Category Archives: Politics

Vote Sideshow Bob…

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I think I get it now. Repubs in Congress make it impossible for the new Dem majority to get anything done by doing all the same things they recently chided the Democrats for doing, except doing it with more brazenness and assholery. That way, they can later mock the Democrats for being weaklings. Vote for the bully.

We’ve seen this before:

A TV commercial for Sideshow Bob is shown.

[scene shows prisoners going in a revolving door and coming out immediately]

Voice: Mayor Quimby supports revolving door prisons. Mayor Quimby even released Sideshow Bob — a man twice convicted of attempted murder.

[scene shows prisoners leaving on escalator and ski lift]

Can you trust a man like Mayor Quimby? Vote Sideshow Bob for mayor.

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Immigration blues

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Dear Minutemen:

I don’t doubt that you have a deep and abiding love of this country. I don’t doubt that you believe you are doing the right thing. I may completely and absolutely disagree with you, but at least you are being honest about your beliefs and feelings.

And those beliefs and feelings have become increasingly horrifying to this particular proud American. Please try to remember that a lot of (perhaps most) Hispanics were born here, and therefore have every right to be in this country. Harassing Catholic Churches will get you nowhere–and please, please, please stop making Bill Donohue seem like a reasonable man!!!

CP

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Freedom of belief, as long as you believe, motherf****r

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I had no idea that this was in the Bill of Rights of the Texas Constitution:

Article 1 – BILL OF RIGHTS
Section 4 – RELIGIOUS TESTS

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being. (Emphasis added)

Other states do this, too, although these clauses tend to not stand up to court challenges.

Still, why risk it? Should I ever run for office, I shall declare my faith in the Invisible Pink Unicorn:

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Webb for President?

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Just a thought. I haven’t actually seen the footage from Meet the Press yet, but The Anonymous Liberal has some great commentary on Senator James Webb’s handling of Lindsay Graham and on how to address the BS about Iraq:

It is not at all surprising that Iranians are assisting Shia militants in Iraq. The Saudis are doing the same thing for Sunni militants. If there’s a proxy war in Iraq, it’s not between the U.S. and Iran, it’s between Iran and Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia. And we’re caught in the middle. The primary fault line in Iraq is between the Sunnis and the Shia. Naturally, the countries that border Iraq, like Shia-dominated Iran and Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia, have an interest in who eventually controls Iraq. This was an utterly predictable consequence of invading Iraq.

We are not at war with anyone in Iraq, really. The war was against the Iraqi armed forces and the Republican Guard, and that war ended in 2003. What we have had since then is an occupation, something very, very different from a war. There are no clear fronts and no distinct enemy armies to defeat. There are homegrown militias, insurgent groups, and a handful of foreign fighters with all sorts of agendas. To speak of “winning” and “victory” is quite simply childish. Occupations either end or they don’t. Finally there is a Democrat with the cojones to stand up and speak some sense. Keep it coming, please.

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Hindus 1, Christianists 0

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The story about the Hindu offering a prayer in the Senate has probably been talked to death by now, but I feel that it is appropriate to note that Washington is not in flames one day after the prayer was offered. The prayer did not occur without incident, of course:

WASHINGTON — A Hindu clergyman made history Thursday by offering the Senate’s morning prayer, but only after police officers removed three shouting protesters from the visitors’ gallery.

Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Reno, Nev., gave the brief prayer that opens each day’s Senate session. As he stood at the chamber’s podium in a bright orange and burgundy robe, two women and a man began shouting “this is an abomination” and other complaints from the gallery.

Police officers quickly arrested them and charged them disrupting Congress, a misdemeanor. The male protester told an AP reporter, “we are Christians and patriots” before police handcuffed them and led them away.

For several days, the Mississippi-based American Family Association has urged its members to object to the prayer because Zed would be “seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god.”

Now that these three self-styled “Christians and patriots” have utterly embarrassed themselves, their religion, and anyone claiming the title “patriot,” I have a few questions for them.

1. Is your objection to the prayer based specifically on the fact that it is Hindu in nature, or is it a more general objection to its “non-monotheistic” nature?
2. If your objection is to the “non-monotheism” of the prayer, what is/are your primary concern(s) about it? E.g., are you concerned about angering the one true God, or are you concerned that, as a result of “non-monotheistic” prayer, God will get confused?
3. Would any monotheistic prayer be acceptable? Christian? Jewish? Muslim? Sikh? Pastafarian?

I await your reply.

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As if being in prison weren’t bad enough

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Check this out:

Red-faced officials at the scandal-racked Texas Youth Commission on Thursday canceled the release on parole of more than 150 teenage offenders after discovering that many had served little time on their sentences for serious violent crimes such as murder, aggravated sexual assault, aggravated robbery and aggravated kidnapping.

They also announced a top-to-bottom review of their parole criteria as a result.

While that must really suck on a personal level for the 150 kids who won’t be getting out of prison after all, it must really suck for TYC, who has been having a bad run of late anyway. If it weren’t so disturbing, it might be funny:

One youth on the recent list had been sentenced to 40 years in the knife slaying of a classmate, who was stabbed 15 times. He had served less than three before the agency recommended his release.

Another, serving time for molesting six children, was recommended for release even though he had numerous write-ups in youth prisons for indecent exposure and for possessing a weapon. One was a sex offender who assaulted a Youth Commission employee about a year earlier.

Two of those recommended for parole were escapees who are still at large.

That is correct–TYC recommended parole of two individuals who had escaped and are still at large. If you ask me (I know you didn’t), the Legislature (whenever they’re around again) should either eliminate the entire agency and start over, or bring in someone to boost TYC’s motivation. Just a thought.

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How far can people go to avoid their professional duties on religious grounds?

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From Overlawyered:

Stephen Dunne, 30, flunked the Massachusetts bar exam and now says it was because he refused on principle to answer an exam question concerning the rights of two married lesbians, their children and property. He claims the hypothetical, which concludes with the question “What are the rights of Mary and Jane?”, violated his First Amendment rights and served as a “screening device” to exclude persons like himself who disapprove on religious grounds of the state’s gay marriage law.

Let’s be clear about this: he left an answer on a bar exam completely blank. Now he is suing a group of lawyers for offending his tender sensibilities. Speaking as a lawyer (albeit one who has neither taken the Massachusetts bar exam nor practiced law there, although I have been to Amherst and thought it was nice), this guy would have made a terrible lawyer anyway. There is really no way, if you want to be any good at what you do, to avoid opining on issues that you may find repellent. The law is what it is, and if you don’t like it, a lawyer can (a) look for a sneaky way around it or (b) become a lobbyist and try to change it. The simple fact that this guy refused to even consider the question, IMHO, suggests that he does not understand the nature of being a lawyer at all.

I previously discussed doctors and pharmacists who don’t want to do their jobs on religious grounds. What gets me about this case is that the guy didn’t even try to answer the question. If he had at least written something that would pass as a bar exam essay, I’m not sure there’d be grounds for a lawsuit, but at least there could be a coherent discussion:

Dunne, who describes himself as a Christian and a Democrat, is seeking $9.75 million in damages and wants a jury to prohibit the Board of Bar Examiners from considering the question in his passage of the exam and to order it removed from all future exams.
“There’s a different forum for that contemporary issue to be discussed, and it’s inappropriate to be on a professional licensing examination,” Dunne told the Herald. “You don’t see questions about partial-birth abortion or abortion on there.”

 

Dunne scored a 268.866 on the bar exam, just missing a passing grade of 270. The exam question at issue concerns two married lesbian attorneys and their rights regarding a house and two children when one decides to end the marriage.

This question has nothing to do with the propriety, morality, validity, etc., of the “marriage” in question–it addresses a situation that is quite likely to occur in the real world (something that rarely happens in law school, trust me.) This guy chooses to skip an entire bar exam question, barely fails, and now blames someone else for offending him. Calling it a “contemporary issue” is one of the most creative non-sequiturs I’ve heard in some time. The practice of law is pretty dang contemporary, as in it deals with current issues like marriage and divorce–which is legal for homosexuals in Massachusetts, at least at the moment. If you don’t think a lawyer should have to address that issue, you don’t deserve to be a lawyer. And you make a pretty strange case for your religious beliefs, as well.

One final quote from the article, for my own amusement:

Dunne claims the question was used as a “screening device” to identify and penalize him for “refusing to subscribe to a liberal ideology based on ‘secular humanism,’ ”according to his lawsuit.
“Homosexual conduct is inconsistent with (Dunne’s) Christian practices, beliefs and values, which are protected by the First Amendment,” the lawsuit states.

 

“I respect people with alternative lifestyles, and we must do that in a civil society,” Dunne said. “I just have a different opinion that millions of people share with me, and I believe that my opinion should be respected just as much as (pro-gay) opinions. I have no intent in spreading hatred or discrimination.”

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Hey, isn’t being in Iraq supposed to stop this from happening???

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In case you missed the news from London today, there were almost some bombings. Big ones, apparently. They were stopped by police. But remember, only Bush’s military can keep us safe from terrorists. That gets less credible all the time.

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I give up…everything is Clinton’s fault

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I will leave most of the sage words and research to Joe Conason at Salon, but this meme that Bill Clinton is really to blame for 9/11 just won’t seem to go away:

The list of Clinton’s actions against terrorism and specifically against al-Qaida is long; the list of his efforts to prepare domestically against a terrorist attack is even longer. He and his aides tried to warn the incoming Bush administration about al-Qaida’s plans to attack the United States, but they were brushed aside, as were the study group led by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman; Bush’s own counterterrorism director, Richard Clarke; and CIA chief George Tenet.

As for Giuliani, what did he do after the ’93 bombing? In their reporting for “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11,” journalists Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins went to great lengths to find out. The answer, they discovered, was that he did nothing. And he said nothing. After he was elected mayor later that year, he still did and said nothing about terrorism, a pattern of inaction and inattention that continued for years, even as the trials of the bombing perpetrators went on in his city — and even as federal investigators uncovered terrorist plots to blow up the Hudson River tunnels and other major New York City targets.

See, according to Giuliani (sorry, but the diminutive “Rudy” is saved for those who deserve it), Bill Clinton failed to do anything after the 1993 WTC bombings, and that apparently led to the 9/11 attacks (I’m paraphrasing his argument, of course).

All this does is draw attention to what Republicans were doing about terrorism in the 1990’s. From encouraging withdrawal from Somalia to mocking retaliation for the 1998 African embassy bombings (would Repubs have supported sending in troops then?), the short answer to that question is this: nothing. They were mostly concerned with blowjobs.

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Sweet, sweet meltdown

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A quick note about Ann Coulter’s total meltdown on Joe Scarborough’s show–it must really suck to have to constantly explain yourself to the very people you insult and mock on paper. Not that I expected anything better from her, but she has raised cowardice to a new height. To mock a bereaved mother and then act aggrieved when that mother has the gall to politely ask her to stop. I feel so sorry for Ann, because one day she will realize what a truly horrible waste of a human being she is, and there will be no one left who cares by then.

I have many more thoughts that I will share later today, but to quickly summarize, on the miniscule chance Ann reads this: you are a coward and a pitiful excuse for a human being, and in your heart you know that.

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