Liquid Water on Mars - But No Signs of Intelligent Life on Earth

Planetary scientists recently detected hydrated salts on these slopes at Horowitz crater, corroborating their original hypothesis that the dark streaks on Mars are indeed formed by liquid water.

On Monday, NASA announced the results of a new study showing that salty liquid water flows seasonally on Mars, giving the red planet one of the essential ingredients for life.

The study focuses on the mysterious recurring slope lineae, or "RSL" -- narrow, streaky features on the planet's surface spotted by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

The RSL are typically about 15 feet in width or smaller, and appear on slopes during the planet's warm seasons. They fade during cooler seasons, then reappear the following year as the planet gets warmer again.

In the same newspaper, I read about the American conservative movement, for whom facts are subordinate to politics. I read bizarre conspiracy theories about birthers, death panels, undocumented workers, and imaginary voter fraud.  I read revisionist accounts about how GWB kept us safe, or why supply-side economics creates jobs – despite all evidence to the contrary.

I read about Donald Trump ("Mexicans are rapists and criminals"), Ben Carson ("no Muslim is fit to be president"), Carly Fiorina ("babies writhing on a dissecting table"), and Ann Coulter ("How many f*#king Jews ...").  Rampant racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny ... the GOP has morphed itself into a HATE GROUP!

Then I read about how Super PAC money distorts representative democracy, and why any Republican who violates party doctrine can expect a primary challenge funded by the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers. 

I want to go home to the peace and quiet of a Martian landscape.  There is no intelligent life on Earth.

The Pope, Climate Change, and Brother Schlubb

Jeb Bush, or Brother Schlubb of the Shrub family as I would prefer to call him, says Pope Francis should not discuss climate change because the pontiff is “not a scientist.”

Brother Schlubb is a politician, not a scientist.  Crusty Christy, a Roman Catholic, says the pontiff should “stay away from politics.”  Rick Sanctimoniously Stupid Santorum, also a Roman Catholic, says the pontiff should “leave science to the scientists.”

None of these quack politicians are scientists. Yet, all share these traits in common: All are Roman Catholic who privilege themselves to speak against climate change, but think the Pope has no right to join the conversation. 

Here’s an inconvenient truth:  Pope Francis holds a degree in chemistry and worked in a lab before joining the Church.  The Pope, more than any of these hacks, has the education, experience and qualifications to understand climate science.  Yet, here is another lame excuse by crackpot politicians to marginalize another voice.

DO ANY OF THESE CRACKPOTS HAVE ANY SELF-AWARENESS ABOUT HOW INCREDIBLY HYPOCRITICAL, SELF-SERVING, AND STUPID THEY APPEAR!

Something You Don't Like About Capitalism?

 "Because we can get away with it."  is essentially the answer given by Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO to the question of why the company raised the price of  Darapram, a drug that's been around for 62 years  by 5000%.  That's not a typo.

Turing acquired the drug by purchasing the company that made it last month, and greed being good, decided to flaunt it.  One pill now costs 750 bucks, up from $13.50. No really, that's not a typo and it's not unique.  It's not, it seems,  that these things didn't make a profit, the development costs having been payed back long ago. It's just that Medical care in America is about making the rich richer, about Turing paying for the company they bought by screwing  the sick and screwing the Insurance companies who pass the cost  on to you and me - because they can and because the Republicans made a deal while calling objectors Communists.

The cost of  existing medications that some people need to stay alive has gone up by hundreds and hundreds of percentage points and not because they cost more to make. It's because they can get away with it and if you don't have insurance, your option is to decrease the surplus population.
And the idiots like Sarah Palin insist that Obamacare has death panels while "buy or die" has replaced free market competition.  Republicans are for free markets, right?

Now if you do have insurance that covers prescriptions, the cost is picked up by the premium payers: us, our employers or Medicare thanks to the Idiot Bush who worked out a deal with the drug companies that forbids any bargaining or competition.  It's one of the reasons they can sell drugs in the US at the highest prices in the world. Turing CEO Martin Shkreli said the price increase brings Daraprim more in line with other drugs for rare diseases, not that that stinks of collusion and price fixing, and is a polite way of saying it's OK for Turing to gouge the sick because everyone else is doing it and besides with all that money we could maybe develop some other drugs you might like -- or increase the size of the corporate jet or hand out bonuses, or whatever.  Hey, it's Capitalism. Something you don't like about Capitalism? You're some kind of Commie?

Is Climate Change Real? Or Just a Delusion Created By Liberals?...

Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth

At one time being a skeptic of climate change (global warming) is what seemed to be a reasonable position. It even sounded plausible to me that left leaning scientists (most are for explainable logical reasons) were in cahoots with left leaning politicians who saw climate change as an avenue to enact legislation (cap and trade) and an pathway to exact more taxes on business. Taxes which could be used to fill the coffers of government so government could spend more on social programs that may ultimately lead to greater dependendency on government.

Sound familiar?

At this juncture in my thought process (aided by evaluating factual data) the narrative now seems more geared to preserving the bottom line profit motivation of companies whose business it is to grow exceedingly wealthy by exploiting and expanding fossil fuel consumption. Of course my re-evaluation has been an evolving process over time. But given the following (which certainly supports my new found premise) continuing skepticism just seems like the elixir of the fool.

The New Yorker - Wednesday morning, journalists at InsideClimate News, a Web site that has won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on oil spills, published the first installment of a multi-part exposé that will be appearing over the next month. The documents they have compiled and the interviews they have conducted with retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming.

There’s a sense, of course, in which one already assumed that this was the case. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy, even outfitting one of the company’s tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2 readings over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Those numbers were about right, too. It was precisely ten years later—after a decade in which Exxon scientists continued to do systematic climate research that showed, as one internal report put it, that stopping “global warming would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion”—that NASA scientist James Hansen took climate change to the broader public, telling a congressional hearing, in June of 1988, that the planet was already warming. And how did Exxon respond? By saying that its own independent research supported Hansen’s findings? By changing the company’s focus to renewable technology?

That didn’t happen. Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns. (In a blog post responding to the I.C.N. report, the company said that the documents were “cherry-picked” to “distort our history of pioneering climate science research” and efforts to reduce emissions.) The company worked with veterans of the tobacco industry to try and infuse the climate debate with doubt. Lee Raymond, who became the Exxon C.E.O. in 1993—and was a senior executive throughout the decade that Exxon had studied climate science—gave a key speech to a group of Chinese leaders and oil industry executives in 1997, on the eve of treaty negotiations in Kyoto. He told them that the globe was cooling, and that government action to limit carbon emissions “defies common sense.” In recent years, it’s gotten so hot (InsideClimate’s exposé coincided with the release of data showing that this past summer was the United States’ hottest in recorded history) that there’s no use denying it any more; Raymond’s successor, Rex Tillerson, has grudgingly accepted climate change as real, but has referred to it as an “engineering problem.” In May, at a shareholders’ meeting, he mocked renewable energy, and said that “mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity,” which would stand it in good stead in the case of “inclement weather” that “may or may not be induced by climate change.”

The influence of the oil industry is essentially undiminished, even now. The Obama Administration may have stood up to Big Coal, but the richer Big Oil got permission this summer to drill in the Arctic; Washington may soon grant the rights for offshore drilling along the Atlantic seaboard, and end a longstanding ban on oil exports. All these measures help drive the flow of carbon into the atmosphere—the flow of carbon that Exxon knew almost forty years ago would likely be disastrous.

We’ve gotten so inured to this kind of corporate power that the report in InsideClimate News received relatively little coverage. The big news of the day on social media came from Irving, Texas, where the police handcuffed a young Muslim boy for taking his homemade alarm clock to school; all day people tweeted #IStandWithAhmed, and rightly so. It’s wondrous to see the power of an Internet-enabled world shining the light on particular (and in this case telling) injustice; there’s a principal and a police chief in Irving that will likely think differently next time. But we badly need the same kind of focus on the long-lasting, underlying abuses of corporate might. As it happens, Exxon is based in Irving, Texas too.

No doubt the rightwing corporatists, and politicians who are getting well greased by corporate money, will deny this and point to it as just another leftwing lie and attempt to manipulate the perception of the general public. These folks know a great deal about manipulation. They've been doing it for decades.

Quacks Like a Duck - Affirming the Consequent

We're liberals, aren't we? So we're primed to believe stories that fit a certain mold without question and often with a good deal of desperate enthusiasm.  An "unarmed child" is shot in the back while kneeling and begging for his life,  a kid is arrested for taking a clock to school. We don't bother with the facts, because after all, there is a history of minorities being treated unfairly and therefore we assume that if B follows A, B implies A.  It doesn't and there's a name for the fallacy.

A kid brings an apparatus in a briefcase to school, made out of clock parts and looks to me very much like the bomb timer you see in so many movies that counts down the minutes to the explosion.  If I were a teacher or Principal, I would have called an expert too and I have a background in electronic engineering. It looks very much like something the movies have conditioned us to see as a countdown timer for a bomb. Did he "invent" a clock and put it in a "pencil case" that looks like it came out of a
James Bond movie or did he take apart a clock and stuff it in something chosen to look suspicious? Your assumptions here mean a lot. The way it's framed means everything.  As many on both sides of the political divide seem to agree:  "It looks like a f*cking bomb!"

But because police have a history of  abusing minorities, any arrest is abuse and because the kid is a Muslim, we, as dependably bigoted and privileged white people are to be presumed acting from bigotry. It must be an act of racism, for are we not white? It must be racism for is he not Muslim?

The thoughts of Liberals seem to be steered by the same sloppy, emotional and instinctive pseudo-reasoning as those of Conservatives, Libertarians, Socialists and for all I know, professors of mathematics.  Go ahead, you blue eyed, blond Norwegian Lutheran - put some clock parts, a battery and a mess of wires in a briefcase and try to get on a plane so you can claim the TSA is profiling Scandinavians.

Hands up!  Don't Shoot!  It was just a clock! The knife was Military Style!   Devious uses of the Framing Effect litter the ground and every thing we read, see and hear are attempts to manipulate opinion, but  even the huge, gilded Rococo monstrosity of this frame seems to escape our notice. Even our experienced knees jerk when tapped by the professionally wielded little hammer.

Are we, as liberals combing the news for examples and when the supply is low, are we so relieved to find yet another juicy one that we suspend disbelief, squint our eyes a little bit and react a little too passionately?  

Studies Show

We think we're rational, but we're not.  It's too easy to be optimistically or pessimistically  irrational. It's too much fun and we have plenty of help, particularly if we watch or read or listen to the news, if we watch television or read magazines. If we look at cartoons, if we read editorials. If we are immersed in advertising -- and we are.  If we answer our phones when they ring, if we read blogs like this one, someone is always trying to sell you an opinion, an attitude, a bias.  We're so used to it, they're so good at it that we rarely pay attention.  We enjoy having a credible group of like minded people, we hardly bother to apply what analytical ability we've managed to hold onto after years, after a lifetime of being subjected to advertising, preaching and the endless, relentless and largely dishonest manipulations that our ears are heir to.

We've been trained from birth not to question and trained to accept with a fierce tenacity anything someone dressed to inspire credulity tells us. It makes us feel smart, hip, a cut above others.  Perhaps herd animals, schools of fish and flocks of birds feel wonderful giving in to the same biological imperatives we follow in the same mindless way. I don't know.  Maybe there's a study.

Open the Sunday paper, click on a news website: you'll read about the 7 foods you should never eat, the foods, the beans and berries that will melt away belly fat and exercise programs that will make you live forever and we take it to be science; the result of valid research done to rigorous standards.  It's rarely the case.  It's nearly always the case that someone is selling something.  Tell someone that milk doesn't produce phlegm, Gluten is not bad for you, that vaccinations don't cause Autism and Autism isn't on the increase and they will turn ugly before they will bother to look at real rigorously tested and peer reviewed evidence beyond what the diet doctor or politician or propagandist of choice is saying.  I have a friend whose cousin is autistic.  That's enough.  A follows B and therefore  A causes B. Sole cause, partial cause, a vague non-causal link or irrelevant -- it doesn't matter to someone who doesn't know science or statistics and probability, and that's pretty much everyone.

Do they teach critical thinking in school?  Do they show people the difference between anecdotes, conjecture, Gerrymandered evidence and large, scale, randomized, double blind and repeatable studies?  If they do, does anyone listen?  Does it make anyone suspicious when the research, the study, are published in Sunday Supplements or pose as real in paid advertising on CNN.com?  You know the answer. 1 in a million may be enough to prove causation.  One in a million may prove unacceptable danger or a high degree of safety depending on the motivation of the salesman and the pet phobias of the believing public.

People who sell "Paleo" diets, or low "carb" diets love to tell you that they are based on research, because after all, people like the Inuit eat blubber and fish and raw meat and little else and don't get heart disease or diabetes. Your uncle Ralph went on Atkins and lost weight eating cheeseburgers.  If you noticed that the assumption that this would be true of anyone eating the same diet of course is called "confirming the consequent" which assumes that if B follows A, then B is evidence of A.  It's not. It's a fallacy you'll learn in Logic 101, but you didn't take that course did you?

Convincing evidence that eating the calorie equivalent in lard or Twinkies or donuts produces similar results,  means nothing to the public and won't get published as an advertising campaign and something that has a tiny correlation can be called a "cause"  or a "link" by someone in a rented lab coat and you'll believe the fraud every time because it gives false hope and hope sells.

The peer reviewed journal Science published a study Thursday. Conducted by the University of California, Berkley. It examined genetic differences between Inuit, Europeans, and ethnic Chinese. and yes, pace hipster science, there are genetic differences, easily observed.  The Inuit and some Chinese have a mutation, perhaps cultivated over the millennia, that enable them to tolerate a diet that would make my cardiologist cry,  Some people lose weight on the Atkins diet.  I'm not one of them.  I don't have the genes for it and that's been confirmed by  testing my DNA.

Should we by a sales pitch because "studies show" when there are no studies but a few anecdotes or biased conjectures?  Of course not, nor should we accept news reports that insist this or that is worse than before or is rising or falling in significant fashion and is not a brief anomaly soon to revert to the mean.  Is this scary incident really the result of this or that or is it a crafted scenario based on a fear, a phobia, a bias. Do we still believe cutting the upper tax bracket will end a recession?   You know the answer. Facts don't matter and studies always show what they're designed to show and we always believe what we want to believe.

For most of us, facts don't matter, And chances are we don't bother to think critically or verify, but chances are also great that proven wrong, belief persists, hardens and becomes militant.  Is that innocent child really a child or innocent?  Was he shot in the back?  No matter, grab the matchces because all cops are bad.  Did some kid's diagnosis illustrate a trend, was it caused by a vaccine or by his genes.  Is proof that there is no increase, the identification of the genetic component, the statistical analysis showing no increase enough to make anyone admit error or accept proof -- hell no.  

When Donald Trump insisted he had damning evidence about Barack Obama and was proved to be a lying asswipe, did that change any minds about Obama?  When some smoker lives to be 110, do we insist that smoking isn't safe?  No.  Studies always show what isn't true is true  and science nor truth really matter to the human ape.  

Any Way You Look at This You Lose

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon.
Going to the candidates' debate.
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at this you lose.

I'm fond of reading books on logic and rhetoric, but it's frustrating and annoying in the extreme to recognize the dishonest and deceptive methods of persuasion that make up nearly all American political discussion.  Some 15 years ago I began writing about such things on Usenet, and Compuserve and I've been blogging on the Web for the last ten.  I've lost any belief or hope in  the idea that clear speech and valid reasoning could compete with the self serving belief, the love of snarky zingers and the tribal chanting.  I really don't know why I do it any more and the ritual political exercises the public takes to be debate,  illustrate the futility of hope.

Candidates lie.  They distort, they embellish, they deny.  They make up statistics, quote dubious authority, they make simplistic generalizations, they manipulate a large deck of fallacy with as much dexterity as any Las Vegas illusionist.  It doesn't matter.  We're not looking for facts, we're looking for confirmation of prejudice, and what's overlooked in our candidate is seen as catastrophic, as egregious, as unforgivable in another.  There's simply no other reason for conducting a campaign or listening to it but to delude or protect our delusion. When I see the same tricks used by proponents I was once sympathetic toward and tricks quite as slippery as the other side uses, I have to question my motivations for continuing.

You simply can't trust the propaganda put out by either side of any serious issue.  Is the problem worse or better or unchanged?  Does the incident or scandal du jour represent anything other than an isolated case?  Is something we are urged to panic about, be angry about, to go out and riot about or even vote in response to only a thing chosen or invented by pressure groups as an example?   We can't trust the statistics or the people who quote them.  "Studies show" too often means there was no study and cited "linkages" have nothing to do with causation, because all that matters in political salesmanship is the Framing Effect.

Our politics are fundamentally dishonest because certain groups take advantage of the technology and the science of dishonesty to manipulate us in ways familiar to Aristotle but invisible to us.  We make no effort to verify despite the technology and instant access to information and we will simply deny facts and elevate fiction as suits our vanity, our pride, our delusion and our affiliation.  Truth doesn't matter, faith does and if we fear vaccinations it doesn't matter that claims and fears are proven utterly false.  We can always come up with a conspiracy, we can always deny, we can always throw dung at the truth and anyone who tells it.

Will this fundamental instability of human nature, our tendency toward hysteria and panic bring down our Republic, or is the question really about how soon?  Will we even notice  with all the howling of all the players?

Bernie Sanders' Speech at Liberty University: Full Text

"Thank you, President Falwell and David. Thank you very much for inviting my wife, Jane, and me to be with you even this morning. We appreciate the invitation very much.

And let me start off by acknowledging what I think all of you already know. And that is the views that many here at Liberty University have and I, on a number of important issues, are very, very different. I believe in a woman's rights....

And the right of a woman to control her own body.

I believe gay rights and gay marriage.

Those are my views, and it is no secret. But I came here today, because I believe from the bottom of my heart that it is vitally important for those of us who hold different views to be able to engage in a civil discourse.

Too often in our country -- and I think both sides bear responsibility for us -- there is too much shouting at each other. There is too much making fun of each other.

Now, in my view, and I say this as somebody whose voice is hoarse, because I have given dozens of speeches in the last few months, it is easy to go out and talk to people who agree with you. I was in Greensboro, North Carolina, just last night. All right. We had 9,000 people out. Mostly they agreed with me. Tonight, we're going to be in Manassas, and have thousands out and they agree with me. That's not hard to do. That's what politicians by and large do.

We go out and we talk to people who agree with us.

But it is harder, but not less important, for us to try and communicate with those who do not agree with us on every issue.

And it is important to see where if possible, and I do believe it is possible, we can find common ground.

Now, Liberty University is a religious school, obviously.

And all of you are proud of that.

You are a school which, as all of us in our own way, tries to understand the meaning of morality. What does is mean to live a moral life? And you try to understand, in this very complicated modern world that we live in, what the words of the Bible mean in today's society.

You are a school which tries to teach its students how to behave with decency and with honesty and how you can best relate to your fellow human beings, and I applaud you for trying to achieve those goals.

Let me take a moment, or a few moments, to tell you what motivates me in the work that I do as a public servant, as a senator from the state of Vermont. And let me tell you that it goes without saying, I am far, far from being a perfect human being, but I am motivated by a vision, which exists in all of the great religions, in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam and Buddhism, and other religions.

And that vision is so beautifully and clearly stated in Matthew 7:12, and it states, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them to do to you, for this sums up the war and the prophets." That is the golden rule. Do unto others, what you would have them do to you. That is the golden rule, and it is not very complicated.

Let me be frank, as I said a moment ago. I understand that the issues of abortion and gay marriage are issues that you feel very strongly about. We disagree on those issues. I get that, but let me respectfully suggest that there are other issues out there that are of enormous consequence to our country and in fact to the entire world, that maybe, just maybe, we do not disagree on and maybe, just maybe, we can try to work together to resolve them.

Amos 5:24, "But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream." Justice treating others the way we want to be treated, treating all people, no matter their race, their color, their stature in life, with respect and with dignity.

Now here is my point. Some of you may agree with me, and some of you may not, but in my view, it would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love, it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today.

In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant. We live, and I hope all of you know this, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

  

But most Americans don't know that. Because almost all of that wealth and income is going to the top 1 percent.

You know, that is the truth. We are living in a time -- and I warn all of you if you would, put this in the context of the Bible, not me, in the context of the Bible -- we are living in a time where a handful of people have wealth beyond comprehension. And I'm talking about tens of billions of dollars, enough to support their families for thousands of years. With huge yachts, and jet planes and tens of billions. More money than they would ever know what to do with.

But at that very same moment, there are millions of people in our country, let alone the rest of the world, who are struggling to feed their families. They are struggling to put a roof over their heads, and some of them are sleeping out on the streets. They are struggling to find money in order to go to a doctor when they are sick.

Now, when we talk about morality, and when we talk about justice, we have to, in my view, understand that there is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little.

There is no justice, and I want you to hear this clearly, when the top one-tenth of 1 percent -- not 1 percent, the top one-tenth of 1 percent -- today in America owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And in your hearts, you will have to determine the morality of that, and the justice of that.

In my view, there is no justice, when here, in Virginia and Vermont and all over this country, millions of people are working long hours for abysmally low wages of $7.25 an hour, of $8 an hour, of $9 an hour, working hard, but unable to bring in enough money to adequately feed their kids.

And yet, at that same time, 58 percent of all new income generated is going to the top 1 percent. You have got to think about the morality of that, the justice of that, and whether or not that is what we want to see in our country.

In my view, there is no justice when, in recent years, we have seen a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires, while at the same time the United States of America has the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth. How can we? I want you to go into your hearts, how can we talk about morality, about justice, when we turn our backs on the children of our country?

Now you have got to think about it. You have to think about it and you have to feel it in your guts. Are you content? Do you think it's moral when 20 percent of the children in this country, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, are living in poverty? Do you think it is acceptable that 40 percent of African American children are living in poverty?

In my view, there is no justice, and morality suffers when in our wealthy country, millions of children go to bed hungry. That is not morality and that is not in my view ... what America should be about.

In my view, there is no justice when the 15 wealthiest people in this country in the last two years -- two years -- saw their wealth increase by $170 billion. Two years. The wealthiest 15 people in this country saw their wealth increase by $170 billion.

My friends, that is more wealth acquired in a two-year period than is owned by the bottom 130 million Americans. And while the very, very rich become much richer, millions of families have no savings at all. Nothing in the bank. And they worry every single day that if their car breaks down, they cannot get to work, and if they cannot get to work, they lose their jobs.

And if they lose their jobs, they do not feed their family. In the last two years, 15 people saw $170 billion increase in their wealth, 45 million Americans live in poverty. That in my view is not justice. That is a rigged economy, designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else.

In my view, there is no justice when thousands of Americans die every single year because they do not have any health insurance and do not go to a doctor when they should. I have talked personally to doctors throughout Vermont and physicians around the country. And without exception, they tell me there are times when patients walk into their office very, very sick and they say, why didn't you come in here when you're sick? And the answer is, I do not have any health insurance or I have a high deductible or I thought the problem would get better. And sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes they die because they lack health insurance.

That is not justice. That is not morality. People should not be dying in the United States of America when they are sick.

What that is, is an indication that we are the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right, and I think we should change that.

And I think -- I think that when we talk about morality, what we are talking about is all of God's children. The poor, the wretched, they have a right to go to a doctor when they are sick.

You know, there is a lot of talk in this country from politicians about family values. You have all heard that. Well, let me tell you about a family value.

In my view, there is no justice when low income and working class mothers are forced to separate from their babies one or two weeks after birth and go back to work because they need the money that their jobs provide. Now I know everybody here -- we all are, maybe in different ways, but all of us believe in family values.

Jane and I have four kids. We have seven beautiful grandchildren. We believe in family values. But it is not a family value when all of you know that the most important moments and time of a human being's life is the first weeks and months after that baby is born. That is the moment when mothers bonds with the baby; gets to love and know her baby -- dad is there as well. That is what a family is about. And those of you -- at least those of you who are parents -- more parents back here than there I suspect. You know what an unforgettable moment that is. What an important moment that is. And I want you to think, whether you believe it is a family value, that the United States of America is the only -- only -- major country on earth that does not provide paid family and medical leave.

Now in English, what that means is that all over the world when a woman has her baby she is guaranteed the right because society understands how important that moment is. She is guaranteed the right to stay home and get income in order to nurture her baby. And that is why I believe when we talk about family values that the United States government must provide at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.

In my view there is no justice in our country when youth unemployment exists at tragically high levels. I requested a study last month from a group of economists. And what they told me is that 51 percent of African American high school graduates between the ages of 17 and 20 are unemployed or underemployed -- 51 percent.

We have in this country sufficient amounts of money to put more people in jail than any other country on earth. The United States has more people in jail than China; a communist authoritarian country.

But apparently we do not have enough money to provide jobs and education to our young people. I believe that's wrong.
I am not a theologian, I am not an expert on the Bible, nor am I a Catholic. I am just a United States senator from the small state of Vermont. But I agree with Pope Francis, who will soon be coming to visit us in the United States.

I agree with Pope Francis when he says, and I quote, "The current financial crisis originated in a profound human crisis, the denial of the primacy of the human person," and this is what he writes: "We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose," end of quote.

And the pope also writes, quote, "There is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone. Money has to serve, not to rule," end of quote.

Now those are pretty profound words, which I hope we will all think about. In the pope's view, and I agree with him, we are living in a nation and in a world, and the Bible speaks to this issue, in a nation and in a world which worships not love of brothers and sisters, not love of the poor and the sick, but worships the acquisition of money and great wealth. I do not believe that is the country we should be living in.

Money and wealth should serve the people. The people should not have to serve money and wealth. (APPLAUSE)

Throughout human history, there has been endless discussion. It is part of who we are as human beings, people who think and ask questions, endless discussion and debate about the meaning of justice and about the meaning of morality. And I know that here at Liberty University, those are the kinds of discussions you have every day, and those are the kinds of discussions you should be having and the kinds of discussions we should be having all over America.

I would hope, and I conclude with this thought, I would hope very much that as part of that discussion and part of that learning process, some of you will conclude that if we are honest in striving to be a moral and just society, it is imperative that we have the courage to stand with the poor, to stand with working people and when necessary, take on very powerful and wealthy people whose greed, in my view, is doing this country enormous harm.

Thank you all very much."

Mike Huckabee Thinks Black People Can't be Citizens

Is everyone too busy hunting for racists under the bed and accusing every dust bunny they find of racism to ignore someone who would make Satan blush and George Wallace take exception at a candidate telling us Black Americans are, by law, not human nor eligible for citizenship?  The Dred Scott decision, says  the excremental Mr. Huckabee,  a man with no knowledge of history, logic or law, is still  "the law of the land."   Is there no shame any more?

No it isn't the law and hasn't been since the constitution was amended to outlaw slavery and to make everyone born here a citizen.  A lot of people died to make that happen and a lot of people died to prevent that.  Any child knows this.  Any naturalized immigrant and probably most of the undocumented immigrants know that our government denies any origin in Biblical law or ecclesiastical authority and again many people died to make that happen.

Frankly there are no Republican candidates that are not delusional, that are not offering their delusions as a reason to vote for them,  nor do any seem to have any grasp of reality or history.  Whether it's the myth of  "Anchor Babies" or Mexican rapists or any of the other lies, distortions or frauds that constitute the Republican platform, not one of them is honest, trustworthy or smarter than a garden slug. Pretending otherwise, giving them support by pretending to be fair and respectful borders on treason, borders on collaborating with an enemy that seeks the destruction of our institutions and the rule of law.  Is this what they mean by "making America great again?

It's embarrassing, it's humiliating and it's terrifying to see this going on and to listen to people who don't react when hearing that Obama is like Hitler, That universal access to health care is Communism or like the Nazis - take your pick: people who think Jesus is or government, that the law applies differently to "believers."  The world laughs at us, and as screwed up as the world is, I don't blame them.  I mean, you can laugh or you can hide under the bed or you can try to find some remote corner of the planet to drink yourself to death in, but  the Zombie apocalypse is upon us: a brainless evil running wild in the streets, waving crosses and pounding on bibles and hunting witches like it's 1499.

The Voice From the Bunker

In the last election, GOP presidential candidates promised $2.50/gallon gas and an unemployment rate below 6% -- but only if Obama loses,"

says Rachel Maddow.  Yesterday's local newspaper had a cartoon of  Obama standing next to a garbage pile labelled DEBT and saying he'll give it the title of  Prosperity.

Is there any more solid proof that the GOP lives in a world of their own?  A hermetic world, where truth never penetrates, a crumbling tenement of the mind with no fire escapes and no exit.

"Care to guess what happened anyway?"

Deficit spending is way down from the last Republican administration, the corner gas station is selling the cheap stuff at $2.44, unemployment is at 5.1%. She's right, it's hard to guess what they're complaining about, but my guess is that they're talking to a crowd who's cognitive functions and base of knowledge is sclerotic with misdirected anger.  It's sad how big that crowd is. Things have been getting steadily better for 6 years and the 8 years of soaring debt and zero job growth, a credit crunch and market collapse only surpassed by the Great Depression - - all those things have been forgotten while the DJ continues to rap about smaller government and less spending and lower taxes.

Is it a bubble or is it a sealed lead sarcophagus where the corpse of  legitimacy, decency, truth and justice lies rotting in it's own stink?

Yes, I know, she's a lesbian, MSNBC has a scarlet LIBERAL painted on it and Obama is a DISASTER says the voice from the bunker.