This is London reports breathlessly that an Islamic extremist site has posted an image of nuclear terror:

Washington is laid to waste. The Capitol is a blackened, smoking ruin. The White House has been razed. Countless thousands are dead.

This is the apocalyptic scene terrorists hope to create if they ever get their hands on a nuclear bomb.

The computer-generated image below was posted on an Islamic extremists' website yesterday.

Here is the picture:

It is indeed a terrifying image.

But terror-wise, there's just one problem.

It's a concept drawing for the upcoming computer game Fallout 3, the latest in the beloved post-apocalyptic computer role playing series.

That, to me, sort of takes the edge off.

Observations:

1. Either someone put this up to scam media outlets, or Islamic terrorists are gamers as well.

2. Does the fact that Islamic terrorists have progressed from featuring Bert to featuring video game images mean they have graduated from toddlerhood to preadolescence? Can we expect some moody Indie album covers to appear on Al-Qaeda propaganda next?

(Note: some have already reported that the site was indie and not an "official" Al-Qaeda group. And as I discovered after I wrote almost all of this, The Fallout 3 Blog already picked up on this. Amusingly, they did so before This is London wrote the breathless prose above. And there are reports that at least one intelligence group was taken in.)

Hat tip to Farley of our forums on this one.

Dateline: North Charleston, South Carolina. City Prosecutor Dale DuTremble is deciding whether or not to prosecute an assault by one woman upon another. He elects not to do so. Usually such decisions pass unremarked, and indeed one might never receive word that the decision was officially made, let alone receive an explanation. But Dale DuTremble saw fit to give an explanation to the suspect and complainant.

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A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Bill Johnson, the candidate for superior court judge in Los Angeles with the white supremacist past. He tried to hitch a ride on the Ron Paul blimp but was wisely given the heave -ho.

My hometown weekly rag — which I grew up reading, and for which I wrote as a high school student — has decided to cover Johnson. Will it be incisive reporting? Will the La Canada Valley Sun blow the lid off of this scandal, or reach some profound conclusions about how a man's evil past can come back to haunt him 25 years later?

Not quite.

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John McCain, recognizing that he is perhaps two years behind Ron Paul in building an army of internet-savvy flying monkeys, has created a point system to encourage his minions to spread his talking points on blogs across the land.

Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you’ve commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.

Wow! The McCain Online Action Center! And you get … points! What are they redeemable for? It's not entirely clear. Prestige? Bragging rights? Ambassadorships in the McCain Administration?

Whatever it is — I see this as a challenge. Who is the Popehatter who can get the most points based on blog posts that are not, in read carefully enough, complimentary to McCain? Scroll down on the page linked above and leave a message. Here's what I left:

Blog: Red State
Blog Username: ProudAmerican
Blog Body: I KNOW that John McCain is a proud AMERICAN unlike baroc HUSSEIN obamma! I was at a rally for JOHN MCAIN and a man walked up who was NOT WEARING AN AMERICAN FLAG PIN! In front of a VETERAN! And LADIES WERE PRESENT! John McCain saw him and got mad and kicked him in the groin so hard that he became incontinent (the guy without the flag pin, not John McCain). That's the kind of patriotism and leadership we need!

I'll let you know if I get points.

Maricpa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a popular guy with the voters. He's on his fourth term as Sheriff. He's achieved impressive popularity by building his brand as "America's Toughest Sheriff" — which has mostly meant doing crowd-pleasing talk-radio-rhetoric things like making jail inmates live in tent cities in the Arizona heat (and then telling them they have it better than soldiers in Iraq), making them wear pink underwear, slashing their food budget, limiting them to G-rated movies, and bringing back chain gangs. If you can imagine Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage suggesting that something be done to inmates to show how tough on crime we are, Joe Arpaio has probably done it and crowed about it.

But if you live there, whatever you do, don't criticize him.

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I only ask, you know, because apparently the FBI is trying to recruit college slackers to infiltrate "vegan potlucks" in the Twin Cities.

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You are an idiot.

The difference between your elected representative and me is that I'm honest enough to tell you what I think of you.  You should thank me for my candor.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

They might as well pass a law against rain at the next Congressional Pages' Combined Picnic and Molestation outing for all the effect this bill will have on oil prices.

Via Matthew Gross

So now we're not only letting the Chinese interrogate our prisoners, we're softening them up for the Chinese interrogators first.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China's ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Now, to be fair, it's not like the Chinese are getting special treatment when we allow them to interrogate their oppressed minorities or anything:

An official authorized to speak on behalf of the Defense Department but who declined to be named confirmed it was Pentagon policy to allow officials from other countries to have access to interview their nationals at Guantanamo but declined to discuss the specifics alleged in the report.

So, you know, if we should pick up any gay poets or anything, Raul Castro should feel free to ask for his secret police to have a chat with them.

Does this mean we think that Uighurs wobble around the edges of terrorism? Well, not exactly:

The U.S. State Department has found China to have suppressed the religious freedom of Uighurs, who are Muslim, and has accused the Chinese government of persecuting, even executing, those who advocate Uighur independence.

In 2006, after the United States released five Uighurs from Guantanamo, China asked for them to be repatriated so they could be prosecuted as terrorists. The United States declined to do so, out of concern they would not be treated humanely. Instead they transferred the men to Albania, which was the only country out of 90 approached by the U.S. government who would take them.

So. We won't send them to you so that you can prosecute them and torture them. But why not come over and interrogate them here? We've got nice facilities. We'll have a beer after or something.

Via.

Resolved: notwithstanding the diagrams that multiculturalism seminar organizers draw on flip charts, a tradition, habit, or belief is not admirable or worthy of respect simply because it comes from another culture or country or from people who look different than us.

Case in point:

Gambia — pardon me, The Gambia — is definitely not fabulous.

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Vito Fossella is a Republican Congressman.

Vito Fossella is a strong family values advocate.

Vito Fossella presents himself as a devout Catholic.

Vito Fossella has supported the Marriage Protection Act.

Vito Fossella shuns his gay sister, avoiding family events were she and her partner are present, on moral grounds.

You know exactly where this is going to go, don't you?

Vito Fossella is not seeking reelection. Why? Because when he got busted for drunk driving recently, it came out that the married, father-of-three Fossella had fathered a fourth child on a woman not his wife, an Air Force colonel with whom he shared a Congressional delegation trip to Europe in 2003.

No airport bathrooms involved, though. So he's got that going for him.

What the fuck? Why is something called the "Jewish World Review" publishing throwback-racist crap like this column by Kathleen Parker?

Full-bloodedness is an old coin that's gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.

Who "gets" America? And who doesn't?

The answer has nothing to do with a flag lapel pin, which Obama donned for a campaign swing through West Virginia, or even military service, though that helps. It's also not about flagpoles in front yards or magnetic ribbons stuck on tailgates.

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Josh Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically — and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century — there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.

We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

Let's leave aside the appalling diction for now, if we can. What is this person's malfunction? And what is JWR's malfunction in printing it?

Via: Multiple, multiple sources.

Sixty-eight percent of Italians want to expel all Roma ("Gypsies") from the country, but expulsion's not enough for many.

Young Neapolitans who threw Molotov cocktails into a Naples Gypsy camp this week, after a girl was accused of trying to abduct a baby, bragged that they were undertaking "ethnic cleansing". A UN spokeswoman compared the scenes to the forced migration of Gypsies from the Balkans. "We never thought we'd see such images in Italy," said Laura Boldrini.

"This hostility is a result of the generally inflammatory language of the current government, as well as the previous one," said EveryOne director Matteo Pegoraro. "Italian football stars at Milan teams assumed to have Gypsy heritage, such as Andrea Pirlo, are now also the subject of threatening chants."

Commenting on the attacks in Naples, Umberto Bossi, the head of the Northern League party said: "People are going to do what the political class cannot."

The defence minister, Ignazio La Russa, said yesterday he would consider deploying soldiers to Italian streets to help fight crime, while a group of Bosnian Gypsies in Rome said they were mounting night guard patrols of their camp to defend against vigilante attacks.

The front explanation about gypsies kidnapping babies is so ludicrous as to bring to mind certain other quaint European folktales.  Buncha goddamned savages.

And where are the media, or at least the American media?  I've been watching loads of cable news over the past week, and wouldn't have heard of this at all if I didn't read fringe media as well.

How do you make right-wing film fans go utterly nuts? Threaten to remake Red Dawn.

Of course, if Jimmy Carter had been elected to a second term in 1980 the world might have turned out much like Milius depicted in Red Dawn.

Leading to, perhaps inevitably,

I just want to say that we didn’t lose the war in vietnam.

I was going to drop in and link them to a fake rumor that someone was going to remake Patton starring Denzel Washington and directed by, oh, I don't know, Rob Reiner, but somehow it seemed small and unsporting.

Via.

Assud, the giant pink Jew-eating Easter Bunny and Hamas kiddie-propaganda-star, is rude to his grandpa. Bad bunny! Bad bunny!

Grandpa: My dear, you’ve never seen such a place. I used to live in Tel Al-Rabi’ [the Arab word for “spring,” which is “Aviv” in Hebrew]. What a beautiful place. My God, when I recall Tel Al-Rabi’, which the Zionists have called…

Assud: There’s no such place called Tel Al-Rabi’. What’s the matter, Grandpa? Have you gone senile?

Oh, yeah, and he's also a freakish, sick symbol of Hamas genocidal ambitions too. So, thumbs down on the rabbit. Though he may scare off Jimmy Carter.

The California Supreme Court has just issued an opinion on the gay marriage issue. Litigants challenged California's one-man-one-woman definition of marriage, approved by voters in the ballot initiative proposition 22.

The Court's web site with the opinion is slammed right now. More when I can get the opinion.

Edit: downloading opinion now.

Edit: Woot!

Accordingly, we conclude that to the extent the current California statutory provisions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, these statutes are unconstitutional.

Edit: opinion here, hosted with us– in Word, because it wasn't downloading in pdf. Analysis later.

Edit: A very little analysis:

1. This is a decision based on California's constitution, not the United States constitution. The gay marriage issue illuminates the fair-weather-federalism of certain conservatives who, under the principles of federalism they normally celebrate, should encourage states (the laboratories of democracy) to create rights under their own constitutions.

2. The all-important remedies section: the court simply struck the restrictive language from the statute and directed the state to permit all marriages immediately:

Accordingly, in light of the conclusions we reach concerning the constitutional questions brought to us for resolution, we determine that the language of section 300 limiting the designation of marriage to a union “between a man and a woman” is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples. In addition, because the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples imposed by section 308.5 can have no constitutionally permissible effect in light of the constitutional conclusions set forth in this opinion, that provision cannot stand.
Plaintiffs are entitled to the issuance of a writ of mandate directing the appropriate state officials to take all actions necessary to effectuate our ruling in this case so as to ensure that county clerks and other local officials throughout the state, in performing their duty to enforce the marriage statutes in their jurisdictions, apply those provisions in a manner consistent with the decision of this court. Further, as the prevailing parties, plaintiffs are entitled to their costs.

3. 4-3 decision, with George, Kennard, Moreno (formerly one of my favorite federal judges), and Werdegar for the majority.

Edit: Andrew Sullivan points out that the ruling takes effect in 30 days. The ballot measure proposed by social conservatives — currently pending signature approval — doesn't go up for a vote until November. Any same-sex couples who wanted to get married would have plenty of time to do so. If the ballot measure (which, unlike Prop 22, amends California's constitution, and therefore would wipe out this decision) passes, there's a dog's breakfast of a legal mess left over — what's the status of all the people who married in the interim?

In recent elections the gay marriage question has been used as a wedge issue, driving turnout in states in which gay marriage bans were on the ballot. I don't think it can drive enough votes to swing California to the Republicans, though. It remains to be seen how it can be used as a wedge issue elsewhere this year.

To see some stereotypical social conservatives braying about the parade of polygamy, child molestation, and bestiality that they believe will follow, check out the comments on Malkin.