Intelligent design

From Effect Measure

Great line of the day

BCer on whether Iggy should go ahead and force an election now:

It looks like the Blue Jays have come back down to Earth, and like most average Canadians I don't have a cottage, so I say let's go.

Shorter

Shorter Pat Buchanan:

If a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx actually got to Princeton and Yale on merit then she would have to be smarter than just about every white man in America including me, and how could that be?

Buchanan is finished -- nobody cares anymore what racist drivel he is spouting.

Thanks

There's a great scene in The Great Escape where Steve McQueen is lying tangled in the barbed wire fence with his dying motorcycle, and he pats the cycle in gratitude for its attempt -- its at the 2:30 point of the video.
I was reminded of this when last night Fleury patted the crossbar:

'It [the crossbar] made a big save for me and I just said 'Thank you,'' said Fleury, who rubbed the iron after dodging a key bullet.

What a great game that was.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

It's been a tough week at work so I haven't been able to blog much -- here's two cartoons to make up for it -- featuring The Shropshire Slasher



and the fair Melissa

Its sorta like that movie

Final Destination.

Oh, so its our fault then?

You know the phrase, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging?
I guess Lisa Raitt hasn't heard it.
Or maybe she misunderstood it!
Because now she's saying its the fault of reporters that her remarks were "so inflamed":

Raitt told Toronto radio station CFRB that when she spoke of the isotope shortage and radioactive leaks as being “sexy,” she meant only that they would be “attractive for people to report on.”
“I knew what I had said, I certainly knew the spirit in which I had said it, which was by no means to be disrespectful to cancer victims or parents,” Raitt said . . . “I didn’t think that it would have been so taken out of context and so widely reported and so inflamed,” she said.

The Ottawa Press Gallery will be so impressed.

Jealous

An idiotic Globe and Mail column by a nitwit called Sarah Hampson trashes the Obamas' trip to New York to see a Broadway show. She asks:

Was I the only one on the planet who thought I was watching a new reality dating show for politicians, in which husbands and wives vie for a prize for being the best possible spouse of all time?

Yes.
This has been another edition of short answers to stupid questions.

Wow

Dexter just strikes me as a very likable man -- and, good campaigning aside, never underestimate the power of simple likability in politics

Great line of the day

Impolitical writes about how the Harper Conservative government ignores judicial rulings they don't like:

A supposed 'law and order' government that hypocritically puts on elaborate presentations replete with backdrops full of nifty slogans to make a show of being strong criminal justice types. That 'law and order' posturing is a farce in the face of these repeated rulings. On the one hand they seek to ratchet up penalties and sentences, yet on the other, when they're the ones being handed a sentence in the form of these lost Federal Court cases, they ignore those judgments. They're the lawless ones with no moral authority to support their latest electoral gambits. They cynically count on the Canadian people not to understand their hypocrisy.

Emphasis mine. Thanks to Boris for the link.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

"Stop shaking your eyes!

Software error?

We know software errors can cause a computer to "crash"? Well, I just found out that software errors can cause airplanes to crash too.
Makes those Mac-PC commercials a lot less funny, doesn't it?

I'll second that!

John Cole writes about people like Andrew Sullivan dithering over whether they would support a woman having an abortion or not:

What this country really needs right now is a serious case of mind your own damned business. We’ve turned into a nation of busybodies and scolds, and people just need to back off. And that goes for the people opposed to and trying to make illegal Andrew’s marriage, for people like Andrew who sound like they want the weight of the law to come down on people making tragic medical decisions that lead to late-term abortions, for the nutjobs who thought they knew better than Michael Schiavo how to handle his horrible situation with his wife, to the lunatics screaming “murder” when we do stem cell research, and so on.
I’m really sick of the crap, and I don’t mean to harsh completely on Andrew, because I sense he does struggle with these matters. But if Andrew’s conscience can’t support a late-term abortion, then right now he is sitting pretty, because under our current system, anyone who doesn’t want an abortion doesn’t have to have one.
And that really should be the end of that.

And somewhere else today I was reading a rant asking why the TV pundits think the only opinions worth discussing on the abortion issue are those of anti-choice men. I'll second that one, too.

Great line of the day

Dave writes about how the Arkansas soldiers and Dr. Tiller were both shot by religious nutballs:

Anyone using their religion, regardless of what it is, as an excuse to shield their behaviour, instead of being able to steer that excuse to mitigate guilt or sentence, should have their sentence extended and the use of religion as an excuse treated as an aggravating factor . . . If an individual drags their religion into souless murder they should be made to pay a greater price.

Emphasis mine.

Late term abortion

This is a late term abortion:

In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.
We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. I could describe in great detail the procedures and the pain and suffering that everyone is subjected to in these situations. However, that is not the point of the post. We can all imagine that this is not something that we would wish on anyone. The point is that the pain and suffering were only mitigated by the compassion and competence of Dr. George Tiller and his staff. We are all diminished today for a host of reasons but most of all because a man of great compassion and courage has been lost to the world.

And this:

I didn't know Dr. Tiller personally but I know of someone who he cared for from the Kansas City area. She was a young woman who was pregnant with an anacephalic baby, one without a complete brain and had no chance of surviving at birth. After a sonogram identified this situation she was so distraught that her ob-gyn here send her to Wichita to terminate the pregnancy. There was a great physical and psychological risk for her to continue carrying a baby that had no chance of life. Upon arrival with her mother, she had to make her way through the protesters who tried to pull her aside. It was a devastating experience to be attacked in that manner and it was a choice made to save her life and sanity. God bless Dr. Tiller and his family.

And this:

. . . My husband and I are devout Christians, and during that time we prayed and prayed, believing that God was going to heal our girls. Instead, the new prognosis was even grimmer than we had anticipated: The twins' conditions were actually growing worse. Savanna's fluid had spread around her abdomen, signaling a condition called ascites, which has a wide range of consequences, including putting additional pressure on the organs, thereby causing respiratory distress and heart failure. Sierra had a leaky heart valve. The doctor also suspected that they were developing Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome, which meant that Savanna was taking blood from Sierra through their shared placenta. Sierra's chance of survival outside the womb hovered at around 5 percent—and she was the healthier of the two girls.
When the doctor who performed this second ultrasound suggested I consider terminating the pregnancy, I grew furious. As a Christian and a married woman who desperately wanted a child, I'd never given much thought to abortion. Like many others, I assumed that only women with unwanted pregnancies had the procedure. I wanted my twins to live. We're not doing that, I thought. There's just no way. But as John pointed out, Savanna was going to die, and when she did, she would take her sister with her. My doctor also confirmed that Savanna's illness could trigger a rare syndrome in me: I was mirroring some of her symptoms and retaining fluids. My body was extremely swollen and I could hardly walk. If I continued the pregnancy, I could put my own health at risk too . . . I have never before been a political activist. But if I have a chance to change even one person's heart by telling my story, that's what I want to do for my girls. I want Savanna's and Sierra's lives to have meant something.

And this:

. . . Instead of cinnamon and spice, our child came with technical terms like hydrocephalus and spina bifida. The spine, she said, had not closed properly, and because of the location of the opening, it was as bad as it got. What they knew -- that the baby would certainly be paralyzed and incontinent, that the baby's brain was being tugged against the opening in the base of the skull and the cranium was full of fluid -- was awful. What they didn't know -- whether the baby would live at all, and if so, with what sort of mental and developmental defects -- was devastating. Countless surgeries would be required if the baby did live. None of them would repair the damage that was already done . . . Though the baby might live, it was not a life that we would choose for our child, a child that we already loved. We decided to terminate the pregnancy. It was our last parental decision.

And I do not understand why anyone would think it was moral to deny parents the right to make their own decision about abortion.