The War on Stupid

Posts from the Front Lines

Grope Your Children Well
Some teachers with grab-hands.

HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. - A class of third-grade students got a lesson in civil liberties when an envelope containing $5 disappeared from their teacher's desk.

The students at Martin Luther King Elementary in Hopkinsville were asked to remove their shoes and socks during a search. Some were patted down and had their pockets checked.

Some parents were angered by the Feb. 15 searches, which did not turn up the missing money at the western Kentucky school.

Of course it didn't. Even if one of them had the money, how are you going to find an envelope, or just a five dollar bill, with a pat-down search? THEY'RE KIND OF THIN WHEN YOU LOOK AT THEM, MORONS.

(The paper/cottony paper products, not the children.)

This did take place in Kentucky. I guess that helps to explain things.

Source: AZ Central

Dissection
An El Reg military analysis article on the likelihood of robot drone insurgent weaponry. Basically: very expensive, unlikely to work as well as the stuff they do today, and beyond their capability.

Of course, you could read the longer article, but that would use up precious brain energy that can be saved for reality tv.

Source: The Register

Shocking Loss to Forces of Dumb
On Sunday, the style section of the Washington Post lobbed a stupid Weapon of Mass Destruction directly into our camps by publishing an op-ed by one Charlotte Allen, who has refined stupid to such a level that she must qualify as a Mad Scientist of Moron.

"Women 'Falling for Obama,' " the story's headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.

I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women "are only children of a larger growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

In your case, I think 'children' is a bit generous. How about 'stunted twits of a larger growth'?

Alternately, the growth you're part of could be a tumor. On my brain.

Then there's Clinton's nearly all-female staff, chosen for loyalty rather than, say, brains or political savvy. Clinton finally fired her daytime-soap-watching, self-styled "Latina queena" campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, known for burning through campaign money and for her open contempt for the "white boys" in the Clinton camp. But stupidly, she did it just in time to alienate the Hispanic voters she now desperately needs to win in Texas or Ohio to have any shot at the Democratic nomination.

Mark Penn is many things. A moron. A clumsy, inept pollster. The sloppiest dresser alive.

But, err, not a woman. He's the head of her campaign, her chief strategist. And male.

Her long-time political fixer, brought in to try and salvage Penn's abortive campaign? A very well connected man named Harold Ickes.

Also, err, not a woman.

What great research!

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

So let me get this straight. Women have slightly over 10% more accidents per mile than men. But men have 200% more fatal accidents than women.

And this makes WOMEN the worse drivers? Come again? Could we have that in ENGLISH please?

So I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

Please, follow your own advice. Stop writing, go home, and start making doilies. I promise to never miss you.

Source: The Washington Post

One Two Punch
Not content with merely asserting that women are stupid, the WaPo published a second op-ed in the same section, on how women are shallow and fickle.

Seriously.

And there we have one of the most puzzling conundrums of the 2008 Democratic contests. Black voters of all socioeconomic classes are voting for the black candidate. Men are voting for the male candidate regardless of race or class. But even though this is also a year with the first major female presidential candidate, women are split every way they can be. They're the only voting bloc not voting their bloc.

For the Clinton campaign, this is devastating. A year ago, chief strategist Mark Penn proclaimed that the double-X factor was going to catapult his candidate all the way to the White House. Instead, the women's vote has fragmented. The only conclusion: American women still aren't strategic enough to form a meaningful political movement directed at taking power. Will they ever be?

People fail to vote according to her predictions. This, obviously, implies a flaw with the people.

Riiight.

So many feminists' turn to solidarity with their own class is a surprise. For decades, they've been loudly proclaiming their loyalty to working-class women and criticizing reporters for writing chiefly about elite women who resemble themselves. Before the election got hot, Ellen Bravo, longtime director of 9 to 5, a national association of working women, asserted that working mothers "with more opportunities" must "take a stand with those who have fewer." I've been the target of some of the more pointed criticism myself, for writing a book about educated women quitting their jobs for motherhood. Nation writer Liza Featherstone "guessed" that my life did not look "very much like that of a Starbucks barista."

This is the part where she asserts that all feminists are wealthy.

Female too, for that matter.

Yeeesh what a tool.

Maybe Obama is the best candidate, and these highly educated women, with their greater political savvy, have recognized his value. A less charitable explanation is that college-educated women don't need the social safety net as much as their less fortunate sisters do, so Clinton's early stand on family leave or her slightly more generous health-care plan aren't as important to them.

Yes, her ever-so-slightly-earlier endorsement of one position and ever-so-slightly broader position on health care must surely be the only explanation.

There can be no other choice! The 'elite' women are gyno-traitors!

Or maybe it has to do with what Pollitt expressed in a recent blog posting: "On foreign policy Obama seems more enlightened, as in less bellicose." Educated women focusing more on foreign policy fits with what we know about women and politics. Although at every class level, women know less than men do about politics in general, they know more as their education level goes up. So it may be that foreign policy issues are more salient to women with a college degree.

Or it could just be that women with more education (and more money) relate on a subconscious level to the young and handsome Barack and Michelle Obama, with their white-porticoed mansion in one of the cooler Chicago neighborhoods and her Jimmy Choo shoes.

Hur, women are dumber than men. Nevermind that men vote for Republicans, the party OF Idiots, far more often than women.

Also, dur, Obama is wealthy. Clinton meanwhile lives a hard-scrabble life on the streets, fighting with the rats for her dinner.

Err, no wait. She's also a wealthy Senator. Huh.

When faced with a "movement," resistance is costly. And for weeks now, online and on cable news channels, almost anyone who expresses criticism of Obama or support for Clinton has elicited a firestorm of disapproval. Obama's scores of defenders -- "Obamabots," they're called -- immediately recite the anti-Clinton litany: Billary, Monica Lewinsky, Hillary's Iraq war vote, identity politics. Well-regarded activists such as Planned Parenthood's Feldt or successful writers such as Tina Fey who support Clinton are excoriated as worthless pieces of nonsense. After Steinem wrote an op-ed on Clinton's behalf in the New York Times, the New Republic published an article titled "Gloria Steinem's Awful Op Ed." Not wrong. Not misguided. But "awful."

Call me cynical, but I read a lot of political news.

A lot.

And I've never heard this "Obamabot" term.

I would remember hearing it. Retarded crap sticks in my brain.

So who precisely calls them that?

Also, GASP, people who support a candidate may have to endure slight criticism from others! "Awful"!

Has this rhetorical firestorm had an effect on the political decisions of college-educated white women?

Seriously, 'firestorm'? A firestorm is when napalm turns your village into cinders and schoolkids running around with their skin falling off.

"Awful" is not a firestorm.

Whatever the explanation, the Clinton campaign could now be stuttering to its close, and Mark Penn has been criticized for everything from short-sightedness about the primary schedule to overspending on sandwich platters. But those failures pale beside the biggest one of all: not recognizing the fickleness of the female voter.

If they're so fickle, why are these trends so hard to overcome? Surely Clinton can just bribe them with chocolates, right?

God what a twit this woman is.

Source: Again, The Washington Post.

Reyes

The House Intelligence Committee chairman expects a compromise soon on renewal of an eavesdropping law that could provide legal protections for telecommunications companies as President Bush has insisted.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, in a television interview broadcast Sunday, did not specifically say whether the House proposal would mirror the Senate's version. The Senate measure provides retroactive legal immunity to the companies that helped the government wiretap U.S. computer and phone lines after the Sept. 11 attacks without clearance from a secret court.

Hey Reyes.

Go fuck yourself.

Source: Raw Story

Gun Incident Near Bush Ranch
Now now, don't get your hopes up. Cheney only shoots *really* old men in the face.

CRAWFORD, Texas (CNN) — A Danish journalist came this close to getting shot Saturday by an elderly woman packing a pistol near President Bush's ranch here in what was easily the strangest incident I've ever witnessed covering the White House.

It all started so innocently as I sat with a group of Danish journalists just down the street from Bush's ranch during a visit by Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The two leaders were having lunch on the ranch, so I was waiting at a nearby historic one-room schoolhouse with White House staff to interview Rasmussen after the meal. Then the prime minister was going to do a brief press conference with the Danish press corps.

Terkel Svensson, a writer for the Danish News Agency, could not get wireless Internet access at the schoolhouse to file a story. But Svensson could get his cell phone working so he called his editor in
Copenhagen and started wandering across a quiet country road as he chatted away.

"I was just so occupied dictating my story that I didn't really see where I went," Svensson told me later. "I was just walking and talking."

What Svensson didn't realize was that he had stopped walking a couple hundred feet away, on the front lawn of an elderly woman. An elderly woman who looked through her window and didn't like that a strange man was standing outside her house. An elderly woman who had, um, a gun.

Texas, ladies and gentlemen.

That's it. That's the joke. Texas.

They don't need parody.

Source: CNN.com

Marriage
No, not in general. One in particular.

An Iranian court has ordered a man to buy his wife 124,000 roses after she filed a complaint against her "stingy" husband to claim her dowry, a press report said on Monday.

"After 10 years of marriage Hengameh had decided to claim her dowry of 124,000 red roses to punish her very stingy husband," the Etemad newspaper said.

"Shortly after marriage I realised that Shahin was very cheap. He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant," said the woman, identified only by her first name Hengameh.

But Shahin told the court he could only afford five roses a day and complained that it was "her billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head."

The court has seized his apartment worth 600 million rials (64,000 dollars) until he has bought her the entire 124,000 roses. A long stemmed red rose costs 20,000 rials (about two dollars) in Tehran.

Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry or mahr, which is a gift pledged by the man at the time of marriage, at any time during married life or when getting a divorce.

So she's demanded, and a court has agreed, that her husband buy her 248,000 dollars worth of roses.

Right. She's a moron, he's one for marrying her, the courts are full of morons, and.... argh. I can't stand it anymore!!

Source: Raw Story

Idealists
Isn't it fun when idealists crash on the cold, hard, merciless rocks of reality?

A British peace activist aiming to walk to India to prove a money-free world is possible has turned back at the first hurdle, after getting to France and finding he needed to speak French.

Writing on his blog Friday, 28-year-old Mark Boyle said he and two friends accompanying him ran into problems the minute they arrived in the French port of Calais.

"Not only did no one... speak the language, they also see us as just a bunch of freeloading backpackers, which is the complete opposite of what the pilgrimage is really about," he wrote.

"That really scared us, and given that we now were pretty much out of food, hadn't slept in days and were really cold, we had to reassess the whole situation.

"We spoke to a few people who were willing to talk and they said that France would not go for this unless we could speak fluent French, which none of us could."

...

"He has not given up his project," she told AFP. "He is currently walking in the southeast of England. He will tour around the UK, learn French and leave again for Porbandar."

So in a few years we'll see a repeat when he manages to mooch his way to the German border, only to discover he doesn't know the 43 syllable word for 'Help, I am a mentally deficient individual in need of food or a damn good kicking!'

Fortunately, they're German. They'll give him one anyway. It's their charitable nature.

Source: Raw Story

The Name Game
So Greece and Macedonia are having a spat.

Greek prime minister Costas Karamanlis said today that his country will block Macedonia’s entrance into the EU and NATO if the country does not change its name. Macedonia expects an invite to NATO at the organization's summit in April and could possibly start EU negotiations this fall.

So what’s wrong with “Macedonia”? According to Greece, the name belongs to its northern region, an area that covers what was once ancient Macedonia back in the glory days of Alexander the Great (and they were glorious). Greece claims that use of “Republic of Macedonia,” as Macedonia calls itself in its constitution, not only violates Greece's historic cultural claim to the name, but also suggests territorial ambitions. Instead, Greece, and the U.N. by default, have continued to call Macedonia by the outdated name “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” ever since Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia seventeen years ago. It’s an awfully long name for a tiny country, but you can call it FYROM for short.

Greece's historical claim to the name? What? They only have an area called Macedonia because the Macedonians beat them silly!

It's just like how, apparently, there are a rather large number of towns in England with French names. BECAUSE THE FRENCH CONQUERED ENGLAND REPEATEDLY.

Honestly, Greece, don't be such prats. Nobody's looking to conquer your backward, imporverished country.

Macedonia, your Southern neighbors are being jerks. Pick a longer form of the name. Like "The Better-than-Greece-by-a-Long-Shot Republic of Macedonia.

Source: Reuters

Math Major He's Not
So Mark Halperin, the same jackass who recently said that McCain should go racist on Obama, now says that Clinton has to stay in the race because she'd be too damn old to run again in 2016, assuming Obama got two full terms.

"I think people are underestimating how badly she'd like to continue and not give up," said Halperin, who edits Time's online tip sheet The Page. "This is probably her one chance to become the Democratic nominee, given everything else going on in the world, and in her actuarial table, and Obama's chances of winning, and I think if she does not win this time she probably realizes that is it."

...

At 68, Clinton would still be younger than presumed Republican nominee John McCain is now. The 71-year-old Arizona senator has also faced questions about his age.

Clinton also would be younger in 2016 than Golda Meir was when she became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969, at age 71. Ronald Reagan, the oldest US president in history, celebrated his 70th birthday just after he was sworn in in 1981.

Combine that with the fact that McCain is already in shaky health, and that women live longer than men, and you can see why Halperin is in the running for Dumbest Man Alive (Not Named Bush Edition)

Source: Raw Story

Wiki-Love
So, let's say, and why not, that you're Jimbo Wales, one of the big muckity-mucks at Wikipedia. You've been trying for years to earn an image of legitimacy for the online news-o-rama, and constantly fighting off accusations of bias, incestuous editing, and general hamfisted amatuerism.

Surely the best course of action is to then use the site to dump your girlfriend.

On one level, it's an encyclopedia. On another, it's The Comedy of Errors.

Over the weekend, in response to a story from Valleywag, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales used the world's most popular online encyclopedia as a means of dumping his girlfriend - onetime Fox News pundit Rachel Marsden.

Marsden responded by sending Valleywag an IM conversation that indicates Wales ordered changes to her Wikipedia biography in an effort to further his, shall we say, personal agenda.

In discussing his sex life on the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit," Wales says that his sex life is not something anyone should be discussing. "Over the last few days, a few gossip websites have decided that my personal life is somehow of interest to people and, against my wishes, are publicizing details about a brief relationship I had with Rachel Marsden," explains the man who calls himself Wikipedia's Spiritual Leader. "While, typically, this would not warrant a response, because my role with Wikipedia is being dragged into it, I felt the need to set the record straight on a couple of issues."

...

But according to the IM conversation Marsden shared with Valleywag, Wales was well aware that in ordering changes to her bio, he was breaking one of Wikipedia's cardinal rules. Wikipedia bills itself as an encyclopedia with a "neutral point of view," and contributors are told not to edit articles where they have a conflict of interest.

During the IM chat, Wales asks Marsden to approve several edits to her bio, and he says that he forwarded these edits to his OTRS team. Wales also explains that in emailing the team, he told them he would be meeting Marsden to "give her advice about her website" and that it would not be appropriate for him "to directly edit the article with a conflict of interest."

Then he tells Marsden that he wasn't exactly honest with his OTRS team: "The truth is of course a much worse conflict of interest than that :) but that will do."

So, slutty ladies out there, if you want a positive Wikipedia bio, just sleep with Wales. He'll handle the rest.

lolz.

Source: The Register (your primo source for Wikipedia dirt)

Comic Strip

Eight British soldiers have been forced to return home from Norway after they reportedly stripped naked and urinated on each other in a bar during an Arctic training exercise, the defence ministry confirmed Tuesday.

"It's being taken extremely seriously," a spokesman for the defence ministry in London said.

Only an Englishman could say that, in this situation, with a straight face.

"They were drunk and there was a problem in the bar, but we are quite used to dealing with British soldiers like this," Harstad police spokesman Gair Pederson was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying.

Oooh, burn.

Source: Raw Story

One Toke Over the Line
Some marijuana legalization advocates wrote to Senator Tom Harkin, asking him why medical pot should still be illegal.

His rambling, incoherent response may go down in legend.

It's 2008, and that teenager drug marijuana is still raping our children. But why does that have to be illegal? According to The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), some person wrote to Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin "asking him to justify why medicinal cannabis is still illegal" after the American College of Physicians recommended it shouldn't be. It merited a hilarious reply from Harkin, which noted many of pot's notorious doom scenarios: "the small child whose parents are so addicted to illegal drugs that they sell everything including perhaps their own children to obtain a fix." Harkin knows the routine: smoke up, eat gyro, play Legend of Zelda, sell children to pirates for more pot, repeat.

Seriously. He said that. Amongst a lot of other nonsense

Marijuana is often the drug singled out for legalization. However, marijuana is not the recreational drug that many believe it to be. In a study completed by the Drug Abuse Warning Network, the number of marijuana related emergencies has nearly reached the level of cocaine related emergencies. As this statistic indicates, marijuana use often has fatal consequences.

Similarly, the Knitting Awareness Network, of which I am the founder, editor, President and Chairman, reports that the number of knitting emergencies in my apartment has nearly reached the number of Cthulhu related emergencies.

Accusations of a conflict of interest, or that I have a very good reason to over promote this issue as a fundraising tool, are clearly vicious lies from the Pro-Knit agenda.

The victims of the drug war are many - the small child whose parents are so addicted to illegal drugs that they sell everything including perhaps their own children to obtain a fix; the police officer's family which must now learn to cope with the loss of their loved one as a result of a violent drug bust gone awry. These are the people I think of when I say that drugs pose a significant threat to the security of this nation.

See, it's the pot that causes the damage. Not the war.

Similarly, all those civilian casualties in Iraq? Iraqis' fault. They should have known we'd carpet bomb them and become fireproof.

Source: Wonkette

Republican Values

Vicious Little Children

Contempt
Today the House of Representatives voted to hold two Bush aides in Contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the Attorney General scandal.

Democrats passed contempt of Congress citations against two Bush administration figures Thursday after the charges had spent months in limbo.

They do so on the basis of executive privilege, despite Bush having not claimed said privilege to Congress.

"This is not a confrontation we have sought, and is one we are still hoping to avoid," Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said earlier Thursday. "However, I believe on the merits our case is quite strong. Unlike other disputes involving executive privilege, the President has never personally asserted privilege, the Committee has never been given a privilege log, and there is no indication the President was ever personally involved in the termination decisions."

Michael Mukasey has already indicated that he will refuse to do his job and prosecute the contempt citations, because Bush told his minions to do it, and that makes it ok. If Bush told them to fillet small children and serve them tartare, I guess that would be ok as well.

Meanwhile, House Republicans staged a series of disruptive protests designed to shield their junta from embarassment, if not (likely any) legal jeopardy.

House Republicans staged a walk-out Thursday afternoon to protest the contempt vote and the failure by the chamber's majority members to bow to President Bush's demands on a controversial spying law.

The worst point in the day came when the GOP caucus stooped so low as to interrupt the memorial service for Representative Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and long-time Congressman from California, to force the Dems to come running back to the House floor for a vote. Absolutely disgusting.

Sources: Raw Story
Americablog

Transgender Issues
Man those Republicans are insecure, aren't they? So insecure in fact that they have to viciously attack anyone who makes them feel 'weird'. The kind of 'weird', as Stephen Colbert put it, when someone disagrees with you about how to use their genitals.

Which is the kind of thing that only keeps you awake at night if you were obsessed with their genitals to begin with, as many Republicans seem to be. Then they turn out to be having cybersex with underage pages, or hanging out in bathrooms at the airport, and it all starts to make sense.

At any rate, today we have Fox News showing off their usual standards of excellence by attacking Transgendered people. In one case, a child. But first, here's your usual Fall of Rome bile from Laura Ingraham.

CODEPINK peace activist Medea Benjamin and pundit Laura Ingraham square off over a proposal to close down a Marines recruiting office.

The ballot initiative, which has already prompted retaliatory action in Washington, would ask the citizens of Berkeley, California whether or not to allow the Marines to continue to recruit within city limits.

Ingraham uses Benjamin's transgender status to counter such a proposal, suggesting that Americans are more accepting of war than they are of an upcoming transgender conference.

"A transgender conference is not killing people," Benjamin responds.

"Just killing the culture, maybe," Ingraham rebuts.

Naturally, this was on the O'Reilly Factor.

What kind of 'culture' is Laura referring to here, anyway? The Conservative 'culture'?

Is it really that easy to wipe it out? Hold some transgender conferences?

Honestly? Huh.

Can I host one? Please?

Source: Page One Q

Transgender Issues Cont.
I'm putting this one under a separate headline, because it really deserves its own space. Fox News Neil Cavuto, who really ought to have an illustration beside 'weasel' in the dictionary, went on a tear today about the news that a second grade kid with gender dysphoria (the clinical term for being transgendered) will be accomodated by their grade school.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that gets Cavuto frothing with rage: when a school accomodates a child with special and diagnosed medical or psychological needs.

In two clips, broadcast on February 12 and 13, Fox News' Neil Cavuto expresses his opinion, in response to one Colorado school's move to accommodate a transgender second grader, saying that the situation is robbing the students of their childhood at taxpayer expense.

"Can we just respect childhood enough not to put them through this nonsense at this age?" he asks.

Child psychologist Jeffrey Gardere calls for more schools to be sensitive to the needs of children with gender dysphoria, but Cavuto disagrees that such accommodations should be made in the sight of children as young as the Colorado student; he feels that they are being made more at the expense of the majority of students, rather than for the equal benefit of the minority.

"What we're finding out," contends Gardere, "is that these kids get these gender dysphoria issues as young as four, five, six years old; they believe that they were born into the wrong body."

"We live in a country where majority rules," counters Cavuto. He worries about what parents of the "other 99%" are going to have to tell their kids about, as he calls them, "Johnny who wants to be Jenna."

"I think many kids can grow from knowing that there are children who lead a different lifestyle, who have these psychological and physiological issues," says Gardere.

"You are robbing kids of their childhood," says Cavuto back to Gardere, "and forcing me as a dad to talk to my sons, sit them down and say, 'All right, now. Some boys like having that penis, now others don't.' And it's weird, doctor."

What's really weird is how you think an obscure news story 'forces' you to talk about penises with your kids, Neil.

Maybe you were just, err, looking for a reason? Just guessing here.

After just being FORCED to talk to his kids about something he clearly doesn't understand in the least, Cavuto responds by soliciting, and then airing, viewer mail attacking a SECOND GRADE STUDENT.

Wednesday's segment includes viewer mail, largely mocking the student. Cavuto calls the situation "stupidity" and "too much damn tolerance," repeating his disagreement with the notion that the majority have to "bend over backwards" for their classmate.

I agree. We have too much damn tolerance. For assholes like Neil Cavuto, that is.

Source: Page One Q

Schlussel
Debbie Schlussel is a real class act, I'll tell you that much.

Summary: In an entry on her website, Debbie Schlussel posted "Valentines," in the form of candy hearts, about Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The hearts for Obama were black instead of the usual pastel colors and referenced widely debunked allegations that Obama is, or has been, a Muslim. A number of the candy hearts Schlussel posted for Clinton referenced David Shuster's remark, "But doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"

Ha ha ha! Obama's black! We'll make him deny being a Muslim, like it's any different from being a Christian in any substantive way! Hillary's a pimp! Hilarious!

What a tool.

Source: Media Matters

Fear the Press
Dana Perino (Peroxide) is showing her usual high caliber gutlessness, refusing to call on a reporter after they asked one too many probing questions about her boss's little adventure in the desert.

I didn't think the question I asked Tony Fratto on January 17 was that outrageous. It merely questioned the huge discrepancy between President Bush's year-ago description of the Iraqi government's domestic security "plan," and Iraqi officals' recent statements about that "plan." But evidently someone in the White House didn't like the question, because since that date, Press Secretary Dana Perino has repeatedly ignored my attempts to ask questions during the daily briefings.

A press secretary who's completely unable to handle the press; another incompetent Republican hire.

Wow. What a surprise.

Source: Raw Story

2008: A Good Year for Whine
Virginia Republicans are mad, or were (sorry, slow at clearing out the clutter), at the idea that, gasp, they might have to support the Republican nominee, or, you know, resign from the party!

Members of the Republican Party in Loudoun County, Viriginia met last week, and took up a variety of business, including a requirement that members of the party's committee support all Republican candidates. With McCain looking set to march away with the nomination, some party members objected.

"I am really concerned that John McCain is going to become the nominee," Erika Jacobson of the newspaper Leesburg Today reported committee member Susan Falknor saying. "He has been against a lot of conservative values."

Look folks. You can vote for whoever you want. That's your right. But the GOP is a private organization; they can enforce whatever silly rules they want, within what few laws apply, like any other elitist club.

Man, I can't believe I just defended the GOP. I feel so dirty.

Source: Raw Story

Gibson the Alcoholic Anti-Semite
So Mel Gibson, famed anti-semite and creator of the submoronic Passion of the Christ (where for 'authenticity' he had everyone speaking a form of Latin that wouldn't exist for at least a thousand years... moron) is out of his court ordered supervision after the drunken tirade that landed him in the news, his career in the toilet, and his future Oscar chancers forever out of reach.

A California judge congratulated star actor-director Mel Gibson for fulfilling the conditions of his probation, a year and a half after he was arrested for drunk-driving, when he blurted out anti-Semitic remarks.

...

At the time of his arrest Gibson -- who was criticized for anti-Semitic portrayals in his 2004 Biblical film "The Passion of the Christ" -- swore at the officer who stopped him, cursing Jews and saying: "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

He later asked forgiveness, explaining that he had battled with alcoholism his whole life.

Yes, it was the BOOZE that made him a raging bigot. Not his lunatic fringe religious beliefs... Riiight.

Source: Raw Story

Stuff We Have to Ban Because They Just Can't Keep Their Hands Off
So Texas' law banning various sex toys from sale has been overturned by a federal court, mercifully relieving the world of the possibility of an endless series of CourtTV appearances by embarassed Texans whose closets got raided by Vice.

Thank the Lord.

FORT WORTH, Texas — A federal appeals court has overturned a Texas statute outlawing sex toy sales, leaving Alabama as the state with the strictest ban on such devices.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by up to two years in jail, violated the Constitution's 14th Amendment on the right to privacy.

Companies that own Dreamer's and Le Rouge Boutique, which sell the devices in its Austin stores, and the retail distributor Adam & Eve, sued in Austin federal court in 2004 over the constitutionality of the law. They appealed after a federal judge dismissed the suit and said the constitution did not protect their right to publicly promote such devices.

In its decision Tuesday, the appeals court cited Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 opinion that struck down bans on consensual sex between gay couples.

Ahh, yet again, Progress comes to the South at the end of a pen.

I'm fine with doing it at the end of a sword, if that's what they'd prefer, though.

Source: Houston Chronicle

Torturers
Torturers abound in the United States government, our response to gruesome injustice is further gruesome injustice.

The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding him without trial.

That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

Sigh. We're as low as we can go without finding a shovel.

There are the usual particularly gruesome details at the site, but I'm tired of pasting that stuff here.

Source: Firedoglake

Esser Ethics
An old ethics 'complaint' against Luke Esser, the man who cheated Huckabee out of the Washington GOP Primary, shows that people, glass houses, yadda yadda yadda.

Source: Horsesass.org

Private Stasi
Who says the Bush administration has a completely naive grasp of history? Bush has apparently decided to revive that most beloved secret police organization from East Germany, the Stasi!

"At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector," the InfraGard website states. "InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories."

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that "350 of our nation's Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard."To join, each person must be sponsored by "an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization." The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

Ahh, networks of secret informants, whatever could go wrong?

Oh, riiight.

One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation -- and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, "Partnership for Protection." On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

"The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage," he says. "From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we'd be given specific benefits." These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out. But that's not all.

"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says.

And people thought it was paranoid to worry about Bush declaring martial law and seizing power in a coup.

Sigh.

Source: Hullabaloo (Digby)

Newsy Politicy Stuff

Politics of the Day

Stories to Chew On

Obama is a Moron
Want a reason why? OK, let's start with idolizing Reagan for 'changing' the country. Changing it into what?

Well, for one thing, he destroyed the economy and saddled the next four or five generations with debt.

Source: The Huffington Post

Pot Meet Kettle
So Chuck Norris, Huckabee supporter extraordinaire, has come out saying that St. John McCain is too old to be President.

So we have a washed-out, retiree 'action' star who can't manage a roundhouse kick telling us that a Senator is too old to be President.

Maybe McCain can hire a younger black man to do all the physical work, just like you did, Chuck!

Source: CNN.com

Time to Take a Stand
Do you want a national set of ID papers, required to do everything from go to court to fly on a plane to get a job to God knows what else?

If not, then you should support Governor Schweitzer of Montana, because he's making a Dodd-esque stand for our fading civil liberties at this very moment.

Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D) declared independence Friday from federal identification rules and called on governors of 17 other states to join him in forcing a showdown with the federal government which says it will not accept the driver's licenses of rebel states' citizens starting May 11.

If that showdown comes to pass, a resident of a non-complying state could not use a driver's license to enter a federal courthouse or a Social Security Administration building nor could he board a plane without undergoing a pat-down search, possibly creating massive backlogs at the nation's airports and almost certainly leading to a flurry of federal lawsuits.

States have until May 11 to request extensions to the Real ID rules that were released last Friday. They require states to make all current identification holders under the age of 50 to apply again with certified birth and marriage certificates. The rules also standardize license formats, require states to interlink their DMV databases and require DMV employee to undergo background checks.

Yeesh, people, this is NOT the Soviet Union yet! We shouldn't have to have official papers to go to court, fly, travel and the like.

What is WRONG with you, America?

Source: Wired

Nothing to See Here, Move Along
Speaking of Big Brother, New York's police want to ban the ownership of devices that measure air quality.

I'm not making this up. They want to ban devices to measure pollution. Private citizens could go to jail for detecting that the air they're breathing is bad. You're not allowed to know what's in your air, if this goes through, unless the Party tells you that you can check.

Gee, I wonder why they would want to ban independent air quality checks....

Dave Newman, an industrial hygienist for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, claimed that under this law, the West Virginia air-quality experts who tested the air after 9/11 would have been a bunch of criminals.

See, disagreeing with the government is wrong. Having facts on your side is WORSE. Stay ignorant and breathe deep, America.

Source: The Village Voice

Texas Republicans
Republican Judge indicted for arson. Republican prosecutor asks judge to dismiss case rather than go ahead.

Color me shocked.

Source: DallasNews.com

Saturday Morning News Coming Down

W00t, Kinkos called about our evil surprise.

Kids Do the Darndest Things
So you hear a lot about kids imitating this or that, and how it's therefore the victim of imitation's responsibility to make a product that kids either won't want to imitate, or won't die from imitating.

But what if, and here's a radical thought, kids are just sort of, you know, stupid, and could die playing any number of games? What if they could, gasp, imitate beneficial behavior as well?

Cases in point. First, a four year old British girl who apparently hung herself by accident, again apparently imitating a Go, Diego Go episode. I'm not sure how they know exactly what she was playing at, since nobody was watching her, but that's the story they're going with.

On the other hand, a young boy tried to defend his mother with a toy lightsaber from some random jackass who assaulted her on the street. Police were thinking that the commotion (and if it wasn't a cheapo saber perhaps the flashing light and sound) helped to drive off Mr. Happy-Fist.

The Lesson here? Maybe we should just remember that kids are kids, and the world is a big, scary place, itself only a fragile soap-bubble thin shell over the howling gulf of madness, and therefore, you might want to supervise the children rather than trying to child-proof Planet Earth.

Sources: Fox Noise
Fox Noise

The Old Axiom Is Probably Right
You know, the one about something seeming too good to be true...

Well, anyway, there's an air-powered car coming to market, promising 200km a tankful of air, a cost of only 7k dollars, and a top speed near 70. It's made of fiberglass and uses a compressed air engine of sorts to power itself.

Great, huh? Well...

If you look at the fine print, it's not that they're lying, but sort of exaggerating the novelty here.

The deal is, this is an electric car. An extremely, extremely light electric car. Tiny too. Instead of using Lithium-Ion batteries as the energy storage mechanism, it uses a tank of compressed air, that it can charge up by being plugged into a wall socket, where it then draws your juice to compress its own internal air supply.

So what you have here isn't a magic air-car, it's a fiberglass alterna-Prius.

Also, they 'hope' to see compressed air charging stations that would allow the car to fill up as fast as a gasoline car, which of course is the same fallacy as hydrogen cars; it'll never happen. There's no economic incentive for Big Oil to become Big Air Compressor.

So that leaves its electric car capabilities. How are those? Sort of.. beta.

It takes quite a while to charge, it's an ultra-light with a low top speed, and it has little bugs like not yet having a heating system worked out, since its engine doesn't generate heat.

Which will come in really handy, from a French automaker. It's not like they have winter in Europe,

right?

*shrug*

I'm all for alternative energy storage mechanisms, but let's not pretend we're reinventing the wheel when all we're doing is changing the number of spokes.

Sources: Raw Story
Promo Site

Texas Still Sucks
So a black couple tried to move into a white neighborhood in Arlington, Texas. Some of the locals were not impressed with this decision, assaulting the woman and spraypainting the house with racist grafitti.

The cops duly charged the woman who performed the assault with, well, assault, and the city is making a big show out of unity or something like that. But the big thing on everybody's mind in Arlington isn't that, you know, their city is full of racist, violent fucks, but that... the victimized homeowner doesn't want to take down the graffiti.

See, the guy has this funny idea that, you know, maybe the Texas town should have to bear its racist shame publicly. The cops, the neighbors, the city, the local media, they all are rather opposed to this idea, and are pressuring the man, trying to make him remove the graffiti. Despite there being no law on the books to compel him to do so, as the victim of the crime.

They're even holding fundraisers and such, as if the problem was that he couldn't pay to get a new garage door (the old one now being colorfully decorated in red spray paint with 'Die Nigger' and so forth.

However, many neighbors were annoyed. "Everyone gets the drift," said one. "It needs to be taken off."

Oh, we get the drift all right. Southerners are happy enough, coddling racist extremists, but they dislike it when the rock is removed and all their animal-lovin cousins scurry out from underneath in full Klan regalia. Bad for the public image and all that.

So once again, I say: Texas sucks.

Source: Raw Story

Privacy For Me, Not For Thee
So a judge has been forced to resign after somebody nicked, and then released to the cops and the press, an audiocassette he made. Apparently the judge likes to indulge in some rather kinky voice recordings. The cops got the impression that there was something horrible going on, until they investigated, it was leaked to the press, who are now suing to get access to the tape to publish it, and the judge, despite having committed no crime, has been pressured into resigning from office.

For what? For having a private life and hurting no one? Come on, people. You can't abuse a dictaphone. Get over yourselves. Here, let me sacrifice my chances at ever being a judge.

I loooove to kill puppies. Their dead, limp bodies feel so soft and squishy. Their fur is so much nicer as it cools, and they make great throw-pillows until the guts start to putrefy. Hmm, guts. I could stab ice picks into their tiny brains all day long, it'd be so much fun, I wish the neighborhood had more dogs!

There. See. I wrote something disgusting. Apparently my public life is over now.

Sort of a relief, really. Who wants to dedicate their life to public service when the public are such a bunch of pearl-clutching pansies, hunched perpetually over their fainting couches?

Source: AZCentral.com

Idiot Science Watch
So some nutbars at Yale have conducted a study they claim shows that women and gays are worse drivers than straight men.

If you think that sounds a bit out there, and would be skeptical, Good for you!

First the headline: Women and gay men are 'worst drivers'

Wow, that sounds pretty ironclad. Let's check the article.

Research has revealed that both perform poorly in tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness when compared to heterosexual men.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, who conducted the study, believe the findings mean driving in a strange environment would be more difficult for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Oh, so they didn't test driving at all. They tested 'navigation and spatial awareness'. Well, that sounds a bit fishy. What does that even mean?

The research team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University.

In one, volunteers had to swim through an underwater maze to find a hidden platform, while the second involved exploring radial arms projecting from a central junction to receive 'rewards' .

So, what the study actually 'showed' is that women and gay men are worse at playing a couple of videogames, developed at Yale.

That's not nearly as big of a news story though, is it? Gee, I wonder why they would have extrapolated so wildly....

This part in particular makes me chuckle.

The results back earlier studies supporting the stereotype that women are poor navigators.

Although women are more successful in tests requiring them to remember the position of objects, men consistently do better in tasks requiring navigation and uncovering hidden objects.

God knows you never need to remember where stuff is when you're FINDING A PLACE.

Lolz. Seriously, these people are nitwits. You have a result that shows, potentially, if your copy of Tron there is actually a decent proxy, that women and gay men might have poorer navigational skills. So you run out and start screaming that they're poor drivers?

Might you want to, I dunno, actually put some subjects behind the wheel first? Test the actual, you know, driving?

Why do I have to know how to do these peoples' jobs better than they do?

Source: The Telegraph

News News Newsity News

Because it hates me actually using my tabs for some reason.

Looney Tunes
McCain, at a campaign event, equates our troop presence in Iraq with Korea, and then says he'd be fine

with us being in Iraq for another hundred years

Can someone give this man a psych exam? Please?

Source: Mother Jones

Someone Please Mess with Texas
So Texas has an astoundingly high rate of false convictions being overturned by DNA evidence. Color me shocked.

Three times during his nearly 27 years in prison, Charles Chatman went before a parole board and refused to admit he was a rapist. His steadfastness was vindicated Thursday, when a judge released him because of new DNA evidence showing he indeed wasn't. The release of Chatman, 47, added to Dallas County's nationally unmatched number of wrongfully convicted inmates.

...

Dallas has freed more inmates after DNA testing than any other county nationwide, said Natalie Roetzel of the Innocence Project of Texas. Texas leads the country in prisoners freed by DNA testing, releasing at least 30 wrongfully convicted inmates since 2001, according to the Innocence Project.

One of the biggest reasons for the large number of exonerations is the crime lab used by Dallas County, which accounts for about half the state's DNA cases. Unlike many jurisdictions, the lab used by police and prosecutors retains biological evidence, meaning DNA testing is a viable option for decades-old crimes.

District Attorney Craig Watkins also attributes the exonerations to a past culture of overly aggressive prosecutors seeking convictions at any cost. Watkins has started a program in which law students, supervised by the Innocence Project of Texas, are reviewing about 450 cases in which convicts have requested DNA testing to prove their innocence.

"It is time we stop kidding ourselves in believing that what happened in Dallas is somehow unique," said Jeff Blackburn, the founder of the Innocence Project of Texas. "What happened in Dallas is common. This is Texas."

Why do we let them pretend to be a state? It's a joke.

Source: Raw Story

Wasn't There a Fairy Tale Like This?
So a kneeboarder (yeah, I had to look it up too), lost a nose stud in some rough waves while out doing their hybrid waterskiing/wakeboarding thing.

Then her boyfriend went fishing and apparently caught a fish that had, err, eaten her nose stud.

My only question is, how do they know for sure it's hers? I thought studs were sort of plain and generic.

It could be a hoax for the publicity I guess.

Maybe I'm just being cynical because the story is from Fox Noise.

Source: FoxNews.com ()
Kneeboarding pic

Number One With a Bullet
Ok, listen up, retards. I'm only going to state this once, for the painfully dense.

When you fire a bullet into the air, it will come down somewhere. Quite rapidly. Your gun does not in fact allow anything to reach escape velocity for the Planet Earth.

A family in Oregon whose kids were thankfully asleep on the floor on New Years found, in the morning, a 2 inch hole in the roof above their kid's room, and a BULLET ON THE PILLOW

What is wrong with you gun toting nuts? The first thing my stepdad ever told me about using guns before I was allowed to shoot one was, 'Never point a gun at anything you don't intend to destroy'.

Do you intend to destroy the sky? Or just random strangers?

Morons.

Source: Fox Noise

Zombie Nutrition Guide
Zombies need to eat healthy too!

Handy Guide!