By now you’ve probably read these Tom DeLay quotes about his goal of destroying the judicial branch :

“I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.”

“We’re having to change a whole culture in this — a culture created by law schools,” he went on. “People really believe that these are nine gods, and that all wisdom is vested in them.”

But that’s just part of his plans. As Salon’s War Room notes, DeLay wants to overhaul the entire government :

During an interview in his Capitol Hill office with staff from the conservative Washington Times, DeLay suggested that the time was ripe to give the U.S. government an extreme makeover: “What I find the most important is to redesign the government, now that we have the opportunity to do that.”

“I started an effort to redesign the Appropriations Committee,” he noted, “to make it harder to spend — to make it easier to spend on our priorities and harder to spend on the Democrats’ priorities.”

Add to this DeLay’s central role in gerrymandering and the lesson is clear : The goal of the Republican party is to turn the United States into a one-party state. The more I see the GOP twist the levers of government to concentrate their power, the more I’m reminded of this bit from the 1946 educational film “Despotism” (which I wrote about a year and a half ago here) :

A power scale is another important yardstick of despotism. It gauges the citizen’s share in making the community’s decisions. Communities which concentrate decision making in a few hands rate low on a power scale and are moving towards despotism. Like France under the Bourbon kings, one of whom said, “The state? I am the state.”



The test of despotic power is that it can disregard the will of the people. It rules without the consent of the governed.Look beyond the legal formalities of an election in measuring a community on the power scale to see if the ballot is really free.

If the citizens can vote only the way they are told, a community approaches despotism. When legislatures become ceremonial assemblies only, and have no real control over lawmaking, their community rates low on a power scale.

And before you even jump to the “one bad apple” defense, let me remind you of that DeLay isn’t just any Republican. He’s the Majority Leader in the House of Representatives. And it wasn’t seniority that got him there either. He was chosen by his peers to lead the House GOP caucus. For all the half-hearted backpedaling some Republicans are now doing, it’s important to keep in mind that DeLay is only doing the job the party wanted him to do.

Not to pat myself on the back or anything, but I made something exactly like this five years ago out of Legos and it’s still sitting on the shelf next to my records. I can’t believe someone would pay $15 for something like this.

This week, the right’s shrill-harpy Ann Coulter is on the cover of Time magazine. Next to her picture, this question is asked :

Is she serious or just having fun?

Last year, the man who many consider to be the left’s equivalent¹, Michael Moore, was on the cover of the same magazine accompanied by the following question :

Is this good for America?

I’m not saying there’s an anti-liberal bias here or anything, but how insane do our guys have to be before they get treated with kid gloves?

^{1 : I don’t remember Moore ever joking about murdering people though.}

David Frum made an interesting point on last night’s Bill Maher show that’s worth repeating. (Sorry if it’s not very readable, I tried to transcribe his high-speed mumbling as well as I could)

The U.S. military does vote very, very heavily Republican and it would probably be a good thing if it didn’t vote so heavily Republican, even though it would cost us maybe a point or two, because the Army ought to be the Army of the whole nation. Instead of asking “Why are these soldiers so brainwashed?” that they support one party and not another what one (Democrats in particular) ought to look at their own party and say “What is it about the Democratic party that makes it so difficult for them to connect with the men and women in uniform?”

It’s a very interesting question and one I’ll definitely remember next time some Republican crybaby complains about journalists, scientists, and teachers who vote overwhelmingly senate. What is it about the Republican party that makes it so difficult for them to connect with the men and women who are the most informed about our country’s problems?

Here’s a bit of a warning to the anti-judicial extremists :

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.
. . .
A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to “engage in violence.”

What goes around…

senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, after vowing last fall to stop Democrats from blocking the most conservative of President Bush’s judicial nominees, will appear in a telecast later this month with leaders of social conservative groups.

According to a flier for the Louisville, Ky., event, it will focus on how judicial filibusters are being used “against people of faith.” The telecast is being organized by the Family Research Council, which sponsored a similar event last year opposing gay marriage. Frist’s staff said he will probably record his message for the telecast.

…eventually comes around.

McCarthy: (Mr. Chairman) …in view of Mr. Welch’s request that the information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing any work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher whom he recommended, incidentally, to do the work on this Committee, who has been, for a number of years, a member of an organization which is named, oh, years and years ago, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party, an organization which always springs to the defense of anyone who dares to expose Communists.
[. . ]
Welch: Senator McCarthy, I did not know, Senator — Senator, sometimes you say may I have your attention –

McCarthy: I’m listening….

Welch: May I have your attention?

McCarthy: I can listen with one ear and talk with –.

Welch: No, this time, sir, I want you to listen with both. Senator McCarthy, I think until this moment –

McCarthy: — Good. Just a minute. Jim, Jim, will you get the news story to the effect that this man belongs to the — to this Communist front organization….

Welch: I will tell you that he belonged to it.

McCarthy: Jim, will you get the citation, one of the citations showing that this was the legal arm of the Communist Party, and the length of time that he belonged, and the fact that he was recommended by Mr. Welch. I think that should be in the record….

Welch: Senator, you won’t need anything in the record when I finish telling you this. Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us….Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I’m a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

McCarthy: Mr. Chairman, may I say that Mr. Welch talks about this being cruel and reckless. He was just baiting. He has been baiting Mr. Cohn here for hours, requesting that Mr. Cohn before sundown get out of any department of the government anyone who is serving the Communist cause. Now, I just give this man’s record and I want to say, Mr. Welch, that it had been labeled long before he became a member, as early as 1944 –

Welch: Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers’ Guild.

McCarthy: Let me finish….

Welch: And Mr. Cohn nods his head at me. I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn?

Cohn: No, sir.

Welch: I meant to do you no personal injury.

Cohn: No, sir.

Welch: And if I did, I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.

McCarthy: Let’s, let’s –

Welch: You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Regardless of how far this paranoid crusade goes, in the end history is rarely kind to witch-hunters. The only question now is how many are going to be burned at the stake before the American people wake up and realize that the people holding the torches are lunatics.

Even if you disagree with him, you gotta give Jimmy Carter credit for bluntness :

In a speech to a human rights conference in Atlanta, Carter said increasing financial assistance was critical to battling malaria, AIDS and other common diseases that disproportionately affect the poorest parts of the world.

“Unfortunately, in the rich countries like ours, we really don’t give a damn,” said Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1981 and who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

He especially criticized the United States for failing to follow other Western nations which are increasing spending.

Although America tops the foreign aid donor list in dollar terms, it falls behind the Netherlands, Canada and many other smaller, less affluent nations when contributions are measured on a per capita basis.

U.S. foreign aid is approximately 0.18 percent of gross national product, the lowest of any G-7 nation and far below a 0.7 percent United Nations target that 22 of the world’s developed nations have agreed to meet by 2015.

Which reminds me of this quote that my friend Josh has in his email sig file :

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man?s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

-John Kenneth Galbraith

Now the reason I bring this up is that the standard conservative response to criticism like Carter’s is to resort to the “we gave X dollars more than every other country” defense, conveniently putting aside notions that generosity should be judged not by what we give, but the size of those gifts in relation to our wealth². Being the kind of patriot that doesn’t fall into the trap of believing my country is above criticism, I think it’s only fair to ask that we at least be as generous as our peers if we want to continue living under the pretense that America is the most compassionate country on Earth.

Remember back when we used to greet every Bush misstep with jokes about “compassionate conservatism”? That was back when he pretended to give a damn about the poor. These days, he still dusts off some of the old rhetoric from time to time, but I don’t think even he believes it anymore…

^{1 : Carter gained a spot on Rush Limbaugh’s “Excrement List”. Apparently the “empty-brained Neanderthals” of the left aren’t the only ones who resort to ad hominem attacks.}

2 : I know it’s become a bit of a theme around here lately, but the President’s favorite philosopher agrees.

Immediately after responding to a commenter who accused me of “unwittingly propagating some rather nasty stereotypes about the differences between Jewish and Christian cultures”, Tom Tomorrow and I were sent a rather long email refuting our posts on the Talking Jesus Action Figure. Since I find theological discussion to be much more interesting than the current Tom DeLay deathwatch, I’m going to respond to the email here :

First of all, I should make it clear that it doesn’t matter if you believe that Jesus always really said what he’s quoted as saying in the Gospels. I personally don’t. It also doesn’t matter if you agree with Jesus’ idea of the Mosaic law. I personally don’t. These things aren’t the point.

The point is the question of whether not there’s something “wrong” with the portrayal of a Jesus who quotes the Mosaic law.

The latest version of the “Jesus shouldn’t quote the ten commandments” idea posted on the Tom Tomorrow site, and echoed at The Talent Show, misrepresents that question.

It’s not that he shouldn’t quote them, but that he didn’t quote them. Jesus said lots of good stuff, why not have a talking doll include something that he actually said??

It says that “various nitpickers are insisting that this would not be theologically inconsistent, because Jesus, as a Jew, would have been intimately familiar with the Commandments.”

This is, however, the least compelling argument for imagining Jesus quoting the ten commandments. I know there are better arguments, since I personally sent a few. Why pick the easiest simplified version of an argument to refute? Isn’t this what we all hate about Fox?

And speaking of Fox, why describe people who disagree with you, categorically, as “nitpickers,” if A) the question of the choice of words for a talking doll is – let’s be honest – a nitpicking question to begin with, and B) it’s far from clear that you’ve studied this question in any detail, as they may have done? If you don’t choose to know or care much about an issue, does it automatically make nitpickers of people who do?

The fact is, Jesus never recites the Ten Commandments in the Bible. Ever. Pointing this out isn’t nitpicking. Coming up with excuses for why it’s okay to misquote Jesus is nitpicking. (And by the same token, my going out of my way to respond to those justifications is also nitppicking)

Probably the most important part of the problem, though, is that dodging the argument in this way leads to ignorant repetitions of stereoypes.

The Talent Show site, for example, tries to show that Jesus rejected the Mosaic law by quoting him as saying that the most important commandments are to love God and your neighbor. The thing is, Jesus is quoting too, when he says that. Specifically, Jesus is quoting from the Mosaic law, more specifically from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. This example thus looks very wrong in an argument against the image of Jesus quoting laws.

It also complicates the easy stereotyped view of Christianity replacing the law, which was dreamed up relatively late by an anti-Judaic Church, and which is simply repeated as fact on The Talent Show site. It’s asserted there, for example, that Paul thinks “fulfilling the law” essentially means “getting rid of the law.” This is demonstrably false, even without knowing the connotations of the Greek word used (“telos”), especially since Jesus himself gives the same speech in the Gospels, all the while insisting that fulfilling the law from a Christian point of view is not to be misunderstood as scrapping it (Matthew 5:17).

Jesus says in that same speech that the Mosaic law is good and timeless, and not one little diacritical mark on its pages is expendable. He says that people who disobey or downplay it will be least in God’s kingdom and people who follow it and teach it will be great.

For those following along at home, I just “got served”. The verses for Matthew referenced here are really worth reading for yourself :

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Is there any flavor of Christianity that follows “the smallest letter” of Mosaic law? Have I missed all the sermons tha condemn people to hell for eating lobster? Or making a pass at menstruating women? Or shaving their unibrow? Are women who wear pants an “abomination”? Are you not allowed to go to church if you have crushed testicles? Should we closely follow God’s instructions for shitting outside and cleaning cum stains out of our clothes?

Yeah, I know it’s a littel hack-ish to point out some of the crazy stuff in the Old Testament, but if Jesus condemns anyone who “breaks one of the least of these commandments”, then then Hell’s gonna be a very crowded place.

These facts make it look like haphazard reconstruction to say, with The Talent Show site, that “The New Testament, by definition, is God’s way of saying ‘Let’s forget all those crazy rules and simplify things a bit.’”

The site goes so far as to say that “the Ten Commandments don’t appear anywhere in the New Testament,” even though it has just quoted him quoting from them in Matthew 19! One could argue that since they don’t appear one by one all the way from one to ten and in the right order, they’re not there, but this would require deliberately ignoring the loose and allusive way that scriptures are always cited in the biblical world. The Hebrew Bible itself quotes the ten commandments in this loose way (compare Exodus 20 with Deuteronomy 4).

Jesus mentions only six commandments in Matthew 19, one of which doesn’t appear in any of the original lists of ten. As I said previously, I find it interesting that when directly asked about the Ten Commandments, Jesus’s response was to mention the five that don’t involve blind devotion to god, staying home on Sundays, etc. While it’s fair to point out the “loose and allusive” way things are cited in the Bible, this does seem to fly in the face of Jesus’s whole “not the least stroke of a pen” stuff.

This “rabbinic” style of quotation exists in Paul and the gospels too. Jesus’ “sermon on the mount,” for example, would have been instantly understood by readers as a commentary on the ten commandments, and it’s significant for our purposes here that his teaching stresses internalizing the law, which he describes as timeless. We’re a long way here from “forgetting all those crazy rules.”

The commentary on the Ten Commandments is part of the Sermon on the Mount, but I have a hard time seeing the connection between the Ten Commandments and teachings like turning the other cheek, giving to the needy, or serving “two masters”.

In short, it’s not “wrong,” and it’s useless “nitpicking” to try to correct inaccurate stereotypes. This is especially true when they have to do with the false barriers of condescending anti-Judaic versions of Christianity, and especially when the current relationship between Jews and Christians is so already so burdened with antagonistic stereotypes.

Like I said in a previous comment, as an athiest, I’ve got no interest in maligning Judaism or elevating Christianity. My overall point, if there is one, is that I find it incredibly puzzling that so many Christians insist on elevating the Ten Commandments¹ over the things that Jesus actually said².

^{1 : Which consist of four religious and six secular laws written in negative language (“Thou shalt not…”)}

2 : Which nearly always used positive language (“Blessed are the…”) and concerned the ways people treat each other here on Earth.

This morning, Tom Tomorrow hosted a particularly funny link to a talking Jesus action figure along with the following note :

Actually, and this is no joke, there’s already a company which makes Talking Jesus dolls. And what I particularly like is that their version of Talking Jesus recites–the Ten Commandments. I assume that even this site’s largely secular audience will understand what’s wrong with that.

I knew he’d end up having to clarify that statement, so it’s no surprise that he ended up adding the following update :

…various nitpickers are insisting that this would not be theologically inconsistent, because Jesus, as a Jew, would have been intimately familiar with the Commandments. Well, sure, and Abraham Lincoln was undoubtedly familiar with the writings of Thomas Jefferson, but if you’re making a talking Abe Lincoln action figure, trying to convey the essence of the man with a few ounces of molded plastic and an embedded thirty second sound chip, are you going to have him reciting excerpts from the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address?

Memo to the nitpickers : He’s right and you’re wrong. The idea of having a Jesus action figure reciting the ten commandments isn’t just ludicrous because he’s covering one of Moses’ greatest hits, but because the whole point of the Jesus story was to reject the sort of legalistic crap in the Old Testament. Hell, just look up the word “testament”¹ . The New Testament, by definition, is God’s² way of saying “Let’s forget all those crazy rules and simplify things a bit”.

But if you’re one of those who thinks every letter in the Bible was typeset by divine authority, let’s just skip all of the history and quote the Bible itself :

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself³.” Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

- Romans 13:8-10

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’There is no commandment greater than these.”

“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

- Mark 12:28-34

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

“Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments.”

“Which ones?” the man inquired.⁴

Jesus replied, ” ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”

- Matthew 19:16-19

You’d have to be a damn fool to believe that Jesus would parrot the Ten Commandments verbatim. If he didn’t do it in the gospels⁵ (even when prompted to do so), why the hell would it make any sense for him to do it as a talking doll? You’ve gotta wonder about the true motives behind someone who would literally put words into their god’s mouth.

^{1 : I knew you’d be too lazy to look it up. Testament, in the Biblical sense, means “A covenant between humans and God”. Or to put things in political terms, the New Testament is essentially Judaism’s New Deal (though Paul did a damn good job of stripping all the Judaism out of it, huh?).}

2 : Assuming you believe all that stuff (which I don’t).

3 : I’m sure I don’t need to point this out or anything, but “Love your neighbor as yourself” isn’t one of the Ten Commandments.

4 : Notice that Jesus doesn’t say “All of them, dumbass”. Obviously Jesus isn’t as big a fan of all Ten Commandments as people like Judge Roy Moore would have us believe.

5 : In fact, the Ten Commandments don’t appear anywhere in the New Testament.

I’m not usually a fan of opposing political tactics just because they’ve been used primarily by conservatives to block progress¹, but Matt’s convinced me on this one. Maybe it really is time to end the filibuster :

There is a basic asymmetry between the two big ideological forces in the United States. As the old saw goes, Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. They’re suspicious, in other words, of new “big government” schemes; but once such schemes are put into place, they prove quite popular. Despite dismal electoral performance over the past 25 (or, if you prefer, 40) years, liberals do a very good job defending the gains of the past. The key liberal achievements of the past — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights, environmental regulation, federal funding for education — have all withstood repeated attack.
. . .
The liberal difficulty is what it always has been — getting new stuff passed into law. The public’s instinctive skepticism toward novelty is re-enforced by the fact that the American political system puts into place an uncommonly large number of veto points at which legislation may be blocked. New bills must pass two separate legislative houses, each representing different sorts of constituencies; acquire a presidential signature; and pass muster with the Supreme Court. The filibuster merely enhances this tendency, already an outlier in the senate world. It’s no coincidence that the United States is also an outlier in terms of having a relatively underdeveloped welfare state. The many sticking points in the legislative process were deliberately designed by the Founders to bias the political system in favor of conservatism. Speaking ill of the Founders is, of course, not something done in polite American political discourse, but such biases are nothing liberals should embrace.
. . .
Indeed, it’s very hard to think of any major conservative legislation that’s ever been stopped by a filibuster.

It is, by contrast, very easy to think of liberal initiatives that filibusters have blocked. Indeed, as conservative activist Jim Boulet Jr. has wisely argued in a memo to his comrades, the filibuster is crucial to conservatism. By his account, without it, majorities would exist to raise the minimum wage; reform labor law to make new union organizing easier; ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment; reduce greenhouse-gas emissions; and close the “gun-show loophole.” I’m not a gun-control fan myself, but everything else on the list is a key priority. In the past, of course, the filibuster is most famous for its role in delaying the dawn of civil rights. Less well known is that it was integral to the defeat of Bill Clinton’s health care plan in 1993. If liberals ever get another chance to go for comprehensible health-care reform, the filibuster will once again rear its ugly head.

Having mostly changed my mind on this topic, I still believe that the Democrats should fight fire with fire. While it may be advantageous for us in the long run to get rid of the filibuster, fighting dirty is the only way to beat the Republicans at their own game. If that means griding the senate to a halt, so be it. Hell, it’s not as if the GOP hasn’t shut down the government before…

^{1 : A good example of this is liberal opposition to defending something based on “states rights” (since that’s been the standard approach in the support of pretty much every social evil this country as ever faced). I usually agree with this, believing that something that’s good for one state is good for every state, but I think the states rights defense can just as easily be used as a way for progressive states to set a good example (eg. medical marijuana) as it is for regressive conservative states to resist destroying the rights of their citizens (eg. slavery, civil rights, universal suffrage, etc…)}

In four words, that’s the Bush Administration’s tax agenda. How else can you explain the urgency behind cutting taxes on capital gains (“earned” through a combination of informed choices and dumb luck), dividends (basically a semi-annual gift to stockholders), and estates (or as many on the left are now calling “Paris Hilton taxes”¹)? Meanwhile, the two most regressive forms of taxation (payroll and income taxes) which are the ones you pay for all those hours you spend at your shitty job have barely changed for those who really need tax cuts. They may pretend to care about working people, but the actions of the Republican party show that they’re more interested in helping multi-millionaires than people living below the poverty level.

It’s been said before, but with April 15th just two days away, it needs to be repeated over and over again. If the Republican party has their way², the only taxes that you’ll be paying will be the ones on the money you broke your back earning. If this makes you as sick as it makes me, alert the media. Write a letter to every newspaper, TV station, and member of the House and senate that you can. Let them know that this unconscionable disregard for the needs of working Americans is an elitism worse than anything those “Hollywood leftists” could dish out.

^{1: As Kevin points out, “Democrats have consistently offered up pretty extreme counterproposals, including Earl Pomeroy’s latest gambit, which would provide a $7 million (!) exemption for couples and thus constrain the estate tax to the tippy top .3% of the population…The only thing being taxed is estates of robber baron size; the only people being taxed are the pampered children of the robber barons; and the cost of repeal is on the order of $1 trillion per decade.” In other words, the Republicans would rather save the Paris Hiltons of the world than the working poor.}

2: Or should that be “when the Republican party has their way”?

It looks like James Dobson (of “Spongebob is gay” fame) has joined his fellow wingnuts in taking aim at the judicial branch¹. Since Dobson is also one of those guys who seems to find homosexuality where it doesn’t exist, I wonder what he’d make of this startling revelation about the Chief Justice?

Can you explain the 4 gold stripes on the sleeves of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s judicial robe?

In a bit of acknowledged whimsy, Chief Justice William Rehnquist decided to personalize his judicial robe with 4 gold braid stripes on each sleeve about 5 years ago. All the other Supreme Court justices wear the traditional unadorned black judicial robes. The inspiration for the gold stripes came from the costume worn by a character in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, “Iolanthe,” first staged in London in 1882.

The costume which inspired Chief Justice Rehnquist is worn by the Lord Chancellor, a character called upon to settle a dispute among a colony of fairies. Ironically, the story line has the Queen of the Fairies taking revenge by casting a spell on the hero, Strephon, which turns him into a Member of Parliament, and grants him the magical power to have any bill passed without opposition. This allows the fairies to take over Parliament.

In another bit of irony, given the subject matter of the impeachment trial now before the senate, the Lord Chancellor sings a song which include these lyrics:

The Law is the true embodiment Of everything that’s excellent. It has no kind of fault or flaw, And I, my Lords, embody the Law.

That’s right, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who once favorably compared a college’s ban on clubs for gay students with “a state law providing that measle sufferers be quarantined”, fancies himself a despotic fairy judge?! Okay Tinkerbell, I think it’s time to retire…

^{1: The criticism goes something like this “the KKK wears robes, judges wear robes, therefore judges are as evil as the KKK”. Seriously. I wonder what Dobson thinks of all those robe-wearing members of the church choir? There’s a fine line between exalting the cross and burning it.}

“Debt Slavery” :

The U.S. senate has passed a dream bill for credit card and financial service companies that, if passed by the House, will land millions of American families in debt slavery. Rather than being able to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and make a difficult new start, families and individuals will be placed on long-term payment plans to credit card companies, companies that will take their houses, their cars, their child-support payments, and their paychecks.

If you think you’re unlikely to land yourself a share-cropping position in this new feudal system, ask yourself if you can be sure that no one in your family will get sick, be injured, die, lose a job, or get divorced. More than one in every 100 adults in America files for bankruptcy each year. If you’re a child, the chances of your family filing for bankruptcy are about twice that. (Kids cost money.) These rates have doubled in the past decade. The basic reason that bankruptcies have increased is that personal debt has increased. In fact, in proportion to debt, bankruptcies are actually down.
. . .
Corporations have a very easy time filing bankruptcy. CEOs are able to squirrel away fortunes while canceling employees’ pensions. Millionaires can file for bankruptcy and keep unlimited amounts of money out of reach in “asset protection trusts” as well as in super-expensive houses. The press secretary for the bill’s primary sponsor, Senator Charles Grassley, told the New York Times that “the senator’s staff was unaware of the trusts and the loophole for the wealthy that they represented.” Uh-huh.

These loopholes need not be exploited offshore, as in the olden days. There are a number of states that allow them, regardless of whether the robber baron lives in the state. But the legal costs of setting up “asset protection trusts” place them beyond the reach of most people. Oh, and corporations are allowed to shop for friendly judges from state to state, a right that Congress recently took away from the victims of corporate practices who try to file class action suits. The current bankruptcy bill leaves these millionaires’ loopholes in place, although it requires that pirates of industry have purchased their mansions three and a third years prior to bankruptcy if they intend to keep them through the homestead exemption.

Real Slavery :

Don’t get me wrong. The bankruptcy bill is a truly awful piece of legislation¹, but it doesn’t quite compare to the evils of slavery. Besides, for those quick to resort to slavery comparisons, it should probably be pointed out that there are real debt slaves living all over the world who would gladly change places with some American who’s getting screwed over by the Congress and credit card companies.

^{1: Seriously, the bankruptcy bill is horrible. Though I concentrated on the hyperbolic title, the article I linked to above is a pretty good primer on what’s wrong with this bill. Also, if you have any doubt about where our representatives loyalties lie, check out this list of amendments to the bill that were defeated.}

Long story short, there was a meltdown at my hosting provider that caused a 12-hour outage. Once the server was back up, it turns out that hey lost a week’s worth of my updates. I’m combing through the Google cache in a vain attempt to restore as much as I can, but it looks like my updates from yesterday are gone forever. Posting will probably be light today, unless I find a way to punch the wall and type at the same time…

UPDATE : Thanks to the caching magic of Google and the quick thinking of my friend Earnest (who had full versions of some of my posts in a cached RSS feed), I’ve been able to restore 90% of the missing entries. I’m working on re-doing the two entries from yesterday from memory (so if you read those already, they might seem kinda weird). Unfortunately, the comments and trackbacks from those entries are gone.

By the way, go check out Earnest’s new blog The Idea Man.

Kevin’s got a great post about the shameful state of healthcare in this country :

But all you hear about in America is that you might have to wait six months for hip replacement surgery. And indeed you might. But that’s because hip replacement surgery is usually pretty low priority stuff. On the other hand, if what you need is either routine medical care or else urgent treatment for something like a heart attack ? that is, the stuff that makes up 99% of actual real life medical care ? France is great.

I’ve long thought that the spectre of “socialized medicine” is the greatest con ever perpetrated on the American public. Think about it. Suppose you were constructing a healthcare system from scratch. Choice #1 is national healthcare along the lines of France or Sweden. (Not Britain. Their system kind of sucks.)

Choice #2 is this: if you’re employed, your employer might provide you with healthcare coverage of some kind. Anytime you change employers or your employer changes plans, your coverage and your doctor will change too. If you’re unemployed, or you work for Wal-Mart, you get nothing ? though in a pinch you can always show up at an emergency room, which is perhaps the most expensive way of delivering healthcare known to man. If you’re poor, there’s a shabby government program that will sort of cover your kids, but probably not you. If you’re over 65, another government program will cover some but not all of your medical expenses. And all of this will cost us about 14% of GDP, far more than any other industrialized country on the planet.

That’s insane. No one would design a healthcare system like that. But that’s what we have, thanks mostly to a weird set of coincidences and political compromises made around the time of World War II.

And who benefits from it? Citizens? Probably 95% of us would be better off with France’s system than with ours. Businesses? Why should they be saddled with the cost and hassle of providing healthcare? Doctors? Maybe a bit, but an awful lot of them would probably be better off in France too. Insurance carriers and pharmaceutical companies? Bingo.

Though I quoted it before, it’s worth repeating that just becuse you have insurance doesn’t mean you’re safe :

Half of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by soaring medical bills and most people sent into debt by illness are middle-class workers with health insurance, researchers said on Wednesday.

The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, estimated that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans every year, if both debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children, are counted.

“Our study is frightening. Unless you’re Bill Gates you’re just one serious illness away from bankruptcy,” said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who led the study.

“Most of the medically bankrupt were average Americans who happened to get sick. Health insurance offered little protection.”
[. . .]
“Among those whose illnesses led to bankruptcy, out-of-pocket costs averaged $11,854 since the start of illness; 75.7 percent had insurance at the onset of illness.”

The average bankrupt person surveyed had spent $13,460 on co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services if they had private insurance. People with no insurance spent an average of $10,893 for such out-of-pocket expenses.

“Even middle-class insured families often fall prey to financial catastrophe when sick,” the researchers wrote.

So let’s go down the list….Medicare has been bloated without actually helping anybody but insurance and pharmeceutical companies, Congress and the President are making it harder for average Americans (ie. those who aren’t millionaires) to declare bankruptcy¹, and neither party has a propsal on the table to do provide universal healthcare². At this point, I’m having a hard time shaking the notion that our representatives aren’t actively trying to hurt people.

^{1: If I remember correctly, an amendment to the current bill going through Congress to provide an exemption for bankrupcies caused by medical emergencies was defeated on a party-line vote. I don’t remember where I read that, but I know it wasn’t from the Democratic party (which should be trumpeting that vote every time they’re in front of a camera).}

2: Let’s face it, national healthcare is the only solution to the problem at hand. I’m sure the Democrats are still shell-shocked over the healthcare-related defeats in 1994, but now’s the time to start laying the groundwork for something like this.

Perhaps it’s just me, but this article about the possible canonization of Pope John Paul II….

An American Jew cured of a brain tumor after attending Mass with Pope John Paul II. A Mexican boy stricken with leukemia who recovered after a papal kiss. Even a cardinal who regained his ability to speak after John Paul touched his throat.

Italian newspapers have been rife with reports of alleged miracles attributed to Pope John Paul II, fueling speculation he may soon be put on the path to sainthood.

Vatican rules, though, are clear: For a miracle to be considered in the saint-making process, it has to have occurred after John Paul’s death. So far, all the reports stem from inexplicable cures that occurred while John Paul was very much alive.
. . .

Nowak, like John Paul a Pole, stressed that historians and theologians would still have to gather all the necessary documentation to start a case for beatifying John Paul, the first step in the process.

But he said such work, which usually takes years if not centuries, could be completed in a mere six months.
. . .
Vatican procedures in place for some 500 years require one miracle for someone to be beatified and a second to be canonized. There has been speculation that a new pope might do away with those procedures and simply declare John Paul a saint based on popular acclaim.

…really reminds me of this classic Saturday Night Live monologue.

Father Guido Sarducci: [ smoking cigarette ] You know, you don’t have-a a patron saint for the United States, but there are some American saints. Just the last couple of years they made-a some. The first was-a about-a two years ago. Her name was-a Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. Mother Seton-is-a what they call her. And she’s got-a these nuns of her own order who lobby-they’re real heavy-they came to Rome and everything. And it’s amazing, you see. To be made a saint in-a the catholic church, you have to have-a four miracles. That’s-a the rules, you know. It’s-a always been that-a. Four miracles, and-a to prove it. Well, this-a Mother Seton-now they could only prove-a three miracles. But the Pope-he just waved the fourth one. He just waved it! And do you know why? It’s-a because she was American. It’s all-a politics. We got-a some Italian-a people, they got-a forty, fifty, sixty miracles to their name. They can’t-a get in just cause they say there’s already too many Italian saints, and this woman comes along with-a three lousy miracles. I understand that-a two of them was-a card tricks. Next thing you know, they’re gonna be making Kreskin a saint. Saint Kreskin-they’ll probably call him. It’s a good one.

I know it’s a bit of a joke, but why go through the trouble of having strict rules about who deserves to become a saint if you’re willing to bend them?