aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Left of the Dial
HBO’s documentary on Air America, Left of the Dial, premiers at 8 eastern tonight. Wonkette’s Greg Beato 
asked the documentary’s co-director/co-producer, Patrick Farrelly, some questions:
GB: Were there any scenes that you missed that you wished you’d gotten?
Patrick: During Air America’s financial meltdown, there was a lot of stuff going on behind closed doors that we would have liked to have access to but we were shut out. Which is totally understandable, but at the same time, as documentary makers, we just want to see and shoot everything. But I think when people see the film they’ll get a great sense of what it was like to be on the inside.
GB: With 350 hours, it sounds like you guys could have actually made this into a reality series, akin to The Restaurant or something like that. Was there ever any talk of that?
Patrick: No. We think that Left of the Dial tells an important story. The founding of Air America Radio which now is a success story, is a really important media and political event. Air America has become an important addition to the political diversity of radio. At a time when the range of opinion you can see on television is getting narrower and narrower as television becomes more corporate, Air America is a really important development. I don’t think a reality show would do much justice to the story. Project Greenlight it certainly isn’t.
Drat! Koppel’s leaving
Ted Koppel, who during a quarter century as the host of “Nightline” on ABC provided a hard-news alternative to the monologues and light banter of Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman, will leave the network when his contract expires in early December, ABC News announced today.
Mr. Koppel said in an interview that he had informed ABC of his decision earlier this week and did not yet know what he might do next. It was not immediately clear how ABC intends to replace him or whether “Nightline” would continue after he leaves.
But there’s still hope for Koppel fans like me:
Asked what those jobs might be, Mr. Koppel said only: “There are some very interesting prospects out there, let’s put it that way.”
Even as my demographic is disparaged:
In recent months, ABC executives have asked the leaders of various divisions within the network - including news, entertainment and sports - to develop proposals for alternative programming for the “Nightline” slot (including an overhauled “Nightline") that might prove more popular than Mr. Koppel’s program and draw a younger audience. [B mine]
4/1 UPDATE: More today.
Pharmacists for life
A front page story in the Washington Post on Monday has set off a fair amount of talk about the “new debate” over “Pharmacists’ Rights” to not fill prescriptions.
I agree with the Carpetbagger:
I’m not trying to be intentionally obtuse here, but I’m not quite sure why this is even a legitimate controversy. Pharmacists, by virtue of their professional responsibilities, agree to fill prescriptions. Doctors prescribe a remedy, a patient seeks that remedy, a pharmacist provides the remedy. It’s a pretty simple system.
If a pharmacist realizes that he or she may be called on to perform tasks with which they’re uncomfortable, this person has a choice: do the job or find a different job in which these moral quandaries won’t be an issue. In other words, if you don’t like filling prescriptions, don’t become a pharmacist.
Legitimate or no, the threat is considerable as this map from Majikthise clearly illustrates. (Georgia alreay has a law allowing pharmacists to refuse to refill prescriptions.)
Read the rest of "Pharmacists for life" in the extended entry.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Beyond the Noise Machine
I thought David Brock’s The Republican Noise Machine did an excellent job of describing the apparatus that conservatives have built to steer American media and set the political agenda. Today, Bill Bradley visualizes that structure as a pyramid.
In response, Kevin Drum makes this hugely important point:
The Democratic response to all this has been simple: build foundations of our own, fashion a competing liberal way of framing issues, fight back on judges, create liberal talk shows, and remind lobbyists that Republicans won’t be in power forever. Which is all fine. But in a way, I think it misses the point.
What conservatives really did was to exploit new levers of power in ways that no one had thought of before. Their answers turned out to be foundations, language, judges, talk radio, and lobbyists, but there’s nothing sacred about those particular levers. So while creating our own foundations and talk shows is important, what’s more important is that we should be constantly searching for new and underappreciated levers of power and figuring out creative ways to exploit them. Howard Dean’s campaign did this in a minor way with its use of internet MeetUps, a new way of organizing grassroots support that took everyone by surprise.
Merely mimicking conservative strategies is a strategy for staying in second place forever. Closer, perhaps, but still in second place. What we need in addition is to stay relentlessly on the lookout for new ways of mobilizing public opinion that no one has thought of before. Suggestions, anyone?
He’s got 94 comments so far.
Closet cases are dangerous II
From Oliver Willis (with grateful thanks):
September, 2004, Douglas S. Smith, Jr defends the boy scouts against charges of intolerance towards gays:
Some intolerant elements in our society want to force scouting to abandon its values and to become fundamentally different. They want scouting to forego its constitutional rights, affirmed in 2000 by the Supreme Court in BSA v. Dale, and adopt fundamentally different values from the ones that helped shape the character of Mr. Collins and 106 million other young men over the past 94 years.
Today:A former top official of the Boy Scouts of America faces federal Internet child pornography charges and is expected to plead guilty Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Douglas S. Smith Jr. faces a single count of receiving and distributing child pornography—a charge resulting from a federal investigation conducted with German authorities.
Now let me be clear, nothing I’ve seen says the kiddie porn he was “receiving and distributing” was gay themed and I hope it was not. But I promise you that no out proud gay “top official of the Boy Scouts of America” would be involved in this kind of crap!
Grokster coverage
Ads to watch
The Carpetbagger Report points to a couple new ads. One, from the Campaign for America’s Future:
“Tom DeLay: He’d like to wash his hands of corruption,” the announcer says before recounting charges against the majority leader. “Tom DeLay can’t wash his hands of corruption,” the ad concludes. “But Congress can certainly wash its hands of Tom DeLay.”
And the other, Maybe the kids will take us in, from True Majority:
Female voice: This is terrible Frank. When President Bush and his Wall Street pals privatized Social Security, they never told us we could actually lose our money.
Male voice: Please don’t cry, Honey. But that’s the stock market for you, it goes up, but now, that we need the money, it’s down.
...
Female voice: Frank, what are we going to do?
Male voice: Maybe the kids will take us in.
The terrorist threat is from the left?
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not list right-wing domestic terrorists and terrorist groups on a document that appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation’s security.
According to the list - part of a draft planning document obtained by CQ Homeland Security - between now and 2011 DHS expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups.
It also lists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. Recent attacks on cars, businesses and property in Virginia, Oregon and California have been attributed to ELF.
DHS did not respond to repeated requests for comment or confirmation of the document’s authenticity.
Here’s a reality check for the Department of Homeland Security: After the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, through Jan. 1, 2000, there were over 40 serious cases of domestic terrorism—some of it realized, some of it thwarted—committed by right-wing extremists.
These were not petty or mere property crimes. They included the bombing of the Atlanta Olympics and abortion clinics by Eric Rudolph; a plan to attack a gathering of military families in the Midwest; and a plot to blow up a California propane facility. In every instance, the planned or perpetrated act involved serious violence in which potentially many people could be killed or injured…
Does this administration’s heavy rightward political tilt have any role in its failure to recognize right-wing extremists as the serious security threat that they objectively are?
The conservative case for gay marriage
I’m engaged in a wonderful dialogue with a conservative colleague on campus. It began when he, a professor of political science, posited post election that a new moral majority was rising up. I go back and forth on that, sometimes I buy it other times I don’t.
He’s just back from Europe and has sent me a bunch of articles on the gay marriage issue there, including this from CBS:
Three years after Amsterdam’s mayor officiated at the Netherlands’ first gay wedding, the gay marriage rate is falling, the first divorces are being registered and the issue has disappeared from the political agenda.
While the United States is engaged in debate on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Canadians are discussing a federal law to legalize it and many European countries are adopting civil unions for gay couples.
But in the Netherlands, nobody talks about the issue anymore.
My colleague’s a conservative Catholic. I’ve never asked what his views are on gay marriage. What I appreciate is the dialogue. I try to avoid strident, inflammatory rhetoric here (where I live and on this blog), even as I take clearly liberal positions.
I could consider myself a moderate in the current climate. But I think it’s important that those of us not at the edges stake our claim to be liberal or conservative; not let the extremes define us away and turn liberal and conservative into something they need not be.
I appreciate my conservative readers (Basil, where are you?) and try to read views other than my own, to put myself in the other side’s shoes. At the very least, appreciate that thoughtful people can come to different conclusions.
This post has lost its focus! Back to the topic! I’ll end with this classic I always love to point to, the conservative case for gay marriage.
Mary cashes in (again)
John Aravosis at AMERICAblog on Mary Cheney:
Well that was quick. Six months ago she was an innocent private wallflower, now she’s hawking her name for half a million bucks.
Gee, mainstream media, didn’t we tell you so? Didn’t we inform you that in 2002 Mary was selling photo ops at gay Republican fundraisers for $500 a pop (i.e., pay Mary 500 bucks and she’ll let you snap a photo with her)? But no, the MSM fell for the “Mary is a private citizen, how DARE you ask any questions about her?” line.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Teaching in the age of belief
Last night on the Newshour they had a segment on creation conflict in schools. The video and the transcript are available on the web, very well done and worth watching. But what I carried with me today were these student comments:
STUDENT: I believe that God created the Earth and put life on this Earth. I don’t really believe in the whole evolution theory…
STUDENT: I believe that God also made us. I just think it’s a lot easier to believe then the big bang theory, or any of the other theories about apes.
STUDENT: I believe God molded man from the dust and he breathed life into it, and I believe we came out with two legs and thumbs and the thought capacity better then any other animal.
I thought that what we are supposed to be doing is teaching students, not catering to their beliefs.
I went to Catholic schools through high school. I learned religion and I learned science. Even today this doesn’t seem to be an issue in Catholic schools. My guess is they’ve dealt with this eons ago, in a different time, and have come down on the side of education.
It makes me wonder again, is this undermining of science an unintended consequence of the separation of church and state?
At a party recently I had a conversation with a Georgia Military College biology teacher. A Brit who’s the son-in-law of the Commandant, he spoke of the problems teaching biology here. For example some students flat out refuse to even listen in class. He believes the problem is Constitutional and boiled it down to this: the lack of religious education in school. He believes religion should be taught in school. All religion. World religion. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, you name it.
And what of faith? Catholics hold faith in high regard. There’s plenty that the believer is not expected to understand or explain but rather to accept as a part of one’s faith. How does that square with the fundamentalist adoption of Intelligent Design and the need to have their beliefs taught as fact in schools? Have they no faith?
With certainty in place of faith, it strikes me as reasonable for them to try in every way they can to get it taught. It’s what they believe. If science is undermined, what does it matter to them? They don’t believe it. I don’t blame them. (I do blame the Discovery Institute: “From the science, we argue that you can tell that intelligence played a role. But we don’t think from the science you can tell the nature or the identity of the designer.” huh? That’s science?)
But America is with them; only a third of Americans believe in evolution. Now that’s a shame.
The scope of the copyright crisis
A few weeks ago I finally got around to listening to The Comedy of the Commons, a September 23 speech by Lawrence Lessig for the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series. There’s much to laud about the speech and I urge you to listen to it (available free through ITConversations.com), but worth highlighting is his description of the dramatic expansion of copyright in our time:
Traditionally copyright rewtrictions in the United States were extremely limited. The traditional rule was an opt-in rule meaning if you wanted to get the benefit of copyright protection you had to raise your hand and say I want it...by registering your work, by marking your work and then subsequently by renewing the copyright after an initial term so our estimates are that over 60% of published works during the 19th and 20th century never entered the copyright system at all…and of the work that did enter the copyright system between 85% and 95%, depending on the type of work, never had their copyright term renewed. So from 1909 to 1976 the term was 28 years plus 28 years, you had to renew it after 28 years and 85 to 95% never went through that renewal. So that means before 1978 the average copyright term, if you take that renewal into consideration, was never more than 32 years, and the expected copyright term…was never more than 16 years. So it’s a relatively short restriction across the full range of works…
This law has radically changed. Not in small ways, in radical ways. We, in 1976 passed a law which took effect in 1978 which totally inverted the tradition that had guided the United States for 186 years of the republic. Copyright now became automatic…and it extends to all works whether you register it or renew it. It became an opt-out regime rather than an opt-in regime…everything is copyrighted automatically and for a term which now is life of the author plus 70 years, or for corporate works 95 years, which means the copyright term has gone from an expected term of 16 years to an expected term of 95 years in 30 years. Or an average term of 32 years to an average term of 95 years in 30 years. It’s been a radical increase in the scope and duration of this copyright covering all works whether or not it is needed for the commercial incentives that drive copyright.
Via Copyfight.
Blogger journalist
LATimes media critic David Shaw says bloggers are not journalists:
Are bloggers entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional print and broadcast journalists?
Given the explosive growth of the blogosphere, some judge is bound to rule on the question one day soon, and when he does, I hope he says the nation’s estimated 8 million bloggers are not entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional journalists - essentially newspaper, magazine, radio and television reporters and editors.
Shaw seems to believe that the First Amendment and its subsidiary protections belong to the credentialed employees of the established corporate press and not to the great unwashed. I suggest that he-or one of the four experienced editors who touched his copy-research the history of the First Amendment. They’ll learn that the Founders wrote it precisely to protect Tom, Dick, and Matt and the wide-eyed pamphleteers and the partisan press of the time. The professional press, which Shaw believes so essential in protecting society, didn’t even exist until the late 19th century.
If blogs err, Shaw has my permission to shame them. If they libel him, he has my blessing to sue. I suspect that the more he treats blogs like the press the more he will come to realize that they are the press, and that the petty attempt he’s made with his column to commandeer the First Amendment for the corporate media will only wreak the damage to society and the press that he so fears.
I’m left confused. I side with Shafer more than Shaw. But I’ve taken the position that bloggers are not journalists and don’t need the special protection of press shield laws here, here, here and here. I would prefer instead legal recognition and full First Amendment protection of bloggers as bloggers. Congress carved out of cable law a spot for Public Access Television, how about something like that?
I’ve never liked that the First Amendment has been effectively taken from the individual and handed over to the corporate media, so I should naturally be on the side of bloggers as journalists. What I don’t like is the abusive manipulation I see from the use of anonymous sources (neither does Jack Shafer) and I don’t like the idea of its spread to bloggers.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Tort hypocrisy
Wampum’s dug up the goods on some Republican politician’s personal commitment to tort reform:
Republicans want to limit the right of others to recover for torts but are quick to sue when they, or members of their family, have been harmed....Perhaps lawsuit abuse would not be holding back our economy and costing us so many jobs if Republican politicians did not file so many of those suits they deplore.
President Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rick Santorum, Tom DeLay…
TiVo sold the fast forward button
Long rumored, it’s apparently here. From PVRBlog:
I’m still not sure what became of that planned feature, but Jeff Sprankle wrote in with a report of something similar happening on his TiVo:
This morning, I started watching Ghostbusters 2 on Comedy Central and, as I always do, paused it for a while so I could FF through commercials. At the first commercial, I used my trusty FF button only to see an ad for The Interpreter smack dab in the middle of the screen. Seems Tivo has started placing ads on your TV when you FF or RW live TV. To me, this is quite obnoxious because it takes up most of the TV screen!
UPDATE from Thomas Hawk:
This is incredibly short sighted for TiVo and will hurt them in the long run. Their advertising revenue represents such a minor amount of profit for the company. I can’t believe that they don’t see that this strategy will only hurt them in the end.
I couldn’t agree more!
Nader’s nadir
I was once a big fan of Ralph Nader:
Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith, author of the award winning book “Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America” call upon the Florida Courts, Governor Jeb Bush and concerned citizens to take any legal action available to let Terri Schiavo live.
Commenter Ken Cope catches the fact that the Nader press release, featured in the
, and the fellow he has partnered with in condemning the Schiavo decisions, both emanate from The Discovery institute, home of crackpot, creationist drivel.
Wesley J. Smith wrote a couple of consumer books with Ralph back in the early 90’s but has since made quite a career fopr himself as a self-anointed bioethicist and expert in “life” issues. (He also has a sub-specialty in knocking the “dangerous” animal rights movement.)
MGM v Grokster
The New York Times has a good background story on the MGM v Grokster case that will be heard this week by the Supreme Court:
The case, M.G.M. v. Grokster, is in many ways the culmination of five years of escalating legal, technical and rhetorical attacks against file-sharing systems and their users by the music industry. It is being eagerly followed by a range of media and technology companies because the court may use this case to redefine the reach of copyright in the era of iPods and TiVo.
But no matter how the court rules, both music executives and file-sharing advocates...agree that it will probably always be possible for fans to find loads of free music with a few clicks of a mouse.
Still, the case will determine whether file sharing can continue to be promoted by companies like LimeWire and Sharman Networks, which makes Kazaa, that operate in public and earn profits from advertising and software sales, or whether the software will be written and distributed by shadowy players on the fringes of the law.
The article appears on the same day as a wrong-headed editorial, which is effectively rebutted by Ernest Miller:
There are lots of technologies that deprive people who create of making money for their creation. The VCR, for one. The VCR is used to infringe copyright, which it seems, automatically takes the money out of the hands of creators. Should the evolution of the VCR have been stopped? Brilliant editorial New York Times, bravo. Cheap rhetorical tricks, unsubstantiated statistics, and complete lack of an actual solution. Is there any error that wasn’t made?
Via CopyFight’s Donna Wentworth who points to a wealth of information on the case.
UPDATE: In this post Wentworth looks at the research on the impact of P2P music sharing on CD sales:
In addition to a lack of negative effects, the study argues, there is evidence for a positive correlation between sharing music and purchasing more new music.
Stop the itch
From Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools:
Zanfel is very expensive, it’s true ($38/oz). But it’s worth every penny to anyone suffering with a poison ivy (or oak) rash. Within 30 seconds of treatment, the itching stops. Really. It’s the only product I know of that chemically binds the urishol which is causing the problem.
Via BoingBoing.
DNR
This article made me remember that in my experience we were more concerned about doctors intervening when we didn’t want it. We weren’t talking about the need for a living will; we were talking about the need for a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate order):
For years, when families and hospitals fought over how to treat critically ill patients, families often pressed to let their loved ones die, while hospitals tried to keep them alive. But in the last decade or so, things have changed. Now...even families who say they believe in removing life support may find that position untenable when their own relatives are involved.
“About 15 years ago, at least 80 percent of the cases were right-to-die kinds of cases,” said Dr. Lachlan Forrow, the director of ethics programs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who handles 50 to 100 end-of-life conflicts a year. “Today, it’s more like at least 80 percent of the cases are the other direction: family members who are pushing for continued or more aggressive life support and doctors and nurses who think that that’s wrong.”I still don’t have a living will. It’s clear that if I want my wishes carried out, rather than those based on the hopes, fears, beliefs and emotions of my family, I must make one. (And, for the record, for me a feeding tube will count as a prohibited extraordinary measure.)
UPDATE: PoliBlog on the feeding tube as medical intervention. Via Outside the Beltway.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
More on choice
The NYTimes today has more on choice:
Critics point out that expanding consumers’ options is not always a good idea. People, they argue, often do not know how to choose properly or they simply refuse to choose. Sometimes, critics argue, government should limit people’s choices. That is, choose for them...For instance, participation rates in 401(k) plans are known to rise sharply when the default choice for the employee is switched to an opt-out from an opt-in.
In Sweden, where personal savings accounts were carved out of the social security system in 1998, 9 out of 10 new entrants to the work force let their investment portfolio go to a default fund set up by the government, instead of choosing one themselves…
The key is whether people understand their choices, said Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago. “People have to know what their preferences are and they have to know how the options they have map onto their preferences,” he said.
This might be easy when choosing between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. But it gets progressively more difficult as the number of flavors increases. When the risks are high and the decisions complex - as when choosing between medical procedures or investment portfolios - consumers may become easily flummoxed.
For more on choice, Thaler and the Swedish experience, see this Dynamist Blog post.
See also my post, The tyranny of choice.
Scalia’s supreme confidence
Just as Jeffrey Rosen’s April Atlantic profile of William Rehnquist is not available online (I posted on it here), neither is last week’s Margaret Talbot profile, “Supreme Confidence: The jurisprudence of Justice Antonin Scalia” from The New Yorker. (One-upping the Atlantic, the New Yorker’s isn’t even available to subscribers. A web only interview with Talbot on Scalia is). My post therefore relies on my own transcription.
Talbot confirms Rosen’s observation that Scalia’s no consensus builder, noting that in the early years, “Scalia’s exuberant questioning was not well received by his colleagues” but now “all of them - with the exception of Clarence Thomas - are garrulous:”
Scalia, having inspired his brethren to become equal in volubility, now primarily distinguishes himself with the force, and sometimes the scorn, of his written opinions. If his questioning is for the benefit of other justices, then his opinions seem to be for the benefit of a future generation that may yet be saved for [the philosophy Scalia ascribes to called] originalism. While his dissents often nimbly dismantle the dodgy logic of the majority opinion, they do so in a tone of such bitter disappointment that it’s hard to imagine his arguments winning over any justice who voted against him. (In fact, his unstinting critiques often help his opponents refine their arguments in subsequent cases.)
An exception to prove the rule:
Scalia has said that Ginsburg is the liberal with whom he’d most like to be stuck on a desert island. “Sometimes he has an Italian temper that flares up,” Ginsburg told an audience at the Georgia State law school in 2003. Still, she recalled, when he wrote the majority opinion in the V.M.I. [Virginia Military Institute] case Scalia came to her chambers to show her a draft of his dissent, saying, “Ruth, you’re not going to like this...but I want you to have my dissent as early as I can give it to you so you’ll have time to respond.” Ginsburg added, “He absolutely ruined my weekend, but my opinion is ever so much better because of his dissent.”
I’m pleased to read that, “Every year, he hires at least one liberal clerk, to give him somebody to spar with.” Lawrence Lessig was once a Scalia clerk, though I don’t know if a chosen liberal.
Reagan, who “began ‘breeding’ Supreme Court Justices - placing possible candidates on the courts of appeal to test them for philosophical consistency,” had to love this about Scalia:
The scholar David Yalof, in his book “Pursuit of Justices,” observes that a “thorough search of Scalia’s record uncovered not a single opinion in which either the result or the ground of the decision seemed problematic from a conservative point of view.”
He put Scalia, who “sailed through his confirmation hearings,” on the bench in 1986.
Read the rest of "Scalia’s supreme confidence" in the extended entry.
What’s in a name?
Apt names were dubbed aptronyms by the columnist Franklin P. Adams. Once you start collecting them, you can’t stop. Think of baseball’s Cecil Fielder and Rollie Fingers, the news executive Bill Headline, the artist Rembrandt Peale, the poet William Wordsworth, the pathologist (not gynecologist) Zoltan Ovary, the novelist Francine Prose, the poker champion Chris Moneymaker, the musicians Paul Horn and Mickey Bass, the TV weatherman Storm Field, Judge Wisdom, the spokesman Larry Speakes, the dancer Benjamin Millepied, the opera singer Peter Schreier, the British neurologist Lord Brain, the entertainer Tommy Tune, the CBS Television ratings maven David Poltrack...Then there are the names of people who succeeded in their professions despite what might be called their an-aptronyms: Dr. Kwak, Judge Lawless or Orson Swindle, a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Long before Armand Hammer bought Arm & Hammer, the baking soda company, many people assumed he owned it.
Faith-based news
Ashley Smith, the 26-year-old woman who was held hostage by Brian Nichols, the accused Atlanta courthouse killer, has been canonized by virtually every American news organization as God’s messenger because she inspired Mr. Nichols to surrender by talking about her faith and reading him a chapter from Rick Warren’s best seller, “The Purpose-Driven Life.” But if she’s speaking for God, what does that make Dennis Rader, the church council president arrested in Wichita’s B.T.K. serial killer case? Was God instructing Terry Ratzmann, the devoted member of the Living Church of God who this month murdered his pastor, an elderly man, two teenagers and two others before killing himself at a weekly church service in Wisconsin? The religious elements of these stories, including the role played by the end-of-times fatalism of Mr. Ratzmann’s church, are left largely unexamined by the same news outlets that serve up Ashley Smith’s tale as an inspirational parable for profit.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Slash & burn
My friend Basil’s comments from the other day seem to compare conservative reaction to the Schiavo case to liberal reaction to Gore’s loss in the 2000 election. I wonder, can anyone find an example of a Democrat saying anything near this from Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King on All Things Considered tonight?
What we have today is a judicial branch that is totally out of control...I am for Congress to exert its rightful constitutional authority over courts… the Constitution establishes only one court and that’s the Supreme Court. All other courts, and they’re called “Inferior Courts” in the Constitution, being federal courts are all creatures of Congress...so whatever Congress gives it can take away. If we wanted to abolish the 9th Circuit for example we could do that. Now I’m not going to say I think that’s a prudent thing to do. We could also cut the budget; we could prohibit the Justice Department from enforcing the orders of the courts. There are many, many tools that we have.
Indeed. They also talk about “court stripping,” removing the court’s jurisdiction to hear certain issues (for example, gay marriage). Listen for yourself.
I pay taxes for a war I don’t believe in, for schools I have no children in. No, I didn’t like the outcome in the 2000 election but yes, I accepted it. Without argument. Gore made a widely admired concession speech that showed respect for the court and support for President Bush.
Since Marbury v Madison we have had and believed in judicial review. We have a separation of powers in our constitutional democracy. Democrats respect that. Show me statements where they don’t. The conservative right clearly does not. This is dangerous and destructive.
Hogzilla
Friends are having a party tonight to watch Hogzilla (on the National Geographic Channel at 7 pm eastern); we’re going to Athens so can’t attend.
Even if this Georgia tale of a 12 foot long 1,000 pound wild hog contains a bit of exaggeration, friends here do report wild hogs in their backyards.
I’m happy to watch the show, but don’t look for me at the festival.
UPDATE: The party has been postponed. They’re recording the program for a party at another time.
