Can you imagine this crook in the White House? No way this is in the cards for America’s future! No way this white supremacist will be allowed in the White House!

Barbour Ignores Budget-balancing Stimulus in Fox News Criticisms

By Bill Minor, 7-19-09

Jackson, Miss – Call it chutzpah, biting the hand that feeds you, or whatever else you might call it when the beneficiary of largesse disdains the one who made the goodies possible.

Gov. Haley Barbour goes on Fox News Channel’s (where else?) Sean Hannity show four days after Mississippi’s Legislature has handed him a balanced state budget without draconian agency cuts or big tax increases, thanks largely to money from President Obama’s $785 billion stimulus package, officially known as American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Does Haley tell Sean anything about how the Obama stimulus money plugged gaping holes in the Mississippi budget? He does not.

No, he tears into the stimulus package with all the pat phrases from the Republican Party playbook.

“Too much spending on social policy and not enough on infrastructure,” Barbour repeats, followed by the old GOP standby: “not enough tax cuts.”

Adding, of course, “It would make a lot more sense if they’d given states more discretion over how to spend the money.”

Translation: Give me say-so on where to put the money (we all remember how Barbour shifted $600 million in Katrina money intended to rebuild housing on the devastated Gulf Coast to the Port of Gulfport’s 10-year old expansion plan that includes creating casino-hotel sites.)

What were the “social policy” programs Barbour told Fox viewers were wrongly included in Obama’s recovery package?

Did that apply to the $160 million stimulus money that made it possible to fully fund Mississippi’s K-12 education program, saving 4,500 teachers’ jobs?

Or $133 million ARRA money for Title 1 to aid poverty students or another $122.3 million for school children with disabilities?

Or the $164 million ARRA money that saved the fiscally troubled Medicaid program and its 600,000 vulnerable clients?

Or the $177 million to the Department of Transportation for shovel-ready projects that will put hundreds of Mississippians to work?

At home, a different tune

Strangely, back home in Mississippi, Barbour whistled a different tune about the Obama recovery package in his Web site. It was saying “spending on all three levels of education will be the highest ever” and acknowledged that federal stimulus money made it possible.

On the Hannity show, Barbour sounded more like a hopeful to be on the GOP’s 2012 ticket, veering off into water over his head on foreign policy and military preparedness.

He roundly criticized President Obama’s recent meetings with Russia’s two top leaders, and his agreement that both U.S. and Russia would reduce to 1,600 their nuclear warheads.

The Mississippi governor charged “it is no time to dismantle our nuclear arsenal to have a charm offensive with the Russians.”

Barbour said that his hero, Ronald Reagan, would never have done such a thing, insisting that Ronnie “showed the world the Russians couldn’t compete with us” in nuclear weaponry.

Barbour forgets Reagan

Obviously Barbour didn’t know or conveniently forgot that Reagan, meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, stunned NATO allies and his aides by proposing both the U. S. and the Soviet Union scrap all of their nuclear weapons.

Reagan aides quickly went into damage control, attributing Reagan’s off-handed nuclear giveaway to a brief lapse of memory, and told the Russian team just to forget what he said.

Makes Obama’s nuclear agreement with the Russian leaders small potatoes by comparison.

Barbour’s Fox News sortie into the foreign policy minefield brings to mind his unmemorable 1982 Senate race against aging Sen. John Stennis when he tried to portray Stennis, then one of the hawkish of war hawks in Congress, as soft on standing up to the Soviets in the Cold War.

Mississippians then saw that Barbour was talking pure hogwash and soundly defeated him.

Bill Minor is a syndicated columnist who has covered Mississippi politics since 1947.  

Beyond the obvious hypocrisy inherent in GOP Senator and Promise Keepers member John Ensign’s recently disclosed extramarital sexual affair, there’s another notable aspect to Ensign’s religious affiliations that has so far escaped public notice: exorcism.

Senator John Ensign belongs to a Pentecostal denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, that promotes a new health care paradigm in which both physical and psychological maladies can be cured through the casting out of demons. In the new approach, individuals can even heal themselves by exorcising their own demons, through a process that a 2003 Associated Press story characterized as “do it yourself exorcism”.

read more

Creationism has seen big gains in the State of Texas school cirriculum in recent months aided by the help of a widespread radical Christian Fundamentalist mind-set.

“Paleontologists took a trip to Answers in Genesis’s Creation “Museum” – and were dismayed, unsurprisingly, by what they saw. The Ninth North American Paleontological Convention was held June 21-26, 2009, at the University of Cincinnati, attracting several hundred paleontologists from around the world to present their latest research, as well as to attend a plenary session on evolution and society featuring NCSE’s executive director Eugenie C. Scott. The organizers of the convention also offered a side trip to the nearby Creation “Museum, explaining that “it is essential for professional paleontologists to become better aware of how their work and their roles in society are portrayed by creationists, themes that are conveyed vividly at the museum.”

read more

NICHOLAS WADE

New York Times 5-3-09

More and more scientific evidence is surfacing which supports the theory that modern human life did originate in Africa.  

Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet.

A new genetic survey of people in Africa, the largest of its kind, suggests, however, that the region in southwest Africa seems, on the present evidence, to be the origin of modern humans. The authors have also identified some 14 ancestral populations.

readmore

Once in a blue moon I stumble across  an essay by Mark Morford and, as always, I am automatically compelled to share it with other Progressives. For better or worse, Morford has a style you don’t easily forget. He can make you laugh and cry all in the same sentence.  

Evil overlords to flaccid clowns in the blink of Jesus’ eye. Adorable!

Mark Morford:

This much we know: Hand evil a big, sticky gob of power, and it quickly becomes a feral monster, dangerous and cruel and willing to sell its own shriveled heart and the heart of its very remorseful mother for a shot at everlasting infamy, even more power and maybe some fresh, raw kitten blood, intravenously, just for the hell of it.

Oh, but take that same vile leviathan and suddenly strip away all its power and influence and capacity for wickedness, and watch it deflate like a wheezing circus tent, quickly turning into a trembling caricature of its former self, a tiny, elfin thing small enough to fit into a shoebox of panic and pathos and residual Godspit.

[…]

But weep not for Miss California, who’s happy as a Prozac clam to take on the title as the new face of Republican hetero marriage. Isn’t she lovely? A skinny, fake-breasted blonde mouthful of air who does exactly as she’s told and never questions her scary Bible and doesn’t really like sex and you want to stick that thing where? Ewww! She’s perfect.

learnmore

 by Al Bratton

While Bible-Thumping Creationists continue to teach that God’s Intelligent Design is responsible for the origin of Earth and Man, science continues to trump their efforts.

“Ten Amino Acids Thermodynamically Favored”

from Talk Reason.org

In the famous Miller-Urey experiment, amino acids, the “building blocks of proteins,” can be relatively easily produced by simple, natural processes. Ten of the 20 life building amino acids were created in conditions similar to the atmosphere of a young planet Earth.

Bottom line:

“…if these 10 amino acids were the basis of life on Earth, and they form so favorably, then there’s a very good chance that life on other planets may have originally used the same 10 amino acids.”

[…]

“…the fact remains that life here on Earth might have a lot in common with life elsewhere….”

learnmore