Tire Rims and Anthrax

Sometimes the internet just sucks me in for hours and hours.

I've gotten caught up in the selections of favorite John Cole posts over at Balloon-Juice.

Still Life with Cole and Pets:

Let’s see if we can come up with John Cole’s greatest hits.  Put up a link to your favorite of his posts, as a comment, along with a brief description of what’s in it and why you like it.  (This will help reduce repetitions; of course it’s fine to talk about whatever comes up.)  I tend to think of slice-of-life posts about pets, cars, roommates, mustard, and the challenges of avoiding long pants, but of course political posts are fair game as well.

Here's one example:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

My own favorite John Cole post is Well, Of Course They Did:

In a stunning 5-4 ruling along partisan lines, the Supreme Court today began chipping away at the separation of church and state:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a town in upstate New York did not violate the Constitution by starting its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month” who was almost always Christian.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that divided the court’s more conservative members from its liberal ones, said the prayers were merely ceremonial. They were neither unduly sectarian nor likely to make members of other faiths feel unwelcome.

“Ceremonial prayer,” he wrote, “is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define.”

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government.”

Town officials in Greece, N.Y., near Rochester, said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, however, almost all of the chaplains were Christian. Some of their prayers were explicitly sectarian, with references, for instance, to “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.”

How the fuck does an atheist lead a prayer?