Barack Obama has supplied his answers to the fourteen questions from Sciencedebate 2008. John McCain has said that he will also be supplying answers. UPDATE (September 17, 2008): John McCain has also supplied his answers to the Sciencedebate 2008 questions. Click here to see their answers side-by-side.
We put a Barack Obama for President sign in front of our house on Sunday; it’s already gone today. A Google search for “Obama sign stolen” shows that thefts of Obama yard signs are occurring all over the place–Midland, TX; Staunton, VA; Springfield, MO; Ivins and St. George, UT; Sartell, MN; Upper Arlington, OH; and so on. A Google search for “McCain sign stolen” shows allegations about McCain stealing a prisoner of war story, Cindy McCain stealing a recipe, and stories of thefts of Obama yard signs–but no reports of stolen McCain signs. I suppose either our sign was stolen by an unethical Obama supporter for their own use (in which case the stolen sign should be popping up elsewhere), or by an unethical McCain supporter who has no respect for freedom of speech or private property. I suspect it’s probably the latter. UPDATE (November 5, 2008): Here’s a story about a university instructor who wrote about his stealing a McCain/Palin sign in Minnesota–he has resigned his visiting professorship at St. Olaf College as a result. Philip Busse is described in the article as a journalist and political activist from Portland, Oregon. ...
Focus on the Family told its followers to pray for rain on Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, and as it turns out, there was some flooding. But the flooding filled the Fox skybox in the Pepsi Center with 50 to 100 gallons of water per minute for about five minutes when the fire suppression sprinkler system went off. A little bit off from the desired location in both time and space, yet somehow more appropriate. God works in mysterious ways. Obama speaks tomorrow evening at Invesco Field. California pastor Wiley Drake has been praying for rain every morning for the past two weeks, and is inviting Christians from around the country to join him tomorrow night on a two-hour conference call to pray for rain on Obama. Weather.com’s forecast for Denver tomorrow is sunny with a high of 82 degrees Fahrenheit and 0% change of precipitation, though it’s partly cloudy with 10% chance of precipitation tonight. (Hat tip to John Hummel.) UPDATE (August 30, 2008): And now it looks like Hurricane Gustav may cause the Republican National Convention to be suspended! ...
Abraham Katsman and Kory Bardash point out several instances of Obama inflating his resumé with bogus claims about his record in The Jerusalem Post. They argue that he is doing this because despite holding multiple noteworthy positions, he really hasn’t accomplished much of anything in any of them. He’s published not a single academic paper while Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, published nothing while Harvard Law Review President, and can’t point to any significant legislation he spearheaded in the U.S. Senate or in the Illinois State Senate. UPDATE: John Lynch, in the comments, has, to my mind, refuted the concerns about publications (a Lecturer is not expected to publish, nor is the Harvard Law Review President), but my main concern was about the false statements. Two of the false statements are that he claimed to have “passed laws” that “extended healthcare for wounded troops who’d been neglected” when he didn’t vote on the bill in question, and his statement that “Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee–which is my committee–a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon” when he’s not even on the Senate Banking Committee. On the latter point, Obama’s campaign says he meant to say “my bill” rather than “my committee,” in which case the statement becomes somewhat more accurate, as Obama did supply some of the provisions to the bill in question. But it isn’t really Obama’s bill, despite his contributions. It’s more accurately described as Christopher Dodd and Richard Shelby’s bill. ...
The latest ApostAZ podcast is out: Episode 007 Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- Go to atheists.meetup.com/157 for group events! Monthly Meetup Epilogue. Debate Tactics and Rhetoric. Sweden Rules Against Prayer as Truth: http://www.guardian.co.uk/. Prayer and Aggression. Obama and Faith Based Initiatives. Pickett Church? http://www.atheistrev.com/ Aggression study: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120083092/abstract. Greydon Square’s Album ‘The Compton Effect’Funny analogy from Shannon: “Prayer is a homeless dude on your couch." Charity Navigator is another site similar to CharityWatch. Shannon incorrectly states that McCain is a creationist. He’s not. And the Creation Museum is in Kentucky, not Tennessee. Picketing churches on the basis of its beliefs and doctrines is a terrible idea that should be left to Fred Phelps and similar kooks. The picketing of the Church of Scientology has generally been based on its behavior, not its doctrines–to the extent the focus is on opposing criminal behavior, that’s reasonable.
The Phoenix Atheists Meetup Group has sent a letter (PDF) and ten questions (PDF) to John McCain, Barack Obama, and the 114 candidates for the Arizona State Senate and House of Representatives who are listed in the Citizens Clean Election Commission candidate statement booklet. Any received answers will be posted here. The ten questions are: 1) Given a legislative voting scenario that presents you with a direct conflict between your religious beliefs/values and your duties to uphold the Constitution which do you choose and how would you make that decision? 2) What is your position regarding prayer while acting in your official capacity as an elected official and what role if any do you think prayer should play in the legislative body you wish to hold? 3) What is your position on enacting law that has religious tenets and/or dogma as its main motivation and reasoning? 4) Is it acceptable for elected officials to hold back or alter scientific reports if they conflict with their own views, and how will you balance scientific information with politics and personal beliefs in your decision-making? 5) Should the modern synthesis of Creationism known as “Intelligent Design” be taught in the public school and is it acceptable for religious ideology to interfere in science? 6) Would you allow a non theistic individual (atheist, humanist, freethinker, etc) to openly serve on your staff? 7) What is your position on a constitutional amendment to define marriage and if in favor of a constitutional amendment to define marriage are your motivations religious or secular? 8) What is your position on abstinence-only sex education? 9) What is your position on government regulation and funding of stem cell research? 10) With regards specifically to the establishment of the United States as a nation, the history of the United States, and the law of the United States do you consider our country to be a “Christian Nation”?
The lunatics at Focus on the Family want people to pray for rain on Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. This is absurd on multiple levels–not only does nothing fail like prayer, but how on earth do they consider this to be a remotely ethical or rational thing to do? Why not just pray that Obama doesn’t get elected? Or follow the pattern with Supreme Court justices, and pray for death? (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) UPDATE (August 12, 2008): Focus on the Family has pulled the video from their site, claiming that it was all just a joke, as the Rocky Mountain News reports: ...
Ed Brayton gives a summary of Radley Balko’s list of tough questions for the candidates. It’s a pity that our mass media is unlikely to ask any of them. (Yet kudos to Fox News for publishing Radley Balko’s columns asking them–they seem to be a whole lot better on the web than they are on television.) Brayton quotes the questions for McCain about how serious he is about cutting corporate pork when he personally profits from it (the laws that mandate alcohol be sold through distributors like Hensley & Co, where his wife got her fortune) and how he reconciles his support for the drug war with the fact that his wife was permitted to avoid any criminal penalties for her prescription drug problems. For Obama, he selected as favorites how Obama plans to pay for his proposed civilian national security force, how he reconciles his support for the drug war with his own past use of marijuana and cocaine, and why he supported the farm bill and supports ethanol subsidies. I think Ed clearly picked out the best questions Balko asked of McCain, but here are a couple other questions for Obama that I particularly liked: In a speech to Cuban-Americans in Miami, you called the Cuban trade embargo “an important inducement for change,” a 180-degree shift from your prior position. The trade embargo has been in place for 46 years. Did denying an entire generation of Cubans access to American goods, culture, and ideas induce any actual change? Wasn’t the real effect just to keep Cubans poor and isolated? In communist countries like Vietnam and China, trade with the U.S. has ushered in economic reform, and vastly improved the standard of living. Why wouldn’t it be the same if we were to start trading with Cuba? In addition to the drugs, Cuba, and school voucher issues, you have also changed or revised your position in recent months on the war in Iraq, government eavesdropping and immunity for the telecom companies, and holding employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants. Under some circumstances, changing or revising one’s position can show admirable introspection — the ability to revise prior conceptions with new information. Some of your new positions are more conservative. Some are more liberal. But they do seem to have one thing in common: Should we be concerned that your shifts have been to those positions that give more power and influence to government? Are there any areas where you’d actually roll back the federal government?Balko asked a question of McCain about the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold), which I think did serious damage to the First Amendment and protects incumbent politicians by prohibiting any corporation (including nonprofits) or by an unincorporated entity using any corporate funds from running ads critical or supportive of a candidate within 30 days of a primary or within 60 days of a general election. I agree McCain should be asked tough questions about his apparent disrespect for political speech, but I didn’t particularly care for the specific question Balko came up with. ...
Stephen Baldwin says he will leave the country if Obama wins. But will he stay away for at least four years? Of course, he’s just mocking his brother Alec’s statement that he would leave the country if Bush were elected in 2000, which he didn’t follow through on, either.
Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, back on June 6: Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway. … Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.Sorry, but this is crazy talk–and crazy talk of the sort that the religious right will grab a hold of, translate “Lightworker” into “Light bearer” into “Lucifer,” and decide that Obama’s the Antichrist. Morford writes that he doesn’t literally believe this, and warns up front that: Warning: If you are a rigid pragmatist/literalist, itchingly evangelical, a scowler, a doubter, a burned-out former ’60s radical with no hope left, or are otherwise unable or unwilling to parse alternative New Age speak, click away right now, because you ain’t gonna like this one little bit.But even on a non-literal level, I don’t like it. The job of the president is to lead the executive branch of the government, not to be national daddy, mommy, or Messiah. Obama clearly has a lot of charisma and speaks very well, which is something that can be used positively or negatively–and more often than not it’s the latter. ...