Rationally Thinking Out Loud Has Moved!

The blog I created here at
RationallyThinkingOutLoud.wordpress.com
has moved and is now over at:

 

RationallyThinkingOutLoud.com.

That’s pretty simple and obvious huh?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Newt Gingrich goes tea party, no tea bagger whacko and gets struck off my list of conservatives I respect and listen too.

I have to wonder just what Newt Gingrich is really thinking . This is a guy I always managed to respect and admire even while i disagreed with him and his policies but with his over the top over reaction to the Sherry Sherod case, his over the top irrational response to the near ground zero Islamic mosque cultural center and now this naked "racial animus" (David Frum’s phrase) he’ jumped the shark and needs to be thrown in the same pile as some of the other irrational crazies and paranoid lunatics on the right such Michelle Bachman and worthless pandering players such as Sarah Palin.

Just what did Gingrich do? I’ll refer you to David Frum’s article: Gingrich: Obama Wants Whitey’s Money for an explanation of the depth of the absurdity of Gingrich (and D’Souza’s cover story in Forbes which Gingrich was affirming).

A couple of years ago here I published a short list of Conservatives I Like (but don’t necessarily agree with) and Therefore Listen To, Gingrich has managed to strike himself off that list.

For more on Gingrich and D’Souza you might also want to read:

• The NonSequitur: Trapped in his father’s time machine
• Think Progress: Andy Card: ‘I Don’t Think That The StatementsNewt Gingrich Made Are Helpful…I’m Disappointed’
• Jay Bookman: Gingrich, et al doing a swan dive into a swimming pool full of crazy
• Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post: How Newt Gingrich thinks.
• The Christian Science Monitor: Newt Gingrich: Did he go too far with comments about Obama?
• Newt Gingrich Pandering to Birthers, White House Suggests

I’m sure there will be more on this over the coming week or two.

The Project Reason Video Conference Winners

To celebrate Richard Dawkins birthday (yes it is Richard Dawkin’s Birthday) I’m posting the winning entries to Project Reason’s recent video conference contest (Project Reason: Spreading Science & Secular Values).

First Place

 

Second Place

Third Place

A Hat Tip to UnReasonableFaith.com for this lead on the videos.

Mr. Deity and the Science Advisor, my favorite episode.

While I love Mr Diety this is my favorte episode of the whole bunch

Mr. Deity and the Science Advisor

You’ll love the Ray Comfort dig in it.

The 9/12 Teabaggers and their Czar

Geez how dangerously niave and unaware are these 9/12 Teabaggers?

Blogger Ron Britton was lamenting about the lack of time he has found blogging recently while he’s living in a hotel as his home is being remodeled and that he has had to resort to "stealing" content origionally created by other bloggers. Well I am going to "steal" this from Ron only I don’t think of it as stealing but instead I see it as helping to spread awareness.

From Ron Britton’s post Teabag Czar:

[...] This video is worth watching. It won’t actually teach you anything you don’t already know. We all know that most teabaggers are ignorant illiterate morons. Fortunately, they are a minority. (Unfortunately, a very loud minority.) If you can actually distance yourself from the fact that these people are trying to sabotage our country and destroy the only hope we have for trying to undo some of the damage of the last eight years, it’s actually a very funny video. It’s the American freak show. PT Barnum would have loved to put them all into his freak museum, next to the Cardiff Giant and Fiji Mermaid. So just sit back and enjoy Morons on Parade.

Concentrated stupidity at giant tea bagging ceremony in Washington

Thanks Ron, and thanks to vjack for helping bring this to all our attention.

If You Are Going To Get Married

Yes, if you are going to do it this is how to do it.

I might use different music but this is the way to have a wedding.

Back in the days when I was designing and building theatrical scenery I had a few contracts that were for weddings but I never got to see what actually happened at the wedding. One in particular that sticks in my mind was for a Greco-Roman theatre stage and skene. I wonder was the wedding party all dressed up in Bacchic costume and regalia, was it a Dionysian festival?

I’m thinking in fact that IF was was going to get married here’s the music I would want to use ….Intro & Dancing In The Wind by Passport. I would need a good choreographer but I have the direction, staging, and lighting all worked out in my head.

I Love John Moore’s Article in The Canadian Post

Well usually whenever I hear or see a reference to Conrad Black‘s Canadian publication The National Post I roll my eyes and wonder "Oh boy, just what are the global warming deniers trying to tell today" but today I read an op-ed there that I thought was thoroughly delightful and put a grin on my face. For those who may not be initiated and familiar with the The National Post it has proudly proclaimed it’s intent to "provide a voice for Canadian conservatives" and openly advocates a "unite-the-right" movement in Canada and is the birthplace of Lawrence Solomon’s The Deniers.

Anyway John Moore in a July 16th 2009 op-ed article (aren’t all articles in the Canadian Post op-ed) writes:

One world government and global warming/climate change/whatever

I knew I was poking the bear when I sent my most recent column (Climate skeptic arguments don’t hold ice, July 14) to my editor here at the National Post. The [Financial] Post publishes almost weekly columns about the fiction of climate change so understandably some readers are well persuaded that the whole global warming house of cards is already tumbling down. The torrent of e-mails and some 48 on-line comments later and I have a new appreciation of just how fiercely some hold on to their denier status.

[...]

Ya just gotta read the whole piece, its great.

Maybe it’s just guilty pleasure and I shouldn’t really say this but I just love seeing the readers of CP get a stick in their eye.

From: Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The Big Swindle Movie

I just dscovered via Tim Lambert’s Deltoid blog that Peter Sinclair who produces the YouTube video series Climate Denial Crock of the Week has produced a new episode that provides futher debunking and discrediting to Martin Duurkin’s now infamous piece of trash "The Great Global Warming Swindle"

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The Big Swindle Movie

Thanks Peter (and Tim). I added this great video essay to my own list of debunking references : “The Great Global Warming Swindle”? Shams & Lies

Whose Deficit Is It?

I just came in from picking up the mail yesterday and caught the Radio America right wing radio host Greg Knapp talking ranting on CNBC about how bad Obama tripled the deficit.

Tripled? Usally the figure I hear cited by the right wing ideologues is quadrupled and they very often cite this chart from an article entitled Bush Deficit vs. Obama Deficit in Pictures found on the website belonging to the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation to make their point! The Heritage Foundation is quick to point out that "The Washington Post has a great graphic which helps put President Obama’s budget deficits in context of President Bush’s."

"…in context of President Bush’s."????

Not really. The graph represents and uneven tilted playing field.

Quoting from reporting done by Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connolly for that same Washington Post:

In addition to the substantive proposals, Obama’s team boasts of improving the budget process itself. For years, budget analysts complained that former president George W. Bush tried to make his deficits look smaller by excluding cost estimates for the war in Iraq and domestic disasters, minimizing the cost of payments to Medicare doctors and assuming that millions more families would pay the costly alternative minimum tax. Obama has banned those techniques, the senior official said.

Take 2005 for instance. If you include just the excluded cost at the time for the Iraq War the REAL deficit figure for fiscal 2005 would be $427 billion* not the $317 billion the CBO used in it’s figures.

So where did this swollen bloated deficit we face really come from? This past week the the NYTimes’ gave us this chart in the David Leonhardt article Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making that gives us a far better more accurate look at just where Obama’s record deficit came from:

How Trillion-Dollar Deficits Were Created

Quoting from the mid-section of the Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making article:

[...]

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits.

How can that be? Some of his proposals, like a plan to put a price on carbon emissions, don’t cost the government any money. Others would be partly offset by proposed tax increases on the affluent and spending cuts. Congressional and White House aides agree that no large new programs, like an expansion of health insurance, are likely to pass unless they are paid for. (JJH- Yes and on the day this article came out Obama proposes making ‘pay-as-you-go’ the law)

Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a widely cited study on the dangers of the current deficits, describes the situation like so: “Bush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years. On the one hand, it might seem unfair for people to blame Obama for not fixing it. On the other hand, he’s not fixing it.”

“And,” he added, “not fixing it is, in a "sense", making it worse.”

When challenged about the deficit, Mr. Obama and his advisers generally start talking about health care. “There is no way you can put the nation on a sound fiscal course without wringing inefficiencies out of health care,” Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, told me.

Outside economists agree. The Medicare budget really is the linchpin of deficit reduction. But there are two problems with leaving the discussion there.

[...]

Looking at the analysis another way courtesy of Matt Yglesias here’s how it looks as a pie chart:

Months ago when I first learned that Obama wasn’t going to be playing around with budget language tricks I made the claim that if you took away the cost of the Iraq War and the Bush Tax Cuts the deficit would be a quarter of what it was and people (my Conservative & Republican friends) scoffed and dismissed what I was saying. It certainly looks now like I wasn’t that far off in my own analysis at the time.

Don’t believe the numbers? Check out the methodology in How We Crunched the Deficit Numbers.

I really don’t expect the Republican, Conservative, and NeoCon right to change their rhetorical denials and really ever own up to responsibility for the deficit, in fact just yesterday Karl Rove flat out refused to accept any responsibility for the deficit and spun his administrations record continuing the deceit (watch it):

ROVE: This guy is going to run up a $1.8 trillion deficit. That’s what it’s projected to be this year,”

VAN SUSTEREN: Do you take some responsibility, meaning you, the Bush eight years, for this…

ROVE: No.

VAN SUSTEREN: You take absolutely no responsibility? Because…

ROVE: No, lets put it this way, look look we had a deficit that ran 2% of GDP and we were fighting a war [Rove carefully avoids saying that the cost of the Iraq War was not included in the deficit] and trying to grow the economy. He planning a 4% of GDP…

VAN SUSTEREN: So that twice?

ROVE: Twice. He’s going to…his smallest deficit is 200 billion dollars larger than Bush’s largest deficit [the cost of the Iraq war, around 200 billion]. Think about that.

….but I think it’s very important for everyone to know that Obama and the Obama administration are standing up and taking responsibility for hundreds of millions , billions of dollars lost, squandered, misspent, and hidden by the last administration. Remember that the next time you hear someone on the far right rant hysterically about Obama running up the largest deficit in history. It is Obama’s deficit, he’s stood up and claimed it, but it is very certainly a gift he received from the last administration.

Happy Darwin Day to Everyone!

Today is Darwin Day

Today is a great day for science. Notably today marks the 200th anniversary of evolutionary biologists Charles Darwin’s birthday. (an interesting ironic aside is that another important figure in world history Abraham Lincoln was also born today and Darwin and Lincoln are rumored to be born only hours apart)

And on another front the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled that Vaccines Are not to blame for autism! Scientific research and the scientific method triumphs over woo, pseudoscience, and guessing! Quoting from the article ABC News: Court Says Vaccine Is Not to Blame for Autism:

The judges in the cases said the evidence was overwhelmingly contrary to the parents’ claims — and backed years of science that found no risk.

"It was abundantly clear that petitioners’ theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive," the court concluded in one of a trio of cases ruled on Thursday.

Interestingly PBS had a rebroacast of another landmark court case won by science on just the other night with Nova – Judgment Day Intelligent Design on Trial perhaps in honor of Darwin’s birthday week celebration.

Happy Darwin Day to everyone!