Whackjob Roundup.

Maureen Dowd wrote a hilarious article this week entitled "Sarah's Ghoulish Carousel" about Sarah Palin's recent fear-mongering and attempts to keep her face in the national spotlight. The article includes hilarious lines like: "Consistency was long ago sent to a death panel in Palin world."

Michele Bachmann has revealed that she will only run for president "If I felt that's what the Lord was calling me to do [...]." Apparently Bachmann only decided to run for Congress because god "called" her to say that she should. After she was told by god to run she prayed and fasted for three days to confirm that she had correctly heard god's will. Jesus Christ that is crazy (note the lack of direct address--I refuse to talk to Jesus, even if he did manage to get Bachmann into office).

Feel free to add other deserving whackjob news to this thread.

Let's bring the blog back, people. I miss reading the posts here.

Only one?!

In the fall of 2006 the Secular Coalition of America announced that they would award $1,000 to the person who identified the highest-level atheist, humanist, freethinker, or other nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States. SCA Advisory Board Chairman Woody Kaplan, a civil liberties activist and former member of the ACLU's National Board of Directors, took some of the suggested names and interviewed close to sixty members of the U.S. House and Senate. “At the time, twenty-two of them told me they didn’t believe in a god,” Kaplan recalls. “Twenty-one of them said, ‘You can’t tell anybody.’ One of them said you could: Congressman Pete Stark.”

Here is his acceptance speech. Nothing earth-shattering, but that's just it - how is it possible that his simple, logical thinking is so rare among elected officials?

A daily dose of crazy

Straight from the Roman Catholic Church and their un-excommunicated Bishop Williamson.

Supreme Court Ruling Causes Violent Double Take

I nearly hit a car yesterday while driving home. OK, that's not quite true, but I certainly lost my full mental capacities for a moment while listening to NPR report on a recent Supreme Court ruling.

Let's say you are John Smith of Washington County. The cops pull you over for speeding, run your license, and see that you have an arrest warrant out in Washington County. Let's further speculate that the arrest warrant isn't for you, it's for a different John Smith, but was attributed to you by clerical error.

Now we'll have some real fun. Let's say there's something illegal in your car, which of course the cops found during the arrest/search process. Of course, eventually it will be discovered that the warrant was in error and your arrest will be cleared ...

However, due to yesterday's Supreme Court ruling, the evidence that the state had no right to search for or seize from you in the first place is now totally admissable for use in a subsequent prosecution.

I mean, that's just such a blatant abuse of governmental power. It's unfortunate that throwing that evidence out would let guilty people walk, but it's certainly not worth the encroachment on the rights of citizens. I could go on but I'll just stop.

BONUS: While searching for this article I found an article about frequent-atheist-lawsuit-bringer Michael Newdow trying to get religious references pulled from next week's inaugural address. He'll surely fail so why does he keep trying? According to these two articles the answer is simple: atheists have so much narcissim and hubris, there's no other way to release it.

Atheist bus ads

Moderately interesting article about atheists putting ads on London buses. Some of the ads read "There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

The article says that Richard Dawkins opposes putting the word "probably" in the ads. In my opinion, though, that turns atheism into a religion, but maybe I'm missing something.

(Still) I hate Huckabee

With the inept John McCain having won the Republican nomination, then Huckabee charismatically appearing on the Colbert Report, and even with his own show, it becomes easy to sort of like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

But let's not forget he's nuts. He suggested of the Bible and the Constitution that we use the perfect text to fix the imperfect one. I could go on, but he was on the View and, well, I'll leave it to you.