Two Videos On How Certain Democrats Reacted To The Legitimate Aspirations Of The LGBT Community

In 1995 Bernie was a Member of the House... and so was Duke Cunningham. In fact, one of the reasons we started DWT was to help focus attention of Cunningham and a gaggle of other corrupt California Republicans, none of whom are still in office... Richard Pombo, Jerry Lewis, Buck McKeon, Gary Miller, John Doolittle, Dan Lungren, Jim Rogan, David Dreier, Elton Gallegly, Wally Herger-- all gone, all flushed down the toilet. Anyway, in the video above ole Duke is being harshly called out on the carpet by Bernie for disparaging gay men and women in the military. Bernie seems angry; Cunningham seems defiant and uncontrite for his ugly bigotry against American fighting men and women.

A decade later, Hillary hadn't evolved yet. She was demonstrating some of the tendencies that made her such a successful president of the Wellesley College Young Republicans-- not just a member or the treasurer or the vice president... she was the president. And in 2004 she was still taking umbrage-- as she gave the Republicans some nice homophobic talking points they could use to deny marriage equality. Duke Cunningham still hadn't be convicted of taking $2.4 million in bribery (and a long list of other felonies) and was still serving in Congress when Hillary made this speech-- and must have been so proud of her-- although he went to prison soon after. The video down below is Hillary telling her colleagues how to oppose marriage equality without sounding like a complete homophobe... which wasn't really a good idea in New York, not even in 2004.

In the middle of January, I got an e-mail from her about what a great champion of gay rights she is. "Howard," she wrote, "in 2011, I went to Geneva to tell the UN that 'gay rights are human rights, once and for all.' We’ve seen so much progress since I made that speech, particularly with last year’s landmark Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. But there’s still so much at stake for LGBT families in America and around the world, and we need our next president to keep us moving forward. I’ve laid out an ambitious plan to advance LGBT rights in our country." But an examination of her LGBT record, wouldn't make her nearly so attractive to gay voters, although there are a certain subset of gay men who worship tragic women. When it became clear Bill was being unfaithful with other women, those gays started treating her like she was Judy Garland. PolitiFact looked into her flip flops on LGBT issues last summer.

On the day that the U.S. Supreme Court was poised to hear oral arguments about same-sex marriage April 28, Hillary Clinton changed her "H" logo to rainbow-colored and tweeted: "Every loving couple & family deserves to be recognized & treated equally under the law across our nation. #LoveMustWin #LoveCantWait."


Clinton came out in support of same-sex marriage in 2013 after more than a decade of opposing it. But her views are particularly in the spotlight now that she is a presidential candidate.


We decided to put Clinton’s statements about same-sex marriage on our Flip-O-Meter, which measures whether a candidate has changed their views without making a value judgment about such flips. We found that as public opinion shifted toward support for same-sex marriage, so did Clinton.


She has had plenty of company among members of her own party to change their stance on same-sex marriage. In 2012, we gave Obama a Full Flop when he announced his support for same-sex marriage.


Currently about three dozen states allow same-sex marriage. The outcome of the decision, expected in June, could mean either that same-sex marriage will become legal in all states or that some states will institute new bans on same-sex marriage. (A spokesman for Clinton’s campaign declined to comment for this Flip-O-Meter item.)


Clinton’s statements during her 2000 Senate race


In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that defined federal marriage as a union between one man and one woman.


Hillary Clinton would face questions about same-sex marriage starting with her 2000 campaign for Senate. Let’s look at the highlights of her statements between 1999 and 2015 in a timeline:


December 1999: Clinton told a group of gay contributors at a fundraiser that she was against the "don't ask, don't tell" military policy signed by her husband.


The New York Times reported that Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said she supported the Defense of Marriage Act but added that "same-sex unions should be recognized and that same-sex unions should be entitled to all the rights and privileges that every other American gets."


January 2000: At a news conference in White Plains, Clinton said, "Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman. But I also believe that people in committed gay marriages, as they believe them to be, should be given rights under the law that recognize and respect their relationship."




April 2000: Clinton again expressed support for civil unions. "I have supported the kind of rights and responsibilities that are being extended to gay couples in Vermont," she said.


July 2004: Clinton spoke on the Senate floor against a proposed federal amendment to ban same-sex marriage. (The amendment ultimately failed.) Though she opposed it, she said that she believed that marriage was "a sacred bond between a man and a woman."


However, she said she took "umbrage at anyone who might suggest that those of us who worry about amending the Constitution are less committed to the sanctity of marriage, or to the fundamental bedrock principle that exists between a man and a woman."


October 2006: Clinton told a group of gay elected officials that she would support same-sex marriage in New York if a future governor and Legislature chose to enact such a law.


"I support states making the decision," she said.


As a 2008 presidential candidate


In 2007, all the presidential contenders except for longshot candidates-- both Democrats and GOP-- were against same-sex marriage, the New York Times reported. So were the majority of Americans, polls showed.


May 2007: In a questionnaire for the Human Rights Campaign in 2007, Clinton backed away from the Defense of Marriage Act:


"I support repealing the provision of DOMA that may prohibit the federal government from providing benefits to people in states that recognize same-sex marriage."


In response to a question about whether marriage should be made legally available to two committed adults of the same sex, Clinton marked that she was "opposed" though she stated she supported civil unions.


August 2007: In a Democratic primary debate sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign and LOGO Network (a gay-oriented TV station) Clinton was asked "What is at the heart of your opposition to same-sex marriage?"


Clinton replied: "Well, I prefer to think of it as being very positive about civil unions. You know, it’s a personal position. How we get to full equality is the debate we’re having, and I am absolutely in favor of civil unions with full equality of benefits, rights, and privileges."


As a 2016 presidential candidate


As Clinton got ready for her second presidential bid, she again modified her position.


March 2013: After leaving her position as secretary of state, she announced her support for same-sex marriage in a video with the Human Rights Campaign on March 18, 2013.


"LGBT Americans are our colleagues, our teachers, our soldiers, our friends, our loved ones. And they are full and equal citizens, and they deserve the rights of citizenship. That includes marriage. That’s why I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples. I support it personally and as a matter of policy and law, embedded in a broader effort to advance equality and opportunity for LGBT Americans and all Americans." 
The comments put her in line with other Democrats at the time who were mentioned as potential 2016 presidential contenders, including Vice President Joe Biden, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley. Obama had announced his support for same-sex marriage in May 2012.


June 2013: Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton issued a joint statement about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the Defense of Marriage Act. The congratulatory note didn’t mention that Bill Clinton had signed the law back in 1996: "the Court recognized that discrimination towards any group holds us all back in our efforts to form a more perfect union."


June 2014: NPR’s Terry Gross grilled Clinton about her past positions’ on gay marriage in what led to a testy exchange. Gross tried to get Clinton to explain if she had truly changed her stance or if the shifting political landscape made it possible for her to announce her support.


At one point Gross asked, "Would you say your view evolved since the '90s or that the American public evolved, allowing you to state your real view?"


Clinton replied: "I think I'm an American. (Laughing) And I think we have all evolved, and it's been one of the fastest, most sweeping transformations."


April 2015: On the day of the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments about same-sex marriage bans in a handful of states in April, Clinton changed her "H" logo to rainbow-colored and tweeted a message of support: "Every loving couple & family deserves to be recognized & treated equally under the law across our nation. #LoveMustWin #LoveCantWait."


Our conclusion


Clinton opposed same-sex marriage as a candidate for the Senate, while in office as a senator, and while running for president in 2008. She expressed her support for civil unions starting in 2000 and for the rights’ of states to set their own laws in favor of same-sex marriage in 2006.


As polls showed that a majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage, Clinton’s views changed, too. She announced her support for same-sex marriage in March 2013.


It’s up to voters to decide how they feel about her changed stance, but on same-sex marriage we give Clinton a Full Flop.

Is she better than Trumpf or Cruz or Rubio or any of the garbage candidates the GOP is offering? Of course she is! But is she any better than the same old transactional hack politician that is rapidly turning Americans off to our whole system of democracy? No, she isn't. Come November, if she wins the nomination, she'll be the lesser of two evils. But still evil. During the primary, though, there is still an opportunity to vote without picking evil. If you'd like to help Bernie's campaign, you can do so here. The person in this video has evolved since she campaigned for Richard Nixon, since she campaigned for Barry Goldwater, since she campaigned for Nelson Rockefeller. She evolved on something else this week too! She's finally for the public option for health care. Luckily Bernie is pushing her.

This problem's a snap to solve -- just change the name of the joint to 'Big Valley 'Cretin' Science 'Museum' "

Welcome to the Big Valley (Alberta) Creation Science Museum. Edgar Nernberg, the man who discovered five 60-million-year-old fish fossils, serves on the board of the "museum."

"This can go down as one of the best examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's 'opposed' to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to you can be written off as fabricated or misinterpreted."

-- the Washington Post's Rachel Feltman, in "Whoops! A
creationist museum supporter stumbled upon a major fossil find"

by Ken

I think frequently of a pungent quote passed on to me by my college roommate Brian, who had grown up in Manchester, NH, and apparently once boasted, "Once I make up my mind, I don't let facts get in the way of my opinion." To which there's not a whole lot to be said.

In this spirit, imagine the situation of a confirmed creationist, secure enough in his comical delusions to put his money where his mouth is, actively supporting a "creation science museum" -- Canada's first, in Big Valley, Alberta (it opened in 2007), devoted to the "science" of the proposition that the earth is 6000 years old -- who while digging in a basement in Calgary stumbles across the fossilized remains of five fish a mere 60 million years old.


Calgary Sun caption: "An assemblage of fossilized fish was recently found during the excavation of a basement in a new development in northwest Calgary, Alta. Five fish were found in a block of sandstone in the Paskapoo Formation -- a roughly 60 million-year-old rock formation that underlies Calgary and much of the surrounding area. The discovery was made by Edgar Nernberg. Photo provided by the University of Calgary"

Actually, for Edgar Nernberg there doesn't appear to be any problem. The discovery "hasn't changed my mind," he's told the Calgary Sun. "We all have the same evidence, and it's just a matter of how you interpret it. There's no dates stamped on these things."

Which prompted this from the Washington Post's Rachel Feltman:

No sir, no dates. Just, you know, isotopic dating, basic geology, really shoddy stuff like that. To be fair, I'm not any more capable of figuring out when a particular fossil is from than Nernberg is. I'd be one sorry paleontologist, given the opportunity. I've never even found a fossil, so he's got me there. But the science of dating fossils is not shaky -- at least not on the order of tens of millions of years of error -- so this fossil and the rocks around it really do give new earth creationism the boot.

But this can go down as one of the best examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's "opposed" to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to you can be written off as fabricated or misinterpreted.

Even if you dig that evidence up with your own hands.

Notwithstanding the discoverer's inability to understand what he discovered, it's a significant discovery, Rachel notes.

The scientific community is thrilled and grateful for the find, and the University of Calgary will unveil the five fossils on Thursday. These fish lived in a time just after the dinosaurs were wiped out, when other species were able to thrive in the giants' absence. It's an important point in Earth's evolutionary history, because new species were popping up all over to make up for the ecological niches dinos left behind. Creatures from this era give us some breathtaking glimpses of evolution in progress. But it's rare to find fossils of that age in Calgary, since most of the rocks are too old and yield dinosaurs instead.

In Edgar Nernberg's fundyworld, of course, those dinosaurs cohabited with humans, all within earth's 6000-year history.
"Ironically," writes Rachel, "Nernberg's contributions at the Creation Science Museum are almost certainly what scientists have to thank for the find."

He's an amateur fossil collector, and he knew the fish were special as soon as he spotted them. "When the five fish fossils presented themselves to me in the excavator bucket, the first thing I said was you’re coming home with me, the second thing was I better call a paleontologist," Nernberg said in a statement.

“Most people would have overlooked these. When these were uncovered, Edgar right away recognized them,” Darla Zelenitsky, paleontologist and assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Calgary, told the Sun. "He’s apparently interested in fossils, and that’s probably how he saw them. An ordinary person might have just seen blobs in the rock.”

Nernberg is reportedly seeking a cast of one of the fish so he can put it on display at the creationist museum.

Well, sure Edgar'd like that for his "museum." After all, those fish could be thousands of years old!

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Is it "good news" about science deniers that they've always been with us?

"We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge -- from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change -- faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you'd think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative. . . .

"The scientific method doesn’t come naturally -- but if you think about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did."

-- Washington Post science writer Joel Achenbach, in the
March National Geographic cover story (the reference to
"the safety of fluoride" will be become clear in a moment)

by Ken

Yes, I'm afraid the best news we're going to take away from the cover story in the March National Geographic, "Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?," is that science deniers have always been with us. Because the other major takeaway is that, it appears, they'll always be with us, and, it appears, there isn't a damned thing we can do about it, because they believe what they believe, and facts to the contrary only make them believe it harder.

And, oh yes, if you're thinking that they're more numerous, more powerful, and more dangerous than they've been before, nothing in the piece will disabuse you.

There's some good news in that the author of the piece is the Washington Post's wonderful science writer Joel Achenbach, and as anyone who has read him either in the paper or on the website knows, he's pretty much the ideal person for the job: smart, broadly knowledgeable, calm, and compassionate. I can't imagine a much better job on the subject for a general audience. It is, I think, a beautiful piece, and everyone should read it.

Which just makes the takeaways from it that much more depressing to, you know, take away.

At this point I think we could use a good laugh or two, so let's take a look at this classic scene from Dr. Strangelove, as the way-off-his-rocker Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), bunkered inside his sealed-off Air Force base while the preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union that he's engineered plays out, tries to "educate" the increasingly hysterical British RAF Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers). Trust me, this is the most fun we're going to have here.



Joel starts us off with a snatch of this gorgeous scene (beginning at about 1:41 of our clip):

RIPPER: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?
MANDRAKE: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.
RIPPER: Well, do you know what it is?
MANDRAKE: No. No, I don’t know what it is. No.
RIPPER: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

Joel proceeds to point out that by the time Stanley Kubrick's "comic masterpiece," Dr. Strangelove, came out, in 1964, "the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established, and antifluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy." This, of course, is what makes General Ripper's obsession with it so funny. This, and the fact that, nevertheless, there were crazy people in 1964 who believed something not nearly far enough from what Jack D.R. did. What's more, Joel says,

you might be surprised to learn that, half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013 citizens in Portland, Oregon, one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate their water, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay—a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brusher or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

To which some people in Portland, echoing antifluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.

It's at this point that Joel delivers the "We live in an age" lines I've quoted at the top of this post. Only now you can get the references to the safety of fluoride and to putting something in the water. Did I mention that Joel is a really gracious writer? Just a sweetheart to read.

Joel notes that the takedown of science has penetrated pop culture, as in the film Interstellar, where the schoolbooks of this "futuristic, downtrodden America" teach that "the Apollo moon landings were faked."


NO, IT'S NOT A NEW THING

[Click to enlarge (a little).]

SQUARE INTUITIONS DIE HARD: That the Earth is round has been known since antiquity -- Columbus knew he wouldn't sail off the edge of the world -- but alternative geographies persisted even after circumnavigations had become common. This 1893 map by Orlando Ferguson, a South Dakota businessman, is a loopy variation on 19th-century flat-Earth beliefs. Flat-Earthers held that the planet was centered on the North Pole and bounded by a wall of ice, with the sun, moon, and planets a few hundred miles above the surface. Science often demands that we discount our direct sensory experiences -- such as seeing the sun cross the sky as if circling the Earth -- in favor of theories that challenge our beliefs about our place in the universe. [National Geographic caption]

Looking at our worldwide epidemic of science denialism (I think it's a mistake to refer to it as "doubt," or to the people who engage in it as "doubters," when what they're about is denial), it's easy to think of it as a modern phenomenon, perhaps in reaction to what may seem to be a takeover of our lives by science.

In a sense all this is not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

We’re asked to accept, for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok—and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, they talk about Frankenfood.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy.

And he engages in a splendid description of the kinds of problems we face in knowing who and what to believe and about who and what. But as the reference to Frankenstein may have hinted, he's here to tell us that the "doubters" have always been with us. And it comes in good part from deep confusion about what science is and tries to do, which is, essentially, to give us the tools to make decisions about those questions of who and what to believe, who and what to fear, based on rigorous and continuously evolving investigation of real-world evidence.

Now Joel has so much to say on this subject, or rather these subjects, that I feel particularly remiss in jumping over most of it -- how many times do I have to tell you to read the damned piece> -- but instead I'm going to refer you to the caption for the "Square and Stationary Earth" map above, and in particular to that last sentence: "Science often demands that we discount our direct sensory experiences—such as seeing the sun cross the sky as if circling the Earth—in favor of theories that challenge our beliefs about our place in the universe."


YESSIR, REGULAR FOLKS TRUST THEIR EYES AND EARS


National Geographic caption: "A worker adjusts a diorama of a moon landing at the Kennedy Space Center." Aha! So this must be how they faked it!

They aren't gonna be fooled by fancypants talk that contradicts what they see and hear. Except that time and again what they think they see and hear is wrong, and as Joel carefully explains, even those of us who accept scientific precepts still tend to cling to "our intuitions -- what researchers call our naive beliefs." At the same time we don't like random or unexplained things ("our brains crave pattern and meaning"), and so we're awfully vulnerable to attempts to explain everything in terms consistent with those naive beliefs, and so we can be suckers for everything from flat-earth hogwash to the craziest of conspiracy theories, all the more so in a time that has bred distrust for smarty-pants "authority."

The conspiracies emphatically include Sen. James Inhofe's favorite one: global warming. Joel points out that the idea of a global-warming conspiracy is preposterous on its face: "The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable—scientists love to debunk one another." (And it's "very clear," as he also points out, "that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public's understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.")

What's more, Joel argues, it isn't just a "scientific communication problem." Research suggests that better-educated people not only are able to believe anti-scientific theories but tend to believe than even more strongly than less-educated people.

Because, as I think many of us have come to understand, facts don't have a lot to do with what people believe. People tend to believe what they want to believe, and that tends to be what the people they feel a shared identity with believe.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. “We’re all in high school. We’ve never left high school,” says Marcia McNutt [a geophysicist "who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal"]. “People still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science.”

And as long as it's who we are that conditions what each of us believes about the universe that science is trying to give us tools to understand, reasoned argument doesn't stand to help us a lot.

"If you're a rationalist," Joel says, "there's something a little dispiriting about all this." After all, he says,

evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences. The people who believe vaccines cause autism—often well educated and affluent, by the way—are undermining “herd immunity” to such diseases as whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong since the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet published a study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously said on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “The University of Google is where I got my degree from.”)

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming. They haven’t had to win the debate on the merits; they’ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.

Joel makes an excellent case that, contrary the hope of some environmental activists that scientists will become more engaged as policy advocates, the likely effect of this would be increase the perception that they're advocates rather than truth-seekers.

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

Joel harks back to something said to him by geophysicist Maria McNutt -- that "scientific thinking has to be taught, and sometimes it’s not taught well."

Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method. [Occidental College's Andrew] Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is. The scientific method doesn’t come naturally—but if you think about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did.

"Now we have incredibly rapid change," Joel writes, "and it’s scary sometimes."

It’s not all progress. Our science has made us the dominant organisms, with all due respect to ants and blue-green algae, and we’re changing the whole planet. Of course we’re right to ask questions about some of the things science and technology allow us to do. “Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.” We need to get a lot better at finding answers, because it’s certain the questions won’t be getting any simpler.

Let me say again that I really haven't done anything like justice to Joel's piece. But one thing I don't think I've overlooked is any grounds for hope. In fairness, I did warn you that this wasn't going to be a lot of fun. Maybe we should have just watched Dr. Strangelove. That wouldn't have helped with the problem, but at least we would have had a good time.

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Why Doesn't America Allow Drug Importation?

Fred Upton sold out his Michigan constituents to the drug companies long ago

I spent the holiday season on a ship cruising around the Galapagos, going from island to island. One day the highlight was seeing a sea lion give birth to her first pup and the next was watching an aquatic iguana rape a female iguana. Another day we saw parent frigates take turns caring for their chick while the other one hunted. The Ecuadorean naturalists helped us put the experiences into context. There wasn't reliable internet access on the ship but I did manage to come across the new Pew Poll about how fewer and fewer Republicans now believe in evolution-- which is a theory in the same way that gravity is a "theory." Republicans like certainty, not theories. It would be awesome if they all jumped off cliffs and high buildings to check on the theory of gravitivity. It's less awesome when the people they elect to Congress want to hold back progress-- the opposite of conservatism-- because something is only a theory.

In 2009, 67% of independent voters, 64% of Democratic voters and even 54% of Republican voters reported they believed in evolution. That was just 5 years ago. Today, as more Fox News and Hate Talk Radio brainwashing has destroyed the capacity of more Republicans to deal rationally with reality, the numbers have changed. Among normal people, most still believe in evolution. Among Democrats, the number went from 64% up to 67%. Among independents, it went down slightly from 67 to 65% but among Republican voters-- those most likely to have had their brains warped by Fox and deranged sociopaths like Beck, Savage and Limbaugh-- the number sunk from 54% all the way down to an astounding 43%. What's wrong with these people who do, after all, live among us?

David Graham, at The Atlantic, says it's not surprising Republicans don't believe in reality. "Republicans," he reminds us, "are also less likely to believe that the earth's climate is warming, or, if they accept that it is, to believe that the change is caused by human activity." But why?

One possibility is that respondents who identified as Republican and believed in evolution in 2009 are no longer identifying as Republicans. Fewer scientists, for example, are reportedly identifying with the GOP, and the overall trend is for fewer Americans to call themselves Republicans. But both Gallup and separate polling from Pew found approximately the same party ID in 2009 and 2013.

...Maybe the gap represents an emotional response by Republicans to being out of power. Among others, Chris Mooney has argued that beliefs on politically contentious topics are often more rooted in opposition to perceived attacks than anything else-- an instance of "motivated reasoning." Given that Democrats have controlled the White House and Senate since 2009, this could be backlash to the political climate, though it will be hard to tell until Republicans control Washington again.

So pigheadedness? OK, maybe. The problem is when their backwardness and obstinacy starts impacting normal people through social policy. On New Year's Eve, PBS re-ran a piece about how Maine's Democratic-led legislature is getting around GOP anti-science freaks by allowing cash-strapped seniors to import prescription drugs from Canada, where massive price-gouging is not allowed, unlike in the U.S., where bribed conservatives have made sure massive price gouging on drugs is built into official government policies. Maine is being sued by the avaricious conservative-backed drug companies.

RICK KARR: The battle between the state of Maine and the pharmaceutical industry started in Portland when the city found a way to cut its health care costs. By the time the battle ends, the whole country might feel the effects. If Maine wins, it could get a lot easier for Americans to import cheaper prescription drugs. If the pharmaceutical companies and their allies win, importing drugs could be harder than ever. One side in the battle is made up of employers-- and their employees. They say they’re fighting for the right to spend less on health care... How much money does this save the company every year?

SCOTT WELLMAN:   About $400,000. That's our savings per year.

RICK KARR:  The other side includes Maine’s pharmacists and retailers and the pharmaceutical industry. They say they’re fighting to protect the safety of consumers who might be tempted to try imported prescription drugs.

AMELIA ARNOLD:  The problem is, is that these medicines aren't safe.

RICK KARR:  The battle started in 2004, when Portland offered its 1,400 employees the option of a new prescription drug plan. Instead of going to local pharmacies to get their prescriptions filled-- and paying a share of the cost-- they could get the drugs by mail from licensed pharmacies in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.K.-- without paying a penny. City employee Jeff Tardif signed his 7-year-old son up for the plan this year to get asthma meds.

JEFF TARDIF:   My big thing is I'm saving money. So, you know, it's 100 bucks that I'm saving monthly-- through this program.

RICK KARR:   Karen Percival gets drugs that treat chronic pain and ADHD. Every three months, a fresh supply from a pharmacy halfway around the world lands on her doorstep.

KAREN PERCIVAL:  It shows up in a box like that.  It's odd that it comes all the way from Australia, and it still costs less money.

RICK KARR:   The program’s managed by a Canadian company called CanaRx. It tracks the prices of prescription drugs in four countries. Whichever country has the lowest price on a drug supplies it-- from licensed, brick-and-mortar pharmacies.

Take the example of a three-month supply of the asthma drug Advair: Under the city’s regular health plan, at Portland pharmacies it costs a little under $600. The CanaRx plan imports it for a little over a $150-- shipping included. With discounts like that, the city of Portland saves $200,000 a year on health care-- and there’s no copay for employees. Two years after the city launched its program, the largest employer in one of Maine’s poorest counties followed suit. Hardwood Products makes food sticks-- the wooden handles that go into popsicles, ice cream bars, corn dogs, and so on. Chief financial officer Scott Wellman says the family-owned company can do a lot with the $400,000 a year it saves on the plan.

SCOTT WELLMAN: That money can be used for employee raises. That money can be used to offset the cost of their health care. It also can be used to invest in equipment so we can produce new products.

RICK KARR:   Early last year, the state of Maine’s employee health care program decided to offer the CanaRx option. Overnight, the number of people eligible for the plan in Maine went from about $3,200 to more than $33,000. And that’s when Maine’s pharmacists decided they had to do something to stop it.

AMELIA ARNOLD:  When we found out that the Maine State Employees Union was going to be contracting with this organization, CanaRx, we realized that it was against both state and federal law at that time.

RICK KARR:   Maine pharmacist Amelia Arnold and other opponents of mail-order drugs say the imports violate the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and that they ran afoul of state law because Maine’s pharmacy board hadn’t licensed the foreign pharmacies to practice in the state. Arnold admits that Maine residents have been crossing the border into Canada for years to get cheaper drugs from retail pharmacies-- like these seniors did in the early 2000s, before the federal government expanded Medicare benefits. But she says mail-order pharmacies in Canada may operate with no oversight and low standards.

AMELIA ARNOLD:  Who's going to police that?  Who's going to find out that the pharmacy's legitimate? Those companies can participate in what we call parallel importation.  So they can get their drugs from other countries. So just because it's coming into the U.S. from Canada doesn't mean that it started in Canada.

RICK KARR: Arnold says the medicines might be old, ineffective-- or even counterfeit. [In September of last year,] Maine’s then-attorney general agreed with the pharmacists that importing drugs violated state law. So CanaRx suspended all three of its programs in Maine.

SCOTT WELLMAN:  We were very angry-- would probably be the best way of putting it.

RICK KARR: Scott Wellman says the ruling inflicted a lot of pain on the employees of Hardwood Products.

SCOTT WELLMAN: They had to make the decisions on, "Okay, do I turn the heat down in the winter?  What do I do?" Because they stopped taking one-- while the program was suspended.

RICK KARR:   Wellman decided it was time to push back, so he reached out to a local firewood dealer.

DOUG THOMAS: You don't get to take advantage of people. "I have this drug, this pill, and it will save your life.  What will you give me for it?" Is that the way we do business in the United States? And, of course, you're going to pay whatever you have to to save your life. And that's not right. It's real close, I think, to holding a gun to people's head.  And it's wrong.

RICK KARR:   Doug Thomas sells firewood and serves as a Republican state senator. He calls himself a conservative, says he hates unions and believes in free enterprise and competition. He also thinks the pharmaceutical industry needs more regulation.

DOUG THOMAS: The drug companies have done a very good job at telling people that they need all this money for research and development, and if we don't give them everything they want, then we're not going to have these new drugs. And that's, I just-- I absolutely don't believe it.  The Canadian system works. The Australian system works.  The drug delivery system in New Zealand works. And it can work better here.

RICK KARR:  Thomas introduced a bill that legalized pharmaceutical imports. So did one of his Democratic colleagues. They rolled their bills into one and joined forces... and both sides of the issue sent their lobbyists to work.

SCOTT WELLMAN: I believe there were four of us that were lobbying on behalf of the bill; there were at least 12 lobbyists from-- representing pharmacies and big pharma.

RICK KARR: The pharmacists and drug companies argued the bill would endanger the people of Maine. But in June, the bill passed both houses with bipartisan majorities. Maine became the first state in the nation to legalize mail-order drug imports. In September-- a month before imports could resume-- the pharmaceutical industry and its allies filed a federal lawsuit to strike down the law.

JOHN A. MURPHY III: There's several things wrong with the Maine law. Not least of which is the fact that it violates the federal Food and Drug Administration's laws prohibiting the importation of prescription medications outside of the F.D.A.'s regulatory construct.

RICK KARR:  John Murphy is a staff lawyer at PhRMA, the drug makers’ trade group and one of the plaintiffs in the suit. He says federal law gives the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate drug imports, and that authority’s illegally undercut by the Maine law.

JOHN A. MURPHY III: Effectively, it permits patients to go onto the Internet, which is completely unregulated, and bring prescription drugs into the United States outside of even the F.D.A.'s-- large-- federal preview. It's-- very concerning.

RICK KARR:  Like Maine pharmacist Amelia Arnold, who’s one of the lead plaintiffs in the suit, Murphy says stopping mail-order imports is all about safety. They say most drugs have cheaper generic equivalents, so there’s no need to take a chance on foreign pharmaceuticals. Murphy says that in 2003, the F.D.A. warned CanaRx that it was “put[ting] the health of the American public at risk” after the company mailed an order of insulin-- a perishable drug that has to be refrigerated. CanaRx says as soon as that happened, it stopped offering perishable drugs and that it has safeguards in place to protect its customers.

RICK KARR: What a lot of the people in Maine have been saying to me, they're saying, "These are the same drugs that are available in the U.S. These are drugs that they're getting that are made by members of your organization."

JOHN A. MURPHY III: And they're able to test those drugs when they come home and verify that they are? Or that they just have a label on them that indicates that they are the same drugs? I mean, that's the interesting question, right? I mean, no one who's personally importing a drug into the United States and bringing it to their home has really any idea what's in that drug. And in fact, we've seen even in the past that drugs that came in through Canada, certain cancer drugs, were sold to physicians. And physicians weren't able to verify the authenticity of those products.

RICK KARR: The response that we get from PhRMA and the pharmacist association is you never know for sure how reliable these pharmacies are. And it's too late if somebody gets sick on account of this. Does this concern you at all?

SCOTT WELLMAN: With our experience, it doesn't. The pharmacies that were having to fill these prescriptions are licensed retail pharmacies. If you're getting, for example, Crestor, you get Crestor in the Astrazeneca package labeled with all their information, with a pharmacy label on it, with the seal on the outside of the package, lot number, date code, everything is on the package. You can trace the pedigree just like you can in the U.S.

RICK KARR: Wellman says he knows what he’s talking about  because he’s also CFO of Hardwood Products’ sibling company, Puritan Products, right across the street. It makes medical supplies.

SCOTT WELLMAN: We have lots and date codes. We have expirations. We make F.D.A.-registered devices here. We have F.D.A. audits that come in here. We understand-- how that process works.

RICK KARR:  Wellman says he hopes the state of Maine prevails in court so more of his neighbors can take advantage of the lower prices on foreign drugs. If Maine does win, other states are likely to follow its lead by allowing mail-order imports. The date of opening arguments in the case, when the battle moves to the courtroom, hasn’t been set.

It's convenient for many Members of Congress to "believe" the spurious arguments against importation. Ironically almost all are conservatives and all are on the take from the drug manufacturers. Since 1990, pharmaceutical manufacturing companies in the U.S. have spent $84,901,125 bribing Members of Congress (not counting many more millions on lobbying; this is just what they gave towards campaigns, legalistic bribes). In the last cycle alone, the 10 most corrupted Members of Congress by the drug industry were:

• Fred Upton (R-MI)- $176,365
• Eric Cantor (R-VA)- $159,250
• John Boehner (R-OH)- $131,000
• Leonard Lance (R-NJ)- $126,000
• Joe Pitts (R-PA)- $114,000
• Dave Camp (R-MI)- $108,500
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)- $108,500
• Anna Eshoo (D-CA)- $102,850
• Allyson Schwartz (New Dem-PA)- $99,000
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- $97,500

All ten have a reputation in Washington for being shills for companies that pay them off. And all are either committee or subcommittee chairs or ranking members or caucus leaders in positions to make sure the big drugs companies' agendas prevail. In the current election cycle, which is just beginning, Big Pharma is already lining up votes by bribing many of the usual suspects. So far this cycle the 5 most corrupt were also on the list from the 2012 cycle:

• Fred Upton- $63,400
• Kevin McCarthy- $58,700
• Eric Cantor- $53,000
• Steny Hoyer- $50,250
• John Boehner- $50,100

These are five of the most corrupt men who have ever been elected to Congress. All of them are in positions to not just sell their own votes but to swing large numbers of other Members away from helping their own constituents towards assisting the industry that is paying off these notorious K Street whores. I might add that the only one of these corrupt congressmen who is electorally vulnerable this cycle is Fred Upton, who is being challenged by an anti-corruption progressive, Paul Clements, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. If you want to see drug importation legalized in the U.S., there is something you can do-- help replace Upton with pro-science/anti-corruption Clements in 11 months. And here's where you can do it.

How Many House Democrats Are Still Unevolved On LGBT Equality?

Boehner happily swearing in a very unevolved Pete Gallego (D-TX), the one freshman Blue Dog

With Bill Nelson (D-FL) finally getting on board the equality train there are no Democratic senators left except for ones who probably go back and forth in their minds every night about whether they should switch to the Republican Party or not, like the idiot from Arkansas who bragged on film about his sadly low IQ. He also has the lowest score on LGBT equality issues of any Democrat in the Senate, a 50%, same as Susan Collins (R-ME), closet case Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and John McCain (R-AZ). Aside from Pryor, the only unevolved Democrats on this matter are arch-conservatives from red states: Tim Johnson (SD), Mary Landrieu (LA) and Joe Manchin (WV). I suspect Landrieu's reticence-- cowardice?-- to embrace equality will hurt her badly with her New Orleans base and she'll lose her reelection bid in 2014. She's using an ass-backwards strategy that is always a loser for Democrats; Republicans have their own candidates and they're not going to rally around a Democrat just because she's reluctantly anti-gay. Tom Johnson is retiring so it will be interesting to see how his son Brendan, a probable candidate for the seat, handles the issue.

The evolution of conservative House members has gotten less attention than conservative senators like Mark Kirk (R-IL), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and Bob Casey (D-PA) announcing they've come around. One longtime homophobe with a miserable record on LGBT issues has been Blue Dog Jim Cooper, whose Nashville district is far more evolved than he is. Recently he gave up on the bigotry too though and announced he would back marriage equality. Until now, Cooper has had a dismal lifetime crucial vote score of 28.57 on LGBT issues, worse than libertarian-leaning Republicans. We had a hint Cooper had started evolving last July when homophobic fanatic Steve King (R-IA) proposed an amendment to a defense budget that would prevent gay soldiers from marrying on bases. Although 17 of Cooper's Blue Dog and ConservaDem colleagues backed King, Cooper actually voted with the Democrats. Several of the 17 who voted with King have since been defeated in primaries and general elections but 9 remain in the House today-- John Barrow (Blue Dog/New Dem-GA), Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA), Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Gene Green (TX), Dan Lipinksi (IL), Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog/New Dem-NC), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN) and Nick Rahall (WV). A tenth, Blue Dog homophobe Joe Donnelly is now in the Senate; he endorsed marriage equality on his Facebook page yesterday. There are also two freshmen who have been elected since then who campaigned on anti-equality platforms, Bill Enyart (IL) and Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX).

There's still some hope for more evolution from some of this lot, though. When the GOP tried to strip protection for gays and lesbians out of the domestic violence legislation in February, only 2 Democrats voted with the GOP-- anti-gay fanatics Mike McIntyre and Dan Lipinski. 60 Republicans voted with the Democrats against the amendment.

Echoing a growing number of Democratic politicians, Rep. Jim Cooper said Tuesday his support for gay marriage developed over his years in office and that he sees the issue mattering for economic development as well as civil rights.

Tennessee Republicans, meanwhile, continued to express opposition while saying the issue is one for the states.

The comments of Cooper, a Nashville Democrat, came in an interview and followed his prepared statement from the day before in which he said he favors recognition of same-sex marriages while recognizing some churches may continue to object.

"We're just talking about civil marriages here," he emphasized again Tuesday.

"A number of groups are trying to figure out what to do," he said. "The nation is working its way through this now."

He added, "My views have evolved over time."

..."My denomination changed its mind (on gay marriage)," he said of the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal House of Bishops, meeting in a national convention in July 2012, OK'd priests blessing same-sex couples but stipulated a blessing did not equate to approving marriage. The latter remained a matter for civil authorities, it said.

Cooper said he was also pleased to see Davidson County adopt a policy that prohibits private-sector firms wanting county business from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender.

"The principle of non-discrimination is important," he said.

And if firms from states that recognize gay marriage want to relocate offices and employees to Tennessee, the congressman said, they may want assurances such marriages will be accepted in the Volunteer State.

"We need to be as welcoming in Tennessee as we can be," Cooper said.

Tennessee, however, adopted a state constitutional amendment in 2006 that says marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

Congressional records show Cooper voted in 2006 for a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman as well.

Every Blue America candidate favors marriage equality, of course. Yesterday I asked the Democrat running against John Boehner in western Ohio if he feels this is an issue people in his district are playing attention to. He does-- and he's very aware that his position is very different from Boehner's. Andy Hounshell: "I want everyone to have the opportunity to be as happy as my wife and I are. It's not just about saying you are married either. There is much more to it than that. You have to be legally married to receive medical benefits, survivor benefits, etc. There is no logical reason why two consenting adults should be denied the same opportunity that I have."

Neanderthals... In Northeast Georgia?

Discover isn't a political magazine and doesn't get into the politics of the science stories it publishes. Something tells me, though, that lunatic fringe science-deniers on the House Science Committee, like Paul Broun (R-Pit of Hell), Mike McCaul (R-TX), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Steve Stockman (R-OK City Federal Building), Steven Palazzo (R-MS), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Tom Massie (R-KY), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Randy Weber (R-TX) and Chris Stewart (R-Utah), don't subscribe. They should-- if, for no other reason-- to get a better understanding of the people who vote for them. At least in this fascinating new article by distinguished science author Carl Zimmer on Interbreeding with Neanderthals.

Did you watch the Paul Broun video at the "Pit of Hell" link above? If you agree with him that the earth was created 9,000 years ago in six 24 hour days, you might as well stop reading right now, since the premises in Zimmer's essay include something about humans and Neanderthals going their separate ways about 700,000 years ago. The essay is about how the branches kept linking up again all over the world-- humans and Neanderthals interbreeding. Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich is who's been doing the work and examining the DNA, that Rep. Broun, a John Birch Society freak running for the open Georgia Senate seat (and not especially as a joke candidate), would term "lies from the pit of hell."

Some 200,000 years ago, our ancestors evolved in East Africa. They spread throughout the rest of the continent and then moved out into Asia and Europe. As they journeyed along coastlines and over mountains, they encountered Neanderthals and other human relatives. And at least once in a while, they had sex.

We don’t know the prurient details of those encounters, although it is possible that someday Reich and other scientists will be able to fill in a few of them. But the work Reich has done already leaves no doubt that interbreeding was a major feature of human evolution. Billions of people carry sizable chunks of DNA from Neanderthals and other archaic human relatives. Some of those genes may play important roles in our health today.

And politics. It certainly goes a long way to explaining why the South is still the South so long after we whooped them in the mid-1860s. White supremacists like Broun would not be happy with conclusions scientists are drawing like "today’s Europeans are not latter-day Neanderthals but African immigrants." Thems fightin' words in the backward part of northeast Georgia that elects Broun to Congress, one of America's most racist and bigoted areas.

Reich was curious about what happened when these groups came into contact with each other. Even though they would probably remain mostly separate, some individuals might interbreed. Reich wondered if he could look at the genomes of living humans and find evidence of those ancient liaisons.

Detecting these signs is not easy. Imagine that two people from very distant parts of the world—a woman from Spain, say, and a man from Polynesia-- get married and have a girl. She is born with 23 pairs of chromosomes: one set from her mother and one from her father. Her mother’s chromosomes are loaded with genetic markers that pinpoint her Spanish heritage. Likewise, her father’s DNA is unmistakably Polynesian. But as the girl’s own eggs develop, her DNA gets mixed up.

In the cells that give rise to an egg, a Spanish chromosome will pair up with its Polynesian counterpart. Segments of the chromosomes switch places. Each egg ends up with a new, hybrid chromosome. Now imagine that the girl grows up and marries a Spanish man. The DNA of her children will be only one quarter Polynesian, and the Polynesian DNA will be chopped up into even smaller segments. As the generations pass, the signs of interbreeding get even fainter.

Despite the challenge, Reich thought that detecting interbreeding could be important. It could expose some of humanity’s hidden history, or even shed light on why people are susceptible to certain diseases. When Reich arrived at Harvard Medical School, he began a study on prostate cancer that proved the value of this type of analysis by revealing the genes that make certain men more likely to develop such cancers. “Prostate cancer occurs 1.5 to 2 times more often in African American men than in European men,” Reich says. “We were able to find the reason why.”

To do so, Reich had to reconstruct the genetic history of African Americans, who came to the United States as slaves beginning in the 17th century. White owners sometimes had sex with their slaves and fathered children, thereby introducing European genes into the African American population. Freed slaves also had children with Native Americans and Latinos. As a result, African Americans today may have up to 80 percent European DNA.

...Finally, Reich and his colleagues had no choice but to conclude that Neanderthals had mated with humans. They estimated that the DNA of living Asians and Europeans was (on average) 2.5 percent Neanderthal. They had to reject a pure version of the out-of-Africa model. Instead, their model was closer to out-of-Africa-and-get-to-know-some-Neanderthals-very-well.

The patterns Reich and his colleagues identified can help narrow down when and where the interbreeding took place. Since Africans do not carry Neanderthal DNA, it would appear Neanderthals bred only with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians. One possibility is that when humans emerged out of Africa some 50,000 or more years ago, they encountered Neanderthals in the Near East.

Once humans and Neanderthals mated, the humans continued to expand into Europe and Asia, taking Neanderthal genes with them. Another possibility is that the interbreeding came later. Neanderthals lived across a vast range, from Spain to Russia. As humans came into contact with Neanderthals, they might have mated in several places... Clearly the hybrid children from these interbreedings had to have been accepted into human cultures. But we can’t say whether these couplings happened as rapes during violent battles between humans and Neanderthals or when individual Neanderthals were welcomed into human society. 

Max Blumenthal concluded his epic book, Republican Gomorrah-- Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party with an epilogue, an anecdote about Broun from 2009 called "The Anointing." By any definition, Broun is a Bronze Age throwback, a time which came considerably after we thought Neanderthals had gone extinct. He may well be the living proof that they're still alive and well. Blumenthal caught up with Broun and a couple of his crackpot friends trying to anoint a door that Obama would pass through with crosses painted in oil (or lard).

Although he was only a backbencher, Broun presented himself as the future of the House Republicans. Joining other right-wing members, he opposed the emergency financial bailout, attacked any efforts at immigration reform, and sponsored a bill to protect soldiers from images of unclad women. "Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit," Broun proclaimed. His spokesman testified to his expertise as an "addictionologist" who is "familiar with the negative consequences associated with long-term exposure to pornography."

On cave walls?

GOP 101... Using The Power Of The State To Warp The Minds Of Students With Ideology And Bronze Age Fairy Tales

In an ideal Republican University, everyone would be required to take an ethics course taught by Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed. Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand's corpse would be teaching economics. Science would be no problem either and they're already honing their skills in the states that they control-- like poor delusional Kansas.

Last week, the Kansas House Education Committee introduced a bill that mandates teachers question the scientific basis of global warming, becoming the latest state to take up one of American Legislative Exchange Council’s “model bills” aiming to misrepresent climate change in schools.

Kansas would join Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee and Oklahoma as the fifth state to cast climate change as a “controversial” topic. But climate change is only controversial in political and polluter circles, not the scientific community. 97 percent of climate scientists actively publishing in the field agree climate change is human-caused.

As National Center for Science Education executive director Eugenie C. Scott explained, “The only effects of enacting such a misguided bill would be to discourage responsible teachers from presenting climate science accurately and to encourage irresponsible teachers to misrepresent it as controversial.”

...The bill resembles an ALEC “model bill,” written for corporate lobbyists. ALEC’s model bill mandates “a range of perspectives presented in a balanced manner,” “instruction in critical thinking so that students will be able to fairly and objectively evaluate scientific and economic controversies,” and present climate change “in language appropriate for education rather than for propagandizing.” At the same time ALEC’s legislation has gained ground in other states, the similarities to Kansas’ bill are striking, even though the state battles a destructive drought made more likely and severe in a warming climate.

This is what happens in a one-party state. They can redefine reality so that it bears little resemblance to what the rest of the world defines as reality. And, obviously Kansas-- which doesn't have a functioning Democratic Party, thanks primarily to Rahm Emanuel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz for wrecking Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy-- is far from the only state whose citizens have been abandoned to the whims of the crackpots. This week Mother Jones has an even sadder story about how Oklahoma politicians are setting policies that warp the minds of the state's students and make them unemployable in the real world.

In biology class, public school students can't generally argue that dinosaurs and people ran around Earth at the same time, at least not without risking a big fat F. But that could soon change for kids in Oklahoma: On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Common Education committee is expected to consider a House bill that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories such as biological evolution and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change.

Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion; it simply encourages scientific exploration. "I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks," says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. "A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations."

Stated another way, students could make untestable, faith-based claims in science classes without fear of receiving a poor mark.

HB1674 is the latest in an ongoing series of "academic freedom" bills aimed at watering down the teaching of science on highly charged topics. Instead of requiring that teachers and textbooks include creationism-- see the bill proposed by Missouri state Rep. Rick Brattin-- HB1674's crafters say it merely encourages teachers and students to question, as the bill puts it, the "scientific strengths and weaknesses" of topics that "cause controversy," including "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Missouri's GOP Whip wants everyone to be steeped in the same ignorance he's stuck in

Is Marco Rubio Really A Bigger Idiot Than Mark Pryor?

All day yesterday people were making fun of Marco Rubio for his idiotic comments to GQ about how old the earth is. Basically, he didn't want to get into that debate-- "I'm not a scientist"-- because Hate Talk Radio, Fox News and the Bronze Age religionist fanatics who control much of his political party will not countenance anyone veering from their fairytale about how the Earth was created in 6 days 5 thousand years ago. Personally, I was more interested in his unlikely comments about Public Enemy, Tupac and Pitbull:

But as Krugman pointed out on his Times blog a few hours later, Rubio's science and evolution denial is a serious matter... particularly for someone who's been in Iowa as much as in his home state recently.

As I like to say, the GOP doesn’t just want to roll back the New Deal; it wants to roll back the Enlightenment.

But here’s what you should realize: when Rubio says that the question of the Earth’s age “has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow,” he’s dead wrong. For one thing, science and technology education has a lot to do with our future productivity-- and how are you going to have effective science education if schools have to give equal time to the views of fundamentalist Christians?

More broadly, the attitude that discounts any amount of evidence-- and boy, do we have lots of evidence on the age of the planet!-- if it conflicts with prejudices is not an attitude consistent with effective policy. If you’re going to ignore what geologists say if you don’t like its implications, what are the chances that you’ll take sensible advice on monetary and fiscal policy? After all, we’ve just seen how Republicans deal with research reports that undermine their faith in the magic of tax cuts: they try to suppress the reports.

I’m belatedly reading Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain; if truth be told, I was afraid that the book would be too much red meat for my own predispositions, and wanted to keep my cool. But Mooney actually makes a very good point: the personality traits we associate with modern conservatism, above all a lack of openness, make the modern GOP fundamentally hostile to the very idea of objective inquiry. If they want your opinion, they’ll tell you what it is; doubters of orthodoxy need not apply, and will in fact be persecuted.

But fret and laugh all you want about Rubio, in 2014 the most endangered Democrat up for reelection is a right-wing goofball from Arkansas with the same mentality-- but in a party where that mentality isn't de rigueur. Yes, Mark Pryor, the senator who at least admits that there's no IQ test required of Senate candidates. Watch this... it's as goofy as Rubio-- especially the very last frames when he suddenly remembers he's being filmed: