What I’m Reading, August 7, 2014

Fox News Calls Ruth Bader Ginsburg an Ignorant Misandrist, Amanda Marcotte, Slate, August 1, 2014

Ginsburg’s comments inspired comical levels of umbrage-taking on The Five on Fox News, where Andrea Tantaros worked herself into full-blown “misandry!” mode. “Isn’t she sort of saying, ‘Keep men away from this court?’ ” she complained. “I get it. She’s a fan of birth control, but she is an enemy to the Bill of Rights.”

“Can you imagine if Justice Scalia would say the same thing about the women on the court, that they have a blind spot? In other words, they’re not reasonable?” Tantaros said. That is an interesting hypothetical, given that, in his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito specifically shut down the possibility that any other kind of health care would be affected by this ruling. He’s the one who singled out contraception as a lesser form of health care, not Ginsburg. But hey, maybe the court will soon rule on whether male-only health care counts as health care enough to be protected as health care, and Tantaros will see her theory put to the test. I’m sure that will happen any day now.

A Reminder: Texas Murdered An Almost Certainly Innocent Man, Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns & Money, August 4, 2014

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What I’m Reading, May 9, 2014

Philipp Clüver [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsBarbarians in Oklahoma, Charles Pierce, Esquire, April 30, 2014 (h/t PZ Myers)

I am saying this quite deliberately. The state of Oklahoma committed an act of fucking barbarism last night. It did so under the color of law, which makes every citizen of that benighted state complicit in the act of fucking barbarism. The governor of that state, a pink balloon named Mary Fallin, is a fucking barbarian. A state legislator named Mike Christian is a fucking barbarian, for reasons we will get to in a moment. Every politician in that benighted state belongs in a fucking cage this morning.

(Emphasis in original.)

Andrew Wakefield: Attracting antivaccine cranks like moths to a flame since 1998, Orac, Respectful Insolence, May 7, 2014

Andrew Wakefield, like many antivaccinationists, doesn’t like being called an “antivaccinationist” or “antivaccine.” This becomes evident in a part of the interview where Billy D [Billy DeMoss] asks Wakefield if there are any vaccines that are effective; i.e., if there are any vacines that “work.” It’s clear that Billy D wants Wakefield to say that vaccines don’t work. He doesn’t say that—exactly. He does, however, equivocate. Instead of saying whether vaccines work or not, he does say that vaccines result in the production of antibodies against the organisms for which they are designed, after which he questions whether antibodies actually lead to immunity and pulls out the antivaccine trope of questioning how long the immunity from vaccines lasts. He even goes so far as to claim that the mumps vaccine is not needed, that it doesn’t work, and that mumps is a “trivial disease,” which it is not. (If you develop deafness from mumps, to you it’s not a trivial disease.”

Rick Santorum: Georgia Law ‘Creates An Opportunity’ For Gun Owners To Police Airports, David, Crooks and Liars, April 27, 2014 Continue reading

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What I’m Reading, May 7, 2014

By California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsU.N. Human Rights Chief: Stop Lethal Injection in U.S., Noa Yachot, ACLU Blog of Rights, May 2, 2014

The pain and suffering of Clayton Lockett during his gruesome execution in Oklahoma this week has been met with outrage around the world. Today the United Nations human rights chief said that Lockett’s botched execution may violate international law, and called for an immediate moratorium on the administration of the death penalty across the United States.

Should scientists ‘Jurassic-Park’ extinct species back to life? John D. Sutter, CNN, May 2, 2014 Continue reading

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