It’s nice to see that Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest has made it clear to everyone that he’s batshit crazy.

Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, “You mother f****r. I’m going to f*** you.” The report also says “Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he ‘owns Malibu’ and will spend all of his money to ‘get even’ with me.”

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?”

The deputy became alarmed as Gibson’s tirade escalated, and called ahead for a sergeant to meet them when they arrived at the station. When they arrived, a sergeant began videotaping Gibson, who noticed the camera and then said, “What the f*** do you think you’re doing?”

A law enforcement source says Gibson then noticed another female sergeant and yelled, “What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?”

So here’s my assignment to you, sugar tits. Now that it’s clear that Mel Gibson thinks “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”, go rent The Passion. Although it seemed that most of the country agreed to overlook the anti-semitism in the movie, it was pretty clear to me when I saw it :

The only characters who get even close to rivaling Jesus in screen-time are the bloodthirsty Jews, who are always a couple steps away with a chant of “Kill him!!” Considering it’s supposed to be a movie about Jesus, Mel Gibson has spent much more time focusing on Jewish bloodlust than say…the sermon on the mount.

The whole concept of a “passion” play is so anti-semitic that the tradition was rejected by the Roman Catholic Church with Vatican II, so can we finally admit that The Passion is bullshit? One of the biggest movies ever made was just an excuse for its crazy filmmaker to blame Jews for killing Jesus and the whole damn world fell for it.

At Sen. Lieberman made it clear when speaking during the Clinton impeachment scandal, real friends always have your back.

Whether he or we think it fair or not, the reality is in 1998, that a president’s private life is public. Contemporary news media standards will have it no other way. And surely, this president was given fair notice of that by the amount of time the news media has dedicated to investigating his personal life during the 1992 campaign and in the years since.

But there is more to this than modern media intrusiveness. The president is not just the elected leader of our country. He is as presidential scholar Clinton Rossiter (ph) observed, and I quote, “the one man distillation of the American people.” And as President Taft said at another time, “the personal embodiment and representative of their dignity and majesty.”

So, when his personal conduct is embarrassing, it is sadly so not just for him and his family, it is embarrassing for all of us as Americans.

The president is a role model. And because of his prominence in the moral authority that emanates from his office, sets standards of behavior for the people he serves.

His duty, as the Reverend Nathan Baxter (ph) of he National Cathedral here in Washington said in a recent sermon, is nothing less than the stewardship of our values. So no matter how much the president or others may wish to compartmentalize the different spheres of his life, the inescapable truth is that the president’s private conduct can and often does have profound public consequences.

In this case, the president apparently had extramarital relations with an employee half his age and did so in the workplace in the vicinity of the Oval Office. Such behavior is not just inappropriate. It is immoral. And it is harmful, for it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family — particularly to our children — which is as influential as the negative messages communicated by the entertainment culture.

Is it any wonder why the people on Connecticut don’t think Sen. Lieberman is willing to defend their interests?

Am I the only one getting tired of hearing about America’s “special relationship” with Israel? Okay, fine, we’re fuckbuddies with the Israelis because Jesus was born there, but can we at least get a little sanity here? If the United States is such a good friend to Israel, we should step in and tell our friends that they need to calm the hell down :

Israel is targeting not only Hezbollah’s fighters but also the social network that earned it wide popularity among Lebanon’s Shiites: an orphanage run by the group has been hit and a seminary that provided help to families leveled.

The attacks – which have also targeted Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television and Al-Nour Radio – show an Israeli determination to undermine the standing of the Iranian-backed group in the Shiite community.

Shiite cleric Adel Akash, his wife and 10 children were asleep when an Israeli warplane fired a missile into their house on July 13. They were all killed.

A week later, an Israeli airstrike leveled the Shiite seminary where Akash taught. Only the dome of its mosque escaped damage and now sits atop a pile of rubble in the coastal city of Sidon.

Other non-military targets include a Hezbollah orphanage in the eastern city of Baalbek, offices that issue interest-free loans near Sidon, a school in the town of Nabatiyeh to the south and charity offices in the Dahiyah district south of Beirut. No one was reported killed in these attacks.

It’s the same macho-bullshit we’ve been seeing with Bush since 9/11, but on a more dramatic scale. Is their military really dumb enough to think that detroying civilian infrastructure will diminish the fanatacism of anti-Israeli extremists? Even if Israel is able to kill every Hizbollah leader, they’ll do so at the cost of further enraging the entire region, creating new terrorists for every one that they kill. When are they going to learn that you can’t use old tricks to beat a new enemy? This is a war of ideas, yet small-minded leaders continue to ignore the obvious lesson that you can’t bomb your way into someone’s heart.

Uh oh. Andrea Yates was just found “not guilty by reason of insanity” in her murder retrial. Despite the fact that this is a perfectly reasonable verdict, this is going to bring the “tough on crime” assholes out of the woodwork.

This one will have you checking your calendars to see if it’s April 1st (via Kottke) :

Monopoly board game players can now pay for properties with debit cards.

Game makers Parker have phased out the standard multi-coloured cash in a new version.

Players will instead use a Visa mock debit card to keep track of how much they win or lose.

It is inserted into an electronic machine where the banker taps in cardholders’ earnings and payments.

Parker said replacing of cash with plastic showed the game was moving with the times.

Spokesman Chris Weatherhead said: “The new electronic Monopoly reflects the changing nature of society and the advancement of technology.”

If they want to modernize Monopoly, why stop there? They should make the properties increase in value quickly so that anyone who doesn’t purchase the property early rounds will never be able to afford anything. The richest player at any given point in the game will be be able to buy his/her way out of jail, while the poorest has to spend twice as long in jail as any other player. Get rid of Community Chest, Free Parking, and Luxury Tax, since they’re just outdated relics of an era in which people cared more for their society than their wallets. And the person who buys the utilities should be allowed to change the rules at any point during the game to ensure they always win. That’s how it seems to work in the real world.

This is good news, but don’t get your hopes up that Arlen Specter suddenly grew a spine :

A powerful Republican committee chairman who has led the fight against President Bush’s signing statements said Monday he would have a bill ready by the end of the week allowing Congress to sue him in federal court.

“We will submit legislation to the United States Senate which will…authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements with the view to having the president’s acts declared unconstitutional,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said on the Senate floor.

Specter’s announcement came the same day that an American Bar Association task force concluded that by attaching conditions to legislation, the president has sidestepped his constitutional duty to either sign a bill, veto it, or take no action.

My guess is that Arlen will grandstand over this issue for a few more weeks before he announces that the Senate has settled on a deal with the President that changes absolutely nothing. At least, that’s the way things seem to be working out with Specter’s “leading the fight” against NSA wiretaps.

That’s the conclusion I could reach after watching Josh Bolten try to defend the President’s indefensible stem cell policy (taken from Crooks & Liars):

I love watching the Bushies try to remind people that King George was the first person to fund stem cell research. Using their rhetoric, it’s like hearing them brag “Actually, I was for murder before I was against it…”

Today :

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an unannounced stop in Beirut Monday in an effort to shore up Lebanon’s fragile government, beleaguered by nearly two weeks of relentless bombing raids that have wrecked much of the country’s infrastructure and sent thousands of Lebanese citizens fleeing for their lives.

Last week :

Bush: What about Kofi Annan? I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically cease-fire and everything else happens.

Blair: I think the thing that is really difficult is you cant stop this unless you get this international presence agreed.

Bush: She’s going. I think Condi’s going to go pretty soon.

Blair: Well that’s all that matters. If you see, it will take some time to get out of there. But at least it gives people …

Bush: It’s a process I agree. I told her your offer too.

Blair: Well it’s only or if she’s gonna or if she needs the ground prepared as it were. See, if she goes out she’s got to succeed as it were, where as I can just go out and talk.

Bush: See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.

Kinda sad to think that the media is so shallow that the President’s use of profanity makes them completely forget the actual substance of what he was saying. Of course, these are the same guys who discount the entire blogging medium because we also like to say “shit” sometimes.

Gosh, it’s been an eventful week for the President. Yesterday he popped his veto cherry on a bill that the vast majority of Americans support and today he finally decided that the African-American community was worth his time. Of course this is the same guy who ignored New Orleans after hurricane Katrina and has celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday by giving recess appointments to racist judges, so you can probably guess that he had use some carefully chosen euphemisms during his address to the NAACP :

THE PRESIDENT: We’ll work together, and as we do so, you must understand I understand that racism still lingers in America. (Applause.) It’s a lot easier to change a law than to change a human heart. And I understand that many African Americans distrust my political party.

AUDIENCE: Yes! (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: I consider it a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community. For too long my party wrote off the African American vote, and many African Americans wrote off the Republican Party. (Applause.)

That history has prevented us from working together when we agree on great goals. That’s not good for our country. That’s what I’ve come to share with you. We’ve put the interests of the country above political party. I want to change the relationship. (Applause.) The America we seek should be bigger than politics. And today I’m going to talk about some areas where I believe we can work together to reduce the obstacles for opportunity for all our citizens.

You knew he was gonna throw in “the party of Abraham Lincoln”, but the rest was equally predictable and hilarious. The GOP “let go” of its ties to black people and “wrote off” their votes. Yeah, that’s one way to put it. Another, more accurate, way to put it would be to say that the Republican Party shunned black people and actively sought the votes of the most vile and racist people in this country. This not only meant overtures to the Dixiecrats who left the Democratic party because it didn’t hate blacks enough but taking sides against the same civil rights leaders who President Bush went out of his way to name-drop today.

The party of Lincoln is dead. Mainstream, racist Republicans killed it and replaced it with the party of the Southern Strategy. While the last forty years may have seen remarkable improvements in Republican attitudes towards non-whites, echoes of the Southern Strategy were still found with the recent debate over whether to renew the Voting Rights Act. The NAACP knows the GOP aren’t on their side. That’s why there was such a big applause when the President said “I understand that many African Americans distrust my political party”.

Of course sitting through the President’s speech was surely a chore for those who were there because it was yet another laundry list of clueless Bush policies. The most obvious example is the fact the Bush’s vow to “reduce the obstacles for opportunity for all our citizens” was just an intro for another canned speech about No Child Left Behind and elimination of the “death tax”.

Seriously.

Why even bother bringing up racial disparities if you’re going to ignore the (Republican) elephant in the room? Poverty. Probably because the good ideas about how to fight poverty fly in the face of the interest groups that have bought the party. For example, do you really think cutting down on predatory lending practices or increasing financial and consumer education is really going to go over well with the party that was paid so handsomely to craft a bankruptcy “reform” bill that sticks it to the poor and middle class?

At the end of the day, the most remarkable thing about the President’s speech wasn’t just that he finally decided that the NAACP was worthy of his time, but that the Republican party is doing so poorly among its traditional base of voters that it actually thought courting African-Americans would do them any good. Less than a year ago you played dicked around with a guitar while poor people drowned in the streets of New Orleans, Mr. President. Too little, too late.

I’ve been getting slammed with comment spam lately. In an effort to stop it, I decided to do a little detective work on a random comment to see what I’d find. My most recent spammed comment came from “furniture henredon” whose IP address was 66.255.174.66. When I did an NSLookup of the IP, it came back with mail.fba.org. Who is fba.org?

I guess somebody didn’t like my last Jesus post.

Seriously though, let me just make it clear to everyone that the fine people at the First Baptist Church of Atlanta aren’t spammers. Their IP only showed up in one comment because they’ve probably got a security vulnerability of some sort that made it easy for spammers to user their servers to submit their comments. Either that or the chruch’s IP address was spoofed by the comment spammers. Regardless of the spamming method, I think we can all agree that comment spammers are scum, right?

They say that this practice is “the law” (as if laws can’t be changed), but it sounds like extortion to me.

You want to get out of the war zone that Lebanon is fast becoming? Reach for your wallet.

In a message to American citizens trapped in Lebanon, the U.S. Embassy’s website reads: “The Department of State reminds American citizens that the U.S. government does not provide no-cost transportation.” For those unfortunate enough to be weathering the bombing and also have empty pockets, the government offers a “repatriation loan” – citizens will get a bill once they land safely in the States.

This is in stark contrast to Canada, which advises its citizens that “All costs related to the evacuation of Canadians citizens from Lebanon will be borne by the Government of Canada.”

People trapped there, of course, have little other recourse for evacuation, since the airport and major roads have been bombed.

You’d think that during an election year, people both sides of the aisle would want to jump into action on a crowd-pleasing issue like “we shouldn’t be nickel-and-diming American war refugees”, but I guess the only issues Congress cares about these days are ones that sharply divide the electorate.

I just added two new links to the blogroll. The first is the blog of frequent commenter and excellent blogger Mr. Furious and the other is my friend Rich’s blog The End of the World. Maintaining a links section is one of those little administrative chores of blogging that often falls to the wayside, so I’m sure there are a ton of great blogs that I’m missing. And there might even be a few out of date links that I need to update or delete. If so, lemme know in comments.

Since there are a few million blogs out there, here’s my criteria for getting added to the blogroll. The site needs to be mostly political, frequently updated, and have been around for at least a few months. Most importantly, it’s gotta have some originality. If the site doesn’t have anything to offer I haven’t already seen on the other blogs in the blogrool, then it’s not getting a link. If you’re too modest to ask for a link, feel free to post a comment as Alan Smithee and include your site in a list with a bunch of crap blogs.

Also, since I haven’t mentioned it lately, Glenn Reynolds is a tool.

From TPM Cafe, here’s something good we can say about Joe Lieberman :

As I wrote below, Election Central posed a question this morning to the Lieberman campaign: Would he or would he not rule out a run on the GOP line if he lost the Dem primary and the line were offered to him?

Well, now campaign spokesperson Marion Steinfels has gotten back to me, and the answer is: He rules it out. Completely.

Steinfels said that Lieberman would “absolutely not” run on the GOP line. She added: “He has said he’s always been a Democrat, and he’ll always be a Democrat.”

That is, unless he loses the primary. Then he’ll be a “Lieberman for Connecticut”. By the way, does anyone know how I can go about running for office on the “Lieberman for Connecticut” party’s ticket? I’m a Democrat, but I’ve been looking for a third-party whose platform is based on Republican ass-kissing, moral grandstanding, and political ineptitude.

When most Presidents have used their veto power to send a message to Congress, the message has generally been either “stop the wasteful spending” or “this legislation is too liberal/conservative”. George Bush has finally issued his first veto and the message he’s sending to Congress is (I’m paraphrasing here) “I’m an ignorant, hypocritical, coward who cares about nothing more than the appeasement of the most reactionary extremists within my base”. Everything the Congress has done over the last few years has been acceptable enough to the President to support (or at least pretend to support), but medical research apparently crosses the line.

As the President spoke today about his unprecedented veto, he surrounded himself with children that were concieved via IVF. It seems to me that a man standing on an ethical principle as strong as a “reverence for the gift of life” wouldn’t have to hide behind children to make his point. As he waxed about how “each of these children began his or her life as a frozen embryo”, he didn’t seem to have much to say about the children’s thousands of frozen siblings waiting to be disposed with the rest of the medical waste. Apparently the moral position on this issue is that frozen embryos shouldn’t be mined for “spare parts”, because the Lord wants frozen embryos to get tossed out with the dirty hypodermic needles and used bandages. Thanks for the lecture on “fundamental morals”, Mr. President.

People who oppose this honestly seem to believe the choice is between an embryo becoming a baby or being mined for stem cells when the reality is that the fate of the embryos in question is already sealed. They’re garbage. Just the byproducts of a procedure that none of the stem-cell opponents have the political courage to fight (assuming they really do buy this whole “embryos are people” crap). Regardless of what happens in Washington, they’re going to “die”. So the choice isn’t between life and death, but whether that “death” can be used to “promote a culture of life” (to borrow a phrase from Bush). So anyone who thinks the stem cell issue is analagous to the abortion debate is a moron. If anything, this isn’t much different than the choice of whether or not you want to be an organ donor, but in this case the President has decided that he should be the one to make the choice for all of us.

One thing you’ve gotta give the Bush Administration credit for is that they’ve got an amazing knack for thinking three steps ahead. Case in point, the recent Supreme Court decision that obliterated the Administration’s legal justifications for torture, NSA wiretapping, etc. The beauty of the decision wasn’t that it settled a legal dispute, but that it reaffirmed the letter of existing law. In other words, the court said “I don’t care what your fancy lawyers say, you’re still bound by the law”. The Bushies thought having their legal team invent extra-constitutional grounds for breaking the law would free them of their legal obligations (as an aside, I long for a day when we have leaders who don’t consider the law an “obligation”), but the Supreme Court made it clear that the “I’ve got a shitty lawyer” defense doesn’t fly.

Which bring us to the brilliance of the Bush Administration strategy. Not only have they done their best to stack the courts with judges who think the executive branch should be able to act with impunity, but they’ve rigged another important part of the puzzle as well. If one wanted to bring federal charges against the President, they’d have to be filed by the Justice Department which is now being run by the “shitty lawyer” mentioned above. If I remember correctly, a lot of us thought it was a really bad idea to give a promotion to the guy who strained to find ways to excuse the President’s use of torture. Unfortunately that view wasn’t held by any of the Republicans in the Senate (or a certain fair-weather Democrat fighting for his political life)