Truly scary. This guy Matt McLaughlin wants to make the Bible "a textbook for grades one through twelve" in California schools "to pupils whose parents do not opt-out by specific objection." (Note: The above links directly to a PDF file.) He tries to spin it by adding that it'd be "for voluntary reading and study" and as part of "as part of a secular program of education." Fine. As long as the Bible is one of several books, say, the texts of the world's five largest religions. That way the kids can get a truly well-rounded religious education.

More on the King James Textbook web site where we learn the following in answer to the predictable question about the separation of church and state:

This initiative provides for the King James Bible to be studied as a great work of literature only. The King James Bible was first published in 1611 and it has become a very important part of our cultural heritage and of the history of the English language.

There is so much to learn by reading the Bible that we should not keep future generations ignorant of one of the most influential books ever written!

The United States Supreme Court has said that studying the Bible is perfectly fine in the public schools when it is presented objectively as part of a secular program of education.

This initiative provides for voluntary study of the King James Bible without devotional or denominational purpose and it allows parents to "opt out" if they do not want their children to participate.

Therefore, because the initiative is for educational purposes only it is Constitutional and does not violate the First Amendment.

Guess that's right. Of course, reading the Koran or, say, Marx's Communist Manifesto would be just as appropriate under those guidelines, too. And just as easy to make sense of for first through twelfth graders, I'm sure.

In the "Just Plain Funny" category: these guys built a "Bond-like" car complete with special gadgets . . . so they could hunt rabbits illegally. Their bunnymobile was even capable of launching a couple of old bicycles behind it to slow the cops down. You read that right.

This story about a gay father being told by a Tennessee court to stay in the closet when his son is around defies belief. The guy was thrown in jail for telling his son he's gay. (Via Atrios)

A Great Way to Make Dough

As just seen on 60 Minutes: in an economy where most businesses do little more for the community that propriety demands, the Greystone Bakery in Yonkers, NC serves as a role model. Not only do they employ the homeless and former felons to help bake their cakes (which retail for $30+), but they also make a profit, which they then pass on to various charities. Their hiring policy appears literally to be "first come, first served."

These people are real heroes. This is capitalism you can actually believe in.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill confirms that the White House planned a pre-emptive war on Iraq before 9/11.

From CNN:

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."

Perhaps this whole house of cards post-9/11 argument for the war is finally about to come down?

O'Neill also described Bush's presence in his Cabinet meetings as "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

Wes Clark is kicking butt and taking names. Specifically, Carl Rove's butt.

Latest insanity from the Rev. Fred Phelps. He sent the director of Parks and Recreation of Topeka Rogers Brazier a $250 check to sponsor a park bench. The message he wished enscribed thereon: "Matt Shepard in Hell. He Defied God's Law."

Brazier said he'd send the check back, so Phelps said he'd "probably" sue:

"It would be because of the content of the message. That's exactly what the Supreme Court says government cannot regulate. Once you allow memorials and messages of one kind, you have to allow all of it."

The Rev. Phelps is awfully creative when it comes to hating gays, I'll give him that much.

Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism. For anyone who believes that the existence of neocons is a conspiracy theory or that mentioning them is akin to anti-Semiticism. These are them, folks. Don't think Francis Fukuyama is Jewish or Bill Bennett either. It ain't about being Jewish. It's about buying into a worldview and that litany of names at the bottom of the page shows you those who do. And the Project for the New American Century couldn't be more real or formidable.

So, Mr. Brooks, are you ready to plead insanity? No, I think as Eric Alterman points out, you know very well what you're doing. Says he:

I know Brooks is too smart to mean what he professes to say. I mean the term [neocon] is self-chosen by the people who operate under its rubric and is used frequently by the likes of Irving Kristol and Norman Podohoretz to describe themselves. I have on the shelf of my library, five books: John Erman’s The Rise of Neoconservatism, Cary Dorrien’s The Neoconservative Mind, Peter Steinfels’ The Neoconservatives, Mark Gerson’s The Essential Neoconservative Reader and Irving Kristol’s Neoconservatism; Autobiography of an Idea. Is Brooks saying all of these people are playing at anti-Semitism? Really, it’s beyond stupid and Brooks is quite smart so he really should apologize before he loses all credibility with his fair-minded (and well-wishing) critics.

That letter was dated September 20th, 2001, folks. The neocons are a smart bunch. Anybody who's given the history of this group even a cursory review knows they wanted to do this long before 9/11. Knows that they'd floated the ideas of pre-emptive attacks and exporting democracy a decade earlier and had been shot down. Soon after September 11th--while bodies were still being ppulled from the rubble-- they saw their opening, knew they'd now have a sympathetic audience, and they seized the day.

Don't play us for fools, Mr. Brooks.

Wonderful little site for fans of the movie Lost in Translation. Links to a video of the Kevin Shields song "City Girl" used in the flick, too.

Now the neocons are claiming that "neocon" is a liberal invention to mask anti-semiticim.

Thanks to Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall and the Daily Howler for jumping all over David Brooks' absurd assertion that "neocon" is a liberal codeword: "Con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish,'" he claims.

The shame is people believe this crap and soon you'll be hearing on Fox News that every time a left-winger complains about the influence of the neocons , what he's really complaining about is a right-wing Jewish cabal holding sway over the Bush administration. Such rubbish. Even a cursory glance at the origins of the term reveals that the neocons came up with it themselves. Why here, for example, a Wall Street Journal writer, Max Boot questions the use of the term, but admits the following:

The original neocons were a band of liberal intellectuals who rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s. At first the neocons clustered around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. The neocons, in the famous formulation of one of their leaders, Irving Kristol, were "liberals mugged by reality."

Now, he too asserts that the term is sometimes misused by folks to insinuate some sorta Jewish cabal:

When Buchananites toss around "neoconservative" -- and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen -- it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is "Jewish conservative." This is a malicious slur on two levels. First, many of the leading neocons aren't Jewish; Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Father John Neuhaus and Michael Novak aren't exactly menorah lighters. Second, support for Israel -- a key tenet of neoconservatism -- is hardly confined to Jews; its strongest constituency in America happens to be among evangelical Christians.

Fair enough. At least he has the decency to show the term's used that way by Republicans, too. And he doesn't deny that there truly is a group of neoconservatives who *do* have an influence on the Bush White House:

The most prominent champions of this view inside the administration are Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Their agenda is known as "neoconservatism," though a more accurate term might be "hard Wilsonianism." Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson's championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives. ("Soft Wilsonians," a k a liberals, place their reliance, in Charles Krauthammer's trenchant phrase, on paper, not power.) Like Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, "hard Wilsonians" want to use American might to promote American ideals.

Exactly! Thank you Mr. Boot. Those are *precisely* the neocons I'm referring to when I say "neocon."

Fascinating story about how Philip F. Gura found a photo of Emily Dickinson on eBay. While its authenticity is still being established, it seems increasingly likely that it's the real deal. Previously, scholars had believed there to be only a single surviving photo of the great American poet.

Gura says,

I know it is she, even if I cannot yet absolutely prove it. If the image proves genuine beyond a doubt, I realize that I will have to find a home for it in some institution, for it then would belong in a new way to all people who love Dickinson’s poetry. Right now, however, I can look at this image every day and thus perhaps get as "close" to this elusive woman as anyone can. It is a delightful feeling.

Gura picked up the photo for $481. The starting price had been $24 and only one other individual (Robert Lucas, "a well-known dealer in Dickinsoniana") even bid on it.

Andrew Sullivan makes an excellent point about Britney's annulment and our hyprocrisy in being titillated by it whilst silmultaneously being horrified by the idea of gay unions:

BRITNEY'S CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT: Look, I know some of you will object to the logic, but can you not see how something like Britney Spears' insta-marriage in Las Vegas might infuriate long-committed gay couples who, even now, don't have a shred of the rights Ms Spears enjoyed for a few days? It is one thing for people to declare their commitment to traditional marriage - i.e. procreative, life-long, heterosexual. It is another thing when that ideal has almost no relationship to civil marriage as it now exists for straights; and when it is nevertheless used to deny gay people access to the institution. Over the holidays, I found myself watching all those VH1 list shows, and happened across the top ten or twenty (I forget which) shortest Hollywood marriages in history. Ha ha ha. We live a world in which Britney Spears just engaged in something "sacred" (in the president's words), where instant and joke hetero marriages and divorces are a subject of titillation, and where a decades-long monogamous lesbian marriage is a threat to civilization as we know it. Please. Can we have a smidgen of consistency here?

Took this Unabomber Quiz on The Smoking Gun and, thank god, I'm normal. Kinda creepy.

This hare-brained US-VISIT program has just been enacted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to fingerprint and photograph visitors to the United States. Ridiculous! How did the terrorists kill 3000 people? By killing themselves. They're not gonna care about being finger-printed - especially if they're ignorant stooges who haven't even fallen under the radar of the intelligence agencies. I mean how many of the terrorists on those 9/11 jets were *known* terrorists? (Many of them apparently didn't even know what they were in for when they got on those planes - in case, they decided to chicken out. Which doesn't justify their participation, of course.)

Aren't most of the guys actually on any terrorist list usually pulling the trigger from the other side of the pond? Isn't publicizing this program just going to ensure that? OK, so it's a possible deterrant to their setting foot on U.S. soil. But I'm still guessing it's the unknown stooges we've really gotta worry about anyway.

The program's euphemistic label US-VISIT stands for United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology. Sigh.

Remember those three questions they used to ask you at the airport (did you pack your own bags? have your bags been out of your sight? blah, blah, blah?), which they ditched after 9/111, admitting that asking them had never conclusively prevented a crime? Same idea here.

Only thousands of good folks are now going to take that much longer to get into the United States when all they wanna do is spend a few hundred dollars (grand?) at Disneyworld. Well, what's betting that some of 'em just don't come now.

Update (010603): Officals claim false hits on the system amount to less than 0.1 percent in trial runs. OK, I'm no mathematician, but sounds like that means that every 1000 visitors or so there's an error. Any idea how many visitors enter the United States *every day*? Gotta be tens of thousands, right? And what exactly does one of these "false hits" entail? Are they people arrested? Detained? What?

Excellent commentary by Josh Kun on the sadly ironic mis-use of Gene McDaniel's excellent Vietnam-era protest song, "Compared to What" by Mya on her album and in a Coke ad.

"Real, real, yeah, let's make it really real," Mya sings with Common in the Coke ad in a vague "it's the real thing" sorta vibe. Talk about reducing art to rubbish.

The original lyrics capture a bleaker, but far more powerful picture:

President he's got his war

Folks don't know just what it's for

Nobody gives us rhyme or reason

Have one doubt, they call it treason

We're chicken-feathers

All without one nut -- God damn it

Tryin' to make it real -- compared to what?

Now, those are some truly timeless, lyrics, huh?