The results are in, and Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have clinched first place in the Iowa Caucus. Both Obama and Huckabee are riding high thanks to some campaign trail assistance from helpful deities - Oprah and Jebus, respectively. No, seriously; check out these entrance poll numbers:
60 percent of voters said they consider themselves evangelical Christians. Huckabee is a Baptist minister. Far more than any other characteristic – 45 percent – Republicans said they are looking for a candidate who “shares my values.” Of those respondents, 44 percent said they were supporting Huckabee.
If by “shares my values” they mean “is a total douche,” then yeah, Huckabee’s the candidate of choice. (And here’s some more doucheness for good measure). Also, according to the entrance poll, Democratic women favored Obama over Clinton 35 percent to 30 percent - obviously the Oprah Effect in action.
In other news, Hillary Clinton came in third place for the Democrats, meaning the apocalypse might not be as nigh as previously feared.
Well, I guess if you read the headline you get the gist of the story. Evel Knievel, daredevil motorcycle rider and man, is dead at 69. In retrospect, I can’t imagine how we forgot to include him in the man bracket for last issue.
Here’s the video of Knievel’s infamous Caesar’s Palace jump, and here’s a list of his injuries (35 broken bones - a world record). I was trying to find a great quote of his that I read a long time ago, but to no avail. I remember it was something like, “If I could have done it all over again, I would have screwed a lot more women and maybe hit a few of those jumps faster.”
The FBI just reported that hate crimes across the country rose 8% in 2006. However, if you read the AP story, it becomes obvious that some of the rise is due to statistical tomfoolery. The number is affected by the amount of participating police agencies, which fluctuates from year to year, leading to a (surprise!) fluctuation in the amount of reported hate crimes. But since we’re having such a good time playing with statistics, I thought I’d throw out a few of my own. (more…)
The National Action Network, led by Reverend Al Sharpton, is leading a march on the U.S. Justice Department in Washington today. This is in response to Jena-6 as well as to “hate crimes and noose hangings on the rise across the country”.
Today is Veterans Day, originally known as Armistice Day, marking the cessation of hostilities of World War I. It evolved into a holiday to commemorate the duty and sacrifice that all veterans have given in their service. It carries an importance with me, as I see it as the appreciation of those that served and came before me and those whose footsteps I will be following. In response to my recognition and celebration of Veterans Day, I received this eloquently drafted message on my Facebook wall from an ‘Asian-American’:
As an update to the item that CJ Posted below, over at H&R Radley Balko weighs in on the Jena Reality Check article. I haven’t been following the case, other than to note that it is definitely bad to beat a guy that severely, but I think this seems relevant.
In light of all the recent hullabaloo on campus about the Jena Six, I found this CSM article, titled “Media myths about the Jena 6″, very interesting. It lays out 12 of the most commonly misreported “facts” about the case.
The author lives in Jena and has reported on the situation from the beginning, which presumably gives him some credence. Of course, you could also argue that this gives him an inherent bias, such as when he claims “Jena is a wonderful place to live for both whites and blacks.” Sure, it might not be as racist as the media have portrayed it, but I’m still not planning my vacation getaway to Jena, Louisiana.
In any case, I think the Jena Six debacle will probably go down in future years as a textbook example of how the media latch on to and distort stories. Race violence is top priority news these days, right behind “missing white woman” and “Britney Spears is crazy.”
Here’s the ODE write-up of the recent rally in support of the Jena Six. See how many of the “media myths” you can spot before it turns into a Diego Hernandez and Ty Schwoeffermann quote-athon. Also, OC Publisher Guy Simmons had a run in with some crazy Jena Six supporters a while back (with wacky results). Finally, props to Hit & Run for the find.
Reason Hit & Run has posted a great news clip from Texas showing floor votes in the Texas legislature. In the era of hanging chads, dead men voting, and lost absentee ballots, it seems that politicians in Texas just don’t seem to understand what “one person, one vote” means. It’s worth a watch.
That is, John Frohnmayer - brother of UO President Dave Frohny. Frohnmayer, who was appointed as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, only to be fired soon after for funding “obscene” art, will run in the 2008 election for U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith’s seat. But get this, he is running as an independant.
“We who have been Republicans should be weeping about the state of the Republican party,” he said. “Because the Republicans have always stood for fiscal responsibility and we have a president who has taken a $3 trillion surplus and turned it into an $8 trillion defecit in seven years.
Frohnmayer, who left the Republican Party in 2005, is a former student of the UO Law School. He currently lives in Corvallis where he is an affiliate professor of liberal arts at Oregon State, “where he teaches First Amendment issues and ethics in the history department.”
“The order of the day ought to be that partisanship ends when a person is elected, and for every minute the person is in office after that, the person ought to be doing the public’s business.”
6 years ago, today, the lenses with which we look at the world were tainted. 6 years ago, a normal morning for the United States of America, came crashing down in flames and smoke as the hijacked passenger airliners were flown into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon Building in Washington, D.C.
It unified our nation, and we vowed to never let it happen again. The world rallied around us in our time of need. In our time of most pain, we were also the strongest and most resolved people.
But it cast our nation into a shadow of fear. Partisan politics have torn our country apart since. We have lost legitimacy in the eyes of much of the world. We are mired in two wars halfway across the globe, and our beloved troops, our Soldiers, Marines, Airmen and Sailors, those that volunteered on behalf of this great nation, are dying everyday. The American people increasingly are questioning the justification and purpose of this war.
And so, on this September 11th, this 6 year mark, I ask you to remember it. Remember that day, honor that day, the people that died. Don’t ever forget, like I almost did, that September 11th was a day that showed the resilience and resolve of the American people. Remember how we got to where we are today as a nation. And think of how we can regain our reputation with the rest of the world.
Most importantly, remember what it means to be an American. I won’t say what I think it is, because to each person, being an American means something different.
No matter what, I was, am, and always will be proud to be an American.
In twp separate but related incidents, public schools banned the game Tag and suspended a 13-year old kid that drew a gun that looked more like a trapezoid with smiley faces.
Wow. The series of school shootings that happened a few years ago shouldn’t be ignored, and I think schools did a few things right when it came to responding to threats of violence. But this is taking it way too far. The drawing didn’t even LOOK like a gun. What’s more is that preventing students from drawing weapons will not take away their fascination in them. What kid didn’t play soldier or pretend to shoot people with their finger guns?
On the other hand, I agree with the suspension of the kid. If he is that deluded to think that a gun looks like that and has smiley faces on it, he should learn a lesson.
The justification that the Colorado school uses for banning Tag is absolutely ridiculous. “[Tag ] causes a lot of conflict on the playground”. Conflict is an inherent aspect of life! Every conflict I have been through has made me a stronger person. If these kids don’t know how to deal with conflict young, what are they going to do in Middle and High School, college, and in the real world? What the hell is happening to our country? Our country is turning into a country full of sissies. These schools banning Tag are deluding our nation’s youth into thinking that life is fair, that there are no winners or losers, and that everyone can live in harmony without scraped knees. Bullshit.
A story published in Reuters today noted the USA as the most heavily armed society in the world, on a gross scale and per-capita scale. Apparently, we have enough firearms to give 90% of our population a gun, and U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms. Second up per-capita is Yemen (wtf?), Finland, and Switzerland.
What is more interesting to me is the fact that we have such good registration of our firearm ownership. Sure, we’ve got a lot of guns lying around and we’ll shoot the shit out of you (and each other) but at least we’re open about it.
In the video linked below, CNN is interviewing two university students, one Democrat and one Republican. CNN asks them who they think will take the primary for their respective parties, and are absolutely shocked when the Republican says Ron Paul. However, Miss GOP’s arguments make a lot of sense. Ron Paul really is a true conservative, and the majority of the Republican party has strayed from their traditional values.
The Democrat student, on the other hand, is the epitome of stupid Democrats. She doesn’t answer the question asked, and repeatedly generalizes, saying that “I just want a Democrat in office.” Has the thought ever crossed her mind that many politicians identify with one of the two big parties FOR political, not ideological reasons? Democrats vary from “gun-control, free pot, let all illegal immigrants have citizenship” crazies to moderates that say “we should stay in Iraq but change the course and maintain a strong presence abroad”.
I hope that not all Democrats are as dumb as she is. I know that these are just two people out of millions, but the Republican is clearly more of a thinker in this case, and solidly wins my confidence.
Yup, Turd Blossom is out. Karl Rove, probably the only man with the political acumen to get George W Bush elected twice has resigned as Deputy Chief of Staff and Special Advisor to the President is gone, leaving only the question who will bust out with the funky-fresh flow to keep the press corps distracted? Go ahead, watch the President call Rove “a dear friend,” and watch Rove choke up at the remembrance of things past… just don’t blame us if you cry a little too.
So what’s next for Rove? Back to Texas to make some money, and escape the Captain Ahabs of Congress who are after his Moby Dick (Oh Yes). Apparently he shouldn’t have too hard a time getting a job either, as his employment record is quite extensive.
Rove, who never graduated from college, joked that he has “an employment record that I think would be attractive to any employer. I’ve worked in an industrial kitchen in a hospital; I’ve waited tables; I’ve worked in convenience stores and have been robbed at the point of a gun twice; I’ve pumped gas; I’ve babysat; I’ve cut lawns; I’ve delivered newspapers.”
Sorry Karl, but we all know it was mostly babysitting.
According to this Daily Tech blog entry, they have discovered a flaw in the NASA study that reported 1998 as the warmest year on record. In response, one of the NASA scientists who did the study admitted they screwed up, and the newly-corrected data now shows that 1934 is the warmest year on record, and five of the ten warmest years on record occurred before World War II.
“Global warming” has to be the one of the few topics where large groups of people blindly accept the results of studies often without independent confirmation or even peer review. Hopefully this revelation will result in a serious attempt at peer-review of popularly-accepted (I’m looking at you, Al Gore) climate studies.
