Category: Uncategorized

A commenter on my “Edumacation” post says we’ve come a long way in the 80 years since the Scopes Monkey Trial, where John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in the public schools.

I don’t think we’ve come very far at all. If anything, in the United States right now we’ve circled around to the beginning again. I believe that the likelihood of another Scopes Trial, with the same outcome, is more likely today than it has been in decades.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine that in 1962, at the height of the space race, that President Kennedy publicly advocated teaching creationism (as it was called then, in a less PR-saturated age) in the public schools alongside evolution.

I wonder how that would have gone over with the mainstream media and the public?

One of the most common witticisms uttered by the crapweasel right wing against people who protested Bush’s war in Iraq was, “Hey commie – if you don’t like it here, why don’t you just go to Iraq!”

Here’s my take on that idea:

Hey Michelle Malkin – you want to live in a country where immigrants are imprisoned? Better find somewhere else to live.

Hey Rick Santorum – want to live somewhere where gay people’s lives are against the law? Get the hell out of my country.

Hey La Shawn Barber and Rush Limbaugh – you want to live in a country where torture is state-sponsored? Grab your passport, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass.

Hey Bill O’Reilly – want religion taught in public school science classes? Find a country more to your liking, please. Lots to choose from out there.

Hey Dean Esmay and Connie du Toit – think dissent is treason? Just leave.

Just leave. Because with these profoundly un-American ideals, you don’t belong here.

UPDATE: A special shout-out to the utterly loathsome Kim du Toit, who wants to hang and/or shoot anyone to the left of Tom Tancredo. Kim, please haul your gun-obsessed ass to the border ASAP. You’re not welcome here.

When it comes to a host of topics, from abortion to child rearing, the crapweasels believe there is one and only one “correct” viewpoint. Anything else stinks of “relativism,” one of the most popular boogeymen used by the right wing.

Is every family equally valid? Is every sexual orientation equally valid? Every religion? No, scream the crapweasels. NO!

So it’s funny that when it comes to evolution and creationism, suddenly teachers have the “responsibility to let students know about all sides of the ‘debate’.” Suddenly, relativism is their bestest friend.

Americablog says it well.

UPDATE: On Tuesday night, Bill O’Reilly said that teaching kids science in science class is “fascism.” Dean Esmay, call your office. (Hat tip: Rude Pundit)

From La Shawn Barber:

I’ve been asked by several people where I stand on the Condi-for-president meme. I wouldn’t vote for Condoleezza Rice for president of the United States. First, I don’t think women generally have the sensibilities to run the country. Before you jump all over me, it’s important that you know I don’t care what you think. You’re reading this blog, so you obviously care what I think, so there it is.

Now there’s a potent stew of misogyny and hubris. And don’t get her started on “the ungodly” or why her fundamentalist Christian beliefs are absolutely not in conflict with her enthusiastic support of state-sponsored torture.

Charming lady, really.

In one of those news stories that can’t help but wake me up briefly from my outrage overload, President Bush yesterday explicitly advocated teaching “intelligent design” in schools alongside that most evil of secular humanist inventions, evolution.

Fucker.

Wonkette has the Quote of the Day:

“Teaching [intelligent design] as ‘alternative’ to evolution is a little like teaching ‘magic’ as an alternative to physics.”

Which reminds me of one of my favorite science stories. Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady from the audience came up to Russell. “What you have told us is rubbish,” she said. “Everyone knows that the world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

Russell chuckled at this and asked the woman, “Then ma’am, what is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”

It’s somewhat comical to me when I see these right-wingers tripping all over themselves to say how Condoleezza Rice would make a great President of the United States.

Here was a woman who was epically unqualified for her original job in the Bush II White House – a Sovietologist in the era of Islamic terrorism. As National Security Advisor, she presided over the greatest attack on U.S. national security in history – a massive failure on every level. (Out of 100 national security meetings the administration held before 9/11, only two were about terrorism.)

After 9/11, she became a major player in selling the Iraq War. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” she said about the Iraqi nuclear program, which at the time existed as doodles on a cocktail napkin.

She has never held any elective office whatsoever.

Hey! Sounds like a great candidate for Leader of the Free World!

It’s been a joke going around liberal circles that the way this administration awards failure, Karl Rove is going to be the next Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. With Condi, that concept becomes reality.

UPDATE: While I was writing this post, Dean Esmay was writing this.

February 24, 2001: “Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capacity with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” says Secretary of State Colin Powell. “He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

July 29, 2001: “We are able to keep [Saddam’s] arms from him,” NSC advisor Rice tells the media. “His military forces have not been rebuilt.”

Yeah.

Unlike Stewart’s earlier (well-deserved) dismantling of Bernard “100 People I Hate! Nyah!” Goldberg, Stewart was so sweet to Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum, I thought the two of them were going to go on a date after the taping. As others have said, Santorum is vulnerable in his district in 2006, and he got better than a free ride from Stewart. That’s damaging.

Stewart has shown that he can take the most intractable crapweasels and turn them inside out without raising his voice. Why he didn’t do it with Santorum, who spreads some of the most hateful rhetoric in the U.S. Senate, is a mystery.

I always chuckle when I hear Christian right and other anti-gay types start in with the “They’re trying to redefine marriage!” yelling, often while clutching a dictionary to their heaving breasts.

Because gay people like me can’t exactly redefine something that hasn’t been defined in the first place – at least, not the way they think it is.

The plain fact is, two people with opposite sex organs can saunter into a Justice of the Peace and create a legal civil marriage in this country with blood tests and signatures. That’s it. Nothing – nothing – else is required.

Not love. Not a promise to procreate. Not shared living quarters. Not shared philosophies, about child-rearing or anything else. Not fidelity, of any kind. They don’t even have to know each other. One penis and one vagina? You’re in.

So I would suggest that if all these things are so important, if all these things are so crucial to the survival of the society, these people should start requiring them of their straight brethren. Physician, heal thyself, as they say. Because right now, straight people are disrespecting their favorite institution much worse than any gay person is able to.

Great stuff from insane old man Paul Harvey:

“Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans. Yes, that was biological warfare! And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever. And we grew prosperous. And, yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves. And so it goes with most nation-states, which, feeling guilty about their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded, and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry and up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.”

No surprise that the Freepers are lining up to celebrate Harvey’s ode to nukes, slavery and genocide. LaShawn Barber, Kim du Toit and Dean Esmay will no doubt be close behind.

America – FUCK YEAH!