Evening No: Not Technically Satanic

by: Natasha Chart

Wed Nov 04, 2009 at 19:00

- Bill in Portland, Maine, offers his rather hopeful read on last night's heartbreaking defeat for marriage equality.

- The most important thing you can do for the climate is to pressure your government.

- If it costs the US government $3 million to settle every illegal wiretapping case, I think they should take it out of the Bush and Cheney family fortunes. Also, I now have a keen interest in finding out if I've been wiretapped.

- A study of 47,677 threatened species, a third are at serious risk of extinction.

- The Slacktivist continues his walk-through of the Left Behind series, and Our Heroes' attempt to save Hattie Durham. The plot dissections work both as entertaining literary criticism and illuminating windows into the strains of Christian fundamentalism most likely to lead people to be Glenn Beck fans.

- "What if my mother had aborted me?" You wouldn't be around to have an opinion about it, that's what. Same as if your dad had worn a condom that night, or if your folks had decided do crosswords instead of each other, or, or, or, etc.

- Abortion is too controversial to cover, but Christian Science prayer treatments will be reimbursable. I hate our politics.

- Demonstrations in Iran on the anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy drew counter-protestors and police crackdowns, as it would seem that not all members of the Iranian public have forgotten the last election.

- Sean Paul Kelley has tried hard to like it, but is really not thrilled with India.

- Nouriel Roubini warns that the currency carry trade in dollars is leading to another asset bubble, and now, the banks are even bigger than when they were too-big-to-fail. Fun!

- The US never had much to fear from Najibullah Zazi. John Mueller explains at the link that if he's the top of the terrorist vanguard, we're probably pretty dang safe.

- The wingnuts descend farther into not-especially-veiled murder fantasies.

- A new scientific technique for gathering proxy data on ice coverage allows CO2 and ice sheet extent to be correlated 20 million years back. They found that, "Specifically, the last time that there was this much CO2 in the air, there was little to no sea ice in the Arctic, Greenland had little to no ice, there was essentially no ice on West Antarctica, and even East Antarctica was mostly ice-free."

- Via Raw Story, an elderly Michigan woman died of a tooth infection after Medicaid cuts stopped her dental coverage, and in completely unrelated news, Barclays' CEO tells churchgoers that bank profits are "not Satanic" but are instead totally compatible with Christianity.