ginandtacos.com - shut up and drink the gin

FIGHTING THE NOT-SO-FRESH FEELING

Things are being spruced up here at ginandtacos. I've updated the blogroll and links. If you are a blogger who reads ginandtacos regularly, please email me (my contact info has also been updated, above the blogroll) or post something in the comments to this entry. I'll be happy to add you.

As for the left side content, I'm working on re-organizing all of it into monthly archives and a single category for all the non-blogging stuff. Most of that stuff is quite old and has probably long since ceased to amuse any regular readers.

Next week I'll be participating in the Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm. Keep an eye peeled for that while you're enjoying your fireworks and tubular meat products.

And since I haven't done album reviews in ages, let me try to cram five of them into one No Politics Friday (tm):

BJU

In a move that lands squarely between "pathetic" and "not fooling anyone," Rudy Giuliani made a stump speech and campaign appearance at Bob Jones University recently. Essentially the only thing I like about our electoral system is the chance it gives us to highlight and mock the shit out of Bob Jones University at regular intervals.

For instance, take a quick look at BJU's Wikipedia entry. I know what you're thinking: isn't a bit suspicious that a college would explicitly mention that it is accredited in the first paragraph? Maybe it's something all schools do. Let's check Michigan. OK, maybe Stanford? Yale? Appalachian State? No, none of these schools feel compelled to inform you in the first paragraph that they are accredited. This is because the reader would never even question the accreditation of any of these institutions. But apparently the folks at Bob Jones University understand that a person's first reaction to the school is very likely to be "Is this fuckin' place accredited?"

Rest assured, it is. It's accredited by something called the "Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools." This group accredits "universities" that teach young earth creationism in lieu of, you know, science. I can only liken getting accreditation from these people to getting a character reference from a child rapist who steals cable. Among the powerhouse institutions that have received the TACCS stamp of approval are:

STICKING UP FOR THE LITTLE GUY

I love how the media deems worthy of attention approximately one out of every fifty Supreme Court decisions. The others, about which we hear nothing, simply must not be important.

On June 25, FEC v Wisconsin Right to Life was decided with little fanfare. And by little I mean none. Rest assured that the 5-4 Alito-led majority (and the Court is handing down an unsurprisingly large number of 5-4 decisions these days) struck a blow against those dastardly, overbearing campaign finance laws that have virtually eliminated money from our elections. Remember the 2004 elections, where both presidential candidates spent over a quarter of a billion dollars? I tell ya, you can barely sneak a red cent past our ironclad campaign finance laws.

Interestingly, I agree with the specifics of the case in question. WRTL intended to run a series of "issue advocacy ads" (which do not advocate voting for or against any particular candidate) within 30 days of the 2004 election. McCain-Feingold (referred to in the decision by its formal name, BCRA) prohibits "electioneering communication" by corporations or private interests in the month prior to the election. Between 1976 (Buckley v Valeo) and the BCRA (2002), political action committees and other organized interests skirted most campaign finance laws by running carefully-worded "issue ads" that made a position quite clear but avoided using "magic words" (i.e. vote for, vote against) which would have qualified them as an electioneering communication. So, for example, the UAW would run an ad talking about how amazing Bill Clinton is, but it would avoid using the words "Vote for Clinton" and therefore skirt the laws.

BCRA attempted to eliminate this loophole by forbidding ads that were the "functional equivalent" of electioneering. The WRTL ads in question, in my semi-qualified opinion, do not constitute a functional equivalent. The ads encourage voters to contact their Wisconsin Senators to oppose a filibuster of judicial nominees. One of the Senators (Kohl) was not even running, and Feingold had a token opponent whose name was not used in the ad. So WRTL, the lower courts decided, had a right to run the ads up to the date of the election and beyond. The SC affirmed that decision, and rightly so.

But Anton Scalia has mastered the judicial equivalent of the President's "signing statement" theory of decision-making. It's never enough to affirm or reverse a decision - he has to go on a 20-page concurring opinion (read: rant) about how the case responsible for the relevant precedent at hand was "wrongly decided." Some enterprising researcher would find "wrongly decided" and "Scalia" about 100 times by searching every written opinion since 1986 (Scalia Year Zero).

Here ol' Anton decides to stretch his legs and explain why McConnell v FEC (one of the few decisions to substantially limit, in any way, the right to piss money into elections) was such an abomination of justice. Anton is never content to stick to the merits or particulars of the case at hand. No, he can't pass up a chance to re-write or re-interpret past decisions and explain how stupid it is to treat precedent with any respect (unless it tells him what he wants to hear, in which case he cites it as a stamp of authenticity).

Most reasonable people would argue, as we look back at a $1.2 billion dollar Presidential race and gaze hopefully forward at our first $2 billion-plus race in 2008, that unfettered corporate soft money expenditures outside of the obscene amounts they can legally spend as "hard" money have a deleterious effect on the democratic process. As the Court stated in Austin v Michigan CoC (1990), the state has a legitimate interest in limiting "corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of [corporate] wealth.” Not Anton. Why, he's such a passionate defender of the First Amendment that he can't see any reasonable standard for determining "functional equivalents" in the BCRA. Isn't that noble? How principled he is!

Note very well that the BCRA places almost no limits whatsoever on corporate issue advocacy expenditures except for the 30-day window before the election. Just so we're clear: the law allows unlimited third-party spending until the first week of October. But in ScaliaLand, that's just going too far. To read his concurring opinion, you'd think the law was handcuffing speech left and right or acting as an omniscient censor on campaign advertising. Of course, that's exactly what he wants you to think.

There are no limits in the BCRA that can't easily be skirted by careful wording, winking, and messing around in the gray area. "Issue advocacy" advertising has always been about exactly that. Since the "magic words" standard proved so easy to defeat, BCRA and McConnell imposed a very reasonable condition - if electioneering is prohibited under a limited set of conditions, so too is the de facto equivalent of electioneering. Scalia argues that this is unreasonable and unenforceably vague. It's about time - wealthy organized interests have been shut out of our political process for far too long.

THIS IS WHY I HATE POLITICS

Article II, Sec. 1, Paragraph 1 of the United States Constitution:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows.

A reasonable person might argue that this is pretty cut-and-dried. But no, we really have to sit here are refute an argument that the Vice President is somehow not part of the Executive branch. That's what we've come to. Someone makes a statement that is patently, indefensibly false (i.e. "The sun rises in the west") and we have to sit here and have a debate about it. Coming up next, our experts debate: does the sun rise in the east or in the west?

Yes, the Vice President has legislative duties (as the Letters of Cato put it, a duty given "for want of other responsibilities"). Yeah? And? So? The CJ of the Supreme Court has legislative duties as well - presiding over impeachment trials in the Senate. Does anyone argue that John Roberts is in Congress?

Speaking of impeachment...

WE VOTED FOR HOLLYWOOD BEFORE WE VOTED AGAINST IT

The more I look at the facts about the 2008 presidential race, the more convinced I become that Fred Thompson has the best shot at the GOP nomination. I'll save that discussion for a later post (this is what savvy marketers would call a "teaser" and those of us with no marketability call a "handjob") but the swelling Thompson love-fest brings to light just one more example of conservative hypocrisy.

Boy, how the right loves to slam Hollywood - the godless heathens and greedy big-city types (read: Jews) who purvey all manner of Anti-Family sex, gore, and violence in pursuit of the almighty dollar. They mortgage our national soul to make a cheap buck appealing to our basest instincts (note: The GOP would never stoop to appeal to a base instinct like fear). This is true of everyone in Hollywood...unless and until someone from Hollywood opens his or her mouth to let loose torrents of right-wing bullshit.

For a party that gets so much mileage out of bashing Barbara Streisand, the Baldwins, and Martin Sheen, the GOP practically shatters its lower mandible and kneecaps in its haste to fellate its photogenic Tinseltown saviors. Whether we're talking about John Wayne's "man's man" eugenics, Ronald Reagan's enthusiasm for reading well anything that was put in front of him, Charlton Heston's shotgun-waving rants, Kirk Cameron's picking-peanuts-out-of-shit insane version of Christianity, or Amend for Arnold Because We So Love How He Calls Liberals Pussies, the right is one enormous hypocrite when it comes to Hollywood. Hollywood is awful - except for Chuck Norris, Charles Barkley, Bruce Willis, or whoever else is "brave" enough to buck their liberal environment and carry water for the PNAC.

Enter Fred Thompson. It's so shameful and disgusting how the left caters to the Hollywood crowd and cashes in on Speilberg-hosted fund raisers. The GOP will stick to good ol' down-home Americana as its base of support - represented, of course, by a Hollywood actor. But he's an anomaly. So was Reagan. So is Arnold. So was Steve Largent. And Jim Bunning. And JC Watts. And Tom Osborne. And Jack Kemp. And Clint Eastwood. And Fred Grandy. And every other celebrity welcomed as a candidate by GOP.

Whether the media and the GOP base are lauding Thompson's "photogenic" qualities (a welcome by-product of his screen time, they say), his odor, or his glamourous lifestyle (read: his wife is half his age and looks like a Botox billboard), average man Fred sure is getting a warm reception. I understand, of course, that this is largely a result of how horrid the GOP field is at the moment. Nevertheless I am pulling up a chair and getting some popcorn. Time to sit back, relax, and see how the right manages to use its tired but reliable Hollywood-bashing-to-please-Dobson shtick while handing its nomination to the star of a dozen really violent films.

And, as usual, I'd like to thank our friends in the mainstream media for unquestioningly and uncritically buying every last drop of the Thompson Is So Magnetic spin. They do America proud by repeating, unfiltered, everything that paid publicists say about a person or issue.

A MOAT AROUND THE BLOGROLL

I want to talk about blogging for a moment. I know it's dangerously "meta" to blog blogging, but I am willing to take the risk that this post will somehow become the Singularity.

I don't really know who, if anyone, reads this site. Maybe a lot of people do, maybe 3 people do. Irrespective of that, I feel like I am a half-decent writer who occasionally has something interesting, useful, or novel to say. I don't have a lot going for me, but at sizeable intervals I say something amusing. We failed graduate students have to take our victories where we can get'em.

I have, on numerous occasions, attempted to get more people to read this thing. The way blogs increase traffic is almost entirely via links from other widely-read blogs. So getting those widely-read blogs to pay any attention is not unlike the remora trying to get an appreciative gesture out of the shark. I usually don't take their snobbish disregard of me too seriously, but after a very recent (and very bad) experience with a "big name" liberal blog, I feel the need to say something (which, as the moral of this story implies, no one will read).

Ever notice how the "BlogRoll" on all the big liberal/progressive/critical blogs seems to be exactly the same? DailyKos links AmericaBlog, AmericaBlog links DailyKos, Crooks and Liars links both referencing each other (inbetween its 5-per-week FireDogLake and MyDD links) and it generally resembles a big orgy of winking. Now, I have nothing against those blogs. I read them all (and the other "usual suspects" on the lib blogroll) regularly. They are indispensible. But to read them would give you the impression that there are all of about 15 blogs on the internets that have anything interesting to say.

Undeterred, I recently sent an email to a big name blog, an admitted piece of shameless self-promotion about a recent entry here that I felt was potentially interesting. While I expect (and receive) no response from those sorts of things, this time I was told that if I wanted a hat tip, I should buy an ad (starting at $500).

OK. So let me get this straight. There's a list of Old Boys' Club blogs that get free traffic-generating links every day, and the rest of us commoners have to pay out the nose for the privilege of getting noticed. Wow. How "progressive."

Several responses are probably coming to mind at this point. I will refute them in order.

ED VS. LOGICAL FALLACIES, PART 2: Ignoratio elenchi

I didn't intend to do two of these in such rapid succession, but I just happened to find a stunningly perfect example of ignoratio elenchi. Or, as it is better known colloquially, a "red herring" or "the Chewbacca defense."

The Greek phrase literally translates as "ignorance of refutation." It simply means that the person using the argument is completely ignorant in the art of rhetoric and does not know how to properly refute his opponent. In practice, it need not be a case of ignorance. In fact most red herrings are offered quite deliberately to distract, confuse, or divert the discussion of a given topic.

Like all fallacies of irrelevance, ignoratio elenchi are particularly dangerous because they are internally consistent. The point offered as a red herring, for example, is often true and logically consistent. The fallacy is that it is, irrespective of its validity, irrelevant to the argument.

Some red herrings are blatantly obvious attempts to change the subject or re-define a discussion. More often, and usually cloaked in a reassuring pile of Science, Facts, and Numbers, they are much more subtle. The more subtle they are, the more harm they have the potential to do. Less-than-astute readers and viewers are easily fooled by such tactics.

Mr. R. Timothy Patterson offers a veritable orgy of logical fallacies for our consumption in his recent Financial Post (Canada) piece "Read the Sunspots." He's got everything in this lengthy article: ad hominem, appeals to science, appeals to consensus, appeals to authority, false dilemma, biased sampling, hasty generalization.....a student of formal logic could write a dissertation on this thing. But rather than discuss those individually, I'd rather focus on the fact that the entirety of his discussion is a big, stinking, red herring.

His argument is clear: the argument that human activity is responsible for climate change is a politically-loaded sham. He believes - and his single-case research supports - that "the sun appears to drive climate change." In other words, any observed changes are natural; "Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth." After setting up his barrage of numbers with some Goldberg-esque mockery of some liberal politicians, he gets to the point:

The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

He then goes on to describe in detail existing research that shows how solar variation can be causally linked to climate change on Earth. His argument is internally consistent; he cites research appropriately and is careful not to misinterpret its conclusions. It would be a very convincing exercise in persuasive journalism if not for the inconvenient fact that his whole discussion is entirely irrelevant to the argument.

He starts by mocking the (liberal) political efforts to limit or alter human activity on the grounds that man has contributed to (or even caused) global climate change. He then moves on to spend 15 paragraphs proving that some change in climate is part of nature. He does not, at any point, realize that those two things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, proving the latter is wholly irrelevant to any discussion of the former.

Scientists have many thousands of years of historical climate data which they can use to show that natural variations are....well, natural. They happen. We know this. The planet's temperature is not stable over time. Comparatively, the human activities which allegedly contribute to climate change (mass atmospheric pollution as a product of hydrocarbon combustion) are largely confined to the last 70 to 100 years. Leaving aside the dramatic imbalance in sample sizes (6000 years of data from ice cores vs. a few decades since we started burning coal and oil at truly alarming rates) his argument still fails to "disprove", as he no doubt feels he has done, the idea that human behavior is affecting climate.

To use an analogy (and I love nothing more), suppose I suspected my neighbor of dumping his old, used motor oil in my yard and killing my trees. I gather data (photographs, samples of oil-laden dirt and roots, etc) and confront him. In response, he gives me a 20-page discussion of all of the natural factors that can lead to arboreal genocide - insects, frost, air pollutants, drought, and so on. His argument would be correct, of course, but it would be nothing more than a distraction. Proving that locusts can kill trees does not prove that you're not killing them with motor oil.

Mr. Patterson is obviously proud of his research. Indeed it is an interesting line of argument and I'd like to see him or his colleagues follow up with a larger sample from a variety of locations around the globe. In fact, he's so obviously proud of his work that I find it hard to believe that he'd use it as little more than a distraction in an unrelated debate.

ED VS. LOGICAL FALLACIES, PART 1: FALSE EQUIVALENCY

I often tell my undergraduates (and by often I mean just about daily) that if I could have the power to change one thing about the educational system it would be to require every single college student to take and pass a class in formal logic. There's nothing that drives me up a wall quite like soon-to-be adults making "arguments" that make no sense and citing "evidence" that does not prove what they think it proves. To wit, let me give you an actual quote from a senior's research paper:

Since 1980 the rate of abortions per 100,000 adult women in the United States has fallen annually, indicating that more women are choosing abstinence and rejecting behaviors that contribute to unplanned pregnancies.

Right. Or it might indicate that people are using birth control more regularly. Or that the ratio of older women to younger women is increasing thanks to the aging baby-boomers and the Let's Wait on Having Kids attitude of Generation X. Or it could mean absolutely nothing at all - correlation does not imply causation.

My point is not to pick on this student. In fact, his/her writing was easy on my eyes and the argument was generally well-formed. But this is a glaring example of why it's so goddamn difficult to have a conversation in our society these days: so many people simply don't understand what (if anything) their facts "prove", and as a result they are apt to wildly overestimate it. They take a fact that, in their mind, proves their point and just keep repeating it to you, the big dummy who doesn't seem to understand how thoroughly they're supporting their position.

So here's what I'm going to do. Ginandtacos will be the forum for a semi-regular (meaning intermittent and/or whenever a particularly good example in the news presents itself) discussion of fallacies of formal logic. I can't watch or read the news for 10 minutes without some idiotic piece of reasoning that an 18 year-old philosophy student could refute, so I'll draw heavily on our friends in the mass media for assistance.

Today I'm starting with False Equivalency (with a hat tip to Vagabond Scholar). I start with it because it has quickly risen from obscurity to be among the most pervasive of the fallacies in little more than a decade (coincidentally enough, since Fox News went on the air 24-7). False Equivalency is, in plain language, the idea that two (or more) opposing viewpoints/alternatives are undeservedly treated as equally important or valid. FE has become such an enormous problem in contemporary discourse for two simple reasons:

AND NOW WE PLAY THE WAITING GAME...

Something struck me whilst typing up yesterday's post, re: bouncing ball logic and moving goalposts in Iraq. There was some sort of malaise coming over me, as if I had to force a little bile out of the ducts. While I initially attributed this to the mononucleosis/bronchitis tag-team, reality struck me quite suddenly: I have Iraq Fatigue. Not only do I have Iraq Fatigue, but the Bill Kristols and Dick Perles of the world have been waiting for me to get it.

Now, by "me" I of course mean "us." Call me cynical, but....does it strike you as entirely possible that the AEI-types who spent the better part of the 1990s planning this war assumed that they can simply outlast their opposition? And are they right?

The more I think about Iraq these days, the less I have to say about it. What more can I, or anyone else for that matter, possibly do except state the bleedlingly obvious - and do so for the upteenth time? It is a cluster-fuck. It is a failure. Nothing that was initially predicted has materialized. All of the legitimate concerns that were initially voiced have manifested themselves with a vengance. The violence isn't abating. The president is an utter moron. The pre-war "intelligence" failures are either a case of malicious manipulation or inexcusable, criminal idiocy.

All of the war cheerleading dead-enders are immune to these and any other facts. And the essential facts don't change. Another day, another 100 corpses in Baghdad, another car-bombing, another couple of dead American soldiers, another idiotic series of pronouncements from the Liebermccain crowd about how we're just starting to make progress and need A Few More Months. We wake up, pound away at the keyboards with a slightly-altered version of yesterday's (or last week's, or last summer's, or 2003's) elucidation of these same points, the words bounce off our mentally-challenged wingnut bretheren, and then we wake up tomorrow and do it all over again. I lose my enthusiasm for it at some point.

Was that the goal all along? This is how wingnuts, cranks, and denialists argue. And this is how they win. We here in the Reality-Based Community are constrained by logic and facts. They are limited only by the expansiveness of their imaginations and the breadth of the asses from which they pull their facts. They say something retarded, we carefully refute it. They say something else retarded, we put effort into refuting that too. We grow tired of the childishness of the repartee. They, having the intellect of children, never tire of it. All the while we subconsciously dignify their idiotic viewpoints by responding and thus validating them as Fodder for Public Discourse. And the usual conclusion (see: Global Warming skeptics) is to wait until respectable people stop dignifying the stupidity with responses - and then declare victory. We Won, because the Ivory Tower intellectuals can't (read: won't/are sick of) debate us!

But what if the strategy here was to stupidly, stubbornly, and naively repeat the same things over and over until everyone - pundits, politicians, and public alike - got so sick of pointing out the obvious responses that they stopped caring altogether? What if the strategy was simply to say Six More Months every six months until the words lacked all credibility? In fact, until the words became so prima facie ridiculous and false that people paid no attention whatsoever?

The president has, in essence, taken hostages. He's standing there with the gun pressed to the temples or the innocent Iraqi civilians caught up in this disaster, and he doesn't give a flying shit whether or not they live or die. We do. Neocons don't. The hostage-taker's demands are simple: let me do what I want or the girl gets it. If we leave now, the price will be paid almost entirely by the civilians who will be caught in the crossfire of the sectarian slaughter. He knows it. So do we. And thereby, one could argue (in fact, I think I just did), has the entirety of America become anesthetized to Iraq as an issue. No more front-page stories, no more opinion columns (we have to devote them to more important things like a stillborn, milquetoasty immigration bill), and no more bile. We know the facts, and we've come to realize that no amount of repetition of said facts is going to affect the War Cheerleaders.

In real-life hostage situations, the police always have the inherent advantage because they can simply wait. Everyone needs to sleep eventually. In this situation, unfortunately, the exact opposite has proven true.

FOLLOW THE BOUNCING BALL!

This article is about a year old, but its shits-and-giggles value is sufficient to justify re-heating it now after seeing Thomas Friedman go on one of his Dadaist rants on Fox News Sunday.

It's fitting to draw our collective attention to the fantastic hit piece that Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting did on Friedman last summer, cataloguing the fourteen separate occasions over a 30-month period in which he wrote or stated that "the next six months" would either A) bring significant progress to Iraq or B) be some sort of "crucial" or "gut-check" time for Iraq's leaders. Ladies and gentlemen, the Friedman Unit might just be the finest of all possible examples of what's wrong with the flat-earthers who just can't let go......just look at Our Leader's 4-year love affair with the idea that we're just beginning to make progress in Iraq!

ICONIC MOMENTS OF MY CHILDHOOD

In any individual's life there are certain moments that stand out as particularly memorable and influential. Similarly, each generation has a small number of shared, defining experiences. Everyone remembers where they were when they watched the moon landing or on 9-11-01, for example. Having been born during the Carter years, for today's NPF I would like to talk about the two defining moments of my generation (excluding the aforementioned and stale topic of 9-11).

1. People dancing on the Berlin Wall

I remember this not only for its historical magnitude but because it was the first evening on which my bedtime was unconditionally tabled. I think I stayed up until about 2:30, which is pretty sweet when you're 10.

2. Krist Novoselic hits self on head with bass

I was pretty sure he was dead, or at least suffering a fractured skull. The magnitude of this event did not fully reveal itself until years later when I first held an Ibanez bass and realized that they weigh about 20 pounds.

Yes, these two events pretty much explain me in a nutshell.

Ceci n'est pas une Libertarian

Be warned: this is, for the second consecutive day, a commentary-within-the-commentary post.

I would like to draw your attention to this little gem from noted right-wing intellectual heavyweight Jonah Goldberg. As with my last post, I'm not terribly bothered by the content of this piece. It's pretty standard boilerplate wouldn't-everything-be-better-if-we-privatized-it dreck. The Cato Institute craps out a dozen of these little rants every week, at which point they're swiftly consigned to the Irrelevant bin in public discourse. No biggie. No, there is something else about this article that bugged me. Upon my first read I could not quite figure out what was odd about it. After a re-reading, it hit me.

This reads like it was written by a college sophomore.

I spend a good majority of my time evaluating the intellectual output of 18-20 year old undergraduates. I've read hundreds - probably thousands by this point - of papers from college kids. So I feel that I have some relevant authority upon which to base this admittedly subjective judgment. I can honestly say that Goldberg's commentary is virtually indistinguishable from most of what I read. All of the stock dialogue of the average College Republican's argument are present.

BETWEEN THE LINES

I can't help but get really, really sad when I read stories like this. Not because of the latest embarassing rhetorical performance by our jack-assed idiot of a president ("First of all, I don’t think I called for a deadline. I thought I said, time — I did? What exactly did I say? I said, 'deadline'? Okay, yes, then I meant what I said."). Those are, of course, sad too.

But really think about that CNN story for a moment. Is this what we're reduced to? Really? Can you even imagine this story running in 1960?

The President of the United States is off on a tour to strengthen alliances with 4th-rate ex-Warsaw Pact powers. That's bad enough. Headlines like "Bush hails Bulgaria as valued ally" are enough to make you sit up and wonder "What the fuck happened to this country?" Is this really it? Is this what the United States is reduced to in 2007: kissing ass in Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, and so on?

As if that's not bad enough, the President then makes a policy-oriented statement about international affairs by asserting our support for Kosovo's independence. Fine. Whatever. And the response? Serbia tells us to go fuck ourselves. Serbia. A country without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. A country that didn't exist independently 12 months ago. The kind of country that used to do everything it could to curry favor with us. Yes, that is how little is thought of the U.S. in today's world - so little that Serbia can blow us off. It used to be that only the Soviet Union could get away with taking those sorts of potshots at us. Now every crackpot named Chavez and post-Soviet shithole can just fire away. That's what happens when you have zero credibility.

And this all happened in one generation. People who lived during the days in which everyone kissed our ass are alive to see us reduced to kissing ass (i.e. Bulgaria) or being told to shove it by afterthought states.

NO POLITICS (WEEKEND)

It's a little late for No Politics Friday (tm), but here's a great video of an even better song from the inimitable Sluts of Trust:

VERBAL MASTURBATION

I'm going to warn you, reading some of this may be hard on your stomach.

Isn't it amazing how quickly the Get Tough On Crime (tm) right wing reverses course when one of its own is roasted by the criminal justice system? Check out the nauseating, effusive paeans written by some of the leading conservative figures in Washington pleading for mercy re: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. My favorite:

He and his family have endured crushing public humiliation as a result of unceasing press coverage. The media commentary about Mr. Libby has often been particularly unfair. Although he did not “out” Ms. Wilson, Mr. Libby has been continually blamed with leaking or orchestrating the leak of her identity. As the evidence at trial showed, as far back as September 2003, reporters were insinuating that Mr. Libby was the leaker. Indeed, based on such false assumptions, Mr. Libby has been repeatedly and wrongfully accused by some people of serious crimes including treason. The burden of relentless and unfair media coverage has fallen heaviest on Mr. Libby’s young children, and imprisonment would separate him from them at a particularly formative time in their lives.

*sniff* *sniff*

Well that just broke my fucking heart. We'll be very lucky, as the Shellac song goes, if I don't bust out crying before I can type any more.

See, let's get this straight. The criminal justice system is for poor people. And more specifically, it is for poor brown people. Scooter Libby may have committed a felony or two, but he's such a good guy! People like him just don't go to prison. Sure, he violated the law with serious adverse consequences, but all the "good things" he's done (like apparently bringing democracy to the peoples of Eastern Europe single-handedly) mean that it's only right for the justice system to give him a pass. That's how it works, right? You just tell the judge "But I've done some good things too!" and then they let you go....right? Or just tell him you have kids. The justice system has never separated parent from child before.

This is the most incredible U-turn in correctional philosophies since Rush "One strike and you're out, mandatory life for drug dealers" Limbaugh had his opiate addiction exposed. If you'll recall the response to that situation, Rush didn't deserve to be punished. He admitted that he had a problem and sought help. All those black people in jail must just want to be in jail. All you need to do to avoid jail is say you're sorry, dummies.

BLITZER 2008

And the campaign continues....

GRAVEL VS. KUCINICH: DECISION 2008

Here is a loosely-organized group of thoughts about the overhyped Democratic Primary debate on CNN last night.

First and foremost, Wolf Blitzer needs a tall glass of Shut the Fuck Up. His handling of the debate made Gwen Ifill's unbelievably embarassing Bush-Kerry 2004 performance look like Edward R. Murrow on performance-enhancing drugs. Dodd's campaign made this amusing graphic to highlight Wolf's verbal diarrhea.

Second, Hillary Clinton is dangerous and the other candidates should take her seriously. Her record is a litany of idiotic statements, centrist waffling, and failure, but much like her husband she eats up these televised connect-with-the-voters opportunities. There's no substance, but she clearly has presence that the others lack.

Third, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden are just wanking themselves off by entering this race. It is probably the strongest Democratic field in 30 years and they are absolutely wasting time and money. They are non-entities compared to the big guns.

Fourth, John Edwards' loss in 2004 is really working to his advantage. He's been "outside" the game for three years and is now in the enviable position of being able to take potshots at the "Washington insiders" who have been in the Senate tying themselves to a track record since 2004. He will hammer Clinton and Obama on their Senate records and there's nothing they can do about it.

Fifth, Bill Richardson made a tremendous mistake by not running (and getting killed) in 2004. A guy like him needs one candidacy just to get his name out there. Had he run in 2004 and gotten his name in the ring as an early 2008 candidate, he'd be getting more out of this race.

Sixth, the past several weeks have convinced me of a point that a Republican friend brought up with me several years ago: the Democrats' strongest candidate in 2008 is Al Gore running an "I told you so" campaign. He won't do it. It's too late and there are too many strong horses in the race. But he has really hit his stride in the past seven years and I think he'd be mopping the floor with these people.

Seventh, nothing could be worse than getting cocky at this point, but I can realistically see four candidates - Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Richardson - who would absolutely slaughter any of the C-list jackasses being trotted out by the GOP. Then again, this was true in 2004. But John Kerry and his friend Bob "Kiss of Death" Shrum found a way to lose anyhow. The Republican field in 2008 is as bad as any field in recent memory - only the 1984 Democratic field comes to mind as an equivalent example.

Eighth, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich are going to come to blows when a debate moderator finally asks the question, "Who in this field is closest to being insane? I don't mean eccentric, I mean pickin'-peanuts-out-of-crap crazy."

And now, on to the GOP cavalcade of errors.

NATURE VS. NURTURE

I have always believed that homosexuality is innate and not "a choice" as some would argue. I have changed my opinion. It can be willfully chosen. In support of my new argument I submit the following bit of hilarious Michelle Malkin "satire":

This video made me gay. Seriously, I was all about pussy like 12 hours ago, and now I am devoting the rest of my life to the male form.

Actually, fuck being gay. This video makes me want to cut my penis off, roast it in an industrial-grade incinerator at 2000 degrees for 90 minutes, put the ashes in a small capsule, pay vast sums of money to put the capsule on a Russian space rocket, and fire it directly into the sun.

This video makes me want to become a test subject for a multi-national effort on the part of the world's top medical scientists to create a human being who has no gender. I want all the testosterone to be removed from my body and replaced with Yoo Hoo. I want what little estrogen I naturally produce to be chemically altered in a way that will ensure that, if I should someday cease to be male, I will not become a lesbian if I find myself female.

This video makes me want to stare directly into a high-powered arc lamp for 6 to 8 hours with my eyes pried open Clockwork Orange-style. After that, I want the high-powered laser that DARPA uses to shoot down satellites to be aimed directly into my retinae and fired at full power.

After my eyes and gonads are irrecovably destroyed, I want to become a monk in some religion where the holy men really are celibate (not one of the "wink wink" celibate religions). Once initiated, I want to be confined to a small, locked room for 23.5 hours per day to make sure I never get out.

In short, this video is bad. But you've got to hand it to those right-wingers - they're hilarious!