Saturday Linkdump

Another Saturday with crappy weather. In between trolling eBay for Spaghetti Westerns not available in the U.S. (someone badly needs a life, eh?), I put together a linkdump for y'all. Enjoy.

I'm still kinda baffled by all of the Obama hoopla on the left. I don't know what to make of it. I'm still cynical in the sense that I believe the race/name thing will make him pretty unelectable in the nether regions of this country. And I think that a lot of people are latching on to him because of his charisma and the fact that he's not Hillary. I haven't seen anything in his legislative record that stands out as something that would make me want to vote for him (and see a few things that would make me NOT want to, such as his support of the bankruptcy bill). And he seems to be pretty good at Clintonesque triangulation, a serious black mark in my book. Yet people go nuts over him, as in this latest account by Vermont Daily Briefing of an Obama meetup in Burlington this last week. I'm sure I'll continue to be baffled many times in the next two years.

Good rundown of the misconceptions floating about since the election from TPM here. Things like, you know, how Bush gives a shit about what anyone else thinks.

More gov't censorship dep't - White House puts the kibosh on an op-ed piece by a former National Security Council member criticizing Iran policy, that had already been cleared by the CIA.

Apparently, it's quite possible to turn your cell phone into a listening bug without you even knowing about it. Not paranoid hoopla, this is for real.

With all the Bible-thumpers going on about 'how we're a Christian nation' bullshit, many often forget or don't know that many of the Founding Fathers, such as Jefferson, were deists. In a nutshell, deists believe that God came and did his work, and left. Dr. Gerry Lower over at Smirking Chimp has a great piece that gives the whole rundown on deism. I don't buy into deism, but it's always been interesting to me because of the historical angle.

Finally, maybe if enough of you visit Norbizness, he'll put me in his blogroll.