After having to defend against various legal maneouvers by the other two major parties, as they persistently attempt to force other parties out of the picture at local, state and federal level, the Libertarian Party filed a complaint in Washington to have Mitt Romney removed from the 2012 election ballot.
I am not a lawyer, so I have no way of knowing how strong the complaint is. However, I think it is high time that the two major parties were forced to defend themselves in court for a change on electoral matters. They have been trying to pretend that libertarians do not exist, although they always prattle on about "Freedoms" at every chance they get, which I kind of thought was a major plank of the Libertarian party's worldview...but there I go, being all logical and stuff...
UPDATE - No sooner did this complaint take to the air, it was shot down today in a brief court hearing.

1. How to Make Yourself Look like a censorious Jerk - Prague High School superintendent
In which Kaitlin Nootbaar is denied her diploma document after she uses the word "Hell" in her valedictorian speech at Prague High School in Oklahoma. The school superintendent doubles down, and becomes an asshat, demanding an apology before they will give her the diploma. Not only is he not going to get an apology, but as this article makes clear, Kaitlin has already moved on.This is not going to end well for the school or the superintendent. Prague High School's Google ranking is going to be entirely driven by an incident where the Superintendent started out by behaving like a censorious nitwit, and then proceeded to dig himself into a hole. If the school is unlucky, a court may end up ordering them to hand over the diploma anyway, which will almost certainly cost the school money that ideally would go into, you know, education.

2. The Eurozone crisis - Iceland
Lost in the more recent perpetual news cycle of Greece, its indebtedness and its desperate attempts to borrow enough money to stave off an exit from the Euro is any examination of the first country to fall into a debt trap - Iceland. While Ireland and Greece took the approach of falling on their swords and agreeing to pay creditors, even at the risk of being indebted for decades, Iceland took a more robust approach to both personal and corporate debt. I expect Iceland to do a lot better in the medium term than either Ireland or Greece.

3. Lubbock County Judge suffers attack of wackadoodle asshattery
Given the extreme antipathy that many people in Texas have to any form of taxation, proposing a tax increase of any kind, particularly out in the countryside, requires some seriously creative rationalization. Step forward County Judge Tom Head. He has a fine reason for asking for a tax increase. Specifically, the money from the tax increase is to be used to buy..weapons...to oppose President Obama if he is re-elected for a second term:

"He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the UN, and what is going to happen when that happens?," Head asked.

You can read the short version of Judge Head's bizarre doomsday scenario here. Suffice it to say that he has swallowed, hook line and sinker, a falsehood that has been circulating among conspiracy theorists for years. This guy needs to be tossed from office, if only because he has demonstrated that he has no clue about how to tell fact from fiction. I don't think you can seriously claim to be qualified for judicial office if you cannot make that rather important distinction when fed information.
UPDATE - Perhaps realizing that he sounded like a complete wackadoodle, Judge Head has been busy clarifying his remarks.

One of the enduring Christian stories from the Old Testament is the story of Noah and his Ark, and how he supposedly saved many representatives of the animal kingdom from a catastrophic flood.
Today, despite the reality that over 5000 years have elapsed (according to Biblical timetables) since the Ark would have been floating around, there is no shortage of people still looking for it. The latest is a former Baywatch actress who has apparently been out in Eastern Turkey looking for the Ark (although, in a true CYA move that shows she has potential for elective office, she is at pains to say that she is "just looking" and does not expect to find it).
The definitive sardonic statement on this nonsensical endeavour comes here:

Using telescopes, astronomers can locate and identify asteroids as small as ten metres long, despite the rocks travelling at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour, at a distance of at least three hundred million kilometres from Earth.
Meanwhile, the religious cannot find a 200 metre boat on a 5000 metre high mountain in a fixed location. Maybe goblins are moving the wreckage around the mountain when people try to look.
Just how dim are people that they can’t grasp the non-existence of the “ark”?

Another commenter in the same thread has a very good point, presumably forgotten by would-be discoverers:

The most pragmatic and sensible pro-flood answer is one I generally don’t hear from flood theorists: That Noah and family cannibalized the ark after landing. Wood is a valuable commodity, and the ark presumably already had much of its wood already in plank and beam forms. Heck, even rotten wood would probably make decent firewood, so it’d still find a use. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for good TV ratings.

1. The fake travel documentary
In 1979, when I went to the cinema to see Monty Python's "Life of Brian", the first item to be shown, following the usual perky and utterly annoying adverts, was a travel documentary about various places in Europe...at least, that was how it started out, apparently. The narrator was clearly John Cleese. His initial commentary was mellifluous and stuffed full of verbose and sweeping phraseology...except that over time one notices a slow warping of the commentary, as he morphs, first to waspishness, then to sarcasm, then on to profanity. He slams Austria, where he manages to commentate on the high suicide rate ("they're topping themselves at a rate of knots") and then arrives at Venice, where his frustrated commentary reaches its first profane apex ("Fucking gondolas!"). After that...well, it's worth listening to, many times over.
I have managed to discover the entire movie online. As this site explains, Cleese wrote the commentary of the entire film, and narrated it over stock footage, in a parody of the cheaply-made banal travel documentaries that used to operate as B movies in many British cinemas in the 1950's and 1960's.

2. The Neville Chamberlain speech recreation
In which John Cleese, directed by the late Peter Cook, attempts to re-enact the famous appearance by Neville Chamberlain on his return from visiting Adolf Hitler in 1938. As you will see, he starts off poorly and then gets steadily worse...

Back in 2010, I wrote about what can only be described as a shakedown racket perpetrated on drivers passing through Tenaha TX. The town's law enforcement was stopping drivers passing through the area and invoking asset forfeiture laws in a way that totally failed to meet any sensible law enforcement standards. Old shibboleths like "driving while black" and "driving while looking Hispanic" appear to have been at the root of many of the stops that led to people having cash, jewelry and other valuables seized on the spot.
A number of victims of the shakedowns filed a class-action lawsuit against the City of Tenaha. We then had to watch in disbelief as city officials tried to actually fund their defense in in the lawsuit using...the funds seized from the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit. Fortunately a state court slapped down that blatant ethical and financial violation.
This case has now been settled in favour of the defendants, and concurrently, Texas State Law has been updated to try to better protect against abuses of asset forfeiture laws (although accountability for abuses is still weak, and ultimately limited by the doctrine of Absolute Immunity that appears to shield most law enforcement officials from accountability for bad or corrupt decisions). The defendants are, needless to say, issuing the usual "we had to do this to get it over with" press releases in order to rationalize away the egregious nature of the original civil rights and policing violations.
I remain politely skeptical about whether this will prevent similar abuses in the future. Asset forfeiture laws are too tempting a target for abuse, since they bring in money for local cities and police forces, in the same way that traffic and parking tickets do. Those sources of revenue are like drugs in the current economic crisis.

1. Lt. William Calley - the saga of his conviction and US inability to process it
This blog posting explains some of the background to events that unfolded after Lt. Calley's conviction on 22 (yes, 22) counts of murder. It is not difficult to see that a lot of people in the USA remained in denial about Calley's guilt and became apologists for his actions.

2. The continuing saga of the GOP War on Voter Fraud
One of the pervasive features of western political systems is the extent to which electors fall for The Fear Card when it is played by politicians. Students of history and literature will know that this tactic, as well as being identified by George Orwell in "1984" was one of the prime ones in the Nazi playbook, as admitted by Herman Goering during his Nuremburg trial and interrogation. I have seen it used so many times by politicians in my lifetime that I have lost count. The sad thing is that politicians use it because it works. Humans are terribly bad at assessing perceived threats in an unemotional fashion, and are also bad at assessing risk. This makes us individually and collectively vulnerable to these kinds of fear-based scares.
One of the fears that has been successfully exploited by the GOP in the last 5 years is "voter fraud". The claim is that many people are voting who are not allowed to vote, either because of defective IDs and paperwork, or impersonation.
The reality is that the claims have no empirical foundation. All recent attempts to find evidence of significant voter fraud have failed. Given that legislative time is scarce, I think it is time for elected representatives to stop doubling down on legislation to address a non-existent problem, and, you know, actually work on important stuff. The current legal initiatives in states to combat voter fraud are nothing more than partisan political masturbation, playing on primitive fears and pandering to the "something must be done" mindset.
However, amusingly and ironically, two recent instances of voter fraud have come to light, and both of them were proved or alleged to have been performed by GOP members. The Indiana Secretary of State was convicted of voter fraud in 2011. Currently, another GOP politician in Arizona has also been accused of voting fraud. One would think that if you are a party who is campaigning to stamp out voter fraud, you would at least try to ensure that your own members aren't engaging in it, but then logic and ethics do not seem to be particularly high on the list of requirements for many political arenas in the USA...

3. NLP and interpreting people's eye movements
One of the cornerstones of NLP is that you can supposedly determine whether a person is lying by their eye movement response to questions. Certain types of eye movements are supposed to be associated with attempts to deceive or lie during responses. This is potentially very important, in a culture that places a high premium on eye contact as a means of assessing trustworthiness.
We already know that certain types of people, known as kinesthetics, do not hold eye contact when asked questions. They tend to look sideways and down. This article explains the tendency, and points out that no less a person than Albert Einstein was a kinesthetic. It also discusses the 1984 Vice-Presidential debate between George H W Bush and Geraldine Ferraro, where Bush broke eye contact by looking through the camera, while Ferraro, a kinesthetic, broke eye contact by looking sideways and down. Immediate post-debate analyses scored Bush more highly than Ferraro in terms of perceived trustworthiness, but this was almost certainly based on the audience's primitive reactions to the different ways in which the candidates used eye contact when processing and answering questions.
I too am a kinesthetic, and, like many people in the UK, I find that sustained eye contact from people makes me uncomfortable. It convinces me that the person engaging in eye contact is actually engaging in artifice, not authenticity. I also tend to be a lot more interested in the words of an answer than body language. Body language is more open to interpretation than words are.
The NLP interpretation has always been that looking sideways and down is an indicator that the person is being deceiving or is lying in their response. Well, it seems that this conclusion is not supported by experimental evidence.

4. Butthurt Roman Catholic leader wants a return to the (not so good) old days
In which a German Roman Catholic bishop, infuriated by criticism of his church and the Pope, has the brilliant idea of resurrecting the old days when blasphemy was a felony.
I've got news for him. They tried that for several hundred years in Europe. It is known in history as The Dark Ages, and we were smart enough to move past it, and stop the Church from defining the boundaries of free speech. The bishop may also want to confer with his CEO in future before he opens his mouth, since the Pope complained last year about Pakistan's blasphemy laws. It is always awkward when the CEO and a director are not on the same page.
It is interesting to see this attack of special pleading by the Church. It is in line with other recent dumbass interpretations of the First Amendment in the USA by other butthurt individuals, including John Rocker, whose idea of free speech not only includes their right to say anything they like, but apparently includes an additional right that they should not be criticized or ridiculed for saying anything they like. The logical conclusion that preventing them from being ridiculed is actually a violation of the free speech rights of others is a conclusion that they either cannot reach or that they have chosen to ignore, because their butthurt is more important than others' free speech.

1. Chick-Fil-A - a Libertarian utters semi-threatening crap
A Libertarian candidate in Mississippi, Ron Williams, has committed a common sin amongst political candidates and representatives. He opened his mouth on a subject with his brain totally disengaged. In this case, he said that the mayors who had stated their opposition to Chick-Fil-A opening in their cities “need to be introduced to the Second Amendment ASAP.”
I'm pissed.
I'm pissed partly because Ron Williams, by any objective analysis, is an idiot. He may have a valid objection to the Mayor's threats (note that they are threats, not actions), but responding with a sinister (albeit vague) threat normally used by gun nuts and wackaloons is stupid beyond belief.
I'm also pissed because, as a Libertarian candidate, Williams should be a damn sight more smart in his choice of language. Libertarians have a hard enough time being taken seriously while trying to combat a two-party power duopoly in the USA. Pseudo-macho horseshit like this is going to further convince independent voters that Libertarians are indeed wackaloons who are being fellated by the NRA. Ron Williams needs to learn to engage his brain before he tries opining in the future.

2. Bigots unite in defensiveness and total confusion
Nothing distresses bigots more than being called on their bigotry. Since many bigots are really engaging in a low-intensity form of bullying, they do not like being called out one bit. This posting over at Freethought Blogs explains (with practical examples) the three tactics most commonly used by bigots to weasel out of being called for their bigoted views.

1. Utter stupidity and vacuousness 101 - John Rocker
John Rocker, long retired from being a minorly-infamous MLB pitcher and source of a significant number of comments about others that seemed to come from a source of half-baked adolescent wankery, has (for reasons that are a mystery to me, but perhaps the money was good) written an article for WorldNet Daily.
Ken over at Popehat, who, as a badass lawyer, can spot verbal nonsense a couple of miles away, analyzes the article...and, well, to say that he finds it wanting is a bit of an understatement.

2. The Mitt Romney European Tour of 2012
Every so often I am asked by fellow Americans who are off to visit or vacation in Europe for some words of advice about what to do, places to visit, what to expect etc. I try to help them (but as you know, some humans are better listeners than others).
One of the things that the really smart ones ask me (not as often as I would like) is: any advice on how to behave?
I like that question, because it allows me to try and explain the phenomenon of The Ugly American, why the stereotype exists, and what they can do to ensure that they do not live down to it. IMPORTANT NOTE - Nobody ever lives up to a stereotype.
Sadly, nobody from Mitt Romney's campaign called me before Mitt set off across the pond on his Impress The Hell Out Of Prospective Voters And Look Presidential 2012 Europe Tour (with special diversion To The Middle East). If they had, I would have given them the same advice that I always give my fellow Americans:

1. Listen, and ask questions if you don't understand why something is the way it is
2. Before you open your mouth, ask yourself if you are about to complain about something. If you are, ask yourself if you are about to complain simply because it is not the same way as in the USA. If the answer to that question is Yes, Don't Say A Word. This is a cultural difference, and complaining about it will immediately mark you as an Ugly American.

It is obvious that Mitt Romney did not absorb anything approaching sensible advice before he set off to Europe.
Now, before I say anything else, I should add that when I lived in Europe, we grew wearily used to seeing politicians or candidates arriving in the UK on a whistle-stop tour of Europe. They would usually say some nice things about the UK, then they would jet off to Ireland or Scotland or some far-flung locale to look for their roots, or engage in a similar activity allowing for some variation of the "man of the people" photo-op. They would also utter nonsensical claptrap along the way that we rapidly realized was intended only for domestic USA consumption. Thus, Irish American politicians would make some ludicrous statements about how the IRA were really not that bad a bunch of chappies and the UK should stop oppressing the people of Northern Ireland (or some such guff). This was all intended for the good old boys in Boston and other Irish enclaves in the USA. I think it's called pandering to your base.
I have no idea why Mitt Romney thought that visiting Europe was a good idea at all in this election cycle. He has no foreign policy experience whatsoever, and has never shown any interest in it as a discpline (not that he had to in any of his previous roles). Unlike (say) George H W Bush, who had accumulated a lot of understanding of the rest of the world because of his role in the CIA and being an ambassador, Romney was starting from ground zero with this trip. Given the legendary lack of interest by most of Middle America towards The Rest Of The World, unless Americans are in peril or bringing back sporting trophies or cheap oil, I have to ask; who the hell thought this was a good idea? I can only assume that the Desire To Look Presidential outweighed all other cautionary thoughts.
So off Mitt goes to Europe, where, from every published account, he basically put his foot in it every other time he opened his mouth,starting in London. When the Mayor of London essentially mocks a US Presidential candidate in public, you know you have probably fucked up in PR terms with your hosts.
The amazing thing is that having committed one faux pas, one would think that Romney would have the good sense to, you know, shut up and focus on listening instead of talking. But no, he goes and makes more inflammatory comments, this time in Israel, which the last time I looked, was regarded as an important US ally in the Middle East. The low point in courtesy terms may have been an abrasive encounter between Romney PR hacks and the media at a Polish holy site, where a Romney advisor told several media representatives to "kiss my ass". That, ladies and gentlemen, is no shining example of positive international relations.
Now...bearing in mind what I said earlier, there is a good argument that none of the European reaction matters. Romney was just talking to the electorate back in the USA, therefore, so the theory goes, the only thing that matters is their reaction.
However, we have to consider what the fallout will be if Romney is elected in November. He will be starting from a perception in Europe that he is a buffoon. This will be worse than the position that George W. Bush started from in 2001 after 9/11 when he began to assemble the Coalition Of The Willing. Bush Jr. was regarded as a lightweight in Europe, but polite skepticism swiftly turned to hostility as his key lieutenants like Donald Rumsfeld (the "Old Europe" jibe) and John Bolton proceeded to open their mouths and say utterly uneffingbelievably stupid things that reduced the willingness of Europe to help in the invasion of Iraq. The final coalition was a lot smaller than it could have been.
Quite simply, being smart and nice pays off, being a bunch of boorish twits does not.
Mitt Romney might regard the trip as a success, but Europe was not impressed, and that will have its own medium term consequences. This, by the way, is one reason why I am not even remotely considering voting for Mitt Romney in the November election. The guy demonstrated on this tour that (a) he is out of his depth, and (b) he does not think ahead. Those are key skills deficits for a prospective US President.

1. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should #2
In which Twitter disables the account of freelance journalist Guy Adams (who writes for, among other publications, The Independent) after he savagely criticized NBC's tape delayed coverage of the Olympic Games, and in the process of doing so, published the email address of an NBC executive that people should complain to.
It appears that Adams violated a Twitter rule that forbids the publication of private email addresses. However, as Adams has pointed out, this was an NBC employee email address, not a private one, and email addresses within NBS are deeply stereotypical to the point of being totally predictable in most cases. Anybody with a functioning brain could have guessed the person's NBC email address in thirty seconds or less given their first and last names.
There was no upside to banning Adams from Twitter. All it did was make Twitter look like a bunch of over-zealous censorious nitwits in the thrall of NBC. That reduces their internet credibility. If they have any sense they will reinstate Adams and find some way of admitting to error. I doubt that this will happen, since large providers of any service generally do not have a well-developed ability to say "we are sorry".
2. Note to the Macho Men who think they could have stopped the Aurora CO shooter
Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station already eviscerated (in passing) the people laboring under the delusion that one or more heroes armed with concealed handguns could have stopped the Aurora CO shooter. Here is another short sharp put-down of the closet Rambos and Chuck Norris wannabes.

1. Free Speech victories in the courts in the US and the UK
From Ken over at Popehat. Note the utter bloviating idiocy of Chris Watson (whoever he may be). The guy wins my Wanker Of The Day award by a country mile.

2. The Aurora CO Shooting
Two superb posts by Jim Wright over at Stonekettle station about the utterly predictable reactions that occur every time one of these outrages occurs. Here and Here.

3. The "Obama is ineligible because I say so" guys are at it again
Gordon Epperly, who previously tried to have Barack Obama ruled ineligible for the Presidency because according to him, he is a mulatto (I kid you not), has now filed another complaint seeking to have Obama removed from the ballot in Alaska. Given that Epperly is not a lawyer, and is representing himself (and it shows) I expect this to get short shrift from the legal system. The people filing these complaints do not seem to understand the meaning of fundamental legal concepts like standing, evidence and argument. Just for grins, I waded into the comments at the article, and I have already been called a liar by one aggrieved commenter. The first time this year. I must be losing my touch.