TestPattern.org: October 2005

Dinosaurs and Creationists Learn to Coexist

"A new poll shows that sixty six percent of Americans think President Bush is doing a poor job of handling the war in Iraq.

And the remaining thirty four percent think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church."

--Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live, October 29, 2005 (Host: Lance Armstrong)

I found Tina Fey's joke hilarious, until I did a google search and found that, yes, some nutcases really do believe that Adam and Eve coexisted with dinosaurs. Are we really living in the 21st Century?!

"We're putting evolutionists on notice: We're taking the dinosaurs back," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that's already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.

"They're used to teach people that there's no God, and they're used to brainwash people," he said. "Evolutionists get very upset when we use dinosaurs. That's their star."

Become Republican

Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hypocrite:
Perjury Just a 'Technicality'

"An indictment of any kind is not a guilty verdict, and I do think we have in this country the right to go to court and have due process and be innocent until proven guilty. And secondly, I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. So they go to something that trips someone up because they said something in the first grand jury and then maybe they found new information or they forgot something and they tried to correct that in a second grand jury."
--Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)

Senator Hutchison made these comments last Sunday on Meet the Press. This comes from a woman who supported the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1999, because he lied under oath.

"What would we be telling Americans, if the Senate of the United States were to conclude: The president lied under oath as an element of a scheme to obstruct the due process of law, but we chose to look the other way. I cannot make that choice. I cannot look away."

In the case of the Valerie Plame leak investigation, what's good for the goose apparently isn't good for the gander, the ganders being Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Is perjury really nothing more than a "technicality," as Hutchison says? Or does it cut to the heart of our judicial system, and the shared belief that no man is above the law? Stephen Colbert had this take on the issue on Monday's The Colbert Report:

Perjury's not a real crime; it's just lying about a real crime. Like manslaughter. It's not murder; it's beating someone brutally in a drunken bar fight, and they just happen to die. You can't blame someone for that."

Soldiers Scripted for Bush Photo Op

I'm sorry, are you suggesting that what our troops were saying was not sincere, or what they said was not their own thoughts?
--Scott McClellan, White House Press Secretary

Gosh, what would any thinking person say after hearing Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Allison Barber coach soldiers for yesterday's nationally televised videoconference in Tikrit, Iraq?

Heroic Brazilian Priest Ends Hunger Strike

Reuters called Roman Catholic Bishop Luiz Flavio Cappio a "militant bishop" and a "leftist priest," but I would simply call him "heroic."

"My fast is suspended in favor of life," Bishop Cappio said outside the small chapel on the banks of Sao Francisco River in Pernambuco state where he has fasted for the past 11 days.

Cappio had vowed to keep up his hunger strike until he died unless President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government canceled the $2 billion project to divert river water through a network of canals. He says it would harm the environment and help big business at the expense of the poor.