Mar 152012
 

Donald Trump was rejected, even by the loony Michel Bachmann, as a presidential debate host, and couldn’t manage to get his own third-party papers filed on time to run himself in November. The ratings of his Celebrity Apprentice show are tanking. His Online University was sued for fraud. He’s alienated the whole country of Scotland. I suppose it was inevitable the carnival barker would want to revive his Birther-barking. I mean, what is utter humiliation to The Donald? A mere bagashells.

Appearing on Hannity, he said in February:

Trump: People say the Manchurian candidate. Nobody knows anything about him; where he comes from, his education, how did he get into Columbia if he had bad marks. How did he get into Harvard if he had bad marks. …

There’s so many things that people just don’t know. You go to Columbia and people don’t know who he is. Do you know the people who went to school with you? You can go back to kindergarten.

Hannity: Absolutely.

(Please see Memories of Barack Obama for all the people who must have hallucinated they went to school with Barack Obama.)

This week, he Tweeted:

When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18, @BarackObama was Barry Soweto. Weird.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2012

I’ve heard the current President of the United States called a lot of things; “Soweto” isn’t one of them. When Obama was 18, as all of his life, his name was Obama and his friends called him “Obama” and he called himself “Obama.” The Occidental College literary magazine published poems by “Obama.” His high school yearbook shows his name “Obama.”

Oh, for goodness sake, I guess his name is Obama.

Now Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s oh so thorough Cold Case Posse, trumped up by Jerome Corsi, has so impressed him, Trump has put it in writing:

WND has confirmed with Michael Cohen, a top aide to Trump, that “The Donald” personally penned a handwritten note of congratulations to Arpaio following the Maricopa County sheriff’s Cold Case Posse news conference March 1 in Phoenix.

Having printed out an Associated Press report of the event that featured a photograph of Arpaio and published by the Huffington Post, Trump penned diagonally in the upper left hand corner, “Joe – Great going – You are the only one with the ‘guts’ to do this – Keep up the good fight – Donald Trump.”

Blowhard to blowhard, Trump had told Jerome Corsi last year, he would get back into the birfer biz when it “resurfaced as a major news item.” The Cold Case Posse is Donald Trump’s idea of a major news item. Okay, then. But what’s become of Donald Trump’s own guts? Surely he didn’t need Arpaio to do what Trump had already done. Where is the Trump Report?

Dale McFeatters at Scripps Howard News Service wondered in December:

Better yet, Trump said he had dispatched a team of special investigators to the islands. “I have people that have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” I, and I’m sure many others, braced for the promised stunning revelations.

And then — nothing. Not a word. Like the people of Roanoke Island, they had simply disappeared with no word, certainly not from Trump, as to their fate. …

The missing investigators have assumed new importance because Trump is now inserting himself back into the Republican race or maybe some other race, because he recently said he “would certainly think of running as an independent.”

There actually may be a simple explanation to the whereabouts of those investigators: They’re all in his head. And as for “they cannot believe what they’re finding”? Maybe it’s his unbelievable ego.

So what about it, Donald? Where is the Trump Report?

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 Posted by at 8:31 am
Mar 152012
 

Does Conservatism Have to Be Synonymous With Ignorance?

But it is Mr. Santorum whose vehement opposition involves not only emerging reproductive technology but also almost any form of medical intervention in reproduction, positive or negative. It would be tempting to chalk up Mr. Santorum’s medieval views to a devout Catholic fundamentalism, but that is unfair to Catholicism. Mr. Santorum instead represents the very epitome of many among the modern breed of conservative Republicans: Ignorant and proud of it.

Mr. Santorum has steadfastly maintained throughout his career an almost perfect record of opposing the well-known evidence of empirical reality. When he was a political footnote this fact was at best amusing. Now that he has managed to win so many primaries, the more general question of why Republicans are so willing to take a giant step backward in the face of modern science to support such ignorance is of more concern. …

More recently, however, his divergence from reality has expanded to include the claim that all forms of contraception are unhealthy. In doing so, he made no comment on either the strain on women’s bodies of repeated childbirth, much less the effects on the mental health of both mother and child. Perhaps most important, in the context of global considerations of the future, he ignored the deleterious effects of our ever-increasing world population on the health of the planet.

If that were not enough, he next spoke out against pre-natal medical care, one of the most important recent modern medical advances to help ensure the birth of healthy and fully functioning infants, as promoting abortion rather than the health of mother and child. He managed to follow that up with the remarkable oxymoronic claim that birth control actually produces more abortions. …

Choosing to censor or distort knowledge rather than risk the possibility that such knowledge, or the technologies that result from it, might challenge faith or confront preexisting ideological biases is a something that should better characterize the Taliban or al Qaeda rather than the Republican Party.

Lawrence M. Krauss on Huffington Post
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 Posted by at 7:05 am

Clouds Inside

 True Goodness  Comments Off
Mar 152012
 

Artist creates stunning indoor clouds

But how does Smilde get the cloud to hang around long enough to hide the smoke machine and compose the shot? “By moistening the air you can shape and keep the cloud from falling apart directly as the moist sticks to it making the smoke heavier,” Smilde explains. “Also when the space is really cold it prevents the smoke from rising too quickly. Basically that’s it, and of course a lot of practice.”

Gizmag

 Posted by at 12:04 am