Tea Party Rep. Paul Broun: Evolution and Big Bang Are “Lies Straight From the Pit Of Hell.” Why Yes, He Serves On the House Science Committee With Todd Akin
At a speech delivered recently to the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet (for those of you calculating at home: Liberty + Baptist + Church + Sportsman = Quadruple Conservative), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), a member of the House Committee on Science and Technology and a freaking medical doctor .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Broun , went on a rant about how science is the work of the devil. Which makes his House committee appointment the work of the devil, too? Is he like a secret agent from God sent to spy on the House Committee on Hedonism and Satan-Worship? We’re not sure.
"All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior."
According to Broun, this science conspiracy is primarily designed to hide the true age of the Earth.
"You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says."
Literally. This is literally what he believes. 9,000 years ago, which post-dates the advent of farming, knitting, and using tools to hunt.
"What I’ve come to learn is that [the Bible is] the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that."
Just so we’re clear, Rep. Broun’s primary guide to public policy is a literal interpretation of a handbook that says that a man survived three days in the stomach of a whale. Not a metaphorical, figurative, in-the-spirit-of interpretation, but a dead literal one.
Okay, but maybe Akin and Broun are just outliers? Presumably the Chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology believes in, you know, science and technology, right? Actually, the Chairman, Ralph Hall .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Hall .. (R-TX), does not believe in climate change, because he’s more afraid of freezing to death than being too warm? Or something like that?
"I’m really more fearful of freezing. And I don’t have any science to prove that. But we have a lot of science that tells us they’re not basing it on real scientific facts."
What. Does. That. Even. Mean?????
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*You know what else God’s handbook says to do? It says to click on this link and go buy stuff on Amazon.com right now .. http://www.amazon.com/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&linkCode=ur2&tag=thdado0e-20 . If you don’t click on the link then the Devil will come eat your soul or something scary like that. This is scientifically proven. We have the data from the House Science Committee to prove it.
"What I’ve come to learn is that [the Bible is] the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society."
Bain Capital and the Race to the Bottom in Manufacturing and Wages
by Mary Bottari — October 24, 2012 - 10:44am
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney wants to have his cake and eat it too. “Governments do not create jobs,” a stern Romney told CNN’s Candy Crowley twice during the second debate. Here in Wisconsin, however, he is running ads promising to “crack down on China” and create 12 million new jobs .. http://www.mittromney.com/videos .
When attempting to square the circle, a look at Bain Capital’s .. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bain_Capital .. investment strategies might be helpful. In 1984, Romney co-founded Bain Capital, a spin-off from Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm. A new accounting details Bain Capital's history in shipping some 15,865 manufacturing jobs overseas (see chart below). Using a conservative multiplier, which takes into account other jobs in the supply chain or community dependent on those manufacturing jobs, Bain is responsible for some 31,730 lost jobs.
According to the analysis by Dr. Raymond Lenzi of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, “Bain has followed a consistent pattern of buying American manufacturing plants and, within one to four years, shipping equipment and jobs to China, Mexico, and India. While Bain may have added some jobs in service companies in which they have invested (Burger King and Staples office supply for example) these jobs have little or no positive impact on the American economy since they pay much less than manufacturing jobs.”
What may be most shocking is the diversity of jobs that firms like Bain have decided the nation can do without. Bain has not only offshored Mr. Coffee, it is in the process of offshoring profitable high-tech, high-wage manufacturing jobs, the type of jobs that American workers were told would be the upside of terrible trade deals like the 1994 NAFTA and the 2000 China pact.
“Bainport” Illinois
Bain's recent decision to close the Sensata Technologies .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/us/politics/as-romney-repeats-trade-message-bain-maintains-china-ties.html?pagewanted=all .. plant in Freeport, Illinois is particularly galling. The plant, which employs some 170 workers, is high-tech, highly profitable, and efficient. It makes sophisticated sensors needed for vehicles including domestic General Motors and Ford cars. In 2011, the company had a net revenue of $1.8 billion and adjusted net income of $355 million. This represents “record levels for the company,” Sensata said in a financial report.
But blockbuster profits are not good enough for Bain who apparently can make more money by shipping the entire firm overseas. So they are.
Piece by piece, Sensata’s equipment is being dismantled, crated and shipped to Jiangsu Province, where the Chinese government has built a new plant. (Maybe governments can create jobs after all?) Not only are Sensata workers being forced to train their Chinese counterparts, who reportedly flew into this small town near the Wisconsin border and took down the American flag, they have been ordered to dismantle the equipment’s safety functions because it slows production and the new Chinese bosses didn’t want it.
The kicker? The plant is closing November 5, the day before the election.
Let’s not kid ourselves about just how cheap offshore labor really is. We not only pay substantially less per hour, we also avoid the costs we would incur if these workers immigrated here. We don’t pay for their medical expenses when they show up in the emergency room without insurance. We don’t pay for their pension costs if they don’t save for retirement. We don’t pay for their children’s public education. Nor do we pay for their out-of-wedlock children, their unemployment benefits and workers’ compensation, their slip and fall torts, their wear and tear on our public infrastructure, and the cost of their drunk driving, drug use and other crimes. We outsource pollution, its adverse effects on our health, and its clean-up costs. Neither the employees nor their employers are here to vote and seek political handouts.
When the plutocracy speaks, it’s not pretty. This attitude underscores a business model vastly privileges the 1% while accelerating the race to the bottom in wages and benefits for American workers.
Trade on the Campaign Trail
China and free trade is a hot topic in key elections this cycle in industrial swing states. Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who has fought against every job-killing trade agreement since she has been in office, framed her whole race on China ..
.. “they lead the world in cheating” and her consistent opposition to the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Now Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS .. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Crossroads_GPS .. is blanketing the state in direct mail falsely asserting that she voted to offshore jobs to China when she voted for the Obama jobs package in 2009. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio has cut some of the best “Made in America” ads around .. http://www.sherrodbrown.com/video/both-from-ohio/ , an appeal based on a car whose parts are made all over Ohio, along with a tough ad on China currency manipulation .. http://www.sherrodbrown.com/video/tv-ad-protecting-ohio-jobs/ -- an issue he has a long track record on.
As for President Obama, he has promised to bring 1 million manufacturing jobs back to America. He deserves credit for saving jobs in Freeport and other towns by applying trade sanctions on China to stop a flood of cheap Chinese tires. But he also pushed through Congress the Korea Free Trade deal and others objected to by the majority of his own party. Worse, the administration is in the process of negotiating another terrible free trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership .. http://www.citizen.org/TPP , a NAFTA deal for Asia.
The good news is that according to the American Alliance for Manufacturing .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-paul/china-debate_b_1974627.html , America really can have a high-wage future in manufacturing. “The brightest minds at Harvard, MIT, and in the consulting community see enormous possibilities for American manufacturing. We're competitive in energy costs, labor productivity, and other factors. Reshoring has already begun,” and both Presidential candidates are being forced to discuss the issue wherever they go.
But Americans who want to secure that high-road, high-wage future will continue to have their work cut out for them.
.. i was thinking Bain's Edward Conard's name is mispelt .. it should be Canard .. now i see from a google search ..
The term "canard" comes from the Medieval French expression “Vendre des canard à moitié.” The meaning literally is “to sell the ducks by half.”
which then led to .. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canard .. “to sell the ducks by half.” .. fits Conard perfectly .. great Americans Romney and Canard .. it's disappointing to understand just what how much fear and ignorance the plutocrats are able to generate with their fucking crass hyperbole and lies .. fear .. ignorance .. SOCIALISM! COMMUNIST! ..
Billy Graham Faces Backlash Over Mormon 'Cult' Removal
In this Dec. 20, 2010 file photo, evangelist Billy Graham speaks to the media at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association headquarters in Charlotte, N.C.
By Daniel Burke Posted: 10/25/2012 6:53 am EDT Updated: 10/25/2012 6:53 am EDT
(RNS) The Rev. Samuel Wynn admired Billy Graham and his evangelistic association for decades, joining its spiritual crusades and urging fellow Christians to do the same. But no more.
"I will never again support anything by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association," said Wynn, the superintendent of a United Methodist Church district in Fayetteville, N.C.
The source of Wynn's ire: The BGEA's recent removal of language on its website calling Mormonism a "cult."
The scrubbing followed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's pilgrimage to Billy Graham's mountaintop home in Montreat, N.C. After the Oct. 11 meeting, Graham pledged to "do all I can to help" Romney, according to a campaign aide.
The BGEA said it cut the "cult" language "because we do not wish to participate in a theological debate about something that has become politicized during this campaign."
But Wynn and other conservative Christians accuse Graham of putting partisanship above piety and risking Christian souls to help Romney, a Mormon, win the White House.
"My question to Billy Graham is, What's more important for the kingdom of God: politics or the message of Jesus Christ?" said Wynn.
For evangelicals, berating Billy Graham is like Catholics dissing the pope. Through his globe-trotting crusades and passionate preaching, the nearly 94-year-old evangelist has converted countless Christians and almost single-handedly ushered evangelicalism into the modern age.
But when "the greatest proclaimer of the gospel in the last century," as one Southern Baptist called Graham, embraced Mormonism last week, he confirmed conservative evangelicals' worst fears about the 2012 election: That Romney's rise would lift his Mormon church to cultural prominence and acceptance within mainstream Christianity.
Howell Scott, senior pastor Bethel Baptist Church in Alamogordo, N.M., said the BGEA's declassification of Mormonism as a cult "will have disastrous unintended consequences."
"The most immediate consequence will be the acceptance and approval of Mormonism as a legitimate Christian'denomination' or faith group," Scott wrote on his blog last week. "The blurring will only increase if Mitt Romney is elected president." Most evangelicals do not consider Mormons Christian because Latter-day Saints revere Joseph Smith as a prophet, consider the Book of Mormon on par with the Bible and conceive of the Christian Trinity as three separate gods. Mormons acknowledge those differences but insist they are Christians.
Graham has been accused of crossing sectarian lines before, said Bill Leonard, a professor of church history at Wake Forest School of Divinity in North Carolina. The evangelist irked fundamentalists decades ago by inviting mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics to join him on stage during his crusades.
But Graham's implicit acceptance of Mormonism last week came on the heels of a much-hyped study showing that Protestants are losing ground in the United States and amid a presidential campaign that includes -- for the first time in history -- a GOP ticket without a Protestant.
"There's a sense that Protestants are beleaguered right now," said Leonard, "and in another four years may be even more so." Leonard and other experts suspect that Billy Graham's son, Franklin, who is also the BGEA's president and CEO, was behind the move to declassify Mormonism as a cult. The younger Graham is a more eager culture warrior, while Billy Graham has expressed regret for his past partisanship.
Just this week, Franklin Graham published an editorial entitled "Can An Evangelical Christian Vote for a Mormon?" The answer was an enthusiastic yes.
Several conservative Christian bloggers, including Scott, note that the BGEA, Franklin Graham and his Christian aid group, Samaritan's Purse, are all longtime clients of public relations executive Mark DeMoss, a Romney campaign adviser. DeMoss said he knew nothing about removing the "cult" language until he read media stories last week. In fact, DeMoss said, for the last six years -- since Romney's first White House run -- he has urged evangelicals to forget about candidates' theology and focus on their values.
"I am not advising anyone about how they discuss or treat theological differences in a political context," DeMoss said, "and there is no evidence I have done so with Franklin Graham or his father."
The BGEA did not respond to a request for comment.
In a recent article in Christianity Today, a magazine founded by Billy Graham, several evangelical leaders supported the BGEA's cult declassification.
"One very good thing about the Romney candidacy is that it is causing both evangelicals and Mormons to clarify terminology in civil dialogue -- as among friends," Jerry Root, director of an evangelism institute at Wheaton College in Illinois, told the magazine. Other evangelicals quoted in the article disagreed with the decision.
In the end, the Grahams' endeavors to ease evangelical consciences about voting for a Mormon may backfire.
Bart Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, said he had been prepared to vote for Romney -- until last week.
"The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association probably cost Mitt Romney my November ballot when it stopped calling Mormonism a cult explicitly because of this election," Barber wrote on his blog.
"For the sake of my congregation, when Billy Graham is muddying the waters of the gospel, I have an obligation to provide clarity," Barber continued.
"For the sake of Mormons in my community who need to know of their need for the gospel of Jesus Christ and who are being reassured in their damnable heresy by none less than Billy Graham," Barber said, "I have an obligation to provide clarity."
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR - April 18, 2013, 6:30 pm 7 Comments
The American government’s goal of vaccinating young girls against the human papillomavirus has been disappointing, with less than a third of teenagers .. http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/resistance-to-hpv-vaccines-needs-new-solutions/ .. having completed a full course of HPV vaccine. But now the United States can look to Australia, which six years into a successful nationwide HPV vaccination campaign has experienced a sharp decline in the number of new cases of genital warts among young men and women.
Russell Kirk/Merck, via Getty Images
The HPV vaccine blocks two forms of human papillomavirus.
The country, one of the first to establish a nationally financed HPV vaccination program for girls and young women, has also seen a decrease in the number of cases of cervical abnormalities, a precursor to cervical cancer.
Australia’s program, which started in 2007, offers free HPV vaccination to girls who are 12 and 13 years old, and catch-up programs for girls and women under 26. The vaccine protects against genital warts as well as cancers of the cervix, head and neck.
The vaccine is typically administered in three doses, beginning around age 12. In 2010, coverage rates for girls that age in Australia’s school-based programs reached 83 percent for the first dose, 80 percent for the second dose and 73 percent for the third.
The findings suggest that Australia’s program, which has experienced little of the resistance that has stymied vaccination efforts in the United States, has been an overwhelming success, said Basil Donovan, an author of the study and a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
As part of the new research, which was published in BMJ .. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3606327/ , a British medical journal, Dr. Donovan and colleagues compared rates of HPV-related diseases in the three years before the vaccine program began and in the four years afterward. The study included data on nearly 86,000 people who visited clinics in Australia between 2004 and 2011.
The researchers found that diagnoses of genital warts among young women ages 12 to 26 plummeted 59 percent in the two years after the program began. For men in the same age group, genital warts cases dropped 39 percent. During the same period, there was also a striking decline in the rate of high-grade cervical abnormalities in teenage girls, a sign that a decline in cervical cancer cases may be on the horizon.
Although a driving force behind the vaccine recommendations is the prevention of cancer, it is too soon to measure an impact there. The incubation period from HPV infection to the development of an HPV-related cancer is typically two to three decades. But for genital warts, the incubation period is about three months.
The findings showed a trend of sharply decreasing diagnoses among younger age groups. The rate of genital warts cases among girls younger than 21, for example, fell to less than 1 percent in 2011 from about 12 percent in 2007, a decline of nearly 93 percent. Among women ages 21 and 30, the decline in diagnoses was roughly 70 percent, to just 3 percent in that age group in 2011 from about 11 percent in 2007. At the same time, however, there was no significant decline in cases among women 30 and over.
A similar pattern was seen in every age group of men, with the infection rate falling more and more sharply with decreasing age. Dr. Donovan said it was clear that the high rate of immunization among young women was protecting young men who have not been vaccinated, a phenomenon known as herd immunity.
“The mathematical modelers told us that a large decline was to be expected, but we tend not to believe it until we see it,” Dr. Donovan said. “We were particularly surprised to see a 93 percent drop in genital warts in young women when only 85 percent were vaccinated. This suggests that the herd immunity that is protecting men is, in turn, also protecting unvaccinated women.”
Australia’s vaccination campaign sharply contrasts with the program in the United States where, studies show, parents often opt out of HPV vaccination for their children, calling the vaccine unnecessary, citing concerns about its safety or saying they have difficulty explaining to their teenagers what the shots are for. Some parents have also hesitated over fears that HPV vaccination might give their teenagers license to have sex, even though studies have countered .. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/hpv-vaccination-does-not-change-sexual-behavior/ .. the notion that the vaccine alters sexual behavior.
“There was little resistance to the HPV vaccine in Australia, just the usual anti-vaccination people and a few religious groups,” Dr. Donovan said. “But even the religious groups have gone quiet, and I suspect that many of them are quietly getting their children vaccinated.”
.. look .. one could come up with any number of different reasons why Australia is able to exhibit more progressive attitudes and practices in some matters, take universal healthcare for one (note: some of your states are ahead of us on the question of gay marriage), but basically you only have to look at the extraordinary influence of the minority of religious, and anti-government, extremists in the USA .. that's it .. reasonable middle of the road Americans know it's just that simple .. those people who relish the light of revelation they see in their trust of extreme religiosity, and in their extremist anti-government mistrust, really are, no doubt, guilty of keeping the USA in the dark, and just a bit backward in so many areas involving social sense, and responsibility .. it's a shame as the USA is such a tremendously forward and wonderful country in so many other ways .. truly, though too many only bitch about the place .. :)
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