Oh, thank God

It looks like the train wreck is finally lurching to a halt.

From People online:

Jon & Kate Plus 8, which in recent months had become just about as fun as reliving your parents' divorce, will stop filming new episodes next month, according to the New York Post.

After Jon Gosselin, 32, forbade TLC from filming his and 34-year-old estranged wife Kate's eight children for their show, the network will try to squeeze out a couple remaining episodes from existing footage before putting the show to rest, according to sources.

As I've written before, continuing this show after the couple called it quits was one of the more monumentally awful parenting decisions recorded in popular culture. While the show may be no more (mirabile dictu), I'm sure the coming months will offer plenty of tawdy details as Jon and Kate continue to publicly eviscerate each other, sufficient to make me want to gouge my eyes out in the check-out lane of the grocery store.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- fame is bad for people. It makes them do insane things. It demolishes lives. Why some people will stop at nothing to hold onto it baffles me. But people are free to choose it for themselves and see how it turns out. However, they should keep it the hell away from their kids.

Today's dose of awesome

Submitted without comment:

Picture of a bad man

If you didn't read the article in The New Yorker about Cameron Todd Willingham, you should. I've written about it before, but things have progressed since then. Or, more accurately, they haven't.

Willingham was convicted of murdering his three children by arson, and was executed by the state of Texas in 2004. The case against him, as the article makes abundantly clear, had numerous flaws, but he was executed anyway. One of the people who could have saved him, or at least have investigated his case, was Governor Rick Perry. Perry is also in charge of the panel that has since been empowered to look into questions about whether Willingham was innocent and wrongly executed.

Can you see where this is going?

From the Dallas Morning News, dated October 1:

Gov. Rick Perry was blasted Wednesday after he swept three appointees from their jobs just two days before they were set to critically examine a flawed arson investigation that contributed to the execution of a Corsicana man.

The hearing of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, scheduled for Friday in Irving, was abruptly canceled by the new chairman the governor chose, Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley. He is considered one of the most conservative, hard-line prosecutors in Texas.

From TPM:

Sam Bassett, the former chair of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, has now told the Houston Chronicle that lawyers for Perry told him the case was inappropriate, and that the hiring of a nationally known fire expert was a "waste of state money."

Over the weekend, Bassett had said he was pressured by the governor's lawyers.

Meanwhile, Perry's GOP rivals are slamming his handling of the issue, and accusing him of a cover-up. As governor, Perry signed off on the execution, despite receiving eleventh-hour documents from lawyers for the convicted man, Cameron Willingham, containing evidence that the original investigation was badly flawed.

Also from TPM, today:

Texas governor Rick Perry has defended his handling of a death penalty case that may have led to the execution of an innocent man -- and launched an extraordinary attack on the dead man himself.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Perry yesterday called Cameron Todd Wilingham a "monster," a "bad man," and "a guy who murdered his three children, who tried to beat his wife into an abortion so that she wouldn't have those kids."

Again, read the article in The New Yorker. Nobody questions that Willingham was a troubled and often violent man. But what remains very much in question is whether he burned his children to death, or whether he was innocent, the victim of a flawed prosecution and a broken clemency system, including an indifferent governor.

Perry has drawn attention to himself for saying some really dumb, inflammatory stuff. He's a politician, so that's pretty much SOP. We can live with that, I suppose. But letting an innocent man die for a crime he didn't commit, flagrantly covering it up, and publicly denigrating him as though your opinion is all that matters? Reprehensible.

Want to know what a "bad man" and a "monster" looks like?

Petraeus for Nominee!

With all the talk about whether David Petraeus would run on the Republican ticket, and whether he'd win, can I just say how nice it would be if he were actually the Republican nominee? We have a well-educated, articulate guy with a doctorate, with a military background, who considers himself an old school Northeastern Rockefeller Republican - remember them? I do, fondly!

I don't know much about Petraeus, but what I do know is far better than any other Republican on offer.

Anyone who wants to nominate a Sarah Palin just so Obama could win has lost sight of the best interests of our country. We would all do better with a good Republican nominee. Moderate right voices would be represented, as they should be. Arguments of left would be sharpened, and, where needed, persuaded to moderate. Right now, arguing against the dregs of the right is shooting fish in a barrel. Reasonable opposition makes everyone more reasonable in the end.

Annals of the blisteringly stupid

OK, really, I don't want to make this blog All Gay, All the Time. Seriously. But over at The Dish, Andrew (who still doesn't know we're on a first-name basis) highlighted a "Dissent of the Day" so epically stupid I just really had to say something.

Behold:

Geez, you’re a princess. Gay people account for what? 9% of the population? That much? Heterosexual sex is the ability to replicate consciousness. All wonders of the universe are created by the union of sperm and egg. The sperm and the egg have created everything.

I don’t feel that homosexuality is a choice. Why would anyone choose it? I feel that homosexuality is unfortunate, that you drew the short straw. Your love can never reproduce a universe. It can only ever be a ghostly comparison of heterosexual love. Be a conservative, recognize your limitations. Accept your cross, and bear it with dignity.

So, I don't know the genius that came up with this, but my only sincere reaction is -- bah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Wheeeeee!!!! That is some Grade A stupid right there.

How about this, Einstein? The universe is wholly indifferent to you, your sperm or your eggs. Really. The Andromeda Galaxy is ignorant of your procreative efforts. In a hundred years, when you are dead and the products of your transcendent sexual congresses are (at best) aged and infirm (or dead themselves), the Horsehead Nebula will still be lurking darkly somewhere in Orion. Your coital endeavors make no more difference to the universe than mine, numbnuts, and your grandiose pronouncements make me laugh.

On the other hand, during our fleeting, evanescent lives, we have a brief chance to be good to one another. We can choose to create the best collective reality possible, or we can pat ourselves on the back for how awesome we are when we get it on and tell other people to go hang. Either way, the universe doesn't care. But maybe, if we choose to fight for the best and most just world we can get, this little teeny backwater of a planet will be a wee bit better for those of us who inhabit it.

Fighting for marriage equality makes our eensy, weensy corner of the universe a bit better for some of us. But, no matter how friskily you copulate on our little hunk of rock, your love is no more astronomically significant than mine.

We'll see where this goes

From the Times:

Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, said Tuesday that she would support the Democrats’ landmark health care legislation.

[snip]

“The mark before us produces some bipartisan landmark reforms,” Ms. Snowe said. “It bolsters what works in the system and engenders quality and competition.”

Ms. Snowe praised provisions in the bill that would help small businesses, and said it was the government’s responsibility to make sure that insurance was affordable for individuals and families.

I'm not sure how "bipartisan" the reforms are, but the legislation is certainly landmark. I'm still waiting to see what the final bill looks like.

I'm also curious to see how this plays out:

Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine) is risking a shot at becoming the top Republican on an influential Senate committee by backing Democratic healthcare legislation, according to senators on the panel.

A Senate Democrat on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee said Republicans on the panel are threatening to vote against Snowe, who is in line for the senior GOP post that is about to come open.

[snip]

“A vote for healthcare would be something that would weigh on our minds when it came time to vote,” said a Republican on Commerce, who said Snowe would otherwise be assured of the ranking member post if not for the healthcare debate.

I think Snowe is right to vote for the bill, obviously, since I'm a liberal who supports health care reform. I also think it's smart politically, since Maine is a generally liberal state with an economically depressed population and a weak industrial base. While I'm sorry that obstructionism is the price for a committee chair, Snowe won't be chair of anything if she gets voted out of office the next time around (which is, admittedly, several years off).

Really, Liz Cheney?

Over at Ordinary Gents, Freddie had a ringing take-down of contemporary conservatism. The whole post is refreshingly cathartic, and worth reading in its entirety. One bit, in particular, sprung to mind this morning:

[This], after all, is all you ever hear from conservatives these days. It wasn’t I who sent our soldiers into Iraq, it wasn’t I who left children to drown in New Orleans, it wasn’t I who ordered federal prosecutors fired for failing to politicize prosecution, it wasn’t I who sat idly by as the financial sector plunged itself off of an abyss…. The only consistent definition of conservative I now feel confident in is that a conservative is someone who is not responsible for anything that the Bush administration or Republican congress has done. No, no one is responsible for the Bush administration and its many crimes. No one is responsible for the congressmen who cheered their way along. No one is responsible for the systematic failure of the Republican party machine, which placed such a pathetic, unqualified and ignorant man in the greatest seat of power the word has ever known. No, don’t blame any actual conservatives for conservatism massive failings.

Well, I suppose you have to give Liz Cheney props for stepping up to the plate. From Politico:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s eldest daughter Liz will launch a new group aimed at rallying opposition to the “radical” foreign policy of the Obama administration which it says has succeeded only in undermining the nation’s security.

The new group, Keep America Safe, will make the case against President Barack Obama’s moves to wrench America away from Bush era foreign policy on issues from detaining alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to building a missile shield in Eastern Europe.

[snip]

The former vice president assumed a high profile role last spring publicly contesting the Obama administration’s move to bring its interrogation policy in line with international law – and defending his own legacy. More recently, he’s faded into the background as Liz Cheney, deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in the Bush years, emerges as the most visible defender of that administration’s foreign policy and the most vocal critic of Obama’s departures from it.

[snip]

Cheney said in an interview that her group’s focus is forward, not back, but that it wouldn’t shrink from defending the still-unpopular Bush era.

“The policies of the Bush administration since Sept. 11 are those policies that kept us safe – there’s no turning away from that legacy at all,” she said.

What's striking is how addle-brained the group's focus will be:

Keep America Safe will focus on issues like troop levels, missile defense, detainees, and interrogation... [Ed. I may have fiddled with that link a little bit.]

Troop levels? Really? Hmmmm... Because maybe going after Obama for troop levels demonstrates a hilarious ignorance of reality. I will leave aside the issue of missile defense, other than to suggest that soothing an increasingly strident relationship with Russia isn't particularly radical.

As far as the treatment of detainees and interrogation are concerned, it simply defies belief that eschewing a practice that has been treated as a crime in our recent history is being described as "radical." Sure, I understand that the daughter of the architect of our horrendous detainee policies has an interest in defending her father. But man is that some morally bankrupt thinking.

Oh, and also? Bill Kristol, you idiot:

“The Left has dozens of organizations and tens of millions of dollars dedicated to undercutting the war on terror,” said Kristol, a seasoned partisan warrior. “The good guys need some help too.”

No, we don't. We have organizations and money dedicated to preventing war crimes and military involvement in countries that are not a threat to us. You aren't the "good guys" when you torture prisoners.