Now I know what causes crop circles

James Randi, by this lady's logic.
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It's like he thinks that gay people have families or something

Ed Brayton reports that Oklahoma law preventing recognition of out-of-state adoptions by gay couples has been struck down:

A three judge panel for the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned an Oklahoma law that denied recognition to adoptions by gays performed outside the state of Oklahoma and they did so on the basis of the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the constitution.

Unfortunately, by the end of the post he goes off the deep end:

Anyone who would argue for such a law has given up all right to claim to be for "family values." This law would, for legal purposes, destroy families. Don't tell me you value families when you push a law that denies adopted children the only parents they've ever known and all the protections that come with that parental relationship. If that is your position, you don't give a damn about children; the only thing you care about is your twisted, bronze age moral code and your ability to inflict it on others.

That poor, deluded honky. Everyone knows that "family" is defined as "one man and one woman, joined in wedlock, raising their own biological offspring."
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If we bomb them enough, they'll lose any ill-will towards us

Wow, I missed this one: Tom Tancredo recently reiterated his calls to nuke Mecca and/or Medina.

Last week, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) reiterated his call for bombing Muslim holy sites as a "deterrent" against terrorist strikes on the U.S. homeland. "If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," he said in Iowa.

"This shows that we mean business," said Bay Buchanan, a senior Tancredo adviser. "There's no more effective deterrent than that."

...

For his part, Tancredo is refusing to back down. At last weekend's debate, he responded, "Boy, when [the State Department] starts complaining about things I say, 'I feel a lot better about the things I say,' I'll tell you right now."

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Dammit, we tossed out the Republicans in '06 for a reason, guys!

The Senate passed a bill expanding the President's powers to spy on anyone, tacitly giving approval to the idea that the President can do anything he fucking wants and the hell with any checks, balances, or oversight.

But not to worry! "Harry Reid emphasized that yesterday's measure is temporary, and that the Senate will revisit the issue in six months."

At which point they'll cave in, yet again:

Democrats "have a Pavlovian reaction: Whenever the president says the word 'terrorism,' they roll over and play dead," said Caroline Fredrickson, Washington legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: "It's twoo, it's twoo!" Edition

In chapter xxiii. of that Prophet [Ezekiel], 8, 20, 21, 27, it is stated that all the lewd abominations practised by the Jews, in his time, which was about 600 years B.C., were brought from Egypt and learned of the Egyptians, whose flesh says Ezekiel (v. 20,) was as the flesh of asses, and their issue as the issue of horses; so gross, fierce, and brutal were they, in their love of disorderly practices. But what do the Scriptures mean in the above phraseology, respecting the Egyptians, namely, that their flesh was as the flesh of asses? Simply as follows: that between the sexual members of the negro man and the brute called an ass, there was but little difference as to elongation and magnitude.

--Josiah Priest, Slavery as it Relates to the Negro, or African Race, p. 151
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I thought this post would be longer

Legal experts say that gay marriage won't necessarily lead to legalized polygamy. Of course, these are Canadian legal experts, so who knows how they think?

Still, it's true that gay marriage shouldn't lead to polygamous marriages. A lot of people like to claim so--as if that were a valid argument. "Recognizing something I don't like might lead to recognition of other things I don't like" is absurd on its face. It is a seductive sort of argument: if it's wrong to deny this kind of marriage, then it's wrong to deny this kind of marriage.

However, there's an important difference between the two. Gays are being denied the right to marry at all (despite all hollers of "they have the same right to marry someone of the opposite sex as the rest of us"). This is obviously not true of polygamists--you can't claim that you're being denied the right to marry if the obstacle is that you're already married.
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I think there's a wee difference between our cultures

In America, we have the government create and release a free computer game about the army. In Soviet Russia, computers make a game out of the army.

No, wait.

In China, they create a game about torturing and executing corrupt government officials:

An online game in which players can torture and kill corrupt officials that Chinese authorities set up to teach people about the perils of graft is a roaring success, state media said today.

"Incorruptible Fighter", developed by the government of east China's Zhejiang province, was launched just over a week ago and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, the Southern Metropolitan Daily reported.

...

The game, which lets players get ahead by killing officials by means of "weapons, magic or torture," is based on well-known incidents taken from Chinese history.

But the parallels in modern China of people struggling against seemingly insurmountable corruption are clear.

To advance to a new level, the player must enter an "Anti-Corruption College" to be lectured in more detail about ancient cases, the Southeast Business newspaper said.

The game is so popular that the server it was on crashed.
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"Who wants their teeth done by the Marquis de Sade?"

North Carolina recently (a couple of weeks ago) honored as "Doctor of the Day" a homophobic crank by the name of Bob Crummie (no "Crummie" puns, please). How much of a crank is he? Well, during his day at the legislature he was handing out free copies of his book, which includes such sections as the following:

"There is no such thing as a homosexual. The Gay Movement is a hoax," Crummie writes. "Individuals who act out homosexually are at best very neurotic and at worst psychotic. Most of them are character disorders."

In what he describes as "one of my funniest stories," Crummie tells how he once put a stop to homosexuality at an N.C. prison when, as superintendent, he threatened to give electric shock therapy to anyone caught in the act. With several inmates present, he demonstrated the procedure on one inmate who was severely depressed, he writes.

So he threatens to electrocute people, and thinks this is funny.

Not the kind of person I want for my doctor.
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As long as I'm commenting on Republican candidates....

I've heard some good chatter about Ron Paul now and then, but I don't recall anything specific.

But looking at some of his ideas... I am a little less enthusiastic about his running.
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"They hate gays and women, we hate gays and women...."

First, there's obviously a Republican presidential candidate proclaiming universal health care for the rest of the world (paid for by Americans) but not for Americans themselves. But that's not entirely new. So Romney had to take it up a notch by adding "what America really needs to do is emulate Hezbollah!"

But why not? Conservative pundits have been exclaiming that they're in agreement with the terrorists for a while now.
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