I haven’t said anything about the now-famous penned atrocity that Ted Rall had pulled from the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper of Record, but Protein Wisdom has been battering him pretty steadily, and hilariously for the past couple days. Today, they reprise the earlier Anne Coughman slicing and dicing of his monumentally stupid scribblings of a couple months ago.

Boy, I hope that I never get on her bad side…

But as long as we’re doing greatest hits, and using Teddy boy for target practice, here’s my take on him from my Media Casualties piece:

“For some, a lucky few, catatonia is a blessed escape. One poor wretch named Ted just sits up in his bed all day. His brow is furrowed, and his eyes are unfocused, or focused on some distant unreality, unseeable by the rest of us.

Old newsroom veterans call it the ‘thousand-word stare.’ They’ve all seen it–that look you get as you gaze intently at a blank computer screen, in a futile attempt to conjure up some words that will somehow spin an obvious and just victory into humiliating and immoral failure.

He had been leading a frontal assault on common sense, when he was cut down in a withering fire of logic and irony by a brigade of blogger sharpshooters and fact checkers. The hits were effective, but not always clean. He lived, but his syntax was badly mangled, and his credibility was shattered beyond any hope of salvaging it.”

But somehow, he keeps getting up, and coming back for more. Masochist.

There seems to be a subtle point missing in much of the discussion of Andrea Yates’ sanity.

Yes, she called the police because she knew that drowning her children like so many kittens in a sack was illegal. But if she (insanely, in my humble opinion) thought that the alternative was to consign them to hell, then she also thought that what she was doing was not wrong.

My opinion–she’s mad as a hatter (or at least she was on the day that she murdered her kids). She’s probably not a danger to society at this point, but she should get years of confined therapy, and never be allowed to bear any more children.

But the larger point is that all that is immoral is not necessarily illegal, nor should it be. And vice versa. Yes, we all know that killing your own children is wrong, but not simply because there’s a law against it. And not all things that are illegal (such as not reporting the location of Jews in Nazi Germany) are wrong.

And the point of this post is that, just because Andrea Yates reported her crime to the authorities, and was willing to accept the consequences, it does not mean that she properly understood the moral implications of her act.

I’ve been as hard on the EU as anyone in blogdom, but I want to extend my most profound sympathy to the families of the German and Danish (and any others of which I’m unaware) soldiers who were killed in Kabul, in defense of civilization.

This is pretty neat. After over twenty years, it’s still possible to communicate with Pioneer 10, even though it’s almost seven and a half billion miles away (twice the distance to Pluto, the most distant planet) and far outside our solar system. It took over twenty-two hours for the signal to be received and acknowledged. From there, the sun is just another bright star, and there is no heat for the spacecraft except what it can still generate from its depleting plutonium power generator.

This would not have been possible if it had had any other than a nuclear power source.

The numbers involved here are staggering. It’s so far away, and the signal so diffuse, that by the time it reaches the earth, it has a power of only ten to the minus 20th or so watts. That’s 0.00000000000000000001 (that’s nineteen zeros after the decimal point). But we can still pick up the signal, using the huge dishes in places like Goldstone in California.

And the data rate is probably excruciatingly low.

Given the ability to get just a few bits through, I wonder what the conversation was…

Ground: Hello, Pioneer. Are you out there?

Pioneer: Yes.

Ground: How are you doing?

Pioneer: How do you think I’m doing? I’M FREEZING IN THE DARK! What did you think you were doing, sending me all the way out here?! And why don’t you ever write?

The EU is understandably upset by the Bush tariffs on steel (well, partially understandably–it’s not like they’re exactly innocent of subsidies and other market interference). I am also.

But I found this headline bizarre:

EU condemns Bush’s ‘Wild West’ steel tariffs

What do steel tariffs have to do with the “wild west”?

This is like when they were calling Bush a “cowboy” because he wouldn’t go along with Kyoto or ABM.

Just what is it with Europeans and the American West? Is it too emblematic of individualism? Is it the guns? Do they hate non-metric ten-gallon hats? Were they scared by a cow when they were young?

What?

I’ve already gone on the blogrecord with a prediction of a Simon win in November, but if Mr. Welch wants to make it interesting, I’m game. Just state the terms.

And I don’t think that I’m “genetically-predisposed” against Mr. Riordan (“Mrs. Simberg, you have a bouncing baby boy. And he came out of the womb holding a sign saying ‘Simon For Governor.’ Just like his daddy…”). No, it’s based on my observations and experience.

While I’m not a “rabid right-winger” (I’d be sure to fail the test on the gay, drugs, evolution, cloning, and immigration issues, among many others), I can certainly understand why Republicans would be loathe to support someone who funds the campaigns of rabid left wingers (like Maxine Waters), who thinks the minimum wage is too low, who doesn’t even seem to know where he stands on abortion, who has no problem with confiscatory taxes or gun laws, whose own wife can’t vote for him in the primary because she’s a registered Democrat…

I can understand why Democrats would like to vote for Riordan against Davis, but I have trouble figuring out why Republicans would want to bother. And as the Democrats should have learned in the Bush-McCain primary battle, Republicans like to choose their own candidates, and not those that some members of the opposite party want them to choose.

And I have to assume that Mr. Welch is just pulling our collective legs when he says:

I wish I could give all the ?Riordan isn?t a Republican? crowd copies of the LA Weekly from 1992, when Mayor Dick was presented as the most craven of influence-peddling, Old Guard Catholic, right-wing rights-abusing firebreather we?d seen in a generation.

Really? The LA Weekly? In 1992? Presenting anyone to the right of Tom Hayden as an Attila-the-Hun reactionary? I’m shocked…just shocked.

I’ve already gone on the blogrecord with a prediction of a Simon win in November, but if Mr. Welch wants to make it interesting, I’m game. Just state the terms.

And I don’t think that I’m “genetically-predisposed” against Mr. Riordan (“Mrs. Simberg, you have a bouncing baby boy. And he came out of the womb holding a sign saying ‘Simon For Governor.’ Just like his daddy…”). No, it’s based on my observations and experience.

While I’m not a “rabid right-winger” (I’d be sure to fail the test on the gay, drugs, evolution, cloning, and immigration issues, among many others), I can certainly understand why Republicans would be loathe to support someone who funds the campaigns of rabid left wingers (like Maxine Waters), who thinks the minimum wage is too low, who doesn’t even seem to know where he stands on abortion, who has no problem with confiscatory taxes or gun laws, whose own wife can’t vote for him in the primary because she’s a registered Democrat…

I can understand why Democrats would like to vote for Riordan against Davis, but I have trouble figuring out why Republicans would want to bother. And as the Democrats should have learned in the Bush-McCain primary battle, Republicans like to choose their own candidates, and not those that some members of the opposite party want them to choose.

And I have to assume that Mr. Welch is just pulling our collective legs when he says:

I wish I could give all the ?Riordan isn?t a Republican? crowd copies of the LA Weekly from 1992, when Mayor Dick was presented as the most craven of influence-peddling, Old Guard Catholic, right-wing rights-abusing firebreather we?d seen in a generation.

Really? The LA Weekly? In 1992? Presenting anyone to the right of Tom Hayden as an Attila-the-Hun reactionary? I’m shocked…just shocked.

I’ve already gone on the blogrecord with a prediction of a Simon win in November, but if Mr. Welch wants to make it interesting, I’m game. Just state the terms.

And I don’t think that I’m “genetically-predisposed” against Mr. Riordan (“Mrs. Simberg, you have a bouncing baby boy. And he came out of the womb holding a sign saying ‘Simon For Governor.’ Just like his daddy…”). No, it’s based on my observations and experience.

While I’m not a “rabid right-winger” (I’d be sure to fail the test on the gay, drugs, evolution, cloning, and immigration issues, among many others), I can certainly understand why Republicans would be loathe to support someone who funds the campaigns of rabid left wingers (like Maxine Waters), who thinks the minimum wage is too low, who doesn’t even seem to know where he stands on abortion, who has no problem with confiscatory taxes or gun laws, whose own wife can’t vote for him in the primary because she’s a registered Democrat…

I can understand why Democrats would like to vote for Riordan against Davis, but I have trouble figuring out why Republicans would want to bother. And as the Democrats should have learned in the Bush-McCain primary battle, Republicans like to choose their own candidates, and not those that some members of the opposite party want them to choose.

And I have to assume that Mr. Welch is just pulling our collective legs when he says:

I wish I could give all the ?Riordan isn?t a Republican? crowd copies of the LA Weekly from 1992, when Mayor Dick was presented as the most craven of influence-peddling, Old Guard Catholic, right-wing rights-abusing firebreather we?d seen in a generation.

Really? The LA Weekly? In 1992? Presenting anyone to the right of Tom Hayden as an Attila-the-Hun reactionary? I’m shocked…just shocked.

The meme of free-enterprise space activities continues to spread. The lastest example is a piece by Radley Balko over at Tech Central Station.

My main critique is that his title (“Lost In Space”) is a little trite and overused.