ACLU
stcynic | July 10, 2006STACLU seems to be taking on new contributors. Unfortunately, the new ones don't seem to be any brighter or capable of rational thought than the old ones. Witness this post by Oak Leaf, which begins with this breathtakingly stupid statement:
Today, the ACLU attacked the Department of Defense and by default all uniformed members of the military of using "abusive interrogation practices" on prisoners taken in the Global War on Terror
Grammatical difficulties aside (the phrase "attacked...of using" is a nonsense phrase), who other than a deluded ideologue would think that accusing the Pentagon…
stcynic | July 10, 2006Here's STACLU's latest exercise in irrationality, a post titled NY Times Paints US Military as a Bunch of Racists. The post is written by Ian from Expose the Left, but all he really does is expose his own lack of reasoning skills. He's up in arms about this article in the NY Times, which points out that the Pentagon is concerned about an increasing number of members of racist hate groups joining the military. He begins by claiming that Times is saying that, "Our troops are not only cold blooded murderers, rapists, or war-mongers, but now they're racists" and he then cites the following from…
stcynic | July 6, 2006Agape Press has an article about Rees Lloyd's testimony in favor of HR 2679. As usual, it's chock full of half-truths and falsehoods. And as usual, STACLU cites it approvingly without bothering to correct any of those falsehoods. For instance:
The ACLU received half a million dollars from the Alabama Ten Commandments case, and $950,000 in attorneys fees in a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts. Steve Crampton, chief counsel with the AFA Law Center and a constitutional law specialist, says the ACLU is able to collect these fees because of an obscure provision of the Civil Rights Act, which PERA is…
stcynic | June 28, 2006This just occured to me. I've made the argument that HR 2679, which would eliminate fee reimbursement for the winning side in establishment clause cases, is really just an attempt to hobble the competition because they can't beat them in court. In case after case, starting with mandatory bible reading and prayer in schools to teaching creationism, the religious right keeps losing in court and they don't like it. So since they can't win in court, they want to take away the ability of the opposition to get to court at all. I think we should call this the Tonya Harding Strategy - she couldn't…
stcynic | June 28, 2006The NY Sun has another article about the internal problems at the ACLU, this one focusing on Anthony Romero's tenure as executive director, which began shortly before 9/11. One of the main criticisms, and one I agree with completely, is that Romero had no background as a civil libertarian prior to taking over:
Mr. Romero, a Bronx native, is the first Hispanic and the first openly gay person to hold the executive director's job. However, he had little prior record of civil liberties activism and has been dogged by complaints that he is not sufficiently devoted to the ACLU's core principles.
"…
stcynic | June 23, 2006The latest temper tantrum from STACLU is over the ACLU filing an FOIA request to have the military's investigation of the Haditha incident made public. And believe me, you're gonna laugh at the, uh, "reasoning" they use. After quoting an article about the ACLU's request and how they hope that this will lead to a credible and comprehensive examination of the incident with real accountability, this is the STACLU response:
Ok then, should we also give the media, the UN, the EU, and Al Jazeera 7 days notice prior to troop movements? Should we be required to inform them how many troops from what…
stcynic | June 23, 2006I knew that being on the STACLU mailing list would be a source of much amusement and it didn't take long to pay off. The second email I got from them referred to a lawsuit filed by a STACLU "supporter" by the name of Bobby Wightman-Cervantes. He's filing a RICO suit against...well, practically everyone, including the ACLU (read the complaint here), alleging a vast conspiracy going all the way back to a Supreme Court decision in 1865. I've just started reading the complaint and it's already given me a good deal of mirth.
First of all, he's alleging a RICO conspiracy involving practically…
stcynic | June 22, 2006Our daily roundup of the absurdity at StopTheACLU starts with this post about the ACLU filing suit to stop government censorship of a book in school libraries.
While I cannot disagree with the Simon's anti-censorship position, I also cannot keep from enjoying the irony in light of their own internal censorship scandal. The Miami lawsuit comes just days after Jay commented on the ACLU censoring their directors from publicly disagreeing with national board members and staff...
If the ACLU really practiced what they preached, the directors would not only be criticizing board members, but they…
stcynic | June 20, 2006I know, I'm going at this guy like Marvin Hagler on a speed bag, but there's just so much nonsense to refute and so many contradictions to point out. Gribbit's latest demonstration of ignorance and cognitive dissonance is this post about education, wherein he actually claims that only the left lies - and this after getting caught lying just a few days ago. He begins with this tired old cliche, which he elevates to the status of "undisputed truth":
There is an old saying, Those who can - do, those who can't - teach. And this is a undisputed truth. Think of it. If an economics professor was any…
stcynic | June 19, 2006The New York Times had an article yesterday about the ACLU board literally debating over their own right to disagree with the rest of the board. They are debating over two proposed rules for the board. The first one would say that "a director may publicly disagree with an A.C.L.U. policy position, but may not criticize the A.C.L.U. board and staff." The second one would say that "Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement." I've written about this before…
stcynic | June 18, 2006After noticing that there are two different StopTheACLUs (.org and .com), with different names attached to them, I sent an email to the guy behind the .org domain, Nedd Kareiva, and asked if they were connected to the .com folks. He wrote back today and said that yes, they are connected, that .org is their main page and .com is their blog. But he also said that, just because I wrote to him, he was putting me on the StopTheACLU newsletter mailing list. Okay, works for me, it should be good for some amusement. I got the first one tonight, and it includes this stunning bit of cognitive…
stcynic | June 17, 2006Boy, just when you think this guy couldn't get any more pathetic, you see something like this. Yes, it was Gribbit who left the comment at Capt. Rational's blog wanting to beat him up tonight at 6 in Cleveland:
I'm off to Cleveland this afternoon to see if a couple of my favorite trolls have the intestinal fortitude to show up and take the ass beating they deserve. So if I don't post for a day or so, that's because I'm in jail.
When I was growing up, you refrained from using the liar moniker because to allow that to fly indiscriminately was grounds for a fat lip. Well there are a couple of…
stcynic | June 16, 2006I came across this interesting article in Christianity Today by Stephen Carter. Carter is a professor at the Yale Law School and a devout Christian who generally opposes the ACLU's establishment clause position. But he writes in Christianity Today against the unprincipled demonization of the ACLU by so many of his fellow Christians. He begins by pointing out that while he disagrees with the ACLU on many establishment clause issues, when it comes to free exercise issues they are generally correct:
I would like to say a word in defense of the American Civil Liberties Union. Christians--…
stcynic | June 16, 2006After posting my explanation of why Kender got the facts completely wrong in his post about the ACLU and the Faith Leaders for Peace meeting at the Federal Building in San Diego, I checked to make sure the trackback went through and it did. Now it's gone. Apparently, Kender doesn't even want people to know that someone has dared to correct his errors. What is it with this crowd and their allergic reaction to facts? They react like the wicked witch to a bucket of water - Get the truth away from me before I melt! It's quite fascinating from a psychological standpoint. I think this tendency…
stcynic | June 16, 2006It is perhaps pointless to give this guy so much attention, but this just keeps getting weirder and weirder. In addition to his various threats that he'll "get" people, Gribbit has now posted all of the web hosting information for the blog Thinking Meat. Why? I have no idea. Perhaps he's hoping one of his (few) readers is going to call up the hosting service and say....well, what? "This guy has been saying mean things about someone else, make him stop"? For a guy who claims to be so courageous, he sure is thin-skinned and whiny. If you dare to tell him he's wrong - and even worse, if you…
stcynic | June 15, 2006Okay, enough of being nice and civil in order to give Gribbit a chance to do the right thing and just admit he was wrong about the ACLU, the Equal Access Act and the Good News Club case. I think this post makes it crystal clear that this guy is just an irrational loony who wouldn't know the truth if it crawled up his pantleg, perched on his ass and yodeled the Ave Maria. Just compare these two statements found in the very same post. Comment #1:
Due to previous encounters with these specific two, they were automatically banned without my reading their stupidity. Why? Because they result to the…
stcynic | June 15, 2006This time from Kender, who stopped by yesterday to accuse me of "attacking" Gribbit, despite the fact that A) Gribbit was the one doing all the attacking, and B) I was merely correcting Gribbit's inaccurate statements. So I was perusing Kender's blog and found this post, in the long line of inaccurate "Where's the ACLU" arguments. " Where the Hell is the ACLU?????", he asks in the title (and yes, all those exclamation points are his - I don't think I'll ever understand the idea that excessive punctuation makes an argument better or more credible), and carries on this juvenile bombast in the…
stcynic | June 14, 2006Gribbit has responded to my questions. In his response, he admits that he was wrong about the order of the two examples, but misses the larger falsehood in his post. Here's his initial claim, again:
We have seen this already. The ACLU fought to gain equality for after school projects so that a gay tolerance group could meet on school grounds after the school day. The fight went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and they won. Shortly there after, the ACLU sent a letter to all Washington public high schools reminding them of this victory and demanded that they comply. However, when…
stcynic | June 14, 2006Nat Hentoff has an interesting column in USA Today about a big fight going on within the ACLU over whether to allow members of the board of directors who disagree with a board decision to publicly dissent from those positions. At issue is this policy:
"Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement. ... There is always a material prospect that public airing of the disagreement will affect the ACLU adversely in terms of public support and fundraising."
This…
stcynic | June 14, 2006Last night I noticed a post at StopTheACLU that included a claim that I highly doubt, but the comments were closed. It was written by Gribbit, so I found the same post on his blog and left two comments. This should actually be a really good test of the intellectual honesty of the StopTheACLU crowd, to see how this plays out. Here's the passage in his post that I am skeptical of:
We have seen this already. The ACLU fought to gain equality for after school projects so that a gay tolerance group could meet on school grounds after the school day. The fight went all the way to the United States…