Obama a jihadist?

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Wow, the wingnuts on the right are are really getting desperate, really starting to push some boundaries.

First, there was the owner of the Wheat Ridge car dealership who decorated a billboard with a caricature of President Barack Obama wearing a turban, with the words, “President or Jihad?” In large print appeared the words “Birth certificate,” followed by “Prove it” and “Wake up America! Remember Ft. Hood!” Nice. At what point are these kooks going to resort to publicly using racial epithets to describe the president? When does the line get crossed? How much will the American public tolerate? A Colorado state senator has already compared Obama to those who hijacked one of the planes on 9/11. What’s next?

Oh, and the name of the Wheat Ridge dealership to blacklist is Wolf Automotive.

Free speech is protected and is a great thing, but there are consequences, as Ward Churchill found out.

The scary part is that there are probably people who will start taking their business to Wolf because of this.

Don’t forget that more than half the country voted to re-elect George W. Bush.

The ice is not melting!

One of the latest incidents in this string of lowball moves from the right is this whole e-mail hacking thing by the climate-change deniers.

E-mails from Boulder’s own Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research were among files that hackers stole from a university in England, according to the Associated Press, and Trenberth says he thinks the intent was to pull comments out of context to undermine scientists’ findings that humans are contributing to global warming.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing in opinion columns and blogs around the world. Right-wing British pundit James Delingpole wrote a blog titled, “Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming?’” The final nail? Hardly. Delingpole and others like him seem to think that they’re in the majority and that those who believe humans are contributing to climate change are on the fringe. In fact, the reverse is true.

Wingnuts seem to be sinking to new depths each week, as if there were some kind of competition going on. Who’s going to be craziest this week? The birthers? The folks who insist Obama is a Muslim? Global warming deniers?

These goofballs must still be mad about those eight years of well-founded criticisms of George W. Bush. But here’s the thing: When liberals insisted that Bush was deceiving the nation about Iraq and pushing us into an unnecessary war, they were right.

Cop a squat Hope you all remembered to celebrate World Toilet Day on Nov. 19.

We didn’t, and the porcelain gods unleashed their vengeful wrath against us by rendering the women’s toilet at the B-dub office useless. We arrived on the morning of the 20th and discovered that the flushing mechanism had been savagely ripped in two, due to our failure to pay proper homage to the can.

But seriously, this World Toilet Day thing is for real. Apparently, it is recognized internationally as a day to raise awareness for the 2.5 billion people in the world who do not have access to proper sanitation.

To mark World Toilet Day, according to an e-mail from WTD Global Coordinator Jenny Steeves, everybody was supposed to be “going to malls, offices, parks and other public places and squatting. For one full minute. (Which is really difficult if you’re not used to squatting.) We’re calling it the Big Squat.”

This may strike you as funny, but Steeves says it’s to recognize that squatting is what 2.5 billion people have to do to relieve themselves.

“It’s undignified,” she says. “It’s unsanitary. And it’s why 1.8 million people die of diarrhea each year, including 5,000 kids a day.”

You, too, could have started a “Squat Squad.” See www.worldtoiletday.com.

Next year we’ll have to pay more attention to our crapper karma. You should, too.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com