Decisions, Decisions

Slog’s Christopher Frizzelle lets us in on his ruminations on the presidential race:

Yesterday, we were lifting weights and scratching our heads over whether it was going to be Clinton or Obama, over what the Oprah Effect was going to be, over who would be more beatable in a general election. We were doing the bench press. He was struggling with some weight and I said, "If you can do five of these Obama wins in Iowa and New Hampshire" …

A friend who lives in New York and was in town on business last night said that he’s a Clinton guy every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and an Obama guy on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. This seemed like the most articulate distillation of my current position. I forgot to ask what he is on Sundays.

Keep bench-pressing.

Quote For The Day

"The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down. An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice. The credibility of those who now manage the nation’s top law enforcement agency is tragically eroded. We are fortunate to have its dedicated career workforce, especially its criminal prosecutors, who have faced the unprecedented politicization of decisions regarding both personnel and investigations," – the Republican Party platform, 2000.

The Next Paradigm Shift?

The latest research suggesting that human evolution has sped up dramatically in the last 10,000 years strikes me at first glance as potentially among the most important discoveries of our time. It affects so much that we have come to know, or think we have come to know. It definitely impacts the race and IQ debate, as well as very basic questions about human nature. The data is still preliminary and sketchy; and my skepticism is primed. But if it’s true, it’s a huge change in human self-understanding:

"Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes," Hawks notes, because that gene—OCA2—had not yet developed. "We are different from people who lived only 400 generations ago in ways that are very obvious; that you can see with your eyes."

Comparing the amount of genetic differentiation between humans and our closest relatives, chimpanzees, suggests that the pace of change has accelerated to 10 to 100 times the average long-term rate, the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Not all populations show the same evolutionary speed. For example, Africans show a slightly lower mutation rate. "Africans haven’t had to adapt to a fundamentally new climate," because modern humanity evolved where they live, Cochran says. "Europeans and East Asians, living in environments very different from those of their African ancestors and early adopters of agriculture, were more maladapted, less fitted to their environments."

Hucklash!

Leading Christianist Tony Perkins is happy that Mike Huckabee did not disown his previous hateful statements about people with HIV and homosexuality. And he predicts a backlash if the scrutiny continues:

There is clearly a reverse religious standard being applied to Mike Huckabee, a standard that says there will be no defining religious beliefs. I would hope the other candidates, including the Democrats, would clearly and absolutely denounce this reverse religious test and keep the media from going further down this path. If not, I predict that bible-believing Christians will step over policy differences they have with Mike Huckabee to stand by and support a candidate who is being attacked because he believes, as they do, that their Christian faith should actually impact the way they live. If that happens, the recent meteoric rise of the Huckabee campaign in the polls could look minuscule compared to the tsunami of support that he will get from Christians who are tired of the elites who belittle their beliefs and attempt to rob them of every public reflection of their faith.

A tsunami for Huckabee? We’ll see. But the consequences of Rovism are getting quite dire for the GOP, aren’t they?