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No time for words; must go get more coffee and put any words I can spare into the thesis. For now, you get my final Georgia video for that thing we called Street Team ‘08.

Just a few of the moments from last night; I gotta go get my Flixwagon footage off the server.

My phone will not be broadcasting to my usual Flixwagon account today; for ease of production I’ll be publishing to a parallel server for MTV, and clips will show up in the player below (UPDATED/FIXED):
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It’s true; most scientists agree science is hard. I know this all too well first hand.

But that doesn’t mean you can mock and ignore it and still lead the free world. There are too many important decisions that rely on a healthy appreciate for and understanding of man’s ability to shape the world with intellect, without just waiting for Jesus to come scoop you up before the Apocalypse.

I’ve been meaning to rant about this ever since McCain decided to make planetarium-bashing a regular part of his debate and stump speech talking points. He keeps referring dismissively to an “overhead projector” as if people want to spend millions to show decaying transparencies of lecture notes, and not excite thousands of school children about studying the heavens. And to think I was once warned that a Clinton administration would be the end of NASA as we know it.

But I’m a little busy doing some science now, so I’ll just excerpt heavily from this article in Slate by Christopher Hitchens, who’s almost as pissed at the GOP’s anti-intellectualism as I am.

Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly.

Anyone who escaped high school without learning about the fruit fly eye color experiments should stay in Alaska. Come on.

Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers…[and the] cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species…. [But] all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue….

Haw haw! Geddit?! Scientists are so stupid, I already saw this one on Law & Order!

[Palin] is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools…and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God.

Don’t forget throwing all those frozen, unused in vitro-fertilized eggs in the dumpster rather than use them to cure disease! Or maybe we don’t have to throw all those potential lives away; I’m sure Sarah Palin will take them in once she’s done with her doomed campaign.

Gov. Palin also says that she doesn’t think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Eschatological arguments aside, right-wing refusal to even think that maybe we had something to do with it — and even if we did, why should be bother starting to fix it before we convince China and India to do it first (there’s American greatness for ya) — has always infuriated me. It’s tantamount to pointing a gun at my head without checking to see if it’s loaded first (something I’ve experienced as well), and it’s doubly painful coming from people who care about their children and their children’s future in every other respect. If there was a chance that maybe their supermarket got a shipment of the scary Chinese milk and eggs with melamine in it, every Republican mom I know would drive across town to another store for a week. But when it comes to global warming, the “speculative” and “hypothetical” consequences — though orders of magnitude more devastating than a Publix full of melamine — do not warrant the cost to the businesses because commerce is our way of life. That’s just the entrenched culture of a party that is 20 years too late to the climate change wake-up call: the status quo of industry (in the generic sense) was more important than the consensus of eggheads in lab coats, so clearly there was some ulterior agenda here. And for the love of God don’t bring those CFL bulbs around here, Rush Limbaugh told me they cause EPA-level toxic spills.

I could go on, but just go read the book.

All of this comes from folksy folks that accuse liberals of being “elitists” over lobster dinners at exclusive country club enclaves — so I can only assume the “elitism” charge is a derisive mockery of our reliance on book larnin’.

The Dude cannot abide that kind of abuse of science. Whatever the downside of Democratic policies and their “wasteful tax-and-spend” practices, so long as any politician enjoys dancing on the grave of intellectual curiosity, I’ll have a hard time taking any of their arguments at face value.

Last weekend I was feeling election fatigued — even partisanship fatigued. I was nauseated by most of the things I saw going on at McCain-Palin rallies, from their lunatic fringe of bigots to their core message that people like me aren’t “pro-American” enough. But I also knew there was plenty of hate coming from the left against the right, particularly against Sarah Palin, easy target though she may be. So this is what I whipped up for my Street Team video commentary:

I’m not so sure I’m feeling that warm and fuzzy anymore, but since the other side does have most of the guns, I guess I’ll keep an open mind to playing nice.

Of course, you know the nutty xenophobes out there will just insist on using Joe the Plumber’s middle name constantly to stoke the “The” fears.

McCainPlumber08.com

Updated with video below!

There were many reasons I loved supporting Joe Biden. Among them was the fact that I have a tendency to speak my mind before I know it’s a good idea, and I admire that in a politician. Sometimes I’ll get really riled up and start talking trash, but then someone will call me on my attitude, and I’m sorry I have to put my money where my mouth is.

I would have been indignant, righteous, nay furious in the 1960s about civil rights. But I think when the po-po showed up with billy clubs, I mighta gone runnin’ home to momma. Not Rep. John Lewis, he got his skull cracked for the right to vote. So he knows a thing or two about hostile environments.

God forbid he denounce the general air of hostility being fomented in the final throes of the McCain campaign, as people scream “Kill him!” and “Terrorist!” from the audience as Gov. Sarah Palin reminds us over and over again of his Otherness, and Sen. McCain only counters the mob once when he accidentally gives the microphone to two xenophobes at one rally.

George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.
[emphasis mine]

Naturally, Sen. McCain’s reaction is to get upset with Rep. Lewis and call his remarks “outrageous,” “unacceptable,” “brazen and baseless.” Oh, and of course to call on Barack Obama — who had nothing to do with it — to repudiate Lewis’s remarks (not like that would do him any more good than his repudiation of Rev. Wright’s remarks or Bill Ayers’s domestic terrorism).

McCain cannot even for a second acknowledge the (perhaps unintended) consequences of his campaign’s strategy of fomenting fear about Obama, and he blames the messenger for trying to bring him back into the light. What the heck do you think is going to come of a campaign based on constantly stoking fear through vague but threatening comments about a candidate’s loyalty to the American way of life? What on earth are you doing even going on stage after some nut pastor opens your rally with an invocation like this?

There are millions of people around this world praying to their god — whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that [McCain’s] opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and Election Day.

These are the kinds of people John McCain “pals around with.” Totally acceptable, yes?

But no, it’s Lewis who’s out of line for suggesting caution. It’s like the same irrational anger you get from an alcoholic when you tell them they drink too much. How dare you accuse them of such a thing!

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, as they say.

Tonight, that bastion of East Coast liberal media elitism CNN showed some video their correspondent Gary Tuchman collected while talking (calmly and rationally) to supporters at a McCain-Palin rally about their beliefs that Obama is a terrorist, a Muslim, a one-man sleeper cell, and various other brilliance. I hope they put it online so I can embed it here for posterity.

Oh, here it is!

Bloggerinterrupted has a very good video up on YouTube with like a million skajillion views. He documents the results of the McCain-Palin campaign’s rather effective effort to brand Barack Obama as “The Other.” I’m sure people can disagree about whether there’s overt or even implicit racism and xenophobia in it, but an excellent point was raised on last week’s On the Media: McCain and especially Palin keep asking, “Who is Barack Obama?” They are painting him as risky by acting like he’s this big question mark, he’s The Unknown. Nevermind the one doing the asking was practically nobody in August. Huh.

This is coming from the same campaign that in another breath will accuse him of basically running for president since 2004, when he gave the speech at the DNC that made us all sit up and take notice. He’s officially been running for president for over a year and a half and probably hasn’t ever been more than 30 feet from a camera or a microphone since then. And yet he is more “unknown” than some backwater “Hockey Mom” that 98% of the country had never heard of two months ago, and who has spent half her time on the ticket in hiding from the big bad mainstream media (and the other half spewing talking points). She gets a free pass to One of Us Village, while that scary Other guy is still too risky and unknown.

Disheartening, to say the least.

Wow. What a jerk move.

In 2000, my father and I actually agreed on a political point. We both liked John McCain. I still knew I was voting for Gore, but I liked McCain and wanted him to be the nominee so two good men could debate serious issues and I could probably live with losing to the McCain of 2000, as we must call him these days.

McCain ‘08 has been a different animal. Most old men seem to mellow out in their twilight years, but some get cantankerous. McCain is clearly the cantankerous sort. And in his effort to win the White House, he has pretty much sold out, and after resisting years of Viet Cong torture has finally been broken to the point of saying anything to win, no matter how dishonest.

In tonight’s debate, he was angry and obnoxious. He would pony up one of his baseless attacks immediately after Obama had just explained how baseless the attack, already on the air in dozens of markets, truly was. It’s like he forgot his hearing aid.

And at the end, McCain, who loves to attack Obama for not “reaching a hand across the aisle” (boy does his beauty queen running mate love that line), couldn’t even reach his cranky hand out to “That One.”

“That One.” Nice, John. I mean, Senator McCain (I’d hate to upset Leslie Sanchez with my informality).

In case you missed this diss running off to a bathroom break, here, watch it over and over again:

(Note: C-SPAN’s Debate Hub is a better link than the one attached to the video above.)

It’s been done before, but frankly, I didn’t like any of the existing mashups out there. So here’s mine.