That’s a good question. After all, how can someone get seriously upset when they’re wished “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”? It’s been ridiculous from the get-go. Well, Max Blumenthal has traced the meme back in an article on who started the War on Christmas, and you probably won’t be too surprised: it originated in racist kooks who blamed foreigners and Jews for all of the nation’s ills. Notice that when people talk about the War on Christmas, they rarely mention who’s waging it. It’s unspoken but understood on the far right that this is a war with Jews and immigrants.

This is clearly Orcinus territory. Dave Neiwert has often made the argument that right-wing radio and TV exists to mainstream the worst ideas of racist extremists, and that the war on Christmas can migrate from the racist founder of the odious VDare website to a daily rant on Bill O’Reilly’s cable show is a perfect example of the phenomenon.

Please go away, Mr Bush. And please, President-elect Obama, clear away the rotting debris of this ghastly administration. The latest example of dreadful Bush appointees: Stephen Johnson, head of the EPA. Asked about the evolution/creation debate, this is what he had to say:

It’s not a clean-cut division. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there’s theistic or God-controlled evolution and there’s variations on all those themes.

Wobble and waffle. Religion and science, it’s all the same to him.

Now you might say that maybe this is irrelevant — as the EPA chief, he’s just a bureaucrat who must manage a horde of underlings, and his scientific qualifications aren’t all that important. Now I’d hope that the guy who is in charge of protecting the environment would know something about science and would care about the environment, but Johnson seems to be a complete flack, a lackey for corporate interests. Josh Rosenau sums him up:

So, on evolution, he rejects scientific evidence in favor of the opinion of his authority figures. On climate change, he again rejects the scientific evidence in favor of the opinion of his authority figure. On the ethics of human testing of pesticides, on the appropriateness of using atrazine, on the environmental risks of mega-farms, and on value of a human life in cost-benefit analyses, Johnson has consistently ignored his scientific advisors, going along with the opinions of his political superiors.

Both of the above links also tap into this typical interview with George W. Bush. We have had this joker in office far too long.

MCFADDEN: Is it literally true, the Bible?

BUSH: You know. Probably not … No, I’m not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it, but I do think that the New Testament, for example is … has got … You know, the important lesson is “God sent a son.”

MCFADDEN: So, you can read the Bible…

BUSH: That God in the flesh, that mankind can understand there is a God who is full of grace and that nothing you can do to earn his love. His love is a gift and that in order to draw closer to God and in order to express your appreciation for that love is why you change your behavior.

MCFADDEN: So, you can read the Bible and not take it literally. I mean you can — it’s not inconsistent to love the Bible and believe in evolution, say.

BUSH: Yeah, I mean, I do. I mean, evolution is an interesting subject. I happen to believe that evolution doesn’t fully explain the mystery of life and …

MCFADDEN: But do you believe in it?

BUSH: That God created the world, I do, yeah.

MCFADDEN: But what about …

BUSH: Well, I think you can have both. I think evolution can — you’re getting me way out of my lane here. I’m just a simple president. But it’s, I think that God created the Earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty, and I don’t think it’s incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.

As of this posting, one month, 12 days, 5 hours, and 21 minutes until Bush is out of office, and it’s not soon enough.

This is a depressing collection of short clips on the economy from Fox News. I know — why would anyone want to watch that?

Schadenfreude, baby.

These are from a year to two years ago. They’ve all got this fellow, Peter Schiff, who is explaining that our debt, our artificially inflated real estate market, and various other problems are going to throw us into a recession, the stock market is going to tank, and we’re going to face a financial crisis (he’s a real Cassandra, and like Cassandra, he was right). Fox News throws in a series of their pet analysts, including the odious Ben Stein and that awful Art Laffer who has been afflicting our country since Reagan, and they’re all laughing at him and promising a coming economic bonanza — like that the Dow will hit 16,000. It’s horrible and fascinating at the same time to see how bad the Fox talking heads are at their job.

These clowns, except for Schiff, have flopped spectacularly and clearly represent an invalid mode of thinking about the economy…but if you turn on Fox News now (not that I recommend it), you can still find these same incompetents populating their financial advice programming.

You all may recall the Holy Joe mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, who had a great plan to deal with urban crime: he bought 2,000 burlap bags so community leaders could dress in sackcloth and ashes and pray. Unfortunately, the federal authorities stuck to the old fashioned scheme of dressing sensibly and pursuing the evidence, and have now arrested Larry Langford on multiple counts of corruption. Curses! If only the Feds had gone with biblical policing scheme!

(via Techskeptic)

You seem to be going down a similar path — expertise is downplayed, any fool can do the job of government, irrationality is promoted to equal footing with reason. It’s worrisome. Didn’t your mother ever ask you whether you’d follow if your friends jumped off a cliff? Well, we’re clinging desperately to the edge of that cliff, and you seem awfully anxious to join us.

Take the case of Gary Goodyear. He’s a chiropractor and a certified acupuncturist. He’s a quack, in other words. And you’ve gone and appointed him to be your science and technology minister! Don’t you have any people up there who actually do Science and Technology? What’s David Suzuki up to?

Come on, fix this. It would really be embarrassing if the United States had to stage an intervention — it would be like having Rush Limbaugh show up at your door to chastise you for your substance abuse habits. Besides, you can’t count on us, since America is probably lying on a floor somewhere, shaking and spasming and shouting “flooba lalla maka wana taka doopa” while a minister is rifling through our wallet. We’re Sarah Palin driving an SUV with a big gun rack while watching the 700 Club on the ceiling-mounted video system, bound and determined to prove our superiority by crashing into anyone who cuts into our lane. We are not a good role model.

Please, Canada. You’ve always been like the sensible, moderate brother who at least sets a good example for us. We can’t afford to see you join us in irresponsible lunacy.

The Bush administration will leave us with another legacy: unqualified Republican ideologues receiving appointments in various institutions, including scientific organizations, as their ship of state sinks. The rats are scuttling overboard, and are being rewarded with captaincies on any available vessel. An article in the Washington post discusses the trend. I thought these were striking examples.

In one recent example, Todd Harding — a 30-year-old political appointee at the Energy Department — applied for and won a post this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There, he told colleagues in a Nov. 12 e-mail, he will work on “space-based science using satellites for geostationary and meteorological data.” Harding earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Kentucky’s Centre College, where he also chaired the Kentucky Federation of College Republicans.

And in mid-July, Jeffrey T. Salmon, who has a doctorate in world politics and was a speechwriter for Vice President Cheney when he served as defense secretary, had been selected as deputy director for resource management in the Energy Department’s Office of Science. In that position, he oversees decisions on its grants and budget.

One of the best changes Obama could make in our government is to inspire a culture of competence. It looks like his ability to do that has just gotten much harder.

The Democrats are giving Joe Lieberman everything he wants, and this is symptomatic of the party: they stand for nothing but the status quo and internal accommodation. “Bipartisanship” is a dirty word when one of the two sides is a discredited, corrupt mob of wannabe theocrats and greedy thugs, but the Democratic leadership simply rolls over and acts as if they are doing a great thing by flushing progressive principles down the toilet.

Glenn Greenwald lambastes the illusion of partisan bickering. We’ve been ruled by one party of idiots and another of fawning puppy dogs, and I’m getting a little tired of it.

I’ve never thought of Australia as a particularly strait-laced place — rather the opposite, actually — so why have they elected a government that wants to do something as stupid as putting an internet filter in place for the whole nation? They claim that they’re out to block child pornography, the usual entry-level excuse to impose censorship, but then they also announce that they will filter “other unwanted content”, which means…what? Watch out, Australia, this is the first step towards allowing the government to control all of your information.

One opposition tactic that might work is to point out that there is one common piece of smut that ought to be filtered under these rules, but that many people consider virtuous: that work of unrepentant filth and violence, the bible.

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The opposition is stirred, and rouses itself to action: a new party has emerged to fight the censorship, among other things. It’s called the Australian Sex Party, which better fits my image of the land down under.

Here’s a graphic illustration of how the presidential election turned out. These are the results by county, with color reflecting the percentage that voted Republican (red) and Democrat (blue).

Here’s what it looks like when the counties are scaled by population size; the smear of reds is greatly diminished.

It’s striking how the emptiest places in the country are enriched with fervent conservatives. People are always fretting over how conservatives are outbreeding liberals, but it seems to me that that actually works in liberals’ favor — as communities become larger and more interdependent, as people grow up aware of social support systems, as their numbers create richer opportunities for education, there’s a trend towards embracing liberal values. There are, of course, historical contingencies that can counter that pattern — Utah has been growing, but isn’t becoming more Democratic, for instance — but it’s interesting that fast-growing urban areas in even the reddest states somehow end up favoring the Democrats. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Quiverful movement, that strange idea on the religious right that women ought to bear swarms of children, was a policy that would simply breed new generations of liberals?

Of course, there is the alternative explanation: this distribution is an indirect measure of prosperity. People tend to move towards areas with more upward mobility and better economic prospects, so population is only a proxy for opportunity—and it’s broadly distributed wealth that produces more liberals. Then it would be the case that pumping out a dozen babies that you can’t afford to educate properly would still produce more minions of the Republicans…by impoverishing the region. I’m sure the religious right would find that notion reassuring, since it also seems to be one of their goals to wreck the political and economic health of the nation.

Whatever the explanation is, I want more blue in these maps. There are more election cartograms to peruse.