We Americans can be one silly bunch of wackos.  Only in America could we make a greeting into a political discussion.  This whole "Merry Christmas, Happy Holiday" thing is just absurd and if anyone believes that it came about for any reason other than someone making political hay has been living with their head up their rear for far too long.

This issue "jumped the shark" when some doofus who was debating the issue on CNN invoked the Nazis’ banned children from saying Merry Christmas as a viable comparison to what’s going on now.  You can see the whole video here.  (Thanks to Ed Cone for the lead.)

I have to say that anyone who feels oppressed or threatened and is a member of the kind of majority that the Christmas-celebrating-Christians represent in this country must have never felt the sting of true oppression.  They should stop and think about people with real problems.  You know people who:

• Are without a home months after their home was destroyed by a hurricane.
• Are freezing to death in the Himalayan mountains months after their homes were leveled by an earthquake.
• Are mourning the death of a loved one due to any number of wars.  For those of you thinking about Iraq, open your mind to the breadth of mankind’s problem with violence.  Hint: Darfur.
• Are living in the streets of the wealthiest country in the world.

So spare me the faux-angst of holiday greetings.  There are people with real problems in this world and we need not be distracted by this idiocy.  Just be happy you can shop at Wal-Mart or Target or anywhere you choose, no matter how they greet you.

Today I learned of a new American constituency, a group made up of types of people I knew existed but did not realize they actually had their own party/ .  They’re called Reconstructionists, or more precisely Christian Reconstructionists and from what I read about them in this article in Mother Jones they make traditional Christian Fundamentalists look like bong smoking alums of Cal-Berkeley.

You’ll have to read the whole article to get the full effect, but here’s some excerpts to give you a hint:

Reconstructionists aren’t shy about what exactly it is they are
pursuing: “The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to
gain exclusive control over the franchise,” Gary North, a top
Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. “Those who refuse to submit publicly…must be denied citizenship.”

WITH HIS KHAKI PANTS and checkered shirts, Gary DeMar could be one of a
million guys meeting weekly in men’s groups at churches around the
country. Bright and articulate, he’s soft-spoken until he gets in front
of a crowd. His publishing house distributes hundreds of tracts, more
than 20 of them written by DeMar himself, with titles such as The Politically Incorrect Guides to Islam (and the Crusades), which promises “all the disturbing facts about Islam and its murderous hostility to the West,” and The Marketing of Evil,
which covers everything “from easy divorce and unrestricted
abortion-on-demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality
to grade-schoolers.”

…The Old Testament—with its 600 or so Mosaic laws—is the inflexible
guide for the society DeMar and other Reconstructionists envision.
Government posts would be reserved for the righteous, as long as they
are male. There would be thousands of executions a year, with stoning a
preferred method because it would turn the deaths into “community
projects,” as movement theologian North has noted. Sinners in line for
the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about
their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their
parents, and gay men (lesbians, however, would be spared because no
specific reference to them can be found in the Books of Moses).

There’s much more where that came from and it’s down right scary.  In fact when I read it the word "treason" kept dancing through my head.  But I’ll take comfort in the fact that there are so many people in America who’d be stoned to death (mostly Republicans from Texas) if these jokers came to power that I can’t see them ever being successful.

Apparently it isn’t "absolutely nothing" as the song says.  Just ask this doofus, the CEO of a defense contractor who reportedly spent $10 million on his daughter’s bat mitzvah.

Just when I think the stories of greed and avarice can’t get any crazier I’m proven wrong.  Thanks to Blog on the Run for the lead.

A couple of convicts from Louisiana escaped from prison, got themselves some fake student IDs from Tulane and after the Katrina disaster made their way to the University of Tennessee where they posed as brothers of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity from the Tulane chapter. The Lambda Chi Alpha brothers at Tennessee opened their hearts and their doors to the cons, as did some co-eds.  The men were recaptured after one of them was caught passing counterfeit $10 bills at a gas station. 

The full story is here along with a picture that ought to warm the hearts of real Katrina victims.

The picture to the left is from Sports Illustrated’s site.  The guy pictured is the t-ball coach who offered $25 to one of his own players to bean another of his players, who was autistic, so that they autistic kid wouldn’t be able to play.  SI named him to their 2005 Turkey’s of the Year list.

Rarely does a picture capture the essence of a man so well.  Notice the collar on the shirt that makes it look like he’s wearing his daddy’s clothes, and the obviously-too-large suit that he is wearing to perhaps make himself at least feel like a man.

What a weenie.

The fact that one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction was code named ”Curveball’ was probably a good hint that his intelligence wasn’t so, well, intelligent.  In an article in the LA Times Curveball’s handlers, all senior officials from the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), claim that "the Bush administration and the CIA  repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq."

In light of what we’ve been learning lately about some of the president’s folks, maybe they felt Curveball was a kindred spirit.  After all, his handlers "said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental
problems. ‘He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND
official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal
person,’ agreed a BND analyst."  Sounds like he’d fit right in working with Rove & Company.

You know, with news like this who needs fiction?

Most of us long ago learned to think of that strange breed of human known as the "lawyer" with a certain degree of disgust.  Following are eight stories that serve as further proof of the nefariousness of this breed, as if we need more proof.  All eight of these stories appeared this week.

1. Users sue Match.com for date fraud
2. Woman sues Dunkin Donuts for $15 million after spilling coffee in her own lap.
3. Japanese hair salon successfully sued for bad hair cut — This one is offered to show some editorial balance.  In other words American lawyers aren’t the only morons in the world.
4. Disney lawyers put a stop to Chinese company’s practice of making bad performers parade around in Mickey Mouse costumes.
5. In settlement with Netflix, class-action lawyers get $2.5 million, customers get a coupon.
6. Studios asked for smoking warnings on DVDs: "attorneys general from 32 states want Hollywood to slap anti-smoking admonitions on all new DVDs."
7. Judge warned for jailing man who sighed in his courtroom.
8. Real estate developer in Ontario slaps $8 million libel lawsuit on a woman for her blog about problems in her development. Since it’s Canadian dollars I guess it works out to about $126 US.