McCain doesn't know Shiite

Granted, I'm no foreign policy genius, but even I know that Iran is Shiite and loathes the Sunni al Qaeda. How is this not HUGELY important news?! Imagine if Sen. Clinton or Obama said this; it'd be all over the news for weeks.

Come on Senator McCain, at least get your facts right when you're trying to hype up war with Iran. Via wonkette:

Nobody understands the military and the Middle East like John McCain does, because he invented them. He also invented calculus, and the Cleveland Steamer, and the French poetry form known as the villanelle. But today we will be talking about Sunnis and Shias, which John McCain also invented, back when he was a young pup hanging out with Mohammed. It's been so long that McCain has forgotten which is which!

Today he told reporters that Iran was training al Qaeda fighters and sending them into Iraq. This is hilarious because of course Iran is Shiite and al Qaeda is Sunni, so they hate each other.

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate."

Joe Lieberman quickly intervened, suggesting that Iran is training Shiite extremists and sending them into Iraq. So there you have it, old foreign policy wonk and most-credible-war-on-terror-guy McCain can't remember which religious sect aligns with which ancient hatred, because he is senile.

biblical adam: the bedroom acrobat

so there's a museum dedicated to creationism... in kentucky (where else?) ... and they made a video about how god created the universe a la genesis...and then this happened:

In a video shown at a new museum purporting to demonstrate how God created the universe, actor Eric Linden portrays Adam breathing life's first breath. A jaunt around the Internet shows Linden posing alongside a drag queen on an explicit Web site he owned called Bedroom Acrobat, the Associated Press reports. The Web site allows its network of members to post explicit stories and photos, AP reports. When it learned of Linden's activities with the Web site, the Creation Museum in Kentucky pulled the 40-second video in which he appears. "We are currently investigating the veracity of these serious claims of his participation in projects that don't align with the biblical standards and moral code upon which the ministry was founded," a spokesman for Answers in Genesis, which built the newly opened museum, said in a written statement to AP.

answers in genesis? really? i suppose that explains the logic behind the associated group "intelligence in george w. bush." still, the idea of a drag queen w/ adam and eve in the garden of eden is pretty awesome.

shame, smithsonian, shame on you

The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum. Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered "to show that global warming could go either way," Sullivan said.

really? back to this whole idea that there is any debate about humans causing global warming? believe it or not, there is not two sides to this issue. it's here. we caused it. now we gotta deal. it's a sad day when an institution like the smithsonain thinks it has to fudge the scientific facts cause they may get their funding pulled by a congress and president indebted to the energy lobby. if you don't take my word for it (and you really shouldn't since my idea of science was and is mr. wizard), here's what dr. naomi oreskes of ucal said (quite well, methinks) on this phony debate:

So why does it seem as if there is major scientific disagreement? Because a few noisy skeptics -- most of whom are not even scientists -- have generated a lot of chatter in the mass media. At the National Press Club recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen dismissed the consensus as "religious belief." To be sure, no scientific conclusion can ever be proven, absolutely, but it is no more a "belief" to say that Earth is heating up than it is to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information or that quarks are the basic building blocks of subatomic matter. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best available science, and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.
The chatter of skeptics is distracting us from the real issue: how best to respond to the threats that global warming presents.

and while the only power point presentation i did not fall asleep in (that's really why it deserved an oscar) was a good jumpstart, news like this self-censorship at the smithsonain of all places does not bode well...