclear club.
Forget for a moment that the Chinese would react to this like it was their own little Cuban Missile Crisis, meaning in all honesty, they would maneuver themselves into a position that the mere idea of Japan becoming a nuclear force would be a laughable fantasy. He's advocating on behalf of Japan for the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Doubt, in something that's probably fictional, is neither arrogant nor certain; yet the most loud, inarticulate, obnoxious prick amongst us never, ever claims or has claimed to know the Will and Mind of the Creator and all-powerful, all-knowing ruler of the Universe.
"The only appropriate attitude for Man to have about the big questions, is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that's what Man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong."
"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." --Article VI of the US Constitution
Seriously, at this point is it insane to speculate about Bloomberg blowing some of that stimulus cash on a life-size replica of one of the ships from Independence Day? Some days the city just needs its own parasol...
My friend Alex started listening to Blue Foundation's most recent album, and he likes it a lot. I only liked a few songs, but one of them was Eyes on Fire.
Watching NUMB3RS earlier this week, they opened the tease with a similar genre song, and I smiled when I found out that "I Monster" was also a british electronica band. Here is "Heaven".
Via The Dish (Andrew on vacation), we're getting early results thanks to Democracy in America and The Economist online:
Public Policy Polling, a firm that does work for Democrats but is typically on the money, tests four possible presidential candidates against Barack Obama. The poll doesn't assume that Mr Obama is incredibly popular—it gives him a 55/38 approval/disapproval rating, worse than the average calculated at Pollster.com. Still, all of the possible Republicans trail the president. Mike Huckabee fares best, only losing by 13 points in a hypothetical match-up.
These polls aren't meaningless. Newt Gingrich's popularity, according to PPP, is about as low as Dick Cheney's. Coincidentally, the White House has no problem elevating Mr Gingrich by inviting him to meetings. A lot of the White House's boldness can be traced back to its fearlessness. There's really no Republican on the horizon popular enough to challenge Mr Obama in 2012, unless the president slips badly.
As far as getting the under 65 vote, y'know, the majority of the country, what's your overall strategy for the future? How are you going to attract the youth; the generation that really doesn't give a fuck if you or your neighbors are black, white, hispanic, gay, lesbian, christian, jew, muslim, atheist, hindi, sikh, whatever; as long as at the end of the day you're able to get the motherfuckin' job done and govern effectively?What are your priorities? (via Think Progress)
STEELE: The problem that we have with this president is that we don’t know [Obama]. He was not vetted, folks. … He was not vetted, because the press fell in love with the black man running for the office. “Oh gee, wouldn’t it be neat to do that? Gee, wouldn’t it make all of our liberal guilt just go away? We can continue to ride around in our limousines and feel so lucky to live in an America with a black president.” Okay that’s wonderful, great scenario, nice backdrop. But what does he stand for? What does he believe? … So we don’t know. We just don’t know.
Remember when I said I had no great love for Jesse Ventura? Yeah, turns out he's not only a media whore, but he's also a 9/11Truther (in the vein of 'the WTC towers were a controlled demolition'), Lincoln Assassination conspiracy nut, and all around New World Order conspiracy theorist.
It's a sad state of affairs when the Onion has the best commentary via satire:
There is a 9/11Truther movie out there on the internet called Loose Change, basically doing the Gish Gallop and throwing mounds of data at you with questions you can't immediately answer at a rate so fast that the average audience member can't even hope to keep up. Over the length of the movie, if you grant it's first few questions out of ignorance, it instills doubt into the idea you have of what actually happened that day. You begin to not lean either way. And pretty soon, you're mold for the hands of propagandists.
There isn't a huge groundswell behind skeptical thinking in our culture, and conspiracy theorists take advantage of that, by proclaiming themselves to be vehicles of critical thinking, skeptics of the "official story". But Skepticism isn't about doubting everything no matter what. The skeptical movement in this country and throughout the world employ reason and actual critical thinking based on evidence, lack of evidence, probability theory, the law of large numbers, and other science-based tools and processes.
In the end, all major conspiracy theories collapse under the weight of their own assumptions. Could the executive branch perpetrate a massive, televised attack in which thousands of eyewitnesses of every demographic stripe and ideological background were bamboozled and the world would be sold a bill of goods. And then 8 years later, no government bureaucrat had come forward as an insider to expose this gigantic atrocity?
Think about it for a second, the US government leaks like a sieve. The Jessica Lynch rescue story was bullshit on a stick and that was halfway around the world in a warzone with no media present. Whistle-blowers are now coming forward about the White House and the Vice President ordering Torture and repealing habeus corpus. Cheney had his own special ops unit that reported directly to him, somebody inside told Sy Hersh. (The investigative reporter for the New Yorker that broke the Abu Ghraib scandal, among other things.)
To give you a separate example of how one can know several things with great authority, but be a fool otherwise, I give you a great thread from PalMD:
"You know the moon landings were ginned up on a Hollywood sound stage, right?"
"Hey, how come it's so hard to get the Truth out there about the 9/11 attacks being staged by the CIA/Mossad?"
"I don't know why they think I'm crazy; the aliens really did probe my anus."
We hear crap like this all the time, but these wackos never get ink in major media outlets because, well, they are so clearly paranoid and deranged. So why do we see a similarly paranoid, deranged person like Jenny McCarthy on the pages of Time magazine? Is it because she's more photogenic than most alien abductees? Is it because she doesn't live in her mom's basement with her cats and collection of tin-foil hats?
The Response:
I am a practicing physician (M.D., Harvard Medical School 2000), a scientist (Ph.D., Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences '94), a husband, and parent to three small children. I am about as rational as a suburban Boston Board-certified anesthesiologist can get.
Please do not use pejoratives in association with the 9/11 Truth Movement. Please do consult Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth (www.mp911truth.org)
The events of September 11, 2001 have been used by our government to justify killing over one million people. President Obama, within weeks of his inauguration, invoked 9/11 as a justification for sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Our civil liberties have been eroded by the Patriot Act of 2001, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the Protect America Act of 2007, and numerous other Orwellian edicts. The official explanation for 9/11 has been conveyed in the mainstream media with astonishing certainty beginning within hours of the attacks. Does this explanation deserve merit? Sadly and disturbingly not. High school physics, a bit of chemistry, and common sense lay bare a false narrative.
‘We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’ -- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981-1987.
‘The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.’ -- William Colby, CIA Director, 1973-1976.
The facts of 9/11 tell the real story. Here are a few impossibilities that serve as tip to the iceberg:
Impossible: rapid and extreme destruction without additional energy source.
Impossible: free-fall speed by pile driver mechanism.
Impossible: molten steel from office fires, still flowing weeks later.
Impossible: numerous examples of prior knowledge -- WTC collapse known by Giuliani; WTC 7 collapse known by officials on the scene, on video; WTC 7 ‘collapse’ reported by multiple news media outlets while the building still stood.
Impossible: that X-ray energy dispersive spectra of multiple 9/11 dust samples would show the chemical fingerprint of the high-energy explosive thermate, if no explosives were used on that day. (ref. J. 9/11 Studies, vol. 19, Jan. 2008)
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
John Hiebert, M.D., Ph.D. Asst. Clinical Professor, Tufts University School of medicine Director of Regional Anesthesia Department of Anesthesiology, Lahey Clinic Burlington, MA
Posted by: John Hiebert | April 2, 2009 6:09 PM
The Response to the Response:
I am about as rational as a suburban Boston Board-certified anesthesiologist can get.
Please do not use pejoratives in association with the 9/11 Truth Movement.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
(wiping tears)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
(coughing, choking)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA -- Which pejoratives should I avoid? Insane? Paranoid? Tinfoilhatwearingnutjob? -- This is a lovely example of something I spend months hammering into trainees: it doesn't matter how competent you may be in one subject [1], you're worse than useless in others. At best you know enough to stay out of the way of people who know what they're doing. -- You forgot to add this about yourself: "I am an ignorant fool."
The reality of conspiracy theories is very different. These don't represent any kind of healthy thought process at all. They require one to reach a conclusion, then ignore any information that contradicts it. They attempt to explain, but only create more questions. I like to say they are non-parsimonious. And worse, rather than make people think, they tend only to enforce bigotry and ideology. It is the intellectual equivalent of self-lobotomy.
Films often seem to reinforce non-skeptical thought. We like to be entertained, or scared, or shocked. Hence, every time someone is introduced as an atheist or "skeptic" in a film they're inevitably exposed to ghosts, or aliens, or whatever unlikely boogeyman serves the script. The skeptic never turns out to be right, as they are in real life. What would be the fun in that? Every movie would turn into an episode of Scooby Doo. It was just old man Withers with a flashlight after all, and a multi-million dollar CGI budget.
In the paranoid mind of the Conspiracy Theorist, there are three classes of human beings: 1)You are a perpetrator of the conspiracy, and thus a special secretive type of evil. 2)You are a dupe, a human completely unaware to the deeper world happening around you. You are described as Sheep, and are often expendable because of your obliviousness and ignorance. 3)You are one of those aware of the conspiracy. You are a savior, trying to expose the truth to the dupes, holding them in reserved contempt while shedding light on those who would try to shadow your world with darkness.
"King, who is the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, concluded his tirade to Politico with: “If we have another 2,000 people killed, I want Nancy Pelosi and [liberal philanthropist] George Soros, John Conyers and Pat Leahy to go to the funeral and say, ‘Your son was vaporized because we didn’t want to dump some guy's head under water for 30 seconds.’”
Stage IV Douche Rocket.
Cole's retort to the argument that "we used it on our troops in SERE school so it's not torture":
Not to diminish Mancow’s experience, but if he thought that was torture, think what the real deal must be like. You are snatched out of nowhere, flown across the world, kept awake for days on end in a freezing room with little food, woken every time you fall asleep on your metal bed, thrown against the wall with that lovely procedure known as collaring, slapped, had dogs threatening you, yelled at and beaten, and so on and so forth. That goes on for a couple weeks to soften you up, then you are dragged by multiple burly men and waterboarded repeatedly. You have no dead man’s switch like Hitchens did, you have no “safe” word to stop the process, there are no cameras and friends there to make sure you are alright. These people have been abusing you non-stop for days or weeks, for all you know this is when they finally kill you.
Of course it is torture. I’m sick and tired of having this stupid damned debate.
...this is a completely bogus distortion of history.
The reality is that after Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy. The country was blindsided. Intelligence officials knew next to nothing about the threats arrayed against them. The Bush administration tried just about everything to discover and prevent threats. The Bush people believed they were operating within the law but they did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive.
The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years. For Democrats, it is surely the period they want to forever hang around the necks of the Republican Party. But that period ended long ago.
By 2005, what you might call the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun. Gradually, in fits and starts, a series of Bush administration officials — including Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Jack Goldsmith and John Bellinger — tried to rein in the excesses of the Bush-Cheney period. They didn’t win every fight, and they were prodded by court decisions and public outrage, but the gradual evolution of policy was clear.
Hey, Hey, Hey! He's reading a teleprompter! Worst. President. Ever. We don't need to wait for a blowjob, he's probably gay anyway! Impeachhimalready! (3rd link is from Hardcore Left-wing/Libertarian/Anarchist/Peace Activist site)
It was a function of a policy of abuse and torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the war on terror in every theater of combat, directed and emanating from the will of Dick Cheney via the pen of George W Bush. It is simply impossible to review the evidence and conclude otherwise and no one, outside the Cheney cocoon, has been able to sustain the fiction that Cheney proposes as fact. The attempt to separate this from his own highly controlled, personally directed program of torture and abuse and coercion is a deep and malicious and wilfull lie. It may be what Bush wishes to believe. But Cheney knows otherwise. His speech was therefore not a patriotic defense of what he thinks is best for this country; it was a vile and deliberately divisive attempt to use the politics of fear and false machismo against the stability of the American polity.
He has clearly learned nothing; and will remain a threat to this country's ability to fight terror and defend its values. The president will remain above this, as he should, as Cheney seeks further to divide and destabilize this country in a futile attempt to rescue his reputation. But his reputation is unrescuable, his crimes a matter of record, and his character now indelibly written in history. Our job is to never let him forget it, to never let history be re-written and to remain resolute in bringing both him and those who attacked us to justice. And that is in the presidential oath of office.
Chest-thumping Bedwetter. Maybe the next stroke will actually make him think he's O'Brien.
O'Brien: Power is not a means, it's an end. - O'Brien: Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing. - Winston Smith: I know you'll fail. Something in this world... some spirit you will never overcome... O'Brien: What is it, this principle? Winston Smith: I don't know. The spirit of man. O'Brien: And do you consider yourself a man? Winston Smith: Yes. O'Brien: If you're a man, Winston, you're the last man. Your kind is extinct. We are the inheritors. Do you realize that you are alone? You are outside history. You unexist. Get up. [Winston gets up and O'Brien shows him his reflection in a mirror. Winston is disheveled and beaten] O'Brien: *That* is the last man. If you are human, *that* is humanity. - The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. - We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
I don't like Fmr. Gov. "I ain't got time to bleed" Ventura. I don't hate the guy. I admire his service, and I thought he was a fluke politician. He's ex-military, a former SEAL, so he not in bed with the left, and he describes himself as a Goldwater Conservative. (Fiscal, Non-interventional foreign policy, social liberal aka doesn't hate fags to get the dumbass religious vote). That said, it is really sad to see him destroy the bimbos that are the modern conservative voices.
I have caught and had 16-year-old kids arrested for $100 theft. This villain Cheney is a threat to the priceless American way of life and everything we have stood for, for over 230 years. He is a criminal.Prosecute him.
"Watching this video brings to mind the astronauts’ claim that they’re just people who work in space. But you know what? They’re people who work in space.
Look what we do."
Wow. And, the milky-way by way of animated multiple extended-shutter photos at the 2009 Texas Star Party:
"This is an important new fossil, a 47 million year old primate nicknamed Ida. She's a female juvenile who was probably caught in a toxic gas cloud from a volcanic lake, and her body settled into the soft sediments of the lake, where she was buried undisturbed. What's so cool about it?
Age. It's 47 million years old. That's interestingly old…it puts us deep into the primate family tree.
Preservation. This is an awesome fossil: it's almost perfectly complete, with all the bones in place, preserved in its death posture. There is a halo of darkly stained material around it; this is a remnant of the flesh and fur that rotted in place, and allows us to see a rough outline of the body and make estimates of muscle size. Furthermore, the guts and stomach contents are preserved. Ida's last meal was fruit and leaves, in case you wanted to know.
Life stage. Ida is a young juvenile, estimate to be right on the transition from requiring parental care to independent living. That means she has a mix of baby teeth and adult teeth — she's a two-fer, giving us information about both.
Phylogeny. A cladistic analysis of the fossil revealed another interesting point. There are two broad groups of primates: the strepsirrhines, which includes the lemurs and lorises, and the haplorhines, which includes monkeys and apes…and us, of course. Ida's anatomy places her in the haplorhines with us, but at the same time she's primitive. This is an animal caught shortly after a major branch point in primate evolutionary history."
That's the cool I found for today, what do you got?
One could make a pretty compelling argument that the biggest upset of 2008 at the presidential level, bigger than even the Obama victory in Indiana, was the fact that Barack Obama stole an electoral vote from John McCain in, of all places, Nebraska.
Nebraska, which awards its electoral votes piecemeal (two for winning the state, one for winning each congressional district), gave Obama one of its five electoral votes by virtue of his victory over John McCain in its Omaha-based 2nd District.
Tuesday night, the Democratic Party, and the voters of Omaha, made it clear that Obama's surprise single electoral vote in Nebraska was not an isolated incident.
Democrat Jim Suttle, a city councilman, scored the narrow win over former Republican mayor Hal Daub. Suttle won 50.7% of the vote, to Daub's 48.7% of the vote.
SLEEPY EYE, MINN. -- The father of Daniel Hauser said today he believes his son and his wife have left the country, but won't say where he thinks they have gone to keep out of reach of authorities. "I have an opinion where they are, but I can't say I know," said Anthony Hauser, adding that he has placed a call to a telephone where he believes he can reach them. Hauser specifically said he does not believe Daniel and Colleen Hauser have fled to Canada rather than subject their 13-year-old son to the chemotherapy that doctors believe is his only hope to survive cancer.
In New York, the National Organization for Marriage, whose resources have been stretched thin from other campaigns in the Northeast, began making phone calls to recruit supporters only late last week. The state’s Roman Catholic bishops have been somewhat distracted, too, having focused their lobbying energies this session on defeating a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse to bring civil claims, and have appeared unprepared for the battle over marriage.
These are cases of religion gone pathological, of belief so absurd and so deep that it denies truth and has overt negative consequences. Moderate Christian believers will read about this and dismiss it as irrelevant to their faith; sure, they'd pray, but they'd also get their children in to legitimate doctors who would give them effective treatment. I have to say something that is heartfelt, and is also meant to offend. I do not absolve you mealy-mouthed moderates, I do not regard your beliefs as harmless. If Colleen Hauser or Leilani Neumann were in your church, you'd tell them to get medical care, but you'd also validate their belief in prayers. You would provide the soothing background muzak that says prayer is good, prayer is virtuous, prayer will connect you to the great lord who can do anything, prayer will give you solace in your time of worry. You would not raise your voice to say that prayer is useless, prayer is self-defeating, that while prayer might make you feel better while your child is suffering, that is no virtue. You pray yourselves. You think it is a noble and generous act for your representatives to prowl the corridors of hospitals, preying on the desperation of the sick. You abase yourselves before false hopes, and sacrifice human dignity on an altar built from the bones of the dead. You would spread the poison, piously excusing yourselves because you only want to administer sub-lethal doses. You are Abraham's enablers. I hope you all feel a small tremor of guilt when you sit your own children down at bedtime to beg a nonexistent being for aid, when you plant the seed of futile supplication and surrender to delusions in their trusting minds. Damn you all.
Also: Having read the bible, it seems as if when Yahweh really wanted people to have their prayers noticed or answered, he'd require/request that the prayer be supplemented with Animal Sacrifice. Whenever I notice an overt act of prayer, at a family dinner for example, I can't help but think to myself "If they really wanted to make this stick, they'd bleed out a goat on the counter."
"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from," the final report of Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.
More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families _ a category that often included unmarried mothers _ were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last church-run facilities shut in the 1990s.
The report, unveiled by High Court Justice Sean Ryan, found that molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys' facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.
"In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine. ... Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were struck on all parts of the body," the report said. "Personal and family denigration was widespread."
Irish-Catholic Guilt culture of "don't acknowledge anything, keep it in the family, sweep it under the rug." To requote PZ, Damn you all.
Cooked a frozen pizza last night, well I needed more than one take:
That "remove the cardboard" part is very important.
25 minutes later, I get a fully cooked pizza but the bottom part of the dough and crust is uncooked. Remedy? I lowered the temp and cooked it for another half hour; it didn't burn the top. I feel so proud about that.
I love Rachel Maddow. She's funny, charming, very intelligent, charming, and she's a dork...and charming. On the one hand she has the unique ability to take a series of related, but seemingly one-off 24hr news cycle stories, and nutshell them into an accurate, informative narrative:
If there is no thought without constraints (chains) and if the constraints cannot be the object of thought because they mark out the space in which thought will go on, what is noticed and perspicuous will always be a function of what cannot be noticed because it cannot be seen. [...]
Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.
The first quote is absolutely meaningless. He utilizes a run-on sentence to wind a blathering thread around the pointless sophistry of theology. The second is a declaration that reason and logic, without a pre-requisite acknowledgment that God is responsible for them, are no more helpful or valid than any nebulous opinion.
Don't read the rest of the article, there's not enough advil in close proximity, I assure you. Stanley Fish is old hat, and a blathering egotist. He wraps the article by linking to an op-ed saying that Fish is smarter than Richard Dawkins.
One more thing. A number of readers chided Eagleton and me for daring to enter the lists against the superior intellects of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. E.R. Wood predicts that “if Fish debated Dawkins, Fish would lose by KO in every round.”
It would be hard to reply to that without seeming either defensive or boastful, so I’m happy to leave it to someone else. I refer you to a piece by syndicated columnist Paul Campos, which begins by asking, “Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins?” Darned if I know.
On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.” This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine.
What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
It would be helpful if we didn't give our enemies blatant in-your-face evidence for their propaganda when they say that our war is a Crusade against all of Islam, mKay?
Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith is claiming President George W. Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the President ordered troops to invade Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.
In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.
Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam--to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”
But I digress, the talking point is still that because Pelosi was briefed about torture, she must step down. Prosecuting those who ordered and enabled torture as the policy though would, of course, be a partisan witch hunt. Also, the President should have anything to do with Notre Dame, because they're Catholic and he's not. And he should know the ONLYthing Catholics care about is abortion.
But at the school's front gate at intersection of Angela and Notre Dame Avenue, more than 100 people gathered to protest the decision to invite Obama to speak at commencement and receive an honorary degree. They said he shouldn't be allowed to speak at the Roman Catholic university because of his support of abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research.
Can I just say I might start considering the church's position on reproductive issues without outright laughter when 1)their leaders no longer need be celibate and 2)they decide that Mary conceiving Jesus as a virgin need not be a linchpin tenet of their faith. [/snark][drink]
