Just 35 percent of self-identified conservatives said they had a “great deal of trust in science” in 2010, a new report published in the journal American Sociological Review reveals. The finding marks a 28 percent decline since the first survey taken in 1974, “when 48 percent of conservatives—about the same percentage as liberals—trusted science.”
Source: ThinkProgress.org
Source: MoveOn.org
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. . .[I]n the wake of the recent killings by a Muslim extremist, the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy is proposing a new law that would jail repeat visitors to extremist web sites. It is a measure that strips away core free speech rights of citizens and gives the government a new ambiguous power to arrest people for the things that they read. . . .
Sarkozy’s Internet law would leave it to the government to determine what sites are espousing “terrorist” viewpoints. Authoritarian governments have long defined critics as criminals and terrorists from China to Iran to North Korea. . . .
It is a pattern that is all too familiar to Americans. After an individual or group commits a heinous act of terror, the government immediately uses the attack to limit freedoms of all citizens and to expand its own ill-defined powers.
Brazilian police seek charges against US oil company Chevron and drilling contractor Transocean for an oil spill off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilians don’t mess around when it comes to oil spills. See what they’re planning to do to their oil barons – that we here in the United States need to copy.
As the line between religious beliefs and political views becomes more and more blurred in the Republican presidential campaign season, MSNBC’s groundbreaking weekend program “Up w/Chris Hayes” will take an in-depth look into atheism in America on Sunday, March 25. The two-hour program (8-10am ET) will talk to several prominent figures in the field, examining how religious views intersect with our political views on both the left and the right, and will discuss the marginalization of those who do not believe in God. The special program comes one day after Saturday’s Reason Rally for atheism on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
Guests of the program will include: Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion”; Steven Pinker, author of “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”; Susan Jacoby, author of “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism”; Robert Wright, author of “The Evolution of God”; and Journalist Jamila Bey.
As part of the discussion about atheism in America, “Up” will speak with a working Christian member of the clergy who will reveal publicly, for the first time, that he is an atheist.
Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Actually, it’s the noise a great political party makes when it loses what’s left of its mind. And it happened — where else? — on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot. . . .
. . . [T]he president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports. . . .
As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it’s one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation’s political life; it’s something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe’s paranoia to receive the party’s presidential nod. . . .
On the rainy night of Sunday, Feb. 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked to a convenience store in Sanford, Fla. On his way home, with his Skittles and iced tea, the African-American teenager was shot and killed. The gunman, George Zimmerman, didn’t run. He claimed that he killed the young man in self-defense. The Sanford Police agreed and let him go. . . .
So, while the police and State Attorney Norm Wolfinger have defended their inaction, a democratic demand for justice has ricocheted around the country, prompting a U.S. Justice Department investigation and leading Wolfinger to promise to convene a grand jury.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has called for the removal of Sanford Police Chief Lee. NAACP President Ben Jealous, recounting a mass meeting in a Sanford-area church Tuesday night, quoted a local resident who stood up and said, “‘If you kill a dog in this town, you’d be in jail the next day.’ Trayvon Martin was killed four weeks ago, and his killer is still walking the streets.”
With his gun.
Always Question Authority 