Monthly Archive

Stephen Colbert, of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, was the featured speaker at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The President was not amused.

As Colbert walked from the podium, when it was over, the president and First Lady gave him quick nods, unsmiling. The president shook his hand and tapped his elbow, and left immediately.

Those seated near Bush told [Editor & Publisher’s] Joe Strupp, who was elsewhere in the room, that Bush had quickly turned from an amused guest to an obviously offended target as Colbert’s comments brought up his low approval ratings and problems in Iraq.

What had Dubya’s panties in a twist? Some of Colbert’s trademark truthiness, without doubt. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin H. at Right on the Right (he recently dropped the ‘Real Teen’ moniker) says he’s enlisted... just not in any fighting force that would require him to leave home, of course:

Well, there is an information war going on, and I’m fighting it. The phrase “101st Fighting Keyboardists” is an attack used often by the left… We do what we can to fight the information war, and we are mocked for it.

It seems, though, that “fighting the information war” means allowing a very convenient "glitch" to delete comments on his blog . Not at random, of course… no, this “glitch” appears to be very selective. It seems to delete only comments that disagree with Justin or like-minded commenters.

Two comments made to Justin’s recent post that claimed Evidence PROVES Plame’s Identity Wasn’t Secret seem to have been targetted by this “glitch”:

• Comment 9058, April 25th, 2006 at 6:59 am
• Comment 9420, April 26th, 2006 at 7:03 pm

And when deletion isn’t enough, there’s always forgery. Witness comment 7767, forged under my nom de blog. That’s a very versatile “glitch”, wouldn’t you agree?

(In the event Justin attempts to erase the evidence of this forgery, the page has been mirrored as it existed at the time of this post.)

Is this dishonesty on Justin’s part, or mere incompetence? Either way, let us hope for the sake of our country that Justin never enlists in the real armed forces. It will be far preferable that he remain at home, where he will be content to fantasize that he is “fighting the information war”.

• “These are some messed-up monkeys…”. I could not have said it better myself: Dance, Monkeys, Dance.

• John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, says that a nuclear-armed Iran is still years away — and he’s being attacked by the ultrahawks for pointing out the facts. The IAEA report released yesterday confirms that Iran has enriched uranium to the 3.6% level (far below that needed for building a weapon) and that all declared nuclear material is accounted for.

• C’mon, you gotta love a site that calls itself Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly. I found these folks thanks to Crooks and Liars. They have a book of the same name out now, as well:
  

  The problem with simply calling Bill a liar is that one has to be aware of one’s lies for them to really be considered lies. We’re not sure Bill qualifies.

• And another great blog has turned up, this time thanks to Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Don’t Stop the ACLU is an obvious counterpoint to the ranting one finds almost daily at StoptheACLU.com. I do like their house rules:
  

  Welcome to Don’t Stop the ACLU, where we won’t call you names or threaten to break your jaw just because we disagree with you. We invite everyone to post comments here, especially dissenters. The only stipulation is this: you must treat us and your fellow posters with respect at all times. Proper debate is about ideas. No personal attacks, no malice, no threats (veiled or otherwise). We’re all adults here. Check your ego at the door.

Jay Stephenson, the nice man who thinks that lynching is a joking matter, makes the claim that:

Yes, the ACLU has a current policy advocating the legalization of child porn distribution and possession.

Yet if you read his article carefully, the only evidence he cites for this claim is other people making the same claim. He never once cites an ACLU document that explicitly sets out this alleged “policy”.

This, folks, is the kind of sloppy, transparent defamation that the far right is known for. Truly pathetic — and Jay Stephenson is among the most pathetic practitioners of this kind of smear.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul R. Pillar, former senior Middle East intelligence analyst for the CIA, makes a compelling case that the Bush administration cherry picked intelligence to sell the Iraq war to the public, and that the intelligence work that was done was driven not by a desire to find the truth, but rather to supply backing for a predetermined viewpoint on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Rajeev Ravisankar, a student at Ohio State University, explains that the fundamentalists we should really be worried about aren’t of the Islamic variety:

[I]t is in fact the Christian Right which seems to be standing against the values often associated with the United States. Individual rights are impeded by their staunch opposition to abortion and the promotion of contraceptive use. Equality is trampled in their stance against gay marriage. The establishment clause of the 1st amendment is eroded as a result of their efforts to inject religion into public schools via intelligent design… It is high time for the media and the American population to reject Christian fundamentalist attitudes and demand policy driven solutions to address the real problems facing this country.

How does a religion become evil?

Well-intentioned people can do things and justify behavior that contradicts what’s at the very heart of their religious tradition, and it can descend into cruel and violent behavior. One example is a belief in absolute truth. People who believe they have God in their pocket and know what God wants for them have proven time and again that they’re capable of doing anything because it’s not their will but God’s will being carried out… You have millions of Christians fixated on Armageddon theology. They spend a great deal of time watching TV preachers, picking apart Bible verses, looking at headlines in the news, patching together pieces of information to create a sort of image that “Jesus is coming on Tuesday.” But when I read the New Testament it’s pretty clear Jesus says nothing like, “On Judgment Day how much of your puzzle did you piece together?” He says, “When I was hungry, did you give me something to eat, and when I was thirsty did you give me something to drink?” The mandate of following Christ involves reaching out to people in need, and peacemaking. Whether Jesus comes next Tuesday or in a thousand years is really God’s business.

Lewis Black reveals the whackjob underbelly of the religious right:

Jerry Falwell said that the reason that September 11th happened, the reason that God allowed it to happen, was because of certain people in our country. People like, and I’m quoting, ‘the pagans,’ which is a motorcycle group. Feminists; he brought up feminists. He used the word even. ‘God,’ I thought, ‘I haven’t heard that word in a while. Did he really think it was feminists? Is that what upset God? That women, a number of years ago, had decided to leave the kitchen, and enter the work place, and demand equal wages, and demand power equal to a man? That’s what upset God? That God looked down into the kitchen, and there was not a stew on the oven and the spice rack was in disarray, and He said, ‘I will SMOTE them!’ And I couldn’t believe it, he said that God had actually talked to him and said, these were the people. That was the reason. It was those people, and that was the reason God allowed this to happen. And I thought, ‘That’s odd.’ Because God had called me 12 hours before, and he said, the reason he was upset was because of people like Jerry Falwell.

Ed Brayton, responding to a commenter at Positive Liberty, explains exactly why the fight against "intelligent design" must continue.

The commenter asked “What exactly are you fearful of that these misguided youth are going to do as a result of being poisoned by ID?” Ed answered:

I’m fearful that it will only compound the already-serious problem we have with the public’s understanding of how science actually operates. It will subvert the teaching of real science and replace all of the scientific criteria by which we determine what is likely to be true and replace it with a well-conceived PR campaign guided by slick hucksters using the tools of marketing rather than earning their place in the classroom by doing actual scientific research. It will send the message that the truth doesn’t matter as long as you can dress up a religious mythology in a veneer of truthiness. We have enough of a problem with the public’s understanding of science as it is. If we allow this dishonest PR campaign to succeed in gaining a place in science classrooms despite having produced absolutely nothing in terms of actual scientific achievement – no coherent model or theory, no original research that might support such a model or theory, nothing but dishonest attempts to distort the evidence for evolution – we will do grave damage to our children’s already weak ability to understand how science operates. It’s hard to imagine a worse idea pedagogically.

To which I can only add: right on, brother.

• At Daily Kos, a contributor calling him/herself “shock” explains that fundamentalist values are not quite an oxymoron, just misguided by defensiveness.

• Here’s a fact one rarely sees acknowledged by the rightists who rant about and “invasion” of “criminal aliens”: Among the first American soldiers to die in the invasion of Iraq was Jose Gutierrez, a Guatemalan who entered the US illegally in 1995. An American is still alive today, because this “criminal alien” gave his life for this country. And it turns out that Hispanics are dying in the war in disproportionate numbers.

• PZ Myers points us to a recent discussion of race and biology by John Wilkins:
  

  That the human species has geographic variation is not at issue. It clearly does, as Feldman’s colleagues have argued. It just doesn’t support the standard racial typology. Alleles had to evolve and spread somewhere. But they do spread, too… So, do I think there are races in biology as well as culture? No. Nothing I have seen indicates that humans nicely group into distinct populations of less than the 54 found by Feldman’s group (probably a lot more – for instance, Papua New Guinea is not represented in their sample set). And this leads us to the paper by the Human Race and Ethnicity Working Group (rare to see a paper that doesn’t list all the authors). They rightly observe that while there are continental differences in genetics, there is no hard division, and genetic variation doesn’t match up with cultural differences per se. There is a genetic substructure to the human population, but it isn’t racial.

• Courtesy of the Skeptics Circle, Urizen at Intelligent Party examines the ways in which the dogmatic mindset leads to the denial of objective reality.
  

  This tendency [towards denying the existence and significance of an objective reality] is a result of a number of things, but mostly it’s a result of dogma. Religious dogma, political dogma, cultural dogma—the common denominator is the steadfast reliance on ideas that don’t respond or correspond to reality. Most of it, I suppose, tends to be tied to religious/theistic dogma, given that speculation about metaphysics (not to mention many religions’ teachings that the material/corporeal world is not something to worry about and is only a means to an end) is likely to lead to a disdain for the material world, and therefore a disdain for empirical fact… The limitations of what we know about the world are significant enough without people deliberately ignoring the things we do know for the sake of expediency.

As usual, Ogre can be counted on to distort reality and lie outright when pursuing his goals.

Ogre begins by lying about the events at a recent protest at UC Santa Cruz.

Communist, Anti-American ADULTS violently threatened and even attacked military recruiters at UC Santa Cruz.

Several media reports about the protest make no mention of any physical attacks on the persons of the recruiters themselves. Ogre doesn’t like this, so he invents the “attacks” out of thin air. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dread Pundit Bluto, who bestows an "award for treason" to:

...the New York Times and writers James Risen and Eric Lichtblau for their efforts to cripple national security and get more Americans killed. Risen and Lichtblau are the pair who exposed the classified NSA program of intercepting emails and international calls between known and suspected terrorists and people in the United States.

To believe that Risen and Lightblau exposed a ‘secret’ program, you have to believe that terrorists don’t read the news… where they would have seen George W. Bush, President of the United States, repeatedly disclose that the US was routinely wiretapping international phone calls. Read the rest of this entry »

• Remember Jay Stephenson? That nice, God-fearing man who wants to hang lawyers? He’s back—and is now joking about killing reporters. These far-right purveyors of eliminationist rhetoric are such comedians, aren’t they?

• And on the subject of eliminationist rhetoric, we have the lovely example of radio whackjob Michael Savage, who advocates killing 100 million Muslims—just because. These Republicans really are all about the culture of life, aren’t they?

  They say, “Oh, there’s a billion of them.” I said, “So, kill 100 million of them, then there’ll be 900 million of them.” I mean, would you rather die—would you rather us die than them?

• John Scalzi examines the strange sexual control some fathers need to exert over their young daughters, via the ritual of the purity ball:
  

  My own thought about these purity balls is that they’re really icky—we could go on all day about what’s wrong about dads making their very small daughters think about sex, or indoctrinating them into thinking their sexuality should be contingent on the dictates of the men in their lives—but given the high holy terror with which fundamentalists regard human sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular, I don’t find these mechanisms of control and indoctrination particularly surprising…

  These “Purity Ball” fathers think [their commitment to care for and protect their children is] best expressed through control; I think it’s best expressed through knowledge. I don’t want my daughter to pledge her “purity” to me, as if having a sexual experience is some sort of karmic besmirching; I want to inform my daughter so that when she has sex, she knows what she’s doing and she has it on her terms, and she comes away from the experience satisfied (as much as anyone comes away from their first experience in such a state) and able to integrate it into her life in a positive way.

• My good friend Buddy Don is reposting some of his earlier posts in order to purge some nasty comment spam that recently inundated his blog. (Blogger has some comment-moderation wierdness, I guess. I wouldn’t know, as I am a happy WordPress user.) BD is a tremendously talented writer. Go. Read his stuff.

 

Right-wing bloggers are so gullible.

Our good friend "Real Teen" has excitedly declared that “All of this outrage over the Valerie Plame issue is going to look pointless when the rest of the press realizes that her identity wasn’t secret”. The basis for this remarkable claim? A story in today’s New York Sun claiming that…

Contrary to published reports, a State Department memorandum at the center of the investigation into the leak of the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, appears to offer no particular indication that Ms. Plame’s role at the agency was classified or covert.

...A Wall Street Journal article on July 19, 2005, citing an unnamed person familiar with the memo, reported that the memo “made clear that information identifying an agent and her role in her husband’s intelligence gathering mission was sensitive and shouldn’t be shared.” The Journal account said the paragraph discussing Ms. Plame’s role in her husband’s trip was marked in a way to indicate it shouldn’t be disclosed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bedwetting bloggers, propaganda instead of policy, a school principal with the right stuff, and the hypothetical Christian life… all in today’s hodgepodge. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, “Real Teen” has again displayed his ignorance of how things are done in America. He has picked up the story of a new law in Ohio that requires defense attorneys to complete and sign questionnaires that ask if they have supported organizations on a federal list of terrorists. RT screeches, in a quivering rage, that

The ACLU is damn-near determined to defend terrorists in the court of law.

Here’s a clue for you, RT: Everyone is entitled to defense in our legal system. Everyone. It doesn’t matter what the defendant is accused of, what ethnicity or nationality he is, nor what the right-wing bloggers think of the defendant. Any one accused of a crime in this country gets a defense. Period. No exceptions, ever. The state of Ohio is trying to interfere in that process, and that is quite simply wrong.

I would suggest to RT and his ilk that they should stop wetting themselves over terrorism. Is it something we should be concerned about, and work to improve our ability to defend ourselves against? Of course. But “Real Teen” and others on the ultra right believe that the threat of terrorism is so terrifying that we must abandon the principles upon which the country and American society was built, including the principle that those accused of crimes are entitled to a defense in court. They’re wrong about this. If our way of life is worth defending, then the principles we live by should be upheld more strongly than ever.

Two soldiers, one American and one British, have spoken out against the war in Iraq. The American, Joseph DuRocher, has returned his pilot’s wings:

Until your administration, I believed it was inconceivable that the United States would ever initiate an aggressive and preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to us. Until your administration, I thought it was impossible for our nation to take hundreds of persons into custody without provable charges of any kind, and to “disappear” them into holes like Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. Until your administration, in my wildest legal fantasy I could not imagine a US Attorney General seeking to justify torture or a President first stating his intent to veto an anti-torture law, and then adding a “signing statement” that he intends to ignore such law as he sees fit. I do not want these things done in my name.

Ben Griffin is an eight-year veteran of Great Britain’s SAS. He left the service after three months in Baghdad.

Mr Griffin, 28, who spent two years with the SAS, said the American military’s “gung-ho and trigger happy mentality” and tactics had completely undermined any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population. He added that many innocent civilians were arrested in night-time raids and interrogated by American soldiers, imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, or handed over to the Iraqi authorities and “most probably” tortured.

Mr Griffin eventually told SAS commanders at Hereford that he could not take part in a war which he regarded as “illegal”.

He added that he now believed that the Prime Minister and the Government had repeatedly “lied” over the war’s conduct.

“I did not join the British Army to conduct American foreign policy,” he said. He expected to be labelled a coward and to face a court martial and imprisonment after making what “the most difficult decision of my life” last March.

Instead, he was discharged with a testimonial describing him as a “balanced, honest, loyal and determined individual who possesses the strength of character to have the courage of his convictions”.

Bravery can be many things. There are brave soldiers of many nationalities in Iraq who serve their countries with honor and with their consciences at ease. They are there to do the job they have been handed, and they can be admired for doing so. But those to speak up against what they see as immoral acts on the part of their governments have their own brand of courage. We ignore their words at our peril.

• Farrell Till debunks The Christian Nation Myth:

  Whenever the Supreme Court makes a decision that in any way restricts the intrusion of religion into the affairs of government, a flood of editorials, articles, and letters protesting the ruling is sure to appear in the newspapers. Many protesters decry these decisions on the grounds that they conflict with the wishes and intents of the “founding fathers.”
  
  Such a view of American history is completely contrary to known facts. The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists.

• “A new Gallup poll released [on Tuesday] finds that most Americans are critical of President Bush’s actions in the Plame/CIA leak scandal... Overall, 63% of Americans believe Bush did something either illegal (21%) or unethical (42%), while 28% say he did nothing wrong. While many more Democrats are critical, 3 in 10 Republicans also find that Bush did something illegal or unethical. ”

• Forty-five percent of Americans polled this week believe Bush should be censured for authorizing wiretaps without the legally required court order.

• Den Vandron of Canada, discussing the administration’s seeming insistence on fostering the worst possible relations with Iran, asks the timeless question: “Is your entire f*cking country on crack???”

John Scalzi, master wordsmith, gives us the perfect moniker for the legions of delicate "Christians" who get their panties in a twist at just about everything:

[A]llow me to coin a phrase for the type of Christians who irrationally believe they and their values are constantly under attack and that they are the underdog in some vast moral scuffle here in the United States… Christian Victim Front. Perfect for the Christian with an overdeveloped sense of moral persecution in the absence of actual persecution.

What the existence of Christian Victim Front shows is an institutionalization of the victim rhetoric and a willingness by members of comfortable majority groups to use the rhetoric of groups who have been legitimately victimized over time, and use it to prop up their unearned privileges, even at the expense of the genuine rights of others. ...The best way to combat this is to point out its inherent silliness. Thus: Christian Victim Front. Use it. Love it. Share it.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the course of making the grandiose claim that he’d be out single-handedly arresting illegal aliens, Kender MacGowan made the assertion that

[I]t is the law of the land that citizens are legally obligated to carry identification that proves their legal right to be within the borders of this great country…

I challenged Kender via email to provide the legal basis for his claim, and he responded:

According to the SCOTUS decision in Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, you can be arrested for failing to provide your name to an officer, and this includes failing to have ID if you are stopped.

(Emphasis mine.)

It seems that poor Kender is the living embodiment of the well-worn saying that a little learning is a dangerous thing. The Supreme Court, in Hiibel, did indeed affirm that a citizen is required to give his name to a police officer if asked. But on the question of carrying identification, the Supreme Court stated:

[T]he Nevada Supreme Court has interpreted NRS §171.123(3) to require only that a suspect disclose his name… As we understand it, the statute does not require a suspect to give the officer a driver’s license or any other document. Provided that the suspect either states his name or communicates it to the officer by other means — a choice, we assume, that the suspect may make — the statute is satisfied and no violation occurs.

Given the contents of the Hiibel decision, there can be no doubt that Kender was lying when he claimed that US citizens are legally obligated to carry identification. There is no such legal requirement. He provides yet another example of the tendency among radical right-wing bloggers to invent whatever “facts” are necessary to support their arguments, regardless of what the truth may be.

UPDATE 04/10/06 05:28 EST: Kender has responded by email. He is apparently still terrified by the thought of discussing his claim in public:

If you do not have ID on you when a cop stops you, for whatever reason, the cop may legally arrest you and hold you until such time as he ascertains your identity. This is completely legal. Which means that you must carry ID, and if you do not you risk arrest for nothing more than NOT carrying ID.

Note that he has abandoned any pretense at supplying factual support for his claim. We are apparently supposed to accept this claim as fact Because! Kender! Say! So! There is no law, nor any court decision, that supports Kender’s position. Kender is still lying, and he knows it.

 

Via Larry Johnson at TPMCafe comes the final proof that George W. Bush lied this country into a war of aggression. From an article in today’s Washington Post:

[In late 2002], the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the U.S. intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not? If they had, the Pentagon would need to reconsider its ties with Niger.

The council’s reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

Bush put his prestige behind the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address. Less than two months later, the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the principal U.S. evidence as bogus. A Bush-appointed commission later concluded that the evidence, a set of contracts and correspondence sold by an Italian informant, was “transparently forged.”

Note the sequence of events. Before the IAEA investigation, before the commission’s report, and most importantly, before the 2003 State of the Union address in which Bush claimed that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium ore, Bush knew that the claim was false. Yet he went ahead and used this lie to sell to the American people the war he’d already decided on starting.

John Dean has boiled this down to its core:

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be “a high crime” under the Constitution’s impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”

It’s important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

Less than ten years ago, a US President was impeached on charges that he had lied about his relationship with an intern. The list of lies employed by the Bush administration to drive this country to war grows longer almost with every passing day. If there is a high crime or misdemeanor more deserving of impeachment than sending the children of Americans to die in a war founded on lies, I’d certainly like to know what it is.

• Remember Bush telling us that "As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down"? Well, it turns out this was complete and utter bullshit. Georgia10 points us to a State Department report (PDF format) that reveals that “there is no deterministic relationship between increasing numbers of trained and equipped Iraqi forces or increasing control of battle space by Iraqi units and any associated drawdown of U.S. forces”. So… what is the US strategy for getting out of Iraq? Do we even have a strategy?

• Juan Cole calls attention to a recent LA Times series on the soldiers wounded in Iraq.

• Penn and Teller reveal a little-known fact: The Bible is Crapola.

• John Scalzi wonders Will Republican Voters Grow Spines in 2006?. He’s doubtful. So am I.

• Jody Wheeler points with approval to a mother who took responsibility for monitoring her daughter’s online behavior.

• Harry Taylor is a GOD. He seized the opportunity to say to George W. Bush what millions of Americans would, if they but had the chance:

What I wanted to say to you is that in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate…And I would hope—I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself…

Watch the video.

 

Kos gets it exactly right in just three simple questions:

Funny how after three years of war in Iraq, war supporters still can’t answer these three simple questions:

1. How does sending our troops to Iraq, separating them form their families and loved ones, putting them in harm’s way, and keeping them there equal “supporting the troops”?

2. Why do those who claim to “honor their sacrifices” want them to continue sacrificing?

3. Why don’t those who bloviate about “supporting” and “honoring” the troops against an enemy they think threatens Western civilization actually, you know, put on combat boots and join them?

Operation Yellow Elephant has been asking that last question for nearly a year. If there is a serious effort being made to recruit young Republicans into the armed forces, it’s been kept well-hidden.

Wil Wheaton speaks truth about parenting:

I’ve always felt that, as a parent, my job (and greatest hope) is to help my kids grow into the kind of adult that I’d be proud of, and I’d like to spend time with, even if we weren’t family: honest, honorable, generous, compassionate, and responsible. Sometimes, as part of the whole Pod People experience, I feel like those efforts are failing. Add the bonus of the really great and neverending loyalty conflict game (that I refuse to play, but have to deal with, anyway,) and it’s easy to wonder if any of the work will ever pay off. It’s been easy to lose hope.

But over the last couple of months, I’ve come to believe that the Pods were actually Chrysalises, because it feels like both Ryan and Nolan have emerged as young adults whose company I really enjoy (and I believe the feeling is mutual.) The moments of irrationality are still there, and I’m sure that I am still so lame from time to time, but I have lots and lots of hope.

If you’re a parent dealing with a Pod Person, don’t give up. One day, you may wake to discover that your Pod Person has vanished as quickly as it arrived, leaving behind an honest, honorable, generous, compassionate, and responsible young adult.

Wil’s boys are stepsons, mine are not… but I know exactly the feelings he expresses here. I see signs that good and honest men are emerging from the pods I sired. I can only hope I did my job as a father as well as Wil obviously has. Good on ya, Wil… and your sons as well.

This is so rich. Two of the brave boys of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders have pledged to risk their own doughy necks in the War On Brown people:

We, the undersigned legal citizens of these United States, do hereby announce that henceforth citizens arrests will commence of any and all persons found within our borders that do not have legal identification that proves their legal status to be within our borders…

Both Kender and "Real Teen" are personally going to go out amongst the dark and deadly masses to root out the insidious threat of brown-skinned agriculture workers and swarthy hotel maids. Yes, the patriotism of these two manly specimens of the Red-Blooded American knows no bounds, folks.

I do expect that they’ll be so successful rounding up the Brown Terror that they’ll have no time to keep track of their exploits. That’s why I’m going to lend these fine soldiers of Truth, Justice, and The American Way a hand. Every time one of them sends me a link to local news coverage of one of their citizen’s arrests, I’ll bump up the counter that keeps track of their individual captures, as well as the total:

Godspeed, boys. Be sure to let us know when you get one of those brown devils.

UPDATE 05/03/06 6:18 AM EDT: My goodness… four whole weeks have gone by, and neither of our brave freedom fighters have reported a single capture. What’s wrong, boys? Is it really that hard to put away the Cheetos, get out from behind the keyboard, and go do what you said you would do? It would appear that we have here two members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who have discovered that it’s much easier to talk the Red Blooded American Hero™ talk than it is to walk the walk.

UPDATE 05/17/06 6:11 AM EDT: Six weeks, and neither Kender nor “Real Teen” have reported a single capture. It is now established beyond all doubt that neither of them ever had any intention of making a single “citizen’s arrest”. Both talk, and talk, and talk… but actually getting out of the chair to do something would never occur to either of them.

Kit Jarrell, known for applauding the bombings of US mosques, has stuck her shit-covered foot in her mouth again. In her post entitled Five Billion People Need to Die From Ebola, she writes:

The title of the post is probably what brought you here. In fact, you’re probably wondering how I could even say something so horrifying.

However, I didn’t make that statement. A renowned leftist scientist did.

Except, of course, that Dr. Eric Pianka said no such thing. Like the rest of the credulous scribblers who infest the right-wing blogs, Kit has swallowed uncritically a recent accusation from Forrest M. Mims III. Read the rest of this entry »