Normally I try not to criticize other people’s religious sentiments, but this particular combination of non-scientific thinking and obnoxious evangelicalism annoys.

The history of civilization is the history of turning the lights on, people.  Crouch in the dark on your own time.

…so here’s what io9.com is calling the Bollywood Iron Man:

…You know, it doesn’t actually look bad.  Although the same people who did that did this.

Via Fark Geek.

May the knowledge of this burn the antiwar movement’s soul like battery acid.

In some ways, John Yoo’s argument (“Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President“) is almost… superfluous.  The basic point is straightforward enough: President Obama, just like every other President since 1973, has come to the conclusion that the War Powers Act is in fact an unconstitutional and onerous restriction on the executive branch’s constitutionally mandated oversight of military affairs.  This conclusion follows the usual evolutionary arc: as Yoo helpfully points out, Senator Obama and Candidate Obama had a fairly different view of unilateral action than does the (theoretically) better-educated and (theoretically) more experienced President Obama.  Couple that with the further detail that the usual Democratic suspects will not be trying to repeat with Libya their largely ineffectual push against the liberation of Iraq (Kuchinich and Dean, to give just two examples, have already been effectively whipped back into place), and one is left to conclude that there was a lot of deliberate lying about motivations being made over the last decade by the Democratic party.

Again, this is almost superfluous.  John Yoo is arguing on Barack Obama’s behalf.  His major complaint is that Obama’s doing a worse job than George W Bush did*.

John Yoo. The guy who did the waterboarding memos. (more…)

As Ben Domenech noted on Twitter, if you’re a blogger it’s important to get your ad hominem insult up and public today if you want to guarantee that you’ll be keeping off of the Huffington Post’s front page.  Background on this absurd story here: the short version is that the Arisian mind-lords over at HuffPo flailed about like lobotomized geckos to find an excuse to throw Andrew Breitbart off of their front page after they invited him on it, and came up with the novel excuse that he had ad-hommed elsewhere.

Hi-jinks, as they said, ensued.

But let’s be clear about something about ad hominem arguments, because the term is horribly misused on the Internet: it is not the same as a direct insult.  Ad hominem is when you bring up a person’s character or actions in order to try to invalidate the person’s argument; put more simply, it attempts to suggest that being wicked means that you can’t ever happen to be right about something.  Which is of course absurd.

So: if I write, say, that  Arianna Huffington is wrong about health care rationing because she’s an easily-scared poopyhead… well, that’s an ad hominem argument.  After all, her recto-cranial inversion has nothing to do with her (I assume) blind support of Obamacare, and it would be highly illogical of me to suggest that it did.  But if I write that Arianna Huffington is a miserable person because she’s an easily-scared poopyhead… well, that’s a direct insult and a mean thing to say – but it’s not an ad hominem.

I hope that this clears things up for people.

The Chicago Sun-Times is far too polite to and about the doddering racist, though:

Farrakhan gave several reasons why the U.S. lacks the moral authority to intervene in the Libyan conflict, including the deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement during the Rodney King protests in 1991 and the unhealthy food that the federal government allows into the marketplace.

…if for no other reason than the fact that ‘the Rodney King protests’ should be more accurately described as ‘the LA Riot.’ If you’re wondering about how people died there, Jim Crogan did a ten-year retrospective*; suffice it to say that Farrakhan is being considerably… ‘nuanced’ is nicer, but ‘mendacious’ is more accurate.  Either way, every so often you have to remind people that, yes, people like Farrakhan are out there and apparently welcome to speak at Left-events without fear of embarrassment for anybody.  But, hey!  Let the Obama administration worry about it now!

Moe Lane

PS: And, oh yes, Obama is our first Jewish President and was picked by shadowy Jewish leaders.  (sigh) The tertiary phase of conspiracy theorizing is never pretty.

*And if you’re wondering what happened to those two guys most well-known for rushing in and saving people from mob violence (thus making them much, much better people than Farrakhan)… well, Rev. Benny Newton tragically passed away a couple of years later, but Bobby Green got the hell out of LA.

Yesterday was a good day for the iPad2 pledge drive: best day yet, in fact.  It ends Monday (no doubt to many readers’ secret relief); and I’ll need to come up with something suitably gonzo to commemorate said ending, of course.  Meanwhile, it turns out that I can get free engraving of a message on said iPad2.  Suggestions welcome, of course: and while I’m not saying that a past or current donation will give a suggestion extra… weight; neither am I saying that it won’t.

Although I suppose that I could just go with “This is my BOOMSTICK!” – which has the virtue of being pretty obvious, at least*. Obvious has its points.

Moe Lane

*I originally thought that I could do some variation of Woodie Guthrie’s slogan This Machine Kills Fascists… except that: no, it didn’t, really. Guthrie kind of sucked at fascist-killing, in fact.

Run-Around, Blues Traveler

I consistently got carded until I was thirty or so.

I didn’t have a driver’s license until I was in my thirties. There were complications with getting a non-driver’s ID: long story, but mostly involving the stupid learner’s permit and never getting around to taking the driving test.

Anyway, carrying around a passport in order to have a damned beer kind of sucked.

As of March 1st; they just need to find a distributor and get it up on the screen – and, more to the point, into a format where I might acquire a copy in exchange for money.

(pause)

You know, I should contact these people and find out if they’re going to be sending out review copies.  I mean, I’m mostly known for political blogging, but what the heck, right?  It’s not like I haven’t been an enthusiastic supporter of their work in public, and everything…

Moe Lane

PS: Trailer:

They listed as one of the Kinect‘s innovations that it “restores sight to the blind!”

Ha!  Good lampooning of corporate advertising, there; yeah, those people over at marketing are always coming up with the most extravagant clai OH JEEBUS THEY WEREN’T JOKING.

Yes, that was kludged together, and it’s a vibro-tactile/audio system rather than a true visual one.  Still.

The topic is Libya, and the snark is epic:

So what the hell are we doing? I realize that President Obama and his advisers have answered this question many times, but I feel it’s necessary to keep asking until the answers begin to make sense.

So sayeth… Eugene [Robinson], of the Washington Post.

Eugene?  Eugene [Robinson]?  Eugene’s writing things like that?

Barry…  Barry, you have a problem.

Moe Lane

PS: I was shell-shocked from the sheer insanity of it all and wrote Washington when I meant Robinson.  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.  Good catch by reader Phil Smith.

The bill in question is HB 1021, and it is designed to get government out of union’s business by: banning automatic dues collection for public sector unions; and requiring union leadership to get permission from individual members before using those dues for partisan politicking.  The bill passed 74-40, despite the rather strenuous objections of Big Labor: a similar bill (SB 830) is making its way through the Florida Senate.  The success of HB 1021 should help with the success of SB 830, which has been fought every step of the way, naturally; the Democratic-Big Labor governmental alliance has zero interest in seeing their profitable feedback cycle disrupted by the ability of mere workers to decide whether they like having their money go to keep one party in office.

Should the bill make it to the state Senate floor, it should pass relatively easily – both branches of the Florida legislature are solidly Republican.  In fact, they were like that before the last legislative elections… and that detail is something that I’d like to highlight, because it’s important.  Given that Florida is in fact a Right-to-Work state already, it may seem surprising that union reform is progressing even further in that state.  Well, there may be a reason for it, and that reason may be Wisconsin: specifically, the puerile, undemocratic, hooliganish, contemptuous, and generally infantile way that Democrats/Big Labor attempted to avoid dealing with the simple notion that elections have consequences.  The Left’s cheerleaders are currently ‘bragging’ – scare quotes because I’m not sure why anybody would be proud of the fact that they’re being vocal defenders of a political party’s deniable corruption slush fund – that their shrill, petulant extended whine against labor union reform in Wisconsin galvanized the Left nationwide.  That may or may not be true, but I can tell you one thing: it definitely galvanized the Right.

And, hey! – We control more state legislatures than you do!

Moe Lane (crosspost)

About how he’s not running for Senate in Florida?

And did you notice how there’s a wide-open field to challenge an increasingly-vulnerable Nelson in 2012?

And do you remember how people told you, back in 2010, that you should swallow your pride, make a deal with Marco Rubio and drop out, and position yourself for 2012?

You do?  Great!

SUFFER.

Moe Lane

(H/T @BrianFaughnan)