Once upon a time, there was a bill moving through congress that was a good bill. It increased funding for research, and for science and math education. It had bipartisan support and was sailing through.

There is a villain to this story, though. Some congresscreatures — Republicans, led by a fool from Texas — didn’t like the good little bill. It’s not clear why. Maybe because it was going to cost some money. Maybe just because they don’t like that science and education stuff.

So they hatched a plan, taking advantage of a little rule. They made a motion to recommit, stopping the bill in its tracks by adding a new addition that would require the whole thing to go back to committee. Congress could vote to kill the addition, which would let the bill proceed, or they could vote to for the recommit, throwing the good little bill back.

Now here’s the cunning part: the addition was a completely irrelevant demand, a new requirement that federal employees caught watching porn would not get paid. Congress could vote for better science and education funding and allow porn watching, or they could vote against science and education and against porn. Sneaky. Devious. Evil. Jebus, but I’ve come to despise Republicans.

So what happened? 121 Democrats promptly abandoned the bill and voted against it. Because they’re cowards without a single bone of principle in their flabby, craven bodies. They didn’t want to be seen voting for porn, so they let the Rethuglican ringmaster crack his whip and herd them right where he wanted them to go.

I think I despise them all.

That insane tea-baggin’ Maine GOP convention did something else of interest. Some of the Republican caucuses were held in a local school, including the 8th grade classroom of teacher Paul Clifford. He returned to the classroom after the weekend to discover that the Republicans had indulged themselves in remodeling the classroom.

• For seven years, Clifford has had “a collage-type poster depicting the history of the U.S. labor movement” on his classroom door. He uses it “to teach his students how to incorporate collages into their annual project on Norman Rockwell’s historic ‘Four Freedoms’ illustrations.” When Clifford returned to his classroom on Monday, after the GOP caucuses, the poster was gone; in its place was a sticker reading, “Working People Vote Republican.”

• Republicans opened a “closed cardboard box they found near Clifford’s desk” and later objected to the fact that it contained copies of the U.S. Constitution donated to the school by the American Civil Liberties Union.

• After the caucuses, “rank-and-file Republicans who were upset by what they said they had seen in Clifford’s classroom” began calling the school, objecting to student art they had seen and a sticker on a filing cabinet reading “People for the American Way — Fight the Right.”

Labor is so un-American, Norman Rockwell was an America-hating commie pinko, and kids shouldn’t be exposed to the Constitution, especially if the ACLU likes it.

It’s getting so you can’t tell the patriots from the vandals. And Republicans are clearly the party against intellectualism, education, and diversity.

We shouldn’t pick on the South all the time, so here is a tale out of the eminently Yankee state of Maine. The Maine Republican party recently met to establis their official platform, and ended up getting hijacked by the tea-baggers. Their new platform contains all kinds of nutty demands.

The document calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, demands an investigation of “collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth,” suggests the adoption of “Austrian Economics,” declares that “‘Freedom of Religion’ does not mean ‘freedom from religion'” (which I guess makes atheism illegal), insists that “healthcare is not a right,” calls for the abrogation of the “UN Treaty on Rights of the Child” and the “Law Of The Sea Treaty” and declares that we must resist “efforts to create a one world government.”

It also contains favorable mentions of both the Tea Party and Ron Paul. You can read the whole thing here.

There are other jewels in there. Marriage is between one man and one woman; all illegal aliens must be immediately arrested, detained, and deported without any possibility of amnesty; the border must be sealed; drill, baby, drill; US out of the UN!; and yes, it really does want to abolish the state board of education and put all schools under entirely local control.

The wingnuts have taken over.

Although…if you’ve ever read the Texas Republican Party platform an any time in the last 20 years, you might also realize that the Maine platform is on the mild side of Republican lunacy.

I apologize. You might not want to read any of this post if you simply cannot bear the raging stupidity that characterizes Fox News. Fair warning: the clip below features both Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin.

I suspect that a lot of you, if you got this far, turned that clip off scant moments into it. The inanity and ignorance is too strong. But here are just a few tidbits. In his opening statement, that fathead O’Reilly says:

The constitution clearly states that the government cannot impose religion on citizens, but setting aside a day to encourage expression of voluntary spirituality is in no way an imposition.

No, here’s what the first amendment actually says.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The US government does not get to establish or favor a particular religion; it is officially excluded from the religion game. The National Day of Prayer is not simply a day of “voluntary spirituality”, but is an open endorsement of sectarian religious belief by the government, in violation of the Constitution. The NDP was made law by religious advocates like Billy Graham and was passed by legislators who specifically invoked the Christian god; it is currently managed by a gang of right-wing religious zealots who send out suggested proclamation texts to the president and state governors that uses Bible quotes…and those texts are frequently used verbatim.

But wait! Can Sarah Palin possibly be even dumber than O’Reilly? You betcha.

…our constitution of course acknowledging that our unalienable rights come from god not man…

Oy.

Here is the first sentence of that thoroughly god-free document, the Constitution of the United States of America.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Yes — the emphasis is in the original.

The babbling goes on from there, with O’Reilly even claiming that the Constitution is based on the Ten Commandments, which is also news to me: I’ve missed the parts that set aside holy days, demand worship of a single god, or outlaws coveting; it doesn’t even make murder and theft illegal! The Constitution is all about laying out the mechanisms of a civil government, the division of powers, specifying what powers each branch has, etc.; the bill of rights lays out specific rights and privileges for citizens. Read it yourself. There’s nothing Biblical in there, absolutely nothing derived from the old or new testaments, and likewise, there is nothing in the Bible that even approximates it in intent or substance.

Jesus, these people are morons.

If you want to cleanse your brain a little bit, here’s another clip from Fox & Friends this past weekend, where the Fox idjit is just as dumb, but in this case, his guest is Dan Barker…who takes him apart.

I was shocked to see that the Virginia attorney general has filed papers against the climate researcher, Michael Mann. Mann had worked at the University of Virginia for 5 or 6 years, doing climate studies that cost the state about a half million dollars over that time. (To put that in perspective, that’s a middling sized grant; big biomedical researchers can get much more than that.) Cuccinelli is claiming that Mann committed fraud, and wants to demand all that money back.

There are no grounds to consider Mann to have committed any breach of ethics. The sole foundation for his legal attack is the hacked email messages from the CRU, which contained no nefarious revelations…other than that some scientists are really pissed off at clueless denialists like Cuccinelli. Most annoyingly, Mann was already subjected to an ethics review, again driven by people complaining about the CRU emails, and was completely absolved of any wrongdoing.

This is a witch hunt, nothing more. Cuccinelli is not pursuing a scientist because he did wrong, he is pursuing a scientist because he did not like the results he honestly got. He is using the law to take a political cheap shot with no basis in substance. That can only have a chilling effect, if carried out: apparently, the only results you are allowed to get at the University of Virginia are those that fit the preconceptions of conservative ideology. If anyone has acted unethically in this matter, it’s Virginia’s Attorney General.

I suggested in jest that maybe we should put England’s sensible Lord Justice Laws on our Supreme Court, but maybe they still need rationalists over there. The Guardian has been using a stellar pro-science panel (Goldacre and Singh, to name two members) to quiz representatives of various political parties on their science stance. They just interviewed the United Kingdom Independence Party, whose representative was…Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. You have got to be kidding; that man is a raving loon. So the UKIP rejects the science of global warming, but advocates for homeopathy.

My favorite part, though, was their position on stem cell research.

Wherever stem cells can be obtained by means other than the killing of very small children, it is ethical only to obtain the stem cells by means that do not involve the loss of little lives. On this basis, there is no reason why Britain should not play a leading part in stem cell research.

That’s completely batty. Why, how can science proceed if we are not free to charge into schoolyards, butchering little tykes so we can harvest a few grams of cells from their guts? The summary of their science policy is damning.

Ukip is the only significant party to support homeopathy, and the only party apart from the BNP still in denial over climate change. The appointment of Viscount Monckton as a science spokesman adds to the air of a party of old British eccentrics.

Woeful.

The one sad bit of this lunatic party is that Pat Condell supports them. Say it ain’t so, Pat — how can anyone defend a party run by refugees from the looney bin?

Prince Charles always seemed like a walloping great dunderhead to me, and I see that my opinion has been confirmed. His great cause, the philanthropic purpose he’d like to be remembered for, is propping up the quackery of homeopathy and other such nonsensical therapies. And now one of his aides in this misguided impulse has been arrested for fraud. How appropriate. I doubt that Charles has done any embezzling — British royalty are rich enough that it would be superfluous — but it’s a shame that he won’t be arrested for the greater harm he has perpetrated.

Any system of hereditary transfer of leadership is going to be afflicted with the unfortunate vagaries of chance, compounded by the distortion of traditional privilege. Why the British continue to put up with this nonsense is a mystery…maybe one virtue of ninnies like Charles is that when an obvious fool sits on the throne, people will come to their senses.

(Nah, that won’t happen. We had a couple of palpable incompetents running the US for a while — Reagan and Bush the Younger — and we’ve still got people revering them.)