Archive for January, 2010

That’s what Scott Roeder, murderer of abortion provider George Tiller, just got from a jury after a scant 37 minutes deliberation. Roeder had, of course, hoped to turn his trial into a media circus and referendum on abortion. By arguing a manslaughter defense and hopefully getting away with a mere five years — the thrust of the defense being that Roeder had an “unreasonable yet sincere conviction” that he had to shoot Tiller in order to save babies, because guys like him care so much about the babies — he and his ideological brethren at Operation Rescue hoped to make his trial the first shot across the bow in the war to eventually overturn Roe v. Wade. The jury, comprised of the sensible Kansans, wasn’t having any. Instead of seeing a valiant superhero of the Lord courageously protecting the unborn, they saw a cowardly, first-class douche canoe who willingly popped a man in the back of the head in public, and handed him a first-degree murder conviction. The prosecutor says she will seek a “hard 50″ sentence, meaning Roeder will have to serve at least 50 years before eligibility for parole. This is effectively the same as life without parole for a man who’s already 51. Once behind bars, if very unlucky, Roeder may have to face an entirely different kind of “hard 50.” Never fear, Scott. Once they’re done with you in there, at least you won’t need an abortion.

What never ceases to amaze me about the Texas State Board of Education is the dazzling arrogance with which they blindly soldier on in the face of almost total loathing from everyone in the state who isn’t a rabid fundagelical teabagger. This is a pretty conservative state, gang, but when you get an editorial like this from the newspaper in Denton — just a short drive north from the DFW Metroplex, so it’s not exactly the tree-hugging lefty Sodom that is Austin — you know you’ve gone so far over the top in your demagoguery that you’ve literally lapped yourself and gotten jammed up your own ass. The lead to this piece is pure win, and the rest ain’t bad at all. All you have to do to show how dire things are at the SBOE is simply to describe what they do. Being ignorant is nothing to be ashamed of, but it is nothing to be particularly proud of either. A large and disruptive segment of the Texas State Board of Education is not only ignorant — a state that we all share at various times and on various subjects — it is proudly and aggressively ignorant, which goes beyond simple ignorance and ventures into the territory of malignant stupidity. Gold. Of course, the defining characteristic of the extremist ideologue is to take the fact that everybody hates you as validation of your perfect and utter rightness in all things. After all, as Dan McLeroy has so bravely said, somebody’s gotta stand up to alla dem expertses!

Lately we’ve been getting a series of barely literate emails from a guy who’s following the usual pattern: Asserting his beliefs as facts, backing them up with variants of “Look at the trees!” and “Study the Bible!”, then bitterly protesting how rude we are for dismissing him as a dimwit. Here’s one excerpt for you to get the general gist. You see why do you insult me, that shows that your mine is block. You see finding the truth comes with humility not pride. So i think you should write with respect. well it looks like you have not really studied the Bible, you call it a book of fairy tales. While one of the greatest scientist like isaac newton call it the word of God and studied it. Thats kind of surprising to here those words from a renowned scientist. And it goes on like that. Amusing, I suppose, the way utter ignoramuses think they’re so humble the way they spout ignorance with smug condescension. But that’s what religion offers: the confidence of faith in ignorance over actual knowledge.

Via email today, I learned the sad news of the passing of Ashlea Doty at the age of 34. When I was host from 2002-04, Ashlea was part of the AETV studio crew. She was enormously good humored, and was one of the four of us who visited a Halloween “Hell House” at a local Pentecostal church the first year any of us did that (my report on that night appears to have been scrubbed from the internets following the discontinuation of GeoCities). After I left the show, she had already drifted away from ACA, but I’d still see her on occasion working as a vet tech at the clinic where I took my dog. She’ll be missed by those who knew her, and to everyone else, remember that every day above ground is a good day. Make them all count.

Okay, so that preposterous, demented d-bag Mike Adams has noticed all the ridicule he’s been getting online, and has, like most deluded narcissists, taken it for validation of his awesomeness. In a new post, he offers the following observation, which deserves an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in Clueless Projection. Now, remember this is the guy who wrote a trillion-word attack on skeptics that led Orac to call him “a pyromaniac in a straw man factory”… Salient hypocrisy boldfaced. Read more