It was three years ago today that President Bush played dress up flew a fighter jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln. You may remember some of his now-infamous words.
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.
How has Iraq gone since then? Think Progress took a look at the numbers since then. Read More »
Sometimes I feel a bit awkward about referring to the Mainstream Media as a single entity. But then comes along something that points out that they often work as a herd. One of these examples happened this weekend - with none other than fake pundit Stephen Colbert.
This was a triumphant sort of weekend for Colbert. He got an interview with 60 Minutes -- for good reasons. He talked to Morley Safer about his show, his life and why he doesn't let his kids watch The Colbert Report. But his real coup came the night before, as the guest of honor at the White House Correspondents Dinner. His appearance may single-handledly have tripled the ratings for C-Span (not that they care). Read More »
The American Cancer Society says that every year in the United States, an estimated 3,700 women die of cervical cancer. Around the world, it is nearer to 270,000.
According to the National Cancer Institute, Human papillomaviruses (HPVs) "are the major cause of cervical cancer." In addition to this, they may cause other cancers.
HPVs are now recognized as the major cause of cervical cancer. Studies also suggest that HPVs may play a role in cancers of the anus, vulva, vagina, and some cancers of the oropharynx (the middle part of the throat that includes the soft palate, the base of the tongue, and the tonsils). Data from several studies also suggest that infection with HPV is a risk factor for penile cancer (cancer of the penis).
The National Cancer Instituate also says that there is no cure for HPV infection - but that soon will not be true. Read More »
First, if you're in Minnesota, you may want to beware of the fish. The non-native fish. Just like everywhere else in the world, it looks like non-native species are pushing out the native species.
A commercial fisherman landed a 45- to 50-pound grass carp in the Lower St. Croix River earlier this month, raising new concerns about invasive fish that are moving north through the Mississippi River from southern states.
A 45-pound fish? Wow. Here in the Land of Enchantment (New Mexico), we don't have many any of those. Read More »
Well, folks, President "Too-Little-Too-Late" is back for more (in)action. In this episode, President Bush decides to actually acknowledge the gas problem.
Now, I know that President Bush may not understand the crunch that a hike in gas prices puts many Americans into. Like many national politicians, Bush grew up privileged and never had to search the couch cushions for change to buy some bread or a gallon of gas. Read More »
The CIA fired a senior official who allegedly leaked information about the secret overseas prisons that the US had.
Several former veteran C.I.A. officials said the dismissal of an agency employee over a leak was rare and perhaps unprecedented. One official recalled the firing of a small number of agency contractors, including retirees, for leaking several years ago.
The right wing has rejoiced. They have called for the firing of anyone involved in leaking classified information, and they got one. One who leaked information of secret government-controlled prisons that were legal black holes. Where the US could do whatever they wanted to the prisoners with no oversight from human rights groups or anyone else. Read More »
A Kansas teacher was forced to remove a drawing of the "flying spaghetti monster."
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the deity of a parody religion created by Bobby Henderson in 2005 to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. On the site and in the letter, Henderson professes belief in a supernatural Creator entity that resembles spaghetti and meatballs, called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and suggests that FSMism should be taught in science classrooms, essentially arguing a reductio ad absurdum against the teaching of Intelligent Design.
The Wichita Eagle reports: Read More »
I was listening to Fresh Air on KANW while in my car today. I listen to Fresh Air just about every day; Terry Gross is a very good interviewer, and while sometimes the subjects can be dry, other times her interviews are classics.
But the best part of today's show was not an interview (with all apologies to Gross) - it was a segment of Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and professor at Stanford. Nunberg talked about the use of the word "alien" as it applies to illegal immigration.
This piqued my interest, because I recently was involved in a debate at The Ramblings of Another Guy (actually friendlier than most) with someone else in the blogosphere about the usage of the word "alien" - I said that the word was disrespectful. Nunberg discusses the problems with using "alien".
[A]lien still suggests strangeness and difference -- people who are "not of our sort." That's partly due to the science-fiction writers who picked the word up in the 1930's to refer to extraterrestrial beings.[1] It's revealing that alien is far more likely to be used to describe Mexicans and Central Americans than Europeans. The tens of thousands of Irish and Poles who are in the country illegally are almost always referred to as "immigrants," not "aliens." And anti-immigrationists almost never use aliens to describe foreigners who are in the country legally -- on news broadcasts, "illegal aliens" outnumbers "legal aliens" by about 100 to 1. Whatever its legal meaning, when it comes to the crunch, alien means "brown people who snuck in."
So there is also a bit of a racial intonation when you use "alien" - so what to use? I use "illegal immigrant." But that is not perfect either. Back to Nunberg:
Nowadays, those connotations have led the majority of the mainstream media to steer clear of the word aliens -- "illegal immigrants" tends to be the phrase of choice. But illegal has something more than a technical meaning, too. True, dictionaries define the word simply as "not according to law." But there are disparaging connotations to the negative prefix in illegal, which is actually just a variant of the prefix in-. Inhuman doesn't mean the same thing as "not human," and you don't become irreligious simply by not going to church. And you hear the same negative tone in words like insincere, inflexible, and illegitimate. So it isn't surprising that we reserve illegal for conveying strong disapproval. We may talk about illegal drugs, but we don't describe the Porsche 959 as an illegal car, even though it can't legally be driven in the US.Then too, we don't usually describe law-breakers as being illegal in themselves. Jack Abramoff may have done illegal lobbying, but nobody has called him an illegal lobbyist. And whatever laws Bernie Ebbers and Martha Stewart may have broken, they weren't illegal CEO's.
So illegal immigrant isn't neutral either. But there is no easy solution in such moral dilemmas. Like everything else that deals with morality, there are not two sides to a story, but dozens of positions, and the gray areas are so large, they are practically the entire debate.
There is no single right answer - possibly no right answer at all.
Aliens, illegals, even undocumented -- over the past hundred years, it has been in the nature of the language of immigration to suppress the human side of the story. Yet language can't wholly obscure those realities. As the Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote in 1965 about the European experience with immigration, "We called for a labor force, but it was human beings that came."[4] Read More »
