[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

As some of you might remember, we went through a bit of a saga about a year ago.  In my opinion, it truly started with the first time South Park confronted the controversy regarding depictions of Mohammed, with this speech:

It starts after the 1:10 mark, and for those who can’t watch for any reason, it features on character (I think Butters’ father) saying:

Freedom of speech is at stake here, don’t you all see? If anything, we should all make cartoons of Mohammed and show the terrorists and the extremists that we are all united in the belief that every person has a right to say what they want. Look people, it’s been really easy for us to stand up for free speech lately. For the past few decades, we haven’t had to risk anything to defend it. One of those times is right now. And if we aren’t willing to risk what we have now, then we just believe in free speech, but won’t defend it.

But of course in an example of bad irony and meta-humor, when the time came for them to actually put Mohammed on screen in that episode, Comedy Central refused to air it.  Seriously, watch it.  Kyle urges the fictional network executive to air it, and its like Matt Stone and Trey Parker talking to the suits as Comedy Central.  In the cartoon, freedom wins.  In life, not so much…

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I like this guy. And with the field narrowing somewhat, it is increasingly obvious how pathetic our choices are. Chris Christie, with his excellent communcation skills, isn’t running. Gingrich is a non-starter after his trashing of the Ryan plan, and Romney’s unapologetic attitude towards Romneycare kills him. Trump is out, and was always a joke. Same goes for Huckabee, in my book. Pawlenty is uncharismatic, and Daniels has the Fred Thompson lack of fire in the belly.

That leaves Herman Cain, Sarah Palin, and possibly Rick Perry. Am I missing anyone? I don’t think so.

I could happily support any of these three candidates, although I have this weird feeling that Herman Cain is the most electable of the three. Perry has the Bush legacy to deal with, and Palin has her high negatives. Still, any of the three would work well. They all seem to have spine and principles. That is sorely needed and in short supply.

And the more I think about it, the less inclined I am to make pronouncements about electability. After all, who thought Obama was electable? I sure didn’t.

I think the news that Perry might run is great. We’ll see if it happens.

[Guest Post by Lee Stranahan]

LOS ANGELES – Arnold Schwarzenegger went into attack mode yesterday against his foe Gov. Gray Davis – who responded by calling him a criminal.

And the campaign was rocked by ever more outrageous allegations.

Three more women – including an assistant director and a stand-in on his 1988 film “Twins” – came forward to tell the Los Angeles Times he molested them, even as a London tabloid bannered that a former stewardess on his private plane bore his love child.

The flight attendant strongly denied the story, but it offers yet another illustration of how California’s recall circus is spinning wildly out of control.

Schwarzenegger’s campaign charged Gov. Gray Davis and the Los Angeles Times were using “puke politics” to terminate his front-running bid for the governor’s mansion, even though the movie star apologized for “bad behavior” toward women.

“The last accusations that I read today are absolutely untrue,” Schwarzenegger said during a stop on his bus tour in California’s Central Valley. “They’re trying to torpedo my campaign. They’re trying to make me look bad out there.”

Maria stands by her man

His wife, Maria Shriver, made an unscheduled appearance to campaign with him – a clear sign the campaign is worried. She planted a kiss on his lips on stage and called him “The man I love, the man I believe in.”

Schwarzenegger spokesman Sean Walsh said, “We believe a smear campaign is being orchestrated by the Davis campaign.”

From the New York Daily News – Emphasis added.

But – it’s not the flight attendant…

A former flight attendant on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s private plane today denied she is the mother of his secret love child.

Tammy Baker Tousignant, a California blonde who was in her late 20s when she worked on his private plane, gave birth to a son after an alleged affair during the Nineties.

She was initially linked to the 63-year-old in 2003 by the actor’s biographer Wendy Leigh, who claimed Tousignant’s son Tanner had a ‘remarkable resemblance’ to the star.

But today her lawyer vehemently denied a romance and insisted that a DNA test had proved the actor is not the father of her child.

Read more here.

– Lee Stranahan

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Ann Althouse reveals that her archive is back.  I haven’t checked, but I will take her word on that.

Cool beans.  She has also been talking about a new url.  Not sure if that means she was ditching blogger, just threatening them or what.  For that matter, maybe she was going to start a blog for her husband, call it Meadhouse.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Since we are talking about beauty inside and outside, objective and subjective, I suddenly remembered this scene from Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter, Black Heart (its mildly NSFW for language):

I previously used that bit in my send off to Helen Thomas whom, let’s face it, is both objectively and subjectively uuuuuugly.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Strange stuff was happening over at Psychology Today as I was literally writing this post.  Seriously, as events developed, I had to go back and literally rewrite half of this.

Last night Patrick posted on the appalling post by Satoshi Kanazawa’s post as Psychology Today arguing that African American women were “objectively” less attractive than women of other colors, a piece that could only be described as wrong-headed and racist.  And later I found where the same author made a post arguing that Islam was an ethnic trait, passed down by blood.  Yes, really. And I criticized Psychology Today for it, writing “Psychology Today has disavowed declaring black women ugly, but Satoshi Kanazawa has been allowed to publish racist crap before and it’s still there.”

Well, for a few minutes today the site appeared to be scrubbed.  For instance, the index page was dead, and I had to use a google cache to much through his archives.  And we caught them briefly scrubbing the author’s name from certain posts.  For instance, in the comments Dustin linked to a post called “Why we are losing this war” as an example of Kanazawa’s dubious scholarship.  But the only problem was when I went there, Kanazawa’s name as well as the name of his Psychology Today blog “The Scientific Fundamentalist” has been scrubbed (even though the phrase appears in the url), and the author of the piece was reduced to “anonymous.”  Dustin fortunately kept the screenshots of the piece after the name was scrubbed:

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[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: And found some other creepy, frankly racist writing from Kanazawa, published in Psychology Today.  See below the fold.

This is a follow up to Patrick’s post on the appalling Psychology Today article stating that black women were “objectively ugly.”

Fifty seven years ago, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education.  It is generally taught to children that in that case the Supreme Court held that segregation was unconstitutional.  That is both right and wrong.  It is wrong in the sense that the decision didn’t reach that broadly—it only declared that segregation in K-12 education was unconstitutional—but on the other hand, the Supreme Court never upheld enforced segregation again (to my knowledge).  They didn’t declare that Plessy v. Fergusson was a dead letter, but as of that day it was.

Now I have long believed that the decision in Brown was fully justified as a matter of original intent and I suspect that if you could inject the justices at the time with some magic truth serum, they would have said that was why they ruled as they did.  But on the face of the opinion, they specifically decry following original intent.  My guess is they did so for two reasons.  First, because it meant admitting that the Supreme Court was inexcusably wrong in the past—and they are loathe to do that.  The second is that the framers in this case were the Radical Republicans that had been vilified for generations across the South for wanting to punish the South by… freeing the slaves, and giving them equal rights, and even the right to vote.  You know, because the only reason to do that is to be mean to someone else (note: I am being sarcastic).  Hell, I was taught that version of history when I was in junior high school in North Carolina.

So they needed to find a new reason to overturn it and Thurgood Marshall’s legal strategy (he was lead lawyer for the NAACP at the time and not yet a Supreme Court justice) led them pretty directly to it.  For years the NAACP’s Ink Fund chipped away at segregation in a piecemeal fashion by showing in case after case that the separate facilities were not actually equal in measurable ways.  Take this famous picture:

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[Guest post by Lee Stranahan]

You know the story – Shirley Sherrod, the USDA and the White House were all blindsided on Monday, July 19^th 2010 when Andrew Breitbart released two excerpts of a speech Sherrod had given to the NAACP months before. That same day, the USDA ordered her to resign at the behest of the White House. The USDA later regretted this rash decision, apologized to Mrs. Sherrod and offered her a new job at UDA.

That’s the basic story you’ve heard every time about what happened to Mrs. Sherrod, right? Video is released 7/19/10 and the USDA / White House make a snap decision to fire her.

But that’s not what happened.

Here’s what really happened. Shirley Sherrod knew about the video excerpt on Thursday, July 14^th — five days before Breitbart published it on BigGovernment. She immediately let the USDA know about the video. And she also thought she knew where to get the entire video, five days before the clips went public.

That’s what Shirley Sherrod told an audience in August, 2010. The speech was posted by the NAACP but has only gotten a total of 46 views in eight months.

In order to avoid the ‘heavily edited’ meme, here’s the entire speech as posted. Sherrod discusses when she found out about the video about 9 minutes in.

This means the USDA didn’t make a snap judgment under sudden pressure. They were informed by Mrs. Sherrod herself but didn’t respond. What did the USDA do? Who knew at the USDA? Did they notify the White House and if so, when?

These are questions the press never asked because they didn’t even get the basic facts correct of when Mrs. Sherrod actually learned about the video. Nearly every single reporter who talked to Mrs. Sherrod failed out of the starting gate to get even the simplest information correct. This set the stage for the Sherrod coverage to come.

– Lee Stranahan