Background: California dentist-lawyer Orly Taitz filed a series of motions in Mississippi seeking to have Barack Obama disqualified from entering the Democratic Party primary election in 2012. That election is long since passed, but Taitz is still trying to have Obama retrospectively disqualified, and, in her latest filings, even accused the Mississippi Democratic Party of felonies under the RICO anti-racketeering laws.
The Mississippi Democratic Party has now filed a Motion To Dismiss against the filings by Taitz. It can be found here for your leisure reading. Suffice it to say that the Motion to Dismiss cites no fewer than twelve (12) arguments in favor of dismissal, all crisply laid out. It even attaches the certified copy of Obaham's Long Form Birth Certificate (you know, the one that the birthers claim either does not exist or is forged) as supporting evidence.
My only surprise is that they are only requesting dismissal with prejudice, and not asking for monetary sanctions or attorney's fees.

As the score of litigants and complainants against President Obama ticks way past 0-120 (depending on how you count), I found two more filings by Birther litigants. The first one is from Cody Judy, who is trying to gain a Writ of Certorati from the Supreme Court (no less).
Next on deck is Robert Strunk's response to the denial of his motion against the certification of Barack Obama by the New York State Board of Elections. His motion was not only dismissed with prejudice, which is effectively the judge saying GTFOOMC, but he now is forbidden to file any more motions without the permission of the court. One would think that Strunk, now he has been effectively declared to be a vexatious litigant, would be more circumspect in his pleadings. Alas, logic and good tactics do not seem to be his strong suit based on his objection to the dismissal. Strunk appears to have not read this part of the judgement against him:

plaintiff STRUNK alleges baseless claims about defendants which are fanciful, fantastic, delusional and irrational.

..because here he is, still trying to insist that since he personally fired President Obama in January 2009, that he therefore has standing:

the Court properly recognizes that Plaintiff had duly fired Barack Hussein Obama within 72 hours of his dual offer of contract byoath on January 20 & 21, 2009; and as such, Plaintiff is the only person in thecountry to have done such firing and suffers a specific particular personal injury as aresult different than any other person in the USA in that Defendant Barack HusseinObama Soebarkah personally has injured Plaintiff

Strunk should maybe have read a clue about the court's view of the validity of this claim by this portion of the hearing transcript:

COURT: I saw your letter that you fired the President. I guess he didn't agree with you, because he's still there

Further reading of the transcript should show that the judge was ridiculing Strunk's entire collection of allegations, but Strunk, like the ram butting the dam, appears to have either not noticed, or is determined to go down with all guns blazing. His response to the ruling is a work of...well, I hesitate to use the word "art", mainly because I think that insults all artists, who work at their craft as opposed to making sh1t up.
I did not manage to make it to the end of either of these filings, mainly because of the sudden onset of an acute headache. Both filings are voluminous, verbose, totally unstructured and devoid of cogent argument. In short, they are going to be treated to what the legal profession neatly terms GTFOOMC or D9D.
This is what happens when no sensible lawyer will touch a ludicrously meritless case, and the lawyer-wannabes take over.
NOTE - GTFOOMC = Get The **** Out Of My Court

Many thousands of column inches and much internet bandwidth has already been used on eulogies for the short life of Junior Seau, who apparently committed suicide at the age of 43 at his home in San Diego.
The superficial verdicts are wearily familiar; gifted athlete, blah blah blah, stellar football career, blah blah blah, pillar of society, blah blah blah, great guy, blah blah blah. By all accounts, Junior Seau claimed to be happy and doing what he wanted to do in his life. All very nice, and in keeping of the Western desire to not speak ill of the departed.
Most of this is nice and irrelevant piffle. A 43 year old man with a stellar sporting career and an almost mythical public image, in what should be the prime of his life, goes into a room at his house, pulls out a gun and shoots himself dead. That speaks to a man who had problems, problems that he despaired of.
Seau's death is not some tawdry story of a rags-to-riches-to-rags roller-coaster, of a life destroyed by addictions or crime. However, it is clear that beneath his happy smile, Seau had problems and demons. He was divorced, and had been involved in incidents of domestic violence. It is known that many famous athletes struggle in life after they retire from their original calling. That Seau struggled with life after football would not be uncommon. However, struggle and suicide are different symptoms of malaise.
As one would expect, not many people want to get into that discussion are at this time. One of the few ex players to contribute is one of Seau's former team-mates, Gary Plummer. In this thoughtful interview, Plummer sketches out some of the factors that could have contributed to the decision of Junior Seau to end his life.

Torture - Unsurprisingly, a Senate committee has concluded that torturing detainees is not effective at providing any useful intelligence. This should not be news to anybody who has been awake recently - everybody I have read from who has worked in covert intelligence gathering has been saying the same thing for years, sometimes decades. It leads me to conclude that the focus on torture is a political response rather than an intelligence community response, born of the desperate need to "be seen to be doing something". It's complete bullcrap which is slowly and inexorably reducing the worldwide crebibility of the United States.
NFL Draft - As if you could avoid it, the NFL Draft is under way, and my local team, the Dallas Cowboys, selected Morris Claiborne at number 6 in the first round. The Cowboys traded up to get Claiborne, giving up a second round pick in addition to swapping first round picks. While clearly a very good player, Claiborne is a Wonderlic test dud - he apparently only scored a 4 on the test at the Combine.
The Cowboys have had all sorts of trouble with Dez Bryant, who they also traded up to draft in the first round in 2010, who appears (to use the old phrase) to have million-dollar talent on the field, but a 10 cent head when it comes to off-field decision-making. Bryant actually scored 16 on the Wonderlic. Claiborne has made statements about his poor Wonderlic score, and if he was being advised what to say by his agent, he either ignored the advice, or his agent needs to be reamed out. He uses double negatives, which immediately makes him sound like a hick, and essentially validates all my concerns about academic-athletic balance in college football. The Cowboys had better hope that Claiborne does not dig himself into a hole off the field like Dez Bryant.

The official transcript of Marine Sgt. Gary Stein's Administrative Separation Board hearing is now online. As is normal for a word by word transcript, it is heavy going. However, what it does show is that the evidence shown at the hearing was that Stein had been making inflammatory, intemperate and derogatory statements at several different public Facebook pages, and also at blog and commentary sites over a significant period of time. This was a pattern of behaviour, not one isolated incident. Contrary to claims made elsewhere, Stein was not being singled out for "15 words" or anything like it. He had dug himself quite a hole over a period of time with a number of statements in violation of military regulations.
UPDATE - The Separation Board has ruled that Sgt. Stein should receive a less-than-honorable discharge. Stein is still living in that place called Denial, clinging to his disingenuous "only 15 words" defense, which was torpedoed by evidence at his original hearing.

Sometimes, when I read what professional athletes have to say, my suspicions are confirmed that their focus on athletic excellence was obtained at the expense of intellectual and emotional development. Confirmation of this comes via Roddy White of the Atlanta Falcons, whose bizarre answer to a Twitter question set him up for an increasingly ludicrous series of Twitter exchanges. The exchange may prove that Roddy White has an animus against gay people, but it is difficult to be sure, given the inarticulate nature of much of the exchanges. However, the track record of NFL players opening their mouths about social issues is not a good one (see Shockey, Jeremy and White, Reggie) - their utterances tend to perpetuate the image of a sport populated largely by bigots and/or macho jerks. Roddy needs to understand that freedom of speech confers with it the right to say what you like, but it also confers the right for you to end up looking and reading like an inarticulate ass.
GOP Representative, after proving that he is batshit insane, doubles down on the stupid, and further proves that he is not only batshit insane, he is also an idiot. If you were logical (like I tend to be) you would think that if you were a politician whose idea of useful contribution to political debate was to channel the ghost of Sen. Joe McCarthy by accusing every member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus of being a communist, which was greeted with a mixture of hilarity and contempt, it might be a good idea for you remember the old saying that it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, rather than open it and remove all doubt. However, if your name is Rep. Allen West, none of that commonsensical stuff applies.
Updated data from the 2010 Census in Mother Jones today about the tendency for states that are the least progressive and most authoritarian (Translation: reliably republican) to also be the states taking more money from the Federal Government than they pay in. Note that one of the states that authoritarian regressives like to whine about the most, California, is still a net contributor to the Federal Government. Suggestions have been made elsewhere that this analysis should be broken down by county in addition to state. This Reason article from 2011 analyzed this paradox, with limited success; as the comment section shows, a lot of people engaged in rationalizations based on confirmation bias, and some occasionally bizarre hypothesizing on root causes.
Ed Brayton, in his usual pointed way, eviscerates the bloviating hypocrisy of opponents of President Obama's comments on the Supreme Court consideration of the Affordable Care Act (NOTE to lazy sloganeers - that is the right name for the legislation). As he notes, authoritarian ratchet-jaws in the GOP have been whining about "judicial activism" for decades. As a commenter points out in the blog posting, it is kind of difficult to intimidate 9 people who have lifetime appointments, although given that Pakistan is in the process of banning US drone usage over Pakistan, another commenter who suggested that the POTUS could use the drones on the Supreme Court made me laught out loud (NOTE to irony-impared readers: that last coment was a recording of a humorous reaction, not an endorsement of an idea).
The inventors of the "Girls Around Me" App, recently pulled from the iPhone store after complaints that it could enable stalkers, appear to have not thought much through beyond the original idea, to judge by this news article.

Mario Apuzzo fails in his latest lawsuit to have Barack Obama removed from the Democratic Party ballot in New Jersey. Apuzzo is now threatening to appeal the decision all the way to the US Supreme Court. He has already filed an appeal, but as is normal for many of these appeals, it starts out with spelling errors, including a howler in the title. Being based on a level of exactitude, the legal system tends to be intolerant of pleadings with poor spelling and command of language. It makes you look incompetent and careless, stupid, or some combination of the two.
Reading the appeal, it is rambling word salad apparently recycled from his original motions, it makes no cogent points as to why the ruling was incorrect. What Apuzzo is really saying, once you edit out the guff, is "you ruled against me and I don't like it, so here once again are all the reasons that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen". This is all irrelevant horseshit. The ruling from the ALJ is that Obama does not have to demonstrate eligibility to get on the Democratic primary ballot in New Jersey. Apuzzo's hand waving about natural born citizenship is therefore irrelevant. His sppeal is going to fail unless he can show where the ALJ erred in following New Jersey state law. "Your decision is wrong because he is not a natural born citizen" is not going to cut it, it fails to answer the question "where did the ALJ err?". This is Lawyering 101.
To use an analogy, what Apuzzo is doing is the equivalent of trying to win an appeal against the denial of a building permit by claiming that the Uniform Building Code is unconstitutional.
I also note that Apuzzo, in the second page of the appeal, persists in perpetuating the fiction that this was a trial. It was not, it was an Administrative Law Hearing. Birthers seem to do this all the time. They appear to have the recurrent wet dream of some sort of Big Trial where they present their overwhelming evidence, see the case decided in their favor, and then watch as the sheriff is dispatched to DC to bring The Usurper back in handcuffs for his comeuppance.

Bobby Petrino's professional hurt escalates as the Arkansas Razorbacks fire him, only a handful of days after he was placed on administrative leave following an "interesting" motorbike accident.
Much hand-waving over a supposedly threatening letter from the Obama campaign to supporters who are not donating. I have read this letter and I do not see it as threatening, which is more than I can say for some of the responses from the bottom-feeders in the comments section of the website. Some of those people are pathetic bloviating chickenshits.
Once in a while, a political party throws up somebody whose across-the-board stupidity and lack of intellectual depth is stunningly low. Then there is Rep. Allen West. Today, Rep. West decided to channel the ghost of Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a meeting with constituents:

Moderator: What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists or International Socialist?
West: It's a good question. I believe there's about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It's called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Unfortunately the moderator failed to ask the obvious follow-up question: So where is your, you know, evidence? (probably because the moderator is not actually a moderator, his role was to feed softball questions to Rep. West).
Two can play this game. Some people say that Allen West is a bloviating wanker. And based on reported behavior, my verdict on him is a damn sight closer to reality than his allegations. As PolitiFact has rapidly concluded, Rep. West is basically a liar.

I have concluded that the reason I received this email in the first place was because I responded to a blog posting by PZ Myers on Pharyngula, in which he pointed to the existence of a "survey" on the web site Public Advocate of The United States.
I was going to eviscerate Delgaudio's email, but PZ Myers already did it for me.
There are some fundamental facts that need to be explained.
Firstly, neither Eugene Delgaudio or anybody supporting Public Advocate can read the English Language. When I filled in their bullshit attempt at a push poll, my answers should have made it clear that I disagreed with their entire warped worldview and their mean-spirited censorious bigotry. Yet I still find this nonsensical screed clogging my inbox. What part of "your questions are crap and I hope the answers show that I profoundly disagree with you" did these people fail to process?

Secondly, this email is not a new development. Delgaudio has previously sent emails of a similar type, with similar apocalyptic content. One of his emails from 2010 is discussed here. Delgaudio specializes in these kinds of apocalyptic screeds.
Eugene Delgaudio's Wikipedia entry can be examined here.
UPDATE - I decided to treat Delgaudio's occasional emails as light comedic relief, which they certainly are. They read like desperate cries for help from a strange parallel universe where "homersexuals" and "pedophiles" (one and the same it would seem in Eugene's world) lurk around every corner, ready to pounce on your family and children and destroy Civilization As We Know It. The world he describes is utterly fucking ridiculous, hence the only appropriate response is ridicule. The only sad thing about his missives is that they appear to be successful in terms of people sending him money. The phrase "there's one born every minute" does appear to have a ring of truth to it...

Wells Fargo gets castigated for bad behavior and fined $3+m over property repossessions. Our mortgage was sold to Wells Fargo some time ago, so we may be adhering to the old Chinese saying "keep your friends close and your enemies closer".
Commenter c u n d Gulag at Lawyers Guns and Money hits the nail on the head with respect to the way that conservative authoritarians bolster their positions:

I love how, when Conservatives try to use some sort of supporting material, they turn not to independent sources, which might contradict what they have to say, but to books and studies by other Conservative individuals, organizations, and think tanks.

He is right...whenever I ask Birthers to come up with some, you know, evidence to support their assertions, I am deluged with references to World Net Daily, cut-and-paste home video efforts on YouTube, and a whole bunch of other conspiracy theory echo-chamber sites. Even more amusingly, some of the video material is sourced from people who created their materials as parody or satire - one thing I have learned over the years is that authoritarians usually have defective or missing fact-checkers and irony meters. My worst day was when I had to follow a link to Conservapedia, which is Internet proof that some people not only want to live in a different reality, but they are prepared to expend a lot of energy documenting it. J.R. Tolkein, eat your heart out...