Man, this term just makes my skin crawl. Every time I hear Bush say “judicial activism” (or “activist courts” or any other variation) I just want to punch the TV. Does Bush even understand how the legal system works?

Y’see, cases are brought before courts by plaintiffs, which are then argued by lawyers. Based on the arguments of the lawyers, the judge (and often juries) make decisions based on the laws and/or constitution (both state and federal). And that’s the only way they’re allowed to make a decision. Any other way, say based on personal opinion or whim, is against the rules.

Are these “activist judges” issuing rulings in violation of the law? If so, then Bush needs to explain the legal flaws in those rulings. If not, then the problem isn’t judges being activists, it’s that the current laws aren’t homophobic enough for Bush.

Lots of good stuff in the comments for this post. First up is boloboffin’s great series of posts that covers a lot more aspects of the movie that I did. Here’s an index :

1. The resurrection of Jesus is not historical.
2. Pilate was the instigator of the death of Jesus, not Caiaphas.
3. Pilate was not the sensitive, thoughtful ruler portrayed in the film.
4. It wasn’t blasphemy to identify yourself as the Messiah or the Son of Man.
5. The Jews who spoke with Jesus were trying to intercede on Jesus’ behalf, not railroad him.
Interlude - Crucifixion Porn
6. The cross is wrong.
7. Roman soldiers were present when Jesus was arrested.
8. Koine Greek, the most common language of the day, isn’t used in the film.
9. Mary the mother of Jesus had other sons.
10. Nails in the wrist, not in the hands.

Also in the comments, Rowdy pointed out this Reuters article that I missed. The history geek quotes alone make this an articlke that you should check out :

Mel Gibson’s portrayal of the final 12 hours of Jesus in his film “The Passion of the Christ” has been hailed as the gospel truth by some believers, but many scholars complain that it is riddled with historical errors.

Their complaints range from inaccuracies about hairstyles and clothes to a lack of gospel context in the film which has raised a furor among Jewish groups who fear its graphic depiction of the crucifixion will fan anti-Jewish violence.
. . .
Experts say this was his first mistake as Greek was the language spoken in Jerusalem during Jesus’s time, along with Aramaic and some Hebrew spoken by Jews.

“Jesus talking to (Pontius) Pilate and Pilate to Jesus in Latin!” exclaimed John Dominic Crossan, a professor of religious studies at the Chicago-based Roman Catholic De Paul University. “I mean in your dreams. It would have been Greek.”

Latin was reserved for official decrees or used by the elite. Most Roman centurions in the Holy Land spoke Greek rather than Latin, historians and archaeologists told Reuters.

The mistakes, experts say, didn’t stop with the wrong language, which Crossan — who speaks Latin — said was so badly pronounced in the film that it was almost incomprehensible.

“He has a long-haired Jesus…Jesus didn’t have long hair,” said physical anthropologist Joe Zias, who has studied hundreds of skeletons found in archaeological digs in Jerusalem. “Jewish men back in antiquity did not have long hair.”
. . .
Crucifixion was a common punishment meted out by the Romans to rebellious Jews during Jesus’s time. The Romans crucified so many Jews, said Zias, that “eventually they ran out of crosses and they ran out of space.”

The depiction of the crucifixion was the part of the film most riddled with errors for Zias, who studied the skeleton of a crucified Jewish man from Jesus’s time — the only remains ever found of a crucified victim from antiquity.

Zias said Jesus would not have carried the entire cross to the crucifixion as vertical beams were kept permanently in place by the ever efficient Romans.

“Nobody was physically able to carry the thing (the entire cross).It weighed about 350 pounds,” Zias said. “He (Jesus) carried the cross-beam, maximum.”

And finally, on the subject of the reported anti-semitism of the film, Ezra and Jesse over and Pandagon have said most of what I wanted to say on the subject, but I’d like to add that in one sense, Gibson does seem to be correctly quoting the Bible :

Matthew 27:22-25

“What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?” Pilate asked.

They all answered, “Crucify him!”

“Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.

But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”

When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”

All the people answered, “Let his blood be on us and on our children!”

Leaving aside the Bible’s sketchy accounts of history, this is just one of four accounts of the crucifixion. Why did Gibson reportedly choose this one? Well, as the title suggests, “The Passion of the Christ” is made in the passion play tradition. Here’s what the Anti-Defemation League has to say about that :

The central narrative of Christian theology is the passion, i.e. the trials and crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. There are four different accounts of the passion in the gospels of Christian Scriptures, in which Jews play different roles. All these accounts culminate in the death and resurrection of Jesus as revealing God’s saving power available to humanity. Good Friday and Easter celebrate respectively the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as the high points of Christian creed and experience. Christians frequently present dramatic representations of this narrative known as “passion plays.”

Because much of Christian Scriptures were written in polemical style that often portrayed Jews and Jesus–and therefore Judaism and Christianity–as adversaries, a common interpretation of the crucifixion was that the Jewish people were responsible for killing Jesus. According to this interpretation, both the Jews at the time of Jesus and the Jewish people for all time bear a divine curse for the sin of deicide. Throughout nearly 1900 years of Christian-Jewish history, the charge of deicide has led to hatred and violence against Jews of Europe and America, and various forms of anti-Semitic expression. Historically, Holy Week (the week leading up to Easter Sunday) was a period when Jews were most vulnerable and when Christians perpetrated some of the worst violence against their Jewish neighbors.

In 1965 at the Second Vatican Council in Rome, the Roman Catholic Church took formal steps to correct this interpretation of the passion. In its document, Nostra Aetate, the Church officially repudiated both the deicide charge and all forms of anti-Semitism. Most Protestant churches followed suit, and since 1965 many Christians have worked cooperatively with Jews to correct anti-Semitic interpretations of within Christian theology. Understanding the influential role that passion plays have exercised in the spread of anti-Semitism, the Catholic Church today urges great caution in all dramatic presentations of the passion to ensure that they not furnish any impetus for anti-Semitic attitude or behavior.

As you’ve probably heard, Gibson is a member of a Catholic splinter group that’s rejected Vatican 2. Does this make him an anti-semite? I’ll leave that up to others to decide since I haven’t seen the movie, but the evidence does seem to lean in that direction.

Okay, read the headline and first few paragraphs with me and tell me whether or not you think this is good or bad :

Kerry’s senate Record Mixed on Defense

John Kerry talks at length about his military service and his strong commitment to the nation’s defense, but his senate voting record on Pentagon spending is a combination of billion-dollar budgets approved and multimillion-dollar weapons opposed.

While the four-term Massachusetts senator has voted for nearly all of the Defense Department’s spending and authorization bills since 1990 ? as the overall total has crept closer to $400 billion ? he has a long record of backing cuts to a number of military aircraft and missile-defense programs, an Associated Press analysis shows.

Leading Republicans, including party chairman Ed Gillespie, have seized on those votes to challenge Kerry, questioning the senate front-runner’s record on national security.

Without even getting into Kerry’s defense, I gotta say that this article makes me like him more. Raising defense spending while cutting funding for all bullshit pet projects like “Star Wars” would do a lot more to strengthen our military than Bush’s plans to make wounded soldiers pay for their own hospital meals. This article makes me think that a president Kerry would be more concerned with spending money on personnel than mini-nukes. That doesn’t sound “mixed” to me.

I know I said that we should just ignore Ralph (which I fully intend to do once I finish writing this post), but Matthew Yglesias at The American Prospect has some pretty harsh things to say that you’ve gotta read :

In reality, though, while John Kerry (or John Edwards, for that matter) might not be an ideal leader, Nader would be a simply awful president. He is, for one thing, grossly unqualified. He has no experience in foreign or military affairs, macroeconomic management, or with tax policy. Even on the topic of consumer regulation, neither he nor Nader-affiliated groups seem to have been involved in a substantive way in key fights for several years.

On TV this Sunday, Nader was angry about the extent of corporate influence on American public policy. There is, he said, “too much power and wealth in too few hands,” and “money is still pouring in from corporate interests.” So does Nader have a plan to reform campaign financing? Apparently not. The issues section of his Web site likewise has nothing to say about it.

On the economic front, Nader criticized the Bush tax cuts for causing huge deficits and proposed repealing them. He also proposed spending the money gained by this repeal on “massive public works” to provide employment. A candidate who understood economics would know how to distinguish between the issue of long-term deficits (bad) and short-term ones (fine, if targeted appropriately). Nader seems to grasp neither.

On foreign policy, if he really thinks Al Gore “would have” invaded Iraq, he might want to read some of Gore’s speeches on the subject. Nader says “it was oil” that motivated the Bush administration to go to war, a view that demonstrates no understanding of the neoconservative ideology that dominates American foreign policy.

Nader also spoke of the need to secure health care for more Americans. Good for him. Only Edwards has a plan that will accomplish this. Kerry has a somewhat different plan that would bring care to even more people. Even Bush has a plan that would help a few of the wealthiest uninsured. Nader has nothing to offer but vague platitudes.

Also, while I’m on the subject, I gotta point out Nader’s hilarious vow that he’ll attract more “liberal Republicans” than the Democrats. Ralph, they’re called “Libertarians” and they’ve proven over and over again that the only criteria they use to pick a candidate is the one who promises them the largest tax cut.

It looks like Smirky has officially chosen sides :

Jumping into a volatile election-year debate on same-sex weddings, President Bush on Tuesday backed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage ? a move he said was needed to stop judges from changing the definition of the “most enduring human institution.”

“After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization,” the president said in urging Congress to approve such an amendment. “Their action has created confusion on an issue that requires clarity.”

Marriage cannot be severed from its “cultural, religious and natural” roots, Bush said in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. It was a statement that was sure to please his conservative backers.

Also, it looks like yesterday’s Pentagon global warming report story is getting more attention :

A secret report prepared by the Pentagon warns that climate change may lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives and is a far greater threat than terrorism.

The report was ordered by an influential US Pentagon advisor but was covered up by “US defense chiefs” for four months, until it was “obtained” by the British weekly The Observer.

The leak promises to draw angry attention to US environmental and military policies, following Washington’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and President George W. Bush’s skepticism about global warning — a stance that has stunned scientists worldwide.
. . .
Coming from the Pentagon, normally a bastion of conservative politics, the report is expected to bring environmental issues to the fore in the US presidential race.

So he wants to change the constitution to include homophobia and he doesn’t believe in global warming? Keep taking those extreme positions, Dubya. You’re doing all the hard work for us.

Have you heard about this shit?

For the first time in more than 31 years, an original litigant in Roe v. Wade will be before a federal appeals court asking it to reconsider the most controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision in modern history.

On March 2, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in McCorvey v. Hill, a case that pits the original plaintiff in Roe v. Wade against the Dallas district attorney over the right to obtain a legal abortion.

Since the 1973 opinion, Norma McCorvey — the plaintiff better known as Jane Roe — has changed her views on abortion. Last year, she filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Dallas requesting that Roe v. Wade, the landmark case legalizing abortion, be reversed.

Bill Hill is the elected successor to the late Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, who was the chief law enforcement officer in 1973 charged with enforcing a Texas law that made abortions illegal in the state and prevented McCorvey, a Dallas resident, from obtaining an abortion.

Hill did not file any documents with the 5th Circuit in response to McCorvey’s appeal, leaving the court in the unusual position of hearing an argument in a highly controversial case from the point of view of only one party.

“It’s an amazing and unusual case,” says Allen E. Parker Jr., an attorney and president of the San Antonio-based Justice Foundation who represents McCorvey.
. . .
Yet Parker says his client is advocating that the 5th Circuit overturn Roe v. Wade based on evidence that didn’t exist at the time the Supreme Court issued its opinion.

“We now have 30 years of evidence that abortion is psychologically damaging to women to a severe degree, where in 1973 abortion was rare and illegal in most places,” Parker says.
. . .
Sarah Weddington, who represented McCorvey and a class of women seeking legal abortions in Texas in 1973, says she’s surprised that the 5th Circuit agreed to hear oral argument in the case all these years later.

“As the winning attorney in Roe v. Wade it is shocking to see an attempt to retry that case 31 years later, especially when there is no standing and no justiciable issue,” says Weddington, who no longer practices law, but still speaks around the country about the case.

Notes Weddington, “This one is destined to become a test question on various law school exams because it’s so unusual and, some might say, weird.”

This case is retarded for a variety of reasons :

Man, the Republicans are always full of jokes. While I wouldn’t classify this as “Dennis Miller” funny, it’s definitely up there with Bush’s trifecta joke. Prepare to laugh your ass off :

Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation’s largest teachers union a “terrorist organization” Monday, taking on the 2.7-million-member National Education Association early in the presidential election year.

Paige’s comments, made to the nation’s governors at a private White House meeting, were denounced by union president Reg Weaver as well as prominent Democrats. Paige said he was sorry, and the White House said he was right to say so.

The education secretary’s words were “pathetic and they are not a laughing matter,” said Weaver, whose union has said it plans to sue the Bush administration over lack of funding for demands included in the “No Child Left Behind” schools law.

Paige said later in an Associated Press interview that his comment was “a bad joke; it was an inappropriate choice of words.” President Bush was not present at the time he made the remark.

Get it? See, terrorists are bad, and so are teachers, apparently. HAW HAW!

Okay, the shitty choice of words aside, isn’t this the kinda of sentiment that should get this guy fired? It seems that the Secretary of Education comparing a teacher’s union to terrorists is as bad as if the head of the EPA opposed environmental regulations, the Attorney General opposed due process, the Secretary of Treasury supported giving our budget surplus away to the rich etc. Oh wait…

Now everybody is freaked out about global warming (link via Tom Tomorrow) :

Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let’s face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon’s strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world’s climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade?like a canoe that’s gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don’t know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies?thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall’s California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia?it’s easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.

For an idea of some of those worst case scenarios, this Guardian article that’s been making it’s way around the blogosphere has some good quotes :

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

And that’s ultimately the problem. We’re dealing with a very serious problem here and the guy in charge is still pretending it didn’t exist. The last time he did something like this was the spring of 2001 (and we all know how well that one turned out). This time, diligence would require us to cut down on our reliance on fossil fuels, which is a lot to ask of an oilman. It’s too bad we can’t just have the election tomorrow, huh?

Okay, I’m not gonna bash “Sex and the City” here, but this kinda annoyed me. While watching CNN this morning, the anchorperson said “Of course, the biggest story today is the end of ‘Sex and the City’, a show that changed television forever.” Now I don’t have any strong opinions on where the show stands in the annals of TV (though I suspect it’s not up there with I Love Lucy or Mary Tyler Moore), but since when did the end of sitcoms become a a reason for the public to mourn? If 9/11 really “changed everything”, wouldn’t that include treating the cancellation of sitcoms like the death of a friend? If they’re making this big a deal out of the end of a show on HBO, I can’t imagine the kind of crap we’ll be hearing when they cancel Friends.

Well, this is annoying :

Ralph Nader, whose third-party White House bid in 2000 was blamed by some Democrats for helping elect President Bush, said on Sunday he will try again this year as an independent.

Ignoring pleas from Democrats to stay out of the race, the veteran consumer advocate said he wanted to challenge the two parties’ stranglehold on the political process and their shared addiction to corporate interests.

“Washington is corporate-occupied territory, and the two parties are ferociously competing to see who is going to go to the White House and take orders from their corporate paymasters,” Nader said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Nader said claims that his candidacy would spoil efforts to beat Bush in November were a “contemptuous” attempt to restrict democracy and maintain a “two-party duopoly.”

That’s right. The reason I’m annoyed by Nader running again is that I’m trying to “restrain democracy”. It has nothing to do with my desire for the left to present a unified front against the worst president ever.

Nader’s argument in 2000 that there was no difference between the Republicans and Democrats was as dishonest as anything George Bush has said over the last three years. At least then, he had the noble intention of getting the green party 5% of the vote so they could qualify for matching funds. What’s he hoping for now?

He’s claiming he isn’t going to be a spoiler, but with the Republicans looking at raising at least $200 million and a media that has (until recently) done nothing but praise George W. Bush, every effort of Ralph’s will serve to dilute liberal efforts to get rid of Bush. He obviously thinks whatever issues are important to him will get more attention this way, but I don’t think he deserves any more attention than he’s receiving right now.