Good day, class. This is Steven of The Opinion Mill, and I'm your substitute for the week. There's a lot to catching up to do and not much time, so please stop fidgeting and pay attention.

Are you qualified to work for Blackwater? Take the Rude Pundit job exam and find out! And while you're there, do something inappropriate to mark the fourth year of more or less continuous rudeness.

Rest easy, parents of Higley, Arizona: Your children are safe from Shakespeare. Meanwhile, science teachers in The Bronx need your help, and here's Questionable Authority with information on how to do it.

Glenn Greenwald gets some Protein Wisdom squirted at him and immediately feels the need for a shower. So will you after you read the comments.

Since the British essentially conjured Iraq into existence as a map-drawig exercise, Joe Biden wants to go them one better by having the United States reconfigure Iraq into North Bushistan, Central Bushistan and South Bushistan. Kevin Drum doesn't think this is such a hot idea.

HOLY CRAP: What's the Dutch word for "Bible-banger"? Whatever it is, it applies to these Dutch evangelicals who are censoring BBC nature documentaries to remove references to evolution and other scientific matters. With nonsense like this going on, Richard Dawkins has to wonder if theology has any place in a modern university.

BOOK NOOK: Christopher Hayes is reading Michael Perelman's The Confiscation of American Prosperity, and maybe you should, too. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have a new book out called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, about how the Israel lobby influences U.S. foreign policy by tarring Israel's critics with the brush of anti-semitism. In the New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg immediately branded the authors as - wait for it - a pair of - hang on while the suspense builds - anti-semites. Reading Goldberg's diatribe, Matt Yglesias at first adopted prim silence , but then expanded on why the article was an embarassment . Eric Alterman has his own take on a related issue.