"Don't be the weird one!" Good advice, but hard to follow.

The Value Voters Summit is this weekend. All the Republican presidential candidates are there, sucking up to the shallow end of the Christian gene pool, who are doomed by evolutionary forces to see their power dry up as the years roll by.

Sarah Palin didn't show up. I think she correctly sensed that the crowd would not be too keen on her right now.

Gil Mertz, who may be the nephew of Fred and Ethel (don't take me for a sap, Fred and Ethel never had sex, that was a beard relationship if ever there was one) told his audience on the first day "Don't be the weird one!", hoping that embarrassing stories would not come out of the conference.

Take a read over at Talking Points Memo here, here, here, here and here.

And, oh yeah, here.

Here's a hint, Gil. You ARE the weird ones. Some Christians delight so much in "not being of this world, but the next", they really don't pay strong attention to this world and what they say comes off as being, well, weird.

Christianity allegedly has huge numbers in this country, but I don't know how many people are truly, deeply committed and when we consider the sub-section that are truly, deeply committed, I don't know how unified a front they can present. In evolutionary terms, genetic advantages this large and even larger have been wiped from the face of the world before, and who knows but it could happen again, especially if this weekend's debacle counts in their fevered brains as "not being the weird ones."

Here endeth the lesson.

Even chubby guys can jump sharks.

When Glenn Beck left Fox News - and Roger Ailes said he did not mind the characterization of that departure as a "dumping" - he said he was moving on to bigger things. Now, he is in Israel for his Restoring Courage rally, and a whole bunch of politically connected attendees are suddenly remembering they have to wash their hair that day. Rep. Joe Walsh of Texas told Beck that the Orange Eminence himself, John Boehner, told members of Congress not to attend because he thought the meeting would be too political. Eric Cantor isn't going, even though he will be in Israel on the date.



And just in case you think it's just mean old Boehner spoiling the fun, Droopy Dog himself, Senator Joe Lieberman (Likud-CT) has canceled his appearance.



Apparently, you can get thrown out of the Republican hierarchy for being too crazy, especially if you lose the protection of Fox News. It looks like Beck is heading into Michael Savage country.



Bring warm clothes, Glenn.

Shame. Not dead, not sleeping.

I was driving on Friday last, listening to the radio version of The News Hour on PBS. Shields and Brooks were giving us their measured, reasonable and usually wrong headed views on the news of the day. Shields, when asked about the Anthony Wiener unpleasantness, said "Shame is officially dead."

Au contraire, Mr. Shields. It is still with us. It just has to applied in the proper forum in the correct way and shame still possesses a crushing force.

Obviously, Mr. Shields would not have said what he did without some data on his side. In past generations, what happened to Bill Clinton or David Vitter or Alec Baldwin or Kanye West or Kobe Bryant or Anthony Wiener would have driven them from the stage, possibly forever. But we live in the post-Nixon era, and if even Tricky Dick can come back from the grave, so can nearly anyone with enough time and intestinal fortitude.


Submitted for your disapproval: Donald Trump. He made some nonsensical noises about running for president, and since we are still more than six months away from an actual delegate in the nomination process to be assigned to a candidate, the press was unable to ignore him.

Then came his decision to hang his hat on the birther issue, to be followed by the long form birth certificate being released.

This did not shame him. He took credit for a thing he did not do, a completely predictable move from such a pompous swine.

No, he was shamed out of the race on C-SPAN (and more importantly, You Tube) by comments made by Barack Obama and Seth Myers at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. In an odd twist, Trump had been to a modern Friar's Club roast only a few weeks before, where the jokes were much more vicious. But at the Friar's Club, it's supposed to be an honor to be mocked, and the target gets the last word. Instead, the Leader of the Free World used irony to crush him while a room of "important people" laughed out loud, completely unimpressed by the fact that the target of the mockery was in the room. Minutes later, Seth Myers tucked in to what was left of the warm and not yet rotting corpse.

And Myers, not Trump, got the last word and the last laugh.

Arnold Schwarzenegger never really wanted a long term career in politics, but he did plan to return to the movies when his stint as the savior of the Californian Republican Party was over.

Those plans are currently on hiatus.

Kind of like Manimal is on hiatus.

People are coming out of the woodwork to tell stories of his swinishness now, and the press is eating these stories up.

It's funny what just one secret child fathered out of wedlock can do in this day and age.

And in this day and age, the "secret" part is far worse than the "fathered out of wedlock" part.

Tiger Woods will not be at the U.S. Open this week. He has to be seriously injured to make such a move. But if you have followed his career, you'll know the last major championship he won, The 2008 U.S. Open, was won on what was effectively a broken left leg, and he then missed the last two major championships that year. He came back in 2009 after surgery to win many regular tournaments, but no majors.

And then, around Thanksgiving 2009, the world found out Tiger did have a hobby outside of golf.

Shame has turned Tiger Woods into Robert Gamez.

Here is sweet Reese Witherspoon. She has been married, her husband Ryan Phillippe cheated on her, she left him. His career has stalled, hers continues to move forward. On my silly gossip blog, she has had 18 cover stories about her since the beginning of 2010, none negative. I looked online to see if she had ever been involved in a feud, and in 2008 she went out of her way to deny any bad blood between her and co-star in Four Christmases Vince Vaughn.

If you have ever seen Jon Favreau's show Dinner For Five, you know Vince Vaughn is an unstoppable flaming asshole in real life. But Our Reese does not want to be seen as a difficult person to get along with.

And then earlier this month, she went on the MTV Movie Awards and said this.

"I get it, girls, that it’s cool to be a bad girl but it is possible to make it in Hollywood without doing a reality show. When I came up in this business, if you made a sex tape, you were embarrassed and you hid it under your bed.”

I am of the opinion that sweet little Reese Witherspoon has just done to Kim Kardashian what Barack Obama and Seth Myers did to Donald Trump. She will finally feel shame. Maybe I'm wrong and she will weather it, but I really think the right words were said on the right venue at the right time and Kim is going to have to be satisfied with being rich and beautiful instead of rich, famous and beautiful.

It's already happened to Paris Hilton. She tried a new reality show and it bombed, she's through.

All things come to an end, pleasures and plagues alike. If you find yourself wondering in 2012 whatever happened to Kim Kardashian, look back at Reese Witherspoon's comments and know that shame is not dead and it is not sleeping. It just has to be applied properly.

Here endeth the lesson.

The math of Penrose tiles, part 3: Two proofs of impossible similarity.

I'm about to prove a couple of negatives about Penrose tilings. Recall Donald Rumsfeld proudly and stupidly saying you couldn't prove a negative when it became obvious to everyone the weapons of mass destruction ruse was a complete phony. I had to wonder exactly how many classes he slept through when he got his degree at Princeton.

Of course you can prove a negative. The only place where real proof exists is in math and we prove that things are impossible all the time.

Let me give a couple examples.


It is impossible to build a larger shape similar to a dart using kites and darts.

The dart is the Penrose tile with the dent, and angle of 216°. It is also the only Penrose tile that has the sharp 36° angle. Those angles are adjacent to each other, which means if you need a 36° angle when you are building something, you have to use a dart and you have to plan for the fact the 216° will be right next to it at the distance of short.

If we want to build a bigger dart, it will have to have two 36° angles and a 216° angle, but the distance between these will have to be at least the length of long.

We can't do this with these pieces, or if we achieve this, we will not have a long enough straight line to make the outside of the dart.

This proof takes no math skills really. If you had some Penrose tiles to play with, you would see pretty quickly the problems involved trying to make a shape similar to the dart.



It is impossible to build a shape similar to a kite bigger than Papa Kite.

Yesterday, I showed this picture of a regular kite, a slightly larger kite made of a dart and two kites (a shape I call Mama Kite) and a third larger shape made out of five kites and three darts I call Papa Kite.

Notice this. Each of the straight lines that make up a side of all three of these kites has at most one side of the short length. Because of the angles available, one short is all you can have if you are building a straight line that is empty on one side and completely filled in on the other. The problem is that to make a straight 180° angle from a 72° angle, we need 108°, which in Penrose tiles can only be done by combining a 72° and a 36° angle. Just as we saw in the earlier problem, the 36° angle is a little clumsy when trying to continue a straight line because it is so closely tied to the dent, the 216° angle, known formally in geometry as a reflex angle.

Here is my best attempt at making Granddaddy Kite, the next size up of similarity. The Fibonacci sequence tells me how many pieces I need, 13 kites and 8 darts. I used 12 kites and 7 darts and the shape of the empty space that caused the problem has a 36° angle that we can't negotiate with the shapes available.

Notice that the unfillable space is exactly a Big Dart, the shape we can't make with the two standard Penrose tiles. If a third Penrose tile existed that was the shape of the Big Dart, with side lengths long and long+short, the number of things we could do with the new system would increase dramatically, though it wouldn't help with making a dart bigger than Big Dart. That would still be impossible.

Instead of Big Dart, another "third" Penrose tile that could help in this situation would be a triangle with sides short, short and long, which would have angles 36°, 36° and 108°. With this addition, Big Dart would be these two triangles put side by side along one of the short sides, and suddenly bigger darts and bigger kites would be much, much easier.

In math, we call this "prove or disprove or salvage". When you prove something can't be done, you try to find the simplest changes you could make to the problem where you could do what was asked. The most famous early example of this was Archimedes proving that trisecting any given angle was impossible with a compass and straightedge, but it could be done if you were allowed to put one mark on the straightedge.

This is one of the reasons mathematicians put Archimedes head and shoulders over other ancients like Euclid or Pythagoras. Nobody else was "thinking outside the box" like our Sicilian pal.

Not that I'm telling Sir Roger what to do with his tiles. He is a Big Damn Deal in physics and I'm a blogger.

Not that I'm comparing my salvage to Archimedes' method for trisecting angles. That is a work of stunning beauty.

I'm just sayin'.

And, oh yeah, Donald Rumsfeld is still a pinhead who planned two wars he didn't know how to finish and he can bite me.

I'm just a blogger, but I'm a shitload smarter than he ever was.

If you ever read this, Don, quod erat demonstrandum, you ugly, murderous little pencil pusher.

SkeptiCal 2011

My sister Karlacita! used to be an author of New Age books. In the past few years, she has come to question the things she used to believe and in some ways has become a pariah in her old field. She found some like minds in the skeptical community, so she decided to attend SkepiCal 11 this past weekend in Berkeley. She asked me to come along as moral support, to be that person she could turn to and ask the all important question, "Is it me or is it them? It's them, isn't it?"

I won't say I felt "right at home" in a conference of skeptics, but I certainly had been in similar situations before. It was a nerd herd. It was somewhere between a professional nerd herd and a amateur nerd herd. For me, an amateur nerd herd is a board game convention or about back in the 1990s, a sealed deck Magic The Gathering tournament. Professional nerd herds have been things like the Computer Game Development Conference back when I did that for a living or math symposiums now.

Since the idea of SkeptiCal was plunking down money to hear people talk, it's more like the professional. By that standard, this was pretty weak. I will be kind and name the only speaker worth his salt, while others will be described but not named.

The first fellow was a member in good standing in the skeptical community who had appeared on Survivor a few times. We spent an hour learning about the ins and outs of a show I have never watched all the way through. (Personal note: The last drummer for my old band The Wonders of Science has been on more than one season, and I still haven't watched one full hour of the show in my entire life.)

Here's the inside dope. What you see is real, but it's all about the editing.

Thanks. I already figured that out without watching. I didn't need an hour's explanation of it. (Karlacita! tells me that in the line to the ladies' room after, my feeling about that hour was echoed several times.)


The next speaker was Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute, a climate scientist who is also a blogger on the Huffington Post, giving a talk entitled Climate Change Misperception. His inclusion on the speakers' list was a source of controversy for reasons I will discuss later.

Gleick's talk was the only one where I actually learned something from the speaker. (I learned plenty from Karlacita!, but that can happen when we're just hangin' out and I don't have to plunk down forty five simoleans to do that.) He discussed several of the critical thinking fallacies - ad hominem attacks, appeal to authority, appeal to consensus, cherry picking data, etc. - and showed concretely how climate change deniers use these tools. He also stated that climate science consensus might look like an argument by consensus, but that it is more that the scientists are convinced by the data and that data forms a valid scientific consensus.

The skeptical community, if one can call it that, is a very contentious bunch and internecine squabbles are common. Gleick showed an e-mail from a skeptic who would not attend because Gleick's inclusion showed the group had obviously caved to the Warmists, as deniers sometimes call the vast majority of climate scientists. This was the last mention of any alleged grudge or slight in Gleick's talk.

There are dozens of tacks the deniers take to poke holes in the climate data. Having only an hour to talk, he only brought up a few examples directly and showed Power Point slides that proved the statements, some of which I had heard before, were egregious examples of cherry picking.

1) Polar ice coverage is not shrinking because April 1989 coverage was less that April 2009 coverage.

Refutation: Yes, April 1989 was less than April 2009, but every other month in 2009 had less ice coverage than 1989, often quite a bit less. Classic cherry picking, especially since there was exactly one cherry in twelve matched pairs of data.

2) Global warming stopped in 1998, even though CO2 levels continue to rise. (I hadn't heard the first argument before, but I had heard this one, notably from George F. Will, who couldn't prove the Pythagorean Theorem with an hour's head start and the address to mathworld.wolfram.com.)

Refutation: Average yearly temperatures go up and down. 1998 was warmer than 2008, but 2005 was warmer than either, and now that 2009 and 2010 data have been added, both far warmer than 1998, this argument is complete bunk, though deniers still quote it.

Again, Gleick's talk was the closest to the quality I would see at a math symposium, most of which are free of charge. (Quibble: everyone who used technology had trouble with it, including Gleick. For most of his talk, the computer resolution was wrong and his slides were cut off at left and right. To his credit, when the problem was pointed out, Gleick is the only one who fixed his technical difficulties.)


You may not have heard of the skeptical community. For example, when Karlacita! told the Gosh Darned Pater Familias about where she was going, neither he or any of his friends had ever heard of people describing themselves as skeptics.

In this small community, the great celebrity is The Amazing Randi, a magician and debunker of paranormal claims. His greatest moment of glory is going on Johnny Carson's show and showing the famed spoon bender Uri Geller was a fake. He is the founder of the modestly titled James Randi Educational Foundation, or JREF.

In December 2009, The Amazing Randi wrote a piece doubtful of climate change, which he has since recanted with a standard non-apology apology. For me the money quotes are using the wry quotations marks around "politically correct" label he gave to the academics who do the hard work he is not willing or able to do and most damningly, the first sentence in paragraph six:

I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid.

For those of you unaware of The Petition Project, climate change deniers got it into their heads to put together a petition of scientists NOT in the field, as though ten sociologists counterbalance one climate scientist. This is obviously both an appeal to completely unearned authority and an appeal to consensus.

Many skeptics fell in line behind Randi and have not changed their position even though he has weakly recanted.

I've seen this before in nerd herds. Way back in the day, a guy named Chris Crawford, a writer of video games that didn't sell well but that he thought were "important", started the Computer Game Developer's Conference (CGDC) to get his ideas out. I had more than a few run-ins with him and his tiny cult, but eventually the business was making too much money to have such a meeting be a yearly pilgrimage to his shrine and he left, though the level of volunteerism in departure is disputed. Once The Great Man was dislodged, the CGDG actually became a Big Damn Deal.

Here's the thing. We can all of us fall prey to these problems with critical thinking. When it comes to hero worship in math, I am honest to Lenny* proud of the fact that I shook the hand of Donald Knuth, the author of The Art Of Computer Programming, and can remember chapter and verse the conversation I had with Frank Harary, the father of graph theory.

Here's my defense. Knuth and Harary actually moved human endeavor forward. As someone who teaches math, it is my job and my glad duty to make sure their names, and more importantly their ideas, are never forgotten.

I cannot say the same for the Amazing Randi.

* For those new to the blog, "honest to Lenny" is my oath to my favorite mathematician in history, Leonhard Euler. Yet another example of hero worship and one I will defend to my last breath.

Here endeth the lesson.

Somebody call the cops.

Dr. Harold Camping is at it again. Judgment Day did happen on Saturday, it was just really quiet. The big damn noisy one will be October 21. That will be the actual end of the world.

Recall that he first said it was in September 1994, though he had bad feelings about 1988. When Don Lattin of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed him in 1995, Camping said with a straight face that 1994 wouldn't be officially over until March 31, 1995.

You might not have any specific memories of March 31, 1995, but one thing you probably will recall is that is was one of those days when the world didn't end. Days when the world doesn't end have a distinctive and easily recognizable pattern, the sun rising in the east the next morning.

If you look at the end of this article from the Associated Press, you will see that Camping's Family Radio is sitting on a boatload of cash. $18.3 million in donations last year, assets of more than $104 million, including $34 million in stocks or other publicly traded securities.

It's time to charge the guy with fraud and take his money.

I realize there's a whole bunch of free speech and exercise of religion stuff involved here, but Camping believes the era of the church is over, so he can't very well call himself a church. He's just a very successful scam artist. Time to separate this fool from his money and give some of it back to the fools who sent it to him in the first place.

As DeForest Kelley might have said in my situation, "Damnit, Jim, I'm a mathematician, not a lawyer!" Even though he looks like a frail old man of great conviction, I swear he's no different from Donald Trump. You can't believe a word he says and it's in the public interest to stop him from fleecing the sheep.

The penis: Necessary evil or evolutionary dead end?

Reading the news these past few weeks has been ultra creepy. It's nothing but penises, penises, penises.

It's not exactly like this Bay to Breakers post from sfmike, which you should DEFINITELY NOT CLICK ON AT WORK. Compared to the real news, this is almost quaint and endearing.

No, the news is filled with penises getting their users in serious trouble. You can't swing a dead cat right now without hitting a live penis, and probably an erect one at that.

I could go with a picture of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose penis has put him in actual jail, or Newt Gingrich or Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose penises have made them unelectable laughingstocks, but instead I go with John Ensign, who should have resigned from the Senate a year ago but waited until just recently, when he found out his penis did more than cost him a mint, it will probably mean he will be on trial and several of his Christian pals who helped engineer payoffs to clean up his penis trouble might find themselves on the wrong end of a subpoena as well.

To make matters worse, I got some movies from the library this week that in one way or another re-enforced the idea that penises are more trouble than they are worth for society. In Venus, Peter O'Toole plays an aging actor who lead a reprehensible life and is still a dirty old man.

Quite a stretch for his penis, I'm sure.

All the people who find him a cad are bad people in the film.

Then why did I find myself agreeing with them?

Having seen Thor, which is the latest film directed by Kenneth Branagh, I decided to rent Dead Again, a movie he directed and starred in with his then wife Emma Thompson before he decided Helena Bonham Carter was juicier. The movie doesn't hold up very well. It was kind of impressive at the time how good their American accents were, but since Xena:Warrior Princess, it's not such an amazing feat. There's also a scene with Campbell Scott that makes no sense, a very greasy Andy Garcia and a silly supernatural plot.

Not Ken's best work.

Last and by no means least, I watched Crimes and Misdemeanors, which I would still rank as one of Woody Allen's best. On screen, it's Martin Landau's penis that is the major cause of grief and chaos, but it's hard to ignore that Allen cast then wife Mia Farrow as the object of his character's hopeless affections. More than that, the innocent love he feels for his niece is more than a little creepy now, though none of the creepiness is in the script or the performances.

I want to say that I am not advocating the abolition of the penis. I have owned one for over fifty years and it's gotten me into very little trouble. I'm just saying that if it was an optional extra you got from a doctor instead of standard equipment, today's FDA would never approve it.

Kind of like aspirin.

A word that should return to regular usage: Mountebank.

Mountebank: a fraud or charlatan; one who makes money by deceiving others.

Etymology: Italian. The direct translation means "mount a bench", which is the way sellers of miracle cures would stand above a large crowd to get attention.

You see the word in 19th Century literature quite a bit. W.S. Gilbert broke up with Sir Arthur Sullivan for a time and wrote an operetta titled The Mountebanks with Alfred Cellier in 1892. The play had a long run in London and short run in New York, but is rarely performed today.

Please do what you can to bring this wonderful word back into usage. There are many mountebanks in the world today. Reading about the derivatives market, mountebanks appear to be the engine of the world economy.

Thank you for your kind attention.

More from Donald Trump, pathological liar.

In an interview this week, Donald Trump said “I actually got lucky because I had a very high draft number. I’ll never forget, that was an amazing period of time in my life.”

I spent a few minutes on Wikipedia and knew he was lying.

Trump left school in 1968. The draft lottery started in December 1969. The reason I knew Trump was lying was because my brother, four years younger than Trump, graduated high school in 1968 and had no plans to go to college, and he was told to show up at the draft board within weeks of graduation.

Young people won't remember this, but back then, the draft board didn't play.


So after leaving school in 1968, Donald Trump must have been in the same boat as my brother. The good folks at The Smoking Gun did a lot more digging than I did, and Trump's lie is exposed. He got several student deferments and in July 1968, he was re-classified 1-A. By October 1968, more than a year before the lottery, he is 1-Y, a medical deferment.

I'm not trashing people who got medical deferments back then. My brother Michael got one because of an allergy to penicillin.

I'm trashing Trump because he is a miserable lying scumbag. He is now and he always has been.

Of all his accomplishments, only the list of women he has had sex with stands up to scrutiny. He has bagged some fabulous babes. Everything else, his alleged success as a student or businessman or anything else, is just another pack of lies.

This guy can't help but lie. If his mouth is open, he's lying. He lies while gargling, for pity's sake.

And what's worse, this is exactly the kind of sack of shit we can't get off the stage in this ridiculous age in which we live.

Lying like a rug in service of the greater good.

Jon Kyl said on the senate floor that abortions are 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.

Somebody fact-checked him, the dirty meany bullies. 3% of the services Planned Parenthood does are abortions, and none of those can receive federal funds. Because abortions are more expensive that birth control, abortions are about 15% of the billing at Planned Parenthood.

Still, there's that 90% number. What was that? Kyl's office was reached for comment, and they said that what he said was not intended to be a factual statement.

I guess I could take the time to rip Kyl a new one, but thankfully for the Republic, we have Jon Stewart, Wyatt Cenac and Stephen Colbert to help out on that front.

The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl's Planned Parenthood Statistics
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl Lies About Planned Parenthood
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

And, oh yeah, the folks at Fox and Friends are equally full of shit.

What a surprise.

I read it for the articles.

Silvio Berlusconi is prime minister of Italy. He also runs a major Italian television network, and always seems to be "hands on" when hiring the honeys that will be on his network.

And we are definitely talking "honeys", as in very pretty and very plural.

Think Newt Gingrich's politics, Donald Trump's ethics and Hugh Hefner's horny-ness, with more money than all of them combined.

Talking Points Memo has a slideshow of the many women involved in the multiple brewing scandals, including this young lady who got a lavish gift from Berlusconi for her 18th birthday. Berlusconi turns 75 this year.

Enjoy the slideshow. You may want to turn the lights down. Some Marvin Gaye might also be in order.

"There's... nothin' wrong with me-eee... lovin' you-oo!"

(I take it back. There might be something wrong, like certain laws.)

Knock me down with a feather.

Just when you think you can't be surprised.

The Nigerian government is starting a bribery case against Halliburton and officials say there is a good chance that charges with be brought against Dick Cheney, former president of Halliburton, former Vice President of the United States and currently leader of The Dead Who Walk The Earth. There's talk of an Interpol arrest warrant.
(recent photo from AFP)

Trying to kick the schadenfreude habit, but backsliding from time to time.

Schadenfreude is the pleasure one feels at the misfortune of others. I consider it a trait for a poorly evolved person, so let me say this about Tom DeLay being found guilty.

OOOK OOOK OOK AAH AHH AAAAHHH!

Evolution humor. Heh heh.

Tom DeLay is the quintessential example of why I hate a certain type of Christian. He smiled in his mug shot so people could see the love of Jesus. He said he wanted a speedy trial, but his lawyers delayed and delayed and delayed the proceedings. Of course, that was his lawyers' doing. His hands were clean, not unlike Pontius Pilate's.

The words "liar" and "scumbag" in the dictionary should have this picture next to them.

He and his defenders in the press said the charges were nonsensical and a witch hunt and he would be shown to be completely innocent of all charges. After all, all he did was get a check directly from corporations for $190,000 that he couldn't give to political campaigns, sent it instead to the Republican National Committee who sent checks totaling $190,000 to various campaigns.

In the period of about one business day.

This isn't the textbook definition of money laundering. This is the textbook definition of EXTREMELY BAD money laundering. Money laundering usually follows a convoluted route over an extended period of time. Forensic accountants should be up all night sorting through shadow accounts and dummy corporations and finally at three o'clock in the morning drinking cold coffee say "AHA! That's how they did it. We've got them!"

DeLay and his lawyers are now saying it's a gross miscarriage of justice.

Horse. Shit.

This was a quick trial and the defense was perfunctory. The jurors took 19 hours to deliberate and they get to have Thanksgiving at home with loved ones. The judge thanked them for their service and so do I.

Delay could be sentenced to up to life in prison. I think that is ridiculous when murderers get a couple years. What I would like to see the judge do is count the years between the crime and the trial and multiply that by two. Give Tom DeLay sixteen years in The Big House and tell him it would have been shorter if his lawyers could have pulled their thumbs out of each others' asses a little quicker than they did.

Again, I am not feeling very evolved about this, but Tom DeLay gets off easy. I wish we could find a way to get him to be bunk mates with Joran van der Sloot down in Peru.

Justice in Texas. Unlike Southern California, they don't play.

Exciting new ideas in disenfranchisement!

During the 1980's, a popular meme was that the left has no new ideas and the right was the ideology moving forward. Of course, the main idea of the right is very old.

"We hate government. If you let us run government, we promise you will soon hate it as much as we do."

I suppose when you have an idea as catchy as that one, you really don't need new ideas. Most of the weirdest ideas from the Tea Party crowd are obvious variations on that theme.


Where can we find exciting new ideas? Why, Hollywood, of course!

Enter Pat Sajak, deep thinker, connoisseur of ceramic dogs, every bit as good at math as Vanna White is good at spelling, which is to say he can read numbers off a teleprompter. Writing in the National Review Online, Pat puts forward the exciting new plan to take the vote away from public employees. After all, public employees want to keep being paid, so doesn't that mean they have a conflict of interest whenever an issue would mean less revenue is taken in?

To be fair to Mr. Sajak, he doesn't want to take my entire right to vote away. He doesn't want to put public employees in the same boat with ex-felons. He just thinks the 240,000 people like me who are California state employees shouldn't vote on measures where we have our livelihoods at stake. I expect he feels the same way about local government employees voting on local bond measures. Extend that to everyone who cashes a government check that isn't federal and we are talking about millions of people across the country.

As a public employee, lemme 'splain, Pat. I don't have a conflict of interest. I have an interest. You have an opposing interest, an interest in paying as little in taxes as you possibly can. You are right that it's easier to win an argument when you don't let the other side speak, but here's the chance of this little ploy gaining traction. Zero. Even if this nonsense got on the ballot somewhere AND more than 50% of voters thought it sounded like a good idea, the courts would kill it. You don't get to take away people's citizenship rights just because they work for the government.

I first heard about this over on the progressive website Talking Points Memo. Most of the commenters went with jokes that were some variations on "Pat, I like to buy a _____." Instead of ending with a gag, I'll end with a brag. This is yet another moment when I'm proud to say I won my money on Jeopardy! and not on your crap show, Pat.

You should stick with the prize packages. This "thinking for a living" gig is harder than it looks.