The Daily Kos has the article Do Republican men ever have sex?

There’s a predictable but bizarre reaction from Republicans with penises (and a few without) to the backlash against the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision: only sluts and whores use birth control. The obvious conclusion is that these guys aren’t getting much in the way of action if they don’t think women should get to have sex for fun. Or they’re only getting it when they pay for it.

They then go on to print quotes from Rush Limpbaugh and Sean Handnity.

The other possible conclusion is that many Republicans just don’t know that much about sex.  If they had any idea how their remarks about sex show how ignorant of the subject that they are, they would be embarrassed to make these remarks.  If they demonstrated this lack of knowledge in High School or even Junior High, they might have been laughed right out of the school by their peers.

In my case, I knew how ignorant I was back then, so I just kept my mouth shut on the topic.

I’ll have to add the following quote to my quotes page.

“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt”
― Mark Twain

My source is the web site goodreads.com.

Naked Capitalism has the article Obama’s Nominee for the VA, Robert McDonald, Former P&G CEO, Should be Held Accountable for Unethical Pharma Study.

While Mr McDonald held high executive positions at Procter and Gamble, the company was involved in a dodgy affair involving conflicts of interest, manipulation of research, and attempted silencing of whistle blowers. In my humble opinion, given that these events occurred directly on his watch, his fitness to run a huge health care system ought to be in question unless his responsibility for these events is disproved.

Where do we find such people to appoint to high offices of trust?  What McDonald is supposed to fix in the VA is very similar to what went on at Procter and Gamble even while he was in charge.  So they fire Shinseki and bring in a guy who made all the same mistakes and never admitted to them nor apologized for them.

Is there any leader in the public or private sector that doesn’t make a habit of shady practices, cutting corners, and suppressing dissent?  Is this just human nature to do these things?  If so, what can we do to protect society from this?

Actually, the problem might originate in how we are brought up in this country.  I don’t know how wide spread this is in the world.  Our parents or aunts and uncles probably had a hand in teaching us that it is not nice to be a tattle-tale.  Perhaps this is where people get the idea that it is right to suppress dissent.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Obama Consults a “Wide Variety of Economists” – Just Not Those Who Got it Right by William K. Black.

The real difference, the thing sure to exclude Galbraith, Baker, Wray, and Kelton from Obama’s luncheon list, is that they have committed the unforgivable sin of having been proved correct (again) about big finance and the crisis.  There is, of course, no chance that Obama will ever invite any of us, much less our friends at Amherst, to lunch to discuss economic policy.

The good news for Americans, which I will explain in my next column, is that Obama is not remotely as bad as the European troika’s leaders and economists that set the EU’s catastrophic economic policies.

Well, at least he ends on some good news about Obama.

Why would you ever want to consult with the people who got it right?  In a perverse application of an investment theory which does not apply here, you don’t want to switch your mutual funds that you own to last year’s best performing mutual funds.  Chances are, they used an unorthodox strategy which just happened to be right for the conditions last year.  Next year, they will be out of phase with the economy. You’d better stick to your losing mutual funds.  The losers might be in phase next year.  They might be next years best performers.

To mix metaphors here, just keep consulting your stopped watch.  It’s going to be exactly right sometime.  Never mind those other watches which are pretty close to right all the time.

We think this must have been an all female convention.

Pictures without the WordPress clutter

Groundswell-movement.org sent me an email pointing to the video Finally! A Muslim-American woman changes how the media talks about Islam.

This video of a Muslim-American woman from New York challenging Islamophobia on CNN might change the way we talk about Islam in the media.

The Islamophobia begins at 00:13, meant to frighten us and turn us against our neighbors—but Linda breaks through at the 1-minute mark with some prophetic truth that we all need to hear.

This is the kind of sense I would like to make common on my blog and elsewhere.

We need to concentrate on catching criminals and avoiding creating feelings of hopelessness. We do not need to be fomenting more hate. We have more than enough hate to go around already.

The Atlanta Banana has the story Supreme Court Upholds Little Caesar’s Right to Feed Christian Employees to Lions. For crying out loud, this story is in The Atlanta Banana, do I have to put a warning on what type of story this is?

Little Caesar’s argued that the persecution of Christians and the feeding of them to ravenous big cats was a “deeply held” religious belief, that the continued survival of the roughly 6,000 Christian employees, as well as the fact that they remained on company payroll, imposed a “substantial financial burden” on their religious liberty.

Have I not given you fair warning? You can’t be surprised by what you read in the article, can you?

By the way, thanks to Randy Katz for posting this on his Facebook page.

The article Why 10% of the Population Hates Cilantro and the Rest Doesn’t Know Any Better finally explains why Sharon and I are not alone in our dislike for cilantro.

The first time I tried cilantro I didn’t realize it; I just thought somebody had emptied a bottle of Old Spice on my pizza in an attempt to poison me. Cilantro tastes like soap to approximately 10% of the people who have had their genotype analyzed by 23andMe

Thanks to Sarah Clark for posting this on her Facebook page.

I decided to respond to this email and to propagate it.

Subject:	Smackdown! Elizabeth Warren vs. Mitch McConnell
Date:	Thu, 03 Jul 2014 10:04:48 -0700
From:	Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn.org Political Action <moveon-help@list.moveon.org>

Elizabeth Warren is going toe-to-toe with Mitch McConnell to provide some relief for families drowning in student debt. If we want her to win, we need to get behind her. Will you chip in $10 to help get her back? Chip in $10

Dear MoveOn member,

When Mitch McConnell filibustered Elizabeth Warren’s bill to ease the burden of student debt, the pundits said the bill was dead and it was time to give up.¹

But Elizabeth Warren isn’t giving up-she’s taking the fight to Mitch McConnell’s backyard.² And we need to get behind her.

Sen. Warren went to Kentucky to campaign with McConnell’s challenger with a simple message: If Mitch McConnell keeps blocking help for families drowning in debt, it might just cost him his seat.

And since the latest polls show Mitch McConnell in a dead heat against his Democratic opponent, he’s either gotta stop blocking help for students-or pay the price politically.

Sen. Warren can’t force Mitch McConnell to back down all on her own. If we can raise $100,000, we’ll get started by putting an ad on the Facebook page of every college student in the state of Kentucky letting them know that Mitch McConnell is almost single-handedly making them pay a higher interest rate on their college loans. Can you chip in $10?

Yes, I can contribute $10 to help Elizabeth Warren fight to reduce student debt.

This is exactly why we were so excited to have Elizabeth Warren in the Senate in the first place. Other Democrats talk about working families. She’s fighting for them.

And here’s why her strategy is so smart: Political experts think Republicans will win control of the Senate because of low turnout in a midterm election. But if college students turn out like they did in 2012, then Democrats will keep control of the Senate, and Mitch McConnell is finished.

Still, if we want Elizabeth Warren to win this fight, we need to get behind her. The opposition of the banks and the big student lenders is just too powerful for anyone to win alone.

Click here to donate $10 to help Elizabeth Warren fight to reduce student debt.

Thanks for all you do.

-Ilya, Alejandro, Corinne, Mark, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. “Elizabeth Warren’s bill to refinance student loans dies in the Senate. Now what?” The Washington Post, June 11, 2014
http://www.moveon.org/r/?r=299836&id=98083-7776955-7Br_bEx&t=4

2. “Alison Grimes and Elizabeth Warren rally for higher ed ” The Courier-Journal, June 29, 2014
http://www.moveon.org/r/?r=299837&id=98083-7776955-7Br_bEx&t=5

Want to support our work? We’re entirely funded by our 8 million members-no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chipin here.

---

PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

The Daily Kos has the great article If Our Founding Fathers Were All Christians, Why Did They Say This? You can appreciate the wisdom of this collection of statements without regard to who said them. However, the author does tell you who said each one.

Some of these may even find their way into my own collection of favorite quotes.

For now, I will just pick one that was appropriate for a discussion I was having about my previous post.

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

– Thomas Paine, The American Crisis No. V (1776)
Note: You can read Paine’s whole pamphlet, where he expresses his atheistic beliefs, here.

Yes, it would be preferable to talk about our founding ancestors rather than our founding fathers. With that title, perhaps the author could have found a few words of wisdom from women of that time period.

The Real News Network has the story In Wake of Murders, Israel Considers More Settlements and Strikes on Gaza.

I bet I can guess what you may be thinking when you listen to the following part of the video.

ABUNIMAH: Well, my question is: where does this all end? We have an out-of-control Israel, which, you know, is–the scope of debate, as Lia describes it accurately, is between steal more land or bomb more Palestinians. And the likelihood is that they will end up doing both. And there seems to be no internal breaks that can change the disastrous course Israel is headed on. And there is also no international peace process. I mean, the peace process that collapsed was a sham anyway and served as a cover for ongoing Israeli colonization.

So the question is: what can change the direction? Even if calm or relative calm returns to Jerusalem or the West Bank in the next few days, it will only be temporary before the next disastrous event. And who knows where this will lead? So really something has to change. And all that I see on the horizon now that really gives hope is the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to raise the price for these Israeli policies of collective punishment, of land confiscation, to make it–you know, I mean, Palestinians are killed without consequence. They can be killed. Nobody says, find the perpetrators. I mean, just this year, six, now seven Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli soldiers. It’s suspected that the seventh was killed by settlers, and nobody is asking internationally, nobody is–you know, Obama is not demanding that the killers be brought to justice.

So, you know, I think it’s very important that people understand that waiting will not produce peace. We need to intervene in the form of boycott, divestment, and sanctions to change the direction and to end this cycle of horror and tragedy.

As I started hearing this, I was thinking, “Well, you know, the Palestinians had to know what the Israeli reaction would be to what they did. So who is going to stop first?”

Then I came to my senses. “The Palestinians” did not do “this”, some individuals who may have been Palestinian did “this”. There are criminals all over the USA that commit kidnapping and murder. Our police used to take the attitude (and sometimes still do) that the Israeli forces do. In our case, they would go into a minority neighborhood, assuming their was the slightest hint that a minority criminal had done the deed, and massively search and arrest people. Now there are many forward thinking police departments that know that you cannot behave this way and expect to get future cooperation from the people in communities that you treat this way. Police efforts to apprehend criminals are fostered by getting the cooperation of the communities in which the criminal might live.

Yes, the Israeli/Palestinian situation has deteriorated to such a point that many people looking in on Israel don’t see how “civilized” standards can be used by Israel in these situations. As in our civil rights struggles in the USA and in those of South Africa, a way was eventually found to turn around an impossible situation. If you don’t even think you ought to be looking for such a way to turn things around, you aren’t ever going to find it.

How deeply is a society willing to descend into depravity, before it realizes what it has become? When will that society decide that what they have become is not what they want to be? Yes, you can apply this to both sides of the fight. If you think it is right to let the side you favor to go on until the other side takes the first step, then you are not helping. Even to start on a trip together, someone had to have taken the first step to get the idea of the trip moving forward.