Tom Levenson writing at the Inverse Square Blog identifies several ways the Bush administration has effectively reversed progress in US science policy using official denialism, direct pressure on scientists and scientific organizations, and by nurturing public contempt. He then goes on to analyze how science might fare under McCain and points out several dismal realities including:

To deliver on his commitments on taxes, defense and fiscal responsibility, John McCain would have to eliminate all discretionary spending — including the few tens of billions spent on science R & D. ... McCain’s priorities are very clear — trillions for defense; trillions more for tax cuts.

I may a have short, somewhat tangentially related post tomorrow on the Saturday Open Science Thread with some, err.., breaking bloggy news.

I don't know what a search of Politicians and their Crazy Pastors on traditional media would come up with. But without seeing the results, I'm willing to speculate the double standard in play on progressive Vs. conservative crazy pastor problems is just breathtaking:

Ed Brayton -- And did you see one article anywhere in the mainstream media about it? I've not seen one that even mentions that on May 2nd, the former president and father of the current president, George HW Bush, was paid by the world's most prominent fascist cult leader to give yet another speech on his behalf, with Moon on the same stage. And it happened right in Washington DC, where the media has no excuse for not knowing about it.

Via CaLibertarian in the open thread, someone please tell me this is satire:

US First Lady Laura Bush accused Myanmar's military rulers Monday of failing to warn their citizens in time about a killer cyclone and pressed the junta to accept US aid in the disaster's wake. "Although they were aware of the threat, Burma's state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm's path," Bush said in an unusual appearance at the White House briefing room podium.

I'll skip the obvious pot & kettle dig here over the Bush Administration's staggering, deadly incompetence before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, put partisanship aside, and only wonder in embarrassment on behalf of the nation I love: what lowlife, imbecilic White House PR slug intentionally sent the First Lady out into the international public spotlight dressed only in this painful irony?

It's a beautiful day in Indiana and North Carolina. Nice day to take it easy, go to the elitist latte shop and  ... get off your asses and to the polls Hoosiers and Tarheels! You're going to select the next President of the United States!

• Indiana Primary General Information

  Hoosier Poll Locator by Registrations & the polls are open!

• North Carolina Primary Primary Voting Information

  Tarheel Poll Locator & the polls are open in NC!

David Berlinski, a member of the anti-science flagship called the Discovery Insitute, plants a seed:

Human Events -- One man -- Charles Darwin -- says: "In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals. ..." Another man -- Adolf Hitler -- says: Let us kill all the Jews of Europe. Is there a connection? Yes obviously is the answer of the historical record and common sense.

Berlinski then launches into a convoluted history lesson tying long standing religious animosity between Jews and other ethnic/religious groups to the holocaust. Probably to give himself cover for the clear thrust of his article, which boils down to saying evolutionary biology and biologists who study it are cozy as bed bugs with the Nazi Final Solution and, hey, maybe even partially responsible for it. He finished by allegedly asking Richard Dawkins if he would like to 'live in a society governed by Darwinian principles,' to which Dawkins reportedly responds 'No, it would be fascism.'

To illustrate the speciousness of that tactic, I wonder how Stephen Hawking would respond to a similar question, like "Would you like to live in a society governed by the strong nuclear force?" To which Hawking could accurately answer in his synthesized voice, do doubt in a somewhat baffled manner, "Ummm no, it might mean instant annihilation of that society as it would immediately collapse into a microscopic black hole." No one wants that, therefore, using Berlinski's logic -- for lack of a better word -- let us all quickly rewrite the Laws of Particle Physics and ban teaching the real thing, lest these genocidal physicist get us all crunched into a quantum-sized event horizon ...

If you can stomach watching it, you'll see Stein explain, with Hannity and Colmes' help, that "Darwinism" wasn't really responsible for the death camps, and biologists aren't really Nazis, it's just that evolution logically led to ... the Nazi death camps. Stein's two-faced con is on display everywhere you look, here using a quote from the Expelled website itself:

Alas, Darwinism has had a far bloodier life span than Imperialism. Darwinism, perhaps mixed with Imperialism, gave us Social Darwinism, a form of racism so vicious that it countenanced the Holocaust against the Jews and mass murder of many other groups in the name of speeding along the evolutionary process.

Gosh Ben, how could anyone possibly get the mysterious idea that evolution is pro Holocaust?

Having gotten their butts kicked for 150 years in science and their clocks cleaned over the last 40 years in court, anti-science goons have reached deep into their black bag of tricks and pulled out a new gimmick called Academic Freedom Bills. By academic freedom, they mean a teacher is free to teach creationism (Or ostensibly anything else in any other subject), and the student is free to blow off mastering the curricula and answer any question or complete any homework assignment using whatever variant of right-wing anti-science nonsense they dream up. In some versions, that vacuous effort has to be awarded a good grade or positive review. The goal, of course, is teaching creationism:

Ed Brayton -- So why single out evolution ...? There is not one single theory in science, no matter how well supported or established, that doesn't have some people "raising questions" about it. Why not have teachers spend a day giving the Christian Science critique of the germ theory of disease?

• You read stuff like the academic freedom post above and it might be easy to get discouraged, these antiscience clowns just never give up. Well neither do we! Just such a state bill quietly died last night, in large part due to the efforts of a small group of committed volunteers working together online called the Florida Citizens for Science:

  Panda's Thumb -- Today is a wonderful day for Florida. The long battle to have new science standards and to teach evolution in our public schools is finally over. In the coming years young Floridians will learn science as they never have before.

• Wired asks Why Can't Hollywood get science right? Good question and discussion, but at this point I'd be delirious with joy if our elected reps would try half as hard as Steven Spielberg.
• Nanobacteria are a controversial topic; it's not clear they even exist! But if, like their larger namesake, they're real and can cause human disease, understanding and treating their effects could be as revolutionary to medical science as the Germ Theory of Disease.
• OK, just for the record: Peak Oil isn't about oil "running out." It's about global demand outstripping production of cheap, accessible oil, and worsened as the world's handful of gigantic, producing reservoirs peak out, causing a sustained price squeeze. The concern some have is such a process could transform a once prosperous, oil consuming country into the national equivalent of a penniless, homeless petro-junkie standing on a street corner in the worst neighborhood imaginable jonesing for just one more oily draw from the pipeline, and willing to sell their mind, body, and soul to the most ruthless, evil bastards on the planet to get it. A problem this severe could only be solved by ... tax cuts benefitting billionaires!

Stand aside Michael Crichton, you have been upstaged. A whole pod of right-wing sci-fi has beens are chiming in with the most peculiar suggestions for fixing social shortcomings heard this side of the Puppeteer Homeworld. What makes this crew spooky is the Department of Homeland Security is reportedly listening to their advice, and that's not fiction:

Sadly, No -- The group has the ear of Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Jay Cohen, head of the science and technology directorate, who has said he likes their unconventional thinking. ...  Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven, the bestselling and award-winning author of such books as "Ringworld". Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

It isn't the first crazy thing Niven has said, but it may be the most despicable yet: Larry Niven is the great grandson of oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny whose clumsy bribe kicked off a corruption investigation that eventually led to the Teapot Dome scandal. Buoyed by a massive trust fund set up by grandpa Doheney, Niven's never had to worry a day in his life about healthcare or anything else for that matter. I doubt it would knock any sense into him, but right about now I'd say Larry could use an uninsured visit to the ER, after a bone snapping wake up call administered by a pissed off Pak Protector suffering from Tree-of-Life withdrawal and a litter of starving Kzinti kits chewing on his raw, salted ass. Anything left over can go to the alleged organ banks. After all, as Niven was fond of writing, they're always empty.

Isn't it amazing how so many facets of conservative economic policy converge on some variant of "Give the rich more money," and end with some version of, "And this will help the middle class and the poor." Like the Underpants Gnomes, they just never get around to filling in that middle part with anything coherent. The clever cons know it's a scam. But I'm pretty sure this is what a lot of grassroots conservatives, mostly the duller or more ignorant ones to be sure, really believe.

Apparently the rest of us are just supposed to be so stupid or apathetic that we never point out that, despite almost three decades of cutting taxes on billionaires, the trickle-down economic Promised Land never seems to materialize (We did manage to accrue one hell of a national debt though!). Why, if I were a cynical person, I'd say all this supply side and trickle down conservative bullshit was just a ruse to defend the class warfare that's been in effect since the dawn of civilization: take from the poor and powerless and give to the rich and powerful.

McCain of course rightly senses the jig of giving zillionaires even more zillions is in jeopardy, what with gas prices at 4 bucks a gallon and the economy crumbling after eight years of George Bush the CEO President. But being a staunch defender of the wealthy, McCain he has to try something. So he tried this:

This Week -- Senator Obama says that he doesn’t want to raise taxes on anybody over — making over $200,000 a year, yet he wants to nearly double the capital gains tax. Nearly double it, which 100 million Americans have investments in — mutual funds, 401(k)s — policemen, firemen, nurses. He wants to increase their taxes. --John McCain

The problem is that is flatly false. It is in fact so fundamentally, embarrassingly wrong that if any other Presidential contender said it, that comment alone might be the end of their bid for the White House.

Investments contained in 401-K's (Or in the case of 'policemen, firemen' usually a 403-B), pensions, IRAs, tax deferred variable annuities, and similar retirement vehicles aren't subject to capital gains tax -- they're not taxed at all. Changing the capital gains tax rate will have zero effect on them. Withdrawals from tax deferred accounts by retirees are generally taxed at whatever the income tax rate is for that person at the time of withdrawal (Which, incidentally, is usually a hell of a lot more than the current long term capital gains tax rate, yet another way to rip off the middle class).

This feature of pension and retirement accounts is about as fundamental as it can get in the retirement planning and tax preparation business. Most laypeople over age 40 know this; let alone rookie financial advisors studying for the series 7, or a barely legal teen on her first day at H & R Block. For McCain not to know that would be, well, terrifying, as this is something that will affect upwards of 80 million freakin retirees during his potential Presidential term[s]. The other possibility is he knowingly lied.

I'm not sure which one of those options is worse, a candidate running for President in the midst of the worst economic crises since the Arab Oil Embargo who can't handle the most basic features of retirement and tax policy, or one who just lies his ass off about it in hopes of handing more money to billionaires. Then again there is a third and even more chilling possibility, one I dearly hope is off the mark: John McCain is struggling with some kind mental or memory issue, he can't remember shit.

Chris Mooney reviews the anti-evolution movie Expelled. After the obligatory and accurate recognition the film is a steaming pile of crap, he points out what most reviewers avoid:

From Michael Crichton’s State of Fear to Stein’s Expelled, there is nothing to prevent the most awful, misleading drivel from reaching and influencing mass audiences. There are no standards. There is no filter. And the truth is not just automatically going to win in the competition of ideas when the playing field tilts against it.

Regardless if the movie is a money maker, thousands of people will see it. Hopefully, most won’t walk out of the theater blaming evolutionary biologists for the Holocaust despite the intent of the producers to do exactly that and more. But I bet plenty of viewers will buy into the slickly packaged premise that evolutionary biology is built on a tottering foundation of lies propped up by a vicious cabal of modern day Lysenkoists eagerly persecuting those brave martyrs presenting the revolutionary evidence for creationism, or intelligent design, or whatever opinion poll tested pseudonym is chosen next. That same spurious public relations methodology will continue to win hearts and minds, on everything from stem cell research to climate change, until such time as we invest in and develop counter measures that can match the efforts of our highly motivated and often well paid anticognates.

• I've recently been highlighting right-wing lunatic Sun-myung Moon by way of author of John Gorenfeld. Let's take a trip down DKos memory lane and revisit Dr. Jonathon Wells who also appears in Expelled and whose science education -- intended in his own words to 'destroy darwinism' -- was paid for by Moon's Unification Church.
• People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is offering a one-million dollar prize for anyone who develops a process to produce meat in the lab, with no animal attached.
• A reader sent me this article which sounds dreadfully familiar to those of you who've followed the political attacks on James Hansen and NASA GISS, except the tax payer supported agency under seige this time is the EPA.
• I hope to be announcing a science panel at Netroots Nation 2008 next week, the subject of which will be, in part, repairing the extensive damage inflicted on US science policy over the last eight horrible years.

Update 5:15 AM EST: It would be inexcusably misleading to blame Christianity for Nazism or the death camps, even though at times Hitler used a perverse, twisted theology to justify his ideology. Hitler referred to his Christian beliefs -- including his idea of Jesus as an Aryan role model that would have condoned persecution of Jews and other scapegoats targeted by Nazis (More recent evidence suggest the Nazis had vague plans to eliminate traditional Christianity or at least those elements of it considered in conflict with Aryan supremacist  dogma and replace it with a more compliant, Nazi friendly version) -- many times more than evolution to rationalize his murderous actions. Any intellectually honest person, religious or otherwise, would readily concede that blaming the Bible and modern day Christians for the evils of Nazism would be as silly and as ugly as blaming Isaac Newton for the V-2 rocket -- or laying the responsibility for Auschwitz at the feet Charles Darwin. Sad to say, there are documented instances of creationists doing precisely that, both directly or indirectly, including portions of Expelled.  

I don't know about you, but it's been a brutally long week here at DarkSyde Manor. So thank the powers that be it's Friday and have an open thread & video on me courtesy of our friends at the National Center for Science Education.

And speaking of science, I should have a panel announcement in the next week or so for Netroots Nation 2008, the subject of which will be reviewing past damage to science policy and repairing same after the disasterous Bush Administration thankfully ends.

Over half a billion¹ years ago, the super continent Rodinia began to come apart at the seams. Gigantic underground cracks formed in the tectonic plate on which the ancient continent rode like a granite raft floating in a sea of denser molten rock. Three cracks radiated away, star-like, each individual fault probing the path of least resistance through the rocky subterranean matrix. Finally, two faults prevailed, defining the jagged rift where Rodinia split in two. And the other crack? With the tension relieved, it stopped spreading, and lay buried and dormant. Paleo-geologists call these ancient scars Aulacogens.

But eons later, if pressure builds anew, deep underground in an otherwise fairly homogeneous stretch of strata, any such flaw that happens to be nearby serves as an ideal place for patches of strained earth to slip past each other. At times with a resounding jolt carried far and wide in waves born on a seismic superconductor. This failed fault theory, one of many possibilities, sounds delightfully geeky: unless you happened to be near the Wabash Valley Fault System running throughout the upper Midwest early yesterday morning. Then you called it a friggin earthquake!

• Thanks to BushCo, neocon clowns have taken over the  Environmental Industrial Protection Agency, so it's no surprise the EPA is employing neocon tactics like ignoring lawful subpoenas, followed by the obligatory nonsense that complying would 'confuse the public.'
• For what it's worth, I think Tristero is absolutely right. We've tried ignoring right-wing stupidity and hoping things like creationism go extinct. It doesn't work. Better to take the lies head on. Here's one way you can add your voice of reason, and win fabulous prizes!
• The man who saw a subtle anomaly in a few lines of data produced by a primitive computer generated climate model has passed away, but his profound insight lives forever: Etched into the very fabric of domains both natural and abstract, simple rules can give rise to infinitely complex behavior. Edward Lorenz's observation would be midwife to a new branch of mathematics/physics called Chaos Theory and the related, fascinating topology hidden in the geometry of Fractals.

As millions of Americans hurry to complete their taxes by April 15, yet more indication that those hard earned dollars are being needlessly lost in the sands of Iraq. With oil over $100 a barrel, Iraqi coffers are bulging with cash. Billions of dollars in fact. So, those revenues are being used to pay for Iraqi security and improvements to infrastructure, like the neocons promised five long years ago, right?

CNN -- He was replying to Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who last week complained that after five years of war, "it is still the American taxpayer who is shouldering the greatest economic burden in Iraq." Levin, a key congressional Democrat, made the comment during a series of hearings last week in the House and Senate on the status of the war. With the 5-year-old war's cost to U.S. taxpayers now estimated at more than $600 billion, the Iraqi windfall provoked sharp questions from lawmakers to the top U.S. general in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, who were among those who testified.

"This nation's facing record deficits, and the Iraqis have translated their oil revenues into budget surpluses rather than effective services," Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday.

The Iraqi foriegn minister went on CNN yesterday to make excuses. I can understand why senior Iraqi officials are happy to sit on their treasure -- along with their asses -- and let US taxpayers cover their bills, pay their salaries, and risk our soldiers' lives, but why in the world would Republicans stand for it? Just which country do John McCain and his conservative pals think they're working for exactly? If Baghdad Republicans want to play US taxpayers for dopes and hand over our money to pad the Swiss bank accounts of Iraqi fat cats, fine, reregister as a foriegn lobby or 527, or whatever the fuck they want. But please, let's dispense with the laughable notion that the Iraq Wing of the GOP is an American political party working with American interests in mind.

Being a science writer, I can't help but gravitate toward scientific metaphors. So imagine for a second if two famous primate experts were interviewed for a nature program while an 800 pound gorilla tore the studio apart in the background. And in the midst of that chaos, the scientists avoided any mention of gorillas, while Calmly and Seriously discussing the theoretical danger posed by bunny rabbits.

Something like that happened last weekend: NBC News "chief" Tim Russert interviewed two leading 'conservative intellectuals,' Andrew Sullivan author of The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, and Christopher Hitchens who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Both guests have been incessantly congratulated for, as the title of their books indicate, their admirable courage in transcending previously defined conservative boundaries and confronting the pernicious influence fringe ideologues and religious fundamentalists exert on the conservative movement.

Amazingly, during an hour long show, I can't recall either ‘critic’ or host raising a single question or making one comment concerning the stranglehold the religious right has on the modern Republican Party. Just for example, there was not one word spoken about conservative foreign cult figure Sun-myung Moon, his ownership of the Washington Times, its sister publication Insight which published the false story that Obama attended a hard-line militant Madrassa as a child, or any of the dozens of other scandalous connections joining ultra right wing religious icons -- some of whom who routinely concoct wild and ugly religious fabrications -- irrevocably to the Republican Party. The fact that McCain political adviser Charlie Black organized a coronation where Moon was literally crowned the Messiah in a US Senate building, and duped two US lawmakers into not just attending, but physically placing a crown on Mister and Mrs. Messiah's head did not rise to the attention of Russert or his guests. Not like there's any shortage of material.

Instead, two or three full segments of the program were exclusively dedicated to Pastor Jeremiah Wright's comments on the electoral prospects for democratic front runner Barack Obama. (To be fair, Sullivan, an outspoken Obama supporter, took time to at least try and put the issue in context.)

A new article in Time Magazine Online explores what a number of us math-physics geeks have been harping on from time to time: Existing biofuel technology is not an ideal solution to our energy dilemma. There are three primary obstacles and one stubborn but irreducible consequence of our pay for play political system. 1) In our petroleum based economy where most farm machinery, processing, and distribution systems are built around petroleum, biofuels made from corn or other high end crops consume as much or more oil as they replace. 2) The former combined with the loss in photosynthetic carbon sinks because of the land cleared to grow these crops is equal or greater to the carbon savings produced by the biofuel itself. 3) There is a food shortage looming and if we really commit the kind of acreage needed to put a dent in our national energy budget it will make matters much worse. The political consequence is that those agricultural industries which stand to gain the most from biofuels, Big Corn or Big Sugar, are among the worst offenders of the three concerns outlined above. But they are the ones with the political power to lobby and divert any well meaning funds away from other ideas and into their bulging pockets, efficiencies be damned.

Direct solar energy either from panels or simple heating, wind energy, tidal basins, nuclear energy, and even biofuels produced either as a byproduct of existing agribusiness or from wild plants growing in conditions that won't support high yield domesticated crops, will work. The easiest low hanging fruit to grab right now is on the shelf fuel efficiency and fuel saving technology. The bottom line, literally, is if we can hand Exxon-Mobil massive tax breaks or spend hundreds of billions securing dwindling oil supplies in Iraq, we can give US automakers incentive to build more fuel efficient cars, stimulate the solar energy and wind industries, and provide small business owners and individual taxpayers with reasons to incorporate all of it and begin to get this nation off the unsustainable, fatal, energy treadmill.

• You've heard of black-holes and super giant stars. But an object that draws little attention is a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are thought to be failed stars that wander around all by their lonesome something like a rogue Jupiter or Saturn. Astronomers have detected the coolest one yet only forty light-years from earth.
• Apologists for Bush's ban on stem cells often point out that there is no law against private research or commercial development. Sounds good, except while they're saying that to us, they're quietly working to put up any obstacle they can think of against private or commercial development.
• And finally, here's one for you legal theoristes: did this right-wing radio host commit an illegal act? Does it qualify as a terrorist threat?
• The Times (UK) covers the recent well-documented human-to-human transmission case of H5N1 from son to father in China, but notes how difficult it is to catch still.

  It is now five years since the present outbreak of H5N1 avian flu first infected people. Though 379 people have since contracted the virus, of whom 239 have died, it has yet to start a pandemic.

  As its name suggests, bird flu remains predominantly an avian disease. While it is very dangerous to humans who catch it, this has happened only rarely, after close contact with infected birds.

  What would we do if a pandemic broke out? We'll discuss that tomorrow when we talk about hospital surge capacity. – DemFromCT

Stem cell researchers have announced an exciting technique that may one day be used to treat victims of Parkinson's. And once again conservative apologists charge into the fray over embryonic stem cells and get it dead wrong.

IBD -- Aside from their medical promise, this discovery and its promising application serve as vindication of President Bush's view that such research can continue without the ethical and moral baggage of using human embryos.

This new development came on the heels of results released late last year by stem cell pioneer Dr. James Thomson and a Japanese team. Back then the usual suspects also rushed in to praise George Bush, until a disgusted Thomson smacked them down:

NYT -- Dr. Thomson estimated that the political controversy and the President’s restrictions on federal funding have actually set the field back four to five years ...In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post on December 3, Dr. Thomson and Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, emphasized that the breakthrough was achieved "despite [political] restrictions," not because of them.

Investors Business Daily prides itself on bringing readers critical information on financial markets and cutting edge investment opportunities around the world. Stem cell research here and abroad may well lead to some of the most revolutionary, lucrative treatments since the advent of antibiotics. And yet here we have what appears to be the editorial staff of IBD publishing a piece that is riddled from start to finish with errors so fundamental a high school student could uncover them with a few minutes on Google. Even the IBD header, which states that scientists 'didn't need human embryos' to make these discoveries is flat wrong.

Dr. Thomson also stressed that neither his nor the Japanese work could have been performed were it not for the knowledge gained over the past decade in human embryonic stem cell research — the very research that Mr. Bush has striven mightily to limit.

The editors/author were either careless to a degree that approaches negligance, or intentionally misled their readers about a dazzling develpoment in biotechonolgy because they value a discredited conservative talking point over factual reporting. Which begs the question: just who are the editors at IBD serving, investors or the Bush administration?

The dismal reality just keeps rolling through my mind at this late hour robbing me of rest. Our troops have to stay. Like water spiraling down the drain and into a sewer, that's where every Republican canard and conservative dodge leads. Over 4000 American KIA, thousands more maimed for life, half a trillion dollars and counting, no end in sight. But according to the mundane idiots and clever liars that got us into this disaster we are making dramatic progress, like this:

NYT -- For a brief moment, Washington politics intruded into a world in which automatic weapons fire, tank fire and explosives rock the streets. But before General Petraeus could complete his prepared statement, the power shut down again.

Look, there are only three future possibilities, and staying in Iraq is the only answer the GOP has for any of the three. Forget crayons, this flow chart could be drawn with a can of spray paint on a legal pad: 1) Violence up, our soldiers have to stay. 2) No change, Petraeus explains why our troops have to stay. And 3) if someday the violence falls to whatever arbitrary magic number is deemed acceptable, can our troops finally come home? TPM dug up this gem from the New Yorker which sums up the absurdity of John McCain's answer to that one perfectly:

McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal - that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.

For years we've been told that our troops can't leave until Iraq is stable and secure, conveniently vague conditions that Crocker and Petraeus were unable to define today despite repeated opportunties to do so. But McCain laid even that lie to rest: we're going to stay in Iraq no matter what for a hundred years, a thousand years, or ten-thousand years. Or until the Republicans and their DINO lackeys are kicked out of DC.  

Polar Bears are members of the order Carnivora. This diverse clade also includes Pinnipedia like seals and walruses; Musteloidea like raccoons, weasels, and skunks; Felidae from kitty cats to tigers; and in my highly biased opinion, the most wonderful creatures on earth, dogs. As the name implies, they're mostly meat eaters. Senator James Inhofe (R-Trainwreck) [Correction: Glenn Beck] explains why we must fight Polar Bears with global warming up there, so we don't have to fight them down here:

Video -- They eat people! For the love of Pete, they’re big, angry bears. They eat people. Not that I say we go out and kill all of them, but I mean, it doesn’t seem to be a problem here. ... I can’t take the lies anymore. [Neither can I Senator Glenn - DS]

• It's neat, it's petite, it's the smallest black-hole ever detected, right at the theoretical mass limit for stellar mass black-holes predicted by astrophysicists.
• What does Barack Obama think about evolutionary biology vs creationism? Read it yourself and enjoy Obama's intellectual honesty.
• If you think the media went nuts over a few remarks by Jeremiah Wright, wait til they get their fangs into this: Wright has been strutting around for years with senior leaders of the Democratic Party, proudly and openly bragging that he speaks with the ghost of Thomas Jefferson, plus a bunch of other famous dead people. According to Wright, they all report from the spirit world that Wright is the Messiah ... Woops! It wasn't Wright, it's a conservative foreign cult leader jetting around with senior Republicans saying it. Well then, no story there...
• Obama acknowledges the threat of a pandemic in a statement on the U.S. Visit of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:

  In Asia, the quality of our alliance and scope of our diplomatic partnership shine brightly. We both face a rapidly evolving security order defined by traditional and non-traditional security problems. These include: changing regional power dynamics and rivalries, territorial disputes, resource competition, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, failed states, environmental degradation, and pandemic diseases. Managing this complex blend of security challenges requires leveraging both bilateral and multilateral mechanisms.

  Clinton has done so previously.  McCain? Still working on whether condoms help prevent AIDS. Which candidate is most likely to help rebuild public  help health infrastructure as part of health reform and use the facts to do so?  – DemFromCT
  

Hard to believe the GOP thinks they can win with a promise of 100 more years of this kind of shit. Via Balloon Juice, the Nation reports on another brutal sexual assault by contractors on an American in Iraq:

[A]ll she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand--but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth. Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions.

KBR contractors are immune from local laws, will the Bush Administration investigate, or just look the other way? I predict no investigation from the White House, John McCain won't even mention it, and right-wing bloggers will go through the vicitm's trash cans and yearbooks looking for ways to smear her character.