Puzzled over Persia

My post on Ken Pollack's book about the history of Iranian-American relations ended up being too lengthy for a regular post, so I'm putting up a permanent link to it here:

Puzzled over Persia

Iraqi election two thirds of a resounding success!

2 - 3

!

Now that the sides of the exciting upcoming Iraqi Civil War have been formalized, let's hear what the participants had to say:

Shiites: Hip Hip Hooray!
Kurds: Hip Hip Hooray!
Sunnis: [sound of gun loading]

In all seriousness, I think that most Iraqis proved yesterday the quality of their character by voting despite the potential for injury and death. And really, when it comes down to it, the sunnis only have themselves to blame by purposefully removing themselves electoral process, and therefore power. My understanding of the theory of democracy is that the majority rules unless the rights of the individual are threatened. But by removing yourself from the system, you remove any leverage you might have had. It's clear that the Sunnis will largely view the election as illegitimate and use that to justify more violence. So the only possibility for success in Iraq longterm will be to precariously balance between a return to the kind of apartheid situation that existed under Saddam and oppression or retribution against the Sunnis. And of course, the sooner the U.S. can leave, the better... except that it will leave a power vacuum. Hmm.

I once suggested that the U.S. load up a C-130 with tons of marijuana inside as a giant flying reefer, flown over the "Triangle of Death." Of course, I suggested that to a former soldier, and he got fairly pissed. Which may just be the natural state of former soldiers. Anyhow, I think that's the only lasting solution.

Hats off to the Iraqis, though. To a large extent they showed patriotism and courage that a lot of frothing-at-the-mouth dittoheads could only dream of.

Reload Caption Contest

Flashback Friday

This Flashback Friday is an obvious one. On January 28, 2003, President Bush delivered his infamous State of the Union address with this now-infamous lie:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

But this wasn't even the only lie of this speech. He also said:

Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.

Nope

But it's something else that is actually more revealing.

From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.

Here's the report from Hans Blix the day before (January 27):

It has regard to the procedures, mechanisms, infrastructure and practical arrangements to pursue inspections and seek verifiable disarmament. While inspection is not built on the premise of confidence but may lead to confidence if it is successful, there must nevertheless be a measure of mutual confidence from the very beginning in running the operation of inspection.

Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt. We have further had great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good. The environment has been workable.

Blix did go on to identify areas where the Iraqi regime was being uncooperative (having nothing to do with what Bush mentioned above), but the sleight-of-hand worked. To this day, I still run into people who believe that Saddam either wasn't cooperating at all, or even kicked the inspectors out. The Bush administration is great at making sure it comes right to the edge of telling a lie without actually telling it, and this was a great example.

But beyond the lies and the poor logic, one thing really stands above the rest for me, both in how Bush sees the world, and in how little many of us understood the situation at the time.

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

There were a great many times that the President was able to convince us that Saddam was just as dangerous as Al Qaeda, and therefore there was no time for delay. This position was wildly popular here, but completely misguided. The thing that we didn't understand was that the most dangerous enemy in the world is one with nothing to lose. That's what separates Al Qaeda from any tyrant. A tyrant, no matter how irrational or aggressive, knows that if they cross a certain line, they will end up being the target. The Iranians know this, even the nutjob in Pyongyang knows this.

Saddam began to cooperate with Blix and the inspectors because he knew he had been close to that line, and the world was debating whether or not he'd crossed it. Bush, of course, did whatever he could to cover up that fact, lest we find out that Saddam wasn't so irrational and difficult to contain after all. Having a President that zealous to start a war is bad enough, re-electing him was a disaster.

Long Live the King

The Cavaliers are visiting the Knicks tonight and the game is being broadcast nationally on ESPN. LeBron might sit with an injured ankle, which would be unfortunate for the fans attending to see him play, but fortunate for the Knicks who are just trying to win a game.

For those of you with ESPN, listen for the "De-fense" chant early on in the game. That will be us.

Cheney's Auschwitz outfit raises eyebrows

This is another example of the international press making a big fuzz about minor observations, this time around is the VP's attire. Apparently Cheney opted for a more casual look to attend the Auschwitz liberation memorial ceremony. I do not recall Joan Rivers or anybody else making a big fuzz when Cheney attended Reagan's funeral wearing bermuda shorts.

Another link to check out

This one: http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/index.html - belongs to a fellow with a plan "for curing human aging" taking an engineering approach to the problem.

Curious. I think rather than having people live to 5000 years old, it would be more interesting and helpful to have the people who live to 120 do so at the fitness level of say, a 40-something year old.

Some links to check out

A real conservative

TABS gives us a local perspective on the righteous folks on the front lines in our war on SpongeBob

A tongue-in-cheek Al Qaeda Progress Report

A co-worker sent me this story of his friend's encounter with a rather dumb Ebay scammer.

Our Vice President reminds everyone in Auschwitz that he's just a country boy from Wyoming.

Mike Tyson's Chickens

Senator Wants Boxing Gloves on Chickens

State Sen. Frank Shurden, a longtime defender of cockfighting, is suggesting that roosters be given little boxing gloves so they can fight without bloodshed. The proposal is in a bill the Democrat has introduced for the legislative session that begins Feb. 7.

Fantastic. I guess this answers the question: What the hell do you do if you're a Democrat in Oklahoma these days.

Shurden said electronic sensors can record the number of hits by each gamefowl to determine which rooster won the boxing match.

Good to know that we're on the verge of cockfighting being more technologically advanced than human boxing.

(Thanks to Juris98 for the link)

Get that Heap outta the Car Bomb Lane!

Tractor bomb kills 5 at Kurdish political office
CNN - Thursday, January 27, 2005 Posted: 9:19 AM EST

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Days before Iraqis head to the polls, a suicide tractor bomb detonated outside the Kurdish Democratic Party office in the northern city of Sinjar, killing four Iraqi soldiers and a guard, a provincial official said.

Are they running out of vehicles that can travel faster than 20 mph because they've all been made into suicide bombs? What, were there no steamrollers in the area? One would imagine a tractor sputtering closer and closer would give them enough time to get their things, cancel the day's appointments, get a realtor to find them a new building, and corral some friends into helping them move before it finally detonated.

And they're freedom fries, not chips!

From the Financial Times 1/26:

Four British men who were freed from US detention at Guantanamo Bay on Tuesday have been released without charge after being questioned by anti-terrorist police, UK police said.

...

The Pentagon has said the release of the four Britons and an Australian came after their governments gave “security assurances” to the US they would “work to prevent them from engaging in or otherwise supporting terrorist activities”.

But Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary, told the House of Commons earlier this month that Britain had given “no side undertakings” to secure the men’s release.

From the Washington Post:

LONDON, Jan. 26 -- British officials proposed far-reaching new powers on Wednesday to control and monitor suspected terrorists without charge or trial, including house arrests, electronic tagging and curfews.

Good doggie. Fetch!

No WMD in Iraq

It's official - the Bush administration has officially ended the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The weapons the U.S. military failed to find are the same as those U.N. weapons inspectors insisted weren't there in the first place. Others - Bush supporters mostly - claim that these weapons probably were there, but were shipped off to Syria and other places while the U.S. was preparing to invade.

So now we are embroiled in a war that we ostensibly entered in order to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his WMD against the US and its allies. Saddam is gone and no one knows where the WMD went. No matter what, the world is a far more dangerous place. Not only is the U.S. creating new enemies every day with what's happening in Iraq, but we also may have spurred Saddam to send his WMD to Syria or elsewhere, in which case we've succeeded in spurring the proliferation of these weapons to terrorists rather than having them stay in Iraq where we might have had some chance of keeping an eye on them. My guess is there were never any WMDs and it was a deliberate fabrication. How do we know this? We haven't seen any chemical or bio weapons being used in terrorist attacks.

At this point, the Bush administration has completely changed its rationale for the war to something more along the lines of - well, we got rid of a terrible dictator and are bringing freedom to Iraq. Iraqi people can't work, have had their homes destroyed, fear going out in public because of the violence and are afraid to vote for that reason, have their homeland occupied by a foreign army and are staring down the barrel of a major civil war. Is this freedom?

I have only one more question to ask about the sham the United States is becoming, or has become. A president was impeached for lying about a mostly harmless blow job. What's the punishment for lying in order to start a pointless war?

Warning: Hypocrisy may Singe Eyebrows

This week's Concrete Dildo award goes to a commenter for the very first time. Not at this site, though, instead at the Drug WarRant in response to this post about the slow, painful death of the 4th Amendment. Commenter "mccm" left this comment (if it's satire, it's brilliant, but if not, whoa boy...):

i'm not just perilously close. i am right on top of them. when pot is illegal, which is the case right now all over the country, it is dumb to carry pot. it IS against the law, and if the guy had nothing to hide, then the sniffing (which the SC majority argues is not a search) would not have resulted in any sort of invasive search. i'll tell you what i do have a problem with though. speed limits. the fact that there are speed limits and everybody speeds means everybody is a criminal. that means cops can selectively choose which criminal they wish to pick on (interesting that this guy has a latino last name). plus, the only case i know of where they lifted speed limits the auto crash fatalities decreased. sort of wish someone would take speeding tickets to a higher court. anywho, point is..drugs are illegal. that is what we need to take care of. you can't expect them not to enforce the law to the full extent while it exists. please don't take this as excusing cops from their responsibility not to be racist bullies. i have no love or respect for the police. i just think that when the laws are on the books you should be perfectly prepared for them to be enforced, and that means if you are going to deal in pounds you better not give a cop even the slightest reason to look at you twice.

So speeding shouldn't be illegal because it allows for selective enforcement, and the laws don't work, but that's totally different from drugs?

No, there's no selective enforcement in the drug war.

Nobel Prize in Marketing - Nomination #2

"Hey baby, what's your sign?"

This is my second nomination for Reload's 2005 Nobel Prize in Marketing award. This nomination goes to Andrew Fischer (above), and SnoreStop, a company that paid $37,375 to stamp their logo on his forehead for a month.

"People will always comment on something out of the ordinary," Fischer said in his sales pitch. "People like weird."

Speaking of weird, I just saw a Mr. Show episode where NASA was going to blow up the moon and everyone was all for it until a chimp used sign language to ask why. I just hope that when we have NASCAR fans with as many tattoos as the cars they root for and bartenders with "Jack Daniels" tattooed on their foreheads, the smartest of the chimps will take off their Animal Planet T-shirts and let the zookeepers know we've gone too far.

Freedom from What?

Fareed Zakaria, in his latest article, notes that Bush's inauguration speech about freedom and liberty is seen as hypocritical throughout the world. He writes:

To borrow an old saw about the mission of journalism, Bush’s words will “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Democratic reformers around the world will surely take heart. Dictators will nervously ponder what it all means. This, too, is in a great American tradition. When Wilson and Roosevelt spoke out against empires, it rattled Europe’s great powers. When Kennedy and Reagan spoke about freedom, it worried the juntas of Latin America and the despots of East Asia. When the Carter administration began issuing annual reports on human rights, it unnerved regimes across the world. In speaking honestly and openly about the importance and universality of freedom, America—and, to be fair, Europe—have made a difference. They have put freedom on the global agenda. Bush has aimed to push it even higher.

Just as he did when he entrusted Bush to responsibly wage what he considered a necessary war in Iraq, Zakaria is still giving Bush too much credit. The problem here is that George Bush's definition of "freedom" and "liberty" have very little to do with those previous edicts from the Oval Office. For Bush, "freedom" and "liberty" are not just the opposite of tyranny, they are the opposite of governmental responsibility as well. With Bush's idea of an "ownership" society, he feels that the government should no longer be a "crutch" for those that aren't willing to "work hard". This, to him, is "freedom", and he truly believes that this type of economic libertarianism is what will help America, and what he needs to export to the rest of the world. Of course, anyone who isn't drinking Karl Rove's Kool-Aid knows that the "ownership" society that Bush dreams of will end up the exact same way the Soviet Union ended up, with a plutocracy that controls all the cards, and everyone else working their asses off to break even. And people like veterans, children, and the elderly have to rely on the generosity of the ruling class to provide for things in which there's no direct profit motive. This is not the same "liberty" that our founding fathers fought for.

The difference comes from mistaking economic libertarianism for social libertarianism. The difference lies between complaining about Taxation without Representation and just complaining about Taxation. We're buying into the notion that tax cuts, and taking away social programs, equals greater freedom, even as we end up paying more in other ways.

The author of American liberty, James Madison, wrote in The Federalist papers that “in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Order and then liberty (we might have remembered this in Iraq).

(emphasis mine)

Zakaria mentions this at the end, as if Bush's invocations of "freedom" and "liberty" were in some way related to these words. Fuck no. Bush doesn't believe in this balance at all. He believes in the exact opposite. He believes that the government is always an impediment to liberty (except as a means of protection from "the evildoers", of course).

Maybe when Zakaria figures out that Bush's ideals of "liberty" and "freedom" have little to do with building up strong, accountable, central governments that promote actual liberty, and more to do with "getting government off our backs", he'll realize why it was so foolish to ride his coattails into Iraq. "Liberty" isn't a form of entrepreneurial anarchy that you promote when you're already at the top of the food chain and can control the army. It's something that a strong government provides through responsible leadership. Not having to provide that safety net for this country is the "freedom" that George Bush is after. We saw this notion of full economic libertarianism play out into the chaos in Iraq as people without jobs and electricity started trying to kill us, and yet some of us somehow still think that Bush is on the same page as us when it comes to doing the right things to promote "freedom" and "liberty" throughout the world. He's not. He's never been. And he never will be.

Fly, Eagles, Fly

On to Jacksonville!

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They're interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well;" - Rush Limbaugh

Hey Rush, thanks again for spending a few weeks last fall to show us that you understand sports as little as you understand politics.

Flashback Friday

The decision to disband the Iraqi Army by Paul Bremer is credited with being one of the major blunders of this war, one that made it a very easy decision for well-armed and well-trained former members of the Iraqi Army to become dangerous insurgents. All of this is painfully obvious to us now, so how was a mistake this big made in the first place? This article from January 21, 2003 by Frank Gaffney Jr, is a great illustration of where that faulty mentality came from. Gaffney is the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, which I'd never heard of, but appears to be a group of book smart nitwits that still think that everything is going fine in Iraq. Unreal. Anyway, here's a portion of Mr. Gaffney's article from 2 years ago today:

An amnesty would also amount to a free-pass for people who must, like Saddam Hussein, be held accountable for war crimes and unimaginable human rights abuses. Without such accountability and a more general program of “lustration” aimed at purging the political system of the ancien regime’s adherents, a post-Saddam Iraq will be denied the chance for real freedom. This chance was fully realized by Germany and Japan, at U.S. insistence, where lustration occurred. It remains, at best, a fragile opportunity for countries of the former Soviet empire where lustration has largely not transpired.

This paragraph demonstrates how people who bought into this poor logic strolled into Baghdad and felt that part of this necessary "lustration" was to tell the Iraqi Army to go home. Unfortunately, this situation was not the same as Germany and Japan. In those cases, the most ardent "adherents" of those regimes had been fighting and dying trying to conquer the world for over 6 years. They'd already been disbanded, and they were already defeated by the time we were rebuilding the country. In Iraq, we happily allowed the "adherents" to become a potent enemy because we couldn't (or wouldn't) see these blatantly obvious differences between the two situations, and never expected the dangerous outcome.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army was a dumb decision. But it was inevitable as long we were willing to believe in dumb comparisons.

Symbolism for the Day

Toilet Trained Elephants

An elephant taking a shit just feels like something that needs to be on the blog today.

Handlers at the camp, in northern Thailand's Chiang Mai province, have previously taught their elephants to paint, dance and play musical instruments.

Elephants that can dance and play musical instruments? I can't believe the RNC settled for Brooks and Dunn for this evening's entertainment.

Reload Caption Contest: Bush Inaugural

Usually theHim post these, but when I saw this pic, I knew I had to post it on Reload.

Jim Wallis

The man appeared on The Daily Show a couple nights ago. He made the first case I've seen in a long long time that Christianity and this administration's fucked up agenda are far far apart.

I even got a little annoyed with Stewart... The man's making sense! Let'im go!

Anyone else see it?

Can I Buy Stock in Satire?

Yesterday, CNN had the headline Bush: Better Human Intelligence Needed, and today, they give us this:

Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider

Is the CNN website now owned by The Daily Show?

Post.Random()

Too much actual work on my mind this week, some random items...

- Greenwave sent me this link. It allows you to program the 'skip-to-hash' button of your TiVo remote to become a 30 second skip button. Very nice feature for skipping through commercials quickly.

- New Hampshire jam band Percy Hill, an amazing band that stays away from a major label and just plays live shows around New England, has a new 2 CD release available here of their November 13th show in Boston. Come out west again, dammit!!

- Kabulrocks sent me this link to a Conan O'Brien clip about outsourcing.

- If they did an episode of The Simple Life - Interns where Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were White House interns, would their incompetence even stand out?

- Finally, a reminder that if the Eagles manage to tank it in the NFC Championship game on Sunday (for the fourth year in a row) blogging from me will cease for some time as I'll be curled up in the fetal position in the corner of my living room for an undetermined number of weeks.

Dan Marino 2

Did anyone else see Boomer Esiason call Peyton Manning this generation's "Dan Marino" right in Marino's face? The implication being that neither Peyton, nor Dan could ever win the big game, despite all the fancy statistics. That might have been the greatest thing ever. Go Boomer!

Mississippi, our third-world friends

The Mahablog has a very thought provoking post today:

I have a proposal. For a lot of reasons this proposal could not be carried out, but let's pretend ... what if we told Mississippi it could outlaw abortions altogether, including the infamous partial-birth abortions, once it got its infant mortality rate down to under 5 deaths per 1,000 infants?

...

In my version of this folk tale, as Mississippians finally confront issues they've been ignoring for so long, they'll experience a gradual awakening. And when that infant mortality number is finally under 5, they'll understand why banning all abortions isn't a great idea -- because driving a problem underground, or across state lines, isn't solving it. And maybe they'll also realize that women who choose to terminate pregnancies aren't all selfish, stupid cows, but human beings with complex human lives to deal with.

I love the thought, but I don't buy the outcome. Maha believes that Mississippians will look at the issue and come to the realization that only liberalism will solve the problem. Heck no. You can throw every number in the book at these people, showing them how wrong they are, and they will not even come close to questioning their ideals of conservatism.

In my version of the folk tale, the Mississippi state legislature will pass a law banning couples from having sex unless they are deemed 'healthy enough' by a doctor. Then, they will look at the fact that since infant mortality rates among blacks and hispanics are higher, they will disallow blacks and hispanics from giving birth in the state. None of those laws would even come close to working, but as we've found out with Iraq, no matter how fucked up a situation gets, today's conservatives will make it a hundred times worse before ever questioning their faulty assumptions.

Reload Caption Contest

Did I have just the right number of Rolling Rocks in me, or was that the best Simpsons episode in years?

Elephants and Mice

Apparently, it's just an old wives' tale that elephants are afraid of mice, but when you look at some Republicans, it's easy to see why we think it might be true. This week's Concrete Dildo award goes to Drew Bruchett from TheRant, who worries that even with Republicans in control of both the White House and Congress, we're in desperate need of a Conservative Re-Revolution.

There have been several times in our nation when we have approached a crossroads. The most notable of these, of course, is the Revolutionary war. If a small band of brave leaders had not decided to fight for our freedom from the British, the entire history of our nation, and even the world, would have been completely different. Indeed, the entire course of humanity could have been changed by the outcome of that war.

I have a bad feeling where this is going. Is Drew attempting to compare the insurgents in Iraq to the soldiers of the British empire? We'll see. Strap on the knee-high boots and hold your nose. There's gonna be a lot of shit to shovel here.

We faced another such crossroads at the onset of the Civil War. The leaders of the Union, after careful consideration, decided that the preservation of the nation was worth fighting and dying for. Thus we were thrust into one of the bloodiest and most emotional conflicts of our history. With brother pitted against brother, the fate of the nation was decided again.

Comparing the Confederate States to the Insurgents? This is a new one. Oh wait, I think I know what's coming here. He's going to compare modern liberals to the southern rebels of the 1860s. I may need a bigger shovel.

President Bush is trying to take our country down the right path. By appointing conservatives with good moral values to his cabinet, he is helping to shape the policy of our country and turn away from the moral decay we experienced under the Clinton presidency and would have continued to experience under Kerry.

"You do what we say and we'll do what we want to
We're fuckin up your city and we're fuckin up your program
Fuckin all your bitches we don't fuckin give a god damn
Twisted Brown gets down with no assistance
We won't quit until we're banned from existence" - Kid Rock, originally scheduled to play at the inauguration.

By selecting judges who follow the constitution instead of “interpreting” it to suit their agendas, he is ensuring that our country will continue down the right path.

A little hint for Drew: When you write opinion columns, it sometimes helps to actually have examples that demonstrate your assinine claims.

The President can’t do this alone, though. He faces strong opposition in congress and in the public.

He does? We're talking about the President of the United States, right?

There are those who would stop our progress and even turn it around down the path of moral and social decay. They must be stopped before their disease can spread. Social liberalism has been allowed to bring about a excess of social programs which have crippled large sections of our society and tricked them into believing that they are owed a living simply because they exist.

Anyone anxious to watch Drew explain to the family of a paralyzed veteran that they shouldn't be relying on the government that sent him to Iraq to pay for his medical bills for the next 50 years? I am.

They scream of tolerance while hating anyone with an opposing viewpoint.

Let me explain something here since I've gone down this path recently with someone else. I don't hate Drew Bruchett. I don't actually send these people Concrete Dildos in the mail and require them to sit on them (although O'Reilly did request one). I just think he's an idiot. And that he deserves ridicule for using a public forum to turn our country into Iran while supposedly upholding "American values". That's all. I'm really a nice guy. Seriously.

They rant about freedoms while attempting to beat down anyone who speaks out in disagreement. They yell about love while allowing brutal dictators to kill millions of innocent people.

Yes. Instead, we should kill millions of innocent people to be able to kill all the brutal dictators. This is a level of linear thinking that would make Chris Hitchens proud.

The economic liberals, while not as morally reprehensible, can still bring about the ruination of our society. Working in collaboration with the social liberals, they have levied tax after tax to pay for their social programs.

If I understand Drew correctly, he believes that the people who set up social programs are a different group of people than the ones who think that taxpayer dollars should be used to pay for the social programs. I guess you really have to be that stupid for Bush's deficits to look fiscally responsible to you.

While preaching fiscal responsibility, they line their pockets with kickbacks and “pork”. While railing that the rich aren’t paying their fair share, they continue to vote themselves pay raises and use as many tax loopholes as possible.

Right, the liberals that control Congress are voting themselves pay raises right now. Either Drew is somehow trapped in a time warp or he's the dumbest columnist I've ever seen on the TheRant.

Their fiscal irresponsibility has led to poor financial decisions such as the social security program*, welfare and inadequate defense spending.

Uh oh, Drew wants more defense spending. He better talk to the economic conservatives to see how to pay for that. Massive deficits, they say? Excellent, it would be irresponsible to raise Warren Buffett's taxes.

Continuing down their roads would eventually lead to a socialized medical system that would cost taxpayers billions and ensure that hundreds of thousands of needy people are not able to be treated.

That sounds like a bad system. God forbid we don't have socialized medicine. People will get the false impression that a government is supposed to provide for our welfare. And you can only get that false impression from interpreting the constitution rather than following it.

We must also teach our children. This is of very high importance. The liberals have invaded our education system and are using it as an indoctrination system for the youth of this country. They are fed lies not only about the future of the country, but also about the past. They are taught such ridiculous things as Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual.

Let's see. He was a tall, skinny, one-time anti-war protester from a blue state representing a party whose strongest support was from the Northeast. Sounds like a homosexual to me.

Any child showing independent thought or disagreement with the “mainstream thought” is branded a troublemaker and watched closely. To battle this, we must start early, ensuring our children have a grounding in the truth.

Maybe we can work it into the Pledge of Allegiance. "One nation, under God, indivisible, Abe Lincoln is a virile, manly man, with liberty and justice for all"

In all, we must always be vigilant. In the 1980s, we became complacent and did not vote. This led to two terms of unbridled liberalism that has nearly brought our country to its knees. If we allow this to happen again, it could spell the end.

In the 1980's? Is he calling Reagan a liberal?

I want to have some snappy close for this, but this one was just too painful. This may be the single dumbest column I've ever seen in TheRant. My head literally hurts right now. Anyone who thinks that conservatives are an endangered minority in this country are as mentally ill as an elephant who's afraid of a mouse.

A Tale of Two Randys

Last Sunday, Randy Moss scored the game-clinching touchdown against Green Bay in a playoff game at Lambeau Field. As part of his celebration, he walked to the goal post and pretended to 'moon' the crowd. The announcers called it "classless" and "disgusting", and since then, we've heard non-stop criticism of Moss about his selfishness and how much he hurts his team. He was fined $10,000.

The next day, in New York, newly signed Yankee Randy Johnson shoved and yelled at a news cameraman who was filming him leaving his hotel to get his team physical. Johnson had several security personnel with him, but still took it upon himself to assault the cameraman who was doing his job.

I first intended to post about this earlier in the week, but I wanted to wait to take in more reactions. At first, I found it amazing that there was a greater uproar over what Moss did, when what Johnson did was magnitudes worse, but I wanted to give it some time before I wrote it all off to America's underlying racial prejudices and typical double standards. Today, I still won't.

At most, this is only indirectly related to race (Moss is black, Johnson is white). There are more things at play here. Both athletes are among the very best in their sports, but Randy Moss has had a very controversial background, and many people paint him as the prototype of the spoiled athlete. Randy Johnson, on the other hand, is notoriously low-key and doesn't make the news for anything other than his exploits on the field. It's this, more than anything else, that causes people to hold Moss to a higher standard.

But I do think that Moss' background is the real difference in how these two incidents played out, and I'll let others decide how much race has played a factor in that. From the link above, we see that:

Moss earned a full ride to Notre Dame in 1995 before a racially-motivated fight his senior year in high school saw him charged with two counts of simple battery and cost him his dream of playing for the Irish.

And

But despite all his natural talent, trouble continued to follow Moss when he tested positive for smoking marijuana at Florida State and was kicked off the team. That's how he found his way back to West Virginia and a three month stay in jail for violating his probation.

So Randy Moss, as one of the best high school athletes in the country, spent time in jail and had to attend a smaller local college (Marshall) because of a positive drug test. This is what he said at the time:

"You only have yourself. There's no one to hug or clown around with. You have a lot of time to sit around and think about what you did wrong. I've messed up. It's as simple as that."

It sounds very different from the Randy Moss you hear today that refuses to apologize for his celebratory 'moon'. Why? It's because he left that jail cell in West Virginia, and through many years in college and the NFL, he began to realize how much of a raw deal he got when he saw others who had similar experiences growing up but none of the consequences. Yes, he has a chip on his shoulder, and I don't blame him.

An NCAA survey conducted in 2001 found similar results to athletes admitting to marijuana use among hockey, football, baseball and basketball. About a quarter of the athletes surveyed, but among so-called minor sports, usage much higher, highest for water polo. Nearly 50 percent for the sport of rifle.

He spent three months in jail for smoking pot, while many of his peers got away with it, and now he has a bad reputation because of it. And we're angry that he hasn't apologized for pretending to pull his pants down?

Going back to the other Randy, here's a letter to the editor of the Arizona Republic from Thursday.

Knowing how aggressive, pushy, antagonistic and general pains in the butt photographers and reporters usually are, they often deserve the treatment they get from celebrities. If reporters would act like gentlemen and ask if they could photograph and interview people before just plunging in, they might be treated with respect by people like Johnson.

God forbid Johnson didn't turn around and pretend to moon him. Then that would've been really bad.

The sentiment expressed in that letter towards cameramen can easily be applied to the Green Bay crowd, which gathers to moon the opposing team's bus after home games. The question becomes, why is it that once you have a "reputation", you lose your ability to be judged fairly?

When he said to 'Bring 'em on' he did not mean that they 'Bring 'it on'?

CNN.com - Bush: 'Sometimes, words have consequences' - Jan 14, 2005

"Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean," Bush said Thursday.

"'Bring 'em on' is the classic example, when I was really trying to rally the troops and make it clear to them that I fully understood, you know, what a great job they were doing. And those words had an unintended consequence. It kind of, some interpreted it to be defiance in the face of danger. That certainly wasn't the case."

The unintended consequence was that he did rally the troops... The enemy troops...

Flashback Friday

The above graphic is at the top of this page which can be found on the White House's Official Site from January 14, 2003. It contains:

Question: The weapons inspectors say they need until March, maybe six months, maybe a year. Is this what you had in mind when you went to the U.N. back in September?

PRESIDENT BUSH: What I have in mind for Saddam Hussein is to disarm. The United Nations spoke with one voice. We said, we expect Saddam Hussein, for the sake of peace, to disarm. That's the question: Is Saddam Hussein disarming? He's been given 11 years to disarm. And so the world came together and we have given him one last chance to disarm. So far, I haven't seen any evidence that he is disarming.

Time is running out on Saddam Hussein. He must disarm. I'm sick and tired of games and deception. And that's my view of timetables.

Now that the search is over, any thoughts on that original timetable for war, Mr. President?

"We had a regime that had a history of using weapons of mass destruction and had a history of defying the international community and had a history of ties to terrorist organizations in Iraq," he said. "We had the attacks on September 11 [2001], that taught us we must confront threats before it's too late."

Denial and deception, huh?

Is Homosexuality Natural or a Choice?

I had the unfortunate experience of listening to Bill O'Reilly for about three minutes the other night, and of course he said several things in that short span that were simply absurd.

First, he was going on about his little tiff with George Clooney. Apparently the 'E' network - that bastion of high brow journalism - painted O'Reilly as a loudmouth (which he didn't dispute, to his credit) and Clooney as a man trying to go good by using his celebrity for fundraising. To this O'Reilly responded, "Well, the E network has to pander to celebrities. We (meaning Fox News I assume) understand that." Of course you do Bill - your network panders to ultra-conservatives and arguably has about as much journalistic credibility as E.

Second, and bit more serious, O'Reilly was responding a letter from a viewer that said something about how those who oppose gay marriage are simply trying to force their own moralism on everyone else, to which O'Reilly responded "C'mon, you can't argue with nature." Suggesting therefore that homosexuality is not natural.

Now, this is a long standing debate. I am among those who believes that homosexuality is a natural occurence, but that choosing to live a homosexual lifestyle is a choice, and an extremely difficult one to make for most people outside of San Fran, NYC, Key West or Ann Arbor.

Now, CJR, another writer here, has argued to me before that homosexuality is, from an evolutionary point of view, detrimental to the species because it essentially means that healty, reproductive males won't reproduce and further our species. Now, in CJR's defense, this is a purely scientific and not social argument.

There are plenty of legitimate arguments to either side. Some say homosexuality doesn't happen in the rest of the animal kingdom, so it's not natural. Well, does that mean having a large brain, the ability to speak, the ability to make complex tools, etc. is not natural because only humans demonstrate these traits? Certainly not.

There are some who think homosexuality is a disease, much like depression or multiple personality disorder. Now this is an interesting tack, because it places the "blame" for homosexuality on societal influences, like being beaten by your father with a wrench can make one develop multiple personalities. But other "diseases" like depression and alcoholism are genetic, but often triggered by social circumstances. In other words, you could have depression genes and still be a pretty happy person most of the time if life doesn't kick the crap out of you. Even if homosexuality were a disease, which I do not believe it is, it certainly couldn't be labeled as "unnatural." But you don't see Pfizer advertising a pill to cure homosexuality...in fact, quite the opposite given all the boner-pill advertising we're subjected to at all times.

The most frightening argument, however, comes from those, like O'Reilly, that are essentially arguing from the bible. The bible says homosexuality is wrong, therefore it's unnatural? Well, lying, killing and theivery are all forbidden by the bible, but that doesn't stop the bible thumpers from starting holy wars based on lies and the desire to steal wealth from an oil rich nation.

The conflict here, for me, is that I respect people's right to believe in what they want. I do not, however, believe that in any form of public, secular debate someone has the right to make an argument that's solely based on the bible and not corroborated by anything else. It's an endless and useless argument, and it's based essentially on the same assumptions ancient people made - if we can't come up with a rational expalantion for something, call it g-d; and if we have to justify something that's clearly without basis, evoke divine right.

Going to Hell with the Congress We Have

From the Veterans for Common Sense site:

In January 2005, the leadership of the 109th Congress removed Representative Chris Smith from his chairmanship of the Veterans Affairs Committee, replacing him with Indiana Representative Steve Buyer.

Why did they do this? Because Rep. Smith was too pro-veteran.

According to a January 11 column by Bob Novak, "The leadership’s problem with Smith has been his insatiable desire to make life better for veterans during 24 years on the Veterans Affairs committee (six years as vice chairman, four years as chairman). That fits the job description set by conservative Democrat Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi during his 12-year chairmanship."

How corrupt do Congressional Republicans have to be to get criticized by the Douchebag of Liberty? It truly boggles the mind.

Congress is rightly concerned about the huge deficits our government is incurring, with the combination of a war and tax-cuts rapidly bankrupting our country. But the 2005 budget, passed by Congress and approved by Congress, managed to find $9 billion to pay for pork-barrel projects in members' districts, including:

$7 million for a bus-maintenance facility in Tempe, Arizona
$430,000 to restore the Fox Tucson Theatre
$3 million for a grape research laboratory
$1.5 million for a demonstration project to transport naturally chilled water from Lake Ontario to Lake Onondaga
$75,000 for the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame in Appleton, Wis.
$200,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
$3 million for the First Tee Program in St. Augustine, Florida
$1 million dollars (ironically) for the Missouri Pork Producers Association

How did they pay for all of this? Among other things, Congress cut the Pentagon account used to pay for up-armored humvees. A Scripps-Howard study of combat deaths in Iraq shows that 1 in 5 of the over 1,300 U.S. deaths in Iraq took place inside humvees.

God forbid we would've had to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame we had, and not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame we wish we had.

Color-Coded PMS Warning System

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OK Asshole, so what would you do?

Before this blog started up, I spent more time in actual online debates on Slate. It was valuable experience, but I had to navigate through a lot of idiots before having an occasional good debate with someone who knew their stuff. It got tiresome after a while though, and I have to admit, my stress level is doing a lot better now that I'm bathed in the lefty blogosphere.

But recently, I left a comment at the Write Wing Conspiracy, a 'conservative' blog here in Seattle that also blogwhores over at the Seattle Blogs trackback site (I ping them with any of my posts of local interest). I'd read a couple of Jason's posts and left a comment for him lamenting about the absurdness of the bipartisanship in this state over a gubernatorial election between two people who were hardly that controversial. However, this was at the same time I gave a Concrete Dildo award to Dennis Prager, so I was subsequently called a hypocrite in this blog post.

Well, that's a good way to get my attention. I won't bore you with the play-by-play of the comments at the end of that post and this one with Jason and another blogger named Nick, but it ended with me daring either of them to debate me specifically about Iraq. Not surprisingly, there wasn't a taker. Two years after having no shortage of people who thought the War in Iraq was a good idea, there are few today who will take that same position, and I've become an even more insufferable asshole because of it.

But it's one thing to be an asshole, and it's another thing to actually be helpful, so I'm going to throw out my answer to the question that people on both the left and the right should be asking right now.

Iraq is broken. How do we fix it?

It's very tempting to just say that we should pick up and leave today, but that really would be a disaster. Any kind of unchecked prolonged conflict there will undoubtedly have long term consequences much worse than if we just hold up a fragile puppet government for years. But at some point, we do risk losing the ability to even do that, if we continue to gather enemies among the Iraqi people. The question becomes, how do we avoid that while still getting out of there without the government simply falling apart?

One hopeful scenario has been to get the U.N. to bail us out. The reason that this didn't happen before is because the Bush Administration wouldn't allow for this to happen without our military leaders still being in charge, and few other countries were eager to send troops into this mess that many of them advised us against. The linked article was from over a year ago though, and I'm not even sure that other countries would be willing to send troops, even if we left. This may now be a lost cause.

At around the same time that Bush was beginning to beg the U.N. to bail us out of this mess, I'd posted on Slate (deleted unfortunately) that the Iraqis won't be free unless they have full control over what our troops are doing there. And this is where I think we can cut our losses and get out of there with as little damage as possible.

Don't doubt for a second that no matter what happens on election day over there, the windbags at Fox News will proclaim it a success and a great day for democracy, even if hundreds of polling places are blown up. But whatever way we ensure that western-friendly people win that vote (and if we don't, we will simply be asked to leave, and that may actually be as bad for us as if we just left voluntarily), we should have the new government call for a referendum in several months on whether or not the coalition troops should stay there. It would allow the Iraqi people to directly vote for or against the occupation.

Is there a bad outcome to this idea? The insurgents would have no interest in disrupting the referendum, especially if it's made clear that too much violence could nullify the vote. If the Iraqis voted for us to leave, it would give Iraqis more confidence that their government is independent of ours and will not function simply as our puppet. Even if the Iraqis voted for us to stay, it would give more ammunition for our attempts to get more countries involved, seeing that there is popular support for the American occupation. Either way, we're finally looking like we support democracy and fairness, something we haven't done anywhere near enough since we undertook this misguided adventure.

Reload Caption Contest

And it looks like satirical, naked, Supreme Court Justices are a little too much for the delicate sensibilities of Mississippi residents...

A look back at the best entertainment of 2004

What better time to look back at the most inspiring entertainment of the past year than the second week of the new year?! The second week is optimal because by now you may have forgotten all the other, inferior looks back at 2004 that you may have come across in such fine publications as "TV Week," "Peoples," and "Seventeen." It is a common trait of humanity to look back into our past and categorize the events in our lives. Typically, I use categories such as "wasted my time" or "did not waste my time." With every passing moment, death comes closer to us all, so we must heap scorn upon the entertainment which fails to delight or enlighten!!!

With that said, here are 2004's top picks:

The Passion of the Christ

Finally, after years of hoping and waiting, the wishes of every religious fanatic came true. Mel Gibson created what they had always wanted to see: Jesus getting the shit beat out of him for two and a half hours. Evidently Jesus forgot to use the safe word. Now Mel tried to make it accurate by using Arameic, but it could have been Pig Latin and it's not like anyone would have checked. On the other hand, Mel left out Jesus' important last-minute commentary on transvestites:

118 [114]. Simon Peter says to them: "Let Mary go out from our midst, for women are not worthy of life!" Jesus says: "See, I will draw her so as to make her male so that she also may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who has become male will enter the Kingdom of heaven."

Here's another review from Reconstructed Belly Button

The Phantom of the Opera

Now here's a movie by Joel Schumacher that's based on the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber which in turn is based on the novel by Gaston Leroux. I think I heard somewhere that Gaston Leroux stole it from the Vikings. The main character is the "phantom" and looks like a cross between Jason from Friday the 13th and The Man Without A Face (starring Mel Gibson.) He could also be Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky after he gets in the car accident. Or maybe Jim Carrey as the Mask. Or Der Clown, who "stands up for the rights of the little people" and "fights crime with his face hidden by a plastic mask." Midgets have no greater ally. Come to think of it, there's lots of people in movies who hide their faces for some reason. Although this guy is the only one who sings about it.

Note that The Phantom of the Opera has nothing to do with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, unless you count the allusions to the fact that Anakin's going to get his face all burned up in lava.

The Passion of the Opera

For those who are unfamiliar with this year's most exciting event, it took place in Lincoln, Nebraska on April 2. Entitled "The Passion of the Opera!", it featured "brass and percussion instruments, soloists and an organ" and not one, but MORE THAN ONE "chorus." It was quite successful. Now I've got to hand it to these folks: I imagine that bringing culture to a place like Nebraska is something of an uphill battle. And that in and of itself is quite an endeavor considering that the state has no hills.

The performance inspired such utterances as "expansive," "smashing," and "wordsmith" from local reviewers.

So you know what comes next...

That's right...

The Man Dressed in a Bee Costume Caught Having An Affair on National Television

Congratulations on guessing that one correctly. Last night I watched the show "Cheaters," which involves suspicious people spying on their cheating scoundrel significant others. If you thought Jerry Springer was Lowest Common Denominator Television, in the words of Morpheus, you have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. Reality television is nearing it's apex: you can now feel jealousy vicariously if you so choose. And if you're human -- which I try to be -- you'll feel a whole lot of pity too.

So this particular episode involved a man who had been cheating on his girlfriend for (apparently) three months. The camera crew follows him, yadda yadda yadda, guilty. They chase him down at a gas station and confront him. The man and his mistress are dressed up for a costume party and are getting some money from an ATM. He's taken aback but procedes to vigorously defend himself. The bee suit does not lend credibility to his arguments. After the heart-broken "cheatee" girlfriend yells "Get the fuck out of here" repeatedly, he departs.

Now, the previous three entries fall into the category of "wastes my time." Which is why I did not view them (the Nebraska one being a little unfair since that would have required a plane trip.) You'd think the last one would too, but it actually wrapped around the "wastes-my-time/doesn't-waste-my-time" scale to have placed it somewhere between a weekend retreat reawakening and the barmitzvah I never had (I'm not Jewish) in terms of significance and entertainment value. I feel as if I am now one step closer to understanding the universe. Indeed, I am nearing true enlightenment. There are polka-dots in the sky and I feel lightheaded. So this is self-actualization.

When the Preachers are Converted

It's commonly accepted that one of the major goals of Al Qaeda is to "convert" us, although what this means is never really discussed. We generally accept that we're talking about religion, Christianity vs. Islam, and that if we don't fight "these people", we'll never get Christmas presents again. But that's not quite the reality here. It's related more to culture. We have a very different culture from Middle Eastern societies. Some of those differences can be traced to religion, but they're more a result of environment and history.

Nearly all Americans prefer the culture of the western world to the culture of the Middle East. The Western World has more freedom, more democracy, more tolerance, and better governance. The notion of being converted to a Middle Eastern culture is disconcerting to anyone who values these benefits of living in western societies. The United States was founded upon these same principles of freedom, democracy, tolerance (arguably more in principle than practice at first), and good governance. And during the 20th century, the U.S. helped lead Europe out of a time of constant struggle and into a union of countries that now spans the continent. And now we feel thrust upon the task of doing the same with the Middle East in order to bring democracy and freedom to people from Morocco to Kashmir.

The basis for this Middle Eastern culture also comes from a history of wars and ethnic conflict. The elements of trust and unity that existed in America in the period after our revolution are mostly nonexistent today in the Middle East. As you can see in Iraq, it's nearly impossible for each of the ethnic groups to cooperate to put together a working government, or even hold elections. In Europe in the early part of the 1900s, it would have been unthinkable for Poles, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Italians, and British to all be able to agree on mutual governance, but we have that today. The process leading up to the modern day E.U. was always a struggle between those who saw the benefits of western culture and those who adopted what we now think of as a Middle Eastern mentality of mistrust that keeps certain groups from working together.

The architects of the Iraq War and its biggest cheerleaders have always pointed to the rebuilding of Germany as the example that we're following as we attempt to rebuild Iraq in our image. But at the same time, they will point to 9/11 and say, "everything's changed" as a justification for everything from detaining terrorists, to torture, to the Patriot Act. In the battle of cultures that we now find ourselves in, these are ways in which the radicals of the Middle East have "converted" us to the culture that prevents democracy and forces freedom to take a backseat to security. In doing so, we've forgotten that we succeeded in rebuilding Germany, and eventually helping the nations of Europe come together, because our ideals of freedom and democracy won out among the people of that continent, not just because we had a military to force it to happen. Instead, we're now stuck in Iraq, where we've quickly adopted the Middle Eastern culture of mistrust and fear in order to maintain some semblance of security and governance. You'll find few people today who think that Iraqis are ready for democracy. Our attempts to "convert" them haven't worked, and much of that failure has been through an abandonment of our ideals.

In the days after September 11th, Ann Coulter famously said, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Unfortunately for Bin Laden and the Muslim radicals, not all of us will be so quick to convert.

Does anyone remember Palestine?

With all of the news about Iraq even being shouted down by the attention given to the Tsunami, it seems like Palestine has been almost completely forgotten in the mainstream television media. Fortunately, US News continues to do a solid job of talking to real people on the ground to see what's happening in the world (as opposed to talking head professors and analysts that go on television with third hand info...).

The Jan.10 US News contains an article called "A New Leader, Same Old Issues" about the upcoming election for a Palestinian leader. The favorite right now is Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen. According to US News, the average Palestinian sees Abbas as the US and Israel's choice, and many feel powerless even with an election - figuring that who the US and Israel want will win either way. (What is it about our electoral system that might give them that idea?)

What was really striking about this article, however, was the duality the reporters - Larry Derfner and Khaled Abu Toameh - illustrated between Palestine's "ruling elite" and the rest of the Palestinians. They talk about how Abu Mazeen rides around with an Israeli security detail in a convoy of limos, mercedes and BMWs. The average man - taxi drivers being interviewed in this case - sees this display and thinks, "that's where all of our money went. That's what my family fought and died for - so Abu Mazen can ride around in a fancy car."

Further, the article talks about how the intifada set Palestinians back 50 years because so much money, effort, death and destruction has gone into or come out of this fight with Israel. The Palestinian people, it says, are tired of fighting and not being able to just live their lives. They see that the intifada accomplished nothing, according to this article. In the meantime, people like Abu Mazen are rich...and think about how much money Arafat took out of Palestine and stashed in bank accounts around the world - literally billions.

In the end, more than a million Palestinians are living in squalor with little hope for their personal futures. These people have been abused by their own leaders and made pawns in the political wrangling that's gone on among the PLO, Hamas, Fatah Israel and the US. Now Arafat is dead, the Palestinian leadership is up for grabs, and the future for Palestinians is a huge question mark.

Though I am a Jew, I have never jumped on the Zionist bandwagon that painted Arafat as a terrorist and an enemy of Israel. In this case - who cares about whether he was an enemy of Jews or Israel. He was an enemy to his own people. His legacy consists of more than a million people with no jobs, no money, no hope and a lot of experience burying the shredded remains of their loved ones. But the US did nothing to stop him from abusing and stealing from these people, though somehow just that sort of thing was enough of a reason for the US to invade Iraq.

It's very difficult to believe that a Palestinian election will end with a result that benefits the people of Palestine, as opposed to the policies of Israel and the US. These poor people are likely to remain pawns, ground down under the boots of the power hungry warmongers that surround them, increasing their hatred for the US and Israel. To me, this is the real danger of our hypocrisy. We talk about liberating people and lifting them up, but in the end we just exploit them and breed hatred by taking hope, sovereignty, money and their homes away from them.

We're breeding new revolutionaries in places like the west bank and Fallujah. I call them revolutionaries because that's what you are when you're fighting for your own life, rights and beliefs against an authoritative group that seeks to deny those rights to you. Whatever a terrorist is, it's not the 12 year old kid in Gaza or Fallujah who knows nothing but war, invasion, destruction and how to clean the Ak-47 he just picked up off his brother's dead body.

Does Anyone Know...?

President Bush has one of the most ethnically/gender diverse cabinets ever. Has anyone seen a printed report anywhere that lists each cabinet member's record on race/ethnicity/gender issues? Does Bush deserve some kind of "liberal" credit for choosing someone other than old white guys, even if they are "yes men?" Having a black woman as secretary of state and a hispanic man as attorney general, for example, are in essence good signs of progress...but not if these people do nothing to advance african americans and hispanic americans in the process.

Karl Rove Just Gets More Frightening

Karl Rove has been all over Time, Newsweek and US News lately. These magazines tend to produce features about some of the same topics, so certain stories about Rove have been reiterated numerous times. For starters, big surprise here, he was a know-it-all little kid who was heavily involved in grade school politics. He considered himself "a Nixon man" while working on a Bush Sr. campaign during which he met Dubya.

Apparently, he was sent to pick Dubya up at the airport where he fell in love at first sight. The various magazines each describe a scene where Dubya struts off the jetway wearing a bomber jacket and cowboy boots, and Rove is overcome by his charisma (which I take to mean he ejaculated on himself). Rove has been Dubya's little worker bee since. Dubya's domestic policy, and some of his foreign policy, is driven and even dictated by Rove who has a hand in every domestic issue except for major league baseball, according to Rove himself.

Basically, Rove is to Dubya what Smithers is to Mr. Burns. Given what little confidence I have in Dubya, I now take even less comfort in knowing that the guy who's really running things in the background is the kind of person who'd fall in love with Dubya at first sight.

His Favorite Martian

This week I'm giving out the first ever Intergalactic Concrete Dildo to Selwyn Duke from TheRant. The reason for such special acclaim is that Mr. Duke has managed not only to insult the intelligence of humans with this column, but he's managed to insult the intelligence of extraterrestrials as well.

A Space Alien’s View of the Separation of Church & State

When Logos came to our solar system from a galaxy far, far away to study the decline of American Civilization, he found our tendency to make life or death political decisions based on emotion to be profoundly fascinating.

The invasion of Iraq? Opposition to global warning? Impractical tax cuts? Banning euthanasia? The Federal Marriage Amendment?

He analyzed many aspects of our society, but on no issue was our dislocation from reality more acute than on the separation of church and state.

Actually, wouldn't he have found the fact that few people on earth believe in extraterrestrials to be their biggest dislocation from reality?

We live inside the box, making the transcending of the boundaries and suppositions of a debate – which is often a prerequisite for cutting to the heart of the matter and revealing the truth – rare indeed.

This box sounds a lot like a television tuned to Fox News.

So let’s see if we can benefit from the insights of an outsider looking in, one Logos, who resides outside the box of our time and place and its attendant assumptions, and inside the box of logic, where no obfuscating emotion dare tread.

I had no idea that inventing space aliens was the best way to approach questions of logic. I guess I should spend some time with Selwyn in outer space.

An impartial observer of this sort would first be struck by the obsession we have with purging every remnant of religious expression from our public sphere.

Logos was struck by the amount of religious expression in the public sphere, as it reminded him of his home planet, where his inability to worship freely caused him to build a spaceship and come to Earth.

Of course, Logos would find no constitutional basis for such a complete rending of our religious traditions, but those of us who have read the Constitution already know it doesn’t exist.

Nor could Logos find a single person who actually wanted to rend any of our religious traditions.

Anyway, one way or another the law eventually takes the shape of the morality of its creators. Moreover, analysis of the law has been done ad infinitum by we terrestrials and doesn’t titillate the intellect like analysis of its moral justifications, so let’s boil this issue down to its bare essence.

Remember, we're using logic rather than emotion here, so putting aside analysis of the law to discuss morality is essential. Nitwit.

Logos first may ask a very simple question: if these ideas really have been handed down by God, the Creator of the Universe, don’t you have an obligation to infuse your every institution, including the public ones, with them? Have you not then been enjoined to inculcate children with them, in as well as out of school?

Logos sounds a lot like Pat Robertson. Are we sure he's not just kissing up so that we'll lift the ban on interspecies marriage?

I think it's time for Selwyn's fastball. Bring the heat!

Except, you see, there’s one minor detail that it overlooks. For Logos will respond, “If they are man-made just like the secular ideas, why do you distinguish between the former and latter? Why do you insist that these man-made ideas that we call “secular” are grist for the public mill, but these man-made ideas that we call “religious” cannot be. If they’re all man-made, wherein lies the difference?

When Logos was asked to give an example of a "secular" idea that was grist for the public mill, he mumbled into his tie, but Selwyn just pretended not to be at the other end.

This is how you put the secularists in a box, for they will be trapped. For, in either case, there is no justification for excluding religious ideas from the public square.

Well, except for the fact that numerous courts have ruled that the government can't endorse a particular religion. But Logos doesn't care about courts, or logic. He's an alien.

It transforms the debate from “Do they deserve equal status with secular ideas or lesser?” to “Do they deserve equal status with secular ideas or greater?” If these ideas are simply man-made, then the distinction between them and secular ones is a false one, ergo they enjoy equivalency. If, however, these ideas originated in the Infinite Mind, then they must take precedence in all things over mere products of limited minds.

The Infinite Mind? Good thing we're still using logic here.

One frailty of limited human minds, however, is that they often cling to old, mistaken ideas long past the time when they should have been disabused of them.

Selwyn, you. are. not. an. alien. Get some help.

So, alas, the debate wouldn’t end there. The next tactic might be to claim that these “man-made ‘religious’ ideas” are offensive to many who don’t hold them.

Welcome to TheRant.us, where aliens argue with strawmen.

But Selwyn is just getting warmed up. Here's some more "logic" from outside the box.

In reality, while that space in the core of one’s being should be occupied by God, when He is not there, something else will most surely be. And make no mistake, that something else can be anything under the sun and often burns with the fires of a thousand zealous passions.

It can be anything under the sun? Can it be a can of beer? A beach ball? A 1992 Nissan Maxima? What the &#^$ are you talking about?

Just think about an old-line Marxist and his formulaic devotion to his own communist creed. Such a person would so often find a reality that contradicts his ideology staring him right in the face and simply dismiss it with the mantra, “That is not what ‘The Party’ says.”

If he was smart, he would've invented a fictional alien who came to Earth to back up his beliefs. It was that lack of logical instinct that caused the Soviet Union to fail.

Bring it home, Selwyn!!

Although, you need not reach beyond today’s political fashions to find such blind faith in secular ideologies. You only have to look at eco-terrorists who burn homes or SUVs, feminists who see the shadowy hand of a patriarchy around every corner and cast everything as a battle of the sexes, white or black supremacists, to whom race is the greatest value, or homosexual activists who wear their sexual proclivities on their shirtsleeves. You need not wonder why these folks will protest on the streets with twisted faces and snarling voices. You need not wonder why they are so doctrinaire, why it’s so difficult to appeal to them with reason: it’s because they have made their ideology their raison d’etre, and woe betide the hapless soul who should question their orthodoxy.

No one is proposing the establishment of a national religion

So if we're to believe Selwyn here, there are widespread national movements of eco-terrorists, psychotic feminists, racists, and angry gays that are all on the verge of taking over this country, but there isn't anyone who wants to establish a national religion. What? That may be the craziest fucking shit I've ever heard.

It’s time to stop trying to put God in a box; instead, we must put the misbegotten separation of church and state argument where it belongs: a pine box. If we do not, that is most assuredly where our civilization will end up.

And it was a sad ending for Logos too, after he asked Bill O'Reilly what a Christmas Tree is and was promptly sent back to his home planet.

Nobel Prize in Marketing 2005

The Nobel Prize committee gives awards every year in the categories of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace, and economics. But what about marketing? The science behind getting people to buy shit is sometimes just as impressive as anything Einstein ever came up with. What's that, you say? Marketing is the scourge of civilization and all marketing people should be dragged into the street and shot?

Well, sorry, but that's not what the Nobel Prize is about. They've given physics prizes to people who built atomic bombs and they've given peace prizes to terrorists. Hell, even Alfred Nobel himself invented dynamite, which just made me check to see if they ever gave a Nobel Prize in Literature to Jimmie Walker.

So it's only natural that they give an award to those individuals who break new ground in the world of advertising a product. With new challenges to marketers such as TiVo, increased illiteracy, a bad economy, and our nation's blinding passionate hatred of advertising, I hope to nominate several businesses and individuals who break new ground in this very competitive field.

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Nomination #1 - 1-800 Water Damage

1-800 Water Damage is a franchise company that recently moved its headquarters from the Bay Area to Seattle. The franchises work with homeowners to repair water damage. It plans to grow to 300 franchises in the next five years. But for now, they plan to "flood the market", and this week, Seattle residents found out exactly what that means.

All throughout Seattle, the company put up yellow signs on the sides of roads, similar to the picture below.



Naturally, it confused drivers (which is admittedly not hard to do in Seattle) and raised the ire of the local Department of Transportation. Drivers couldn't call the number because they were already on the phone, and it wasn't even supposed to rain this week. So why was this good?

Well, because it made the local news, that's why! Mission accomplished. People tend to forgive you for creating a driving hazard when their basement is flooded. And it's that kind of thinking that puts you in the running for the Nobel Prize in Marketing.

Myth vs. Opinion

I'd been planning to write a post about how there's a strange disconnect I'm beginning to have with people who consider themselves centrists, but unfortunately Publius at Legal Fiction already wrote a great post about this in October in regards to Team America: World Police that sums up a lot of my thoughts perfectly, but I want to summarize it and bring up another revelant point concerning how we view facts in politics.

On Centerfield a few months back, I had asked the main blogger there, Rick Heller, what he thought a centrist was, and he felt that it could be measured by percentages. You take some online survey with questions on all the issues and based on those opinions, you're either on the left, on the right, or in the center. I can't argue with that definition. But I'm beginning to feel right now that centrism is not so much a function of moderation as much as it is a belief that both Michael Moore and Sean Hannity are nuts and therefore being somewhere in the middle is right.

Matt and Trey, the producers of South Park and Team America, proudly consider themselves centrists when it comes to politics, and they truly dislike the fact that everyone gets painted as either left or right in this country. Though they admittedly don't care as much about politics as it may appear from watching their show and their movies.

This was a quote from Trey in an interview:

Just like everything we do — and the “South Park” movie was this way, too — [our scripts] always start off being about 120 pages of politics and basically expository crap. And then you whittle it down and whittle it down, and you start to look at stuff, and then you realize, “Okay, the funniest stuff is watching a puppet falling out of a car — and that’s what the movie’s really about.” [laughs] You weed it out and let the politics take a back seat. Because I know I’m sick of politics. It’s more about f***in’ up puppets.

South Park has been one of my favorite shows on TV for years, but I've learned over time not to take their politics too seriously, mainly because you can easily tell that they don't. And with the political climate of the country right now, that disconnect is really beginning to show.

The disconnect comes, as Publius points out so well, that the arguments of the left and the right have to be weighed equally against the facts to be able to say that a centrist position is either the most wise or the closest to the truth. When it came to the Iraq War, we weren't talking about some nebulous philosophical debate between "being weak" and "being strong" where you naturally want to be somewhere in the middle. We were talking about whether or not invading a country was the right strategy in the War on Terror. So while over here in reality, we were trying to ascertain facts, too many centrists like Matt and Trey seemed to think that it was just detached celebrities and hippies arguing with military men and racists, and that the right answer was somewhere in the middle.

Well, no, it wasn't. And this leads into the main point of this post. There's a very big difference between an opinion and a myth. I had a conversation recently with someone on the right who felt that believing in things such as Saddam's links to terrorism or that believing that the inspectors weren't given access to Iraqi sites in the beginning of 2003 were opinions, and that if you were on the right, you had a valid reason for having those opinions. Again, no, you don't. You can't believe in things that aren't true and just call it your opinion because it supports your position. The problem I see with centrists today is that they're looking at people on the right who are saying, "Everything in Iraq is going great, we're just not getting the good news," and considering that as valid an opinion as the person who admits that things are disastrously bad, despite the fact that one 'opinion' is based on reality and the other 'opinion' is clearly a myth.

I've stopped going to Centerfield since they non-sarcastically posted links to Chrenkoff, who's still trying like mad to convince everyone there's a ton of good news in Iraq that no one wants to report. I truly worry about this country when even people who have understood the value of moderation well enough to become centrists are now believing in fairy tales in order to still feel centrist.

Reload Caption Contest

Blogging may be light this week, trying to get the final push on my electrical work here done, and I'm not exactly sure if any of my co-bloggers are back yet from holiday...



Entertain me.

Bad Logic 101

From Cliff May at The Corner:

(But for the MSM, it’s an article of faith – what else can you call it? -- that the Saddam-Zarqawi relationship does not constitute a link between Baathists and Jihadists. They’re rivals, you see? But to suggest that rivals can’t be engaged in the same business is akin to saying that the Yankees and the Red Sox can’t both be baseball teams because, after all, they play against each other.)

Using sports as an analogy for real life is pretty dangerous territory to start with, but this one is especially dumb. If you continue on with May's logic, it leads to a new strategy for the Mariners to win the World Series this year. They just need to make all the other teams unite against them so that they only have to play one team, with all the best players on it. Without having to play 29 other teams, they can just focus on one. And the fact that Barry Bonds, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Mark Mulder, Scott Rolen, Sammy Sosa, Eric Gagne, and Jim Thome are all on that team is just an inconvenient fact that the MSM points out to dash the Mariners' confidence.

Catblogging

You know you love it...

The liberal press must be stopped

The Fuhrer made another appearance last night to write a review for his favorite author. Please vote.

2004 in the Rear-View Mirror

This week, The Stranger listed out its regrets for 2004. Among them was this:

On November 4, Stranger news reporters Erica C. Barnett and Sandeep Kaushik wrote a story about Seattle-area political bloggers that was pretty much the lamest article either reporter has ever written.

I knew that when I started this blog that there would be no limits to my own lameness, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I'd be able to inspire lameness in others. How did this happen? Well, I still don't know. But with the new year beginning, I think it's time for me to give an explainer on what the hell this site is all about, so that we can perhaps curtail its ability to spread any more lameness.

The story of Reload began with the Frenchman, Frenchgilles, who used the term 'Reload' (a software term) to describe the act of refilling a pint glass from the pitcher during our regular Friday happy hour at the Mustard Seed Too in Bellevue.

The first version of 'Reload' was an internal email alias at our work where we'd send funny links and news articles to each other. In the spring, though, we took the link down due to fears that we might actually get fired for the crap we were sending around. At the same time, I had just begun reading blogs like Altercation and Sadly No! and realized that it was an even better format for our online discussions and another place for me to write the stuff that I usually wrote on Slate along with Greenwave (who is "covoj" on Slate). After about two weeks of incredibly futile attempts at building a blog site from scratch, Jose pointed me to Blogger and Blog Reload was born.

The Concrete Dildo was also an invention of the Frenchman, who has supposedly used that terminology in meetings at work as a way to accurately describe the pain of implementing a certain design. We're pretty sure he's full of shit, but the term itself made us laugh, and as we've watched politicians and pundits do and say things that we know could cause us serious pain, we've found a new use for it.

The other members of Reload have been busy these days, on and off the blog (mostly off).

Boss Tweed has become the blogosphere's foremost expert on bees.

Jose just got married back home in Puerto Rico.

Unofficial member The Texan is turning Japanese.

Greenwave started a new job and will hopefully blog again when the election stops pissing him off.

Mourad is back in his native Egypt for the first time since the events of September 11, which altered the ability of many brown people to easily get in and out of this fine country.

Bobby is doing some hardcore home repair projects but is talking about reviving the weekly Happy Hour. Nice.

Kabulrocks just moved into a nice new house, and I'm looking forward to the first official gathering in the "Pelican room"

Marc and another unofficial member, the Italian, are expecting to become fathers for the first time in the next two months. It was nice knowing them.

Frenchgilles is still perpetuating every bad stereotype of French people we know.

Kermit is swamped with work right now, but I hope he returns to write some stuff this good again.

And theher still puts up with my ass, for reasons unknown.

In addition to the Reload Crew in Seattle, I also invited a couple of old friends from the East Coast, Edward, Catfish Johnny Redbeard, and Subhero, as well, but they have their own projects. Edward and Catfish have started up a blog for New York Knicks fans and continue in their efforts to keep Patrick "Foothands" Ewing out of the Hall of Fame. Subhero is the webmaster of Blird and I'm still holding my breath.

So, have a Happy New Year, and I hope that this site remains a place with some interesting perspectives, a few laughs, some good discussion, and if time and motivation permit, possibly some cool extra features from some ideas that have been rattling around in my head. For now, here are some of the greatest hits of 2004.

The Wizard of Oz post.
Boss Tweed gets his Shakespeare on
Devo was Right
Reload's Theocracy Mentorship Program
The Live Story tenth anniversary
Greenwave finds legendary hypocrisy