No one expects a blogaround – For the Children

It’s vital to be aware that the mistakes we make in the present will only hurt the next generation. So you can be pretty sure that our kids will grow up just like us – not overly bright and totally confused about how to fix the economy.

• Selwyn Duke: Conservatives must have a lot of children. That’ll show those damned liberals.
• Mad Kane: This is no laughing matter. To most.
• The Sideshow: The U.S. preparing to be the next nation trounced by disaster capitalism?
• Betfair: The dark side of the Sporno industry.
• Sensen No Sen: If they’d just debate the facts about the Employee Free Choice Act, there would be no debate.
• Jesus’ General: Obama’s use of teleprompters hides a horrifying, and possibly Amish, secret.
• The Angry Black Women: Get ready writers, Verb Noire is coming and ready for submissions.
• NeuroLogica Blog: UFO conspiracies are easily debunked.
• Anonymous Liberal: Could we please get a better press corps?

–WKW

The Spy Game continues unabated

With less than nine months until they expire, the FBI wants to make sure they still have the right to spy via the Patriot Act. Because, you know, it works.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III today urged lawmakers to move swiftly to renew intelligence-gathering measures set to expire in December, calling them “exceptional” tools to help protect national security.

Mueller told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he hoped that the reauthorization of two provisions contained in the Patriot Act would be far less “controversial” than in previous years. During the Bush administration, the law drove a wedge between investigators seeking to detect terrorist threats and advocates warning that it trampled on Americans’ civil liberties.

In response to a question from Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Mueller said that his agents had used a provision that helped authorities secure access to business records about 220 times between 2004 and 2007. Data for last year was not yet available, Mueller said.

The measure, known as section 215 after its location in the Patriot Act, has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union as allegedly violating the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens. It allows investigators probing terrorism to seek a suspect’s records from third parties such as financial services, travel and telephone companies without notifying the suspect.

“It has been exceptionally helpful in our national security investigations,” the FBI director said.

For anyone who thought that Barack Obama would take office and immediately begin shedding the powers that George W. Bush bestowed on himself, then you just aren’t paying attention. Leaders just don’t voluntary give up power, no matter what the purposes.

So the FBI will continue to spy. Because it works. Of course, so does shooting every criminal and suspected terrorist in the head. That’ll make the baddies think twice. After all, once you’ve blown off civil liberties, anything goes.

–WKW

Congress going after college football little more than B(C)S

Whew. That was a tough financial crisis, eh? And those wars, they were a drag, too. And it was a real bummer when our education and health care systems were a complete nightmare, as well.

But those days are gone. Now, it’s time for Congress to get to the good stuff. Like holding hearings about the Bowl Championship Series in College Football.

Behind the push for the hearings is the subcommittee’s top Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. People there were furious that Utah was bypassed for the national championship despite going undefeated in the regular season.

The title game pitted No. 1 Florida (12-1) against No. 2 Oklahoma (12-1); Florida won 24-14 and claimed the title.

The subcommittee’s statement said Hatch would introduce legislation “to rectify this situation.” No details were offered and Hatch’s office declined to provide any.

Hatch said in a statement that the BCS system “has proven itself to be inadequate, not only for those of us who are fans of college football, but for anyone who believes that competition and fair play should have a role in collegiate sports.”

In the House, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, has sponsored legislation that would prevent the NCAA from calling a football game a “national championship” unless the game culminates from a playoff system.

Thank God this is being taken care of before Utah fans get screwed again. And hopefully, very soon, Congress will reconvene to take a deeper look into the idea that the NBA needs to widen the lane and move the 3-point line back a foot.

–WKW

America recoils in disgust as Bill O’Reilly gets “his pipe up” in bold, fresh, piece of crap audio book

Submitted with some slight retching:

–WKW

No one expects a blogaround – Patrick Byrne edition

As far as being a prodigious writer on the Internet, I’ll put my track record up against anyone. Except maybe Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. Because I’ve written quite a bit these last two weeks, but Byrne has trumped me. And done so while being the CEO of a large Internet retailer. Here’s just a taste:

• Patrick Byrne: Journalists suck.
• Patrick Byrne: Commenters on blog posts suck.
• Patrick Byrne: The Lord Sith is out there.
• Patrick Byrne: 10,000 words describing why you live in the Matrix.
• Patrick Byrne: Bear Stearns crashed a year ago. Watch this video.
• Patrick Byrne: Hey, random blogger, go read Deep Capture.
• Patrick Byrne: Hey, random blogger, sorry if I scared you.
• Patrick Byrne: I have to apologize to The Daily Show, I’ll explain later.
• Patrick Byrne: Jim Cramer being on the Daily Show proves that all journalists are criminals bent on my own destruction.
• Patrick Byrne: Jim Cramer is a criminal. Please reference my other work where I call him a criminal for proof.

–WKW

Sperm industry comes to the rescue during economic crisis

Tough economic times like these force everyone to cut back. Families around the U.S. are sitting at their family room table, pouring over bills, desperately searching for where they can make cuts.

Luckily for many Americans, those cuts won’t have to include sperm.

Yes, for the sperm-needy amongst us, the sperm bank Xytex International is offering crazy, clearinghouse discounts on its gallons of warm, ready-to-bake sperm. Because despite the economic downturn, Xytex is literally over-flowing with generic, just-some-dude sperm, and it’s ready to let the savings drip on down to you.

Select donors are a new level of donor which we introduced to try to help our clients who are interested in third-party reproduction but, with the tough economy, are having a little bit of trouble purchasing a regular donor,” Xytex spokeswoman Danielle Moores told AFP.

Select donors, explained Moores, are men from whom Xytex has “many, many vials because they’re very successful donors or able to stop in several times a week or — for whatever reason, we have a huge inventory,” and it is being made available in a sort of clearance sale.

Xytex prefers to call it the balancing effect of supply and demand.

“Select donors haven’t reached the end of their shelf-life, they’re just over-produced,” Moores said.

Select donor units run between 250 and 350 dollars, representing a savings of between 135 and 235 dollars on comparable vials from a standard Xytex donor, which start at 385 dollars and go up to 585 dollars.

So folks, remember, during these hard times, it’s up to Americans to make things better in America. Xytex International is heeding that call. So if you’re looking for some good sperm – but not too good of sperm, give Xytex a call. They’re ready to come give you a hand.

–WKW

Sarah and Scientology? Or, Sarah Palin: The Michael Jordan of blogging topics

Right from the get go, it was apparent Sarah Palin was special. With her “go-getcha” personality, her dances with witch doctors, her invented resume, her wardrobe budget, in addition to truly impressive physical appeal, Palin’s run as John McCain’s running mate made her one of the most well-known women in the nation. And for bloggers, she was like Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush combined – an almost limitless subject for blog posts.

And now, months following her return to Alaska, she just keeps on giving, adding Scientology and Greta Van Sustern and her massive journalistic ethics violations to her list of strange deeds. Geoffrey Dunne has the whole thing at The Huffington Post.

While there’s something ironic about Alaska’s most famous evangelical Christians pallin’ around with a couple who believes that 75 million years ago an entity named Xenu brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling DC-8 airliners, it’s all been good for Van Susteren’s ratings. It’s also expanded her television profile from the narrow confines of legal journalism to broader national political commentary. She’s ridden Palin’s conservative steed into an entirely new level of public exposure.

Palin may have hurt me in one sense – I no longer feel quite as cool about talking up my days in Alaska. But as a blogger, let it be known that I’m unwavering in my opinion that Sarah Palin was, and continues to be, the greatest blog post topic in history.

–WKW

Texas to debate whether to teach children that Earth is 6,000 years old

At some point, you truly have to marvel that in 2009, there is actually going to be a debate in Texas about whether or not school children should be taught creationism alongside evolution. P.J. Myers says it much better than I:

The Texas Board of Education is led by Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist and plagiarist who believes that the earth is only 6000 years old.

Just stop there and savor it. The man who wants to dictate what all of the children in one of the largest educational systems in the country should learn about science believes his pathetic and patently false superstition supersedes the evidence and the informed evaluation of virtually all the scientists in the world. There is no other way to put it than to point out that McLeroy is a blithering idiot who willingly puts his incompetence on display. His job is not at risk, and he’s even advancing his freakish agenda with some success.

It’s a marvel, isn’t it? A fellow just wants to laugh and shoo him back to his church and his dental practice, but instead, he’s been given all this power over the education of American children, and it’s hard to laugh, because it is so damned terrifying.

But wait! The unbelievable insanity is not yet complete! The Texas school board is debating and will vote on a revised curriculum this week, a curriculum in which the uninformed, uneducated doubts of this arrogantly ignorant man will be enshrined in the lesson plans of every child in Texas. And the board is about evenly split!

There’s a deeper problem here than the simple superficial fact that we’ve got influential people trying to push nonsense into science classrooms. It’s that somehow, we have a system that gives flaming incompetents this kind of power — that we willingly hand over important decisions about the education of our children to people who aren’t qualified, who have no understanding of science, and who want prioritize a page and a half of vague, poetic metaphor from a ragged old hodge-podge of a book of mythology over the concrete, well-tested, and well-documented body of modern scientific information.

The wanton display of ignorance debate is being live blogged here.

–WKW

Robbery – or, as we like to call it “business as usual”

In regard to Tim Geithner’s plan to continue to hurl money into an empty pit, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wasn’t so impressed:

The U.S. government is basically using the taxpayer to guarantee against downside risk on the value of these assets, while giving the upside, or potential profits, to private investors, he said.

“Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people. I don’t think it’s going to work because I think there’ll be a lot of anger about putting the losses so much on the shoulder of the American taxpayer.”

Does it really take a Nobel Prize winner to figure out that this is what we’ve been doing all along?

–WKW

Even Google knows Fred Phelps is a psycho douchebag

Natasha Richardson’s tragic death has affected many. And, of course, it got the attention of Fred Phelps and his gay-hating troop of hate-filled nutjobs. Because Richardson supported finding a cure for AIDS.

MILLBROOK — Amid news members of the Topeka, Kan.-based baptist church said they are coming to Millbrook Sunday to protest Natasha Richardson’s funeral, residents said her family deserves privacy in mourning.

On its Web site, Westboro Baptist Church said it plans to protest at St. Joseph’s Church because Richardson supported research for a cure for AIDS. The small Kansas church has protested schools, colleges, churches, funerals and other venues.

Richardson and her husband, actor Liam Neeson, moved to the Millbrook area 15 years ago and were married in a ceremony on their property. Richardson, daughter of actress Vanessa Redgrave, died Wednesday at 45 of brain injuries following a skiing accident at the Mount Tremblant ski resort in Quebec, Canada.

While no one of any significance will give Phelps the time of day, the fact is he still goes way, way out of his way to increase the grief of many because he supposedly knows exactly what God wants. And his is one scary, paranoid, hate-mongering God.

But, hey, we all know what Phelps is all about. Hell, even a Google search of his community of haters makes that pretty clear:

–WKW

Blame the feminists – Part 1,276,129,023

Being a woman, Kathryn Jean Lopez decided to write an article about feminism. Being a conservative, she hasn’t the foggiest clue what the hell it is she’s writing about.

Jumping off from the Rihanna-Chris Brown domestic assault, Lopez meanders about blaming feminists for most the world’s ills, based on her own personal feelings – which is that men are all weak-kneed wimps because of feminism.

What has happened — and what Rihanna and Chris have to do with Gloria and us — is that by inventing oppression where there is none and remaking woman in man’s image, as the sexual and feminist revolutions have done, we’ve confused everyone. The reaction those kids had was unnatural. It’s natural for us to expect men to protect women, and for women to expect some level of physical protection. But in post-modern America, those natural gender roles have been beaten by academics and political rhetoric and the occasional modern woman being offended by having a door opened for her. The result is confusion.

Damn that invented oppression.

Sometimes, of course, women are victims. There are many Rihannas who do not have the escape hatch that being famous allows in this instance. But while feminists whine about false pay gaps and oppression that doesn’t exist, we ignore the mess that we’ve created in rejecting the fact that there is good in nature and tradition. We’ve so confused ourselves that now many teenagers in Boston are excusing Chris Brown. Why wouldn’t they? He and Rihanna are equal, and we expect no more from men — in fact, we’ve conditioned a generation or two now to expect less.

Not only has Lopez penned a fact-free assault on feminists, she even manages to go so far as inventing facts like the “false pay gaps” between the sexes and to just write off oppression. But, hey, she does point out that some women are victims.

Basically, the nut graph for Lopez is this:

And in a culture in which masculinity — well, at least in men — is so often suspect, some women seem to be looking to reinvent the masculine themselves.

And there we have it. The end run for conservative anti-feminists – feminism makes men weak. If we could all just live in Sparta, then we’d be a more natural society. And then, maybe opuses like Lopez’s wouldn’t be met with derision and mocking.

–WKW

Nope, sorry, no AIG here

So I hear some AIG execs are returning their bonuses. Good on them. Too bad they’re hiding, as these before-and-after pictures show:

Before:

After:

Those crafty bastards.

–WKW

From the sports desk

Thoughts from an occasional sports writer …

• Japan was a deserving winner of the World Baseball Classic, but what about South Korea? They’ve played baseball for just 25 years and play at this level? That’s just remarkable.
• The U.S. showing in international baseball competitions has been quite unremarkable, however.
• If the Klitschko brothers don’t agree to fight each other, there’s really no use for either of them to fight again. It’s just not that entertaining to see giant guys overwhelm smaller and limited opposition. Someone needs to start a rift between the brothers K.
• While I’m sorry that Dunga’s parents are stuggling, the fact is that all he’s doing now is keeping the job of Brazilian National Team coach warm for Felipão.
• It just can’t be easy being Ryan Leaf.
• As far as I’m concerned, March Madness doesn’t really get started until Duke loses.
• It’s official, nothing you say about John Daly will get you in trouble for libel.

–WKW

AIG: Not just thieves, but terrorists, as well

When you’ve found a mule to whip, whip it good. Because not only is AIG the reason for all that is wrong with the world economy, they are also terrorist-hugging anti-American traitors:

“Although widespread public anger has rightfully focused on bonuses AIG paid to top executives using taxpayers’ money, that anger would be at an even higher pitch if the public knew that our tax dollars were being used by AIG to promote Islam and Shariah law, which provides support for terrorist activities aimed at killing Americans and destroying America.”

“TMLC Sues AIG for Promoting Islam; Responds to Justice Dept’s Motion to Dismiss Suit Challenging AIG.”

Soon, we’ll learn that AIG is also the root cause of Global Climate Change, as well as acne. It makes things much easier just to consolidate all problems and lay them at their doorstep rather than look around for more obvious culprits, anyway.

–WKW

No, you aren’t a Libertarian

There’s been a lot of ruckus from the far-right of late about how they’re actually Libertarians now. For them, here’s a very quick and easy method to test their Libertarian cred:

1. Do you think Gays and Lesbians should be allowed to marry?

2. Do you think Gays and Lesbians should be allowed to adopt children?

If you answered “no” to either of these questions, you aren’t a Libertarian. You’re just some prick that doesn’t want to pay taxes.

–WKW

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