Monthly Archive

Justin at RightontheRight.com isn’t thinking straight — again. He’s crying that the sky is falling in the wake of yesterday’s decision by the US Supreme Court in the Hamdan case. Apparently he is laboring under the delusion that the only options left are to release all suspected terrorists, or try them in civilian courts:

Do we release dangerous terrorists back into the world, or do we spend years upon years trying every single one of them in a civilian court… Congress is going to have to do something, as we simply can’t begin trying hundreds of foreign enemies in our domestic courts. I wonder if our soldiers in Iraq may now have to shoot instead of detain terrorists, just so they don’t have to make countless court appearances. Can you believe this idiocy?

Caveat: I have yet to read all 185 pages of the Hamdan decision [PDF], but I would certainly be surprised to find that the Supreme Court mandated the use of civilian courts in trying terror suspects. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, that Misha. The potty-mouthed, reality-challenged blowhard who goes by the name of “Emperor Darth Misha I” (no megalomania there, eh?) is completely full of shit.

So is most of the rest of the rightwing blogosphere. The hysteria du jour they’re hyping is that the New York Times revealed “covert measures” when it published a story detailing the Bush administration’s use of bank records to track terrorists. Unfortunately, Misha and his fellow dimwits have succeeded only in exposing their own ignorance. There was nothing secret about the “Terrorist Finance Tracking Program”, save for the fact that it was carried out without judicial oversight. Read the rest of this entry »

Kit Jarrell demonstrates her tenuous grasp of the facts again.

Quoting a CNN report, she claims that witnesses to the killing of an Iraqi civilian are "lying". What does the CNN report actually say?

An autopsy report on the Iraqi civilian a squad of Marines are accused of murdering in April indicates the man may not have been disabled as his family reported, defense sources said Wednesday.

A preliminary, partial report released to defense lawyers does not mention any deformity or other injury consistent with a permanent disability, a source familiar with the evidence told CNN.

Seven Marines and a Navy medical corpsman have been charged with killing Hasham Ibrahim Awad in the town of Hamdaniya, west of Baghdad, on April 26. Prosecutors began handing over computer discs that contain the evidence against the men to their lawyers last week.

Awad’s body had been exhumed as part of the investigation. The remains were severely decomposed by the time the autopsy was performed, sources told CNN.

Let’s see… this CNN report is based on a “preliminary, partial report” of an autopsy on a body that was “severely decomposed by the time the autopsy was performed”. The report is one that Kit herself has not seen. Yet she knows for a fact that the witnesses were lying.

I wonder what else Kit knows without having any evidence to support her accusations.

(Aside: I can find no indication that the new Euphoric Reality site accepts trackbacks. Gotta wonder if Kit and Heidi are trying hard to insulate themselves from any criticism…)

• Further evidence has come to light that the Bush administration cherry-picked the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq:
  

  Iraq WMD red flags ignored, ex-CIA aide tells paper

  A former CIA officer says he made repeated efforts to alert top agency officials to problems with an Iraqi defector’s claims about the country’s mobile biological weapons labs but he was ignored, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

  CIA officer Tyler Drumheller said he personally crossed out a reference to the labs from a classified draft of a U.N. speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell because he recognized the source as a defector, code-named Curveball, who was suspected to be mentally unstable and a liar.

  Drumheller told the Post he was surprised when a few days later, on February 5, 2003, Powell told the U.N. Security Council that “we have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails.”

• Larry Johnson points out that the Bush administration’s whining about recent revelations in the New York Times ebar the unmistakable stench of hypocrisy:
  

  Bullshit alert! After watching George Bush and Dick Cheney weep and wail over the “damage” done by the New York Times for reporting that financial data is being dumped into the CIA as part of an effort to find terrorist networks, I kept waiting for Darryl Hannah to pop up and say, “Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night”. Does George have Alzheimer’s Disease? Has he forgotten that he used to love the New York Times?...

  [W]ho can forget that Vice President Cheney instructed his Chief of Staff, the intrepid Scooter Libby, to leak misleading portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to the New York Times’ Judith Miller. NPR’s David Greene reported that:

  Former vice presidential aide Lewis Libby, indicted for leaking a CIA agent’s identity, has testified that any classified information he may have leaked to a reporter was authorized by President Bush through the vice president. The claim is included in court documents released Thursday.
  
  Libby told a grand jury that classified information he may have leaked to a New York Times reporter was authorized for use by President Bush, acting through Vice President Dick Cheney. Lewis is awaiting trial on charges that he lied to the grand jury, which was investigating the leak of the agent’s identity to the media.

  We should also remember that the New York Times was not the only friendly outlet for planting “news”. White House officials turned to Time Magazine and the Chicago Sun Times in shopping information about Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA officer. For this White House, leaking classified information that damages national security is okay as long as it can be used to save the President’s political reputation.

• MarkCC analyzes the latest lie from Powerline about the ticket sales for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. I’d only add this: Suppose the ticket sales for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ were, in fact, dropping. Does that prove anything at all about the factual content of the movie?

• In a related item, the US Senate is using taxpayer dollars to fund a disinformation campaign about ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

• Media Matters has a resource page collecting their articles about Ann Coulter.

If the facts don’t support your preconceived notions, argue personalities. That would seem to be Woody’s motto as he stumbles through another post about Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Woody opens with one of his typically empty claims:

When I read the Associated Press article titled "Scientists OK Gore’s Movie for Accuracy", I went to see the substance of that claim and realized that it was more leftist fluff than fact.

What exactly in the article was non-factual? Woody can’t say. We are apparently supposed to accept his assessment of the article without one single shred of upporting evidence. This is Woody’s famous because-I-say-so! tactic, and it’s just as feeble here as it’s always been.

Next, the expected ad hominem attack:

The AP article quotes Robert Correll, the chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment group. It appears from the article that Correll has a personal relationship with Gore, having viewed the film at a private screening at the invitation of the former Vice President. Maybe he got free popcorn along with some grants, too.

What did Correll say that was wrong or untrue? Woody cannot say. What evidence is there that Correll’s opinion is affected by the alleged “personal relationship with Gore”? Woody cannot say.

If Woody doesn’t have the facts, he’ll smear. Every single time.

In her latest attempt to avoid answering a very simple question, Cao provides both some unintended entertainment and further confirmation that one of the most common traits — perhaps even a prerequisite — of being an ultra-rightwing blogger is the inability to draw rational conclusions from the data at hand.

Her post "Miami 7, Islam and media lies" has a number of obvious flaws. The first appears in the very first sentence:

Apparently some people simply don’t know about the Nation of Islam and its ideological connecton with Al Qaeda and terrorism (which was apparent in the comments section of this post).

Now, why does Cao need to establish this ‘ideological connecton’ (sic)? Simple… to date, there has been reported no tangible evidence linking the seven suspects to anyone in the Nation of Islam. So, lacking a substantive connection, Cao is forced to reach back into the history of the Nation of Islam and invent the vaporous ‘ideological connection’ as a justification for tying the NOI to the alleged terrorists. Read her claims carefully — the ideological connection is the only connection she even tries to make between the seven terror suspects and the Nation of Islam. Read the rest of this entry »

• Ed Brayton provides an overview of the royal fisking that Ann Coulter is being subjected to regarding her latest attempt to sell books by pandering to the ‘intelligent design’ crowd:

  The Panda’s Thumb crew decided to take her 4 chapters on evolution and dissect them, picking out some of the more absurd claims and showing, in great detail, why she’s wrong about them. Suffice to say that there are enough claims that are not just weak but stunningly dishonest and wide of the mark that this could take weeks to complete…
  
  On the first claim, that there is no evidence for evolution, Myers correctly points to the scientific literature that contains hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of articles about various aspects of evolution. That represents the life’s work of tens of thousands of scientists, difficult and painstaking work that slowly and steadily adds to our understanding of evolution. Of course, Ann has it backwards. The issue is not whether there is evidence that supports evolution, but whether there is evidence that is explained by evolution. Theories, after all, are explanations for data…
  
  The Coulter chapters get much, much worse. As Ian Musgrave notes, she repeats practically every old creationist canard in existence, including the claim that there are no transitional fossils. Again, why would an ID advocate deny the existence of transitional fossils if ID is genuinely consistent with guided common descent? One would expect there to be transitional fossils if that is true, just as we would expect them to be there is unguided common descent is true. The answer seems obvious to me: because they really don’t mean it when they say that ID is okay with common descent, despite the monumental evidence for it.

• Greg Sargent points out that the right only cares about the victims of terrorism when said victims are politically useful:

  I’ve asked this before, but what is it about the relatives of people killed by terrorists that these wingnuts hate so much? Recall that Ann Coulter smeared the widows of 9/11 victims and that many righty bloggers smeared the father of Nick Berg, who was beheaded in Iraq. Their sin, of course, was that they criticized America and George Bush.
  
  Let me put this as clearly as I can: To the likes of Hinderaker, the pain of those who lost loved ones to this war only matters to the extent that the bereaved allow their grief to be used to prop up the war effort and Bush himself. If the bereaved relatives don’t allow their grief to be used in this fashion, their sacrifice and loss no longer matter a whit—they’re not to be pitied or empathized with, but scorned and humiliated as brutally as possible. Despicable.

• And, just because we all need a laugh now and again, I present Victor Navone’s classic animation, "Alien Song":
  
  

From all indications, it doesn’t take much talent at all to be a rabidly right-wing blogger. You need a lot of rage, the willingness to make accusations and draw conclusions based on little or no evidence, and the conviction that anyone who holds a view that deviates even slightly from your own is a moron, a traitor, or both.

Oh, and you must be utterly unwilling to answer simple questions. Even better, you have to be ready to run away from those questions like a scared little bunny. Cao has just provided us with an excellent example of this trait, in the comments section for her post " Seven swore allegiance to Al Qaeda in Miami". Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Stephenson, who has already proven himself to be a liar, makes some snarky comments about recently released reports detailing abuse of prisoners by the US military. Let’s examine just how ignorant Jay proves himself to be.

To start with, Jay gets the most basic details of the reports wrong. He claims (with evident sarcasm) that the documents reveal the “horrible terror techniques of our ‘evil’ military at Gitmo”, when in fact the reports do not examine allegations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay at all. The AP story that Jay links to makes this crystal clear

[The documents] included two major reports – one by Army Brig. Gen. Richard Formica on specials operations forces in Iraq and one by Brig. Gen. Charles Jacoby on Afghanistan detainees.

Note that Jay must have read this story, because he quotes the sentence immediately preceding. Gawd DAMN, Jay, how willfully blind ignorant can one man be? Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew “Gribbit” Richardson apparently does not like having his words subjected to serious scrutiny. He finds being fact-checked extremely distressing… as well he should. His command of the facts is feeble, at best.

Most amazing is his claim to total honesty:

I DO NOT LIE.

One tiny problem: Gribbit does indeed lie, and that can be proven. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin H. again demonstrates his utter blindness to reality:

I’ve been reading tons about the recent song “Hadji Girl” which the CAIR morons are using for propoganda purposes. This is part of a continuous dishonest effort to undermine U.S. military actions by painting our soldiers as viscious killers. Simply put, they do kill, but we have the most humane military on the planet. People die, and our soldiers do the best they can.

Of course what Justin refuses to tell you is that in the song, an Iraqi child is killed because a Marine uses her for a human shield — and his fellow Marines roar with laughter at this scenario. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew “Gribbit” Richardson of Gribbit Online likes to fancy himself a ‘pit bull’ ‘bulldog’ of the right. He has, however, made a habit of running from rational debate. I am happy to be able to showcase his latest act of intellectual cowardice.

Richardson recently made some claims about the way the ACLU has argued cases in recent years, and Ed Brayton challenged Richardson to back up his claims with facts. Richardson’s response was to delete Brayton’s comments. Read the rest of this entry »

• Stars and Stripes tells us that the Iraqi army is hemorrhaging:

  Iraqi soldiers in Al Anbar province are leaving their army in droves, draining much-needed manpower from fledgling Iraqi security forces and preventing U.S. troops from reducing troop strength in the volatile region, U.S. and Iraqi military officials say.
  
  Lousy living conditions, bad food and failure to receive regular pay are the main reasons behind the exodus, which is running at least several hundred soldiers a month, the officials say.

• Gretchen Rubin provides tips on losing weight without dieting. (Thanks to Chris Brogan at lifehack.org.)

  8. Don’t eat off other people’s plates. Consider that two swallows of a chocolate milkshake has 72 calories, and four fast-food French fries have 42 calories. It adds up.
  
  9. Keep a bowl of sliced red and yellow peppers in the fridge.
  
  10. Know your weaknesses, and avoid them. My weakness is anything in mini form. I wouldn’t dream of eating a whole Tootsie Roll bar, but I’d eat 50 mini-Tootsie Rolls without blinking.

• Rude Pundit is digging up evidence of repeated plagiarism by Ann Coulter. Raw Story has some info on this, as well. And Gawker has found a Boston Globe column from five years ago suggesting that Coulter has been plagiarizing other writers for quite some time now.

• And while we’re at it, Media Matters suggests some questions that could be asked of Ann Coulter, as the… um… irregularities in her narrative are explored.

• Juan Cole reports that according to Our Sainted President, we are near victory in Iraq — just as long as you redefine victory loosely enough:

  Bush tried to define down victory to a general ability of people to go about their lives. He said it was unreasonable to expect to end “all violence.” But Mr. Bush, no one suggested that you end “all violence.” The goal here is to win the guerrilla war.
  
  During a guerrilla war, people always go about their daily lives, except when a bomb is going off in their specific neighborhood. So if the goal is that Iraqis should be able to buy bread and go to school and drive to work, most of them have that already most of the time. It is just that little problem of some 12,000 people a year being blown up, assassinated, or beheaded and their heads wrapped in cellophane and stored in banana crates along the side of the road that remains.
  
  In other words, Bush defines the main weapon in the guerrilla war, carbombings, as ineradicable, and declares that he can win that war without actually ending its main weapon. It is a cheap trick of rhetoric, a prestidigitation of the lips. “These are not the ‘droids you’re looking for.”

• Some excellent satire from fafblog:

  Run for your lives – America is under attack! Just days ago three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide in a savage assault on America’s freedom to not care about prisoner suicides! Oh sure, the “Blame Atrocities First” crowd will tell you these prisoners were “driven to despair,” that they “had no rights,” that they were “held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice.” But what they won’t tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide! This fiendish attempt to slander the great American institution of the gulag is nothing less than an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States – a noose is just a suicide bomb with a very small blast radius, people! – and when faced with a terrorist attack, America must respond. Giblets demands immediate retaliatory airstrikes on depressed Muslim torture victims throughout the mideast!

Justin:

You have once again succeeded brilliantly in making a complete ass of yourself. In a recent post, you stated that:

Ann Coulter is under attack because of a series of comments she made about an infamous group of 9/11 widows known collectively as “The Jersey Four.”

What were those comments, Justin? Do you have the guts to repeat them on your own blog? ALL of them?

It certainly seems that you do not. Why do you suppose that is?

All she said is that the widows shouldn’t go unanswered. Coulter answered the widows in a big way.

That’s an utter and complete lie, Justin, and you damn well know it. She said a good bit more than just “the widows shouldn’t go unanswered”. Of course, by now, no one has any expectation that you will discuss anything with any measure of truthfulness.

“These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted like the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony.”

“The 9/11 widows are witches and harpies.”

“I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”

“And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren’t planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they’d better hurry up and appear in Playboy.”

There’s a reason you didn’t actually post Coulter’s actual comments, Justin: You know in your heart that what she said is utterly indefensible. Not to mention that they don’t match the fairy-tale world in your head.

God help you when you get out into the real world and have to deal with people who don’t live in the fantasy world you inhabit. You’re going to pay a heavy price thoughout life for your inability to deal with facts that you don’t like, as well as your habitual dishonesty.

UPDATE 06/12/06 18:38 PM: I see you managed to screw your courage to the sticking place, Justin. Much good has it done you.

Let’s go over Coulter’s spewings, and your justifications thereof. Pay attention — you may learn something about the fine art of critical thinking.

COULTER: “These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted like the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony.”

JUSTIN: “As for the first one, she was addressing the fact that they are constantly flaunted as experts on 9/11, and no one is brought up to make counter-points.”

Coulter says nothing whatsoever here about the widows being “constantly flaunted as experts on 9/11”. She makes a claim about the widow’s beliefs for which she provides absolutely no factual support whatsoever. And there was, so far as I am aware, no ban of any sort on anyone, anywhere, “mak[ing] counter-points” to what the widows had to say. Can you explain — with factual examples — how this alleged ban worked in practice?

COULTER: “The 9/11 widows are witches and harpies.”

JUSTIN: “The second one, is once again referring to the manipulative ‘Jersey Four.’”

No, Justin. She says nothing about them being ‘manipulative’. She merely calls them names. Pay attention to what is actually said, and you’ll make fewer silly mistakes like this.

Now can you provide factual examples in which any of the widows were overtly ‘manipulative’? You remember facts, don’t you, Justin? Search your memory. Surely you’ve been exposed to one or two in your brief lifetime.

COULTER: “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”

JUSTIN: The next one is referring to them being media whores, which they are.

Again, dead wrong. Coulter says nothing in this comment about the widows being ‘media whores’. As usual, Justin, when you are cornered, you panic and make shit up out of whole cloth.

Try real hard, Justin, and see if you can dredge up some fragment of empathy for another human being. I’m sure there were times in your early childhood when you could still summon that trait. Ask yourself if you can truly believe that each and every one of the widows truly enjoyed, relished, rejoiced in the fact that their husbands died fiery, horrible deaths. Do you really think ordinary human women have those feelings when their mates are killed?

Never mind. I just realized I’ve asked far too much of you.

COULTER: “And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren’t planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they’d better hurry up and appear in Playboy.”

JUSTIN: “As for the last one, I don’t really agree. I don’t think she should have attacked their personal life.”

Good God, Justin, PAY ATTENTION! What is Coulter doing throughout the entire tirade? Attacking these women because of something that happened in their personal lives. Neither she nor you can construct one single cogent counter-argument to what the 9/11 widows said. Neither she nor you have even tried.

Like Coulter, personal attacks against these women is all you’ve got. It’s sadder than that, really — it’s all you can conceive of.

UPDATE 06/12/06 20:16 PM: Steve Young has a hilariously spot-on parody of Coulter’s latest pukings:

Chapter 12 – Like We’re Supposed To Care?

I have never seen children enjoying their incurable diseases so much.

It seems to be all the rage for witches of want with a so-called “terrible illness” to try and turn their maladies into some sort of whining, cause-celeb begathon for medicines and research to cure their condition or relieve their pain.

...

Parents of the perpetually sick just throw good money after bad. If the child is going to die, dragging it out isn’t going to make her or him any more alive.

People will defend the screams of agony from these health-wannabes with a liberal doctrine of infallibility, saying that we can’t question their neediness because they’re sick or are going to suffer some horrible death. Their shelf-life is dwindling. Don’t be surprised to see whatever is left of this sicklings soon stripping off their feeding tubes and bandages on the pages of Playboy.

Jay Stephenson recently posted an article on his site entitled Democrats Call Zarqawi Killing A Stunt, copying the headline from a Washington Times article. Neither Jay’s article nor the Times article contain any quotes from any Democrat who uses the word ‘stunt’ to describe the killing of Zarqawi.

The blogger known as Beaming Visionary challenged Jay to explain this discrepancy:

Hey Jay: Please point out the part of the article where a Democrat is quoted as calling the killing a stunt. If you cannot or will not, you are a liar.

Jay’s response? In a stunningly blatant act of pure intellectual cowardice, he deleted the challenge. If you look at the page now, no trace of BV’s comment remains. I’ve mirrored Jay’s page here, as proof of his actions.

Honest people will either back up their assertions with facts, or issue a retraction when their claims are shown to be incorrect. Only dishonest cowards try to pretend that they were never challenged in the first place. Jay Stephenson has once again shown us what kind of person he is.

UPDATE 06/10/06 07:52 AM: loboinok states in his comment that he is responsible for removing BV’s challenge, not Jay himself. Assuming that his statement is true, I stand corrected in this regard. Jay did not personally remove the comment from BV.

The fact remains, however, that whether Jay removes such challenges himself or has someone do it for him, it is clear that he is shielded from questions about the veracity of his claims. Ultimately, the responsibility for what happens on Jay’s site is Jay’s alone.

UPDATE 06/18/06 09:15 AM: Ten days, and Jay has made no attempt to cite any passage in the article that quotes a Democrat who calls the killing of Zarqawi a ‘stunt’, as his post title claims. Jay is hoping his lie will be forgotten. He is destined to be disappointed.

Once again, Ogre demonstrates that he can embarrass himself publicly in very few words:

By now I’m sure you’ve read throughout the internet that Al-Zarqawi is dead. The reports claim that he was killed in Iraq. However, I simply cannot accept any of those reports as true—we’ve been told for YEARS and years that there is no connection between Iraq and Al-Queerda. The left and the media have been telling us over and over again that there are no members of Al-Queerda in Iraq.

Of course, Ogre provides no substantive examples of anyone “telling us over and over again that there are no members of Al-Queerda in Iraq”. No, facts are far too inconvenient — he finds it much more expedient to just make shit up as he goes. Read the rest of this entry »

Be proud, America. US soldiers are giving their lives every day to keep Iraqis free — especially the women:

The women of Basra have disappeared. Three years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, women’s secular freedoms — once the envy of women across the Middle East — have been snatched away because militant Islam is rising across the country.

Across Iraq, a bloody and relentless oppression of women has taken hold. Many women had their heads shaved for refusing to wear a scarf or have been stoned in the street for wearing make-up. Others have been kidnapped and murdered for crimes that are being labelled simply as “inappropriate behaviour”. The insurrection against the fragile and barely functioning state has left the country prey to extremists whose notion of freedom does not extend to women.

Mission accomplished!

• The evidence continues to mount that the Republican party’s single goal is the accumulation of power by any means, legal or illegal:

  The latest sign that Republicans have an election-year strategy to shut down voter registration drives comes from Ohio. As the state gears up for a very competitive election season this fall, its secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, has put in place “emergency” regulations that could hit voter registration workers with criminal penalties for perfectly legitimate registration practices. The rules are so draconian they could shut down registration drives in Ohio.
  
  Mr. Blackwell, who also happens to be the Republican candidate for governor this year, has a history of this sort of behavior. In 2004, he instructed county boards of elections to reject any registrations on paper of less than 80-pound stock — about the thickness of a postcard. His order was almost certainly illegal, and he retracted it after he came under intense criticism. It was, however, in place long enough to get some registrations tossed out.
  
  This year, Mr. Blackwell’s office has issued rules and materials that appear to require that paid registration workers, and perhaps even volunteers, personally take the forms they collect to an election office. Organizations that run registration drives generally have the people who register voters bring the forms back to supervisors, who can then review them for errors. Under Mr. Blackwell’s edict, everyone involved could be committing a crime. Mr. Blackwell’s rules also appear to prohibit people who register voters from sending the forms in by mail. That rule itself may violate federal elections law.

• Janet Stemwedel (aka Dr. Free-ride) reviews two short guides to the techniques of critical thinking:

  Today, I’m going to give you my review of two little books that appeared in my faculty mailbox, both from The Foundation for Critical Thinking. The first is The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools, the second The Thinker’s Guide to Fallacies: The Art of Mental Trickery and Manipulation, both written by Richard Paul and Linda Elder.

• "Can how we think change our brains in a way that will make life more joyful and less stressful? " The thinkers at the Mind & Life Institute Mission and Organization aim to find out. Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project has another approach: she’s going to spend a year delving into ways to be happy, wherever she finds them. And, courtesy of Cognitive Daily comes a happiness test from the BBC.

• The wish is granted! Long live Jambi!:

  After being shuttered for more than 15 years, the doors to “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” are being reopened. The Emmy Award-winning show will get new life on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup, which will air all 45 original episodes beginning July 10, company officials announced Monday.

Jay Stephenson is a nice Christian boy who believes in assaulting lawyers. He and his contributors have made their mark on the blogosphere by whining incessantly about the “anti-Christian” ACLU:

"...how could anyone say this organization is not anti-Christian?"

"This just continues to drive home the Anti-Christian agenda."

How, one wonders, will Jay deal with the latest case to receive attention from that bastion of Christian-bashing?

ACLU backs student’s singing of Christian song

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a legal brief today supporting a Frenchtown elementary school student’s right to express her religion by singing a pop Christian song at a school talent show.

Maryann and Robert Turton sued the district last year after the school struck the act from its performance list. School officials said the Turtons’ daughter, Olivia, then in second grade, could not sing the song “Awesome God” at the evening talent show because it was too religious for a school setting.

After the suit was filed in federal court in Trenton, the ACLU asked to intervene in the case.

...

The ACLU argued in its motion filed today that no reasonable person could conclude the school endorsed religion simply by allowing Olivia to sing her song.

One suspects that Jay will simply have to practice some invincible ignorance, and pretend that this never happened.

Hat tip to Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

John Scalzi rips supporters of the Federal Marriage Amendment a new one...

Why aren’t people asking the marriage bigots flat out what they have against marriage? Against married couples? And by what right are they able to say that couples who are already legally married should have their marriages declared null and void? This proposed amendment breaks up marriages. God damn it, people should be hollering this at the top their lungs every time one of those marriage bigots gets all sanctimonious about what marriage means. People ought to be getting these marriage bigots into a corner and getting them to admit that they need to destroy legal, loving marriages in order to accomplish their goals. We ought to be getting these marriage bigots admitting that they have to strip away rights these Americans already have to do what they want to do. And then we need to ask the people “who don’t know what they think about it” if they want to align themselves with people who want to destroy actual marriages in order to “preserve” a definition of marriage that doesn’t actually exist.

...

I’m not worried that this obnoxious and hateful proposed amendment will pass, mind you—there are enough people who think that something as odious as this ought not be in our foundation document, even if they don’t like the idea of guys marrying guys. But the argument is much larger than the proposed amendment, and the marriage bigots are falsely arrogating the moral high ground in the argument. Look: anyone who wants to destroy marriages should not get the high ground in the marriage debate. I don’t know how much more simple it can be made.

Scalzi is, as always, spot on here. It is incredible that there are (allegedly) human beings in this country that propose to ‘defend’ marriage by destroying thousands of marriages. Kafka would be proud.

UPDATE 06/06 12:33 EDT: driftglass has another view of the issue that is most definitely worth reading.

John Cole makes a cogent and timely point regarding one of the major problem with American political discourse:

If somebody cannot bring him or herself to represent the opposition honestly then there seems to be little point in talking, since the second party in the “conversation” isn’t really you but the malicious voices inside the person’s own head.

Misrepresentation of the other side’s argument — better known as the ‘straw man’ fallacy — is rampant on all sides of the American polity. Knock it off, people.

Woody’s back, and he’s doing what he does best: twisting the facts. In a post entitled "Al Gore Admits Global Warming Lie", Woody claims that…

...the left practices situational ethics. Their causes are so noble (to them), that any means to achieve success is okay—lying especially. Al Gore gave further support to this claim when he said the folowing:

Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

As the title of his post indicates, Woody claims that this is evidence that Gore has “admitted” a “lie”. The liar here is, of course, Woody himself. The first clue that Woody is playing fast and loose with the facts is that he fails to give a citation to the original interview. Can’t have that — someone might check Woody’s facts.

Well, someone has. Read the rest of this entry »

My good friend Buddy Don has just posted his rewritten lyrics for the classic anthem, “America” (aka "My Country ‘Tis of Thee")...

America?

My country, ‘tis of thee
Land of security, with thee I fear!
Land where my fathers quail
Scared that death might prevail
Liberty has to fail – life is too dear!

Go and read the whole thing. Brilliant.
 

• At Martini Republic, Alex explains the latest fearmongering meme from the ultra-right: we will “literally lose America” if we withdraw from Iraq. As Alex points out, “the cause and effect is obvious — if you’re a twit on acid”.

• Ava Lowrey is a young peace activist and creator of dozens of animations, most dealing with the war in Iraq. Her site is called Peace Takes Courage. How does one so young become so wise?

• There is good reason to doubt that the Bush administration is truly serious about pursuing a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear situation:

  In the end, said one former official who has kept close tabs on the debate, “it came down to convincing Cheney and others that if we are going to confront Iran, we first have to check off the box” of trying talks.

• "DefCon is an online grassroots movement combating the growing power of the religious right. We will fight for the separation of church and state, individual freedom, scientific progress, pluralism, and tolerance while respecting people of faith and their right to express their beliefs."

Cao tells us on May 29th:

“Shut up!” is all you’ve got.

Cao tells us on June 1:

The facts aren’t all in yet, so why don’t people just shut the hell up?

Your foot will taste better if you put some salt on it, Cao.

Good news on the NSA wiretap front:

A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to make a legal defense in a public court hearing of the National Security Agency’s program of communications monitoring during the war on terrorism—a program under challenge in federal courts across the nation. Senior U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit on Wednesday denied a Department request to put off a hearing on the merits of a legal challenge in her Court until after she had ruled on the government’s claim that the case must be dismissed based on the “state secrets privilege.”

Put simply, the Bush Administration has been told that it cannot hide behind the ‘state secrets’ doctrine to avoid judicial review of its wiretapping program. While the danger still exists that the administration could scuttle this case, at least Judge Diggs is unwilling to give them a free pass. It turns out that we do still have some jurists in America who understand that this is indeed a country governed by laws, not men.