Pandagon explains how to talk to a Libertarian. It’s fucking brilliant:

But there are some Libertarians who remain unswayed by such ugly facts. Whether through persistent ignorance or sociopathy or a mixture of the two, they hold as an article of near-religious faith that they derive no benefit from the modern regulatory apparatus that they could not duplicate on their own with the homebrew FDA they have in their garage. Or even worse, they manifestly hold the welfare of others as far less important than their own profit and comfort. … In a cutthroat economic free-for-all, with the mass of people on the bottom and a handful of ruthless Machiavellian princes at the top, each one of these goobers thinks it’s inevitable that he (gender specificity deliberate) will inevitably become one of the princes.**

And the footnote:

** This is, of course, known as the Renaissance Faire Fallacy.

Then, introducing her first tactic for Libertarian cranial discombobulation, she drops this gem:

Most American Libertarians have precious little grasp of the history of their political philosophy. They seem to think that the Libertarian school of thought sprang fully formed like Athena from Ayn Rand’s beetled brow, with Robert Heinlein as attending midwife.

Beautiful. Go read the whole thing.

Have you been following that story about a Georgia state rep (Ben Bridges) who has been promulgating the idea that Darwin and Copernicus are both wrong, and that spreading their theories is the work of a shadowy Jewish cabal? Here’s a sample:

The Earth is not rotating, nor is it going around the sun. The universe is not one ten-trillionth the size we are told. Today’s cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as “science.” The whole scheme from Copernicanism to Big Bangism is a factless lie.

Said legislator gets these ideas from his campaign manager, who is married to the King Hell nutcase, one Marshall Hall (see FixedEarth.com). Other state-level pols got Bridges’ memo supporting Hall’s kookery, and some sent it on to other colleagues. People appear to have been taking him seriously, at least until someone pointed out what a raving nutbird looney he is; however, Bridges’ memo is clearly the product of Hall, so it raises the question of just exactly what he’s doing sending out unvetted correspondence that is so transparently looney and, by the way, anti-Semetic.

Anyway, it’s a mess, and we wanted to point it out. As for additional analysis, we rely on the inimitable Fred Clark, who is on the case and doing a better job than we have time for this week.

Conan O’Brien’s Meet the Press for Idiots should NOT be missed.

The court of appeals has sided with Bush in refusing to strike down a law denying Federal courts the ability to review the cases of Gitmo detainees.

Twice before the United States Supreme Court has ruled that federal courts may consider habeas corpus petitions by the Guantanamo Bay detainees. In response to those decisions, Congress has twice rewritten the law in an attempt to limit the avenues of appeal by the detainees.

The most recent revision to the law, at issue in today’s decision, was signed by President Bush last October. It eliminated the jurisdiction of federal courts over habeas challenges by any non-citizens held as enemy combatants, and set up a military review for the prisoners at Guantanamo, with limited right of appeal to the federal courts afterwards.

We’ll see what the Supremes say. Surely it’s impossible that the Administration has figured out an end run around the Constitution that’s as simple as holding people in Cuba.

We’re pretty sure this doesn’t qualify:

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While we love that he typically keeps his knives out for braindead Republicans, we think this one will be funny to just about everybody.

How Faith and Science differ when it comes to understanding the Universe, as expressed in easy-to-understand flow charts.

Now, can we please get those creationist goons out of our schools now?

GOP: Gleefully votes to eliminate habeas corpus.

Dems: Upon regaining control of Congress, introduce bill to restore said.

Now Congress just wants to monitor EVERYTHING on the Internet — all emails, IM, web traffic, the whole schmeel.

Can anyone else figure out why this is a terrible, terrible idea?

Tenent warned Rice 2 months before 9/11. There’d been a drastic uptick in al-Qaeda communications, and it was clear something was up. This warning, like those before it, was largely ignored.

Also note the context in which the Post runs this:

Editor’s Note: How much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush’s “neocons” and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks. Rice responded in an interview that “what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years.”

The Rice claim doesn’t even pass the giggle test.