With WPE’s veto of a bill banning waterboarding, we now have a list of nine laws that our President thinks are so wrong-headed that he can’t simply ignore them like he usually does with laws he doesn’t like. The offending legislative initiatives, in order:
1. Funding for potentially life-saving research using stem cells.
2. Benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet, that we might someday leave that country.
3. Again, funding for potentially life-saving research.
4. Health insurance for children.
5. Water resources act: the one veto which it can be plausibly argued had something to do with fiscal discipline.
6. A bill that would ban the use of thimerosal, which crazy people think has something to do with autism. Sure, okay, whatever.
7. Again, health insurance for children.
8. A defense authorization bill pocket-vetoed at the last minute for somewhat puzzling reasons (Jack Daniels)
9. A ban on (some kinds of) torture
So to recap: health insurance for children: very bad. Potential cures for crippling disease: very bad. Spending on infrastructure: occasionally bad, but way to close the barn door after burning the building down. Mercury in vaccines: not a problem (which, to give him credit, is probably true). Torture: absolutely vital. Jack Daniels: awesome.
What a fucking asshole. However ugly the primary fights have been, he’s got more ugly in his little finger. If I were in Congress I’d be introducing bills banning the skinning of babies for leather just to see if there’s any bottom to his depravity. Whatever else happens, let’s hope we can yank the reins of power from this boy king before he finds more people to kill, and let’s damn well keep Bush’s treasured Sky Captain Andy Rooney kewpie doll right where he belongs:
March 8, 2008 at 9:41 am
Sky Captain Andy Rooney = keeper.
March 8, 2008 at 9:43 am
Although, might he be more of a Sky Captain Mickey Rooney? This would be a good debate question.
March 8, 2008 at 9:45 am
Whoever wins the nomination, they’ll have to distance themselves from their anti-leather base to have any chance in the primary.
March 8, 2008 at 9:45 am
ack primary s/b general. But you knew that.
March 8, 2008 at 11:32 am
Okay some mothers may be crazy, and some autistic parents may be crazed. And maybe the rise of autism is because it is a sexy new thang to diagnose and hand over a bunch of pricey pills. But sheesh. The number of vaccinations given out to younguns nowadays is huge: some twenty or thirty before the age of five! Can’t they cut that back just a little? Are they really sure that ALL those injections with phenol (known irritant and mutagen/carcinogen) as well as mercury don’t pose even a teeny hazard maybe beyond the known hazard for impetigo InigoJonesia minora or whatever?
March 8, 2008 at 12:39 pm
There is a large class of questions – “scientific” questions, in a very broad sense – which don’t get resolved by the speculation of generalists, on the internets or elsewhere. See also: global warming, “debate” over; evolution, theory of; AIDS, Thabo Mbeki’s analysis of; etc. Probably someone – probably a doctor who specializes in it, more likely an entire subbranch of immunology or whatever they call it – has probably already thought of that, has probably already thought of everything that flows from that, and from that and from that and then from that, and has probably produced and studied a few lives’ works of empirical data on the question, and could probably tell you substantially more than we could tell them. Generally the results of these works are left in really obvious places (NIH, WHO, and the ever-popular NAS would be my guesses in this case), and written very boringly, and not paid much attention to. But there they are.
A lot of things are ‘possible’, more and more as one’s knowledge gets less and less. A small fraction of these things are actually true, and an increasing fraction of these true things are provably true (or comprehensively un-dis-proven, depending on your philosophy). AFAIK, it’s possible that vaccines cause autism, disco dancing and Western medicine cause AIDS, the WTC was felled by space laser, Pearl Harbor was attacked by FDR’s false flag Dragon Army, and we all live in the Matrix. Totally possible, as far as I actually know, and not inconsistent in anyway with my own verifiable experience of the world – crucially, a very very limited quantity. IMHO, none of these things should be considered true in the face of expert disapproval (if there is such disapproval, I’m assuming Sifu is doing my homework for me here), because this is how one takes one’s first goofy-footed step in a long and deeply silly walk down Crackpot Lane. E.g.: everything written on the internet, ever.
March 8, 2008 at 3:39 pm
What an idiot this guy is!
March 9, 2008 at 9:20 am
You know, that water bill he vetoed had nothing to do with spending money, and only authorizing Congress to, if they saw fit, fund those programs. I mean, WPE didn’t veto spending money on an Asian carp barrier for the Great Lakes, he vetoed a bill that authorized Congress to pass another, separate bill spending money on an Asian carp barrier.
March 10, 2008 at 1:09 pm
All told, the less mercury one is exposed to the better. Unlike, prog rock or hobbits.
March 10, 2008 at 6:32 pm
This picture is particularly a good example of the crony and pandering indicative in their party. These are the type of people who would say “don’t give your brother a dime on the street”…but when it comes time for political pandering (and expedient press conferences about irritated bowel syndrome) these people are first in line. Any thing to garner the vote.
March 10, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I find that anybody who would combine words like liberal and fascism…is just trying to be provocative for the sake of rhetoric…unfortunately what the precocious initiate doesn’t understand are the semantics from within the body of the popular mode of the knowledge conveyed…if we border outside the envelope of a respective eschatology for a semantical use we are in the realm of rhetoric. Being that most people in the country are liberals (as well as democrats) this is why the Republican party must deliberately as feloniously as possible subvert elections in the most incipient means possible…this is the nasty arena of partisan politics that stem back to the days of the Articles of Confederation…unfortunately, there are some people in the nation (and other countries) who believe America still functions on the Articles of Confederation. The popular application of a trendy homogenization of the modes of knowledge and learning lend themselves particularly well to this sort of pseudo politicization and incipient correlations for the sake of being (to reiterate) provocative.
Granted really, some people in their best intentions to be provocative, usually bring up sex or race.
August 6, 2008 at 7:34 pm
While frodo441 may be saying something worthwhile and sensible, his conflation of rare long words and complex sentence structure make it seem more like an I’m-smarter-than-you ego trip.
Perhaps, though, he was writing for ‘precocious initiates’ who grasp the semantics of an envelope of a respective eschatology. Give me a couple months to diagram his sentences…