Musing's musings

Signing off here

2005-05-28T23:29:00.000-05:00

I'm definitely jumping ship. It's going to take me a while to figure out all the bells and whistles over at Typepad, but I'm liking what I've been able to do in just a couple of days. So if you read or link to this blog, please move your bookmarks and links over to the new place: musing85.typepad.com. Except in extraordinary circumstances (and I can't readily imagine what those might be), there will be no more posts here.

Catch you on the flip!

Kill it! Kill it! Beat it with a stick!

2005-05-27T12:51:00.000-05:00

It's time for Illinois residents to get out the cell phones and warm up the fax machines. We need to talk to our legislators in Springfield, and pronto. It appears that Gov. Blagojevich thinks he has the votes to ram through his disastrous budget this weekend, before the constitutional deadline: and I have more than a sneaking suspicion that he's waited this long to do it precisely because he knows it's going to piss off an awful lot of his constituents, and he's hoping everyone will be so busy with the Memorial Day weekend that they won't be paying attention to his shenanigans.

I vote we disabuse him of that notion right now.

It has long since become obvious to almost everyone in Illinois except our legislators and the Blagorgeous that there is no more fat to be pared from the state budget, no more blood to be squeezed from this particular turnip. Yet I heard some twit of an assemblyman this morning on NPR saying that while he agreed the governor's pension holiday idea was a disaster in the making, there were no other options available to fix the state's financial problems.

That's an outright lie. There's one rather obvious solution that nobody seems to be talking about: to wit, raising our state income tax rate a little bit. We could even make it a temporary increase, to tide us over until the state's economy (and hence its finances) get back on more solid ground. I really don't think there'd be all that much political fallout, and whatever fallout did arise would be in the short term.

We can all recognize that jiggery-pokery with more casino gambling, and all of Blagojevich's other tricks are simply not going to work in the long run. It's not even clear to me that they'll work in the short run, and I think it's about bloody time someone in the General Assembly developed the "testicular virility" to tell him so in no uncertain terms.

Let's take a good look at this pension holiday idea, because the more you look at it, the worse it stinks. Let's start with the fact that one of the reasons the state's budget is currently in such dire straits is because another governor, facing another budget crisis back in the 1980s, decided to stop funding state contributions toward its employees' retirement plans, despite the fact that such contributions are constitutionally mandated. Sure, the pension holiday averted a tide of red ink then, but we're sure as hell paying for it now: because the state not only has to put back all the money it didn't put into employees' pension funds in the 1980s, but it also has to make up the difference in terms of earned interest and compounded rates of return.

To put that in perspective, consider this quote from a story in the Champaign News-Gazette this past Tuesday:

Every dollar the state shorts the pension systems this year will cost $13 in 2045, Teachers' Retirement System Executive Director Jon Bauman told the General Assembly's Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability.

In other words, if the governor shorts the state's employee pension funds the full $1.2 billion he's short in this year's budget, in another 40 years the state is going to be paying $15.6 billion for its "holiday" this year: or more than half of the state's enacted budget for the 2005 fiscal year that's just about to end ($25.6 billion).

But let's forget about the fact that the pension holiday is a budgetary disaster waiting to happen--and to be passed on to our children and grandchildren in the name of political expediency. It also represents what Rich Miller rightly calls "a gigantic flip-flop" from Blagorgeous. Let's remind the governor of what he said in his budget message this February:

Imagine you have a credit card.
Every month, you keep using that card. At the same time, you’re not always paying the balance you owe. In fact, sometimes, you even skip a payment or two.

But you keep using that card to buy new things. So what happens? The principal goes up, the interest rate goes up, and the monthly minimum goes up.

Just paying the monthly minimum takes away the money you need to pay the rent, pay for groceries, for clothes, and for everything else.

Now imagine doing this for 35 years.

For the average family, that’s a surefire recipe for personal bankruptcy. But unfortunately, it’s exactly what the State of Illinois has been doing, year in and year out.

In 1995, the legislature tried to solve the problem by passing legislation to strengthen pension funding. But it didn't work. [...]

In fact, it got a lot worse.

So what changed, governor? More importantly, what was it changed your mind, so that you now think balancing the budget on the backs of the state's employees, who are already giving until it hurts, is now the only way to go? This is hardly the kind of leadership we have a right to expect from our elected officials, and it is far from being a ringing endorsement of your candidacy for a second term in office.

Speaking of which, Governor Blagojevich, if I were you, I'd think about updating my resume. Starting right now.

The better angels of our nature

2005-05-27T11:49:00.000-05:00

You should go read Tarek's post from yesterday. His soon-to-be 59-year-old father, who wasn't even born in the United States, has just shipped out to Iraq as a flight surgeon in the USAF Reserve:

He is a flight surgeon, and there will only be one other physician at this little camp which it seems strange to call a hospital. These two doctors will alternate 12 hour shifts (much like my dad does now as an emergency room physician) and will handle what they can and airlift what need more attention. This is what he does currently, in a way, without, in all likelihood, any danger of being harmed.
I was saying to my sister that the thing about my father is, he is considers himself a patriotic American. He believes deeply in this country, and though he loves Egypt, he considers this nation his home. That's why he signed up to be an Air Force Reservist. I just hope it doesn't get him killed.

I'll quite happily sing an "Amen" to that last sentiment. And I must say, it's exactly this kind of devotion that puts the 101st Fighting Keyboarders to shame. I'm sure we all remember when Jonah Goldberg was whining about how he was too old (at 38, if memory serves) to go and fight in Bush's Big Adventure, for which he was such an enthusiastic cheerleader. Well, Jonah baby, if a guy half again your age can do it, so can you. Get thee to an induction station, go!

Friday random 10

2005-05-27T10:22:00.000-05:00

The rules: Take out your iPod or other musical device. Put it in "random" mode. Hit "play." Write down the first ten tracks that come up--and no fair putting in ones you think will make you look cool, or omitting ones that make you look like a total dork.

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

Rain (Erasure, Cowboy). I still don't know why the critics thought this was a terrible album. I love it.
Minstrels/Night, Part 3 (George Winston, December)
Concerto in G major, RV 145, first movement, allegro molto (I Musici, Vivaldi: Concertos for Strings and Continuo)
TV Pilot (Lewis Black, The White Album)
The Garment of Love (Notre Dame Folk Choir, Candled Seasons)
Hartbreak Hotel (Capitol Steps, Shamlet: A Political Comedy)
Sometimes, extended mix (Erasure, The Circus)
Veni, veni Emmanuel (Mannheim Steamroller, Fresh Aire Christmas 1988)
Live from Matt Molloy's Pub (The Chieftains, Water from the Well)
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36, fourth movement, allegro molto (John Eliot Gardiner/Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Beethoven: 9 Symphonies)

Cross-posted from my Typepad blog.

I'm thinking about moving

2005-05-27T10:04:00.000-05:00

After waiting six hours to post the other day, for a "temporary" service interruption that wasn't supposed to last more than an hour, I went hunting for a new blog home. I'm not 100% satisfied with it, and I'll probably be bugging any of my blogging buddies who host with Typepad for help to figure out the tricks of the trade, but for right now that's probably where I'm going to wind up.

For the duration of the trial period, I'm probably going to be dual-posting both here and at my possible new home, http://musing85.typepad.com/. So if you're a regular reader and you don't want to miss anything, you might want to add the Typepad address to your bookmarks. Feel free to drop by the new place and let me know how you like the design, features you think I should add, etc.

News of the weak in review

2005-05-25T10:32:00.000-05:00

The spokes-hamster is going to be getting another beating from Karl Rove, methinks. In Monday's press briefing, Scott "I'm A Big Boy Now" McClellan actually told the truth for a change:

Q: One other question. Karzai was quite definite in saying that he didn't believe that the violence in Afghanistan was directly tied to the Newsweek article about Koran desecration. Yet, from this podium, you have made that link. So --
MR. McCLELLAN: Actually, I don't think you're actually characterizing what was said accurately.

(My emphasis)

Well, OK, he only mostly told the truth. Because the reporter was correctly characterizing what Scotty-boy said last week:

Q: Scott, you said that the retraction by Newsweek magazine of its story is a good first step. What else does the President want this American magazine to do?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, it's what I talked about yesterday. This report, which Newsweek has now retracted and said was wrong, has had serious consequences. People did lose their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged; there is lasting damage to our image because of this report. And we would encourage Newsweek to do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done, particularly in the region.

(My emphasis)

But, back to Monday, Scotty did manage to pull a rabbit out of his ~~ass~~ hat, which may do something to placate his irascible master. (Unfortunately for his professional career--or perhaps fortunately, as long as he doesn't go looking for a job in the reality-based community--it will do nothing to repair the damage to his tattered credibility.)

MR. McCLELLAN: As I said last week, and as President Karzai said today, and as General Myers had said previously, the protest may well have been pre-staged. The discredited report was damaging. It was used to incite violence. But those who espouse an ideology of hatred and oppression and murder don't need an excuse to incite violence. But the reports from the region showed how this story was used to incite violence.

Q: But Karzai seemed to think that that wasn't what led to the violence, that it was --

MR. McCLELLAN: That's right, he actually -- he talked about -- President Karzai spoke about how the demonstrations were aimed at undercutting the progress being made toward democracy in Afghanistan, and the progress on elections. They have elections coming up soon. And I spoke about that, as well, last week.

Q: So could it be said that the Newsweek article played a role, but was not --

MR. McCLELLAN: John, I think we've made our views known when it comes to the discredited report. There are some that want to continue to defend what is a discredited report that has been disavowed by Newsweek, and that's their business. We're perfectly willing to trust the American people to make their own judgment about it.

(My emphasis)

So which is it gonna be, Scotty? Newsweek is responsible for the deaths, or Newsweek isn't responsible and you're just another lying sack of Republican shite? I know which answer I'd give to that question, but I'd like to hear it from your own lips.

And that line about trusting the American people to make their own judgments? Don't make me laugh. You and the people you work for can't possibly trust the American people to make informed judgments--because if you did, not only would you not be making the preznit's public appearances harder to get into than the sultan's harem to any non-neutered male, your man wouldn't have any public appearances to make.

A crack in the Blagorgeous façade?

2005-05-25T09:02:00.000-05:00

Or perhaps I should say "another crack." When the governor's approval ratings are lower even than those of the Worst. President. Ever., it's inevitable that those little worry lines are going to start showing up. And showing.

I have to think they got a lot bigger Monday. When your state's senior senator, and a member of your own party, goes on record like this, you know it's time to start thinking about updating your résumé:

CHICAGO - U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Springfield, today did not discourage fellow Democrats from taking on controversy-plagued Gov. Rod Blagojevich in next year's primary election and said he's not endorsing the incumbent at this point."Anyone can run for any office," Durbin said at an unrelated news conference in Chicago.
"I'm not going to say what's good or bad for the party. I want to make sure that the voters in Illinois have good candidates to vote for."Asked if he'll endorse Blagojevich, who's expected to run for a second term in 2006, Durbin replied: "I'm not making any endorsement today. What I've said in the past is I've worked with him, I'm looking forward to working with him in the future."

Durbin didn't throw his own hat in the ring, and that's good. I think he'd make an excellent governor, and his support Downstate could well be key in a primary faceoff against Blagorgeous, who is hated in those parts. But I'd much rather keep Durbin in Washington and in a Democratic leadership post. His seniority and experience will come in handy throughout the rest of the fading Bush administration--and will be most welcome should the Democrats be successful in wresting control of Congress away from the radical Republicans now running it at the next congressional elections in 2006.

Now all we need to do is find a solid Democrat with good name recognition and either enough of his/her own money to beat off Blagorgeous and his warchest, or who can attract enough support from the state and national Democratic Party to take down this poseur before he runs the state into the ground.

Deal off?

2005-05-25T00:21:00.000-05:00

Hey, what do you know? Blogger finally woke up and let me post again--after six hours of waiting. What follows here was originally posted over at the Liberal Coalition site (it still is, in fact). And since I was a good little boy (or something), I get to post it here, too. Anybody know a good, reliable, and reasonably cheap blog host?

Anyway, on to the serious matters at hand. If you read this site yesterday, you know I'm anything but pleased about the compromise reached last night to end the nuclear option. I still think the Democrats gave away just about everything in the store and got considerably less than $24 worth of trinkets in return.

However, the Republican extremists may yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, at least if a story in today's New York Times is to be believed:

Just a day after the agreement broke an impasse that had vexed the Senate and the Bush administration for years, senators on both sides of the aisle portrayed the new framework as fragile. Republicans in particular said the bipartisan deal, brokered by seven Democrats and seven Republicans on the eve of a showdown that could have crippled the Senate, would survive only if Democrats refrained from filibustering other emerging nominees, including some who were not guaranteed a vote in the last-minute agreement.
Other Republicans threatened to immediately invoke what some have called the nuclear option - doing away with the filibuster against judicial candidates - if Democrats tried to block any nominee except in the most extreme cases.

"This is merely a truce; it's not a treaty yet," said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee.

Clearly, James Dobson has whipped his minions into a froth every bit as frenzied as his own expostulation on the subject of the compromise last night. (Google it for yourselves; I'll be damned if I give that fanatic extremist any bounce.) But while I absolutely expected this kind of backpedaling from the lying Republicans in a Congress that is clearly in thrall to the most radical elements of the radical right wing, even I didn't expect it to start barely 24 hours after the agreement was reached.

Since I hate the agreement anyway, I'd be lying if I said I felt any regrets at the prospect of waking up tomorrow and finding it lying in tiny pieces all over the floor. I could almost begin to hope for such an eventuality, since that discovery would be the missing ingredient for turning what can only be regarded as a Pyrrhic victory for the Democrats at best (we had to destroy the filibuster--in terms of its being an effective deterrent--in order to save it) into a rout the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, otherwise known as the Battle of the Philippine Sea, which was fought just about 61 years ago.

So yes, let Dobson, Falwell, Bauer, Frist, and all the other radical Republican extremists "furiously rage together," to borrow a phrase from Händel's Messiah. Let them, in their folly, pull the trigger on the nuclear option sometime next week when one of Bush's other extremist judicial nominees makes it to the floor of the Senate and is filibustered. Hell, let them do it later this week, when the galactically unqualified John Bolton comes up for confirmation as ambassador to the United Nations and is sent packing.

Because if they do so, then the Democrats get all the credit for being the party of moderation, the party that was willing to compromise on nominations it felt very strongly about, in order to get back to doing the work of the people who voted to send them to Washington in the first place. And the Republicans will be revealed for what they really are--a party of extremist zealots, whose primary allegiance is not to the voters who elected them, the nation they allegedly serve, nor even the Constitution they swore a sacred oath to "preserve, protect, and defend from all enemies, foreign and domestic," but rather to a small group of religious extremists whose ultimate goal is to destroy that very Constitution, the better to advance the warped and twisted agenda of the idol they worship in place of the God of the Bible.

Want a Democratic Congress in 2006, Senator Frist? A Democratic White House in 2008? Go ahead, make our day: Pull that nuclear trigger.

Just be sure you're standing at ground zero when you do so. Think your own presidential ambitions are in tatters now? Just wait until you see what they'll look like after you reap the whirlwind of the wind you've already sown.

Holy shit!

2005-05-24T18:51:00.000-05:00

Well, OK, here's one positive thing to come out of this whole nukular opshun compromise: Howard Kurtz quoted me in today's Washington Post. Unfortunately, he chose to quote (and link to) the cross-posting at the Liberal Coalition and not the original here. But, hey, I hope the increased notice will drive some traffic to all the rest of the LC blogs.

And a hat-tip to fellow LC blogger iddybud, for pointing it out on her blog. (I only noticed the quote when I saw someone linking back to my blog from hers and clicked to see what the reference was.)

Podesta gets it (mostly) right

2005-05-24T12:57:00.000-05:00

Over at the Center for American Progress, CEO John D. Podesta's statement on the compromise to avoid the nuclear option comes the closest of any of the major think-tanks' positions to my own. I like that he starts his statement with the sentence "It should never have come to this."

I can't join him, however, in commending the Felonious Fourteen for lacking the spine to stand firm for the principles of fairness and the rules of the Senate as these have been in place for more than two and a quarter centuries. But the middle three grafs are spot-on:

But this victory comes at a heavy price: the near-certain confirmation of at least three nominees whose contempt for constitutional liberties and disregard of precedent make them manifestly unworthy of judicial office.
While the fate of the remaining nominees remains uncertain, at least two of them will be subject to a filibuster and a cloture vote, and presumably these and certain other nominees will be defeated if they cannot muster the support of 60 senators.

The success of this fragile compromise will depend upon the good faith of senators on both sides, and on the willingness of the White House to desist from the confrontational behavior that precipitated this crisis.

I can't understand the enthusiasm even mainstream liberal/progressive bloggers (like kos at dKos, and even some of my colleagues in the Liberal Coalition) are displaying at the fact that we managed to block two nominees at the price of allowing arguably the three worst to proceed to almost-certain confirmation. Rumors abound that at least one of them will fail on his/her "up-or-down vote," but of course there is no hard evidence to go on until the Clerk of the Senate has finished calling the roll for the yeas and nays. And if these nominees were despicable and unacceptable the day before yesterday, they certainly haven't become any less so in the wake of this compromise.

The biggest fly in this fly-spotted ointment, however, is what Podesta takes on in his last paragraph, and that is the vacancy on the Supreme Court when Chief Justice Rehnquist probably steps down at the end of the current term. Sure, the compromise reached yesterday allegedly preserves the filibuster. But it does so in terms that make it far from clear to this reader that its preservation actually means anything. The filibuster is not dead, but neither can it really be said to be living.

Two of the Republicans who signed onto this agreement (Lindsey Graham and Mike DeWine) have already indicated that, as far as they're concerned, they're perfectly free to haul out the nuclear option again in the event of a real or promised Democratic filibuster against any judicial nominee this Congress. Senator Cat Killer is on the same page.

And while, as Podesta also notices, the document does express a hope that the preznit will "consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration," it is, after all, only a hope. Probably a forlorn one at that, given this preznit's apparently unshakeable conviction that he has some kind of a direct line to God on all matters having to do with his presidency or the course of this nation. That's not exactly the sort of attitude that tends to promote consultation, and his behavior in all other respects (tightly controlled access to presidential events, for example) only confirms the suspicion that this Emperor Chimpy is not a man who cares to listen to opinions other than his own--or at least those of the people who are pulling his strings.

Another thing that's bugging me is the "shut your fucking pie-hole" attitude that a lot of lefty bloggers (again, including some of my colleagues in the Liberal Coalition) are adopting about this compromise. "It's over," they're telling us, "and we won. Get over it."

Sorry, but I don't work like that--and regular readers of this blog know it. Nobody gets to tell me how to think or what to believe. They certainly don't get to dictate to me on my emotional state or the contents of my noetic structure. I make those decisions myself, and I continue to be peeved that this compromise was made at all. Nor does the lavish application of victory lipstick to this incredibly ugly pig of a loss make me any more inclined to celebrate it.

Tuesday non-random 14

2005-05-24T07:30:00.000-05:00

In "honor" of the Felonious Fourteen, herewith a listing of tracks on my MP3 player that I consider appropriate to the "compromise" bargain they struck. Many, though not all, of these tunes were played last night as I tried to get myself into something like a mood where sleep was going to be possible. I have little doubt I'll be needing them again in future, sadly.

American Idiot (Green Day, American Idiot). Particularly appropriate for the opening lines of the chorus: "Welcome to a new kind of tension/All across the alienation/Where everything isn't meant to be OK."
La vendetta (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro). The opening line of Dr. Bartolo's first-act aria gives me a little hope: La vendetta è un piacer serbato ai saggi, "Vengeance is a pleasure reserved for the wise."
Non più andrai (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro). While I wouldn't describe any of the Gang of Fourteen as farfallone amorosi, "amorous butterflies," I can certainly join in Figaro's glee at the fact that (Deo volente), they "won't be around anymore" in a couple of years.
Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Die Zauberflöte). I'm with the Queen of the Night: the rage of Hell is burning in my heart.
Thou shalt break them (Georg Frideric Händel, Messiah). One of the tenor parts I've always loved. Today more than ever I'm in the mood to break things "with a rod of iron" and to "dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth (Georg Frideric Händel, Messiah). A baritone piece I've also loved. I'm just praying like crazy that after we get through this latest bit of "gross darkness" covering the people of this land, the Lord will indeed arise upon us and dispel the gloom--by whisking the extremist Republicans off to jail (or at least out of Congress), and bringing sanity back to our government.
(Don't want to live) In the real world (Alan Parsons Project, Stereotomy). Oh, how I wish the seven wavering Democrats (many of them in name only) had taken the first line of this song to heart: "One more compromise I won't be making."
Si, ch'io vorrei morire (Claudio Monteverdi, Il secondo libro dei madrigali). Well, OK, this one's just a teensy bit over the top. I don't really feel like dying: but if any one of the Gang of Fourteen feels so inclined, please, don't stop on my account.
Draw on, sweet night (John Rutter/The Cambridge Singers, Flora Gave Me Finest Flowers). It's a lovely piece, and John Wilbye was right to call night "best friend unto those cares that do arise from painful melancholy."
I'm So Happy, I Can't Stop Crying (Sting, Mercury Falling). Self-explanatory.
Beaujolais (Alan Parsons Project, Stereotomy). One good way of inviting sweet night to draw on.
Shoebox (of lies) (Barenaked Ladies, Shoebox). Exactly where we can put the text of this agreement, right next to that "mutual trust and confidence" we're supposed to expect from the Republican extremists.
He was cut off out of the land of the living (Georg Frideric Händel, Messiah). OK, this one's a bit OTT as well. I don't really want to see Holy Joe whacked, but I do think he should be "stricken" from Congress for his transgressions, which are legion.
Love to hate you (Erasure, Chorus). Describes my feelings about the Felonious Fourteen to a "T."

What a revolting development

2005-05-23T19:53:00.000-05:00

I never thought Senator Cat-Killer had the votes (or the "testicular virility," to steal a phrase from Governor Blagorgeous) to go through with his "nuclear option." I had hoped the matter would be settled when a few of the Republicans realized they would be slitting their own throats as James Dobson's patsies, and vote with the Democrats.

But I never expected this kind of lily-livered nonsense. Three of the most extreme Republican radicals (Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, and Priscilla Owen) get a pass to lifetime appointments on the federal bench, and future judicial nominees "would only be filibustered 'under extraordinary circumstances,'" according to John McCain, speaking on behalf of the other 13 senators who brokered this "deal" (if you want to call it that).

I'm sorry. I thought Harry Reid had more guts than that. But just when it seemed the Democratic Party was growing a spine, it reverted to type.

Update: It gets worse. The full text of the agreement is available here (PDF link), and the terms are everything the Republican radicals could have wanted.

The first laugher comes in the second sentence of the first paragraph: "This memorandum confirms an understanding among the signatories, based upon mutual trust and confidence..."

"Mutual trust and confidence"? In the Republican majority? What have these people been smoking, and where can I get some to make the rest of the next three years bearable? I'd have thought that the last five years dealing with these radical extremists would have demonstrated beyond anyone's capacity to doubt that these people cannot be trusted to do anything except that which is either in their political interest or that which is decreed by the even more extreme radicals running the show (Dobson, Robertson, Falwell, Norquist, et aliae).

The next interesting bit comes in Part II.B:

In light of the spirit and continuing commitments made in this agreement, we commit to oppose the rules changes in the 109th Congress, which we understand to be any amendment to or interpretation of the Rules of the Senate that would force a vote on a judicial nomination by means other than unanimous consent or Rule XXII.

Translated from the bureaucratese: "OK, we'll give you the filibuster for now. Come the 110th Congress, all bets are off."

And while they "encourage" the executive branch to consult with both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate prior to submitting a judicial nomination, they make no guarantees that such consultations will either take place or involve all parties--or that they will be substantive in any way. In other words, the preznit will keep sending up more and more radical wingnuts to the federal bench, and the spineless Republicans in Congress will vote to confirm them--and to hell with the Constitution, with ethics, with the rules of the Senate or even of common sense, because the preznit must be allowed to fuck over the country completely.

It's signed by a group I'm going to start calling the Felonious Fourteen, two of whose signatures I can't make out clearly. But here are the bad boys and girls who perpetrated this miscarriage of justice on the American people: Benjamin Nelson, Mike DeWine, ???, Susan Collins, Mark Pryor, Lindsey Graham (who, along with DeWine is already talking about how if anybody dares to propose another filibuster, they'll just come right back and vote on the nuclear option again--so much for the spirit of compromise, eh?), Lincoln Chafee, John McCain, John Warner, Robert Byrd, Mary Landrieu, Olympia Snowe, Ken Salazar, and ???. A pox on all their houses.

Update 2: It appears that one of the illegible signatures is that of Holy Joe. It figures: Just add it to the ways he's been screwing the Democratic Party since 2000.

It's crunch time

2005-05-22T12:08:00.000-05:00

I'm not 100% convinced they'll actually do it, because I still don't think Senator Cat-Killer has all the votes he needs to go "nuclear." However, the radical Republicans in the Senate leadership have scheduled a floor vote for Tuesday on the renominated Republican wingnuts Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. It is anticipated that if the zealots cannot reach the necessary 60 votes to close debate on whichever nomination they take up first, they will pull the trigger on the "nuclear option" on Wednesday.

What this boils down to is nothing less than the survival of the Constitution all of those radical Republicans swore to uphold. They are threatening the very heart of our system of checks and balances that has functioned exactly as the Framers intended it should since the founding of this republic in 1789. And whether or not the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party actually goes nuclear, I think the principles on which our government was founded are worth fighting for.

As usual, the Republicans are lying. The radicals in the Republican leadership would have us believe that the filibuster is unconstitutional, when in fact it is the "nuclear option" which violates the Constitution.

The radicals in the Republican leadership would have us believe that the Constitution requires an "up or down vote" on all nominees. Funny, but I've never seen that provision in the text, and I've read it on many occasions. Neither did the Republican radicals--many of them the same ones leading the charge for the "nuclear option"--10 years ago when they used all manner of extra-legal tricks ("blue slips," anonymous holds, etc.) to block 62 of President Clinton's judicial nominees from receiving what they now allege was their constitutional due.

The radical Republicans go on and on about two hundred years' worth of tradition. But they don't seem to have any problems with President Bush tossing all of that tradition overboard by renominating candidates who had already been rejected by the Senate.

MoveOn PAC is trying to gather 500,000 signatures on a petition that will be brought to the Congress every three hours, from Monday morning until the final vote is completed. As of this writing, they're at only five percent of that goal. If you can, I urge you to sign the petition, spread the word, and give them a little turkee if you have it to spare.

The radical Republicans and their allies on the theocratic right have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to lie, cheat, distort, and steal in order to get what they want--which is nothing short of the complete overthrow of our constitutional system of government and the checks and balances put into place by its framers. They will literally stop at nothing to achieve their nefarious ends. We cannot allow them to succeed. A little time and a few spare pennies if you have them are surely worth it to stop these radical zealots in their tracks.

Yet if, by some unhappy circumstance, they should prevail and eliminate the filibuster, let us warn them to expect retribution in full measure for their crimes. If they go "nuclear," we must work to guarantee that they lose the majority in Congress in 2006, and the White House in 2008--at which point the Democratic Party should begin to nominate all the ACLU lawyers, all the environmentalists, all the pro-choice activists, all the anti-business candidates it can come up with. Let the Republican radicals then squirm in impotence as all of those candidates are confirmed by a Democratic Senate they can do nothing to stop.

There's an old, old saying that these Republican radicals have forgotten about. It goes like this: "Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it." Our first goal should be to stop these hateful people in their tracks. Failing that, we must serve out to them the revenge they justly deserve for what they will have done to this formerly great nation.

Libera nos ab omnibus dissimulatis*

2005-05-19T21:54:00.000-05:00

For what will, regrettably, almost certainly not be the last time, I have had it with the hypocrisy of the hatewingers. All over the wingnuttosphere (Michelle Malkin, InstaHack, and the Freepi, along with numerous lesser lights, all turned up on the first page of the Google search I did: I'm damned if I'm linking to any of that cesspool of human excrement and slime) we're hearing variations on the theme of "Newsweek lied, people died." The fugue on that canon can be read between these lines of the preznit's spokes-hamster at the Tuesday press gaggle, which I quoted earlier today:

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, it's what I talked about yesterday. This report, which Newsweek has now retracted and said was wrong, has had serious consequences. People did lose their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged; there is lasting damage to our image because of this report. And we would encourage Newsweek to do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done, particularly in the region.

Translation: "Think carefully about what you say and how you say it, because words can hurt real people."

That's a fair point, though I would argue that Scotty "I'm A Big Boy Now" McClellan had absolutely no business applying it to the item that ran in Newsweek--after running in multiple other media sources over at least the last two years, I might add. However, as ever, the Repugnacons seem to have come down with a fatal case (at least from the standpoint of consistency and self-referential coherence) of selective memory.

What makes me say that? Well, how about we open with this bit from the Douchebag of Liberty, which I quoted last weekend:

Because the whole system (INAUDIBLE) you're not going to have -- like going to a concentration camp and picking out which people go to the death chamber. You're not going to let the Democrats do that, say, We're going to -- we're going to confirm this person, we're not going to confirm the other person. They're going to -- they're going to say that this is not the way we're going to do it. They've had all kinds of different offers of that kind. (Emphasis mine.)

Or how about this screenshot from Faux News, courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Or how about this little snippet of tape, also from Crooks and Liars, of Senator Man-on-Dog on the floor of the Senate during today's debate over the "nukular opshun":

What the Democrats are doing is "the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It's mine.' This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster.
(My emphasis)

Or consider the following book titles, all of which, with the exception of the Coulternator's (which is available at the store, according to their online inventory), I found staring me in the face yesterday afternoon as I sat perusing a book on German science at the local Borders:

Michael Savage's latest screed, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder
Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism, and Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism

And those are just the titles that I remember seeing.

So while Newsweek should censor itself so as not to tarnish our precious image abroad (as if G. Dumbya, Condosleezza, Dumsfeld, Big Dick, et aliae hadn't irreparably damaged it long before Newsweek's Qur'an story surfaced), and libruls should all shut the fuck up and get behind our Glorious Leader (because we're at war, dammit!), the hatewingers not only get to declare open season on liberals, they get to rake in six- and seven-figure book deals doing it.

Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, pot.

I'm not gonna take it anymore.

My regular readers know that I am at base a gentle soul, and not one to pick a fight. That policy ends today where the hatewingers are concerned. From here on out, I'm adopting their own "take no prisoners" policy. I will do my utmost to kick them, rhetorically at least, in the nuts at every opportunity that presents itself. They get no free passes from me. I will always portray them, and everything they say, in the worst possible light consistent with the commonly accepted rules of textual interpretation. No more benefit of the doubt: if it can reasonably be parsed to mean something evil, hateful, venal, treasonous, duplicitous, deranged, vile, or any combination of some or all of the above, then I'm going to presume that's exactly what the author meant to convey with those words.

Let them weep their crocodile tears about being hated, because they are the haters. Not me, and not my fellow Democrats or my fellow liberals of whatever political persuasion. We don't hate Janice Rogers Brown personally. We just hate what she's done to our legal system, and the Repugnacons' attempt to allow her to do even more damage in a higher court. We don't hate Ann Coulter, though she manifestly hates us. We just hate the evil, nasty, bigoted, contemptuous, and almost always untrue, things she says about us.

To quote your Dear Leader, bring it on, you Repukes. I've got a black belt in bitch, and I'm not afraid to use it.

*"Deliver us from all hypocrites." Paraphrased from the Ordinary of the Mass, Libera nos, quaesumus, Domine, ab omnibus malis, "Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day." That's a prayer I'm going to be repeating with even greater fervor than usual in these troubled times. (Especially when by "evil" I mean "conservatives.")

Arma virumque cano

2005-05-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

(With apologies to Publius Vergilius Maro for cribbing the opening line of his Aeneid for this post's title.)

Either Roman or Spartan mothers (depending upon which version of the probably apocryphal story you're following) used to tell their sons going off to war, "Come back with your shield or on it." That's the kind of day the preznit's spokes-hamster had this Tuesday, when apparently the White House Press Corpse woke up and remembered everything they'd ever learned in J-school. And Scotty had been doing such a good job of training those bad habits out of them!

Let's get right to the highlights:

Q: Scott, the Senate has managed to function -- or not function, as the case may be -- for more than 200 years without a ban on judicial filibusters. Is the President concerned about the historic nature of what's being talked about up on the Hill?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, John, the Senate is working to move forward on their constitutional responsibility, which is to give nominees and up or down vote. One of the priorities for this President is to put people on the bench that are highly qualified and that have a conservative judicial philosophy -- people that show judicial restraint when it comes to the bench. And there are a number of vacancies that the Senate has not moved forward on.

You've had a minority of Senate Democrats blocking up or down votes for these nominees. All we're asking for is for these nominees to receive a simple up or down vote on the floor of the United States Senate. Unfortunately, there are some Senate Democrats that have played politics in taking this to an unprecedented level. We have not seen anything like this in our 214-year history in the Senate. So I would turn that around on you and look at it from the other perspective.

Q: Well, let me ask two questions about what you just said. Where in the Constitution are judicial nominees guaranteed an up or down vote? And what about the impact of this whole so-called "nuclear option" on this idea of equal representation in the Senate?

Oops. Somebody forgot that one does never, ever ask what the Constitution (or any other authoritative source) actually says, one is only supposed to ask how the preznit and his minions are spinning it ~~this month~~ ~~this week~~ ~~today~~ ~~this particular minute~~ this nanosecond.

Q: Scott, you said that the retraction by Newsweek magazine of its story is a good first step. What else does the President want this American magazine to do?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, it's what I talked about yesterday. This report, which Newsweek has now retracted and said was wrong, has had serious consequences. People did lose their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged; there is lasting damage to our image because of this report. And we would encourage Newsweek to do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done, particularly in the region.

And I think Newsweek can do that by talking about the way they got this wrong, and pointing out what the policies and practices of the United States military are when it comes to the handling of the Holy Koran. The military put in place policies and procedures to make sure that the Koran was handled -- or is handled with the utmost care and respect. And I think it would help to point that out, because some have taken this report -- those that are opposed to the United States -- some have taken this report and exploited it and used it to incite violence.

Q: With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print? (My emphasis)

Oooh, snap! I'd just like to know where that attitude has been the last five years or so...

Q: Back on Newsweek. Richard Myers, last Thursday -- I'm going to read you a quote from him. He said, "It's a judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eichenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran." He said it was "more tied up in the political process and reconciliation that President Karzai and his cabinet were conducting." And he said that that was from an after-action report he got that day.
So what has changed between last Thursday and today, five days later, to make you now think that those -- that that violence was a result of Newsweek?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, clearly, the report was used to incite violence by people who oppose the United States and want to mischaracterize the values and the views of the United States of America. The protests may have been pre-staged by those who oppose the United States and who may be opposed to moving forward on freedom and democracy in the region, but the images that we have seen across our television screens over the last few days clearly show that this report was used to incite violence. People lost their lives --

Q: But may I just follow up, please? He didn't say "protest," he said -- he used the word very specifically, "violence." He said the violence, as far as they know from their people on the ground -- which is something that you always say you respect wholeheartedly -- it was not because of Newsweek.

[edit]

Q: Scott, to go back to Dana's question, are you saying that General Myers was wrong, therefore, that this -- the violence he's talking about? Are you saying he was wrong in his assessment of what happened in Afghanistan?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, not at all. In fact, maybe you didn't hear me, but as I said, there are people that are opposed to the United States that look at every opportunity to try to do damage to our image in the region, and --

Translated from the bureaucratese, that last paragraph should read, "No, the commander on the ground isn't wrong: as long as he's saying what we want him to say. But when he doesn't say what we want him to say, we reserve the right to blame the problem he's talking about on the media, and we hope you'll continue to let us get away with that."

This next one is a real shocker, given that it's coming from Elisabeth "I Proudly Fellate the Preznit at Every Opportunity" Bumiller:

Q: Are you asking them to write a story?
MR. McCLELLAN: -- because of this report. I think Newsweek is going to be in the best position to determine how to achieve that. And there are ways that I pointed out that they can help repair the damage. One way is to point out what the policies and practices of our United States military are. Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care --

Q: Are you asking them to write a story about how great the American military is; is that what you're saying here?

MR. McCLELLAN: Elisabeth, let me finish my sentence. Our military --

Q: You've already said what you're -- I know what -- how it ends.

Translation: "Save your breath, Scotty-boy. You'll be needing it when Karl Rove takes you into the back room for a little discipline, because I'm not buying your line of spin this time."

MR. McCLELLAN: We have to continue speaking out about the values that the United States stands for. And one value that we stand very strongly for is religious freedom. We believe all people should be able to practice their religion as they see fit. And we welcome a diversity of views.

As long as they're the same views as James Dobson's and Pat Robertson's, that is.

Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of the bondage gear and go to work in the morning.

Cross-posted at Unbossed.

Godwin's Law disproved

2005-05-19T12:07:00.000-05:00

Regular readers here will remember this post from last week, in which I decried Mall*Wart's colossally inappropriate use of a photograph of a Nazi-era book-burning (of gay and lesbian authors' works, by the by) in an advertising campaign to defeat a citizens' initiative in Flagstaff, Arizona, to limit the size of retail stores that could be built in the city.

I regret to have to report that Mall*Wart won by a razor-thin margin (365 votes out of 17,000 ballots cast). So much for the tradition on the internets that whoever mentions the Nazis first in a discussion loses it.

The big-box supporters predictably yammered about how their victory (I'm surprised they didn't try to take a page from G. Dumbya's playbook and call it a "mandate") meant that Flagstaff was "pro-business and looking forward to the future," but said nary a word about their attempt to link a reasonable limited-growth initiative with Nazi atrocities and censorship. This brings up a number of issues for me.

First off, when did being "pro-business" become such a great thing? I'd have thought the first duty of a community was to look after the people who live in it, not to suck up to some corporate giant in the hope of attracting a few low-wage, no-benefit jobs and bringing in the urban blight that typically comes with such big-box stores. Along the same lines, when did "pro-business" become synonymous with "pro-big-corporations"? Whatever happened to all those entrepreneurs and small-business owners the Repukes are always lauding to the skies? Could it be that they just can't compete with the flipping great wodges of cash the big-box boys can throw at the pols who grease their wheels? (Mall*Wart spent close to $300,000--or about 10 times as much as the citizens' group opposing them--to fight Proposition 100. If they can afford to drop that kind of cash on fighting one ballot initiative in one Arizona town, their political ~~warchest~~ slush fund must run into the millions.

Mall*Wart's crocodile tears ring more than usually hollow. It would be censorship for anyone to oppose the Bentonville Behemoth as it mows down small-town business districts in the name of engorging its already obscene profit margins. But it's perfectly legitimate for the behemoth to insist that artists change their song lyrics or album cover art if the Boys from Bentonville find it too explicit. The same goes for certain video games. They also don't like it when students target them for parody (which is a permissible use under copyright law, by the way). They won't sell certain magazines, and insist that others change or hide their covers, again if the Boys from Bentonville deem them too risqué.

It's a sad day in Flagstaff--and elsewhere in the land of Cheap Plastic Crap Not Made in America.

Paging a rhetorician, stat!

2005-05-18T14:44:00.000-05:00

The curtain has been pulled all the way back, and we can see that behind the Great and Powerful Cat-Killer is...nothing. Except maybe James Dobson's hand up his rear, yanking on whatever strings it takes to produce this example of sterling debate in response to a simple question from the floor:

SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?
SEN. FRIST: The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination - we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe - a point - and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.

In other words, it's OK to filibuster one judicial nominee at a time (if you're a Repuglican, natch). But if you're a Democrat, or if you try to filibuster more than one thing at a time, fuhgeddaboudit. As an added bonus to being an incoherent rambler right up there with G. Dumbya, as the folks at Think Progress point out, Frist's position here "completely undercuts [his] argument that judicial filibusters are unconstitutional." Oops.

But it gets better still:

SEN. FRIST: The issue is not cloture votes per se, it’s the partisan, leadership-led use of cloture votes to kill - to defeat - to assassinate these nominees. That’s the difference. Cloture has been used in the past on this floor to postpone, to get more info, to ask further questions.

Uh-huh. It just happened to take you four years "get more info" and "ask further questions" about the nomination of Richard Paez? I don't think so, you lying sack of Repuglican scum.

I'm with Armando: "Frist has made a despicable Faustian bargain--do what Dobson tells him on the Nuclear Option, judicial nominees, and just about everything else, and they will back him for President in 2008." The Repukes are gunning for bear on this one, and I have to think they're likely to lose: if not in the Senate, then in two years at the ballot box. From this blog to God's ears and around the block to the voting booth!

Toles to McClellan: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on

2005-05-17T23:12:00.000-05:00

Now that's an ID proposal I could get behind

2005-05-17T11:29:00.000-05:00

Quoth Jesse:

This does give me an idea for the intelligent design fight - instead of fighting over letting ID into the classroom, let students "choose" whether or not they want to learn about ID. However, at the end of the class, they should still get a copy of The Origin Of Species with the religious reminder that if they don't believe in evolution, God thinks they're an idiot. Problem solved!

I'm sure the wingnuts wouldn't go for it, of course. They don't want anybody to be able to choose--unless it's them, which was the whole point of Jesse's rant in the first place. (It's really about that ridiculously named "Silver Ring Thing" that they were talking about this morning on Nice Polite Republicans: a Christian evangelization show masquerading as "abstinence education.") Still, I think the idea has some merit--unlike anything the Bushoviki have proposed on sex education.

Word

2005-05-17T08:46:00.000-05:00

I hate it when that happens. Keith Olbermann took the words right out of my mouth. I was fuming in the shower this morning, listening to what seemed an endless parade of Newsweek retraction stories and "analysis" on Nice Polite Republicans. I figured I was going to be writing something on the fiasco today, but thanks to TBogg, I found Olbermann's piece--and he did a much better job on it than I could. So here are a few of the highlights--go read the rest!

SECAUCUS -- I smell something - and it ain’t a copy of the Qu’ran sopping wet from being stuck in a toilet in Guantanamo Bay. It’s the ink drying on Scott McClellan’s resignation, and in an only partly imperfect world, it would be drifting out over Washington, and imminently.
Last Thursday, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld’s go-to guy whenever the situation calls for the kind of gravitas the Secretary himself can’t supply, told reporters at the Pentagon that rioting in Afghanistan was related more to the on-going political reconciliation process there, than it was to a controversial note buried in the pages of Newsweek claiming that the government was investigating whether or not some nitwit interrogator at Gitmo really had desecrated a Muslim holy book.

But Monday afternoon, while offering himself up to the networks for a series of rare, almost unprecedented sit-down interviews on the White House lawn, Press Secretary McClellan said, in effect, that General Myers, and the head of the after-action report following the disturbances in Jalalabad, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, were dead wrong. The Newsweek story, McClellan said, “has done damage to our image abroad and it has done damage to the credibility of the media and Newsweek in particular. People have lost lives. This report has had serious consequences.”

Whenever I hear Scott McClellan talking about ‘media credibility,’ I strain to remember who it was who admitted Jeff Gannon to the White House press room and called on him all those times.

Whenever I hear this White House talking about ‘doing to damage [sic] to our image abroad’ and how ‘people have lost lives,’ I strain to remember who it was who went traipsing into Iraq looking for WMD that will apparently turn up just after the Holy Grail will - and at what human cost.

[edit]

Or would somebody rather play politics with this? The way Craig Crawford reconstructed it, this one went similarly to the way the Killian Memos story evolved at the White House. The news organization turns to the administration for a denial. The administration says nothing. The news organization runs the story. The administration jumps on the necks of the news organization with both feet - or has its proxies do it for them.

That’s beyond shameful. It’s treasonous.

It’s also not very smart. While places like the Fox News Channel (which, only today, I finally recognized - it’s the newscast perpetually running on the giant video screens in the movie “1984”) ask how many heads should roll at Newsweek, it forgets in its fervor that both the story and the phony controversy around it are not so cut-and-dried this time.

[edit]

Ultimately, though, the administration may have effected its biggest mistake over this saga, in making the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs look like a liar or naïf, just to draw a little blood out of Newsweek’s hide. Either way - and also for that tasteless, soul-less conclusion that deaths in Afghanistan should be lain at the magazine’s doorstep - Scott McClellan should resign. The expiration on his carton full of blank-eyed bully-collaborator act passed this afternoon as he sat reeling off those holier-than-thou remarks. Ah, that’s what I smelled.

Did'ja see it? He used the "T" word!

Which rhymes with "T," which stands for "trouble"

2005-05-16T20:49:00.000-05:00

And that's what Dumbya is in here in Illinois. The Trib has the numbers: 41 percent overall job approval (down four percent from last October). Even in the heavily Republican collar counties around Chicago, Bush is in negative territory (46 percent in this survey, down from 53 last October), and the news is worse downstate (47 percent, down a full ten points from 57 last October).

But there's worse news yet. As unpopular as Bush is hereabouts, our Democratic governor is even less so, according to polling data in Saturday's Trib. Blagorgeous' numbers: 35 percent approve, 44 percent disapprove, 45 percent don't want him re-elected. When the Democratc governor is less popular than a highly unpopular reactionary Republican president who didn't even win the state last year, that's got to make a few political consultants break into a cold sweat.

Granted, it's still 18 months until the gubernatorial election, Blagojevich is said to have $10 million at his disposal to play politics with, and the Republicans are still in disarray after last year's disastrous Senate campaign. If they nominate a complete nertz along the lines of Alan Keyes, or some non-entity who's conservative enough for the wingnuts, but still moderate enough for everybody else, then Blagojevich could still pull it off and get another four years to mess up the state even worse than he has already.

But if the Republicans have the sense to nominate one of their better people--hell, even if they can convince Jim Edgar to come out of retirement for another term--we'll be kissing a Democratic state house goodbye in 2007. I'm with Rich Osborne: things aren't looking good for Blagorgeous and I wish like hell the Democratic Party mucky-mucks would grow a pair and put up a serious primary opponent to the Fair Haired Boy Who Would Be King. We could really do some good in this state, but Blago just isn't the guy for it.

A year on

2005-05-16T11:42:00.000-05:00

It was a year ago tomorrow that Massachusetts achieved marriage equality. If you haven't already, you should go read MAJeff's excellent series of anniversary diaries over at dKos:

Commenter PhillyGal in that last diary had some interesting statistics on offer:

Date same-sex couples began legally marrying: May 17, 2004
Number of same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts from May 17, 2004, until February 2005: 6,142
Number of male couples: 2,170
Number of female couples: 3,972
Number of heterosexual marriages in Massachusetts during that time: 30,872
Public support in Massachusetts for marriage equality in April 2005: 56%
Public support one year ago: 35%
Public support across the nation for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman: 53%
Number of states that have amended their constitutions to ban gay marriage since 2004: 14
Percentage of Massachusetts voters who believe gay marriage has had a positive or no impact on the quality of life in Massachusetts: 84%

To which commenter Bearpaw added:

Number of skies that have fallen: 0
Number of cities destroyed by divine wrath: 0
Number of people who have married their pets: 0
Number of mixed-sex marriages harmed by the existence of same-sex marriages: 0
People in same-sex couples denied equal marriage rights (& responsibilities) in Massachusetts: 0

My own contribution was to paraphrase a famous speech from awhile back:

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men and women, yes, gay men as well as straight men, and lesbian women as well as straight women, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her gay and lesbian citizens are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the gay people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

edit

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the gay community must not lead us to a distrust of all straight people, for many of our straight brothers and sisters, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

edit

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

edit

I have a dream that our little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin or the faith they profess, or the gender of the persons whom they love or by the political party they prefer, but by the content of their character.

(Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream," paraphrased and edited.)

Veni, veni

2005-05-15T21:50:00.000-05:00

No, not "Emmanuel." Wrong season for that lovely bit of chant: but wait another six months and we can talk.

Today is Pentecost Sunday, when the Church celebrates the promised descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, and thus upon their descendants in faith by apostolic transmission. One of the oldest hymns in the Catholic tradition goes with this feast, and given the posts I've been slapping up here of late, I didn't want to let today pass without something to provide, in the dying words of Johann von Goethe, mehr Licht, "more light." This is the so-called "Golden Sequence," composed by we know not who, back in the mists of time, and traditionally sung at Mass from Pentecost until the following Sunday (but also, as recently when the cardinals went into conclave to elect a new pope, whenever a need for divine guidance is felt):

Veni Sancte Spiritus
et emitte caelitus
lucis tuae radium.
Veni pater pauperum
veni dator munerum
veni lumen cordium.

Consolator optime
dulcis hospes animae
dulce refrigerium.

In labore requies
in aestu temperies
in fletu solatium.

O Lux beatissima
reple cordis intima
tuorum fidelium.

Sine tuo numine
nihil est in homine
nihil est innoxium.

Lava quod est sordidum
riga quod est aridum
sana quod est saucium.

Flecte quod est rigidum
fove quod est frigidum
rege quod est devium.

Da tuis fidelibus
in te confidentibus
sacrum septenarium.

Da virtutis meritum
da salutis exitum
da perenne gaudium.
Amen. Alleluia.

Come, Holy Spirit,
and send forth from heaven
the ray of Your Light.

Come, Father of the poor;
Come, Giver of gifts;
Come, Light of all hearts.

O best of Comforters,
O gentle Guest of the soul,
O sweet Relief.

You are rest in toil,
Refreshment in the heat of day,
Solace in our tears.

O most blessed Light,
Fill the depths of
the hearts of Your faithful.

Without Your divinity
there is nothing in humanity,
nothing is harmless.

Cleanse that which is dirty,
water that which is dry,
heal that which is wounded.

Bend that which is rigid,
melt that which is frozen,
correct that which has gone astray.

Give to Your faithful,
trusting in You,
the sevenfold gifts of grace.

Give us the reward of virtue,
Give us a holy end,
Give us perpetual joy.
Amen. Alleluia.

(My translation from the Latin of the Missale Romanum.)

What is it with these people?

2005-05-15T13:15:00.000-05:00

Herewith the Douchebag of Liberty, yesterday on The Capital Gang:

HUNT: Bob, why would Senator Frist refuse an offer to break the deadlock?
NOVAK: Because the whole system (INAUDIBLE) you're not going to have -- like going to a concentration camp and picking out which people go to the death chamber. You're not going to let the Democrats do that, say, We're going to -- we're going to confirm this person, we're not going to confirm the other person. They're going to -- they're going to say that this is not the way we're going to do it. They've had all kinds of different offers of that kind. (Emphasis mine.)

Although I couldn't find anything directly attributable to Novakula on the issue, we must remember that it was his party that was frothing at the mouth last year when someone submitted an ad to MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest comparing Emperor Chimpy to der Führer. I won't, however, be holding my breath waiting for them to line up to condemn Novak's latest flagrant violation of Godwin's Law, because as we all know, IOKIYAR.

Sadder still, I doubt the Douchebag of Liberty can even see the irony in his statement. Because let's face it: the seven extremist judges that Bush renominated because he felt like rubbing the Democrats' noses in the fetid crap of his miraculous re-election have a lot more in common with Dr. Mengele than do the Democrats who are attempting to stave off both that batch of rightwing activist judges from ever getting near the federal bench and the Repugnacons' efforts to stick them there come hell or high water--or the rules of the Senate. When Alberto "Abu" Gonzalez calls you a judicial activist (as he did his fellow Texas Supreme Court justice Priscilla Owen), you know you're in deep trouble. And when you compare homosexuality to "necrophilia, bestiality, child porn, incest, and pedophilia," as former Alabama attorney general William H. Pryor did in a brief to the Supreme Court, you're drinking from the same ideological well as Heinrich Himmler, who observed in a speech to his SS-Gruppenführer in 1937:

In the SS today, we still have about one case of homosexuality a month. In a whole year, about eight to ten cases occur in the entire SS. I have now decided upon the following: in each case, these people will naturally be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts. Following completion of the punishment imposed by the courts, they will be sent, by my order, to a concentration camp, and they will be shot in the concentration camp, while attempting to escape. I will make that known by order to the unit to which the person so affected belonged. Thereby, I hope finally to have done with persons of this type in the SS, so that at least the good blood, which we have in the SS, and the increasingly healthy blood which we are cultivating for Germany, will be kept pure.
However, this does not represent a solution to the problem for the whole Germany. One must not have illusions about the following. When I bring a homosexual before the courts and have him locked up, the matter is not settled, because the homosexual comes out of prison just as homosexual as before he went in. Therefore the whole question is not clarified in the sense that this burden has been identified, in contrast to the years before the seizure of power.

I will give CNN props for airing the next exchange, between Mark Shields and the DoL:

SHIELDS: All, you know, if hypocrisy were a felony, they couldn't get a quorum in the Senate at this point. Thirty of the fifty-five senators on the Republican side have all employed methods, extra-legal methods, to prevent votes -- John Sununu not among them because John Sununu is too late to the game to do it. But every one of the others -- Rick Santorum, one of the real change agents in this whole system, he had a wonderful judge, highly rated, totally rated for the ABA, rated -- endorsed by every newspaper in the state, by every major legal organization in the state of Pennsylvania -- he blue-slipped him, Al. That's what you do, just prevent someone from ever getting a vote -- 65 judges.
Now, I mean, let's -- let's not pretend that all of a sudden, this is some new system. The reality is that in the past, there was a comity that was worked out in the Senate in the vast majority of cases. We are changing that now and forever, and don't you ever forget it, because it'll be 51, and they'll be ideological and it's going to be a change in the American judiciary permanently.

NOVAK: Oh, Christ!

Good on Shields for pounding them on the hypocrisy angle. And Novakula, you took the words right out of my mouth. But I was referring to your colossal ignorance of history and propriety, not the fact that Shields had the gall to state the obvious fact that Emperor Chimpy and his minions are all starkers.

You heard it here first

2005-05-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

Val Kilmer is a better kisser than Colin Farrell. (Link is in German, by the by.)

Quoth Robert Downey, Jr., at the Cannes Film Festival, "I've only kissed two men in my life, and Colin Farrell isn't as good as Val Kilmer." Kilmer plays a gay detective in the forthcoming movie Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, in which Downey plays the criminal.

Friday random 10

2005-05-13T09:45:00.000-05:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

Precious (Erasure, Cowboy). Unfortunately not one of the ones the boys did in concert a couple of weekends ago in Chicago.
The Dingle Set: Dance (The Chieftains, The Bells of Dublin)
Lust or Love (Scorpions, Crazy World)
Franz Schubert, Das Heimweh (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert: 21 Lieder)
Johann Sebastian Bach, fugue from Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C major, BWV 564 (E. Power Biggs, J. S. Bach: Great Organ Favorites)
Quem pastores laudavere (John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers: Christmas with the Cambridge Singers)
The Wild West is Where I Want to Be (Tom Lehrer, The Remains of Tom Lehrer)
What Child is This? (Patrick Ball, The Christmas Rose)
Crudel, perchè mi fuggi? (Claudio Monteverdi, Il secondo libro dei madrigali)
Tanzen und Springen (The King's Singers, Madrigal History Tour)

Seems to have been a bit of a Christmas day today. And if you can find it, I highly recommend the Patrick Ball album referenced in No. 8--some of the best harp music you'll ever hear, and his rendition of Dona nobis pacem is breathtakingly gorgeous.

Reason No. 372,457

2005-05-12T20:55:00.000-05:00

Not to shop at Mall*Wart, that is. Seems the boys from Bentonville are more than a little peeved at the prospect of not being able to build a new SuperDuperMegaGalactic Emporium o' Crap in Flagstaff, Arizona. Citizens there are considering Proposition 100, which would require a special-use permit for retail buildings bigger than 75,000 square feet--and would prohibit retail buildings larger than 125,000 square feet--in the city.

The citizens of Flagstaff are also more than a little peeved at some of the ads Wal-Mart is running in an attempt to head off the proposition. Why? Well, it might be that one of the ads sorta-kinda-almost-explicitly compares a zoning restriction on a ginormous corporate bad citizen (which already has a retail presence in Flagstaff, mind you) to the Holocaust.

Words fail me to describe exactly how galactically, off-the-fucking-charts, egregiously sick and wrong, clueless, offensive, insensitive, and just plain stupid that ad campaign is. Mall*Wart might--might--stand to lose a few bucks because it can't expand its already huge presence in Flagstaff by some 80,000 square feet, and devote 30%-40% of its floor space to grocery items. Could someone please explain to me, using really small words and some diagrams, exactly how that trifling loss (which won't even show up on the daily balance sheets of the world's biggest ~~retailer~~ hypocrite) is supposed to be the moral or other equivalent of the murder of six million Jews, hundreds of thousands of homosexuals, tens of thousands of priests and nuns and political dissidents?

I find it particularly offensive that the well-known homophobes from Arkansas chose to use a photograph in their ad against Proposition 100 that was pulled from the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The picture shows German students tossing books from the library of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft onto a blazing pyre in the middle of the Berlin Opernplatz in May 1933.

For those of you not familiar with Hirschfeld and his work, he founded his research institute (the first in the world to study sexual matters exclusively) in 1919. He was himself gay, and he lobbied tirelessly on behalf of gay rights in Germany, including the repeal of the notorious Paragraph 175 of the German civil code, which criminalized homosexual sex. He died in exile in France just two years after the Nazis looted his research institute, burned its library, and ransacked the files of the counseling service it ran, looking for other homosexuals to persecute. For Wal-Mart, no friend to gays and lesbians, to compare its petty little inconvenience in Flagstaff--and only a potential inconvenience at that--to the brutal repression of gays and lesbians at the hands of the Nazis is hubris on so galactic a scale that Aeschylus on his best day wouldn't have known how to work it into a tragic trilogy.

Can someone clue me in?

2005-05-12T10:17:00.000-05:00

I'm seeing a tremendous number of hits to the blog today (I'm at 55 for the day so far, and it's just barely midmorning). The funny thing is, most of them seem to be coming from search engines in response to a query that is something along the lines of "Saki's simple advice."

Somebody want to tell me why the sudden interest in the writings of H.H. Munro? 'Cuz I'm a huge fan, and if there's something I've been missing all along in his works, I'd love to know what it is and where to go look.

Drop me a comment and let me know.

VLWC? Let's make one up!

2005-05-11T09:32:00.000-05:00

We in the reality-based community have been hearing for years about this nefarious "vast left-wing conspiracy" that allegedly controls everything in the United States (the Republican domination of politics and the media apparently notwithstanding). Well, me hearties, the chips are down and the cards are soon to be on the table. And I say that means it's long past time we actually did something to create such a "left-wing conspiracy." Because we simply can't endure much more of the kind of crap the Bushoviki are dishing out on an hourly basis.

So I'm endorsing Markos' and Bob Brigham's call "for Democratic bloggers to sign up and unite to wage politics online." I signed on yesterday, and to date I seem to be the only Illinois member of the reality-based coalition on there. I know I'm not the only Illinois liberal, because there are a number of Illinois bloggers I read on a regular basis. So c'mon, guys, sign up and let's get organized, mmm-kay?

The same goes for all y'all my liberal blogging buddies who aren't in Illinois. We're all fed up with the Shrubbery and its shenanigans, so let's do something about it. Blogging is great, but we all know it's not going to be enough. Get organized, get active, and let's get going to take our country back from the Christofascists and their henchmen.

Vivent les Etats-Unis! A bas Bush!

Anybody got a brick?

2005-05-11T08:57:00.000-05:00

I feel like engaging in a little iconoclasm this morning:

Come sing Hosanna!

2005-05-10T20:36:00.000-05:00

While I was waiting my turn at the barber shop this afternoon, I chanced upon an article in today's Chicago Tribune. It seems the movement to draft Paul Vallas (who came in second to Rod Blagojevich in the Democratic primary leading up to the 2002 gubernatorial race in Illinois) is, like the old beggar at the start of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, not dead yet.

Vallas is now head of the Philadelphia school district, after leaving his post as CEO of the Chicago school system to run for governor. He has said publicly that he "has no plans to return to Illinois or leave his school post before his five-year contract is finished." (It has two years and a bit left to run.)

On the other hand, Vallas has not publicly disavowed his brother Dean's efforts to draft him to run against now Governor Blagojevich, whose popularity has tanked steadily since winning the office. While Blagorgeous has reportedly amassed a $10 million war chest to fund his re-election next year, he's seriously vulnerable in this Illinois resident's estimation.

In fact, I think it's fair to say that it was not so much that Blagojevich won the 2002 election as it is to say that his predecessor in office, George Ryan, lost it. There was no way Ryan was going to win re-election (which was one reason he elected not to run for re-election), and his scandal-plagued administration guaranteed that unless the Democrats put up a complete buffoon, they would win.

Nearly four years later, Blagojevich is looking pretty doggone buffoonish. He's pissed off members of the General Assembly on both sides of the aisle by his shenanigans. He's routinely been late in getting state business done (in fact, there was a letter to the editor in today's Tribune from one of the Republican members, castigating what looks to be political foot-dragging on the part of Blagojevich in getting his budget proposals before the legislature in time to make the constitutional deadline). Granted, the economy he inherited from his predecessor was anything but healthy, but Blagorgeous hasn't done anything to improve its condition in Illinois in three years of trying. He's still paying state bills late, cutting important projects to save a buck, and then ladling out the pork to his cronies.

The state education system is still languishing in the bottom third when it comes to state support at the K-12 level. Don't even get me started on Blago's higher-education proposals: let's just say they've been an unmitigated disaster. State universities are facing record enrollments as far as the eye can see, and we're having to turn away thousands of qualified applicants because we haven't got the classrooms to house them or the teachers to teach them. We're doing more and more with less and less--money, resources, personnel--and each year we're told to suck up another budget cut, another hiring freeze, another benefit that we're either going to lose or now have to pay more to retain, even as our salaries are stagnant with respect to inflation and the cost of living.

Any sane person would have realized at least two years ago that, unpleasant as it would be, there was simply no alternative but to raise the state income tax rate--at least temporarily--to offset the humongous budget deficits produced by a slumping national economy and Washington's indifference to anything that doesn't enrich its corporate masters. Not Blagojevich. He's positively Republican in his insistence on sticking by his "no new taxes" pledge. He's covered his shortfalls, mostly, by jacking up license fees on everything, various sin taxes, and apparently some jiggery-pokery with the books.

Meanwhile, roads are going unbuilt and unrepaired, our state infrastructure is crumbling, our schools are filled to the bursting point and beyond, hospitals and nursing homes and doctors are waiting months to get paid when they do work for the state, museums and other institutions are cutting back on both staff and hours, and every state employee is working a lot harder to accomplish the same amount of progress, but without the necessary resources to handle the load.

I would love it if the Democratic Party mounted a primary challenger to Blagojevich next year. Because if they don't, and if the Republican challenger is halfway tolerable, I'm going to have to think very seriously about voting for the challenger. At the very least about voting for a third-party candidate. Because there's no way I'm voting for four more years of Illinois à la Blagorgeous. We can't take another four years of this crap. And if we could get Paul Vallas to come back and run against Blagorgeous, I'd vote for him (again) in a heartbeat.

Color me jealous

2005-05-10T13:01:00.000-05:00

Illinois' junior senator, Barack Obama, will give this year's commencement address at my alma mater.

Now, I have nothing against the politician (Patricia Schroeder, then representing Colorado in the House of Representatives) who gave my commencement address. But getting a send-off from Barack? That's priceless! I was so disappointed when he wound up facing off against Alan Keyes in the Senate race last year, which meant the cancellation of a planned debate at Knox--incidentally the only surviving site of any of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Now I wish I knew someone in the Class of 2005, or could swing a ticket to hear the address. I look forward to reading it on Obama's blog or Knox's web page later this summer.

Dennis Prager royally screws up...again

2005-05-10T12:39:00.000-05:00

It starts in the first paragraph of Dennis Prager's latest in what appears to be a series of seriously misguided musings on what he's pleased to call "Judeo-Christian values," and goes downhill from there. Here's that first paragraph:

Ask believing Christians -- probably from as young as 8 years of age -- what their mission as Christians is, and it is overwhelmingly likely they will answer, "to bring people to Christ" or "spread the Gospel."

I guess by "believing Christians" Prager must mean only Christians of the fundagelical, born-again sort. Because I guarantee you that if you ask that question at a Catholic church or service, you will not get "to bring people to Christ" or "to spread the Gospel" as an answer. But, hey, Cath-a-licks ain't real Christians anyhow, right?

The Jews' mission is as it always has been -- to bring the world to ethical monotheism. Ethical monotheism means there is one God and therefore one moral standard that He has revealed, and He holds all humans accountable to it. This is the point of Jewish chosenness. God chose a people -- a particularly small undistinguished people (chosenness has never implied inherent superiority) -- to make the world aware of the God of ethical demands and moral judgment. Jews have never been required to bring the world to Judaism, but they were chosen to bring the world to God and to the values found in the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament.
Were Jews true to their mission, they would stand alongside Christians who work to bring the Torah's values to the world.

That last paragraph proves, to my satisfaction at any rate, that Dennis Prager understands nothing about Judaism. At least insofar as I, an interested non-Jew, understand it, Judaism is not now and never has been a proselytizing religion. It welcomes converts, but does not seek them out. The primary purpose of a Jew's life is to live in accordance with the Covenant. What other people do is their own business. There is, to the best of my recollection, nothing in the Torah (or the rest of the Tanakh) that is even functionally the equivalent of Jesus' command to his disciples to "Go forth and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19).

Nor is it true, again to the best of my understanding, that Jews believe all the nations are held accountable to the "one moral standard" represented by the Covenant. The terms of the Covenant are binding on God and on the Jews, but inapplicable to the rest of the world. That is certainly how the Muslims would parse the situation, given their belief that God sends different Messengers (and different messages) to different people. Again, I can recall no passage in the Tanakh where God says that the nations will be judged by the standards of the Covenant with Israel, only that Israel will be so judged.

Moreover, Judaism would seem technically to be a henotheistic, not a monotheistic faith. Monotheism is the belief that there is one, and exactly one, god. Henotheism, on the other hand, acknowledges at least the possibility that there might be other ones out there, while paying allegiance to just one of them. Jews believe in one God, but there are numerous passages in the Torah that seem, at least to this non-Jew, to suggest that there are other, lesser gods around and that the Jews are not supposed to pervert themselves to run after them.

I've got to agree with Ezra's take on this piece:

And if you were real Jews, you'd be Christians. But since you're not, you're screwing shit up royally. You know, in the history of Christians patronizingly "helping" Jews, Prager may have come up with the greatest leap forward since Jews For Jesus - the declination of Judiasm by liberalism. Each vote for a Republican is one step towards the realization of God's Judeo-Christian goals, which seem, oddly enough, to focus entirely on Jesus.

Cross-posted at Unbossed.

Second verse, same as the first

2005-05-09T21:06:00.000-05:00

Bliss

2005-05-08T20:47:00.000-05:00

A day spent looking at long-forgotten family photos. A nice dinner eaten al fresco on the deck overlooking the golf course on a warm, breezy afternoon. And to top it all off, a homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Friday random 10

2005-05-06T10:42:00.000-05:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

Scarlatti, Keyboard Sonata in E major, K. 360, "Cortège" (Igor Kipnis, The Virtuoso Scarlatti)
Franz Schubert, Impromptu No. 3 in B flat, D. 935 (Alfred Brendel, Complete Impromptus and Moments Musicaux)
Marty Haugen, Lay Hands Upon Us (Spirit of Malia)
Tom Lehrer, I Wanna Go Back to Dixie (The Remains of Tom Lehrer, disc 2)
William Byrd, Sanctus and Benedictus from the Mass for Five Voices (David Willcocks and the choir of King's College, Cambridge, Byrd: Three Masses)
Benjamin Orr, Hold On (The Lace)
Claudio Monteverdi, O Rossignuol (Il terzo libro dei madrigali)
Capitol Steps, Stand by Your Klan (Fools on the Hill)
William Byrd, Turn Our Captivity (John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers, Ave Verum Corpus: Motets and Anthems of William Byrd)
The Police, Spirits in the Material World (Every Breath You Take: The Classics)

NPR sells out

2005-05-03T20:34:00.000-05:00

It was only a matter of time. They keep cutting back on actual news coverage, devoting more and more time to talk about less and less. They fire Bob Edwards, and keep wingnuts like Juan Williams, Cokie Roberts, and Barbara Bradley Hagerty. But this is the living end.

I'll give Mr. Dvorkin his first point. Un-redacting a redacted document posted to NPR's website and then publishing it was a questionable move, especially when that document revealed the names of the personnel involved in the Calipari shooting, and details of policies and procedures for hostage incidents.

But Dvorkin spectacularly missed the larger meaning of the incident. His conclusion? Blame the bloggers:

Second, the blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules. The consequences for misbehavior are still vague. The possibility of civic responsibility remains remote. It is a place where the philosophy of "who posts first, wins" predominates.

The blogosphere has proven to be nothing of the kind. The MSM, on the other hand, has repeatedly demonstrated its amorality, its disdain for elementary rules of objectivity and fairness, and has abdicated any sense of civic responsibility. They are, purely and simply, bought and paid for by the rich and powerful on whom they fawningly report with great and nauseating regularity.

To be sure, there are dishonest bloggers and honest journalists in the world. Fortunately (in the former instance) and unfortunately (in the latter), their numbers are very, very small.

Nor was that the only point that Dvorkin grievously mangled:

Those who rely on the Internet as their primary source of news keeps growing compared to other media sources. This group also considers Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, to be the most trusted television anchor.
At the same time, readership for newspapers and viewers of network television news continue to fall.

And do you know why we are more inclined to trust Jon Stewart than Peter Jennings or Anderson Cooper or Bill O'Lielly--or Cokie Roberts, Mr. Dvorkin? It's because Jon Stewart is fucking honest! He makes no pretense to be reporting the news, though he often does a better job of it than his so-called "professional" colleagues. When was the last time Cokie Roberts made a full on-air disclosure of who butters her bread before doing one of her vapid Monday-morning political commentaries? I don't believe I've ever heard Juan Williams admit that he's also a correspondent for Faux News before doing one of his suck-up-to-the-right-wing interviews on the allegedly fair and unbiased NPR. If you want that kind of trust from your listeners, Mr. Dvorkin, you need to have that level of honesty. And I'm not sure NPR knows the meaning of that word, anymore:

Can the MSM adopt any blog values to attract the younger audience? Or should we wait and see? Perhaps these younger people will outgrow these youthful informational indiscretions and come to their senses -- and back to media that can serve them best...

"Daddy knows best" doesn't cut it in my world anymore, Mr. Dvorkin. In fact, as a child of the 1960s, it never really did. I began to lose confidence in my elected officials around 1974. The 2000 and 2004 elections haven't done anything to restore any of that lost confidence. They certainly haven't done anything to impress me with the accuracy, the objectivity, or the reliability of the mainstream media.

I have found, however, that by using the power the internet gives me to seek out news and information from a variety of sources around the nation and literally around the world, I can often cobble together a better and more accurate picture, in less time, and without commercial interruptions to boot, than anything I could hope to see or read or hear from the "professional" journalists at NPR or CBS or The New York Times.

That same power lets me connect to a vast network of other well-informed, well-connected people who can correct my vision if need be, and who can offer alternative sources or clarify difficult questions. I can't get that from a television talking head--even if his job weren't to read "news" prepared by a government agency or some special-interest group with ulterior motives, I have no way of interacting with him in real-time.

Another advantage to gathering information over the internet is that it allows me to pursue multiple sources at the same time, through the wonders of things like tabbed browsing (thank you, Firefox!), live chat, and yes, broadcast e-mail. I can also be online even as I'm watching a report on television, or listening to the radio, and double-checking the accuracy of the reports I'm hearing. I'm very sorry to have to tell you, Mr. Dvorkin, that you and your colleagues have a lousy track record in that area.

Blogs aren't your problem, sir. It's that "battered credibility" that's largely responsible for the "vanishing audiences" that you deplore. Your paternalistic attitude doesn't help, either. Because it's not true that we don't want news--on the contrary, we want a lot more of it than we're getting from you. We want it up-to-the-second, we want it accurate, and we want it, as the title of one of the blogs I write for has it, Unbossed and un-paid-for. Give us that. You'll get your audiences: and a lot fewer pesky complaints when you screw something up royally.

Update, 4 May, 1244: Here, ad verbam, is the galactically clueless reply I just received from Mr. Dvorkin:

I thought the column was, in the end, pro-blog. We all have to take a bit of constructive criticism, you know.

Well, that's his opinion. I didn't see a single thing in that column that was pro-blog. Nor would I characterize his criticisms therein as "constructive."

You've got to be fucking kidding me!

2005-05-03T14:36:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted from Unbossed.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

A three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia just released what may well prove to be one of the stupidest rulings ever handed down (sorry, PDF link) in First Amendment jurisprudence.

No, strike that. It may well be one of the stupidest rulings ever handed down, period.

The case, Simpson v. Chesterfield County, was brought by a practicing witch, who had applied to give the invocation at the start of the regular meeting of the county board of supervisors. The county turned her down. The exact words used by the county attorney in refusing Simpson's request, as repeated in the court's opinion, were as follows:

Chesterfield’s non-sectarian invocations are traditionally made to a divinity that is consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition...

To quote Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." A non-sectarian prayer, by definition, cannot be limited to one single faith or faith tradition. That's elementary logic.

Well, it would appear that the three federal judges who heard this case never bothered to take elementary logic, or else they failed it miserably. Because here's the first paragraph of their opinion:

In this case we consider the effect of the Establishment Clause on a local government’s policy concerning legislative invocations. Because that policy does not "proselytize or advance any one, or [ ] disparage any other, faith or belief," Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783, 794-95 (1983), we believe it fits within the Supreme Court’s requirements for legislative prayer. We therefore remand the case with directions that the district court dismiss the complaint.

It boggles the mind. How could any reasonable person look at a policy that says, explicitly, that only Judaeo-Christian (which effectively means "Christian," although the history behind the case as cited in the opinion makes it clear that Jews and Muslims have offered a few invocations at county board meetings) prayers are permitted at public meetings, and maintain that it neither advances one nor disparages any other religious tradition?

According to the opinion, the court used the Marsh test because it was more appropriate to a case involving legislative invocations. I have to wonder if it might not also have been because even this batch of yahoos realized that the county's policy was never going to pass the smell test, much less the more rigorous Lemon test that the Supreme Court handed down in 1970.

Under that ruling, any legislative act involving religion must:

Have a secular legislative purpose. Personally, I would think that legislative invocations generally would fail this prong of the test right away, and should therefore be eliminated. But let's move on;
Neither advance nor inhibit religion as its principal effect; and
Not foster excessive government entanglement with religion.

Even if we allow Chesterfield's policy of starting public meetings with an invocation to get past the first prong, I'd have to say that its stated policy restricting those invocations to faiths within the Judaeo-Christian tradition is obviously incompatible with the second prong. And since "Judaeo-Christian," in Virginia, apparently includes Muslims, I could see a case being made that the policy flunks the third prong as well: someone is going to have to spend some time figuring out just which traditions count, and which ones don't. Remember, Supreme Court jurisprudence is not like baseball: you don't need three strikes to be out. One will suffice.

Worse, the Fourth Circuit panel can't even seem to see the inconsistency in its own decisions. Beginning on page 10 of the opinion, the judges start a line of argument based on an earlier Fourth Circuit decision in which they "held that Marsh precluded local legislatures from improperly exploiting 'a "prayer opportunity" to "advance" one religion over others.' Id. at 298 (quoting Marsh, 463 U.S. at 794)." They then insist that the Chesterfield policy did not constitute such a "prayer opportunity" because "[c]lerics from multiple faiths and traditions have described divinity in wide and embracive terms ....Chesterfield's openness to this ecumenism is consonant with our character both as a nation of faith and as a country of free religious exercise and broad religious tolerance."

I guess three faiths (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) constitute a "multiple" for these judges. The fact that all three are monotheistic religions whose adherents all believe in the same Deity apparently doesn't constitute an improper exclusion or a denigration of the possibility that there might be other deities out there, or other religious traditions:

The Judeo-Christian tradition is, after all, not a single faith but an umbrella covering many faiths.

The idiotic hubris of that last quote is simply stunning. Yes, Judaism and Christianity are two separate faith traditions. Christianity comes in a great many flavors. But it is effectively one faith, and the God to whom Christians pray is the same HaShem to whom Jews address their prayers (and, I note in passing, the same Allah to whom Muslims address theirs). That "umbrella" is barely wide enough to cover a cocktail glass. It is certainly too small for the whole scope of human religious experience and tradition.

Fortunately, Ms. Simpson and her lawyers plan to file an appeal to request a rehearing in front of the full court. Let us hope that the rest of the Fourth Circuit judges are not as blind, stupid, or narrow-minded as the three who wrote this piece of drivel. And if they turn out to be just as bad as their benighted colleagues, then let us hope that the Supreme Court will weigh in and set the matter right.

It's a matter of basic fairness. If there's going to be prayer at a public meeting, that prayer must be open to any religious tradition that's interested in giving it. Otherwise it should not be allowed in the first place.

Game and first set

2005-05-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

And Bush's Social Security "plan" is down, love-six.

Still, there have been calls, from reliable Repugnacon shills, saying that now that Emperor Chimpicus has put a "real" proposal on the table, it's up to the Democrats to support it or come up with an alternative of their own. With E. J. Dionne, I'm calling Bushit.

And speaking of Dionne, he served up a serious ace in today's Washington Post (go read the link--seriously). The highlights: the Democrats are fools if they take the bait and treat Bush's "plan" seriously, because first off, "Bush's 'plan' is still not a plan, just a few ideas." And it just gets better from there:

If the president is serious, let him first persuade members of his own party to agree to a detailed proposal so everyone knows what the trade-offs are. If what he has in mind is a good idea, Republicans will be eager to sign on. And if Bush can't get Republicans to go along, might that say something about the merits of his suggestions?
Opponents of Bush's cut-and-privatize project -- they include not only Democrats but also skeptical Republicans -- do have a responsibility. Their task is to subject half-baked concepts to the criticism they deserve and insist that they be fully baked before serious discussions can begin. Social Security, the most successful government program in our history, should not be overturned lightly.

Dionne scored set point, however, when he pointed out that the game is fixed. The attack ads, the wingnut talking heads, have all been pushing the same lying meme for at least the last month. It goes something like "The preznit has said he's willing to put all ideas on the table. Where are the Democrats' ideas?"

Trouble is, Bush has not put all ideas on the table. There is an entire raft of ideas that he won't even consider. As Dionne puts it:

The game is also fixed because the president has narrowed the range of Social Security options to protect his most questionable policy choices.
Some press reports have suggested that Bush's willingness to cut Social Security benefits for the wealthy turned him into some latter-day Karl Marx, or at least Ted Kennedy.

This is nonsense.

Bush has refused to put his own tax cuts on the table as part of a Social Security fix. Repealing Bush's tax cuts for those earning more than $350,000 a year could cover all or most of the 75-year Social Security shortfall. Keeping part of the estate tax in place could cover a quarter to half of the shortfall. Some of the hole could be filled in by a modest surtax on dividends or capital gains.

But Bush is resolute about protecting the interests of the truly rich by making sure that any taxes on wealth are ruled out of the game from the beginning. The Social Security cuts he is proposing for the wealthy are a pittance compared with the benefits they get from his tax cuts. The president is keeping his eye on what really matters to him.

Dionne is 100% right when he concludes "...when the danger involves gambling away the future of Social Security, the truly responsible thing is to leave the table." There can be no compromise on this issue: no tit-for-tat deals. Bush is not negotiating in good faith, and until he's willing to start, we should not be enabling his bad habits. The crocodile tears of the Bushoviki over the "crisis" in the Social Security trust fund mean less than nothing. Bush's Social Security "plan" is just the latest incarnation of the same basic shell game he's been playing ever since he conned his way into the White House in 2000. We've lost enough--money, lives, credibility, international goodwill--already. It's time to stop playing Bush's rigged games.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

2005-05-02T19:50:00.000-05:00

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. And when the Bushoviki get involved, compounding the stupidity quotient by a factor of ten (million?), matters only get worse. And worst of all, this particular incidence of stupidity entails children falling victim to a horrible disease that we almost had conquered a decade ago.

Growing up, we had a book, the Family Medical Guide, that was fascinating to me on many levels. I believe the copyright date was early in the '60s, but the material was obviously older. One of the things that fascinated me was the appendix in the rear that dealt with things like what to do after an atomic bomb attack, or how to decontaminate after a suspected chemical weapons incident. Equally fascinating were the pictures of small paralyzed children lying in iron lungs--the giant contraptions that represented the state of the art in respiratory technology in the middle of the last century--and the lists of things not to do when there was a polio epidemic in the area.

Seeing those pictures was enough to convince me that nobody should ever have to live like that again. I have to think that watching someone you love lose the ability to move would be even more effective, yet according to the Times, many contries either stopped or significantly cut back on polio vaccinations in the '90s when they eliminated polio there. That's where the human stupidity begins. The thing about vaccinations is that they don't eliminate the subject disease, they just keep people from catching it. If you want that protection to continue, of course you have to keep up the vaccinations.

But the real kicker in the article for me was the following:

Many people from northern Nigeria to the Pakistan frontier have resisted getting polio vaccines because of persistent rumors that it is a Western plot to render Muslim girls infertile or to spread AIDS. (Paradoxically, after several states in Muslim northern Nigeria halted vaccinations in 2003, it was purchases of Indonesian vaccine that finally convinced wary imams and politicians to drop their opposition, because it came from a Muslim country.)

Holy hypodermics, Batman! I'm sure that the way the Shrubbery has been throwing its weight around in the last four and a half years hasn't done anything to contribute to the spreading of those vicious rumors--and if you believe I actually meant that last statement, I've got some oceanfront property in Iowa I'm looking to unload.

I'm equally sure that the America-first-and-only policies of the Bushoviki are going to make it an arduous, protracted task to overcome that kind of fear and get vaccination programs back on track to the point where we might have a shot at eradicating polio--the way we did in the middle of President Clinton's first term. Those same Bush policies will also make it very difficult for us to do much of anything worthwhile to help move that goal along. Foreign aid is not exactly a priority for the Bush administration, but even if it were, our "help" would most likely be taken as further evidence of a western plot, and would only doom the vaccination efforts we were trying to foster.

I hope the mullahs and the imams and the ayatollahs will all unite behind a plan to push for all Muslims to get vaccinated, and that some irreproachable wealthy Muslim will foot the bill. We can't help out on this one, and Indonesia, at least, is probably not going to be able to do much on its own after two major earthquakes in the last six months, and the tsunami that followed the first one. But nobody should have to watch a little child grow still, never to move again--assuming she lives at all.

Good. Now maybe they'll rethink the whole idea

2005-05-01T18:23:00.000-05:00

Security concerns raised by the New York City Police Department have apparently put construction of the so-called "Freedom Tower" at Ground Zero on hold. The Times story says that no specific details of the concerns were released, just that they were substantial and could involve millions of dollars in extra costs, and potentially a relocation of the building itself, all of which "could delay the start of construction from several months to a year."

Fine by me. First, the design they picked was atrocious. But even more atrocious (I'd call it obscene) is the idea of building anything on that site where so many died. Remember the furor about 10 years ago when Disney floated the idea of building a Civil War theme park barely three and a half miles from the Manassas battlefield? That's how I felt when I heard they were considering rebuilding on the site of the World Trade Center.

And really, what kind of idiot expects that people are going to flock to a building complex that sits atop the site of one of our worst national disasters? I have to think that selling space in anything built there is going to be awfully hard to accomplish--especially given the generally soft market for commercial real estate these days. On top of which, I don't imagine these concerns about the possibility of a second terrorist attack against the new structure are going to do anything to bring the tenants flocking to the rental agency's doors.

This building was a bad idea from the start. Just because George Pataki wants a better legacy than the fact that the original occupants of that site came down on his watch is not sufficient reason to go forward with this grandiose monstrosity. Let the dead rest in peace. Plant a few thousand trees at Ground Zero, one for each of the victims. That's a far more fitting memorial to their loss than any office building could ever be.

Friday random 10

2005-04-29T13:31:00.000-05:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

Clueless (Wolfstone, Piping Hot: Celtic Bagpipe Collection)
Ludwig van Beethoven, Allegro, Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, (Alfred Brendel, Alfred Brendel Plays Beethoven Piano Sonatas, vol. III)
Henry Purcell, "Thou Knowest, Lord" (The Cambridge Singers, Faire is the Heaven: Music of the English Church)
Claudio Monteverdi, "Bevea Fillide mia" (Il secondo libro dei madrigali)
A Little Respect (Erasure, The Innocents--maybe I'll get to hear this one live in concert tomorrow night!)
Kevin Crawford, Dillon's Fancy/Maids in the Meadow/Toss the Feathers (Dance Music of Ireland: Jigs and Reels)
William Byrd, Gloria, Mass for Five Voices (David Willcocks and the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, Byrd: Three Masses)
Ludwig van Beethoven, Allegretto (second movement), Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor, "Moonlight," (Rudolf Serkin, Rudolf Serkin Plays Beethoven)
Sorry Now (Sugar Ray, Sugar Ray)
Rebel (Bryan Adams, Into the Fire)

The "nuclear option" by any other name stinks as badly

2005-04-29T08:56:00.000-05:00

"A big wet kiss to the far right." That's how Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) properly described the pseudo-compromise offered yesterday by the majority leader in the ongoing controversy over the alleged crisis in judicial nominations. I would further characterize the position of Senator Frist (R-Clueless) as "much ado about nothing" or, better yet, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

OK, enough Shakespeare snippets for this morning. Frist's proposal would permit filibusters of legislation, executive appointments by the president, and federal district judges. No filibusters would be allowed for appellate court judges or nominees to the Supreme Court. In other words, Frist is proposing the "nuclear option lite." And Reid was right to throw the proposal back in Frist's face. (He should have kicked him in the groin at the same time, but that's a violation of Senate decorum.)

Of all the nominees that must be confirmed by the Senate, federal appeals court judges and justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are the ones that have the potential to do the most harm (or good) to the nation, over a very long period of time. Unlike Cabinet appointments which are only good for four years (or eight at the most), these positions carry lifetime tenure. Such nominees, as Senator Reid noted in his floor speech on the issue, need more attention focused on them, not less, precisely because they are for life.

The Repugnacons' ignorance or rejection of their own history in Congress continues apace, as evidenced by this bout of crocodile tears from the Cat-Killer:

I sincerely hope the Senate minority does not intend to escalate its judicial obstruction to potential Supreme Court nominees. That would be a terrible blow to constitutional principles and to political civility in America.

Tell that to Abe Fortas' ghost, you twit. To say nothing of the 60-odd judicial nominees that Senator Frist and his Repugnacon colleagues gleefully bottled up in committee, and through blue slips, and through home-senator holds, and all manner of underhanded parliamentary tricks in the Clinton years. Six times as many of Clinton's nominees were blocked by the Republican minority in the Senate as the Democrats have blocked of Bush's appointments. It was right and fair and just and noble when the Republicans were doing it. Now that it's the Democrats, of course, it's wrong and ignoble and unjust, unpatriotic, unconstitutional, and un-American.

The leader doth protest too much, methinks.

So this is what "supporting our troops" looks like

2005-04-28T10:55:00.000-05:00

Now we know. Carlos Lazo got on a wooden raft in 1992 to come to the United States from Cuba, leaving a family behind on the island whom he continued to visit and to support. After moving to Seattle, Lazo joined the Army National Guard after an earthquake hit Washington state.

In 2003, his unit was, predictably, called up for service in Iraq. Lazo, a medic, was in on the hellish street-fight in Fallujah. When his first opportunity for R&R came up, six months later, he flew to Miami and then boarded a charter flight to Cuba so he could see his teen-aged sons--just like any father home on leave from the war would want to.

But the Bushoviki didn't let Lazo go to Cuba. Although he arrived in Miami two days before new Bush-sponsored travel limitations went into effect, the charter company told Lazo "it was not allowed to take any more passengers to Cuba." Lazo continues in his op-ed:

The calculations behind the travel restriction were simple. While U.S. troops were trying to bring democracy to Iraq, President Bush was trying to ensure his reelection by catering to a small but politically powerful group of anti-Castro extremists who demand complete isolation of Cuba as the price of their support. Bush met their demands, but it is average Cubans, and families like mine, that have paid the price.
[edit]

I was proud to serve. My children would be proud, too, to hear what Americans will do for the cause of freedom. But the administration that trusted me in battle in Iraq does not trust me to visit my children in Cuba.

It gets better. As Lazo notes in his op-ed, he is now in Washington, D.C., exercising his right to petition his government for redress of grievances. But according to today's Progress Report, Florida Senator Mel Martinez (R-No Conscience), "passed him off to a staffer who then canceled the meeting."

That's cold--for anybody. Doubly so, at least, for one of our guys in uniform who's been on the ground patching up the victims of the Bush war machine. Further proof, as if any were needed, that the Shrubbery's "support" for our troops is merely an empty shell of rhetoric.

Spring is here

2005-04-27T12:40:00.000-05:00

Alas, that doesn't always mean that life is skittles and life is beer. From our in-house meteorologist's forecast today comes this little gem:

I probably am the only person thrilled to see a funnel cloud pass right OVER my house, but that's exactly what happened at 5:30 PM yesterday. I knew it had no chance of touching down, given the dry, cool airmass here at ground level...but it was interesting to have funnels come to me instead of driving a 1,000 miles to see one!

It helps to know that when he's not watching the weather and keeping the campus alerted to severe weather possibilities, he likes to go storm chasing. And I'm very glad we've got him, because he's (a) faster and (b) usually better than the National Weather Service office in Chicago. He's also single-handedly responsible for getting this university a Storm Ready certification (first ever in the nation), and to get people to buy weather radios and know how to use them during severe weather season. If you haven't got one already, and you live anywhere the weather is likely to get nasty, head down to your local electronics store and get one (preferably one that's SAME-ready, so you can customize the alerts you receive according to your county of residence). They really do make a difference.

Blogging forecast: Light and variable

2005-04-26T20:53:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry for the lack of recent posting hereabouts: I'm trying to watch how much typing and other repetitive activities I do with my left hand. While my physical therapist told me last Friday that we're making satisfactory progress, and while the pain is a lot less than it was when this mess started three-plus weeks ago, I'm still having some pain issues, and there's definitely still a loss of strength and agility in that hand. Typing for extended periods of time puts a lot of stress on the hand, so I'm trying to take it easy and let things heal.

Unfortunately, the nature of my job is such that I have to do at least some typing, and lately I've been doing a lot of database and tabulating work--and that makes that hand absolutely scream. I spent a large part of yesterday trying to get my student recruitment tracking database up to date, and I could only do it for about 15-20 minutes at a time before I had to stop and do something else and let the cramps and the aches subside. Needless to say, I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the idea of banging out a long blog post when I got home. Today was better, but not perfect.

But rest assured, I've got plenty of fight left in me, and lots of ideas still to cover. I'm just not physically up to covering all of them (or even many of them) right now. Long comments are easier to do, and I'm trying not to do too many of them, either. But I'm far from dead yet, and I have not yet begun to blog. Or something like that.

Just Us Sunday

2005-04-24T12:56:00.000-05:00

Carl Nyberg posted a wonderful diary at Daily Kos this morning. In it, he asked the pointed question, "What did your ancestors do to build the United States of America into the country it is today?" You should go read the comments thereon (one of which was the genesis of this post): it offers a stinging rebuke to the Repukes' pet notion that all liberals hate America and everything it stands for.

Hence the title of this post. On the day when the (Ir)religious Reich will meet in quasi-conclave to subvert the Constitution and to plot what I consider tantamount to treason against the United States, a day which they have cruelly mis-named "Justice Sunday," I propose that we remind them of "Just Us." Not only that the only people they care about are themselves, but that it was "Just Us" and our ancestors that built this country from the ground up, shaped its ideals, and shed our blood to defend it when it was threatened. How dare they try to pretend that only Repuglicans ever served their country, or cared about its ideals? (Especially when most of the ones braying the loudest about patriotism and the Constitution never served a day in their lives and haven't ever read the document they've sworn to uphold and which their actions are doing more to destroy than any Hitler ever could.)

So here's my little tale. Feel free to add yours in the comments, or to post on your blogs and link back here.

One branch of my family arrived in Maryland barely a generation after the Mayflower. They came from rural England, but also some from London and its environs. They settled in and did what they'd done for generations--farmed the land.

Come 1776, at least three of them we know of enlisted in the Continental Army. One of them died at Valley Forge. After the war, back to farming. Some of the younger sons went westward, winding up in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, where they mostly stayed.

On my maternal grandmother's side of the family, they were mostly later arrivals--Norwegian and Swedish, mostly, but also French, Scotch, Irish, and German. One whole family emigrated from the Eidsvoll region near Oslo in Norway just after the end of the Civil War. They were also farmers, but some turned to logging or railroad work when they settled in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. My maternal grandmother's mother was a first-generation American citizen--both of her parents were Norwegian immigrants.

My maternal great-grandfather was quite the character. Born in Ohio to a farming family, he was truly a jack-of-all-trades. He worked road construction, built houses, dug ditches, anything that would let him support his family. He built the house he and my great-grandmother lived in out in the North Woods of far northern Wisconsin himself (and built it to her scale: she was quite the petite woman). His pride and joy was the rock garden outside. During Prohibition, he used to brew bathtub gin; as the odor wafted through the woods, friends and neighbors would gather at the house. When it was ready, they'd play pinochle all night long until the booze was gone. It was the only time my great-grandmother smoked (she rolled her own) or drank. He always used to tell us he was descended from an "Indian princess." We were sure he was just pulling our legs. Except recently we uncovered a privately printed family history from around the 1920s that spoke of a young woman (although not a direct ancestor of my great-grandfather's) who had been taken in a raid (I think by the Cherokee, but I can't swear to that). She decided she liked her new life better and stayed with her "captors" even after the opportunity arose for her to go back to her former family. She married well (though I think "princess" is probably a stretch).

Most of my people until the last generation were simple farmers or workers. Many of them served their country honorably: I'm pretty sure that at least one of my relatives has been involved in every major war this country has fought since the Revolution. My father served as a radarman in Korea during the Vietnam war; my stepfather served in World War II, as did a distant cousin who was shot down and killed in a bombing raid over Germany in 1944.

That's how my people built this country. We fed it. Some of us built it--literally. And we fought for it when its cause was just.

The governor doth protest too much, methinks

2005-04-23T14:09:00.000-05:00

Pity poor Jeb! He just doesn't know what to do when the Vatican writes him letters.

"I get uneasy when the Vatican writes me letters when a death penalty case is about ready to take place in Florida. I'll be honest with you, that gives me pause. It makes me pray harder," Bush told reporters in Rome on Saturday.
"Even though it's the law of our land and I have a duty to uphold that law, when there is a conflict .. it does give me concern.

"But having said that, I think the president's decision (on Iraq) was the right one," he added, returning to an original question about Iraq.

As you might expect given that last paragraph, an epistolary shot across the bow from Rome doesn't seem to hold Jeb! back for very long:

Jeb Bush considered postponing an execution earlier this month until after John Paul's funeral on April 8.
He decided to proceed after speaking with the victims' family, and the 47-year-old was killed by lethal injection for the 1999 strangling of a store clerk. He was the 60th person to be put to death since Florida reinstated the death penalty in the 1970s.

The opinion of the leadership of his church can't even convince Jeb! to postpone an execution, much less cancel one outright. But a few well-chosen words from a few angry Florida voters (i.e., people with a real opportunity to affect Jeb!'s future), and he cowers in the corner like a whipped puppy.

Hypocritical Bastards 1, Culture of Life 0.

I've got the responsorial Psalm

2005-04-22T20:30:00.000-05:00

For the "Justice Sunday" gathering this weekend:

Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests. He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness; he restoreth my fears.

He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war, I will find no exit; for thou art in office.

Thy tax cuts for the rich, and thy media control, they discomfort me.

Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy religion. Thou anointest my head with foreign oil. My health insurance runneth out.

Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the days of thy term, and my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.

Got that one from my mum, who got it from someone as an e-mail. No provenance was given, or I'd happily credit the author.

Friday random 10

2005-04-22T11:04:00.000-05:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

W. A. Mozart, Domine Jesu Christe (Mozart: Requiem, Choeurs et Orchestre de Paris / Daniel Barenboim)
W. A. Mozart, Dies' Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön (Die Zauberflöte, Act I; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields / Sir Neville Marriner)
Franz Josef Haydn, O glücklich Paar! (Die Schöpfung, Part III; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Antal Dorati)
Fun, Fun, Fun 'Til Teddy Puts His T-Shirt Away (Capitol Steps, 76 Bad Loans)
W. A. Mozart, Wie? Wie? Wie? (Die Zauberflöte, Act II; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields / Sir Neville Marriner)
William Byrd, Agnus Dei from the Mass for 5 Voices (Byrd: The Three Masses, David Willcocks and the Choir of King's College, Cambridge)
Vigilante (Magnum, The Spirit)
Environmental Terrorism or Global Warming? (Lewis Black, End of the Universe)
George's Revenge (Capitol Steps, Shamlet: A Political Comedy of Errors)
The One I Love (R.E.M., Eponymous)

Seems to have been my day for Mozart operas and sacred music!

Oh, the places you'll go!

2005-04-21T08:39:00.000-05:00

(Or rather, the places I've been.) Courtesy of the newly mastered Ian McGibboney at Not Right About Anything, I found a nice little site that lets you color in the places on the map you've been to. First, my globe-trotting version:

create your own visited country map

Now my wanderings about the continental (thus far) United States:

create your own personalized map of the USA

Color me surprised. Again

2005-04-20T09:02:00.000-05:00

Via Windy City Lefty, I came across a little thingy that looks at how people talk. I'm sure it's not 100% valid, but I figured it would be a nice way to spend a couple of minutes of a drab morning in this little hotbox of an office, so I took it. Herewith the results:

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

25% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

The funny thing is that 65% rating for general American English. Because most people who know me personally have told me that I tend to speak like someone from Down East. (Maybe that's more of an accent thing than a word-choice thing, though--and in fact it's because I enunciate carefully just like I was taught by years of coaches when I was on the forensics team in high school, like every choir director I've ever had, and by Mr. D. when I did theatre at The Alma Mater^TM. In fact, when Mr. D. retired last year, I took him aside at the reception and told him it was his fault everybody thinks I'm from the East Coast. He just laughed.)

Also funny is that 5% Midwestern rating. I was born in Ohio and grew up in Illinois, where I've lived ever since, with the exception of the two years I spent in the People's Republic of Boulder, getting my first master's degree. But apparently the standard English I've learned along the way, and the formal English I necessarily use when I'm writing for publication, has overcome most of the Midwest regionalisms that my childhood should have inculcated.

What might Benedict XVI's election mean?

2005-04-19T22:17:00.000-05:00

I wasn't going to do this. I'm depressed and anxious and what I really want to do tonight is kill off many, many pints of Guinness. But so much has been said by so many that is so fundamentally warped and hateful and twisted (and flat-out wrong) that I felt I had to chime in. The result was the dKos diary that I'm adapting for this post here.

So, bearing in mind that I'm 0-2 on major election forecasts in the last six months, and bearing in mind that it was only yesterday afternoon that I was expressing a firm opinion that Ratzinger was the last guy the cardinals would ever choose to succeed John Paul II (with a host of what I thought were excellent reasons to come to that conclusion), I'm going to throw out a few thoughts on what his election might mean from my perspective as a gay liberal American Catholic.

First, the bad news. Ratzinger spent the last 20 years as the modern-day equivalent of the Grand Inquisitor. It was his job to play the heavy with any theologian, any priest or religious (in the formal sense of a monk or a nun, not just somebody warming a pew on Sunday mornings--though he could go after them, too, if he'd wanted to), who got too far out of line with the official teachings of the Church. (Properly called the Magisterium: one of the three legs that makes up the stool of Catholic doctrine. The other two are Scripture and Tradition, both capitalized advisedly.)

In that role, he either wrote personally, or else inspired and/or approved, the publication of a number of reactionary documents. Some notable numbers on the Ratzinger hit parade were the 1986 Halloween pastoral On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, in which he declared that homosexuality, while not per se sinful, was nevertheless a "strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." Then there was the 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus, quite the little triumphalist rant, a portion of whose conclusion reads as follows (internal citations omitted):

Indeed, the Church, guided by charity and respect for freedom, must be primarily committed to proclaiming to all people the truth definitively revealed by the Lord, and to announcing the necessity of conversion to Jesus Christ and of adherence to the Church through Baptism and the other sacraments, in order to participate fully in communion with God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Ratzinger was also the main architect of the 1990 apostolic constitution Ex corde ecclesiae, which dealt with Catholic universities--and what, exactly, it meant to be called one. He's certainly been the chief sparring partner of the U.S. Catholic bishops as they've fought over the guidelines for implementing the provisions of that constitution in the U.S. over the last decade. The USCC sent up at least two (and maybe more, though my memory isn't clear on this point) proposed drafts, and Ratzinger rejected them both and held out until he got exactly what he wanted--a requirement that anyone who teaches theology at any Catholic university hold a mandatum from the local bishop saying s/he was authorized to teach. No mandatum, no teaching--at least as far as theology is concerned, and at least at a Catholic university. To hell with sissy-pansy considerations like tenure and academic freedom.

Ratzinger and John Paul II were like two peas in a pod when it came to most of the contentious issues in the Church these days. Neither one supported allowing priests to get married (unless they're already married when they convert from Anglicanism, or belong to one of the Eastern Rite churches in communion with Rome) or the ordination of women (despite the fact that the Church has already done so, when it needed undercover help in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia). The modern world is a swamp of evil and vice and sin and is to be resisted and preached at, not listened to. Gay rights are an abomination, and it's probably the gays that are responsible for that filthy pedophilia problem they're having over there in the United States.

[Pre-emptive troll warning: I'm not saying I agree with that last statement--at all. But that's what the man has, if not stated explicitly, at least strongly implied, in public remarks. And his remedy would be to prohibit the ordination of any openly homosexual man to the priesthood, which should have a really interesting effect on the already dire shortage of priests. And I'm gay, remember: I know that gay does not equal pedophile. So don't even go there.]

So. What inferences might we be able to draw from all of that, and from the very little we have to go on from Pope Benedict?

Let's look at his choice of name, for starters. Given the man they elected, I'm not at all surprised he didn't decide to be called John Paul III. Whatever I may think of the man personally (not a lot, in case that's not already apparent), he's not stupid. He knows his reputation--hell, he's probably proud of it. He's been in the thick of things in Rome the last three weeks. He's seen the crowds thronging St. Peter's to file past the late pope's body. He heard that huge crowd chanting Santo subito! ("A saint right away!") at his predecessor's funeral. And he knows damn well that he's never going to beat John Paul II--alive or dead--in a popularity contest. Taking the name John Paul III, for him, would have been tantamount to an insult, and it would probably have cost him some serious points.

So why pick Benedict XVI? He could have become Paul VII, or Pius XIII just as easily. (I doubt he'd have wanted to go for John XXIV, lest he cause a few heart attacks among the guys who had just elected him.)

It's possible that his choice of papal name indicates a desire to have a mediocre papacy. Lord knows the last guy to use that name had one. Elected just after World War I broke out, lasted eight years, and did not a heck of a lot of anything. I don't believe I've ever seen an encyclical of his quoted in anything, and if you go to his page on the Vatican web site, you'll find that most of the links down the left-hand side of the page don't even have any content. Benedict XV's big claim to fame is that he separated Pius X from Pius XI. (And not, as I claimed in a comment on my previous papal post, Leo XIII from Pius XI. My bad.)

The same could be said of the present Benedict's first public utterance after being elected:

Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope, John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me, a simple and humble worker in the Lord's vineyard.
The fact that the Lord can work and act even with insufficient means consoles me, and above all I entrust myself to your prayers.

Bear in mind, I'm a cynic where this man is concerned. Anything that comes out of his mouth is automatically going to get a higher level of scrutiny than the same words would if they'd come from anybody else's mouth, just because it was the guy formerly known as Ratzinger who was saying it. That said, I look at that first statement and I get the distinct impression he really meant what he said. That humble simplicity may wear off after the novelty of the office does--but it might not, too.

The provisions of canon law prohibit the bartering of votes in conclave, or the making of promises to secure them. So there's no possibility that he got the job on the understanding that he'd toe a certain line. But if you ask anybody who's been around the Vatican for longer than a couple of hours, you'll learn that the place is practically built and sustained on nuance and innuendo. You never just look at the words of a Vatican statement, you read, delicately, between the lines. They never use a word without meaning to, and there are shades and shades of meaning to be found in even the simplest gestures.

My guess is that Ratzinger got the nod because he's not a spring chicken, and because he represented a known quantity. The cardinals were not ready for an all-out change from John Paul II's policies and papacy, so they went with a man they could reasonably expect to continue it. It's entirely possible that they will get exactly what they bargained for--John Paul III in everything but name.

Of course, it's also possible that they've elected a maverick who will shake up their comfortable world in ways they never anticipated. That, after all, is what happened the last time they elected a caretaker pope.

So, yes. I am not thrilled with the election of Benedict XVI. I'm going to be very anxious until he's settled in and has made some more public statements that will give me a better read on just where he plans to steer the Barque of Peter--because there are several potential sailing points that are fairly close to our present position that, if he takes us there, would cause me to have to get my ass off the ship. But I'm not jumping ship yet. I'm biding my time, keeping my Rosary beads warm, and looking forward to some heavy drinking with some of my liberal Catholic friends at an unspecified future time.

A little levity

2005-04-19T14:05:00.000-05:00

Very little, alas.

As I was walking back to the office after my appointment at the ophthalmologist's, I encountered a very dirty white car. On its bumper, scrawled in the dust right above the "Bush/Cheney '04" sticker, was this phrase:

Save a horse, ride a cowboy!

Nuntio vobis dolorem magnum

2005-04-19T11:13:00.000-05:00

You may color me surprised. On their fourth ballot, the cardinals have elected a pope. The announcement of who he is will be made shortly.

Update, 1157: You may color me shocked. Appalled. Disgusted. Distraught.

Somehow, some way, the Grand Inquisitor got to two-thirds plus one. And he's taken the name Benedict XVI, which doesn't bode well. We can forget about Vatican II, but I'd be willing to bet we'll be hearing a hell of a lot more about Vatican I.

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

Update, 1214: I've changed the link on the election of Benedict XVI to a more substantive Reuters piece. And somewhere tonight, I'm going to be polishing off a lot of Guinness in the company of some of my liberal Catholic friends. Feel free to join us, if only in spirit.

Which of these things is not like the other?

2005-04-19T07:42:00.000-05:00

The Doofus-in-Chief is befouling the fair state of Illinois today, coming to help with the dedication of the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. Meanwhile, further to the west and south, both Big Dick and the Big Dog will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing (registration may be required to read that link).

Coincidence? I think not.

Bush doesn't have the cojones to go to Oklahoma City. I suspect he's also wary of the implication that his much-vaunted War on Terra might have to be extended to include, you know, white people. So he sends his crusty old second-in-command in his stead, and tries to bask in the reflected glow of one of the greatest presidents this nation has ever known. I'm sure he'll make at least one brazen attempt, in his remarks at the dedication, to link his presidency with Lincoln's heritage. One hopes that the tremors as the martyred president begins whirling in his grave at a dangerously high velocity won't cause too much damage in the state capital.

Flappy Hunk Day!

2005-04-18T16:16:00.000-05:00

I've just received word (alas, too late to act upon) that today is Flunk Day at The Alma Mater^TM. By the rules of the day, that means y'all have to kiss me since I do still have my "Kiss me, it's Flunk Day" button. :-)

What, you may be asking, is Flunk Day? It's an old tradition where I went to school, dating back to an observance known as Roughneck Week in the 1920s. The upshot is that when the Old Main bell starts pealing at 4:30 a.m., you can arise (if you're not already awake and partying) knowing that classes are cancelled for the day, any assignments you might have had to turn in are deferred to the next class meeting, and the weather's forecast to be good enough to allow a day of mainly outdoor activities.

The purpose of Flunk Day is to allow Knox students to blow off a little of the pent-up steam created by 25-odd weeks of intensive academic effort, and to do so in less dangerous and hurtful ways than by going postal on their roommates. At least back in the Paleolithic Age when I was a student, the mornings tended to be a bit of a drunken debauch, and the afternoons were more mellow. By lunchtime, everybody was feeling pretty good, and the faculty brought their kids to campus to enjoy the picnic and the entertainment (usually a stand-up comic). The rest of the afternoon was for games, organized or otherwise, sleep if you could get it, and then a picnic supper, a last movie, and a closing dance wrapped up the occasion.

The world would be a better place, in my opinion, if everybody celebrated Flunk Day. So hoist an adult beverage of your choosing and celebrate it with me and my fellow Knoxites.

Slainte!

Non habemus papam

2005-04-18T16:13:00.000-05:00

The 115 cardinals locked away in conclave got in at least one vote today, but produced no new pope. My sense is, we're in for at least a couple of days of this, folks, so pull up a chair and get comfortable.

As with most reputable Vatican-watchers, I will make no predictions here about who will be the next pope. I feel confident, however, in stating that it will not be His Bavarian Eminence, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. He's too close to the late pope, both administratively and theologically (and more conservative on both fronts). I don't get the sense that anybody but Ratzinger thinks that "more of the same, and then some" is a good idea for the Church right now.

Also, to get to two-thirds plus one (77 votes, required since 115 is not evenly divisible by three), any candidate is going to have to have substantial support from Europe and the Americas. Asia wouldn't hurt, either. Ratzinger has huge negatives in all three. The Latin American cardinals are still smarting from the way he and his boss treated liberation theology in the '80s and early '90s. The Asians are upset at the way Ratzinger quashed their acculturation initiatives, and at the high-handed treatment of Sri Lankan theologian Tissa Balasuriya nearly 10 years ago. American cardinals resent his high-handed administrative style, and they've been tussling with him for the better part of a decade on the norms for implementation of Ex corde ecclesiae, the papal document on the role of Catholic universities.

I suppose it would be possible that Ratzinger could squeak out a majority-vote win if the conclave were to extend long enough to bring it into play. But he'd have to have enough support to vote to switch voting rules (unlikely), and then enough to get to 50%+1 (equally unlikely). He's not even a good caretaker candidate, given that he's 78 years old and doesn't have much of a natural constituency. My suspicion is that the Europeans are going to vote for an Italian, if at all possible, and possibly for a Latin American if that doesn't seem to be working out.

I'll be very much surprised if we have a new pope before Wednesday. At the earliest.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sen. Frist!

2005-04-17T01:02:00.000-05:00

My name is Michael, and I live in Illinois. I am an adult convert to Roman Catholicism and a practitioner of zazen meditation. I hold a lay minister's certificate in liturgy in the Diocese of Rockford, and have been very active in my local church community in the past. I have twice made pilgrimage to the Holy Land (in 1998 and 2000), and once to Rome, for the Great Jubilee of 2000. My religious beliefs were but one of the reasons I cast my vote in 2004 for Sen. John Kerry.

I say all of that not to brag, but to demonstrate exactly how ridiculous is the idea, put forward by people calling themselves Republicans and Christians, that anyone who opposes Mr. Bush's atrocious policies must ipso facto be hostile to the faith or to other people of faith. I call that allegation exactly what it is: hogwash.

My faith is not threatened by liberals: it's far more likely to be put into practice by them. Indeed, one of the reasons I am myself a liberal is that I can't see any other way of behaving if I want to remain faithful to the principles of my faith tradition. More than a century ago, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum novarum, the first so-called "social" encyclical. While it denounced the socialists and found that there was absolutely a right to private property, that encyclical also enjoined upon "the wealthy owner and the employer" the duties of treating their employees as persons "ennobled by Christian character," noting that it was "truly shameful and inhuman" to treat workers "as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers." Employers were enjoined to give their workers time off for their religious duties, and to see to it that they did not neglect "home and family" or squander their earnings. Their "great and principal duty is to give every one what is just."

Pope Leo wasn't just pulling those phrases out of thin air, either. Jesus told his disciples (Luke 10:7, my translation from the original Greek) "The worker is worthy of his pay" and also this (Matthew 25:31-40, my translation):

Whenever the Son of Man may come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then will he sit upon the throne of his glory. He shall gather together before him all the nations, and he shall separate them one from another, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He shall place the sheep at his right hand, and the goats at his left.
Then the Ruler will say to those on his right, "Come here, you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the realm that was prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you watched over me, I was in prison and you came to me."

Then the just will respond to him and say, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you to drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison and come to you?"

And the Ruler will answer them, saying, "I solemnly assure you, as often as you did so for one of the least of my brothers or sisters, you did it for me."

That passage does sound an awful lot like a political platform. It just doesn't sound anything like the Republican one. It certainly doesn't sound like the policies this administration has enacted.

And that is why I am so upset at these people's attempt to hijack my faith for their political ends. Mr. Bush claims to be a Christian, but his actions belie his words. As Jesus himself said (Matthew 7:16), it's the actions that count: "By their fruits shall you know them" and again (7:21), "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, lord' will enter into the Realm of Heaven, but rather that one doing the will of my Father in heaven."

Rather than admit that he's not doing a good job of living up to the faith he claims to profess, Mr. Bush prefers to attack the faith of anyone who happens to disagree with him, the better to ramrod his hateful policies through a recalcitrant Congress and force them upon a population that seems increasingly not to trust him.

The First Amendment to our Constitution gives Mr. Bush the right to believe as he chooses. It gives me exactly the same right, and it also prohibits our government from either forcing one brand of religion on all of its citizens or from interfering in how we choose to live out our beliefs, as long as we don't break any laws in doing so.

I think our founders got that position exactly right. Nobody should be allowed to tell anyone else how they should believe, what manner of life they should live, or how they should put their own faith into action. Are there things I would like to see in the laws of our land? Absolutely. But unless I can find solid reasons to enact those provisions into law that are not bound up solely with the tenets of my faith, I'm going to be unsuccessful in that endeavor--and that's the way it should be.

I came to Catholicism as an adult of my own free will. I would not want anybody to be able to tell me that I either had to join that church, or that I could not. Consequently, if I want that freedom for myself, by what right do I deny it to anyone else? I recognize that reasonable people can come to different conclusions about ultimate things, and that in no way threatens my faith or my church--or my government. I believe, with the Catholic Church, that there is a spark of truth in all religions that are not oriented specifically toward evil, and for my part I believe in dialogue with those other traditions, so I can try to learn from them that facet of the Truth that they, and they alone, see most clearly.

So no, Senator Frist, I am not hostile to faith or to people of faith. But I'll tell you what I am hostile toward: wolves in sheep's clothing who parade around wearing their faith upon their sleeves and proclaiming it loudly on the street corners and in the marketplaces, but whose actions demonstrate that their allegiance is not to the Most High but to Mammon. I am unshakeably hostile to people who prate on about freedom and democracy, yet seek to destroy both of those things not only abroad but also here at home. I will rail against anyone who suggests that I should give up even the least and littlest of my civil rights in the name of some trumped-up war on a nebulous terrorist enemy that we can neither define nor catch. I will protest, vociferously but peacefully, anyone who attempts to prosecute aggressive war in my name. I will work to defeat anyone who attempts to dismantle the social safety net that keeps our youngest and our oldest citizens safely housed and fed and cared for, and offers a helping hand to anyone who needs it. I will not hesitate to cry out that the emperor has no clothes when he claims to act out of a concern for the ordinary citizen but in reality only enriches the already-wealthy corporate fatcats who would fleece him of his last dime and do it gleefully. I will oppose, with every fiber of my being, any politician, any so-called priest or minister, and any judge or judicial nominee who attempts to violate the constitutionally mandated separation of powers (or the separation of church and state), or to impose any kind of a religious test for public office. I will not brook any unwarranted governmental interference in my private affairs--of whatever kind.

You are calling your attempt to do all of those things "Justice Sunday." I will suggest to you, sir, that you do not understand either the meaning of the word "justice," or the respect that the Sabbath day is due. If you did, you would not now be pushing the false dilemma of a young man having to choose between public service and faith, nor would you be working for political gain (which surely counts as "work or activities that hinder the worship owed to God" within the meaning of No. 2185 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which you should know well, given your claim to be a practicing Catholic) on the Sabbath.

I reject out-of-hand the corporatist, elitist, and warmongering agenda of the Republican leadership. It is not worthy of consideration by serious people of any faith, based as it is on entirely selfish and self-centered principles, and given that it has manifestly resulted in tremendous suffering for people both here in the United States and abroad. But I do not do that out of any hostility to faith: far from it. I do it precisely because I am a person of faith, and I hold fast to the principles that Jesus taught in the Gospels: caring for the widow and the orphan and the poor among us, sharing my bread with the needy, sustaining the sick and those in prison, rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's but at the same time never forgetting to render to God what is God's, and God's alone.

I recommend the same course to you, Mr. Frist, and to you, Mr. Bush, and to all of your fellow Republican leaders. Let me paraphrase for you a few other words from the Scriptures (Matthew 23:13-15, 23, 25, 27; my translation from the Greek):

Woe to you, neoconservatives and Republicans, hypocrites, for you slam shut the Realm of Heaven in people's faces. You will not go in yourselves, but neither will you allow anyone else to go in.
Woe to you, neoconservatives and Republicans, hypocrites, for you go all over lands and seas to make a single convert, and when you get him, you make him a child of hell twice as bad as yourselves.

Woe to you, neoconservatives and Republicans, hypocrites, for you tithe on mint and dill and cumin but neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith: you ought to have been doing those things, not leaving them behind!

Woe to you, neoconservatives and Republicans, hypocrites, for you are become like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but which are filled up inside with the bones of the dead and all kinds of filth.

Dumber than a box of rocks

2005-04-16T13:24:00.000-05:00

No, really.

I understand that people forget things--especially as they grow older, and even more so if they're recovering alcoholics and/or coke-heads. But isn't it supposed to be the preznit's job to, you know, read the bills that he signs? And isn't one of the reasons the preznit has this huge staff around him to remind him of the important things to remember?

So how comes it that I can read this on CNN today?

"When I first read that in the newspaper about the need to have passports, particularly today's crossings that take place, about a million for instance in the state of Texas, I said, 'What's going on here?"' Bush said when asked about the rules at a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
"I thought there was a better way to expedite the legal flow of traffic and people," he said.

Bush, a former Texas governor, said he has ordered a review of the rules. "If people have to have a passport, it's going to disrupt the honest flow of traffic. I think there's some flexibility in the law, and that's what we're checking out right now," the president said.

"On the larger scale, we've got a lot to do to enforce the border," he said.

In December, Bush signed into law an intelligence overhaul that requires tighter border security against terrorists and was the basis for the passport proposal. The White House did not say why the president was unaware of the plans his administration announced just a week earlier.

No shit, Sherlock. Anybody who's ever tried to cross into Windsor from Detroit (or, I imagine, from Tijuana to San Diego, though I've never had that experience myself) could have told the Бушовики that it was going to create an enormous hassle.

Worst. Preznit. Ever.

Friday Random 10

2005-04-15T07:34:00.000-05:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

'Twas in the Moon of Wintertime (Cambridge Singers, Christmas with the Cambridge Singers)
An Buinnean Bui/The Yellow Bittern/The County (Chieftains, Water from the Well)
Love is Reason (a-ha, Hunting High and Low)
Variatio 9, Canone alla Terza (J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, Ton Koopman)
Love Comes Quickly (Pet Shop Boys, Please)
I Will Sing of Life (Knox College Choir, 2002 Compilation)
Don't Stop Believin' (Journey, Escape)
Spinning (Benjamin Orr, The Lace)
Stolen Moments (Dan Fogelberg, The Innocent Age)
Robbie Hannan's Jigs (Jerry O'Sullivan, Dance Music of Ireland: Jigs & Reels)

Introducing, in this corner....

2005-04-13T20:48:00.000-05:00

Brother Main Gauche of Forgiveness

That's my Unitarian Jihad Name. Get yours here.

(Hat tip: Shakespeare's Sister, via Windy City Lefty (who needs to fix his link).)

Tired and sore

2005-04-12T15:38:00.000-05:00

My herniated disc has flared up again, and I started my six weeks of physical therapy today. I know it's going to make me feel better in the long run, but for right now, I just hurt. And that, plus my medications, plus the fact that I didn't sleep well last night, equals a very tired me. Past experience has taught me that a tired and sore Michael is not a happy Michael. And since I don't want to take out my frustrations on the next poor little target to cross my virtual radar screen, I think I'm going to take it easy the rest of the day. Blogging will be light to non-existent.

Book meme redux

2005-04-11T12:08:00.000-05:00

Although I already did this once without being tapped, I just can't say no when a lady asks me politely to help out: and andante of Collective Sigh counts as a lady in my book. She's passed me the virtual baton again in the latest meme craze sweeping the blogs, and I'm happy to oblige.

But in the spirit of liberalism and free choice and all that goody stuff, I'm exercising my right to change my answers from last time. (Not that that's likely to be a problem for my ~~legions~~ ~~dozens~~ several faithful readers, natch.)

On to the meme! Our first question is, You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I had to have this one explained to me, since I've never read Fahrenheit 451. Apparently in the book, to save works from being destroyed, people memorize one book which they then "become."

Personally, I find the whole idea rather creepy, though maybe that's just because the whole idea of people burning books makes me very nervous (it's often people like me that get tossed onto the flames next, don'tcha know?). On the other hand, back in the day when books were still a future technology that the human race hadn't mastered, people did this all the time.

I'm torn on this choice. The first one that came to mind was the Riverside Shakespeare. It'd be awfully damn nice to be able to spout off the Bard at the drop of a hat, and to carry all of that beautiful prose (and poetry, too) inside my head. But that last paragraph got me thinking about the rhapsodes in classical Greece who used to memorize Homer, and that's probably going to win out. And since I'm being liberal-contrarian, I'm going to do both the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the original Greek. If I had to do it in translation, I'm not sure which one I'd pick, except that it wouldn't be Fitzgerald. Lattimore's is closer to the original Greek (he even tries to do it in hexameter, though he's not worrying about the feet), but reads rather dully. Fagles, on the other hand, is much better poetry, but also a freer translation.

Question two: Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Not that I can remember, so we'll put that one down as a "no." But then, I almost never get pictures of the characters in my head as I'm reading. Voices, sometimes, but rarely pictures.

Question three: The last book you bought is?

Depends on what you mean by "bought." I just ordered a couple from Barnes & Noble this noon (Lewis Black's memoir Nothing's Sacred and Rogers Brubaker's Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, the latter, obviously, for my M.A. research project), but I don't actually have them in-hand at the moment. If by "bought" you mean books actually in my possession, they would be the four I'd just bought the first time I participated in this meme: Tamara Sonn, A Brief History of Islam; A. J. P. Taylor, The First World War: An Illustrated History; John Keegan, Face of Battle; and Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps.

Question four: What are you currently reading?

Oh, crikey. I've probably got a good dozen that I'm sorta-kinda-almost-occasionally meandering through. Ones I'm actively reading at the moment include:

Tamara Sonn, A Brief History of Islam
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
Code de la nationalité: Code civil et textes annexes
Asma Afsaruddin, Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership
Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation
Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life

For the ones that I've started and am technically reading, but probably haven't had a chance to pick up or look at in a while, check the reading list in the left sidebar.

Question five: Five books you would take to a deserted island:

This is the toughie. I'm a bibliophile's bibliophile; the "gentle madness" that Nicholas Basbanes talked about in his book of the same name (which is on my "one of these days I'm gonna read it" list) struck me early and hard. When I moved into my current apartment years and years ago, and was able to get all my books out of storage after three years, it was the books I unpacked first--primarily because I needed to get the boxes out of the way so I could get to other things like furniture and dishes and clothes. So cutting me down to five is going to be a huge sacrifice: and I'm going to assert librarian's privilege and treat a complete story as one book, no matter how many volumes it has.

If you forced me, this is probably what I'd take right now:

My breviary (four volumes; gives me the liturgical office for each day and season of the year, so all of the psalms and most of the good bits of Scripture, plus commentary, prayers, hymns, and canticles: your one-stop resource for worship.)
Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar novels (probably pushing 20 by now: all of them cracking great reads, and it's a wonderful world she's created, peopled by interesting characters many of whom I'd love to meet in real life--and I think the closest I've ever come to having a crush on a fictional character was with Bard Stefen, one of her gay protagonists early on in the series).
Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels (ditto, though I might consider leaving behind a few of the early ones; her writing has gotten so much better and richer as the years have passed).
Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels (all 20 of 'em: this may well be the best oeuvre of historical fiction ever written. I just finished re-reading the entire cycle over Christmas break, and it was well worth the time it took away from my thesis project.).
Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization. I have a complete hardbound set, inherited from a late friend, but haven't had the time to delve into it. If I'm going to be stuck on an island all by myself, that shouldn't be a problem: and it's good to take some history along.

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

My first victim is going to be em dash of Unbossed, my new group blog venture (where I'm probably going to cross-post this, once I'm done here), because a little blog-whoring can't hurt and I'm truly interested in finding out what she'll say. My second victim is going to be my namesake Michael at Here's What's Left (he can have Heather help if he wants, or even pass it off to her if he's too busy), because they're both cool people and I'd be interested in learning more about them. And my third and final victim is going to be Pastor Dan, of dKos and Faith Forward, because he's a great guy and could use the exposure.

Update: em dash has posted her response in the comments to my Unbossed post. ~~Still waiting to hear from not-me Michael and Pastor Dan.~~

Update 2: Pastor Dan has posted his list at Faith Forward, and not-me Michael has promised to join in the fun--and he's getting Heather to post as well. I'll have links as soon as they're posted.

Friday random 10

2005-04-08T09:13:00.000-05:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

Somerset Wassail (Christmas with the Cambridge Singers)
Can You Forgive Her? (Pet Shop Boys, Very)
Rondo: Grazioso, Sonata No. 2 in A major, fourth movement (Alfred Brendel, Alfred Brendel Plays Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Vol. IV)
Variatio 8 (Ton Koopman, J. S. Bach: Goldberg Variations)
Unto which of the angels (Georg Frideric Händel, Messiah, Trevor Pinnock/The English Concert)
Heinrich Isaac, "Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen" (Knox College Choir, European Tour 1999)
Siren Song (Erasure, Chorus)
Zu dir wall ich, mein Jesus Christ (Wagner, Tannhäuser, Act I, Scene 2: Franz Konwitschny/Berliner Staatsoper)
Adagio con molto espressione, Sonata No. 11 in B-flat major, second movement (Alfred Brendel, Alfred Brendel Plays Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Vol. IV)
Quell' ombr' esser vorrei (Claudio Monteverdi, Il secondo libro dei madrigali)

Burn, baby, burn!

2005-04-05T23:20:00.000-05:00

Or, to borrow one of my favorite lines from Dave, "Die, you pond scum!"

The New York Times will report tomorrow that Federal Election Commission reports and Texas financial-disclosure records indicate that Tom DeLay's "political action and campaign committees" have paid more than half a million dollars to DeLay's wife and daughter since 2001.

This, after today's Washington Post detailed yet another episode in the Tom DeLay Carnival of Errors:

A six-day trip to Moscow in 1997 by then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was underwritten by business interests lobbying in support of the Russian government, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the trip arrangements.
DeLay reported that the trip was sponsored by a Washington-based nonprofit organization. But interviews with those involved in planning DeLay's trip say the expenses were covered by a mysterious company registered in the Bahamas that also paid for an intensive $440,000 lobbying campaign.

I wish I could say that it was the mainstream or regular media that was digging all this dirt up (they're not). But at least they're starting to report it--which is very good for us, and very bad for the Cockroach-Killer-in-Chief. Maybe very, very bad. My wish for Mr. DeLay is a reign shorter than his rhyming almost-namesake Lady Jane Grey (also known as the Nine Days' Queen).

Hallelujah, let us rejoice!

2005-04-05T13:08:00.000-05:00

All that nattering about allegations of liberal bias in academic circles? Fuhgeddaboudit. The Mighty Eagle is soaring to the rescue.

That's right. I read in this week's issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft will join Regent University ...as a part-time professor this spring. Mr. Ashcroft will teach a short-term course on leadership during times of crisis in April, and again in the summer, fall, and next spring.

To be featured prominently on the course syllabus, no doubt, will be topics such as emergency breast-disguising maneuvers (in case an R-rated statue hoves into view), the care and feeding of Duct Tape, and a mandatory seminar on exactly how to "run in circles, scream and shout" whenever in danger or in doubt. And I can't help but wonder whether that last sentence in the quote above was a subtle allusion to the way the War on Terra just keeps going...and going...and going...and going...

(I'm cross-posting this to Unbossed.)

Twelve steps for wingnuts

2005-04-03T18:39:00.000-05:00

Riffing off of this post from Mustang Bobby, who presented us with an unfunny e-mail he received from a wingnut relative I decided the best possible response was to turn it on its head and send it back whence it came. So without further ado, here we go:

The Twelve Steps for Wingnuts

Admitting You're A Wingnut. This is the first step for every anarcho-conservacon on the way to recovery. It is important to understand that you're not a "moderate," you're not a "conservative," and you're not a "libertarian." You're a wingnut, and you need to be honest with yourself about that fact.
Pledge To Support Your Beliefs With Facts. Realize that truth is more important than moral superiority and is the only way to come over to reality. You must research beyond propaganda from the Club for Growth, the Republican National Committee, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News to understand things as they really exist in the world. You can no longer argue based on RNC talking points and blast faxes, or the latest screed from Coulter or Michelle Malkin or Jonah Goldberg. You will actually need to back up your arguments with real information. This is a difficult step, because it means you cannot be lazy any more.
Love America--Warts and All. This may be the most difficult step for those of you who are neo-cons and Iraq War hawks. Admitting that you hate the country you live in, and everything it stands for, can make some of you physically ill: just like admitting that we have not always stood foursquare for freedom and democracy. You might want to make a visit to a museum to better understand that men and women gave their lives to get us to the point where we are today. Read a little history, and be sure to cover things like slavery, Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow, and anti-Semitism. If your people had gotten their way in the First (or the Second) World War, there's a good chance we'd be blogging in German now, and Europe wouldn't have even the few Jews left in it today.
Take a College Level History Class. A wingnut is defined as someone who has never taken a history class. Most wingnuts have a hard time understanding the checkered history of their own country, much less that of the rest of the world--which is much longer and far more complicated than our own. It is time to flush your complete ignorance of basic history (and world politics) down the toilet and understand how the world actually functions. This step is very important, because the next steps involve fascism, facts about corporations, and the accomplishments of government.
Just Say "No" to Fascism. While this concept is obvious to most of the free world, it is an important step in your recovery process. If you have difficulty with this step, spend a week reading up on the Reichstag Fire, Kristallnacht, and visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum--or better yet, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Admit that Corporations are a Necessary Evil. They represent a perversion of the basic principles of capitalism, they foster tremendous inequities that lead to worker unrest and the kind of risky behaviors that wingnuts frequently engage in. Corporations are not the root of all evil, but the love of corporations often is.
Admit that the Government is Your Friend. If you are reading this article on-line or in an email, it is thanks to the government, which financed the development of the first computers, and also developed the internets. If you get some kind of paycheck, you can thank the government for forcing your employer to pay you a halfway decent wage--something that employers have historically been reluctant to do. If you value a 40-hour work week, paid vacation, health and safety regulations, clean air and water, a decent road system, national parks, and, oh yeah, Social Security, you should get down on your knees and thank the government.
If you are one of those wingnuts who believes that the government should be shrunk down to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub, you need to pay special attention to this step. You need to realize that corporations don't care about anything except their bottom lines. Entrepreneurs won't take care of you when you're old and decrepit. Small businesses won't pay you overtime unless the government forces them. Try to get a straight answer out of Kenny-Boy Lay or Bernie Ebbers about just what they were doing with their investors' money if you need a reminder about the evils of corporations or the security that comes from relying on Adam Smith's (in)famous "invisible hand."
The Earth Really Is Your "Mother" . . . and She's Dying. The time has come to start giving to Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and every other environmental organization you have maligned all your life. Face the reality that the earth, society and our environment are worse off today than ever in recorded history and that conditions are continuing to worsen. I realize that many of you anarcho-conservacons will have a very difficult time letting go of the corporatist solution to environmental problems. But I would suggest reading the report of the National Academy of Sciences on global warming, and taking a look at the shrinkage of the Himalayan glaciers to help pry yourselves loose.
Stop Smoking. Okay, some of you might need to enter another 12-Step program to complete this step. Tobacco is distorting your sense of reality, and you need to stop using it. Besides, you will save a fortune on cigarettes--and eventually on your doctor bills and insurance premiums. You might also, if you're emulating your buddy Rush, want to consider putting down the Oxy and getting some help. You'll find your political thinking is a lot less muddled when you aren't high.
Skip a Hamburger. God did not mind us eating animals, but She never intended for us to live off of them exclusively. For God's sake, have a salad once in a while. Or a nice bit of pasta. You will look and feel better than you ever imagined. You can always tape a photograph of Hermann Goering or Dennis Hastert to your refrigerator (or your grill) to help get you through this step.
Stop Re-writing Political History. It is now time to admit that Bill Clinton was guilty of nothing more than cheating on his wife--and that it was nobody's business but theirs. It's also time to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton is not the demon incarnate painted by Ann Coulter (who has a lot more going for her in the demonic department than Hillary ever could). You've also got to admit that every complete count of the votes demonstrated clearly that Al Gore really did win the 2000 election, and that it was the anarcho-conservacons, with their purchased demonstrations and by running to court to enlist the assistance of their activist judges, that stole the election from President Gore. Ronald Reagan did not end the Cold War and did nothing to solve the homeless problem, the AIDS problem, or the welfare problem--and he did commit an impeachable offense when he allowed his flunkies Oliver North and friends to sell drugs and buy weapons for the Contras. Jimmy Carter is a nice man who has done far more to spread freedom and democracy than George W. Bush ever could.
Speaking of W, you know he's lying whenever his lips are moving. He is neither compassionate nor a conservative. There were no WMDs in Iraq, and his war was never about that. He has not made--or kept--us safe since September 11, 2001, and let's remember that while the terrorists were planning that atrocity upon the body politic W was off clearing "brush" on his Texas "ranch," while his advisers ignored the dozens upon dozens of warnings their predecessors in the Clinton administration had left for them.
Be a Missionary. Once you have completed the previous steps to help you confront your wingnuttery, it is time for you to share this awakening with others who are not as fortunate. Go out amongst your wingnut brethren and spread the good word of your freedom from the chains of ignorance that once bound you.

Congratulations . . . and welcome to reality.

My thoughts on John Paul II's legacy

2005-04-02T17:53:00.000-06:00

John Paul II was a man always in earnest and never in doubt. That last was something for which I would fault him, if it were my task to weigh his life and his ministry in the balance. When one attains the pinnacle of power where he spent the last quarter-century and more, a little humble doubt is a good thing. Not that we would have wanted a Hamlet-ian ditherer in the Chair of Peter, but I think a little holy simplicity à la Saint Francis would have helped him to cope with some of the bigger problems of his papacy.

In his defense, however, his certitude was probably adopted out of necessity. He was a teen-ager when the Nazis invaded Poland, and when they left the Soviets came in. You absolutely had to know which side you were on, whom you could trust, and what you stood for--or you were lost. There could be no dissent among the ranks of the Church, because it would allow the dictators to drive a wedge into that crack and split one faction off from the rest and destroy it. If the whole was to survive, it had to be united. Unfortunately, John Paul II never seemed to recognize that this world-view was a dated product of a particular time. Once the Cold War was dead and buried, it was more problematic than pragmatic, more of a hindrance than a help.

As an actor, John Paul II knew how to use the media. Unless one was either Catholic or somehow associated with Catholicism (as a scholar, a journalist, etc.), chances are no one would have recognized Paul VI if he had appeared on the news in street clothes. Everybody who had ever seen a television or a newspaper knew who John Paul II was. He took John XXIII's wandering nature and kicked it up ten or a dozen notches, visiting hundreds of countries around the world, and taking the show on the road. The pope was no longer this shadowy, mysterious figure thundering from a throne in Rome--he was a guy in a sombrero or a ski suit, ministering and preaching the Gospel wherever he happened to be.

He was a micro-manager, and that is likely to be one of the bigger factors in determining his successor. He wanted to run the Church like a CEO from his office in Rome, and that did not sit well with his brother bishops--who took seriously their roles as successors of the Apostles in their dioceses. They resented very much having some Roman flunky tell them what was best for the Catholics of Rockford, Illinois, or Sydney, Australia, or Lagos, Nigeria.

His teaching is conflicted. He was fierce on the "culture of life," but often acted without the kind of deep understanding of the life he wanted to preserve, at least as it is lived in the modern world. Obsessive about sexuality, he neglected other equally (or more) important issues in human life: things like economic justice, the right to health care, the right of workers to organize and to receive a just wage for their labors. He also neglected the liturgy something dreadful, despite canonizing more saints in his quarter-century in office than all of his predecessors combined. For all is reverence for liturgy as a minister, he never seemed to want to talk about it unless someone forced him to. I suspect we owe the resurrection of the Tridentine Rite more to the influence of Cardinal Ratzinger than to John Paul II (and I would love it if one of the first acts of John Paul II's successor was to accept Ratzinger's resignation as ~~Grand Inquisitor~~ Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and then to abolish Opus Dei and the Tridentine Rite).

Among the things which redound to his credit, I would have to number the following at a minimum:

Forgiving and meeting with Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who nearly killed him in 1981
Admitting, albeit grievously after the fact, that the Church's persecution of Galileo was unjust
Admitting the Church's complicity in the persecution of Jews during the Second World War, and apologizing for it--along with visiting synagogues in Rome and the Western Wall in Jerusalem
Reaching out to Muslim and Jewish people in an attempt to heal some of the wounds affecting the People of the Book
Apologizing to women for the centuries of treating them as second-class citizens--though in my estimation he should have gone farther and allowed them to participate fully in the ministry as ordained priests: and not just when the Church needed them to get around Communist dictators or other obstructionists

I disagreed with many of the man's policies: but never cavalierly or without proper and careful thought, reflection, and prayer. John Paul II was not perfect--as a man or as pope--far from it. But neither was he this demon incarnate that some are already painting before his body is even cold. I think I can legitimately say that he did the best he knew how with what he had to work with. And that's a praiseworthy accomplishment in my book, though I wouldn't go as far as the official Church will likely go and canonize him.

Sede vacante

2005-04-02T14:07:00.000-06:00

I woke up from a bit of a nap to find a "breaking news" trailer on CNN announcing that the See of Peter has fallen vacant. At 13:37 this afternoon (Central Time; 21:37 in Rome), John Paul II was gathered to his everlasting reward.

God be good to him, and to the Church who must now decide which fork in the road to take.

No pharmaceutical Taliban in Illinois

2005-04-02T09:13:00.000-06:00

Tuesday evening, I wrote Pharmacists to the Taliban, noting an increasing number of conservo-fascist pharmacists who are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills or emergency contraception (the "morning-after pill"). I noted there that such refusals seemed to be at odds with most of the applicable pharmacists' codes of ethics.

It seems that Governor Blagorgeous has also noticed the phenomenon--and has done something about it. The governor filed an emergency rule yesterday requiring all pharmacies in the state that sell contraceptives to fill prescriptions for them without delay:

The governor and activist groups say there has been an increase across the country of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for morning-after contraception. Some pharmacists who oppose filling the prescriptions have said they feel the pills stop the life of an early human embryo.
But Blagojevich said his new regulation makes it clear that if a woman goes to a pharmacy with a prescription, the pharmacy can not selectively choose which it dispenses or to whom they are sold.

"The pharmacy will be expected to accept that prescription and fill it," he said. "No delays. No hassles. No lectures."

The rule will remain in effect for the next 150 days, during which time the Tribune says that the governor is expected to try to make the change permanent. I also suspect that there will be a few pharmacies that will decide to stop selling contraceptives in Illinois during that time, though it remains to be seen whether they will be able to stay in business if they do stop offering full service.

The pope is dying

2005-04-01T10:15:00.000-06:00

This is cross-posted from my new group blog home, Unbossed.

Update: 12:59 p.m. CST. The Associated Press reports that the Vatican is denying Italian media reports stating that the pope was dead. His breathing is shallow and his kidneys are said to be failing. Multiple sources have reported that he has lost consciousness, but it appears that he has not yet died. La Repubblica is reporting that a Vatican spokesman has said "there is no more hope" for improvement; the pope's death will only be a matter of time.

Update 12:27 CST. CNN has just reported, quoting Reuters quoting Italian wire services, that Pope John Paul II has died. No official statement has yet been issued from the Vatican, and no online source is yet reporting the death. CNN itself is prominently featuring a caption over its coverage that it "has not independently confirmed Italian media reports of pope's death."

It appears that we will have a new pope this year, perhaps even this month. The latest bulletins are very grave, suggesting that Pope John Paul II has suffered a significant infection leading to septic shock and heart failure. His blood pressure is said to be highly unstable, although he remains conscious and lucid. He has decided not to return to the Gemelli Hospital, choosing to remain in his apartments in the Vatican.

This is a solemn and somber time for the Roman Catholic Church, even for those Catholics (like myself) who have disagreed with this pope on one or more of his policy positions. It is a time of potential promise as well, as we begin to consider likely or possible successors to the Great Bridge-Builder (Pontifex Maximus, one of the most ancient of the pope's ceremonial titles).

The next pope will be the fourth of my lifetime, though only the second since I became Catholic. I just missed the reign of John XXIII of blessed memory, being born under Paul VI. I was a teen-ager in 1978, the Year of Three Popes, when Paul VI died, and John Paul I was elected and then died a month later, culminating in October with the election of John Paul II.

For those of my readers who don't happen to be Catholic, let me offer a sketch of what will happen when the pope is gathered to his everlasting reward. The process of burying the old pope and electing his successor is a mix of centuries-old traditions and modern adaptations. The rules for the drama are spelled out in various Church documents, chiefly John Paul II's own apostolic constitution, Universi Dominici gregis.

When the pope dies, the Cardinal Camerlengo ("chamberlain") must certify the death. In past years, this was done by tapping on the forehead of the deceased pope with a silver hammer three times, calling him by his baptismal name and waiting for a response. I'm not sure if that tradition will be continued or not. The pope's study and bedroom will then be sealed, and his papal ring and seal will be destroyed so they cannot be used.

Arrangements will be made for the deceased pope to lie in state in the Basilica of St. Peter for a period of three days. A full nine days of mourning ceremonies will be offered for the pope, with a Mass for his intention offered each of those nine days. The pope's funeral will be celebrated between the fourth and the sixth days after his death, followed by burial in the crypt below the high altar of St. Peter's, near the bones of St. Peter himself.

Not less than 15 days, and not more than 20 days, after the pope's death, the conclave to elect his successor will open. All cardinals who have not attained their 80th birthday as of the pope's death are eligible to vote to elect his successor--and to become the next pope. Technically any practicing Catholic male is eligible to be elected, but it has been centuries since the last non-cardinal won election to the papacy.

Until a new pope is elected, all the Curial cardinals (the heads of the various congregations or "dicasteries" that actually run the Church) lose their powers, though their congregations continue to operate normally under the direction of their secretaries. Ordinary business of the Church is handled by a Particular Congregation composed of the Cardinal Camerlengo and three other cardinals, chosen by lot (one from each order--deacons, priests, and bishops) from among those cardinals resident or already present in Rome. More serious matters are referred to the General Congregation, composed of all the cardinal electors present in Rome at the time. But any decision that would require the assent or the advice of the pope must wait until a successor is chosen.

The cardinal electors are locked away from the outside world and prepare themselves by prayer and meditation for the task of electing the next pope. They must take an oath not to divulge what goes on within the conclave, and not to allow any outsider either to veto the selection made by the cardinals or to influence their votes. John Paul II had a special residence, the Domus Sanctae Marthae (St. Martha's House), built in Vatican City to house the cardinal electors and their attendants during conclaves. Previously, the cardinals would take cells carved out of various Vatican offices and apartments, hastily thrown up and very inconvenient in terms of bathroom facilities and other creature comforts. They are not allowed to have telephones or radios (and probably, in this modern age, computers capable of connecting to the internet) or any other means of communicating with the outside world, or allowing it to communicate with them.

It is considered bad form to campaign for election to the papacy, or to vote for oneself in the scrutinies (voting sessions). There are four such scrutinies each day of the conclave--two in the morning and two in the afternoon. Voting is carried out in the Sistine Chapel. After a series of prayers and a time of meditation, each cardinal elector writes the name of his choice on a ballot form, folds and seals it, and waits until he is called by name to tip it into a receptacle on the main altar in the chapel, under Michelangelo's fresco of the Last Judgement. The ballots are then mixed and counted, to ensure that neither more nor less are present in the receptacle than there are electors voting. Three scrutineers chosen by lot from among the cardinals remove the ballots one by one, reading them and recording the results. The third scrutineer reads each vote aloud so the other cardinals can keep track.

To be elected pope, a candidate must receive either two-thirds of the votes (if the number of cardinal electors can be evenly divided by three) or two-thirds plus one (if that number is not evenly divisible by three). If no candidate receives that number of votes, another vote can be taken immediately or deferred, as seems best to the cardinal electors. The ballots are again checked and counted, and will then be burnt in a small stove provided for that purpose in the chapel. If no pope has been elected, a chemical pellet will be added to the ballots to produce black smoke (formerly wet straw was used). Otherwise, only the ballots will be burned, producing white smoke announcing the election of a new pope.

That new pope will receive the allegiance of all the cardinals present, after which he will proceed to the papal apartments to be vested with the white robes of his office. The Cardinal Camerlengo and several other cardinals then conduct the new pope to the balcony above St. Peter's Square. The Camerlengo will announce the election with the Latin formula Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum: Habemus papam! ("I announce to you all a great joy: We have a pope!"), and then names him and announces the name by which he has chosen to be known as pope. The new pope then comes out to offer his first blessing urbi et orbi, to the city and to the world.

Speculation is always rampant at times like these about who will be the next pope. But there are a few important things to remember. First, campaigning is prohibited (or at least frowned upon). Any quid pro quo arrangement, promising a favor in return for a vote, is invalid. And there's an old, old saying that he who goes into the conclave a pope comes out of it a cardinal.

I've heard all sorts of allegations, and I don't put m uch stock in any of them. I think we can reasonably infer that the next pope will not be more conservative or reactionary than the present one. Historically, after a long pontificate such as John Paul II's, the choice of a successor has fallen upon someone with diametrically opposite views. That was the case with the only pope to reign longer than this one, Pius IX, known in Italian as "Pio Nono" both because "nono" means "nine" in that language, but also because of his reputation of being an obstructionist whose favorite word was "No." His succesor was Gioacchino Pecci, who became Leo XIII and who penned the first of the great "social" encyclicals, Rerum novarum.

I also don't think it's very likely that the next pope will be from the third world. It's certain he won't be from America. I'm betting on an Italian, after 26 years of a Polish pope, though any European would probably do. It's possible that we could see the election of what is commonly known as a "caretaker pope"--someone who belongs to no faction and supposedly has no agenda, and who is tacitly not expected to live very long. That permits the rest of the cardinal electors to consider the direction in which they would like the Church to go and the one they feel is best able to take it there. Of course, the last time the cardinals elected what they thought would be a caretaker, they got John XXIII of blessed memory, who convened the Second Vatican Council. And that could happen again. Personally, I'd like that, because I think we're sorely in need of another ecumenical council.

In the meantime, though I have profound disagreements with this pope on a number of policy issues, I am keeping him in my thoughts and prayers. God grant him the grace of a happy and painless death, and be good to him in the next life.

A new home on the web

2005-04-01T07:56:00.000-06:00

This is not a "Goodbye, cruel world" posting. Just wanted to get that out of the way right at the start. This blog isn't going anywhere, at least not today.

But starting now, you can also find me at a brand-new group blog, Unbossed. We're still painting the trim and thinking about accessories over there, but we're up and running. It's a great bunch of folks, about half men and half women (so much for the theory that there are no women bloggers out there!), from all around the U.S. If you're looking for Faux News-style "fair and balanced" coverage, you probably won't like it. (On second thought, that's probably a good description of what Unbossed is going to look like--but actually fair and reasonably balanced, though with a decidedly liberal outlook.)

So c'mon over, kick the tires, and take Unbossed out for a spin. And tell a friend or three.

Friday Random 10

2005-04-01T07:38:00.000-06:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

Molasses to Rum (1776, original Broadway cast)
Franz Schubert, Moment Musicaux No. 1 in C, D. 780 (Alfred Brendel, Complete Impromptus and Moments Musicaux)
In paradisum from Fauré's Requiem (Knox College Choir, 2002 Compilation)
Georg Frideric Händel, The Lord gave the word (Messiah, Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert)
I Know (Barenaked Ladies, Born on a Pirate Ship)
Vivace from Sonata No. 5 in F Minor, BWV 1018 (Micaela Camberti, J.S. Bach: The Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, vol. 2)
Jeremullah Was a Bullfrog (The Capitol Steps, 76 Bad Loans)
Stereotomy Two (Alan Parsons Project, Stereotomy)
Piña Colada in a Pint Glass (Gaelic Storm, How Are We Getting Home?)
Lunge da lei (Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata)

This can't be good

2005-03-31T11:18:00.000-06:00

I happened to catch a snippet of the "Scud Stud" talking with the Chief Minion of Evil from Fucking Up the Family. As the telly warmed up, Dobson was attempting to pontificate on the meaning of Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

According to Dobson, that supposedly means that Congress has the power to tinker with the courts however it wishes. He specifically argued that it gives Congress the power to make and remake courts (he used the example of the Ninth Circuit in California, one of few remaining liberal bastions in the federal judiciary), presumably to restock them with more reliably conservative members. That section also, at least in Dobson's warped little mind, gives Congress the authority to allocate (and revoke) jurisdiction on a whim.

Equally disturbing was Dobson's response to a question from Blitzer about whether he was angry with the Bushes (Jeb! and Dumbya) for not being more politically activist in the Schiavo case. Dobson replied that no, he wasn't angry with either of the Bushes--just the "activist judges" like the ultra-Republican Judge Greer for usurping the politicians' role to "tell us who we are as a country."

Jeebus, that man is scary. But I really wish he'd said he was pissed with the Bushoviki. It would have made it that much easier to wipe the floor with them in next year's elections.

Ah, the joys of spring

2005-03-30T14:22:00.000-06:00

Though it looked for quite a while as if we weren't going to see any warm weather at all this month, the last three days have been very pleasant: highs in the upper 60s or low 70s, plenty of sunshine, spring breezes. I saw my first robins yesterday.

And now today, another sure and certain sign that it's spring in northern Illinois: our first tornado watch of the season. According to our in-house meteorologist, we have a moderate risk for severe weather across the area this afternoon. Saith he:

A broken squall line of storms is expected...with supercell (rotating) thunderstorms expected on the south end of any breaks in the line, or with any more discrete/isolated cells ahead of it. Moisture is still lacking for strong, long-lived tornadoes...but upper level dynamics still support isolated tornadoes this afternoon that can cause substantial damage. However, it must be emphasized that due to dry air aloft, the main threats will be microbursts producing straight-line winds in excess of 80 MPH with any storm...with a lesser threat of hail up to 2" in diameter...

Good thing I scheduled my doctor's appointment for this morning. It was windy enough driving across the backcountry this morning, and the wind is already appreciably stronger. I think I'm going to keep an eye peeled for the Weather Channel and any e-mail updates from our severe storms list. Blogging will probably be light as a result.

Pharmacists to the Taliban

2005-03-29T20:28:00.000-06:00

Conservative pharmacists have been refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. Now that several states have passed, or are considering passing so-called "conscience clauses" allowing the practice, these conservative activists have been getting bolder.

The funny thing is, I can't quite work out exactly why these (or any) pharmacists should have any reason to exercise their consciences on other people's lives. They are, of course, perfectly free to make moral decisions for themselves. But I'm hardly the only person who wishes they'd butt out of trying to make such decisions for me.

My faith teaches me that my salvation (or lack thereof) is a matter entirely up to me and God to work out. I can request advice and counsel from others (or they can offer it), but I am not required to take or follow it, and the people I consult can't be held responsible for my actions.

Of course, of course. These "conservative" pharmacists are probably operating out of a desire to witness to their faith and be their brothers' (and sisters') keepers. Tough beans, say I. Their faith would be better served if they concentrated on their own righteousness (including living up to their obligations to their professions) and left others to worry about themselves.

Moreover, I'm wondering how a "conscience clause" would fit with pharmacists' professional codes of ethics. I had a look around at several of them this morning, including those of the American Pharmacists' Association (the same code is also endorsed by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists [PDF link]), the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, and the International Pharmaceutical Federation (PDF link). They all included some kind of a statement about how the pharmacist was supposed to respect the "relationship between the patient and pharmacist", the "autonomy and dignity of each patient" (APA), not denying "services on the basis of race, religion, gender, disability, age or national origin" (IACP), or "to ensure that their priorities are the safety, well being and best interests of those to whom they provide professional services" and "to respect the rights of individual patients to participate in decisions about their treatment" (FIP).

The pharmacist's duty is to compound or to dispense the medications that the patient's physician has prescribed, and to ensure that the patient understands how to take them, and what their side-effects might be. No more, no less. There's nothing there about butting in to a patient's relationship with his/her doctor (and his/her conscience). If somebody can find the provisions in any or all of those ethics codes that allows that type of behavior, I'd be happy to retract that statement. But I doubt I'll have to make good on that promise.

These pharmacists, I feel justified in saying, would quite likely tell me that as a gay man I'm perfectly free to marry--so long as I marry a nice woman and not the man of my dreams. So I feel perfectly justified in applying the same logic to them. Of course they can be pharmacists, as long as they're willing to go against the dictates of their consciences and uphold the ethics of the profession they claim to love. Sauce for the goose, after all.

Bloody lovely

2005-03-29T20:19:00.000-06:00

Fags aren't welcome in the Boy Scouts. But aficionados of child porn are just fine. Unfortunately for the BSA, no self-respecting fag would have anything to do with kiddie porn.

What are "extraordinary" measures?

2005-03-28T21:04:00.000-06:00

This post has been coming on for a while. It was the Terri Schiavo mess that caralyzed it, but that's hardly the only reason it's been on my mind. This has not been a great spring for me, for my family, or for my circle of friends. My friend and spiritual director lost a seven-year battle with cancer in February, just weeks after my stepfather had to have double bypass surgery, and subsequently suffered a very small stroke. And just before Easter, a friend of mine who was Fr. Stephen's primary caregiver (and probably his best friend) had to take her husband to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with a 100% blockage of his left anterior descending coronary artery (a condition known in the trade as "the widowmaker" which is usually detected only at autopsy).

Fortunately for all concerned, the two latter gentlemen both underwent successful surgeries and are recuperating nicely (although one of them is definitely, and the other is possibly, getting on his wife's nerves). But all the time I've spent in hospitals and nursing homes, or hearing stories of how other people close to me were spending time there, has definitely brought a few end-of-life issues to my mind.

I already have both a living will and a limited medical power of attorney on file. I felt it was a reasonable precaution to take before I made my second pilgrimage to Israel in 2000, given the fact that the second intifada had started barely a month before we left. And since I was going to see my lawyer to update my will anyway, I was able to kill three sets of legal documents with one set of visits.

Something the Schiavo case brought up, however, and which was briefly touched on in NPR's report this afternoon on the linkage between Schiavo's situation and that of the pope, was exactly what constituted "extraordinary" lifesaving measures. The distinction is a fairly important one at least in Catholic moral theology, because a Catholic is only permitted to refuse the extraordinary measures. Ordinary or routine matters are non-negotiable.

The pope, it is alleged, has determined that the provision of food and water, even if through a feeding tube, constitutes a routine measure and cannot legitimately be refused (or removed, if the practitioner is Catholic). It is worth noting, however, that while I have seen and heard this allegation several times, no one has ever provided a citation for the document in which the pope's claim was made, or referenced the speech or allocution in which he made it. I haven't been able to find it in the Vatican's online archive of papal documents, though I also haven't been looking for it very hard lately--too many other things on my mind.

If the reports are in fact an accurate summary of the pope's position, it may turn out to be yet another thing on which he and I will have to agree, charitably, to disagree. I cannot dismiss his reasoning out of hand: I have to read it first, check his sources, and devote some thought and some prayer to the issue, at a bare minimum, before I can begin to think about dissenting. That's also standard Catholic doctrine, though understandably not one beloved of His Germanic Eminence Josef Cardinal Rat~~zinger~~.

From my own perspective, as a person of faith who is also trained in logic and reasoning (and who has a fair background in medical science as well), it is difficult for me to see how the pope could legitimately classify the artificial provision of food and water as a routine measure of care and not an extraordinary one--at least in any case where the artificial provision of nutrition and hydration was the only way the patient was ever going to be able to receive it.

We can start by noting that the kind of permanent feeding tube that was removed 10 days ago from Terri Schiavo requires a surgical intervention before it can be used. Other extraordinary measures, such as artificial respiration or electrocardiac shock, do not. (Though it is usual to perform a tracheotomy, such as was performed on the pope last month, when the patient is going to be on a respirator for a prolonged period of time, this is not a requirement to start the therapy.)

Second, if food and water are classified as basic necessities of life (which they are, in the normal course of affairs), it is hard to see how cutting off a patient's oxygen or air (as is done when a ventilator is turned off) could legitimately be deemed a morally permissible act (which it is). Of food, water, and air, the one that is most necessary to life is undoubtedly air. Cut off our air supply for even a few minutes and we shuffle off this mortal coil. It takes days or weeks to die from a lack of water or food.

There can be no question that a feeding tube constitutes an artificial life-support measure in a person such as Terri Schiavo who is in a permanent vegetative state. One consequence of the tremendous damage to Schiavo's brain is that she lacks control over most (if not all) voluntary functions--including the act of swallowing. Once the food or water has been swallowed, the autonomic or involuntary nervous system takes over the job of moving it down the esophagus, into the stomach, through the intestines, and then out again. But to get the process started requires a conscious act. Less than a century ago, when a person got to that stage, s/he was done for. There was no way to prolong his or her life past the point where the kidneys shut down or the body wasted away after consuming its own resources.

Granted, this is 2005, not 1915. We can do tremendous things with medical science, even routinely, that would have been considered virtually miraculous back then. But the $64,000 question is whether we are morally obligated to do something, especially something that unquestionably constitutes an artificial intervention in a natural process (i.e., dying), simply because we can.

I would have to argue, and the Catholic Church would normally agree with me, that because we can is never a morally sufficient argument for doing anything. We can, after all, destroy the world through self-inflicted nuclear holocaust. I haven't heard anybody arguing that was all of a sudden a moral imperative. Why should the provision of a feeding tube be any different? (Not that I'm making a facile equation of the two, mind you, but the principle is the same in both cases.)

It seems obvious to me that the provision of nutrition and hydration through a feeding tube is both morally permissible and morally required when the paralysis or inability to eat normally is only temporary, or as long as there is some reasonable hope that recovery is possible--assuming, of course, that the patient had not specifically directed that such treatment was not to be undertaken in the first place. But once it becomes obvious that the condition is not temporary, or that recovery is no longer reasonably to be hoped for, it should also be morally plausible to suspend the treatment.

There are a number of bases from which to conclude that the removal of a feeding tube under such circumstances is morally permissible. The first and simplest of these is the principle of the double effect. The removal of the feeding tube will of course inevitably result in the death of the patient, who is unable to take nourishment on his or her own. But so long as this is not a directly intended end, the action is morally permissible.

Another plausible base on which to build a case is the question of limited resources. Full-time nursing care for someone in a permanent vegetative state does not come cheaply: circa $80,000 a year for Terri Schiavo alone (at least that is the figure that has been bandied about the blogs these last few days). If we had infinite resources, we could of course provide for those needs and we would have a moral obligation to do so. But we aren't even close to having infinite resources, and the money is only the last and least of the resources in question. We don't have adequate facilities for long-term care, we don't have an adequate pool of highly trained staff to operate the facilities we already do have, let alone all the ones we would need to do an adequate job for everybody who needed this kind of intensive care.

I would never dare to suggest that lack of wherewithal (financial or otherwise) could constitute a morally sufficient reason to withhold or remove medical treatment automatically. That is the bugaboo the Weepublicans (and some Catholics) brandish before the public whenever people start talking about end-of-life issues such as refusal of extraordinary measures or euthanasia), but it is the reddest of red herrings. If resources can be found to cover the costs of such care, and its provision is not otherwise removing scarce medical resources from the pool available to treat others in need of those services, by all means, let the treatment continue. But do we really want to legislate or moralize ourselves into a situation where we as a nation (or we as individuals, whether alone or in groups--in such things as insurance pools, for example) are going to be required to provide absolutely any medical procedure any patient needs, for as long as the patient needs it? Because if we go down that road, my friends, there are going to be an awful lot of other things we're going to have to give up (like all those billions of dollars we don't actually have in the till that the Maximum Doofus is sending over to Iraq every day).

Of course, the simplest solution to the problem is to have as many people as possible make advance directives for their care if they should ever wind up in a situation analogous to that of Terri Schiavo. That's one of the rare silver linings inside the dark cloud that hangs over the poor woman's last few days on this earth: by all accounts, filings of wills and living wills and medical powers of attorney are significantly up all across the country. People are talking about the case--and expressing their own feelings on being kept alive through artificial means--at dinner tables and in offices, with friends and family, on a level probably never seen before, and perhaps never to be seen again.

Oh, fuck!

2005-03-28T10:54:00.000-06:00

This is seriously not a good thing. About half an hour ago, an earthquake measuring 8.5 (preliminary estimate) on the Richter scale struck near northern Sumatra in Indonesia, at 2.3 N, 97.1 E. According to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center bulletin just issued, "This earthquake has the potential to generate a widely destructive tsunami in the ocean or seas near the earthquake.

Like they need another one.

These wheels have exploded...

2005-03-27T18:36:00.000-06:00

...right off the Bushovik cart. And methinks we'll see the cart itself in flames before very much longer, especially if recent trends continue.

According to Sunday Morning Talk's recap of the gabfests today:

As Dubya starts to see his numbers slide, This Week reported that the Bush administration are starting to distance themselves from Republicans on Capitol Hill, leaking that Bush didn't even want to return to Washington to sign the Schiavo bill last Sunday. In the spin wars, it's now clear that while the Democrats might have ran [sic] for cover last week, their storyline of the Republicans politicizing a family dispute in Florida has had traction in the polls.

Un. Be. Fucking. Lievable.

In one week, they've gone from wrapping themselves in the "culture of life" flag to trying, like Heracles, to rip this latest incarnation of Nessus' robe off their backs. I wish them as much luck as Heracles himself had with it.

Meantime, I'm befuddled and bemused at precisely what to make of this latest revolting development. Obviously, it's one of the most brazen, craven acts of Bush's tenure--and that's saying something. The unnamed flack is either going to find him/herself out on the street tomorrow morning, looking for a job and an eight-figure book advance, or Bush is going to be in serious trouble with his "pro-life" base, even more so than he already is now. I have a hard time believing that even these people, not known for being the sharpest set of knives in the drawer, are going to be able to keep blindly supporting the man who has blatantly used them for his own political gains, while accomplishing none of theirs. And while G. Dumbya may not care anymore, since he no longer has to face the electorate, his party may find itself caring very much, and in little more than a year's time, when they will be counting on as many of the fundagelical wingnuts as possible getting out to vote in the mid-term elections, to counteract the probable Democratic avalanche that is otherwise likely to envelop the Weepublicans.

In fact, I think the Doofus-in-Chief has painted himself into a corner. His actions, and those of Tom DeLay in particular, in the Schiavo matter were obviously and blatantly self-serving, and this cowardly attempt on Bush's part to swim away from the vortex before the S.S. Culture of Life sinks forevermore beneath the waves of indignation on all sides is only going to highlight that fact. The fundagelical "pro-lifers" are a vital component of the Weepublicans' base, and their most reliable weapon in off-year elections. They can almost always be counted on to turn out in droves for candidates who talk the right talk and who have walked at least some of it, enough to convince this voting bloc of their sincerity. I have a hard time seeing how ~~Bush~~ Rove is going to be able to pull that card out of the bag of tricks in 2006 after the way the Schiavo case has backfired on them (and its degrading dénouement in particular). It will be difficult, if not impossible, to gain their trust with words alone--and if it proves to be possible (and even if it does not), the kind of words it would take, to say nothing of the potential actions the Bushoviki might choose to lend their hollow words the ring of veracity, are equally likely to fire up the Democratic opposition as to mobilize the Weepublican base.

I believe we may at least consider getting the forks out of the drawer, my friends. It may not be completely done as yet, but I do think the Bush goose has at least begun to cook.

Good Friday random 10

2005-03-25T08:01:00.000-06:00

In keeping with the feast, I thought I'd do a second Friday random 10 post, but this time limiting the set to the tracks in the "Religious" genre on my Dell DJ. Here they are:

Heinrich Isaac, Sanctus from the Missa prolationem (Voices of Ascension, From Chant to Renaissance)
Thomas Tallis, Hear the Voice and Prayer (The Tallis Scholars, Thomas Tallis: The Complete English Anthems)
William Byrd, Gaudeamus omnes (The Cambridge Singers, Ave verum Corpus: Motets and Anthems of William Byrd)
Sergei Rachmaninov, The Great Litany (The Kansas City Chorale, Rachmaninov: Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom)
Marty Haugen, The Storyteller (Spirit of Malia)
Marty Haugen, Speak, Lord, from the Mass of Remembrance (Shepherd Me, O God)
David Haas, Sing Our God Together (No Longer Strangers)
Ingegneri, Tenebrae factae sunt (Voices of Ascension, From Chant to Renaissance)
David Haas, Saints of God/I Know that My Redeemer Lives (I Shall See God)
Gabriel Fauré, Offertoire from the Requiem Mass (Knox College Choir, 2002 Compendium)

Friday random 10

2005-03-25T07:45:00.000-06:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

Finale: Allegro molto (fourth movement of Beethoven's 'Eroica' symphony, no. 3 in E-flat major; John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique)
Shoe Box, album version (Barenaked Ladies, Shoe Box EP)
Old Horatius Had a Farm (Knox College Choir, European Tour 1999; it's a version of "Old MacDonald" in Latin, and I love it!)
Something to Do (Depeche Mode, 101, disc 1)
Giovanni Gabrieli, Salvator noster (Vespro della Beata Vergine, the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra)
Eye to Eye (Asia, Alpha)
Exile (Enya, Watermark)
In Old Mexico (Tom Lehrer, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, disc 2 of The Remains of Tom Lehrer)
Witch in the Ditch (Erasure, The Innocents)
Hosanna to the Son of David (Orlando Gibbons, from the Cambridge Singers' album Faire is the Heaven: Music of the English Church)

An encouraging sign

2005-03-24T20:07:00.000-06:00

The proof will of course be in the pudding. But I'm heartened to learn that Jimmy Carter has been tapped to lead an election reform commission charged with examining "problems with the U.S. election system." Carter was the obvious choice to head up the bipartisan panel. He has enough rectitude for three ordinary politicians (if not more), and since leaving office he's made it a point to help secure elections and prevent fraud around the world. He knows from experience what to look for, and he can't be bought.

I'm less thrilled to see that Tom Daschle has also been appointed to the panel. But even more distressing than the appointment of a spineless loser is the fact that the commission is only going to hold two public hearings (one in Washington, D.C. next month, and the other in Houston in June), and "aims to produce a report to Congress" on its findings by September. True, by that time we'll be just over a year away from the midterm congressional elections, and a fair amount of lead time will be required to implement any recommendations the commission may make.

On the other hand, the problems with our present electoral system go far beyond the "disputes over recounts and voter eligibility" mentioned in the Reuters story. It's going to take much longer than five and a half months to dig into them and come up with effective remedies--to say nothing of the amount of time it's going to take to browbeat the anarcho-conservacon leadership of this Congress into doing anything to change the very system that let them usurp power.

I'll be watching this process closely, and hoping for the best.

A book meme

2005-03-24T15:40:00.000-06:00

Courtesy of Zac Attack (even though he didn't tap me as one of his three bloggers), I'm participating in another book meme.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? First off, I've never read F451 (I don't like Bradbury; so sue me!), so I'm not exactly sure if there's a subtext behind this question. And I'm not sure I want to be any book. I'd much rather be a character in one, and there are dozens that I could name.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? I can't say as I have, no. There are certainly actors aplenty that I like looking at (too many to list here), but when I'm reading I don't really visualize the characters enough to get all hot and bothered about one of them. Though, again, there are plenty of fictional characters I've seen or read about that I wouldn't mind being, at least for a brief stint.

The last book you bought is? There were four, actually. Got 'em just about 10 days ago: Tamara Sonn, A Brief History of Islam; A. J. P. Taylor, The First World War: An Illustrated History; John Keegan, Face of Battle; and Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps.

The last book you read was? Depends on how you define "read." If you mean "read" in the sense of "finished," that would be Patrick O'Brian's final Aubrey-Maturin novel, Blue at the Mizzen. If you mean the last book I opened and read part of, that would be Rogers Brubaker's Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, at lunch today.

What are you currently reading? Oy. Again, depends on how you define "currently reading." The ones I'm actively working on right now are Sonn and Brubaker; Barton J. Bernstein, The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues; Asma Afsaruddin, Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership; Code de la nationalité: Code civil et textes annexes; Marie-Joseph Bopp, Ma ville à l'heure nazie: Colmar, 1940-1945; and the galleys of a forthcoming book by my M.A. research adviser (she lent me a proof copy to use in my research work, but since it's not out yet I'll hold off on mentioning the title, in case it changes). As for what I've started and come back to now and then when I have time, the list (which wants updating) is in the sidebar at the left.

Five books you would take to a deserted island? No way I could limit it to five books. Five crates would probably be pushing it. The printed word has long been at the top of my list of drugs of choice.

At this point, I'm supposed to pick three other bloggers whom I "nominate" to answer the same list of questions, but I've never liked the "chain-letter" kind of posting. If you liked this one and feel inclined to do so, put your answers in the comments, or post it to your own blog and trackback that post here. If not, hey, that's cool, too.

Consummatum est

2005-03-24T10:33:00.000-06:00

The Supreme Court has refused to grant certiorari in the Schiavo case...for the fifth time. And since the Florida Senate showed a little sense this morning and refused to pass the latest emergency bill that Jeb! had urged on them, it would appear that Terri Schiavo will finally get her wish to die with as much dignity as the media circus that is swirling around her will allow.

God grant her the grace of a happy and painless death...and the opposite to all the ghouls who have tried to use her to advance their own peculiar political purposes.

Update, 13:45: Judge George Greer has rejected Jeb!'s attempt to have Schiavo made a ward of the state, saying that the request appeared to be brought solely "for the purpose of circumventing the court's final judgment." Unfortunately for Judge Greer, that decision, though correct, will probably see his hate-mail quotient increase by an order or two of magnitude.

I'd love to see a bill like that

2005-03-23T15:25:00.000-06:00

Jeb Bush said he would "continue to call on the Florida Legislature to pass legislation to honor patients' decisions about end of life care [and] protect all vulnerable Floridians..."

Of course, I did a little selective editing there. What Jeb! actually meant was that he wanted the Florida legislature to allow him to meddle, yet again, in the Terri Schiavo matter. (The words represented by the ellipsis in the preceding quote were "...and spare Terri's life.")

Apparently Jeb! missed that day in school where they talked about irony. (And possibly the day when they talked about logic, as well.) Because if we take him at his word, he's asking to have his cake and eat it, too. If he wants to intervene to keep Schiavo alive, he's going to have to disregard her decision about end-of-life care. And if he wants to honor that decision, well, then he's not going to be able to spare her life.

I'm sure the residents of Florida would very much like some legislation to protect them. But I'm equally sure that Jeb! didn't mean anything like spending more money on police protection for battered women, or on supplemental assistance for people who can't make ends meet, or a realistic plan to offer insurance to those who can't get it from their employers (or the elderly, who are thick upon the ground in Florida). He's not talking about adequate funding for education, or teaching abstinence-plus in the Florida schools.

No, what I'm sure Jeb! meant by "protect all vulnerable Floridians" was "criminalize abortion." And probably "speed up executions," "ban gay marriage and adoptions," and "prohibit euthanasia or anything even remotely like it." Because Jeb! is all about the culture of [Republican] life.

The colossal prick.

And the answer is...

2005-03-23T08:44:00.000-06:00

The answer to yesterday's Bloggers Quiz Bowl question: the passage in question was written by Mohammad Khatami (the president of Iran), in Islam, Liberty and Development (Binghamton, NY: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, 1998), p. 73. I found the quote in Tamara Sonn's excellent A Brief History of Islam (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 86. If you click on the link, you can buy it from Barnes and Noble online.

(Bryan: Were you reading over my shoulder while I typed it in, or did you just get lucky?)

Bloggers' quiz bowl

2005-03-22T09:10:00.000-06:00

Since I had such luck with my first edition awhile back, I think I'm going to try another. Read the following quote and see if you can guess (a) the religion, if any, of its author, (b) his/her identity, and (c) about when it might have been written:

In the ...world ...whenever oppressed people have risen against tyranny, their activism has been channeled through religion. People have always witnessed the fiery and bloodied face of religious revolutionaries who have risen to fight oppression and despotism.
Our social conscience is replete with memories of the clash of true believers with hypocrites who have used religion to justify people's misery. Our part of the world has witnessed the historical antagonism between truth- and justice-seeking religion and the oppressive and misguided views of religion that have been the tool of oppressors.

Is it not true that in ...history ...religion has opposed religious and secular tyranny?

Answers tomorrow.

Check it out

2005-03-22T08:19:00.000-06:00

The image at left is of the desk where I spend most of the day, Monday through Friday. And today is a relatively neat day by comparison. I can neither confirm nor deny that blogging activity takes place from this location.

Note, please, the framed photo at the upper left. That's the first print that my fellow LC blogger N. Todd Pritsky sold from his new endeavor, Winding Roads Visual Arts. You'll also notice their graphic in the sidebar at left. I support NTodd when I can, and I hope you, my legions of faithful readers, will do the same. He's prompt, his prices are reasonable, and there's no denying he has the eye of a photographer.

And besides, as I told him myself, he's taken the advice I've given to dozens or hundreds of people in the past and followed his bliss. If I failed to support him in that, after telling other people to go and do likewise, I'd be a bigger hypocrite than G. Dumbya "Culture of Life" Bush--and I don't want to go there. So, like the ad copy says, if you've got the blues and want a little visual pick-me-up, go check out NTodd's work and send him some coin if you have it to spare.

G.O.P.=Ghoulishly Opportunistic Panderers

2005-03-21T07:40:00.000-06:00

Or "Gigantically Obstreperous Prostitutes." Or "Grossly Overreaching Piss-ants." Or "Gutless Obstructionist Pricks."

Alas, I cannot cast aspersions only at the Weepublicans for skulking away under cover of darkness after passing a private bill to allow yet another judge to meddle in the case of Terry Schiavo. There were 47 Democrats voting "Yea" on that bill in the House--and five Republicans who had the guts to buck the leadership and vote "Nay."

I didn't bother listening to the shouting heads on NPR this morning when this bill's passage came up on "Morning Edition." I've heard all the arguments before. Absolutely nothing has changed since yesterday, when I wrote this:

This has nothing to do with respect for life. It has everything to do with grabbing power, placating the fundagelical base, and, I suspect, with diverting attention from the spectacle of Tom DeLay and his legal problems.

I was pleased to hear Juan Williams (filling in for Cokie Roberts this week as the Monday morning Weepublican apologist) acknowledge the fact that DeLay is in trouble up to his dewlaps--and the tide is rising. But that doesn't excuse this latest act of idiocy on the part of the Shrubbery. "Culture of life," my ass!

These people wouldn't recognize the culture of life if it came up to them on the street and kicked them in the 'nads. George W. Bush was proud of his record as a hanging governor in Texas, and publicly mocked one woman who appealed for clemency on the grounds that she had been born again. That's supposed to wipe the slate clean of George's drinking problem and alleged cocaine abuse, and all the other bad behavior that went with those substance abuse problems--but it didn't work that way for Karla Faye Tucker. Tom DeLay used to make his living killing bugs--and he seems to think that many (or even most) human beings who don't happen to be white, male, powerful, wealthy, Protestant Christian, and Republican qualify as "bugs" as well. Bill Frist made much of his credentials as a physician: where was that side of him when he was whoring himself on behalf of the preznit's plan to wrap a ginormous giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry in the guise of a Medicare prescription benefit? Or when Bush decided to cut federal funding for the EMS equipment (and the training that goes along with it) needed in ambulances to keep infants and children stable until they can get to the hospital? Where were all the Weepublican legislators when it came time to raise the minimum wage to something that the average working family could actually live on? Or when it was time to keep after-school programs up and running?

The list could go on and on and on. Just like the hypocrisy of the Shrubbery and its minions in this case. God grant them all and only what they deserve.

Initium finis

2005-03-20T15:01:00.000-06:00

The beginning of the pope's end is now officially underway. As I've previously noted here, there is an age-old tradition in the Catholic Church that the pope is never ill until the pope is dead. But when the pope--and especially this pope, who has a tremendous love for the liturgy generally and for Holy Week in particular--is forced to forego the public celebration of the Eucharist during the holiest season of the liturgical year, well, that's pretty hard to ignore.

So hard to ignore, in fact, that non-Catholic media like the Chicago Tribune have started to comment. And I'm inclined to agree with their analysis:

The final act of Pope John Paul II's pontificate is difficult to watch, but he is determined that the whole world see it.
The drama will be played out again this Holy Week, the most important week of the liturgical calendar, as the pontiff, barely able to speak or stand, struggles to demonstrate that he is able to lead his flock of 1.1 billion Roman Catholics.

The Vatican has promised only that on Easter the pope will offer a televised blessing from the papal apartments. By lowering expectations the papal handlers seem to be calculating that any words or appearances beyond that will be interpreted as a sign that the pope's health is improving.

But the reality, obvious to all, is that the 84-year-old pope is dying, and in the act of dying he is adding yet another chapter to a legacy that already is larger than life.

The Parkinson's disease that eats away at his vitality has left him hunched and immobile. His hands tremble uncontrollably. His great Slavic head slumps to his chest; his face, drained of color and expression, is a mask of pain. His words are unintelligible. He drools, and a bevy of aides attend to him with tissues.

His most recent appearance, via live video on Thursday, lasted less than a minute. He appeared gaunt and did not speak.

In a global culture that worships youth and beauty and politely averts its eyes from the wrinkled and infirm, the pope is an anomaly.

"When public figures get old and start to decay, they tend to step off the public stage," said John Allen, author of several books on the papacy and Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. "When we hear the news of some old celebrity's death, most of the time we say, 'Gee, I didn't know he was still alive.' That won't happen in the case of John Paul II."

[edit]

The pope's inner circle works hard to create the impression of a fully engaged pontiff leading his church. Each day, dozens of documents go out under his name, a workload that would stagger a man half his age.

The reality is quite different. This has been an emeritus papacy for several years. Critics point to the Vatican's slow response to the recent pedophilia scandal in the U.S. and the muddled signals it has sent on its relations with other faiths as indicative of the lack of clear leadership at the top.

There is speculation that John Paul, like his predecessor Paul VI, has prepared an abdication document that would become effective if he were to become permanently disabled. Although John Paul replied "Did Christ come down from the cross?" when asked if he would ever consider retiring from the papacy, the act is not without precedent--though the last time a pope resigned his office was 711 years ago (Celestine V, who resigned barely five months after being elected to office in 1294). And I have to think that, for all his desire to make his death a public act, as he said, uniting his "own sufferings with those of Christ," this pope has too much respect for the office he has held this quarter-century and more, and cares too deeply for the Church, to let it linger overlong with an incapacitated shepherd at its head.

The poor man has visibly gone downhill--considerably--in the four and a half years since I saw him in person at a general audience in the Piazza San Pietro during the Great Jubilee. At that point he could hardly walk on his own, and his speech was so slurred that I had difficulty understanding a good half of what he was saying in Italian, much less being able to translate it into English. But he was the picture of health then, in comparison to the man I watched celebrating Christmas Mass on television last year--the man who couldn't even hold his own head upright, let alone stand unaided, and whose speech was so impaired that if I hadn't known from other cues (and the persistent blathering of Archbishop Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications--i.e., the Church's press secretary--who always yammers over every broadcast of a Vatican ceremony televised in the United States, as if the Catholics who were watching wouldn't know what the Sanctus was) that it was time for the final blessing and dismissal, I would never have been able to figure out that the syllables he was trying to utter were intended to be the Pontifical Blessing in Latin.

My suspicion is that the "flu" for which the pope was recently hospitalized was something considerably more serious. The fact that his doctors have let him go home to the Vatican may mean that he is in fact on the mend, or it may mean that there isn't anything else they can do for the poor man and felt it was better to let him die in peace at home. It would not surprise me in the least to wake up some morning soon to the news that John Paul II had been gathered to his everlasting reward.

And I disagree with Gregg Easterbrook that there is nothing to grieve over when that announcement is finally made--though I will not, personally, grieve this pope's passing overmuch. I disagree with the pope on a number of major doctrinal issues, and I think his long and faithful service, and his patient acceptance of his sufferings over the last decade and more, have more than merited a rest. I cleave more to the opinion of John Donne, who noted (Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, xvii), "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."

You have GOT to be kidding me!

2005-03-20T11:40:00.000-06:00

Via NTodd at Dohiyi Mir (go buy one of his prints while you're there) comes this from Frank Rich in today's edition of the Paper of Record:

USA Today reported this month that the Department of Homeland Security, having failed miserably to secure American ports and air transportation from potential Al Qaeda attacks, has nonetheless shelled out $100,000-plus to hire "a Hollywood liaison": Bobbie Faye Ferguson, an actress whose credits include the movie "The Bermuda Triangle" and guest shots on television schlock like "Designing Women" and "The Dukes of Hazzard." She will "work with moviemakers and scriptwriters" to give us homeland security infotainment - which is to actual homeland security what the movie "Independence Day" is to an actual terrorist attack.

George W. Bush: The Potemkin President. (Or should I say "Worst. Potemkin. President. Ever."?)

Whatever. I'm going back to bed, I'm pulling the covers over my head, and I'm not coming out until this bunch of loons is history. Assuming they haven't gotten us all nuked to Kingdom Come first.

Ipocriti maledetti!

2005-03-20T09:49:00.000-06:00

Ed Kilgore, who's filling in at TPM for the honeymooning Josh Marshall, perfectly expresses my disgust at the Weepublicans' hijacking of the Terry Schiavo case:

During a long drive today, while trying to find a basketball broadcast on the boombox that provides radio in my very old car, I happened upon the voice of Tom DeLay pontificating on the Schiavo case, and it made me physically ill. His claim was that what's happening to Schiavo would be illegal if it happened to a dog.
The cynicism and hypocrisy of that line of reasoning is breathtaking, even coming from Tom DeLay.

[edit]

The only unique thing about this case, of course, is the extended legal battle between Schiavo's husband and parents, and the media notoriety that has made it so ripe for political opportunism.

Do DeLay, his supporters in Congress, and those Men of God so conspicuously on display down in Florida really propose to picket every intensive care unit, nursing home, and hospice in America to ensure that no family facing Schiavo's situation is allowed to let their loved one die? Is Congress really going to legislatively ban natural death so long as some theoretical means is available to continue it? Oh no, says James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and DeLay's prime enabler in this weekend's grandstand play: the "emergency" legislation is "narrowly targeted" and not designed to set a precedent.

In other words, this is pure political exploitation of a private family conflict that's become a media sensation, even though it involves a very common, if, for the people involved, agonizing event.

As such, the GOP's Schiavo intervention is of a piece with other cynical efforts by Bush and his supporters to signal support for a "culture of life" without much regard for logic and consistency. It's a whole lot like the Bush position on human embryo research, as a matter of fact. Many thousands of human embryos are created each year in fertility clinics; it's only when it is proposed that these certain-to-be-discarded embryos be used for life-saving research that the Hammer comes down and Congress is asked to take a stand for life. Wouldn't want to inconvenience or embarass possible Republican voters utlilizing those fertility clinics, right?

Kilgore nails it: this has nothing to do with respect for life. It has everything to do with grabbing power, placating the fundagelical base, and, I suspect, with diverting attention from the spectacle of Tom DeLay and his legal problems.

Because if the Weepublicans really cared about human life, they would be doing more to enhance the quality of that life for everyone--not "narrowly tailoring" an unconstitutional law to apply only to a single particularly tragic family situation. Where is the law guaranteeing health care to everyone who needs it, not just a particular white woman in a persistent vegetative state? Where is the law creating a program to educate people about end-of-life issues, or encouraging people to create advance directives so they won't end up in Terry Schiavo's situation? (And while we're at it, where's the money to provide legal assistance to people wanting to fill out such directives but who can't afford to pay the lawyers to do so?) Where is the incentive program to address the critical shortage of nurses (especially in nursing homes, hospices, and long-term care facilities? It seems the Weepubs are too busy ladling out the largesse to their corporate masters and producing propaganda for dissemination to the masses to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of running the country--and actually promoting the "culture of life" they spend so much time talking about (when they're not rushing prisoners off death row and into the execution chamber, that is).

Hat tip to Mustang Bobby.

Tom DeLay is a fucking ghoul

2005-03-19T17:26:00.000-06:00

If there were any possible remaining doubt about whether Tom DeLay even knows the meaning of the word "shame," his actions today would have removed it. So desperate is DeLay to move the media spotlight off of him and his myriad legal troubles, he will grasp at any straw, make for any port, try any tactic.

His latest attempt at a power-grab? Yet another unwarranted (and illegal) intervention in the matter of Terry Schiavo. DeLay and his fellow Weepublican ghouls in Congress have hauled their members back for a special session tomorrow to consider a Senate bill that would allow a federal judge to become the 16th to rule on the Schiavo case. Apparently blithely unaware of the irony, DeLay had this to say for himself:

We are confident that this compromise addresses everyone's concerns.

Yeah. Everybody's concerns except those of the people most intimately connected with this decision: Terry and Michael Schiavo.

By any right standard, in anything even remotely similar to a just world, Terry Schiavo would already be lying peacefully in her grave these many years. But her parents, desperately clinging to any sliver of a glimmer of a scintilla of hope, have mounted a decade-long campaign to keep her alive--a campaign that has grown to involve Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida; the Florida legislature; and now, the United States Congress.

My advice to all these would-be heroes blathering about their tremendous respect for the so-called "culture of life" their policies are supposedly aimed at creating is this: Butt. The. Fuck. Out. It's none of your fucking business. It was never any of your fucking business. There is no legal, constitutional way to make it any of your fucking business. And if there were any justice in the world, your very tongues would cleave to the roofs of your mouths if you so much as tried to talk about the "culture of life."

The Weepublicans' "culture of life" only seems to apply to fetuses in the womb and women in persistent vegetative states. Otherwise, God help you--because the Weepublicans sure as hell won't. Once that kid pops out of the womb, she can go screw for all they care: they won't pay for adequate day care, decent schools, crime-free streets, reasonable opportunities for higher education, decent jobs that pay a living wage, health care, pensions, retirement benefits, or long-term care in old age. They're too busy kissing the asses of their corporate masters to worry about trivialities like those. Hell, they aren't even willing to do anything to help foot the $80,000-a-year cost of keeping Terry Schiavo alive in one of the few hospice beds available in ~~the state of Florida~~ God's Waiting Room South.

Those pious platitudes falling from the lips of DeLay and his fellow Repugnacons are a hissing in the dark. This is such an obvious political ploy, with so many ulterior motives behind it, that I wonder any reasonable person could hear them flapping their jaws and not laugh in their faces.

Fucking ghouls. May they get no more than what they deserve.

Lenten music request

2005-03-19T14:59:00.000-06:00

Last night in a comment on my Friday Random 10 post, my LC fellow blogger andante from Collective Sigh asked me to list my favorite Lenten music. Since I have a hard time saying no to a lady, I'm granting that request with this post.

I should note, however, as I told andante in comments last night, that there's not a lot of Lenten music per se in the Catholic tradition. The major changes we make this season, liturgically speaking, are omitting the Gloria from the opening ritual of the Mass, changing the usual color of the vestments and paraments to purple, and eliminating the Alleluia before the Gospel in favor of an acclamation without that joyful noise in it. Otherwise, the music continues to be chosen (or should be) with an eye toward the readings for the day and the feast being celebrated. There is specialized music for the Paschal Triduum (the generic name given to the three days leading up to Easter, which we will celebrate at the end of next week: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday), but that doesn't really count as "Lenten" music. (Still, that's not going to keep me from listing some of it in what follows.)

So, in no particular order, here is some of the music for this general season of the liturgical year that I like the best, and why:

Liam Lawton, The Silence and the Sorrow (This is one of Lawton's best, and he doesn't have many off-days. The text is heart-rendingly beautiful, and the music is perfectly adapted to it.)
Dans nos obscurités/Within Our Darkest Night, Taizé Community (A simple ostinato anthem that goes very well with Tenebrae services. I've loved this one since the first time I sang it, at a Lenten Taizé service some years ago. It acquired even greater poignancy when I was privileged to sing it in the Church of All Nations in Jerusalem, built over the traditional site of the rock in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed before his arrest.)
Jesus Remember Me, Taizé Community (Another Taizé anthem, very simple, with lovely harmonies, often used as a recessional anthem as the Blessed Sacrament is transferred to the altar of repose on Holy Thursday night, and also as an anthem during the veneration of the Cross the next day.)
The Exsultet (This is an ancient chant of praise, traditionally sung by a priest or a deacon, but which can be appropriated by a layman if there's no clergyman capable of doing it justice. It's sung during the Vigil Mass for Easter, after the new Paschal Candle has been blessed and lit, and the candles of the faithful have been lit from it. I've done it both in the original Gregorian version in Latin, and in English, both chant and adapted versions.)
Steven C. Warner's adaptation of Julian of Norwich's text "All Will Be Well" (It took me a while to warm to this piece, but after doing it half a dozen times I finally got the eerie tenor harmony part down.)
Ave verum Corpus, either Mozart's or William Byrd's (You've got to have a little Latin in your Lent, and both of these composers did superb jobs. This is one of the classics for the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, as the veneration of the Sacrament commences at the end of Mass.)
Confitemini Domino / Come and fill, Taizé Community (Another lovely ostinato chant from Taizé. I like both the music and the text on this one: Confitemini Domino quoniam bonus, literally "Give thanks to the Lord for He is good," but the adapted English text for the music is also nice: "Come and fill our hearts with your peace, You alone, O Lord, are holy.")
Dan Schutte, How Long, O Lord? (A wonderful meditation piece, and nobody does it as well as my singin' buddy Jan.)
John Michael Talbot, I Am the Bread of Life (Simply gorgeous; a great anthem for Communion any time, but also for veneration of the Sacrament on Holy Thursday. It was the second Communion anthem we sang at Fr. Stephen's funeral the first Friday in Lent this year.)
Steven C. Warner, I Have Been Anointed (I should hate this song, since it was a major part of the repertoire for the 1998 Trip from Hell to Israel, but it's too good. The Notre Dame Folk Choir have recorded an awesome version of this piece.)
David Haas, I Thirst for You (A setting of one of my favorite psalms--42--to an Irish traditional melody. I fell in love with this one when three of the four female singers in Still Pointe sprang it on us as a surprise just before we left for Israel in 2000.)
Rory Cooney, Jerusalem My Destiny (I remember when this song was brand new, back in 1990. We used it as a Lenten anthem that year at the Once-and-Future Parish, and it was good. But it took on a very special meaning for me in 1998 when we adopted it as our anthem on the Trip from Hell--and doubly so when we reclaimed it as our own in 2000, singing it standing beneath an ancient pine tree in the Garden of Gethsemane and watching the sun set over the ramparts of the Old City as the pilgrims received their pilgrimage crosses at the start of the journey.)
Suzanne Toolan, Jesus Christ, Inner Light (Another Taizé-style anthem, which I've sung at dozens of prayer services. And the text, suggested by Brother Roger of Taizé, is simple and beautiful: "Jesus Christ, inner light, let not our own darkness conquer us. Jesus Christ, inner light, enable us to welcome your love.")
Jesus Christ is Risen Today (Yes, it's a moldy oldie, but I look forward to singing it as the recessional at the end of the Easter Vigil each year.)
Lord Jesus Christ (Another Taizé piece, with a similar text to that of "Jesus Christ, Inner Light": "Lord Jesus Christ, your light shines within us. Let not my doubts nor my darkness speak to me. Lord Jesus Christ, your light shines within us. Let my heart always welcome your love.")
Francis Patrick O'Brien, You Are All We Have (A lovely responsorial psalm that can also be used as a meditation piece. One of my all-time favorite solos, and also one that Fr. Stephen loved to hear me sing.)
~~Marty Haugen, Triduum Hymn (A difficult piece to learn, but once you get it, it's sensational. An extended meditation on the traditional hymn "Wondrous Love.")~~
Michael Joncas, We Come to Your Feast (A great piece to use for the ritual redressing of the altar at the Easter Vigil, since all the verses except the last begin with the words "We place upon your table..." A nice calypso beat helps get people awake again after sitting quietly for the better part of two hours, much of it in the dark.)
This Joyful Easter-tide (A 17th-century Dutch traditional melody. I fell in love with this piece when I sang it as a sophomore in college, I believe it was.)
Take, O take me as I am, Iona Community (Another simple, meditative tune with a beautiful text: "Take, O take me as I am; summon out what I shall be; set your seal upon my heart and live in me.")
Bleib mit deiner Gnade / Stay with us (Another Taizé anthem: "Stay with us, O Lord Jesus Christ, night will soon fall. Then stay with us, O Lord Jesus Christ, light in our darkness.")
Scott Soper, Song of Moses (A forceful sung response to the Exodus story--the only one of the prescribed seven readings for the Easter Vigil that cannot be skipped. It goes very nice with finger-cymbals.)

I'm sure I've forgotten something, but those are the pieces that stick out the most in my memory. Hope that helps, andante!

Correction: While there's nothing wrong with Haugen's "Wondrous Love," it isn't the one I was thinking of--just the one I happened to have music for. The fiendishly tricky piece of his that I had in mind is "Song at the Empty Tomb," a meditation on and adaptation of the ancient Gregorian sequence Victimae Paschali laudes. The time signatures are all weird--like 13/9--and change about every five bars. But once you get the timing down, it's a tremendous piece. It's on his Wondrous Love CD, available from GIA Publications.

Friday random 10

2005-03-18T10:42:00.000-06:00

Without further ado, here are mine for today:

Their sound is gone out (Händel, Messiah, Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert)
When I Win (Gaelic Storm, How Are We Getting Home?)
An Cailin Deas Rua (Gaelic Storm, How Are We Getting Home?; I'm beginning to wonder if maybe my Dell DJ is having a bit of a Celtic hangover from St. Paddy's Day yesterday!)
La, la la, je ne l'ose dire (The King's Singers, Madrigal History Tour)
Longe da te, cor mio (Claudio Monteverdi, Il quarto libro dei madrigali)
In ieiunio et fletu (Voices of Ascension, From Chant to Renaissance)
Allegro vivace (Beethoven, Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, third movement; John Eliot Gardiner/Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique)
Behind the Wheel (Depeche Mode, Music for the Masses)
Cross that Line (Howard Jones, Cross that Line)
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park (Tom Lehrer, The Remains of Tom Lehrer)

Hypocrisy reaches new high

2005-03-17T20:09:00.000-06:00

OK, it was bad enough when it was just Jeb! and the Florida legislature that were trying to horn in and score a few basis points with the base on the Terry Schiavo case. Now the Weepublicans have taken the show on the road to Washington:

WASHINGTON, March 17 - The Republican leadership of Congress thrust itself into the politically charged case of Terry Schiavo today, pressing for federal legislation that would prevent the removal of her feeding tube on Friday. The White House indicated that President Bush would sign the measure, if it passed, but it was uncertain whether any bill would reach his desk before doctors acted.
Democrats today blocked Senate consideration of two bills that would move the case of Ms. Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman, into the federal courts. A bill passed by the House on Wednesday was a broad measure that could be applied to many such cases; the Senate measure is confined strictly to the Schiavo matter.

[edit]

At the White House, the president's chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the proposed legislation fell within Mr. Bush's desire to "build a culture of life."

At least the Democrats in Congress have apparently read the Constitution and understand that it specifically prohibits them from passing an ex post facto law--a lesson the Weepublicans could stand to learn. And if there were any justice in the world, the spokes-hamster's head should have spun around on his shoulders and his nose grown about a foot in length for even daring to mention the words "culture of life" in the same sentence with G. Dumbya Bush.

Why is it that the Weepublicans wrap themselves in the pro-life mantle so often? More importantly, why is it that people believe them when they do it?

The only lives these people seem to care about (apart from their own, of course) are those in other women's wombs and those on life support. Once the kid draws his first breath, assuming he's not in a persistent vegetative state, he can go screw for all the Weepublicans care. Fuck paying for schools, effective sex education, condoms, clean needles, a decent jobs program, quality health care, renewal of our inner cities: what's really important is to make sure that nobody has an abortion or pulls the plug on a respirator. Never mind that paying for all that other stuff migh mean there would be fewer abortions to prevent and fewer respirators to unplug, to say nothing of fewer people sucking up government resources in prison.

Oh, wait, I forgot. The Weepublicans like to celebrate their noted "culture of life" by executing people. A lot of people. Very quickly. And sometimes without bothering with all the fuss and bother of the legal formalities. Can't have anything that might interfere with the execution factory, can we?

Bastards.

A cure for our corporate ills?

2005-03-17T12:58:00.000-06:00

In a column that will appear this weekend in the New York Times, Frank Rich takes on Enron:

His trial is still months away, but there [Ken Lay] was last Sunday on "60 Minutes," saying he knew nothin' 'bout nothin' that went down at Enron.
[edit]

The enduring legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose source of profits was an utter mystery - and yet it thrived, unquestioned, for years. How?

I have a couple of suggestions on how to deal with future Enron situations. First, we outlaw the "Sergeant Schultz defense." If you're CEO (or CFO, or COO, or on the board) of a company, it's your fucking job to know what's going on there. It's possible that somebody might be lying to you, but they don't pay you the big bucks just to sit in a fancy corner office and look pretty on the cover of the annual report. You're supposed to notice when the numbers don't add up, and have a nose for when people are lying to you. If you're any good at all, you won't hire the kind of people who'd lie to you in the first place. And if you're not that good, well, then you don't really have much business running the show, do you?

And I'm going to steal a page from Lewis Black. On his album Rules of Enragement, he offers the following advice for avoiding another Enron--and addresses the very question that Frank Rich raised at the end of the segment I've quoted above:

If you have a company and it can't explain in one sentence what it does, it's illegal.

That strikes me as pretty doggone reasonable. That one sentence shouldn't have to go into all the finicky technical details--but it should be enough information that the average person would be able to understand what the company does and how it makes its money. If they can't explain that, then they can't do business. It's that simple.

A cure for our corporate ills?

2005-03-17T12:55:00.000-06:00

In a column that will appear this weekend in the New York Times, Frank Rich takes on Enron:

His trial is still months away, but there [Ken Lay] was last Sunday on "60 Minutes," saying he knew nothin' 'bout nothin' that went down at Enron.
[edit]

The enduring legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose source of profits was an utter mystery - and yet it thrived, unquestioned, for years. How?

If you have a company and it can't explain in one sentence what it does, it's illegal.