Hearing this just made my heart sink. It’s a horrible mischaracterization of what happened to Matthew Shepard, who was selected, tortured, left for dead, and yes, robbed, because he was gay.

Congresswoman Foxx was arguing against a hate crime bill when she went off the deep end. Sure, the bill bears Matthew’s name, so evidently she wanted to clarify her thoughts on the case itself, but what in the hell was she thinking? How does this explanation even help her case? What does it have to do with hate crime legislation? Was she hoping to prove that crimes against gays just don’t happen, thus negating the need for a hate crime law?

I’m not hugely in favor of hate crime laws, but this seems like just about the weakest argument one could make against it - not to mention that it’s horribly ignorant and hurtful.

I read that Matthew Shepard’s mom was present when Congresswoman Foxx made these remarks. I can only imagine how much that hurt her to hear them.

This sort of irks me (emphasis mine):

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

What?!

This is really unfortunate wording. It implies that in order to determine whether Obama is popular, we have to throw out African American opinions to find out what real public opinion is.

In fact, I’m having a hard time finding a way to interpret this that isn’t troubling.

Sure, I’m willing to accept that a large percentage of African Americans support the President (and people can debate the reasons for this on their own time; I don’t care to address this). But how does that make him “seem” more popular than he “actually” is? This boggles me.

So much stupid today, I’m not sure where to start. Hmmm, ok.

The gays and the marriage.

So this group made this commercial.  It looked like a remake of the made-for-tv movie The Langoliers, and it sounded like a whole mess o’ crazy. See for yourself:

I’m sorry, what? Legalizing gay marriage results in my rights being taken away exactly how?  Like, my right to criticize people for being gay somehow disappears once a law is made? No way! My right to be a bigot can’t be infringed upon by the likes of a godless “law”. The government can’t make me like those people.

I understand that people have religious reasons for opposing gay marriage. Seriously, I do. I think that any religious institution that opposes gay marriage ought not perform gay marriage ceremonies.  I just don’t get this ad.

Also, I love how the people are coming together “in love” for the express purpose of restricting the actions of others.

Also, I love how the male actors in the commercial appear to be in the closet themselves.

Let’s see…what’s next.  Oh, yes:

Asians need to stop with all the funny-sounding names.

So, Texas is embroiled in a big debate over whether to require photo id in order to vote. I don’t have strong feelings about this issue (though I tend to want to err on the side that allows the most democratic participation to occur). I do, however, wonder a lot about this (emphasis mine):

A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

The comments caused the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday to demand an apology from state Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell. But a spokesman for Brown said her comments were only an attempt to overcome problems with identifying Asian names for voting purposes.

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver’s license on school registrations.

Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Later, Brown said that her comment wasn’t intended to be racially insensitive; it’s just that Asian names are so hard to pronounce and ambiguously spelled, making ID verification difficult.

Check it out yourself. It gets good after about the 3-minute mark.

And finally, on the crazy front: for a mere $220 per night, you can spend the night in Saddam Hussein’s bed.

From Wired:

Let the robot holocaust commence: robots think we taste like bacon.

Researchers at NEC System technologies and Mie University have designed the cute little guy to the right: a metal man gastronomist, “an electromechanical sommelier”, capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d’oeuvres. Upon being given a sample, he will speak up in a childlike voice and identify what he has just been fed. The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle, amongst other more obscure uses…like “tell me what this strange grayish lump at the back of my freezer is/was.”

But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Absolutely horrifying. Like cows, once robots taste blood, their hunger for human flesh can never be satiated.

( I’m pretty sure it would identify my husband as prosciutto, too.)

So, great. I guess it’s a race to see whether we’re destroyed by zombies or by our own creations. This reminds me of the cartoons where the cartoon cat drools, imagining its prey as a walking steak.

I’ve listened to Ed Schultz on Sirius for a few years now, and though he’s a little bit shouty, I thought he provided some good analysis leading up to the election and afterward, with a notable exception (in my opinion) of his dogmatic party line defense for bailing out the Big 3 automakers. Over the years, Big Eddie seemed to get even bigger - or at least, the ego part of him did. He got a fancy sound setup, and started charging for premium access to his website, We Got Ed. He’s made a ton of TV appearances, on Fox and MSNBC and probably others, and I figured it was a matter of time before he got his own show.

Well, it happened. The Ed Show premiered on MSNBC this week, and wow does he have a lot of work to do. It was a bit of a train wreck, in my opinion…at least the first half was. His opening monologue, “Op Ed” (heh heh, get it? Ed?) was ostensibly about health care, but more closely resembled a stream of consciousness attempt to explain his whole being in 2 minutes.  Pace yourself, Eddie - it’s an hour-long show. There were other, smaller problems, like not knowing which camera to shout look at, but I’m confident he can work those out in time.

What he really needs to do is to stop hollering and sounding accusatory. I like his (apparent) catch phrase, “We can do better than that”, but the way it’s delivered seems a bit off putting, and might alienate his audience a bit if it’s not already familiar with his personality - or maybe even if it is. On the radio, it’s easy enough to believe that he’s just a big guy with a big voice, but on camera it’s pretty apparent that he’s one pissed off dude. If his speaking style is intended to get people riled up and ready for action, I’m not sure it worked. His fast, loud talking and his skipping around made me feel nervous, or that he was.

He also needs to organize his thoughts, and structure his pieces more carefully.  Since he takes caller opinions on his radio show, and that determines to a certain degree the direction of the show, Ed’s probably gotten used to jumping around from topic to topic. But on a TV show like his, where it’s just him and the camera most of the time, he needs to calm down a bit and deliver a thought from beginning to end (says the girl without her own TV show).

We’ll see if he can pull it together over the coming weeks. I’m sure Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck didn’t show up perfectly camera-ready right out of the box.  He’s got generally okay analysis and passion - just needs to stop shouting it at us.