You Are Dumb - Post-Millennial Judgment and Retribution for the Information Age

Induhpendunce D'Oh

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:16:51 -0500

Holidays, 4 July 2008

Memo to the American Family Association: ENJOY FREEDOM, MORONS.

It's a holiday, which means most of you aren't actually reading this. That means I get to put in MINIMAL EFFORT. I enjoy minimal effort, for reasons that should be obvious. Luckily, the American Family Association believes in MAXIMAL EFFORT when it comes to being dumb. Donald Wildmon's group is the grand old dame of the bluenose ball, still kicking it butt-stupid after 31 years.

And man, do they hate gay people. They hate gay people so much they don't even like gay people calling themselves "gay". They think gay people should always be called HOMOSEXUALS, presumably because the more syllables you have, the more disgust you can work up in the audience. And if the AFA is committed to anything, it's committed to quintupling disgust. So what they do is replace the word "gay" in any wire stories they run on their site with the word "homosexual". Presumably by some sort of automated process. Which led to the following appearing on their website last week. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday... Homosexual didn’t get off to a particularly strong start in the first semifinal..."

The wire stories, of course, were talking about track star Tyson Gay. Man, I wonder how he learned to run so fast?

Clearly, this bothered the AFA, which is used to being a national laughingstock for stuff they do on purpose, not stuff they do by accident because they're crazy. So they jumped right back on that bucking bugfuck bronco and went after McDonalds for its support of the tyson homosexual agenda.

No, seriously. Well, except for the "tyson" part. That bit was the kind of clever wordplay you'd enjoy if you read the column on holidays. But they really do want us to boycott Mickey D's. Why?

"McDonald’s has chosen not to remain neutral but to give the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage."

McDonalds' crimes? First, they gave $20,000 to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Second, one of their corporate employees is a member of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. And third, the AFA really hates gay people. If there are any other reasons, they're lost amidst the crappy, hysterical writing and even worse design of the boycottmcdonalds.com site.

Clearly emboldened by that one time they got Ford to stop advertising in a gay magazine*, the AFA now thinks it can take down what is arguably the modern world's first example of horrifying American global corporate dominance. They'll be lucky if all they get is a bun and a pickle. Of course, knowing them, they'll see the bun and the pickle as promoting the homosexual agenda.

*I know this because it's the only touchstone the hundreds of retarded commenters on the site bother using.

Jingo All The Way

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:50:39 -0500

Racism, 3 July 2008

Memo to Rickie Pitre: YOU ARE DUMB.

And you're a dickhole. A huge dickhole. So huge a dickhole that we could catheterize you with a length of industrial drainage pipe and still have to pack something around the outside to keep it from shifting. There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with you, and I suggest you dig into your psyche and your past and figure out what the fuck it is before you allow yourself to mingle with polite human society again.

Let's place you, a sane, reasonable person, in a... let's say, hypothetical, situation. You are attending a graduation ceremony. The valedictorian, a Vietnamese girl, includes a line of Vietnamese in her speech, and explains it's advice her parents had given her. Her co-valedictorian and cousin also included some Vietnamese in her speech, thanking her parents, who aren't fluent in English.

As a sane, reasonable person, I'm guessing you would think that's nice. As a sane, reasonable person, I'm sure you wouldn't begrudge an honored student speaking to loved ones during that special moment. As a sane, reasonable person, you would have a very difficult time getting onto, and staying onto, the school board in Terrebonne Parrish, Louisiana. Because right after this happened, board member Rickie Pitre and several of his compatriots called for regulating graduation ceremonies so that they will be only in English.

What, exactly, has to go wrong in your brain to make you do that? How much propaganda do you have to be force-fed by racist, anti-immigrant, reactionary nutjobs with microphones and three-hour slots on AM radio? How deeply do you have to internalize the rabid jingoism and the terror that you're being supplanted and replaced by the Other that a few sentences of Vietnamese at a public ceremony force you to take action? And then try, and fail miserably, to justify your fucked-up worldveiw? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"As board members, we get to observe the different ceremonies and there’s some inconsistencies I think the board or administration more importantly needs to address... I don’t like them addressing in a foreign language. They should be in English." - Richie "Waste Of Fucking Oxygen" Pitre.

First, the obvious. From his sentence structure and word choice, I'd bet that not only was Richie Pitre never the valedictorian of anything, anywhere, ever, but I suspect this whole mess could have been avoided if someone had told him they WERE speaking English, just fancy smart-person English, and mocked him for not understanding it.

But really? "Inconsistencies"? That's just replacing ignorant racism with insane arrogance. You're telling me the school board should step in, on behalf of Richie Pitre and the dozen or so school officials who have to attend multiple graduation ceremonies, so that these officials aren't thrown or confused by minor differences in the speeches and presentations? It's a graduation ceremony. It's not about some redneck school board member's comfort. A point lost on fellow board member Roger DeHart.

"I’m not trying to discriminate against any other language said. We should all know what’s being said." All right. First of all, you actually are trying to discriminate against, literally, ANY other language. That's what requiring English means, you swamp-sucking alligator-humper. And second of all, it's a graduation ceremony. I've been to a few in my time. These people have been to a lot more. Enough to figure out by now that the range of topics covered therein is even narrower than the average mind in Louisiana.

You give me the text of a high school graduation speech from any language in the world, and I bet I could give you a pretty good translation just by looking up the words "future", "friends", "thank you", "important", and "time". They're the E, T, A, O, and N of the valedictorian Wheel of Fortune.

And, you know, this is in fucking Louisiana, where they just now decided that students' academic freedom is so fucking important that they will suffer greatly if they're not told in science class about the evils of cloning and how Jesus rode a dinosaur. Yet strangely, students' freedom gets tossed right under the short bus the instant some asshole hears a word he doesn't understand. Awesome. Way to uphold that reputation.

Killer Robots From Berkeley

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:32:02 -0500

Wingnuts, 2 July 2008

Memo to Greater Wingnuttia: YOU ARE DUMB.

It never fails. Just when I'm starting to feel the cynical dread as I watch yet another Democratic candidate duck and cover in the face of a barrage from the stupidly hostile - or is that hostile and stupid? - media, along comes the right-wing blogosphere to make me feel better about myself, and by extension, the entire left-wing, from Harry Reid's vague lip-service to the Constitution all the way to Starbuck-smashing anarchists. Because at least we're not scared of robots.

I suppose we're duly wary of some robots, like robot drones with bombs strapped to them, but we're not afraid of the cute robots. We don't wake up at night in a cold sweat, terrified that Robosapien will brainwash our children with a vision of Aryan perfection, or that Japan's unending array of special-purpose fetish robots will endear the young to the amazing things that can come from unregulated markets. This is because, well, we're sane. You know who's not sane? Greg Pollowitz at National Review Online:

"It was like a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment." Man, that sounds awful. I can't imagine someone claiming that over-consumption and the destruction of the environment are dangerous. What gall these as-yet-unrevealed purveyors of entertainment have! But wait, we need corroboration. Take it away, Glenn Beck!

"You know if your kid has ever come home and said, 'Dad, how come we use so much styrofoam,' oh, this is the movie for you. I love that. 'Dad, how come we don't recycle as much as we should?' 'We do recycle.' 'Well, teacher says we don't recycle enough.' 'Oh, really? Is that what teacher is saying? What's the teacher's phone number?' I'm becoming one of those people, I really am." - What perfidious film could possibly drive Glenn Beck into fantasies about berating his child's teacher, and can we stop ourselves from wondering exactly how that fantasy ends? Quick, we need a distraction! Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, you're our only hope!

"I agree that the Malthusian fear mongering was annoying." - I, too, would be annoyed if someone kept trying to convince me I should be afraid of Thomas Malthus, who, after 180-plus-years in the grave, wouldn't even make a good zombie in some kind of highly ineffective zombie philosopher uprising. I think it's time for the big reveal in any event, for which we turn to yet another of the National Review Online denizens, Shannon Coffin:

"As for me, Pixar's latest offering was Godforsaken dreck. Mankind has had to abandon the earth because there is too much garbage. WALL-E is the only remaining garbage compacting robot in a metropolis of garbage skyscrapers. And his only living companion is a cockroach, described by a Washington Post reviewer (who doubtlessly thinks very highly of the Nobel Committee) as cute, but pretty much just a cockroach... From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind."

Now, the National Review Online has a creepy stalker thing with Star Trek, so it's understandable that they think at least one character in every science fiction piece is a stand-in for Communists. Now, I haven't seen Wall-E yet. For all I know, it could be the Marxist diatribe that only crazy wingnuts, and nobody else on the planet, thinks it is. But is it really Marxist to say that garbage is bad?

I can't imagine why Jonah Goldberg and his NRO pals would be, perhaps, offended by scenes of corpulent, pasty humans in thrall to a decadent corporate lifestyle. But at least they didn't take it as far as "Dirty Harry", who you may recall from his Hollywood-hating screeds over at Libertas. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Have we lost Pixar? Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome? Here you have a winning streak going back ten-years, enormous amounts of public goodwill, equal amounts of credibility as serious storytellers, and they stop things cold, yanking you out of the story with the liberal nonsense."

OK, "The Incredibles" I understand. Wingnuts read a whole Randian "the superior should be allowed to run roughshod over the inferior" subtext into the movie that wasn't there. But "Ratatouille"? How can Dirty Harry rail about the hidden liberal message of Wall-E while praising a film in which a hedonistic French rodent wins his ultimate victory over... a critic? It's as if Harry were dome kind of idiot, blinded by ideology, and still using the phrase "Bush Derangement Syndrome" to describe criticism of a man with a 23% approval rating.

Democratic candidates take note. If you are hesitant to take on the right-wing noise machine, consider wrapping a box in tinfoil and putting it on your head. That should make them completely lose their shit.

Take The Shot

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:27:23 -0500

Election 2008, 1 July 2008

Memo to Barack Obama: PICK ONE.

You're going to have to pick one between now and November, and it really doesn't help you to wait while pitch after pitch bounces off your head. You're going to have to pick one and fight it, because if you don't, it's not going to stop.

Wesley Clark would have been a good one to pick. I'm normally not a huge proponent of the theory that all it takes to defuse a bully is to stand up to them once, in a dramatic fashion. Life doesn't play out like an episode of Growing Pains. But politics, strangely enough, often does.

For those of you who weren't following this, on Sunday, in response to a leading question, Wesley Clark said the following:"Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president." And oh, was there a pulling of hair and rending of garments and wailing!

Big fucking whoop. First, this is true. We've had 43 presidents, and a startlingly small number of them were fighter pilots who were shot down. Second, militarily, General Wesley Clark outranks Captain John McCain, so you'd think he'd be given some leeway in terms of smack talk. And third, who really gives a shit?

But, as a wise man prophetically stated yesterday, "the media, in its desire for an exciting narrative of a divided country, will downplay reasons not to vote for McCain, and amplify reasons not to vote for Obama." And so the media dutifully amplified the fake outrage from the same people who said John Kerry faked injuries to get his Purple Hearts*.

Obama could have said this was a bullshit attack. He could have stood up for the media manhandling of one of his surrogates. What Clark said was so far inside the boundaries of acceptable discourse that letting it be attacked actually redefines acceptable discourse in a way that will hurt Obama in the long run. I believe we all know what's coming next. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"As he's said many times before, Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain's service, and of course he rejects yesterday's statement by General Clark." - Obama spokesman Bill Burton, apparently a product of John Kerry's Nerf factory.

Conventional wisdom says that by doing this, you take the issue off the table, stop the attacks, and move on to talking about the issues. Funny thing about conventional wisdom - it only seems to apply when the people in charge of the "conventional wisdom" decide it should apply. If Fox and CNN and MSNBC decide they can keep this thing going for a few more days, rejecting or no rejecting. And if you give them a reject, they'll demand a denounce. If they get a denounce, they'll demand a fired. If they get a fired, they'll STILL bring it up whenever it'll give them a boost.

There's another, even stupider line of thought that casts this as a clever, super-double-secret strategy. By doing the "say bad thing, denounce bad thing" game, Obama "gets it out there" that McCain's military service isn't that big a deal. Which would be great, except, well, that only works for conservatives. And the only reason it works for conservatives is that once it's "out there", their media enablers feel free to repeat it. You're not going to turn on the TV tomorrow and, now that it's "out there", see Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson debating the suddenly important question of the true worth of John McCain's military experience.

The current rules are the result of two decades of conservative media-bashing and media-buying. You don't fight that by pretending it's not there, or trying to play along with it. You have to bloody it. You have to punch it in the nose like it's a hungry shark. Shame and embarrass it publicly so that maybe they'll think twice the next time they try it. And to do that, you need an easy win, something so blatantly false and mischaracterized that even Glenn Beck would feel his last shred of shame stirring if he tried to defend it. This Clark business might have been that easy win, but now Obama's gonna have to pick another one.

*And I mean literally the same people. Bud Day, one of the Swift Boat Douchebags for Bush, is now part of John McCain's "truth squad", which in every news story today has appeared with quotation marks around it, which I choose to interpret as punctuational subliminal messaging.

Windows To The Uterus

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:07:16 -0500

Election 2008, 30 June 2008
Memo to America: HERE, HAVE SOME MORE.

You Are Dumb Dot Net has had, and will continue to have, one consistent position on the 2008 election: DO NOT VOTE FOR JOHN MCCAIN. I really don't give a shit how you feel about Obama's stance on FISA (even though it sucks), or his stance on public financing (even though it's practical), or whatever. Doesn't matter. Because it's never been about Obama's worthiness. It's about his one incontrovertibly positive quality - he's not John McCain.

Very few people actually want to vote for John McCain, and that's good. It's more interesting on the news, however, if people DO want to vote for John McCain, and that's bad. Because the media, in its desire for an exciting narrative of a divided country, will downplay reasons not to vote for McCain, and amplify reasons not to vote for Obama. As a tiny counterbalance to this, I will keep reminding you of why voting for McCain is an awful idea. Which reminds me. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Oh, I don't remember. Now there's Secret Service protection. But I've done it for many, many years. I don't recall and frankly, I don't see how it matters. I've had hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings, many as short a time ago as yesterday. I communicate with the people and they communicate with me very effectively.

This is John McCain's answer to the question "When was the last time you pumped your own gas, and how much did it cost?" Now, from a strictly semantic perspective, a perspective that Republicans have surely already adopted, John McCain did not say he didn't know how much gas costs these days. He just said he can't remember the last time he pumped his own gas. But even given that, it's an awful, awful answer.

If you're John McCain, you're chiefly worried about three things keeping you from becoming the next President of the United States. One, that people will blame Republicans for ruining the country just because Republicans ruined the country. Two, that people will stop picking the McCain stance that appeals most to them, and actually notice when he also takes the opposite stance. And three, coming across as a doddering, irritable old coot. And that last one is the only one he can actually do something about.

There are few things more dodderingly cootish than saying the Secret Service pumps my gas, so it doesn't matter, and anyway, I HAVE TOWN HALL MEETINGS! If the Straight Talk Express had taken a sharper turn onto Completely Unrelated Talking Point Lane any faster, the thing would have rolled over and burst into flames. You would think, at this point, McCain would at least recognize the delusional importance the country has placed on feigning the lack of elitism. All he had to do was work the words "four dollars a gallon" in there somewhere. The phrase is inescapable. Dead Amish hermits know gas is four bucks a gallon.

Sure, the Secret Service pumps John McCain's gas now. And sure, for years before that, his driver pumped it. And when he flies, his wife fills up the private jet. But it's still in his best interests to seem more on the ball than a dead Amish hermit. And he couldn't pull it off.

REASON #2: EYE BABIES.

John McCain is a Republican. When a Republican takes over for another Republican, the new Republican rarely makes it a priority to root out all the Republicans the old Republican hired. This is a problem. Because it seems that the Bush administration hired attorneys for the Justice Department based largely on how good they were at not making eye babies.

I sense your confusion, and do not begrudge you it. I admit that sentence is the kind of sentence that can drive men mad if they gaze upon it for long enough. Let me work it back for you. A report out last week found out that the Justice Department has been illegally filtering applicants for their Honors Program based on political affiliation. The Honors Program is basically how you get hired as an attorney by the Justice Department. The main person involved in this, and apparently the subsequent destruction of the application records, is Esther Slater McDonald. Esther Slater McDonald is a graduate of Pensacola Christian College. Here's a small slice of what life was like at McDonald's unaccredited alma mater:

"Even couples who are not talking or touching can be reprimanded. Sabrina Poirier, a student at Pensacola who withdrew in 1997, was disciplined for what is known on the campus as 'optical intercourse' — staring too intently into the eyes of a member of the opposite sex. This is also referred to as 'making eye babies.' While the rule does not appear in written form, most students interviewed for this article were familiar with the concept. - Chronicle of Higher Education.

After four and a half years of this, I continue to be amazed at the ingenuity the fundamentalists in America bring to their attempts at surprising me. There are certain things that come out of people's mouths that should disqualify them from holding anything with sharp edges, much less be in charge of hiring in the Justice Department. "Making eye babies" is one of those things.

I don't know how much Barack Obama cares that the Justice Department is full of people who were ideologically vetted by a crazy woman who spent her formative college years trying to avoid having ocular intercourse with men. But I know that John McCain cares LESS. And that's another great reason not to vote for him.

But Not A Drop To Think

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:58:54 -0500

Racism, 27 June 2008
Memo to Rush Limbaugh and Jeffrey Seyfert: YOU ARE DUMB.

There is no greater tool in the arsenal of the professional dickwad than the false equivalency. I've expounded on this many times in the past. It's when someone with an axe to grind treats two completely different situations as if they were the same. They do this so they can compare the reactions or solutions to the two situations in a way that makes them look good and their enemies look bad. It's a classic dick move.

The way you make it work is through the powerful effect that superficial similarity has on stupid people. Take, as an example, floods. If you're an idiot, a bunch of water is a bunch of water. A basement-full, a field-full, or a city-full, doesn't matter. Its all floods, so its all the same.

Rush Limbaugh knows his audience is stupid. He knows this shit will work on them, especially if it can reinforce their existing worldview and prejudices. So while it wasn't surprising that he'd say this, it's still quite the dickly move. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois—I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans. I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property…I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can…whining and moaning—where’s FEMA, where’s BUSH. I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America."

Rush "sees" devastation that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. He sees it. Now, I hate to minimize the suffering and damage from this year's floods, but I wouldn't have to bring them back down to their actual size if Rush Limbaugh hadn't inflated them so that he could praise Midwestern (white) people and deride Louisiana (black) people. So here we go.

Death Toll (Midwest Floods 2008) - 24
Death Toll (Katrina and Flooding) - 1,836
Damage Estimate (Midwest Floods 2008) - $3 - $4 billion*
Damage Estimate (Katrina and Flooding) - $81 billion

Comparing the size of these floods to Katrina is like comparing the size of Rush Limbaugh's daily Oxycontin dose to Rush Limbaugh himself. Both are troublingly large on their own, but it's clear to everyone except racist fuckholes who want to keep blaming the New Orleans victims for their inability to breathe underwater that one of them is much, much larger than the other. False equivalency.

We know why Rush says it. Because he's a hateful bastard and because his audience needs to hear it. And sure enough, the talking point was picked up loud and clear by Jeffrey Seyfert in a letter that the Star Tribune inexplicably made its "Letter Of The Day" last Sunday.

"Where is Hollywood and why aren't they putting together a telethon to help the victims of the flooding? Where is Kanye West looking into the camera and saying George Bush hates black people... The reason you don't see them is it doesn't fit the template. It doesn't fit the template that the federal government is supposed to be omnipresent in our lives and that self-reliance and self-responsibility are mere clichés of days long ago."

No, you fucking moron, the reason you're not seeing these things is that Hurricane Katrina was somewhere between twenty and seventy-five times worse than this year's floods. What you have done, if you'll allow my true equivalency to get in the way of your false equivalency, is damn an entire nation of paraplegics for their poor stair-climbing ability because you managed it just fine when you were on crutches. And if you're going to be that big of an asshole, at least have the sense, like Rush does, to get PAID for it.

So please. Take your lingering resentment, your simmering racism, and your apparently gnat-like memory of recent history and fuck right off back to your comfortable life in Farmington. Take five minutes out of the three hours a day you spend listening to right-wing talk radio and spend them learning to use Google and a calculator, and maybe, just maybe, you won't publicly humiliate yourself like this again.

*There's no final damage estimate as yet, so I took the average of what I could find, and then I doubled it just to be safe. Double it a couple more times and it's still not even fucking close.

Tesla Would Be Pissed

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:15:28 -0500

Education, 26 June 2008
Memo to fundies: I DON'T WANNA HEAR IT.

That's it. No more claims of persecution and victimization. No more crusades against the ACLU and activist judges. I don't wanna fucking hear it. We need the ACLU and the judges, because the fact is, if you had your way, our schools would be full of John Freshwaters. And without the ACLU and the courts, you would in fact have your way.

Even without the ACLU and the courts, Mount Vernon, Ohio had the actual John Freshwater for 21 years, teaching science classes. Not teaching science, of course, but teaching science CLASSES. Even though there were at least eleven years of complaints about him, he was there, in his eighth grade classroom, branding crosses into his students' arms with a Tesla coil.

I. Shit. You. Not.

More accurately, it was a BD-10A High Frequency Generator, which is meant to ionize gases in test tubes. Freshwater obviously found a unique scientific use for the device, which its manufacturer said was not meant to be used on skin. You'd think that'd be a given for any device producing 50,000 volts at the tip, but the prospect of bending Devil Science to God's will was just too tempting for poor John Freshwater.

But we should probably back up a bit. When one of the students whose arm he branded with a cross actually complained, that's when he FINALLY got in trouble, and will likely be fired. That's what sparked, if you will, the investigation that brought him down. Here's what this fucker was pulling before that:

He had the Ten Commandments and other religious posters papering his classroom. When they finally got around to asking them to take them down, he took down all but one. Which is exactly the kind of behavior you'd expect from the radical follower of a noble martyr, I suppose.

Keeping between a minimum of two and a maximum, if reports are to be believed, a metric shitload of bibles in his classroom at all times. When we say the public schools are having a tough time providing books for the student, we're not asking teachers to play Gideon.

Teaching evolution begrudgingly, telling students he was being forced to teach it, then telling them it was wrong and telling them all about creationism and intelligent design, using the same type of "alternate materials" Louisiana wants to permit. How bad was it? The high school could always tell which students had been through Freshwater's class, because they had to spend extra time overwriting all the bullshit Freshwater poured into their little Midwestern heads.

Giving his class an extra-credit assignment to watch "Expelled", an act which makes the branding incident seem almost kind by comparison.

Saying the cross he branded on the student's arm was an "X", which is doubly stupid - first, because there were photos of the burn that showed it was clearly a cross, and second, because "X" is not exactly devoid of fundamentalist significance.

And you know, we wouldn't have to rely on the ACLU and the courts to weed out and stop bastards like Freshwater if, after all these things have been revealed, there weren't hundreds of local citizens still supporting him and claiming he's being persecuted for his faith. He's not being persecuted for his faith. He's being persecuted for expressing his faith in the FLESH OF HIS STUDENTS. But that's just fine with some people on the inevitable local newspaper comments thread. RAPID FIRE ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"If we had more teachers like Freshwater, the moslems would never have bombed New York."

"Believe what you want but don't take my rights away to believe what I want. The schools have stepped over the line by allowing evolution to be taught in the first place. THAT was the FIRST mistake in all of this."

"This report proves this is nothing more than a witch hunt bought and paid for by folks with the intent to "prove" their point and then use thereport as the backbone to terminate this teacher."

"Well, evolution offends me as it is not true. A man wrote a book on evolution whereas God the Creator is the author of the Holy Bible."

We can't make you think. We can't make you stop being wrong. But we can keep you from using the authority of your public-school, government-endorsed position to give your wrongness official imprimatur. And we're going to keep doing it no matter how much you whine, no matter how many students you brand.

Two Jims And A Big Baby

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:44:40 -0500

Dead People, 25 June 2008
Memo to James Lileks, Karl Rove, and James Dobson: YOU ARE DUMB.

For those who wonder about such things, no, yesterday's lack of column was not a tribute to the death of George Carlin. Not that he's undeserving of tribute - I'm just saying the two events weren't related. I do think it's both fitting and sad that he died when he did, though. Sad, because he died before the stupidity he railed against had fully bottomed out and we perhaps started to climb out of the hole we've dug ourselves. And fitting, because he died with all his most cynical feelings about the state of the human race completely justified. And in honor of that, IDIOTS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS!

"I never heard Carlin be as hard on himself as he was on his favorite strawmen. That wasn’t his job, of course, and you can’t fault him for the routines he didn’t do. But the more you confront and accept your own human faults the less outrage you find in the small mishaps of others, and I never got the feeling Carlin spent a lot of time interrogating his own character with the same confident derision he brought to things much greater than himself." - James Lileks.

Fuck you, James Lileks. Not for speaking ill of the dead, a pastime which I support wholeheartedly and, I suspect, will engage in with great glee when YOU finally pass on to a magical land where all the people remember Paul Anka and serve Jell-O salads and nobody is black. No, fuck you for being such a condescending prick about it. With the faux-sympathetic bit about how maybe Carlin would have been nicer if he'd recognized his flaws - flaws which you yourself don't actually bother to fucking enumerate.

About the only bad thing Lileks points out about Carlin is that Lileks found his later, politically-charged work less funny and more lecture-y, which is what happens when someone who's right is yelling at someone who's wrong. That's not Carlin's fault. But don't worry, James. Carlin never expected you to listen, and in your posthumous ramblings, you've managed to help vindicate Carlin's work. Dipshit.

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by." - Karl Rove.

I'll give Karl credit where credit is due. Only the first sentence is racist. The rest of it is some of the weirdest fucking image-mongering I've ever seen, and that includes the entire rest of Turd Blossom's illustrious career. Is Karl Rove trying to turn us away from Barack Obama by telling us he's essentially a cross between James Bond and Jon Stewart? Because I'll forget that FISA bullshit in a minute if it means trading in the retarded brush-clearer for someone who hasn't run up a record class deficit in addition to all his other record deficits.

I mean, obviously, Karl's trying to tap some deep vein of doughy, middle-class American resentment here, but as someone who would never come within 1,000 feet of a country club willingly, if I were forced to be at one, I'd be desperately looking for the guy making fun of everyone else in the country club. And I'd endure second-hand smoke to join in.

"I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology. He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter. Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?" - James Dobson

As irritating as this long election season is, you have GOT to love all these chances to see some of the most dominant rhetorical forces of the past decade, like Rove and Dobson, completely off their fucking game. First Rove attacks Obama for having metaphorical pretty girls date him, and now Dobson loses his shit because Obama mentioned his name in a speech about abandoning religious extremism in politics. And he does this by... being religiously extreme in politics. Even to a country deadened to hypocrisy, James Dobson accusing Obama of distorting the Bible will be the laugh line of the month.

Oh, and Dobsie? Let me answer your question. No, you aren't required to conform your efforts in a democracy. Assuming that means what I think it means. You do, however, have to be prepared to LOSE. And from the sounds of things, you've got a lot of preparing to do before November.

In Touch With Her Caribou Side

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:11:35 -0500

Environment, 23 June 2008
Memo to Michelle Bachmann: YOU ARE STILL DUMB.

I appreciate you keeping a largely low profile these days. Really I do. It's a stunning example of market forces at work. The supply of batshit crazy appears to have finally, at long last, have exceeded the demand. So there's really no need to go searching for new sources of it, and old, depleted sources of batshit crazy, like Michelle Bachmann, should ideally lie fallow and return to nature.

Not so with oil. $140 a barrel and climbing, four dollar a gallon for gas, and nobody has any answers. Well, except the Republicans. They've found the solution to the world's energy problems, and it's so simple I can't believe nobody thought of it before. Just drill for more oil!

There are all kinds of places we haven't drilled yet, for stupid, liberal reasons like there not being very much oil there, or doing so will help kill the oceans even faster than we are already. Fuck that shit, we need oil and we need it in five to ten years from NOW. And if Michelle Bachmann says so, who am I to argue? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"It's a plan that has the broad support of the American people. Only the out-of-touch congressional leadership stands in the way." - Bachmann's plan? Drill in Alaska, drill offshore, drill anywhere else we think there might be some oil, and build more refineries to process the literally months worth of oil that await the hungry drills of Exxon-Mobil. And what's more, it'll actually be GOOD for the environment!

"Some suggestions are that perhaps we would see an enhancement of wildlife expansion because of the warmth of the pipeline." Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we MUST drill for oil in Alaska. If we don't, the caribou will be slightly chilly. Oh, if only their intelligent designer had provided them with the physiology necessary to survive in Alaska!

Now, don't get me wrong. I hate filling up as much as the next guy. I've gotten used to a life subsidized by cheap petroleum. But the fact of the matter is this - dinosaur juice is a fucking dead end. We can bore hole after hole after hole into the planet if we want, but we're still withdrawing millions of years worth of banked energy with no way to bank more. Which is a bad fucking idea.

Oil itself might not be a dead end. Every six months or so you hear about pilot plants and new technologies to turn stuff we don't need, like turkey carcasses or vats full of algae, into hydrocarbon chains we can use for important things, like fueling NASCAR races and make blister packs for three dollar USB cables. We're a long way off from plug-in electric cars recharged using green power generated from the hopes and dreams of the Sierra Club. And you can't very well make an Iron Man action figure out of the wind.

But throwing time, money, and effort into sucking up the last dregs of decomposed ferns, at the expense of the seas, the animals, just to eke a few more years out of a system that's clearly doomed? That's about as textbook a definition of "reactionary" as you can get. And that's why you see Bachmann, and Bush, and McCain, and Cheney all yelling about how we have to dig up ANWR and drill offshore, and why they're trying to convince you to go along with it by lying about happy warm caribou, the lack of any oil spills during Katrina*, and the Chinese stealing our oil from off the coast of Cuba. Because they're reactionary dinosaurs, and until we find a way to turn them into light sweet crude, they're useless to us.

*Seriously. They're actually going around saying that offshore drill platforms endured Hurricane Katrina without spilling a drop of oil. Which is true, for values of "a drop" less than THREE QUARTER OF A MILLION GALLONS.

Can't Spell Goldfarb Without "Blarg"

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:13:02 -0500

John McCain, 20 June 2008
Memo to Michael Goldfarb: YOU'RE JUST A GIGOLO.

You see, a gigolo is a hired dick. And as the primary contributor to the McCain Report blog on John McCain's website, that's Goldfarb's job. He's being paid to be a dick several times a day. Nice work, if you can get it.

You see, for a guy who needs his wife to help him understand the new-fangled computers, John McCain's campaign website has two, count them, TWO blogs. One, the John McCain Blog, is about as interesting as the blog of any 71-year-old dude who isn't running for president. It's got the latest ads, nice things about the late Tim Russert, and is updated every two to three days.

But like every position McCain's taken in the past ten years, the McCain Blog has a polar opposite: The McCain Report is the red-meat attack stuff, the stuff that gets down into the mud, makes up bad stuff about Barack Obama, and then breathlessly tells us how bad it is. And that's mostly Michael Goldfarb's job.

The McCain Report is a treasure-trove of awesome, and I expect to be returning to it often between now and November. Here's just a small sampling of the things Goldfarb has written in the past week:

"Obama has more preconditions for a town hall with John McCain than for a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinjead, the head of a terrorist state."

This is in reference to the town hall meetings argument, which, if you don't know, went like this. McCain gave a crappy speech. Obama gave a not-crappy speech. Realizing the speech deficit, McCain offered some town hall debates. Obama said "maybe". McCain then set ten dates, promised a neutral audience, held the first one even though Obama didn't agree, stocked the audience with his supporters, and took softball questions while mocking Obama for not being stupid enough to walk blindly into a hostile environment.

You'd think McCain's people would understand that, given how many soldiers and helicopters he took with him into that peaceful Baghdad street market, but being understanding would undercut Goldfarb's vitally important role as the McCain campaign dick. In this case, a dick that manages to rattle a saber.

"Obama wants to take us back to the bad old days of going after terrorists with prosecutors rather than predators. And he even has the gall to blame the Bush administration's methods as having been a boon to terrorist recruitment. With all the international credibility the Clinton administration earned, and the international terrorists they incapacitated, one wonders how bin Laden even recruited 19 men to attack this country on September 11."

This paragraph is so awe-inspiringly stupid it's hard to imagine that even Goldfarb believes it. First of all, his failure to capitalize "predators" makes me think Goldfarb is advocating the use of wolves and/or pedophiles to fight terrorism, instead of robot drone planes. Second, it doesn't take gall to blame Bush for increased terrorist recruitment. All it takes is aqueous humour.

And you can lay the snark on as thick as you like, motherfucker, but if you're going to sit there and blame Clinton's foreign policy for not reducing the number of radical terrorists to below eighteen, then I'm going to sit over here and point out what a huge dick that makes you.

"But [Richard] Clarke is the consummate 9/10 Democrat--and thus an awkward choice to defend Obama from the same charge. In April of this year Clarke said of Bill Clinton, 'he doesn’t make mistakes.' We respectfully disagree.

"Respectfully?" I'm not sure that word means what you think it does. That quote seemed woefully out of context, so after a bit of research, I discovered three things. First of all, the only person ever to bring this quote up at any other time was some guy named Michael Goldfarb in a blog at the Weekly Standard. Second, The McCain report does its hyperlinks as bolded black text, which is a pain in the ass. And third, the quote in question is from an episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, and surprise, surprise, Goldfarb has pulled another dick move.

In context, Clarke was saying that when Bill was covering for Hillary over the whole sniper fire thing, the kinds of things Bill was getting wrong weren't the kinds of things he got wrong as President. The implication being that Bill Clinton was being a smidge disingenuous. I think it's telling that Michael Goldfarb, if Google is to be believed, is the ONLY right-wing nutjob willing to be that big of a dick about what Clarke said.

And don't even fucking get me started on "9/10 Democrats". I think we'd be a hell of a lot better off if we just admitted what we all know is true - we, as a country, over-reacted like fucking crazy to 9/11, and did so many stupid things in the years since that future historians will have a tough time recounting them with a straight face. If Barack Obama really does want to take us back to the relative sanity of 9/10, I'll buy a first-class ticket on that Wayback Machine, thank you very much.

The Freedom To Be Wrong

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:34:51 -0500

Louisiana, 19 June 2008
Memo to Creationists: STAY DOWN.

I suppose it's too much to ask that a group of people who don't know how old the Earth is might know when to give up, but a man can hope. After two and a half blissful years of peace and quiet while the stupidest people on the planet licked their wounds, they have risen like a retarded Dracula once again, in Louisiana, in the form of Senate Bill 733, which will likely be signed into law in a matter of days.

Senate Bill 733 is full of the latest attempts to get the Six-Thousand-Year-Old Earth into public school curricula. It does so by hiding behind perfectly reasonable language that is difficult to object to at face value, but whose purpose becomes clear once you remember that creationists are crazy fucking idiots who cannot be trusted. ACTUAL BILL TIME!

"The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, upon request of a city, parish, or other local public school board, shall allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Who doesn't love critical thinking? Who could possibly oppose logical analysis? Who in their right mind would stand athwart open and objective discussion? Well, actually, creationists would. In classic Rovian jujitsu, they adopt the mantle of what they hate, disguising themselves as a member of the herd so they can destroy it from within. The kicker is the topics they single out for mention. What do they all have in common? They just HAPPEN to be the bits fundamentalists lose their shit over. And how will this alleged open discussion happen?

"A teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner..."

And there you have it. Teachers teach the correct stuff, and then, to provide a balanced view, can bring in pictures of Jesus ministering to dinosaurs and Noah sailing down the newly formed Grand Canyon. But wait, you say. The Louisiana Legislature is an ostensibly secular body! I'm sure they don't have any particular religious tradition in mind when they open the classroom up to dissenting views." And you would be an adorably naive strawman if you did. But the proof of religious intent is right there in the bill itself. Check this out:

"This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion."

There's your proof right there. There are two possible reasons to include this clause. One, that they mean it, and that this bill, promoted heavily by the hyper-Christian whackjobs at the Louisiana Family Forum and the hyper-Christian whackjobs at the Discovery Institute, doesn't promote any religion at all, especially fundamentalist whackjob Christianity.

The other possibility is that the Louisiana legislature, knowing what's happened to creationism and intelligent design in the courts, is stupid enough to think they can survive judicial review if they just mention, in passing, that by the way, we don't mean anything religious by this bill that allows the teachers of a deeply religious Southern state to bring in additional materials on a series of hot-button science issues important to Christians.

It would be funny if it weren't the people of Louisiana whose tax dollars will be wasted fighting this thing all the way through however many appellate courts it will take them to give up. Actually, it'll STILL be funny. It'd just be funnier if they weren't actively damaging a state that has not had an easy time of it this decade. On the other hand, a majority of these people DID vote for Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor who claims to have performed a cancer-curing exorcism in his youth and who, of the bill he's about to sign, said the following:

"I personally think human life and the world we live in wasn’t created accidentally. I do think that there’s a creator. Now the way that he did it, I’d certainly want my kids to be exposed to the very best science. I don’t want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from them because of political correctness."

If you elect a governor who's openly vowing to do what he can to avoid correctness, then you're going to end up fucked over on account of being incorrect. See you all in a courtroom in a year or two.

Nocturnal Admissions

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:17:58 -0500

Sex, 18 June 2008
Memo to Glenn Murphy, Jr: I GET IT NOW.

I often talk about how Republicans are wrong, when measured objectively against consensual reality. But I now realize that's an oversimplification, and that from the correct viewpoint, Republicans are right about EVERYTHING. As long as that viewpoint looks from the perspective of Republicans at other Republicans. Hear me out.

Tax cuts improve the economy? Well, if you're a Republican, tax cuts improve YOUR economy. Government doesn't work and should be kept as small as possible? Again, when Republicans are in charge of the government, it's hard to argue with that philosophy. Homosexuals are deviant predators who will take any opportunity to indulge their sick lifestyle, and no straight man in their vicinity is safe? Again, apparently true of gay REPUBLICANS. With wide stances.

This brings us to Glenn Murphy Jr. On the one hand, I cannot believe I didn't hear about Murphy's transgression when it happened, last August. On the other hand, hearing about it now, after he's pled guilty, means I can take that irritating but legally useful word, "alleged", set it on fire, and push it out a window. Thanks, due process!

So what, exactly, did Glenn Murphy Jr. do to get arrested for, and plead guilty to, criminal deviate conduct*? Why is he facing two years in jail? You'll love this. He went to a party. He crashed overnight. And the next morning, he climbed out of the bunkbed, and started blowing the guy in the bottom bunk, who was asleep.

Murphy, whose name, ironically, is an onomatopoeic adjective for what you sound like with a dick in your mouth, was the chairman of the Clark County Republican party, and the chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, or "YRNF", which could also be an oral-pleasure sound effect, now that I think about it. Once again, a repressed closet case has to get what he wants in secret, in the morning, under the delusional impression that when the guy wakes up, he'll thank you.

The guy didn't thank him. He did, however, secretly tape Murphy apologizing and begging him not to tell the authorities. Which is the bad judgment icing on the bad judgment cake you bought from the bad judgment bakery in West Bad Judgmentia. And even then, he tried to pass off quitting his Republican jobs as the result of an exciting new business opportunity that "would prohibit him from holding a partisan political position". No, you wouldn't have met this business opportunity. It's in Canada. But I swear, it's totally hot. And not gay at all.

Once again, I offer this advice to closeted gay Republicans: COME OUT ALREADY. Get it over with. Meet a nice guy. Maybe move to California and get married. Settle down. Satisfy your man-craving in the privacy of your own home, and maybe you won't think you can get away with blowing your sleeping acquaintances. And if, after all that, you're still filled with self-loathing and the desire for capital gains tax cuts, there's always the Log Cabin Republicans.

*Don't fucking look at me, that's what the Indiana penal code calls the offense. I don't know why it's not "deviant conduct" either.

Can't Be Reasonable Without Reason

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:58:12 -0500

Sex, 17 June 2008
Memo to Katherine Kersten: YOU ARE DUMB.

Time once again to pay a visit to Minneapolis' official pet conservative, columnist Katherine Kersten. I'd been worried, over the past few weeks, that Kersten had been abandoning her traditional schtick of extreme conservatude hiding behind soft, banal paeans to reasonable compromise. I was concerned that she was angling toward becoming a green-bean casserole version of Ann Coulter; Michelle Malkin on a stick. But thanks to Shakopee Middle School, Kersten has returned to her insipid form.

You see, Shakopee Middle School, like any middle school full of eleven- and twelve-year-old kids, has a sex-ed unit. Lasts about two weeks. This year, the traditional script that has played itself out since the sixties made its return to the stage. Students come home, tell parents they learned about vaginas, parents lose their shit and yell at the school.

In this particular case, the parents' concerns focused around two things - first, that their official "We're Going To Teach Your Kids About Vaginas" letter was vague, calling the unit "Human Growth And Development". And second, that the boys and the girls learned about the boys and the girls together. In the same room. Gasp. Shock. Horror. Stupid.

And when stupid people in the Twin Cities area are being stupid, one woman heeds their call and leaps to their defense. It's a bird, it's a brain, it's BIRDBRAIN:

"The district passed off the class it was foisting on 11- and 12-year-olds as “Human Growth and Development.” As a result, neither parents nor self-conscious pre-adolescents suspected that teachers would show a 'picture of a developing girl' to a room of boys and girls sitting side by side."

These would, I presume, be the same parents that were surprised that Mortal Kombat had fighting to the death in it. A girl is a human. A developing girl is a developing human. They taught students about a developing girl in a class on human development. DO THE MATH.

I mean, yeah, they vagued it up a bit, but come on. It's 2008. The parents of the eleven- and twelve-year-olds in Shakopee very likely went through their own two week sex ed classes when THEY were in middle or high school. If the school's going out of its way, toward the end of the school year, to send you a letter warning you that your child is about to go through a special two-week unit on "Human Growth and Development", you don't have to be either Dr. or Mr. Spock to figure out that your kid's about to learn how fucking works. It's basic cultural literacy, assholes. Learn it.

But cultural literacy is not a valued asset on the far side of the culture wars, which is why you get Kersten saying stupid shit like: "Today’s clinical sex-ed programs often run roughshod over boys’ and girls’ natural modesty. If you want to guarantee a classroom of kids drawn up in the fetal position, show them “developing girl” pictures in mixed company."

First of all, why is it the developing girl parts that send the boys and girls into seizures? Having seen many a clinical diagram of human reproductive organs in my time, and I'll take the gentle, ram's-head fallopian cross-section over the series-of-tubes sack and wang side-shot every single time. But no, it's the mysteries of womanhood that are so utterly disturbing and embarrassing to both boys and girls alike. Right.

But the kicker is this. The parents themselves complain about the program's failure to "teach about the emotional and beautiful part of sex, focusing instead on the biological part.", causing Kersten to echo with the even more ludicrous "Middle school is a time when parents and teachers should show great sensitivity, and guard against reducing the mysterious and beautiful aspects of sex to mere biology."

By following this logic chain, we reach the inescapable conclusion that the ideal sex education program would preserve the mystery of sex. Which makes no goddamned sense, but that's what happens when you try to sound reasonable while still finding a way to object to knowledge.

Sex IS biology. So is emotion. So is beauty, for that matter. Kersten is so concerned about the comfort level and the modesty of the students? Well, a clinical, biological approach to sex ed maintains that a hell of a lot better than a seventh-grade teacher trying to tastefully describe the emotional, beautiful, and apparently metaphysical aspects of boot-knocking.

"Emotion" and "beauty" are just code words for 1950s style closed-door married missionary fucking, anyway. I would love to see the reactions from Kersten and her ilk if a school system chose to teach about the emotional aspects of sex by actually instructing students on the full range of reasons, motivations, and emotional outcomes of sex, from the bathroom-stall quickie to the hairy campground orgy. Somehow, I think they'd be diving for the overhead projector with the uterus transparency faster than you could say "human development".

Can't Spell Asshole Without A.S.

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:57:49 -0500

The Courts, 16 June 2008
Memo to Antonin Scalia: YOU ARE DUMB.

No, wait. That is insufficient and imprecise. After all, we're dealing with the Supreme Court here - the highest deliberative body in the land, the nine individuals who turn their keen, legally-trained minds upon the most vital issues of the day and hand down final, unchallengable rulings. As a member of that body, Scalia deserves better than "dumb".

Antonin Scalia, you are an asshole. But not just any asshole. You are an asshole so huge, so gaping, so prolapsed that even the most depraved websites on the Internet would balk at using your picture to shock and disgust your users. You're more than an asshole. You're like a dimensional gateway to the colon of some vast, angry Lovecraftian god. You're like the asshole of Galactus, designed to handle the stresses of the digestive detritus of a being that devours worlds. You are the apex predator of assholes. The alpha asshole, who stands proudly while all the other assholes sniff you, whimper, and sulk under tree branches. Yours is the Rectum Sanctorum*.

I am speaking, of course, of the recent 5-4 decision overturning the Military Commissions Act and the unconscionable removal of habeas corpus rights from "enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay, the men that we have locked up and tortured for nearly six years without charges or trials, on the grounds that some of them might be dangerous terrorists. Scalia, the Sphincter Supreme, was on the losing side of this one, which does two things. It makes me smile, and it makes me emphasize one more time that anyone not voting against John McCain this November might as well pack up their stuff and buy a brand new condo currently being built inside the titanium-clad walls of Antonin Scalia's asshole, because whomever John McCain appoints to the court will not be able to keep Scalia neutralized.

Scalia is such an asshole that even in defeat, he managed to say things so egregiously stupid and poop-chutey that just reading them gave me a case of hysterical blindness. I hope you're made of stronger stuff than I, because it's ASSHOLE QUOTE TIME!

"Most tragically it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving in a civilian court ... that evidence supports the confinement of each and every prisoner."

I've been following our country's exciting adventures in gulags for a while now, and I've never seen anything quite as explicitly galling as this. Scalia, in this one sentence, admits that the United States is holding detainees without enough evidence to support their detention. And that it is completely unreasonable, nay, TRAGIC, that we demand such a thing. Coming from a Rush Limbaugh, this would be obscene. Coming from Ann Coulter, it would be, well, the latest thing Ann Coulter said when she realized people weren't paying enough attention to her. But this is from a Supreme Court justice.

This is from a man whose lifetime vocation is to listen to EVIDENCE. Who makes decisions that affect millions of lives every year, ostensibly based on EVIDENCE. And here he is, dismissing evidence as an insurmountable obstacle to doing whatever the fuck you want to whoever the fuck you want under the guise of "keeping us safe". It's an outright rejection of his entire purpose. And he tosses it off almost casually, not even bothering to shroud it in legalese or disguise it as an intellectual exercise. Man, what an asshole.

Scalia was such an asshole here that he eclipsed John Roberts, Chief Justice, head judge of all nine head judges of the entire country, when he said, in HIS dissenting opinion, what would have been one of the assholiest things in the history of the court, but is now relegated to a distant second place:

"[The American people] lost a bit more control over the conduct of this nation's foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.".

Did you see that? That, right there, is a Republican talking point demonizing the judicial branch of government, uttered by the titular leader of the JUDICIAL FUCKING BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT. Of all the unelected, politically unaccountable judges in the land, John Roberts is the unelectedest, and the most politically unaccountable. But he is apparently so devoted to the ideology that put him in that job that he's willing to undermine himself in order to further it. That is some serious fucking self-loathing right there, that is. Democrats gained so much by not daring to filibuster his nomination. Thanks, assholes.

*Note the "c", Savage Love fans. I beg you, note the "c".

Morons Against Drunk Driving

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:42:40 -0500

California, 13 June 2008
Memo to California: STOP BEING TENNESSEE.

My very first thought, when I heard about the Oceanside, CA high school that played an elaborate prank on its student body, ostensibly to teach them a lesson about dangerous life choices, I immediately thought of beautiful, downtown Murfreesboro, TN, where they staged that fake school shooting for the sixth graders last year.

Now, California didn't stage a fake school shooting. I'm led to understand that, on account of the state containing nothing but liberal hippie freaks, nobody in the entire state even has a fake gun they could use. No, in California, they focused their attention on a much more prolific killer than the armed, disaffected teen: the wheeled, intoxicated teen.

Another big difference between Murfreesboro, which I admit I like typing because it's a ridiculous name for a town, and Oceanside is that while the Tennessee case was more of a prank gone horribly wrong, Oceanside's GOAL was to shock, horrify, and traumatize the student body. Which they did by coming into class one day and telling everyone that twenty six students had died the night before in drunken driving accidents.

Now, I presume they didn't tell everyone that all the students died at the same time. That would strain credulity, even amongst a group of people who believe "The Hills" is compelling television. No, they went to various classes, and told each class that one or two of their mysteriously absent classmates had in fact performed the alcoholic windshield dive into the Great Beyond.

The plan was to let the students stew for most of the day, then reveal at an assembly the joyous truth that none of their friends had died because they were all too smart to drive drunk. And then everyone would laugh, like at the end of all those half-hour documentaries from the 80s. You know, "Diff'rent Strokes" and "Charles In Charge". This plan was derailed when, in a reaction nobody could have possibly predicted, a whole bunch of normally completely rational teenagers, upon learning of the deaths of their friends, completely lost their shit.

So some of the kids were told early, and the word of the hoax spread, and then came the recriminations and the defensiveness. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized. That's how they get the message." - Guidance counselor and bad-idea ringleader Lori Tauber. Yes, they got the message. They got the message that you cannot be trusted, and that you're willing to manipulate them to get your point across. Which, surprise surprise, then proceeds to undermine every single other message, valid or otherwise, that you've tried to impart to them over the past few years. Good job.

Luckily, some of the students, being human, American, and young, didn't actually follow through on that message because they're not very bright. Case in point, Cardie Magos, for whom I will cut some slack because she's only fifteen, but who happens to be in possession of one of the single most vile beliefs of our modern times:

"You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust. But then I felt selfish for feeling that way, because, I mean, if it saves one life, it's worth it."

No, it's not. The potential savings of one life is not of infinite value. But that hasn't stopped it from justifying all kinds of ridiculous shit, from high school panic hoaxes to abortion clinic protests to the Iraq war. Yet the "if it saves just one life" trope persists and grows, to the extent that a fifteen-year-old girl feels bad that she's outraged by the abuse of power from those in authority. Fucking awesome.

And that all assumes that this "scared straight" approach even works. Teens have been losing friends and family members to drunk driving since Henry Ford put the first cup-holder in the Model T. Yet strangely, that hasn't stopped legions of Bud-addled football captains from thinking they could make it home OK. Are these kids really going to call their parents for a ride after a night of illegal drinking, or think to bring that kid from the math team along as a designated driver, because for half an hour they thought their buddies were road pizza?

I have, as you may guess, my doubts.