Jonathan Stuckey, Bass

I found this over at the Crisis Papers. It’s a very good description of the way our elections are just so much manipulation. Here’s the opening:

In the United States of America, the public selects the candidates of each of the two parties. Several candidates of these parties offer themselves to the citizens of a number of states, the free US press presents the policy positions of the candidates to the public, and the free broadcast media conduct debates in which the issues are openly discussed. Then the states hold primaries and caucuses, in which delegates are chosen by the voters, whereupon the delegates choose the parties’ nominees at open national party conventions.

And little George Washington really did chop down his daddy’s cherry tree.

It gets even better. Check it out.

Taylor County, Florida, just decided to oppose evolution. They want evolution “presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.” First off, they misunderstand the term “theory” as it is used in science. Second, they do not seem to understand that evolution describes how organisms change over time through inheritance and adaptation, not how the universe was formed. That’s physical cosmology, not evolution.

Taylor County, you are ijits.

Mitt Romney is a liar of the “pants on fire” degree. This excerpt explains it:

Romney sternly replied, “I don’t describe your plan as amnesty in my ad. I don’t call it amnesty.”

This denial earns Romney a “Pants on Fire” ruling because two ads he released in recent days use that exact language. The only thing possibly saving the former Massachusetts governor is that the ads feature other people using the controversial word, not Romney himself.

FactCheck.org has a list of some of the biggest lies the presidential campaigners told in 2007. Here’s a good one:

Giuliani claimed in a radio ad that men suffering from prostate cancer have only a 44 percent survival rate under England’s system of “socialized medicine.” The true figure is 74.4 percent. Giuliani’s bogus statistic was the result of bad math by a campaign adviser with no particular expertise in cancer research. It was denounced by any number of cancer experts including one who called it “nonsense.” Giuliani stubbornly refused to admit his error, claiming the 44 percent figure is “absolutely accurate.” It isn’t.

And:

Romney claimed that Democratic President Clinton “began to dismantle the military,” but really it was Republican President George H.W. Bush who started making deep cuts in defense budgets years before Clinton took office.

And this one about the “Fair Tax”:

Proponents of the so-called “FairTax,” prominently including Huckabee, claimed that a national sales tax of 23 percent could replace both the federal income tax and Social Security taxes, and eliminate the Internal Revenue Service.

In truth, the actual rate of the proposed tax would be 30 percent, when calculated the same way as state and local sales taxes. And it would have to be 34 percent to raise the same revenue as the taxes it would replace, according to a bipartisan presidential commission. The FairTax would, for example, raise the price of gasoline by roughly $1 per gallon at today’s prices and cause a $150,000 new home to cost at least $195,000 including the 30 percent tax.

Read the article for more.

December 18, 1865

The Thirteenth Amendment to the US constitution prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Note—I hope to make this a recurring feature.

A great post over at Rationally Speaking:

Unquestioning ideological commitment is the real enemy, be that in favor of a religion or political position, in reverence of a prophet or a political leader. Ironically, I think our tragic tendency to fall for facile ideological brainwashing may be the result of the fact that, despite our literature, science, and technology, we are still little more than a species of social chimpanzees – and we instinctively align ourselves with the alpha male, regardless of how much stupidity and suffering may result from it.

The full post is here.

I almost forgot to mention this. Today, December 10, is Human Rights Day.

Keith Olbermann is consistently good. Here, he takes Newt Gingrich to task over his comments about the First Amendment.

The only way to guarantee that your voice is not heard is to stay away from the polls. Your vote may not matter if you do vote, but if you don’t even make the attempt to participate in your government, you have no right to complain when it doesn’t go your way.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
–Mark Twain