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Archive for April 2007
Help! Mom! Al Gore Is under My Bed!
Posted by Clif on 04/28/07 at 8:54 am
Category: Wingnuts
St. Peggy of the Dolphins is in fine form in this week’s Wall Street Journal column, having drunk deeply of the bracing draught of Grey Goose before stumbling to her keyboard to tell us that we are scaring the shit out of our children. Peggy is, of course, rather an expert on scaring children and small animals.
Peggy starts out by declaring that a Los Angeles mural, which she evidently has never seen, is deeply traumatic to children. (Click here to see the mural. Make sure children are safely confined in a separate room to avoid possible trauma).
Now having actually seen the mural, you might well ask what’s so frightening about it? According to Peggy:
The mural is big–400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak–and eye-catching, as would be anything that “presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America’s indigenous people by genocidal Europeans.”
So, of course, the mural should be painted over and replaced with something smaller and more wholesome, say a picture of Spanish missionaries converting awe-stricken Aztecs simply by reading the Gospel to them.
What else does Peggy think scares children? Global warming. No, really:
It’s not only roughness and frightening things in our mass media, it’s politics too. Daily alarms on global warming with constant videotape of glaciers melting and crashing into the sea. Anchors constantly asking, “Is there still time to save the Earth? Scientists warn we must move now.”
Al Gore should just shut his fat mouth and stop scaring the children.
What else, according to Peggy, scares children? Why Rosie of course. And anti-smoking commercials.
As if all this weren’t preposterous enough, Peggy, filled with the vodka of human kindness, discovers at the bottom of her martini glass a heretofore unexpressed concern for the plight of poor children:
We are frightening our children to death, and I’ll tell you what makes me angriest. Affluence buys protection. . . . If you have money in America, you can hire people who compose the human chrysalis that protects the butterflies of the upper classes as they grow. The lacking, the poor, the working and middle class–they have no protection. Their kids are on their own. And they’re scared.
That’s right. The plight of poor children isn’t that they are going to bed hungry. It’s that they don’t have nannies to tell them that Al Gore is a big fat liar.
Not surprisingly, the sponsor of Peggy’s column was Skyy90 vodka.
That image was not digitally manipulated. Promise.
Fred Scare
Posted by Clif on 04/27/07 at 12:16 pm Category: Stupid Republicans
When Fred isn’t memorizing his part on Law and Order, he apparently spends his time collecting the latest wingnut legends to repeat during his commentary spot on the Mouse Radio Network. Currently Fred is spouting a story that originates from a chain email (usually an unimpeachable source) which claims that schools in Great Britain have stopped teaching about the Holocaust and about the Crusades for fear of offending Muslims:
Now, according to a study funded by the British government, we find out that some schools in Great Britain have stopped teaching history that is offensive to Muslim students. The topics that have been erased from the curriculum, the study found, include both the Nazi genocide and the Crusades.
Yikes. Next thing you know they’ll be banning bacon at Safeway and shutting down Sunday Schools.
Except, of course, that Fred’s not telling the whole truth.
Let’s look at the study that Fred mentions but doesn’t cite because, of course, Fred only saw the chain email version.
For example, a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils. In another department, teachers were strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination. In another history department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils, but the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 because their balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was taught in some local mosques.
Ahhhh. So Fred doesn’t tell us that “some” schools means “two” schools. Only one school in the study stopped teaching the Holocaust and only one school stopped teaching the Crusades. There are thousands of schools in Great Britain and if only two succumbed to pressure from the Muslims, that wouldn’t be so scary, now would it? Hardly worth mentioning, even on the Mouse Radio Network. “Some” sounds so much better than “only two.”
And, oddly, Fred doesn’t mention the school that stopped teaching the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict because of flack from some fundamentalist Christians. I wonder why not? Any ideas?
Ben Finally Proves That He Really Is America’s Worst Law Student
Posted by Clif on 04/25/07 at 6:22 pm Category: America's Worst Law Student
Faithful Outsiders™ know that each time we report on the latest bit of wankery by Ben Shapiro, aka America’s Worst Law Student™, we have felt compelled to issue a disclaimer that we weren’t able to judge whether he was really America’s Worst Law Student and only meant by it to suggest that Ben was America’s Tiniest Wanker.
Well, Outsiders™, the day of the disclaimer is over! Ben’s latest sublimated ejaculation over at Clown Hall proves, once and for all and beyond any question, that Ben is indeed America’s Worst Law Student. In fact, Ben makes Nancy Grace look like Justice Felix Freaking Frankfurter.
Ben’s column joins the fray of the other would-be wingnut Rambos that are calling the Virginia Tech students a bunch of wusses. To remind folks that he’s been guarding the halls of Harvard Law School all by his lonesome, Ben starts the column with an attempt at an erudite legal reference:
Most contracts for goods and services contain an “Act of God” provision. Such provisions typically allow contracting parties to dissolve a contract in case of an unexpected and unavoidable catastrophe: an earthquake, a tsunami, a lightning strike. This is perfectly logical. Man can act based on predictions about human behavior, but has no control over forces of nature.
Er, no, Ben, and if you put crap like that on your bar exam you can expect to spend the rest of your life collecting wingnut welfare.
The provision that Ben is talking about is what is normally called a force majeure clause. Such a clause refers not just to “acts of God” or “forces of nature” as Ben asserts. They also refer to other unforeseen contingencies that aren’t “acts of God” or “forces of nature” such as war, civil unrest, labor stoppages, etc., i.e., anything outside the reasonable control of the contracting parties which may, of course, include human behavior like strikes and war. So much for Ben’s explanation of why such clauses are “perfectly logical.”
Nor does the occurrence of such events “dissolve” a contract as Ben suggests. The occurrence just permits the affected party to delay performance of that part of the contract affected by the event until such time as the effects of the event have subsided. This is something that every 1L knows. Even at Regent.
Each time Ben publishes a column, Harvard Law has to reduce its tuition rates.
Girls Gone WiFi XXX
Posted by Clif on 04/24/07 at 4:22 pm Category: Wingnuts, Stupid Republicans
You can count on a law professor who believes that a sip of Coca-Cola will send you straight to hell to be a veritable fount of wingnuterrific ideas and, in that regard, Brigham Young Law Professor Cheryl Preston does not disappoint. Professor Jenkins is disturbed by the notion that impressionable teenagers are sneaking onto their neighbors’ unsecured wireless networks in order to look at uncovered body parts. So she’s proposed legislation in the Utah Legislature to punish people who have unsecured wireless home networks.
Under her legislation leaving a wireless network open would be considered the same as providing pornography to children, thereby creating, in one fell swoop, an entirely new class of technologically challenged pornographers: namely, your Aunt Emily and my Uncle George, neither of whom could figure out how to put a password on their wireless networks. Preston is also considering legislation to imprison people who watch HBO without drawing their blinds first and on those people who can’t figure out how to reset their appliance clocks for daylight savings time.
Hearings were held last week by the Utah legislature on Professor Preston’s proposed bill and, of course, hilarity ensued. Apparently the idea of a wireless network was more than one Republican could get his arms around:
“My brain is on the edge of frying, trying to understand” the technology involved, said committee co-chairman Sen. Scott Jenkins, R-Plain City.
The problem started when Jenkins tried to figure out how stuff made its way out of the Internet’s various tubes and into mysterious magic rays that shoot out from a little box with blinking lights and then infiltrate a nearby computer.
Fake DA by Day, Gun Nut by Night
Posted by Clif on 04/23/07 at 8:39 am Category: Lying Republicans
Fred Thompson, whose experience with firearms is limited to shooting blanks on a television show, takes the Virginia Tech massacre as an opportunity to lecture the slack-jawed readers of the National Review on gun control. Naturally, the faux-DA thinks that the answer to the problem is letting people pack heat and he marshals a few wingnutistics to support his theory:
Virginia, like 39 other states, allows citizens with training and legal permits to carry concealed weapons. . . . and are far safer than . . . San Francisco, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, or Washington, D.C., where such permits are difficult or impossible to obtain.
The statistics are clear. Communities that recognize and grant Second Amendment rights to responsible adults have a significantly lower incidence of violent crime than those that do not. More to the point, incarcerated criminals tell criminologists that they consider local gun laws when they decide what sort of crime they will commit, and where they will do so.
Like all wingnutistics, these have that requisite stench of fakery on first sniff. It seems suspicious, for example, for Thompson to suggest that the well-known crime capital of San Francisco is more dangerous than all the cities in Virgina. I guess you get ideas like that when you spend all day on a the set of a television crime show. But reality, of course, is a different place. Richmond, for example, has a violent crime rate of 1,200 per 100,000; for San Francisco it’s 800.
And the notion that concealed carry states in general have lower crime rates than states restricting concealed carry — an idea the originated in John Lott’s 1996 book More Guns, Less Crime — has been debunked:
In the 29 states that have lax CCW laws (where law enforcement must issue CCW licenses to almost all applicants), the crime rate fell 2.1%, from 5397.0 to 5285.1 crimes per 100,000 population from 1996 to 1997. During the same time period, in the 21 states and the District of Columbia with strict carry laws or which don’t allow the carrying of concealed weapons at all, the crime rate fell 4.4%, from 4810.5 to 4599.9 crimes per 100,000 population. The decline in the crime rate of strict licensing and no-carry states was 2.1 times that of states with lax CCW systems, indicating that there are more effective ways to fight crime than to encourage more people to carry guns.
But the biggest whopper in Thompson’s paean to packing heat is his idea that “incarcerated criminals tell criminologists that they consider local gun laws when they decide” where to commit crimes. I just can’t get my arms around the image of a criminal in a bus station looking at a chart of concealed carry states to decide what ticket to buy. “Er, okay, sell me a ticket to Boston.”
Thompson inhabits a world devoid of links and citations so it’s impossible to tell where he dug up this improbable gem. I’ve looked around trying to find a study relying on interviews with incarcerated criminals that would provide some support for Thompson’s absurd notion. Presumably Thompson is referring to the Wright-Rossi study “The Armed Criminal in America: A Survey of Incarcerated Felons.” Wright and Rossi did note that 40% of the interviewed felons said that they had decided not to commit a crime because they feared that the victim might be armed. But Wright notes a significant qualification:
These findings, too, must be interpreted with caution. Although the survey did not ask who those “intended victims” were, it is likely that many would be the felons’ own “colleagues,” since men of the sort studied in this research are clearly not above preying upon one another.
So much for the idea that criminals are thinking about concealed carry laws.
Choosy Mothers Don’t Choose Wingnut Buttars
Posted by Clif on 04/20/07 at 9:11 am Category: Buttars
The comments of Utah wingnut Chris Buttars on the recent anti-abortion ruling of the Supreme Court tells us how he really feels about women:
Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, said he, too, would be willing to sponsor a trigger bill that hinges on a repeal of Roe v. Wade, “which we all believe will happen some day.”
Such a law should consider the life of the mother, but not her health, Buttars said. “If you just consider the health of the mother, is it ‘Will she be tired more often?’ or is it something much more serious in the ladder of health deterioration?”
Answering that question is why we go to doctors for medical care and not to dim-witted right-wing state legislators who believe that God lives on the planet Kolob.
Giuliani Cancels Campaign Appearance in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
Posted by Clif on 04/19/07 at 9:18 am Category: Politics, Wankers
After reading about this, er, overeaction by the Bloomfield Hills Michigan police department, you have to wonder whether the cops in Bloomfield have to leave a trail of donut crumbs in order to find their way back to the precinct:
Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills went into lockdown Monday morning after parents reported seeing a suspicious man dressed as a woman near a campus bus stop.
Police described a white male about 6 feet tall, wearing a gray or blond wig, lipstick, a flowered skirt, a dark coat and high heels.
“He was walking up the lot toward Kingswood School,” said Lt. Paul Myszenski with the Bloomfield Hills Department of Public Safety.
While he was not observed doing anything illegal, authorities decided to lock down schools after 8 a.m. Students were told to sit in their classrooms with lights off as police did a room-by-room search.
Looking for what? Stick-on nails and mascara?
Afterward, officials admitted Monday’s tragic shootings in Virginia factored into the Cranbrook lockdown.
“In light of what happened yesterday, everyone is on extra high alert,” Myszenski said. “We’re trying to be safe than sorry.”
Later in the day, a SWAT team blew away two brown squirrels that Bloomfield police officers thought had been making threatening gestures in a wooded patch next to the Burger King.
(Via Pam)
Oxymoron of the Day: Wingnut Bravery
Posted by Clif on 04/17/07 at 9:41 pm Category: Politics, Wingnuts, Wankers
Oddly-monikered Nathanael Blake is over at Human Wingnuts Online proving that it’s easy to be brave while typing:
College classrooms have scads of young men who are at their physical peak, and none of them [at Virginia Tech] seems to have done anything beyond ducking, running, and holding doors shut.
Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.
Nathanael is currently exhibiting his manliness and fighting the bad guys as an Associate Editor of Celebrate Life. He used to be protecting others by writing a column over at Town Hall until even the Heritage Foundation found him too preposterous to publish and dumped him.
Everything Tommy Knows About Jews He Learned from “Fiddler on the Roof”
Posted by Clif on 04/17/07 at 7:09 am Category: Loathsome Republicans, Stupid Republicans
Tommy Thompson is the only GOP Presidential candidate with an implanted microchip so that he can be returned home if he gets lost. Although that chip might prevent him from being mistakenly euthanized at an animal control center, he might consider trying to have an additional chip implanted that would stop him from saying extraordinarily stupid things:
At the outset of a speech to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the former Wisconsin governor told an audience of a few hundred people that, “I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money.”
Added Thompson: “You know that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition, and I do not find anything wrong with that. I enjoy that.”
He went on to say that he’d thought about converting to Judaism because of the religion’s love for money until he realized that he’d never be able to eat New England clam chowder again.
Additionally Thompson told the crowd that he had lots of Jewish friends, said nice things about the extremist Jewish Defense League, called Winston Churchill a “leader of the Israeli region” and talked about “Jewish Bonds.”
A spokesman for Thompson said that it wasn’t all that bad. “At least he didn’t call them Jew bonds.”
(In case it’s not obvious, the remarks about clam chowder and the statement from the Thompson spokesman are satiric. Everything else is, sadly, true. Including the implanted chip.)