Wow. I’m away for one day and I miss all the good news. The Supreme Court strikes down sodomy laws and Strom Thurmond dies. I can’t help but think the two were probably related. I hope Stom’s last words were “They’re lettin’ homos do what? Uggh…”

Ezra posted a great message the other day that made me do a complete 180 degree shift in the way I viewed Clarence Thomas :

This argument that Thomas is hypocritical for benefitting from and then decrying affirmative action strikes me completely wrong. I’ve benefitted from white privilege – I’m against it. I benefit from the lack of economic affirmative action – I’m for it. The idea that we have to refrain from attacking societal wrongs that have aided us is insane and will pretty much stop social justice in its tracks because social movements require converting those who are benefitting from an injustice. I might not agree with Thomas’ position, but he has every right to hold it without being held up to some standard of hypocrisy that none of us match.

I guess now I’ll have to be content with disliking him because he put a pubic hair on someone’s Coke.

This one is so outrageous that it’s funny (link via Rosskumar) :

A woman given a ticket for breast-feeding her daughter while driving on the Ohio Turnpike last month could have gone on her merry way with a slap on the wrist and a $100 fine.

At least that was the offer from the Portage County Prosecutor’s Office on May 9, the day after a trucker called 911 to report that he had seen the woman driving her car with a baby in her lap.

The woman’s husband, however, is trying to make a federal case out of it — literally — by claiming she is not the real defendant.

He said he is.

He made that claim, citing Mosaic law from the Old Testament and writings from the days of the Founding Fathers because of the couple’s “deeply held spiritual beliefs” that the husband is “the sole head of the family” and the only one who can punish the wife for a public act.

That’s it, we need to find this woman and get her some counseling. She’s obviously stuck with jackass for a husband who’s comepletely unaware that we don’t treat women like property. I wonder if she even realizes she’s allowed to vote now?

Wow. Supreme Court, you’ve officially sort of restored my faith in you:

In a landmark 6-to-3 decision announced yesterday, America’s highest court commanded the states to get out of the business of attempting to regulate what can or can’t happen within private, intimate relationships between consenting adults. Instead, five of the six majority justices ruled that Americans enjoy a fundamental right to conduct the most personal and private aspects of their lives free from the prying eyes of government officials.

Except, of course, for Scalia, the crusty old turd, but hell, what do you expect. There are a lot of really great things about this ruling, not the least of which is that not only does this invalidate state laws against “sodomy” (which invariably, in these laws, means “anything other than missionary, procreational sex,” with or without the sheet with a hole in it thrown over your woman to keep her from enjoying herself), but because of the following:

The case is significant in constitutional terms because in recognizing a fundamental right to relationship privacy, the majority justices have bolstered one of the pillars of the high court’s controversial 1973 abortion ruling. Yesterday’s decision, by finding once again that privacy in “intimate conduct” between adults is a constitutionally protected right, will make it much harder for a future court to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent.

Vastly outvoted, Scalia had some helpful comments about how, since the majority disagreed with him, they’ve obviously “signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” I’ve never been quite clear on the homosexual agenda; my gay and lesbian friends and family members refuse to discuss it and regard me with suspicion when I bring it up; I can only assume this means they know that Justice Scalia and I are on to them. Either their agenda is to make everybody be gay, or else they just want to redecorate everything and to mince on public streets. I can’t tell which.

In a semi-related note, the SCOTUS sent the Nike case back to the California Supreme Court, basically declining to say all that much about it, except that they weren’t sure it was a federal issue. Draw your own conclusion.

Blogging is going to be very light to non-existent for the next few days. I’m flying back home to Tulsa for a wedding. Don’t worry about me though, I’ll have these to keep me safe :

Hopefully my co-blogger Brian will drop by and add a few things to fill the void while I’m gone.

Did ya think Bush just suppressed environmental reports that don’t agree with his policies?

The Bush administration’s top Medicare accountant has calculated how millions of senior citizens would be affected by bringing private managed care into the program, but the administration won’t release the information.

An earlier analysis suggested that a Republican plan to inject market forces into Medicare could increase premiums for those who stay in traditional programs by as much as 25 percent. If that’s still the case, it could help Democrats who argue that the GOP plan is risky for those who want to stay in traditional Medicare, where they can pick any doctor, rather than move to a managed care plan.
. . .
Medicare chief Tom Scully said in an interview Wednesday that Democrats had no right to request the information from Foster in the first place.

“They don’t have the right on the Hill to call up my actuary and demand things,” said Scully, chief of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “These people work for the executive branch, period.”

Scully said he would release the analysis “if I feel like it.”

And that folks, is why you can’t let a dumb guy run the country. Bush thinks that hiding proof that he’s wrong about the environment, Medicare, WMDs, the economy, etc. will suddenly make him right. Somebody forgot to tell him that the truth doesn’t work that way. I wonder if he stays up late at night pondering whether the light in the refrigerator is on when the door is shut or whether covering his eyes will make him turn invisible.

Last week on the Daily Show, Lewis Lapham caught my ear with by referring to the Bush Administration as “utopian anarchists”. In trying to find a transcript of the interview online, I came across this criticism of Lapham’s comment :

For someone who is ostensibly a member of America’s intellectual elite, I was shocked at his fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of conservative political philosophy. He made the argument that conservatism today was essentially “utopian anarchism”, a charge that had me floored. Lapham’s view of conservatism could not be more incorrect – in fact, what he sees as conservatism is its diametrical opposite.

What followed was a good description of traditional conservatism and an explanation of why labeling conservatives “utopian anarchists” is a misnomer. Although I sgree, I think the writer missed the point of Lapham’s comments entirely.

What Lapham was trying to say is that by being “utopian anarchists”, Bush and his fellow neo-conservatives are not conservatives in the traditional sense. This point was made very well in a Marketplace commentary by Thomas Frank last week :

Time was you could always count on conservatives to scream for a balanced federal budget. Not anymore. What they want these days is tax cuts and the budget be damnned.

You’ve no doubt heard that this year’s tax cuts will mainly be enjoyed by the rich; that three-quarters of them will go to society’s wealthiest fifth. This is true but describing them this way misses an important point : The reason the Administration wants to do away with dividend taxes, estate taxes, and all the rest of it is not just to reward the wealthy but to de-fund government, to pull the rug out from under the New Deal social order once and for all.

“Government is not the solution to our problem,” Ronald Reagan famously said in 1981. “Government is the problem.” And today the phrase reverberates across the years echoed by a mighty chorus : Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, North, Gingrich, Barr, DeLay, Heyworth, Graham, Santorum..

Yesterday’s far right is today’s mainstream and the belief that government was merely misguided has given way to the belief that government is unredeemable. That the beuracrats who staff it are elitist, un-American, treasonable.

Now detroying government would be tought to pull off if you had to break down each job that the government does and prove that we’d be better off without it. It’s far easier to just pull the money and let nature take its course. Five years from now we’ll all no doubt be reading bestsellers about the menace that budget deficits pose to our grandkids and our legislators will have no choice but to poack up and turn off the lights.

Massive deficits are great because they force government downsizing down the road and this is why they’ve become the signature gesture of Republican administrations, from Ronald Reagan to George Bush Sr. and now to his son. The true goal is not to “jump start” consumer spending or even to spark entrepreneurship, but to throw a wrench into the works of this despised institution : To jam the locomotive into reverse, throw something heavy on the throttle, and jump for it.

Bush and his economic team can’t be completely retarded. They know that the government can’t run a deficit forever. The fact is, the Bush policy of annual tax cuts are a time bomb designed to force the eventual bankruptcy of the social programs conservative extremists have been decrying for decades. Like Mohammed Atta piloting a 747, George Bush is deliberately steering the budget into a nosedive. Sounds like utopian anarchism to me.

There’s an interesting post at the Volokh Conspiracy about how the Gray Davis recall movement could open the doors to a third-party candidate being elected governor :

Here are an interesting collection of facts about the movement to recall California Governor Gray Davis:

• It looks like the recall petition will qualify for the ballot.
• Voters must vote whether or not to recall Davis and vote for a replacement (contingent on the recall passing) on the very same ballot.
• If Davis is recalled, the replacement candidate who garners the most votes will be governor. No majority needed; no runoffs. (If I understand the rules correctly). Depending on how many candidates run — and it only costs $3500 to get on the ballot — it is conceivable that the winner could receive fewer than 20% of the votes cast. Maybe even far fewer.
• All of the Democrats who are well-known statewide have announced they will not be a candidate to succeed Davis
• Few Republican politicians have significant statewide name recognition.

Most voters are furious at all California politicians of both parties for the electricity debacle, the enormous deficit, and the failure to enact a budget. All of these factors suggest to me that it just might be the right time to elect a governor not affiliated with either major party — a “Jesse Ventura moment.”

I haven’t commented on the recall movement yet, but it’s pretty much a farce. The whole thing seems to be an effort by Darrell Issa to boot Gov. Davis out of office. So far he’s contributed more than $1.75 million towards the recall campaign. Have I mentioned that he’s also running for governor? Basically, this dick knew he couldn’t win a real election, so he’s trying to buy his own election. It’ll probably happen too, but I really doubt it’ll succeed. If there was a huge public outcry about all this, they wouldn’t be struggling to get the million signatures necessary to put this on the ballot.

That said, I think the whole third party candidate thing brought up at Volokh’s is an interesting point. Even if Davis is recalled, Issa won’t have a chance to win if he’s matched up against a “real” candidate or anyone with some name recognition. Of course if Arnold Schwarzenegger, then California will certainly be the Kindergarten Cop state for a few years. But if he doesn’t run, it’s anyone’s guess. There’s plenty of politically active celebrities that could easily walk away with the election. Anybody have any ideas on who would be masochistic enough to try it? Warren Beatty maybe?

It was a matter of time before something like this was going to come out :

A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told congressional investigators he had been pressured to change his analysis of intelligence on Iraq and other issues, the New York Times reported, citing unnamed congressional officials.

The expert, identified by the daily as Christian Westermann, reportedly told the House of Representatives Intelligence committee during private hearings last week that he had felt pressure from the administration of President George W. Bush to tailor his analyses to the administration’s positions.

The New York Times has some more info about Westermann :

Mr. Westermann, who is in his mid-40’s, has worked as a State Department expert on unconventional weapons for the last several years and is viewed within the department as a careful and respected analyst of intelligence.

An administration official said he had served previously as a Navy officer and had not worked for the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies.

Mr. Westermann’s decision to speak out has caused a stir inside the House and senate intelligence committees, even though he did not go into details and indicated he was not comfortable doing so in front of the large group of officials around him in the House hearing. But he said he was prepared to discuss the matter further.

Bush has been making others take the blame for his failures for too long. It’s about time somebody came forward. I just hope this one pans out.

Yet another example of Bush dragging his feet over terrorism prior to 9/11 (nto to be confused with his current incompetence) :

Prowling the skies over Afghanistan in the months before President Bush took office, unmanned and unarmed Predator drones proved to be one of America’s major successes in its frustrating hunt for Osama bin Laden.

But the promising aircraft remained grounded under the new administration until after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, say current and former U.S. officials who describe a paralyzing internal debate over finances, arming the drones with deadly missiles and concern over who would take the blame if something went wrong.

As late as a week before the suicide attacks against New York and Washington, senior administration officials meeting at the White House had not yet resolved questions about plans to equip each Predator with as many as two Hellfire missiles to kill bin Laden, these officials told The Associated Press.

This came despite the remarkable successes in the fall 2000, including what many intelligence experts concluded were three separate sightings of bin Laden during a series of 11 Predator flights over the Afghan desert.

Ever since 9/11 liberals have been expected to drop the whole “Bush stealing control of the most powerful nation on earth” thing by repeating the line “Yeah, this would have happened regardless of who was president”. But the more news like this that comes out, the more I think that maybe it wouldn’t have happened with Al Gore in charge.

When the Clinton administration briefed Bush’s incoming team they reportedly told them that the biggest isse they’d be facing was terrorism. You’d think that would be enough to wake them up, but conservatives attitudes towards Clinton was so negative any good advice was met with rolling eyes. I guess they were too busy leaking news about “trashed offices” to worry about our safety.

Then the Hart-Rudman report came out that once again reiterated the urgency of terrorism issue. When the it was recieved by Bush, it was greeted with a silence so deafening you’d think it was an EPA report. Among the report’s reccomendations was the formation of a cabinet-level agency that would deal with the terrorist threat, an idea that Bush loves to take credit for now even though he opposed the idea for a year after 9/11.

After that, Bush recieved at least two specific warnings about terrorists hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings. Once again, Bush was much too busy planning his month long vacation to worry about a threat he didn’t take very seriously anyways.

And now it’s revealed that the Clinton administration had a program that was following Osama bin Laden around Afghanistan that was put on hold while Bush and his pals haggled over the bill. After all, how do you pay for security and a massive annual tax cut? Well, we all know which one Bush chose.

With President Gore in charge, how would things be different? Well, I think we can all agree that Gore would have continued most of the Clinton Administrations programs. (isn’t that why so many people voted against him in the first place?) So that would seemingly include an overall focus on terrorism. Even if Al wasn’t in the loop while VP, it’s a good bet that he would have taken the advice of Bill seriously. That means the Hart-Rudman report wouldn’t have fallen on deaf ears. That means he might have payed more attention to the warnings he recieved during summer 2001. And that means he wouldn’t have completely stopped the Predator drone program. So while it’s safe to assume that 9/11 would have probably happened with Gore in charge, who’s to say that Osama wasn’t just waiting for a nine month window when he wasn’t being chased around to enact his plans?

There’s a group called “Republicans for Sharpton” whose goal is to “turn the 2004 senate primary into the most bizarre political circus in history”. Normally I wouldn’t give this much thought, since I’ve been known to register Republican and vote for the lesser of the evils in the primaries myself. The thing that really caught my eye though was this picture at their website :

Being a minor boxing history buff, it seemed odd to me that they’d chose a photo like that to represent the two candidates. I figured they’d just PhotoShop-ed an old picture from a Jack Johnson or Joe Louis fight, but after looking around online, I found this picture :

What’s funny is that this isn’t Joe Louis or Jack Johnson. This is a picture of James J. Jeffries [left] and Robert Fitzsimmons [right], two white guys. What’s even stranger is that they pasted Sharpton’s head on Jeffries, the guy who actually won the fight! Are they trying to imply that Sharpton would beat Bush? Democrats don’t even think that!

Great article in Slate yesterday about how Bush can be considered both stupid and a liar :

Is President Bush a liar? The New York Times’ David Rosenbaum examined this question with a surfeit of post-Howell-Raines fair-mindedness in the June 22 “Week in Review” section. His bottom line: “[A] review of the president’s public statements found little that could lead to a conclusion that the president actually lied” in two particular instances. The first was when Bush claimed he knew Saddam Hussein to possess large quantities of chemical and biological weapons. The second was when Bush claimed that his tax cut would provide tax relief for everyone who pays income taxes. In both instances, Chatterbox is baffled by Rosenbaum’s doubt.

Let’s address Bush’s tax claim first. Its falsity is not in dispute. Chatterbox has written elsewhere that Bush lied when he said, “My jobs and growth plan would reduce tax rates for everyone who pays income tax.” (The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center found 8.1 million people who pay taxes but will receive no tax cuts.) Rosenbaum recognized that Bush’s statement was untrue but expressed doubt that Bush knew it to be untrue. Can a false statement be a lie if the speaker is unaware it is a lie?

That leads us immediately to a second question, one that Rosenbaum dared not address: Why is the speaker unaware that his statement is a lie? In Bush’s case, the answer is painfully obvious. It’s because Bush is a functionally not-bright man. As Chatterbox has explained elsewhere, it’s impossible to tell?and, ultimately, of little interest?whether Bush lacks the necessary mental equipment, or whether he’s simply incurious. The end result is the same.

This “he’s too retarded to know he’s lying”, which I will now refer to as “The Corky Defense” (named after the second most famous mentally retarded guy), seems to be a pretty consistant theme among Bush supporters.

Bush said his tax cuts would help everybody, but it turns out he’s screwing the poor. Bush said he knows for a fact that Saddam Hussein tried to get uranium from Africa, but it was known for almost a year that the evidence was forged. Bush’s buddy Ken Lay rips off investors for billions, but when asked about him, Bush suddenly turns into St. Peter and pretends he doesn’t even know him. Bush said that there are links between Iraq and al Qaeda, but the CIA concluded that there aren’t any. There were numerous prior warning about 9/11, but Bush didn’t get them and he didn’t remember the numerous warnings he’d beeen briefed on about terrorists hijacking planes into buildings.

In all these cases, all he had to do was invoke The Corky Defense and any allegations of wrongdoing and negligence went away. I guess this shouldn’t be a suprise to anyone though. Back in the 2000 election, one of the biggest defenses of Bush’s clear mental inferiority to Al Gore was “Well, he may not be that bright, but he’s surrounding himself with bright people. He’s got Colin Powell!” It was clear then that Bush wasn’t exactly the micromanager type.

What Bush doesn’t seem to realize is that being a leader isn’t just about delegating authority, but accepting responsibility for mistakes made within your oganization. Sorry George, but saying “I don’t know” doesn’t cut it. Knowing what the hell you’re talking about is one of the minimum requirements of the presidency and if you can’t even handle that, then maybe you shouldn’t be in charge anymore.

Well, today is the first day of Moveon.org’s virtual primary. If you’re a member of their mailing list, take a few minutes to research the candidates and pick your favorite. After giving the issue some serious thought, I put down my vote for Howard Dean.

All things being equal, I like the positions of Dennis Kucinich above all the other candidates. As JoeF pointed out, he’s definitely the most progressive of the bunch :

Kucinich is doing something that a liberal hasn’t done in a while…he’s running a truly progressive campaign, with a well thought out and well articulated point of view. We, as progressives, should support that.

Many, many people bitch about the DNC moving towards the center. But then they go and vote for a guy who’s willing to move towards the center (like Kerry, Gephardt, or Dean). If you really want to force the DNC to move back to the left, you should be supporting Kucinich. He’s the only one with a strong progressive agenda, and the more support he gets, the more the DNC will have to come to terms with the unhappiness most of us have with their centrist moves.

Although I agree, I think that’s only half the equation in a case like this. Just as important as the candidate’s views (at least in a case where most of the candidates are pretty good) is whether the candidate can get elected and how willing he/she is to comprimise in order to get some work done.

As much as I like Kucinich, he’s so outwardly liberal that he’ll turn off a lot of moderate voters. Even in the one-in-a-million chance that he could get elected, I have serious doubts about his ability to enact his agenda. At least one or both of the houses of congress are going to be Republican after 2004. If the senate president doesn’t know when to hold em’ and know when to fold em’, then it’s not gonna do anybody any good.

So that’s why I like Howard Dean. I don’t agree with him some of the issues, but I haven’t been this excited about a candidate since Al Gore whooped up on Bush in the 2000 debates (Seriously, watch them again and you can count how many questions Bush actually answers on one hand). The thing that really sold me on Dean was this quote :

“White folks in the South driving with Confederate decals on the back of pickup trucks ought to be voting with us, not them, because their kids don’t have health insurance either.”

That one says more about Dean’s inclusiveness than a thousand conerned speeches about “the black vote”. One of the big problems that liberals face is that we’ve been labeled as insincere and elitist by the conservative press. I think there’s definitely something to it, but when given the choice between politicians who talk down to minorities and politicians who openly screw minorities, the choice is pretty clear. Dean has shown that he can cut through the perception of the liberal snob and really appeal to moderates.

Time magazine has a great article about the flood of missionaries that have invaded the Middle East since 9/11. It’s people like this that make me hate missionaries :

Over the next three hours, “Barbara,” minus her burqa, dispensed lists of comparisons between Jesus and Muhammad (“Jesus arose from the dead and is alive. Muhammad is dead.”) and of dos and don’ts of ministering to Muslims. (Do listen to their story. Don’t argue about Israel.) She projected a statement by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft on a screen: “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.” After his comment was publicized in late 2001, Ashcroft said it referred to terrorists and not to mainstream Muslims, but the point seemed lost on her. “Islam is the terrorist,” Barbara asserted. “Muslims are the victim.” The class ended in prayer. “We mourn the loss of life” in Iraq, someone said. Added Barbara: “We pray that the weapon of mass destruction, Islam, be torn down. Lord, we declare that your blood is enough to forgive every single Muslim. It is enough.”

This is exactly the kind of arrogant bullshit that makes the Islamic world hate us so much. Hell, if everybody in America was as xenophobic and ignorant as Barbara, I’d want to blow people up too. I just wish there were less like her and more like this couple :

“Henry” and “Sarah” practice a kind of evangelism that might satisfy the staunchest agnostic. In the early 1980s they arrived in the North African country where they serve as missionary-team leaders. “We didn’t want to run through, do our thing and preach,” says Sarah. “We wanted to live.” They founded an adventure-travel business and made friends. They talked sports and taxes and children with their neighbors, went camping with them and gathered with them on Muslim feast days. They didn’t hide their faith, but they didn’t press it on others, so when a friend’s friend who had taken a Christian correspondence course approached them on behalf of his family, they shared Christ on his terms. “They pursued us,” Henry insists. The two clans grew close and still are; eventually several of the Muslims embraced Christ. To tentmaking theorists, this is “relationship evangelism.” Henry prefers to speak of the difference in connotation between two Arabic words, tansir and tabshir. “Tansir means to coerce people to change their religion,” he explains. “Tabshir means to share, to be a witness.”

I wish I was optimistic enough to believe that most missionaries were like Henry and Sarah, but the more I hear about people like Rev. Franklin Graham (who called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion”) the more it seems that missionaries are less interested in helping needy people and more interested in making sure their backwards, superstitious ignorance is more popular than someone else’s.

Do we really need another reason to be pissed at the Bush Administration?

Dozens of people are showing up every day at a hospital near a defunct Iraqi nuclear plant, suffering from rashes, bloody noses and other symptoms of radiation poisoning, doctors said Saturday.

The Tuwaitha nuclear facility, 12 miles south of Baghdad, was left unguarded after Iraqi troops fled the area on the eve of the war. It is thought to have contained hundreds of tons of natural uranium and nearly two tons of low-enriched uranium, which could be used to make nuclear weapons

U.S. troops didn’t secure the area until April 7. By then, looters from surrounding villages had stripped it of much of its contents, including uranium storage barrels they later used to hold drinking water.

People suffering from symptoms of radiation sickness started showing up at the hospital closest to the nuclear site as early as two months ago, two doctors interviewed by The Associated Press said Saturday. Their numbers have since grown considerably.

“Some 30 to 40 patients suffering from bloody diarrhea visit our hospital every day, probably due to their exposure to nuclear radiation,” said Bassim Abbud, a physician at the Mada’in General Hospital, about 9 miles from the Tuwaitha nuclear facility.

It goes without saying that this shows yet again the Bush administration’s negligence in keeping up safe from the threat of “dirty bombs” and nuclear weapons, but to give Iraqi civilians bloody poop is just gross.