Area talent in the news

I agree with [Milwaukee area "shock jock" Mark] Belling. By the time you're 74 years old, you're just too grizzled and old to be effective at anything. Seventy-somethings are just bitter about the fact that they're old, and they need to be put in their place! How dare these old people try and re-live the memories of their glory days, which are so far behind them they probably can't even remember them!!! Yes, old people are horrible.

— Kyle Broflovski

Local nut-right squawker finds a listener

Cease and desist, the porpoise said

Ann and Nancy Wilson of the 1970s band Heart are displeased with the GOP's use of their chart topping hit Barracuda to market John McCain's vice-presidential running mate.

The hard driving classic rock number pounded out over the P.A. system as the closing notes to this week's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN to the delight of reveling conventioneers.

"I think it's completely unfair to be so misrepresented," [Nancy Wilson] said in a phone call to EW.com after [McCain's] speech. "I feel completely f---ed over." She and sister Ann Wilson then e-mailed the following exclusive statement:

"Sarah Palin's views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women."

Interestingly, some of the original band members were draft dodgers who moved to Vancouver, British Columbia just prior to Heart's heyday, and the Wilson sisters relocated there as well, although it's not clear whether the former POW John McCain and his supporters were grooving to their work or that of Canadian studio musicians.

The song's similarly unvetted lyrics refer to the Barracuda as "lying low in the weeds" and accuse the Barracuda of "mak[ing] up something real quick" if "the real thing don't do the trick."

In the past, the GOP paid much closer attention to its musical accompaniments, as when it broadcast The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again during George W. Bush's year 2000 celebrations, but well advisedly switched back to some NASCAR banjo music before the line, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

McCain consultants preemptively nixed any reprise of that song at this year's convention for obvious reasons, among which may be its remarkable applicability.

That damnable National Enquirer

Wasn't it only recently that certain vocal members of the conservative GOP punditry were excoriating the "mainstream media" for failing to follow up on the National Enquirer's delving into the affairs of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards?

Think they'll stay on message?

Biden will imprison entire Bush administration

"If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued," [Delaware Senator Joe] Biden said during a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, Florida, according to ABC.

Shocking.

Stand by for Obamanoia outrage redux.

Banned Books Week

In commemoration of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, which begins September 27, an excerpt from a letter written by Anne Kilkenny, a resident of Wasilla, AK:

While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin’s attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

"Petty tyranny" is one of the phrases that spring to mind.

McCain admits defeat, endorses Obama

We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust, when we valued our power over our principles. ... Change is coming. — John McCain

Four more years! — Jack Abramoff

"John Bush is very much his own man." — Tom Ridge

"Sarah Pawlenty, our next vice president."

"It's over." — Peggy Noonan

And Sarah Palin raised $10 million in 24 hours for Obama.

Community organizer

Thank you, Sarah Palin (YouTube, 2:55)

Jesus Christ was a community organizer.
Pontius Pilate was a Governor.

pwnt.

St. Paul stumbles on another Saviour

"Snide efficiency" is how Illinois Senator Barack Obama's campaign adviser David Axelrod described Sarah Palin's well-rehearsed teleprompted performance last night. That's about right. I haven't heard such a boring litany of Kulturkampf platitudes since I cancelled my subscription to Jerry Falwell's weekly political newsletter.

Predictably, local Palin apologists are hailing her tedious, Holy Ghostwritten sermon to the already safely converted "a masterwork." Yes, you read that correctly: "a masterwork." The work of a master. It's right up there with the Mass in B Minor, King Lear, and (most appropriately) Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi, don't you know.

Sean Hannity called it one of the greatest speeches "in history," as Karl Rove nodded sagely in agreement. That would be the same Karl Rove who derided Virginia governor and former mayor of the city of Richmond Tim Kaine's lack of executive experience while Kaine was under consideration as Barack Obama's running mate.

Now the less-than-half-a-term Alaska governor and former mayor of the village of Wasilla Sarah Palin's considerably less impressive executive experience is suddenly an embarrassment of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and she just delivered one of the greatest orations "in history."

"In history." Thucydides, meet Hannity.

The "masterwork" characterization, incidentally, issues from the same observer who just got finished wagging a righteously indignant finger at those who might mention Sarah Palin's daughter (in the course of mentioning Sarah Palin's daughter by name ten times across nine mercifully brief paragraphs — doubtless a Google-hit bonanza) but more recently gushes that "the youngest daughter is an adorable little ham."

No mention of the infant son passed off from hand to hand like a ham for Republican teevee cameras, however. Those children are off limits. Right. Except by way of praising the masterworks of a squadron of partisan masterworkers, apparently.

Oh, just let Sarah Palin be a proud mother and soon-to-be grandmother, so we are told, and I'm all for that. She's a creationist, you'd expect her to be creating, and creating to be expecting.

But don't tell me they're "off limits" at the same instant you're parading them around a national political convention on full saturation national network teevee in the hopes of soliciting votes by means of that parading. Not that I'm planning on taking any cheap slapshots, but don't say you aren't practically begging for them, hockey moms for Sarah, hottest governor from the coolest State.

Besides, didn't John McCain's own campaign manager just inform us that this presidential election isn't about the issues?

There were few raised last night in St. Paul. If there were, they were buried too subtly amongst the petty sniping, and the resounding on-cue ovations for same from the "family values" crowd (and a less-than-capacity one, at that — that was some clever camouflaging of the rows upon rows of empty seats).

As for whatever substance Sarah Palin did have to offer — and there was little that wasn't either fake or false — James Rowen correctly points to her condescending mockery of community organizers.

Everybody knows you can pretty much write your own ticket with a Harvard law degree. But Obama took his and went back to Chicago's South Side to work with the unemployed and other folks down on their luck. And for this he's scourged by the so-called Christian conservatives? That would be Christian as in Jesus who, if I recall correctly, was something of a community organizer himself.

Speaking of Jesus, how about that guest speaker at Sarah Palin's Assembly of God church last month who blames terrorist attacks in Israel on the Jewish victims' failure to convert to Christianity?

That's part of God's judgment, said the preacher. Another of God's judgments was awarding a $30 billion gas pipeline to a Calgary, Alberta company, according to Sarah Palin. Mysterious ways, etc.

Are these bizarre views off limits too? No more than is Obama's experience as a community organizer, I reckon. After all, Jeremiah Wright opened that door, did he not? And Michael Pfleger, another community organizer and Catholic priest who adopted three African American kids but who local gibbering primate and even more ridiculous Palin apologist Charlie Sykes famously called a "racist"?

And talk about elitism. What did warm-up act Rudolph Giuliani, an extremely wealthy man, do with his NYU law degree? Roll up his sleeves and head down to Bed-Stuy? No, he used it to, among other things, obtain a deferment from the Vietnam draft. Of course these days he's shouting up and down over John McCain's Vietnam service. He didn't have to be jealous; he needed that law degree, after all.

Never mind Mitt Romney, another of last night's featured Obama-bashers, whose personal net worth is approaching 10% of the entire Alaska State budget. They don't come any more elite.

Speaking of Alaska, don't they have community organizers up there? Maybe they aren't needed, because guess which State of the Union receives more per capita federal transfer payments than any other? You guessed right. Damn that pork, and damn those earmarks, eh?

Residents of Illinois, on the other hand, get about 45% of the federally transferred dollars their Alaskan counterparts do. And things are just a bit rougher on Chicago's South Side than they are in the village of Wasilla, AK. Albeit, fewer rampaging caribou, maybe.

And freshly minted GOP superstar Sarah Palin? As governor, she once did the official honor of auctioning off an airplane on eBay.* So take heart, America. While only some doctors believe a president John McCain's mortal coil might well stubbornly resist shuffling off for another four years, this week's featured seller, sarah_barracuda44, has 94.3% positive feedback.

Among hardcore Christian conservative Republicans, that is. Last night's televised festival of self-congratulation and typical Republican political mockery and divisiveness will convince few others, if any.

* Er, not quite.

Maverick power elites on parade

What a spectacle, Washington power elites praising other Washington power elites for the benefit of the hardscrabble Grand Old Party grassroots True Believers, who seemed to be eating it up, despite the weird dissonance.

'We're going to rearrange the Washington power elites,' cried the mavericky Washington power elites, one after another.

"Country First!" the Party Faithful exulted at the Party Convention, while outside, police arrested the journalist Amy Goodman on suspicion of exercising her First Amendment rights.

A seemingly befuddled George W. Bush, appearing live via hologram, was generously allotted a few brief moments to offer his obligatory support for the Republican candidate, John McCain.

Any more than those few minutes and it would have dawned on the Party revelers that not only has the War President's approval rating been hovering around 25% for ages, but that more than one-quarter of Americans polled consider him the worst U.S. president in history.

In their defense, they haven't seen Sarah Palin yet.

President Bush, who is also the Leader of the Republican Party, had barely gasped his final empty platitude when the control booth erased his familiar deer-in-the-headlights visage from the giant screen. Whew! Glad we got that over with.

And while Bush may be radioactive in the Plutonium-239 sense, an atomic half-life of 24,000 years is but a geological instant compared with Dick "Rubidium" Cheney, who will remain safely encased in his concrete bunker throughout the GOP convention.

Next up was Fred Thompson, the elite but sleepy Hollywood star who mounted his own reluctantly half-assed presidential bid for a week or two, and who the GOP has recently dragged from the mothballs to make the circuit. Unfortunately the Party organizers didn't see fit to provide Sleepy Fred with a noise gate for his microphone.

Thompson's folksy harangue was devoted to describing John McCain's harrowing experiences as a Vietnam prisoner of war in considerable detail, right down to the size of the boils underneath McCain's armpits (9 to 9.25 inches in circumference).

But in spite of this eidetic narrative, Sleepy Fred concluded, having been a POW does not a president make, although it may excuse you from not knowing how many houses and condominiums you own.

This was interesting, because when Wesley Clark, a 4-star general and decorated Vietnam veteran in his own right made precisely that identical observation, he was widely and loudly shouted down by the very same Party Faithful.

So evidently if you're an elite Hollywood star like Fred Thompson or Sean Penn, you can get away with it and indeed, be awarded with raucous applause (and some annoying goof in the front row yelling "Yeah!" throughout — why couldn't they have arrested him?).

But it turns out the Party Faithful's latest "Country First!" hero is none other than Country Joe Lieberman, an elite United States Senator of ancient and deeply entrenched standing from Stamford, Connecticut, which ranks Country First! in the nation among States by highest per capita personal income.

Joe Lieberman, it may be recalled, is a registered Democrat who, along with the widely despised Albert Gore, Jr., popularly defeated the Cheney/Bush ticket just eight years ago before the U.S. Supreme Court, in an admirable exercise of "judicial restraint," elitely stepped in to order Florida elections canvassers to stop counting votes just in case they found any more marked for Lieberman.

Lieberman — who Republicans used to call "Loserman" and "LIE-berman" — justifed the latter epithet when he related a tall tale from his Senate days "when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground," a deliberate falsehood.

As its 29th most senior member, Lieberman knows better than most how the Senate works, and how bills circulate with various related and unrelated attachments. Most of all, he knows Obama never voted to "cut off funding for our troops on the ground," and he understands full well that the one vote in question had to do with the attachment of timetables that Congress was wrangling over in the spring of '07.

Even more bizarre was Lieberman's effusive praise for Sarah Palin, a former village mayor from Alaska currently the subject of a legislative investigation into an alleged abuse of the awesome power of that State's governorship. Lieberman had reportedly just met Palin for the first time only hours before. He's a quick study, I guess.

Either that or he doesn't read the news.

And as if Republicans are the only Americans who put "Country First." Isn't it odd that the GOP invited a registered Democrat, one from among they who impliedly put their country last, to prove the GOP's own key convention slogan wrong, and even present Joe Lieberman the opportunity to argue why it's wrong. Given more time to do so, in fact, than they provided the Leader of their own Party.

They can have him, and he can happily allow himself to be strummed like a violin. He's convinced himself to vote for McCain and his sidekick village mayor, that's clear. Whether he convinced anyone else is highly questionable. Although there's little doubt he's convinced many of his shameless political opportunism. And naturally the True Believers didn't need any convincing in the first place.

Earlier, local laughing stock Michele Bachmann offered further evidence that conservatives are generally immune to irony.

If I recall correctly, the cable news networks devoted very little time to actually broadcasting the speeches from last week's Democratic convention, concentrating only on the final speakers of each evening.

But last night, the same networks showed uninterrupted footage of at least the last four or five Washington power elites, including the sentimental videotaped homage to Saint Ronald Reagan.

That would be your liberal media in action.

Tonight's feature: A noun, a verb, and Rudy 91u1an1.

Former Wasilla, AK mayor speaks

So it can get a little more entertaining:

[John] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast."

That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

Mayor Palin: A Rough Record.

McCain mini-meltdown

Wolf Blitzer is reporting that John McCain is some upset with CNN because one of his media flacks, Tucker Bounds, almost had to — horror of horrors! — respond on point to a fair question during a rare instance of a journalist actually doing her job for a change.

Watch.

The good stuff starts around 3:20. Poor babies! Even though Tucker Bounds gets to blather on tediously for seven minutes, gratis. Cue the world's tiniest string orchestra for the floundering McCain.

Canadian pipeline is "God's will"

Seriously. (By the way, it's a natural gas pipeline, Mr. Daily Dish.) But I agree the $500m advance is at least a slice of manna from Heaven.

No wonder all my erstwhile colleagues in the construction game are rejoicing. And no wonder Barack Obama is polling at more than 50% for the first time since this campaign began:

Rasmussen
Gallup

Get odds on whether Gov. Sarah Palin will withdraw. While you're at it, God likes the Giants on Thursday night, minus three-and-a-half.

Esenberg gets some competition

The Marquette Law School Faculty Blog

Michael O'Hear is one of the smartest people in the universe.

The week ahead in conservatism

How much more entertaining can the John McCain campaign get this week? Recent revelations will be hard to top.

Senator McCain, who once upon a time famously denounced Religious Right leaders as "agents of intolerance," has apparently acceded to their desires by setting aside his favored running mates for an unknown quantity whose main selling point seems to be her "social conservatism."

Unknown, as in unknown even to John McCain.

While Sarah Palin's private family life is her business, her public policy pronouncements are decidedly not, and it's more than a little ironic that an abstinence-only educator currently has an unwed teenage kid with a bun in the oven, while adding unintended new meaning to her own self-description as a "hockey mom."

She's certainly in no position to dictate her ineffective public sex-ed curricula to anybody else's children.

Then of course there is the McCain campaign's trumpeting of talking points that simply aren't true. She opposed a bridge construction when she supported it. She fought Senator Ted Stevens when she helped raise money and campaign for him. She eschewed federal earmarks while she lobbied Congress for them.

She rallied against corruption while she and her "first dude" fired administration officials to appease their feuding in-laws. She's a foreign policy expert by dint of the Aleutian Islands.

Now she's touted as ready from day one to take over the office of Abraham Lincoln while she's been playing at being Jefferson Davis.

Chuck Kopp, who Sarah Palin appointed as Alaska's top police officer after firing his predecessor and who she also had to get rid of two weeks later when she found out that Kopp had been reprimanded for sexual harassment, probably summed up the conservative devotion to Palin best when he testified, "While I have been portrayed in a negative light, my personal worth is found in the person of Jesus Christ, and not on the one who accepts or rejects me."

Quite so. Welcome to the faith-based public official.

Sarah Palin's church

While it's a bit too conspiratorial for my tastes, a Daily Kos diarist, dogemperor, investigates and writes about Sarah Palin's Assemblies of God congregations together with some pretty far-out Christian Dominionists.

Among the diarist's attempted premises is that the Juneau (AK) Christian Center's "School of Destiny" is somehow code for Joel's Army, a special brand of militaristic Christianity profiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center here.

To the extent that dogemperor, who is herself apparently a former member of a "coercive" Dominionist movement, is trying to establish a nexus between the cast of characters described by the SPLC and Sarah Palin, I'm skeptical, despite the diarist's informed assurances.

But given the incessant howling from the political right over Barack Obama's Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright and his associates, these inquiries are fair game, unlike another recent Daily Kos diary, which seems to me little more than a load of speculative sleaze.

Nevertheless, there's a good bit of interesting — and occasionally disturbing — reading at the links above.

Obama's divine hurricane envy

A godfearing conservative blogger gesticulates, having satisfyingly derived the appropriate measure of self-righteous indignation at an off-color remark by filmmaker Michael Moore which quite obviously had far more to do with the 2008 Republican National Convention and the legend of "Heckuva Job Brownie" than anything else:

McCain displays great class by potentially postponing the convention. That's what leaders do. Obama would have pressed on despite the hurricane and exploited the plight of those hit. It would have been, pardon the pun, a Godsend for Obama to have a hurricane during his convention.

Uh huh. It ain't easy to make Michael Moore appear tasteful and demure by comparison. Behold one such rare success.

Gustav bears down on St. Paul, MN

Republican notables George W. Bush and the GOP's official demon exorcist Bobby Jindal are reportedly preparing to put their RNC performances on hold, as Hurricane Gustav heads north and gains strength across the bathwater-boiling expanse of the Gulf of Mexico.

The hurricane may also force the cancellation of the RNC's keynote musical address, featuring old timey country fiddler and post-9/11 First Amendment scholar Charlie Daniels, whose band is scheduled to run through its signature number, The Devil Went Down To Georgia, symbolically decked out in short-sleeved shirts purchased from Burlington Coat Factory's autumn "Back to Gulag" collection.

John McCain is to offer a medley of Beach Boys tunes while "moderate" law professor Ann Althouse is set to live-vlog her celebrated Carrie Underwood box-of-Shiraz solo drinking game.

Nobody has ever heard of any of the other musical acts appearing at the RNC, and it's unclear whether "Big and Rich" is one of them or the overarching theme for the event's supporters and beneficiaries.

Palin "extremely disappointed" with McCain judges

The Legal Times's U.S. Supreme Court correspondent Tony Mauro notes that Sarah Palin harshly criticized John McCain's favorite conservative judges after they "gutted" an Anchorage, Alaska jury's punitive damages award in June.

Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Scalia and Thomas, joined the former Republican Attorney General from New Hampshire and George H.W. Bush appointee Justice David Souter in slashing the award against Exxon Shipping Co. by 90%.

In an unprecedented arrogation by black-robed judicial tyrants, the conservative favorites, who hail from such elitist East Coast establishments as Harvard and Yale, legislated directly from the bench by declaring new rules of maritime law in flagrant disregard for affirmative evidence that the people's elected representatives in Congress had deliberately chosen not to restrict similar jury awards.

Palin would have been better satisfied by the three dissenters, Justices Stevens, Breyer, and Ginsburg, who "tweaked" McCain's conservative favorites for failing to exercise "judicial restraint."

McCain, on the other hand, peevishly informed a New Age, Left Coast megapreacher recently that he never would have nominated any of the dissenting Justices to the Court in the first place, in spite of his Senate votes to confirm the appointments of the latter two.

(Justice Stevens was named to the Court by yet another Republican president in 1975, several years before John McCain had the opportunity to register his enthusiastic advice and consent.)

McCain's remaining favorite, Justice Samuel Alito, was forced to abstain from the decision because he owns too much stock in Exxon.

Campaign ponders candidate's mortality

"Most doctors think that he’ll be around at least [four years],” said Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain’s top advisers.

That's comforting. At least 50% plus one of them.

Or is it 270 Electoral College votes.

Teach both what?

Unless she's figured it out in the meantime, Sarah Palin doesn't know much about either science or the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment when it comes to public schools.

Responding to a question during a 2006 gubernatorial debate on the so-called "controversy" between evolution and creationism, Palin said, "Teach both. ... I am a proponent of teaching both."

How many times and by how many courts do these people need to be informed that creationism — including its most recent incarnation, "intelligent design" — is religion, and not biology.

The platform for the Republican Party of Alaska, of which that State's governor is a ranking member, contains this bit of gibberish:

We support giving Creation Science equal representation with other theories of the origin of life. If evolution is taught, it should be presented as only a theory.

"Creation science"? Are they kidding? Apparently not.

The former set of absurd GOP claims is unconstitutional on its face, and the risible pointlessness of the latter is easily demonstrated by substituting the word "gravity" for "evolution."

Yet within hours of claiming to be "a proponent of teaching both" evolution and creation, Palin is reported to have said that creationism "doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

Palin also admitted she hadn't thought about it much. That seems clear. What else hasn't she thought about much, I wonder.

Telling the truth?

Canadian welders thank Sarah Palin

On Wednesday, Alaska governor and McCain veep Sarah Palin awarded a potential $30 billion contract — including a 500 million dollar advance — for construction of a 1700-mile pipeline between Prudhoe Bay and Alberta to TransCanada Corp., based in Calgary.

Technically, it's not shipping jobs "overseas."

A Best of the Blogs nomination

A local blogger says of Barack Obama's speech to the DNC in Denver last night, "Leni Riefenstahl couldn't have done it better."

Leni Riefenstahl, of course, was a German filmmaker and notorious Nazi collaborator who became enamored with Adolf Hitler upon reading his Mein Kampf, an autobiography filled with vicious racism and containing the seeds of Hitler's plan to exterminate European Jews and other "non-Aryan" minorities, a project he set about accomplishing with Leni Riefenstahl's kind assistance.

But despite this, observes the blogger, it was Barack Obama's speech that is "vindictive" and "mean-spirited" because Obama dared to criticize the record of Republican candidate John McCain.

Charlie Parker, b. Aug. 29, 1920

Jaco Pastorius — Donna Lee

Charlie Parker — Koko

Scroll down, Prof. Esenberg

Rick Esenberg quaffs deeply from the GOP Kool-Aid by observing that Barack Obama's stage at Invesco Field resembles a "Greek temple." Perhaps he's never been to Washington, D.C., where neoclassical architecture has long been held to represent democratic ideals.

And there aren't any spires atop those buildings, either.

Presented with two photos of George W. Bush's own 2004 acceptance ceremony at Madison Square Garden, Esenberg tosses a cursory glance at the first and pronounces dismissively, "Two faux columns does not a temple make." (That probably should be "do not.")

Neither does one faux blog post, for that matter.

Yet the second photo reveals the coronated El Presidente, recently emerged from enshrinement within an edifice comprised of no fewer than six Greco-Roman columns and having strode a shining path of royal blue, poised regally on a gigantic podium assembled from a series of golden discs ringed by velvet ropes and sumptuous scarlet carpeting, and further surrounded by throngs of dutiful worshipers.

The sheer pomposity of the scene makes Obama's plywood construction look positively modest by comparison. Come to think of it, Senator Obama's Invesco installation reminds me of this:



(Note the pagan idol housed within.)

Recent estimates put the cost of producing each U.S. penny at approaching two cents. Obama's nod to the Lincoln Memorial is clearly a sly reference to eight long years of deficit spending and the squandering of a federal budget surplus inherited by the Bush administration. So be sure to treat yourselves to some more of McSame come November, teaches Prof. Esenberg.

Your gun lobby at work

While most people know that convicted felons may be prevented from owning firearms, there is a federal law that prohibits those convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from owning them as well.

And although it's a federal law, it applies to State misdemeanors — "convictions in any court" — because guns move about in interstate commerce, and Congress may regulate that.*

There is an exception to the federal law, however, in that those convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse whose conviction has been "expunged or set aside" may once again own firearms.

For some reason, in 2004, the Wyoming legislature put in place a procedure by which the individuals in question could apply to have their convictions "expunged or set aside," but only for the narrow, specific purpose of "restoring any firearms rights lost."

In other words, a conviction still stood as a prior offense, for example, if the individual was again convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse, but not if they wanted to own a firearm. And, presumably, since an element of misdemeanor domestic abuse in Wyoming is "an attempted use of physical force," that subsequent offense might involve a newly restored firearm under Wyoming law.

Furthermore, the Wyoming statute would have had the effect of allowing convicted domestic abusers to secure a concealed carry permit and thus be exempt from federal background checks, which would otherwise uncover the still existing domestic abuse conviction.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives objected because, the Bureau argued, what Congress meant by "expunged or set aside" was completely expunged or set aside, not simply a State setting aside those particular effects of the conviction that prevented the individual from owning a firearm.

Wyoming challenged the Bureau's interpretation in federal district court, and its challenge was dismissed. The State then appealed and yesterday the 10th Circuit affirmed the district court, holding that while the terms "expunge" and "set aside" may have different meanings in Wyoming caselaw and indeed, meanings different from each other, what Congress meant by both is the same thing.

That is, the very fact and existence of the conviction itself needs to have been erased from the record in order to qualify for the federal exception, not just one of its effects, that of its prohibiting firearm ownership to convicted domestic abusers.

This seems to me a strange attempt by Wyoming lawmakers, and there is considerable irony in the argument of the State's Attorney General, Patrick J. Crank, that it was the ATF's interpretation of federal law which was "arbitrary and capricious."

Wyoming v. United States (.pdf, 25 pgs.)

* And yes, I'm aware that this is arguably a non sequitur, but the constitutionality of the federal law wasn't at issue here.

Gustav mauler

Looks like the RNC may be in for a little competition.

Not even Mitt Romney can blow 110 mph wind.

Man Ray

A more proficient make-up artist was Man Ray, the American photographer and bon vivant born this day at Philadelphia in 1890.

One of my favorite books is Man Ray's autobiography, Self Portrait, which apparently seems to be out-of-print at the moment.

Man Ray Trust.

Loyal Bushies lose another round in federal court

Yesterday a federal district court in D.C. handed the Bush administration yet another defeat in its ongoing efforts to delay the subpoenaed testimony of Bush lawyer and occasional U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and others.

Last month the same court ordered Miers to comply with the House Judiciary Committee's subpoena to testify and produce documents in the matter of dismissed federal prosecutors. The administration requested that the July 31 order be stayed — delayed — so it could continue to prepare its arguments on appeal.

The administration continues to claim "absolute immunity" from testimony before Congress as its grounds for resisting the subpoena, because Miers was a member of the executive branch.

While the president enjoys that immunity, Bush's lawyers have been working at extending it all the way down to White House servants and dog walkers, except when Vice President Dick "Dick" Cheney is acting as president of the Senate. Under those circumstances, Cheney just tells you to "go f*ck yourself."

Bush's challenge to the July 31 order concerned the likelihood that an appeals court will rule in favor of its claims of absolute immunity for executive branch advisers such as Miers.

To prevail yesterday, the Bushies needed to demonstrate that 1) they were likely to win that appeal; 2) they would suffer irreparable harm by being denied additional delay; 3) further delay would cause no harm to the now-seated House Judiciary Committee; and 4) another delay would be in the public interest (as opposed to another DeLay).

According to the district court, Bush failed on 1), and failed hard. In their motion to the court, the loyal Bushies asserted only that the July 31 order was "susceptible to serious debate." But even if that were true, the court said, that isn't the point: the question is whether Bush can win the contemplated appeal, not whether he can continue to argue the July 31 order, which has nothing to do with the executive privilege issues the administration wishes to keep litigating.

Simply calling an issue important ... does not transform the Executive’s weak arguments into a likelihood of success or a substantial appellate issue.

An odd bit of procedural confusion on the Bushies' part, for sure.

Next, Bush failed on 2) because the only truly irreparable harm would be Harriet Miers's mere appearance in Congress, which isn't any harm at all, notwithstanding the disturbingly raccoon-like eyeliner.

Miers may continue to assert executive privilege before Congress, and she may announce that her appearance is made only under protest from the administration (and perhaps Maybelline), both devices which would allow Bush to preserve his concerns for appeal.

As for the documents, the court had not ordered the administration to produce any privileged information in the first place.

Neither could Bush prove that the House Judiciary Committee would suffer no harm, because the Bushies' contemplated schedule for their protracted litigation would have pushed beyond not only the dissolution of the current 110th Congress, but likely clear into the next presidential administration, and the district court rightly declined to speculate as to how a subsequent presidency — or the 111th Congress — would choose to handle the matter.

Finally, on the fourth element, the district court found at least some merit to the administration's claims, in that executive privilege and the separation of powers are important constitutional questions and therefore in the public interest, but that the public's interest in a speedier resolution to the irregular activities on the part of the Alberto Gonzales/Karl Rove Department of Justice outweighed the former concerns, particularly in view of the administration's failure to make its case on the first three elements of its burden.

Committee on the Judiciary v. Miers (.pdf, 15 pgs.)*

* Featuring an incorrect usage of the word "presently."

Nyet nyet, Soviet

Red Army Lt. Col. Vladislav Tretiak.

h/t TOSOMM.

Send Don Wildmon a gay Hallmark card

Do it today.

Faux News covers the DNC

"Well, I guess they don't believe in freedom of speech," concludes intrepid Faux News teevee journalist Griff Jenkins after wading into and attempting to disrupt a "marching thing" in Denver.

"Come here! What's your name?" (YouTube, 3:11)

Sounds to me like they were speaking pretty freely.

Bestest of the Bestest Wisconsin Blogs

One thing I invariably look forward to on Saturday evenings is finding out what complete nonsense the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's editorial board, in its collective wisdom, has deemed fit to enshrine at the weekly "Best of the Wisconsin Blogs" featurette.

Tonight is certainly no disappointment, nor should it be for readers of tomorrow's hard copy edition, where this stuff actually appears.

This week's "Best of the Blogs" memorializes the mostly pointless meanderings of one Christian Schneider, who resides at a "free market think tank," the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, also storied home to such profoundly compelling cogitators as the local medium-wave radio "personality" Charlie Sykes.

Evidently Mr. Schneider was quite disturbed and alarmed by outgoing University of Wisconsin Chancellor John D. Wiley's deliciously trenchant kiss-off to the State's legislative and executive branches, and especially to Wiley's smacking around of the dishonest partisan apparatchiks dwelling at Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.

Skipping beyond the more blathery portions of Schneider's screed, what seems to be some hard number crunching appears forthwith:

First, Wiley trots out the old canard that the UW System is underfunded:

According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the total UW budget was $2.5 billion in 1996-97. By 2006-07, just 10 years later, the total system budget had ballooned to $4.3 billion, an average increase of 5.7% per year over a decade.

What the Journal-Sentinel doesn't tell you is that but a portion of those figures is derived from State government contributions, which only increased by less than 2.2% annually over that same decade. And during two of the most recent annual periods, State funding was slashed, in one of them, by 10%. And cut again the next.

System-wide enrollment alone, meanwhile, rose by nearly 9%, to say nothing of other many and varied rising costs.

So how did UW pick up the State funding shortfalls? For one thing, it had to increase tuition. Drastically. In 2003, for example, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee bumped tuition almost 19%. The next year, it raised undergraduate tuition another 16%.

Since I first attended UWM in 2000, tuition has nearly doubled. The increases at the main campus in Madison, where enrollment is around 40,000 souls — roughly twice that of Milwaukee — are almost identical. And that's just resident tuition. I'm afraid to look at the figures for out-of-State tuition, which I paid for three or four semesters. From my own free market pocket, incidentally.

Of course, not even the "think tank" denizen Christian Schneider mentions any of that, let alone the Journal-Sentinel. Because then he'd actually have to address Chancellor Wiley's central point, instead of barely nibbling flaccidly around its nether edges, which is all he's apparently capable of doing.

But here's what Chancellor Wiley was saying: The less funding the State provides, the more difficult it is for Wisconsin individuals and families to receive college educations. And the more difficult that becomes for Wisconsinites, the less competitive the State becomes, academically, at business, and at research.

It's as simple as that and not really all that tough to follow.

And, forgive me the appeal to authority, but I'm prepared to defer to the head of the university on these matters rather than to an ideological bosom buddy of Charlie Sykes. The fact of beatification as a Journal-Sentinel "Best of the Bloggers" notwithstanding.

Yet Schneider has the unmitigated gall to say of Chancellor Wiley's missive, "The entire vitriolic commentary smacks of typical academic elitism — if you disagree with him, you are either evil or stupid."

Evidently Schneider counts himself among those who disagree with Wiley, and the reader is left to decide and pronounce upon which disjunctive side of Schneider's puerile false dichotomy applies to he.

But by disagreeing with Wiley one is forced to perpetuate academic elitism itself. Obviously when tuition doubles every few years, then pretty damn soon only the elite can afford academics.

Rocket science or even Econ 101, it ain't.

Occasionally I have to wonder why the Journal-Sentinel reproduces babblings like Schneider's in the truncated manner that it does. It's hard to tell whether Schneider's piece is excerpted thus as a means of positive recognition, or to make him look at least doubly foolish.

Because what it reproduced of Schneider's blog post is about 90% abusive rant and 9% misleading figures (the remainder is ellipses inserted by the paper's editors, including one set substituted for a quotation from Chancellor Wiley's original article).

And even at that, that's about all Schneider has to say about the University of Wisconsin's budget in his own original blog post. The balance of his deep thoughts, and not just the substanceless blithering selected by the Journal-Sentinel's editorial board, is all devoted to weeping the blues for poor little put-upon Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. Cry us a river, won't you please.

Wiley goes on to blame WMC for the "toxic" political environment in Wisconsin, as if there has never been tension between those who want to raise taxes and lower them.

Ah, yes. Like complaining that the DVDs stocked by the Milwaukee Public Library aren't highbrow enough. Pretty tense stuff, that.

"Think tank." "Best of the Blogs." It is to laugh.

Go Biden, Number Two Messiah

Never forget, Senator Biden saved America from Robert Bork.

"I believe I have rights because I exist, in spite of my government, not because of my government. Judge Bork believes that rights flow from the majority, through the Constitution to individuals, a notion I reject."

Learned counsel Michael B. Plaisted says it all.

Right-wing busts open the latest conspiracy

Yesterday an anonymous commenter here left behind a strange deposit alleging that criticism of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce is part of an "orchestrated campaign."

Just coincidentally, I'm sure, an earlier post at Milwaukee medium-wave harlequin Charlie Sykes's so-called blog claimed as Maestro of the said "orchestration" the governor of Wisconsin:

Sore Loser Lefty of the Day — John Wiley. First: none of these attacks on WMC is coincidence. This attack, Louis Butler's, and all the other "WMC is the problem" voices out there are being orchestrated by Jim Doyle, who is still wanting to make WMC pay for not supporting him last election.

Sykes actually considers this baseless conspiratorial observation a "savvy" one. Seriously.

And sure enough, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's dependable "right-wing guy" Patrick McIlheran is all over it:

Why would Wiley do this? Sykes' blog quotes a listener who contends by email that this is all orchestrated by Jim Doyle, ticked off at WMC.

Sounds plausible. The left-wing pressure group One Wisconsin Now has been trying to get its followers to flood WMC members' inboxes with emails saying they'd better stop being so Republican.

How's that for an intuitive handspring. So, what — Jim Doyle is running One Wisconsin Now, now? Sound plausible?

"The nerve of those tradesmen," McIlheran snorts. I don't know about McIlheran, but I detect the presence of no tradesmen among WMC's Board of Directors. I see corporate CEOs, managing partners at the State's biggest law firms, bankers, and financial consultants.

No manufacturers of tinfoil hats, however, which Sykes and McIlheran and their dedicated followers must be purchasing from out-of-State.

I doubt McIlheran would find any tradesmen among the partisan hacks who orchestrate WMC political campaigns either. Unless he has in mind steamfitters and plumbers in the Nixonian sense.

And non-union ones at that, naturally.

But he would definitely find lots of tradesmen on Epic Systems's construction site near Madison working for David Cullen, who withdrew from WMC in the wake of WMC's multi-million-dollar campaign of sleazy personal attacks against Justice Louis Butler.

As far as I can tell, everybody who opposes WMC's political techniques does so for their own individual reasons and indeed, one of WMC's most energetic critics, Paul Soglin, actually supports many of its goals. In most cases, it's the means and not the ends that are at issue in this ongoing debate.

If both Sykes and McIlheran seriously believe Governor Jim Doyle is acting as the puppetmaster to the WMC critics, you'd think they could come up with some better evidence than an unsigned e-mail from one of Sykes's own devoted and clownishly "savvy" acolytes.

Then again, probably not. Because the only conspiracy in evidence here is the one between fellow Journal Communications, Inc. employees Charlie Sykes and Patrick McIlheran. Forward, meme.

More from the cappermeister.

More patent dishonesty from WMC

So James A. Buchen, one of the handful of characters in charge of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce's political activities, claims that WMC "actively lobbied for final passage of the [University of Wisconsin] budget."

"But no such lobbying effort shows up in WMC's report to the state Government Accountability Board," according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Patrick Marley.

Instead, Buchen points to one sentence from its Legislative Agenda, buried in a .pdf file deep within WMC's website.

Buchen was responding to outgoing UW Chancellor John D. Wiley's plangent asskicking that appeared online this morning.

Even better, Chancellor Wiley also accused WMC of engaging in personal attacks against former State Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler, which WMC unquestionably did.

Yet James Buchen flatly asserts, "WMC did not engage in personal attacks, and that is simply false."

Unfortunately for James A. Buchen, what's utterly false is his own statement. The truth is that in two of WMC's teevee ads, the business outfit did nothing except engage in personal attacks.

WMC's personal attacks are otherwise known as circumstantial ad hominem, a logical fallacy, in which WMC freely indulged.

A circumstantial ad hominem is one in which some irrelevant personal circumstance surrounding the opponent is offered as evidence against the opponent's position. This fallacy is often introduced by phrases such as: "Of course, that's what you'd expect him to say." The fallacy claims that the only reason why he argues as he does is because of personal circumstances, such as standing to gain from the argument's acceptance.

This is precisely what WMC did.

During this year's State election campaign, WMC produced and aired spots devoted to Justice Butler's lone dissenting opinion in a case called State v. Jensen. In that opinion, Butler enunciated an argument based on the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution and its history that was subsequently affirmed by the most conservative Justices of the United States Supreme Court in a similar case out of California.

However, rather than engaging Justice Butler's reasoning, WMC portrayed him as someone "delivering loopholes" and "siding with criminals who threaten our safety." In its other Jensen ad, WMC referred to the Sixth Amendment itself as a technicality, and suggested through its use of Butler's ancient nickname that Butler was actively seeking to find a "technicality" in the case.

Louis Butler, decades ago, worked for the Wisconsin State Public Defender. He earned the nickname, which WMC put to such shamelessly fallacious use, because he was good at that job. Even assuming that the task of criminal defense lawyers is "finding loopholes," it's completely irrelevant to the role of a Supreme Court Justice, who is an advocate for neither side in disputes.

Here are the texts of both WMC teevee spots:

We count on judges to use practical common sense to keep violent criminals behind bars. But faced with an unspeakable crime, Justice Louis Butler almost jeopardized the prosecution of a murderer because he saw a technicality. When prosecutors needed to show critical evidence, Butler dissented, going against six other Justices. Thankfully, he didn't get his way. Jurors said it was the most important piece of evidence they saw. Call Louis Butler. Tell him to stand up for victims, not technicalities.

We've heard it before. Judge cites loophole, sides with criminal who threatens our safety. Take Justice Louis Butler. His colleagues called him Loophole Louie. A woman beaten to death with a bat. Butler uses a loophole, suppressing critical evidence. A husband poisoned his wife. Butler cites a loophole, almost jeopardizing the prosecution. Butler doesn't mind being called Loophole Louie. He says it's affectionate. Call Justice Louis Butler. Ask him to deliver justice, not loopholes.

This is pure personal attack, nothing more. Neither ad says anything about the constitutional arguments Butler forwarded in his opinion in Jensen. Argumentation attacks arguments. Ad hominem attacks the person: personal attacks. That's what ad hominem means.

And you'll never hear a peep out of WMC that Justice Antonin Scalia arrived at the same conclusion as did Justice Butler based on the same constitutional principles and their historical antecedents.

Not loopholes, and not technicalities. The Sixth Amendment. And because the Sixth Amendment applies not only to the federal government but also to the States, Justice Scalia's opinion is now the law of the land. Justice Butler beat him to it, that's all.

UW Chancellor Wiley is entirely correct in characterizing James Buchen's attempt at defending WMC's personal attacks as "lame." In fact it's beyond lame. It's disingenuous and intellectually dishonest.

But there's nothing surprising about that, as the entire campaign against Justice Butler — including that of his politically motivated challenger — was marked by patent dishonesty from start to finish. And, evidently, it continues still, thanks to those who speak on behalf of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.

A better explanation for promiscuity: Satan

Prof. Amy Wax believes it's caused by the gay agenda.

And the gay agenda, says Father Jeremy Davies of Westminster, is driven by "a contagious demonic factor." Father Davies is also the town exorcist, looking to drum up new accounts, apparently.

Even regular old missionary position intercourse, if committed outside of marriage, is a "pathway for evil spirits," sez the exorcist, who took a four-month training program in Rome under the Catholic Church's top caster-outer-of-demons, Father Gabriele Amorth.

Satan doesn't mess with married people, or something.

Furthermore, Satan is working overtime to blind "secular humanists" to the "dehumanising effects of 'homosexual marriage.'" Dehumanizing humanists — clearly an insidious Satanic trick.

Satan also reportedly keeps in shape by performing "trendy exercise" such as yoga and even finds time to compose your daily horoscope.

So stay away from those, even "for fun," advises Father Davies.

Satan himself was unavailable for comment, despite Father Davies's claims that he's relatively easy to summon via séance, Ouija board, or the local atheist, who of course maintains close contact with most supernatural personages including Zeus, Thor, and the leprechauns.

Jeremiah Wright in a skirt

World Nut Daily, the online lair of fabulist smear merchant Jerome Corsi, today responds to a lengthy profile of Leah Daughtry, who is helping organize the Democratic National Convention, that appeared in the New York Times last month.

For some reason, World Nut quotes extensively from Judi McLeod, a Canadian and former columnist at the low-market tabloid Toronto Sun, which years ago perfected the practice of printing letters to the editor complete with bitingly sarcastic, italicized rebuttals.

Daughtry, a pentecostal preacher with a D.C. congregation of 20, seems to be coming under fire from just about every direction, for her "black liberation" opinions from the theologically pure World Nut crowd, from the Catholic League's Wild Bill Donohue for accrediting a gay blogger, and from so-called "secularists" for kicking off the Dem convention with some kind of mass prayer service.

The Democrats are seeking all those godly "values voters," apparently. Whatever it takes, I guess. This is America, after all, where politics and religion are practically inextricable.

That's why I find it odd that World Nut attributes so much alleged wisdom to somebody from Canada, where religion has had little to do with politics since Catholics and Protestants used to engage in murderous street fights in the 19th century each year on the anniversary of the 17th century Battle of the Boyne.

It goes to show what close attention Canadians pay to U.S. politics, whereas the converse is essentially non-existent. Even Barack Obama himself made reference to the "president of Canada."

One of the reasons for that is because election campaigns in Canada — even national ones — last for all of about two weeks, whereas here they are seemingly perpetual. Furthermore, American news media is all-pervasive throughout the Great White North, while the average Canuck expat can barely get to watch a hockey game in Shorewood.

But the best part is where erstwhile presidential candidate Howard Dean said the Book of Job was his favorite New Testament reading.

Hard to say which is sillier: that response, or the attenuated relevance of the question that elicited it in the first place.

Earlier:
Jeremiah Wright: Enough already
God damn European cantatas

Federalist Society same-sex marriage "debate"

Here is an amusing online debate among some law professors on the question of same-sex marriage, hosted by the Federalist Society. Two participants are arguing the pro position, while two argue the anti (although one of them only shows up at the end to say goodbye and thank his partner for doing all the "heavy lifting").

The other anti proponent is Prof. Amy Wax, whom the Federalist Society praises for her "uniquely insightful approach."

Prof. Wax's opening salvo begins with, "a big part of the gay agenda for decades has been to repudiate what are regarded as overly restrictive expectations of monogamy and sexual fidelity," and then claiming, "the rise of multi-partner relationships as a way of life has been a major force in the decline of marriage."

Not even the other debate participants know what she's on about: "I’m afraid I've lost the thread of what all this has to do with the same-sex marriage question," says Prof. Andrew Koppelman.

Prof. Koppelman nevertheless helpfully breaks Prof. Wax's "argument" into its constituent premises and conclusions, showing both that the premises are entirely dubious and that even if they were sound, her conclusions don't follow from them anyway.

Prof. Wax responds: "Too logical for me! I guess I just don't agree that gay men will keep their non-monogamy to themselves."

Funny stuff, and worth a (quick) read.

Another Canadian deemed too sexy

Welcome to the club, Avril Lavigne.

Why not just cancel her because she's too awful.

Fortunately, Milwaukee books the talented Canadians.

Donohue's homo bookmarking

Wild Bill Donohue, the irascible fruitcake head of something called the Catholic League, is upset that a website "with homosexual tendencies" has been awarded media credentials to report from next week's Democratic National Convention in Denver.

So he's demanding that Leah Daughtry, who's running the convention, dump the blogger.

Why? Because the site's proprietor wrote a blog post citing a report in the Manchester Guardian that Joseph Ratzinger is the first pope in 40 years to dress himself up in ermine-trimmed robes and hats, complete with what seems to me some entirely fair commentary comparing Ratzinger's fur bearing proclivities with several of his other infallible policy positions.

Also, because it "shows men in jockstraps and underwear" (although, mercifully, Joseph Ratzinger is not among those, ermine-trimmed or otherwise). But so do store catalogs, don't they?

What the heck is Wild Bill Donohue doing trolling around on gay websites, is what I'd like to know. Shopping for underwear?

Here it is.

Bush, not Obama, ordained by God

So conservatives are whooping it up over Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's introduction of Barack Obama as "a leader that God has blessed us with at this time" during a fundraising event. Would that they were as distraught and inflamed by Republican god-bothering.

Scalia assists in lesbian impregnation

Via Prof. Friedman:

The California Supreme Court held unanimously that a medical clinic's physicians are prohibited from discriminating against patients on the basis of sexual orientation.

Two clinic physicians refused, on religious grounds, to perform intrauterine insemination for an unmarried lesbian patient. The court held that under the 1st Amendment, no religious exemption is mandated because the [California] Unruh Civil Rights Act is a neutral law of general application.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia formulated that rule.

Thanks for making his point

Via Pundit Nation:

Daniel Cody is wondering at the time Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker is spending calling in to the Charlie Sykes show and preparing e-mail that Sykes can post at his blog. Isn't he supposed to be running county government?

Walker dutifully responded to Daniel Cody's inquiry — by e-mailing Charlie Sykes, who in turn dutifully reproduced Walker's e-mail.

And to top it all off, Sykes thinks the irony lies everywhere else.

Personhood also above Ratzinger's pay grade

The assumption of Obama's critics is that a president should always reduce complex issues to simple black and white truisms, unfounded in reality. That's why they supported Bush. And that's why they're supporting McCain.

Andrew Sullivan.

Recall that Rick Warren didn't ask Barack Obama 'When does life begin,' but rather, "At what point does a baby get human rights."

John McCain got, "At what point is a baby entitled to human rights." Those are two very different questions, in that one may not get what one is entitled to — and vice versa — and both are quite a bit different than 'When does life begin,' a separate inquiry to which McCain seems to have been responding.

Needless to say, the right-wingers are currently engrossed in a typical self-righteous snit, despite apparently not even having considered the meaning of the questions themselves. Much like John McCain.

John Sidnevich McSolzhenitsyn?

The Christian Prison Guards of Communist North Vietnam.

Evidently John McCain was in no "cone of silence" either, as Left Coast megapastor Rick Warren had claimed on Saturday evening.

Rick Warren completely contradicted himself on whether or not he knew McCain was in the building. Twice. First, he says they had a coin toss before the forum started to see who would go first. But if McCain was not there, how could they conduct the coin toss? And if Warren knew McCain wasn’t there to do the coin toss, why did he continue to state that McCain was in the building? The second contradiction was his remarks to CNN’s Rick Sanchez where he said that he did not know that McCain was out of the building ... but then felt compelled to ask Obama an extra question because McCain had not yet arrived at the building! Is he for real?

Funny business.

Regardless, Senator McCain lately seems to have become considerably less reluctant to discuss his experiences as a POW.

Last week, when the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a close Bush ally, publicly questioned McCain’s character, the McCain campaign responded by highlighting McCain’s background as a prisoner of war. When Dems attacked McCain’s healthcare plan in May, McCain responded by noting his background as a prisoner of war. Asked by a local reporter about the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks of Pittsburgh, McCain responded by talking about his background as a prisoner of war.

And, just yesterday, on the bogus "cone of silence" question, a McCain campaign spokeswoman replied:

The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.

What's that got to do with it? There's no question McCain's experience as a POW was horrendous and dreadful, and it took great character and courage to refuse the North Vietnamese offer of release, but it doesn't otherwise indemnify him against scrutiny.

McCain's absolute faith based pandering

Last night during Left Coast megapastor Rick Warren's Q&A session with Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, Warren asked for both presidential candidates' view of the so-called faith based initiatives, whereby federal funds are diverted to religious groups for performing otherwise non-religious social services:

WARREN: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows religious organizations, not just churches, but faith based organizations, to keep and hire the people that they believe [they] share common beliefs with.

McCAIN: Yes.

WARREN: Would you insist that faith based organizations forfeit that right to access federal funds?

McCAIN: Absolutely not. And if you do, it would mean a severe crippling of faith based organizations and their abilities to do the things that they have done so well successfully.

Then, my friends, McCain rambled away into another tedious stump speech, which is pretty much all he did for an entire hour.

McCain doesn't have a clue, although his stream of absolutisms plays well with the evangelical crowd, who are absolutely enamored with the idea of absolutely absolute everything.

But federal funds are not available for programs whose implementation involves discrimination on the basis of religion.

Obama got it right:

I think generally speaking faith based organizations should not be advantaged or disadvantaged when it comes to getting federal funds by virtue of the fact that they are faith based organizations. They just want a level playing field.

But what we want to make sure of is that as a general principle we're not using federal funding to discriminate but that is only when it comes to the narrow program that is being funded by the federal government. That does not affect any of the other ministries that are taking place.

In other words, they're free to discriminate with their own money, and the government isn't going to stop them from discriminating.

McCain's "absolutely not" is as silly as his suggestion that the rights of fully grown, adult women must be abrogated in favor of the "human rights" of an undifferentiated zygote they may be hosting.

Interestingly, McCain also referred to the right to privacy as "one of the fundamental and basic rights we have," which, as everybody except John McCain seems to understand, is one of the core constitutional principles underlying Roe v. Wade.

The constitutional right to privacy was only recently "discovered," as many conservatives will tell you, in a 1965 case called Griswold v. Connecticut. It's nice to know, however, that McCain is apparently a big supporter of Griswold.

Indeed, that it's a "fundamental and basic right" is at the heart of Lawrence v. Texas, another U.S. Supreme Court case hated by conservatives, in which statutes banning sodomy were struck down.

McCain's all mixed up. No wonder conservatives don't trust him.

Incidentally, Senator McCain voted 'Yea' in favor of the nominations of three of the four sitting Supreme Court Justices he now claims he wouldn't have nominated. The fourth, Justice John Paul Stevens, was named to the Court before McCain arrived in the Senate.

And let's not forget Robert Novak's reporting that McCain had referred to Justice Samuel Alito as "too conservative" for McCain's liking. But suddenly Alito is one of McCain's "most recent favorites."

What, now Justice Alito is liberal enough for McCain?

Anonymous said ...

The values of this country are degenerating at a rapid pace and all we have to do is look in the mirror to see why.

I'll take her/him and his/her mirror at their respective words, and will also take care to avoid all those valueless churches.

Smite him with an instrument of iron

Khristian Oliver killed Joe Collins when Collins arrived home to discover Oliver in the midst of a burglary. After shooting Collins, Oliver whacked him on the head a few times with a rifle butt.

At Oliver's trial for capital murder, a medical examiner testified that although Collins was probably already dead from the shooting, the rifle butt attack was such that it alone could have caused Collins's demise.

A jury convicted Oliver and in separate deliberations, sentenced him to death. The latter procedure turned into a mini Bible study group, and Oliver filed a motion seeking a new trial because of that.

At a hearing on Oliver's motion, jurors said there were no fewer than four King James Bibles floating around the jury room and in particular several lines from the Book of Numbers were consulted in order to assist jurors in determining whether Oliver should face capital punishment based on a "What Would Yahweh Do" theory.

The central problem here concerned the claim that the verses consulted supposedly specifically described the facts directly germane to the circumstances of Oliver's criminal offense.

For example:

And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.

And:

Or if he smite him with an hand weapon of wood, wherewith he may die, and he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.

The trouble with that is, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, the introduction of an "external influence" to jury deliberations is presumed to be a potential violation of a criminal defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.

For another thing, "smiting" alone doesn't warrant the death penalty in Texas. It needs to be a smiting plus something else; in this instance the something else was during the course of a burglary.

The tricky part, of course, is that plenty of jurors are thinking Bible-thoughts during deliberations, but in this case the jurors specifically consulted hard copy Bibles with a view to assessing their application to the very facts and law presented at trial, and jurors are only to consider those facts and that law without the aid of the said external influences.

In other words, Bible law was not a factor during Oliver's trial and therefore may not be considered as part of the jury deliberations.

Having unsuccessfully exhausted his Texas State remedies, Oliver resorted to the federal system, and on Thursday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower federal court that while what his jury did was impermissible according to federal law, Oliver failed to demonstrate the level of prejudice on the part of the jury required to overturn his penalty.

Apart from strongly deferring to the State courts' earlier determinations against Oliver, the Fifth Circuit noted that 1) it wasn't clear whether the jurors engaged in Bible study before or after reaching their decision 2) some of the twelve jurors said the Bible had nothing to do with their vote and 3) there was no evidence the Bibles were consulted with even the slightest whiff of permission from the trial court and indeed the court expressly instructed the jury to deliberate on nothing but the facts and law presented at trial.

That is, had the trial court even impliedly sanctioned the Bible consultations, it would have been a different story altogether.

What the Fifth Circuit did decide was that in this case, the Bible was an "external influence" as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court and in that sense the Fifth Circuit's decision is in accord with several other federal circuits in similar cases.

But since there is a two-part test, and Oliver was only able to satisfy the first part — that the jury's consultation of the Bible was impermissible under the circumstances — Oliver failed to prove the alleged prejudicial effects of that impermissibility were such that they rose to the level of a Sixth Amendment violation.

So, barring any intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court or the governor of Texas, Khristian Oliver will himself likely be smited, or smote, or however it is that they're doing it down there these days.

Oliver v. Quarterman (.pdf; 23 pgs.)

The diaries of Eric Arthur Blair

Better known as George Orwell, follow his daily entries from 1938 at this link. The project will continue for some time, apparently.

August 9: Caught a large snake.

h/t The History Blog.*

* Who informs me that the entries will continue through 2012.

Of Corsi cant

Via The Motley Cow:

Too crazy for even the deranged and the demented.

eta: Via gnarlytrombone:

9/11 "truther" nuttiness.

Jerome Corsi: The new right-wing hero.