Bill O’Reilly is a big fat idiot. So is Sarah Palin.

I apologize. You might not want to read any of this post if you simply cannot bear the raging stupidity that characterizes Fox News. Fair warning: the clip below features both Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin.

I suspect that a lot of you, if you got this far, turned that clip off scant moments into it. The inanity and ignorance is too strong. But here are just a few tidbits. In his opening statement, that fathead O’Reilly says:

The constitution clearly states that the government cannot impose religion on citizens, but setting aside a day to encourage expression of voluntary spirituality is in no way an imposition.

No, here’s what the first amendment actually says.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The US government does not get to establish or favor a particular religion; it is officially excluded from the religion game. The National Day of Prayer is not simply a day of “voluntary spirituality”, but is an open endorsement of sectarian religious belief by the government, in violation of the Constitution. The NDP was made law by religious advocates like Billy Graham and was passed by legislators who specifically invoked the Christian god; it is currently managed by a gang of right-wing religious zealots who send out suggested proclamation texts to the president and state governors that uses Bible quotes…and those texts are frequently used verbatim.

But wait! Can Sarah Palin possibly be even dumber than O’Reilly? You betcha.

…our constitution of course acknowledging that our unalienable rights come from god not man…

Oy.

Here is the first sentence of that thoroughly god-free document, the Constitution of the United States of America.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Yes — the emphasis is in the original.

The babbling goes on from there, with O’Reilly even claiming that the Constitution is based on the Ten Commandments, which is also news to me: I’ve missed the parts that set aside holy days, demand worship of a single god, or outlaws coveting; it doesn’t even make murder and theft illegal! The Constitution is all about laying out the mechanisms of a civil government, the division of powers, specifying what powers each branch has, etc.; the bill of rights lays out specific rights and privileges for citizens. Read it yourself. There’s nothing Biblical in there, absolutely nothing derived from the old or new testaments, and likewise, there is nothing in the Bible that even approximates it in intent or substance.

Jesus, these people are morons.

If you want to cleanse your brain a little bit, here’s another clip from Fox & Friends this past weekend, where the Fox idjit is just as dumb, but in this case, his guest is Dan Barker…who takes him apart.

Happy National Day Of Prayer!

Sometimes I am just so embarrassed by my country. Do we really need the government telling people to appeal to an invisible magic man in the sky? Apparently, we do.

“I call upon the citizens of our nation to pray, or otherwise give thanks, in accordance with their own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and I invite all people of faith to join me in asking for God’s continued guidance, grace, and protection as we meet the challenges before us,” Obama said in his official proclamation.

Get stuffed, you pandering, unprincipled hack.

Let’s just hope that the appeal of the rejection of the NDOP goes our way…not that I have high hopes that this Supreme Court will help.

Cuccinelli is using the law to pursue a vendetta

I was shocked to see that the Virginia attorney general has filed papers against the climate researcher, Michael Mann. Mann had worked at the University of Virginia for 5 or 6 years, doing climate studies that cost the state about a half million dollars over that time. (To put that in perspective, that’s a middling sized grant; big biomedical researchers can get much more than that.) Cuccinelli is claiming that Mann committed fraud, and wants to demand all that money back.

There are no grounds to consider Mann to have committed any breach of ethics. The sole foundation for his legal attack is the hacked email messages from the CRU, which contained no nefarious revelations…other than that some scientists are really pissed off at clueless denialists like Cuccinelli. Most annoyingly, Mann was already subjected to an ethics review, again driven by people complaining about the CRU emails, and was completely absolved of any wrongdoing.

This is a witch hunt, nothing more. Cuccinelli is not pursuing a scientist because he did wrong, he is pursuing a scientist because he did not like the results he honestly got. He is using the law to take a political cheap shot with no basis in substance. That can only have a chilling effect, if carried out: apparently, the only results you are allowed to get at the University of Virginia are those that fit the preconceptions of conservative ideology. If anyone has acted unethically in this matter, it’s Virginia’s Attorney General.

Wait! Maybe Britain needs to keep Lord Justice Laws

I suggested in jest that maybe we should put England’s sensible Lord Justice Laws on our Supreme Court, but maybe they still need rationalists over there. The Guardian has been using a stellar pro-science panel (Goldacre and Singh, to name two members) to quiz representatives of various political parties on their science stance. They just interviewed the United Kingdom Independence Party, whose representative was…Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. You have got to be kidding; that man is a raving loon. So the UKIP rejects the science of global warming, but advocates for homeopathy.

My favorite part, though, was their position on stem cell research.

Wherever stem cells can be obtained by means other than the killing of very small children, it is ethical only to obtain the stem cells by means that do not involve the loss of little lives. On this basis, there is no reason why Britain should not play a leading part in stem cell research.

That’s completely batty. Why, how can science proceed if we are not free to charge into schoolyards, butchering little tykes so we can harvest a few grams of cells from their guts? The summary of their science policy is damning.

Ukip is the only significant party to support homeopathy, and the only party apart from the BNP still in denial over climate change. The appointment of Viscount Monckton as a science spokesman adds to the air of a party of old British eccentrics.

Woeful.

The one sad bit of this lunatic party is that Pat Condell supports them. Say it ain’t so, Pat — how can anyone defend a party run by refugees from the looney bin?

The monarchy is reduced to this folly

Prince Charles always seemed like a walloping great dunderhead to me, and I see that my opinion has been confirmed. His great cause, the philanthropic purpose he’d like to be remembered for, is propping up the quackery of homeopathy and other such nonsensical therapies. And now one of his aides in this misguided impulse has been arrested for fraud. How appropriate. I doubt that Charles has done any embezzling — British royalty are rich enough that it would be superfluous — but it’s a shame that he won’t be arrested for the greater harm he has perpetrated.

Any system of hereditary transfer of leadership is going to be afflicted with the unfortunate vagaries of chance, compounded by the distortion of traditional privilege. Why the British continue to put up with this nonsense is a mystery…maybe one virtue of ninnies like Charles is that when an obvious fool sits on the throne, people will come to their senses.

(Nah, that won’t happen. We had a couple of palpable incompetents running the US for a while — Reagan and Bush the Younger — and we’ve still got people revering them.)

Republicans: petty and stupid

Yesterday, I linked to an offensive poll by Minnesota Republicans in district 42 (that’s one of the Minneapolis suburbs, by the way). My readers marched in, voted against their support for Arizona’s racial-profiling, anti-immigrant law, and completely skewed the results to be against the desired Republican outcome.

This happens often enough; the point is that these kinds of internet polls do not reliably produce accurate results, and it’s easy to twist a poll in a contrary way. Most often these polls are put up as a kind of exercise in self-affirmation, because, for instance, very few non-Republicans read the SD42 Republican web site, and what we do is subvert that backpatting purpose of the poll.

What typically happens then is that eventually the poll is archived or closed, and everybody moves on. It’s a freakin’ internet poll, you know — it’s inconsequential. Only…the Republicans of SD42 just can’t let it go. It’s apparently very important to them that they preserve their illusion that their readers support their policies in every possible way.

So what did they do? Multiple resets of the poll, throwing out all of the votes — for a while, they were resetting it every 10 minutes. Attempts to lock the poll: they’d let votes accumulate for a few minutes from a fresh start, and as soon as their side showed a slight edge, freeze it there (some of the readers here discovered an alternate path to the polling service and worked their way around it). Rewriting the answers, first to remove the stereotypical language, then to reverse the sense of the answers (we were not fooled), and now…and now, look at what they’ve done.

Do you believe in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws?

Yes. An orderly immigration policy is essential to maintaining a free society.
Yes. And that is why I support Arizona’s immigration law.

That is amazingly pathetic.

I declare this pharyngulation a total victory, the most complete demolition of a poll that we have ever accomplished. They are in a shambles, reduced to displaying meaningless noise that doesn’t even have a pretense of giving voters a choice.

Imagine if these clowns were actually running our real world election system…oh, wait. They are.

Once again, right-wing foot in right-wing mouth

This is Minnesota. We’re mostly pale and of Scandinavian/German ancestry up here, which means our local racists are mostly blithely confident and don’t have much opportunity to express themselves. We just saw one interesting example of a regional Republican party with a contemptuous attitude towards Hispanics…but you’ve got to go to the teabaggers to see that topped.

Members of the Mille Lacs Tea Party Patriots held the second annual Tea Party rally on Thursday, April 15 in Milaca. Roughly 60 people turned out for the event in which Sue Bican told attendees they must resolve to become active, to do something. “If we do nothing, we are no better than the Jews who stood in line for the gas chambers, Bican said.

Yes, because being a white Republican in Minnesota is exactly like being a hated minority targeted for extermination by racist Nazis.

Shall we mess up a local Republican poll?

You may have heard that Arizona has a draconian new immigration law that essentially legalizes racial profiling, and requires immigrants to carry their registration documents at all times…and by default, then, you better not be caught brown in Arizona without proof of citizenship, no matter what your legal status.

One of our local Republican districts has a poll on this issue. You will not believe the wording on it.

President Obama called the new Arizona bill banning illegal immigration “misguided”. Do you agree?

Sí, señor!
22%
No Way, José!
77%

They really need to add a cute little icon of the Frito Bandito to that, just to add a little more class. It’s especially funny because Minnesota is experiencing a growing influx of Hispanic workers, who are getting stuck with the essential but menial jobs of our agricultural economy. It seems like a bad idea for Republicans to be mocking a growing part of our electorate, but hey, if they want to shoot themselves in the voting booth, go ahead.

By the way, read it carefully. They are not asking if you approve of the immigration bill, they are asking if you approve of Obama’s dislike of the bill. If you think the bill is misguided, vote yes; if you think we need to crack down on the rising brown tide, vote no. I actually wonder if the current small vote for yes is the result of Republicans unable to puzzle out the question.

The Rethuglicans noticed. The poll has been reset, and the ridiculously stereotyped answers have been changed to a simple yes and no now. I guess we embarrassed them.

No sense of humour at all, Part II

I thought the whole Affair of the Mocking Memo was grossly overblown and absurd, but I had no idea how pretentious the Vatican could be. Now, because of an internal memo that made some mild jests about confronting the Pope on his British visit with the consequences of his policies, the silly men in dresses are threatening to stick their noses in the air, sniff, and refuse to come.

One highly-placed source in the Vatican said: “This could have very severe repercussions and is embarrassing for the British government – one has to question whether the action taken is enough.

“It is disgusting. Britain’s ambassador to the Holy See has been in to see the Secretary of State and explain what happened and this will all be relayed to the Pope.

“It’s even possible the trip could be cancelled as this matter is hugely offensive.”

Cardinal Renato Martino, the former head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said: “The British government has invited the Pope as its guest and he should be treated with respect.

“To make a mockery of his beliefs and the beliefs of millions of Catholics not just in Britain but across the world is very offensive indeed.”

Oh, “very offensive indeed.” Merely joking about asking the Pope to defend himself outrages the Vatican…but we’re supposed to overlook the effects his lies about birth control, disease, and the treatment of children have had on the world.

Stay home, Ratzi, stay home. Hide in your palace surrounded by your sleazy sycophants, and stuff up your ears when others dare to point out that you are an evil old man running a corrupt establishment.