Here we go again...

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Yet another Presidential election year is upon us and again, the Paultards are out in force. Every time I mention one of the many things Ron Paul has said in the past which makes me oppose him as a candidate (for anything), or any of the other crackpot, crazy ideas that he touts, his supporters come out of the woodwork like cockroaches white-knighting for his cause. One particular rebuttal is that he voted to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell. What they fail to say (and probably don't know) is that he supports DOMA, the Marriage Protection Act, and the We the People Act which explicitly allowing discrimination against homosexuals. Is he homophobic? I don't know. Is he interested in protecting rights of homosexuals? Clearly not. He doesn't want the federal government meddling in people's affairs, but he has no problem at all with state government banning same-sex everything if they so choose. I don't think he is racist or homophobic, but it doesn't matter because he'll allow the racists and homophobes at the state levels to write racist and homophobic laws. Being the president is a practical job, and he's a philosopher with no concern for practicality or the real-life consequences of his philosophies. I shouldn't have less rights than my compatriots just because I was unlucky enough to born in a certain region. And I shouldn't have to wait 50 years for bigots to learn better either.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

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The video above, is classic Christopher Hitchens, during an appearance on CNN talking about the subject of the death of Jerry Falwell. No one could communicate his point so harshly, yet so well. The humanist movement has lost a giant today. Juli Weiner, writing for Vanity Fair, has an excellent piece on Hitchens. Hitchens worked for Vanity Fair since 1992.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades. William Grimes, writing for the New York Times, has a wonderful obituary which discusses his life. Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died on Thursday in Houston. He was 62.

SOPA Hearings: This is terrifying to watch yet almost amusing. Except that this time, the joke’s on us.

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Mike Masnick, writing on Techdirt:

All in all, the process should leave you frightened for our country. This was not an attempt to fix a broken law. It was an attempt to please some Hollywood funders at the expense of innovation and jobs. It's insanity. Worth the read.

How Fox News is Helping Barack Obama's Re-Election Bid

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Jonathan Freedland wrote an article for the Guardian that makes a lot of sense to me.

Because Fox has put off the best Republican candidates, Barack Obama will be much less vulnerable at the election

Whoever wrote the political rulebook needs to start rewriting it. It used to be an iron maxim that voters' most vital organ was neither their head nor their heart, but their wallet. If they were suffering economically, they'd throw the incumbents out. Yet in Britain a coalition presiding over barely-there growth, rising unemployment and forecasts of gloom stretching to the horizon is holding steady in the opinion polls, while in the US Barack Obama is mired in horrible numbers – except for the ones showing him beating all-comers in the election now less than 11 months away. Even though the US economy is slumped in the doldrums, some of the country's shrewdest commentators make a serious case that Obama could be heading for a landslide victory in 2012. How to explain such a turnaround? In the United States, at least, there is one compellingly simple, two-word answer: Fox News. I think he's 100% correct. Worth the read.

My Problem With Polls That Say Congress Has 9% Approval

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Congress is not a person. The country, as a whole, does not vote for a person by the name of "Congress". My parents vote for their congressman in southern Virginia. My wife and I vote for our congressman in Alexandria, VA. I think, mostly, that my congressman has done an okay job. Given that I will be faced between the choice of him and a Republican, I will vote for him again. My parents dislike their congressman (because he's a Republican) and will vote against him. He will probably be reelected, though, because most other people in their district vote Republican. My point is that these polls are asking the wrong question. Most people like their own Congressional Representative (that's how he/she got elected) but dislike everyone else's. Unfortunately, I don't get to vote for or against any other Congressional Rep other than my own. These shallow headlines that proclaim, "HEY LOOK HOW MUCH PEOPLE HATE CONGRESS" also don't clarify that those poll numbers are likely to have zero major impact on the next Congressional election. Instead, the issues that directly (whether real or perceived) affected each district will be what the voters use to base their votes on. When you see headlines that proclaim how low Congress's approval rating has dropped, stop to ask yourself if you think your own representative is likely to get re-elected or not. I'm willing to bet that for the most of you, they will.

Romney Spent $100,000 In Taxpayer Money To Conceal Digital Records

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Alex Seitz-Wald writes on ThinkProgress:

Then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney spent almost $100,000 in taxpayer funds to replace computers when he left office “as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret,” Reuters reports. ThinkProgress has previously noted, Romney led an obfuscation campaign that state officials described as “unheard of.” Staffers deleted emails, purchased official hard drives, and otherwise obliterating digital records of Romney’s time in office. … Now, according to Reuters, Romney used state funds to carry out this political activity:

The cleanup of records by Romney’s staff before his term ended included spending $205,000 for a three-year lease on new computers for the governor’s office, according to official documents and state officials. In signing the lease, Romney aides broke an earlier three-year lease that provided the same number of computers for about half the cost – $108,000. Lease documents obtained by Reuters under the state’s freedom of information law indicate that the broken lease still had 18 months to run. As a result of the change in leases, the cost to the state for computers in the governor’s office was an additional $97,000.

Why Siri Can’t Find Abortion Clinics & How It’s Not An Apple Conspiracy

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Danny Sullivan, writing on Search Engine Land:

“I’m standing in front of a Planned Parenthood,” the CNN reporter says, “And Siri can’t find it when I search for abortion clinic.” No, it can’t. It’s not because Apple is pro-life. It’s because Planned Parenthood doesn’t call itself an abortion clinic. Really disappointed in MoveOn.org and other Democratic organizations bad mouthing Apple. I have a feeling 50% of the people doing it know it's a straw man and they're just using it as an opportunity to push their political agenda, and 50% of those people really are clueless idiots. Either way, they just lost a supporter.