...reason why religion makes no sense to me.

Sappy olympic stories generally wear thin by about the time the torch is lit. But man, this piece on U.S. gymnast Courtney McCool is a weeper. You gotta' feel really bad for her. And her dad.

The Iraqi national soccer team has asked that President Bush stop using them for his reelection campaign.

Yes, I understand that these same athletes endured torture at the hands of Uday Hussein under his father's regime. And yes, it seems they don't have much in the way of gratitude. But I find it hard to find fault with the people who, you know, acutally endured Saddam's regime. Seems they're more qualified to their opinion than I am.

And that's really beside the point. The point is that Bush administration rather casually assumed everything would be hunky-dory once we deposed Saddam.

People are still dying over there. Seems awfully callous for the president to already be attempting to turn this small source of joy among Iraqis into campaign soundbites. Particularly when Iraqis themselves would rather he didn't.

In 1996, Manuel Navarro was ordered to pay $250 per month in child support for two boys. Disclaiming paternity, Navarro recently had a DNA test, which proved he wasn't the boys' father. Incredulously, a trial court acknowledged the evidence disproving Navarro's paternity, but still ordered Navarro to continue with his payments, because he didn't protest his paternity in time (he was served in absentia). In stern, harsh wording, an appelate court struck down the trial court ruling, stating:

"Los Angeles County should not enforce child-support judgments it knows to be unfounded...

[W]hen a mistake occurs in a child-support action, the county must correct it, not exploit it."

Here's where it gets infuriating. According to the Washington Times, L.A.'s child services agency is asking the California Supreme Court to depublish the ruling, so that no man in the future can cite the ruling and his own DNA evidence to free himself from paying for children that aren't his.

Matt Welch wrote on this heartbreaking issue several months ago. Wendy McElory has written on it, too. Here's Welch:

...what nearly 10 million American men have discovered to their chagrin since the welfare reform legislation of 1996, is that when the government accuses you of fathering a child, no matter how flimsy the evidence, you are one month away from having your life wrecked. Federal law gives a man just 30 days to file a written challenge; if he doesn't, he is presumed guilty. And once that steamroller of justice starts rolling, dozens of statutory lubricants help make it extremely difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to stop -- even, in most cases, if there�s conclusive DNA proof that the man is not the child's father.

By some estimates, there are areas of the country where as many as one in five children's biological father isn't who their mothers tell them it is. And it's not all innocent mistakes. Nor is it limited to demogragphic groups with a high incidence of single motherhood. Cuckolding's far more common and pervasive than we'd like to believe.

The sad thing is, the child services people don't care. They're only interested in that child support check, no matter who it comes from. See the last paragraph in the Washington Times piece:

Yet many child-support officials are not sympathetic to the men, contending that losing a putative father's support is likely to be detrimental to the children. "At what point should the truth about genetic parentage outweigh the consequences of leaving a child fatherless?" Paula Roberts of the Center for Law and Social Policy asked in a 2003 paper.

Always. Because the mother lied or was mistaken about paternity at the time of birth, we should force another man to financially supoprt a kid for the rest of his life? What the hell kind of justice is that?

Think about the incentive this provides to single mothers in low-income areas. Your baby's father is in prison, or is a deadbeat, or a cad. You're asked to name the father when you deliver. Why not name a guy you know who has a job, or who has more prospects than the kid's real father? If you're certain the real father's going to default on child support, skip town, or wind up in jail anyway, why not take a chance on naming someone with better prospects? You have nothing to lose.

Advice to child services activists and like-minded feminists: If you want more children to benefit from the inluence of a father, start enforcing visitation rights, or agitate for more paternal equity in custody disputes. Stop looking at fathers as revenue sources, and perhaps we'll begin to take your opinions seriously.

This is just tragic.

So in the course of composing the post below, I wanted to link to a clip of the Clayton Bigsby sketch from Chapelle's Show.

On a whim, I typed (www.chapellesshow.com) into my browser.

Oddly enough, this is where I was directed.

Hmmm...

I shot an email to the guy who registered the domain. I'll let you know what he says.

From News of the Weird:

Ms. Courtney Mann, the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, who worked as a tax preparer and was a single mother, was rebuffed in an attempt to join a Ku Klux Klan-sponsored march in Pittsburgh in April 1997. Though she had been in the NAAWP for at least four years, the Klan turned her down because she is black. Said the Grand Dragon, incredulously: "She wanted to stay at my house (during rally weekend). She's all confused, man. I don't think she knows she's black."

This is hillarious.

Let the character assassinations begin.

Doing the Lyndie.

I see at least three Michelle Malkin columns here.

I blame gay marriage.

Have fun!

Seems that Athens hasn't yet fully grasped this whole Internet thing.

Not only has France banned vending machines from schools, the country also now requires all food companies to include health warnings with their advertisements, or fork over 1.5% of their respective advertising budgets to the French equivalent of HHS.

The Technology Liberation Front is a new blog featuring some really smart folks opining on tech, Internet, telecom, and entertainment issues.

Check 'em out here.

The electoral map still gives Kerry a pretty decisive advantage, 317 to 202. But some once-forgotten states have suddenly become competitive.

The latest polls in Colorado, for example, show a dead tie. Same for Wisconsin. Kerry has pulled withn five points in Georgia, and within one point in Nevada (where, surprisingly, Badnarik is pulling in three percent). Kerry has taken a small lead in Ohio, and cut the lead in Virginia to just three points. Kerry's up six in Florida.

On the other side, Bush has pulled within four points in Maine (though it doesn't help him much, as Maine apportions electoral votes by congressional district). Bush is also just five points down in Pennsylvania, and four points down in Michigan, both of which once seemed safe Kerry states.

Minesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee are also all within three points of going either way.

So while Kerry has a considerable lead in electoral votes, seems that just a little momentum from Bush could swing the whole thing the other way.

Somebody flaked on the Agitator.com fantasy football league. So we have one spot open.

It's your turn to pick. You get the last pick of the first round, and the first pick of the second.

First person to send me an email gets the slot.

Gene Healy's amusing discovery that D.C. inept health department took the regrettable moniker DOH(!) triggered an equally funny link in his comments section to this organization.

Check the logo.

The decision over whether or not to classify obesity as an illness is under hot debate...

...in friggin' India:

The problems of a minuscule proportion of an over-indulgent urban elite which lives in a state of physical inertia appear to have become a media obsession. Hence, the constant call to debate whether obesity ought to be classified as
a disease requiring medical treatment, as opposed to dealing with it through programmes offered by fitness centres.

Of course, it is a disease with terrible side-effects. But it is hardly a cause for concern in India, where at least 204 million people are malnourished and get barely one square meal a day. This number is likely to grow by another 19 million in the next year. A mere 1 per cent of men in the lower income group are obese, and the figure for women is 4 per cent. Yet, there is disproportionate hype over the problem of obesity among the upper classes. This is all the more galling as this strata has access to the best education and information, which should automatically deter them from engaging in unhealthy lifestyles.

The to-do over obesity is the apex of the cult of victimhood. While most of India starves, its elite wallow in self-pity. Intstead of stepping up and taking responsibility for the choices they've made, they're looking for government solutions -- and someone else to blame.

It's sort of a microcosm of what's happening between the West and the developing world. They're hungry. We're fat. Instead of showing them how to sustain themselves, we'd rather bitch about the chains of affluence. Instead of exporting the technology that made us fat and happy to the people who need it, we'd rather sit sullen in introspection, pondering the unseemliness of the technology that got us here (GMO's, for example), or blaming the very food industry that saved us for our own propensity to cave to indulgence. We're looking to punish food makers for giving us excess -- when we should be removing barriers, so they can market to people who don't have the necessities.

Sad state of affairs.

Colorado voters will decide this November if the state's electoral votes will be apportioned by percentage of the popular vote.

I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but I think this is a good idea. Maine now apportions its electoral votes by congressional district. I like that, too.

Most states I think are too diverse for the winner-take-all system. Northern Virgnia, for example, may as well be Boston when it comes to its politics. Yet its votes are routinely overidden by the conservative proclivities of the rest of the state, which is very much southern. I'm not advocating either ideological position. In fact, given that NoVa's one of the fastest growing regions in the country, it's probably just a matter of time before the opposite is true -- Virginia will soon be stolid blue-state territory, despite that everything south and west of the Beltway votes like Mississippi.

I'm not sure I can see a clear problem with localizing electoral votes, provided that the decision to do so comes from the states themselves, and not from an act of Congress.

More direct apportionment would prevent the presidential campaigns from ignoring vast swaths of the country that their respective strategists have deemed either safe or out of reach. Upstate New York would no longer be lumped in with New York City and its suburbs. Urban areas in flyover country would get a voice. Agrarian Northern California would no longer be overshadowed by the urban centers in L.A., San Francisco, Oakland, and the like.

If there are good arguments against this, I'm certainly open to hearing them.

You've just lost control of your car, and crashed into a pond. The car is rapidly sinking to the bottom of the pond, and you're still in it. Do you:

A) Crack the window to relieve pressure, thereby making it easier to open the door.

B) Kick through the window to secure a passage out of the car.

C) See if you can call for help on your cell phone (hands-free device only, please).

D) Light up a crack pipe.

(Hat tip: Vice Squad.)

The Reason Public Policy Institute blog compiled a list of what's being banned of late.

Equal parts amusing and depressing.

I'm quoted in this Omaha World-Herlad piece about private companies hiring only non-smoking workers.

Generally, I don't have a problem with it. If a company believes the money it might save in health insurance, sick days, training, etc. is worth the risk of hiring a less qualified non-smoker over a more qualified smoker, well, that's okay with me.

The market will dictate whether or not such a decision was wise.

I usually find all the blogosphere Paul Krugman bashing boring, tedious, and easy. Like bashing Michael Moore. But man. Krugman's latest is a real heap of dung. Writing on the one good thing the Bush administration is pushing this campaign season -- the ownership society, Krugman miffs:

A new Bush campaign ad pushes the theme of an "ownership society," and concludes with President Bush declaring, "I understand if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America."

Call me naïve, but I thought all Americans have a vital stake in the nation's future, regardless of how much property they own. (Should we go back to the days when states, arguing that only men of sufficient substance could be trusted, imposed property qualifications for voting?) Even if Mr. Bush is talking only about the economic future, don't workers have as much stake as property owners in the economy's success?

But there's a political imperative behind the "ownership society" theme: the need to provide pseudopopulist cover to policies that are, in reality, highly elitist.

All of these proposals are aimed giving middle and lower-class Americans possession of their health, their retirement, and their homes. It's about extending real wealth and equity to groups of people who've had to rely on government benevolence for generations. Private Social Security accounts, for example, would mean low-income men who die before retirement age could bequeath their lifetime accumulated FICA "contribution" to their heirs. At it currently stands, that lifetime "contribution" goes straight back into the general fund.

I think Krugman's real beef here is any move toward an ownership society would create investors in places where there were never investors before. And a society of investors is a society that's decidedly friendly to free markets. Better to keep the underclass dependent on wages, sucking at the government teat.

That, after all, is how Krugman's ideological comrades get voted into office.

Bob Vanasse is a friend of Agitydom. He's also the brains behind Stoveboat Productions, a film production company that just sold its first documentary, called "Cooking for Julia."

The film is a look behind the scenes of Washington, D.C.'s 1789 restaurant, on the night the restaurant learned it would be Julia Child, her staff, and her entourage would be dining there. Child was in town to promote a Smithsonian exhibit in her honor.

Washington's PBS station PBS bought the film last month, but will hurry production to run it as part of a series honoring Child, who passed away this week.

If you want to watch online, the password to access the film is "video."

Unflattering profile of Bill O'Reilly from Rolling Stone. Snippet:

After verbally abusing Mallick as "anti-American," a "socialist" and someone who writes "stuff that's not true," O'Reilly takes the gloves off. "Now," he says, "if your government harbors these two deserters . . . there will be a boycott of your country, which will hurt your country enormously. France is now feeling that sting." (He's referring to a boycott that O'Reilly called for after France declined to join the Bush administration in Iraq.)

"I don't think for a moment such a boycott would take place," says Mallick. "We are your biggest trading partner -- "

"No," O'Reilly cuts in, "it will take place, madam. In France -- "

"I don't think that your French boycott has done too well -- "

At which point O'Reilly executes his signature move -- the bellowing, bullying, peremptory interruption. "They've lost billions of dollars in France, according to the Paris Business Review!" he thunders.

In short, amazing TV -- the modern media equivalent of witnessing a Christian torn apart by lions, with a touch of opera buffo thrown in. (Boycott Canada?) It mattered not that most of what O'Reilly said bears no relation to the truth. The Paris Business Review doesn't exist, and the "billions" of dollars France supposedly lost reflect figures dating to the 2001 recession, predating by two years O'Reilly's call for a ban on buying French goods (since then, French exports to America have actually gone up).

Still, I probably won't be joining the O'Reilly Factor Premium any time soon.

Sorry for the absence without warning. My personal life went a little haywire the last few days. These things happen.

Hope to be back posting regularly this week.

BTW, I think four straight days without a post might be an Agitator.com record.

Love me, hate me, engage me, debate me. Y'all at least get your money's worth, I guess. In quantity, if not quality.