This is a great clip of The Daily Show surgically dismantling the two-faced bullshit of right-wing talking heads. How anyone takes a guy like Karl Rove or Bill O’Reilly seriously is just way beyond me.

Meanwhile, you should check out this description of how the people at TDS put together these clips, which Adam linked to a few days ago. And while I’m here, I should say that I’m glad the people at TDS built their website so that sharing these types of clips is so easy. Way to embrace technology and free advertising, guys.

By now you’ve probably heard about all of this, but just in case I wanted to bring together a couple of quotes for you. First, we have Barack Obama talking about Sarah Palin’s daughter, who is pregnant at 17:

“Let me be a clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.

“And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and, you know, teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits.”

You might disagree with that, but you have to admit that it’s classy. With that in mind, let’s have John McCain with a comment at a GOP fund-raiser in 1999:

Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.

Last week The Daily Show ran a bit where John Oliver went up to people dancing at the DNC and asked them serious questions like “What is [Barack Obama] going to do to resolve the mortgage crisis?” When the revelers gave answers like, “He’s going to do everything right,” Oliver said, “I’m just worried those are soundbites with no substance.” I know it’s The Daily Show’s job to be achingly cynical, but I’m still surprised to see them missing the point so badly. While I have no idea what Barack Obama would do to resolve the crisis in South Ossetia, I just don’t think that matters. Among so many more things, I am tired of having a raging dick for a president. I want to be able to watch the news without seething, and only one candidate seems likely to give me that.

My Google Reader has been overflowing with stories and opinions about Sarah Palin, and I’ve been sharing a lot of it. But I thought it would be useful to do a quick round-up here.

To start with, if you haven’t read anything at all and are just wondering, “What are people saying,” Andy Tanenbaum at Electoral Vote has a decent summary, along with a hypothetical dialog explaining the choice.

PZ Myers has a post that, at first, seems to be about the completely unrelated subject of a militaristic evangelical sect. There are quotes like:

“An end-time army has one common purpose — to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion,” Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada.

But then PZ ends with this:

Let’s hope this is a fringe cult that will fade away, rather than rising to greater power. Let’s hope. But … Sarah Palin’s home church is dominionist, with connections to Joel’s Army.

Afraid yet?

So, uh, that’s awesome. Anyway, back to Palin. Two good posts by Alaskans about the way she is perceived in her home state at Statistical Modeling and Lawyers, Guns and Money. But by far the best coverage so far as been by Edge of the American West. There’s this excellent post about the right and the wrong way to go about attacking the choice. Hint: leave the beauty queeen bit out. There are two great illustrations of how Palin represents four more years of embarassing political cronyism. The posts respectively compare Palin to a “Mayberry Machiavelli” and to Alberto Gonzales. So, you know, that’s pretty flattering. And then there’s this, which begins with a most important question:

“Why is Sarah Palin running with John McCain if she hates old people so much?”

To wrap up on a more serious note, I have Henry Abbott making an important point. With Barack Obama and Sarah Palin on the Democratic and Republican tickets, America is guaranteed something significant: a serious basketball player in the White House.

Everyone who spends a lot of time following American basketball knows the name Frederic Weis. Not because he’s any good, but because he was once in the wrong place at the wrong time. Frederic Weis is a household name (in the homes of hoops nerds) because he’s 7′2″ tall, and because Vince Carter once jumped over him. Like, over him over him.

Why would anyone who reads this blog care about this? Because I want it to make sense when I say in November that McCain got Weis’d.

This terrific design is courtesy of the people at UNDRCRWN, purveyors of awesome shit, all of which would look completely ridiculous on me. (Via First Cuts, by way of Ball Don’t Lie.)

Neil Gaiman points to a podcast called The Moth, which consists of people on stage telling true stories without any notes. Neil’s is OK, but I laughed harder at the end of this story by playwright Edgar Oliver than I have at anything else in a very long time. It’s only about 15 minutes long, and Oliver’s storytelling voice is priceless.

For reasons that are no longer apparent to me, I was looking up the Tales from the Crypt show that ran on HBO in the 90s. I’m hoping that some of you, like myself, have fond memories of watching this show, more notable for twist endings than being particularly scary (although I’ll confess that I remember an episode or two that created a sense of creepiness that lingers to this day). As always, Wikipedia is the best resource for everything, and their coverage of the show comes complete with an episode list that conveys better than anything just how cool the show was. Anyone remember the episode where the old millionaire is buying (piecemeal) the body of a young stud? Did you realize that Ahnold directed it? Remember that one where the criminal is handcuffed to the dead body of a state trooper in the middle of the desert? Did you know, back then, that Kyle MachLachlan played the criminal? Or that he later directed the episode where a husban suspects his wife of having an affair with a priest? (The husband is Adam West, by the way.) Another gem that I only discovered when looking up the show is an episode where Ed Begley, Jr., plays a travelling salesman struggling to escape alive from a hillbilly family played by Tim Curry (yes, all three family members are Tim Curry). You can watch it online here (I’d embed the video but it’s in four parts, so you’d need to click through anyway). It’s not terribly scary, but it is mildly disturbing, somewhat amusing, and actually a great performance by Curry on all three counts - just about everything that made the show worth watching when I was young.

Why hasn’t anyone shown me this clip of Mos Def on Bill Maher’s show last year? Mighty Mos clearly has some strange ideas (Bin Laden wasn’t behind the September 11 attacks? No one walked on the moon? OJ was innocent? Hard to tell if he’s joking anymore), but his take is interesting, and it’s definitely fun to watch him blowing Maher’s mind. Meanwhile, when did Bill Maher become one of those “Oh noes, the Islamofascists are coming for us” dudes?

The clip also includes a performance from Dr. Cornel West which constitutes a watershed moment in the history of YouTube*.

Two bits of awesome from the internet, either of which you may already have seen. The first is really old; in fact, I’m upset that no one told me earlier that there’s a music video featuring the entire male cast of The Karate Kid. (Except, of course, for Pat “Mr. Miagi” Morita; his role is filled in admirably by Mr. Belding.) The song is pretty mediocre, but the conceit is perfect.

Second, I absolutely demand that you go and watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is (so far) thirty minutes of pure awesome. Awesome put together by Joss Whedon during the writers’ strike, and staring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. In Whedon’s words:

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

Go there, and don’t come back until you’ve gotten to the end of Act II and you know what the hammer is. It’s only available until Sunday, so go quickly.

Yesterday, PZ Myers linked to a Vanity Fair article for which Christopher Hitchens had himself waterboarded. Hitch wanted to decide for himself whether or not it’s torture. In short:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

That’s pretty interesting, and I considered posting it at the time. But, lacking anything to add, I passed. Then today Scott Kaufman brought back the reaction from the wingnut frontier, and it included bits like this:

The enemy believes that we are weak, & Hitchens & his ilk are to blame. It will come to a point, & soon me thinks, when real force will be required. And then it shall come to pass that the unpleasant realities of preemption need to be replaced with the even more unpleasant realities of vengeance […] & the Hitchens of the world will cease to be relevant.

They think we’re weak, and Hitchens is to blame? You mean, this Hitchens: “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer”? How hard-assed do they want our rhetoric to be? Perhaps from now on, whenever you write about terrorists, you should pretend to be that the masked dude from the Saw franchise or Arnold’s character from Predator. Then you’ll have the right levels of machismo and sadism to sound like a patriot.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll addresses the Wired article on the “end of theory.” He makes a similar argument to mine, only he does it much better. For instance, I didn’t have this excellent one-line demolition of the whole argument: “Theory is understanding, and understanding our world is what science is all about.”

Highly recommended for examples involving Brahe, Kepler, Newton and the Large Hadron Collider.