Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Is it hot enough for you? I can tell already – it’s going to be a long summer. How are you keeping cool?
Surprised eyebrow raise on this story – Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (whose name has been floated as a possible GOP presidential contender) is holding an anti-Mitt Romney rally.
McCotter, home for recess, scheduled his own Detroit-area rally Wednesday to coincide with Romney’s Michigan visit. The event was announced by his congressional staff as a “harsh welcome” for Romney. The title of the gathering is “Discussion Economy, Jobs and the Mitt Romney-Obama Ticket.”
“Motor City Hospitality dictates a Michigan message to Mitt,” McCotter said in a statement. “Our struggling families, entrepreneurs and workers think Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama are not rivals, they’re running mates.”
Right now there are candidates lining up to be the anti-Mitt. How much will this calculus change if Sarah Palin enters the race?
For those who can’t watch clips online, Barton argued, “You go back to the Founding Fathers, as far as they were concerned, they’d already had the entire debate on creation-evolution. And you get Thomas Paine, who was the least religious Founding Father, saying you’ve got to teach creation science in the public school classroom. The scientific method demands that. Now, we’re opposite today.”
It’s hard to know where to start with such an argument. One could note, for example, that the scope of political leaders’ scientific knowledge towards the end of the 18th century isn’t especially relevant right now.
Or perhaps one should point out that Darwin didn’t write On The Origin of Species until 1859, making it unlikely that the Founding Fathers had “already had the entire debate on creation-evolution” nearly a century earlier.
The founding fathers are now the new appeal to authority figures. Of course only rightwingers know what the founding fathers think of things, and it mysteriously always agrees with what they think.