You know I would like to believe our country has progressed enough since the mid 19th century to stop viewing immigrants as a foreign menace. I would like to believe that neanderthals like Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo are few and far between. I would like to believe only collections of rednecks like the Minutemen were the groups opposing immigration.

I would like these things to be true, but they’re clearly a fantasy. This is an honest to god statement released by the anti-immigration (not just illegal immigration, actual immigration) group NumbersUSA:

Senator Menendez is holding the reauthorization of E-Verify hostage until Congress submits to his demand to drastically increase the number of permanent, employment-based visas to be made available to US employers seeking to import foreign workers to permanently take American jobs.

OH THE FUCKING HORROR! HE WANTS TO ALLOW MORE PEOPLE TO ENTER THIS COUNTRY! HOW DARE THIS MAN ENGAGE IN SUCH SUBTERFUGE? TREASON, I SAY!

I mean seriously, how backwards stupid does one have to be to actually find legal immigration awful? Granted I am so extreme on the issue I have no problem with illegal immigration, but even if you value human life less than I do, to complain about legal immigration is indicative of a severe mental disease.

The racist lunatic, and almost certainly creationist minded “Council of Conservative Citizens” is using an article from The New Scientist to promote their twisted racist opinions under the guise of “science.” This is a lot like Ben Stein trying to compare belief in evolutionary biology as the way human beings came into being as we see ourselves presently, and and the belief in the master race theory as envisioned by Adolf Hitler.

The headline for the piece is “Cro-Magnon Man Shunned Interracial Breeding.” They quote approvingly from the article in New Scientist:

Did the first modern humans in Europe share a bed with nearby Neanderthals? Almost certainly not, according to a new analysis of 28,000 year old Cro-Magnon DNA.

The Cro-Magnons were the first modern Homo sapiens in Europe, living there between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago. Their DNA sequences match those of today’s Europeans, says Guido Barbujani, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Ferrera, Italy, suggesting that “Neanderthal hybridisation” did not occur.

…

Barbujani agrees that mitochondrial DNA alone can’t rule out the possibility that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals bred, but nearly every ancient human skeleton recovered in Europe belongs to either Cro-Magnons or Neanderthals, not the hybrids that would be expected from interbreeding.

The only potential intermediate is a child’s skull found in Portugal and dated to 24,500 years ago – after Neanderthals went extinct. However, other researchers have questioned the skeleton, suggesting it belonged to a “chunky” human child.

I hate to break this to the Council of Conservative Citizens… Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man, WERE TWO DIFFERENT FUCKING SPECIES. NOT RACES OF HUMAN. A black human isn’t Homo sapien sapien negropis or whatever. Blacks, whites, Asians, Arabs, Jews, Christians, Hindus, we’re all of the biological classification Homo sapien sapien. Neanderthal was Homo neanderthalensis. Cro-magnon man was Homo sapien (not Homo sapien sapien as we are today, we’ve evolved beyond Cro-magnon man).

An eagle and a vulture are two different SPECIES of bird, not two different races of bird. Ethnicity and race are not going to appear in scientific binomial nominclature. Unless you’re some kind of lunatic doctor like the former confederate “scientist” who came up with Traeptomania.

Here, by the way, is a picture of their recent protest in my home state of North Carolina against Mexicans:

Notice how one says “now swim back.” Considering Mexico ISN’T an island, and actually shares a land border with the United States, and no Mexican has ever needed to swim to North Carolina from Mexico EVER, this sign is doubly stupid and shows the utter mental sickness which has infested the brains these so-called “conservatives.”

Pat Buchanan has really gone off the deep-end with his public loathing of Israel and Jewry. First he appeared on a right wing radio show which proudly links to the Institute for Historical Review, a group which “minimizes” (re: denies) the severity of the Holocaust. His site’s official blogger then mocked the Anti-Defamation League’s justifiable outrage that he showed up on the show and started spouting his Hitler apologetics.

His latest book all but blames the victims of Nazi brutality for the horrible things the Nazis did to them, inexplicably thinking that diplomacy and rational debate with Adolf Hitler would have satisfied him. Pretty much ignoring how big a psychopath Hitler was. It’s rare when I’m on the same side as Victor Hansen, but his hard review of Pat’s latest book was right on the money.

Now his latest article implies that are we to head into war, it will be a result of the perfidious nature of Israeli Jews because in his eyes, they’ll launch an unprovoked attack on Iran, and when Iran responds, we’ll be “forced” into defending Israel.

On June 6, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, “If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program, we will attack it.”

Ehud Olmert returned from a June meeting with Bush to tell Israelis, “George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term.”

Is Israel bluffing, or in dead earnest?

For while Israel can do damage to Iran, she cannot defeat Iran without using nuclear weapons. But any attack Israel launched against Iran would require U.S. complicity, and any Israeli war with Iran would almost certainly require the United States to do most of the fighting to win or end it.

Thus, if George Bush does not want war with Iran, with two U.S. wars already, he must inform the Israelis in unequivocal terms that the United States opposes any Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran, and will not assist, but denounce any such attack.

This loathing of Jews and Israel on his part has reached “Iranian.”

Before going into the scientific reasons why “intelligent” design is not a theory of human creation worthy of being taught in our public schools, let’s take a look at what “intelligent” design is, and a look at the individuals supporting the inclusion of a non-scientific theory in science classes.

For the uninitiated, “intelligent” design is the theory that at the very initial point of the universe’s formation, something (they never admit they’re refering to God, but that’s who they’re refering to when they say a “designer”) caused the universe to form. Their reasoning, basically, is something can’t come from nothing, there had to be something that caused the universe to form that led to all these chemical and physical reactions taking place. This is perfectly understandable reasoning, and the answer has never been found perfectly.

And there is nothing wrong with their final answer being an intelligent designer (re: God) created the universe billions upon billions of years ago. Where they’re wrong is claiming their final answer is scientifically based. It isn’t, it’s based on faith, secretly a faith in the Bible being inerrant, publicly a faith that it’s impossible to prove a negative, no matter how utterly ridiculous the negative is.

The main mover of the “intelligent” design movement is a man named Phillip E. Johnson. He is the “designer” of the Discovery Institute. He doesn’t believe HIV causes AIDS, which by itself should discredit him as a serious scientific mind. He is a professor of Law and Philosophy at Berkley University, which again, shows no scientific background to make his pronouncements concerning the evolution of man worthy of being debated. He’s not even remotely aware of that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has nothing to do with supplanting religion.

“This isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science,” says the conference’s prime mover, law professor Phillip Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley. “It’s about religion and philosophy.” Mr. Johnson also insists the real issue in the century-old debate isn’t even about the early chapters of Genesis. “I turn instead to John 1,” says the astute Presbyterian layman, “where we’re told that ‘In the beginning was the word.’”

He readily admits his desire to see “intelligent” design brought into the science class isn’t even about science. He basically is afraid if people learn facts, they’ll become immoral atheists. Like Osama bin Laden, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad… oh wait, they’re devout practioners of their faith.

The argument made concerning the teaching of “intelligent” design in the classrom is that students should have every theory concerning the creation of man available to them. It’s a free market approach to education, which if it didn’t potentially retard the learning of a student when it comes to science, would be alright. However, to believe everything that’s taught should be accepted based on some market or democratically determined process is the height of foolishness. It also invites the potential for hideous theories like anything promoted by the Institute for Historical Review.

The prime mover of the “intelligent” design theory readily admits he’s motivated by creationist impulses, and the “i”d supporters’s utterly bogus claims of being unfairly silenced sound awfully similar to the IHR’s complaints that their theories aren’t being given a fair shot in the marketplace of ideas. What groups like the Discovery Institute and Institute for Historical Review fail to understand is that the marketplace of ideas isn’t how facts are determined. Democracy works for figuring out leadership in a nation-state. It’s not how history, biological and real, actually happened.

Next part, the main thrusts of the “intelligent” designer’s arguments.

Barack Obama was speaking to some group of people and the issue of late-term abortion, from here on out refered to as infanticide, came up. Barack Obama said he has no problems with restricting access to late-term abortions unless the woman will suffer physical damage from completing the pregnancy. His position is the correct one, with regards to infanticide. I’m pro-life from conception to the grave, so I think all abortions should be restricted except to women who will die as a result of carrying the child to term, but hearing Obama come out publicly with the morally correct position to some degree on abortion is somewhat nice to see.

However, easily the stupidest blogger on the left, Nicole Belle of Crooks and Liars, is going apeshit bananas over Barack Obama’s statements concerning infanticide. Here is the relevant quote from Barack Obama:

“I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.”

Here is Nicole Belle’s reaction:

And this is where I get really angry. Anyone who has paid attention to the relative non-issue of late-term abortions–the stuff that the right wing lives to distract and horrify the electorate with–knows that this framing of women deciding after more than 6 months that she’s just not interested in being pregnant was designed as a slippery slope platform to hurt women from getting abortions, at any time.

I have been told by several pro-choice friends that infanticide should have no restrictions on it whatsoever. Feeling blue is as proper a reason for terminating the life of a perfectly viable baby to them as the possibility of the mother dying during labor. This is morbid and disgusting.

And at some point those favoring no restrictions whatsoever on abortion have to realize this fact, restrictionless abortions are just as dangerous to society as eliminating them completely. An open market in terminating pregnancies allows for unsafe family planning centers to show up. And finally, at some point you have to realize it’s called ABORTION for a reason: something is ending. In this case a life.

The mission of Creationist/Intelligent Design supporters regarding Darwinian evolution is to provide competing theories and let the children decide which one makes the most sense. This implies, of course, the veracity of scientific facts isn’t something set in stone, but something to let the market determine. News flash: SCIENCE ISN’T AN ECONOMY. Those of us who realize that intelligent design isn’t science are cowards, fascists, or according to morons like Ben Stein, Nazi supporting eugenicists (do something a couple times just to see how much fun it could be, and you’re labelled for life!).

Well the conservative web community Townhall.com has an article written by Floyd and Mary Beth Brown praising Bobby Jindal’s decision to allow “Intelligent” Design entering the science classroom, and talking about how fearful evolutionists are of academic freedom.

Celebrate the courage of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in the fight for freedom. He has shown tremendous courage in signing the Louisiana Science Education Bill, an important blow for academic freedom.

“Our freedom to think and consider more than one option is part of what has given America her competitive edge in the international marketplace of ideas,” said biology scientist Caroline Crocker to the Louisiana House Committee on Education. “The current denial of academic freedom rights for those who are judged politically incorrect may put this in jeopardy.”

Crocker was testifying on the bill allowing supplemental materials into Louisiana public school science classrooms about evolution, cloning, global warming and other debatable topics. The legislature went on to unanimously (35-0) pass the bill. Now it has become law because of Gov. Jindal’s courage.

One would think legislation which allows an environment that promotes “critical thinking” and “objective discussion” in the classroom would please everyone — it did the bipartisan group of legislators in Louisiana — but such is not the case. The New York Times felt threatened by the legislation, calling it “retrograde,” naming its editorial on the topic, “Louisiana’s Latest Assault on Darwin.” They were attempting to pressure Gov. Jindal to not sign the law, using a number of tactics including implicit ridicule, subtle belittling insults and untruths.

The law is straightforward and clearly restricts any intent to promote a religious doctrine. There is no mention of either intelligent design or creationism. Darwinism is not banned and teachers are required to teach students from standard textbooks. But the Times calls the legislation a “Trojan horse” because the state board of education must, upon request of local school districts, help foster an environment of “critical thinking” and “open discussion” on controversial scientific subjects. This allows teachers to use supplemental materials to analyze evolution and show views other than Darwin’s theory. It allows evolution to be criticized, and the law protects the rights of teachers and students to talk freely about a wide range of ideas without fear of reprisal.

Since Mr. and Mrs. Brown seem to have little problem with “criticism” and other views concerning the indisputable evidence that natual selection as described by Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory, then they obviously have no problem with Holocaust Revisionism being taught in public schools. If academia works in an open democratic market, then competing theories to how extreme the Nazi Holocaust against European Jewry should be made available to children. Let them have the freedom to determine, after hearing all arguments, what the Nazis did to Europe’s Jewish population. If one supports “academic freedom” being the basis of how biology is to be taught, then clearly “academic freedom” has to be the basis of how history is taught.

Considering the Discovery Institute’s founder’s views on issues like HIV, this might be a good way for them to finally achieve their goal and team up with the odious Institute for Historical Review.

The short list for John McCain’s choice of running mate involve mostly governors. Charlie Crist of Florida, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Mitt Romney formerly of Massachusetts, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, and possibly Marc Sanford of South Carolina. However, according to Bloomberg, Mitt Romney is the “logical” choice for John McCain.

The prerequisites for John McCain’s running mate are clear: a Washington outsider with solid economic credentials who isn’t associated with President George W. Bush, can fill the vice-presidential attack-dog role, help win Western and Midwestern states and cut into Democrat Barack Obama’s fundraising advantage.

One candidate fits the bill: former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

The challenge would be in overcoming the animus that set in between Romney and the presumptive Republican nominee during the party’s primaries.

Romney, 61, has “no shortage of strengths,” said Dan Schnur, who was McCain’s communications director in 2000.”

Really? How does someone who had to pay for his primary race ease the money burden that Barack Obama’s fundraising prowess has put on McCain? Winning midwestern states? Like when Mike Huckabee won in Iowa despite all the effort and money Mitt Romney put into the state? How will McCain’s accurate mentioning of Obama’s shifting positions on various issues seem at all genuine when one looks at the major policy switches Mitt Romney has undergone? He was against illegal immigration while he was employing illegal immigrants. It’s utterly ridiculous.

The only people in this election whose primary campaigns were more of a disaster than Mitt Romney’s were Fred Thompson’s, who for some unbelievable reason thought he could do nothing and somehow win, and Rudy Giuliani who thought winning the Florida Primary was going to be enough for him to win the GOP Presidential nomination.

I remember when I learned that my family was moving to North Carolina. Outside of it completely fucking up my senior year of high school, the thing that annoyed me a lot was moving to a state with Jesse Helms as one of its Senators. In the last fifty years there have been few Senators who are more odious than the late-Senator. Whether it was refusing to support the Martin Luther King holiday, using racist imagery in his campaign ads, threatening the life of a sitting President of the United States, or supporting racist authoritarian regimes viewed as even too right wing for Margaret Thatcher, Jesse Helms’ legacy is one of absolute hideousness.

Yet the local media has been acting as though his passing is a bad thing. It’s about as bad for this state as Strom Thurmond’s death. They were both racist, homophobic, disgusting Dixiecrats whose loathesome views on civil rights and minority rights belong in John Calhoun’s Senate, not the post-World War II Senate.

I think Christopher Hitchens’s Eulogy for Jesse Helms is especially good:

It seemed somehow profane that Sen. Jesse Helms should have managed to depart this life on the 232nd anniversary of the declaration of American independence. To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn’t want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon.

Or, as the obituary in the New York Times so gently phrased it, for a man for whom “the orderliness of the small town even encompassed racial segregation; as a child, he saw it not as a great evil but as an accepted part of his world.” He continued to “see” it that way as an adult, too, switching his party allegiance from Democrat to Republican in tune with the Nixon “Southern strategy” and famously deploying the “white hands” ad 20 years later, in which the genius of Dick Morris exploited the woes of the rejected white job seeker. That episode did get a mention in the obituary, but there was no recollection of Helms’ role in opposing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, in protecting the apartheid state from the imposition of sanctions, or in defending white Rhodesia. (Margaret Thatcher’s government complained officially at one point about the role played by Helms staffer John Carbaugh in urging the white settler regime of Ian Smith to hang tough in the independence negotiations.)

His chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a period of national embarrassment and, sometimes, disgrace. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, imposing additional economic sanctions on Cuba, multiplied the misery and beggary of Cuba’s luckless inhabitants while doing nothing whatever to weaken its military dictatorship. Helms’ amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act in 1973, forbidding American aid to any family-planning groups that even mentioned the option of abortion, also greatly added to the woes and miseries of millions of Africans. (Fairness obliges me to say that in his last year in the Senate he did somewhat relax his equally stubborn and reactionary opposition to measures designed to combat AIDS in Africa. But this was only because it had by then become obvious that the disease was heterosexually transmitted. In general, his attitude to the AIDS plague was determined by a Bible-based bigotry that saw it as divine retribution for perversion.)

You can read the whole article here.

Quick, how many of the current justices on the Supreme Court were nominated by a Democrat President? If you said two, you’d be more politically aware than GOP nominee John McCain, who apparently forgot that three of the justices who ruled in favor of keeping child rapists alive in Louisiana were Republican appointees.

Oh, and he voted to confirm four of the five who voted in favor of eliminating the death penalty as punishment for raping a child. He couldn’t vote for John Paul Stevens because he was out strengthening his Commander in Chief credentials leading a Naval squadron during peacetime.

Nevertheless, McCain asked: “Why is it that the majority includes the same justices he usually holds out as the models for future nominations?”

“My opponent may not care for this particular decision, but it was exactly the kind of opinion we could expect from an Obama court,” the Arizona senator said.

When asked by CNN in May whether any current justices would be models for his nominees, Obama replied that he considered Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter to be sensible judges. All three voted in the majority in the child rape case, as did Justices Anthony Kennedy and John Paul Stevens.

I can understand that McCain forgot about voting for these four justices. I mean the last one of those was nominated like 14 years ago, when John McCain was a lad of 57. Obviously he thought their judicial philosophy was sound enough for him to support their ascension to the Supreme Court. If they’re backwards and ruling in a manner he finds offensive, why did he vote for them? I suspect the law and constitutionality are foreign concepts to Senator McCain, like the economy. Ruth Ginsberg did work for the ACLU, this came out during her confirmation process Senator McCain. One of the major issues the ACLU fights is the death penalty. Did you honestly believe Ruth Bader Ginsberg would rule in favor of a death penalty law that didn’t involve treason or murder?

And if you did believe that, your judgment then should be called into question and your judgment now even moreso.

When some idiot nobody wrote an attack on John McCain on the Huffington Post questioning John McCain’s service to America because he wouldn’t release his military records, I called the dude an idiot to any unfortunate soul who had the misfortune of speaking to me or being in the presence of anything I said. Questioning his service simply because he doesn’t release everything he ever did ever ever is moronic.

However, the furor surrounding General Wesley Clark’s statement on Sunday shows three things:

1. The media has absolutely no ability to distinguish between calling one’s experiences irrelevent to the presidency (as Clark did) and denigrating one’s service to their country (as that irretrievably stupid racist Michelle Malkin did by implying John Kerry injured himself to get Purple Hearts).

2. Any American who got genuinely offended by Wes Clark’s comments probably thinks John McCain and George W. Bush are visionaries and inspiring speakers. The inside-the-beltway punditocracy who threw shitfits don’t think this way, however, they’re simply braindead children. And that includes Bob Schieffer.

3. And finally, Barack Obama’s swift repudiation, distancing, and burning at the stake of Wesley Clark shows what kind of amazing pussy he is. This kind of weak-kneed limpwristed shit makes it painfully clear the Democratic Party doesn’t have the spine to actually lead this country effectively. This isn’t to imply there aren’t liberals strong enough to be effective leaders. The Nation has shown balls by standing by Clark. If the people who write for The Nation didn’t advocate economic policies that would lead to the destruction of this country I’d want them to take over the Democratic leadership.

Here is what Wesley Clark said about John McCain:

“In the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” ”It’s a matter of gauging your opponents and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war.

“He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world, but he hasn’t held executive responsibility,” Clark said. “That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron.”

THE HORROR! Here is how Barack Obama reacted, through an e-mail from Obama campaign person Bill Burton:

“As he’s said many times before, Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”

WESLEY CLARK FUCKING SAID HE RESPECTED AND HONORED MCCAIN’S SERVICE TOO. Barack Obama is doing everything he can to make me glad I switched parties to Republican in February of this year. The man has smaller balls than his wife. At least she stands by the shit she says.