Friday, September 28, 2012

Quote o' the day, liberal firing squad edition

Rebecca Solnit responds to those who Twitter-scream that Obama's drone policy or the inadequacy of Obamacare make him Obamney.

O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities
 Via Eric Loomis, to whom Glenn Greenwald is now unfit to be a liberal.

Please read them.

Labels:

The Young Rascals


Labels:

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Wake the *&^% up!


Us and Them

Mitt Romney proclaims his deep empathy for the 47 percent.

"President Obama and I both care about poor and middle-class families. The difference is my policies will make things better for them." 
 "Them."



Monday, September 24, 2012

Blue Monday, Merle Haggard edition

Friday, September 21, 2012

Because....well..John Bonham


Labels:

Thursday, September 20, 2012

The priest knows when you have committed a sin

Odd, Paul Ryan seems to have a Catholic problem.  First, American nuns, now American Jesuits.

No matter, I guess.  They're part of the takers, not the makers.

And yes, I know, this guy likes him.

Labels: ,

Monday, September 17, 2012

A solution looking for a minority

Snark can be helpful, but it would be nice if the NY Times would simply call bullshit on this.

Weeks later, another True the Vote representative told a meeting of conservative women about a bus seen at a San Diego polling place in 2010 offloading people “who did not appear to be from this country.” 

Officials in both San Diego and Wisconsin said they had no evidence that the buses were real. “It’s so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate,” said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. “Pick your minority group,” he said. 

Labels:

Blue Monday, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Canned Heat edition

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Nixon's the one!



Watch out for a familiar face at :12.

Via, and.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Blue Monday, Howlin' Wolf edition

Friday, September 07, 2012

Jorma and Jerry

Thursday, September 06, 2012

"Junk," indeed

I am guessing that a Romney/Ryan budget won't have room for this sort of "waste."

Among the many mysteries of human biology is why complex diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and psychiatric disorders are so difficult to predict and, often, to treat. An equally perplexing puzzle is why one individual gets a disease like cancer or depression, while an identical twin remains perfectly healthy.
Now scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches.
The findings, which are the fruit of an immense federal project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, will have immediate applications for understanding how alterations in the non-gene parts of DNA contribute to human diseases, which may in turn lead to new drugs. They can also help explain how the environment can affect disease risk. In the case of identical twins, small changes in environmental exposure can slightly alter gene switches, with the result that one twin gets a disease and the other does not.
As scientists delved into the “junk” — parts of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins — they discovered a complex system that controls genes. At least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed. The result of the work is an annotated road map of much of this DNA, noting what it is doing and how. It includes the system of switches that, acting like dimmer switches for lights, control which genes are used in a cell and when they are used, and determine, for instance, whether a cell becomes a liver cell or a neuron.
“It’s Google Maps,” said Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute, a joint research endeavor of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In contrast, the project’s predecessor, the Human Genome Project, which determined the entire sequence of human DNA, “was like getting a picture of Earth from space,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you where the roads are, it doesn’t tell you what traffic is like at what time of the day, it doesn’t tell you where the good restaurants are, or the hospitals or the cities or the rivers.”
The new result “is a stunning resource,” said Dr. Lander, who was not involved in the research that produced it but was a leader in the Human Genome Project. “My head explodes at the amount of data.” 
 In a Romney/Ryan world, those damned scientists could just borrow the money from their parents.

Labels:

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

A tale of two conventions

From a commenter over at Charlie Pierce's place:

I'm waiting for the right-wing blog post about how horrible some delegate on the floor is, throwing health insurance at them and saying, "This is how we take care of people."

Labels: , ,

Monday, September 03, 2012

Blue Monday, Fleetwood Mac edition

Sunday, September 02, 2012

Sun Myun Moon

Dead at 92.

One of the more bizarre moments in Mr. Moon’s later years came on March 23, 2004, at what was described as a peace awards banquet held at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington. Members of Congress were among the guests. At one point the Representative Danny K. Davis, an Illinois Democrat, wearing white gloves, carried in on a pillow one of two gold crowns, which were placed on the heads of Mr. Moon and his wife.

Some of the members of Congress who attended said they had no idea that Mr. Moon was to be involved in the banquet, though it was hosted by the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, a foundation affiliated with the Unification Church.

At the banquet, Mr. Moon stated that emperors, kings and presidents had “declared to all heaven and earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity’s savior, messiah, returning lord and true parent.”

He added that the founders of the world’s great religions, along with figures like Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin, had “found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons.”
Good times.

Labels: ,

Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com Site Meter