The infectious jingles sung by FreeCreditReport.com’s Beck impersonator are also based on another, even more insidious lie — the notion that one’s “credit score” is a worthwhile, accurate or reliable measure of trustworthiness. Failure to make timely payments is one possible reason for a lower “score,” but so is the failure to have large amounts of disposable income. By confusing and falsely equating those two things — being untrustworthy and being poor — our current obsession with credit scoring feeds into the mythology that the poor are poor because they are less deserving, less moral, less worthy than the rest of us. Read more

The anti-anti-, i.e., pro-hate-crime talking point favored by Sheldon and his colleagues on the religious right is the idea that this will somehow lead to pastors being thrown into jail for preaching that homosexuality is a sin. It's a "slippery-slope" argument that has no basis -- and doesn't claim any basis -- in the text of the law itself. Nor does it have any basis in experience: Hate crime laws pertaining to racist motives are already on the books, yet none of the racist CHINO pastors still preaching their "curse of Ham" blasphemies has ever been prosecuted. Bob Jones III is still a free man. Read more

Not only was the Pentagon braintrust flummoxed by Van Riper in the war game, they were just as surprised, months later during the actual invasion, when Iraqi insurgents began employing many of these same tactics. This was, they said, just another one of those calamities that "no one could have predicted." Except that everybody had. Read more