2009 April | Hanlon's Razor

Update: religious people STILL more likely to advocate torture

By Hanlon, on April 30th, 2009 at 08:10 PM

From the Pew people:

torture

I say “update” because I found a similar study back in 2007. Funny stuff.

Hanlon’s Theatre: Do You Feel Safer?

By Hanlon, on April 30th, 2009 at 08:01 PM

When in doubt, try to scare the shit out of people.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKNbi-_Mxo8[/youtube]

You know why I feel safer with Obama? Because I know damn well that he won’t ignore a memo that says “BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN US.”

The mighty Michelle Bachmann

By Hanlon, on April 30th, 2009 at 03:58 PM

bachman I’ve tried to avoid this, but in the past week there’s been a damn avalanche of stupidity from this woman. See, playing the game of “boy check out what this idiot said” is a fun diversion, but sometimes a special occasion pops up. If, for example, it’s a person who actually got elected instead of a pundit, and if it happens over, and over, and over again.

Exhibit A: Bachmann completely misses who to blame the Great Depression on.

“FDR applied just the opposite formula — the Hoot-Smalley Act, which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions, and then, of course, trade barriers and the regulatory burden and tax barriers. That’s what we saw happen under FDR. That took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost 10 years under that kind of thinking.”

This is actually triple-wrong. First off it’s the “Smoot-Hawley” Act, both Smoot and Hawley were republicans, and the bill was signed under president Hoover. Triple wrong.

Exhibit B: she tries to draw some idiotic connection between swine flu epidemics and Democrats.

Bachmann, speaking on Pajamas TV, noted: “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

Just single-wrong this time, as in the swine flu happened in 1976 under Ford, not Carter.

Exhibit C: she has absolutely no farking clue how hate crime laws work.

If you have an individual going through a crosswalk and a person is in their car and they hit that person in the crosswalk, it is up to the person who is hit to file the charge if it was a hate crime or not. So if the person is gay, and that is the status that is being protected, and the person driving the car is straight, would it be a hate crime if the person driving the car who is straight hit the person who is gay in the crosswalk? So does it say, then, that that life that was hit in the crosswalk is more valuable because it was a gay life versus if the person who was in the car, who is gay, who hits the person in the crosswalk, who is straight, does that mean that the straight person in the crosswalk doesn’t have a cause of action against the person who is gay who is driving that car? It raises the question of whose life is valuable and whose isn’t. That is the question that Mr. Gohmert raised earlier.

Yeah, once again, hate crime laws don’t work like that. If a straight guy runs a red light and hits a gay guy, it’s reckless driving and possible involuntary manslaughter if the dude dies. That’s it. If you actually read the damn thing there’s no way to come up with a conclusion like Bachmann. It’s about protecting people from being victimized for who they are, period.

It’s terrifying that people voted for her. I’ve got my fingers crossed she won’t last long. Or maybe I hope she does, it gives me some comic relief.

This might be the stupidest news day I have ever seen.

By Will, on April 30th, 2009 at 02:02 PM

medicine I read Fark. It’s a great site for a whole mishmash of links for politics, tech stuff, and general bullshit. Many of the stories we cover here, I find on Fark. Usually I can find three or four good and/or remarkably terrible stories and links to share with Hanlon and turn into posts, but today has been a goddamn record for political crazystupid. Instead of going over them post-by-post, I’m just going to throw up the biggest, dumbest stories with quotes to help you understand how insane today has been.

The “American Grand Jury” has indicted Obama for fraud and treason.

After reviewing the evidence and voting, the 32 member American Grand Jury handed down the presentment(s) recommending that person(s) known as Barack Obama, aka: Barack Obama, Jr., aka: Barack Hussein Obama, aka: Barry Soetoro; aka: Barry Obama; aka: Barack H. Obama, aka: Barack Obama II, presumed President of the United States, be tried in Criminal Court for charges of fraud (eligibility) and treason.

Said Grand Jury was convened under the power and authority vested with the people as guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States of America, Amendent 5 of the Bill of Rights.

This is the first time I have ever seen anyone interpret the Fifth Amendment as giving carte blanche for any group of fuckwits to form a “grand jury” and judge people. Also, according to the site’s “history” page, the group was either led or inspired by a Mr. Leo Donofrio, the New Jersey lawyer who filed suit in 2008 claiming that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.

Anti-Specter fail

By Hanlon, on April 30th, 2009 at 11:38 AM

Now THAT'S funny. I knew that the Republicans were going to start flailing when Specter ran off, but I had no idea it was going to get this bad. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has launched a site called Meet Democrat Arlen Specter. The premise of the whole thing is that… Arlen used to support Republicans and knock Democrats.

From their press release:

“In light of Senator Specter’s changing political party, we felt it was our civic duty to adequately inform Pennsylvania Democrat primary voters about their new Senator’s record and his close relationship with our former President George W. Bush,” said NRSC spokeswoman Amber Wilkerson.

Uh… yeah. As far as a political move goes, this is outright moronic.

What the hell is the NRSC’s goal here? To get Specter to lose the Democratic primary? Okay, let’s say he loses. He gets replaced with a candidate who is far more to the left than Specter and then that guy wins the overall, leaving the Senate even leftier than it was before. It’s like the NRSC read my earlier post and decided to make sure the exact opposite happens.

If the goal is to get someone too liberal on the ticket so Toomey has a chance, well they muffed that one up too. By highlighting Specter’s attachments to the Republican Party as the reason not to vote for him, any of the rightward-leaning Democrats receiving the calls are certainly not going to be turned off of Specter and onto the guy on the Republican ticket. It’s a robo-call that calls the entire Republican Party Specter’s albatross.

It isn’t just “here’s Specter with Bush”, it’s Specter on Lynn Swann, John McCain, Limbaugh, talking about Reid, the works. We’re looking at the kind of “shoot yourself in the foot” tactic that I’d expect out of the DCCC. The Republicans appear to want Specter to lose for no reason other than they’re mad at him. It’s amazingly short-sighted and if it works they’re going to be in even worse shape come 2010.

Budget passes Congress with not one single Republican vote

By Hanlon, on April 29th, 2009 at 11:18 PM

Not in the House, where Kucinich was amongst the 16 Democrats who said no.

Not in the Senate, where newfound Democrat Specter was amongst the four who said no.

Best part? The Republicans will probably blame Obama for not being bipartisan enough.

100 days

By Hanlon, on April 29th, 2009 at 08:26 PM

To be honest, I don’t really care. Hooray, 100. Tomorrow: 101. Then 102. I’m more curious about his 365th; will we be in a better position in a year?

Bill Kristol is never right about anything ever

By Hanlon, on April 29th, 2009 at 04:15 PM

Go sit in the corner, dunce. In the wake of Specter’s defection, it’s been hard to avoid looking at the last time Republicans lost a member, when Jim Jeffords turned Independent in 2001. Whether or not a lesson can be drawn from history (Olympia Snowe argues it can) it’s still a worthwhile event to peer back at.

Bill Kristol agrees, but not only in an ass-backwards kind of way, he also manages to land so far on the wrong side of “correlation does not imply causation” it’s comical.

On May 24, 2001, I wrote an op-ed for The Post in the wake of Vermont Sen. James Jeffords’s party switch. I argued that the switch, which cost Republicans control of the Senate, could well turn out to be good for President Bush.

Not entirely for the reasons I speculated on in the op-ed, I turned out to be right. Bush was still able to get enough cooperation to govern over the next year and a half, and he was also able to run successfully against the Democratic Senate in the fall of 2002. The GOP regained control that November.

“Not entirely” would be an understatement, Bill. Those two events have nothing to do with one another. In fact, all of that happened despite Jeffords’ defection, not because of it. Jeffords’ party-switch wasn’t good for the Republicans at all. It was bad in the short term, mostly ineffective in the long-term. He might as well have claimed that Bush won because the Red Sox won the World Series, which broke the famous Washington Redskins electoral “prediction”.

New Hampshire Senate approves gay marriage

By Hanlon, on April 29th, 2009 at 04:01 PM

It’s gonna start coming faster and faster now, just you watch.

US to cut off Taliban funding: the opium

By Hanlon, on April 29th, 2009 at 10:43 AM

An air strike on the land Whenever I see a story like this, it feels like it’s come from the past. Like somehow I accidentally opened up my Google Reader’s archive and read a story from 2002. The headline US Aims to cut off Taliban’s bankroll, all by itself, explains how badly the United States lost its way in the “war on terror”.

Buckle up, things get hilarious.

Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.

Yeah. The Taliban, who we supposedly totally decimated and drove out of Afghanistan, are pulling in more money than the board of AIG from friggin’ opium trade alone.

We landed in this mess thanks to an administration that wanted to claim that these guys were a threat to civilization itself, but that the war could be fought on the cheap with minimal resources. As unpalatable as a bombing of Dresden style assault might have been in 2002, 2009 might be going a little more smoothly had the Bush Administration treated their war like a damn war and not a quick pit stop before Iraq.

I dunno how Obama thinks we’re going to get out of this one, and right now I’m not really convinced he knows either. The “hey let’s just throw a bunch of troops in there” thing hasn’t exactly proven to be the magic bullet.