They have a vision. They have a dream. They know what shape they want America to take. And they have formed an “organization inspired by the principles of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the Evangelical and Christian Reconstruction movements”. And completely oblivious to the irony, with no hint that they understand the associations it will inspire, they have named this organization…the PALIBAN.

2012 is going to be so much fun.

And by “fun”, I mean “loaded with despair and exasperation and disappointment in my fellow citizens.”

(Read their blog and you might suspect a Poe, though. It’s just a little too all that.)

Another casualty in the War on Drugs: an enthusiastic science student, of the sort that would normally go on to be a scientist, is arrested for having a chemistry lab.

A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab – and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism.

Lewis Casey, an 18-year-old in Saskatchewan, had built a small chemistry lab in his family’s garage near the university where he studies. Then two weeks ago, police arrived at his home with a search warrant and based on a quick survey of his lab determined that it was a meth lab. They pulled Casey out of the shower to interrogate him, and then arrested him.

A few days later, police admitted that Casey’s chemistry lab wasn’t a meth lab – but they kept him in jail, claiming that he had some of the materials necessary to produce explosives. Friends and neighbors wrote dozens of letters to the court, testifying that Casey was innocent and merely a student who is really enthusiastic about chemistry.

Errm, having the “materials necessary to produce explosives” is an awfully low bar to set. If we’re going to go that route, let’s round up and arrest all the farmers — they’ve got fuel oil and fertilizer in bulk, and are a far more serious danger.

Don’t criminalize reagents. Monitor them, sure, but instead target the products of criminal chemistry. Anything else is going to have lots of false positives and is going to damage science education.

We’re learning more about what Obama is actually going to do in office, and while there are some negatives, right now the positives outweigh them.

Let’s get the bad decisions out of the way first.

Rick Warren, professional homophobe, bigot, and smirking airhead, will be prominently promoted in the invocation at the inauguration. This is a symbolic slap to the face of rationalists and GLBT citizens of our country, and is not a good sign.

The man who will be the Interior Secretary, a position which should be concerned about conservation of the country’s natural resources and which has been typically filled with vultures and exploiters from industry by Republican presidents, is going to be more of the same: Ken Salazar, who will almost certainly promote mining and ranching interests.

Both of those are real disgraces, and it’s not as if Obama was boxed in or lacking alternatives. They’re also incomprehensible. Warren is a sneaky little creep who already got more respect than he deserves by hosting one of the presidential debates, and he’s also a guy who is anti-Democratic policies — you know he did not vote for Obama. So why throw him another bone? Salazar just sounds like a lazy choice, somebody who was picked to appease industry…but he’s not a steward of the environment.

The bads are awful, but I’ve got to say that his good decisions are very, very good.

The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be John Holdren of Harvard University, a professor of environmental policy who takes a hard line on global climate change — he was an advisor to Al Gore on the movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

Jane Lubchenko is a professor of marine biology at Oregon State University. She’ll be in charge of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key appointment in climate change policy.

Co-chairs of the Council of Advisers on Science and Technology will be Harold Varmus, who won a Nobel for his work on viral oncogenes, and Eric Lander, a very big name in genomics research.

Another Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, will be the Secretary of Energy. Chu has also been outspoken about climate change and is a strong promoter of alternative energy sources.

If these good people are actually listened to by the president, expect to see major improvements in energy policy and biology research, and some serious attention paid to carbon. This is, overall, a net plus for science and a real strike against anti-science in the White House, a huge change from the last 8 years. Salazar is troubling, some people are concerned that NASA will suffer, and sucking up to the odious Rick Warren still makes me wonder what atavistic social policies might be nestled in Obama’s mind, but there is some hope on the horizon, at least. Now if only he could do even better.

Lots of people complained that throwing shoes at the president was an act of violence, and therefore beyond the pale of what should be allowed. I think they’re wrong, that it’s a harmless expression of naked contempt, and that there ought to be more contempt expressed towards this president, but let’s compromise. No throwing shoes. How about politely handing them to him?

The Rude Pundit had a brilliant and obvious idea.

This morning, the Rude Pundit decided to honor the efforts of Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi shoe-tosser, by taking out a raggedy old pair of sneakers, putting them in a Priority Mail shipping box, helpfully provided by the United States Post Office, and shipping them to President George W. Bush at the White House. He included a note that read, “This is a farewell kiss from the American people, you dog.”

Since throwing objects at the president is generally considered a crime, the Rude Pundit figures sending shoes to Bush is a small, good thing, a gesture of contempt that has context. Sweet Christ, at this point, there should be giant sacks of shoes heading to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20500, like letters to Santa.

None of you can have any objections in principle to that, I should hope. Let us all make our own small protest and send George W Bush a little Christmas present, a polite version of an upraised middle finger, and box up some old shoes and send him a deluge of metaphorical and symbolic disgust.

It would also be nice if the shoes were at least serviceable, so maybe the White House could follow up with one last decent act by donating them to the needy.

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Alternative suggestion! I really like the idea mentioned in the comments. Since the shoes won’t actually be seen Bush and will probably be thrown out, cut out the middleman and do this:

• Donate a pair of shoes to the local charity of your choice.

• Send Bush a postcard, stating, “A pair of shoes has been donated to the needy in your name. This is a farewell kiss from the American people, you dog.”

Simple, cheap, and it gets the message across just as well, while also doing something good.

Our president, the wretched villain who threw away our economy and our people’s lives in a wasteful, failed war, skulked into Iraq and tried to pretend he was a hero. Nobody was fooled, and he got a rude surprise.

Bush had just finished his prepared remarks in which he said the security agreement was made possible by the U.S. surge of troops earlier this year, when the journalist, Muthathar al Zaidi pulled his shoes off and hurled them at the president. “This is a goodbye kiss, you dog,” Zaidi shouted.

Bush dodged the shoes and was not struck. Bodyguards quickly wrestled Zaidi to the floor and hauled him, kicking and screaming, from the room. Two other Iraqi journalists were briefly detained after one of them called Zaidi’s actions “courageous.”

Catch that last line: journalists were detained for commenting on this action. I’ll comment, too: I think Zaidi was brave and right. I wish a few American journalists had the guts to throw shoes at the president — they should have started in 2001. Can we make it a new tradition?

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.