Oliver Willis Revealed to be Only Human

Regular readers know how much respect I have for Oliver Willis (e.g., e.g.). He is, however, dead wrong when he says this:

Atheists being dicks to the religious, this time in the U.K. I cannot understand an entire belief built on putting down others. It sucks when Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others do it and its lame when Atheists do it. I guess this means they’re in the big leagues now: as offensive as everyone else.

In the first place, as a general principle, he's sorely mistaken to think that not believing in God equates to "an entire belief built on putting down others." This is hyperbolic and hysterical. He's regurgitating the victimology put forth by the sort of Bible-thumper who spends every waking moment searching for excuses to take offense. This is an asinine statement, particularly coming from someone whose brain is usually engaged.

But let's attend to specifics.

Oliver's objection is to a sign that's been posted on, at this moment, 800 buses in the U.K. The sign reads: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

As I said in the Comments over at his place:

That’s a tame, even friendly, message, and I for one am overjoyed to see atheists putting out a little something to contradict the endless flood of proselytizing from the Christianists.

If you follow his link to Ariane Sherine's commentary in the Guardian, you'll see this:

... the campaign was originally started as a positive counter-response to the Jesus Said ads running on London buses in June 2008. These ads displayed the URL of a website which stated that non-Christians "will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell … Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire prepared for the devil". Our rational slogan will hopefully reassure anyone who has been scared by this kind of evangelism.

For too long, atheists and agnostics have been cowed, afraid to speak up and speak out when overly religious people use their faith as a club to drive policy and a trump card to dominate discourse. A big part of the problem has been attitudes like the one Oliver displays. Proclamations of faith deserve as much respect as any other assertion of belief, but no more. Letting them stand unchallenged is unhealthy for society. This is particularly true when the religious majority seeks to intimidate people who do not share their beliefs.

Ariane says elsewhere in her column:

Today, thanks to many Cif readers, the overall total raised for the Atheist Bus Campaign stands at a truly overwhelming £135,000, breaking our original target of £5,500 by over 2400%.

What that says to me is that there are a lot of people who are overjoyed to find out -- maybe for the first time -- that they're not alone in feeling squashed under the jackboot of sanctimony. Good for them, good for Ariane Sherine, and boo on Oliver Willis.

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NB: Picture of James Dobson added for artistic purposes. I do not mean to suggest that he was specifically affiliated with the Jesus Said ad campaign to which Ariane refers. It is true that this is more or less the message he preaches all the time, though.

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[Added] Do not fail to read Alastair's comment on this post.

Sign of Hope?

At this moment, the seventh-most emailed article from the website of The New York Times is one about an open source statistics software package called R.

Is this related to the looming departure of Bush and inauguration of Geek-in-Chief Obama? Are Americans falling in love with data-driven, reality-based analysis all over again?

On the other hand, the second-most emailed article is one about squirrels -- it's the new white meat! So maybe everyone wants to learn about R because they figure it'll help them pick better lottery numbers.

Watch Out, Liberals!

Erick Erickson and RedState.com are forming an army!

(click pic for larger version)

(sources: warrior | logo)

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Update: Hanx!

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Update: Susan of Texas offers us another logo.

"The Red Phone"

Part of Mark Leahy's blog, Mxrk, is a new web comic series called "The Red Phone."

Here's #20, "Waiting Game" (click it to big it):

If you've ever listened to Harry Shearer's "Dick Cheney: Confidential," this'll really resonate. It's #19, "Hierarchy" (same deal on the click):

Guess who's getting added to the blogroll?

(h/t: The Jed Report)

Blog Post Title Of The Week

The bombings will continue until good will improves
-- Thoreau/Unqualified Offerings

(cf.)

Entire Internet Makes "Thou Shalt Not Steal" Joke

But I'd say the lying about it after being busted is worse.

Neale Donald Walsch: plagiarist. And such treacle, to boot.

Good News From Up North

If you're a fan of Wingnuttia Search, you'll be happy to hear this: J. A. Baker, the proprietor of the fine blog JABbering Stooge, has built a Canadian-specific version, and named it Operation Poutine-Bake.

Visit his announcement post for the full list of sites and other details. JAB explains the meaning of the name in an earlier post.

Barney: No Annoying Purple Dinosaur He

The New Yorker has a profile of Barney Frank up. I've just started reading it, and couldn't resist passing this along:

Not long ago, Paul Begala, the political strategist, was speaking at a fund-raiser for a gay-rights group and said, “When I told my father, back in Texas, that I was speaking to an L.G.B.T. group, he said that sounded like a sandwich.” From the audience, Frank called out, “Sometimes it is!”

Thanks to Instaputz, who grabbed the line right before.

My Ongoing Efforts ...

... to enter incorrect data about myself into every online database possible appears to be paying off. Shown at left is an ad that just appeared on my Facebook home page, custom-tailored and narrowly target to … well, certainly not me.

Disturbing Wingnut Image of the Day

K-Lo … jumping out of a cake wearing only a Ronald Reagan mask …
-- TBogg

The real beauty of the post whence this was ripped is that it's all about Scolder-in-Chief Kathryn Jean Lopez scolding the Fatcats in Training Wheels Young Eagles for the big bash they're planning RIGHT AFTER --ZOMG-- B HUSSEIN X TAKES OFFICE!!11!1!!

Wingnut Takedown Line of the Day

RedState has officially passed over whatever glory years it ever had and has prematurely entered the “Smell the Glove” phase of its career.
-- Brad from Sadly, No!

Wingnuttia goes to 11!

What's more hilarious, RedState Strike Force or a PUMA Prowl?

Brain Food

Heather Hurlburt, who is a leading light among the regulars on Bloggingheads.tv, interviews Andrew Bacevich:

(alt. video link)

The whole thing is about 70 minutes long and well worth your time. Here's the list of topics and approximate run times for each:

Andy’s new book, “The Limits of Power” (06:25)

How the Iraq War military leadership failed upward (06:13)

Will Petraeus run for president? Should he? (09:48)

Solutions for Afghanistan (08:11)

Andy on how to meet our moral obligations in the Middle East (07:39)

How limited is American power? (11:12)

If the above embedded video doesn't work well for you, click the alt. video link. Also available on that same page are downloadable audio and video files, if you'd rather consume the diavlog a different way. But eat it up, one way or another. These are smart people.

You might also have a look at Heather Hurlburt's home page and Andrew Bacevich's home page.

And Bust

Doghouse on Teh Legacy. Quick and hilarious.

Why We Like Al Franken: Another In An Ongoing Series

While looking for election results, I came across 72 seconds of footage shot in March 2007. Don't be alarmed by the first face you see.

(alt. video link)

Sample wingnut reaction (from this past August):

Clips of his debate with Coulter show Franken choosing Hitler as the famous figure he’d most like to have been. He promptly adds that he could thereby prevent the Holocaust, but it is doubtful Franken would take that context into account if Coulter had made the statement.
-- Kathy Shaidle, FrontPageMag

Seriously, wingnuts see different things. And no, they do not get jokes.

Kathy Shaidle may be better known by her blog title: Five Feet of Fury. Perhaps that rings a bell? Happily, Yes!

Is she on The List? She will be momentarily!

(h/t: Paul Schmelzer)

The Talking Points Presidency Issues Fresh Set of Talking Points

Those old enough to remember Mad magazine's "Very Thin Books" will appreciate this image:

This is the cover from a honkin' 16,388,638 byte-sized PDF file, available for download from WhiteHouse.com (I kid!*) WhiteHouse.gov.

Here is Frank Rich's three-paragraph rebuttal:

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”

This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist.

Frank Rich, FTW.

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* Well, that joke's passed its sell-by date. For those of you new to the Internets, WhiteHouse.com used to be a porn site. Now, sadly, it appears it no longer is. Another sign of the looming apocalypse impending American theocracy elevated discourse and return of decency to America, thanks to the election of Barack Obama, I feel certain.

How Would a PATRIOT Act?

The beginning of an article in today's WaPo by Lisa Rein and Josh White:

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.

One of the possible "crimes" in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: "civil rights."

If you've done nothing wrong, there's no need to read the whole thing.

Right?

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(h/t: Steve Benen via John Cole)

NB: Link, from Steve's post, added to quoted material by me

Sliding Into Irrelevance

In between repeated plugs for her old books (get 'em before they're pulped!), Ann Coulter's latest column, posted on some web site you never heard of, addresses "a couple of other facts that some of us are forced to keep repeating because liberals refuse to learn."

These things we do not know about?

The Presidential Daily Briefing of 6 August 2001 and the attack ad Saxby Chambliss ran against Max Cleland in 2002. The dateline of the column is 31 December 2008.

She concludes by flirting with honesty:

Someday, I could stop writing new columns altogether and could just repost columns and book excerpts I've already written disproving the same yarns liberals spin over and over again.

Somewhere before that, she tries to rekindle the old Annthrax Coultergiest by, um, snipping about Kwanzaa, comparing liberals to worms, Stalin, and fruit fly larvae, and making a joke about unions.

Yawn.

I am reminded of nothing so much as this:

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(inset pic. source)

Rumsfeldian Mashup of the Day

You take pictures of the bassets you have, not the bassets you wish you had.
-- TBogg

That face on the left in the first one, especially, makes me understand why people love these dogs.

A Delightful Read

James Wolcott wraps up the 2008 political winners and losers: The Good, the Bad, and Joe Lieberman.

Oh, how I want to quote some snippets. But it wouldn't be fair -- you should get to come across them yourself.

Pwnage of the Year!

Okay, so the year is only three days old. Still, this might have me laughing until December:

Erick the RedState RedFace Erickson.

(pic. source)

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[Added] TBogg observes another aspect of the Red State of Delusion.

[Added] More goodness on the dullness of Erick from the sharp-eyed Adam Serwer. (via, via)

Right On, Too

In light of the previous post, read Roy Edroso's latest, in particular, the part about Al Franken.

Right On

Just echoing what Josh says, it isn't clear that the Village media-industrial complex is Republican, but it is clear that most of them think that only the opinions of Republicans really matter. Expect David Gergen to wield a sort of extra-constitutional veto over everything Obama does.

-Atrios 14:35

Exactly as I see it, too. I'll add that we can expect many hands will be wrung over Obama's perceived unwillingness to "govern from the center," many chins will be stroked over Obama's "overreach" and "hesitancy," depending on which minute it is, and I know as sure as I know anything that if Obama hasn't fixed by early spring everything that George WPE Bush broke over the past eight years, it will be "fair to ask, 'Is it too early to call this Administration a failure?'"

Naturally, this will be further proof that the liberal media is in the tank for Obama.

A Couple of Google Search Tips

I just added these to the bottom of the Wingnuttia Search post and I decided that they were useful enough to get a little more attention. Here are modified versions of what I wrote there.

Eliminate the results from a specific site

I often find that the results for a current hot topic are cluttered by frenzied chatter on certain sites, for example, Free Republic. To eliminate hits from the Freepers, add -freerepublic.com to the search string. (Note leading hyphen.) You can do this in the initial search or by adding it to the search box on the page of results. You can do this for more than one site at a time, too -- just add another space and another hyphen-sitename to the search box and press Enter again. Repeat as necessary.

Restricting the date range

You probably already know that you can restrict the date range through Google's Advanced Search interface. The following technique may be more efficient, particularly if you like keeping your hands on the keyboard and away from the mouse as much as I do.

First, do the search that you want. Then, on the results page, go up to your browser's location (address) bar, and add a string like this to the end of the URL: &as_qdr=d5. Then press Enter. (Note leading ampersand.)

This particular example restricts the results to the past five days. You can use another number in place of 5, of course. You can also use, say, &as_qdr=w2 to get results restricted to the last two weeks, &as_qdr=m4 to get results restricted to the last four months, &as_qdr=y1 to get results restricted to the past year, and so on. Here's what it looks like after searching for obama and then appending &as_qdr=d5 to the URL of the results page.

Note that, because of added comments or other updates to a given page, you may get hits from pages originally posted outside of the date range restriction you specified.

A reminder: CTRL-l (pressing the Control key and the letter L key together) makes the location bar active and ready for your typing. Once you get in the habit, the sequence CTRL-l, End (key), &as_qdr=... saves a lot of time and mousing.

I use Ah, Shit [too many results]. Quick! Date Restrict! as a mnemonic. I'm open to better ones.

Got a favorite Google search tip? Please add it in the comments.

Good Taste Noted

I see that the sidebar for the blog athousandruts now features the Wingnuttia Search widget.

Since I don't see a way to contact the blog's owner, I'll have to hope he is as prone to egosurfing as I am and comes across this message: Thanks, Sparky! May it serve you well. Feedback more than welcome.

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For those of you wondering what I'm talking about, here's the short version. Wingnuttia Search is a utility, built using Google Custom Search, that does a Google search restricted to a specified list of sites that represent the unhinged Right. There are 62 sites on the list at the moment. Nominations for additions are welcome.

You can use it through the widget near the top of my sidebar (or athousandrut's sidebar). You can also use it by visiting the home page for Wingnuttia Search. You can bookmark that site, post a link to it on your own blogroll as JABbering Stooge has, and/or grab a copy of the widget from that page for embedding on your own site, if you like.

More details, including the full list of sites searched, are available on the original announcement post. If you want to be notified of changes, you can subscribe to that post's comment feed by clicking the link at the bottom of that page (or by clicking here). I usually note changes on my Twitter feed, as well.

Idle Thought

If one morning, the President-elect actually did walk on top of the water across the Potomac River, Greater Wingnuttia would immediately stop calling him the Messiah. They would instead blog furiously, "Obama too elitist to swim."

(Apologies to Lyndon Johnson.)

Would You Believe ...

... the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, performing "Theme from Shaft?"

It's actually pretty good. Go see.

Oliver Is Exactly Right

As usual.

Blog Deconstructed

I was just fooling around with Google's Webmaster Tools and when looking at the search terms used by people who end up at this blog, I discovered something a liitle disconcerting: I currently hold 5th place in Google rankings for the entire known universe for … well, now I'm afraid to type it out, so just go look.

Perhaps even worse: I'm currently eighth for this and first (first!) for this.

Twenty More Days

The last (only?) skill of the Current Occupant appears to have vanished. As Bob Cesca points out, "He couldn't even nail the photo op."

(alt. video link)

Disambiguate This

I've mentioned the heartbreak of Googlegängers before. Now I'm even more annoyed. Instead of them setting me up to be mistaken for a TV reporter, why couldn't my parents have named me Brad Stone?

I mean, who wouldn't want to be introduced to the planet as follows?

He is a tanned, muscular top man known for his large, thick penis. A dildo modeled on his penis has been produced measuring 29.2 cm (11.5 inches) long, overall from tip to suction cup, and 5.1 cm (2 inches) in diameter, with an insertable length of 22.86 cm (9 inches).

The page where that introduction resides concludes:

This article on a pornographic actor or actress is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Starting off the New Year right: with dick jokes!

Have a Happy One.

(h/t: TWiT, eps. 118, during the introduction of Brad Stone)