LibertyVoter.Org

By Paul Rosenberg, Salon

When scientists announced the discovery of water on Mars recently, Rush Limbaugh drew the obvious conclusion: It was all part of a conspiratorial plot:

LIMBAUGH: If there was once all that water on Mars, and there is a lot of water here on earth, what’s going to happen to our ocean? How did the water vanish?

My point is, they’re presenting all this stuff to you as fact just like they’re presenting everything involving global warming as scientific fact. It`s nothing but wild guesses. It’s nothing but based on computer models which is the result of data input that who knows if it’s legit or not.

That’s to be expected from Limbaugh, I suppose. If you’re a huckster by trade, the truth is your enemy—and not just the truth, but the very possibility of truth. The veryexistence of science is a threat to you. So naturally, if you’ve got as much time to fill as Limbaugh does, you engage in war on science. But the real problem isn’t Rush Limbaugh, it’s the way that the entirety of the GOP adapts to him in various different ways—especially those who are deemed “sensible” in the world of bipartisan consensus, whose job it is to make plausible excuses for their sorry party.

Case in point: GOP strategist Liz Mair, who back in March was abruptly fired after just one day as a Scott Walker online strategist, in response to outrage over an earlier set of tweets critical of Iowa during a January forum. After her firing, Mair fired off a long tweet storm clarifying her views, which she did again—with a more critical edge—just after Walker left the race a few weeks ago. In short, if there’s anyone working inside the GOP likely to be honestly critical of its problems, it’s Mair. Which presumably is why MSNBC likes having her on. But Limbaugh’s anti-science conspiracism clearly illuminates the limits of such critical honesty.

Thus, when Chris Matthews played that clip of Limbaugh and opened up a discussion on “Hardball” on Sept. 29 [transcript], Mair …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Adam Johnson, AlterNet

Bill Maher and his good friend, Richard Dawkins, sat down on his show Real Time last night for the fifth time in almost eight seasons. Their discussion, per usual, was an agreeable, tedious mix of self-victimization and indignation about why so many on the left – specifically the Twitter left – think their obsession with “radical Islam” makes them bigots.

“It's so dumb, because all the people who are accused of being Islamophobes like you and me and Sam [Harris], we're liberals.” Maher said perplexed. “When I was a child in my home, I was seven and my parents said 'we're for Kennedy, we're for him letting black people go to college in the south” Maher fumed, as Dawkins nodded enthusiastically along with Maher's notoriously sycophantic audience. 

“Why don't liberals love us”, they ask. “We're so goddamn liberal but for some reason our critiques of Islam are seen as hateful”. And while Maher is correct that he's generally good on taxes and calling out Republican bigotry, this doesn't give him a free pass on his rank Islamophobia (a term he thinks is “meaningless”.)  

Firstly, no one thinks “Islam is a protected species” as Maher put it. This is a typical strawman New Athiest employ. Dawkins doesn't go after “all religions” equally. Quite the opposite, he has said that Islam is uniquely sinister, referring to it as “unmitigated evil“, on numerous occasions. Accusations of bigotry on their part, therefore, are not selective in favor of Islam, they are a reaction to their selective, repeated highlighting of it. Secondly, this position is dripping with libertarian false equivalency. The “I criticize all religions equally” is the close cousin to “I criticize all races equally” — a principle that sounds cute in theory but willfully ignores the burden of history and imperialism.

To the Mahers and the Dawkins of the world, the connection between America's wars in the Middle East is cosmetic at best, and “silly  liberal” relativism, at worst. That President Obama – who …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Marina Hyde, The Guardian

It is typically intriguing of Justin Bieber to choose cosmology for his first foray into scientific debunking, when many feel he could provide a more elegant rebuke to Darwinism. Either way, it’s bad news for Cern (Twitter followers: 1.24 million) as Justin (Twitter followers: 68 million) finally starts using his power for good – in this case, to explain how ludicrous the so-called origins of the universe are.

“I’m the type of dude who always wants to figure it out,” explains the What Do U Mean hitmaker. “Science makes a lot of sense,” he concedes. Or does he? “Then I start thinking — wait, the ‘big bang’. For a ‘big bang’ to create all this is more wild to think about than thinking about there being a God. Imagine putting a bunch of gold into a box, shaking up the box, and out comes a Rolex. It’s so preposterous once people start saying it.”

Word. I think I read somewhere that the watchmaker was blind, but maybe we need to accept that he was just wearing really limited-edition Wayfarers.

Anyway, where was I? Or rather, where was Justin? The answer to that, he’ll have you know, is “in a good place”. In case you have been preoccupied with the various fripperies of the news pages, you won’t have failed to notice that the world is being gifted Bieber 3.0 at present, with the star anxious to use all media appearances to declare the coming of his third age. First he was a teen pop sensation; then he was a bad boy; now he is at a point in his evolution – and I don’t mean to use a curse-word there – where he is no longer going to hide the fact that Jesus is his salvation.

Consequently, Justin has granted a lengthy interview to a mag called Complex – which seems anything but – where he ruminates on Christianity. Or what we might more accurately call …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By AlterNet Staff, AlterNet

Bill Maher took some time out on Friday night's Real Time to point out the modern GOP was currently worshiping a totally fantastical Jesus. One who's contemptuous of the poor, greedy, and less about values and more about maximizing shareholder value. 

To do this he created Supply Side Jesus who wears a suit and believes in small government. He's closer to Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli than the biblical Jesus – a point Maher drove home by quoting a series of bible quotes that would be entirely foreign to the current Republican party. 

“He'd love to help the less fortunate,” Maher said about Supply Side Jesus, “but he has investors to think about. Like the time [he] performed a miracle, creating a bounty of fishes and gave them all to the 1% so they could trickle down to the takers.”

Watch the clip below:

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Source: ALTERNET