Category: Evil

Fabulous!

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The Uganda constitutional court has ruled their Kill the Gays (lite) bill unconstitutional:

Gay rights campaigners in Uganda and around the world are celebrating a decision by the country’s constitutional court to strike down a widely condemned anti-gay law on a legal technicality.

Activists in the courtroom cheered after a panel of five judges ruled on Friday that the speaker of parliament acted illegally when she allowed a vote on the measure despite at least three objections that not enough MPs were in attendance.

“The speaker was obliged to ensure that there was quorum,” the court said in its ruling. “We come to the conclusion that she acted illegally.”

While celebrating the ruling, activists warned that homosexuality remained a criminal offence in the east African country under colonial-era laws.

While much of the blame for this rests on the politicians of Uganda, who are, after all, human beings with their own capability of agency, but I really do think that we should be investigating members of “The Family” in the United States for conspiracy to commit genocide.  (Click the link, the Family is a scary bunch of people)

It’s nice that Uganda cannot throw people convicted of “aggravated homosexuality” into jail for life, but it would be nicer still if they were to repeal the colonial-era laws.

Fascism is Back in Europe

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In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Fascism had as its philosophical basis the idea that liberal democracy had failed.

Well, the current President of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is making exactly same argument:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he wants to abandon liberal democracy in favor of an “illiberal state,” citing Russia and Turkey as examples.

The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad, Romania.

“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

Orban, who was re-elected in April for a second consecutive four-year term, has clashed with the EU as he amassed more power than any of his predecessors since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, replacing the heads of independent institutions including the courts with allies, tightening control over media and changing election rules to help him retain a constitutional majority in Parliament.

………

Orban, who has fueled employment with public works projects, said this weekend that he wants to replace welfare societies with a “workfare” state. He has earlier said more centralized control was needed to confront multinational companies such as banks and energy firms, to escape from “debt slavery,” and to protect Hungarians from becoming a “colony” of the EU.

Orban said his “illiberal democracy” won’t deny the “fundamental values” of liberalism, such as “freedom.”

Am I the only one who think that Hungary in 2014 is looking a lot like Italy in 1924.

Not good.

When juxtaposed with the ECB working too hard at fighting imaginary inflation, though not to the extremes taken the German central bank in the 1930s, it’s not tough to imagine Europe at war again before I die.

Well, This is Prize

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It turns out that the NRA’s chief counsel, and close confident of NRA chief Wayne LaPierre, is a murderer:

Shortly before dark on the evening of April 17, 1963, Robert J. Dowlut went looking for a gun inside the city cemetery in South Bend, Indiana. Making his way through the headstones, he stopped in front of the abandoned Studebaker family mausoleum. He knelt by the front right corner of the blocky gray monument and lifted a stone from the damp ground. Then, as one of the two police detectives accompanying him later testified, the 17-year-old “used his hands and did some digging.” He unearthed a revolver and ammunition. As Dowlut would later tell a judge, the detectives then took the gun, “jammed it in my hand,” and photographed him. “They were real happy.”

Two days earlier, a woman named Anna Marie Yocum had been murdered in her South Bend home. An autopsy determined she had been shot three times, once through the chest and twice in the back, likely at close range as she’d either fled or fallen down the stairs from her apartment. Two .45-caliber bullets had pierced her heart.

………

The following morning, Dowlut was charged with first-degree murder. A year and a half later, a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. Before the judge handed down a life sentence, he asked the defendant if there was any reason why he shouldn’t be put away. Dowlut replied, “I am not guilty.” A day later, the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City registered Dowlut, now 19, as prisoner number 33848.

Less than six years later, Robert Dowlut would be a free man—his murder conviction thrown out by the Indiana Supreme Court because of a flawed police investigation. The court ordered a new trial, but one never took place. Dowlut would return to the Army and go on to earn college and law degrees. Then he would embark on a career that put him at the epicenter of the movement to transform America’s gun laws.

Today, the 68-year-old Dowlut is the general counsel of the National Rifle Association. As the NRA’s top lawyer, he has been a key architect of the gun lobby’s campaign to define the legal interpretation of the Second Amendment. He helped oversee the NRA’s effort to strike down Chicago’s handgun ban in the 2010 Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, and he is the longtime secretary of the organization’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, which has spent millions assisting gun owners in court and sponsoring gun rights researchers. Dowlut’s journal articles have been cited by federal judges and are quoted by pro-gun activists. Chris W. Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s lobbying operation, has praised him as “a longtime distinguished Second Amendment scholar.” Dowlut’s behind-the-scenes legal work may have done as much to tighten the NRA’s grip on gun policy as its blustery talking heads and provocative PR campaigns.

BTW, it’s not just this guy, but also Harlon Carter, installed after the Cincinnati Coup at the NRA as Executive VP, who also murdered someone.

It really is remarkable just how much the intersection between groups “NRA leadership” and “law abiding citizens” is a null set.

If You Are Going to Piss on Art Modell’s Grave, Take Your Penis Out

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An irate Cleveland Browns fan urinated on Art Modell’s grave.

The writer at the above link objects to this, because he feels it generates sympathy for Art Modell, the worst NFL team owner ever.

I disagree.

Why?

  • When the Colts moved to Indianapolis, Modell trademarked “Baltimore Browns”.
  • For the next 10 years, he blocked an expansion franchise from opening in Baltimore.
  • He repeatedly turned down Cleveland’s offer for a new stadium before we announced his intention to move, and then blamed Cleveland repeatedly for “having to leave”

That being said, while I understand the need for some stealth, so I do not object to his showing up in a Raven’s jersey, and then taking it off to reveal a Brown’s Jersey*, but I do object to his method of urination: he used a catheter tube that ran down the leg of his pants to surreptitiously pee.

This      is      Wrong

If you are going to piss on someone’s grave,† you have to whip out your penis.

The brandishing of genitalia is an essential part of disrespect, as can clearly be observed when watching the behavior of Baboons and Soccer Hooligans.

If you war going with the whole catheter thing, you might as well just bring it in a F%$#ing jar.

It wasn’t like they weren’t going to catch you, you posted the vid to YouTube, and you are now facing up to 2 years in jail, so half measures just do not make sense.

*It was Lyle Alzedo’s Jersey, but Alzedo only played about ⅓ of his career at Cleveland. He should have gone with someone who spent their entire career at the Browns, like Jim Brown, Otto Graham, Gary Collins, Ozzie Newsome, or Lou “The Toe” Groza.
†Full disclosure, my father pissed on Huey Long’s grave while in Louisiana.‡
‡I believe that some quantity of alcohol was involved.€
€This is not the weirdest thing that my dad has done.  While he was in the Navy, he was a Corpsman, he was also ordered to function as an HMO for the local brothels around the Navy base at Yokosuka, Japan, because of his CO deal with the fact that, “The base had the highest VD rate in the Pacific Theater.” §
§Well, actually, he wasn’t ordered to be an HMO for the local brothels, he was just told to, “Fix it”, and that his CO, “Didn’t want to hear anything more about it.” Implicit in this was the unspoken thought that my dad could use the supplies of Penicillin, but that if he got caught, the CO knew nothing of it. Ah, the military life.  (He was not caught, and left with an honorable discharge)

The Demon Sheep Lady? Seriously?

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No, Really, Carly paid to make this ad

Carly Fiorina is looking at running for President:

Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in California in 2010, is diving back into electoral politics.

For now, her work is focused on pushing back against Democrats’ claim of a Republican-led “war on women” in the 2014 midterms. But her recent moves in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire have convinced some she’s eyeing a bigger prize come 2016.

Fiorina slipped into the Granite State last week to promote her new political group, dubbed UP for “Unlocking Potential.” Its mission is to engage women with new messages and combat the gaping gender gap that’s hobbling Republicans in races up and down the ballot. In addition to headlining a breakfast last Thursday for more than 200 GOP activists in the business and political spheres, Fiorina attended a GOP gala the night before honoring Joe McQuaid, the conservative publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper.

Jim Merrill, a top adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 New Hampshire campaign, is interpreting the largely under-the-radar moves as a sign of someone that’s at least pondering a White House bid.

“I thought of it as a testing-the-waters exercise and she got a great response,” Merrill says. “It was very clear to me she’s someone taking the temperature of New Hampshire.”

It wasn’t Fiorina’s first trip to New Hampshire this year, either. She was the keynote speaker at the Northeastern Republican Leadership Conference in Nashua in March, when she declared, “The highest calling of leadership and of our nation is to change the order of things. It is time.”

Carly Fiorina, who came to prominence as a senior executive responsible for sales at Lucent, where she was touted as a success, but it all imploded into a morass of shady accounting and fraud shortly after she left.

Then became CEO at HP, where her purchase of Compaq (and DEC, which had been purchased by Compaq) turned out to be largely a disaster, and when she was fired, employees at multiple locations of HP spontaneously singing “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.”

Finally, we have her “Demon Sheep” Senate campaign. (See the attached vid)

Damn!  The Republicans have a wicked thin bench for 2016!

Detroit Retirees Vote to Cut Own Pensions, Bond Scum Plan to Fight it in Court

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I understand how insurance works: You sell insurance, and when someone makes a claim, you do whatever you can to screw your policy holders.

In the case of Detroit pensioners, who have no access social security as municipal employees, made concessessions, but the bond insurers want it all:

Two major bond insurers that could lose billions on Detroit’s bankruptcy blasted the city’s plan to pay retirees more than financial creditors and vowed to fight retirees’ endorsement of the deal.

After pensioners voted by a wide margin to accept cuts and allow the Detroit Institute of Arts to spin off into an independent charitable trust, bond insurers Syncora and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. (FGIC) pledged to continue their vigorous legal fight against the city.

Judge Steven Rhodes will now conduct a confirmation trial starting Aug. 14 to consider evidence and witness testimony before determining whether the plan is fair, feasible and legal and can be approved.

The bond insurers — which backed a $1.4-billion debt deal brokered in 2005 by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s administration to fund pensions — voted no on the city’s offer to them, which ranged from 0 to 10 cents on the dollar.

BTW, they want the Detroit Institute of Art, one of the finest art collections in the United States, to sell off all of its art, because they cheated Detroit with their (probably illegal) interest rate swaps, fair and square.

Not enough bullets.

Why Snowden Going Through Channels was Never a Real Options

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NPR looks at what happened to other people who attempted to complain about agency misconduct, and it ain’t pretty:  Harassment, bogus charges, and systematic vilification, specifically the cases of Bill Binney and Thomas Drake.

I think that the quote describes just how effective the inspectors general are about such things:

“Perhaps it’s the case that we could’ve shown, we could’ve explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” [NSA Inspector General George] Ellard said.

 We he is refer”Perhaps it’s the case that we could’ve shown, we could’ve explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” Ellard said.

If you listen to the interview, you realize that he’s not talking the Inspector General’s office, he’s talking about the NSA.

The IG, and the whole whistle blowing apparatus are completely captured, and have not the slightest interest in addressing any potential issues.

His goal is talking Edward Snowden and other potential whistle-blowers out of actually blowing the whistle.

Also, it as it is noted in in the report, the new “protections” for intelligence operatives does not apply to contractors, and almost all new hires of the intelligence agencies are contractors.

How convenient.

In Which a Pundit Gets it Completely F%$#ing Wrong

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Over at The Atlantic they are wringing their hands because gay rights groups are now balking at religious exemptions embedded in gay rights legislation because of the Hobby Lobby decision:

In the Hobby Lobby decision handed down last month, the Supreme Court was asked to strike a balance between women’s rights and religious freedom. But the major conflict that has erupted in the wake of that decision has been between religious freedom and gay rights. The resulting controversy has split gay-rights and faith groups on the left, with wide-ranging political fallout that some now fear could hurt both causes.

One chapter of the controversy is set to close on Monday, when President Obama plans to sign a long-awaited executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays and lesbians, according to a White House official. But the debate that began over that order’s provisions for religious nonprofits has spilled over into a broader conflict. Many prominent gay-rights groups have now withdrawn their support from a top legislative priority, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, over the religious exemption it contains.

It’s not a bad thing, this response is essential to good governance.

As I have noted before, “My dear, religion is like a penis. It’s a perfectly fine thing for one to have and take pride in, but when one takes it out and waves it in my face we have a problem.” 

Civil rights should not be conditioned to kowtowing to those who use religion for self-aggrandizement or as an excuse to show hostility.

Religion is a private matter, and not a matter of public morality, nor should it ever be.

On a more pragmatic level, these religious carve outs create an impetus for more carve outs, so now we have a nurse suing a birth control clinic because they would not hire her because she would refuse to prescribe to birth control.

This is insanity, and it needs to stop.

They Will Destroy this Man

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The Miami Herald has discovered that a Navy nurse has refused to force feed the Guantanamo detainees:

In the first known rebellion against Guantánamo’s force-feeding policy, a Navy medical officer recently refused to continue managing tube-feedings of prison hunger strikers and was reassigned to “alternative duties.”

 A prison camp spokesman, Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, would not provide precise details but said Monday night that the episode had “no impact to medical support operations at the base.”

 “There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry out the enteral feeding of a detainee,” he said in an email. “The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership.”

 Word of the refusal reached the outside world last week in a call from prisoner Abu Wael Dhiab to attorney Cori Crider of the London-based legal defense group Reprieve. Dhiab, a hunger striker, described how a nurse in the Navy medical corps abruptly refused to “force-feed us” sometime before the Fourth of July — and disappeared from detention center duty.

(emphasis mine)

Needless to say, not only is this guy’s career over, you can be sure that the his command, and perhaps JAG Corps will go after him like the US Attorney went after Aaron Swartz, notwithstanding the declarations to the contrary made later in the article.

Guantanamo is an ethical black hole, our own little Abu Ghraib, our own little Gulag, and under those circumstances, they cannot allow people to assert a conscience objection, because would short circuit the cognitive dissonance that allows the facility to function..

Charlie Pierce on a Rant is a Thing of Beauty

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In a post entitled, “Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Mainline Antifreeze, Part The Infinity,” he takes on Politico‘s hosting a fete of, and then writing a fawning article about Papa Dick and Baby Dick Cheney:

Its puerilty has finally crossed over into indecency. Its triviality has finally crossed over into obscenity. The comical political starfcking that is its primary raison d’erp has finally crossed over into $10 meth-whoring on the Singapore docks. Once a mere surface irritation, Tiger Beat On The Potomac has finally crossed over into being a thickly pustulating chancre on the craft of journalism. It has demonstrated its essential worthlessness. It has demonstrated that it has the moral character of a sea-slug and the professional conscience of the Treponema pallidum spirochete. Trust me. Stephen Glass never sunk this low. Mike (Payola) Allen has accomplished the impossible. He’s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.

It goes on, and most of it near the perfection of, “He’s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.“

Read the rest of it, and then someone please nominate Mr. Pierce for a Pulitzer.

The Financial Times Suggests that Private Equity is Screwing their Clients

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No, seriously. It is the Financial Times, and they are suggesting that private equity is fundamentally corrupt in their business practices:

It is too early to say whether the $30bn leveraged buyout of First Data in 2007 on the eve of the financial crash was a bad deal. KKR, the private equity group with a controlling stake, could yet recoup its investment, which it has written down by 20 per cent: the payment processing specialist will attempt to go public, possibly this year.

But one thing is certain: the Atlanta company, which has struggled under $24bn of debt since the KKR acquisition, will have paid its owner more than $100m in fees for a range of advisory, transaction and consulting services – including some that may never be required.

For the past three years alone, total fees to KKR-related parties amounted to $117m, according to First Data’s yearly regulatory filings. The bulk was an annual charge of about $20m that the company has to pay until 2019 for being “monitored”. If KKR, run by Henry Kravis and George Roberts, decides to sell or float its stake before that date, it is entitled to a termination fee.

First Data also paid KKR’s capital markets unit $21m for financing and underwriting services, and $35m for consulting work to Capstone, a company that works exclusively for the New York buyout house.

Such arrangements, struck with companies that can hardly say no to their majority owners, are coming under growing scrutiny by regulators. They are also sparking frustration among some investors, although few have incentives to reform the system.

“Those fees pump substance out of portfolio companies. It is the sort of greed you would typically see in investment banking,” says Georges Sudarskis, an industry veteran who advises Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a hard look at the industry’s fees. Andrew Bowden, a director at the SEC, said in May that his team had identified “violations of law or material weaknesses in controls over 50 per cent of the time” when reviewing payments from portfolio companies to their private equity owners.

(emphasis mine)

I just love the phrase, “It is the sort of greed you would typically see in investment banking.”

BTW, private equity do not deliver higher rates of return that would justify these fees.

I’m beginning to think that if we simply threw everyone who worked on Wall Street in jail, you would have a wrongful conviction rate in the single digit percentiles.

Pusillanimous Police, Prosecutors, Punt Penis Pix

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Well, it looks like DA and the Cops in Manassas have backed down on their demand to a photograph of a teens genitalia in a sexting case:

Manassas City police said Thursday they would not serve a search warrant seeking to take photos of a 17-year-old boy charged with “sexting” an explicit video to his 15-year-old girlfriend earlier this year.

The teen is facing felony counts of manufacturing and distributing child pornography. As the case was headed to trial last week, Manassas City police and Prince William County prosecutors said in juvenile court that they had obtained a warrant to photograph the teen’s erect penis, in order to compare with the video he allegedly sent in January, according to the teen’s lawyers. When defense lawyer Jessica Harbeson Foster asked how they would obtain a photo of her client while aroused, she said police told her they would take him to a hospital and inject him with a drug to force an erection.

On Thursday, Prince William authorities decided to drop that plan. Lt. Brian Larkin of the Manassas City police said, “We are not going to pursue it.” He said the police planned to allow the search warrant, obtained last week, to expire. He would not say why the decision had been made to abandon the warrant or discuss the reasons for the search.

They would still be going for this, except for the fact that it got ink.

Sunlight is a disinfectant to this sort of vile behavior, and here’s hoping that this destroys a few careers in law enforcement.

In This Case, it is Appropriate to Use Porcine Metaphors to Refer to Law Enforcement

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You know the story, girl sexts boy, boy sexts girl back, and the police and district attorney demand a photo of boys erect penis:

A Manassas City teenager accused of “sexting” a video to his girlfriend is now facing a search warrant in which Manassas City police and Prince William County prosecutors want to take a photo of his erect penis, possibly forcing the teen to become erect by taking him to a hospital and giving him an injection, the teen’s lawyers said. A Prince William County judge allowed the 17-year-old to leave the area without the warrant being served or the pictures being taken — yet.

 The teen is facing two felony charges, for possession of child pornography and manufacturing child pornography, which could lead not only to incarceration until he’s 21, but inclusion on the state sex offender data base for, possibly, the rest of his life. David Culver of NBC Washington first reported the story and interviewed the teen’s guardian, his aunt, who was shocked at the lengths Prince William authorities were willing to go to make a sexting case in juvenile court.

 ………

 Foster said the case began when the teen’s 15-year-old girlfriend sent photos of herself to the 17-year-old, who in turn sent her the video in question. The girl has not been charged, and her mother filed a complaint about the boy’s video, Foster said. The male teen was served with petitions from juvenile court in early February, and not arrested, but when the case went to trial in juvenile court in June, Foster said prosecutors forgot to certify that the teen was a juvenile. The case was dismissed, but police immediately obtained new charges and also a search warrant for his home. Police also arrested the teen and took him to juvenile jail, where Foster said they took photos of the teen’s genitals against his will.

 The case was set for trial on July 1, where Foster said Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Claiborne Richardson told her that her client must either plead guilty or police would obtain another search warrant “for pictures of his erect penis,” for comparison to the evidence from the teen’s cell phone. Foster asked how that would be accomplished and was told that “we just take him down to the hospital, give him a shot and then take the pictures that we need.”

(emphasis mine)

This is beyond contemptible.

This is a profound abuse of prosecutorial discretion.  In fact, I would argue that this is a credible threat of torture, as well as conspiracy to produce child pornography.

This is profoundly and deeply unethical, and the local bar should be apprised of this behavior.

If there were justice in the world, that evil ratf%$# attorney would be flipping burgers for a living.

First as Tragedy, then as Farce*

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Paul Wolfowitz is boosting Ahmed Chalabi as the next Prime Minister of Iraq:

Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi who helped spur the U.S. invasion of his country, would be viable as its next prime minister though close ties he established with Iran pose an impediment, said Paul Wolfowitz, a top American national security official when the war launched.

“The man is a survivor,” Wolfowitz said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capitol with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “That’s impressive. I think he wants to succeed in what he does, he’s smart; maybe he’ll figure out a way to do it.”

Chalabi, 69, currently serves in Iraq’s Parliament as government forces battle insurgents who have destabilized the country and prompted calls for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s resignation.

Chalabi’s political group, the Iraqi National Congress, supplied Wolfowitz and others in President George W. Bush’s administration with information that tied then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and alleged he was developing weapons of mass destruction — the justification for the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The information was later discredited and in May 2004, U.S. soldiers raided Chalabi’s house and offices in Iraq to investigate allegations of fraud and grand theft against him.

Why are we listening to these people after all that they have screwed up to completely?

The fact that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, etc. are viewed as anything but a punchline is a complete indictment of our media.

* The full quote, ascribed to Karl Marx, is “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”

Yes, Snowden Could have Used Channels to Raise His Concerns ……… Not

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Jeffrey Scudder had his career destroyed by the CIA because he filed Freedom of Information Act Requests to declassify historical documents:

His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.

 It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.

 To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act — a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.

 His request set in motion a harrowing sequence. He was confronted by supervisors and accused of mishandling classified information while assembling his FOIA request. His house was raided by the FBI and his family’s computers seized. Stripped of his job and his security clearance, Scudder said he agreed to retire last year after being told that if he refused, he risked losing much of his pension.

What were these documents?

The documents sought by Scudder amount to a catalog of a bygone era of espionage. Among them are articles with the titles “Intelligence Lessons from Pearl Harbor” and “Soviet Television — a New Asset for Kremlin Watchers.”

 Scudder said he discovered them after he took an assignment in 2007 as a project manager for the CIA’s Historical Collections Division, an office set up to comb the agency’s archives for materials — often decades old — that can be released without posing any security risk.

(emphasis mine)

BTW, the CIA has since closed the Historical Collections Division, claiming “budget concerns.”

This is how the US state security apparatus addresses an attempt to hasten the declassification anodyne historical documents.

What do you think would have happened if Edward Snowden had gone further with his complaints?

He would still have had to flee the country for his own safety.

Another Day, Another Study Proving Antivaxxers full of It

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Parents worried about getting young children vaccinated against infectious diseases have fresh cause for reassurance, researchers say.

A new review of existing scientific evidence has concluded that childhood vaccines are safe and don’t cause serious health problems such as autism or leukemia.

“Our findings support that vaccines are very safe for children, and add to a substantial body of evidence that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the very low risks,” said senior author Dr. Courtney Gidengil, an associate physician scientist at RAND Corporation and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. “Hopefully, this will engage hesitant parents in discussions with their health care providers.”

The review found strong evidence that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine is not associated with autism, which is consistent with previous reviews of this rumored link.

Some parents have chosen not to have their children vaccinated because of a now-debunked and retracted study published in 1998 that suggested that the MMR vaccine might cause autism. It was later reported that the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, had altered some of the study’s results.

The researchers behind the new study also found no link between childhood leukemia and vaccines for MMR, DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis), tetanus, influenza and hepatitis B.

Overall, vaccines given to children 6 or younger are safe, causing few side effects, the review concluded. The findings are published in the July 1 online edition and the August print issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The fact that Andrew Wakefield is still a free man, when the death toll of his fraud numbers in the thousands, dishonors both the justice system and the scientific community.

And the Hobby Lobby Decision Has Already Started to Bear Bitter Fruit

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We now have the usual group of rat-f%$#s, including Rick “Invited by Obama to giva a benediction at his first inaugeration” Warren, are demanding the right to discriminate against LGBT employees:

This week, in the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court ruled that a religious employer could not be required to provide employees with certain types of contraception. That decision is beginning to reverberate: A group of faith leaders is urging the Obama administration to include a religious exemption in a forthcoming LGBT anti-discrimination action.

 Their call, in a letter sent to the White House Tuesday, attempts to capitalize on the Supreme Court case by arguing that it shows the administration must show more deference to the prerogatives of religion.

 “We are asking that an extension of protection for one group not come at the expense of faith communities whose religious identity and beliefs motivate them to serve those in need,” the letter states.

I am so ready for Antonin Scalia to choke to death on his own bile and be replaced by a justice who is not an unethical hack.

Letter follows:

Religious Exemption Letter to President Obama