Last week the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit again ruled against the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a blatantly unconstitutional law enacted in 1998 to, ostensibly, protect the little kiddies from sex on the internet.  That’s right, 1998.  COPA has been never been enforced, and it has spent it’s entire life getting the living shit beat out of it in court.  The ACLU sums up the legal history:

Previously, a federal district court and a federal appeals court found the online censorship law violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. The Supreme Court upheld that decision, effectively banning enforcement of the law in June 2004 and sending the case back to the district court to determine whether there had been any changes in technology that would affect the constitutionality of the statute, such as whether commercially available blocking software was still as effective as the banned law might be in blocking material deemed “harmful to minors.” In March 2007, a district judge once again struck down COPA; the government again appealed, and today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the ban.

COPA is so unconstitutional and has been brutalized so badly in court that supporters of the law are almost extinct.  But leave it to Janet LaRue, formerly of Concerned Women for America, to step up and defend the indefensible.  I’m not going to fisk her entire article, mostly because there isn’t much in the way of substance in it to tackle.  Instead, I’ll just take on the main thrust of the thing, which is that COPA is a great law that protects children from the evil porno that infests the intertubes: Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who has paid any attention to right-wing talking heads is familiar with the common contention that the mainstream media are in love with Barack Obama.  The volume of this complaint has been ratcheted up to deafening levels recently due to Obama’s world tour last week.  As usual, though, this little bit of conservative “conventional wisdom” is dead wrong.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

This doesn’t surprise me one bit.  I’ve been stunned at how effortlessly Republicans have been able to control the media dialogue regarding Obama.  The people who make the argument, however, tend to honestly think that Fox News is truly “fair and balanced”, so to them media outlets that don’t base their reporting on the premise that Obama is some sort of anti-American Manchurian Candidate are infatuated with the Democrat and biased against McCain.

Damn it.  Ed Brayton had to go and expose me to the horrors of the comments section of the Boycott McDonald’s website.  The McDonald’s boycott, the newest project of the American Family Association, was started after McDonald’s gave some money to the NGLCC, an organization of gay and lesbian business owners.  Naturally, the homophobes reacted as if Ronald McDonald had just fellated Mayor McCheese on national television.  After this grave assault on Family Values™, the AFA attacked McDonald’s for refusing to “remain neutral in the culture wars” and urged its supporters to boycott the fast-food giant.  Unfortunately, the AFA allows supporters to leave comments of their own on the boycott website.  The result is a badass car crash of thought that onlookers cannot help but gawk at in a strange mixture of fear, curiosity, and amazement.  If you’re looking for a depressing window into the small minds of “values voters”, check out the comments section at the boycott website.  Here are some of my favorites: Read the rest of this entry »

The ignorance on display at Conservapedia regarding Richard Lenski’s paper finally got to me, so I decided to try posting to the talk page of their “Flaws in Richard Lenski Study” article to see how long it would take to get banned.  And I don’t mean banned for blatant trolling, mind you, but merely for disagreeing with Andy Schlafly.  It actually took a bit longer than I thought, 8 days, but I did try really hard to remain cordial with the douchebags.  It began innocently enough, simply trying to engage the eggplants on some of their more egregious deficiencies.  But it quickly became apparent that Andy Schlafly and his goons aren’t at all interested in actually discussing anything.  Andy is particularly bad, and his tactic is to ignore all substantive criticism, either by not replying or stubbornly restating his original point as if no counterpoint had ever been offered.

The most disconcerting thing, however, is the tendency of the Conservapedia faithful, Andy included, to eschew argumentation altogether and instead assure their adversaries that their objections will we allayed if they just “open their minds”.  For example, one user told me, “You need to open your mind to the truth.”  This was immediately followed by a comment from Andy Schlafly stating that “People who do open their minds are amazed by the insights and happiness it brings.”  Another Conservapedia detractor was urged to “…open your mind more to other ways of thinking and you’ll see the truth for what it is.”  This is what passes for rigorous debate at Conservapedia. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, Don Wildmon, the founder of the American Family Association and, without a doubt, the most irrationally homophobic man on the planet, commented that Christians will have lost the culture war if California voters defeat an amendment to ban gay marriages in the state:

Dr. Donald Wildmon is founder of the American Family Association and an organizer of the Arlington Group. He says passage of the California marriage amendment is critical.
 
“If we lose California, if they defeat the marriage amendment, I’m afraid that the culture war is over and Christians have lost,” says Wildmon, a 30-year veteran of the culture war. “I’ve never said that publicly until now — but that’s just the reality of the fact.
 
“If the homosexuals are able to defeat the marriage amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, then the culture war is over and we’ve lost — and gradually, secularism will replace Christianity as the foundation of our society,” he adds.

Well then, here’s some good news:  it looks like the California marriage amendment is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ at the polls in November.  A new survey by The Field Poll (pdf) reveals that a majority of California voters would vote against the proposed amendment:

In June groups opposed to the legal recognition of same-sex marriage qualified a constitutional amendment, Proposition 8, for the November ballot, which if approved would again provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. 

In a statewide survey completed this week among 672 likely voters, The Field Poll finds that if the election were being held now, more voters say they would vote No (51%) on Prop. 8 than would vote Yes (42%). 

Of course, Wildmon is talking out of his fundamentalist ass.  No reasonable person could honestly believe that a defeat at the polls in November would put an end to the raging dumbshittery of fundamentalist Christian activists in this country.  In fact, such a defeat would just goad them to push harder for a federal gay marriage amendment.  But a man can dream, can’t he?  Just think how great it would be if, following a rejection in California, all the Don Wildmons of the country finally surrendered to The Enlightenment and agreed to peacefully join the 18th century.  Imagine if they all walked into school boards across the country and promised to keep their religion out of science curricula.    Wouldn’t that be fantasitic?  It ain’t gonna happen, though.  Nope, you can’t just turn off that kind of stupid.  

A week ago I noticed that Answers In Genesis had posted a write-up of a creationist “study” on antibiotic resistance in the bacteria Serratia marcescens. I’ve been planning on fisking the crap out of it, but then I noticed today that erv has just given it a good thrashing.  You snooze, you lose, I suppose.  But I’m not going to let that stop me.  Things aren’t going so well in lab this week, so I’m going take out my frustration on some clueless “creation science”.

The AiG article is titled, “Darwin at the Drugstore?  Testing the Biological Fitness of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria.”  Creationists don’t like to admit that beneficial mutations exist, so antibiotic resistance is a sticky subject for them.  Remarkably, they’ve tried to get around this problem by claiming that antibiotic resistance doesn’t qualify as a beneficial mutation (It’s stupid, I know, but they are creationists–stupid is par for the course).  According to this argument, mutation may give bacteria resistance to antibiotics, but that resistance comes at a cost such that sum is a net negative effect on fitness.  The “study” in question aims to provide evidence for that claim by comparing the fitness of antibiotic resistant and non-resistant strains of S. marcescens. Here is their summary: Read the rest of this entry »

I bring you more absurdity from the Worldnutdaily.  Calling it “breaking” news, the WND informed its readers that:

As part of a month-long aircraft makeover, a painted American flag was removed from the tail of Sen. Barack Obama’s official campaign airplane and was replaced with the presidential candidate’s trademark “O” symbol.

Holy shit!  Clearly Obama hates America!  It’s true, at least according to Worldnutdaily readers.  Just look at the results of this WND poll (as of 1 pm edt):

And if you want a scalding hot serving of village-idiocy, check out the comments section of the poll. One commenter is curious to know “if some Islamic group has paid his campaign a huge amount of money for him to remove the American flag from his plane.”  Awesome!  My favorite comment is from a reader who says, “The sad thing about this whole incident is that so many people won’t see anything wrong with what he did.”  Hmmm…maybe they’ll think that because there is nothing fucking wrong with it! For most people, failure to plaster oneself with the goddamn flag is not equivalent to high treason.  But in the Worldnutdaily universe, if you don’t look like this…:

…then you’re an Islamic extremist bent on imposing Sharia law on the American people.  It’s depressing to know that Worldnutdaily readers actually exist.

Via Radley Balko, I’ve learned of an NPR story that seriously fails to generate much sympathy.  Titled “For Some Ohioans, Even Meat Is Out Of Reach”, the story details the plight of a struggling mother and daughter in the face of rising food prices and a crappy economy:

The rising cost of food means their money gets them about a third fewer bags of groceries — $100 used to buy about 12 bags of groceries, but now it’s more like seven or eight. So they cut back on expensive items like meat, and they don’t buy extras like ice cream anymore. Instead, they eat a lot of starches like potatoes and noodles.

Of course, I do appreciate the struggle of poor people in this country, and rising food prices are hitting many families hard.  But take a look at the women featured in the NPR story:

I have to concur with Radley when he says:

…if NPR’s point is to show how the economy and high gas prices are making working Americans go hungry, you’d think they’d have come up with better subjects than two obese women, one of whom at age 40 has never held a job.

Seriously, it’s supposed to bother me that those two women have had to cut back on their ice cream purchases?

In his most recent post on his blog, Billy Dembski, the pope of the intelligent design movement, falls hook, line, and sinker for the freshest droppings from global warming denialists.  While declaring the death of scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming, he approvingly cites a story from the denialist website DailyTech.com about an alleged policy reversal by the American Physical Society.

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

Just one little problem, though:  the APS has done no such thing.  From the front page of the APS website:

APS Position Remains Unchanged

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS.  The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.”  This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.

Oops.  Not that we needed any further evidence that Billy D. is a credulous asshat, but come on, it took me less than five minutes to debunk that DailyTech article.

A county commissioner from Oklahoma County, OK has written a comic book to be distributed as part of his re-election campaign, and I don’t think it’s going to have the desired effect.

The 16-page publication prepared by Commissioner Brent Rinehart’s re-election campaign lampoons gays and criticizes Rinehart’s political opponents. It also features an angel who supports the embattled commissioner and Satan, who supports his critics.

“It’s more or less a story of my experiences of the last four years of being the county commissioner of District 2,” Rinehart told The Oklahoman, which obtained the comic on Wednesday.

Toga-wearing gays, political figures, trench coat-clad henchmen, concerned residents and Rinehart make up the rest of the comic’s characters.

In one sequence,

Satan says: “If I can get the kids to believe homosexuality is normal!”

The angel replies: “Hey Satan, not with Brent around you won’t!”

(…) Keith Gaddie, a University of Oklahoma political science professor, called the book “one of the strangest things” he’d ever seen.

“I’ve never seen a comic book with the phrase ‘anal sodomy’ in it before. That was a new one for me.”

You can download a pdf of the comic here.  It’s absolutely kooky, and I think Mr. Rinehart needs some serious psychiatric care.  The guy can’t even spell words correctly; the word “pedophile” is misspelled two different ways in the comic.  Here’s my favorite panel:

Yep, definitely the product of someone who is perfectly sane.