ABBREVIATING CONGRESS

                Washington is dense with acronyms.  It seems that only a couple of years ago we were alerted to the acronym POTUS, referring to the President of the United States.  Pretty slick!  The Secret Service has probably referred to whoever the current "him" is as POTUS for decades, managing to be both clear and obscure in the same breath.  That's where the "secret" in secret service lies.

                During the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, we heard a related acronym—SCOTUS, which means Supreme Court of the United States.  Perhaps in regular use among lawyers, and DC lawyers in particular, I only became alert to it just now.  I figure that the conservatives on the Senate Judiciary Committee should have started referring to Judge Sotomayor as "SoSo" since that's apparently how they feel about her.  Nobody ever gave the U.S. Senate points for creativity, even a little bit, so I guess I'm not too surprised.

                Let me have a turn at the name game.  I propose that we refer to the Congress of the United States as COTUS, and the conservative faction of that congress as COTUS interruptus.  Do I need to make myself clearer?

                One illustration is now winding its way through the Senate.  Senators Brownback and Landrieu—a conservative republican and a conservative democrat, respectively, are co-sponsoring a Bill that outlaws the hybridization of humans and animals.  Sounds pretty ugly, that hybridization process, and I guess I'm against that, too.  But wait!  Who's doing that sort of thing today?  Is there a lab anywhere under the purview of the United States that is trying to make hubits (human rabbits), hish (human fish, pluralized in the standard format), or hugers (human tigers)?  Maybe I'm being species arrogant, and should be referring to timans—putting the tiger first.

                If the twenty (Yes!  Twenty!) senators—one-fifth of that august body—had decided to debate eugenics instead, I'd have been all over it like Troy Polamalu on a safety blitz!  Scientists trying to intervene badly in human genetics may comprise the dark side of stem cell research or the human genome project, and a debate on the potential creation of a master race is something people could, and probably should, engage.  Who would waste scientific resources creating a centaur!  Can you imagine if a centaur, at 16, wanted to learn to drive?  We'd need to bring back the 1959 Cadillac convertible to fit the six-limbed freak behind the wheel!

                Nope!  The conservative movement must be absolutely bankrupt to use manimals as a distraction.  Lost on abortion?  No problem.  That magical 25% will be distracted and believe anything you say, so give them another hook to hang their next unintelligent design argument on.

                We're at a political crossroads now.  We are trying to address to wars, nuclear weapons in societies that could actually use them on someone, health care, a financial mess, global environmental issues, and a housing crisis; that's just the top of the list.  Yet conservatives continue to decide that nonsense is the opposing side of the debate from sense.  I can only hope that they practice enough of this COTUS interruptus to achieve negative population growth.

Of Mice-Men

The Senate Bill sponsored by Senators Brownback and Landrieu regarding the genetic engineering of hybrid species who are part animal and part people is a living demonstration of the problem with American education versus the "big lie."

 

One must first be alerted to the desire among scientists to carry out such preposterous research, and then move to stop it.  As far as I know, no such research is extant, which begs the question of why such a Bill would be necessary.  If we were presented with evidence that such experimentation is happening in labs around the country, practically every American would rise up against it… me included.  But where is that evidence?  Where are those facts?  Where are people getting the information that would lead to such a Bill in the Senate?

 

The more insidious "master race" issue is not even mentioned in the same context, but that would seem the far more likely result of genetic research.  "Better" people is a much more fraught ethical issue that creating a person whose hair could be shorn, rather than cut, to provide raw material for overcoats. What would you name that person?  Perhaps Al Paca?

 

How would a cow be improved by making it a biped?  How would a person be improved by providing a smaller brain and a tail?  The imagination runs amok with possibilities, but all of them have already been seen on the silver screen, culminating with the Harry Potter series. 

 

It seems that these particular senators are afraid that, since they have failed on Roe v. Wade and stem cell research, they need a new boogeyman to scare the nation's scientific illiterates into believing that American values are even further under assault.  Hey, we're losing on every front so let's make something out of nothing!  A whole bunch of people will believe anything if we spin it the right way, and those people wouldn't trust science if it cruised up in a bass boat!

 

Twenty percent of the U.S. Senate has signed on to this absolute malarkey. That begs the question of whether we need to create an intelligence test that senators-elect must pass before being sworn in.  I'm pretty sure that Al Franken would pass.  I'm not so sure about Mary Landrieu, and since she's my cousin (her grandfather and my grandmother were brother and sister, respectively), I must see myself as suspect—unless, of course, she's a hybrid herself!