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Via Boing Boing: Last week a Texas man asked his daughter’s school district to drop Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future world where “firemen” don’t fight fires, but burn books.

“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read “Fahrenheit 451.” “The words don’t need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class.”

Last week, you may recall, was the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. How much do you suppose the ALA had to pay Mr. Verm to illustrate the problem so effectively?

This is not an ad. I haven’t bought anything from this vendor. I just like this sticker from Progressive Passion, that’s all.

I’m still thinking Nixon, but Bush keeps moving up.

How will the “moral values” Republicans talk their way out of the Mark Foley scandal and cover-up? How will they avoid charges of hypocrisy? Over on Fox News, the O’Reilly Factor has the answer: just label Foley as a Democrat. Quick. Easy. Almost subliminal.

But nobody tops Rush Limbaugh:

There are things that will offend liberals. Or are there? ’Cause I continue to ask, are they really offended by this? How many of them wish that they were in on the action?

Notice how blissfully free of content Limbaugh is. He doesn’t have to offer any evidence that any liberals “wish they were in on the action,” because he never actually says they do. He just “continues to ask,” that’s all.

Last night, MSNBC’s Countdown without Keith Olbermann brought together a lot of Republican talking points:

Update: I thought Fox labeling Foley a Democrat was a simple slip-up, but maybe not. It’s never smart to give Fox the benefit of the doubt.

Let me get this straight: No plan for victory. Detailed plan for victory celebration?

Even as the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I Day might be only months away.

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

A few days ago, I mentioned my suspicions about the drop in gasoline prices as we approach election day. But surely that’s just the magic of the marketplace, huh? Maybe not:

Prince Bandar enjoys easy access to the Oval Office. His family and the Bush family are close. And Woodward told 60 Minutes that Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election — to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day.

Woodward says that Bandar understood that economic conditions were key before a presidential election: “They’re [oil prices] high. And they could go down very quickly. That’s the Saudi pledge. Certainly over the summer, or as we get closer to the election, they could increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop significantly.”

Okay, what do you think will happen to gas prices after election day?

I went to the Ohio Democratic Party fundraiser with John Kerry this morning.

I felt a little out of my depth. Almost everyone there was a big wheel. Fortunately, I think they assumed I was a big wheel, too, and they just weren’t recognizing me. I wore my button that says “I’m the decider. I vote!” and was warned that with Ken Blackwell running elections here in Ohio, perhaps I was being naive. I said I was an optimist.

I was able to walk right up and chat with Senator Kerry and shake his hand. It’s kinda fun being mistaken for a big wheel.

I saw him again, a little later, when he spoke to a student crowd at the Ohio State University.

The College Republicans had set up a recruiting table outside, with a sign that said, “Join the College Republicans, Make a Difference.” As the crowd came out after Kerry’s speech, they held up signs and one guy shouted derision through a bullhorn. Most of them were wearing masks. I told them I understood — I’d be ashamed, too.

I don’t drink. Many years ago, when I was a little kid, I was once offered the sip of beer I had been clamoring for, and it wasn’t nearly as good as I had imagined it would be. Since then, I’ve never seen the appeal of alcohol, and I’ve counted myself lucky.

Today, someone suggested I ought to start drinking, anyway. That way, if I ever got caught doing something shameful — not that I would ever do anything shameful, heaven forfend — I could just blame it on the booze and check myself into rehab.

The demon rum has provided convenient absolution for countless public figures in recent years, but you can’t swear off the bottle unless you drink. It’s a quandary.

The current consensus seems to be that Republican Mark Foley’s misbehavior, and the Republican leadership’s apparent year-long cover-up might hurt the GOP. Heaven forfend, indeed. So some Republican apologists are going to work — for example, Matt Drudge blames the young pages, not former congressman Foley.

But look on the bright side. The Foley story is everywhere today — all over the news, all over the blogs. And people talking about Foley aren’t talking about Iraq, where at least 70 U.S. troops were killed in September, along with thousands of civilians.

The Foley story is getting another big boost today from things like a call by some conservatives for Dennis Hastert’s resignation.

It sounds like bad news for Republicans, but it sure has changed the subject, hasn’t it?

I’m thinking, “Karl Rove, Suuuper Genius.”

I first saw John Kerry many years ago, on Dick Cavett’s late night talk show on ABC TV.

I was impressed. Years went by and I followed his career — his unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 1972, his rise through prosecutor, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and then into the U.S. Senate — and I thought that he would someday make a good president. Voters really missed the boat in 2004.

From a recent Kerry speech:

Just recently, Donald Rumsfeld — the man who should have been fired as Secretary of Defense long ago — Donald Rumsfeld gave a low and ugly speech in which he smeared those who dissent from a catastrophic policy, and then spoke of “moral confusion.”

Well, there certainly is a lot of moral confusion around these days.

It is immoral for old men to send young Americans to fight and die in a conflict without a strategy that can work — on a mission that has not weakened terrorism but worsened it.

It is immoral to lie about progress in that war to get through a news cycle or an election.

It is immoral to treat 9/11 as a political pawn — and to continue to excuse the invasion of Iraq by exploiting the 3,000 mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who were lost that day. They were attacked and killed not by Saddam Hussein but by Osama bin Laden.

And it is deeply immoral to compare a majority of Americans who oppose a failing policy and seek a winning one to appeasers of Fascism and Nazism.

Kerry is coming here to Columbus, Ohio tomorrow, to raise money and drum up support for the Ohio Democratic Party and local candidates. He’s going to be busy.

From 8:45 to 10:00 tomorrow morning, we have the “Wake Up for Change Breakfast,” a fundraiser for the Ohio Democratic Party, at The Capital Club, 41 South High Street. I called to make a reservation, and was told there’s no need for reservations, I can just pay at the door. There are several price tiers. The lowest is $150, but it’s for a good cause.

At 11:30, Kerry will be at the Ohio Union East Ball Room at 1739 North High Street. Doors open at 11:00 am. Admission is free. There is a form on Kerry’s website if you would like to attend.

At 12:30 pm, Kerry moves a just a little bit down the street, to Eddie George’s Grille 27, at 1636 North High Street, for a fundraiser for Mary Jo Kilroy’s congressional campaign. Once again, there are several price tiers, and the lowest is $150. The email I got announcing this fundraiser said “Please RSVP to Ray Coatoam at (614) 437-9793 or CoatoamR@gmail.com,” but I haven’t had time to call. I’ll bet money is all you need to get in there, too.

Update: Just got another email message. Kerry will promote early voting at 10:00am at St. Dominic Parish Center, 455 North 20th Street. Open to the public, no RSVP or donation required.

You can’t say the man doesn’t have a full schedule.

Crooks and Liars has video and a transcript of Bob Woodward on 60 Minutes, talking about his new book, State of Denial.

With thanks to Bob Geiger for his weekly roundup of political cartoons, here’s political cartoonist David Horsey on war profiteering in Iraq and how the Iraq rebuilding team was chosen.

Tom Toles on the torture compromise.

Matt Davies on worries about leaks.

Jack Ohman on the National Intelligence Estimate and torture.

Drew Sheneman also has a comment on the declassified intelligence estimate.

Stuart Carlson on just what Bush is spreading in the middle east.

I’ve been recording and watching MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann for a good while now.

The show is an hour long, and very fluffy — usually I can watch the whole thing in fifteen or twenty minutes, fast-forwarding through the celebrity gossip and animal stunts. What’s left is pretty good, most of the time.

Olbermann is often forcefully critical of the Bush administration, and this has made him a favorite among many anti-Bush blogs, including this one. A month ago, he made a strongly-worded “special comment” in response to a Donald Rumsfeld speech comparing critics of the Iraq War to World War II-era appeasers of fascism. Olbermann seemed genuinely angry, and the blogosphere was buzzing for days.

It must have been good for ratings, because Olbermann has since made a number of “special comments.” Some of these later commentaries have struck me as calculated crowd-pleasing diatribes generating more heat than light — as if Olbermann seeks to be the anti-Bush Bill O’Reilly.

But this week, responding to Republican efforts to blame Bill Clinton for 9/11 and absolve the Bush administration, Olbermann presented this meaty look at what the Bush administration did to protect America before 9/11:

More like that, please, Keith.

Josh Marshall writes a few bumper sticker slogans for the GOP:

According to the president, those who think he’s created a mess in Iraq which is making us less rather than more secure are “buy[ing] into the enemy’s propaganda.”

Isn’t this what the president’s own intelligence agencies are telling him? I guess they’re buying into the enemy’s propaganda.

…

Pick it apart and [Bush’s] argument is that Iraq’s a disaster which has made us less safe. And if we can’t change it from a disaster to a success it will be even worse than it is now.

So the argument amounts to, Stick to The Incompetent Crew Who Created the Mess!

Give Us Your Vote Because Who Better to Trust Than the Guys Who Created the Mess!

Or maybe, Vote For Us Because Don’t We Have to do Something Right Eventually!?!

Hey, they’re due!

From Talking Points Memo:

Basically, [the Republicans’] entire argument is that if we don’t stick with their failures, they will become bigger failures.

But if we do stick with their failures, they’re ready to introduce a fresh line of newer, even more exciting failures.

What to do, what to do…

In his new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rich dismisses the popular notion that George W. Bush is stupid, and makes a penetrating observation:

[T]here was plenty of evidence to suggest that Bush was no dunce. His mediocre grades at Yale — which he tried to keep private — were indistinguishable from those of the showily wonky Gore at Harvard. The problem with Bush was not that he was stupid but that he thought everyone else was stupid.

There’s a lot of that going around.

Rich continues:

He believed he could sell anything if he repeated the pitch often enough (and often verbatim).

On left-wing blogs, conservatives and Republicans are idiots. On right-wing blogs, liberals and Democrats are morons. On both sides, everyone in the middle is uninformed or ill-informed or just plain dense — otherwise, they would agree with me.

“I harangue and I harangue, but do you listen?”

Homer Simpson expressed the mindset admirably, explaining why something had been done the way it was: “Because they’re stupid, that’s why. That’s why everybody does everything!”

Oh, I’m guilty, too. As a Macintosh zealot, I am morally obligated to pity those poor souls who use Microsoft Windows. It’s not their fault, really — they just don’t know any better. For their part, Windows users seem to view Mac people with scorn, more than pity.

The belief that everyone else is stupid seems deeply ingrained. I can’t tell whether it’s a trait of human nature, of the American character, or just of the particular bunch of jerks I keep running into.

What’s the benefit of recognizing stupidity in others? It’s a great time-saver. You don’t have to waste your time listening to morons or explaining your own views to idiots.

The problem is that the only way to determine whether someone is worth listening to is to listen to him for a while. It seems, increasingly, that we’ve cut out that step. We never listen, so we never learn. That makes us ineducable.

“Ineducable.” Yeah, it’s a big word. I’m not stupid. I’m just incapable of learning anything, which is completely different.

It’s official — I’m a cynic.

Gasoline prices around here have fallen more than a dollar from their all-time highs only a few weeks ago. But am I happy? No.

The oil companies know they’ve never had better friends in Washington than the Bush Administration and current Republican leadership in Congress. These politicians have swept aside environmental and consumer protections, have engineered massive giveaways of drilling rights on government land, and have peppered the tax code with countless loopholes and exemptions, all for the benefit of Big Oil.

The oil companies have been cashing in big time, but recently their giddy excess has become a burden to their friends in Washington. If the Democrats win control of Congress, might the good times be over?

There are countless forces affecting gas prices. That helps make it difficult to prove manipulation. But I feel a psychic prediction coming on: gas prices will stay low until election day, but will be significantly higher three weeks after election day than they were on election day.

We’ll see.

I’m cynical when I read this:

According to two conservative websites, White House political strategist Karl Rove has been promising GOP insiders that there will be an “October surprise” before the midterm elections.

followed by this leak:

French and U.S. officials discounted a report Saturday in a French newspaper indicating that Osama bin Laden had died of typhoid last month in a remote area of Pakistan.

It doesn’t help that the French newspaper is called L’Est Republicain.

Hey, maybe Pakistan’s recent truce with Taliban-allied militants is actually part of an elaborate ruse calculated to let Bush pull bin Laden out of a hat just before the November elections. Maybe the long trail of stumbles and fumbles has all been a ruse to lull bin Laden and al Zawahiri into a false sense of security. Gosh, I hope so.

Gary Hart suggests a different October surprise:

It should come as no surprise if the Bush Administration undertakes a preemptive war against Iran sometime before the November election.

Were these more normal times, this would be a stunning possibility, quickly dismissed by thoughtful people as dangerous, unprovoked, and out of keeping with our national character. But we do not live in normal times.

I am among those who believe that Karl Rove bugged his own office in a 1986 campaign and blamed it on the Democrats. There’s really almost nothing he wouldn’t do to win an election.

I hope his “October surprise” is more creative than launching a new war — that’s been done to death.

Hey — I just said “I hope“. Maybe I’m not a total cynic after all.