Bark Bark Woof Woof

...in Albuquerque.

A 32-year-old woman who vanished just days before her wedding was found alive early Saturday in New Mexico after calling her fiance from a pay phone and saying she had been kidnapped, authorities said.

Jennifer Wilbanks was safe and in police custody more than 1,420 miles from her home in Duluth, Ga., said Kathy Mabry of the Albuquerque Police Department.

The bride-to-be had been missing since Tuesday, when her fiance reported she went for her nightly run and didn't come home, according to Duluth police.

Wilbanks called her fiance, John Mason, early Saturday and said she had been kidnapped, her stepmother said. As she spoke to Mason, Duluth police traced the phone call to Albuquerque, the stepmother said. She said the family would fly to Albuquerque later Saturday.

Relatives Friday had asked the public to pray for Wilbanks, who hadn't been seen since she went on an evening jog. She was reported missing Tuesday night by her fiance, John Mason.

The two were due to be married this weekend in a ceremony with 600 guests and featuring 14 bridesmaids.

Turns out she got cold feet and hopped a bus to Vegas. Hey, when you have a wedding with 14 bridesmaids and 600 guests, it's understandable -- have you seen the dresses?

What I love is watching CNN breathlessly breaking in with BREAKING NEWS announcing her recovery and all the hype about kidnapping by mysterious people in a blue van and all the drama that that entails -- interviews with tearful family members, questioning the fiance, making plans to search the woods -- and then finding out that she took one look at all the hype around her wedding -- she had eight wedding showers, for Dog's sake -- and bailed. Now the anchors on CNN are really pissed off; they were all ready to go to special logos and music on this story, floating rumors about a "Hispanic man" and clumps of hair, and now they find out that it all boils down to "Never mind..." CNN is now painting her as a flighty twit on a bender, and as soon as they can gracefully extricate themselves, they'll be going back to "People In the News."

This points out the trouble with 24/7 cable news coverage...not every missing person is the next Laci Peterson, and treating them like they are actually trivializes the real missing persons. I suppose they can be forgiven for the hype -- no one really knew what happened with this woman until she called 9-1-1 from the 7-11 -- but maybe next time they'll tone it down a little.

Yeah, right.

From KOB-TV in Albuquerque:

It wasn’t a gun that caused police to lock down Marshall Junior High School in Clovis. It was a burrito.

Police locked the school down after a citizen saw a student walking into school with a long, skinny object wrapped in a white cloth. He thought it was a gun and called police.

Officers searched for the student while the school was on lockdown. But the student came forward first, admitting he had what they were looking for – a two-and-a-half-foot-long burrito.

The student had taken the burrito, wrapped in foil and a white cloth, to present in a culinary career class. It was loaded – with meat and beans.

Police called the incident a good exercise for all of the officers who responded to the school.

One observer joked that with the right combination of ingredients, the burrito could have been a deadly weapon.

You have the right to order a la carte. If you give up that right, anything you order can and will be used against you in the food court...

From the Toledo Blade:

The federal probe into whether local Republican fund-raiser Tom Noe was illegally funneling money to the Bush campaign had been ongoing for months. It reached a turning point Wednesday night.

FBI agents swept into Mr. Noe’s Maumee condo about 7:30 p.m., spending three hours scouring the home of one of the most prominent Republicans in northwest Ohio. They were looking for evidence of violations of federal campaign contribution laws.

The federal probe is studying Mr. Noe’s campaign contributions to the President, and specifically contributions made by others who may have received money from Mr. Noe, possibly allowing him to exceed the $2,000 spending cap.

[...]

Mr. Noe, 50, is a coin dealer and former chairman of the Lucas County Republican Party. He manages two rare-coin funds that have received $50 million from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation.

That investment arrangement is currently under a separate investigation being conducted by the Ohio inspector general.

Mr. Noe also is chairman of the Ohio Turnpike Commission and a member of the Ohio Board of Regents.

He also is chairman of the U.S. Mint’s Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee.

Yesterday, state Sen. Marc Dann, a Democrat from suburban Youngstown, asked federal, state, and county authorities to investigate whether there were any violations involving state and local campaign contributions.

"It’s becoming clear that Tom Noe has given large contributions to Republicans, while also obtaining state contracts in which he made millions of dollars investing in risky rare coins," Mr. Dann said.

[...]

Reached for comment yesterday after a Statehouse event, Gov. Bob Taft, who has strongly defended Mr. Noe in the past, said he was "certainly surprised" on Wednesday to learn of the federal investigation.

Mr. Taft said he did not plan to ask for Mr. Noe’s resignation from the Ohio Board of Regents or the Ohio Turnpike Commission.

"I think we need to let that investigation run its course, to see what happens before we make any decisions on a matter like that," he said.

When asked if he still supports the state’s rare-coin investment with Mr. Noe, the governor replied:

"Well, I think that’s the purpose of the inspector general’s investigation. It obviously has achieved a return for the state of Ohio. It’s been part of the overall successful investment policy of the bureau.

"But if there are serious questions or concerns with regard to the appropriateness of the bureau investing in that particular investment, that is what the inspector general will be focusing on," Mr. Taft said.

Not that it's any surprise, but I'm sure that there are a lot more stories like this just waiting to be told. Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay are just the tip of the iceberg.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

Pregnant and living in a shelter, a 13-year-old Palm Beach County girl is snared in a court fight of national scope after the state's social services agency blocked her attempt to have an abortion.

The legal and political wrangling surrounding the girl intensified Thursday as legislators and advocates weighed in on the case in light of state and federal efforts to pass a parental notification law that would apply to pregnant teens.

State law allows minors to have abortions without notifying their guardians. Experts say the law extends to wards of the state, raising the question of why this girl's decision has ended up before a judge.

Identified in court records simply as L.G., the girl's plans to end her 131/2-week pregnancy were thwarted when her guardian, the state Department of Children & Families, filed an emergency motion in Juvenile Court to prevent the abortion. The American Civil Liberties Union, represented by attorney James K. Green, filed an emergency appeal Wednesday arguing that neither the court nor DCF should be involved in L.G.'s decision.

[...]

Stephanie Grutman, executive director of the Florida Association of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, said that L.G. will enter her second trimester in a few days, making an abortion slightly more risky and sharply reducing the number of providers in Florida willing to perform the procedure.

"This teen did exactly what she was supposed to do when faced with an unexpected pregnancy," Grutman said. "She went to a trusted adult ... and a healthcare center, got the information she needed and made a responsible decision for her life ... Now we have bureaucrats playing politics with a young woman's life. We're in a situation where every moment counts."

Given DCF's miserable record over the last four years -- losing children, putting them in homes of serial abusers, and hiring Jerry Reiger, an advocate of corporal punishment on a biblical scale, as the head of the agency -- the State of Florida once again proves that it cares deeply about children...until they're born.

Back at work for a full week and I'm ready for more time off. I think I'll take off tomorrow and Sunday...

Ready to go around the garden with The Liberal Coalition? Here's what's happening.

archy has further thoughts on the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Bark Bark Woof Woof deconstructs Bush's press conference.

BlogAmY wants to fight back.

Bloggg on having The Talk with her son.

Chris checks out the New York Public Library on-line.

Collective Sigh celebrates a baby step towards sanity.

Corrente covers the coverage on religious broadcasters.

NTodd has an agenda.

Echidne tells tales of creepy people in the Red States.

edwardpig joins Echidne on the hypocrisy trail in Wisconsin.

First Draft follows up on the tale of the fake Secret Service agent who harrassed attenders at a Social Security rally.

The Fulcrum supports the troops.

Sponsor the Gamer's Nook in the Revlon Walk for Women.

Happy Furry Puppy has fun with quotes from Star Wars.

iddybud will be examining the Religious Reich this weekend.

In Search of Telford gets graphic about Bush's tax hikes.

The Invisible Library brings reality to fairy tales.

Left is Right follows the Bolton story.

Make Me a Commentator has a little list.

MercuryX23 reviews the Big 10.

Musing's musings on supporting our troops -- unless it conflicts with getting support from los historicos in Miami.

Pen-Elayne got naught from yesterday's attempts to raise the consciousness of people at work regarding kids and secretaries.

Meet Alex at Respectful of Otters. Aww...!

Rick asks for your vote.

Send get-well wishes to Rook's Girlfriend.

rubber hose on the miserable failure.

Scrutiny Hooligans on the housing industry.

Sooner Thought and thoughts on Gore.

Steve Gilliard covers the Princeton Frist filibuster.

T. Rex on the "unprecedented" filibuster.

Trish Wilson hails Canada's lead in medical common sense.

Wanda urges you to filiblog.

WTF Is It Now wonders about Jeff.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has the Houston Public Library's new code of conduct, otherwise known as the Tightass Rules.

That's all for now.

Watching Bush's press conference is like watching a person go into some kind of uncontrollable seizure, and all you can do is gape. He's spews out canned responses that sound one step above gibberish, and he's looks at the camera as if he's watching a cockroach race going on right under his nose.

8:18 p.m.: He went into near melt-down on the David Gregory question of mixing religion with politics, and the answer he gave to Terry Moran on the question about increased terrorism had nothing to do with the question. To quote Danny Concannon, I'm sure it was an answer to some question, but it wasn't to the one he asked.

8:23 p.m.: He's talking about the president of Russia ("Vladimir") like he's a fraternity brother. I'm wondering if his nickname for him is "Vlady-Poo."

8:31 p.m.: The Bolton Question. John, start looking for your next gig.

8:32 p.m.: He wants us to have the option of setting up our own savings accounts for retirement. What, like an IRA?

8:37 p.m.: I'm glad he clarified the fact that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is his top military advisor. I wondered about that.

8:41 p.m.: "Look at me, I can pronounce Kim - Jung - Ill! Still working on 'nuclear.'"

8:43 p.m.: Mr. President, name one issue where you put politics aside for the good of the nation. Go on, take your time. (By the way, name-dropping Pete Domenici's name as a sign of bipartisan cooperation is a non-starter. Domenici is a Republican.)

8:47 p.m.: Referring to cabinet members by their first name only makes you sound like you're trying to be folksy. Even LBJ didn't do that. Of course, he was a real Texan.

8:50 p.m.: On the economy: "Higher gas prices cost people more money." I stand in awe of his grasp of the stunningly obvious. (Well, he's said he doesn't do nuance.) And what the hell does asbestos reform legislation have to do with the economy?

8:53 p.m.: On NCLB: "It's working! People are learning to read and write!" So why is he proposing to cut money from the Family Literacy grants? "People were graduating from high school who were illiterate." Yeah, and they graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, apparently.

8:59 p.m.: "Last question so I can get back to watching Spike TV." He sells the Social Security reform like that guy on the infomercial selling the Showtime cooker.

9:01 p.m.: Last line: "Thank you all for your answers! God bless America!"

For this they pre-empted The O.C.?

Via AMERICAblog from CBS News:

A college production tells the story of Matthew Sheppard, a student beaten to death because he was gay.

And soon, it could be banned in Alabama.

Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

"I don't look at it as censorship," says State Representative Gerald Allen. "I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children."

Books by any gay author would have to go: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple" has lesbian characters.

Allen originally wanted to ban even some Shakespeare. After criticism, he narrowed his bill to exempt the classics, although he still can't define what a classic is. Also exempted now Alabama's public and college libraries.

[...]

But in book after book, Allen reads what he calls the "homosexual agenda,"
and he's alarmed.

"It's not healthy for America, it doesn't fit what we stand for," says Allen. "And they will do whatever it takes to reach their goal."

It's not gay people who have an agenda -- hell, we're not even organized enough to agree on fashion trends. The only people that have a gay agenda are people like this poor bastard and the nutsery on the far-right who have it in for an entire class of people who come from every strata and segment of humanity and whose very existence represents some kind of threat to them. This kind of pathology has been seen before in our recent history, and the language is very familiar, especially if you give it a touch of a Teutonic accent. It's way beyond time we called them on it, stood up to them, and said Never Again.

NPR reports that an ivory-billed woodpecker, last sighted over sixty years ago, has been sighted in Arkansas.

A group of wildlife scientists believe the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct. They say they have made seven firm sightings of the bird in central Arkansas. The landmark find caps a search that began more than 60 years ago, after biologists said North America’s largest woodpecker had become extinct in the United States.

The large, showy bird is an American legend -- it disappeared when the big bottomland forests of North America were logged, and relentless searches have produced only false alarms. Now, in an intensive year-long search in the Cache River and White River national wildlife refuges involving more than 50 experts and field biologists working together as part of the Big Woods Partnership, an ivory-billed male has been captured on video.

"We have solid evidence, there are solid sightings, this bird is here," says Tim Barksdale, a wildlife photographer and biologist.

For an NPR/National Geographic Radio Expeditions story, NPR science correspondent Christopher Joyce joined the search last January along Arkansas’ White River, where a kayaker spotted what he believed to be an ivory-billed woodpecker more than a year ago. Many other similar sightings over the last 60 years have raised false hopes.

But this time, Joyce reports that experts associated with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York and The Nature Conservancy were able to confirm the sighting. They kept the find a secret for more than a year, partly to give conservation groups and government agencies time to protect the bird’s habitat.

The Nature Conservancy has been buying and protecting land along the White and Cache Rivers for years, along with the state and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Since the discovery, they've bought more land to protect the bird.

For those of us who have more than just a passive interest in birds and nature conservancy, this is one of best pieces of news in a very long time; it's like finding the Holy Grail. And even if you don't know anything about birds, this is good news; it means that there's hope that efforts like land conservation and common-sense environmental regulation have real results.

Former Vice President Al Gore really tore the top off last night in a speech in Washington, D.C. Some highlights:

It is no accident that this assault on the integrity of our constitutional design has been fueled by a small group claiming special knowledge of God's will in American politics. They even claim that those of us who disagree with their point of view are waging war against "people of faith." How dare they?

Long before our founders met in Philadelphia, their forebears first came to these shores to escape oppression at the hands of despots in the old world who mixed religion with politics and claimed dominion over both their pocketbooks and their souls.

This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place.

James Madison warned us in Federalist #10 that sometimes, "A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction."

Unfortunately the virulent faction now committed to changing the basic nature of democracy now wields enough political power within the Republican party to have a major influence over who secures the Republican nomination for president in the 2008 election. It appears painfully obvious that some of those who have their eyes on that nomination are falling all over themselves to curry favor with this faction.

They are the ones demanding the destructive constitutional confrontation now pending in the Senate. They are the ones willfully forcing the Senate leadership to drive democracy to the precipice that now lies before us.

I remember a time not too long ago when Senate leaders in both parties saw it as part of their responsibility to protect the Senate against the destructive designs of demagogues who would subordinate the workings of our democracy to their narrow factional agendas.

Our founders understood that the way you protect and defend people of faith is by preventing any one sect from dominating. Most people of faith I know in both parties have been getting a belly-full of this extremist push to cloak their political agenda in religiosity and mix up their version of religion with their version of right-wing politics and force it on everyone else.

They should learn that religious faith is a precious freedom and not a tool to divide and conquer.

I think it is truly important to expose the fundamental flaw in the arguments of these zealots. The unifying theme now being pushed by this coalition is actually an American heresy -- a highly developed political philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with the founding principles of the United States of America.

We began as a nation with a clear formulation of the basic relationship between God, our rights as individuals, the government we created to secure those rights, and the prerequisites for any power exercised by our government.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," our founders declared. "That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."

But while our rights come from God, as our founders added, "governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed."

So, unlike our inalienable rights, our laws are human creations that derive their moral authority from our consent to their enactment-informed consent given freely within our deliberative processes of self-government.

Any who seek to wield the powers of government without the consent of the people, act unjustly.

Read the rest in Salon.com (subscription/Day Pass required).

According to Jeffrey Birnbaum in the Washington Post, if Tom DeLay escapes punishment from the newly-minted House Ethics Committee, it will be because he will invoke the same tactic that Bernie Ebbers tried to use in the Worldcom trial, known as the Sgt. Schultz defense: "I know nothing!"

"The rules are written in a way that indicate that if a member of Congress is misled about who's paying for things, that is a credible defense," said Kenneth A. Gross, a lawyer who deals with congressional ethics. The House will have to wrestle with whether DeLay, the chamber's second-ranking Republican, knew or should have known that he might be violating House rules.

Uh huh. You can say a lot about Tom DeLay, but one thing he is not is unaware of his surroundings. He knows exactly who's who, what's what, and why things happen -- and who makes them happen. That's how he got to be the House majority leader. He sure didn't get the job based on his winning personality and bright eyes.

By the way, if DeLay pleads ignorance before the House committee and it turns out he's lying, can he be indicted for perjury?

Last year Al Franken, the comedian and host of the Al Franken Show on Air America toyed with the idea of running against Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman in 2008. After a few days he decided not to. But now he's thinking about it again.

I'd rather be part of [the process] than commenting on it," he insists. But he pauses, shrugs indecisively, a boyish chuckle follows. "I think. I don't know. That might be part of the calculus of whether I go for it or not." Whether Franken will "go for it" in 2008, against freshman Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, remains to be seen. "I can tell you honestly, I don't know if I'm going to run," Franken continues, as we now sit 41 floors below his studio, in the skyscraper's courtyard. "But I'm doing the stuff I need to do, in order to do it."

That stuff includes moving home to Minnesota after three decades away. He's buying an apartment in Minneapolis, and moving his radio show to the Twin Cities. He's talking about political action committees and fundraising with key state and national Democrats, looking to raise money for candidates in the 2006 elections. After years of stumping for Democrats nationwide, he has some chits to cash in. "He has national reach; his name and who he is will attract small contributors and large contributors from all over the country, so a lot of little folks too," says Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. "In that way he's like the Dean campaign because he's really somebody that can energize not just Minnesota but around the country, to get involved and contribute."

[...]

"I do take politics very seriously even though I'm a comedian. I never thought there was a contradiction in it; I always thought that comedy and satire are a legitimate way of dealing with very serious things," Franken continues. "Having a sense of humor helps. If you look at terrorists, they really have no sense of humor." But then he changes gears, a little. "Minnesotans take their politics seriously and running for Senate is a big deal."

It's certainly a big deal for the Minnesota Democratic Party. "Franken's viable, no question," says Minnesota Democratic strategist Wy Spano, who is also the director of the Center for Advocacy and Political Leadership at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. "There's lots of buzz about him. I really do think that Al Franken as a star will bring lots of folks, and lots of money to the party."[Salon.com]

This could be interesting.

Should DeLay stay or should he go?

David Corn and the editors of The Nation lay out the reasons for Tom DeLay to resign:

Tom DeLay should resign as leader of the House Republican majority. If he doesn't, Republicans should have the decency to remove him. He's been rebuked unanimously four times by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee--which he then proceeded to purge and disembowel. Three of his political associates are under indictment in Texas for raising illegal corporate campaign contributions. He's luxuriated in lavish junkets on the tab of crooked lobbyists and foreign agents. He's given "family values" a new meaning by paying his wife and daughter $500,000 from his PACs for part-time work. And one of his cronies, "Casino Jack" Abramoff, who is under investigation for bilking Indian tribes and pressing them to donate to the GOP, says DeLay "knew everything" about what was going on.

Corruption isn't, or shouldn't be, a partisan issue. DeLay isn't in trouble because he's a conservative, as he claims. He's in trouble because he is "The Hammer," the "undisputed and unapologetic master"--as the Wall Street Journal puts it--of a Republican-controlled Congress whose hallmark is the flagrant exchange of legislative favors for campaign contributions.

[...]

The Republican National Committee talking points in defense of DeLay dismiss his troubles as partisan politics and suggest that his effective leadership will be demonstrated by moving forward with the Republican agenda. But that agenda--a bankruptcy bill designed by the credit card companies, tort "reform" sculpted by companies to limit their liability for injuries caused by their negligence, a Big Oil energy bill that ladles out subsidies to every energy producer while increasing our dependence on foreign oil--doesn't distract from DeLay's corruption but exemplifies it.

A small group of public interest organizations--the Campaign for America's Future, Public Campaign Action Fund, Common Cause, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington--have led the charge against DeLay and done a commendable job of bringing his abuses to public attention. They've shaken the system enough to get Republicans on the ethics committee to try to make the controversy go away by offering to set up a carefully managed "investigation" of DeLay in return for Democratic endorsement of rules changes that would gut the committee's ability to fight corruption. Democrats should stand firm for a real investigation and do what Republicans already charge they are doing: Use DeLay's excesses to expose the corruption of the Congressional majority. Even as they do this, Democrats should make themselves into the party of reform, offering proposals to curb lobbyists, expose the back rooms to sunlight and move toward clean elections that limit the role of big money in politics.

[...]

Americans tend to be pretty cynical about politicians and think corruption is widespread. But periodically, when the stench gets particularly bad, they realize it's time to clean out the stables. By 2006 Democrats may find the public ready to do just that. But DeLay's ouster cannot wait that long. He must go--now.

Jonathon Alter in Newsweek offers reasons why DeLay must stay.

A couple of years ago, Tom DeLay was chomping on a cigar at a Washington restaurant with some lobbyists. The manager went over to tell him he couldn't smoke because the restaurant was located on property leased from the federal government, which bars smoking. "I am the federal government," DeLay replied, in words that will follow the onetime exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, like ants at a picnic.

The line reeks of the arrogance and self-importance that may bring DeLay low, but it also has the advantage of being true: all three branches of the federal government belong to Republicans, and the autocratic House majority leader is the purest representation of the breed. On every issue—ethics, the environment, guns, tax cuts, judges—he is a clarifying figure for anyone who might be confused about the true nature of today's GOP.

So assuming he dodges indictment, DeLay should stay in his post for 18 months, until the 2006 midterm elections. Even if his legendary gerrymandering has made it unlikely that the Democrats will regain control of Congress, at least the voters—who now, finally, have heard of this guy—would have a clearer decision about where the country should go. His potential successors are all just as conservative as DeLay, but they seem colorless and would thus fuzz up the choice. The midterms should be a referendum on DeLay's America. Stay on the right fringe or move toward the center? Let the people decide.

Some Democrats aren't buying. Sure, it would be nice to have "the Hammer" around as a bogeyman for direct-mail solicitations, they say, but he should step down. They claim that his death by a thousand cuts is, as Democratic Rep. Harold Ford puts it, "a big distraction from all that we are trying to do."

Actually, that's an argument for keeping DeLay around. We should want the 109th Congress "distracted" and kept from returning to normal business for as long as possible. Anything the Democrats are "trying to do" won't get done anyway. And what the Radical Republicans are trying to do is usually bad—from cutting taxes further amid monster deficits to immunizing polluters in the energy bill (which won't do a thing, as even proponents admit, to cut gas prices), to subjecting Social Security to the whims of the stock market. It was once conservatives who thought Congress should legislate less. Now this should be the Democratic mantra: Don't do anything. Just stand there!

[...]

Sure, it's wrong when DeLay takes Scottish golf outings courtesy of Indian casinos or lets lobbyists write bills or turns the House ethics committee from a bipartisan panel into his own personal Laundromat, bent on cleaning his reputation. This is the same man who asked in 1995: "Are they [representatives] feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special-interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people have a right to know."

But this smelly hypocrisy — assuming it's not found illegal — merely offends the senses. DeLay's views on muscling the judiciary and ending the separation of church and state (which he believes is a fiction) offend the Constitution. That makes it too important to leave to the media and the rest of the Washington scandal machine to remedy. This job belongs to the voters, who can hammer the Hammer by siding against his many acolytes in Congress. Let's make 2006 a referendum on the right wing. For that, DeLay must stay.

Okay, readers, you make the call: who makes the better case?

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:01 PM  

From the AP:

ODESSA, Texas (AP) -- The school board in this West Texas town voted unanimously to add a Bible class to its high school curriculum.

Hundreds of people, most of them supporters of the proposal, packed the board meeting Tuesday night. More than 6,000 Odessa residents had signed a petition supporting the class.

Some residents, however, said the school board acted too quickly. Others said they feared a national constitutional fight.

Barring any hurdles, the class should be added to the curriculum in fall 2006 and taught as a history or literature course. The school board still must develop a curriculum, which board member Floy Hinson said should be open for public review.

I have no problem with teaching the Bible as history -- as long as it's in there with Greek mythology -- so the students get an idea of what formed a culture. And I don't have a problem with teaching it as literature; any book that starts off with two naked people and a talking snake is right up there with Beowulf. Just keep it the hell out of the science curriculum.

From Mike Allen in the WaPo:

House Republican leaders, acknowledging that ethics disputes are taking a heavy toll on the party's image, decided yesterday to rescind a controversial rule change that led to the three-month shutdown of the ethics committee, according to officials who participated in the talks.

Republicans touched off a political uproar in January by changing a rule that had required the ethics committee to continue considering a complaint against a House member if there was a deadlock between the committee's five Republicans and five Democrats. The January change reversed this, calling for automatic dismissal of an ethics complaint when a deadlock occurs.

Democrats rebelled against that and other changes -- saying Republicans were trying to protect House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) from further ethics investigations -- and blocked the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, as the ethics panel is officially known, from organizing for the new Congress.

Republicans on the committee say they will launch an investigation of DeLay's handling of overseas trips and gifts as soon as the impasse over the rules is broken. The Washington Post reported last weekend that Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff charged DeLay's airfare to London and Scotland to his American Express card in 2000.

Tom is toast.

Update: Via my new buddy The Daou Report, ABC News has this little tidbit:

Over two years, Rep. Tom DeLay had at least two dozen discussions with a lobbyist working to keep a U.S. territory's factories free from new labor laws. The lobbyist contributed to the House leader's campaigns and arranged travel for him.

Records show that DeLay's staff spoke with the lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, or his team almost daily during this period.

DeLay's office kept Abramoff, now under criminal investigation, routinely apprised of congressional efforts to block new regulations on his client, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Questions have been raised about whether Abramoff himself paid for some of DeLay's foreign trips in violation of House rules. DeLay maintains they were properly financed by trip sponsors.

Abramoff's firm reported it drafted legislative materials for DeLay, and Abramoff boasted to island leaders he could use his close ties to Republican leaders to block legislation from receiving a House vote.

"Getting the bill off the schedule for next week, however, should enable us to use our connections within the Leadership to ensure that … it will not come to the floor," Abramoff wrote the islands in September 1996.

The Northern Marianas billing and correspondence records of Abramoff's former lobbying firm, Preston Gates, were obtained by The Associated Press under an open records request approved by the island government

They provide a day-by-day account of the lobbyist's campaign of fundraising, trip-providing and schmoozing with lawmakers in both parties aimed at, among other things, getting Congress to block Clinton administration efforts to regulate alleged "sweatshop" garment factories in the Northern Marianas. Those rules were never enacted.

For those of you who missed Watergate, this is a microcosm of what happened to President Nixon during the spring and summer of 1974...the shit started to cascade down on him until he resigned on August 9. Enjoy the ride.

Former Senator Bob Dole speaks up on the Nuclear Option (TM Trent Lott):

...I hope changing the Senate's rules won't be necessary, but Senator Frist will be fully justified in doing so if he believes he has exhausted every effort at compromise. Of course, there is an easier solution to the impasse: Democrats can stop playing their obstruction game and let President Bush's judicial nominees receive what they are entitled to: an up-or-down vote on the floor of the world's greatest deliberative body.

Mr. Dole can be forgiven if he's forgotten the fact that the Republicans have effectively blocked the Democrats from any form of participation in the process of advise and consent on any of Bush's nominees since before the election -- after all, he was in the Senate when they actually allowed the minority to speak up, and all he knows now is what Liddy tells him. So it's no surprise that he's shocked, shocked that the Democrats are resorting to the only arrows left in their quiver. He's conveniently forgetting the fact that the Democrats have offered some signs of compromise to the Republicans -- who cannot accept them without the risk of setting off several thermonuclear devices in the hallowed halls of Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs. And he's also forgetting the fact that the filibuster was used to great effect by the Republicans in 1968 to block the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas by President Johnson to be the Chief Justice. It's not a surprise, however; Mr. Dole practically invented the concept of IOKIYAR -- It's OK If You're A Republican -- when he was the Senate Majority Leader and presidential candidate in 1996, and asked with actual wonder (if not just a tad of disingenuousness) "Where's the outrage?" at the Clinton Administration when it was the Republicans who nearly brought the country to its knees over a blowjob in the Oval Office. (Oops. Bad pun.)

Mr. Dole would do well to remember that the Senate can only be "the world's greatest deliberative body" if both sides are allowed to participate. If not, they're just a bunch of overpaid cheerleaders.

From the New York Times:

Gov. Jeb Bush signed a bill on Tuesday giving Florida citizens more leeway to use deadly force in their homes and in public, a move that gun-control groups and several urban police chiefs warned would give rise to needless deaths.

The measure, known as the "stand your ground" bill, lets people use guns or other deadly force to defend themselves in public places without first trying to escape.

[...]

Governor Bush, a Republican, said he supported the measure because when people faced life-threatening situations, "to have to retreat and put yourself in a very precarious position defies common sense."

But John F. Timoney, Miami's police chief, called the bill unnecessary and dangerous. Chief Timoney, who has successfully pushed his police officers to use less deadly force, said many people, including children, could become innocent victims. The bill could make gun owners, including drivers with road rage or drunken sports fans who get into fights leaving ball games, assume they have "total immunity," he said.

"Whether it's trick-or-treaters or kids playing in the yard of someone who doesn't want them there or some drunk guy stumbling into the wrong house," Chief Timoney said, "you're encouraging people to possibly use deadly physical force where it shouldn't be used."

Chief Chuck Harmon of the St. Petersburg police and Sheriff Ken Jenne of Broward County also publicly opposed the bill. The Florida House of Representatives voted 94 to 20 in favor of the bill earlier this month, while the Senate passed it 39 to 0.

But Jeb! signed it anyway because packin' heat makes his balls clank, and he wants to show the hard right that he's got a pair after being such a big law-abiding wussy in the Terri Schiavo case. Meanwhile, they're going to be staging a new version of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on the Palmetto Expressway.

I feel safer already.

From the New York Times:

President Bush offered a gesture of support today for Tom DeLay, the embattled House majority leader, by giving him a ride back to Washington from their home state of Texas aboard Air Force One.

Mr. Bush is near the end of a 60-day series of personal forays around the country to build support for his efforts to overhaul the Social Security system and offer workers the chance to divert some of their payroll taxes into personal investment accounts that they would manage for themselves. With opinion polls showing only tepid public support for the plan, Congress began hearings today on ways to overhaul Social Security, and Democratic leaders held rallies in New York and Washington to express opposition to the president's proposals.

Mr. Bush used the occasion of his own rally, in Galveston, to express support for Mr. DeLay at a time when he has come under heavy fire from Democrats, and even some Republicans have expressed misgivings about his future.

"I appreciate the leadership of Congressman Tom DeLay, in working on important issues that matter to the country," Mr. Bush said, crediting the powerful house leader with pushing energy and medical liability legislation through the House.

Mr. DeLay, whose Congressional district is near Galveston, sat in the audience, several rows back from the stage where Mr. Bush spoke.

Mr. DeLay is facing questions about possible House ethics violations involving his overseas travel and ties to lobbyists. His activities are also being examined by a state grand jury in Texas that has indicted two close political operatives on charges of illegal fund-raising. Mr. DeLay has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, and said in a recent letter to constituents that the accusations against him were being raised by a "legion of Democrat-friendly press."

As Mr. Bush continues to try to push his Social Security plans, he needs the support of powerful lawmakers like Mr. DeLay. But in the last few weeks, as questions about Mr. DeLay's travels and who paid for them have mounted, the president has been careful in the way he has shown support for his fellow Texan.

Two weeks ago, when the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, was asked about the president's support for the lawmaker, he said the president backed what Mr. DeLay and other Congressional leaders were doing "to move forward on the agenda that the American people want us to enact."

But Mr. McClellan was careful in answering a question about whether the president and Mr. DeLay were close, suggesting the relationship was more business than social.

"Sure," Mr. McClellan said, when asked if the president considered Mr. DeLay a friend. But he went on to add that "I think there are different levels of friendship with anybody."

Today, when reporters pressed him on how strongly Mr. Bush was supporting Mr. DeLay, Mr. McClellan responded, "Strongly as he ever has, which is strongly."

What a great idea. When Bush's Social Security plan goes down like the Titanic, he can tag Tom DeLay with the blame: "See, it woulda passed, but Tom DeLay insisted on tagging along on the tour and he screwed it all up. I don't even know the guy!"

At least when the Titanic went down, the captain went with it. And they had a band.

The Daou Report linked to Bark Bark Woof Woof today.

That's the second time in three weeks that the big guns have noticed this site. Wow.

AMERICAblog reveals that Microsoft has Ralph Reed, the former altar boy (with all that that particular metaphor implies) of Pat Robertson, on retainer as a lobbyist.

This is not the first time the cherubic Karl Rove-wannabe has been on the MSFT payroll -- he first worked for them in 1998 -- and it raises the question as to whether or not he had a hand in the software giant caving on supporting the gay-rights law up for a vote in the Washington legislature.

Here's an interesting note from E.J. Dionne.

...in an amusing but revealing question, the pollsters asked how Americans would vote in a contest between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush if the Constitution were changed to allow them to run in 2008. Clinton beat Bush, 53 percent to 43 percent -- a rather decisive judgment on our two most recent political legacies.

Heh.

From Salon.com, Peter Dizikes reports on John Edwards and what he's planning for 2008.

In 2008, when George W. Bush will be a semipopular president leaving office for good, the next Democratic candidate will face a new challenge and a new opponent, but will still need a broad, compelling critique of Republican ideas and practices. Edwards may not find it, but then again, he just might.

[...]

Maybe he'll run and maybe he won't, but Edwards is laying the campaign groundwork, just in case.

In the meantime, Edwards has taken a position as head of a new institute tailored to his interests: the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received his law degree. Read into this what you want, but Edwards' position is described by the University as a part-time role, and it has a two-year term.

Still, Edwards only finished a distant second in the 2004 primaries, as the senior senator from North Carolina -- and then garnered mixed reviews during the general election, following his uneven convention speech, a stalemate in the vice-presidential debate, and his limited impact in the final months of the campaign. So how can Edwards improve as a candidate in 2008, holding no office and burdened with a losing record in presidential races? Indeed, Edwards is in the most unusual position of all the potential Democratic hopefuls: Outside of the formal structure of his own party, unable to burnish his political resumé by conventional means, and unable to use political office to gain media attention.

On the other hand, Edwards is now free to craft his own message, without senatorial duties or the weight of a long voting record that can be used against him. The king of retail campaigning could have, in effect, four years of retail politics ahead of him.

If John Edwards plans to make the run in 2008 as an out-of-office campaigner by collecting IOU's from state and county candidates in 2006, he's got a lot of history working in his favor -- that's how Richard Nixon rehabilitated himself in 1968 and Ronald Reagan did it in 1980, both after courting disaster within their own party (Nixon cratered after the 1960 loss to Kennedy and his ill-fated run for California governor in 1962, and Reagan is blamed for weakening Jerry Ford in 1976 by running against him in the primaries, giving the election to Jimmy Carter). A lot of Democrats will have more than just a passing interest in fielding a candidate who is not the lightning rod that is Hillary Clinton.

PS: Iddybud has been carrying the torch for John Edwards since the election and before. Check out her blog for the latest Edwards news.

The New York Times bids farewell to Star Trek: Enterprise.

By the middle of May, the "Star Trek" franchise will be no more, having died a death as long and lingering as -- well, insert your favorite Trekkie long-and-lingering-death simile here. UPN has decided to bring "Star Trek: Enterprise" - the latest version of the saga - to an end and to give the whole idea of "Star Trek" a creative rest. The producers of the show have rejected a hopeless last-ditch effort to raise funds directly from fans to continue production.

The original "Star Trek" series proved what a little imagination, a little patience and a lot of plywood and foam core could do for televised science fiction. It ran for only three seasons on NBC in the late 1960's but attracted a devoted following that seems, somehow, to have replicated itself by cloning. It also inspired four additional series, 10 "Star Trek" movies and a delightful parody called "Galaxy Quest," starring Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver, which flirted momentarily with the nihilistic possibility that a television show about space might merely be a television show about space.

For "Star Trek" fans, a future with no "Star Trek" at all must seem as empty as one of those great space voids the ever-endangered starship Enterprise kept getting sucked into. But somewhere, a TV executive is undoubtedly repeating the slogan about going where no one has gone before - and wondering how to make that idea about direct fan-financing work.

Yeah, the franchise has kind of run out of steam, and there will be endless debates as to which was the best iteration of the concept. There are those who accept only the original, and those, like me, who think that the best work was done in the middle of the Next Generation series run when it wasn't worried about proving itself as a worthy successor and before it began to run thin on ideas. (My favorite episode is "Ship in a Bottle." Feel free to chime in with your favorite, if you had one.)

As for this being the end of the voyage, well, I wouldn't bet on that. In 1976 the automotive world bid a fond farewell to the Cadillac Eldorado convertible, said to be the end of an era because no one wanted convertibles any more. Much to my delight, they were wrong. Thus it will be with Star Trek, and at some point, someone's going to spilt their infinitives and take the chance "to boldy go where no one has gone before"...again.

Here's an interesting story in the Washington Post:

The Senate's top two Democrats, seeking a break in the impasse over seven stalled judicial nominees, said for the first time yesterday that they would consider a compromise in which some of the seven would be confirmed and the others withdrawn.

The comments by Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) startled some liberal groups because Democratic leaders have said until now that all seven nominees were unacceptable because of their sharply conservative stands on women's issues, civil rights, the environment and other issues.

It is far from clear that such a deal would be acceptable to Republicans, because it would require them to drop their threat to change Senate rules in order to ban filibusters of judicial nominees. Democrats, who hold 44 of the Senate's 100 seats, used the filibuster to block 10 appellate court nominees in President Bush's first term. It takes 60 votes to end a filibuster.

While a compromise on the part of the Democrats would undoubtedly piss off some -- maybe a lot of -- liberals, that's nothing compared to the reaction from James Dobson and his minions on the right if the Republicans are seen as willing to negotiate with "anti-Christians." Harry Reid and Dick Durbin would take some heat, assuming that the Republicans even bite on the idea of letting one or two judges through, but Bill Frist would be crucified for betraying the hard right, who brook no compromises on their agenda and look askance at anyone who suggests that there might be a middle ground. Frist should know that you never negotiate with terrorists, especially if they're on your side.

A few thoughts on going back to see where part of the novel takes place.

To those of you who may be visiting this site for the first time because you saw the web address on a t-shirt this past week in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport; Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Independence, Kansas; O'Hare Airport in Chicago; or Miami International, welcome. Take a look around and drop me a note if you like. As you'll quickly discover, this is not a site about our canine friends, but political commentary and observations about life in general.

Yeah, I got around a lot last week. Glad to be home. What's been going on?

Oh, come on, Democrats, play nice and go on the snipe hunt with the Republicans. You can trust them on the judicial nominations. After all, they won the election.

Yeah, right. Pull the other one, David; it jingles.

From Bush and the Republicans on the state of the economy to the rest of the country (fingers in ears and eyes closed): "La-la-la-la; I can't hear you!"

From the Washington Post:

Howard Dean may not be running for anything, but his elbows appear to be as sharp as ever.

Since taking over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year, the former presidential candidate has been quoted in newspapers making unusually caustic remarks about Republicans.

Dean has suggested that they are "evil." That they are "corrupt." He called them "brain-dead" during a stop in Toronto -- and while the Terri Schiavo case was still in the news. He has tagged Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) as a "liar." Last week, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that he mimicked a "drug-snorting Rush Limbaugh" at an event there.

Dean was noted for his candid and often unpredictable comments during his campaign last year. Then, as now, many Democrats said they don't mind the former Vermont governor's bluntness.

"You don't want a wallflower for a party chairman," one Senate Democratic aide said. Dean's remarks have not attracted much attention in the national media, in part because he has focused largely on local and regional news outlets since taking the party's helm in February.

But his counterparts in the Republican National Committee have noticed. "It's odd that Howard Dean says he wants to earn the respect of those who live in the red states, but chooses to not only attack their views but attack them personally," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said. "Americans want to hear an agenda, rather than name calling."

May I direct Ms. Schmitt's attention to the posting below or any press conference held by Tom DeLay for a fine example of name-calling, and remind her that when it comes to an agenda, we have yet to hear one from the Republicans on how to reform Social Security (private accounts don't do that), how to restructure our energy policy to lower costs and provide for the future (ANWR doesn't do that), or how to reduce the deficit that wasn't there four years ago (more tax cuts for the rich doesn't do that). After all, the Republicans are supposed to be the party in charge; if so, let them demonstrate their much-vaunted leadership. Meanwhile, quit whimpering about a little humor at your expense and get to work.

Senator Frist to the rally of the "faithful" at Louisville last night:

"Emotions are running high on both sides, and it reveals once again our country's desperate need for more civility in political life," he said in his taped message, part of the program simulcast to churches, homes and organizations from a 6,000-member Baptist church east of Louisville.

[...]

Frist's comments were more moderate than those of several religious leaders headlining "Justice Sunday: Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith."

Charles W. Colson, head of Prison Fellowship Ministries, also appeared by videotape. He said Senate Democrats are trying to use the filibuster "to seize what they lost at the ballot box and to prevent the appointment of judges, holding the judiciary hostage." Their actions, he said, "are destroying the balance of power, which was a vital Christian contribution to the founding of our nation."

James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, spoke from the church's pulpit and criticized the Supreme Court, seven of whose nine members were named by Republican presidents. The court's majority, Dobson said, "are unelected and unaccountable and arrogant and imperious and determined to redesign the culture according to their own biases and values, and they're out of control."

The court's majority does not care "about the sanctity of life," he said. Pornography is a growing problem, he said, "plus this matter of judicial tyranny to people of faith, and that has to stop."

Dobson said the Senate has "six or eight very squishy Republicans" who have not committed to helping change the filibuster rule. Throughout the program, the names and phone numbers of senators scrolled across the screen, and speakers urged listeners to call and demand that the filibusters be stopped. Among the senators whose photos were shown were Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.).

If Senator Frist wants "civility" in this debate, perhaps he should examine his own party first. It wasn't the Democrats who warned judges that their lives may be in danger for following the law and that it would be understandable if violence against them occurred. It wasn't the Democrats who drove the federal government through the walls of Terri Schiavo's hospice room, and it wasn't the Democrats who re-shaped the House Ethics Committee rules to guarantee that their House majority leader could still run the show while he was under indictment, and then removed their own members from the panel who balked at the change, replacing them with toadys who had received campaign contributions from the leader's PAC. You want civility, Dr. Frist? Physician, heal thyself.

Made it back home safe and sound -- I know you've all been waiting to hear that. The flight from Chicago to Miami was delayed because of snow in Detroit. Go figure.

The house is intact, the cars started, the plants are still alive, the lawn was cut, the mail will be back tomorrow, and my house sitter -- more a visitor than a sitter actually -- reports that nothing happened. Two messages on the machine: one from someone mumbling in Spanish, which leads me to want to change my message to "Yo no hablo español. Si usted busca alguien que habla español, usted tiene el número equivocado;" and another from The Old Professor wanting to know how the Inge Festival went. I'll write about it tomorrow. Right now I need to drink about a quart of water and get to bed. Tomorrow is almost here.

Frank Rich lends his considerable insight to the right wing's hijacking of faith.

Tonight is the much-awaited "Justice Sunday," the judge-bashing rally being disseminated nationwide by cable, satellite and Internet from a megachurch in Louisville. It may not boast a plume of smoke emerging from above the Sistine Chapel, but it will feature its share of smoke and mirrors as well as traditions that, while not dating back a couple of millenniums, do at least recall the 1920's immortalized in "Elmer Gantry." These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends. While Sinclair Lewis wrote that Gantry, his hypocritical evangelical preacher, "was born to be a senator," we now have senators who are born to be Gantrys. One of them, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, hatched plans to be beamed into tonight's festivities by videotape, a stunt that in itself imbues "Justice Sunday" with a touch of all-American spectacle worthy of "The Wizard of Oz."

Like the wizard himself, "Justice Sunday" is a humbug, albeit one with real potential consequences. It brings mass-media firepower to a campaign against so-called activist judges whose virulence increasingly echoes the rhetoric of George Wallace and other segregationists in the 1960's. Back then, Wallace called for the impeachment of Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge in Alabama whose activism extended to upholding the Montgomery bus boycott and voting rights march. Despite stepped-up security, a cross was burned on Johnson's lawn and his mother's house was bombed.

[...]

The "Justice Sunday" mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore. The real "Justice Sunday" agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the "Tonight" show last week: " 'Activist judges' is a code word for gay." The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight. To paraphrase the "Justice Sunday" flier, now it's the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.

[...]

Perhaps the closest historical antecedent of tonight's crusade was that staged in the 1950's and 60's by a George Wallace ally, the televangelist Billy James Hargis. At its peak, his so-called Christian Crusade was carried by 500 radio stations and more than 200 television stations. In the "Impeach Earl Warren" era, Hargis would preach of the "collapse of moral values" engineered by a "powerfully entrenched, anti-God Liberal Establishment." He also decried any sex education that talked about homosexuality or even sexual intercourse. Or so he did until his career was ended by accusations that he had had sex with female students at the Christian college he founded as well as with boys in the school's All-American Kids choir.

Hargis died in obscurity the week before Dr. Frist's "This Week" appearance. But no less effectively than the cardinals in Rome, he has passed the torch.

Need a dose of fiction, poetry, or whimsy? Check out some of the offerings at The Practical Press.

The William Inge Festival ended last night; today I'll say goodbye to all my new friends, drive down to Tulsa, and turn in my rented car (a 2005 Mustang, of course). I'm off to find a copy of today's New York Times so I can do the puzzle during my return flights -- Tulsa to Chicago to Miami.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 8:19 AM  

Two columnists in the Washington Post take a look at tomorrow's "Justice Sunday."

Colbert I. King:

The American flag was appropriated by the political right wing years ago. Now the Christian right is trying to hijack religion. This time it shouldn't be allowed to happen without a fight.

[...]

The statement by one of the sponsors of tomorrow's event, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, is an example of the Holy War that is being launched by the right. In one of the most outrageous smears to be uttered by a so-called religious leader, Perkins said that "activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups . . . have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms." That is an unmitigated lie that should not be allowed to stand.

Which judges are out to rob Christians of their heritage? That is religious McCarthyism. Perkins should name them, provide evidence of their attempted theft of "our Christian heritage" or retract that statement with an apology. Don't count on that happening.

Angered by Democratic opposition to some of President Bush's judicial nominees, Perkins's group has also put out a flier charging that "the filibuster . . . is being used against people of faith." To suggest Democrats are out to get "people of faith" is despicable demagoguery that the truly faithful ought to rise up and reject.

But will that occur in American pulpits tomorrow? The Christian right counts on the religiously timid to keep their mouths shut. So why not exploit religion for their own ends? They will if we let them.

[...]

They are not now and never will be the final arbiters of Christian beliefs and values. They warrant as much deference as religious leaders as do members of the Ku Klux Klan, who also marched under the cross.

They should be resisted, not pandered to by politicians. Case in point: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. The Republican leader is going to appear by videotape at tomorrow's self-pity party. He shouldn't. But if he does, Frist should use the occasion to tell the assembled that they are wrong in saying Bush's nominees are being blocked because they are people of faith. He should say that invoking Christianity as an instrument to advance a political agenda or to vanquish a political opponent is divisive, demagogic and beyond the pale in American politics. And if Frist shows up on TV and passes on the opportunity to place his party on the side of tolerance and goodwill, then his performance will be Exhibit A in the case to be made against his presidential quest.

The Bergen Record in Hackensack, N.J., editorialized that the attempt by the Christian right to dominate all three branches of government "has to frighten anyone who is not a Christian conservative. It should frighten us all." Baloney. It should make us mad. Fighting mad.

Paul Gaston:

People calling themselves Christians are gathering once again for a crusade against what they consider to be the secular humanist subversion of Christian values. This time the object of their wrath is the judiciary. In the wake of the fanatical and fruitless assaults against the judicial system for letting Terri Schiavo die, the Family Research Council will convene tomorrow what it calls "Justice Sunday," a live simulcast to pit Christian values against "our out-of-control courts."

The burgeoning assault on the American judicial system by right-wing Christians is an integral part of their attack on "godless" secular humanism. According to them, secular humanists nurture a culture that promotes abortion; encourages gay marriage; prohibits prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance in permissive schools that indoctrinate students with Darwin's "theory" of evolution; preaches moral relativism; and generally threatens to subvert the Christian foundations of the republic.

What these self-avowed Christians do not acknowledge -- and what the American public seems little aware of -- is that the war they are waging is actually against other people calling themselves Christians. To simplify: Right-wing and fundamentalist Christians are really at war with left-wing and mainstream Christians. It is a battle over both the meaning and practice of Christianity as well as over the definition and destiny of the republic. Secular humanism is a bogeyman, a smoke screen obscuring the right-wing Christians' struggle for supremacy.

The assault on the judiciary is especially revealing. The vicious attacks on Judge George Greer, the Florida jurist who presided over the Schiavo case, reveal the bizarre nature of right-wing Christian fantasies. A regular recipient of hate mail and threats against his life that required him to walk to court with an armed marshal, Judge Greer is a lifelong Southern Baptist, a regular in church and a conservative Republican. None of those credentials protected him from the assaults of fellow Christians, including messages saying he would go straight to Hell. What he found "exasperating," he told a journalist, "is that my faith is based on forgiveness because that's what God did. . . . When I see people in my faith being extremely judgmental, it's very disconcerting."

[...]

All Americans, of whatever religious or non-religious persuasion, need to be on the alert to preserve those principles. The burden falls especially heavily on the mainstream Christians who are slowly awakening to the gravity of the challenge facing them. Too long tolerant of their brethren, too much given to forgiveness rather than to confrontation, they need to mount a spirited, nationwide response to what constitutes a dangerous distortion of Christian truths and a frightening threat to the republic they love.

The end of the proverb, as anybody with a cursory knowledge of the Bible -- and of theatre -- knows, is "shall inherit the wind."

Update: Apropos of that quote, today we scattered some of the late Jerome Lawrence's ashes around the tree planted in his memory in the Playwright's Garden at Independence Community College, home of the William Inge Theatre Festival. Jerry was a co-founder of the festival in 1983 and attended it for many years. "There was much greatness in that man."

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 8:36 AM  

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Washington's failure to pass a bill extending civil rights protections to gays and lesbians:

Many who gathered in the state Senate chamber yesterday may have hoped to witness history. And it would have been historic if, after nearly 30 years of attempts, the Legislature had passed a bill extending civil rights protections to gays and lesbians.

The bill did not pass. It failed by a single vote, opposed by all the Senate Republicans and two Democrats.

But those expecting a glimpse of history were not denied, no matter how disappointing the vote. What they witnessed was a piece of history, a ragged slice of a long, dark history of politicians and governments perpetuating prejudice, bigotry and injustice.

Those present may have sniffed in that chamber the lingering stale scent of Southern halls of government nearly a half-century ago. There was the same musty flavor in the religious justifications for prejudice and the political arguments for continued government tolerance of discrimination against a group of people deemed inferior or just plain different.

Most senators who voted no presumably did so to reflect their districts, believing that a majority of their constituents favor discrimination over civil liberties. Particularly in such increasingly diverse suburban areas as Kirkland, Vancouver, Bellevue, Issaquah, Bothell and Auburn, the final measure of that political calculation may await only the next election.

It's no secret that Microsoft, one of the largest employers in the state and no slouch -- until now -- in supporting civil rights for the gay community, caved to pressure from the Religious Reich and decided to stay neutral on the bill's passage, whereas in the past they had supported it. John at AMERICAblog is canvassing his readers for suggestions on how to retaliate against Microsoft, either by boycotting their products or voicing outrage to Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft. One step would be for those who own shares of Microsoft stock (whose symbol on the NASDAQ is MSFT, earning it the ironic nickname of "Mr. Softee" because of its agressive take-over policies) to dump them from their portfolio and go with companies that are more queer-friendly -- or at least not "neutral" when it comes to supporting basic human rights for all Americans.

My suggestion is to support the Human Rights Campaign's efforts to get the attention of Microsoft and get them to reconsider their position, and write -- or better yet, e-mail -- the company to get them to see the error of their ways. The damage has been done; the Washington legislature defeated the bill, but there is now the opportunity to educate both the politicians and the public.

Failing that, Linux and Firefox work on most computers. And I still have my Apple IIc in the garage.

Last night at the William Inge Festival we paid tribute to the late Jerome Lawrence, one of the authors of Inherit the Wind, with a film and a staged reading of The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. That play was written at the height of the Vietnam war and focuses very clearly on Henry David Thoreau's opposition to the Mexican war -- "an unjust war" -- and the reaction of his fellow citizens of Massachusetts to his refusal to pay taxes to support the war.

Last night at dinner I sat with one of the local residents of Independence. We've become friends over the last fourteen years, and while he is a great supporter of the festival and Independence Community College, he is by no means a liberal. His father, who is approaching the age of 95 and was a supporter of Alf Landon (who grew up here), still curses the name of FDR. We go back to the time of the Clinton administration, and he and I used to cheerfully toss barbs back and forth all those years about scandals and morality. I remember that last year he was supremely confident that Bush would get his second term and he said at one point, "You'll see -- W's gonna pull it off."

Last night at dinner, though, he was a little subdued when I gave him a couple of pokes about some of the items in the news like the Schiavo case, Tom DeLay, and the nuclear option. "Well, I gotta tell ya, Bobby -- those aren't conservative things going on there," he said with a touch of a grin. "Dad's not too happy about that shit." I asked him if a lot of people around here were paying any attention to it. "We're not in the middle of nowhere. We have cable TV and high-speed internet, y'know. People watch TV. They see what's going on." What do they think of it? I asked. He shrugged. "Most folks want to be left alone. Do for themselves when they can and get what they need when they can't. Like anywhere." He shrugged. "'Course, that's just one man's opinion."

That's one man in one small town. But I think he's speaking for a lot of people, and that's one man's opinion.

From Independence, Kansas, home of the 24th annual William Inge Festival...

Okay, there's a new pope, Tom DeLay is wading into more brown sauce, Jim Jeffords is retiring, and Ann Coulter is on the cover of Time magazine, looking like an ad for death... what else is the gang at The Liberal Coalition writing about?

archy comments on the week's news.

Bark Bark Woof Woof is on the road to New Mexico and Kansas and learns that Microsoft's new color scheme is yellow.

Amy's planning a wedding.

moi at bloggg is going to the zoo.

Chris hopes for some Spidey-guidance.

Collective Sigh on the Minutemen giving up their border patrols.

Corrente on the flagging support of the nuclear option.

Dohiyi Mir on the Bush economy.

Echidne of the Snakes does a take-down on David Brooks.

edwardpig on Tom DeLay's outrage over the internet being used for research.

First Draft on Scott McClellan's gagging gaggle.

The Gamer's Nook goes job hunting.

Happy Furry Puppy on more Texas outrageousness.

iddybud on the "people of faith" telecast.

Jesse writes on the lip service from the Democrats on alternative energy...and gets a response.

The Invisible Library on some really important new discoveries in the written word.

Left is Right has some words to cherish.

Make Me a Commentator gives Cal Thomas a math lesson.

MercuryX23 remembers a wise man's words.

Michael gets around.

Pen-Elayne meets the neighbors.

Rook's Rant does the Shorter David Brooks bit.

rubber hose makes a Dune connection.

Scrutiny Hooligans celebrates Earth Day.

Sooner Thought picks up William Rivers Pitt's thoughts on the theocrats.

Speedkill channels a rare medium well done.

Steve Gilliard links to Anne Scott Tyson's report in the Washington Post on a day of fighting in Iraq.

T. Rex gets us the lowdown on crazy rock stars with guns.

Trish Wilson finds out that in South Carolina, chickens are more important than women.

Wanda on the top ten reasons we have rotten politicians.

WTF Is It Now on the Bolton nomination.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat hears some discouraging words, but won't take them lying down.

How was your week?

From the New York Times:

The Microsoft Corporation, at the forefront of corporate gay rights for decades, is coming under fire from gay rights groups, politicians and its own employees for withdrawing its support for a state bill that would have barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Many of the critics accused the company of bowing to pressure from a prominent evangelical church in Redmond, Wash., located a few blocks from Microsoft's sprawling headquarters.

The bill, or similar versions of it, has been introduced repeatedly over three decades; it failed by one vote Thursday in the State Senate. Gay rights advocates denounced Microsoft, which had supported the bill for the last two years, for abandoning their cause. Blogs and online chat rooms were buzzing on Thursday with accusations that the company, which has offered benefits to same-sex partners for years, had given in to the Christian right.

"I think people should feel betrayed," said Tina Podlodowski, a former Microsoft senior manager and former Seattle city councilwoman who now runs an advocacy group for AIDS patients. "To me, Microsoft has been one of the big supporters of gay and lesbian civil rights issues, and they did it when it wasn't an issue of political expediency, when it was the right thing to do."

Microsoft officials denied any connection between their decision not to endorse the bill and the church's opposition, although they acknowledged meeting twice with the church minister, Ken Hutcherson.

Dr. Hutcherson, pastor of the Antioch Bible Church, who has organized several rallies opposing same-sex marriage here and in Washington, D.C., said he threatened in those meetings to organize a national boycott of Microsoft products.

After that, "they backed off," the pastor said Thursday in a telephone interview. "I told them I was going to give them something to be afraid of Christians about," he said.

I've been looking for a reason to unload my MSFT stock. I seem to have found one.

Today's another travel day, this time going from Albuquerque to Independence, Kansas by way of DFW and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Next stop -- the William Inge Theatre Festival that gets under way today.

I'll check in here when I check in there...

A bumpersticker seen in Albuquerque:

IF EVOLUTION IS OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL EVOLVE

Ha.

Eric Boelhart in Salon.com digs into the blowjob Time magazine gives Ann ("Smile when you call me Eva Braun") Coulter.

The Time profile rings hollow right from the cover blurb: "Fair and balanced she ain't. This conservative flame-thrower enrages the left and delights the right." Time plays dumb, though, failing to note that Coulter has been abandoned by the conservative press, with the National Review dismissing her as "barely coherent" and a Weekly Standard writer, reviewing Coulter's "Liberal Lies About the American Right" for the Washington Post, describing her book as "a piece of political hackwork."

The true tipoff to the Time feature comes in the fourth paragraph, when it tries to get "serious with Coulter and asks her why she enjoys attacking liberals." Here's what follows:

"'They're terrible people, liberals. They believe -- this can really summarize it all -- these are people who believe,' she said, now raising her voice, 'you can deliver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exercised. That really says it all.'"

Puncturing the skulls of newborn babies? In order for the feature to stay afloat, Time has to ignore Coulter's graphic riff on so-called partial-birth abortions as a symbol of Democratic beliefs, which it dutifully does. Author John Cloud seems to think the comment is darling, marveling how her response helped humanize her.

According to Time, Coulter, whom "you can trust will speak from her heart," sees herself "as a public intellectual." Cloud adds, "The officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire." (During a recent C-Span appearance Coulter insisted, "Conservatives believe in God. By contrast, liberals believe they are God." So much for intellect.)

And there's this beaut: "Coulter is more like Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of this magazine's co-founder, who rankled the Roosevelt establishment in the '40s with her take-no-prisoners opposition to the New Deal and communism." Actually, Clare Boothe Luce was a pioneering editor, playwright, politician, journalist and diplomat. Coulter is a professional name-caller.

I cancelled my subscription to Time in 1990 when I got tired of their breathless toadying to the Republicans. Nothing has changed, I see.

First it was sex at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Now it's Jesus.

Less than two years after it was plunged into a rape scandal, the Air Force Academy is scrambling to address complaints that evangelical Christians wield so much influence at the school that anti-Semitism and other forms of religious harassment have become pervasive.

There have been 55 complaints of religious discrimination at the academy in the past four years, including cases in which a Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.

[...]

More than 90 percent of the cadets identify themselves as Christian. A cadet survey in 2003 found that half had heard religious slurs and jokes, and that many non-Christians believed Christians get special treatment.

"There were people walking up to someone and basically they would get in a conversation and it would end with, 'If you don't believe what I believe you are going to hell,'" Vice Commandant Col. Debra Gray said.

Critics of the academy say the sometimes-public endorsement of Christianity by high-ranking staff has contributed to a climate of fear and violates the constitutional separation of church and state at a taxpayer-supported school whose mission is to produce Air Force leaders.

They also say academy leaders are desperate to avoid the sort of uproar that came with the 2003 scandal in which dozens of women said their complaints of sexual assault were ignored.

"They are deliberately trivializing the problem so that we don't have another situation the magnitude of the sex assault scandal. It is inextricably intertwined in every aspect of the academy," said Mikey Weinstein of Albuquerque, N.M., a 1977 graduate who has sent two sons to the school. He said the younger, Curtis, has been called a "filthy Jew" many times. [New York Times]

Just the thing to bring democracy to the rest of the world -- the Luftwaffe Serenade.

There's some excellent writing going on over at The Practical Press, including poetry, drama, some intriguing short stories, and other good works.

Why, yes, I do have some new stuff up there...thanks for asking.

...and to finish the paraphrase from The Who, "same as the old pope."

At least that's the vibe I'm getting from people far more in the know than I am. Michael at Musing's musings is not amused with the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany as Pope Benedict XVI, and I consider Michael to be my source authority when it comes to what the Roman Catholic church is up to.

We can forget about Vatican II, but I'd be willing to bet we'll be hearing a hell of a lot more about Vatican I.

I'm not sure what this is going to mean for me, personally. But it's not looking good.

John at AMERICAblog isn't too wild about the selection either, noting that Cardinal Ratzinger's stand on gay rights is in keeping with his membership as a young man in the Hitler Youth, and that as Pope John Paul II's enforcer of doctrine, it made him the Vactican equivalent to Karl Rove.

In terms of my personal beliefs, the instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference who is the pope. We Quakers don't recognize clergy anyway. But I am more than a little concerned that a man who defends violence against gays is now the CEO of a rather large and well-financed multinational corporation that claims the Ruler of the Universe as their Chairman of the Board.

The buzz has been that whomever was elected pope would be seen as an "interim," whatever that means. The man is elected for life. Mr. Ratzinger is 78 years old -- acutarially that doesn't give him much of a chance of serving as long as his predecessor; John Paul II was 78 in 1999 and look where he is now. But a lot of damage can be done in very short period of time -- you've seen what one president can do in four years. So even if Benedict XVI only serves until his mid-eighties, he can accomplish a great deal.

I'm told by those who know that the first Benedict was the founder of the monasteries that spread the Catholic faith across Europe, evangelizing and keeping the struggling Holy Roman Empire afloat. Oh, there's a lovely historical example to follow. Step right up, folks; you only thought you missed out on the Middle Ages!

Yes, I'm on vacation, so the blogging forecast is light and variable. In the meantime, there is a lot of good stuff going up at The Practical Press, including short stories, poems, chapters of novels, and a little essay on writing by yours truly. Check it all out.

Tomorrow I'll be posting from Santa Fe.

The Great Southwest Chile Tour begins Day Three today with a visit to an as-yet undecided location for lunch. We've already sampled the fine cuisine of Casa de Benevidez (red chile on the enchiladas, green on the tamales) in the North Valley of Albuquerque (Saturday) and yesterday paid a visit to Los Cuates, noted for their fine chile rellenos (green). I'm amazed at how quickly my gastrointestinal system was able to re-adjust to the rousing flavors and sharp spices; after almost four years away, it took barely half a bowl of salsa and chips to reset my taste buds. By the way, the official State Question of New Mexico is "Red or green?"

New Mexico has been having some strange weather lately. After almost ten years of drought they had one of the wettest winters on record, and about three hours after I arrived there was a funnel cloud spotted just south of the Albuquerque airport. It touched down briefly. This was followed by a pounding thunderstorm and pea-sized hail. (I'm sure it's a coincidence, but on the day that I drove out of Albuquerque heading for Miami -- July 31, 2001 -- they had the exact same weather.) The good news is that the drought, while not over, certainly has eased a bit. The bad news is that all the rain may bring out mosquitos and West Nile virus.

Today will bring more reconnections with old friends. I already stopped by my old neighborhood and visited with my former next-door neighbor, who was in good health and good spirits. My old house looks pretty much the same from the outside -- the ivy we planted in 1998 is still growing.

Albuquerque hasn't changed much in the last four years, and the changes I've noticed have been for the good. The new I-40 / I-25 interchange was finished on time and under budget, and the revitalization of downtown has transformed it from slightly seedy to modern and spacious. It's good to see progress like that and it gives me hope for other cities that face bleak futures. Toledo could learn a few things from it.

Anyway, the chile hunt continues. Hasta luego.

Frank Rich in the New York Times on Tom DeLay's need to get religion.

In the DeLay story almost every player has ostentatious religious trappings, starting with the House majority leader himself. His efforts to play God with Terri Schiavo were preceded by crusades like blaming the teaching of evolution for school shootings and raising money for the Traditional Values Coalition's campaign to save America from the "war on Christianity." Mr. DeLay's chief of staff was his pastor, and, according to Time magazine, organized daily prayer sessions in their office. Today this holy man, Ed Buckham, is a lobbyist implicated in another DeLay junket to South Korea.

But it's not merely Christian denominations that figure in the religious plumage of this crowd. Mr. Abramoff, who is now being investigated by nearly as many federal agencies as there are nights of Passover, is an Orthodox Jew who in his salad days wore a yarmulke to press interviews. In Washington, he opened not one but two kosher restaurants (I hear the deli was passable by D.C. standards) and started a yeshiva. His uncompromising piety drove him to condemn the one Orthodox Jew in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, for securing "the tortuous death of millions" by supporting abortion rights. Mr. Abramoff's own moral constellation can be found in e-mail messages in which he referred to his Indian clients as "idiots" and "monkeys" even as he squeezed them for every last million. A previous client was Zaire's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, unlike Senator Lieberman, actually was a practitioner of torture and mass murder.

Another Abramoff crony is the political operative Ralph Reed, whom Mr. Abramoff hired for his College Republicans operation in the early 1980's. Mr. Reed, who has called gambling "a cancer on the body politic" and is running for lieutenant governor in Georgia, is now busily explaining that he, like Mr. DeLay, had no idea that some of his consulting firm's Abramoff-Scanlon paydays ($4.2 million worth) were indirect transfers of casino dough. Mr. Reed, of course, is best known for his stint as the public altar boy's face of Pat Robertson's political machine, the Christian Coalition.

[...]

The values alleged so far in this scandal - greed, hypocrisy, favor-selling, dissembling - belong to no creed except the ruthless pursuit of power. They are not exclusive to either political party. But the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes these Beltway creeps from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets.

It's not for nothing that Mr. DeLay's nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a "body bag." The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right's anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope's funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, "Death solves all problems; no man, no problem." The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get "a few more bodyguards." It wasn't necessarily a joke.

You can see why Dick Cheney and President Bush in rapid succession distanced themselves from Mr. DeLay's threats of retribution against judges who presided in the Schiavo case. If an Eric Rudolph murders a judge in close chronological proximity to that kind of rhetoric, they've got a political Armageddon on their hands. Mr. DeLay got the message, sort of. At his Wednesday news conference, he tried to dial back some of his words, if only as a way of changing the subject from Indians and his own potential outings in a court of law. Unlike Bill Frist, he has yet to sign on to next Sunday's national Christian right telecast bashing what its organizer, the Family Research Council, calls "out-of-control courts."

The difference between the rise of Newt Gingrich and the "Contract with America" in the 1990's and the new band of Republican warriors is that Mr. Gingrich did not cloak his soldiers and his mission in the mantle of religion. There is nothing wrong with being a "person of faith" in politics -- it's no more a disqualifier than any other personal agenda you bring along with you -- but when you arm yourself and your arguments with the Sword of the Lord, you attach a perverted holiness to it of the manner of a crusade. Religion and democracy are antithetical: there can be no loyal opposition, there are only heretics and blasphemers. And that makes the current crop of power-hungry politicians far more dangerous than all the threats that have arisen before to confront us. In Watergate where a president flaunted the Constitution and defied the Congress, there was not a presumption that is was being done in the name of some higher power and that mankind must inevitably submit to it. In the Clinton era it was purely the naked hatred and envy of those out of power. This time, though, it's being drawn as the line in the sand -- you are either with us and our God or you are to be cast out... or Left Behind.

This country has had its share of religious fanatics attempting to reach for the seat of real power. Fortunately karma or luck has intervened in the past to derail them. But even karmic intervention can be tricky, and sometimes it requires more than just the universal constants of checks and balances to keep us safe. In other words, let's nip these bastards in the bud this time.

Bienvenidos a Albuquerque.

The trip was uneventful, in spite of the previous postings, and I am ensconced in the home of my friend Brian and enjoying my recollections of the life here. If you've never been here, I recommend it. Compared to Miami, it's a laid-back place with things moving at a nice leisurely pace. Flying in over the mountains and seeing the desert and the scrub pines, pinons, and junipers brought back a lot of good memories.

I have a feeling that postings will be sporadic from here -- there's a lot to catch up on, and I plan to spend some time out with old friends -- but I'll be here nonetheless, so check in.

Tonight: Casa de Benevides!

I jotted these down on my trip today.

Airports are never finished. In the thirty-some years I've been traveling through Miami International Airport, there is always something under construction, whether it's a new terminal, new parking, new access roads, new something. The same is true at DFW and the Albuquerque International Sunport. I'm guessing that if all the airports were actually completed, there would be a spike in unemployment like that of the Great Depression. It keeps America working.

There is an FAA regulation that states all arriving planes with connecting passengers must park at the farthest gate from the connecting planes on an inverse proportion to the time between the arrival of one plane and the departure of the next. At DFW this is facilitated by making sure that all connections less than one hour arrive at the south end of the C concourse and departing flights are at the north end of the A concourse. If the connection is more than two hours, the connecting gates are next to each other.

The FAA also requires that airlines announcing a gate change must hold off until the last minute so the agents can get their bets in on which passenger with the most luggage will get to the new gate the fastest.

If you have to pee, the nearest restroom is ten gates away from your departure gate. If you don't, it's across the hall.

If you want to see where people who drive like idiots on the freeways of America learn how to do it, take a look at the concourses of a major airport. People walk as if they are driving on the Palmetto Expressway: turning suddenly into traffic, changing lanes without notice, proceeding slowly without any idea of overtaking traffic, and generally walking as if they just flew in from Zombia. Unlike the freeway, though, if you bump into them, there's little damage, and that's good. However, unlike in a car, they can hear you when you curse them for walking like an idiot.

If you find a remote spot and are lucky enough to find a corner with two electrical outlets where you can recharge your dying cellphone and plug in your laptop for a little peace and quiet and writing, it sets off an alert to all families traveling with small children who will then congregate around you, call their mothers on their cellphones and describe Aunt Edna's funeral in great detail ("Lucille insisted on having an open casket, and Edna looked like she was made outta wax and covered with bad stucco. Uh huh, and Eugene brought that floozie that he's been shacking up with, too... The nerve of some people.") Meanwhile the children are running around with a sugar buzz from Cinnabon that would light up Toledo, they throw things, shriek like car alarms, and trip over your power cord.

Airlines should throw in the towel on trying to load planes in an orderly fashion. American uses the Group method; some still board by rows. It doesn't matter. Passengers will knot up around the boarding door so that no one can get on in an orderly fashion, and even people in First Class have to wait behind someone whose boarding pass refuses to be read by the card reader. (I have a friend in the airline business who refers to passengers as "self-loading cargo.")

I have found that the best way to get through a trip is to just accept the fact that these things will happen and it makes for an adventure. Just grin through it, find a good crossword puzzle, and take notes.

Off to Albuquerque this morning, so there's not going to be much in the way of blogging until later in the day. Meanwhile check out the Friday Blogaround for some good reading, and don't forget about The Practical Press -- it's really getting going.

I've welcomed The Disgruntled Chemist to the blogroll, and thanks to Shakespeare's Sister for adding me.

See you next from the banks of the Rio Grande...

I got linked by BuzzMachine today. He hooked up to my comments on Sen. Frist.

Wow. Think I should return the favor and put BuzzMachine on my blogroll? How can I not?

Some thoughts on how three little words and a song come together in Can't Live Without You.

I took the rest of the day off to get ready for the trip. I leave in the morning first for Albuquerque to visit friends in the town where I used to hang my hat, restore my chile tolerance, speak some real Spanglish, and do a little Bobby Cramer research in the hills overlooking Santa Fe. From Albuquerque it's on to Independence, Kansas, for the William Inge Festival.

So I'm doing some last-minute laundry, writing detailed notes for the house-sitter (drive the Pontiac all you want, but touch the Mustang and die), and locating little things like the network cable for the laptop and my passport. The Weather Channel is forecasting great weather for the next ten days in all the locations, but I'm taking a jacket anyway. I dubbed off a CD of the Beach Boys songs for the rental car I'm picking up in Tulsa; Hertz promised me a 2005 Mustang. Hot damn!

And a note to Lab Kat or any other Metroplex bloggers: I'll be wandering through DFW tomorrow morning on my way from one gate to another, so for two hours and ten minutes the population of liberal bloggers in Texas will have an increase of one. I'll be wearing a Bark Bark Woof Woof shirt in proud proclamation of liberal defiance. Yip-yah!

Waiting for Bro is a short acting exercise I wrote when I was teaching theatre as a volunteer for a charter school in Albuquerque. It's my first posting at The Practical Press.

Welcome another Florida blogger -- Julien's List -- to the blogroll. Who knew there were so many women bloggers?

Here's what's happening in The Liberal Coalition.

All Facts and Opinions is back on-line after a short interruption.

archy covers the bunker mentality.

Bark Bark Woof Woof sees deeper meaning in a radio station format change in Miami.

blogAmY tells of a murder of a reporter.

moi at bloggg joins an autism blog ring.

Chris reviews Velvet Revolver.

Collective Sigh is pissed at the Missouri state legislature.

The Farmer at Corrente finds a historical precedent to government "redesign."

NTodd is the podcaster...or is that NToddcaster?

Echidne mulls on the role of women as targets of the right wing.

edwardpig considers the Independent Home.

First Draft on the president actually speaking to reporters.

The Fulcrum mines the field of mines.

The Gamer's Nook picks up the story of soldiers getting the shaft in Florida.

Happy Furry Puppy looks at the bankruptcy bill through the eyes of Gordon Gecko.

Iddybud reports on John Edwards' visit to Harvard.

In Search of Telford has good and bad news about bio-fuels.

The Invisible Library reflects on the passing of the pope.

Did you know there was an oil spill in Alaska? Left is Right did.

Make Me a Commentator invokes the Bard to describe two scandals.

MercuryX23 is back... or he was for a little while.

Michael needs some new meds. *ouch*

Pen-Elayne notes the little flu virus oops.

Rivka at Respectful of Otters welcomes the latest new otter. Congratulations Mom and Alexandra!

Rick has his lastest gig schedule.

Rook's Rant (a fellow Practical Press writer) admires Kevin Drum's coffee choice.

rubber hose takes a longer look at a David Brooks column.

Scrutiny Hooligans on the new leader at PBS.

Sooner Thought reports on a union filing suit against Wal-Mart.

Speedkill takes on the AFA.

Steve Gilliard predicts the future for Bernie Kerick.

T. Rex presents evidence that the Republicans hate veterans.

Trish has a look at people other than pharmacists who invoke the "conscience clause."

Wanda has found a Social Security plan she can support.

WTF Is It Now reports that Scalia got asked The Question.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat chuckles over the Unitarian Jihad.

If you're reading this, you must be done with your taxes.

Next week's blogaround may be abbreviated -- I'll be on the road in Independence, Kansas and may not have the time to do it. If any fellow TLC blogger wants to pick up the baton for a day, I'd appreciate it. Meanwhile, have a great weekend.

Sen. Bill Frist joins the jihad.

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."

[...]

Dr. Frist's spokesman said the senator's speech in the telecast would reflect his previous remarks on judicial appointments. In the past he has consistently balanced a determination "not to yield" on the president's nominees with appeals to the Democrats for compromise. He has distanced himself from the statements of others like the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, who have attacked the courts, saying they are too liberal, "run amok" or are hostile to Christianity.

The telecast, however, will put Dr. Frist in a very different context. Asked about Dr. Frist's participation in an event describing the filibuster "as against people of faith," his spokesman, Bob Stevenson, did not answer the question directly.

"Senator Frist is doing everything he can to ensure judicial nominees are treated fairly and that every senator has the opportunity to give the president their advice and consent through an up or down vote," Mr. Stevenson said, adding, "He has spoken to groups all across the nation to press that point, and as long as a minority of Democrats continue to block a vote, he will continue to do so."

[...]

The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.

"As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group's Web site. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

[...]

Democrats accused Dr. Frist of exploiting religious faith for political ends by joining the telecast. "No party has a monopoly on faith, and for Senator Frist to participate in this kind of telecast just throws more oil on the partisan flames," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

[...]

On Thursday, Mr. Schumer released an open letter calling on Dr. Frist to denounce such attacks. "The last thing we need is inflammatory rhetoric which on its face encourages violence against judges," he wrote.

Does this guy really want to run for president? Lining up with a bunch of loons obsessed with turning this country into the Christian version of Taliban-run Afghanistan isn't exactly going to win the hearts and minds of the nation. If the Schiavo case proved anything, it's that the vast majority of Americans reject the wingnuts that Frist is chumming up to.

Oh, and thanks to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council for proving my point about transference.

I watched the first ten minutes of NBC's miniseries Revelation last night, and I had one: it's a huge steaming pile of crap. In the scene on the plane where Dr. Massey (Bill Pullman) was flying back to the U.S. with the Satanist in custody, Mr. Pullman's expression reminded me of Hedley Lamarr's line in Blazing Saddles as he got in the limousine: "Drive me off this picture!"

You want a better forecast of what's coming, switch to The Weather Channel. The acting's better, too.

From the WaPo:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) apologized yesterday for heated comments he made about possible retribution against federal judges for their handling of the Terri Schiavo case, but declined to say whether he favors impeaching those judges.

[...]

DeLay addressed his earlier comments during a crowded news conference at the Capitol. "I said something in an inartful way, and I shouldn't have said it that way, and I apologize for saying it that way," he said. "It was taken wrong. I didn't explain it or clarify my remarks, as I'm clarifying them here. I am sorry that I said it that way, and I shouldn't have."

Ah, the old "it was taken wrong" dodge. And where did he come up with "inartful"? It sounds like a town in Sweden, not a word you're going to hear bandied around in Sugar Land, Texas: "Sorry, Maw -- didn't mean to shoot yer dog. Guess I was just bein', y'know, inartful."

Just to cover his ass, Mr. DeLay added helpfully,

"I believe in an independent judiciary," he told reporters.

Meanwhile, while DeLay is apologizing, his minions are going to the mattresses in defense of their Leader.

House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) said members are standing by DeLay. "We know we're under attack," he said. "It's a scorched-earth policy."

DeLay's defenders continued to galvanize national conservative groups on the outside while blaming Democrats on the inside. Allies coordinated appearances on talk radio stations, and supporters were given talking points detailing the number of trips taken by Democrats.

It's only a matter of time. I'm guessing by the time the Catholics have a new pope, the Republicans will be looking for a new majority leader. Just look for the whisps of smoke coming out of David Dreier's ears.

From CNN:

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (AP) -- A man who fought for years to keep his home and businesses in the Everglades has accepted a $4.95 million buyout offer from the state, which plans to restore the wetlands ecosystem.

The deal, approved Wednesday by a Collier County judge after a more than 12-hour mediation hearing, allows Jesse Hardy to remain on his 160 acres until November 30.

Hardy paid $60,000 in 1976 for the land about 40 miles east of downtown Naples on the southwest coast, and built a small, corrugated metal-roofed house. He had no electricity and used propane for cooking and refrigeration.

Makes me sorry I hung up on that guy who was trying to sell me that piece of property in east Naples.

Sen. Trent Lott is trying to make a comeback, and he's doing it at the expense of some of his Republican colleagues, including Bill Frist and some folks in the Bush administration.

It takes a certain determination for a politician to fall so spectacularly from grace and then refuse to go away. Lott, 63, a shipyard worker's son who grew up in Pascagoula, is clawing his way back to power because, well, he can't help himself. "I'm just rooting around trying to find ways to be useful," Lott said recently during a visit back home, ticking off a few of his projects: helping to arrange a deal on the 2006 budget, working to change immigration laws and pass highway funding, and trying to quell a Democratic uprising over judicial nominations. "Maybe what I'm doing is what comes naturally to me."

Lott's demise after six years as majority leader and Republican leader was self-inflicted. At Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party Dec. 5, 2002 -- a month after the Republicans reclaimed control of the Senate from the Democrats -- Lott noted Thurmond's 1948 run for president on the anti-civil-rights "Dixiecrat" ticket and said that "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years" had Thurmond won. Lott insisted he was just trying to flatter the old man, but once the line received widespread media attention it triggered a national furor.

Lott apologized repeatedly for his remarks; appeared on Black Entertainment Television to swear allegiance to civil rights, including affirmative action; and called colleagues to explain and apologize.

But nothing worked. African Americans seethed, some conservatives joined liberals in calling for his resignation, and President Bush sharply criticized him. Lott resigned as majority leader-designate in late December and was succeeded by Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a favorite of the White House. While Frist is as conservative as Lott on many issues, Frist has a smoother image and the administration viewed him as a more reliable partner.

[...]

Given how Bush and some of his GOP colleagues abandoned him, Lott figures he owes them nothing. "I feel perfectly at liberty now to shoot at anyone," Lott told Rotary Club luncheon guests. He then proceeded to say of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, "His degree of arrogance just turns me off."

Another Lott target is a White House commission on military base closings, which the senator views as a threat to installations in Mississippi. Hoping to slow the commission's work, he blocked the confirmation of the commission's designated chairman, Anthony J. Principi. Last week, Bush used his recess-appointment power to install Principi, along with eight other commission members, while Congress was away on an Easter break.

"He did what he had to," Lott said of Bush. The senator said he is considering his next move. "Everything in the Senate relates to everything else," Lott told reporters cheerfully. "I'm never done."

Some observers, including senators and aides who do not care for Lott, speculate that he is engaging in advance damage control, in the event his forthcoming memoir portrays those behind his downfall in a harsh light. Lott says the book will look broadly at his entire career. But he said he does "make it clear" that he was not pleased with how Bush responded to the controversy over his 2002 Thurmond birthday party remarks, and that "I would have been leader today if Frist hadn't made his move."

It sounds like David Brooks' theory that the Republicans do best when they're fighting among themselves is about to get a work-out. Far be it from me -- or any liberal -- to stand in their way.

Shorter David Brooks on John Bolton:

So, he's not perfect. Neither is the U.N. But that mustache has me in its thrall...

The Miami Herald editorial board:

As a rule, presidents should have wide latitude in appointments for high office. When questions arise, the nominee deserves the benefit of the doubt -- absent an egregious transgression. John Bolton's well-known disdain for the United Nations doesn't by itself disqualify him for the job of U.S. ambassador. But his ideological zeal, demonstrated by his dismaying record of carving the facts to fit narrow political goals, make him a singularly poor choice for this important position.

Under the guidance of Kenneth Quinnell (T. Rex's Guide to Life), a new literary blog, The Practical Press, has been launched. It is "the place where bloggers come to be creative -- fiction, poetry, drama, screenplays, art, photos, literary reviews and discussion, we do it all." I'm proud to be a part of this new effort. I encourage you to link to it and stop by to see what we're writing about.

For my part, I'll be contributing some of my work on Bobby Cramer, some of my short plays and short stories, and perhaps some essays on writing along the lines of my Writing on Writing series that started here.

If you'd like to be a part of this new adventure, check out the submission guidelines, and drop us a line.

Some thoughts on the re-writes and re-reading I've done on Can't Live Without You are posted at Bobby Cramer.

Ellen Goodman has some thoughts on the latest moral crusade.

To begin with, I don't believe that anyone should be compelled to do work that they regard as unethical. History is full of heroes who rebelliously followed their consciences. It's also full of people who shamefully followed orders.

I believe that companies and institutions should have a code of ethics. What is the alternative to corporate responsibility and public morality? Enron? So I approach the subject of conscience clauses rather gingerly.

The very first such laws offered an exemption for doctors in 47 states who don't want to perform abortions on moral grounds. That seems to me a matter of common decency. Doctors are not automatons who leave their beliefs at the operating-room door. It also seems like common sense. Who would want their abortion performed by an opponent?

Gradually however, we have had the incredibly expanding conscience clause. In 10 states, healthcare professionals can conscientiously refuse to provide contraceptives. In 12 states, they can refuse to do sterilizations.

Indeed, last year the government decided that entire hospitals and HMOs had the right to deny these services without losing federal funding. Never mind that it is not clear who owns the conscience of a hospital: A church hierarchy? A board of directors? The doctors? The community? Or the taxpayers who foot the hospital bills?

[...]

It's the pharmacists who are getting the most attention right now. In just six months, there were about 180 reports of pharmacists who said No. One refused to fill a college student's birth-control prescription. Another refused medication to a woman who had suffered a miscarriage.

This has led to a counter bill in California that would make pharmacists tell employers of their objections in advance and be prepared to make referrals. It's led to a rule by the Illinois governor that every pharmacy -- though not every pharmacist -- must fill prescriptions, "No delays. No hassles. No lectures."

Karen Brauer, who heads a group called Pharmacists for Life that claims 1,600 members, compares them to "conscientious objectors." But it isn't that simple.

The pharmacist who refuses emergency contraception is not just following his moral code, he's trumping the moral beliefs of the doctor and the patient.

[...]

Yes, we want people to have a strong moral compass. But they have to coexist with others whose compasses point in another direction. Frances Kissling, of Catholics for a Free Choice, says properly, "There is very little recognition that the conscience of the woman is as important, let alone more important, than the conscience of the provider." There are other ways to exercise a private conscience clause. Indeed, in a conflict between your job and your ethics, you can quit. When Thoreau refused to pay taxes as a war protest, remember, he went to jail. What the pharmacists and others are asking for is conscience without consequence. The plea to protect their conscience is a thinly veiled ploy for conquest.

This is not easy stuff. But in the culture wars we have become awfully enamored of moral stances. Have we forgotten that what holds us together is the other lowly virtue: minding your own business? To each his own conscience. But the drugstore is not an altar. The last time I looked, the pharmacist's license did not include the right to dispense morality.

There's a funny scene in The Summer of '42 where teenage boys try to buy rubbers from a suspicious druggist. Any boy of sixteen -- straight or gay -- can identify with it and the awkwardness of taking their first step into the adult world. But it's only a movie.

From the Washington Post:

Britney Spears has revealed what might be Hollywood's worst-kept secret: She's pregnant. In a posting on her Web site, Spears told fans that she and husband, Kevin Federline, were expecting their first child together.

They know what causes that now.

From Salon.com's War Room:

There are all sorts of reasons that a fellow might travel to New Hampshire and then to Iowa in quick succession, even if we can't think of any right off the bat. But if the fellow in question is an out-of-office politician with a big political following, there's probably only one real explanation: He's looking to run for president.

The Hill has the travel itinerary today for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and it says a lot about his plans for 2008. Next week, Gingrich visits New Hampshire for a $50-per-person Republican state committee fundraiser and meetings with the Concord Monitor, the Union Leader and the Valley News. Then Gingrich is off to Iowa, with visits planned for Sioux City, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. On the question of a White House run in 2008, Gingrich's spokesman tells The Hill that nothing has been ruled in and nothing has been ruled out. Gingrich has also been coy; when he was asked recently about running, he said: "You never know." In an interview in Monday's Las Vegas Business Press, Gingrich said he doesn't miss public life.

[...]

If Gingrich enters the race, his name recognition and history with the Republican Party will put him in the thick of a pack that's likely to include Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Bill Frist and Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback.

Okay, so Newt Gingrich, who has been married three times, twice to women with whom he committed adultery with while still married to the previous wife, wants to run as the candidate of the party that champions family values and traditional marriage. And he wants to run for that nomination against Rudy Giuliani, who escorted his mistress to city events and later lived with a gay couple (not that there's anything wrong with that -- it makes a great sitcom premise, i.e. Three's Company, Yer Honor!). Oh, in the name of all that is holy in the realm of fun and snarkiness, I beg the former Speaker of the House -- the Robespierre of the 1994 Republican Revolution and the role model for Dudley Dursley -- to run like hell for President in 2008.

The state of Ohio, the new bastion of right-wing nutsery (vis last year's anti-gay marriage amendment and vote-count fiasco) is shaking off the mantle of true conservatism -- less government and more family values -- and attempting to inject the state into the most private choices a family can make.

Not quite two weeks after Terri Schiavo's death, states including Alabama, Louisiana, Michigan and Ohio have introduced end-of-life legislation to clarify proceedings for cases in which a patient has not left a living will. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the proposals have a pro-life slant; Alabama's bill is called the "Starvation and Dehydration Prevention Act."

The hastily penned bills have already stalled in several states -- but members of the Ohio senate are just getting warmed up, responding to what they call the "tragedy surrounding the death of Theresa Marie Schiavo" by proposing to empower state officials and distant relatives. Blogger Chris Geidner of Law Dork has a copy of a letter from state senators Jeff Jacobson, R-Butler Twp., and Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, inviting other senators to co-sponsor a bill that would allow the state's prosecutors and attorney general to present evidence in family disputes taken to probate court.

In addition to inviting the state to influence judicial proceedings, the bill would reconfigure how a patient's various family members are empowered to make his or her end-of-life decisions. The language seems to set the stage for family feuds, a kind of deathbed filibuster that favors the right-to-life agenda: "An individual's guardian, spouse, child(ren), parents, or a majority of siblings all have a right to intervene when determining whether to withhold or withdraw nutrition and hydration in the absence of a living will, durable power of attorney over healthcare, or express consent… Presently, only the highest priority class [of family member] available can decide to withhold or withdraw nutrition and hydration; those individuals in a lower priority class who disagree would not be consulted until the matter is considered in probate court. This proposal would enable any priority-class individual to have a voice in preserving their loved one's life." [Page Rockwell in Salon.com]

Somehow it's not a surprise to me to see that the Ohio legislature does what it can to make the one in Florida look intelligent.

Miami used to have a fine classical radio station -- WTMI. But on December 31, 2001, it sold out and changed its format to "dance" music, which I and my friends refer to as "gay teen disco." Some enterprising souls took up the gauntlet and bought a Spanish language AM station, changed the call letters to WKAT, and started broadcasting classical music with many of the same people that used to work at WTMI. But AM radio is not the medium for classical music; the signal was weak and it sounded like they were channeling the music from an old eight-track through a series of downspouts, and stereo AM went out with quadraphonics. A couple of months ago they threw in the towel and switched formats again, this time to conservative talk. Miami already has one powerhouse talk station -- WIOD -- with the likes of Rush and his imitators, so WKAT is carrying the second-string of Rush wannabes like Michael Medved.

The point behind that lead-in is that WKAT has embarked on an aggressive advertising campaign to attract listeners by putting up billboards around town promoting the new format: LIBERALS HATE IT. WKAT 1360.

It's a catchy slogan, but it's also in keeping with the paranoid bunker mentality that seems to have infected the right wing for the last forty years or so: the liberals are out to get them, the intelligensia hates them, and they love it. Richard Nixon used it to great effect in his political and personal career, and even the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan had a hard-edged tinge of allusions to attacks from his opponents. Today with the battle lines between the red and blue states, the Christians and versus the secular, there is this constant drumbeat from the right wing that "the liberals hate us and we welcome their hatred because it energizes us."

What it actually does is give them a reason to point their fingers at something else, conveniently diverting attention away from their own vitriol. Speaking for myself and from what I've seen in the virtual neighborhood I hang out in, I am hard-pressed to find a level of animosity or even hatred from the left that comes close to the level of noise and anger from the right. Anyone who was around during the Clinton administration can recall the attacks on Bill and Hillary from the day he announced his candidacy, and it's still going on; can Rush or Oliver North or G. Gordon Liddy get through a day without some attack on them? And we're not talking about policy differences... there were enough accusations of everything from drug-running and murder (remember "The Clinton Chronicles") to rape and adultery to populate an HBO series on the level of "Deadwood" or "The Sopranos."

The left's attacks on George W. Bush have been pale in comparison, and usually they are in the manner of satire and comedy; even accusations of drug use or secret abortions have been overshadowed by the laughingstock supplied by the malapropisms and goofy Alfred E. Neuman smirk that mark the legacy of George W. Bush in spite of the genuine fear and recklessness to our rights and allies that his policies have engendered. The attacks from the left have for the most part been in keeping with the Mel Brooks philosophy of deflating pomposity and disarming one's enemies by laughing at them, which drives them crazy because we're not playing their game. Laughter is not a sign of hatred.

The right wing's hatred for their opponents and their ideas comes from the fear that even though they control nearly every aspect of American life and government, they still feel like they are under attack, and deep inside they doubt their own legitimacy and live in dread that they will be found out. This self-doubt turns into self-loathing and it causes them to lash out, accusing their enemies of the very thing they feel in themselves. So when they say that liberals or secular humanists hate them, it empowers them.

The ironic thing is that here in South Florida the one messenger of civility -- classical music -- has been sacrificed for the sake of the voice of hatred, and it's the right wing that blames the liberals for the coarsening of our culture.

Not to me but to the Miami Herald on Leonard Pitts' column yesterday, where they have a bit of a cage match going on. First from the right, where a little refreshing honesty about the motives and intentions of the Christian Right comes out.

Re Leonard Pitts Jr.'s April 11 column, America having doubts about Christian right: There is no doubt that Pitts despises the Religious Right. His loathing of us is not primarily because we are Christian or conservative or that we burn books, love censorship and desire a theocracy. It is rather because we tend to vote Republican. And nothing enrages Pitts more than a Republican except a Christian Republican.

Pitts should rather respect a worthier and more numerous foe: well-educated conservative Christians who read books rather than burn them, abhor censorship and scoff at theocracy. We also will vote Republican.

MICHAEL ROY EATON, Miami

And then there's another country heard from:

If Christian fundamentalists ever manage to gain the power they crave, America will become its own version of the Middle East. Religious leaders claiming to have the one true lock on the "answer" will discriminate and systematically rid themselves of those with "inferior" beliefs. All of America should be very afraid.

JEFF MARCUS, Miami

I have no doubt that there are "well-educated conservative Christians who read books rather than burn them." But they won't be the ones running the show if the fundamentalists ever take charge.

The list of special guests attending the 24th Annual William Inge Festival next week has been posted.

No, I'm not on it. But I'll be there.

Here's a brief bio of Tina Howe, the playwright we'll be honoring.

Peter Rubin has an extended article in Salon.com (subscription/Day Pass required) on Mike Salvini, "...an evangelist for natural penis enlargement, a weird and scientifically unproven way of upsizing the male member. And thousands of men are going to great lengths to follow him."

The jokes, entendres, and snarky comments are inevitable, so feel free to have at it.

(And does anyone think that "Peter Rubin" is the author's real name?)

The House is preparing to make permanent the repeal on the estate tax that was part of the first go-round of tax cuts in 2001.

That sucks.

Or, to put it more delicately,

This is unnecessary, irrational and unaffordable. Those who inveigh against the "death tax" point to the travails of family farmers and other small-business owners whose heirs are supposedly forced to liquidate enterprises to pay the tax bill. In fact, even if the estate tax were to revert in 2011 to its 2001 level -- and no one believes that the exemption will remain at $1 million -- it would affect the estates of only 2 percent of those expected to die that year. At $3.5 million (and $7 million for a couple) -- the level proposed in a Democratic alternative sponsored by Rep. Earl Pomeroy (N.D.) -- a mere three-tenths of 1 percent of estates would be covered. In other words, no one but the richest Americans would be asked to pay estate tax. [Washington Post editorial]

So what alternatives are there? Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, has some thoughts on the matter.

Instead of an outright repeal, tax fairness groups are calling for reforms to ensure that the average working family is exempt while not letting millionaires off the hook. They propose that exemptions for family farms and businesses be simplified and improved and that the estate value subject to the tax be raised to $3.5 million, or $7 million for couples. These reforms would provide relief for 88% of current applicable estates leaving only the largest 0.25% of estates subject to the tax.

Knowing that the wealthy will be able to lobby -- or just plain buy off -- members of Congress, going for the reform ideas might be a better approach and would appeal to all but the most rabid anti-taxers, such as Robert Novak, who thinks the rich shouldn't have to pay any taxes as their reward for being so wealthy. (That same mindset led to the French Revolution, Bob -- want some cake?) After all, how many people in this country are actually paying a huge estate tax to begin with? If they were too stupid or ignornant to hire a decent accountant to advise them on how to avoid it, it makes sense that they should pay up. It's about time this country made some money off stupid rich people.

John F. Harris in the Washington Post on the new thinking of scandal cover-up:

In the decades after Watergate, Washington figures in legal or political hot water heard some familiar words of wisdom:

The coverup is almost always worse than the crime. Never hunker down. Above all, never lie.

Lately, though, the evidence is mounting that this tried-and-true advice may no longer be true.

Recent evidence suggests that hunkering down can sometimes work just fine, in a political and news media environment that has changed significantly in recent years. Examples include legal controversies involving prominent Democrats as well as the Bush White House. Even people who got caught in falsehoods have resolved their cases with no apparent penalty for the deception.

[...]

The case of Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, who served as national security adviser in the Clinton White House, is the latest instance in which some old truisms of scandal management were safely abandoned. He and his spokesmen initially said that he took copies of classified documents about terrorism from the National Archives by accident and then misplaced them in what Berger described as an "honest mistake."

Earlier this month, Berger struck a plea bargain with Justice Department prosecutors in which he admitted that he took the copies on purpose and then destroyed some of them at his office with scissors. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, accepting a $10,000 fine and a three-year suspension of his national security clearance -- terms that his friends and defense team said were a good deal for Berger.

At the moment, it is House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) who is most urgently facing the classic Washington choice about how to respond to an ethics uproar.

One option commonly taken by political figures is to try to "get in front of the story" by voluntarily disclosing as much information as possible, and by projecting an aura of nondefensive cooperation with legal and media inquiries. At the other end of the spectrum is a strategy of denouncing questions as illegitimate or politically motivated, disclosing little information, and hoping the storm will pass.

DeLay, who is facing questions about his connections to lobbyists, has taken a middle course. His aides have responded to questions from reporters examining public records. At the same time, he has gone on the offensive. Last month, he told the Family Research Council, a prominent group of social conservatives, that criticism of his ethics was being promoted by liberal "do-gooder groups" and the "national media" as part of "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in."

[...]

The most famous example of a politician who hunkered down and survived to tell about it is former president Bill Clinton. He has said he believes that if he had told the truth about his relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky in the first days after the scandal erupted in January 1998, the uproar would have forced him from office. By the time he acknowledged the affair seven months later, polls suggested that a majority of the public had long since concluded that Clinton was probably lying but that the matter was a private transgression.

"I think the overwhelming likelihood is that I would have been forced from office, because I think the Democrats would have -- some Democrats might have abandoned me," Clinton told PBS's Jim Lehrer last year. "I'm not sure that would have happened," he added, but "I thought at the time it was a realistic possibility."

[...]

John D. Podesta, head of the liberal Center for American Progress and a White House and congressional staff veteran since the 1970s, said "one-party control" by Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue "changes the dynamic substantially" in political scandals.

"You just don't have anyone in power in Congress who will issue a subpoena," forcing truthful testimony, he said, chiding legislators to restore a sense "that there's things that they just won't tolerate, whether it's done by Republicans or Democrats."

Given the majority leader's problems, Podesta said, in some not exactly friendly advice, "if I was advising DeLay, I don't know that 'getting it all out' is a particularly useful strategy for him."

I'd be happy if Tom DeLay went the Nixon route -- I love a good grande guignol.

From NBC6.net:

LAS VEGAS -- A former NFL player accused of shooting at Siegfried and Roy's compound reportedly wanted to warn the world the illusionists posed a threat.

That's the findings of a psychiatric report on former Oakland Raiders kicker Cole Ford after he was charged with firing shotgun blasts in September at the entertainers' Las Vegas home.

Ford has been ruled incompetent to stand trial. He's being treated at a mental health facility.

According to the Las Vegas Journal-Review, a psychiatrist wrote that Ford believed the world's problems were linked to Siegfried and Roy's treatment, dominance and unhealthy intimacy with animals.

No one was hurt in the shooting -- and Ford maintains he never intended to harm anyone.

And all this time we've been thinking it was Osama bin Laden. (Oh, and if you think I'm going to go near that line about "dominance and unhealthy intimacy with animals," well... that would be just beastly.)

Not exactly fair Verona here...

CRESCENT CITY, FL -- Members of neighboring families shot at each other, wounding six people, as part of a long-running feud that victims said peaked when a girl from one family began dating a boy from the other one.

Six people ages 14 to 22 were taken to hospitals Sunday for treatment of gunshot wounds. Two remained hospitalized Monday, one in serious condition.

Baldemar Riojas, 46, was charged with six counts of aggravated battery with a firearm. He was freed on $15,000 bail.

Members of the Soliz and Ortiz families say their feud with the neighboring Riojas family has simmered for more than a year and became more heated when Riojas' teenage daughter started dating Miguel Soliz, 15, who was among the wounded.

"All this started because they were dating," said Melva Ortiz, Miguel's mother. "I tried to tell him to leave the girl, but you know how kids are."

Maj. Rick Ryan of the Putnam County sheriff's office said members of both families had guns and fired across a street at each other.

However, he said investigators had been stymied by the families' reluctance to talk to authorities. "We get out there and nobody knows anything," Ryan said.

Maybe we could do a production of West Side Story for them.

What's the point of reforming Social Security if you're dead?

Well, here's a pleasant -- though not totally unexpected -- piece of news: my hard-right Republican Cuban/American congresswoman, Ilena Ros-Lehtinen has called for the repeal of "don't ask / don't tell."

At odds with her party's leadership, Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami is urging the Pentagon to allow gay men and lesbians to serve in the military -- a direct challenge to the policy of "don't ask, don't tell."

"We've tried the policy. I don't think it works. And we've spent a lot of money enforcing it," said Ros-Lehtinen, a member of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, who Tuesday co-sponsored a bill allowing gays to serve.

"We investigate people. Bring them up on charges. Basically wreck their lives," she told The Herald. "People who've signed up to serve our country. We should be thanking them."

Although her support won't change the law overnight, it represents a dramatic break with Republican leadership over a hot-button issue that has split both parties and the nation.

Ros-Lehtinen -- with House Republicans Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Jim Kolbe of Arizona -- joins 70 Democrats in support of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, introduced last month by Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., to repeal the longtime gay ban.

[...]

Since 2000, her congressional district has included Monroe County and Key West, with its large, politically active gay population. Ros-Lehtinen has taken a leadership role in backing pro-gay legislation. She has co-sponsored or supported:

• A federal hate-crimes act.

• A bill that would protect gays from federal employment discrimination.

• Laws that increased funding for HIV/AIDS prevention.

[...]

Among the congresswoman's supporters is former acting U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen -- her husband.

Lehtinen received a Purple Heart for severe facial injuries he suffered in 1971 during Army combat in Vietnam. He spent 18 months in hospitals, much of that time unable to see. Military nurses cared for him. One nurse served in Vietnam and spent 20 years with the Army. But when her commanders learned she was a lesbian, she was discharged.

"She was the kind of nurse who could have saved my life in Vietnam," Lehtinen, 59, said Saturday. "She had served and saved lives. Back in the States, we find reason to kick her out. Anybody who can perform, the country needs. Gays can perform just as well -- no better, no worse -- than anybody. And the military can handle it better than anybody."

Sexual orientation makes no difference, Lehtinen said, especially in combat.

"It was tough and sweaty. What was always on your mind was mines.... Hoofing through the brush, you weren't thinking abut sex with anybody."

(Speak for yourself, Dexter; some people like it tough and sweaty...)

It's good to have Ilena on board with this. It's not enough to get me to vote for her, but at least she's aware of the stupidity of the rule and the impact it has on morale in the armed forces, not to mention the fact that if she ever wants to go to Key West again, they'll at least let her get past Southard Street.

If you think that the Terri Schiavo episode showed the lengths (or the depths) to which the Christian conservative movement will go to get their idea of biblically-inspired government into law, you are in for a nasty surprise. Michelle Goldberg reports in Salon.com from the conference on Confronting the Judicial War on Faith that was held this past weekend in Washington, D.C.

Having won control of two branches of the federal government, the activists of the religious right have come to see the courts as the intolerable obstacle thwarting their dream of a reborn Christian nation. They believe in a revisionist history, taught in Christian schools and spread through Christian media, which claims biblical law as the source of the Constitution. Thus any ruling that contradicts their theology seems to them to be de facto unconstitutional, and its enforcement tyrannical.

Some believe that the problem can be rectified by replacing liberal judges with conservative ones. Others, noting that even judges appointed by Republicans often rule against them, have become convinced that they must destroy the federal judiciary itself. Thus, ideas offered at the conference ranged from ending the filibuster and impeaching all but the most right-wing judges to abolishing all federal courts below the Supreme Court altogether. At least one panelist dropped coy hints about murder.

[...]

The sense that America is on the cusp of chaos was nearly universal at the conference, leading to calls for a radical restructuring of American government. On panel after panel, speakers -- including Michael Schwartz, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn's chief of staff -- demanded the impeachment of judges who disagree with the doctrine of Antonin Scalia-style strict constructionism. Several asserted the right of the president and Congress to disregard court decisions they think are unconstitutional. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was excoriated with the kind of venom the right once reserved for Hillary Clinton.

On a Friday panel titled Remedies to Judicial Tyranny, a constitutional lawyer named Edwin Vieira discussed Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence vs. Texas, which struck down that state's anti-sodomy law. Vieira accused Kennedy of relying on "Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principals drawn from foreign law" in his jurisprudence.

What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said, "Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We're talking about the greatest political figure of the 20th century…He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'"

The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated it. "'No man, no problem.' This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel."

As Dana Milbank pointed out on Saturday in the Washington Post, the full Stalin quote is this: "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Milbank suggested that Kennedy would be wise to hire more bodyguards.

Replacing judges is only half of the story. There's finding the right kind of judge to replace them. Farhad Manjoo reports on the attempts to clone Antonin Scalia.

The day after Terri Schiavo died, Gallup pollsters began calling Americans to ask them how various national figures had acquitted themselves in the operatic debate over whether to remove the terminally ill woman's feeding tube. The results seem to provide a simple outline of American opinion on the matter. In short, Americans think the Schiavo case was none of their business. The poll, like all other polls on the case, shows that Americans, by an overwhelming majority, don't think it was the president's or Congress' business, either. Asked what issues matter to them, Americans said pretty much the same thing they've been saying for months -- terrorism, healthcare costs, gas prices and the state of the economy. "Changes to how the federal courts handle moral issues" is an issue deemed "extremely important" by only 20 percent of the nation.

Here's the troubling thing: That 20 percent is running the country, and they're now pressing for such changes in the way the courts decide cases. While most Americans are apparently indifferent to the long-term implications of the Schiavo case, many religious conservatives see it as having lasting political utility. Its most important outcome, they say, is in highlighting an unsettling flaw in American governance. They call this flaw "judicial tyranny," though most of the rest of us know it by a friendlier name, "checks and balances."

For the politicians representing this minority -- which is to say, leaders in the House and Senate, if not the president himself -- the Schiavo case presents an opportunity to stem what conservatives frequently call an "out-of-control" judiciary. By "out of control," they mean out of their control; in the Schiavo case, after all, we saw two branches of the federal government succumb to the will of this savvy minority, while a third branch remained determinedly out of reach. Now that third branch is under attack. It is far from clear that the judiciary will survive unscathed....

This whole situation is causing Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald some worry.

It was about 25 years ago that a magazine article first called to my attention something called the Christian right. The story depicted a movement of religious fundamentalists who sought to radically restructure American life -- mandating school prayer, creationism, censorship. I remember thinking the article was a little alarmist.

Actually, it was prescient.

That realization crept over me much as Christian fundamentalism has crept over American life: steadily. The movement -- well-organized, well-funded and with true believer zeal -- has made itself the primary ideological engine of the Republican Party, climbing to power from school boards to state legislatures to Congress to the White House.

And along the way, books were burned and banned. Religion masquerading as science elbowed its way into classrooms. Legislation requiring recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance became law. Pharmacists, citing religious objections, refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. A lawmaker suggested unmarried pregnant women be prohibited from teaching in schools.

And that movement came to seem a scary thing, indeed.

So you will understand the sense of disconnect I felt upon the release of a new USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll which suggests that people are becoming a little concerned about the power of the Christian right.

The proximate cause of this ripple of anxiety -- and it is, statistically speaking, only that -- is the fight over removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. The poll found that, by large margins, Americans disapproved of the way Congress and the president intruded upon the ordeal of that brain-damaged Florida woman and her family.

Pollsters also found that Americans believe the GOP -- the party of nonintrusive government -- is more likely than the folks across the aisle to interfere in citizens' private lives. And 39 percent of us now say the religious right has too much influence over the Bush administration; 18 percent believe it has too little.

As I said, a ripple. Thirty-nine percent is not exactly a majority. And for the record, another 39 percent think the Christian right has just the right amount of influence. Still, as USA Today points out, the new numbers represent a change from previous polls in which roughly equal numbers thought conservative Christians wielded too much power or too little. Now ''too much'' leads ''too little'' by 2-1.

I choose to believe it means people are beginning to have their doubts about the new American theocracy. Maybe they are looking at the theocracies of the Middle East and Africa and asking if these are really models to which we should aspire. Maybe they're realizing that for all its pious moralizing, the fundamentalist movement is less about right than self-righteousness, less about faith than intrusion and less about God than power.

Yes this is, as the fundamentalists are fond of saying, a Christian nation. Thing is, it's also a Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Hispanic and gay nation.

The only way that works is if we inculcate respect for difference and, more to the point, respect for the laws and customs that protect difference. The Schiavo case offered an up-close and unpretty look at the sort of respect fundamentalists have for difference -- in this case, difference of opinion. And it wasn't hard to imagine yourself in the position of Schiavo's husband, making a hard, painful and private decision no one should ever be asked to make, only to find yourself intruded upon by an army of religious zealots eager to substitute their judgment for yours. And a government breaking its own rules to empower them.

So a few more of us are wondering, worrying, and saying, hey, wait a minute.

I have just one question for them.

What took you so long?

You know those Roadrunner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote is teetering on the edge of a cliff, struggling to hold up a big boulder that's about to push him over the edge? He gets it to stop just in time. He heaves a sigh of relief, only to hear a pebble fall away under his feet ... *tink* ...then another ... *tink* ...then...

The No. 3 Republican in the Senate said Sunday that embattled House Majority Leader Tom DeLay needs to answer questions about his ethics and "let the people then judge for themselves."

Sen. Rick Santorum's comments seem to reflect the nervousness among congressional Republicans about the fallout from the increased scrutiny into DeLay's way of doing business. One of DeLay's GOP colleagues in the House called him an "absolute embarrassment" and doubled [sic] DeLay would last as majority leader.

[...]

Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., said DeLay should step down as leader because his continuing ethics problems are hurting the GOP.

"Tom's conduct is hurting the Republican Party, is hurting this Republican majority and it is hurting any Republican who is up for re-election," Shays told The Associated Press Sunday.

A moderate Republican who has battled with his party's leadership on a number of issues, including campaign finance reform, Shays said efforts by the House GOP members to change ethics rules to protect DeLay only make the party look bad.

"My party is going to have to decide whether we are going to continue to make excuses for Tom to the detriment of Republicans seeking election," Shays said. [Washington Post]

What do you tink of that, Mr. DeLay?

Frank Rich on the emerging Buzzard Culture in America.

Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.

As sponsors line up to buy time on "CSI," so celebrity deaths have become a marvelous opportunity for beatific self-promotion by news and political stars alike. Tim Russert showed a video of his papal encounter on a "Meet the Press" where one of the guests, unchallenged, gave John Paul an A-plus for his handling of the church's sex abuse scandal. Jesse Jackson, staking out a new career as the angel of deathotainment, hit the trifecta: in rapid succession he appeared with the Schindlers at their daughter's hospice in Florida, eulogized Johnnie Cochran on "Larry King Live" and reminisced about his own papal audience with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

This agenda is synergistic with the entertainment culture of Mr. Bush's base: No one does the culture of death with more of a vengeance - literally so - than the doomsday right. The "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as Eric J. Greenberg has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a 40-title series, "Left Behind: The Kids," that warns Jewish children of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too late. Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original series' 60 million.

[...]

If there's one lesson to take away from the saturation coverage of the pope, it is how relatively enlightened he was compared with the men in business suits ruling Washington. Our leaders are not only to the right of most Americans (at least three-quarters of whom opposed Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case) but even to the right of most American evangelical Christians (most of whom favored the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, according to Time magazine). They are also, like Mel Gibson and the fiery nun of "Revelations," to the right of the largely conservative pontiff they say they revere. This is true not only on such issues as the war in Iraq and the death penalty but also on the core belief of how life began. Though the president of the United States believes that the jury is still out on evolution, John Paul in 1996 officially declared that "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis."

We don't know the identity of the corpse that will follow the pope in riveting the nation's attention. What we do know is that the reality show we've made of death has jumped the shark, turning from a soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade.

Conservatives are circling their wagons around Tom DeLay.

Allies and friends of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) have concluded that public attention to his ethics is unlikely to abate for months to come, and they plan to try to preserve his power by launching an aggressive media strategy and calling in favors from prominent conservative leaders, according to Republicans participating in the strategy sessions.

The Republicans said the strategy combines leaks from DeLay allies about questionable Democratic trips and financial matters; denunciations of unfavorable news stories as biased, orchestrated rehashes; and swift, organized responses to journalists' inquiries.

The resistance was launched two weeks ago when DeLay flew back to Washington from Texas during Easter recess to speak to a group of about 30 conservative leaders who had gathered in the conference room of the Family Research Council for a call to arms on his behalf.

Officials working with DeLay said he is trying to lock in support by sowing the message that an attack on him is an attack on the conservative movement, and that taking him out would be the Democrats' first step toward regaining control of the House and Senate. These officials said they believe the attacks are part of a strategy by Democrats, aided by watchdog groups funded by liberals, to use the ethics process to try to regain power.

[...]

DeLay staff members are linking with outside lawyers -- including Barbara Comstock, former research director of the Republican National Committee -- to form what is essentially a campaign organization aimed at minimizing damage to DeLay and building support despite what they believe will be a continuing torrent of news stories about his travel, fundraising and dealings with lobbyists.

One Republican familiar with the strategy, who asked not to be identified in order to be more candid, described the message as "Clintonian" in that it emphasized the idea that "there's no news, and they're out to get us" -- with the addition that "liberal media, liberal Democrats" are to blame.

[...]

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a prominent social conservative, said his mission is to remind people that DeLay is a large reason that Congress has a conservative majority. "He is in the cross hairs in large part because of his effectiveness," Perkins said. "It's a typical strategy: Take out the leader, and other people scatter."

This is great. The conservatives are doing exactly the right thing to make Tom DeLay the poster boy for right-wing arrogance, and just like Newt Gingrich, they're giving their opponents a big helmet-haired (and slightly balding in the back) target. Knock yourself out, guys.

The Blade notes the approaching 80th anniversary of the Scopes Trial.

Americans are approaching the 80th anniversary of the famous "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tenn., one of the few legal proceedings in our history that genuinely qualifies for the title of "trial of the century."
It defined a generation and, while the case was inconclusive, it carved out the stereotype of the "Bible Belt" or "the Sahara of the Bozart," an area of the country that could be deemed to be south of freedom, which, as the acerbic H.L. Mencken wrote, is "a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence."

The state of Ohio is not exempt from this Bozartian trend, as demonstrated by an effort to mobilize 2,000 evangelical, Pentecostal, and Roman Catholic leaders in a grass-roots campaign to gain control of the Ohio Republican Party.

For years there was a cultural divide within the country. Now, it appears to be reaching toward the 49th parallel. Robert Bennett, chairman of the Ohio GOP, warned that the party, if pushed too far to the right, could lose its role as a "party of a big tent," and its decade-long dominance in a state that still remains quite equally divided.

Do Ohioans really want to get their marching orders from the pulpits across the state? If churches were to become adjuncts of a political party, it could be argued that they should forfeit the tax-free status that religion enjoys in this country, unless they manage to gain control of the third branch of the federal government, the still largely independent judiciary.

How long would the voters of a diverse and free-wheeling federal republic tolerate a tyranny of the majority, one in which doctors and pharmacists might even some day refuse to provide birth control pills for women on grounds of religious scruples and in which clergymen attempt to set the political agenda?

In the Scopes "monkey trial," which revolved around the teaching of evolution, it may be said that the prosecution eventually triumphed. Surveys have shown that teachers increasingly avoid the teaching of evolution or are pressured to label it as a "theory" and to put forward the biblical version of the creation of life on earth.

The result of that almost certainly will be the production of generations of young people who are scientifically illiterate and have contempt for science and its methods of inquiry. The folks in Dayton, Tenn., at least are profiting from the furor over Charles Darwin's theories; it brings in tourism dollars.

Strangely, Americans fail to comprehend the irony of imposing religious orthodoxy on our own society at a time when we are under attack by Islamic radicals and in which peace prospects between militant Israelis and their Muslim adversaries are not noticeably brighter.

It remains one of history's great paradoxes that wars fought over religion have been the scourge of mankind.

Ohioans should reject a pulpit-centered march to the right led by so-called "Patriot pastors" and the opportunistic politicians seeking to ally themselves with such a movement.

It sounds like a good time for a revival of Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:33 AM  

T. Rex has an idea.

Inspired by Bobby Cramer, Mustang Bobby's blog about his novel in progress, and by my own unpublished writings, I came up with an idea.

Now, like most of you other bloggers, one of the reasons I blog is so that I have a regular writing gig. Like some of you, I'm sure, I got into writing by writing poetry fiction, not political stuff. And, like many of you, I have a resevoir of unpublished fiction and poetry that is just screaming at me for an audience.

So, here's what I propose. A group of us should get together and create our own online magazine for the purpose of publishing our fiction, poetry, drama and other literary works. Theoretically, we would push it in the direction of becoming a legitimate publication that amateur writers would submit stuff to and the like, maybe we'd even appear in literary market and things like that. We could also include articles and essays on literature, reviews, and stuff about getting published or the art of writing.

As you can probably imagine, I like the idea very much.

Cross-posted at Bobby Cramer.

Dennis Jett has some thoughts on the appointment of Karen Hughes as the new sales rep for American foreign policy.

Some people seem to think that America's image abroad can be improved merely by changing the salesman. Unfortunately that's not the case. To paraphrase an over-used line: "It's the policy, stupid."

You would never know that from reading the commentary on the recent appointment of Karen Hughes as under secretary of state for public diplomacy. The pundits declared that Hughes faces a huge challenge, but she is the right person for the job because she is close to President Bush. They asserted because of that proximity to power, she will succeed where the bureaucracy and her two predecessors have failed.

[...]

She is undoubtedly tackling a grave problem. Every new report confirms people overseas view the United States with growing distrust and hostility. One study concluded ``U.S.-Arab relations are at their lowest point in generations.''

A public-opinion poll in Australia shows just how bad things are. It revealed that the United States isn't even among the top 10 countries Aussies respect most. Worse, the percentage that considers U.S. foreign policy the greatest threat to the world today is equal to the number that believe that the threat comes from Islamic fundamentalism.

Will Hughes be able to change all that? She is undeniably close to the president. So close that she wrote his autobiography with little help. But that closeness is likely to convince foreign audiences only of her loyalty to him and not of the wisdom of his policies. Tucker Carlson, a conservative commentator, once said about Hughes: "The striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness." If Hughes can't even con conservatives at home, she won't convince anyone abroad.

[...]

Repeating the message with consistency does not mean the rest of the world will soon believe it. Hughes, and her new boss Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, can fix the world with their steely glares and repeat the mantra as many times as they want. The rest of the world will still see not just the rhetoric of U.S. policy, but its impact as well.

We invaded a country without weapons of mass destruction or ties to 9/11 or al Qaeda and then claimed it was all about democracy. We torture, murder and indefinitely imprison hundreds and assert we care about human rights. Because much of our foreign policy is dictated by the religious right, abstinence is our prescription for AIDS, and the perception abroad is that we could not be more deeply embedded in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's pocket.

So Hughes will face a challenge: Get the world to sign on to a faith-based reality. And if she doesn't have any more success than her predecessors?

The Bush administration believes that the United States should not be ashamed of using its power to promote its values around the world. And if the rest of the world doesn't realize that what America wants is best for them, that is their problem. When you are the world's only superpower and convinced of your own moral and intellectual superiority, what the rest of the world thinks doesn't really matter.

It occurs to me that there's something to the fact that the the public faces of the Bush administration's foreign policy are women: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and now Karen Hughes. Some might say that it's a sign of progress for the conservative Republicans to get to this point of promoting equal opportunities for women as policy-makers. Others (guess who) have a more cynical take on it; that Rice and Hughes are being used by the Bushies to protect them from attacks on their foreign policy because anyone who criticizes them would be seen as bullies picking on girls. Also, they know that as conservative as the Bush administration might be, they don't hold a candle to some of our allies -- Saudi Arabia comes to mind -- who see women as one step up the food chain from a houseplant and it puts them on the defensive to have them deal with a female Secretary of State. It wouldn't be the first time the Republicans have used their own perverted idea of "affirmative action" in promoting someone based on their gender or race to tweak the nose of the liberals; remember Clarence Thomas being promoted as the "best choice out there" to succeed Thurgood Marshall? That may be over the top -- after all, Ms. Rice is not the first female Secretary of State -- but when it comes to motives for the current administration, there's nothing wrong with being a tad cynical.

Once again I have to make excuses for the Republicans.

John at archy has selected me as one of his three to pass on the Dreaded Book Meme. I'm flattered and I accept his challenge. John, by the way, was pegged by Coturnix at Science and Politics, and it started somewhere else before there. It will go on from here, trust me.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I am loath to admit that I never read Fahrenheit 451. I saw the film, though, and I know the premise: what book would I memorize to pass on to the next generation?

Lots of choices run through my mind; a play, certainly, or something practical, like The Joy of Cooking, or great literature that speaks to the beauty of the human spirit. John suggested a history might be valuable, though, so that younger generations would know where they came from and perhaps avoid the doom of repeating it. For that reason I'd choose William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Does that include characters I've created? It sounds incestuous if I say that I have a crush on Bobby in Bobby Cramer, and besides, a crush is totally unrequited; the other person doesn't know you exist, and Bobby knows me all too well. In that case I'd have to say it would be Ken Talley in 5th of July by Lanford Wilson. He's strong, independent, vulnerable, funny, and intelligent. "Anything's possible with a little taste and charm."

The last book you bought is?

For myself, it's The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's about the fourth or fifth copy I've owned. I keep lending it out or finding new editions.

What are you currently reading?

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. My mom read it and sent me a copy without hesitation, and I'm slowly savoring it. It gives me great hope that there are writers out there who appreciate stories that aren't all flash and melodrama and that there's an audience for them.

True to form, it's not the only book on the table. I'm working on Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominic Lapierre about the liberation of Paris in 1944, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart, Pentimento by Lillian Hellman, and a screenplay written by a good friend.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

My single-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings. It was published in a thick paperback version in Great Britain and Canada in the early 1970's, and it's one book I never get tired of exploring.

The Wilderness Handbook by Paul Petzoldt. It got me through my NOLS course in 1974, and if I'm going to be on a deserted island it could come in handy.

One of the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome. There are twelve in the series of stories about children sailing and having adventures in the Lake District of England and other places where boats and camping out is a part of life. My father read them as a child and passed them on to me. The hard part would be deciding which one, but in a pinch I'd take Pigeon Post because that's the one that got me through my first time on a deserted island: my freshman year at St. George's.

A good anthology of plays through the ages like Stages of Drama would inspire me to write, which leads me to my last choice:

A large notebook of empty pages and a reliable writing implement. I can't be expected to just read the entire time.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat. This is a man who knows the written word as well as anyone I've met in real life or on-line, and I'd love to know what his choices would be.

Kat at Lab Kat. I love the way she thinks and I know she'll come up with some really interesting choices.

Bryan at Why Now? is one of the most articulate and thoughtful bloggers out there.

Don't feel left out -- do it yourself in the comments.

Thanks, John; this was fun.

Updates: Lab Kat, Steve at YDD, and Bryan at Why Now? have posted their memes. They have exceeded my wildest expectations.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 5:14 PM  

It's been a very strange week. The Pope, Prince Rainier, and Saul Bellow are among the notables that shuffled off this mortal coil, and Tom DeLay found himself in more deep shit. The right wing got all worked up over another fake memo that turned out to be the real thing and caused them a bit of embarrassment -- not like they'd ever own up to it, though. And tonight here in South Florida we get a partial eclipse of the sun if it will stop raining long enough for us to see it. Oh, and Blogger was having its weekly tantrum. But there are a lot of other things going on to catch the attention of the Liberal Coalition.

archy looks for suggestions for the next pope's name.

Bark Bark Woof Woof offers a short course in economics.

BlogAmY has Dave's Friday Question.

bloggg is in their new digs (check the URL to see if yours is current) and offers thought on food.

Chris asks some questions about Lost.

Collective Sigh heaves one over the lottery in North Carolina.

Corrente has their own little wrap-up of the news.

NTodd notes the slow rollout of Discovery.

Echidne does some dog-blogging.

edwardpig writes his senator.

First Draft offers Friday Funeral Blogging.

The Fulcrum is back! Best wishes, Charles2.

The Gamer's Nook looks back and forward.

Happy Furry Pup makes a run for the border.

Jude at iddybud is pissed that Jimmy Carter got snubbed.

In Search of Telford goes in search of alternative energy.

The Invisible Library examines the liberal message.

Kick The Leftist bids farewell to blogging. (Note: the link will stay active in the LC blogroll for a while.)

Left Is Right has some fun for today.

Make Me a Commentator offers a blogaround in haiku.

Musing's musings rises to my challenge from last week on the Twelve Steps for Liberals with his own version for the wingnutsery.

Pen-Elayne books a Sheroes Bloggers meeting.

Rook's Rant is on ecology and makes his point short and sweet.

rubber hose contemplates the VAT.

Scrutiny Hooligans on the decline and fall of an empire.

Sooner Thought has Gen. Wesley Clark's testimony before Congress.

Speedkill on the resurrected Pope...in comic form.

Steve Gilliard on blogging for dollars.

T. Rex has today's Action Alerts.

Trish Wilson on the definition of legal chutzpah.

Wanda on future shock.

WTF Is It Now congratulates the Daily Show on its second Peabody.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat is on the trail of the Cornyn stupidity.

That's it for now. Have a good weekend.

From Salon.com / AP:

An Army sergeant who was wounded in Iraq wants a chance to remain in the military as an openly gay soldier, a desire that's bringing him into conflict with the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Sgt. Robert Stout, 23, says he has not encountered trouble from fellow soldiers and would like to stay if not for the policy that permits gay men and women to serve only if they keep their sexual orientation a secret.

"I know a ton of gay men that would be more than willing to stay in the Army if they could just be open," Stout said in an interview with The Associated Press. "But if we have to stay here and hide our lives all the time, it's just not worth it."

Stout, of Utica, Ohio, was awarded the Purple Heart after a grenade sent pieces of shrapnel into his arm, face and legs while he was operating a machine gun on an armored Humvee last May.

He is believed to be the first gay soldier wounded in Iraq to publicly discuss his sexuality, said Aaron Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

"We can't keep hiding the fact that there's gay people in the military and they aren't causing any harm," said Stout, who says he is openly gay among most of his 26-member platoon, which is part of the 9th Engineer Battalion based in Schweinfurt, Germany.

Stout, who served in Iraq for more than a year as a combat engineer, said by acknowledging he is gay, he could be jailed and probably will be discharged before his scheduled release date of May 31.

[...]

The issue of whether gays should be allowed to openly serve in the military has received increased attention in recent months as the Army has struggled to meet its recruiting goals. Twelve gays expelled from the military sued the government in December, citing a Supreme Court ruling that declared unconstitutional state laws against homosexual sex.

The Bush administration has asked a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit.

Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey has said he opposes changing the policy, although Pentagon figures show a sharp decline in the number of U.S. military members discharged for making it known they are homosexual, falling from 1,227 in 2001 to 653 last year.

A recent congressional study on the impact of "don't ask, don't tell" said that hundreds of highly skilled troops, including many translators, have left the armed forces because of the rule, at a cost of nearly $200 million, mostly for recruiting and training replacements for 9,500 troops discharged between 1994 and 2003.

Gary Gates, a statistician at the University of California at Los Angeles, estimates there are about 65,000 gays and lesbians currently serving in the military, accounting for about 2.8 percent of all personnel. He estimates that at least 25 gay soldiers have been killed in Iraq.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative advocacy group that opposes gays serving in the military, said a better way to avoid the cost of replacing soldiers who are discharged for being gay is to make it very clear to people who enlist in the military, including Stout, that they are ineligible to serve if they are gay.

"I honor and respect his service to this country, but the fact that he's wounded really doesn't change the underlying fact. ... He is not eligible to serve," Donnelly said, adding that there are many reasons why people aren't eligible to serve. "This is just one of them."

I'd say that Sgt. Stout is more eligible to serve in the armed forces than Ms. Donnelly -- he is, at the least, a human being, and Ms. Donnelly is not.

[Postponed from earlier this morning due to technical difficulties.]

I'm not sure what happened this morning -- probably something to do with some strange machinations on the web and a confluence of nasty weather and migrating servers, not to mention the slithy toves gyring and gimbelling in the wabe -- but I was unable to post anything this morning, so that's why you see this instead of the usual Friday Blogaround, which I hope to get to during lunch. (I already had a concerned phone call from the Faithful Correspondent wondering if I was okay.) Andante offered a helpful suggestion, and it got me at least to Blogger. Now let's see if it will publish...

Maybe this belongs at Bobby Cramer, but kudos to John Wells for the excellent writing on the season-finale cliffhanger last night on The West Wing. The match-up for the general election pits Texas Congressman Matt Santos as the Democratic presidential nominee with former Labor Secretary and White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry as his vice-president against California Senator Arnold Vinnick for president with Gov. Ray Sullivan of West Virgina as his veep choice for the Republicans.

Would that we had such a choice in real life.

Well, they passed it.

Floridians will soon have the right to shoot or stab someone in a violent confrontation with fewer possibilities of being prosecuted, under a proposed law passed Tuesday by the Legislature. Gov. Jeb Bush has pledged his support.

The proposal to expand and clarify the "castle doctrine" -- named after the philosophy that "a man's home is his castle" -- cleared its final hurdle in the Florida House with 94 votes. The 20 dissenters were all Democrats from urban areas.

Democrats primarily objected to language that will remove from current law the duty of citizens to retreat in confrontations in public settings.

The duty to retreat traditionally has not applied to a person facing a home invader.

"For a House that talks about the culture of life, it's ironic that we would be devaluing life in this bill," said Rep. Dan Gelber, a Miami Beach Democrat, referring to the rallying cry of conservatives during the recent Terri Schiavo debate.

But supporters of the legislation say the proposal protects innocent life and aims to reduce crime in Florida, one of the most violent states in the nation, because criminals will think twice before bothering someone on the street.

And it will also give anybody the right to shoot someone down in the street for whatever good reason their lawyer can come up with: "Oh, yes, Your Honor, my client felt very threatened by the little old lady waving her umbrella at him while he was scoring a rock of crack."

PS: Notice the headline NBC6.net chose to use for this story:

Florida NRA Bill Would Allow People To Kill Others In Public

Pretty much sums it up right there, doesn't it?

Maybe David Brooks was right...it really is good when the Republicans fight among themselves.

The Terri Schiavo case has reinvigorated a drive by congressional conservatives to discipline and curtail the power of federal judges, just as Senate Republicans are trying to repel Democratic claims that the GOP is extremist and overreaching in its bid to shape the federal judiciary.

The debate is causing tensions within the Republican Party, whose Senate leaders distanced themselves this week from an attack on judges leveled by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

Party insiders say Congress is unlikely to impeach judges or dramatically limit the courts' jurisdiction, as DeLay has repeatedly threatened to do. But Democrats, sensing a political opening, have pounced on DeLay's comments -- and similar remarks made by other conservatives -- in their campaign to prevent Senate Republicans from changing filibuster rules that have enabled Democrats to block several of President Bush's appellate court nominees.

"If they don't get what they want, they attack whoever's around," Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters this week. "Now they're after the courts, and I think it goes back to this arrogance of power."

[...]

Democrats have denounced the comments, as well as those by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who said this week that violence against judges might be linked to a perception that they make "political decisions."

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said yesterday, "The Schiavo case cast a bright light on the dark forces behind the . . . campaign" to change Senate rules and bar judicial filibusters. Noting that federal judges are asking Congress for an extra $12 million for security systems in most of their homes, Kennedy said: "I urge President Bush and [Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist to call a halt to the reckless Republican rhetoric that is endangering judges' lives."

[...]

GOP attacks on the federal judiciary could prove politically tricky. Well more than half of the nation's 266 U.S. appellate court judges and approximately 1,000 district court judges were appointed by Republican presidents.

Senate Democrats cite such facts to depict Republican activists as extremists who will stop at nothing to turn the federal judiciary into a conservative bastion. "Apparently, it's not enough for Republicans to rule the White House and the Congress," Kennedy said. "They want power over the independent judiciary, too. The checks and balances so vital to our democracy are for them merely an inconvenience."

Meanwhile, the GOP is getting nervous about Tom DeLay now that three big guns in the SCLM -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, and ABC News -- are finally beginning to find out and announce to the world that he's a sleazebag. (It's about time; the blogosphere has been all over him for years now.) They felt the need to send out one of their more sycophantic House members, Roy Blount of Missouri, to announce that "I don't see any wavering of support for the leader. I think a lot of members think he's taking arrows for all of us." An unfortunate metaphor, given that two of DeLay's colleagues are under investigation for screwing Indian tribes out of money for lobbying for casinos.

And in a rare showing of going for the jugular, the Democrats are finally getting out there with an aggressive and pro-active attack on DeLay.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) , bolstered by a recent poll showing diminished support for DeLay in his Houston area district, said her party would make a strong attempt to unseat him. "There are several good candidates who have put themselves forward.... I think there are other candidates who are looking at the race now," Pelosi said.

Democratic-allied groups also stepped up efforts to portray DeLay as the face of the Republican Party. The Campaign for America's Future, a liberal group that previously ran an ad in DeLay's district, will begin running a new print ad this week that says "once upon a time" conservatives had high standards, but now have DeLay as their leader. The full-page ad will run today in the Washington Times.

Smart move buying an ad in the Moonie-run paper -- that's the paper of record for the GOP. That should get their attention.

Jon Chait in the New Republic Online does a great job of tearing down Brooks' theory that the conservatives are at odds with each other. Of course, it all depends on how you define "conservative," but by and large, they're all at one with their Dear Leader:

Brooks insists, "Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly." In fact, on every important debate of his presidency, Bush has enjoyed a solid phalanx of conservative pundits all repeating the same talking points on his behalf. It's a successful arrangement. It also worked for the Comintern, for a while. I'm sure the communist intellectuals who relentlessly backed Moscow's every move liked to flatter themselves by insisting they were a bunch of squabbling freethinkers, too.

Я соглашаюсь, товарищ!

From the Washington Post:

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.

Martinez, the GOP's Senate point man on the issue, said he earlier had been assured by aides that his office had nothing to do with producing the memo. "I never did an investigation, as such," he said. "I just took it for granted that we wouldn't be that stupid. It was never my intention to in any way politicize this issue."

I love it when people suddenly realize that the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

[...]

The mystery of the memo's origin had roiled the Capitol, with Republicans accusing Democrats of concocting the document as a dirty trick, and Democrats accusing Republicans of trying to duck responsibility for exploiting the dying days of an incapacitated woman.

Conservative Web logs have challenged the authenticity of the memo, in some cases likening it to the discredited documents about Bush's National Guard service that CBS News reported last fall....

It sounds like the freshman senator was set up like some sort of fraternity prank, doesn't it? But that's not the kind of behavior you'd expect from the World's Greatest Deliberative Body, now does it? Does it...?

AMERICAblog has the right-wing on the record that the memo is a complete phony. Oh, what fun...

I've added Winding Roads Visual Arts, the photo gallery of NTodd and friends, to the blogroll; anything to make the world a more beautiful place.

I've also been doing some rewrites on Can't Live Without You in preparation for the Inge Festival. Read about them at Bobby Cramer.

Update: I wrote a post about Travels with Bobby during lunch. (Thanks for the idea, Amy.)

Got a dollar bill in your wallet? Have you ever read what it says on it?

It's called a Federal Reserve Note, and it says that "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." That's it. There is nothing more to that piece of paper than the fact that the United States Government and the Department of the Treasury says it is worth one dollar and you can exchange it for a dollar's worth of something else, like food or .43 of a gallon of gasoline. That's what's known as the "full faith and credit" clause, and our entire economy -- indeed, the entire economy of the world -- runs on such full faith and credit; that the government would stand behind the currency it issues in whatever form -- bills, notes, and bonds -- and will pay its debts.

It didn't used to be that way. Up until about forty years ago, a dollar bill was a "silver certificate" and you could exchange it for an actual dollar's worth of silver. But Congress decided that our economy was based on trust -- much the same as the bank trusts you to pay your credit card bill -- and they took us off the silver standard and asked us and the world to accept that we would be good for our debts.

This bit of Economics 101 has apparently escaped President Bush.

President Bush on Tuesday turned a government file cabinet in the hills of West Virginia into his Exhibit A for why Social Security needs urgent change.

To dramatize Social Security's future solvency problem, the president peered into the four-drawer ivory cabinet inside the Bureau of Public Debt office here along the Ohio River. In the second drawer was a white three-ring binder filled with pieces of paper providing physical evidence of $1.7 trillion in Treasury bonds that back Social Security benefits.

"Imagine," Bush said in a speech a short time later at West Virginia University at Parkersburg. "The retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet.

"It's time to strengthen and modernize Social Security for future generations with growing assets that you can control, that you call your own — assets that the government can't take away."

[...]

The pieces of paper Bush saw are not real Treasury securities. In today's computer age, investors no longer get honest-to-goodness Treasury bonds they can hold in their hands. However, by law, the bureau creates paper bonds to put in the file cabinet just in case anybody, like Bush, wants to see the trust fund.

While the paper IOUs are not negotiable instruments, they still represent trust fund Treasury bonds that are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

So unless President Bush wants us to go back to the silver standard, he's going to have to trust that the Treasury will stand behind the bonds that it issues. It seems to work for everyone else, including our debt holders. That's why it's called a "trust fund." Duh.

From the New York Times:

The wife and daughter of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have been paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by Mr. DeLay's political action and campaign committees, according to a detailed review of disclosure statements filed with the Federal Election Commission and separate fund-raising records in Mr. DeLay's home state, Texas.

Most of the payments to his wife, Christine A. DeLay, and his only child, Dani DeLay Ferro, were described in the disclosure forms as "fund-raising fees," "campaign management" or "payroll," with no additional details about how they earned the money. The payments appear to reflect what Mr. DeLay's aides say is the central role played by the majority leader's wife and daughter in his political career.

Mr. DeLay's national political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, or Armpac, said in a statement on Tuesday that the two women had provided valuable services to the committee in exchange for the payments: "Mrs. DeLay provides big picture, long-term strategic guidance and helps with personnel decisions. Ms. Ferro is a skilled and experienced professional event planner who assists Armpac in arranging and organizing individual events."

Mrs. Ferro has managed several of her father's re-election campaigns for his House seat.

His spokesman said that Mr. DeLay had no additional comment. Although several members of Congress employ family members as campaign managers or on their political action committees, advocacy groups seeking an overhaul of federal campaign-finance and ethics laws say that the payments to Mr. DeLay's family members were unusually generous, and should be the focus of new scrutiny of the Texas congressman.

This is the point where people who are under investigation hire lawyers and start talking about spending more time with their family.

Bob and I took our usual walk around Mary Pace Park along Biscayne Bay. Bob noticed a turkey vulture perched on a rock.

BOB: I wonder why that vulture hasn't migrated yet.

ME: Maybe he lost his luggage and all he had left was his carrion.

Thwap.

Well, the Tigers are 1-0! That's better than last year.

Just when I got all smug and gloating over the idiots Texas has in their political arena (see below), my adopted state goes one better.

From Fred Grimm of the Miami Herald Opinion page:

Ain't no blue blazer, Perry Como, country club Republicans 'round here no more.

The Legislature has gone hip-hop.

Brutally violent, machismo sentiments usually associated with urban rap lyrics have been translated into legislation:

Kill 'em in your castle.

Kill 'em in your car.

Kill 'em on the streets.

Kill 'em in the bar.

The wimpy notion that a citizen ought to avoid potentially deadly confrontations has been jettisoned in favor of a bill, approved by the Florida Senate and sure to be passed this week by the House, that downright encourages gunplay.

Feeling threatened? Intimidated? Or a little grouchy?

Go ahead. Kill 'em.

Some loudmouthed lunkhead at the kid's soccer game bumps up against you, uses a nasty epithet, reaches into his pocket and pulls out . . . What? Could be his Blackberry. Or it just might be a black anodized aluminum Colt .45 pistol with seven in the clip and one in the chamber.

Assume the worst. Whip out your AK-47 and empty the banana clip.

Florida legislators, in an effort to codify the a-man's-home-is-his-castle doctrine, got carried away. It started out as an effort to get rid of the idea that a resident ought to retreat before gunning down an intruder. So language was crafted to protect residents against prosecution or a civil suit if they blast away at an intruder, as long as they think the intruder is about to commit a forcible felony. (That includes murder, manslaughter, sexual battery, robbery, kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated battery, aggravated stalking, burglary and treason. I'm still trying to grasp the concept of a home invasion treason.)

This ought to provide homeowners the legal protection necessary to rid the neighborhood of pesky trick-or-treaters. It certainly would have hampered the prosecution of Jay Steven Levin, who gunned down a 16-year-old he caught ringing the doorbell of his Boca Raton home and running away.

Levin, 40, explained to investigators that he was "in fear," a shabby defense in 2003 but not so far-fetched in 2005 if the governor signs the Home Protection Act.

But Rapmaster Dennis Baxley, a Republican state rep from the mean streets of Ocala, decided that Home Protection need not stop at home. Baxley extended state endorsement of the use of force against force, even presumed force, to cars, sidewalks, restaurants, bars, PTA meetings and other places where danger lurks.

One would no longer be obligated to avoid a deadly run-in in a public place. Instead, the bill says, one "has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force. . . .''

Baxley (also known as 15 Cents) took his message to the House floor:

Meet force with force.

If they poke you with your finger,

You have the right to poke them back.

If they attack you,

You have the right to use whatever deadly force to defend yourself.

The Baxley Doctrine, designed with the suburban homeowner in mind, should provide an interesting legal strategy for urban gangbangers -- already strong supporters of the meet-force-with-force concept -- hauled into court for gunning down their rivals.

Baxley's rap, of course, represents yet another triumph of the all-powerful National Rifle Association, which also is working on kill 'em legislation in other states. In Georgia and Arizona, the NRA is pushing, with little resistance, laws allowing gun owners to take their concealed firearms into restaurants.

In Tennessee, the NRA gets blamed for a similar bill allowing folks to pack heat in bars. But I suspect the state's country-music writers are the real sponsors, imagining the lyric-inspiring gunshot pathos generated when well-armed barflies get macho mad.

After all, they're thinking up in Nashville, why should Florida rappers get all the good tragic material?

Okay, so all the nuts aren't in Texas.

[Updated to add the author's name.]

To John Patrick Shanley for his Pulitzer Prize for Doubt, A Parable.

From the WaPo:

Sen. John Cornyn said yesterday that recent examples of courthouse violence may be linked to public anger over judges who make politically charged decisions without being held accountable.

In a Senate floor speech in which he sharply criticized a recent Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, Cornyn (R-Tex.) -- a former Texas Supreme Court justice and member of the Judiciary Committee -- said Americans are growing increasingly frustrated by what he describes as activist jurists.

"It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions," he said. Sometimes, he said, "the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policymaker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people."

Cornyn continued: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have."

Need I remind the Senator that the last two violent incidents against judges -- the murder of Judge Lefkow's family in Chicago and the courthouse carnage in Atlanta -- had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "enforcing political decisions." One was a personal vendetta by a whack-job and the other was an escaping prisoner. Linking them to the political agenda of the wingnuts is a stunning reach, even for a senator who comes across as the poor man's version of Tom DeLay.

And may I say to the good people of Texas -- and the state of my birth: you need to seriously consider who you send to the national political arena. Your record of the last decade or so doesn't speak well of you.

When conservatives fight, that's a good thing. Peace is war, black is white, and whoring for the Right is the only way to preserve my virtue.

And you thought my April 1 posting was a parody, huh?

I was fifteen, in my last months of my freshman -- and only -- year at St. George's. At nine p.m., after study hall, our dorm master and school chaplain, the Rev. Hayes Rockwell, called us into the common room on the second floor of Auchincloss Hall and said, "Well, they've killed Dr. Martin Luther King."

The room was silent for a moment, but all eyes furtively turned to the only black kid in our class. His reaction was the same as ours -- silence. He was the son of a wealthy Washington banker and knew as much about "the black experience" as I did. But we all knew who Dr. King was and we knew about the civil rights struggle as well as high school kids today know about the war in Iraq; a presence in the background that didn't touch us directly but dominated the news.

The next couple of days were filled with the pictures of the nation's shock and the news magazines and papers went through the same paroxyms of heart-tugging stories -- the grieving but stoic widow, the puzzled looks on the faces of Dr. King's young children, the sonorous tones of politicians calling for justice and healing -- just as they had done in November 1963.

Over the next few weeks there was unrest in many cities, including Washington D.C., unrest that I was sure Dr. King would have hated, especially if it was done in his name, but the die was cast and the orbit shifted just a little.

Two months later it all happened again with Bobby Kennedy, and on the day of his funeral -- June 8, the day I left St. George's -- they captured James Earl Ray, the man who killed Dr. King, in London. To his dying day he never said why he did it. I wonder if it's because he saw what he -- or those who were really responsible -- had wrought in the world and could not, in the dark depths of his subconscous, bear to face it.

Another relative -- from the smart side of the family -- sent this to me:

--By Robert Friedman, Perspective Editor, St. Petersburg Times

Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues.

Here's what mine says:

* In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me.

* I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.

* I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable vigil at my bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.

* I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.

* I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.

* I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.

* I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.

* I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the Florida Legislature to ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a forum for weeks of politically calculated bloviation.

* I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz friars and all other hangers-on - to start calling me "Bobby," as if they had known me since childhood.

* I'm not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be nice if Congress passed a "Bobby's Law" that applied only to me and ignored the medical needs of tens of millions of other Americans without adequate health coverage.

* Even if the "Bobby's Law" idea doesn't work out, I want Congress - especially all those self-described conservatives who claim to believe in "less government and more freedom" - to trample on the decisions of doctors, judges and other experts who actually know something about my case. And I want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate that gives them another excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the economy.

* In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case as an opportunity to divert the country's attention from the mounting political and legal troubles stemming from his slimy misbehavior.

* And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his Harvard medical degree by misrepresenting the details of my case in ways that might give a boost to his 2008 presidential campaign.

* I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition on the basis of a snippet of dated and demeaning videotape that should have remained private.

* Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent vegetative state, I'd want President Bush - the same guy who publicly mocked Karla Faye Tucker when signing off on her death warrant as governor of Texas - to claim he was intervening in my case because it is always best "to err on the side of life."

* I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at the last moment to take responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad could ever happen to anyone under DCF's care.

* And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human being on the face of the Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned directives to be disregarded if the governor happens to disagree with them. If he says he knows what's best for me, I won't be in any position to argue.

Works for me.

Red Sox fans were ready and waiting...

But...

On the most-hyped Opening Night in baseball history, the Yankees spanked the Sox, 9-2, on the strength of 15 hits, plus six innings of five-hit, six-strikeout (five looking) pitching by Hall-of-Fame-bound Randy Johnson, who may prove to be the most important acquisition of the winter of 2004-05.

"Pretty ugly out there," said Johnny Damon, who went 0 for 4 and committed one of the Sox' two errors. "This is absolutely not the way we wanted to start, especially coming off the busy offseason we all had. It was good to get this first one under our belt. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out as well as we planned." [Boston Globe]

It's only the first game.

The Tigers open today at home against Kansas City.

The 24th Annual William Inge Theatre Festival gets underway in a little over two weeks (April 20-23) at the William Inge Center for the Arts at Independence Community College in Independence, Kansas.

This year's honoree is Tina Howe, author of Painting Churches, Museum, and The Art of Dining.

This will be my fourteenth year of attending the festival. It's my one chance each year to assume my secret identity as a theatre scholar and hang out with some truly amazing people in theatre. Over the years I've had breakfast with Neil Simon, sang camp songs with Pat Hingle and Shirley Knight, gossiped with Eileen Heckart, did a playreading with Polly Holiday, had Edward Albee pat my thigh, and became good friends with a lot of people who share my love of plays and playwriting.

If you're in the area -- Indpendence is 90 miles north of Tulsa, Oklahoma and about a three-hour drive from Kansas City -- tickets are still available on-line. If you can't make it, I'll be posting from there.

A new group has sprung up to oppose Bush and the Republican's plans to "reform" Social Security. ProtectYourCheck.org bills itself as "a non-profit advocacy organization established to oppose the White House's effort to dismantle Social Security, the most successful retirement and anti-poverty program in our nation's history. ProtectYourCheck.org will educate Americans on the financial health of Social Security, promote policies to strengthen Social Security and encourage citizens to speak out about this issue to ensure that Congress doesn't pass legislation that weakens the Social Security Trust Fund."

It's got some heavy hitters behind it, including Harold Ickes, former deputy chief of staff for Bill Clinton and founder of the Media Fund; Jim Jordan, the first campaign manager for the Kerry campaign, and Jim Margolis, a political advertising consultant.

Their mission is to "quickly raise $15 million to design, produce and place advertising to affect the legislative fight over Social Security reform." They're going to have to move quickly; the Bush-backers already have their "ticking clock" campaign running on cable.

Looking for some fish in a barrel to shoot? I got the following e-mail from a relative of mine who is a Republican and who is under the assumption that he is hilarious. (To be fair, he passed it along from someone else, and he was wise enough not to include the Faithful Correspondent in his mail-chain. He does not have a death wish, I guess.) I present it to you unedited (and therefore I disavow any of the sentiments therein) and invite any and all to come back with your best shots in the Speak! (comments) section. In fact, feel free to cut and paste it to your blog and come up with your own sharp retorts.

So you are a liberal. This is not the end of the world. Just as alcoholics, drug addicts and sexual predators are amenable to treatment, so are liberals. But, you have to begin with a . . .

TWELVE STEP PROGRAM:

Step 1 -- Admitting You're A Liberal

This is the first step for every liberal on the way to recovery. It is important to understand that you're not "progressive," "moderate," or "enlightened." You're a liberal, and you need to be honest with yourself about that fact.

Step 2 -- Pledge To Support Your Beliefs With Facts

Realize that truth is more important than moral superiority and is the only way to come over to reality. You must research beyond propaganda from the Sierra Club, Hilllary Clinton, and CNN to understand things as they really exist in the world. You can no longer argue based on "feelings" or emotion. You will actually need to back up your arguments with real information. This is a difficult step, because it means you cannot be lazy any more.

Step 3 -- Love America

This may be the most difficult step for those of you who are hippies and peaceniks. Admitting that the country you hate actually stands as a beacon to defend freedom throughout the world can make some of you physically ill. You might want to make a visit to a military cemetery to better understand that these men and women gave their lives so that you could spew hatred. Otherwise, you would currently be living in a police state that would never let you wear that nasty patchouli oil, let alone speak out against your government.

Step 4 -- Take A College Level Economics Class

A Socialist is defined as someone who has never taken an economics class. Most Socialists have a hard time balancing their checkbooks, let alone explaining the simple concept of supply-and-demand. It is time to flush your complete ignorance of basic economics down the toilet and understand how the world actually functions.

This concept will be very important for the next steps that involve communism, facts about corporations, and the inefficiencies of government.

Step 5 -- Say "No" To Communism And Socialism

While this concept is obvious to most of the free world, it is an important step in your recovery process. If you have difficulty with this step, spend a week living and working in Cuba.

Step 6 -- Corporations Are Not Evil

If you are reading this article on-line or in an email, it is thanks to corporations. If you get some kind of paycheck, you can thank corporations. If you work for a nonprofit or the government, you still have to thank corporations. The nonprofit sector and the government would not have any money to pay you without corporations. It is also important that you understand that making a profit does not equate to "greed" or exploitation. Capitalism has created the greatest society in our world's history. Even communist countries need corporations to survive, so enjoy a nice, hot cup of reality.

Step 7 -- The Government Is Inefficient

If you are one of those liberals who believe the government should tax us more in order to take care of society, you need to pay special attention to this step. You need to realize that government bureaucracy will waste most of your tax dollars, while the private sector will put your money to much better use. Even most Democrat politicians understand this to some degree, which is why Hillary's socialist healthcare proposal was voted down by a majority of both Democrats and Republicans. Go to your local Post Office or call the IRS to ask a tax question if you need a reminder about government inefficiency.

Step 8 -- The Earth Is Not Your "Mother" . . . and She's Not Dying

The time has now come to stop your donations to Greenpeace, The Sierra Club, and every other EnviroNazi organization to which you belong. Face the reality that the earth, society and our environment are better off today than ever in recorded history and that they are continuing to improve. I realize that many of you tree huggers will have a very difficult time letting go of the Douglas Fir on this one. I would suggest reading The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. Mr. Lomborg is a former member of Greenpeace and is currently a statistics professor at a university in Denmark. He set out to prove the world was in bad shape and ended up surprising himself by proving the exact opposite.

Step 9 -- Stop Smoking The Wacky Tobacco

Okay, some of you might need to enter another 12-Step program to complete this step. Marijuana is distorting your sense of reality, and you need to stop using it. Besides, you will save a fortune on snacks.

Step 10 -- Eat A Hamburger

If God did not intend for us to eat animals, he would not have made them out of meat. You can put your sprouts and tofu on the hamburger, but get some meat into you. You will look and feel better than you ever imagined. You can always remind yourself that Nazi propaganda hailed Adolf Hitler as a vegetarian to get you through this step.

Step 11 -- Stop Re-writing Political History

It is now time to admit that Bill Clinton is a lying-cheating-sexist-racist-rapist jackass, Hillary Clinton is one of the worst role models for women in this country, Al Gore really did lose the 2000 election by every vote tabulation which was attempted, Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War and did not create the homeless problem, and Jimmy Carter is a nice man but has one of the worst presidential records of anyone in history.

Step 12 -- Be A Missionary

Once you have completed the previous steps to help you confront your liberalism, it is time for you to share this awakening with others who are not as fortunate. Go out amongst your liberal brethren and spread the good word of your freedom from the chains of ignorance that once bound you.

Congratulations . . . and welcome to reality.

I thought about posting my relative's e-mail address so you could respond directly, but then again, that's something only a Freeper would do.

Have fun!

How to cure road rage?

TALLAHASSEE - Cruising in the fast lane may become a thing of the past for most Florida drivers, under a bill that's on the fast track for approval by the state Legislature.

Calling it the Road Rage Reduction Act, legislators want to make it illegal to drive in the left lanes of highways throughout the state. Violations would be considered noncriminal traffic infractions and punishable by fines and four points on the driver's license.

The House and Senate bills would require drivers to use the right-hand lanes of all four-lane highways at all times, unless they meet certain exceptions, among them:

EXCEPTIONS

• When passing another vehicle;

• When no vehicle is directly behind them;

• When congestion makes driving on the right impractical or highway design makes it necessary to drive on the left when preparing to exit;

• When there are obstructions or hazards on the right.

The list goes on.

Supporters of the legislation say that clearing out left lanes and designating them as passing-only should ease tensions and episodes of road rage among drivers. Some say it could facilitate the flow of traffic in some areas and even make it easier to see speeders.

"Occupying the left lane is a source of aggressive driving," said Joseph Mosca, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper in Miami-Dade County.

The rule would partially apply to drivers traveling on limited access roadways that have two or more lanes for each direction. Drivers in the left-most lanes of those roads would only be required to yield to any vehicle traveling at a higher speed by moving to the nearest lane to the right at "the first practicable and safe opportunity."

There is a difference between aggressive driving and what is commonly referred to as road rage, FHP spokesman Ernesto Duarte said.

Duarte said that it takes two to tango when it comes to road rage. He said that the driver weaving in and out of lanes and "flicking people off" is not exhibiting road rage. That person is simply an aggressive driver. Road rage happens when two or more such drivers are aggressive with each other.

One example, Duarte said, is when a car traveling in the left lane approaches another car from behind, and the driver in the rear flashes his or her lights in an attempt to get the car in front to move out of the way. The situation escalates to road rage when the driver in front starts slamming on the brakes instead of pulling over to the right lane and letting the other car pass.

Now if they would only do something about the little old ladies in the twenty-year-old Corollas who tootle down US 1 at 25 mph in the left lane with their right turn signal on and the seatbelt dangling out the door making sparks.

Remember the war in Iraq?

Insurgents assailed Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on Saturday, launching waves of car bombs, rockets and gunfire in an hours-long onslaught that wounded 18 American GIs and 12 detainees, the U.S. military said.

The attackers apparently did not penetrate the prison grounds, although some inmates were reported to have been seriously wounded. The second of two car bombs exploded as troops were trying to evacuate the injured after the first, the Reuters news agency said.

Meanwhile, the possibility of defusing Iraq's Sunni Muslim-led insurgency by drawing the Sunni minority into the country's government and military appeared more remote.

The Association of Muslim Scholars, the most prominent of dozens of groups speaking for disaffected Sunnis, distanced itself Saturday from an edict by 64 Sunni clerics and scholars the previous day that had encouraged Sunnis to join Iraq's new security forces.

In another setback for the government, efforts stalled to select a Sunni who would be widely accepted as parliament speaker.

The U.S. military said between 40 and 60 insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. U.S. forces still maintain a base and a detainee center at the sprawling complex, which became the focus of a U.S. military abuse scandal last year when photos emerged of American troops taunting naked, contorted Iraqi detainees.

So now we're into our third year of the cakewalk.

But all is not lost. Hope springs eternal, and memories can be sweet.

NEW YORK -- Tonight they return to the place where the magic unfolded on those cold October nights a little more than five months ago. The last baseball game at Yankee Stadium was played Oct. 20, 2004, which is now Boston baseball's Bastille Day, a New England holiday commemorating the liberation of the suffering souls of Red Sox Nation.

Tonight the world champion Red Sox play the Yankees again (weather permitting) and Sox fans who dare venture into the Bronx can cite the parade-day words of captain catcher Jason Varitek, who told them they can forever hold their heads high in future visits to The House That Ruth Built.

We witnessed the ultimate demonstration of the alternate universe last autumn when it was the Yankees who folded and the Red Sox who broke the hearts and spirit of the arrogant New York fans. There will be no chants of "1918" tonight and no Yankee fans holding signs with the ghostly image of the great Bambino.

As if this uber-rivalry needed any more hype, the Red Sox will send the 21st century Babe to the mound in the fat form of 41-year-old David Wells, a collector of Ruth memorabilia and a man who owns one of the best winning percentages in the storied history of the Yankee franchise. The portly portsider will wear the Babe's No. 3 on his Boston jersey, channeling the Big Fella who pitched against New York the last time the Red Sox were defending world champs back in 1919....

That's for you, Beantown Girl.

I love technology sometimes. The computer and DVD/VCR automatically reset their internal clocks. The cable box, however, is another matter. Oh, Comcast...

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:13 AM  

In October 1978 I was just starting my job at a small-town radio station in northern Michigan when Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected pope. The Associated Press teletype dinged out the BULLETIN bell warning, and I went on the air with the station's first "We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin...." I was very excited to be the first station in the area to get the news on the air, but then again, my competition was the public radio station that didn't do news and an automated AM station in Manistee that played country music. I was also proud of my ability to pronouce his Polish name correctly, but then I grew up near Toledo where names like that are fairly common.

I knew that the election of this then-young cardinal was a monummental event and that his papacy would have an impact on the world far beyond the church over which he presided. This was still the time of the Cold War, but this man's outspoken manner and his stern opposition to communism and totalitarianism -- at least in the secular world -- played a major role in setting in motion the changes we've seen in the world since 1978. The Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981 took its cue and courage from his leadership, and that was the first sign of the chink in the Iron Curtain. Many credit Ronald Reagan for ending the Cold War and bringing down the end of the Soviet Union, but it was the pope who actually had a hand in it and placed the prestige of his office and his institution on the line for doing so. It was an enormous risk; if the Russians had reacted to the uprisings in eastern Europe as they had in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, the pope and the Roman Catholic church would have had to take the blame for the bloodshed. But this man who had faced both Nazism and communism had some steel in him, forged by his faith and enhanced by his remarkable skills as a politician, and he won without a shot being fired. Josef Stalin once sneered at the possibility that his purges in Russia would anger the Vatican, replying, "How many divisions does the pope have?" Brezhnev, Jaruzelski, Coucescu, and Gorbachev found out the answer, much to their dismay...or, in Gorbachev's case, relief.

Not being raised in the Roman Catholic church, I really don't remember much about the popes of my lifetime, except I remember quite well the smiling cherubic visage of John XXIII, and I remember the coverage of his death in June 1963 and the election of his successor, Paul VI. I remember Paul traveled a lot, including a trip to America. He did a mass at Yankee Stadium and spoke at the United Nations. He carried out the wishes of his predecessor and "Vatican II" in modernizing the church -- performing the liturgy in the local language, laying off a lot of saints, and relaxing the rules about meat on Fridays. I knew this because I grew up down the street from a Catholic church and I had a friends who were Catholic. It wasn't until my teens when I began to pay attention to religion and my connection with spirituality that the teachings of the Roman Catholic church such as their views on homosexuality and reproductive rights, two issues I care about, became important to me. I felt that a church, regardless of how many followers it had, had no business in attempting to influence the political affairs of other nations, regardless of what their intentions were. In the last two thousand years more harm has been done in the name of religion -- all religions -- than any other cause in human history. The well-meaning and even helpful interference by a religious entity carries with it more portents of danger simply by the implication that they are acting under the authority of a supernatural being and that they must answer to this higher power, not to the people whose lives they are affecting. I resent the condemnation of an entire segment of humanity because of their sexual orientation...and that includes the exclusion of women from the Roman Catholic clergy, and I am deeply offended by the attempt of a religion -- any religion -- to dictate moral teachings and legislation to a nation no matter how many adherents there are in the population. But Pope Paul VI was not a very outspoken man, nor did he have the stage presence of a politician, and whenever something was done in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, be it a stand on the war in Vietnam or contraception, it was the Church as an institution that spoke out, not the skinny little guy in glasses who sort of reminded me of my school bus driver when I was in Grade 8. When he died in August 1978, I remember it only because a Catholic friend moaned that now he was going to have to spend the next week in church.

In the tumult that followed his death, the election of Pope John Paul I and his sudden death a month later (I remember chuckling over a National Lampoon issue on the election of Pope John Paul John Paul who didn't even live long enough to get his vestments on) and the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, there were many predicitons about how the Roman Catholic Church was going through some radical changes and the papacy of this outsider would bring about tremendous changes -- the same things they say whenever there's any kind of transition in a large institution. Little did they realize, though.

To this several-steps-removed observer (a Quaker with powerful distrust of monolithic institutions governed by dogma literally carved in stone), the papacy of John Paul II will be viewed as the period in which his church and its institutions turned against the course of evolution -- going from a constitutional monarchy where the pope was a figurehead back to the autocratic example of a ruler like an emperor in the model of the 18th century. It was no longer just the Church that set the course, it was the Pope himself and doing so in a way that raised his voice alone above the walls of the Vatican. It is more than just slightly ironic that the man who set in motion the demolition of the dictatorships of eastern European communism did so while he was solidifying his power as the sole voice of authority for his political regime. It has caused me no little concern to see this dictatorship grow, no matter how benign or well-meaning its intent. Hearing the pope as recently as last February condemn gay marriage as the "ideology of evil" doesn't bode well for the prospects of gays and lesbians in their quest to be treated as equals in any society, regardless of its religious beliefs or the lack of them, because the pope speaks not just for himself and the Roman Catholic church to his followers; he speaks to senates and parliaments and the people in them who believe that he speaks as the representative of God on earth. Talk about an influential lobbyist. K Street should be so lucky.

I have no doubt whatsoever that John Paul II was a devout and decent man who served his church and his vision of the betterment of mankind with every good intention right up to the time he died. He was charming and charismatic and he stuck it to dictators and presidents alike. While I disagree vehemently with many of his church's teachings and dogma, I thought of him as a genuine and honest man without an ounce of phoniness in him -- something you cannot say about many political leaders, and one superb example of his polar opposite comes to mind. (He's also the only pope I've seen in person. Long story short: in 1986 Allen and I went to Italy to visit a friend, and since Allen was raised Catholic, we went to Rome and attended one of the weekly general audience with the pope, along with apparently most of the nuns from Bulgaria. It was amazing -- they had a circus performance right there for him.) The shoes of the fisherman will be hard to fill this time. I hold Karol Wojtyla in the Light, and I do also for the men who will choose his successor with the hopes that perhaps he will lead his church -- along with its considerable political influence -- into at least the 20th Century.

I placed second in my class (Daily Driver 1994-1998) at the fifth annual South Florida Mustang & Ford Roundup today. That's pretty good for the first time I've ever had a car of my own in a show.

Mustang Bobby's 1995 Mustang GT

There were also some really impressive cars there, including about twenty first-generation (1964-1/2 - 1973) Mustangs; one of them -- a red 1965 convertible with a white interior -- is a dead ringer for the Mustang that plays a part in Bobby Cramer. The weather was iffy; we got a good rain around 11:30, but it was over soon and a cold front came through, keeping it nice and cool on the parking lot. All in all it was a lot of fun...and since I got shut out in the Koufax Awards, this was a nice consolation.

Cal Thomas has a column in the Miami Herald today, moaning again about the liberals on college campuses.

According to a study by professors at Smith College, George Mason University and the University of Toronto (they surveyed 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools), 72 percent of professors at American universities labeled themselves liberal, while just 15 percent said they are conservative; 50 percent of faculty members identified themselves as Democrats and only 11 percent Republicans.

Political science professors Robert Lichter of George Mason University, Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto and Stanley Rothman of Smith College also found that 51 percent of those surveyed said they rarely or never attend church or synagogue.

These liberal leanings translate into liberal political beliefs. 84 percent of those surveyed are strongly or somewhat in favor of abortion rights, 67 percent think homosexuality is acceptable, 88 percent want more environmental protection ''even if it raises prices or costs jobs'' and 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, which puts the professors left of the Democratic Party.

Well, I couldn't pass up the chance to fire back, so I clicked on the link on his column and dropped him an e-mail:

I gather from your column in today's Miami Herald that you're bothered by the fact that people with liberal leanings teach in colleges and universities and that they are swaying the minds of college students who might otherwise harbor conservative beliefs. Are you therefore saying that young conservative adults -- people old enough to vote -- are too stupid or too weak-willed to make up their own mind and that being exposed to a teacher with a different point of view will irreparably harm them? That sounds to me as if you have very little faith in your flock. You also have obviously not spent a lot of time on college campuses. Students aren't just between the ages of 18 and 21; many are older and come from a variety of backgrounds.

I also wonder if the various polls you cite polled EVERY professor on campus. For instance, did they survey the political leanings of professors in business, physical education, law, medicine, engineering, criminal justice, or did they just hit the departments where they thought they'd find liberals, like English or Sociology. (By the way, being an English major doesn't guarantee you a job - going to business school raises the odds a lot.)

Have you stopped to consider why there's this alleged imbalance in the first place? Might it have something to do with the fact that teaching is not a high-paying profession, which is anathema to conservatives. You can't be a real success as a conservative, apparently, if all you do is give back to the community and make a pittance at it.

Finally, it's fine to get worked up about how many professors vote for Democrats... you need something to rail against, I suppose. But how many of the major institutions of American life are run by conservatives? Wall Street, the Pentagon, most of the major corporations; all of those are going to have a much more direct impact on daily life than some college professor waxing poetic about the war in Iraq. Yet that doesn't bother me.

Tell you what, though...if you'll let the liberals take over the Pentagon, we liberals will let you take over the Yale School of Drama.

Yeah, I've made this argument before and you, Dear Reader, are well aware of that fact that this is one of my pet peeves. But I couldn't resist. Cal Thomas is such an easy target.

You knew this was coming.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), under fire from Democrats for what they consider threatening remarks about federal judges, plans to ask the Judiciary Committee to undertake a broad review of the courts' handing of the Terri Schiavo case, his office said yesterday.

DeLay's office did not specify exactly what the majority leader wants the committee to do. The Constitution gives Congress the power to set the areas of authority for federal courts, but it was unclear what could be done by the committee in response to the Schiavo case, in particular.

This wouldn't have anything at all to do with the fact that Mr. DeLay is on the verge of being indicted in Texas, would it? Nah, just a coincidence.

This year's hurricane forecast is out. The bad news is that the predicition is for an active season. The good news is that the chances of Florida getting four hits like we did last year are "highly unlikely."

The long-term average is about 10 tropical storms that develop into six hurricanes, two of them with intense winds above 110 mph. Last year, the tropics produced 15 named storms that grew into nine hurricanes, six of them intense.

Even though all we got down here was heavy rain and some gusty wind, we don't need to go through it again, thanks.

Speaking of rain, the weather has been great all week, and the forecast for Sunday is also clear and sunny. But I have a car show today, so guess what the forecast is calling for:

Windy with scattered thunderstorms. High 82F. Winds SW at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 50%.

Argh.

Juan Cole predicts that Terri Schiavo's ordeal could be the tipping point for the Religious Reich.

Both the reelection of George Bush and the Schiavo travesty have heightened the sense that the religious right in the United States is all-powerful. Reading the press, you get the impression that almost all Americans are devout Christians, people who believe in a literal heaven and hell and spend their idle moments devouring the "Left Behind" novels about the end of the world. This isn't true -- and it's getting less true all the time. While evangelical Christians are a significant political force, they are probably only a fifth of the country, and not all of them are politically conservative: Only 14 percent of voters in an exit poll for the presidential elections in 2000 characterized themselves as part of the "Christian right." In fact, polls show that the United States is becoming less religious. Only about 60 percent of Americans say religion is important in their lives. The United States is still a predominantly Christian country, but it is no longer an overwhelmingly Christian one. And more and more Americans are either non-religious, unchurched or subscribe to non-Christian religions.

The public relations fiasco that attended the Republican Party's cynical attempt to play the religion card in the tragic case of the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo suggests that the religious right has jumped the shark.

Read the rest here (from Salon.com).

I have a guest-poster today:

When I was a young boy, playing with my G. Gordon Liddy action figure, I dreamed of a wonderful world where all of the people in this country would realize that the only thing keeping us from achieving a perfect life was the interference of well-meaning but misguided people.

All it would take, I reasoned, would be for these people to realize that our great nation's true strength lies in strength. All it takes is muscles.

Not just big brawny bulging biceps, strapping pectorals, pyramidic deltoids, humongous quads. It's more than physical strength. There are other muscles, including the mind. Moreover, in transcendence, it is the mind that controls the muscles that makes our nation great. That, I reasoned, is what our country needed. And it would show those well-meaning but misguided people that if they had muscles they would see the error of their ways.

The well-meaning but misquided people I speak of are, of course, the Liberals. All they need is to work hard, sweat, build their strength up, strain against the tight bonds of the cloth of Liberalism that confines them and keeps them thinking that only the government can do the heavy lifting.

To prove this, I traveled into the suburbs past babbling brooks and by the farms and fields of our nation, into the land beyond the beltway; to, for lack of a better term, Paradise. I saw men working in the fields, their brute strength tilling the soil of our nation. They are not Liberals.

I saw big men hauling steel to build our skyscrapers, their tight jeans encasing their hard thighs like sausages as they heaved the heavy girders. They are not Liberals.

I saw energetic young men, happily married muscular fathers in tank tops playing with their tow-headed tots or tossing a football to their well-built teenaged son, laughing easily as they taught them the ways of being a man. They are not Liberals.

Nothing is handed to them. The lone policeman on the beat -- yes, technically he works for the government -- but this fine example of manhood in a blue uniform doesn't ask for a handout from the government. He protects and serves because he has the strength to do it. The strength no Liberal could have. The strength of knwoing he is Right.

Conservatives believe in strength. Some believe in strength through joy and that work will make you free. Strength forges a bond with men -- and women -- that the Liberals decry as bullying. But that's not so.

I know about bullying. When I was a radiant boy clutching a brown paper bag that contained a piece of sacred turf harvested from Shea Stadium where the New York Mets had recently won the world championship of baseball, I got an atomic wedgie from some Yankee fans who were undoubtedly Liberals -- it took four of them to do it.

And I vowed that from that day on I would not let Liberals take away my joy. I would become stronger -- if not with muscles, then perhaps with something else, like a twice-weekly column in a newspaper where I could show the Liberals that being a conservative made me stronger than them, and, moreover, richer and morally better.

A conservative, yes, has the strength to give any other person an atomic wedgie, or a melvin, or even a swirlie. But in knowing we can, we do not. We save it for showing the world that we can. And that makes them afraid.

It takes muscles to run the world and save it from itself. The Conservatives have them; George W. Bush stands atop the posing platform, his body oiled down, his skin-tight Speedo damp with sweat. The Liberals can't match that, and they hate us for it.

And their petty jealousy and envy is all that's keeping us from a perfect life of rock-hard strength and the courage of our convictions.

I have the solution that the Liberals would love: get the government to buy every Liberal a Bowflex.

This guy's good. He could get a gig as a blogger.

April Fools Day, eh? Well, let's see what foolishness -- or not -- The Liberal Coalition is covering this week.

All Facts and Opinions celebrates a small step towards equality in Maryland.

archy finds more gun nutsery.

Bark Bark Woof Woof looks at life upon the wicked stage.

blogAmY sees the next wave of intolerance.

bloggg has a fun personality test. (Oh, hey...scroll down to her previous posting. Yo ho ho!)

Chris reviews Countdown to Infinite Crisis.

Andante reads That Book.

Corrente gets ready for the summer tour.

Dohiyi Mir hits The Hammer.

Echidne gets back to fundamentals.

edwardpig on the crisis of malnutrition in Iraq.

The Gamer's Nook remembers the Dead of '73.

Happy Furry details the level of foolery.

iddybud profiles Jon Stewart.

Kick the Leftist is getting ready to exit the stage.

Make Me a Commentator reads Pat Sajak's blog. No, really...he has one.

Musing's musings on phundamentalist pharmacists.

Pen-Elayne wraps up Estrogen Month.

Respectful of Otters cites a great treatise on "life" and "freedom."

Rick's Cafe on the WMD report.

Rook's Rant on James Wolcott.

rubber hose on just what the Fourteenth Amendment meant.

Scrutiny Hooligans on the neo-cons planning ahead.

Sooner Thought on owing your life.

Speedkill on effective protest.

Steve Gilliard goes after Wonkette.

T. Rex lists more reasons why we shouldn't have gone to Iraq.

First Draft serves pie.

I hope everything's all right over at The Fulcrum.

The Invisible Library ponders civilization.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat offers some doggerel for the day.

Trish Wilson tells a charming story of being in control.

Wanda makes her wishes clear.

In Search of Telford has a series of architectural quizzes.

So, what's your best April Fools story?