Internal Monologue

Atrios has trackbacks again! Yay! As a reward for his good behavior, I will link to this small item (links being the primary positive reinforcement tool in the blogosphere): Who are all these stridently secular politicians? Nobody ever says, but they keep writing the same column over and over about them. Maybe the stridently secular politician is…me! It seems highly unlikely, given that I haven’t been elected to anything since my college D&D group decided that I would get to be Dungeon Master. But this isn’t the first time I’ve vastly underestimated my own reach . And I certainly can’t think of any well known “stridently secular politicians”. If anyone discovers any, please bring them to my attention.

Andrew Sullivan posts a reader’s email about how small government conservatives flush their political capital down the toilet: By continuing to vote for Republicans for no other reason than they are not Democrats, fiscal and small government conservatives are shooting themselves in the foot. The Republican party will never respond to the concerns of fiscal and small government conservatives because they don’t have to. No matter what they do or how they betray their values, Republicans have the votes of the majority of this group. I totally agree. Fiscal and small government conservatives should be solidly Democratic, or form their own party. One has only to point to the budget and growth of government numbers during the Clinton administration and compare them to those of the Bush administration to see which party stands for fiscal responsibility. (Though you could also make the argument that it is divided government that keeps the bloat down. Even so, fiscal conservatives should then

Thanks to the reality of transgendered people, we have modern equivalents of the legendary seer Tiresias , who lived life both as a man and a woman. Here’s what one of them, a female-to-male neuroscientist, had to say about the differences (from majikthise ): As a transgendered person, no one understands more deeply than I do that there are innate differences between men and women. I suspect that my transgendered identity was caused by fetal exposure to high doses of a testosterone-like drug. But there is no evidence that sexually dimorphic brain wiring is at all relevant to the abilities needed to be successful in a chosen academic career. I underwent intensive cognitive testing before and after starting testosterone treatment about 10 years ago. This showed that my spatial abilities have increased as a consequence of taking testosterone. Alas, it has been to no avail; I still get lost all the time when driving (although I am no longer willing to ask for directions). There was one inn

Sullivan's article on the funeral eulogy of Ken Lay (of Enron infamy)paints a very disturbing picture: And then the coup de grace: the white-collar convicted criminal was compared to an innocent black man, James Byrd, brutally lynched in Texas not so long ago, tied to the back of a truck and dragged through dirt roads until his body split in two. “Ken Lay was neither black nor poor, as James Byrd was, but I’m angry because Ken was the victim of a lynching,” the minister said to huge and hearty applause. Welcome to the strange new world of conservative evangelical Christianity, where government torture is no big deal, Lay is a martyr, and the death penalty is God’s will. In this version of Christianity what matters is not so much what you do — but what’s in your heart. And if you have committed to Jesus Christ and attend the right church, a little corporate larceny is no big whoop. First of all, this wasn't "a little corporate larceny". This was one of the biggest an

I know that we’re not supposed to spread the “George W. Bush is stupid meme”, because that lets him off too easily. But sometimes he says things that are so bone-headed that you can’t help but wonder if his dumbing himself down for the masses act hasn’t taken on a reality of its own. Via digby and DailyKos , CNN has the following quote from Bush, talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin: "I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same," Bush said. SusanG from DailyKos asks , "You gotta wonder what the expression was on Putin's face when he replied: We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly. "

Hatred of homosexuals ! They may be killing each other left and right, but those monotheists are sure united in their puritanical bigotry!