Posts from — May 2009

Barack Obama is the President, not the Pope. Meanwhile, in Fox News land:

Maybe it’s just me, but they seem to be suggesting that private prayer is less effective than public prayer, as if it were somehow measurable.

Not a parody:

Some language NSFW. Andy Samberg, Will Arnett and Bill Hader:

OK, now back to not posting anything MTV-related.

One of the reasons that the issue of torture interests me so much is because it deals with a fundamental abuse of power: the President is asserting that he is above the rule of law and is not required to follow, or even acknowledge, American and international law. I’m not just talking about Bush here, but also Obama’s “looking forward” comments.

Torture proponents should be vocally advocating that we repeal or substantially modify federal prohibitions against torture. They should be advocating that we withdraw from the UN Convention on Torture. They aren’t.

We’re [supposed to be] a country ruled by laws- if we don’t like the laws, we well-defined processes for changing them. If the President wants to do something that violates a current law, he can ask to have it changed, or, if it had to be violated in haste, work to have it reconsidered in retrospect. We have a constitution… this is what it’s for.

If we don’t change the laws and just accept that the executive branch can do whatever it wants, we end up with an executive branch that betrays the ideals of the founding fathers. Citizens concerned about tyrrany (I’m looking at you, tea-partiers) should be more concerned about this executive expansionism than tax rates.

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” –Robert Frost

A video about open-mindedness that I’ve been meaning to share for a while:

Facts!

An interview with Louis CK, my favorite comedian:

Herbie Hancock’s piece “Fat Mama” has always been one of my favorites.

I previously listed this as good music to play while smiling, and that’s still the case. I can’t imagine Herbie playing like that and being anything but happy at the time.

(The video is some random travel video, that was the best I could find, though it’s actually pretty good.)

From Boing Boing:

Pharmaceutical giant Merck paid science publishing juggernaut Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed scientific journal, Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine

There are far too many bad incentives in the pharmaceutical industry, and it seems like money is driving it in a lot of wrong directions. I sure hope that this is an FTC violation, at the very least, as it’s blatant corruption.

Are these guys much better than the homeopathy peddlers? I really hope so, but sometimes they make me wonder.

Reihan Salam reads a Pew poll:

“of voters who approve of Obama’s job performance, 7 percent believe that he’s a Muslim”

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Stanford recently, and took some questions from students:

I was really impressed by the poise and respectful persistence of the students. It’s hard to ask challenging questions to people who are so accustomed to answering evasively (i.e. any politician), but these students did a better job than most of the “professionals”.

The most notable part of the exchange was Rice’s Nixonian statement:

“I just said — the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture.”

I don’t really have anything new to say about this.

One thing that struck me as strange was that Rice referred to the 9/11 attackers as “murderous tyrants”. These people didn’t fit any definition of ‘tyrant’ that I know of. I don’t doubt that this was just a slip of the tongue, but I can’t help but think that this is symptomatic of the Bush administration’s tendency to lump all sorts of enemies together, e.g. the “axis of evil”.