Alabamian.net

I cannot express how thoroughly disappointed I am that Senator Obama will not take a principled, and constitutional, stand against an unconstitutional ex post facto law.

The Constitution specifically prohibits ex post facto laws. You cannot legalize illegal behavior after the fact! If we sit idly by and allow this flagrant violation of the Constitution to stand it will not be long before we are dealing with laws that make legal behavior illegal after the fact.

Do you want to find yourself in court someday answering for a crime that wasn’t a crime at the time you committed the act? If your answer is no, as it rightly should be, then you must oppose the unconstitutional ex post facto legalization of criminal activities by the telecoms!

I will continue to view this as a giant black mark against Senator Obama until he finally agrees to stand with the people and the Constitution.

My freedoms and my rights are NOT NEGOTIABLE, Senator!

Barack Obama: My Position On FISA

The political world is abuzz over General Wesley Clark’s recent comments about John McCain’s qualifications for President of the United States of America.  Clark stated the obvious - being a POW does not qualify you to be President.  The McCain camp has responded with faux outrage over the ‘questioning’ of Senator McCain’s military service in an attempt to dodge the issue of his presidential bonafides.

Clark, former NATO supreme allied commander, said McCain’s combat experience as a fighter pilot did not make him more qualified to be president than Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

“Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” he said.

Speaking the truth, it seems, can be just as much a political gaffe as telling a lie.  Why is everyone responding with shock and outrage over a simple statement of fact?

John McCain has made his POW experience an issue in this campaign by running ads suggesting that it somehow qualifies him to be President.  This false assertion begs to be repudiated.  Unless Senator McCain can somehow explain why being shot down and taken prisoner qualifies one to be President, he needs to be called on his shameless ploy to garner sympathy votes.

Stating the obvious - that being a POW is not a qualification for POTUS - does not equate to questioning and disrespecting Senator McCain’s military service.  I’m glad that someone finally had the cajones to call McCain’s bluff.

To use McCain’s own words, being a POW “…certainly doesn’t do anything to address the challenges that Americans have in keeping their jobs, homes and supporting their families.”

New research is helping to put the final nails in the tired argument that homosexuality is a choice.  A study performed at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found similarities in brain structure and connectivity between straight men and gay women and gay men and straight women.

MRI scans found that the right hemisphere of the brain was larger than the left in straight men and gay women.  The hemispheres were symmetrical in gay men and straight women.  PET scans showed strong similarities in the connectivity of the amygdala - responsible for the fight-or-flight reflex and emotional learning - between straight men and gay women and between gay men and straight women.

“This is a very interesting study demonstrating a possible neurobiological relationship in brain size between gay men and straight women,” said Paul Sanberg, distinguished professor of neurosurgery and director of the University of South Florida Center for Aging and Brain Repair in Tampa.

“I do think this is pointing to some type of neurobiological underpinning [to sexual orientation],” added Keith A. Young, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in Waco.”

Of course this won’t stop fundie nutters like Fred Phelps, John Hagee and Rod Parsley from claiming that homosexuals choose to have their brains develop like heterosexual members of the opposite sex, that the development of the homosexual brain is a sure sign of demon possession or some other ridiculous tripe. 

There isn’t much you can do to win over public figures who treat science and reason as little more than silly superstitions - except to ridicule them mercilessly in the public square and expose them for the ignorant, hate-filled bigots that they are.

Suck it, Fundies!

Gay Men, Straight Women Have Similar Brains

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Reichwing radio talk show host and son of former President Ronald Reagan, Michael Reagan, applied for and received his official Reichwing Nutter Badge this past Tuesday during the second hour of his show.

Upset with members of the 911 Truth Movement who are mailing DVD videos to US troops in Iraq, Reagan issued an on-air death threat and called for his listeners to “take them out and shoot them” and said that he would “pay for the bullets.”

Obviously Mr. Reagan has no respect for the Constitution or the law.  He thinks that it is the most American of ideals to assassinate political dissenters and to terrorize those who hold opposing points of view.  If Mr. Reagan truly believes that these individuals are guilty of treason then he should call for them to be prosecuted. 

Advocating their summary execution by a vigilante lynch mob is absolutely unamerican and Mr. Reagan should be publicly shamed and removed from the airwaves.

A major evolutionary shift has been observed in a laboratory setting for the first time.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

Mostly, the patterns Lenski saw were similar in each separate population. All 12 evolved larger cells, for example, as well as faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities.

But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolize citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

So much for Creationism aka Intelligent Design.

Suck it, Fundies!

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

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Text of Hillary Clinton’s speech

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Great little video from the Florida Democratic Party that illustrates McCain’s hypocrisy and lies and demonstrates that a McCain presidency would effectively be a third term for Bush.

Florida Democrats release web video blasting McCain

Katrina Kerfuffle

Barack Obama secured the Democratic nomination for President last night and made history by becoming the first African-American nominee to the highest office in the land, but Hillary Clinton wasn’t about to let him enjoy it.

Rather than give a gracious concession speech acknowledging her opponent’s hard won victory and begin the work of unifying the Democratic Party to defeat John McCain in November, Mrs. Clinton chose instead to take her party hostage with the veiled threat of its destruction if she doesn’t get what she wants.

In what was supposed to be a private conference call with the New York House delegation, Clinton said that if Obama offered her the job of Vice President she would accept.  The details of the conference call were then quickly leaked to the press.

By announcing her acceptance of a position that has not yet been offered to her, Hillary effectively sabotaged Obama’s freedom to choose, given the realities of the American political electoral landscape, whom he thinks would best complete his ticket  heading into the general election.

Wielding the cudgel of her 18 million strong constituency during her speech last night in New York, Hillary announced to Obama and the Democratic Party, “Put me on the party ticket - or else.”

Way to go, Hillary.  Way to put the party and the nation ahead of your personal ambition.

A new Gallup poll is showing that Americans are not buying what Bush and McCain are shoveling.  Bush and McCain are trying to convince us that engaging our enemies diplomatically is the same as Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis.  My fellow citizens, it seems, are smarter than the current administration and the Republican presidential nominee would care to think.

Large majorities of Democrats and independents, and even about half of Republicans, believe the president of the United States should meet with the leaders of countries that are considered enemies of the United States. Overall, 67% of Americans say this kind of diplomacy is a good idea.

About 6 in 10 Americans (59%) think it would be a good idea for the president of the United States to meet with the president of Iran. This includes about half of Republicans, a majority of independents, and most Democrats.

Even Republican voters are beginning to figure out that talking to our enemies is not the same as bending over for our enemies.  Americans want a return to diplomacy and an end to duhplomacy.  To quote Moshe Dayan, “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends.  You talk to your enemies.”

Americans Favor President Meeting With U.S. Enemies

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How does an unsigned band, strapped for cash, go about filming a proper music video?  The Get Out Clause, a local band in Manchester, have used the growing ubiquity of CCTV surveillance to provide a novel solution.  Unable to afford a camera crew, the band setup in front of surveillance cameras in various locations around the city, performed their song, and then used the Freedom of Information Act to acquire the relevant video.

The Get Out Clause, Manchester stars of CCTV