A few good links

Nothing says lunch break like a new Stain Club post. Here're a few articles of interest.

I've been saying this for years. While the writer neglects to refer to Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry as "Demo-bots," he still makes a great point.

First time I came across this argument was during a "This Week in God" skit on the Daily Show. They gave an amazing 3 minute run-down of every crazy thing that Scientologists believe, then at the end Jon Stewart deadpans something along the lines of, "Why can't they believe in something sensible like a burning bush that talks to people?" It was incredible. The audience needed an extra second to start laughing.

I know Hitchens is everywhere these days. Being the leader of the recent anti-theist wave of books, he is never far from a television interview. He has perfected the art of combining anger, eloquence, and intoxication. I'm shocked that the arrest surrounding the Quran desecration at Pace University hasn't received more coverage. This controversy is a remarkably simple one to solve. Was it his book? If so, no problem. If it's not then I'm sure there are any number of statutes he could be prosecuted under, theft and destruction of property come immediately to mind. Calling it a hate crime is ridiculous. The story of the boy who cried wolf comes immediately to mind. This guy wasn't burning a giant wooden crescent outside of a muslim's house. There's a difference of degree between those and hopefully everyone can see it is a large one. We, as a society are asking for trouble when we apply our laws so rigidly.

And for the purposes of a strong finish, here's a Malcolm Gladwell article about the rise of Zero Tolerance.

Whoops

Much like a man falling from a scooter while on vacation (see my last post), Dick Cheney recently admitted that he was wrong. And while there's a part of me that wants to take my pound of flesh from him, I have to say I prefer when politicians admit their mistakes. He was wrong about that, and likely will be proven wrong about a number of other things in the near future. Despite that, I find a simple mea culpa (which Cheney didn't exactly give) to a, dare I say it, flip-flopping answer. It reminds me of the popular saying, "it's not the crime, it's the cover up." Between the Congress and the President, no one in America seems to like politicians. I can't say I blame us. And I could write rant on all my issues with American politics but I'll simply leave off by saying that I've already given up on the idea of a real statesman who is looking out for the good of the country. Now, I'm happy with any politician who is willing to say he may have been slightly mistaken about anything. Now that's disapproval.

A Few Good Links

In terms of the often polarizing debate on US foreign relations I rather like what this guy is saying. It is unfortunate that such thoughtful and moderate views are often lost in the media cacophony.

Bill Kristol is a hack. The sun will come out tomorrow. I'm sure you can think of other factual statements to add to that short list. Also, on page 3, you'll find that Stain Club's favored son, Keith Olbermann, will be moderating one of the Democratic debates. I love Olbermann for his rants and raves, but he's the wrong guy to host this sort of event. I would not be happy if Bill O'Reilly was in charge of a Republican debate and I think we can all agree on that.

Bill Simmons writes a good one about the NBA. I generally don't care about it, but I remember once upon a time we had the Big Four in sports. That number seems to be dropping rapidly.

Another stupid running back decided to open his idiot mouth and chime in on an ongoing investigation. According to dearest Emmitt, Vick's alleged participation in dogfighting, "Now, granted he might have been to a dogfight a time or two, maybe five times, maybe 20 times, may have bet some money" isn't relevant because "he's not the one you're after. He's not the one you're after, he's just the one whose going to take the fall -- publicly." Thanks Emmitt. I'm glad you're there to let us know that we should ignore the laws banning this sort of deplorable activity to let us know that somehow Vick isn't at fault. Are football agents around the country frantically calling their clients in an effort to teach them to say, "Dogfighting is a cruel and terrible crime, but..." before defending Vick? Apparently they need to. Right now Emmitt and Ladell Betts' backup are worse in my book than Vick. He is still innocent until proven guilty. These morons, on the other hand, don't think anything bad happened and that's despicable.

Edit: This one didn't make the original post, but all of us baseball loving Stain Clubbers would have been remiss not to include it. It's a fitting tribute to Hank Aaron, a man whose accomplishments in the face of adversity will be remembered as much more than a long held home run record

Also my apologies for all the Washington Post articles today.

Recruiting efforts

In an effort to drum up more daily readership, I'm going to start posting more links and less commentary. During my meandering work day I churn through a lot of good links and now you can too.

S.Q., a dedicated crusader for the english language, would greatly enjoy this one.

Ever feel like you're liberal but the cold logic of economics still appeals to you? If so, join the Liberaltarians. (I came up with this term independently before reading this article and googled it just in case I had a wholly original idea. Alas I did not.)

Reason #124381537891 that Andy Dick sucks and still isn't funny.

African columnist drops bombs on attention seeking celebrity humanitarians.

A dialogue between one of my favorite authors (Malcolm Gladwell) and another author (James Surowiecki) whose book is on my short list to read. Exceedingly interesting and thought-provoking.

I may have been sucking on the blogging front, but I am reading a fictional book about blogging, Boomsday by Christopher Buckley, and to be slightly more honest, the Stain Club was thoroughly stained (read as drunk) over Arts Fest weekend. When it came to posting... we didn't have it.

Oh yes, a certain milestone that starts with a 1 and ends with 0000 was reached recently and the Stain Club has been oddly silent on the topic. I think the annual tears of Philly fans everywhere speak louder to this issue than the strongest written word.

Olbermann Strikes Again!

Once again, Keith Olbermann has a ginormous (look that word up in Webster's this fall as it's been added as a new word) balls as he calls out our President for a second time. If you missed it the first time, please feel free to check it out here. I will leave Keith to do the talking as this rant has only one man (well one administration, but Mr. Bush is certainly the central target) on his mind and he does not approve of the actions (most recently the pardon of Mr. Libby, and for our reader out there who is short on memory, I wrote up on the possible pardon of Libby here) of this administration or our President so much that the most appropriate action for the sake of this nation, with so much damage that has been done in during this presidency, is for the el Presidente and Vice el Presidente to resign and spare this republic for which it stands from any more harm. I couldn't agree more.



P.S. Major bonus points for Keith as he embraces Stain Club by using "stain" not once, not twice, but thrice within the first two and a half minutes.

6.27 Political Link Dump

A little more specialized today as I found these links/videos most interesting

--Ann Coulter Getting Owned By Mrs. John Edwards

--Our President Making Various Cameos on Family Guy

--O'Reilly Getting Owned by...a High School Student (Bonus Points for using a quote from O'Reilly's book against him)

--Part II in the Four Part Series that Plumpy posted on earlier today

--Not only is Bush's Approval Ranking tanking in America, but around the world as well (Shocking, isn't it?)

In-Depth Journalism... No seriously

On the long list of things I dislike, the 24-hour news cycle and its emphasis on fluffy non-stories ranks somewhere just below the other five NL Central teams and the Pittsburgh Steelers (Va fa Pittsburgh?). Because of that, I'm always over-joyed to see some news institution step up and do an in-depth comprehensive analysis of a situation instead of force-feeding everyone the news du jour. The Washington Post (one of the few remaining bastions of independently run news) fearlessly went for the BPAS on this four part series on Dick Cheney. I highly recommend you give it a look. Some of the stories are incredible and shed real light on the inner workings of the Bush presidency.

And in case you need a warm up before tackling that, I would recommend this Newsweek quiz which claims to test your Global IQ. Stupid though the title is, the quiz is still worth checking out.

Brain hits 4 Mice

The two pieces of news I tracked down for a little stain commentary today are so far apart that the post title is the only thing I could think of to connect them.

The Bong Hits 4 Jesus decision came down today. When all is said and done I'm not a fan of the decision and enjoy Stevens' dissent, "This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message." I see the schools point that kids can't be shouting at the top of their lungs or unfurling huge banners all the time in the classroom, but this decision isn't the right way to address it.

Oh yeah, in other news, the Supreme Court and protected the free speech rights of issue advocates who want to buy advertising spots for attack ads against politicians right before the election. I haven't read the decisions but on its face, they seem to have opposite messages.

Souter stepped up and read his dissent from the bench and called out the majority for altering precedent without a substantive change in the facts. Were someone able to change the nominees so there was a liberal majority and flip the decision, Bush would hold a press conference to decry "judicial activism." Oddly, he has been silent on this. Regardless of my own thoughts on the case, I think judicial activism is one of the most illogical arguments in politics today. The easy solution to this case, people need to stop trusting political ads. Especially the ones on TV.

After reading the news on both, I began to wonder if students could circumvent the Bong Hits decision by buying advertising space advocating "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" on their high school television channels. Not sure if it would change the legal ramifications, but it would be hilarious.

Now for the totally unrelated second article. In summation, the article details the increasingly common practice of growing human tissue inside of animals and then testing drugs and chemicals on the animals. There's a great discussion on the ethics of this practice and also goes to show how incredible modern science is. Despite all that, I think many people will be left uneasy about the prospect of growing human brain cells in a mouse. Something to think about for sure.

Al Gore with the QFS

I have begun to realize that with the exception of Plumpy's Ghost's The Quit Down and the word "stain" itself, we here at Stain Club have not been using our own unique terminology as much as we should be recently. To rectify this, to some degree, I recently found a great example of Quitting For Strength. Al Gore himself is quitting her on down on the presidential election, in all likelihood. In a title that would probably upset Nikos Kazantzakis, the Time magazine cover story article notes that Al Gore is probably not running for president, and quitting to keep his strength up to talk about the environment. PROBABLY. Things more likely than Gore running: The Reds trading Griffey or Dunn, the Phillies making the playoffs, and S.Q. Hagglepuss posting daily once more (alright, maybe not that last one).

I watched and enjoyed Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and I was not the only one. Of course, after the movie talk degenerated into a vision of Al Gore becoming popular X-Men character Iceman (pictured above right) in an effort to save the world from both global warming and Magneto. I have no idea quite how this happened, but I found it incredibly humorous at the time.

So, there you have it. Gore quits for strength, and Stain Club marches on.

For serious, she makes a Ginormous point

Continuing S.Q. Hagglepuss' lesser-known crusade to save the english language (in contrast to the better known to our reader crusade to stop the war in Iraq), Anne Applebaum highlights hilarious political turns of phrase that are full of sound and fury but signify nothing (quoting Shakespeare never goes out of style). Also be sure to check the first link in the column, which points to the bad writing competition that served as her inspiration.

Putting the Map in perspective

Am I plagiarizing an earlier title because its early and I'm not feeling clever? Yes. Am I going to promise another posting theme only to drop it days later? Hopefully not. Moving on...

Call me a social studies dork if you will, but having a map that matches every state in the country with an actual country based on roughly equivalent GDP's is cool. Also how humorous is it that Texas is being compared to Canada.

Keith Olbermann Has Huge Balls

This video, in that of itself, may make up for the lack of "Not a Day Goes By" posts over the past few days. Keith lays the smackdown on not only Bush, but the spineless Democrats who, despite public support, could not garner any sort of support to override Bush's veto to set a time-table for troop withdrawal. That's mostly an overview of what he says, but trust me, you want to hear what he has to say. If you want a transcript of his "Special Comment," you can find it here.

And while we're on troop withdrawals, here's another instance of Dick Cheyney eating his own words from two years back by asseting that the war in Iraq is coming to a close and that the troops would be home by the end of his administration (we're to assume that this is also Cheyney's administration). The most horrendous fact of all is the number of American soldier deaths, which has surpassed the casualty numbers of the Spanish-American War and the War of 1812. Will we surpass the American Revolution? God I hope not.

Sir Charles keeps it real

Some of our older Philadelphia people may recall that once upon a time, Charles Barkley played for your beloved Sixers. Here is a picture of him:



Now that he's off the court and in the booth, he rumbles through questions about America in much the same way that he drove to the hoop.


Editor's Note: If The New Republic tries to make you register, I would recommend the venerable username: password combined with the password: password, as a cure-all for your ills.

Stay the course?

In a recent poll published by Newsweek, President Bush received his lowest approval rating to date, with only 28% of voters supporting Bush. In light of these numbers, support from the Republican Party has begun to erode.

Nearly two out of every three Americans believe that Bush’s decisions on the Iraq war show that he is "stubborn and unwilling to admit his mistakes". His actions are beginning to affect the chances for other would-be republican presidential candidates. A hypothetical presidential race between Barak Obama and Rudy Giuliani showed Obama winning by a margin of 50% to 43%.

House minority leader John Boehner stated that if success in Iraq is not met by the end of the summer, Bush will be asked, not only by the Democrats, but Republicans as well, to change his course; but I suppose the word ‘success’, at least in terms of the Iraqi war, is ill-defined. We evidently met with success four years ago, and look where we are now. Semantics notwithstanding, it’s still a step in the right direction. If there’s no improvement, I guess that will only leave Laura and Barney.

Krauthammer's a hypocrite though, apparently

The esteemed Mr. Ghost posted the other day about a Charles Krauthammer article that called out Obama for using the Virginia Tech tragedy to make political points. Glenn Greenwald did the heavy lifting, though, and in this post he eviscerates Krauthammer for using the very same tragedy to make a much stainier political point, before Obama got around to it. Here's a quote:

KRAUTHAMMER: What you can say, just -- not as a psychiatrist, but as somebody who's lived through the a past seven or eight years, is that if you look at that picture, it draws its inspiration from the manifestos, the iconic photographs of the Islamic suicide bombers over the last half decade in Palestine, in Iraq and elsewhere.

Of course, this isn't to say that it makes Obama's sleazy speech any better, but hypocrisy this blatant is even less acceptable, especially by those whose whole job is telling us what they think we need to know about politics in this country.

Smerconish goes huge

I try to keep an eye on Philadelphia's significance in national matters. This is generally a rewarding enterprise, but sometimes Philly stains it up. Case in point, the "shame of Philadelphia" (thanks Atrios) will now be the new Imus, at least as far as MSNBC is concerned.

Stains for one and all

Earlier this week, I wrote critically about the comments from White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. You may remember that she went huge on a 2nd Amendment defense mere hours after the Virginia Tech shootings. I believe we can all agree that she didn't have it. I felt that it was a pretty stainy thing to say. However, politicians, much like lemmings, always like to run off the same cliff of stupidity in droves (It's important to note that lemmings, being more intelligent than a lot of politicians actually do not run haphazard off of cliffs as per my earlier post). This particular stain was discovered by Charles Krauthammer who writes a column in the Washington Post that I regularly disagree with. However, he is one of the better columnists out there and usually has an identifiable thought process behind what he says. In the article linked above, he calls out Barack Obama for comparing every problem under the sun to the recent shootings. I'm no Obama-maniac but I think even the most ardent supporter would want him to show a little more dignity at least for the first couple days.

A Few Things

First, let me offer my prayers and condolences to the families and friends of those harmed at Virginia Tech today. I remember vividly the day Columbine happened, and, as my colleague Mr. Ghost pointed out, the death toll today was nearly three times as large, which is simply mind-boggling.

Also mind-boggling is how quickly people of all political stripes began trying to use this for their pro- or anti- gun control views. I'm sure there's a debate to be had, but please, can we let the bodies be counted first?

I also want to make a quick observation on the blogs vs conventional media argument. Basically, everyone is biased and objectivity is an illusion, but the honest bias of most blogs is much less insidious and much easier to cope with than the thoroughly hidden bias of professional reporters and the commercial entities they represent. Blogs allow you to get a view of a subject that's incredibly more sophisticated than the one you would get from simply relying on the Inquirer or CNN, as long as you're willing to check different sources and read between the lines. If you're any good at deciphering rhetoric and you don't mind doing a little work for your news, blogs are by far the best way to get informed about both facts and opinions. Of course, that doesn't count for breaking news such as today's tragedy, where cameras and reporters on site are necessary.

Another fellow stain of mine, Mr. Cumstein, posted about the failure of Congress to support the Constitution, linking to an article about AIPAC. While there is much to be said about the pro-Israel lobby, there are more pressing matters in my opinion. Torture, extraordinary rendition, the endangered status of habeas corpus, illegal wiretapping, politicization of government offices, and radical expansion of executive powers are just a few off the top of my head. Oh yeah: war by choice, based on lies, with no definition of victory and no plan for withdrawal ever - that's another one.

Here's an article, via Glenn Greenwald, by Charlie Savage, the guy who just won the Pulitzer for Journalism. It's about Cheney's view that the oval office ought to have a throne in it, and if it doesn't scare you about how much rebuilding of our government needs to be done then nothing will.

Finally, via Andrew Sullivan, here's a little blog post about a rowing competition in Baghdad that would be funny if it wasn't sad.

Progress is the Key Word

I've always found it ironic that "pro" is the exact opposite of "con," and in the case of the United States government, is it possible that Congress is the exact opposite of Progress? I only bring this up because of an interesting article concerning how the Constitution, the very document our nation was founded upon, no longer holds any credence amongst the suits of Washington, D.C. The very sovergeinty, this article explains, is at risk when we let a lobby such as the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, determine this country's forgein policy that is not in its best interest. Ignorance is bliss, but I have to say it comes as no surprise that not only has the Constitution being trampled upon, but also that an assortment of political lobbies have considerable leverage on the government.

Sticking with the idea of progress, Jon Stewart breaks down the timeline that we should have been using the whole time in Iraq. Bush was the only one who was wise enough to use it himself. But hey, he's the president for gosh sakes, and I have to take his word for it, don't I?

Imus is gone...

via Atrios

Did you ever watch old Bugs Bunny cartoons? The ones that use every old racist stereotype for humor, like when Bugs goes to South America and people in loincloths with bones through their noses try to boil him in a big pot? Those things never really offended me, just because they seemed so quaint, so long gone in our society.

Then I read this. Don Imus has been fired, and that's probably a good thing - even if you don't think his most recent comments warranted it - because of his long history of racism and misogyny and general awfulness. Media Matters compiled an article called "It's Not Just Imus" that contains dozens of quotes from people like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Michael Smerconish (he's on the Big Talker, right?). The quotes are literally jaw-dropping, and it struck me immediately how sad it is that these men aren't considered radical or anachronistic at all. They're some of the most popular radio and cable television hosts in the country, and that's something of which we should be ashamed.

Here's a small sampling:

Savage called Arabs "non-humans" and "racist, fascist bigots"; asserted that Americans would like to "drop a nuclear weapon" on any Arab country; and that "these people" in the Middle East "need to be forcibly converted to Christianity" in order to "turn them into human beings."

During a discussion of the development of ethanol-fueled vehicles in Brazil, O'Reilly stated that "they still have people in Brazil running around with their little darts, hitting you in the head with the poisoned darts, with the loincloths."

Limbaugh proclaimed: My "cat's taught me more about women, than anything my whole life" because his pet cat "comes to me when she wants to be fed," and "[s]he's smart enough to know she can't feed herself. She's actually [a] very smart cat. She gets loved. She gets adoration. She gets petted. She gets fed. And she doesn't have to do anything for it."

I'm not a prude, and I can take a joke, and I see nothing wrong with edgy or controversial programming, but I think it's clear that these men cross a line. There's a difference between challenging stereotypes by making jokes about them, a la Chappelle or Chris Rock or Larry the Cable Guy or Jeff Foxworthy, and consistently mocking anyone who isn't white and male. I guess we're still waiting for that final straw for all these guys, but there are some pretty overloaded camels around, it seems to me.