FunctionalAmbivalent

Cranks

In Tequesta, Florida, a 78-year old man has been arrested after assaulting another retiree on a golf course. The disagreement started after the eventual assailant accused the inevitable victim of not paying his greens fees. Apparently, after being delayed on the tee several times, the assailant started hitting into the non-paying group. On the green, he appeared waving a golf club and hit the victim in the eye.

In England, police had to break up a fight between two elderly neighbors. The argument began after one opened his car door too wide and hit the door of the other's car, parked in the next spot. "Watch the door, asshole," the offended 72-year old reportedly shouted, and in a few minutes the situation "went from bad to worse," with the men grabbing each other's heads and kicking each other in the groins.

In Windsor, Ontario, a 75-year old woman is in custody for assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon. When police came to arrest her apparently good-for-nothing son, Mary Elias swung into action, hitting an officer over the head with a plate.

Painted-On Jeans

Literally

Jinx

Reason:

Give McCain every undecided voter in the country this week, and Obama wins the election anyway with 306 electoral votes.

You're Going To Be Hearing a Lot About This Once the Camera Crews Get There

A wealthy, 43-year old Moslem cleric in Indonesia decides it's time to take a second wife, so he holds a contest. The panel of judges assessing the potential of second wife candidates includes the cleric's first wife, to whom the cleric is still married. The "winner" is a 12-year old middle school student whose parents entered her in the contest because they were having financial troubles. The cleric is so impressed by contest entrants that he plans to take two more wives, currently nine and seven years old. Indonesian authorities are investigating, but the cleric and his supporters claim Islamic law allows the taking of underage wives so long as there is no sex until the girls start menstruating.

Dishonor Before Death

The Chicago Tribune investigates and discovers that an awfully lot of people are claiming military decorations for valor under fire that they did not earn.

Take the online edition of Who's Who, long the nation's premier biographical reference. Of the 333 people whose profiles state they earned one of the nation's most esteemed military medals, fully a third of those claims cannot be supported by military records.

Even in death, these stories live on. A look at 273 obituaries published in the past decade alone found that in more than four of five cases, official records didn't support decorations for bravery attributed to the deceased.

The Tribune also found bogus decorations engraved on headstones in military cemeteries across the country.

In all, more than half the medals for bravery examined, including the exalted Medal of Honor, are unsupported by official military records obtained by the Tribune from federal archives under the Freedom of Information Act.

The people claiming the military citations are accomplished in their careers and professions. You don't get into Who's Who by accident, after all. Still, they feel some compulsion to add military accomplishment to their already impressive resumes.

Claiming military citations not actually awarded is a crime under the 2006 Stolen Valor Act, and legislation pending before Congress would create a central database to expedite fact-checking of claims of medals earned. There is already a database for Medals of Honor, and you can read it here.

How To Tell If You're One of Them

A recurring point of argument on this blog is my tendency to talk about "conservatives" and "Republicans" as if they were uniform groups. Of course they're not, as my readers often remind me. But still, there are traits that the great majority of those overlapping groups have that make it difficult for me to see the necessity of larding my stuff with weasel words like "most" or "some."

So, in order to clarify, here's a list of traits that define the particular kind of "Republicans" and "conservatives" I'm talking about when I talk about Republicans and conservatives. You're one of them if:

1. You think waterboarding isn't torture.
2. You think President's greatest responsibility is to protect Americans' physical safety.
3. Your primary emotion is outrage.
4. You repeat every bad thing any nutjob tells you.
5. You believe that the reason Republicans are going to lose this election is vote fraud.
6. You believe things that are obviously untrue.
7. You think Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh are credible sources of information.
8. You can't understand the difference between surrender and changing strategy.
9. You think there are a large number of people who were born and raised in America, who live in America, who are leading fulfilling lives in America, who are engaged in legal American political processes, but who are nonetheless anti-American. 
10. You recite Republican attacks without knowing what those attacks actually mean.

What I'm Here For: The Rules

One link, 40 unwritten rules. For example:

Do not get a visible tattoo bigger than your penis.

I'm Never Talking To Anyone On the Phone Again

Nokia does research:
53 percent of those quizzed by Nokia admitted taking a work related phone call or reading an email while on the toilet.

Losers

For the first time this season, police made no public intoxication arrests at a Texas Tech football game.
The Red Raiders are currently 8-0 and are ranked seventh in the BCS rankings, but no one cares.

One More Reason To Stand In Awe of Barack Obama

David Kurtz at TPM:

Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don't think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia.