"You have to be interested in politics these days. If you're not, you're a completely lost individual. Whereas, years ago, politics seemed to be this thing that was secluded for a minority of intellectuals, these days you can't get away with that argument; you have to be attuned to what's happening, there's so much at stake. There's absolutely no excuse for people who aren't politically aware." — Morrissey, November 1983
Hmm
Specter is considering filing legislation that would allow the United States Congress to sue President Bush over the use of signing statements. The legislation would be required as the Supreme Court ruled that Congress lacks standing to sue the president over passed legislation back when several members sued President Clinton over the bi-partisan line-item veto power.I’m not sure I like the idea of Congress having the right to sue the president, and I’m certain that I’d prefer Specter to exhaust existing measures—like censure—before passing legislation to sue the president. It seems impossible to me that he’ll be able to drum up more support for suing Bush than he could for censuring him for misuse of signing statements, but maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?
Dobson’s Dog-Whistle
First of all, I can’t even imagine why CNN would give the cyberspace to this homobigot retrofuck to air his asinine rantings in the first place, though considering he uses the opportunity to rail against CNN for their part in promulgating the radical homosexual agenda, I can only presume they’re motivated by some sort of deeply entrenched, masochistic shame about the merest perception of “liberal bias,” and a belief that flagellation-by-proxy will relieve them of their burden.
Anyhoo…
Dr. Dobson spends the majority of his column citing a bunch of meaningless statistics about state percentages of support for gay marriage—meaningless because the Family Marriage Amendment’s failure does not mean that gay marriage will suddenly become legal across the country, and meaningless because many of the Senators who voted against it did so not because they support gay marriage, or because they “don't give a hoot about the traditional family,” but because they do not support codifying discrimination into the Constitution or addressing marriage at the federal level.
Then he whines about activist judges for a bit, including those appointed by Clinton, who he conveniently fails to note was responsible for the Defense of Marriage Act passing on his watch. Then there’s the requisite caterwauling about “liberal judges and activists … destroy[ing] this 5,000-year-old institution, which was designed by the Creator, Himself.”
And here’s the best part: “So where does the issue go from here? Time will tell. It took William Wilberforce more than 30 years to bring about an end to Britain's slave trade in the 1800s. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of a protracted victory.”
Yes, that’s right. Evangelical Christian leader James Dobson just compared legalizing gay marriage to slave-trading.
I suspect the lunacy of that comment needs no commentary…but why do you suppose Dobson chose to reference the end of the British slave trade instead of the more obvious example of American slavery? An obvious explanation is that none too few Americans of any color would take exception to our horrendous history of slavery being invoked in such a manner, but perhaps fewer will balk at the British reference. Another possibility falls under the old dog-whistle theory—he’s giving a shout-out to the evangelicals that only they can hear.
William Wilberforce was white (unlike some prominent American abolitionists one might name, like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass), and he was also an Evangelical Christian who managed to successfully convince the House of Commons to require missionary work a condition of the British East India Company's 1813 renewed charter. In other words, to do business, they had to agree to “introduc[e] Christian light into India.”
To you or me, mentioning this rather obscure British patrician in passing might just seem weird. To Dobson’s devotees, however, it becomes a message that white evangelicals must continue their struggle to blur the line separating church and state—and, more nefariously, a message to politicians that if they want to stay in business, they’d better play by Dobson’s rules.
Impassionately urging his congregants to “vote their consciences,” because, if they do, “there could be some new faces in the Congress soon,” and invoking the name of a man who successfully made policy and commerce contingent upon religious indoctrination, Dobson has made his point very clearly to those whose ears are trained to hear his dog-whistle. And CNN opened its doors to give this extremist conservative bully the opportunity to threaten D.C.
(Thanks to Mr. Shakes for passing that one along.)
Katrina still devastating NOLA…
…whether we pay attention or not.
According to the coroner's office in New Orleans, the city's suicide rate nearly tripled in the months after Katrina. A suicide rate of nine per 100,000 residents jumped to almost 27 per 100,000 residents.
…The New Orleans police department operates a "crisis unit" that helps people who need to be protected from harming themselves. Sgt. Ben Glaudi, the man who started the unit 24 years ago, says there has been a dramatic increase in the rate of people who need to be helped.
Image from a Chicago Tribune slide show of photographs from New Orleans’ lower 9th ward taken by Pete Souza nine months after Katrina. You can view this very moving slide show here.
Claire has some information on helping restock NOLA’s libraries. I’m highlighting that in particular, even though there are still many more ways to help, because although of course there is a continuing need for donations, for tangible items, for money, surely lifting spirits in New Orleans is dependent on breathing life, slowly but surely, back into its culture, too.
Now can we do something about it?!
The WaPo reports that cybersecurity experts staged a mock election “determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election,” and came to the alarming (but totally unsurprising to anyone who’s been paying attention) conclusion that “it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.”
Got that? One person could change the outcome of an entire election.
Most of the gaping security flaws, found in all three major electronic voting systems used in the US—which are quickly replacing older methods thanks to “billions of dollars of support from the federal government”—could “be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities.” But in spite of the federal government’s financial generosity to increase the use of these vulnerable machines, they’ve shown little interest in mandating a verifiable paper trail.
Except for Rep. Rush Holt, (D-NJ).
Now, finally, some Republicans are starting to take notice. Republican Reps. Tom Cole (OK) and Thomas M. Davis III (VA), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, have decided to join Holt “in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines.” Someone less generous than I might suggest that Cole and Davis only started getting itchy when the polls started showing that Dems had a real possibility of taking the House this November, but I’ll give these two fine gentlemen the benefit of the doubt. Ahem.
Get it done, you Beltway wankers.
Glug
LOL:
England fans are drinking Germany dry.Sie sind nur glücklich, dass Schottland zu furchtbar war, zu konkurrieren. Or, as we say at Shakes Manor, Yoo’re joost looky that Scootland was too shite to coompete!
Breweries warned that beer could run out before the final due to demand.
In Nuremberg fans drank 1.2 millions pints of beer during the Trinidad game reports The Sun. Stuttgart landlords said an extra 900,000 pints were sunk last weekend as 60,000 fans celebrated England's win over Ecuador. In Cologne - where England drew with Sweden - pubs ran out of bottles and barrels.
Comparative religiopolitics
As a guide for the perplexed regarding Barack Obama's clumsy evangelical outreach, we present this teaching moment in comparative religiopolitics:
It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase 'under God'...
It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase 'Allahu Akbar'...
Different? How, exactly? Discuss.
Bonus question: Why is it that Dems like Obama and Howard Dean are unable to talk about religious values without insulting or undermining their own base? Ten minutes, then pencils down.
(Cross-posted.)
$1,000,000,000,000
One trillion dollars. That’s what the Iraq war is shaping up to cost by 2010, as calculated by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
Richard Cranium at the All Spin Zone has the lowdown.
And Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) takes us for a ride in the wayback machine. (Please note that the first lying piece of shit on the list is now my bloody governor. Sob.)
Disturbing
Remember earlier this month, I posted that a judge had been shot in Reno? At the time, I noted having “found some very angry fathers’ rights advocates who were complaining that he ran on a platform promising to uphold fathers’ rights, but has let them down.”
Well, the guy who’s been charged with the shooting, Darren Mack—who also killed his estranged wife earlier the same day—does indeed appear to be a disgruntled fathers’ rights advocate who is angry about “the crimes that divorce industry are inflicting on mostly men thoughtout [sic] this country.” And he may have been monitoring Trish Wilson’s site while he was on the lam. Trish, as I’ve mentioned before, writes regularly about the ugly side of the fathers’ rights movement.
Now, That's an Endorsement!
Well done, Lieberman. You're Michelle Malkin's favorite Democrat. Congratulations; I'm sure you're very proud.
Energy Dome tip to Crooks and Liars. Fortunately, you can watch the Malkin clip via YouTube without having to go to her vile site. As much as I loathe Malkin, you may want to check it out... the incredibly amateurish "report" is worth a chuckle.
Behind the Times
In America: We’re still arguing about gays serving in the military and gay marriage.
In Spain: “Two gay privates in Spain's Air Force will marry this summer the ETA news agency reported on Tuesday. The wedding will be the first same-sex marriage for the country's military.”
Sigh.
A Tale of Two Pictures
The body of Army Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, arrived at the Brownsville airport Monday in a solemn ceremony broken only by the sobs of his young widow. Eighteen-year-old Christina Menchaca of Big Spring, Texas received her husband’s body shortly after noon, surrounded by family, her little boy, and Rev. Carlos Villarreal. They watched as 11 members of the 101st Screaming Eagles Military Funeral Detachment team provided full honors as they carried the varnished brown coffin from a chartered Falcon jet to a waiting hearse… “By coming here I am showing my respect,” said Frank Garza, a former soldier. Even though he doesn’t know Menchaca’s family, Garza’s nephew, who is currently assigned to Border Patrol duty, will be driving in from Arizona for the funeral.
President Bush jogs with Army Staff Sgt. Christian Bagge, 23, from Eugene, Ore., who lost both legs to a roadside bomb in Iraq, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington Tuesday, June 27, 2006. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)… “The president met the soldier on a New Year's Day visit to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where Bagge had been recuperating from his injuries for months. Bagge, now 23 and a native of Eugene, Ore., was in a convoy hit by roadside bombs a year ago in the remote Iraq desert south of Kirkuk… He told Bush during their January visit that he wanted to run with him.”
To be clear, I believe that President Bush did a good thing by honoring his promise to a severely injured soldier that he’d go on a run with him someday. I genuinely don’t think he did it cynically; that there was also PR value to it is something for which I cannot fault the president—that’s the nature of any good deed any president does.
But here’s my problem. He did it on the same day that the body of a soldier who had been kidnapped, brutally tortured, and killed arrived home, in his “home state,” as it happens. As veteran Garza notes, above, he attended the procession because, “By coming here I am showing my respect.” People who didn’t know Menchaca showed up to honor a fallen soldier. Two thousand people went to the wake. They will go to his funeral. None of them are among the people responsible for sending him to the war in which he died.
And, you know, I find any excuses rooted in “security issues” a bit flimsy, considering that our soldiers must live day in and day out in fear for their lives.
I believe President Bush honored Sgt. Bagge by spending time with him. And I believe he should do more to honor the soldiers who will no longer run, with him or anyone else, ever again, too.
"More slowly than hoped"
We've been waiting to hear some official assessment of the progress of the two-week old security crackdown in Baghdad. We finally get one, and it's not a ray of sunshine:
Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, said the overwhelming security operation launched two weeks ago to rein in violence in Baghdad was moving more slowly than hoped."It's going to take some time. We do not see an upward trend. We … see a slight decrease but not of the degree we would like to see at this point," he said at a news conference in the heavily fortified Green Zone.
The numbers bear out Caldwell's measured words. One hundred and fifty-four civilians and military personnel were reported killed in Baghdad over the two-week period of the security initiative, based on news reports compiled by the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. This does indeed mark a decrease from the 190 civilians and military slain over the previous thirteen days in June. Any downward trend in the slaughter rate is good news, but it is tempered by the fact that it took a combined 75,000 Iraqi and American troops to effect it - a massive application of force that cannot be extended indefinitely. In the wake of the elimination of terror kingpin Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the military had doubtless hoped to make great inroads quickly against the insurgency. As the numbers bear out, that hasn't happened.
(Dutifully cross-posted...)
You’ve got to be kidding me.
House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records.Would that the Republicans, including President “Disgraceful” himself, were half as concerned about the outing of a covert CIA operative working on weapons proliferation, or going to war on
The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation.
The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative.
…President Bush criticized the reports during a press event Monday, calling the disclosure “disgraceful” and a “great harm” to national security.
Matthews: Unleashed!
Did anyone else watch The Colbert Report last night? Chris Matthews was Stephen’s guest, and he was an utter lunatic. At first, he seemed as though he would be more reasonable than usual…and then everything went pear-shaped. He got stuck on one of his maniacal “HA!”s, and did it like 10 times in a row, which sort of sounded vaguely like laughter, but also like machine gun fire through a thick block of gelatin.
Then he completely lost the plot and put Colbert in a headlock. It was all meant to seem like fun and games, but I couldn’t get over my impression that Matthews looked like a giant Rockem Sockem Robot that had come loose from its mooring, swallowed a bucket of PCP, and gone on a rampage.
Howsabout some wrastlin', girly-man?
Yeah, Great. How Topical of You.
The Limbaugh/Viagra thing is annoying me, for multiple reasons. It's not just the Clinton jokes that are so fucking old, they should be taken out back and shot like Old Yeller:
Limbaugh joked about the search on his radio show Tuesday, saying Customs officials didn't believe him when he said he got the pills at the Clinton Library and he was told they were blue M&Ms.Ho, ho ho! As Stewie says, "...any 'Titanic' jokes you want to throw at me too, as long as we're hitting these phenomena at the height of their popularity?"
There's also this:
He later added, chuckling: "I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it."As if this whole thing wasn't icky enough, he's got to up the "completely disgusting" ante by forcing us all to imagine him making the twin-backed beast. But here's the thing that really pisses me off:
Limbaugh's lawyer, Roy Black, said the prescription was written in his doctor's name "for privacy purposes." The conservative radio host was released without being charged and investigators confiscated the Viagra, which treats erectile dysfunction.First off, I call "complete bullshit." You see, there's this little thing called HIPAA, The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It's got this little Privacy Rule. Basically, it keeps all of your medical information between you and your health care provider. I worked at a pharmacy... if there was one thing that was hammered into our heads, it was that you do not compromise the privacy of a patient under HIPAA; you'll get spanked. Big time.
So, no one would know about Limbaugh's viagra other than his doctor, and his pharmacist. If he's really that paranoid that he's lying awake at night imagining his pharmacist snickering over his hardon pill, he's got problems that viagra and/or oxycontin aren't going to help. And if he's that worried about anyone finding out, why sneak it around in his luggage, where it's probably going to be found, and as we're all seeing, become national news, due to the fact that he's been busted for prescription fraud before?
He either did this intentionally, hoping it would give him a popularity boost, or he's really that fucking stupid, or he was just desperate to find another reason to drag out that stupid Clinton joke.
Oh, and one final thing: It was said during the oxycontin mess, but it bears repeating. If Limbaugh was just Joe Average, he wouldn't be on the radio after getting busted. Again.
And what the fuck was he doing running around the Dominican Republic with a three-hour hardon, anyway? I think you'd better reel in those Clinton jokes, Rush... Clinton's obviously not the only frisky boy at the table.
(All bolds mine. I apologize in advance for mentioning Rush with a hardon. The cross-post made me do it.)
What's the matter? WHAT'S THE MATTER?
I will tell you "what's the matter!" I go out of my way for you! I do everything to try and make you happy. I feed you, I clean you, I dress you, and what thanks do I get?
No, seriously... since the emails are already starting to come in... yes, I have seen the book Better Living Through Bad Movies. Rest assured, I'm planning on buying one to read on the plane next month when I wing my way to New York City... and after next payday. Where does the money go? But thank you for thinking of me. I'll start showing you a little more appreciation around here, MISTER MAN!!
And by the way... since this book is brought to you by the wonderful people that bring you World 'O Crap, you might want to pick up a copy for yourself, and support a progressive blogger.
(By the way, is there anyone out there that knows anything about getting published? Because I've got a couple of great ideas for movie books... which I will write in my copious amounts of spare time. *snort*
Question of the Day
Do you have a preference for what happens to your body after you die?
I'd like whatever parts can be used to be donated before the rest of me is disposed of in whatever way is most environmentally friendly at the time of my death. Beyond that, I have no desire to be buried or my ashes scattered or anything like that. You could throw my carcass in the woods to rot or feed me to starving lions for all I care.
I once worked for a guy who had built his own plywood casket, to be used only if his wife found "sticking a ham bone up my butt and letting the dogs drag me away" too objectionable. That sounds about right to me.
The Devil Busies Himself With Utah Politics
Because there’s nothing much for him to do these days, what with the Bush administration having taken over so many of his usual duties:
John Jacob, a Congressional candidate from Utah, said Thursday that Satan was trying to keep him out of office.After—shockingly—being branded kind of a crackpot for blaming Lucifer for his political problems (which include “business deals gone sour, allegations that he aided illegal immigrants, and revelations that the devout Mormon used the gamble”), Jingleheimer-Schmidt issued a clarification, explaining, “What I was trying to say, and obviously didn’t do it very well, is that over the last eight months I’ve had more adversity in my life than I’ve had in the last 10 years.”
…"There's another force that wants to keep us from going to Washington, D.C. It's the devil is what it is. I don't want you to print that, but it feels like that's what it is," he said, apparently unaware that pleas for secrecy are like catnip to journalists.
…"I don't know who else it would be if it wasn't him," he said. "Now when that gets out in the paper, I'm going to be one of the screw-loose people."
This is exactly what came to pass, because Satan deemed it so.
Well, I suppose it could be the devil unearthing his dirty little dealings and emptying his closet of its cobwebbed skeletons, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that he’s challenging a five-term incumbent Republican—and the GOP don’t mess around, bitch. As John McCain once whispered in his sleep, “I’ve seen Karl Rove. I’ve known Karl Rove. Karl Rove was an enemy of mine. Beelzebub, you are no Karl Rove.”
