My two sisters comment here as Anwyn’s Sister and Thelmajoy. Apparently it’s Link to Hot Air Night here at Chez Anwyn, so this one’s for littlest Sister, who loves her some Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood. Okay, I like ’em too. They did their schtick with Karl Rove tonight at the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner in DC.

Even more than Mochrie, though, I like to see President Bush relaxed and sounding good. And funny. He brings the funny.

I’m off for the weekend, so just a few thoughts until I return next week.

1) Dear Dr. Dobson, don’t you realize this kind of thing annoys even Christians? It’s not your business to pronounce on whether any other man is a Christian or not, and it’s far worse than arrogant for you to redefine “Christian” to mean “public figure who speaks openly about his faith.” If you want to see an outspoken Christian in the White House, say that. And then say whom you endorse. Say whom you won’t endorse because they’re not outspoken enough, but when you say they’re not Christian enough, you’ve crossed the line. Please get over yourself. Or, rather, pay attention to your own Christianity and let Mr. Fred Thompson take care of his, both public and private. Love, A Christian

2) Speaking of Mr. Fred Thompson, I think I love him.

3) In an internet whirlwind of headline-skimming and soundbite-grabbing, you may not have 45 minutes to watch this. If you don’t have 45, trust me: watch 20 or so. A taste:

The modern liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. … They’re convinced that … the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found, can only be found, in the attempt to be right. See, if nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn’t disagree, surely we wouldn’t fight. If we didn’t fight, of course we wouldn’t go to war. Without war there’d be no poverty, without poverty there’d be no crime, without crime there’d be no injustice. It’s a utopian vision, and all that’s required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality and decency.

Speaking truth to flower power.

4) Your Dancing with the Stars prediction: It’ll come down to Laila Ali and–yeah, I’m as surprised as you are–Joey Fatone, formerly of N’Sync. The girl can groove, and the boy can move. The rest of the top five will be John Ratzenburger, Ian Ziering (did his mother really name him Aye-in, or is that just a conceit he plastered over Ee-in?), and Apolo Anton Ohno. The women are always at a disadvantage on this show, because if a man gets the steps right and has a little charm, he’s good to go, but if a woman doesn’t have the fiery persona of the ballroom dancer, it’s instantly all too obvious. And this season the women just aren’t feeling it so far, so it’ll be all men in the final weeks–except, of course, Laila, who could win it all if she keeps going like she has been. Football hero can mambo; boxer can mambo.

5) Last but not least, thoughts and prayers for Tony Snow.

Funny:

Not funny, far too “on the nose,” alienates Tolkien fans with the bald statement of “Frodo failed,” completely lacking cleverness: Bumper sticker that reads “Frodo failed. Bush has the Ring.”

Subtlety sells, people. Don’t rip off a picture worth a thousand well-chosen words into a hack set of six that doesn’t get the job done.

No Elite Eight for my Butler Bulldogs, though they gave Florida a heart attack or two. Gators took it in a defensive slugfest, if such is an appropriate phrase to use about basketball, 65-57. Query, sportswriters: If a five-seed doesn’t exempt a team from being called “scrappy” despite their small school size and rare tournament bid, what would?

“We didn’t come here just to give them a scare,” [Butler player] Mike Green said. “We wanted to win. A loss is a loss. It hurts.”

Auf wiedersehen, Dawgs.

Quote of the Day: “The girl next door is a crack shot.”

I have a different issue: How exasperated must it make the teachers when kids can refuse to speak in class or answer direct questions by hiding behind a school-sanctioned–and thus by the standards of the church & state crowd, government-sanctioned–political opinion?

On the Day of Silence, students can refrain from speaking as an effort to protest discrimination against homosexuals.

In response to a Day of Silence event at the school in April 2006, Zamecnik wore a shirt that read “MY DAY OF SILENCE, STRAIGHT ALLIANCE” on the front and “BE HAPPY, NOT GAY” on the back, according to the suit filed Wednesday.

According to the suit, one school administrator ordered Zamecnik to remove the T-shirt and another official ordered her to cross out “NOT GAY” with a marker.

Sauce, goose, gander. If the school sanctions a “form of speech,” again lifting from the crowd that is the most zealous about defining the terms, that supports a particular viewpoint, surely they must allow speech on different viewpoints as well. A T-shirt does not rise to the level of “discrimination,” and gee, even if it did, wouldn’t that just give the protesting students somebody to practice their silent treatment on? Win-win! (Sarcasm, for the humor-impaired.)

Let the girl wear her shirt or kick the whole thing to the boundary line of the school property. Who’s being silenced here?

It’s official: Mary Katharine Ham is too cute for color TV.

A photo by Terry Prather, on staff at the Ledger Independent of Maysville, Kentucky, shows what happened to a few of those wakeful trees that surrounded the orcs at Helm’s Deep:

(H/t: thelmajoy.)

Nasty Imagery of the Day: Lileks’s freezer may not smell like “Gollum’s loincloth,” but for the Bonus Ew he tags the similarity between freezer and loincloth in the very next sentence: “fish-bricks.”

Name the movie: Rumor has it you’re a real cold fish. Think your bricks smell sweeter than most.

Even a UK newspaper that once championed its legality says so.

Over the weekend I followed the story of the Boy Scout lost in Doughton Park, North Carolina. He was found alive and well yesterday. It took the searchers four days and was a difficult trick–though Doughton Park does have some open space, as seen from the summit of the Blue Ridge it is a crease in the land, solidly paved with trees. Relief that the story ended well gave way to my mother’s exasperation for a kid who’s supposed to have sense wandering off from his group in the mountains.

It’s been a rough year here for rescue operations in Oregon, with the boy lost and presumed dead at Crater Lake, the death of James Kim amid the successful rescue of his family, and the three climbers lost on Mt. Hood. Though they’ve had plenty of success as well, the stories of grief are what stick in the mind.

Why would the kid–any kid, let alone a 12-year-old Boy Scout–wander off from his group? Or, in the case of the Crater Lake child, eight years old, from his father? They’re old enough to know better. I realize that kids have minds of their own no matter how well they’re trained, but it makes my hackles rise nevertheless. Kent Auberry, father of Michael Auberry, Boy Scout:

“He was homesick,” said Kent Auberry, father of Michael, at a hospital news conference Tuesday. “He started walking and at one point when he was walking he thought maybe he’d walk as far as the road and hitchhike home.”

“We’re going to have our lectures about hitchhiking again,” the elder Auberry added. “We’ve had them in the past, but with a special vigor, we’ll go over that again with Michael.”

Is it usual for a 12-year-old to think hitchhiking is a good idea? Regardless, Mr. Auberry, if four days in the wilderness doesn’t teach the kid his lesson about doing his own thing under inappropriate circumstances, I’m afraid your “special vigor” will be unavailing.

Well, enough of my spleen. The best part of the story next to the sparing of Michael Auberry’s life? It was a dog who found him–according to the radio report I heard yesterday, the dog and his trainer, Misha Marshall, had only joined the search lately when the dog picked up Michael’s scent and went straight to him.

The dog’s name? Gandalf. Nice.

(H/t TORn.)

As soon as I saw the title of Dave’s post, “How Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended,” I knew what the projected ending would be. We used to get this question an average of once a month back at TORn: “Why didn’t the Eagles just drop the Ring into Mount Doom?”

Well, whether you buy my answer from back then or not, the movie’s cute.

Moron jurors agitate to reopen a case to the point where the DA gives the guilty perp–a father who killed his 33-day-old daughter when he threw her into the air as high as he could and then “threw her down onto the couch with great force,” according to his confession–a new plea-bargain in order to avoid having the case reopened.

[Baby killer] Haley had been charged with felony murder for shaking Gabrielle to death. When he went on trial, [defense attorney] Connall brought in an expert witness who testified that shaken-baby syndrome is old medicine. But before the evidence was all in, Haley decided to plead no contest to second-degree manslaughter and received six years in prison.

When [Judge] Johnson informed the jurors, they objected and said they believed the expert witness had created reasonable doubt. [Moron juror] Hanau contacted Connall, who swiftly went to court to change Haley’s plea. The jurors appealed to District Attorney Michael Schrunk, who reminded them that they had not heard all the evidence. Still, the jurors pursued the case.

Schrunk tried to block the case from being reopened, but he lost in the state Supreme Court. The case was headed for a new trial last fall when Connall appealed to Schrunk to help forge a new plea agreement. After several rounds of talks, he agreed to accept Connall’s proposal, which Haley completed Monday.

He was serving six years, then got a second plea-bargain through the efforts of these moron jurors. The new deal includes four years of prison, three already served, plus probation and a prohibition against caring for children under 18. Oh, and parenting classes. He was high as a kite on weed and had thrown her around much more than once–all according to his confession, which was the return the DA got for this laughably lenient sentence agreement.

Note that the “reasonable doubt” the moron jurors cited was created by an “expert” witness testifying that the shaking need not have caused her death–it’s not reported whether the jurors doubted that she was shaken. You have to be a real moron not to believe that whipping a baby’s unsupported neck around violently will eventually kill her and a real asshole to testify to a “medical” opinion that it won’t.

And the moron jurors were stunned when the confession was read.

[Moron juror] Jean Maynard smiled ruefully. “We don’t think we were stupid jurors.”

Lady, as in everything else connected with this case, you and your fellow morons were dead wrong.