Christian Murderers in Oregon

Religion: Faith healing in Oregon on trial. The first week in the trial of Jeff and Marci Beagley for the negligent homicide of their son Neil concluded on Friday with a doctor's testimony that signs of Neil Beagley's failing health gave his parents ample warning that the teenager needed immediate medical treatment.

Neil Beagley of Oregon City was only 16 when he died in June 2008 of complications from a urinary tract blockage that doctors said could have been easily treated. Neil and his parents refused to seek medical treatment in favor of prayer. The decision proved fatal.

The Beagleys are also the parents of Raylene Worthington, whose 15-month-old daughter, the Beagleys' granddaughter, died in 2008 of pneumonia and a blood infection.

Jeff and Marci Beagley are members of the Followers of Christ Church, which rejects doctors and medical treatment in favor of faith healing. The church has become notorious in Oregon for allowing children to die rather than seek routine medical care.

The Beagley's defense hangs on the claim that Neil, being 16 years of age, had the legal right to refuse medical attention under Oregon law. Yet poor Neil never had a chance. Home schooled and isolated, surrounded and raised by religious zealots lacking any moral compass, Neil was brainwashed from birth.

In addition to the negligent homicide charges, Jeff and Marci Beagley should be charged with 16 years of child abuse. What else can we call parents who isolate their children and feed them a diet of nothing but religious mumbo jumbo and biblical non-sense?

A Modest Proposal: Let Corporations Vote

As published in Umair Haque's Harvard Business Review blog:

Dear Supreme Court,

I'm highly impressed with your recent decision to vaporize limits on corporate political spending. It's the kind of campaign finance reform our ailing res publica needs. In fact, I found it so inspirational, here's an even better idea.

Let's give corporations the right to vote. One share, one vote. The logic? It's simple. Corporations are people; all people are created equal; ergo, corporations must have equal rights — and no right is more important than the right to vote. (Well, maybe the right to buy fully automatic machine guns, but that's another story).

Goldman Sachs, for example, has 514,080,000 shares outstanding — so they'd get 514 millon votes (in fact, maybe we should give them more, because they're so smart). Ford has 3.31 billion shares outstanding, so they'd get approximately 2.8 billion more votes than Goldman.

I've discussed this with several other economists, and we all agree: it's the most efficient solution. Why, it should save hundreds of millions in lobbying alone. Who needs K Street when corporations can simply, quickly, easily vote in the candidate of their choice? As a bonus, political scientists agree that the increasing polarization between left and right would quickly disappear, too. Human people — with their perpetual squabbling — would be simply outvoted by corporate people, who know what's good for everyone.

But the most lucrative upside is this. The money that's saved can then be invested in the high-value products and services which our publicly traded corporations, the Goliaths of the global economy, excel at — like toxic CDOs, bigger burgers, and mega bonuses. And if we've learned anything over the last 30 years, it's this: everyone's better off when the benefits of more mass-produced stuff trickle down to the average (lazy, shiftless) Joe.

It's time to save our democracy, Justices — through a better kind of democracy. I call it "corpocracy": power to the people who matter most, corporations. Democracy 2.0: it's the next stage in the evolution of the American Dream.

It's not just humans who are people. We've been discriminating against corporate people for too long, and it's unethical. Are you with me, Justices? Its time to liberate corporations from human oppression. Here's hoping it's your legacy.

Satan Writes In...

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake.

Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best,
Satan

(From Minneapolis - St. Paul Star Tribune)

Where Will Conan Go?

Some Recent Humor

On Fox News, Ann Coulter said she's against body scans at the airport because terrorists will still be able to hide explosives in their anus. So finally Ann Coulter is speaking on a topic she knows something about.

Jay Leno, January 6, 2010


Rush Limbaugh was released from a hospital in Hawaii two days after suffering from chest pains. He's fine. Doctors say they don't know what caused it, but it may have something to do with being an overweight man whose job is being enraged.

Jimmy Fallon, January 4, 2010

Yesterday, President Obama prank-called a Washington radio station, calling himself 'Barry from D.C.' Then, just to mess with him, Obama called Glenn Beck's radio show as 'B. Hussein from Kenya.'

Conan O'Brien, December 23, 2009

Dick Cheney has been named “Conservative of the Year” by Human Events magazine. I think this is the first time “Dick Cheney” and “human” have been used in the same sentence.

David Letterman, December 22, 2009

The design for George W. Bush's presidential library was unveiled Wednesday in Dallas, and features a lantern-shaped roof that will glow at night. Mr. President, I don't want to make any more jokes about you being dumb, but you have to meet me halfway. Don't build a library where the lights are on when no one is home.

Steh Meyers, SNL Weekend Update, Nov. 21, 2009

New York Times: The Senate is Unconstitutional

...the Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional: as we saw during the recent health care debacle, a 60-vote majority is required to overcome a filibuster and pass any contested bill. The founders, though, were dead set against supermajorities as a general rule, and the ever-present filibuster threat has made the Senate a more extreme check on the popular will than they ever intended.

This change to the Constitution was not the result of, say, a formal amendment, but a procedural rule adopted in 1975: a revision of Senate Rule 22, which was the old cloture rule. Before 1975, it took two-thirds of the Senate to end a filibuster, but it was the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” filibuster: if senators wanted to stop a vote, they had to bring in the cots and the coffee and read from Grandma’s recipe for chicken soup until, unshaven, they keeled over from their own rhetorical exhaust.

For the record, nothing like Senate Rule 22 appears in the Constitution, nor was there unlimited debate until Vice President Aaron Burr presided over the Senate in the early 180os. In 1917, after a century of chaos, the Senate put in the old Rule 22 to stop unlimited filibusters. Because it was about stopping real, often distressing, floor debate, one might have been able to defend that rule under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which says, “Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.”

As revised in 1975, Senate Rule 22 seemed to be an improvement: it required 60 senators, not 67, to stop floor debate. But there also came a significant change in de facto Senate practice: to maintain a filibuster, senators no longer had to keep talking. Nowadays, they don’t even have to start; they just say they will, and that’s enough. Senators need not be on the floor at all. They can be at home watching Jimmy Stewart on cable. Senate Rule 22 now exists to cut off what are ghost filibusters, disembodied debates.

As a result, the supermajority vote no longer deserves any protection under Article I, Section 5 — if it ever did at all. It is instead a revision of Article I itself: not used to cut off debate, but to decide in effect whether to enact a law. The filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent.

Here’s why. First, the Constitution explicitly requires supermajorities only in a few special cases: ratifying treaties and constitutional amendments, overriding presidential vetoes, expelling members and for impeachments. With so many lawyers among them, the founders knew and operated under the maxim “expressio unius est exclusio alterius” — the express mention of one thing excludes all others. But one need not leave it at a maxim. In the Federalist Papers, every time Alexander Hamilton or John Jay defends a particular supermajority rule, he does so at length and with an obvious sense of guilt over his departure from majority rule.

Second, Article I, Section 3, expressly says that the vice president as the presiding officer of the Senate should cast the deciding vote when senators are “equally divided.” The procedural filibuster does an end run around this constitutional requirement, which presumed that on the truly contested bills there would be ties. With supermajority voting, the Senate is never “equally divided” on the big, contested issues of our day, so that it is a rogue senator, and not the vice president, who casts the deciding vote.

The procedural filibuster effectively disenfranchises the vice president, eliminating as it does one of the office’s only two constitutional functions. Yet the founders very consciously intended for the vice president, as part of the checks and balances system, to play this tie-breaking role

...

Hamilton denounced the use of supermajority rule in these prophetic words: “The history of every political establishment in which this principle has prevailed is a history of impotence, perplexity and disorder.” That is a suitable epitaph for what has happened to the Senate.

Doesn't Seem Right, Does It?

I "stole" this image from An Atheist's Answer blog because it exposes the general "unfairness" of christianity.

And An Atheist's Answer blog is well worth checking out if you are so inclinded.

An Interesting Perspective on the USA and China

The following comes from an article written by Scott Burns, a syndicated columnist and Chief Investment Strategist at AssetBuilder. (The entire article can be read by following this link, or you can peruse the main thrust of it here...)

George Friedman holds up a recent Fortune magazine, his face a portrait in incredulity. The cover declares that China is buying everything, much as the Japanese were doing nearly two decades ago. The inside story is titled “It’s China’s World. (We just live in it.)”

“If China is so healthy, why is everyone there not investing in China?” he asks.

“The obvious question is: Why are they doing this? Fortune doesn’t remember that we saw this before. It’s called capital flight.”

Mr. Friedman, the founder and prime mover at Stratfor, goes on to point out some basic facts about the size of the U.S. economy relative to China. While we bemoan the loss of industrial capacity in the United States, for instance, we still manufacture more than China and Japan combined. And the United States still produces 25 percent of the world’s output. And our output is larger than the combined gross domestic products of the next three largest economies, Japan, China and Germany.

We simply don’t know our own strength.

“If we grow at 2.5 percent a year, China would have to grow at 8.2 percent just to keep the absolute gap steady. It will take generations for the Chinese to catch up,” he says.

Nor do we understand the deep poverty of China. He points out that China has a population of 1.3 billion people. But of that number, 600 million have an income under $1,000 a year. Another 440 million have incomes of $1,000 to $2,000 a year. Only 60 million people have incomes of $20,000 a year or more.

“In the U.S. we have ignored the numbers. So we say all industry has left the United States. That’s rubbish,” he declares.