The Department of Too Many Departments Department

Via Radley Balko, I've just learned that the state of Texas has spent 18 months to publish a 668-page report finding that the state of Texas ... issues too many reports.

The article doesn't mention if the report came from the Department of Redundancy Department, but it wouldn't surprise me.

The best part? Despite the report's finding, its issuers assure their paymasters that continuing to report on the excess of reports is vital:

As for the commission's massive report on reports, Heskett predicts it won't go away.

"For the report to be effective, it must be ongoing," he said.

I'm pretty sure that the part of state records administrator Michael Heskett is actually being played by the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, but I'll certainly issue a report once I'm positive.

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Catholics Against Torture

As Andrew says, we've heard plenty from the left about why torture is a bad idea, but very little from the right. This post from "Catholic and Enjoying It" is therefore a welcome change, and really made me think about the issue in a new way. Here's a brief excerpt:

What lies at the heart of all consequentialist appeals to do grave evil for the greater good is, ultimately, a refusal to trust that God knows what he is talking about. It is the conviction that the Christian revelation is not an insight into the heart of reality, but a sort of idealistic dream that is fun to contemplate in quiet moments and maybe even an "inspiration" in a vague way, but is nonetheless something that hard thinkers and tough-minded men must sweep away when crunch time comes in favor of "realistic" solutions that require us to frankly embrace sin and evil if we hope to live or remain free. In this analysis, the functional belief of the Machiavellian realist is "You shall embrace evil, and evil shall make you free and keep you safe."

The argument of the Christian revelation is that this is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie from the pit of hell.

I remain confused as to why American Christianity and the Republican party have become synonymous on issues like torture, war, poverty, health care, and race relations. There is ample support for what Americans would consider liberal positions on these problems, and yet it is as if such a thing is unthinkable in the public discourse.

If I haven't made it clear on this blog before, I think torture is evil. I think it is wrong. I think it is useless, misguided, dangerous, and corrupting to the torturer. It is to be avoided at nearly all costs, and I am deeply appalled that our nation has joined the despicable ranks of those regimes that routinely employ it. I know there are those among the religious who feel the same way, and I am delighted that finally, at long last, their voices are getting heard.

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Texas Constitution Bans Atheists From Office

Did you know that it is unconstitutional for me to hold a public office in the state of Texas? Article 1, Section 4 of the Texas Constitution states:

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.

Not that I was planning on running for Governor any time soon, but still, I'd have liked to think that I could in theory give something back to my state in the form of public service.

Guess not.

This is the kind of thing that made me "come out". Prejudice against people without a belief in god is enshrined in the actual constitution of the state I inhabit.

Think about that for a moment.

A child molester could hold office here. Or an admitted terrorist. Or a serial murderer. All of them are in theory qualified to hold the public trust, as long as they were Catholic, or Southern Baptist, or Hindu, or what have you.

But not me.

P.S. I better stay the hell out of Arkansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee, too.

(Hat tip to Holly Orr for the link.)

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Senatorial Bathroom Power Stance

At the risk of turning this into a potty-themed blog, I just can't let this story about US Senator Larry Craig's (R-Idaho) arrest for lewd behavior in an airport restroom go without comment:

Craig stated "that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine," the report states. Craig also told the arresting officer that he reached down with his right hand to pick up a piece of paper that was on the floor.

I've been in a number of public restroom stalls in my 38 years, but I can't ever recall being in such dire gastric distress that I would need to take a stance while seated so wide that my foot was at any risk of touching the foot of the gentleman in the next stall. All I can say is, if you need to take a stance that wide, you'd better be in the handicapped stall, because you're going to need to grip those handlebars for leverage.

What really disturbs me is that you have to touch feet to signal you want to do something naughty. Frankly, I think foot-on-foot intimate contact is just wrong, and ought to be illegal pretty much anywhere. If feet weren't meant to be gross, they'd not have evolved to be waaaaaaay down there at the opposite end of our bodies from all our sense organs. They're stuck on the end of the legs for a reason -- they're nasty!

On a more serious note, I have a hard time understanding what was illegal about this episode. He didn't actually solicit any sort of illegal contact, he just exhibited some behaviors typical of people who would. And though as I noted, he lied about why he did those things -- the grip and the "I was just picking up a piece of paper" -- that's all after the fact. It seems like you'd have to prove he intended to solicit illegal behavior, and I don't see how you could do that in this case.

I understand the desire to keep lewd acts out of public restrooms, but honestly, this seems to be a pretty outrageous law. By comparison, you can't arrest a guy just for driving around slowly in an area known for prostitution. You have to see them actually solicit the illegal act -- just acting suspicious isn't (and shouldn't) be enough.

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Why Americans Hate the Media

Matt Yglesias points this morning to an absolutely fascinating 1996 discussion of why Americans hate the media by James Fallows. Although it's 11 years old, the article still rings absolutely true. I think Matt's right -- it's so good there's almost no way to select only the "good parts" -- but being a stubborn git I nonetheless have tried to pull a few paragraphs that really jumped out at me to give you the general idea of the piece below the fold.

The discussion shows that are supposed to enhance public understanding may actually reduce it, by hammering home the message that issues don't matter except as items for politicians to fight over. Some politicians in Washington may indeed view all issues as mere tools to use against their opponents. But far from offsetting this view of public life, the national press often encourages it...

It is more fun—and easier—to write about Bill Clinton's "positioning" on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is "handling" the need to cut Medicare, than it is to look into the issues themselves...

[A]ll issues are shoehorned into the area of expertise the most-prominent correspondents do have:the struggle for one-upmanship among a handful of political leaders...

Midway through the interview Bradley gave a long answer to the effect that everyone involved in politics had to get out of the rut of converting every subject or comment into a political "issue," used for partisan advantage. Let's stop talking, Bradley said, about who will win what race and start responding to one another's ideas.

As soon as he finished, Woodruff asked her next question: "Do you want to be President?" It was as if she had not heard a word he had been saying—or couldn't hear it, because the media's language of political analysis is utterly separate from the terms in which people describe real problems in their lives...

[A] relentless emphasis on the cynical game of politics threatens public life itself, by implying day after day that the political sphere is nothing more than an arena in which ambitious politicians struggle for dominance, rather than a structure in which citizens can deal with worrisome collective problems...

Why not imagine, just for a moment, that your journalistic duty might involve something more varied and constructive than doing standups from the White House lawn and sounding skeptical about whatever announcement the President's spokesman put out that day? ...

The point is not that the pundits are necessarily wrong and the public necessarily right. The point is the gulf between the two groups' reactions. The very aspects of the speech that had seemed so ridiculous to the professional commentators—its detail, its inclusiveness, the hyperearnestness of Clinton's conclusion about the "common good"—seemed attractive and worthwhile to most viewers...

"Polls show that both Republicans and Democrats felt better about the Congress just after the 1994 elections," a Clinton Administration official said last year. "They had 'made the monkey jump'—they were able to discipline an institution they didn't like. They could register the fact that they were unhappy. There doesn't seem to be any way to do that with the press, except to stop watching and reading, which more and more people have done."

As I've gotten older, I've come to think of the mainstream media not as "liberal" or "conservative", but as Establishment. Like the popular clique at school, their main goal is the maintenance of their own power and influence. What matters is not truth, or fairness, or intelligence, but increasing the scope of their own importance. And as Fallows points out, the way to do that is to focus on only the interpersonal, political, high-school sociology of politics rather than the things that actually matter.

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High Schoolers with Cajones

According to this MSNBC.com story:

President Bush was presented with a letter Monday signed by 50 high school seniors in the Presidential Scholars program urging a halt to "violations of the human rights" of terror suspects held by the United States. The White House said Bush had not expected the letter ...

"We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants," the letter said.

It's both a proud and a sad day when a group of high school students has the balls to say to the President of the United States what neither the Congress nor the media will. Suddenly the future looks just a little bit brighter, if these are the outstanding young men and women who will be running it.

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I Don't Want to Vote for Hillary Clinton

I don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton. Here's why:

1. Dynasty. We've gone Bush - Clinton - Bush. I don't want to see that pattern continue -- we did away with hereditary monarchies a long time ago, for good reason.


2. Authoritarianism. I think Hillary is the same type of authoritarian leader as G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Richard Nixon, the type who thinks the rules don't apply to her or her subordinates, and who thinks the rule of law is an inconvenient weakness to be skirted rather than the core of what makes our country great.


3. Baggage. I'm still exhausted from the last few years of Bill Clinton's presidency, when I had a friend on the phone tell me that he hated Bill and Hillary personally. Not just their politics or their positions, but as human beings. I don't think I can take four more years of that kind of anger from the right.
   


4. Lack of Vision. Her vote on Iraq showed me that she lacks insight and wisdom. Granted, she's not alone, a lot of people got it wrong at the time (including me), but I'd rather have someone who got it right serve as our next President. If I was willing to settle for someone as gullible as I am, I'd vote for myself.
   


5. An Unwillingness to Admit When She's Wrong. I hate people who can't say "I was wrong, I'm sorry." Her tortured defense of the original Iraq vote now that it's obvious she was wrong is painful to watch. A lack of vision joined with an inability to admit error is a bad combination.


6. The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. For seven years we've had an Administration who treats the opposing party as anti-American, traitorous scum who by virtue of having lost an election are no longer allowed to have a voice in how the country is run, and I'm sick of it. I think Hillary fundamentally sees the world the same way, as "Us versus Them", where "Them" is other Americans who happen to disagree with her. Haven't we learned by now that that's a bad way to run the country? We don't need a ruler, we need a leader, and you can't lead with hatred and fear. Not for long, anyway.


7. The Health Care Initiative. I've done some reading lately on how she handled the Health Care Initiative at the beginning of Bill's presidency, and it wasn't pretty. High-handed authoritarianism and contempt for the opposition were evident even then, and she wasn't even elected! Again, seven years of that is enough.

Having said that, I will absolutely not vote for a Republican, because I think it's crucial both for our country and their party that they lose this election, and lose big. As "The Commander Guy" said, we only get one chance every four years to pass judgment on the leadership of the President and his party. Given that, I'm happy to oblige him by telling the Republicans exactly what I think of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the Debacle in Iraqle, the "Unitary Executive", Presidential Signing Statements, "Heckuva Job, Brownie", ballooning federal debt and deficits, extraordinary rendition, torture, warrantless wiretaps, and the rest of the legacy foisted on us by this renegade bunch of malicious incompetents. (Yes, that statement's probably over the top, but damn it was fun to write!)

Any other Democrat besides Hillary is pretty much a shoe-in for me. Since I live in Texas and my vote's not going to count anyway (anyone with an "R" after their name has our electoral college reps all wrapped up by now), I have the luxury of not voting for Hillary if she's the Democratic nominee. I wish the primary season worked differently and I had a chance to at least influence who my party was going to nominate, but I'm shut out of that by virtue of the calendar. So I don't get a say at any level really, and thus I'm at a loss as to what to do when I'm in the booth on Election Day.

The Libertarian candidate looks like a first-class nutjob, which I guess means I'll have to look into the Green Party or something. Man, I'll feel like a whacko if I do that. I wish we had more choices somehow, either with a parliamentary system like in England, where each party gets a percentage of seats in government proportional to the votes cast for them, or just by having a greater number of viable parties. Having only two candidates with a reasonable hope of success sucks.

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Smile! You're Arrested.

Did you know you can be arrested and sent to prison for videotaping a police officer, even if it's to protect yourself from false accusations?

Randy Radley Balko, a libertarian-minded columnist for Reason Magazine and FoxNews.com who I like a lot, has a column today documenting some of the recent arrests for this "offense". He makes the excellent point that the police are public servants, and since we're the public, we should have the right to hold them accountable with videotape evidence of their actions:

Earlier this year, Iraq war veteran Elio Carrion was shot three times at near-point-blank range by San Bernardino, Calif., deputy Ivory Webb. Carrion was lying on the ground and was unarmed. Video of the arrest and shooting, however, was captured by bystander Jose Louis Valdez. Webb since has been fired from the police department and is on trial on charges of attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm. The video is the key piece of evidence in his trial.

While it's possible that police and prosecutors would have believed Carrion's version of events over Webb's even without the video, it seems unlikely.

The price of liberty is constant vigilance. I'm glad people like Randy Radley Balko are out there watching for this kind of crap and keeping the rest of us informed. The article's well worth a read if you're concerned about infringements on civil liberties. Balko has his own site, The Agitator, where he blogs about such issues. It's well worth a bookmark.

(I don't know how in the heck I got "Randy" originally. Duh.)

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Happy Loving Day!

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage in the United States.

Read that again. Just forty years ago, it was illegal for a Black person and a White person to get married. I'm only 38, my wife's only 42, and I have a sister who's over 50. Within our lifetimes, racism was enshrined in the laws of many states, and not yet considered unconstitutional by the federal government.

Just one year after "Loving", Kirk and Uhura shared the first interracial kiss in television history. Think about that -- at a time when this program about the progress of mankind in the future was airing, it was illegal for two human beings who happened to have different skin colors to marry each other. I daren't think about what would have happened to Spock's parents, a human and a Vulcan, contemplating a union in that kind of environment.

In some ways it's hard to imagine what people were thinking back then, how such blatant hatred and racism wouldn't inspire automatic revulsion. And yet, something like 20% of Americans still think it is wrong for whites and blacks to marry. Who can defend such bigotry? Let's turn to the very words they themselves wrote to find out. Judge Leon Bazile said in his original judgement:

In this State marriage is treated as a civil contract, but it is more than a mere civil contract, it is a public institution established by God himself, is recognized in all Christian and civilized nations and is essential to the peace, happiness, and well being of society. * * *"

"* * * The right in the States to control, to guard, protect and preserve this God-giving, civilizing and Christianizing institution is of inestimable importance, and cannot be surrendered, nor can the States suffer or permit any interference therewith.

And of course later Judge Bazile wrote:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races showes that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Does that sound familiar to you? It should. It's the same exact "reasoning" used to justify the enshrinement of homosexual bigotry in state laws today. I wish our generation had the sense to learn the lesson of Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores Jeter, that extending the protection of marriage to two people sincerely in love and committed to each other can only make the institution more secure, more profound, more valuable to our society.

Will our children look back forty years from now at this period in time and wonder how we could have lived with ourselves, how people could harbor such irrational hatred of two people in love?

I fervently, earnestly, and with all my heart hope so. Today we celebrate the victory in one battle of this long war for freedom, even while we fight on a new front. Bigotry and hatred may change the masks they show the world, but hopefully there will always be those who, like Loving and Jeter, stand up and call it for what it is.

Happy Loving Day, everyone! Now get out there and love someone, dammit!

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What Next For America?

Fareed Zakaria has written a great column about what America can do after Bush leaves office to get the country back on the right track internationally. I'll post some excerpts after the jump, but I agree with virtually every word in the essay. Really good stuff.

Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face...

This distinct American advantage—which testifies to our ability to assimilate new immigrants—is increasingly in jeopardy. If leaders begin insinuating that the entire Muslim population be viewed with suspicion, that will change the community's relationship to the United States. Wiretapping America's mosques and threatening to bomb Mecca are certainly a big step down this ugly road...

We will never be able to prevent a small group of misfits from planning some terrible act of terror. No matter how far-seeing and competent our intelligence and law-enforcement officials, people will always be able to slip through the cracks in a large, open and diverse country. The real test of American leadership is not whether we can make 100 percent sure we prevent the attack, but rather how we respond to it. Stephen Flynn, a homeland-security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that our goal should be resilience—how quickly can we bounce back from a disruption? In the materials sciences, he points out, resilience is the ability of a material to recover its original shape after a deformation. If one day bombs do go off, we must ensure that they cause as little disruption—economic, social, political—as possible. This would deprive the terrorist of his main objective. If we are not terrorized, then in a crucial sense we have defeated terrorism...

To recover its place in the world, America first needs to recover its confidence. For those who look at the future and see challenges, competition and threats, keep in mind that this new world has been forming over the last 20 years, and the United States has forged ahead amid all the turmoil. In 1980, the U.S. share of global GDP was 20 percent. Today it is 29 percent. We lead the world in technology and research. Our firms have found enormous success in new markets overseas. We continue to generate new products, new brands, new companies and new industries...

Perhaps the most hopeful sign for the United States is that alone among industrial nations, we will not have a shortage of productive citizens in the decades ahead. Unlike Germany, Japan and even China, we should have more than enough workers to grow the economy and sustain the elderly population. This is largely thanks to immigration. If America has a core competitive advantage, it is this: every year we take in more immigrants than the rest of the world put together...

I have no magic formula to stop Iran from going nuclear, nor to change Iran's regime. But the strategy we have adopted against so many troublesome countries over the last few decades—sanction, isolate, ignore, chastise—has simply not worked...

At the end of the day, openness is America's greatest strength. Many people on both sides of the political aisle have ideas that they believe will keep America strong in this new world—fences, tariffs, subsidies, investments. But America has succeeded not because of the ingenuity of its government programs. It has thrived because it has kept itself open to the world—to goods and services, ideas and inventions, people and cultures. This openness has allowed us to respond fast and flexibly in new economic times, to manage change and diversity with remarkable ease, and to push forward the boundaries of freedom and autonomy.

Our openness, our adherence to the rule of law, our dedication to the idea of liberty for all, these are not weaknesses as George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their Republican cheerleaders would have us believe. They are instead the core of our strength, the very things that make us admired by the good and hated by the evil. That is why Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, torture and war, walls and fear-mongering, illegal wiretapping and the Unitary Executive, are such bad, impractical, foolish, misguided and dangerous ideas. We have shrugged off the mantle of Superman, fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and assumed the guise of The Punisher, looking to the barrel of a gun to solve all our problems and scorning the very principles that made us great.

We can do better. We must do better. And I think Zakaria is dead-on about how we go about doing that. I strongly encourage you to read the entire original article in its entirety.

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At What Cost "Victory"?

Andrew Sullivan, conservative Catholic blogger and initially a vociferous war supporter, has in the last year or two come to realize what a costly mistake Iraq has been for the United States. His column today is, in my opinion, a must-read, as he finally comes to consider what the cost to America has been at home. I'll post a lengthy except after the jump:

At home, the public has come to accept torture as a legitimate instrument of government, something that the Founding Fathers would have been aghast at. We have come to accept that the president is not bound by habeas corpus, if he decides he isn't. He can sign laws and say they don't apply to him. We know that an American citizen can be detained for years without charges and tortured and abused - and then critical evidence of his torture will be "lost". We have come to accept our phones being tapped without a warrant and without our even knowing about it. These huge surrenders of liberty have occurred without much public outcry. When the next major terrorist attack comes, the question will simply be how much liberty Americans have left. That is a victory al Qaeda could not have achieved by force of arms. It is something they have achieved with our witting and conscious help.

In reassessing the war, in other words, the moral cost to America must come into the equation. The Iraq war has removed for a generation the concept of the U.S. military being an unimpeachable source of national honor. It has infringed civil liberties. It has legalized and institutionalized torture as a government tool - and helped abuse and brutality metastasize throughout the field of conflict. To be sure, abuse of captives always happens in wartime. What's different now is that the commander-in-chief has authorized and legitimized it, and so the contagion has spread like wildfire. The tragedy is that none of this will help us actually win this war. By alienating so many Iraqis, the occupation has badly damaged American soft-power in the world. It has alienated many allies. It has exhausted the military itself. It has failed to quell an insurgency. History also teaches us that success against such an insurgency in such a country would require over a decade of a brutal war of attrition.

The question we have to ask is: if this is the way we achieve victory, what kind of country would America be at the end of it? To paraphrase Robert Bolt, it profit a man nothing if he gain the whole world and lose his soul. But for Iraq?

It's selfish, but to me this has been the saddest chapter in the Iraq War saga, that we as a nation have taken such large and drastic steps along the road to becoming that which we long considered evil. When I was growing up, the Soviet Union was the Bad Guy, building walls between nations, crushing native opposition beneath the treads of their tanks, torturing captured enemies in secret gulags far from the rule of law.

Now, we are the ones doing those very same things. And very few Americans seem to care. Are we that afraid of terrorists? Are we that gutless and weak, that we are willing to throw away the very freedoms we're supposedly fighting to protect? What has happened to our sense of moral outrage that such deep and fundamental changes pass without comment?

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The Evolution of Republicans

In the Republican debate last night, moderator Chris Matthews asked the candidates to raise their hand if they did not believe in evolution. Kansas senator Sam Brownback, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and Tom Tancredo all raised their hands.

I find it depressing how far one of the only two viable political parties in our nation has fallen. Thirty percent of those who are potential Republican candidates for the office of the most powerful person in the world do not accept a scientific explanation as fundamental to our understanding of the universe as gravity or the germ theory of disease. They might as well have raised their hands to say they don't believe the Earth is round. How can you expect someone to make sound decisions about the direction of our nation when they can't even understand something so fundamental, so clearly true?

I remember when Republicans stood for sober reality, for dealing with the universe and the world as they are and not as we might wish them to be, for wrestling honestly and openly with the problems that beset us. Agree or disagree with their take on how to address the issues, they had the reputation for being realistic about the true nature of the world.

And yet here we are, with thirty percent of their candidates preferring to believe an overly literal translation of an ancient book over what science has clearly proven beyond any reasonable doubt to be true. You can be a Christian and still accept the physical reality of the world -- hundreds of millions of Catholics, including the Pope, understand this along with tens of thousands of theistic scientists -- but that is not what these deeply misguided men have done. They are instead turning their backs on the Enlightenment, refusing to accept the evidence of reason, of rationality, of the intellect, retreating behind a foolish consistency that is as blasphemous as it is wrong.

And they are, potentially, in line to be elected President of the United States of America.

What has happened to this once great party? Where is the spirit of Ronald Reagan, who had the vision to imagine a better world but let it be guided by hard-headed rationality? We've only got two parties to choose from in America, for better or for worse, and one of them is badly, badly broken. If you're a Republican and you're reading this, I beg you, for the health of our country's political future, get involved with your local party organization to change your course, to get back to the good parts of conservatism. Those ideals are being betrayed by these deeply unserious, foolish, misguided men, and in the end it is all of America who will pay as our already limited choices are whittled down to only one.

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Hobbesian Friday: Bad Polling Edition

Last month I predicted that Bush's approval numbers in polls would go up to 41% by September due to Democrats having taken control of the Congress. We've still got a long ways to go till then, but so far one month later I'm looking every bit as wrong as I predicted I'd be:

President George W. Bush's job performance rating has sunk to a new low, with only 28 percent of U.S. adults viewing his job performance positively. In a new Harris Interactive Poll, seven out of ten adults view Bush's job performance negatively, including 48 percent who say his job performance is poor. This is down significantly since February, where 32 percent viewed his job positively, and 67 percent viewed it negatively.

I'm not very good at math, but I'm pretty sure going from 32% to 28% is getting further away from my predicted 41%, not closer. And like Calvin's dad, I suspect the decline has a lot to do with something Bush has actually done. Iraq and continued corruption charges for members of his administration aren't in the same league as flooding the basement, but then again, I don't see Laura making him skip desert either.

On one hand, it's nice that I continue to be wrong; if I were suddenly right about something it would upset the natural balance of the universe and the Earth might spin off its axis into the sun, which would be a real bummer. On the other hand, it's gotta suck to be either the President or Calvin's dad right about now.

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VaTech Blame Game Scorecard

I was in the middle of writing this great post about how many different things have been "blamed" for the Virginia Tech tragedy, but then I discovered that "Cynical-C Blog" beat me to it, and did a better job, to boot.

So instead, I'll just point you there. Here are a few of my favorites, though:

It’s either the fault of violent video games, or the cowardly students who didn’t rush the shooter, secularism, or Muslims and/or foreigners, or Atheists, or it’s society’s fault, or the Liberals, or maybe it’s pedophilia, homosexual couplings and adulterous behavior’s fault (not sure if he means all at the same time or separately), or capitalism, or the Chinese, or Simon Cowell, or Bill Gates, or possibly it’s the fault of trauma induced mind control by a military industrial complex, or because colleges have co-ed dorms and/or students who major in English, or the GOP, or the Democrats, or it could be the fault of Markos from Daily Kos, or Charlton Heston, W, or vaccines, or schools teaching that the theory of evolution as fact, or the school’s architecture.

But come on, you know it's the fault of the Jews. Isn't everything?

I think Ed Brayton put it best, though:

Let me tell you who is to blame for this: the guy pulling the trigger. That's it. End of discussion. One crazed psychotic who decides it's time to go postal is going to find a clock tower to shoot from and people to shoot at, and it doesn't matter how many laws we pass against it. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to visit the clue store.

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Contempt of Government

In an interview with a career Department of Justice employee about the politicization of that department under Alberto Gonzales comes this comment (emphasis mine):

Third, and most significantly for present purposes, there was an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it.

But the disdain for government in this administration has not been confined to just the Department of Justice. You saw it in the way FEMA was run, in how the Iraq invasion was (un)planned and (incompetently) executed, in the derisive way it has treated the Constitutional duties of the Congress, and in the extraordinarily wide-ranging tendency to write "Signing Statements" that flatly declare they have no intention of complying with the laws they're passing.

Look, I don't have a problem with conservatives who believe government should be smaller. In fact, that's an inclination I generally share. But I do have a problem with people who think government is useless, who have contempt for anything in any way related to government. The last person you want running an enterprise is someone who thinks the enterprise ought not to exist, and yet that's exactly what we've got.

If you think the government should only be responsible for three things, then that's fine. But it ought to be GOOD at those three things. It ought to be efficient in executing those three things. The same is true if you think it ought to be responsible for three hundred things, or three thousand -- whatever you think the proper role of government is, you ought to want it to fill that role well.

I see no evidence that the Bush Administration feels this way, however. From their actions and words, I can only conclude that the disdain the man above sensed from the ill-qualified new DoJ lawyers is but an echo of the same disdain emanating from the top down, a feeling that the only acceptable role of government is to not exist at all.

And that's something I just can't accept. Elect a Republican if you must, but by all that's sane, elect one who thinks the government ought to perform its functions well.

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Not a Christian?

James Dobson, no longer content with rejecting Christ's admonishments to avoid material wealth and to render political power unto Caesar in his role as head of the immensely wealthy and politically powerful "Focus on Family" group, has now decided to also deny Christ's teaching that "Wheresover two or more of you gather in my name, there too am I" by saying that potential GOP Presidential candidate and Church of Christ member Fred Thompson, is "Not a Christian":

"Everyone knows he's conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for," Dobson said of Thompson. "[But] I don't think he's a Christian; at least that's my impression," Dobson added ...

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson's characterization of the former Tennessee senator. "Thompson is indeed a Christian," he said. "He was baptized into the Church of Christ."

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added.

I wrote a few days ago about being careful to not redefine a word like "Christian" into meaninglessness by expanding it to cover basically "anyone nice whom we like", but Dobson is guilty of doing the same thing in reverse. He's decided that he gets to decide who's a Christian and who's not by defining the term downward; apparently it's not enough to believe Christ was Lord, that He rose from the dead, that he was the Son of God, or any of that other nonsense.

No, what's important to Mr. Dobson is that you be an evangelical Christian. All of you who foolishly follow Christ's advice to shut yourself in your room and pray devoutly there rather than braying out your dogma on a street corner, well, you're no Christian. I mean come on, will devoutly praying by yourself and remaining private get a Presidential advisor to visit you and ask for your approval of a potential Supreme Court nominee? I think not.

Catholics, Mormons, Church of Christers, you might as well just turn in your crucifixes, because according to Mr. Dobson you're not really Christians. I bet that comes as a shock to you, seeing as how you were believing Christ is Lord and all. Feel free to take a few moments to recover as you're ushered out of mainstream religion and politics by Mr. Dobson and his Dogma Police. Luckily we atheists will be here to give you a hug -- we've been outside the mainstream for so long we've got the place nicely decorated. It's not so bad, really.

I don't know what's more appalling here, Dobson's utter betrayal of the very philosophies he built his vast political and material fortune on, or his complete lack of shame at claiming to be the keeper of "Family Values" while endorsing the thrice-divorced serial adulterer Newt Gingrich for President at the same time.

Wait, that's no contest -- "Deeply offensive, self-indulgent, arrogant power-mad money whores who blaspheme their god" is definitely more appalling. I never thought I'd say this, because I didn't think Newt Gingrich could ever come off looking morally superior to anyone, but he's really slumming it by sucking up to the likes of Dobson.

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Conservatives for American Freedom

I know the more conservative readers of this blog will simply roll their eyes and think this is "Just another knee-jerk hysterical over-reaction by a Democrat who wants to undermine Republicans", but at last even conservatives have come to appreciate the warnings long sounded by liberals and libertarians.

This week a group of conservative thinkers has formed the American Freedom Agenda, a group committed to restoring fundamental liberties threatened under Bush's leadership. As Ed Brayton describes the group behind the effort:

It's an interesting group: Bruce Fein, former DOJ official under Reagan and prominent legal scholar; David Keene of the American Conservative Union; Bob Barr, former Georgia Congressman; and Richard Viguerie, who may not be a well known name but is probably the man most responsible for the election of Ronald Reagan and the formation of the modern conservative movement.

This is not a group you can dismiss as America-hating defeatocrats who are nothing more than unhinged Bush bashers, desperate enough to exaggerate any incident into Orwellian proclamations of Doom. These are sober-minded, thoughtful, intelligent, deliberate movement conservatives, who have finally come to share the same understanding as many liberals and libertarians that the Bush Administration has governed in a way that is a genuine and urgent threat to our basic civil liberties.

This group is asking all 2008 Presidential candidates to sign their pledge, which outlines the following ten commitments:

I, (candidate), hereby pledge that if elected President of the United States I will undertake the following to restore the Constitution's checks and balances, to honor fundamental protections against injustice, and to eschew usurpations oflegislative or judicial power.These are keystones of national security and individual freedom:

1. No Military Commissions Except on the Battlefield.
2. No Evidence Extracted by Torture or Coercion.
3. No Detaining Citizens as Unlawful Enemy Combatants.
4. RestoringHabeas Corpus for Suspected Alien Enemy Combatants.
5. Prohibiting Warrantless Spying by the National Security Agency in Violation of Law.
6. Renouncing Presidential Signing Statements.
7. Ending Secret Government by Invoking State Secrets Privilege.
8. Stopping Extraordinary Renditions.
9. Stopping Threats to Prosecuting Journalists under the Espionage Act.
10. Ending the Listing of Individuals or Organizations as Terrorists Based on Secret Evidence.

I will issue a public report annually elaborating on how the actions enumerated in paragraphs 1-10 have strengthened the ability of the United States to defeat international terrorism, secure fundamental freedoms, and preserve the nation's democratic dispensation.

I make a lot of jokes about being a baby-eating liberal, but the fact of the matter is that in the non-partisan sense of the word, I am at core quite conservative. I believe that the Constitution is the greatest template for a government ever devised, and that its principles of freedom, liberty, and suspicion of power (particularly to governmental power) are absolutely vital to a truly great nation. That is the main reason I have, over the last seven years, become so much more actively partisan than I have ever been before -- I believe that the policies of the Bush Administration are the gravest non-military threat to the core principles of the Constitution and individual liberty our nation has ever faced.

I applaud the actions of this group of true conservatives, who recognize that duty to country is far more important than a misguided loyalty to party or person. Long after George Bush is no longer our President, we're going to have to live with the results of his tampering with the fundamental levers of our government.

I would encourage my Republican readers to think about what Hillary Clinton would be like if she could simply wave her hand and dismiss any Congressional oversight, could put you and your family under FBI surveillance with no warrant or recourse to court, could disappear your friends and political colleagues -- even US citizens -- to foreign countries to be tortured without due process or habeus corpus rights, or any of the other items on the list above. This is not an argument that no Republican should have these powers, it's that no President at all, ever, should have them.

Power begets power, and if we let the principles of the Unitary Executive and the removal of checks and balances settle in, we're never going to be rid of them. The time to demand a return to the proven methods of governance that have shielded our nation and our liberty for 200 years and more is now, before our leaders (of either party!) become too comfortable with the garments of power. That is true conservatism.

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An Upcoming Bush Bounce

I generally avoid discussing politics here because, let's be honest, I don't know squat about politics. But I am going to go out on a limb and predict that President Bush's approval ratings will improve over the next 6 months from the currently abysmal low 30's to the still bad but not epic upper 30's/low 40's.

I say that because the Democrats now control the Congress, and so can actually start doing things rather than being forced to just flap their gums. That will give President Bush the opportunity to attack everything they do, and if there's one thing Republicans love, it's attacking liberals. It's practically the entire party platform. If they had a "Make a Liberal Look Like an Idiot" show on television it would have huge ratings.

Oh, wait, they already have that -- it's called "Hannity & Colmes". My bad.

In fact, I will go so far as to say the foundation of the Republican Party is not lower taxes, smaller government, banning abortion, or "defending marriage". It is now, and has been since I've been of age, simply this:

Hating Liberals.

Now the enemy is once again on the radar, and the Liberal Bashing can begin. That will whet the bloody appetite of the fiercer partisans, and bring them back to the fold. You can tell this is true because I have the same qualifications as the guys who get on cable television to analyze this stuff -- none. Not knowing jack squat guarantees me a spot on some 24 hour news channel show. I'm not saying I could make one of the biggies like The O'Reilley Factor or Countdown, but maybe something like The Glenn Beck Show or Paula Zahn, who are desperate for someone -- anyone -- to book as a guest.

Remember, you read it here first -- Bush at 41% by September. You can trust me because I'm ignorant.

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Hobbesian Friday: Maturity Edition

On the possible eve of a compromise bill on Iraq passing the House, and in light of recent debates here over religion and atheism, I think this sums it all up pretty well:

© Universal Syndicate
Click for a larger version.

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Accountability in the Defense Department

"Support The Troops" isn't -- or shouldn't be, at least -- just another way of saying "Don't Question The President". It should mean that we honor the sacrifice of our citizens who willingly sacrifice their freedom and risk their lives to protect our nation. That support doesn't end when their term of service does, nor does it extend only to those who make it through healthy and whole. It means that we should provide them with adequate training and material, that we should give them aid and comfort when and where we can, and we should do our best to take care of those who are harmed in the course of their duties.

Recently a series of reports from "The Washington Post" have uncovered truly deplorable conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including poor living conditions like mold, filth and leaks in Building 18, an Army facility that houses recovering troops.

Up until now I have come to expect a complete lack of accountability in this Administration. Every time someone has performed in a spectacularly incompetent fashion, they've been rewarded and supported by their political masters. The low point, of course, was "Heckuva job, Brownie".

And for a while there, it looked like this was going to be just another in the long list of whitewashes (literally in this case). But today, a funny thing happened:

Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey abruptly stepped down from his post, apparently because Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was displeased with the way he handled the Walter Reed situation.

According to MSNBC.com, Gates said in a press briefing that "I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to outpatient care at Walter Reed."

I blogged earlier on the appointment of Secretary Gates, expressing hope that at long last a grown-up would be in charge of the Defense Department. This is just one instance, but it is very much looking like that hope was not misplaced. I am delighted that Gates is making it clear that anyone who treats our soldiers with less than complete professionalism and the highest standards will be disciplined.

Nothing less than the best should be accorded the men and women who have made huge sacrifices so we can all sit back and enjoy the fruits of liberty. Adequate health care is the very least that we owe them, and I thank Secretary Gates for holding responsible those in the senior leadership who fail to truly support our troops. I can only imagine how much better off we'd all be had Gates replaced Rumsfeld earlier, but regardless, I'm glad he's there now. I hope this kind of no-nonsense, professional administration continues.

Gig 'em, Bob.

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