ABQjournal: Minimum Wage Hike Pressed, Could End Up On The Legislature’s Calendar

“We believe that nobody who works full time should live in poverty,” said Christine Trujillo, president of the New Mexico Federation of Labor and the American Federation of Teachers of New Mexico. “We believe that working people should be paid a wage that can support a family.”

That should be a plank of the Democratic Party Platform nationally. Most Democrats would agree and most Republicans would jeer and sneer. mjh

“Maybe the hand of God is everywhere in the universe,” says Dave Thomas, an Albuquerque scientist and president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason. “But it’s not the job of science to dust for (his) fingerprints.”

ABQjournal: Theologians In Conflict Over Controversy

Wave of Marine Species Extinctions Feared

“At the end of my career, I get to document the destruction of the species I’ve been documenting for 20 years,” he lamented as he watched the bulldozers. “Wonderful.” – Samuel H. Gruber — a University of Miami professor who has devoted more than two decades to studying the lemon sharks that breed … [in] mangroves being ripped up to build a new resort, [which] provide food and protection that the sharks can’t get in the open ocean….

“I think if you asked God, he’d say the Ten Commandments were a road map for living. Instead, you have these self-appointed pharisees who think the Ten Commandments can be turned into a stiletto to use against their political opponents.” Representative David Obey, Wisconsin Democrat
—–
Keeping Faith With Religious Freedom By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Thus did Obey offer an amendment to the military appropriations bill calling on the secretary of the Air Force to “develop a plan to ensure that the Air Force Academy maintains a climate free from coercive intimidation and inappropriate proselytizing.”

Obey’s all-American assertion of religious liberty was, for Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.), part of “the long war on Christianity in America [that] continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives. It continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats. . . . Like a moth to a flame, Democrats can’t help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians.”

Need I point out that paranoid, bellicose, radical right, evangelical Christians are turning themselves into demons without any outside help.

By the way, of our 3 New Mexico Representatives, Udall and Wilson, an Air Force Academy alumna, voted for the amendment while Steve Pearce channeled Joe Skeen and voted against it (alone, as he was, in voting against removing spying on library patrons from the Patiot Act). mjh

Mind Over Mathematics: Astronomy and Number

Don’t fall into the trap of collapsing geometry into arithmetic!

“Friday, the Stock Market suffered its third triple digit loss in a week. The good news is your Social Security funds aren’t in there YET.” — Amy Pohler, Weekend Update, SNL

From News Hounds: We watch FOX so you don’t have to.

Fox News Channel ad introduces new motto

A sexy female voice-over says “We’re always live” ….

FNC shows re-runs from 11pm ET to 5am ET weekdays.

Maybe I misunderstood and she’s saying “We’re always lies.” Yeah, that must be it – they’re replacing their ridiculous old motto with a more accurate new one.

“Now that I, too, am a professional whore, I can see that the sharp distinction I used to draw between the working press and the shoe scrapings of the PR industry was simply a vanity of vanities — a product of my youthful arrogance …. And whatever real distinction there may have once been between journalism and flackery has long since been swept away by the howling, gibbering tsunami of the cable news channels, leaving only a few dazed refugees clinging to the treetops in the print press. And pretty soon they’ll be gone, too.” — Billmon

What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques ? as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. …

And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn?t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate ? particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.

Whiskey Bar: My Back Pages

“I’m a warrior, and I know what is inside of me.” — Michael Jackson

“It’s very painful, but this has kind of been a pattern among black luminaries in this country.”

[mjh: the “Kobe Bryant defense” is a lot like Bill O’Reilly’s.]

Montana News Association

“I do not want to end up with an American style of politics, with us all going out there beating our chest about our faith,” said British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

[I]n a question and answer period Blair said that using religion in politics was ?a bit unhealthy.?

via NewMexiKen:

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles. It is true that, in the meantime, we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war, and long oppressions of enormous public debt. … If the game runs sometimes against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost. For this is a game where principles are the stake.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1798

Washington > Conservatives: G.O.P. Right Is Splintered on Schiavo Intervention” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/politics/23repubs.html?ei=5090&en=b374f7629523357d&ex=1269234000&partner=rssuserland&pagewanted=all&position=”>The New York Times > Washington > Conservatives: G.O.P. Right Is Splintered on Schiavo Intervention

“This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy,” Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill, said. “There are going to be repercussions from this vote. There are a number of people who feel that the government is getting involved in their personal lives in a way that scares them.”

Darwinism and Its Discontents (washingtonpost.com)

[I]n an 1860 debate at Oxford University, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce — a leading critic of Darwinism — mockingly asked scholar T.H. Huxley whether he was descended from apes on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. Huxley’s response is worth noting, even 145 years later:

“A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.

“If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect — who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.”

[via MARK ECKENWILER, via dangerousmeta!]

News Hounds: Bush Hypocrisy on Terri Schiavo Ignored by FOX, the “Real Journalism” Network

“The conservative constituency appears to consist exclusively of the Unborn, the Born-Rich, the Born-Again and the Undead.” — Rotwang

CEOs are fond of saying “Our employees are our most valuable asset,” and then they merrily go about announcing layoffs, which means they are giving away, for free, the company assets. You can tell a lot about an organization by how it treats people who are leaving, whether voluntarily or not.

Dale Dauten

God’s clock By James Carroll

Religion is to God what the clock is to time.

New Mexico Politics with Joe Monahan

“Let Me Off The Plane, I Gotta Blog!”