Posts from — May 2005

When they talk about “traditional values”, they mean their values, not middle-of-the-road Christian values. A lot of people see the word “Baptist” and react negatively, but one of the best Christians that most Americans know, Jimmy Carter, is a Baptist.

The Reich’s stereotyping of its opponents doesn’t justify stereotyping by those opponents. I know a number of Baptists who are good Christians. Of course none of them go to the Southern Baptist Convention multimedia business calling itself a church just down the road from me.

August J. Pollock’s new cartoon at Xoverboard discusses a new military policy and, no, he isn’t making it up, it is a new policy.

Len at Dark Bilious Vapors pointed me to Jo at Democratic Veteran who quotes Gordon at The Alternate Brain‘s article: Fearless Leader, Ha!

It turns out that the Marines who marched at the Inauguration Parade had the bolts removed from their rifles.

This is isn’t caution; this is clinical paranoia. If a President can’t trust the Marines assigned to the Capitol District, he should just hide in the basement. This is highly insulting to men who would be providing the first line of defense for the White House in case of a large attack. The Marines fly the President’s helicopter, if you can’t trust the Marines you need another line of work.

Now I have issues with the Marines. I mean people who get up at O Dark Thirty in the morning to run around the base carrying rifles over their head and singing deserve a special level of Hell, but I would never question their honor, as this act did. If Bush doesn’t trust them, why should they trust him?

Karen at Dark Bilious Vapors offers us: More on the De-Volution in Kansas….

Ron Reagan is not happy about the “trial” in Kansas, not simply the way the trial is going, but that there is a trial at all.

Update: Why isn’t there some kind or type of official recognition of the 60^th anniversity of V-E Day in the US? Would a ceremony at the World War II Memorial been too much to expect? We are running out of World War II veterans, and it would have been nice to recognise their service.

The judge says that while he is Catholic, he stopped going to church three years ago because of the issue of abuse by priests. As a juvenile court judge Mr. Alvarez would know more about abuse than anyone should.

I wonder if it occurs to these people, and the Baptists that asked Judge Greer to leave, that they are making their candidates less electable. John Kennedy had to come out and say that he wouldn’t govern based on the dictates of the Vatican. When these people emphasize their insistence on ideological purity and conformance to religion over the laws, they make people leery of supporting candidates of their sect.

It’s not as if we didn’t already have enough extraneous garbage in our political campaigns, now we have to listen to candidates compare their “orthodoxy” or lack of it to get elected.

Setting the record straight on one of recent history’s most persistent political myths, The Webby Awards will present Former Vice President Al Gore with The Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the pivotal role he has played in the development of the Internet over the past three decades. Vint Cerf, widely credited as one of the “fathers of the Internet,” will present Vice President Gore with the award.

For those who don’t know, Vinton G. Cerf joined Robert E. Kahn’s project at DARPA in 1973 and the two of them created the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. TCP/IP is the basic scheme that makes the Internet as it currently exists possible.

Stalin was afraid of Hitler and asked for a treaty with Britain and France. The treaty was turned down, so Stalin inked a deal with Hitler that cut up the countries bordering the Baltic. The countries given to Stalin by the treaty supported Hitler against Stalin. In the final disposition the Allies gave Stalin control over those areas. Millions of people died as a result of this mess and Bush stepped right into the middle of it.

There are no readily identifiable “good guys”, and “my country didn’t commit as many atrocities as your country” is not a great rallying cry. When Hitler and Stalin are involved there are no good choices. The area only shows up in nasty ethics exams by sadistic professors, or the conversations of drunken graduate students.

Bush has gone so far as to decry the decision of FDR not to go to war with the Soviet Union after the defeat of the German Armies. The decision not to push the Soviet Union back to its pre-World War II borders was a recognition of the reality that the people of the US would not support further war.

Any review of the limp support for the Korean War would show the folly of suggesting that FDR should have opposed Stalin at the end of World War Two. The Soviets took the brunt of the German violence for years and lost tens of millions of people. The Allies made a number of decisions that cost Soviet lives, and Stalin was paranoid to begin with. Stalin and the Russian weather might have been able to defeat Hitler eventually, and the Allies didn’t want to face that possibility.

Remind me again what Condi Rice’s specialty is supposed to be.

Well, we can’t outlaw leaded fuel for NASCAR because it would cost the teams money to redesign their engines, unlike millions of American cars that have already been converted.

Britain is broken into 646 Parliamentary seats and you only have to receive the largest number of votes to win, you do not have to win a majority. Parties vote for their leader, and the leader of the party that wins the most seats is the Prime Minister.

In 2001 Labour won 413 seats with 40.7% of the vote, the Conservatives got only 166 seats for their 31.7%, the Liberal Democrats won 52 seats with 18.3%, and the other parties received 28 seats with 9.3% of the vote. If the British used a proportional system as some European companies do the distribution would have been Labour-263, Conservative-205, Liberal Democrats-118, and others-60 with no parliamentary majority of 324 seats.

In 2005 Labour won 356 seats with 35.2% of the vote, the Conservatives got only 197 seats for their 32.3%, the Liberal Democrats won 62 seats with 22%, and the other parties received 30 seats with 10.5% of the vote. If the British used a proportional system as some European companies do the distribution would have been Labour-227, Conservative-210, Liberal Democrats-142, and others-68 with no parliamentary majority.

In Britain people voted for the party that they perceived as best for their pocket books, despite its foreign policy, even with the majority of 32 seats, Blair is going to have to listen to his back bench to get anything passed.

The event was picketed by people who felt he should have abandoned his years of commitment to the law and ruled in accordance with their beliefs.

There is a basic misunderstanding in this country as to how the system works. People don’t seem to understand that the voters approve the constitution and amendments, the legislature approves laws, and judges simply read and apply laws to specific cases.

If the picketers wanted a different outcome, all they would have had to do in the state of Florida is gather signatures and get an amendment on the ballot to alter the constitution. That’s all it took to prevent pregnant pigs from being forced to live in cages. They had years to do this, but it didn’t happen because they know they don’t have the votes.

Rumsfeld has been saying that the military needs to close about 25% of its current bases to save money. He has been saying this for years, based on the “conventional wisdom” of cutting costs to increase profits. Of course this attitude ignores the inconvenient facts that he isn’t running a business and there isn’t supposed to be a profit.

Finally someone has reminded him that part of his cost cutting was to bring US military force back from foreign bases, and if he does that, those forces need to have places to live and work.

Rumfeld is now saying that the base closings will be in the 10-12% range. This still doesn’t deal with the reality that the current military is not large enough to accomplish its current missions, and needs to be expanded.

There are several varieties of mold with better planning skills that Rumfeld’s Pentagon.

Fort Benning, one of the largest US Army bases and the home of the 82^nd Airborne Division, is located beside Columbus, Georgia and many of the students in the school system have parents on active duty with the military.

Anyone who would order that boy to hang up on what might be the last time he ever talked to his mother because of a “school rule”, and then gave him a suspension when he refused, has no business in education of any kind.

Their claim that they went easy on him and didn’t have him arrested is several horizons beyond the pale. The kid’s mother is serving in a war zone, and any educator who lacks the humanity to deal with that needs to be removed.

Update: School authorities have decided to reduce the penalty to a three day suspension following massive protests against their original decision. I would suggest sending the people involved to Baghdad to set up a base education center.

Adjust your links as required. Oh, she took her main graphic with her.

[™ Kevin Drum]

Kittens

Bast, but that’s one scary thing!

[Edit: I found these two while moving some stuff scheduled for removal. I’m fairly sure they belong to Lone Ranger.]

Friday Ark

I don’t see why there’s a need for separation, the majority of Americans are Christians.

Oh, you want your life controlled by the Pope?

Why would you ask that?

Well, the biggest Christian church in this country is the Catholic Church, so don’t get too carried away with your democratic visions. The Catholic Church has a lot of experience telling countries what to do and their congregations how to vote.

There are more Protestants than Catholics.

But Protestants don’t act or think like a single group and they can’t even agree on the version of the Bible to use, so the Catholics would get the most votes while the Baptists argue about what kind of Baptists they are. If my people had wanted to take orders from Catholics, they’d have stayed in Europe.

Historical note: many states have a “Blaine amendment” in their constitution. The purpose of the amendment was to prevent Catholic schools from receiving funding. Of course these amendments now prevent funding of any religious school.

This chunk of bigotry is now working against the bigots. James G. Blaine was riding the rise of “nativism” [the American “Know Nothing” Party] of the 19th century, which was reborn as the new KKK after World War I. Anyone who wasn’t a Northern European Protestant was “evil” and should be ejected from the United States.

This garbage keeps being revived. Folks, it was bigotry in the 19^th century; it was bigotry in the 20^th century; and it is bigotry in the 21^st century. Changing the color of the ribbon on the package doesn’t make the contents smell any better. No matter what you call it, the odor tells you what it is.