As expected, the shrillness quotient increased after the initial report was debunked.

IKEA has a nuclear bomb? What is it called? The boomba?

It’ll be missing 3 fucking screws

I love the first half of this post.

Aren’t we supposed to be ramping up the War on Christmas right about now?

An awful lot of people don’t seem to care. Are these the last days of Western Civ?

To paraphrase the Mahatma, how can they be the last days when there never were any first days?

Aren’t we supposed to be ramping up the War on Christmas right about now?

Oh you silly goose. Everybody knows the War on Christmas doesn’t start until *after* the Halloween Christian Baby Sacrifices.

Obama let Korea get the bomb!

Pretend you care,
read the entire AP story, not just Andy B’s shorter.

And: Bad news for Burt Prelutsky. Next thing he’ll be getting an email from the Grim Reaper. Or Breitbart.

So Don Surber is now the Prostetnic Vogon Jelz before Arthur got the fish in his ear?

Oh freddled gruntbuggly…

Obviously, Iran sent a couple of clever young undercover ops to a bunch of ACORN offices to ask for advice on setting up a child prostitution ring and building a nuclear bomb.

Are these the last days of Western Civ?

Perhaps it’s the first days of Shop Class.

Thanks, M. Bouffant! I enjoyed reading Prelutsky’s grumble that Townhall is “politically correct.”

Also, $20 a column, huh? I always wondered about how much jake there really could be in Wingnut Welfare …

Are these the last days of Western Civ?

Quick, ask someone in Oklahoma!

So after the bombs drop, we wade through the radioactive rubble and cry, “we told you so.”

Now there’s wishful thinking for you.

Following is a truth-gets-its-boots-on exhibition
Secretly we’ve swapped Truth’s boots for a pair two sizes too small! Let’s see how long till she notices!

Aren’t we supposed to be ramping up the War on Christmas right about now?

Oh you silly goose. Everybody knows the War on Christmas doesn’t start until *after* the Halloween Christian Baby Sacrifices.

Maybe I’m getting old, it seems like it arrives earlier and earlier each year. My local drug store is already stocking druid wreaths and satanic potions.

There are graveyards all over the world that are filled with millions of people who believed political leaders would not kill them. 🙁

Good news: most of those dead folks were right!

Has Halloween become overcommercialized?

Obama let Korea get the bomb!

I think what you meant to say is:

“Obama let Korea set us up the bomb!”

“For great justice!”

Are these the last days of Western Civ?
– – – – – – – – – – – –
Quick, ask someone in Oklahoma!

11% of the 1,000 Oklahoma high school seniors who took the test thought the two main American political parties were the Republican Party and the Communist Party.

The Commercial War on Christmas stared BEFORE Labor Day on my telebision, w/ KMart/Sears Christmas Club ads. A web log pimp, but it’s got the advert.

And kids, Daddy’s sorry to tell you this, but this yr.’s War On Commercial Xmas won’t be like all the others. Ammo prices are just through the roof. Anyone know what fuel oil & fertilizer are going for these days?

Beautiful. 2% of students thought Michael Jackson wrote the Constitution.

But who did they think wrote the Book of Love?

Question: What is the supreme law of the land?

The 20 who answered “Monroe Doctrine” are quite clever, actually.

Well, it’s the Super-Monroe Doctrine: “Get off our oil, people who dress funny!”

I wish the Marilyn Monroe doctrine was the law of the land.

Right-wing think tank dude in YouTube video at the Oklahoma test link:

The citizenship exam has a first-try passing rate of 92%. Sadly, our high-school students only passed at the rate of 2.8%. So that was, uh, that was actually kind of a punch in the gut.

A punch in the gut…in Spanish, huevón!

But who did they think wrote the Book of Love?

Dave Vitter?

@M.Bouffant

Well, it’s the Super-Monroe Doctrine: “Get off our oil, people who dress funny!”

full of so much win.

You know, the second I saw the headline “Iran won’t rule out weapons” on MSNBC today, beyond the idiot conflation of “weapons” in general with WMDs, as if the wingnut fantasies of the 2nd Amendment were indeed true and Mr. Average Not-Plumber Joe should be allowed missile silos and chemical artillery emplacements in his back yard, and even though if you read the article (Grid FORBID) you’d find out Ahmadinejad was about as forthright and open as George Bush but still was of the opinion that, while Iran could possibly make nuclear weapons, this was not an active nuclear program, I said to myself, “Self, you know damn well that in the finest tradition of ‘WMD-related activities’ the wingnuts are going to leap all over this like recess at the flea circus and claim that ability = intent and we should invade Iran NOW NOW NOW before we’re all killed in nookoolar fireballs”.

And, hey presto, I click over to Sadly, No!, and what are the crazies doing but bringing the crazy.

The kids who thought George W. Bush was the first president may just have misread it as “worst president”.

“Something tells me that the history books will be written in Arabic -Persian or Russian…”

Russian? Patrick Swayze’s death must be hitting this one particularly hard.

or

“Something tells me that the history books will be written in Arabic -Persian or Russian.”

You read history books?

Something tells me that the history books will be written in Arabic -Persian or Russian…

Written in Russian while the author’s queued to buy toilet paper, undoubtedly.

What Don doesn’t know is that they will ACTUALLY be written in Esperanto.

They were right about which ocean is to the east of us, provided you go far enough east.

Also. Pardon me to muse for a moment on the apocalyptic assholery that constantly prompts wingnuts to overstate events, turning an average blather-fest with Ahmadinejad (which, as I said, read like an interview with, oh, pretty much anyone from the Bush White House) into some kind of jihadi declaration of war on the West.

I mean, really, the future histories WILL probably not be written in English, but not because Obama let the Iranians get TEH EVIL BOOMBE!!!1 but because America will have become so insistent on navel-gazing and fretting over trivia that we’ll have abandoned history to others, leaving the “Third World” to produce the academic analyses while we release scholarly tomes on the history of boy bands in the late 20th Century and the economic impact of Beanie Babies.

the stibbert welcomes our new Esperanto-speaking overlairds.

…while we release scholarly tomes on the history of boy bands in the late 20th Century and the economic impact of Beanie Babies.

Will these be written, or picture books like in Fahrenheit 451?

Teh history books will be written in blood. They usually are.

Jennifer said,

September 18, 2009 at 1:01

Obama let Korea get the bomb!

I think what you meant to say is:

“Obama let Korea set us up the bomb!”

“For great justice!”

While I was as certain as day follows night that that was coming along, you’re about the last person I expected to do it.

Books of Love are written in SHUT UP SMUT

Will these be written, or picture books like in Fahrenheit 451?

One word: Kindle.

(what an appropriate name Amazon picked for the instrument of death for the paper-bound book. I suppose at some point they will be releasing the special “Montag” edition with a salamander on the back.

Yes, I haz issues. )

Obama let Korea get the bomb!

Damn, they’re fast!

11% of the 1,000 Oklahoma high school seniors who took the test thought the two main American political parties were the Republican Party and the Communist Party.

Only 11%? Mr. Scaife will be displeased….

I’d just like to point out that the Oklahoma results could have been much worse. For six of the ten questions, the correct answer and “Don’t Know” are the leading answers. How to interpret “don’t know” is difficult with high schoolers. I was a smartass in high school and I would have considered drawing a line straight down the “don’t know” column in a quiz like that.

Second, a decent number of the incorrect answers are so blatantly incorrect that they should be considered “don’t know” or joke answers. Nobody thinks Barack Obama or George W. Bush was the first president, and they got 10% of the total for that question. These kids didn’t take the test seriously.

Interestingly, the questions where the second highest answer was wrong are the “first president” question, which has the lowest “don’t know” in the survey (and a correct most popular answer), the two questions which request a number as a response, and “Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?”

To be honest, I think you’d have a pretty low correct response rate with any demographic group of Americans other than recently naturalized citizens and the heavily politically engaged with the questions “how long does a Senator serve?” and “how many Justices are on the Supreme Court?” People tend to do poorly with multiple-choice questions with numeric answers, and most people have worse memories for numbers than for names.

The authorship of the Declaration of Independence is probably, of all the question, both the least commonly-known and the least useful. It doesn’t really bother me that much that kids don’t know it.

Obviously, I’d prefer everyone to have a comprehensive understanding of their country’s history. But the “Idiocracy” references are going too far — I know a lot of very intelligent, productive individuals who would have done fairly poorly on this test.

Knowing a Senator has a six year term seems pretty gosh-durned basic, Djur.

I am concerned to learn that teh swarming hordes of Spanish-speaking immigrants are no longer the main threat to the supremacy of English as a history-book-writing language.
Who’s going to buy these t-shirts now?!

Djur – you have an excellent point.

It’s not how much of Social Studies you know, but what you do with it. History is just rote memorization unless you take lessons from it – why people did what they did, what they hoped to achieve and what was actually achieved, and how we can use this information to look at present-day America – and admittedly, that’s not something public schools are going to be much into these days, lest they be accused of treason and Communism.

Much simpler to memorize dates & names than risk the wrath of teabaggers by showing how radical the ideas the Founders who these morons idolize actually had were.

to be fair, the zombies have already been through OK.

So you know, brains have been et.

We have two dogs. The older one is on her last legs, we suspect, she is pretty blind and very deaf and is prone to peeing at a moment’s notice pretty much anywhere in the house, no matter how long she has been outside. Reading Don, I am reminded that I have to find her before she wakes up and get her outside. Back in a bit.

I say this of course with uttermost delicacy as the children are slumbering their innocent sleep, their diapers dewy, but it must be noted: all your base belong to us.

I get djur’s point though, this is so obviously a chump-test, any high schooler brighter than dull-normal SHOULD be farkin the answers, dammit.

are belong. I hate my life.

Djur, I’m sure some of the kids goofed on the testers, but out of 1000 kids not all of them did and yet nobody got more than 6/10 correct.

Speaking of children, dinosaur news for LDMM and Dash.
~

out of 1000 kids, 500 of them are below average.

yet nobody got more than 6/10 correct.

Um, yeah, where are the outliers? Usually in this sample size you get some respondents that plot out on either end of the spectrum, from “coma” to “studious and good at multiple choice tests.” No one scored 70 percent. I know it’s fish in a barrel, but still, this is sad.

To be fair to them Oklahomies, some of those questions are jes’ plain dum.

Supreme Law of the Land? He who pays makes the rules.
Ocean on the East coast? Well what about Hawai’i?
In charge of the Executive Branch? Well individual states have executive branches – but the right answer “the guys running the re-election campaigns” isn’t an option.

I am, however, totally amused by the options for Question 7.

Besides, why are we talking Civics when IRAN HAS THE BOMB!!!11!1!

Poop your pants! Poop ’em now! IRAN HAS THE BOMB!one11!

IRAN! BOMB! IRAN!!111one1

The International Atomic Energy Agency reaffirmed IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei’s….

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!!!!!!

It all makes sense now. First Obama dismantles the F-22 program and missile defense – and then, while we were all distracted by his puppet Mac Baucus’ health care two-step, IRAN GETS THE BOMB!!!111!one

Without those European missile defense outposts, Israel is a sitting duck! And then it’ll be Shania Law and Dhimmit00d for everyone.

the Executive Branch
Possible answers do not include “The one with the noose”. TRICK QUESTION.

I’m sure glad the media, both mainstream & alternative alike, knows just where to focus its attention when it comes to nuclear weapons. Failure to do so would surely be both negligent & highly dangerous.

*cough*

Notice how no one ever complains about having to press #2?

Are these the last days of Western Civ?

Yes, but almost entirely because wingnuts like ‘Don L’ have aided and abetted the conversion of western civilization into a corrupt, dysfunctional, cesspit of crony capitalism.

Irony, thy name is wingnut.

Given that it’s Oklahoma kids, I’m surprised they did that well.

Think about it — their parents keep electing Inhofe. Repeatedly.

Apple, fall, tree, etc.

Without those European missile defense outposts, Israel is a sitting duck! And then it’ll be Shania Law and Dhimmit00d for everyone.

In other words, a fair trade. Works for me.

that comment, about graveyards and leaders and power? with the sad face made from the colon and parenthesis at the end? brilliant.

hey, where’s your emoticons iaea?

The authorship of the Declaration of Independence is probably, of all the question, both the least commonly-known and the least useful.
You just can’t say that ’round where I am.
Mayflower!
Old North Bridge!!
Valley Forge, goddammitt!1!!!
\DAR