Interesting:

more than 10 percent of McDonald’s beef is currently traceable back to the individual animal

The Onion got a letter. The essence is “stop using the Presidential Seal.”

It has come to my attention that The Onion is using the presidential seal on its Web site.

…

[The seal] is not to be used in connection with commercial ventures or products in any way that suggests presidential support or endorsement.

Bloggers react by first ridiculing Grant M. Dixton, and then in a show of solidarity with the Onion, posting the Presidential Seal on their blogs.

Participants so far:

Pandagon
All Spin Zone
PhillyBits
Jesus General
The Poor Man Institute
Majikthise
Ablogistan (hah!)
Three Bulls
Ken Ashford
Watching Washington
Dommynicius

Others commenting:

Chaos Digest
Praxxus
KAILiPuGos

Kay Bailey Hutchison issued the following statement (h/t MM) when voting to convict Clinton on perjury charges.

ELEMENTS REQUIRED FOR CONVICTION OF PERJURY

Lying is a moral wrong. Perjury is a lie told under oath that is legally wrong. To be illegal, the lie must be willfully told, must be believed to be untrue, and must relate to a material matter. Title 18, Section 1621 and 1623, U.S. Code.

If President Washington, as a child, had cut down a cherry tree and lied about it, he would be guilty of `lying,’ but would not be guilty of `perjury.’

If, on the other hand, President Washington, as an adult, had been warned not to cut down a cherry tree, but he cut it down anyway, with the tree falling on a man and severely injuring or killing him, with President Washington stating later under oath that it was not he who cut down the tree, that would be `perjury.’ Because it was a material fact in determining the circumstances of the man’s injury or death.

Some would argue that the President in the second example should not be impeached because the whole thing is about a cherry tree, and lies about cherry trees, even under oath, though despicable, do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution. I disagree.

The perjury committed in the second example was an attempt to impede, frustrate, and obstruct the judicial system in determining how the man was injured or killed, when, and by whose hand, in order to escape personal responsibility under the law, either civil or criminal. Such would be an impeachable offense. To say otherwise would be to severely lower the moral and legal standards of accountability that are imposed on ordinary citizens every day. The same standard should be imposed on our leaders.

Nearly every child in America believes that President Washington, as a child himself, did in fact cut down the cherry tree and admitted to his father that he did it, saying simply: `I cannot tell a lie.’

I will not compromise this simple but high moral principle in order to avoid serious consequences to a successor President who may choose to ignore it.

Here is what she said yesterday to Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Hutchison, you think those comments from the White House are credible?

SEN. HUTCHISON: Tim, you know, I think we have to remember something here. An indictment of any kind is not a guilty verdict, and I do think we have in this country the right to go to court and have due process and be innocent until proven guilty. And secondly, I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. So they go to something that trips someone up because they said something in the first grand jury and then maybe they found new information or they forgot something and they tried to correct that in a second grand jury.

Russert responds, correctly in my opinion, with this:

But the fact is perjury or obstruction of justice is a very serious crime

Bill Faith over at Small Town Vets thinks Michelle is a bit over the top calling this a “blunder.”

James Joyner appreciates the irony of the Democrats sudden interest in the seriousness of perjury.

Ian has a montage which includes Hutchison’s comments.

John Hawkins has this to add:

[T]here has been absolutely no evidence up to this point, not one single shred, that Patrick Fitzgerald has been unfair or politically motivated. Nor would bringing perjury or obstruction of justice charges be evidence of bias either. Anyone who works in the White House should know better than to lie under oath or get involved in cover-up, and if they did something that foolish, then they should expect to be charged with a crime.

That’s not to say that Patrick Fitzgerald is beyond criticism, but conservatives should be very careful not to go down the same contemptible road that the Clinton administration did with Ken Starr. While in all fairness, Kay Bailey Hutchinson cannot be accused of the same sort of contemptible partisan sliming that the Clintons and their allies aimed at Starr, it seems to me that her comments are a step in that direction. That is not the sort behavior Republicans should engage in…

If you haven’t seen Religion of Peace’s list of terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam, check it out, it’s pretty staggering. Here is a description of what is included.

This list, of over 3,000 terrorist attacks committed by Muslims since 9/11/01 (a rate better than two per day), is incomplete because only a small percentage of attacks were picked up by international news sources, even those involving multiple loss of life. We included an attack if it was committed by Muslims in the name of Islam, and usually only if loss of life occurred (with a handful of exceptions where there were a very large number of injuries). In several cases, the victims are undercounted because deaths from trauma caused by the Islamists may occur in later days, despite the best efforts of medical personnel to keep the victims alive.

We usually don’t include action that occurs in combat situations, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, unless it involves particularly heinous terrorist tactics. Unprovoked sniper, drive-by or roadside bombing attacks on military personnel serving normal police duties are sometimes included depending on the circumstances.

Jay over at Stop the ACLU is looking for your ideas on the best way to wish the ACLU a Merry Christmas.

In the same post, he references a pretty interesting discussion of the “Tiny Cross” crusade of the ACLU. Check it out.

This time around, the folks with the magnifying glasses are leaning on the village of Tijeras, N.M., whose seal contains a conquistador’s helmet and sword, a scroll, a desert plant, a fairly large religious symbol (the Native American zia) and a quite small Christian cross. “Tiny cross” inspectors are not permitted to fret about large non-Christian religious symbols, only undersized Christian ones, so the ACLU filed suit to get the cross removed.

…

Last year the ACLU demanded that Los Angeles County eliminate from its seal a microscopic cross representing the missions that settled the state of California. Under threat of expensive litigation, the county complied. The cross was about one-sixth the size of a not-very-big image of a cow tucked away on the lower right segment of the seal, and maybe a hundredth of the size of a pagan god (Pomona, goddess of fruit) who dominated the seal. Pomona survived the religious purge. She is not the sort of god that the ACLU worries about, whereas the flyspeck-sized cross was a threat to unravel separation of church and state, as we know it. What will happen if the ACLU learns that Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Sacramento, San Francisco, St. Louis and Corpus Christi actually have religious names?