Politics
stcynic | January 23, 2005Rusty Lopez has reacted to my post about Bush backing away from the Federal Marriage Amendment with this strangely myopic post. He says:
Speaking of venturing out of the "ghetto," Ed Brayton, over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, seems to think that because President Bush is now not pushing for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, that he has somehow taken conservative Christians for a ride. Has the fact that constitutional amendments are extremely costly and time consuming evaded Ed's notice? If one can achieve a similar goal, without the expense involved in amending the…
stcynic | January 20, 2005Another part of Bush's interview with the Washington Post the other day that was fascinating was this exchange on the Federal Marriage Amendment:
The Post: Do you plan to expend any political capital to aggressively lobby senators for a gay marriage amendment?
THE PRESIDENT: You know, I think that the situation in the last session -- well, first of all, I do believe it's necessary; many in the Senate didn't, because they believe DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act] will -- is in place, but -- they know DOMA is in place, and they're waiting to see whether or not DOMA will withstand a…
stcynic | January 9, 2005Amy Sullivan has this delightful little passage in an article about Robert Novak, the reporter/commentator who passed on information from "senior administration officials" about the identity of Valerie Plame, ending her CIA career, damaging years of undercover work on WMD programs and putting the lives of Plame, her family, and her foreign sources at risk:
Robert Novak was in high dudgeon. He and his colleagues on CNN's "The Capital Gang" were squabbling over whether CBS should have run a story on President George W. Bush's National Guard service, a story which relied on documents whose…
stcynic | January 6, 2005Like Jon Rowe, Timothy Sandefur has been on quite a roll lately with great writing. Today he has a three-part post on the differences between libertarian thinking (or "classical liberalism") and conservative thinking: part one, part two and part three. Go thither (thanks, Wesley) and read.
stcynic | January 5, 2005Senator Harry Reid, the incoming Senator minority leader, caught a lot of flak for saying that Clarence Thomas' legal opinions are poorly written and that he was "an embarrassment to the court." Some of that flak came from me, in a post where I pointed out that while I am on the opposite side of most issues with Justice Thomas, Reid's claim was unjustifed and beneath the dignity of a Senate leader. Alas, Reid is not quite done making himself look like an ass. James Taranto, writing in the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web, quotes Reid's response when asked on CNN to provide an example of…
tlambert | January 2, 2005 Tim Blair posted this accusation that the UN was lying about the tsunami relief effort:
Via Diplomad, some comments from the UN's Jan Egeland:
In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. <...> Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an "air-freight handling centre" in Aceh.
Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers - 90 of them - which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food,…
stcynic | December 23, 2004A lot of attention lately has been paid to Lakoff, a fairly obscure Berkeley linguistics professor, for a book he wrote suggesting that Democrats learn to use language to frame the debate as well as the Republicans have. Since I don't have much preference for either of those parties, I'm not really interested in the electoral results of it, but I do think that Lakoff is dead on in his analysis of how well the right has used language. When I've said in the past that the Republicans simply play the game better than the Democrats, this is largely what I'm referring to.
What the right has…
stcynic | December 15, 2004For months I've been blasting Donald Rumsfeld and his astonishing incompetence as Secretary of Defense, and Bush for putting him in a position of total control over the occupation of Iraq and then letting him screw it up so monumentally. It's nice to see at least a few Bush supporters coming around to see what a disaster this guy has been. Bill Kristol, one of the smartest guys on the right, lashed out at Rumsfeld in the Washington Post this morning:
Contrast the magnificent performance of our soldiers with the arrogant buck-passing of Rumsfeld...
At least the topic of those conversations…
stcynic | December 8, 2004Good ol' Don Rumsfeld and his charming wit:
Hundreds of troops applauded a comrade who complained to Rumsfeld that U.S. forces were being forced to dig up scrap metal to protect their vehicles in Iraq because of a shortage of armored ones.
"Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles? And why don't we have those resources readily available to us?" the soldier asked.
Rumsfeld asked the soldier to repeat the question.
The soldier said, "A lot of us are getting ready to move north (into Iraq)…
stcynic | December 6, 2004In the last election, Michigan voters, I am embarrassed to say, approved an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage. Here is the text of that amendment in its entirety:
Article 1, Section 25: To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose.
Prior to the election, backers of the amendment swore up and down that it only dealt with who could get married, not with partnership benefits offered…
stcynic | December 3, 2004Steve Sanders has a post up about the decision by NBC and CBS not to run an advertisement paid for by the United Church of Christ, an ad that bore the message "Jesus didn't turn people away." Watching the excuses offered by the networks on this one is just surreal. They'll show every piece of crap reality show you can think of. They'll show on talk show after another featuring a never ending line of people who slept with their grandmothers while their uncle videotaped it. They'll show anything they can legally get away with that will get the attention of people to condemn it as long as it…
stcynic | November 29, 2004I've said several times lately that the social conservatives, who are playing up the alleged "moral mandate" from the Presidential election, may well overplay their hand and end up getting smacked down by the electorate later for it. Here's a good example of why I think that. The religious right has tried to move heaven and earth to keep Arlen Specter from becoming chair of the Judiciary Committee, mobilizing a huge call-in to Senate offices and an enormous and coordinated campaign of outright lying about Specter's record and his statements. They've done so for one reason - because Specter is…
stcynic | November 27, 2004For those of us who have been wondering whether Bush is really on the so-con bandwagon or was just pretending to be in order to court their votes in the last election, here is one bit of evidence for the first conclusion:
President Bush's re-election insures that more federal money will flow to abstinence education that precludes discussion of birth control, even as the administration awaits evidence that the approach gets kids to refrain from sex.
Congress last weekend included more than $131 million for abstinence programs in a $388 billion spending bill, an increase of $30 million but…
stcynic | November 26, 2004Steve Sanders has an interesting post about a recent poll on many of the items on the social conservative agenda. I won't go through all of the numbers he lists, but I agree firmly with his conclusion as it pertains to the election results and the so-cons misreading of them:
The Republican base was energized by its religious righteousness and muscle, its pathological obsession with gay people, and its authoritarian disdain for judges willing to enforce the Constitution. But as anyone who took freshman political science learned, political bases are always more extreme, doctrinaire, and…
stcynic | November 24, 2004I highly recommend Julian Sanchez' essay about the Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was just passed by Congress, a $388 billion spending bill packed full of pork spending and worse. The bill is 3200 pages long and not a single person who voted for it likely knows what is in even half of those pages. Buried on page 1,112 was a provision that gave appropriations chairmen or their agents the authority to examine the tax returns of any American they chose. How did that get in there? Well here's the punchline - nobody knows.
As Sanchez points out, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he has no…
stcynic | November 21, 2004From Noam Chomsky's blog:
The outcome was a disappointment, but there have been disappointments before. Take 1984, when essentially the same gang of thugs--a little less tilted to the extreme reactionary statist side--won by a 2-1 margin, with about the same percentage of the electoral vote as today.
About the same percentage of the electoral vote as today? In 1984, the electoral count was 525-13, for crying out loud, with Mondale managing only to win his own state of Minnesota. 2004 was one of the closest elections in history, 1984 was one of the largest (I believe the largest) victories…
stcynic | November 17, 2004It looks like, as predicted, the SoCons overplayed their hand and Arlen Specter is going to succeed Orrin Hatch as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman. Picking up the endorsement of Hatch almost certainly assures him of winning the caucus vote for that chairmanship. I'd call that the victory of sanity over dishonesty. The campaign of distortion that the religious right through at Specter will end up backfiring on them in the end, I predict.
stcynic | November 14, 2004From Agape Press:
A Virginia pro-family advocate says the people who helped re-elect President Bush don't support homosexual relationships -- the administration apparently does. Joe Glover, president of the Family Policy Network, has worked tirelessly for family values, including the fight against legalized homosexual "marriage." He says it was conservative Christians who put the president back in office and who held to the belief that the president shared their views. But Glover says the day after the election, that all seemed to go out the window. "The day after George Bush was elected…
stcynic | November 12, 2004Not content with trying to destroy all moderate voices within the Republican party, religious right groups have now moved on to eating their own for the crime of not being fully on board with their purge for purity. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette is reporting that not only are they after Specter, they're also going after Rick Santorum, one of their staunchest political allies and the junior senator from the same state, because he's not joining in their political witch hunt.
The groups noted that they already were upset with Santorum, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, for supporting Specter…
stcynic | November 11, 2004Finally, a voice of sanity in the Republican Party and of all people, it's Hugh Hewitt. In the Weekly Standard, he issues a warning to his fellow Republicans:
Fast forward four years. The Democrats have convened in late summer in Cleveland to nominate former Virginia governor Mark Warner and Senator Barack Obama. It is the third night of the convention, and the Democrats have chosen as their keynote speaker...Arlen Specter. Or Olympia Snowe. Or Chuck Hagel. Or some other GOP big who has grown disgusted with his or her inability to have any influence on Republican deliberations. So they have…