Via the (in this case entirely justifiably) Angry Asian Man, I see this gem from Planet Texas.

There's a dispute because Texas' new proposed reading curriculum from K-12 only has 4 books concerning Hispanic culture out of 150. Hispanics make up about 25% of Texans. Dig the response of the chairman of the Texas Board of Education:

Don McLeroy, board chairman, said Friday he couldn't comment about the list because he hadn't reviewed which books made it into the document.

However, McLeroy said he directed a group of experts to add examples of "good literature" to the list. He said students should spend their time in English class learning English and reading literature that will help prepare them for college.

"What good does it do to put a Chinese story in an English book?" he said. "You learn all these Chinese words, OK. That's not going to help you master … English. So you really don't want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them. Why should you take a child's time trying to learn a word that they'll never ever use again?"

He added that some words — such as chow mein — might be useful.

Wow, Don, you really took the hat trick of cowardly, stupid, and obnoxious there. Cowardly because it's perfectly obvious that you are actually talking about Spanish, not Chinese — you just don't have the stones to address the dispute directly. Stupid because if you don't recognize how knowing a few words of Spanish in Texas could come in useful, you're a dim-bulb. And obnoxious because — well, I'll let you puzzle that out, I don't want to tire you.

Jack Thompson, a rascally "attorney" with a Cloverfield-sized bug up his ass about video games, has been a subject here before, usually as a result of Game Politics' excellent coverage of him.

Game Politics has now obtained transcripts of Thompson's nine-day state bar trial late last year, and has been running excerpts and commentary. It's astonishing; it reaches a can't-look-away-from-the-car-wreck level of sick fascination. On another level it is sad; the depiction of Mr. Thompson in action strongly reinforces my impression of him that he's seriously in need of therapy. Attorneys will enjoy Mr. Thompson's comments to the judge and his quirky (to put it mildly) grasp of evidence and procedure.

Enjoy.

In further news of the high moral and intellectual standard set by professional sports, I learned from Steelers chairman Dan Rooney that the pursuit of sacraments mitigates assault and battery:

On March 8, Harrison was charged with assaulting his girlfriend, Beth Tibbot, in her Ohio Township home. According to a police affadavit, Harrison broke down a door, broke Tibbot's cell phone in half as she attempted to call 911, then slapped her face with an open hand, knocking off her glasses. He was charged with simple assault and criminal mischief and faces an April 3 preliminary hearing before a magistrate in Bellevue.

But Harrison was kept on. Wilson, another guy who fondles dead pigs for a living, was let go. Why?

"I know many are asking the question of [why] we released Wilson and Harrison we kept," Rooney said. "The circumstances — I know of the incidents, they are completely different. In fact, when I say we don't condone these things, we don't, but we do have to look at the circumstances that are involved with other players and things like that, so they're not all the same."

In Harrison's case, Rooney said the player was trying to take his son to be baptized.

"What Jimmy Harrison was doing and how the incident occurred, what he was trying to do was really well worth it," Rooney said of Harrison's initial intent with his son. "He was doing something that was good, wanted to take his son to get baptized where he lived and things like that. She said she didn't want to do it."

Yes, that makes perfect sense. It's a good thing for Beth Tibbot that Harrison wasn't on his way to an extreme unction.

Most political activists recognize that their methods, to be effective, should be tailored to the mood of the day. When you're down and out and nobody is paying attention to you, it might take some theatrics and self-immolation, literal or figurative, to get attention to your issue.

However, when a majority of the nation agrees with you, the same tactics can come off as silly and self-indulgent.

Somehow, I don't think the Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War had that firmly in mind when they disrupted an Easter mass and sprayed fake blood around.

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Just in time for Easter, James Carville — most memorably and aptly described by Dennis Miller (back when he was funny) as a "demented muppet accidentally washed on hot" — gets angry enough to Go There:

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

I find it difficult to imagine Hillary being content seated at the right hand of the Father.

A few weeks ago I mentioned an employee at the oppressively named Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis being disciplined for reading a historical book about the KKK. IUPUI backed off eventually, muttering angrily that it couldn't prove he was trying to harass people by reading.

Now via The Fire I see that IUPUI continued its moronic justifications in press coverage of the event:

The university suggested in a statement, though, that the book's anti-racism themes were not at issue: "Regrettably, that has focused attention on the book he was reading, rather than the conduct of Mr. Sampson, which his co-workers believed to be deliberately hostile."

The statement says co-workers had felt Sampson was trying to create a "hostile atmosphere of antagonism."

Congrats to IUIPI for continuing its anti-book, pro-ignorance stance. Not many institutions of higher learning are willing to go out on that particular limb.

Look, IUIPI, you got caught acting like jack-booted cretins. Cease this embarrassing self-justification. There will always be people who think that reading is somehow mean or hostile or uppity or aggressive, and none of them should be taken seriously. Apologize.

You may have seen news about a web site called Juicy Campus, a platform for anonymous gossip about students at various colleges. It's been controversial and various schools have considered blocking it from campus networks. The site prominently markets itself as 100% anonymous and brags that it doesn't track posting. The result has been wildly unpredictable, unless you are a carbon-based lifeform capable of deeper thought than a radish — the site's college-specific forums are clogged not with lighthearted "I think Suzy may have a crush on Johnny" posts, but with the most vile crap you can imagine. Anonymous posts single out individuals for sexual, racial, and religious abuse (most vigorously when the target is a woman) and anonymous replies gleefully pile on. For an example, check out the UCLA posts.

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I see that Joe Francis, proprietor of Girls Gone Wild, has cut a deal in Florida and escaped further jail there on charges of filming underage girls. He's still facing federal tax charges — he's being represented by a really very good white collar defense lawyer that I know — but he's probably been emboldened on that by Blade's recent successes.

I have said on these pages before, probably to an extent that a significant percentage of our readers finds to be creepy and/or nauseating, that I am a staunch supporter of breasts. However, no mention of Joe Francis can possibly be complete without mentioning that he is a psychopathic vermin. If you haven't read it before, this searing L.A. Times portrait limns him very well. Though I normally avoid such pronouncements, let me say this: the world will be much improved if an when he encounters a knotted bedsheet or sharpened toothbrush in the federal pen.

There's been a fair amount of ink spilled about wives like Silda Spitzer standing up by their husbands at the sort of press conferences that ex-Gov. Spitzer had to hold this week. Many people hate it, thinking that the wives are demeaning themselves. (Certainly that's long been an undercurrent of resentment in some quarters towards Hillary Clinton.) Of course, there are always the outliers like that demented freak "Dr." Laura Schlessinger, who apparently thinks that Elliot would never have developed a taste for the strange if he had gotten a few more spontaneous blow jobs at home, or something. Feh.

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Once scandals took days or weeks to play out. But in the age of Google, a miscreant can be identified, accused, and given the boot in the time it takes you to nurse a mild hangover. Case in point — Timothy S. Goeglein, a treacly columnist for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, was accused of plagiarism by blogger Nancy Nall in an email to his paper last night, exposed publicly by Nall this morning, further instances of apparent plagiarism identified by commenters on Nall's blog within minutes, and confessed and thrown under the bus by noon by the paper. Note that Goeglein has warned the paper that there may be other instances. That seems prudent.

Why is this notable, other than for the speed of Goeglein's downfall?

Tim Goeglein is on the White House staff. He's President Bush's Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liason and tasked with — wait for it — the White House's relationship with the religious community.

Ethics and morals (religious or not) aside, in a world with Google, he is too fucking stupid or self-destructive to be in politics.

Edited to add:  That's some nice journalism by Nall, and the quick discovery of further apparent instances by her commenters demonstrates how the internet empowers individuals to feats of research previously undreamed of except by professional reporters.

We've mentioned Jack Thompson in these pages before; he's a serially unhinged "attorney" whose crusade for the past decade has been the evils of videogames. (Previous bizarre obsessions included Janet Reno's sexual preference and rap music.)

Jack's been in a bit of trouble of late. Most recently, as Game Politics reported, the Florida Supreme Court issued an Order to Show Cause why he should not be sanctioned for frivolous filings. Sanctions could include such vexatious litigant measures as a limit on filing. Today, Game Politics speculates convincingly about what might have been the last straw for the Florida supremes — a bizarre filing that Game Politics has hosted here. In it, Thompson berates the court in a pleading including rebuses. No. Really.

This, of course, is not the first time Jack Thompson has gotten into trouble over visual aides in filings; previously he's included gay porn. (Link is safe.)

It is possible that video games made him this way. I'm just not sure which ones.

Here's what some dude called Tom Buffenbarger had to say about Obama and Obama supporters when he warmed up the crowd for Clinton last night:

Buffenbarger called Obama a “thespian,” and he sarcastically referred to the junior senator from Illinois as a “wunderkind.” He compared Obama to “Janus, the two-faced Roman god of ancient times.” And he pleaded with the crowd to boo Obama’s labor record.

Early in his speech, Buffenbarger asked, “So now we have a decision to make. Will we rely on the Harvard Law Review editor? The silver-tongued orator from Kansas, Hawaii and Illinois? The man in love with the microphone?”

Taking off the gloves, he said, “Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali. He took a walk every time there was a tough vote in the Illinois State Senate. He took a walk more than a 130 times. That's what a shadow boxer does. All the right moves. All the right combinations. All the right footwork. But he never steps into the ring.”

But it was Obama supporters for whom Buffenbarger saved his most vitriolic contempt, and he proved that the Democratic Party’s coalition is nothing if not fragile. Channeling Howard Beale from the movie "Network," he yelled into the microphone, “Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.”

Ah, the sweet scent of panicked hacks. What a troll.

He's right about people on the Harvard Law Review, though.

Scenes from the re-animation and subsequent evisceration of satire, part ad infinitum:

1. Anti-gaming lunatic Jack Thompson rushes to blame NIU shootings on video games;
2. Among the resulting critiques is a satirical letter purporting to be from Samuel L. Jackson condemning Thompson on a blog;
3. Thompson takes the bait and responds as if it is actually Jackson, then a few minutes later realizes he's been duped and retracts (possibly after seeing the sidebar banner saying "these are not real").

You can't make that shit up.

Edit: Don't think for a minute that Lyndon LaRouche is going to let Jack Thompsonbogart all the crazy on this one.

Some of you may recall the tumult that occurred when gamers discovered the "Hot Coffee" mod to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. That mod permitted the gamer to see digitized characters "having sex" — as Overlawyered.com aptly described it, "an animation at about the level of a Ken doll rubbing up against an unclothed Barbie doll with X-rated sound effects." Mind you, the regular edition of the game allows (and even encourages) your character to engage in home invasion robberies, drive-by shootings, and general slaughter of every stripe. It also includes pimping and various other less explicit depictions of sex.

Naturally lawyers saw an opportunity, and filed a class action against the makers of the game. It's been settled. Overlawyered.com, at the link above, has offered comments, as well as part of the deposition of the lead plaintiff, who bought the game despite the carnage pretty clearly disclosed on the box but thought she should get money because there was a hidden sex scene.

And she's a teacher.

Still laboring over that 9th Circuit brief, but wanted to bring your attention to an example of college student douchebaggery.

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