And now --

let's hear from that elusive 24 percent of Americans who are so cataclysmically dull-witted that they still think Georgie Bush is doing a good job, and that a Republican administration is the only thing standing between the USA and another terrorist attack...

... in spite of the screamingly obvious fact that the Republicans were in charge when the last one happened. This is a new nadir of stupid for which there is, as yet, no appropriate descriptor. For now, "fucking braindead" will have to do.

Earth Hour shines a light on... right-wing moronitude

Whether last night's Earth Hour saved a pile of energy or not, it was successful -- it was a strategy that raised awareness of the climate change issue better than the holy grail of media time, a spot in the Superbowl, could ever hope to do. Earth Hour was interactive marketing at its finest: whether one participated or not (and apparently millions did -- Ontario's power usage was down by 3-5% -- make that 5.2% -- during that hour), Earth Hour was thought about, talked about, written about, argued about, wondered and worried about, blogged and bullshitted about -- whether it was disparaged or celebrated wasn't the point. Buzz was the point, and Mission Accomplished. There's more awareness of the climate change issue today than there was 24 hours ago.

On a vastly tinier scale, there's also more awareness of The Stupid that oozes from the deranged right-wing jerkoffosphere like pus from a festering sore. Earth Hour was called a lot of things by its detractors -- a commie conspiracy, groupthink, fascism (does that guy even know what "fascism" is?) etc. etc. blah blah blah yack yack yackety yack -- but by far the most ludicrous response was the wankosphere's lame-o attempt to try and offset some of whatever good the initiative might do. As CC noted, an adult who wasn't into Earth Hour would probably just say "No thanks, I think I'll pass", but adulthood is easy: you gotta fight for your right to be a dumbfuck. In doing so, the citizens of Lower Wingnuttia not only helped raise awareness of Earth Hour, but shone a halogen-bright light on their own stupidity.

Imagine if you will, a moderate, non-partisan individual googling "Earth Hour" to find out what all the fuss was about, and stumbling upon The Angry Villagers with their goofy exhortations to fire up all the appliances and lights, let vehicles idle for an hour and maybe put off that welding job until 8pm. It's one thing to say Earth Hour was a symbolic gesture tantamount to nothing, quite another to go out of your way to try to saboutage it (as if that would even be possible). It's like some bozo keying a Prius because they think the owner's an "enviro-weenie".

It's good to keep an eye on these cretins and occasionally point out their absurdity. But sometimes they do the job so well themselves that there's nothing left to do but stand back and avoid the splatter from their intellectual wet farts.

Morning cup of stupid

Won't someone think of the children!? Socially-conservative wingnuts continued to cement their reputation as warped, twisted and sexually-obsessed goofballs last week in the UK, where a kids' bed has been removed from the Woolworth stores product lineup at their behest. Why? Because some pearl-clutching poltroon didn't like its name, "the Lolita bed":

"A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens. said staff who administer the web site selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In "Lolita," a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter -- but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it."

Hey "furious parents", get your minds out of the gutter -- "Lolita" was a girl's name long before Nabokov wrote his novel. It's just a kids' bed, it's not as if it looked like this little bordello bassinet:

Is it any wonder Ikea gives all its products nordic-language names?

Smoking and the painful stupid of the conservative mind

(Or maybe this is a good time to employ their beloved scare quotes: make that the conservative "mind".)

Over at that bastion of bigotry and brain damage known as FD, a poster bitching about lawsuits stemming from mistreatment of natives ponders: "Should White People sue the Indians for Tobacco Cancers?"

Right, that makes sense. If you're an idiot.

When natives offered our marauding European ancestors a hit off the old peace pipe and a free sample to take back home, I doubt if their shamans had amassed all the medical evidence that tobacco smoke was harmful. And though the natural tobacco the natives smoked would have contained tar, it didn't contain the odious chemicals that drive someone to light up 20 times a day. It was only when profit-mongering Europeans figured out how to make this pleasant ritual addictive by adding nicotine, and more accessible by rolling it in paper, and smoother-tasting and more evenly-burning by adding to it a toxic soup of chemical shit, that tobacco became really deadly.

It would be redundant to point out that in the process of teaching white people how to smoke, natives didn't take over their homes, force them to give up their language and traditions, torture them in residential schools, systematically slaughter them by introducing diseases to which they had no immunity, etc etc and so on and so on. But just based on the tobacco issue alone, if anything, natives who get tobacco-related cancers should be the ones suing white people for fucking up their relatively harmless tobacco-smoking tradition and turning it into a virulent addiction.

Put that in your pipe...

Witless in Washington (Part 3,782)

This is almost surreal:

"A top immigration official has apologized after awarding "most original costume" to a Homeland Security Department employee who dressed in prison stripes, dreadlocks and dark makeup for a Halloween gathering at the agency.

Julie Myers, assistant secretary overseeing Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, was part of a three-judge panel that lauded the costume, worn by a white employee, last Wednesday. She also posed for a photo with him."

So a guy shows up at a DHS Hallowe'en party in a racist costume, and not only is he not called out on it and immediately ejected from the party, his boss gives him a prize for "Most Original Costume", no less! And has no fucking clue that there might be something wrong, something just a little... off... with the whole scenario, until someone else at the party complains. Then it's "Oh... whoopsie!" Needless to say, the photo of Julie Meyers posing with the racist jerk in the "prize-winning" costume has gone down the memory hole and it's apologies all around.

Julie Myers, an immigration official (immigration?! official), is related to former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard B. Meyers, and she's also married to someone who used to work for DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. So the upshot of it all is that while the idiot in the costume has been placed on "adminstrative leave", Myers won't be getting any reprimand.

Little things like this are glimpses into the hotbed of incest and insanity that is the current administration, and their complete and utter detachment from reality. And how they only care when they get caught.

(via Think Progress)

Responsible gun ownership

More proof that republicans wade in the shallow end of the gene pool. Today, the son of republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee got pinched trying to get on a plane with a loaded 9mm Glock and an extra clip of ammunition in his carry-on luggage, no less:

"LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - David Huckabee, a son of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, was arrested at an Arkansas airport Thursday after a federal X-ray technician detected a loaded Glock pistol in his carry-on luggage.

"I removed the bag and asked Mr. Huckabee if he knew what he had in the bag," Little Rock police officer Arthur Nugent wrote in a report after being summoned to a security checkpoint. "He replied he did now."

What? With all the hyped-up security, this nitwit wants to play James Bond at the airport? Oh right, "Duh, I din't know, but I know now". So he wasn't playing James Bond, he just had no idea that he had a loaded Glock and an extra clip in his carry-on. It hardly matters: either is bad. Either is indicative of someone way too fucking stupid to be allowed near scissors, let alone firearms. And the man who spawned this fine model of intellectual supremacy wants to be president? Oh, wait... yeah.