Last Call

Been a while since the whole "Obama the Antichrist" nonsense got any play, but leave it to Walker, Texas Moron to get things started right for the Republicans.

A video released this weekend by action movie hero Chuck Norris claims that America faces “1,000 years of darkness” if President Barack Obama is reelected.

“If we look to history, our great country and freedom are under attack,” Norris warns, standing next to his wife. “We’re at a tipping point and, quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course in which our country is headed.”

The pair go on to explain that Obama won in 2008 because more than 30 million evangelical Christians stayed home on Election Day. “We know you love your family and your freedom as much as Gena and I do, and it is because of that we can no longer sit quietly or stand on the sidelines and watch our country go the way of socialism or something much worse,” Norris explains.

Quoting President Ronald Reagan, Norris’s wife Gina adds that defeating Obama “will preserve for our children this last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into 1,000 years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

See, here's the problem.  Somebody's going to say "But Chuck, if we fail and he wins, we didn't do all we could do to stop him.  He's still alive."  Which is the one thing Chuckles here can't say directly, of course.  The whole "any means necessary" is simply implied.

Onward, Christian soldiers.

Podcast Versus The Stupid, Labor Day Special

We get to the non RNC week in news as Bon and I talk Thurston Howell Romney III evading taxes at Bain Capital, cops beating up nurses, the worst priest/pedophile criminal defense lawyers in history, and good news as the courts step in to help fight GOP voter suppression laws in key states.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

We'll have a special on the DNC on Thursday evening as we cover the events from Charlotte, too.  Stay tuned!

Now You're Just Being Stupid

(AP) DES MOINES, Iowa - Authorities say the brutal heat is suspected in the death of a Des Moines police dog found dead inside a patrol vehicle.

Des Moines television KCCI reports that Harley, a Labrador retriever assigned to the narcotics team, was found Wednesday afternoon. The temperature had already reached the low 90s.

Are you freaking kidding me?  Christ in a sidecar, when will people figure out CHILDREN AND ANIMALS DIE WHEN YOU LEAVE THEM LOCKED IN CARS.  They cannot defend or help themselves. They live, and often die, because of our actions.

Labor Day Goodness

This made me absurdly happy, so I wanted to share it with you.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A formerly blind Sumatran orangutan can see her baby twins for the first time after undergoing cataract surgery in the first such operation in Indonesia.

The orangutan, named Gober, was captured for her own safety in late 2008 in North Sumatra province after she went blind in both eyes due to cataracts. She gave birth to the twins in early 2011 as part of a breeding program.

Doctors at the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program in the provincial capital of Medan performed the cataract surgery on the 40-year-old animal on Monday. They announced the successful results late Thursday.

Excuse me, there's something in my eye.  Please click the link to the full article for picture goodness.  Might wanna grab a Kleenex first, it's a leaker.

Boys Will Be Boys

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — An employee of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph says the bishop commented that “boys will be boys” when he was told about lewd images of children on a priest’s laptop computer.

That lawsuit alleges the Rev. Shawn Ratigan abused a 9-year-old girl months after the diocese learned of the photos on his computer.

Ratigan has pleaded guilty to federal charges of producing child pornography. Finn and the diocese are charged in state court with misdemeanor failure to report suspected child abuse. Finn has pleaded not guilty.

Of course he isn't guilty.  I mean, sometimes the kids are the aggressors, right?  The adults just can't help themselves when pressured.  In other words, the kid asked for it.  Or to use their own words, boys will be boys.

Tell us again why it's not their fault.

What Romney Convention Bounce?

Gallup finds there's so far zero evidence of any convention bounce for Mitt Romney in their own numbers.

The seven-day average has been at 47% Obama, 46% Romney for the last five days. As a matter of fact, both Obama and Romney for the most part have been at or around 46% since we began tracking in April. The latest Gallup average covers Aug. 26-Sept. 1, or Sunday through Saturday. That for the most part covers the GOP convention, albeit with only two days of polling completely after Thursday's climactic events, including Mitt Romney’s speech, and actor Clint Eastwood’s appearance.

At this point, as noted, there is no consistent change in the pattern of vote intentions within our Daily tracking. Each of the two candidates has been up at some point over the last week in the individual nightly numbers, but that’s normal. Romney so far has not been able to generate a sustained “bounce” from his convention over the last week.

We’ll know a little more when we report our seven-day average on Tuesday,September 4, which will contain include four days after Romney’s speech on Thursday. After that point, any impact of the GOP convention will begin to be co-mingled with the impact of the Democratic convention. That’s why the ultimate reckoning will be what the election landscape looks like after both conventions.

We do have some new data that reinforce the tentative conclusion that the Republican convention did not change the race. The results, from data gathered Friday and Saturday and set to be released on gallup.com Monday morning, show that both the self-reported impact of the GOP convention and  evaluations of Romney’s speech were at the very low end of the scale compared with the previous years in which we have asked the same questions about other conventions and nominees. 

Indeed, that evidence shows that just 38% of Americans found Romney's speech to be good or excellent, a far cry from the 58% President Obama got in 2008.  However, given the very plausible case that a vast majority of Americans have already made up their mind at this point, I don't expect the DNC to move the needle much either.

StupidiNews, Labor Day Edition!

• Authorities in Louisiana at keeping an eye on the Pearl River canal lock near St. Tammany Parish, as floodwaters from Isaac are threatening to break open the gates.
• As with the Republican National Convention in Tampa, tough new security measures at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte are raising concerns.
• Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says that more stimulus may be needed if job growth continues to stall.
• Corruption in India's Uttar Pradesh state alone may have cost millions of starving people there as much as $14.5 billion in food over the last decade, according to Bloomberg News.
• A Brooklyn bookshop is restoring out-of-print sci-fi classics as public domain e-books, with a little help from the internet.