What, no hearing protection FOR THE CHILDREN?

Other than that moment of amusement, I was not particularly happy with my decision to check the NYT's headlines this morning.

Here's one measure of how crazy desperate to oppose all things Obama some rich wingnuts have become:

The most mysterious of the new groups is Use Your Mandate. Portraying itself as a gay rights group, it has sent mailers to voters in seven states — including New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Montana — and run television ads against Mr. Hagel in New York and Washington. It has sent out posts on Twitter questioning his gay rights record and asking, “Is this what we worked so hard for?”

Which seems like it'd be about as effective as becoming a drag queen to boost Tupperware sales. Oh, wait.

Another measure of their desperation? Michael Goldfarb is a fundraiser in this anonymously funded campaign to Save America From Hagel. If you're giving money to Michael Goldfarb, you've really lost your mind.

I confess I could not make it very far through the article about the pushers.

The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle.

What, and not in high heels and a bikini?

The caption for this picture is NOT "The bus driver said, 'Hold my beer and watch this.'"

Yes, it's probably in bad taste, since there were some sad consequences. Sorry, couldn't help myself. My inner eight-year-old said, "Cool!"

What's the only force that can make good people do evil things?

"It's just high school kids being kids and administrators doing what they do on a daily basis -- keeping kids safe," Carney said …

"Carney" being Riverhead High School superintendent Nancy Carney and "keeping kids safe" being suspending students for Tebowing in the school hallway.

(h/t: Twitter trending topics | title: cf.)

Be advised: there IS a difference

The beer tasted fine, if a bit citrusy, but I had a hell of a time getting a good finish on my bookcase.

Report on "Rampant Child Prostitution" Exposed as Bullshit

You should have a look at Nick Pinto's cover story in The Village Voice, "Women's Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study Is Junk Science."

I'd be the last person to advocate turning a blind eye to the problem of girls being forced into prostitution, but it doesn't help when an advocacy group hires a PR firm to put together a study that is so easily called into question. And it really doesn't help when lazy reporters so uncritically retype press releases.

Thers is right: the rebuttal from The Schapiro Group -- the firm whose study Pinto lambastes -- is a powerful fertilizer such that none may abide its smell.

Hurrah! Our democracy republic is saved!

In news of GOP priorities:

Legislature passes bill to teach U.S. is republic

A bill that would ensure Utah students learn the U.S. is a compound constitutional republic — not a democracy — has passed both Houses of the Legislature and is now headed to the governor for his signature.

HB220 would require schools to teach students that the U.S. is a compound constitutional republic and about other forms of government such as pure democracy, monarchy and oligarchy along with political philosophies and economic systems such as socialism, individualism and free-market capitalism. The Senate passed the bill with no dissenting votes Monday.

And on Tuesday, the House agreed to wording changes made in the Senate.

Eh, no big deal, right? Legislatures pass dumb symbolic things all the time, right? Yada, yada, we recognize thus and such, let's move on to real business …

The bill passed after weeks of debate over the differences between democracies and republics and whether socialism is a form of government or a philosophy.

Opponents of the bill argued that the concepts within it are already being taught and that the Legislature shouldn’t get involved in curriculum matters.

But on Monday, Senate floor sponsor Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Eagle Mountain, said in some states children are being indoctrinated in socialism via some curriculum.

“This is happening at least in some places in our country, so I believe this is all the more important in this state, so that we can protect our children from such curriculum,” Madsen said.

Sometimes there are no words.

(h/t: Jack Stuef | x-posted)

STFUpChuck

Oh, hey, look. That sad little old man with the bad dye job is yelling into his typewriter about the liberals brainwashing your children in their liberal public schools. Again.

Stuef is correct to mock Chuck Norris's "real news headlines" claim.

I Googled the first: it led to FreeRepublic, which led to Townhall. I Googled the second. It led to WorldNetDaily. I Googled the third. Okay, looks like this one wasn't just a wingnut wankfest, not that this headline seems particularly controversial. (Kids ask for information! And free stuff! The horror!) I Googled the fourth. WorldNetDaily again. The fifth: FoxNews. The sixth: ditto. The seventh? Looks maybe okay -- Yahoo -- but clicking the link shows it's from the "Yahoo contributor network," which may earn bonus points for truth in advertising, one concedes. In this case, the networker is someone named Sheryl Young. You make the call.

The eighth. Back to WorldNetDaily. Ditto the ninth. Ditto the tenth. Ditto the eleventh, if you click through -- just an aggregator. Or aggravator. Hard to say. We'll give him an okay on the twelfth -- though using a "Some say" story from the MSM is not what one would ordinarily call conclusive of anything, if one viewed the claimant as reasonably in possession of mental faculties.

In conclusion: Fact: Chuck Norris bats 2 for 12, if we score generously. Mendoza could kick his ass.

Fact: Chuck Norris is too much of a wussy to provide his own links.

Also.

(h/t: pic. source)

Exorcise this

@Will_Bunch:

If his train-wreck Obama rebuttal speech didn't kill Jindal's political future, wife charity scam might http://nyti.ms/hqtpZD

Let's have a look.

Louisiana’s biggest corporate players, many with long agendas before the state government, are restricted in making campaign contributions to Gov. Bobby Jindal. But they can give whatever they like to the foundation set up by his wife months after he took office.

AT&T, which needed Mr. Jindal, a Republican, to sign off on legislation allowing the company to sell cable television services without having to negotiate with individual parishes, has pledged at least $250,000 to the Supriya Jindal Foundation for Louisiana’s Children.

Marathon Oil, which last year won approval from the Jindal administration to increase the amount of oil it can refine at its Louisiana plant, also committed to a $250,000 donation. And the military contractor Northrop Grumman, which got state officials to help set up an airplane maintenance facility at a former Air Force base, promised $10,000 to the charity.

The foundation has collected nearly $1 million in previously unreported pledges from major oil companies, insurers and other corporations in Louisiana with high-stakes regulatory issues, according to a review by The New York Times.

[...]

Dow Chemical, which has pledged $100,000 to the foundation, is the largest petrochemical company in Louisiana and has had numerous interactions with state officials during the Jindal administration, including an investigation into a July 2009 spill at its St. Charles Parish plant that forced the evacuation of area homes. The state in December 2009 proposed fining the company and its Union Carbide subsidiary for allowing the release of a toxic pollutant and failing to quickly notify state authorities of the leak, but so far no fine has been assessed.

Alon USA, an Israeli oil company that has pledged $250,000 to the Jindal Foundation, last year sought permit changes that would allow it to discharge more pollutants at its Krotz Springs refinery. In 2009, state environmental officials also eased requirements for the company to check for spills of oil, ammonia or other contaminants in waterways to twice a month, instead of twice a week, records show.

[...]

Several of the charity’s major donors are large state contractors, like Acadian Ambulance, or D&J Construction, which alone has received $67.6 million in contracts since 2009, mostly for highways, said a separate report on the foundation being issued this week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Both companies have pledged at least $10,000 to the foundation.

The story is laced with sputtering denials from everyone you might expect.

(x-posted)

Minor Setback in the Ongoing War Against Treacliness

Evidently, there are a few people in Virginia from whose rectums you couldn't pull a needle with a tractor. This great license plate ended up being revoked after being issued:

Pull the lever, Conan!

Jack Stuef calls attention to that guy best known for getting his ass kicked thirty-five years ago by some small Chinese person, who these days is a regular columnist at WingNutDaily, who has posted another in an endless series of screeds about our godless Kenyan overlord and his godless minions:

Chuck Norris: Atheist National Park Service Sullying Founding Fathers

Because I can never get enough of arguments about why the only way Chuck Norris's fundamentalist butthurt -- "it alarms me when omissions are exclusively divine and so easily exit [sic] and are excused by the U.S. supreme leader," "the National Park Service guide leading their group blurted out five unbelievable lies and distortions about our founders' religious beliefs and history, with school-aged children present as well in the room," etc. -- can be salved is by jamming the Bible down the throat of every public school student in America, I clicked on over. There at the bottom was the real comedy:

(embiggen)

Cool! Fleecing the True Believers by copying, pasting, and packaging a bunch of stuff available for free all over the Internet! St. Sarah would be proud. Let's click that "Order" link:

(embiggen)

(title: vide)

Heather's Got the Vapors Again

Heather Mac Donald, often held up as an intellectual force on the right (got a job at the Manhattan Institute, a pointless space in her last name, and everything!), is still Very Very Concerned About Those Black People She Knows So Well. After spouting a bunch of statistics about the Negros and their love for killin', she then gets to her point:

If the black illegitimacy rate were not nearly three times the rate of whites’, I would have few qualms about gay marriage.

Yes, she actually typed that. Why it required an introduction filled with murder statistics I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Continuing ...

Or if someone can guarantee that widespread gay marriage would not further erode the expectation among blacks that marriage is the proper context for raising children, I would also not worry. But no one can make that guarantee.

Therefore, since you can not satisfy her impossible made-up request, she is fully justified in another aspect of her bigotry.

Why might it further depress the black marriage rate? There is a logical reason and a visceral reason. First, it sends the signal that marriage is simply about numbers: it is an institution that binds two (for the moment) people who are in love.

Because everyone knows Teh Ghey no likee the long-term commitment. Why else are They always going in the bushes at Griffith Park, amirite?

Or wait .. maybe "(for the moment)" is dog-whistle to people who are convinced that letting the same-sex couples get married inevitably leads to polygamy. Okay, whatever. What's next?

It erases completely the significance that marriage is THE context in which the children of biological parents should be raised.

Yes, when two men or two women get married (and we won't even address the horror of ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION OR THEM ADOPTING CHILDREN), the guaranteed consequence is that straight couples will forget why they ever had the urge to get married.

And there are undoubtedly many other subtle meanings and effects of gay marriage that we cannot even imagine at the moment—which institutional shift is something that conservatives should be most attuned to.

We cannot imagine them, but we know they are scary!

As for the visceral reason: ...

It's the ick factor, isn't it, Heather? Oh, no? More psuedo-intellectualizin'? Please, continue.

It is no secret that resistance to homosexuality is highest among the black population (though probably other ethnic minorities are close contenders).

And never mind the population of, say, white evangelical Christians. Wouldn't want to slice the population in any way except as it allows Heather to portray blacks as the worst, right?

I fear that it will be harder than usual to persuade black men of the obligation to marry the mother of their children if the inevitable media saturation coverage associates marriage with homosexuals. Is the availability of homosexual marriage a valid reason to shun the institution? No, but that doesn’t make the reaction any less likely.

Shorter: straight black men won't marry women because they're afraid if they do, everyone will think they're fags.

In her defense, she eventually gets around to ...

What are the chances that gay marriage would further doom marriage among blacks? I don’t know.

... though this does raise the question of why she started writing this lunacy in the first place.

(h/t: Andrew Sullivan | pic. source | cross-posted)

Bonehead of the Week

So, there's this group called the HeliOS Project. It's an advocacy group that tries to get the word out about the advantages of Linux, especially as an alternative to Windows. One of the things the HeliOS Project does is give refurbished computers and FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to poor children.

A teacher comes upon a student demonstrating Linux to other kids. The student is also handing out LiveCDs. These contain a Linux distribution that not only allows one to install Linux; they also allow Linux to be run directly from the disk, to test-drive Linux before committing to installation. They are greater than sliced bread. Many companies who build Linux distributions not only permit, they encourage everyone to duplicate these disks and hand them out -- it saves them the effort of doing it themselves, and it cuts down on their server load and bandwidth costs by providing an alternative to people looking to download a Linux distro.

The teacher confiscates the disks and grills the student. She then writes an email to Ken Starks, who runs the HeliOS Project. It says, in part:

... I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows.

The teacher is from Texas. Just sayin.'

The rest of the email, and Starks's reply, are here. Starks also posted a follow-up here.

If you take the time to read the whole first post, you'll understand why people like me aren't hyperventilating when we speak of Microsoft's spreading of FUD. Not to mention the police state mentality fostered by certain other groups (RIAA, MPAA, GOP, etc.) and encouraged by people proud of their own ignorance.

(h/t: Slashdot, via Buzz Out Loud)

Uncarefully Couched Language

You know how the wingnuts love to whine about Democrats being the "nanny state" party?

In yet another chapter in the endless saga of IOKIYAR, we have Republican state legislator Tim Couch introducing a bill into the Kentucky House that would ban anonymous posting on the Internet.

You know how the wingnuts used to like to scream about Democratic presidents (it's been a while, I know -- act like you remember) and their unfunded mandates?

Couch's bill would require the owners of web sites to collect, verify, and maintain real identification information, under threat of heavy fines.

You know how the wingnuts love to gush about law and order and the original intent of the framers? If I hadn't already told you, this would have revealed the party affiliation beyond all doubt:

Couch ... acknowledges that the bill is probably unconstitutional ...

And the kicker?

... [H]e wanted to call attention to the phenomenon of unkind and often untrue comments about people being posted online by Kentuckians hiding behind the cloak of anonymity.

"Some nasty things have been said about high school kids in my district, usually by other kids," Couch said. "The adults get in on it, too."

Ah, yes. Protect The Children^TM. The all-purpose cover story for Republicans who squirm at the thought of different tastes and opinions.

Now, I have gone on a bit in the past about weenies who flame from behind the cloak of anonymity, I'll admit. The difference, though, is this: I am trying to persuade people to change their behavior. That's all. If you want to post anonymous comments on my blog, for example, go right ahead. I simply state that I respect you more if you use your real name. The typical Republican, on the other hand, wants to drag it out of you by force.

Those Republicans sure do love some accountability for personal actions, don't they? With very few exceptions, of course.

Above: was frequently
pantsed in high school

Reading between the lines, it seems obvious that a big motivator behind this bill is the frequent appearance of anonymous comments that say mean things about … Tim Couch.

So, Rep. Couch, as long as my real name and contact info are available right here, I presume it's okay to mess with your photo? And to say that you have a silly name, a stupid face, less sense about the Web than Ted Stevens, and less respect for civil rights than the Commander-of-19% himself?

kthxbai

---

(h/t: Buzz Out Loud. Pic. source: you guessed it!)