You Are Dumb - The Courts

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".

Black Robe, Hood Optional

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:59:04 -0600

The Courts, 14 February 2008
Memo to Antonin Scalia: YOU ARE DUMB.

You wanna know how bad things are? No, really. Do you want to know how completely fucking awful things have become? I'll tell you. It's become so fucking awful that I, your foul-mouthed chronicler of men being fucked to death by horses, can turn to a sitting Supreme Court justice, and ask him, without a trace of irony or hypocrisy, to SHOW SOME FUCKING DECORUM ALREADY.

It's bad enough that we're torturing people. It's bad enough that we're torturing people and nobody cares. It's bad enough that Bill Dog-raping Kristol can go on A Daily Show and say, with a straight face, that he's ambivalent about torture, and that Jon Stewart responded by saying it sounded human. It doesn't sound human. It sounds bastard. If all you have to do to sound like a reasonable human is to express a small amount of doubt that torture isn't the best response to some situations, then we'd better dig up a bunch of huge fucking rocks, because it's time to crawl back under them.

But then we have Antonin Scalia. Who has never been the most serene, thoughtful bastard to sit on our nation's ultimate arbiting body. So Scalia gives an interview on the BBC, gets asked about torture, and comes off sounding like the definitive Ugly American. Like a Townhall poster without as many opportunities for typos. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"And I suppose it’s the same thing about 'so-called' torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited under the Constitution? Because smacking someone in the face would violate the 8th amendment in a prison context. You can’t go around smacking people about. Is it obvious that what can’t be done for punishment can’t be done to exact information that is crucial to this society? It’s not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth."

Yes it is. It's an incredibly easy question. All you need is the tiniest vestige of a shred of fucking decency, and it becomes REALLY SO EASY. It's not a no-brainer, because people with no brains frequently get it wrong, but it is really just that simple. But wait, there's more!

"There are no easy answers involved, in either direction, but I certainly know you can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, “Oh, this is torture and therefore it’s no good.” You would not apply that in some real-life situations. It may not be a ticking bomb in Los Angeles, but it may be: 'Where is this group that we know is plotting this painful action against the United States? Where are they? What are they currently planning?'"

I'm pretty sure we've covered this ground before, but first of all, Scalia is invoking the Jack Bauer Scenario, so named because it's FUCKING FICTIONAL. But even if it weren't, you don't need legal, sanctioned torture as a matter of policy to prevent the Jack Bauer scenario. In fact, you need to outlaw legal, sanctioned torture to make sure that any torture that does happen only happens in a Jack Bauer Scenario.

I guarantee you, if a law enforcement official were ever to get hold of an actual terrorist who knew actual information about an actual imminent attack, and tortured that terrorist, and got the information, and stopped the attack, and then came forward and surrendered to authorities for violating the law, he'd either get off scot-free, or be convicted, and whatever President pardoned him between the courthouse and the start of the parade would get a 10-point jump in his approval rating.

But if you tortured someone, and they didn't know a goddamned thing? Or there wasn't an imminent attack? Or the guy wasn't a terrorist, but was instead a taxi driver from Afghanistan or a random guy from Canada? Well, then you'd be in trouble. In Scalia's universe, the mere possibility that you MIGHT be justified in torturing someone means that all torture is justifiable. And that's seriously fucked up.

Plus, you know, is it too much to ask that once you get nominated to the Supreme Court, you make an effort to keep up the appearance that you take shit seriously? And not use phrases like "smacking people around" and "shoving things under their fingernails"? And saying things to British journalists, say, on the subject of other countries' positions on torture...

"Europeans get really quite self-righteous, you know... I don't look to their law, why do they look to mine?" Future historians will refer to this as the Fuck That Shining City And The Hill It Rode In On Doctrine. I guess diplomacy is a lost art, and not being a complete jackwad is close behind it.

I know that Supreme Court justices are just regular assholes who lucked into a great job because they knew the right people at the right time. And I can only imagine the shit I'd say if I knew I could never be fired until I quit or died. But I miss the veneer. Even if it was fake, I miss that we used to pretend that we didn't think shit like this, that we had some kind of reputation or image to maintain at the highest levels of power. For all Nixon's faults, he kept his most venal assholery where it belonged - on secret tapes from his private office that we only got to listen to after he died. Now, it's hanging out there for all to see.

The Electric Blue Line

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 23:30:33 -0600

The Courts, 24 December 2007
Memo to Claudia Wright: YOU ARE DUMB.

I'm torn on the whole Taser issue. On the one hand, I find the rash of gratuitous and unnecessary Taserings of the past few years to be a horrifying and dangerous trend. And I'd love to see the goddamned things taken out of the hands of police officers who have become enamored of the damn things, and what the damn things let them do to the average citizen.

And another part of me thinks that if you take away the Tasers, then all the completely innocent Best Buy customers who get upset at being accused of using a stolen credit card will just get a bullet in the head instead of 50,000 volts. There's something ugly going on here, and the latest incident in Daytona Beach is just another example.

Here's what went down. It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and one of the crack squad of blue-shirted drones at a Daytona Beach Best Buy suspected a customer was using a stolen credit card. There was a police officer in the store, Daytona Beach PD officer Claudia Wright. She confronted the customer. The customer "became belligerent" and pointed her finger at her face. Less than a minute of this was enough for Wright to decide that fifty thousand volts was the only solution.

Apparently, only the calm and quiet provided by the fine product from Taser, Inc. were able to calm things down to the point where people could learn that the customer wasn't using a stolen credit card, and was belligerent because, well, she was being accused of a crime because she walked away from the cashier in mid-transaction. And she walked away from the cashier in mid-transaction because she got a call from her husband about their children on her cell phone.

It's completely fucking ridiculous. At what point are we going to draw a line and say that certain behaviors, even unwise ones, don't rise to the level of electrical shock and arrest? Is it too much to ask that our police officers be willing to spend more than a minute determining the facts of a situation before stunning people? I don't think it is, but people will make lots of excuses for cops. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"The fact that she (the victim) was resisting and not following commands being given by a uniformed officer, that means that officer eventually was going to get hurt. Claudia Wright did not wake up that morning and say, 'I think I want to tase someone today.' Everybody has their opinion, but at the end of the day none of the people who have an opinion walk in that officer's shoes." - Police Chief Mike Chitwood

First of all, I know I don't have a law enforcement background. But I'm pretty damn sure that, statistically speaking, less than 100% of situations where people are yelling and not following commands lead to an attack on police officers. Especially 35-year-old women shopping at Best Buy. And second of all, FUCK THE OFFICER'S SHOES.

I'm tired of hearing that the only people who can recognize when a cop has fucked up in a particular situation are other cops. We get that it's not easy. We get that it's dangerous. But we're way beyond the judgment calls of back alleys and random traffic stops here. The police are not infallible and not unassailable, and average citizens should not be living in a constant fear that the slightest perceived infraction in front of an officer could lead to us twitching and drooling on the pavement

...especially people whose only crime was not completing a retail transaction at Best Buy. I know same-store sales are down this Christmas season, but we can't start Tasering people for not shopping. We go down that road, and pretty soon there'll be an assistant manager waterboarding you until you accept the extended service agreement, and sending you to Gitmo for trying to return something without a gift receipt. And then we'll really be fucked, because we'll have to shop at Circuit City instead.

There's No I In Scooter

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:07:49 -0500

The Courts, 4 July 2007
Happy Independence Day. And in honor of independence, allow me to help you stay independent from people saying stupid shit. Specifically, people saying stupid shit about Scooter Libby. SCOOTER'S IDIOT FRIENDS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS!

"My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant and private citizen will be long-lasting." - George W. Bush

There are a few things about this that we have to establish as crystal fucking clear. And the first, and most important, is that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is not suffering and will not suffer. Not now. That litany of "harsh punishment", which you will hear repeated by many people soon (if you haven't already) is purest bullshit.

The fines? Please. I know $250,000 seems like a lot of money to the rest of us, but if you really think Scooter Libby is going to be wondering whether to buy food or pay his electrical bill as a result of this, you're insane. Yes, it's a large fine. If only Libby were connected to wealthy and powerful people who could lay their hands on that kind of money. If only Libby weren't ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE. That assumes he even has to pay it all, up front, right now, while he appeals.

Probation? Consequences of having a felony conviction on his record? He'll have to be extra careful not to get busted for drunk driving for a couple of years, I guess, but other than that, what are the consequences? Are potential employers going to run a background check on Lewis Libby and be SHOCKED to discover he's a convicted felon? No. Everyone knows, and as we've seen all too clearly, there is a large pool of people more than willing to overlook Libby's felony conviction already. If G. Gordon Liddy can be a radio talk show host, I. Lewis Libby will land on his feet.

The same goes for his reputation, only more so. We are at this point because a vast communal fiction has been built up around Scooter, and Bush's commuting of the sentence is part and parcel of that fiction. As long as that fiction - components of which include "no underlying crime" and "politically motivated" - remains intact, then Scooter Libby has an entirely fictional reputation he can turn to whenever he needs it.

Shed no tears for Scooter Libby. Even if anything being said about his horrible tribulations were true, he's still coming out of it with a better life than you have.

"His decision to commute Libby’s sentence but not erase his conviction was exactly right. It punishes him for his perjury, but not for the phantasmagorical political farce that grew to surround him. It takes away his career, but not his family." - David Brooks, in the New York Times.

And that's the other thing we need to nip right in the fucking bud. Let's not pretend that President Bush saw an injustice, wrestled with how best to balance the rule of law and a political circus gotten out of hand, and made a wise, middle-of-the-road decision. Because crazy people pretend that.

What Bush did is what he does. He protects himself first, his associates second, and constructs a minimally plausible framework in which to justify it, knowing that there are people like David Brooks out there who will repeat it and maybe even believe it.

Remember what the new standard is, people. As long as someone in a suit can provide an explanation for how an action is legal, right, or just, that action cannot be proven to be illegal, wrong, or unjust. That is the rule under which we operate. Someone, somewhere, comes up with an explanation and gets a guy in a suit to recite it on TV. The explanation may not hold water, but that doesn't matter, because nobody will ever even consider trying to pour water into it. That would be rude.

That's the ultimate lesson of Scooter Libby, right there. A court may have convicted him. A judge may have sentenced him. But as long as there's one dickhead in a suit with the power to say he doesn't have to go to jail, and a whole other passel of dickheads in suits to nod knowingly and agree, then the jury and the judge didn't actually determine anything. They're just part of the show.

Racebating

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 19:37:37 -0500

Main Column, 3 July 2007
Memo to the Roberts/Alito Court: THANK YOU IN ADVANCE.

Now, if you're one of those knee-jerk, moonbat, leftist, limousine, lipstick liberals who I hear control the media, you're probably aghast at the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision next week with dismay. "Oh noes!" you are proclaiming on your Daily Koses... Kosi... Ki? "The dark days of segregation are back!"

And really, that's just racist. Why do they have to be the DARK days of segregation? Allow me to posit instead that the 5-4 decision has, instead, ushered in the LIGHT days of segregation.

Here's the thing. I'm not a legal scholar, so I have to assume that when I hear the majority decided that race couldn't be used as a factor for improving the diversity of schools, I'm the one that's missing something. I mean, sure, to my layman's ears it seems insane that attempts to increase racial diversity would locate students based on anything OTHER than race, but everything I know about the legal system I gleaned from Matlock parodies, so I'm guessing the keen legal minds on the highest court in the land would scoff at my naive, oversimplified "logic".

I mean, sure, when I hear Chief Justice Roberts, in his majority opinion, actually say "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," my initial reaction was probably the same as yours. Because it certainly SOUNDS like the kind of bullshit homily that would spew from the mouth of a privileged white male right-winger who conveniently ignores power dynamics and social context in order to project his version of equality on a fundamentally unequal situation.

But someone like that wouldn't be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, breezing through confirmation hearings while noncombative Democrats smiled and pretended to ask tough questions. No, there must be something else at play. And then I realized what it was. The Roberts Court is actually FORWARD-THINKING, and are trying to pre-emptively solve our future Jenas before they happen.

If you don't know about Jena, you should. The short version - a Louisiana school. A "whites only" tree that white students hung out under. Black student sits under tree. Nooses are hung from tree. Fights break out. White kids beat up black kids. Black kids beat up white kids. Black kids get charged with attempted murder.

It's an ugly, ugly situation, and as Roberts and his four cohorts understand all too well, the fault can be lain squarely at the feet of the race-based determination of tree diversity. I mean, the town's population is only 12% black. In a truly equal society, the white kids would get a tree, and the black kids would get 12% of a tree. You know, a bush or a shrub or something. But instead, they tried to achieve a stated diversity goal, and ended up provoking rural white Louisianans to respond in the only way they knew how - intimations of lynching.

Thanks to the Roberts/Alito Supreme Court though, ugliness like this will soon be a thing of the past. Once people stop encountering different people long enough, eventually they'll forget they hate them. And Martin Luther King's dream can finally be achieved. Thanks, Supremes!

Why Things Suck, Part 8,248

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:28:45 -0500

Main Column, 28 September 2006
Memo to the House of Representatives: DUMB AGAIN.

People! Please! Show some fucking mercy! I only have so much free time in the day for red-hazed rage towards congressional moronitude. And most of that is directed at the fact that it's about to abandon the two simplest and most basic of human rights - don't torture people, and don't lock them up for life without a trial. This is simple, basic Bad Shit You Do Not Allow, and my foot is twitching constantly because it can't decide who it wants to kick first - the people trying to make it happen, the people rolling over and letting it happen, or the people who trusted JOHN MOTHERFUCKING MCCAIN to do something about it. Twitchy twitch twitch twitch.

But I can't even write about the torture thing, because if I do, I'll just be parroting the decent lefty blogs, plus my Livejournal readers might explode. Suffice it to say that my remaining tolerance for this Congress is smaller than the amount of useful work they've accomplished. NOT AN EASY FEAT. And then I have to go and hear about the Public Expression of Religion Act.

If you know anything about the current climate and political nomenclature, your veins are already throbbing. It's worse than it sounds, except for the strong likelihood that it'll never become law. But still, when you hear what 244 representatives, including 26 Democrats, voted for, you will find it's piss-poor prospects for passage a shitty salve.

What the Act does is purest evil. It prevents plaintiffs from being awarded legal fees when they successfully sue based on the Establishment Clause. That's the church/state chunk of the First Amendment, in case you were wondering.

You see, what was happening was that people were suing various levels and branches of government for being too damn Jesusy, and they were winning. And when they won, they got their court costs paid, because, well, this shit is expensive, and you can't really collect damages. Since the right loves Jesus, and loves Jesusvotes more still, they wanted to put a stop to it. But even through their thick proto-skulls, they realized they couldn't just get away with making it illegal to sue someone for violating the Constitution. Or making it illegal for judges to rule on those suits.

So instead, being mostly Republicans, they decided to let market forces do their work for them, and are trying to pass a law making it prohibitively expensive. Now, cities, states, and the federal government can appeal all they want, knowing that most people simply can't afford to keep up. That's our tax dollars being used to outlast people who just want to sit through a fucking school board meeting without having to take Communion or wrestle a snake. Well, as far as the House is concerned, tough titties. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Liberal groups . . . scour the country looking to sue cities and states with any kind of religious display, regardless of how popular these displays are." - Florida representative Ginny Brown-Waite, who apparently thinks the Bill of Rights is handled a lot like the finals of American Idol.

Anyway, this fucking disgrace masquerading as legislation passed the House 244-173. Notable supporters included local boy Mark Kennedy, who's going down faster in November than the lobbyists he hooks up with in his office restroom.

For the rest of you, look here for the names of your local representatives, and... I don't know. If they're GOP, you'll be punishing them anyway, and if they're Dems, it's too late to punish them electorally. And I can't legally recommend you key their cars or put flaming bags of poop on their doorsteps. Plus it'd probably get you shot. But still - remember their names, and remember what utter failures they are.

If they keep this shit up, I'll NEVER get around to marvelling at how necrophilia is legal in Wisconsin.

Instant Pariah

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 22:23:18 -0500

The Courts, 6 September 2006
Memo to parents: YOU ARE DUMB.

Up to a point, I can't blame you. You're merely acting on fundamental genetic imperative. The species must continue, so you must spawn, and make sure your spawn reaches adulthood. Or at least lives long enough to make spawn of their own. But one of the great things about a brain is that it allows us to overcome our genetic imperatives.

We can, for example, wear condoms. We can choose when to breed. Or whether. We can recognize that life carries with it certain dangers, and that we live at a point in time, in a place where those dangers are smaller than at any other time in human history. A child growing up in Western civilization right now is incredibly safe. Yet never, it seems, safe ENOUGH.

Partly it's the corporations, knowing you're more likely to buy something, say, a chemical-covered disposable cloth, if they tell you it'll keep your kids from getting ebola sitting at the dining room table. Partly it's the politicians, exploiting fear and promising to protect the children from anything that may harm them, be it Mortal Kombat, swarthy terrorists, or environmental pollution. OK, that last one's a bit farfetched.

But at the end of the day, there's one thing above all else that nobody dare say children are safe enough from. And that's Uncle Fondle McCreepy. Pedophiles. Sexual predators. Deviant kiddie-fiddlers. Who apparently lurk by the millions in our playgrounds and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theaterses, slavering at the parade of unripe genitalia. And on the rare occasions that they're caught, the liberal courts provide them plenty of loopholes to walk the streets again. Or so we're told.

How else do you explain the Vermont judge who got death threats for offering prison and treatment instead of just prison to one convicted sex offender? How else do you explain the legislative one-upsmanship designed to ensure that even after prison and treatment, sex offenders can't live anywhere, work anywhere, or do anything? Parents having their kids taken away because of bathtub pictures? And certainly, how else do you explain Ohio trying to close that pesky loophole that lets filthy perverts walk free just because nobody was able to prove they're filthy perverts?

Yes, according to the Toledo Blade, Ohio is on the verge of setting up the first ever "civil registry" for sex offenders in the country. Here's how it works. Someone says you fucked a kid. Someone convinces a judge that you might have fucked a kid, even though they can't prove it in either a court of law or a civil suit. The judge agrees, and you get put on a new list, and have to follow all the same rules about where you can live and work as people who've actually fucked kids.

The only difference is, after SIX YEARS, you can ask the court pretty please to be taken off the list, and if the judge thinks you haven't fucked any kids in that time, you get taken off the list, and the incredibly efficient government bureaucracy ensures that not only does that happen instantaneously, but you never turn up on an old copy of a list some HR guy stashed in a drawer somewhere. It's not due process, but as long as it keeps ONE CHILD from getting his weiner touched at camp, I'm sure you'll understand and bear your false stigma with pride.

Obviously, I'm not pro-pedophile, but for FUCK'S SAKE, PEOPLE. Get a fucking grip. Your kid's probably safe from bad touch just on the odds alone. You can't protect everyone from everything, and you certainly can't do it with a process so ripe for abuse it makes the "terrorist bounties" we paid out in Afghanistan look enlightened by comparison. You might as well just castrate every man on the planet. That way, not only will no children be molested, but in 20 years or so, there won't be any children to molest.

I don't care how heinous or repulsive a crime is. It doesn't mean that you get a free pass to go apeshit and drag society down with you into slavering witch-hunt insanity. If you can't bear the thought that something bad might happen to a kid because people aren't constantly monitored and locked up at the slightest whiff of a hint of perceived trouble, then you shouldn't be having kids, living in this country, or frankly, existing in our shared reality. Bad shit's gonna happen on a regular basis, and what matters isn't the extent we go to prevent it, but how we deal with the aftermath.

Am I Missing Something?

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 22:27:55 -0600

The Courts, 31 January 2006
Memo to the Democratic Party: LIE TO ME.

Tell me that wasn't the plan. Please. Lie to me if you have to. But whatever you do, please don't tell me your big plan for stopping Sam Alito consisted of John Kerry suddenly deciding to do something on Thursday and rounding up a whopping 25 of them to go along by today?

Actually, I know that wasn't your plan. That was your BACKUP PLAN. I know it was your backup plan because I watched the epic clusterfuck that was "Operation Hope He Says Something Stupid On Live TV". Which got completely derailed by one shot of Mrs. Alito in tears. When your entire political strategy can be struck down by one crying jag (and since it doesn't matter, I'll even allow for it to be genuine and not staged), then you have problems.

I do not understand the Democratic Party's objection to doing things they're going to be accused of anyway. Everyone's gonna THINK you did anyway, so why don't you? I simply don't get it.

For example. John Cornyn, Texas senator and gigantic asshole, spent the hearings complaining that Democrats had made up their mind on Alito. Of course, they hadn't. But they fucking well should have. Any Senator who actually thought the hearings were going to produce new information is either an idiot, or was accidentally frozen after the Bork hearings and just thawed out last November.

They should have known what they were going to do before the hearings even started. And then stuck to it. When you have Dianne Feinstein saying stupid shit about how she doesn't want him on the court, but doesn't want to do anything to stop it, and then changing her mind over this past weekend, it plays into every single stereotype the right has been building about Democrats for decades.

You're gonna be called partisan. SO BE PARTISAN. You're gonna get called obstructionist. SO OBSTRUCT. You're afraid of the nuclear option? What possible nominee could you need to use it on more? Unless you've been talking with Ann Coulter's rat-poison supplier, and you know something I don't, what's your fucking excuse?

What is being protected, what is being saved by not taking this stand, here, now. Your reputation? Already in the shitter. Your re-election chances? I hear a lot about "red-state Democrats" supporting Alito, but I have a hard time seeing a huge constituency who WOULD have voted Democrat if only they hadn't been mean to the poor, embryo-fetishizing guy with the tear-factory for a wife.

You tried facts. That got you kicked in the balls. You tried some kind of noble spirit of bipartisanship. That got you kicked in the balls. You tried some sort of half-assed rebellion led by Frankenstein Failure. And that got you kicked in the balls. And you will KEEP getting kicked in the balls until you somehow realize you're playing the game that the rest of us have seen for a decade or more.

Or we're all somehow missing something, and this was the latest in a series of brilliant, subtle, calculated moves to lull the Republicans even further into a false sense of national security. In which case it's working beautifully.

Harassholes

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 22:39:41 -0600

The Courts, 28 November 2005
Memo to the Caldwells: YOU ARE DUMB.

Ah, creationists. A year ago, I dedicated an entire week to them, but they just can't get enough. Today we discuss the curious case of Larry Caldwell and wife Jeanne, who are professional harassholes.

You see, America's court system has been, for all practical intents and purposes, the sole means by which we've fought back the creationists. It was the 1987 Supreme Court decision that forced them to rename it "intelligent design", it was the hassle of the court case that got the Dover 8 tossed out on their asses. Time and time again, courts have ruled that creationism is religion. This is mainly because creationism is religion.

The Cardwells are the type of creationists who see their repeated defeat in court not as a sign that they are wrong, but rather as a tactical guide to future action. They've sued their local district to try to get anti-evolution bullshit introduced, and their most recent claims that a University of Berkeley site promoting evolution violates the separation of church and state.

Now, we've seen the "evolution is just a matter of faith" argument before. From, well, complete fucking idiots who don't understand evolution, and therefore think it's magic. It's not their fault, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out. They feel the same way about math. And airplanes. And toasters. You don't think that bread turns brown just because heat's applied to it, do you? And where does that heat come from? There's no heat in an electrical outlet. It's cool to the touch. No matter how many forks you stick in it, no heat will come out. It's MAGIC TOAST.

But that's not the thrust of the Caldwell's lawsuit. You see, the Berkeley web site, "Understanding Evolution", is aimed at helping teachers teach the subject. Teachers NEED to be more comfortable with the subject because of all the ridiculous arguments put forth by the Caldwells and their ilk. So the Berkeley site includes a wide variety of resources for teachers. And one of those resources is a FAQ on the "evolution controversy". And one of the questions in that FAQ links to a separate website, at the National Center for Science Education, featuring pro-evolution statemnents by various religious groups, like Wisconsin clergy, the American Jewish Alliance, and some Georgia Episcopalians.

Since the Berkeley website received funding from the National Science Foundation, this means the government is endorsing pro-evolution religions over anti-evolution religions, and that, according to the Caldwells, is unconstitutional.

Or, to translate into the voices I'm sure are coursing through the Caldwell's heads, "I'M NOT A MONKEY, I'M NOT A MONKEY, I'M NOT A MONKEY!"What's hilarious is that, in the news coverage of the latest trial, Jeanne Caldwell actually gets away with a statement that, while true, is utterly misleading. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Yes, I'm a Christian, but I would not categorize myself as an ID proponent. I believe God created the world."

When this story got picked up by the Associated Press, however, this statement got interpreted thusly: " The plaintiffs are not proponents of "intelligent design" -- a theory that living organisms are so complex they must have been created by a higher intelligence -- but they object to the teaching of evolution as scientific fact, Jeanne Caldwell said.

Whoops. They're not ID proponents because they're RABID, PURE CREATIONISTS. They don't believe in fucking around with mamby-pamby sciency-sounding names. The AP version makes them sound reasonable, because the standard media dichotomy is "intelligent design" vs. "evolution". By saying they weren't proponents of ID, the AP moved them toward the other side of the semantic equation, when the exact opposite was called for.

The lawsuit is ridiculous, but it'll have to make its way through the system, and Berkeley will have to spend time and money defending itself for a tiny infraction on a tiny part of its tiny website that's not really an infraction at all, but can be sort of vaguely portrayed as one by a couple of harassholes bitter about getting slapped down in court for being religious.

Let's hope the Caldwells hear those magical words, "Berkeley is awarded court costs", in the near future.

Gooooooldberg! Gooooooldberg!

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 22:03:59 -0500

Wingnuts, 12 October 2005
Memo to Jonah Goldberg: YOU ARE DUMB.

Or willfully disingenuous, which in my book is just as bad. When you have to ignore the obvious to such a mind-boggling degree to make your point, either you're an idiot, or you want me to believe you're an idiot. And that's something I'm more than willing to oblige you on.

We once again dip our toes into the sticky morass of the blogosphere, but it's OK, 'cause Jonah Goldberg is moderately famous for things beyond his blog (National Review editor, TV commentator, etc.). He gets to be rated as a notch or two above Generic Wingnut With A Blogspot Account, and thus I am comfortable making fun of stupid shit he says on his blog about the Harriet Miers nomination.

Ah, Harriet Miers. She's like a Pokemon. Yesterday, she evolved from Cronyta into the more advanced form, Sycophantusaur, with the embarassing revelation that her correspondence with the President wouldn't be that out of place in a high school yearbook. Anyone stroking Dubya's ego that unabashedly is suspect on general principle.

Jonah Goldberg doesn't like Harriet Miers either, but for the same reason the rest of the right is cranky - she's not one of the dozens of judgebots they've spent the past twenty years constructing for this specific occasion. This archconservative grumpiness over their manifest destiny has met with certain rhetorical tactics by die-hard Bush supporters, and this does not sit well with Goldberg. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Fed by what are to me very cheap arguments by RNC spokesmen and independent stalwarts of the administration -- chiefly, it seems, Hugh Hewitt -- there is now this permanently established belief in some quarters that people around here and elsewhere oppose Miers based purely on bad motives -- elitism, cowardice, sexism etc. I find this horribly disappointing and the sort of thing I normally expect from leftwingers."

I guess the tip of the arrow flying towards you really does look different than the ass of the arrow moving away from you, because Goldberg is apparently incapable of recognizing it as the same goddamn arrow the administration shoots off every single time they're threatened. Discrediting the dissenters has been such a well-worn MO for the past five years that I'm amazed and astonished that Goldberg didn't expect it the instant he stepped out of line. But if we are to believe him, shooting the messenger was the last thing on his mind.

"It is one of the cheapest forms of argumentation to assert bad motives, particularly to your friends, when you disagree with them. Judging by a torrent of email over the last week, I am supposed to take seriously the accusation that my fellow NROers* and I are troubled by Miers solely because we're fair-weather supporters of the President and the GOP who get the vapors the moment Bush is in trouble. We want to impress the liberal and left wing media. We are elitists. We are sexists. But most of all, we're just not tough enough to take the heat."

I love how the cheap argument somehow gets cheaper when you use it against your own side. That's a telling double standard right there. No, you're not supposed to take seriously the charge that you oppose Miers because you're sexist. Nobody's suppoed to take that charge seriously. But they do.

Nobody's supposed to take it seriously when anti-war protestors are called unpatriotic, either. Or when senators are accused of aiding and comforting the enemy by not voting the right way on an energy bill. Or when candidates are compared to Osama Bin Laden. But they do. That's why the tactic works, and that's why the tactic keeps getting used, and anyone who's been hanging around the National Review for as long as Goldberg has either knows this and is lying, or doesn't know this and is delusional.

And either way, once he's done helping keep the crazy Bush-fellating lawyer off the highest court in the land, he should probably take a few minutes to go fuck himself.

*National Review Online, which Goldberg's blog calls home.

Miers - Lemon

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 13:29:25 -0500

The Courts, 5 October 2005
Memo to President Bush: YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME.

Chief Justice Infinite Albedo was bad enough, but this is getting fucking ridiculous. It's like you've devolved into some freakish trope of self-parody as policy.

Five years after picking the head of the vice-presidential selection group to be his vice-president, Bush picks the head of his Supreme Court justice-finding group to be the next Supreme Court justice. Now, that's bad. It says something about a man who tasks his underlings with finding the best person for a job, and then believes them when they say "It seems to be me, sir."

But scant weeks after Brownie, to pick a close personal friend with a skimpy resume to be a Supreme Court justice? The reflexive "cronyism" reaction is so automatic that I'm suspicious of it. Even though I know the President really IS that stupid, the little fuck gets away with so much I figure there's gotta be a Rovian catch in there somewhere.

Miers will be an awful, awful judge, and I can only hope the Democrats won't take the right-wing blogs too seriously and think they've got a winner on their hands. She's a puppet. Worse, she's the puppet OF A PUPPET. She's like some kind of metatextual right hand of Senor Wences. And that's not alright.

For one thing, it's really bad form to let an embattled, corrupt president put HIS OWN LAWYER on the highest court in the land. I can't help but think that, should a miracle happen, and any of the myriad influence-peddling, career-destroying, or system-gaming scandals were to actualy progress, the obvious conflicts of interest would be brushed aside quicker than you could say "What golf trip to Scotland?"

But there's an even more important and less ideological reason to oppose Miers. Now, admittedly, this reason requires taking George W. Bush at his word, but in this case, I think it's a safe bet. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I know her well enough to say she's not going to change, that 20 years from now she will be the same person with the same philosophy she has today. She'll have more experience ... but nevertheless, her philosophy won't change, and that's important to me."

That's important to me too, because it's absolutely fucking terrifying. From a realpolitik standpoint, we all know what he was saying - NO SOUTER, PROMISE. The wingnuts hate the Souter, because they thought he was one of them, and it turns out instead he was human.

That's what humans do, you see. They change. That's what good judges do. They recognize changes in society, and let those changes affect their own thinking. They recognize when a particular genie has been evicted from its particular bit of ornate glassware, never to return. I don't care if a judge moves to the left, or moves to the right, or moves to the center. I just want to see some evidence those fuckers move.

But Miers already has her marching orders, and if Bush and the early evidence is right, she's got the fervor and the zeal to stick to them. She is the anatheme of an independent judiciary - independent neither in thought nor in politics, beholden to the man giving her the job, and apparently unwilling to consider any new ideas, even in a job she's never done for a single day of her life.

She's an awful, wretched choice, and the last thing we need is to let the right-wing's despair at not getting the Satan in a black robe they thought they were promised blind us to her countless, fatal flaws.

The last thing we need, but I'd lay odds it's the first thing we'll get.

Brownies And Other Small Children

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 08:05:39 -0500

The Courts, 13 September 2005
First, let me say this right off the bat. I hate John Roberts. Not because he's conservative. Not because he's so white Clorox would love to vivisect him. Not because he's the latest Bush buddy to luck his way into an epic-level job.

I hate him because that motherfucker uses his children as props. And not just in the usual "stand next to politician daddy at the campaign rally" way. And not just in the "Could you keep your lesbian self out of the public eye for a bit, honey" kind of way. But in the actual "dress them up and turn them into animatronic Hummels" kind of way.

That vat-grown product of 1950's cryogenic techniques, who spent the eighties as Reagan's chief legal enabler, shows up for his confirmation hearing with his fucking toddlers in tow. Robert Bork didn't bring his kids. Clarence Thomas didn't bring his kids. Roberts brought his kids. Dressed thusly, according to the AP. AQT!

"5-year-old Josie, in her baby blue party dress and white headband, and 4-year-old Jack, in his blue blazer, bow tie and short gray flannel pants." Even Tucker Carlson doesn't make his kids wear a bow tie, much less short pants. Who dresses their kid like that for a public appearance? Someone who's trying very, very hard to create a specific image. And if someone's trying very hard to create a specific image, they're doing it so we don't see what they're really like. And there's no way in hell the done-deal confirmation hearings are gonna show us. You heard it here first. Little Jack Roberts' short pants are a harbinger of judicial doom.

In other bureaucratic news, we here at You Are Dumb Dot Net would like to present you with the journalistic coup of the year - sources deep inside FEMA snuck this off Michael Brown's desk while he was delivering his letter of resignation. Enjoy.

Twelve Stupid Men

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:50:31 -0500

The Courts, 10 August 2005
Memo to my so-called peers: YOU ARE DUMB.

You know why I'm never going to commit a serious crime? Not morality. Not fear of punishment. I'm terrified of placing my fate in the hands of juries.

Because juries are made up of jurors, and jurors are people, and people are fucking stupid. And selfish. And crazy. Still, it could be worse. At least I'm not famous, too.

Case in point: Ray Hultman and Eleanor Cook. Let's face it. It's incredibly hard to get me to feel sympathy for Michael Jackson. I mean, yes, tragic figure, ruined childhood, yadda yadda. There are lots of tragic figures with ruined childhoods out there, and most of them don't go through millions of dollars and end up even more fucked up than when they started.

But Hultman and Cook... if these two Jackson jurors are any kind of sample of the kind of people that are sitting on juries today, my advice to you all is don't even LITTER.

First, they're both writing books. Which is really fucking tacky. I know that it is American tradition to cash in on any famous situation you happen to find yourself accidentally near, but it's still tacky. Especially when you title your books "Guilty As Sin, Free As A Bird" (Cook) and "The Deliberator" (Hultman). That's just sad. Especially Hultman's, which makes him sound like an action hero who thinks about it for an hour before shooting you in the head.

They're both peddling the same story - that they believed Jackson was a kiddie-fiddler, but due to the unbelievable pressure from the other ten jurors, caved and voted "not guilty" on all charges. Now free of that pressure, their true story must be told. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I really think he is a danger to young boys and it breaks my heart." - Cook. Here's a hint. If you really believe that's the case, the place to make your principled stand is IN THE COURTROOM. If they threaten to throw you off the jury, get thrown off. If they yell at you... so what? If you're really defending the innocence of young boys, what's a little yelling between jurors?

That way, when you find yourself printing up "Don't Snap Your Fingers At Me, Lady" T-shirts commemorating what you yelled at the victim's mother after the trial, you'll do so from a firm moral high ground. Or at least the closest thing you can manage to one.

I'll warn you all right now, if I catch you on the streets in a "Don't Snap Your Fingers At Me, Lady" T-Shirt, I'll... I'll... fuck, I can't do ANYTHING, because if I do, I'll end up before some jury filled with T-Shirt-hawking grannies with book deals. This whole court is out of order.

Hultman, who bears a striking resemblence to the love child of John Bolton and Don Knotts, ain't much better.

"There were a lot of people that were interested in this case from day one. People expect to know what's going on with their justice system and how things work." - The DELIBERATOR, on why he's not actually cashing in, but really providing a civics lesson on our court system to all the citizens who were captivated by the Jackson trial.

No, really. You can tell he's sincere. Just look at his T-Shirt. It says "I'm Sincere" on the front in big block letters, and "Even though I said something completely different right after the trial ended" in really tiny letters on the back.

Remember, in America, it's innocent until you're proven guilty, or until you're found innocent but your jury gets a book deal. USA! USA! USA!

Use Stugly In Your Fine Sentences Today!

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 17:12:34 -0500

Main Column, 5 July 2005
Memo to everyone: HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS.

You're gonna need something to puke in by October.

Oh, boy, is this Supreme Court thing gonna be ugly. It's gonna be fugly. It's gonna be STUGLY*. And I'm not even thinking about the outcome, the political and social implications of letting the Pretzeljockey In Chief get to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. I can't even look that far ahead. The Supremes have been a shaky bulwark against the theocracy as it is, and I can't imagine Dubya is going to take this opportunity to wedge a chair under the doorknob. But I can't think about that, because I'm dreading the mere PROCESS more than I've dreaded, well, anything since I started this column. Stug-ly.

This is gonna be the Super Bowl of partisanship. It's going to be the culmination of everything that politics has become to date - media manipulation, spin, demonizing, dirty tricks, bad journalism, and the Us Vs. Them mentality that has sunk into every facet of government. It does differ from the Super Bowl in two important ways, though. First, the ads are going to be a lot duller, and second, the outcome actually matters.

I need to talk for a second about "partisanship", because it's something I've espoused, and occasionally glorified, in these very pages. And I stand by that, because of the nature of the current climate and the actions of the majority. In such an environment, attempting bi-partisanship is surrender and suicide. But just because I'm aware of the only practical response to the current state of affairs doesn't mean I actually LIKE the current state of affairs.

Because partisanship is the Prisoner's Dilemma, writ large upon our societal landscape. If you don't know the Prisoner's Dilemma, here's the Cliff Notes. Two people are given a choice - rat out the other, or stay silent. If they both stay silent, they get six months in prison. If one betrays the other, and the other stays silent, the betrayer goes free and the other prisoner gets ten years. But if both prisoners betray each other, they both go to jail for two years.

That's partisanship. If the Democrats act in a bi-partisan manner, and the Republicans act like partisan bastards, the Democrats end up fucked. If both sides would actually work together, maybe we'd all be better off, but they won't do that, because they cannot be trusted not to turn the other side in for their own personal gain. So the only thing to do is be a bastard too, and so while everyone may get hosed, at least they're all getting hosed equally. But it's a long, long way from ideal, isn't it?

Let me give you an idea of how bad things are right now. This very instant, less than four days after O'Connor announced her resignation, and another three or four days before any potential replacement is named.

First of all, Alberto "I HEART TORTURE" Gonzalez, the man whose sole job for over a decade has been to tell George W. Bush that whatever George W. Bush wants to do, George W. Bush is legally able to do, is a potential Supreme Court nominee. That's not the bad part. I mean, it's BAD, but we always knew he might get the nod. No, the bad part is this. Alberto "I HEART TORTURE" Gonzalez is TOO LIBERAL for the American Taliban. If Alberto Gonzalez doesn't have enough Kool-Aid running through his veins for the people that think they have Dubya's balls in a vise, it ain't gonna be pretty.

Oh, and remember that wonderful compromise? The filibuster compromise? The Gang of 14? The one I mentioned, idly, in passing, was merely the obligatory dinner before the inevitable fucking, and the Democrats even picked up the tab? Here's how Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of the filibuster nominees, is trying to define the previously undefined and deliberately vague "extraordinary circumstances" that might allow a filibuster of the nominee. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Ideological attacks are not an extraordinary circumstance. To me, it'd have to be a character problem, an ethics problem, some allegation about the qualifications of the person, not an ideological bent." - In other words, all the shit that should kill a nomination stone fucking dead - an off-the-books nanny, being incompetent, or huge corporate conflicts of interest - anything that should utterly disqualify the nominee in a sane world, well, then it's OK for the Democrats to try and delay their appointment for a little while. But if the judge merely has extremist beliefs - say, that life begins at erection, or that pharmacists get to follow you back to your house and picket you if you ask for birth control - that's not extraordinary enough, according to one of the so-called moderates who so-called incurred the so-called wrath of the partisans by making this so-called "compromise". Told ya.

And these are the PRELIMINARIES. The first, tentative punches feeling out the opponents. The most half-hearted fo attempts to frame the debate for the months to come. I guarantee you, by the end of August, you're all going to be wishing for another dead Pope to take your mind off it all.

*Strom Thurmond Ugly.

Stupidity + Anatomy = Comedy

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:21:04 -0500

Sports, 2 June 2005
Here's something you may not know about stupid people. Turns out, stupid people have organs called "mouths". Colloquially referred to as the piehole, the gob, the shitspout, or, in the case of Norm Coleman, "Where The Teeth Hold Dominion", this mouth is capable of exuding the most astonishing feats of illogic the world has ever seen. So today, I'd like to spotlight a few of these feats, in a segment I'd like to call "Idiots Say The Damndest Things".
"I don?t think Deep Throat is a hero. I think Deep Throat is a snake." - Pat Buchanan
Luckily, I trust Buchanan's opinion on herpetology about as much as I trust his opinion on immigration. And the color of my shoes, for that matter.
I love, by the way, that all the experts they're turning to to analyze whether W. Mark Felt did the right thing or not are all the aides, speechwriters (like Patty Patty Buke Buke), and convicted felons of the Nixon administration. Just because Liddy and Colton have served their time and moved on to lucrative careers in talk radio and Christian evangelism doesn't mean they weren't nose-deep in Nixon's shit. They got caught. Sent to prison. Their boss forced to resign in shame because he was dirty as hell and sloppy about it to boot. They helped him.
So maybe, just maybe, these aren't the people we should be turning to for a moral judgment on the matter? Or am I talking the crazy-talk again? Ignoring the realities of the 24-hour news cycle? Some kind of pundophobe? Fuck it. Doesn't really matter anyway, because as Deep Throats go, Felt isn't the guy anyone wanted it to be. You know you all wanted it to be Ben Stein. I know my demographic. Post-buellerites, the lot of you.
"I don't think there's a church-state issue, because it's not mandatory, and I say 'worship services' instead of 'church." - Kentucky Judge Michael Caperton
Caperton is being delusional in defense of his idea of innovative sentencing - giving people the option of going to jail, or getting out of their jail time by attending the aforementioned "worship services". Just a bunch of misdemeanor drug and alcohol offenders, but still. Even in Kentucky, you don't get out of separation of church and state just by changing the name of something. You have to change the name of it so that it pretends to remove the religious connotations. If they'e renamed Creationism "The Godmadeit Theory" instead of "Intelligent Design", you think they'd have gotten anywhere? OK, do you think they'd have gotten as far. As fast? No.
Here's some more from Caperton: "I saw that our drug problems were getting worse and worse and decided we needed to try something new. All the feedback I've gotten on it has been very positive." - First of all, you don't get to call religion "something new". Even Scientology's been around for decades by now. Hell, all the guys who put on purple sneakers and cut their balls off are making travel plans for their ten year reunion.
And second, of course all the feedback you've received on it has been positive. You live in KENTUCKY. Where thinking dinosaurs waved to Adam and Eve on the way to the tar pit for a bath qualifies you for a seat on the school board. You'll keep getting the positive feedback until the first guy you let out goes and hangs out with the Wiccans on the equinox. Or cuts off his balls and buys purple sneakers. Or as soon as anyone asks the ACLU, which they did, and no, they're not thrilled.

"Some people may think I'm a crazy nonsensical parent and I'm overzealous, but I feel okay with what I'm doing." - Michael Croteau, New Brunswick, Canada.

What he's doing, in case you were wondering, is waging a crazy, nonsensical overzealous war against that oppressor of human rights, Hockey Canada. You see, three years ago, Hockey Canada did not give Mr. Croteau's son an MVP award. Now I know hockey is more important in Canada than it is here, and I know it's more important here than it is to me, but when your son loses out on award, should you really sue the award-givers? That's what Dad decided to do.

And then, when he lost that case, and the hockey league suspended his kid because of the ongoing lawsuit, he filed a HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION complaint with Canadian authorities. Which he also lost. So now he's set up a web site, and is thinking of appealing his case to Canada's Supreme Court. Which doesn't handle nearly as many hockey-related cases as you might think. But, you know. He's okay with what he does. And so, he says, is his son, who coincidentally refuses to talk to reporters about it. Probably because, well, he's 19, he's in law school, and he wants a chance in Canada's frozen hell of getting laid at some point in his life.

While science has yet to find a way to actually stop dumb people from using their flatulent tongueholders, research is continuing into this pesky conundrum. And until that glorious day when You Are Dumb Brand Telepathic Self-Applying Duct Tape is loosed upon a grateful world, we'll just have to endure as best we can. For the sake of the children.