silveradept | Finally feeling back to my old self

Up top tonight, the Eternal Earthbound Pets service, which offers to have genuine atheists take care of your pets in case you should be Raptured. Peace of mind, y'know.

Elsewhere in the world, Taliban forces looking for medical treatment for one of the leaders took over a clinic, which then was surrounded and sieged by NATO forces. In a piece to help contemplate the costs of life, and possibly to harden hearts against the Afghanistan campaign, the Times reports only 150 votes were cast in a region that claimed the lives of UK soldiers during the election unrest.

In the domestic sphere, stop and pause for a moment. Who is the better Christian, Sarah Palin, Steven Anderson, or Ted Kennedy, if, you know, the thing about "by their fruits ye shall know them" is true.

Additionally, a well-known illegal immigrant is in favor of social welfafre programs. Go figure, right?

In our Weird News file, even if you fight the police, you cannot fight science, which says persons with flammable vapors in and on their body will ignite when exposed to a high-voltage spark.

A judge has ruled that Kentucky cannot require that its citizens depend on "Almighty God" during emergencies, based on such language in a law establishing the state's department of homeland security. The judge based his decision on the argument that such language was tantamount to an establishment of religion by the state. (An example of said text, supposedly on a plaque outside the office - "the safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God") In their defense, the opposition said "They make the argument ... that it has to do with a religion...and promoting a religion. God is not a religion. God is God....There are real benefits to acknowledging Him. There was not a single founder or framer of the Constitution who didn't believe that." Okay, here's the wasy mental exercise. Replace "God" with "Allah". (Yes, I know, replace the Abrahamic God with Himself, very funny.) See if that works. Try "Vishnu." Or better yet, "Kali", since she seems to like destruction. Still willing to put up that plaque, or have you already screamed in a high-pitched manner about the rpesence of demons and other Satanic things. (Hell, put "Satan" up there and see whether or not you want to put up the sign.) If you're not willing to do it for other entities that could stake a claim on protecting you, then you're probably doing it wrong. Good for the judge to rule in this way.

Regarding the latest thing about the Presidential Staff,

theweaselking reminds us that the Transmetropolitan world also has the press seeking to see a Member of the party.

Elsewhere in sexuality, El Paso, Texas now does the domestic partner benefits thing. Yaaaaay! And for your continuing neesds on the fight to enure that people are people, and not just seen according to their sexuality, check out Gay Marriage Watch.

Finally, the *facepalm* department has a doozie - Congresswoman from Kansas says the GOP is looking for "the Great White Hope". Beat. Beat. *facepalm* Of course, realizing what had been said, and what she could have meant by it, the backpedaling began in earnest, but sometimes those slips of language tell us more about the underlying societal anxiety and situation than any Klan rally could.

Lets play the opinion game.

Mr. Boortz leads the pack with throwing his hands up and declaring that our spending is unsustainable, and that perhaps Republicans could use it as a momentum gainer in 2010, but really, we're just going to get buried under the Obama spending plans and the Obama-friendly media will bury any opposition plan that has good suggestions on how to deal with the ballooning defecit. Such despair. Is there no hope of receovery, Mr. Boortz? Are you as depressed about spending as Mary Beth Hicks is irritated at the continuing marketing attempts to market adult seuxality, cheap products, and insistence that brand names make the woman to young girls (looking at you, Di$ney, and you, Harrison)? (By the way, eating breakfast apparently helps you remain abstinent longer, just so that you know. Srsly. Never mind that it's about stable family life, not breakfast itself.)

the Slacktivist gives insight into why he sees entities like Good Fight not as innocents parroting things they believe but haven&aops;t been shown the truth, but at least in some way actively choosing not to acknowledge some part of reality, because what they put out has often be selectively cut and edited to deliberately excise the parts that are inconsistent with their message or the part of reality that they deem exists. Soemone in there has to see it and then clip it, so someone knows and chooses to ifnore. That's not innocent.

Mr. Quelch in Bloomberg today hails the end of Cash for Clunkers, what he sees as another government auto maker bailout that stole future sales for a frenzy now.

Mr. Goldberg, perhaps aiming to drive a wedge between factions of the liberal coalition, expresses his relief at how Mr. Obama is blending faith and politics on issues, just like the last administrator did, with that nice little hole somewhere in abortion. His point, though, is that politicians on both sides attempt to use and co-opt the religious to go along with their designs, and that the Democrats are not the scientific secular atheists they and others want to claim they are. Thus, Goldberg vindicates Marx, at least indirectly, and provides evidence for the claim that we should be trying to minimize the religious reasoning and impact, where possible, in our laws and our government if we want high fidelity to the ideas presented in both the establishment and free exercise clauses.

Major changes always seem to get the opinions these days, so yes, we've got a nice crop on health care. Let's start with the sane and work our way outwards. In the safe and sane (and probably liberal) circle, a column about why we're willing to continue believing a lie even after we find out it isn't true - as we've found out before, people believe what they want to, and seek information that confirms their beliefs.

Moving away from sane, Ms. McCaughey brings up statements made by Dr. Emanuel that the singular focus on helping the patient, regardless of the cost, is driving up the cost of health care, and that we should be looking more at whether the cost of the treatment is justified for the extension of life that it will bring. She paints this as "the evil Dr. Emanuel wants to ration your care, kill your grandmothers and your infants", but I'm betting that most of what the doc is talking about is already in place when it comes to how insurance companies make decisions on whether or not to fund care, and then we can add on their profit motive on top of that. Removing the profit motive, even if it leaves an undesirable utilitarianism to the care, might still be an improvement.

Mr. Turd Blossom goes further out, implying the President will employ threats to get his way on health care, getting another strike against him from the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics department for quoting numbers out of context, and claiming private insurance is superior to Medicare, all getting in the way of his column saying that the President plans on making cuts to a program that lets seniors take Medicare money and buy a private insurance plan with it.

We go back to Boortz as our farthest out, who decries what he sees as union pork in health care as a smokescreen to his main point: ":The claim that healthcare is a right is tantamount to a claim that you have a right to a portion of the life and property of another.", which he asks for a defense of. Well, I could bring up a tax analogue, but really, I think that would be playing into the libertarianism and not providing a defense he would accept. (Despite the argument that all "public goods" predicate on this idea, and are equally paid for by all of us through taxes, so we all own it, and thus have the right to that life and property, but again, that's not a defense that a libertarian would readily accept, if I read the philosophy correctly.) The true defense is "Someone is paying for it, Boortz, just not the person who is receiving the care." And that's true even today, without having to reference any taxation - insurance pays for the majority of our care costs, and we pay the insurance company in premiums. Because we pay those premiums, we make claims on the life and property of doctors and hospitals and such. It's our right. Thus, insurance claims shouldn't really be able to deny us our claims, yet they do, anyway. What's wrong with that picture?

And now, for the derby that nobody wants to participate in, much less win - the dishonor of being the recipient of our golden high-velocity quiche. Knocking on the door because he smelled the baking, at our pronze level, Mr. Williams returns to his favorite subject, education, highlighting an American Council of Trustees and Alumni report (of which we note there are absolutely no teachers as part of their membership) that says four-year university students aren't learning any sort of foundation or core classes, because most of those universities don't require courses in seven subjects - "English composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and science". Furthermore, Mr. Williams also claims that universities that offer options for their students to fulfill gen-ed requirements don't get to count it, because they can take something like "Introduction to Popular TV and Movies" as something to fulfill their gen-eds, something the report criticizes as "do it yourself general education". Mr. Williams has clearly never met

greyweirdo, nor does he recognize how much popular movies can say about the culture behind the lens as well as what's depicted in front of it. And, of course, he points out that the expensive universities (usually with the options) have the worst grades, while the cheap schools do best in the study at requirement fulfillment. Hrm. Looking over my own university, we get a D grade for only requiring comp and foreign languages explicitly, with the study ignoring distribution requirements that lead to maths and sciences because there are apparently "unqualified" courses that could be taken to satisfy those requirements, checkmarks that the rival schools got (and thus improved themselves to a B grade).

If you want to read and deconstruct the report yourself, What Will They Learn is available in a PDF from the ACTA website. Pay special attention to what they use as guidelines and how easy it is for an instutition to not be awarded their checkmark based on subjective criteria or the presence of even one course that doesn't meet with their "approved" ideas, and the impetus for the study, which appears to be that employers are not finding graduates up to their requirements. Well, if you have an English major whom you hired for work involving large amounts of mathematics, precisely who is to blame for the misfit? Finally, offering the course does not mean competence in it will be achieved, past the point where someone can pass the class. The employer might still find them deficient, even if they did get through all the "required" classes. We find that skill, competence, and good fits for employment come from actual interest in the job and its skills.

Escaping pastry doom tonight, for only managing the silver level, Mr. Boortz returns yet again, this time screaming bias because the case against members of the New Black Panther party was dropped by Mr. Holder, yet prosecutions against CIA agents will continue. This continues the strange Up is Down trend where people who have clearly broken the law are supposed to get a free pass in the name of national security and keeping us safe, but people who have clearly broken voter intimidation laws should be prosecuted to the hilt. Ideally, both groups, if there is clear violation of the law, get prosecuted. More on this in a minute when...

Making it all the way to the point of pastry, Mr. Henninger, who claims that the CIA prosecutions are the death knell of the war on terror, and implying that the next time we get hit or have a "24"-style ticking time bomb scenario, we won't be able to stop it in time. That kind of fear mongering is irresponsible at best, and reinforces the idea that somehow, national security trumps all other things, including the necessary consideration of the law and hearing out those who object to procedures that might break it. This gets paired up with the WSJ's unsigned confidently claiming the report points out that the program was well-run, effective, and stayed within the boundaries of the law the majority of the time. The parts mentioned that are scandalous, they say, weren't clear enough to warrant prosecution, which to them means they didn't happen. And the information gathered, apparently, was great and totally a result of all the enhanced interrogation techniques (that the Congress knew about, by the way) used on the detainees. It winds back down to this idea that even prosecuting people for possibly having broken the law while interrogating detainees is somehow demoralizing and scandalous and wholly political revenge. We have long established, since Nuremburg, that "I was only following orders" is not a defense against violation of the laws or treaties. It falls to the Attorney General to investigate the allegations the law was broken, and the ones that said people were involved in providing cover to those who were breaking the law. The AG is doing his job, just like you claim the CIA interrogators were doing theirs.

In technology, a robot nurse that looks like a bear, which may or may not achieve the idea of "friendly" with patients, the 150th birthday of the first known petroleum well, and more research into developing an intelligent network of transit vehicles that could get us from one place to another smoothly and safely.

Last for tonight, Diagrammr, a web application that generates a visual diagram based on sentence input.