Thanks, Fox News!

The following clip from Fox News is about the Netherlands, and I'm pretty sure viewers are supposed to find it terribly disturbing. Their intended effect isn't exactly what I got out of it.



Happy stoners? Uncontroversial same-sex marriage? Lots of sex? An aversion to religion?

Sounds good to me. Let's all go to Holland!

Compromise is a jerk!

Oh, crazy letter to the editor-writers, why must you tempt me so? I always feel a little guilty for mocking you, as if I were picking on the kids on the short bus. On the other hand, this particular crazy person is advocating imposing his religious beliefs on everyone, so he deserves it.

I am referring to this letter published in today's Sentinel with the headline of "Compromised values hurt America close to home." Damn dirty compromise!

Let the fisking begin:

America is losing the war, not the war on terrorism, but the war against the very soul of America. This enemy is cunning, highly intelligent and knows very well how to defeat America.

This enemy does not come at us from the outside, but from within directly attacking the core values and principles of this great nation and of its people. The very foundation that built our house and stood as a city on a hill.

Okay, so it sounds like the "enemy" here is Americans who happen to disagree with any of the views of our letter-writer. I guess that would be pretty much everyone who isn't the author of this letter. I'm pretty sure I know who will win this war.

As one who served in the military understands, to defeat one's enemy you attack the core.

This enemy is compromise, and it has been working in this country for at least 50 to 60 years now.

Oh wait, the enemy is "compromise"? How does that work? Compromise is "cunning" and "highly intelligent"? That's pretty good for an abstract concept!

Also, has compromise seriously only existed for 50 or 60 years? Didn't King Solomon propose cutting that baby in half as a compromise? Sure, they didn't go through with it, but clearly the concept was around.

Please explain your theory, sir!

The enemy of compromise could have started with one of the greatest deceptions in promoting separation of church and state. This deception has and continues to affect many Americans to compromise their core values and principles.

We as a people group, society and a nation are slowly giving over our core values and principles that our forefathers fought for and established for this great nation.

Umm... huh. Those sentences don't actually make any sense, but I think he's saying that separation of church and state is a deception? It must be a pretty good deception, since it's smack-dab in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Were the founding fathers deceived? Perhaps!

Or maybe they were the deceivers themselves! They did do an awful lot of compromising.

What else has this evil "compromise" done with its army of compromise-bots?

Compromise has taken prayer out of school.

Well, that's not really true, is it? You can pray in school all you want. You just can't force other people to pray, or to listen to you pray. But hey, if you want to pray in school, go for it!

Still, it wasn't "compromise" that removed official prayer from public schools. It was that pesky First Amendment again. Damn founding fathers!

Maybe compromise is up to no good elsewhere?

Compromise is removing the 10 Commandments from the public forum even though many of our laws are based upon them.

Which laws would those be?

I'm pretty sure having other gods before Yahweh is legal, as are making idols, using God's name in vain, doing things on the Sabbath, dishonoring your parents, committing adultery, bearing false witness (unless you're under oath), and coveting your neighbor's wife and oxen and assorted sundries.

Admittedly, murder and theft are both illegal. So that's two commandments that actually have laws related to them. Of course, murder and theft are illegal everywhere, and prohibitions against them predate the ten commandments by quite a bit. They're just sensible laws.

It's conceivable that our letter-writer is not a legal scholar. Maybe we should just move on.

Compromise gave us aborting innocent life and the acceptance of mercy killing of elders or those who are terminally sick.

Okay, at this point it's pretty clear that Mr. Crazy-Letter-Writer-Guy doesn't actually know what the word "compromise" even means. I suspect he thinks it's a synonym for "anyone I don't like," which it is not. But at least it makes the letter more coherent if we do a little mental substitution.

We have compromised the sanctity of marriage and allow people of the same sex to be married, and who knows what in the near future.

God dammit! Now he's actually using the word correctly. Jerk.

I do like that "who knows what" part. Indeed, who knows? Will fish start marrying televisions? Will clowns be encouraged to have sex on the steps in front of City Hall? Who knows, but it's probably terrible!

Further compromise is occurring within the area of underage drinking, illegal use of drugs, prostitution and gambling.

Fuck it, I don't even know what compromise means anymore. Maybe it's just shorthand for "compromises of my strict authoritarian standards."

Is this stuff still supposed to be related to Jeebus somehow? Because he pretty famously enjoyed hanging out with prostitutes, and didn't really have a lot to say about drugs or gambling.

He was way cooler than the jackass behind this letter, that's for sure!

We now see our government and judges willing to compromise these core values and our constitution as they continue to make laws that are contrary to basic moral and ethical values.

Translation: "Not violating the constitutional separation between church and state is a violation of the Constitution!"

Yep, clearly not a legal scholar.

I could go on and on with many other areas where we are compromising and diluting our values and principles and negating our constitution.

... but I'm far too drunk to do so right now. I need a nap.

Many say simply the times are changing and we should change with them.

However, I challenge you with this. It is not time that changes but people and how they think and what they want changes.

Actually, time does change. It goes forward. People change too, which is sometimes called "growth." How is this a challenge?

This very enemy is causing the American people to become selfish, arrogant and prideful.

Wait, which enemy? Change, compromise, or people you don't like? Maybe the founding fathers? I'm so confused.

As for the sun, it will always rise in the east and set in the west. Likewise with so many of our values and principles and constitution are deep rooted, they should never be compromised.

So because the Earth rotates in a certain direction, nothing should ever change? Hell of a theory you've got there, buddy. Also, you really need to stop throwing the Constitution in with your own personal biases, because I'm pretty sure most of the founding fathers would think you're a clueless asshole.

Finally, the coup de grace!

Many of you who read this may not agree, but then, why should you?

Oh, I get it! It was all just a big joke. He's making fun of people who take this kind of nonsense seriously.

Well done, sir! You had me thinking you were just another whiny theocrat, demanding that everyone follow your personal values system, and using your utter lack of understanding of the Constitution to try to give yourself some credibility.

I'm pleased to see that you are, in fact, merely a joke.

In search of a credible search engine

The internet is obviously a wonderful source of information. Unfortunately, a lot of that information isn't actually true.

The misinformation isn't usually intentionally malicious. It's just the byproduct of every dumbass with a computer having the ability to put their own mistaken beliefs on the web. Some of the resulting misinformation is more widely-believed than the actual truth, and this leads to problems.

Google is really a very good search engine. I use it all the time, and generally the first few results you get from a Google search are decent enough. But not always.

Recently, I've been contemplating how much better searching would be if the results for certain kinds of searches were sorted not by popularity, but by credibility. Far too often have I encountered search results where the misinformation heavily outranked the truth.

Well, as it turns out there are at least two search engines out there who claim to promote credible information on searches related to health care (but nothing much else at this point). Since bad healthcare information dominates the internet, and since that misinformation can actually have pretty severe consequences for people who believe it, health information seems like a great place to start.

Today I'm going to examine these two new search engines and compare their results to Google on a number of health issues. Let's see how they work.

The following search engines will be used:

• Bing - this is Microsoft's recently-renamed search engine, that they stupidly choose to call a "decision engine." I don't know what that means either. Wikipedia (itself not exactly the most credible source) describes its "Bing Health" search services as follows:

  Bing Health (previously Live Search Health) is a health-related search service as part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. It is a search engine specifically for health-related information through a variety of trusted and credible sources, including Medstory, Mayo Clinic, National Institutes of Health's MedlinePlus, as well as from Wikipedia.

• hakia - I just discovered this one last night. It's still in beta, but does make a very concerted effort to provide credible information. As they describe it, hakia gets librarians to submit credible sources, and require a source to be peer-reviewed, lack commercial bias, have current information, and not be controlled by outside parties for it to be considered credible. At this point, their credible search element is limited to health and environmental information.
• Google - really needs no introduction.

I'll be using a few different health-related search terms to see how these three compare. They are:

• diabetes - basic, easy one to start with.
• vaccine ingredients - simple enough, just give me accurate information on what's in vaccines.
• swine flu - because big stories draw scammers.

I'll submit each of those italicized search terms to the three engines, and let's see what we end up with. I'm only going to deal with the top five results from each, because that's where the vast majority of people are going to end up.

Test #1 - diabetes

Google - The first five results (discarding ads, duplicates from the same domain, and news results) are pretty good. At the top is the American Diabetes Association, with WebMD, a journal of diabetes, and NIH information in the top five.

Unfortunately, this site ranks third, and it's little more than a marketing site for the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. Pretty blatant conflict of interest there.

Bing - Bing separates its results out into different categories (like "Diabetes Symptoms," "Diabetes Prevention," etc). I'm just going to use the top-level stuff that doesn't have a subheading, and again ignore the ads at the top.

Bing does okay here. The top results is from the Mayo Clinic, who clearly have partnered with Microsoft here. Second is the ADA. Third is Wikipedia's article on diabetes, which is not exactly what I'd consider a credible source (Wikipedia articles are a great example of popular ideas winning out over true ones). GSK's little propaganda site is up there too.

hakia - A search at the default hakia.com domain brings up a special diabetes page. All the information seems pretty good, with the ADA, Mayo Clinic, and some other fairly respectable sources of information available. Notably absent are GSK's site and Wikipedia, which is nice.

Clicking on the "credible" tab for results gives us several PubMed articles, as well as a couple of top results for the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides. Which is a decently reality-based page, but probably not what you're actually looking for if you just search for "diabetes."

Verdict! - They're all pretty decent, actually. hakia is maybe a tiny bit ahead for keeping out GSK and Wikipedia, but loses points for relatively useless "credible" results. Let's call this one a tie.

Test #2 - vaccine ingredients

This one is going to be interesting. There's a large antivaccination contingent on the internet, so getting accurate information about what's actually in vaccines is tricky.

Google - It's not pretty. The top two results are both antivacine sites, publishing lists of dubious quality to try to scare people away from vaccines. Lots of talk of thimerosol, which crazy people insist causes autism despite tons of evidence to the contrary.

The third result is the CDC, which is the only credible source in the top five. Then it's back to the antivaccine propaganda. Just below the CDC, we even get Rense.com. One look at that site should be enough to show just how credible their information is.

Bing - Holy crap. Google's results were already horrible, but Bing's are even worse. Rense has moved up to the top spot, with the even more batshit-insane Whale.to taking up third place. The entire top 10 is utter crap, except for the CDC at number 8. Horrible results.

hakia - Well, the "Web Results" are still incredibly bad. But hakia does put the "Credible Sites" right next to them.


So we have batshit insanity right next to very good stuff. It would be nice if the credible stuff actually showed up in the general "web results" too, but perhaps that's something that will come about at a later stage (note that hakia is still in beta). Additionally, hakia's credible results are poorly-ranked. They skew towards overly-specific when people are looking for general information. Again, this is something that might be worked out later.

Verdict! - They all suck, but hakia sucks slightly less than the others. Bing is actually even worse than Google, despite their claim to provide credible health information.

Test #3 - swine flu

Google - Not too bad. The CDC's excellent swine flu portal is in the top position, with the rest of the top five rounded out by Wikipedia, a mostly-reasonable but ad-heavy medical portal, the World Health Organization, and Medline. Wikipedia's presence is probably okay in this case, because of H1N1's newsworthiness.

Bing - Again we get the Mayo Clinic at the top, with Wikipedia following close after. Then some stuff from the Guardian which is pretty reasonable.

But right after that we get a really stupid blog, which has a lot of bad information (like telling you to disinfect your shoes, which is just dumb) and appears to be a veiled attempt at selling you an herbal supplement. It's a scam site part of a network of identical scam sites, plain and simple.

Overall, the Bing results for swine flu appear to be about 20% credible and 80% scams and bullshit.

hakia - Pretty good! The credible results are indeed very credible, though they once again suffer from not being particularly relevant. The normal results are also pretty credible, and there's nary a scam to be found. The normal results do skew a little newsy at times, but overall not too bad.

Verdict! - Google and hakia both win this round. They avoided nonsense and provided good information. hakia's "credible search" is still giving good, but often irrelevant results, but their normal search made up for it. Bing was fine for two links and then turned to crap.

Results

I had intended to do a couple more test searches, but this is getting lengthy and there's a pretty clear pattern emerging.

Basically, when it comes to health information your best options are either Google or hakia. Google has a lot of bad stuff mixed in, but the top few results are usually decent. hakia has a way to go before it's truly useful, but the credible results it delivers are certainly credible. They're just not necessarily very relevant. If it works out the kinks, maybe by the time it's out of beta it'll be something quite good.

Bing, on the other hand, sucks really hard. I'm not sure how a search engine that goes out of its way to provide credible health information managed to provide worse information than Google (which makes no such attempt), but it did. Avoid this one.

Also notable is that all our engines did pretty badly with the vaccine ingredient search. This was not the least bit surprising, and is actually the reason why I chose that term. Faced with the tons of stupid out there, hakia seemed to do the best. Dealing with these sorts of controversial topics may be the most difficult test of a search engine, so hakia's relatively good performance may signal good things on the way.

Of course, it's necessary with any search engine to use your own critical thinking skills and actually sort out what's true from what's not. Even the most credible and well-respected sites can contain errors, and no search engine is going to be able to make the final call for you.

Hopefully we can reach a point where a simple health-related search can bring back mostly-credible results instead of mostly-nonsense results. There's still a way to go, but it's good to see some people trying.

A great musician is dead

Let's take today to remember a truly great musician. A man of great honor, talent, and principle. A man whose death reminds us just how fleeting the best things in life can be.

I speak of course of the legendary D. Boon, singer and guitarist for the Minutemen. He died in an auto accident in 1985.

In memorial, here's an old, grainy video of the Minutemen performing "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing" (lyrics here).



To the best of my knowledge, Jackson never actually did sing that song. His loss.

Swine Flu (probably) Hits Leominster Schools

There's an interesting article in the S&E today about high absentee rates in Leominster schools. This is most likely an outbreak of swine flu/H1N1, but it seems as if those quoted in the article are reluctant to admit it.

Let's look at the article.

A large number of students have been out sick at Fall Brook Elementary School over the past week, but there have been no confirmed cases of swine flu, according to Superintendent of Schools Nadine Binkley.

"There has been a lot of flu going around, but it's of the fairly light variety," Binkley said.

Binkley said 65 students at Fall Brook were out sick Wednesday. The school has between 20 and 25 absences per day during an average week throughout the year, Binkley said.

Fall Brook has a total of 664 students.

Okay, that's a good chunk of students out. It's about 10% of the total student population, and three times the normal level.

There being "no confirmed cases of swine flu" doesn't actually mean a whole lot, because of the way the word "confirmed" is defined. According to the CDC, here's what it takes to be a confirmed case:

A confirmed case of novel influenza A (H1N1) virus infection is defined as a person with an influenza-like illness with laboratory confirmed novel influenza A (H1N1) virus infection by one or more of the following tests:

1. real-time RT-PCR
2. viral culture

So yeah, to be considered a "confirmed case," you have to actually do lab work to confirm it. You can have swine flu without being a confirmed case, and most people at this stage will not be confirmed cases simply because these tests are no longer being done for most cases.

This was pointed out in the article, though they neglect to give you the background about what "confirmed" means:

Leominster Health Director Christopher Knuth said Wednesday that there have been no confirmed cases of swine flu at Fall Brook, but also noted that the state recently stopped testing for it.

"We wouldn't get notified anymore," Knuth said.

Bingo. There actually can't be any confirmed cases if that testing isn't done. Hell, there probably can't even be any "probable" cases, since those also require a lesser degree of testing.

So when you read "but there have been no confirmed cases of swine flu", it really tells you nothing at all. These cases are going to be considered "suspected," as will the vast majority of swine flu. It's just not practical to test everybody at this stage.

Binkley's statement about there being a lot of cases of the flu going around, but them being "of the fairly light variety" is also telling.

First of all, there's no reason for that "but." H1N1 at this stage doesn't appear to be much more severe than the seasonal flu. Having had the seasonal flu, I'd never refer to it as "light," but if you're expecting H1N1 to be a death sentence you might.

Secondly, if there's a lot of flu going around currently, it's almost certainly H1N1. Here's a chart of flu cases by week from the CDC:

A very good explanation of this chart (including its weaknesses) can be found here, but I'll sum it up for you.

The orange bars represent swine flu, yellow is non-subtyped influenza A, which may or may not be swine flu, and the other colors are not swine flu, but are mostly what we'd consider the seasonal flu.

Knowing that, you can pretty easily see the seasonal flu fading away and the swine flu taking off. The little spike at the end of flu season is probably an artifact of increased testing as swine flu began to appear, but we were near the end of flu season, and subsequent weeks show it falling off.

The important thing to take from this is that the seasonal flu is basically done for this season. The swine flu is likely responsible for the vast majority of current flu cases.

Certainly it's possible that there are other factors at work in Leominster's situation. Absenteeism increases at the end of the year, normal colds and allergies may be getting misidentified as the flu, etc. But if it is indeed the flu, it's most likely the swine flu.

So, it's a possible flu outbreak. What are they going to do about it?

"We're going to sit tight with it for right now," Binkley said. "There are a lot of factors we weigh before we would close a school."

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education advises schools to remain open as long as the absences have not affected teaching and learning, Binkley said.

"We don't have a high number of teachers out, and we feel that the classroom environment is still productive," Binkley said. "We don't think it's serious enough to close the school."

This is probably fine. There are indeed a lot of factors to consider before closing a school. A closure doesn't just affect the students, it affects the whole community. Sick kids means parents staying home to take care of them, which means those parents aren't at work, which means your plumber can't come fix that leak because he has to cover for his coworker whose kid is sick. The impact reaches a lot further than you might first imagine.

Since Leominster's last day before summer recess is tomorrow, it's probably more reasonable just to finish up the year than to close early and make a mess of things.

The article gives several good pieces of advice about what to do if you have the flu, most of which you've heard before. Most importantly, if you're sick, and especially if you have a fever, stay home.

Let me repeat that: stay home. That doesn't mean going to the grocery story instead of work or school. It doesn't mean hanging out with friends. It means sitting around in your house, feeling crappy. (If you want to kill time, I suggest playing this flash game about sneezing on people. It's oddly satisfying.)

When school gets out on Friday, any student who does have swine flu will suddenly have a lot more opportunities to infect others in the community. Even on vacation, staying home and not becoming a disease vector to those around you is important.

Finally, if you're healthy, don't worry. Yes, there is flu in the community. There's not much you can do about it outside of normal disease control measures (hand washing, careful with sneezing, etc). If you get it you'll probably feel pretty lousy, but unless you have underlying medical problems you're unlikely to die from it.

It's nothing to panic about, and it sounds like keeping the school open is a perfectly reasonable decision. But let's call a spade a spade. Yes, this is probably swine flu, and there's no reason to pretend otherwise. Now let's deal with it.

Fitchburg's Bond Rating Improves

This is actually pretty important news, but holy crap is it boring.

The Standard & Poor's bond rating agency increased Fitchburg's bond rating, Mayor Lisa Wong's office announced Tuesday.

Wong credited conservative budget practices, including increasing the stabilization fund and negotiating lower health care costs, with the improvement.

The bond rating was BBB minus with a negative outlook.

S & P officials upgraded the bond rating to BBB plus with a stable outlook, Wong's office announced.

Yay! Good news!

This is also news that is pretty much impossible to say anything funny or interesting about, so you're just going to have to make do with that picture of Timothy Dalton. We're nowhere near Connery level yet, but at least things are moving in the right direction.

Conservatives embrace political correctness, stupidity

One of the more profoundly annoying things to come up in recent weeks has been the whole manufactroversy about David Letterman (a comedian) making a joke. If you're not familiar with it, consider yourself lucky.

If you're one of those people and want to maintain your blissful ignorance, please stop reading now.

See, I would have happily avoided writing about this if it weren't for yet another neuron-apoptosing editorial by (unbylined, but presumably) Jeff McMenemy, wittily titled Liberal media slow to scold Letterman for Palin comments.

Okay, let's get this over with...

If you don't believe a double standard exists in much of the mainstream media when it comes to how inappropriate or tasteless comments are treated, just consider the case of late-night talk show host David Letterman.

Letterman, before referring to what he described as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's "slutty flight-attendant look," made a truly tasteless and classless joke early last week about the governor's 14-year-old daughter, saying she had been "knocked up" by Alex Rodriguez during a trip to watch a New York Yankees game.

Wow, lies right off the bat. That didn't take long.

Let's look at the actual joke, delivered as part of a top-10 list about Sarah Palin's trip to New York:

One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game. During the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.

I don't know about you, but when I first heard about that I assumed it was about Bristol Palin, who is Sarah Palin's famously knocked-up daughter. That is, in fact, who the joke was about, according to Letterman.

Clearly, it's also about a baseball player that I know little about, but I guess he's sort of sleazy? Arguably, the joke is more at his expense than Palin's. I wonder why nobody is coming to his defense.

But since Palin was at the game with her 14-year old daughter Willow (a fact that wasn't exactly common knowledge), all the deeply politically correct conservatives decided that Letterman was actually making a joke about statutory rape. Even though he wasn't. But when has the truth ever stood in the way of manufactured outrage?

Anyway, Letterman apologized and made clear his intentions, but Bible Spice was more interested in using her 14-year-old daughter as a political tool (which is totally not unethical) than accepting that it was a joke that went a little wrong and moving on.

So there's the background. It pretty much invalidates McMenemy's entire rant, but let's just check out what he has to say anyway. I'm sure it's enlightening.

Palin called the liberal-leaning Letterman "pathetic," and her husband quite rightly said that "any jokes about raping my 14-year-old are despicable."

Well yeah, that would be despicable. Not really relevant though, since Letterman didn't make any such joke.

McMenemy:

And if you think such a joke is harmless, please take a moment to consider how you would react if someone made a joke about "knocking up" your teenage daughter.

I suppose that would depend. If it was about my very knocked-up 18 year old daughter, I don't think I'd have a whole lot to complain about. But I'm not desperate to keep my name in the news for a 2012 presidential run, so maybe that would change things.

But while other less liberal talk-show hosts, like Don Imus for example, have been summarily fired from their job and attacked by the liberal media when they made tasteless comments, many were slow to respond correctly to Letterman's tasteless joke and basic lack of decency.

Here, McMenemy is whining about not enough people whining. About a joke on a late-night comedy show. Which didn't mean what he has decided it means.

I wonder how quickly McMenemy condemned Bill O'Reilly when he said this:

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

... and then later dismissed it as a "satirical riff."

I bet Pope McMenemy, scourge of tasteless jokes, was right on top of that!

It hurts to go on...

But as slow as much of the mainstream media was to respond to the incident, Letterman was even slower, waiting a full week before he apologized for a "bad joke" that couldn't be defended.

But when he apologized on Monday night, Letterman still insisted he was making the joke about Palin's 18-year-old daughter.

Well, yeah. Of course he was. That's why people laughed (jokes about raping 14 year olds don't get a lot of laughs). That's how it was intended, and that's how it was taken by virtually everyone who heard it. The manufactroversy came later.

Also, it's worth noting that the apology a week after the joke was the second apology. The first came pretty quickly, but I guess Palin wasn't ready to stop exploiting her daughter for political points yet.

We find that claim to be unbelievable, but even if it is true, does that really make things any better?

"Unbelievable" is used in a nonstandard way in this sentence. It doesn't mean something that can't be believed, it means something that McMenemy chooses not to believe. Because he's a dipshit.

Anyway, yes it makes it better! Bristol Palin was knocked up! That's widely-known, and is the reason she goes on tv advocating... ummm... abstinence. Because it worked so well for her!

I'm also pretty sure that 18 is the age of adulthood (and consent, many places) in this country. That makes a huge difference. It's not a joke about a girl having sex, it's a joke about a woman getting knocked up. Even though she actually became pregnant before she was 18. Hmm... Levi has some 'splaining to do!

Enough of the intentionally-misrepresented comedy bits though, let's get to intentionally-misrepresented media response.

The big issue here is not whether Letterman should be fired -- that's up to his advertisers and his viewers -- but why so many in the media think it's OK to cross all lines of decency and verbally attack 14-year-old girls, as long as they're the daughters of Republicans.

Oh, there was still some intentionally-misrepresented comedy bit in there. Oh well.

Regardless, nobody in the media thinks that! Even this joke, which wasn't about a 14 year old, has gotten all kinds of media attention. Far, far more than it should have.

We're glad that Letterman has finally apologized, but we find it troubling that the same liberal pundits who have gleefully attacked conservatives when they make tasteless comments, remained silent after Letterman's comments.

Damn right! Those faggy liberal pundits should recognize the difference between a late-night comedian making a joke that went wrong, and prominent conservative pundits using eliminationist rhetoric that they later dismiss as "satire."

See, when Ann Coulter includes a line like like "I think our motto should be, post-9-11, 'raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'" in a speech to CPAC, and then follows it up with "You know, ok. I made a few jokes — and they killed 3000 Americans. Fair trade." that's an hilarious joke! Ha ha ha!

But when David Letterman (an actual comedian) makes a joke that right-wingers interpret incorrectly, that's a terrible affront to civility. People should be outraged!

Stupid liberals, don't they know that the only funny jokes are ones that denigrate Muslims or feature some sort of violent rhetoric? Jokes about celebrities having sex are just wrong!

Of course, no McMenemy piece is complete without an appeal to "civility":

And we hope that all political discourse, whether it's a serious political debate or just late-night jokes, will remain civil above all else.

Yay, civility!

Here are McMenemy's allies in the fight for civility. Enjoy.



Now that's funny!