I may not believe in God, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to Hell for laughing so hard at these.

In light of the recent news that the Bush administration wants to snoop through our Google records, Tom Tomorrow has come up with a choice little piece of snark: he entered the text of the Fourth Amendment into his Google search engine. I liked this notion enough to do it myself, both on my home computer and at work. It's tiny, it's trivial, but I enjoy the tiny, trivial giggle that I get from fantasizing about how seeing the text of the Constitution will cause Bush and his cronies to burst into flames like vampires in direct sunlight.

In case anybody else would like to contribute their own bit of snark to Bush's data set, here's the handy-dandy text for you to cut and past into your search window:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I was originally hoping to have time for a serious post today, on the topic of why the anti-choice forces aren't particularly interested in actually overturning Roe. I was planning to highlight why keeping Roe as a rallying point is politically useful and why they don't need to get rid of Roe to eliminate reproductive freedom for women.

However, in what I suppose is a very appropriate move, I decided to terminate that post rather than bring it to term. The main reason is that I like to make topics open for debate around here, but abortion is one subject that I am utterly uninterested in debating. I believe that every individual's reproductive choices are their own goddam business and I have no interest in talking to people who believe in sticking their bossy little noses up my uterus.

So here's a link dump instead. Read them, or don't.

Ampersand writes the post I was planning to write

NARAL's Women Are Waiting site (Please tell me none of my readers are stupid enough to believe that Plan B is "abortion.")

Lies, and the Lying Anti-Choice "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" That Tell Them

PZ Myers gives us the numbers (Fun fact: 1 in 3 American women will have an abortion by the time she is 45. Do you know three women?)

The Last Abortion Clinic

The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion

Oh, and by the way...when did Al Gore become such a badass? As the Rude Pundit put it,

Man, someone spiked Al Gore's coffee with spinach yesterday [linkies], 'cause he went all Popeye on the Bush administration's Bluto ass.

..."You want threats?" Gore is saying. "Dude, you only gotta keep track of a couple hundred goatfuckers who shit in holes on the side of a mountain. Try dealin' with a few million Soviets. God, stop being a dickhead about it and just do your job without fucking up the joint too much, a'ight?"

I voted for Gore, of course, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about it. If only he'd shown this kind of spunk back then, maybe we wouldn't be in such dire need of it now.

Fafblog has been added to the side links. Here's why:

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," says me.
"And zombies," says Giblets.
"Yes, and zombies," says me. "But we should also fear our fear of zombies."
"Fear of zombies is useful," says Giblets. "It got us way up in this tree out of reach of the zombies."
"Well yeah that's true," says me. "But maybe it prevents us from workin together with the zombies to overcome our differences."
"As long as the zombies adhere to their rigid pro-eating-us agenda no compromise is possible!" says Giblets.
"But Giblets that's what compromise is all about," says me. "Maybe if we compromise on gettin eaten they'll compromise on pork tariffs an the border dispute."
"Zombies will never give up their pork tariffs," says Giblets. "They are as militantly opposed to free trade as they are to polysyllabic speech and personal hygiene!"
"Now that's an uninformed stereotype, Giblets," says me. "There's a lotta hard-workin people in the zombie community who maintain a neat an professional appearance for many days after the brain eatage."
"You just want to trade Giblets's succulent guts for cheap, cheap zombie ham!" says Giblets.
"Aff's nah hroo," says me with a mouthful a ham. "I just wanna better world where man an zombie can live in peace an respect our unique cultures an experiences."
"Giblets's plan was just to get em all to stand in one place so we could squish em with a big rock," says Giblets.
"But maybe if we did that we'd just end up squishin ourselves with a different rock," says me. "The rock of fear."
"No, no I don't think so," says Giblets lookin at the rock. "Giblets is pretty sure this is basalt."
"The basalt of fear, Giblets," says me. "Which is the only kinda basalt we have to fear."
"Crazy talk!" says Giblets. "Basalt is an extrusive igneous rock whereas fear is a clastic sedimentary! It is formed over thousands of years by the gradual process of erosion and deposit."
"Particles of anxiety and paranoia get broken down through chemical an mechanical weathering," says me. "Eventually they settle in river beds of dread, where horrifular pressure condenses them into geological fright."
"Some of the greatest statues in the world have been sculpted from fear," says Giblets, "like the Bigfoot Memorial and Michelangelo's Satan and Evil Mount Rushmore."
"Evil Mount Rushmore was over five thousand feet tall an carved out of a single block of patriotic terror," says me.
"When its giant monster presidents rampaged through New York, the national guard was helpless with inspiration," says Giblets. "Until one little boy defeated them with the power of caring."
"That little boy grew up to be Franklin Roosevelt," says me, "who told us we have nothing to fear but fear itself."
"Fear and Zombie Franklin Roosevelt," says Giblets, "who will eat our brains and detain our japanese-americans."
"He's headin this way!" says me.
"Giblets is totally gonna hit im with this rock," says Giblets.

Is the year really 2006? Because, according to this Reuters story, the first female crash-test dummy was just created.

Just. Created.

According to the story, "All current crash test dummies are based on how men's bodies react in collisions and other accidents."

It is the year 2006, right? So automobiles have been around for like a century, right? And female human beings have existed for at least the majority of that time, right? Yet this whole time they've been using only male crash-test dummies.

I promise that I really am trying to let the whole ACLU series die off, but the universe seems determined not to let me do so. While I was away for the New Year, several of my friends started discussing Mr. Bill O'Reilly. I swear, I had nothing to do with bringing up this topic, but of course I could not restrain myself from joining in. One fellow insisted that O'Reilly never lies, he just presents the facts with his own editorial commentary. Well, this one's for you, Matt:

On the January 3 edition of CBS' Late Show with David Letterman, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly appeared as a guest and resurrected his false claim that a Wisconsin elementary school banned the singing of the Christmas hymn "Silent Night."

...

But as the weblog Think Progress first noted, O'Reilly and others have falsely attributed the changed lyrics to political correctness. For example, on the December 9 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly stated that Ridgewood Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, "forced the kids to sing" the different lyrics. The conservative legal group Liberty Counsel condemned what it called the "secularized rendition" of the song, which it claimed "mocks one of the world's best-known Christmas songs," and threatened to sue the school district.

Think Progress further explained that the play's creator, Dwight Elrich, is the musical director of the New Covenant Singers at Bel Air Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles -- which a December 20 Washington Post article noted was "former president Ronald and Nancy Reagan's church in California" -- and his play has been performed by churches across the country. According to Elrich's website, his products "make it easy for you to produce a fantastic Kids Christmas Musical Program." Elrich told the Post: "I'm just flabbergasted. I'm a choir director in a church! I perform 'Silent Night' 40 or 50 times each year! I thought the play was a really charming, wonderful, positive story about love and acceptance ... removing it from the Christian tradition was something I never thought anyone could ever come up with. We were telling a story about a little tree, so we used a familiar tune to help the kids get it."

Bill O'Reilly says that the lyrics to "Silent Night" were secularized by the evil forces of political correctness that so devistatingly ravaged Christmas 2005. In reality, a church choir director wrote the altered lyrics nearly 20 years ago, and churches around the country have been performing the musical play ever since. O'Reilly's "mistake" has been clearly exposed many times, perhaps most notably by Think Progress back on December 14th, yet almost a month later he is still trying to loofa his ego with lies.

And, once again, my winter holiday leaves me in serious need of a vacation.

But it's the good kind of tired, the kind you get after eating lots of wicked food and piling up lots of awesome loot. Plus, the weather in DC is marginally better than when I left and the new take-out place stuffing menus under my door makes some yummy lasagna. Life is good.

For just a tidbit of something fun, the Guardian has a Top 10 list of scientific breakthroughs in 2005. My favorite? "British scientists found that, all else being equal, putting on a red shirt means you are more likely to win a football game."