NevadaGayAtheist

George Walker Bush is the WORST president this nation has ever had. This country will be paying the price for his appalling presidency for generations to come and you are an idiot for voting for him in the first place and nothing short of an asshole if you continue to support him. Please never speak to me again for I have no regard for your intelligence or your judgment.

Greg Saunders of The Talent Show has a couple of great posts up at This Modern World that have the goods on the real problem with immigration and what should be done about it.
This Modern World » George Bush’s Contempt For American Workers
Immigrants are being exploited, American workers are getting screwed, and the whole debate is happenening as if these two groups of victims are on opposite sides. If you want to stop illegal immigration, you don’t need to build a fence. The supply of illegal labor will go away once the demand for it ceases. We don’t need new plans, we need to rigorously enforce the laws already on the books. If that means that employers are going to have to pay more to the people doing the jobs that “Americans won’t do” and pass those costs on to the consumer, then it’s hardly our place to question the wisdom of the invisible hand, right?
This Modern World » Divide and Conquer
We’ve got a serious immigration problem in this country that’s the fault of businesses who have shifted jobs from American workers to illegal immigrants and the goverment that’s looked the other way for decades. The idea that the President and his allies want to codify this second class of workers (and solidify the division between the two) shows you how out of touch he is with working men and women. The struggle in the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere isn’t one between immigrants and Americans, but between the working class and the business/government entities that are looking for new avenues to cheap labor, even if it means exploiting ethnic tensions to turn people against each other.

Adherents.com: Atheist Statistics Agnostic

Nod to Jim Lippard at the Secular Outpost.

Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune: "This argument couldn't have been more wrong: The lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted - at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In short, fundamentalists have become no different than the 'godless' Stalinist Communists, to whom everything was permitted, since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress Toward Communism.

Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume made this point poignantly when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence."

Hellbound Alleee: A Civil Discussion

Nod to PZ Myers.

They hate us. What else is new. Bigotry prevails as usual.
Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority, according to new U of M study : News Releases: UMNnews: U of M.

Molly Saves the Day: 03/01/2006 - 03/31/2006: "If the government wanted to force you to donate blood monthly, would you be okay with this as legislation?

What if the government passed a law mandating that all children who are able to donate blood without dying should donate blood as well as all adults?

If someone living is a tissue match for someone else who needs a kidney, should the government be able to force them to give the kidney to the other person?

If it is okay to commandeer a woman's uterus in the name of preserving a life, why wouldn't it be okay to mandate the use of blood, bone marrow, or kidneys from living people in order to preserve lives?"

Ampersand at ALAS, a blog, has a post which does a good job of summing up why Libertarinism sounds great on the the first gloss, but when you delve deeper, has serious problems for those of us who care about both political AND economic freedom and opportunity.

Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Libertarian Follies
The flaw in Cathy's thinking - and in the thinking of most libertarians - is that she mistakenly writes as if the government were the only possible threat to freedom. In fact, the government is only one of many threats to freedom.
"Freedom," as libertarians use the word, never seems to mean anything other than freedom from government intrusion. Real freedom, however, means having a wide range of attractive options. When someone's options are eliminated by the marketplace, by illness, or by lack of available assistance, that is as real a threat to their freedom as government intrusion.

The problem of the religious left and atheists/secularists. They usually demand nothing less than absolute toadying from us or whine that we don't respect them.
Pharyngula: No respect for Christianity...so stop demanding it: "Explaining that the Right has successfully portrayed the Left as "godless" and then talking about how wrong they are because the Left is full of good religious people and that there are atheists on the Right too is simply perpetuating the idea the Right wants spread—that atheists are bad, a taint on the culture, and that a good way to demean a movement is to mention that its got atheists in it. Thanks, but no thanks. Can we instead just try to get across the message that freethinkers are good people we aren't ashamed of for a change?
...
So, no, the final word is that I will never give his religion a bit of respect. I will tolerate it. I will respect his right to practice his religion. But I will not hesitate to express my scorn every time one of my "allies" in this "coalition" thinks the way to better the country is to promote more belief in false fantasies."

alicublog: "Hello, my boy is a big fag and me and Lutiebelle decided to de-fag him but good. First I gotta ask: is your program approved by the American Psychological Association? It hain't? Shoot, Lutiebelle, guess'n we all gots to take dick up the ass! Th' APA has spoken!"

Go read all about NARTH, an gussied-up ex-gay organization that's wimpering like a baby because the APA won't give an endorsement or its baseless, science-free reparative therapy. This is what the AP has to say about reparative therapy.

Just one of the many, many things I have in common with George Clooney. ;-)
The Blog George Clooney: I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It! The Huffington Post

Nod to Tom Tommorow.

Update 2006-03-22: Clooney claims that he never wrote this column and that it was cobbled together, without his permission, from statements he's made. That's why the link is no good anymore.

...sexist asshat.

More than that, he's an irredeemable and rotting piece of degenerated humanity.

Susie Bright's Journal : Bury My Womb At Wounded Knee

Also check out South Dakota's Bill Napoli Clinches "Asshat of the Year" Award at 2% Company.

Amy Sullivan: Democrats Should Abandon Secularism, Church/State Separation?: "Christianity isn't an oppressed minority; Christianity is an ideology which has been behind every unjust tradition and power structure that this nation has ever experienced. Christianity doesn't need to be pandered to, it needs to be challenged, questioned, stood up to, and even mocked at times. Christians who don't get that can't be attracted to a political party in order to be part of the solution-they are still part of the problem because they still think that their religion merits special deference and privileges.

Pandering to that attitude in order to attract their political support is like pandering to white racists in order to attract their political support for a program to end racism. Does that makes sense? Of course not. A political party that wants to end privileges for whites has to first convince whites that their privileges are unjust and should never have existed-only then will their support be positive and productive. Similarly, many Christians need to be convinced that the privileges and deference which have traditionally been accorded to Christianity was never just and shouldn't continue."

More on HPV. There's a vaccine. The Religous Right doesn't want it because it might hamper their agenda. These people are monsters! Read this poignant story (SteveAudio: Sister Bluebird flying high above) about this man's sister who died from cervical cancer.

"So I take special interest in hearing that Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council is quoted as saying: 'Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex,' Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus."
...
"I watched my sister die. She knew she was going to Heaven. I felt, at that moment, that there indeed was a Heaven for her. Ms. Maher, until you watch someone you love die, don't lecture me, or anyone, about morality."

And works in a little humor too.
Pharyngula: Black & White: "Developmentally speaking, fertilization is one transition state among many. It's a major bottleneck and an incredibly wasteful process-the overwhelming majority of gametes fail to fuse-but even when fertilization occurs, Nature is quite cavalier about throwing the whole thing out and requiring us to start again. Other major events in which an error can negate all prior processes are implantation, gastrulation, neurulation, birth, and learning to drive."

Atheism with a smile - Los Angeles Times: "(B)y giving atheism a human face, Sweeney confounds the notion that atheists are amoral dupes."

Don't forget her blog.