He didn't know watermelons were a stereotype

One of the most annoying things about the faux apologies that go around these days is that the apologizer implicit assumes the rest of us a credulous fools who are as stupid as they are.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/25/white-house-watermelon-em_n_169933.html

The latest is Los Alomitos, Calif., Mayor Dean Grose. He said he was unaware of the racial stereotype that black people like watermelons.

Right.

Evidently he assumes that we're stupid enough to believe that it's just a coincidence he chose watermelons to be on the White House lawn in his email "joke."

Here's a photo of the mayor from his Web site. I don;t know how old he is, but he's obviously not a young kid and it's simply unbelievable that a grown man his age didn't know about the stereotype.

In the Army we used to call this sort of behavior pissing-on-me-and-telling-me-it-is-raining.

It's bad enough he did it, but please don't insult our intelligence by pretending it was some innocent mistake.

Mocked by a Nobel prize winner

Krugman notes that conservatives used to agree with liberals that there are some things that governments properly do, such as defense and provide for public safety.

Hence his surprise that Jindal criticized funding for monitoring volcanos that could erupt, obviously a public good that no private interest could undertake.

Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

GOP too stupid to earn votes of the college-educated

Scott Horton's long post has plenty of example, but this one stands out for the profound ignorance it reveals:

And of course there was the recent historical excursion of Ohio Republican Congressman Steve Austria:
“When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression,” Austria said. “He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.”
Except of course that Roosevelt became president in 1933 and the Great Depression started in 1929 in the presidency of Republican Herbert Hoover.

He goes on: How does this play to the voters? In an intriguing article in the current National Journal, Ronald Brownstein and David Wasserman take a look at how Republicans are doing with educated voters. Their view: Democrats are scoring “dramatic gains” among better educated voters, namely those who hold college diplomas. They bore into a number of sample counties, like Oakland County, Michigan, which was once reliably Republican—and where well-educated voters now feel the G.O.P. is just too stupid to earn their vote.

The whole post is here: http://www.harpers.org/subjects/NoComment

Sullivan explains again the stakes in the torture debate

Rather bemusedly he wonders how conservatives could support such a surrender of absolute power to the state.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/02/humane-altern-1.html

Talking sense

Beltway blatherings about bipartisanship get dissed here http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123491659161904365.html by Thomas Frank of the Wall Street Journal:

The way I remember it, the No. 1 issue in the election was the collapsing economy, followed at some distance by the Iraq war. On both of these questions, Mr. Obama prevailed because he was the candidate who promised most convincingly to reverse Republican policies -- not because he planned to meet the GOP halfway across the charred ruins of American prosperity.
The reason the Washington media think bipartisanship is the top issue, even when economic disaster stomps Americans like Godzilla, is because of the way it reflects their own professional standards. They are themselves technically impartial, and so it's only natural for them to wish for a hazy millennium in which everyone else in Washington is impartial, too.
It is supposed to be high-minded stuff, this longing for a bipartisan golden age. But in some ways it is the most cynical stance possible. It takes no idea seriously, since everything is up for compromise. The role of the political parties is merely to cancel each other out, so that only the glorious centrists remain, triangulating majestically between obnoxious extremes.
What's more, bipartisanship's boosters can't even discern friend from foe. The Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, which seems to be growing even more conservative as its numbers shrink, has clearly resumed the strategies of the early Gingrich era -- obstruction, bomb-throwing and more obstruction. But to the mainstream media, the angry Republican pols seem to mainly discredit Mr. Obama, who failed to win over the GOP. Which will, of course, encourage the bitter-enders to obstruct even more.
Never has Beltway orthodoxy looked as clueless and futile as it does today. Confronted with the greatest failure of economic ideas in decades, it demands that the president make common cause with people for whom those failed ideas are still sacred. To think we can solve our problems in this way is like hoping to chart a route to the moon by water.

Science integrity is a National Defense issue

I don't know how to put it more bluntly than this, but the creationist/global warming-denialist knuckleheads making up the core of the GOP these days and passing crap like the so-called "Louisiana Science Education Law" (sic) are a present danger to the United States.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2706,Analysis-of-SB-733-LA-Science-Education-Act,Lousiana-Coalition-for-Science


This warplane was NOT designed by people who disregard science, folks:


Maj. Micah Fesler, a 433rd Weapons Squadron pilot, flies an F-22A “Raptor” from a Lockheed-Martin factory in Georgia to Nellis AFB, Jan. 9. This Raptor is the first to be delivered to the 57th Wing from Lockheed-Martin, and is scheduled to be used by the U.S. Air Force Weapons School for training of PhD-level instructor pilots. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Phil Landram)



This is the kind of weapon designed by people who have no use for science and believe the world was created 6,000 years ago:

An artillery shell rigged as an IED in Iraq. Photo taken from globalsecurity.org site

Fire Yoo

Prof. Brad DeLong makes the case well: http://www.scribd.com/doc/12561194/null