I'm becoming a one-trick-pony here, but I can't resist this follow-up to yesterday's expose on Barack's ingenious plans to dominate the world from the womb!  (Okay pre-womb, but who's paying attention?)

Today, Reason's own delightful Dave Weigel digs in with his column, More Fun With the Dumbest People on the Internet http://www.reason.com/blog/show/128025.h tml

It's been a while since I suited up and dumpster-dived in the Obama conspiracyverse. In my absence, I reckon that the average IQ there has dipped by 20-25 points. Take this latest revelation from Larry "Whitey Tape" Johnson.

   Republican operatives, with help from their own island backers, have unearthed critical information on Obama and are just biding their time until after the convention to drop it on him. Such as? Having a birth certificate that lists you as Barry Soetoro.

Incredible! Ann Dunham met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro in 1966, in Hawaii. "Barry" Obama was, at this time, five years old. The only reasonable explanation is that Dunham and Soetoro built (or purchased) a Genesis Device to clone a new son, using DNA from Barack Obama Sr. that Dunham had pulled off one of his combs.

Seriously. The "evidence" for Johnson's claim is the now-familiar murmurings of "sources" and GOP "operatives" (who appear in these things quicker than agents of H.Y.D.R.A.) and the fact--not reported in too many places, but never disputed--that when Lolo Soetoro became his adoptive father, the young Barack was enrolled in school as "Barack Soetoro."

Dave does us the favor of contextualizing this outrage within the political sphere - after the bump:

The Assault on Reason, by the Honorable Al Gore is to be released by Penguin Press on May 22 which is in about three weeks. It is reported to be about the difficulty politics has with making decisions based on facts and reason, and using this current regime as the prime example of corruption, fear mongering, and the assault on reason that seeks to bind the soul in perpetual servitude to those interests that represent the antithesis of all our Constitution stands for.

The excerpt below is posted with the full permission, even encouragement, of the author, who wants his essays to be read by as many people as possible.

President Gore? Send a message about this essay to letters@thehill.com.  If your letter is good enough to be published, it will be read by your senators and congressman!

From The Hill:

Gore, a man on a mission

By Brent Budowsky

Al Gore's [upcoming] testimony before the Senate and the House embodies the gold standard about  how a political leader with a cause can rally a movement, get things done, and change the world. Who else could attract so much interest from Internet activists, faith-based stewards, environmental leaders, hedge-fund managers and Wall Street banks placing smart-money bets on America's future?

MORE MORE MORE

To my loyal readers and first-time visitors:

What follows is a little off-topic.  It is my contribution to a celebration of the life of Carl Sagan on the tenth anniversary of his passing.  The idea for what is called the Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon was spawned by Joel Schlosberg, and there is another blog commemorating Sagan called Celebrating Sagan, which I also recommend.

I am posting this piece on both of my blogs; my political blog FifteenNineteen, and Paul is Making Me Nervous, relating to my work in music and theatre.  I hope you like what you read, and will go and find out more about this amazing human being we lost a decade ago.  

I don't remember where I was when I first heard that Carl Sagan had passed away, but I do remember where I was later that night.  I was in college, hanging out at my friend's apartment.  A few close friends were there, and I brought up the news item of Dr. Sagan's death.

"Carl Sagan died today," I said, sadly.

"Who's Carl Sagan?" was the reply.

I was totally surprised, because I assumed everyone knew who he was. I didn't expect that most people had read a bunch of his books, or had seen Cosmos (recently, anyway), but surely he was famous enough to warrant recognition by my friends at least.  I mean, Johnny Carson had imitated him!  "Billions and billions!"  Come on people!

I tried to convey to them why it was so bad that we had lost this important man, and while my friends played along and humored me, I really couldn't get my message across.  I would have to grieve a little more privately.  It was too lonely to be openly morose about the death of a man who, to everyone I was with, was no more than some guy that nerds worship for space or something.  Maybe now, ten years later, I can have another go at it.  Read on.

    American public life today is a spectacle of growing lunacy. If the American people and their leaders are not yet completely out of their minds, they are rapidly losing their ability to think and act rationality, to make decisions on the basis of reasonable discussion, scientific investigation, and historical experience. Increasingly policy makers are making judgments based on abstract ideological principles that bear only the most superficial relation to reality. But many ordinary Americans also live in a fantasy land. The grim nature of reality sometimes intrudes, but who will explain it to them or say what should be done about it? The world is going mad, and Americans, no less than the rest, are grasping to retain their sanity.

While we're on the subject of Scalia, one of his favorite gripes has to do with U.S. Courts citing foreign laws and legal decisions.  This is an issue that has been popular with the far-right in this country for a while, and has bubbled up again recently following a speech Justice Ginsburg gave in South Africa in February.  

Far-right conspiracy theorists see the citing of foreign law as the U.S. "outsourcing American law".  The fact of the matter, though, is that this is really a non-issue.

The Bush administration is in a state of collapse. Around the country, people are starting to talk about the need to impeach and remove Bush from office. Many of these people, like the one-time Republicans described here are, like William Buckley, totally lost and devoid of answers. Especially in Red or Purple areas, everybody will know who the resident liberal is - even if you have never said a word about it.