How did you expect this to turn out?

(Newscom/Zuma Press via TPM)

How did you expect this to turn out? How did you expect taking assault rifles to political rallies to end? Not that it's ended yet, of course. Most likely, this is only the beginning.

In July, some lunatic fan of Glenn Beck, taking his rants seriously, set off to attack the Tides Foundation. Luckily for them, he got into a shootout with the police while on the way there.

Now we've got Rep. Gabrielle Giffords with a bullet hole through her brain, six people dead - so far - including a nine-year-old girl, and 11 more injured. Don't tell me you're surprised.

Yes, both of these violent attackers were complete lunatics, no doubt. But what else did you expect? When you get a whole mob of people frothing at the mouth, shaking their assault rifles, it's not the relatively sane ones who'll be the first to start shooting people. No, it's the real lunatics who'll take you seriously.

Here's how Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik put it:

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government; the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," he said.

"And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

I've posted about this insanity before - before either of these two incidents. It's been building for a long time. It's been encouraged, as a deliberate tactic in right-wing politics. Republicans have blood on their hands, they really do.

And even "moderate Republicans" - if any still exist - are enabling these bloody-handed extremists. The loonies are still a minority, even today.

But when moderates and Independents overlook this kind of overheated rhetoric, when they vote for spittle-spewing extremists, when they watch Fox "News," when they deny the legitimacy of their own democratically-elected President, when they go along with the worst excesses in American politics, they help create incidents just like this.

My Republican friends, look at your own hands. How much scrubbing will it take to get the blood off?

Democratic Congresswoman shot in Arizona

(TPM)

I just saw this at TPM. Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at point blank range in Tuscon this morning, as she was holding a "Congress on Your Corner" event.

Local news confirmed initial reports by NPR that the suspect in his late teens or early twenties was tackled on the scene and is in custody. Gawker spoke to an apparent eyewitness, former ER doctor Steven Rayle, who assisted in apprehending the suspect.

The gunman, who may have come from inside the Safeway, walked up and shot Gifford in the head first, "point blank". According to Rayle, who is a former ER doctor, Gifford was able to move her hands after being shot. After shooting Gifford, the gunman opened fire indiscriminately for a few seconds, firing 20-30 rounds and hitting a number of people, including a kid no older than 10 years old. Rayle hid behind a concrete pole and pretended to be dead. When the gunman apparently ran out of ammunition he attempted to flee, but a member of Gifford's staff tackled him.

According to TPM, the child is dead, and so is Federal Judge John Roll, who himself faced death threats from right-wing loonies in 2009, after presiding over a civil rights case. Many of the others are still in critical condition.

Another excerpt from TPM:

Giffords has dealt with several violent incidents in the last year, mostly related to the health care reform vote. In August 2009 at another "Congress on Your Corner" event at a Douglas, AZ Safeway, one attendee dropped a gun. Her office was vandalized in March 2010 after the health care vote. That same month, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (R) put Giffords on SarahPAC's "target" list with a gun site over her district. Giffords' opponent in a tough reelection campaign last fall, tea partier Jesse Kelly (R), reportedly held an event in June 2010 in which supporters were invited to shoot an M-16 with him to "Get On Target For Victory."

It's early yet, so we can't say anything for sure. But note that this nut fired 20 to 30 rounds, until he finally ran out of ammunition. Of course, the gun nuts support carrying weapons like this. So instead of having one or two people shot, we have ten - and we're lucky it was only that many.

Really, what kind of country are we becoming? The lunatics are taking over the asylum.

Not the original intent

(Pat Bagley)

Thomas Aikenhead

From the Freedom From Religion Foundation:

On this day in 1697, Scottish medical student Thomas Aikenhead, 18 or 19 years old, was hanged to death for blasphemy, in Britain's last execution for blasphemy. The young Edinburgh student was found guilty of denying the trinity, and was convicted on the testimony of five "friends" to whom he had confided his strong religious doubts. Evidence against him were "atheistic" books in his possession. The Church of Scotland urged his "vigorous execution."

“ . . . it is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hid treasure. . .  ”

— Thomas Aikenhead, letter to friends on date of execution, Jan. 8, 1697

This is more than 300 years ago, but it should not be forgotten. It was a capital offense for a young man to have "strong religious doubts." And they murdered him for it, at the vigorous urging of the Church of Scotland.

When you already know everything

(Jesus and Mo)

That's a shocking indictment of the Arab world, don't you think? This is based on the 2002 Arab Human Development Report which states, in part:

The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa’moun’s time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year (Galal, S., 1999).

These numbers have been criticized, of course, and the report is almost a decade old. The whole point of the development report was to highlight improvements which needed to be made, and the translation gap is one of those being targeted. Nevertheless, even more optimistic estimates seem to show "a crisis in the creation, access and dissemination of knowledge in the Arab world."

Is this all because of religion? Of course not. But religion doesn't help. The whole idea of blasphemy certainly doesn't help. When you fear other ideas, it's because you don't think your idea is good enough to compete. When you censor books, you're simply trying to protect your erroneous beliefs from better ones. And when you kill people for blasphemy, well, that's self-explanatory, isn't it?

As Michael Servetus said, before he was burned at the stake in 1553, "To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man." If you can't defend your doctrine through rational argument, how good can it really be?

Incidentally, Jesus and Mo is one of the finalists for Best Webcomic of 2010 and for the 2011 Riffy Award, both at the Washington Post. Check out both links and vote for your favorite.

Admittedly, there's some tough competition. Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comic strips, and so is Calamities of Nature. But I'm sorry that Bug isn't a finalist. (I did nominate it.)

QOTD: Quick, where's an invisible blond woman?

Quote of the Day:

Lawrence Murphy was an evil man. He was a Wisconsin priest who molested over 200 boys, and just to make the story particularly deplorable, they were deaf children. Preying on the weakest and most vulnerable was apparently his life's mission. Furthermore, this was the scandalous case that was reported directly to then Cardinal Ratzinger in his role as the Vatican enforcer; his enforcement involved shuffling the guilty around to hide their crimes and give them fresh opportunities in new hunting grounds.

Well, the Vatican has finally found it in its black (but gold-plated!) and shriveled husk of a heart to do something for Wisconsin: they've blessed a ghost sighting as genuine. Woo hoo! That'll fix everything right up!

The church has declared that a sighting in 1859 of a blond Mary hovering between two trees was real and worthy, and the local Catholic church is now busily expanding their parking lot to cope with the expected influx of gullible suckers pilgrims who will flock to the site to imagine a floating cheerleader for Jesus.

It's a funny story, too. ...

Another funny thing is that the priests are obviously uncomfortably aware that this all sounds like rather convenient timing. ...

Never mind that! We've got child-raping priests! This calls for an immediate distraction in the form of invisible blond women, bugger the blatant nature of the ploy, and pass out the platitudes! - PZ Myers

Here we go again...

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I've been meaning to blog about these GOP "cut-go" rules. What a scam! The name sounds like it might be similar to the "pay-go" rules of the Democrats. But whereas "pay-go" was designed to avoid increasing the deficit, "cut-go" seems to be designed to explode the deficit. It's basically a con on the American people.

Here's how TPM put it:

In 2007, just weeks after Republicans lost control of the House and Senate and six years after the first passel of Bush tax cuts were signed into law, Democrats made a key change to the budget rules to prevent that episode from repeating itself.

Republicans had used the budget reconciliation process -- immune from a filibuster -- to pass the cuts and explode the deficit: two things the reconciliation process was never meant to allow. To get away with it, Republicans were forced to include a 10-year sunset in package -- planting the seeds for the tax cut fight we just saw on Capitol Hill. After Dems wrested control of Congress, they banned the reconciliation loopholes used by the GOP altogether.

But as they return to power in the House of Representatives, Republicans are taking steps to unravel those changes.

And here's a more detailed explanation from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. An excerpt:

Current House rules include a pay-as-you-go requirement that any tax cut or spending increase for a mandatory (i.e., entitlement) program must be offset by cuts in other mandatory spending or increases in other taxes, in order to avoid increasing the deficit. Current rules also bar the House from using budget “reconciliation” procedures — special rules that facilitate speedy action on specified budget legislation — to pass bills that would increase the deficit. The new rules would alter and greatly weaken these commonsense measures ...

Sadly, we’ve been here before. In the 1990s, when pay-as-you-go rules applied to both spending increases and tax cuts and Congress used reconciliation solely to enact deficit-reduction packages, the country went from large deficits to a balanced budget. (A strong economy obviously helped as well.) But in the early 2000s, with Republicans controlling Congress and President Bush in the White House, Congress set aside pay-as-you-go and turned reconciliation on its head, using it not to reduce deficits but instead to push through costly, unpaid-for tax cuts in both 2001 and 2003. Previously, reconciliation had only been used for deficit reduction.

The results are plain to see. The Bush-era tax cuts were a significant factor in the return to large deficits after 2001, contributing $2.6 trillion (including added interest costs on the national debt) to the budgetary deterioration between 2001 and 2010. House Republicans now plan to restore the very type of permissive budget rules that contributed markedly to that fiscal deterioration.

Moreover, measures to scuttle the current, even-handed pay-as-you-go rule and to allow use of the reconciliation process to increase the deficit are even more indefensible today than such steps were in 2001 — because now we already have deficits that exceed $1 trillion a year.

Does anyone really think that Republicans care two hoots about the budget deficit? If so, why do they keep pushing measures to hugely increase the deficit? Why is it that only Democrats seem to fight to keep the deficit down, while Republican control inevitably means huge deficit increases?

And I was wondering what "cut-go" says about waging war, too. Much of our current deficit is the result of two idiotic wars Republicans started, without paying for them (remember how the Iraq War was going to "pay for itself"?). And caring for our maimed soldiers is going to be a necessary expense for generations.

Anyway, I thought Jon Stewart did a great job with that video clip. And here are a couple of cartoons that fit well in this post, too:

(Jim Morin)

(John de Rosier)

Ya think?

(Nick Anderson)

I know I'm always railing about cowardly Democrats, but what can I say? This cartoon really hit home for me.

Terrified by the polls, Democrats tried to run away from their accomplishments - and from the black man at the head of their party - those who weren't just hiding under the bed, shivering in fear. OK, maybe they would have gotten stomped anyway, but they certainly got stomped as it is, didn't they? And they left the right-wing with undisputed possession of the debate.

Then, after they got beat, Democrats turned around and did something - a bunch of somethings, in fact. They were quite impressive. But what good will it be now, with Republicans firmly in charge of the House for the next two years and stronger in the Senate, too?

Playing defense would have been a lot easier before the election. And dare I suggest that they could have been playing offense then, too, if they hadn't been so cowardly and so politically inept? I'm still absolutely astonished that they didn't take that tax-cut gift from the GOP and run with it. How could you ask for a better political issue?

Tell me, why are the Democrats so bad at this stuff? And why are the Republicans so incompetent at everything except politics?

Bill O'Reilly proves God exists!

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Hmm,... if anything you don't know is proof that God exists, I guess I understand why so many believers are ignorant of science. No, it's not - or not necessarily - that their scientific ignorance makes them believe. It's probably more that their belief makes them want to stay scientifically ignorant.

Of course, this doesn't apply to all believers, certainly not. Even some scientists believe in a god (or gods). Yet all too many believers, just like Bill O'Reilly, seem determined to maintain their ignorance - and even wear it as a badge of honor. No evidence-based thinking for them! They're not like those elitists who got a good education and understand the scientific method.

Ha! All those nerds will be suffering when the Rapture comes, won't they? Won't that be fun to watch as we're floating up to Heaven, getting ready to meet Jesus and our 72 perpetual virgins? Or something like that...

Garbage can babies mean health care reform is unconstitutional?

Jebus, do these Republicans ever listen to themselves? There are always babies who are born, lived, and died without crossing a state line, never getting any health care whatsoever, because they're thrown in garbage cans at birth,... and that means health care reform is unconstitutional???

What's wrong with these people? I'd point out that such an infant would never be required to buy health insurance under this law, either, in his tragically few minutes of life - but is it really necessary to even make that argument?

Honestly, the whole Republican Party has gone completely off the deep end, don't you think?

PS. And also on the subject of health care, how about the Congressional Budget Office estimate that repealing the health care reform bill would increase the deficit by $230 billion, just in the first decade?

Of course, Republicans deal with that just like they deal with global warming and all other unwelcome facts. They just refuse to believe it. After all, if they don't believe in something, it doesn't exist, right?

Slavery? What slavery?

So Republicans are reading the U.S. Constitution today on the floor of the House of Representatives, but they're leaving out the awkward parts, like counting black slaves as three-fifths of a person.

I don't know. It just reminds me of Southern Republicans celebrating secession and the Confederacy without mentioning slavery at all (or simply insisting - despite abundant historical evidence otherwise - that slavery had little to do with it).

Of course, this is just political theater, nothing more. And I have to say it's also funny that a lunatic "birther" interrupted them, yelling out "except Obama, except Obama, help us Jesus!" when they got to the part about requiring the President to be a natural born citizen. Heh, heh. And that's one of their supporters!

Well, when you try to use lunatics for political advantage, you've got a tiger by its tail. John McCain has learned that the past two years, and so have plenty of other Republicans, desperately trying to placate the far-right fanatics who've become the GOP base.

But I don't feel sorry for them, not at all. I feel a lot sorrier for our country!

PS. I must admit that I like Rep. Jerrold Nadler's take on this:

"They are reading it like a sacred text," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the outgoing chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, who has studied and memorized the Constitution with talmudic intensity.

Nadler called the "ritualistic reading" on the floor "total nonsense" and "propaganda" intended to claim the document for Republicans. "You read the Torah, you read the Bible, you build a worship service around it," said Nadler, who argued that the Founders were not "demigods" and that the document's need for amendments to abolish slavery and other injustices showed it was "highly imperfect."

"You are not supposed to worship your constitution. You are supposed to govern your government by it," he said.

Anderson Cooper interviews Wakefield

I mentioned this story earlier today, but I had to post this video clip, when I saw it. Anderson Cooper does a great job, doesn't he?

And I have to say that it's a perfect example of why you should not get your medical beliefs from actresses and politicians!

Unfortunately, Rep. Dan Burton is like most Republicans in his dismissal of science (though I hope most aren't this foolish). They'd rather believe what they want to believe, rather than look to the scientific evidence.

But how dumb do the rest of us have to be to elect these people to public office?

Mandate!

(Joel Pett)

Yellowline International, Inc.

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Autism study was an elaborate fraud

I've blogged before about the erroneous idea that vaccines cause autism, and about how many people refuse to believe that they're wrong, no matter what the evidence shows, and I'm sure this won't make much difference to the true believers. But the British Medical Journal now says that the original study, which claimed to show a link, was a deliberate fraud.

Here's how CNN puts it:

A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines is an "elaborate fraud," according to a medical journal -- a charge the physician behind the study vigorously denies.

The British medical journal BMJ, which published the results of its investigation, concluded Dr. Andrew Wakefield misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible. The journalist who wrote the BMJ articles said Thursday he believes Wakefield should face criminal charges. ...

The medical publication says the study has done long-lasting damage to public health.

"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May.

Note that the original study was based on only 12 children, a very tiny sample size. But subsequent review shows that the medical histories of all 12 were fraudulently altered. This isn't a close call, not in the slightest.

The original article, which claimed to find a link between childhood vaccines and autism, was published in the Lancet, a respected medical journal, in 1998, causing an immediate uproar. But the Lancet retracted the article in January last year, and as mentioned above, Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in May.

Ten of the co-authors of the original article have since retracted their support for its conclusions, since Wakefield apparently faked the data. This wasn't a mistake on his part, but a deliberate, elaborate fraud.

Of course, the true believers don't accept that and likely never will. After all, he's such a nice man, a "man of integrity and honor" (except that he's not, according to the evidence). According to them, this is all a giant, worldwide conspiracy of vaccine manufacturers - and individuals who just want to see more children get autism, apparently.

Well, the true believer trusts in faith, not in evidence. They just believe what they believe, so there's never a mechanism by which they'll accept that they're wrong.

As Brian Deer, the author of this latest article, points out, Andrew Wakefield has an easy remedy, if this charge of fraud isn't true. Britain has one of the easiest libel laws in the world. It's been a complete embarrassment to scientists and skeptics, being widely used by frauds to censor, or just deter, criticism.

If Wakefield really has been libeled, if he's not a complete fraud, he could sue Deer and the British Medical Journal for everything they have. Heck, he could even do it in America, and our libel laws are far, far stricter. In Britain, this would be a slam-dunk,... assuming, of course, that he didn't fake the data.

Sadly, all this has scared parents and led to lower rates of childhood vaccinations worldwide. And that has led to children dying! Because of this irrational fear, according to the Jenny McCarthy Body Count, just since 2007 there have been 72,475 preventable illnesses and 622 preventable child deaths (often, in infants too young to be vaccinated, because of the loss of herd immunity). And not once has autism been scientifically linked to vaccines.

If you're interested, here's the complete text of Deer's article in the British Medical Journal, complete with 124 footnotes. (It's nothing if not well-documented.) Note that it's free, not even requiring registration to read. And apparently, this is only the first article in a series.

Let's all stand on John McCain's lawn

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How long before Fox picks up on this?

(Mike Keefe)

PZ Myers is a Christian?

QOTD: Springtime for hypocrites

Quote of the Day:

It has been a great week on the hypocrisy front. A couple of high points:

The hypocrisy of the apparatchiks: Joe Nocera amplifies some of the points I made in my column. The determination of the Republicans on the crisis commission to lay the blame on Fannie and Freddie flies right in the face of the evidence; and Nocera also adds some information on the curious switch of positions taking place. A few years ago the same people now attacking F&F for promoting loans to low-income borrowers were attacking F&F for … not promoting loans to low-income borrowers. Back then they castigated F&F by pointing to the fact that private lenders were making loans where the agencies refused to tread, now they say that it was F&F that lured the private sector into making those very same loans.

Whatever. It must be the government’s fault, because, you know, because.

The hypocrisy of the centrists: Just two weeks ago, the deficit was the great evil, and all the VSPs insisted that we needed fiscal austerity now now now. Then, magically, a big tax cut — increasing federal debt by more than the original Obama stimulus, and substantially raising the probability of making unaffordable tax cuts permanent — was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Why, it’s almost as if all the concern about the deficit was a front for opposing anything progressives might want, to be dropped as soon as debt was being run up on behalf of conservative goals. But that can’t be true, can it?

In a way, I almost welcome the frankness of someone like Ron Paul, who tells us that there’s no need for any kind of bank regulations. It’s crazy, of course — even Adam Smith called for bank regulations, comparing them to building regulations designed to prevent the spread of fires. But at least the guy’s consistent. - Paul Krugman

That magic, magic gold

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I mentioned a small part of that a few days ago, but it also reminds me of this post by PZ Myers the same day:

I just saw a commercial peddling gold coins, going on and on about how the price of gold was soaring above $1300 per ounce, and showing this fancy glinting well-lit shiny gold coin and telling everyone the cost of gold meant the $50 price could only be guaranteed for 7 days. This coin is 14 karat 0.9999 pure gold clad! A little deeper in to the spiel, they mention that it contains 14 milligrams of pure gold.

Using their own numbers, by my calculation that means the $50 coin contains about 64¢ worth of gold.

It sounds like a tax on dumb people, to me. They're probably snaring people who watch Glenn Beck and read the Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, a tax on dumb people is a pretty good way of putting it. That is, after all, why Glenn Beck peddles gold on his show, why his sponsor is there at all.

The problem is that they're making more dumb people every day, with their attacks on science and on education in general. OK, ignorant people, rather than "dumb," perhaps. But the effect is the same.

It's to the advantage of Fox "News" that their viewers remain ignorant, and from studies I've seen, they do a pretty good job of it. Their viewers are the least informed - and the most misinformed - of all cable news viewers. (No, you can have different opinions, but you're not allowed to invent your own facts.)

Republicans, of course, want to turn back the clock on everything, back to some mythical past, an idealized past, not the real one. (As I noted previously, they certainly don't want to return tax rates on rich people to the 1950s!) Still, fighting against paper money seems backward even for them, don't you think? Do they know anything about economics?

The Fed has made a lot of mistakes over the years, but compare that to the mistakes made by politicians. Well, that's the whole point, I think. Republican politicians are simply trying to find a scapegoat to direct attention away from their own culpability. It's just sad to realized that that kind of thing still works, even in the 21st Century.

It's like we climbed down out of the trees only yesterday.