Cheerleading?

Now I don't follow the politics of all states, so I'm not positive that they're all doing incredibly important stuff, but if they're all bogged down with things as pointless as trying to make state agencies police the sexiness factor of high school cheerleaders, then I think we're in trouble.

I've seen a number of high school cheerleaders in my day, and even though I know I have a more liberal viewpoint about things like this, I didn't see anything too terribly wrong with what they were doing. Sure, sometimes things could get suggestive, especially as influenced by movies and pop music and Britney *%#$ing Spears, but I don't see where Texas gets off trying to make this a state issue.

I'm not a Texan, so I'm not proposing that I know better how to run Texas than do the Texans. But I just don't see how this thing is enforceable. Are they going to have TEA (Texas Education Agency) agents at every local sporting event where cheerleaders perform? I think that would probably tend to bloat the budget of the TEA to unacceptable levels. So what, then? Will the ability of individual school administrators to reprimand cheerleaders be constricted? Will a school's principal have to run to the TEA to get them to come down next week and tell Kaitlyn Jones that she shook it a little too hard and offended a mother in the crowd?

I understand what they're trying to do, but the way they did it makes it seem like a futile gesture at best; vulgar "moral" positioning at worst.

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Good for them

It may have been forced upon them, but Reps. Smith (R) and Cole (R) of the Ethics Committee are bowing out of any investigation of Tom DeLay because of potential conflicts of interest. As I said, it may not have been their initiative, but it's a good thing, and the GOP should at least be recognized for trying to get things back to some semblance of morality.

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Dude...

I just posted a comment over at Decision '08, and I noticed that the date is 05-05-05. That's creepy.

That is all.

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Ben Folds

And now, a rare non-political post. If you are reading this and you're not familiar with Ben Folds and his music, then do yourself a favor and get out there and get some. Go buy a CD at Best Buy, or download some stuff on iTunes, whatever you want to do. He's got three albums and three EPs (Albums: Rockin' the Suburbs, Ben Folds Live, Songs for Silverman; EPs: Speed Graphic, Sunny 16, Super D), and he's got four albums with his group Ben Folds Five, which broke up in 1999 (Ben Folds Five, Whatever and Ever Amen, Naked Baby Photos, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner).

The man's truly one of the most talented singer/songwriters out there today. I saw him on his Ben Folds Live tour in April, 2003, and it was the most amazing concert I've ever been to. It was just one guy and a piano on stage for two full hours, and there was more energy there than I've seen with full bands and pyrotechnics and all that jazz.

So do yourself a favor and get familiar with him if you're not already.

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Dobson

Why do they keep using the kid gloves when talking about this guy?

Argh.

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A proposal of bipartisanship

I went to church with Andy Card a couple of times. Most recently this past Christmas Eve, as a matter of fact. I wrote a post about it back then, if you want to dig. But you don't have to, because it's not really that interesting. Anyway, he seemed like a nice enough guy, and I'm sure he is.

But that doesn't stop him from being a partisan hack, just like many others on both sides of the aisle.

Card was all over the talk shows this weekend, spouting that new GOP line that Democrats need to be part of the solution rather than complaining about the problem. He talked about a couple of issues. There's the judges and Bolton, there's DeLay, and there's Social Security. He says that he'd like the Democrats to be more than just oppositionists. But is that all they're doing? And how can you tell when you're coming from just as stubborn a position? There's no common ground being found here. And when you look at what Card's really got to say here, it's pretty simple.

• Democrats should get over themselves and confirm Bolton
• Tom DeLay didn't do anything wrong, and everybody's just making it all up
  
• The only way for Democrats to cooperate on Social Security is to go with the President's plan, such as it is
• Even though it's legitimate and not against the rules to use the filibuster on judicial nominees, he doesn't like it and it therefore shouldn't be allowed.

That's not building a bridge. That's not reaching out. That's like a deal with the devil. To basically tell people that the only way for them to gain traction is to give up their own sincerely held principles is naive and laughable. We can have debate, and that's fine, but when it gets to the point where your rhetoric denies the possibility of another point of viiew, then we're in trouble.

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The only difference...

...between the ongoing fight for the already-done Washington state governor's race and the fight for the United States presidential race of 2000 is that the GOP is far more tenacious than the Democrats seemed to want to be. Now a judge is letting them use proportional analysis in their attack on the governorship. That means that if they find 10 illegal votes cast in a district that voted 60% Democrat and 40% Republican, it's assumed that those illegal votes kept the same proportions. Yeah, it's guesswork, but there's really no better way to do it, I don't think. If you want to disqualify the illegal votes, you've got to do it somehow, and it wouldn't work to get the people who cast those votes to testify about how they voted.

I think the larger issue here is that it's still going on. The Democrats, in 2000, were urged to give up fighting for the presidency. For the good of the nation, they said. Hand recounts that have been completed in Washington State were stopped by the courts in Florida four and a half years ago.

I guess this time it's for the good of Washington State to have a protracted, six month battle over their gubernatorial election, right?

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Sorry

I apologize to my readers for the lack of blogging recently. I don't know what it was, but I just wasn't inspired to write anything recently. I've been keeping track of the news and stuff, but nothing jumped out at me, really. It made me think that perhaps my ability to tolerate the bullshit that still somehow passes for "legitimate journalism" had reached critical mass.

Plenty of people have had plenty of things to say, for instance, about the Wilbanks case, so I don't have anything new to add. But it certainly points to a media hungry for tragedy when they're preemptively talking about ordering a lie detector test for the fiance, things like that.

I watched some of Bush's press conference the other day, and it was nothing special. It was nothing we didn't know he'd say. He took up the positions he'd already taken up before, and said stuff he's said before. But that having been said, it's the President of the United States, and networks were cutting him off in the middle for other programming. Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't care less about The Apprentice, so I don't need NBC to cut off the President to show it.

I get most of my news online now, and I use my television to watch movies and play the occasional video game (I wish Donkey Konga 2 would come out sooner.....I'm such a dork). But to tell the truth, the blogosphere isn't all that much better. It can point you toward what stories are all the buzz, but then you've got 3,000 blogs all having to have their say about it. The Wilbanks story? Big buzz. But there's really nothing to be said about it, which you would have a hard time telling from the amount already written and "reported" on it. Look all over the liberal blogosphere and you'll see people outraged that ABC is giving commercial time to Focus on the Family when they didn't give it to the United Church of Christ. The UCC is very open and tolerant, and their message was deemed too controversial. Focus on the Family is founded by James Dobson, and their commercial will be peddling a message of Pavlovian conditioning of children to be obedient. Causing children physical pain every time they screw up will make them learn, for sure.

How do I know all that? Because I read it on about 10 different liberal blogs. I feel the same way, but at what point do you stop and say to yourself, "You know, I could write something on this, but it would be the same as what I just read"? The answer? In the political blogosphere, almost nobody says that to themselves.

So I'm at an impasse here. Either I become a hypocrite and just start blogging on news stories that I see on CNN and MSNBC again (maybe tempered by not reading so many blogs to color my opinion before the fact), or else maybe I take my time and write some reasoned, thoughtful essay-type pieces.

What do you think?

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Willful Ignorance

It gets scarier and scarier. The anti-scientific lobby is getting closer and closer in a lot of places (notably Kansas, in this article) to lifting intelligent design and creationism to at least equal standing with evolution in biology classes.

Biology is a science. We don't teach, in the context of science, convictions that are unfounded by evidence. If your theory of biology consists of, "Well, I just don't see how there can't be an intelligent designer," then I'm sorry, but you're not on the same footing as evolution. Evolution has taken observations and examples over years and formed hypotheses based on them. Are there holes? Sure, and they're looking to fill them, as they are little by little every day. But evolution is more than just a theory. It's a Theory. See the difference? A scientific Theory (see the Theory of Relativity, for example) is more than, say, a theory that a detective might have on a Law & Order episode. Theory is for all intents and purposes fact, in scientific terms.

Argh.

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Strange comment...

Most of you won't see this, as it's on a post that's a few months old, so I figured it'd merit a post of its own. I just got a comment on my "Confederate Flag Prom Dress" post, and I'll post it here for your benefit:

Well pardon me but I think that this girl was causing no harm I meanif its
okay for guys and girls to wear there pants showing their buttcrack then she
should've been aloud to wear her dress. And also youdont know what the flag
stands for because if you did you would thinkthere was no harm in whaty she did.
So keep your DUMB PREJUDICEcomments to your self
By the way Im gonna have a rebel flag prom dress so comment aboutthat
Always J.H. REDNECK ON A MISSION

I gave you a topic. Discuss.

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Sidekick DeLay?

This just seems like a bad idea. DeLay is joining Bush on the Social Security barnstorming tour. I can't help but think that, whatever the political advantages of adding DeLay to his team, it can't be a good thing to bring on board somebody who's had to collect over $300,000 just in legal defense monies over the last year and a half. DeLay's been getting increasingly shrill and partisan in a time when, I would think, Bush would be wanting to get less partisan, in hopes of crafting a bill that has any chance of passing.

I can't help but think that this will alienate some on-the-fence-about-Social-Security Democrats.

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Not too surprising...

A new ABC/WaPo poll shows that the public rejects the GOP's "nuclear option" by a 2-1 margin. Not surprising, I think. Of course the left opposes it. That much goes without saying. But it seems logical to me that a portion of the right would oppose the rules change as well, in anticipation of a backswing in political influence. The Republicans will not be in power forever, and some forward-thinking Republicans want to have the option to use in a few years when justices they don't like are being brought up to the Senate.

Plus, I've found that people are, in general, not too fond of railroading. If there's legitimate rules that can block something from happening, people are going to get upset if your solution is to change the rules, and then try to tell everybody that the rules were wrong in the first place.

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New Energy Bill?

This makes me sick. But not as sick as the people being made actually physically ill by their contaminated groundwater.

MTBE manufacturers (a gasoline additive) have been granted, in the House version of this Energy Bill, liability protection from lawsuits about contaminated drinking water. They've said they need protection because they expect an upsurge in lawsuits.

See, what that says to me is that they've been doing a lot of naughty business, and now they don't want to have to pay for it. Congress will be only too happy to oblige.

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Obesity redux

Is it terrible that, upon reading this article on FOXNews, my first thought was that the CDC is in the hands of corporate fast-food interests?

So in January, the CDC said that obesity-related deaths in the United States had shot up to 365,000 per year. 1,000 per day. Now, they say that it's only 25,814. That would slide obesity from the second biggest killer to the seventh biggest killer in the U.S.

How is it possible that they've revised their estimate down by fourteen times? And what's more, they're saying now that they've previously underestimated the benefits of being moderately overweight! At that point, if it's safer to be "moderately overweight" as opposed to being normal weight, what the hell does "normal" mean?

This whole thing stinks to me. Like crazy.

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No More Internet!

Anthony Kennedy has done research on the internet? That's a nish-nish, as Bruno would say.

Seriously, though, unless Kennedy's coming in and saying, "Well, Josh Marshall says this...." or "Glenn Reynolds says that...." I don't see the issue. I don't see why Supreme Court justices should be blocked from being able to expand their bases of knowledge and opinion through whatever means they so desire.

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The Lessons of Bubbles

Thanks to Dad for the link.

I had thought that everybody had learned a big lesson from the dot-com bubble of the late nineties. What was that lesson? Bubbles pop. Everybody goes around saying that lessons were learned, that we won't make that mistake again, but what's going on now?

The Housing bubble.

That's what everyone calls it. It's another bubble. We all know about bubbles now. We've learned valuable lessons from them. Remember what bubbles do? They pop.

But I've had a number of conversations with people who have no doubt that this bubble will either just continue to climb (which is a view absolutely divorced from reality), or that housing prices will reach a nice little plateau and just stay there for a while.

Housing prices are already perilously high. A hell of a lot of people can't afford to buy houses, and the ones who already have them are getting money just for the fact that they happened to have them at the right time. If the appraised value of your house goes up, your equity goes up, and you can take out home equity loans for a lot more money. What's more, the rising prices makes demand high because so many people want into the free money business, and that drives prices up even higher.

So in this "ownership society," fewer and fewer people every day are able to own houses.

But we've got to be cognizant of the lessons we've already learned from bubbles. We've known this since we were two years old.

Bubbles pop.

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A New Pope

I don't have much to say about this. I mean, good for them for getting it all done quickly and such.

But I just wonder, after years of calling him Joseph Ratzinger, is it supposed to be easy to just switch right into calling him Benedict XVI and Holy Father? What about for the people who didn't vote for him? Are they supposed to feel ashamed of themselves for not being in touch with who God wanted to be the pope?

So confusing...

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Get over yourself

Ann Coulter, "reigning diva of the hysterical Right," as Al Franken would have it, is on the cover of Time magazine this week. Awesome. So that should probably assuage some of her misgivings about the media being so left-leaning, right?

Wrong.

Now she and other conservatives are complaining, get this, that though the six-page story is complimentary and factually correct, the picture on the cover isn't as flattering as they'd like. They think it makes her look like she has a big head, in their words. You tell me.



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Polls

I took down the Best Picture poll, finally. Y'all decided that it was a tie between Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Incredibles, though all but one of the ten choices got at least one vote. Mine was for Eternal Sunshine, personally.

Now I've got a new one up. Vote in it. Vote like crazy.

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John Edwards Is the Man

I don't think he stands a snowball's chance in hell at a run for the presidency, but this post by John Edwards over at TalkingPointsMemo's Bankruptcy Blog makes me respect him like crazy.

Who'd've thought that such a casual admission as "I was wrong" can engender such good feelings?

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Manufacturing Crises

As is being widely noted in the blogosphere and the news, this estate tax is on the road to repeal. I wrote about it yesterday, but should issue a correction. When I said that it would cost $290 billion in the next 10 years, it was techinically true, but that means it would cost $290 billion between 2005 and 2015. But it wouldn't take effect until 2012. In the 10 years between 2012 and 2022, it would cost close to a trillion dollars to repeal the estate tax.

Many are rightly noting that it seems to be the height of idiocy to push through another trillion dollar tax cut on one hand while screaming that we don't have enough money to finance our obligations to the Social Security Trust Fund on the other hand. Conservatives argue that we'll meet with a shortfall and have to raise taxes again to cover it. But if they hadn't so drastically and precipitously lowered taxes in the first place, would we be in this place?

Is it not possible that this "crisis" in Social Security's solvency has been a carefully calculated and manufactured one? It seems quite easy. Ramp up the rhetoric, talk about giving back "your money" to the people, until it's not politically viable to vote against massive tax cuts. Then, when all of a sudden you've cut the government's revenue like crazy, say that you won't have enough money to pay back the obligations to the program which you despise. Maybe, more rightly, the program devised by someone you despise.

So we'd have to raise taxes, huh? Well, screw that, say the American people! We have the God-given right to lower taxes, to keep our money, etc. How quickly we forget that just a few short years ago we had higher taxes, a balanced budget, and no trumped-up crisis about Social Security.

So the smartest thing to do, probably, is to eliminate the estate tax, which would go about halfway toward funding the liabilities owed the Social Security Trust Fund by the federal government.

Way to go, guys.

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Day of Silence/Day of Truth

One's about promoting tolerance and respect, the other's about promoting intolerance and disrespect. One's secular, the other's religious. One's preemptive, the other's reactionary.

You all know how I feel about this debate, so I hope I can say I think that this "Day of Truth" nonsense is disgusting.

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Estate tax

Misinformation and intentionally perpetuated ignorance fuel the fierce battle for the repeal of the estate tax. Republicans started calling it the "death tax" in 1995, when studies showed that "death tax" polled better than "estate tax." But is "death tax" really accurate?

Just think about the term for a second. Calling it a "death tax" makes it seem as though everybody is going to be taxed upon their deaths, but that's simply not true. The average estate which had to pay the estate tax was $2.7 million. That's a hell of a lot more than the average American has at the time of his or her death.

Moreover, the permanent repeal of the estate tax will end up costing $290 billion in tax revenue over the next 10 years. So how have they done it? What have the conservatives done to trump up such widespread support (firmly more than a majority no matter how the question's asked) for repealing a measure that affects so few?

Fairness.

That's right, they've appealed to lower- and middle-class Americans' concept of fairness. "Neither rich nor poor should have to be taxed upon their deaths," they say, and Americans gobble it up. Never mind that this is a tax that only affects the top 2.1% or so of the population; it wouldn't be fair to treat them differently.

But is it fair for economic policies to let the rich keep getting richer while the poor get poorer? Wait, that's not harsh enough. Policies let the rich get richer while the poor get blamed for getting themselves poorer. They're told that it's their fault, and that anybody can make it, and that extenuating circumstances aren't excuses, because everybody should have enough cash in reserve to take care of themselves. If they don't, then they're just not trying hard enough and don't deserve to be taken care of anyway.

These tax cuts, in the face of massive (and increasing) federal spending, are reckless and greedy. The opposite of fiscal responsibility.

In the '80s it was "Greed is good," right? So voting with your own economic interests was the thing to do. Well, the top earners still do. Why, then, do they insist on pushing some artificial doctrine of fairness onto the middle and low earners? Because the top earners don't have enough votes to democratically make things happen in their own economic interests. So they have to rely on misinformation and ignorance to get other people to vote against their economic interests.

Sorry, this was rambling. I hope it made sense.

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On Filibusters (Sort of)

We can (and should, probably) have a lively debate on whether or not filibusters are necessary or constitutional in general, but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the filibuster of judicial nominees. Mickey Kaus has an excellent post on it over at Slate (thanks to Mark Coffey for the link) in which he argues that while the filibuster may be disposable in most cases, the filibuster of judicial nominees is crucial for moderation of the courts. Kaus's argument is that since judicial confirmations are almost invariably politicized votes, where people tend to vote along party lines for controversial candidates, the filibuster would help moderate that process.

I'd go him a step further. Why not make the confirmation of judges a supermajority vote? It would amount to pretty much the same thing in terms of number of votes, and it would stop Presidents from both sides from even thinking about nominating judges that would just clog up the process. As it is right now, Presidents can nominate extremists for two purposes: throwing a bone to extremist bases, and daring the opposition to be cast as obstructionists by using the filibuster. But this willful, knowledgeable gumming up of the Senate proceedings is counter-productive on all sides.

So if nominees had to get 61 votes instead of 51, any attempt to nominate unconfirmable extremists would be stripped down as transparently partisan and political. And it's possible for judges to get that many votes, regardless of who's nominating them. See the post right below this one.

Call me crazy.....

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Compromise? Is it possible?

But I thought everyone was telling us that those evil Democrats in the Senate were never going to confirm any of Bush's judicial nominees! So CNN must be lying when they say that Paul Crotty was confirmed 95-0 in the Senate, and that he was the 205th Bush-appointed judge confirmed since 2001.

See, this is my issue. There are obviously people that both sides can agree on. This guy was confirmed unanimously by everyone there, and he was nominated by Bush. Why can't they stick to those people? They're the people who would probably let ideology cloud their judgments the least, on one side or the other, and it would speed Senate proceedings by both not making the confirmation process take longer, and by not increasing friction between the liberals and the conservatives.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

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Unintentional humor

From Louis Woodhill over at Social Security Choice (boy, do I wish they had comments enabled), we have this entry on why "America Must Be an Ownership State, Not a Welfare State." Here's a couple of highlights:

First, he says what liberals say:

Personal Social Security Accounts (PSSAs) represent an effort to dismantle the American welfare state, started by the sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR).

Next, he gives his response:

Yes, that’s exactly what PSSAs are for.

Finally, he cites a news story which "proves his point":

Earlier this year, a New York City subway fire seriously disrupted Manhattan transit service. The switching gear destroyed dated back to when the subway was built in 1932.

So wait, let me see if I understand the logic. Liberals say the conservatives don't like FDR, which is true, ergo if subway switching gear from the 1930s is faulty, Social Security must go.

I can't make this stuff up, folks. Go check it out yourself.

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Separation of Church and State

Via Jesus Politics, I bring you this quiz concerning the separation of church and state. It's quite an interesting quiz, and you might be surprised by some of the answers. I got 16 correct out of 21. Put your scores up, if you dare.

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That bastard!

To what depths will this rapscallion not sink? What new mountains of depravity will he not scale?

Bill Clinton just announced that his foundation is donating $10 million to help treat children with AIDS in developing countries around the world.* Of all the sneaky, rotten, no-good.....Now he's willing to spend millions of dollars just to buy publicity. Schmuck.**

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*If you didn't catch it already, I was kidding. I think that this is a wonderful thing, and that Clinton is to be commended for using his ex-presidency to good effect in recent months, with traveling to the parts of the world afflicted by the tsunami with Bush 41 to this. Congrats, Billy boy.

**The model for this faux anti-Clinton screed can be found at http://rantsandrefinements.blogspot.com.

UPDATE: I just wanted to tell y'all that I am aware that I used the word "screed" in two posts in a row. Deal with it.

Dr. James Dobson, Cleric

Further proving my point that higher education is no proof of intelligence, we have a radio clip from Dr. James Dobson. In it, he talks with Mark Levin, author of Men in Black, the inexplicable New York Times bestselling screed which charges that the Supreme Court is destroying our country.

Josh Marshall and Oliver Willis both cite Dobson's comparison of the black-robed Supreme Court to the white-robed Ku Klux Klan as the height of Dobson's insanity, but it's really just the easiest bullet point. If you've got the stomach, listen to the whole thing. It's about 26 minutes long, and it just gets more and more ridiculous.

For me, the height came when, after talking about Terri Schiavo and the execution of minors, Dobson and Levin agreed completely that history would bear out that granting "a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy" would prove to be one of the worst decisions our country ever made. They don't offer justification, they don't offer hypotheticals. They just go on to imply that since there's no explicit right to sodomy enumerated in the constitution, then nobody has that right.

It's insane to think how much influence these people have.

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Of Education and Politics

The debate about education and politics is heating up again. Evidently I'll have to reference my post about assumptions and help the conservatives to use the same logic.

There are numerous studies which show that liberals outnumber conservatives on college and university campuses. That's not really disputable. The different studies aren't always comparable, so it's hard to show a trend, but the liberals pretty far outnumber the conservatives, and that's for sure.

Now as I said before, to assume that this means an increase in intelligence leads to a tendency toward liberalism is faulty logic for a number of reasons, not least of which is the implicit assumption within it that people who work in academia are somehow smarter than anyone who works outside of academia. Not true at all. Level of education is only a very very very rough indicator of overall intelligence, I think, but it certainly does not follow that anybody with an advanced degree is smarter than anyone without an advanced degree.

But neither do these results prove that there has been some sort of conservative witch hunt in the academic world, as many conservatives have been claiming. This is the same sort of assumption as I outlined above; to assume persecution as the only possible reason for an underrepresentation of a particular viewpoint in a particular population is faulty logic. Especially when we're dealing with so small and specialized a segment of the population as college and university professors. To do a comprehensive study and come to some definite conclusions, we'd have to know about the number and relative strength of conservative applicants versus liberal applicants.

But until that study's done, neither side can go around asserting one conclusion or the other as fact.

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UPDATE: Harvey calls my attention to an article at EvolutionBlog entitled "God Bless Paul Krugman" (read it too, you conservatives, for yea, it is relevant). The PermaLink isn't working, so just scroll down to Wednesday, April 06, 2005, and it's right there.

Disturbed

A little tangent here...

I recently installed a new hit counter on my blog here, and it lets me track where people got here from, where in the country they reside, etc. Well, a few months ago, I had a post about the futility of abstinence-only education entitled "Kids are gonna have sex." Seemed pretty innocent, I thought.

But when I was checking out my stat counter, I saw that one of my visitors came here from a Yahoo search for "do kids have sex," and another came from a Yahoo search for "kids that have sex."

This troubles me a bit.

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Way to go Joe!

Joe Scarborough does it again, this time in easy-to-access internet form!

He proves that he cares almost enough about Terri Schiavo to spell her name correctly!

He asserts that condoms would do nothing to even help stem the tide of AIDS in Africa!

He tells us that God is behind the Republicans' political victories!

I hate you, Joe Scarborough.

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I have no words

Thanks to dad for the link. Conservatives are starting to scare me more than they ever were before. Religious folk are starting to scare me more than they ever were before. Now they're advocating impeachment for judges who disagree with them, and we've got one guy quoting Stalin, implying that death would be justified.

Where do we live now?

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Too good to be true?

Probably.

The Republicans in the Senate are evidently thinking about backing off of the personal accounts tip for a little while in favor of fighting the solvency battle. You know what? Good for them. They're two separate issues, and they shouldn't be conflated. One has to do with a fix, one has to do with a fundamental break from the current system.

But they are going to try to keep pushing the private accounts after they're done with their fixes. Somebody pointed out, as well (I can't remember who, and I'm sorry if I'm stepping on toes here) that it's crazy to talk about the Trust Fund as IOUs out of one side of your mouth, and then talk about solvency out of the other side. The solvency debate presupposes that the Trust Fund will have to be drawn upon at some point. Hell, Reagan presupposed that the Trust Fund would have to be drawn upon at some point. It just doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

And, just for a laugh, in case you were ever confused about what your parents, grandparents, and Founding Father actually wanted, the nice folks over at Social Security Choice tell us:

President Bush’s vision of an ownership society is the same as that of our Founding Fathers, our grandparents and our parents.

Wow. Just make sure not to tell my dad that he's been lying to me all along about what he wants, OK?

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Way to go, CT

Connecticut is on its way to becoming, I think, the first state in the union to preemptively legislate in favor of homosexual civil unions.

That is to say, there are civil unions in Vermont, and gay marriages in Massachusetts, but those were brought to the fore by judicial action. Connecticut has taken an important step in following the legislative process to bring such rights to the people, rather than throwing together a hasty statewide popular vote on a constitutional amendment.

The bill now has to pass the Connecticut House and get signed by Republican governor Jodi Rell (who approves of civil unions, but would have preferred if the bill included language limiting "marriage" to one man and one woman), but it looks like it's on its way.

So Connecticut, I know that in the past our relationship has been rocky. I've said stuff behind your back about how boring you are, about how you didn't offer me anything to do in high school, and about how frustrating it was that you shut your liquor stores at nine o'clock. I even left you for a few other states. But I wanted you to know that I heard about you, and I'm very proud of you for this.

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Polls

Just a gentle reminder to y'all.....if you're here and you haven't voted in my polls (one up at the top, one down a little on the right side), you're morally obligated to do so.

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Wow.....

I'm a little amazed, a little dismayed by this report from the Washington Post. A bill just passed the Florida Senate 39-0 and the Florida House 94-20 which would allow citizens to use deadly force anywhere, not just in their homes, if they feel threatened and without trying to flee first. Currently, the law states that if you're threatened, you're obligated to attempt to flee before violence is justified (though people who kill in self-defense without first trying to flee are rarely prosecuted). In addition, you're allowed to use deadly force in your own home, and the rationale there is that you probably don't have anyplace to be fleeing to from your house. I'll buy that.

But now, if you're walking down the street with a Glock in your waistband, and you feel threatened, you'll be able to shoot the bastard who you feel is threatening you.

Does that mean that duels would be allowed? The winner could always just claim that he was threatened, because the other guy was gonna shoot if he didn't.

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DeLay = Scumbag

It's all the liberal media's fault, says DeLay. The Times and the Post are just out to get him, and he hasn't done anything more wrong than anybody else in the Senate.

That's why he's facing criminal charges? That's why they were trying to change the House Ethics Committee rules to allow him to remain House Majority Leader while being indicted?

Sure, just par for the course in the Congress. So basically, what Tom DeLay's saying (by way of Roy Blunt, one of his chief supporters) is that we shouldn't be getting our panties in a bunch over him. We should be getting our panties in a bunch over him and 534 other criminals. Usually excuses are something that are offered up to exonerate the accused party. Instead, it looks like DeLay's just getting his cronies to try to bring everyone down to his level.

Then we'll just have to accept that Congress is a bunch of liars, thieves, and crooks, and do nothing about it. Wonderful.

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Schiavo Memo

I don't have much at all to say about this, because I haven't already, and because a bunch of people have beaten me to the punch. But basically, there was a GOP memo circulating the floor of the Senate which implored Republicans to seize on the Schiavo issue as a good political issue. Basically, to throw a bone to the Religious Right.

Well, you can probably imagine, when nobody 'fessed up, the bloggers went nuts, claiming another "memogate," and the failure of the MSM (mainstream media) yet again. But now they're singing a different tune, since Mel Martinez admitted that it was written by one of his staffers. Well, a--

EDIT: I had written a complete entry here, but Blogger messed it up, and to tell you the truth, I don't remember exactly what I had finished with. I guess I can come up with something.

Martinez said that he inadvertently passed the memo on the floor to Senator Harkin. Harkin says differently. He says that Martinez was passing copies out. Now it's important to remember that this is certainly not a GOP-leadership sanctioned thing, but it's also not a Democrat-sanctioned thing, which a lot of the blogs were trying to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt not a few days ago.

And Martinez has got to work on making up plausible alibis, I think.

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Vatican Delegation

I don't think it's a big fat hairy deal that Jimmy Carter wasn't able to go see the Pope's funeral, but looking at the pictures accompanying this FOX News story, I could swear that that's Andy Card second from the right, which would bring the delegation to 6 (7, if the dude next to Card is somebody official, too). In case you hadn't heard, Carter couldn't go because the delegation had been capped at 5 (Mr. & Mrs. President, Clinton, Condi, & Bush 41).

Just seems strange to me.

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Minutemen

These guys, in case you haven't heard, are a bunch of regular civilians taking it upon themselves to help patrol the border. There's been talk of some carrying rifles, or of white supremacists being involved, but I'm not going to go there, as I don't feel like digging it up, and it's not what the article talks about.

According to the article, the Minutemen, as they call themselves, are simply sitting by the border, trying to help alert border patrol to immigrants illegally crossing. They're not allowed to confront the crossers, and they say all they do is to phone the border patrol when they see someone crossing.

But reports are saying that these folks are doing more harm than good. They're setting off sensors inadvertently that draw the border patrol there for no reason. And while they say they're just calmly sitting there, any 6th grader will be able to tell you that "Minutemen" has a definite military connotation to it.

So whichever side of the border issue you fall on, it seems like these fellows are doing nothing but making it harder for a group that they already criticize for not doing enough.

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A Sad Day

I don't have much to say about the fact that at least 16 U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan today in a helicopter crash. I just wish their families well.

Fargus...

Kansas, of all places

Of all places for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Kansas has stepped up. The thing that I find most interesting, though, is that there was already a law banning gay marriage. It was supported and enforced, but the proponents of the state constitutional amendment say that it was necessary to shield marriage from attack.

You've got quotes in that article from people basing their vote on the Bible, and God's word. Now I've long been one to defend peoples' right to vote whichever way they desire for whatever reason they desire, and I'm not about to stop that now. If somebody wants to vote for Bush because they find their daughters more attractive than Kerry's, that's entirely their right. The right is a right to vote, not an obligation to vote intelligently.

But sometimes I wish people would take some time and consider more than just their own visceral reactions. Gays have done nothing to damage the sanctity of marriage. Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Larry King and Elizabeth Taylor (not to mention Rush Limbaugh) have done plenty, but not the gays. They haven't had the chance yet. But even if the divorce rate of gays were to be higher than the divorce rate of heterosexuals, or if the rate of adultery were higher with gays than with heterosexuals, who would they be hurting? If divorce and adultery are not criminal for heterosexuals (and those are the only real "dangers" I see in marriage.....point some more out in the comments if you've got some), then it must be because they are not judged to infringe upon the rights or safety of anybody.

How would that be any different for homosexuals?

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(No) Common Sensenbrenner

For those of you confused by the obscure title of this post, you won't be for long. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-WIS) is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He says that flagrant violators of indecency regulations should face criminal prosecution, since in his estimation, the regulatory process is not working.

The people who are trying to do the right thing end up being penalized the same
way the people who are doing the wrong thing.

OK, so he thinks that some people are being punished too much. Some broadcasters who are, as he says, legitimately making an effort to do the right thing. But where in his proposal is leniency for these people mentioned? Where is it proposed that these "decent" broadcasters should have their fines mitigated?

It's not. All I see there is the need to up the punishment for "flagrant" violators not just in dollar values, but to the next level. Up to the majors from the minors, it seems.

But isn't this all just another example of trying to push punishment for perceived thought crime? If the committee examines and finds that your intentions were good and that you are pure of heart and retain the ability to see unicorns, then you'll just get saddled with a massive fine. But if it's legislatively determined that your intentions were bad, then look out. Boy, I remember getting reamed out in English class for proposing that I had an idea what Shakespeare's intention was in a certain scene of Hamlet.

Maybe I should get Mrs. Bachiochi to talk to Mr. Sensenbrenner.

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Back to Social Security!

Ah, I haven't made a post on Social Security in a while, but this tidbit was too good to pass up.

Evidently the President recently made a visit to Parkersburg, West Virginia. What's there, you ask? Well, I'll tell you. There's a filing cabinet filled with the Treasury bonds that back the Social Security Trust Fund. President Bush seized on this opportunity to say that the retirement security of Americans sits in this humble file cabinet filled with IOUs, and that we need to let people take control of their own money and have it in assets that they can touch.

Now I've said this before, and a lot of people have said it before, and a lot of people have said it again, and I will follow suit: Those Treasury bonds are considered the most secure investment in the world. To call them "simply IOUs" raises serious questions about the state of the massive $7.8 trillion federal debt, which is held in mostly these same Treasury bonds. If, as Bush seems to be implying, the government shouldn't have any obligation to pay back the bonds which back the Social Security Trust Fund, then what of the bonds that back China's investment in the United States' debt?

I'm no economist, and I've admitted such all over the place. But let's imagine that you decide to put your money into the bank. Imagine, then, that one day you're in there, putting in more money, and you see an old woman trying to withdraw her money. In response, the bank manager gets the CEO to fly down and tell the old lady that the bank's not going to make good on her investment.

It'd make you think twice about putting your money into that bank, wouldn't it?

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Tom DeLay Imploding

Boy, I'm not one to go around telling the other side how they should act, especially with how pissed off I get when I hear them doing it ("The Democrats should have picked Howard Dean, the candidate they really wanted." Thanks, Ann Coulter, for that amazing insight into the Democratic mind). But I'll make an exception this once and remind them that they need to drop Tom DeLay like a bad habit.

The dude went mad with power, and that's it. Plain and simple. He misappropriated all sorts of funds all over the place, misused federal agencies (using the FAA to track down Democratic Texas legislators trying to outrun the gerrymandering vote), and all sorts of other assorted crap. The latest is that his wife and daughter have been paid more than half a million dollars in campaign monies since 2001. Let's say it's exactly $500,000, split between the two of them over four years. That's $62,500 a year for each of them. After taxes, I'd think (though I'm not sure about that). That's a well-paying job.

Connecticut's former governor John Rowland just went to jail for crap like this. No wonder DeLay latched so hard onto the Schiavo case--to distract from his own scandals.

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Assumptions

I was just having a nice walk & talk with Johan, and we started talking about differences between the two political poles in America. Johan brought up the oft-cited statistic that the higher their education level, the more likely people are to vote liberal.

I have to say, as a liberal, it's quite an alluring argument, and it would be nice to be able to just accept it out of hand. But I've heard this statistic thrown around a lot, and I have always felt a little uneasy about it for a number of reasons. I don't think, for one thing, that education level and graduate degrees correlate necessarily to intelligence. I met idiots at Lafayette. Seriously, full-blown idiots. And I've met much smarter people who never went to college. But barring my own personal experience, I wasn't able to figure out exactly where the logical gap in the argument lay.

But tonight I found it. The argument assumes a causality that it cannot prove. No matter how alluring the argument may be, you can't prove that greater intelligence objectively makes one lean more toward a liberal worldview. It could be the other way around; in other words, the world of higher education has more appeal and draw to people with liberal mindsets, and as such people with higher degrees are predominantly liberal.

I'm not saying that either one is true; I'm saying that neither one has convincing evidence to back it up, and as such, I can't use it as an argument anymore, much as I'd like to be able to.

Conservatives, feel free to use that one to discredit that argument. I'm just here trying to be an object lesson in my call to everyone out there to examine and test their own beliefs and arguments, to see how they hold up.

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Breaking News!

You won't find this story anywhere else, but Pope John Paul II has died. This hard-to-find story has been forced down by that anti-religious MSM, so you won't have a chance of seeing it on your televisions. It's as if they think everything in the world happening right now is more important than the Pope's death.

Yeah, I mean all of that. Except the exact opposite.

Look, I understand that the passing of the Pope is a big deal. Nobody is arguing that, I don't think. His reign was longer than almost any other in the long history of the Catholic church. The Catholic church has ever been one of the most powerful organizations on the planet. His papacy thrust the office from a provincial religious leader to an outspoken globetrotting moral activist. There is a lot about Karol Wojtyla's life to be celebrating, lauding, and remembering.

Yet I can't help but think that other things have happened in the world in the last two days. We have three twenty-four hour news channels that have offered wall-to-wall Pope coverage since Saturday (maybe with breaks for commercials and weather), and will most likely continue to do so until a few days after the smoke burns white from the conclave.

The media is laying down on the job here, folks. I don't know whether it's that the American public can't pay attention to more than one thing at once or whether the administrators of the media think that we can't pay attention to more thing at once, but the two amount to basically the same thing. We live in a complex world, but for the last couple of weeks, we've been dominated by single issues. What about the horrendous school shooting in Red Lake, Minnesota? What about the continuing tour on "reforming" Social Security? What about the train crash in Washington state? What about the coordinated attack by insurgents at Abu Ghraib prison that left 44 US servicemen injured?

The Pope's death deserves time on the news networks. But not all of the time they have available.

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Oh my God I'm back again

I'm back from Connecticut for the weekend. I had a great time, saw some friends that I hadn't seen for a while, and learned some new words that it's not appropriate to post here. Since I last posted, Terri Schiavo died and Pope John Paul II died. I'll have something to say on those later, but I just wanted to say this for now (and I won't pretend it's not directed at somebody specific): If it's okay for religious people to think it's wrong to be gay, then why is it not right for me to think that it's wrong to be so self-righteously zealous about their faith?

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Argh

If you've met me in person, imagine me as mad as you've ever seen me. Then imagine that multiplied by ten. Then you'll have some idea of how much this article pisses me off.

Oliver called me up and told me about this. Evidently, leaders of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are getting together in Jerusalem today. They're putting away the pugilist tendencies for a while. And for what cause? World peace? Talking about the peaceful coexistence of their religions in the land which all hold holy?

Nope.

They want to make sure everybody knows it's not okay to be gay.

Now imagine me throwing up.

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Fidgety

Josh Marshall pins the tail on Bush's primary phase-out constituency.

Fargus...

Let the pandering officially begin!

So now the news networks are officially in the business of letting us know about God, too. MSNBC's got its own "Faith in America" section, and if CNN covers Rick Warren (author of The Purpose Driven Life) anymore, he'll need a restraining order.

In an interesting side note, I noticed a lifely debate/round table discussion on the PAX Network on Saturday eveing wherein purported experts debated whether or not the resurrection happened.

So here's my take on faith, I guess.

Faith's a very personal thing. Whether you believe in God or not, whether you believe in Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed, it's certainly a very personal thing. Not just for yourself, but for everyone. That's why people get so upset when others proselytize. It's all well and good to have your own faith, but when you go trying to push your own personal views on someone else, it infringes on that intimacy that they want to have with their faith. That's why, I think, so many people are so uncomfortable with the unabashed, unapologetic displays of religion in recent days. Ostensibly, at least in the Pledge and the Ten Commandments cases, it's the separation of church and state, but I think it goes a little deeper than that; those who don't want faith shoved down their throats may be themselves faithful, but they don't want their own faith to infringe upon that of others, and neither do they want others to infringe upon their own.

As for Christianity, my view's pretty much the same. It's a personal thing, and there's nothing in the Bible prescribing mandatory attendance at church every week. Or what church that should be. Or that you should automatically submit to being told by someone what the Bible should mean to you. Whether or not you believe in Jesus, he says this: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me." He doesn't say, "No one comes to the Father but by me, and you should kick anyone's ass who thinks differently." He doesn't say, "No one comes to the Father but by regular church attendance with the requisite 10% tithe and submission to the church hierarchy who knows what God says better than you do."

I feel like it's entirely possible to be a good Christian without attending church regularly. Hell, I think (minus the whole believing in Jesus part) it's entirely possible to be a good Christian without even giving a second thought to Christianity. It's about living your life well and being good to others. And that's what most people do.

But some, most notably those among us who claim to be the most faithful, or at least the most vocal about their faith, are the quickest to act in ways that are antithetical to Christianity. "Love thy neighbor," they say. Unless he's gay. Or an abortion doctor. Then it's okay to let him know on a reegular basis that he's going to hell, or hurl replicas of aborted fetuses at his workplace. Respectively, of course. They draw what laws they choose to draw from the Old Testament, ignoring of course the dietary laws and other prohibitions that aren't important to them. It's hypocritical, and it's an easy way to use Scripture to mask an already-held, long-passed-on hatred.

OK, I'm done for now.

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Tipping

I'm going to go off on a tangent here and make a non-political post.

I just had a discusison last night with my roommate's girlfriend about tipping. We were out at a restaurant, and my roommate's mother (who is from Holland, and thus not familiar with American tipping customs) asked him how much she should tip. The girlfriend stepped in and said that she usually tips about 10%, and I was pretty much aghast at that, especially as a former waiter.

I made the point to her that waiters make considerably less hourly than minimum wage, and that their tips are what they live from. She was well aware of that, but considers tips to be for exemplary service, above and beyond the norm. Moreover, she said, she doesn't like that they don't make minimum wage, but it's not her job to pay their salary.

But I'd argue the opposite. The way that tippable positions stand in the United States today, it is our job to pay their salary. Legislation has lowered their wages to below the minimum not because we deem their jobs to be the lowest of the low; rather, it's because we've deemed that they can reasonably rely on tips to make up the rest of that money. But when somebody decides that they don't like that and so aren't going to abide by it, then it undermines the whole idea.

What's more, it gets really awkward and terrible for the other people at the table, who don't want to be part of a party that shortchanges on a tip. So the people who've already tipped more end up tipping even more because they feel bad and want to make up for the cheapskate. This has happened to me more times than I can count.

Bottom line, in the US, when you're planning to go out for dinner, it should be implicit that a base level tip should be included in what you're projecting to be the price of your meal.

What do you think?

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Social Security again

I just wanted to point out that I haven't yet gotten any comments on my post further down the page about Social Security, and whether investment of the Trust Fund at large in a higher-yield portfolio would be possible. Distributed risk, higher return, doesn't seem bad to me.

Anyone?

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Overreach, anyone?

New poll numbers are out, and Bush's approval ratings are in the mid to low 40s. This since the rise of gas prices, the steady decline in support for his Social Security plan, and the Schiavo debacle.

I guess political capital's spending power is in recession, huh?

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Joe Scarborough, come on down!

Congratulations, Joe Scarborough! In the media circus surrounding the Schiavo case, I've had the chance to see a lot of news programs about it, mostly in the mad dash to try to get away from having to hear about it. I've watched some MSNBC, some FOX News, a little bit of CNN, a lot of internet stuff, and a smattering of The Daily Show. And Joe Scarborough, I'm proud to say, your coverage has been the worst of all! Well, I can't vouch for all of the nutjob bloggers out there, but I'd have to imagine that in the non-internet media, you're the worst. So congratulations!

Joe couldn't be here this morning, so I'll read a prepared (by Fargus) statement:

Thank you so much for this award. You spread misinformation and lies for years and years, and then when it finally pays off, you almost don't even know what to say.

I really tried hard to enforce that strict journalistic tenet of shutting people up who didn't agree with me. Franken tried to pull that crap, talking about some law in Texas, some baby getting murdered against the wishes of its mother, in accordance with a law signed by George W. Bush. As I reminded him, "I'm not married to the guy!" Heh, that shut him up.

But some other jackass tried to bring it up the next night! Can you believe it? So I told him that I wasn't going to let him sit on my show and read the Texas Constitution! Take that! And back to Franken for just a second, I'll be damned if I'll allow him to correct me on my own show! Facts or no, it's my show, and I can say what I want!

Last but not least, I want it to be known that I've really tried to use the last segment of my show, the opinion segment, to rally support among the community for ignoring the judiciary when we don't like what they say. Y'all thought it was just a crazy blogger's dream, but I'm working hard to make it a reality. "It's time for us to take our judiciary back," I said, and you all knew that what I really meant was that the current judiciary is illegitimate. How can we be expected to obey rulings that we don't like?

Well, Joe, I guess you've said it all. Keep up the monumentally atrocious work.

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Plame case not a crime?

Maybe I'm just not up on the ins and outs of the law--in fact, I know I'm not. But this post from some blog that I found doesn't seem to jibe with the reality that we've been looking at for what, the last year and a half?

There was a huge-ass flap concerning Bob Novak's (Douchebag for Liberty) revelation of Valerie Plame's name and identity as an undercover CIA operative. For those of you who don't know, Plame is the wife of former US ambassador Joe Wilson. Wilson was quite outspoken in his criticism of the administration, and shortly thereafter, Novak wrote a column that screwed his wife. Not literally, though I'm sure he would have gone there if he could have, just to stick it to an infidel like Wilson a little more.

But anyway, people were up in arms about this, and about who leaked this sensitive information. There wasn't even question about whether or not it was criminal; just about what to do about it. It seemed that every reporter who touched the story was under scrutiny. Except Bob Novak, of course. That gargantuan tool seems to enjoy some sort of immunity in even the investigative press. I guess they're a bit worried about turning on themselves.

But how is it now that we're starting to hear, in the blogosphere, whispers that this may not have been a crime? Is this really how things go? Are the bloggers just going chronologically backwards and retroactively thinking up excuses, issue by issue?

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I'm back

Hey, I'm back. I wasn't able to post anything for a couple of days, and to my regular reader(s), if you've been disappointed, I apologize.

I don't have much to say. Just that I get more and more disenchanted with religion the more I see stuff like this Schiavo case played out. Bill Frist is morally reprehensible as a doctor who feels that he can make a better medical diagnosis based on a clip show designed to play to the heart than can doctors who have actually examined Terri Schiavo. Tom DeLay is morally reprehensible for embracing this cause so readily simply to divert attention away from his own mounting problems. George W. Bush is morally reprehensible for putting so much attention on this, but hypocritically allowing a baby to die in Texas last week (under the provisions of a law that HE SIGNED) against the wishes of its mother because the hospital deemed its care futile.

That's all I have to say about that.

Fargus...

And another thing...

This isn't really anything specific--I've written more posts than I'd said I would about Terri Schiavo, and it's all you can find in the news today--but it's something that's bugged me a lot lately.

People (and this includes both sides of the aisle, and I'm not excluding myself from time to time) feel entirely justified in pigeonholing media outlets based on what they perceive as their bias. I put up the results of a Washington Post poll the other day, and those results appeared to be damaging to the conservative position, but they were rationalized away just because they came from the Washington Post and its perceived liberal bias.

So that's the first part. It's dangerous to feel like you can ignore anything that doesn't come from someplace you like. You've got to evaluate everything equally, seems to me.

But here's the other part. Many people (and again, I've done it too) feel entirely justified using those media outlets to back up their point when they happen to agree with them. Too often, I see conservatives cherry-picking articles from the New York Times or the Washington Post, citing that even they agree with the conservative position. In many liberal circles, this is why The New Republic has lost a lot of credibility. Many liberals even go so far as to call it "...even the liberal New Republic."

What I'm trying to say is that you can't have it both ways. You can't make a blanket statement saying that a media outlet is biased in everything it does, and then turn around and say that your point is even stronger because "the other side" even agrees with you. If they're biased in everything they do, they're biased in everything they do, and their agreement with your position is somehow compromised. If you're going to use something that they wrote/reported as concrete evidence of your position's correctness, then you have to give at least some weight to their other reporting as well.

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Presumption of Life

Bush: "...our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life."

Unless someone's convicted of murder. Then we gone fry that sumbitch.

Again, I completely understand that you can be for the death penalty and for saving Terry Schiavo with no apparent conflict of interest. No problem there. Just like you can be pro-choice and against the death penalty.

But the hypocritical rhetoric being spewed about the "inalienable right to life" is making me sicker by the second.

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What?

Congress is holding a special session on Sunday aimed at saving Terri Schiavo's life. The Senate and the House have to vote on it, and they will. So here's my question: how come important stuff can take years and years to do, but when it comes to a clear-cut case of where something should be the authority of the state of Florida, Congress has no trouble getting together and rushing something through?

I didn't even know that they were capable of rushing things through.

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Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy floors me. Simply floors me.

There's a lot of people who are condemning the actions taken by Judge Greer in Florida, allowing the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. They're "pro-life," seeking to end "132nd trimester abortions," as one wit put it. They'll claim the Declaration of Independence's assertion that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, one of which is the right to life. They say that man does not have the right to decide in matters of life and death, and that the removal of the feeding tube is an affront to God. They're going to the federal government and trying every last-ditch effort they can think of to get this judge's ruling overturned.

These are, in large part, the same people who snarl viscerally at the barest mention of Scott Peterson's name. People who wouldn't mind killing the man with their bare hands. There's no mention of the Declaration with Peterson, and no mention of his execution being an affront to God, as it's carried out by Man.

These are, in large part, people who purport to be against government involvement in personal lives. Yet they're trying to get the US Congress to intervene with something that they don't like. They call themselves pro-life, yet they seem to want to watch another man die, when he's done something they don't like. I guess he wasn't endowed with the inalienable right to life by their Creator, huh?

These are, in large part, people who champion personal rights, but in practice denigrate the right to privacy that the Peterson, Rocha, Schiavo and Schindler families should have enjoyed.

Let's get this straight right now: this Schiavo issue isn't an "important" issue, as far as it affects people directly. It affects the families, and it's not really setting any important judicial precedents. What it is doing is testing the waters for near-future battles of religion and government. The proponents of keeping Schiavo alive are, in large part, believers in the healing power of prayer, and in the intervention of God in their personal lives. They believe that God will intervene in the life of Terri Schiavo. This issue affects only the families directly, but it's sort of like a referendum on where the public stands on their belief in God. I think that we're in for a lot of battles over religion in the coming years; this is just a little taste.

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Terri Schiavo

I feel like I should have something to blog about, and this is what was all over the news all day. But like Harry Shearer said over at Talking Points Memo today, it really should be none of our business. This is a personal tragedy for a few people that's been thrust into the public sphere, and that's not really fair. So I thought that I'd instead write a positive post about FOX News and their coverage that I saw today.

I was in Greenbrook, NJ picking up my car (I had to get the catalytic converter, front brake pads, and rear sway bar bushings replaced) at the dealership, and they told me it was going to be another two hours. So I walked with my friend Eli over to a local bar to pass the time over a couple of White Russians, and FOX News happened to be on the television. The main story that they were covering was the Terri Schiavo story, of course, and they had a panel of four people: the anchorlady, Michael Smerconish, another lady, and R. Lee Ermey.

The lady and Smerconish were on the same page. I know, from listening to him guest host O'Reilly's Radio Factor over the summer, that Smerconish is a conservative. I'd guess that, in the name of fairness and balance, that the lady on the panel was a liberal (though I'm not entirely sure). R. Lee Ermey was there in the name of some organization, but I didn't quite catch what it was. Anyway, the panelists were sticking pretty strictly to the legal issues involved, and I was very happy to see that. Smerconish and the lady panelist both chided conservatives for being the "party of less government," but running straight to the government to try to help them solve this problem. Ermey objected to the method of the proposed death of Schiavo. But all of the panelists, as well as everybody I've heard (both on TV and personally), was very clear in saying that they'd not want to live if their "life" was like that of Schiavo.

Shepherd Smith came on after that, and he was also very good on the issue. He was very clear to issue a correction, saying that Schiavo is in a "persistent vegetative state," not a coma as had been previously said. He was very clear to say that that nobody has ever come out of a persistent vegetative state. He said that what this taught him was that it would be smart for all of us to have living wills, which I think is a very good idea to avoid being tossed around like a political football.

Bravo, FOX News. Bravo.

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Budget

The Senate passed its budget today. So what does that mean?

Well, the Senate and the House have to agree on a budget for it to get ultimately passed. What today's vote means is that the Senate has chosen its first budget draft. The House has also proposed its own fiscal outline, but the two are quite different. The Senate's plan has excised some of the budget cuts that Bush had called for, while the House's plan calls for many more spending cuts. The House has chided the Senate for irresponsible spending, most notably in Medicaid (which Bush had proposed be cut).

So what does this all mean? I have absolutely no idea. I know that the two houses of Congress have to agree on a budget, but I also know that sometimes a budget doesn't pass, and that that's not a catastrophic thing. I don't understand for a second why that should be.

If anybody's got any idea, please throw a comment up there and enlighten.

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Polls!

Y'all should notice that I've added two polls to the page. One is up in my profile, and it's a movie poll. I'll try to change that one every week or so, if there's enough votes. Right now it's "What's the best Back to the Future movie?" Next week's will be about the best Indiana Jones movie. Basically, just a fun poll.

Now down on the left, in the sidebar, between "Recent Posts" and "Archives," is the other poll. I made it so that you can only vote once a year, I think, becuase I'd like to get a fairly accurate picture of what kind of people visit my blog. So go vote in both of them!

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Obesity

There's a startling new report in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine which claims that within the next 50 years, obesity will shorten the average life expectancy by two to five years.

Now reading through the article, they've already made the requisite connection with Social Security, which is good. Here I thought I was going to be innovative. Oh well. But it is a good question. Skeptics say that even if the average life expectancy is lowered by rampant obesity, it will be more than countered by medical advances in the same period.

But it's already started, the report contends. It says that if obesity had been at "normal" levels in the recent past, then the average life expectancy would be four to nine months higher than the current record high of 77.6 years. As a mathematician, I guess that says to me that the skeptics are essentially right. Though life expectancy is lower than it would be without obesity being so rampant, it's still higher than it's ever been, indicating that there are other factors which are more than balancing out the variable of obesity.

But still, I wonder if the Social Security actuaries are using too rosy an outlook for life expectancy in their calculations. Because even if medical measures more than balance out the obesity, and the life expectancy continues to rise, it certainly would not be as sharp or dramatic a rise.

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Bush on Wolfowitz

Thanks to The Daily Show for bringing this bit of a Bush press conference to my attention (any emphasis mine):

Question: Paul Wolfowitz, who is the -- a chief architect of one of the most
unpopular wars in history, is your choice to be --
President Bush: (Laughs) That's an interesting start.
Question: -- is your choice to be the president of the World Bank. What kind of a signal does that send to the rest of the world?
President Bush: First of all, I think people -- first, I appreciate the world leaders taking my phone calls as I explain to them why I think Paul will be a strong president of the World Bank. I said he was a man of good experience. He helped manage a large organization. The World Bank's a large organization; the Pentagon's a large organization. He's been involved in the management of that organization. He's a skilled diplomat, worked at the State Department in high positions. He was ambassador to Indonesia, where he did a very good job representing our country. And Paul is committed to development. He's a compassionate, decent man who will do a fine job in the World Bank. And that's why I called leaders of countries, and that's why I put him up.

I don't pretend to know much about the World Bank, and I'm a little ashamed of that. Maybe I'll do some reading today. But to imply that a manager of one large organization is qualified to head up any other large organization is a bit daft, don't you think? Oh well, chalk it up to a Bush gaffe, I have no problem with that.

The bloggers have been going nuts trying to figure out what this means, though. Kevin Drum supposes that it's a message to the rest of the world that if they're hoping for conciliatory measures, then they know where they can put those hopes. Matthew Yglesias thinks that it's more a "kicking upstairs," so to speak. Getting Wolfowitz into an ostensibly higher position, but also distancing himself from him.

I'm not going to engage in such speculation because again, I don't know enough about the whole thing to speculate on what it means. But I do have to wonder what kind of bank this is if somebody with no economic credentials can be chosen to head it up.

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Social Security Question

Here's an open question to anybody out there that might have thoughts on it. When it comes to Social Security, why isn't the possibility of reinvestment at large in higher-yielding interests being discussed?

The issue for most of the Democrats is distributed risk, but that issue is taken care of simply by the system's collective nature. If you have investments where you get a higher average yield with a higher risk, but that risk is dissipated among a hundred million people, you're still not operating a system with any individual risk.

The issue (they claim) for a lot of the Republicans is the low rate of return on the Social Security taxes. But this kind of idea could boost the rate of return, since the payroll taxes would be invested in higher-yielding portfolios.

Now the way I see it, this kind of system would have more advantages than just distributing the risk and raising the rate of return. It would also help with the solvency debate in two key ways. First, the Trust Fund would be allowed to grow faster. If coupled with a raise of the payroll tax cap, this idea could potentially move the 2018 date (the date that we need to start dipping into the Trust Fund) back by more than the 6 or 7 years of just the cap raise alone*.

Second, if the Trust Fund stoppped investing in Treasury Bills and instead invested in assets that were easier to liquidate, like stock and bond portfolios, the argument that the Trust Fund is simply full of IOUs would lose all of its clout. The federal government would have to tighten its pursestrings in the short term if it were no longer able to pilfer the Social Security surplus, but by the time 2018 (or whatever it may change to) came, we wouldn't be in the same spot of having to raise taxes, borrow, or cut spending in order to pay off the T-bills that the Trust Fund currently possesses.

As I think about it, one possible detriment to this plan is that when the Trust Fund started being drawn upon, perhaps it, being so massive, could cause some kind of fluctuation, some kind of destabilization in the market. But maybe not. I don't really know enough about it.

So anyway, I welcome any comments on this, even if they're just to tell me I'm crazy and I don't know what I'm talking about**.

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*Note: By moving the 2018 date back 6 or 7 years, the 2042/2052 date doesn't just get moved back 6 or 7 years; it's significantly more than that, since those 6 or 7 years are ones in which the Trust Fund is growing, and therefore will have considerably more assets to pay out when it needs to start paying out. Therefore, moving 2018 back to 2024 or 2025 actually moves 2042/2052 out past 2079.

**Please don't leave comments of this type.

FCC Chair

I'm certainly not the first to talk about this, and as such I don't really have much to say. The link pretty much speaks for itself.

Evidently Brent Bozell's Parents Television Council has enthusiastically endorsee the chairmanship of Kevin Martin over at the FCC. Y'all see why this is a problem? If you didn't know, the Parents Television Council (which is what the link above goes to...the article in question is proudly displayed on the front page) is one of those hyper-conservative media watchdog groups that decries filth by making its members watch it all day and tell everybody about it.

OK, so maybe I do have a little something to say about it. If you don't want "filth" around, and if you find it distasteful and corrosive to the human soul, isn't it somewhat counterproductive to bring all sorts of attention to it by filing millions--and I do mean millions--of complaints to the FCC? Isn't it terrible that you've got the entire population of the "pro-values" PTC watching MTV's entire Spring Break coverage, just in hopes of chronicling everything that's wrong? Won't that be corrosive to the members' souls? What if their kids walk in on them watching these terrible shows? Will they be confused when, the next day, they hear their parents loudly denouncing the television they just saw them watching the night before?

I think the thing to do would be (and I'm only writing this because I know no self-respecting members of the PTC--not to mention very few self-respecting members of society at large--actually read this blog) to launch an intense, targeted campaign against one, maybe two things at once. Instead of flooding with millions of complaints about thousands of shows, and instead of flooding e-mail inboxes with thousands of form letters that don't delete the line that says "Your Name Here," why not tell the membership to all watch a specific show one night, in the hopes that there will be something indecent contained therein, and then have them compose their own e-mails? Seems like it'd be more effective than trying to target the whole field at once.

But mayabe none of that will matter under Martin, who's strongly supported not only increased fines from the FCC, but an in-depth investigation of even the non-Janet related parts of last year's Super Bowl halftime show, as well as the bill proposed in the Senate that would extend FCC regulations to cable television and satellite radio.

Goodbye, Will & Grace; hello, Touched by an Angel (but not there, and with a chaperone present).

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ANWR

If I'm not mistaken, I don't think I've ever written an entry concerning the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, or the obsession that many conservatives have with drilling there for oil. I did read Sean Hannity's book, though, and if I were to take that as my only source, I could conclude that as soon as ANWR is opened up for drilling, Jesus Christ will descend from Heaven with his angels and usher in a new era of energy independence that will last for 1000 years.

I may be exaggerating just a little bit.

But today the Senate voted to open ANWR to drilling. Thing is, it was done all sneaky-like. You might think that, with something like this, they'd propose it and let it get voted up or down. But that's not the way that it is, it seems. See, the Republican senators attached a rider to the budget to authorize the drilling, and the budget is immune to filibuster. Some Democratic senators brought up a motion to strip the budget of the ANWR provision, but it was voted down 51-49. That's awfully close, especially considering that there's 55 Republicans in the Senate. I guess 4 of them weren't feeling it today, or something.

They've been trying to open up ANWR for years and years, through straight votes, and it always failed. This sort of sneak attack wasn't even possible, since the Senate only just picked up three additional seats in favor of drilling. That meant that the last vote likely would have gone 55-45 in favor of stripping the provision, in a situation like this. But 51-49 is the barest majority with which you can pass legislation, and it's not nearly enough to block a filibuster.

The silver lining on this cloud is that the provision isn't technically passed yet. It's tied to the budget, and the budget has to be approved by Congress (which it wasn't last year) to be passed. But now a bit more about ANWR.

The pervasive claim by pro-drilling advocates is that the "footprint" made by the drilling site would be no more than 2,000 acres out of a 19,000,000 acre refuge. If you're playing along at home, that's just over one hundredth of one percent. Not too bloody much, right?

But what about the roads that will have to be built to get to and from this "footprint"? What about the houses of workers there, and the network of pipelines that will have to extend from the footprint out to the Alaskan National Pipeline (I think that's what it's called)? The 2,000 acre claim is pretty deliberately misleading, I think.

From the figures I've read that haven't come out of the mouth of Sean Hannity, or of other FOX News employees echoing Sean Hannity, the cost of getting up there and getting the oil isn't going to be worth the payoff, for how much oil there is. I'll see if I can't come up with some figures about that and post them in a comment sometime later.

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FOX News is my Favorite

So now, evidently, from acclaimed author Mark Levin (advertised on such worthy, mainstream, middle-of-the-road sources as NewsMax and WorldNetDaily) comes the assertion that Supreme Court Justices are overstepping their bounds to look to learn from other countries. Here's the key bit:

But it's become very, very popular now. It's also popular in Europe, where the justices go to vacation or relax during the summer, meeting with other justices. Sandra Day O'Connor has even written about this in her book. They talk about the need to look at other societies; we can learn from other societies.

They are not supposed to learn from other societies. They are supposed to apply the law, the Constitution of the United States. We'll leave it to the senators and the congressmen to learn from other societies.

Here, again, is that question of the immutability of the Constitution. If all these people have to do is sit there and apply the law, not to interpret it, then why do we need people at all? Why can't all the parties involved in a case get together, sit down with a copy, and conclude what must be so clearly written there?

Let's face it: it's clear that there are many different interpretations of at least some passages in the Constitution. That's clear from the fact that people disagree on it. But it just so happens that one of those views, the view of Levin and Justice Scalia, happens to preclude the possibility of the other views' correctness. That's something that my view doesn't do, personally. I allow for other possible interpretations of the Constitution, but I believe in my interpretation, and I believe that I can make a convincing argument for why I believe in it.

That doesn't matter to Levin and Scalia, because their view says that there's only one true interpretation, and that following any other interpretation is counter to the will of the Founding Fathers, and is indicative of our society's moral decline into judiciary relativism.

Let me write that last graf again, replacing and adding a few words.

That doesn't matter to Levin and Scalia, because their view says that there's only one true interpretation [of the Bible], and that following any other interpretation [of the Bible] is counter to the will of the Founding Fathers God, and is indicative of our society's moral decline into judiciary religious relativism.

Sound a little bit like Constitution worship? Deification of the Founding Fathers? I think so.

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Senate Antics

Democrats in the Senate, under the leadership of Harry Reid, have threatened to slow down or stop the legislative process if Republicans change rules to enact what's known as "the nuclear option." For those of y'all who don't know what the nuclear option is, I'm glad you asked.

There is a system in place in the Senate (as any discriminating viewer of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington will no doubt know; Jimmy Stewart is the man) called the filibuster. That system has been modified from when it was originally conceived. Initially, the Senate had no rules on how to stop debate. Any senator could start a filibuster, and there was no way for the rest of the Senate to stop it. In case some of you haven't seen the movie I mentioned above (in which case I say "shame"), a filibuster is when a senator gets up and takes the floor for an extended period of time in order to block legislation. Typically the senator will make a speech about something unrelated to the legislation at hand, because who can talk about the same thing for over 24 hours (the length of time that Strom Thurmond famously filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1957)?

In 1917, a cloture rule was enacted, which meant that at any time, two-thirds of the present Senate membership (meaning those present at the time...hence, if only 60 senators were present, they'd need 40+ votes as opposed to the 67 they'd need if the entire membership were present) could vote to cut off debate and force a vote on the legislation at hand. In 1949, the rule was changed to two-thirds of the entire Senate membership, meaning that if only 60 senators were present, then they stood no chance at all of cutting off debate. In 1959, the rule was changed again, back to what it originally was in 1917. In 1975, the rule was revised from two-thirds of the voting senators present to three-fifths of the entire Senate membership.

So in the last 88 years, the system of debate in the Senate has been rethought a number of times. And here we are, on the cusp of changing it again. The so-called "nuclear option" is a Republican idea, championed by Bill "You-might-get-AIDS-from-tears-and-saliva" Frist, M.D., which would change the rules on cloture once again. This time they're not talking about two-thirds or three-fifths, though. They're talking about a simple majority. Fifty-one out of a hundred votes would close all debate on an issue and force a vote. Why is this significant?

You might be thinking to yourselves, "Well, that's a good thing. Senators shouldn't be able to hold up the process because they don't like what's going on, especially if they're in the minority." But such reasoning is antithetical to what we do here in our country. It's antithetical to the ideals of our Republic, which offer protection to the minority in cases where they stand the chance of being overwhelmed by the majority. The problem is that in a two-party system, either the Senate is deadlocked (party-wise), or one side has a majority (excepting, of course, anomalies like Jim Jeffords, an independent senator from Vermont). The filibuster is there to offer protection and a voice to a minority. Not just a small minority, but a large minority. Bigger than 40%. We're not talking about 5 senators being able to get together and hold up business. We're talking about better than two out of five senators getting together and making their voices heard.

Do I like the idea of holdups in the legislative process? Nope, I don't. But I also don't like the idea of a precedent being set where 40% is not a big enough group to get its voice heard, or to have an impact on things.

And the most absurd thing of all is that Republicans have used the filibuster when they were in the minority! This certainly seems a bit short-sighted, at least to me. They must really think that they've got a hold on the Senate until the end of time, because if they didn't think that, they might be tempted to realize that this could potentially affect them too, when the pendulum begins its long, slow swing in the other direction.

Which it will.

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Slanted coverage?

There's a story going around on the major blogs and news outlets about coverage during the presidential campaign being much harder on Bush than on Kerry. The study says that 12% of coverage on Kerry was negative, but 36% of coverage on Bush was negative. It also says that while 20% of Bush's coverage was positive, 30% of Kerry's was positive. It also said that 20% of stories on Iraq were positive, while 25% were negative (a far cry from the insistence that the media only reported the bad).

Now I don't have reason to doubt the conclusions of this study, so I'm not going to do that. And I'm not going to go expounding on ideological lines. But I'd just like to raise the question that the reports I've read haven't. But the study says that it examined 16 newspapers, 4 nightly newscasts, 3 network morning news shows, 9 cable programs and 9 Web sites (This is all through the course of 2004). But it doesn't say how much coverage there was given to each candidate, relative to one another. Were there exactly as many stories about Bush as about Kerry? I find that a little hard to believe, but I think it'd be a relative statistic, as it'd push the margin of error up or down depending.

The other thing, which my conservative readers will probably come down on me for, is that when there's a race between an incumbent and a challenger, I wouldn't expect for a second that the coverage of them would be exactly the same. The President is obviously receiving a lot more scrutiny about the job that he's doing at the time as well as about his campaigning for re-election. The incumbent's just got the election.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this study, upon a little deeper inspection, doesn't really seem to say all that much.

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Why do we have a Supreme Court?

An interesting article, this one.

Justice Antonin Scalia has this to say:

The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete’s sake, it is legal document, and like all legal documents, it says some things and doesn’t say others [...] What was 'cruel and unusual' and unconstitutional in 1791 remains that today. Executing someone under 18 was not unconstitutional in 1791, so it is not unconstitutional today.

So why, I'd ask, do we need a Supreme Court at all, if it's so clear? If it's so cut & dry? The article speculates that Scalia may be campaigning for Chief Justice, but it would be of an impotent court, I'd think, if his vision were the reality.

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