Yes, I'm going to get out that one-noted harmonica again, and I'm going to play the one note on it, just because some things bear repeating occasionally.

Suppose that the bastards who sell that "Obama '08" t-shirt with a picture of Curious George on it also sold, side by side on the shelf, another shirt with the same monkey picture on it but captioned "McCain '08" instead. Are both shirts equally bad? If not, isn't that a double standard?

The answer, of course, is hell yes there's a double standard, and it's there for a really good reason. There's a long, long history of racist rhetoric equating African-Americans with apes, and the Obama/George shirt was clearly designed to appeal to that racist meme in a way the McCain counterpart does not. The double standard isn't a bad thing invented by whiny liberals but an inevitable result of the history of racist rhetoric in this country.

Why say something so obvious? Because over the last few weeks, DailyKos has seen something similar in category to the Obama-monkey t-shirts -- not lots of it, but enough to deserve an ahem. And that's when classic antisemitic memes are dug up, brushed off, and used to slap around people who support Israel.

Just a brief note on the day Obama clinches the nomination.

Barack Obama announced his run for the Presidency from the steps of the Old State Capital Building in Springfield, Illinois. It was in the very same building, a century and a half ago, that a congressman named Abraham Lincoln said the following:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

It was going to be the Religious Right's answer to Michael Moore. It was going to be a blockbuster that blew open a whole new front in the culture wars, and not so incidentally made the producers a hefty stack of cash in the process. Take that, liberals!

And then it just went pop like a soap bubble.

No riots, no fighting in the streets, no angry mobs with torches, and -- worst of all -- no profit.

At the close of its fourth weekend, down to about a third of the screens it was released on, the total box office for "Expelled" has just inched over the $7M mark. Given a production budget of $3.5M and a publicity budget described by the producers as "multiples" of that, we're probably talking about at least $11.5M at bare minimum to make and market the thing, including the literally million-dollar expense of making over a thousand prints for such a wide release.

In other words, our friends the creationists have, despite all their attempts to rally their own troops, taken a multi-million dollar bath.

Isn't that nice?

So that naturally brings up the question, "Who killed 'Expelled'?" Was it the nefarious nabobs of Big Science and the Librul Media? Or was it you? Read on.

Want your head to explode? Here's how, in two easy steps.

1. Go to your local theater complex and buy a ticket to any movie except "Expelled: No Intelligent Audience."

2. Go into the theater playing "Expelled" instead of which ever one you paid for -- (I chose "Baby Mama" because the world needs more Tina Fey movies) -- and watch as much of it as you can stand.

3. Kablam!

So the new Gallup poll results are out, and George Bush has a new record: the highest disapproval rating ever scored in the entire history of Gallup polling.

Disapproval of Bush breaks record

President Bush has set a record he'd presumably prefer to avoid: the highest disapproval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

USA Today

A quick look at the other number, the Gallup disapproval rating, in historical context.

A note about the boycott-Israel movement's latest setback, this one in the UK.

Nothing too earth-shattering, unless you like I/P stuff.

A follow-up, now that Ahmadinejad has demonstrated at Columbia, that, yes, he's still spouting Holocaust denial.

He pulled a number of things from the standard-issue Holocaust denier trick-bag that I thought might be worth holding up to the light a little bit. In particular, I wanted to look at the "why shouldn't there be more research" bit and the "why throw historians into jail" bit. (I know, as if Ahmadinejad has room to complain about throwing dissenting academics into jail, but there you go.)

Update: interestingly, if you read the comments you can see someone going, step by step, reproducing the various mendacities I mention in the article. And check out his more persistent upraters, if you'd like some excellent examples of what it means to be a useful idiot.

Second Update: say goodbye to one purveyor of standard-issue Holocaust denial patter and two useful idiots.

Just a quick note about Holocaust denial in reference to the NYC appearance of one of the world's most famous Holocaust deniers, Mahmoud Gonadigonad. (Did I spell that right?)

I've seen some comments, here and elsewhere, that it's wrong to call Ahmadinejad a Holocaust denier; after all, he hasn't ever said "The Holocaust didn't happen," just that it may not have happened, or may have happened far differently than the way we think it did.

That's a good, reasonable-sounding two-second answer, which is why he uses it.

Thing is, though, that's also the two-second answer you'll get from every leading Holocaust denier in the world. You'll get it from David Irving, you'll get it from David Duke. It is their standard line of patter, and it's no coincidence that Ahmadinejad uses it as well.

The thing is, Holocaust denial isn't just about denying the Holocaust, it's also about being in denial about the Holocaust.

So it's been a few months since the Happy Peace-Loving Peace-Lovers of Hamas took over Gaza in a violent coup. So it's a good time to ask, how are they doing, now that the Palestinians have had a chance to see, up close and personal, what life in a Hamas state is like?

The AP had a story yesterday. And the answer is: uh-oh! Not so good!

Some thoughts on a tenor named Jerry Hadley, who is now on life-support.

Suppose a Kossack knowingly accepts free front-page advertising on a hate site -- one bearing not only her own posts but also those of, say, David Irving, Ernst Zündel, Lyndon LaRouche, Edgar Steele (google them if you're unfamiliar with them). Is that good or bad for DailyKos?

Part of the problem in the current metadiscussion about Israel and Palestine on DKos is that it's missing a key point. That point is: what Hunter is really asking, as are many of the posters in the discussion, is not for censorship but a much simpler proposition: don't be a schmuck.

To help out, here's my guide on how to be a schmuck in the DKos I/P discussions.

Edit -- as Jack Nicholson sez in The Shining, "We're gonna make a new rule here." An additional schmuckism has been added at the bottom.\

And one more thing -- You can knock me down, spit on my face, slander my name all over the place, but huh-uh, baby, don't you call me right-wing just because I support Israel or I'll strangle you with my ACLU card.

And double bonus stamps for the winner of this week's More Naïve than Candide contest -- If you decide to post a message hand-delivered to you from an internationally recognized terrorist organization like, oh, say, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, don't be amazed if this makes it difficult to get through to an American audience. To put it mildly.

Just a quick note on something from Media Matters, citing the Nation.

Seems Tricky Dick was convinced that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was cooking the books to make his economy look more sour than it was. Well, not the entire BLS, just -- remember, this is Nixon we're talking about -- a certain cabal of Jews there.  So he sent his factotum out to discretely asses the BLS's ratio of Those Of The Hebraic Persuasion, just to see if his theory was right.  Well, I don't know what the result was, whether or not a disproportionate number of signs in the fine hallways of the BLS were written right to left, but it turns out that Nixon's Jew counter has a new job.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House said Friday it believes embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales can survive the uproar over the firing of eight federal prosecutors, a day after his one-time chief of staff undercut Gonzales' account of the firings.

Isn't that a heartwarming thing to read? Not "we're behind him a thousand percent," but "we think he can survive." Can we manage the expectations any lower? Next up, I suppose, is "we believe the AG's battles are in their last throes," and then finally "We believe the his mission is accomplished."

Just a brief diary about the Gallup poll information released today on what Americans think of Israel and the Palestinians.

About our campus's other drink-green-beer-until-you-puke Binge Holiday.

For the last twenty years, the University of Illinois’ athletic symbol, Chief Illiniwek, has been under siege. A week and a half ago, the siege finally broke with an official announcement from the Board of Trustees that the Chief would be retired. And, predictably, all hell has broken loose.