To take a brief break from pessimistic and cynical talk of Bush and his speech, I'm going to relay a term I learned today: undocumented immigrants. Apparently the term "illegal alien" was too harsh because of the "alien" part, and now we're scrapping the "illegal" half as well for "undocumented". As per a year old MSNBC article: The nation’s undocumented immigrant population surged to 10.3 million last year, spurred largely since 2000 by the arrivals of unauthorized Mexicans in the United States, according to a report released Monday. The population of undocumented residents in the United States increased by about 23 percent from 8.4 million in the four-year period ending last March, according to the analysis of government data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a private research group. Notice the neat twist on that: undocumented resident. It sounds so innocent, doesn't it? They live here, they just don't quite have the paperwork yet. Other than that they're normal US residents! Don't get me wrong, I'm big on being careful with terminology and I'm not a fan of abusive or inaccurate labels, I wasn't a huge fan of "alien" because it made it sound like they were a separate species from everyone else. But the thing is, this is for inaccurate labels. If you come into this country without doing it legally? That's illegal. Simple as that. They're illegal immigrants. Yes they're undocumented, but that makes it sound like they forgot to drop by the office and fill out some paperwork. Political Correctness is running rampant. Now we're out there protecting people who shouldn't even be here.

I'm not sure which was the dumber statement: 1) That Lincoln "could have allowed slavery in order to keep the peace". 2) Saying that if we'd been allowed to spy on the people whose calls we intercepted prior to 9/11 we could have prevented it. Which is worse, a president that has never taken a basic history class, or a president who has no idea how to reach a logical conclusion based on facts? I also wonder if anyone's going to pick up on the fact that he's been talking about less reliance on foreign oil for five years running now.

Everyone get your TiVos and DVDRs set for the State of the Union address, folks. I'd consider making a drinking game for it, but there are so many targets that unless I made it one drink per 4 or 5 instances of whatever word or phrase no one would make it to the end. In the meanwhile, I'm going to keep a tally of the following words and phrases (variants included with each): - Osama bin Laden - Terror - 9/11 - God - Evildoers - Sanctity of marriage Also going to be on the lookout for the following phenomena: - Jokes that he chortles to himself after - Extremely lame pandering for applause - Mentioning something he's mentioned yearly (such as less dependence on foreign oil) - Straw man arguments against democrats - Acting as though the country is unified behind him - Telling us now is not a time for partisan politics - Talking tough on the terror he has yet to do anything about Oh there's a million more, but that's all I can think of beforehand. Can't wait! UPDATE: Someone apparently made a drinking game for us all. Go for it, fellas!

And there it is, the final count is 58 yes, 42 no. Well America, there you have it. Samuel Alito is sitting on the bench and will watch the SOTU from his new position. I don't really have anything to say about it, there's not much to be said that I didn't talk about last night, so I'll just worry more about the aforementioned address tonight at 9. Though talk about a squeaker. Needs 51 yes votes and gets 58. Huh, Chris Matthews predicted it just like that. Good work, Tweety.

Finally got a site overhaul. No more high school looking design and we've got an actual banner now. Also got rid of that stupid "Pandora of Political Ponderings" name. Not sure why I thought that sounded any good. Not the first overhaul, not the last, hopefully in the next few months it'll start looking professional.

Well, as many of you probably know by now, the filibuster of Alito got shot down tonight. I sit here with a pint of Guinness to think things over, as good of a brain juice as any far as I'm concerned, and to be perfectly honest I don't consider it a loss. Yes, I entirely disagree with the concept of an Alito on the bench. I believe the future rammifications will be quite frightening, from the loss of civil rights (women particularly I fear) to the idea that Alito will be on the bench when Bush is eventually investigated for his scandals (secret to getting off for breaking the law? Make sure you hired the judge). On that same token, that's fine. The way I see it, there were basically three issues facing us in this country when it comes to Bush: Alito, Abramoff, and the NSA. I would rank them in that order from least to most important, personally. I know Alito has more potential for problems 10 years down the road than Bush dealing with Abramoff, but no matter what the concept of Bush spying on the US without a warrant is something that needs stopped more than anything. My point of "ranking" the issues, aside from rationalizing that our "loss" was the "least important" one, is that Democrats came pretty far in the past week. We went from a few disjointed complaints to the potential for a filibuster. No, it didn't happen, but solidarity is building, and I think the hesitance toward such filibuster was not its importance but its futility. Thanks to numbers and the time frame, I believe a lot of dems thought that trying to mount such a movement. But what this tells me is that all is not lost. It tells me that the left is starting to see the big picture, that they can't just sit around and complain about things without doing anything. Hopefully when Abramoff comes around as a full-blown issue, more Dems will rally together, and when Bush is on the grill for the NSA it'll be all out. I think things are going to be difficult as hell for the remainder of Bush's term. Maybe we should just shoot them all in the head. ...sorry if that sounded like it was in bad taste, Anne Coulter told me it'd be a funny joke.

Been a few days, I've been busy with life. Regardless, here's a list of things I've had thrown at me as genuine rebuttals to what I say by republicans. Well maybe, but [liberal] did it! This one really drives me nuts. It puts the world in the perspective of My Team vs Their Team and we're all going on a point system. If one guy with a blue hat does something illegal, if someone with a red hat did the same thing then the score is 1-1 and now no one can complain. First off, that assumes that if I call myself a "liberal" (which I really don't, I'm mostly just anti-conservative so I land as "liberal" by default to most), then I therefore must support everyone who calls themselves liberal. To be honest, I believe Clinton lied, I believe he did some stupid shit, I believe Kerry's campaign was a failure because of his lack of firm stances on issues. I believe Dean needed to calm down during his campaign, I think Hillary needs to shut her mouth. Harry Belefonte isn't doing anyone any favors by sounding like a lunatic and Michael Moore is very effective at forcing a fresh viewpoint to others but he can be Ann Coulter-like in that it's more about browbeating than debating. Look, I don't care if a liberal fucked up. No party is perfect, I don't think Democrats have their hands clean of dirty money (for example). The point is that THIS is the issue, and if you think someone can't be held accountable because other guilty people exist, then no one will be held accountable and everyone will become a guilty person at some point. I don't have any stock in democrat politicians, and if it turns out they're guilty, then fry 'em as well. My problem with republicans trying to drag dems down with them and Abramoff isn't my resistance to the idea that they may be guilty of something, but that it's a dirty tactic to pull people down with you simply in order to change public opinion. It's like a murderer complaining that someone in the jury got in a fight so they have no right to convict him. Well of course [whoever] would say that! This one crops up whenever anyone but Faux News or a White House mouthpiece says something. I agree that there are people who will take an anti-republican stance no matter what, but not everyone who comes to an anti-republican conclusion starts off there. People seem to think that the only people who believe that Bush has incriminating evidence with Abramoff or the NSA is illegal is a bunch of Bush-hating liberals (or "lie-brals" because they're so clever). And any proof offered from a source without a White House stamp on it is thus worthless. It doesn't matter if it's right, it just matters where it came from, apparently. There's also an interesting side-spin on this in the form of "that's just spinning the numbers!" It happens when clearly irrefutable numbers are cropped up from unbiased sources and given out by the "liberal media". In this case, it's not that the facts are wrong, it's that the evil liberals are making the numbers look a lot worse than they are. This is a dead-end with arguments, it's best to walk away. If it was illegal, why isn't it all over the news? This is one of those statements so patently stupid it's hard to properly assess and work with. Generally it comes from someone who sticks to one news source that they watch now and again when there's nothing interesting on SpikeTV and ESPN2. The kind of people who change the channel if their favorite show is interrupted by a presidential news conference. Somehow they expect every major issue to leap out of their televisions and radios whenever they happen and infiltrate their brains while they still get to enjoy MXC. The alternate version is when this comes from a hardcore righty who avoids any news that isn't coming out of Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh's mouth. It also usually comes accompanied with chatter of the "liberal media" and a claim that this phenomenon would leap all over Bush and the republicans "if it were true". Keep in mind this is bizarre logic. They claim that it's not out there because the liberal media would have covered it, and the proof of the media being liberal is usually something asinine such as using an entirely pointless story that Fox News jumped on (case in point: O'Reilly's "War on Christmas"). The fact that democratic speeches denouncing the president are swept under the rug while Bush's "strong statements" are paraded on all stations is entirely lost. If it was illegal, they'd have been arrested by now! See above. When confronted with this, I was actually dumbstruck for a few moments. Somehow people think that Bush is powerless to stonewall information and has no sway over the people in power to do the investigating. As though he were some observer during the whole thing who can't stave off anyone who wants evidence. Also amusing because it also assumes that every illegal thing that any official has ever done is immediately uncovered. The person in question who threw this at me later commented about Clinton having people killed. I wonder, if it was really illegal, why didn't he ever get in trouble with it? Bush said it's legal what he did, so I believe him! Scott Peterson said the same thing, as have nearly every convicted felon. Moving along. You want Bush to release that information because you WANT to find some dirt on him! This is another case of "change the direction of the debate so I can sound like I'm winning". It also assumes that I, like the person I'm talking to, starts off with an opinion and only accepts finding out that I was right. I dislike Bush, I dislike him a lot, however I'm not too big on crucifying him for something he's not guilty for. Aside from sending the wrong message ("you can get away with crimes, but watch out for something you didn't do"), it also sets a piss-poor precedent of someone who someone simply dislikes being found guilty and punished without any evidence confirmed of a crime. The simplest refutation is that if he's truly innocent, why wouldn't he release the information? That brings me to my next argument. It'll just be used to make him look bad! Not if it ain't true. And even that's a moot point because it assumes that Bush is the only one holding said information. Whether or not he wants it to, those pictures will emerge and Abramoff will spill the beans on every contact he had with the president. It's like when Clinton was confronted with the dress. The proof exists, and he's not in control of it. The question now turns into why he would hold out on information he can't stop from emerging in the future? When Abramoff himself finally throws everything out there he's going to have to deal with people swamping him with "why didn't you release these before?" Refusing to prove your innocence is often a sideways way of admitting guilt. There's just a few pictures! or That's only two republicans! The former argument is Abramoff, the latter is in response to a few republicans publically denouncing Bush's spying. It follows along with the "they'd have been arrested by now" argument in that the person for some reason things all information and all people out there right now are all that there will ever be. A big offender here is Scott McClellan and Bush himself. First Bush has never met Abramoff. Then there's some pictures, so what? He meets a lot of people. Then it turns out there are pictures from a meeting, not just a meet-and-greet. So what? He meets with a lot of lobbyists. It's constantly passing the buck along, rationalizing the current information by saying there isn't very much of it so there isn't any guilt. Then as more emerges, simply applying the same to that. The problem is, it won't work in the end, particularly when the supplier of said information is out of your grasp. That goes back to the prior piece. That's just a sampling of arguments I've gotten, some of my thoughts on them that fell on deaf ears. Oh there's a bunch more, and I plan on putting up a piece like this when new issues show up and I get more incredibly stupid arguments. I'm holding out on the religious variety for obvious reasons.

A question: if it's perfectly legal for Bush to get warrantless wiretaps, why have a system to get warrants for wiretaps at all? It's not as if as soon as the 'war on terror' started all requests to FISA stopped. If what Bush was doing were perfectly legal, you'd think he wouldn't bother to get any warrants whatsoever. However, as you can see, Bush was getting a high amount of wiretaps from the beginning of his presidency, and three years after 9/11, when his legal ability to circumvent FISA legislature supposedly started, he was still going for over 1700 warrants, over double that of any year outside of Clinton's last. So again, the question remains: why would Bush continue to send requests to FISA if it were perfectly legal to get wiretaps without a warrant?

Sometimes it's a little tricky to find things to write about with this administration. Namely, things don't seem to change. Bush's SOTU warmup was today, and in incredibly typical Bush fair he spent the bulk of it dodging any question he didn't like. Ask him about the pictures with Abramoff and he talks about how he takes lots of pictures so it doesn't mean anything. Ask him about meetings with Abramoff regardless of pictures and he talks about how he takes lots of pictures so it doesn't mean anything. So I'll move to something else. I really wish I knew where the liberal media was. I can't seem to find it. I just get Wolf Blitzer and Katie Couric trying to insist that Democrats were involved with the Abramoff scandal, repetition over and over of Rove and Gonzales saying Clinton did illegal searches, and Hillary's "plantation" quip on near loop. Then we find Matthews and Fucker, er... Tucker Carlson babbling over and over how Osama is taking notes from Democrats (because clearly a comprehensive list of Bush failures means democrats). As I sit here I get to listen to Matthews asking if the Filibuster idea of Alito is useless while Pat Buchanan laughs at any suggestion otherwise. In a recent episode of Scarborough Country, there was a story about liberal professors, with our friends the Bruin Alumni Association on one side (represented by Ben Shapiro, the author of Brainwashed) and Brian Wilson from the UCLA department of film and telivision offering the two sides of the issue. Near the end, the conversation quickly turned to an attack on the professor for his own beliefs. The show ended in this manner: SCARBOROUGH: That‘s not what we are talking about. We‘re talking about bias on college campuses. You say you don‘t know if there is bias on college campuses. I‘m asking you, if you had to place that bet, straight-faced test, as my law professor in torts once told me, would you bet for—put your moneyon John Kerry or George W. Bush? WALTER: The fact that there‘s a preponderance of Democrats does not mean that there‘s a political bias and a propagandization of students in the way that is described by Mr. Shapiro. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: Richard, let me help you, buddy. Let me help you, buddy. (LAUGHTER) SCARBOROUGH: Take all your chips and pile it up on Kerry, and you will make a lot of money. No matter how much Walter tried, Scarborough and this 21 year old self-important ass would stomp all over him. They refused to let him get the point across that, you know what, it's pretty easy for a lot of democrats to be the professors but that doesn't necessarily translate to a liberal bias IN THE CLASSROOM. In fact, immediately prefacing Scarborough's "question" about voting, Wilson had this to say: Most everybody that I know and that I know of at UCLA and in every college, and I know lots of people at lots of colleges, do what I try to do, which is to air all sides of the issues, to get students to speak for them—to think for themselves. Sometimes, I will embrace a point of view that I don‘t even agree with, simply to provoke students into thinking for themselves. That‘s our job. And that‘s what we do responsibly. But that means nothing to these guys. All that matters is who the professors vote for, not what they teach in the classroom. Damn liberal media!

No real article here, just something I was thinking about. Hayden and others in the NSA have said a downfall of the FISA is that it requires a phone number, some manner of identification of the party on the international end of the communications. He also has said, as have other NSA employees, that thanks to email and throwaway cell phones which do not require any kind of identification to purchase and use, it is nearly impossible to comply with FISA standards. So, I think the obvious question is this: If throwaway cell phones and such make it impossible to get any information about that person, how in the hell can we possibly claim to know it's a terrorist or an al Qaeda agent over there? Or perhaps I got it backwards, the problem is throwaway cell phones and handheld email devices on our soil. Then the question remains and we can bring in the 4th amendment. How in the hell can one possibly have "probable cause" when we can't even get a name for the phone user?

Dear Mr Bush, You have recently started collecting internet search results from Yahoo, MSN, and others, including thus far failed attempts at gathering said information from Google. Your NSA wiretapping and other eavesdropping has been at record high numbers. Conversely, your briefing about said surveillance was, as Senator Rockefeller described it in his handwritten letter to Mr Cheney, vague and hard to understand. He also mentioned that he was prohibited by you from discussing matters of that briefing with his colleagues. More recently, Scott McLellan has stonewalled any information related to your involvement with Jack Abramoff, releasing only minimal facts when forced to by what the media has already uncovered. Mr President, you are very driven to monitoring the activities of Americans. Why is it you are equally driven to hiding your activities from America? If law-abiding citizens should have nothing to hide, as you and others have said, why are you hiding? Anyone who will be anywhere that Pres Bush will be answering unscreened questions, please take this.

Warning: Zach you've just entered a "no spin zone" That's right, you heard me! it's time for you to put your money where your mouth is. It's time for you to take a bite out of Bill O'Reilly like Scruff McGruff does to unemployed black men. Zach are you ready to BLOVIATE with Bill? I hope you are because i have just signed you up to be one of 6, count em', 6 lucky SOB's to debate Bill O'Reilly Live on Fox News' numero uno show, "the O'reilly Factor." It's so exciting, it is like Mr. O'Reilly's very own little Willy Wonka adventure, and you are my sweet little agustus gloop. But, let's get down to business. It's time to put down the Ben and Jerry's ice cream and boycott the Jolly Green Mountain State, the evil Vermont. That's right, due to the 4th Reich of Vermonts refusal to punish Judge Ed Cashman. (who you may recall as the judge who was too soft in dealing with a suspected child molester, stating that the man needed treatment along with sentencing, and is now seen as enemy number 1 to all bible totting bleeding heart conservatives all around this country.) we all must now Boycott Vermont. they must be punished for their backing of this so called "man" who did not deal out a death sentence to this child molester. Ok, you caught me, i don't really care about any of these people. I dont care about the victim, i dont care about the judge. no, Im a realist, and i understand that all i want is whatever benifits me most. I can prove it. i like Michael Jackson's music, and i dont care how many times he has to squeeze Macauley Caulkins steamin hot 12 year old ass to make and produce it. no, i dont care at all, as long as i get to enjoy the musical stylings of Jacko. (come on a voice over by Vincent Price, classic) So about this judge. Im happy he did what he did. he stood firm and was not swayed by the people and groups who think they know better. i am sick and tired of all of these bible totting bleeding heart conservatives who use religion to justify their being 100% insane. Look at how many people use the Bible to justify what they are doing. have the pro-life abortion critics who kill planned parenthood doctors every seen in another light. you see they too use the bible to justify their actions. but by saying that, guess who's group they get placed into, Osama Bin Laden's terrorist cell, who uses the same biblical principals to justify killing. but we do not look at these pro-life extremist in the same way as we look at muslim extremist, why do you think that is? I'll tell you why. Because Jesus would have registered as a republican. That's right, if these people are correct, and know what Jesus' message really is then i say embrace it. we should not "turn the other cheek" as otherwise suggested, but instead take Jesus' choosen path for dealing with life's little problems...eye for an eye, a direct course of action. kill and punish everyone....for everything....Bush is on the right path. with his Macheavellian campaign of "the ends justify the means." whats the difference between doing the right thing, and doing the wrong thing? who cares! as long as the problem gets solved. so i say, kill chester the molester and any other dipshit that steps out of line, let your babies grow up to be cowboys, and let the government keep taps on all of us so we dont become "Dangerous" citizens. hey, it's what the bible tells us to do, right? Vote Bush 84'......opps, sorry George "Orwell" Bush, i meant to say 08' I dont think we have had a good old fashion inquistition in years. hell, lets celebrate with a picinic. i'll bring the hot dog, you bring the bun. that's all i've got for you this week. just remember, im not a business man. i'm a business, man. ...Oh baby, that was sexy. take note of the B-Boy stance and i'll see you later. keep the faith p.s. sorry if it seems like i was rambling. it's 2am on a weds morning and i havent seen the monitor clearly since 12:30

Though I'm not a giant fan of it, I watch the mainstream media. I keep switching between MSNBC and Fox/Faux News in the background while my primary focus is here on the internet front. Why? Partly to keep tabs on what they're missing, partly to see what slop they're throwing at America, and partly because now and again you get to see an appearance by someone official. So imagine my surprise tonight when MSNBC's Countdown showed to be rather ballsy via Keith Olbermann's outright response to something General Hayden's comment about the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. That's what it says. ... The amendment says "unreasonable search and seizure". ... No [it doesn't say "probable cause"], the amendment says "unreasonable search and seizure". ... Just to be very clear, okay? Believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the fourth, and it is a reasonable standard. Good stuff so far. He shuts down repeated accusations as to what the Fourth Amendment says and tells us what the letter of the law is. I myself believe in following what the law says and not what we think it "probably meant", so I respect that he's standing firm. Being that he's a General, he created the whole program, I'd say he should know what he's talking about, wouldn't you? Well, not quite. You see, as Olbermann himself noticed, the fourth amendment itself goes like this: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. It doesn't take deep knowledge of the law to see where Hayden is wrong. You don't have to have a degree and hours of research in order to unearth hidden sections of it to see where Hayden may or may not be right. The Fourth Amendment is that one single paragraph, and as you can see the man who created the program the President is using to eavesdrop on Americans doesn't know what it says. In fact, worse than that, he clings onto what he thinks it says and doesn't say. Something that basic would be asked on an elementary school history test. And yet there's General Hayden on national television exposing the fact that he has no idea what the law says. It's almost as if he heard about the 4th amendment while he was eating lunch one day and just memorized that one phrase, "unreasonable search and seizure" and that's all he got. Or possibly, he was lying and hoping no one would notice. I honestly cannot remember the last time anything a higher-up from the right said anything that couldn't be proven wrong with a 30 second Google search. Of course, one of the implications of the Busheviks (I love that term, thank you Crisis Papers) wanting to monitor Google Searches means they could entirely block from the results what they don't want you to see. So they can tell us complete lies and untruths, then block us from finding the reality.

As much as the right likes to complain about the liberal media, I've found it amazing that they never seem to call the right on the mounds of bullshit they fling around. If the media were that liberal, you'd think they'd be constantly criticizing the right, these scandals would be on all the time. But naw, we get missing girls and other stories. Meanwhile Clinton was plastered on every station 24/7, even kids too young to understand what was going on saw it all the time. ...but I'm on a tangent, my point here is that it truly does fascinate me how often the right gets out of things by dodging. Now, so far we've had Al Gore smacking down attempts by Attorney General Gonzales and other mouthpieces to point the finger back at Clinton and his own spying and searching. Howard Dean slapped down Blitzer and others who tried to claim that there were democrats taking money from Jack Abramoff. Most recently our good friend Karl Rove tried to redirect the debate again concerning the legality of spying: Mr. Rove's speech on Friday to the Republican National Committee was a classic example. "Let me be as clear as I can be: President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," Mr. Rove said. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree." I don't know what democrats Rove is talking about. John Kerry certainly isn't one of those Dems, as he said on This Week: You know, Osama bin Laden is going to die of kidney failure before he’s killed by Karl Rove and his crowd. And all he does is divide America over this issue and exploit it. And what he’s trying to pretend is somehow Democrats don’t want to eavesdrop appropriately to protect the country. That’s a lie. We’re prepared to eavesdrop wherever and whenever necessary in order to make America safer. But we put a procedure in place to protect the constitutional rights of Americans. And what I believe, George, and I believe it deeply, is you can protect the United States of America without devoiding, without ignoring the Constitution of the country. If there are any democrats out there that anyone can find who thinks we shouldn't be spying on terrorists, I'd like to meet them. Apparently they're everywhere and poor Karl needs to defend himself. The debate clearly isn't about the fact that there is an incredibly easy way to eavesdrop legally on those affiliated with terrorists, it has nothing to do with the fact that a warrant can be gotten 72 hours after the tap has been in place, no. Apparently these democrats have been all over the place saying we shouldn't protect the nation. The right has no qualms with derailing intelligent debate by offering an entirely unrelated counterpoint and then they cry about the mean liberals hating America. The really sad part is that they manage to force the debate in that direction because not enough people call them on it.

I think I'm officially convinced of this. Oh he's who people voted for, and he's the guy who sits at the desk that says "prezadent" (he made that himself), but I do not believe George W Bush is not actually doing anything when it comes to running the country. I first started to get inklings of this when Bush was out there talking about how he knows that our soldiers are getting the best armor and best equipment. Clearly he was off playing with his Legos or something when report after report came out telling otherwise. Recently he's cropped up telling the talking points of his underlings verbatim (today's flavor would be "terrorist surveillance program"). What really nailed it for me was his famous recent quote about spying: "It's amazing that people say to me, 'Well, he's just breaking the law.' If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?" asked Bush. It's a fair question, and one that will rally a lot of support for him. But the funny thing is, he didn't brief Congress. Well, he did technically, but Senator Rockefeller sent a handwritten letter back to our friend Dick Cheney saying the briefing didn't make sense, it was confusing, and asked why he was specifically prohibited from telling anyone in his staff about it. This part is particularly neat. "The record needs to be set clear that the Administration never afforded members briefed on the program an opportunity to either approve or disapprove the NSA program. The limited members who were told of the program were prohibited by the Administration from sharing any information about it with our colleagues, including other members of the Intelligence Committees." Of course, the memo wasn't sent to Bush himself, it was sent to Cheney, and I suppose if Bush knew what was going on he wouldn't be able to say what he did with any conviction, so ol' Dickie decided to just sweep that one under the rug (Rockefeller was never given a response to his letter). He just sits in Washington and the people around him tell him what to say, and he does it because he knows Uncle Dick and Uncle Karl wouldn't lie.

Really, I have nothing to add to this one. John Kerry on Kos. Here's what I'd like to see debated on Hardball. President Bush's mouthpiece Scott McClellan can claim this administration puts terrorists out of business, but yesterday's tape reminds us that instead of being out of business, Osama is still out there. If this administration had followed through on the opportunity to capture Osama Bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001, the world would be a better place with Osama Bin Laden brought to justice -- and we wouldn't be having this discussion today. And here's what the media should insist we discuss. President Bush and his defenders continue to claim that Osama Bin Laden didn't escape at Tora Bora. But Gary Bernstein's book Jawbreaker documents what I said early in 2002 and during my debates with George Bush: that because Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon didn't use American troops to do the job and instead outsourced the job of killing the world's #1 terrorist to Afghan warlords, this cold blooded killer got away.

Well, it looks like our good friend Osama has released a new tape for the world to freak out about. Amongst his comments (out of a 70 minute tape) is that there needs to be a "truce" settled, and that America's security is so bad that he could get us at any time. But, fortunately, the Bush Administration is there to let us know that everything is going to be juuuuust fine. "Clearly the al Qaeda leaders and other terrorists are on the run. They're under a lot of pressure," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "We do not negotiate with terrorists. We put them out of business." Well that's good to know. Maybe it's just me, but I find this situation to be incredibly convenient. Right smack in the middle of all of the scandals the Bush administration is running into, all of a sudden an enormous audio tape from Bin Laden just happens to show up, just to remind us all that there is terrorism out there in the world. I don't think it would be a surprise to anyone to find Bush on TV in the next day or two telling the world that we need to "stop worrying about bipartisan political attacks and unite to fight the war on terror". It couldn't have happened in early December before Abramoff, Alito, and the NSA blew up. It couldn't happen after. It happens now. So far we've been told that Osama is dead two or three times, and each time he manages to come back to tell us that he's still out there, he's still scary, and he still wants to sweep in and take your children in the middle of the night. But now he comes in the form of an incredibly long-winded audio tape. No more videos, apparently he lost his camera, so now we have a voice on a tape that CNN described as "muffled". Amazingly, America reacts the same way each time. Osama "returns" from death to scare us and Bush can come out and tell us all that we need to trust him and give him all of this power so he can protect us. Then he dies and people cheer, knowing that Bush has saved us. Then he comes back again and rather than questioning the president, they cling to him again asking for help. It wouldn't be difficult at all to suggest that these tapes could be fabricated just to keep us in fear at all times, just so Bush can comfort us and we can hand over some liberties. Of course, it's peculiar. We've got McClellan, who truly does deserve a punch in the face, telling America that we don't negotiate with terrorists, but the strangest thing is that we only take that approach when there is truly no threat. We'll talk tough Clint Eastwood against a weaponless and basically inert Iraq, or against a speaking "Osama", but when it comes to Iran, what's the president's opinion? Asked if he expected sanctions to be imposed on Iran, Mr Bush said he was "not going to prejudge what the United Nations Security Council should do What you're seeing is the evolution of a proactive diplomatic policy." Of course. We have to be careful when the threat is real. Talk tough against the ineffective enemy, shrink down against the one that can hit back. It's easy to tell if we should be worried or not. If Bush's cronies are telling us we're gonna git 'em, there's nothing to worry about. If we have to be careful, panic time.

Short one today. So it appears Google is battling with the Bush administration. The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases. The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches. So here we see the BA so concerned for the children that it wants to get all of Google's database records, what terms were searched for as well as who searched for them, in order to see how many children have gotten access to pornography. Granted, I don't have any inside connections, I'm not best friends with any Washington officials, but isn't the timing on this just a wee bit convenient? We've got these guys spying on everyone from suspected terrorists to peace protestors, most likely CNN's Amanpour who's as much of a terrorist as she is an ocean liner, and the author of an anti-Bush book being put on the "no fly list". The scandal blows up and people know they're being spied on, what do they do? Rip out a law from 1998 that was kicked down already to get every record from whenever they want from the biggest search engine in the world. Just like he cried about terrorism before, he's trying to plead to our "save the children" heartstrings to he can stomp all over our civil liberties again. This isn't about pornography. Adult web sites have an age agreement on their front page and Google has a mature content filter that is on by default. This is about more invasion of our lives. I, for one, am incredibly happy that Google is fighting this one. Next they'll be asking nationwide ISPs to provide records of everywhere their users have been so they can "check where households with minors have surfed". Anyone who believes this is really about pornography isn't reading. I don't normally like to think Bush supporters are truly stupid, just they have different priorities, but the people who will believe what he says at face value in cases like this (and make no mistake, there will be droves of "concerned parents" or the AFA) just make me wonder how they graduated high school.

I'll tell you, the most aggravating part of the past few weeks has been reading the news, watching the reports and noticing that the left seems to have absolutely no problem just lying there while the right stomps all over them. First the NSA issue was going for weeks without anyone saying a word outside of the blogs and a few obligatory mentions on the news stations, which prompted all of the usual mouthpieces to parrot the argument that Bush likes to make this into rather than what's actually happening (meaning it's an argument about whether or not spying on terrorists is good, not that he was breaking the law). Then we got to wade through the Alito hearing which just amounted to Biden wearing a Princeton cap and babbling for a half hour, followed by a few little jabs about his judgement that he evaded without too much trouble. It was pathetic and the only beacon was Tedward Kennedy arguing with Specter about the investigation into the CAP involvement. When the only moment of light is when a dem fights about something that really isn't of any relevance, that tells me we're in trouble. No questions about strip-searching 10 year olds, nothing about shooting teenagers in the head just for running from the cops, nothing. The Abramoff scandal seems to have fallen by the wayside in current news. Oh it's still mentioned on the blogs and the internet sources, but in the news people mention it more as something to point at AS a scandal. Trent Lott I saw on Hardball saying "we need to know that we can trust our officials", but that was it. The list of Abramoff recipients is a half mile long and it's all republicans. It's a clear-cut red issue (as Howard Dean happily noted to a dumbstruck Wolf Blitzer) and where was the call to arms from the left? Not there. Nothing. What did they do? They appoint James Clyburn head of the Clean House Team. Clyburn, you see, may have gone on a boat trip paid for by Abramoff. No proof anything illegal actually happened, or anything unethical, but that's shooting yourself in the foot horribly. Combine that with the impending war in Iran and I was waiting for Bush to use his "war powers" to turn the country into a "temporary" dictatorship a la Palpatine in Episode II. There was a glimmer of hope with the aforementioned Dean shutting down Wolf Blitzer on Late Edition, but obviously that just isn't enough. Dean is smart as hell, but he's easy for the right to rip out the screaming video and suddenly no one pays attention. Al Gore then dropped his bombshell of a speech calling Bush a lawbreaker and that he was doing so repetitively. Things were on their way up. Even Attorney General Gonzales's bullshit response couldn't slow the guy down, as Gore later said: "The Administration's response to my speech illustrates perfectly the need for a special counsel to review the legality of the NSA wiretapping program. The Attorney General is making a political defense of the President without even addressing the substantive legal questions that have so troubled millions of Americans in both political parties. There are two problems with the Attorney General's effort to focus attention on the past instead of the present Administration's behavior. First, as others have thoroughly documented, his charges are factually wrong. Both before and after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was amended in 1995, the Clinton/Gore Administration complied fully and completely with the terms of the law. I call that an owning, my friends. Even the Associate Press got 'em. But at the time of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed. Hillary Clinton going crazy aside, the best part of my day happened when watching Situation Room with the aforementioned Wolf Blitzer roughly five hours ago. Now, while I was a Kerry supporter roundabout 2004, I will readily admit he's not the greatest assistance to the democratic party. I think the accusations that he's a flip-flopper are weak, the guy is so moderated with his beliefs that he hardly has any room to flip-flop. So he was questioned about the potential for a war in Iran, the bombing in Pakistan, and his answers took a bare minimum five minutes a pop. He took the safest stances possible, no surprises ("Do you agree with the types of attacks that happened in Pakistan?" "Well, if all of our intelligence says so, and if it is verifiable by a bipartisan source, if the information is proven to be valid...") So then Wolf asks him "Do you think Bush has been breaking the law with his wire taps?" At this point I was ready to get a sandwich, come back and hear Kerry starting to say something. I didn't get to move when Kerry looked at the camera and said "Yes." That was it. One word. No hedging, no saying he agrees with the war on terror but we need to make sure the president is working within the law, just "Yes." There was a pause. Wolf looks, waiting for a longer response that doesn't come. Unsure, he starts to ask for an elaboration, to which Kerry pops in mid-sentence and says "Yes, undeniably yes." I almost exploded right there, I couldn't believe Kerry, the king of longwinded speeches, would answer so briefly. And that was when I started to feel like the left is growing some balls. Kennedy's fighting Specter, Harry Reid and Dean are fighting over and over that no, there are still no democrats implicated in the Abramoff scandal. Gore comes out attacking Bush for his wire tapping and shuts down McLellan and Gonzales's arguments that Clinton in any way did the same lawbreaking, and now we've got Kerry of all people taking a firm stance. The AP is reporting the truth, I can't believe how quickly things are turning around. I'll tell you, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It looks like the left is going to start fighting.

"...Most Americans believe there has been significant progress in achieving Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial equality, though blacks are more skeptical..." - AP HA!..Thanks Honkey's That being said, I've just securely fastened a huge rip of Redman into my left cheek, turned on Toto's classic Ballad "Hold the Line" and am ready to rocksore your socksores. Let's start slow with something im sure Pozun is going to give me some shit about. that of course is NASA doing things that are so stoopid that the correct spelling of the word "stupid" need not apply to the situation. apparently 7 years ago NASA broke a mirror and decided that the only possible solution to all their bad luck with deep space rovers and orbiters being destroyed and/or lost was to send out a space probe to collect meteor dust to solve the ancient mysteries of the universe. seven years later we finally have our answer. that's right people, after a 2.9 billion mile journey through space the probe "Stardust", which was sent out to collect meteor dust which is believed to be untouched since the dawn of time (which scientist believe to be 4.5 billion years ago, you know, when OUR sun was created...aren't we being egocentric regardless of our knowledge of Star Wars happening a long time ago, which yes, my star trek buddies have confirmed to have been years before our sun was created.). scientist at Nasa beleive this dust holds the keys to life in the universe, and the elements that helped to create the galaxy. this ancient space dust will make its triumphant return back to earth as it slams into Utah, america's "other" white state, tonight! Now i thought long an hard about it and questioned what they are expecting to find on this giant rock in space. is it some curiously strange new element we can add to the Periodic Table of sexellent Elements? have we finally found the monoliths from 2001: a space odyssey? or have we just found more Carbon atoms in space? being a Realist i suspect the latter. that the millions of dollars spent and the seven years of foreplay will only produce many of the basic elements found on earth such as carbon. I thought about all of this for a while, and to my chagrin, my face melted off...much like the Indiana Jones movie. I mean come on this money could have been spent to solve so many other important mysteries of space that the public wants answers for. like my favorite, is Mars habouring terrorist like Osama Bin Laden or Sean Penn? Moving right along, let's discuss Pennsylvania's favorite wacky Republican, Arlen Specter. Along with the always contriversial supreme court nominee Sam "wearin a speedo" Alito. What a cute couple. I think it's time to accept his nomination along with the acceptence that Bush isn't swayed by public opinion or something normal people like myself refer to as the checks and balances system / the law. wait, he tapped your phone? maybe he does care. But i do believe it is time to give Arlen Specter a break. He has already confirmed he is voting for Alito. "I intend to vote to support Judge Alito's nomination as associate justice of the Supreme Court," said the Pennsylvania Republican at the conclusion of his committee's confirmation hearing. - AP it really isn't his fault that all of this is going on. I mean there is only one nominee for Sandra Day "Sinead" O'Connors spot. who else is he going to vote for, think about it you little mathmaticians. there is only one person running for the position at the current time which should tell you two things. he is the best nominee, and is also the worst nominee. so we might as well lube up our buttholes and just take it like men. (sorry for the gay sex reference, but its a domination thing, not a gay thing...you know like the animal kingdom. lions will have sex with other lions just so the other lion knows his place) yea that's a little weird.........anyways... Update: Good News, there is brain Activity in Ariel Sharon's brain. it's reportedly the first time in 30 years, ever since he refused to share holy land with everyone else...what a douche bag, im glad that guy from the 700 Club sent his family that letter telling the Sharon family that this is God's way of ball tagging Ariel for all his bullshit.....wait, that's aweful, the 700 Club guy is a Dick too. wow, i don't think i could top that last one at the moment so i will call it a day. but i would love to hear what my blogging brethern think about any of this stuff. so guys, you can either blog it in response, or you can email me at SexyStetzy@www.clownpenis.fart. till next time, this is Sexy Stetzy telling you to keep it...... ......the faith that is.

So apparently Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is going to testify at a Senate hearing regarding the NSA and its legal situation with the wire tapping. Now, over the past few weeks there has been a flurry of activity concerning the whole issue, ranging from the spying on CNN's Christiane Amanpour to pointing out Bush's April 2004 speech that brings up the issue of wire taps requiring a court order. Though it's beating a dead horse, for the sake of my own amusement, here's that chunk of Bush's speech: Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution. There have been many websites that dissect the Patriot Act and the act is references, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, looking at what constitutes a legal wire tap and pondering the meaning of a "US person". The various pieces refer to what is and what isn't a terrorist, when the wire taps are legal and what needs to be ascertained before doing so. Many got excited to find the clause that says it is illegal to have a tap if it turns out a US person (not citizen) is to get caught up in the surveillance, however as a previous article states, "US person" does not include those working with terrorist groups. While this is a good idea to look through the documents, it misses one key issue. All of the pieces of the FISA hinge on the President determining that the tap is legal and then getting a warrant via the Attorney General who submits the request to a secret committee whose entire purpose is deciding on cases like this. Your (or my) opinion of wiretapping is fairly unimportant, the ethics aren't really the issue since it's on paper there that someone can be spied upon if it is reasonable to think that they're communicating with terrorists. The thing is, Bush didn't go to any Attorneys General (that's the proper plural, look it up), and they didn't give any warrants. Using the FISA to see if what Bush did is legal or not is a moot point, because he didn't follow any of the protocol outlined therein. Whether or not FISA or the Patriot Act gives him permission to spy on these people is irrelevant as he never got the documents signed. It's like illegal immigrants crying for their rights, if you aren't complying with the system you aren't protected by it. As often as Gonzalez in on TV assuring us that Bush was within his legal rights to do what he did, one thing he hasn't said was "he sent me the request, we issued the warrants". As it turns out, the FISC was mildly involved with Bush's wiretaps, and was swamped with such requests for a while. This is somewhat understandable as it's part of his post-9/11 fiasco, but what's most interesting is this passage: "They wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn't think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people," said Bamford Later in the article we find that Bush requested roughly 5,700 wiretaps, that a record 179 were modified or rejected in some manner. And yet, this system was apparently not enough, and thus Bush scrapped the system and started putting wiretaps in on his own, without permission. With nearly 6,000 such requests formally made, one can only wonder at how many he's illegally made. The man wanted to eavesdrop on so many people he couldn't feasibly ask for permission for all of them without hiring a staff to make all the forms and send them for him. He wanted so many wiretaps put in place it would have been a full-time job securing them all. But of course, that's an odd thing, because how are we going to sift through all of these correspondences? Cheney famously said that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented had we had surveillance that the Pres is putting out there. Ignoring the obvious argument that without 9/11 Bush wouldn't have been able to coerce the country into a war and he wouldn't have been able to put any law into place he wants, the fact remains that recorded correspondance wasn't translated on time prior to 9/11. The reports warning of an impending al Qaeda attack were there but Bush ignored them. The proof it was coming was there but we didn't get it translated on time. Now Bush is claiming that we didn't have enough information to prevent 9/11 and that's why we need his God-approved, instructed even, help in gathering more information. Information that he will no doubt ignore or be lost in the shuffle so when another attack gets through, he'll be able to get even more power. Though to quote Jack Cafferty, "want to abuse our civil liberties? Just do it." It truly boggles my mind to think that Bush would put so much effort in passing the Patriot Act, defending it in front of the world when he had no plans of doing anything it instructs him to. It's not even that he made that comment and then got wiretaps without a court order. He was doing it all the while. Breaking his own laws, invading our privacy, and lying about it for years. What's really scary is that a lot of people voted for him because of his morals.

I'm sure there are people wondering how I've managed to post this thing up without mentioning the NSA, Jack Abramoff, the fiasco in Iraq, or the Alito situation yet, and to that I say hold your horses. I'm getting to it.

By now I'm sure everyone's heard about the big controversy concerning James Frey's book, A Million Little Pieces. The Smoking Gun did a fantastic investigation into this (which my little entry ganks the title from), starting from the first page of the novel and traveling along, looking at each of the supposed criminal aspects of the writer's life and how they attempted to confirm each incident. As you can imagine, things didn't go well, and aside from ol' Jimmy never spending a single day in prison, it's incredibly doubtful that he did any hard drugs or was the tough outcast of the world that he portrayed himself as. By all accounts, the guy was a clean cut kid who graduated college on time and had a few DUIs, so TSG has discovered. I'm not here to recount or claim to be authoring any of the findings of that, feel free to read it for yourself. I will say, however, that it's interesting that he was apparently trying to get his book published as a work of fiction, but only when it became nonfiction was it picked up. The core issue that I believe this gets to is that of giving false hope to the desparate. Generally speaking, people will find a story more inspiring or meaningful if it's believed to be true. I can easily refer to the number of urban legends spread around as email as proof of this. People pass these stories on as true, and when they find out they're false the meaning starts to fade and people hold them in less reverance. People generally don't take life lessons from movie and TV characters because they are fiction, so the writer can create any sequence of events he'd like. If a character in a book in the fiction section were to do what Frey claims to have done and come out as cleanly as he did, it would be considered a rather interesting story but nothing to model your life after. If the author wants his character, a lifelong drug addict, to go on a five week bender, try to kill himself by hanging but, in his inebriation, fall without the rope and subsequently learn of the horrible life he was in, take community college classes and make a good life for himself, he can. No reader will take that and believe it to be an inspiration that one can pull oneself out of the worst pit of drug dependency without help and come out totally roses. It's fanciful and clearly fiction. Throw that same book in the nonfiction section and now people believe the character was working within the scope of reality, and thus if that person did it so can you. With Frey, we have a rather dangerous case. People are taking his word at face value, using his story as an example for what the power of will can do. Frey has said that 12 step programs are no good, that he did what he did by "just saying no". Which, of course, would be a perfectly acceptable lesson to teach millions of readers across the country if it were true. My opinion of 12 step programs notwithstanding, this has given millions of people the message that you don't need help. He calls addiction a 'weakness', and has said that you can change by making yourself do it, by yourself. And with his history, how can you disagree? The man decided to quit a lifestyle littered with nosebleeds from coke and years he doesn't remember, warrants in multiple states, and prison terms (one of which spawned another book). If he can do it, after all, why can't you? Only, he didn't do it. At least not from nearly the pit he wrote for himself. Do I entirely blame him for it? Of course I do. The man had this story loosely based on his life, events around him, with a dash of ol' American bullshit, and found he couldn't sell it. So he said it was real and now it's sold. Unfortunately, he thought he was going to have a mild success book, he didn't anticipate Oprah getting a hold of it and turning his mountain of lies into the most heavily read book in the nation (which I got a copy of as a gift before the Oprah version came out). So now he's forced to say on national television and on the radio that it's all true and it's coming up to bite him in the ass. And now so many people find themselves in the position of WANTING it to be true and will thus hold onto it as fact. They're giving Jimmy Frey the power and the money to make more books, to have the movie come out based on his life that didn't happen, writing other movies. There are people coming in droves to book signings, inspired by his strength. The strength he's never had. The strength these poor misled readers are drawing from to hopefully get some for themselves. Then there are those who say that the details in the middle are fairly unimportant, that creative license is understandable. What matters is he lived that terrible life, got himself cleaned up and lived to tell the tale to help others through their own ordeals. He lived, died, went to his own hell, and was resurrected to give hope to us all. Only he made it up. The religious parallels practically leap off of the screen begging me to write about them, but I'll save such talk for another time.

I want to expand a bit on Gates' post about Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. As he correctly points out, a scientific theory has a specific meaning. A scientific theory is something that is accepted by the scientific community made up of scholars who are dedicated to peer-review of papers and studies in order to reach a consensus. Similarly, a theory must also make predictions that are falsifiable either by observation or experiment. Obviously experimental sciences are laboratory sciences, such as chemistry, where theories are tested by direct experimentation. Observational sciences such, as astronomy, rely on observation of phenomena in order to test theories on the nature of the phenomena. It is often claimed that evolution by natural selection is not a valid theory because it is not reproducible in the lab. Clearly evolutionary biology is an observational science, based on observations in the field and in the fossil record, predictions of natural selection can be verified. Yet, we have to ask why exactly evolution by natural selection is so completely vilified to the point that its credibility as science is challenged. As far as scientific theories go, evolution by natural selection is one of the most robust, well-supported theories in existance. Strictly speaking in scientific terms, evolution itself is a fact. The fossil record confirms the emergence of new species just as we observe bacterial evolution in action. Debating whether evolution itself occurs is like debating whether rain exists or not. The "debate" is in the mechanism behind such evolution. The scientifically accepted mechanism natural selection in punctuated equilibrium, as developed by Eldredge and Gould, makes consistent predictions that are routinely verified by observation in the fossil record. In short, evolution is a fact and the mechanism explaining that fact is one of the most complete and well-tested theories in science today. So why natural selection? Why not one of the more exotic theories in science today? Quantum theory makes absolutely counterintuitive predictions as a matter of fact. The phenomenon of quantum tunneling allows particles to briefly aquire a negative kinetic energy and pass through a barrier that it does not have the energy to pass through--like walking through a wall with no damage to you or the wall. Quantum mechanics also predicts that under certain circumstances, a group atoms with a certain characteristic (integer spin) can "collapse" into a single location and actually all sit in the same physical place at once. Certainly counterintuitive and mind-boggling, yet both phenomena have been experimentally verified. Gravity is one of the biggest mysteries in science. Of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetic, weak, strong) gravity is orders of magnitude smaller. Why? The other forces all have had their carrier particles discovered. The force carrier particle of gravity, the graviton, has been postulated, yet never discovered. General relativity predicts that gravity is the result of a curvature in space-time, yet such a prediction is certainly incomplete. Still gravity as a theory is never challenged; the simplistic Newtonian gravitational theory is still taught routinely in high schools despite having significant flaws (such as the fact it is completely at odds with relativity). One of the more cutting-edge theories, superstring theory, has been called a theory from centuries ahead that happened to fall into this century. The theory is so far advanced that we barely have the math to fully expand and understand its power--it'd be like giving a modern supercomputer to 1850s scientists; they may have a general idea of its power, but little clue how to truly harness it. Despite making significant predictions, such as the existance of supermassive particles as a residual from the big bang, none have been experimentally verified. Yet, the scientific community is not under fire for making such predictions. Evolution by natural selection is challenged simply because it makes some assumptions we, as a people, do not want to hear. Humans always want to see themselves as something special on this earth--either created in God's image or on earth to be the most powerful species by design. Yet, natural selection tells us that we are little more than a species lucky enough to evolve the power to think at the level we do. Given the rules of natural selection, it is no surprise that intelligence is a highly powerful trait. Our existance is not a surprise, it may even be LIKELY that a highly intelligent species would come to dominate. Yet, such predictions still only go as far as to say that we are only the product of the system--a product of the rules. We have no greater roots to exist than the rules that produced us. That is the hardest part to swallow for most people; the thought that we are not special. Some of the wildest theories in science, for instance that our universe is actually a 3-dimensional "membrane" floating in a 10-dimensional multiverse, make predictions have have not been fully tested. It is truly depressing that one of the most robustly evaluated theories of science instead meets the ire of those who see themselves as something more special than the product of a specific set of rules.

One thing that keeps popping up in the argument for Intelligent Design to be taught is that evolution is a "theory", as is creationism, neither are "fact" so why teach only one? The problem is, as good as that sounds, it totally neglects the difference between scientific theory and colloquial theory. If I were to sit here and say that I theorize the universe is like St Elsewhere, all in the imagination of an autistic kid looking at a snowglobe, then people would say "okay that's your theory". That's the colloquial definition, that anything posited by someone as what they believe to be true is a theory. Scientifically, that's hardly even a hypothesis. Good resource: http://wilstar.com/theories.htm Theory: A theory is more like a scientific law than a hypothesis. A theory is an explanation of a set of related observations or events based upon proven hypotheses and verified multiple times by detached groups of researchers. One scientist cannot create a theory; he can only create a hypothesis. ...A theory is like the automobile. Components of it can be changed or improved upon, without changing the overall truth of the theory as a whole. Scientifically speaking, a theory is practically a law, it just needs to stick around and gather a little bit more proof before it can be termed such. That said, the end result of a scientific theory is accepted as truth. Now, ID'ers want their shit taught in science classes based on the "fact" that evolution is only a theory, thus it shouldn't be taught without alternatives. The funny thing is, we're taught a lot of theories in school that no one seems to mind. - Theory of General/Special Relativity - Quantum Theory - Atomic Theory - Global Warming - Continental Drift And many more. If these people were truly speaking in the interest of science, they'd have "Intelligent" counters to all of these other theories as well, not just the one that happens to have a nice little counter sitting in the Bible. Though, personally, I look forward to the day when "Intelligent Heating" is used to explain climate changes, or "Intelligent Pushing" explains why the continents move around.

In lieu of putting down any kind of a meaningful entry, I'll just blatantly copy a political comic I rather like.