Parrot Cage

There is joy to be taken from Republicans behind bars...

...and that usually commences soon after lockdown.

Rush Limbaugh gets arrested for his oxy-contin addiction.  Welcome to the salty bulbous head of the drug war.  Limbaugh probably won't spend a day in jail: his drug of choice holds no mandatory minimums.  No, Limbaugh will be off the hook if he simply follows through with his rehab program.

Must be nice.  Rich Republican pornographers who stoke the fires of this horrific War on Drugs, which has destroyed more lives than the drugs they are saving us from, get a wink and a nod to indulge their chemical passions.

We don't think anyone, even a douchebag like Limbaugh, should receive anything other than treatment for the crime of addiction.  But as that fat bastard puffs away on his cigar and issues talking points to your idiot brother-in-law, consider the victims of themselves who become victims of the state. It's enough to provoke Republicans-in-prison rape fantasies.

New Orleans Mayoral Race--Which One Do They Deserve?

The New Orleans mayoral race will go into a runoff between Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu (brother of hapless Senator Mary Landrieu) and current mayor Ray Nagin.  While Nagin was the only established black candidate in the race, it is surprising that he has any suport at all in New Orleans.  Nagin's inept management of the disaster within his city almost makes him an honorary Bush.  Then again, with all the brown-nosing he's had to do with the administration, is it any wonder the guy's lost in chocolate city?

Another Hitchens Smackdown

Notoriously ill-reasoned Bush apologist Christopher Hitchens continues to defend discredited facts long after they've been dismissed by everyone else.  In the last two weeks he has concentrated his venom on Ambassador Joe Wilson who exposed the Iraq-Niger connection as nonsense.

Hitchens is insisting that, forged documents notwithstanding, Saddam Hussein was desperately trying to purchase Uranium from Niger.  And he is attacking Wilson primarily for making a laughingstock of such suggestions.

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson rather impolitely puts a boot up Hitchens' ass.

Saddam's ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, made a trip to Niger to, as a literate person can understand from Wilson's account, encourage African statesmen to break the diplomatic sanctions against Iraq which, along with their connection to all other UN sanctions, were devastating the country.

Hitchens' alternate theory is that Zahawie had no other business in Africa but to purchase uranium for bomb-making since poor Niger is merely:

a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore.

For a while Hitchens was saying that the ultimate evidence of Saddam's WMDs lay in the garden bed of Iraqi engineer Mahdi Obeidi.  In his book The Bomb in My Garden (and soon to be a Johnny Depp-produced film) Obeidi tells of how he built a centrifuge prototype for Saddam in the 1980's, but buried it in his garden when UN inspections took force following the first Gulf War.  Components and blue prints for the centrifuge prototype were abandoned and forgotten since 1991; any sane person would see this story as ultimate evidence of Saddam's impotency, not his danger.  However, Hitchens has championed this book as the smoking gun in Saddam's quest for WMD.  Compare the centrifuge prototype to Iran's functioning centrifuges. Then ask yourself what Saddam could have possibly done with any uranium, had he actually been seeking it.  With only a prototype of an uranium enriching device buried in parts of a small garden, Saddam would have been better off mass-producing glow-in-the-dark Spiderman watches.

Of the many ridiculous claims Hitchens has made about Saddam's nuclear ambitions the fantastical Niger connection isn't even the most absurd.  Hitchens' claim that Saddam was attempting to buy nuclear ICBMs from North Korea "off the shelf" stands in a class all by itself.  Mind you, the "off the shelf" wording is what is most laughable.  That North Korea is even capable of producing nuclear weapons is a source of some debate.  The only people convinced of North Korea's bomb-making abilities are the same folk that assured us Saddam was days away from nuclear proliferation.  Even sillier still, North Korea would have to create some kind of delivery system for a nuclear device for it to be even practical.  North Korea's rocketry skills are commensurate to their skills at producing NBA stars. 

If Christopher Hitchens imagines that Kim Jung Il is stocking his shelves with nuclear ICBMs for sale, there's almost nothing he can't imagine.  Few are served when imagination is the crucial rationale in debates of war and conquest.

The Fox News Exit Strategy in the War on Holidays

Media Matters uncovers Bill O'Reilly contradicting himself, again.  The unstable Fox staple warned of a War on Easter, and then became incensed that anyone would accuse him of fabricating a War on Easter.  Many people think Bill O'Reilly is just a moron, but we actually think this could be the Fox News exit strategy in the War on Holidays (those with pseudo-Christian pretexts, as opposed to those holidays which Christians really do want to destroy).

Come Christmas time O'Reilly and Fox cohorts will be tempted to beat the War on Christmas drum, except they've already used up all their material: the stuff they either seriously exaggerated, misrepresented, or completely manufactured. 

We remember O'Reilly telling Dave Letterman about a school in Wisconsin who allegedly changed the lyrics to Silent Night to excise Jesus from the traditional Christmas song.  This incident was central to the Fox News anti-Christmas theme and has been repeated by numerous white ringers, mooniebots, and John Gibson--the stupidest man on television.  This Wisconsin fairy tale has since been exposed as a complete ruse: the song in question was part of a copyrighted Christmas play which freely borrows from traditional Christmas carols and was written by a devout Presbyterian.

With their chickenshit grievances and boogieman stories, how long can they really sustain the War on Holidays illusion with a straight face?  How long can they cling to the "Happy Holidays is an insult" battle cry?

Well, the Fox News and white-ringer media chorus may have profited from exploiting Christianist paranoia, but they aren't true theocrats, they're a business.  And it looks like this faux crusade may be reaching the point to where it isn't even credible to Republicans.

No, my friends, it looks like the War on Christmas is winding down.  O'Reilly and his ilk will declare victory: claiming that their militant efforts have intimidated Christmas-haters into submission.  After declaring a fictional victory in a fictional war, Fox and friends will head on home to more pressing issues... like the disappearance of Natalee Holloway.

The Godless Few

While we've always known that atheism (or whatever you want to call the reasoned conclusion that religious people are nuts) is an exclusive club, we found CBS News' recent headline rather wishful:

For Almost All Americans, There is God

Now, while we always relish our own deviancy, that "almost all" insistence doesn't quite come close to an accurate summary of their opinion poll finding that around 80% of Americans believe in god. 

Recent population samplings have suggested that Latinos make up around 20% of the American public.  Naturally, the geniuses at CBS News would have to conclude with a bold headline: 

Almost All Americans Are Not Latino

or the associative of that...

Almost No Americans Are Latino

We know the other 80% would like to wish us away, but we're here and we know the rest of you are weird.

Pink and the Brain

Ooow Gawd! Do we have to start liking Pink now?

Actually, when she started hanging out with Linda Perry, we figured she couldn't be all bad.  And now that she's done a killer anti-Bush song with the Indigo Girls, we may be forced to ignore her pop tart origins and Top 40 sensibility and actually start listening to her music.

She's been called smart, but obviously not smart in the ways to curb over indulgences in either fashion or liquor or the heeby-jeebies.

Oh, money and idleness can grind even the finest minds to mush.  Luckily, this one seems salvageable. 

Maybe she'll hook up with Medea Benjamin for a little color-coded solidarity.

Anti-War Dust-Up at UC Santa Cruz

Military recruiters were unceremoniously driven from a job fair at UC Santa Cruz.  We've either participated in or been witness to many of these kind of incidents and know better than to trust msm accounts to get it right, so compare with indymedia accounts.

We actually happen to have a few insider takes on this event. 

• These Santa Cruz anti-war folk are serious motherfuckers.  They aren't cowed by accusations of being anti-patriotic and they will get in your face.  And where most would-be peaceniks balk at saying or doing anything remotely anti-military, or anything upsetting to the myth of the soldier saint, these Santa Cruz cats will tear it up.  In many ways, they embody the anti-American hippie stereotype which white-ringers love to hate and build much of their identity around.

• Also, one of our friends had a chance to chat with Captain William Griffin who was on the receiving end of the anti-recruitment furor.  Seems the guy has a rather, uh, progressive attitude about the whole incident.  He was slated to appear on many of the cable news shows.  We haven't heard what he said on the air, but privately he was delighted that there is some passion and conviction left in America's youth.

Naturally, this whole incident has been an answer to the prayers of unhinged mooniebots.  At last they have the America-hating hippie scum they've so wanted to attack--and just when they need them most.  They've been champing at the treason bit for too long, and Michael Moore was never quite incriminating enough on his own.  Truly, manna from heaven for fascists.

When Economists Go Bad

For those who don't know the likes of John Lott, he's a gun fetishist researcher who has published some books suggesting, well, the title of his most popular book says it all: More Guns, Less Crime.
Lott recently filed a lawsuit against highly respected economist and co-author of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt.

If you've read Freakonomics (and if you haven't, we strongly recommend it), you know that Levitt isn't exactly "rabidly anti-gun", nor is he a fan of John Lott.  The lawsuit targets a particular statement in Freakonomics:

According to Levitt's book: "When other scholars have tried to replicate [Lott's] results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime."

But according to Lott's lawsuit: "In fact, every time that an economist or other researcher has replicated Lott's research, he or she has confirmed Lott's conclusion."

By suggesting that Lott's results could not be replicated, Levitt is "alleging that Lott falsified his results," the lawsuit says.

Factually, the dispute is a matter of semantics.  Lott claims that the studies which debunk his pro-gun findings did not "replicate" his methodology, but used different approaches to the same data.  Given Lott's specious methodologies, meticulously "replicating" their flaws is something few credible researchers would have any interest in.

Tim Lambert at Deltoid is our primary source for many of Lott's scandals, unscrupulous behavior and dubious research.  We're not sure which is the more fun fact about Lott: that he created a pseudonym (Mary Rosh) to pay himself some gushing compliments on internet bulletin boards, or that he cited as evidence in his pro-gun book a survey which he supposedly financed by himself, involved unknown persons, has no documentation of any sort, and produced strange, almost impossible results.

This guy is gonna get creamed in court.  With Lott's feeble credibility, why would he want a libel suit that accuses Levitt of ruining his reputation when he's done all the heavy lifting himself?  Quite simply, Lott probably has nothing left to lose.  He lost his cushy job at the American Enterprise Institute last year, and when conservative think tank scams have no use for you, that leaves precious few job opportunities as a "researcher".

Oddly enough, AEI fellow Ted Franks notes the lawsuit on his overlawyered.com blog with a nearly audible tsk-tsk.  Fun fact: Ted Franks wrote the glowing review of More Guns, Less Crime as featured on Amazon.  An Amazon update may be forthcoming.

McCain on the ropes

Some Carpenter's Union brothers heckled and booed Arizona Senator John McCain for telling them that they didn't have the work ethic of immigrant laborers. 

Lately, in his next bid for the Presidency, McCain has jumped ship from the Straight Talk Express.  His position on immigration seems an appeasement to his corporate overlords, while holding hands with Jerry Falwell is his desperate wink to the religious white.

Too bad it took Jon Stewart to get McCain to confess to sucking up to the base.

In an effort to please everyone, McCain could very well end up appealing to no one.  McCain has a very Catholic approach to politics: there's no level of degradation that can't be apologized for and repented of later.  McCain grossly overestimates the forgiving nature of the voting public.

No Lama on your Mayo?

The Dalai Lama will be giving a speech at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota.  The Mayo Clinic is a world-renowned medical facility which has treated thousands of critical needs patients over the years.

To some, the arrival of the Dalai Lama poses a greater risk than cancer.  The local Christian fundamentalists got wind of the upcoming visit by "His Holiness" and threw an unholy fit.   Remember Dana Carvey's Church Lady?  Well, she goes by the name of Jan Markell and is organizing a prayer against the heathen holyman.  Seems the Dalai Lama's great offense lies in not accepting Jesus Christ as his personal savior--a significant ommission in many Buddhist clerics.

Now, as atheists--and protestant atheists at that--we don't often find ourselves pulling for one religion against the other.  Not all religions are equally toxic, but they are equally indefensible.  However, let's take a stand on this one.  The Dalai Lama may be a difficult man to take seriously.  Nevermind the whole reincarnation nonsense, the guy offers less wisdom than a basket of fortune cookies.  But he does preach non-violence and, sadly, that's a rare commodity in religious figures.  So, we say "Go Lama!"

While we may be irreligious, we resent anyone who may prevent us from converting to any religion we choose.  Even if it isn't Christianity.