[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

George Bush, of course, got an honorable discharge from the National Guard, which should erase any question of wrongdoing while he was in the Guard. Sorta like John Muhammad, who was court-martialed twice (once for hitting a non-com), and later got an honorable discharge. The Fox News story says the honorable discharge can’t be confirmed, but the AP story and the ABC News story linked above both claim to have a source for that portion of the tale.

Via Matt Lavine, who keeps track of right-wing dog injuries. He also once summarized a post of mine as noting “that absence of evidence about absence might not mean evidence of absence, but that there is evidence which already shows absence by the absence of evidence of presence. Yeah!” Which is an accurate summary and you gotta love that.

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

Wednesday Weird #3 asks us to weirdify the classic bar scenario. It’s 6 AM and I’ve been up since like 4 AM, so I think I’m good to go on this one.

OK, so there’s a bar. I guess it’s a fantasy world, but it doesn’t really matter that much. Maybe it’s Shadowrun. It’s better if there’s not a lot of magical healing, though. The point is, there’s this bar, and you can’t die as long as you’re inside it. You also can’t get any better. It’s like you’re stuck at whatever age you were or with whatever wounds you had when you walked in.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of room.

So you have the regulars, and they’re really regular. Never leave the place. There’s the guy who took down an Emperor, and in the city outside there’s an entire clan of assassins that’s spent five hundred years waiting for him to come out. There’s the old adventurer who’s seen it all and knows a little bit about everything; good source of info if you can get to him when he’s not drunk. There’s a god with no worshippers. (Some people say he made the bar in the first place, to save himself from oblivion.) There’s the bartender, who is missing the lower half of his body, but he’s always cheerful anyhow. There are horrible injuries. There’s a gloomy albino with a big black sword which constantly begs its master to leave.

People like to have duels right outside, just in case. For a while, there was a guy who built a wall around the bar and charged admission. He got rich and moved to another city.

There’s a cult that worships the bar. Fat lot of good that does the forgotten god, though.

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

Roy Moore is thinking about running for President. That makes Bush’s decision to hold tight on a marriage amendment all the more risky. There’s no guarantee that the radical right will vote for Bush if there’s a more attractive fringe candidate out there. (Via Oliver Willis.)

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

William Cork is keeping a very good blog on The Passion. I pretty much concur with his thoughts on the movie, which are summarized here.

I still think Mel Gibson is a well-meaning individual, but until he takes a deep breath and acknowledges that his father is a lunatic and that his movie is going to inspire hatred, it really doesn’t matter what his motivations are. Take a look at some Hutton Gibson quotes from the link above (via Orcinus):

“I don’t know what their [the Jews’] agenda is except that it’s all about control. They’re after one world religion and one world government. That’s why they’ve attacked the Catholic Church so strongly, to ultimately take control over it by their doctrine and make one world religion and one world government.”

And:

“To a Jew a Christian commits idolatry every time he looks at a crucifix and says a prayer. You know they’re in control and they’re going to get in control the way things are going. Because they get all of our people…They killed several generations of us Americans [referring to WWI and WWII] … The Jews weren’t in the army much in WWI that because they were fomenting a revolt in Russia. America had no right to fight in foreign wars.”

This is purely and utterly sick. Expect to see more of it. The white supremacists are coming out of the woodwork on this one; the silver lining to all this is that it’ll get some of them out from under their rocks.