A Kiwi by Peter Woytuk at the 72nd Street subway station, part of his series of sculptures on Broadway in New York City.
photo by Scott Beale
As a Catholic, I'm getting a little tired of right-wingers like Newt Gingrich spewing nonsense like this.
Newt Gingrich sought to make inroads among religious voters Sunday, accusing President Obama of having “basically declared war on the Catholic Church.”
Gingrich, who converted to Catholicism himself in 2009 (his third wife, Callista, sings in a Catholic choir), was speaking about the Obama administration decision this week to require church-affiliated employers to cover birth control drugs in their health plans, regardless of religious beliefs.
Gingrich, in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, said the decision represented “a radical Obama administration imposing secular rules on religion.”
Since Newt is a new convert, he might be surprised to learn that,
Some 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the church, research published on Wednesday showed.
And,
A Le Moyne College/Zogby International national poll in 2007 found 67 percent of American Catholics disagree with the church teaching that artificial birth control is wrong.
And,
In particular, Catholic voters do not approve of schools teaching abstinence-only programs in schools. Six in ten (64 percent) oppose requiring high school sex education programs to only teach abstinence. They also believe insurance companies should be required to cover and pharmacists required to sell birth control pills. Three-quarters of Catholics support requiring health insurance plans to cover birth control pills (75 percent). Nearly eight in ten (78 percent) oppose allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions.
Let's get real, shall we? The U.S. government is actually on the same side of this "war" as most American Catholics. Those "secular rules" Gingrich whines about the Obama administration enforcing are already being embraced by church members, whether he knows it or not.
What really annoys me is that right-wing partisans like Gingrich side with the Vatican when it's convenient and ignore it when it's not. Want to discuss the Vatican's position on the death penalty, the Iraq War, global warming, torture or Social Security and Medicare, Newt?
Didn't think so.
http://www.GiantITP.com/comics/oots0833.html
Freedom Is Blogging in Your Underwear, the latest book by Hugh MacLeod, comes out April 26 (pre-order info).
Think of it a wee love letter to the blog. As everything and everybody gets swallowed up by Facebook, Google+ and other death stars, remember the importance of having one’s own piece of real estate to call one’s own…
[hackitbuildit], from instructables, has brought us a a DIY windows 8 tablet. To make the tablet, an old laptop is used that meets the minimum requirements of windows 8 preview, a touch screen conversion kit, and of course the software itself. The laptop is first prepared by removing the casing around the screen, and if you just go by the pictures it kind of looks like he is ripping it apart! Though if you look at the video screws are being removed.
The screen is flipped around and laid on the keyboard with a couple spacers between them, as many laptops use the keyboard area as heat sinking. The touch screen is installed, and some wood strips are hot-glued to the outside to fill in the gap between the screen and base. With a little paint you’re left with a large, but functional windows 8 tablet to get started developing for.
I’m not a big guy. It doesn’t take a tremendous shove to send me crashing to the floor. But what does it take to knock the Earth’s climate off balance? In the case of the Little Ice Age, a recent 400-year cold snap, a new study suggests a few well-timed volcanic eruptions might have done the trick.
Major glacial periods are controlled by the Earth's orbit. Summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have been on a slow decline for the last 8,000 years as the orbital precession cycle pushed summer closer to aphelion, the point in Earth’s orbit where it’s farthest from the Sun. That’s just the first few steps on the road that would eventually lead us down from the peak of our current interglacial and into the next glacial period. But there have been bumps along this road, the most familiar of them being the "Little Ice Age."
If I were to tally up all the people I've shot throughout the host of single player first-person shooter campaigns I've played I'd be shocked. Outside of the games where the antagonists are super natural or not of this world, most of the humans were foreigners, people who already feel alien to me an...
Hey, everyone. It's good to be back. Belatedly, I hope you all had a nice holiday season.
Anyway, I really thought that if anything could bring America together, it was Madonna's reprehensibly awful Super Bowl halftime show yesterday. It was so bad, we should get Romney to fire whomever was responsible for it. (Nothing says the American heartland, or Indiana, quite like Madonna, "Vogue," and Roman Empire kitsch. Was Mellencamp too busy?) But then I took to Twitter and Facebook and found that a lot of people just looooved it. And so we have a new divide, and this one, too, is unbridgeable. There's just no accounting for terrible taste. But... onwards!
No More Mister Nice Blog: Romney's speeches, like the man himself, are devoid of uplift, offering sourness, not hope.
The Grey Matter: Romney isn't just gaffe-prone, he's a bad politician who can't go off-script without failing.
The Impolitic: He may not have much of a hope, but there are still good reasons to root for Newt.
Beeryblog: Can progressives really like a violent, war-like sport like football? (Yes, we can!)
Round-up by Michael J.W. Stickings of The Reaction. I'll be here all week.
Send tips to mbru@crooksandliars.com.
Interesting.
