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Another COG in the GOP machine

Posted by Clif on 09/30/06 at 11:23 am
Category: Lying Republicans, Loathsome Republicans, Pedophilegate

That was then:

[Foley] said he was shocked by the newspaper article about the naked camps that have been going on in his home state since 1993.

Foley suggested the camps force kids to fixate on nudity during their impressionable, formative years. Normal teen sexual urges can become inflamed by the nakedness around them, he said.

“It’s putting matches a little too close to gasoline,” he said.

This is now:

Maf54: What ya wearing?
Teen: tshirt and shorts
Maf54: Love to slip them off of you.

That was then:

After meeting with officials of one nudist summer camp for children, near Tampa, Foley said he wanted to see the camp adopt stricter background checks for employees and tighter security to keep out “creepy old guys,” otherwise known as COGs.

This is now:

Maf54: Do I make you a little horny?
Teen: A little.
Maf54: Cool.

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CAFE au Lie

Posted by Clif on 09/30/06 at 9:03 am
Category: Wingnuts, Environment, The War on Science

Iain Murray, who makes a “living” sucking from the teat of of the fossil fuel industry at CEI, proves, yet again, that there are no limits to his capacity to distort the evidence relative to global warming issues.

Over at at America’s Shittiest Website™, Murray turns his talent for lying to the federal CAFE standards for vehicle fleet fuel efficiency:

On the subject of whether or not killing people is good if it reduces emissions – that seems to be the enviros’ position when it comes to fuel economy standards. The NAS found that the introduction of CAFÉ [sic] standards raised the road accident death rate by 2000 fatalities a year because of reduced vehicle size. Over 30 years, that’s one heck of a toll. Yet the enviros want enforced fuel economy which means lighter cars and more dead bodies.

There is, of course, a reason why Murray doesn’t link to the NAS study that he cites other than the impact that a few seconds typing in the hyperlink would have on his ratio of snack food ingestion to written output. Simply put, the NAS study doesn’t say what Murray claims.

Although the NAS study indicates that initial efforts to meet CAFE standards by downsizing vehicles increased vehicle fatalities, it pointed out that new technologies permitted increased efficiencies through methods other than downsizing:

In the period since 1975, manufacturers have made considerable improvements in the basic efficiency of engines, drive trains, and vehicle aerodynamics. . . . By 1985, light-duty vehicles had improved enough to meet CAFE standards. Thereafter, technology improvements were concentrated principally on performance and other vehicle attributes (including improved occupant protection). . . . Technologies exist that, if applied to passenger cars and light-duty trucks would significantly reduce fuel consumption within 15 years.

Methods cited by the NAS study that would improve efficiency without downsizing included direct-injection lean burning gasoline and ignition-compression (diesel) engines as well as hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles. These alternate technologies led the report to conclude that the government needs to enforce fuel efficiency standards beyond those levels that a free market would naturally attain.

To paraphrase a wingnut chestnut: CAFE standards don’t kill people, people who lie about CAFE standards kill people.

Cross-posted at The American Street.

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Riehlly Stupid

Posted by Clif on 09/28/06 at 4:01 pm
Category: Wingnuts

Winger blogger Dan Riehl (best known for his creepy obsession with Nathalie Holloway) is up in arms about the cancellation of a production of Idomeneo in Germany. This is more than a little hilarious since before Riehl read the newsclip about the cancellation, it is quite apparent that he thought that Idomeneo was either an Italian restaurant, a cheap perfume or the Spanish word for dominoes:

You have got to be kidding me, this is about as pathetic as it gets.

The now-cancelled production of Mozart’s opera, directed by provocateur Hans Neuenfels, includes a scene in which King Idomeneo is shown staggering on stage next to the severed heads of Buddha, Jesus, Poseidon and the Prophet Mohammad, which sit on chairs. It was an equal-opportunity insult of religions. But it doesn’t matter. When Mohammed is insulted, you know the consequences.

Germany is simply going to dismiss Mozart, or some portion of his work, as it might offend immigrant Muslims?

Uh, no, Dan,you ignorant twit. The cancellation had nothing to do with Mozart and everything to do with director Hans Neunfels. There’s nothing in the original Mozart opera that has anything to do with Muslims or Mohammed or Islam (or Buddha or Jesus, for that matter); that was all added by Neunfels.

It’s so cute when the wingnuts get all riled up about protecting cultural icons that are as foreign to them as the suras of the Koran.

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Non-Iraquitur

Posted by Clif on 09/27/06 at 9:24 pm
Category: Politics, White House, Iraq

During his press conference yesterday with Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Bush trotted out an outrageous non-sequitur (which he’s used before) to justify his argument that the war in Iraq has not increased our risk from terrorism:

You know, to suggest that if we weren’t in Iraq, we would see a rosier scenario with fewer extremists joining the radical movement requires us to ignore 20 years of experience. We weren’t in Iraq when we got attacked on September the
11th. . . . We weren’t in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. We weren’t in Iraq when they bombed the Cole. We weren’t in Iraq when they blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

This is like saying that tainted spinach didn’t cause the latest outbreak of food poisoning because people came down with food poisoning before the tainted spinach was sold in grocery stores. Or that gunshots don’t cause death because people have died before guns were invented.

I’m sure that you’ll be totally surprised that John “Corndogger” Hinderaker at PowerTool breathlessly quoted this mind-numbingly preposterous non-sequitur from Bush and added:

As usual, the President stands head and shoulders above his critics.

Which, of course, only goes to show that when your mouth is buried in someone’s groin you really have no clue as to how tall they are.

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Woohoo!!

Posted by Clif on 09/27/06 at 8:48 am
Category: Miscellaneous

Sometime last night Outside the Tent passed the half-million visitor mark! Yeah, I know, Kos and the Catman, er, Atrios each get a half-million visitors every two seconds. Still, I think it’s a milestone (and a millstone), and I only have you, my faithful Outsiders™, to thank as well as all the bigger, better and cooler blogs that made the mistake of putting an ill-tempered, smart-mouthed chumpstick like me on their blogroll. Thanks!

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Translation from the Medvedic

Posted by Clif on 09/27/06 at 8:30 am
Category: Politics, Wingnuts

If proof were really needed that AM talk radio destroys more brain cells than huffing furniture polish, one need look no further than Michael Medved. In an interview with the New York Times, Medved expressed his displeasure with recent comments by Mel Gibson where Gibson compared the American troop deployment in Iraq to the Mayan human sacrifices depicted in his new movie:

If these antiwar comments are the beginning of an ill-considered, organized campaign to get back into the good graces of the Hollywood establishment that gave him the Oscar for ‘Braveheart,’ so he can show he’s not different from them and march arm-in-arm with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, there will be a great deal of disgust from the people who have enjoyed Mel’s movies in the past.

Translation:

It didn’t really bother me when Mel called me, my family, and my forbears a bunch of “fucking Jews.” However, when he criticizes George Bush, that’s going too far and will really upset people who wished he’d get back to making movies that blame the crucifixion of Christ on my forbears.

Thanks to Roxanne for noticing this article.

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Schmidiest. Explanation. Ever. Part 2.

Posted by Clif on 09/26/06 at 8:46 pm
Category: Politics, Lying Republicans, Loathsome Republicans

Jean Schmidt’s explanation for why her newspaper editorial was virtually identical to a press release by Deborah Pryce, another Republican House of Representatives member from Ohio, is a doozy. Schmidt now claims that the column in question was authored by the House Republican Conference and they said it was okay to put her name on it. According to Schmidt:

It is not plagiarism if they tell you to use it.

Uh, no. Do you think that argument would work if a student told her professor that the term paper company that wrote the paper said it was okay for the student to put her name on it?

The Cincinnati Enquirer provides more details:

Geoff Embler, spokesman for the House Republican Conference, said the sample editorials are there for all lawmakers to use however they wish. But Embler could not name any other lawmaker who has produced an editorial that was almost identical to the samples provided.

Right. Because everybody else knows that passing off somebody else’s work as your own is wrong even if you have permission.

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Schmidtiest. Explanation. Ever

Posted by Clif on 09/24/06 at 12:17 pm
Category: Lying Republicans

Jean Schmidt (R - Ohio) has stepped in it again. It appears that a September 13 newspaper column that appeared under her name had been copied virtually word for word from a press release issued by Rep. Deborah Pryce several months earlier on July 10. You can see a word for word comparison here.

That alone would be a good enough story, but it gets even better. When confronted with the damning evidence, Schmidt’s campaign issued this astonishing press release:

While Congresswoman Pryce’s and Congresswoman Schmidt’s columns were very similar, this was not a case of plagiarism. Using the same words, in the same sequence, and in the same quantity does not necessarily imply plagiarism. Also, note that in the first paragraph, Ms. Pryce uses the word ‘Congress’, while Ms. Schmidt uses the word ‘Republicans’. I think the evidence speaks for itself.

No, using the same words, in the same sequence, and in the same quantity was instead just a remarkable coincidence. Or wait, it’s actually proof that Deborah Pryce has a time machine and that she traveled ahead two months in time, copied Schmidt’s column, and then traveled back in time to print Schmidt’s column under her own name. Or maybe it’s proof that Schmidt wrote the column in July and that Pryce broke into Schmidt’s office, stole a copy and then claimed that she wrote it. You know, the possibilities here are endless.

UPDATE: In case you might have thought otherwise, the press release is a fabrication. Still, I can’t imagine that Schmidt will have a better explanation.

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Wild Ass Bray

Posted by Clif on 09/23/06 at 11:03 am
Category: Gay Issues, Radical Clerics

Gerald Bray, a British wingnut and Anglican priest currently ensconced in a Baptist seminary in Alabama, has a burr up his, er, donkey about gays in the Episcopal Church and particularly about a certain gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. In a recent editorial in the revealingly-named publication Churchman, Fr. Bray actually commits to paper this gasp-inducing observation:

For example, although the American South is well-known for its conservatism and no-one [sic] will be surprised to discover that many (probably most) of the Episcopal churches there are horrified at the recent election of a practising homosexual as bishop [sic] of New Hampshire, the nature of Southern [sic] traditionalism does not immediately suggest that they would turn to a place like Rwanda for assistance. But faced with a choice between a white American homosexual bishop and a black-skinned African Archbishop [sic], there has been no hesitation — Rwanda has won hands down. The celebrant may look more like the church janitor than like any of the worshippers in the pews, but it does not matter. . . .

Of course, although this statement might evoke outrage in most other places, it passes without comment at a Baptist seminary in Alabama. At least he didn’t say that the celebrant looked more like a chain-gang worker than the people in the pews.

UPDATE: We just received a puzzling email about this post from Fr. Bray:

It is a simple statement of fact. The incident I described actually happened. I am not in favour of it, of course, but there it is. I am sorry if this was not clear to you.

Is it a simple statement of fact that black people look like janitors? And then I suppose the rest of the email means that he’s sorry that black people look like janitors, but there it is. It seems to me that this reply is even more loathsome than Bray’s original comments.

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More GonzaLies

Posted by Clif on 09/21/06 at 9:24 pm
Category: Politics

At a press conference on Tuesday, Alberto Gonzales was asked about Maher Arar, the Canadian that the U.S. government mistakenly shipped off to Syria for torture, er, interrogation:

QUESTION: Canada, as you know, released a long-awaited report yesterday on the treatment of Maher Arar. Since the Department was the agency that allowed his removal to Syria in which he was then tortured, doesn’t the Department owe him an apology?

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria, I’m not aware that he was tortured, and I haven’t read the Commission report.

At first it appears that Gonzales is trying to say that Arar was kidnapped by aliens and taken by flying saucer to Syria. His actual explanation for that is, frankly, not really much better:

On Wednesday, a Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Gonzales had intended to make only a narrow point: that deportations are now handled by the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice.

The spokesman, Charles Miller, said the attorney general forgot that at the time of Mr. Arar’s deportation, such matters were still handled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was part of the Department of Justice.

Translation: Gonzales was trying to blame it on someone else having forgotten that there was indisputable evidence that this was untrue.

And Gonzales’s statements that he is unaware that Arar had been tortured makes sense only if it was Gonzales who had been captured by aliens and flown in a UFO to a distant planet where no U.S. news sources were available.

But the best part of Gonzales’s little side step and tap dance was this:

We understand as a government what our obligations are with respect to anyone who is rendered by this government to another country, and that is that we seek to satisfy ourselves that they will not be tortured. And we do that in every case. And if in fact he had been rendered to Syria, we would have sought those same kind of assurances.

The Bush administration has called Syria a state-supporter of terrorism, a proxy for Iran, and an enemy of peace and democracy in the Middle East, and yet Gonzales can stand up with a straight face and say that when Syria assures us that they don’t torture people, we believe them. These people have lied so much that they can no longer tell the difference between a plausible lie and an obvious one.

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Miranda Fights

Posted by Clif on 09/20/06 at 8:22 am
Category: America's Shittiest Website, Stupid Republicans

Andy McCarthy is over at America’s Shittiest Website™ demonstrating why he is now a former prosecutor receiving wingnut welfare from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies rather than a practicing lawyer. Indeed his post on the supposed evils of the McCain-Graham-
Warner amendments to Bush’s military commission proposal is so filled with errors and misstatements that I suspect that it alone could be a sufficient basis to yank Andy’s license to practice law.

McCarthy kicks off his parade of errors by saying that the McCain-
Graham-Warner proposal “would require us to give Miranda warnings at the moment of battlefield capture for an al Qaeda terrorist.” Apparently, Andy hasn’t bothered to even read the McCain-Graham-
Warner proposal because § 948b(c)(B) of that proposal explicitly excludes the application of Article 31(b) of the UCMJ. Article 31(b) is the provision of the UCMJ which requires the UCMJ’s analogue of the Miranda warnings. Even if Article 31(b) applied, it doesn’t require the warnings on the battlefield at the moment of capture, only prior to interrogation.

To make the prospect of Article 31 warnings to battlefield detainees even scarier, Andy mischaraterizes the scope of those warnings by claiming that “the UCMJ’s generous Miranda protections . . . are actually better than what criminals get in the civilian justice system.” This makes me wonder if Andy even has a clue as to the contents of either the civilian Miranda warnings or the UCMJ’s Article 31 warnings. Miranda warnings require, and Article 31 does not require, a statement that the suspect has the right to an attorney and that, in the event that the suspect can’t afford an attorney, a court-appointed attorney. Given that difference, I don’t think anyone would say that Article 31 protections are “better.”

Having mischaracterized the McCain-Graham-Warner proposal, the Miranda warnings, and Article 31 of the UCMJ, Andy applies his legal, er, acumen to the McCain Amendment on torture:

But . . . the horse is already out of the barn. Attention class: THANKS TO THE McCAIN AMENDMENT, WE ARE ALREADY OBLIGATED TO PROVIDE MIRANDA WARNINGS IF WE HAVE ANY HOPE OF USING CONFESSION EVIDENCE IN EVENTUAL TERRORIST TRIALS.

Andy probably thinks that if he puts complete crap in caps, we’ll be forced to believe it. Once again it is manifestly clear that Andy hasn’t bothered to read the McCain Amendment before lecturing people on what it says. And there’s really no excuse for that because the Amendment is really quite short. Read it for yourself and see if you find a requirement there to provide Miranda warnings (or any other kind of warnings) to DoD detainees.

So why does Andy think that the McCain Amendment requires these warnings? Here is Andy’s razor-sharp logic:

The McCain Amendment vested alien enemy combatants held outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts with Fifth Amendment rights. . . . Consequently, if al Qaeda gets 5th Amendment protection, it also gets Miranda protection.

Except that the McCain Amendment didn’t vest DoD detainees with full Fifth Amendment rights, just the rights under the Fifth Amendment not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Here’s the language in question:

In this section, the term ‘’cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment'’ means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. . . .

Finally let’s suppose that something in the McCain Amendment or in the McCain-Graham-Warner required that someone read Article 31 or even Miranda rights to people captured on the battlefield. Just why exactly is that the end of the world? Are we actually to believe that a hardened terrorist would have confessed everything but for being told that he had the right to remain silent?

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