The Phelps family in action
I think the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is a fine thing.
Really.
But sometimes, late at night, I really really wish there were better-defined moral limits to it.
Cowardly cowardly custard!/Stick Rupert’s head in the mustard!
Poor Rupert Murdoch. He threatens to prevent Google from aggregating news items from sites he owns, and at the same time threatens to put his news sites behind pay-to-view portals.
And with typical California cool, Google threatens, “Cool. Do what you have to do.”
UPDATE: Murdoch adds that Glenn Beck was right back in July to say that President Obama is a racist–”though he shouldn’t have said so”. Better get a wider shovel, Rupert; that hole you’re digging is getting deeper.
The idea is to keep an open mind, not to sink a hole in your skull
Tea party wingnuts promote Igor Panarin’s theories that the United States will break up in 2010.
House of Representatives minority leader John Boehner and well-known Minnesota wingnut Representative Michelle Bachmann appear at the tea party rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, where abound multiple Nazi-like shouts and racial slurs on handmade signs. Boehner read aloud from the Declaration of Independence (after claiming it was from the Constitution), and wingnuts galore wander the halls of the Rayburn Office Building, seeking Congresscritters to harass and finding unhappy security and police personnel.
Sarah Palin, the GOP’s Princess-in-Waiting, abandons her party during a NY representative election in favor of the Conservative Party candidate.
One step forward, one step back
Yesterday Maine voters chose to discriminate against an estimated 10% of the state’s citizens by repealing the law giving gay people the right to marry each other. Imagine having to get the permission of half of 536,000 people in order to marry the person you love.
Maine voters also chose to allow the sale of marijuana for medical purposes. Imagine how long racial desegregation of schools in Alabama and Mississippi would have taken in the 1960s if it had been put to a popular vote.
There’s a reason why the U.S. employs representative government instead of a pure democracy.
I’ve always been a big believer in social change by evolution rather than by revolution. You cannot healthily force social change; attempts to do so often lead to totalitarianism. In the latter case above, we’ve evolved one small step toward legalizing the use of a substance with no known toxicity effects and proven medical benefits. In the former, evolution still has a long way to go.
That being said, I begin to understand why revolutionaries tire of waiting.
Fickle credit card companies
Bank of America dumps a credit card customer one day (apparently as a result of griping about having her limit cut in half without notice), and then asks her to come back two days later at the original credit limit…
and NOT because of a reporter’s inquiry about the issue, per BoA.
Riiiiight.
I don’t normally post twice a day…
…but this one’s too good to let go by unnoticed.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have voted against Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark legal case that paved the way for racial desegregation of school systems across America.
So, homosexual acts, abortion upon demand, same-sex marriage, equal pay for equal work, and racial desegration of school systems are all “new constitutional rights that were never intended by the drafters”.
This man is evil. (And Justice Clarence Thomas is his sock puppet.)
NASA takes its next leap–Ares I-X
The next leap into space
The Ares I-X orbital vehicle is sitting on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral this morning, waiting for its first flight test. America’s next leap into space is about to take first steps.
Here is a great page for showing your children where their future is going.
The new disease: Crazy Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)
- birthers
- Glen Beck conspiracy theories
- openly-carried weapons outside presidential appearances
- tea parties
- death panels
- proposed U.S. military coups
- the wingnuttery over the census
- cancellation of presidential speeches to schoolchildren
- obsession with ACORN
- celebrations over losing the Chicago Olympics bid
- scorning government involvement in health care while clinging desperately to Medicare
- falling for obvious gags about fake Obama thesis
It’s enough to make you collapse into the newest American disease: CFS, the crippler of young liberals
Meet 30 senators who approve of rape
A recent defense spending bill (FY2010 Defense Appropriations Bill) contains an amendment, sponsored by Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken, that requires companies with government contracts to allow employees to seek redress in a court of law rather than be forced into private arbitration. The penalty for violating companies would be loss of all government contracts.
Minnesota junior senator Al Franken
The amendment was prompted by the plight of Jamie Leigh Jones, a former Halliburton contractor who was gang-raped by co-workers while she was on assignment in Iraq. Her contract forbade her to seek legal redress; it also required her to not disclose what happened. She ignored that requirement, and was fired.
The Senate passed the amendment 68-30. 30 senators, all Republican, voted against this particular amendment.
I’ll say it again: 30 United States senators decided that staying on Halliburton’s good list was more important than allowing Americans to seek redress in our legal system.
And, they gave tacit approval to rape.
Here are the names of those distinguished white middle-aged (or older) gentlemen:
Alexander (R-TN) Barrasso (R-WY) Bond (R-MO) Brownback (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY) Burr (R-NC) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) Ensign (R-NV) Enzi (R-WY) Graham (R-SC) Gregg (R-NH) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Johanns (R-NE) Kyl (R-AZ) McCain (R-AZ) McConnell (R-KY) Risch (R-ID) Roberts (R-KS) Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Thune (R-SD) Vitter (R-LA) Wicker (R-MS).
Here’s a lovely list of these gentlemen, with pictures and contact phone numbers.
(Note that from 11 states both senators voted against the amendment, including the last Republican candidate for the U.S. Presidency.)
In addition, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbied against it, and the U.S. Department of Defense conspired to stop it.
The House is now considering the appropriations bill, and Hawaii Representative Dan Inouye (of congressional Watergate investigative committee fame) is being heavily lobbied to remove or water down the amendment. Let’s see how he and the rest of the House votes.
Sometimes those Founding Fathers were damned sharp
From President James Madison’s Speech on the Right of Suffrage:
“The right of suffrage is a fundamental Article in Republican Constitutions. The regulation of it is, at the same time, a task of peculiar delicacy.
“Allow the right exclusively to property, and the rights of persons may be oppressed. The feudal polity alone sufficiently proves it.
“Extend it equally to all, and the rights of property or the claims of justice may be overruled by a majority without property, or interested in measures of injustice. Of this abundant proof is afforded by other popular Govts. and is not without examples in our own…
“In a just & a free Government, therefore, the rights both of property & of persons ought to be effectually guarded…
“Should Experience or public opinion require an equal & universal suffrage for each branch of the Govt…a resource favorable to the rights of landed & other property, when its possessors become the Minority, may be found in an enlargement of the Election Districts for one branch of the Legislature, and an extension of its period of service [the U.S. Senate]. Large districts are manifestly favorable to the election of persons of general respectability, and of probable attachment to the rights of property…The tendency of a longer period of service would be, to render the Body more stable in its policy, and more capable of stemming popular currents taking a wrong direction, till reason & justice could regain their ascendancy.”
[bracketed insert and emphases mine]
The U.S. Senate was created to supply a more stable institution to balance the more frequently elected, more volatile House of Representatives. Also note that the Senate, created to represent the “rights of landed & other property”, cannot initiate bills dealing with money (revenue). That is reserved to the House only.
Sometimes there is no justice
Bill Caudle, at the age of 39, joined the U.S. Army this month.
Why? It was the only solution he could see. He was laid off in March from a position he’d held for 20 years, and he got inducted so he would have coverage for his wife’s chemotherapy.
He will be gone for four years.
He will miss his youngest child’s entire high school career.
His wife’s ovarian cancer may well kill her before he musters out.
R. Crumb and the Bible
Mr. Crumb, of underground comic fame, has released an illustrated Book of Genesis. (I should have bought it at the local comic con earlier this month.)
Lot, post-Sodom and Gomorrah
I must have dozed off in Sunday School when they covered the above-illustrated story about Lot’s daughters having sex with him (“to maintain his line”) (Genesis 19). This was after Lot had offered the samesaid daughters to a gang of rowdies for a group shagging, just so the gang would leave Lot and his guests (the pair of angels that had come to warn him of Sodom and Gomorrah’s imminent destruction) alone.
I must have been on vacation when they discussed the business of Elijah asking God to send she-bears to rip apart the children that had made fun of Elijah’s bald head (2 Kings 2).
And we’re not going to get anywhere near that psilocybin trip that is Revelations.
