Late edit: The video below appear to have been taken down, but HuffPo still has it up here. 

Here to usher in the new work week is Bill O'Reilly, from back in his "Inside Edition" days, doing his best satirical impression of Bill O'Reilly:

Spectacular. (via reddit)

After I got linked to it via reddit, I was hoping against hope that this was some sort of hoax, a commentary, perhaps, on the degraded, increasingly inane state of mass media entertainment.

No, it's real. IMDB confirms that it will include the voices of Drew Barrymore, Salma Hayek, and Jamie Lee Curtis, all of whom will presumably, some might say hopefully, fall victim to some ancient Aztec curse shortly thereafter. (Or is it Incan? Some reddit commenters have pointed out that the trailer seems rather vague on the matter.)

Late edit: I only just now noticed this, but the rapping chihuahua (two words that should never appear consecutively, by the way), who is ostensibly Aztec (Incan? Mexican? You know, one of those Spanish countries down thurrr), has what is more or less a Brooklyn accent. Sweet.

I agree with a lot of this Joseph Rago column in the Wall Street Journal (now there's something I don't say often), which details the story of Priya Venkatesan, a professor at Dartmouth. Venkatesan left the school for Northwestern and threatened to sue her students (along with her bosses) for violating her civil rights due to their "anti-intellectualism" after they were less than receptive to her ideas.

When you spend a lot of time on the internet, where news of petty cruelties travels at the speed of light, you get jaded pretty quickly. You find yourself thinking things like, “Well sure, that video of a policeman tazing an 80-year-old nun who was leading an orphanage field trip is pretty bad, but it’s nothing compared to that jackass ‘artist’ who starved a dog to death for one of his ‘exhibits.’” In other words, it becomes more and more difficult to be impressed or shocked by the random idiocy and violence that’s out there.

But once in awhile, you come across a story that far exceeds the internet’s usual standards—a story that replenishes your faith that humanity has yet to plumb its deepest depths, that we still have miles to go.

Maybe someone who's smarter than me can answer this convincingly, but this graf from today's Wall Street Journal confused me:

The U.S. military says it has found caches of newly made Iranian weapons in Iraq, leading senior officials to conclude Tehran is continuing to funnel armaments into Iraq despite its pledges to the contrary.

How does the premise (there are newly made Iranian weapons in Iraq) lead to the conclusion (the Iranian government is responsible)? Given that a newly-manufactured weapon has to go somewhere, and given the huge amount of instability in Iraq, all of which goes back to the Sunni-Shia divide and numerous other ethnic and political conflicts, what would prevent someone with access to Iranian arms from shipping them to his favored side in the civil war? Isn't this a supremely likely occurrence?

Politically and strategically, there is a miles-wide difference between some random Iranian lieutenant funneling arms to Iraq and the Iranian government doing the same. Where's the hard evidence that the latter is the case? Certainly the fact that the weapons are new points us slightly in that direction, but on its own that's a pretty flimsy case.

Discouraging but predictable news from the AP:

North Carolina was the only school among the four No. 1 seeds in the NCAA men's tournament to graduate at least 50 percent of its players.

A report released Monday found 86 percent of Tar Heels men's players earned diplomas during a six-year period. The other top seeds were far worse: 45 percent at Kansas and 40 percent at UCLA and Memphis.

Few people are legally exploited as thoroughly as student-athletes at big-time schools. These kids bring in tens of millions of dollars to their universities but, other than the tiny fraction who are able to go pro, many come away with nothing to show for it. A good number of them simply aren't equipped to succeed at an academically rigorous four-year college, and since they're athletes first and students second, there's little incentive for their schools to make sure they graduate. 

The inevitable rejoinder to all this is "Yeah, but they're given free room, board, and education!" Big deal. The cost of all that is a drop in the bucket compared to how much money a big basketball or football program brings in. If you're going to give a kid a scholarship but do nothing to make sure he comes away with a degree, you're not doing him a favor at all.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Since I grew up near Boston College and rooted for the Eagles, I should give a shout out to BC, which consistently ranks near the top when it comes to graduation rates for its student-athletes.

Every year, Derrick Z. Jackson, a Boston Globe columnist, compiles graduation rates for college football programs and takes a look at any racial disparities therein. Check it out.

Bush on Afghanistan. From Reuters, via reddit:

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

No bleeping comment. 

An AP article reports that lawmakers are starting to crack down on salvia divinorum, a legal, extremely potent short-term psychedelic. I know about salvia despite my relatively drug-averse nature thanks to Erowid, which is an incredibly valuable site if you're looking for information on an unfamiliar drug.

The article is somewhat balanced, but this is ruined by the ridiculous headline, "Is salvia the next marijuana?" Um, no. One is relatively mild and used by millions of people who would never touch anything more intense, the other "is a hallucinogen that gives users an out-of-body sense of traveling through time and space or merging with inanimate objects."

We also get a choice quote from Pathetic, Posturing Southern Anti-Drug Politician #2348230:

"As soon as we make one drug illegal, kids start looking around for other drugs they can buy legally. This is just the next one," said Florida state Rep. Mary Brandenburg, who has introduced a bill to make possession of salvia a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

That's brilliant. Because a) we all know kids no longer buy weed since it's illegal, and b) when possession of salvia goes from legal to a felony overnight and countless teens are thrown in jail, they... won't be able to do salvia anymore? This sort of idiocy would be funnier if it didn't lead to so many ruined lives.

Once in awhile you gotta slap up a purely feel-good post, especially if it's Friday.

Here you go. [via Deadspin]

Last night my housemates and I were a bit freaked out because approximately everyone in our neighborhood of Columbia Heights has been mugged at gunpoint within the last 48 hours (only a slight exaggeration, unfortunately), and because one of my housemates heard gunshots nearby later in the night.

So when I got to work today I searched Google News for “Columbia Heights,” hoping the Post or some other local outlet would have coverage of the mini-crime wave. And, in a case of almost painful predictability, instead the first hit was this Post piece from today headlined “A Rapid Renaissance in Columbia Heights”:

The New York Times has a nice story about the remarkable success Talking Points Memo has had. The blog just won a George Polk Award for legal reporting for its coverage of the US attorney firings scandal.

This bit at the end kind of annoyed me, though:

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of an influential blog, the Daily Kos, and a big fan of Mr. Marshall, agreed.

“Josh isn’t necessarily partisan,” he said, “I see him as a progressive who is passionate about the news and approaches the news from that perspective.”

Mr. Moulitsas predicted, “It may take a decade, but Josh will win a Pulitzer some day.”

It won’t be this year. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said in an e-mail message that online articles are eligible for the awards, but they must have been published on a weekly or daily newspaper’s Web site.

“A freestanding Web site does not qualify,” he said.

That seems like a really dumb, arbitrary law. TPM covered one of the most important scandals of the Bush era far more aggressively than almost any other mainstream media outlet, and they're effectively punished because they're not... a mainstream media outlet? Change that rule, Pulitzer people.

When you hold certain jobs, there are some things you just can't say. If you do say them, you should be fired or suspended -- it's as simple as that. If you're a political news reporter for a major paper and give a quote expressing your contempt for a candidate and desire to smear him, you should be fired or suspdended. If you're a safety official at a factory and admit that you regularly nap through the factory's busiest periods, you should be fired or suspended. With that in mind, here, thanks to UPI, is the story of a man who absolutely needs to be fired or suspended (emphasis mine):

DALLAS, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- The Secret Service told Dallas police to stop screening for weapons while people were still arriving at a campaign rally for Barack Obama, a report said.

Police stopped checking people for weapons at the front gates of Reunion Arena more than an hour before the Democratic presidential hopeful appeared on stage Wednesday, the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram reported.

Police said the order to stop using metal detectors and checking purses and laptop bags constituted a security lapse, the newspaper reported.

Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence -- who heads the department's homeland security and special operations divisions -- told the Star-Telegram the order had been intended to speed up seating of the more than 17,000 people who came to hear the candidate speak.

Lawrence said he was concerned about the large number of people being let in without being screened, but that the crowd seemed "friendly," the newspaper said.

This has nothing to do with your feelings on Obama or thoughts on the election. We have here a man who heads the homeland security operations for Dallas's police department -- the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area being one of the largest in the country -- explaining that he skipped normal security procedures because a huge crowd, didn't, you know, seem dangerous. To him. This dude should not be employed at the end of the week.