No More Mr. Nice Guy!

A week is a short time in politics

Last night, Arnold Schwarzenegger's pudgy-me, Jay Leno, made some lame quip about the Democrats in Congress moving to a four-day work week, accompanied by the standard rethug ranting-points about lazy Dems who don't get anything done, are even more unpopular than Junior, etc, etc. I hadn't heard anything about this in the news, and when I searched on Google News, all I found was a couple of links to lunatic extreme-right hate blogs, which I'm not going to link to because they just spew more of the same ignorant, hateful crap.

I think it's worthwhile recalling that the rethug congress of 2004-06 had only a two-day work week, or two and a half at most (when it wasn't in recess), and wasted whole months with mindless craw-thumping and bible-banging about gay marriage, flag burning and Terri Schiavo, while US troops were dying and trillions of taxpayer dollars were being flushed down the crapper in a pointless, exitless quagmire.

When the Democrats announced after the midterms that Congress would move to a five-day work week, the rethugs were livid with rage, and whining about those mean nasty anti-family liberals.

"Keeping us up here eats away at families," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. "Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families -- that's what this says."

Of course, some Republicans saw this new schedule in more of a political light:

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), one of the architects of the lighter workweek, put the best Republican face on Hoyer's new schedule.

"They've got a lot more freshmen then we do," he said of the Democrats. "That schedule will make it incredibly difficult for those freshmen to establish themselves in their districts. So we're all for it."

Now of course the 'thugs are singing a different song. The Dems are giving up! They've realized that they can't accomplish anything! Never mind that it's the mindless, partisan knee-jerk filibustering, obstructionism and sabotage of the 'thugs, gumming up the works over even the most routine and uncontroversial matters, that has prevented progress. (A strategy crafted by odious neanderthal Trent Lott and carefully ignored by the media.)

Sick, sleazy, slimy hypocritical bastards. They turn my stomach, every single one of them.

"It depends on what the definition of torture is..."

So much for Michael Mukasey's promise to be independent of the White House. With Cheney the Dick breathing down his neck and waving a shotgun in a threatening manner, Mukasey flips and flops, zigs and zags, and refuses to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture.

Meanwhile, George Bush Junior's scientific advisor, Samuel Bodman, declined to express an opinion on whether the world was more than 6,000 years old, and the administration's family planning czar, Susan Orr, said that more evidence is needed before ruling out the stork theory of human reproduction. Junior's nominee for the position of US envoy to the Vatican, Ian Paisley, refused to answer when asked whether his belief that the pope is the Antichrist and the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon would be an impediment to him in the position.

Isn't it time for the Senate to begin "enhanced questioning" of Junior's nominees? After all, traditional notions of due process and the rule of law are quaint and obsolete.

I continue to believe that the Dems should tell Junior he should withdraw Mukasey's name and nominate one of the purged attorneys. Poetic justice, righting a wrong and all that. Sadly, it's more likely that regardless of any noises they are currently making, the Dems will once again cave like a West Virginia coalmine and saddle us with yet another "loyal Bushie" who will continue to rubber-stamp the Boy Chimperor's continuing defecation on the Constitution.

Obama, where art thou?

I'm well aware that atheists are the most despised group in the US, but it saddens me that the Dem candidates feel they have to vie with each other to pander to the religious right. We expect this kind of political calculus and triangulation from Hillary, but Obama seems to be lurching further right every day in a way that leaves many progressives banging their heads in frustration.

Once again the clueless Dems are falling for the rethugs' frame, playing their game, falling into their trap. The "frame" is that the GOP is the party of good, gawd-fearing Christians - pardon me, Judeo-Christians - and the Dems are the party of godless, atheist, jeezus-hatin' heathens. Which is total BS. The Democratic Party has always been just as dominated by Christians and fundies as the Republan Party - it's just that they are more likely to treat their religion as a private affair, as it should be, rather than trumpeting it from the rooftops for petty partisan gain. In fact it seems to me they are more genuine Christians.

I don't recall Jesus ever preaching, thou shalt invade and destroy other countries (though there's plenty of that in the Old Testament), thou shalt cut taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor, thou shalt hate gays, thou shalt hate Mexicans, thou shalt hate anybody. The only time he was recorded as getting angry was when he chased the capitalists out of the temple. Jesus would not recognize any of today's craw-thumping rethugs as his followers; he would say, "Get thee behind me, Satan, thou whited sepulchers."

Since the rethugs are so spectacularly wrong on every issue, why do the Dems keep having to capitulate to them? Why aren't they putting out the message 24-7, saying that hate is not Christian, greed is not Christian, violence is not Christian?

The watchmaker is blind, and the cretinist emperor is naked.

This is a fascinating video which shows that, Paley's hoary old argument notwithstanding, a fully functioning watch could evolve - if there were a population of watches subject to mutation and natural selection.

Obviously it's just a thought experiment, but it convincingly demolishes the cretinist dogma that complexity is prima facie proof that goddidit. If you don't see the video widget, click here.

Housekeeping announcements

First of all, I'm glad to announce that I finally fixed a long-lived bug in the comments code, knock on wood (raps self on head - ouch). When commenting, you can click on "(Reply)" in someone else's comment and reply to it, and your comment will show up as "in reply to Fred" or whatever name the other commenter gave, instead of "in reply to Original article." It was always supposed to work that way, but there was a tricky bug which took a long time to figure out and eradicate.

Secondly, in response to a recent slew of spam, I've added a captcha check in the comments form. Not only does this fight spam, it helps to digitize old books, as explained here. So I hope you will excuse the inconvenience as it's in a good cause.

As always, if you find bugs or other problems with any part of this site, please let me know - my address is on the links page. And don't ever be shy about commenting - I am always interested to hear what other people think of my posts and I hate feeling like I'm talking to myself.

Ghostly groping

Speaking of closeted gay rethugs... Wonkette dishes some more dirt on Larry Craig. And today's Arizona Repulsive has an unintentionally amusing story on an allegedly haunted Phoenix hotel:

In one entry, a female guest relives her night in the Marilyn Monroe Suite, a room on the third floor that the bombshell starlet requested because of its proximity to the rooftop pool. The guest wrote that on May 22, 2006, she and her boyfriend kept hearing the phone ring in the middle of the night. Only heavy breathing was heard when they picked it up. She wrote that the lights would continually dim and brighten. She later felt a foot rub against her foot.

Oh my god! Larry Craig is everywhere!

Beat the meat

Jeezus... life under the Potemkin Village Idiot gets more surreal every day. FEMA holds a fake press conference at which its own staff flunkies pretend to be journalists lobbing softballs at Harvey Johnson, Admiral of Vice and deputy administrator of the agency. Real journalists could only dial in on a listen-only conference call, and the whole thing wasn't even announced until 15 minutes beforehand.

I wonder if Jimjeff Gannuckert was there?

Genocide is not a family value

Nowadays, whenever a US organization has "family" in its name, you can bet it's a bunch of lunatic extreme-right Bush-worshippers. Think of the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, etc. But this really takes the cake. Philip Atkinson of the "Family Security Foundation" writes:

The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. [...]

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar's example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming "ex-president" Bush or he can become "President-for-Life" Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world?

(Warning: the page linked to above contains a graphic image of a "liberated" Iraqi boy)

This is just stunning, and sickening. Not to mention scary as hell. How high up in the corridors of power does this type of thinking hold sway? How many people are saying: well, shit, we've already shredded the Constitution and swept away centuries of legal protections, invaded countries for their oil, and routinely torture innocent people - let's go the whole hog! Nuke 'em all and let Gawd sort 'em out!

In six short years, we have gone further down the road to fascism and a "final solution" than I would have ever thought possible. Is it too late to pull the US back from the brink?

Prophet without honor

A young Pakistani-Italian woman is murdered by her father in an "honor killing." How sickening.

Hina (photo), who dressed in western clothes, worked in a pizzeria in the northern town of Sarezzo and lived with her Italian boyfriend was found with her throat slit buried in the garden of her family home, her head facing Mecca in August 2006.

Her father Mohammed confessed to her slaying.

Prosecutors allege he murdered Hina with the aid of other male relatives after they decided Hina had 'dishonoured' the family.

This kind of barbarism makes me think that Islam is a despicable religion that treats women as beasts of burden. A few years ago in Pakistan a woman was gang-raped by the elders of her village as "punishment" for a "crime" committed by her 12-year-old brother; he had looked at a higher-caste woman. I'm surprised the same elders didn't then stone the woman to death for committing adultery (i.e. being raped by them).

See also my review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book Infidel. There can be no doubt that Islam degrades and oppresses women, and this is a big factor in the relative backwardness of the Muslim world. Starting from the example of Mohammed having sex with a nine-year old girl, down to the present day, Islam has always treated women as inanimate property with no rights and no individuality. They are inherently filthy, unclean beasts who must stay at home and cover every square inch of themselves with black robes, lest the merest glimpse of them corrupt good holy Muslim men. Bollocks to that!

Now, I've known plenty of Muslims of both sexes who were good, decent people. Like moderate Christians, moderate Muslims pick and choose which parts of their holy scrolls to believe, and reject what is outrageous and repugnant, even if they don't admit or aren't consciously aware that they are doing so. The problem is that the Quran claims to be the final, perfect, unalterable word of God, dictated directly by him to Mohammed. Thus Islam is by definition fundamentalist. You can't reform it, you can only make a clean break with it, thus risking another "honor killing", since it is the duty of every Muslim to kill apostates.

It should be remembered that Christianity was once just as vicious and bloodthirsty as Islam. It took centuries of war and an ocean of blood before Christianity was reined in, stripped of absolute power, and replaced by the liberal humanist consensus that underpins western democracy. Islam must follow the same path, but with nuclear weapons in the mix, we don't have centuries to spare!

How can we overcome fundamentalist Islam? I don't have the answer, but I know that the neonazi-cons' oil-driven crusade and George Bush Junior's combination of overwhelming firepower and appalling ignorance is the worst possible response, guaranteed to make the situation infinitely more dangerous. The tendency of some European countries to excuse barbarism in the name of multiculturalism isn't helping. Now more than ever, we must stand up for the values of humanism, freedom and equality, and hope that at least some of them will rub off on western Muslims - as they frequently do, given half a chance.

Laura Bush gives aid and comfort to Islamofascists! Stop the presses!

Remember the shitstorm the lunatic extreme right screamed up when Nancy Pelosi donned a headscarf to enter a Syrian mosque?

Well, the Stepford-Wife-in-Chief is now in Saudi Arabia (home of 15 out of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers) and happily trying on a hijab, and she's not even in a mosque. Will we hear rightards screeching, "The First Lady is now donning the garb of America's enemies. What's next - a suicide bomber belt?"

In fact, will we see any coverage of this at all in the "liberal media"? Chirp, chirp.

Once again, if it wasn't for double standards, the lunatic extreme right wouldn't have any standards at all.

Hillary the Hippie?

St. John McCain, who apparently has already crowned himself the rethug nominee for the '08 presidential election, is running an attack ad against Hillary Clinton over her sponsoring of federal earmarks for a Woodstock museum. Oh for Christ's sake!

Steering federal pork to their home state or district is something all Congresspeople do. I'm not defending the practice, but Hillary is no more vulnerable on this count than McCain himself. In fact McCain's close association with Anheuser-Busch is a far more glaring example of conflict of interest.

D'inept D'loser

I was going to take Dinesh D'Souza to task for spouting a load of cant under the title What Atheists Kant Refute (also published as Why Atheists are Not Very Bright), but I procrastinated until PZ and Skeptico, among others, did a better job than I would have. Unfortunately, D'Souza has an inexhaustible amount of pompous BS to shovel before us.

D'Souza's latest opus to come marching out of the fever-swamps of his Jesus-addled brain is The Atheist Indoctrination Project. I seem to have missed the memo on that one, but when you strip away the windy verbiage, ad-hominem attacks and strawman arguments, what it boils down to is: if schools aren't indoctrinating Christianity in children, then they're indoctrinating atheism.

D'Souza liberally quotes Dawkins, Hitchens and other names likely to provoke the hate reflex in his far-right readers. Funnily enough, the points they make - that religious indoctrination of children, the teaching of absurd superstitions as facts that may not be questioned, is not a good thing - seems totally reasonable to me. But for D'Souza, it is simply outrageous to ask, for example (as Hitchens does), "How can we ever know how many children had their psychological and physical lives irreparably maimed by the compulsory inculcation of faith?" and therefore there is no need to respond in any way. (If you can stomach an extreme example of how religious indoctrination is most definitely child abuse, read this article I wrote last year.)

D'Souza quotes psychologist Nicholas Humphrey: "Parents have no god-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith." Daniel Dennett adds: "Parents don't literally own their children the way slaveowners once owned slaves, but are, rather, their stewards and guardians and ought to be held accountable by outsiders for their guardianship, which does imply that outsiders have a right to interfere." D'Souza makes no response to this. Does he or does he not think parents are slaveowners of their children?

According to D'Souza,

In his book Breaking the Spell, Dennett urges that schools teach religion as a purely natural phenomenon. By this he means that religion should be taught as if it were untrue.

Wrong! As Dennett makes clear in the next sentence, religion should be taught objectively as a human phenomenon. Teachers should say: "this is what Religion X believes, and here is the evidence it has for its beliefs." (That second bit would be the shortest part of the lesson.) Teachers should not say: "A, B and C are true because that is what Religion X teaches."

After coming to the end of his atheist quote dump, D'Souza whines:

This is how many secular teachers treat the traditional beliefs of students. The strategy is not to argue with religious views or to prove them wrong. Rather, it is to subject them to such scorn that they are pushed outside the bounds of acceptable debate.

First of all, the onus is not on anyone to "prove" religion wrong. Believers must at least offer some independent support for their views if they want them to be taken seriously. And it's worth noting that no such support exists. Every time religion makes a statement that can be checked by science, religion makes a fool of itself, whether it's a 6,010 year old earth, insects having four legs, rabbits chewing the cud, etc. Quite frankly, religion's track record is so abysmally pathetic that after giving it a more than fair hearing over the last several millennia, we are fully entitled to treat it with derision and ridicule.

But D'Souza cannot bring himself to admit that his superstitious myths simply cannot stand up to scientific inquiry, so he wails about professors brainwashing students "to think a certain way merely by making that point of view seem fashionable and enlightened." He just can't grasp the idea that a university is where you are supposed to learn to think for yourself, to weigh evidence, to consider the burden of proof, to accept hypotheses tentatively for the sake of argument instead of dividing all of human knowledge into dogma and heresy. How did D'Souza spend his time at Dartmouth, anyway? Oh, yeah - writing "humorous" attacks on African-American and gay students.

D'Souza concludes:

Isn't it brilliant that they [atheists] have persuaded Christian moms and dads to finance the destruction of their own beliefs and values? Who said atheists aren't clever?

Um... you did, dickwad. We're "not very bright", remember?

D'Souza's whole screed is just a more pompous and pretentious version of those annoying "jokes" your neanderthal fundy relative emails to you along with everyone else in your family. The kind that is premised on the belief that every professor in every college is an atheist who spends every minute of every class declaring that God does not exist. The joke usually ends with God sending a marine drill sergeant to punch the professor's lights out. Yeah, let's hear it for brute force triumphing over the intellect!

Having devoted way more time to D'Souza's rant than it deserves, I can only continue to shake my head in amazement that the theocrats are so panicked by a few books by a handful of atheist authors. Do they realize at some subconscious level that the emperor really is naked, and that if enough people can overcome the constant psychological bullying of the religious right's attack pundits, and start thinking for themselves and asking awkward questions, the whole creaking and decrepit edifice will come crashing down?

King George the Third Degree

Jesus... this is so fucked up. When word initially got out that the US was torturing people, the lunatic right justified it on the grounds that the victims were dangerous, highly-trained "Islamofascists" who were plotting night and day to destroy America.

Now, torture is so routine that the FBI squeezes confessions out of innocent people by threatening to torture their wives and children.

The word "torture" originally meant "to twist" and derived from a torture machine used by the Christian Church to torture heretics and force them to recant. There were five degrees of twisting. The third degree caused excruciating pain, the fourth caused death, and the fifth tore the body to pieces. This is where we get the term "third degree."

Historically, torture has most often been used not to gain information but to force people to say what the authorities want them to say; to confess to crimes they didn't commit, to accuse other people of crimes, or to renounce their beliefs. Every intelligence officer knows that torture is next to useless as a means of extracting information. Even if the victim talks, the intelligence is of the lowest grade and must be corroborated before being usable. So much for the "ticking time bomb" excuse! It's far more common to give the torture victim a script to read, as for example when the CIA tortured Sheikh al-Libi into making a false connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

It seems to me there is another and in a way even sicker motive for torture. When you look at filthy pigs like Cheney the Dick, Scooter Libby with his sado-porn novel, or the entire current slate of rethug presidential candidates, it's clear that they get their jollies from the idea of brown people being tortured and abused. They are sick, twisted, disgusting sacks of shit.

I shouldn't have to point out that torture is never acceptable for several reasons:

• It is evil and immoral in itself.
• It is ineffective, if your goal is to learn information.
• It endangers our troops. If we torture the enemy's troops, they will torture ours.
• It coarsens and brutalizes our entire society. Witness the cheering and applause when rethug candidates try to out-macho each other and ramp up the torture stakes.

It's incredible how much damage the neonazi-cons and lunatic extreme right have done to the US in the few short years since they seized power against the will of the people. Everything they have touched has turned to shit. They've defecated on our Constitution and our core values, and flushed our world standing down the toilet. They've turned what used to be a beacon of hope and freedom into just another third-world tinpot hellhole. I can't tell you how much I despise these sickening swine for what they've done to this country.

Keyes to the kingdom

So, what's Alan Keyes been up to lately? For some reason you never seem to see him among the line-up of rich white old pasty-faced guys in the rethug debates. Some nutters at Wingnut Daily, who consider Keyes the most Christ-like candidate (hmmm, I guess what Jesus would do is disown his own lesbian daughter), are dropping dark hints that Keyes is being discriminated against by the rethug leadership because he is too pure and Christian for those "pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, anti-Jesus" moderates. Yeah, right!

In fact, the South Carolina state GOP is so determined to exclude Keyes from the ballot that they are trying to extract $35,000 in "extortion money" from him! Oh my god, how blatantly discriminatory! Except that this figure applies to all candidates, even Stephen Colbert.

Now a group of wingnuts is calling on Keyes to run as a third party candidate. If I were a cynic, I'd guess that the rethugs are frightened by the prospect of the extreme religious right running a third party candidate, splitting the vote, and losing in a landslide to the Dem nominee, and that they're trying to neutralize this danger by making sure the third party candidate is someone the base will never vote for in a million years, despite his being a barking mad self-appointed sex policeman. Or maybe it's just the Cheney the Dick still bears a grudge against Keyes for calling his daughter a "sinner" and "selfish hedonist".

As for Keyes himself, he seems to have made a pretty good living off running unsuccessfully for president, so I'm sure he'll be fine with being used as a prop and token yet again.

I always suspected they had something in common...

I almost wish Jerry Falwell had lived long enough to see this. Oh well, we'll always have the hate-osphere.

Send 'em to Alcatraz

Blackwater, the mercenary gang that is killing and rampaging at will in Iraq and carrying out ethnic cleansing in New Orleans, has reportedly evaded tens of millions of dollars in federal taxes.

Hey, if it worked to put Al Capone away, it's worth another try...

Bush sticks head up ass yet again

Click on the image for the Crooks and Liars video.

Andrew Thomas gives "criminal attorney" a whole new meaning

On Friday I wrote about Joe Arpaio, America's most cowardly sheriff, and his reign of terror in Maricopa County, Arizona, which came to a head when he had two newspaper owners arrested for exposing his corruption and criminality.

The good news is that the misdemeanor charges against the two victims of this blatant abuse of power have been dropped. Now the spotlight shifts to Arpaio's political henchman, the berserkly right-wing Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. A local newspaper revealed that Thomas has spent over $320,000 of taxpayer money using private lawyers to investigate and harass people and organizations he and Arpaio politically oppose.

Thomas has long been notorious among Arizona's large Hispanic population for his racist attitudes. When a law was passed to get tough with coyotes - criminals who smuggle illegal aliens into the US, and often abuse them, rob them and even leave them for dead in the desert - Thomas started using the law against the immigrants themselves, arguing that they were conspiring to have themselves smuggled. When judges demurred against this bizarre interpretation, Thomas launched a political war against them, trying to get some of them kicked off the bench and pissing off enough people that the state Bar Association started investigating him for ethics violations - and this was even before Friday's fiasco, which finally reveals that Thomas has no ethics whatsoever.

Also, in keeping with conservative dogma that morality begins and ends with (other people's) sex, Thomas loves to throw the book at 'em, lock 'em up and throw away the key whenever sex is concerned - going so far as to seek a 90-year sentence against a teenage boy. Thomas's draconian crusade has led to the county's courts being overwhelmed with cases, the prisons bursting at the seams, and Maricopa County becoming the death penalty capital of the US - and many lawyers growing very rich, including his old law firm. (I wonder how much in kickbacks Thomas gets from the private prison industrial complex?)

When it comes to abusing his powers of office, Thomas is just as bad as Arpaio. He's carried out partisan witch hunts against Democratic opponent Terry Goddard, and Republican opponent Dan Saban, a police chief whom Thomas and Arpaio accused of rape - though they were carefully not to file charges, just spread rumors and smears before the Republican primary.

When the dust has settled, I want to see Arpaio and Thomas sharing an open tent in the desert, chained together, wearing pink underwear and eating spoiled bologna. The two most powerful men in Maricopa County are also the two most corrupt and criminal! We have to take them out!

Wiggle like a snake, wobble like a duck...

So far in this blog I've trashed Rudi Giuliani many times, plus Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, John McCain and Fred Thompson. Let's see, that leaves... way too many of them. I'll let Paul Krugman dish the dirt on Mike Huckabee. (Executive summary: he somehow manages to link the lunatic extreme right's two main hate issues, abortion and illegal aliens.)

No More Mr. Nice Congressman!

I don't think it's a coincidence that Pete Stark, the only openly atheistic member of Congress, is also the only one with the guts to say what needs to be said about George Bush Junior's massive cluster-cheney in Iraq.

I'm just amazed that the Republicans are worried that we can't pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal War in Iraq.

You're gonna tell us lies? Like you're telling us today? Is that how you're gonna fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're gonna spend it, to blow up innocent people if we could get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement.

President Bush's statements about children's health shouldn't be taken any more seriously than his lies about the War in Iraq. The truth is that that Bush just likes to blow things up - in Iraq, in the United States, and in Congress.

Needless to say, the cowardly, craven, quisling Dem leadership is getting shrieking fits of the vapors and frantically waving the smelling salts over these long-overdue home truths. Nancy Pelosi is tripping over herself in her frantic rush to distance herself from Stark after stabbing him in the back in true fratricidal Dem fashion.

And of course the lunatic extreme right is once again orgasmic at the opportunity to froth at the mouth in righteous (and infinitely hypocritical) anger and synchronized synthetic outrage. They haven't been this happy since the "Betrayus" ad. "How dare anyone disrespect the office of the president!" screech the rotting whited sepulchers who spent the entire Clinton presidency calling Bill a rapist, murderer, traitor, drug smuggler, pedophile, you name it.

Let's remember a few inconvenient truths about Monkeynuts. As a child, he loved to blow up frogs with firecrackers. As misgovernor of Texas, he presided over a record increase in executions, showed no concern about whether the condemned were innocent or not, and mocked Karla Faye Tucker after signing her death warrant. And when informed that the bombardment of Baghdad had commenced in March 2003, he pumped his fist and screamed orgiastically, "This feels good."

Can anyone really doubt that the Psycho-in-Chief finds the deaths of US troops amusing?

Junking the science

George Bush Junior has always found science inconvenient for his mega-corporate, christofascist agenda. Climate collapse, evolution, stem cell research, environmental research, research that shows the total uselessness of his ignorance-only approach to sex education - all have invoked the Chimperor's ire.

Earlier this year, Junior decided to take care of the "problem" once and for all by signing Executive Order 13422 to exert total White House control over federal agencies, stuffing scientific directorships with unqualified cronies and further politicizing and even burying scientific research. But now We the People have a chance to do something about it.

Dick Durbin is working to cut off funds to enforce Executive Order 13422. Sign the petition to support him! The need for unbiased, objective scientific research has never been greater.

Jail to the Chief

Phoenix is in many ways a microcosm of Georgebushistan. Our compassionate conservative uniter commander-in-chief is Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa County, the vast sprawling county which includes most of metropolitan Phoenix.

Arpaio has held the office of Sheriff since 1992, with overwhelming support from Maricopa's extreme-right voters, by posing as "America's Toughest Sheriff." He furthers this image, not by reducing violent crimes, but by humiliating his inmates in the county jail, most of whom are awaiting trial and therefore are innocent until proven guilty. He feeds them spoiled bologna at a cost of 30 cents a day, parades them in chain gangs in pink underwear (and once forced a chain gang to march through Downtown Phoenix in the summer heat, wearing nothing but underwear), points webcams at them (including in the women's bathroom) to rob them of all privacy, and generally is so brutal that he has come to the attention of Amnesty International. An Irish judge even refused to extradite an alleged pedophile priest to Arizona, citing Arpaio's "chillingly sadistic pleasure in his role as incarcerator."

Arpaio's department is a festering swamp of cronyism and incompetence. It's not uncommon for his testosterone-addled stormtroopers to destroy homes and terrify whole neighborhoods while attempting to serve a search warrant. And a long list of people has died suspiciously while in custody, forcing the county to pay out $50 million of taxpayers' money in settlement over the last few years. But Arpaio will never clean up his act; he's too busy with political intrigue and dirty tricks against Democratic politicians and the few local journalists who call him on his out-of-control brutality.

The one thorn in Arpaio's side has been the independent Phoenix New Times, which for years has been documenting Arpaio's corruption, criminality, incompetence and ever-increasing megalomania. Last night, Arpaio finally snapped and had the owners of the newspaper arrested. He's also subpoenaing all logs from the paper's web server, wanting to see dates, times, IP addresses, computer types and referring pages for everyone who viewed the website in the last several years. Good grief! Abolishing freedom of the press, shredding the Constitution, using the Sheriff's office as his private gang of goons and legbreakers, harassing ordinary people for the crime of visiting a website that criticizes him - how much does he think he can get away with?

The time is long overdue to rein in this petty, tinpot tyrant, this self-aggrandizing buffoon who has nothing but contempt for the rule of law. Let him spend a few years in his tent city, sweltering in the desert in pink underwear and eating rotten bologna. In fact I'd say that's too good for him!

Dems wimp out yet again

Jeezus wept... the rethugs never cease to amaze me with their infinite, stunning hypocrisy, sleaze and cynical hucksterism.

Dems in Congress wanted to pass a surveillance bill which, though deeply flawed, at least tried to increase court oversight of government spying on US citizens. Well, golly, we can't have that!

The House's Democratic leaders pulled the bill after discovering that Republicans planned to offer a motion that politically vulnerable Democrats would have a hard time voting against.

The amendment would have said that nothing in the bill could limit surveillance of Osama bin Laden and terrorist organizations. While Democrats say their bill already provides that authority, voting against the amendment could make it seem as though a member of Congress were against spying on al-Qaida. [Link]

And of course the 'thugs, during their six years of absolute power, did such a bang-up job of finding Osama bin Laden. Not! Of course, Junior would have vetoed the bill anyway, because it didn't contain blanket immunities for the telecom companies who were his partners in crime.

Two questions present themselves. Firstly, the 'thugs seem to have endless procedural maneuvers at their disposal for obstruction and sabotage. Why did the Dems never use these tactics while they were in the minority, to put the brakes on at least some of the appalling legislation the 'thugs were churning out? And secondly, why is it that at the first vague hint of rethug opposition, the Dems cave faster than a Utah coalmine? Why oh why won't they ever put up a fight?

The Democrat Party: weak on genocide

I can just see the next round of rethug attack ads. Never mind that the Democrats withdrew their Armenian genocide resolution under pressure from Bush. "Congressman X supports genocide! He wouldn't vote against it!"

I'm really baffled by what motivated the Dems to put forward this resolution in the first place. It was apropos of nothing, served no purpose, and even the Dems couldn't have been so clueless and naive as to imagine it would sail through without obstacles. What was the point? Are there two grades of genocide, those that have been officially condemned by Congress and those that haven't? No, obviously anyone civilized person (which excludes many rethugs and fundies) knows that genocide is unspeakably wrong and must always be opposed.

But as Atrios say, it's beyond me why the Dems keep picking more fights to lose when they're already getting their asses whipped on the stuff that actually means something, like getting the f%#k out of Iraq and making health care available to non-millionaires.

The Last Stupor

I hope Stephen Colbert runs as a Republan. He would certainly liven up the debates.

Romney: "I'll double Guantanamo! I'll triple it! I'll waterboard everyone in it!"

Colbert: "I'll build a new Guantanamo inside Guantanamo!"

Tancredo: "I'm looking for Jack Bauer!"

Thompson: "Zzzzzz... um... what? What about me? I'm Arthur Branch!"

Colbert: "I AM TEK JANSEN!"

Run, Stephen, run!

The rich white guys' club

This interesting little tidbit emerged in the wake of Stephen Colbert's announcement that he would run for US president in South Carolina.

To run as a Democrat, you must either pay a $2,500 filing fee with the state Democratic party or gather 3,000 signatures. To run as a Republan (if they can take the "ic" out of our party name, we can do it to them), you have to cough up $35,000.

That says it all, doesn't it?

Hello Dalai

When Democrats pass a resolution calling the 1915 massacre of Armenians genocide, all freeping hell breaks loose and the White House rushes to carry water for the regime in Turkey, which is a key staging point in Junior's war against the people of Iraq. (Bush himself spoke of the "genocidal campaign" against Armenians while campaigning in 2000 but has since quietly dropped the subject.)

Yes, how foolish of those silly naive Dems to piss off our staunch allies like that! Yet it's perfectly okay for Junior to insult China by making a big song and dance about making an award to the Dalai Lama, even though China basically owns this country, thanks to the debts Junior incurred off the books to finance his pet war.

As always, IOKIYAR.

Waaaaaaaaaay too geeky

Some guy is dressing up for Halloween as a Pac-Man arcade game which can actually be played. If I ever get that geeky, someone please shoot me.

Bush throws a tantrum

Oh, Jesus... Part Two. George Bush Junior vetoes children's health care in order to show that he is still "relevant". Heckuva job, 29% Boy!

Meanwhile, rightards continue foaming at the mouth over Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize. Oh for christ's sake! Are they waiting for the Supreme Court to take it away from him? Or just angry that Monkeynuts didn't win a Nobel War Prize?

Oh, Jesus...

Target has declared war on Christmas! Well, Jesus anyway. I breathlessly await Bill O'Felafel's mouth-foaming denunciation of this vile attack on our most cherished institutions. I mean, they're selling talking Jesus action figures - that's idolatry! And they're commercializing and making money off the most holy icon of our national religion! C'mon, righties, action stations! (Chirp, chirp)

Oh well, I guess it's better than Chocolate Jesus or Pedophile Jesus.

A commenter at Pharyngula wonders if, since the figures are made in China, they'll give children lead poisoning. I think brain poisoning is more likely.

Another commenter points out that Action Jesus will get mixed up with the other toys, lose an eye, get naked etc. That's a good point. Just wait till Action Jesus goes scuba diving in the toilet with GI Joe! Will he rise again on the turd day?

9/11 Boy busted yet again

The more information that comes out about Rudy Giuliani, the dirtier he looks. Not content with situating his emergency command room in the World Trade Center, for cronyist reasons and over the pleas of his advisors, he gave Motorola a no-bid contract to supply radios to the NYFD which never worked and cost the city millions of dollars more than necessary - and the lives of hundreds of firemen. Sign the petition to have Giuliani's ties to Motorola investigated. Remember when 9/11 Boy interrupted his speech to the NRA to take a phone call from his wife du jour? Let's send him a real wake-up call. If enough people find out the facts about this corrupt crook, his White House hopes will come crashing down faster than the Twin Towers!

Why religion sucks

This post was inspired by a comment war I got into on another blog, which led to my being banned. Oh well, I was getting tired of banging my head against a brick wall of willful ignorance in trying to get my point across.

Maha is one of those religious moderates who smugly intone "a pox on both your houses" in reference to atheists and fundamentalists, but who, when push comes to shove, will always line up with the latter against the former. To her, atheists are from another planet and cannot possibly know anything about religion (despite the rather obvious fact that most of them were born into a religious family), and therefore anything they say about religion can be dismissed out of hand. When they criticize the sort of simple-minded Christian fundamentalism that determines public policy in the US today, they are in effect landing their UFO at the North Pole and declaring that the entire world is covered in ice.

You see, true religion is nothing like that which is practiced by 99.9 (recurring) percent of religionists. Only us exalted moderates decide what religion is, so we can redefine it in order to claim that Richard Dawkins et al are ignorant of religion and are attacking strawmen. So what exactly is religion, then? We're not going to tell you! If you are an atheist, you're never going to get it. You're like a person who has never experienced an orgasm, or has lived in the desert all his life and cannot understand the ocean. (Again, despite the obvious fact that us atheists in the US are drowning in public religiosity every day.) Religion is that which cannot be defined, and anyway we're not going to define it for stupid atheists like you, who are so full of hatred and anger for all religions and refuse to distinguish between our advanced, recondite religion and everyone else's.

So much for Maha's knowledge and opinion of atheists. For anyone who has surfed here from there, I am just going to state my position dispassionately, and move on. If you feel I'm attacking your religion, well, it was your choice to come here.

Let me state first of all that I fully recognize that religion is not monolithic. In fact I've written before that there is no such thing as religion, only religions. "Religion" is an umbrella term for a continuum of belief systems and traditions ranging from the most knuckle-dragging neanderthal fundamentalism to the most ethereal, woo-woo mystical concepts held by a vanishingly small fringe of people.

The increasingly common use of the mealy-mouthed terms "people of faith" and "Judeo-Christian values" pisses me off - it's a dishonest attempt to paper over the vast gaping differences between different religions, and to claim both moral superiority and victim status by forming a strange-bedfellow coalition against those of us who value reason and science, and want to uphold the Constitution.

Secondly, I don't "hate" religion or consider it "the root of all evil". The real root problem, it seems to me, is a complex of (a) tribalism, and the tendency to see those outside the tribe as subhuman and deserving of slaughter or subjugation; and (b) irrationality, a refusal to think for oneself, and an eagerness to blindly and unquestioningly swallow a package deal of beliefs and prejudices.

There are many grouping schemes other than religion that can cause this problem. Certainly, Marxism (which has a lot in common with religion) has been associated with incalculable violence and suffering. The same goes for Maoism and whatever glorious-leader ideology the Khmer Rouge followed. Knowing how obnoxious objectivists can be even in small groups, I'd hate to live in a country where they obtained absolute power.

I suppose even atheism could be an oppressive force, if a bunch of atheists united behind a (to them) charismatic leader, say Christopher Hitchens. But atheists are notoriously harder to herd than cats at a crossroads, and it's difficult to see how "generic" atheism - the absence of belief in a god or gods - could be the basis for a tyrannical movement, unless a lot of extraneous baggage is added.

Here's the thing, though; religion really has nothing to do with morality and is all about tribalism. It creates artificial tribes, and invariably exacerbates existing tribal divisions. The divisions between Shias and Sunnis make as much sense to us in the West as the difference between the Gostak and the Doshes, but are causing unbelievable savagery and hatred in Iraq right now. Not that the West holds any moral high ground, considering the centuries of religious violence and lunacy that wracked Europe.

What irks me greatly about religious moderates is that in view of the current parlous world situation, where religious fundamentalism (whether Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Hindu - it makes no difference) threatens to plunge us all into a new Dark Ages at best, or even destroy civilization, you'd think the moderates would be busy denouncing fundy fanaticism and begging believers to stop and think about whether they were really acting in accordance with the precepts of their religion (or at least the warm fuzzy bits). But no, the moderates are too busy boo-hooing about how meany nasty old Richard Dawkins is dissing them. Good grief, even if he is, so what? How many people has he murdered? How many subway bombs has he planted?

In a nutshell, fundamentalist, dogmatic religion sucks because it inculcates mindlessness, violence and fanaticism. Moderate religion sucks because it provides cover for the fundy extremists. It's so busy basking in its aura of superiority and enlightenment that it strains at the gnat of Richard Dawkins and swallows the camel of Pat Robertson and Osama bin Laden.

So Richard Dawkins doesn't understand the finer, more abstruse points of theology? Don't lecture him, tell the 99.999...% of Christians who are even more ignorant! So Christopher Hitchens points out that religion leads to blind hatred and violence? Then clean up religion's act! Shooting the messenger just betrays your own weakness and insecurity.

The ironic thing about being booted from Mahablog is that Maha's religion of Buddhism is one I am relatively sympathetic towards. I know very little about it, but admire what I perceive as its lack of dogmatism and its insistence that people think for themselves. Which is why I am an atheist, of course. I don't rule out the possibility of a spiritual dimension to existence (though it is more likely to have a neurological than supernatural basis). But if it is as ineffable and undefinable as we are told, that is all the more reason not to be dogmatic and supercilious about it.

Michelle Malkin finally takes on someone her own size

Good. Friggin' Grief.

Not content with swift-boating a disabled 12-year-old child of low-income parents, Cruella de Malkin and her deranged, howling mob of torch-wielding peasants are now attacking a two-year-old baby. And we're seeing more evidence that leading rethugs in Congress are lurking in the shadows, pulling strings and keeping the whole debacle going.

These people are dead. Brain-dead, morally dead, intellectually dead. Dead to all notions of empathy for their fellow human beings, and even of basic human decency and common sense. They are being kept artificially alive by massive infusions of cash from the megacorporate ruling elite, but they are nothing but rotting corpses, the foul stench of their corruption and decay wafting over the airwaves and poisoning the air throughout the land.

In November 2008, we may (or may not) finally get a chance to give them a decent burial.

This is not America

One thing I really despise George Bush Junior and his gang of corrupt criminal traitors for is how radically they have changed this country for the worse.

Read this essay by Naomi Wolf on ordinary, hard-working people who break down in tears when they think about how much damage has been done.

It isn't America when people are afraid to speak their minds, afraid for their careers, their children, their life and liberty. It isn't America when we constantly have to censor ourselves to avoid coming to the attention of the powers that be, and getting on some enemy combatants list.

It isn't America when political critics end up dead in the street, or on a military base, murdered execution-style with a shot in the head. It isn't America when a private mercenary militia is above the law and can rape, rampage and murder with impunity, protected from all accountability by its crony links to the regime.

It isn't America when we cut off health care to millions of poor children to finance tax breaks for billionaires. It isn't America when a power-crazed princeling can defecate on the Constitution, declare war at will, and stuff the regime top to bottom with corrupt incompetent criminal cronies who let whole cities be destroyed.

The America I believe in is a beacon of hope and freedom, not a fascist theocratic dictatorship. Will we ever see the old America again? As Wolf says, "The time for weeping has to stop; the time for confronting must begin."

Your tax dollars at work...

Producing juvenile and inane anti-SCHIP propaganda, on an official government website, that would embarrass the most deranged freeper. Un-friggin'-believable.

Gore winnerman

Congratulations to President-elect Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Along with his Oscar and Emmy, it is well deserved.

I would still like to see Al run in '08, but at this point I am getting resigned to the idea that he won't. Being president of the United States, would, frankly, be a step down for him. The next president will perforce be a glorified janitor, cleaning up the Augean Stables of George Bush Junior's mess. Junior has done almost irreparable damage to our Constitution, our whole system of government, justice and elections, our health and educational systems, and our standing in the world.

The 43th legitimately elected US president will be occupied 24-7 trying to undo some of the damage, but this country's place in the world has been permanently reduced. Europe and the Far East are going to be the real superpowers in the 21st century. The dollar has already been reduced to the status of toilet paper, and scientists are leaving the US in droves for countries where fundamentalist religion does not have a stranglehold on science.

Climate collapse remains the biggest threat facing this planet, and we need Al Gore on the case, working without distractions, keeping the issue front and center with his eloquence and moral authority. Hopefully the next administration will give him some kind of official capacity, as a goodwill ambassador with a brief to get the world united in an effort to avert climatic catastrophe. In fact, if the Dem candidates were smart they would announce such a plan today, and see an immediate boost in their polls numbers. And of course if Gore endorses one of the Dems, it'll be a lock.

Anyway, best of luck to Al Gore in all his future endeavors.

Justice and blindness

A Canadian Reader (of Mahablog) posts a link to a very thought-provoking article on the just world hypothesis. Basically, when some people see injustice, they want to correct it, but others assume that since the world is intrinsically just, the victim of injustice must deserve it, e.g. the poor are lazy, rape victims are sluts, and so on.

[Scientists] found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. [...]

Ironically, then, the belief in a just world may take the place of a genuine commitment to justice. For some people, it is simply easier to assume that forces beyond their control mete out justice. When that occurs, the result may be the abdication of personal responsibility, acquiescence in the face of suffering and misfortune, and indifference towards injustice.

And Republicans imagine themselves to be the party of personal responsibility!

It seems to me that this is one more corrosive effect of religion. There is no god in heaven, and if we want justice on earth, there's just us!

Junior's Evil Empire

Remember purge-gate? Think everything is hunky dory now that Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzales has resigned? Well, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg, but it's a very ugly sight indeed.

More and more cases are coming to light of Democratic politicians being sent to jail on totally trumped up charges. The Justice Department, which was supposed to be the golden flagship agency of the federal government, has been turned into yet another sleazy attack machine by Karl Rove.

Torture? Check.

Gulags? Check.

Cult of personality and leader worship? Check.

Rampant crime, corruption and cronyism? Check.

Rounding up and imprisoning political opponents? Check.

Total breakdown of the rule of law? Check.

Heckuva job, Reagan! Now we are the Evil Empire, the focus of all evil in the modern world.

My god, these despicable thugs are so sickening and disgusting, there are no words for them.

Let's run some more theocracy up the flagpole and see who salutes!

Oh fer cryin' out loud! I am so sick of this crap.

WASHINGTON -- A 17-year-old Eagle scout wanting to honor his grandfather's "love of God, country and family" with a flag flown over the U.S. Capitol has helped remove a ban on the word "God" in certificates that accompany these flags.

The acting Architect of the Capitol, Stephen Ayers, said Thursday he was revising guidelines on Capitol flag certificates because it was "beyond the scope of this agency's responsibilities to censor messages from members of Congress."

Apparently in 2003 a policy was formulated banning religious and political expressions on the certificates, which attest to the authenticity of a flag that has flown over the Capitol. You can argue over whether the policy makes sense - personally it's the kind of thing I would let slide, since it's less obvious that it constitutes government endorsement of a religion - but what kills me is how the usual posse of howling theocratic baboons instantly jerk their knees and launch into full crisis mode over such a trivial issue.

Not content to demand apologies and firings all round, they are working themselves up to ever greater fever pitches of mouth-foaming and coronary-inducing anger. Dan Burton (who, during the Clinton era, convened hearings to investigate Socks the Cat), called for Stephen Ayers to be fired, and thundered: "I can't imagine anybody wanting to take God out of a certificate for a Boy Scout." Pretty impotent god and lord of all creation you've got there, Danny Boy, if he's no match for some civil servant in Washington, and relies on your protection.

Meanwhile, John Boner is spluttering that the case "has rightly drawn outrage from the American people, who have grown weary of endless attempts by politicians and bureaucrats to bar the word God and even the most tacit references to faith from our public institutions." And Jim DeMint of South Jesus-stan, unappeased by the instant capitulation of the Dems,

is sponsoring the "Andrew Larochelle God, Family, and Country Act of 2007" in the Senate. "I still plan to introduce legislation to ensure the First Amendment rights for people of faith are not trampled in the future," he said.

This idiotic and time-wasting bill has 60 co-sponsors. And a fellow theocrat in the House has introduced a similar bill, HR 3779.

Jeezus! Don't those moronic tub-thumpers ever get tired of this charade? Doesn't it ever occur to them that their constituency is not an invisible old man in the sky, but real people who are counting on them to fix health care, get us out of Iraq, and do stuff that actually matters?

These rethugs are such pompous, priggish piles of sanctimonious hypocrisy and moronic claptrap, they would gag a Hottentot.

Cat got your tongue?

Lolcats is one of those insufferably cutesy and mawkish websites that I despise (I'm much more a fan of Cats That Look Like Hitler), but this is funny: The bible translated into lolcats.

1. Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat waz invisible, & he maded the skiez & da earths, but he did not eated it.
2. The earths wus witout shapez & wus dark & scary & stufs, & he rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3. & Ceiling Cat sayz, i can has light? & light wuz.
4. & Ceiling Cat sawed teh light, to sees stufs, & speraratered the light form dark & stufs but taht wuz ok cuz cats can seez in teh dark & not tripz ovr nethin.
5. & Ceiling Cat sayed light Day & dark no Day. Teh evning & morning was teh first day.
6. & Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh ceilingz of waterz, with waterz up & waterz down. & he maded hole in teh Ceiling.
7. & Ceiling Cat doed the skiez with waterz down & waterz up, & stuff.
8. & Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so evning & morning was teh twoth day.
9. & Ceiling Cat gotted all no waterz into ur base, so no waterz wus not wetted & Ceiling Cat hadz teh dry placez cuz cats dusnt lieks to get wet,
10. & Ceiling Cat called no waterz urths and waters oshunz, so tehre.

I've always thought the idea that the great God Cat coughed up a hairball which became the universe is at least as deserving of being taught in the science classroom as creationism.

Impeachment, not immunity!

Sign this petition and demand that the Democrats investigate and impeach George Bush Junior and Dick Cheney for their repeated criminal activity, instead of being cowardly accomplices after the fact.

Links:

• Democrats Seem Ready to Extend Wiretap Powers
• Behind The Scenes, Liberals Ponder Supporting FISA Legislation
• Is Steny Hoyer the Stupidest Democrat in HISTORY?

Ron Paul is no libertarian

Ron Paul is attracting fanatical support from a lot of people who have no idea what he really stands for.

Take a look at this piece he wrote, on the so-called "War on Christmas." It's identical to what Bill O'Reilly starts blustering about every year like clockwork, from September until late January. It also displays abysmal and alarming ignorance about the United States Constitution and the philosophy of the founding fathers. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are both "replete with references to God." Bzzzzt! Number of references to God, Jesus, Christ or Christianity: zilch. Nada. Zip. Zero.

On the question of women's rights, Paul is definitely no libertarian; he is firmly in the compulsory pregnancy and childbirth camp. He's also against gay rights, immigration and free trade.

Finally, Paul's views on race are positively neanderthal:

Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action [...] Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the 'criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

Even if this was ghost-written as Paul claims, he put his name to it and thus bears responsibilty for it.

It's very worrying that many progressives are jumping on the Paul bandwagon, thus unwittingly getting into bed with people like David Duke, the John Birch society, and assorted Branch Davidians and violent white supremacists. (See the above link - scroll to the end of the article.)

Paul is dead? No, but he should be, politically speaking.

Coulter: We should invade Israel, kill its leaders, and convert its people to Christianity

OMFG!!!

How far does that ugly, crappy-headed ho have to go before the media will finally stop saturating the airwaves with her ugly face and her even uglier racism and eliminationism?

Yawn'n'Order

The media giveth, and the media taketh away.

Fred Thompson was never anything more than a media creation. The media whores were the ones drooling over him and lapping up his corn pone country-boy shtick, while everyone else was falling asleep.

Now the media is belatedly waking up to the fact that what it has created, Frankenstein-style, is nothing but an empty suit. After spending a few years unnoticed in the Senate, and sleep-walking through bit parts in a couple of movies and TV series, Thompson was eagerly siezed on by the media as soon as he coyly started hinting at a presidential run, so desperate were they for a rethug candidate who could simulate folksiness, masquerade as an outsider (in the traditional rethug ritual), and wasn't as stark raving insane as, say, Brownback or Tancredo.

Well, Thompson finally turned up for a debate, and the media is agreed: he was just about adequate at best. Like Law and Order, the debate had a huge cast, seemed to go on forever, and Fred Thompson showed up at the end. He was armed with some standard talking points about "Islamofascism", but true to form, most of the time he was a bystander.

But the flabby-faced old coot with his tired, worn-out appeal to more of the same has to be a huge disappointment to the pundits who thought he would set the race on fire and prevent the inevitable bloodbath for rethugs in the '08 polls. Is Mr. Yesteryear destined to go the way of George "Macaca" Allen? Are people finally waking up and seeing that an artificial, carefully groomed image is no substitute for substance?

The SCHIP hits the fan

The swift-boating of a disabled 12-year-old boy and his disadvantaged family continues with ever-increasing frenzy and viciousness. The slatternly Michelle Malkin and her flying monkeys are still stalking Graeme Frost and his sister and parents, harassing them and making their lives hell, egged on by Tub O'Guts, while Mitch McConnell's office skulks in the background. It truly is a sickening sight. These "people" are assholes, pure and simple.

Gee, I wonder how Michelle would like it if liberals started surrounding her house, quizzing her neighbors and peering in her windows to see if she deserved the tax cuts for the wealthy that she enjoys?

I'm tempted to say it's too bad Graeme recovered consciousness after his accident, instead of falling into a permanent vegetative state. Then the baying baboons of the lunatic extreme right would be quite happy to spend millions of taxpayer dollars every year to keep his corpse artificially alive, and prevent his parents from letting him go with dignity.

Let this be a lesson, o ye of the reality-based community! Speak out, or even think disloyal thoughts about Glorious Leader, at your peril! You will be destroyed, torn limb from limb, and left to lie bleeding in the gutter. Nothing is sacred, nothing is off limits! It's not enough to disagree with you; we, the mighty freepii, will totally annihilate you!

This whole sordid episode proves once again that Bushism is not politics as usual, even compared to the sleaziest machine politics of yore. There is something far darker, sicker and more twisted about it. The true believers have been caught up in an outbreak of religious mass insanity, just like in the Crusades, the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials, and have taken leave of their senses. There is no middle ground, no shades of gray; they are totally pure and good, everyone else is infinitely evil and must be utterly destroyed.

The day the Republican Party decided on the Southern Strategy, the day they married the greed-driven megacorporate elite to the backward, ignorant racists and bigots of the religious right and deliberately choose divisiveness and hatemongering as a way to political hegemony, is a day that will live in infamy. The fallout from their evil and cynical maneuver will haunt this nation for centuries, if it doesn't destroy it altogether.

Quote of the day

If Alister McGrath & co. think Richard Dawkins is mean and nasty to them, they should be on their knees thanking Jesus that they weren't around at the same time as H.L. Mencken. Here's a choice excerpt from Mencken's reporting of the Scopes Trial:

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.

This was published in the Baltimore Evening Sun on September 14, 1925. Can you imagine anything remotely similar being published in a mainstream media outlet today? Dawkins and Hitchens are milquetoasts by comparison.

When you compare the fearless denunciations of religious stupidity by Mencken and Mark Twain, or Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, with the pusillanimous bowing and scraping that today's media renders unto the religiocrats, you have to conclude that the US as a nation has gone badly backwards.

Deluded about Dawkins (Part II)

After posting the first part of this series, and promising to review Alister McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion for the second part, I had a twinge of misgivings. Wasn't I prejudging McGrath? Suppose he turned out not to be deluded after all?

Well, having finished the book, I've decided to stick with the proposed headline, "Deluded about Dawkins" - only because that it the most charitable possible reading of McGrath's ranting, intemperate screed. The only alternative is that McGrath is flat-out dishonest. I won't give a point-by-point refutation of McGrath's book, since this has already been done with devastating thoroughness by Dan Bye. Instead, let me give my overall impression of McGrath's arguments, and my response.

McGrath's 97-page book review of The God Delusion can fairly be summarized as:

• Dawkins is attacking some forms of religion, namely the dogmatic and literalist forms (he explicitly excludes what he calls "Einsteinian religion");
• Therefore, Dawkins is attacking all forms of religion;
• Therefore, he is attacking my religion, and lumping in my advanced, ethereal philosophy with the lowest-common-denominator religion of the literalists;
• Therefore, he is attacking me personally, and I must reply in kind.

Reduced to its essentials, McGrath's argument doesn't look very well founded. But I've often observed that people are very emotionally invested in their religious beliefs, and any attack on these beliefs is perceived as a personal attack, even an attack on their very identity. It seems ivory-tower professors of theology are just as susceptible to this process as your average megachurch attendee. Certainly, McGrath's constant stream of bile and ad-hominem remarks goes well beyond what you would expect from a theologian who was simply concerned with dispassionately correcting the ignorant mistakes of a layman, as McGrath tries to present himself.

The book's subtitle, "Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine", sets the tone right out of the starting gate. Early on in the book, in a rather self-congratulating passage, a furious young man who is a true believer of Richard Dawkins, angrily confronts McGrath for having "destroyed his faith". McGrath imagines Dawkins preaching to the "god-hating choir":

Those who think biological evolution can be reconciled with religion are dishonest! Amen! They belong to the Neville Chamberlain school" of evolutionists! They are appeasers! Amen! Real scientists reject belief in God! Hallelujah! The God that Jews believed in back in Old Testament times is a psychotic child abuser! Amen! You tell them, brother!

A large part of the book consists of McGrath putting words in Dawkins' mouth in this fashion. It's a pretty obvious example of the strawman argument, and is frequently accompanied by a kind of reverse strawman argument, where McGrath redefines religion, or leaves it deliberately fuzzy and undefined, in order to accuse Dawkins of a strawman attack. We don't even see any attempt at a definition of McGraths's god - a supernatural entity "who actively communicates with humanity and to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer" - until we're more than halfway into the book. And yet McGrath feels free to leap from this tenuous basis to such certitudes as:

So how are we to make sense of the Hebrew Scriptures? Dawkins rightly demands that there should be an external criterion for dealing with the interpretation of these texts. Yet he seems unaware of the Christian insistence that there indeed exists such a criterion - the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

Surely McGrath understands that non-Christians by definition don't accept Jesus as the final authority on morals, or an objective reality whose existence cannot be questioned? That this is, in other words, an incredibly weak argument with which to respond to an atheist? What makes it even worse is the context: McGrath sneers at Dawkins for bringing up some of the horrific texts in the "Old Testament", and claims Dawkins is trying to make his readers "believe that Christians are in the habit of stoning people to death." Well, we don't, ripostes McGrath, we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe in. Which was precisely Dawkins' point!

There are many other places where McGrath takes his beliefs for granted and fails to recognize that not everyone shares them, thus hugely weakening his arguments. He ridicules Dawkins' "inept engagement with Luther" and with Aquinas, who fulminated against using reason to make sense of the world, and proposed "proofs" of God's existence respectively. Silly Dawkins doesn't understand theology! Aquinas is not claiming his proofs actually prove anything, they just show that belief in God is consistent. The true believer starts from the assumption that God exists, and Aquinas' "proofs" reassure him that he is on the right track, while Luther's attacks on "the devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore" are to impress on the believer, just in case he is tempted to use reason, that it does not have all the answers. Score another one for McGrath! Except that all he has accomplished is to show a glaring difference in the MO's of science and theology, and strengthen my impression that much of theology is intellectually vacuous at best and dishonest at worst. The whole point of a proof should be to increase human knowledge, not reinforce the brainwashing!