This is the crap that gets me seeing red...

Contrary to an evidently popular belief by conservatives that liberal, free thinkers want to "destroy" conservative ideologists, we actually want to destroy their narrow-minded, NOT-BASED-ON-FACTS or REALITY viewpoints that blur the line between TRUTH and fiction.

You cannot just makeup facts that support your position and then pass them off as the truth! Evidently, "truthiness" is the de facto position of conservative ideology.

Dear Lord, save us from your followers...


Conservapedia: online reference that's read from right to right

By Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times
Saturday, June 23, 2007 - 12:00 AM

Andy Schlafly was appalled. He was teaching a history class to home-schooled teens and one student had turned in an assignment that dated events as "BCE" -- before the common era -- rather than "B.C.," before Christ.

"Where did that come from?" he asked.

Her answer: "Wikipedia."

Schlafly knew he had to act. In his mind, the popular online encyclopedia -- written and edited by self-appointed experts worldwide -- was riddled with liberal bias. Dating events without referring to the New Testament was only one example.

How about Wikipedia's entry on golfer Zach Johnson, winner of the 2007 Masters? Nothing about how Johnson gave credit for his victory to Jesus Christ.

Thus was born Conservapedia.com, touted as "a conservative encyclopedia you can trust."

Schlafly, 46, one of Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly's sons, started small, urging his students to post brief -- often one-sentence -- entries on ancient history. He went live with the site in November. It has grown substantially, offering what he described as fair, scholarly articles. Many have a distinctly religious-right perspective.

Take the Pleistocene epoch. Most scientists know it as the ice age and date it back at least 1.6 million years. But Conservapedia calls it "a theorized period of time," a theory contradicted, according to the entry, by "multiple lines of evidence" indicating that Earth is less than 10,000 years old, as described in the Book of Genesis.

"We have certain principles that we adhere to, and we are up-front about them," Schlafly writes in his mission statement. "Beyond that, we welcome the facts."

With fewer than 12,000 entries and typos galore, Conservapedia isn't about to supplant Wikipedia, which boasts 1.8 million articles in English alone.

But the all-volunteer site has several thousand active readers and writers. Schlafly encourages students to use it as a reference. On the home page, just above the daily Bible verse, he tallies total views: 12.8million, and counting.

Conservapedia's critics for the most part have no problem with the articles heaping praise on President Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

But they worry about material presented as fact in science and medicine entries that typically seeks to debunk evolution, condemn homosexuality and raise fears about abortion. They're also concerned that children will assume everything in it is authoritative.

Schlafly said students can follow the footnotes to find more information, but few links connect to dissenting -- or even mainstream -- views.

"The project specifically targets high-schoolers, and that's probably what I find most dangerous," said Andreas Kjeldsen, 27, a Danish graduate student who wrote several entries on medieval history before stopping in protest.

Many, perhaps most, of Conservapedia's articles are free of ideology. There are brisk, straightforward entries about hundreds of topics: the tuba, Claude Monet, Latvia, Robin Hood, polygons, the Renaissance.

But consider the entry on Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (b. 1947). She "may suffer from a psychological condition that would raise questions about her fitness for office," namely, "clinical narcissism," Conservapedia asserts.

Evidence includes her "ever-changing opinion of the Iraq war." Although Schlafly demands that entries be rigorously footnoted, these sentences are not.

Schlafly called the armchair psychology "borderline in acceptability" for his site, but he defended the Clinton article on balance as "an objective, bias-free piece from a conservative perspective."

The point of his encyclopedia, he said, is to provide a different angle on the facts, ones a student researcher wouldn't necessarily find on Wikipedia or in the school library.

Schlafly, a Harvard-educated attorney who practices in Chester, N.J., does not know most of Conservapedia's contributors; they're spread across the world and communicate through online pseudonyms. He promotes writers he finds trustworthy to be systems administrators, who are able to block editors and protect certain articles from changes.

Even among this elite group, there's no ideological conformity. Terry Koeckritz doesn't take the creation account in the Book of Genesis literally, but he enjoys the site and spends hours writing articles on topics such as Fox News.

"It is what it is," said Koeckritz, 56, a computer consultant in Reno, Nev. "A family-friendly, Christian-friendly encyclopedia."

Articles change constantly, as most are open to editing by anyone online.

A glance at an entry's history -- which shows editing over time -- makes clear how quickly dissenting views are deleted.

Dr. Peter Lipson, an internist in Southfield, Mich., repeatedly tried to amend an article on breast cancer to tone down Conservapedia's claim that abortion raises a woman's risk. Administrators, including Schlafly, questioned his credentials and shut off debate.

After administrators blocked their accounts, Lipson and several other editors started their own Web site, RationalWiki.com. From there, they monitor Conservapedia. And -- by their admission -- engage in acts of cybervandalism.

Conservapedia's articles have been hit frequently by interlopers from RationalWiki and elsewhere.

The vandals have inserted errors, pornographic photos and satire, including this addition to an entry on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: "Mr. Gonzales is a strong supporter of torture as a law enforcement tool for use against Democrats and third world inhabitants."

Such aggression has reinforced the view among some Conservapedia writers that left-wingers are out to suppress their free speech.

"I had heard it spoken of, but it had never really hit home before just how hostile they are," said a 15-year-old New Jersey girl whose mother asked that her name not be used.

The girl, who is home-schooled, wrote an article for Conservapedia on Irish dancing and uses the site to research papers. But the biggest lesson she's taken away as a young conservative is: "There are people who want to destroy us."

Conservapedia's take

Environmentalists: "People who profess concern about the environment"; entry also notes that some want to impose legal limits on the use of toilet paper.

Femininity: The quality of being "childlike, gentle, pretty, willowy, submissive."

Minimum-wage increase: "A controversial manoeuvre that increases the incentive for young people to drop out of school."

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company

Well, duh! It's a two-fer!

Who isn't aware that their vote for Hillary for President is also a vote for putting Bill back in the White House? Oh how I long for the days when Monica was giving Bill a hummer in the Oral Office... er...

More appropriately, the days when we had a surplus and not a multi-trillion dollar deficit... the days when I wasn't being told on a daily basis how many young Americans had died that day in a war created by a moronic president who should've dealt with his daddy issues early on in his life (oh, that's what the booze and drugs were supposed to do).

So, hell yeah she's with Bill! That and the fact that it's time a strong female lead this country is the reason why I'll vote for Hillary!

Clinton Reminds New Hampshire, I’m With Bill

By PATRICK HEALY

As she made her first outing to New Hampshire as a presidential candidate last weekend, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton left her husband at home, yet she tried to tap his old political magic at nearly every turn.

Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, mentioned Mr. Clinton at least eight times on Saturday — at one point talking about “Bill’s heart surgery” to illuminate her own travails with health care bureaucracy — and a few times on Sunday, most memorably when she said of Republicans, “Bill and I have beaten them before, and we will again.”

For the first time in her bid for the White House, Mrs. Clinton directly laid claim to the legacy and popularity of former President Bill Clinton — and did so in a crucial primary state where her husband showed his resiliency in 1992, when he finished second despite weeks of troubles.

“It helps her because we know Bill Clinton and we love Bill Clinton. We know him and his foibles. We know he loves his Dunkin’ Donuts; we know his love for burgers,” said State Representative Patricia M. McMahon, a longtime ally of both Clintons. “It shows that she’s human, too, and appreciates her husband and likes him as much as we do.”

This latest chapter in the Clinton political relationship is still a work in progress. Twice as a candidate for the Senate, and during her six-year term, Mrs. Clinton has kept a measure of professional distance from her husband, partly to keep the spotlight on “the politician in the family,” as he has called her. Where the two have appeared together — for example, at the funeral of Coretta Scott King last year — his skills as a speaker have overshadowed hers.

Now that Mrs. Clinton is a presidential candidate, however, her advisers say it would be folly to minimize Mr. Clinton’s role in her life: as a potential first gentleman, as her “full-time political counselor” (as she called him on Saturday) and as a source of emotional support.

Mr. Clinton is an asset in particular with his fan base, which was obvious as Mrs. Clinton drew smiles and laughter by recalling their White House days, “what Bill did” with the government in the 1990s (which she said she would try to replicate) and his famous tardiness, which, she noted with humor, she has endured with everyone else.

“The way she talked about him gave me a better feeling for her warmth,” said Karen Ryan of Concord, who attended a question-and-answer forum with the senator there on Saturday. “And the Clinton administration is a much better memory than the one we have now.”

Yet Mr. Clinton is also a potential liability because of the questions he provokes, as both a polarizing former president who could return to the White House and as a husband whose behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair lingers in the some minds.

“It’s nice that she stayed with him, but as strong as she is, I think she should’ve dumped him after Monica,” said Karla Frasse, a dental assistant in Concord. “I want to see her in her own right and not really be reminded of the two of them together.”

Mr. Clinton stepped in for Mrs. Clinton on Sunday for the first time since she announced her candidacy, speaking at a breakfast of Westchester County Democrats in New York. It was not an official campaign event, though he did say that her huge re-election victory in November helped catapult her to New Hampshire. It was a reminder that Mr. Clinton will be a chief surrogate at fund-raisers and political events through November 2008, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said.

There are no plans for Mr. Clinton to campaign on his own or to appear with his wife at events right now, though they will eventually campaign together, said Howard Wolfson, a senior campaign adviser.

Mr. Wolfson said that Mrs. Clinton’s references to her husband were not scripted, and that he did not know whether the couple had cooked up a Dunkin’ Donuts joke — in which she said, a few times, that Mr. Clinton had gained 20 pounds from his pit stops there, and that she would need voters’ help to keep off the pounds.

“I think it’s hard for her to think about New Hampshire without thinking about him,” Mr. Wolfson said.

Mr. Clinton finished second in the New Hampshire primary in February 1992 despite a winter of controversy over his draft record and other problems, and he declared himself “the comeback kid.”

Today he is exceptionally popular among Democrats in the state; in interviews this past weekend, several New Hampshire Democrats recalled their first conversations with him in 1992 as if they had just happened.

Mrs. Clinton’s informal references to “Bill” turned off a few Democrats, who said they found it distracting or informal. Yet political analysts said her casual references showed a certain assuredness, since many politicians, particularly women, are careful about saying or doing anything to suggest they are under the sway of their spouses.

“I think the way she was teasing about him, and not shying away from their years together, projected a nice confidence,” said Dante Scala, an associate professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. “It helps engender early good will that can help build a candidacy.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company