Maybe they’re reading this post right now

Neddie finds something rather disturbing: a border guard leaving a comment in a blog, flaunting his knowledge of the comings and goings of the blogger at a border crossing. It’s vaguely threatening, in a “I know where you live” kind of way. The assertion that “you do not have a right to privacy” is even more creepy—I think someone on the border patrol is a little too full of himself.

I’ve driven up to Canada a couple of times now, and the remarkable contrast has been how pleasant and casual the guards at the entry into Canada have been, and how surly, snide, and officious the guards coming back into the US have been. I don’t quite understand the point of having the guards at the border treating people as potential criminals; it’s not as if real criminals and terrorists are going to be at all dissuaded by supercilious snottiness, but legitimate visitors to our country are going to be dismayed by our gracelessness at the doorway.

Even us residents aren’t at all thrilled with their behavior. After showing multiple forms of ID and answering all their questions, they still acted suspicious and resentful, as if they were offended that I had dared visit a foreign country, and they weren’t sure if they should let me come back home. (Uh-oh…next time I visit Canada, are the guards going to mutter about my blog and subject me to a strip search now?)

It’s an honor, of sorts

She beat Brownback. She trounced Tancredo. She even clobbered Coburn. America’s Holiest Congressperson is Minnesota’s own Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

Bachmann, an Evangelical Lutheran, and self-professed “fool for Christ,” ran for Congress because God—and her husband—wanted her to. The representative publicly credited her campaign to her submission to her husband, who was channeling God’s wishes for her.

Prior to this higher calling, Bachmann earned a law degree from Coburn, an affiliate of Oral Roberts University, and helped found a charter school where she reportedly worked to prevent the Disney movie Aladdin from being shown, because it supposedly promoted paganism. Then, as a Minnesota state senator, Bachmann launched a crusade to outlaw gay marriage that turned into a highly publicized spectacle replete with restroom run-ins with angry lesbians and grainy photos suggesting that Bachmann was “spying” on a gay rights rally while crouching behind a bush.

Tireless in her pursuit, Bachmann has even gone so far as to be active in efforts to “rehabilitate” people who “suffer from ‘same-sex attractions,’ and once articulated the merits of being “hot for Jesus Christ.”

The magazine also has a list of our Ten Dumbest Congressperson — couldn’t they have saved some space by consolidating the two lists?

Hitchens on Rose

Christopher Hitchens’ appearance on the Daily Show was a disappointment—largely because Hitchens seemed to be half in the bag, and Stewart kept stepping all over his words trying to make them funny, and the short format was not to the favor of a fellow who tends to speak in complete sentences and paragraphs. So how about a half hour interview with an alert Hitchens, with an interviewer who’s interested in hearing what he has to say, and gives him the opportunity to speak at more length? Here’s Hitchens on the Charlie Rose show.

Much better, even if I disagreed strongly with Hitchens on much of what he said.

More than half of the interview is taken up with discussing the Iraq war. I agree with Hitchens’ assessment that an important nation in the Middle East is on the road to destruction, that it is going to be a failed state, and that by pulling out we diminish the power of the US in the region. I also agree that it is a great tragedy, and that leaving Iraq will mean many of our supporters will die. Where I disagree, though, is that Hitchens thinks the war was inevitable and necessary, and that the US did the right thing by invading. I say we sowed the seeds of defeat when our government decided the appropriate response was to invade with crushing force, and make Iraq a treasure chest to be looted by military contractors. The current ongoing debacle can be blamed directly on the credulous boosters for war as a prerequisite for nation building, of whom Hitchens was one.

The last half is a discussion of his new book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I haven’t read it yet—my copy is supposed to arrive this next week—but I’m looking forward to it, and there’s some hope from this interview that it will be a solid piece of work. This part of the interview was much less contentious than the first half, I thought — I’d be curious to see what a Christian pro-war Republican would say, though.

Go ahead and talk about the Republican debate

I don’t want to talk about it — I despise the whole field — but everyone is emailing me about it, and I was even talking to my mother on the phone tonight and she asked me about it (I said I wouldn’t watch those weasels unless they were in a crotch-kicking contest). I’ll let this thread open up for a free-for-all discussion of the cacophony.

All I’ve heard so far is that a) they avoided talking about Bush, preferring to measure themselves against Reagan (Reagan was almost as great an incompetent as the current resident, so they’re obviously aiming low), and b) when they were asked about evolution, a goodly subset of them were so stupid that they said they didn’t believe it. Too bad this debate wasn’t merged with that quiz show, so some stern harridan could have announced, “You are the weakest link!” and pulled a lever that would have catapulted them into a shark tank or something entertaining.

So who are the Republican anti-science goons? Huckabee, Brownback, and … ?

Watch the response at Crooks and Liars. The foolish three are Huckabee, Brownback, and Tancredo.

Mitt Romney flaunts his taste

Romney was asked to name his favorite novel, and what does he say? Battlefield Earth, by L. Ron Hubbard — that monstrous lump of pulp with the absurd Mary Sue plot. Admittedly, it wasn’t as bad as the Eye of Argon, but still … maybe it’s just that someone who can swallow the goofy mythology of the Mormon church is a little more open to the goofy mythology of the Church of Scientology founder (or ghost-writer). I would have at least expected him to have slightly higher literary standards, though.

Deliberate and calculated lies

Atrios has links and videos of the Tillman hearings on misinformation from the battlefield; Tillman, you may recall, was the soldier who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan a few years ago. Jessica Lynch also gives an accurate account of her story. The common theme is that our government lied to us, intentionally distorting the facts to achieve propaganda goals. These are ugly stories of a government with no regard for the truth, except in how it can be twisted to support failed policies.

Why is this administration still in office again?

What are you doing, Al?

Al Gore is generally a good guy, and I think his message on global warming is an important one. He’s still traveling around, giving his slideshow that we’ve seen in An Inconvenient Truth, but apparently he has added some new material — and these aren’t slides that make me very happy.

The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to the “rise of humans.”

Cool beans. So he believes that Homo sapiens evolved from other hominid ancestors, right? Nope. In the very same breath, he then continued to explain that according to his religious beliefs, this “rise of humans” was God’s creation of mankind — apparently 200,000 years ago. His graph then changed to include the caption “Adam & Eve” above this starting point.

Wha…?

He might as well have shown the chart of global temperature vs. number of pirates — it’s nonsense that completely undercuts the serious of the science he’s discussing.

It’s strange how this one little slide makes me far less enthusiastic about the prospect of another Gore run for the presidency. Even if he doesn’t actually believe in a literal creation event for mankind, he’s not above pandering to the ignorant.