Seriously.  I simply cannot understand how Barack Obama is not totally obliterating John McCain in the polls.  McCain is running what is arguably the most inept presidential campaign this country has ever seen, and today they might have hit rock bottom.  Now that the sparkle has faded from their last gimmick (Sarah Palin), the McCain camp has come up with a new one:  refuse to participate in Friday’s presidential debate unless Congress comes passes a bailout for Wall Street.

Let me get this straight.  After very recently stating that the economy is fundamentally sound, McCain suddenly decides that it is in such crappy shape that there aren’t even 90 minutes to spare in fixing it?  John “Keating 5″ McCain?  Does anyone really buy that crap?  Well, it’s still early, but right now it looks like this little ploy isn’t going to help McCain one bit.  A poll by SurveyUSA found that 90% of respondents believe the debate should be held as scheduled.  And if this is any indication, this stunt isn’t going to play well for him in the media, either.  Honestly, I just can’t fathom how this seemed like a good idea to the McCain people.  How do think it will look for McCain if he is a no-show at the debate?  As long as Obama doesn’t cave to this chickenshit political stunt, he should see a nice boost in his numbers if McCain doesn’t show.

Update: Now the McCain camp is talking about postponing the VP debate.  Maybe that’s their game, find some way to completely hide Sarah Palin from any meaningful public exposure before the election.  Can’t say I wouldn’t do the same if I were them.  She’s dumber than a bag of hammers.

The execrable DaveScot approvingly posted the following video on Bill Dembski’s ID blog, Uncommon Descent.  I suggest keeping a bucket close by for puke:

Unghh, that fucking song! I challenge anyone to find a piece of music more detestable than that Lee Greenwood abortion. Although it was the perfect cherry to place on top of the tacky, infantile patriotism that permeated the entire video. You know, the kind of patriotism that produces crap like this:

And seriously, is he trying to justify the Iraq war on the premise that the Iraqi people are better off now than they were in 2002? Really? Sure, Saddam isn’t in power anymore, but when he was at least Iraqis didn’t have to worry about getting blown up on their way to the market. And on top of that, all we did was replace a secular dictator with a theocratic parliament. That’s freedom? Furthermore, if we remember back a few years, the Iraq war was not sold to the American people (at least not until it was over) as a fight for the freedom of the Iraqi people, but rather as defending the US from Saddam Hussein and his WMDs. If Bush had tried to garner public support for invading Iraq on the principle of spreading Freedom^TM to Iraq, the war never would have happened.

Beyond this, though, is the bigger issue of the role of US military power in the world. According to the tool in the video, freedom is worth any cost, and there is no more important mission for the US military than spreading freedom. If we take this argument seriously, then we’ve got a shitload of wars to start. So, who’s next? How about Saudi Arabia, which is without a doubt less free than Iraq was under Saddam. Maybe Turkey? China? Sorry pal, but our military should not be in the nation building business. Yes, it’s tragic that people have to live under authoritarian regimes, but Americans volunteer for military service to protect their own country, not to liberate others. The Iraq war is undoubtedly a mistake of cosmic proportions. And there is nothing unpatriotic in saying that, at least not in any sense of patriotism that goes beyond the thumb-sucking, collectors plate version.

Time Magazine reports that most Americans believe that guardian angels are real:

More than half of all Americans believe they have been helped by a guardian angel in the course of their lives, according to a new poll by the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion. In a poll of 1700 respondents, 55% answered affirmatively to the statement, “I was protected from harm by a guardian angel.” The responses defied standard class and denominational assumptions about religious belief; the majority held up regardless of denomination, region or education — though the figure was a little lower (37%) among respondents earning more than $150,000 a year.

Things like shouldn’t bother me anymore, as a bevy of previous polls have pretty much conclusively demonstrated that the majority of Americans believe highly stupid shit.  Still, I can’t get over the sheer ridiculousness of adults in the 21st century believing that they were “protected from harm by a guardian angel.”  And why, in our society, is it acceptable to believe in magic, protective anthropomorphs with wings, but completely insane to believe in leprechauns, Santa Claus, or Xenu?  Why do we grant protected status to some batshit insane beliefs, but not to others?

Hurray!  Someone in the media actually took notice of McSame’s ghastly health care “reform”.  Bob Herbert of the NY Times nails it:

Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation’s health insurance system?

These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.

A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.

According to the study: “The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now.”

Exactly.  If McCain were to get his way on health care, millions of Americans (particularly the blue-collar, working class families from small-town America that the McCain-Palin ticket claims to represent) will find themselves paying through the nose for the same, if not fewer, benefits.  And that’s if they’re fortunate enough to be healthy–any pre-existing conditions in the family and they’re fucked.

Granted, Connecticut isn’t a battle ground state, so I don’t really know what kind of ads the Obama campaign in running, but they should absolutely be hitting people over the head with this issue.  McCain’s health care prescription is a clear disaster that would wreck the lives of low and middle class families.  Unfortunately, the media in this country don’t do their jobs, so people simply don’t know what McSame has in store for them.  If this became the issue that it should be in this election, I think the cognitive dissonance in many current McCain-Palin supporters might actually break through the simplistic culture war shit that has taken over their minds.

Well, it appears that PNAS has sent a response to Andy Schlafly about his letter to the journal detailing “flaws” in Richard Lenski’s inaugural article. As anyone with even a fraction of cognitive ability could have predicted, PNAS has refused to publish his child-like screed. Here is the response from a member of the PNAS editorial board (emphasis mine):

From what I take to be the underlying issue from the numbered points, Mr. Schlafly’s main concern has to do with the fact that one experiment failed to yield a statistically significant result, and this happened to be the experiment with the largest sample size. Every experiment has limited power to detect a difference of any given magnitude, and so in a series of experiments some may yield non-significant results even when the null hypothesis is false. The non-significant experiment may even be the one with the largest sample size. There is nothing exceptional in this–it is a matter of chance. Nevertheless, from a statistical point of view, it is proper to combine the results of independent experiments, as Blount et al. did correctly in their original paper. If the overall result is significant, as it is in this case, then the whole series of tests is regarded as significant. Mr. Schlafly seems to suggest that experiments differing in sample size cannot be combined in an overall analysis, and if this is what he is suggesting, he is wrong. I think Letters published in PNAS should raise points that in themselves, or in conjunction with the authors’ response, should be of wide interest to the readership of PNAS or should illuminate some obscure or subtle point. The issues raised by Mr. Schlafly are neither obscure nor subtle, but are part of everyday statistical analysis at a level too elementary to need rehearsal in the pages of PNAS. Mr. Schlafly’s final comment about release of data is uncalled for. My understanding is that the authors have made the relevant materials available on their web site. This seems to me to meet the requirement that “data collected with public funds belong in the public domain.” If Mr. Schlafly believes that the disclosure is incomplete, that is an issue that needs to be argued with the original funding agency, not with the readers of PNAS.

Shorter PNAS: “We don’t print letters from mouthbreathing simpletons who cannot understand simple math or science. Please fuck off.”

Of course, the Conservapedia talk page for the PNAS response is filled with delirious wackaloons complaining that this is further evidence of a conspiracy within the scientific community to censor creationists. For example, commenter Raul offers this bleating remark:

Oh my dear God, I can’t believe this!! Where has this beautiful country gone to if even science is not reliable anymore nowadays. Hope things will change in the future. Good thing there still are people like Mr. Schlafly, who have the brains and power to stand up, and turn the people of America in the right direction again.

Andy Schlafly? Brains? Those terms should never be found together in any sentence that isn’t pointing out that the former does not possess the latter.

Hello again.  I should be getting back to posting more regularly now after my vacation.  Last week I returned from two weeks in Germany–which were great–only to find the election turn to shit as the Republicans once again transform the political landscape into a fantastically vapid reality show pitting small-town, common-sense folk against pointy-headed, big-city intellectuals.  Needless to say, the success that they’ve had with that tactic has made me both depressed and cranky.  I’ve attempted to write several times over the last week, but anger would always overtake me and I would decide to try again at some point in the future when I might not find myself using the word “fuck” twenty times per sentence.  So anyway, I’m back from the dead, so to speak.  And with the McCain campaign spewing lies at a rate never before seen in national politics, it looks like I’ll have plenty of material to blog about.