They’re talking about banning the burqa in France. Banning anything makes me uncomfortable as an American, but this is France. They also have more trouble with Muslims as they sometimes have — what do they call them — “youths” running around and setting cars on fire. We wouldn’t put up with the crap here in America.

So what is the point at which you stop being polite and say, “Your culture is stupid and irritating; stop it.”? This had sort of come up once in Florida when a woman tried to use a covered face for her driver’s license photo which just plain didn’t work. And there is something that feel quite anti-American about the burqa. A lot of America’s history is about fighting oppression (both inside and out), and making women walk around in hefty bags seems pretty antithetical to that. Sure, it could be the woman’s choice to wear a burqa, but Islam doesn’t really seem to be a lot about respecting women’s decisions.

Would banning the burqa in America be cromulent? What do you think?

In a recent poll, 87% said they think English should be America’s official language. That’s a lot of people. 9% disagreed, and 4% answered “Qué?”

Right now, we like unofficially have an official language of English. So when people are trying to pander on amnesty, they’re always like, “We’ll make sure they have to learn English first.” Why? It’s not the official language. It’s just the language the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written in and the language anyone with aspirations beyond dishwasher learns. Other countries learn English just because it’s the language we speak and thus the language of success, so it’s pretty silly we ever even act like people can come to this country and not learn it.

Of course, there are some people afraid that if we make English the official language, then people are going to then beat people up who don’t speak English. That’s ridiculous. We’re just going to beat up hippies, regardless of what language they speak. In fact, when we can understand them, it only makes us angrier.

It could be worse, though: We could have two official languages like Quebec. There everything written in English also has to be repeated in unintelligible monkey jibber. That’s just unworkable. Think if when we have dinosaurs with rocket launchers and the law required that they have to respond to multiple languages so as not to be discriminatory. Can dinosaurs even learn that many languages? I don’t know because there hasn’t been good studies on dinosaur intelligence since most of our knowledge comes from the dumb ones who fell in tar.

One more thing: If we make English our official language, we should change its name to “American.” It’s our language now; we own it!

So we’ve found out the IMAO Baby, due in October, is going to be a girl. So if you have any good girl name suggestions, now is the time to tell them. I really like “Buttercup” for a middle name, but SarahK doesn’t like it because she hates joy and happiness. But I’m pretty settled on it; she’s going to be my little Princess Buttercup and I’m going to love her forever.

And I still think “Vengeance” is a good girl’s name.

So come up with some cool name suggestions, and if you want to celebrate that we’re having a girl, here’s a good idea: Buy my new t-shirt. Money will go towards buying Princess Buttercup pink things.

There is a proposal to award medals for “Courageous Restraint.”

Really?

To paraphrase Patton: No dumb poor bastard won a war with courageous restraint; he won a war by making the other dumb poor bastard being courageously restrained.

Is that really the behavior we want to encourage in our military? I didn’t even join the military — where’s my medal for courageous restraint?

We should instead encourage more productive behavior — like maybe a medal for “Courageous Face-Shooting.” That’s a medal you get for shooting lots of the enemy in the face. I’m pretty sure that’s more along the lines of how you win a war; at least, it works really well in Call of Duty.

Glenn Greenwald actually stumbled onto a pretty telling point: When conservatives put up Supreme Court nominees, those nominees don’t have any problem talking about the conservative agenda of being a strict constructionalist. When liberals put up a nominee, that nominee does everything he or she can to keep from talking about her judicial philosophy. Has any liberal nominee ever actually said, “I’m just going to make stuff up based on what I think is right so we can avoid that whole democracy thing on my pet causes.” That’s what all the liberals judges do, but they know not to say it because all that will do is enrage the average American.

To the average American, they don’t know any other way to treat the Constitution than being a strict constructionalist. It says what it means and that doesn’t change. You don’t act like Nicolas Cage and find some hidden code in the Constitution and say, “It looks like the Founding Father hid gay marriage in here all along!” But liberals know their ideas are hated and they are never going to be able to pass an amendment, so they’ve made this whole bizarro world legal philosophy where black is white, up is down, and there is no individual right to firearms despite the Constitution explicitly saying so. This all seems very smart to them but very moronic to everyone else, and they’re at least conscious enough of that fact to try and seem normal in confirmation hearings.

It’s hard to find people with the humility to just read what’s there in the law and not strive to be that famous judge who made up popular new rights. I really the think the Supreme Court was the least well thought out part of the Constitution. Here’s my suggestion for an extra check and balance: Have that any Justice who is found to have just made stuff up be executed for treason. While maybe we need extra smart people to write all those opinions no one but other law professors read, any idiot can tell when a judge just totally made something up that isn’t anywhere mentioned in the Constitution. And altering the Constitution like that is pretty much treason, so execution. So, judges, make sure you very carefully explain exactly where in the Constitution (and not anywhere else) your opinion came from, and that answer can’t always be “the Commerce Clause.”

A UN report says that a third of animals in the world are at risk of extinction. I’m not sure why, but I’m guessing it has to do with the environment. The environment has been nothing but trouble since we discovered it.

So, should we be worried? I’m not so sure. In this economy, we’re running out of money and resources, so maybe it’s time to start looking into doing some harsh cuts on the flora and fauna. A third seems like a lot, but have you ever looked at all the types of animals out there? Most of the species you’ve probably never even heard of. It really seems like the number of species in this world is a place we could afford to do some cuts. Like, do you know we have four types of echidnas? Exactly how many different kinds of egg-laying, spiny anteaters do we need? I’m going to go with zero.

So instead of freaking out any time a species is about to go extinct, we need to ask ourselves: “Do we actually need that animal for anything, or is it just taking up space and hogging resources?”

Japan used to be a proud country full of warriors like samurai and ninjas, and now they have women hiding from attackers by disguising as a Coca-Cola machine.

If you’ve seen the demographics for Japan, you know this is what it looks like when a society slowly dies off. You may ignore the old people ranting about kids these days and how awful culture has become and think that’s just what the old people always rant about, but you might want to listen a little bit. Otherwise, one day we could end up like Japan.

I feel like I should say something about the Supreme Court nominee, but I don’t really know anything to say. She’s not a lesbian — the Obama administration is very clear on that — and she was never like a judge so she doesn’t have any legal opinions to analyze. That’s all I know. Still, if Obama nominated her, I doubt she’s all like, “Hey, you can’t do that; that’s not in the Constitution!” That’s something only crazy, right-wing judges say.

There are some rumors she used to live in a gingerbread house and kidnap children, but the Obama administration hasn’t denied those rumors like they did the lesbian ones. And she came in second in a national hot dog eating contest, though I’m not sure how that relates to a legal philosophy.

Yeah, I know so little I already had to start making stuff up. Really, though, Obama is replacing a liberal Justice with presumably another liberal and I don’t think there’s any chance we’ll like who he picks, so I’m not sure under what conditions am I supposed to care about this. So, by default, I am opposed to Ellen Kagan because Obama likes her and we’ve seen the sort of people Obama likes, but I don’t care that much.

So Obama is ranting about iPods and video game now:

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

He then followed up with a comment about “kids these days and their loud rock music.”

Yeah, I don’t get it. Isn’t bombarding people with empty sights and sounds how Obama become president?

“Yes we can!”

“Hope & Change!”

Obama’s whole campaign was based on repeating stuff like that over and over and hoping no one really thought about it. There was more substance to the plot behind the videogame Doom than the Obama campaign. And didn’t he give the Queen of England an iPod full of his speeches? Is that a distraction, a diversion, or a form of entertainment? I think it’s at least two of them.

Isn’t the only hope for the Democrats not to get devastated in November for there to be lots more distractions? They need shiny things with blinking lights that make loud noises everywhere and constantly befuddling everyone, because if people get to stop for even a second and think about the trillions Obama has spent and the massive bills he’s passed that no one knows what are in them, Obama’s approval ratings plummet.

So what has been BP’s big solution to the oil spill so far? Drop a box on it!

I guess they realized that’s the sort of solution a four-year-old would come up with, so they changed it up a little. They decided they’ll drop a box on it… USING ROBOTS!

I like that concept — take a low tech idea and then try to spice it up by gratuitously throwing in something futuristic. So maybe in the future there’s an oil spill on land, and everyone is like, “What will we do about it?” And BP will be like, “We’ll throw a tarp over it.” And everyone will say, “Well, that’s not much of a solution.” And BP will be like, “You didn’t let me finish: We’ll throw a tarp over it… FROM SPACE!” And everyone will be like, “Wow! What an awesome idea!”

Of course, the robots dropping a box idea didn’t actually work, but box dropping robots are a new technology. As the technology improves, scientists estimate that half of all our problems in the future will be solved by robots dropping boxes on things. The other half will be solved by violence, same as always.