Why Should You Vote Democrat Tomorrow?

A woman from Athens, Georgia, wanted to express herself earlier this year. To tell the world her opinions, she did what a lot of people do — she used a bumper sticker. Denise Grier, 47, was given a $100 ticket last March after a DeKalb County police officer spotted the profane, anti-Bush bumper sticker. In this case, her sticker read "I'm Tired of All the BUSH*T."

Even though the courts threw out the ticket in April — the state's "lewd decal" law was declared unconstitutional in 1990 — Grier has now filed a lawsuit in federal court against the county and its officials. Working with the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, she is not only seeking damages from DeKalb County for emotional distress, but also a declaration in federal court that her bumper sticker is considered constitutionally protected speech. According to the lawsuit, Grier says she is "uncertain and insecure regarding her right to display her bumper sticker in DeKalb County."

It has been noted previously that the Republican-controlled government has been gradually restricting American's right to Freedom of Speech for several years. Even politely telling the Vice President that you disagree with him can lead to the possibility of arrest (yes, he politely disagreed with the Vice President - while the word "reprehensible" is possibly impolite, he didn't yell, or even raise his voice). While expression of free speech can occasionally lead to consequences, it is a dangerous precedent for government officials to be allowed to stifle rights guaranteed in the Constitution.

Grier's bumper sticker ticket is not the first time that law enforcement in Georgia have overreacted to anti-Republican vehicle adornments. As it has been over a decade and a half since Georgia had a "lewd decal" law, it seems odd that the police officer would try to ticket her on that basis.

And this isn't the first time these proto-fascists have tried this kind of thing. There's only one solution. We need to vote them out. If you vote for a single Republican tomorrow, you're just voting for more of the same. More people trying to prevent you from expressing your opinion.

Even the New York Times is breaking with their usual tradition, and refusing to support even a single Republican candidate. And yes, despite what you hear on Fox News, the New York Times is not a "bastion of liberal thinking." They're normally bipartisan. Except for this election.

So vote tomorrow. Think about it, and vote smart. Because there's only one thing we can expect from a government opposed to Freedom of Speech.

The Cutting Edge of Research

A survey of 3,069 students on the campuses of Cornell University and Princeton University, has arrived at a conclusion that some might find shocking: Fully 17 percent of these Ivy League college students have cut, burned, carved or otherwise harmed themselves. Less than 7 percent have ever sought medical help for their self-inflicted injuries.

The study by researchers at Cornell and Princeton is billed as the largest study on self-injurious behavior (SIB) in the United States to date. "Self-injurious behavior is defined as inflicting harm to one's body without the obvious intent of committing suicide," Janis Whitlock, director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behaviors in the Family Life Development Center (FLDC) at Cornell and lead author of the study, said in a news release. SIB also may include such behaviors as ripping or pulling skin or hair, biting, bruising and breaking bones, she said.

They are also coming together on the Internet. "Internet message boards provide a powerful vehicle for bringing self-injurious adolescents together, and to a great extent, they provide a safe forum and a source of valuable support for teens who might otherwise feel marginalized and who may be struggling with shame," said Whitlock. However, while the majority of the postings are supportive in nature, some reinforce self-injury behaviors and could create a "social contagion" effect, the researchers warned.

The Death of Civil Discourse

It's difficult, here in a swing state, to watch TV without seeing at least one political commercial. And both sides are busy going negative - there's no mistaking that. But on the Democrat side, that's only reasonable. If the Republicans have proved anything in the last decade or so, it's that "going negative" works.

When I talk about this to anyone, they say that the attack ads make them want to vote for the other side, just out of spite. But people who work in a hospital (like I do) aren't the demographic being targeted by the negative ads. It's the average, uneducated, non-reading public they're trying to sway.

I know this because, unlike most of America, I volunteer for our Democratic Congressional candidate (there's a story there, but I don't feel like going over it right now). And one of the most soul-crushing things you can do when you're volunteering is phone-banking. You're cold-calling people you've never met, trying to pass along your candidate's viewpoint, and they usually don't want to hear it. Most people have already made up their minds - you're just trying to randomly hit one of the ones who haven't.

But some of the winners you get to talk to are proud of their stupidity and ignorance. You have dedicated Republicans, who will vote along party lines and refuse to listen to anything you have to say. You have one-issue voters, who will ignore every other factor, as long as their candidate is willing to (for example) make the abortion punishable by the death penalty. And you have a lot of hang-ups.

But some of the worst calls you get to suffer through are the enthusiastically blind. I've talked about Heather Wilson's ads that try to paint Patricia Madrid as being easily bribed. And I had the opportunity to talk to a woman who'd bought the whole story - "I couldn't vote for her. Not after she took all that money from the casino owners."

Once the idiots make up their minds, it isn't easy to crowbar any facts into there.

And it's only going to get worse, too. David Brooks points out that many of the vulnerable Republicans during this upcoming midterm election are moderates. And once we eliminate the moderates, the GOP will have nobody left but the loonies. The people who have abandoned every principle of conservatism and given themselves over to the Far Right. The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party will have become the middle of the GOP road.

Darth Cheney lives.

President Bush and his advisors certainly have no reason to make peace between the two sides of the political coin. They've advanced as far as they have by widening partisan rifts, and declaring anyone who disagrees with them a traitor.

Keith Olberman, the Edward R. Murrow of the current news choices, said it best a few weeks ago.

While the leadership in Congress has self-destructed over the revelations of an unmatched, and unrelieved, march through a cesspool ...

While the leadership inside the White House has self-destructed over the revelations of a book with a glowing red cover ...

The president of the United States - unbowed, undeterred and unconnected to reality - has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: the Democrats.

Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said, 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.' "

The hell they did.

One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president's seizure of another part of the Constitution. Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn’t be listening to the conversations of terrorists.

President Bush hears what he wants.

Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said, "Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we're attacked again before we respond."

Mr. Bush fabricated that, too. And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind reader.

"If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party," the president said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, "it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is - wait until we're attacked again."

The president doesn't just hear what he wants. He hears things that only he can hear.

It defies belief that this president and his administration could continue to find new unexplored political gutters into which they could wallow. Yet they do.

It is startling enough that such things could be said out loud by any president of this nation. Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders, Democrats, the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies of treason.

But it is the context that truly makes the head spin. Just 25 days ago, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this same man spoke to this nation and insisted, "We must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us."

Mr. Bush, this is a test you have already failed.

If your commitment to 'put aside differences and work together' is replaced in the span of just three weeks by claiming your political opponents prefer to wait to see this country attacked again, and by spewing fabrications about what they've said, then the questions your critics need to be asking are no longer about your policies. They are, instead, solemn and even terrible questions, about your fitness to fulfill the responsibilities of your office.

No Democrat, sir, has ever said anything approaching the suggestion that the best means of self-defense is to "wait until we're attacked again."

No critic, no commentator, no reluctant Republican in the Senate has ever said anything that any responsible person could even have exaggerated into the slander you spoke in Nevada on Monday night, nor the slander you spoke in California on Tuesday, nor the slander you spoke in Arizona on Wednesday ... nor whatever is next.
You have dishonored your party, sir; you have dishonored your supporters; you have dishonored yourself.

But tonight the stark question we must face is — why?

Why has the ferocity of your venom against the Democrats now exceeded the ferocity of your venom against the terrorists?

Why have you chosen to go down in history as the president who made things up?

I can't see that how the political scene is likely to be anything but ugly for the next few years.

Situational Morals

Let's talk about morality. And priorities, really. To be precise, let's once again talk about Congresswoman Heather Wilson (R-NM).

Heather seems to have a problem with human sexual intercourse. During her first year in office, she voted to have Bill Clinton impeached for having consensual sexual relations with a 22-year-old woman.

Six years later, she became something of an embarrassment to any reasonable adult in New Mexico, by practically bursting into tears over the momentary, grainy exposure of a female breast during a Superbowl halftime show.

"You knew what you were doing," said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., her voice cracking. "You knew that shock and indecency creates a buzz that moves market share and lines your pockets."

But then, faced with a Republican Congressman like Mark Foley (R-FL) who had an inappropriate fondness for teenaged boys, what's her reaction? She plans to donate the money she got from him to charity.

It would be crude and unkind of anyone to point out that Heather Wilson only seems to object to heterosexual adult relations, wouldn't it? So let's not get into that.

Instead, let's consider a point made by Ms. Wilson's opponent, Patricia Madrid: Heather, you see, was on the House Page Board from 2001 to 2004. Would it be unfair to say that she was one of the people in charge of protecting the pages from predatory congressmen? That was, after all, the reason the Board was set up.

The House Page Board was created after a scandal in 1983 in which two members of Congress were censured after admitting having sexual relations with pages.

Of course, when Ms. Madrid pointed this out, Heather's spokesman, Enrique Carlos Knell, indignantly blustered that "Patsy Madrid's charges go well over the top and don't have any credibility, and she should be ashamed of herself even suggesting such a malicious thing."

(They like to call her "Patsy" - it's a diminutive. They're classy that way.)

But nobody seems to want to ask one question of Mr. Knell. Heather was on a five-person board that was specifically created to prevent congressmen from having sex with a small group of teenaged boys. And she had no idea that there was a congressman out there who wanted to have sex with those same teenaged boys.

So what, exactly, was she doing during her four years on that board? How is it unfair to point out that she wasn't doing her job?

Let's compare that with ads saying that Patricia Madrid, as Attorney General, was responsible for a pervert named Matthew Ward getting "back on our streets"? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe it's the judge who gets to decide a man's sentence, isn't it? At least, when I'm watching Boston Legal or LA Law, I don't remember the prosecutor getting to do that, anyway.

Hell, let's compare the two cases. Matthew Ward, thinking that he's talking to a 14-year-old girl, tries to get together and have sex with her. Mark Foley, who actually is talking to sixteen-year-old boys, tries to get together and have sex with them. One gets probation and is now a registered sex offender. The other... is in rehab.

Oh, yeah. By the way, in Foley's case (at least according to conservative talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage), the whole thing is obviously a case of entrapment by those teenaged sexually predators against a fine, upstanding Republican congressman.

Go figure.

Talkin' To The Man

Our United States Senate just voted to allow torture of prisoners. That noise you hear is coming from the East Coast. It's the remains of our Founding Fathers, spinning in their graves.

Around two hundred and thirty years ago, thirteen colonies split off from England because a group of brave men felt that their rights were not being properly represented in the government that controlled them. And they felt strongly enough about these "rights" that they put them to paper and made them the basis for a new form of government; they enshrined these words to the extent that they could, telling the world that, in this new country at least, the common man could not be unfairly treated by the government.

Now, though, because our elected representatives are too cowardly to tell a nascent dictator that torture is wrong, our government now has the right to swoop down on any person at any time and take him into custody, and that person doesn't have the right to a trial to determine whether he (or she) is guilty. No evidence needs to be presented. A person can now be arrested on no evidence, held for as long as the government deems neccessary, and no court in the land will argue that this person should be free.

The name for this particular right, by the way, is habeas corpus, and it's defined like this:

habeas corpus (hā'bē'us kôr'pus) [Lat.,=you should have the body], writ directed by a judge to some person who is detaining another, commanding him to bring the body of the person in his custody at a specified time to a specified place for a specified purpose. The writ's sole function is to release an individual from unlawful imprisonment; through this use it has come to be regarded as the great writ of liberty. The writ tests only whether a prisoner has been accorded due process, not whether he is guilty...

The term is mentioned as early as the 14th cent. in England, and was formalized in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. The privilege of the use of this writ as a safeguard against illegal imprisonment was highly regarded by the British colonists in America, and wrongful refusals to issue the writ were one of the grievances before the American Revolution. As a result, the Constitution of the United States provides that "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it" (Article 1, Section 9).

Here in New Mexico, our Senators split evenly on the issue of habeas corpus. Republican Pete Domenici voted to continue shredding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and Democrat Jeff Bingaman voted on the side of Goodness and Light.

To Senator Bingaman, who I contacted fairly easily at senator_bingaman@bingaman.senate.gov, I wrote a short message of support.

For your vote against the destruction of habeus corpus, you have shown that you understand what our forefathers were trying to create in this fledgling country some 225 years ago.

You have just earned my vote, unlike your counterpart, Senator Domenici. Keep it up.

Thank you.

I spent a little more time on our other senator.

First, he doesn't support the idea of open communication. He requires that you go to his website and fill in a "contact form." (The closest he could come to demanding papers, I guess - the electronic equivalent of "Ihre papieren, bitte!")

When I finished, a little message came up on the screen. "Thank you for using our form!" I liked the exclamation point. God knows that forms should be exciting.

Incidentally, considering Domenici's apparent attitudes, if you don't hear from me for a while, it might be best to pretend you don't know me. Here's the message I sent to Pete Domenici on his exhilarating little form.

Senator Domenici,

You are a disappointment to me, sir. I did not always agree with your politics, but at some point, I felt that you might at least hold our forefathers in higher regard. Somewhere, in my twenty years in the military, I like to think that I absorbed at least a small amount of American history, and some knowledge of what it means to be an American.

You have just voted against habeas corpus. One of the central rights supported by that group of honorable men who gathered together in 1781 to create a country. You trampled it into the dirt with a simple wave of your hand and a single syllable.

Humorously enough, the front page of www.senate.gov talks about "Celebrating the Constitution." You need to consider having your webmaster locked away for "unreasonable sarcasm."

Consider the facts. An "enemy combatant" is now defined as any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, and he can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

Now, suppose an American tourist in Cairo or Casablanca or Bangkok is arrested for some feebly-defined "crime against the state." At what point is that foreign government going to release our tourist? And what will they be able to do to him, legally, while they're holding him?

Or let's bring it a little closer to home. Suppose my cousin, a Special Forces corporal, is wounded during a reconnaissance near the border to Syria, and taken captive by soldiers from that country. What will happen to him?

What happened to the theory that we should treat prisoners the way we would wish to be treated?

The theory, as the president explains it, is that the terrorists wish to destroy our way of life because they "hate our freedom." So why are you giving the terrorists what they want?

If there is such a thing as a single philosophy that makes us American, it is that we are better than our enemy. Are you proud of destroying that ideal, Senator? Do you sleep better at night, having done exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted?

Is that the action of a hero? Is the act of capitulation considered brave in these dark days? You were a lawyer once. What is the definition of "precedent" again?

So keep it in mind. "Good Americans" aren't in danger, are they? Just the Jews, the gypsies and the homosexuals. And anyone declared by our Leader as being an "enemy of the state."

You have just lost any chance of my voting for you ever again, sir. I only vote for people who can show that they understand the American ideal. People who oppose tyranny.

I only vote for real Americans.

It didn't do a damned bit of good. Although, within 24 hours, he sent me a form letter thanking me for contacting him. That made me feel all warm and cozy.

November can't come too soon. Let's vote these bastards out.

Heather and the Smear Merchants

Looking through the news can yield up all kinds of interesting trivia. Try this one, for example:

Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest in the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which this year assigned six operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.

Gee, I wonder why they'd do that? I mean, couldn't Republicans run on the overwhelming victories in Iraq and the flowering of democracy all over the Middle East?

...OK, maybe not...

But we've improved conditions in Afghanistan and kicked out the Taliban, right? Well, technically, we've only improved things for the opium farmers and given them a bumper crop of heroin. And the Taliban is still pretty strong over there, too. So maybe we shouldn't bring that up, either.

But they could run on how they've made government smaller and more efficient, and saved American tax dollars! Well, technically, our Republican-controlled Congress took a record-breaking surplus and turned it into a record-breaking deficit. And those pesky Democrats keep bringing up little things like the Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere" (a Republican-led, federally funded, $223 million dollar bridge that would link fifty people on the Alaskan island of Ketchikan to the mainland).

So what does this leave them? Well, pretty much just personal attacks on their opponents. When you don't have a record to run on, you demonize the other side.

Which brings us to the Patricia Madrid/Heather Wilson fight.

Heather likes to call herself "independent" - it’s right there at the top of her website: "Independent. Honest. Effective." She likes that word so much that it’s on her bio page six times. But her voting record doesn’t support that idea - she votes pretty much a straight Republican ticket. (Which kind of makes you wonder about the "honest" part of that soundbite, doesn't it? Especially if you remember her claim that the Democrats love her so much that they keep asking her to join their party.)

But since Heather isn’t willing to talk about her record (like her long-standing support of the Iraq war), she’s fired off a series of attack ads. One of them claims that Patricia Madrid received donations from a casino owner, and the legal problems of that casino magically disappeared. Which sounds pretty bad, until you consider what actually happened.

It's a pretty simple story, really. You see, the problem was that, every so often, a tribe wants to build a casino outside of their reservation, and declare it reservation land "in trust." Madrid pointed out that the sovreignity of the Native American tribes on their reservations was the loophole that allowed them to build casinos. But our friends in the Republican Party don't want you to know unimportant things like facts in this case - they prefer the libelous impression that they want to give you.

Heather also tries to smear Ms. Madrid for "interfering with the investigation" into former State Treasurer Robert Vigil on 24 separate charges of corruption. Strangely enough, Heather can never quite explain how Patricia "interfered" - perhaps the problem was that Patricia, as a trained lawyer, could see how the evidence was a little flimsy? In fact, it was so flimsy that a jury this weekend acquitted Vigil of twenty-three out of the twenty-four charges. (I wonder if we're going to see that fascinating fact in any of Heather's future ads?)

But hey, it seems only fair to reverse that little mirror, doesn't it? I wonder who gives money to Heather?

Well, if you check out the groups that donate to her, you find that she’s one of the top recipients of money from oil and gas companies, and she’s gotten a surprisingly large amount of cash from the electronics and defense industries - in fact, the corporation that threw the largest amount of money to her was Lockheed Martin.

Hmm... Isn't it amazing? Heather has consistently voted in favor of allowing our troops to be shot at in Iraq, and the companies that are making the most profit out of this little Middle East dust-up are giving Heather money.

I’d hesitate to use words like "kickback," but it's a fascinating coincidence, don't you think? Definitely a fine example of that old political maxim "one hand washes the other."

Didn’t Pontius Pilate wash his hands, too?

Even better, let's look at who Heather’s best friends are. She’s taken thousands of dollars from Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, the recently-outed pedophile Mark Foley, Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney.

Isn't that cute? Heather Wilson is in the pockets of the top convicted criminals in the Republican Party (OK, they haven’t convicted Foley yet - but they need to). Doesn't that feel make you feel all warm inside?

Of course, Heather wants to look clean, so she returned donations from Bob Ney and Duke Cunningham. She also claimed to have returned all of the money she got from Delay, even though she only gave back around a fifth of it - ten thousand out of the almost forty-seven thousand dollars ($46,959) she took from him (that’s the easily-documented amount – some sources place the figure closer to sixty-five thousand).

There’s a phrase my late, lamented momma taught me - "you’re judged by the company you keep."

And looking at it that way, Heather, you’re a dirty, dirty girl.

What are our "Traditional Values"?

In the 1930s and 40s, gays, Jews and gypsies in Germany were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. They were never given a trial and never allowed legal representation.

In the Thirties through the Nineties, gulags, or labor camps in the former Soviet Union, were established to house common criminals, corrupt officials, "counterrevolutionaries," and occasionally the victims of arbitrary mass arrests of ordinary citizens.

At the start of the Twenty-First Century, the government of the United States of America set up a number of camps around the world (including one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) to house people they had identified as "terrorists." None of people locked up in these camps was ever convicted by a court of law. Many of the prisoners (possibly a majority of them) were locked away, not because they had committed any crime, but because they were sold to the Americans by someone who hated them.

That last link is a .pdf document, by the way. If you have a problem with those, it's a report by a lawyer, a Seton Hall professor and a bunch of student aides, entitled "REPORT ON GUANTANAMO DETAINEES - A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data." The important part of the text, in this case, reads as follows:

Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

I'll leave you to do the math for yourself. Or actually read the report - it's only 28 pages long, and a fascinating look at the "evidence" used to incarcerate our Guantanamo residents. Enjoy.

But now, because the comparisons to fascist regimes don't go far enough yet, the White House wants us to pass laws that would allow them to torture prisoners.

Stephen Colbert explained it as follows (and I'm going from memory here, so I'm not even going to try to quote him): One - torture is against the law. Two - the United States is a country of laws. So, three - we have to change the law.

One fascinating group that has come out in favor of torture is the Traditional Values Coalition. Their leader, Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, told Senator John McCain that, if he continued to oppose the torture of prisoners, he could wave goodbye to the conservative evangelical community. I have to say, this confuses me. I thought the conservative evangelical community went to see The Passion of the Christ because it showed them how much Jesus suffered for them, not because it was a primer for the treatment of prisoners. Obviously, I was mistaken.

I have only one question for Reverend Sheldon. And I urge everyone arguing against torture to take it up as their mantra. "What would Jesus think?" Consider how He died, Reverend. You claim to be hoping for His return. So what's He going to say to you for joining with the Pharisees?

McCain, along with Senators Lindsay Graham and Senator John Warner, are a trio of Republicans with the courage, or perhaps just the humanity and common decency, to have come out against torture.

What is wrong with America when you can make headlines for coming out against torture? Shouldn't the 24-point font and the exclamation marks be directed against people in favor of torture? What sort of twisted, perverted view of America are we living in, where the acceptance of torture is the norm, and opposition to it is newsworthy?

However, even McCain, who was himself tortured in Vietnam, eventually backed down and compromised with the President. Of course, this agreement, as far as some people can tell, is that the Republicans will pretend that nobody is being tortured. So I'm not sure this is a victory for the forces of righteousness after all.

Bush actually went out in public and tried to justify himself:

In its ruling on military commissions, the Court determined that a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as "Common Article Three" applies to our war with al Qaeda. This article includes provisions that prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment." The problem is that these and other provisions of Common Article Three are vague and undefined, and each could be interpreted in different ways by American or foreign judges.

And that statement is so disingenuous that it makes your head spin.

How is it that the people who have no problem identifying pornography - an equally "vague and undefined" concept - are having such a hard time with the concept of torture?

I want to be very clear on one thing. Whether showing pictures of a prisoner in his cell is "humiliating and degrading" or an "outrage on personal dignity" can be argued. However, some things are, without question, illegal, immoral and qualify as torture. Waterboarding, beating with sticks, cattle prods, hanging from walls - these are torture.

Forced public nudity, forced masturbation, items shoved into prisoner's rectums, and most of the other things we all got to see in the sadomasochistic, oddly homoerotic Abu Ghraib photos - these are not only torture, they're also the mark of sexual deviance. And again, I'm having a hard time figuring out how the conservative evangelicals can fit these ideas into their concept of "traditional values."

So let's make a deal. I want President Bush to tell me what methods of "aggressive questioning" are allowed. And then I want him to submit to them, for as long as I'm willing to continue to administer them.

Because I have some questions I want answered, too.

Why Do They Love The Nazis?

Let's consider the evidence.

Everybody's favorite Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was talking to the American Legion and explained that people who disagreed with the president on his handling of the war were suffering from "moral or intellectual confusion," and weren't recognizing the "new type of fascism."

Unfortunately for him, I can recognize fascism. And unlike our friends in the White House, I remember that, first of all, not all Muslims are terrorists. And on top of that, "fascism" requires little things like... well, a government.

But terrorists don't really support the idea of a strong government. So logically, the phrase "islamo-fascism" doesn't make a lot of sense.

On the other hand, a government trying desperately to remove all freedoms from its people, trying to impose its own moral code, trying to suppress all resistance to its rule… well, that, we can certainly understand to be falling in line with the concept of fascism.

But what little fact does this underline?

Well, if you disagree with the Administration, they'll accuse you of the worst thing that they can think of. However, they don't have a lot of imagination. So they keep harkening back to WWII. By carefully avoiding Vietnam (after all, John Kerry fought there) and Korea (uh… what was that about, again?), they get to raise the spectre of an Evil That Spanned The Globe!

Unfortunately, a lot of area has to get covered by this same argument.

First, Bush can't seem to help himself. He jumped all over the Nazi rhetoric, saying that "Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them." Which is nice. Ignores the facts of history, but a nice argument. But that's not the only place where we can find Republicans waving the swastika.

Let's not forget the Neverending Struggle Against Science. Al Gore takes the worst of that fight. He gets compared to Hitler because of the movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Glenn Beck (small-time radio guy and habitual liar) tried to say that Al Gore was "just like Hitler" for making this movie. (Yeah. Al Gore and the cattle cars. Right.)

And a guy named Sterling Burnett (who gets his paychecks from Exxon, by the way), compared Al Gore to Joseph Goebbels, just because Al Gore happened to point out that Exxon might have something to do with global warming. Nice bit of logic, there.

I'll just assume that you're starting to see a pattern building up.

So, anybody want to lay odds that we'll be seeing more of these comparisons as we get closer to 2008? Personally, I'm thinking that there will be a spate of fascist/Nazi comparisons for the next two months. Anybody want to take that bet?

The True Face of Abortion Opponents

Sometimes, I gotta concentrate on work a little more than others. So, rather than doing something original, let me just point you toward another blog that goes by the name of Needlenose:

It will be most interesting to hear the reaction of anti-abortion groups to the FDA's decision yesterday to allow Plan-B "morning after" pills to be sold over the counter (limited to those over-18). The most often cited reason for these groups opposing anything related to abortion (clinics, pills, etc.) is that they are doing it to protect the life of a helpless child. But Plan-B contains doses of the hormone Progestin which prevents the release or fertilization of an egg. In other words it keeps a woman's reproductive system out of the reproductive lottery. Thanks to Science the whole raison d'etre of abortion groups is rendered moot.

No released eggs means no fertilization, no fetus, nothing. So this leaves these groups with three options:

1. Concede that science may have finally found a way to eliminate abortions, pack up their bags and go home.
2. Stick their fingers in their ears and go la la la la...
3. Admit that their objection isn't really to abortion, but to contraception -- or better yet, to people having sex.

Some of them are making a valiant attempt at a fourth option: to change the definition of an 'embryo' (i.e. what they're trying to protect) from a fertilized egg implanted in a woman's womb and undergoing cell division to a plain old fertilized egg, just floating around. The idea is that anything that gets in the way of this whole sperm + egg -> fertilization -> implantation -> cell-division process is tantamount to abortion and therefore qualifies as an object of their ire. But it's a real grasping at straws based on a single sentence in the manufacturer's fine print. Besides the FDA's decision to allow over-the-counter sales has let the cat out of the bag. Now they have to take a position that is consistent with the fact that abortion clinics may very well stop performing abortions altogether because nobody needs them any more.

That takes us back to the three options. I'm not holding my breath for #1 to happen any time soon and they can get away with #2 for only so long before they run out of air. Sooner or later they'll have to admit #3 -- that at the root of their objection is that they just hate it for unmarried people to have sex, that their blood starts boiling whenever they picture their daughter getting jiggy with the neighbor's son -- even if both of them are over eighteen.

That, of course, puts them on the same wavelength as the Taliban and the rest of the Sharia-loving crowd -- and if there's one thing that makes these people angrier than women exercising control over their own bodies, it's being compared to a bunch of Muslims.

So thanks Dr. Science, for driving a nice little wedge between these people and their nasty little judgemental causes and ripping away their thinly-veiled morality facade (oops, did I say veiled?)

I don't like abortions either. Nobody does. I wish they could be avoided altogether -- and it looks like they very well may be.

And the Racism Continues...

Let's revisit racism. Yeah, it seems like just last month, I was babbling about our friends with ethnicity issues. (OK, it was just three weeks ago... and... uh... three weeks before that... man, I do go on sometimes, don't I?) But let's see what else has crawled out from under the rock since then.

Our boy Senator George Allen (R-VA) got in a little trouble a while back for displaying a noose in his office and a Confederate flag at home. Well, this time, he was caught on tape referring to S.R. Sidarth, a young man of Indian descent, as "Macaca." He clearly said the word twice, so at least nobody has tried to claim he was misunderstood. Well, nobody but Allen.

His exact words were:

"This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere. And it's just great... Let's give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

Allen's first answer, when asked about his use of the word "macaca," was the basic defensive response: "I don't know what it means." Then he tried to claim that it was a reference to the man's hair, as in "Mohawk" - oddly enough, a cut that is only barely related to the mullet sported by our cameraman, in that they both involve hair.

Now, blogger Jeffrey Feldman did a little research, and discovered that the word was used by white supremacists to refer to black men (mostly when "nigger" seems redundant, apparently). His links are a little hard to follow: in the face of the controversy, Stormfront seems to have scrubbed their pages, and I somehow didn't feel like logging in to Vanguard News Network.

Mr Feldman also wasn't as careful as he could have been: he was referring to one post in a thread, but gave the link for the mother post it was responding to.

But the word is out there, and it doesn't mean "I respect you and don't object to your skin tone."

Since Mr. Sidarth was born and raised in Fairfax County, Virginia, it seems a little unreasonable of Allen to have welcomed him to either America or Virginia. Perhaps having realized that, Allen met with a number of Indian-American leaders to apologize for being an ass. They weren't impressed. "We expect better from our leaders... We're working toward getting satisfied; it is a work in progress."

Racism seems to be rearing its ugly head everywhere lately. The President dismisses every Muslim in the world as an "islamofascist," and Michelle Malkin, the Queen Bee of pop-culture bigotry, chimes in with a theory that all Muslims are the same and the race war is on.

Where does it lead? Well, in Maryland, we get bigots standing outside the home of Saqib Ali, a candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates, wearing a T-shirt reading "this mind is an Allah-free zone" and holding up a hand-lettered "Islam sucks" sign. That's always a good way to spend your day, right?

In the UK, two Muslim men were forced off of a flight for “acting suspiciously” and “speaking Arabic.” That's all they did. They talked quietly to each other, possibly in Arabic (the news stories haven't established what language they were speaking), and they didn't proceed directly to their seat. So they were obviously terrorists, right?

A British man named Azar Iqbal, travelling to Disneyland with his wife and three children, was detained at the Atlanta airport, questioned about whether he knew anything about a terror plot, told that "we didn't ask you to come to America," and denied entry into the United States. Because, after all, nobody of Middle Eastern descent would take their children to "the Happiest Place on Earth," would they? Everybody knows that Arabs don't love their children. Even if they're British citizens.

Here's the way it works. If it's OK to discriminate against one type of people based on their race or religion, then suddenly, it can become easier to discriminate against another race. So, what are we going to see next?

How about major movie stars getting in touch with their inner anti-Semite? (OK, let's get real, folks. Alcohol lowers inhibitions, it doesn't create new thought patterns. A drunk might blurt out things already in his mind, but he isn't likely to spontaneously create a new, original line of thought.)

How about Republican Congressional candidate's talking about how "blacks aren't the best swimmers or may not even know how to swim," or White House press secretaries using the term "tar baby" in a press conference?

Or you can do a Google news search on "Klan," and discover that they seem to be resurfacing, with rallies in Texas and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And showing up at a Harper's Ferry discussion of race relations. And even trying to gain a little press by adopting a Missouri highway. (You can even buy Klan and Nazi memorabilia at county fairs in Pennsylvania these days. Go figure.)

Keep an eye on this kind of thing. I think we'll be seeing more of it in the near future.

But one more thing about our friend George Felix Allen. Sidarth had introduced himself to Allen earlier in the week. Now, Allen had heard Sidarth's name and felt that it was appropriate to make fun of it, this could show that he doesn't respect people and their cultures. Or perhaps he just likes to give people of other races nonsense names (I wonder if he likes to call all Asians "Ching Chong" or all Middle Easterners "Abdul") - that's one of the marks of a racist.

Either way, it isn't something I'd want coming out of my Senator's mouth. Maybe it's a good thing I don't live in Virginia.

The Shadow Republican

Let's talk about Joe Lieberman. (Hell, everybody else is doing it. Why shouldn't I?)

Let’s be clear on what we have here. Joe Lieberman, a man who once said, while talking about the 2004 elections, "Senator Kerry got a lot of votes, 56 million votes, more than any Democratic candidate for president in history, but there's no prizes for second place in American politics."

Suddenly, because he doesn’t like how things turned out, that idea is out the window. Where he once wanted people to accept the results of an election, now he wants to ignore it completely. He wants to be handed the prize for coming in second.

Well, I’m sorry, Joe, but look at the bigger picture. The polling group Zogby International asked around, and discovered that almost four out of five Democrats are happy to see you go. I'm sorry if you don't like those numbers, Joe, but that's reality.

It's fascinating that most of Lieberman's support right now is coming, not from Democrats, but from Republicans. People like Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, White House press secretary Tony Snow and Vice President Dick Cheney are all making statements about Lieberman's defeat being a great national tragedy. In fact, Karl Rove apparently called Joe to say "The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do."

Or, to be fair, maybe he didn't say it. The White House denied it almost immediately, so there's really no proof either way. (On the third hand, there's an old joke: "How can you tell when insert politician here is lying? His lips are moving.")

(I'm going to indulge in a little speculation at this point, though. Consider the GOP's love of Lieberman. And then consider that we now have evidence that the White House was pressuring the British to arrest their liquid-explosive-laden terror suspects right away. Is it beyond belief that the Administration wanted the arrests to occur before the Connecticut primary? And in resisting the pressure, the British police actually threw off Karl Rove's timetable, and the arrests happened a few too days late to help out their boy Joe? Like I said, speculation. But not hard to believe, when you think about this White House's record.)

You know who's getting ignored in all this? A guy named Alan Schlesinger. He's the actual Republican running against Ned Lamont in Connecticut. A man who's pretty much ignored by his party right about now. It must suck to be him, huh?

So why would the Republicans want to support a Democratic... oh, sorry, an Independent candidate? Well, that one's easy. First, they see him as a Democrat who supports Republican ideals. (An attitude that begs the question, "What do you call someone who firmly supports the major points of the Republican party?" Answer - a Republican.)

Secondly, they see the possibility of Lieberman acting as a spoiler in the Connecticut Senate race. Every vote for Lieberman is a vote that didn't go to Lamont. And that thought must make Karl Rove wet himself with pleasure every time he thinks about it.

But why would Lieberman want to do that? Could it be that he's just following the orders given to him by the White House? Or is it something a little more basic?

I like the theory that it's simple human nature on Lieberman's part. He likes to claim that he's one of the "common people," but he's more of a child of privilege. He was born in Stamford, Connecticut, which isn't exactly Compton or South Philly. And he went to Yale, not the local community college.

Every time anybody mentions Ned Lamont, they like to add the adjective "millionaire" in front of his name, in the same place that the word "Senator" gets place in front of Lieberman. But that ignores the fact that Joe Lieberman, in his 2003 financial disclosure form, showed that he had a net worth of somewhere between $482,000 to $1.8 million. The man isn't exactly worrying about whether he can make the rent this month.

That's how I see it. Joe Lieberman thinks that he deserves to be a Senator. It's his right. He feels that he was elected three times, so he's entitled to the job now. He earned it. This attitude, of course, ignores the fact that he wasn't elected this time, but Joe isn't paying attention to that little fact now. He's like a sulky two-year-old - if reality doesn't fit with what he wants, that reality must be wrong.

That's a strangely Republican viewpoint, really. Does anybody recall Ron Suskind's little tale about his meeting with a senior Bush advisor?

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community... That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities"

So take it as you will. Some people prefer the idea that Joe is a puppet, acting out the bidding of his Republican masters. I prefer the idea that Joe is an elitist, unwilling to admit that he doesn't deserve to be in the job, even though the Democrats of Connecticut voted to replace him. Because obviously, the Connecticut Democrats aren't smartest voters in the world, or they wouldn't have voted to have him removed.

Or as Stephen Colbert put it, "Ned Lamont may have won the primary but his supporters are not mainstream Democrats. They’re against the Iraq war. A position so extreme that only 86% of Democrats agree with him" (It's possible that statistic is correct. It's possible that Stephen made it up. But it feels right, doesn't it?)

It's time for Joe to admit the truth, though. He needs to just take his ball and go home.

Well, I guess it's a good sign...

You know, it's odd. When you're clicking around randomly on YouTube, you might come across Al Gore's Penguin Army, which includes the tagline "What is Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, all about? Global Warming? The Environment? Or something much more BORING? See Al Gore's Penguin Army learn how crazy this flick really is..." It even has a link to a MySpace page (which, as it turns out, is pretty much just a placeholder for the movie).

And if you're really bored, you might make the mistake of watching the thing. And that's when you realize that this video is evidence of why some people are neither professional comedy writers or animators. It's boring. The animation is crap.
It has one joke (which isn't even funny - the penguins fall asleep because Al Gore is boring), and it goes on for WAY too long. (OK, it's only two minutes and change. But it seems like a lot longer, somehow...)

But, hey, somebody went to the trouble of making it and posting it, which is more than you've done, right? Well, that's where it gets a little tricky. Because, as it turns out, this little piece was produced by a company called DCI, a public relations firm working for Exxon-Mobil.

And strangely enough, would you like to guess which left-wing rag uncovered this? Mother Jones magazine? Nature? Again, that's where it get's tricky. Because the member of the Giant Liberal Conspiracy who found this out turns out to be the Wall Street Journal, which has long been an arm of the Democratic party, right?

So that leaves us with only two questions. First, isn't Big Oil supposed to be some kind of supervillian bent on world domination? Then why are they acting like high school kids?

And second, with trillions of dollars at their disposal, this is the best they can come up with? Something that even Conan O'Brien wouldn't think was funny? Yes, bad animation can be forgiven in an amateur video. But for maximum effect, there should be some humor involved. After all, the purpose of the video is that people should want to see it. And should want to show it to their friends. And maybe, should absorb, at least subconsciously, part of the message.

But if the video is stupid, it's got limited replay value, which destroys the entire purpose.

Suddenly, I'm feeling a lot better about the future of the environment, if these guys are the ones trying to destroy it.

I'm also wondering if Linux is going to sue, since the PR firm stole their penguins.

Racism in America

Quick disclaimer. I'm white.

I'm sorry. I can't help it. It's just the way I was born. And some people might think that this pigmentation deficiency of mine might make me unfit to comment on racism. But you know what? I don't care. I'm going to do that anyway...

You know, it's odd. I see things like (a few months ago) the controversy over a Spanish version of "the Star Spangled Banner," and I think "racism." After all, it's related to the argument over illegal aliens, which stems from a fear of people coming over and taking your job...

At least, if you happen to pick fruit for less than minimum wage, they'll be taking your job... Not that many of us do that...

But anyway, racism is alive and well in America. Four years ago, while I was still in the Air Force, I was involved in kicking a couple of Klan members out of the service, because their "personal beliefs" had started to interfere with their ability to operate in...

OK, let's just get real. We kicked them out because they were racist. Maybe soon I'll tell you why it all came to a head. But that's not the point I'm trying to get to. So let's move on.

I will be the first to admit that there are some people who see racism entirely too easily, of course. My sister's boyfriend (oh, yeah. By the way, he's black. Sorry, I'd have brought it up before, but it's not something I tend to think about. Not that he'd be willing to admit that. But that's also another story. Let's move on...)

Where was I? Oh, right. My sister's boyfriend. He thinks that the latest version of King Kong was a racist movie. See, the natives were black, and they were shown in a negative light. And the gorilla? Well, he's big and black, so he's the symbol of the strong black man. And when he dies in the end, it's symbolic of the white man triumphing over the black man. Makes it a happy ending, so all the little blond girls can sleep well...

Or something like that, anyway.

I can't agree. The natives were, if you look, painted black. Because they worshipped Kong, and wanted to be like him. And as for Kong himself, well, he's... um.... geez, how to put this delicately...

King Kong is a gorilla. They tend to be black.

There's a lot more I could say, about how this is a reimagining of a movie from the 30's, which stays fairly true to the socio-political realities of the 30's, but I don't feel like getting into that. Let's just put it this way: sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

But there's a wider point here. Let me turn this thing over to someone older and wiser than I am. New Mexico State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino.

The Race Card
by Jerry Ortiz y Pino

It is now apparently a given in American civic dialogue that racism no longer exists in America … if indeed it ever did.

If a minority group member asserts that racism still exists in this country, that incautious soul will immediately be lashed for "playing the race card" and all further rational discussion of the topic will cease.

In fact, the minority group member who rashly points to some tangible bit of evidence that a heck of a lot more than "vestigial" racism persists here will almost certainly get slapped upside the head and charged with being a "reverse racist" … whatever that means.

So vehement is the reflexive denunciation of anyone who dares to question our national record on race that it has succeeded in silencing much of the discussion on this issue. We are laboring under the impossible delusion that "race is not a factor" in our society, that we have become truly, monumentally "colorblind."

Don’t believe any of it. We continue to drag around an enormous ball and chain firmly attached to our collective ankle, the legacy of pervasive racism. It is still easier for a white ex-con in the United States today to get a job than it is for a black person without a criminal record. And when it comes to education, the notion of racial parity increasingly sounds like nothing more than a joke.

It wasn’t always that way. In fact, as recently as the early '80s, data showed we had made some amazing gains in closing the gap between white student achievement and that of minorities. Parity in literacy, high school graduation rates, college admission and even college graduation seemed tantalizingly within our grasp. We were close to having created a society with true equality of educational opportunity.

Then, maddeningly, it began slipping backward. With the Reagan administration, the two lines charting whites and non-whites in our schools, which had been converging slowly over a 20-year period, began drifting apart. They continue to diverge today, with nothing to indicate that the disparity has even made it onto the national radar, let alone sparked any outrage.

In a recent article, Jonathan Kozol notes that American public schools are today, in 2006, more racially segregated than they were at the time of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court Decision of the mid-'50s that supposedly ended our "separate but equal" public school systems. That’s an incredible indictment.

Worse, all the numbers are shocking. Minority students drop out of high school at a higher rate than whites, graduate at a lower rate, get suspended more often than whites (even for identical offenses), and have a harder time getting into college, especially the elite upper-echelon schools that for a time actively courted minority students.

What happened? For starters, the courts have backed away from affirmative action programs in university admissions, with the consequence that fewer blacks, Latinos or Native Americans are getting in.

And in a particularly insidious move, Congress has gradually but inexorably, ever since Ronald Reagan, been "trimming" social programs for the poor. "After all, the numbers were getting better all through the '60s and '70s," so the rationale went, "so we can afford to start paring back on the props that made those improved numbers possible."

Scholarship programs were turned into loans - or into nothing. Tutoring and mentoring supportive efforts were morphed into "volunteer faith-based initiatives" … or completely wiped out. Job programs like summer youth employment, Neighborhood Youth Corps, Youth Tutoring Youth—were all axed after being labeled "ineffective."

Democrats like Bill Clinton jumped on the bandwagon, too. The carnage created by his so-called Welfare Reform and Workforce Investment legislation cannot be ignored when you start totaling up the causes for our current malaise in minority education.

In exchange for losing billions of dollars in supportive assistance programs, minorities got a "No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law that has further widened the gap between the educational haves and have-nots. (In a future column, I’ll share some specific case studies that identify how NCLB is failing minority youth.)

Instead of the straight-forward traditional indicators of how we are doing educationally (drop-out and graduation rates; college admissions; literacy levels), NCLB has substituted a nightmarish complex of tests and comparisons that seem exquisitely designed to ensure that white student success will not be challenged in any way and that minority students will be kept in their place.

NCLB is up for re-authorization by Congress this year. It would be altogether appropriate for the issue of parity in public education to be raised during that crucial debate, but to do so would first require an acknowledgment that we still have a vast amount of work before us if we have any hope of converting this into a truly colorblind society.

Meanwhile, looming on the horizon, waiting its turn for our attention, is an even more difficult educational challenge: the assimilation and education of the 11 million predominately Spanish-speaking undocumented immigrants already in this country.

Healing the wounds of racism; assimilating and preparing undocumented workers and their families—these are not minor bumps in the road to be dealt with through casual indifference or as an afterthought. We need to get to work. Both Congress and the president should be digging in for some heavy lifting. Instead, they piddle around. I’m getting very worried.

So there you have it. Sometimes, a gorilla is just a gorilla. But sometimes, the gorilla is actually the elephant in the room that nobody is willing to talk about.

Why am I not surprised?

This story should be stunning. We should be reeling, and angrily calling for an investigation. But it isn't going to happen. It's not enough that George W. Bush sells out to corporations, he has to give it the personal touch, too. He sells out to individuals. All part of the fine service he provides to his "base."

And you don't need to read the whole story. You don't even need to read all of the first five paragraphs: read the first two paragraphs, skip two, and read the fifth.

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.

The administration plans to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency's 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, in less than 70 days. Kevin Brown, an IRS deputy commissioner, confirmed the cuts after The New York Times was given internal documents by people inside the IRS who oppose them.

The Bush administration has successfully lobbied Congress to enact measures that reduce the number of Americans who are subject to the estate tax -- which opponents refer to as the "death tax" -- but has failed in its efforts to eliminate the tax entirely.

Brown said Friday that he had ordered the staff cuts because far fewer people were obliged to pay estate taxes under President Bush's legislation.
But six IRS estate tax lawyers whose jobs are likely to be eliminated said in interviews that the cuts were just the latest moves behind the scenes at the IRS to shield people with political connections and complex tax-avoidance devices from thorough audits.

Sharyn Phillips, a veteran IRS estate tax lawyer in Manhattan, called the cuts a "back-door way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax."

There really isn't much more to say after that point. This is the only Administration in the history of the world who cut taxes during a time of war. And now we're cutting them more. But we're only cutting the taxes of the people who can afford to pay.

This is why America is going broke.

There are no "conservatives" in the Republican Party any more. Why do they keep using that word to refer to themselves?

Louisiana and racist cops. And Cheesy Poofs, for that matter.

Tomorrow, there's going to be a news conference about the racist sheriff of St. Tammany Parish. But is it just an overreaction? Is the sheriff racist, or just misunderstood?

Well, first of all, crooksandliars.com has a lot to be proud of, since nobody was paying any attention to this story until they brought it to the attention of America. We have a video of the sheriff of St Tammany Parish, Jack Strain, making the following statement.

"Now I don’t get into calling people names and all that fact, but if you’re gonna walk the streets of St. Tammany Parish with dreadlocks and 'Chee Wee' hairstyles, then you can expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff’s deputy."

That seems pretty open. Obvious, even. The sheriff is planning to specifically target people based on their haircut. Haircuts mostly worn by black people.

Gee, I don't see how that could possibly be considered racist...

And after John Amato's blog (crooksandliars.com - pay attention, people!) brought this to America's short attention span (on the sixth of July), suddenly the story makes the Associated Press (on the eighth of July).

And now, Annie Spell, one of the only white branch presidents of the NAACP has a relatively high-profile press conference on the subject.

To be entirely honest, the sheriff managed to confuse me a little. Having lived in N'Awlins as a kid, I know that "Chee Wees" are a cheese snack, pretty much like Cheetos. Well, OK, Chee Wees are puffed, and Cheetos are... collapsed, I guess. But if I said that they're like Cheez Doodles or Cheese Curls, I wouldn't get nearly the universal understanding, would I?

OK, so I could have gone for the cheap pop-culture reference and said "Cheesy Poofs," but that would have been a cop-out, wouldn't it?

Anyway... (crap, I knew I had a point here... what the hell was it? Oh, right...) Anyway, I have absolutely no idea how the cheesy snack food became a slang term for a hairstyle, but there it is.

So Annie Spell will be holding a press conference in Covington, Louisiana, in front of the sarcastically-named "St Tammany Parish Justice Center." If you happen to be in the neighborhood, go there.

But this isn't the first time that we've had problems with law enforcement in Louisiana and their racist attitudes toward Katrina survivors. At this stage, very few people remember a little, almost ignored story from the days of Hurricane Katrina. But while the right wing was trying to blame New Orleans natives for not evacuating (despite the fact that 26% of New Orleans residents didn't own cars - yeah, I know, it's shocking in the dawn of the 21st Century, but it's true), nobody remembers that people who tried to evacuate on foot were stopped, threatened with guns, and forced to walk back into the flooded city.

If you have any questions on this incident, direct them to Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna Police Department. Perhaps he has an explanation for this unchristian behavior on the part of his officers.

Hey, I'm just being fair and balanced here. We report, you decide.

Par-TAY!

My wife forced me to be sociable this weekend.

That's not something I do well. I'm not a party-animal type of guy. I deal with people well in a business environment, because I can claim work pressures and go away. But for the most part, I'm just as happy not dealing with them.

My wife, on the other hand, has some strange, twisted pack-animal mentality that makes her want to be around other people, no matter how loud, annoying or unavoidable they are. What she has never really grasped is the fact that most people are ignorant. She doggedly assumes that people are worth knowing, rather than avoiding. I don't understand it.

But that's the way she is, and I've pretty much gotten used to it by now.

I was at least fortunate in one respect. She managed to assemble some relatively intelligent people for this party, instead of the usual gang of idiots. No children - there were a couple of teenagers, who we easily kept distracted by dangling shiny objects in front of them, and by setting up video games in the living room.

And the rest of us stood outside and drank, grilled large amounts of meat, made plenty of stupid jokes, and embarrassed the hell out of one lady's teenaged daughter (she didn't like video games, so she came out to join the adults).

We had, for anyone under twenty-one, lemonade, homemade raspberry lemonade, iced tea, milk and water. This, of course, made the teenagers unhappy, because we had our legal drug of choice (alcohol) and they didn't have any of theirs (caffeine). So the ungrateful bastards actually got up en masse, cadged money from whatever adults were nearby, and walked a half-mile to the corner store to buy Coke and Red Bull. Go figure.

As for the adults, my wife made a spectacular white sangria (it involved cheap boxed wine, apricot brandy, a lot of fruit, and some other stuff that I'll just mysteriously call "ingredients," because I wasn't technically paying attention when she told me what was in it). Plus there was wine, brandy, rum and beer. One of our guests brought Bud Light, but consented to drink real beer after I made fun of the carbonated water in his hands.

Another guest brought Mike's Hard Lemonade (actually a variety box, with a range of brightly-colored bottles), which I didn't properly make fun of because I didn't have any at the time. But I found an unopened one in the cooler the next day, and made the mistake of drinking it.

I don't think that I approve of Mike's. It tastes like Koolaid, and you can't even tell that it has 5% alcohol. This undoubtedly makes it popular with teenagers: because you can't tell it contains alcohol, and because only teenagers can drink that much high-fructose corn syrup without puking.

Trust me on this, if you see a Mike's drinker puking in pretty rainbow colors, it's because their stomach finally rebelled from all the crap, and not because of the healthy, life-sustaining alcohol in it.

But all in all, the whole thing didn't work out too badly. I was in a crowd of people all day, and I didn't kill anyone. And now my wife owes me, for putting up with all of this.

To keep balance in the universe, of course, the next day I had to cover for a coworker who was sick. I had to answer phones and do Customer Service-type work.

I suspect that it's because God hates me.

Flagging Enthusiasm

I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and then wrap himself in the flag.
~~ Representative Craig Washington (D-Texas)

Once again, our Congress is ignoring the environment, Iraq, the destruction of the economy, and everything else that really matters. Instead, they're wasting time and money on a subject that looks good for the voters: a ban on burning the US flag. And not just something simple like a law: they want an amendment to the Constitution.

This is, of course, a scam. This is something that lawmakers do to hide the fact that they haven't done anything worthwhile.

I'm not sure who came up with it first, but there's a basic truth floating around out there.

Countries that already outlaw burning the national flag include China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Cuba.

That's Iraq under Saddam, by the way. That seems like a nice crowd to be associated with, doesn't it?

Let's be clear about one thing. Nobody can be hurt when a flag is burned, unless they're busy wrapping themselves in it. A flag is just a symbol. And before we get our knickers all knotted up over the destruction of a symbol, perhaps we should ignore the symbol for a moment. Because we should be more concerned about the people destroying what that flag stands for - America and the values this country used to represent.

There isn't a lot of flag burning going on in America right now. It all seems to be overseas, and mostly in the Middle East - the last place America invaded, you might notice. And oddly enough, since they aren't subject to American laws over there, they aren't too worried about getting arrested for their un-American activities.

And by the way, do you happen to know what the official method of destroying a tattered or frayed flag is? Let's check out the US Code - to be exact, 4 USC 8(k):

The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.

OK. So if this amendment passes, they won't be getting a lot of volunteers for that duty.

Oh, wait. The difference between respectfully burning the flag, and burning the flag in protest of something changes how the arsonist in question is treated? So now we get to arrest people because of what they're thinking? Who is it out there that thinks that a formally-defined federal law enforcing "thought crimes" is a good idea?

Personally, I don't have a problem with Joe Iraqi burning an American flag. I already knew he didn't like us. On the other hand, I have a problem with people who attach flags onto their car to show their patriotism. This started happening a lot right after 9/11.

Trouble is, the average flag (and especially the average small souvenir-type flag, cheaply made in some third-world country) isn't made to stand up to speeds of sixty miles an hour, or even thirty miles an hour. So it doesn't take long before you end up with a frayed red-gray-and-blue rag on a stick. And yes, that qualifies as desecration.

Incidentally, a car is a carefully-engineered machine, and anything attached to the outside, even a three-by-six souvenir flag, will increase wind resistance by a small amount, which will increase the amount of fuel that the car burns. And even if it's only by a miniscule amount, that amount is multiplied by the thousands of other cars on the road with attached flags.

And increased gas mileage means more money into the pockets of Middle Eastern regimes, many of which are known to support terrorism. Which means that by attaching a flag to your car, you are supporting terrorism. Think about that for a while.

But that brings us to the biggest problem with an amendment to the Constitution on his subject. Do you just ban "burning" (which would leave the market wide open for "US Flag Toilet Paper®"), or are you going with a more general "desecration"?

Well, the trouble is, you then have to define "desecration." For example, how about a jacket with an American flag across the back? Or a red-white-and-blue bandanna tied around your head?

What about a Ku Klux Klan rally? Personally, I think that when the American flag is used to celebrate racism, then that action qualifies as desecration. But you don't see me rushing to get an amendment into the Constitution, do you?

Many businesses use the American flag in ads to sell their product. Great. But does that mean that we have to look over the newspaper before we use it to start a fire in the fireplace? Don't want to have the Feds breaking down the door when the two of you are making love on the rug in front of a roaring fire, do you?

Or how about a soda in a "Forth of July Collectable can?" Are you allowed to just throw that away, or will there be a special method for disposing of it?

If you have a flagpole in your front yard and the flag touches the ground as you're lowering it, is that a problem? Even if it gets muddy? What about those displays by various groups where a bunch of souvenir flags are planted in the ground? Are you subject to arrest for stepping on one?

Which leads into the other problem with this concept: they haven't defined "flag." Yeah, it seems like a simple question, but let's go back to that newspaper ad. Suppose somebody printed an American flag on a sheet of newsprint, with a one-inch white border. Is that a flag? Or is it a picture of a flag? And if it's a picture of a flag instead of a real flag, can you burn it, or would you still get in trouble?

For that matter, what if you ran some polyvinyl through that printing press? Is it still a flag if it has a white border around it? Or is it an image of a flag on a cloth-like substance? How about painting an American flag in oil paint on a canvas? It's just a painting, right?

What if someone takes an American flag (an actual flag this time), and paints a large black swastika in the middle of it? Can you burn that? Wouldn't any true patriot want to?

And which flag are we talking about, anyway? America has had a bunch of them, after all. Is it just the current flag that we can't burn, or are we including all the flags through history? The one with thirteen stars in a circle? The forty-eight-star flag from the fifties looks awfully similar to the current one.

What about the various versions of the "Don't Tread On Me" snake? Does he count? That one's usually not even in the right colors.

An amendment to the Constitution over a badly defined and unenforceable "crime" is a waste of both time and money. And how many people would be arrested for burning a red-white-and-yellow flag? Or one with fourteen stripes or fifty-four stars? By definition, they are innocent of any crime, although it might not appear that way to the casual observer.

Maybe we should stick to prosecuting crimes where people are actually getting hurt. Can we do that?

Suffering from Rove Rage

You know, it's strange. I spent twenty-one years in the military. I've had three kids (two of them are twenty and technically adults; one is sixteen and technically a pain in the ass). It takes a lot to make me angry. I've been yelled at by experts. I've been lied to, in my face, by both experts and complete amateurs. I've hunkered down in fox holes, wondering if the next bomb would drop just a little bit too close. I've watched inexperienced, uncaring idiots try to destroy the country that gave me life.

And I'm pretty placid.

I know about the morons wandering through America. I can even rail against them. But, for the most part, I don't really get carried away with my feelings. It takes a lot to make me really angry. I see the morons, I wonder at their ability to ignore simple logic, but it's been years since I've felt the heat rising to my face, felt my blood pressure rising, and been unable to control my anger over the injustices being perpetrated by an uncaring government.

On the other hand, I left the Air Force because George Bush got reelected.

For entirely logical reasons, of course. I felt that it was time to get out of the military. I'd been to Iraq, and I hadn't had to kill anyone. And I didn't want to take the chance that I would end up going back and killing an Iraqi, who would be attacking people invading his country - in other words, doing for his country exactly what I'd be trying to do for mine if our situations were reversed.

(Yes, I understand that there are outside forces at work in Iraq. But there are also people born in Iraq, who see Americans as the evil bastards who attacked them, destroyed their country, and started torturing and killing innocent Iraqi people. And those are the people I wouldn't want to shoot.)

However, just like everybody else, I'm a prisoner of my upbringing. My father was a career Army officer: a West Point graduate, from a time when they were still able to instill ethics in their officers. And then I became a non-commissioned officer myself, with a certain inherited sense of history and ethics.

So you might (or might not) understand that I hate to be lied to. It’s a flaw in my character, but one that I can't really control that well. Liars and hypocrites bother me, and I find myself automatically disliking them.

When you couple that minor quirk in my personality with a barely-perceptible pride in my military background, and you end up with a convergence of attitudes that, to be honest, rarely intrudes on my life.

Until Karl Roves stands up and talks.

The man is bad enough when he stays behind the scenes. He's one of those lower life forms that do well in politics. He likes to play his little games, lying about people and setting up his little tricks. And he seems to be pretty good at it, until he starts to make speeches.

Karl Rove's entire career has been built around dirty politics. Any history of his career mentions him sneaking in to the headquarters of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon, stealing some official letterhead, and sending out a thousand invitations to a party at the Democrat's headquarters, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing." (This was in 1970, before home computers and printers, when "letterhead stationary" meant a lot more than it does today.)

Or in 1986, Rove was working for Republican Bill Clements. Right before a debate between Clements and Democrat Mark White, Rove told reporters that the Democrats had bugged his office. Oddly enough, the battery in the bug was so small that it needed to be changed every few hours, and it had just been changed out before Rove showed it to the press. The police and FBI dropped the investigation. But White's reputation was shot, and he subsequently lost the election.

With just a little bit of research, you start to see that Karl Rove has a long history of dishonesty and double-dealing. But let's look at more recent news.

Rove gave a speech in New Hampshire a week ago, where he accused Democrats of being cowards.

(Nor is this the first time that he crawled out from under his rock and called Democrats cowards and traitors. Odd how that works: if you disagree with Bush's policies, there's no way that you could just have a difference of opinion. You must immediately be labeled a traitor. Or a Nazi. Strange, that...)

Let's consider the words of that brave leader of men, Karl Rove.

"When it gets tough, they fall back on that party's old platform of cutting and running," he said. "They may be with you for the first few bullets but they won't be there for the last tough battles."

But strangely enough, despite his strong words about patriotism and bravery, when Karl Rove had the opportunity to go to war himself, he ran away.

While my father, a man with a wife and three children, was spending two tours in Vietnam, Karl Rove was dodging the draft. He took student deferments when he wasn't a full-time student. He moved and didn't notify the draft board.

Of course, he isn't the only one. George Bush has never been able to document his time in the National Guard. Dick Cheney took five deferments to get out of Vietnam. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz - even the Republican's unelected spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, avoided the draft because of a boil on his butt (OK, technically a pilonidal cyst, but I'm too busy resisting any "pain in the ass" jokes to make a medical diagnosis).

And that's where my problem with lying starts to kick in. If a pasty-faced coward like Karl Rove is going to stand up there and talk about bravery, maybe he should reach down and see if he has testicles of his own.

Karl Rove didn't have the courage to stand up for his country for "the first few bullets," much less "the last tough battles." It's time for him to shut the hell up.

Cats make a house a home (a Home for the Criminally Insane)

You know, I've never been a cat person. Dogs, at least, will give you unconditional love in exchange for the disgusting food you feed them. Cats, on the other hand, will ignore you until they're hungry, when they'll yowl in a loud and obnoxious manner until you feed them.

And sometimes, they might even consent to lie next to you and let you pet them.

But, despite the obvious similarities between cats, as it turns out, they have distinctly different personalities. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I seem to have become the zookeeper for a collection of (among other beasts) four different cats. And here's the way you tell them apart (aside from relatively insignificant differences in size and fur color, of course).

Our primary cat, Bucky, is a large (but not quite overweight) orange tabby beast, whose primary purpose in life is finding a comfortable place to sit. She has the gift of immovable stubbornness, in that if she's sitting somewhere, that place is off limits for everybody else in the family. She will even stare down the dogs, if they deign to intrude on her space. Once she's ensconced herself in a seat, it is, by God, hers. Nobody dares to move her.

Except me, of course. Because I'm apparently a bastard. I'll just sweep her from whatever spot I plan to sit down in, and plant my butt right in the recently-vacated cat-shaped dimple (and then get yelled at by my wife for being mean to the poor little kitty).

Screw it. There's only one computer chair, and I'm not going to learn to type standing up at this point in my life. But if you're looking for two words to describe Bucky, I think I've encompassed them in the last two paragraphs. "Stubborn" and "lazy."

But then there's our second cat, Phantom. Ugliest beast you ever saw. In a moment of weakness, I said that we could have a second cat ("But only one!" You see how well that worked out...) to keep the first one company. My only rule was that we should get a kitten. (Hey, I like kittens. What's your point?) And we ended up with a black-and-brown mottled beast with a light spot across one eye. My wife says it looks like the Phantom of the Opera mask. Hence the name.

Personally, I think it looks like an irregular birthmark, but nobody wants to hear my opinion. (I remember when the "man of the house" was respected. What the hell happened to that perfectly good attitude?)

Phantom (occasionally Menace, as in "the Phantom Menace") is a bully. She's the second biggest cat in the house, and she figures it's her duty to keep the other cats in shape. She's their personal trainer - her exercise regimen consists of jumping on them from darkened corners, attacking them when they're asleep, and generally making life "interesting" for them.

She doesn't do this to Bucky, because Bucky wouldn't stand for it. But she still has two other cats to annoy, so she's happy.

So let's consider those two other cants. We have Pandora, who's supposed to belong to my daughter. (Oddly enough, the daughter moved out, but the cat's still here. How the hell does that happen?) Pure black, small for her age, and needy. I stopped having to wake up for two o'clock feedings years ago. Nonetheless, I still find myself wandering down the hall at God-awful early hours of the night, to grab the lonely cat yowling in despair and lob her into my son's room. (Hey, let him take care of her. I'm going back to bed...) She can't stand to be alone, and she'll sob piteously if she suddenly thinks that everyone has left.

Not that anyone has. She's just on the wrong end of the house, and doesn't have the brains to find her way back to us, across that huge 20-yard expanse of rug, without getting lost.

And finally, we have Abby. (Short for, as far as I'm concerned, Abby-normal.) No matter how stupid Pandora might be, she's a Nobel Prize winner next to Abby. I have actually seen Abby jump for a windowsill and miss. Three times. I have seen her sitting at the end of the hallway, watching as Pandora gets mugged by Phantom: Pandora runs away, Phantom retreats into her shadowed corner. And Abby goes marching down the hall, right into the kill-zone where even the houseplants can figure out that Phantom is going to attack her.

All the brains of a ball-peen hammer. I wonder sometimes why Darwin doesn't come back from the dead and kill her himself.

Abby has issues. For example, she doesn't like cat food. She'll eat it, if forced, but she prefers dog food. In fact, she loves it so much that I've come into the kitchen to find one of the dogs snorking up the kibble like a vacuum cleaner on steroids, and there, on the other side of the bowl, is Abby, coated in flying dog-spittle, delicately munching away.

So yes, if forced, I will admit that cats have personalities. Maybe not good ones, but personalities.

I still prefer dogs.

Let's check in on Michelle Malkin

So, here's what we have.

On October 20, 1970, Michelle Maglalang was born to Filipino parents in the United States on a work visa (a fact that her official bio is strangely silent about, although you can find it mentioned in passing at other sites). She married college sweetheart Jesse Malkin (who some have accused of being her puppet-master/co-writer, or at least the source of her political leanings), and began writing under the name (you guessed it) Michelle Malkin.

She recently made some statements critical of "anchor babies" - babies that foreign nationals have in the United States, which those damned brown people (or as she calls them, "obstetric tourists") use to gain American citizenship. A scenario which sounds strangely like her own biography.

The General, in another brilliant letter, called her on this apparent hypocrisy. Somehow, I doubt that she'll reply to him.

Hell, she never sent me an answer. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Absentee Blogger

Haven't posted for two weeks or so. Major plumbing work in my house, and didn't have the time. Sorry for those (two) of you who are actually reading my babblings.

Here's some thoughts on home repair for you:

1. Every job takes three times as long as you allow for it. Even if you budget for three times as long, you've then moved the end date up three times farther into the future.

2. Just when you think you've got a handle on fixing one problem, something else breaks.

2(a). If you think that you've got a handle on fixing one problem, you don't know the whole story.
2(b). Oh, yeah, and by the way. That other thing? It's still gonna break.

3. Pain is God's way of saying that you're doing it right.

3(a). Except when it isn't.

4. You didn't need that knuckle, did you?

5. Hear that grinding noise? That's gonna cost you. Feel free to switch out "dripping," "whining," "snapping," or "crackling." Or no noise at all.

6. You know that wall board you just ripped out? Four choices.

6(a). You didn't rip out enough.
6(b). You ripped out wa-aaay too much.
6(c). You ripped out entirely the wrong one.
6(d). Hey, check out the new problem you just found!

7. "Uh, honey? Did you remember to pay the homeowner's insurance?"