Educate yourself

With the combination of a poor economy/job market and the recent will crushing heat, we all know that we need to better ourselves in a way that doesn't make us come into direct contact with the outside world, what with the whole bursting into flames the second your skin hits sunlight thing. So thoughts of course turn to degrees and education and improving your skill set. But what if you lack the rigorous and stellar academic record needed to gain entrance into prestigious Phoenix University? What if your personal tastes in the field of human sexuality has had the man "advise" you to take up other interests online or face a minimum prison term of 5-10 years? What if you are a gullible sort who likes wasting money? What then?

Then you have Glenn Beck to thank. Because he's opening Glenn Beck University... for you.

This July, while others are relaxing poolside, head back to the classroom - from the comfort of your own home. That may sound like an oxymoron but Glenn’s new academic program is only available online.

Offered exclusively to Insider Extreme subscribers, Beck University is a unique academic experience bringing together experts in the fields of religion, American history and economics. Through captivating lectures and interactive online discussions, these experts will explore the concepts of Faith, Hope and Charity and show you how they influence America’s past, her present and most importantly her future.

So don’t miss out on this amazing experience. Enroll in Beck University today

For a mere $10 bucks a month ($75 a year, which is a savings of $45 dollars over the monthly rate) you can learn about American history and American Future combines with heaping doses of the Bible, by a man who seemingly understands none of these concepts. But at least he'll finally have a legitimate excuse for that chalkboard. Oh, and his "Advance Crying Techniques" class will really be a study with the master, as will his "Recognizing the Investment Value of Gold, sponsored by Goldline" class. So join now, otherwise you'll miss out on "Faith 101," "Hope 101," and "Charity 101", which are literally the titles of the classes.

I mean this totally sounds like a legitimate thing and not yet another effort for Glenn to bilk his supporters with some sub-Nigerian e-mail scheme "education" malarkey. He has a crest and everything! It has George Washington on it and a buffalo and some Latin. "Tyrannis Seditio, Obsequium Deo," -> "Revolution against tyrants, submission to God." I bet that totally isn't also the pseudo-intellectual Latin motto of at least 30 or more rural militias.

Anything else I should know?

Beck University will be online-only and courses are not for credit.

I'm sure this has NOTHING to do with the fact that no accredited institution of higher learning would even think about recognizing the curriculum. BAH! I know where I want my masters degree in Faith 101 to come from and I ain't gonna let no gubmint tell me if it's valid or not! Higher education is a liberal plot lorded over by snooty progressive professors in ivory towers!

So if you've got a couple spare bucks and need a good laugh, you could do worse than Glen Beck University. Plus, it's got to be most people's safety school in case they don't get into the Glenn Beck Institute of Technology. It's much more reputable than Beck State is at any event. Everyone knows that's just a party school.

Video of the day

We take a break from our daily ritual of cataloging all that is cheap and stupid to pause and listen to a smart and erudite comedian opine on things. Stephen Fry is interviewed by Peter Samuelson in something called What I Wish I'd Known When I Was 18.

Things you need to know

• Whether or not Smithers picked Mr. Burns the most statistically dominant team of the era to play softball for the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant team. Perhaps he should have added Mordecai Three Finger Brown and scoured the Negro leagues a little harder, because that Steve Sax pick looks unforgivable even taking into account he was responsible for all the unsolved murders in New York.


• DJ Shadow has an internet radio station.


• Any street with the world Grape in it was probably a notorious road for prostitution and had it's name previously changed from the more advertising savvy and branding accurate Gropecunt Lane. Yes, the Middle Ages did entail a better class of street names.


• Birds are poisonous now. Possibly all birds, but definitely the Variable Pitohui, which secretes a poison similar to the Poison Dart Frog. And you thought the only danger from birds was them all going crazy and attacking Tippi Hedren. No, they can surreptitiously poison you now. DON'T TRUST BIRDS.


• The Director of Media Technology for the Penguins, Chris DeVivio, has a blog. As if I needed to tell you more than that, I will. It's called Backteching and goes into the process of the building of the new Consol Energy Arena and the kinds of technology and technological decisions that goes into building a modern sports complex.


• This is the kind of thing that would get your movie banned and you branded a purveyor of filth and lewdness in the 20's. Warning: there are female ankles... on full display.

Eat it, Jefferson. Eat it hard.

Last week we congratulated Texas for sending Don McElroy, the man who was spearheading Texas' efforts to use school textbooks as a means to rewrite history with a right wing christian conservative bent, packing in a primary contest. But we added in the caveat that the man still had several months left on his term and the board still had a christian conservative bent, so there was still time for them to do some damage. And boy did they ever decide to use the time they had left.

Among the changes made include:

removing a reference to “sex and gender as social constructs” in order to avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else”, refused to require that students learn the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others, added references to "laws of nature and nature's God" in sections about major political ideas, made the second amendment the only relevant idea in the Bill of Rights, considered it important to learn about "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association", students now learn about the "violent philosophy of the Black Panthers" to counterbalance the nonviolence platform of MLK, tries to excuse the inherent racism of Japanese internment, added apologetics for McCarthyism and the McCarthy hearings because I guess that whole period wasn't all bad, made it so that Hispanics don't exist inside of US history, added ominous references to the "unintended consequences" of of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX, removed the word "capitalism" because it has a "negative connotation", and knocked Thomas Jefferson out of the required curriculum and the Enlightenment... mostly because he coined the phrase “separation between church and state”. It also didn't help that he was a paleontologist.

So America is a Christian nation whose founders gave no thought to anything other than Biblical law ruling the land, whites did everything, McCarthyism and internment weren't so bad, and Thomas Jefferson isn't important to US history but Phyllis Schlafly is. Let's let Donny boy explain himself.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Yes, reality does have a well known liberal bias. What's one of the non-crazy board members think?

Mary Helen Berlanga, [stormed] out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

Yes they can.

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

Yeah, but if you rewrite history, then it becomes history! See how it works? Ah well, who needed to learn about Thomas Jefferson anyway? If he was important he would have had a bigger role in HBO's John Adams mini-series.

A round of applause for Texas' contributions to education, culture, and knowledge. It's not enough that our culture, media, entertainment, government, politicians, and news work to dumb this country down, now we have to go into books in an attempt to more proactively dumb our kids down. I'm sure it's all for the best, who learns anything from history anyway?

I'm not sure I like the sound of this

When you've just committed to a policy to escalate the manpower, diplomatic force, aid, and money to Afghanistan in a last ditch effort to salvage something out of an eight year neglected clusterfuck, what's the one thing you don't wan to hear about the intel capabilities of US agencies that are supposed to provide an understanding and framework to help you execute the diplomatic and counter-insurgent plans that the whole effort hinges upon? Is it this?

Flynn’s report — which was prepared for public release by the Center for a New American Security – begins with a stunning admission. “Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” the report states. “Having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade.”

I should mention that's the nice paragraph in the article, it actually gets a bit more scathing after that. But what would this Flynn character know anyway? I mean he's only the top intelligence aide to International Security Assistance Force Commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal and a Major General in the US army.

Ah well, I'm sure we'll be able to win their hearts and minds even if we don't know what those hearts and minds want or even where on the Afghan body the heart or mind is located. What's understanding a populace got to do with getting them to do what we want forever? I'm sure this will all work out splendidly.

For your edification

IF we are about one thing here at These Bastards, it is education. We're also about laughing at the misery of others, lamenting the state of affairs, wishing ill to our social/financial/elected betters, and dick jokes, but we're mostly about education.

Take the tea party movement. For months we've been laboring under the assumption that they were a fringe offshoot of right wingers, as well as being too crazy for words. We were wrong. Rasmussen polling told us so.

Running under the Tea Party brand may be better in congressional races than being a Republican.

In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.

That's right, the people in the “Project 912 Glenn Beck Tea Party” video below, which includes immortal discussion on “infiltration by the Communist Party” in government and the rallying cry “Burn the books!...The ones in college, those, those brainwashing books.... Like, the evolution crap”, are more popular than the Republican Party.



So we're sorry teabaggers and teapartiers, you aren't a fringe offshoot of the GOP, the GOP is a fringe offshoot of you.

It' a shame though, Sean and I are going to go broke helping support you and groups like you. Ah well, that's the price of purposes of unending amusement & disdainful blog fodder

Stay classy, Feds

Quick question: how do you stop the fucking peasants who deign to catch a glimpse of the unelected betters who cart dump trucks full of money to our financial betters on Wall Street? By changing them exorbitant sums of money for their pissant Freedom Of Information Act requests.

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

The Treasury Department, Wood said, is “downright telling us where we can stick it.”
...
Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill (.pdf).

How else is the Treasury going to recoup all that money it handed out to banks? By asking them to pay it back? You're fucking out of your mind.

Sadly this man wasn't trying to get information about the bank bailouts. No, that would have been almost too perfect. No, the man in question was simply trying to get info about some sort of deal with the Libyans and unpaid monies. I think it involved plutonium and a fake bomb made out of pinball machine parts. But hey, you gotta appreciate any attempt the Treasury Department takes to make itself even more lovable than it already is. Half a mil for making copies. Time Geithner can't keep the lights on charging 3 cents a page like Kinko's. Stay classy, Treasury Department.

And for God's sake if Matt Taibbi ever makes an FOIA request to you, please try to charge him half a million. The world needs another one of his articles on the financial industry and needs it to be completely filled to brim with utter disdain and bile.

Chart of the day

Via Ezra Klein at the Washington Post comes something Klein learned from a talk with Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson. In it he received a bunch of charts from the International Federation of Health Plans that actually compared health care prices between countries. The long and short of it? We pay more because we choose to pay more on every unit of health care there is. If were to pay Canadian prices, we'd cut health care costs by 50%. If we were to pay Medicare prices (you'll note those are represented by the 'USA low-end' part of the charts) we'd drastically cut costs.

The end result? Well, basically we just had a health care debate and health care bill that failed to seriously address price differentials and cost controls. In other words, more specifically in the words of George Halvorson, "A health-care debate in this country that isn't aware of the price differential is not an informed debate." But you already knew we didn't have an informed debate, didn't you?

We'll get back to you on that

Harry Reid, in an baffling display of balls and a peculiar interest in Democratic priorities, took it upon himself to ask the Obama Administration when they'd like to get a start on that whole 'no gays in the military' thing that we like to use to make sure we have no Arabic translators. National Security Adviser Jim Jones (BALLIN'!) decided that hemming and hawing was the best way to answer the question.

JONES: The President has an awful lot on his desk. I know this is an issue that he intends to take on at the appropriate time.
...
KING: No idea when the right time is?

JONES: Um, I don’t think it’s going to be — it’s not years, but I think it will be teed up appropriately.

Missing from the transcript is the part where Jim Jones (Na Na NaNa Na Na!) nervously tugs at his collar, then throws a bunch of papers into the air and runs out of the studio yelling about how "something important came up." I forget, is it a positive sign when instead of saying something will happen on gay rights issues, someone starts talking about the "right time"? Especially when everyone knows the "right time" to take on any type of gay rights issue in Washington is never? Very courageous, especially since it came on the heels of a Pentagon report saying that repealing DADA would have no effect on the morale of effectiveness of troops. But how would Jones have known that? I mean it's not like the National Security Adviser deals with the Pentagon or that he ever dealt with the Pentagon in his previous job as a 4 star Marine General.

Still though, getting outflanked by Harry Reid...is there no lower place to sink?

Cheap Blogging Crutch 09.29

Revolving Door Spins Ex-Hill Aides Into Lobbyists
I know this is something you probably didn't need to be told, but it seems that out of the 2,737 vultures swarming Washington on behalf of the health care and pharmaceutical industries trying to convince our unelected betters to forgo the pleasantries of lube when they screw us, 52% or 1,418 are former government employees/elected representatives. Duh! Do you really think a Senator wants to take corporate contributions and marching orders from a stranger?

Keeping Iran honest
One of those smug assholes who had the politically debilitating misfortune of being right about Iraq, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, has decided to stick his big nose and his "I know things about the Middle East and weapons" attitude into this whole Iran mess. Apparently this ass thinks that by calmly stating what is going on, explicitly explaining the international laws involved, and cogently using his knowledge of weapons systems and manufacturing capacity to tamp down fears of Iranian nukes, that he can somehow enlighten people and clam them down over what is happening. Hopefully we'll ignore this jerk-off before his dirty facts taint our precious "start a war or start a nuclear war" debate.

Four-Winged Fossil Bridges Bird-Dinosaur Gap
Listen, I know I caused a controversy yesterday when I, perhaps too hastily as it turns out, suggested that Jurassic Park was not as accurate a documentary as we all thought. It turns out I was wrong. It seems that, as Dr. Alan Grant postulated, that the thunder lizards just up and became birds. And now there's a fossil record. Of a transitional evolutionary species. That sound you heard was Kirk Cameron shrieking as Darwin planted a size 11 Timberland right in his groin. That's the scientific theories of Darwin/Jurassic Park - 1, the scientific theories of Growing Pains - 0.

Girl Talk, Working Memory and Creativity
One man takes a recent GQ profile of Pittsburgh musician and mash-up artist Greg "Girl Talk" Gillis and takes it as a jumping off point for how memory works in relation to music and specifically mash-up music. It turns out there's a little more to it than "Wu-Tang and Boston were always meant to be together."

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on
That's right, the Oxford English Dictionary re-opened its killing fields for another year and this time no hyphen was spared. Ice-cream is now icecream. Test-tube is now test tube. And both Sean and I are nervously awaiting the rulings on fuck-face and jerk-off for a piece on Glenn Beck. Who's to blame? The interwebs and all it's various assorted hyphen hating tubes combined with a populace that is just to damned lazy to use them. Don't worry about all those hyphens...*sniff*...they're with Jesus now.

Coda

GQ put up more excerpts of Matt Latimer's book on the last days of the Bush Administration. Instead of merely being childish insults and tone deaf observations about his political enemies, this chunk takes a look at the performance of the Boy Wonder during the financial crisis and bailout phase of our economic meltdown. The picture it paints.....it...ugh...it really isn't pretty. It reads like the caricature of Bush we all had in our heads and liked to joke about. Trust me, read the whole thing to get the full horror, but otherwise these excerpts below really put that exclamation point on the failure pile in a sadness bowl that was the Bush Administration. It's a fitting coda.

“We can’t even defend our own proposal?” the president asked. “Why did we propose it, then?”
...
“Then why the hell did I support it if I didn’t believe it would pass?” he snapped.
...
Under his proposal, [Bush] said, the federal government would buy troubled mortgages on the cheap and then resell them at a higher price when the market for them stabilized.

“We’re buying low and selling high,” he kept saying.

The problem was that his proposal didn’t work like that. One of the president’s staff members anxiously pulled a few of us aside. “The president is misunderstanding this proposal,” he warned. “He has the wrong idea in his head.”
...
When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.

I feel like that singing and dancing Warner Brothers frog should jump out from behind the article, wearing a top hat and tails, and singing "And he was the President for eight yeaaaaarrrrrsssss!" before launching back into "Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey" as a curtain drops. Wonderful questions, George. I get the feeling that you were asking ones like that quite a bit during those two terms. It shows, it really shows.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 09.09

Follow the money: the world's sharpest fraudbusters
Wired UK gives us the story of the world's elite team of financial fraudbusters: The Super Best Money Friends. Follow them as they investigate, expose, and prosecute thieving jackals from the finance and banking industry. It's a very interesting look at not only how people are duped by these schemes, but how they are uncovered, and how they are handled once discovered. With a little luck and a little higher profile, this group of men might be the very group of people we ignore about fraud and bubbles before we begin our next financial sector induced freefall off a cliff.

Dick Cheney 'put airline bomb plot case in jeopardy'
How much does Dick Cheney love illegally imprisoning terrorist suspects and flaunting the law? Well according to the Times, so much so that he'll willingly jeopardize actual legal efforts to imprison those same terrorist suspects in such a reckless manner as to almost let them go free while ensuring that their collaborators do go free or are never even discovered. God, it's such a shame we don't have his leadership on the war on terror anymore. Thanks, Dick.

Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth
Look, look, I know, I know, I'm sorry. Yes this is a link to a Brookings Institute study on how to effectively reduce health care costs. It's full of numbers and figures and probably has a chart or two to go along with it's complete absence of curse words or dick jokes. But, if you are interested in a litany of smart things that aren't being considered in the health care debate, this is a great place to start working up some edumacated libary book smartifying anger.

Sick and Wrong
Finally. Rolling Stone has now put up Matt Taibbi's extensive look at the legislative and political effort to fuck you hard on health care. Now you can move from just vaguely knowing the shapeless mass that is trying, and succeeding, to stick it to you, to seeing the true form of the beast and what specific horrible curses and incantations they are hurling at you. Surprisingly it only took five steps to completely screw things up.

The mainstreaming of crazy
Phil Plait of Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog, himself no stranger to fighting bad science and lies about everything from climate change to moon landings, finally cracks and unleashes hell on the poisoned state of debate, intellectualism, and intelligence in this country. What finally caused him to crack? The GOP outrage over Obama telling schoolkids to study hard and stay in school. Yeah, that was crazy, but I'd only rate it about a 4 out of 10 on the Beck Scale.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 08.20

Obama Calls Health Plan a ‘Moral Obligation’
Obama getting all biblical up in this bitch. He called those lying about his plan as "bearing false witness" as he made his pitch to religious leaders. But while he did stress that it was a moral obligation, he did say that how moral it was was up for debate and he was willing to negotiate on just how much of an obligation it should be. He then asked the leaders to pray with him, so that the Lord might smite his enemies. I hope it works out for him.

10 Reasons to Support Reform
I'm sorry to break up the little Harvest Festival of dick jokes and bitching we have going on here, but here's an actual link to actual information from Families USA. It explains what we need to get from reform, why certain changes are needed, and tells us what's being proposed to address those concerns. Sorry to do that to you, now back to killer robots!

Real-Life Decepticons: Robots Learn to Cheat
Scientists, for some God awful reason, decided to give robots functioning animal like brains. What is the first things these newly brained robots learned to do? Cheat and deceive over food. As if we needed one more reason to fear robots, we learn that even the simplest of their kind quickly evolve into a dishonest whirring of deceptive cogs and treacherous motors. At least know that when a robot is feasting on your flesh for its power, it will at least attempt to lie to surrounding robots about your deliciousness, saving you from a multiple robot gore orgy. This is all you have to look forward to in the future.

Comet Contains One of Life’s Precursors
Science has officially found that comets can contain the building blocks of life and thus can seed life onto planets during a collision. So for those of you counting at home, that now make a fourth plausible "how life began" story to join with "God did it", "evolution did it", and "Gil Gerard did it by using a time machine to travel back to the dawn of man to ejaculate into the primordial ooze".

Behind the Scenes at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History
Did you ever wish to view Vladimir Nabokov's collection of butterfly genitalia, but didn't have the time or connections to peruse through the Harvard Museum of Natural History's archives? Thankfully for you there's a book coming out on the subject and it has photos. Ostensibly it's a book about Harvard's role in the history of biology and filled with some of their most interesting specimens, but I dare you to come away thinking about anything other than "Vladimir Nabokov was kind of weird."

Fox News: Your source for geography

All these years and I thought we had went to war over in Iraq. Apparently we've been warring in Egypt this whole time and no one in the American media had the balls to step up and set the record straight until now. Who knew?

I'm just glad they bothered to use real country names. I half-expected the labels to say "Oil, brown people, brown people, evil brown people, really evil brown people, oil, bagel makers, pyramids, war place." This is a step in the right direction.

Dictionary refresher

For those conservative pundits, columnists, and lawmakers who can't seem to go five minutes without crying socialism, I thought I'd give you a quick refresher on the definition of the term using easily available information found on many of the knowledge tubes in the intarwubs and dusty parchment and scrolls found in many book libraries. You know, before you hear Obama or Pelosi had sausage and bacon with their breakfast and start declaring it yet another slide into ultra-gay France-ishness on the way to a full blown Fourth Reich.

so·cial·ism n.
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

So let's be clear here.

Things that are socialist: socialism, Alaska's state owned oil resources whose profits are redistributed among the citizenry, Venezuela, Britain's government run and controlled health care system.

Things that are not socialist: offering a public health insurance plan to compete with private insurers, everything that you heard some Democrat did, that pigeon out on your balcony, generally anything that you say is socialist.

So next time you decide to work up a nice crazy froth about how some innocuous bill is going to lead to the US hot-tubbing with Hugo Chavez and the ghost of Karl Marx, stop, breathe, read this, and then let your reptile political instincts override your sense of logic and honesty. I just want you to know you're talking absolute shit, instead of now where you guys are just willfully ignorant of basic political theory. Thanks. We know return you to your regularly scheduled dick joke making and childish mockery.

New GM: Kind of like the old GM

Well the New GM is off to a roaring start. They've announced their new plans and , more importantly, are running weird ads featuring prosthetic legged runners, random stock footage of hockey players lying injured on the ice, Joe Lewis, a butterfly, random footage from sporting events relative to Pennsylvanians, lists all the general ways in which their actions over the past decade were stupid, and uses a slogan that is basically "yeah, we fucked up horrifically, so give us a second chance already." Also: New GM's New CEO is admitting he's ill prepared to run GM. That's the classic GM we all remember, glad they remembered to keep that.

The 6-foot-4-inch Texan nicknamed “Big Ed” said steering the nation’s largest automaker after bankruptcy is “a public service.” People who know him say he can meet GM’s need for the type of transformation he orchestrated at Dallas-based AT&T.

“I don’t know anything about cars,” Whitacre, 67, said yesterday in an interview after his appointment. “A business is a business, and I think I can learn about cars. I’m not that old, and I think the business principles are the same.”

I'm no business expert, but from the looks of things it seemed like GM's problem was that no one wanted to buy their cars. A large part of that seemed to be because nobody liked the cars GM was making, because no one at GM seemed to know enough about cars to actually know what a normal human being would want. But then again the people supposedly running Gm and other American car companies were "auto experts", so really how much worse can a guy who knows nothing do? On second thought, how hard is it to tell everyone to "do what Toyota does".

So there is the new GM: weirdly terrible "my bad" ads and a CEO who admits he is completely clueless when it comes to the failing industry he has been tasked to completely revamp and overhaul. Doesn't it make you wish we had put more taxpayer money into GM?

Quote of the day

Republican House member Todd Akin of Missouruh starts his Science Lecture '09 series early with a warning against liberal plots to end seasons.

AKIN: This whole thing strikes me, if it weren’t so serious, as being a comedy, you know. I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s a good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change you know. Who in the world want to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways? What a dumb idea.

For the Coup de grace he laid out the crack science squad he's put together for the expressed purpose of stopping Nancy Pelosi from eradicating Autumn.

We’ve been joined by another doctor, a medical doctor but also a guy who graduated from high school science as well, from Georgia, my good friend, Congressman Gingrey. … So to have actually a guy who’s passed high school science is tremendously helpful.

A guy who passed high school science in Georgia. Take that scientists, what with your fancy doctorates and Bunsen burners. I bet you didn't even go to school in Georgia!

Torture History 101

You have to applaud the Bush Administration. They don't care about which torture techniques was prosecuted as a war crime by the US during WWII, what torture techniques were used against American pilots by the North Koreans during the Korean War, what techniques Pol Pot used while murdering and torturing his people in Cambodia, or what techniques got their start during the Spanish Inquisition, they just focused on what worked. Or in this case, what was proven to not work and in fact elicit false confessions. And by 'don't care' I mean 'was too ignorant to learn'.

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?
...
This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they wereapproving with little debate.
...
The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Ouch. So in addition to failing Basic Humanity 101, Modern Intelligence Gathering 201, and Advanced Legal Bullshittery, they didn't even pass Torture History 101. At least the high marks in Advance Bald Faced Lying and the Lack of Human Decency lab will bring up that GPA.

So let's see here: The Bush Administration picked a bunch of torture techniques that it liked the sound of, didn't even bother to do a rudimentary check on the history of usage and war crimes prosecution for these techniques, openly admitted the legal justification for these techniques almost assuredly wouldn't hold up in court, and used the torture techniques against detainees in pursuit of uncovering conspiracies they wished were happening. They aren't being prosecuted.....why?