Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

Not all heroes wear capes.

Let me file that under fuck it.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Let there be snark.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

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Archives for 2005

Hell To Pay

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If you thought the rhetoric and behavior of those attempting at every level to topple the judiciary was ugly now, you better strap on your seatbelts, because it is about to get ugly with a capital U:

RANDALL TERRY, OPERATION RESCUE: If she dies, there is going to be hell to pay with the pro-life, pro-family Republican people of various legislative levels, statewide and federal wide, who have used pro-life, pro-family conservative rhetoric to get into power, and then when they have that power, they refuse to use it.

Apparently, lawlessness in the name of God is what Randall Terry and his ilk thought he was getting, and that was what DeLay et. al were trying to deliver. The Instapundit notes:

I’m quite astonished to hear people who call themselves conservatives arguing, in effect, that Congress and the federal courts have a free-ranging charter to correct any injustice, anywhere, regardless of the Constitution. And yet my email runneth over with just those kinds of comments. And arguing that “it’s okay because liberals do it too” doesn’t undercut my point that conservatives are acting like liberals here. It makes it.

Every system generates unjust results. This may (or may not) be one of them, but there’s no reason to think that Congressional action on an individual legal case is likely to improve things. My lefty law professors used to think that more procedures were always better, and seemed willing to tie the Constitution and the rules of procedure into knots to get to the result they liked. Even they have learned, to a degree, that more procedure doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes overall. And conservatives, as opposed to bleeding-heart liberals, are supposed to understand that there’s more at stake than the outcome in individual cases, and that there are real costs to putting whatever thumb-pressure on the scales it takes to get to a desired outcome in each case. Or so I thought.

They aren’t conservatives, Glenn. It took me a while to realize it, to realize what I had helped to create, what I had enabled, but I have not been laboring for conservatism. It’s Big Government, Morality Edition, with a healthy dose of Corporate Cronyism, and they are just as troubling as the statists on the left. Speaking of the statists on the left, Ralph Nader has now inserted himself into the Schiavo household.

Talk about an eye opener. I agree with with Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and Steve Gilliard. As it was noted in the comments below, “How weird is it that you now have to argue with Republicans that the law = justice?”

My world is upside down, and it is about to get zanier:

When party leaders have a view of reality that is at odds with that of their base, they’ve got a looming political problem. I suspect that Hill Republicans think that they have just gone the extra mile for pro-lifers with the Schiavo bill and therefore should be cut a little slack on stem cells. Most motivated pro-life voters, on the other hand, are going to be coming at this with a totally different mindset: By their lights, the Republicans waited until the last minute to act in the Schiavo case–and then failed. They are not going to be happy with Republicans who are deliberately and freely choosing to highlight an issue where the politics are difficult for pro-lifers right after they have had a bitter defeat.

I favor stem cell research, but I have been on record defending the compromise met by Bush several years ago, believing that compromise was possible. I was wrong. We were warned about the growing power of the theocrats, and we ignored those warning us. Hell- I derided them and chided them- at every opportunity. The day of reckoning is here, and it is going to be of Bibilical proportions. And I only hope that many of the Republicans in Congress, who like me were playing with fire and brimstone, begin to recognize it.

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Why?

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I lovethe Mountaineers, but sometimes I just can’t stand the students:

University officials condemned students and fans who celebrated West Virginia’s victory in an NCAA regional semifinal by setting about 50 street fires.

The Mountaineers defeated Texas Tech 65-60 on Thursday night, moving West Virginia into the regional finals for the first time since Jerry West led the school to the NCAA championship game in 1959.

“It’s unfortunate that people who had nothing to do with the team’s victory stole the spotlight briefly after the game,” said Ken Gray, WVU’s vice president for student affairs.

Gray vowed Friday that students who set fires will face sanctions, including expulsion.

These guys on the basketball team are all class, their coach is all class, and this has been the feel-good Cinderella story of the tournament. For once, West Virginia and West Virginia University is receiving nothing but positive press, and then these jackasses go and do this. Idiots.

*** Update ***

Shit. It made Drudge.

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Unbelievable

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Really, this isn’t all about religion:

A man was arrested after trying to steal a weapon from a gun shop so he could “take some action and rescue Terri Schiavo,” authorities said.

Michael W. Mitchell, of Rockford, Ill., entered Randall’s Firearms Inc. in Seminole just before 6 p.m. Thursday with a box cutter and tried to steal a gun, said Marianne Pasha, a spokeswoman for the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.

Mitchell, 50, told deputies he wanted to “take some action and rescue Terri Schiavo” after he visited the Pinellas Park hospice where she lives, Pasha said.

The feeding tube that has kept Schiavo alive for more than a decade was removed March 18 over objections from her parents. Schiavo’s husband has said his wife would not want to be kept alive artificially.

Doctors have said she would probably die within a week or two of the tube being pulled.

Randy McKenzie, the owner of Randall’s Firearms, said Mitchell pulled out the box cutter and broke the glass on a couple of display cases.

“He told me if I wasn’t on Terri’s side then I wasn’t on God’s side, either,” McKenzie told The Associated Press.

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Reality is Breaking Out All Over

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Remember this?

Many of us remember the headline, “Declaration of Independence banned from classroom.” Just before Thanksgiving, the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit against the Cupertino, Calif., school district and issued a press release with that claim at the top–and all hell broke loose.

Talk radio and TV rushed to the aid of Steven Williams, a public-school teacher and professed Christian who had apparently suffered religious discrimination at the hands of a martinet-principal. Not allowed to teach the Declaration of Independence? Was it possible? People all over the country began contacting the Stevens Creek Elementary School. The court of public opinion’s verdict was swift: Someone had pushed the cause of secularism into new realms of absurdity and abuse…

It turns out that the Declaration had not been “banned.” It still appears in the school’s fifth-grade textbook and hangs from classroom walls. The real claim is narrower. The suit alleges that, for religious reasons, Mr. Williams was forced to get approval from the principal before handing out supplemental materials to his fifth-grade class, and among those materials, on one occasion, was an excerpt from the Declaration. How did it come about that the school’s principal, Patti Vidmar, withheld her approval from this noble text?
According to Mark Davis, the school district’s counsel, Mr. Williams had become the subject of “a couple of formal and some informal complaints” because of the frequency and alleged inappropriateness of his mentions of faith in the classroom. He had become a born-again Christian in spring 2001…

Other parents claim Mr. Williams kept a Bible on his desk alongside worship CDs and regularly spoke to his classes about his weekend Bible studies. Armineh Noravian objected when Mr. Williams passed out President Bush’s Day of Prayer proclamation in her son’s class this year, to show students, Mr. Williams later told her, “the importance of prayer.”

Ultimately, Ms. Vidmar–a Christian herself, who got permission at Stevens Creek for an after-school Good News Bible club–stepped in. She asked Mr. Williams to show her lesson plans mentioning God or religion. She approved some, like the one showing C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories to be Christian allegory. But others, like the lesson on Easter and the Resurrection, she told him to omit…

Religious people nationwide will no doubt be following the case closely, thinking of instances in which public schools have over-interpreted the separation of church and state to mean virtually banning religion from their premises. But should this new lawsuit join that list of excessive vigilance? The parents and principal at Stevens Creek don’t seem to have a problem with religion at their school. They do seem to feel that one of their fifth-grade teachers crossed a line. For those who worry about the way faith is treated in our public institutions, Mr. Williams may not be the best candidate for a hero.

The gig is up. And this is from the dyed-in-the-wool liberals at the Wall Street Journal. In other news, some pinko-communist leftist clown the former solicitor general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan notes, in no uncertain terms, why the Schiavo legislation was such a bad deal:

IN their intervention in the Terri Schiavo matter, Republicans in Congress and President Bush have, in a few brief legislative clauses, embraced the kind of free-floating judicial activism, disregard for orderly procedure and contempt for the integrity of state processes that they quite rightly have denounced and sought to discipline for decades…

Congress’s intervention in the Schiavo case is equally mischievous. It demanded that a federal court decide this issue without giving any deference to state law or the previous course of state court proceedings. This is exactly the sort of episodic federal intervention without regard for the integrity of state processes that plagued death penalty cases for years, and that Congress moved to end when it passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. And the real possibility now of the case bouncing back and forth between the federal district court and the federal appeals court, and maybe even back to state court, is just what Congress tried to shut down in death penalty cases…

Finally, the law passed by Congress on Monday was an obvious attempt – under the pretense of allowing the determination of federal constitutional rights – to delay the outcome decreed by Florida state law with the hope of making that outcome impossible. That is precisely the worrisome tactic employed with increasingly imaginative stays and orders of re-litigation in a number of federal courts, most noticeably the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine Western states. And it is also precisely the sort of tactic that Congress sought to discipline in the Effective Death Penalty Act.

It is no good for politicians to try to justify this absurd departure from principles of federalism and respect for sound and orderly judicial administration by saying that, in this case, the life at stake is unquestionably innocent. For in many of the death penalty cases, the claim has also been that the prisoner had at least unfairly, and perhaps even incorrectly, been condemned to death.

What we have is many of the the same political leaders who denounced the Supreme Court’s decision forbidding states from executing those who committed their crimes as juveniles now feel free to parachute in on a case that had been within a state court’s purview for 15 years.

And while we are at it, we should point out the absolute cowardice on the part of Senate Democrats:

The House of Representatives acted quickly over the weekend in the wrenching case of Terri Schiavo, so quickly that maybe those who opposed the special bill allowing the federal courts to take over the case might have missed the Senate’s role – conspicuous for its silence.

The debate was confined to the House, for nearly four hours late Sunday night and early Monday. In the Senate, home of Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, and, of course, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer of New York, nothing.

An objection from just one senator might have blocked or slowed the measure’s march to the House. Instead, the Senate Democratic leadership approved the bill by unanimous consent, with no floor discussion about the Florida woman whose doctors say is in a “persistent vegetative state.” What’s going on?

Senators, at least those here in New York, are not talking for public consumption, but neither is their strategy well hidden. They have opted to sit back, let the courts take the heat and avoid a passionate attack from social conservatives who see this as an issue of life, like abortion, and want Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube, removed on Friday, reinserted. By not tangling on the Senate floor, the lawmakers have escaped broad accusation of opposing life.

Democratic Senators who are critical of the measure were saying this week that they had little to gain by taking on this issue. Constitutional experts assured them that there was little chance that the federal courts would step in or that the United States Supreme Court would intervene after refusing several times to hear the state case. They also worried that if they blocked the bill, they risked being blamed if Ms. Schiavo died before the House passed it.

Enough already.

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One Last Thing

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I just wanted to say that if you found my lengthy condemnation of the perversion of the judicial and legislative system mean-spirited towards those of religious faith, then you have missed the point of the post completely. I have no problem with individuals who are deeply religious- I have a major problem with people who are profoundly religious and think it is an ideal that should be foisted upon the rest of society. And that is precisely what Tom DeLay and his ilk are trying to do.

When I use the terms ‘jihad,’ and ‘zealots,’ and ‘radicals,’ it is because that is how I have grown to view them. Religion is a wonderful source of divine inspiration for many, and in the past I have defended the Pope from what I felt were unfair attacks. Religion and religious teachings can be a wonderful source of morality and a foundation of guiding principles and laws, but they should not be the law itself.

You can count the recent failings of the Republican party as an epiphany for me, something I should have noticed earlier, but didn’t, or maybe didn’t want to. As a Republican, I spent most of my life in the minority party, so maybe I overlooked some things now that my side was in power. The signs were there, though- the growing overt hostility towards homosexuals, the marginalization of out-groups, the general sanctimoniousness, the groupthink, all tied in with the corporate cronyism best exemplified by the give-away to the credit card industry.

I don’t think religion has lost its way. Who should we expect to defend the existence of Terri Schiavo if not the Pope and other religious leaders? I would demand nothing less, and I would lose respect for them should they change their beliefs to suit the fickle will of the people. But the Pope and religious leaders do not and should not set the legislative agenda, nor should we all be forced to live by religious mandate. Clearly we can still recognize the difference between calls for moral behavior and the attempts to impose a Judeo-Christian version of Sharia.

While religion may not have lost its way, I do think my party has, although I reject the idea of a conservative crack-up. This isn’t a ‘crack-up’ so much as it is an internecine struggle for the soul of my party, and if you really think about it, as I have for the past couple of weeks, we just aren’t very ‘conservative’ anymore anyway.

Unless, of course, conservative means a profound lack of respect for individual liberty and individual wishes, a blatant disrespect for the rule of law and an independent judiciary, a condemnation of federalism and an outright hostility to limited government, as well as bloated government and heavy regulation of all media, including political speech. Then, of course, we are real damned ‘conservative.’ We have become nihilists, saying whatever is necessary to achieve short-term gain while holding almost no principles, other than retaining our death grip on the different branches of government.

I don’t want any more of it, and if it means we need to lose power, so be it. We have already lost our way, and I personally find myself much more comfortable opposing the stupid laws that came pre-1994 than I do now, when my party is the one proposing even worse legislation. And to make matters worse, we have been more disciplined and more successful passing bad legislation.

Look at these quotes to see how far we have strayed:

“Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.”

“It’s political Daddyism and it’s as old as demagogues and despotism.”

“Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order. ”

“You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.”

The Bull Moose is right- Barry Goldwater wouldn’t recognize our party anymore, and I get the growing suspicion that William F. Buckley doesn’t, either. Ever wonder why William F. Buckley has the position he does on our drug policy?

I am sorry if you are deeply religious and I offended you- that was not my intent. I want you to look at what these radicals we have elected are doing- systematically dismantling our democracy in the pursuit of cash and power.

I am sorry if you think I am all soapbox and no soap. There are plenty of other blogs out there for you that can and will give you the party line. I may be wrong about a lot of things, but my beliefs are genuine.

And I am sorry if I sound ‘shrill’ or ‘extreme’ or ‘unhinged.’ I confess- right now I am all of the above, but for good reason. I have taken a good look around, including in my own archives with their damning accuracy, and I just don’t like what I see. Let me just say that there is no monster as scary as the one staring at you in the mirror.

If that means I am no longer a member of the good Republican club, then I will just have to live with it. I most certainly am not going to throw everything I believe out the window to become a Democrat, so I am going to remain shrill and extreme and unhinged and a member of the GOP until things start to change and we regain our focus, because right now I feel a lot like Dr. Frankenstein. Quitting the party would be the easy way out. I helped break this, I need to help fix it.

And with that, let me leave you with one more quote:

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

And it IS our liberty that is at stake.

*** Update ***

How about this for a bellwether? When you read Maureen Dowd, and say to your self, “Shit. She is 100% right,” it is time for some serious soul-searching.

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