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American Idol: Psychotic Right-Wing Edition. Whose cheesy vocals will infect your ears next? A bunch of new right-wing sonic confections have arrived, courtesy of the Meat Beetles, particularly their compositions constructed from the cretinous utterances of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

(Do the Meat Beetles know how much of a debt they owe to Steinski?)

{ 9:23 AM }

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Institutionalized ignorance. Watch out, Enlightenment, here comes the Creation Museum:

...inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.

It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.

So dinosaur skeletons and brightly colored mineral crystals and images of the Grand Canyon are here, as are life-size dioramas showing paleontologists digging in mock earth, Moses and Paul teaching their doctrines, Martin Luther chastising the church to return to Scripture, Adam and Eve guiltily standing near skinned animals, covering their nakedness, and a supposedly full-size reproduction of a section of Noah’s ark.

There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah’s flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.

Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.

Americans are raising an entire generation of children forced to live in a parallel universe of their parents' making. In this universe, the most basic information about science and history and finance and even sex is utterly lacking.

I'm not really sure what to say except that I feel almost as bad for these poor kids as I do for the children of Islamic fundamentalists. They are ritually, systematically, institutionally abused. And the Creation Museum is just another logical step in that abuse, with Patrick Marsh as the new Leni Riefenstahl.

{ 12:41 PM }

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Deleting the love. A few days ago we examined a mysterious report of the love missing from Bush's life. Now an excellent point is raised by JV of Hugo Zoom:

I think the AP, not disney, scrubbed the Bush needing love graf (see here) ........... now I'm guessing the white house has a person charged with watching the internets and ready to jump down the throats of the AP, CNN, et al when they see an item they don't like; perhaps we're paying his salary(?).

With all due respect, JV, I beg to dissent on one small aspect of your account. Coming from the righteous left, I think it is a sexist observation to assume that our covert AP propagandist is male — how do we know it's a "him"?

A political functionary whose salary we're paying could theoretically be a "her," a "Monica," if you will. The machinery of GOP propaganda is blind to gender and is demonstrably an equal opportunity employer. How ironic that the right, whose support of equal and civil rights was always in question, is now actively recruiting and hiring a Monica or a Clarence or an Alberto to undermine those same rights.

{ 9:05 AM }

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How the Middle East can invest in its own demise. Here's an exciting investment opportunity, courtesy of Cheney's former haunts (WSJ):

As part of an effort to grab a growing share of the booming Middle Eastern oil-field-service market, Halliburton Co. Chief Executive David Lesar said he would welcome a Middle East investor taking a "major" equity stake and may dually list its shares in Dubai. [...]

Mr. Lesar is also indirectly addressing market concerns that Halliburton is too heavily reliant on work in North America. [...] He also said Halliburton planned to increase its revenue from the Middle East and the Eastern Hemisphere as it targets $80 billion of projects over the next five years.

Clearly, one of biggest beneficiaries of the Iraq fiasco has been the vice president's former company.

Why would anyone want to invest in the architect of a ruin?

{ 9:05 AM }

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Desperate to kiss and be touched. What's missing when you steal hundreds of billions of dollars and kill tens of thousands of people? Could it be... love?

Bush spoke for eight minutes. Then he came off the stage and talked to people in the crowd for 2 1/2 hours, methodically making his way along the metal barricades. He often works such a "rope line" as he ends events, but this was one of the longest of his presidency.

As much as George Bush likes to pretend he's emotionally bulletproof, this past Tuesday, he never looked so publicly troubled, and almost desperate to kiss and be touched.

The original post at ABC News has been altered since quoted above by BAGnewsNotes, evidently to remove the "desperate to kiss" paragraph.

ABC news editors must have reviewed the copy and thought, "Whaddaya say — a little too vulnerable, a little too femmy for the Commander Guy?"

Luckily, a team of Disney imagineers was on the scene to airbrush the desperation away.

{ 11:35 AM }

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Filet o' feces. "Federal authorities are working on a proposal to allow chickens raised, slaughtered, and cooked in China to be sold here, and under current regulations, store labels do not have to indicate the meat's origin."

{ 9:29 AM }

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Happy 70th birthday, Thomas Pynchon. I'm 300 pages into reading Against the Day, and I like it.

{ 5:51 PM }

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It's okay for a mentally ill student to buy guns and ammo but Grandma can't buy drugs from Canada.

So much for the USA's "free" market — it gives us the benefit of both the Virginia Tech massacre and the highest drug prices on earth.

{ 1:18 PM }

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