in an apparent effort to continue to prove just exactly what kind of idiotic, nonsensical, and downright stupid move the nomination of sarah palin for the vice-presidency was, her people have now entered into a fracas with peta president ingrid newkirk over a game put up on the organisation’s website in which one is supposed to lob snowballs at the former candidate and other “celebrities” such as madonna and the olson twins… (thus displacing our other favorite game of the week, lobbing shoes at prez w. which you can do here)…

according to alaskareport, after the game went online, newkirk received a phone call from someone in palin’s office…

Yesterday morning, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk took a call from someone in Sarah Palin’s office, demanding that we pull down a new online game that involves pelting the Governor with snowballs. When she asked for his name, he yelled into the phone, “Just take the game down or you’ll read my name on the lawsuit.”

Within a few hours of our posting information about the call on our Web site, the Governor’s communication director, Bill McAllister, emailed (he must have been monitoring to see if the call would have the desired effect), and our President had an interesting follow-up exchange with him.

Sarah Palin is a bully who never saw an animal she didn’t want to kill, so it’s not surprising that her staff would try to intimidate us anonymously and then backtrack when called out. Our game represents a fun way to focus attention on a very serious subject—cruelty to animals supported by Sarah Palin and the other targets of the game—and we have no intention of taking it down in response to these pathetic attempts at intimidation.

the article then goes on to quote an email exchange between newkirk and bill mcallister, sarah palin’s director of communications which becomes increasingly both amusing and nonsensical as it goes on… (it also shows, if mcallister is supposed to be the communications director for palin just exactly where she got such great skill in the field…)

ah, well, one definitely positive thing that has come from ms. palin’s outrage.. it’s drawn our attention to the game and made it an easy choice for our time-waster of the week… (don’t these people ever learn that by protesting some silly-assed thing like this they just draw more attention to it? i certainly never would have even noticed it without reading about the protests from the governor’s office…) so go ahead and have a good hurl at the governor and her cohorts… you can find the game right here…

see, here’s the thing.. i’m not really that big a fan of bumper stickers…  as i’ve often been known to say, i don’t wear my heart on my sleeve or my politics on my car… oh, sure some of them are quite witty, some cute, but all too often they’re simply trite attempts to condense a thought to even less than your average news soundbite…

of course, one of the most prevalent bumper stickers this campaign season has been some variation on electing mccain equals four more years of bush… a sentiment prevalent not only on the ass-end of thousands of cars around the country, but one that was repeated so much at the democratic national convention that it almost became the new national mantra…

unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the catch phrase doesn’t even begin to capture the full horror of the truth… if the mccain campaign has shown us anything so far it is that the past eight years may only have been a warm-up…

let’s face it, what have been some of the most egregious faults of the current administration? ineptitude when it comes to making political appointments; an overarching (and overreaching) propensity for expanding not only the power of the executive branch, but also the use of executive privilege; and at best a loose regard for the facts and at worst a proclivity to actually lie to the american people to further their goals…

of course since john mccain is the maverick, his administration will be nothing like that, correct? well let’s take a look… under bush we had the nomination of harriet “the best person i could find” meirs to the supreme court… george deutsch, a 24-year-old nasa appointee who barred nasa scientists from talking publicly about global warming, and who ordered nasa’s Web designer to append the word theory to every mention of the big bang… all of this despite not only not having a science background, but not even having graduated college… fortunately he had wroked for pre. w’s re-election campaign… we had claude allan, tapped by bush for a federal appeals court judgeship… until it turned out that he had acted as lead counsel in a case exactly once, and had practiced law for only seven years - five years short of what the american bar association defines as the minimal qualification for a judicial nominee… oh, and let us not forget michael “brownie” brown, picked to be head of fema after being director of the arabian horse association, and his deputy, patrick rhode, a former tv anchorman and bush advanceman who praised the fema response to Katrina as “probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country’s history.”…

as for mccain, well, what can one say? as sarah palin daily further demonstrates her lack of knowledge (beyond how to regurgitate a packaged sound bite over and over) and her lack of qualifications to have even the second spot on the ticket, much less take over the first spot should something happen to mccain, one certainly must wonder about who else the republican senator might tap for key positions… of course, he may very well have been blinded by her own competence in making appointments, such as the high school classmate and real estate agent ms. palin selected to be her state agriculture director due to her “long-standing affection for cows”…

“ok,” i hear you say, “but what about the other stuff you mentioned, like the executive privilege atrocities? surely mccain/palin can’t be as bad as the current administration on that…”

hmm… i take it you’re talking about things like the justice department hearings where the administration not only wouldn’t relesase numerous documnets to the courts but did their best to claim executive privelege to keep people who might actually have known what was going on (such as then attorney general alberto gonzales or his assistants) from testifying before congress? well, how about this little snippet:

Todd Palin, the husband of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, will not heed a subpoena to appear before an Alaska legislative committee Friday morning to testify about his role in Troopergate…

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which issued subpoenas for Todd Palin and a dozen other people, most of them state employees, is scheduled to meet at Friday morning at the legislative office building downtown to take their testimony.

But few if any of these people are expected to appear and, in fact, some of them never were actually served with the subpoenas after the governor’s appointed attorney general, Talis Colberg, declared Palin administration workers would not testify.

or this:

The Washington Post reports that Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) is “being asked by a local Republican activist to release more than 1,100 e-mails she withheld from a public records request, including 40 that were copied to her husband, Todd.” Invoking a favored practice of the Bush administration, Palin has claimed executive privilege to keep the e-mails secret — despite the fact many of them were sent to Todd, who is not an elected official.

starting to sound familiar?

we will give the mccain/palin team credit for onr thing though… at least they haven’t stated outright that the vice-president is not part of the executive branch of the government as dick cheney once famously did… instead ms. palin simply refused to answer the question… of course, there’s always the possibility that she simply didn’t understand the meaning of the phrase “executive branch”…

alright, so their disdain for the actual laws of the land can be taken for granted, but what about their disdain for the truth? we did mention a loose regard for the facts and actual lying to the american people, right? well, as the new republic reports,

About a week after John McCain’s campaign unveiled a vice-presidential nominee who incessantly boasted about her decision to turn down federal funding for a notoriously pointless bridge (”I told Congress ‘thanks, but no thanks’ on that Bridge to Nowhere”), the press corps began to notice that Sarah Palin had, in fact, vigorously championed the project until it was no longer tenable. Political fibs, even brazen ones such as this, are hardly unprecedented. What happened next, though, was somewhat unusual. Despite having its claim exposed in nearly every media outlet, the McCain campaign continued to assert it anyway, day after day, dozens of times in all. It was as if Bill Clinton had persisted in his claim that he did not have sexual relations with that woman even after the appearance of the semen-stained dress.

But what happened after that was even more unusual, and possibly without precedent: McCain’s supporters simply suggested that the truth or falsity of their statements didn’t matter. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said this to Politico about the increased media scrutiny of the campaign’s factual claims: “We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.” Republican strategist John Feehery made the point even more bluntly, telling The Washington Post: “The more The New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there, and the bigger truths are: She’s new, she’s popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent.” Then, he added, “As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.”

“these little facts”… obviously straight talk doesn’t mean it’s necessarily truthful…

so, looking at all this, where does it leave us? would mccain/palin actually be a bush/cheney redux? well, considering that they’re not even in office yet and we’re already seeing so many echoes of the current administration, i can only answer no… instead it’s actually likely to be much worse…

-moose out…

so, for those of ya who are new, “moose droppings” is our (supposedly) weekly roundup of all those things that might have fallen through the cracks during the rest of the week… stuff that either caught our eye or is just plain humorous… just click on the link within the item for more info… so, without further ado, let’s get to the first

item! in case you were sitting around thinking to yourself (as the moose was just the other day) “y’know, i still can’t figure out why tanya harding would have done that to nancy kerrigan”, now we have the answer… it seems they are the reincarnations of lee harvey oswald and j.f.k…. of course, the real surprise is oksana baiyul bein the reincarnation of nikita krushchev…

item! the times of india reports on a scientific study that proves something we have really known all along… a study by the University of Leuven found an inverse relationship between testosterone levels and price awareness among males… in other words, according to the article, “men who are exposed to naked women stop paying attention to prices….” umm, well yeah….once again, the main thing this study makes the moose wonder is… where do we get in on one of these studies?

item! at first i was rather taken aback by this article from the daily mail online… another instance of the nanny state doing everything they can to “protect the children” and make parents and other adults that much more impotent… then i realised upon actually reading further into it that they really only want to keep the kids safe from the environmentally-conscious penguins…

item! in an apparent attempt to prove that they really are insane and the election of jesse ventura as governor was not just some poorly organised joke that backfired, the people of minnesota have elected al franken to be the democratic candidate to the u.s. senate…

item! if ya didn’t have enough reason to check out ebay, surely you’ll be tempted by this next item… a pair of size-28 Calvin Klein white briefs once belonging to michael jackson… and to make them even more appealing, according to the new york post “The unwashed underpants … were part of the evidence confiscated in 2003 by then-Santa Barbara DA Tom Sneddon, who wanted a DNA sample for his unsuccessful child-molestation case against the washed-up King of Pop”… so apparently you get the sticky along with the icky…. uck..

item! at least they’re impartial.. not only can you order your schoolgirl sarah palin figure, you can also get a beach blanket obama figure from the same place…

item! apparently it’s not even easy being green if you’re a polar bear…

item! the latest example of anti-social behavior? apparently looking for your missing cat…

item! y’know, one of the reasons the moose didn’t come back earlier in the week was not wanting to have to confront all the sarah palin b.s…. a lot has been and will be said about the woman, some of it credible, some of it not… but, when we run across a quote like “so sambo beat the bitch“, well…

item! y’know, we are always grateful when our greatest minds turn to solving problems like this one…

item! i always knew those cyclists and their exposed ankles were gonna get somebody sent to hell…

item! “Last night there was 11 big ones on my house, jumping and hitting me in the head and stuff like that,”…

item! the latest global warming threat? giant ice penises…

item! coming from a time when the federal government tried to pass off ketchup as a vegetable in order to meet school lunch requirements, i can’t help but wonder when baked potatoes became “not healthy enough”

item! “Clearly, we don’t support being a surveillance culture,” says head of firm supplying belt-mounted video cameras to police officers in seattle…

item! obviously, the broken pencil sharpener was a threat to the safety of every student in the school… fortunately, the miscreant who brought it to school and then actually tried sharpening his pencil with it was given a two day suspension… that’ll teach the little terrorist…

item! some 21% of those making $100,000 or more say that they are living paychek-to-paycheck… hmmm, wonder can i convince them to swap paychecks?…

item! “Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from the science lesson…” says the “rev prof” michael reiss, the director of education at london’s royal society… the flying spaghetti monster couldn’t agree more…

item! once again, sometimes the headline says it all… “teacher ok after crashing into bear on a bicycle“…

item! much has been made of barak obama’s possible affiliations, whether or not he is a secret muslim, etc., and the common refrain that we hear is that we don’t know enough about him and his beliefs to really trust him… unfortunately, however, we know plenty about sarah palin’s church’s beliefs…

item! in a rare instance of someone actually saying what they think, “Obama isn’t even really black — Bill Clinton is more black than Obama,” said Mike Wallace…

last item! finally, today, we leave you with a couple of clips to prepare ya for the upcoming vice presidential debates (which we are banking on to be some of the most entertaining political theater we’ve seen in years), here are a couple of clips of the candidates at their finest…. first up, joe biden rallies supporters including one who just happens to be in a wheelchair…

and finally, sarah palin (as portrayed by the ever-sexy and surprisingly-fitting-lookalike gina gershon) explains her positions on… well, pretty much everything…

ok, mooseheads, that’s it for this week… be sure to check in tomorrow for our saturday morning toon time, sunday for (hopefully) some moose drop-ed, and then monday for the return of our regular daily moosings…

yeah, the drop-ed page is usually a weekend feature, but since i’m not quite up to a full-blown moosing yet, hopefully this’ll give you guys a little something to pass the time while yer waiting…

item! first up, from new york magazine, a column by john heilemann who considers the question of whether mudslinging might be the only way that mccain can actually defeat obama…

…we now have an inkling of just how deep in the mud McCain and his people are willing to wallow in order to win in November: right up to their Republican eyeballs.

As countless fact-checkers and tsk-tskers have maintained, the broadsides were a blend of distortion, innuendo, and outright slander. But that doesn’t mean they (and their inevitable successors) won’t prove effective, especially against an opponent with so little experience under ruthless and relentless fire.

item! the same topic is taken on by joe conason at salon who points out

As many observers have noted by now, the negative strategy adopted by the McCain campaign under the leadership of new manager Steve Schmidt follows a template created by Schmidt’s old boss, Karl Rove. It is all very familiar stuff, from the direct assault on Obama’s power as a media star to the insinuations that he is weak, elitist and not truly patriotic. All these themes can and will be amplified by “independent” advertising that raises doubts about Obama’s religious and racial attitudes (or those of his wife).

It isn’t Swift-boating — yet — but it regurgitates the same themes used by Rove in both the midterm campaigns of 2002 and the presidential race of 2004. Whether Schmidt or Rove executes those same old appeals to the worst in us hardly matters. What matters is that McCain has adopted an approach that was once thought beneath him. And that choice dates back to his decision to ally himself with George W. Bush and indeed with Rove, despite the vicious tactics that defeated him in the Republican primaries of 2000 — for which he held them responsible.

item! next, the washington post’s eugene robinson looks at recently released memos outlining the administration’s deplorable attitude towards “advanced interrogation techniques”…

Three previously classified administration memos obtained last week by the American Civil Liberties Union add to our understanding of this disgraceful episode. The documents are attempts to justify the unjustifiable — the use of brutal interrogation methods that international agreements define as torture — and keep those who ordered and carried out this dirty business from being prosecuted and jailed…

The most stunning of the memos — written in August 2002 by Jay Bybee, who was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — makes the incredible claim that unless a torturer has the ‘’specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering,'’ no violation of U.S. laws against torture has occurred. Bybee, since appointed to the federal bench, wrote that the torturer needed only the ‘’honest belief'’ that he was not actually committing torture in order to avoid legal jeopardy. Oh, and Bybee added that it wasn’t even necessary for that belief to be “reasonable.'’

item! just in case you were wondering what the administration has been up to lately (after all, they have been awfully quiet while mccain and obama have been vying for the spotlight, but just because they’ve been quiet doesn’t mean they haven’t been busy), seymore hersh of the new yorker looks at secret funding they’ve been acquiring and how they’ve been using it in iraq…

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

item! headed back over to slate for a moment, we have two more columns examining john mccain’s takes on two very hot button topics: first, timothy noah looks at mccain’s record on taxes… not just what he has said, but how he has voted…

McCain was one of only two Republicans to oppose the first Bush tax cut and one of only three to oppose the second. But, technically, voting against a tax cut isn’t the same as voting in favor of a tax increase. In 2006, when it came time to vote on whether to extend the Bush tax cuts McCain had previously opposed, a “nay” vote now constituted a tax increase. Consequently, McCain voted in favor. Explaining his apparent flip-flop on NBC News’ Meet the Press, McCain said, “The economy had adjusted, the tax cuts were there, and if it would have been—and that’s the way it was designed. It would’ve been tantamount to a tax increase.” (Emphasis added.)

No one bought it, of course, because it was too plainly apparent by 2006 that if McCain continued to oppose Bush’s 2001 tax cuts he wouldn’t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination in 2008. “Out of favor with the Republican base,” observed the rabidly anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform, “McCain has slowly tried to reinvent himself as a taxpayer friendly Senator.” The similarly rabid Club for Growth pronounced, “John McCain is no supply-sider.” This year, McCain has tried to recast his earlier opposition to Bush’s rate cuts as a vote in favor of budgetary prudence. In a January appearance on Meet the Press, McCain said, “[T]he reason—major reason why I was opposed to it was because there was no spending cuts. I was proud to be part—a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution. And we had tax cuts, but we had spending cuts that went right along with it.”

There are three problems with this statement.

also, fred kapian asks the question of just how much mccain actually knows about foreign policy

in formal prepared speeches, McCain has proposed certain actions and policies that raise serious questions about his suitability for the highest office. As president, he has said, he would boot Russia out of the G-8 on the grounds that its leaders don’t share the West’s values. He would form an international “League of Democracy” as a united front against the forces of autocracy and terror. And though it’s not exactly a stated policy, he continues to employ as his foreign-policy adviser an outspoken, second-tier neoconservative named Randy Scheunemann, who coined the term “rogue-state rollback” and still prescribes it as sound policy.

last item! finally, it’s not so much an opinion piece, but it does make for fascinating reading: in the new yorker, charles van doren recounts his involvement in the quiz show scandals of the fifties:

The first time Al called, he asked me to come to his apartment. When I arrived, he seemed nervous. I wondered what I was getting into.

Right away, he said, “You remember I told you about this fellow Stempel? Well, the sponsors want him to be beaten. He’ll walk away with a bundle, but they want somebody more sympathetic.”

“Do they have a right to do that?”

“Hey, come off it, Charlie. Don’t be naïve.” And he launched into his argument—that, when all was said and done, these game shows were mere entertainment. “Even Shakespeare is entertainment,” he said, although he conceded that the shows, unlike the plays, were presented as the real thing.

Al played an episode of “Twenty-One” for me, in which Stempel seemed very sure of himself. His answers were obviously based on genuine knowledge. I say “obviously,” although I realized that I couldn’t be certain. How would anyone know?

Stempel’s posture and gestures were awkward, his clothes were too tight—he seemed almost to be choking in his shirt—and his speech was wooden. I remembered Al’s remark that I might have a good chance against him, and then he came right out and said it: “I’ve thought about it, Charlie, and I’ve decided you should be the person to beat Stempel. And I’ll help you do it.”

happy reading!

moose out…

yeah, it’s been awhile since we’ve done one of these round-ups of various editorials and think-pieces, but with lots of folks having time off today for presidents’ day or just maybe having a few extra minutes to indulge a little reading, we figured why not… as always, we may not agree with them all, but they’re all definitely worth your time to read… also, as always, click the link for the full article…

item! first up, we have author philip ross in an interview with der spiegel talking about his writing, growing old, and why president w. is the worst american president ever:

Philip Roth, who will be 75 in March, is one of America’s most critically acclaimed living writers. His 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” brought him fame, and he went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for 1997’s “American Pastoral.”

SPIEGEL: What will remain of the current president, George W. Bush? Could he be forgotten once he leaves office?

Roth: He was too horrendous to be forgotten. There will be an awful lot written about this. And there’s a lot to be written about the war. There’s a lot to be written about what he did with Reaganism, since he went much further than Reagan. So he won’t be forgotten. Someone has said he’s the worst American president we’ve ever had. I think that’s true.

SPIEGEL: Why?

Roth: Well, the biggest thing would be the war, the deceptions surrounding the entrance into the war. The absolute cynicism that surrounds the deception. The cost of the war, the Treasury and the lives of the Americans. It’s hideous. There is nothing quite like it. The next thing would be the attitude towards global warming, which is a global crisis, and they were utterly indifferent, if not hostile, to any attempt to address it. And so on and so on and so on and so on. So he’s done a lot of harm.

SPIEGEL: Since your book is set in that week during the 2004 elections, can you explain why Americans voted for Bush once again?

Roth: I suspect it was the business of being in a war and not wanting to change, and political stupidity. Why does anybody elect anybody? I thought highly of John Kerry when he began, but he couldn’t stand up against Bush. The Democrats aren’t brutes, which is too bad, because the Republicans are brutes. Brutes win.

item! up next, an article from salon on how technology makes killing in war easy and impersonal:

You see a man, walking through a shrub-dotted, dusty field. A small dog wanders behind him. Another screen shows a group of individuals, standing huddled together on a city street, looking like they could be chatting about a ballgame. A third Predator tracks a figure getting into a car, following as the car snakes through traffic. Yet another screen stays fixated on a single squat house surrounded by what looks like a low cement wall, as if someone is about to emerge from the front door.

The scenes look misleadingly pedestrian. The miniature people on the screens do not know they are being watched. “We are looking for individual people,” Lt. Col. Walt Manwill says, as he stares up at the massive screens. “Especially when you are killing people, you want to make sure you do it right.”…

Targeters here show me recent footage of two men on the ground in Iraq. The two men, far below the Predator drone’s gaze, appear to be setting up a mortar on a city street. They are in the shadow of a building just feet away. Suddenly, the two men explode. Everything around the men, including the buildings, looks unharmed. But when the dust clears, the two men are wiped away. A small bomb, tailor-made for hunting single individuals, has done the job.

An Air Force colonel describes these operations to me as “getting Bubba.”

item! next, arianna huffington writes on something we almost tackled last week - john mccain’s vote against the torture ban last week:

He made a similar case on the campaign trail in Iowa in October 2007: “When I was imprisoned, I took heart from the fact that I knew my North Vietnamese captors would never be treated like I was treated by them. There are much better and more effective ways to get information. You torture someone long enough, he’ll tell you whatever he thinks you want to know.”

And there was this pithy and powerful summation of why torture should never be an option: “It’s not about who they are, it’s about who we are.”

Of course, all that was before he put his conscience in leg irons — and before caving to the would-be Torquemadas on the Right became his campaign strategy.

Now we get tortured logic instead. Taking to the Senate floor to justify his vote against the torture ban yesterday, McCain twisted himself in knots trying to explain how he could sponsor a bill — the 2006 Detainee Treatment Act — that prohibits the use of any cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment by the military while voting against a bill that would extend that ban to the CIA and other intelligence agencies: “It is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to [detain and interrogate terrorists]. At the same time the CIA’s interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act.”

Got that? The CIA has to abide by rules prohibiting torture but we can’t tie the CIA’s hands by making it abide by rules prohibiting torture. Straight talk, RIP.

item! in the new york times book section, patricia cohen asks if americans are hostile to knowledge:

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture….

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice….

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

item! on the huffington post, joe wilson (yes, the husband of valerie plame wilson) writes about why he thinks hillary clinton will make the better nominee than barack obama to go up against john mccain…

I have spent the past four years fighting a concerted character assassination campaign orchestrated by the George W. Bush White House.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the few who fully understood the stakes in that battle. Time and again, she reached out to my wife — outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson — and me to remind us that as painful as the attacks were, we simply could not allow ourselves to be driven from the public square by bullying. To do so would validate the radical right’s thesis that the way to win debates is to demonize opponents, taking full advantage of the natural desire to avoid confrontation, even if it means yielding on substantive issues. Hillary knew this from experience, having spent the better part of the past 20 years fighting the Republican attack machine. She is a fighter.

But will Mr. Obama fight? His brief time on the national scene gives little comfort. Consider a February 2006 exchange of letters with Mr. McCain on the subject of ethics reform. The wrathful Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of being “disingenuous,” to which Mr. Obama meekly replied, “The fact that you have now questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you.” Then one of McCain’s aides said of Obama, “Obama wouldn’t know the difference between an RPG and a bong.”

Mr. McCain was insultingly dismissive but successful in intimidating his inexperienced colleague. Thus, in his one face-to-face encounter with Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama failed to stand his ground.

What gives us confidence Mr. Obama will be stronger the next time he faces Mr. McCain, a seasoned political fighter with extensive national security credentials? Even more important, what special disadvantages does Mr. Obama carry into this contest on questions of national security?

last item! finally, a video commentary from keith olbermann on president w., the telecom bill, fisa, and how according to his own definition, president w. is siding with the terrorists:

Does this endless presidency of loopholes and fine print extend even here? If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it! There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend.

You’re a fascist — get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it! What else is this but fascism? Did you see Mark Klein on this newscast last November?

Mark Klein was the AT&T whistleblower who explained in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood IT desk how he personally attached all AT&T circuits, everything, carrying every one of your phone calls, every one of your e-mails, every bit of your Web browsing into a secure room, room No. 641-A at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, where it was all copied so the government could look at it.

Not some of it, not just the international part of it, certainly not just the stuff some spy, a spy both patriotic and telepathic, might be able to divine had been sent or spoken by or to a terrorist.Everything! Every time you looked at a naked picture. Every time you bid on eBay. Every time you phoned in a donation to a Democrat. “My thought was,” Mr. Klein told us last November, “George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ And here I am, forced to connect the Big Brother machine.”

And if there’s one thing we know about Big Brother, Mr. Bush, it is that he is — you are — a liar.

“This Saturday at midnight,” you said Thursday, “legislation authorizing intelligence professionals to quickly and effectively monitor terrorist communications will expire. If Congress does not act by that time, our ability to find out who the terrorists are talking to, what they are saying and what they are planning will be compromised.” You said that “the lives of countless Americans depend” on your getting your way.

This is crap. And you sling it with an audacity and a speed unrivaled by even the greatest political felons of our history.

once again taking father lane denson up on his offer to “Be free to use it as you will.” with his daily posting known as “out of nowhere”… when i read it this morning i knew it would be perfect for my fellow mooseheads… further information about and writings by fr. lane can be found here… enjoy…

The award-winning Borowitz Report recently broke the news that the White House had announced that the President’s State of the Union address would be simulcast in English. When OoN’s investigative reporter enquired of this, she was told that this breach with precedent is apparently to show support for those who are urging that English be made the national official language.

Previously, the Administration had resisted this growing movement arguing that the such last minute translations would impose an undue burden on the presidents’ speech writers and voice coaches. Watching the speech last evening and as it turned out, apparently the announcement was a fig leaf of somebody’s imagination, as there was no evidence of any use of English at all, save, perhaps in the rebuttal following.

As well, a late news item reported that the frequency of sitting and standing reps throughout the address, especially on one side of the aisle, gave all those who so participated a free pass to skip all other congressional gymnastics in hopes that until Valentine Day when their heart rates should be back to normal.

friday! moose droppings! let’s do it!

item! say it isn’t so… hydrox cookies are gone?!?!?!

item! the price per pound for selling fruit by the pound? apparently somewhere around $130,000… umm… how much is that in pounds?

item! apparently the bus driver was afraid they were going to the back seat to do a little heavy petting?

item! tonight is burns night, but apparently ol’ rabbie won’t be getting any of his favorite food… at least not around here…

item! ok, we really could care less that oliver stone wants to do a movie about president w… after all, we’ve managed to ignore most of his other flicks… but… josh brolin as w? now that’s just wrong…

item! y’know when you go to the mcdonalds drive-thru and they ask you to pull forward to wait for your food so they can keep their official window times down and look good to the district manager…. looks like you’d better do what they say…

item! dang! where’s steve mcqueen when you need him?
item! a very interesting essay on the legacy of doctor king… “All we know is that this guy had a dream. We don’t know what that dream was.”

item! good news! apparently the u.s. doesn’t torture people after all… canada apologises for thinking “forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding prisoners” falls under the “definition of torture”…

item! dennis kucinich has abandoned his run for president… unfortunately that means we’ll no longer have an excuse to run pictures of his gorgeous wife…

item! what would jesus do? apparently he’d hold himself hostage until your weiner dog quit crapping in the neighbor’s yard…

last item! finally, we’re gonna try to use little words here and not get too complicated so that maybe even the republicans in our audience can understand what we’re driving at… when one of the basic standards of your party is a strict interpretation of the constitution, when one of your most sacred tenets is that we need judges who are going to “apply the constitution, not interpret it”, how can one of the front-runners for your party’s nominee to be the president be a man who says “[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,”? (you all do remember the constitution, right, it’s that thing president w. called “just a damned piece of paper”)… are you truly so desperate for the evangelical vote that you’d put forward a man who says that gay sex is the same as pedophilia and bestiality? of course, considering the other candidates in the race, huckleberry may very well be the best chance you have… (not that the dems are doing any better… between bickering about who might actually have said something nice about ronald reagan and whether it’s worse to have defended a slumlord in court or been on the board of the ultimate evil that is wal-mart it’s been a banner couple of weeks in presidential politics…)

-moose out…

so it’s the first moose-droppings of the new year and the first after our long time off, so what say we get right at it…

item! so are ya wondering what the new year will bring? well wonder no more, because pat robertson has your answers… (oh, and he’s sorry about that whole “a nuclear explosion in the u.s. will kill untold millions” prediction last year… at least it was a good whoops, right?)

item! ah, yes, isn’t it good to know that when a totalitarian regime needs new ways to keep track of their people they can always count on u.s. corporations to come to their aid?

item! the “cultural lodestone of the middle east”? well, that’s what they want to be, and this effort (along with a new guggenheim museum and louvre sattelite) may very well be a good place to start…

item! so here’s how the list breaks down: indicted/convicted/pled guilty: 10 names; resigned due to investigation, pending investigation, or allegations of impropriety: 24 names; nomination failed due to scandal: 5 names; under investigation but still in office: 3 names… and hey, we’ve still got a year to go yet… yay team!

item! ok, it’s true that one of the moose family resolutions this year was to eat better and also to expand our cooking repertoire, but that still doesn’t mean that badger is on the menu…

item! wait a minute… i thought they determined long ago that treat williams was d.b. cooper… so what’s all this about then?

item! “ok, so man i want you to make me this really cool tat…” “ok, dude…” “i want it to be of this .357 magnum…” “ok, dude, but i can’t freehand that, i’ll have to trace it…” “that’s cool dude just be careful that the safety’s…” >bang<

item! britain to america: umm.. yeah, that whole “war on terror” thing? uh… yeah… i don’t think we’ll be calling it that anymore… but  hey, thanks for including us anyway… feel free to call on us next time you need help fighting “members of an aimless ‘death cult.’”

item! next time you’re looking for a job, if you’ve got a good nose and live in the purdue area, you might want to check this out…

item! why is imprisoning a wrongly-convicted man for ONLY 27 years being touted as a good thing? i guess because it wasn’t 28 years…

last item! finally, once again, the headline writers do our work for us: this time, from the bbc news: “snow holers using new ‘poo chute’” ummm.. hunh?

ok, kids, that it for today… but be sure to come back tomorrow for saturday morning ‘toon time and sunday for the poetry corner and (if y’all are extry good) maybe even a little extra dose of droppings…

yep, the moose is back, so that means the moose droppings can’t be far behind, right? so here we go once again with our roundup of all the little things we’ve passed over or found interesting but not blogged for the past week (or more in this case)…

item! (thanks to our buddy chris to alerting us to this one…) apparently australian santas are coming just a little too close to turning into don imus…
item! finally getting the respect he is due, the flying spahetti monster is going to be on the agenda at the american academy of religion’s annual meeting in san diego this weekend…

item! once again, we let the copy writers do our job for us: “A man caught trying to have sex with his bicycle has been sentenced to three years on probation.”

item! freedom of speech? not if you play bridge, apparently…

item! nor if you’re an iraqi war vet wanting to march in a veteran’s day parade…

item! what do you do with hundreds of bottles of jack daniels whiskey - some of them almost 100 years old with the seal intact? apparently if you’re a member of the tennessee alcoholic beverage comission, the answer is: pour it down the drain…

item! finally someone has found a good use for a gerbil… (warning: only go to this site if your sense of irony is fully intact…)

item! umm… ok, can someone explain how the hospital is responsible for this woman’s lack of faith? (after all, according to their beliefs, isn’t that what killed her?)

item! apparently not only was she asking for it, then she actually had the audacity to talk about it afterwards… (yet another reason i’m so glad as a u.s. citizen that these are the type of people we have chosen to ally ourselves with on the world stage…)

item! man’s best friend? apparently not once they learn to use a gun…

item! see? there’s a good reason not to have sex ed in schools… if we did we might not be able to set the record for most std’s…

item! of course, if you’re not going to let the schools teach your kids about sex, you’d better do it yourself, right? umm… apparently not unless you want to go to jail…

item! okay, let’s put this in perspective - if your annual salary is $32,000, it would take you two years to earn what mitt romney is spending per day on campaign ads… and let’s not even consider the 3.9 million that barak obama has already spent, since you won’t make that much in your working lifetime…

item! think you know what the word privacy means? better think again if you’re living in the bush regime… (or on second thought, it may be best no to think at all… after all if it works for the articulator in chief…)

item! maybe instead of spending all that money on tv advertising romney should just buy a few ipods…

last item! finally, i know this website really should go in the “that’s just so wrong” category, but at the same time there’s something just so deadly accurate about some of the pictures… (and the one of uncle (or is that aunt) newt had your friendly neighborhood moose literally rolling on the floor…)

for all the talk in washington about caring for our troops, whether it’s republicans saying that democrats who want to cut war funding don’t support the troops that are there or democrats blaming republicans for putting them “in harm’s way” in the first place, it seems like both sides of the aisle are doing a wonderful job of forgetting about them once they get home, whether it’s deplorable conditions at walter reed hospital, veterans who have lost limbs or suffered other injuries not getting the equipment they need to help them have productive lives now that they’re back, or this latest issue:

from portland’s nbc affiliate wcsh:

When they came home from Iraq, 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard had been deployed longer than any other ground combat unit. The tour lasted 22 months and had been extended as part of President Bush’s surge.

1st Lt. Jon Anderson said he never expected to come home to this: A government refusing to pay education benefits he says he should have earned under the GI bill.

“It’s pretty much a slap in the face,” Anderson said. “I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership… once again failing the soldiers.”

Anderson’s orders, and the orders of 1,161 other Minnesota guard members, were written for 729 days.

Had they been written for 730 days, just one day more, the soldiers would receive those benefits to pay for school.

“Which would be allowing the soldiers an extra $500 to $800 a month,” Anderson said.

That money would help him pay for his master’s degree in public administration. It would help Anderson’s fellow platoon leader, John Hobot, pay for a degree in law enforcement.”I would assume, and I would hope, that when I get back from a deployment of 22 months, my senior leadership in Washington, the leadership that extended us in the first place, would take care of us once we got home,” Hobot said.

more than that, one would think with pres. w. going back to congress and asking for billions and billions more to fight his war, someone would stand up and at least say “only if at least a part of this is going to go to taking care of our troops once they’re back and not treating them like the disposable people you seem to think they are…